Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i JazzTimes

Exclusive Content For our latest JazzTimes 10 list, Michael J. West combs through the catalog of iconic tenor saxophonist Stan Getz to find 10 standout recordings. Plus photo galleries, album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News The Playboy Jazz Festival didn’t happen in 2020 or 2021, and now that it’s coming back to the Hollywood Bowl this year, it isn’t the Playboy Jazz Festival anymore. Rebranded as the Hollywood Bowl Jazz Festival and presented by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it’s currently scheduled to take place on June 25-26, 2022. Terri Lyne Carrington (pictured) + Social Science, Gregory Porter, Cory Wong, Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, José James, Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, Azar Lawrence, and Gerald Clayton are among the headliners. Audio & Video Curtis Stigers sings and—for…

If you haven’t heard of the San Francisco-based trio Charged Particles, you’ve likely heard of the iconic artist that the group salutes on its latest CD: Live at the Baked Potato! (Summit) pays tribute to tenor saxophonist Michael Brecker (1949-2007). The album was recorded in March of 2019 at the famed Los Angeles nightclub, where keyboardist Murray Low, bassist Aaron Germain, and drummer Jon Krosnick, joined by tenor saxophonist Tod Dickow and guest percussionist Omar Ledezma, captured nine favorites from Brecker’s 20-year solo recording career and his work with sibling/trumpeter Randy in their heralded fusion act the Brecker Brothers. Randy, who knew his brother’s music better than anyone, testifies to the disc’s power on its back cover, calling it “smoking and intense from beginning to end.” Dickow first played with…

Jeff Ballard—drummer, bandleader, educator, and intrepid spirit—plops himself down into the chair onstage with a smile and a dark beer. Less than an hour after arriving by plane in Barcelona, he’s ready for a full day of activities: a performance with a student big band under the direction of Majorcan composer/arranger Toni Vaquer, as part of the Voll-Damm Barcelona Jazz Festival; a master class at the Conservatori Liceu, a leading European music institution; and a 90-minute Before & After listening session in one of the conservatory’s performance/lecture rooms, open to all Liceu students and a few members of the public. As the exercise is explained—“how Jeff interacts with the music is what we want to hear”—he tilts his head back and snores. The students all laugh. “That was me on…

“I think that the greatest thing to have happened has been George Floyd.” What? As an artist, Henry Threadgill has never shied away from provocation. The music he’s made over his 50-year career challenges listeners’ ideas of rhythm, harmony, form, and timbre. This, however, is—to say the least—an unexpected assertion. Especially from the 78-year-old multi-reedist, composer, and bandleader, whose personal manner is unfailingly gentle and cerebral (not to mention a little playful). But after the initial shock, it’s clear that Threadgill is talking about the aftermath of Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer: protests, activism, and the United States’ public reckoning with race and inequality. That, to him, has been overwhelmingly positive. “It’s kind of like the civil rights movement,” he says, speaking by phone from his home…

Paying tribute to Sérgio Mendes with a spirited sound that blends jazz improvisation, Uruguayan candombe, and breezy Airto/Flora-esque pop is never a bad thing. Just ask the six members of Brasuka, whose luscious 2021 debut album A Vida Com Paixão—which translates as A Life with Passion—is a welcome balm of cross-cultural rhythm and righteous, jazzy soul. Brasuka is rooted in a 20-year-old friendship between percussionist Ricardo Bozas and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Rosana Eckert. The twosome worked various gigs together in Dallas, playing Latin jazz, salsa, and tango in bilingual (Spanish/English) church services. “One day before a service, I found Ricardo in his car blasting Mendes’ Brasileiro,” Eckert recalls from Brasuka’s Texan HQ. “When he saw how much I loved it, he asked, ‘Do you want to start a band and play Sérgio…

From the very beginning, in 1966, we’ve been a festival for the people of Barcelona, not for tourists. We’re known to our community and to the music students here too,” says Joan Anton Cararach, artistic director of the Voll-Damm Barcelona Jazz Festival. His statement points to both a longstanding programming approach of mixing local and international artists, and a current survival strategy dealing with pandemic restrictions. Like many other annual festivals in Europe that continue to face the upside-downing impact of COVID, Barcelona has managed to soldier on while respecting shifting regulations and dwindling audiences, and it presented a robust schedule this past October and November. Significantly, the 2021 program featured a range of events in the city’s Conservatori Superior de Música del Liceu, the 183-year-old institution that first forged…

The work-from-home trend has brought families and roommates closer than ever … for better or worse. On the worse side, many professionals are finding it hard to concentrate on their work while the kids are playing nearby, and they’re getting frustrated when the noise from ever-present family members makes it hard to hear their jazz albums. Many commercials and tech columns suggest noise-canceling headphones as a solution—but they wrongly assume noise-canceling headphones cancel all noise. The reality is, for much of the noise you probably want to cancel, noise-canceling headphones are no more of an effective block than standard headphones and earphones are, and sometimes not as good. Noise-canceling headphones work by using microphones inside (and sometimes outside) the headphones to pick up noise. The audio signal from these microphones…

I’ve had the good fortune to be on a stage with Pat Martino a few times. The first time—at a jazz festival in Reading, Pennsylvania—was one of the scariest experiences in my life. Imagine going to the zoo and seeing a lion or a bear. They look intimidating enough when they’re on the other side of the cage. But now imagine you being in the cage with that beautiful, powerful animal. They seem to grow a little bigger. You can hear them breathing. You can feel the energy coming off their bodies and you know that at any given moment, they can rip you to shreds. For me, that’s the way it was getting on stage with Pat Martino. I felt lucky to walk away breathing! But I walked away…

Wayne Shorter and Esperanza Spalding’s opera …(Iphigenia) begins with a woman dropping dead. Even in opera’s greatest tragedies the bodies don’t usually start piling up quite this soon. As it turns out, though, a body count drives the entire first act of …(Iphigenia). By its end, we’ve seen the killing of five women and two deer—and one of the deer has transformed into a woman who is marked for death. The women, though each is dressed in a different and very bright color, are all named Iphigenia. They’re distinctive and they shine, especially in contrast to the earthtones of Frank Gehry’s set (yes, that Frank Gehry) and the costumes of the Greek soldiers that the males play. In the men’s eyes, though, they are interchangeable, with no purpose other than…

If Jesse Palter’s brisk, buoyant composition “Spinning ’Round” sounds familiar to you on first listen, there’s a reason for that: Other jazz singers like it a lot. Sara Gazarek recorded it on her Grammy-nominated 2019 album Thirsty Ghost. Cécile McLorin Salvant has performed it at the GroundUP Festival and at New York’s Village Vanguard. “There is nothing more exhilarating than when other artists think enough of my songs to record or sing them live,” Palter says. “It’s the grandest of honors. But it feels so profound to me that people can finally hear my version.” “Finally” is the proper adverb here, as the release of Palter’s own rendition of her song has been a long time coming. She recorded it in 2013 as part of a full-length album, cut with…

On an unseasonably warm evening in December, just at the opening break of Omicron and yet another shift in everyone’s lives, alto saxophonist/composer Immanuel Wilkins is busy in his new Brooklyn home. Cooking. A lot. Calm in the face of a just-canceled show at the Village Vanguard while readying The 7th Hand—his second Blue Note album with his longtime quartet (pianist Micah Thomas, bassist Daryl Johns, drummer Kweku Sumbry)—Wilkins passionately runs through cuisine-related minutiae as if he were tightening his ligature or wetting his reeds. Preparing braised short ribs with more tinkling and crashing than you might hear from his drummer’s cymbals at a gig, Wilkins laughs as he discusses the joy of cooking. “I had spent so much money on exorbitant dinners before COVID that I didn’t want to…

VOTING CONDUCTED VIA AN ONLINE SURVEY POSTED AT JAZZTIMES.COM Winners are bolded; runners-up are listed below in order of number of votes (an asterisk * denotes a tie). When casting their ballots at jazztimes.com, readers were asked to focus on artists’ achievements occurring between January and December 2021. Best of All ARTIST OF THE YEAR Allen Lowe Brandee Younger Pat Metheny Emmet Cohen NEW ARTIST PAKT Samara Joy Nicole Glover Emma-Jean Thackray NEW RELEASE Brandee Younger Somewhere Different (Impulse!) Pat Metheny Side-Eye NYC (V1.IV) (Modern/BMG) PAKT (Percy Jones/Alex Skolnick/Kenny Grohowski/Tim Motzer) PAKT (MoonJune) Chick Corea Akoustic Band LIVE (Concord) VOCAL RELEASE Tony Bennett & Lady Gaga Love for Sale (Columbia/Interscope) Veronica Swift This Bitter Earth (Mack Avenue) Esperanza Spalding Songwrights Apothecary Lab (Concord) Kurt Elling SuperBlue (Edition) HISTORICAL/VAULT/REISSUE RELEASE John…

“It’s almost like a nirvana for jazz artists.” From Straight Life to Jazz and Justice, creative-music literature is rife with horror stories about artists—especially Black ones—getting ripped off. As pianist/composer/educator Jason Moran reiterates to JazzTimes, “The history of our music and being taken advantage of goes back to slavery in this country.” Moran spent 18 years on Blue Note Records, which he describes as a positive experience. After fulfilling two contracts for the label, it was time to move on. But when he surveyed the streaming landscape for new options, he found it wanting; history seemed to be repeating itself. And so, with Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Ahmad Jamal in mind—artists whom he cites as “taking back the catalog”—Moran decided to follow in their footsteps, 21st-century style. Instead of…