Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i JazzTimes

Healdsburg Jazz Festival 5/31-6/9 | Healdsburg, CA The 21st edition of this Sonoma County fest will orient itself around 13 separate concerts, three of which celebrate ECM Records’ 50th anniversary: Ralph Towner and Paul McCandless (5/31), DeJohnette-Coltrane-Garrison (6/1), and a Carla Bley Trio/Ethan Iverson-Mark Turner Duo double bill (6/2). ➜ www.healdsburgjazzfestival.org DC Jazz Festival 6/7-16 | Washington, DC Held in a variety of indoor and outdoor venues across the nation’s capital, this 10-day extravaganza will feature performances by Stefon Harris, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Snarky Puppy, Jon Batiste, Michael Franks, Joshua Redman, Joey Alexander, and Terri Lyne Carrington, among many others. ➜ www.dcjazzfest.org Festival International de Jazz de Montréal 6/27-7/6 | Montreal, QC, Canada The Montreal Jazz Festival turns 40 in 2019, and its co-founder/VP André Ménard has announced that this…

“The guys who say, ‘You can’t play the blues unless you’ve lived them’—what the fuck does that even mean? I gotta have my teeth punched out before I can play the blues?” “I’m ready when you are.” Branford Marsalis does not waste time. In the handful of minutes since we shook hands in the lobby of his New York hotel, the saxophonist has marched into the adjacent restaurant, picked a window table, and ordered coffee and a pastry. He’s still looking at his cellphone, scrolling for last-minute messages, when he fires the starting gun for this interview. What follows is like a flash flood, a 90-minute torrent of strident judgments, firm challenges, and illustrative anecdotes, delivered with informed passion in often colorful language. Questions are asked; some don’t make it…

Combine Cannonball Adderley with Clarence Clemons, pour in a large beaker of R&B, garnish with eye-grabbing stagecraft, and you have the essential ingredients of a performance by Mindi Abair. The Grammy-nominated saxophonist, singer, and songwriter—whose credits range from Aerosmith and American Idol to Dave Koz, Jeff Golub, Keb’ Mo’, and her own group, the Boneshakers—was on the road to promote her album No Good Deed (Pretty Good for a Girl) when we tracked her down to ask how she delivers her signature sound. “Obviously, it starts with my saxes,” she says. “With the Boneshakers and some of the touring acts I play with, I have to be heard over a loud band. I find that Yamaha horns can cut through while still sounding full, big, and dynamic. Plus, they can…

You may have noticed that the latest issue of JazzTimes looks a little different. For months, our art director Carolyn Marsden and our graphic designer Eoin Laramee have been on a mission to reset the magazine visually, fiddling with fonts, sampling swatches, and laboring over layouts. You can now see the results of all their hard work in our first redesigned issue. To our eyes, the new design retains a classic underlying structure while ensuring that even our more text-heavy pages get a vivifying splash of color. We hope you enjoy it. This redesign of the print magazine coincides with a similar retooling of JazzTimes.com. If you’ve ever found our website frustrating, I’ve got a confession to make: So have we. It’s looked the same for a decade, it was…

On their debut album, Pride & Joy (Posi-Tone), the all-female sextet Lioness makes a potent jazz statement while celebrating female jazz artistry past and present. The ensemble features six acclaimed musicians—alto saxophonist Alexa Tarantino, tenor saxophonist Jenny Hill, baritone saxophonist Lauren Sevian, guitarist Amanda Monaco, organist Akiko Tsuruga, and drummer Allison Miller—and all the tracks were composed by women (okay, there’s one man with a composer credit, but he’s a co-composer). Fittingly, Pride & Joy was released on International Women’s Day, March 8. “Camaraderie is really the biggest thing,” Tarantino tells me in the lobby of a hotel on New York’s Upper West Side. The young altoist plays with another distinguished all-female ensemble, the DIVA Jazz Orchestra, and she likens the vibe of the Lioness sessions to that of DIVA’s…

Scheduled to play a concert in Boston, Marty Ehrlich finds himself facing more immediate concerns. “I’m supposed to play with the Makanda Project, which does the music of Makanda Ken McIntyre,” says the 64-year-old saxophonist, bass clarinetist, flutist, and composer, speaking in early March from his Beantown lodgings. “I’m the guest artist tonight—if it happens. We’re in the middle of a huge snowstorm.” Snow is one of the more minor obstacles that Ehrlich has seen lately. Like most musicians, he’s had to adjust to changes in the recording industry, forcing him to rethink both his compositional approach and his revenue streams. (Ehrlich’s most recent CD, Trio Exaltation, came out in May 2018.) He’s also not alone in feeling the current trends in academia: dwindling enrollment, decreased funding, strained faculty. Ehrlich’s…

One of jazz culture’s many graces is that a musician’s value—his or her relevance, to use a deeply flawed term—has little to do with age. A brilliant example of this is Gary Bartz, who seems to have hit upon yet another apex. At 78, the Baltimore-born, Oakland-based saxophonist, composer, and educator is in a rare position to be all things to all jazz people. To start, he’s one of the most reliable living narrators of the music’s history, an intermediary between the bop and fusion generations with oodles of memoir-worthy firsthand accounts. A nice haul of those tales appears below (and is expanded further on JazzTimes.com), but this interview yielded much more: a recollection of the time Bartz’s hero Jackie McLean taught him to never leave his horn with a…

Many people think of headphones as commodity items that deserve little of your attention or budget. Headphone enthusiasts beg to differ. As manufacturers started inching up their prices after seeing the success Beats had selling $300 models, they found ’phone enthusiasts happy to spend more in search of sonic nirvana. The last two years have seen the launch of numerous headphones priced at $2,000 or more … and sometimes way more. Don’t Take the A Train Non-enthusiasts surely wonder how anyone could justify spending thousands of dollars on something you plug into your phone when you’re on the subway, but most high-end headphones are designed only for use in the home. Many are bulky, some are heavy, and most reach optimum performance only when paired with a separate amplifier. Many…

The Dream Is You: Vanessa Rubin Sings Tadd Dameron Nibur More than a labor of love, The Dream Is You is a reckoning, a polished-to-a-sheen tribute to bebop’s greatest orchestral mind. Like Tadd Dameron, vocalist/producer Vanessa Rubin came up in Cleveland, and she’s spent years developing a program devoted to his seminal, often lushly romantic music. Directed and co-produced by Cecil Bridgewater, the album hits all the right notes, with a thoughtful array of Dameron’s standards and lesser-known works arranged for a talent-laden octet. In many ways this project highlights the vital, ongoing presence of bop-era masters and their unprecedented creative longevity. Although Dameron died in 1965 at the age of 48, afflicted by addiction and a lack of playing and recording opportunities in his final decade, Rubin makes brilliant…

On April 13, an Ivy League institution became an improvisational center as Princeton University welcomed an impressive roster of musicians to its main New Jersey campus for the university’s first jazz festival. Organized by Jazz at Princeton University—which is helmed by saxophonist and university jazz director Rudresh Mahanthappa—the day-long festival featured performances by students as well as (and sometimes alongside) Joel Frahm, Tia Fuller, Ingrid Jensen, the Charenée Wade Quartet, the Pedrito Martinez Group, and the Donny McCaslin Quartet. At a ticketed evening event in Alexander Hall, bassist Dave Holland provided the final set of the festival, with help from the university’s Small Group I. Photographer ALAN NAHIGIAN was there both day and night, and captured the following images. PRINCETON UNIVERSITY JAZZ FESTIVAL…

James Newton is still best-known for a remarkable series of jazz albums recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, when the flutist was aligned with fearlessly creative musicians like Arthur Blythe, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, Amina Claudine Myers, Anthony Davis, and Abdul Wadud. In order to forge a unique voice on his instrument, Newton drew inspiration from the effusive bird calls of Eric Dolphy; his virtuoso solo recitals, such as Axum and Echo Canyon, are in a luminous category of one. The American jazz critics appreciated the work of Newton and his community. The high-end Gramavision release I’ve Known Rivers by Newton, Davis, and Wadud was a talking point of the era. Newton’s debut on Blue Note, The African Flower: The Music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, won DownBeat’s album…

“It’s like asking, ‘Do you ever get tired of living?’ You do, but it’s always temporary.” Chris Potter is laughing as he tries to explain how, 30 years after he arrived in New York as one of jazz music’s most heralded prodigies, he’s still motivated to write, record, and perform. For the acclaimed saxophonist, now 48, the reason is so fundamental that it almost sounds hyperbolic and a little dark—to say that playing is like breathing might seem like a line consciously designed to project seriousness, and Potter recognizes that as he says it. But for him, it’s also true. “Music has always been a vehicle for me to investigate the things that are important about life. It’s been a way of figuring out what it is I need to…

In 2002, the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition focused on saxophonists. There were 15 musicians, and the bar was set high enough that a player as polished and original as Marcus Strickland only placed third. The winner was 31-year-old Seamus Blake, a British-born, Vancouver-reared New Yorker who, at that point, was little known outside of a few select scenes. But as Ben Ratliff, writing for the New York Times, put it, Blake’s win was no contest. By the end, Ratliff wrote, “most at the competition, judges and spectators alike, agreed that he had more of everything: melody, harmony, time, coherence, originality.” “I honestly didn’t think I would win,” Blake says now. “I entered because I wanted to meet Wayne [Shorter] and Herbie [Hancock], two of my biggest idols.” He not…

Has Scott Robinson’s tenor saxophone ever forgiven him for the time when, exhausted after a late gig, he absentmindedly left it on a New Jersey Transit bus? “I sometimes feel my horn is rebuking me,” Robinson, 60, told me recently by phone, referring to the silver 1924 Conn that has been his partner since he bought it from an antiques dealer in 1975 when he was 16. In the liner notes for his new album, Tenormore (Arbors), Robinson writes, “This old tenor has been around the world with me many times, and we’ve been through a lot of scrapes and jams together.” He does all his own repairs, “soldering this, reinforcing that, replacing pads, patching the metal where it’s nearly worn through, even making my own parts when needed.” (Significant…

Sun of Goldfinger ECM That David Torn is the most electric of jazz guitarists is made clear in the opening minutes of “Eye Meddle,” the first of three 20-minute-plus performances here. Before even the first note is plucked, there’s a pulsing thrum of feedback from Torn’s Marshall amp, while in the background, a sampler oscillates between two notes like a demented klaxon. As Ches Smith’s drums kick in, treated so they sound like the clanking of a factory in a 1930s cartoon, Torn continues to coax shrieks and wails from his axe, while Berne, playing the highest of high harmonics, whistles in the background like an impatient tea kettle. It’s a nervy, imposing swirl of sound, and yet there’s something oddly welcoming about its eddying melodies and raucous clangor. There…

Best of the Baritone I was playing alto saxophone when I was growing up and was not really connected to it. I didn’t want to switch to tenor, so my teacher suggested the bari. I said, “What are you, crazy? I don’t want to carry that thing around!” But the first time I tried it, three notes in I was connected. The first player he hipped me to was Pepper Adams, who became my biggest influence in terms of sound and approach. Then came Cecil Payne and Gerry Mulligan. As far as what makes an effective solo, something has to come to my mind when I’m listening to it, like I can almost feel what the story was that they were trying to tell. The baritone saxophone is often overlooked,…