Miguel Zenón’s rhythms follow a changing culture

February 22, 2013 By

Boston Globe, February 21, 2013

The saxophonist Miguel Zenón came from Puerto Rico to Boston to study at the Berklee College of Music in 1996, and fast emerged as a major creative voice in jazz, with a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2008 to attest to it. In his young but prolific career, he has made Puerto Rico one of his work’s running themes, exploring in several recent albums, with his quartet, its classic song canon and folkways.

With his new project, which he brings to NEC’s Jordan Hall Friday, Zenón follows this logic but takes a new tack, shifting his focus from the island itself to those who left it to come work in the United States, and their descendants. In the multimedia performance “Identities Are Changeable: Tales from the Diaspora,” he takes on a question that has fascinated him ever since his own move to the mainland. [Read more...]

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A singer at the busy crossroads of soul and jazz

January 24, 2013 By

Boston Globe, January 24, 2013

The singer José James grew up in Minneapolis and studied jazz in New York, but he’s made his career mostly out of the American mainstream eye: recording for overseas and indie labels, living a few years in London, working with recherché producers like Gilles Peterson and Flying Lotus.

His recordings, spanning jazz and soul on a spectrum that stretches from Nat King Cole to J. Dilla, have earned him a cadre of committed fans on both sides of the Atlantic but no breakout commercial success — not least because his work has not fit neatly into any of the genre designations that regiment the US music industry.

Now, however, a new synthesis of jazz and soul, driven by musicians shaped by hip-hop and myriad other influences, is under way, and James, who is 35 and now lives in Brooklyn, finds himself in the center of it.

[Read more...]

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DeFrancesco, Coryell, and Cobb preserve a feel-good jazz sound

January 10, 2013 By

Boston Globe, January 10, 2013

There’s only ever been a scant few acknowledged masters of the Hammond B-3 organ in jazz at any given time. So few, in fact, that when one leaves the scene — as in 2005, when the great Jimmy Smith passed away — aficionados have been left to wonder whether the instrument has a future in jazz at all.

That questioning has nothing to do with a lack of players, of course. Invented in the 1930s and marketed to churches, where it offered a portable, affordable alternative to the grand wind organs, the Hammond is played with joy and reverence across the land on Sundays. And in jazz, its shaky spot in the canon reflects decisions by record companies over the years — for instance in the 1970s, when organ-led records were lumped under the rubric “soul-jazz” — more than any dearth of creative players, then or now.

“Record companies pigeonholed them. But let’s face it, guys are playing the organ,” says Joey DeFrancesco, perhaps the best known B-3 player in jazz today. “They still call them soul-jazz records. But isn’t all jazz soul?”

[Read more...]

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Trumpeter Christian Scott gives jazz much-needed stretch

August 9, 2012 By

Boston Globe, August 9, 2012

NEW YORK — The trumpeter Christian Scott terms “stretch music” the big, open-minded sound that he seeks, for his own band and for jazz in general.

On his brand-new album, “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” Scott stretches more than just rhythmic and harmonic conventions. The album itself is a sprawling double CD, 23 tracks long. Even Scott’s name has grown longer: the New Orleans native is now Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a “completion,” as he puts it, that honors his ultimate African ancestry.

At 29 and with eight albums as a leader, Scott, who plays Scullers Friday, has not been shy with compositions and ideas. “Christian aTunde Adjuah,” though, presents as a uniquely personal statement — and not just by its length, title, or cover art, which features Scott in the regalia of a Black Indian, the New Orleans ritual tradition in which he grew up.

[Read more...]

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At Newport Jazz, Frisell gets by with a little help from his friends

August 2, 2012 By

Boston Globe, August 2, 2012

The jazz guitarist Bill Frisell can play knotty, cerebral music with the best of the avant-garde, but being cryptic is not his stock in trade. He’s interested in the history and art of the song, the American folk tradition, roots music of different origins, and that makes much of his own work lyrical and in some emotional sense, familiar.

But while some music feels familiar in a vague way, other songs are so universal that they summon in the listener instantly recalled lyrics and a kaleidoscope of memories; songs freighted, even burdened, with meaning.

“All We Are Saying. . .”, Frisell’s latest album, devoted to the repertoire of John Lennon, and which he presents on Saturday with his quintet at the Newport Jazz Festival, boldly enters that complicated territory.

[Read more...]

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Liner Essay: Debo Band, “Debo Band” (Album)

July 10, 2012 By

Sub Pop Records, July 10, 2012

The Debo Band’s debut CD on Sub Pop/Next Ambiance came out today. Here is the text of the liner essay I contributed to the album. 

There’s something dangerous about tales of a Golden Age: especially a brief one. The so-called Golden Age of Ethiopian popular music (or Ethio-jazz, or Ethio-groove) lasted less than a decade. It took hold in the late 1960s in the cosmopolitan circles of Addis Ababa, fed by exposure to American soul and jazz, and boosted by the return of the Berklee College of Music-trained bandleader and arranger Mulatu Astatke. A blossoming scene produced, refined and sprouted new branches of a hitherto unheard synthesis of jazz (and Latin music) with Ethiopian pentatonic scales, distilled by brass-heavy bands adding guitar, vibraphone, and organ. But the 1974 coup that deposed Emperor Haile Selassie plunged Ethiopia into a long and difficult period of military rule and civil war. The swank nightlife of Addis shut down; the musicians scattered and the moment passed.

So the story goes. And it’s not wrong, in its broad outline. Certainly something special transpired in those years in Addis. The era produced an ample trove of recordings that now, decades later, have started to emerge from their hiding places, thanks to projects like the Ethiopiques series, curated by French producer Francis Falceto, and, not least, to the foresight of the Addis players and impresarios of the time who held onto the tapes as they dispersed around the world. The richness—the sheer grooviness—of this work and the seemingly bottomless reserve of material has made Ethio-jazz, not unlike Fela Kuti-era Afrobeat, the target of a growing field of cover and revival projects in hip precincts from New York to Tokyo to Amsterdam.

[Read more...]

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Boston singer Marianne Solivan’s NY move pays off

May 25, 2012 By

Boston Globe, May 25, 2012

NEW YORK — This city may boast the nation’s highest concentration of jazz musicians, venues, recording opportunities, and cover-charge-paying aficionados, but that doesn’t mean you can just show up here and get a gig.

Just ask singer Marianne Solivan.

When she first got here in 2007, with enough money for a one-month sublet to get her started, she left behind the comfortable lifestyle that she had made for herself through regular work on the Boston scene.

“I had tons of gigs, teaching jobs, I was making money, I had a great apartment, a car,” she says. She sang twice a week at Les Zygomates in the Leather District. She was a regular at the Living Room and Red Fez. She ran a jam session at the Chopping Block in Mission Hill. She played cruises and corporate gigs.

And weddings. “So many weddings,” she says.

[Read more...]

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With jazz trio Pilc Moutin Hoenig, anything can happen

May 18, 2012 By

Boston Globe, May 18, 2012

When pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, bassist François Moutin, and drummer Ari Hoenig play music together, whether in concert or in the studio recording an album, the plan is always the same: There is no plan.

No sheet music. Nothing discussed in advanced. Only improvisation.

“We go on stage and we don’t know what we’re going to do,” says Moutin. “No set list, no preconceived idea. It’s whatever happens there.”

What happens — one can say this much — is a roiling, vibrant set by a jazz trio that sounds like no other. It’s rhythmic, inventive, potentially wild, and also lyrical and prone to poignant emotion. Pilc might introduce a theme, but so might Moutin, or Hoenig, who has honed his technique to turn the drum kit into an instrument that produces melody.

The other thing that happens is what separates this group from the stereotype of without-a-net improvisation, in which cerebral, eccentric, or abstruse elements can lose the audience, like a novel stubbornly bereft of any plotline.

Not so here. As exemplified by their 2011 album, “Threedom,” a set by Pilc Moutin Hoenig, as the trio is known, contains songs; discrete, discernable songs, songs with motion and structure, including clearly identifiable versions of standards and jazz classics, such as Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” or Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue.”

[Read more...]

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Tessa Souter adopts classical airs

May 14, 2012 By

Boston Globe, May 14, 2012

The jazz vocalist Tessa Souter, who released her fourth CD, “Beyond the Blue,” last week, has always had an eclectic, even adventurous, approach to repertoire.

Alongside songbook standards and Brazilian classics like “Manhã de Carnaval,” she’s delivered scintillating takes on spiritually intense works like Pharoah Sanders’s “The Creator Has a Master Plan” or Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue.”

And in echoes of her own upbringing in London in the 1960s and 1970s, she has interpreted her own arrangements of period songs like “White Room,” made famous by Cream, or Nick Drake’s melancholy ballad “River Man.”

What Souter had yet to do, until now, was an album featuring lyrics of almost entirely her own writing. “Beyond the Blue,” whose release brings Souter to Scullers on Wednesday with a quintet including the pianist Steve Kuhn, does that and more.

[Read more...]

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Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire makes a jazz life on his own terms

May 4, 2012 By

Boston Globe, May 4, 2012

NEW YORK — Ambrose Akinmusire — young trumpeter, recent signee to the hallowed Blue Note label, and author, with his quintet, of one of last year’s best-received jazz albums — is a creature of habit.

“Annoyingly so,” he says, laughing.

He wakes every day at the same time, and makes the ritual walk to his favorite coffee shop in upper Manhattan, one mile and back. He settles in to practice, watching in the background the same TV shows. His constancy, he says, drives his girlfriend nuts. They’ve been together 13 years, since high school in Berkeley, Calif.

Akinmusire, 30, is a guy who knows what he likes.

“That’s just who I am,” he says, over lunch in a Morningside Heights cafe. He’s enjoying a mozzarella panino, the same one he’s ordered hundreds of times in the past decade, since attending the Manhattan School of Music nearby.

“I have to have a routine,” he says. “It allows me to be free on the bandstand.”

For Akinmusire, habit doesn’t breed predictable music. Quite the opposite: Through his loyalties and routines, he’s built a tight-knit band of mostly old friends who feel safe experimenting together. They need little direction and even less reassurance.

[Read more...]

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