Innehållsförteckning för April 2018 från JazzTimes

I adore criticism, and I rarely enjoy reading more than when I’m digging into great profile writing. But I also find straight-up oral history fascinating, especially when the person doing the talking is a musician. The feeling of candid nightclub conversation is more palpable than when the dialogue is being filtered through a features writer. If that scribe is as perceptive and erudite as, say, JT’s Matthew Kassel, who writes about the bassist Thomas Morgan beginning on p. 28, then fantastic. If not, I’d often rather comb through Q&As. This bass-themed issue is chock-full of musicians simply telling stories and sharing thoughts: Ron Carter recalling the classic Freddie Hubbard session where Rudy Van Gelder and Lenny White butted heads over an “oil-can bass drum”; Anne Mette Iversen explaining what she…

Review: The Boston Creative Jazz Scene 1970-1983 When the roots of avant-garde jazz are traced, the signs usually point to its legendary hotbeds— New York and Chicago—as the sanctuaries where icons like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and the founders of the AACM made their indelible marks. But Boston as a haven to complete the trifecta? That has yet to be etched into the annals of free jazz. Yet the tide is turning. Underground and staunchly DIY, the radical creative music movement that emerged from Boston throughout the 1970s featured a classification-defying community of artists who have been criminally overlooked. Enter the long overdue reissue of a pair of private-press touchstones that helped document that clandestine scene. Originally released in 1974 and recently anthologized by Now-Again Records, Peace in the…

“I WAS LIKE, ‘WHAT IS ALL THIS CRAZY STUFF? I’M NOT FEELING THAT.’” About an hour before he takes the stage alongside Charles Lloyd for a gig at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Reuben Rogers is reminiscing about the first time he heard the jazz legend: on tape, via a gift from a fellow Berklee student, saxophonist Teodross Avery. “You need to listen to some more music, man!” Avery told Rogers, as he shared cassettes with the young bassist whose love affair with jazz had begun only a few years prior. “Of course, I didn’t know then that I would wind up playing with him for 15 years,” Rogers says, laughing at the memory. “I revisited it as the years went on, and my ears opened up so much.…

Philadelphia has a storied history of nurturing great jazz artists, but rarely has there been a more impressive concentration than could be found in the classrooms of the city’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA) in the late 1980s. The student body during those years included three already-impressive musicians who would go on to be among the most influential jazz artists of their generation: bassist Christian McBride, organist Joey DeFrancesco and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel. At roughly the same time, the founding members of the hit-making R&B group Boyz II Men were in the vocal department, and drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and emcee Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter were brainstorming the group that would become the Roots. JazzTimes talked to several of those gifted alumni and their beloved mentors…

Audio product launches can now come at any time of year, but the biggest push is still in late fall and early winter, starting around October and ending with January’s CES, the colossal annual tradeshow in Las Vegas. In the last few months, new audio products and technologies debuted at shows all around the world, from Denver to Warsaw. And now that it’s all over, I can share with you what I think will be the most important new gear for jazz lovers to consider in 2018. The Best Bargain in Sound? Polk Audio used CES to launch one of the most fully featured sound systems I’ve seen—and it’s only $299. The Command Bar is the first soundbar with Amazon Alexa built in, so you can simply tell it, “Alexa,…

Review: Bill Charlap Trio’s Uptown, Downtown The new millennium has been a period of worldwide experimentation within the jazz art form. This energy is healthy. Jazz must innovate, or it will stagnate. But when you hear an album like Bill Charlap’s Grammy-nominated Uptown, Downtown, you realize that creative breakthroughs can also occur in the context of, and because of, the inspiration of the great jazz tradition. “Style” can be a neutral term, meaning simply “approach” or “manner.” But style of surpassing grace and proportion, as practiced by Charlap, becomes art in itself. He is often described as a “mainstream” piano player, but his own understanding is that, as he puts it, “All art is about being yourself, about being driven and guided by your truest inner voice. I’m not feeling…

It is not incorrect to call Alicia Hall Moran an opera singer. After all, she did understudy Audra McDonald in the 2012 Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, and starred in the national tour that followed. It is, however, an incomplete definition. Moran, the wife of pianist Jason Moran, intends for her second album, Here Today (YES), to make that clear. “I really had to make something that sounded like me and looked like me,” she says. “I wanted to listen to the lessons of the great makers of things, but that led me to this place where I only started to listen to myself. And myself is in a lot of places.” Here Today is also in a lot of places—often at the same time. It’s a wholly original…

When it comes to straight-ahead jazz, the upright bass largely remains the low-hertz instrument of choice. Historically, many bass guitarists possessing expertise in walking and swinging got there by way of migrating from the double bass. Take Steve Swallow and the late Bob Cranshaw, for instance: Both played and recorded on the upright before transitioning to bass guitar and mostly never looking back. Still, bias against bass guitar in straight-ahead jazz is real. And working bassists who either don’t play upright or can’t bring the hulking instrument to a bar or wedding gig will ultimately need to emulate the double bass when someone calls for “All the Things You Are.” It can be done, says John Patitucci, a bass doubler who started on the electric bass at age 10 before…

There is so much jazz theory about rhythm and harmony, but writing a good melody is more about intuition. It hasn’t been analyzed in the same way, and it’s difficult to teach someone to write a good melody. There’s an inner structure to these songs; they go places and develop. And there’s a level of storytelling to them. As a bassist, I think a great bassline is essentially a great melody—that playing a good walking line is identical to playing a good melody. Steve Swallow “SHE WAS YOUNG…” Home (ECM, 1980) Steve Swallow was my first bass hero. This song starts out with his solo, which to me is one long, almost perfect melody. It has such a natural sense of development to it, and it has so much infrastructure;…

Feature: Inside Mingus and Joni Mitchell’s unlikely collaboration “CHARLES MINGUS WOULD BE VERY PROUD OF THIS BAND,” said Charles McPherson, shortly after Mingus Dynasty’s sold-out “Tijuana Moods” concert in San Diego on Jan. 22. If anyone is qualified to offer an expert evaluation of this seven-man ensemble— and suggest how its iconic namesake would have rated the group’s performance— it’s McPherson. The esteemed alto saxophonist was hired by Mingus in late 1959. He remained with the towering bassist, composer and bandleader until 1972, performing on numerous Mingus recordings and in myriad concerts. McPherson teamed up with Mingus two years after Tijuana Moods was made in 1957. But he’s well acquainted with the music on that seminal album, which inexplicably languished in the RCA Records vaults for five years before finally being…

Onstage with Steve Miller at Jazz at Lincoln Center in early December, the guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, Texas blues royalty at age 66, used his generous solo spots to invoke history. Electric blues guitar, with its rough-edged phrasing and tonal grit, saw that winsome rawness smoothed over as blues-rock became a virtuoso’s medium (see Vaughan’s iconic little brother, Stevie Ray). But Vaughan’s playing imagined a world in which T-Bone Walker and Gatemouth Brown are still playing one-nighters, and the British Invasion and Jimi Hendrix never happened. Like Lou Donaldson or Loretta Lynn, he delivers an unmistakable and distinctly American sound that is equally rousing and comforting. Over the past few years, Vaughan has taken his midcentury vibe to the organ-trio format, and a recent album, Live at CBoy’s (Proper), captured at…

Review: Jon Batiste, Chad Smith & Bill Laswell’s The Process Many musicians have worked in a wide range of genres, but few have collaborated with the top names in each of those styles like Bill Laswell has. On bass, or as a producer, he’s made music with some of the most important figures in rock (Iggy Pop, Ramones), reggae (Sly and Robbie, Lee “Scratch” Perry), world music (Manu Dibango, Hassan Hakmoun), funk (Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell), the Downtown scene (John Zorn, Fred Frith), jazz (Herbie Hancock) and avant-garde jazz (Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Sharrock). Regardless of place, he’s always in good company. At a Manhattan restaurant in mid-January, the reserved but opinionated artist, 63, shared his favorite prog bands, talked about the influence of Miles bassist Michael Henderson, discussed the group…

Since moving to New York almost 20 years ago, the bassist Thomas Morgan has appeared on more than 100 albums, establishing himself as one of the most in-demand sidemen in jazz. Collectively, the musicians he has recorded with make up a kind of modern pantheon of influential jazz artists: Craig Taborn, David Virelles, Paul Motian, Masabumi Kikuchi, Jen Shyu, Tomasz Stańko, David Binney, Tyshawn Sorey, Steve Coleman, Miles Okazaki, John Abercrombie and Steve Cardenas, among many others. It is, of course, easier for a bassist to leave his footprint in the recording world than it is for a guitarist or a trumpeter; bassists are almost always in demand. Yet the rate at which Morgan pops up on other musicians’ albums is still something of a marvel. Morgan has played and…

MILES DAVIS & JOHN COLTRANE THE FINAL TOUR: THE BOOTLEG SERIES, VOL. 6 (Columbia/Legacy) Jazz is a music of ensembles working toward a shared common goal through improvisatory avenues, but it is most special when focused on partnerships. Bird and Diz. Lady Day and Prez. Dolphy and Little. Ella and Satch. Near the top of any such pyramid belongs Miles Davis and John Coltrane, with this four-disc set bearing audio witness that there is immense artistic power in the sound of two partners splintering from each other. Culled from radio broadcasts of five of the pair’s final shows together in the spring of 1960, this Bootleg installment chronicles an important tour for Davis. It represented his arrival as jazz royalty. He was displeased with his tenorman, Coltrane, who had had…

A MUSICAL TRIBUTE TO DR. MUHAL RICHARD ABRAMS ON MONDAY, JAN. 29, the AACM’s New York City Chapter presented “A Musical Tribute to Dr. Muhal Richard Abrams” at the Community Church of New York. Abrams, the profoundly influential pianist-composer and AACM co-founder who died on Oct. 29, was eulogized via words and/ or music by his friends, family, colleagues and admirers, among them Jack DeJohnette, Randy Weston, Henry Threadgill, Roscoe Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, Oliver Lake, Adegoke Steve Colson, Amina Claudine Myers, Wadada Leo Smith, Vijay Iyer and George E. Lewis. (Anthony Braxton was present but unable to perform due to time constraints.) JT photographer ALAN NAHIGIAN was there to document this heartfelt tribute.…