Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i JazzTimes

→ Exclusive Content What exactly is “fazz” and what does it have to do with Noel Paul Stookey, best known as one-third of Peter, Paul and Mary? Lee Mergner’s recent online profile of Stookey explains that “fazz”—a combination of “folk” and “jazz” first coined by saxophonist Paul Desmond—appears in the title of the singer/guitarist’s latest album … but you’ll have to read the article to find out why. Plus JazzTimes 10 lists, festival reviews, photo galleries, obituaries, and much more. → JT News The city of Newark, New Jersey, in partnership with jazz radio station WBGO, has renamed a section of Park Place as Wayne Shorter Way in honor of the saxophonist, composer, and bandleader, who was born and raised in Newark. On April 29, WBGO and the city celebrated…

Gil Evans: Gil Evans & Ten (Prestige, 1957) Frisky and purposeful solos on “Ella Speed” and “Just One of Those Things” find Lacy starting to lean into Rollins. Steve Lacy: The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy (Candid, 1961) A masterpiece: No weak links in the pianoless quartet (Charles Davis, John Ore, Roy Haynes), a stimulating program (Bird, Monk, Cecil Taylor), and Lacy playing past his influences. Steve Lacy: Evidence (New Jazz, 1962) A buoyant quartet (Don Cherry, Carl Brown, Billy Higgins) tackles Monk, Ellington, and Strayhorn. The added weight and range of Lacy’s sound surely reflect his sessions on the bridge with Rollins.…

Bassist Tim Lefebvre makes no bones about it: For cooking, his comfort zone is outside. The kitchen belongs to his wife, singer/songwriter/keyboardist Rachel Eckroth. “She’s way better inside sauteeing and baking things for people,” he says. “I’m just a gorilla who throws meat on the grill.” A self-taught cook who cut his teeth slinging steaks over an open flame while living in New York and Los Angeles during the ’90s and early 2000s, Lefebvre refined his passion for outdoor cooking after a relatively recent move to Arizona. Once he realized he had easy access to one of that state’s greatest natural resources—mesquite wood—his grilling chops, so to speak, reached a new level. “We’ve got lots of mesquite trees here, so I started gathering up all the dead branches lying around,…

First the good news: As you can see in our annual Festival Guide (beginning on pg. 34), there are plenty of jazz festivals scheduled to happen around the world this year, and at the moment there seems little reason to doubt that they’ll all take place more or less as planned. Now the not-so-good news: You just never know what might happen around the bend. Take the COVID pandemic, for example (or, as Jackie Mason might say, please). A lot of people had a difficult time acknowledging its existence at first. Then they had similar difficulty envisioning what havoc it would wreak on the world. More than six million deaths later, many of those same people would very much like to believe that the danger is over. I would very…

Everything about Israeli-born tenor and soprano saxophonist Eli Degibri is a celebration. You can hear that in his sideman gigs with Herbie Hancock and Al Foster; on his earliest leader albums, such as 2004’s In the Beginning; on the ruminative Israeli Song of 2010; and on his new self-released Henri and Rachel, a haunting elegy for his parents. It’s in his tone: smooth and inviting but never saccharine and unafraid of a rough edge. It’s in his incessant devotion to jazz, family, and home. And in every one of his phrases, either musical or in conversation from his home in Tel Aviv, you can find revelry. “Jazz is joy,” Degibri says. “Music—it is everything to me.” In 2012, he moved from his adopted New York City back to Tel Aviv…

Charnett Moffett, a bassist and composer whose virtuosity on both electric (often fretless) and acoustic instruments was matched by his versatility, died of a heart attack April 11 at Stanford University Medical Center in Stanford, Calif. He was 54 and “had been struggling with bouts of intense pain from Trigeminal Neuralgia for the past few years,” according to an official announcement. Despite his young age, Moffett was ubiquitous for nearly four decades, both as an accompanist/collaborator and as a bandleader. A former child prodigy who first recorded at age eight with his drummer father Charles Moffett Sr., he reportedly contributed to more than 200 albums during his career, by a dizzying array of artists ranging from Pharoah Sanders to Harry Connick Jr., Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman, Art Blakey,…

Walter Smith III has been burning the candle at both ends. As he connected with JazzTimes via Zoom from a New York City hotel room in mid-March, a flurry of activity surrounded him. He spent the previous weekend playing with both the Maria Schneider Orchestra and vocalist Sara Gazarek in their respective performances at Birdland, kicked off a weeklong run with drummer Bill Stewart’s trio at the Village Vanguard the night before this virtual listening session, and completed six hours of work on schedules for the summer and fall semesters at Berklee College of Music—his alma mater, where he now serves as the chair of the woodwind department—shortly before we logged on. One might think such a workload and pace would sap him of his energy, but he was right…

IT’S A COLD MARCH Friday night in New York City, but the crowd inside the Village Vanguard crackles with warmth as it engages with the robust music of Melissa Aldana’s quintet. A hallowed basement room that’s generally as quiet as you’d expect jazz’s mother church to be is full of clapping, whistling, cheering, even whooping by the end of the 75-minute set, all of which is made up of material from Aldana’s new album 12 Stars, which has just hit streaming services today (the album’s physical release is scheduled for later in April). This is also the Chilean saxophonist’s first-ever run headlining the Vanguard, which has attracted much younger and more diverse crowds than normal for the club—especially a lot of students, according to one server that night. You can…

Visit a pro audio retailer and almost every studio monitor speaker you see will have amplification built in. But visit a high-end audio store and you’ll see mostly old-school passive speakers, which have to be connected to an amplifier. Audio production professionals might wonder why the consumer audio industry hasn’t embraced a technology that’s been the norm in studios for at least 20 years—but audiophiles have their reasons.s.. Pros switched to powered (also known as “active”) monitor speakers primarily because of the precision they offer. With the electronics built into the speakers, manufacturers can tune them to near perfection—and even add a switch to simulate the sound of classic studio monitors like the Auratone and Yamaha NS-10. But audiophiles have been skeptical that a speaker with amps built in could…

1 bone-in pork butt (8-10 lbs.)1 container Meat Church dry rub (The Gospel, Holy Gospel, Honey Bacon, or Deez Nuts)1 container Meat Church Honey Hog hot rub1 stick European or Irish unsalted butter1 cup brown sugar1 cup apple juice or cider vinegar1 cup barbecue sauceYellow mustard1 half steam pan & foil to cover Prepare your smoker at a temperature of 275° Fahrenheit; medium-smoke wood such as hickory or pecan recommended. Remove all excess fat from the pork butt. Slather the pork in yellow mustard. (This allows the seasoning to adhere more quickly and will not affect the flavor.) Season all sides of the pork liberally with dry rub; give it some time to “sweat out” so the seasoning can fully adhere. Place the pork directly on the smoker grate, fat side down.…

When we learn a song, we play it from here.” At the word “here,” Charlie Gabriel motions to his heart. It is a Tuesday afternoon in early April and Gabriel, the octogenarian saxophonist for the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, is explaining over Zoom how musicians from New Orleans learn music, learn to truly inhabit the music and let the music inhabit them. “What the most important thing is … If you don’t know the melody of the song, really know it, then you don’t know the song, see? You have to know the melody and let it become part of who you are.” Musicians of any age should listen well to the word of Gabriel, and his heavenly music. At 89 years old, Charlie Gabriel—or “Mister Charlie,” as he’s known…

Tenor saxophonist Julieta Eugenio was recently reminded of the distinct pleasure one can derive from masters of her chosen instrument. While cooking at home and listening to Ben Webster Plays Ballads, she was struck by the depth of his vibrato. “He sounded like a violin,” she tells JazzTimes with awe. “He makes you feel something. That’s what I love about him.” Eugenio used to play alto as an undergrad back in her home country of Argentina. She grew up about five hours from the “big city” of Buenos Aires, where she attended the Manuel de Falla Conservatory for Jazz Performance. “I was between medicine and music,” she says, the latter having been her physician father’s career path. “He was like, ‘Well, I’d rather you try doing music first, rather than…

Steve Lacy was once a brilliant bebop player. Yet conventional wisdom says the opposite. Many have long argued that a key to the innovative soprano saxophonist’s stubborn originality over a 50-year career was precisely the fact that he never played bebop, the common-practice language of jazz since about 1950. The Lacy creation myth unfolds like this: Born in New York in 1934, he fell in love with the soprano sax as a teenager after hearing Sidney Bechet, cozied up to pre-bop elders like his teacher Cecil Scott, and made his first records in 1954 at age 20 in quasi-trad/swing bands. Shortly thereafter, iconoclastic pianist and composer Cecil Taylor plucked him out of revivalist waters and threw him into the avant-garde ocean. Lacy then discovered his lifelong guru, Thelonious Monk, whose…

Unless you’re a certified guitar nerd, the name Ted McCarty (1909-2001) probably means nothing to you. But no matter who you are, there’s little doubt that you’re familiar on some level with his work. As president of Gibson from 1950 to 1966, he helped develop a series of electric guitars that have become classics of American instrument design, including the ES-335, the Les Paul, the SG, the Firebird, the Flying V, and the Explorer. Interestingly, like his fellow innovator and rival Leo Fender, McCarty wasn’t a guitarist himself. He was, however, an inveterate doodler, known for drawing sketches of instruments to keep his mind focused during phone calls and long, boring business meetings. Every once in a while, these spur-of-the-moment sketches turned into something more. That seems to have been…