Siddhartha Mitter

Boston Globe, August 8, 2008

Were it not for certain wrenching circumstances, it might sound like a run of absurd good fortune: A young woman from Philadelphia, an amateur musician with career aspirations elsewhere, writes and sings a few songs for personal use. Reluctantly she shares the recordings with a friend who, unbeknownst to her, sets up a MySpace page to show off her work. A gig ensues, and then another …

Next thing you know, 23-year-old Melody Gardot is the new sensation in sultry vocal jazz, a sophisticated chanteuse with a fast-selling album, “Worrisome Heart,” that has earned instant comparisons to Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux. The tour schedule and festival invitations have followed. Gardot plays the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport, R.I., tomorrow and visits the Regattabar Aug. 23.

That’s the happy part. But inextricably woven into the blossoming of Melody Gardot is the horrific accident that nearly killed her four years ago, when she was 19, riding her bike in Philly to the college where she was studying fashion. An SUV driver made an illegal turn and rammed into her, leaving her with shattered bones and severe neurological damage.

Read More

Boston Globe, May 18, 2008

A ritual of summer takes on a jazz flavoring this year, as perhaps the season’s most anticipated reunion tour is the one featuring the classic lineup of Return to Forever, one of the most iconic jazz units of the ’70s.

The four-man electric band led by pianist Chick Corea was responsible for some of the best-regarded, and in many ways still remarkably fresh, statements of the jazz-rock fusion popular at the time, earning a Grammy in 1975 for the album “No Mystery,” and a following among a broad swath of the baby boom generation that remains unabated.

It’s mostly that audience that figures to fill the midsize venues on the band’s extensive reunion journey, which begins later this month in Austin, Texas, and continues across North America and Europe into August, including a penultimate stop in Boston at Bank of America Pavilion Aug. 6.

Read More

Boston Globe, May 16, 2008

NEW YORK – When he was about 12 years old, Pete Robbins knew he wanted to learn a wind instrument so he could play in his school band. And he worried that his original choice, the clarinet, simply wasn’t cool.

So his father – a nonmusician but an avid jazz listener – sat him down on the living room couch in their suburban Andover, Mass., home and served him a sampler platter of musical dishes to help him make his choice.

“He put on a couple of CDs,” says Robbins, recalling the moment as a key point on his path toward becoming a critically noticed musician and composer on the jazz scene here. “And he said, `All right, there’s saxophone and trumpet, and two kinds of saxophones, tenor and alto. Ready? Here we go.”’

Read More

Boston Globe, April 11, 2008

As the passage of time inexorably thins the ranks of living jazz masters who were present at the birth of bebop, so too risk fading the memories of that key moment in the shaping of what would eventually become known as “America’s classical music.” In the 1940s and early 1950s, jazz was still outsider art, its evolution the fruit of struggles that jazz education programs today both celebrate and, in a way, obscure.

It falls to those who soldier on, like 79-year-old tenor saxophonist Benny Golson, who arrives at Harvard this week for the college’s spring jazz residency, to remind us of the full picture. And Golson, whose Cambridge appearances will include a retrospective discussion of his career on Thursday and a Sanders Theatre tribute concert with pianist Mulgrew Miller on April 19, is a perfect ambassador for his generation, not only for the memories, but also for his own towering contribution to the genre.

A celebrated composer as well as instrumentalist, Golson is the author of some of jazz’s most-recognized standards, including the moody eulogy “I Remember Clifford,” honoring trumpeter Clifford Brown, and the brilliant and catchy “Blues March,” which he originally contributed to Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and which is liable to set nodding in recognition even people who worry they know nothing about jazz.

Read More

Boston Globe, March 14, 2008

One of the most interesting recent albums to beam back from the frontier where jazz, rock, electronica, and free improvisation intersect was David Torn’s “Prezens.” It’s a digitally enhanced quartet led by a guitarist-producer whose career has taken on the most abstract projects as well as some of the most commercial, as a composer of Hollywood soundtracks or a session musician on major pop and R&B releases.

“Prezens” is both the title of the album, which came out last year on the ECM label, and the name for the group behind it, which performs Thursday at Regattabar. The unit brings together Los Angeles-based Torn with the experimental-jazz trio Hard Cell, which is made up of saxophonist Tim Berne, drummer Tom Rainey, and keyboard player Craig Taborn.

Together, the four have made a record that is all texture and flow, as easy to listen to as it is hard to describe. Though its leader is a guitarist, it doesn’t feel like a “guitar album”: pyrotechnic solos are shunned, and even the moments of mayhem blend the sound to the point where it’s not clear which instrument is which. That quality shows both the deep understanding among the players – most of the record is improvised – and the sophistication of the post-production sampling, looping, and the like that are a trademark of the Torn approach.

Read More

Boston Globe, February 24, 2008

In the Japanese tradition, the ronin is the masterless samurai. The consummate free agent, he rejects conventional authority and moves through the world with defiance and dignity.

In jazz today, Ronin designates something no less rigorous and idiosyncratic. It’s the name that Swiss pianist Nik Bartsch chose for his quintet, a one-of-a-kind unit that performs what Bartsch calls Zen-funk – a cerebral music influenced by minimalism, yet blessed with head-nodding, foot-tapping rhythmic tendencies, and an exhilarating sense of pacing that makes each composition a fascinating adventure.

The group visits Regattabar on Thursday in support of its new album on the prestigious ECM label, “Holon.” It’s the first full-fledged US tour for Bartsch, 36, who has been steadily developing his concepts for many years but was virtually unknown outside certain Swiss and German circles until hooking up with ECM two albums ago.

Read More

Boston Globe, February 8, 2008

Improvised music never happens in a vacuum. It’s the product of an encounter, when musicians listen and respond together in a way that none could have achieved alone. The deeper the encounter, the more fully present the players, the greater the liberties they can take with conventions and still produce beautiful music.

That’s what the saxophonists John Tchicai and Charlie Kohlhase and the guitarist Garrison Fewell have done in a trio where the unusual instrumentation, with overlapping saxes and no rhythm section, creates a warm, contemplative sound through an elegant balance of melodic elements and free improvisation, as well as judicious use of quiet.

The combo released an album, “Good Night Songs,” in 2006, on the Vermont label Boxholder Records. It’s a live recording of a concert they gave at a Unitarian chapel in Amherst, arguably a spiritually propitious setting as well as one that offered nice acoustics. They reunite Sunday at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis.

Read More

Boston Globe, January 25, 2008

When John Coltrane passed away in 1967, he was just a few years into the spiritual quest that his later albums document, with titles like “Om” and “Interstellar Space,” and the liberation they reflect from conventions of jazz form and expression. Coltrane was only 40 at his death, and no one knows where his music might have gone had he lived longer. It’s been left to his collaborators and others whom he inspired to imagine this invisible yet compelling legacy.

With the passage of time and changes in the zeitgeist, mystical ultra-free jazz exists at the outer periphery of the music business. It’s completely non-lucrative, and its practitioners have long since accepted life at the margins; indeed, many of them prefer things that way. For one reason or another, performances by artists in this spirit don’t occur frequently. When they do – as with the appearance of drummer Rakalam Bob Moses and guitarist Tisziji Munoz, Monday at Jordan Hall – it’s advisable to expect the unexpected.

Read More

Boston Globe, December 21, 2007

Of all the great expressive traditions in jazz, the male vocal is one that has had difficulty maintaining its position in the music’s evolving marketplace. The shortage of prominent male singers is especially pronounced when it comes to African-American voices. For all the reinvigoration of jazz today, few if any inheritors of Nat King Cole or Johnny Hartman have emerged, and there’s a case to be made that something important beyond the music itself is thereby threatened.

This context makes the story of Andy Bey all the more remarkable. Now 68, Bey was a noted vocalist half a century ago, before nearly vanishing in the 1970s. Now he’s a decade into a comeback career that has proved commercially fitful but earned critical acclaim. Since “Ballads, Blues & Bey” in 1996, he has made several albums, released on small labels, that interpret standards in particular with a level of technique, sensitivity, and – dare one say it – soul that surpasses the competition.

Bey celebrates his latest release, “Ain’t Necessarily So,” tonight at Regattabar. The recording itself isn’t new. A 1997 live date at a New York club, it presents eight songs at an unhurried pace. From the start of the title track, Bey’s radiant baritone is redolent with church and the blues, and later, on “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” he conveys to perfection the Depression-era classic’s mixture of anger and dignity.

Read More

Boston Globe, September 28, 2007

NEW YORK—Few life stories in jazz have been as fulfilling as that of George Wein, the pianist and promoter who virtually invented the jazz festival at Newport in 1954 and went on to become the music’s most iconic and influential impresario.

Now, two years since the death of Joyce Alexander Wein, his wife and longtime creative partner, and days away from his own 82d birthday, Wein is looking back on a charmed life that has bridged business, performance, philanthropy, and personal friendships with scores of the music’s most important artists.

All these dimensions come together tonight in a spectacular, sold-out Symphony Hall concert to benefit a scholarship fund in Joyce’s name at the Berklee College of Music. The event is also a homecoming for Wein, who grew up in Boston and at the time of the founding the Newport festival ran Storyville, a Copley Square club that regularly hosted the likes of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Miles Davis.

Read More

Boston Globe, September 23, 2007

NEW YORK—When Herbie Hancock embarked on making “River: The Joni Letters,” his new album out Tuesday based on the music of Joni Mitchell, he quickly found himself treading at once on familiar and unfamiliar ground.

Familiar, because Hancock, the great jazz pianist, has known Mitchell since 1979, when he and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, his friend and fellow alumnus of the classic Miles Davis quintet, teamed up with the singer on a project she was developing with Charles Mingus. Though Mingus passed away that year, causing the album, “Mingus,” to come out incomplete, the sessions formed the basis of a friendship that would grow richer over the years. Hancock would later appear on another Mitchell album, the orchestral collection “Both Sides Now,” released in 2000.

But unfamiliar at the same time, because in taking on “River,” Hancock, who performs at the BeanTown Jazz Festival Friday night, confronted the need to compose and perform music specifically tailored to lyrics – and not just any lyrics, but Mitchell’s powerful and idiosyncratic poetry. As Hancock explains, putting the lyric first forced an inversion of the typical jazz instrumentalist’s instinct and presented, even to this veteran musical innovator and transgressor of genre boundaries, a new creative challenge.

Read More

Boston Globe, September 14, 2007

One of the most complete jazz pianists around and also one of the most engaging, Michel Camilo has spent the past few years working outside the trio format that has been the anchor of his three-decade career. Now, the Dominican-born virtuoso is returning to the trio re-energized by his recent solo, flamenco, and orchestral projects. The results include a concise and compelling trio album, “Spirit of the Moment,” released this year on the Telarc label, and a tour that visits Regattabar for a three-night engagement next week.

Camilo has won a Grammy and two Latin Grammy awards, accolades that speak to both the accessible appeal of his work and the recognition he’s earned in both straight-ahead and Latin jazz worlds. He was classically trained in the Dominican Republic before establishing himself in New York in the ’70s, so trespassing those genre boundaries is something that he has come to do naturally.

“Latino musicians of my generation, we don’t want to be tagged with one label,” Camilo says on the phone from Los Angeles, where he’s rehearsing Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” with the LA Philharmonic. “We want to be part of the tradition, part of that big tree that is evolving.”

Read More