Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2018 i JazzTimes

At New York’s Café Carlyle in May, the “punk-vaudeville” band Nancy and Beth thought broadly. In addition to touching on jazz, country, soul, and gospel, the proceedings included choreographed dance moves and sidesplitting between-tune chitchat. But the scope of the performance was nearly outmatched by the star power onstage: Nancy and Beth—the group formed in 2012 and released a self-titled album last year—is fronted by the actresses Megan Mullally, 59, and Stephanie Hunt, 29, the former best known for her work as Karen Walker on Will & Grace. And as a bonus, the ensemble was introduced by Mullally’s husband, the actor Nick Offerman, a.k.a. Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson. Before one of their Carlyle sets, Mullally, Hunt, and Petra Haden—a daughter of jazz bass great Charlie Haden, Petra sings and…

The release this past spring of the 10-LP Ornette Coleman set The Atlantic Years qualifies as one of the year’s top reissues. In this excerpt from the box’s liner notes, Ben Ratliff discusses the lasting effect Coleman’s innovations had on multiple musical genres. Ornette Coleman’s early work hit some of his contemporaries—Paul Bley, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Giuffre—with great force. This music set off or encouraged subsequent movements in free or experimental jazz, particularly in Chicago and Europe. Coleman’s handling of melodic improvisation and group arrangement has inspired Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Branford Mar-salis, Ethan Iverson, and many others in jazz. It has also inspired, perhaps less directly but no less profoundly, all kinds of other self-starters and outliers. The plaintive, aggrieved rasp Bob Dylan used on tour in…

Imagine if someone told you they’d met the best tenor saxophone player who ever lived—better than Hawk, better than Sonny, better even than Trane. Imagine they showed you glowing testimonials from famous musicians raving about the new player’s skills. But when you went to hear this supposedly miraculous artist, he would play only solo versions of original tunes from behind a curtain. This is much like the situation audiophiles find themselves in with the introduction of MQA, or Master Quality Authenticated. MQA is the name both of the technology and of the company that’s licensing it. MQA claims to deliver the best sound ever available—better than vinyl, better than CD, better even than high-resolution audio. Yet despite the fact that MQA was announced in 2014, many audiophiles and journalists still…

For those of us who grew up on rock and pop, and then graduated to jazz, one of the major transitions is in the approach to the bass. Rock and pop basslines are often riff-oriented; jazz tries to find a way to keep the same groove and feel but does so while staying constantly in motion with the details. When we started playing together, both of us started listening to bass more aggressively—Penn, who was initially a rock bassist, to learn how to make that transition, and Mike, a jazz pianist, to give Penn guidance. In the process we came to identify certain songs, both jazz and non, as “bass songs.” Ray Brown with John Clayton and Christian McBride “PAPA WAS A ROLLING STONE” SuperBass 2 (Telarc, 2001) Jillette: The…

A replica of Parliament-Funkadelic’s mid-1970s Mothership tour spacecraft, one of James Brown’s ’70s black wool jumpsuits with the word “sex” in sequined beads around the waist, the lipstick-red ’73 Cadillac Eldorado that Chuck Berry drove in the 1987 documentary, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll, and Michael Jackson’s black fedora worn during the Jacksons’ 1984 Victory tour are just some of the cherished memorabilia you can see at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, D.C. Those items are part of the museum’s “Musical Crossroads” exhibition, which—through an assortment of musical instruments, sheet music, clothing, records, posters, films, and audio snippets—attempts to convey the polygonal evolution of African-American music through a compelling narrative. Jazz is represented too. Louis Armstrong’s 1946 Henri Selmer B-flat custom-made trumpet;…

Some use visual art; others look to poetry. But the muse for Erik Friedlander’s latest album, Artemisia, is absinthe, the famously hallucination-inducing alcoholic drink that was only re-legalized in the U.S. in 2007, after a nearly 100-year ban. The New York cellist, whose career is filled with solo albums and John Zorn sideman shifts, hadn’t had a drop of the stuff prior to this project. But the music, willed into being by Friedlander with pianist Uri Caine, bassist Mark Helias, and drummer Ches Smith, should sound familiar to anyone who’s ever partaken of controlled (more or less) substances. Focused and intense, with titles like “The Devil Made Liquid” and “Drop by Drop,” it perfectly captures the “moment of clarity” one often has while under the influence. The inspiration for Artemisia…

Fifty-five years ago, the John Coltrane Quartet recorded an album’s worth of challenging new music in one day. This summer, that music was released at last. Michael J. West got the inside story on how it was made—and why it took so long to reach our ears. It wasn’t that the session was unknown, but it seemed a given that it would be forever unheard. Researchers and scholars of John Coltrane had long known that on March 6, 1963, the legendary saxophonist had taken his classic quartet (with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones) into Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. They’d laid down seven tunes, including Coltrane’s “Impressions” and four untitled originals, along with two covers. The existence of the session was…

To the average passerby, the street-level space at 70 University Place in Manhattan, just a few blocks south of Union Square, holds little significance; it currently houses a garden-variety sports bar. For jazz musicians and fans in the know, however, it’s a landmark. There, from 1969 to 1996, stood Bradley Cunningham’s eponymous saloon—a spot that served as an enclave for artists of all stripes, a pole star for pianists and bassists, and the last port of call for the jazz community on a nightly basis. Blessed with one of the city’s best pianos (courtesy of Paul Desmond), Bradley’s was, in the words of the New York Times’ Peter Watrous—written just after the club closed its doors for the last time—“part jazz headquarters, part jazz college, part exhibition hall.” And all…

Jazz has changed a lot over the past hundred or so years, but at least one thing about it has remained a constant: New York is—and probably always will be—its undisputed hub. Ever since Duke Ellington decamped from Washington, D.C., for Manhattan in the early 1920s, eventually establishing his orchestra as the house band at the storied Cotton Club in Harlem, New York has been a kind of Emerald City for aspiring jazz musicians. And every year they pour in, instrument cases in hand, hoping to make an impression. The city is much more welcoming than it used to be (the Cotton Club audience, remember, was exclusively white). But it is prohibitive in other ways, with a high cost of living that can be particularly hard on creative types with…

VORTEX (RareNoise) Sometimes opposites really do attract. Sonar is an eight-year-old Swiss “post-minimalist” quartet that combines austere, oddly interlocking rhythms with a distinctive tritone bass and guitar tuning, and does so with mathematical precision (their primary songwriter, Stephan Thelen, actually is a mathematician). They proudly proclaimed their first couple of records “live in studio,” without any loops or post-production gadgetry. Guitarist and producer David Torn is an inveterate tinkerer, looper, pedal-stomping electronics wiz, and maestro of the volcanic splatter. His kindred spirit in avant-garde guitar, Henry Kaiser, thought Torn producing Sonar would be a magical matchup. The chemistry was immediately evident, to the extent that Torn essentially became a fifth band member. On Vortex, the template that’s made Sonar an art-rock cult favorite remains intact. There’s enough space in Thelen’s…

DESPITE A RECORD-BREAKING HEATWAVE over the Canada Day holiday weekend, the 10-day music marathon that is the 39th Montreal International Jazz Festival (June 28-July 8) proceeded in fine fashion, with a smorgasbord of high-caliber performances rooted in jazz, blues, pop, world music, and other genres. Hundreds of thousands of concertgoers flooded onto the streets around the Place des Arts performing arts complex for a fest featuring 500 indoor and outdoor shows—two-thirds of them free—on 20 stages by 3,000 musicians from 300 countries. The highlights were many, and JT’s SHARONNE COHEN was on hand to photograph them.…

Dusk was giving way to a cool spring Jazz Fest night at the Music Box Village, an outdoor hamlet of musical shanties and sound-making structures by New Orleans’ Industrial Canal, when Nolatet’s Mike Dillon delivered a solo-ending “thwap” to his vibes. He paused and smiled, his mallets uncharacteristically still for more than a few bars while bassist James Singleton and drummer Johnny Vidacovich dug into the tune. When pianist Brian Haas picked up a melodica, looking cautious as he waited for the right moment to dive in, Dillon selected a piece from his handheld percussion arsenal and set up a restrained layer of sound beneath the building drum solo. “One of our secret weapons with Nolatet is all four of us barely ever play at the same time,” Haas says…

Terminology matters to Nik Bärtsch. “We talk about music and we want to feel a certain energy in it, a certain metaphoric direction,” says the pianist, speaking over Skype from his home in Zürich. “So it’s very important to me to have a term that says something very clear in a very short form.” He has coined just such a term for the music of his Ronin quartet: Zen funk. Bärtsch acknowledges the inherent contradiction of the term, juxtaposing a meditative state against aggressive rhythm. “In what we play, in our attitudes, these two energies—meditative flow and strong, kinetic groove—are both essential. In my music I try to bring them together and I feel it very strongly.” It works, especially in Ronin’s live performances. Bärtsch, along with bassist Thomy Jordi…

Closing out the the opening night of the 2018 Vision Festival on May 23 at Roulette in Brooklyn, 34-year-old tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis played an hour-long collective improvisation set with masters of the form: drummer Andrew Cyrille, bassist William Parker, pianist Dave Burrell (the nominal leader), and the group’s senior member, the omnivorously avant-garde 83-year-old tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Between them, Lewis and Jordan stretched one motif across an entire hour without losing musical interest, showing the ability to express forking paths of harmony and rhythm in a single note. By the end of the set, the two had exhausted the possibilities of the unbroken extended improvisation, and themselves. It wasn’t the first time someone symbolically passed Lewis the torch. Named personally by Sonny Rollins as one of his…

The material that’s now packaged as Both Directions at Once took up four tape reels—four, that is, out of 35 that Naima Coltrane’s family had intended to consign to the Guernsey’s jazz auction in 2005. Barry Kernfeld, who acted as the content consultant for Guernsey’s, listened to all of them. “A few of them are turkeys, and the first one is just stuff that’s already been released,” Kernfeld says. “But there’s a good 20 tapes of really rich stuff still to come out.” Some of it already has. The master tapes, for example, of the sextet version of A Love Supreme (with saxophonist Archie Shepp and bassist Art Davis added to the standard quartet) were part of Kernfeld’s assay. At the time he heard the tapes, Impulse! had recently released…

To some observers, jazz was in mortal danger after the 1960s, until Wynton and the Young Lions arrived. NATE CHINEN sees things differently, and in this excerpt from his new book Playing Changes: Jazz for a New Century, he examines the warring trends of the ’70s and ’80s, showing how their conflict set the stage for the music’s renaissance in our time. “Conservation” is another word for saving. And the idea of conservation first began to exert a powerful pull in jazz during the 1970s, a decade in which American interests at large seemed to mobilize around the idea. (The Environmental Protection Agency was established, by executive order, late in ’70.) The music’s elders and originators were shuffling off in greater numbers—Armstrong died in ’71, Ellington a few years later—fueling…

INTERSTELLAR ADVENTURES (Posi-Tone) Interstellar Adventures makes good on the promise displayed on 2017’s Promethean, the young pianist’s debut for Posi-Tone, and 2015’s Live at Smalls, his first as a leader. It also far surpasses them in originality and pluck. Where the earlier outings, particularly Promethean, showed Hill to be an imaginative player with one eye focused keenly on tradition and the other eagerly searching beyond it, the new set finds Hill increasingly willing to burn bridges with his influences and carve out his own territory. Like its predecessor, the new release is a trio recording, with Rashaan Carter playing basses and Rudy Royston drums. Half of its 10 tracks are penned solely by Hill, including the opening title track, which eases in cautiously, allowing the group to find its way…