New Gil Scott-Heron
Me and The Devil is the first single off Gil Scott-Heron's new album "I'm New Here". It's his first record in 13 years and I'm really digging what I've heard so far. Nice article about him and the record in The Village Voice here.
Gerald Clayton Trio at The Village Vanguard
The immensly talented young pianist Gerald Clayton and his trio made their debut at the famous Village Vanguard this week. New York Times review here and even better the full show can be heard here at NPR Music.
“Historic Sounds of Newport, Newly Online”
NY TIMES
November 10, 2009
By BEN RATLIFF
As the future of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals continues to unfold, its recorded past has suddenly been thrown open.
Recently the festivals themselves almost disappeared, amid the financial collapse of their producing company, the Festival Network LLC. They returned last summer in a new guise, at their usual site, once George Wein, the founder of both festivals, regained the right to hold music events there.
It’s a complicated story. But if you want to know why the Newport Jazz Festival has been so important to American music, it’s easy: you just have to hear the recorded evidence. Bits and pieces have emerged over the years, in live recordings by Ellington, Coltrane and others. Now Wolfgang’s Vault, the online concert-recording archive, intends to fill in the gaps.
The company, based in San Francisco, bought the archives of the Newport festivals from the Festival Network last year. Bill Sagan, founder and chief executive of Wolfgang’s Vault, says the archives include many, many tapes: 1,000 to 1,200 individual performances, dating at least to 1955, the festival’s second year, and continuing to the end of the century. It is not a complete audio record — certain years contain only a small number of performances, or are missing completely — but it is a major one nonetheless.
Since the purchase, Wolfgang’s Vault has spent almost $5 million, Mr. Sagan said, on making audio transfers and mixes of the tapes. (Neither Mr. Sagan nor Chris Shields of the Festival Network would reveal the amount spent on acquiring the archive itself.) On Wednesday the company will begin posting free streams of a handful of performances from the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival, at wolfgangsvault.com: the first offerings include Count Basie, Dakota Staton and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. By next Tuesday, when more are added, there will be 27 sets from that year’s jazz festival, including some by Ahmad Jamal, Joe Williams, Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver. The plan is to have hundreds more online in the coming months, from other years of Newport Jazz and from the Newport Folk Festival as well. Full Article...
“Miles Davis In Your Ears”
Not really sure what to think about these...
JAZZ TIMES
By Lee Mergner
October 26th, 2009
Miles Davis died in 1991, but left behind a legacy as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th Century. Since his death, the jazz world has seen all sorts of reissues and special products dedicated to that legacy. Given what great ears he had, it should be no surprise that among the products being manufactured in his name is a set of Miles Davis Tribute Headphones, produced by Monster Cable. The headphones are described as being high performance, much like their inspiration. The headphones feature the iconic image of Miles, taken by the late David Gahr and most associated with the Jack Johnson recording for Columbia.
Created in conjunction with Miles Davis Properties, the headphones are being offered in individually numbered limited editions. And, according to a press release sent to JT, purchasers of the Miles Davis Tribute headphones will also be able to enjoy free of charge the official 50th Anniversary boxed set of the artist’s seminal album Kind of Blue, featuring two music CDs, a DVD and a 24-page booklet.
For more product information and images of the design and case for the Miles Davis Tribute Headphones, visit Monster Cable’s site.
Wayne Shorter – Live at Montreux 1996
JAZZ TIMES
April 2009
By Bill Meredith
From the 1950s through the 1980s, saxophonist Wayne Shorter played with some of the greatest bands in jazz, including Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Miles Davis Quintet and Weather Report. Shorter also started his solo recording career during the 1950s, but didn’t primarily become a solo artist until Weather Report’s 1985 coda. Yet as his new Live at Montreux DVD shows, some of the saxophonist’s subsequent touring units (and there are three on display here, counting the bonus tracks) merited comparison with those supergroups.
Shorter opens the set on tenor with “On the Milky Way Express,” from his Grammy-winning 1996 album High Life. The band of keyboardist James Beard, guitarist David Gilmore, bassist Alphonso Johnson and drummer Rodney Holmes contributes to a dramatic intro buildup, and Shorter’s old Weather Report bandmate Johnson delivers a melodic solo. A showy 1991 bonus version of the same tune, with the lineup of keyboardist Herbie Hancock, bassist Stanley Clarke and drummer Omar Hakim, provides contrast near disc’s end.
Other tracks showcase the primary band’s interaction, and go far beyond their contemporary recorded versions. “At the Fair,” with Shorter on soprano, features a soaring solo by Gilmore and creative accents on the entire drum kit by Holmes. Both musicians also stand out on the frenetic “Over Shadow Hill Way,” from Shorter’s 1988 album Joy Ryder. Another gem is “Children of the Night,” with a muscular mid-tempo funk arrangement that bears little resemblance to the version Shorter played with Blakey. The final bonus cuts, “Pinocchio” and “Pee Wee/Theme,” feature Shorter reuniting with the other members of Davis’ great 1960s quintet (Hancock, bassist Ron Carter, drummer Tony Williams). Captured the year after Davis’ death, and featuring trumpeter Wallace Roney, the acoustic tracks provide fitting and fascinating closure.
“Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus”
JAZZ TIMES
May 2009
By Mike Joyce
Robert Mugge’s 1986 film Saxophone Colossus was widely hailed upon its release as essential viewing, not just for fans of jazz but for anyone even remotely interested in the creative process. The newest DVD incarnation, complete with Mugge’s recollections of the joys and challenges encountered during production, reaffirms the film’s many virtues.
Here, after all, is a documentary that, in addition to capturing Rollins in prime form, wielding his tenor in ways that have elicited hosannas from fans and critics alike for decades on end, examines the saxophonist’s methodical approach to performing and improvising. Practice alone may take some musicians to Carnegie Hall, but as Rollins tells Mugge at one point, meditation and visualization are a big part of his pre-concert regimen. Here we also see, during an outdoors concert filmed at the Opus 40 quarry garden in upstate New York, various aspects of Rollins’ persona onstage: the full-throated improviser who seems incapable of physically exhausting himself or depleting the wealth of his ideas; the gifted dramatist, skillfully balancing emotional tension and release; the unabashed entertainer, whimsically stringing together the familiar melodies that pop into his head. (This is also the storied concert in which Rollins jumps off a six-foot stage ledge, only to end up on his back with a broken heel. The misadventure, however, doesn’t prevent him from quickly resuming the performance, albeit in a supine position.)
The quintet concert footage is effectively juxtaposed with an ambitious, large-scale production: the world premiere of Rollins’ “Concerto For Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra,” performed in Tokyo by Rollins and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. While it’s not as memorable as the small combo performances of “G-Man” and “Don’t Stop The Carnival,” the orchestral segment sheds light on Rollins’ diverse interests in composing and collaborating. Interspersed are vintage concert footage and chats with critics Gary Giddins, Ira Gitler and Francis Davis, who dutifully (and glowingly) opine, each providing insights and context, as does Rollins’ late wife and manager, Lucille. The final word belongs to Mugge, who gratefully dedicates the new release of this remarkable film in Lucille’s memory.
“Questing After Coltrane’s Messy Transcendence”
NY TIMES
August 27th, 2009
By NATE CHINEN
The dauntless, combustible energies of jazz’s 1960s avant-garde have long held a deep attraction for the guitarist Marc Ribot. His public profile may involve a great deal of tact and concision — he works widely as a gun for hire, often infusing low-gloss pop albums with a proper hint of twang — but as a bandleader he tends to reach for a messier, more transcendent ideal. In recent years he has expressed that impulse best through his band Spiritual Unity, inspired by the free-jazz firebrand Albert Ayler.
He’s after the same thing with Sun Ship, named after an album of similar temperament by John Coltrane. Mr. Ribot unveiled this group in May, during a week of festivities tied to his 55th birthday. It resurfaced on Wednesday night at Rose Live Music in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, drawing largely from the album.
“Sun Ship” was recorded in late August 1965, a time of steep transition for Coltrane. Two months earlier he had made his large-canvas free-jazz album “Ascension.” He still had his quartet, but his music was pulling away from its foundations. On one level “Sun Ship” reflects Coltrane’s attunement to younger saxophonists like Ayler. On another it represents a moment of late grace for his landmark first band. (It was released in 1971, four years after Coltrane’s death.)
Mr. Ribot’s strategy for this music skirts the obvious angles of approach. His Sun Ship features neither tenor saxophone nor piano. Instead he enlists a second guitarist, Mary Halvorson, as well as Jason Ajemian on upright bass and Chad Taylor on drums. He assumes an unambiguous lead voice, as Coltrane did, but his vision for the band descends from multiple stylistic platforms: not just polyrhythmic post-bop but also Cuban music, psychedelic surf-rock, maybe a bit of vintage punk. Full Article...
“Doomsayers May Be Playing Taps, but Jazz Isn’t Ready to Sing the Blues”
Jason Moran and The Bandwagon
NEW YORK TIMES
By NATE CHINEN
August 18, 2009
The crowd was robust, lively and engaged at a recent jazz gig in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and by the looks of it most people were in their early 20s to mid-30s — about the same age as the band members. It could have been almost any given night on the New York club scene, though you might not have had that impression, depending on your sources.
Over the last week or so, as Woodstock commemoration reached its happy zenith, the jazz world has been rumbling with a more panicked sort of nostalgia. What set it off was an Aug. 9 column by the critic Terry Teachout — headlined “Can Jazz Be Saved?” — in The Wall Street Journal. A longtime advocate of jazz, Mr. Teachout weighed its cultural advances against its popular decline, reaching the conclusion that “it’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.”
Jazz has had more than its share of hand-wringers, and so this Chicken Little lament felt wearily familiar. But Mr. Teachout came armed with data from Arts Participation 2008, a recent survey by the National Endowment for the Arts. Conducted in partnership with the United States Census Bureau, it found that only 7.8 percent of adults in this country claimed to have attended a jazz performance last year. The figure reported in previous years — 1982, 1992 and 2002 — was closer to 10 percent. A demographic breakdown showed steady upticks among respondents 55 and over, and a downward trend for everyone else. (Attendance also slipped for art museums, classical concerts, the ballet and the theater.)
Mr. Teachout wasn’t the first to sound an alarm: the jazz historian Ted Gioia weighed in last month at the Web site Jazz.com. “The most likely — indeed the only plausible — explanation for these numbers is that very few new fans have discovered jazz since the 1980s,” Mr. Gioia wrote. “The old fans continue to follow the music, but teenagers and 20-somethings have very little interest in jazz.”
But there’s a wealth of anecdotal evidence to the contrary, as many jazz bloggers and commentators, responding mainly to Mr. Teachout, have been quick to point out. Try dropping in one night this week at the Village Vanguard, where Jason Moran and the Bandwagon are appearing. Or head to the Stone in the East Village, which is likely to hit sweaty capacity for each set programmed by the young drummer-composer Tyshawn Sorey. Or stop by the Highline Ballroom in Chelsea on Friday night for a show by the Bad Plus. Scratch anywhere past the surface and you might begin to wonder whether the likes of Mr. Teachout and Mr. Gioia don’t see young people listening because they don’t know where to look. Full Article...
“Les Paul, Guitar Innovator, Dies at 94″
By JON PARELES
August 13, 2009
Les Paul, the virtuoso guitarist and inventor whose solid-body electric guitar and recording studio innovations changed the course of 20th-century popular music, died Thursday in White Plains. He was 94.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, the Gibson Guitar Corporation announced.
Mr. Paul was a remarkable musician as well as a tireless tinkerer. He played guitar with leading prewar jazz and pop musicians from Louis Armstrong to Bing Crosby. In the 1930s he began experimenting with guitar amplification, and by 1941 he had built what was probably the first solid-body electric guitar, although there are other claimants. With his electric guitar and the vocals of his wife, Mary Ford, he used overdubbing, multitrack recording and new electronic effects to create a string of hits in the 1950s.
Mr. Paul’s style encompassed the twang of country music, the harmonic richness of jazz and, later, the bite of rock ’n’ roll. For all his technological impact, though, he remained a down-home performer whose main goal, he often said, was to make people happy.
Mr. Paul, whose original name was Lester William Polfus, was born on June 9, 1915, in Waukesha, Wis. His childhood piano teacher wrote to his mother, “Your boy, Lester, will never learn music.” But he picked up harmonica, guitar and banjo by the time he was a teenager and started playing with country bands in the Midwest. In Chicago he performed for radio broadcasts on WLS and led the house band at WJJD; he billed himself as the Wizard of Waukesha, Hot Rod Red and Rhubarb Red.
His interest in gadgets came early. At 10 years old he devised a harmonica holder from a coat hanger. Soon afterward he made his first amplified guitar by opening the back of a Sears acoustic model and inserting, behind the strings, the pickup from a dismantled Victrola. With the record player on, the acoustic guitar became an electric one. Later, he built his own pickup from ham radio earphone parts and assembled a recording machine from a Cadillac flywheel and the belt from a dentist’s drill. Full Article...
“Can Jazz Be Saved?”
The Wall Street Journal
August 8th, 2009
By Terry Teachout
In 1987, Congress passed a joint resolution declaring jazz to be “a rare and valuable national treasure.” Nowadays the music of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is taught in public schools, heard on TV commercials and performed at prestigious venues such as New York’s Lincoln Center, which even runs its own nightclub, Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola.
Here’s the catch: Nobody’s listening.
No, it’s not quite that bad—but it’s no longer possible for head-in-the-sand types to pretend that the great American art form is economically healthy or that its future looks anything other than bleak.
The bad news came from the National Endowment for the Arts’ latest Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the fourth to be conducted by the NEA (in participation with the U.S. Census Bureau) since 1982. These are the findings that made jazz musicians sit up and take notice:
• In 2002, the year of the last survey, 10.8% of adult Americans attended at least one jazz performance. In 2008, that figure fell to 7.8%.
• Not only is the audience for jazz shrinking, but it’s growing older—fast. The median age of adults in America who attended a live jazz performance in 2008 was 46. In 1982 it was 29. Full Article...
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