Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content Lee Mergner celebrates the reopening of New York jazz clubs with a weeklong series of live reviews, and Alan Nahigian presents a gallery of images from a recent live tribute to Wayne Shorter at the River to River Festival, featuring Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Germany’s MPS Records, which issued jazz records from 1968 to 1983 and had a reputation for high-quality recordings, is reissuing key catalog items on CD and limited-edition vinyl. Titles include Ella Fitzgerald’s Sunshine of Your Love (1969); Freddie Hubbard’s The Hub of Hubbard (1970); the Oscar Peterson Trio/Voices Unlimited’s In Tune (1971); Bill Evans’ Symbiosis (1974); and Joe Henderson’s Mirror Mirror (1980). Audio & Video Check out violinist Curtis Stewart’s solo…

“I feel like it’s my passion to uncover these forgotten gems.” Since her early days during the folk revival of the 1960s, Maria Muldaur has been immersed in American roots music of the past—the often quite distant past, at that. A native of New York City, specifically the West Village, Muldaur got her start playing with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band along with her then-husband, singer/guitarist Geoff Muldaur. “We’d spend all our spare time listening to old jug band recordings looking for stuff to play ourselves,” she explains. “We were also listening to a lot of jazz, like Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey Brothers, the McKinney Cotton Pickers … We’d spend hours listening to those old records. It’s really a part of me.” Muldaur recorded her first solo album…

The pandemic that began in March 2020 had a disproportionate effect on jazz festivals, in part because the majority take place in the spring, summer, and early fall, and in part because they are, by definition, large gatherings of people. Some festivals tried postponing their in-person events, while others reverted to virtual or streamed performances—either live, archival, or both, but without audiences. With vaccinations on the rise, more festivals are resuming activities with live audiences this summer and fall, though all have had to comply with the directives of their local and state governments. And the corresponding protocols vary widely from state to state. Regardless, it’s exciting to see musicians performing live in front of audiences, at whatever capacity is allowed. Here’s a rundown of all the United States-based festivals…

In Lee Daniels’ film The United States vs. Billie Holiday, the words “Earle Theater, Philadelphia, May 27, 1947” flash onscreen, and one sees a row of policemen, with Holiday’s manager Joe Glaser standing at the center of them. Billie comes onstage and sings the first words of “Strange Fruit, solo. Immediately, Glaser orders the police, “Get her off that stage!” and they storm forward. But wait! Holiday was not at the Earle Theater on that date. She never sang “Strange Fruit” as the first number in a set, and never sang that or anything else a cappella. Glaser didn’t generally attend the performances of the many artists he managed. Most significant, never in her entire career was Billie stopped while performing “Strange Fruit.” Yes, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics pursued…

It’s impossible to shop for audio products without confronting specifications—numbers included in web pages, brochures, and ads to lend scientific cred to marketing claims. In making their buying decisions, some shoppers rely heavily on specs, but many ignore them entirely. Considering that many marketing claims about sound quality are written by advertising pros who’ve never heard the products, it’s rational to seek out a more objective assessment. But while specs promise this, they rarely deliver. As one of the few journalists who performs scientific measurements of audio gear and conducts blind listening panels to confirm the validity of those measurements, I can share a unique perspective on this topic. For this column, I’ll examine different categories of audio products and explain which specs are meaningful and trustworthy. SPEAKERS Decades of…

Reel to Real This two-CD set comes from the archives of the Left Bank Jazz Society. From the mid-1960s into the 1980s, this organization presented Sunday concerts at the Famous Ballroom on Charles Street in Baltimore. A self-taught engineer, Vernon Welsh, recorded hundreds of shows on his Akai home tape deck. In recent years over a dozen releases on several labels have been sourced from the Welsh tapes. One of the most essential is Understanding. Roy Brooks was from Detroit. When he died there in 2005 at 67, he had been off the jazz radar for years because of mental illness and incarceration. He was a unique, creative drummer who is remembered today (when he is remembered) for his four years with Horace Silver’s quintet in the early 1960s. Occasionally…

“Going back helps with the process of moving forward.” Simon Moullier’s respect for standards runs deep. “I think they’re an important part of the culture of this music,” he says. “I’ve always learned and will continue to learn from these great composer/musicians who left us such a large body of work to explore and play within.” The French-born, New York-based vibraphonist’s debut, 2020’s quintet-centric Spirit Song, only hinted at that appreciation with the inclusion of a shimmering, odd-metered take on “I’ll Remember April”—the album focused mostly on expansive originals aglow with modernistic promise. But its follow-up goes all in. Countdown, released this past June, speaks to both the durability and malleability of standards. Capitalizing on a kinship with the rhythm section from his initial offering (bassist Luca Alemanno and drummer…

“For the minutes when we perform, we are in love.” Argentine expat jazz singer/composer Roxana Amed knows something about being a stranger in a strange land. She also knows how to adapt, meet like-minded musicians, and forge deep creative partnerships. Amed can, and does, sing anything, from Argentine classical music to Joni Mitchell, from Monk to the American Songbook. But she shies away from tango. “It’s too dark and dramatic for me,” she told me recently in a Zoom call from her Miami home. “It’s very Italian, a little too intense. And I am intense, as you can tell from the new album”—she’s referring to Ontology (Sony Latin), her seventh CD—“but I might still be too young for it.” Amed, who has lived in Miami since 2013, has a foot…

Sonny Stitt: Sonny Stitt Plays Arrangements from the Pen of Quincy Jones (Roost, 1956) Stitt’s alto soars atop Jones’ inventive little-big-band charts—dig “Love Walked In”—featuring a multigenerational cast with a majestic Jo Jones on drums. Ray Charles: The Great Ray Charles (Atlantic, 1957) Soulful simplicity defines Jones’ septet arrangements on this instrumental LP by his childhood mentor, especially “Doodlin’.” Sarah Vaughan: Vaughan and Violins (Mercury, 1959) Jones lived in Paris when he arranged these orchestral ballads for Sassy. The eloquent harmonic movement and gossamer sonorities reflect his love for Ravel…

Against all odds, Alice Coltrane’s meditation rugs remain vivid gold, scarlet, and green. Since she sold the home she’d shared with her husband John in Dix Hills, New York, in 1973, the place has been infested with mold, raided for copper wire, and overtaken by wild animals. Even sandblasted and stripped to the studs, though, the ’50s abode still retains some of Alice’s chakra-colored decor. Poking out of drab construction wrapping, the rugs’ vibrancy is impossible to ignore. True, the house is just a shell right now. But they’re symbolic, these flashes of color against brown and beige. A gaggle of selfless volunteers have tamed the house’s surrounding overgrowth, planted flowers out front, and installed indoor plumbing. The Coltrane Home’s president, Steve Fulgoni, foresees a future where the house is…

Pianist Sumi Tonooka was just 19 years old when she began taking the train from Philadelphia to Harlem to study with Mary Lou Williams. Those formative lessons took place in the same apartment where, a few decades earlier, the leading lights of bebop—Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, and Elmo Hope among them—would gather for regular salons where ideas were shared that helped shape the direction of jazz. It was a prerequisite that Williams’ young student be very aware of the ghosts that lingered in that space. “Mary Lou made sure, especially during my first lesson, that I understood that history before I ever played a note,” Tonooka recalled with a chuckle. “I didn’t touch that piano until she ran down who had been in the room. I was already…

LEE MORGAN The Complete Live at the Lighthouse Blue Note When Lee Morgan’s Live at the Lighthouse was originally released, in March 1971, it was a double-LP set with four sidelong selections. When it was reissued in 1996, it was expanded to a three-CD set, offering one version of each of the 13 tunes Morgan and company played that July 1970 weekend in Hermosa Beach, California. But now, with The Complete Live at the Lighthouse, we get the whole kit and caboodle, just about every note that the quintet recorded during their three-night, 12-set stand. With more than seven-and-a-half hours of sound stretched across eight CDs or 12 LPs, it’s a gargantuan release, easily on the scale of Miles Davis’ The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965. Except where…

“This is a voice right out of them cotton fields, out of the neighborhood.” In the concluding section of Marty Ehrlich’s gold-standard booklet notes for The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony (New World), a seven-CD extravaganza culled from the 180 audio and visual documents contained in the Julius Hemphill Archive at NYU’s Fales Library, Ehrlich reminds us that Hemphill (1938-1995)—with whom he collaborated closely for a decade, and whose music he played and organized posthumously with the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet—“would never tell you what his music meant.” No back stories or provenance are required to appreciate Hemphill’s homegrown, novelistic corpus, herein represented with 46 tracks, including 35 original compositions (25 of them previously unreleased) by 16 different configurations recorded at 18 different locations. The collection substantially augments the Fort…

This writer has always disliked first-person criticism. Readers don’t care about a writer’s subjective experience of art. The Leopolis Jazz Fest, however, has put me in a singular position—one that even I can’t generalize. The past 15 months of watching concerts on Zoom would likely have rendered any live, in-person festival incerta terra. I want to acknowledge that before I state for the record that the 2021 Leopolis Jazz Fest—held in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, whose historical Latin name is Leopolis—was both my first jazz festival since the COVID-19 pandemic and the strangest I have ever encountered. On the one hand, the programming was superlative. Artistic director Alexei Kogan, recognized as Ukraine’s nonpareil jazz authority, takes great pains to bring international talents to an international setting. (The only major…

Conventional wisdom—and many people’s understanding of jazz history—asserts that John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme is the saxophonist’s masterpiece. Recorded in a single session with his indomitable Quartet on December 9, 1964, it almost makes sense as a variety of Christmas disc, an offering from the mind and soul of the true artist to a power beyond. It’s numinous but not preachy, and simultaneously as secular as cutting through an alley to get to the bar faster. The turnaround from studio to factory to shelves was swift. By January of the new year—which proved to be Trane’s fieriest annum—A Love Supreme was in record stores. Even though Coltrane had already been many places jazz musicians had not previously, something about the album felt different. Like the apex, the high-water mark. But…

Zodiac Suite (Asch, 1945; reissued by Smithsonian Folkways, 1995) Williams’ masterpiece is both an impressionistic representation of the signs of the zodiac and a striking series of portraits of her musical colleagues. The song cycle, which still sounds utterly modern today, is brilliantly cohesive despite its diverse range of moods and styles. Though never fully realized in the way its composer envisioned, the Zodiac Suite has continued to reveal its riches through reinterpretations by Geri Allen and Chris Pattishall as well as symphonic expansions. A Keyboard History (Jazztone, 1955) A lovely summation of the first part of Williams’ career, A Keyboard History dips into everything from stride to bop in a set of relaxed, intimate solo and trio tunes. The songs capture the mix of the sprightly and serious that…

Gregory Porter got a late start as a recording musician, but that was because he was busy flexing his chops on a culinary stage. His infatuation with cooking started during his teen years, and after college he ground his way through a variety of catering roles in San Diego, including a stint prepping vegetarian dishes with New Age guru Deepak Chopra. But it was when he moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn in 2004 that Porter began to put it all together—he became a cook at his brother Lloyd’s restaurant Bread-Stuy (later named Bread Love). “I was the soup and salad man there,” he remembers. “People loved my black bean turkey chili, and Bed-Stuy fell in love with my borscht recipe after never having tasted anything like it before.”…