Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2018 i JazzTimes

The future of the jazz tradition is a future of techniques, influences, instruments, cultural exchanges, audiences, clubs, festivals, distribution, copyright, broadcasting and education. All that. But I think it is also probably a future of creative honoring. By honoring greatness, of the elders and the departed, I’m not talking so much about official or institutional recognition, about erecting monuments or naming streets or bestowing awards. That’s fine as far as it goes, but I mean figuring out new ways to render artists as social beings in their time, and as presiding consciences in ours. The jazz tradition is a philosophy of living; the lessons of its guiding spirits go beyond music. And every year there are more and more of them, staying right in the music’s common language and modes…

If you haven’t caught Johnny O’Neal lately, you really should. The Detroit-born pianist and vocalist, whose fabled history includes a stint as a Jazz Messenger in the ’80s and an appearance as Art Tatum in the 2004 movie Ray, and whose personal health battles appear to be mostly behind him, is hale and confident. Onstage, his attitude is sunny, funny and positive. The 61-year-old fits better these days into the brocaded jackets and hats he often wears, and his well-known command of postbop piano and sense of dynamics are stronger than ever—all energetic leaps and fluid rhythmic shifts, as he laughs and grunts and gasps in mock surprise. Then he’ll close his eyes, downshift the tempo and out comes that blues-soaked voice. With his buoyant personality and an unpredictable set…

ON A MILD EVENING IN MID-OCTOBER, THE CUBAN-BORN PIANIST DAVID VIRELLES was channeling Thelonious Monk at Jazz Standard in Manhattan. The occasion was Monk’s centennial, and Virelles had enlisted a couple of seasoned collaborators—the bassist Ben Street and the drummer Andrew Cyrille—to help him pay tribute to one of jazz’s chief architects. Though Virelles is just 34, he has internalized the lessons Monk imparted. His piano style is deceptively simple, concealing complex ideas about harmony and rhythm, and onstage he maintains a distant presence, letting his music speak for itself. During his early set at the Standard, Virelles sat slightly hunched at the piano, calm and inscrutable as he improvised on one Monk staple after another, including “Eronel,” “Light Blue” and “Off Minor.” Wearing a red-and-black Senegalese dress shirt, he soloed…

Audio technology never stands still, but in the last decade it’s felt like the industry’s been running the 100-yard dash every day. In just a few years we’ve gone from CDs to MP3s to streaming, from larger stereo systems to all-in-one wireless speakers, and from listening at home to listening on the go almost exclusively. Although no one can say for sure where audio technology will go in the next five years, recent products and new technologies can help us make some educated guesses. E.S.P. Meets DSP It’s been about 20 years since the first digital speakers—those with internal amplifiers and digital signal processing (DSP)—appeared, and tradition-bound audiophiles haven’t been quick to embrace them. That’s a drag, because having a separate amp for every woofer, tweeter and midrange, with each…

On a pair of 2017 releases for Blue Note, a resolute EP called A Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and a radiant album titled The Source, drummer Tony Allen conjures up not a mix of two genres but a fresh outlook born from the mixing. Now 77 and the undisputed architect of Afrobeat drumming—he maintained the groove for Fela Kuti starting in the mid-’60s and up through the end of the ’70s—Allen is molding jazz music in his unique, rhythmically taut image. Though he refers to this music as “Afrobeat-jazz,” that tag sells his sound short. Something new is afoot. The Blakey EP, featuring a hornheavy septet, is an electrifying journey through the repertoire of the indomitable hard-bop drummer; “Moanin’” and “A Night in Tunisia” are especially…

PRACTICALLY SPEAKING, Familia: Tribute to Bebo & Chico (Motéma), the new double album by the renowned pianists, composers and bandleaders Arturo O’Farrill and Chucho Valdés, first came under serious consideration in 2014. But in theory, its roots go back more than a lifetime. The 76-year-old Valdés’ father was Bebo Valdés (1918-2013), the pioneering Cuban pianist and composer. His son is likewise a towering presence, figuratively and literally, appearing a generation younger than his age and standing a full head above O’Farrill, who’s nearly 6 feet tall. The 57-year-old O’Farrill’s father was Havana-born Chico O’Farrill (1921-2001), the gifted pianist, composer and arranger whose work fueled memorable recordings by Machito, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Stan Kenton and others. Familia features compositions by both of its principal pianists (the co-penned “BeboChico-ChuchoTuro”; Valdés’ “Tema de…

I like to think of Jason Moran as jazz’s current time-capsule musician. By which I mean, if one were given the futile task of pointing to a single figure to represent the music at this particular postmodern moment, you could hardly do better than the 42-year-old pianist-composer and Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center. With style rather than sanctimony, he personifies the system of balances often held up as jazz’s contemporary ideal: future and past, respect and audacity, nightclub and concert hall, inside and out, postbop and pop, working musician and high-minded conceptualist. His ongoing collaborations with skateboarders, which began publicly in San Francisco in 2013, might very well be the best allegory for his generous, progressive ambassadorship. Skateboarding, whose culture harbors an intellectual and cosmopolitan element that…

Pharoah Sanders “ASTRAL TRAVELING” Thembi (Impulse!, 1971) This was the first track from this genre that I heard and was inspired by. The whole record, Thembi, was a game-changer for me. It was one of the first electric-jazz records I heard. Free jazz was living right next to these groove feels. To me, that was a complete notion of what an improvised-music record could be. The prominent percussion, along with the meditative calm of this piece, transports the listener to a path toward a higher state of consciousness. John Coltrane “NAIMA” Live at the Village Vanguard Again! (Impulse!, 1966) This version of “Naima” is an apex moment. Coltrane explodes the notion of how you deal with composed music and transforms one of his harmonic masterpieces with complete freedom; an open…

Special Report: Inside Irvin Mayfield’s NOJO scandal On Oct. 26, a year and a half after its last public performance, the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra (NOJO) returned to the New Orleans Jazz Market to kick off a new season—this time, without its founder and former artistic director, Irvin Mayfield. The trumpeter resigned in July 2016 amid an ongoing scandal: Mayfield was accused of redirecting more than $1.1 million in funds from the New Orleans Public Library Foundation toward his non-profit orchestra and the $10 million venue he had built to serve as its home base. (Both Mayfield and his business partner, NOJO’s former president and CEO Ronald Markham, who also resigned from his position as director of the New Orleans Public Library Foundation board after the scandal broke, reportedly drew six-figure…

The past few years have been momentous ones for Jason Moran. In 2015 the pianist, bandleader and MacArthur Fellow turned 40; that same year, he ended his relationship with Blue Note Records, where he’d been on the roster since the late 1990s. In the summer of 2016 he released The Armory Concert, inaugurating Yes Records, the label Moran owns with his wife, the opera singer Alicia Hall Moran. At press time in late November, three more recordings have followed in 2017 (see sidebar): Thanksgiving at the Vanguard, a live album with Moran’s core trio, the Bandwagon; BANGS, a studio session with guitarist Mary Halvorson and cornetist Ron Miles; and MASS {Howl, eon}, featuring cornetist Graham Haynes and drummer Jamire Williams, and inspired by the visual artist Julie Mehretu. All the…

NO ONE WOULD EVER CALL DAVID CROSBY A JAZZ SINGER. Yet the singer-songwriter’s music—his guitar tunings, chording and vocal phrasing, his insatiable desire to step out of bounds—has been informed by jazz since he first appeared on the scene in the mid-’60s as an original member of the Byrds. While neither that group nor Crosby, Stills & Nash ever steered toward jazz in an overt manner, Crosby’s lifelong love for the music has, at times, poked through and made itself known. In 1970, no less than Miles Davis picked up on and covered “Guinnevere,” a ballad Crosby had written the previous year for the debut CSN album (more on that in a minute). That song found its way into a new jazz-based arrangement in 2013, when Crosby, Stills & Nash collaborated…

Among the topics that Herbie Hancock promises to cover in the intro to his MasterClass series is “one’s own ability to develop one’s own sound.” Though there are plenty of vital tips and techniques to be found in the 25-lesson online video tutorial, don’t expect the iconic pianist-composer to hand you your voice. “That can’t be taught,” Hancock, 77, admitted over the phone from his hotel room in Norway. “You have to do that. You don’t get that from somebody else. But it can be encouraged, and what can be taught, perhaps, are pitfalls that pull you away from finding your own voice. Most of us learn in the beginning by being a copycat. But if you stay there and only become good at copying somebody else, you’re not really…

Introducing saxophone great Archie Shepp for a rare performance at Princeton University in early December, Rudresh Mahanthappa recalled his own college days, often spent huddling with friends to listen to John Coltrane’s Ascension into the wee hours. Lessons gleaned from the music of that era, he continued, instilled the idea that social activism was as key a part of the music as aesthetic concerns. The students in Princeton’s jazz program, which Mahanthappa has directed since 2016, received that lesson first-hand as Shepp spent the week giving workshops before taking the stage with the school’s Creative Large Ensemble under the direction of Darcy James Argue. The 90-minute set, in the intimate, wood-paneled Richardson Auditorium, largely followed the program of Shepp’s Grammy-nominated 2013 album, I Hear the Sound, itself a big-band revival of…