The saxophonist Sonny Rollins, one of the all-time greats of jazz, is on an 80th birthday world tour and still blowing strong.

THE TELEGRAPH
November 12, 2010
By MARTIN GAYFORD

A nice interview with Henry Threadgill in the Wall Street Journal.  His new album “This Brings Us To, Vol. II” on Pi Records is really happening.  I have posted a couple tracks from Volume 1 after the article…

WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 9, 2010
By MARTIN JOHNSON

For a quarter century beginning in the mid-1970s, reedman and composer Henry Threadgill was a dominant force on the jazz and contemporary-classical music scenes. He led a variety of ensembles with increasingly idiosyncratic names like Air, the Henry Threadgill Sextett, the Very Very Circus, Make a Move and Zooid. These groups pushed the boundaries of both jazz and new music, yet they also trafficked in familiar elements like tangos, marches and fanfares. It was easy to become a Henry Threadgill fan without being a lover of jazz or new-music.

“What first struck me about Henry’s work is its lyricism,” said Butch Morris, a composer, cornetist and conductor who has followed Mr. Threadgill’s career since the ’70s. “He’s taken familiar forms and really advanced them.”

Then about eight years ago, Mr. Threadgill faded to the margins. He released no widely distributed recordings, and was heard in concert only sporadically. He finally returned last autumn with his band, Zooid, on “This Brings Us To, Vol. I,” (Pi Recordings), which was widely hailed as one of the best jazz recordings of the year.

This season, Mr. Threadgill is much more prominent, with “This Brings Us To, Vol. II” (Pi) and Mosaic Records’s limited-edition eight-disc retrospective, “The Complete Novus & Columbia Recordings of Henry Threadgill & Air.” In addition, Zooid is to perform Mr. Threadgill’s newest works at Roulette in SoHo for three nights this week beginning Thursday.

Over drinks at an Italian café near his East Village home, Mr. Threadgill said the hiatus gave his band time to master his new style of composing music. “I have completely left the majorminor system in favor of a chromatic way,” he said.

Liberty Ellman, Zooid’s guitarist, added via email, “It’s a system for developing harmony and counterpoint from a set of intervals that originate in chord analysis.”

For Mr. Threadgill, one of the key goals of the new system was to facilitate collective improvisation along the lines of early jazz. Mr. Ellman said it was a challenge to learn the new system. “It’s difficult at first to put aside your pre-existing vocabulary while learning to play Henry’s music, but over time it becomes intuitive and it really opens your ears up to a larger musical universe.”  Full Article…

Henry Threadgill Zooid – “To Undertake My Corners Open”

Henry Threadgill Zooid – “Sap”

From “This Brings Us To, Vol. 1” : 2009 : Pi Recordings Pi31

Herman Leonard, the great photographer of jazz musicians passed away Saturday at the age of 87.  An important figure in jazz, Leonard went beyond simple portraits and his images of artists in their element defined the heyday of jazz to many listeners.  A great obituary in the LA Times can be found here.

Dexter Gordon, Royal Roost, NYC, 1948

Bud Powell, Birdland, NYC, 1949

Frank Sinatra, Monte Carlo, 1958

Charlie Parker with Metronome All-Stars, NYC, 1949

All images © Herman Leonard

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.

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.

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…

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.

JAZZ TIMES
April 2009
By Bill Meredith

JAZZ TIMES
May 2009
By Mike Joyce

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.

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…