Even though the best-sounding jazz recordings are made in studios, most people’s favorite jazz albums were made live in clubs or concert halls. Jazz recorded in a studio is to jazz recorded live as animals in a zoo are to animals in their wild natural habitat.
FiveLive could not have happened in a studio. Someone would have tried to make it prove a point, or cleaned it up. FiveLive was recorded in October 2007 in a little joint on north Broadway called Smoke. It is not so much a record as a vicarious night out in Manhattan: a night of raw, real, hard, fast, high-caliber New York jazz.
Proven urban warriors like tenor saxophonist Eric Alexander, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, bassist John Webber and drummer Joe Farnsworth are in the band. Leader Mike LeDonne writes strong tunes to blow on, takes fierce, careening piano solos, and kicks ass when he comps.
Alexander explodes out of the 6 of “Manteca” into straight 4 and wails. Pelt spits fire on “Encounter.” But LeDonne is in charge. With just the rhythm section, he freely reimagines “I Got It Bad” and suddenly sobers everybody up and turns the party mood in Smoke all pensive.
Related Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro