Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2020 i JazzTimes

→ Exclusive Content Ulysses Owens Jr. offers tips on pandemic entrepreneurship for musicians; Colin Fleming draws a line between “St. James Infirmary” and COVID-19; Ashley Kahn conducts a Before & After listening session with guitarist David Gilmore; and Ken Micallef picks 10 key recorded examples of jazz drumming in our latest JazzTimes 10. Plus album reviews and much more. → JT Blog At press time, the Detroit Jazz Festival is still scheduled to go forward this year, on three indoor stages at the Detroit Marriott at the Renaissance Center Sept. 4-7, but those stages will not be open to the public. Instead, all performances will be streamed or broadcast live for free via the festival’s web page, public radio and TV, and the Detroit-JazzFest LIVE! app, among other outlets. →…

Los Angeles-born and bred, Billy Childs has built a remarkable career as a pianist, composer, and arranger largely away from the New York jazz scene. The child of two teachers, he was classically trained both in high school and at USC, where he studied composition. After early gigs with J.J. Johnson and Freddie Hubbard, Childs went on to lead his own groups and release a dozen albums on the Windham Hill, Stretch, Shanachie and, most recently, Mack Avenue labels, netting 13 Grammy nominations. Artists such as Dianne Reeves and Chris Botti have leaned on his composing and arranging chops. Especially gifted in working with singers and the spoken word, he’s also written numerous large-scale works for classical orchestras and chamber ensembles. Childs’ latest album Acceptance features the same core instrumentalists…

“Honestly, at first I was a little worried about it coming off as trite,” says Ike Sturm, bassist for the acoustic duo Endless Field, about recording their new album, Alive in the Wilderness, live in the dramatic outdoor setting of Utah’s Escalante National Monument. “Y’know: ‘Oh, wow, there are nature sounds! Listen—rushing water!’” However, when Sturm and his Endless Field partner, guitarist Jesse Lewis, finally began tracking both audio and video in the park, those concerns became moot points. “We let all those worries go,” Sturm says, “and let the environment transform the music. The trees, the water, even the sides of canyons with their natural reverb, all these things became new instruments in the ensemble.” What’s more, the pair are putting their money where their strings are: All proceeds…

The weeks that preceded this online Before & After were sheer worldwide overload—murders and marches, more deaths and outrage, widening protests, all during a continuing pandemic. Finally, as people kept speaking out, there was a degree of hope; the shared sense of history in the making was everywhere. In the music community, against this backdrop, there arose questions of increasing complexity: What should music be doing in this moment? What activities should musicians be focusing on? When the economic future of the music scene—jazz especially—is so precarious, already limited to online interaction and transaction, how much business should be business as usual? A day-long blackout initiated by the recording industry, intending to draw attention to social rather than commercial priorities, generated as much controversy as support. Many jazz musicians and…

In a holiday telegram to Martha Glaser, Erroll Garner asked about “my little princess.” He was referring to Glaser’s niece Susan Rosenberg. “My aunt was very present in my life growing up, as was Erroll,” Rosenberg says. “She was committed to jazz and, more broadly, African-American culture, and through her I learned a lot about the centrality of African-American music in American life. She was also an influence as an independent woman—her struggles as a business person before many women were in business, her struggles as a woman manager and producer and sound engineer. She fought for her client on every level, and I understood that from early on.” Before Glaser became Garner’s manager in 1953, she had extensive experience in the labor movement and civil rights-oriented politics. Her parents…

In homage to Anthony Braxton, the collective of five New England Conservatory graduates called Tropos titled their debut release on Biophilia Records Axioms // 75ab. Besides acknowledging the saxophonist/composer’s 75th birthday this past June, and referencing his “Tri-Axiom” music, the title ties into the six interpretations of Braxton compositions on the album. It would be inaccurate to consider the quintet a repertoire band, though, and that’s not just because their lineup of voice, piano, saxophone, bass, and drums reshapes the music. The Braxton pieces follow five works written by members of Tropos, and together they reveal a group deeply focused on compositions and ways to improvise within them. Although they had crossed paths with each other previously, the members of Tropos—Phillip Golub (piano), Laila Smith (vocals), Raef Sengupta (alto saxophone),…

It is November 26, 1945 in New York City, the Monday morning after the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, and producer Teddy Reig has arrived at the apartment of Charlie Parker to fetch the alto saxophonist—who required some looking after—and bring him to WOR Studios. The previous week, toasts had been drunk over the signing of a Union contract for a standard recording session, something that hadn’t been standard for quite some time; there had been a two-year ban on such sessions to save on shellac as part of the war rationing effort. The session is to last for three hours, with the aim of producing four sides. The paperwork stipulates the presence of Parker, Miles Davis on trumpet, Bud Powell on piano, Curly Russell on bass, and Max Roach on drums.…

As the COVID-19 pandemic rages on, musicians of all stripes have repeatedly, whether in interviews, in casual conversation, or on social media, said the same thing: What they miss the most is playing with other people. That familiar refrain has led to the increasing currency—particularly in jazz circles—of an unfamiliar word. The word is “telematic,” and it offers something of a solution to the problem of social distance in music. “Telematic music is where performers play together, live on the internet, with other musicians who are in different geographical locations,” explains bassist Mark Dresser, who teaches at the University of California at San Diego. “Michael Dessen, the trombonist, is at UC Irvine [about 70 miles north of San Diego], and he and I have been experimenting with this for years.”…

THELONIOUS MONK Palo Alto Impulse! The back story makes this album irresistible even before you’ve listened to it: In 1968, a 16-year-old jazz fan at Palo Alto High School in California decides to hold a concert in the school’s auditorium to raise funds for its International Club—and convinces Thelonious Monk’s manager that his client should be the headliner. (Not surprisingly, the student, Danny Scher, would soon become a major force in the live-music production world.) As concert day approaches, one of the school’s janitors, an audio enthusiast, offers to tune the piano in exchange for recording the show, a deal that’s quickly agreed to. On the afternoon of October 27, the Thelonious Monk Quartet gives its only known high-school performance. Afterward, the janitor (his name apparently lost to history, though…

From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, Ornette Coleman’s most euphonious music was the product of a unique group of like-minded geniuses. The style was scrupulously avant-garde yet also melodic, bluesy, and swinging. Ornette’s original quartet included Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins; soon Ed Blackwell replaced Higgins; several years later, Dewey Redman joined the mix. The capstone of this era is 1972’s Science Fiction, collecting all these musicians and more for one of the greatest jazz LPs of all time. Redman joined Haden in Keith Jarrett’s quartet with Paul Motian in 1971. While some of this music was unruly free jazz not far from Ornette’s noisiest utterances, much of the Jarrett repertoire was concerned with a kind of hippie ethos suitable for the Aquarian age. In the…

The offices of ESP-Disk’ have moved many times over the years. A quick scan of the label’s 1960s album covers reveals the various addresses where founder Bernard Stollman set up shop, from Brooklyn to Manhattan to Krumville, a hamlet close to Woodstock. Last January, the home office was in its final days at its latest location, the ground-floor apartment of a Brooklyn brownstone. It doubled as the home of Steve Holtje, who has managed the company since 2013, two years before Stollman passed away. Seated in a room off of his kitchen—among shelves of inventory, a coveted box of original ESP vinyl pressings, and two computers—the 59-year-old Holtje, a burly gentleman with a walrus mustache, exhibits some qualities one would expect from a label manager. “As a former critic I’ve…

For the last decade, soundbars—simple, elongated speakers designed to fit elegantly under a TV screen—were considered a poor man’s home theater. But thanks to technological innovations and improving designs, today’s soundbars have become viable replacements for home theater systems. And some are even good enough to replace a modest stereo system. The appeal of soundbars is undeniable. They take up very little space, and they can be surprisingly affordable—prices start at less than $100, and good ones are readily available from the mid-$200 range. Hookup is often as simple as a single cable connected to a TV set, and adjusting the systems for the best sound takes only a few seconds. If the soundbar is connected to the TV through an HDMI cable, it works like part of the TV:…

Music technology changed a lot after World War II. Postwar introductions included the solidbody electric guitar, electric bass, seven-inch single, multitrack tape, transistors, and much more. On paper, it would seem like an ideal era to launch a new affordable alternative to the venerable brass saxophone. London-based Italian inventor Hector Sommaruga thought so, anyway. He patented a basic design for a plastic alto sax in 1945 and built a non-working prototype a year later. With backing from John E. Dallas & Sons Ltd and others, he was ready to begin commercial production in 1950, naming his instrument for his workshop’s Grafton Way street address. According to Steve Goodson’s SaxGourmet.com, engineering firm De La Rue produced Grafton’s molded plastic body, bell, and key guards out of an acrylic compound developed by…