Rudresh Mahanthappa — an extraordinary American jazzman of South Asian descent — has a critical fave with Kinsmen, his album featuring his own alto sax coupled with that of Indian Carnatic master musician Kadri Golpanath, supported by Karachi-born but L.A.-bred former surfer/electric guitarist Rez Abassi, violin, bass, traps, mridingam from East and West. They all talk and play in my NPR production on last night’s “All Things Considered.”
Archives for 2008
Freddie plays, Freddie talks
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Celebrating Freddie Hubbard, the intrepid fox
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died last night around 2 a.m. in Sherman Oaks Hospital (Los Angeles) of complications following a heart attack he had suffered on the night before Thanksgiving (November 26), not November 30 as previously reported. He was 70 years old.
late gift ideas
You can’t buy ’em music, ’cause you don’t know what they’re missing – so try other music and beyond formats (books, videos, music toys) as stocking stuffers for the out-leaning —
I wake up screaming
“Do You Hear What I Hear?” —  the most odious quasi-pop song ever committed – was ringing in my semi-conscious loud enough to jolt me out of sleep one night last week (I summoned to mind “Night In Tunisia,” trying to recall ever kink in Charlie Parker’s famous alto break, to dispell it). “Little Drummer Boy,” “Silent Night,” Gene Autry’s original version of “Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer” and James Taylor singing “Go Tell It On The Mountain” — does it really have an extended chorus for recorder ensemble? — assault me at the grocery store (the butcher behind the deli counter fights it with a salsa radio station on high volume). “Jingle Bell Rock” is the best of the bunch — at least Bobby Helms swings and the guitar twangs. Must we suffer this cloying drivel every winter holiday?
Trumpeter Freddie Hubbard ailing
On the second of four nights at Freddie Hubbard’s record date with the New Jazz Composers Octet in December 2007, the star trumpeter didn’t commit a note. He improvised poses, faces and witticisms, but no lines on his horn. He didn’t even venture into the isolation booth Tony Bennett’s sound engineer had prepared for him…
Ten top of 2008 and many more recommendations
So much music, so little time — it’s absurd to whittle down this year’s “best” recordings to 10, an act that merely bows to convention. Why not 15? 25? 50? — if there are that many albums that reward repeated listening with enjoyment and revelation.
Classic Monk, classical Jazz at Lincoln Center
The jazziest scene at the second night of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Monk Festival was in the fifth floor atrium, during intermission of simultaneous concerts by pianist Danilo Perez’s trio (reprising his cd Panamonk, in the Allen Room) and the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra performing members’ arrangements of Monk’s music in big band settings led by Wynton Marsalis, with featured pianist Marcus Roberts (in more formal Rose Hall).Â
Guitar heroes, virtual and actual
Mostly Other People’s killer liner notes
Mostly Other People Do The Killing is a super-serious-with-a-sense-of-humor Philadelphia-based  quartet paying homage to Ornette Coleman with its hot new album This Is Our Moosic.The cd’s cover photo cops and mocks the oh-so-cool look of Coleman’s earth-shaking quartet on its classic 1960 release This Is Our MusicÂ
The jazz of victory and celebration
It’s odd that of all the nuances of expression jazz can convey, the thrill of victory and celebration of success is hard to find among the music’s classics. Barack Obama’s heartening win of the presidency prompts me to search out joyous music, but I can’t think of a movement akin to the bells ringing in Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” in the repertoire of Miles, Ornette, Cecil or Coltrane, Mingus, Monk, Bird and Diz, or Ellington, Basie and Goodman. The crowning last chorus of Armstrong’s “Tight LIke This” comes to mind, though the satisfaction bespoke in the trumpeter’s final ringing notes seems to reflect gratification that’s more personal than socio-political. Where’s jazz’s happy party music?
hail Studs Terkel, Jazz Age Chicagoan
A talker and listener, actor-dj-writer-oral historian, good humored realist and pragmatic idealist, Studs Terkel (1912 – 2008) stands as an American cultural patriot, who enjoyed as rich if not untroubled a life as genuinely democratic artist might hope for over the course of the 20th century — earning Roger Ebert’s thumbs up as greatest Chicagoan. Studs was hugely enthusiastic about music, loving blues as well as jazz, gospel, rootsy folk, the Great American Songbook, the soundtrack of the labor and Civil Rights movement, classical stuff too — taste way above and beyond genre. May we sometime soon see his like again.
Globalism in the Azores
Globalism held its head high at the tenth annual Ponta Delgada Jazz Festival last week. Five nights of concerts performed by an international coterie of improvisers in the superb acoustics of a nicely modernized old center-city theater for a stylish, educated audience didn’t seem a cultural far cry, though they were held in the capital of the Azores, the mid-Atlantic archipelago 700 miles from mainland Portugal.