Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i JazzTimes

– Exclusive Content For our latest JazzTimes 10 list, Colin Fleming selects 10 gems from the catalog of New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. Plus photo galleries, album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. – JT News The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) has announced the launch of its Creative Inflections program, a new initiative to provide grants to jazz artists for innovative collaborations with performing-arts presenting organizations. Its inaugural class of five organizations and seven artists—including Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Samora Pinderhughes, and Jen Shyu (pictured)—have received grants of up to $200,000 to develop multidisciplinary works that focus on social-justice themes. – Audio & Video Grammy-nominated pianist, composer, arranger, and producer David Benoit works with a big band—featuring trumpeter Wayne Bergeron and saxophonists Eric…

The bass guitar and the symphony orchestra may strike some as strange bedfellows. But it’s not like they’ve never met before. Every now and again, they connect over a concerto on stages typically home to classical musicians. John Patitucci recorded such a piece written for him by Jeff Beal, while Finland’s Lauri Porra, great-grandson of composer Jean Sibelius, composed and played a bass-guitar concerto, and Ramon Vazquez performed one by Alfonso Fuentes, to name just a few examples of a field that’s still small, if growing. “People don’t expect to have bass players get together and sound like music and not just like a bunch of elephants.” Now Victor Wooten has entered the fray with La Leccion Tres (“Lesson Three”). The Nashville-based bass virtuoso, best known for his work with…

Live at the Village Vanguard (Soul Note) Muddy sound diminishes the quartet’s two LPs taped at the Vanguard in 1983, but the first features a boisterous reading of Pullen’s nutty “The Necessary Blues.” Decisions (Timeless) Somewhat overlooked, this 1984 album boasts a gaggle of winning songs, strong playing, and a soulful Adams-Pullen duet on the hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow.” Breakthrough (Blue Note) Two Blue Note recordings in 1986-87—this and Song Everlasting—pushed the quartet to its popular zenith. I prefer the anarchy and lyricism of the inaugural Breakthrough.…

Sometimes you honor tradition, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, you recognize that you’ve become part of it. For their self-titled debut album, released in 2015, the Chicago-based trio Artifacts—flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer/percussionist Mike Reed—showcased compositions that had been written and originally performed by some of the most esteemed guiding lights of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), including Anthony Braxton, Fred Anderson, Roscoe Mitchell, and Amina Claudine Myers. For their follow-up, last year’s …and then there’s this, they took a different tack, acknowledging that all three Artifacts members are themselves longstanding AACM members (Mitchell was the association’s chair from 2009 to 2011). Although the disc includes two pieces from the oeuvres of their forebears—Muhal Richard Abrams’ “Soprano Song” and Roscoe Mitchell’s “No Side…

I Hear Voices Remember the talk box? Or the vocoder? The folks at Casio do, and they’re bringing that voice-activation technology into the 21st century with their new Casiotone CT-S1000V. Just type some words into the keyboard’s companion app and select one of 22 Vocalist types (including simulations of the two gadgets mentioned previously). You can set phrases to be played all at once, according to a set rhythm, or one syllable at a time, and you can sequence them together. That’s in addition to everything else the CT-S1000V’s got, including 800 hi-res sounds, 100 DSP effects, and the ability to sample up to 10 seconds of audio. $679.99 MSRP | casiomusicgear.com On the Edge The original Otto Link Tone Edge EB (Early Babbitt) tenor saxophone mouthpieces were made in…

If you were to ask most people what they’d want to be doing in the middle of a global pandemic, opening a jazz club in New Hampshire probably wouldn’t be all that high up the choice list. Then again, most people aren’t Michael and Peter Labrie. The longtime local restaurateurs are now co-owners of Jimmy’s Jazz & Blues Club, which opened on Congress Street in the quaintly arty seaside town of Portsmouth last September after five years of planning and construction. On a recent Zoom call with JazzTimes, the Labrie brothers, not very surprisingly, were choosing to look on the bright side of a rather strange situation. “In a lot of ways,” Michael Labrie said, “what we’re doing now is paralleling the Roaring Twenties. People then were coming out of…

When it comes to stereos, acoustic jazz fans have it easy. The deepest tones in traditional jazz come from the double bass, which in most cases goes down as low as 41 Hz, and the kick drum, which usually has a fundamental tone around 50 or 60 Hz. These notes aren’t deep enough to challenge most speakers. Fans of R&B, rock, and hip-hop need bigger speakers—or subwoofers—to reproduce the deep tones of instruments such as five- and six-string electric bass guitars (which play down to 31 Hz) or synthesizer bass and electronic percussion (both of which can get down to 20 Hz and below). Reproducing midrange and treble is easy for most speakers, but once the notes get below the range of electric guitar, the demands increase exponentially. The deeper…

ILMILIEKKI QUARTET Ilmiliekki Quartet We Jazz The jazz coming out of Finland these days is distinctive and adventurous. Yet there is not a living Finnish jazz musician who is truly famous outside the Nordic region. Verneri Pohjola could change that. He is a trumpet player with lethal chops and a deeply poetic sensibility. He has engaged in many diverse collaborations over his 20-year career. His longest association, and perhaps his most “inside” project, is the Ilmiliekki Quartet. Pohjola, pianist Tuomo Prättälä, bassist Antti Lötjönen, and drummer Olavi Louhivuori formed a group in 2002 for a Nordic jazz competition. They have been together, off and on, ever since. “Inside” is relative. Everything this band plays sounds fresh to the ear. All four write tunes. Such a democratic approach is popular among…

“I still feel [Brand X] was my band, along with [John] Goodsall’s. I think we created a good legacy.” In the mid-1970s, a young musician playing fretless electric bass started a groundbreaking career in jazz fusion as a session musician, solo recording artist, and member of one of the subgenre’s most highly regarded groups. And it wasn’t Jaco Pastorius. Percy Jones first recorded with guitarist John Goodsall, keyboardist Robin Lumley, and drummer Phil Collins (of progressive rockers Genesis) in 1975 as Brand X, a band name that Jones would be associated with through 2020. The results appeared on the group’s 1976 debut release, Unorthodox Behaviour. Collins had recently become Genesis’ lead vocalist as well as its drummer following the departure of original singer Peter Gabriel, but he sought an outlet…

On April 18, 1972, the Roland Corporation was founded in Osaka, Japan. Its mission: to produce electronic instruments and accessories for musicians. Two years later, it launched its first truly iconic product, the RE-201 Space Echo effects unit. A year after that, it debuted the JC-120 Jazz Chorus guitar amplifier. Another two years on, there emerged the MC-8 MicroComposer, a tiny but powerful sequencing device that was revolutionary at the time. Then, at the dawn of the 1980s, came the king of them all: the epochal TR-808 Rhythm Composer drum machine (see our March 2021 Gearhead column for more on that). In less than a decade, with these and many other clever inventions, the designers and engineers at Roland had changed the way music of all genres sounded. And they…

IN COMMON In Common III Whirlwind It’s become a treat to discover what new three-piece rhythm section guitarist Matt Stevens and saxophonist Walter Smith III have assembled for their latest quintet recording under the In Common moniker. The co-leaders possess the taste, credibility, and connections to choose delectable cohorts each time out. With Dave Holland on bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums, and Kris Davis on piano, the lineup for In Common III doesn’t disappoint. Davis’ presence feels the most impactful, as In Common ventures into more untethered improvisations than on its first two albums. “Oliver” wobbles with the woozy dissociation of a funhouse mirror (ironically, Davis’ ostinato is the constant), “Shutout” has a spectral mix punctuated by what sounds like a distant outboard motor, and Smith’s “Variable” syncs up…

My entry into Paul Chambers’ bass playing was Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, which I first heard when I was in high school. From there I went to the Miles Prestige records—Relaxin’, Cookin’, all that stuff. And then to all the offshoots: Cannonball Adderley, Wynton Kelly, Red Garland. It was like a family tree, where you start at the root and just take off and find out all the other combos. What I noticed through this journey of exploring Paul’s music is that it’s really a story of his friendships. It became apparent how much he supported his band members, how much he allowed them to be themselves and be free. I wanted to turn that into a guide to my own life: How can I be like Paul Chambers…