Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i JazzTimes

For more images from Jazz Congress, visit JazzTimes.com Even in our fully digitized era, print has its selling points: portability, durability, cheaper than an iPad. But timeliness? Not so much. I’m sending this completed, polished “In Memoriam” issue to the printer at the same time I’m editing an online obituary for Hugh Masekela. Surely the architect of South African jazz should’ve had a major part in this issue’s compilation of loving tributes, but the presses aren’t as easily stopped as they might seem from movies. Luckily we have the website too, so visit JazzTimes.com for a remembrance from a fellow musician who knew and loved Bra Hugh. In the meantime, here are my two cents: In 2009 I traveled to the Cape Town International Jazz Festival, where I was able…

On Jan. 11, in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Appel Room, basketball legend and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar gave the keynote address at the first edition of Jazz Congress, a two-day event presented by JALC and JazzTimes. Included here are highlights from that speech. For more on the Congress, which featured industry panels, learning sessions and more, see JT Notes. SOUNDTRACK OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE Jazz has been the musical narrative of my life. My love of jazz stems not just from the music itself, but from its history. The music connects me to my own thoughts and feelings but also connects me to my cultural history. Jazz is the original soundtrack of the black experience in America. It expresses the hardships, frustrations, rage, melancholy, unity and hopefulness. Jazz was the popular…

Kevin Mahogany, a singer who made a great impact in the 1990s with a rich, soulful baritone sound evocative of Joe Williams and Johnny Hartman, died at his home in Kansas City, Mo., on Dec. 17. The cause was a heart attack. He was 59. During his career Mahogany recorded about a dozen critically acclaimed albums for labels including Enja, Warner Bros. and Telarc. He also toured with fellow vocal-jazz greats Kurt Elling, Jon Hendricks and Mark Murphy as the Four Brothers, and portrayed a vocalist based on Joe Turner in Robert Altman’s 1996 film Kansas City. Hugh Masekela, a trumpeter, vocalist and composer known as “The Father of South African Jazz,” died Jan. 23 in Johannesburg, South Africa, after a long battle with prostate cancer. He was 78. Masekela…

Q&A: Ethan Iverson IT WAS A FAMILIAR PARADE. ON DEC. 27, the founding members of the Bad Plus—pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson and drummer Dave King—walked single file along the upper banquette at New York’s Village Vanguard toward the stage for their first set of the evening. They were dressed much like I first saw them at the club in February of 2003— the week Columbia Records released the group’s major-label debut, These Are the Vistas—and many other nights there and around town for 15 years. Somehow, the Bad Plus—to me the most compelling, reliably challenging and singularly cohesive trio in 21st-century jazz—always looked like they’d just arrived from three different bands. There was King, the punk-rock laborer in a checked shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing…

These are drummers you might hear in my playing; they were all instrumental to my outlook. The feel, the groove, is the most important thing to me— for a drummer and for any musician, period. It’s the thing I care about the most. All of these people have a tremendous sense of rhythm and groove. Drummer Stanton Moore chooses great brush performances Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers “BLUES MARCH” Blakey, drums Moanin’ (Blue Note, 1959) My dad, when I was 8 years old, told me if I learned how to play this Benny Golson classic, I’d be able to get somewhere. He was an architect but he made a very astute musical observation. The solo grooves heavily but is also melodic, very catchy. Miles Davis “SEVEN STEPS TO HEAVEN”…

Profile: Esperanza Spalding Last September, Esperanza Spalding found and executed a new concept of live improvised music. The bassist and vocalist, 33, gave herself a 77-hour window in which to compose, record and produce a full album—with special guests including pianist Robert Glasper and singers Lalah Hathaway and Andrew Bird (who also plays violin)—and live-streamed the entire process as a Facebook Live video. The resulting record, Exposure (Concord), saw a limited release split between 7,777 vinyl and CD copies. (The run sold out during pre-order, before the live-stream had ended; the album is not available for digital download or on streaming services.) Spalding felt that the project’s primary artistic values were its spontaneity and viewers’ in-the-moment experience of its creation; she didn’t want to cheapen either with a mass-marketed reproduction.…

GERI ALLEN 6.12.57 – 6.27.17 By Nicole M. Mitchell I can’t express enough what it meant in my early 20s to see Geri Allen, a woman instrumentalist, who looked like one of my aunties, standing elegantly fierce on what appeared to be the highest peak of respect in the jazz community. Pianist-composer Geri Allen was always steadily accomplishing incredible creativity with great integrity. Upon hearing her, one realized that her music carried the legacy of seemingly every piano technique known in traditional jazz, synthesized into a sound that was clearly innovative and identifiably her own. Geri could gesture single-line improvisations with the expertise of Wayne Shorter or Terence Blanchard, or she might choose to phrase uptempo in an Oscar Peterson double-octave winding-melodic fashion. She could jump Monkishly into jagged, spacious,…

Chops: A pianist’s guide to getting started on organ To hear the examples, visit JazzTimes.com This piece might have been called “Mission Impossible”: Selecting just five essential jazz organists from such a rich and still-thriving tradition was no easy feat, but I managed to select the players I thought were the most important—the foundational musicians that aspiring organists simply need to study. Here I’ll outline some key elements of their styles as well as the sound settings most associated with them. I will use a string of nine numbers to refer to the drawbar settings of the different artists. For example, 888000004 means the first three drawbars are pulled all the way out and the last one halfway out. Besides the drawbars, other controls discussed include the vibrato scanner, which…

JAZZ CONGRESS PRESENTED BY JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER & JAZZTIMES JALC | NEW YORK, N.Y. Jan. 11-12, 2018 All images courtesy of Jazz at Lincoln Center…

Review: Joshua White’s Monk competition performance Joshua White came so highly recommended to Rudresh Mahanthappa that the celebrated saxophonist hired him for a European concert tour without having ever met—or even heard—the San Diego piano phenom. That was in late 2015, two years before the release of 13 Short Stories, White’s audacious, long-overdue leader debut on Fresh Sound Records. “I’d been hearing about him from a few different sources, and I think Mark Dresser was the first to mention him to me,” Mahanthappa recalled recently. “I was intrigued that somebody Mark enjoyed playing with had also been a finalist in the [2011] Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz competition [where White earned second place]. I was like, ‘Whoa! What planet is this guy from?’ “Joshua played with my Bird Calls band…

Between Trump, Brexit and at least a dozen other causes for alarm, it’s no surprise that jazz musicians are upset. How they choose to express that varies, of course. Any single critic’s attempt to review Winter Jazzfest NYC comprehensively is predestined to fail, for reasons perhaps best explained by the title of an old Firesign Theatre album: How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all? With 125 performances at 12 Manhattan venues—109 of them occurring over two nights—the festival’s 2018 edition was, in this respect, no different from the previous 13. Best then to forget about being definitive and instead focus on a few common themes that recurred throughout the event. I noticed three in particular. JAZZ IS NOT JAZZ Those four words,…

Critic Natalie Weiner answers the question, “Is Jazz Still Sexist?” In late December, when I first spoke to the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra’s new president and CEO, Sarah Bell, about gender bias and sexual harassment in jazz, she told me that overall her personal experience has been positive. A few days passed, then she reached out again. Since taking over her current role at NOJO last year, she said, she’s often found that being introduced as the leader of the organization earns “a chuckle and an apologetic smile” from new business contacts. “They make a beeline to [a male colleague]. [Other times] when I’m introduced, they blurt out, ‘Oh!’ and I can see the mental adjustment being made and their approach to the conversation being instantly re-evaluated,” she said. In…