Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2020 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Matthew Kassel reviews the Jazztopad festival in Poland; singers Sheila Jordan, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Veronica Swift sit down for a roundtable chat; and Lee Mergner selects the top jazz memoirs and biographies in our biweekly JazzTimes 10 list. Plus album reviews and much more. JT Blog Congratulations to guitarist Evgeny Pobozhiy (right), the first Russian winner of the Herbie Hancock International Jazz Competition—and to the second- and third-place finishers, fellow guitarists Max Light (left) and Cecil Alexander (middle). Check out Michael J. West’s full report on our website. Audio & Video The first episode of David Sanborn’s new music video series Sanborn Sessions, featuring Kandace Springs; track premieres by Mike Baggetta and Jana Herzen; downloads from Randy Brecker/Ada Rovatti and the DIVA Jazz Orchestra…

This month: September 2000 In 2000, our computer systems and infrastructure did not simultaneously crash and cause a Y2K-induced apocalypse. JazzTimes turned 30 that year, and to recognize that marker of youth gone by, we put together an anniversary issue that ended up being both timely and timeless, and for the first time featured no image on the cover, just text—appropriately for the content inside. The September 2000 issue was anchored by long-form essays on the three preceding decades in jazz—Chip Stern on the ’70s, Bob Blumenthal on the ’80s, and Peter Watrous on the ’90s—as well as eight shorter pieces on various genres of jazz, such as mainstream, avant-garde, fusion, Latin jazz, smooth jazz and more, from contributors like Stanley Crouch, Bill Shoemaker, and Bill Milkowski. A serious jazz…

Raising two young children as a single parent while holding down four teaching positions is more than enough to fill anyone’s days. Trying to juggle all that and compose an album’s worth of new material had begun to feel unachievable for Carmen Sandim. The Colorado-based pianist thought about setting her music career aside—not for the first time—when a viewing of the John Coltrane documentary Chasing Trane provided a much-needed jolt of inspiration. “I felt like I received a message from that movie,” Sandim recalls. “There’s such an intensity to both single parenting and musicianship, I realized that there’s no such thing as balance. There’s just do what you love or don’t do what you love. Something’s got to give, and balance is what I chose to let go of.” Sandim’s…

YOU DON’T GET AN ANSWER when you ask Michel Camilo a question, you get a story—like the one about how he gravitated toward the piano as a child growing up in the Dominican Republic. “When I turned almost five, that Christmas my mother and father gave me a very tiny accordion,” says the now 65-year-old pianist, bandleader, and composer. “Luckily it was in tune, so I was able to pick out the melody to ‘Silent Night’ by ear. I discovered the notes on my own. Then the next one I played was ‘Happy Birthday.’ The family said, ‘Wow!’ because I was learning really fast. My uncle could also play accordion, and just by watching him, I was picking up everything. Then, by the time I was six, I started coming…

Trio+ Stricker Street Todd Marcus, one of the few bass clarinetists in modern jazz, has almost made a point of understating his skill as a player throughout his recording career. His first albums aimed to incorporate his ethnic heritage into his art, wedding Egyptian music theory with big-band jazz. On These Streets, his 2018 release, was an immersive, moving reflection of his work as an activist, organizer, and resident of West Baltimore. Marcus’ instrument was more his group than his horn on these records, as he used the ensembles to weave rich narratives through the arrangements. However, the bass clarinet is front and center on Trio+, a strong postbop showcase for Marcus’ unquestionable command of the instrument in a small-combo setting. His ambition is announced swiftly and directly across the…

Munich 2016 ECM A Keith Jarrett solo recital is its own art form. It is unlike solo performances by other jazz pianists, most of whom improvise off composed tunes or create free jazz absent of structure. Calling Jarrett an improvising pianist is too limiting. He’s more akin to a classical composer—except that he works really, really quickly. His original solo works may be wholly improvised, but it’s more accurate to say that they’re composed on the spot. He writes études and sonatas directly onto the keys, before enormous crowds. Maybe that’s why he demands such stillness from his audiences: He’s not just playing, he’s composing (he’s trying to work here!). This is especially true of the 12-part suite that makes up most of the two-disc Munich 2016, recorded in July…

During the documentary Dave Grusin: Not Enough Time, there’s a clip of the keyboardist and composer seated at his piano during a concert. He tells the audience, “I have a gratitude factor that I can’t even express about being allowed to have this kind of life.” And what a life it’s been. Over a career spanning six decades, Grusin touched virtually every corner of the entertainment world. He scored dozens of major films, including Tootsie, The Firm, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and On Golden Pond, earning eight Oscar nominations and winning one, for his score of The Milagro Beanfield War in 1988. He composed the themes to a slew of hit TV shows like St. Elsewhere, Maude, Good Times, and Baretta. As a recording artist he’s won 10 Grammys, and…

Chick Corea: “Steps - What Was” (from Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, 1968) The birth of a provocatively new—and yet fully realized—piano trio sound. Chick Corea: “No. 3” (from Children’s Songs, 1984) One compact crystalline miniature in a set of them, designed to evoke the stealth lyricism of Béla Bartók and Erik Satie. Gary Burton/Chick Corea: “Crystal Silence” (from Crystal Silence, 1973) A placid yet meta-minded conversation in which two dialed-in improvisers take turns discovering (and cultivating) constantly evolving, delicately shaded landscapes. Chick Corea: “Day Danse” (from My Spanish Heart, 1976) The tightest track from an ambitious and wide-ranging work that celebrates traditional forms (bolero, rumba, tango) using non-traditional orchestration. Chick Corea: “Litha” (from Tones for Joan’s Bones, 1968) Corea’s leader debut features inventive hard-bop composition and correspondingly agitated…

Old New Cuneiform Few records embody the spirit of jazz in 2019 as well as the new release from the Tomeka Reid Quartet. A cellist who began her rise in Chicago during the ’00s as a sidewoman in groups led by Mike Reed, Nicole Mitchell, and others associated with the AACM, Reid leads a stellar group through nine compositions that blend tradition and innovation seamlessly. Her ensemble includes guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and they nimbly move through a wide range of musical styles—with influences ranging from Renaissance to Roscoe (Mitchell)—changing lead and support roles with ease. Solos feel organic rather than scripted, and group improvisations arrive at unsuspecting moments. Highlights include “Wabash Blues,” where Halvorson, Fujiwara, and the leader all reference the titular genre…

Ray Santos, a Latin-jazz saxophonist, composer, and arranger whose exceptional craftsmanship and depth of musical knowledge earned him the nickname “El Maestro,” died Oct. 17 from congestive heart failure at a hospital in the South Bronx. He was 90. A lifelong resident of New York, Santos was a member of the city’s Nuyorican community and eventually played in the bands of both of that community’s two leading musical lights, Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez. Those two bandleaders, along with the Cuban American Machito—with whom Santos also played—formed the “Big Three” of mambo music. He later lent his saxophone and arranging talents to Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Palmieri, Mario Bauzá, and Celia Cruz, cementing his place as a major figure in the world of Afro-Latin music. Santos was best known, however, for…

1 John Coltrane Blue World (Impulse!) In my JazzTimes record review, I said Blue World might not win the historical category this year because it is only 37 minutes long and contains only eight takes of five tunes. My bad. When there is John Coltrane music never heard before, performed by the greatest small jazz ensemble of all time at the top of its game, recorded by no less than Rudy Van Gelder, the jazz world seizes upon it, and why not? T.C. 2. Eric Dolphy Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions (Resonance) In the summer of 1963, Eric Dolphy recorded two long sessions for FM Records. The unreleased tracks from those sessions—both the unaccompanied duets with bassist Richard Davis and the piano-less ensembles with Bobby Hutcherson,…

DIATOM RIBBONS STARTED LIFE AS A FUNK RECORD. Kris Davis was simply relaxing with some music during the off hours of her 2018 duo tour with Craig Taborn when her regular producer, David Breskin, heard the muffled but unmistakable thump of a James Brown groove pulsing from her earphones. “You should do a funk record,” Breskin suggested offhandedly, perhaps at least half in jest. Still, the idea triggered connections that led Davis to think about what Brown had in common with Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, or Henry Threadgill’s Society Situation Dance Band, or the Senegalese pop of Youssou N’Dour, or with Stevie Wonder, the first artist she ever saw live … But maybe it didn’t start there. Maybe it started with a run of recent tribute concerts that brought Davis…

For nearly 50 years, The Real Book has sat proudly on music stands across the world, from clubs and society gigs to practice rooms and jam sessions. It’s—unofficially—the best-selling “fake book” of all time. Generations of jazz musicians have learned to play standards and classics from the Great American Songbook via its venerable pages. So why in the name of Irving Berlin would someone set out to reharmonize its contents? “Music is in a whole different place now,” says guitarist Jack Grassel, 71, a professional jazz musician and educator of more than 50 years. “People don’t use ii-V-I progressions now, and if they do, it makes the music sound very old.” The Reharmonized Real Book (Hal Leonard) contains 393 songs from The Real Book (6th Edition), featuring all-new harmonizations of its…

Atlantic Extraction (Out of Your Head) Nick Dunston didn’t have a particular ensemble sound in his head when he built his new quintet last year. He just hoped a handful of committed improvisers would naturally morph into a working band, sharing their savvy and collectively shaping a music that deep-sixed the constraints of idiom. Guess what? Dude’s dream came true. Atlantic Extraction’s debut is an engaging date that offers unique vista after unique vista, coming on like a suite regardless of how far-flung any of its individual elements seem to be. The young bassist, who has swooped onto the New York jazz scene with surprising velocity in the last two years, has myriad interests. So the terrain of this program’s 16 tracks is in constant flux; his embrace of modern…

Hallowed Advance Dance Disques The evolution of New Yor-Uba, pianist Michele Rosewoman’s painstaking synthesis of modern jazz and ancient Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions, has been a journey of slow-motion magnificence. Three full decades after premiering her semi-big band in 1983, Rosewoman released its first recording, the live double-disc New Yor-Uba, 30 Years: A Musical Celebration of Cuba in America, to critical acclaim. Now, six years later, comes Hallowed, with Rosewoman offering only slight refinements of New Yor-Uba’s unique template. The crown jewel here is “Oru de Oro” (“Room of Gold”), a 10-song, nearly 48-minute “rhythmic suite” commissioned by Chamber Music America. It’s undergirded by batá drums, described by Rosewoman as “the orchestra of the Yoruba temple,” with patterns recreated from tradition by folklorist Román Diaz. New Yor-Uba hews to the traditional…

There are certain pianists that just can’t hide—not that they would want to. I’ve always been fascinated by those who have developed such a strong Identity. Commonly, people say they have their own style, but there is so much more at stake. Key elements would be touch, phrasing, language, sense of time and swing, orchestral visualization, harmonic approaches, and of course heart and guts. I’ve chosen seven “easy” examples to make this obvious, but the list goes on and on and has carried into my generation (Brad Mehldau, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Fred Hersch, Robert Glasper, etc.). Ahmad Jamal “Poinciana” Ahmad Jamal Trio at the Pershing: But Not for Me (Argo, 1958) A personal favorite for two important reasons. Mr. Jamal, who possesses a brilliant technique, has shown us what “less is…