If Herbie Nichols is remembered at all, it’s as a jazz composer and a pianist, not as a songwriter. In the decades since his death he’s carved out a small legacy with musicians like Roswell Rudd, the Clusone Trio and Misha Mengelberg recording albums with his material. These are the records that do the heavy lifting in carrying his music on; Nichols own The Complete Blue Note Recordings (Blue Note, 1997) is a bulky three-CD set that's out-of-print and goes for a premium on the secondary market.
Never a recording success in his short lifetime, Nichols paid the bills by working a variety of gigs: he taught piano, penned articles and poems for magazines, and accompanied singers. Throughout this he was writing music at an almost frantic pace: about 170 compositions, some with lyrics. And even if you don’t know Nichols’s name, you’ve probably heard his most famous one: “Lady Sings the Blues,” a song that Billie Holiday turned into a standard. When Nichols died in 1963, writer AB Spellman noted he’d never had a year where he supported himself solely on his own music.
In recent years, New York based jazz singer Fay Victor has developed her interest in Nichols music with her Herbie Nichols SUNG project. Life Is Funny That Way is the result of these years of work: she’d added lyrics to a set of Nichols’s songs, fleshed out arrangements on others. Over 11 performances, she’s backed with a jazz quartet and brings this music — some of it never recorded in Nichols’s lifetime — to life.
It opens with “Life Is Funny That Way,” a song starting with Victor and sax player Michaël Attias together. When they get to the chorus the band joins in with a nicely swinging groove. Immediately you can hear the chemistry between Attias and Victor: they almost play in unison, his notes mirroring her singing. The other players (Anthony Coleman on piano, Ratzo Harris on bass, and Tom Rainey on drums) create a nice backing for Attias and Victor to branch out on.
Conversely, Coleman and Harris are all but absent on “The Bassist.” It opens with an understated drum solo by Rainey: light rolls, gentle cymbal taps. He builds up until Victor and Attias join in together, again acting as two leads that are mostly playing in sync. But when Victor starts scatting, her and Attias start trading riffs and playing off each other.
Occasionally, the band slows things down to a crawl, giving Victor a chance to stretch out and sing a slow ballad. “Bright Butterfly” has Harris bowing his lines, giving a thick and fuzzy background for Attias and Victor. “The Culprit Is You” has a similar approach, but with Coleman’s sparse piano and little pushes by Rainey’s drumming. It lends this performance a nice smoky, late-night vibe where you can almost see the spotlight closing tight onto Victor as she stretches her notes. And on “Lady Sings the Blues,” Victor’s voice has a bright, almost warm quality as she leans into Billie Holiday’s lyrics.
The band occasionally gets a chance to shine too. Late in the record, they play “Twelve Bars” as a slow mood piece, with Coleman bouncing around his piano as the rhythm section whips up a swirl of noise behind him. It’s one of the more angular pieces here, showing Nichols’ more outside style. He wasn’t just a straight ahead bop pianist.
Life Is Funny That Way offers a nice primer on Nichols: music that’s alternately challenging and straight ahead, close enough to the tradition to seem familiar with enough twists it can catch you off guard. It’s a good way to dive into his music. Let’s hope Victor’s project isn’t a one-off.
07.21.19 JG Thirlwell had an excellent show debuting his brand new multi-channel electro-acoustic solo show Silver Mantis at Roulette on July 21 2019, as part of Roulette's 40th Season Closeout Party. Thirlwell's new set features electronics, theremin and prepared piano, with new immersive visuals created by Swedish visual artist Sten Backman. Also on the bill were John Zorn’s Simulacrum, John Medeski and Val Jeanty & Fay Victor. Photos by Dora Blount.
Over the past decade, a new wave of Black avant-garde music has been gathering momentum in New York, Philadelphia, and beyond.
This wave constitutes a major new phase of the movement now commonly known as experimentalism.
One of the hallmarks of this movement is the fusion of free jazz and experimental music with various forms of text, including poetry, literary works, and histories that engage deeply with African American pasts, presents, and futures.
The other defining feature of this emerging wave is a direct engagement with the culture, social organizations, and politics of the era of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s. [Read More]
The prolific saxophonist Ivo Perelman rarely collaborates with vocalists, but these two sets with Fay Victor and the Czech actress turned violinist and songstress Iva Bittová are full of freeform theatrics, shared discoveries and curious folk motifs.
Blackity Black Black Is Beautiful is the very first solo record by Fay Victor, whose 30-year-long music career has covered everything from House, New Music, Jazz (Blues) and Free Improvisation. Her deep history with dance music, her genreless output, and her lived experience as a Black woman in the world shaped the brand new process she used to create this prismatic album which touches on all the decades of her life like diary snapshots. It’s a mesmerizing collection of composed work that could only be made by an extraordinary improviser.
This solo project was built out of composed tracks + processing + piano playing and vocalizing all by Fay Victor.
‘How Can You Do It?’ is composed John Lee Hooker.
Thank you to the deepest Black Woman Inspiration for my entire life - my mother, Faith Evangeline Susannah Victor, a quiet warrior full of grace that raised me to be the me you see. To mavericks and sages such as Betty Carter, bell hooks, Zora Neal Hurston, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Abbey Lincoln, Jeanne Lee, Nicole Mitchell, Stephanie Perry and Dr. Yaba Blay. To all the black women I've known in my life that got up, went to work, day in and day out for decades to take care of their families without fanfare. The women that watched and worked from the sidelines so their families could eat and the will to exist with dignity and strength, which may be the biggest protest towards the systems that work to keep so many of us back. Thank you to the kindness and generosity of the Universe.
