Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Al Green and Sonny Rollins, now and then

Al Green, age 62, won two Grammy awards last week  — Best R&B Performance by a Duo for “Stay with Me (By the Sea)” and Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance for “You’ve Got The Love I Need” — and of course out-classed Justin Timberlake on the televised award program singing his 1972 classic “Let’s Stay Together.” 

Sonny Rollins, 78, won Record of the Year in the VIllage Voice’s 3rd annual jazz critics’ poll, with Road Shows Vol. 1  (which made my 2008 10-best list) and resumes touring in April with concerts in Arkansas, Miami and California.  
Picture of: Road Shows, Vol. 1  Both Green and Rollins are captured at the earlier career peaks by documentarian Robert Mugge — who I spoke to recently — in his movies The Gospel According to Al Green and Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus, from 1984 and 1986 respectively, newly available on DVD by Acorn Media. 

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Eddie Palmieri sets Jazz at Lincoln Center afire

Eddie Palmieri, the genius and prophet of Afro-Caribbean jazz, showed Herbie Hancock, maybe Wynton Marsalis and certainly the roaring audience at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall a thing or three last weekend. His band La Perfecta II, reconstituting the instrumentation and compositions for mambo, cha-cha and pachanga dancing Palmieri introduced in 1961, blew the lid off the joint as I’ve heard no other band do since it opened in 2004, establishing Latin music’s clavé rhythm for all time at the core of what Marsalis likes to call “the house that swing built.” 

Swing they did, La Perfecta, swing hard, with style, precision and vengeance much more driving, cool and fiery than anything else taken for swing today. If only the Rose Hall seats could have been pushed aside for dancing. Swing, swivel, dip, cut, twist, step, shift, glide, gesture — faster, faster, faster — in perfect syncopation with the polyrhythmic percussion, the riffing trombones and trumpet, the steely-plucked trés and full-bodied but sparely applied flute.
Palmieri at the piano – age 73, dapper in suit and yellow tie, busy cueing his horns, supporting his elegant yet impassioned male singers, goosing the tempo kept by his deft young bassist and veteran conga player, breaking into unpredictably funky or classical, flowing or staggered keyboard solos — is probably the last surviving bandleader in America today who makes “swing” transcend its historic import to render big band virtuosity, intensity and density at highest speeds more immediate than tomorrow’s pop. His music isn’t  contemporary, it’s immediate, and thus timeless.
He expands on an extraordinary American idiom — check out this clip from a Fania All-Stars session of Palmieri, the “Sun of Latin Music” with fellow keyboardists Larry Harlow and Papo Lucca, Johnny Pacheco playing flute and Ismael Quintana singing lead: 

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A visitation with Don Cherry’s spirit

Attempts to revisit the music of an extraordinary improviser work all too infrequently, if “work” means evoking something close to the living presence of the player him-or-herself. This is true even when the tribute-payers are the tributee’s collaborators, bearing the best intentions.

But “In the Spirit of Don Cherry,” an all-star octet organized by pianist Karl Berger was able at a Symphony Space performance a couple weeks back to imbue seldom-heard yet unusually memorable songs with the wit, grace and world-ranging musicality of the man who created them (playing pocket trumpet with Collin Walcott, tabla in this photo by Lona Foote).

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Don Cherry and Colin Walcott – photo ©Lona Foote

Berger,  the force behind the legendary, influential and under-reported Creative Music Studio of Woodstock — with trumpeter/cornetist Graham Haynes, tenor saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum, tubaist Bob Stewart, guitarist Kenny Wessel, bassist Mark Helias, drummer Tani Tabal and vocalist Ingrid Sertso — performed tunes Cherry included in his great albums of suites Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers (both on celebrated Blue Note Records, from 1965 and ’66, respectively) as well as a couple recorded elsewhere, like “Art Deco,” title track of a 1986 album. True to its name, the concert’s operative plan was “in the spirit of . . .” rather than “note-for-note.” The musicians, most of whom had worked directly with Cherry, evoked the beauty, playfulness, pathos, imagination, unforced complexity and constant interactivity he tapped in himself and others by blowing as if they were onstage with him.

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Civil Rights-Jazz document, 1963

Prior to tomorrow’s inauguration, the New York Times (and I suspect many other publications) has focused in many columns, book reviews and reports on Barack Obama’s election as a turning point in the U.S.’s movement towards full civil rights for all people. The entertainment section makes the case for movies having led the way to our first not-completely- “white”-identified President.

I maintain that the jazz community was in the forefront of the civil rights movement, and remains in the lead for demonstrating how all-inclusive meritocracies look, sound and work. A historical document highlighting the conjunction of jazz and the Civil Rights movement has come to hand — programs from two nights in 1963 when major players performed and major jazz journalists emceed in benefit for CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality) at New York City’s Five Spot Cafe, plus a letter of thanks to bassist Henry Grimes for his participation.

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Armstrong to Ellington to Obama

If anyone needs a primer on how jazz leads directly to the inauguration of Barack Obama as 44th president of the U.S., see Nat Hentoff’s Wall Street Journal article on the history of musicians, audiences, presenters and producers of all “colors” in the struggle for Civil Rights. 
The march from Buddy Bolden playing in New Orleans’ “back ‘o’ town” to a man of diverse ancestry leading the free world from the White House has been direct (if not necessarily “straight”) and determined.

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Cutting Contest, online

Six emerging jazz acts, playing in their hometowns from Fresno to Brisbane, Australia competed publicly via video clips to win a Coltrane boxed set and $1000 cash prizes — that was the First World Internet “Cutting Contest”, results announced January 31 online (of course).  Pretty good gimmick — er, marketing idea — to use the web, expose new talent, enlist the audience in interactivity, among other things the endeavor of TruthInMusic.com (among its motto’s:  “This is John Coltrane’s world . . . we just live in it”)  seems to be about. 

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Parameters of jazz now

The Winterjazzfest held at three venues in Greenwich Village last Saturday, a smorgasbord of almost two dozen acts offered up to attendees of the Association of Performing Arts Centers conference, gave a hint of some sounds to be heard around the U.S. in the months to come. What I witnessed was diverse, engaging, virtuosic but not didactic. The musicians seem to know they’ve got to be audience-friendly, or go without. So they’ve tailored their acts for clarity, balancing familiarity and novelty but not dumbing down. 

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Manhattan music surge for APAP

The Association of Performing Arts Presenters (APAP) convenes in Manhattan this weekend, demonstrating the greatest health and resilience of any sector of the jazz-new music economy. Last year more than 4000 attendees registered to schmooze, exhibit, theorize and opine on panels, take in showcase performances and make deals with musicians eager for gigs.
The talent search is paramount, and among the numerous music showcases in conjunction with APAP all around Manhattan January 9 – 13, three especially stand out: Winterjazzfest, the Brooklyn Jazz Underground Festival and globalFEST 2009. Talent to spare!

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Hope we still hope we can believe in

We — I — need a deep-winter burst of positivity. The Presidential election was two months ago, and nothing has changed! Except the pres-elect is getting heat for all he hasn’t done (bring peace to Israel-Gaza, fix the economy, justify appointments) while the sitting lame duck gets a virtual pass for what he’s ignoring (Israel-Gaza), what he’s flubbed (US economy, world affairs, environment — need more examples?) and what he’s doing now (opening wilderness to development, putting appointees in protected jobs, spinning his legacy).

So here’s an Obama praise song by Fula Flute, an internationally-constituted band featuring a felicitous West African sound: two unusual flutes in not-quite-unison, kora and balafon, upright bass, congas. Vocalist Adoulaye Diabate sings, “If you’re looking for a great leader, you have to find a good person . . . Good evening, Barack Obama.” Fula Flute dedicates its new, second album Mansa America to Big O, with the note “May he help lead the World into a new enlightened era.” Amen to that. 

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South Asian-American jazz from New York

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.”

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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.

Gifted with powerful technique, abundant melodic imagination, rhythmic drive and a deep bluesy feeling, Hubbard emerged in the 1960s as one of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and recorded timeless music throughout that decade with John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill and many others — as well as leading his own crackling sessions for Blue Note and Atlantic Records. He was not ideologically an avant-gardist; his compositions such as “Up Jumped Spring” had a lyrical playfulness. But he also excelled at expressing urgency with tunes such as “Crisis” and “Breaking Point.” 

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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 — 

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