Outside New Orleans, the name Danny Barker isn’t all that well known.
Yet talk to a New Orleans musician of any age, who plays in nearly any style, and Mr. Barker—as these players call him—inevitably comes up, in reverent and warm tones, much the way modern-jazz musicians talk about drummer Art Blakey.
Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Marching Band, which he founded in 1970, late in life, helped launch many careers. No Barker, no Dirty Dozen Brass Band, no Rebirth Brass Band. No Barker, and it’s hard to know what trumpeters including Wynton Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Leroy Jones and Kermit Ruffins would sound like, just how drummers like Herlin Riley and Shannon Powell might swing.
Yet Barker’s legacy is bigger than that, and just as much about the names we don’t know. His Fairview Baptist band was a training ground for young musicians. For anyone even remotely connected to the city’s indigenous culture, Barker—who played banjo and guitar, sang and wrote songs, and led bands—is the key figure of a brass-band revival at a moment when many felt that tradition slipping away.
Back in August, away from the high-profile “Kartrina” hoopla, I moderated a panel discussion in New Orleans—”Ten Years After: The State of New Orleans Culture.” There, Barker’s name was invoked again and again, as a man who saved not just a style of music but a constellation of community values connected to an indigenous culture.
A few years ago, filmmaker Darren Hoffman made a wonderful documentary about Barker’s legacy, “Tradition is a Temple.”
Yet the best tribute to Barker’s living legacy is The Danny Barker Banjo and Guitar Festival. It begins January 14 (a day past what would have been Barker’s 107th birthday) and runs through January 17 in New Orleans, with an additional concert on January 21 by singer Maria Muldaur, who once scored a hit with Barker’s “Don’t You Feel My Leg.” Continue reading “Celebrating Danny Barker's Essential Legacy in New Orleans”
Top Ten Jazz Recordings of 2015
Those who pine for a new big idea in jazz—one that lends the music’s next chapter a catchy name—largely miss what’s going on.
Radical thinkers—seeming outliers—are today’s prime movers. If this has been the case throughout much of jazz’s history, what is different today is that these innovators no longer beget clear schools. Jazz’s forward flow is not well measured by stylistic monikers and pop-culture breakthroughs, but rather through profound ripples of impact. The most influential musicians now suggest less about how jazz should sound or be sold and more about how meaningful musical possibilities may be awakened within the context of jazz tradition.
On those terms, two musicians— Henry Threadgill, 71 years old, and Steve Coleman, 59—loom especially large right now. Threadgill and Coleman have achieved masterly and original voices as instrumentalists (both play alto saxophone; Mr. Threadgill is also a flutist). Leading unconventional ensembles, both are starkly authoritative yet also warmly nurturing presences. Both have successfully met one of jazz’s central challenges: to synthesize the acts of composition and improvisation through personalized yet rigorous approaches to structure and form. Each has crafted and stuck to a unique process that can’t really be imitated but can be shared.
And share they have. Their influence stands behind what I sometimes call “the quietest revolution you’ve never heard of”—that is, a growing swath of distinguished musicians whose music owes to direct and indirect lessons learned from the music of Threadgill and Coleman and the bands they lead (sometimes, in Threadgill’s case, conducts). These are subtle ideas with profound effects—the “rhythm chants” that underlie most of Coleman’s music, say, and the ways in which Threadgill liberates each instrument from its conventional role.
My year-end Top 10 jazz albums list includes one musician whose close collaboration with Coleman formed essential inspiration, Jen Shyu. It includes a band that features Threadgill, led by drummer Jack DeJohnette, who absorbed essential influence in the same Chicago scene Threadgill rose from. It’s topped by dazzling CDs from Coleman and Threadgill themselves. Continue reading “Top Ten Jazz Recordings of 2015”
Allen Toussaint Deserves a Statue in New Orleans—And in New York City, Too
Though I didn’t file an obituary for the late great Allen Toussaint, who died on November 27, I was as stunned and saddened as anyone by his death last month.
Pianist Jon Batiste‘s recent tribute to Batiste at New York’s City Winer gave me a chance to reflect on the brilliance of Toussaint within a long line of New Orleans legends and his indelible connection to New York City. And to return to the pages of the Village Voice.
You can find that piece here.
As I wrote: Continue reading “Allen Toussaint Deserves a Statue in New Orleans—And in New York City, Too”
Listening to the Women of Chicago's AACM
I can’t think of a better way for the Jazz Institute of Chicago to wrap up a year of programming highlighting the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) than with a free concert on Dec. 11 by the Voices Heard! ensemble. The event gathers women who have made significant contributions to the AACM and whose musicianship has been marked by the AACM’s influence: vocalist Dee Alexander, pianist and singer Ann Ward, flutist Nicole Mitchell, cellist Tomeka Reid, violinist Renee Baker, and percussionist, singer and songwriter Coco Elysses.
The promotional headline reads:
“Empowering Women, Spanning Generations: The Women of the AACM Unite!”
It celebrates an aspect of AACM’s legacy that deserves attention beyond Chicago.
Earlier this year, while researching a Wall Street Journal piece celebrating the AACM anniversary, I spoke at length with Mitchell, a perennial poll-topper as flutist and a real visionary as a composer and the leader of several groups (her Black Earth Ensemble performs at the Chicago event). Currently also Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine, Mitchell arrived in Chicago in 1990, where she began playing music on the streets. She was drawn to the AACM, eventually serving as its first female president, from 2009-2011.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation: Continue reading “Listening to the Women of Chicago's AACM”
Chucho Valdés At 74 & Irakere At 40—Still Growing
“I was a privileged child because Havana was a center for both Cuban music and jazz when I was a boy,” Chucho Valdés told me several years ago, at his home in Havana’s Miramar section, where congas sit alongside the grand piano and photographs of Cuban musical heroes hang next to a 1998 proclamation of “Chucho Valdés Day” in San Francisco. “Cuban music and American jazz, that’s what we lived and breathed in my house. And to me they are different sons of the same mother: Africa.”
Valdés, who recently turned 74, was 4 when he sat at the piano with his own father, pianist Bebo Valdés, who was a central figure among the first generation of big-band mambo arrangers in Cuba. During his decadelong tenure as pianist for Havana’s famed Tropicana nightclub, Bebo led the island’s top players and worked closely with visiting American stars.
As was his father’s, Chucho’s embrace of Cuban music and American jazz is bold, without stylistic prejudice, and always marked by invention. Chucho may well have crafted his own towering legacy atop his inheritance from his father, but nothing could have prepared the world for Irakere, the band Chucho founded in 1973, in Havana, and which took the world by storm five years later.
Chucho has revived the spirit and format of Irakere, 40 years past its founding. I heard them recently at Manhattan’s Town Hall (set list below for notetakers), and was struck by how current the band sounds. That’s because, in the true spirit of Cuban music and American jazz, Chucho never sits still, always leans forward.
(You can find a video of the group at the Lugano Jazz Festival here.)
As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Chucho’s new CD, “Tribute to Irakere (Live in Marciac)”:
Chucho has revived the spirit and format of Irakere, 40 years past its founding. I heard them recently at Manhattan’s Town Hall (set list below for notetakers), and was struck by how current the band sounds. That’s because, in the true spirit of Cuban music and American jazz, Chucho never sits still, always leans forward.
(You can find a video of the group at the Lugano Jazz Festival here.)
As I wrote in my Wall Street Journal review of Chucho’s new CD, “Tribute to Irakere (Live in Marciac)”:
When pianist Chucho Valdés presented “Irakere 40” at Manhattan’s Town Hall earlier this month, he rekindled the sound of a band with which he changed the course of Cuban music four decades ago. Older audience members might have attended Irakere’s U.S. debut at Carnegie Hall during the 1978 Newport Jazz Festival. Appearing unannounced on a program that featured jazz pianists Mary Lou Williams, McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans, Irakere stole that show.
Then, Mr. Valdés introduced New Yorkers to a bold and subversive music, both a response to Cuba’s post-revolution rejection of American jazz and rock and a seed for Cuban dance music now known as timbá. His tight band with a huge sound expressed a sweep of influences that ranged from Afro Cuban folkloric music to bebop, from Mr. Valdés’ father, Bebo (a towering Cuban pianist and composer in his own right) to Blood, Sweat & Tears.
and as I point out:
With this project, Mr. Valdés neither takes a victory lap nor looks back. At 74, he remains a musician of restless and searching ambition….
Mr. Valdés call this album a tribute to Irakere. It sounds more like testimony to the continuity and vitality of a vision that has always spanned borders and genres, conflated centuries, defied politics and, by now, having influenced generations, is bigger than any one band.
Chucho Valdes Irakere 40 at Town Hall
Nov. 10, 2015
set list:
Continue reading “Chucho Valdés At 74 & Irakere At 40—Still Growing”
Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages: One for the Ages Comes Back
The news of a reissue of Sonny Sharrock‘s 1991 album “Ask the Ages” made me feel nostalgic. I can only wonder how Sharrock’s searing sound will seem in a new “enhanced and re-mastered from the original,” as promised from M.O.D. Technologies, the label run by Bill Laswell and Giacomo Bruzzo. The press release tells me that “M.O.D. resumes and continues the legacy of Axiom, the timeless imprint established in 1989 by Bill Laswell with Chris Blackwell, founder of Island Records,” which first released this album, and that Laswell, who produced it, “first heard Sharrock at fourteen.”
I was much older than 14 in 1998, but much younger than I am now. I was editor-in-chief of Jazziz magazine then. For the September issue, in celebration of the magazine’s 15th anniversary, I planned all sorts of special coverage. There were competing essays depicting the period from 1983-1998 as either a jazz Dark Age or a Renaissance. For the review section, I had critics select albums released in 1983 or later and destined to be memorable well into the future.
Among the albums I chose was “Ask the Ages.” Below is what I wrote. I like to think I’d express it better today—and maybe I will, upon listening to this reissue. (Not sure I still stand by my criticism of Laswell’s mix. Still, I stand by my enthusiasm. Everyone should own this album. Save for a few ripples here and there—the power trio Harriet Tubman for instance—I haven’t heard much that followed the path Sharrock was blazing.
Anyway, here’s that old review (sadly, the magazine is not online): Continue reading “Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages: One for the Ages Comes Back”
Laugh, Don't Cry! It's Christmas With Harry Shearer, Judith Owen and Their Talented Friends
Harry Shearer described his wife, Judith Owen, as “a Welsh woman prone to melancholia who could not stand the fact that, at Christmastime, Southern California was about 78 degrees and sunny.”
She confessed the truth in all that. “In a strange way, bad weather means Christmas to me.”
I learned that at last year’s New York edition of “Christmas Without Tears,” the annual holiday season pageant, a fundraiser for charity, that the couple hosts each year. There, Shearer, the humorist and actor—whose many credits include The Simpsons’ megalomaniacal Mr. Burns, Spinal Tap’s affably insecure bassist Derek Smalls, and former president Richard Nixon (who was, among other things, both megalomaniacal and affably insecure)—revealed his innate musicality. Owen, a magificently gifted singer, pianist and songwriter, flashed a biting wit that might well cast Harry as the straight man in the family.
The couple’s traveling Christmas show, now in its tenth year, began as a house party in Los Angeles, a way for Owen to “reinvent the joy and fun of Christmas” not long after losing her mother and moving to Southern California (with its oppressive lack of incelement weather). Continue reading “Laugh, Don't Cry! It's Christmas With Harry Shearer, Judith Owen and Their Talented Friends”
In William Parker's Words
I first put William Parker on the cover of Jazziz magazine in 1999, when I was editor-in-chief. I’ve since written about Parker—who is best known as a bassist, but whose sincerity is nicely depicted in Jack Vartoogian’s photo, above, of Parker playing a double-reeded horn—in many contexts, including the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.
I returned to the pages of Jazziz for a long and, I think, meaty interview with Parker (you can find it here on pag 38; if you can’t access it, feel free to contact me for a file version).
Below are some excerpts, beginning with a section about the Vision Festival, which Parker helped found 20 years ago. Continue reading “In William Parker's Words”
Let's Build a Statue of Allen Toussaint (Yes We Can Can)
I was as stunned and saddened as anyone by the news of Allen Tousaint’s death at 77 on Nov. 10, while on tour in Spain.
I’ll write more about him soon. But right now, I want to draw attention to an interesting development, reported yesterday by Doug MacCash at NOLA.com.
A Facebook page titled “Allen Toussaint Circle,” proposing that Lee Circle be renamed Toussaint Circle in honor of the legendary composer and pianist who died Tuesday (Nov. 10) has garnered social media attention.
On June 24, Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army, on the St. Charles Avenue traffic circle as a gesture of racial reconciliation in the aftermath of the June 17 massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof, a militant white supremacist.
Since then, the city has buzzed with discussion of whether Confederate monuments should be removed. And, if so, what should replace them?
An online petition related to the “Allen Toussaint Circle” Facebook page, titled “Honor Allen Toussaint – Rename Lee Circle,” meant to formally propose replacing Lee’s image with Toussaint’s has gathered 3,943 supporters from around the globe as of Friday morning.
Aside from Toussaint’s gifts for melody and harmony, his handiness with a hook and his innate sense of funkiness, he had an ear for lyrics that captured truths and anticipated needs. He distilled the pain of romantic longing into “Lipstick traces/On a cigarette.” He penned “Yes We Can Can” nearly forty years before Obama hung his successful White House run on the same sentiment — though it’s rhythmically more astute as phrased by Toussaint.
In New Orleans, a city known for musical innovation, imponderable dualities and inscrutable personal style, Toussaint epitomized it all: He was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken creator of hits who drove a cream-colored 1974 Silver Shadow Rolls Royce, who could look elegantly complete in a suit jacket, silk tie, and a pair of white athletic socks and sandals.
The petition to replace Robert E. Lee with Toussaint sounds about right.
Continue reading “Let's Build a Statue of Allen Toussaint (Yes We Can Can)”
Jen Shyu Sings Her Story in Five Languages
When I last wrote about Jen Shyu—a singer and musician who is as remarkable for her diligence as for her talent—in The Wall Street Journal four years ago, here’s how I started the profile:
Lettered tiles crisscrossed the coffee table in singer Jen Shyu’s Bronx apartment, remnants of an unfinished game of Bananagrams—a sped-up, free-form variant of Scrabble. How fitting. A playful yet rigorous approach to language animates her stirring music. Sounding fierce at times, ruminative at others, displaying tonal precision and an intuitive rhythmic sense, Ms. Shyu is among New York’s most invigorating vocal presences. And perhaps the most enigmatic.
Part of the intrigue, especially through her highest-profile role, in alto saxophonist Steve Coleman’s Five Elements band, is the question of language. “People always ask what I’m singing,” she said. “The answer is a variety of languages, including ones from China, Taiwan and East Timor, which are points in my ancestry. When I’m improvising, I’m singing in all of them. Or none of them. I’m taking bits and pieces, making it sound like it could be a language.”
Ms. Shyu’s fluency in seven languages and several traditional musical styles is based on far-flung and deeply immersed study. (She leaves later this month for a year in Indonesia, her great-great-grandmother’s birthplace, on a Fulbright Scholarship to study sindhenan, the traditional singing of Javanese gamelan music.)
Having completed that and other research, Shyu has sythesized this knowledge into something utterly and beautifully new—“Sounds and Cries of the World,” her terrific new album. (You can find my Wall Street Journal review here.)
On this latest recording, Shyu sings original lyrics in five languages: English, Korean, Javanese, Indonesian and Tetum, the language of East Timor. She plays instruments that originated in four different countries. Despite these facts, and even the album’s title—“Sounds and Cries of the World” (Pi Recordings)—this is neither world music nor fusion of any sort. Continue reading “Jen Shyu Sings Her Story in Five Languages”