Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i JazzTimes

As I write this, the 2018 Newport Jazz Festival is a recent memory. By the time you read this, it’ll be less so, which is why you won’t read much about it in this issue. Brief summary: Christian McBride’s second go-round as artistic director was as cannily and eclectically programmed as his first; to celebrate his 80th birthday, Charles Lloyd played three very different sets on three separate days; it rained a lot on Saturday. To learn more, I suggest you check out our Newport recap on jazztimes.com, with commentary by Jim Macnie and photography by Marek Lazarski, Alan Nahigian, and Ken Franckling. Speaking of our website, in July we debuted a feature on jazztimes.com, a top-10 list called The JazzTimes 10. The subject’s different each week (look for a…

Words have always mattered to Luciana Souza as much as music. The Brazilian singer and composer—whose father was a bossa nova guitarist and songwriter, and whose mother was a poet—is that rare jazz artist who has always been equally comfortable in both worlds. In The Book of Longing (Sunnyside), her 12th album and first in three years, everything emanates from the written word. Souza’s point of departure is Leonard Cohen’s 2006 book of sacred and profane poetry of the same name, from which she sets four poems of longing and loss to spare, hypnotic music. Other songs are based on similarly melancholy poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, and Christina Rossetti, and three by Souza herself. She wrote and arranged the music with two sensitive and creative musicians…

It’s the Funk Parade, Washington, D.C.’s annual street music festival, and Dupont Brass is onstage. The brass band, named for the Metro station at which they busked while students at Howard University, has become a full-time concern, and they’re now an act on the Parade’s main stage at the African American Civil War Memorial on U Street NW. Jared “MK Zulu” Bailey is performing a whopper of a cornet solo on their tune “Downtown,” full of tasty phrases, growls, and masterful note bends. But it’s the man standing behind Bailey who’s impossible to turn away from. Brent “Bass Heavy Slim” Gossett is a very large man with a very large sousaphone wrapped around him. Of the four horn players standing onstage with Bailey, he alone is riffing under the cornet…

Most of these tracks are pretty chill. More to the point, though, they’re tracks that I like to chill to. Some of them are tracks that meant a lot to me a long time ago; some of them are things that I’m listening to right now. Some of them are really pushing the bounds in some respects. But if there’s any one common thread that runs through all of them, it’s just an awesome brass sound. Eric Dolphy “AGGRESSION” At the Five Spot (Prestige, 1961) “Aggression” is maybe the all-time best document of Booker Little, who was a contemporary of Clifford Brown’s and influenced by him—but took the trumpet to another place. Booker’s sound is more biting, and he also had a more linear, melodically based message than Brownie. “Aggression”…

A classic rule of journalism is “If you can’t be first, be best.” You could just as easily apply that principle to Jazzmatazz Vol. 1 by the late hip-hop artist Guru. A quarter-century ago, the rapper born Keith Edward Elam used his debut solo release to marry two genres—hip-hop and jazz—that had already enjoyed a long history of courtship. Through his careful calibration, the two discovered a more joyous, organic, and even-handed relationship than they had ever known before. Guru had been enamored of jazz ever since he was a kid, when his godfather exposed him to the work of Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, and Betty Carter. The Boston-born, Brooklyn-based rapper took those influences so deeply to heart that they were already present in the first recording he cut with…

Benje Daneman is slightly uncomfortable with the idea that you might hear his new album, a 10-part suite based on Biblical scripture, as explicitly religious. “I don’t want to become that Christian jazz guy, because that’s not what it’s all about,” the trumpeter says in a recent phone interview from Michigan, where he lives with his family. Not that jazz and religion can’t be intertwined. Alice and John Coltrane, of course, were “blatantly spiritual,” notes Daneman, who counts Be Still, an album of hymns released in 2012 by trumpeter/composer Dave Douglas, as one of his favorite recordings. But Daneman, who is 34 and describes himself as an “on-again, off-again Christian,” hopes you won’t think his record is an act of evangelism. His concern is unwarranted. Light in the Darkness, commissioned…

Tucked into the fine-print liner notes of Wayne Shorter’s latest project, Emanon, is an unusual advisory: “This package is intentionally designed to reveal its dormant possibilities as it travels between alternative realities of the multi-verse.” And … we’re back! Welcome once again to the decidedly asynchronous, defiantly expansive musical realm that Shorter—voracious reader, idea hoarder, gifted composer, jazz legend—has inhabited for decades. The world of Super Nova and Atlantis and “Dance Cadaverous,” brought to life by a musician who has always been tuned to the remote frequencies and trace fragile sounds beamed from alternate realities. Still, even by his standards, this disclaimer—and/or warning—is curious. Maybe it’s a kind of spoiler alert. After all, the three-disc Emanon, a combination of live and studio recordings, is bundled with an allegorical science-fiction graphic…

Anyone old enough to remember Miles’ comeback is old enough to remember when the only sounds personal computers could play were the primitive bloops and bleeps of early video games. Thirty-seven years later, personal computers still aren’t really optimized for audio. Even the very latest laptops, fitted with relatively large hard drives, can’t hold a sizable collection of digital music, unless the music is data-compressed (and sonically distorted) using MP3 or some other digital technology. The growing popularity of high-resolution audio among audiophiles has only made the problem worse. For example, bassist/vocalist Casey Abrams’ version of “Take the ‘A’ Train,” from his album Put a Spell on You, clocks in at just three minutes, 34 seconds, but in its 24-bit/192-kilohertz high-resolution version, in the AIFF format, it occupies 243 megabytes…

THE 2018 NEWPORT JAZZ FESTIVAL in Newport, R.I. (Aug. 3-5), may not be remembered fondly for its weather—a Saturday-afternoon monsoon turned Fort Adams State Park into a giant mud puddle, and Sunday brought high heat and humidity—but its musical high points were high indeed. To name just a few: Charles Lloyd celebrated his 80th birthday by playing three headlining sets, each one with a different band; Still Dreaming brought together four great improvisers in Joshua Redman, Ron Miles, Scott Colley, and Brian Blade; and the all-female groups Artemis, Maqueque, and DIVA Jazz Orchestra swung righteously. JazzTimes photographers MAREK LAZARSKI and ALAN NAHIGIAN were there for all three days to capture the action (with KEN FRANCKLING joining the team on Sunday).…

The compact stage at New York’s Jazz Standard comfortably accommodates half a dozen musicians at best, which posed something of a logistical hitch when the popular venue hosted the Michael Leonhart Orchestra’s two-night run in July. The MLO numbered 17 pieces, all of them essential to the reproduction of the music they’d be performing from their recent debut album The Painted Lady Suite (Sunnyside). The only solution: remove a row of tables in front of the stage and put Leonhart there, his back to the patrons, at the head of it all. There he conducted the excerpts from the album along with a handful of brilliantly arranged reworkings of music from Fela Kuti, Vince Guaraldi, and a pair of New York-centric films: The Godfather Part III and The Taking of…

Just back from touring summertime Europe with the Mingus Big Band, Robin Eubanks has driven in from his home in northern New Jersey to meet for his first Before & After. We’re in a studio at New York University’s Clive Davis Institute for Recorded Music, and for a man whose schedule book is full to the margins, he appears grounded and well-rested. His is a workable balance of road gigs (the Detroit Jazz Festival in September, a month-long residency in San Francisco with the SF Collective in October, followed by another three-week European jaunt), recording projects, and his mainstay: teaching and guiding young players at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he’s been teaching jazz trombone and composition for more than 20 years. In 2017, he added a position at…

1. The Singer This story begins in 1948. A young man just a few years out of Army duty in the European theater of WWII went into Decca’s New York recording studio and cut a version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Fascinating Rhythm.” Born with a name seemingly both too long and too ethnic for show business, the young singer had been using the shorter moniker Joe Bari for his professional appearances. According to Dick Golden—jazz radio host, historian, and author, as well as friend of the singer—it was Bob Hope who invited Bari to perform with him at the Paramount. The story goes that Hope asked the young man, “Again, what’s your name?” and he replied, “My professional name is Joe Bari but my real name is Anthony Dominick…

One day when Adam O’Farrill was around five, he had a remarkable experience that, as he is careful to note, may or may not have been prophetic. He was visiting the Upper West Side apartment of the late saxophonist Mario Rivera, who had long been a fixture of the stateside Latin-jazz community, having played alongside everyone from Tito Puente to O’Farrill’s grandfather Chico to Dizzy Gillespie. Rivera had one of Diz’s trumpets and, as you do when you’re a de facto member of jazz royalty, Adam picked up the horn and blew a note or two. “It still smelled all smoky,” he recalls now, sharing the story over tacos and quesadillas at a hole-in-the-wall Mexican deli in Brooklyn’s Ditmas Park. “Maybe that had something to do with it.” “It” is…

In late June, at the club Nublu in Manhattan’s East Village, I sidled up to the musician and bandleader Steven Bernstein at the bar. I said hello and explained that I needed to interview him for an article on the slide trumpet, that obscure brass instrument he’s long been synonymous with. I wasn’t rolling tape, but I’m sure his response went like this: “Oh, man—that is the worst idea for an article I’ve ever heard!” I added that this harebrained concept was among the last story ideas I’d come up with as editor of JazzTimes. Wait for the punch: “No wonder they fired your ass.” But Bernstein, 56, was smiling and chuckling all the while. (And let the record show that I quit.) You could make a very strong argument…