Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2020 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Our new “Jazz in the Age of COVID” page directs readers to a regularly updated cancellation/postponement list, online events calendar, and photo gallery of musicians lost in the coronavirus pandemic. Plus interviews with Uri Caine and Mike Karn, album and book reviews, and much more. JT Blog For our 50th-anniversary issue in September, we’re compiling a list of the top 50 jazz albums of the past 50 years, and we want to know what you’d put on it. Please vote in our readers’ polls, organized by decade and open for two weeks each. The 1970s (above) and ’80s polls have closed, but let us know your top 10 choices of the ’90s (starting May 18), ’00s (starting June 1), and ’10s (starting June 15). Audio & Video Exclusive…

If you ask saxophonist Remy Le Boeuf about his fascination with shadows, you receive a characteristically thoughtful answer. “I like the metaphor of the absence of something having substance,” he says. “We tend to put a lot of value on substance, but I think the absence is very powerful.” That line of thinking has yielded a modest amount of art in the past for this rising star, including various personal poems, lyrics, and music. But it’s become an even greater impetus in the present, firing Le Boeuf’s imagination and undergirding one of 2019’s most absorbing large-ensemble releases—the self-titled debut from Remy Le Boeuf’s Assembly of Shadows. A finely honed work steeped in fantasy and stacked with some of New York’s most impressive players, the album draws attention, rightly, to the…

One of the most innovative educational television series presenting jazz did not debut, as one might guess, on PBS or its precursor, National Educational Television. Rather, it emanated from KABC, a commercial station broadcasting in Los Angeles. Stars of Jazz was a weekly 30-minute series that ran for 130 episodes from June of 1956 through December of 1958. Artists appearing on the show ran the gamut of jazz’s history, from Dixieland and swing through bebop and modern. The first episode featured the Stan Getz Quartet opposite Kid Ory and his Creole Jazz Band. The second featured Erroll Garner’s trio and singer Faith Winthrop, and the show would follow that basic single-combo-plus-vocalist format for the rest of its run. In the eighth episode, Billie Holiday was the vocalist. Virtually the entire…

That American audiences rarely get to experience the full extent of jazz talent from other countries is no secret, and nothing new. The door into the U.S. has never swung with the same ease as the one leading out. Consider the British scene of the past 60 years. For every George Shearing, John McLaughlin, and Jamie Cullum who established themselves in America with regular touring schedules and recordings, there were deserving players like Johnny Dankworth, Joe Harriott, and Django Bates who did not. A few succeeded by relocating here—Marian McPartland, Dave Holland—and some managed a Stateside presence for a few years but unfairly faded, like Tubby Hayes in the ’60s and two other saxophonists, Courtney Pine and Soweto Kinch, in the ’90s and ’00s. This fact is not lost on…

Archie Shepp will mark his 83rd year on May 24, and will surely have to delay celebrating it in proper style until the coronavirus crisis passes. These days, he moves at a more deliberate pace than he once did, using a stylish French walking stick, ebony and white. It fits with the sartorial sense he favors these days—tailored suits, fedoras with snap-down brims—a far different look from what he wore when he first rose to prominence in the 1960s. Then he was the outsider fighting his way onto the scene, and came to serve as the spearpoint of The New Thing: a generational movement focused on politically charged, avant-garde jazz. Sixty years on, with almost 100 albums to his credit, he looks and fits the role of an éminence grise.…

Traditional stereo systems sound better than wireless all-in-one speakers like Sonos, but they’ve largely fallen out of favor—no surprise when you can get a good wireless speaker for less than $200. Audio enthusiasts craving higher fidelity are embracing an even more affordable option, though: recently developed amplifier technology that makes it easy to put together a nice stereo system for around $100. The technology is called Class D amplification, sometimes referred to as “digital” amplification. It debuted about 20 years ago, and has become the norm in inexpensive audio gear. In a conventional amp, the transistors that power your speakers always run somewhere between on and off, and any energy they’re not using is converted to heat, which has to be removed by fans or large aluminum heat sinks. In…

Things changed profoundly for the Netherlands’ Tineke Postma following the 2014 release of her album Sonic Halo, a collaboration with fellow alto and soprano saxophonist/composer Greg Osby. That year, Postma gave birth to a son; she suddenly found herself moving at a different pace than she was accustomed to, and her priorities shifting. Although she didn’t—couldn’t—jump right into her next project, Postma began channeling inspirations from her motherhood experience into new music, ultimately resulting in Freya, her six-years-later followup. “I just needed more time to create a new album, being a new mom,” she says. “I wanted to not rush, to come up with something I could really stand behind once it felt right to record again as a bandleader.” Freya, which she began piecing together in 2018, features 10…

Saxophonist Ernie Watts built a career as a bandleader and sideman with one foot in many musical camps, but jazz remains his most abiding love. “When you study jazz and you learn how to improvise and you learn the harmonic structures and you learn the chords and the scales, all of that knowledge crosses over into pop and rock and blues,” he says. Over his 50-plus-year career, the 74-year-old two-time Grammy winner has done more than a little crossing over. He’s recorded and/or toured with a galaxy of jazz, pop, rock, and R&B superstars, including the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, Cannonball Adderley, the Jacksons, the Commodores, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Steely Dan, Barry White, Frank Zappa, Elton John, Pat Metheny, and James Brown. He played on film and TV projects…

On alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin’s new themed album of John and Alice Coltrane covers, Pursuance: The Coltranes, she doesn’t just pay homage to jazz’s most intimidating power couple. Benjamin also enlisted a dizzying assemblage of guests, from the Coltranes’ colleagues (bassists Ron Carter and Reggie Workman) to rising players (singer Georgia Anne Muldrow and trumpeter Keyon Harrold) to genre-blurring innovators (bassist Meshell Ndegeocello and keyboardist Surya Botofasina). Which says less about the depth of her Rolodex than it does her expertise in herding cats. “It’s assumed that they’re all my friends and they wanted to play on the CD and they all love me,” Benjamin tells JazzTimes over a Skype call during the height of the coronavirus pandemic. “It was hard to get every last one of them. There was…

ORRIN EVANS AND THE CAPTAIN BLACK BIG BAND The Intangible Between Smoke Sessions In his most recently acquired role as the keyboard-playing third of the Bad Plus, Philadelphia-based Orrin Evans put on his thinking cap and added large doses of quirk to his usual hard bop-enlivened piano stylings for the good of the woolly collective. Solid. What’s left, then, for his workouts with his big band of ever-shifting size is a mix of bright, off-kilter arrangements (Evans’ first substantial contribution to his band’s book as an arranger) that would do the latter-day Gil Evans Orchestra proud (particularly on the brassy “Proclaim Liberty”), gospel traditionalism (on Harry Dixon Loes’ funky-cool “This Little Light of Mine”), flywheel rhythms from drummer Anwar Marshall, and rousing solos from Captain Black ensemble players old and…

Wallace Roney, a star trumpeter—and the only trumpeter ever to study personally with Miles Davis—who built a 40-plus-year career chasing the cutting edge of jazz, died on the morning of March 31 at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey. He was 59. His death was confirmed by his publicist, Lydia Liebman, who said that the cause of death was complications from COVID-19. “I can’t believe this man is gone,” said fellow jazz trumpeter and composer Jeremy Pelt on Instagram. “He meant so much to me and his very real presence in the music kept people honest.” Already an accomplished and recognized musician during his youth in Washington, D.C., Roney broke through to the wider world at the tail end of the 1980s’ “Young Lions” era as a…

The rhythm section of Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb enjoyed a celebrated 1959-1962 tenure with Miles Davis, appearing on the studio recordings Kind of Blue and Someday My Prince Will Come, plus a bevy of live recordings at Carnegie Hall, the Blackhawk, and all over Europe. This unit was also heard on other great albums of that era by John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter, Booker Little, Benny Golson, Art Pepper, Frank Strozier, Sonny Red, and Chambers himself. After the Miles Davis years they became a working trio on their own or in tandem with Wes Montgomery; the 1965 Kelly/Montgomery live set Smokin’ at the Half Note is famous. Of their own albums led by the pianist, Kelly Blue might be definitive. However, every single note this trio…

On Valentine’s Day weekend in Manhattan, a few weeks before the rampant spread of COVID-19 squashed the pleasure quotient of macabre entertainment, the Jazz Gallery presented a CD release party for The Ice Siren (Parade Light), a jazz oratorio composed by saxophonist John Ellis, with libretto by playwright Andy Bragen. Its narrative involves the journey of a male protagonist (Miles Griffith) into the phantasmagorically frozen world beneath the crypt inhabited by his beloved (Gretchen Parlato). The singers were reprising their performances at The Ice Siren’s 2009 Jazz Gallery debut, and the 2015 repeat performance there that spurred Ellis to document the work on his label. So were such New York stalwarts as guitarist Mike Moreno, tubist Marcus Rojas, vibraphonist Chris Dingman, and percussionists Daniel Freedman and Daniel Sadownick, who—along with…