Innehållsförteckning för May 2018 från JazzTimes

Trailer: Bill Frisell: A Portrait Interview: Bill Frisell & Jim Hall Midway through Emma Franz’s charming but weirdly structured documentary Bill Frisell: A Portrait, the director is following the guitarist with a camera as he walks down 5th Avenue in Greenwich Village. As they get to the corner of 8th Street, Frisell takes note of the passersby who are staring at him quizzically, wondering if he might be, you know, famous or something. “Little do they know,” he confides to Franz with a somewhat embarrassed grin, “I’m one of them.” And yet he’s not, quite. At this point, it’s beyond argument that Frisell is one of the leading jazz guitarists of his generation; given that his generation also included John Abercrombie, Pat Metheny and John Scofield, that’s not a bad…

Didier Lockwood, a French violinist who was a former protégé of French jazz legend Stephane Grappelli but became an acclaimed and innovative musician in his own right, died suddenly in Paris in the early hours of Feb. 18, after a concert at the city’s Le Bal Blomet jazz club. He was one week past his 62nd birthday. The cause of death was a heart attack. While Lockwood acknowledged Grappelli as his hero, he by no means limited himself to the Gypsy-jazz milieu. Lockwood achieved stardom as a member of the progressive-rock band Magma before studying with Grappelli, and would proceed from his tutelage to a career heavily identified with jazz fusion. In addition, Lockwood was a composer of violin concertos as well as two operas, and created a musical with…

Kurt Elling’s tribute to his mentor and hero Jon Hendricks On a frigidly cold night in January, Kurt Elling opened his showcase set at Birdland in New York City by singing the first few verses of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” a cappella. Oh where have you been my blue-eyed son? Oh where have you been my darling young one? Although the choice of that Dylan tune, or any Dylan tune, might seem a stretch for a jazz vocalist, somehow the song and arrangement appropriately encapsulated Elling’s approach to jazz singing: a love of words and poetry, a passion for politics and social issues, and an affinity for drama. I sat with Elling a month later, during the Jazz Cruise, when the ship was docked in New Orleans…

Photos: Jazz Congress 2018 ANDRE GUESS: We know historically that, in jazz’s heyday, the country was dealing with race in a much different way than it is right now. So I want you both to respond to [these questions]: When we were a segregated society, how did jazz help to move forward the conversation on race, and then, conversely, in a contemporary setting, what if anything is jazz doing to not advance the agenda? ETHAN IVERSON: No problem, I got this. [audience laughter] Thank you, Wynton, for inviting me into your house, by the way. A couple of my friends were like, “What are you doing?” [laughter from audience and panel] To respond to the question, I think jazz was the greatest 20th-century music. I’m actually fairly adept at music…

Artist’s Choice: Singer René Marie on protest music Hoagy Carmichael “LAZYBONES” Co-written with Johnny Mercer Stardust & Much More (Bluebird; rec. 1933, rel. 1989) This might be one of the greatest protest songs ever written, because it’s about radical non-participation. There’s a line in Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut where the woman who’s working as a relative underling wishes everyone would just stop thinking. That makes me think of this song. I have a friend who says, “If everyone would just do 10 percent less.” Edith Wilson “(WHAT DID I DO TO BE SO) BLACK AND BLUE” Music by Fats Waller with lyrics by Harry Brooks and Andy Razaf (Columbia, 1929) I was able to perform this for a member of the original cast of Black and Blue. [The song…

Back when I drove a taxi in New York City, in the mid-1980s, the cabs had not yet been outfitted with air conditioning. In the spring and summer, I left the windows open to create cross-ventilation. That meant that the noise from the street was a constant presence, an orchestral cacophony dominated by honking horns, sirens, jackhammers and music. The music that pierced through all the other sounds and soothed my urban soul was Latin-jazz. I had come from the West Coast and grown up on a mushy amalgam of mostly soft rock and whatever else was being played on local radio stations—music concocted by one corporate entity (the record companies) and peddled to another (radio stations that were often owned in part by those same corporations). American teenagers listened…

Profile: Rez Abbasi Despite his important work as part of groups like Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition and Adam Rudolph’s Go: Organic Guitar Orchestra, the New York-based guitarist Rez Abbasi is best known as a leader. Over the course of more than 10 albums, he has engaged with the sounds of South Asia; employed standout players like Vijay Iyer and Bill Ware; and reached a sharp, exultant place on his ax, as heard on his latest album, 2017’s spacious and fusion-y Unfiltered Universe (Whirlwind), featuring Mahanthappa on sax and Iyer on piano, plus cellist Elizabeth Mikhael, bassist Johannes Weidenmueller and drummer Dan Weiss. At Abbasi’s Harlem home in February, the guitarist, 52, reflected on the importance of being both an improviser and a composer; the singular combination of steel-string acoustic guitar,…

This Time It’s Love (Blue Note, 1998) Elling’s two most consequential influences, Frank Sinatra and Mark Murphy, are skillfully balanced in this standards-heavy set of elegant readings subtly bent with keen interpretive experimentation. Provided lean support from a core quartet of pianist Laurence Hobgood, guitarist Dave Onderdonk, bassist Rob Amster and drummer/percussionist Michael Raynor, Elling travels from the romantic depths of “My Foolish Heart” to a lighter-than-air “The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing” and, propelled by violinist Johnny Frigo, a puckish “I Feel So Smoochie.” Highlight: Elling shaping a paean to wife Jennifer with a roiling vocalese reworking of “She’s Funny That Way.” Nightmoves (Concord Jazz, 2007) Elling’s penchant for mixing works by poets of all stripes first reached full stride with Nightmoves. A band featuring Hobgood, Amster, drummer…

INTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY April 30, 2018 St. Petersburg, Russia and Sydney, Australia (2019) (and all around the world) jazzday.com United States NORTHEAST BOSCOV’S BERKS JAZZ FEST April 6-15, 2018 Various venues, Reading/Berks County, PA berksjazzfest.com EXIT O INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL (SPRING) April 20-22, 2018 Cape May, NJ exit0jazzfest.com CENTER CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL April 28, 2018 Various venues, Philadelphia, PA ccjazzfest.com ALLENTOWN JAZZFEST Dates currently unconfirmed Various venues, Allentown, PA allentownjazzfest.org CELEBRATE MARY LOU WILLIAMS May 5, 2018 at 7:00PM Kennedy Center, Washington, DC kennedy-center.org BERLIN JAZZ & BLUES BASH May 5, 2018 Historic Downtown Berlin, MD berlinchamber.org ESSENTIALLY ELLINGTON HIGH SCHOOL JAZZ BAND COMPETITION AND FESTIVAL May 10-12, 2018 Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, NY academy.jazz.org/ee/ VISION FESTIVAL May 23-28, 2018 509 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn, NY artsforart.org/vf23.html HAPPY VALLEY…

FOR OUR DIGITAL READERS THE JAZZ CRUISE m/s Celebrity Summit Feb. 3-8, 2018 thejazzcruise.com…

Interview: Alice Coltrane on her life with John Coltrane She has been singing since childhood and shares one of the most illustrious names in jazz. But, putting family commitments first, Michelle Coltrane, daughter of Alice and stepdaughter of John (who died when she was 6), waited until her mid-30s to record her debut album, I Think of You. It has taken almost a quarter-century for Coltrane, now 57, to shape her sophomore release, Awakening (Blujazz), a fine collection of covers and originals that honors the Coltrane legacy while remaining true to her own musical vision. JAZZTIMES: YOUR JAZZ LINEAGE ACTUALLY GOES DEEPER THAN THE COLTRANES. YOUR BIRTH FATHER WAS VOCALIST KENNY HAGOOD. MICHELLE COLTRANE: Absolutely. I really didn’t know him or have a chance to make a bond with him.…

Q&A: Shabaka Hutchings Shabaka Hutchings’ new album is about what you think it’s about. Its title, Your Queen Is a Reptile, is not a metaphor or an allegory: The record’s goal is to challenge what Hutchings views as the mythology of the monarchy. Instead of a lizard Queen Elizabeth—a queen who “does not see us as human,” as he describes in the liner notes—Hutchings, alongside his band Sons of Kemet, proposes a list of black women he’d be OK with bowing down to: Angela Davis, Mamie Phipps Clark, Harriet Tubman. For the lattermost, his tribute takes the form of an almost six-minute jam that’s half rhythm (drummers Eddie Hick and Tom Skinner) and half contrapuntal harmony (Hutchings and tuba player Theon Cross). It has the danceability of soca, the angularity…

AudioFiles: Advanced portable music players When Apple launched its AirPods in December, it brought the tech world’s attention to a new product category: hearables. Hearables are tiny, smartphone-connected in-ear headphones that rest in your ears and have no cables. They also incorporate computers and sensing capabilities. In their first two weeks on sale, the average-sounding, $159 AirPods grabbed 26 percent of the wireless headphone market, which suggests that hearables may someday become as common as smartphones. Because hearables can tap the power of smartphones and, through them, the Internet, asking what exactly hearables can do is like asking what a computer can do. They can all function as in-ear Bluetooth headphones, and most have biometric sensors that can track your fitness. Some include voice-command features, for no-hands operation and access…