Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2021 i JazzTimes

I don’t mean to sound like a complainer, or to rehash the complaints that countless others have already expressed before me, but wasn’t 2021 supposed to be better than 2020? Or was that just a grand delusion under which we all were suffering? You could argue, justifiably, that the jazz world has seen some major signs of improvement this year. COVID vaccines are here, and they generally work. Clubs are open again. Festivals actually took place this summer and fall. Colleges, universities, and conservatories are back to holding in-person classes, with educators in the same room as their students. This is indeed progress. And yet, as I compiled this issue’s Farewells page, taking note of the names within it and the number of those names, I have to confess that…

George Wein, a pianist, producer, impresario, and NEA Jazz Master whose name became synonymous with music festivals, died Sept. 13 at his home in Manhattan. He was 95. Wein’s early work managing and booking Boston’s Storyville club in the 1950s eventually led him to become the organizing force behind the Newport Jazz Festival, the Newport Folk Festival, and the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, among others. John Sheridan, a pianist known for his decades of work with Texas trad revivalists the Jim Cullum Jazz Band, died Aug. 24 in San Antonio of cancer. He was 75. Jemeel Moondoc, an alto saxophonist who studied with Cecil Taylor in the 1960s and became a prime mover in the New York loft-jazz scene of the ’70s with his group Ensemble Muntu, died…

When putting together her latest project—Sing a Song of Bird, a dynamic production that features Charlie Parker compositions with new arrangements and lyrics—Roseanna Vitro nearly wrote herself off her own album. That wasn’t intentional; she was generously making room for the contributions of other singers, including Sheila Jordan, Marion Cowings, and the late Bob Dorough. However, when Vitro started the process of submitting the album for Grammy Awards consideration, she realized that she had to be on at least 51% of the disc for it to be categorized under her name and not as Various Artists. Her husband, the accomplished recording engineer Paul Wickliffe (also the album’s producer), meticulously counted the minutes; it turned out that she was on exactly 51% of the album. Why is Vitro willing to share…

Concord Jazz Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe was the title of a 1969 Albert Ayler recording, and more than 50 years later, bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding is taking up the cause. Her inspiration was not Ayler but another legendary saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, with whom she collaborated on the opera Iphigenia, which will be presented at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., this December. Shorter was in ill health at the time and rebounded as the two worked together. However, holistic concerns have been at the root of much of Spalding’s recent music. Her 2019 release, 12 Little Spells, correlated each song to a body part. It’s not hard to imagine in these times of pandemic, global climate crisis, and a capricious level of economic stratification that…

Hollistic MusicWorks Forget scenes or subgenres: What vibe of jazz got you into this music? For this writer, it was the inimitable feeling of four or five musicians playing swinging blues in a cramped dining hall inches from your face, the ride cymbal skipping like a stone. If that’s your jam, absorb all the ’60s Blue Note and Impulse! music, then head straight for ’90s labels: HighNote, Savant, Criss Cross, et al. It won’t be long before you come across Brian Lynch. Lynch is an undisputed, understated master of the trumpet. After releasing his debut album as a leader, 1986’s Peer Pressure, he performed in the final incarnation of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. That led to a succession of great solo records on Criss Cross, Sharp Nine, and…

Since her arrival on the jazz scene in the early 1990s, vocalist Kate McGarry has carved out a unique niche, respected by her fellow singers as someone who can take on rock, folk, and pop songs and make them her own. Her latest album, What to Wear in the Dark—for which she shares billing with her partner in music and life, guitarist Keith Ganz—takes on compositions from classic rock and singer/songwriters of the early ’70s, including the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Cat Stevens, Leonard Cohen, Steely Dan, and the Eagles. In choosing the material, McGarry was inspired by two very different sources: the music she heard growing up in the ’70s on Cape Cod (thanks in large part to her six sisters and three brothers) and the vision of…

Counting off a tune as she steps to the mic, Veronica Swift holds tempo in her stride. In the living room of a longtime collaborator, pianist Emmet Cohen, she engages those around her and begins telling a story as only she can. That’s her truth on the bandstand. Away from it, Swift enters a state of artistic metacognition. Since the dramatic worldwide changes of spring 2020, the singer and composer out of Charlottesville, Virginia, has been stepping outside herself to observe permutations of her own expression. “It’s almost a meditation,” the 27-year-old artist says. “You take yourself out of your body and it gives you clarity when you come back in.” Despite the solemnity of her words, thick white-framed sunglasses that cover half her face can’t hide the glint in…

Tenor saxophonist Nicole Glover was no stranger to the jazz world before September, when she released her debut album as a leader, Strange Lands, on the Savant label—she’d played with George Colligan, Esperanza Spalding, and the quintet Out to Dinner—but she wasn’t exactly high-profile either. (Disclosure: I wrote the liner notes for Strange Lands.) How did HighNote/Savant head Barney Fields get wind of her? Through the artists he’d already signed. “[Trumpeter] Jeremy Pelt and [pianist] George Cables were on tour with a trio in February of 2020,” Fields says. “And they heard her. Cables first brought up Nicole: ‘Oh, she’s particularly good. She’s a great player, she’s been around, playing with a bunch of different people.’ Then Pelt took it on himself, when he came back from the tour—he came…

ART BLAKEY AND THE JAZZ MESSENGERS First Flight to Tokyo: The Lost 1961 Recordings Blue Note Taken from a previously unissued live recording caught at Tokyo’s Hibiya Public Hall in 1961, during the Jazz Messengers’ first-ever tour of Japan, First Flight to Tokyo chronicles a fresh performance by one of jazz’s greatest bands in front of an adoring audience. The release features the legend/leader with the top Messengers lineup of Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Bobby Timmons, and Jymie Merritt. Songs include “Now’s the Time,” “’Round About Midnight,” and Messengers standards “Dat Dere” and “Moanin.’” First Flight includes rare photos and new interviews with Shorter, Japanese music critic Reiko Yukawa, and contemporary drum greats Louis Hayes, Billy Hart, and Cindy Blackman Santana. Audio was transferred from the original ¼" tape reels;…

International Anthem Neither the Jamire Williams who drummed with the likes of Dr. Lonnie Smith, Christian Scott, and Jeff Parker nor the one who made the free solo-drum album Effectual in 2016 is the Jamire Williams behind the eerie, astonishing But Only After You Have Suffered. This incarnation combines traces of his genre-busting former band EMIRAJ; generous hints of art-soul singer Solange, whose 2019 album When I Get Home Williams co-produced; and—judging by the sound—some potent LSD. That last is wanton speculation. Still, the sound collages that constitute much of But Only After You Have Suffered favor amorphous, alien atmospheres with lots of reverb, psychedelic drones, and distorted pitch and speed (and other manipulation). Williams’ primary instruments are sequencers and samplers (sometimes adding drums, synths, Mellotron, and even vocals), but…

“I’M ALL ABOUT TRYING TO LIVE THE LIVES THAT I SING ABOUT.” When the world shut down last year, so did Alicia Olatuja. The St. Louis, Missouri-bred vocalist sat in her New Jersey apartment one day watching a video and started crying because she missed performing. The COVID lockdown had forced artists into a virtual atmosphere, in which they had to imagine the large crowds that they would normally see. But that was not so easy to do. For Olatuja, it wasn’t just live singing that she longed for; it was the chance to sprinkle seeds of hope and inspiration among the people who come to see her. Since childhood, Olatuja has loved to sing. She handles multiple genres—opera, gospel, soul, jazz—with equal self-assurance and has become something of a…

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KURT ELLING SuperBlue Edition No one could have known it at the time, but the seeds for vocalist Kurt Elling’s SuperBlue may have been sown when he guested on seven-string hybrid guitarist Charlie Hunter’s underrated, genre-bending 2001 release, Songs from the Analog Playground. Twenty years later, the Grammy-winning Elling expands his horizons with Hunter (who co-produced SuperBlue with him) and keyboardist DJ Harrison and drummer Corey Fonville, both from the funk/jazz/hip-hop group Butcher Brown. With travel restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, Elling never even met his Butcher Brown bandmates. Hunter acted as the go-between, recording basic tracks with them; presenting the instrumentals to the singer to interpret; and then finishing the project with Elling, all in separate studio locations. From the downbeat of the strutting opening title track, it’s clear…

Whirlwind Hardly a novice as a leader or sideman, Montreal-based tenor saxophonist, occasional bass clarinetist, and composer Chet Doxas has rarely received his flowers. Viewed through the lens of lyrical early-’60s Wayne Shorter and Branford Marsalis at his most muscular, Doxas has got chops, buoyancy, and tone for days. In particular, his work with Carla Bley, his straight-ahead leader debut Sidewalk Etiquette, the improv-heavy Rich in Symbols, and his co-leadership of Dave Douglas’ Riverside quartet stick out. Put a check next to You Can’t Take It with You as one more dynamic effort. For his first album fronting a trio, the saxophonist has drawn two aces in onetime Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson and bassist Thomas Morgan. Recorded in 2019, with production and album art (!) by Doxas, his ninth…