Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2019 i JazzTimes

HE WAS A SUPERSTAR. A beloved singer with over 100 hit records to his name, the world’s highest-selling recording artist between Bing Crosby and Elvis Presley, and the host of his own national television show. Today, a century after his birth and 54 years after his death, he remains a household name. Yet even if you know all that about Nat King Cole, you only know half the story. By the time “Straighten Up and Fly Right”—Cole’s breakthrough hit at the head of the King Cole Trio—reached Billboard’s pop Top 10 in the spring of 1944, the 25-year-old had already been a professional musician for a decade. In those early years, though, he was not primarily a singer, but a pianist … a brilliant one. “Nat Cole is easily one…

Choosing holiday gifts for the musicians in your life is always a bit tricky. Our advice: Unless you like embarrassed silences, stay away from novelty and buy something useful. Renewables (strings, reeds, cleaning supplies) are always appreciated, provided you can discreetly discover players’ preferred specs. Don’t guess; spy on them, or get the info via intermediaries. If you’re squeamish about espionage—or think of strings and reeds as the musical equivalent of socks and underwear—all is not lost! Books, tools, small (but decent-quality) instruments, and useful tech could stock our stocking any day. For example, take any of the following 10 nifty products. Chic Click Available in a range of colors, the Korg KDM-3 Digital Metronome doesn’t have a swinging arm, but its traditional shape and onboard display lets players use…

Sonocardiogram Brownswood Vocalist Daymé Arocena first grabbed our attention in 2014 in Jane Bunnett’s Maqueque, the Canadian saxophonist’s ongoing project showcasing Cuban women musicians long overlooked both at home and abroad. Around the same time Arocena connected with influential French-born, London-based producer Gilles Peterson, who presented her in an array of settings, often remixed with electronica beats. For lovers of Cuban roots music, these efforts could come across as gilding a lily. Her voice, redolent of rumba chants and Santería invocations, is a thing of glory; on her previous album, 2017’s Cubafonía, Peterson’s lavish production sometimes seemed to tamp down her vitality. Her new album, Sonocardiogram, is an intricately produced work too, but Arocena is at the helm, reveling in her multifarious musical world. Recorded in Havana, the album opens…

In this month’s cover story on Cyrille Aimée, Allen Morrison refers to a February 2019 show at Birdland on West 44th St. in New York—Aimée’s first public performance of the Stephen Sondheim interpretations that make up her latest album, Move On. It just so happens that I was at the show he mentions. I remember it well, not just because it was so great (although it was) but because of who my immediate neighbor was. After taking my seat, I looked around the club and couldn’t help thinking that the white-grizzled man at the table in front of mine seemed awfully familiar. It took a minute—I’m a little slow sometimes—but then I realized he was in fact Stephen Sondheim. Because his back was mostly turned to me, I could take…

Harold Mabern, a pianist, composer, and educator of indomitable energy and irrepressible good humor who came out of Memphis, Tenn., to become one of the world’s premier hard-bop musicians, died of a heart attack on Sept. 17 in New Jersey. He was 83. While he was a highly respected bandleader who gigged frequently (and released more than 30 albums) under his own name, Mabern also continued working as a sideman until the end of his life. Over 60 years, his résumé included playing with Harry “Sweets” Edison, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson, Lee Morgan, Jackie McLean, Wes Montgomery, Sarah Vaughan, and his close friend and Manassas High School classmate George Coleman, among many others. Mabern developed a style that was noted for its aggression and heavy immersion in the…

Joe Henderson made it clear from the beginning that if he and Laurie Antonioli were going to spend time together she needed to read up on literature. A budding singer who’d spent two years studying bebop in the innovative jazz program at Portland’s Mt. Hood College in the mid-1970s, she’d returned to her native Bay Area raring to go. Plunging into the roiling jazz scene, she started sitting in regularly with Mark Murphy at his weekly gig at the Dock, a Marin County joint in Tiburon. On Henderson’s recommendation Antonioli soaked up Dostoevsky and Camus, Kafka and Hermann Hesse, “and then we would talk about it,” she says. “Joe was very shy on the one hand, definitely not an extrovert, but he liked to chat and do long phone calls.…

Because audio technology just keeps marching on, every year sees success and failure. Some manufacturers, through skill or luck, are able to master the latest tech trends and bring in terrific new products, sometimes at surprisingly comfortable prices. It’s those companies and products we’re here to celebrate, in our list of the best audio gear of 2019. While some of these selections aren’t necessarily the absolute state of the art in their categories, most of them are products that practically every jazz fan can afford and enjoy. Bose NC 700 headphones I can’t say that Bose has finally come up with the perfect noise-canceling headphones, but I also can’t name a single thing I dislike about the NC 700. Its state-of-the-art noise canceling is adjustable in 10 steps, from light…

Long Waves Unit How’s this for a jazz bio: For almost 60 years Franco Ambrosetti has been an active, respected trumpet player on the European scene. For 30 of those years he also ran Ambrosetti Industrial Group, as CEO and eventually chairman. (The company manufactured steel wheels for vehicles and landing gear for airplanes.) He has recorded 28 albums as a leader, often assembling all-star bands with people like Kenny Barron, Tommy Flanagan, Dave Holland, and Phil Woods. For Long Waves, he hired John Scofield, Uri Caine, Scott Colley, and Jack DeJohnette. They make a remarkably relaxed, selfless, natural band. Ambrosetti, 77, has a clean, warm tone and refined ideas about lyricism. He writes attractive tunes like the sinuous “Milonga” and the deceptively intense title track. With these sidemen, he…

Jazz Education Network Conference 1/7-1/10 | New Orleans, LA Now in its 11th year, the JEN conference will touch down in jazz’s birthplace for four days of panels, presentations, clinics, and concerts. Confirmed participants include Kenny Werner, Terell Stafford, Tia Fuller, Sherrie Maricle, Bob Mintzer, Bria Skonberg, Peter Erskine, Jeff Lederer, Rosana Eckert, and many more. jazzednet.org Winter Jazzfest 1/9-1/18 | New York, NY The 16th edition of this annual festival will boast more than 150 groups on 20 stages in select venues throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Highlights include a British jazz showcase featuring Moses Boyd and others; a celebration of Marcus Belgrave with Ron Carter, Sheila Jordan, and Louis Hayes; and a performance by Brazilian singer/guitarist Seu Jorge. winterjazzfest.com Jazz Congress 1/13-1/14 | New York, NY For the third…

“Jazz has no frontiers. You can be very free.” That’s the message that was imparted to vocalist Youn Sun Nah by her teachers when she was struggling to find herself as a twentysomething jazz student in Paris in the 1990s. “I really wanted to sing like Ella Fitzgerald or Sarah Vaughan, but it was impossible so I almost gave up,” she confesses. Fortunately that piece of encouragement—a verbal means to artistic liberation, as it turned out—strengthened her resolve to follow her own course. Today, half a lifetime removed from that moment, Nah continues to uphold the ideal of borderless expression, walking a jazz path that fuses art song with art-pop, minimalism with virtuosity, and avant-expressionism with impressionistic allure. The one constant in her output remains her sui generis singing. With…

That the modifier “rising” should no longer be applied to “star” when describing the remarkable vocalist Jazzmeia Horn is apparent throughout her sophomore release, Love and Liberation (Concord). Joined by a band of top-shelf under-35ers that includes fellow Thelonious Monk Competition winners Ben Williams and Jamison Ross, the leader imprints her kaleidoscopic personality on Erykah Badu’s “Green Eyes,” Rachelle Ferrell’s “Reflections of My Heart,” Jon Hendricks’ “No More,” and the Van Heusen-Mercer standard “I Thought About You,” and interprets eight original songs to which she composed the music and wrote the lyrics. Horn claims that each number sounds like a jazz standard, and she isn’t lying. The 28-year-old Dallas native’s star power was fully on display at a September 9 release concert at Le Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village, on…

Irrationalities Enja This delicate yet muscular recording reflects bassist and composer Petros Klampanis’ desire to, according to the liner notes, evoke “living in an imaginary city that combines Greek and European culture and New York culture” and to create music “between having a structure and at the same time breaking free of structure, being open, discovering life.” Joined by pianist Kristjan Randalu and drummer/percussionist Bodek Janke, Klampanis jettisons the larger themes of his previous two albums for something more intimate, and in doing so, the Greek native finds even greater profundity of expression (if not freedom from structure). Klampanis gets more mileage out of carefully constructed trio arrangements than many musicians realize with a 16-piece big band. The title track is a case in point. After an unusual vocal-harmony introduction,…

The Space Between Disguises GenreFluid Streaming, especially on non-conventional platforms like YouTube, has become the dominant mode for disseminating music in 2019. With decades of recordings of centuries of music at our fingertips, musicians have access to a seemingly infinite wellspring of inspiration. So why does more of their work not reflect that? Why not make music that truly synthesizes traditions rather than simply flirting with them? On pianist and accordionist Simone Baron’s debut album The Space Between Disguises, a Mahler-esque string quartet fades into a Chopinian piano étude that explodes into a pizzicato dervish-folk dance that morphs into a ruminative postbop piano trio that dips into vivacious rumba. And that’s just what happens in the first, five-minute track. Yes, stacking musical ideas alone does not make one novel or…