Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2016 i JazzTimes

I don’t hang out with musicians, not because I don’t like them, but because I do. When you want to ethically edit a music publication, having fond personal relationships with artists presents a liability. It’s more difficult to assign or write genuine criticism and probing features when you know that the musician in question is a kind, thoughtful person, as most jazz players tend to be. That said, it can be journalistically beneficial to entertain a choice friendship or two, in order to better experience how these folks whose work you obsess over actually live. And other musicians have such outsized personalities they can’t be avoided or ignored. One of those was the multi-hyphenate jazzman Bob Belden, who died in May at age 58, following a heart attack he’d suffered…

“IN MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WE NEVER TALKED THAT MUCH ABOUT FOLKLORIC MUSIC IN CHILE, OR EVEN ANY MUSIC WITH LATIN-AMERICAN ROOTS. … PROBABLY DUE TO THE DICTATORSHIP OF PINOCHET, THE CHILEAN PEOPLE MAY HAVE TO AN EXTENT AVOIDED THEIR OWN CULTURE.” For those hearing saxophonist Melissa Aldana live for the first time, it can be an immediately arresting experience. Her tone, broad and velvety, initially brings to mind post-swing masters, an unexpected echo of an earlier era amid the younger, forward-looking NYC scene she calls home. Yet her tunes, performed with her piano-less Crash Trio, reveal her conception to be fluid and remarkably modern, the clarity and looseness in her playing informed by the likes of Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson. The balance of these apparent opposites, a confident lyricism…

The story of photographer Robert James Campbell is one of increasing rarity in the current age of communication oversaturation, when obscurity can seem almost impossible. Even for lost souls, Campbell’s familiar narrative of early artistic brilliance and eventual dire straits tends to have a happier ending nowadays, thanks to technology. Campbell, who died homeless in Vermont in 2002, when the Internet couldn’t so readily identify and revive forgotten talent, never caught such a break. Not while he was alive, anyway. Born into affluence and deeply wounded by the ineptitude of his mother, he began photographing musicians while enlisted as the bassist in an Army jazz band, and from there led a life that can neither be called nomadic nor purposeful. He traversed Europe, did serious work for DownBeat and the…

“The thing about a studio is that it’s really about the community,” says Steve Rosenthal. “It’s what happens inside the room when people play together that creates the records. When you lose the studio, you lose that place. Every time a studio closes, a part of the community closes with it.” Music poured from the speakers, mingling with a hum of conversation, on the afternoon I paid a visit to RCA Studio A in Nashville. But with a little imagination it was still possible—standing in the middle of the floor, looking toward the control booth—to hear faint echoes of other recordings made in the room. Propped on the soundboard of a nearby piano were a few LPs with that pedigree: Dolly Par-ton’s Jolene; Willie Nelson’s Good Times; Superpickers, by Chet…

The cover art of Chicago-based cellist Tomeka Reid’s new release on Thirsty Ear, Tomeka Reid Quartet, her debut as a leader, portrays a young girl bathed in light, apparently either dancing or running through a thicket of trees and undergrowth toward the light’s source. It seems as if she’s found herself in a land of enchantment whose wonders she can apprehend only if she forges ahead—serendipity, toughened by determination. To hear Reid tell it, that’s also pretty much the story of her life in music. She was born in 1977, grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and chose the cello in the fourth grade. For a long time, her focus was on classical music. It wasn’t until her senior year at the University of Maryland, College Park, that a…

At the album release show for Soundscapes, his first disc as a leader in five years, the 75-year-old tenor saxophonist and flutist Lew Tabackin peppered his spry rendering of “Afternoon in Paris” with references to Ellington’s “Rockin’ in Rhythm”—a defiant riposte to the mass shooting of Nov. 13. “It was kind of appropriate to play something in relation to Paris” Tabackin told the crowd gathered at Club Bonafide, on 52nd Street in New York. Fronting his longtime trio—drummer Mark Taylor has been a member since 1982; and bassist Boris Kozlov, of the Mingus Big Band, has toured with Tabackin since 2000—Tabackin demonstrated that his prodigious hard-bop acumen is still intact, as is his full-bodied tenor sound. On flute, his personality is more Pan-like, leavened by the judicious use of vibrato…

ORNETTE COLEMAN 3.9.30 – 6.11.15 By Branford Marsalis I WAS 22 YEARS OLD, MAYBE 23, WHEN Stanley Crouch brought around a copy of Ornette’s record The Shape of Jazz to Come to Wynton’s house. He put it on, and I went, “Aw, man, turn that shit off. My ears are bleeding.” I hated it. He said, “You just can’t hear it yet. Just hold on to that record a while. I think there’s some shit in there that you could use.” I’m like, “Yeah, OK.” I listened every day, trying to figure out what was good about it. About four months in, I suddenly started hearing the music the way Ornette heard it—and then it was like my brain exploded. He played the saxophone in a very unconventional way. I…

IT IS STRIKING HOW CAFISO’S SAXOPHONE PLAYING HAS CHANGED. HE IS NO LONGER THE ORDERLY TRADITIONAL IMPROVISER WITH THE PRETTY, SINGING TONE. HIS NEW FREEDOM MAKES HIM WILDLY UNPREDICTABLE. Child prodigies in jazz are most often pianists. But when Francesco Cafiso was 14, he was good enough on alto saxophone to tour Europe with Wynton Marsalis. In 2005, just after his 16th birthday, he made A Tribute to Charlie Parker with an Italian orchestra. He used the original arrangements from Parker’s two LPs with strings from 1950, but improvised new solos containing lines of flawless elegance, in wave upon wave. The project confirmed two things about Cafiso: He was a virtuoso and a conservative. By 2011, when he released Moody’n through Verve and was still playing (brilliant) bebop, some critics…

Paul Bley, a tremendously influential, leading-edge pianist for more than seven decades, died of natural causes on Jan. 3, at age 83, in Stuart, Fla. Trained in bebop, Bley found his way to a wistful, introspective version of the avant-garde that felt chamberlike in temperament, on essential albums under his own name (1965’s Closer, on ESPDisk’) and not (Jimmy Giuffre’s landmark Free Fall, from 1963). Bley performed many compositions by his first wife, the composer and pianist Carla Bley, rightfully elevating her profile, and became renowned for his solo piano performances, especially the 1972 ECM release Open, to Love, a classic in the format. Among his other credits are concerts and/or recordings with a who’s who of historic musicians, from Lester Young and Ben Webster to Charles Mingus and, during…

Winners are bolded; runners-up are listed below in order of number of points. BEST OF ALL New Artist • Kamasi Washington• Joey Alexander• James Brandon Lewis• Adam O’Farrill Artist of the Year • Kamasi Washington• Charles Lloyd• Maria Schneider• Rudresh Mahanthappa BEST GROUPS Acoustic Group/Artist • Rudresh Mahanthappa “Bird Calls”• Vijay Iyer Trio• Christian McBride Trio• Jack DeJohnette “Made in Chicago” Electric/Fusion/ Contemporary Group/ Artist • Snarky Puppy• Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah “Stretch Music”• Terence Blanchard Featuring the E-Collective• Kamasi Washington & the Next Step Big Band/ Large Ensemble • Maria Schneider Orchestra• Arturo O’Farrill & the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra• Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society• The Gil Evans Project Directed by Ryan Truesdell Vocal Group • Take 6• London, Meader, Pramuk & Ross• Duchess [tied w/ below]• Tillery BEST OF THE JAZZ INDUSTRY Record Label • ECM• Blue Note• Motéma• Pi Festival • Winter Jazzfest (NYC)• Detroit Jazz Festival• Montreal International Jazz Festival• Monterey Jazz Festival Nightclub • Village Vanguard• Jazz Standard• Birdland• Dizzy’s Club…