Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i JazzTimes

Coleman Hawkins, Keynote Recordings (1944) Crosby is on hand for four of Hawk’s best sides of the ’40s, along with Teddy Wilson and Cozy Cole: “Flame Thrower,” “Imagination,” “Night and Day,” “Cattin’ at Keynote.” Chu Berry and his Stompy Stevedores Chu (Variety, 1937) Swing-era gems, reissued on Epic and Columbia, led by a tenor sax hero with Crosby in great early form and especially creative on “Too Marvelous for Words.” Benny Morton, Blue Note Recordings (1945) Even in the ‘40s, Blue Note gave us superb sonics, so Crosby’s bass rings out loud and clear on these five sides with Morton, Barney Bigard, Ben Webster, and others.…

Rising ’Tide Eventide’s H90 Harmonizer pedal builds on the legacy of the popular H9 by adding more routing, more control, a bigger display, and 10 new algorithms. Larger than the H9 Max, the H90 is designed to bring more of the power of Eventide’s flagship H9000 rack unit to a stage-friendly form factor. In addition to 62 algorithms (including new effects like Polyphony and Bouquet Delay and more), the H90 boasts an expanded control set with five push knobs, seven LED buttons, and three footswitches. There’s also a pair of mono inserts to integrate with the rest of your rig, a pair of expression pedal connections, and USB/Bluetooth for remote editing. The high-res OLED display also makes it easier to make changes at the pedal itself, though like the H9,…

Acrobats Whirlwind A prominent jazz writer recently tweeted that he’d received a copy of Jo Lawry’s new album Acrobats and immediately put the unopened CD on the discard pile upon realizing that it featured the vocalist backed only by bass and drums. To each his own, but curiosity alone induced me to take a listen, wondering how the daredevil Australian singer would fare on her first new release in a decade. My conclusion was that prejudice against vocalists plunging into a profoundly exposed setting could mean missing out on some exhilarating music, particularly when the singer is joined by insuperable, high-flying companions like bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Allison Miller. Acrobats features a beguiling mix of reimagined standards and idiosyncratic selections, like the bass/vocal soft-shoe through “Takes Two…

You ask, ‘Why’?” says Joëlle Léandre, 71, when asked about recording somewhere between 140 and 200 albums since 1981, with three times as many gigs under her belt. “I say, ‘Why not?’ I always say, ‘Why not?’ I never say, ‘No.’” With one foot out the door from her home in Paris — en route to Switzerland and a series of live shows — the improvisational composer and contrabass player has no intention of ever slowing, ever. Along with releasing J. LÉANDRE - C. TABORN - M. MANERI with pianist Craig Taborn and violinist Mat Maneri this month on the Rogue Art label, she’s headed to New York for the 2023 Arts for Art Vision Festival, where she will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award on June 13. “Being…

Say the name “Jon Cowherd” in elite jazz circles, and his acclaim is that of a towering, tender pianist, organist, and electronic keyboardist who’s equally at ease in cross-genre exploration as he is with jazz greats. The foremost example is Joni Mitchell, with whom Cowherd played and produced the legendary songwriter’s Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration project in 2018. (Relatedly, he played piano on Joni acolyte Brandi Carlile’s concerts performing the Blue album in Los Angeles and New York.) He has additionally recorded with Lizz Wright, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, and punk rocker-turned-lounge-lizard Iggy Pop. Cowherd’s notoriety is even greater in terms of his work with equally introspective drummer-bandleader Brian Blade, in whose Fellowship he’s been since 1998’s eponymous recording. Yet, while Blade’s 2023-released Lifecycles, Vols. 1-2: Now! and Forever…

Auguroni! If you want to take the Italian word for congratulations, “auguri,” and push it to 11, just add on the “-oni.” When the Umbria Jazz Festival marks its 50th year this coming July, that linguistic tag will be particularly appropriate in the small Italian hilltop town of Perugia, the long-standing seat of the festival, as it once again hosts an influx of crowds and an outpouring of music on a variety of indoor and outdoor stages. Brad Mehldau, Snarky Puppy, Branford Marsalis, Ben Harper, Joe Bonamassa, Stewart Copeland, Rhiannon Giddens, and Paolo Conte are among the bigger headliners who’ve been announced to perform between July 7 and 16. A generous slate of European and American performers will be there as well, including Samara Joy, Paolo Fresu, Bill Frisell, Gianluca…

Hearing loss now affects 15% of American adults, and according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, that number is expected to rise to 22% by 2060. Fortunately, awareness of the problem is also rising, which is why Apple recently earned praise for including a hearing-protection feature in its latest-generation AirPods Pro true wireless earbuds. Like many earbuds equipped with noise canceling, the new AirPods Pro have a “transparency” mode that uses tiny microphones to pick up outside sounds, then amplifies the sounds and plays them through the earbuds, so you can carry on conversations while listening to music. In the new AirPods Pro, Apple limits the maximum volume in transparency mode to 85 decibels (dB), which is the level that hearing scientists consider safe for about eight hours of continuous…

When the New York City jazz scene — and much of the world — went into lockdown in March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread, clubs closed, and tours were canceled. Many musicians had few income streams but were itching to play to sustain their chops and sanity. With little hint as to what it might become, pianist Emmet Cohen started livestreaming informal concerts, dubbed “Live From Emmet’s Place,” every Monday evening. It teamed his regular trio (bassist Russell Hall and drummer Kyle Poole) with different guest performers, all crammed into the living room of his Harlem apartment. The livestreams didn’t end with the lockdowns. With 103 episodes and about 150 featured musicians under his belt as of mid-January, the pianist took stock of the project while working on The…

Bassist Israel Crosby is best known for the seven prolific years he spent with the landmark Ahmad Jamal Trio from 1954-62. His bass lines on classics such as “But Not for Me,” “Poinciana,” and, well, everything else he recorded with Jamal are ingenious masterpieces of melodic invention, harmonic direction, swinging propulsion, and subtle orchestration. But Crosby deserves his spot in the pantheon for more than his tenure with Jamal. He enjoyed a significant if often overlooked career as an innovator through the 1930s and 1940s, and his tragically brief, post-Jamal musical life was heading in intriguing directions when he died from a heart condition at 43 in August 1962. Put it this way: If all you know is Crosby with Jamal, then you don’t know the full measure of his…

Saxophonist Wendell Harrison, 80, and trombonist Phil Ranelin, 83, longtime friends and cofounders of the renowned jazz collective Tribe, still have the drive and work ethic of jazz musicians more than half their age. On a cold Monday evening in January, Harrison was preparing for a live show at the Detroit Institute of Arts, a commissioned work for the nonprofit organization Fighting for the Children featuring a rhythm section, horn sections, and a string orchestra of young musicians. Harrison spent most of that day performing and promoting the concert at local radio station WDET. The rest of his week consisted of rehearsals for the show and publicizing the concert on social media. “I’m tired as hell,” Harrison says, half-jokingly. Ranelin, based in Indianapolis, is bouncing back from a stroke, but…

Remote practicing and teaching may have become a necessity during COVID, but even as we go back to a sort of normal, the idea of being able to jam, rehearse, or teach from different locations has plenty of appeal. If you have a webcam and a decent audio interface, it should work, right? But as anyone who’s tried to find the groove over Zoom can tell you, web tools designed for sales meetings don’t quite cut it when trying to play music. Fast Wi-Fi is often too slow. Even if you plug your computer into Ethernet, the round-trip between your audio interface and that of your remote partner is enough to put you behind the beat—and not in a good way. Enter RealTime Audio, a platform that’s designed to reduce…

JASON MORAN From the Dancehall to the Battlefield Yes His spoken summation (over a vamping 10-piece band) of 1910s ragtime/jazz bandleader James Reese Europe’s life, career, and contributions might have become a lecture. But addressing jazz’s musical and social history without it feeling pedantic is one of Jason Moran’s superpowers. His introduction to the magnificent From the Dancehall to the Battlefield becomes a meditation about context, place, and liberation in African American music. But neither is Mozran all pensiveness and arty reflection: The abovementioned “context” means remembering that Europe’s idiom was a social, festive, dancing one. Hence the horn-filled romps of “Russian Rag” and “Memphis Blues,” both deploying two-step ragtime beats and New Orleans polyphony, along with the more somber “All of No Man’s Land Is Ours” and “Clef Club…

It’s in live settings that we hear this music really unfold, develop, and cook. I love those risks that happen in live and improvised music, and the way the audience feels the energy and the rewards of those risks makes it hard to recapture in the studio. The bass is no exception, even though a lot of what the instrument does is the underlying stuff that maybe not everybody notices. This list of recordings highlights that stuff and includes a range of different musicians, eras, and venues. Charles Mingus “Sophisticated Lady” Charles Mingus – Cornell 1964 (Blue Note, 2007 [originally recorded March 18, 1964]) This is one of my favorite records. It’s such a phenomenal band. On this “Sophisticated Lady” with just Mingus and pianist Jaki Byard, the time, the…