Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 i JazzTimes

Few films define “labor of love” as accurately as JACO, the long-anticipated documentary on the trailblazing, tragic life of bass virtuoso Jaco Pastorius. Initiated by the Pastorius family and adopted by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo with their continued input, the movie went through three directors, many, many recuts and a gradual yet successful ascent on the festival circuit to reach its official DVD/ Blu-ray release on Nov. 27. The effort paid off, because JACO is essential viewing, featuring rare footage, photos and audio plus a deep well of interviewees, from Zawinul, Shorter, Hancock and Joni Mitchell to the rock celebrities who felt Pastorius’ influence deeply. Most important, it balances the bassist’s musical brilliance and psychological unraveling with sensitivity and honesty. We caught up with Trujillo, 52, in New York in…

It’s difficult to remember how little known the singer and guitarist Eva Cassidy was at the beginning of 1996, just five years before her Songbird album topped the charts in England and Ireland (and the reissue chart in the U.S.). Even in her hometown of Washington, D.C., she was little more than a rumor to most people. Although she had released a duet album with go-go pioneer Chuck Brown in 1992, The Other Side, she still hadn’t finished her first solo studio album by the end of 1995. The lucky few who had heard her infrequent gigs, though, were clamoring for recordings. So Cassidy, 32, cashed in a small pension from her day job at a plant nursery to rent Washington’s most prominent jazz club, Blues Alley, for the first…

The National Endowment for the Arts has announced its 2016 NEA Jazz Masters. They include three musicians—vibraphonist Gary Burton, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and saxophonist Archie Shepp—and an advocate, Wendy Oxenhorn, executive director and vice chairman of the Jazz Foundation of America. The 2016 class will be celebrated with a free concert at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center on April 4. The 12th annual NYC Winter Jazzfest will take place Jan. 13-17. The tentative lineup includes Bill Laswell, Christian McBride, Kamasi Washington and Julian Lage. A celebration of ECM Records, including performances by Chris Potter, Vijay Iyer and David Torn, among other ECM artists, is also part of the program. The festival will feature more than 100 different groups over five days, on 12 stages in and around Greenwich Village. The 13th…

While Nina Simone’s discography spans more than 40 albums, the closest she ever came to a genuine bestseller in the U.S. was her 1958 debut LP for Bethlehem. Despite her consistent lack of sales power she recorded steadily for 35 years, often for major labels, and she stands, alongside Sinatra, as one of few artists of her era whose catalog remains near-entirely in print. Not one to be pigeonholed, Simone bounced freely between jazz, pop, blues, folk and gospel, often with classical undertones that harkened back to her earliest career ambitions. So powerful yet amorphous a body of work is difficult to dissect, but here, in rank order, are nine must-hear Simone albums plus a heterogeneous endnote. 1. NINA SIMONE SINGS THE BLUES (RCA, 1967) Focusing on lean, lithe blues,…

DINAH WASHINGTON What a Diff’rence a Day Makes! (Mercury, 1959) A game-changer for this amazing singer who was already working sublimely between jazz and blues, this LP arrived with a noticeable pop sheen, thanks to Belford Hendricks’ savvy arrangements. Washington’s rendition of the title track set a new standard, and her covers of “I Thought About You” and “Cry Me a River” are equally potent. As a whole, the album helped pave the way for soul-jazz singing. OSCAR BROWN JR. Sin & Soul … and Then Some (Columbia, 1961) Clearly a lodestar for such talents as Gregory Porter and Kurt Elling, Oscar Brown Jr. delighted fans with his ingenious juxtapositions of jazz and soul, humor and sobriety. Here he addresses various sociopolitical concerns within the black community—check out…

JEN SHYU & JADE TONGUE SOUNDS AND CRIES OF THE WORLD (Pi) “Song for Naldo” the penultimate track on vocalist, composer and multi-instrumentalist Jen Shyu’s new album first nods to a writer friend, a “weaver of words” a “weaver of dreams.” The focus then shifts to a vibrant dream of Shyu’s own that, involving an otherworldly image of her mother, is equal parts reverie and nightmare. That dark-light, soothing-terrifying duality is evident across eight of the nine other selections (calling them “songs” is a disservice; her work is performance art of the highest order). Though born in Peoria, Ill., Shyu, a Fulbright Scholar and Doris Duke Impact Award recipient who spent eight years with Steve Coleman’s Five Elements, has dedicated much of her professional life to exploring the musical heritages…

Tony Bennett sings the title track of his new album, The Silver Lining: The Songs of Jerome Kern (RPM/Columbia), as a literal valediction, a parting word to the faithful. He’s accompanied on piano by both Bill Charlap, with whom he shares an artist credit for the album, and Renee Rosnes, Charlap’s partner by marriage. “Look for the Silver Lining” is the full name of the song, which they negotiate in an oratorical cadence, with softly glowing chords and a chromatic key change about halfway through. There’s a delicate improvised piano interlude but the focus remains fixed on Bennett, who takes evident care in his enunciation of the lyrics, as if to lift them from idiomatic cliché into a realm of moral authority, or maybe just accumulated wisdom. Bennett is…

The jazz intelligentsia was out in full force on Sept. 17 at New York City’s Cornelia Street Café. The occasion was guitarist Liberty Ellman’s release show for Radiate (Pi), his fourth album as a leader but his first in nine years. In a compact first set, Ellman combined the cerebral and the visceral in a way that brought to mind a rarefied group of rhythmically savvy composer-musicians—namely Henry Threadgill, Butch Morris and Steve Coleman. The opener, “Supercell” shook the basement club with its combination of polyphonic textures and interlocking parts. With the exception of tuba player José Davila, the album’s musicians were present, including saxophonist Steve Lehman, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Damion Reid, all of whom were up to the task of making harmonic and polyrhythmic…

Theo Bleckmann’s voice has an otherworldly quality, somehow familiar yet unlike anything that came before it in the vocal-jazz canon. His subtle phrasing approaches its own discrete language of emotion, color and shape; he deploys an effortless control of diction; and his technical virtuosity will remind you that the voice was the original instrument. On his most recent release, A Clear Midnight: Kurt Weill and America (ECM), in collaboration with the Julia Hülsmann Quartet, his diaphanous tone and three-and-a-half-octave range hold a mirror up to Weill’s vital contributions straddling jazz and classical traditions. A crossover artist equally comfortable with the avant-garde, vocalese and the art songs of his native Germany, Bleckmann’s 2012 Grammy-nominated album with Kneebody, Twelve Songs by Charles Ives, had the same effect, as did his interpretations of…

DEE DEE BRIDGWATER I remember first hearing “Four Women” in the ’60s. It made such a statement to me that I used the lyrics to do my term paper for my English class during my first year of college. I wrote the piece on black paper with silver ink, and examined the different social experiences that the women she sings about go through, and how the differences in our skin tones as African-Americans affect how we are perceived, which is still something that happens. I thought she was amazing. She was very important to me. She was extremely outspoken. I loved that she stood up for civil rights and was the voice of the movement. I recorded “Four Women” on my Red Earth CD, and I’m going to record “Mississippi…

Two of today’s leading jazz singers, Jamie Cullum and José James, performed on the opening day of this year’s Nice Jazz Festival, held on the French Riviera in July, and agreed to a brief double-interview to kick off the festival’s new series of live discussions. The conversation took place under a bright summer sun with roughly 100 fans and local dignitaries attending. Choosing the topic? That was easy: Both vocalists had recently recorded tributes to Billie Holiday, in honor of her centenary, both released in the States on Blue Note. James’ fills an entire album, the critically lauded Yesterday I Had the Blues, while on his Interlude, Cullum teams with the British soul singer Laura Mvula for a stunning rendition of “Good Morning Heartache” (a tune James interprets on his…

Mark Murphy, a trailblazing jazz vocalist known for his improvisational skill and ability to interpret a wide range of song material, died Oct. 22 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J. The cause of death was complications related to pneumonia. He was 83. Larry Rosen, an entrepreneur whose many credits include cofounding the GRP Records label with musician Dave Grusin, cofounding the Internet e-commerce and content company N2K, and establishing the Jazz Roots concert series and educational program, died at his Park Ridge, N.J., home on Oct. 9. The cause was brain cancer. He was 75. Dave Pike, a vibraphonist who performed with Herbie Mann before launching his own group, died Oct. 3 in Del Mar, Calif. The cause was emphysema. He was 77.…

In the 1970s, when Cleo Laine broke through in the States after years of British stardom, she was all over TV: an exotic hothouse flower with an Afro-like headful of floppy curls, a siren’s saucy glance and the loose-limbed, doll-like moves of a marionette. Her luscious, low contralto resounded like a foghorn, and zoomed three and a half octaves into the ether. Singing “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” the exuberant ’60s show tune, Laine took listeners on a giddy helium balloon ride. She soared circles around the tune, then leapt up to an ear-popping high G; opera’s greatest coloratura soprano, Joan Sutherland, sang up to high F. However did she do it? At 88, Laine—now Dame Cleo—chuckles and responds with tongue-in-cheek hauteur: “It may be hahd for…

When Nina Simone died in 2003, the burden of preserving her legacy fell largely to her daughter, Lisa. It meant that for more than a decade, Lisa, a singer and Broadway actress, would have to put her late mother’s life before her own. “She used to say, ‘God help you when I’m gone ’” Lisa remembers. “I never understood what she meant by that until she was gone.” With this past summer’s release of the Netflix documentary›What Happened, Miss Simone?, the story of the singer’s trailblazing›career and turbulent personal life, Lisa is finally able to emerge from her mother’s›shadow. The film, directed by Academy Award nominee Liz Garbus, traces Simone’s journey from aspiring classical pianist to civil rights activist, and chronicles her later years abroad. Along the way, it juxtaposes…

UMO JAZZ ORCHESTRA WITH MICHAEL BRECKER LIVE IN HELSINKI 1995 (Random Act) When this stellar archival find was recorded two decades ago, tenor saxophonist Manuel Dunkel was a 24-year-old member of Finland’s UMO Jazz Orchestra and a major Michael Brecker fan. Imagine his elation upon learning that he’d be sharing a stage with his idol for a gig at the Royal Cotton Club in Helsinki. And imagine the nerves he must have felt when said idol suggested during rehearsal that they trade eights on a piece written for the occasion, Kirmo Lintinen’s rather convoluted “Ginare.” You can hear some of those nerves in the final performance; particularly toward the end of their duel, Dunkel seems wary of getting in Brecker’s way. But Brecker keeps egging Dunkel on, echoing and extending…