Drummer Max Roach, who died last week, was one of the pioneers of modern jazz, and musicians and poets came out in force for his funeral Friday. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.
He works to raise hope, and homes, in New Orleans
Boston Globe, August 24, 2007
Days before the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, the righteous anger animates Terence Blanchard just as it did in the storm’s wake. The distinguished New Orleanian trumpeter, who remembers being evacuated by rowboat from the Ninth Ward as a child during 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, came home after Katrina to find his mother’s neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain leveled. Images of Blanchard escorting his mother to her first sight of the void that was her house, and his own candor negotiating the outrage and sadness, are emotional highlights of Spike Lee’s HBO documentary, “When the Levees Broke.”
Now Blanchard continues the catharsis and consciousness-raising with a majestic album, “A Tale of God’s Will,” just out on Blue Note. With a full orchestra backing Blanchard’s quintet, the disc is a funeral suite laced with worship, perseverance, and transcendence; both drawing on and deviating from classic New Orleans jazz, it’s one of the richest artistic responses to Katrina yet released. It’s also the primary material for Blanchard’s current quintet tour, which visits Regattabar tonight.
Those who follow Blanchard’s work will not be surprised by the album’s cinematic texture: The finely paced exposition and the lush but tempered orchestration reflect Blanchard’s long experience writing scores for Lee’s films. The songs ease poignantly from wide-angle evocations of city, earth, water, to the close-up intimacy of lives facing crisis and recovery. The pervasive melancholy that Blanchard’s horn signals as it sinews through the arrangements is never treacly or overwrought, but simply a matter of fact.
No time to quit the blues: Koko Taylor
Boston Globe, August 17, 2007
Koko Taylor’s new album is called “Old School,” and rarely was a title ever so succinct and so apt. There’s no blues artist active today who so perfectly channels the thrill, the sadness, and the power of classic Chicago blues as Taylor, who left sharecropper Tennessee for the Windy City in 1953 and resides there to this day. With a new album and a busy tour schedule that brings her to Lowell’s Boarding House Park on Thursday, after five decades of raw-soul singing Taylor is going plenty strong.
Queen, doyenne, keeper of the flame are some of the titles that are regularly trotted out to describe the 71-year-old blues belter, and she accepts them all with good grace. “Yes, I do,” she says on the phone from her home. “I’m very honored to be in that position. I’m out here to make people happy with my music.”
“Old School” is just that – a dozen solid tracks, five penned by Taylor, played by three different high-caliber Chicago blues combos and released, like all of Taylor’s work since 1975, on Alligator, the label that has become a one-stop curator of the genre today. This is classic urban blues, mainly fast-paced but with a pair of scorching slow songs, Johnny Thompson’s “Money is the Name of the Game” and Walter Williams’s “Bad Avenue.”
At Newark funerals, “It’s sadness all over”
Newark police are seeking a fourth suspect in the execution style murders of three college-age young people on August 4th. Newark mayor Cory Booker announced the warrant for Rodolfo Godinez on Saturday morning at a brief press conference wedged between funerals. The victims were buried on Saturday after funerals at three different Baptist churches around the city. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spoke with the mourners.
Her long trip proves worth it
Boston Globe, August 10, 2007
Sometimes a jazz musician appears on the scene with a recording that is both so unique and so well-crafted that you wonder where he or she has been all your life. That kind of revelation came a few months ago with the release of “A Long Story,” the debut of Israeli pianist Anat Fort. Though she’s been active in the New York jazz world for more than a decade, Fort is just now coming into the limelight beyond those rarefied downtown circles, and not a moment too soon. Her visit to Regattabar tonight is a chance to catch up with one of the more original piano voices at work today, as well as one of the most elegant and subtle.
On “A Long Story,” Fort allies spirit-filled melodicism with evidence of an ongoing search for simplicity. Her pacing is exquisite: She seems to invest the silences with nearly as much meaning as the notes, yet never falls into austerity or abstraction. She enjoys sympathetic accompaniment from bassist Ed Schuller and legendary drummer Paul Motian, whose work with pianists like Keith Jarrett makes him a perfect foil. Clarinetist Perry Robinson joins on several tracks. But the compositions are Fort’s, and from the very first notes of “Just Now, Var. 1,” the alluring motif piece that opens the record and recurs twice in different instrumentations, it’s clear that this is her artistic vision.
Taking her bow to a grab bag of styles: Jenny Scheinman
Boston Globe, August 3, 2007
NEW YORK—The jazz violin community is a small one; even its stars, like Regina Carter, Billy Bang, or Mark Feldman, are little known beyond hard-core music circles. But paradoxically, this obscurity has helped to make the violin a vehicle for some of the most interesting new music today.
Perhaps one reason is that it draws artists who enjoy a challenge. But it’s also because jazz violinists bring backgrounds in other genres. Classical, klezmer, country, and folk are just some of the sources that these violinists tap and then reinterpret through the jazz idiom of improvisation.
Jenny Scheinman, who at 34 has been anointed jazz violin’s rising star, is no exception. Her playing sometimes flirts with the angular abstractions of experimental music, but far more often it resonates with the warmth and lyricism of the folk and country music she grew up with in rural Northern California, where her East Coast family rusticated in search of simplicity and community values. She’s classically trained on piano, and she enjoys singing, but in rock and folk, not jazz settings.
Bringing a master back home: the Makanda Project
Boston Globe, July 27, 2007
It’s easy for great musicians to slip out of their art’s official history. In jazz, where so many artists have lived volatile and difficult lives, perhaps as many fine players and innovators are forgotten as are celebrated in the music’s canon. From time to time, the memory of one such figure is rescued in extremis. Of late the Makanda Project, led by Boston pianist and arranger John Kordalewski, has been celebrating Makanda Ken McIntyre, a composer and multi-reed player who died six years ago in relative obscurity.
But just as important an aim of the project is to bring McIntyre’s work – and by extension, the spirit and practice of high-quality jazz – back to Boston’s historic African-American community. McIntyre, who was born in 1931, grew up on Wellington Street in the South End when that neighborhood and Lower Roxbury made up the heart of black Boston. He played around Boston during the heyday of the local jazz scene in the 1950s, before moving to New York and eventually spending the bulk of his career as an educator and pioneer of jazz studies, notably at SUNY at Old Westbury on Long Island.
Nothing wrong with a little hip-hop nostalgia
Boston Globe, July 25, 2007
Summer is the season of nostalgia and reunion tours, and hip-hop is no exception to this pop music rule. Though hip-hop finds the bulk of its audience in the under-30 crowd, the genre has now been around for longer than many of its listeners have been alive; there’s no shortage of history to tap into and influential acts to revive. Not only that, but considering that most hip-hop stars broke out while barely out of their teens, not even the pioneers are over the hill: Hip-hop may be in a state of flux and self-questioning – of which more in a moment – but it’s nowhere near fossilized.
In recent years, a festival called Rock the Bells, started in 2003 by a Southern California rap aficionado named Chang Weisberg, has asserted itself as the premier hip-hop summer tour, its increasingly lavish lineup assembling old-guard heavies with new underground favorites and, as the event has gone national, regional stars in some of the host cities. This year’s edition kicks off tomorrow at the Tweeter Center, with Nas and the Wu-Tang Clan – the two 1990s acts that anchor the national tour – topping the bill. The fullest lineup gathers at tour stops in New York and California. Listeners there will be able to catch such 1980s legends as Public Enemy, Rakim, and EPMD.
Harlem Book Fair: The uptown book scene
The ninth edition of the Harlem Book Fair takes place today. Up to 70,000 visitors are expected on 135th Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, along with 300 exhibitors from the spectrum of African-American publishing. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter checked in on the uptown book scene.
He’ll keep trucking, but solo: Jason Isbell
Boston Globe, July 15, 2007
The Alabama band Drive-By Truckers has earned something of a cult following both for its fresh take on classic themes of Southern music and for its powerful three-guitar front line, made up most recently of Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell, all native sons of the musically distinguished Muscle Shoals region. Now Isbell has gone solo, a development that has caused some alarm among Truckers fans, but that also marks a broadening of the revival and reinvention of Southern rock that DBT has heralded.
At 28, Isbell is quite a bit younger than Hood or Cooley, but he made himself essential both as a musician and as a gifted songwriter on the group’s last three records. Hood and DBT drummer Brad Morgan and bassist Shonna Tucker, from whom Isbell is divorced, appear on Isbell’s just-released solo album, “Sirens of the Ditch,” confirming that all these splits have been amicable. Isbell is touring now with a brand-new group; they stop at T.T. the Bear’s in Cambridge tomorrow.
An afternoon phone call on the eve of the tour’s launch finds Isbell at a bar in Muscle Shoals, taking a break from helping to set up for the next day’s gig. “I wanted to do a local show to kick off the tour,” he says. Though the town is home to the legendary FAME studios, where countless soul and rock classics were once recorded, it has no large music venue, and Isbell and friends are converting a firehouse-turned-studio into a concert hall for the occasion, which has involved practical matters like getting a vendor’s license.
For Miles: Ron Carter
Boston Globe, July 13, 2007
As befits an art where experience forms more through apprenticeship with the masters than through sheet music or book knowledge, jazz has always honored its elders. Still, among the senior figures of the music, some icons stand out as especially monumental and command the greatest reverence. One of these today is Ron Carter. The bassist, who turned 70 earlier this year and visits the Regattabar for two nights this weekend, is generally acknowledged to be one of the key living custodians of the jazz tradition.
It’s easy to understand why. The man is almost absurdly prolific, having reputedly appeared on more than 2,500 recordings. He is an innovator on his instrument who long ago carved out a path for jazz bassists to come out from the rhythm-section background and assume melodic responsibilities, and who has assembled and composed for numerous multi-strings outfits, from ones contrasting the standard double bass with the higher-tuned piccolo bass all the way to a nonet featuring four cellos.
Of course Carter’s place in history has been secure for four decades thanks to what remains his best-known work, as a charter member of the Miles Davis Quintet of the 1960s, a combo as important and influential as any that has existed in jazz. But wallowing in past glories is of little interest to Carter, even though, understandably enough, he’s often invited to do so by younger musicians.
Nels Cline: Guitarist who straddles two worlds
Boston Globe, June 22, 2007
The intersection of jazz and rock ‘n’ roll brings to mind crossovers of the ’70s, from the Miles Davis of “Bitches Brew” or John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra to the refined session pop of Steely Dan, as well as the sprawling miasma known as fusion. But today, the atomization of music into myriad substyles makes possible whole new kinds of encounters, as well as offering passage between both worlds to those daring enough to try. For an example, consider the case of Nels Cline, known to rock connoisseurs since 2004 as the lead guitarist in Wilco, but also for close on three decades a figure in the often-esoteric free-jazz and improvisation scenes.
This summer brings opportunities to savor Cline’s guitar prowess in three settings. On Thursday, he appears with Wilco at the Bank of America Pavilion. On Aug. 8, he accompanies the jazz violinist Jenny Scheinman at Regattabar. And next week, he releases “Draw Breath,” the second album by his trio the Nels Cline Singers, with Devin Hoff on bass, Scott Amendola on drums, and a guest appearance by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche on percussion.
“Nobody thinks I’m slumming anymore,” Cline says on the phone from a tour stop in Cincinnati. But other than that, he says, becoming the lead guitarist of a big-time rock band hasn’t made his life all that different from what it was before. At 51, he’s Wilco’s eldest member, but he’s unafraid of the demands of the road. “I thrive in it,” he says. “I love to play. It’s normal for me, I’ve been in a lot of bands. The tour buses and the number of people are different, but everything else is the same.”
Nawal’s musical journey to liberation
Boston Globe, June 22, 2007
Chalk it up to globalization: The foremost cultural ambassador of an obscure Islamic island nation off the coast of East Africa can be found, when her schedule permits, taking the waters at a Northern California yoga and meditation spa.
Such is the habit of Nawal, the singer and instrumentalist who is the first female performing artist of the Comoros, an archipelago of four islands of which three are an independent republic, and the fourth, Mayotte, is a French territory. Though she moved to France as a child and is today based in Paris, she has become an object of Comorian national pride and returned to play there with her trio, which includes an American woman, to rapturous stadium crowds.
Her music takes as its point of departure traditional Comorian sounds, which resonate with Arabic and African influences accumulated over centuries through the Indian Ocean trade. The instrumentation showcases the gambusi, a string instrument akin to the oud. On Nawal’s new album, “Aman,” her lyrics draw in part on Sufi incantations and on traditional laments that Comorian women perform at private gatherings.
Governors Island design competition under way
What to do with Governors Island has been a running question for a decade, ever since the Coast Guard stopped using the 192-acre island off the tip of Manhattan. So far, efforts to develop the island have never gotten off the ground. Now a design competition is under way to turn much of the island into new public parkland in the hope of attracting visitors – and businesses. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.
Robin Eubanks’ envelope pushing, hi-tech jazz
Boston Globe, June 15, 2007
Jazz at the electronic frontier produces music that’s all over the map: The encounter of acoustic instruments with computer technology can yield soupy fusion or aggressive avant-garde noise, but it has also opened new evolutionary paths for straight-ahead jazz and created new platforms for brilliance. For proof, look no further than trombonist Robin Eubanks’s EB3 trio. The unusual combo of trombone, keyboards, and drums, augmented by an array of devices that the musicians engage and tweak as they play, shows Eubanks is not just the reigning mad scientist of the trombone but one of the most innovative jazz leaders today.
On tour behind their new album, “Live Vol. 1,” EB3 plays the Cambridge River Festival tomorrow; the opportunity to watch the group at work is one worth catching, as this music is as much a visual as an aural experience. Conveniently, the record package includes a performance DVD that gives an idea of the craftsman’s patient layering, the instrumental versatility, and the improvisational whimsy that all go into making music that is much more than the sum of its parts.
Consider the opening song, “Me, Myself and I.” It is technically a solo – but one in which Eubanks establishes and loops a pair of trombone lines and improvises over the top, along the way working in a beat that he concocts on a set of electronic percussion pads. The repetitive parts give the piece propulsion and a clear structure, but this is also improvisation, both in how the artist builds each element before locking it in, and in how he manages the total organism before breaking it back down to a solitary acoustic finale.
Common ground, with gongs
Boston Globe, May 27, 2007
Eight small round gongs lie horizontally in a rectangular box and shimmer to the touch of soft wooden sticks. The sound is intricate, playful, liquid, the tuning flexible and untethered to a specific scale. Now hand drums weave in, offering a loose countervailing beat. A laptop beams loops and samples from field recordings: traditional music groups, children at play, street noise, a call to prayer taped off a hazy transistor radio.
This is the soundscape of Electric Kulintang, the venture of wife-and-husband team Susie Ibarra and Roberto Rodriguez that conjugates her Filipino and his Cuban cultural heritage with the experimentalism of the New York improvised music scene they inhabit. Deeply rooted yet entirely new, it is one of those refreshing projects that ushers the listener into a total sonic experience just past the edge of the familiar, in the process subjecting the superannuated concept of “world music” to some much-needed creative destruction.
With an album released last year on independent label Plastic Records, Electric Kulintang visits the Museum of Fine Arts for two daytime sets tomorrow as part of the museum’s Memorial Day open house. It’s an inspired programming choice, as the music is of a nature to captivate children and adults alike, and its textural qualities suit it for both intense and casual listening.
Watts pays tribute to those who inspired him
Boston Globe, May 27, 2007
Drummers are rarely bandleaders in jazz, mainly for the simple reason that they are too busy drumming; the best ones are in high demand and therefore overextended, or end up tightly identified with a particular leader’s group and channel their creative energy there. Historic exceptions apply, of course, such as Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers was for decades a proving ground for new talent. By and large, though, the drummer works the background. So it’s a treat when one of the day’s top drummers assembles a group and marks it with his or her distinct vision and personality, particularly when it’s Jeff “Tain” Watts, who possesses an abundance of both.
Watts, who visits Scullers on Thursday with young saxophonist Marcus Strickland and first-call pianist David Kikoski, has been a familiar figure in jazz since the 1980s “young lions” revival, in which he took part as the drummer in Wynton Marsalis’s band. He later played with saxophonist Kenny Garrett, and also served on what he’s referred to as the “plantation” of the “Tonight Show” house band. Lest these associations seem to peg him too narrowly, consider that Watts frequently played with the late Alice Coltrane – he took part in her memorial service-cum-concert in New York last week – and has worked at pretty much every point in between on the neotraditional-to-far-out spectrum.
Voodoo child: Erol Josué
Boston Globe, May 25, 2007
NEW YORK—The chance to savor the cuisine of the home you’ve left behind is a signal moment of bittersweet pleasure for an expatriate. So it’s fitting that it’s at a small Haitian restaurant here, before a dish of lambi, or conch-meat stew, that Erol Josue – singer, dancer, actor, and voodoo priest – settles in to discuss his new album, “Regleman,” in which he filters the traditional and sacramental music of his roots through the prism of his diasporic life in Paris and now New York.
Josue left Haiti at 20; now 33, he has honed an artistic identity and a personal aesthetic that inscribe him in the grand tradition of the soulful self-described exile. He is neither tall nor stocky, and inhabits his body with a physical assurance that reflects years as a dancer and choreographer with his own ensemble, Compagnie Shango, in Paris. His style is dapper, running toward brown vests and tight slacks. He speaks quietly, but with enthusiasm, and still favors French though he’s been based in New York for several years now.
“Regleman,” Josue’s first album, came out this week; he makes the second stop of his record release tour tonight at Johnny D’s in Somerville. The album is personal and heartfelt; its framing concept is encapsulated in the title, which, Josue says, carries a very specific meaning in Haitian, and specifically voodoo, culture.
Reuben Rogers puts his stamp on the moment
Boston Globe, May 18, 2007
The new album from bassist Reuben Rogers is an easygoing set that brims with positive energy. On a program of mainly Rogers’s compositions, a roster of high-flying buddies like trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxmen Joshua Redman and Ron Blake drop in with bright, clean contributions. You feel the warmth even without knowing Rogers’s roots in the Virgin Islands and affection for his Caribbean culture.
Once you do know those things, however, the calypso and reggae influences on some songs make all the more sense, and the album title, “The Things I Am,” takes on its full meaning. It’s a statement of self-expression from an artist who after 14 years as a sideman is finally granting himself a turn in the spotlight.
Rogers visits Scullers on Tuesday to celebrate the new release. He’ll be joined by Blake, a longtime friend and mentor; drummer Gregory Hutchinson, who also appears on the album; and pianist Danny Grissett. It’s a return to old haunts for Rogers, who attended Berklee in the mid-1990s and stayed on in Boston awhile, playing at venues such as Wally’s and Ryles before making the move to the New York area.
Duo connects with each other and audience
Boston Globe, May 11, 2007
There is an aura of difficulty that hangs over creative improvisation – an art form at the confines of jazz, in which musicians expound together and in the moment, often with no predetermined structure or plan. It’s difficult to perform: It demands that each musician combine self-assured technique with the capacity to intensely and closely listen to the others. And all too often, it’s difficult to hear, offering the audience little in the way of signposts or emotional cues.
To all but the most cerebral and obsessive listeners, this hermetic quality is a major turnoff. Fortunately, from time to time a creative improvisation project comes around that achieves its musical ends in a manner that is open, accessible, and sincere. The 19 concise and moving improvisations that make up “Heart Mountain,” a new album by violist-violinist Tanya Kalmanovitch and pianist Myra Melford, draw us into the inner sanctum of the creative process without attitude or fear; they put us in the presence of music.
Kalmanovitch and Melford visit the Lily Pad in Cambridge on Wednesday; the galleryish setting is typical for this type of music, which gets lumped into the grab bag of “avant-garde” and never makes much money for anyone. Be that as it may, the intimate space offers lovers of classical music, in which both women trained, and jazz, the vernacular to which they are closest, the opportunity to be present at a creation: to witness a musical encounter and contribute to its energy.
In their name: Ravi Coltrane
Boston Globe, May 4, 2007
The peculiar burden of saxophonist Ravi Coltrane has been to balance his own creative development with the real and symbolic duties that come with carrying one of the most important names in American – or world – musical history. Coltrane, who visits Scullers this weekend, is the son of the peerless John Coltrane and the pianist Alice Coltrane, a member of the master’s final group who later devoted herself to the spiritual life as Swamini A.C. Turiyasangitananda, founding an ashram in Southern California.
In the swirl of their legacy, Ravi Coltrane has emerged as an important voice in jazz not through anointment or fiery irruption, but rather by means of quiet perseverance. It was not until his early 20s that he devoted himself to the saxophone, and though long a valued sideman on the New York scene, he has only four albums as a leader, most recently “In Flux” in 2005.
In the past year, however, Coltrane’s role as son and heir has predominated, as a result of design and then fate. Last fall, he joined Alice Coltrane in three public concerts, her first in 25 years, accompanied by, among others, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Roy Haynes, both of whom played with his father. Ravi had already been central in bringing about Alice’s 2004 album, “Translinear Light,” which was hailed in the jazz world for both its musical strength and its historic significance.
Young artists bring Langston Hughes’ home back to life
The poet Langston Hughes died of cancer 40 years ago this month. His work spanned the time from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power movement, and he is recognized as one of the great figures of American literature. But Hughes’s longtime home in Harlem hasn’t fared as well as his legacy – until recently. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter visited some of the young artists who are bringing the house back to life.
Hometown cricket fans
The Cricket World Cup is down to its final four. In the U.S, cricket is still obscure, and the Cup has only made news for a tragic incident early on. But for many expatriates and immigrants in New York, cricket is a way of life, and a connection to each other and the places they call home. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter travels from the West Village to Richmond Hill, Queens to find New York’s hometown cricket fans.
The hip-hop generation in Africa: Ghana and Ivory Coast
Produced by Siddhartha Mitter. Follow link for audio. We explore the current pop music of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, two countries where elements of hip-hop and international pop music have grafted themselves onto local styles to create whole new genres-ones robust enough to not only take over the local youth culture but also spread beyond their borders. In Ghana, hip-life–a synthesis of hip-hop and highlife–dukes it out with gospel music on the airwaves. In Cote d’Ivoire, music has blossomed despite a stubborn political crisis. The idiosyncratic local music of social comment, zouglou, has morphed into coupe-décalé, a dance-driven style that has supplanted Congolese soukous as the sound of the moment in Francophone Africa and its Diaspora.
Meeting of minds at a musical crossroads
Boston Globe, April 13, 2007
The guitarist Pat Metheny has long been an ambassador for a big-tent jazz sensibility in which technical virtuosity is put in the service of texture and melody. The combination of raw force and lyricism places his work at a crossroads where instrumental rock meets improvisational creative music, which accounts for Metheny’s popularity among jam-band aficionados and a brand-name draw that can fill huge venues where jazz is not a staple. But Metheny, a musical omnivore, is also steeped in jazz history and conversant across traditional and avant-garde forms, with the discography to back it up.
His wild mane and trademark casual demeanor notwithstanding, Metheny is now 52 and gradually turning the corner into elder-statesman status. In the pianist Brad Mehldau, 36, he has found a new acolyte who, though possessing an entirely different sound, shares his emphasis on lyricism and wide-open musical appetites atop an orthodox foundation.
A pair of albums, “Metheny/Mehldau,” released last year, and “Metheny Mehldau Quartet,” out this month, document the two men’s compatibility and are two of the more interesting recent jazz releases. On a North American tour behind these discs, Metheny and Mehldau visit the Boston Opera House tomorrow.
When worlds collide: Slavic Soul Party!
Boston Globe, March 30, 2007
NEW YORK—They have played – with equal relish and abandon, and no compromise on style – before audiences including the following: the Turkish political and business elite gathered in a Bosporus palace; blue-collar workers in Rust Belt dive bars; skate-punk kids waiting in line for the Warped summer arena tour; the Brooklyn arty intelligentsia, on a shared bill with the Kronos Quartet.
And that’s just a sampler of the venues where the New York-based nonet Slavic Soul Party! (complete with exclamation mark) has distilled its bottom-heavy whirls of brass band music from the rural Balkans. They draw on their serious study of traditions that, in the US music market at least, can only be described as obscure, and adapt them with equal measures of strategy and whimsy.
Not bad for a crew of merry pranksters who are ethnically about as Slavic as the Brazilian Girls are Brazilian, which is to say they ain’t. The band’s one Balkan member is Gypsy, and the founder, Matt Moran, is a converted jazz vibraphonist from the wilds of northeast Connecticut who in his neo-Bulgarian avatar officiates from behind a large multipurpose drum called, depending on where in the Balkans you are, the tapan, davul, or bubanj. Sometimes they have a female guest vocalist.
Young vocalist stresses respect and restraint
Boston Globe, March 30, 2007
NEW YORK—These days, neither music schools nor underground club circuits seem to produce male jazz vocalists at the rate they do female singers or instrumentalists of either sex. Boys with voices head for Broadway or R&B; in jazz, perhaps the concatenation of traditional gender roles with the competitive geekery inherent in the genre pushes males toward instrumental abstraction and away from something as direct and tender as a song. At any rate, it’s not often that a male singer makes a noteworthy recorded debut, so when it happens, it’s worth checking in.
This week offers just that opportunity with the release of “Eyes Wide Open,” the poised first album by Sachal Vasandani, a 28-year-old singer with a cool baritone, eclectic inspirations, and hints of the proverbial old soul. To mark the occasion, Vasandani launches a coast-to-coast mini-tour on Wednesday with a visit to Scullers.
On first listen, “Eyes Wide Open” impresses with restraint; Vasandani favors control over ornamentation, and many of the songs own the refined nocturnal hush that comes from unhurried exposition and impeccable piano-trio arrangements. Vasandani’s keen intimacy with his core group – pianist Jeb Patton, bassist David Wong, and drummer Quincy Davis – shows throughout, and the guest contributions, particularly from vibraphone master Stefon Harris, are just as fluid and easy.
Unique beyond words
Boston Globe, March 23, 2007
NEW YORK—When fully expressed, the human voice has such potential that instruments are crafted to imitate it, not the other way round. In fact, whole traditions of music honor the voice above all other instruments. Seen this way, a song can be a terribly limiting thing. Verses and refrains shackle inventiveness. Lyrics force subtle shadings of tone into foregone conclusions, constrained by language and vocabulary.
That’s just one way of looking at things, of course, but it’s enough to have bred a stream of jazz musicians who use their voice to interpret mainly wordless compositions. It’s a different technique than scatting: In wordless singing the voice harmonizes with the other instruments, improvises, maybe takes a solo. It’s hard to do, and when done poorly, can be quite a drag.
Now a young singer and composer who has embraced the technique to great effect is emerging on the Boston scene. Sara Serpa was the featured guest of saxophone great Greg Osby during a recent Berklee residency. Wednesday, she takes the stage at Ryles as the leader of her quintet.
Air: French mood setters still a band apart
Alarm Magazine, March 20, 2007
[Cover Story]
AIR. It always was an ambitious name for a band, so brief and elemental. It posed from the start the question of substance, and when the French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel turned up in 1998 with the, well, airy electronic sketches of Moon Safari, they achieved saturation in certain circles followed by a depletion of density.
Having spawned no imitators, initiated no trends, they returned at unhurried intervals with albums mining essentially the same concept: highly produced affairs with a pop sophistication so uncanny as to cause as much wariness as listening pleasure, earning them not-quite-friendly designations like “soft electropop.”
And now they’re back, three years after their 2004 sortie Talkie Walkie, with a new album called Pocket Symphony that finds them in a stripped-down, quiet place, a minimalist project that might or might not prove a commercial risk. The “French Touch” club wave, to which they only awkwardly belonged in the first place, has long since waned. They are alone – a condition, it turns out, that they find quite appealing.
Hundreds grieve at funeral for Bronx fire victims
An emotional moment for a West African community today, as the ten victims of the deadly Bronx fire last Wednesday were remembered, prayed over, and laid to rest. Nine of those victims were children. The deaths have brought forth an outpouring of support from the Malian community, and from across the city. Reporter Siddhartha Mitter was at the funeral and spoke with WNYC’s All Things Considered host, Amy Eddings.
New York’s Ghanaian community celebrates independence
Today, the West African nation of Ghana celebrates 50 years of independence. After a turbulent history, Ghana is now a democracy. There’s a large Ghanaian community in New York and the ties between New York and Ghana go all the way back to the birth of the US civil rights movement. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter has the story.
In pianist’s hands, the tradition evolves
Boston Globe, March 2, 2007
NEW YORK—On the middle floor of a Harlem brownstone that once was home to Langston Hughes, the pianist Marc Cary holes up in a studio crowded with computers, keyboards, partly depleted bottles of red wine, and other flotsam of the creative process.
In the next room, his collaborator in business and music, Shon “Chance” Miller, a hip-hop artist and producer, lurks in similar fashion. Motema Music, the indie label on which Cary records, has its office in a space upstairs. And on the parlor floor, in the one fully renovated room, a concert piano stands proudly beneath a bank of stage lights.
Folks trundle up and down the narrow staircase and maneuver past drywall and over ripped-up carpet. Hughes, the great poet of the Harlem Renaissance, may have lived here, but the house is no elegant Harlem dowager. When the artists leased the building last year, they found it in a state unbecoming to the memory of its illustrious resident.
“It was in such disrepair and disrespect,” Cary says. Now, he says, they’re bringing the energy back, and he is starting to feel the presence of the luminaries who once met here. “Sometimes when you sit here – quietly – you can see something out of the corner of your eye. There’s a certain joy in here that’s come back to life.”
Starrett City: The character of an unusual urban community
The proposed buyers of Brooklyn’s Starrett City have received nothing but bad press since putting up their $1.3 billion bid. Most of it has been directed at developer David Bistricer. The latest allegations – from the housing advocacy group Acorn – are that he refuses to rent apartments to people with Section 8 vouchers at another complex he owns in Brooklyn. If true, it would be illegal and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo tells The New York Times he’ll look into it. The allegations are exactly the kind of thing that has the complex’s 12,000 residents worried, but beyond the cost of housing, what may be at stake is the character of an unusual urban community. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter spoke with some of Starrett City’s residents.
Off the beaten path of Latin jazz lies “Duende”
Boston Globe, February 24, 2007
When pianist Nando Michelin arrived in Boston from his native Uruguay in 1989 to study at Berklee, he imagined that, like many other jazz students, he’d complete his degree and quickly move on, to New York and points beyond.
But to the great benefit of the New England jazz scene, things didn’t work out that way. Today, Michelin is a local stalwart who lives in Arlington, makes his living teaching at Tufts and privately, and is a prolific composer and arranger with seven albums as a leader and many more as a sought-after sideman in both straight-ahead and Latin settings. Yet his work is also something of a well-kept secret.
But if there is any justice, Michelin’s latest album, “Duende,” a fluid and literate trio date with drummer Richie Barshay and bassist Esperanza Spalding, will change all of that. And the record release event, Wednesday at Ryles in Cambridge, should double as a delayed-but-deserved coming-out party.
His musical inheritance: Vieux Farka Touré comes into his own
Boston Globe, February 23, 2007
NEW YORK—It isn’t customary for a 25-year-old West African musician with just one brand-new album to his name to make his American debut before a sold-out house including his nation’s ambassador, record label executives, and Harry Belafonte.
But the tall young man in the grand silver-blue traditional robe wielding the black electric guitar at the downtown venue Joe’s Pub earlier this month is no ordinary first-timer. He is Vieux Farka Toure, son and musical heir to Ali Farka Toure, the peerless Malian “desert blues” guitarist who died of cancer last March. And his lineage, validated by a nearly flawless first album, makes his maiden North American tour, which comes to Johnny D’s in Davis Square Thursday, a major event on the world-music circuit this year.
It would be artificial to consider Vieux – as everyone calls him – in isolation from his father, one of the great icons of 20th-century music, in whose haunting, sinewy style many find the clearest evidence of the African origins of the blues. Yet although he inherits from the elder Toure technique, material, and even that black guitar, Vieux plays with less austerity and more of an age-appropriate energy and appetite for experimentation, abetted in this by his American producer, bassist, and buddy Eric Herman.
Trio’s motto could be all for one, one for all
Boston Globe, February 9, 2007
In the universe of jazz ensembles, the piano trio – made of piano, bass, and drums – is one of the classic forms. It is also, potentially, one of the most hermetic. It lacks the marshalling, directing effect that a horn appears to provide; in fact, it sometimes seems to have no leader at all.
That selflessness, of course, is a virtue, one that pianist Marc Copland, bassist Gary Peacock, and drummer Bill Stewart have captured on a crystalline new recording, “Modinha,” in support of which they visit the Regattabar on Thursday.
The spine of this collaboration is between Peacock and Copland, who first worked together in the 1980s. Suitably enough, each is listed as the group’s leader – Copland on the record, Peacock on the show bill. Each is a veteran of several waves of jazz history and, to some degree, an outsider.
On the street, a fashion classic is new again
It’s Fashion Week and on the runways models strut, celebrities gawk and the trends are set. But for some fashion conscious folks, there’s no substitute for the judgment of the streets. WNYC’s Siddhartha Mitter reports.
He nurtures players as well as he plays
Boston Globe, February 2, 2007
The Berklee College of Music is a Boston jazz treasure not just for the quality of education it dispenses but also for the chance it affords the general public to get in on the action. Among the city’s best-kept secrets, the school’s concerts feature students on the verge of graduating to make waves in the world of creative music alongside the masters who come to town to teach them. On Thursday, for instance, a modest five-spot will earn you admission to a retrospective concert of the career of alto saxophonist Greg Osby, a workhorse of the New York scene whose projects have been as diverse as anyone’s in the past two decades, and whose gift for nurturing young talent is legendary.
Consider this: Groups led by Osby started the careers of pianist Jason Moran and vibraphonist Stefon Harris, two of the bona fide young superstars of straightahead jazz (and both of whom have graced Boston stages in recent days). Osby has also nurtured less-famous but no less creative young players such as saxman Mark Shim, bassists Lonnie Plaxico and Tarus Mateen, drummers Rodney Green and Eric Harland, and plenty more. It’s a legacy of mentorship not dissimilar to that left by Art Blakey, only Osby, at 46, is still a young guy with plenty more gas in the tank and projects in mind for young talent.
Pianist Jason Moran challenges tradition
Boston Globe, January 26, 2007
Whenever Jason Moran, Tarus Mateen, and Nasheet Waits take the stage, one of the tightest units in jazz is about to get cooking. Many consider Moran, 32, the foremost pianist of his generation, with seven albums as a leader on Blue Note since “Soundtrack to Human Motion” in 1999. Bassist Mateen and drummer Waits are his longtime co-conspirators. Known as the Bandwagon, the trio, which plays the Regattabar on Thursday, exhibits the kind of exquisite mind-melding interplay that’s a jazz listener’s Holy Grail.
But look a little more closely, and details emerge that suggest Moran is not content to play the role of the tradition-upholding “young lion.” For one thing, there’s that mini-disc recorder sitting within easy reach atop his instrument. As he plays, he flips the recorder on and off, and odd sounds emanate: speeches from historic figures; a strange scratching sound that turns out to be a pencil running across paper; performance artist (and MIT prof) Joan Jonas intoning in a loop, “Artists ought to be writing …”
Taking jazz violin on a trip back in time
Boston Globe, January 21, 2007
For all the creativity on display in jazz, there hasn’t been much room for the violin in the genre, at least not since the birth of bebop six decades ago. Violin, cello, and viola found themselves relegated to the occasional string section, and in the 1960s, while “out” musicians took up everything from cowbells to Eastern strings like the oud and sitar, the good old violin remained mainly untouched, as if reserved for classical European playing.
In that atmosphere, to take on a career in jazz violin had to be an act of stubbornness verging on temerity. So it’s gratifying to see Regina Carter, who almost single-handedly has returned the violin to jazz prominence in a 15-year run of virtuosity, headlining a Celebrity Series concert at Sanders Theatre tomorrow. With full respect to other bow-wielders, the terms jazz violin and celebrity rarely figure in the same sentence.
The show also features singer Dee Dee Bridgewater, but this is Carter’s project. The program, drawn from her latest album, “I’ll Be Seeing You: A Sentimental Journey,” features pre-World War II classics from “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” to “Georgia on My Mind.” It should well suit the dark, ornate confines of Sanders.
Dengue Fever spreads Cambodian rock
Boston Globe, January 20, 2007
Dengue fever is a fairly nasty, mosquito-borne tropical disease. But the spread of an infectious new strain in the United States should be no cause for alarm. Dengue Fever, the Los Angeles band, transmits itself through music and results in nothing worse than 1970s surf-rock flashbacks and a sudden urge to explore Cambodian culture.
Perhaps we should take a step back. Ten years ago a California rocker named Ethan Holtzman took a trip to Cambodia with a friend. The friend picked up dengue, the disease (he recovered). Holtzman picked up a bunch of cassettes of 1970s Cambodian rock and, by way of his pal’s misfortune, a quirky name for a band.
By 2001, Holtzman not only remained obsessed with the blend of psychedelia, surf rock, Bollywood, and traditional influences in the vintage Cambodian sound he’d discovered, but had convinced a posse of like-minded rock eccentrics – brother Zac Holtzman on guitar, Paul Smith on drums, bassist Senon Williams, saxophonist David Ralicke – to join him in resurrecting the sound. And thus was born Dengue Fever the band.
The Brazilian sound is music to pianist’s ears
Boston Globe, December 22, 2006
Pianist Kenny Barron is a jazz listener’s dream: He records and tours constantly, yet no two dates are ever the same. His range of projects makes him not just one of the finest players of the day, but also a jazz activist with insatiable curiosity. Among memorable recent ventures are a project with violinist Regina Carter, and the Classical Jazz Quartet, a supergroup including Stefon Harris, Ron Carter, and Lewis Nash that has taken on Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky.
Next week, Barron hits Regattabar, one of his regular stops, for three nights with the New York-based Brazilian outfit Trio da Paz, with whom he has forged an ongoing encounter between jazz and Brazilian music that, like its authors, refuses to take the easy way out.
Barron’s interest in Brazil dates back to a visit to Rio with Sphere, the quartet that he led in the 1980s. “We went out to clubs, and everywhere people were playing fantastic music,” he recalls on the phone from his home in New York.
An ambitious explorer of “cool”
Boston Globe, November 24, 2006
Joe Lovano is everything all at once: renowned saxophonist, Berklee College of Music professor, stalwart of the New York jazz scene, and prolific music maker whose recent albums as a leader include trio, quartet, and nonet work, and even a program of songs from the opera great Enrico Caruso.
Lovano’s newest album, “Streams of Expression,” is as ambitious as any he’s made. It interlocks a new interpretation of the seminal Miles Davis work “Birth of the Cool” by composer Gunther Schuller (who as a young French horn player actually took part in the 1949 Davis recording) with a Lovano suite, “Streams of Expression,” that journeys from pre-bop swing to the wild, honking dissonance of post-Coltrane free jazz and back again. Lovano just returned from a long European tour; we checked in with him in advance of his Tuesday performance at Scullers to benefit the new jazz promotion and education group JazzBoston.
Finding his place in the jazz lineage
Boston Globe, November 24, 2006
NEW YORK—To properly unpack the layers of musical and cultural meaning in “African Tarantella,” the latest album from the brilliant vibraphonist and bandleader Stefon Harris, it would require a longer article than these columns permit.
So here’s a summary. A tarantella is an Italian dance whose frenzied execution was once believed to cure a tarantula’s bite – hence, supposedly, the name. Indeed, the album’s cover photo shows Harris bent forward to display a hairy arachnid perched on his head. “African Tarantella” is Harris’s attempt to express the dual European and African paternity of jazz – and with it, in some ways, of American culture itself.
If that sounds abstract, have no fear. “African Tarantella,” which Harris brings this weekend to the Regattabar, is wholly accessible, a beautiful program of movements from suites by Duke Ellington and Harris himself, interpreted on the album by a thoughtfully constructed ensemble that includes, among other instruments, viola, cello, trombone, and flute.
Octet is moved by spiritual inspiration of the east
Boston Globe, November 17, 2006
NEW YORK—Sparked in the ’60s, the conversation between jazz and the East was always a serious matter. While the interest of hippies came and went, jazz musicians found in Indian, African, and Arabic music limitless material for inspiration and research. Yet today, the musicians at this crossroads fall in no prevailing commercial category, and toil mostly in obscurity.
Percussionist Adam Rudolph, who came up in the Chicago scene and went on to work with some of the greatest names of jazz and world music, is a perfect example. Despite decades of maturation, his sound remains rarely heard. His gig tomorrow at Brookline Tai Chi with his Moving Pictures Octet will be the first time the Los Angeles-based artist presents his work to a Boston audience.
The venue tells part of the story. Creative music, as cross-genre improvisational music is sometimes called, finds its locales where it can. In Europe it has access to major festivals; in New York, where Rudolph has spent the fall, he played this week at Symphony Space. But in many US cities, some of the most interesting programming occurs away from the usual-suspect clubs and concert venues.
She sings blues, and then some
Boston Globe, November 12, 2006
Shemekia Copeland sings the blues. This fact alone sets her apart from virtually all the singers of her generation. And at age 27, with four albums to her name on Alligator Records, the Chicago-based contemporary blues powerhouse label, she’s already amassed a considerable portfolio – and she’s just getting started.
In many ways Copeland, who visits the Regattabar on Thursday, is a blueswoman of the old school. Hers is an unornamented gutbucket sound delivered with force and flair, steeped in the music’s black working-class roots and augmented by the defiant, seen-it-all sass common to many great female blues singers, from Big Mama Thornton on down the line.
Nevertheless, on the phone from her home in Chicago, Copeland, who is as refreshingly forthright in conversation as she is in performance, rejects the label of blues traditionalist.
Sounds like Africa—and rock n’ roll
Boston Globe, November 10, 2006
With its 21 strings, the long West African instrument called the kora delivers a sound rich in nuance and finesse. It also requires lengthy study. Together these factors have made it a vehicle for the preservation of traditional music by griots – the praise-singing troubadours of Mali and Guinea – rather than innovation and fusion with modern genres.
Then Ba Cissoko came along, with the band that bears his name. The Guinean combo, which visits the Somerville Theatre tonight on its maiden US tour, has jolted tradition by matching Cissoko’s conventional kora with an electric version invented and played by his cousin Sekou Kouyate. And they have taken their koras into unlikely terrain such as reggae, salsa, and rock without jettisoning traditional themes.
“Electric Griot Land,” the band’s second album, available as a European import, states the group’s approach in its title. The Jimi Hendrix reference is no accident, but the interplay of acoustic and electric kora, backed by Kourou Kouyate, another cousin, on bass and Ibrahima Bah on percussion, is more elegant, less dissonant than the comparison might imply. Contributions from French-African soul duo Les Nubians, Somali rapper K’Naan, and Ivorian reggae star Tiken Jah Fakoly bolster the overall global-groovy feel.
Gomez’s original Latin sound crosses musical borders
Boston Globe, November 3, 2006
For Marta Gomez, absence makes the heart grow fonder. When she left Colombia to study at the Berklee School of Music, the distance gave her the perspective to value her home country’s traditional musical styles. And though she moved to New York, as many Berklee graduates do, in 2003, Boston remains her favorite market and one she visits frequently, as she does for two sets at the Regattabar tonight.
In the course of four albums with her longtime band – two independently produced, followed by two on the New York label Chesky – Gomez has developed a poised, sensitive musical personality with an easy, earnest charm that spills into conversation. She has also managed to confuse the mysterious gremlins who label music by category, as iTunes, for instance, lists her work variously as jazz, world, Latin, and folk.
Does that bother her? “It’s actually the opposite,” Gomez says. “It means I can work more. I can go to jazz festivals, Latin festivals. … It’s a good thing.” What she does, after all, is consistent: mainly original compositions that draw on traditional rhythms from across Latin America, performed in a warm, unornamented style with a jazzy feel.
Try, try again
Boston Globe, November 3, 2006
Since the days of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, the male-female duet has held a special place in R&B. Part of the mystique is that the great ones have been rare. More than just artistic compatibility, they demand a deep emotional connection, whether as lovers or friends, for the output to be affecting and sustained. A connection, in the words of the Ashford and Simpson hit, “solid as a rock.”
It’s small wonder that in today’s music landscape obsessed with individual star making and instant-gratification themes, such duos have all but disappeared. And that’s where Chante Moore and Kenny Lattimore come in. When they married five years ago, each had a solid track record making mainstream R&B. Now they are Kenny & Chante. They perform tomorrow at Boston’s annual “Steppin’ Out” gala, behind their brand-new double album, “Uncovered/Covered.”
It takes just a few moments on the phone with the couple to key into their easy rapport, which feels a lot like their music: mid-tempo, with impeccable production values. These are grown folks who make grown-folks music for people like themselves: middle-class professionals, especially black women, who dress well, even sexy, and go to church on Sundays. It’s a big demographic, though one the music industry often overlooks.
Festival of Sufi music celebrates the mystical tradition
Boston Globe, October 27, 2006
At a time when Islam makes frequent headlines for what some would call all the wrong reasons, the rich legacy and nuances of Islamic culture have received comparatively short shrift. Among these is the Sufi mystical tradition, which produced or influenced some of the world’s greatest works of art, such as the poems of Rumi, Persian miniature paintings, and the architecture and music of Mughal, India.
In 2001, Muzaffar Ali, an Indian filmmaker and impresario long fascinated with Sufi culture, launched an international festival of Sufi music that has become a major event on Delhi’s blossoming cultural calendar. That festival, titled “Jahan-e-Khusrau” or “The Realm of the Heart,” holds its first event outside India tomorrow at the Museum of Fine Arts, featuring rare performances by esteemed artists from Turkey and India, as well as Boston-based music and dance ensembles.
The Delhi-Boston axis grew out of a collaboration between Ali and Woodman Taylor, the MFA’s assistant curator of South Asian and Islamic art, who met Ali last year while on a teaching stint at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Taylor observed the success of the Delhi festival, which is now held over three days next to the ornate mausoleum of the 16th century emperor Humayun, with artists from across the Islamic world. Holding a Boston event seemed a natural fit with the MFA exhibition “Domains of Wonder: Masterworks of Indian Painting,” which is currently up at the museum.
Siddhartha Mitter 