Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2020 i JazzTimes

– Exclusive Content Lee Mergner talks to James Taylor and John Pizzarelli about their collaboration on American Standard and reports on the Toronto premiere of Oscar Peterson’s Africa Suite, while Michael J. West examines the catalog of Geri Allen and post-Bitches Brew fusion in our biweekly JazzTimes 10 list. Plus album reviews, photo galleries, and much more. – JT Blog Congratulations to 18-year-old Matthew Whitaker, one of 20 recipients of this year’s Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Awards, established in 2002 by the ASCAP Foundation to encourage jazz composers up to the age of 30. The recipients receive cash awards, and one of them will also be featured on stage at the 2020 Newport Jazz Festival. – Audio & Video Track premieres by the Fred Hersch Duo with Miguel Zenón…

Lyle Mays, an acclaimed pianist, keyboardist, and composer best known for his long and close association with guitarist Pat Metheny, died Feb. 10 in Los Angeles, after what his niece, vocalist Aubrey Johnson, described as “a long battle with a recurring illness.” He was 66. Mays was a cofounder of the Pat Metheny Group in 1977 and remained a member for 33 years, serving as co-composer and primary arranger; the group enjoyed considerable crossover success and won 11 Grammy awards. However, he also had his own solo career, thereby earning another four Grammy nominations, and worked with a host of other musicians, including Pat Coil, Bobby McFerrin, Rickie Lee Jones, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Joni Mitchell. After leaving the Pat Metheny Group in 2010, Mays essentially retired from the…

When the 2020 New York Winter Jazzfest picked drummer/composer Mark Guiliana as its artist in residence for 2020, the festival’s organizers asked him to enlist performers for various collaborative sets over the course of seven nights. Future-jazz quartet Kneebody was at the top of his list. The choice made sense, as these five musicians have a great deal in common. Thrust into a brighter spotlight by his masterful playing on David Bowie’s final album, 2016’s Blackstar, Guiliana is a musician of eclectic tastes whose projects range from acoustic jazz (his quartet with saxophonist Jason Rigby, bassist Chris Morrissey, and pianist Fabian Almazan, sometimes called the Jersey Quartet after its 2017 recording Jersey) to EDM (the synth-driven Beat Music, whose most recent album Beat Music! Beat Music! Beat Music! garnered a…

Jazz and headphones are both around 100 years old. But while jazz is codified to the point that four players who’ve never met can play a standards gig together with no rehearsal, the audio industry is only now establishing a useful set of guidelines for how headphones should sound. Fortunately, the headphones that are based on these guidelines may have been worth the wait. Headphone sales unexpectedly boomed with the introduction of the Apple iPod, and later the iPhone, but headphone manufacturers were stuck with an outdated set of engineering guidelines created in the 1980s. As Sean Olive, senior fellow at Harman International (parent company of AKG, JBL, Mark Levinson, and other audio brands) puts it, “There were standards for headphone response, but no one was following them so there…

As the first South African artist to release an album worldwide on the storied Blue Note label, Nduduzo Makhathini carries a weight of expectation on his shoulders. Cognizant of the position he’s in, the 37-year-old pianist sees this opportunity as a means to work from the present moment right down to its roots. “Part of what I want to figure out with Blue Note is how to create an awareness about the broader cultures from which I emerged,” he explains. “As opposed to being about me, this must essentially be about the community I come from. It deals with the histories and the importance of engaging those histories, using me as a bridge to link South Africa to the United States and vice versa.” Raised in the rural hills of…

Nashville isn’t a city that most people would immediately associate with jazz. Until recently, the world’s country music capital didn’t have a single jazz club. But that changed in May 2017, when Rudy’s Jazz Room opened on a quiet block in the Gulch, the trendy Nashville neighborhood that sits between Music Row and the Lower Broadway honky-tonks. Since then, the club has established itself as a destination, showcasing a formidable array of local and regional acts and drawing nationally recognized performers such as Christian McBride, Charlie Hunter, and Jason Marsalis. Rudy’s founders, childhood friends Adam Charney and Michael Braden, both in their late forties, knew they were taking a risk when they left their jobs in the software industry to launch the club, soliciting investments from friends and family while…

Live in Nuremberg, tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman’s new album on SMP with pianist Matthew Shipp, is his 95th recording under his own name—at least. “I’ve also heard over 100,” says Perelman, who was born and raised in Brazil but lives in New York. “I haven’t kept count myself.” Whatever the tally is, it’s a big one. Perelman, 59, made his first recordings in 1989 and 1991 before upping the frequency in 1994. Since then, he’s released an average of almost four recordings a year, with a remarkable number of collaborators (even if he has a smaller circle that he returns to most often) and in settings of various sizes and instrumentations—nearly all of them free jazz. Recently he’s put most of his energy into duos and trios, with occasional quartets,…

Last fall, standing in the Philadelphia construction site that would soon be transformed into the latest of his City Winery franchises, Michael Dorf reflected on the distance he’d traveled since cobbling together his first music venue more than three decades earlier. When he arrived in New York City in the mid-1980s, Dorf was a law-school dropout from Wisconsin who’d never heard of John Zorn, the Jazz Passengers, the M-Base collective, or any of the converging strands that made up the eclectic, stream-crossing downtown scene. By the end of the ’80s the Knitting Factory had become synonymous with that scene, which needed a laboratory for its experiments to flourish. Over the seven years that the Knit remained in its tiny space on Houston Street before decamping for Tribeca, Dorf built the club into…

Long before Robert Pinsky became the only three-time poet laureate in American history, he was an alto saxophonist and clarinetist who couldn’t hack it in the music business. Now, in the third act of his career, the 79-year-old collaborates with pianist Laurence Hobgood on a live and studio project called PoemJazz. If the name evokes berets and bongos, don’t worry—they’re aware. “Robert has very strong feelings about not in any way gravitating toward the stereotyped, clichéd, hepcat thing,” Hobgood tells JazzTimes. They circumvent this, he says, by treating poetry-jazz like any other musical performance and prioritizing sound above all. “No aspect of a poem is more singular, more unique, than its rhythm,” Pinsky wrote in his 1998 book The Sound of Poetry. “His focus, like mine, is on sound,” Hobgood…

McCoy Tyner, one of the most innovative and influential pianists in the history of jazz, an NEA Jazz Master, and the last surviving member of John Coltrane’s epochal early-1960s quartet, died March 6 at his New Jersey home. He was 81. In the hours after Tyner’s passing was announced, JT contributor Colin Fleming wrote this appreciation. If you came of musical age on rock & roll, as I did, and you then turned to jazz, chances are as high as a Dizzy Gillespie trumpet note that you commenced your new odyssey with John Coltrane’s Quartet. Rock & roll adherents are drawn to the allure of the 1960s and also to edge, which made Trane’s unit perfect. Collectively they pushed the envelope so far that it would have flown right off…

Jimmy Lyons had a beautiful and penetrating alto sound: warm, round, slightly bitter. In his lifetime, he mostly put that miraculous sound in service of his master Cecil Taylor, an act of devotion that may have obscured just how great Lyons really was. His first record as a leader, Other Afternoons, is a comparatively rare example of Lyons away from the Taylor fold. It remains an extraordinary document, one of the most poetic examples of the aggressive “new thing” that dominated critical conversations of the era. Cut in August 1969 in Paris for BYG Actuel, it was part of a weeklong BYG recording marathon that resulted in a dozen important releases by the likes of Andrew Cyrille, Grachan Moncur, Archie Shepp, Alan Silva, Dave Burrell, Sunny Murray, and the Art…

Picking at his weight-conscious lunch of Brussels sprouts, blistered shishito peppers, and wine at an Italian place near his Upper West Side Manhattan home, Kurt Elling recalls a favorite bit about body image from the comedian Tom Papa, whose Netflix special he has just watched. “Look at you … you’re doing great!” he intones, mimicking Papa’s sing-song delivery with uncanny accuracy. “You’re a little chubby … we’re all a little chubby. You’re doing great! So you’re not built like an Olympic athlete. You’re not an Olympic athlete.” He laughs uproariously. Then, more seriously, reflecting on how self-critical Americans tend to be, he adds, “We’ve been sold a bill of goods, man! Everything that makes this economy run is based upon fear and self-judgment, and venal declarations, man, and exploitation … Everything but this record!” he…

Note: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all listings in this directory are even more subject to change than usual, and we are unable to guarantee the accuracy of any listing beyond press time. Please check festival websites to confirm. United States NORTHEAST ALLENTOWN JAZZFEST 2020 Dates TBD Various venues, Allentown, PA www.allentownjazzfest.org EXIT ZERO JAZZ FESTIVAL 2020 Dates TBD Various venues Cape May, NJ www.exitzerojazzfestival.com CENTER CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2020 Dates TBD Various venues, Philadelphia, PA www.ccjazzfest.com INTERNATIONAL JAZZ DAY April 30, 2020 Various venues worldwide www.jazzday.com ESSENTIALLY ELLINGTON HIGH SCHOOL JAZZ BAND COMPETITION AND FESTIVAL May 7-9, 2020 Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York, NY academy.jazz.org/ee MARY LOU WILLIAMS JAZZ FESTIVAL May 8-9, 2020 Kennedy Center, Washington, DC www.kennedy-center.org JAZZ & BLUES, WINE & BREWS May 9, 2020 Historic…

TED POOR You Already Know New Deal/Impulse! While some chatter on about “spiritual jazz,” drummer/composer Ted Poor actually makes it on his unlikely New Deal/Impulse! debut. Not only are You Already Know’s nine tracks profound and moving, but their construction also has an unusual back story—with equally unusual instrumentation. Poor typically divides time between his own music, that of indie pop stars and producers, drumming for Chris Thile’s cornball but popular radio show Live from Here, and his role as assistant professor of jazz studies at the University of Washington, which makes this album that much more of a surprise. With talented trickster tenor/alto saxophonist/bass clarinetist Andrew D’Angelo performing on most songs (which usually lack bass-range instruments), some might label the music avant-garde, but it’s pure folk. Using his drums…