Pick Hit:
Kris Davis Duopoly (Pyroclastic Records): Davis has for quite some time been one of the most distinctive of pianists on the New York scene to make a big noise without, well, making that much noise. There’s a grace and even quietude to her best work, which is not to say that her playing lacks energy, swing, or any other quality. Yet there’s something about her touch and her thinking (free, yet never wandering) that makes her an ideal collaborator (I loved her work in the trio Paradoxical Frog, with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tyshawn Sorey). The concept on this CD is a series of duets, pairing Davis with an interestingly curated cast: guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage; pianists Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez; drummers Billy Drummond and Marcus Gilmore; and reed players Tim Berne and Don Byron. These are A-list improvisers, not to mention mostly rugged individualists who collaborate with compassion but bend to no one’s will. The first half of the CD cycles through each partner in composed pieces; the second reverses that order for free improvisations. If that seems contrived in theory, it doesn’t sound so in the results. There is instead a lovely balance and a coherent flow. Frisell heightens Davis’s innate sense of weirdness, and highlights the good use she makes of prepared piano (I’m pretty sure it was prepared, anyway; sometimes Frisell’s arsenal of sounds can make even a standard piano sound so…) and repetitive figures. Berne lures her into dark corners of harmony and a playful sense of form. A version of “Prelude to a Kiss” with Byron is the most creative and tonally logical combination of clarinet and piano I’ve heard recorded in this young century. And with Taborn, Davis shares something truly special—based on restraint, conscious of space, and something like floating. (There’s a DVD included in this package. Maybe it’s cool. The music was all I needed to understand what went on here.)
Essential library additions:
Miles Davis Quintet Freedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 (Columbia/Legacy, Oct. 21): There was a time when I thought that maybe record labels shouldn’t be releasing all this bootleg session stuff. Maybe we didn’t need it. Maybe it was too much. Maybe there are even ethical problems (“The Complete Bud Powell on Verve,” which was among the earliest of the boxed-set reissue collections during the CD’s glory days, raised such questions in its expansive notes.) The answer—at least when it comes to anything from this Miles quintet is: Yes, please bring it on! These three CDs, from 1966-68, would be worth listening to simply for the studio chatter, which is as illuminating as it is cool. Included here is, as the press release states, “every second of music and dialogue that were taped for the ‘Miles Smiles album…” And, as they say on TV—that’s not all.. Personally, I can’t possible get enough of the making of “Nefertiti” or “Footprints.” If there were 10 more reels, I’d want those too.
David S. Ware & Matthew Shipp Duo Live in Sant’Anna Arressi, 2004 (Aum, Oct. 21): This second volume in AUM’s Davis S. Ware Archive Series, is essential listening for anyone who valued the magisterial possibilities of Ware’s playing and anyone who tracked, as I did, the work of his wondrous quaret, which included pianist Shipp. There are few musicians who could sustain what is essentially one album-length improvisation: Ware was one. There are also few musicians who would know how to channel that abundant energy and process its purpose: Shipp remains one.
Next up to hear:
Donny McCaslin Beyond Now (Motéma): This is basically David Bowie’s last band, the one he used for “Blackstar,” including saxophonist McCaslin, bassist Tim Lefebvre, drummer Mark Guiliana and keyboardist Jason Lindner, along with some additional guests. It’s not as if Bowie set McCaslin on this path; really, the plugged-in sound, rhythmic intensity and sense of ambient possibility heard on Blackstar was evident in McCaslin’s music since his 2011 release, “Perpetual Motion.” Yet there are few forces as animating and galvanizing as Bowie was to lend purpose and poise to an idea. I haven’t yet dug in, but I’m eager to hear what McCaslin took from that experience.
Aziza (Dare2): This quartet—bassist Dave Holland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, saxophonist Chris Potter and drummer Eric Harland—assembled for Holland’s Dare2 label is in one respect a fascinating elder master-plus-midcareer standouts ensemble. It also promises to be a fascinating left-of-center springboard for collective creations from four limber and free-thinking players. The name—Aziza—is drawn from the mythology of Dahomey, the African kingdom that encompassed Loueke’s homeland, Benin: in that tradition, Aziza is a small, elusive woodland creature that lends magic to artists and hunters in the woods. Holland isn’t a small guy, but otherwise he fits that bill.
Photo by Larry Blumenfeld
Join Me For Conversation and Live Music With David Virelles & Román Díaz on Oct. 18 (Special Offer for Pedrito Martinez Tickets!)
During my first of four sessions of “NYC: The Afro-Cuban Beat” at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, saxophonist and chekere player Yosvany Terry shared, among other things: secrets from his birthplace, Cuba’s Camagüey province; lessons from his father, Eladio “Don Pancho” Terry, a violinist and master of the chekeré; and new unreleased music from his innovative collective, Bohemian Trio.
If you missed all that, you’ll want to make it to the museum on Tuesday, October 18.
It will be an especially powerful session, thanks to the presence of pianist David Virelles and percussonist Román Díaz, two musicians who have invigorated the New York scene in several ways, including while playing together. The premise of my series is that Afro-Cuban traditions (not just rhythms, despite my title) have always coursed through New York City jazz; my “beat” covering that scene has revealed a recent flowering of that connection and its possibilities.
We’ll have discussion, recorded excerpts and live duo performance. Suggested $10 donation.
Here’s more on the program:
History, Mystery and Modernism: Pianist and composer David Virelles mines traditions of his native Santiago, Cuba, while using his current home in Brooklyn as a base for some of New York’s most striking and progressive music. Since coming to the U.S. in 1999, master percussionist, scholar and composer Román Díaz has been mentor to many musicians, key player in several ensembles, a spiritual guide to wide-ranging scene. Virelles and Díaz will discuss and demonstrate and discuss how musicology, mysticism and Cuban culture combine in their music.
I’ve written widely about both musicians. Here’s a blog piece on Díaz (which includes an embedded video from his Thursday night midnight rumba at Zinc Bar; and a Wall Street Journal profile of Virelles. Both articles out-of-date by now (these guys never stand still); we’ll be discussing what gave rise to thier music and how it continues to grow.
Here’s what’s coming up in the series in November:
November 7:
The Conversation Continued: Grammy-winning pianist and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill reflects on: the journey of his father, composer Chico O’Farrill, from Cuba to Manhattan; his own journeys in reverse; the founding and development of his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra; the present diplomatic embrace between the U.S. and Cuba; and his dream of an expansive, borderless musical tradition.
November 15:
New Yor-Uba, Then and Now: More than 30 years ago, pianist and composer Michele Rosewoman’s parallel paths—jazz and Afro-Cuban folklore—merged into a compelling whole in New York through her New Yor-Uba ensemble. Rosewoman will describe the awakening that led to that group, remember her studies with the late Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, and explain the cross-generational way in which she has rekindled that group’s flame.
About that special offer:
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem invites you to its 2nd Annual Harlem Shout Fall Benefit Concert featuring Grammy nominated Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martinez his quartet at the historic Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem on Nov. 1.
Proceeds go towards supporting ongoing free Jazz for Curious Listeners programming and Born in Harlem education programs for Upper Manhattan schools.
I’ve written about Pedrito often. Of course, he’d be a great addition to my conversation series. Then again, he says it all with his drums, his chants and his band. Also, good as his band has been, I’m told that the wondeful Yunior Terry (brother of Yosvany) is now the group’s bassist; that news gives me chills.
While supplies last (as they say on TV), the Museum is offering 50% to Blu Notes readers at this link. See you there.
Happy Columbus Day From Nicholas Payton
In honor of Columbus Day—a holiday I can neither grasp nor endorse save for the joy of suspended alternate-side parking in my neighborhood—here’s a celebration from Nicholas Payton—”The Egyptian Second Line” (two versions, in fact).I first met Payton, a trumpeter, keyboardist and singer, while he was still in his teens (he’s 43 now). He was supporting pianist Ellis Marsalis in a band assembled for a morning TV show. It was the sort of publicity event that, 20-some-odd-years ago, supported the idea of a nascent neo-traditionalist jazz renaissance (with Payton as the latest young lion to follow in Louis Armstrong’s—and perhaps Ellis’s son Wynton’s—wake).
Payton had soaked in his history and his tradition, for sure, not least from his father, bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton.
In the decades since, Payton has distinguished himself as a musician who questions categories and even the dogma of accepted history as much as, well, Armstrong did (do some research at the Armstrong House museum, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about).
Payton is an intense and restless soul, and his thoughts and feelings spill forth with self-assuredness and defiant pride through both his music and his online posts. His music should probably raise more eyebrows than it does because, aside from its integrity and range, it generally doesn’t respect the party line heeded by many so-called jazz musicians. Payton’s blog posts—in which, among other stances, he refuses to wear the term “jazz,” and instead favors the acronym BAM (for Black American Music)—perhaps shouldn’t raise as many eyebrows as they have. At least, these missives can’t be dismissed as rants, which they’re not, or even radical, which they’re also not. The musicians involved in Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) said pretty much the same things 50 years ago.
I’ll not get into a long catalog of what Payton has written online and what was then written about him and what he then wrote in response (though it’s easy enough, and illuminating, to follow that chronology). Yes, it’s about race as much as music, as it should be: Yet whereas, say, the comments appended to articles in the Times Picayune of Payton’s hometown discusses race in a lowest-common-denominator who-can-hate-more style, Payton channels his own feelings (sometimes, yes, rage) into the sort of truth-telling that black trumpeters born and raised in the United States have long done. Amstrong and Miles Davis weren’t enamored with the term “jazz” either.
In a March post titled “#WorldSoWhite,” Payton wrote:
“Louis bowed and scraped so Miles could turn his back.”
He’s right about that.
And still, let’s not let all that distract our attention from Payton’s music, which keeps coming and never stays put.
Through an arrangement with his own music label, Paytone, Ropeadope Records will reissue five of Payton’s recordings and plans to release his “Afro-Carribean Mixtape.” (You can find his catalog at pantone.bandcamp.com.)
The label describes the forthcoming release as “an exploration into the history of the African diaspora as it follows the original trade routes to this hemisphere”—which must naturally involve the slave trade.
Ropeadope released a download of Payton’s single, “The Egyptian Second Line,”on Friday, October 7th as “a poignant statement in advance of Columbus Day, as much of the nation questions the version of history handed down by the colonists.”
The stuff is deeply funky, simple on the surface in both groove and structure, yet embedded with a complex and shifting set of cues, clues and hues, most through a dense layering of samples.
I’ll not say more about it until I listen more. And perhaps not until I get the whole album and can pen a proper review.
But here’s what Payton wrote about what’s in the mix:
In the spirit of reclaiming that which colonization sought to destroy, I’m releasing the first single from my upcoming album Afro-Caribbean Mixtape at the top of Columbus Day weekend. Like a piece of African patchwork, this track is comprised of a lot of different elements — some old, some new. The main body of this record was constructed from the end vamp of a tune I wrote for Dr. Greg Carr (chair of African-American studies at Howard University) called, “Kimathi.” In fact, throughout the piece, you can hear my turntablist, DJ Lady Fingaz, scratching a sample I chopped from one of his interviews. I constructed a new work by cutting and pasting the best moments of Kevin Hays and I playing keyboards on top of the extended jam, and superimposed that over the groove laid down by bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Joe Dyson, and percussionist Daniel Sadownick. I did this with the help of my mix engineer, Blake Leyh (The Wire, Treme).
Towards the beginning of the piece, you’ll hear a chant from vocalists Yolanda Robinson, Jolynda Phillips, and Christina Machado. It’s from a thing my father made up while walking through his childhood neighborhood of 13th Ward New Orleans back in the 1940s, “Na-na ni-ta ho-ho. Left, right. Left, right.” Thirty years later, as an elementary school band teacher at McDonogh #15, he had us chant this whenever we marched in second line parades. It recalls the syllabic prayers of ancient languages used in modern dance songs like Mani Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” of which Michael Jackson borrowed for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”
The centerpiece of the single is a poem I wrote back in 2006 in the aftermath of the flood commonly referred to as “Katrina.” It’s called “The Egyptian Second Line,” recited by Nicole Sweeney, a deejay at WBGO. The gist of it toys with the theory that somehow Africans submitted to slavery in an attempt to become better versions of themselves. After the ladies chirp the hook, I step away from the keyboards and embrace the instrument I’m most known for — the trumpet — and blow a few before we take it out. With this song, I am channeling the energy of the ancestors to help give Africa back to herself in the best way I know how, through the power of music.
In New Orleans, a “second line” is the procession where we dance in the streets to music played by a brass band to celebrate either life or death. When I think about what an Egyptian second line looks like, I think of the imagery of that photo of Louis Armstrong serenading his wife, Lucille in front of the Sphinx — again Africans giving Africa back to herself.
Andrew Cyrille Declares His Independence (Once Again, and Twice…)
I could have picked nearly any moment in the past decade or so to celebrate the power and beauty of drummer Andrew Cyrille’s music and his presence on the New York scene. Cyrille is simply that important and prolific, even now at 76. (I certainly should have in 2011, when he released the wonderful album “Route de Freres” with his Haitian Fascination band.
In my Wall Street Journal piece today, I review two new CDs bearing Cyrille’s name: “The Declaration of Musical Independence” (ECM), with Cyrille leading a quartet including guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer and piano; and “Proximity” (Sunnyside), which extends his catalog of duets, alongside tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.
As I say in the review: Continue reading “Andrew Cyrille Declares His Independence (Once Again, and Twice…)”
Panama Jazz Festival Gets Written Into National Law
In 1989, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 57, declaring: “Jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure, to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood, and promulgated.”
It was a way to pay governmental lip service to jazz as an art form; more important, it sent federal funding jazz’s way.
On September 5th, 2016, the Panama Jazz Festival became Law 312 of the Republic of Panama.
The law guarantees funds of at least $250,000 in each year, beginning in 2018, for the festival, which is held annually in January. It stipulates that “the government of Panama recognizes the Panama Jazz Festival is an event that creates a space for cultural exchange, that provides education and social awareness, where people of all ages, cultural and social backgrounds meet to share interdisciplinary ideas about music of the highest academic quality.”
Word of this development came my way via email, from Patricia Zarate, a saxophonist and the wife of pianist Danilo Pérez, who founded the festival in his hometown of Panama City in 2004. According to Zarate, the support will go to the activities that benefit Panamanian citizens the most: the educational component and the outdoor free concert.
I covered the festival for The Wall Street Journal in 2006. (My complete article is pasted below.)
Back then, Pérez told me, “The spirit of jazz has always been here, but it’s been sleeping for years.” And I noticed that his festival was clearly a labor of love, with good will and sheer dedication substituting for budget at times. Continue reading “Panama Jazz Festival Gets Written Into National Law”
Fred Hersch, At Home at the Vanguard
I try not to miss pianist Fred Hersch when he performs at the Village Vanguard. Hersch shapes the sound of his piano with care and fine calibration, which is doubly rewarded by the club’s celebrated acoustics.
I began my Wall Street Journal review of Hersch’s new CD, “Sunday Night at the Village Vanguard,” (recorded there in March) with an account of him on a recent August Tuesday night. As I wrote there:
“he projected the comfort of a man settled into a favorite easy chair…. As much as any musician, Mr. Hersch considers the Vanguard home. For any jazz lover the basement venue on Seventh Avenue South, which opened in 1935, resonates with history. Its pie-slice shape makes it gorgeously resonant in acoustical terms. For both reasons, musicians have long been moved to record there.”
I also pointed out that “this new release, recorded on the final night of a March engagement, highlights the continuing development of Mr. Hersch’s trio, now seven years running. It’s a wondrous vehicle, set in motion by Mr. Hersch’s music and his crafty interpretations of a wide range of material, but fueled largely by the imaginations of his inventive partners.”
Hersch made his Vanguard debut as a leader in 1996. By then, his career was well established. Yet Hersch has always been determined to do things his way. He resisted the invitations to play the club with all-star rhythm sections; he waited until he could bring his own band in, and that stubbornness has paid off.
I’d documented Hersch’s remarkable comeback from a debilitating two-month coma in 2008. Back then, he told me:
“People tell me that my playing is somehow deeper now since my recovery. I can’t judge whether that’s true or not. But I’ve always been determined to be my own man at the piano. And now, I feel even more of a desire to just be Fred.”
It’s hard to say how much his brush with death and the rigor of rehabilitation had to do with the clarity and exalted expression evident in Hersch’s playing these days, and how much of that is simply the natural maturation of a great talent, back on course. When I listen to Hersch now, the answer hardly matters.
The full review is below: Continue reading “Fred Hersch, At Home at the Vanguard”
Join Me for "NYC: The Afro-Cuban Beat" @ The National Jazz Museum in Harlem (Admission is Free)
Come join me in Harlem this Fall for some exciting and free-of-charge events.
I’m thrilled to extend my long relationship with the National Jazz Museum in Harlem with a new series of discussions and listening sessions at the museum’s lovely new location on West 129th Street—NYC: The Afro-Cuban Beat.
My previous programs at NJMIH focused on New Orleans since the flood; these were low-key, in-depth and always highly charged conversations, rich with audience participation and musical interludes.
This new series explores a current flowering of Afro-Cuban influence along New York’s jazz landscape. My guests include: Yosvany Terry (September 22:); David Virelles and Román Díaz (October 18:); Arturo O’Farrill (November 7); and Michele Rosewoman (November 15). Details and links below.
Continue reading “Join Me for "NYC: The Afro-Cuban Beat" @ The National Jazz Museum in Harlem (Admission is Free)”
At Haystack, Summer 2016
I’m still unpacking from my recent trip to Deer Isle, Maine.
The clothes are long out of suitcases, and all that. Still, with newspaper deadlines and daily life rushing back in I haven’t yet made sense of the ideas newly swirling in my mind or unpacked the feelings that got stirred up inside me.
Deer Isle, a gorgeous island off the coast of Down East Maine where photos sometimes end up more like paintings (see above), is distinguished in obvious ways by its tidal coves and its luscious lobster and in less obvious ones by distinguished craftsmanship of all types and an open-minded fascination with the arts.
The latter two qualities owe in good measure to the presence, on the far end of Stinson Neck, of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. Haystack, which was founded in 1950, is a summer camp—if, that is, all the campers were ceramic and textile artists and glassblowers and woodworkers, and the campgrounds designed by a world-class architect (in this case, Edward Larrabee Barnes) to flow gently into the wooded cliff overlooking Jericho Bay, which feeds the Atlantic Ocean.
For more than decade, I’ve connected the musicians I’ve engaged for the Deer Isle Jazz Festival (another good story) with Haystack for two-week residencies. These residencies have brought memorable moments: pianist Arturo O’Farrill organizing artists on homemade instruments for an improvised Afro-Cuban opera; pipa player Min Xiao Fen leading a similar performance on traditional Chinese instruments; bassist William Parker, in concert at the Stonington Opera House, playing the glass bells a Haystack glassblower designed for him; guitarist Dave Tronzo, using the custom slides made at Haystack during another concert; poet and saxophonist Roy Nathanson mining local oral histories of lobstermen for lyrics, and leading Haystack students in an original song cycle.
Strangely beautiful stuff happens if you hang around Haystack long enough. Now it was my turn. Continue reading “At Haystack, Summer 2016”
Now Playing: Pick Hits and Forthcoming Albums
Pick Hit:
Marc Ribot The Young Philadelphians: Live in Tokyo (Yellowbird, just released)
It’s hard to imagine something musical that guitarist Marc Ribot couldn’t do—or wouldn’t wish to.
That’s not to say that Ribot is eclectic, or that he lacks discernment. Far from it; he doesn’t dabble. He just likes many different styles of music for many different reasons. His technique is so sharp and profound, his sonic identity so strong, that all of his music, whatever it taps into, seems grounded in a single expansive concept reflective of these qualities: an improvisational credo drawn from jazz; a toughness and urgency that owes to punk and early rock; and a devotion to detail that can found wherever serious musicians gather.
Ribot describes his Young Philadelphians band in his liner notes as “where deco meets disco meets decon,” in tribute to twin legacies: “The mind-blowing harmolodic punk-funk of Ornette Coleman’s first Prime Time band and the sweet, optimistic pulse of 1970s Philly soul.”
He’s got bassist Jamaladeen Tacuma and drummer G. Calvin Weston, both Prime Time alumni, in tow here, along with fellow guitarist Mary Halvorson and a 3-piece string section. Ribot is celebrating a moment, now some 40 years old, “before dance went digital,” reinventing hits like Silver Convention’s “Fly, Robin, Fly,” Teddy Pendergrass’s “Love TKO,” and, yes, Van McCoy’s “The Hustle.” Did you have to ask? Of course, they play “TSOP (The Sounds of Philadelphia)” by MFSB (Mother, Father, Sister, Brother—if that’s really what it meant…)
I grew up on and danced to this soundtrack in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. This stuff was a guilty pleasure for me, long suppressed, now released from its dated trappings and its too-rigid disco beat by Ribot and company. They isolate both the inner grit and the pleasing naivete these songs managed to balance. And they invest these worthy pop confections (I’d forgotten how lovely some of these string lines are) with fresh fissures of noise and threads of wild invention.
This is no retro shtick. There’s nothing ironic about it. And why not honor both Ornette Coleman and Van McCoy at once (if you’ve got the chops and the love to do it).
What else am I listening to now? Continue reading “Now Playing: Pick Hits and Forthcoming Albums”
Jason Moran, in Real and Imagined Rooms of His Own
“I’m a straight-up jazz musician, no doubt,” Jason Moran told me in an interview a decade ago. “But I also like to think of myself as an urban performance artist who happens to play piano.”
Then, I was writing a profile for Jazziz magazine of Moran, who was already well into a successful career as a pianist and bandleader and as invigorating a presence as jazz had known at the start of the 21st century. He had yet to be awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which arrived in 2010, or to take over for the late Billy Taylor as the Kennedy Center’s artistic director for jazz. He had only recent begun to working in deep and ongoing collaboration with visual artists such as Adrian Piper and Joan Jonas.
I used that quote again in my Wall Street Journal review of Moran’s new solo-piano recording, “The Armory Concert” (available to download through the bandcamp website), which makes for gorgeous and provocative listening. It also marks Moran’s departure from the Blue Note label, on which he has documented his growth and range since 1999, and. As I wrote, the new recording reflects “the growing sense of autonomy he’s displayed while casting off conventions of genre and even music as a strict discipline.” Continue reading “Jason Moran, in Real and Imagined Rooms of His Own”