Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2021 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Lee Mergner talks to Maria Muldaur about her new collaboration with New Orleans’ Tuba Skinny, and Michael J. West selects 10 outstanding Horace Silver recordings in our latest JazzTimes 10. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Among the 2021 inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is pioneering singer/songwriter and poet Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011), who made politically potent music in the 1970s that fused jazz with R&B and who—although he preferred to refer to himself as a “bluesologist”—is widely regarded as one of the earliest rappers. The induction ceremony will take place on October 30 in Cleveland, Ohio. Audio & Video Our new performance series Jazz in Europe, hosted by guitarist Dekel Bor, introduces a world audience to some of the…

To say that the recorder has no cachet in jazz is putting it mildly. But that never deterred Tali Rubinstein. In fact, the instrument’s status as a tabula rasa in that genre is part of what drives her artistry and development. “I think the fact that it hasn’t been explored very much is exciting because it’s open to discovery,” she says. “There are no rules. There’s no aesthetic for jazz recorder, so you have to be your own judge and develop your own tastes in order to decide what feels authentic.” Rubinstein, 36, has caused many to reevaluate the recorder’s station. Breathing new life into these duct flutes, she echoes the boundless enthusiasm that initially set her on this path some 30 years ago while growing up in Israel. “I…

One day in 1959, pianist/composer Freddie Redd went to see alto saxophonist Jackie McLean with some new music and a unique opportunity. Redd had fallen into a Bohemian circle of painters, actors, and writers. Among them was Jack Gelber, a young playwright whose debut, The Connection, was being produced by the experimental Living Theatre. Combining a play-within-a-play structure descended from Pirandello and an existential bleakness à la Beckett, The Connection explores the gritty reality of heroin addicts waiting for their fix. Gelber’s script calls for an onstage jazz quartet to perform “in the tradition of Charlie Parker.” The musicians have speaking roles too. With Gelber’s blessing, Redd wrote an original score and recruited McLean, whose Parker-inspired alto and animated personality were perfect for the play. “When I heard the music,…

Jen Shyu is slumped over a desk. As a green spotlight illuminates her long, dark hair and shoulders, a disembodied female voice imitates bird and animal calls. The voice is Shyu’s, who—herself mute—slowly raises her head and opens her eyes as drummer Dan Weiss (sitting in the shadows behind her) flutters brushes over his snare. Her lips remain closed as the animal sounds give way to English words, again in Shyu’s (multitracked) voice: “New life. Breath. Wind. Sun. Rebirth. Butterflies. New beginning.” Now, finally, Shyu sings. “We live on earth.” She looks upward smiling, stretching the word “earth” in both time and pitch. Other Jen Shyus join her in harmony. Welcome to her new theatrical production, livestreamed from Roulette, a theater in downtown Brooklyn. The vocalist and her band Jade…

In the 1980s, as synthesizers and drum machines threatened to take over popular music, electric guitar manufacturers tried to come up with instruments that were more relevant to the times—or at least looked that way. Guitars made from non-standard materials like graphite and fiberglass began showing up in music stores; many of them (the most famous being Steinberger’s “headless” axes) were visually striking, indicating that a major guitar-design rethink was underway. One of the oddest examples of this was the Bond Electraglide, devised by Englishman Andrew Bond (an ex-bus conductor) and produced in a purpose-built factory in Muir of Ord, a village in the Scottish Highlands. Its black carbon-fiber body, graphite neck, and aluminum fingerboard set it apart immediately from more traditional wooden models. But even more distinctive was that…

Like an ornery real-estate magnate, the work of Nick Millevoi screams, “Location, location, location.” Whether as a composer or as a guitarist, he makes music that holds a distinct sense of place wherever he roams. And so it’s no surprise that this human GPS chose to write a book of 25 compositions, Streets of Philadelphia, named after streets in his old Pennsylvania stomping ground. It was published in 2019; an album of the same name, featuring 10 pieces from the book, came out late last year. Millevoi’s “locations” teem with melody, feedback and, more often than not, non-traditional tunings—a mélange of shifting terrains. “Part of my desire to create a Streets of Philadelphia book relates to wanting to have my compositions live in different contexts,” says Millevoi, who not only…

In the wake of the March 16 shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people, violence against Asians hit the top of the news cycle. It had been ramping up for months as more and more Asians were (and are) being attacked across the country. It’s not a new story, by any means, but I’d never seen it reach the American consciousness as prevalently as it did that week. However, I felt like the narrative that the news was conveying didn’t represent my story or my state of mind. I don’t think about being Asian. My identity is not defined by my ethnicity. The only time I think about it is when I’m faced with it—either positively, like when we’re celebrating culture, or negatively, like when I’m faced with some sort…

In the fall of that notorious election year of 2016, six-time Grammy-winning arranger/composer Vince Mendoza was working on a commission from the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. The five-movement piece, called simply “Concerto for Orchestra,” was driven by how much his gut churned at the mere possibility that 45—not once in our interview does he use the name Trump—might win the presidency. “The temperature of America was shifting, and the music was a mostly emotional reaction to that,” Mendoza says of its soaring, shouting strings. “As I was putting the structure of the concerto together, it became more than an emotional and musical exercise. It was the realization that my music couldn’t be separated from what was happening in the world.” October turned to November, and the dreaded possibility became reality.…

Vinyl enthusiasts love to brag that last year, the dollar volume of record sales surpassed that of CDs for the first time since the 1980s. But ask them what people are playing those records on, and they’ll likely clam up. That’s because the vast majority of people play their sides not on elite, high-end turntables such as those from Pro-Ject and VPI, but on all-in-one record players purchased for less than $100 at big-box stores such as Best Buy or Walmart. Whether or not you agree with audiophiles’ claims that vinyl sounds better, there’s little chance that those sonic benefits could find their way through these record players’ cheap ceramic phono cartridges and tiny speakers. And the extremely heavy tracking force applied by these players is enough to do significant…

ROY HARGROVE/MULGREW MILLER In Harmony Resonance This two-disc set was compiled from two different performances, one recorded at Merkin Hall at the Kaufman Music Center in New York, in January of 2006, and the other at the Williams Center for the Arts at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in November of the following year. Aside from the quality of the music, the recordings are notable because they’re the only ones Roy Hargrove made without a drummer; Mulgrew Miller, who died in 2013, played a handful of drummer-less dates over the course of his career. With their unerring synergy and the deep-grooved rhythmic impetus they summon together, these artists do not seem at all to miss the presence of a stickman. Miller, of course, has the responsibility to make full use…

Almost everybody has seen it: Sailor Sabol’s spectacularly out-of-tune rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the February 2021 CPAC convention. Dozens of videos are circulating on social media, some of them presenting the performance a cappella as it was originally sung, some of them parodies with after-the-fact accompanists trying to follow Sabol as she wanders through at least four excruciating key changes. But the funniest of them all—and the one that went the most viral by far—was the brainchild of Larry Goldings, the much-admired L.A.-based pianist, organist, and composer. In it he portrays both a hapless keyboard accompanist who shows up late for the gig, having missed rehearsal and soundcheck, and the show’s exasperated director, whose voice is heard in the accompanist’s headphones saying, “You’d better not screw this up!”…

British keyboardist Pat Thomas has performed alongside avant-garde luminaries for decades, but somehow has remained a relatively unknown quantity on this side of the Atlantic. At age 60, he has yet to play a live show in America. However, he’s increasingly been releasing music on U.S.-based imprints, including Nights on Saturn (communication), the most recent album by his quartet [Ahmed], issued in late March by Astral Spirits. While the group’s name pays tribute to Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927-1993), a Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston compatriot, its work strays far from his swing, indulging instead in rhythmically acute free improv that rarely relents in its pounding explorations. [Ahmed] started as a coincidence. Several years back, Thomas and saxophonist Seymour Wright had individually begun playing with bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal,…

Sonny Simmons, an alto saxophonist and English hornist who cut a unique and long-overlooked figure in the jazz avant-garde, died April 6. He was 87. Raised in Northern California, Simmons first gained attention in Los Angeles as the heir apparent to Ornette Coleman. He formed a partnership there with saxophonist/flutist Prince Lasha, which continued as both musicians moved first to New York and then back to California. Simmons—a pioneer of the English horn’s use in jazz—also established a solo career on both coasts; however, his profile remained low and was brought even lower by personal problems that left him alone and homeless on the streets of San Francisco, playing for spare change under the name Blackjack Pleasant. Discovered busking in the early 1990s by Parisian jazz club owner Geraldine Postel,…

A funny thing happened to the Canadian jazz guitar master Lorne Lofsky as he walked down Mt. Pleasant Road in Toronto one day a little over 40 years ago, a thing that would lead the jazz piano titan Oscar Peterson to produce Lofsky’s first album. At the time, Lofsky was a young, scuffling, jazz-mad musician looking for his first actual jazz gig. An alto player named Jerry Toth—someone he had never met—was coming toward him. To his great surprise, Toth stopped him on the sidewalk and said, “Are you a guitar player?” Lofsky had played a few coffeehouses and bar gigs but so far had failed to achieve his goal of breaking into the city’s first (and, for a time, only) major jazz venue, George’s Spaghetti House. Toth had heard…

As I absorbed Pasquale Grasso’s performances seriatim on the Sony Masterworks digital EP releases Solo Standards, Solo Ballads, Solo Monk, Solo Bud Powell, and Solo Bird, two aural illusions emerged. Frequently, it seemed that a pair of virtuoso guitarists were in synchronous dialogue. A less frequent but equally palpable trompe l’oreille was the sensation that Grasso’s nimble fingers had prestidigitatiously transformed his guitar strings into 88 piano keys, all the better to apply his comprehensive, creative refraction of the language of Art Tatum and Bud Powell: the long arpeggiated runs, the harmonic extensions, the disjunctive comping, the complex rhythmic shapes, the impeccable pocket, the poetic sensibility. In point of fact, Grasso, who recorded the tracks in 2017 and 2018, generated every note, chord, and voicing on his signature Trenier guitar,…

Those only familiar with Diego Barber’s Sunnyside Records output might be taken aback by his latest release on the label, Drago. Its largely electronic sounds seem to be a major departure for a virtuoso on the nylon-string guitar in both classical and jazz settings. But those who are aware of his collaboration with electronics whiz Hugo Cipres on the 2013 Origin Arts release 411 will be less surprised. That record saw Barber, on processed electric guitar, joining Cipres, Seamus Blake on tenor sax and EWI, Johannes Weidenmueller on bass, and drummer Ari Hoenig to cook up a delicious stew of jazz, groove, and electronica. Fact is, this Spanish-born, Brooklyn-residing guitarist harbors a strong affinity for modern sounds. A lover of Chicago and Detroit dancefloor tunes, he also enjoyed Berlin’s electronic…

Sometimes I like to imagine I’m a workaday jazz musician from a very specific point in time. It’s May 1941 in New York City. I’m dragging and it’s getting late, but I head on over to Minton’s Playhouse, where some cats are going to jam into the morning. I park myself out of the way, listen to the nascent forms of bebop taking hold, but it’s only when a 24-year-old guitarist starts doing his thing that I shed all vestiges of the soporific and come alive. That guitarist, of course, is Charlie Christian, who will (and it feels like a miracle in reverse) be dead in less than a year. His body of work—his legacy—is built over the years 1939-1941. Doesn’t seem like a lot, until, that is, you start…