Indholdsfortegnelse for December 2017 i JazzTimes

I was single, childless and 25 years old in the summer of 2009, but I don’t remember being carefree. I had been an editor at JazzTimes since the spring of 2006, but the magazine was between owners, so I was unemployed. Contributors hadn’t been paid for their hard work, and they were rightfully furious. Petitions were received; livid phone calls and emails from writers I considered my heroes were fielded; inquiries from NPR and the New York Times were deflected. At some point a sale of the magazine began to seem imminent, so JT publisher Lee Mergner and I opened up shop again, pro bono, to make the transition possible. Christopher Loudon, our longtime vocaljazz critic and invaluable editorial utility man, was one of a very few writers and photographers…

Thanks to his Tony Award-winning performance as Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway musical Hamilton, Leslie Odom Jr. became an overnight success. Or so it would seem. In reality, all that acclaim came after nearly two decades of hustling. The more accurate lede is that Leslie Odom Jr. is a singer. A singer who can dance. A singer who can act. But a singer first and foremost. He was born in Queens, but when he was 7 his family moved to Philadelphia. He attended the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), whose alumni include Boyz II Men, Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Joey DeFrancesco and the Roots. With a keen interest in musical theatre, Odom continued his performingarts training at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, and managed…

In his introduction to The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (Pantheon), noted authority Will Friedwald positions it as the conclusion of a quasitrilogy. That triptych of sorts began a decade and a half ago with Stardust Melodies: A Biography of 12 of America’s Most Popular Songs, assaying such timeless Tin Pan Alley gems as “Summertime” and “Stormy Weather,” and continued with 2010’s A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers. So, in logical sequence: songs, singers, albums. Around the time A Biographical Guide was published, Friedwald observed in a JazzTimes interview that even at 800-plus pages, with individual entries for more than 200 singers, the hefty tome wasn’t definitive, leaving out such worthy artists as Catherine Russell, Jane Harvey and Rebecca Kilgore. Here, the results of Friedwald’s…

In April, Japan’s favorite jazz singer for more than 50 years returned for what she called her “sayonara” engagement. As Helen Merrill stepped onstage at the Blue Note Tokyo, her 1954 recording of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To”—the standout of her nowiconic debut album with trumpeter Clifford Brown—filled the club to a roaring ovation. That track, which appeared in a Seiko commercial, had made the Manhattan-born blonde an idol of the Japanese. They were mesmerized by her foggy-sweet tone and stark minimalism, and by a delivery both confidential and mysterious. In Japan, she was called “the Sigh of New York.” Back home, she hadn’t fared so well. Musicians embraced her, but her subtle approach and introverted stage presence were drowned out in noisy clubs and overshadowed by…

Most fans of American jazz and pop vocalists would agree that Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra were the undisputed champs of their era. But in 1959, both at the height of their artistic prowess, Sinatra ceded the top spot, admitting, “Ella Fitzgerald is the only performer with whom I’ve ever worked who made me nervous. Because I try to work up to what she does. You know, try to pull myself up to that height, because I believe she is the greatest popular singer in the world, barring none—male or female.” The feeling was mutual, and they duetted on several high-profile occasions. Fitzgerald adored Sinatra, deeply respected his talent and, given her natural humility, would never have claimed superiority. The career arcs of these two giants were eerily similar, beginning…

Jason Moran’s approach to the role of Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., has been suspiciously similar to his approach to the role of pianist, composer and bandleader: He mediates a dialogue between the music’s history and its cutting-edge present. That has often meant bringing in elder statesmen along with rising young players, or helming tradition-minded exploratory projects like his Fats Waller Dance Party. It can also mean putting multiple generations onstage together in celebration of jazz immortals. In October, it meant two centennial celebrations—for Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie—in a two-week span. Moran was an active participant in the Oct. 8 Monk centennial show, clearly the more personal of the two for him. “Can we all rise and have another round of applause for…

John Vanore first heard Oliver Nelson’s music in 1966, when he was 19, and it changed his life. The moment came at the National Stage Band Camp at Indiana University. Vanore had just completed his first year of college. He was not a music major but had been playing trumpet since the second grade. “Oliver was there, directing a student big band,” he recalls. “They played ‘Reuben’s Rondo’ and it felt like lightning had struck. I went, ‘This is it. I’m doing this.’” Vanore stayed in school and earned a degree in economics from Widener University in Chester, Pa. But after graduation he went on the road with Woody Herman. Six months later he returned to his hometown of Philadelphia, where he’s been a full-time professional jazz musician ever since.…

Sometimes our jazz-education bin fills up with theory and technique guides whose aim is so specific and language so obtuse they read like grad-school dissertations. (Some surely are.) But three excellent recent books combine palatable writing with practical instruction informed by heavy-duty experience. The Drummer’s Lifeline: Quick Fixes, Hacks, and Tips of the Trade (Alfred, $12.99), by Weather Report veteran Peter Erskine and Dave Black, is a 126-page cheat sheet for everything from choosing and maintaining equipment to effective warm-ups to touring and the music business. Democracy in Action: The High School Jazz Band Director’s Handbook (Such Sweet Thunder, $49.95), by the trusted composer-arranger (and Ellington expert) David Berger, is a mother lode of invaluable info, with plainspoken advice on instrumentation, picking charts, teaching by ear, running rehearsals, programming a…

Review: Teri Roiger’s Dear Abbey TERI ROIGER GHOST OF YESTERDAY: SHADES OF LADY DAY (Dot Time) Since Billie Holiday was a major influence on Abbey Lincoln, it’s entirely apt that vocalist Teri Roiger, who owes a considerable debt to both, follows her 2012 tribute to Lincoln—a fine, thoughtful appreciation— with an equally imaginative salute to Holiday. Roiger opens with a less funky but no less stirring take on Gil Scott-Heron’s “Lady Day and John Coltrane.” Later, she offers up her own paean, “Lady Day,” based on music contributed to Roiger by the late David “Fathead” Newman, dotted with Holiday touchstones, including references to Lester Young and “Don’t Explain.” Both Young and Holiday recorded “(I Don’t Stand) A Ghost of a Chance With You,” though not together. Roiger introduces her version…

Daymé Arocena doesn’t mince words when it comes to her goals: “I’m fighting for Cuba,” she says on the phone from Havana, where she was born 25 years ago and still lives today. Though the singer earned international acclaim early into her career, thanks to co-signs from saxophonist Jane Bunnett and impresario Gilles Peterson, two studio albums in she’s still musically grounded in her home country. Arocena is determined to avoid clichés and keep innovating, even as her music is framed by Cuba’s rich musical tradition and her practice of Santería. She’s just as likely to cite Sampha and Kendrick Lamar as she is La Lupe and Mongo Santamaría, and her first band, Alami, was intentionally composed only of women. Participation in another all-woman outing, Jane Bunnett and Maqueque, earned…

Millions of people heard Alicia Olatuja on the televised Washington D.C. concert celebrating Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration in 2013, when the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir featured her on the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” But the course of her career changed because one particular pair of ears happened to hear that glorious performance. Dianne Reeves was so impressed with Olatuja’s voice that she emailed pianist Billy Childs a link to the performance, writing, “You should hear this girl, she can really sing!” “At the time, I had nothing I needed a singer for,” says Childs, whose close friendship and creative alliance with Reeves dates back some four decades. “But Dianne often refers me to things that really catch her ears, and when I was looking for a vocalist to join…

A pologies to James Brown, but Ella Fitzgerald, who would have turned 100 on April 25, was the hardest working singer in show business. Fiercely career focused from her teens through her 70s, she maintained an exhausting tour schedule and amassed a discography than runs to more than four-dozen studio releases, hundreds of singles and one of jazz’s widest, richest arrays of live albums. Never, even long past reaching the pinnacle, did she cease honing her preternatural technical, interpretive and improvisational skills. It is an extraordinary legacy—one that has affected pretty much every jazz singer who’s followed in her wake and still resonates strongly among today’s foremost practitioners. Concisely summing up her influence, Kurt Elling considers her “one of the main ingredients. Her sense of swing, of timing and phrasing,…

DAVID SEDARIS IS WELL KNOWN AS AN AUTHOR AND ESSAYIST WHOSE STORIES ABOUT HIS FAMILY AND TRAVELS HAVE DELIGHTED AUDIENCES SINCE HE BEGAN APPEARING ON NPR IN THE EARLY 1990s. But even the writer’s fans might not be aware of his deep passion for and knowledge of jazz, an interest he inherited in part from his father, Lou. “If anything happens to me,” Sedaris has said, “the one thing my father wants is my iPod.” On that iPod are hundreds of jazz cuts, everything from Betty Carter and Abbey Lincoln to Duke Pearson and Jessica Williams. Living mostly in a small village in England, Sedaris is an obsessive walker who can rack up as many as 30 miles per day. It is during those walks that he listens to jazz…