Big Butter and Egg Man

JAZZ TODAY: Jazz Triumphs of 2011 That Only a Fool Could Miss

2012-01-31T03:22:00.000-08:00

To be a critic is to risk being a boob. Those who dare to open their blabbermouths and spout an opinion are going to get called on the carpet. As they should.

And in the arts, with matters of judgment being highly subjective, getting it “wrong” is essentially guaranteed. Not everyone can agree with you.

Jazz singer Gretchen Parlato, unfairly overlooked by ME.

And often enough, a critic can’t even agree with himself. For me, as a jazz critic, the music is in constant motion, evolving. Just as a jazz musician plays a different solo every night on the same tune, my ear takes in the music in varying ways over time.

And so it is that, with the ‘ink barely dry’ on the PopMatters Best Jazz of 2011 list, I feel the need to come back with some amendments or additions—five recordings that I realize are so good that, well, how dare I have left them out?

Here they are; here’s why they’re so fine; and here’s why I may have missed them the first time around.

Tyshawn Sorey, Oblique—1 (Pi)

Miguel Zenón, Alma Adentro, The Puerto Rican Songbook (Marsalis Music)

Gretchen Parlato, The Lost and Found (ObliqueSound)

Brad Shepik Quartet, Across the Way (Songlines)

Steven Bernstein and the Millennial Territory Orchestra, MTO Plays Sly (The Royal Potato Family)

Read by full review of each of these discs HERE: Jazz Triumphs of 2011 That Only a Fool Could Miss.

Chick Corea / Eddie Gomez / Paul Motian: Further Explorations

2012-01-20T03:29:00.000-08:00

Further Explorations, is a play on the 1961 LP from Evans, Scott LaFaro and Motian, Explorations. It’s a perfect title because the new record both comes from that early Evans conception and never feels trapped by it. As with the template, Corea/Gomez/Motian share the musical space equally, creating breathtaking jazz democracy. But there is very little sense that the group consciously restricts itself to some notion of a “Bill Evans style”. The early Evans trio is strictly a springboard, and then it’s off into the sky.

The trio’s take on “But Beautiful” is a prime example. This Jimmy Van Heusen song was introduced by Bing Crosby in Road to Rio (1947) and later recorded by Billie Holiday, Nat Cole, and Doris Day before Evans got to it—but for modern jazz players Evans essentially defines a delicate, impressionistic take on this tune.

The new version here begins with Gomez playing a classical-tinged bowed solo that begins freely away from the melody and then brings us in. In “Part II”, Corea takes the baton from the bassist as a solo pianist and brings the trio into a swinging, mid-tempo exploration. The piano references the melody in places but not much, with Motian playing his standard but fragmented version of swing and Gomez providing accompaniment that is better heard as commentary, with dramatic bursts of plucked melody rising through the conversation every few bars. When Gomez takes his proper solo, it’s Corea who is impossible to suppress, and finally the song moves into a final phase where the rhythmic play becomes more complex. It is decidedly not a fragile ballad performance that another Evans imitator might cook up. Thank goodness.

Read by full PopMatters review of the disc here: Chick Corea / Eddie Gomez / Paul Motian: Further Explorations

Rez Abbasis Invocation: Suno Suno

2012-01-13T03:05:00.000-08:00

Here is one of best and unique recordings of 2011—a wildly fun and powerful outing from jazz guitarist Rez Abassi. Outwardly, this band (with Vijay Iyer on piano and Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto sax—essentially an all-star band) is creating a surging connection between jazz and Pakistani music. But to my simpler and less sophisticated ears this sounds like a super-smart fusion record.

Yup, as in jazz-rock. It has the power, precision, and frenzied drive that lived in the best of the early “fusion” records of the 1970s.

Other than Abbasi’s occasionally over-driven electric guitar, this would hardly seem like a real “fusion” band. But the leader’s compositions and arrangements make it so nevertheless, built as they are on lean and repeated licks that lock together across a rock-solid backbeat. “Onus on Us”, for example, starts simply enough with a syncopated two-chord groove, then it tacks on a basic and clear unison melody for alto and guitar. Quickly, however, the drums grow more complex, and the bass line interlocks with the melody, which in turns starts to jabber with more complexity. The whole arrangement comes together not just in trickiness but also in a programmed mutation into different rhythms and forms — so, for example, the guitar solo has a different, stuttering rhythmic feel than the statement of melody. So the music is “fusiony” in two ways: in that it relies on complex and precise arrangements that do not shy away from a certain virtuosity, and that drummer Dan Weiss plays with a rock-level of energy across the tunes.

Read my entire review of the disc here: Rez Abbasi's Invocation: Suno Suno

Remembering Paul Motian: The Drummer Who Quietly Shook Things Up

2012-01-10T03:20:00.000-08:00

Late last year, jazz lost one of the quiet guys, the subtle guys, the guys that only insiders are really in love with. But it hurts more because he wasn't a famous jazz musician. You mourn his loss more quietly—which in Paul Motian's case is exactly the right way. You know that for those cared about this music, the hole he leaves in the scene is huge. Particularly in New York, which is where he exclusively played in the last years of his life.

I saw Paul Motian for the last time in on the first Friday in September. He was, of course, playing a gig at the Village Vanguard, New York's temple of mainstream jazz, with his "New Trio", a band that jazz folks wanted to see. Paul's other band are legion—it seems like he became much more prolific in the last ten years, composing like mad, forming great bands, showing up on critical recordings by others.

I brought my daughter to this gig, which makes it stick in my memory that much more.

As was typical of Motian over the last three decades of his art, he played very little straight “time”. Rather, he was engaged in a continual conversation with the guitar and tenor, which is to say that he was playing a conversational and independent counterpoint to his own compositions and arrangements. He played not just time and accents but contrasting and complementary melodies and rhythms, often seeming more sculptor of sound and texture than merely a “drummer”.

This was Motian’s revolution.

I had no idea that Motian was ill, suffering from complications of myelodysplastic syndrome, a blood and bone-marrow disorder, which killed him in November 2011. Motian had seemed old, or let’s say “distinguished”, for a long time—but never less than vital. In fact, he was the rare artist who seemed to be getting larger and more varied over time. In the last few years I had seen him or listened to him in musical conversations with young players like Greg Osby and older players like Lee Konitz. In the best sense, he was the most alive jazz musician on the scene.

Like Miles Davis, Paul Motian was said to use silence very effectively in his art. But 22 November brought too much.

Read the rest of my tribute to Paul here: Remembering Paul Motian: The Drummer Who Quietly Shook Things Up

The Best Jazz of 2011

2011-12-21T03:14:00.000-08:00

O these "best of year" lists! What good are they? Must everything in life be a competition?

Yet they help to focus the mind and provide a moment of synthesis. And this year, so scattered in so many ways, needed that more than most.

So, flawed and full of holes, based on incomplete listening and silly forgetfulness, here is my list of the dozen best jazz records of 2011, compiled with fellow PopMatters critic John Garratt: The Best Jazz of 2011.

For me, the top disc, the one that still thrills me the most is the Blue Note debut of trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusere. It still sounds to me like this young(ish) artist is playing his instrument in a genuinely new way, moving past some boundary previously established and also bring a great young band along with him (or, maybe I should write: being propelled forward by a great young band). If you are going to fish for just one 2011 jazz record, that's the one.

Apologies to Tyshawn Sorey, Gretchen Parlato, and many others who really should be on here. The cookie, she crumbles at the end of the year.

Keith Jarrett: Rio

2011-11-29T03:34:00.000-08:00

In 1975, Keith Jarrett recorded and ECM released a disc called The Koln Concert—fully improvised solo piano that came in three looooooong chunks of grooving, rollicking lyricism. In college dorms and in little apartments and, well, just about everywhere, jazz fans (and others too) were enraptured by the sound of a great pianist just thinking out loud. And it didn't hurt that the guy infused his playing with a gospel groove and aching melody.

After years of playing with Charles Lloyd and Miles Davis and his own groups, Keith Jarrett had the jazz equivalent of a "hit record," and it lifted his renown (and that of ECM). Tons of great stuff followed (including many more solo piano records), but so did a reputation of being a difficult guy. Jarrett played and recorded lots of classical music, and he experimented with free jazz, chamber jazz, a trio that played nothing but standards—a huge variety. He flirted with outright greatness and he courted some discontent among part of the jazz community.

But with his new record Rio (read my full PopMatters review HERE) Jarrett returns to solo piano greatness and, perhaps, makes us realize that he is as good a summary of what has been great about jazz for the last 30 years.

This is a fantastic recording: compelling, challenging, engaging, beautiful, knotty. Unlike many of this solo excursions, it features relatively brief piece that link together as a whole concert. This is a two-CD set, but it flies by. There are blues, ballads, free playing, rocking pop sounds, gospel, impressionism, you name it. The touch of Jarrett's classical playing is here, but there is almost no sense of "pretense." This is jazz eclecticism at its best because everything is seamless and natural. Even Keith's "moaning" along with his playing is effective (or, if you prefer, mostly in check).

Both more than dinner background music and utterly accessible, Rio (recorded at a concert venue in that Brazilian city) would be a great way to introduce someone to Jarrett—or to jazz in general. It is a model of invention, but it also sounds "composed." It challenges regular harmony while mostly staying within the consonant. It beguiles without alienating.

It's one of a small handful of recordings in 2011 that I'll still be listening to ten years from now.

Sympathetic Vibrations

2011-11-21T23:19:00.000-08:00

Most people don’t know what a vibraphone is. Why should they? The vibraphone (sometimes called a vibraharp and more often just called “the vibes”) is a niche taste. Classical music has no role for it, and in pop music it once flavored a batch of Motown hits, but that’s it. The obscure theremin, with its leading role in hit songs like the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”, is probably better known.

In jazz, however, the percussive attack of the vibes combines with lyrical beauty, creating something close to logical genius. Only in jazz has the instrument produced virtuosos: Hampton, Milt Jackson, Gary Burton, a few others. But even in jazz, the lineage and use of the instrument is somewhat limited. A few of the great big bands used vibes, but most did not. The legendary small groups, from the Armstrong Hot Seven to the Miles Davis Quintet to the Art Ensemble of Chicago are wholly vibes-free.

Recently, however, the instrument has grown in range and application in jazz. Read my full column on the topic, Sympathetic Vibrations, HERE.

Recent releases demonstrating great work on vibes include Chris Dingman's Waking Dreams, the latest from Gary Burton, and a wondrous new record from John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet, among others.

George Benson: Guitar Man

2011-11-18T03:28:00.001-08:00

O, fates! Why do you bless certain people with awe-inspiring talent and brilliant drive to succeed, only to give them questionable taste in how they USE that gift?

Why did Eddie Murphy make The Klumps?

And why must guitarist George Benson make mushy, hum-drum music?

Guitar Man is the latest from Benson (read my full PopMatters review HERE), and it's partly brilliant and mostly mush. It starts with a tour de force on acoustic guitar: a solo rendering of the standard “Tenderly”. Astonishing, precise, neither too ornate nor too plain, tasteful, invincible. George Benson, Guitarman? Yes. He’s back, and in stellar form.

But then you get to the second track, which is precisely the kind of thing you were fearing—a de-toothing of the Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” that is so schlocky that rock fans cannot even recognize the melody. A string section, some soothing woodwinds, soft-focus production, simplistic back-beat drumming that lacks the force of rock, the swing of jazz or the deep pocket of soul. Muzak, ack. There’s a dramatic key change toward the end that gilds the lily. Through it all, Benson plays amazing licks, most certainly, but it doesn’t matter. It’s a disaster.

And on it goes with this record. A sparkling acoustic "Danny Boy" or a small-group take on Coltrane's "Naima", nice. A cheesy "Tequila" (a la Wes Montgomery, presumably) or a soft-centered "Lady in My Life" (from Thriller). The good stuff is short, and the terrible stuff is not short enough.

Hearing George Benson play the guitar is still astonishing. And Eddie Murphy is still a very very funny man. But what difference does it make if they are content to muddle forward making middle-of-the-road pablum?

O fates.

Freddie Hubbard: Pinnacle Live and Unreleased from Keystone Korner

2011-10-10T06:27:00.000-07:00

In jazz as in most things, I tend to prefer the subtler stuff, not the highest notes of the loudest playing. Maynard Ferguson would be my LEAST favorite jazz trumpeter, particularly after an adolescence in which all the high school trumpet players idolized him and had barely heard of Miles Davis.

But Freddie Hubbard was different. His frequent and spectacular flights into the upper register had a daring harmonic purpose. As he proudly knew, he sounded more like a saxophone player than a trumpeter in the way he serpentined his way up there, playing harmonically daring lines that shot into the stratosphere with real jazz daring. If you don't know it by heart already, I'm begging you to go now and listen to Freddie's brilliant solo on Herbie Hancock's classic "Maiden Voyage."

As a bandleader, Freddie was a mixed bag. He might be remembered more for this time with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers or for his countless Blue Note records (as a leader and as a sideman) that were not necessarily with working groups. But in the 1970s and '80s he led some hot bands on the strength of his successful CTI recordings (Red Clay, First Light) and some commercial stuff he did for Columbia that is mostly better forgotten.

Freddie Hubbard: Pinnacle Live and Unreleased from Keystone Korner(reviewed in full on PopMatters here) collects some hot 1980 recordings from San Francisco's Keystone Korner, and great club. Billy Childs is on piano, and his playing is fully up to Hubbard's. The rest of playing is merely very good, but as a group these guys were seriously cookin'. And Freddie himself was probably never in better shape with his chops, his ideas, and his sense of freedom within the band.

The tunes offered here are a fine cross-section of the mid-career Freddie: "The Intrepid Fox" from Red Clay, "One of Another Kind" from the VSOP dates with Hancock, Shorter, Carter and Williams, "Blues for Duane" and the terrific "First Light." In addition, Hubbard plays it pretty on Michel LeGrand's Summer of '42 theme and plays a grrrrrreat and athletic solo on "Giant Steps"—the only recording of that jazz classic by Freddie, at least that I know of.

This is more than nostalgia, but it also reminds us that from 1980 onward Hubbard's best days were behind him. In 1992 he burst his lip, then it got infected and he was never the same as a player. In 2008 he died of congestive heart failure, having to be bailed out of financial trouble by friends. I prefer to remember him as a swaggering great of his horn.

I actually ran into him on the street one night. I was at DC's old One Step Down to hear Woody Shaw play with a local rhythm section, and Freddie was at Blues Alley with McCoy Tyner's trio. After his set, Freddie was strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue with a beautiful date. He was wearing a lovely coat and a fedora, and I recognized him from a block away—his stride and his confidence and his lip too, messed up by years of that hard, beautiful playing. Woody had sounded great, and it was a fine night. Freddie played with Woody Shaw around that time and I guess they were friends. As Freddie approached me, he sized me up and then asked me, "Where's Woody?" drawing out the word "where's" with a great long breath. I was too stunned to answer and just pointed at the One Step.

Where's Freddie? Gone, but with this disc suddenly here, still remembered and heard.

John Scofield: A Moment's Peace

2011-09-28T11:20:00.000-07:00

I really really like guitarist John Scofield. His start with Mingus and Chet Baker, his stint with post-comeback Miles, his fusiony bands in the early 1980s and then his killer string of discs on Blue Note and Verve: great stuff.

But when he became a kind of "jam band star" with the superfine disc A Go Go (with the trio Medeski, Martin, and Wood), things maybe soured a little. A bunch of his records after that seemed a little puffed up with affectation—not all of them, nope, but certainly Uberjam and its live follow-up, which seemed like lowest common denominator stuff for a guy who wasn't into coasting.

If Sco's career in the last dozen years has been up and down, then his new disc, A Moment's Peace, is up-up-up. Featuring a brilliant band (Larry Golding, Brian Blade and Scott Colley) and a wonderful mix of standards, pop songs and originals, this is a quietly daring recording.

The band’s treatment of standards is similarly quirky and strong throughout. “You Don’t Know What Love Is” is given a fresh take—with Goldings playing a pulsing kind-of-reggae offbeat figure throughout. Blade’s rhythm approach, however, works somewhat against that groove, with jazz accents and melodic rolls acting like a gentle version of what Elvin Jones might have played on this kind of tune. Goldings solos memorably over the “A” sections, setting up Sco for a fluid and sharp statement on the bridge.

Both “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You” and “I Want to Talk About You” are played in a more conventional jazz style, but both are superb. “Gee Baby” catches Scofield in note-bending mood, like a weirder, subtler B.B. King. Every note is clear and tangy. The Eckstine tune moves Goldings over to piano, where he is just fine. Colley comes through in the mix more completely, letting the partnership with Blade shine at mid-tempo. As Scofield tackles the tougher harmonic path on “Talk About You”, the rest of the band sets up beautiful polyrhythms behind him. Now, this is no jam band in the popular sense, but the group dynamics and sense of play here are outstanding. Everyone in the band is cooking, but there isn’t a cliché in sight.

This is a band that is exceptional at setting a mood. Blade’s mallet work combines with Golding's piano to prepare Sco for a lovely reading of “Throw It Away”, a tune by Abbey Lincoln. Carla Bley’s “Lawns” gets a treatment that is quietly warm, with just a hint of strut in its step. And several Scofield originals are typically hard to get out of your head.

Maybe one of finest jazz records of the year, A Moment's Peace makes John Scofield seem a little less jammy and whole lot relevant and cool.

Farmers by Nature: Out of This Worlds Distortions

2011-09-21T03:31:00.000-07:00

There is extreme playfulness in the bloodline of the trio Farmers by Nature: Craig Taborn on piano, William Parker on bass and Gerald Cleaver's drums. “Sir Snacktray Speaks” puts together a jabbing little jig from Taborn’s piano with an aching set of held bowed tones on Parker’s bass to generate a smiling theme. Then Cleaver takes over for a cluttered drum lead that scampers over a Parker pizzicato line. Then Taborn reenters, with a moody set of locked-hand chords, which sets up Parker to return to his bow for some down-home fiddle figures.

If it’s a lovely ballad you hanker for, then the opener, “For Fred Anderson” (a reference to the recently passed Chicago free tenor player), is a haunting, lovely theme. Taborn rings his keys with the sustain pedal down, getting a series of beautiful overtone resonances—a bed of stunning sound over which Parker plays very quiet bowed tones. The texture of this performance is spare and transparent, but Cleaver thickens it with subtle cymbal and percussion work.

The title track of Out of This World’s Distortions may be its highlight. Parker begins with a stately plucked melodic over pulsing cymbals. Taborn eventually enters with a set of sculpted rising patterns that are not the theme as much as a framing accompaniment. Over time, this balanced conversation draws you in, seeming to ask a million questions without providing obvious answers. You might listen to it 10 times, concentrating on different elements each time.

Read my full review of the recording HERE.

Each of these performances makes the case that “free jazz” is not a forbidding mess but rather an open plain of possibilities. Farmers by Nature is a band that takes seriously its mission to communicate to listeners, even though there is not a compromise in sight. The music is not appealing because it is familiar but because it sounds grounded, rooted, in basic patterns and in a connection to emotion.

Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver move as one on this record. And if you give the music half a chance, you move with them.

A Dear John Letter to Jazz: To Hell with Loving You

2011-09-19T04:03:00.000-07:00

Well, here it is: an announcement of intention. A decision, long mulled over. A cry for help in the lonely jazz night.

Why be faithful to jazz? What has she ever really done for me? Who's she running around with on the side? When people see me, then think of her, what's really going on in their heads?

Well, I'm done.

My resignation, of a sort. Read the kiss-off RIGHT HERE.

A love affair, ended, and then . . . ?

Ornette Coleman: Something Else!

2011-09-09T04:33:00.000-07:00

Every revolution has to start somewhere, and often the beginnings are not particularly unsettling. That was certainly the case with Ornette Coleman and his "free jazz" style. Or was it? At the time, people reacted to Ornette as if he had taken a poop in his horn and set it on fire.

Looking back at his first album Something Else! (read my full PopMatters review HERE), it seems like Ornette was just a slightly ornery bebopper with a loose sense of intonation. It sounds pretty mainstream. The themes are spirited and tonal, and the whole enterprise certainly swings like mad. In the original liner notes, Ornette states: “I think that one day music will be a lot freer”. Even the artist did not think it was there yet.

Pianist Walter Norris and bassist Don Payne are simply playing bebop—just listen to their solos on “Angel Voice” and you will hear utterly conventional bop playing of the late ‘50s. And Billy Higgins’ drumming, while fluid and simpatico with Coleman in every moment, swings in conventional time. It is notably less “out” than the work of, say, Max Roach or Art Blakey from the same era. Don Cherry on "pocket trumpet" is also playing bebop, but he is closer to Coleman in concept. His long solo on “Alpha” is a clear balance. On the one hand, Cherry crackles with licks that run across the harmonies, just as if he were Kenny Dorham. On the other hand, there is a raggedness to his tone in places, and he has developing a way of abstracting the harmonies without really playing “wrong” notes.

The leader, however, is already free on his solos. Not only does Coleman use an off-putting and highly vocalized tone, but he tends to play flat in ways that makes all his notes sounds like blues tones. Then, when actually selecting notes and building phrases, he does not necessarily follow the chord patterns that Norris and Payne are playing. On “The Blessing”, which is a wonderful and attractive theme over the “I’ve Got Rhythm” chord changes, Coleman’s line is significantly in conflict with the first pattern. On “Alpha”, Coleman sounds a good bit like Eric Dolphy in the way he follows his own sense of vocal patterns down interesting melodic allies.

Listening to the whole package in 2011, it's clear that there was, in fact, a revolutionary player and thinker leading this enterprise. He just didn't have his concept full actualized yet, and his bandmates weren't quite on board. A mere year or so later, he would have Charlie Haden on bass and eventually Ed Blackwell on drums, dropping the piano. The revolution—though lovely and lyrical in many places—would arrive.

But it started here.

Cannonball Adderley with Bill Evans: Know What I Mean?

2011-08-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

The opening strains of this classic Riverside album are pure-pure delicacy that could only come from the fingers of Bill Evans. His chiming piano, playing the original “Waltz for Debby”, is something that brings to mind a particular kind of jazz—intimate, sweet, contemplative. Then, 1:07 in, Percy Heath’s bass burbles downward and Connie Kay’s brushes start working against a snare—and the ripe sound of Cannonball Adderley’s alto sax just pops into the tune. Yummmmm.

This tune alone—the most swinging of all the “Debby”s ever recorded and one that is my all-time favorite example of a waltz suddenly busting into swinging 4/4—makes Know What I Mean? a classic, must-have jazz album. Read my full review HERE.

Of course, Adderley and Evans played together in the classic Miles Davis band—the one that recorded Kind of Blue, no less—so they were familiar with this particular sweet-and-sour set up. And this simpatico teamwork shows throughout this disc. There are lovely ballads on which Adderley nevertheless finds a blues strain, and there are skipping swingers on which Evans is perfectly at home.

The modal tune "Know What I Mean?" is particularly intriguing, with Adderley at home while playing flutters against a set of scales, then a whispered piano solo in that mode. At the mid-point, however, Kay sets up a jagged Latin groove for Cannonball’s solo, shifting gears into straight 4/4 swing only to find Evans soloing over the bolder groove as well. The shift back to brushes and ballad tempo is sudden and dramatic.

It's great, then, to hear the alternate take of this tune included on this reissue. This unused take moves into the groove section much sooner and finds Adderley stretching out more expansively and then re-entering over the groove just as the rhythm section switches into a bit of double-time 12/8. Clearly the band was fooling around with this arrangement in the studio, and it’s great to hear part of the creative process here—with the unused take making more sense, I think, of this shape-shifting tune.

The whole disc contains a bounty of great music. If you love jazz but don't know this album: stop reading. Get it now.

The Off-Handed Cool of Michael Franks

2011-08-23T03:27:00.000-07:00

Back in the '70s when I was first getting into jazz, it was great to discover the Reprise debut of the singer and songwriter Michael Franks. The Art of Tea was hip and swinging and funny, which is to say that a bunch of the songs were sly winks full of clever wordplay. They were sexy but smart. Franks, as a singer, was subtle and barely there, but he was backed by a collection of cool musicians drawn mostly from the band the Jazz Crusaders. "Popsicle Toes" and "Eggplant" and "Sometime I Forget to Smile" were cookin' little swingers that I wished I was cool enough to sing myself.

Over time, Franks demonstrated that he was also heavily influenced by Antonio Carlos Jobim—he was a great writer and singer of sophisticated bossa novas, and his ballads were great too. But as the albums tumbled onward toward the 1980s, the mushy side of Franks emerged as well. He preceded but was, essentially, pre-made for the "smooth jazz" sound, and I stopped paying attention to him at some point in the next decade.

Now he is back with a new record, Time Together (read my review HERE), and it surely reminds of what I always loved about Franks. So I made a more complete profile of him into this month's column, JAZZ TODAY: The Off-Handed Cool of Michael Franks, clickable here.

In any case, looking back, I think it's fair to say that Franks has always been an amazing songwriter and—in fact—a fine jazz singer. That he got gooped up in all that smooth jazz cotton candy doesn't change the fact that his songs are beautiful and well-written. And maybe, with the smoove jazz haze finally parting these days, he's back to being cool again?

Madeleine Peyroux: Standing on the Rooftop

2011-08-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

I recall clearly hearing Madeleine Peyroux's debut at a party 15 years ago. "Is that Billie Holiday? With an electric guitar?!?" I thought that someone had sampled a Billie vocal and built some kind of psudeo-jazz modern arrangement around it. But, nope, it was this American singer, 22 years old, who'd been singing on the streets of Paris for a while and now had made her debut album. And she just happens to sound exactly like Billie Holiday—every melodic tendency, the timbre, the rhythms, everything. Is that legal? I recall thinking.

Madeleine Peyroux is still doing it. Standing on the Rooftop [read my full review on PopMatters HERE] is the singer's sixth recording, and it's a mess. It was produced by Craig Street, who did wonderful things for Cassandra Wilson when she started with Blue Note, and who gives things his signature moody touch. Songs were co-written with Bill Wyman and Jenny Sheinman (the jazz violinist). Alan Toussaint and M'shell N'degeocello play. There are covers of the Beatles, Robert Johnson, and Dylan. But the album wastes all this with an unfortunate aimlessness.

It is hardly original to note that Peyroux’s singing is eerily—queerly—reminiscent of Billie Holiday. But on her sixth record over 15 years, this persistent truth can’t be ignored. Peyroux applies an oddly “different” approach to many songs here, but she does it with a recycled sound that is, of course, a faded Xerox of the original. So, when Standing on the Rooftop starts out with “Martha, My Dear”, you’re glad that it does not sound like The Beatles—but were you expecting to hear “silly girl” come out of the throat of Lady Day? And it sounds like a kind of odd Holiday: Billie on Ambien, falling asleep in the middle of “when you find yourself in the thick of it”. It is intimate singing, I suppose, but I think it’s more accurate to call it weak and faltering.

Where does Peyroux sound more contemporary or more like “herself”? Ironically, “The Way of All Things” has a neat little swing rhythm but seems to liberate the singer from sounding so affected. It’s a cool tune that evokes her Parisian background to some extent. Even better is the tune co-written with Wyman, “The Kind You Can’t Afford”. Given a snakey little funk feeling, replete with snatches of wah-guitar, this tune is playful and funny. The lyrics compare the narrator’s low-rent tastes to those of a rich rival (“You got art collections, I got comic books / You use plastic surgeons, I stay the way I look”) but she has “that real good lovin’—the kind you can’t afford”. Peyroux punches the lyrics and talks and sells it all with some natural zing—a huge relief from the vocal posing that dominates the record.

What could be variety comes off as grab-bag variation. “Meet Me in Rio” tosses in a bit of pseudo-bossa-nova strutting, while “Standing on the Rooftop” has a pulsing indie-rock plainness. Jazz, folk, country, a touch of funk: all wrapped up in that Billie Holiday imitation. It seems bewildering rather than variegated, aimless rather than genre-bending.

Madeleine Peyroux is an artist literally without her own voice. Borrowing from one source heavily and dabblingly from myriad sources, her Standing on the Rooftop is the sound of nothing so much as hip confusion

James Farm: James Farm

2011-08-09T04:47:00.000-07:00

James Farm is a collective recording from four potent young jazz players that attempts—and utterly succeeds—at making instrumental jazz that is catchy and fun to hear while still offering serious pleasures in the originality of its compositions and the verve of its improvisations.

The band James Farm consists of saxophonist Joshua Redman, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman, and drummer Eric Harland. Redman was a young phenom in the early 1990s and has since led a series of bands that have concerned themselves with making the “jazz tradition” relevant to and mixed with more contemporary sounds. Each member of the rhythm section is also a leader and recording artist, but it may be most useful to note that this trio was a heart of Parks’ brilliant 2008 debut on Blue Note, Invisible Cinema. That recording superbly generated a grooving vocabulary for the new century’s jazz, working elements of hip hop rhythm and rock expressionism into a precise and dazzling jazz hybrid

James Farm places Redman’s expressive tenor saxophone into this trio’s shimmering, exciting world. Using compositions from all four members of the group, James Farm sounds like another step—another leap—in the right direction. Each song establishes a scrambling, skittering rhythm that pushes and pulls in an exciting way. Harland almost never plays a “swing” beat, but he infuses the backbeats and sharp accents of modern rock and hip hop with a loose-limbed elasticity that is, nevertheless, pure jazz. Penman plays with economy and melody, and Parks continues his ascent: sounding just a little like Keith Jarrett at times, but more often playing with a jittery freedom that is all his own. His piano patterns dominate many of these tunes, and his sparse but dramatic use of a few other keyboards is smart and wise rather than cheesy.

Read my full review of James Farm HERE

Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian: Live at Birdland

2011-07-25T04:40:00.000-07:00

Lee Konitz has played in many different styles, from bop to cool to out, but he's now at that stage in his career where he plays it all and he plays none of it. Indeed, to hear him on this 2009 live date with this all-start rhythm section, he at first sounds like the liability—the old guy who has lost his tone and it playing slightly out of key. But a deeper listening reveals a saxophonist who is working intensely to discover the essence of every melody.

Konitz's impeccable bandmates respond with a sense of intense exploration and introspection. Live at Birdland contains six performances, and all but one are essentially ballads, allowing the players to work at a ruminative pace Inside these medium to slower tempos, the band is conversational and thoughtful, debating each chord, going off on tangents, making risky arguments or coming up with some daring theories. It is consistently fascinating listening, the kind that requires concentration and involvement.

Read my full review of Lee Konitz, Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian: Live at Birdland HERE.

The band’s other primary soloist is Mehldau, who acts as a useful contrast to Konitz. Mehldau is the relative rookie of the band—more than 30 years younger than each of his compatriots. He is, however, every bit as commanding and free. Unlike Konitz, he plays with a surface attractiveness of tone and touch that help his more daring explorations to go down easy. On most tunes, the listener also gets a healthy dose of Haden’s singing bass. The pairing of Haden and Motian is always empathetic and wonderful, and Haden is the most purely lovely player on this date. His solo on “You Stepped Out of a Dream” is logical and lyrical at once, and his statement on “Lullaby of Birdland” ingeniously uses the rhythms and intervals of the original melody to keep the improvisation focused and enchanting.

The quartet, taken as a whole, sets Konitz in good contrast and makes a compelling case that it’s more important what notes you choose than whether they are played with brilliant technique. Listening, for example, to Konitz and Motian improvise a duet on “Oleo” at first is a truly fascinating conversation. And when Mehldau joins, tartly and minimally, then Haden as well—you have a great band on your hands.

Pat Metheny: Whats It All About

2011-07-20T03:59:00.000-07:00

Pat Metheny and I grew up around the same time, and I remember listening to the pop music of the 1960s on AM radio, knowing even then that it was a lucky and good thing to be experiencing. There was "rock," sure, but this melodically and harmonically rich pop music was just as emblematic of the time—and if you let it do so, it could tie you back to the past too.

Metheny's latest disc, What's It All About (full review on PopMatters right HERE) is a solo acoustic guitar recital of these kinds of tunes, mostly played on a uniquely-tuned baritone acoustic guitar. (A few songs are played on nylon string guitar or the 42-string "Pikasso" guitar.) In being a solo acoustic recording, the record is a follow-up to Metheny's One Quiet Night from 2003. The tunes here, however, are also united by being from this unique era of songwriting.

So we get Pat playing Bacharach's "Alfie," which requires no reinterpretation or gimmickry. Metheny simply loses himself in the astonishing harmonies, pulling on melodic threads that unspool beautifully. (The failure of more jazz musicians to really absorb and explore the Bacharach catalog is hereby noted and lamented.) Similarly, the Stylistics "Betcha By Golly, Wow" is played simply but with a touch of swing, and Metheny's delicious voicings bring some new harmonies to the front in various places.

The most spare and surprising interpretation here is Metheny’s rethinking of Jobim’s “The Girl From Ipanema”. If you are like me, then you have heard this bossa nova chestnut played in countless piano bars, usually with an insulting anonymity. Metheny conceives it as a minimal exercise, using just a fragment of the melody and emphasizing a series of new harmonies that allow him to explore the texture and resonance of his instrument. If you release your expectations, then your ear will hang on every note and every fresh chord.

In addition, the album features the surf-rock classic "Pipeline", "The Sounds of Silence", "And I Love Her", and "The Girl from Ipanema", among other '60s tunes. Some listeners will find too fluffy, to noodly, but they're wrong. What's It All About is a beautiful statement, and not less good because it is mostly simple.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: The Sesjun Radio Shows

2011-07-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

Between 1978 and 1983, the drummer Art Blakey had his great band, the Jazz Messengers, in serious transition. The mid-1970s had not been a great era for the band (or for mainstream jazz as a whole), and he was shaking the group out of a doldrums with an infusion of new young players.

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers: The Sesjun Radio Shows (read my full PopMatters review HERE) brings to light three recordings of European concerts from this time that have never been released before. The music is exciting and vibrant, particularly the playing of alto saxophonist (and band music director for much of this period) Bobby Watson. Watson's solos have swagger and swing, and his sound is drenched in blues that way the sound of a guy from Kansas City should be. Watson is also a featured composer, and his "E.T.A." is one of the highlights.

Bobby Watson

Also well-represented here is the great two-fisted piano player James Williams. Williams was the most down-home Messenger pianist since Bobby Timmons, and his playing here can be both harmonically rich and simply direct. As with Watson, his tunes ("1977 A.D.", for example) are among the freshest on the date.

This record is also a reason to reconsider the Messenger legacy of trumpeter Valerie Ponomerev. He had a long tenure with the band, but I'd mostly thought of him as the placeholder until Wynton Marsalis came along in 1981-82. That is probably unfair. He acquits himself nicely in the first of the three concerts here (the third featuring Terence Blanchard, who replaced Marsalis), particularly with his ballad playing. Still, it remains that the bands feature Ponomerev and tenor player David Schnitter, while exciting, does not play with the polish and snap that would come to the ensemble once Wynton and brother Branford Marsalis came along.

But more Art Blakey is good for the world, particularly now that he's gone and jazz no longer has a mainstay such as the Messengers to be creating crackling hard bop. This release is more than welcome.

JAZZ TODAY: Does TREME Hate Modern Jazz?

2011-07-10T11:46:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of Treme, the brilliant David Simon show on HBO about post-Katrina New Orleans. While it is very different in tone from The Wire, Simon's new show (which just finished its second season a week ago) is similar in that it takes as its subject the culture of an American city. And the culture of New Orleans is centrally about music.

Again, I love the show. I love music featured on the show—which is primarily the blessed soul and R'n'B that is associated with greats such as Professor Longhair and Allen Toussaint.

But as a jazz critic, it is somewhat disconcerting to me that the show sets up jazz—or, at least, "modern jazz" as it has existed since the 1950s with its world capitol being New York—as a kind of villain. It is, symbolically if not explicitly, the essence of soullessness and the embodiment of abandoning "home." The character on the show who plays modern jazz, Delmond, is the son of the chief of a Mardi Gras "Indian" tribe who cannot really accept his son's version of New Orleans's great music.

The way jazz is used in the story is complex and fascinating, and I hardly mean to suggest that David Simon himself or the show's other creators actually "hate" jazz, but there's no question that the show uses jazz as a stand-in for the abandonment of certain core traditions—and therefore for the abandonment of New Orleans itself as a city that needs to be rescued after tragedy. Compared to Antoine Batiste, the warm and wonderful trombone player who starts his own "Soul Apostles" band or to Annie and Harley, street musicians from a larger folk tradition who use music to understand or seek their personal identities, Delmond seems like a spoiled kid in a fancy suit who plays music of technical but not heartfelt appeal.

Delmond, the modern jazz player on TREME

Read my full essay on the topic HERE at PopMatters.

Ultimately, Treme ends its second season (another has been ordered by HBO—yes!) by allowing Delmond and his dad to bring together modern jazz and traditional Mardi Gras music in a fascinating hybrid. However, the price of such coming together is that Delmond leaves New York to move back to New Orleans and seems to have conceded that his father was right that this music simply could not be made outside of New Orleans.

It's more complicated than that, sure, but my point is this: modern jazz takes it on the chin as cold and boring, a kind of music that people just don't like or that requires you to "think" too much rather than just enjoy. That is unfair to jazz, which remains a passionate, diverse music that goes well beyond mere technical execution. And it's a slightly lazy sign of the times that reminds me of political appeals that hold up for derision people with good educations in favor of "folksier" types to can "relate to regular people."

Not that I think David Simon is some kind of George Bush fan—hardly. But the rigors of modern jazz can be thrilling too. On that point, just a little, Treme is off key.

Bill Evans: The Sesjun Radio Shows

2011-06-30T04:03:00.000-07:00

Everybody digs Bill Evans—the brilliant and tortured and massively influential jazz pianist whose playing from the late '50s through the 1970s was never anything less than beautiful and compelling. Though he is best known for his impressionistic approach to ballads, he was in fact a completely versatile modern jazz player whose rhythmic innovations was as strong as his use of harmonies picked up from Ravel and Debussy.

Here is a new two-disc set of three concerts in Europe, recorded perfectly in 1973, 1975 and 1979. The first finds him playing only with the melodic and brilliant bassist Eddie Gomez. The second puts him with Gomez and drummer Eliot Zigmund, and the third features his last trio (with drummer Joe LaBarbara and Macc Johnson on bass) alone and then with guest harmonica player Toots Thielemans.

My full review on PopMatters of Bill Evans: The Sesjun Radio Shows can he found HERE.

These recordings are flat-out terrific, showcasing everything that was wonderful about the great pianist. Evans is one of the handful of modern pianists who is most influential on contemporary players. Younger jazz fans will hear Brad Mehldau and many other great player's debts to Evans here. His takes on standards are always lovely and ingenious, and his original tunes could only have come from Bill. But the center of Evans' legacy is the way that his trios interact—though one player may be "soloing" at any one time, every player is in continual and nearly co-equal dialogue all the time. There is a rare balance in these bands.

It's great music, heard here for the first time. Thanks, Bill.

Short Story, "Birds"

2011-06-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

Hey—I don't normally put up anything here at Big Butter and Egg Man that is not related to jazz, or at least music.

An exception, if you will indulge me.

I just had a short story published in BETHESDA Magazine. Not the NEW YORKER, but still I'm happy with the story, "Birds," and perhaps you would like to read it HERE.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

Timmy flew to China. He loved the little packets the airline gave us, the ones with a tiny toothbrush in two put-togetherable pieces and the tiny tube of toothpaste. He used that toothpaste for a month, squeezing it tight with his 6-year-old fingers, eking out the last minty smudge.

But his flying days were over, he told us. Only two years later, his understanding of physics had dangerously advanced.

It's about a father and son, primarily, as the father slowly takes on his son's fear of flying. It's not too long and it's a little bit about love, so what have you got to lose?

Literary stuff is nutritious for your soul. Like music, but with words instead of notes. Dig in.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma: For the Love of Ornette

2011-06-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

This is one of the best jazz recordings of the year: Ornette Coleman's old Prime Time bassist playing again with the master himself in a large-ish ensemble that runs like free clockwork.

Jamaaladeen Tacuma has an original style on electric bass—funky and free but also supremely melodic and searching. Much like Ornette, with whom he first gigged when he was 19. Now they are much more equal footing. Most of the tunes are Tacuma's and the band is excellent: Coleman’s alto sax is joined by two other woodwinds in tenor saxophonist Tony Kofi and Wolfgang Puschnig’s flute and with Tacuma in the rhythm section are pianist Yoichi Uzeki, Justin Faulkner on drums and David Haynes on “finger drums”.

Check out my full PopMatters review of Jamaaladeen Tacuma: For the Love of Ornette right HERE.

Because Puschnig’s flute sounds distinctive on this kind of record, it’s worth noting that this particular tonal pleasure is reminiscent of the great Lenox Avenue Breakdown record by Arthur Blythe from 1979, where James Newton rode over a similarly funky ensemble. For the Love of Ornette, however, is a more probing set of performances, with a richer set of competing soloists. Breakdown was one of the very best jazz recordings of the late ‘70s, which means For the Love of Ornette must be one of my favorite recordings of 2011 so far.

Dave Liebman: Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman

2011-06-21T03:41:00.000-07:00

There are two dominant strains of modern saxophonic thinking—those of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Trane's concept was mainly harmonic, and Ornette's was mainly melodic. Dave Liebman is a Coltrane guy, by practice, admission, and clear inclination.

On his latest quartet disc, however, he applies his Coltrane-ishness to the music of Coleman, to fine and pleasing results. Read my full PopMatters review of Dave Liebman: Turnaround: The Music of Ornette Coleman right HERE.

Liebman's method is primarily to have his excellent guitarist, Vic Juris, play explicitly the implies harmonies behind Coleman's melodies. As a result, a tune like "Bird Food" sounds like the bebop it always, kind of, was. Other tunes that already had a strong harmonic base, such as "Kathelyn Grey" (first recorded by Ornette with Pat Metheny), sound right at home.

The most intriguing transformation here is probably “Lonely Woman”, Coleman’s most famous and compelling melody. The original was beautiful but unsettling, a tune that seemed to grow organically, note by note, but in a direction that wasn’t expected. Liebman’s version is set against a space-aged drone of swelling electric guitar and atmospherics, then played on a wooden flute to give it the exotic flavor of the east. Listening to this “Lonely Woman”, you get the feeling that you are peering through a jungle canopy, into the mist. Is it a fair interpretation of Coleman’s music? Well, it’s rich with feeling, so: yes.

Tedeschi Trucks Band: Revelator

2011-06-15T03:33:00.000-07:00

Here, folks, is the best pop music of the summer: the first true collaboration between husband and slide guitarist Derek Trucks and wife and singer Susan Tedeschi. The tunes are classic pop and blues, the performances and syncopated and jammy without being aimless, and the whole package makes you want to put a spatula in your hand and head straight for the grill.

Revelator is outstanding in the extreme.

Everything is in place here. Kofi Burbridge’s keyboards are pitch-perfect in every small spot: a simple organ lick, a bed of Wurlitzer shimmer, the concert hall echo of acoustic piano. Background vocals around Tedeschi are sparingly used, but the duet elements of “Shelter” are a critical change of pace. Trucks never whips out his guitar prowess indulgently, instead choosing to serve every song, individually.

This is so true that it’s hard to believe that Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi are darlings of the jam band scene. Though it combines players from both leaders’ bands, this new group plays like a crack studio band with heart. On the one hand, these tunes are handcrafted like perfect miniatures, but on the other hand, these players have the instincts and the chops to craft solos that really tell a story.

Read my full review of Tedeschi Trucks Band, Revelator, right HERE.

Revelator, as much as anything, makes you wonder why the Tedeschi Trucks Band took so long to come together. Susan Tedeschi’s six-album career has been terrific but always just one star away from stellar. And the Derek Trucks Band had a tendency, perhaps, to feel too much like the Allman Brothers or too much like a “Man, you’ve gotta hear ‘em live” kind of band. Though they have toured together before and guested on each other’s discs plenty, this true collaboration brings it all together. Trucks is less of a Pure Player here than he is a bandleader, and Tedeschi seems less like a Great Voice than someone who is crafting memorable original songs just for your ears.

Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo: Songs of Mirth and Melancholy

2011-06-14T03:33:00.000-07:00

Joey Calderazzo has been playing the piano in Branford Marsalis superb quartet since about 1998, when Kenny Kirkland died and left a gaping hole. Both as a composer and as a pianist, it has been a period of great development for the pianist. On Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, Calderazzo shares composing credits with Branford, and they deliver a frequently delicate program of crystalline duets. The influence of classical music is particularly strong here—something that is rare in jazz, and rarely pulled off with grace and ease.

Marsalis plays mostly his soprano saxophone here, and he sounds great—graceful, emotional, and perfectly in tune. Wayne Shorter's "Face on the Barroom Floor" (from the Weather Report album Sportin' Life) is the only non-original song, and it reminds us the degree to which Branford has continued Shorter's legacy on soprano—the younger player sounds a great deal like the composer here, yet he also finds his own sound. Mostly, however, these sides are fresh and non-imitative. Calderazzo and Marsalis find ways to play uniquely as a duet, not just comping and soloing but truly playing as two interlocked voices.

The set is ballad-heavy, to be sure, but the more uptempo songs are thrilling. Marsalis's "Endymion" is composed in a Keith Jarrett mode, and it surges forward with great momentum and excitement. Calderazzo's opener, "One Way" is built on a funky/Monk-ish piano figure that allows Branford's tenor to get dirty on top.

My full review of Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo: Songs of Mirth and Melancholy can be found here.

On the slower songs, the duo is explicitly classical in style and intent, even playing Brahams's "Die Trauernde". This means that the piano will be playing a specific line in contrast to the saxophone rather than just rhythmic chords and that the articulation of both instruments is less likely to be swinging and urgent than delicately placed and tonally pure. It's unusual to hear jazz musicians make these choices so explicitly, but why should it be? It's a refreshing direction for a pair of wonderful players.

JAZZ TODAY: Jazz is Not For Amateurs!

2011-06-08T03:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I received by mail the debut CD from a young jazz singer. A very young jazz singer. Normally I wouldn't bother listening to something recorded by a 13 year-old, but the title of the disc, Scattin' Doll, was so awful . . . I had to dip my toe in the water.

Now, I don't normally set out to be a cranky jerk in my role as music critic. I'm here to promote the best of the music, not strut about as if I'm superior. I'm certainly not. But someone needs to cry foul when a talented girl who is barely a teenager is being promoted as if she was already the real thing. This CD had been produced by the girl's dad, with his pals playing in her rhythm section. She was, a bit like the young Nikki Yanofsky, a carbon copy of Ella Fitzgerald, but without the impeccable time and intonation. Very good for a 13 year-old? Yes. Good enough to have a CD being promoted and sent to critics? Noooooooo way.

Here is my JAZZ TODAY column about all this, an open letter to the father of young Claire Dickson: Sorry, Parents of All Those Little Prodigies Out There, Jazz is Not for Amateurs.

Sorry to be such an asshole but, unlike singing "Baby, Baby", jazz requires more than enthusiasm and some moxy. Claire, I hope to give you a good review in another eight or nine years.

David Foster Wallace: THE PALE KING

2011-06-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

While this space is usually reserved for my writing about music, I also write about books. I just finished reading the final (and unfinished) novel by the late David Forster Wallace. It is a book that is frequently brilliant and beautiful. It contains Wallace's virtuoso sentences, filled with music and drama, and it features just enough of his ecstatic humor too. But mostly it's an extraordinarily sad book, as he surely intended it to be.

The Pale King is not a book about his death, as so many have been tempted to suggest. But it is obsessed with his own obsession about the disease of self-consciousness, about the dilemma of being trapped inside one's own head, inescapably caught up in one's own do-loop of fears and fears about fears.

The book is set in an IRS Regional Examination Center in the 1980s, and it features a large cast of IRS employees who struggle with the tedium of their jobs. There is even a character referred to as "the author" and named David Wallace who swears that the book is a memoir crafted as a novel for legal reasons. We see these characters stumble through a transition period for the Peoria, IL, REC as new supervisors arrive and begin to implement some kind of change. There's plenty of boring tax talk (which, Wallace makes clear, is purposely boring for you, the reader) but there is also a good amount of mystery and intrigue, not to mention ghosts who haunt the place and long, fascinating stories from the characters' childhoods. Honestly, the book is a mess in many ways—literally cobbled together by Wallace's editor after it was found scattered around his study after his death—but a frequently glorious one.

Read my full PopMatter review of The Pale King HERE.

I miss David Foster Wallace. But it's questionable whether I'll read The Pale King a second time, like I did his masterpiece Infinite Jest (twice). Still, thanks for leaving us a little bit more, Dave.

Edie Brickell: Edie Brickell / The Gaddabouts: The Gaddabouts

2011-05-27T03:46:00.000-07:00

There is a certain kind of tuneful folk-pop music that would be hard to criticize if one were to be fair, but that in 2011, with all the factors fully considered and summed up, also lands on the musical palate with a bit of a fssssss. A nice voice, an acoustic guitar, a sturdy verse ‘n’ chorus kind of songwriting, a gentle examination of personal foibles or relationships or culture: you know this kind of music if you’re over 30, and you probably love some of it. Or plenty of it. Because there is such a plenty of it.

Now, just because Joni Mitchell’s Blue exists does not mean that Edie Brickell shouldn’t make some more music. But here’s the thing: you are excused if even the high quality tunesmithing and breezy/breathy vocals of her two new discs don’t move you. You get a pass if you aren’t paying close attention to her twin releases on her own label, one eponymous and one with the Gaddabouts, which is led by drummer Steve Gadd and features Brickell and her tunes. This is, after all, a whole lot of folk-rock to absorb in one sitting.

Ready my full PopMatters reviews of Edie Brickell: Edie Brickell / The Gaddabouts: The Gaddabouts HERE.

Edie Brickell is a smoother, more consistent disc, with an even band sound throughout—one that often leans back on the sturdy piano-pop of Elton John or, more recently, Bruce Hornsby. The Gaddabouts refers to a wider range of different styles, and at its best it places Brickell's bluesy, slightly lazy voice into a swinging jazz area that is very strong. Ronnie Cuber solos on baritone sax, and these tunes sound remarkably fresh.

Good music—well-crafted and well-written and fine indeed. But just a touch of a snooze in 2011.

Marcus Miller: A Night in Monte-Carlo

2011-05-19T03:42:00.000-07:00

I like Marcus Miller. I better like him—he's incredibly cool (and incredibly nice, as I interviewed him once when he was in an airport and found him utterly giving and kind) and he's about the best electric bass player on the planet. And he was the arranger and producer of choice for both Miles Davis and Luther Vandross.

But his solo records are not quite jazz classics. His latest, Marcus Miller: A Night in Monte-Carlo (read my full PopMatters review here), is typical of Miller's solo work: eclectic to a fault and sometimes brilliant. This is a live date with Miller's funky jazz group, a full orchestra, guest vocalists, and a ton of stylistic range. Opera, bossa nova, funk, classic jazz, snappy pop singing. There's "Amazing Grace" and there's "So What". We get groovy vocal percussion from Raul Midon and feather-cool flugelhorn playing from Roy Hargrove. It's a pu-pu platter of music for sure, but at times it all works wonderfully—as when the orchestra and DJ Logic are both grooving at "So What" with the backbeat perfectly in the pocket.

A Night in Monte Carlo is a neat representation of a great polymath musician to whom boundaries are beside the point. If it works for you, then dig it.

Jane Ira Bloom's Sinuous Soprano

2011-05-17T03:43:00.000-07:00

I'm a huge fan of the singular sound of Jane Ira Bloom's soprano saxophone. It's a sound so pure and so beautiful that it almost sounds electronic as it cuts through the air to your ear.

It's rare, of course, for a musician to focus only on the soprano sax. It's even more rare for a jazz musician who is not a singer or a pianist to be a woman. Bloom, in short, is a very rare player. Check out out latest JAZZ TODAY column about her here: Jane Ira Bloom's Sinuous Soprano.

Bloom's latest recording, Wingwalker, extends her long tradition of fine and bold programs. Her latest quartet features the pianist Dawn Clement, Mark Helias on bass, and her longstanding drummer Bobby Previte. Bloom is still using "live electronics" to thicken and process slightly the sound of her horn, though this gimmick is utilized with considerable skill and subtlety. And Bloom still walks the line between great loveliness of form and a certain beyond-the-harmony daring in how she plays.

Jane Ira Bloom, now and always, plays with with feminine grace but not a hint of cliche or schmaltz. She still sounds mesmerizing.

'An Evening with Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops'

2011-04-28T04:20:00.000-07:00

As a young jazz fan growing up in the 1970s, I had an inevitable fascination with the music of Frank Zappa. For me, Zappa was a kind of jazz musician. This was before Zappa was mainly known for chiding the Parents Music Resource Center, of course, but it roughly coincides with a time when Zappa was known to teenagers for a being a kind of novelty song guy. 1974's "Don't Eat Yellow Snow" (from Apostrophe) was even on the radio.

But for me Zappa was synonymous with his 1971-72 albums Waka/Jawaka and The Grand Wazoo, which were mainly instrumental and seemed like everything I loved about jazz at the time, plus a whole lot of what was cool about that classic-era in rock. To a 13 year-old boy, in short, HEAVEN. (Also, I was obsessed with Jean-Luc Ponty's 1969 record King Kong: Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa, on which the budding fusion violinist played Frank's tunes with Frank on guitar. So hip!)

And I still feel that way about Zappa. He was the smartest, funniest, most serious, most not-taking-himself-seriously guy in music. And yet he took his music very seriously.

'An Evening with Frank Zappa, The Torture Never Stops' (reviewed by me here on PopMatters) is a DVD containing the complete, Zappa-produced footage of a concert at New York's Palladium Theater on Halloween, 1981. What a band! Steve Vai is searing on guitar, and Chad Wackerman is doing everything on drums. They play tunes from all across the Zappa spectrum to that point, with Zappa singing a bit, playing his guitar a bit, and also doing plenty of conducting with a baton. The music is literally non-stop, as one tune runs directly into the next in perfect, super-precise succession.

Seeing the music made before your eyes will renew your sense of how complex and detailed Zappa's music was. The rippling runs on harmonized marimba and electric guitar and analog synth send chills down your spine. At least they do to mine.

I still love Frank and his music. Here is a great walloping, live dose of it. Delicious!

The World Saxophone Quartet: Yes We Can

2011-04-18T04:06:00.000-07:00

Old things can be new again.

And in jazz, too few bands stick around for thirty years. Certainly there are too few edgy bands that stick around for decades without losing their bracing newness. But the World Saxophone Quartet is just that. Begun in 1976, the WSQ has always functioned on the avant-garde wing of jazz but with tremendous success and showmanship. For all its honking and squealing, the WSQ has also covered Jimi Hendrix and Duke Ellington, making it for a long time on Elektra/Nonesuch. The band, which normally plays as just four saxophones with no rhythm section, long ago achieved a balance between the daring and the structured.

Yes We Can (read my PopMatters full review HERE) finds the band live in concert, playing alone and without frills. Things are not just as they were in '76, however. Julius Hemphill passed a while ago, and he is replaced here by the band's newest permanent member, the thrilling James Carter. Replacing Oliver Lake for a few concerts was Kidd Jordan, the New Orleans veteran who originally brought the band together. Founding members David Murray and Hamiet Bluiett are on hand and holding down the traditional sound.

Things start, as they always did when I saw the band live in the past, with Bluiett's "Hattie Wall," grounding things in a stomping groove rather than just abstraction. But this program then moves into fresh territory: something wild from Jordan, a lovely ballad from Murray that has the WSQ sounding like a lovely, harmonized chorus, "The Guessing Game" from Bluiett that takes advantage of the band's facility with pastel clarinet sounds.

This is a solid WSQ record in the classic mode. No African drummers or R 'n' B covers, which were both cool things for the band but not its bread and butter. Yes We Can, which of course refers to the US election of Barack Obama, find the band content and solid but also new, looking to the past but happily grounded in the present. It's a good place to discover the band if you don't know it, and it's a good place to come back to if you're an old fan who hasn't heard these boys in a while.

Paul Simon: So Beautiful or So What

2011-04-15T03:54:00.000-07:00

There has always been more to Simon than what was easily embraced, and that work—including his new, scintillating So Beautiful or So What—is much of his finest music.

The sound of So Beautiful is a kaleidoscope that moves from throbbing Graceland guitar to South Asian grooves on tablas to gentle ballads that incorporate harps, to outright rockers that are nevertheless flavored with bluegrass elements or even subtle atmospherics such as the sound of ringing phones, an old sermon, or an atonal glockenspiel. These elements, however, are juggled and mixed with great care and balance. So Beautiful is a not a pu-pu platter of styles but rather a summation of a great musician’s many interests. It coheres because the sounds serve the songs.

And the songs themselves are united utterly, thematically obsessed with the largest and most intriguing questions that art can tackle. Read my full PopMatters review of So Beautiful or So What right HERE.

By all accounts, Paul Simon—born in Newark, NJ, as a Jew during World War II—isn’t a deeply religious man. But So Beautiful relentlessly comes back to the notion of God (and frequently a Christian God) and to the value of love. But this is not the equivalent of Dylan’s born-again Slow Train Coming. Rather, Simon uses Christian iconography to raise spiritual questions of the most philosophical sort: Is there an order to life? Is there anything beyond this life? Are there sure answers to important questions? What redeems us, flawed though we are?

At least two songs here seem like outright Simon classics. “Getting Ready for Christmas Day” sets up a strange delta groove, and Simon’s sung verses about regular folks facing Christmas amidst adversity alternate with segments of an old sermon (with the call-and-response of a congregation) about both the terror and the glory of what might be waiting for various people. It’s an ingenious and ambiguous piece of art.

Even better is “Questions for the Angels”, a song that begins as an impossibly lovely song about a “pilgrim” wandering through New York. On the one hand, it is a very specific story song, and on the other hand it gets to abstractions such as “Who am I in this lonely world?” The song shifts halfway through to become a jaunty waltz, but that is just how Simon hears his music now—unrestricted and able to surprise you even as it casts a specific spell.

So Beautiful or So What is a complete classic—an album in which to lose yourself even as you get found.

JAZZ TODAY: An Infectious Case of Jazz Fanaticism

2011-04-14T03:58:00.000-07:00

A month ago I was in New York for work and had the chance to go the late night "Spontaneous Construction" show at The Blue Note. It was going to be a great, if crazy, show—an unrehearsed band featuring free tenor player Joe McPhee and drummer Nasheet Waits, along with cellist Marika Hughes and the bass player John Hebert. Fun.

The only issue was that I felt like I should invite my co-workers—but how likely were they to dig some real "eek-onk" music: free blowing with not set melodies and plenty of atonality? If if they hated it, well, you know the way that can compromise your own enjoyment. Still, two adventurous colleagues were ready for the thrill and downtown we went.

You can read the whole tale, and a bit about the group that puts on "Spontaneous Construction", in my latest JAZZ TODAY column, here: An Infectious Case of Jazz Fanaticism.

Ambrose Akinmusire: When the Heart Emerges Glistening

2011-04-05T03:46:00.000-07:00

The new Blue Note album by Ambrose Akinmusire, When the Heart Emerges Glistening, is a complete knock-out. Here is my PopMatters review, in total:

Thirty years ago, in 1981, a young trumpeter made his first statement on a major label and blew listeners out of their seats. When Wynton Marsalis debuted on Columbia, it was legitimate to say that you had never heard anyone play with such quicksilver fluency. It wasn’t that the music itself was daringly original but that Marsalis’s voice on the instrument seemed like a sudden, dramatic upgrade in brilliance.

The 2011 Blue Note debut of Ambrose Akinmusire has a similar power and excitement. Akinmusire is older (28), and he already released a very good disc on Fresh Sound New Talent (Prelude to Cora). But it remains that When the Heart Emerges Glistening is a thrilling, dazzling debut—the emergence of a new voice in the music and a new sound and conception for the trumpet.

Akinmusire doesn’t come out of nowhere. He played with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements band out of high school, he attended the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in LA, then he won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. Akinmusire was on the radar. A jazz fan might have seen him coming. But our ears still weren’t ready.

So, what’s so special about this trumpet player? Akinmusire combines three brilliant instrumental merits: a virtuosity of speed and fluency, an ability to generate new kinds of patterns and intervals and a freshly conceived approach to sound.

Akinmusire doesn’t show off by playing fast and high, necessarily. But he moves like a ninja through an alleyway—slippery and precise, in front of you, then behind you, then beyond you. His playing on the original “The Walls of Lechuguilla” is flabbergasting. The trumpet-only introduction is like nothing you have heard before. Akinmusire toggles between two notes, playing the higher note with a deadened sound, then begins dropping the lower note micro-tonally Then he starts speeding up the pattern, then complicating it until it is a spiraling flurry. If it reminds you a bit of Lester Bowie, but also a bit of Dizzy Gillespie, then you’re hearing the kind of thrill that I am. It also brings to mind, just a bit, Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues” as the whole exercise ultimately fuses brilliantly into the composition itself, continuing as a fascinating and percussive dialogue with a great rhythm section.

On this tune alone, Akinmusire demonstrates that he is playing in an original jazz trumpet voice. He monkeys with tone and note choice, but he does it at crackerjack tempo. You might be so taken with the dazzle of it all that you don’t realize that he does it all in the service of the composition. But, amazingly, he has that base covered too.

The opening tune, “Confessions to My Unborn Daughter”, is nearly as fine. Another introductory trumpet cadenza draws you in with unsettling originality, and then the band makes sense of it all with a grooving but stately triple meter. The rhythm section (pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown) locks in with a blend of jazz complexity and pop instinct. Like the finest bands out there today, these guys blend the elaborate dialogue of jazz with a stuttering edge of hip hop punch. And then there is tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, who plays like he is wired into Akinmusire’s brain directly. The two are twinned up like an Ornette Coleman/Don Cherry for the new era.

On “Confessions” and on “Henya”, there are moments where the two horn players, separately but also together, bend and choke their notes like virtuoso singers who operate without the boundaries of traditional scales or Western instruments. It might seem kind of avant-garde if it weren’t so utterly beautiful. It’s not bold as much as it is breathtaking. When the Heart Emerges Glistening isn’t a manifesto; it’s just great.

Akinmusire’s compositions are appealing, but they often have the jagged trickiness of his mentor Steve Coleman. “Far But Few Between” starts with a series of interval jabs by trumpet which are then answered by a rhythm section pattern that is so skitteringly complex that it seems improvised beyond a time signature (though I’m quite certain it is predetermined). “Jaya” is a mid-tempo groove tune based on a time pattern that sounds perfectly natural but that non-experts will hardly be able to discern. Remarkable it is, then, that these songs are not in the least forbidding or unappealing. Indeed, like all of Glistening, these tunes seem as easy to enjoy as anything from Wynton Marsalis or from a basic mid-60s Blue Note album.

A couple of tracks have notably different formats. “Ayneh (Cora)” is a delicate duet for piano (Clayton) and celeste (Akinmusire). The two also duet on “Ayneh (Campbell)” and “Regret (No More)”, where Akinmusire’s trumpet control—his mastery of tone and pure sound—serves a heartfelt melody. “My Name is Oscar” is a duet for Akinmusire’s spoken-word evocation of a police shooting in his hometown of Oakland, Calif., and Brown’s drums. Clean and powerful, it works.

Tellingly, Akinmusire includes only one standard in this recital: “What’s New”, also a duet. The feeling is outwardly more traditional, with Clayton playing in a modern stride style. But even here, the leader sounds fully up-to-the-minute, not aping his hero Clifford Brown but, instead, suggesting that Brown’s legacy is arcing into the future, decades after it seemed like there might be no new way to play “mainstream” jazz.

Kudos to Blue Note president Bruce Lundvall for getting Ambrose Akinmusire and his band into the studio. And kudos to pianist Jason Moran for not only suggesting this but also producing the recording (and playing Rhodes, subtly and beautifully, on a couple of tracks).

When the Heart Emerges Glistening is a gem. It’s a jazz record to rave about and to push on your friends. It’s the product of a talent that should send shivers up every jazz fan’s spine. Ambrose Akinmusire has been holding back, finding his voice, developing his band, and now he is here in full bloom.

Spring has arrived. You can feel it in your bones, and now you can hear it with your ears.

Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis featuring Norah Jones: Here We Go Again

2011-04-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A-and, add Norah Jones to the mix as well.

In 2008, Blue Note released a live recording from Wynton Marsalis featuring the timeless Willie Nelson as guest singer and soloist. Two Men with the Blues was one of the highlights of that year because Nelson made the sometimes antiseptic Marsalis (with a crack quintet) looser and more fun and Marsalis pushed the sometimes-rather-lazy Nelson to be sharper. It was a classic win-win.

The boys are back together again with Here We Go Again (read my full PopMatters review here). And it's another strong outing. How could it not be, with the material this time being the stellar repertoire associated with Ray Charles and with the single-malt voice of Norah Jones featured as well? Again, Marsalis's arrangements for quintet are clever and swinging, astutely recasting familiar material in smart ways. And Nelson proves again that his laconic singing style is as much a child of Louis Armstrong as any proper "jazz" singer. Finally, this is the first we've gotten to hear Jones singing with a true jazz group behind (rather than merely her fine but limited pop band), and Marsalis spurs her singing to a higher realm. (Seriously, why hasn't Norah Jones made a real jazz album?)

What's missing from Here We Go Again is pretty well implied by the title—it's a bit routine. You know these songs a little too well, and everyone involved is doing what they do perfectly on cue. This disc doesn't seem to have a capacity to surprise us.

That said, it's lovely in nearly every way—a great example of how jazz can still be a powerful popular medium. It's a jazz album that I think just about anyone should delight in.

Randy Weston and his African Rhythms Sextet: The Storyteller

2011-03-29T06:04:00.000-07:00

2010 was big for pianist and composer Randy Weston. He published his illuminating and riveting autobiography, and he continued playing like a vital musician—continuing to play his fresh compositions. Weston's story is legitimately different than that of any other jazz musician because he has no peer when it comes to integrating the music of Africa into contemporary jazz.

Weston recorded a live set at Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola with his working group, the African Rhythms, and it's as good a place as any to remind yourself that you probably haven't listen to Weston as much as you should. With TK Blue on saxiphone and (the late and missed) Benny Powell on trombone, Weston has a distinctive and deep front line to put across his material. The rhythm section is percolating with polyrhythms between bassist Alex Blake and hand percussionist Neil Clarke. For this gig, Weston also added drummer Lewis Nash. A solid band got more solid.

Ready my full review here: Randy Weston and his African Rhythms Sextet: The Storyteller.

The set features several of Weston's finest compositions. His "African Cookbook Suite" comes in three parts and is magisterial. "Chano Pozo," of course, is a tribute to Dizzy Gillespie's great percussionist and the grand-daddy of Afro-Cuban jazz. And the classic "Hi Fly" is also here, but taken at a slow tempo with a merely implied melody—Weston then plays "Fly Hi", which is a kind of inversion of the original taken at a quick pace.

In short, The Storyteller is a vital recording from a musician who is now 85 years old. If we haven't already, it's well time to start paying close attention to his innovations.

Keren Ann: 101

2011-03-23T03:56:00.000-07:00

Keren Ann is different than most of the female vocalists being put out there by Blue Note Records. She isn't a jazz singer, nope, though her previous work has been a mixture of cabaret and chanteuse-ery. Her latest album, 101, is a full program of whispered indie-pop, an up-to-the-minute record of songs that set up little movies in your head. My full review is up at PopMatters, HERE.

A good chunk of 101 suggests gentle folk music, with finger-picked guitars and big, open piano chords. And because Keren Ann (born Keren Ann Zeidel and a child in Israel, Holland, and Paris) sings with a limited, breathy instrument with a limited range, the whole enterprise feels even more like a kind of folk music. But plenty of songs here use synth bass, drum loops, repetitive electric keyboards and—more importantly—intelligent layers of sound that make clear that this is a different kind of project. Horns and strings are in play, but not in the way that you would hear them on a jazz or adult contemporary disc. Instead, Keren Ann deploys these sounds as subtle pads of sound that build up throbbing atmosphere.

The New York Times, in a recent magazine profile on Keren Ann, called this music "Gansta Folk", but I think they got it wrong on both counts. Sure, there is a song here that imagines the performer on stage pulling out a gun and shooting up the whole music hall. (And, of course, note the album's cover.) But other songs are as likely to detail a distant marriage or some other novelistic topic.

101 is a healthy piece of intelligent indie-pop. It brings to mind The Flaming Lips or The Decemberists much more than it suggests a hip hop poseur. It doesn't need a catchy new moniker. Blue Note put out a good piece of fresh pop music rather than jazz, and it works.

Kurt Elling: THE GATE

2011-03-14T03:55:00.000-07:00

When it comes to guys singing jazz in 2011, Kurt Elling is King. Since his 1995 debut, Close Your Eyes (Blue Note), to 2009's Dedicated to You (Concord), he has been daring, solid, and utterly identifiable. Brimming with technique that draws equally on Sinatra and Mark Murphy, the guy is a jazz singing superstar, and yet he has also been quirky and off-beat. You could hardly ask for more.

Elling's latest, The Gate, keep the streak alive. Check out my full PopMatters review here.

The Gate mixes "new standards" by the Beatles, King Crimson, Stevie Wonder, and others with jazz classics by Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. But with the vogue for this kind of Jazz Singer Does Rock! long past, this is no gimmick. Along with super--producer Don Was and longtime accompanist Lawrence Hobgood, Elling finds all sorts of elastic swing or syncopated funk in these pop songs, and he delivers them with soaring, daring power.

Even the most familiar songs take on a delicious new flavor. "Norwegian Wood" gets a whole new rhythmic feeling. Joe Jackson's "Steppin' Out" sounds much like the original, but Elling flats one note of the melody to sour things wonderfully, then he deconstructs the songs like Picasso after a key change. And best of all, many of the arrangements are flavored by flashes of overdubbed harmony that jar the listener out of what we usually expect from a jazz singer. Hancock's "Come Running to Me," for example, sounds like a fully new direction for Elling because of the way the vocals are layered into a sinuous texture.

Throughout, Hobgood's solos sparkle. Bob Mintzer contributes some color on saxophone, and the occassional guitar solo is distorted rather than clean. But the main attraction remains Kurt Elling's dramatic baritone moving confidently through songs of real quality, finding the nuance or the beauty in them, and opening up new vistas. The Gate seems as good as gets in jazz singing these days.

JAZZ TODAY: The Blessing and the Curse of the Grammys

2011-03-07T03:33:00.000-08:00

Jazz gets its 15 minutes of fame every couple of years, and it isn't always pretty. Last month, jazz was thrust into the headlines because angry 13 year-old girls had never heard of Esperanza Spalding.

Why should they heard of her? She's Joe Lovano's bass player.

But she's also an up-and-coming crossover star in jazz, a solo artist with sinuous tunes, an elastic voice, and a following among folks—including President Obama—who like soulfully smart jazz. And, after being nominated by the Recording Academy for "Best New Artist," she was the upset winner over Drake, Florence & the Machine, Mumford & Sons, and—oh, yeah—Justin Bieber. Hence the derision of a generation of girls named Brittany.

Read my reaction to this, which includes reflections on the treacle of Glee and the stunning Arcade Fire victory in the new Jazz Today column The Blessing and the Curse of the Grammys on PopMatters.

Buddy Miller: The Majestic Silver Strings

2011-03-03T19:35:00.000-08:00

I don't review too many country albums, but then again there aren't many country albums that feature jazz guitarists Marc Ribot and Bill Frisell. There also aren't many country artists as irresistible and stunning as Buddy Miller.

The Majestic Silver Strings (reviewed on PopMatters HERE) is a collection that allows Miller to transform a heap of classic country songs with the help of a veritable guitar army. In addition of Frisell and Ribot, who both sound utterly like themselves here, Miller has session whiz Greg Leisz in the band as well. And, amazingly, these four guitars (as Miller himself is a brilliant player) never get in each other's way.

In addition to the musicianship here, Miller has enlisted a stunning line-up of vocalists. Shawn Colvin sounds clear and pure on Lefty Frizzell's "Thats' the Way Love Goes," and Patty Griffin duets with Miller nicely on "I Want to Be with You Always." Julie Miller (wife and frequent partner) sounds fine on "God's Wing'd Horse." Even Ribot gets to singing, solo on two songs and in duet with the leader on "Why Baby Why." Perhaps the best tune on the album is a feature for Chocolate Genius (Marc Anthony Thompson) on the grooving "Dang Me."

As always with Buddy Miller, the conventions of country fall away. His work sounds like folk and rock and classic pop all at once, yet it does so without seeming generic or pretentiously "alt." This album, while obviously not as focused as some of Miller's best discs, remains a study in hip attitude and eclectic taste. That's Buddy Miller.

The Microscopic Septet: Friday the Thirteenth, The Micros Play Monk

2011-02-24T03:57:00.000-08:00

Any fan of The Microscopic Septet can tell you that the band is a Monk specialist. The slightly off-center feel of The Micros over the years has always lent itself to interpreting jazz's most off-center—and brilliant—composer.

The surprise is that they have never devoted an album of arrangement to the master . . . until now.

Not that the band has had a long career in which to deal with this. Joel Forrester (piano) and Philip Johnston (soprano sax) led the band actively from 1982-1992, recording four discs of mostly original material, which was reissued in 2006. This led to 2008's Lobster Leaps In, a fresh set of tunes for this four-sax-plus-rhythm band. 2010 delivered the inevitable, new recordings of (some old, some new) arrangement of "Pannonica," "Wee See," "Bye-Ya" and the like. (For Micro neophytes, you might recognize this band and its sound from NPR's great Fresh Air with Terry Gross—they composed and play that stuttering, tumbling theme song.)

And, boy is it fun! The Micros load on the Latin grooves and a martial beat, sleek swing and avant-garde freak-outs. They don't stray all that far from Monk's tunes or his ultimate intentions, but they bring a fresh sense of quirk to these (mostly) familiar jazz standards. My only reservation is that the tunes are short and the players don't stretch out much. But then again, long solos have never been The Micros' thing. Even the leaders are not riveting soloists who regularly grip you with the narrative feeling of their instrumental solos.

You might feel that you don't need another Monk tribute disc, but this is a theme record that overcomes any sense of familiarity. These guys have long been some of the few pranksters in jazz, and it's great to have them playing on the monkey bars of such a great composer.

Cassandra Wilson: Silver Pony

2011-02-21T04:05:00.000-08:00

For me, Cassandra Wilson raised the bar for jazz singers in the last two decades. High. On the one hand she started out singing jazz from a rare perspective—from the fringe. Her origins in jazz are with Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman. On the other hand, her recordings since she joined Blue Note (with 1993's Blue Light Till Dawn) have been singular successes at bringing rock-era pop and blues into a jazz singer's repertoire.

Cassandra, I would follow you anywhere.

But her latest, 2010's Silver Pony, is a disappointment. Her voice is wonderful as usual: deep and elastic and insinuating. But she is plainly coasting. The first three tracks are live versions of songs from her last album. And as much as I like her "Lover Come Back to Me" and her "St. James Infirmary," hearing them again live so quickly is not high on my list of Cassandra Wilson hopes and dreams.

Worse, there are a few tunes here that just seem like filler, particularly a couple of "songs" that are merely excepts of jams from a live show, one presented on its own and the other given lyrics and worked into something new. "A Night in Seville" and the title track are going nowhere fast.

It's not all live, too, which adds to my sense that this is an oddly stitched-together program. I dig some of the new stuff—a great "Forty Days and Forty Nights", which is a fresh take on Muddy Waters, and wonderfully spare "If It's Magic," from Stevie's brilliant Songs in the Key of Life. I also like the new band, particularly young pianist Jonathan Batiste.

If you love Cassandra Wilson, you'll find other good stuff here as well—a duet with John Legend, a ripping slide guitar solo, a neat reharmonization of "Blackbird." But Silver Pony is a grab-bag of stuff, not a great new album. I expect something more impressive next time from my favorite jazz singer.

JAZZ TODAY: Two Key Stories from 2010 — Mary Halvorson and Clean Feed Records

2011-02-16T04:17:00.000-08:00

There are at least two important jazz developments from last year that I haven't written about yet. One is the emergence—with great volume and creativity—of the Lisbon-based Clean Feed Records. The other is the ubiquity and quality and fresh inventiveness of guitarist Mary Halvorson.

Read the full JAZZ TODAY column right here.

Clean Feed released almost 50 (!) disc last year, recordings that featured both very well-known jazz players and obscure artists on the rise. Nearly every one is worth a deep, long listen. This is thrilling, adventurous work where musicians are given the chance to stretch out, explore, be contemplative, recombine is interesting groupings. In my column, I detail what I love about Clean Feed by reviewing music by James Carney/Stephan Crump, Rudresh Mahanthappa/Steve Lehman, Anthony Davis/James Robinson, Tony Malaby/Wadada Leo Smith/William Parker/Nasheet Waits, and the Tom Rainey Trio (featuring guitarist Mary Halvorson). If your taste in jazz tends toward to fresh and new, then Clean Feed is something you should be eating for lunch.

Mary Halvorson played with a dozen interesting bands in 2010, but what brings her to mind is her triumphant recording Saturn Sings from last year. It scooted past my "best of 2010" lists because my own ears took a while to catch up to it. I heard Halvorson live during the 2009 Vancouver Jazz Festival, where she was playing with Taylor Ho Bynum's group, and at that time I found her fascinating but sour. Her playing is a far cry from conventional jazz guitar, consistently largely of jagged melodic forms and scratched out textures. While she can play beautifully, its the gorgeousness of the sour or unexpected—not a huge surprise when you consider that her training comes from the bands of Anthony Braxton, in part.

Saturn Sings pairs her trio (with John Hebert on bass and drummer Ches Smith) with two horns (Jonathan Finlayson's trumpet and John Irabagon from Mostly Other People Do The Killing on alto sax), and it contains crisp, wonderful writing. While the horns on not on every track, they help to polish up Halvorson's musical instincts and to set off the off-kilter sound of her guitar trio with some of the polish and structure of an old Blue Note date. Listening to Saturn Sings is just a wee bit like hearing an old Andrew Hill record if he had been a guitarist rather than a pianist—it lurches and surprises and thrills. It takes you by surprise.

Clean Feed has already produced some great work in 2011, to be reviewed here soon. I'm sure Mary Halvorson is cooking up delights as well. The state of the music in 2011: just fine.

African Rhythms: The Autobiography of Randy Weston

2011-02-15T04:02:00.000-08:00

Randy Weston is surely an under-appreciated jazz pianist. Most fans will know that Weston wrote the standard "Hi Fly" (about, it turns out, how tall he is) but not the real heart of his story. It turns out to be not merely an interesting story but also a singular one.

In African Rhythms, Weston puts down his story in workmanlike but engaging prose (with the help of jazz writer Willard Jenkins), relating his connection to his father, who raised him in Brooklyn with great pride in being a man with roots in Africa, then his unusual jazz apprenticeship in the Berkshires where he started playing seriously in the mountain resorts, then his inevitable travel to and residency in Morocco. My full review of the book on PopMatters is HERE.

Through all of this, Weston relates his story of being a musician primarily. There is relatively little in African Rhythms about Weston's personal life. Aside from his father, the most important 'secondary player' in the story if trombonist and arranger Melba Liston, to whom Weston would turn at the critical musical moments in this life. For example, she arranged the music for Uhuru Afrika, which was the seminal work from 1961 that helped to propel Weston on his first trip to his real "home" and that he describes as his most important writing. But even Liston comes off as a minor character compared to the music itself.

African Rhythms is a huge triumph in getting the reader to hunger to hear Weston's music. It sent me back to his recordings with truly fresh ears. And while the book itself was occasionally awkward or repetitious in its storytelling, the musical story it had to tell was riveting and unique. Weston's has been a jazz life like no other. For fans of the music, this is a fine and true jazz man's tale.

Dave Brubeck: The Definitive Dave Brubeck on Fantasy, Concord Jazz, and Telarc

2011-02-11T03:56:00.000-08:00

The definitive recording of Dave Brubeck's entire career, people should know, are not on this new collection. The sides for which the pianist is most well-known (indeed, the tracks that make up 95% of his reputation as one of the most accessible and, kinda, weird jazz musicians) were on Columbia, and they're not here.

Rather, this collection brings together the man's early recordings and then his late recordings: everything of note that is not on Columbia. Thus, it is a kind of "best of" supplement, something for Brubeck completists to grab and mull over.

And it is fascinating. The early Brubeck is curious and various. There is the young man studying with Darius Milhaud who turns a standard ("The Way You Look Tonight") into an academic, mannered exercise. There is also the trendy leader of a trio who chases down the interest in Latin jazz by letting drummer Cal Tjader go crazy on bongos and, eventually, on vibes. Eventually we hear this guy encounter an alto saxophonist named Paul Desmond, and their immediate rapport creates the sound of the classic Brubeck Quartet. The first sparks of this, including some freshly improvised classical-ish counterpoint, is a marvel to hear.

The late Brubeck is less bombastic, avoiding the crashing block chord solos that make the classic quartet so thrilling and, often, unswinging. But these groups rarely seem as balanced, as Brubeck hunts around for a reed player as fulfilling as Desmond. There are some lovely recordings here, however, and none more lovely that a version of "Forty Days" from 2004 that reminds us that Brubeck was always a great jazz composer even if he wasn't the most nuanced player.

If you grew up loving Dave Brubeck but have never hunted down his more obscure stuff, this could be for you. For others, the Columbia recordings remain where it's at.

Chick Corea/Stanley Clarke/Lenny White: Forever

2011-02-10T04:34:00.000-08:00

The industry that Return to Forever has become is offering up an intriguing new piece of product: Forever, the first release from just the trio of Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White. It's nothing new exactly, but rather a concert recording of these three masterful jazz musicians playing live (mostly standards, a few tasty RTF classics like "Senor Mouse") or, oddly enough, rehearsing to play live. I know, it sounds like filler material, fluff to keep fans of the old fusion juggernaut in candy.

But it's more than that and better than that, even though that's what it is. My PopMatters review is HERE.

It's better because, no matter how you slice it, Corea and Co are stunning jazz musicians, and when they play without bombast and fusion-show-offiness they are take-your-breath-away wonderful. There are two discs here, and on the first it is just the trio, playing acoustic on harmonically rich material. It's hard to imagine too many jazz fans turning their nose up at this stuff.

On disc two, the trio is captured either in concert or in rehearsal with guests. Guitarist Bill Connors is there to reprise the earliest of the RTF quartets, electric and searing. Then Jean-Luc Ponty comes in on electric violin to reprise some material from one Chick's solo albums, My Spanish Heart. Then the five of them play together. Nice. More out of left field, the trio brings in singer Chaka Khan to reprise two tunes from the Echoes of an Era band. (Do any fans remember this oddly unbalanced album from 1982 with the fondness that I do—originally with Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard on horns?) For jazz fans of that time, this disc recaptures some wonderful oddities. Ponty's acoustic original "Renaissance" is a delight. No doubt, this second disc is less timeless than the first, but for fans of Corea, it's a plus.

If this music were brand new today, would it delight me so, or is nostalgia doing its work? I think that the superb playing transcends time, but you can find out for yourself.

Eddie Henderson: For All We Know

2011-02-08T03:43:00.000-08:00

Eddie Henderson is best known for his trumpet work in Herbie Handcock's Mwandishi Band from the early 1970s. That was a great band, no doubt, but that was over 40 years ago. It turns out that Eddie Henderson is something else too.

For All We Know is Henderson's most recent solo recording, and it stands as a distinctive statement from an elegant, happening player. My PopMatters review can be found HERE. Henderson plays originals and standards, sounding a good bit like Miles Davis or Art Farmer but a whole lot like himself. His playing has a lovely fluidity, and the construction of his solos is logical and clear. He can buzz and skip and catch a neat rhythmic wave. He is modern but not mechanical. His playing is pretty.

The other star here is John Scofield on guitar, working as the only chording instrument and providing Henderson with a very orchestral backing. His signature sound is here: jagged and Monk-ish, edgy but still beautiful. It's great to hear Sco in a truly pure jazz setting, not jamming or bumping or funking at all but playing the changes and liberated from the need to energize things or excite things. Here, his playing is plenty energizing without having to dive for the jugular. And it's great.

Eddie Henderson: I bet you have some other brilliant solo work I've been letting slip past me. Time to start hunting it down.

Amos Lee: Mission Bell

2011-02-03T03:48:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed Amos Lee's Blue Note debut, a bunch of albums back. He's not a jazz guy, not even as jazzy as Norah Jones, but he was playing with Jones's band and had a super-appealing voice and some good tunes. Blue Note had itself another winner, all the better to finance more Joe Lovano albums!

But on his fourth disc, Mission Bell, Lee seems as generic as he can get. A little lite-soul, a whole lot of mellow. It's 1977 again, but without the awesome band that would have been on the latest Jackson Brown or Paul Simon disc. And sure as hell without the songs those guys were writing.

Check out by PopMatters review here.

Mission Bell was produced by Joey Burns of the band Calexico, and that's the band that provides the backing here. He has also called in some guests—Willy Nelson, showing up Lee on a reprise of one song and Lucinda Williams, wasted on another. The big-name guests just underline that this disc, that these tunes, don't stand well on their own. This is a very "mellow" album. Mushy, sweet, soft. The bad kind of mellow. Making Norah Jones seems edgy—that kind of mellow.

And I read yesterday that the album had debuted at "number one" on some chart or other. [Sigh.]

The Bad Plus Plays It Straight(ish): Interview with Ethan Iverson

2011-01-24T03:20:00.000-08:00

Last year The Bad Plus released Never Stop, their first disc of purely original songs. Looking back on the 2010, I think I may have overlooked this disc in the hailstorm of fantastic jazz piano recordings. There are several tunes here that, as well as anything this great band has ever done, expand the definition of swing to include a variety of creative backbeats. Unlike the jazz-rock fusion of the ‘70s or the smooth jazz-funk of the last 25 years, this incarnation of rocking jazz is as rubbery and rich as Ellington.

I had the chance to interview Ethan Iverson, the pianist for The Bad Plus, and that interview (after too long a delay) is finally published at Popatters today, RIGHT HERE.

Iverson is an incredibly articulate and even sweet guy, and talking to him is a real pleasure. He has a lot to say. I think it is particularly interesting that, when asked about all the slew of great and creative young pianist in jazz today, he agreed with me, but added: "I wish more of them would have the courage to take their name off the marquee and be in a band instead. That is really the way I want to be influential: form bands."

Check out Iverson, but more importantly check out his band, The Bad Plus.

Joe Lovano/Us Five: Bird Songs

2011-01-20T03:57:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe, but Joe Lovano has made almost two dozen albums for Blue Note. And, depending on your taste for certain gimmicks (such as jazz versions of operatic arias), there hasn't been a stinker in the bunch. Lovano is a premiere saxophonist with a unique tone and a brilliant imagination.

It's hard to believe that, until now, he had never truly taken on the legacy of Charlie Parker. My PopMatters review is HERE.

Bird Songs features Lovano's recent working quintet, "Us Five," featuring James Weidman on piano (with the best work of his career), Esperanza Spalding on bass (yup, the new jazz star, as a sidewoman), Otis Brown on drums, and Francisco Mela also on drums. This is not a fleet and nimble unit exactly—they prefer crazier, earthier arrangements, tunes where they can play a little bit bop but also quite a bit free.

On this disc, Lovano's pulls apart these classic Bird tunes (or tunes associated with him) and remakes them fundamentally. "Passport" and "Moose the Mooche" use short riffs from the original tunes as written to create new structures over which the whole melody turns. "Birdyard" and "Blue Collage" are original mash-ups of Parker tunes that weave melodies or parts of melodies together in utterly original ways. And "Koko" lets the saxophonist play mostly free over percussion in an improvised deconstruction of the original.

There are more conventional takes here as well. "Lover Man" and "Donna Lee" are straight but swinging, with the latter never stating the melody but just licensing Lovano to play like Coleman Hawkins (that is, with unparalleled melodic invention) and the former being a powerful stroll on the new "G Mezzo Soprano" saxophone.

Joe Lovano and his band are a great unit. This is their second outing for Blue Note. May there be more.

The Jazz Passengers: Reunited

2011-01-19T03:45:00.000-08:00

Here is one of very best jazz records of 2010—a lark and joy and also a serious recording, a jazz disc where the solos are short and to the point but not less inventive or innovative, a project featuring pop songs (Peaches and Herb! Radiohead!) and even pop stars (Debbie Harry! Elvis Costello!) but where the core band still rules the roost.

Reunited, a comeback album by the great Jazz Passengers. My PopMatters review is HERE.

These guys were darlings of the downtown NY jazz scene as far back as the 1980s, emerging from John Lurie's "faux-jazz" Lounge Lizards with their sense of crazy theater intact but a fully "serious" musical mission at hand. Reunited is the first recording by the band (Roy Nathanson's alto, Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Bill Ware on vibes, Sam Bardfeld's violin, Brad Jones on bass, drummer E.J. Rodriguez, and part-timers Marc Ribot, Harry and Costello) in many years, but it's certainly a return to the band's best form: serious composition mixing with humor, great playing in the service musical entertainment.

This is pungent music with a light touch. Jazz, usually pretty bad at maintaining a sense of humor needs more from the Passengers. It's great to hear them again.

Kurt Rosenwinkel and OJM: Our Secret World

2011-01-10T04:28:00.000-08:00

Kurt Rosenwinkel has been a smart and sometimes supercharged new jazz guitarist for a while now, and his bands and recording projects have been outstanding. His "Standards Trio" released a truly fine disc in 2009 (check out my review, HERE) and his efforts in conjunction with Mark Turner on tenor have created a stellar guitar/sex pairing. Rosenwinkel plays with jazz invention and not a little fire, placing him in the Scofield/Frisell/Abercrombie camp but a generation younger and more vital.

Our Secret World places him in front of a big band for the first time. Check out my PopMatters review HERE. This is a Portuguese band called the Orchestra de Jazz de Matosinhos, and their arrangers do intriguing things with Rosenwinkel's own tunes, translating their cascading lines to brass and woodwinds. The band plays with power and assurance.

The biggest drawback to the disc is that Rosenwinkel is the only soloist on every tune but one. He sounds terrific, but that's the whole game. And the band, for all its technical excellence, never really sounds distinctive as a big band. The days of big bands with clear, unmistakable personalities is likely over anyway, but you wish for a bit more here.

JAZZ TODAY: An Interview with Guitarist Rez Abbasi

2011-01-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

I'm an excitable guy, so maybe every year seems like a great one in jazz to me. But I thought 2010 was a blockbuster. One of the keenest recordings this year that appeared on far too few top-ten lists was Rez Abbasi's Natural Selection, featuring his acoustic quartet.

My latest JAZZ TODAY column features a long interview with Abbasi—I know you'll find it interesting. Abbasi is a warm and keenly intelligent man. He was charming to talk to, revealing plenty of interesting information about how he works, how he approaches improvisation, and how he approaches the economic challenges of being a jazz musician in 2011.

Mostly Abbasi is known for his electric work in a free-wheeling, modern vein. His previous disc, Things To Come, was a highlight of 2009, featuring Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto, Vijay Iyer on piano, and Abbasi's wife, the vocalist Kiran Ahluwalia. Abbasi managed to fuse up-to-the-minute jazz with South Asian micro-tonal composing in an thrilling effort. Abbasi plays as a sideman in groups led by Mahanthappa as well.

But Natural Selection sounds more focused and traditional, perhaps. The acoustic ensemble is beautifully enhanced by the vibes playing of Bill Ware (The Jazz Passengers), Stephan Crump on bass (from Iyer's recent trio, leader of the Rosetta Trio, and accompanist of his wife, vocalist Jen Chapin), and Eric McPherson's drums. Abbasi tackles unusual repertoire: Keith Jarrett's "Personal Mountains" as well as Joe Henderson's "Punjab", not to mention an overdubbed guitar duet on "Ain't No Sunshine." Abbasi's originals have snap and intriguing structure, and he includes some work containing idiomatically "Indian" elements, but that's not mainly that this disc is about.

Thanks for the interview, Rez. May 2011 bring you more success! The music is GREAT.

Will on WNYC's Soundcheck, Monday, 12/13: BEST JAZZ OF 2010

2010-12-13T15:16:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again: Best-of List Time!

John Schaefer, Soundcheck Host

Man, I love a good list. Love all things enumerated. Rankings, choosings, comparings. I'm the decider, baby.

The good people at WNYC's fantastic show "SoundCheck" once again had the wisdom, kindness (and resilience) to invite me to chat up host John Schaefer regarding the year's best jazz. You can listen to the apprearance HERE.

If you want to look at the list I came up with along with PopMatters colleague John Garratt, then click on through right HERE.

Guillermo Klein: Domador de Huellas, Music of “Cuchi” Leguizamon PopMatters

2010-12-13T03:58:00.000-08:00

One of the top jazz recordings of the year is by the distinctive pianist and composer Guillermo Klein, Domador de Huellas, Music of “Cuchi” Leguizamon. Check out my PopMatter review here.

Klein interprets the tunes of a fellow Argentine, but his own presence is critical, blending warm vocal performances with arrangements that use electric and acoustic pianos, horns, and percussion in a manner that is swinging, impressionistic, pungent, and hypnotic.

The writing covers a huge emotional territory from melancholy to triumphant, yet the overall feeling never veers too far from the warmly dancing. Traces of Aaron Copland mingle with the pulse of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

There are so many truly outstanding jazz pianists on the scene these days, and Klein deserves a spot among them. He dazzles, however, not in his chops or flights of improvisation but in how he works with a band.

He is, I suppose, the one of the most Ellingtonian of the crop of current fine pianists in the music. That, of course is high praise.

Danilo Perez: Providencia

2010-12-07T04:11:00.000-08:00

Panamanian pianist Danilo Perez took my breath away with his work in Wayne Shorter's quartet, playing blistering modern jazz that defied nearly every category. Previously, I had heard him as a superb but fairly standard post-bop piano player with an exciting Latin tinge to his mainstream music. Maybe I needed to hear him again?

And Providencia provides plenty of evidence that he has a wealth of fresh ideas about jazz in his bag. My PopMatters review is HERE.

This new recording features not only Perez's fine trio but also a woodwind quartet, breezy scat vocals, the acid tones of alto player Rudresh Mahanthappa, not to mention a wealth of fresh compositional ideas. It's a bit of a mish-mash as a program, but that is intentional. It offers something new to hear each time you put it on, and it should be a disc that sounds as good in 2020 as in 2010.

What more do you want?

Hilary Kole: You Are There

2010-12-06T03:46:00.000-08:00

I had never heard Hilary Kole before, a very young and lovely jazz singer based ('f course) in New York. She is the youngest singer ever to play in just about every room she has graced, and her chops are remarkable -- remarkably sensitive and subtle. She's not a Robo-Ella like li'l Nikki Yanovsky.

Her latest (and second) album is called You Are There. You can read my PopMatters review HERE. This disc features eleven (11!) different jazz pianists in duet with Kole. And they are the best in the biz: Cedar Walton, Kenny Barron, Alan Broadbent, the late/great Hank Jones, and on and on it goes. And some of the tracks here are exquisite. The version of "I Remember" from Sondheim's Evening Primrose is absolutely sublime. Some of the more played-to-death standards are good but not revelatory—"Lush Life" with Barron, for example, is merely very good. But how many very good "Lush Life"s have you heard?

A personal peeve: I love the title track, "You Are There" by Dave Frishberg and Johnny Mercer. It should be a lock-down jazz standard, what with a searching, melancholy melody and heart-breaking lyrics that are free of cliche. But this version is clunker, with Kole pushing it way to hard, kind of Broadway-ing it up with too much vocal ACTING. Sorry, Hilary, but you overdid that one. Which is an anomaly here.

This project was constructed over four years, and it's incredible that a young singer like Kole could get the deans of jazz piano to work with her on such a focused project. She's a huge talent. But you're excused if You Are There isn't a disc you return to over and over again. It's too much of too little. Or something like that.

New JAZZ TODAY: Rebirth in the Treme, New Orleans Ascendant

2010-12-01T03:01:00.000-08:00

Your blogger and his oldest friend, struttin' with some BBQ

Over the Halloween weekend I visited New Orleans with three close friends. We were there to celebrate the 50th birthday of my oldest friend (with my own just two months coming) and to do some work for Habitat for Humanity.

And we planned to eat ourselves into a jambalaya/po' boy/red beans 'n' rice stomach ache.

And there's the music.

What I wasn't expecting, however, was for the music to be "jazz." These days, the Mecca of jazz is New York, of course. But we ended up seeing some great New Orleans music—popular New Orleans musicians—who make jazz in the Crescent City feel alive again.

Kermit Ruffins, killin' it at Vaughan's Lounge on a Thursday

The latest JAZZ TODAY, up and readable here, is all about this trip and the experience of hearing Kermit Ruffins and Trombone Shorty over just a few days. Ruffins seemed at first like merely a good-time player—rough around the edges and merely having fun. But the longer I listened (and it was fun, I assure you), the more I heard his music as a wonderful melding of the Armstrong trumpet/vocal tradition with modern jazz feeling and groove.

Even more fun, and ultimately more exciting for this music, was a set by Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue, his invincibly funky band.

Trombone Shorty started playing second line music in the the Treme when he was a tiny kid, too little to handle his instrument (thus, the nickname), and today he is playing that instrument with amazing precision and attack—as well as trumpet—in front of what amounts to a New Orleans rock rhythm section. The groove of the band (with drums and congas powering it fiercely) is pure N'Awlins, but the guitar is a fuzz-toned Gibson with plenty of blues fire. Plus, Shorty sings soulfully, and he plays in a front line with tenor and baritone saxophone. The result is a truly powerful, incredibly entertaining groove band that blows the roof off a room. We heard them at Tipitina's, the classic New Orleans club, and it's night I'll never forget.

Photos from Bobby and David Atkins. Thanks, guys!

The Ray Anderson-Marty Ehrlich Quartet, LIVE

2010-12-01T02:33:00.000-08:00

Two summers ago I saw trombonist Ray Anderson give a clinic at the Vancouver Jazz Festival. It was a great conversation about his history and playing, and his solo trombone playing was a minor miracle. I asked him that afternoon how a guy like him makes a living from music, and he laughed. "Now, why'd you have ask that, man?"

Here is the latest recording from Mr. Anderson, in a quartet with Marty Ehrlich, the wonderful clarinetist and alto saxophonist. Matt Wilson on drums, also fantastic. My review on PopMatters is HERE.

It growls and and struts, it's funky and loose, it's out it's in. Wonderful music, particularly Anderson's compositions, such as "Alligatory Rhumba." All hail musicians who struggle to make but still make it for us.

My Interview with Miles's Son and Nephew

2010-11-30T03:45:00.000-08:00

This fall marked the 40th anniversary of Miles Davis's great Bitches Brew. It may have been controversial in its day (1970), but time has proven that the seminal "jazz-rock" album is brilliant: tuneful, rhythmically audacious, moody, and memorable. (Listen to my spirited debate with Ashley Kahn about the relative merits of Bitches Brew and Kind of Blue right HERE from a recent edition of WNYC's "Soundcheck.")

But it's been reissued several times—I bought the box set with out-takes a few years ago. Does its 40th warrant another reissue with concert footage on DVD and so on?

I had the chance to interview Miles nephew, Vince Wilburn, Jr., and Miles youngest son, Erin Davis, both of whom played with Miles during parts of his "comeback" period (1981-91). My feature on BB and the Miles legacy is up on PopMatters right HERE. They are all about celebrating the great man's legacy and continuing it into the future. But, what with the recent release of a Dogfish Head "Bitches Brew" ale and this massive but unnecessary reissue, it's also easy to see Miles Davis as a one big piece of commerce. That said, the concert footage included in package is stunning.

Personally, I'm about done buying Miles Davis box sets. But I'll be listening to them forever.

Sting: Live in Berlin

2010-11-22T04:07:00.000-08:00

Was there any better pop music in the 1980s than The Police? Compelling tunes, a clever mixture of punk and pop and reggae, and one of the best voices in commercial radio from Mr. Gordon Sumner—Sting.

In 1985, Sting blew up the band to go solo, and that was initially pretty great too. Dream of the Blue Turtles was a remarkable solo debut, and it didn't hurt that it featured a killer band of jazz musicians: Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Kenny Kirkland on keys, Darryl Jones on bass, and Omar Hakim on drums. The documentary about forming that band, Bring on the Night (check out my review of the DVD release HERE), was also terrific, funny, revealing.

But it didn't take long for Sting's solo career, despite brilliant middle-of-the-road success, to grow fat and happy. (Not Sting—he's still chiseled and vaguely royal.) So it was surely just a matter of time before he demanded the Sting With Strings treatment. 2010 brought the album Smphonicities and now we have the full-on live treatment, a CD/DVD combo document the tour, Live in Berlin. My PopMatters review is HERE.

When it's good, it's okay. Some of this music sounds right and proper with all the woodwinds and harp and French horns and such. When it's wrong, of course, it's an overproduced mess. The highlight of the whole thing, for a jazz fan like me, is in the DVD extras where Branford Marsalis (who strolls out occasionally on this tour to take a droll soprano solo, looking amazingly bored with things) chats with the camera and with Sting, treating the Big Star like he was just some guy, albeit a guy who writes great tunes. The recording and film work is top-notch, and Sting has never sounded in better voice. But the edge left Sting so long ago that you may not care that this all seems like entertainment for your most middle-aged chum who no longer really digs those old Police records.

If you still have affection for your youth, this may be asking too much of you. Let's hope so.

Geri Allen: Flying Toward the Sound

2010-11-19T13:28:00.000-08:00

My review of the latest from a great jazz pianist is up today, right HERE.

When Geri Allen first appeared on the scene, she caused a thrill for many jazz fans. Here was a new young pianist at once lyrical and risky, precise in her technique but daring to stray into the dissonant. Recording with musicians such as Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, Oliver Lake, and Steve Coleman, Allen was one of the reasons that the 1980s seemed like a renaissance period for free-bop jazz.

In the decades that followed, Allen matured as an artist and issued interesting discs that featured larger groups, choirs, and all manner of styles. If the pace of her recordings slowed, their range widened—from playing in a quartet with Ornette Coleman to working in gospel music.

Flying Toward the Sound is a rare solo piano recording featuring a suite of music composed for her Guggenheim Fellowship. There is a good dose of the old thrill here, as Allen melds several influences—including Cecil Taylor and Herbie Hancock—into a personal vision. At times as meditative as it is dissonant, Flying Toward the Sound has a flatly programmatic element. It seems to tell a story in rhythm, with the song titles (“Dancing Mystic Poets at Twylight”, “Faith Carriers of Life”, “God’s Ancient Sky”) suggesting a spiritual journey.

The playing, however, is playful and daring rather than some kind of New Age blather. Check out the hopping pleasures of the aforementioned “Dancing Mystic Poets at Twylight” or the throbbing pulse of “Red Velvet in Winter”, which evokes what Keith Jarrett might sound like on a grounded, concise day.

I’d been thinking that Geri Allen had somehow gone flat in recent years, but I was wrong. She is just more catholic in the way she packages her intelligent, brave playing.

Wallace Roney: If Only For One Night

2010-11-16T03:33:00.000-08:00

The old saw that trumpeter Wallace Roney sounds just like Miles Davis is beside the point because, well, he does sound a heck of a lot like Miles. That’s okay. A generation of trumpeters sounded just like Dizzy Gillespie or just like Clifford Brown.

On the live record If Only for One Night, Roney and his working quintet present a varied program of music that runs straight toward the Miles connection.

Here, the band starts with a Bitches Brew era funk workout, “Quadrant”, with Aruan Ortiz rocking a heavy synth sound, a clavinet groove, and eventually an adventurous acoustic piano solo. Roney is pungent on trumpet, and he has his brother Antoine back in the band here playing tenor and soprano. On “Only with You” and “Metropolis”, the quintet sounds like Miles in the 1960s, playing driving post-bop that brims with muscular attitude. Roney is Harmon-muted and introspective on the title track, and he pulls off a Miles-esque pop cover of Janet Jackson on “Let’s Wait a While”.

Throughout this set, the band is inventive and powerful, even if they seem to be searching for a clear identity. In being able to play anything (at least anything Davis-inspired), the band loses itself a bit. Roney seems most himself on the final track, a solo trumpet essay for his son, where he sheds the Miles sound somewhat and hints at his classical studies.

David Weiss and Point of Departure: Snuck In

2010-11-08T03:13:00.000-08:00

There's plenty of post-bop revivalism in jazz—reinterpretations of the music of the 1960s—but it's rarely as interesting, original, and fresh as what we hear from David Weiss on Snuck In. My review on PopMatters is up today.

On the most superficial level, Weiss's band, Point of Departure (for the classic Andrew Hill album of the mid-60s) uses guitar rather than piano for the chording instrument—a simple innovation that gives this band a more contemporary sound. The guitarist is Nir Felder, a young Berklee cat whose sounds is fresh enough to give this band a tasty ZING.

Second, Weiss (known mainly as the arranger for the New Jazz Composers Octet, which has recently played with/for/behind the late Freddie Hubbard) has chosen tunes that we don't usually hear covered—tunes by Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill, and (!) Charles Moore that are not the standard Real Book fare.

The playing is loose and joyous. JD Allen on tenor never plays cliches. And Jamire Williams (from Robert Glasper's great piano trio) plus Matt Clohesy make for a driving rhythm section. Weiss himself borrows from Hubbard and Lee Morgan, but he adds his own tart tone and ragged flash of imagination.

For jazz fans who never got enough of those old Blue Notes that teetered on the edge of freedom but never quite went "out," Snuck In is a much-recommended blast from the past.

Jeff Lorber: Fusioning-up a Smooth Storm

2010-10-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

I pick on Jeff Lorber, the smooth jazz keyboard star, because I think he's a very good musician. The cat can play, and he writes engaging fusion melodies, and there is something rich and interesting in most of his solos.

Jeff Lorber, back when he looked like Kenny G

But I still don't like his records.

Two years ago I wrote a pair of Jazz Today columns about the slow death of the smooth jazz format in radio. Both DC and NY had just seen their smooth jazz station fade into soprano saxophone nothingness. Good riddance, I wrote. In the second column, I examined the latest Jeff Lorber disc in some detail to explain how this particular music platform could take a talented guy and lead him to Sominex horror.

Now, Mr. Lorber has a new disc, Now Is The Time, where he re-examines many of his early tunes, and I started off thinking that it was a the better recording. But by the end of the review, I was just exasperated as two years ago. Must he cover a Weather Report tune by Wayne Shorter, a really terrific piece of music, and flatten it with aimless noodling? Apparently he must. "Mysterious Traveler," you have been wounded.

My angry reaction to this kind of music stems, I think, from my passion for jazz generally. This masquerading instrumental R&B, this sonic wallpaper, this smoooooved-out digitized soulless pacifier music is almost jazz in a bunch of ways—with its saxophones and its improvisations and its similarities to the jazz-rock fusion of the 1970s. It fakes people into thinking they're digging the rich, real thing. But they're not. Sure, some people start on 'smooth jazz' like it was a tricycle and graduate up to JAZZ, but way more folks just drift along bobbing their heads to the fake stuff.

It would probably be good for me to swear off of reviewing this stuff. Maybe a new year's resolution for 2011. No more shooting fish in a barrel.

Cedar Walton, PLEASE.

2010-10-26T03:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe I'm as guilty as anyone of leaving what we think of as "mainstream jazz" on shelf these days—taken for granted, not as worthy of 'ink', less likely to appeal to a new audience.

But a show I attended last month at DC's Bohemian Caverns gave the lie to all that. I've written about it in this month's JAZZ TODAY on PopMatters.

The brilliant Cedar Walton, with Javon Jackson on tenor, David Williams on bass and Willie Jones III on drums, played a set of utterly up-to-the-minute, sparkling straight-ahead jazz . . . that really wasn't all that straight ahead. Walton, at 76, is still clever and swift and daring, and I think any fan with half an ear would have loved it.

Alas, the median age of the audience had to be 55. Man, I was one of the young folks. Walton was slow moving across the the stage, but his fingers weren't hindered at all. I still love him. You've got to see him.

Check out Cedar Walton, please.

Vijay Iyer's SOLO: Brilliant Unadorned Jazz Piano

2010-10-20T03:38:00.000-07:00

The notion of a young jazz pianist covering Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" doesn't immediately sit well with me. Miles Davis pulled off his minimalist version of the tune in the 1980s, not long after he did such a great job with the Cyndi Lauper hit "Time After Time," and it worked. But recreating that seems like an unnecessary idea.

But Vijay Iyer is not about to copy someone else—I should have known that.

On his first solo piano recording, SOLO (my PopMatters review is up today), Iyer turns "Human Nature" into an utterly original thing: a highly patterned exercise that reinvents the tune without ruining its charms. And he manages the same magic with Monk's "Epistrophy" and a couple of Ellington tunes. At the same time, he offers a program of original compositions that move with a thrilling wheel-within-a-wheel action—swirls of patterns and flurries, sometimes sounding atonal like Cecil Taylor but other times have the beautiful repetitions of Steve Reich. It's an utterly original jazz piano conception.

But, thrillingly, it has roots too. Iyer plays a tune by his old boss, saxophonist Steve Coleman, and shows how his sometimes sterile-sounding music informs Iyer's own. And Iyer's touch with the Ellington and Monk gets at enough stride piano and ballad piano history to let you feel where these new sounds have come from.

This is one of the best jazz records of 2010.

HERBIE HANCOCK: The Imagine Project

2010-10-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

The latest recording from the keyboard master and citizen of the universe, Herbie Hancock, is a "theme album" featuring songs with uplifting lyrics about the unity of mankind and, you know, stuff like that.

Will, why are you being so grumpy about good intentions?

Check out my Popmatters review HERE. Basically, my complaint is that the music is unfocused, eclectic to a fault, a mushy mess. Not that I don't like the Susan Tedeschi/Derrick Trucks-driven "Space Captain" or the convincing "A Change Is Gonna Come" featuring James Morrison. But for the most part The Imagine Project is a collection of pop covers featuring too many guest stars and not enough Herbie Hancock.

The title track, John Lennon's done-to-death anthem, featuring Pink and Seal AND Inida Arie. AND guitarist Jeff Beck. AND African singers. It reminds me of the recipe I came up with a few summers ago for "Cake Awesome": carrot cake with chocolate chips and coconut icing. Too much stuff in one cake. No matter how good my intentions, that cake was a mess.

A thought for Mr Hancock's next project. Get a band together, a trio or quartet. Heck, go nuts and make it seven pieces. No singers, no superstars. No "project," no theme. Write and play great original music. Now that would be an event.

HOW DID THE 1970s WEAN YOUNG JAZZ FANS, Part Three: The Jazz Crusaders

2010-10-01T20:41:00.000-07:00

Just getting started on jazz in the 1970s wasn't easy. I was kid, and while I digging the likes of Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins, I still needed some soul groove keep me from being a total dork.

And, happily, 1970s provided such.

Because out of the great jukebox-jazz hits of the 1960s, like Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder," there grew a more contemporary form of soul/jazz for the new decade. And for me, this plush groove was beautifully integrated with a unique front-line sound, emotional solos played right inside the pocket, and some tasty-as-lime Fender Rhodes stylings that were, frankly, a lot hipper than all that fusion stuff. I write of The Jazz Crusaders.

The JAZZ Crusaders, in the 1960s

The Jazz Crusaders—initially Wayne Henderson on trombone, Wilton Felder on tenor sax, Joe Sample on piano, and "Stix" Hooper on drums—started out of Houston, Texas as a hard-driving bop unit in 1960. Their front line of trombone and tenor was beefy and distinctive, and they played soul-infused solos that hardly seemed out of the jazz mainstream. The group relocated to Los Angeles and made many albums for Pacific Jazz, often playing with bassist Buster Williams. In the mid-sixties, they were fleet and flying. But even then they had a taste for the popular, creating a grooving arrangement of "Eleanor Rigby."

In 1971, the band dropped the word "jazz" from their name, and surely many fans faded away. They stopped properly "swinging" and began playing a style of instrumental music that leaned more heavily on soul grooves and a gospel-tinged way of playing, but this new incarnation was hardly the limp instrumental pop that would later be called "smooth jazz."

In fact, it was during this period that my friends and I first discovered The Crusaders. They were now recording for Blue Thumb Records, and they they made a string of discs that I will always love: 1, The 2nd Crusade, Unsung Heros, Scratch, and Southern Comfort. The sound of these discs is still unique. The band kept that trombone/tenor front line, but they added guitarist Larry Carlton. They still took long blues-based solos, but they became a band based around the sound of a Fender Rhodes electric piano, with its lush, bell-like chording and percussive right hand attack. This music was accessible but still an adventure—at least it was for a bunch of Jersey teenagers who were trying to find out way into jazz and needed more than just the gorgeous mathematics of Charlie Parker or the moody brilliance of Bill Evans. The Crusaders had some Texas stomp in their sound, but they still gave you the thrill ride of jazz improvisation. We were hooked.

In fact, Southern Comfort was one of the first two jazz albums I bought for myself in a Sam Goody's one afternoon in 1974. We listened to it at home while eating turkey-cole slaw sandwiches and drinking huge goblets of Coca-cola, and I still remember that my friend Bobby pronounced the music "greasy." A high compliment.

We loved the guitar tone and slap of the funk on "Stomp and Buck Dance." We loved the looping bass line on "Double Bubble" and also how that tune used some funky acoustic piano in the middle of the groove. We could not get enough of the dastardly horn line syncopation of "Time Bomb," which we actually danced to. (Don't ask.) And, especially, I loved "Whispering Pines."

"Whispering Pines" still defies category for me. It has one of the band's most dashing but wistful melody lines, set over a hugely melodic bass line that spins in a precise arpeggio. Soulful but still cool, it seems like a theme that could introduce a news program or be a backdrop to heartbreak. And the tune inspired remarkable solos from the band. They were generous in length, and they built up slowly, rising and climaxing on a huge tide of melody. Under the improvisations was a dodging, weaving bass line that was in continual hide-and-seek with Hoopers snare and cymbals.

What The Crusaders seemed to have perfected around 1974 was a hip music that incorporated soul into jazz, but a way that created a singular signature sound. This wasn't music that grew out of Bitches Brew. It wasn't "fusion" as the '70s would come to define that word. It wasn't clinical or calculated or framed for market, though it sold pretty well. It was genuinely soulful, and it was still jazz, no matter what name the group had adopted.

Not that it didn't all turn sour. 1975's follow-up to Southern Comfort, Chain Reaction, was good but curdled a little—synthesizers creeping in and the funk seeming more mechanical. Those Southern Knights was obviously the moment when the fruit when over-ripe, with the guys on the cover in Lancelot outfits and then chanting the vocal on "Keep That Same Old Feelin'" in the grooves. This was popular stuff, but my friends and I had already moved on the more challenging jazz, so that when the band's biggest hit emerged on Street Life in 1979, we didn't feel betrayed.

Once Reagan was president, plenty of things fell apart, and The Crusaders were gone before you could say "I remember Oliver North." Henderson left years earlier, in '75, and Hooper split in 1983. Only Joe ample remained active over the next couple of decades, finding a place for himself in the Kenny G-iverse. At which point I'm not sure it was really any longer cool to admit how great you had found The Crusaders back when you were a kid.

The last couple of years of demonstrated, however, that a good idea never dies. Felder and Sample recorded as "The Crusaders" again in 1991, then again in 2003. In the mid-90s, Henderson wrangled Carlton and Felder into recording (to Sample's chagrin) as "The Jazz Crusaders."

And then, in 2010: word started spreading of true reunion dates with Henderson, Felder and Sample all in on the action again. Almost completely under the radar, the group played at Yoshi's in the Bay Area in the spring, but then word was out that Felder was ill, and replacement reed players were in the band. They've had dates scheduled in recent weeks in places like Milwaukee.

Personally, I miss them. The clarity and soul of The Crusaders ushered me into caring about jazz, into listening to the stories that its players have to tell.

Love live The Jazz Crusaders.

Next Time: Grover Washington, Jr—Another Blast of Soul

Steve Coleman—Saxophone Funkmaster, Musical Philosopher, Shaman, Baffler

2010-10-01T03:56:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning, seemingly forever, to spend more time with the recent music of Steve Coleman, the saxophonist and composer. His "M-BASE" construct is often discussed, but what does it mean? Why does his music frequently seem mechanical, yet how has he also gathered the rapt attention of so many great musicians?

And, for me, hadn't I been a massive fan of a few of early albums? Had something changed?

The release of his new Harvesting Semblances and Affinities on Pi gave me a great excuse to think this all through in a new JAZZ TODAY. You can check it out here.

Coleman's music is, without a doubt, often organized by a formal concept rather than by expressive necessity. In other words, he is using ideas rather than passions to construct his art. In writing and in other arts, I've always been taught that his is a mistake—focusing on your tool rather than your output. But in Coleman's case, the output has nevertheless been frequently thrilling. And sometimes numbing, yes, but perhaps that's the price an artist pays for working out new ways to move the art forward.

Harvesting Semblances and Affinities is not different than Coleman's other work, but it is very successful. It's funky and shimmering, it's mind-expanding and feeling. The terrific Kevin Whitehead said this on Fresh Air when he reviewed the disc: “If Steve Coleman’s music sounds a little chilly sometimes, it’s because he’s more interested in compositional logics than setting a mood. That’s okay; there’s room for all kinds of approaches.” I agree. Coleman’s music is riveting but often more for your head than for your heart. As a result, he has created interesting new structures for jazz composition and improvisation, and he has seeded many interesting clouds.

JOHN McLAUGHLIN: TO THE ONE — Fusion the Way We Used to Like It

2010-09-20T03:39:00.000-07:00

At its peak, jazz-rock fusion was better than just fast-and-loud, but fast and loud was part of it. Hey, I was a teenager during those days, and if I was going to spend a good chunk of my listening time on jazz rather than Led Zeppelin, then I was going to need some crunch and danger.

Guitarist John McLaughlin—he of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—usually satisfied. The Inner-Mounting Flame and Birds of Fire still sound good to me today. But, other than his duet album with Carlos Santana and his work with Shakti (his acoustic band, playing a different kind of Indian/fusion), the rest of McLaughlin's work has been hard to love.

2010, however, brings a return to the driving fusion of the early Mahavishnu days. To the One, featuring a new-ish band called The Fourth Dimension, is the old searing McLaughlin, back with speed and excitement but still some intelligence. My review is up on PopMatters today.

Other McLaughlin's wonderful guitar, the recording features outstanding keyboard work by Gary Husband. Using acoustic piano, Rhodes, and synth sounds, he gets everything right. That Husband is also one of two over-the-top drummers on the date just dazzles all the more. Not every jazz fan is going to be with me one this—this is a real '70s fusion date, with some of the indulgence associated therewith—but it is the real thing, not some watered-down smooth jazz syrup. McLaughlin sees the album as a contemporary offshoot of Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and you can hear it in the way the players surge and sing in their playing. It's exciting, but the playing comes from a well of desire.

I'm not a fan of McLaughlin's use, on To The One, of guitar synthesizer. This gizmo makes his sound generic and cold. That he uses the devise on a couple of ballads just makes it worse, as these are tunes where the flesh-on-string sound could have been that much better.

But mostly I like To The One. I like it better than anything Johnny M has done in decades. It comes darn close to making me feel 16 again—130 pounds, full head of hair, living in New Jersey and still with a small crush on Barbara Feldon from Get Smart. The power of music, huh?

Generosity: An Enhancement (a novel by Richard Powers)

2010-09-16T03:36:00.000-07:00

My appetite for music and my appetite for books used to be almost equal, but sometimes a book comes along that turns reading into a chore. I feel as though I've been reading Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers for a year. (Seriously, I may have been—it is now out in paperback, but I've been reading a hardcover review copy.)

Powers is a great novelist, or at least he has been for me. Let me recommend Operation Wandering Soul as a strange, brilliant, dreamlike novel about love and children and disease and language itself.

But Generosity is a book about how advances in genetics—specifically our understanding of the genetics of happiness—may be changing our world. The characters in the book are mere agents for these meditations on science. My full review is HERE.

Now back to reading less brilliant books that are better, more pulsating, more alive with regularish, dopey folks like us.

LAYMAN ON SOUNDCHECK, 9/7/10: A Miles Davis Debate with Ashley Kahn

2010-09-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

I will have the pleasure of taking part in another "Soundcheck Smackdown" this Tuesday at 2pm on WNYC. This time out, the debate will be about two seminal Miles Davis albums, Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew. I will be defending the honor of Miles's great 1970 disc, which plowed the fields of jazz funk and made possible so much of the great music of the last 40 years. Bitches Brew turns 40 this year.

My "opponent" this time out (previously I have faced off against jazz folk no less esteemed than Branford Marsalis and Howard Mandel) is author and producer Ashley Kahn. Ashley is the author is a terrific book about the making of Kind of Blue—highly recommended. That said, I plan to win the smackdown with a combination of hyperbole and playful metaphor.

The host of Soundcheck is John Schaefer, and I want to thank him and the Soundcheck producers for so kindly inviting me back to the show so often. WNYC is a great public radio station in New York City at 93.9fm and 820am. The show will broadcast live at 2pm Eastern and will later be available online.

ABOSOLUTE ENSEMBLE with JOE ZAWINUL: Absolute Zawinul

2010-09-03T04:54:00.000-07:00

When classical ensemble get mixed up in jazz, the results are mixed, at best. Or at least that used to be the case.

These days, jazz musicians are more fluent with the power and use of classical forms, and classical musicians probably grew up with a fluency with pop and jazz rhythms. As a result, these kinds of jazz/classical crossovers have been seeming more natural in recent years. Esperanza Spalding's latest, Chamber Music Society, has no trouble incorporating a string trio, for example, to choose just the most recent example.

Here is my review of the powerful final album featuring the keyboardist and composer (and Weather Report founder) Joe Zawinul, Absolute Zawinul.

Properly speaking, this is not a Joe Zawinul recording as much as it is the latest project from the classical ensemble, the Absolute Ensemble, led by Kristjan Jarvi. Jarvi has taken an album's worth of brand new Zawinul composition and arranged them for strings and woodwinds, brass and percussion, then invited Zawinul and members of his "Zawinul Syndicate" to bring their voices, groove, and—'f course—keyboard sounds.

The result is mostly wonderful. The classical ensemble brings life and the human touch to Zawinul's tunes, where in his own hands they sometimes seemed like over-synthesized puzzles. This is not so much jazz, at this point, as it is a truly whole blend of world music, American music, and classical music. The interlocking voices and lines that Zawinul favors fall perfectly into the zone of Absolute's string and flutes—it's a great, pulsing thing.

In too many places, Joe's own vo-coder-laced vocals seem like a lapse in taste, but this is easy to overlook, particularly as you ought to be in the mood to celebrate the man himself. His work with Cannonball Adderly and Miles Davis is timeless and, for me, the first three or four Weather Report albums are still always worth returning to. If his solo career was not my cup of tea, then Absolute Zawinul makes me realize that I may have been missing something great.

HOW DID THE 1970s WEAN YOUNG JAZZ FANS, Part Two: Soul Jazz "Makin' It Real"

2010-08-23T08:02:00.000-07:00

As I said in my first installment in this series, the 1970s was no easy time to become a jazz fan. The '60s avant garde had made the leading edge of the music forbidding, and venues for the music (not to mention vital fathers of the music like Duke and Pops) were dying out. How as an interested teenager supposed to find a hook into this great tradition?

McCann's first Atlantic LP, Much Les

Happily, as I said in Part One, I had WRVR to hep me to what was great from the past. But as the '70s progressed, RVR wanted to make money and played plenty of what it hoped was hipper, hookier jazz. Eventually, that would mean that they played the beginnings of "smooth jazz," but for a long time RVR's bread and butter was the down home soul jazz that thrived in the '60s and, yup, the '70s.

Especially the Les McCann/Eddie Harris recording of "Compared to What."

In 1969, Les McCann was soul-jazz pianist with a history of solid releases on Pacific Jazz and Limelight who had must moved over to Atlantic Records. Arguably in the line that produced Ray Charles, McCann had recorded with both the Gerald Wilson Jazz Orchestra and the Jazz Crusaders. Steeped in gospel groove, his piano sound could move you, literally. That year he appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival with Eddie Harris on saxophone and Benny Bailey on trumpet, and Atlantic recorded the show for a live album, Swiss Movement.

Eugene McDaniels, also on Atlantic

In the US, the Vietnam was was raging, Nixon was in office, and cities were burning. So it should be no surprise that McCann chose to play the Eugene McDaniels song "Compared to What," which had first been recorded as the first track of Roberta Flack's debut First Take, released earlier in '69. (Check out Mark Anthony Neal's sweet essay on the tune HERE.) "Compared to What" was a full-on critique of US culture—the war, racism, the complacency of the comfortable majority, materialism, you name it—all in five succinct and poetic verses. McCann contributed not only a grooving piano sound but his gruff-n-ready vocal style which expressed outrage and sarcasm in equal measure. The song, once released by Atlantic, became a kind of hit. And a hit with legs, because I heard it on the NY jazz station every week or so for all my years in high school.

Here's why I loved it and why "Compared to What" is great.

Before you hear a bit of singing or lyric, the tune has you—and it has you with a certain biting content. The bass line is rock solid, the drummer Donald Dean is slamming out a cowbell groove, the whole thing is dripping with funk, and then McCann plays the melody to "Aquarius," the hit song from the hippie musical Hair that was then playing on Broadway. Hair was against the war too, of course, but that music—so limp and airy compared to what I would come to love about jazz—hardly had the bite of what McCann was about to sing. Also, on a purely musical level, McCann shifts his trio through several modes, rather than a set of heavy chord changes. In it's own way, "Compared to What" in this version brings to the ear just a little bit of Kind of Blue and Coltrane's "Impressions."

Then you get the soul content of the tenor playing by Eddie Harris. Harris keeps his playing here simple and blues-grounded. He and trumpeter Bailey had not rehearsed for the date, didn't really know the tunes, but Harris uses a couple of simple soul band tricks that form the tune: certain repetitions of licks, octave leaps, sudden cries in the altissimo range, punctuating honks down low—just the kind of stuff you would hear in a James Brown horn section. It's two minutes before the actual "song" begins.

McCann's singing is natural and easy, even as it's emphatic. He has a bit of the smooth delivery of Nat Cole (Brother Ray's primary influence early on), but then he brings some urgency in his upper range, a dose of rasp, and the sweet sideburns he's sporting don't hurt either. The whole thing feels like the definition of COOL. As he sits at the piano, easy and loose, he delivers the scathing lyrics ("Unreal values, crass distortion / Unwed mothers need abortion") but he does it was slight layer of distance—a hip commentator more than an angry guy. A smart guy with a gospel right hand and a great band.

Benny Bailey

When I used to hear this tune on the radio in my comfortable suburban bedroom, I felt like I was someone else. I would move a little, pretend I could play the piano this way, mouth the lyrics even as they got me thinking, and I'd wait for the trumpet solo. McCann is singing "We're chicken feathers all without one nut, goddamn it, trying to make it real compare to what! Sock it to me!" I knew the phrase "sock it to me" as a cheap punchline on the show Laugh-In (then on the air and at the height of its buzz), but McCann says it here differently, meaning it. And then Benny Bailey enters with a Don't-Hold-Me-Back trumpet solo: smeared notes, half-valving, crazy growls, a few high-note punctuations. Just 16 bars, but it seemed to me like it was worth the whole history of jazz at the time because it shouted out something . . . real. Here was jazz expressing killer feeling in a way that anyone would understand.

There was plenty of other soul-jazz in this vein in the '60s and '70s, but "Compared to What" was a little different because it connected with such force to the actual culture, to what it meant to be American at that Watergate-stained moment when I was listening to it. This music I was coming to love was more than a nerdy obsession for a kid who like music. It mattered.

Next Installment in the Series: The (Jazz) Crusaders and Grover Washington—Pre-Smooth Jazz

PAUL MOTIAN: LOST IN A DREAM

2010-08-23T04:56:00.000-07:00

As a critic, I'm always making and revising a "best of the year" list in my head. I don't have a number I'm wed to—top ten, top dozen, whatever—but simply have a "I'll know it when I hear it" attitude. Certain discs are keepers. I know I'll still be listening to them ten (or a dozen or whatever) years down the road.

The latest from drummer Paul Motian, Lost in a Dream, is one of those recordings. My review is up today at PopMatters.

Chris Potter on tenor

This is a trio recording, live at the Village Vanguard, with Motian quietly sculpted drumming, tenor saxophone from Chris Potter, and Jason Moran on piano. It is a wonderful mix of musical personalities. Potter is keening and lyrical, muscular but still plenty tender. Motian, as he always does, contributes drumming that is less pure timekeeping than it is an ingenious coloration of the space around the tunes. And Jason Moran—playing here in a Motian group for the first time—is pure revelation. His strong left hand makes a bass player unnecessary, and his inside/outisde sense of improvisation makes every tune a thrill.

Most of all, Paul Motian is a great composer. Nearly all the tunes here are ballads (with just one standard, Cole Porter's "Be Careful It's My Heart"), and they are a mixture of new and older. This recording reinforces how singular and lovely Motian's melodic sense is. "Blue Midnight" and "Cathedral Song" are standouts of the first order. Other musicians should start covering Motian songs to bring them into the standard repertoire.

ESPERANZA SPALDING: CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY

2010-08-17T04:47:00.000-07:00

By now, plenty of foax know about the phenom bass player and singer Esperanza Spalding. She is a favorite of President Obama (she played at his Nobel ceremony and at the White House) and Oprah. By jazz standards, she is BIG. Her last eponymous disc landed her on the late night talk shows, where her soulful singing and funky grooves wowed people. But her straight-ahead jazz credibility is also for real—she has played, for example, with Joe Lovano.

Her new recording is called Chamber Music Society, reviewed by me today at PopMatters. It features a string trio and a second voice (Gretchen Parlato) in addition to a jazz trio (including, notably, Teri Lynn Carrington on drums). While fans of the last record may worry that "chamber music" and the addition of a string trio means that Spalding has wrecked the pop appeal of her music this time out with classical pretension, that is not the case.

Chamber Music Society contains plenty of snapping backbeat and sinuous melody, and the string arrangements are integrated into the music so that this does not feel like Spalding just grafted some High Cul-chuh onto her regular music. It is an extension of her sound, an expansion of her sound, not something altogether different.

On a personal note, last year the high school jazz band that I co-lead chose two Spalding songs for performance, "I Know You Know" and "Precious". The students—both the singers and the musicians—loved them and loved playing them. In their connection to today's rhythms and in their pure pop appeal, they linked up with 16 year-olds, but in their harmonic and rhythmic sophistication, they challenged our most talented students.

That is a great place for jazz to be in 2010, and Esperanza Spalding takes the music there.

TRACY BONHAM: Masts of Manhatta

2010-08-16T04:24:00.000-07:00

Wayfaring Strangers' 2001 Debut

Most folks who know the powerful singer-songwriter Tracy Bonham know her from her 1996 hit song, "Mother, Mother." I missed that one in the moment. But in 2001, when Ken Burns' JAZZ documentary was broadcast, I became fascinated by the musician Matt Glaser, a violinist who spoke about how Louis Armstrong was comparable to Einstein in the way that he made time relative in his placement of improvised notes against the beat. (You can read my 2005 interview with Glaser HERE.)

Soon enough, I'd discovered Glaser's odd/breathtaking jazz/bluegrass/klezmer/folk collective Wayfaring Strangers (Shifting Sands of Time, 2001, and This Train, 2003), including the singing and fiddling of Tracy Bonham.

Bonham was not a jazz singer, nor was she a bluegrass or klezmer or folk artist, exactly. But that's the kind of band Wayfaring Strangers is. Soon enough, I found myself reviewing her third album, Blink the Brightest, a collection that I still find irresistible today. "DUMBO Sun" and "Whether You Fall" are hit records in my universe any day—catchy, smart, fun, melodic, a bit sassy.

Her new record is called Masts of Manhatta (reviewed today at www.PopMatters.com), and it is nearly as wonderful. The sound is a bit more acoustic, a bit more country. Bonham and her husband now live partly in Brooklyn and partly in Woodstock, NY, which is supposed to account for the blend of sounds on the disc. But this is not just some mid-career shift toward country sounds. In fact, the disc contains all the great pop arrangements from Blink, with idiosyncratic song structures and off-beat stories in the lyrics. The sound is just a bit more rootsy, and it wonderfully features guitarist Smoky Hormel and his band.

Manhatta is one of the treats of the 2010 summer.

ABBEY LINCOLN, ONE FOR THE AGES

2010-08-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

The great jazz singer Abbey Lincoln died yesterday at the age of 80.

It's hard to write analytically about jazz singing, I think. It is very personal. Some singers have technique and style but also have a sound that just turns me off. Abbey Lincoln usually had the opposite effect on me: her delivery was declamatory and personal, and she sang the blues all the time no matter what style of song she was delivering. I didn't like all her work—sometimes I felt that her tunes were lectures directed at me rather than stories that should move me—but I mostly loved her.

Here she is on the great Night Music show, singing the Charlie Haden tune, "First Song":

If she's new to you, here are the basics. Lincoln (a stage name, she was born Anna Marie Wooldridge in Michigan) started singing and acting in the mid-50s, singing under the useful influence of Billie Holiday. But her direction as a jazz musician was largely formed when she collaborated with the great bop drummer on 1960's We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. The two were married from 1962 through 1970. Lincoln was a wholly individual artist whose sure delivery could be insistent and political but also introspective. Her recent work has highlighted original songs that are worth your listening time.

Lincoln had a great influence on younger jazz singers, mostly notably Cassandra Wilson. Wilson's rich sound and unusual phrasing is inconceivable without Lincoln's model. Neither artist has been happy to base a career mainly around half-century-old standards. Here is a recording of Wilson singing one of Lincoln's songs:

For me, Lincoln embodies a certain kind of affectless jazz singing. It's not that it lacks style or individuality—far from it. But Abbey sang relatively fewer notes; she did not embellish her singing with useless filigree or show-biz grimacing. She incorporated the feeling into her tone and into the rhythmic placement of her notes in relation to the time of her band. That defines jazz singing more than anything else, and all the great ones did it. Lincoln did it brilliantly, and she did it her own particular way.

Rest in peace, Abbey Lincoln.

HOW DID THE 1970s WEAN YOUNG JAZZ FANS, Part One: ED BEACH and WRVR

2010-08-10T13:09:00.000-07:00

There has to be a large contingent of jazz fans today who started listening to the music during the 1970s. This was quite a feat, and something I'd like to write about over the course of some time.

It's not that the '70s didn't produce some great jazz. There was a wealth of great music during those fateful American years. Beautiful music got released by ECM (such as Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds), Miles Davis produced five years of fiery, mad, electric thrills, Ornette Coleman and The Art Ensemble of Chicago were flying high, the World Saxophone Quartet got started, and much more. But, as these examples suggest, the signature jazz of the 1970s was not easy for beginners.

How, I'm wondering, did we kids of the '70s get weaned onto this music. This is the first in a series of meditations on that question. And I eagerly invite you to chime in with comments.

The most important tool of indoctrination for me was the astonishing and late WRVR, 106.7 FM, a New York radio station broadcast out of the Riverside Church in Manhattan. Precisely, my young friends and I were obsessed with RVR's quirky and brilliant DJ Ed Beach, a true jazz scholar who made his detailed lessons on jazz history fun with a mad, Shakespearean delivery.

In the '60s, RVR was a noncommercial station, and Beach's daily "Just Jazz" radio show was uncompromised. But my the time my friends and I were really digging him, the station had become commercial, and there was increasing pressure to play more vocals and fusion. But through all that Beach remained a gem, and I'll never forget hearing him spin—and explain—Max Roach and Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and Django Reinhardt.

Then, right around the time I was head off to college, Beach suddenly went off the air. WRVR had changed ownership and management, and Old Uncle Eddie wasn't happy. Not long afterward, in an overnight shocker, the station went country. My youth was gone.

Ed Beach in 2003 at his home in Eugene, OR, chatting with me.

About ten years ago, I got to wondering where Ed Beach had gone, and so I tracked him down to a nice apartment in Eugene, Oregon. I called him up on the phone and was lucky enough to be invited for a visit, during which I spent two days interviewing him, learning his story, and laughing at his incredible tales. Not long after, I published a version of the following piece in the radio industry magazine Radio and Records. Here it is again, based on interviews and research done in 2003.

Ed Beach: Alive, Well, and Still Ready for the Airwaves (2003)

“Just Jazz — Ed Beach with you."

Those words were once the promise of great music to fans of New York’s legendary WRVR. They were crooned, from 1961 to 1973, in a resonant baritone over the swinging line of Wes Montgomery’s “So Do It,” by a trained Shakespearean actor and journeyman jazz pianist — and by the finest educator and disk jockey in the history of jazz radio.

Today, over 2,000 hours of what The New York Times once called “the most notable nonplaying contribution jazz has witnessed in New York” are not only being preserved at the Library of Congress but also are again available for broadcast. Ed Beach, who turned 80 this January and lives in Eugene, Oregon, hopes the tapes that are his legacy will survive and find a new audience. Many highly influential members of the jazz community agree that Beach’s contributions to broadcasting and to jazz should not be forgotten.

A citation from the City of New York honoring Ed Beach

In the 50s and 60s, New York boasted several legendary jazz jocks. Sparkling pianist Billy Taylor did a show on WLIB. Mort Fega was a hip sensation with “Jazz Unlimited” on WNRC and then WEVD. And you can’t forget Symphony Sid. But even in that crowd, “Just Jazz with Ed Beach” was the jewel of jazz radio. The show may be less well-remembered only because Beach and his program were less about style and more about music.

Innovative Broadcasting

Beach in his prime

“Ed Beach set a precedent for intelligent jazz broadcasting that has yet to be equalled,” according to Gary Giddins, longtime jazz writer for the Village Voice and author of biographies of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Bing Crosby. Giddins speaks from personal experience. He recalls first hearing “Just Jazz” on his car radio while driving to and from an early job. “Ed Beach was absolutely an inspiration,” Giddins states.

“Just Jazz” was a revolutionary radio program. Each two-hour show featured a single artist — and often focused on one period for a prolific artist like Ellington or Armstrong. While Symphony Sid broadcast a “personality show,” Beach put the music first and used his dry wit to bring in new listeners. “Ed told you what you wanted to know, but he let the music speak for itself,” explains Giddins. “He told you who the musicians were, he gave you the recording dates, he never blathered, and you never felt it was about him.”

Phil Schaap, archivist at Jazz at Lincoln Center and broadcaster on New York’s WKCR who started listening to Ed as a kid in 1963, states it simply: “Ed Beach is the greatest.” Schaap explains the “Just Jazz” approach this way: “This is a guy who had enough stage presence to bring off discography as the language of a radio program.” Giddins similarly recalls that Beach was funny as well as educational. “He had a lot of fun with it. So it was very easy to get involved with the music without feeling it was a college course. This was music he loved. He also had incredible taste."

Creating a Generation of Jazz Fans

Dizzy Gillespie loved Ed Beach.

A list of Beach’s devoted fans reads like a Who’s Who of today’s jazz world. In addition to Giddins and Schaap, the Ed Beach Fan Club includes figures as disparate as the Head of the Music Division of the Library of Congress Jon Newsom, classical and jazz expert Gunther Schuller, jazz historian Lewis Porter, as well as jazz musicians like pianist Hank Jones, saxophonist Illinois Jacquet and drummer Danny Gottleib. Newsom’s assessment of beach’s impact is definitive: “Ed Beach created a generation of people who are today keeping jazz alive.”

Danny Gottleib, an original member of the Pat Metheny Band, was hipped to Beach by his high school band teacher in New Jersey. “I lived for that show. It was a very meticulous approach to the music but done in a very compelling, entertaining style. He had a very beboppy, erudite kind of voice, almost like the great Yankee Stadium announcer Bob Shepard. He had such a compelling voice that you couldn’t wait to listen to it.” The New York Times wrote that Ed’s voice “suggests Louis Armstrong as a Harvard man.”

Like Giddins, Schaap, and Gottleib, the Library of Congress’s Jon Newsom was a teenage Beach fan. So when the preeminent jazz historian, composer, conductor and Beach fanatic Gunther Schuller tipped him to the availability of well-preserved “Just Jazz” tapes, Newsom contacted Beach and acquired them for the Library in 1992. Today, tapes of his best programs — over a thousand of them — are carefully preserved and seeking a new audience.

The tapes exist because RVR started broadcasting “Just Jazz” in the morning with a repeat each afternoon and a block of repeats on Saturday — as well as sending the show to Boston’s WBUR for rebroadcast. A copy was kept in a cool, second-floor storage room in the Riverside Church, which both owned the station and housed its studios. The tapes span the broadcast years 1965 to 1973 and cover all of jazz history up to that point, from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Scott Joplin through George Benson and the Jazz Crusaders — as well as everything in between.

“There are so many rooms in the house of jazz,” Beach recalls today. “I loved the variety and energy of it.” After his morning broadcast, Beach would spend the whole day in an office at the back of the RVR studios, auditioning, timing and choosing tracks for the next day’s show. “I would get home in time to catch the rebroadcast at six, then spend the night doing biographical and discographical research.” Ed used records from both the WRVR collection that he built with the help of RVR DJ Max Cole and from his personal library of 8,000 jazz albums.

Jay Kernis, today the Senior Vice President of Programming for National Public Radio, was a summer intern at WRVR for five summers from 1969 to 1973. He vividly recalls Beach as “tall, theatrical in his precise, deep speech and revered by all. He mostly kept to himself, but was always available for a chat at his desk, especially if you wanted to ask him about jazz.” Robert Seigel, NPR’s host of “All Things Considered” was also at RVR during that time and recalls that Beach “loved and knew jazz with encyclopedic authority.”

WRVR's Demise

Robert Seigel worked at WRVR with Beach.

By 1973, however, the grant that had made WRVR a radio utopia ended, and the station went commercial. Although — largely on the basis of the success engendered by “Just Jazz with Ed Beach” — it started broadcasting jazz 24 hours a day, it also began using play-lists. Beach’s meticulously researched shows gave way to more mundane fare, and “Just Jazz” was no longer preserved on tape. Beach left WRVR at the end of 1976 after the Riverside Church sold the station to Sonderling Broadcasting and, as Beach puts it, “the writing was on the wall.” On September 8, 1980 at noon — after it had been acquired by Viacom International — WRVR went from playing Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” to Waylon Jennings. It had become a country station.

Folks who heard Beach will never forget him. Lewis Porter, a leading jazz scholar and author who is Professor of Music at Rutgers University and founder of its jazz masters program, recalls: “I listened every day after school, for hours and took notes. ‘Just Jazz’ was an important early education for me.” Danny Gottleib remembers “specific shows that changed my life. One was the Maynard Ferguson show – I went out and bought every Ferguson album I could find. I remember the Oscar Pettiford show. It was Ed’s demeanor. He was like a friend because he was so cool and knew so much.”

But Gary Giddins worries that “Beach is already forgotten. There is no awareness of him any more.” Phil Schaap may be even more pessimistic. “Not only do people not remember Ed Beach — they don’t remember Duke Ellington. As recently as 1998, Ed was interviewed by Schaap on WKCR for Louis Armstrong’s birthday, but otherwise Beach has no interest in returning to the airwaves in real time.

The Ed Beach Collection at Clackamas Community College

Tapes Available

The “Just Jazz” tapes may be another story. Van Jay, who worked with Beach at WRVR and is currently a jazz and gospel programming consultant and producer for WKBY in Chatham, VA, and WWDJ radio in NY, is working toward getting the show back on the air. “The diehard jazz fans really appreciated Ed Beach. Ed was not a commercial guy – he could care less if he sold a record. He was a dedicated man. Ed was an in-house historian who knew the music very well. But some people took Ed’s knowledge for granted and took Ed for granted. Now,” Van Jay says, “my goal is to get the music, and Ed’s brilliant commentary, back out there where people can hear it.”

The recordings are now owned by the Library of Congress, and Jon Newsom explains that he too wants to makes the shows available again. “My vision is to have the entire Ed Beach Collection on line so that when you’re out there and you’re wondering what went on with Charlie Parker in 1946 you could hear Ed’s entire program on Bird. I’d love to put it out for free, accessible to everybody at all times, on demand.” However, legal clearances from the owners of the copyrights to all the recordings on the “Just Jazz” tapes, at least for now, are holding up Newsom’s vision.

“Some people are interested in putting Ed’s programs on radio again,” Newsom adds. “We’d be delighted to have that happen. Rebroadcasting the tapes on public radio will not require the broadcaster to go back to the owners of the copyright. Anyone who wants the tapes — including public radio — can have them for the price of a copy.” Both Newsom and Van Jay agree that, as soon as possible, the goal is have the whole archive converted to a digital format. To date, the Library has converted only about ten percent of the archive, though Newsom reports that the condition of the originals is “pretty good, as they were made during an era of ‘sticky tape’ that does not deteriorate quickly.

"Legacy of the Highest Magnitude"

Ed himself is also in good shape. Born in Canada as the only child of Eupopean immigrants, Ed grew up in Portland, Oregon and first heard jazz on the radio broadcasts during the ‘30s. “I remember loving Ellington and Fats Waller. I ran out and bought those records. They thrilled me.” Senough, Ed learned to play piano by ear and he was catching gigs with local bands. He led played and sang with a small group that he says “shamelessly copied the Nat Cole style.” Once in New York, he fell further in love with swing and bebop, carching Dizzy’s big band at the Spot light club, as well as Billie Holiday, Don Byas and others along 52nd Street at its height. “New York back then was glorious,” recalls.

Ed Beach's Music Room in his Eugene apartment

He returned to Oregon for college and then found that his voice was a natural for the stage. He played Shakespeare and other work off-Broadway and in summer stock before landing his first radio gig.

Phil Schaap gives Ed Beach the highest praise, calling him a champion of the music when it had too few. “His is an important legacy of the highest magnitude. When no one else was doing it, Ed was keeping the music alive on the radio. Today, we’re looking for the next Ed Beach, the person who’s going to take the next watch. Ed did his as well as it could be done.”

Gary Giddins is excited about the prospect of hearing “Just Jazz on the radio again. “I’m a very enthusiastic Ed Beach fan, and I think that people should remember what he achieved. I think those tapes should be played again.”

Ed, however, remains modest about his achievement. “Why did I spend so much time on ‘Just Jazz’? I did it for me. I was learning the history of jazz. And I thought — well, why shouldn’t the listeners learn too?”

Ed Beach and Will Layman in 2003

To this day, Beach listens to jazz recordings for hours every day. He’s still enthralled by the power of the Basie band, the melodic invention of Sidney Bechet, the harmonies of Bill Evans. And he still gets out to hear music — in the last few months he caught the Dave Holland Quintet and was knocked out by trombonist Robin Eubanks. But some things can’t be put into words even by a legendary jazz educator. Like, for instance, what is it that makes jazz so great? Beach hesitates and shakes his head. “It just swings, man,” he says.

And he’s right.

* * *

The last I heard from Ed Beach was a holiday card two years ago. Ed has gracious stayed in touch with me, and he usually sends a hilarious card consisting of a photocopy of one or more New Yorker cartoons that are then inscribed with his precise handwriting and unmistakable wit. Based on those cards, I can tell you that the man—at least until a couple years ago—was still lively, liberal, and wonderfully cranky about the world.

But, to my deep sadness, Ed died on Christmas Day, 2009, in Eugene. His New York Times obituary is HERE.

Many of us owe him the greatest passion in our lives. In the 1970s, we needed the likes of Ed Beach.

Next Installment of "How Did the '70s Wean Jazz Fans": Soul Jazz and the Groove of "Compared to What"

TEN REASONS TO LOVE JASON MORAN

2010-08-09T04:31:00.000-07:00

Just up today on PopMatters, a new JAZZ TODAY column about Jason Moran.

Pianist, composer Jason Moran

Moran is as a good a summary of the history of jazz piano as I can imagine today. He bridges way-back stride technique (via Thelonious Monk, 'f course) with avant-garde tone clusters, but he has a full command of everything in between.

More importantly, Moran has a fully developed personality as a composer and improviser. He melds modern rhythmic ideas from hip hop with the jazz tradition, and plays beautiful, lyrical melodies without seeming to be aping anything from the past.

Another thing I love about Moran—he is active as both a leader and sideman. His own music is distinctively his own, but when he plays with Paul Motian or Cassandra Wilson he complements their concept and still brings his own voice to the proceedings. Cat would have thrived in the 1960s on Blue Note.

Jason Moran: refreshing but connected to tradition, still young but full mature as an artist. Great!

THE NEW FACE OF JAZZ, a remarkable new book.

2010-08-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

Jazz has not always fared so well on the page. Most fans have a favorite book or two about jazz, but it is an art form that is somewhat resistant to verbal description. Perhaps because the music has a strong mythology and set of visual clichés, writing about jazz has a way of become trite with little effort.

There has been at least one great novel that is explicitly about jazz: The Bear Comes Home by Rafi Zabor (check out my radio commentary about this book here), and there are plenty of classic short stories that use jazz as essential material: Eudora Welty's "Powerhouse" (based on a memory of Fats Waller) and James Baldwin's great "Sonny's Blues." If you are hungry for this kind of stuff, I heartily recommend The Jazz Fiction Anthology, which came out just recently.

Of course, there are some great jazz biographies (Lush Life, about Strayhorn), autobiographies (Miles Davis's profane, hilarious book), and purely historical studies (Gunther Schuller's Early Jazz and The Swing Era).

When I was first learning about jazz as a kid, I loved reading books that either collected short essays about the music or let the musicians tell their own stories. Material by Nat Hentoff was great, particularly Hear Me Talkin' To Ya and Jazz Is, both of which let the musicians themselves talk about the music. I also loved The Jazz Book by the late Joachim Berendt, which has recently been updated by a younger writer (check out by review here)—a book of classification and opinion that still seems smart and fresh and unafraid of different styles.

Musician and writer Cicily Janus has just published a new jazz book in this style: The New Face of Jazz. Janus's book takes the form of more than 200 short profiles of individual musicians. First, Janus provides a career overview, including a website and single representative recording. Then there follows a statement by the artist in his or her own words, condensed from the extensive interviews conducted for the book. This is the kind of book you would never read straight through but, rather, one you want to flip through and sample in little bites.

What makes The New Face of Jazz different is that it profiles only living jazz musicians, and it gives equal space to legends (McCoy Tyner and Sonny Rollins), crossover figures (George Benson, Lee Ritenour), contemporary stars (Esperanza Spalding, Melody Gardot), players on the modern edge (Vijay Iyer, Matthew Shipp), mainstream figures (Maria Schneider), and scores of musicians you almost certainly do not know. Janus's goal was to project a fresh sense of what jazz is today rather than merely recounting the usual stories about Pops and Duke and Bird and Miles. Mission accomplished.

Also different about this book is the substance of most of the artist's statements. There is relatively little about the usual topics: their influences, their technique, their personal history. Rather, Janus asked the musicians to talk about what the music means to them, about their feelings about life beyond music, and about what makes them tick as creative people. This results in statements that range from the ponderous to the profound, but it is a fresh way of thinking about jazz. This is a book about how jazz intersects with life and feeling—not a history, not a set of biographies, not a mess of reviews.

To choose just one example, it is fascinating to read Vijay Iyer's explanation of how and why jazz reflects his experience "as an American." His parents came to the US from India in the mid-1960s, and he explains:

The experience of growing up "different" in this country is . . . fundamental to who I am. [L]earning how to be a person happened in the context of an experience of newness and difference. Improvisation is central to how we dealt with that reality. It's something I learned from my parents—their adaptive skills. They had to find a space for themselves in this culture. In a basic sense, it was all about improvisation.

This kind of expression is all over The New Face of Jazz. This is a book that allows musicians to find new ways of talking about music, and there is hardly a single reference to a diminished chord or a flatted ninth.

Not that the book is perfect. At times Janus struggles to find fresh ways to write about the musicians in her summaries. Trying to explain trumpeter Tom Harrell's music: "the aural landscape coming through his sound portraits is organic in its wholeness." But this kind of thing is near inevitable in jazz writing. How would I explain Harrell's mesmerizing arrangements any better? More peculiar—and probably to be laid at the feet of editors or publishers rather than the author—is the decision to designate certain musicians "Living Legends" and others not. (The book's subtitle is "An Intimate Look at Today Living Legends and the Artists of Tomorrow"). Fred Hersch is a "Living Legend" but not McCoy Tyner? Michael Abene qualifies but not Phil Woods? Who cares, but it's still curious.

Also notable: the book is sprinkled with excellent but too-small photos by Ned Radinsky. I dearly wish there were more and that they could have been reproduced better. The stories here deserve the extra zip that these photographs could have provided.

In the end, The New Face of Jazz is an immensely valuable labor for the music. Janus dedicated the better part of two years of her life to reaching out to the these many musicians, many of whom dearly deserve recognition but rarely get it. And with a lovely forward by bassist Marcus Miller and an opening word from Wynton Marsalis, it is clear that this book was embraced by the community that it serves.

The New Face of Jazz affirms that the community of brilliant jazz musicians is immense and deeply intelligent, and it reminds us that jazz is a great American art form because of how deftly and powerfully it reflects our lives and our culture.

"JAZZ" SINGING GETS AMAZING: REBECCA MARTIN AND JEN CHAPIN

2010-08-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've recently been involved in some interesting debates about the importance and value to jazz of innovation versus tradition. This is one of those topics that has been front and center in jazz for a long time: the battles between boppers and "moldy figs", the suspicion during the 1960s of "free" music, and the various stand-offs between neo-traditionalists and less conventional players (and between those fusing jazz with other forms) in the 1980s.

I'd like to think that these debates have become mostly irrelevant today. So many musicians cross these boundaries every day. And they do this in surprising ways. For example, the singers Rebecca Martin and Jen Chapin.

Rebecca Martin, Larry Grenadier, and Bill McHenry

Martin's new album is When I Was Long Ago, and it is a collection of standards. Now, that is a prescription for jazz traditionalism, right? But this disc—for all its standards such as "Lush Life" and "Willow Weep for Me"—is risky and daring.

To start with, Martin is backed only by two instrumentalists: bassist Larry Grenadier (also her husband) and saxophonist Bill McHenry. Inevitably these are spare arrangements that leave Martin's vocal sound vulnerable and exposed. This makes it a kind of vocal tightrope walking—which can be exhilarating to listen to.

Rebecca Martin

Check out "But Not For Me" as just one example. Martin sings the rarely heard verse accompanied just by Grenadier—no small feat as it meanders melodically in an interesting way. Then when the familiar melody appears, McHenry enters with a single held note that acts like a tart, slightly dissonant, complement to the charming melody. While Martin doesn't do anything deeply weird with the tune—she sings close to the melody—her tone is not an Ella-esque smooth jazz glide but a personality-rich voice that has the bend and sway of jazz along with rock traces of Rod Stewart or Joplin. And Bill McHenry sounds fabulous and free on his solo: both exploratory and at the same time briefly quoting "Tangerine." This isn't avant-garde music, yet it feels unfettered in the best ways.

It's hard to explain how Martin sounds more contemporary than the standard modern Billie Holiday imitator (and, yeah, I'm talking about you, M Peyroux), but Martin owns this material more like she wrote the songs than as if she just loved her old records. When she sings "Lush Life," she is telling you the story for the first time rather than SINGING it like she was Coltrane.

Rebecca Martin is recording for Sunnyside, and she is typically backed by great jazz players like Kurt Rosenwinkel, but maybe it's not quite right to call her a "jazz" singer. Her style assembles jazz and folk, maybe you want to call her "indie-pop" or maybe you'd rather skip the labels altogether. She has worked with songwriter Jesse Harris—the guy who penned the Norah Jones smash hit—so maybe that makes her a Norah-ish pop/jazzer? But the sound of her bands—dreamy and impressionistic and hauntily swinging—makes her seem more like a purveyor of modern art songs like Jon Mitchell. Now, by recording a full program of standards, Martin seems to be working with the jazz label even as she nudges it aside.

While I've been criticized for suggesting that jazz needs to find ways to make itself relevant to today's world, I still feel this is true. The point is not for jazz to sell more discs or pander to popular styles. Audiences may dig pandering in the short term, but it will kill an art form. But if jazz musicians want their art to live actively in the public ear in 2010, they have to make the art of jazz mean something in 2010 beyond nostalgia or abstraction. I think that Rebecca Martin is doing that by investing these standards with contemporary feeling and by reimagining them without their decades of old associations.

Jen Chapin and Stephan Crump

Remarkably, singer Jen Chapin (yup, Harry's daughter, but more a soul or jazz singer than a folkie) used this precise instrumentation of voice/acoustic bass/saxophonist for her 2009 take on the Stevie Wonder songbook, Revisions. I've written about Jen at length before, and you can read my profile of her and family in an old edition of my PopMatters column, JAZZ TODAY. I still feel the same way about Jen—that she deserves way more acclaim. Because she hasn't fashioned herself as a "jazz singer" but also hasn’t hit it big she lives in a middle area where the fame/publicity is limited but the artistic rewards are huge.

Backed another husband who happens to be a first-call jazz bassist (Stephan Crump, recently of Vijay Iyer's trio and his own Rosetta Trio) and a terrific saxophonist Chris Cheek, Chapin provides Wonder's songs with a new lens that is supremely elastic and interesting. Though her voice carries the timbre of a modern soul singer, her time is drenched in a feeling for jazz. And with Crump swinging like mad even when he is playing funky patterns, this disc becomes another refreshing example of how jazz can be refreshed brilliantly by touching something that feels more a part of today's world.

In a sense, Revisions is the flip side of the Martin recording in that it uses a repertoire that is not associated with jazz but then applies jazz techniques to get inside the songs. "Renewable" is a Wonder song that I don't really know in its original form, but here Chapin's vocal is in constant dialogue with Cheek's tenor saxophone while Crump plays a probing bass line that would only be found on a jazz record. Chapin doesn't "improvise" in the usual jazz sense, but she works with the song in a context that requires her to listen to instrumentalists who are improvising. It's a bracing performance in every respect.

When Chapin approaches Wonder in a more direct and funky way, you won't be able to resist. Her "Jesus Children of America" is given a rocking bottom by Crump's slap/pluck technique, and Cheek plays the edges as her equal: soulful. "Village Ghetto Land" is sung delicately and playfully, with a prancing bass part and Cheek sounding almost fussy on soprano—an ingenious way of making the lyrics about terrible conditions for poor folks in the city seem particularly poignant.

Any chance you get to check out Rebecca Martin or Jen Chapin: take it. Today's pop music on the radio is fun, but Martin and Chapin are finding ways to combine jazz technique with the deeper side of our grand American tradition of popular art. If you'd have told me that 2009-2010 would find two brilliant singers use the voice/acoustic bass/saxophone format to make stunning music, I'd have thought you were nuts.

But it's true. Thanks, Rebecca and Jen. We're not nuts—we're lucky.

PUNCH BROTHERS, ANTIFOGMATIC

2010-08-05T05:51:00.000-07:00

Nickel Creek, with Chris Thile on the left

Like a million of other people who grew up in the New York area, I had a healthy wariness of country music and related forms when I was younger—the twang was alien to me, I suppose, and I was too immature to really listen. But my love of jazz helped me to hear the technical brilliance of bluegrass, eventually, and I've been expanding my range ever since.

Punch Brothers, a different kind of bluegrass

Of course, you didn't have to be a bluegrass fan to enjoy Nickel Creek, the bluegrass/pop band featuring Sean and Sara Watkins (guitar, fiddle) and Chris Thile (mandolin), which made charming and melodic "newgrass" that had more than a tinge of pop delight about it. But Nickel Creek is taking a break while all three members pursue other projects. And Chris Thile's new band, Punch Brothers, brings me right back to my jazz roots, kind of.

Punch Brothers have a new album out, Antifogmatic, and you can read my full PopMatters.com review to get the complete lowdown. The first commenter on the review complained that people should not describe this band as being "bluegrass" despite their classic bluegrass instrumentation (guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, acoustic bass, stacked vocals), and this is fair enough. These guys write and play exceedingly complex music that sometimes sounds old-timey but just as often uses elements of classical music, jazz, rock, or folk music. Most often it mixes and matches styles such that it is entirely sui generis, a bit hard to follow, less than purely appealing.

But that is fine by me. Antifogmatic makes you work hard as a listener, to be sure, but it rewards the listening with surprise and invention. It suggests (as my commenter over on PM, a fellow Bethesda-ite apparently, should appreciate) that easy labels won't do. And it contains some truly dazzling playing from all the guys in the band, though Thile is usually so good that it's easy to forget that any one else is playing.

It's not a perfect recording for me—like I wish that there were a track or two that contained less fancy footwork and just let the guys PLAY—but it's not a perfect world. Thile, Punch Brothers and Antifogmatic are making it a little better, though, I'll tell you that.