Category Archives: Further Reading

“Icons Among Us”

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Robert Glasper
Robert Glasper

NEW YORK TIMES
April 19th, 2009
By BEN RATLIFF

“Icons Among Us,” a four-part series beginning Monday on the Documentary Channel, serves as a retort to Ken Burns’s 2001 television documentary “Jazz.” It doesn’t make this explicit, but it doesn’t need to. There’s no other elephant in the room.

Mr. Burns’s series, you may remember, outlined styles and eras and individual accomplishments. His film — with a narrator supplying context and imposing historical judgments — attempted to tell the story from the music’s beginning. He put forth a big extra-musical idea: jazz is the music of sophisticated Americans coming to terms with their country’s sickness about race. And he did not bother much with current trends, putting all of jazz since 1960, more or less, inside its final episode.

When Mr. Burns’s documentary came out, some viewers protested the way he seemed to shine up jazz’s past at the expense of its present. This new film strikes a vague blow for those dissenters. In many ways “Icons Among Us” is starkly anti-Burnsian. It suggests jazz more as a philosophical ideal — “a reflection of what life could be,” in the guitarist Bill Frisell’s on-camera words, “where there’s infinite possibilities, and no one gets hurt” — and less as a particular sound or tradition. It’s mostly about musicians currently under 50. It has a lot of time for jazz that’s basically pop: specifically, jam-band music or hip-hop. It presents jazz musicians as gifted but down-to-earth people, not demigods. And it’s extra-wary about the tyranny of the past.  Full Article….

“Finding New Facets in a Treasury of Old Diamonds”

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bluenote71
The Blue Note 7
NEW YORK TIMES
April 16, 2009
By NATE CHINEN

The Blue Note 7, appearing through Sunday night at Birdland, upholds an extremely clear agenda with crisp results. Assembled as a tie-in to the 70th anniversary of Blue Note Records, the group has an album, “Mosaic,” featuring new versions of classic tunes from the label’s catalog. And this week’s run concludes a tour that began at the start of this year, hitting 50 cities across the country. There’s reason to trust that the ensemble — a coalition of bandleaders, almost to a man — has established its own sound and footing.

That’s largely true, judging by its animated late set on Tuesday. Beginning and ending strong, with just a momentary lull in between, the Blue Note 7 fulfilled its mandate with precision and more than a whiff of style. There were good, bracing solos all around, especially by the trumpeter Nicholas Payton and the tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane. The rhythm section, led by the pianist Bill Charlap, worked impeccably.

Still, there was a hint of creative constraint to the band’s output, which may have had little to do with the musicians themselves. While the recorded legacy of Blue Note reaches back 70 years, the set spanned only a decade, with songs that originally appeared on records between 1958 and 1967. You can hardly fault a decision to focus on the label’s commercial and creative heyday, but it seems to have placed a rigid grid on the group.  Full Article…

“Montreal International Jazz Fest Lineup”

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Wayne Shorter
Wayne Shorter

The lineup for this year’s Montreal International Jazz Festival has been announced and includes Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, Wynton Marsalis, Joshua Redman, Kenny Garrett, Robert Irving III, Dave Holland and Rudresh Mahanthappa.  The full line-up and ticket details can be found at montrealjazzfest.com as well as the special celebrations taking place to celebrate the 30th year of the festival.

Wayne Shorter – Black Nile from “Night Dreamer”

Ornette Coleman – Matador from “Sound Grammar”

Robert Irving III – Fire Flower from “New Momentum”

Rudresh Mahanthappa – Adana from “Apti”

Kenny Garrett – Wayne’s Thang from “Sketches of MD”

Joshua Redman – Round Reuben from “Compass”

“Ian Carr, Jazz Trumpeter and Author, Dies at 75″

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Nucleus & Ian Carr

NEW YORK TIMES
March 11th, 2009
By BRUCE WEBER

Ian Carr, a Scottish-born trumpeter who, like his formidable influence, Miles Davis, was an early practitioner of jazz-rock fusion and later repaid his artistic debt by writing Davis’s biography, died on Feb. 25 in London. He was 75.

The cause was complications after pneumonia and a series of mini-strokes, Alyn Shipton, Mr. Carr’s biographer, said in an e-mail message. An obituary on the Web site iancarrsnucleus.net — dedicated to the music of Mr. Carr and the band Nucleus, which he founded nearly 40 years ago — said that Mr. Carr had Alzheimer’s disease.

As a writer and researcher, composer and bandleader, Mr. Carr contributed to jazz history both by making music and by explaining it. He started Nucleus in late 1969, a time when jazz musicians were just beginning to find ways of appropriating the tools of rock ’n’ roll. Nucleus mingled traditional jazz instruments (like trumpet, soprano and tenor sax) with rock-band staples (like electric bass and electric guitar) and melded improvisations with a driving, creative bass line and urgent, forward-leaning rhythms. It was a hit at the 1970 Montreux Jazz Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival that year as well.

The band, which had several rosters, dissolved in the 1980s, though there were various reunions for concert dates and recordings into the 21st century. Its sound was clearly related to that of the rock-infused records Davis was producing as the 1960s turned to the 1970s — “In a Silent Way,” “Bitches Brew” and “A Tribute to Jack Johnson” — and Nucleus predated several better-known bands that became mainstays of jazz-rock fusion, including Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

In its heyday in the 1970s, Nucleus recorded a dozen or so albums, including “Belladonna,” “Alleycat” and “Out of the Long Dark,” the last reflecting Mr. Carr’s battle with depression. (Mr. Shipton appropriated the title for his 2006 biography.)

Mr. Carr wrote for several jazz publications, and his first book, “Music Outside: Contemporary Jazz in Britain,” was published in 1973, but his 1982 book, “Miles Davis: A Critical Biography,” was the high point of his writing life. An evenhanded assessment of Davis’s life and music, it distinguished itself by its careful analysis of Davis’s playing and his innovations. Writing about the book in The New York Times Book Review, Bill Zavatsky lauded the clarity of Mr. Carr’s writing and his ability to explain musical technique to the lay reader. (The book was expanded and revised in the 1990s and republished as “Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography.”) Full Article…

“2 Approaches To Monk’s Historic Night”

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Monk Town Hall

NEW YORK TIMES
March 2, 2009
By BEN RATLIFF

In 1959, at 41, Thelonious Monk had only recently located a broader audience. That February he gave a concert with a 10-piece orchestra at Town Hall: a risky, expensive way to secure an official beachhead in New York culture, a way to get beyond his reputation, such as it was, for small groups, jabbing dissonance and cultishness.

Last week’s concerts at Town Hall, on Thursday and Friday — an outgrowth of a Monk festival at Duke University in 2007 — demonstrated two different kinds of respect for the music recorded that night 50 years earlier.

In Thursday’s concert Charles Tolliver, the trumpeter and bandleader, recreated the original concert as closely as he could. (Sixteen years old then, he had been in the audience.) Following his own transcriptions of the live album’s music, he used the same instrumentation, the same order of songs, the same order of solos inside the songs.

The differences were in what couldn’t be replicated. The drummer, Gene Jackson, landed harder and more stiffly on his beats than the original one, Arthur Taylor: a generational thing. The solos were different, too, obviously, and here the tenor saxophonist Marcus Strickland stood out. His style, especially on “Monk’s Mood,” annexed the broad sound and some of the mannerisms of saxophonists from that period. But the content was new in its harmony and narrative shape.

The peak of the 1959 concert, and of Thursday’s show, was Monk’s piece “Little Rootie Tootie” (with a full-band performance of Monk’s solo from a previous occasion). Mr. Tolliver likes a big, battling sound, and as conductor he drove the band hard here, punching the air for brass accents; he gave the song a sense of vengeance. But it got away from him, dragged under by soloists. For the encore version of the same song, he counted off a hyperthyroid tempo — unnaturally fast, but a good way to end an academic night.

The concert on Friday, called “In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959,” more or less followed the 1959 program too. But where Mr. Tolliver treated it as a work of impregnable authority, the pianist Jason Moran came at it sideways, seeking a connection with its creator. He used not just a live band — an enlarged version of his group, the Bandwagon, which roughed up the music, isolated phrases and bent tempos to its own will — but video, still photography and recorded audio as well. It was as much inspired by identity-focused conceptual art of the 1970s as by jazz of the 1950s.  Full Article…

“The Blue and The Great”

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Miles

NEWSWEEK
February 9, 2009
By MALCOM JONES

Fifty years ago, Miles Davis recorded ‘Kind of Blue.’ If you own one jazz album, this is probably the one.

At 2:30 on March 2, 1959, the 32-year-old trumpet player and bandleader Miles Davis took six sidemen into a New York City studio, where they spent the afternoon and early evening recording three songs. On April 22, the same cohort, minus one of the two piano players who worked on the first date, returned to the same studio and recorded two more songs. As far as the musicians were concerned, that was the end of the story. For the rest of the world, it was just beginning. Four months later, the five selections were released on the album “Kind of Blue.” The record became an immediate success, embraced by jazz fans, critics and musicians. Two songs on the album, “So What” and “All Blues,” quickly became staples in the jazz repertoire. “So What” even became a favorite of college and high-school marching bands. Meanwhile, the record kept selling, and selling and selling. Today, 50 years after it was released, “Kind of Blue” remains the bestselling jazz album of all time. More than 4 million copies have been sold, and the album still sells an average of 5,000 copies a week. If you have a jazz album on your shelf, odds are it’s “Kind of Blue.”  Full Article…

At 70, A Legendary Jazz Label Asks, ‘Now What?’

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NY TIMES
February 7, 2009
By NATE CHINEN

At a recent 70th-anniversary reception for Blue Note Records at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson played his trademark hit, “Alligator Boogaloo,” from 1967. Norah Jones, who made her multiplatinum debut in 2002, mingled at the bar. And presiding over the evening was Bruce Lundvall, who has run the label for the last 25 years.

Mr. Donaldson, Ms. Jones and Mr. Lundvall represent points along a continuum in the history of the most storied label in jazz. Founded in 1939 by a German émigré, Alfred Lion, Blue Note has built a catalog that includes almost every major figure in the music, from pioneers like Sidney Bechet to modern masters like Wayne Shorter.

Now part of a larger corporate entity, facing both a parlous music industry and the looming prospect of Mr. Lundvall’s retirement, Blue Note has entered a pivotal moment in its history. Branching beyond jazz, it has moved into what Mr. Lundvall calls “the adult sophisticated pop area.” Its best-selling release last year was by Al Green (“Lay It Down,” which has sold more than 175,000 copies). Next in line was a live album from Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson, who will reunite for two sold-out shows on Monday and Tuesday at the Rose Theater, with Ms. Jones as a featured guest. (Their album has sold more than 100,000 copies.)

The quandary for Blue Note is how it can remain the pre-eminent jazz label while surviving as a profitable business. “One of the first things that Alfred Lion said to me was, ‘What are you going to do to be commercial?’ ” Mr. Lundvall, 73, recalled recently in his office. It’s a question that resonates even more today.  Full Article…