Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2016 i JazzTimes

The highest form of flattery any book about music can receive is for its reader to become immersed in the recordings it covers. That certainly happened to me this past month, while making my way through Krin Gabbard’s excellent, unconventional new Mingus bio, Better Git It in Your Soul. I was busy choosing one worthwhile chunk to excerpt among so many, finally settling on an expertly researched account of how Mingus’ autobiography came to be. My soundtrack was Mingus, naturally—in particular 1960’s Blues & Roots, an LP I can’t possibly hear enough. Like his hero Ellington, Mingus sounds best to me at his most harmonically modest. I came to the music through blues, a term I use not in the jazz sense, where it implies a form, an aesthetic or…

LADY SINGS THE BLUES Billie Holiday with William Dufty (Doubleday, 1956) Despite later controversies about potential factual inaccuracies, the vocalist’s recounting of her life and hard times is suffused with all the pain and poetry of her finest recordings. And though Holiday may be one of American music’s most over-romanticized drug casualties, her own perspective on her plight (“When I got hooked I was unlucky all round”) is undeniably clear-eyed—and thus all the more haunting. TO BE, OR NOT ... TO BOP Dizzy Gillespie with Al Fraser (Doubleday, 1979) Gillespie’s reputation as one of jazz’s great jesters is on rich display throughout this exhaustive chronicle, which intersperses the trumpeter’s raucous recollections with musings from a panoply of musical colleagues including Cab Calloway and Thelonious Monk. But amidst the…

The balance of melody and harmony is vital to the craft of jazz, especially when it comes to improvisation. That balance can become precarious, however, when one musician is responsible for both of those elements. Players of chordal instruments, like piano and guitar, have to grapple with that tension to a great degree. But theres a specific subset of musicians who have a far greater challenge with it: bass-playing vocalists. These are technicians who are working simultaneously on two instruments, and with fully developed missions on each. The bass doesn’t merely play the harmony—it anchors it. The vocal doesn’t merely carry the melody—it adds full layers of meaning and nuance to it. And since jazz is often about tension between harmony and melody, the bassist-vocalist’s two missions are sometimes at…

The Distance , Formanek’s third album as a leader on ECM, often achieves a crushing density of sound—but even during lighter, sparser moments, the music’s center of gravity feels definitively low-slung. Bigness becomes Michael Formanek. An acoustic bassist with a hulking, roomy sound, he has always seemed like one of those musicians whose playing is an extension of his physical self. That’s reductive, and perhaps a bit ridiculous, but go ahead and listen to “Diesel Shortbread”—a deep-drone concerto from Formanek’s 1998 solo bass album, Am I Bothering You?—and tell me you don’t hear the virtuoso rambling of one expressly large dude. By that token, Ensemble Kolossus, as Formanek calls his new 18-piece chamber orchestra, suggests the logical embodiment of an idea. A choice assortment of improvisers culled from the…

During a few formative years in the mid-1970s, Philadelphia high-schooler Rudy McDaniel faced a pair of decisions that would prove to be life altering. The first concerned whether to spend his after-school hours pursuing basketball or music. Once the latter won out, he determined to focus on either the acoustic or electric bass exclusively. Guided by his love of funk and rock music and the pioneering work of Jaco Pastorius and Alphonso Johnson, he opted to plug in. But the young bassist made himself a promise: “I remember clearly saying to myself, ‘When I become 60 years old, I’m gonna play the upright bass ’ I felt as though I would be a bit more relaxed and in tune to myself at that age ” Two years ago, McDaniel, renamed…

When bassist Scott Colley, saxophonist Joshua Redman, drummer Brian Blade and cornetist Ron Miles took the stage at Jazz Standard on Jan. 12, in one of the first performances of Still Dreaming, their effervescent tribute to Old and New Dreams, it felt more like an uncanny reunion than homage. “Dewey’s Tune” and “Guinea” sat comfortably next to originals penned by Redman and Colley, yet the group handily eschewed the pitfalls of impersonating their musical forebears; the original quartet is irreproducible, but the new incarnation took its spirit and soared. The instantaneous group cohesion was no surprise. To some extent, all the players grew up with their Old and New Dreams counterparts. On Dec. 29, during a set by the Chris Potter Trio at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Old and New Dreams’…

United States ALABAMA University of Alabama Crimson Music Camp – Jazz (Improv and Combos) June 2-5 Tuscaloosa http://bands.ua.edu/programs/crimsoncamp/ Audience: Students who have completed grades 9-12 as of June 2016. Description: The Jazz Camp will offer high school students an opportunity to discover the language of jazz music through the use of scales, arpeggios, patterns, and listening, and help them to comprehend its basic principles in theory and practice. It also welcomes more experienced improvisers who wish to further their concept of improvisation in the jazz idiom as more advanced techniques are introduced. Placement in combos, concerts, and master classes are also a part of the camp. The faculty includes Professor Chris Kozak, Director of Jazz Studies and Dr. Jonathan Noffsinger, Professor of Saxophone and Jazz Studies. Open to the following…

SONNY ROLLINS HOLDING THE STAGE: ROAD SHOWS VOL. 4 (Doxy/OKeh) Sonny Rollins’ most celebrated album of the 21st century is, and may very well always be, Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert. In part that’s because of the dramatic circumstances behind its genesis. Four days after the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, which had left him stranded in Downtown Manhattan without electricity, Rollins made a difficult trip to Boston to keep a previously booked date at the Berklee Performance Center. The circumstances triggered something deep in Rollins’ playing that September night, and the concert was at once an outpouring of emotion, a celebration of the creative impulse and an inspiring show of indomitability in the face of terror. The biggest news about Holding the Stage, the latest installment…

Victor Bailey landed his dream job in 1982 when, still in his early 20s, he succeeded Jaco Pastorius to become the last in the line of stellar electric bassists in his favorite band, Weather Report. He stayed with Weather Report until cofounders Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter disbanded it in 1986, performing on the albums Procession, Domino Theory, Sportin’ Life and This Is This!, then continued working with Zawinul in his groups Weather Update and the Zawinul Syndicate. Bailey also toured and/or recorded through the years with numerous other big names from the worlds of jazz and pop—Sonny Rollins, Ron Carter, Steps Ahead, Madonna and Lady Gaga among them—racking up appearances on more than 1,000 albums. But today Bailey, who turns 56 on March 27, resides in an assisted-living apartment…

Kitty Kallen, a big-band singer who worked with the orchestras of Artie Shaw, Harry James, Jimmy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden, and enjoyed hit recordings under her own name, died Jan. 7 at her home in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She was 94. Saxophonist Edmund “Leon” Henderson, an important presence on the Detroit jazz scene in the 1960s and a brother of tenor titan Joe Henderson, died Feb. 5 of natural causes in Canton, Mich. He was 75. He is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the 1969 Blue Note LP Introducing Kenny Cox and the Contemporary Jazz Quintet. Two of his compositions, “Diahnn” and “Eclipse,” were included on that recording. One other tune from the LP made it onto Blue Note’s recent benefit project Detroit Jazz City.…

In his compelling new book, Better Git It in Your Soul: An Interpretive Biography of Charles Mingus, jazz author and scholar KRIN GABBARD mines fresh insights by homing in on specific, important elements of the Mingus phenomenon—from his relationship with the Third Stream movement to his participation in motion pictures, his rapport with certain trusted sidemen and, perhaps most important, his profound abilities as a wordsmith. In this excerpt, Gabbard details the publishing industry saga that resulted in Mingus’ Beneath the Underdog, the brilliant, notorious, wildly entertaining autobiography that is an essential title in the jazz-lit canon. The achievements of bassist, composer and bandleader Charles Mingus were not entirely musical. His written work includes poems, letters, manifestos, liner notes and lyrics, but he will be most remembered for his autobiography,…

No one ever knows for sure what’s going to happen in the world of audio, but you can get a good idea by walking through the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas every January. CES covers everything from the inexpensive mass-market audio gear at the Las Vegas Convention Center to six-figure audio gear at the Venetian Hotel. You can’t possibly see it all, but because I stay from the CES Unveiled opening event until the final nanosecond of the show five days later, I manage to see most of the excellent new gear. Here are several of the new launches from CES that I predict will be the most important audio products of the coming year. Some will be available by the time you read this while others won’t…

JAZZ CONNECT CONFERENCE SAINT PETER’S CHURCH, NYC, JAN. 14-15 WINTER JAZZFEST VARIOUS NYC VENUES, JAN. 13-17 For more Winter Jazzfest coverage, visit JazzTimes.com…