Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2019 i JazzTimes

My November 2018 was emotionally all over the place. First there was the crushing news of Roy Hargrove’s death (see our short obituary on pg. 17 and longer obit online; a more in-depth appreciation by one of his closest friends will appear in our next issue). Then there was the excitement of tabulating our contributors’ votes for my debut year-end Top 50 list as JazzTimes editor (and it was exciting, even though the No. 1 new and historical albums were pretty much foregone conclusions). And then there were the moments that put everything in wider perspective. The most memorable of those happened at the Village Vanguard on Nov. 13, as I watched pianist Marcus Roberts make his first headlining appearance at that club in 15 years, covering his 1990 album…

1. JOHN COLTRANE BOTH DIRECTIONS AT ONCE: THE LOST ALBUM (IMPULSE!) Of the unsuspected caches of Coltrane that have been miraculously unearthed in the new millennium, Both Directions at Once ranks third, after Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall and One Down, One Up. It contains material recorded at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio on March 6, 1963 by Coltrane’s Classic Quartet at the peak of its powers. Among the masterpieces are “Slow Blues” and “Impressions.” It is ungrateful to rank gifts from the gods. T.C. 2. MILES DAVIS & JOHN COLTRANE THE FINAL TOUR: THE BOOTLEG SERIES, VOL. 6(COLUMBIA/LEGACY) By 1960, only with some arm-twisting was Davis able to get a reluctant Coltrane to stick around for one last tour: Miles’ first European trip with his own band.…

On a New York evening in mid-autumn, the pianist Myra Melford, playing with her quintet, Snowy Egret, opened the first set of a two-night run at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola with “Small Thoughts,” a memorable track from her new album, The Other Side of Air. Released on the Firehouse 12 label in November, the record is inspired by two of Melford’s favorite visual artists, Cy Twombly and William Kentridge, and in many ways, “Small Thoughts”—a spindly tune held together with contrapuntal guitar, cornet, piano, and bass lines, culminating in a fierce drum solo—bore their sketch-based imprint. Melford, who in some ways resembles a bird, with an aquiline nose and short gray curly hair, sat at the keyboard, pounding away with percussive force and smiling mischievously. If it seemed as if she…

Vinyl records are hotter than they’ve been since the late 1980s, but the systems we use for music listening have changed radically since then. In vinyl’s heyday, we plugged our record players into stereo receivers, connected to a pair of speakers. Now, the most common music system is a compact, all-in-one speaker or a set of headphones, usually connected wirelessly to a smartphone. As the vinyl resurgence moves from audio enthusiasts to mainstream music lovers, turntable manufacturers are adapting to the new tech landscape. They’re adding wireless technologies that let you play your records the same way you always did—dropping the needle into the groove—but connecting easily to today’s audio systems. There are downsides to this, though. Wireless connections can be more complicated than plugging in cables, and they sometimes…

LEBROBA (ECM) It is profoundly satisfying to hear drummer Andrew Cyrille—who helped shepherd the tornado of Cecil Taylor through Unit Structures, among many others, more than 50 years ago—now in regal equipoise with a pair of esteemed elder peers, trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and guitarist Bill Frisell. Lebroba relaxes you like a landscape painting, allowing your senses to settle easily over the whole, with the opportunity always available to be stimulated by the details. In that sense, the album’s quintessential song is Smith’s “Turiya: Alice Coltrane Meditations and Dreams: Love,” a 17-minute walkabout through a series of tone poems and snippets. In purely musical terms, it bears scant resemblance to Alice Coltrane’s music, but its animating principles of patience, calm self-assurance, and absence of ego and pretension form an underlying…

On Dec. 2, 2018, drummer/composer Makaya McCraven celebrated the recent release of his ambitious Universal Beings album—recorded in four cities with a dazzling array of boundary-pushing musicians—by putting on a special show in New York with 10 of those illustrious guest stars. Joining him onstage at Le Poisson Rouge (in a performance that was part of the Red Bull Music Presents concert series) were saxophonists Shabaka Hutchings, Nubya Garcia, and Josh Johnson; violist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson; harpist Brandee Younger; guitarist Jeff Parker; bassists Junius Paul and Dezron Douglas; vibraphonist Joel Ross; and percussionist Carlos Niño. Before a packed house, the ensemble played for almost two hours with hardly a break in the action. The buzz surrounding this show was so sizable, and the line outside the club so long, that many…

When Satoko Fujii was four, she was so shy that she begged to quit kindergarten. In response, her parents sent her to piano lessons. It was the first step in the self-discovery of a genuinely avant-garde musical artist. “With music we can be totally free and it is special for that reason—the best thing about music,” she declared over the phone 56 years later, from her home in Japan. “So I don’t want to limit myself.” The Japanese celebrate a person’s 60th birthday as kanreki, a time when one circle of life is completed and another begins. Fujii honored the tradition with an audacious undertaking: the release of a CD of new music for each month of her kanreki year of 2018. She didn’t limit herself. There is an album…

➤ For the first time, an Israeli musician—pianist Tom Oren—is the winner of the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, held Dec. 2-3 in Washington, D.C. A native of Tel Aviv, Oren was one of three contestants to reach the Dec. 3 finals round at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, walking away with the top prize of a $25,000 scholarship and a contract with Concord Records. He, second-place winner Isaiah Thompson (from West Orange, N.J.), and third-place winner Maxime Sanchez (from Toulouse, France) performed with bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Carl Allen before a panel of judges that included Herbie Hancock, Monty Alexander, Joanne Brackeen, Cyrus Chestnut, Jason Moran, Danilo Pérez, and Renee Rosnes. This was the last iteration of jazz’s most prestigious contest that will bear…

Man, there is no other gig like this,” Jon Batiste declares buoyantly, settling onto a sofa in his New York office. It’s a little after 11 a.m., and the Louisiana-born musician has just arrived for work—next door to the Ed Sullivan Theater, where he’s been on stage five nights a week since September 2015, playing piano and leading his band Stay Human on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “It’s like audio Lego,” Batiste continues, grinning. “There’s improvisation and incidental music, cues to accent different jokes. Then there’s the audience—500 people every night, a different house. Jazz, at the root of what I do, helps me tremendously.” Batiste, 32, is doing extra labor tonight as the musical guest, performing the quietly urgent ballad “Don’t Stop” from his new Verve album,…

MONK’S DREAMS: THE COMPLETE COMPOSITIONS OF THELONIOUS SPHERE MONK (Sunnyside) Pianist Frank Kimbrough never really considered covering Thelonious Monk’s entire compositional oeuvre until a friend planted and watered the seed. Upon hearing Kimbrough perform a program of Monk’s music at New York’s Jazz Standard in October of 2017 (during the club’s celebration of Monk’s centennial), concert presenter Mait Jones approached him with the idea. Instead of balking, Kimbrough considered it. Then, once he saw that François Zalacain at Sunnyside Records seemed open to the project, the pianist put a plan in motion. Between the initial gig and a two-night engagement at Jazz at Kitano in April of 2018, Kimbrough and his bandmates—bassist Rufus Reid, drummer Billy Drummond, and man-of-many-horns Scott Robinson—worked through 45 Monk tunes, more than halfway to the…

PHENOMENAL WOMAN: THE MAYA ANGELOU SONGS (Di-Tone) The quandary facing 21st-century jazz singers is where to find fresh material. Actress and singer Capathia Jenkins isn’t a jazz vocalist, but she’s provided an invaluable gift to singers looking for songs that are ripe for interpretation and reimagination. Working with longtime creative partner Louis Rosen, a Guggenheim-honored composer and arranger with an extensive list of Broadway credits, Jenkins delivers a song cycle based on Maya Angelou poems that’s like a Christmas present wrapped in velvet. Arranged for a flexible sextet with four multi-instrumentalists, Rosen’s settings of Angelou’s text feel like songs from a hit 1955 Broadway show, with the kind of wit, irony, humor, and drama that proved irresistible to jazz artists. From her caress of the album’s opening line “The highway’s…

For updated information, go to jazzcongress.org MONDAY, JANUARY 7 8:30 am – 4:30 pm Registration 8:30 am – 6:45 pm Exhibits Open (Mica and Ahmet Ertegun Atrium) 8:30 am – 4 pm Headshot Service (Location TBA) 9:30 am Panels & Workshops ■ JAZZ, SWING, RACE AND CULTURE Considering swing as a rhythm or swing as a feeling or a verb, what are the social, cultural, and racial factors that affect individuals’ perception, acceptance, or rejection of the concept? Players and thinkers ponder what swing means in 2019. Moderator: Andre Guess Panelists: Wynton Marsalis; Christian McBride; Myra Melford; Nicholas Payton (The Appel Room) ■ YOUR FIVE DIGITAL PRIORITIES: A MARKETING MASTERCLASS Having a presence digitally means more than just having a website. Molly Garber of the digital marketing firm Capacity Interactive—which counts…

Talking with Jeff Goldblum is one rare instance in which it’s comforting to learn that a Hollywood reputation holds true. Well, nearly true. Reached by phone this past fall, Goldblum, 66, is less quirky than he is enthusiastic without affectation—especially about his new Decca release, The Capitol Studios Sessions, an outgrowth of his semiregular gig at the L.A. venue Rockwell Table & Stage. There, Goldblum leads a small group of aces from the piano, swinging agreeably on meat-and-potatoes repertoire, bringing in special guests, and charming the curiosity-seeking crowd. The album, recorded in front of a studio audience and produced by Larry Klein, is an effective advertisement for that Wednesday-night engagement. Throughout the hour-long program of jazz and trad-pop standards, Goldblum quips and comps, mostly letting featured players like trumpeter Till…

1. WAYNE SHORTER EMANON (BLUE NOTE) Like Himalayan peaks, these performances stretch out before the listener, vast in scale. A full disc in-studio with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, two discs live from London with the spectacular Shorter quartet, even a graphic novel: It’s as triumphant a late-career statement as anyone could make. Choose any entry point and one can get lost in it, with tantalizing clues and markers to be grasped as one ascends. Three of the four Orpheus pieces receive quartet treatments as well, including “Prometheus Unbound,” seeds of which were sown in “Capricorn 2,” the final track from Alegría. It’s heartrending to recall that on David Weiss’ Endangered Species: The Music of Wayne Shorter (2013), we hear Geri Allen probe the same piece’s secrets alongside bassist Dwayne Burno—two…

For over 20 years, pianist Aaron Goldberg has set himself apart as one of the most scintillating performers in jazz, in a longstanding trio with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland and in pivotal sideman stints with Joshua Redman, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Wynton Marsalis, and others. His new album, At the Edge of the World (Sunnyside), marks the debut of a new trio with bassist Matt Penman and drummer/percussionist Leon Parker. Returning to the jazz scene after years of obscurity in France—he left the U.S. on September 10, 2001—Parker makes his presence felt not just on drums but with vocal percussion and a system of self-contained music-making he calls EmbodiRhythm. These elements have opened a new dimension in Goldberg’s trio concept. Catching up with the pianist via phone from Toulouse,…

QUIET REVOLUTION (Sonic Camera) Valuable chunks of the jazz canon go undistinguished—no doubt about that. But while the process of honoring the classics may be forever heroic, there’s no guarantee that listeners will be engaged by past glories. To make hay with yesteryear, artists must imbue the tunes with a personal vision. Sometimes that means upending the originals, sometimes it means refracting the base elements, and sometimes, as with this glide through the hushed gems of Jim Hall and Jimmy Giuffre, it means genuflecting to the initial designs while injecting a deep sense of self. Interpreting pieces introduced in the late ’50s and early ’60s by clarinetist Giuffre’s trios and guitarist Hall’s early work, Ben Allison’s Quiet Revolution has equal interests in grace and delicacy. Group chemistry is at an…