Indholdsfortegnelse for January - February 2017 i JazzTimes

NORAH JONES DAY BREAKS The 9-time GRAMMY winner comes full circle returning to her jazz roots on an album featuring WAYNE BLADE and SHORTER others , , DR proving . LONNIE her to SMITH be this , BRIAN era’s quintessential American artist with a sound that fuses elements of several bedrock styles of American music. JOSÉ JAMES LOVE IN A TIME OF MADNESS The critically-acclaimed vocalist makes a triumphant return, venturing deeper into modern R&B while staying true to his Jazz and Soul roots. Featuring vocalists MALI MUSIC and OLETA ADAMS, this 12 track collection takes listeners on an autobiographical exploration of the various forms of love and the places it can go. ROBERT GLASPER EXPERIMENT ARTSCIENCE 2-time GRAMMY winners return with another genre-defying album that weaves through R&B, hip-hop,…

“WHEN I FIRST PLAYED WITH SONNY [ROLLINS], HE SENT ME A CASSETTE TAPE OF ALL THE TUNES THAT WE WERE GOING TO PLAY, AND HE SENT ME ALL VOCAL VERSIONS. [MIMICS ROLLINS’ VOICE] ‘I WANT YOU TO KNOW WHAT THESE TUNES REALLY SOUND LIKE…’” Known for his exceptional output as a leader and his modern-minded pianism in bands led by Nicholas Payton, Al Foster, Chris Potter and more, Kevin Hays has nothing if not a discerning ear. He’s rooted and highly proficient in the postbop piano lineage but always game to branch out. On several releases, most recently the 2015 trio outing New Day, he has featured his mellow, pop-tinged singing voice. He’s ventured into semi-classical terrain with the 2011 solo piano disc Variations and the two-piano collaboration Modern Music…

It was November 4, and Carla Bley sat at the piano at Jazz Standard in New York, gesticulating at drummer Matt Wilson during “Silent Spring,” one of Bley’s elegiac compositions on Time/ Life: Song for the Whales and Other Beings, the Liberation Music Orchestra’s fifth album over as many decades. The orientation of the stage made it so that only Wilson had a clear sightline to the conductor’s Warholian shock of hair. He communicated cues to the band with subtle cymbal shots, so seamlessly it felt as though Charlie Haden, the band’s late founder, was in the room. Before the show, the 80-year-old high priestess of chamber jazz sat down with her daughter, Karen Mantler, at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, CUNY, to reflect on…

Keyboardist and composer Chick Corea has a storied history of performances at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club, including multi-week stands marking his 60th and 70th birthdays. But in mid-October through mid-December, Corea celebrated his 75th with an eight-week concert series featuring a strikingly diverse program of past and present collaborators. JT photographer Alan Nahigian was granted access to the sound checks and sets, and we’re pleased to offer a sample of his images here. (More will appear online at JazzTimes.com.) At press time Corea is nearing the series’ close, which culminates with an all-star fusion summit including Corea, guitarist John McLaughlin, bassist Victor Wooten and drummer Lenny White.…

There are plenty of reasons why Roberta Piket decided to record a tribute album to Marian McPartland. One has to do with timing. The English-American pianist, composer and longtime host of NPR’s Piano Jazz died almost a year to the day before Piket performed with a sextet at the Wall Street Jazz Festival, in Kingston, N.Y., in 2014. There’s also a personal connection. McPartland invited Piket to appear on Piano Jazz for the first time in 1994, before the younger pianist even had a recording to her name, and continued to encourage and support her throughout her career. Then there are the purely musical reasons. McPartland left behind a wealth of compositions, many of them rarely performed or recorded. On a warm evening in mid-October, Piket joined saxophonist Steve Wilson…

KEITH JARRETT HAS GARNERED A RARE CULT OF CLOSE LISTENERS OVER HIS MORE THAN 40 YEARS OF IMPROVISED SOLO PIANO CONCERTS: CONNOISSEURS OF HIS SOUND, DEVOTED MAVENS OF HIS STYLE, LIST-MAKING FANATICS, DISCERNING EXPERTS, EVEN THE ODD ASTUTE CRITIC. None of these people, it’s fair to say, has better insight into Jarrett’s solo music than the pianist himself. This is one reason to take special note of A Multitude of Angels, a collection of archival solo performances recorded over a single week in 1996, during a tour of opera houses and small halls in Italy. Each concert—in Modena, Ferrara, Turin and Genoa—takes up a single disc in the set and features the rhapsodic, long-form improvisations that Jarrett introduced back in 1975, with his best-selling album The Köln Concert. As it…

THURSDAY, JANUARY 5 9 am – 3:30 pm Table-top displays in foyer (Narthex Gallery) 9:30 am – 10:30 am PANELS • SOCIAL MEDIA: THE ARTIST’S PERSPECTIVE Artists with a hands-on approach to social media discuss how they deal with the ever-changing landscape—from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to Vine, Periscope and whatever’s next. (Sanctuary on LL1) COMMUNITY CHOICE PANEL TOPIC TBA (Living Room on LL1) • INDIE LABEL ROUNDTABLE: INDIES’ RISE IN CHANGING THE SHAPE OF POPULAR CULTURE Major labels were always the dominant force in driving the popular music agenda. In recent years, indie labels have gained not only a voice but have grabbed a large percentage of record sales—including physical, digital and streaming. So how can we all be part of the newfound importance and market share…

The definition of jazz as a musical style has caused decades of disagreement, a fact underscored by Miles Davis, who expressed disapproval of the label throughout his life. In the 1966 documentary The Universal Mind of Bill Evans , the pianist (and Miles alum) offers a point of view that, if not a solution, presents a worthy perspective: “Jazz is not a style,” he says, “it’s a process.” Like jazz, the term “world music” is also subjective. Taking all of this into consideration, here are five tracks I find unique and brilliant in their blending of jazz and world music. Michael Brecker “ITSBYNNE REEL” Don’t Try This at Home (Impulse!, 1988) The concept of a Celtic reel played on EWI in unison with a fiddle, weaving in…

Macy Gray cuts a powerful figure on the cover of Stripped, her ninth studio album. Her defiant gaze and proud posture exemplify the iconoclastic style that has marked the R&B artist’s work since her 1999 solo debut, On How Life Is. But Gray’s fringed flapper dress also calls to mind images of classic 1920s blues singers, like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who carved their place in the music’s history with nothing but a microphone, some trusted accompanists and the sheer might of their voices and personalities. The album’s m.o. follows suit. In recent years Gray’s collaborations with saxophonist David Murray have tapped into her connections to jazz and blues, and the vocalist further solidifies her place in that lineage with Stripped, her first jazz album and her inaugural release…

Singing jazz competently is an uncommon skill, a high bar that most aspirants will never reach. Becoming a worthy heir to Sarah Vaughan, however, is another thing entirely. The kind of perfection that Vaughan personified—a combination of artistic refinement and authentic emotion, chops and musical sensitivity—comes along once or twice in a generation. So it’s not a critique of any of the contestants at the 2016 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition for women—dubbed the “Sassy Awards,” after Vaughan’s nickname, and held Nov. 20 at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark—if most audience members’ socks stayed firmly in place. While all the singers trod a fairly conventional path through a program mostly consisting of jazz standards, the eventual winner, London chanteuse Deelee Dubé, displayed a beguiling soulfulness and…

“SHALL I REVEAL A WORLD?” Paraphrased from The Crying of Lot 49—Thomas Pynchon’s classic conspiracy-theory novella—these five words take center stage during “Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,” the fourth movement of Darcy James Argue’s Real Enemies. More precisely, they take center screen: the nucleus of the 15 massive screens, mounted in the collective shape of an inverted trapezoid above the heads of Argue’s acclaimed 18-member big band, Secret Society. Indeed, those words aren’t a bad summary of Real Enemies, inasmuch as a multimedia epic can be summarized in an epigram. The production is a three-way collaboration between composer Argue, writer-director Isaac Butler and video artist Peter Nigrini. Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), it premiered there last November. (The music is now a standalone, released via New Amsterdam…

DAVID S. WARE & MATTHEW SHIPP DUO LIVE IN SANT’ANNA ARRESI, 2004 (AUM Fidelity) BOBBY KAPP & MATTHEW SHIPP CACTUS (Northern Spy) MATTHEW SHIPP TRIO PIANO SONG (Thirsty Ear) “[D]uring the entire 17-year period we worked together, we felt like we were on a mission. Every performance we felt like we were changing the world and lighting up the stars.” Those words come from Matthew Shipp’s liner notes for Live in Sant’Anna Arresi 2004, and reflect on his tenure in David S. Ware’s quartet. The band’s large discography bears witness to the shared intensity between the pianist and the saxophonist, along with bassist William Parker and various drummers. This performance, recorded in Sardinia, offers a more intimate portrait of these close friends and collaborators, as they hit the stage with…