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December in live jazz

NY Times reviews

Introducing a new monthly column, featuring live reviews of five standout shows at venues across New York City. This month...

Borderlands Trio

Harish Raghavan 

Thomas Morgan

StoneFest

Nioka Workman, Michael Wimberly and Ghail Rhodes Benjami

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RIP Roswell Rudd

NY Times obituary

With groups like the New York Art Quartet and Archie Shepp’s bands of the mid-1960s, Mr. Rudd was at the center of the free-jazz scene. But he eventually moved on, teaching at colleges and collaborating with musicians from around the world.

After his return to commercial recording and international performances in 1999, his music became more diverse, mixing tuneful original compositions and jazz standards with R&B classics and ballads from France and Cuba.

What drew it all together was Mr. Rudd’s fluid playing, which could swiftly reroute a listener’s attention without disrupting the flow of a song.

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RIP Kevin Mahogany

NY Times obituary

Mr. Mahogany arrived on the national jazz stage in the 1990s boasting a silky tone and a languid swagger. His style drew on Kansas City’s tradition of bluesy male vocals, while also reflecting the influence of R&B and jazz from the 1960s and ’70s. His voice was weighty and wide, yet his articulation always remained crisp.

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Photo by Alan Nahigian

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R.I.P. Sunny Murray

NY Times obituary

Sunny Murray was still finding his footing on New York’s jazz scene in 1960 when he met the pianist Cecil Taylor, a rising star of the avant-garde. The two played together at a jam session, and they clicked.

“I don’t know what I did, but he looked over his shoulder and said, ‘Do that again. You’ve got the will, so the spirits will do it.’ I’ll never forget that,” Mr. Murray told the writer A. B. Spellman.

He eventually established himself as the first drummer willing to match Mr. Taylor’s free-flowing method — namely by abandoning a time-keeping role, and treating the drum set as a palette of textures more than a percussion instrument. By creating friction between the tones of his drums and cymbals, he sought to create new dimensions and hues, rather than pulse.

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10 favorite live moments from 2017

NY Times article

Jazz seemed to be all over the place this year, a big tent for multimedia mixing, vociferous protest and challenges to the standard definitions of a performer’s role. Here are 10 outstanding concert experiences — nine in New York, and one in Newport, R.I., where jazz’s mainstream goes each summer to take its temperature.

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Revisiting the Downtown scene

NY Times critic’s notebook

Kamikaze Ground Crew, the Jazz Passengers and the Microscopic Septet — three bands from New York’s Downtown scene of the 1980s — shared a stage last week for the first time. They made me wonder: Were the ’80s also our least existentialist decade, one of our most embodied? In a digital marketplace of crippling choice, there’s room for a lot more of that. The old downtown scene isn’t just a guide for today’s eclectic thinkers; it’s a foil.

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Quincy Jones and jazz’s new Netflix-like video service

NY Times article

For much of jazz’s history, devotees discovered music over the radio airwaves and in library stacks, rooting out old LPs or videos to borrow and sample. Today, a lot of that exploration happens online — particularly on YouTube. Most major albums have found their way onto that streaming platform, as have concert bootlegs, studio sessions and old documentaries that were once impossible to track down.

Now a new video platform is seeking to raise the bar, offering a curated library of high-quality video content from across the jazz world. Quincy Jones, the jazz musician and impresario, is helping to start Qwest TV, an online library of concert videos and feature documentaries, most of them unavailable on YouTube or any other streaming site.

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The ‘best’ of 2017

NY Times year-end list

These were my favorite jazz and jazz-related releases of 2017. (Click the link above for the list with little write-ups.)

And here are some honorable mentions that certainly merited a chance to greet your ears...

Lastly, if anyone’s still reading, I’m taking advantage of my autonomy over here to gently remind the lector that I listen to things other than jazz. Here’s a tossed-together index of favorites from around the bend and across the tracks.

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Photos by Nicholas Hunt, Greta Rybus, John Salangsang, Elizabeth Weinberg, Nicole Fara Silver and Mark Abramson (clockwise from top left)

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In 2017, recognition and reckoning for women in jazz

NY Times year-end essay

In this year-end essay on the powerful statements made by female jazz instrumentalists in 2017, I tried to maintain a balance between the positivity of progress, and the arduousness of the journey. There was a lot I couldn’t find room to responsibly address. Like ...

the role of all-women jazz albums/festivals/organizations in laying groundwork for the present moment, and their (auspicious) decline today;

the scourge of student-to-student sexual aggression and rape at music schools, in addition to the harassment and assault by teachers that I did discuss;

why the jazz avant-garde has fostered female instrumentalists more readily than the straight-ahead scene, and the different ways in which both still manifest onstage sexism (not that there are just two “scenes,” or that the divide between them is in any way clear);

the role that class and race play in raising the barrier to entry — even higher — for many nonwhite women in jazz, particularly those dependent on the public school system;

the concrete steps that the jazz community can, must and soon will take to set up new expectations for its men — be they teachers, organizers or gigging musicians.

The conversation continues.

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Photo by Mark Abramson

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Holiday hits and jingle bell schlock

NY Times list

I took a listen to the new Christmas-themed albums by Herb Alpert and Cheap Trick, plus a collection of old jazz and blues recordings. Turns out, Christmas cash-in recordings are as old as the industry itself.

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Photo by Michelle V. Agins

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Dee Dee Bridgewater goes back to Memphis

Feature article, NY Times

“Dee Dee Bridgewater spills with theatrics and sensuality, and at first blush you might peg her as a classic jazz vocalist: coquettish, feminine, vaguely antiquated. But her orientation is different. There’s nothing overly generous or self-offering about the attitude Ms. Bridgewater projects. Whether strutting through the aisle and teasing the members of the audience, or soliciting a blown kiss from her bassist, Ms. Bridgewater is taking as much as she’s giving.”

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Photo by Joe Martinez

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Irène Schweizer and Joey Baron’s ‘Live!’

DownBeat review

Irène Schweizer has a deceptively capacious understanding of what it means to play the piano. Her new album with Joey Baron is a gem.

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Monk’s rich afterlife

Critic’s notebook, NY Times

"Starting in the early 1940s, Monk became a major architect of the style known as bebop — and, immediately, an iconoclast within it. He helped devise its language of thick harmonies, zipping melodies and steamed-up rhythm. But Monk maintained a rough piano style and wrote tunes to reflect it; his virtuosity worked on a level that was more tonal, and more physical. (In Monk’s musical manuscripts, which Mr. Iverson discovered on eBay and posted to his personal blog, he even invents a more evocative way of spelling a bell sound: 'Tding tding tding.')

“Rather than dashing futurism, his bebop was about arrangement and choreography. Each note in his compositions sounds like a weight-bearing limb, supporting the body of the song and leading into the next movement. And those limbs often pause to hold a pose: On a simple, singsong piece like “Rhythm-a-Ning” or a wound-up work like “Criss Cross,” he uses silence more than speed.”

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Photo by Justin Cook

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So you say you want a revolution

Critic’s notebook, NY Times

“The October Revolution in Jazz & Contemporary Music was something like a State of the Union for free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and also a statement of potential. An intergenerational sweep of experimentalists — including younger acts as well as many of free jazz’s first-generation heroes, now in their 70s, 80s and 90s — appeared on a well-appointed stage in a city not known for high-budget jazz presentations. It was a rare institutional moment for the improvising avant-garde and maybe proof that in a moment when jazz is surging, the United States can respect its fringes on a level that only Europe historically has.“

And yet.

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Photo by Ryan Collerd

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Vijay Iyer’s ‘Far from Over’

DownBeat review

Here’s the lead review in the November issue of DownBeat magazine, giving 4.5 stars to the first album from Vijay Iyer’s sextet.

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Darius Jones’ big, visceral sound

Preview, NY Times

“There are a couple major ways an alto saxophonist can handle the instrument. You can clench and bridle, in the manner of an avant-gardist like Oliver Lake, using the horn to signify something like refusal. Or you can tease the listener, dilate your sound, give it the vibrato of a body overcome. That’s what Johnny Hodges did in Duke Ellington’s orchestra. If you’re Darius Jones, the most visceral and distinctive alto saxophonist of this era, you go for both.”

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Photo by Hiroyuki Ito

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Jazz at Lincoln Center celebrates 30 years. Now what?

Feature article, NY Times

"Jazz at Lincoln Center typically sells out more than 90 percent of its seats for these major shows, so there is clearly a New York audience still interested in standard-issue jazz. Still, other performing arts centers have expanded their approach more willingly. In Washington, under the direction of the pianist Jason Moran, the Kennedy Center now books classic jazz heroes like Ron Carter alongside the rapper Q-Tip and the electric trio Harriet Tubman, whose improvised music sounds more like bluesy doom metal than bebop. In San Francisco, the SFJazz Center takes a similar tack.

“Jazz at Lincoln Center’s decision to stay the traditionalist course has left a wide opening for other New York presenters — even as its nearly $50 million endowment gobbles up most of the city’s philanthropic jazz funding. This heterophony is, in fact, a good thing. It means diversity of artistic growth, and more points of contact for the public.”