Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2021 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Our beloved JazzTimes 10 lists are back, and first on the docket is Lee Mergner’s selection of the most notable ghost performances by jazz musicians in well-known films. When Frank Sinatra “played” drums in The Man with the Golden Arm, for example, who was really doing the playing? Find out here. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT Blog Just as this issue of JazzTimes was about to go to press, we received word that one of jazz’s true modern masters, Chick Corea, passed away on Feb. 9 at the age of 79 after a short battle with a rare form of cancer. Go to our website to read Michael J. West’s full obituary, along with personal tributes from musicians who knew and worked with…

I tend to flow with what feels right in the moment,” Jorge Roeder notes. It’s a comment about some pivotal moves in his life, but it could just as easily serve as an overarching philosophy for his work. With an unerring ear, quick reflexes, an exacting sense of rhythm, and a virtuosic streak veiled by its conversational nature, Roeder is nothing if not purely present. Leveraging that high level of focus, he’s become one of the premier bassists on the scene while bolstering bands led by guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Shai Maestro, trombonist Ryan Keberle, saxophonist John Zorn, and numerous others. Each person who calls on Roeder is, no doubt, attracted to something slightly different in his musical makeup, but the broad appeal, as boiled down by Lage, surrounds one…

My music always expresses the way I see things from day to day—how my perceptions change, what’s meaningful or less meaningful,” bassist Buster Williams told me in 2004, when I wrote the liner notes for Griot Liberté (HighNote). That album, his last as a leader until 2018’s Audacity (Smoke Sessions), featured his working group of the time (Stefon Harris, vibes; George Colligan, piano; Lenny White, drums), navigating six Williams originals with aphoristic titles like “The Wind of an Immortal Soul” and “The Triumphant Dance of the Butterfly.” “The griot is a storyteller who liberates the soul and the spirit,” Williams elaborated. “To be liberated is to be able to go to sleep instantly at night because your day has been fulfilled with victory. The real victory is how we defeat…

This column usually focuses on the needs of more advanced or professional musicians. But what about all of us jazz fans who don’t play an instrument, or haven’t played since band practice in high school or that basement band with our college friends? Two musicians, using different approaches with different instruments, are addressing this new and expanding market. Bassist Gerald Veasley initially created his Bass Boot Camp in 2012 for the usual workshop/clinic audience: younger, early (or pre-) professionals. “It was really a challenge for them to sign up; they didn’t have the money or they didn’t have the time, or they needed to really focus on just playing,” he explains. “Then we noticed who did embrace it—the older students. We just pivoted to offer it to the folks who…

My original plans for this issue hadn’t called for Buster Williams and Eddie Henderson to be sharing feature space. But since fate dictated otherwise, it would be remiss of me not to mention an important anniversary for both musicians. It was 50 years ago—early March 1971—that the first album Williams and Henderson recorded together reached the ears of the world. That disc was Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi, also featuring trombonist Julian Priester, bass clarinetist/flutist Bennie Maupin, and drummer Billy Hart. The so-called “Mwandishi sextet” would make two more albums together—Crossings (1972) and Sextant (1973)—and be largely responsible as well for Henderson’s first three albums: Realization (1973), Inside Out (1974), and Sunburst (1975). The prevailing mood of this music is spacy yet murky, celebratory yet ominous, both funky and free, seeming to…

With 25 albums to his credit as a leader since his mid-’80s debut, Brian Bromberg is nothing if not prolific. The veteran of countless sessions has applied his virtuoso-level skills on a huge variety of upright basses and bass guitars to a rangy mix of soundscapes. There’s last fall’s high-energy Bromberg Plays Hendrix – 2020 Remix and radio-ready smooth-jazz productions like his new A Little Driving Music, as well as tributes to fusion giant Jaco Pastorius and bossa-nova heavyweight Antonio Carlos Jobim, and a bruising rock release called Metal. “I’ve been blessed with the curse of diversity. I could play five different things that I’ve recorded, and you would have no idea who the artist is,” Bromberg says from his home about an hour and a half outside of Los…

For this Before & After listening session, originally done via Zoom and streamed live online, we decided that a multifaceted subject like bassist/composer/arranger/bandleader/educator John Clayton should have another musician act as host. We chose clarinetist and saxophonist Ken Peplowski, not just because he has a long personal and musical relationship with Clayton—with whom he’s played at many a jazz festival, party, and cruise—but also because he’s an amateur musicologist and clever raconteur with a host of anecdotes at his disposal. The result was a conversation not just about the music that was played, but also about the intricacies of intonation, the nuance of the beat, the dangers of the metronome, and why fake books hurt rather than help young musicians. Clayton proved to be an astute, respectful listener who, rather…

You’re probably familiar with the cartoons that depict biological evolution as a parade of walking figures: crouching chimpanzee on the left, stooped humanoid and stocky Neanderthal in the middle, modern human on the right. The cover of Morgan Guerin’s debut album, The Saga, released in 2016 when he was 18, depicts an analogous musical evolution. On the left is a toddler in diapers holding drum sticks half as long as he is. To his right is a grade-school student holding a cymbal and an alto saxophone. Next over is a middle-school student in shades with a keyboard in his right hand and an electric bass in his left. At the far right is a high-school student with drumsticks pinned under his right elbow as he plays a tenor sax. It’s…

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 program websites to confirm. United States ALASKA Juneau Jazz & Classics Festival May 19-29 Juneau (907) 463-3378 jazzandclassics.org Description: Juneau Jazz & Classics brings world-class artists to inspire, teach, and enrich the lives of Alaskans in a beautiful yet remote location. JJ&C education includes school clinics, performances and public workshops. 2021 format TBA. Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival July 18-August 1 University of Alaska, Fairbanks (907) 474-8869 fsaf.org AK Jazz Workshop Summer 2021 Jazz Camp August 2-7 University of Alaska Anchorage Fine Arts Building, Anchorage (907) 332-3234 akjazzworkshop.org Description: The AJW Jazz Camp at UAA features…

As veteran JazzTimes followers know, every year around now we present a report on the annual National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show in Anaheim, California. Why? Because going to NAMM is a longstanding tradition, rooted in a deeply held sense of duty to scout out the absolute best in new musical equipment and then tell our readers about it, so they can make informed purchasing decisions in total confidence. Okay, so maybe that’s not the whole truth. The JazzTimes NAMM trip is indeed a longstanding tradition, but it’s only partly about duty. It’s also a chance for us to shake a lot of hands, put faces to the names that land regularly in our email inboxes, shoot the breeze with friends in the business whom we don’t get to…

The cover of Eddie Henderson’s most recent album, 2020’s Shuffle and Deal (Smoke Sessions), finds the trumpet titan sitting on the hood of his Ferrari. The car isn’t on the cover simply because he loves it—although he does, as he’ll happily tell you—but because Ferraris served for Henderson as an odd stepping stone into his long career as a jazz musician. “I had known Herbie Hancock when he was with Miles Davis [in the mid-1960s], but all we talked about was sports cars!” he explains. “He had a Shelby Cobra, and I always wanted a Ferrari. But he only knew me as a friend of Miles [Davis, who was close to Henderson’s parents] who lived in San Francisco and loved sports cars. He didn’t even know I played. “So, when…

Every jazz fan knows that intimate clubs like the Village Vanguard sound different from large venues like Carnegie Hall. Clearly, the space we listen in matters. But many of us never consider the effect that our own rooms have on sound. A bad room can ruin the sound of even the best speakers—and a small investment in acoustical treatment can make any speaker sound better. Rooms can help the sound, because the reflections of sound waves around the room increase the sense of spaciousness you hear. But they can also hurt the sound, causing some bass notes to boom loudly and others to nearly disappear, as if someone were randomly flicking the volume control on Ron Carter’s amp. Bare walls and floors can make sounds bounce rapidly back and forth,…

ARCHIE SHEPP & JASON MORAN Let My People Go Archieball The words of Exodus suffuse the entirety of Archie Shepp and Jason Moran’s new album of duo performances, from the title to every note the two play. But listening to it, I couldn’t help but think of another passage of scripture that resonates with the soul-rattling, cavernous echo of Shepp’s saxophone: “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Make straight the path of the Lord.” As John the Baptist spoke those words in gentle yet emphatic direction to the Judeans then, Shepp’s horn screams to us today how we have failed to straighten that path. Let My People Go collects seven tracks that Shepp, the iconic saxophonist, activist and artistic polymath, and Moran, arguably the most imaginative…

Were it possible to measure the weight of a band’s sound, I’m not sure you could find a greater scale-tipper than the Count Basie Orchestra of the late 1930s. They surged as a slab of pure rhythm, a juking continental shelf. Such a setting might not seem an ideal playground for an imaginative bassist. But the Count’s man of the low tones, Walter Page, brokered no fetters—you could even say that he was a liberator, establishing sonic freedoms few players at the time got to enjoy. Born February 9, 1900, in Gallatin, Missouri, Page arrived at the very dawn of a century he’d help to imbue with its rhythmic edge. He started with the Bennie Moten Orchestra, later led his own Blue Devils—with Lester Young in tow—and was eventually absorbed…