Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Mac Randall and Ken Micallef report on the 16th annual NYC Winter Jazzfest; full obituaries for keyboardist/composer Lyle Mays and drummer Bob Gullotti; and Michael J. West selects the top winners of the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Jazz Solo in our biweekly JazzTimes 10 list. Plus album reviews, photo galleries, and much more. JT Blog A remarkable all-star lineup will headline the 66th annual Newport Jazz Festival, set for August 7-9 in Rhode Island. The festival’s topline acts are anchored by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, vocalists Norah Jones and Diana Krall, and pianist Robert Glasper, who will serve as this year’s artist in residence. Audio & Video Track premieres by Sammy Miller and the Congregation and the Anna Webber/Angela Morris Big Band; downloads from Kerry Politzer, the Kim…

For Dezron Douglas, a musical career was a family legacy, and it began early. “I’ve been playing bass in church since I was seven or eight,” he recently recounted to graduate students at New York University’s jazz program. “I played with my brothers and my father and we were in a lot of [gospel] programs up and down—Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts. Then I got good at 12, and started to really study in Hartford. To this day, some of my favorite bass players are people you probably never heard of. But they were great local bass players on the gospel circuit.” Douglas is a proud product of the jazz circle in Hartford, where he was born and came to study with Jackie McLean’s Institute of African American Music; drummer Michael…

If there’s one kind of technological development that every gigging musician likes, it’s the kind that makes one’s gear easier to deal with: smaller, lighter, less cumbersome, less logistically taxing. This year’s Winter NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) show, held as usual in January at the Anaheim Convention Center in California, was a big winner in that department, full of products designed to help pare down and simplify. At the top of the list were three new offerings in the Yamaha sector of the show, which took up an entire ballroom at the Marriott hotel adjoining the Convention Center. The SLB300SK Silent Bass ($4,495) is an electric instrument that sounds and responds to touch remarkably like a real upright but without a giant wooden body—a breeze to carry around,…

I t’s late fall, but still balmy on this Wednesday evening at Teder—a one-of-a-kind outdoor entertainment venue nestled in the courtyard of a historic building in south Tel Aviv. Just a few blocks in from the Mediterranean Sea, several hundred people have gathered for drinks, wood-fired gourmet pizza, and the launch of trumpeter Sefi Zisling’s sophomore album Expanse (Tru Thoughts). The unique urban environment and Zisling’s music combine to create a decidedly relaxed, almost magical vibe, a welcome reprieve from persistent political unrest. Zisling started playing the trumpet at 10; his childhood heroes included John Coltrane, Grant Green, and Fred Wesley. “I really love bold and fierce voices—music that allows me to hear the artist’s heart, not just their intellect,” he reflects, counting Alice Coltrane, Donald Byrd, Yusef Lateef, Don…

Joe Randall had only just retired from his decades-long career as a chef and culinary instructor when a local businessman came to him with an idea: Was he interested in opening a jazz club and restaurant in the heart of Savannah, Ga.? Randall, a longtime resident of Savannah, has always loved jazz. He grew up in Harrisburg, Pa., where he saw Jimmy McGriff, Richard “Groove” Holmes, and other heavyweights perform at a popular club called Lawson’s Hotel. But Randall, who is 73 and recently wrapped up a 17-year run as the leader of his own local cooking school, had never operated a club. When the offer presented itself, it seemed like a good chance to combine two lifelong passions: jazz and food. Now a little more than two years into…

When Marc Johnson left North Texas State University in 1977, it was through a revolving door into the Woody Herman Orchestra. Two years prior, the Herd had picked up its entire rhythm section from that school: pianist Lyle Mays, drummer Steve Houghton, and bassist Kerby Stewart. So when the bass chair opened up again, it was only natural that Mays would suggest Johnson, his classmate and collaborator, for the gig. Although his time in a big band was invaluable, Johnson had his heart set on playing in small group settings. What he didn’t expect was that when the opportunity to join a piano trio arose 10 months later, it would be with the very group that had caused him to fall in love with the format: the Bill Evans Trio.…

The year 2019 concluded on an extraordinary note for the music industry. In the week ending December 26, more than 1.2 million vinyl albums were sold in the United States. That’s the highest weekly number since Nielsen began tracking music sales in 1991. And this record for records wasn’t an anomaly; last year also boasted the third-, fourth-, and fifth-biggest vinyl sales weeks of that nearly three-decade period. Clearly, the LP’s resurgence in the 21st century—roughly a 10% increase in sales every year for the past 15 years—shows no signs of abating. Further evidence of this long-running trend lies in the return of mom-and-pop record stores throughout the U.S. and the success of the twice-yearly Record Store Day events in April and November. (Record Store Day Black Friday on November…

Stereo and conventional surround sound capture the width and depth of a recording venue, but as anyone who’s ever heard live music knows, reflections from above are just as important to natural reverberance. Thanks to new “immersive audio” technologies, it’s now possible to capture the height of a soundscape, from the famously low basement ceiling of the Village Vanguard to the 83-foot ceiling of Carnegie Hall. Dolby Laboratories is bringing its Atmos technology, already a standard in commercial cinemas and home theaters, to music. Immersive is the biggest push in new music recording and distribution technology since surround sound. But of course, surround-sound music largely flopped. Why might immersive take off when conventional surround sound didn’t? All Directions at Once Immersive sound reproduces height information in a few different ways.…

Few musicians in jazz history have been as revered—and reviled—as Buddy Rich (1917-1987). Two recent remembrances chronicle those extremes. Pelle Berglund’s biography, One of a Kind: The Making of the World’s Greatest Drummer (Hudson Music), reveals the self-taught musician’s natural brilliance and infamous temperament, from joining his parents’ vaudeville act as an 18-month-old to leading his final self-named big band at age 69. And Just in Time: The Final Recording (Gearbox), captured live at Ronnie Scott’s in London less than five months before his death from complications of brain cancer, displays Rich in top form to the end as both drummer and bandleader. Rich was notorious for being overly demanding of other musicians, a mindset that stemmed in part from his quest for perfection within his own playing. The Stockholm-based…

Today, Gary Peacock is probably best known for his long association with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette. He also has recorded many excellent albums as a leader. But when thinking about his contribution to jazz, it’s good to go back to the music’s revolutionary years. On key 1963-1965 albums from Paul Bley, Albert Ayler, and Tony Williams, Peacock displays utter mastery in diverse avant-garde idioms. Ornette Coleman showed Paul Bley the way to ditch rules and regulations. Bley called Ornette’s fast atonal utterances “erasure phrases.” One played something like Bird, then a blues lick in a different key, then an erasure phrase to move further into orbit. While Bley wasn’t going to be influenced by Bill Evans pianistically, the interactive trio style pioneered by Evans with Scott LaFaro and Paul…

ON JANUARY 10, 2010, AN EARTHQUAKE MEASURING 7.0 on the Richter scale struck Haiti, destroying much of its capital city, Port-au-Prince. Ten years later, with two traffic lights in a city of over a million, and a staggering gap between the 1% and 99%, this resilient Caribbean nation—the first to claim its independence—is still struggling to recover and rebuild, suffering from widespread corruption and a sense of powerlessness to bring about change. But at least one positive thing has remained consistent here for the past decade: the Port-au-Prince (PAP) Jazz Festival. From January 18 to 25, 2020, the festival celebrated its 14th edition. It was held in 2010 despite the earthquake, but the fact that it went on as planned this year was, if anything, even more remarkable—a testament to organizational…

FRANK ZAPPA The Hot Rats Sessions Zappa Focus wasn’t Frank Zappa’s strong suit. When the early records by the Mothers of Invention hit in the mid-’60s, they deployed a parade of whimsically diverse ideas. Mock pop, percussion romps, R&B bubblegum, theatrical satire, musique concrète, oddball skronk—from Freak Out! to Uncle Meat, pastiche was paramount. So when Hot Rats arrived in the fall of ’69, months after the Mothers had folded, its five instrumental tunes and one vocal track were viewed as a balm to those bewildered by the renegade auteur’s sound spectrum. The music was enterprising, but comparatively unified. Celebrating the golden anniversary of Zappa’s revered solo flight, this six-CD boxed set of outtakes, rehearsals, and miscellany delivers more than seven hours’ worth of tangents the bandleader concocted while honing…