4 Tuesday is live jazz night at Bella Luna, an exceptional Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the past couple of years, guitarist Jack Wilkins has held court at this intimate hang, swinging nonchalantly in one corner of the room as unsuspecting patrons chow down on their rigatoni. On most Tuesday nights a coterie of hardcore Wilkins fans—most amateur and professional six-stringers themselves—gathers at the bar just a few feet away from the Brooklyn native to take in every nuance of his remarkable playing. They sip their wine and whiskey with eyes glued to Wilkins’ busy right hand; they soak in his lush chordal voicings, shimmering arpeggios and ringing harmonics. Though Wilkins’ fretboard prowess is on par with such celebrated contemporaries as Pat Martino and Larry Coryell, the 65-year-old guitarist has been flying under the radar since the release of his debut record, 1973’s <I>Windows</I> on the Mainstream label. A one-time member of Buddy Rich’s working septet of the early ’70s and accompanist to a bevy of great jazz singers over the years, from Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor and Jay Clayton to Morgana King, Nancy Harrow and Amy London, Wilkins remains highly regarded in guitar circles. And when it comes to assessing his standing in the guitar firmament, the guitar aficionados at Bella Luna are quick to give their man kudos. “Jack is definitely one of the best guitarists out there today, without a doubt,” says one ardent fan at the bar. “His problem is he’s just not so good at promoting himself. But the players know the deal.” The particular Tuesday night I attended the weekly guitar ritual at Bella Luna, Wilkins was joined by special guest Howard Alden, whose impeccable playing on a rich-sounding seven-string guitar blended beautifully with Wilkins’ rhythmically charged comping and fluid single-note lines. The two created magic on a set of Great American Songbook favorites, interweaving tight counterpoint lines on “Give Me the Simple Life,” nimbly shifting roles back and forth on “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” and blowing through the changes on uptempo renditions of “Fascinating Rhythm” and “Everything I’ve Got.” At one point, a woman approached Wilkins with a request on the night of her engagement dinner—“When I Fall in Love.” Wilkins turned in a stirring solo rendition that was brimming with beautiful chordal melodies and deft re-harmonization, in the tradition of guitar role models like Joe Pass, Tal Farlow and Johnny Smith. On his most recent release, the superb <I>Until It’s Time</I> (MaxJazz), Wilkins covers Smith’s “Walk Don’t Run” (a tune popularized in the early ’60s by the Ventures). The piece begins with a fugue-like quote of the familiar melody before it opens up and starts swinging. “Johnny Smith is the musician that made me wanna play music in the first place,” says Wilkins. “The first time I heard his records I went crazy. I said, ‘This is ridiculous. I wanna do that!’” Wilkins is joined on his 14th recording as a leader by bassist and longtime collaborator Steve LaSpina, along with pianist Jon Cowherd and drummer Mark Ferber. “I played with Steve a million times,” says the guitarist. “Jon I’ve played with a whole lot. Mark I haven’t played with as much as the others but we had an immediate hookup. And so I knew it was going to be a righteous group.” Following a day of rehearsal, they knocked out all 12 tracks in a single day in the studio. The title track is a cover of the romantic Buffy Sainte-Marie tune from the ’60s, “Until It’s Time for You to Go.” Says Wilkins, “I was doing some solo guitar gigs, subbing for Gene Bertoncini at this place called La Madeleine, and one night somebody requested that tune. And as I played it I realized how gorgeous the changes were, with the beautiful harmonies and the bassline that moves around. I’ve always loved the song and I loved the way she sang it, just a very emotional reading of the tune.” A gifted player with a great ear and an impeccable sense of time, Wilkins got his big break with bandleader and drummer Buddy Rich. “I only played with Buddy’s big band once and, frankly, I didn’t care for it,” he says. “It was no fun for me. As a guitar player, you get lost in the big band. So for three years I always played in a small-group setting with Buddy. We went out on the road as a septet—sometimes we’d even play quartet. I learned a million tunes, and every night I came home from that gig I realized what I had to work on.” Rich’s working septet during this period (1971-74) included such heavy hitters as alto saxophonist Sonny Fortune, tenor saxophonist Sal Nistico, pianist Kenny Barron and electric bassist Anthony Jackson. They made one live recording as a unit, 1971’s <I>Very Live at Buddy’s Place</I> (Groove Merchant). “Buddy loved these guys,” says Wilkins. “And when he sat behind those drums he was just as happy as he could be. I sat two feet away from him the whole time I was in the band … and I still can’t believe what I saw. It was uncanny.” During their sets, Rich would invariably dismiss the rest of the band to feature Wilkins in a solo setting. “It started one night when Buddy looked at me and said, ‘Play something!’ and then left the stage. Maybe he was tired and hot and wanted to get a drink. Whatever the case, I was left up there all alone and had to come up with something quick to draw the crowd into my playing the best I could. It was a great learning experience for me to actually sit there and play something that people enjoyed. It taught me a lot about creating colors and moods and dynamics within a tune. I couldn’t just get up there and wail a lot of notes, I had to really communicate and make it happen in an organic way. And I could always tell if I was good. If Buddy liked it, I knew it was OK.” During his tenure with Rich, Wilkins wrote one tune for him called “Fum,” which they recorded together on 1974’s Transition. As Wilkins recalls, “Buddy loved that piece. We played it every night. When I first brought it to him he said, ‘What the hell kind of name is that? Like “Fee Fi Fo Fum”?’ And I told him, ‘No, it stands for “Fuck You, Man.”’ He just couldn’t stop laughing for a week after that.” As for the fabled Rich temper, Wilkins says he never saw it. “Buddy was so nice to me you can’t believe it. Buddy and I became really good friends. We’re both from Brooklyn, we both loved baseball, we both played music and I didn’t give him any shit about anything. Why would I? I mean, we all knew who the boss was. He was the boss, and we were cool with that.” Recommended Listening: Until It’s Time (MaxJazz, 2009) Reunion (Chiaroscuro, 2001) Merge (Chiaroscuro, 1977) true 21 2009-10-03T13:04:26-04:00 false 25112 175 true 80 2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Tuesday is live jazz night at Bella Luna, an exceptional Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. For the past couple of years, guitarist Jack Wilkins has held court at this intimate hang, swinging nonchalantly in one corner of the room as unsuspecting patrons chow down on their rigatoni. On most Tuesday nights a coterie of hardcore Wilkins fans—most amateur and professional six-stringers themselves—gathers at the bar just a few feet away from the Brooklyn native to take in every nuance of his remarkable playing. They sip their wine and whiskey with eyes glued to Wilkins’ busy right hand; they soak in his lush chordal voicings, shimmering arpeggios and ringing harmonics. Though Wilkins’ fretboard prowess is on par with such celebrated contemporaries as Pat Martino and Larry Coryell, the 65-year-old guitarist has been flying under the radar since the release of his debut record, 1973’s Windows on the Mainstream label. A one-time member of Buddy Rich’s working septet of the early ’70s and accompanist to a bevy of great jazz singers over the years, from Sarah Vaughan, Chris Connor and Jay Clayton to Morgana King, Nancy Harrow and Amy London, Wilkins remains highly regarded in guitar circles. And when it comes to assessing his standing in the guitar firmament, the guitar aficionados at Bella Luna are quick to give their man kudos. “Jack is definitely one of the best guitarists out there today, without a doubt,” says one ardent fan at the bar. “His problem is he’s just not so good at promoting himself. But the...

2009-10-12T11:21:58-04:00

4 Like many musicians who came up during the swing era and have since spent much of their life traveling the world, saxophonist Red Holloway has a trove of road stories to share. Yet none is more vivid or revealing than his childhood recollection of leaving the segregated South for the promised land of Chicago during the depths of the Depression. A midwife brought James Holloway into the world on May 31, 1927, in Helena, Ark. His mother was 13 when he was born; his father, whom he wouldn’t meet until 21 years later, was 17. Though Holloway spent only the first five years of his life in Helena, he has no difficulty recalling the suffocating air of racial tension, the indignity of having “to step off the sidewalk and onto the hot asphalt when white folks passed by,” and the not unfounded fears that almost consumed his teenage mother. “The racial thing in Arkansas was so bad that my mother, me being a male, didn’t want me to stay there, so we moved to Chicago,” says the veteran reedman and occasional vocalist, speaking from his home in California. “That was quite a trip, riding in the bus with a shoebox full of chicken. In Arkansas, on the black side of town, there were no electric street lights, so every place we’d get to, I’d see bright lights and say, ‘Mama, is this Chicago?’ ‘No, not yet.’ “They didn’t have toilets on the buses, of course,” Holloway continues. “And blacks couldn’t stop at every place on the normal route so we had to have a pickle jar to pee in and throw it out the window. We were in the back of the bus, of course, but we were lucky enough to get that long seat back there.” Even as a child in Arkansas, Holloway was drawn to music. His mother played piano and pump organ. “They used to have a crank on some of those, and I’d pump it while she played in church,” he recalls. Piano lessons came early, but it wasn’t until years later, in Chicago, when Holloway heard the Count Basie Orchestra on the radio, that he caught a glimpse of his future. “When I heard Lester Young, that’s when I knew I wanted to play saxophone. I guess most of us wanted to be Lester.” Enter Captain Walter Dyett, revered educator and bandleader at DuSable High School. An incubator for talented youth, the school was home to the likes of Johnny Griffin, Gene Ammons, Dinah Washington, Von Freeman and Redd Foxx, among many other budding musicians and entertainers. Dyett was a notoriously strict taskmaster. “If you didn’t practice, he’d throw you off the band,” Holloway recalls. “He threw out Johnny Griffin all the time. Johnny was playing alto, and when I wasn’t practicing he’d throw me out, too. But he had his own band and he’d take the best players and give them work. It was real nice.” By the time Holloway was 16 he had turned professional. Gone were the days of delivering 25-cent quarts of beer by bicycle. After joining Gene Wright’s big band, Holloway was making good money for a few years, until he joined the Army. After returning home, the saxophonist received a comprehensive education in the blues, courtesy of the great pianist Roosevelt Sykes. “My mother went to school with him,” Holloway recalls. “He was visiting her one day and he saw my saxophone. ‘Boy, do you play that thing?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ So he sat down at the piano and started playing some blues and I played with him. ‘You want to go out on the road with me?’ I said, ‘Yes, sir.’” And off they went. “Georgia, Arkansas, out west to Kansas City, everywhere,” Holloway recalls. “He taught me everything about the blues. And all those blues players knew each other. In fact, I got more gigs from blues players than jazz players back then.” Of course, it didn’t hurt that Holloway was at the right place at the right time. He played with just about everyone who was anyone on the flourishing Chicago blues scene in the late ’40s and ’50s, in the studio or onstage, from Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim to his favorite vocalists: Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Witherspoon and Joe Turner. “Wolf and Witherspoon I liked because they had a raspy, big voice, a real blues voice,” Holloway says with a laugh. “They had that ‘I’m hungry and it’s time for us to get some money so I can eat every day’ sound.” At one point, Holloway was busy working in one capacity or another at the Chance, Chess, Checkers and Vee Jay labels. His professional association with Leonard and Phil Chess began shortly after the siblings purchased the Aristocrat label in 1949. “I used to write lead sheets for Leonard,” Holloway says. “I was getting three dollars a lead sheet. I’d write up 10 of them and they’d send them down to get copyrighted. So when I asked for my 30 dollars, he’d say, ‘Every time I turn around, you’re asking for money. Why don’t you take one percent of this company?’ This was back when they were operating Aristocrat. I said, ‘No, I just want my 30 dollars,’ never knowing how big the company would get when they changed the name to Chess.” Jazz, though, was always Holloway’s passion, and the advent of bop didn’t diminish his enthusiasm. While playing with Wright’s big band at the Persian Lounge, he got his first chance to hear Charlie Parker up close. “He was playing so much that I thought maybe I’d better go into the real estate business. I was still honking like Arnett Cobb!” Holloway credits his memorable alliance with his late friend Sonny Stitt for heightening his appreciation of bop. The two met in 1944, but it wasn’t until the late ’70s that Stitt convinced Holloway to play alto as well tenor on tour, a dicey proposition as it turned out. During one of their first road gigs, the two exchanged a few alto choruses on “Now’s the Time” before Stitt lowered the hammer: “He played 10 choruses and drove me right into the floor,” recalls Holloway. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, you MF. I didn’t want to bring this alto in the first place. You act like I’m the enemy.’ He said, ‘There ain’t no friendship on the bandstand.’” As much as Holloway admired other reedmen, no one has inspired his robust tone and melodic conception more than Ben Webster. Holloway got a chance to play with the tenor titan for six months during the mid-’50s. He wasn’t prepared, however, to spend much time going toe-to-toe with the grandmaster: “I’d play maybe two tunes and get right off the stage. But I’d furnish the Teacher’s Scotch every night so I could get a lesson.” You can still detect Webster’s influence on Holloway’s playing today. His recent release, Go Red Go! (Delmark), makes room for romantic ballads that showcase his big-toned lyricism, including “Stardust” and “Deep Purple,” as well as the kind of Hammond B3 organ grooves that recall Holloway’s influential recordings with Jack McDuff and George Benson.“I’ve always liked pretty music,” Holloway volunteers. “I remember what Ben Webster used to tell me: It’s like when you meet a pretty woman and you want to sing to her—make your horn sing.” Mention of McDuff and Benson quickly triggers a laugh: “George was—and is—a helluva player,” Holloway says. “But I remember he’d say, ‘McDuff, please let me sing one.’ McDuff used to say, ‘If I wanted a singer, I’d hire one!’” Years later Holloway wouldn’t miss an opportunity to needle McDuff. “I’d say, ‘Don’t you wish you let that boy sing?’ And he’d say, ‘F you!’ We always laughed about it.” Since the late ’60s, Holloway has been based on the West Coast. For 15 years he served as the talent coordinator for the luxe Parisian Room in Los Angeles, a job that he was well suited for given the similar positions he held at various clubs in Chicago. When he’s not touring, the reedman enjoys the good life, surrounded by friends and musicians in Cambria, Calif., a sunny enclave with an ocean view. He shares his home now with a 120-pound malamute—“half wolf and half Alaskan husky.” “Yes,” he adds, “it’s a beautiful place to live: no police, no jails and no fast food joints.” Recommended Listening: <I>Go Red Go!</I> (Delmark, 2009) <I>Coast to Coast</I> (Milestone, 2003) <I>Live With Harry “Sweets” Edison</I> (Chiaroscuro, 1995) true 110 2009-10-08T16:07:00-04:00 false 25159 176 true 80 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

Like many musicians who came up during the swing era and have since spent much of their life traveling the world, saxophonist Red Holloway has a trove of road stories to share. Yet none is more vivid or revealing than his childhood recollection of leaving the segregated South for the promised land of Chicago during the depths of the Depression. A midwife brought James Holloway into the world on May 31, 1927, in Helena, Ark. His mother was 13 when he was born; his father, whom he wouldn’t meet until 21 years later, was 17. Though Holloway spent only the first five years of his life in Helena, he has no difficulty recalling the suffocating air of racial tension, the indignity of having “to step off the sidewalk and onto the hot asphalt when white folks passed by,” and the not unfounded fears that almost consumed his teenage mother. “The racial thing in Arkansas was so bad that my mother, me being a male, didn’t want me to stay there, so we moved to Chicago,” says the veteran reedman and occasional vocalist, speaking from his home in California. “That was quite a trip, riding in the bus with a shoebox full of chicken. In Arkansas, on the black side of town, there were no electric street lights, so every place we’d get to, I’d see bright lights and say, ‘Mama, is this Chicago?’ ‘No, not yet.’ “They didn’t have toilets on the buses, of course,” Holloway continues. “And blacks couldn’t stop at every place on the...

2009-10-08T16:07:47-04:00

4 Drummer Ray LeVier has chops. His Web page includes video of a drum clinic near his home in New York’s Hudson Valley that places his virtuosity beyond question, as do his heavy beats behind singer-songwriter KJ Denhert. But on his postbop-oriented leader debut, Ray’s Way (Origin), LeVier epitomizes understatement; he takes no solos, save for a series of one-bar breaks on one track, and comps so subtly that even the bass (played by François Moutin or Ned Mann) frequently dominates him. “I wanted it to sound like a band, not a bunch of hired guns,” says LeVier. “I didn’t want it to sound like a drummer’s album, but like an album.” Hardly standard operating procedure for a drummer-as-bandleader, but LeVier’s entire musical career has defied conventional wisdom. Shortly after discovering his instrument at age 12, he suffered extensive third-degree burns when his sleeping bag caught fire during a campout. The accident deprived him of most of the fingers on his left hand, causing his doctors to believe that he’d never play drums again. LeVier didn’t accept that answer: He asked his mother to bandage a drumstick to his hand and beat the skins even when it aggravated his injuries. “The skin was like tissue paper,” he recalls, “and my hands were bleeding. But I kept at it and just kept trying to figure out a way. So I was walking through a parking lot and I found what I think was a hockey glove—no fingers. And I said, ‘Well, why can’t I just stick my hand in this, and duct tape the stick to my hand?’” The trick worked, and began a series of innovations in his technique. LeVier had his thumb surgically reset to provide a fulcrum for the stick, but if it slipped from his grasp he couldn’t catch it. “I was just sitting there one day and happened across a rubber band, and I said, ‘Wow, maybe this’ll work.’ So I put it around the butt end of the stick and on my hand: voila! If the stick started to slide out I would just let go and the rubber band would pull it back in.” Even more effective, he later found, was an adhesive commonly used for wigs, which held the stick in place but still allowed him to put it down if he needed brushes for the next tune. LeVier’s goal in these experiments was to be a rock drummer. When he began studying with Sol LaRocca, a veteran of Teddy Wilson and Junior Mance’s bands, he was stymied by the teacher’s approach. “He scared the crap out of me!” LeVier laughs. “I didn’t have time for these rudiments; I was going to be a rock star!” But when college neared and he began to regard drumming as a serious career, LeVier turned back to LaRocca. “One of my best teachers,” he says after the second go-round. “He really did miracles for me.” LaRocca also won his student over on jazz. By the time LeVier arrived at New Jersey’s William Paterson University, he’d decided to major in jazz performance. Since finishing college, LeVier has been a successful freelance musician, and has also worked in the funk-fusion project Berkana with guitarist Nat Janoff and bassist François Moutin. His most frequent gig, however, is with Denhert, whose music is a rootsy mix of folk, rock, jazz and soul. “We play a club in New York called the 55 Bar, have been there every other Saturday for 10 years now,” he says. “She’s also doing a lot of touring, and we’ve been playing the jazz festival in Umbria, the summer and winter versions, for the last four years.” The job has kept LeVier so busy that it’s only now, at 39, that he’s recorded his debut with Ray’s Way. “I guess life has a way of moving very fast,” he says. “You get busy with doing your gigs and living your life, and although it’s something I always wanted to do I put it on the backburner.” The disc actually began several years ago in a trio session with guitarist Mike Stern and bassist Ned Mann; encouraged by his wife, Nury, and all who heard it, LeVier recorded a second session with Stern, Moutin and saxophonist Dave Binney, then finished with a larger band including Moutin, Binney, vibraphonist Joe Locke, guitarist John Abercrombie and soprano saxophonist Federico Turreni. Ray’s Way has a fusion-ish sound, thanks to Abercrombie’s solidbody guitar and LeVier’s own rockish style. “That’s kind of where I came from,” he remarks. Fusion drummers, he adds, have been a particular inspiration. “To me those were the drummers that had a real grasp on things, the ones that can play different styles from different worlds, but make it sound good.” LeVier is inadvertently describing himself along with his mentors. His ability to master drums across genres testifies to his perseverance as well as his talent. true 10607 2009-04-17T14:59:24-04:00 false 24585 174 true 139 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Drummer Ray LeVier has chops. His Web page includes video of a drum clinic near his home in New York’s Hudson Valley that places his virtuosity beyond question, as do his heavy beats behind singer-songwriter KJ Denhert. But on his postbop-oriented leader debut, Ray’s Way (Origin), LeVier epitomizes understatement; he takes no solos, save for a series of one-bar breaks on one track, and comps so subtly that even the bass (played by François Moutin or Ned Mann) frequently dominates him. “I wanted it to sound like a band, not a bunch of hired guns,” says LeVier. “I didn’t want it to sound like a drummer’s album, but like an album.” Hardly standard operating procedure for a drummer-as-bandleader, but LeVier’s entire musical career has defied conventional wisdom. Shortly after discovering his instrument at age 12, he suffered extensive third-degree burns when his sleeping bag caught fire during a campout. The accident deprived him of most of the fingers on his left hand, causing his doctors to believe that he’d never play drums again. LeVier didn’t accept that answer: He asked his mother to bandage a drumstick to his hand and beat the skins even when it aggravated his injuries. “The skin was like tissue paper,” he recalls, “and my hands were bleeding. But I kept at it and just kept trying to figure out a way. So I was walking through a parking lot and I found what I think was a hockey glove—no fingers. And I said, ‘Well, why can’t I just stick my hand...

2009-04-23T12:25:03-04:00

4 The sun had just gone down when Arve Henriksen ducked into a coffee shop. “It’s freezing cold in Oslo now,” the Norwegian trumpeter said, laughing. “It’s quite nice, actually, the winter here.” Accompanying him on this mid-February evening was his girlfriend, Trio Mediaeval’s Anna Maria Friman, who makes several appearances on Cartography, Henriksen’s latest full-length and his first as a leader for the ECM label. One of the tracks on which the Grammy-nominated chanteuse can be heard is “Recording Angel,” a moody, post-Miles number that includes a sample of a Trio Mediaeval soundcheck. The performance, recorded by Cartography’s co-producer Jan Bang, is used as the foundation for one of Henriksen’s sparse improvisations. “This shows the ongoing process while we were working on this record,” Henriksen said of Bang’s tendency to create songs out of a variety of audio sources. “Jan did it and brought it into the session when we were in the studio.” Bang, who co-produced Henriksen’s 2004 release Chiaroscuro and worked on trumpeter Jon Hassell’s new album Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street, also provided the spark that got the record off the ground. “The process started about two-and-a-half, three years ago, [with] Jan Bang bringing in some sketches,” Henriksen said. “We had been working together for a long time and he would just occasionally bring in some new ideas.” In addition to Bang’s electronic blueprints and two live tracks recorded at the Norwegian Punkt festival, Cartography also features “Before and Afterlife,” a spoken word and trumpet piece that was conceived, in part, by David Sylvian. The British singer-songwriter first collaborated with Henriksen on Snow Borne Sorrow, a 2005 full-length by Sylvian’s group Nine Horses, and then asked the trumpeter to contribute to a 2006 installation piece called When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima. “When we were working [on Cartography], I remembered he also sent me a file for this art magazine thing,” Henriksen said. “And he asked if he could use some of my trumpet phrases on a new song that he was making. … That’s the second track on the new record.” If this patchwork doesn’t exactly suggest the usual ECM production—that is, a Rudy Van Gelder-style session helmed by Manfred Eicher—that’s because Cartography was completed before Henriksen knew who would release it. “Jan had a recording session in France together with Jon Hassell,” Henriksen said when asked how the album ended up on the long-running German label. “So Jan just mentioned this [to] Manfred and he wanted to listen to it and liked it … and wanted to release it. But the process before that had been … to release it, actually, on another label: the Rune Grammofon label.” It’s hard to say which would’ve been a better fit. The genre-defying Norwegian indie released Henriksen’s first three albums—Chiaroscuro, 2001’s Sakuteiki and 2007’s Strjon—as well as the entire output of his jazz-rock outfit Supersilent. But ECM has a long history of supporting Norwegian artists who take unorthodox approaches to improvisation. Henriksen sees himself as a part of this tradition. “Jan, of course, and [co-producer] Erik [Honoré] and myself, we are very fond of sounds,” he said. “That’s mainly the approach in many of my projects—also Supersilent. And that goes for many of my colleagues in different bands here in Norway. We’re fond of the classical music, fond of the medieval music, fond of most different kinds. We just want to bring it in and see what can be achieved, musically, by doing that.” Henriksen’s liberal outlook might put him at odds with the core American jazz audience, which, thanks to ECM, will have a much easier time finding Cartography than the trumpeter’s previous records. But, truth be told, he doesn’t see himself in an American light. “The Norwegian jazz scene has always been sort of a melting point of many different things,” he said. “And you have to look at the Norwegian scene with some sort of European eyes, because it’s not American jazz.” In other words, don’t expect a Wynton Marsalis record—or even the kind of music that Miles Davis was making in the ’70s. Cartography is much closer to Davis in spirit than in sound, as evidenced by Henriksen’s eagerness to work with Bang and Honoré, producers who attracted him because of their experience with radio-friendly forms. “They have been working with a lot of pop artists here in Norway,” Henriksen said of the pair. “That’s the reason I chose them to produce it, because it would give me a glimpse of another world.” Interestingly enough, the collaboration resulted in one of his least otherworldly recordings. Henriksen eschews the heavy processing of Strjon and Supersilent’s recordings, opting instead for the simple sound of trumpet played over rhythms that are almost subliminally soft. “It was the work of Erik and Jan,” he said, in typical humble fashion. “They have maybe managed to make me play less notes and more simple, maybe. And hopefully this is a stronger output from my trumpet playing.” true 300 2009-04-20T10:04:56-04:00 false 24594 174 true 139 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

The sun had just gone down when Arve Henriksen ducked into a coffee shop. “It’s freezing cold in Oslo now,” the Norwegian trumpeter said, laughing. “It’s quite nice, actually, the winter here.” Accompanying him on this mid-February evening was his girlfriend, Trio Mediaeval’s Anna Maria Friman, who makes several appearances on Cartography, Henriksen’s latest full-length and his first as a leader for the ECM label. One of the tracks on which the Grammy-nominated chanteuse can be heard is “Recording Angel,” a moody, post-Miles number that includes a sample of a Trio Mediaeval soundcheck. The performance, recorded by Cartography’s co-producer Jan Bang, is used as the foundation for one of Henriksen’s sparse improvisations. “This shows the ongoing process while we were working on this record,” Henriksen said of Bang’s tendency to create songs out of a variety of audio sources. “Jan did it and brought it into the session when we were in the studio.” Bang, who co-produced Henriksen’s 2004 release Chiaroscuro and worked on trumpeter Jon Hassell’s new album Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street, also provided the spark that got the record off the ground. “The process started about two-and-a-half, three years ago, [with] Jan Bang bringing in some sketches,” Henriksen said. “We had been working together for a long time and he would just occasionally bring in some new ideas.” In addition to Bang’s electronic blueprints and two live tracks recorded at the Norwegian Punkt festival, Cartography also features “Before and Afterlife,” a spoken word and trumpet piece that...

2009-04-23T12:24:36-04:00

4 Gongs ring out, loud and long, followed by the boom of timpani and the sparse rattle of percussion. Then, from the rear of Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, out of view, several horns begin an achingly dissonant rubato theme. Soon the players emerge from the darkness, continuing the music as they march slowly through the black-box theater, finally joining the half-dozen musicians already onstage. John Hollenbeck, switching from melodica to drum set, kicks off a driving beat as the players fall into tempo, adding to a powerful unison line that crests and then draws to a conclusive finish. The piece, “Paterna Terra” (“fatherland”), is a journey in itself. But it’s just the first of Hollenbeck’s offerings with a band he has dubbed the “Philly 12.” This concert, in early March, was the culminating event of Hollenbeck’s “Big Ears” residency at the Painted Bride. In coordination with Lenny Seidman, the Bride’s music curator, Hollenbeck chose 12 musicians from a pool of local applicants. He wound up with a vibrant cross-section of Philadelphia’s improvised-music community: alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel, tenor saxophonist Bryan Rogers, soprano sax/clarinetist Aino Söderhielm, trumpeter Bart Miltenberger, trombonist Brent White, violinist Katt Hernandez, guitarist Matt Davis, vocalist Venissa Santí, pianist Matthew Mitchell and bassist Brian Howell. Hollenbeck reserved the drummer slot for himself, but Patricia Franceschy and Gabe Globus-Hoenich, both classically trained on percussion and mallets, added much to the group’s sonic identity. The idea behind “Big Ears” was simple: throw Hollenbeck, one of New York’s leading lights, together with a group of Philly-based artists he doesn’t know and then see what happens. If the effort helped shed light on the vital yet underexposed creative music scene in Philadelphia, all the better. “I tried not to have any expectations, and I didn’t want anyone else to have expectations,” Hollenbeck says. Nonetheless, there were certain goals in mind. First, the drummer spent a week in January with the Philly 12, workshopping ideas, doing rhythmic exercises and getting acquainted musically. Then the Bride hosted Hollenbeck’s Grammy-nominated Large Ensemble in a bravura performance on Feb. 28, followed by a second week of residency with the Philly 12. By this point, the workshops evolved into rehearsals. Hollenbeck brought in written music—older repurposed material as well as brand new—and started devising a concert program. “This was probably the most differing group of improvisers I’ve ever been in one room with, including school,” said Hernandez, whose work involves in-depth study of microtonality. But according to Zankel, who has played with everyone from Hank Mobley and Jymie Merritt to Cecil Taylor, “The commonalities were hugely greater than the differences.” Indeed, some of the Philly 12 already had strong bonds as members of Zankel’s Warriors of the Wonderful Sound, Davis’ Aerial Photograph and other groups on the cutting edge of the Philly scene. Hollenbeck was assertive in the leader’s role, keeping the music free and loose even as he focused carefully on dynamics, articulation and stagecraft. In several pieces, one heard a latticework of overlapping rhythms, set against richly harmonized melodic clauses often unrelated to the main tempo. The bit-by-bit rhythmic consensus-building of the residency had borne fruit. “Forced Empathy,” a frenetic repeating theme with improvised breaks, contained within it a slow conducted interlude called “Getting Chilly.” Santí handled spoken-word parts with poise on “The Bird With the Coppery, Keen Claws” (based on verse by Wallace Stevens). Later, she cued the horns through the crosscutting melodic bursts of the finale, “Jazz Envy.” Four players gathered in front for “Domino,” a stark experimental piece involving open call-and-response segments and a choreographed round robin of solos. As the four exited in a line, the remaining players struck up “Saudade,” a flowing modern-jazz tune with eloquent solos from White, Rogers and Davis. “You have to find a place where everyone can be included,” Hollenbeck said on a rehearsal break. “I wanted people to be comfortable, but I also wanted moments of, ‘God, I’ve never done this before, I have no idea what I’m doing.’” The trick was to render those moments all but undetectable, to merge comfort and discomfort in the arc of a compelling performance. Rogers and Miltenberger stoked the fires again when “Drum Conversation,” Hollenbeck’s detailed orchestration of a 1953 Max Roach solo, exploded from mid-tempo to double-time swing. “Tarak,” a serene drone-based piece with a voiceover by 7-year-old Tarak McLain (from National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series), changed the pace dramatically. But the voice sequencing from Mitchell’s laptop, and another dramatic procession around the room, didn’t sync up as smoothly as intended, one of a few ambitious technical details that made the show run long. “John’s compositions have a modular element to them,” offered Hernandez at a post-gig reception. “They have these moveable pieces that allow this or that much space between sections. It’s like motivic tone painting, which was a really interesting thing to interact with and think about.” Reflecting on the whole experience, Zankel said, “If I had to describe John in two words—and this is a point where I feel a real kinship with him—he’s a ‘melody man.’ For all he knows about rhythm and tonality and orchestration, I think the bottom line for him is melody, and that’s a profound approach to music.” true 247 2009-04-20T10:08:03-04:00 false 24595 174 true 139 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Gongs ring out, loud and long, followed by the boom of timpani and the sparse rattle of percussion. Then, from the rear of Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Art Center, out of view, several horns begin an achingly dissonant rubato theme. Soon the players emerge from the darkness, continuing the music as they march slowly through the black-box theater, finally joining the half-dozen musicians already onstage. John Hollenbeck, switching from melodica to drum set, kicks off a driving beat as the players fall into tempo, adding to a powerful unison line that crests and then draws to a conclusive finish. The piece, “Paterna Terra” (“fatherland”), is a journey in itself. But it’s just the first of Hollenbeck’s offerings with a band he has dubbed the “Philly 12.” This concert, in early March, was the culminating event of Hollenbeck’s “Big Ears” residency at the Painted Bride. In coordination with Lenny Seidman, the Bride’s music curator, Hollenbeck chose 12 musicians from a pool of local applicants. He wound up with a vibrant cross-section of Philadelphia’s improvised-music community: alto saxophonist Bobby Zankel, tenor saxophonist Bryan Rogers, soprano sax/clarinetist Aino Söderhielm, trumpeter Bart Miltenberger, trombonist Brent White, violinist Katt Hernandez, guitarist Matt Davis, vocalist Venissa Santí, pianist Matthew Mitchell and bassist Brian Howell. Hollenbeck reserved the drummer slot for himself, but Patricia Franceschy and Gabe Globus-Hoenich, both classically trained on percussion and mallets, added much to the group’s sonic identity. The idea behind “Big Ears” was simple: throw Hollenbeck, one of New York’s leading lights, together with a group of Philly-based artists...

2009-04-23T12:23:52-04:00

4 The story of rock ’n’ roll is usually told as a triumphant march, a populist victory for exuberant kids over the forces of repression and cultural conformity. But the rock revolution, particularly the second wave spearheaded by the British Invasion, also inflicted extensive casualties, in many cases sweeping away the livelihoods of the artists who paved the way for the insurrection in the first place. As a singer who came of age performing with jazz orchestras in the 1940s, Ernestine Anderson was on the frontline when the seismic forces unleashed by rock swept away most of the American music market. A commanding jazz vocalist with a powerful feeling for the blues, Anderson was born in Houston, raised in Seattle and weaned on gospel. In the late 1950s she’d gained an international following with a series of polished recordings for Mercury. But as the music business changed, Anderson found herself unable to work consistently in the United States. In a poetic twist, the tsunami triggered by the Beatles forced many American jazz and blues singers to seek work in the United Kingdom, which is where Anderson found a receptive audience in 1965. (Rare footage can be found on YouTube of Anderson in her prime on German television, singing “Moanin’” in 1967 with the formidable South African organist Cherry Wainer.) “When rock ’n’ roll became the music of America, I moved to London for two years,” says Anderson, 80, from her home in Seattle. “In order to keep working I had to leave the country. And when I came back, I stopped singing for a while. I just didn’t want to go through the hassle of starting all over again. I decided maybe it was time for me to give it up, and that’s what I did.” Fortunately, Anderson has enjoyed a career with a long, productive second act. After a decade of obscurity, she surfaced with a splash when bassist Ray Brown heard her sing at a jazz party on Vancouver Island in 1976. “At the end of it Ray asked me if I was ready to come back and start singing again,” Anderson says. “I told him I needed a record, I couldn’t just start cold. I needed something out there for people to hear. He called me a week later and said I’ve booked you at the Concord Jazz Festival and they’re going to record you there. That was my first recording after getting back in the business.” With Brown serving as her manager and the careful attention of Concord’s Carl Jefferson, Anderson spent 15 years with the label, recording more than a dozen consistently rewarding albums in a variety of settings. “Carl really had his hand on the pulse of the music, and knew how to record different artists,” Anderson says. “Once a record was made, he knew how to get behind it and promote it. He was a giant that way.” Showcasing her gift for delivering standards with rhythmic ease and emotional honesty and her bone-deep feeling for the blues, the Concord albums paired her with powerhouse big bands and a succession of superlative accompanists, including Hank Jones, Monty Alexander and Gene Harris. She felt particularly comfortable with George Shearing, recording a sensational set of lustrous ballads and midtempo, finger-snapping standards on 1988’s A Perfect Match. In a sure sign of flattery, Anderson has seen her signature tunes, particularly “I Love Being Here With You” and “Never Make Your Move Too Soon,” widely borrowed by other singers. Raised in a musical household, she absorbed blues and jazz listening to the radio at home with her parents, and gospel and hymns at church with her father. “My mother was a housewife and my father worked on the Great Northern Railroad,” Anderson recalls. “When I was growing up he sang bass in a quartet in Houston. They used to sing in different churches and I used to follow my dad around because I loved hearing them sing.” Anderson learned how to win over an audience at a very young age. She first gained attention as a 12-year-old who was chaperoned for Sunday performances with trumpeter Russell Jacquet at Houston’s El Dorado Ballroom. By 18 she was touring with a jump-blues band led by R&B pioneer Johnny Otis. Early on she worshipped Sarah Vaughan, but when Otis’ tenor saxophonist Paul Quinichette told her she needed to find her own sound if she wanted a career if jazz, Anderson stopped listening to vocalists for several years and concentrated on deciphering the new bebop recordings by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. After a few years, she made jazz’s major leagues, joining Lionel Hampton’s hugely popular orchestra in 1952. “Hamp was in town and my husband heard that Betty Carter was leaving the orchestra and that he was looking for a singer,” Anderson says. “He pushed me to go and audition for the band and I got the job. I traveled with that band for a year, and it was one of the hottest bands that Lionel ever had. Quincy Jones was there too and he was writing for the band and Jimmy Scott was the other singer.” With Hampton she was immediately thrust into the big time, performing at high-profile gigs like Dwight D. Eisenhower’s first inauguration. At the time, the orchestra bristled with brilliant musicians, including saxophonists Gigi Gryce and Jerome Richardson, trombonist Jimmy Cleveland and a trumpet section featuring Art Farmer, Quincy Jones and Clifford Brown. But like all of Hamp’s vocalists, Anderson didn’t last long. She left the band after a year rather than embark on what turned out to be an ill-fated European tour (she was replaced by Annie Ross). She did make an important connection with Gryce, recording a definitive version of his tune “Social Call” on his 1955 Savoy album Nica’s Tempo. A partnership with Swedish trumpeter Rolf Ericson led to a three-month Scandinavian tour, which launched Anderson as a major attraction in Europe. She recorded the album Hot Cargo in 1956 with a Swedish orchestra led by Harry Arnold, an album that became a hit when it was released in the U.S. by Mercury. “It was a wonderful experience,” Anderson says. “I found out that the Swedish people love jazz. After that I found that to be true all over Europe and Asia, every place except our own country.” She settled in San Francisco when she returned to the States, and quickly won a devoted fan in Ralph J. Gleason, the incisive San Francisco Chronicle columnist who was a founding editor at Rolling Stone and helped launch the Monterey Jazz Festival. In a striking case of the power of the jazz press, he made it his mission to spread the word about Anderson’s talent. Landing a coveted spot at the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 performing with piano ace Gerald Wiggins, Anderson cemented her status as rising star. The following year DownBeat presented her with the “New Star” award. “Ralph Gleason did so much for me,” Anderson says. “He was responsible for getting Hot Cargo off the ground when I came back from Sweden. He made Monterey happen and was responsible for getting an article in Time magazine, which was unheard of in those days for a jazz musician. He really got behind me and made it happen.” Anderson hasn’t won another jazz poll for half a century, an oversight that might partly be explained by her decision to spend most of her career based on the West Coast. Like the beloved but perennially underappreciated Etta Jones, who went about her business recording one captivating album after another until she passed in 2001, Anderson brings a quiet professionalism to every project. She puts her stamp on a song with her relaxed phrasing and supple sense of time, swinging fiercely and slyly generating tension by breaking up lines in unexpected places. Her mellow contralto has proven remarkably resilient, sounding warm and pleasingly weathered on her recent albums. It seems particularly fitting that Anderson has found a late-career home at HighNote, the label responsible for documenting Jones’ final years. Released in January, Anderson’s latest album, A Song for You, feels like a gift and a valediction. The session features Jones’ longtime musical partner, tenor saxophonist Houston Person, who offers purring commentary to Anderson’s playful reading of “This Can’t Be Love” and a ravishing rendition of “Skylark.” But it’s the closing track, a devastating version of “For All We Know,” that captures the essence of Anderson’s music. Tough but tender, vulnerable but self-assured and utterly without self-pity, Anderson offers a fearless glimpse at mortality. “Singing is what keeps me going,” Anderson says. “It’s my life’s work. I don’t know anything else to do and retirement is out of the question.” Recommended Listening: A Song for You (HighNote, 2009) I Love Being Here With You (Concord Jazz, 2002) A Perfect Match (with George Shearing; Concord Jazz, 1988) true 290 2009-04-20T10:10:10-04:00 false 24596 174 true 80 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

The story of rock ’n’ roll is usually told as a triumphant march, a populist victory for exuberant kids over the forces of repression and cultural conformity. But the rock revolution, particularly the second wave spearheaded by the British Invasion, also inflicted extensive casualties, in many cases sweeping away the livelihoods of the artists who paved the way for the insurrection in the first place. As a singer who came of age performing with jazz orchestras in the 1940s, Ernestine Anderson was on the frontline when the seismic forces unleashed by rock swept away most of the American music market. A commanding jazz vocalist with a powerful feeling for the blues, Anderson was born in Houston, raised in Seattle and weaned on gospel. In the late 1950s she’d gained an international following with a series of polished recordings for Mercury. But as the music business changed, Anderson found herself unable to work consistently in the United States. In a poetic twist, the tsunami triggered by the Beatles forced many American jazz and blues singers to seek work in the United Kingdom, which is where Anderson found a receptive audience in 1965. (Rare footage can be found on YouTube of Anderson in her prime on German television, singing “Moanin’” in 1967 with the formidable South African organist Cherry Wainer.) “When rock ’n’ roll became the music of America, I moved to London for two years,” says Anderson, 80, from her home in Seattle. “In order to keep working I had to leave the country. And when I...

2009-11-03T14:37:01-05:00

4 I don’t want to hug the tar baby …” With these words, sampled and spliced into a hip-hop montage, Tar Baby’s eponymous debut begins. The voice belongs to the late Tony Snow, press secretary for the Bush White House, who used the term from the Br’er Rabbit folk legend as a metaphor for getting lured into a rhetorical trap. It’s vaguely provocative—some would say racially charged—and yet the members of Tar Baby don’t intend the band name as a political statement. As tenor saxophonist Stacy Dillard puts it, “The name is based on musical experiences and observations.” Bassist Eric Revis elaborates: “In the story, the tar baby is something you don’t want to attach yourself to. And it seems to me there are elements of jazz that a lot of people don’t want to attach themselves to: the idea of swinging, playing with conviction, with reckless abandon. Everything now tends to be very pensive and ‘interesting.’ An exercise in the math of music. None of us are about that.” For drummer Nasheet Waits, Tar Baby speaks to the need for musicians to engage the full sweep of jazz tradition, not focus narrowly on what’s current. “The best players have a firm sense of history,” he says. “That’s why they’re able to walk their own path. There’s a cultural message that I think is being lost today, with the younger generation not referencing certain elements that are key to making jazz strong, making it what it is.” Although Tar Baby found a home on pianist Orrin Evans’ Imani label, the band is a co-led collective, with Evans, Revis, Dillard and Waits at the core. J.D. Allen, also on tenor, has since decided to focus on his own work as a leader. But the three Allen compositions on the disc, including the mysterious title track, will remain in the book, and Allen is still spoken of as an honorary member. “It’s not a parochial view of a group,” says Waits, noting the two guest appearances by vocalist TC III. “We’re always open to change. The band can always augment itself, and that was the vision.” After the opening intro, the quintet offers a heated, to-the-point reading of Don Cherry’s “Awake Nu,” a clear statement of interest in the free-jazz continuum. Revis and Waits have explored these modalities in a trio with the iconic Peter Brötzmann. And yet Tar Baby’s sound is largely tonal, wide in range, from the dark, loosely flowing 6/8 of Allen’s “Being in Nothingness” to the agitated funk motifs of Evans’ “Iz Beatdown Time” and the shuffle groove of “Psalm 150-2,” by Philadelphia organ legend Trudy Pitts. Revis’ tricky, swinging “O,” named for Evans, might call to mind the Branford Marsalis Quartet, in which Revis has played for years. Another version appears on Laughter’s Necklace of Tears, the bassist’s new album, also featuring Evans and Dillard. “The tune pretty much describes Orrin,” Revis offers. “It’s ‘simply complex,’ you know, with this earth-visceral thing but also this sophisticated thing that’s in there.” Asked about his and Allen’s respective approaches on tenor, Dillard cuts to the chase: “The one playing crazy is me. The one with the sweeter tone, that’s J.D.” Both saxophonists hail from Michigan, but Dillard, the youngest of the group at 31, wasn’t aware of that connection when he first heard Allen, an experience that “took me onto a whole different page musically,” he says. When Tar Baby formed, he recalls, “they suited me up, took me in like a little brother, and here we are.” Tar Baby comes in at a concise, perhaps even brusque 33 minutes, yet it seems very much a rounded and complete narrative, harking back to pre-CD days when albums were necessarily shorter. “Some of the greatest music ever made in jazz is like three minutes long,” Revis contends. “I think that phase [long tunes, long albums] served its purpose, but we’ve gone through the exploration thing. Now, at least for me, it’s time to start whittling all this stuff down and getting to the essence of something.” Bolstering the point, Waits fondly recalls the advice of an old mentor: “Get to your shit quick.” That’s not to say the band won’t stretch when the live setting calls for it. At New York’s Winter Jazzfest in January, Tar Baby sounded more exploratory and supple—more like a band—than Jeff “Tain” Watts’ star-studded quartet across the street with Branford Marsalis, Terence Blanchard and Christian McBride. Another Tar Baby studio effort is under discussion. “I’ve been at the drawing board quite a bit and I’ve got material ready,” confides Dillard. Waits plans to contribute as well. “We all have equal input,” the drummer says. “There’s strength in numbers, that’s our motto. It’s all about ‘us’ and ‘our.’” true 247 2009-03-25T10:46:15-04:00 false 24390 138 true 139 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

I don’t want to hug the tar baby …” With these words, sampled and spliced into a hip-hop montage, Tar Baby’s eponymous debut begins. The voice belongs to the late Tony Snow, press secretary for the Bush White House, who used the term from the Br’er Rabbit folk legend as a metaphor for getting lured into a rhetorical trap. It’s vaguely provocative—some would say racially charged—and yet the members of Tar Baby don’t intend the band name as a political statement. As tenor saxophonist Stacy Dillard puts it, “The name is based on musical experiences and observations.” Bassist Eric Revis elaborates: “In the story, the tar baby is something you don’t want to attach yourself to. And it seems to me there are elements of jazz that a lot of people don’t want to attach themselves to: the idea of swinging, playing with conviction, with reckless abandon. Everything now tends to be very pensive and ‘interesting.’ An exercise in the math of music. None of us are about that.” For drummer Nasheet Waits, Tar Baby speaks to the need for musicians to engage the full sweep of jazz tradition, not focus narrowly on what’s current. “The best players have a firm sense of history,” he says. “That’s why they’re able to walk their own path. There’s a cultural message that I think is being lost today, with the younger generation not referencing certain elements that are key to making jazz strong, making it what it is.” Although Tar Baby found a home on pianist Orrin Evans’...

2009-04-17T12:21:03-04:00

4 In devoting an entire album to Thelonious Monk’s repertoire, Peter Bernstein joins the small number of guitar players who have accepted such a challenge. Bernstein, however, hardly considers the release to be a definitive work. Achieving such a benchmark, he said, would require a lifetime of concentration on the composer’s music. Sitting at a Starbucks blocks away from his apartment in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Bernstein said he’s had little time to think about the release of Monk (Xanadu/The Orchard), which features a dozen well-known compositions. “I haven’t listened to [the album],” Bernstein admitted in early February, just days after returning from a month-long national tour with the Blue Note 7, an all-star band paying tribute to Blue Note Records’ 70th anniversary. The tour is scheduled through April. Instead of focusing on the recording, his seventh as a leader, Bernstein spends the bulk of an interview discussing Monk’s compositions. “It’s very sophisticated music,” Bernstein, 41, said, “and also very rooted, and [it] has great strength in [its] simplicity, too. When I got into it, I found certain voicings did lay on the guitar because of the spacing. It’s really not the sound of a piano—it’s the sound of Monk playing the piano.” Even so, Bernstein struggled at times to translate the music to the guitar because of the instrument’s technical limitations. “I’ve always been frustrated as a guitar player harmonically,” he said, “because you can’t play all the notes like a piano player can. The range is smaller, and it’s harder to play closer voicings on the guitar because you have to stretch between the strings.” Greg Scholl, president and chief executive of The Orchard, chose Bernstein to record the inaugural album for the reformed Xanadu Records, a bop label that operated from 1975 to 1999. Xanadu’s catalog features roughly 130 albums, including reissues originally appearing on imprints like Signal, Manor and Sittin’ In. Monk, released Jan. 13, features a trio that includes bassist Doug Weiss and drummer Bill Stewart, although three tracks spotlight Bernstein performing unaccompanied. Bernstein’s readings of tunes like “Brilliant Corners,” “Monk’s Mood” and “Ruby, My Dear” highlight the lyricism rather than the uneven aspects. Scholl, who produced the album, appreciated Bernstein’s approach. “I’ve heard other guitarists play Monk and really stress the oddness and the angularity,” Scholl said, “and to a degree I like what Peter did because it’s very counter to how most people would approach the [repertoire].” Indeed, Bernstein remains unique among his peers: He plays only one guitar (and owns but two archtops); he eschews effects pedals and other sonic equipment; he aligns himself with a jazz guitar tradition rooted in the 1950s and 1960s. Bernstein looks beyond the guitar for inspiration, a penchant he attributes in part to studying with guitarist Ted Dunbar in 1985. “He was the one who told me [to] learn about harmony [by hanging out] with piano players and arrangers,” Bernstein said. “And if you want to learn about phrasing, hang out with horn players and good singers. And if you want to learn about rhythm, hang out with drummers and bass players. Don’t be a guitar player that hangs around other guitar players.” Bernstein’s passion for jazz guitar began in 1982 when the use of effects had reached a saturation point, particularly with regard to the chorus pedal. Bernstein went in the opposite direction, pursuing a style focused entirely on producing a clean, unembellished tone. “Everybody was playing … through chorus [and creating] heavily processed sound,” Bernstein recalled. “And the guys that I loved had a touch on the instrument. “So that was a conscious decision not to play with chorus,” he said. “I just wanted to deal with the music, and develop a relationship with the instrument that was just the instrument, that would come from my hands. “I think that effects are great,” he added, “and if you can use them to enhance your personality, it’s a great thing. But people can also sound the same when they turn on the same pedals.” Guitarist Jim Hall admires Bernstein’s commitment to the straight-ahead school of jazz guitar, a style less pervasive today. “It’s quite different from somebody like Bill Frisell,” said Hall, one of Bernstein’s mentors. “[Bernstein] just is really intense and white hot all the time. I love it. I’m really glad he’s there, and he’s moving ahead in his own way. With so much going on with electronics and all kinds of gadgetry, [Bernstein has] found his voice and … to me that’s what the rest of us are all trying to do.” true 10608 2009-03-25T10:52:29-04:00 false 24391 138 true 139 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

In devoting an entire album to Thelonious Monk’s repertoire, Peter Bernstein joins the small number of guitar players who have accepted such a challenge. Bernstein, however, hardly considers the release to be a definitive work. Achieving such a benchmark, he said, would require a lifetime of concentration on the composer’s music. Sitting at a Starbucks blocks away from his apartment in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood, Bernstein said he’s had little time to think about the release of Monk (Xanadu/The Orchard), which features a dozen well-known compositions. “I haven’t listened to [the album],” Bernstein admitted in early February, just days after returning from a month-long national tour with the Blue Note 7, an all-star band paying tribute to Blue Note Records’ 70th anniversary. The tour is scheduled through April. Instead of focusing on the recording, his seventh as a leader, Bernstein spends the bulk of an interview discussing Monk’s compositions. “It’s very sophisticated music,” Bernstein, 41, said, “and also very rooted, and [it] has great strength in [its] simplicity, too. When I got into it, I found certain voicings did lay on the guitar because of the spacing. It’s really not the sound of a piano—it’s the sound of Monk playing the piano.” Even so, Bernstein struggled at times to translate the music to the guitar because of the instrument’s technical limitations. “I’ve always been frustrated as a guitar player harmonically,” he said, “because you can’t play all the notes like a piano player can. The range is smaller, and it’s harder to play closer voicings...

2009-04-03T10:42:00-04:00

4 It’s a Wednesday afternoon in New Orleans and trumpeter Kermit Ruffins is holding court at his corner bar, Sidney’s Saloon. He’s awaiting the delivery of some nutria—large rodents found in Louisiana’s coastal wetlands—and a couple of raccoons that he’ll cook up and offer to anyone who happens by. In the year since he acquired the spot on the fringe of his beloved Treme neighborhood, it has become headquarters for community events, Saints games and celebrations of all kinds. That’s because in this city, the always-affable Ruffins is more than a trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader. He is New Orleans. “It will be the biggest nutria party in years and years,” Ruffins exclaims with his usual enthusiasm. “We love coming out here on any given day and throwing the biggest barbeque ever. It starts with like four people and then the text messages start going and cell phones start ringing.” True to his personality, Ruffins makes his latest CD, Living a Treme Life (Basin Street), personal. Every selection has a story behind it and a reason for its presence. “I wanted it to be real, real neighborhood-ish, and at the same time pick some tunes that reach out to the world,” he explains. Having started his career in 1983 with the ReBirth Brass Band, Ruffins, 44, kicks off the album with two classic brass-band numbers, “Didn’t He Ramble,” complete with the dirty slide of Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, and “I Ate Up the Apple Tree.” “When I was thinking about the Treme back in the day, those two songs came to mind right away,” Ruffins says. He smiles at the memory of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Dirty Dozen Brass Band ruled the streets and tore up “Apple Tree” at the tiny (and now infamous) club, the Glass House. “We were hooked on the Dozen,” he acknowledges, referring to himself and the other members of the ReBirth. Ruffins knew he had to include “I Can See Clearly Now” on the disc after hearing it performed during the Democratic National Convention. “I started playing it at my very next gig,” he recalls. For many, sharing the experience of election night with Ruffins at Sidney’s Saloon was a given. He and his band, the appropriately dubbed Barbeque Swingers, set up on the sidewalk in front of his club while giant pots of oil bubbled in preparation for a fish fry. As the sun went down, “I Can See Clearly Now” became the anthem of the night as folks hugged each other in anticipation. Though the menu changed from fish to red beans on Inauguration Day, a similar scene blossomed. Again, the audience rose to its feet as Ruffins, with a smile apparent in his voice, sang the familiar “It’s going to be a bright, bright, bright sunshine-y day.” “I knew I was going to throw two big parties. I’ve never been so excited in my life,” Ruffins says. It’s easy to imagine people from other parts of the country wondering what the rock ’n’ roll classic “Hi-Heel Sneakers” has to do with New Orleans. Because it was played and recorded by the much-beloved Anthony “Tuba Fats” Lacen and the Chosen Few, all of the city’s brass bands perform it in recognition of the big man. Just a few days before the nutria party, the ReBirth Brass Band bounced the tune down the street with the Treme Sidewalk Steppers Social Aid & Pleasure Club parade. After four hours, the procession headed “home” to Sidney’s Saloon where it would disband. Ruffins arrived back in New Orleans just in time to video the Sidewalk Steppers’ entire parade. “I couldn’t miss that,” proclaims Ruffins, who had been in Baltimore playing a private party for writer/producer David Simon. Ruffins is working with Simon as a consultant and actor on his new HBO series, Treme, which begins shooting in the spring. “I get to play myself,” Ruffins says. The trumpeter penned three originals for the disc, including two signature swinging numbers, “Good Morning New Orleans” and “Hey Naa.” Ruffins’ horn holds a certain sweetness of tone as he opens the finger-snapping “Good Morning.” Onboard is an all-star rhythm section with drummer Herlin Riley, pianist David Torkanowsky and bassist George Porter echoing the feel-good flavor. “Hey Naa,” a phrase that’s now heard all over town, carries a similar vibe. true 35 2009-03-25T11:02:33-04:00 false 24392 138 true 139 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in New Orleans and trumpeter Kermit Ruffins is holding court at his corner bar, Sidney’s Saloon. He’s awaiting the delivery of some nutria—large rodents found in Louisiana’s coastal wetlands—and a couple of raccoons that he’ll cook up and offer to anyone who happens by. In the year since he acquired the spot on the fringe of his beloved Treme neighborhood, it has become headquarters for community events, Saints games and celebrations of all kinds. That’s because in this city, the always-affable Ruffins is more than a trumpeter, vocalist and bandleader. He is New Orleans. “It will be the biggest nutria party in years and years,” Ruffins exclaims with his usual enthusiasm. “We love coming out here on any given day and throwing the biggest barbeque ever. It starts with like four people and then the text messages start going and cell phones start ringing.” True to his personality, Ruffins makes his latest CD, Living a Treme Life (Basin Street), personal. Every selection has a story behind it and a reason for its presence. “I wanted it to be real, real neighborhood-ish, and at the same time pick some tunes that reach out to the world,” he explains. Having started his career in 1983 with the ReBirth Brass Band, Ruffins, 44, kicks off the album with two classic brass-band numbers, “Didn’t He Ramble,” complete with the dirty slide of Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, and “I Ate Up the Apple Tree.” “When I was thinking about the Treme back in the day, those two...

2009-04-03T10:41:48-04:00

4 On Arild Andersen’s new ECM album, Live at Belleville, Tommy Smith’s tenor saxophone rasps and brays and lunges over intervals and keens toward madness. Andersen’s bass enters and hammers nails into the music. Drummer Paolo Vinaccia randomly erupts, scattering curses. Then the three settle into time and fly, Smith’s blistering runs converging to long hoarse cries. The sound, like the music, is raw. Aren’t ECM recordings supposed to be moody and ethereal, with crystalline, transparent sonic quality? Whatever happened to the cool, austere “Nordic jazz sensibility”? Is there really such a thing as an “ECM sound”? “I think I’ve always been in between some kind of energy type playing, and more spacey stuff,” says Andersen, speaking by phone from his home in Oslo, Norway. It is morning on the West Coast of the United States, but late afternoon in Oslo, “completely dark and snowing.” Andersen has just returned from Paris, where he received the Prix du Musicien Européen 2008, from the Académie du Jazz. He continues: “I like to burn. But sometimes it’s difficult to catch that feeling in the studio. On my live albums, like Molde Concert and Belleville, you can hear what I sound like live: high energy. But my studio albums have been more held back, in a sense. It’s like the difference between what you want to hear at a Friday night hang in a club, and what you like to listen to at home—maybe on a Monday morning.” Those “held back” ECM studio albums include Hyperborean, from 1997, which just whispers, Andersen’s bass meditating over the somber, subtle backgrounds of a classical string quartet. There is also Electra, from 2005, the kind of project few jazz labels would undertake: 18 composed scenes of theater music for Sophocles’ tragedy, employing six instruments and a four-voice choir. Even Live at Belleville often subsides into quietude. The album is mostly taken up with “Independency,” a sweeping, diverse suite in four parts, commissioned by an agency of the Norwegian government to mark the centenary of Norway’s liberation from the union with Sweden. Hardly the subject matter for a blowing session. Andersen is not as famous as some ECM artists like Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, but there is no musician more closely identified with the label. He played on the very first ECM recording session in 1970 (for Garbarek’s Afric Pepperbird). Since 1975, he has released 18 ECM albums as leader or co-leader, and has been a sideman on many others. You can dip into this voluminous discography almost anywhere and become convinced that Andersen is among the great living bassists. He is deeply, poetically expressive as a soloist. His warm, looming sound, combined with his sense of dramatic timing, communicates nuances of emotion beyond the reach of mere horns. And he is a demon in a rhythm section. But “bassist” is a very incomplete job description. He is also a bandleader, a composer/arranger, a conceptualist behind ambitious projects, and a pioneer in the use of electronics in acoustic jazz. He sustained (for a decade) one of the seminal Norwegian small jazz ensembles (Masqualero), was among the first to bring Norwegian folk forms into jazz, collaborated with major guitarists like Bill Frisell and Ralph Towner and Terje Rypdal, and co-led a groundbreaking piano trio with Greek classical pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos. Not surprisingly, the project that Andersen is most excited about is his current one, the trio with Scotsman Tommy Smith and Italian Paolo Vinaccia. He says, “This trio is my ideal band, a band that doesn’t need a bass player. Sometimes I can comp the saxophone. On some songs I can just lay out. I can come in wherever I want. The energy is moving around. We can build a saxophone solo to go up, up, up, and all of a sudden we take a left turn and it’s very quiet. The feeling of three equally balanced musicians is very important for me, and with this trio I think I’ve finally found it. Also, without keyboards or guitar, I can use my electronics more freely.” Those electronics include a Boss octave pedal, a Gibson Echoplex Pro, and a TC Electronics M2000 reverb unit. On Live at Belleville, Andersen uses them to multiply three instruments into occasional orchestras. Three tracks come from the first gig that Smith and Vinaccia ever played together, and were recorded (on a soundboard tape) without Andersen’s prior knowledge. In Europe, the album appeared on many “Best of 2008” lists. Like virtually every European jazz artist of his generation, Andersen says that his course was set by his early exposure to American musicians. “When I came up in the ’60s, there were no jazz schools in Norway. In Scandinavia, I had a chance to play with people like George Russell and Don Cherry. Dexter Gordon and Art Farmer also spent time here. Then I visited New York in the early ’70s and played with Sam Rivers and Paul Bley. To play with these masters, learning how they phrased, feeling their time, that was my school. It shaped the music I’ve been doing all my life.” But while Americans got him started, Andersen’s career has been as Euro-centric as that of any jazz musician of his stature. He has recorded almost exclusively with Europeans. It has been largely a practical matter: “Living in Norway, I have needed to pick people to play on my records who could go on tour.” Some he “picked,” like Jon Christensen and Nils Petter Molvær, have gone on to international reputations. More, like Tore Brunborg and Eivind Aarset and Bendik Hofseth, remain almost entirely unknown in the United States. To discover the creative strength of these players through Andersen’s recordings is to realize that there is now a fully independent jazz scene in Europe. Andersen himself has rarely played in the United States, and never since the early 1990s. To immerse oneself in Andersen’s ECM discography, with its variations of mood and its huge swings in dynamic range, is to once again encounter the question: Is it meaningful to speak of an “ECM sound”? Andersen thinks so. He believes that what gives the ECM catalog its unity is the fact that “Manfred Eicher is not a producer, he is an artist, and when he is in the studio, you listen to him. Manfred’s approach to music is that feeling you get on ECM records.” Andersen also has some ideas about what critics like to call “the Nordic sensibility” in jazz. He says, “When I was in New York, playing with Sam Rivers and Barry Altschul, I was really into that free, fast-moving, ‘streets of New York’ type of sound. Coming back to Norway, the music reflects a bit of the life here, the nature.” He also speculates, “Another difference with northern, or Scandinavian, jazz, may be the idea of sharing. I find American jazz more of a hierarchy, in the sense of a bandleader with sidemen, or a soloist with a rhythm section. Here we share everything: the money, the solos, the good food, the bad wine, whatever: We share it.” Andersen will turn 64 this year, and is busier than ever. From the beginning of October until mid-December 2008, he played 40 concerts, half in Norway, half in other European destinations. “It’s challenging,” he says, “when you are not on tour but have to fly to almost every concert.” He is able, “90 percent of the time,” to bring his “real bass,” a German instrument from the late 1800s. An Accord carbon-fiber bass case (“only 14 kilo”) has been a valuable recent acquisition. When the plane is too small, he brings a Yamaha SLB200 electric bass, on which he has changed out the pickup for his preferred Danish Wilson. He says, “I have to check out what kind of aircraft is flying. It’s not so much the flying time or the price but can I get the bass on?” His projects may be erudite, like his rarefied ruminations on Sophocles. He may pursue the most sophisticated organic relationships between composition and go-for-broke improvisation, as on Live at Belleville. He may use electronics to introduce cold north winds into the open vistas of his music, like on Electra. But Andersen is refreshingly down to earth. When asked which takes more of his time, composing or practicing the bass, he does not hesitate: “Sending e-mails and booking flight tickets.” Recommended Listening: Live At Belleville (ECM, 2008) Electra (ECM, 2005) Selected Recordings (ECM :rarum Series, 2004) Hyperborean (ECM, 1997) Molde Concert (ECM, 1982) true 209 2009-03-25T11:08:04-04:00 false 24394 138 true 80 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

"I think I've finally found it," says this ECM artist

2009-04-23T11:23:50-04:00

4 Joshua Redman didn’t set out to make a double-trio record, but once that notion entered his head, the tenor and soprano saxophonist knew he would have to go ahead and give it a try. The result, Compass (Nonesuch), doesn’t so much pick up where 2007’s critically lauded Back East left off as it takes the trio concept to another place altogether. Where Back East featured Redman working out amidst a number of bass-drum configurations—and augmenting them with guest saxophonists Joe Lovano, Chris Cheek and dad Dewey Redman, who passed away before the album’s release—Compass loses the additional horn players but ups the ante on the standard trio model by featuring, on several tracks, two bassists and two drummers playing with Redman simultaneously. After he wrapped up touring behind Back East, Redman says from his home in Berkeley, Calif., he experienced what he calls “a burst of compositional productivity, which is very rare for me. I wrote 10 or so tunes for trio in a very short time, like in four or five days. “Initially,” he says, “my conception was to find one trio—one bass player and one drummer—and just record these tunes and maybe release them as an album. But obviously things got a little out of control.” Redman made plans to cut the new tunes with bassists Larry Grenadier and Reuben Rogers and drummers Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson—all except Hutchinson had been among the cast on Back East. Then, a couple of months before the sessions were scheduled to begin, the idea hit: “What would it be like to do some stuff with everybody together?” Says Redman, “I went through this process of rejecting the idea as dangerous and probably foolhardy. But my instinct kept bringing me back to it. I had never done this before and I’d never been part of [anything like it] before. We had a couple days of recording laid aside, so I said, ‘Let’s take another day and start the session off with everybody together,’ with no expectation that anything was really gonna come out of it or that anything would end up on the record. The reason we scheduled it like that was so that we would try some of these tunes in the double trio on the first day, but if we didn’t feel like they worked out, we’d have the next two days to redo them in the individual trio format.” Of the 13 tracks on Compass, Redman wrote most solo, Grenadier and Blade contributed one each, and the opener, “Uncharted,” is an improvisation credited to the four who play on it, which is everyone except Blade. For the straight trio tracks, Redman rotated the personnel so that each musician got a chance to play in that format with every other at some point during the sessions. That leaves five tracks featuring the entire crew, including the album’s sole interpretive piece, “Moonlight,” based on Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” What makes the double trio tracks on Compass work, aside from the abilities and distinctive voices of the musicians themselves, is the decision by Redman (who also produced) and engineer James Farber to place one bass and drum team on the left side of the mix and the other on the right. The split keeps the jams from jumbling up and provides something of a surreal listening experience as the approaches by the two side-by-side rhythm sections shift radically and repeatedly. “With all that sound, all these instruments occupying the same sonic spectrum, there was a real importance in each instrument having its space in the recording,” says Redman, “but at the same time, having everybody together. I tried to provide a very loose roadmap. I thought about different ways in which we might utilize this configuration so that every tune we tried like that would not be everybody playing at the same time. So on one tune I had the conception of bouncing things back and forth between the two rhythm sections or having one combination play at one time and the other combination play at another time and then build them up to everyone playing together. “I relied on the instincts of the other musicians, and the mutual respect and trust that we had, to craft it as we went along. That was really the key: everyone embracing the concept. I think everyone had a certain sense of space and the importance of space in this context. We didn’t want a sense of separation, but a sense of place.” That idea of place and space is essential to the album, hence its title. “Compass,” Redman says, “refers to going on a journey and the sense of travel without a clear map, or even a clear sense of where you’re heading. The compass is what we use to orient ourselves. So I think, especially with the double trio, there’s a sense of sailing off into the unknown, a sense of adventure, but at the same time the importance of navigating through that.” true 10422 2009-02-24T16:28:43-05:00 false 21261 137 true 139 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Joshua Redman didn’t set out to make a double-trio record, but once that notion entered his head, the tenor and soprano saxophonist knew he would have to go ahead and give it a try. The result, Compass (Nonesuch), doesn’t so much pick up where 2007’s critically lauded Back East left off as it takes the trio concept to another place altogether. Where Back East featured Redman working out amidst a number of bass-drum configurations—and augmenting them with guest saxophonists Joe Lovano, Chris Cheek and dad Dewey Redman, who passed away before the album’s release—Compass loses the additional horn players but ups the ante on the standard trio model by featuring, on several tracks, two bassists and two drummers playing with Redman simultaneously. After he wrapped up touring behind Back East, Redman says from his home in Berkeley, Calif., he experienced what he calls “a burst of compositional productivity, which is very rare for me. I wrote 10 or so tunes for trio in a very short time, like in four or five days. “Initially,” he says, “my conception was to find one trio—one bass player and one drummer—and just record these tunes and maybe release them as an album. But obviously things got a little out of control.” Redman made plans to cut the new tunes with bassists Larry Grenadier and Reuben Rogers and drummers Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson—all except Hutchinson had been among the cast on Back East. Then, a couple of months before the sessions were scheduled to begin, the idea hit: “What...

43320 2009-03-12T13:51:41-04:00

4 Where will 10 years of violin lessons, a Sinatra cassette and a business degree get you? For vocalist/pianist Tony DeSare, it was enough to take him to the very top—literally. The violin lessons began when DeSare was 8. He discovered the Sinatra tape, a collection of seminal Capitol hits that opened up a whole new world of music for DeSare, when he was 14. The degree was earned in the mid-’90s at Ithaca College. Like so many eager twentysomethings armed with a biz diploma, DeSare headed for Manhattan. And, in 1998, he did land on Wall Street, but not as a trader or analyst. Having decided, against the protests of his Ithaca professors, to aim for a career as a crooner and piano player, DeSare found himself an agent and was immediately granted a gig at Windows on the World, high atop the World Trade Center. “It was,” DeSare recalls, “a one-nighter that really didn’t pay anything, but it was my first official New York City appearance and it made me realize what I was up against to try and make a career of this.” After three months of “stuffing envelopes” as a temp, DeSare earned a spot with the band at another Manhattan high mark, playing five nights a week in the 44th-floor lounge at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. He then won an understudy role in the off-Broadway production of Our Sinatra (another up-and-coming singer-pianist, Peter Cincotti, would follow him in the cast), strengthened his Sinatra connections by playing at the reopened Jilly’s of New York, found a friend and mentor in comedian (and celebrated Sinatra impersonator) Joe Piscopo, cut a demo with Bucky Pizzarelli and, in 2005, found his way onto the Telarc roster. DeSare’s first two Telarc releases, 2005’s Want You and 2007’s Last First Kiss, revealed a performer who, blending the best qualities of Michael Bublé and Harry Connick Jr., can swing like Sinatra or Bobby Darin on hipster anthems like “Baby, Dream Your Dream,” “Come on Strong” and “We’ve Got a World That Swings,” but is equally comfortable with material from the Carole King, Dylan and Prince songbooks. Of the quasi-retro vibe that pervades DeSare’s work, he says, “People often ask if I’m trying to bring back a certain era or if I think I was born too late, but this is simply a specific way of putting across music that has lots more room for exploration. It’s not retro. It’s a statement about 20th-century American pop, but it also points forward, making the case that different takes are possible on songs the people might otherwise not have thought could survive the transition from the rock-pop ’80s to a big-band swing arrangement.” DeSare’s latest album, the recently released Radio Show, extends his era-shifting skills by crafting a faux radio program, complete with deejay intros provided by Piscopo, that follows a circuitous route from the 1940s to the ’80s. “I got the idea about a year ago,” he explains. “I love the [Sinatra/Darin] style of music and there are many talented people doing it, but what I felt hadn’t been done yet was to take a cue from hip-hop recordings that use elements from different musical sources to put together a show. I’m not a huge fan of hip-hop or rap, but I respect the originality of those artists and their drive to do something new. They really build a show and make each CD a flowing experience. I started wondering how that could be done in this genre, and it got me thinking that most people know these songs from hearing them on the radio. So the idea became to build the album around a radio experience and take the listener on a journey, almost like you’re on an hour-long drive, switching stations and looking for your favorite songs.” Radio Show travels from such Great American Songbook classics as “Get Happy” and “All or Nothing at All” into the rock era, finally landing in the ’80s with distinctively clever covers of Phil Collins’ “Easy Lover” and New Order’s “Bizarre Love Triangle” (on which DeSare is ideally paired with Jane Monheit). In addition to these inventive interpretations, the album demonstrates DeSare’s continuing growth as a songwriter. Blessed with a remarkable ability to construct tunes that rival the best of Sammy Cahn, Jimmy Van Heusen and Cy Coleman, DeSare says, “There’s a tendency among people who write in this style to try and write something that’s retro-sounding, and to try and recreate the lingo of another era. But I approach it from a modern perspective. So when I write a song like ‘A Little Bit Closer’ [from Radio Show], I’m doing it from my perspective as a child of the ’80s. I’m not afraid on my songs to use current references like ‘turn off your phone’ [from “Let’s Stay In” on Last First Kiss] or Abercrombie & Fitch [on “If I Had Drew” from Want You]. Also, if I’m going to include an established standard written by a great songwriter on a CD and the next track is a song written by me, my strict standards demand that my song be able to hold its own in context.” With three albums under his belt and his audience rapidly expanding, DeSare says he’s “finally starting to feel my power as a singer and performer, and I want to see how far it can take me. “I simply want to share my music with people who want to hear it. Whether that ends up being Radio City Music Hall or a 50-person club, that’s OK, as long as I get to do this for as long as I possibly can.” true 204 2009-02-24T16:31:03-05:00 false 21262 137 true 139 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Christopher Loudon profiles young jazz singer Tony DeSare and his latest project that salutes the magic of radio AND the Great American Songbook.

42960 2009-03-13T07:23:30-04:00

4 In September of 1999, author, critic and Black Rock Coalition co-founder Greg Tate had the notion to form a new band that captured some of what he calls “the extreme kind of Stygian darkness and gnarly, Abyssinian, evil-sounding vibe and crusty, Jurassic, tectonic funk of Miles Davis’ Dark Magus and Agharta bands.” A volatile outfit comprised of three guitars with rhythm section, Burnt Sugar played its earliest gigs at alternative-rock emporiums like CBGB, featuring Tate wailing away on his ax with Pete Cosey-like abandon. Evolving over time into a sprawling ensemble that took its cues from Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as Jimi Hendrix and electric Miles, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber has now expanded to 15 to 20 musicians with a four-piece horn section and a full complement of vocalists. And auteur Tate has traded his guitar for a baton, following in the footsteps of “conduction” maestro Lawrence “Butch” Morris. “I’ve been watching Butch do the conductions since the first one he did at [Manhattan arts space] the Kitchen back in 1985, which came out as a live recording, Current Trends in Racism in Modern America [Sound Aspects],” says Tate. “Of the hundreds of conductions that he’s done in New York, I’ve probably seen about 30 or more. So I’ve been a huge admirer of Butch’s work and his ability to just pull music out of musicians in the moment, to create symphonies in the moment.” The epiphany that caused Tate to take up the baton came to him at a gig with Morris at the now-defunct Cooler in Manhattan’s meatpacking district. “It’s funny, because it wasn’t anything at the concert that made this indelible impression on me—it was what happened before the concert. I brought a big Peavey amp to the gig and took that heavy-ass thing down all those stairs with a guitar and bag of effects, got set up and came back upstairs for air. And as soon as I hit the street I look up and Butch is getting out of a cab, and he’s just got this little pool-cue case with his baton in it. And I was like, ‘Huh! Wouldn’t I love to do that!’” On Making Love to the Dark Ages (LiveWired), the latest recording by Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, Tate wields a baton along with a laptop and occasionally his trusty guitar. The results range from his expansive meditation on slavery, “Chains and Water,” full of free-blowing conversations between the horns and soulful vocals supplied by dynamic singer Lisala, to the electric Miles-ish groover “Love to Tical,” to the dreamlike, ambient, Eno-meets-Teo soundscape “Dominata,” which incorporates his audacious laptop experiments, to an intriguing mashup of Tate’s funky “Thorazine” with the Ron Carter-Miles Davis composition “Eighty-One” (from E.S.P.). Tate’s ensemble comprises such high-caliber players as keyboardist Vijay Iyer, bassist Jared Nickerson, trumpeter Lewis “Flip” Barnes, alto saxophonists Matana Roberts and Avram Fefer, baritone saxophonist Paula Henderson, guitarists Ben Tyree and Rene Akan and vocalists Lisala, Karma Johnson, Abby Dobson and Justice Dilla X. Special guest guitarist Vernon Reid explodes with ferocious metal-esque abandon on “Love to Tical.” Says Tate of the Living Colour founder, “Vernon’s like a damn Ferrari, man! He can start where most guitar players climax, and then he keeps on taking it out from there. In the midst of an improv piece you just call on Vernon and ... bam! He’s setting land speed records.” Other special guests in this rotating cast of characters on Making Love to the Dark Ages include violinist Mazz Swift, trombonist David Smith and tenor saxophonist V. Jeffrey Smith. “Throughout the band there are definitely people who approach their instrument with more of an orchestral approach than a genre- or idiomatic-based approach,” says Tate. “I think they’re coming at it like painters and poets and scions of Bernard Herrmann or [Ennio] Morricone. People of different instruments in the band think of bringing those kinds of sensibilities. They’re colorists, really.” While the band has recently taken to performing radically re-imagined covers of tunes by everyone from Hendrix and Chaka Khan to Grace Jones, Michael Jackson, Iggy Pop and Joni Mitchell, Tate’s spontaneous conduction and the ensemble’s adeptness at pure improv remain the ensemble’s focus. “It’s really great having cats that when you want them to just go crazy, just paint the sky red, and bam—they’re there. And then they can just pull it all the way in and interpret really classic pieces of material, too. You know, it’s kind of a real powerful piece of machine we’re driving.” To commemorate the 10th anniversary of Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber, Tate is remixing and remastering the group’s first recording, Blood on the Leaf, which is due out in September. true 21 2009-02-24T16:33:52-05:00 false 21263 137 true 139 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

In September of 1999, author, critic and Black Rock Coalition co-founder Greg Tate had the notion to form a new band that captured some of what he calls “the extreme kind of Stygian darkness and gnarly, Abyssinian, evil-sounding vibe and crusty, Jurassic, tectonic funk of Miles Davis’ Dark Magus and Agharta bands.” A volatile outfit comprised of three guitars with rhythm section, Burnt Sugar played its earliest gigs at alternative-rock emporiums like CBGB, featuring Tate wailing away on his ax with Pete Cosey-like abandon. Evolving over time into a sprawling ensemble that took its cues from Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as Jimi Hendrix and electric Miles, Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber has now expanded to 15 to 20 musicians with a four-piece horn section and a full complement of vocalists. And auteur Tate has traded his guitar for a baton, following in the footsteps of “conduction” maestro Lawrence “Butch” Morris. “I’ve been watching Butch do the conductions since the first one he did at [Manhattan arts space] the Kitchen back in 1985, which came out as a live recording, Current Trends in Racism in Modern America [Sound Aspects],” says Tate. “Of the hundreds of conductions that he’s done in New York, I’ve probably seen about 30 or more. So I’ve been a huge admirer of Butch’s work and his ability to just pull music out of musicians in the moment, to create symphonies in the moment.” The epiphany that caused Tate to take up the baton came to him...

42970 2009-03-04T11:30:35-05:00

4 It’s undoubtedly an understatement when Donald “Duck” Bailey refers to the Philadelphia music scene of his youth—the Philly of John Coltrane, Lee Morgan, the Heath Brothers and so many others—as “exciting.” But it’s probably just as much of an understatement when the next word the 75-year-old drummer uses to describe that period is “prejudiced.” He believes, however, that the one atmosphere fueled the other, with innovation being born of hardship. “The times, unfortunately, brought out that musicianship,” Bailey said over the phone from his home in Oakland. “Whatever happens in the world, musicians or poets will say something about it. Now, people are at least trying to get along better, so the music has changed. I don’t like what happened before, but I like the way the music felt before.” Though his name may not be as instantly recognizable as those of his more renowned peers, Bailey played an essential role in the feel of that music. He assumed the drum chair in Jimmy Smith’s trio in 1956, when he was only 22 years old. His nine-year stint coincided with the organ legend’s fruitful period with Blue Note, which made Bailey a key player in defining the sound of the modern organ trio. He spent the following decade in Los Angeles, where he worked with a number of musicians including Carmen McRae, Hampton Hawes, Blue Mitchell and George Benson. After five years in Japan, Bailey settled in Oakland in 1982, where he continues to play on an almost daily basis, frequently performing on the street in a tourist-frequented section of town. He says little about these intervening decades, partly because he considers his years with Smith the highlight of his career, and partly due to memory issues brought on nearly a decade ago, he says, by a traumatic divorce and medical problems. Bailey is getting at least some long-overdue attention via his forthcoming CD, to be released March 17 as the third volume of Talking House Records’ “Blueprints of Jazz” series, which shines the spotlight on several lesser-known innovators. For his session, Bailey enlisted tenor saxophonist Odean Pope, beside whom he spent his teenage years studying and playing at YMCA dances. The two had lost touch for decades, but their shared formative experiences apparently forged quite a bond, as they make for a fierce, muscular pair throughout. Pope brought along two fellow Philadelphians to round out the quartet, bassist Tyrone Brown and pianist George Burton. Trumpeter Charles Tolliver also appears on two tracks, including the ballad “Blue Gardenia,” on which Bailey lays down the sticks and picks up his second ax, the harmonica. The jarring change in instruments is just the last of many surprises on the record, which finds a drummer noted for his soul-jazz grooves charting an edgier course. “I wanted to try to highlight dissonant music in a more melodic fashion,” Bailey said of the disc, which does find him skirting the fringes of straightahead jazz, swinging hard but charged with a raw inventiveness. He cites Tony Williams and Thelonious Monk as influences, but perhaps the chief architect of this approach for Bailey was the obscure pianist Hassan ibn Ali, a figure shrouded in mystery who recorded only one session, with Max Roach and Art Davis, but who Bailey insists casts a very long shadow. “All the great musicians who came out of Philadelphia had some association with Hassan ibn Ali,” Bailey explained. “And my opinion is that whatever advancements they made, he played a big part in them. When Coltrane started playing outside, I knew that Hassan had something to do with that. I met him when I was very young, and I was really scared of him. I’d never met a person that looked or acted like him. But he approached the music in a different kind of way, and he allowed me to have certain kinds of freedom I couldn’t get with other musicians.” That freedom led Bailey to this more dissonant approach to playing, which in turn allows him to express the full range of his emotions through the kit. “You have sweet melodies to play for lovers, you have a certain kind of music to play for war, and if I blend dissonant music with melodic tones I’m able to interject my feelings about life. If there’s no room for me to play dissonance, then I don’t feel as comfortable.” Despite the social changes that have occurred over his half-century in the music business, Bailey still finds plenty of fuel for his own impassioned playing in the day’s headlines. Speaking back in September of last year, the morning after John McCain gave his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he was alarmed at what he saw as the event’s hypocrisy. “There’s an election coming up, and all this stuff about the flag and liberty is played out, but it’s not true for a lot of people,” Bailey said. “Barack came out and made this statement about change, and now the Republicans came out and took his words, like they started it. That in itself makes me feel a little upset and I want to jump on my drums and play a little different. Because of the fact that I’m a musician, I’m not going to be violent. I have the opportunity to do whatever I have to do in love or anger from the drum chair.” true 10613 2009-02-24T16:42:39-05:00 false 21264 137 true 139 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Jimmy Smith's former drummer helped define the modern organ trio

42977 2009-03-20T10:44:27-04:00

4 During an interview last fall, cellist Erik Friedlander ran through several pizzicato techniques that figure prominently into his latest album, Broken Arm Trio (SkipStone). Sitting in his apartment in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Friedlander plucked the cello strings like a bassist, fingerpicked like a guitar player and created a tremolo effect using just one finger. During a casual conversation afterward, Friedlander’s cello rested horizontally on his lap like an oversized guitar. While pizzicato plays only a minor role in the cello’s centuries-old repertoire, Friedlander believes spotlighting the instrument in this manner makes it accessible and also compelling for jazz listeners. “I really believe it’s an exceptional jazz voice,” he said earlier at a nearby café. “Not [in] the modern jazz that I’ve been part of in the last 15 years, but in the jazz of the past. The minute you pick up the bow,” he added, “I think … the cello becomes [a] different instrument, something that’s taking jazz into some other new, modern territory.” Friedlander graduated in 1982 from Columbia University, and initially concentrated on classical music and studio work. Peter Sanders, a cellist with the New York City Ballet Orchestra, recalled Friedlander’s strong technique in a telephone interview. “There were things that he was doing that I literally couldn’t do at the time … such as working on various violin études, which were pretty advanced for a cellist,” said Sanders, who performed with Friedlander throughout the 1980s. “I didn’t at that point know any other cellist delving into that kind of a technical approach.” Friedlander’s jazz career blossomed in the late 1980s. He received exposure performing alongside trumpeter Dave Douglas and composer John Zorn, leaders of New York’s experimental downtown scene. Friedlander later incorporated pizzicato while touring with pianist Myra Melford’s The Same River, Twice band. “[Previously] I brought my classical bias—pizzicato is something you do only rarely,” said Friedlander, 48. “[But] in [Melford’s] band there was no bass … so I was playing pizzicato like crazy, and it was natural for me to continue to do that in the solos. It was a great experience and I remember thinking, Wow, [pizzicato] is really something I know how to do. I got to research this more … and find out what the possibilities are.” He concluded that the cello benefits from pizzicato. The brightness and intensity produced by the bow blend poorly with instruments such as the saxophone, guitar, piano and bass. “It brings with it a very hot, emotional sound,” he said. “Although it’s the same range as a tenor sax, it has none of that suaveness. With pizzicato it’s a different thing. It has that cool; it has a little more reserve. It’s still got all the warmth, but it also has a little less of that in-your-face intensity and complexity that allows it to be a really great jazz instrument.” Friedlander documents his pizzicato work on Melford’s The Same River, Twice (1996) and on Block Ice & Propane (2007), a collection of solo performances that draws inspiration from the road trips that Friedlander’s family took each summer while accompanying his father, acclaimed photographer Lee Friedlander, to his assignments. Broken Arm Trio celebrates Oscar Pettiford, the great bop-era bassist. Pettiford began doubling on cello in 1949 after breaking his arm. Pettiford tuned the cello in fourths like a bass and never incorporated the bow; even so he became one of the first jazz musicians to showcase the instrument onstage and also on the album My Little Cello. “Even though he wasn’t really a cello player [in the classical sense],” Friedlander said, “he did a lot more than many [cellists] did by first of all writing new music … and then creating an interesting group with French horn and saxophone. I feel like he’s really a forefather of being creative with the cello.” Pettiford suffered from chronic back pain and had an uneven disposition, but Friedlander characterizes his music as sunny and optimistic. Broken Arm Trio conveys this sensibility. The tracks are short, and the chemistry of drummer Mike Sarin and bassist Trevor Dunn heightens the interest. “Hop Skip” has a bluesy flavor, and “Big Shoes” swings. “Spinning Plates,” “Knife Points” and “Cake” feature lively syncopated patterns, while Friedlander’s pizzicato work on the more subdued “Pearls” and “Buffalo” suggests a classical guitar. Dave Douglas attributes Friedlander’s originality to his careful study of the cello’s history, and his willingness to tackle a broad spectrum of music. “I think what you’re hearing in Erik has developed out of a lot of different gigs that he’s done with a lot of different people: pop music and avant-garde and jazz and world music,” Douglas said by phone. “So I think the reason that it’s sounding so rich is that he’s gone so many places with it.” Friedlander said the cello’s place in jazz is still a work in progress. He enjoys the challenge. “You cannot just pretend it’s a jazz instrument. It’s not,” he said. “[But] we’re not tethered to any tradition besides classical. So [cellists] can be in any kind of music and make a statement.” true 10608 2009-02-24T16:44:48-05:00 false 21265 137 true 139 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Eric Fine speaks with cellist Erik Friedlander about his Broken Arm Trio project.

42984 2009-03-18T09:02:25-04:00

4 To celebrate her 80th birthday last November, Sheila Jordan hired a string quartet to accompany her regular trio of longtime collaborator and pianist Steve Kuhn, bassist David Finck and drummer Billy Drummond in a weeklong engagement at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York. “I wanted to sing with a string quartet ever since I heard Bird With Strings,” confides the lifelong Charlie Parker fanatic. “I had worked with strings before at a festival in Vancouver, also a few times in Italy, but I had never done it in the States. And to work with strings in New York, a city I love so much, was a special treat for me. I told myself, ‘I don’t care what it costs me; I’m gonna make it happen.’ So it was my 80th birthday gift to myself.” Her Dizzy’s gig turned out to be a major triumph. Canadian cellist Harold Birston, who had worked with Jordan before in Vancouver, wrote some special arrangements for the occasion, including a rendition of Parker’s “Confirmation” that incorporated a note-for-note transcription of Bird’s two-chorus solo. With violinist Mark Feldman also contributing virtuosic solos on pieces like Tom Harrell’s “Out to Sea,” Dave Frishberg’s “Heart’s Desire,” the Dietz-Schwartz standard “Haunted Heart” and a clever medley of Frank Loesser’s “Inch Worm” and Larry Gelb’s “The Caterpillar Song,” Jordan sang impressionistic curlicues around the notes, never quite landing directly on them but rather fluttering around them as if in zero gravity. And she delivered each tune with such personal flair and old-school charisma that she quickly won over the adoring Dizzy’s audience. “Thank you, my dears, my darlings,” she would say to them after each round of applause. And her casual between-song banter, in which she shared anecdotes about her amazing journey from small-town poverty to the heights of bebop to her current status as a grand dame of jazz, was both entertaining and revealing. You can hear that kind of openness and instant rapport with her audience on Jordan’s latest recording, the live Winter Sunshine (Justin Time). Recorded at the Upstairs club in Montreal during the frigid month of February, Jordan warms up the audience with her inventive takes on George and Ira Gershwin’s “Lady Be Good,” Bobby Timmons’ “Dat Dere” with Oscar Brown Jr.’s playful lyrics, and Bronislaw Kaper’s “All God’s Chillun Got Rhythm,” which segues neatly into Miles Davis’ “Little Willie Leaps.” But she makes her biggest impact with her autobiographical tunes “The Crossing,” written after her recovery from alcoholism, and “Sheila’s Blues,” a starkly dramatic tune that she recorded on four previous occasions and which has been her crowd-pleasing set closer for years. “Sheila’s Blues” tells the tale of little Sheila Jeanette Dawson. Born on Nov. 18, 1928, in Detroit, she was raised by her grandparents in the coal-mining town of Ehrenfield, Pa. (aka “Scoopy Town”). “Mother had me when she was 17,” she explains. “And since she and my father were not together, I was sent to live in Pennsylvania with my grandparents while my mother stayed in Detroit to work in the factory.” She grew up there in a house with six relatives. “My aunts and uncles were more like my brothers and sisters,” she recalls. “In fact, one uncle was six years younger than me. We had no heat or plumbing in our house and food was scarce. And there was a lot of alcoholism in my family. My grandmother and grandfather did the best they could but we were very poor and there was a lot of suffering. It was not a happy childhood.” Singing became Sheila’s salvation during those lean years. “I sang when I was sad, I sang when I was happy, I sang when I was scared. All my emotions revolved around singing. Singing was necessary for my existence. I sang because I needed to sing.” She also remembers as a child serenading the out-of-work coal miners at a local beer garden that her grandmother would frequent. “She used to take me up to these different beer gardens and there would be live music and then they’d get me up there to sing. And my grandma used to say, ‘When they throw money at you, don’t stop singing. Don’t pick it up until after you’re through singing.’” By the time Jordan returned to Detroit as a teenager, she met hipsters Skeeter Spight and Leroy Mitchell and formed a kind of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross-styled singing group with them. Along with fellow Bird fanatics like Barry Harris, Kenny Burrell and Tommy Flanagan, they would follow Charlie Parker from places like the Club Sudan to El Sino to hear him play. Since they were all too young to get into the clubs, they would invariably hang out in the alley and peek into the back window to catch a glimpse of Bird in flight. “One time he came out between sets and played his sax to us kids standing out there in the alley,” she recalls. “I’ll never forget that night.” In Detroit, Jordan dated saxophonist Frank Wess, though the sight of an interracial couple in late ’40s Detroit was a cause for agitation among the locals. “There was so much racial prejudice, it was terrible,” she says. “I was always being hassled, constantly down at the police station being questioned as to why I hung around with black people. Of course, those were not the words they used. I hated that other word they used. ... I can’t even say it. The police would constantly stop me and my black friends for no reason, coming to and from the clubs, and they’d ask where I lived, how old I was, where I was going. It got to be a real drag, so I finally decided to split. The racial prejudice drove me out of Detroit. But I was ready to leave anyway to go follow Bird’s music to New York.” Shortly after arriving in town in 1951, Jordan began studying with Lennie Tristano and hanging at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem after hours. Around this time she also took up with Bird’s piano player, Duke Jordan. “I had met Duke in Detroit and got reacquainted with him in New York,” she says. “Somehow we started going out and we ended up together and got married in 1952. It wasn’t a happy marriage but the nice thing about that was, he was with Bird at the time. So anytime Bird had a gig, I could go and hear him. And Bird would always ask me to sit in.” In 1955, Sheila gave birth to her daughter Traci. That same year, her hero Charlie Parker died. “Of course, I was devastated,” she says, “but I wasn’t surprised, in a way. He had fallen prey to this baffling, powerful disease of heroin addiction. He was in bad shape mentally and physically. He was really such a sweet and caring man but the drugs and alcohol made him a different person.” A few years later, Jordan began singing at the Page Three, which is where composer George Russell first heard her. He recruited Jordan to contribute haunting, ethereal vocals on a unique arrangement he had written on “You Are My Sunshine,” a tune that she used to sing to the out-of-work coal miners in Scoopy Town. That session for Russell’s 1962 Riverside recording The Outer View was her first-ever recording, and led to her own date for Blue Note, Portrait of Sheila, which was recorded later that year and released in 1963. “And then I didn’t record again for about a dozen years,” she says. “I’m not a pusher. I don’t go out there and push. I don’t know how to do that.” Although Jordan has only 21 albums as a leader to her credit in her 60 years as a vocalist, she has made countless appearances in nightclubs and at festivals all over the world. And every time she hits the stage, she continues to pay tribute to her idol and main inspiration, Charlie Parker. “I cannot let this man’s name die,” she says. “I constantly talk about Bird because some people forget about him or they put him on a back burner. But he’s too important to me. I wouldn’t be sitting here today if it weren’t for Bird. “It’s amazing because every time I need an uplift, his music picks me up,” she says. “The first time I heard Bird was on a jukebox. It was a version of ‘Now’s the Time’ by Charlie Parker and his Reboppers, and as I listened to it the hair stood up on my arms. I heard three notes coming out of that jukebox and I said, ‘Oh, my God, that’s the music I’ll dedicate my life to!’ “Then, just yesterday, I was feeling kind of down,” she continues. “I went into a Japanese restaurant and ordered some miso soup, and just as soon as I put the spoon to my mouth ... what comes on? Charlie Parker playing ‘Now’s The Time.’ And as I sat there listening to Bird, I said to myself, ‘Yeah, everything’s all right with the world.’ Jordan still lives in the same Chelsea apartment where she has resided for the past 44 years, within walking distance of some of the Greenwich Village clubs where she used to play during the early ’60s, like the Page Three. “You know, I never thought I’d live to be this old,” she laughs as we finish our tea. “But you can’t fight it. There’s nothing you can do about it, except grow old gracefully. That’s what I want to do.” Recommended Listening: Guitar Moods by Mundell Lowe (Riverside) A Grand Night for Swinging (Riverside) Old Friends (with Ray Brown and André Previn) (Telarc) Haunted Heart (with Jim Ferguson) (Lily’s Dad’s Music) true 21 2009-02-24T16:47:02-05:00 false 21266 137 true 80 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Bill Milkowski gives an Overdue Ovation to singer Sheila Jordan.

28830 2009-04-03T10:52:13-04:00