Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2018 i JazzTimes

November is traditionally the month when JazzTimes focuses on percussion, and that’s one reason why Brian Blade is on the front cover. Another reason: The last time he was on our cover, it was November 2000. Having been a fan of his drumming ever since I first saw him in Daniel Lanois’ band back in 1993, I find this 18-year gap—during which he’s played on close to 100 albums, many of them superb—close to unfathomable. Under the circumstances, it only seemed right to have him tackle a Bright Moments feature. Usually we reserve these catalog-surveying pieces for older players, but given Blade’s track record over the past quarter-century, there was way more than enough to talk about. Elsewhere in the issue, Geoffrey Himes contributes a perceptive story on the Nigerian…

At the Newport Jazz Festival in August, drummer Nate Smith is seemingly everywhere at once. Most artists are proud to do one set at the storied festival, but Smith is playing three: two with singer Jose James doing the material of Bill Withers, and one leading his own band, Kinfolk. No matter the context, Smith is a dynamic presence on the stage, an athletic drummer who can shift almost seamlessly from in-the-pocket funk to hard-bop swing. Born in Norfolk, Va., Smith grew up a little farther north in Chesapeake. His father and brother turned him on to the music and instrument that would resonate with him for years afterward. “My dad had a great record collection and I would listen to his stuff,” he explains. “He listened to a lot…

On a hot August day they gathered at the Jazz Gallery club in New York City: four of jazz’s foremost vibraphonists—Stefon Harris, Joe Locke, Joel Ross, and Warren Wolf—who had agreed to sit down together with JazzTimes and discuss the state of their instrument (along with whatever else was on their minds). Three of the four came into this summit with soon-to-be-released albums. Harris says Sonic Creed, his September release with his band Blackout, “is about paying tribute to the cultural values associated with this art form.” It’s his first album as a leader in nine years. Nowadays, Harris spends a lot more time on campus than in the recording studio; he’s the associate dean and director of jazz arts at the Manhattan School of Music, and his other academic…

INDIGO (Blue Note) There is a tremendous less-is-more majesty to vocalist and pianist Kandace Springs’ sophomore release, its 13 tracks rarely featuring more than four players, yet each incredibly atmospheric. Apart from drummer/percussionist Karriem Riggins, who produced or co-produced all but two of the cuts and plays on seven, there are no core bandmates. Instead, various configurations were assembled to custom-tailor the mood and vibe. Citing Nina Simone as her inspiration, Springs evinces a similarly powerful beauty, a satin ’n’ sinew verve, though her soul-infused sound more strongly suggests Cassandra Wilson by way of Whitney Houston. There are covers: “People Make the World Go ’Round” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” both respectfully true to the Stylistics and Roberta Flack originals; a swirling, gypsy-infused take on Jesse…

Thinking back to his early days as a curious young musician, Eddie Palmieri remembers hours of close listening to records. The Cuban bands of the ’50s held a particular fascination for the percussionist-turned-pianist; he’d dissect every detail of the music to learn how the various parts worked together and, ideally, how to play with them. There were, of course, limits to what could be gleaned from listening to a large ensemble on a 78. This was well before Jamey Aebersold launched his seminal Play-A-Long series, after all, and the genres central to Palmieri’s sound had nary a foothold in music education programs, DIY or otherwise. Some six decades later, Palmieri has landed at the forefront of technology designed to give today’s music students access to the kind of instructive listening…

“I COME TO BE A STORYTELLER,” Randy Weston wrote in the introduction to his 2010 autobiography, African Rhythms. “I’m not a jazz musician. God is the real musician. I’m an instrument.” On Sept. 1, 2018, one of God’s finest instruments—a lauded pianist, bandleader, and composer, and the man who arguably did more than anyone in the world to draw attention to jazz’s roots in the culture of Africa—left this plane of existence at the age of 92. Ten days later, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, family, friends, colleagues, and fans gathered to honor Weston’s memory and celebrate a life well lived, both in words and, of course, in music. JazzTimes’ ALAN NAHIGIAN was there to document the event in images.…

Allison Miller and Carmen Staaf met serendipitously. Miller, drummer and leader of the quartet Boom Tic Boom, had booked her band at the 2014 Reykjavik Jazz Festival but then discovered that its pianist, Myra Melford, couldn’t make it. “I called Todd Sickafoose, the bassist in the band, and said, ‘Hey, do you know anybody who’s exciting you right now on piano?’” Miller recalls. “He said, ‘Oh, I was just at a Monk Institute performance in L.A., and this young pianist was by far the most amazing thing happening onstage.’” “She sent me a message, saying ‘Hey, I have this gig in Iceland and I need a piano player. Do you want to do it?’” Staaf says. “I had been a fan of her music, and I said, ‘Yeah, I totally…

“I was kind of worried that the first set would be underattended,” Eliot Zigmund deadpanned to a packed room at Smalls, the basement jazz club in the West Village, on a temperate evening in early July. “Reminds me of the Village Vanguard when I used to play there, too many years ago to tell you.” If Zigmund, now 73, seemed anxious about the crowd size—or his age, for that matter—it didn’t show in his performance as the leader of a quintet he had assembled just for the night. Throughout the set, calling tunes and arrangements on the fly, he delivered forceful, swinging rhythms at the drums, punctuating each song with satisfyingly deliberate hits on his dark cymbals and low-tuned toms. At one moment, just after he had switched to brushes…

Last December, the drummers Chris Dave, 44, Eric Harland, 41, and Kendrick Scott, 38, found themselves on old stomping ground, milling about the hallways of Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA). They had returned for the annual holiday-season “DocFest” benefit, which raises money for a music scholarship fund, and decided to take a surreal detour down memory lane. “We all went to the band room and just stood in there and looked at each other—like, ‘Wow,’” Scott recalls, chuckling. “And then everybody looked at the [wall of] plaques, and I’ll tell you the truth: I remember seeing each of their names on there, but I never made all-state. … To this day, that’s one of my motivating factors. That always irked me. I don’t even think…

THE GRAND CONCOURSE (Machat) The Grand Concourse is a major statement from pianist Dayramir Gonzalez. It makes the most of the increasingly endangered 70-plus-minute album format, featuring an overture, a thoughtful musical dialogue between turn-of-the-20th-century Havana and 2010s New York (the album’s title is after the Bronx’s main thoroughfare), and an escalating rhythmic aggression. It’s quite an achievement. Indeed, that “Sencillez,” a delicate and remarkably authentic circa-1900 danza with string quartet and vocal chorus, can sit in close quarters with the fiercely percussive (thanks to guests Pedrito Martínez and Yosvany Terry) and contemporary “Iyesa Con Miel” in a way that makes any sense at all is an achievement in itself. Rodriguez manages it simply by using the clave as a through-line, even as it shifts tempo; he also lets loose…

REMEMBER LOVE (Highnote) The phrase “age before beauty” does not apply to the duet partnership of tenor saxophonist Houston Person and acoustic bassist Ron Carter. Sure, Remember Love is the first of their six pairings on record to occur when both are octogenarians. Yes, seven of the eight covers are more than 65 years old, and the other, Luis Bonfá’s bossa nova “Gentle Rain,” was written in 1965. Yet all that history is mere backdrop to better admire the beauty, the organic profundity of their musical conversations. A particularly notable charm of their combination is that Carter, the ostensible “rhythm” player, is the alpha figure. Houston Person will forever be recognized for his enveloping sound and reliably melodic approach, the plush tone and slyly inventive romanticism he derives from his…

These days, the name for what I teach is either Non-Performance Studies or Emergent Media. When I started teaching, only 15 years ago, it was simply Music History and Criticism. A big part of the challenge and the fun—if one cares to look at it that way—of being a music instructor is riding the waves of change that continue to wash through the world of music instruction and academia in general. The university courses I first created for music majors and general college students alike—players and non-players, jazz-focused or not—were specific to artists and styles: Miles Davis, Kind of Blue, and Modern Jazz. Paul Simon, Graceland, and “World” Music. John Coltrane, Spirituality, and A Love Supreme. Led Zeppelin, Electric Blues, and Hard Rock. The syllabi consciously balanced contemporaneous articles and…

In the battle for better sound, no one has it tougher than students. Most are on limited budgets—and if they’re music students, their reeds, strings, or cymbals come first. Most live in small bedrooms or dorm rooms, often shared with others who might resent a late-night exploration of Head Hunters or Bitches Brew. The good news is that there’s more excellent-sounding, affordable audio gear now than ever before. Thanks to technological advances and more efficient manufacturing, today’s 18-year-old saxophone student may well have a better, more versatile audio system than her father did when he went to college, for less than a third of the inflation-adjusted price. In this guide, I’ll explain what audio gear students—especially music students—need to own, and make specific recommendations for products that not only sound…

The clock had barely hit 7 a.m. when I phoned up avant-garde composer and multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire Tyshawn Sorey, and he sounded as if he’d already been up hours. He was preparing for a day of teaching at the Banff International Workshop in Jazz & Creative Music, where he’s been a staple every summer for the last six years. But for Sorey, this year’s edition was special. Not only were two of his pieces premiered as part of Banff’s Summer Music Series, but he was also appointed the workshop’s co-artistic director, in tandem with his longtime collaborator, composer/pianist Vijay Iyer. Given this turn of events, the headline of JazzTimes’ last feature on Sorey—“The Maestro,” published two years ago—seems even more appropriate now than it was then. “It seems like 10 years…

One of the most impressive things about Adam Nussbaum is the stylistic range of the music he’s made. He played with James Moody for many years, with George Gruntz and Michael Brecker each for a few, and continues to work in various different groups led by Dave Liebman. He’s been with Gil Evans, John Scofield (they’re both from around Norwalk, Conn., and knew each other as teenagers), and Joe Sample—“just a piano trio, but we did funky Crusaders stuff.” The many recordings that Nussbaum’s heard on also tend to impress: Joey Calderazzo’s debut In the Door and John Abercrombie’s organ-trio album Tactics, to name just two. Then there’s the fact that 40 years on from the time Nussbaum first hit the scene—supporting singers Joe Lee Wilson and Sheila Jordan in…

When I was growing up in rural Washington state in the 1970s, my first set of records—big-band 78s—came from my grandparents. That’s when my love of jazz began, and the two things that always caught my ear were soaring melodies and the undercurrent of powerful rhythms. Decades later, when I studied drumming in West Africa, one of my teachers said that melody represented the “Spirit” and rhythm represented the “Earth.” Now that I’m in my fifties, I see that timeless truth in all classic songs, and that’s because the mark of any great song, regardless of the genre, is its ability to convey a great melody with a powerful rhythm. Here are some instrumental songs in chronological order that greatly influenced me as both a composer and drummer, largely because…

A college degree is no guarantee. It’s a cliché, but it only becomes truer as time goes on. It’s truer still in the music world, and perhaps in the jazz world most of all. “There’s this kind of fallacy that you get a jazz degree and all of a sudden you’re supposed to be gifted gigs,” says Dan “Chimy” Chmielinski, a bassist who graduated from the Juilliard School in 2017 and toured extensively with Joey Alexander. “It’s not a golden ticket. I’ve never once been asked to do a gig and asked where I went to school or how many degrees I had.” To some extent, though, a degree isn’t so much ignored as it is assumed. New York and Los Angeles are full of musicians competing for the next…

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA FLYING HORSE BIG BAND THE BAT SWINGS (Flying Horse) Holy bebop, Batman! UCF jazz director Jeff Rupert decided to turn the school’s premier student jazz ensemble loose on classic 1960s TV-superhero music. This CD focuses on the energetic, quirky stuff that Nelson Riddle and others wrote for Batman, with a nod to Spider-Man for good measure. Rupert, fellow saxophonists Harry Allen and Mark Taylor, trumpeter Michael Philip Mossman, and pianist/UCF faculty member Per Danielsson arranged the material for this narrowly focused big-band project. The band sounds inspired and tight throughout, augmented on a couple of tracks by faculty members Richard Drexler on Hammond B-3 and Marty Morell on varied percussion. Baritone saxophonist Saul Dautch contributes excellent solos to the opener, “Batman to Airport” (chart by Mossman),…

Lots of jazz artists and presenters like to talk about reaching a younger audience. But few go as far as clarinetist and saxophonist Oran Etkin, who regularly teaches and plays music to infants. Etkin created his Timbalooloo teaching method in order to reach potential music students before life, language, and thinking get in the way. As he explained by phone from Turkey, where he was performing and recording new material, Timbalooloo isn’t about learning to play an instrument, but rather learning to speak the language of music intuitively. “[When] we teach a foreign language to older students,” he explains, “we teach all the rules of grammar, and maybe they study for several years, but then they go abroad and can’t speak fluently because they’re thinking about how to conjugate every…