Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2020 i JazzTimes

Mark Colby, a well-traveled saxophonist who eventually put down roots in Chicago as a jazz educator, died Aug. 31 from complications related to cancer. He was 71. Colby spent three years in the 1970s as part of Maynard Ferguson’s big band, then moved over to Bob James’ band for six years. With James’ assistance, he signed to CBS Records and cut two notable albums, 1978’s Serpentine Fire and 1979’s One Good Turn, featuring James, Steve Gadd, Hiram Bullock, Mike Mainieri, and others. He also performed with a wide range of artists including Tony Bennett, Sammy Davis Jr., Charlie Haden, Jaco Pastorius, Doc Severinsen, Frank Sinatra, and Sarah Vaughan. In 1980 he moved to Illinois, and although he continued to gig and record well into the 21st century, his focus shifted…

JAZZTIMES DID NOT START WITH A PROPOSAL, prospectus, or PowerPoint presentation. There was no capital investment. There was no particular strategic plan. It didn’t even have a name. What kind of magazine is launched without a thoroughly researched and market-tested name? The answer is a jazz magazine in 1970—one that would evolve into an award-winning publication and, with all modesty, one of the finest music magazines in the world. Like most publications, it started as the vision of one man. In the ’60s, Ira Sabin, a former society drummer and concert presenter, was the owner of an R&B and jazz record store—Sabin’s Discount Records—in the U Street corridor of Washington, D.C. The store became a cultural hot spot, with many of the great African-American artists of that time stopping by…

A snap quiz from the Kollege of Musical Knowledge: Who introduced the timeless tune “Singin’ in the Rain” in a Hollywood musical? Gene Kelly in the eponymous 1952 movie, right? Wrong. “Singin’ in the Rain” was first performed on screen in The Hollywood Revue of 1929 by Ukulele Ike. Here’s another one: Who sang “When You Wish Upon a Star”? You got this—Jiminy Cricket, in Disney’s 1940 animated feature Pinocchio. One more: The cow goes moo… The cat meows… The duck goes quack… Easy, that’s from the mind-numbing viral YouTube phenomenon “The Fox (What Does the Fox Say?).” But those lines appeared decades earlier in “You Are a Human Animal,” which aired on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club back in 1955. The singer was Cliff Edwards. The thing is, Ukulele…

After Prince’s Parade tour ended in September 1986, Eric Leeds was sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon when he got a call from his boss: “I’m here with my dad playing some jazz. Want to come over and play with us?” An hour later, Leeds showed up at Prince’s house, where Prince led him to an upstairs room with a grand piano. “His dad had left, though, so now what?” The two went on to do what they often did: jam with no explanation. “We’re sitting at the piano. I get my horn out. Prince starts to play progressions on the piano. I’m writing down chord changes. He’s coming up with melodies … we went through three songs until he said, ‘Let’s get to work.’ I’m thinking we’re going…

49th Parallel Reel to Real With an archival jazz release, you need the backstory. The Real to Reel label is diligent about backstories. In 1987, Neil Swainson, a first-call bassist on the Toronto jazz scene, made an ambitious plan for his first (and to date only) album as a leader: Hire trumpeter Woody Shaw (with whom Swainson had gigged) and tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson (whom he had never met). Use reliable, familiar Canadians in the rhythm section (pianist Gary Williamson, drummer Jerry Fuller). Write some tunes with openings for bass solos. It came together on May 2 and 3, 1987, at Studio 306 in Toronto. Henderson was a no-show on May 2. (He was famous for such behavior.) He appears on four of the seven tracks. All seven are terrific.…

José Martí en Nueva York Greenleaf Sometimes big lives require big bands. That’s what Cuban composer/pianist Manuel Valera discovered after he’d completed his 2013 Chamber Music Jazz Works commission for the project José Martí en Nueva York. Martí was the patron saint of Cuba, an activist/writer and fierce catalyst for the country’s independence from Spain, who martyred himself for the cause at age 42 at the Battle of Dos Rios in 1895. Four years earlier, exiled in New York, he completed Versos Sencillos, a book of poems regarded as his masterpiece. Valera composed music around nine of those poems and premiered the project with his New Cuban Express sextet in 2014. But he soon believed the material demanded a grander scope. With the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the…

JazzTimes—or, more accurately, the publication that would become JazzTimes—predates me by about two years. As Ira Sabin and his jazz-loving colleagues in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere labored to turn a record-store circular into a tabloid newspaper (you can read more about that on pg. 20), I was a young boy in southeastern Massachusetts finding my way through preschool and kindergarten. When that paper officially adopted the JazzTimes moniker, I was in elementary school in Boston. I started playing guitar at age nine, and became a jazz fan within two or three years. But I was a latecomer to JazzTimes. Because I regularly haunted the music sections of my local newsstands, I saw it all the time, both the tabloid and the later glossy version. But for some reason I never…

Meredith D’Ambrosio’s second album from 1981, Another Time, is a perfect object, absolutely one of a kind. Her voice is low in range but light in affect. She’s clearly a saloon singer, someone used to delivering torch songs to the accompaniment of booze and cigarettes, but somehow her presentation is totally innocent nonetheless. Evelyn Waugh said that P.G. Wodehouse’s stories existed in Eden before the Fall. In D’Ambrosio’s hands, even adult songs like “Lazy Afternoon” lack any suggestion of sin. At the piano, she works over the material, pruning and shaping, finding a personal interpretation for the accompaniment. The diatonic chime of her reharmonizations occasionally recalls a child’s music box, but there’s also just enough of Bill Evans’ added-tone colors to satisfy the experienced listener. Each song is under three…

Over the years, we learned that sometimes it was best to have a musician interview another musician, because there would be an instant ease and shorthand between them. Our subjects clearly opened up in these situations, in a way that they would never have done with a jazz writer or critic. We thought you’d enjoy reading a few select excerpts from our back pages, in which artists from the contemporary scene spoke with jazz greats about some of their peers and mentors—all legends in the history of jazz. LEE MERGNER TONY BENNETT, interviewed by BILL CHARLAP (2006) CHARLAP: Can you tell me about your relationship with Count Basie? BENNETT: What happened with Count Basie and myself was a little ahead of time, because the record companies, generally, were very hesitant…

IN APRIL OF 1953, PEGGY LEE EMBARKED UPON a recording project that would produce a top-ten jazz vocal album of all time—her peerless and legendary collection Black Coffee. This album represented the crowning achievement of her Decca years, the most acclaimed album of her entire career, and one of the very first concept albums ever produced. Initially it appeared in a 10-inch, long-play record format with only eight songs. The enormous success of this modest recording compelled Decca executives to propose an expansion and rerelease of the album a few years later to include a total of 12 songs. The augmented album was crafted in the new 12-inch disc medium that remained prevalent in fans’ living rooms for nearly three more decades. Songs subsequently added to this project in 1956…

Jackets XL Mack Avenue Thirty-nine years in and still dropping cracking grooves and catchy melodies, Yellowjackets return with their 25th album, which finds the quartet revisiting original material from its past discography. If you’re like me, you’ve jumped on or off Yellowjackets’ train at various times in their career. Who could resist their eponymous 1981 debut, a blast of fresh L.A. jazz-funk? I personally dove deep during their ’86-’87 period and the burners Shades and Four Corners. Regardless of year, though, they’ve retained an instantly recognizable sound: knotty drum grooves, brain-glued melodies, clever harmonies, and extended, rip-roaring solos. Performed by the current YJ lineup of tenor saxophonist/EWI player Bob Mintzer, keyboardist Russell Ferrante, drummer Will Kennedy, and electric bassist Dane Alderson, Jackets XL also features the WDR Big Band, which…

Joni Mitchell “Woodstock” Ladies of the Canyon (Reprise, 1970) I cannot begin to write about the significance of Joni Mitchell and who she is and what she means to me. The heroine of the story. The one and only. There is a bittersweet set of circumstances that brought on this masterpiece, but nevertheless, it is an anthem for a generation at its zenith and as it fades away. She puts it perfectly: We are stardust/We are golden/And we’ve got to get ourselves/Back to the garden. The Ahmad Jamal Trio “The Awakening” The Awakening (Impulse!, 1970) Ahmad Jamal is an absolute master of space, groove, song structure, and interpretation. The balance of his brilliance is unparalleled, and at the fulcrum rests his total command of the instrument to execute whatever he…

What better way to celebrate the anniversary of a music magazine than by making a list? Given how much time we’re spending at home right now, a list of albums seemed the most sensible, and fun, option. Under normal circumstances, we might not all have the chance to delve into so many recorded statements of such length; we may as well take advantage of the opportunity while we’ve got it. A few basic ground rules were necessary, though. The most important: 1. Ten albums for each decade that JazzTimes has been around.2. No more than one album per decade by any single “headline” artist. (Of course, many of these artists have a way of reappearing on other people’s albums, but we didn’t penalize them for that. Similarly, we didn’t consider…

Bringing together musical geniuses with huge egos—no matter what respect or affection exists between them—can be more difficult than uniting warring nations or battling spouses. So it was with the brief dance between Prince and Miles Davis. In the first half of the 1980s, Prince established himself as a wunderkind-auteur known for rolling cosmopolitan R&B, funk, psychedelic rock, and new wave into one sweetly soulful yet edgy pop mélange. In that same period Davis, jazz’s eclectic, ever-changing trumpet god, re-emerged from a five-year retirement and left his longtime label Columbia for Warner Bros., Prince’s industry home since 1977. That each loved the other’s work is no secret; that they actively sought collaboration is the stuff of legend. Now, more than three decades after the twosome sort of connected, what little…