Indholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2018 i JazzTimes

On a warm night at the beginning of May, one of New York’s most prestigious venues was taken over by a band of Gypsies. The venerable walls of Carnegie Hall resonated with the classic timbres of le jazz hot, in its manouche translation: sassy violin, ebullient accordion and multiple dexterously played acoustic guitars. Although the concert was called “Forever Django,” in tribute to the undisputed king of Gypsy jazz, Django Reinhardt, the man in the brightest spotlight was 60-year-old French guitarist and violinist Dorado Schmitt. A veteran performer in the Django Festival that’s been a feature at Birdland for the past 18 years, Schmitt is one of the principal modern-day keepers of the Reinhardt flame. And at Carnegie, in time-honored Gypsy style, he was figuratively passing that flame on to…

Steve Cardenas’ recent Newvelle Records LP is called Charlie & Paul—as in Haden and Motian, two of the guitarist’s biggest influences and two musicians who gave his career a boost by hiring him. The lyricism of their compositions is echoed in his two leader albums for Fresh Sounds and two subsequent ones for Sunnyside. Cardenas didn’t move to New York until he was in his early 30s, not because he wasn’t ready but because he was so busy gigging wherever he was. He grew up in Kansas City, where he progressed from junior-high rock bands to prog-rock to fusion to mainstream jazz, and got a chance to play with Jay McShann and Claude Williams. He lived in San Francisco for four years, playing with Paul McCandless and Jeff Beal, and…

Odd as it seems, Grant Green (1935-1979) is simultaneously one of the most and least celebrated guitarists in jazz history. He was certainly one of the most prolific. The writer and radio personality Bob Porter, in his Soul Jazz: Jazz in the Black Community, 1945-1975, notes that the St. Louis native played on 15 sessions for Blue Note Records in 1961, 18 more in 1962 and another 18 in 1963. He made 22 albums as a leader between 1960 and 1965, according to veteran producer Michael Cuscuna. Only 14 were released at the time, but soon after Green’s tragic death at age 43, the shelved material began to surface. More and more has emerged from the vaults over the decades, the latest additions being two live albums from Resonance Records,…

“When I’m playing, I don’t know whether I’m a girl, boy, dog, cat or whatever,” the guitarist Emily Remler said in late 1983, during an interview for Canadian radio. “I’m just playing the music. When I leave the stage, that’s when people remind me that I’m a woman.” But just a year and a half later, Remler, then 27, saw things differently. Jazz author Julie Coryell asked her in May of 1985 if she’d had to work harder for acceptance as a woman. “I still do,” she replied. “I didn’t conquer it. Are you kidding? Now they know that I can play. But I still have to prove myself every single time.” Prove herself she did. By the time she talked to Coryell, Remler had already recorded four albums as…

Bobby Broom’s 2009 Thelonious Monk tribute album, Bobby Broom Plays for Monk (Origin), almost didn’t happen. Prior to going into the studio, the Chicago-based guitarist convened his trio to test out the concept. After hitting on a New Orleans-flavored arrangement of “Bemsha Swing” that felt right, bassist Dennis Carroll suggested that the tune sounded like something John Scofield might do, so Broom ran to the computer. “I searched ‘Sco’ and ‘Bemsha Swing’ and didn’t find anything,” Broom recalls. “But I found a whole Peter Bernstein Monk record, and when I checked iTunes I realized it had been released that day!” Broom almost canceled his tribute on the spot, but a quick listen to a few of the tracks from Bernstein’s Monk (Xanadu) assured him that his arrangements were different enough…

LOVE STONE (Savant) Look past JD Allen’s propulsiveness as a player and you’ll note that his melodic sense has always leaned toward the concise. Ballads may have seemed previously like tokens on the tenor saxophonist’s hard-driving and exploratory records, but a whole album of them is actually a natural fit for him. Love Stone, recorded with his longtime trio (bassist Gregg August and drummer Rudy Royston) and guitarist Liberty Ellman, finds him in his element even as he treads what for him has been a road less traveled. There’s certainly no shortage of decorative work from Allen. His solo on “Stranger in Paradise” has plenty of ornaments and curlicues, as does “Prisoner of Love”—but they’re asides, the flourishes on the signature. Both improvisations have solid spines and no superfluous parts.…

Terence Blanchard didn’t form his fusion band the E-Collective with the intention of making politically and socially informed music. But, he says, “Real life was happening, and we couldn’t avoid that. So instead of making a feel-good record, we decided to have music that was inspired by these things that were happening in our country.” Live, the group’s newly released Blue Note followup to 2015’s Breathless, was recorded in front of audiences in U.S. cities affected by high-profile instances of gun violence, committed both by police and against law enforcement. The album features Blanchard on trumpet and keyboards, Charles Altura on electric guitar, David Ginyard Jr. on electric bass, Fabian Almazan on keyboards and piano and Oscar Seaton playing drums. Dr. Cornel West contributes a couple of spoken-word passages. Blanchard,…

When Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood made its public-television debut on Feb. 19, 1968, its creator and host, Fred Rogers, already knew that music would play an important role in the show; he was, after all, a pianist and composer himself. But for most of the program’s 31-season run, the melodies Rogers wrote would be given a distinctive character by musical director and Pittsburgh jazz-piano great Johnny Costa. Deeply interwoven within Rogers’ kindly and compassionate approach to instructing youngsters—and addressing such weighty topics as divorce, overcoming fear or feeling angry—was some of the most colorful and creative jazz ever aired on national TV. What Costa, who died of anemia in 1996, at age 74, brought to the show was a sense of improvisatory sophistication that exposed millions of kids to a complex…

On a recent evening at Jazz Standard in Manhattan, Mary Halvorson was hunched over her large hollowbody guitar, unleashing some alien sounds. Though her instrument—a Guild Artist Award—sat imposingly in her lap, she wielded it like a toy, strumming with spasmodic energy, plucking jagged phrases, and using pedal effects to create thick distortion and, at points, vaguely extraterrestrial noises. Halvorson, who is 37, sat in deep concentration, partly hidden by the music stand before her, making serious mischief. It was her first appearance at the Standard as a leader, and she was playing with her new group, Code Girl, which features the experimental vocalist Amirtha Kidambi, who sings Halvorson’s original lyrics. Kidambi is the kind of singer who uses her voice like an instrument. Her incantatory style, a kind of…

“You have to imagine peace, and work for it,” the arts producer and musician Hannibal Saad told me in the late evening of April 30. “Otherwise you become insane.” We were standing in the ballroom-style atrium of the Commandant’s House at the Peter and Paul Fortress in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Established by Peter the Great around the dawn of the 18th century and built over the next few decades, the fortress is arresting in its architectural grandeur, like so much of Russia’s cultural capital. A cast party for the 2018 International Jazz Day All-Star Global Concert had begun to wane, and Saad was detailing the jazz-related entrepreneurship he undertook in his native Syria. After gaining an education in the U.S., he “started the modern jazz movement in Syria in 2004,”…

UNCHARTED TERRITORIES (Dare2) Dave Holland and Evan Parker go way back, having first met during the British jazz avant-garde’s early flourishing in the 1960s. To have the bassist and saxophonist renew their lengthy acquaintance in a recording studio is notable enough, but to make matters more intriguing, they’ve hooked up on this double-disc set with two players of a younger generation and a similar free spirit, keyboardist Craig Taborn and drummer-percussionist Ches Smith. Only three of the 23 tracks were pre-written; the rest are free improvisations, titled according to their instrument combinations. Smith’s “Thought on Earth” starts things off, its pensive intro leading into a more exploratory section in which each player occupies a distinct rhythmic zone, related to but barely overlapping with the others. From there, the group splits…

Van Morrison’s love for jazz and blues is well documented, going back to his genre-bending classic Astral Weeks, recorded in 1968 and featuring bassist Richard Davis and drummer Connie Kay. A different sort of jazz influence, evocative of Miles’ In a Silent Way, pervaded the ’80s albums he recorded with trumpeter Mark Isham. In recent years, Morrison has released the jazz-flecked R&B album Born to Sing: No Plan B on Blue Note, sung alongside the likes of George Benson and Gregory Porter on a duets album, and delved into the Great American Songbook on last year’s Versatile. However, none of those recordings have swung quite as hard as You’re Driving Me Crazy (Legacy), his current collaboration with organist and trumpeter Joey DeFrancesco and his band. We spoke with DeFrancesco about…

Last fall, at a New York performance by the current incarnation of King Crimson, I was reminded of the long-running alliances between progressive rock and jazz—not only in the music, which upholds a similar respect for virtuosity and ensemble dynamics, but also the crowd, whose patience and focus seemed more in line with the concert hall than the rock club. Rolling Stone veteran David Fricke was also at that show, and we got to talking about those exhilarating LPs on which jazz, fusion and prog coalesce. Jack Bruce Things We Like (ATCO, 1971) The Scottish bassist’s second solo LP is a work of striking postbop turbulence actually recorded in August 1968, during his last months with Cream, and it features Bruce on his first instrument, the double bass. The original…

Simple as stereos might seem, they’ve become complicated in recent years. Not only have new technologies such as high-resolution audio, network-distributed music files and streaming added layers of confusion, but the resurrection of older technologies like vinyl records and vacuum tubes has forced audiophiles onto the web in search of lost knowledge. This increasing complexity has spawned conflicting opinions, with audio enthusiasts, writers, dealers and manufacturers often disagreeing about the best path for budding audiophiles to take. Of course, my voice is just one more in that crowd, but having advised thousands of readers in the course of my career as an audio journalist, and having tested thousands of audio products, I can at least warn you off some of the big mistakes. Avoid these and you’ll end up with…

KAMASI WASHINGTON HEAVEN AND EARTH (Young Turks) The estimable tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington has, over the past few years, earned a reputation as something of a seer. That’s partly thanks to his choice of promotional imagery. On the cover of his aptly titled breakout album, The Epic—released on the Brainfeeder label in 2015—Washington is depicted in a black-and-white photograph, holding up his horn as a sort of offering, painted planets arrayed behind him. It’s cosmic stuff. But so is his music. The Epic was a three-hour saga, featuring an excellent two-drummer band, a choir and an orchestra. And it had stylistic scope, harking back to Coltrane’s mid-’60s spiritual phase, electric Miles, Donald Byrd, Wayne Shorter, Grover Washington Jr., Fela Kuti—a potent synthesis of jazz and funk. Washington wasn’t inventing a…

STILL DREAMING (Nonesuch) When Joshua Redman formed Still Dreaming a couple of years ago, the group’s name and instrumentation—Redman on saxophone, Ron Miles on trumpet, Scott Colley on bass, Brian Blade on drums, no chordal instruments—were clearly meant as a reference to his late father Dewey Redman’s Old and New Dreams, which was itself a kind of continuation of Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet (consisting as it did of four former Coleman bandmates). That’s a potentially heavy historical burden for any band to carry, so it’s remarkable that Still Dreaming’s first album is characterized more than anything by its lightness. This music has a permanent spring in its step; even when it slows down, it continues to dance. Colley’s “New Year” and Redman’s “Unanimity,” which open the album, are both giddily…

These were the most meaningful and significant jazz-guitar tracks for me growing up. I made some discoveries at the public library, where you could take out 10 LPs at a time; others through my early guitar teachers; and still more just from word of mouth and friends who played. It was fun to revisit some stuff that I haven’t listened to in decades. Every track holds up. I thought I might shrug at some of them and say, “Well, I outgrew that,” but it was all still fresh, and in some cases my appreciation even deepened. Jim Hall “ANGEL EYES” Live! (Horizon, 1975) The first thing that strikes you are the subtle interjections during the melody, like a sax player providing filigree between a singer’s phrases. The solo starts out…