Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i JazzTimes

On a chilly Thursday evening last November, a long line of well-dressed people stretched down a block of Broadway in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood. A sense of anticipation was palpable as the crowd waited to be admitted into the city’s newest jazz club, Keys Jazz Bistro, on opening night. The excitement grew inside the club as drinks and hors d’oeuvres were served, and several people within earshot could be heard expressing their happiness at being out to hear live music for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Then, when the evening’s talent—the local singer Clairdee, supported by pianist David Udolf, bassist Doug Miller, and drummer Jim Zimmerman—started playing their first song, a sprightly modern interpretation of “On Green Dolphin Street,” the crowd fell to a…

George V. Johnson keeps a recording close at hand. It’s a 16-second clip of Eddie Jefferson, the jazz vocalist who invented “vocalese,” from 1977. In the clip, Jefferson counts off a 4/4 beat; as a trio gets going behind him, he announces, “One of my students, George Johnson, come out from Washington, D.C. He’s next in line, next in line.” It’s the defining moment of Johnson’s musical career, and perhaps of his life: His teacher, one of jazz’s best-known male singers and innovators (and a dear friend before his 1979 murder), naming the younger singer as heir apparent. Not surprisingly, the tape became his calling card. He used it to introduce himself to musicians, and sometimes played it as a prologue to his performances. He even used it to open…

The story of the 55 Bar dates back to Prohibition, when the underground West Village watering hole opened as a speakeasy. It entered jazz lore in 1983, when the late bassist Jeff Andrews approached then-owner Peter Williams about performing there. Andrews later recruited Mike Stern, then Miles Davis’ hotshot young guitarist, who began a twice-weekly residency that would last until the club’s demise nearly 40 years later. Stern put 55 Bar on the jazz map, attracting international visitors to a space that was little more than a subterranean dive bar. When she bought the 55 in 2001, Queva Lutz endeavored to transform the space into a higher-class venue. It never lost the dive bar shabbiness, but it did become a breeding ground for a generation of musicians who used it…

Hans Helewaut, a Belgian film composer and saxophonist, came to jazz late in life, but not too late to use Jamey Aebersold’s play-along CDs as a resource. “I still use them,” he says. “I’ve gotten better because of them, and still I do other things with them.” However, he also noticed their limitations. They’re for horn players, but don’t offer as much to rhythm instruments; they’re no use at all for deep listening or transcribing; and worst of all, they’re just no fun. “Those play-alongs are so, so lifeless,” Helewaut says. “So many of them are machine-generated. To me, music has to have an artistic value to be able to say you can learn something from it.” On top of that, CDs seem to be going the way of the…

It makes sense to draw parallels between the artfully quiet and thoughtful music of protean Scottish drummer/composer Sebastian Rochford and the gentle conversation he makes regarding his recorded work. Like his elegant ECM album with pianist Kit Downes, A Short Diary–written to celebrate the drummer’s father, acclaimed poet Gerard Rochford (1932–2019)–Sebastian speaks slowly and somnolently about what brought his compositional pen to his “sonic memory” of family. Though the elder’s poetry is ruminative and warmly academic, it is not the wordsmith Gerard Rochford that inspired his son to write the spare, languid melodies of A Short Diary and welcome Downes to interpret songs such as “This Tune Your Ears Will Never Hear.” Instead, it is the family man Gerard Rochford, a music lover (“He was fond of Keith Jarrett and…

“HOW IS AN ACCORDION LIKE AN ARTILLERY SHELL?” THE OLD JOKE GOES. “ONCE YOU HEAR IT, IT’S ALREADY TOO LATE.” OK, that’s funny, but it also implies a problem. People who dismiss the accordion as soon as they hear it, as soon as it triggers associations with bad wedding bands, are not really listening to it. If they really listened to this contraption with the bellows and buttons, they’d recognize its tremendous technical versatility and emotional capacity. They’d begin to understand why it’s so central to such folk traditions as Cajun, zydeco, conjunto, tango, forró, choro, klezmer, vallenato, township jive, and Celtic—and why it’s becoming ever more visible in the jazz world in the hands of artists such as Gil Goldstein, Gary Versace, Andrea Parkins, Richard Galliano, Ben Thomas, Dino…

PHAROAH SANDERS October 13, 1940–September 24, 2022 By Dezron Douglas Dear Pharoah, Thank you for your contribution of Love, Light, Culture, Genius, Soul and GOD’s vibration in creation to this Society, Planet and Universe. Thank you for the countless bandstands in which you gave your all to show that there is beauty in this world. Thank you for keeping the legacy of black music strong and the legacy of black lineage fertile. Your spirit endureth time and space. Thank you for being an ambassador of black culture all over the world, and thank you for your contributions to the catalog of Black History, American History and fellowship. Most of all, thank you for taking a chance on me, a young hothead kid from Hartford, Connecticut, whom you first brought to…

Eric Schneider, Eric’s Alley (Gatemouth, 1981) On Sill’s third record date, he sounds totally at home alongside heavyweights Barry Harris and Mel Lewis in support of a young Sonny Stitt-inspired alto and tenor man with Illinois roots. Akio Sasajima, Humpty Dumpty (Enja) An exhilarating 1988 session led by a then-Chicago guitarist featuring a killer band of Joe Henderson in top form, Renee Rosnes, Sill, and Joel Spencer. McNeely, Sill, Spencer, Boneyard (Origin, 2007) Pianist-composer Jim McNeely, another University of Illinois product, consecrates a 35-year relationship with Sill and Spencer. I love the unique energy, muscle, adventure, discernment, and emotion with which they share the musical space.…

Behind Fred Hersch there’s a view of Central Park. Billows of lush trees buffer the bright, sunny green of the Sheep Meadow, bracketed by the scaffolds of two skyscrapers-in-progress. It’s a lovely slice of New York summer. Except that it’s a few days before Christmas, and Hersch is speaking (via Zoom) from his apartment in SoHo—some 60 blocks from the Park. “This woman I went to high school with named Susan Wides, she took this photo,” the pianist explains. “It’s like an extra window in the apartment. I have a lot of art, and 90 percent of it is people I know. Everything on the tables or on the wall has a story.” He holds up a wooden sculpture of a cartoonish bulldog: crazed eyes, filthy snout, tongue lolling out.…

Whether consciously or intuitively, everyone realizes that rooms have a huge effect on sound. If someone blindfolded you and led you first into the Village Vanguard and then into Carnegie Hall, you’d immediately know which one you were in just from listening, even if you’d never visited those venues. This rule applies not only to music venues, but also to the spaces where we listen to recorded music—such as a living room, a bedroom, or even a back porch. But in this digital age, where even the modest audio devices often pack serious computational power, manufacturers are making it possible for their devices to “listen in” on their surroundings and automatically adjust themselves to sound their best, no matter if they’re used in a bathroom or in a cavernous great…

KENNY BARRON The Source ArtWork At this point, the arrival of any recording from the venerable Kenny Barron is cause for celebration. But The Source merits even more attention and recognition than the norm in that category. The NEA Jazz Master’s first solo album in more than 40 years, it offers a remarkably clear example of his estimable skills as an interpreter and pianist par excellence. Working his way through his own “What If” for starters, Barron erects and dissects like nobody’s business. He uses a scuttling torrent as a setup for a display of brilliance surrounding independence and interdependence. An insistent left hand figure plays against a searching right, and the concepts of self-support and subversion are perfectly balanced in the process. Later, toward album’s end, Barron pulls three…