Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2021 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Branford Marsalis talks to Lee Mergner about writing, recording, and filming the music of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in an exclusive Q&A, and Michael J. West explores the work of Dizzy Gillespie in our latest JazzTimes 10. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Bandleader/composer Maria Schneider and the late piano legend Chick Corea each won two trophies at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards. Schneider won Best Large Ensemble Jazz Album for Data Lords and Best Instrumental Composition for “Sputnik”; Corea won Best Jazz Instrumental Album for Trilogy 2 and Best Improvised Jazz Solo for “All Blues.” Audio & Video On “SALT,” one of three singles he’s releasing this spring, Joey Alexander makes his recorded debut on Fender Rhodes; the track premiered on jazztimes.com.…

One of the most beguiling ambient tracks you’ll ever hear—one worthy of Eno, Fripp, or Glass—is buried in the soundtrack to the SNES video game Donkey Kong Country. “It feels so romantic and melancholy and grand,” saxophonist Grace Kelly tells JazzTimes of “Aquatic Ambiance,” a piece of music packaged in cartoon ape imagery and sold to children in 1994. “When I hear that song, I feel like anything’s possible. If someone heard this and didn’t think of themselves as a gamer, they might be incentivized to be like, ‘This music sounds so deep and gorgeous. What could be going on in the game and in the story?’” “Aquatic Ambiance” is so enrapturing that the 8-Bit Big Band, a New York jazz/pops orchestra featuring anywhere from 30 to 65 people, covered…

After a year of lockdown, it’s getting hard to tell if someone is naturally gregarious, or if the need for conversation and interaction is driving the urge to speak in longer bursts. With Warren Wolf, who’s been at home in Baltimore since the start of the pandemic, a jovial spark and conversational flow come across as his normal groove. “It’s funny,” he says when asked how he’s been faring. “Next week will be about one year since the lockdown started and honestly, I’ve continued to perform. Maybe not worldwide like I would normally, but I’ve been bouncing between two venues here in Baltimore, An Die Musik and Keystone Korner Baltimore. Also doing a lot of home recordings, home master classes, some performances virtually from home, and a lot of teaching…

The history of jazz musicians “ghosting” parts in films for non-playing actors is a long and storied one, from Nat Adderley playing the trumpet for Sammy Davis Jr.’s character in A Man Called Adam to Keyon Harrold doing the honors for Don Cheadle in Miles Ahead. For every Jamie Foxx (who did play and sing for the title role of Ray), there are dozens of actors who merely mimed their way through their portrayals of gifted musicians. Hey, they’re actors. What did you expect? You didn’t really think that Cheadle learned to play the trumpet as well as Miles, did you? It’s true that many of the actors did learn the rudiments of their appointed instrument, but that was just so they could pass as a professional musician and not…

For his fifth and latest release as a leader, the assertively titled Still Doing Our Thing (Posi-Tone), New Jersey-based vibraphonist Behn Gillece leads a quartet through compositions abounding with tight-fitting arrangements and rapt solos, tempered by a heartfelt groove appeal that’ll keep you glued to your headphones. In an era of sometimes academic jazz that can leave listeners disengaged, that’s no easy task. “I always try to strike a good balance between making music listenable and also making it compelling for people that really listen to jazz,” Gillece says. “I want to create something that isn’t going to lose the average person, music that people who don’t really know anything about jazz can enjoy. At the same time, I definitely want to make something challenging and compelling, because that’s what…

My assignment for this month’s column was to write about Basra, the classic 1965 Blue Note album by drummer Pete “La Roca” Sims (1938-2012), so I called one of the other musicians who played on it, bassist Steve Swallow, for a quote or two. His commentary, which follows, was so valuable that I felt nothing more needed to be said. “I met Pete La Roca on a Don Ellis gig in Queens. Jaki Byard was the pianist, and afterwards, Jaki would always tease me, ‘I was there the night you fell in love.’ The very first beat, it was love at first hit. After that, Pete and I were inseparable. We had a solemn pact to recommend each other for gigs; we also shared a room on tour, did drugs…

Freda Payne didn’t expect to be a soul singer with a hit single that would resonate across decades. She wanted to be a singer of jazz and the Great American Songbook. After all, she’d been recruited by Duke Ellington to be his band’s principal vocalist when she was only 17. She’d recorded her first album, When the Lights Go Down and Much More!!!, for a new subsidiary of ABC called Impulse!, with arrangements by Manny Albam. And she’d performed with Lionel Hampton’s band, as well as with Billy Eckstine and his gifted young arranger Quincy Jones. But Brian Holland, an old schoolfriend from Detroit, had other ideas when he ran into Payne in New York in 1969. He and his writing partners Brian Dozier and Eddie Holland had left the…

On February 9, 2021, the world of music lost one of its most indefatigable forces. For nearly 60 years as a professional, Chick Corea had delighted listeners with his startling command of the keyboard, his enviable compositional gifts, his melodic invention, his rhythmic verve, and his seemingly boundless vitality. And then, suddenly, it was all gone. Except that it really wasn’t. The thousands of audio and video recordings; the countless notes scrawled on countless piles of music manuscript paper; and, of course, the memories of family, friends, and fans all attest to that. Just about everyone who plays jazz today owes something to Corea, whether they know it or not (and most do). And so it’s appropriate that the following tributes come from a diverse range of artists, from veteran…

These days, if you’ve got the right apps, you can recreate the sound of just about any instrument on earth. In the early 1970s, when there was no digital recording, people weren’t so lucky. Back then, the best you could do was buy a Mellotron or Chamberlin. These were keyboards that played back recordings of various different instruments on magnetic tape cartridges, an analog version of what we now call samples. Cool as these early proto-sampling keyboards could be (Herbie Hancock coaxed some of the scariest sounds ever heard on this planet out of a Mellotron for 1972’s Crossings), they were expensive and tough to use. Which is where the Optigan came in. Introduced in 1971 and originally built by the Mattel toy company, the Optigan got its weird name…

Before he knew what he wanted to do for his debut album, Chris Pattishall was adamant about what he didn’t want to do. “I didn’t want to make an ‘Introducing Chris Pattishall,’” the 34-year-old pianist says. “Those types of records, oftentimes there’s great playing and a really imaginative, ambitious energy, but I’m much more interested in music that takes fuller advantage of microphones and preamps and recording consoles, how that imparts color to the sound.” Instead of filling his first recording as a leader with his own tunes, Pattishall found source material in the 75-year-old Zodiac Suite, recorded for Folkways Records by the late Mary Lou Williams. Pattishall transcribed the 12 movements of Williams’ creation and then—with producer Rafiq Bhatia and a core ensemble of Riley Mulherkar (trumpet), Ruben Fox…

>Paul Bley, Footloose! (Savoy, 1963)— “Paul and I had been playing that repertoire extensively as a duo for several months. I got Pete on the date and ended up being the musical interlocutor between Paul and Pete. Pete was upholding the value of swing, while Paul was straining at those boundaries, even though he could get a merciless groove going if so inclined. There was wonderful electricity in the air; I love that record.” >Pete La Roca, Turkish Women at the Bath (Douglas, 1967)— “I’m not on this record because I was on tour, but [bassist] Walter Booker was a lovely guy, I just loved his spirit. John Gilmore is another vastly undervalued player, and this LP is one of the few places to hear him away from of Sun…

Having been a fan of Pat Metheny’s for decades (who hasn’t?), it came as a wonderful surprise to be asked to interview him for his new project, Road to the Sun. We had been circling each other for about six years, beginning with my father Bucky’s stroke in October of 2015. Pat was gracious enough to write a get-well-soon email that I read to my father, who replied, “Didn’t we meet him in Perugia?” In fact we had, at the Umbria Jazz festival in 1999. Before that, I had taken my father to see Pat at the Beacon Theater in 1988. During that concert, my dad was taken by the different guitars Pat played and started to name them: “He’s got the classical … that’s the Gibson …” The synth…

Old hardware of any sort often carries a certain cachet. But vintage audio gear, produced from the 1950s through the 1980s, has become an obsession for many music enthusiasts. Stereo receivers that might have once sold for $40 at a garage sale now run more than $10,000 on eBay, and vintage Pioneer and JBL equipment even showed up in a recent Spotify promo video featuring the 19-year-old singer Billie Eilish. When I asked Gordon Sauck, proprietor of vintage audio gear retailer Innovative Audio in Surrey, British Columbia, about his recent experiences in the field, he confirmed that his business is up about 35 to 40 percent over the last five years, and has been especially good since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. “There’s some element of nostalgia, where people want the…

FLOATING POINTS/PHAROAH SANDERS/LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Promises Luaka Bop An album featuring electronic musician and DJ Floating Points (the nom de plume of Manchester, U.K. native Sam Shepherd), the intensity of jazz saxophone icon Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra seems on the surface built to overwhelm. Yet the anchor of Promises is a delicate, seven-note piano phrase that repeats every nine-and-a-half seconds. (Seriously: Time it.) Sound dull? In fact, it’s enchanting: as if twinkling lights were blinking on, in preparation for Sanders’ warm tenor entrance at 1:28. He undertakes some melodic wanderings which continue as a subtle string bed glides in under him at three and a quarter minutes. His sax will then weave in and out of the mix—letting more frequent but still delicate keyboard lines (both acoustic…