AUGUST 2020—ISSUE 220

YOUR FREE GUIDE TO THE NYC JAZZ SCENENYCJAZZRECORD.COM

ARCHIE

SHEPP
still seeking
the way ahead

digitalonly
editionSHABAKA
HUTCHINGSHILLIARD
GREENE

ALVIN
QUEEN

FRANK
LOWE

Managing Editor:
Laurence Donohue-Greene
Editorial Director &Production Manager:
Andrey Henkin
To Contact:
The New York City Jazz Record
66 Mt. Airy Road East
Croton-on-Hudson, NY 10520
United States
Phone/Fax: 212-568-9628

AUGUST 2020—ISSUE 220
New York@Night

Laurence Donohue-Greene:ldgreene@nycjazzrecord.com

Interview : SHABAKA HUTCHINGS

Andrey Henkin:ahenkin@nycjazzrecord.com

Artist Feature : HILLIARD GREENE
On The Cover : ARCHIE SHEPP

General Inquiries:
info@nycjazzrecord.com

Encore : alvin queen

Advertising:advertising@nycjazzrecord.com

Lest We Forget : frank lowe

Calendar:calendar@nycjazzrecord.com

LAbel Spotlight : MAHAKALAVOXNews:
voxnews@nycjazzrecord.com

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obituaries
album Reviews

Staff Writers
Duck Baker, Stuart Broomer,
Robert Bush, Kevin Canfield,
Marco Cangiano, Thomas Conrad,
Pierre Crépon, Ken Dryden,
Donald Elfman, Phil Freeman,
Kurt Gottschalk, Tom Greenland,
George Grella, Tyran Grillo,Alex Henderson, Robert Iannapollo,
Mark Keresman, Marilyn Lester,
Suzanne Lorge, Marc Medwin,
Jim Motavalli, Russ Musto,
John Pietaro, Joel Roberts,
John Sharpe, Elliott Simon,
Anna Steegmann, Scott Yanow

Miscellany

Contributing Photographers
Florence Ducommun, Scott Friedlander,
John Rogers, Adrien H. Tillmann

nycjazzrecord.com

by john sharpeby john pietaroby kyle oleksiukby jim motavalli
by anders griffen
by george grellaby suzanne lorge
by andrey henkinby andrey henkin

I got the feeling that’s something’s goin’ wrong
And I’m worried bout the human soul
I’ve got a feeling
If I could have had the chance to make the decision
Every man could walk this earth on equal condition
Every child could do more than just dream of a star
Bringing voices to a world that’s gettin’ old...
Do I worry do I worry yes I worry ‘bout the human soul, yeah...
I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices, I see people
I hear voices of many people, sayin’
Everything ain’t everything

Contributing Writers
Dan Bilawsky, Pierre Giroux, Anders Griffen,
George Kanzler, Kyle Oleksiuk, Eric Wendell

Fact-checker
Nate Dorward

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Only when nature doesn’t take its natural toll, am I worried for the human soul.
Some people think that they are in their rights and on command to take a black
man’s life. But let me give a rundown on how I feel.
If it ain’t natural, then it ain’t real. I wish i were better.
Almost half a century ago, Henry Hull, Albertine Robinson and Joshie Armstead sang andWilliam Kunstler spoke Beaver Harris’ words on Archie Shepp’s 1972 Impulse! album Attica
Blues. Speaking about the current state of American racial strife, Shepp (On The Cover), who
has been thinking about this weighty topic his whole life, is bleak in his assessment: “We were
protesting then just as we are now and the amazing thing is that things have changed so little.”
In this month’s cover story, the legendary saxophonist, 83 years old but with no loss of wisdom
and fire, provides much needed perspective to a problem that has never seen linear progress. His
words are powerful as are those of the myriad others who have spoken on the topic and foughtfor the cause. But just as powerful and resilient have been their opponents, as is evident in that
Shepp’s fight and that of his relatives, heirs and fellow human beings is far from over.
On The Cover: Archie Shepp (©️John Rogers / johnrogersnyc.com)
Corrections: In last month’s CD Reviews, the lyrics to “Life of the Party”, recorded by the OWL
Trio, were written by Joy Dragland.
All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission strictly prohibited. All material copyrights property of the authors.

2 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

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ProvidesEmergency Support
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To Our Beloved
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Jazz and Blues
Musicians.

Please Donate Now:
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Fred Staton
Photo by Richard Corman

NEW YORK @ NIGHT
Kurt Rosenwinkel, currently a professor in Berlin,
was featured ‘live’ (several cuts in the video stream
revealed the set had been prerecorded) from his livingroom (Jul. 4th), a night of seemingly interminablefireworks for those sequestered in the five boroughs.
The guitarist offered a few fret-board pyrotechnics of
his own during an hour-long solo set of originals andstandards. The logged-on crowd had grown to about
125 by the time he, after a curt greeting, began withpiece that, though it sounded like a standard, turned
out to be an improvisation, a tribute to the coherence of
his melodic conception. On several (unannounced)
numbers he constructed long single-note phrases
occasionally punctuated with chords or harmonics,
moving to complex passages with odd yet beguiling
contrapuntal harmonies and flamenco-tinged chords.
“One For Eric” (Clapton) included finger-stylearpeggios reminiscent of Heitor Villa-Lobos’
compositions; Thelonious Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear”
was beautifully arranged for guitar. A cover of Billy
Joel’s “And So It Goes” was the closest Rosenwinkel
veered towards an Americana style and his version ofCharles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” hinted atblues, but his take on Mark Turner ’s “Casa Oscura”
showed a more abstract, postmodern approach.
Separated by an ocean and a six-hour time difference,
it was nonetheless exciting to witness Rosenwinkel’s
formidable skills up close—so close (it seemed) thatyou could almost touch the strings. —Tom Greenland

Smoke, late to the live-streaming game, showed that

Kurt Rosenwinkel @ Live From Our Living Rooms

Wayne Escoffery @ Smoke

H ard to believe, as NYC enters the first phases of
COVID-19 recovery, that some jazz musicians haven’t
played together—with anyone—since March or evenFebruary. It was a celebration, then, when guitarist
Mike Moreno’s quartet gathered at Smalls (Jul. 11th)
to enjoy one other ’s musical company, in real time andreal space. Adorned in medical masks, the musicians(pianist Taylor Eigsti, bassist Matt Brewer, drummer
Obed Calvaire) resembled a gang of bank robbers.
Though they played to rows of empty barstools andtables, there was, ironically, an increasing sense of
release and even exuberance as the set unfolded.
Having toured Asia in the not-so-far-off past, theyknew Moreno’s music and so, even with no rehearsal,
had little trouble revitalizing his compositions, evenwhen he threw a few new ones at them to play downon the spot. Starting with a new (untitled) piece,
then “Lotus” (another original) and Wayne Shorter ’s“This Is for Albert”, the quartet became progressively
more comfortable and enthused as they followed
Moreno’s hornlike lead, assertive yet restrained,leaving ample room for group responses. A readingof “My Foolish Heart” was spartan but poignant. By“The Hills of Kykuit” and “Epilogue” the group was infull flower, Calvaire in particular seeming to thrive on
the group interplay. After the final tones faded in the(almost) empty room, the men exchanged elbowbumps (instead of shakes or hugs) and stories, eager
for a time when real people would fill the seats.
(TG)

O f all the musicians stuck at home over the past fourmonths, some are with musician partners, others play
instruments that work unaccompanied and a few canprobe the outer depths solo. But what of a traditionalbassist? Imagine he or she slowly going crazy playing
the Peter Gunn theme over and over and over and over,hoping someday to be able to support others. Just
before he presumably snapped like a worn G-string,bassist Ari Folman-Cohen was liberated, holding down
the low-end in the Stephane Wrembel Trio, livestreamed from Barbès (Jul. 16th, with decent soundand a few camera angles), the band, completed bysecond guitarist Thor Jensen, performing together for
the first time in months. So excited was Folman-Cohen
that he could barely sit and when he stood he boogied
around the small stage, (unconsciously) did little taproutines with his feet and nearly lost his protective
mask on several occasions. That was just the visuals;
while always a strong presence in Wrembel’s bands,
here he was unleashed, bringing rock and funk energy
to French chanson and the Django Reinhardt songbook,of which Wrembel is the undisputed master, though,refreshingly not letting it master him, expanding upon
the tradition much like his inspiration. Of the hourlong show, the highlights were the trio taking “Dinah”
for a long, exploratory ride but bringing her home
before lights out and “Si Tu Savais”, Folman-Cohen
stealing the show with his lines and Wrembel adding(AH)
unorthodox effects to great effect.		

4 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

waiting was worth the wait, with its inaugural online
concerts, a two-night engagement of the Wayne
Escoffery Quartet (Jul. 17th-18th). The smallest of the
major clubs by capacity, the Upper West Side venue
known for its intimacy in person was well recreatedonline, with the best sound this reviewer has (virtually)
heard thus far and no less than six camera angles,
including a beautiful Sidney Lumet-inspired view ofdrummer Carl Allen from below the perimeter of his
snare drum. Given the club’s layout, once seated inreal life, there is no moving around so the chance to gofrom Allen to a closeup of pianist David Kikoski’s
fingers to straight-on and three-quarters views of thewhole band makes seeing music in person superfluous(jk). And if the band didn’t know how good theylooked, they certainly could feel how good theysounded, almost giddy with the chance to play together
after four months of involuntary shedding. The leader
stayed on tenor saxophone for the Saturday set, theband completed by Ugonna Okegwo wielding a bass
and a huge smile. Ostensibly a release weekend for
Escoffery’s The Humble Warrior (Smoke Sessions), theband only played two tunes from the album, the title
track and Benjamin Britten’s “Kyrie”, filling out the set
with saxophone colossi John Coltrane, Benny Golson,
Stanley Turrentine and Charlie Rouse (plus trumpeter
Donald Byrd). “You’ve been a wonderful audience...
I hope,” quipped Escoffery.
—Andrey Henkin

The cessation of touring during the pandemic afforded
Ravi Coltrane the opportunity to reunite with themembers of his working quartet for a live-streamed
performance from The Jazz Gallery (Jul. 9th). The
group, with pianist David Virelles, bassist Dezron
Douglas and drummer Johnathan Blake, opened with
“D.C.G.”, an original by the leader reminiscent of thelatter-day work of his father ’s band with Pharoah
Sanders. It began with ascendant dark-toned tenor
over the trio’s ruminative rubato intro, which morphed
into a serene melody played over an engaging bassline.
Sadly, technical difficulties muted the audio towards
the end of the saxophonist’s solo and for the next fiveminutes the trio starred in a silent movie before soundreturned as Coltrane closed out the piece. Segueing
into Virelles’ “Tiempos”, the trio got its chance tostretch, with the pianist displaying an impressivecommand of Cuban and jazz traditions as he melded ahabanera rhythm with fluid percussive lines recalling
Cecil Taylor, prompting Coltrane’s return on potent
soprano. Blake’s “Rivers and Parks”, a lyrical outing
with Coltrane back on tenor, swinging in the tradition,
followed. Prefacing a spirited reading of McCoy
Tyner ’s “Fly With The Wind”, bowed bass andrumbling malleted drums solemnly introduced John
Coltrane’s “Alabama”. An extended Douglas solo thenled the band into his beautiful “Forligno”, before theset ended with the leader wailing on sopranino on
mother Alice Coltrane’s “Los Caballos”. —Russ Musto

A rollicking one-man second line emoted over Ralph
Peterson’s snare drum. Accented rimshots, bass-drumbombs, woodblock and cowbell, too, called the trio toorder (Jul. 3rd). This Blue Note at Home concert, happy
to report, featured brilliantly crisp sound. The
drummer, pianist Zaccai Curtis and his bassist brother
Luques Curtis kicked “Bemsha Swing” into the new—leaping the decades since Monk revolutionized jazz.
“This song is associated with Thelonious Monk, but it
was composed by Denzil Best,” Peterson told the homeaudience, sure to represent for the noted bop drummer
whose history includes writing important works. On
that note, the trio ripped into the Latin-esque rhythms
propelling Peterson’s “The Right to Live”, a topical
work inspired by the righteous street-heat of Black
Lives Matter. It, however, called on parts of jazz history
long predating the current movement, with crashingharmonies and lengthy melodic lines incorporating
leaps, all of which poured from Zaccai’s aerial, able
hands. Peterson and Luques, throbbing gloriously,
exemplified both the fight and victorious intent. This
piece easily flowed into a ballad, “The Tears I Cannot
Hide”; though composed several years ago, Peterson
described it as, “another reflection of today’s times ofsocial injustice”, commentary on the ongoing nature of
struggle. Peterson and company also brought new life
to works by late pianists Geri Allen and John Hicks,
demonstrating for all the wide swathe of style, school—John Pietaro
and genre on which they thrive.

W H AT ’ S N E W S
A tribute to the recently departed pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs,
where a tree will be planted and a commemorative plaqueinstalled, alongside a performance of the Onaje Allen Gumbs
All-Star Band, will take place Aug. 22nd at 120 DeKruif Place
Building #7 Section One Co-op City. For more information,
contact Rose Petal Entertainment Media at 347-213-5776 or
rosecedric2@gmail.com.
As part of the Charlie Parker Centennial Celebration,Charlie Parker: The Clef 10” Albums Collection will beavailable on Aug. 28th, a five-LP boxed set featuring “newly
remastered audio from the original analog tapes and will
include faithful reproductions of the classic artwork andpackaging. The albums will be pressed on 180-gram black
10” vinyl and will be housed in an attractive slipcase.” For
more information, visit shop.udiscovermusic.com.
Trombonist Delfeayo Marsalis will celebrate the founding of
his non-profit Keep NOLA Music Alive with a virtual concert
Aug. 2nd at 7 pm on facebook.com/Delfeayo Marsalis. For
more information, visit knoma.org.
Jen Shyu and Sara Serpa have launched M³—Mutual
Mentorship for Musicians, an “initiative that empowers andelevates womxn musicians around the world (including
BIPOC and LGBTQIA2S+ across generations) in a newmodel of mentorship comprising four sessions per year witheach session culminating in a performance of new
collaborative commissions.” The initial participants are
Romarna Campbell, Caroline Davis, Eden Girma, Val Jeanty,
Maya Keren, Erica Lindsay, Lesley Mok, Tomeka Reid, Anjna
Swaminathan and Sumi Tonooka. For more information, visit
mutualmentorshipformusicians.org.
Entries are now being accepted for the Sarah VaughanInternational Jazz Vocal Competition. The deadline is Sep.
8th. For more information, visit njpac.org/sarah-vaughaninternational-jazz-vocal-competition.
Guitarist Pat Metheny’s ECM catalogue, 11 albums madebetween 1976-2015, has been made available as high-resolution
masters for download and/or streaming at platforms Qobuz,
HDtracks, Acoustic Sounds, Prostudiomaster, Tidal, Apple andAmazon. For more information, visit ecm.lnk.to/PatMethenyHD.
Vocalist Gregory Porter sang “America The Beautiful” at thelaunch of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission
last month, the first recording artist ever to be invited by NASAto perform at such an event.

Ravi Coltrane Quartet @ The Jazz Gallery

Ralph Peterson Trio @ Blue Note At Home

“We might not be ‘essential workers’, but music is
absolutely essential to just life in general and I thinkit’s important that musicians continue to create anda situation like this kind of forces it out of you,” Eric
Reed noted from the piano chair at the Village
Vanguard (Jul. 9th), where his quartet live-streamed
music written while in quarantine for his upcoming
album For Such A Time As This. The band, with tenor
saxophonist Stacy Dillard, bassist Dezron Douglas anddrummer McClenty Hunter, kicked things off charging
straightahead on “Western Rebellion”, a hardbopping
tribute to pianist Cedar Walton’s Eastern Rebellion
quartet and Reed’s California homebase. The group
followed with “Theloningus”, a quirky melody steepedin the blues, which conjured the spirits of the iconic
pianist and bassist referred to in its title. That segued
into Reed’s adaptation of vocalist-drummer Jamison
Ross’ soulful arrangement of Walton’s “Martha’sPrize”, the rhythm section grooving on the funky vampfrom Roy Hargrove’s “Strasbourg St. Denis”. Dillard
laid out for the trio’s medley of “Dear Bud”, Reed’s
moving ballad tribute to pianist Powell, and a swinging
reading of the Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn standard “It’s
You Or No One”. Dillard returned for a freewheelingtake on Monk’s “Work” featuring commanding bass,
tenor and piano solos and a series of hard-hitting
exchanges with Hunter. The set ended with Reed’s
uplifting gospel-tinged “Una Mujer Elegante”, before
angularly racing to the finish with his “Ornate”. (RM)

This Arts for Art event (Jul. 8th) was Zoom-broadcast

from four different locations with headphones andcomputer screens as the musicians’ only unifiers, but
the distance between them was never evident. Led bycelebrated baritone saxophonist Dave Sewelson, theoutfit was aptly named the Music for a Free World
Quartet. Avant garde vets all, the band required noprep for the single collectively improvised work
offered. Opening with broken triplets across his
drumkit, Marvin Bugalu Smith set the shape of thepiece, quickly signaling in the entry of bassist William
Parker. By the time Sewelson and trombonist Steve
Swell had joined, viewers were transported back to asimpler, pre-COVID-19 time. Effortlessly, the horns
traded points of taking the lead (if there is such a thingin collective work), constructing intricate lines about
one another ’s improvisations and pulsations. At one
point, the two leapt up into registers well above thatof such low horns, intoning a gently whirling melisma.
Parker added a third voice on what appeared to becornet, allowing for a gripping three-wind chasewonderfully throttled by free drumming. If there wasany downside at all, the fault doesn’t lie with theplayers but the state of remote audio technology.
Currently, such broadcasts cause drumkits to soundakin to cardboard and the bass’ depth becomes lost in
the whole. One can imagine the power, reach andrelevance of global feeds like this when technology(JP)finally catches up to the arts. 		

Bryant Park’s annual Piano in the Park series will take placethrough Oct. 2nd. Scheduled performers, appearing MondayFriday at 12:30 pm at the base of the William Cullen Bryant
Statue include Victor Lin, Danny Mixon, Dan Manjovi, FrankOwens, Terry Waldo, Luiz Simas, Russ Kassoff, Ayako
Shirasaki, Charlie Judkins, Yuka Aikawa and Sue Maskaleris.
For more information, visit bryantpark.org.
The 4th Annual Seifert Competition, with a jury of Ernst
Reijseger, Michał Urbaniak and Miroslav Vitouš, awarded two
joint second prizes of €5,000 to Austrian violinist Johannes
Dickbauer and French violinist Youenn Rohaut and two joint thirdprizes of €2,000 to Israeli violinist Omer Ashano and French
violinist Clément Janinet. The first prize was not awarded.
The International Songwriting Competition is now
accepting submissions in various categories, including jazz,with or without lyrics. For more information and to apply, visit
songwritingcompetition.com.
The Jazz Loft in Stony Brook was awarded a $40,000 grant
towards archiving more than 10,000 historical jazz artifacts in thepossession of the museum by The Robert David Lion GardinerFoundation, Inc. For more information, visit thejazzloft.org.
The Creative Music Workshop has begun an online educational
initiative drawing on CMS’ nearly-50-year history. Resources arefree and available at creativemusicworkshop.com.
The board of the European Jazz Network has announced that
the EJN Conference 2020, scheduled for Sep. 10th-13th in
Sofia, Bulgaria, has been cancelled. For more information,
visit europejazz.net.
Submit news to info@nycjazzrecord.com

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 5

Adrien H. Tillmann - www.aht1985.com

I NTERVIEWSHABAKA
HUTCHINGS
by john sharpe

A s the first UK signing to Impulse!, British-Barbadiansaxophonist and bandleader Shabaka Hutchings has becomea figurehead for the breakout London scene. His activity is
as relentless as his music is visceral. Sons of Kemet rides atorrent of African-Caribbean-influenced rhythm, The CometIs Coming fuses trance, AfroBeat and electronica and latest
vehicle Shabaka And The Ancestors, with a young South
African crew, wades deep into spiritual jazz with diversions
into Township grooves. But a broad hinterland also taking
in free improvisation and guest spots with the Art Ensembleof Chicago and Sun Ra Arkestra ensures that Hutchings
brings nuance to festival stages worldwide.
The New York City Jazz Record: What was it about
jazz that appealed to you so much?
Shabaka Hutchings: Different elements have appealed
to me at different stages in my life. At the beginning
not a lot appealed to me. I got in through the morecommercial elements. So when I started it was more
people like Grover Washington, Jr., Maceo Parker, theCaribbean Jazz Project of Paquito D’Rivera, Greg
Osby’s Man-Talk For Moderns Vol. X and the hip-hop
fusions that they were doing in the early ‘90s. But I
think the initial thing that got me was the interaction
between people. For instance, one of the first memories
I have of a real eureka moment with jazz is with Miles
Davis’ My Funny Valentine. And I think it is a Herbie
Hancock solo, there’s two moments in the solo, I
remember being 16 or 17 and listening to them andthinking that the whole band is really together in the
climax. And it’s those magical moments where any
particular group comes together and achieves
something as a unit that I really appreciate.
TNYCJR: Who were your inspirations on saxophone?
SH: As I learned more and started to practice the music
more and play with other people in a live scenario,
then it became the greats like John Coltrane, Sam
Rivers, Wayne Shorter, all the people you would
consider to be the torch-bearers of the music. And there
are people that I really loved throughout the years thatyou probably won’t hear a direct influence from,people like Warne Marsh, Hank Mobley, Anthony
Braxton. But obviously I started my jazz journey in
Britain, so the players I had direct contact with
influenced me a lot in terms of how they related to theAmerican tradition as well. So people like Steve
Williamson, Evan Parker, Courtney Pine obviously.
TNYCJR: How has signing to Impulse! changed things
for you?
SH: It’s been really fundamental in terms of the
exposure it’s given me in the United States, because
there’s always been that blockage in terms of U.K.
musicians going over to the U.S., in that you’ve really
got to struggle to make the case for having something

to contribute to a legacy that’s already so established.
Signing to a label like Impulse! means that people willat least give you the time of day and listen to the music
on its own terms. Also having a structure that’s really
supportive musically behind me has been really greatfor just giving me the freedom to make what I want to
make. Everyone I’m involved with within the company
is really passionate about music and determined to justlet me do my thing. It’s a great working relationship.
TNYCJR: And of course the label has a fantastic history,
so there must be some resonance for you there as well.
SH: Exactly. It’s one of those things where for me mysigning with Impulse! isn’t just about my personal
interaction with it, it’s connecting the history of British
jazz music with the history of American jazz music. So
my signing with Impulse! is a result of all the efforts of
say Courtney and Steve Williamson and Django Bates
and John Surman creating a situation where at thisstage someone from England has joined the big
historical legacy that has built up Impulse!.

TNYCJR: Another Impulse! CD, My Queen Is A Reptile
by Sons Of Kemet, has an unusual instrumentation
with tuba and twin drums. How did it come about?
SH: Before I started the group I was mainly into the free
improvising scene in London. So I was a member of the
London Improvisers Orchestra, which had members
like Lol Coxhill, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Mark
Sanders, John Edwards, John Butcher and people likethat. The main emphasis on that group and the small
groups that would play concerts outside of it, wasunusual instrumentation because it wasn’t trying tohave the orthodox jazz formations, like the quartet withrhythm section and horn soloist. So you might have lotsof these different variations on musicians, you might
get a viola, snare drum and bassoon combination if
they were free improvising. It becomes more about how
the personalities of the musiciansinteract together. So
that was my thinking. Who do I think would make thebest combination of personalities? At the time it was
the members that would be Sons Of Kemet: [drummer]
Tom Skinner, [drummer] Seb Rochford [now Eddie
Hick] and [tuba player] Oren Marshall [now Theon
Cross]. That was the reasoning in my head when
I formed the group, but looking back in retrospect I can
see that there might have been various different
elements running subconsciously that made me
attracted to that combination, like the link to New
Orleans formations, fife and drums and how that
actually relates to the tradition of Barbadian tuk music.
It’s the same formation of a bunch of drums and flutes
basically and sometimes a bass instrument.
TNYCJR: You often sit in with Sun Ra Arkestra when it
visits the U.K. What are you getting from that experience?
				(CONTINUED ON PAGE 13)

alvin queen

TNYCJR: Shabaka And The Ancestors, whose
sophomore album We Are Sent Here By History was
released this year, grew out of playing with local
musicians on your visits to South Africa. How has thatconcept developed since recording and touring?
SH: They all develop naturally. When I first started
playing with the individual members it was with theirown music and I would guest in their bands and playwith them at jam sessions. For the first album, I wrote
music and brought it to them, we rehearsed it and thenwe played it. And from that point when we started
touring the music started to realize itself. The soundand attitude of the band was more apparent after werecorded the first album. Now from touring andplaying and hanging out together we have an idea ofwhat we want to express, or I’ve got an idea of what
can be expressed in this formation.
TNYCJR: Your titles are often a call to action and thatcarries through into lyrics and words from guest
rappers, vocalists and poets as well. Do you have themessage in mind when you compose the music?
SH: No. When I compose the music I consciously makean effort not to have anything in mind apart frommaking the best or the most fitting music that I can at
the time. Then after the actual notes and the music iswritten or recorded or rehearsed, I have a process oftrying to go back and try to analyze what was on mymind or what was in the air at the time of recording.
That can come from conversations we were havingaround the time of recording, it might come from what
I was talking about with friends. But it’s really aprocess of trying to write the music with the mostintegrity.

6 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD“His OP [Stunt, 2019],
dedicated to Oscar
Peterson, rings true tothe reverence he has fora friend who gave him
the opportunity to beheard by audiences
worldwide…a sincere
dedication to the manymusical memories theyshared on their historic
journey together.”—newswire

Sundance.dk

© SCOTT FRIEDLANDER

ARTIST FEATUREHILLIARD
GREENEby john pietaro

F rom the opening strains of Spirituals (Unseen Rain),the latest release by Hilliard Greene, the listener iscompelled by something very new, but also eternallyold. And in any case, utterly vital. The bassist’s second
venture into solo bass recordings couldn’t have comeat a better time. “It was important for me to record
these pieces, largely a set of Negro Spirituals, in lightof the Black Lives Matter movement,” Greene
explained. “I haven’t always taken part in the protests,
so I needed for my voice to be heard. I was born in thelate ‘50s and got a healthy dose of what segregation
was like for my parents.” Greene, who was raised in
Iowa (his father was a Sociology professor at the
University of Northern Iowa), had a thoroughawareness of the racial structure in rural America.
“I recall being a five-year-old entering grade school.
I felt that I needed to present a certain way as I was the
only Black person these people would ever know.”
Profoundly, Greene came to this conclusion through an
independent view. “I never told my parents this, but
I’ll never forget that feeling.”
During this past year, Greene had been travelingnationally in solo presentations of coded spirituals—
message songs used by slaves as a guide in escaping
the brutality of their bondage—entitled “Milestone
Negro Spirituals Until the Civil War; when folksongs
bring freedom”. “This body of song has long been in
the repertoire of choirs, but often without anunderstanding of the meaning behind the lyrics.
‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ includes directions andinspiration for slaves seeking liberation. When I
present these coded spirituals it’s within a performanceand a discussion” to educate the audience of thishistoric, revolutionary reality. “I’ve done a mini-tourof Pennsylvania, Ohio, Iowa and other places, but I’mtrying to bring this to as many parts of the country as
possible. The time for this is now.”“His natural swing andtaste allow him to revisit
well-throttled standards withgusto and originality...
A welcome debut by an artist
who definitely deserves
wider exposure and appreciation.”—The New York City Jazz Record

watjazz.com

The bassist’s musical immersion during his
formative years laid a cultural foundation, particularly
when he was introduced to the music of Miles Davis.
“I had been listening to rock and then to recordings of
Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and ‘the three Kings’:
Freddie, B.B. and Albert” but when his high schoolmusic teacher played Kind of Blue for the class, he wasdrawn in. Greene studied both contrabass and electricbass guitar and played in the school orchestra as well
as local bands. After attending college in Iowa where
he studied music, Greene sought still higher education
at Berklee. “I recognized that in this music, jazz, there
was something I could feel a strong connection to, an
art form of Black Americans.” Pouring himself into
practice sessions of eight-plus hours per day, thebassist developed rapidly and began performing in the
Boston area with multiple ensembles including theband of R&B vocalist Bobby Hebb, whose hit “Sunny”
continued to propel club dates more than a decade
after its release.
Following graduation, Greene settled in New Yorkduring the creatively fervent ‘80s. “After my first two
weeks in this city, I felt more comfortable here than I’dever felt at any other time in my life.” Residing in a
rented Flatbush house with other musicians just as the
Brooklyn scene was undergoing stunning renewal andthe Downtown sound continued thriving, Greene was
exposed to the music at every turn. “I was going to theTin Palace and the Knitting Factory, but one day when
I was in Grand Central Station I heard this music,
incredible stuff. I ran around to find out who it wasand saw this guy playing a silver alto for spare change.
It was Charles Gayle. He was homeless then but invited
me to hear him play a couple of days later at First onFirst so, of course, I went to that club and we spokeright after.” Greene soon became a regular bassist with
Gayle. “Charles was a real formative part of myeducation. The music took on a life of its own. We
played at one place in the East Village with no heat and
we wore our coats at first, but by the time the set
ended, I was heavily perspiring [and] realized I could
never play this way in Iowa.”
Around the same time, Greene also began playing
with drummer Rashied Ali. “We rehearsed at his loft
and that was an occasion onto itself. Incredible. I wasjust doin’ it,” he recalled. “I just wish I was moredeveloped as a player by then. There was so muchmusic when we played, Rashied had so much history.
And he also told these great stories,” he added witha laugh, unfortunately refraining from any juicy bits ofthis lost history.
By the early ‘90s, the bassist’s association withpianist Cecil Taylor began. He was soon elevated to thedirector of Taylor ’s big band, which also included
Steve Swell, Jackson Krall and many other notables.
“Being that close to an artist like Cecil, someone of thatmagnitude, you learn so much.” Furthering thestrength of such an experiential opportunity, Greene
also played in a Taylor trio with Krall, which held

court at the (old) Knitting Factory. “We did several of
his compositions but there was no setlist, so I would
just latch onto the key and Cecil’s momentum. His
energy wave would build to a certain point and thenpeak. Then the next energy wave came in and we rodeit together, but each time it was more powerful than
before. Between tunes I would noodle a while and thenwe’d go again, building intensity more and more and it
kept going like that. And just when I’d thought wewere at the very edge, that place where we could go nofurther, he’d elbow accented chord clusters and bringus to a new max!”
In the years that followed, Greene’s resumé took
on quite mythic proportions. In addition to serving as
house bassist at Minton’s Playhouse, some of his
collaborators have included Billy Bang, Barry Altschul,
Leroy Jenkins, Karl Berger, Grady Tate, Vijay Iyer,
Joanne Brackeen, Bern Nix, Greg Osby, Cindy
Blackman, Frank Lacy, Don Pullen, Jason Kao Hwang
and Kenny Barron. He also developed a penchant forworking with vocalists such as Jon Hendricks, The Ink
Spots, Marlene VerPlanck and, primarily, Jimmy Scott,with whom he had a 25-year association including
global travel. “There are not enough words to describe
the impact of that experience. He was like a second
father. When I began working with Jimmy, his audience
was over 50 and Black and I was in my late 20s. He dida record for Warner Bros. called All the Way (1992),
which was nominated for a Grammy. That had such an
impact to shift his audience to under 50 and white(laughs). That is the power of a recording.”Greene is hopeful that the power of his latest
recording, too, will carry some weight as well as his
current focus of solo performances. He was recently
honored by the Bronx Council on the Arts for his workwith coded spirituals; he is planning on establishingconcerts with the Council following the coronavirus
restrictions on public gatherings. “There is a major
place in this renewed struggle for Black lives and an
equitable society wherein the music itself becomes
cultural education.” v
For more information, visit hilliardgreene.com. Greene isscheduled to play solo at 440Gallery Aug. 22nd. For more
information, visit 440gallery.com.
Recommended Listening:• Jimmy Scott—Heaven (Warner Bros., 1996)• Gebhard Ullmann/Steve Swell 4—News? No News
(Jazzwerkstatt, 2008)• Billy Bang—Da Bang (TUM, 2011)• Salim Washington—Dogon Revisited(Passin Thru, 2012)• Jemeel Moondoc/Hilliard Greene—
Cosmic Nickelodeon (Relative Pitch, 2015)• Hilliard Greene—Spirituals (Unseen Rain, 2017-18)

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 7

ON THE COVER

still seeking the way aheadby kyle oleksiuk

Archie Shepp: saxophonist, professor, uncle. The
83-year-old wears all three hats in his most recent
album Ocean Bridges (Redefinition), a collaboration
with his nephew, rapper Raw Poetic, and the producer/
DJ Damu The Fudgemunk. As saxophonist, heaccompanies his nephew’s raps and occasionally leads
the band. As professor (which he was for 30 years at
UMass-Amherst), he lectures about the importance of
education on a track titled “Professor Shepp’s Agenda
1”. And as uncle, he exudes an avuncular warmth thatflows across the album, which was spontaneously
recorded and incorporates a great deal of
uncle-nephew conversation caught on tape in therecording studio.
Although Ocean Bridges represents his first
performance on a hip-hop album, Shepp is no stranger
to rap. “I feel like one of the godfathers of rap,” Sheppsays, “because I started to do this kind of thing back inthe ‘60s, along with groups like The Last Poets.
I infused my work with poems and statements, whichwere primarily at that time political… When I firststarted recording music, I was very accessible to the
spoken word as an important adjunct to music.” In thedecades since, his convictions on the relationshipbetween music and language, particularly African
American language, have only increased.
Shepp explains, “African American language
lends itself very readily to musical expression” andspecifically to the spontaneity of improvisation. “It
comes from the heart, [and] by nature it has an iambic
quality, going back to poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Black language often also has a quality of spontaneity…
It springs out of the Black experience, which isfrequently a response to what’s going on at the time—
we frequently find ourselves in situations we never
expected. Racism is like that. Frequently we are thevictims of situations, which we have to respond to in
an improvised manner. So improvisation is afundamental aspect of the Black experience.”
Shepp has spent much of his musical career
exploring and communicating this “fundamental
aspect of the Black experience” via political recordingsthat take a strong stance on the issue of race and racism
in America. One of the most beloved is Attica Blues, a1972 album made in response to the Attica prison riots.
On that album, as on many others he has made, Shepp
directly confronts the political reality of his moment.
Doing so is particularly important because he cares
deeply about the interwoven relationship between
Black music and the history of Black life in America.
He speaks of the relationship between the two withsuch insight that it deserves to be quoted at length:“I’ve always looked at music not so much as an
academic experience, but as a life experience, as a living
thing. Especially Black music, which, if one pursues it
simply as chord changes, as an academic phenomenon,
you miss out the real essential meaning of that music. It
has a verbal basis, as well as an academic existence innotes. And over the years, I’ve begun to incorporate theverbal, linguistic, human element of that music into thenotes themselves...by feeling and understanding thatthe music is more than notes. That some of the terrible
experiences that we have had to go through, slavery
and discrimination, Jim Crow, all these things, havehelped to form a whole cultural outlook. One whichtells a story, a story that should be told and understoodby more people than it is.
“Survival, identity: these are qualities that havegrown out of a horrifying social experience in whichpeople were stolen from their homes, their homelandand put on ships and sent thousands of miles away,
exposed naked to an entirely different community
and...survived this naked exposure. And we sang oursong in a strange land, to such an extent that that songhas been imitated by the strangers—and, at times, been
put to very negative uses. I was looking at a program
the other night, in which a Neo-Nazi was saying how
he was going to a rock concert in Germany. And I waswondering, ‘gee...rock music is actually Black music,transformed by white people and exploited. And so allthese skinheads are being nourished by a Black
experience.’ There’s something ironic about that andit tells us that the world wouldn’t be anything without
us. It’s we who provide the songs, the sound, theenergy, the creativity that inspires even the world of
Neo-Nazis. They would be nothing without us.”
Shepp’s lifelong engagement with Black music andpolitics has been almost literally life-long—at a very
early age, he was introduced to both subjects by his
father. “My father was a banjo player,” Shepp says,“and through him I became interested in music...
I asked him [to teach me] so much that he finally taughtme the first few chords to James P. Johnson’s ‘The
Charleston’.” At the same time, his father introduced
him to discussions of politics and race and made him
precociously aware of their importance. “When I wasin the third grade,” Shepp recalls, “my teacher asked
us to write about something important to us andI wrote about the situation of race. It wasn’t a very
extensive academic paper, but she was really impressedthat I had these things on my mind. And she said,
where did you learn about this? And I said, well, frommy father and the man upstairs. Every Saturday they
discuss political issues.” Thinking forward to the effectthose discussions would have on his life, Shepp
supposes that he “grew up in a world where I was
ordained to discuss these things and eventually toconfront them. When I went to college, my initial idea
was to become a lawyer. I graduated with a degree intheater, but I always had this idea that somehow
whatever I did would be to help, to change thecondition of my people.”
Meaningless as it is to estimate one person’s worth
within a movement of millions, Shepp has indeed
made great strides of progress in the worlds of music
and academia. As a professor at the UMass-Amherst,
he introduced three decades of students to a historicalconsciousness of Black music. As Shepp told the UMass
student paper, The Daily Collegian, in 2007: “There isa continuity in Black Music, which begins in Africa andis still important today when we hear a performer like
Branford [Marsalis]. Or Aretha Franklin. All related by

8 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

a set of circumstances.” In his years as a professor, oneof his proudest memories is his experience teaching Dr.
Cuthbert Simpkins, who wrote one of the firstbiographies of John Coltrane, Shepp’s contemporary
and frequent collaborator. Shepp remembers withparticular pride that Simpkins “caught onto some ofJohn’s theoretical ideas, like the Squared Circle [a.k.a.
the “Circle of Fourths”] and ‘Giant Steps’ [chord
progression], which had a real theoretical basis... [andthat Simpkins] took an African American artist, one of
his own people, seriously enough to write about him
and to explore the meaning of the man.”
As a musician, Shepp has spent decades making
political statements and incorporating diverse strandsof Black musical and cultural traditions into the art
form known as jazz. “I don’t use the term jazz,” says
Shepp, “because I find it tends to be very limited interms of what we expect from [a jazz] performance.” Itis certainly limiting in terms of what we expect from a
Shepp performance. Since the early ‘60s, Shepp hascomposed and performed profound, politicized music,
which includes elements of the blues, spirituals,
continental African percussion, R&B and now rap.
Still, after decades of labor, the saxophonist andprofessor says that things are not going the way he’d
hoped when he was first agitating for change in the‘60s. “We were protesting then just as we are now,”
Shepp says, “and the amazing thing is that things havechanged so little. We thought we had resolved the
problem in the ‘60s with Martin Luther King andMalcolm and the rent strikes and all the protests—andmany of them spontaneously resulted in some dramaticchange in the United States. But then apparently that
was all a myth, because nowadays more Black kids arebeing killed in the streets than during the time when I
was a young man... In fact, the discourse is going backto a kind of a James Baldwin theme. We find ourselves
questioning what it is to be an African American, to be
Black in a white world.”
Despite this dispiriting lack of progress, Shepp does
not feel that his work has been for nothing. He has
regrets like anyone, but “I hope,” he says, that “as in thecase of my nephew, that these things have been inspiring
to people who came after me...that they will take courage
and refuge in the idea that things have got to change…
and that our young people should not be easily bought
out, or sell out, for money or fame or success. And realizethat the ultimate goal is to liberate ourselves.” v
For more information, visit facebook.com/ArchieShepp.official
Recommended Listening:• Archie Shepp—Four for Trane (Impulse!, 1964)• Archie Shepp—The Way Ahead (Impulse!, 1968)• Archie Shepp—The Tradition (Horo, 1977)• Archie Shepp/Horace Parlan—
Trouble in Mind (SteepleChase, 1980)• Archie Shepp Meets Kahil El’Zabar ’s Ritual Trio—
Conversations (Delmark, 1999)• Archie Shepp/Raw Poetic/Damu The Fudgemunk—
Ocean Bridges (Redefinition, 2019)©️John Rogers / johnrogersnyc.com

archie shepp

ArChie Shepp One of the major forces in modern jazzCDs

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ENCORE

ALVIN
QUEEN
by jim motavalli
Drummer Alvin Queen, born in the Bronx 70 years
ago this month, is a great storyteller and so what if
many of his compelling stories are from before hesettled permanently in Europe circa 1979? As he enjoys
his Swiss government pension and takes long walks in
the Alps, he has no regrets about leaving the Americancauldron behind.
Queen was a child prodigy on drums. He recorded
his first album (still unreleased!) when he was only 11
or 12 years old. Lest you think it was a kid’s record,consider the personnel: Zoot Sims played saxophone,
Art Davis was on bass and Harold Mabern on piano,with Joe Newman acting as music director and playing
trumpet. “I remember that Clifford Brown’s ‘Daahoud’
was on it,” Queen said. “We recorded it at Nola
Rehearsal Studios in Manhattan. Joe Newman was on
my back all the time. I’d love to hear it again—I think it
would sound beautiful.”
Queen’s grandmother was music director at theBronx church whose parishioners included Denzel
Washington. His brother was a percussionist in schoolparades and young Queen used to steal his drumsticks
and bang on the concrete. He joined the marching bandhimself at around age eight and remembers the orange
and black uniforms. One Christmas, Queen’s mothertook him shopping and he saw a kid playing drums in astore window. He wanted that for himself and was soon
taking lessons with that kid’s teacher. An immersion injazz happened when his father, a bar manager, took him
to the Apollo Theater. “We heard Art Blakey with
Olatunji there, Nancy Wilson with Cannonball
Adderley, John Coltrane playing ‘My Favorite Things’.
And we also saw Big Maybelle, The Jackson Five, Stevie
Wonder, Moms Mabley, everybody.”

Young Queen used to take his radio to bed,
listening to Symphony Sid with the volume turned
low. “You had to really love jazz to do that,” he said. By
this point, Queen’s family had moved to Mount Vernon,
NY. When he was 10 or 11, the band at a bar his father
was managing lost its drummer and the musicians
wanted to know if they could “use the kid”. A
delegation was sent to Queen’s house and the little
prodigy was brought out. “What kind of music do you
play?” was the only question he asked. When helearned it was jazz everything was fine and he wentand got his best suit for the evening’s session. The
drum pedals had to be adjusted.
Queen, still very young, would take the subway
down to Grand Central Station, get off and go over toFrank Wolf’s drum shop on 48th Street, where people
like Gene Krupa, Cozy Cole and Buddy Rich would
hang out. Anything to be close to the music. He
remembers the cheap food and drink that maintained
many a musician at the original Beefsteak Charlie’s.
The gigs started coming. The names Queen
mentions are too numerous to list. When he was just 16
he played with Wild Bill Davis’ Trio and the pianist
Don Pullen (not yet famous for his Mingus stint) andbacked singer Ruth Brown in Atlantic City. In 1969, stilla teenager, he played with trombonist Benny Greenand guitarist Tiny Grimes, then replaced Billy Cobhamin Horace Silver ’s group.
Queen’s musical associations are myriad. He
rehearsed with a quartet led by Coltrane bassist Jimmy
Garrison that also included pianist Ronnie Mathews
but then in 1976 Garrison died. He played with Oscar
Peterson for years between 2004 until the pianist’s
death in 2007—after first saying no because “I’d heardthat Oscar could be a hard one.”
Queen first went to Europe in 1971 with trumpet
player Charles Tolliver, a collaboration documented on
the Live at the Loosdrecht Jazz Festival and Impact albums.
Queen wasn’t quite ready to move to Europe yet, but
he had the wanderlust, spending part of the ‘70s in
Montréal, Canada, playing jazz and R&B withmusicians like American expatriate pianist Sadik
Hakim (born Forrest Argonne Thornton). He also
played with nearly every organ player, since the soundwas big then—especially in Harlem. “All the clubs inHarlem had Hammond organs,” Queen recalls.
Queen was a confirmed bebopper, but when hebegan playing in Europe he had to acquaint himself
with some earlier styles. “A lot of the older musicians,
some of them ex-Duke Ellington, had come to Europe
as individual players and I had to fit in with what they
were doing,” he said. He name-checks Jimmy Woode,
Harry “Sweets” Edison, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson,
Red Holloway, Buddy Tate, Benny Bailey and Clark
Terry. “I started playing all over Europe, so I asked
myself, ‘Why should I go back to New York?’,” Queen
said. He became the house drummer at the Antibes
Jazz Festival and also recalls friendly relations withsome of the avant garde musicians in Europe at thattime—Sunny Murray, Alan Silva. But he wasn’t goingto play in their style. “They’d tell me I had to play more
free, but I’d say that before I bake a cake, I want toknow what all the ingredients are,” Queen said.
From his Swiss base, Queen traveled all over,including a fractious stint with Nina Simone andseveral State Department tours with Tolliver, Silver
and others, including eight weeks in Africa. And hestarted recording music himself, on his Nilva (Alvinspelled backwards) label. “I made so much money
playing I was able to open up the label,” he said. “Wehave 19 titles.” To know what Queen sounded like backthen, check out the 1980 LP In Europe.
Married to a Swiss woman and permanently
settled in Geneva at the end of the ‘70s, Queen foundhe could put youthful bad habits behind him. “I was ina better position over here,” he said. “I could cool out
better, meet some new people.” Eventually, Queengave up his American citizenship because of tax
problems, but that complicates his situation now.
Back in 1969, a car Queen was riding in got stopped
and the police found a gun in the trunk. It wasn’t
Queen’s gun, but he spent three weeks on Rikers
Island. Grant Green’s lawyer got him out. That wasthat, but when Queen attempted to come back for a
Washington, D.C. event honoring the World War I-era
Harlem Hellfighters in 2017, he was denied a visa.
Authorities brought up that arrest and a drug charge
					(CONTINUED ON PAGE 13)

Saigon. He had the good fortune of listening toa collection of jazz records, but the escalating conflict
was frightening and Black soldiers were the first to go.
Luckily his service was short, but the effect never wentaway. Moving to San Francisco he was on the HaightAshbury scene. He worked at a record shop with Jerry
Garcia and became a trolley operator. He continuously
pursued music and studied saxophone with Bert
Wilson, who was part of a free jazz scene that included
Sonny Simmons and Donald Rafael Garrett. Lowegravitated toward the latter because he had worked
with Coltrane and Lowe credits Garrett for teaching
him breathing techniques for relaxation. Drummer
Michael Carvin recalls meeting him when he first
moved to San Francisco and checking him out because
he had that “I am somebody” vibe. Shortly after theymet, Lowe went to see Ornette Coleman perform at theBoth/And Club. After the show Lowe went and playedfor him and Ornette said he should move to New York.
He and his wife Carmen packed up and were soon in
the big city.
Alice Coltrane hired Lowe on Coleman’s
recommendation and he made his album debut on her
World Galaxy (Impulse!, 1971). “I listened to John
Coltrane so hard,” Lowe said, “until I listened my way
right into his band!” Of course John had been gone
four years by then. His association with the Alice
Coltrane band gave him instant legitimacy and soon he
was performing with trumpeter Don Cherry, drummer

Milford Graves and everybody on the nascent loft
scene, including drummer Rashied Ali. Together, Ali
and Lowe recorded Duo Exchange for their own label,
Survival Records. The label produced a beautiful
reissue earlier this year mastered from original tapes
and expanded with never-before-heard music. Lowe’s
partnership in the label was short-lived, but he and Ali
worked together periodically into the 2000s.
In 1973, Lowe led his first record date, Black Beings(ESP-Disk’, also bassist William Parker ’s first record).
In 2012, additional music from that initial date wasreleased as The Loweski; and in 2014, a double LP
entitled Out Loud was released, which was conceived
as his second release but never issued. It was importantto the artist to have something to show for the work
he was doing and from 1975 onward, Lowe regularly
produced records with a supporting cast that included,
among others, Lester (trumpet) and Joseph (trombone)
Bowie, trumpeters Wadada Leo Smith, Butch Morrisand Olu Dara, bassists Alex Blake, Fred Williams andDidier Levallet and drummers Charles Bobo Shaw,
Steve Reid and Phillip Wilson.
He also formed a fruitful relationship with Cherry
and appeared on Relativity Suite (1973) and Brown Rice
(1975). Later in the ‘70s he started a lasting relationshipwith violinist Billy Bang, realizing several projects
together including The Jazz Doctors (with Garrett anddrummer Denis Charles) and in the 2000s, a project					(CONTINUED ON PAGE 13)

LEST WE FORGET

frank
lowe
by anders griffen
F rank Lowe was a tenor saxophonist known for his
fiery sound and fierce conviction in the post-John
Coltrane wave of free jazz improvisers. Born inMemphis, Tennessee, he was obsessed with music by
the time he was a teenager and did all he could just to
be near it. He started playing saxophone around theage of 12 and toward the end of high school, he got a
job as a clerk and gofer at Stax Records. He befriended
Packy Axton, a saxophonist just a couple years older,
who played in the studio’s house band (The Royal
Spades, then The Mar-Keys) and taught him R&B licks.
After high school, Lowe attempted a responsible pathforward enrolling at the University of Kansas,
Lawrence as a social science major. Listening to music
fanatically, especially Coltrane, he did not complete
his degree.
Lowe spent 1965 in Vietnam. He had been arrested
and had to make the choice between jail or the war. In
Vietnam he was a military police officer stationed in

10 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

L ABEL SPOTLIGHT

MAHAKALA
by george grella
The outskirts of Hot Spring, Arkansas are not usuallyassociated with jazz, much less free jazz. But that is thehome of saxophonist Chad Fowler, who is also thefounder of Mahakala Music, a record label that debuted
last year and focuses on the free end of thecontemporary scene.
“I’m certainly not surrounded by like-minded
individuals,” he says on the phone from his home. He
delivers a brief history of how he got where he is:“I grew up in Arkansas, went to school at the Universityof Memphis, played on Beale Street…I used to organize
jazz shows at the University.” Like so many musicians,
Fowler eventually needed a day job. He got into techand ended up in Berlin, working for 6 Wunderkinder
GmBH, the firm that made the popular task-organizing
app Wunderlist. When Microsoft bought up thesoftware, Fowler decided to take his leave of the techbusiness. So he went home.
“Being in the tech world, location-based things
annoy me. It’s stupid with the internet and I do all mywork on the internet.” Still, Mahakala has somethingof a local angle, in that Fowler wanted, as he says. “tobring the greats of free jazz together with local
musicians.” He wants the label to be “international
and local at the same time, I want to bring in Berlin
musicians I met” when he lived in that city.
Along with the collapsing of Southern andinternational geography, the other guiding principle ofMore Music for a Free World
Dave Sewelson

Garden Party
Dopolarians

the label comes from the title. Mahakala, Fowler
explains, is the “Tibetan god of compassion, a wrathfulemanation of something that should be beautiful andgentle.” Fitting Fowler ’s expansive view, the deity iscommon to Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism and is
one of the guises of Shiva, an embodiment ofdestructive and creative power.
That concept is clear on the label’s first release,
Garden City, credited to the ensemble Dopolarians andrecorded in New Orleans. The group features bassist
William Parker but other than him is, as the liner notes
point out, “a decidedly Southern affair”—with Fowler,
tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan, vocalist Kelley Hurt,
pianist Chris Parker and percussionist Alvin Fielder.
The album was recorded in 2018, Fielder passed awayin early 2019 and is honored on a recent Mahakala
release, A Tribute to Alvin Fielder—Live at Vision Festival
XXIV.
Garden City is a prototype of the Mahakala sound.
The free playing has strong roots in the down-homeblues style of Ornette Coleman and the improvisational
interplay is seasoned with shout music and boogiewoogie. The qualities are subtle yet strong, so deep inthe musicians’ DNA that they themselves may not be
conscious of them.
That may imply a mastermind at work, but not all
the label’s releases are direct products of Fowler ’s
thinking. What’s on the imprint is “a combination of
my producing for the label and musicians bringing me
things.” As for the producing, Fowler is “reallyinterested in putting different humans together andseeing what happens.”
Case in point: another 2020 release, More Music fora Free World was put in the can by saxophonist Dave

AmalgamIvo Perelman/Matthew ShippSewelson, trombonist Steve Swell, Parker and drummer
Marvin Bugalu Smith in 2018. Fowler read about it in aconversation with Sewelson that Parker published in
his Conversations III book and Fowler knew he had tohave it. And despite demurring that he has any
particular aesthetic vision, the balance of free playing,muscular pulse and sheer soulfulness across all thelabel’s nascent releases show that he has a practiced
ear for both the abstract and the grounded. “My desire
is to do stuff that expands the common free language,”he reveals, “and strives to be beautiful.”This past spring, the label also released an album
capturing the ongoing series of duets between
saxophonist Ivo Perelman and pianist Matthew Shipp,Amalgam. July saw the release of Lacrimosa, a duo album
with Fowler and drummer/percussionist W.C. “Chad”
Anderson. This month Mahakala is putting out analbum of music from free jazz hero Frank Lowe, Nothing
But Love, with contributions from Fowler, Hurt, Parker,
bassist Bernard Santacruz, drummer Anders Griffen
and a special appearance from saxophonist and fellow
Memphian Bobby Lavell. Fowler has also put the labelon all the streaming services, explaining via email that
“I’m not really trying to make money—or even worried
about making my money back—on this stuff. It’s allabout getting the music out there.”
Thinking about what the post-coronavirus
landscape might look like, Fowler offers, “When things
get back to normal, I’m really going to wrap up
production” on his current studio album, “and maybe
do some live things.” Like everyone else, he longs forthe live music scene. v
For more information, visit mahakalamusic.com

A Tribute to Alvin Fielder
Jordan/Futterman/Parker/Drake

Lacrimosa
Chad Fowler/WC Anderson

VOXNEWS

Some
Sweet
Words
by suzanne lorge
In April 2009, bassist Gregg August premiered Dialogues

On Race, a suite based on race-themed poetry andcommissioned by The Jerome Foundation and The Jazz
Gallery. After this debut—then a comment on race
relations within the U.S. following Barack Obama’s
ascent to the presidency—August more or less forgot
about the project until 2019, when he went into thestudio to record it with a 12-piece jazz ensemble. This
month, he releases Dialogues On Race, Volume I (Iacuessa),
a work that has only grown in significance in the years
since its inception. The instrumentals on this two-disc,
12-track recording take inspiration from gripping poetryby the likes of Maya Angelou (“The Bird Leaps”),
Langston Hughes (“Sweet Words on Race”) andCornelius Eady (“Sherbet”). Without words, August’s
evocative modern jazz compositions convey all thecomplexity and depth of their difficult theme. But the
tracks with vocals pack the greatest emotional punch—
it’s hard to hide from the messages they impart, even if
one were so inclined. On “I Sang In The Sun”, a poem byCarolyn Kizer, singer Forest VanDyke adopts theremorseful stance of witnesses to racial injustice and on
the tripartite “Your Only Child”, singers Frank Lacy and

Shelley Washington capture the elegiac solemnity of
Marilyn Nelson’s text, excerpted from her narrative
poem, “A Wreath for Emmett Till”. But what slays is theoverdubbed voice of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley,
describing her son’s murdered body as the ensemble
stirs ominously underneath on “Mother Mamie’s
Reflections”. Be forewarned. This one hurts.
Pioneering jazz singer Peggy Lee would have turned
100 this past May. Not many have taken on her songbook
as an oeuvre worth exploring musically—and none haveapproached the trailblazing figure as a subject of academic
inquiry. Singer/author Tish Oney addresses this omission
with her book, Peggy Lee: A Century of Song (Rowman &Littlefield). Carefully researched and lovingly written, thebiography digs into the backstories of Lee’s career,
documenting challenges faced and triumphs claimed
during six decades of performing. Oney’s backstory
deserves attention: a PhD candidate at USC’s Thornton
School of Music, she chose Lee’s long-ignored original
work as the topic of her dissertation and went on todevelop a related stage show, The Peggy Lee Project,under the tutelage of singer/jazz educator Tierney Sutton.
Two other summer reads for jazz singers: This is Bop:
Jon Hendricks and the Art of Vocal Jazz (Equinox) by singer
and journalist Peter Jones, who explores how vocalesemaverick Jon Hendricks’ contributions to vocal jazz,mind-boggling in their scope, set new standards for jazz
singers everywhere. And Embodied VoiceWork: Beyond
Singing (Barcelona Publishers), by singer/composer Lisa

Sokolov, a primer that helps singers understand the artof vocal improvisation. As an intro, hear Sokolov discuss
her self-styled approach to vocal artistry on Lisa Peers’
podcast for singers, The Voice Work.
For singers who want to learn in a classroom, albeit
a virtual one, this month singer Ayelet Rose Gottlieb
sends up Orchard of Pomegranates (ayeletrose.com), an
online intensive designed to delve into “the playful,spiritual and technical aspects of singing,” she writes.
“With eight cutting edge artist-teachers, we will explore
our vocal expression through body-voice work, deep
listening, experimental improvisation, VoiceNoise anda bit of jazz.” To help in this effort, Gottlieb has lined upa star-studded online faculty: Theo Bleckmann, DB
Boyko, Christine Duncan, Anat Fort, Susanna Hood,
Sofía Rei, Pyeng Threadgill and Fay Victor.
While the pandemic rages on, three new standards
releases offer some happy diversion: Vermont-based
vocalist Bidi Dworkin recently launched her debut,
Beautiful Souvenirs (Twenty Two Productions), a
showcase for her sparkling voice at its finest, witharrangements by jazz legend Jay Clayton; singer Noa
Levy joins bassist Shimpei Ogawa on You, Me and Cole
(Belle Records), 10 expertly rendered selections bymusical mastermind Cole Porter; and Italian singer
Mafalda Minnozzi, a leading interpreter of Brazilian
jazz, just released Sensorial: Portraits in Bossa & Jazz
(Mama Produções Artísticas), a collection of seductive
airs by beloved Brazilian composers. v

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 11

i n me moria mkeithtippett
by andrey henkin

JERRY BRUNO (1920 - Jun. 22nd, 2020)
The bassist was active since the ‘50s,
recording and performing with Dick
Garcia, Al Caiola, Bucky and John
Pizzarelli, Red Norvo, Dave Bennett,
John Cutrone and others. Bruno died
Jun. 29th at 100.

photo courtesy of the artist

FREDDY COLE (Oct. 15th, 1931 - Jun.
27th, 2020) The pianist and vocalist(and member of a musical family withbrothers Nat, Ike and Eddie and niece
Natalie and nephew Lionel all
professional musicians) began leading
dates in the mid ‘60s for a variety oflabels, then gained a higher profile with runs of albums
for Fantasy (1994-99), Telarc (2000-2003) and, mostprolifically, HighNote starting in 2005, the latter
resulting in nearly a dozen albums, most recently
2018’s My Mood Is You. Cole died Jun. 27th at 88.

British pianist Keith Tippett, a key figure bridging thevarious jazz and art-rock scenes of late ‘60s-early ‘70s
Britain and whose albums ranged from solo outings tomassive ensembles Centipede and Ark, died Jun. 14th
at 72 from a heart attack after chronic health problems.
Tippett was born Aug. 25th, 1947 in thesouthwestern city of Bristol. In his youth he played
both traditional jazz and church organ, foreshadowing
a career of eclecticism. His earliest recordings
demonstrated this further: sideman appearances with
Jamaica-born, London-based saxophonist Harold
McNair and progressive rock group King Crimson to
go along with his debut You Are Here... I Am There(Polydor, 1970), which included a cross-section of his
countrymen: Elton Dean, Nick Evans, Marc Charig, Jeff
Clyne and Alan Jackson.
One of his most significant early statements camea year later with Centipede, a 50+ ensemble that
included erstwhile members of Soft Machine, The Blue
Notes, Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Nucleus,
Brotherhood of Breath and the Mike WestbrookOrchestra and released a double LP, Septober Energy,
for RCA Neon, as close to a British version of A GreatDay in Harlem as can be imagined. Seven years latercame a smaller but no less ambitious band, Ark, withsome of the same players but key additions in Stan
Tracey, Trevor Watts, Louis Moholo and Peter Kowald
and another double-LP release, Frames (Music for an
imaginary film), on Ogun.
Over the decades Tippett released dozens ofalbums on Vertigo, RCA Victor, Vinyl, Ogun, FMP,
Editions EG, Victo, FMR, Discus and other imprints. He
had longterm partnerships with countrymen pianists
Tracey (duet albums in 1976 and 2008) and Howard
Riley (several collaborative dates between 1980-2002)
and, most notably, his vocalist/wife Julie Tippetts (néeDriscoll, she took his legal name), the pair working
together on Tippett’s albums, in collaborative projects
and as a duo under the moniker Couple In Spirit(Tippetts survives her husband). Another longterm
project was Mujician, originally the name used for three‘80s solo albums for FMP but in 1990 applied to aquartet with saxophonist Paul Dunmall, bassist Paul
Rogers and drummer Tony Levin, which made six
albums for Cuneiform between 1990-2005.
Apart from all this were dozens of credits as asideman with Dean, Charig, Dudu Pukwana, Harry
Miller, Moholo, Dennis Gonzalez, Harry Beckett,
Dunmall and many others, participation as a player
and arranger for the early ‘90s Blue Notes tributeproject Dedication Orchestra as well as credits as acomposer for various ensembles. Tippett was active up
until his death, reviving his solo Mujician project,recording with his octet, working with Tippetts andcontinuing to play alongside a wide array of partners.

JACQUES COURSIL (Mar. 31st, 1938 Jun. 25th, 2020) The French-Martiniquan
trumpeter was active in The New Thingin mid ‘60s New York with credits under
Sunny Murray and Frank Wright (plus
an unissued ESP-Disk’ session) and backin his hometown of Paris at the end of
the decade with Burton Greene and two leader releases
for BYG-Actuel, then left a music career for decades toconcentrate on teaching linguistic theory, returning in
the new millennium with albums on Tzadik, Universal
Music France, Sunnyside, RogueArt and, posthumously,
SAVVY. Coursil died Jun. 25th at 82.
SIMON H. FELL (Jan. 13th, 1959 - Jun.
28th, 2020) The British bassist madedozens of improvised music albums forhis own Bruce’s Fingers imprint since
the mid ‘80s as well as dates released by
Leo Lab, Discus, Red Toucan, Victo,
Bo’Weavil and Confront to go alongwith credits with Alan Wilkinson, Paul Hession, Martin
Archer, London Improvisers Orchestra, Company, Alex
Ward, Milo Fine, Peter Brötzmann, Joe Morris, Phil
Minton as well as the collaborative groups IST,
Badland, VHF and Amere3. Fell died Jun. 28th at 61.
HUGH FRASER (Oct. 26th, 1958 - Jun.
17th, 2020) The Canadian trombonist
has albums on CBC, Jazz Focus andBoathouse,membershipinthe
VancouverEnsembleof
Jazz
Improvisation and credits under Kenny
Wheeler, Graham Collier and Hard
Rubber Orchestra. Fraser died Jun. 17th at 62.
MILTON GLASER (Jun. 26th, 1929 Jun. 26th, 2020) The graphic designer ’samorous feelings for The Big Apple
were clear with his iconic I ❤ NY logo
and founding of New York magazine but
his early work had him creating album
and poster art, which in the jazz world
included ‘50s-60s designs for Tony Scott, Dave
Brubeck, Charlie Byrd and Barry Miles. Glaser died
Jun. 26th at 91.
ARTHUR HOYLE (Sep. 9th, 1929 - Jun.
4th, 2020) The trumpeter had credits inthe ‘50s-60s big bands of Lionel
Hampton and Oliver Nelson, sideman
work during the same period with
Sonny
Cox
and
Bunky
Green,
membership in the mid ‘50s iteration of
the Sun Ra Arkestra and a guest appearance on Mike
Reed’s People, Places & Things Stories and Negotiations(428 Music, 2010). Hoyle died Jun. 4th at 90.

12 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORDIVAR LINDELL (May 19th, 1940 - Jun.
3rd, 2020) The Swedish bassist had
credits under Gunnar Lindqvist’s G.L.
Unit, Jan Wallgren’s Orkester, Börje
Fredriksson, Gunnar Fors, Lasse
Werner, Christer Boustedt and SuneSpångberg and a 2004 collaboration
with Bobo Stenson and Sven-Åke Johansson. Lindell
died Jun. 3rd at 80.
JOHNNY MANDEL (Nov. 23rd, 1925 Jun. 29th, 2020) The composer had early
credits as a trombonist with Buddy
Rich, Charlie Ventura and Count Basie
but is far better known for his tunes,
performed by Basie, Chet Baker, Woody
Herman, Quincy Jones, Rolf Ericson,
Bill Perkins and others, the “Great Jazz Score” from thefilm I Want To Live! (with such players as Shelly Manne,
Mel Lewis, Bill Holman, Frank Rosolino and more) andvarious pieces for movies that would become jazzstandards, such as “Emily”, “Close Enough for Love”
and “The Shadow of Your Smile”. Mandel died Jun.
29th at 94.
GILBERT MATTHEWS (Sep. 28th,
1943 - Jun. 25th, 2020) The South African
drummer made his recording debut in1969 with Chris Schilder, had mid tolate ‘70s credits with Dollar Brand, Pat
Matshikiza, Kippie Moketsi, Basil
Coetzee and membership in Spirits
Rejoice (not to be confused with fellow South African
drummer Louis Moholo’s period project of the samename) then, after moving to Sweden in the late ‘70s,
work under Christer Boustedt, Johnny Dyani, Anders
Gahnold, Chris McGregor, John Tchicai and Roland
Keijser, six albums with the cooperative Brus Trio and
one date as a leader, Hot House (Flash Music, 1994).
Matthews died Jun. 25th at 76.
TONY ROMANDINI (Jul. 27th, 1928 Jun. 3rd, 2020) The Québecois guitarist
had albums on EMC and RCA Victor
in the ‘60s and sideman credits with
Maynard Ferguson, Herman Apple,
Benny Barbara and Emile Normand.
Romandini died Jun. 3rd at 91.
PIERRE SIM (Mar. 29th, 1929 - Jun.
15th, 2020) The French bassist recordedwith Django Reinhardt, Don Byas, The
Golden Gate Quartet, Jef Gilson, Buck
Clayton, Bill Coleman, Dany Doriz,
Robert Viger and others. Sim died Jun.
15th at 91. v
Out now on all platforms

www.onemusic-label.com

(INTERVIEW CONTINUED FROM PAGE 6)
SH: Oh, it’s great. The main impression I get every
time I play with them is that there is an internal
structure allowing individuals to be themselves. I
think the first time I played with them, Marshall Allencame up to me and he said, “you are thinking too
much, I can hear you thinking about whether what you
are playing is right or wrong.” I really took a lot from
that. The main thing is he’s allowing me to enter intothat unit because of who I am, so they don’t want me toconsider if what I’m doing is right or wrong. They
want me to just play and try to express myself as fully
as possible. And that is what I feel like within thatband, that is a bunch of individuals expressing
themselves as fully as possible but with the communal
aim of making the best kind of group music as theycan. That’s something I try to carry through to all thegroups in the context of the music that we play.
TNYCJR: Do you have further Impulse! releases planned?
SH: Yeah. Right now we are just about finishing themixing of the next Sons Of Kemet album, which should
be out hopefully at the beginning of next year. We did
the recording before lockdown and now lockdown’s
relaxed a bit we are just pressing on with the mixing andproduction, getting some horn parts done. I’m reallyexcited with that and it’s going to be a great album.
TNYCJR: Excellent! Are there things you want to dothat aren’t catered for by your current groups?
SH: There’s a project that I’m probably going to start
towards the end of the year, which is a collaboration
between myself and a Martiniquan percussionist andelectronic music producer called DJ Noss. He mixes
traditional Martiniquan bélé music with electronic
music in a very interactive way that I like so there’s a
lot that can be done with that combination. I just get
ideas all the time. I’ve got books full of ideas. But forme the main thing is just time and what I decide tofocus on. So at the moment it’s just focusing on theSons Of Kemet album.
TNYCJR: How would you describe the resurgence ofjazz on the London scene?
SH: London has always had a thriving jazz scene but
I think the factors around it have changed, in that
there’s a bigger and younger audience at the moment
for it than there was 15 to 20 years ago. Certain
musicians are playing a lot bigger spaces, so bigger,
more commercial, festivals and just bigger venues. The
media interest in it just wasn’t there before. When I wasin college the whole narrative was that we’re not able toget instrumental music recognized by the mainstreampress. There was a stigmatization around the music thatit’s not for regular people. One of the big factors in theresurgence is that there seems to be an acceptance of
instrumental music from a jazz background that there
wasn’t before, which is heartening. I think a lot of themusic that’s being pushed forward as representative of
the London jazz scene is music that takes a lot ofelements from the American form but uses the musicthat we are into in London. And I think that theaudiences are appreciating that, they are appreciating
the creative element to mixing up the music and finding
a way of making a lot of people enjoy it in a way thatthey thought they couldn’t before.
TNYCJR: How does reception in NYC compare to London?
SH: The reception in New York is great. I’ve been going
there quite a lot in the last couple of years and feel likethe audience is growing and growing. They are startingto get an idea of what the music is and what the music is
supposed to be achieving. But London for me is myfavorite place to play. It’s the place where the music wasformed and the audience is just the best audience. They
come there to dance, to listen and be emotional with us.
Whereas in the States, as far as I have experienced, there
is an idea of reverence for the music in that it’s taken in
a concert for people to stand and listen to the music in avery reverential fashion. In London there’s less of that.
People dance to the music. They listen to it but they
seem to be more engaged with their bodies. Not that allmusic has to have that, but for our music it does help,
because it has a strong pulse to it. v
For more information, visit shabakahutchings.com. Hutchings
plays SummerStage Anywhere Aug. 8th. For more information,
visit cityparksfoundation.org/events/shabaka-hutchings.
Recommended Listening:• Zed-U—Night Time on the Middle Passage (Babel, 2009)• Sons Of Kemet—Burn (Naim, 2013)• The Heliocentrics—13 Degrees Of Reality (Naim, 2013)• Sons Of Kemet—Your Queen Is A Reptile(Impulse!, 2016-17)• The Comet Is Coming—Trust in the Lifeforce of the
Deep Mystery (Impulse!, 2017)• Shabaka And The Ancestors—We Are Sent Here By
History (Impulse!, 2018-19)(ENCORE CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10)
from a stint with George Benson, as well as a DUI. He
was told he’d need a waiver from the Department ofHomeland Security. It could be seen as tragic, but Queen
doesn’t even vaguely resemble a tragic figure. He’s
actually pretty serene. One reason is the success of his
latest album, OP: A Tribute to Oscar Peterson (Stunt),
recorded in Copenhagen in 2018 with Danish musiciansZier Romme Larsen (piano) and Ida Hvid (drums). “I’ma happy guy,” he said. “Happier than ever. I’ve taken up
photography and I hike all the way to the top of the
Swiss mountains and take pictures up there.” v

ADAM NUSSBAUM
LEAD BELLYREIMAGINEDSSC 1578
AVAILABLE 8/28/20

T

wo years ago, Sunnyside released drummer Adam
Nussbaum’s first true recording as a leader, and fantastic tribute to one of his idols, The Lead Belly Project.
Nussbaum’s band of saxophonist Ohad Talmor and dual
guitarists, Steve Cardenas and Nate Radley, ably channeled a program of Lead Belly tunes chosen by the leader,mainly culled from the Folkway Recordings 10-inch records Nussbaum grew up listening to. The project allowed
Nussbaum to show another side of his musical character
that he hadn’t previously been able to showcase regularly
during his remarkable forty-year career.

In July of 2019, Nussbam and the ensemble returned toTalmor’s home studio, Seeds, in Brooklyn. They recordedwith no separation between the musicians and entirely
live. The musicians’ comfort with the material and eachother can be heard in the results, as the pieces have an
emotional intimacy that goes beyond their prior efforts.
The result of these recordings can be heard on their new
album, Lead Belly Reimagined.

DAVY MOONEY
AND THE HOPE OF HOME BAND

LIVE@NATIONAL SAWDUST

For more information, visit alvinqueen.com
Recommended Listening:• Music Inc. / Charles Tolliver—Impact (Enja, 1972)• Alvin Queen—Ashanti (Nilva, 1981)• Alvin Queen/Lonnie Smith (feat. Melvin Sparks)—
Lenox and Seventh: The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions(Black & Blue, 1985)• Kenny Drew Trio—At The Brewhouse (Storyville, 1992)• Alvin Queen—I Ain’t Looking At You (Enja, 2005)• Alvin Queen—OP: A Tribute to Oscar Peterson(Stunt, 2018)(lest we forget CONTINUED FROM PAGE 10)
reflecting on Vietnam with Bang’s fellow veterans. In
the ‘90s he formed the Saxemble with James Carter andMichael Marcus, an ensemble consisting of saxophones
accompanied by drums. He also formed a relationshipwith bassist Bernard Santacruz that produced threealbums and a number of tours. One of his final bands
was formed around pianist Bertha Hope. Lowe died ofcomplications due to lung cancer on Sep. 19th, 2003. v
Recommended Listening:• Frank Lowe/Rashied Ali—Duo Exchange:

The Complete Sessions (Survival, 1972)• Frank Lowe—The Flam (Black Saint, 1975)• Frank Lowe—Decision in Paradise (Soul Note, 1984)• Frank Lowe—Bodies and Soul (CIMP, 1995)• Frank Lowe/Bernard Santacruz—

SSC 1591
AVAILABLE 7/17/20

Guitarist/composer Davy Mooney knows just how special these experiences are and wanted to capture theessence of their magic on his new recording, Live at National Sawdust. On the recording, Mooney brings together
his incredible Hope of Home band, featuring saxophonist
John Ellis, pianist Jon Cowherd, bassist Matt Clohesy anddrummer Brian Blade, to play old and new material for a
receptive group of listeners at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust
and to conjure a fabulously warm and heartfelt performance that can be revisited over and over.

Mooney and the Hope of Home Band assembled at
National Sawdust on January 27, 2020 with engineer
Sascha von Oertzen. Of course, live recordings have theirchallenges. The performers have to consider the audienceand can not just start over again. But that is precisely whylive recordings can be amazing. The emphasis on being in
the moment supercedes the idea of perfection, typically
producing compelling performances.

Short Tales (Bleu Regard, 1999)• Billy Bang Quintet (featuring Frank Lowe)—

Above & Beyond: An Evening in Grand Rapids(Justin Time, 2003)

www.sunnysiderecords.com

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 13

album REVIEWSThe Question
Glenn Zaleski (Sunnyside)by Dan Bilawsky

Answers, while often prized, are merely end points.
Questions, however, are wide-open planes. Ripe for
examination and rich in possibility, questions tend tomorph and multiply—and offer far more than any
single person can fully understand—as life flies by.
That’s something that pianist Glenn Zaleski readily
acknowledges.
In the summer of 2019, barely into his 30s witha wife who was expecting, new realities quickly
surrounded Zaleski. Those developments brought him
back to a treasured adage—“the question is more
important than the answer”—and pushed him forward
into different spaces. Allowing his music to absorb andrefract these experiences, Zaleski laid the foundations
for this compelling quintet set.
Fronting a group of familiars, Zaleski opens on“The Question” itself. One of several pieces penned
during that summer of searching, it initially presents
a sense of uncertainty before gelling and offering space
to tenor saxophonist Lucas Pino, Zaleski and drummer
Allan Mednard. “The Answer”, logically, serves as theconclusion to the album. There Zaleski ruminatesalone, chewing on the question(s) and offering asummation in concise fashion.
Six numbers appear between those related poles,
offering glimpses into the pianist’s heart, impulses,
calculations and friendships. “Backstep”, a waltz thatleans on Coltrane changes in reverse, puts Adam
O’Farrill’s cheery trumpet in a positive light. “Smoke
and Mirrors”, a (mostly) low-key look at framing social
media fiction as real life, finds bassist Desmond White
playing to the title in his use of a mirrored bassline.
Zaleski’s gorgeous take on Dave Brubeck’s “Strange
Meadow Lark” honors the dearly departed pianist in
the year of his centennial celebration. And James
Williams’ swinging “Road Life” appeals to a jazzmusician’s very nature.
Two tracks find Zaleski working with an expanded
palette—the creatively colorful “Subterfuge” adds
Alex LoRe (alto), Andrew Gutauskas (baritone), Nick
Finzer (trombone) and Andrew Renfroe (guitar) to themix while the mellow “BK Bossa Nova” brings guitarist
Yotam Silberstein into the picture—but neither one
stands in opposition to the overall feel of the record.
The Question freely offers space to music of many
shapes and sizes.
For more information, visit sunnysiderecords.com. Zaleski
live-streams at patreon.com/glennzaleski.

Free at Last
Mal Waldron (ECM)by George Grella

The retrospective of 50 years of history for the great
modern music label ECM makes it even more surprising

to remember that this was Manfred Eicher ’s inauguralrelease. In a universe built out of Keith Jarrett and the
Art Ensemble of Chicago and Dave Holland and Pat
Metheny and Arvo Pärt, Mal Waldron, who would
have turned 95 this month, seems like a radical outlier.
But is he? If the sonic and aesthetic values of thelabel emphasize clarity and a sense of purpose andmeaningfulness, then Waldron is a perfect mentor andthis album an urtext. And this is an excellent ECM
album and an excellent jazz album all around. Even
with issue number one, the deep, crystalline
engineering is there and it flatters Waldron’s sound to
maximum effect.
Plangent is a word that describes both the pianist’s
art and the label’s vision. Waldron is all about the left
hand and while Free at Last is a familiar example of his
virtues, he and Swiss bassist Isla Eckinger andAmerican drummer Clarence Becton are at their peakin getting the most out of the basslines and vamps.
Waldron and Eckinger play loose around the beatbut have a tight, ongoing call and response between
each other; Waldron plays a bass riff, Eckinger returns
his own version in time, the groove goes on. Becton has
a spry motor and the drummer too builds his solostatements off of Waldron’s playing.
This is really one of the strongest statements onrecord of Waldron’s mature voice. Tracks likes the
opening “Rat Now” and “Rock My Soul” are soulful,bluesy, funky and hypnotic, one foot in the deep rootsof Black music in America, the other in a global view ofmusic as a trance experience. It’s the kind of thing,modern but with clear roots, that may have been just as
responsible for guiding Eicher ’s vision for the label as
was Eicher ’s aesthetics in choosing Waldron for his
first recording.
As for the roots, in between the 19th Century and1969, when the album was recorded, there came Billie
Holiday and Waldron looks back at his extensive
experience with her by playing Ann Ronell’s “Willow
Weep for Me” in an arrangement that manages adelicate balance between old school and modernism.
The reissue duplicates this track with one of its extra
cuts, a longer edit of the master take.
There are also alternate takes of “1-3-234” and“Balladina” and “Boo”. These four extend the original
duration to a generous 70 minutes from the original
release’s 42. The extra music is all good, but what itreally does is reinforce the punchy, succinct stature of
the original release.
For more information, visit ecmrecords.com

Fedchock arrangements. His signature approach is
generally filled with a captivating feeling ofapproachability, musical interplay that is neither
understated nor inflexible.
Opener “RSVP” features an initial section ofdissonance before leading into Fedchock’s opening
solo. The frame is a Latin vibe pushed along by
Halvorson. All the players are given a chance to strut
their stuff, forecasting what lies ahead.
In 1961, Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers
recorded their first sextet album entitled Art Blakey!!!!!
Jazz Messengers!!!!!, which featured a trumpet,
trombone and tenor saxophone frontline. Fedchock
tips his cap to that iteration of the group with anotheroriginal entitled “Alpha Dog”. Following an intro ofunison harmony by the frontline, Fedchock jumps into
his solo, showing he is a player of perspective andassurance, neither of which should come as a surprise.
Weiskopf follows with an intrepid solo reminiscent ofWayne Shorter, the saxophonist on the aforementioned
Blakey album. The band demonstrates that they aremeasured and thoughtful improvisers.
The three familiar standards are Axel StordahlPaul Weston-Sammy Cahn’s “I Should Care”, Eden
Ahbez’ “Nature Boy” and Gene de Paul-Don Raye’s“Star Eyes”, all given updated readings covering
a range of styles, tempo and harmonization thereby
putting “new wine into old bottles”.
The closer is a blues-infused flag waver “On The
Edge”. The theme is set by Farnham as he lays down
an intro filled with speed and complexity. Fedchock’s
solo is full of improvisational tangents and as eachsoloist picks up their piece of the composition theirofferings are bright and harmonically layered.
For more information, visit summitrecords.com

Know Without Knowing
R Experience—To(Agogo)e • Conny
Bauer/Matthias Bauer/Dag Magnus—
The Gift (NoBusiness)c • Daniel Carter, Matthew Shipp,Parker, Gerald Cleaver—o William
Welcome Adventure! Vol. 1 (577 Records)
Ceccarelli/Hamid Drake/m • Luigi
Gianni Trovalusci/Ken Vandermark—Open Border (Catalytic Sound)m • PaulDesmond—The Complete 1975 Toronto
Recordings (Mosaic)e • Billy
Martin—Guilty (Amulet)
Entropy—Rituals (Discus-Music)n •• Orchestra
Barre Phillips—Thirty years in betweend (Victo)
Shulman Septet—West Meets Easte • Adam(Cellar Music)
Spence—Whirlpool (Solo Piano)d • Alister(Alister Spence Music)• Mulatu Astatke & The Black Jesus

Laurence Donohue-Greene, Managing Editor

Into the ShadowsJohn Fedchock NY Sextet (Summit)
by Pierre Giroux

J ohn Fedchock is a savvy and fluid bop-influenced
trombonist who, prior to leading his own big band andother smaller groups, did a stellar seven-year stintwith the Woody Herman band of the ‘80s, serving as
Music Director, featured soloist and one of the band’s
prominent arrangers of such numbers as “Blues For
Red” and “Come Sunday”.
In this snap, crackle and pop session, Fedchockleads his NY Sextet of Scott Wendholt (trumpet/
flugelhorn), Walt Weiskopf (tenor saxophone), Allan
Farnham (piano), David Finck (bass) and Eric
Halvorson (drums) through five Fedchock originals
and three recognized standards, the latter all in

14 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORDn • Full Blast—Farewell Tonic (Trost)
Garchik—Clear Line (Yestereve)e •• Jacob
Mark Helias—Roof Rights (Radio Legs Music)
Improvisers Orchestra—w • Krakow
KJO at Cricoteka (Not Two)
• Joachim Kühn & Trummerschlunk—

Playing Probabilities (ACT Music)r • Michael
Musillami/Peter Madsen—
Pictures (Playscape)e • Sam
Newsome Trio—Free Wyoming(Live at the Metro Coffee Co.) (s/r)
l • AnaRuiz—e • Øyvind
And The World Exploded Into Love (s/r)
Skarbø/Fredrik Ljungkvist/a Kris Davis/Ole
Morten Vågan—Inland Empire (Clean Feed)s • Masayuki Takayanagi New Direction
Revolvable Thinge Unit—Axis/Another(In Concert) (Blank Forms)s Andrey Henkin, Editorial Director

UNEARTHED GEM

Fellini 100 - I Compani 35
I Compani (ICDISC)
by Stuart Broomer

Data Lords
Maria Schneider Orchestra (ArtistShare)by George Kanzler

F ellini 100 - I Compani 35 commemorates a pair of Maria Schneider ’s Data Lords orchestral album

2020 anniversaries: the centennial of filmmaker
Federico Fellini’s birth and the 35th anniversary of
I Compani, the Dutch orchestra led by saxophonist/composer/arranger Bo van de Graaf. There’s anessential connection between the two. I Compani
began as a kind of tribute band, devoted to thesoundtracks of Fellini’s films, celebrating particularly
the director ’s long-standing relationship withcomposer Nino Rota. During its history, I Compani has
increasingly integrated original music, including
compositions by its leader and others, but the FelliniRota connection remains a key part of its identity.
The other essential component is a special
trajectory of “New Dutch Swing”, the witty orchestral
curve that includes some of Misha Mengelberg’s
compositions and arrangements for the InstantComposers Pool (ICP) and the radicalized village-bandcharacter of the Willem Breuker Kollektief, joined herewith the influences of Charles Mingus and Carla Bley.
This commemorative program, recorded live in
Nijmegen on Jan. 19th, 2020, touches on all theseelements and does so with a special animation, lively
inventiveorchestrations
bursting
with
vital
improvisation. I Compani is constructed for orchestralcolor and texture, with three saxophonists (van deGraaf, Frank Nielander, Inga Rothammel), electric andacoustic bassists (Carel van Rijn and Arjen Gorter),three pianists/keyboardists (Kees Molhoek, Guus
Janssen and Leo Bouwmeester), three strings (Aili
Deiwiks, Friedmar Hitzer and Saskia Meijs), twosingers (Peter Freijsen and Serena Jansen), two
drummers (Thomas Jaspers and Rob Verdurmen) andan individual trumpeter (Paul Vlieks), trombonist(Arjen Reeser) and accordion player (Gert Wantenaar).
Rota’s art is initially celebrated with “Milano eNadio”, a theme from Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and his
Brothers, arranged by Vlieks. It immediately establishes
the band’s élan, a combination of polished, rapidly
shifting voices and rhythms conjoined with fierce
swing, including foregrounded passages by Gorter andvan Rijn. The Fellini-Rota connection is mined
repeatedly, including a brilliant minute of “Charleston
di Giulietta” and the suite “Ocho e Mezzo” (“8 ½”),
a van de Graaf adaptation of Bley’s arrangement for
the recently departed Hal Willner ’s Fellini project.
Music that springs from other sources
complements the film music. Van de Graaf’s extended
four-part suite “Maar Nooit Vergeten (Don’t Forget)”is rich in shifting moods and materials while Janssen’s“Jojo Jive” crushes 1920s dance music, sentimental
balladry and atonal strings into a compact form.
Mengelberg’s “De Sprong o Romantiek der Hazen (theRomantic Jump of Hares)” can sound like a Mingus
parody when played by the ICP, but here it sounds
more like a tribute, thanks to baritone saxophonist
Rothammel, who sounds like she’s channeling Hamiet
Bluiett. Giuseppe Verdi’s “Pieta ti prenda del mio
dolor”, an aria from Aida, is similarly graced by
Nielander ’s soaring tenor saxophone.
I Compani is as compelling as it is quirky.
Hopefully its perfect balance of romance and irony
will sustain it for years to come.

consists of two contrasting suites—each its own CD—
made up of pieces that are more tone poems than songsor blues. The first five-piece suite is “The Digital
World”, its emphatic, signature sound dominated by
Ben Monder ’s electric guitar. The six pieces comprising“Our Natural World” are distinguished by theaccordion of Gary Versace. Throughout, Schneider
employs dynamics, contrast, time-tempo changes andtonal-timbral variations to build her pieces rather thanmore conventional forms. And she unleashes soloists
against or within those forms on all 11 tracks.
“The Digital World” begins with “A World Lost”,
a wistful piano-chords-led introduction giving way toskeining electric guitar over rising horns, a tenor
saxophone (Rich Perry) eventually engulfed by theensemble before deceleration to a guitar and rhythm
section finale. The suite ends with “Data Lords”,
a sometimes frenzied, high-energy evocation ofpessimism about the eventual takeover of life byartificial intelligence (AI) as predicted by Stephen
Hawking, AI represented by Mike Rodriguez’
electronically enhanced trumpet and the brutal
drums and brass riffs swamping Dave Pietro’s alto
saxophone solo.
In between those two are three pieces devoted toquestionable aspects of the digital world as Schneider
sees it. The “Don’t Be Evil” motto “mocks Google as
the cartoonish overlord that it is,” according to thecomposer. It is her most blatantly satiric work,
burlesquing elements of martial and patriotic music.
“CQ CQ, Is Anybody There?” has rhythms andpassages built on ham radio Morse Code (her father
was a ham radio operator), with Donny McCaslin’s
tenor saxophone representing the human and Greg
Gisbert’s electrified trumpet AI. Today’s world ofcommercial and military satellites orbiting the globe isevoked by the ensemble, with Scott Robinson’s baritone
saxophone embodying “Sputnik”.
“Our Natural World” takes inspiration fromnature (a garden, a bird, the sky), pottery and poetry.
The suite’s music is more lyrical and melodic than“The Digital World”, with some slower tempos and, in“Look Up”, the only conventional swing rhythm on thealbum as well as a formidable feature for trombonist
Marshall Gilkes. “Sanzenin”, evoking a Buddhist
garden, features accordion over a brass choir; “StoneSong” bounces syncopations deftly among Steve
Wilson’s soprano saxophone, accordion, piano (Frank
Kimbrough), bass (Jay Anderson) and drums(Johnathan Blake); “Braided Together” weaves
ensemble textures and dynamics around Pietro’s alto.
Wilson’s alto dominates “Bluebird” in interactions
with the ensemble and rhythm section. And McCaslin’s
tenor hails “The Sun Waited for Me”, a setting for a Ted
Kooser poem in the tradition of Duke Ellington’s“I Like the Sunrise”.
Data Lords is available as a download, but the
CD version includes a lavishly illustrated 36-pagebooklet with Schneider ’s comments on all the pieces,
numerous photographs of musicians and the Kooser
poems that inspired “Braided Together” and “The Sun
Waited for Me”.

For more information, visit icompani.nl

For more information, visit artistshare.com

The Duo: Duke Ellington 100
Mulgrew Miller & Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen(Storyville)by Marilyn Lester

Storyville Record’s release of The Duo, 21 years after its
recording, begs the question, “what took so long?” The
CD, with pianist Mulgrew Miller (who would haveturned 65 this month) and Danish bassist Niels-HenningØrsted Pedersen (NHØP), is a magnificent homage to
Duke Ellington’s work with his revolutionary young
bassist Jimmie Blanton. This 1999 effort (Ellington’scentenary year) never copies, but splendidly invokes
the spirit of the masters they honor.
Blanton was a wunderkind, discovered by
Ellington in St. Louis in late October 1939 and hired
immediately to play with the Orchestra. Blanton,
initially trained on violin, applied those principles
to the upright, adding pizzicato and arco techniques
to the walking 4/4 time-keeping meter, sparking amajor transformation in the way jazz bassists
approached their craft. NHØP is possibly what
Blanton could have become creatively had he lived
beyond his mere 23 years. Not only does NHØPhave an amazing range of technique but is also a
remarkably intuitive player. Both he and Miller are
wonderfully attuned to each other but, beyond that,NHØP is channeling something extra from theethers, so much so that he often achieves a Zen
oneness with the instrument. Like Blanton, there aretimes when NHØP emulates violin or guitar andeven brass. His work on “Come Sunday” features
fingering that a saxophonist would employ runningup and down the keys. Miller ’s style is akin to thatof Oscar Peterson: lyrical and sometimes florid, butwith a certain elegant restraint. Both have an
impeccable sense of harmony and timing, often
weaving in and out of each other ’s output withremarkable finesse. This feat is especially evident on
the 12-bar-based “C Jam Blues”, elevating thenumber to something beyond its relative simplicity.
In Blanton Ellington knew the prize he’dcaptured, quick to feature him out front on the
bandstand. He also recorded duets with Blanton
beginning in November 1939; “Blues” and “Pitter
Patter Panther” are two that Miller and NHØPinclude here. The pair captures the fun of the latterpiece in this joyous homage, Miller ’s take on
Ellington’s Harlem Stride style full of respect, thepianist delivering his own innovative and supportive
performance on the keys. This musical deference isseen in NHØP’s “O.D. Blues”, which parallels
Ellington backing Blanton out front. Anotheroriginal composition is by Miller: the easy-listening“Blues in the PM’s”. Several tunes allow Miller tocome forward for the bulk of play, including aswinging, exotic “Caravan” and “I Got It Bad (AndThat Ain’t Good)”, although taken as a whole, The
Duo is NHØP’s. The magic created by Miller andNHØP led the pair to continue to work together
until the latter ’s untimely death in 2005, the former
following in 2013 with his own premature demise,
all the more reason that The Duo is a CD to treasure.
For more information, visit storyvillerecords.com

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 15

G LO B E U N I T Y

Pu:Ville Herrala (We Jazz)El Suelo Mío
Jorge Roeder (s/r)
The Balloon Catcher
Jošt Drašler (Sploh)by Tom Greenland

P hysically difficult to play, sonically marginalized

at the low end of the pitch range and often relegatedto a supportive role in improvising ensembles, theacoustic bass is nevertheless a marvelously versatile
instrument, fully capable (when handled by anadept) of sustaining a listener ’s interest all on its
lonesome, as proven by three recent solo projects.
Pu:, Finnish bassist Ville Herrala’s debut, contains
14 terse vignettes that alternately highlight pizzicato
and arco techniques. The former is employed overrolling riffs (“Pu:1”, “Pu:10”), minimalistic motifs(“Pu:3”), chromatic walking lines (“Pu:14”) and long,slowly but relentlessly developed ideas (“Pu:7”). On“Pu:5” he uses a two-handed batting technique tochurn out pentatonic lines. He uses a bow to extract
colorful arrays of upper frequencies, which can whirr
like a throat-singer (“Pu:2”), crackle like a campfirelog (“Pu:11”), mewl like a peevish tot (“Pu:4”), groan
like a mudslide (“Pu:6”) or sputter like an overworked
machine (“Pu:8”). On “Pu:9” he bats the bow to
conjure up a forest full of crickets; on “Pu:12” hepounds the bass body itself. “Pu:13”, his most varied
piece, sounds something like an atonal cello suite.
Though Peruvian bassist Jorge Roeder has
worked with top-shelf artists in New York for over a
decade, El Suelo Mío is his first album. The 13 tracks
combine originals and covers, all but one featuring
his powerful yet graceful plucked attack, his robust
ringing tone to the fore, several pieces anchored bylow D and C pedal tones made possible by a string
extender. On “Solo Juntos”, “Bounce” and “Thing
Thing” his ornamented melodic sequences, spurredby a powerful pizzicato, recall an oud player ’s
taksim (improvisation). On the title track, “Chabuca
Limeña”, “El Plebeyo”, “I’ll Remember April” and“Silencio de um Minuto” he shows an orchestralcommand of the bass, balancing melody,counterpoint, harmony and percussion with theagility of a solo pianist or guitarist. His mostexpressive work is on “Patrona”, “Rambler” and acover of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”.
Slovenian bassist Jošt Drašler ’s solo debut The
Balloon Catcher is a suite of impromptu miniatures
realized through diverse preparations, implements
and extended techniques. “Blue Balloon” reveals—
in fits and starts—a plethora of sounds: lions
fighting in the night, an elephant’s trumpet, a drumroll, a pinched growl, a model airplane motor. “Red
Balloon” is more tentative, evoking the rappings ofa haunted house, the drips of a leaky faucet, bumps
in the night. Drašler is not afraid to let silences
speak for him, as on “Water Balloon”, “Green
Balloon” or “Grandma Balloon”, where the gaps andlulls invite a response. Not a melodic player in the
traditional sense, he is, like Roeder, a masterorchestrator, melding sounds and textures into
dense, polychromatic soundscapes, best exemplified
by the organized anarchy of “Yellow Balloon” andmellifluous cacophony of “Flying Balloon”.
For more information, visit wejazz.fi, jorgeroeder.com
and sploh.si

Masters in Paris
Martial Solal/Dave Liebman (Sunnyside)by Ken Dryden

Given the wide range of stylistic interests that French

pianist Martial Solal (who turns 93 this month) andAmericansaxophonist
Dave
Liebmanhave
demonstrated during their respective decades-longcareers, finding middle ground was not an issue during
their duo performances together in 2016. An earlier CDfrom an August 2016 French concert, Masters In Bordeaux,
was issued in 2017 to critical acclaim. This new CD is a
Parisian concert recorded a few months later andeclipses the previous release. While they performfamiliar standards and jazz favorites, including twosongs that they tackled on the previous album, there isnothing predictable about their approaches to any ofthese songs, with their originals being an added bonus.
Spontaneity is the key element in each song.
An off-center piano vamp and bristling, gutsy tenor
saxophone quickly detour from the theme of “A NightIn Tunisia” while creative use of space should be
required listening for young virtuosi who haven’t yet
learned to let their music breathe. Solal’s dissonant,inventive chords introduce the theme of “Stella By
Starlight”, conveying a sense of playfulness, thenLiebman makes his entrance on soprano to bring in awistful air to contrast with the pianist’s humorous line.
Solal previously recorded his “In and Out” with
Johnny Griffin; this version with Liebman on tenor
proves to be even more striking, as his improvisational
flights soar above the mysterious melody. Solal’s
whimsical side is on full display in the rambunctious
interpretation of “Night and Day”, as he hints at Bud
Powell with a “Parisian Thoroughfare”-like run andmyriad salutes to other bop greats without making
them overly obvious. Liebman (on tenor) is up to thechallenge and he revels in providing an inventive
contrasting line while also adding his own amusing
licks. Liebman’s easygoing waltz “Small One” isa terrific showcase for his soprano, with Solal’s
unconventional supporting lines stimulating thecomposer to greater heights. One can only hope that
other concerts featuring these two jazz masters are
waiting to be prepared for release.
For more information, visit sunnysiderecords.com

Imaginary Archipelago
Adam Rudolph/Ralph M. Jones/Hamid Drake (Meta)
Balancing Tear
Mako Sica/Hamid Drake (Astral Spirits)
A Tribute to Alvin Fielder (Live at Vision Festival XXIV)
Kidd Jordan/Joel Futterman/
William Parker/Hamid Drake (Mahakala)by Robert Iannapollo

H amid Drake, who turns 65 this month, becamefamiliar to creative music listeners with his recording
debut on the Mandingo Griot Society album from 1978.
Over 40 years later he’s still going strong, one of theforemost drummers in creative improvised music.
One of his bandmates on that first release was
percussionist Adam Rudolph. Since that auspicious
debut, their musical partnership has been particularly

16 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

strong. Throughout the years, they’ve cropped up oneach other ’s albums and albums by Yusef Lateef, Fred
Anderson, Pharoah Sanders and others.
In 2017, they formed Karuna Trio with reed/flute
player Ralph M. Jones and released a self-titled album
to great reviews. Imaginary Archipelago is thefollowup. This volume is dedicated to Lateef and
Karuna’s music shares elements with his ventures into
“non-idiomatic” improvisatory music. But all threeplayers are strong individualists with their own ideasof how to approach this idiom.
Imaginary Archipelago consists of 11 tracks
stemming from improvisations then refashioned by
Rudolph through editing, electronic processing andsequencing. Rudolph is a master at this as he’s shownon his own recordings. Dividing the music intosequences from 4 to 11 minutes, he doesn’t overload itwith effects or flashy editing. Each member details his
corner of the triangle and the results are then enhanced
by Rudolph’s post-production. He crafts a suite thatflows from beginning to end as it fades into the ether.
“Alima” starts with a phrase from bass clarinet that isthen looped and becomes the base for the track.
Electronics are added as the piece develops, featuring
subtle percussive elements. The floating group stasisof “Chandirasa” is succeeded by the vibrantpercussion/saxophone-heavy “Suwakaba” but thesequencing sounds natural. (Incidentally, although
there is post-processing involved, they do this sort ofthing live as well.) The first Karuna album was goodbut Imaginary Archipelago ups the ante by presenting it
as a more coherent whole. This is clearly the music of aunit.
Mako Sica is a band from Chicago that has been
making music on the rock side of the spectrum for overa decade, with Przemyslaw Krys Drazek (trumpet,
guitar), Brent Fuscaldo (vocals, electric bass, classicalguitar, harmonica, Tibetan prayer beads, lightbulb)
and Chaetan Newell (piano, cello, drums, electric
piano, sound effects, synthesizer, tambourine, ukelele,acoustic bass, viola). But boundaries seem immaterial
to the makeup of this group. The influence of therecently departed Ennio Morricone’s Westernsoundtracks informs the opener “Trapeze” with its
lonely trumpet, twangy guitar and slowly developing
pace. One can also hear the influence of Middle Easternmodes in their playing, especially on “Enchanted
City”. Drake has recorded and played with Mako Sicabefore, giving them a firm rhythmic foundation
without ever overpowering the band’s unique soundand approach. He knows when to give the music agroove, textural color and when not to play. All in all,a meeting between two Chicago forces bearing fruit.
The third disc featuring Drake in the drum seat is
A Tribute to Alvin Fielder, recorded at the 24th Vision
Festival in 2019. Fielder (who died in January of thatyear) was an original member of the AACM in ‘60s
Chicago. By the time Drake began associating with
AACM in the ‘70s, Fielder had moved to New Orleans
where he, along with saxophonist Kidd Jordan,
nurtured a nascent free jazz scene. Fielder was arevered drummer in AACM circles and Drake is theperfect drummer for this celebration. This disc presents
the full festival set, the quartet completed by Jordan,
pianist Joel Futterman and bassist William Parker. It’sa bracing, invigorating 45 minutes, weaving in and outof various moods and rhythmic sequences. Songs arereferenced including “Nature Boy” (twice) and“Motherless Child”, with a digression that switches
things to a swinging tempo for a few minutes. During
Futterman’s solo he quotes Monk’s “Crepuscule with
Nellie”. But basically this is free blowing of the highest
order from four current masters paying tribute to aformer musical comrade (Jordan and Futterman) and amusical elder (Parker and Drake).
For
more
information,
visit
metarecords.com,
astralspiritsrecords.com and mahakalamusic.com

Tribute to Louis Armstrong & His All-Stars
Gordon Au (s/r)
by Scott Yanow

During 1947-71, Louis Armstrong toured the world
with his All-Stars, a versatile sextet with whom thegreat trumpeter-singer entertained millions oflisteners. He put on a colorful if sometimes predictableshow filled with swing standards, his hits, pop tunes,
New Orleans jazz and humorous novelties. There aregood and bad points to trumpeter Gordon Au’s live
tribute to the Armstrong All-Stars of the ‘50s, available
in time for what would have been the trumpeter ’s
119th birthday this month. Au’s trumpet playing comesclose to sounding like Armstrong much of the time,
although without the high notes, and the joy in his
playing along with the way that he improvises off the
melody are similar.
It is nice to hear revivals of some tunes that
Armstrong recorded but rarely played live including“Unless”, “Lovely Weather We’re Having” and “Don’t
Fence Me In”. The sidemen sound comfortable in thissetting with clarinetist Jacob Zimmerman occasionallyhinting at Barney Bigard and trombonist Lucian Cobb
adding sparks (the band is completed by sopranosaxophonist/clarinetist Keenan McKenzie, guitarist
Jonathan Stout, pianist Chris Dawson, bassist Jen
Hodge and drummer Josh Collazo). And, fortunately,
no one tries to imitate Armstrong’s singing.
On the minus side, nearly every song is taken at a
slow-medium tempo, one that may be preferred byon screen

Kansas City - a film by Robert Altman(Arrow Films)
by George Kanzler

N ever has a mainstream movie not about jazz been

so infused with the music as Robert Altman’s 1995
film noir, Kansas City. Other movies—also roughly
categorized as film noir—such as Anatomy of a Murder(Duke Ellington) and Elevator to the Gallows (Miles
Davis) are suffused with jazz in their scores, but
the music is mostly off-screen background. The
musicians in Kansas City are seen, frequently, on
screen. Jazz serves not only as the background music
but also as an on-screen leifmotif. Every scene in one
strand of the intermeshed plot, involving a Black
gangster, Seldom Seen (Harry Belafonte), is
introduced with a closeup of a jazz musician soloingin Seen’s nightclub, The Hey Hey Club. And at thevery center of the film is an extended cutting/jam
session (advertised on posters) between tenor
saxophonists Lester Young (Joshua Redman) andColeman Hawkins (Craig Handy).
The noir-ish plot of Kansas City concerns asome dancers but which gives this set a samenessthroughout. Armstrong always varied his tempos,
ranging from heated romps to dramatic ballads, neverletting his show drag, like during this routine version
of “Beale Street Blues”. All but 5 of the 18 songs have
vocals, either from the pleasant if bland Laura Windleyor Jim Ziegler and none of the soloists get to stretch out
much. Many of the ensemble passages are arranged
rather than jammed, which takes away from thepotential excitement and spontaneity. And, with a few
exceptions, Armstrong’s trademark songs are missing.
Of course, one should neither expect a grouptoday to sound exactly like Armstrong’s bands, norshould they be expected to copy his versions of songs.
But this well-meaning tribute, at its best on a mostly
stirring rendition of “C’est Si Bon” and the closing
ensembles of “St. Louis Blues”, could have used aninfusion of excitement, humor and color. Instead ofbeing hot, it is mostly just cool.
For more information, visit gordonaumusic.com

Blood Moon
Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis (Intakt)
by John Pietaro“This new release is part of my series of duo albums

with pianists,” saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock explained.
But clearly, here’s a pairing that comes complete withmight in its history. “Kris was one of the firstconnections I made in the U.S. when I was still
kidnapping perpetrated by a young woman andself-styled “moll” Blondie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) of alaudanum-addled politician’s wife, Red (Miranda
Richardson) in order to influence the KC politicalmachine to convince Seen to release her husband/boyfriend Johnny O’Hara (Dermot Mulroney), who
was caught after robbing a customer of Seen’s
gambling operation while wearing blackface. The
film’s opening half-hour recounts the initial
kidnapping and robbery in cross-cut scenes andchronology that eventually elide together.
But Kansas City is much more than a noir plot,even much more than an evocation of the city’s
vibrant jazz scene in 1934. It is Altman’s memories of
the city he grew up in, as experienced and as told tohim as a child. Filming in Kansas City, his production
refurbished parts of the old Union Station railroad
terminal as well as the downtown street that once
hosted The Hey Hey and other jazz nightclubs. The
film becomes a rich tapestry infused with all the realand fantastic memories of Kansas City percolating in
Altman’s head. Blondie worships Jean Harlow, thefilm star who actually hailed from Kansas City, andtakes her moll characters as portrayed not only inmovies but also in screen magazines as her
inspiration; she even takes Red to see a Clark GableJean Harlow movie. When seen as reflecting those
influences, Leigh’s performance is not as cartoonish
as it seems. Altman also emphasizes the contrast
between Blondie and her Harlow ideal by showing
her throughout most of the film with ratty hair andugly, prosthetic teeth.
The peregrinations of Blondie and Red aroundthe city, from Union Station to a gas station (where agangster chase and shootout happen almost

commuting from London,” she says so the final productis akin to breathing in tandem. The two have enjoyednumerous performances together over a dozen or so
years, whether in cooperative projects like Paradoxical
Frog or the LARK Quartet, Laubrock’s Anti-House andContemporary Chaos Practices or Davis’ Capricorn
Climber. This intimate set may well be the apex.
The album opens with a work by Davis, “Snakes
and Lattice”, which, filled with noir-esque phrases,
immediately draws the listener in. Dominated by fast
melodic runs in unison, it’s reminiscent of some ofthose late ‘50s works that refused to be cited as Third
Stream but nonetheless contain all of the ingredients ofmodern classical fused with jazz. Swinging even
without a rhythm section, per se, it bumps and careensdeliciously as expansive harmonies take us along thisroller-coaster ride through the dark.
And yet, it contrasts markedly with Laubrock’s
first piece on the album, the title cut, which speaks to
the haunting sound of Erik Satie and the band of
French modernists in his wake, Les Six. Davis lays thegroundwork for this deep foray, with sopranosaxophone emoting out front, equal parts vibrant andsinewy, foregoing the expected range of the horn. So
tangible, so evocative is this sound, it conjures thescore of a dramatic tragedy.
Later, the pair also indulge in casting soundscapes,
taunting the very harmonics (is that Laubrock playing
into the open piano, allowing the strings to vibrate
sympathetically and intone on “Flying Embers”?) andpatiently color the air about one’s stereo speakers.
Though both Davis and Laubrock are busy composers
in their own right, they are first vital improvisers andseveral selections appear to be freely devised, credited
jointly (“Gunweep” and “Elephant in the Room”).
Within the whole, such works easily reflect where freejazz took on new music with a vengeance.
For more information, visit intaktrec.ch. Laubrock livestreams at facebook.com/laubrock.
irrelevantly), Charlie Parker ’s mother ’s home to amaternity home to Blondie’s brother-in-law’s bar,where men are brought to be taken out to votemultiple times in the election taking place, allow
Altman to show us an expansive view of his
remembered Kansas City. Just as the alternating
scenes at The Hey Hey Club let him bring the jazzbackground into the foreground.
Parker is a young boy scout, carrying but neverplaying an alto saxophone as he watches the action
from The Hey Hey Club balcony. Those he sees
include Count Basie (Cyrus Chestnut), Mary Lou
Williams (Geri Allen) and Joe Turner (Kevin
Mahogany). We also briefly see the famously corrupt
Democratic boss of KC, Tom Pendergast and his
minions in smoke-filled backrooms, looking andacting remarkably like the gangsters.
The absurdist strain that runs through theBlondie-Red part of the plot comes to a deadly
conclusion as the film ends, but don’t miss the end
credits, over a rendition of Duke Ellington’s “In My
Solitude” featuring bassists Ron Carter and Christian
McBride. If you want to hear more of the music fromthe film, seek out Jazz ‘34, a companion film of justthe musicians in Kansas City performing complete
versions of all the tunes heard in snippets in themovie. Unfortunately this newly released Blu-raydisc doesn’t include Jazz ‘34, although it has manyother additions, including Altman’s running
commentary over the (repeated) full film;commentaries by two critics and interviews withcast members and Joshua Redman.
For more information, visit arrowfilms.com/productdetail/kansas-city-blu-ray/FCD1983

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 17

IN PRINT

The Voice in the Headphones
David Grubbs(Duke University Press)by George GrellaThis is a book about recording music in a
professional studio that will in no way instructanyone in how to have a successful recording
session. Nor is it about making music, or any kind ofcreative process, though paradoxically it is a sort ofblow-by-blow chronicle of how some music got
made and was recorded.
Guitarist David Grubbs has instead written aslice of a day in the life of a musician, a novellalength prose poem, which is at its core a personal
journal—impressionistic, mercurial, nicely bemusedat himself and the situation he finds himself in,which is specifically in Skylight Recording, on a“Tuesday or Wednesday”.
In The Voice in the Headphones, Grubbs (who has
written Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, theSixties and Sound Recording and the more recent Now
that the audience is assembled, which more closely
resembles this new book) is in the studio to record
soundtrack music for a film. It is an experience
encapsulated in the space-time of the recording
process of isolation booths, mixing boards, the roomthat not only floats acoustically but also is free fromthe flow of real time in the outside world.
The first line: “The voice in the headphones
says, ‘You’re rolling’” and the book then spools out
like the tape on the multi-track machine. Yes, tape—
Grubbs has nostalgia for the gone-away world of
analog recordings. He’s not sentimental, he’s
sensual: “to savor the full stop of the tape transport
as it slams like a circuit breaker. Relish the precursor,
pre-flashing cursor, antecedent to digital media’s
attendant cursor... I engage the high-speed rewind,
gun it in the straightaway and steel yourself as theend of the reel flaps insanely.”
As conversational and relaxed as is that tone
and as peripatetic as the journey through one man’s
synaptic memories can be, the writing is focused
and precise. Along with the quasi-buried rhythms
and rhyme schemes of the above excerpt, Grubbs isalways moving forward, like the tape reel. With
breaks for playback, friends’ visits, even lunch, hegets to the end of the session—the mix.
Along the way, Grubbs detours into the story of
Familiar Faces, apparently a band he was in as a kid
with his sister and cousin, the mystery of a cassetteof scratch song recordings somehow overwritten by
the room tone of a car ’s trunk rolling down the
highway and an observation on what it means tosquander one’s talent and if that’s even possible.
“The auditioning of individual tracks,” he observesof the mix, “is the dumbest and most satisfying ofremixes, the examination of one strand at a time.”
This is an insider ’s inside book about an insideexperience, but Grubbs’ warmth will appeal toanyone who’s wondered just what goes on in thosesequestered rooms.
For more information, visit dukeupress.edu/the-voice-inthe-headphones

Dialogues On Race, Volume One
Gregg August (Iacuessa)
by Marco Cangiano

Summer Serenade
Benny Carter Quartet (Storyville)
by Pierre Giroux

Race relations in the United States have never beentenser than in the last few months and this work
provides a much-needed pause for reflection. Gregg
August is an accomplished bass player and composer
equally at ease with the classical, avant garde, jazz and
Latin jazz circles. Among his many accomplishments ismembership in the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, JD
Allen Trio (nine albums) and Arturo O’Farrill’s
AfroLatin Jazz Orchestra.
In 2003 he founded his own record label, Iacuessa,
for which he has recorded three critically acclaimed
albums. Dialogues On Race, Volume One is the result of
a commission from The Jazz Gallery and The Jerome
Foundation to raise the awareness on race. In essence,
it is an extended suite for a 12-piece jazz ensemble,
plus 3 vocalists, strings and a narrator. August, much
like fellow bassist Charles Mingus, seems to use thefull ensemble as an extension of his considerable
musical and technical skills as player. Tenor
saxophonist Allen is the leading soloist but each of themusicians involved participate and contribute to themusic with passion and brilliant leads.
The fulcrum of two CDs is the 1955 infamous
lynching of a 14-year-old boy, Emmett Till, in
Mississippi, which inspires three versions of “Your
Only Child”, based on Marylin Nelson’s poemcomparing the suffering of Till’s mother with Marymother of Christ. The first two versions feature FrankLacy’s harsh singing and a pizzicato solo by August.
But it is the third version that strikes a chord with thislistener as Allen’s tenor dialogue with Shelley
Washington’s voice builds an almost tangible tension,then leaves strings and arco bass to describe asentiment of hopelessness. In between August placesa chilling rendition of “Mother Mamie’s Reflections”,
where the voice of Emmett’s own mother describes theuncovering of the coffin so that the whole world could
see the sheer brutality of which her son was theinnocent victim. A dramatic use of phases à la Steve
Reich combined with Allen’s declamatory tenor add
tension to the drama delivering a performance that is
hard to forget.
The remainder of the music is sumptuous yet
somewhat somber, taking inspiration from poems by
Maya Angelou (“The Bird Leaps” and “I Rise”),
Francisco Alarcón (“Letter to America”) and Langston
Hughes (“Sweet Words on Race”), among others. Mostof the pieces are structured along instrumental opening
conversations—“I Rise” is a wonderful example—
followed by either singing or recitatives and/or full
ensemble performances. Although Mingus comes tomind, particularly in the shifting “Sky” and “The Bird
Leaps”, August’s music is more structured andprogrammatic, lacking orgiastic explosions and suddenchanges of pace and mood. The soloists are all superb,
with particular mention to Ken Thomson on bass
clarinet, Marcus Rojas on tuba in “Letter to America”
and Rafi Malkiel on trombone and euphonium. This ismusic that should be widely disseminated andcarefully listened to while put in the broader context
we have been living for the last few decades. It is a
project like this that gives hope for progress at last.
Looking forward to Volume Two.

Benny Carter was a major force of the Swing Era
although he may not have obtained the full recognition
he deserved. As an alto saxophonist, he gave theinstrument credibility as a jazz voice together with
Johnny Hodges. And as a composer, he enjoyedsuccess, many of his compositions becoming jazz andpopular standards, four of which are included in thissession.
This album for the Danish Storyville label wasrecorded 40 years ago this month in Copenhagen with
two longtime expatriates, pianist Kenny Drew anddrummer Ed Thigpen, plus local bassist Jesper
Lundgaard. In this mainstream session, Carter and hiscohorts sashay through the compositions in theirunderstated way.
Side A opens with an uptempo romp of “Indiana”
with swinging alto providing a bopping pulse throughthe initial introduction of the melody. Always
inventive, Carter decorates the composition with his
fertile improvisations. Drew, who was the pianist on
John Coltrane’s influential album Blue Train, has afondness for long right-hand lines and shows that
disposition in his solo. After an exchange of eighths
between Lundgaard and Thigpen, Carter takes thetune out with his characteristic flourishes.
The title track, a Carter original, is a softly offeredbossa nova with an elegant alto tone and wondrous
vibrato leading the way. Drew is thoughtfully
inventive,
hisstrongsingle-note
playingcomplementary to Carter ’s efforts. The side closes withanother Carter number “All That Jazz”. It is offered asa vocal by Richard Boone the actor, who may best be
remembered as Paladin, the errant knight gunslinger
in the 1957-1963 TV series Have Gun Will Travel. He
delivers the number with conviction and in tune, butthere was never any chance that he would have had
a career as a singer.
Side B is dominated by two classic Cartercompositions, “Blue Star” and “When Lights Are
Low”. The former was a hallmark track on Carter ’s
1961 album Further Definitions, which in addition to
Carter, featured tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins
out in front of a mini-big band. In this version of thecomposition, Carter lays down the melody in a slow
tempo, on which he provides a solo filled witharpeggios, double-time figures and extensions on theframe of the composition. Drew picks up the
progression of the melody and manipulates the number
in inventive ways. Carter ’s out chorus repeats the
melody. “When Lights Are Low” is one of Carter ’s
best-known compositions and has been covered bynumerous jazz and popular musicians including Chet
Baker, Tony Bennett and John Pizzarelli. His own
interpretation is a bright tempo swinger, which offers
each of the players a chance to explore the notes,
chords and rhythm patterns of the piece to imbue itwith freshness.
This release is a limited-edition run and pressedon 180-gram virgin vinyl, remastered for the bestsound to complement the pressing. It also contains theoriginal cover art and liner notes. There is also a tie in
to Carter ’s birthday on Aug. 8th, when he would haveturned 113 years old.

For more information, visit greggaugust.com

For more information, visit storyvillerecords.com

18 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORDWhirpool (Solo Piano)
Alister Spence (Alister Spence Music)
by Thomas Conrad

Alister Spence will be a new name to most Americans
but he is established on the Australian avant garde
scene. Whirlpool is his first solo piano recording in over
30 years. It is a two-CD set with 104 minutes of entirely
improvised music.
Spence, who turns 65 this month, knows his way
around a keyboard. Press notes state that he recorded
this session “with no preparation aside from practicing
particular techniques.” Some of the techniques are
formidable. He can execute high-speed complexity incompound clusters like “(over)taken”. He is capable ofarcane dissonance like “(re)new” and erudite harmony
like “(well)spring” and powerful jolting tremolos like“(under)standing”. He derives an impressive variety
of sonorities from a piano, not only with his many
levels of percussiveness but also with scraping or
howling or nasal twanging from a prepared piano.
For most of the first CD, Spence keeps you, if notenthralled, then curious. You wonder what he will
come up with next. But extended exposure to Spence
becomes an experience more intellectual and technicalthan aesthetic. The 23 dark, dense, turgid, crabbed
pieces sound like scientific exercises in pianistic
problem-solving. Spence is entitled to his own personal
concept of beauty. The prediction here is that his
concept will leave many listeners out in the cold.
Perhaps one issue with this album, apart from thecontent, is the vibe. The musician who wrote the bookon fully improvised solo piano works is, of course,
Keith Jarrett. But Jarrett’s “solo concerts” are recorded
live, in settings where you can hear and feel theaudience responding to the creative swells and eventhe lulls in Jarrett’s impulsive spontaneous momentto-moment discoveries. Whirlpool was done at a studioin Sydney. It feels cloistral, closed in on itself. It lacks
the electricity of shared energy. Perhaps improvisedsolo piano performances need to take place in public,in the open air.

hurt her in the eyes of the jazz press.
Eberhard explored Dolphy’s music in her Potsa
Lotsa, with a name borrowed from a Dolphy working
title. The quartet grew to a septet and is now a tentet
playing her own compositions. She says Dolphy’s
ghost runs through the music on her new Silk Songs For
Space Dogs but if he’s in there, his old boss Mingus isstill calling the shots. The tight themes, full of sharp
turns and orchestrated variation, call his Atlantic
albums very much to mind. It’s a smart set from start
to finish: enjoyably upbeat tunes that neither lean on
nor tear down the orthodoxy. “Skeletons andSilhouettes” shines with unison piano/vibraphonelines and bright horn counterpoint that tickle the inner
ear and ripple up to the imagination.
One of those bright horns is trumpeter Nikolaus
Neuser, a steady force in both the Dolphy and Mingus
projects. He’s also a part of a rather unlikely foursome
with Eberhard and manic New York duo Talibam!. The
two pairs toured Europe together last year and at somepoint pit their unscripted, double duologues direct tolathe cutter. The result is the LP/download This Week isin Two Weeks, a surprising expedition with a collage by
the late poet Steve Dalachinsky on the cover.
The surprise here comes from the New York sideof the equation. Talibam! generally thrives on chaos,often combining disparate forms and ideas into asingle, sometimes messy, endeavor, with drummer
Kevin Shea seemingly capable of playing anything andkeyboard player Matt Mottel willing to do anything.
The surprise here is that Mottel’s ordinarily unbridled
keyboards become the paste that holds them together.
His Sun Ra–inspired synthesizer is present as ever, but
he displays an unexpected proficiency for rhythmic
piano patterns that bridge the extemporaneous
outbursts of the other three. It’s sort of a free jazzversion of the 1972 pile-up Jamming with Edward, inwhich Ry Cooder and 60% of The Rolling Stones flip,
flop and fly while pianist Nicky Hopkins keeps themin something of a formation. This Week is in Two Weeks
may not be any better remembered than that earlier
album, but it similarly captures an oddly unexpurgatedmoment in time.

leveraging, to borrow from Zilber ’s own words, “moreof a sense of urgency with the New York band andmore of a feeling of contemplation and space with the
Bay Area band.” The results are captivating, with amore hard-swinging approach prevailing with theformer and a more lyrical one with the latter. Eachensemble is of the highest quality, both in interpreting
Zilber ’s arrangements and in the solo department,
unfortunately not identified in the scanty liner notes.
Turning to the material, many are the highlights.
From the New York band it is worth mentioning
opening burner “Hen House”, reminiscent of Joe
Henderson’s “Inner Urge”, particularly in Zilber ’s
effective solo; the arrangement and solos of a complex
and introspective reading of Wayne Shorter ’s “Fall”;
Miles Davis’ “Joshua”, based on a funky bassline byJohn Benitez and featuring the Rhodes piano of Mike
Holober (of Gotham Jazz Orchestra); and the ingenious“The Breckerfast Club” dedicated to and based onsome of the late Michael Brecker ’s patterns andfeaturing an exciting saxophone chase.
The Bay Area band’s highlights are the heartfelt
dedication “Shiva” to bassist John Shifflett, featuring
Dan Feiszli’s warm bass; “Another Prayer”, a John
Coltrane-inspired composition and arrangement;
and “Weather Shorter”, a dedication to Shorter ’s
Weather Report period featuring Zilber ’s soprano.
Speaking of which, it is only fair to emphasize theleader ’s contributions on both tenor and soprano,besides his composing, arranging and conducting.
Less convincing are the readings of “Skylark” and“Over The Rainbow”, with a rather conventional vocal
contribution by Joe Bagale. Overall a fine album
deserving a rapid follow-up.
For more information, visit originrecords.com

For more information, visit leorecords.com and espdisk.com

For more information, visit alisterspence.com

East West: Music for Big Bands
Michael Zilber (Origin)by Marco Cangiano

Silk Songs For Space Dogs
Potsa Lotsa XL (Leo)This Week is in Two Weeks
Talibam! with Silke Eberhard and Nikolaus Neuser(ESP-Disk’)by Kurt Gottschalk

Silke Eberhard’s fine work as instrumentalist andcomposer has won her the 2020 Jazzpreis Berlin thismonth, but it’s her talent as an arranger that makes her
stand out against a globe full of talented musicians in
the jazz tradition. Some well-placed and more-thanworthy projects have helped her to gain much deserved
attention; a couple of albums of Charles Mingus tunes
arranged for the unusual formation of trumpet, drums
and her own saxophone and the completion andrecording of an unfinished Eric Dolphy suite haven’t

Michael Zilber ’s resumé is rich and varied, deserving
much wider recognition. Originally from Canada, hespent the first part of his career in New York thenmoved across the country to San Francisco, where he
now resides. This is by far his most ambitious project
and first recording with big bands, following the very
successful Originals for the Originals and the quartets heshared with guitar great John Stowell.
Zilber ’s writing reflects a deep knowledge andappreciation of the jazz tradition, as many of his
original compositions paraphrase and borrow fromfamiliar chord sequences—“Fantasia on Trane
Changes” and “Repressions” being clear examples ofthis approach. Overall, Zilber seems to prefer a middleof-the-road aesthetic compared with Maria Schneider ’smore imaginative writing and Darcy James Argue andMichael Leonhart’s iconoclastic takes on the genre.
The juxtaposition between east and west isreflected by the choice of material, which aims at
THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 19

IN PRINT
Crossings
Veryan Weston (Hi4Head)
Crucial Anatomy
Last Dream of the Morning (Trost)
Shifa: Live at Cafe Oto
Rachel Musson/Pat Thomas/Mark Sanders (577 Records)
by Marc Medwin
Chasin’ The Bird (Charlie Parker in California)
Dave Chisholm with Peter Markowski (Z2 Comics)
by Elliott Simon

With a two-month residency at Billy Berg’s L.A. Jazz
Club, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie brought
bebop to the West Coast. Chasin’ the Bird is a graphic
novel that examines a portion of Bird’s time there.
The events that led up to Bird’s stay at Camarillo
State Hospital, subsequent release and famousresurgent performance at Jack’s Basket Room provide
fertile material for author/artist Dave Chisholm andcolorist Peter Markowski to chronicle Parker’s highs
and lows and add to his legend. The 2020 releasecoincides with the centennial of Parker’s birth and is
set to include recordings from this time period.
Chisholm is a trumpet player and educator witha deep understanding of Parker’s revolutionary
contributions to modern jazz but the story he tells is
contemporary. Frank discussion of racial inequality
and police brutality coupled with the “Breath” thatcomes out of Bird’s saxophone when he plays arechilling in their immediacy while Kareem AbdulJabbar’s foreword candidly places the past into thepresent. Chisholm also plays with the vagaries ofmemory and the astute reader can discover out-ofplace elements as six distinct narrators describe
Parker’s disappearances, public nudity, drug addiction
and hedonism. More interesting though are theirmemories of Bird’s thirst for knowledge and quest foruniversal truth as they relate to his music and being
Black in America. Markowski’s exceptional coloring is
the soundtrack to Chisholm’s narrative and as Parker’s
life spirals downward the music turns monochromatic.
Save for Gillespie, who is clearly Parker ’s
brother-in arms but exits early, the narrators all end
up at Jack’s Basket Room after giving singularinsights into Bird along the way. Jirayr Zorthian is
the “fellow artist”, whose ranch was a Bohemianparadise and the setting for a Parker performancethat literally turned orgiastic. He and Parker debate
the universality of art in the context of the origins of
the universe. The “fan” is photographer William
Claxton, who lives with his parents in suburbia. Hisinteractions with Bird are among the most interesting
and with Claxton’s parents away Bird crashes attheir house, turns young white suburban kids on to
Bach and tells them to remember everything thatthey practice and then forget it all when you start toplay. He and Claxton discuss race in America with
Parker opining, “Racism isn’t always loud…it’s thequiet kind that makes it impossible to relax.”
Sculptor Julie MacDonald is the “lover” who exposes
Parker to her world before the inevitable breakup
while John Coltrane, after a heated argument overParker ’s admiration for “old white European
musicians”, sees the future of Black American music
after hearing Parker play. Ross Russell, the founderof Dial Records who recorded Parker ’s most iconic
sides, is the “record executive” who takes the reader
through Parker ’s crash and burn and subsequent
rebirth. Parker ’s legend is ever expanding andChasin’ the Bird is a unique addition to canon.
For more information, visit z2comics.com

It is easy for the reviewer, confronted by music difficult
to understand, let alone elucidate, to fling adjectives
concerning diversity and versatility at the page andhope they stick. Mark Sanders removes all guilt fromthat verbal association, because it would be difficult toimagine a more multivalent presence in the drum chair.
He can make a “New Thing” blowing session swing
and a delicately free improvisation shimmer, but healso interjects powerhouse time drumming with justthe right balance of groove and freedom to keep a rocksolid sense of swing fresh. This entire continuum of
possibility is reflected on these discs, revealing a crosssection of his talent as we celebrate his 60th birthday.
While his wonderful trio with bassist John
Edwards and pianist Veryan Weston is not represented,
per se, two of the albums do allow audition of his workin that illustrious company, though the everadventurous Weston is at a keystation on Crossings.
The nine pieces offer up a bewildering but sometimes
whimsical array of influence, none more so than on“Extinction”. Dig that opening bass groove Weston islaying down, redolent of nothing so much as Stevie
Wonder ’s “Superstition”, with Sanders only too willingto join in the fun. The funky groove just begins to sizzle
when cellist Hannah Marshall intones the words ofWilliam Butler Yeats: “Had I the heavens’ embroideredcloths…” Her cello-doubled melody inhabits a spaceoutside but conjoined to everything else, a modal areaof “light and half-light” placing Sanders and Weston’ssure-fire brick-and-mortar foundation in stark relief. It
is a stunningly effective study in time and contrast,
mirrored in an even subtler fashion on the aptly titled“Kalimba Setting”. Who’s got the melody anyway,
Weston’s “kalimba” or Marshall’s wonderful pizzicato?
Maybe, it’s actually given to Sanders’ hi-hat, which wehear transforming, almost without awareness, fromexquisite echo and foil to rhythmic pillar.
A similar subtlety defines Crucial Anatomy, thesecond album by the trio of Sanders, saxophonist John
Butcher and bassist John Edwards. Amid thetransparent clarity of malleted toms and blocks, thatnasty groove Sanders can set up at any moment justpeeks around the corner on “Free from Ghosts” before
disappearing again to return in various transformations.
Edwards and Sanders are as tight as ever, as their loose
but womb-secure interplay opening the microtonallydroning “Curling Vine” attests and Butcher may as
well be an orchestra unto himself. The composer andimproviser Keith Rowe telescopes time by amplifying
the clicks made by movements of a steel ruler; Butcher
does something similar via staggeringly fastarticulation, flutter-tonguing his way toward rapture
as the trio intensity slowly builds from atomism towardlaminarity. Beyond all of this is the iridescent openingof “Spike Oil”, where the obvious percussion comesfrom Edwards! Butcher and Sanders are in territory
initially charted by AMM or Group Ongaku. While
Butcher ’s nearly inaudible rustlings liquify the air,
Sanders resonates and brushes parts of his kit insolidarity, several minutes of permeable bliss before
the piece takes on something close to an idiom.
Not that the word idiom is meant as a pejorative, as
illustrated by the live recordings comprising Shifa underthe brilliant direction of saxophonist Rachel Musson.
She, Sanders and pianist Pat Thomas engage in what
could be the most easily categorized of these three

20 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

albums,thoughThomas’counterpointon“Improvisation 2” already casts doubt on that statement,
prefiguring the complexities of exchanges to come.
Shades of those immensely satisfying early European
free improv dates are conjured as the trio interacts withall of the rapid-fire communication desired. This ismusic that also hearkens back to Stockhausen’s moment
form. Listen starting at 1:29 for one of these pithy
moments, explored and then discarded for further
adventures. Soprano and snare hit in perfectsynchronicity, Musson then revisiting a ripe tone while
Sanders crescendos with rolls on metal and skin,Thomas interjecting something miraculously merging
block chord and arpeggio. If Sanders spends
considerable portions in his non-repetitive and timbrally
diverse Tony Oxley bag, he is continually reaching
beyond it, as with the multiple traditions he evokes in
the first improvisation after Thomas and Musson’s richdialogue. He virtually whispers, cymbal and snarebarely breathing past chords and tenor. Of course, therepose doesn’t last long in such a dynamic setting.
It is largely down to Sanders’ comfort in whateversituation he finds himself, his obvious love ofcollaboration, that these albums work as well as theydo, but every musician in these trio sessions works
along similarly symbiotic lines. They create music
whose originality may just as often reject or reference
the myriad traditions spawning it.
For more information, visit hi4headrecords.com, trost.atand 577records.com

Vanishing Light in the Tunnel of Dreams
Pinkish Black/Yells at Eels (Ayler)
by Alex Henderson

Vanishing Light in the Tunnel of Dreams brings together

two very different groups: experimental rock duo
Pinkish Black (Daron Beck, keyboards, synthesizer; Jon
Teague, drums, synthesizer) and avant garde jazz trio
Yells at Eels (Dennis González, trumpet, percussion,
who turns 66 this month; and sons Aaron, electric bass,
acoustic bass, vocals and Stefan, drums, percussion,
marimba). This recording mixes electric avant garde
jazz with elements of progressive rock, space rock andfunk, the eclecticism partially from the variety of
instruments in use. Some of the synthesizers emulate
the sound of a crunching rock guitar and, as such,moody offerings such as “The Sorrow of Guernica”,“Slow Cascade of Tears” and Middle Eastern-flavored“Heatstroke Mirage” have a great deal of rock energy
to go with their electric avant garde jazz improvisation.
The word “moody” definitely applies throughout
this CD. “Meditation”, the title track and otherselections favor the more contemplative and restrainedside of avant garde jazz. Darker emotions are often
expressed and some of the harmonies recall classic
Pink Floyd albums of the ‘70s such as Dark Side of theMoon, Animals and Wish You Were Here while theinfluence of Miles Davis’ fusion dates of the ‘70s-80s is
impossible to miss during González’ spare,introspective trumpet improvisations on “The Sorrowof Guernica”, “Meditation” and other selections.
The members of Pinkish Black and Yells at Eels
aren’t afraid to incorporate many different types ofmusic and the result is an appealing, unexpected
departure from the groups’ own releases.
For more information, visit ayler.com

drop the needle

Astonishments
Steve Swell Quintet Soul Travelers (RogueArt)
The Center Will Hold (featuring Andrew Cyrille)
Steve Swell (Not Two)by Mark Keresman

N ot to burden trombonist Steve Swell with titanic

comparisons, but it is safe to say that he is a logical heir
to the worldly, cutting-edge personship of Roswell
Rudd. Swell studied under Rudd and also with masters
Jimmy Knepper and Grachan Moncur III (like Rudd,
an associate of Archie Shepp in the ‘60s). Swell
possesses a hearty, rippling, vibrant, somewhat
vocalized tone, one of the most distinctive around, andlike Rudd, is strongly rooted in the past with an eye on
the outermost limits.
Astonishments is one of those relatively rare items,a jazz album featuring spoken word, in this case by
Leena Conquest. The kickoff title track features her
dryly sing-song narration amid the dandy din. Bassist
William Parker and drummer Gerald Cleaver maintaina viable feeling of forward motion as Conquest pays
homage to free jazz masters past and present and themuse(s) that drove them, Swell sounding out bristlingtrombone in punctuation.
“Sketch 7” finds the leader front and center,leading a twisty bit of freebop, driving and punchy,
pianist Dave Burrell opaquely banging out percussive
chords, alto saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc delivering
obliquely Charlie Parker-flavored swing, robust andlithe. Parker buzzes a brief solo and Cleaver is, well,
Cleaver—clean, sharp and churning without overly
drawing attention to himself, a true team player. Fullof vibrancy and free of self-absorption, Astonishments
is a consistently bracing and fascinating listen.
The Center Will Not Hold is a slightly moreconventional Swell effort. The instrumentation,
however, veers off the beaten path—this is perhaps oneof the rarest of birds, as this session features harmonica
not employed in any sort of bluesy or rootsy manner.
Ariel Bart plays in a way that texturally enriches theensemble playing, the “saxophone” (this writer has
heard the harmonica referred to as the “Mississippi
saxophone”) to Swell’s trombone.
Béla Bartók’s “Mikrokosmos II” features a minifree-for-all until Swell’s torrid soloing shows one way
through the piece with crystalline, shimmering piano
from Robert Boston, drummer Andrew Cyrille crackling
through the stratosphere and strings (violinist/violist
Jason Kao Hwang and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm)searing their way across the skies. “Laugh So You Don’t
Cry” has a droll, zigzagging, vaguely Thelonious
Monk-like theme, a launching pad for invigorating
soloing from Hwang and Bart, the latter who aims forsteely, brass-like wails and gets them too. Swell makeswith jolly burlesques and Boston goes to town with his
inner Cecil Taylor but veers into rollicking, barrelhouseing Jaki Byard territory as well. The midtempo,
undulating “Robo Call” has a nifty Monk-meets-Steve
Reich intro, then trombone, harmonica and strings
paint a yearning panorama. Swell roars like Ruddreborn here amid a tensely, tersely clattering
background, Bart blowing soulfully or frenetically, thestrings evoking the wah-wah effect on Miles Davis’
horn heard in his early ‘70s records.
In an era where far too many jazz albums can besummarized in seven words or less, Swell delivers two
gems that lay down good times while keeping you
guessing—fun, substantial and substantially fun.

First Time Out (Live at Slugs 1967)
Rashied Ali Quintet (Survival)
Duo Exchange
Rashied Ali/Frank Lowe (Survival)by Duck Baker

G iven how things played out, it’s amusing toremember that Rashied Ali did not make John
Coltrane’s Ascension date in June 1965 because HE
didn’t like the idea of playing with another drummer
in the band. Instead Ali’s recording debut came with
Archie Shepp the following month (for On This Night).
But Coltrane was determined to pursue the idea of
a two-drummer lineup and Ali joined the band a few
months later, appearing on Meditations in November.
This led to McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones leaving thegroup, both saying that they couldn’t hear what wasgoing on. And ironically, Coltrane never again
recorded with two trap drummers, though otherpercussionists were often added (as had happened onsome dates with Jones).
In retrospect, Coltrane’s desire for having two
drummers seems less relevant than his admiration for
Ali’s ability to play “multi-directional rhythms”,
which allowed the leader to go take any rhythmic
path at any time. This seems key, not only in contrast
to Jones, who always implied a given time and usuallystated it, but also to the continuous flow of a Sunny
Murray or the total abstraction of the young Milford
Graves. And we certainly heard how Coltrane thrived
in Ali’s rhythmic universe on the late quintet
recordings and especially the duos on Interstellar
Space (recorded in early 1967 but not released until1974). He hadn’t intended simply to replace Joneswith Ali, but in retrospect each drummer was perfectfor Coltrane’s purposes when they were in the band.
Just as Coltrane was making his last live
appearances, Ali began leading his own dates in clubs
around New York and we now have a live recordingof the first of these, recorded at Slugs’ Saloon in May
of 1967. The historical value of this release isenormous, for several reasons. Not least of these is
the chance to hear more of trumpeter Dewey Johnson,
who made such a strong impression on Ascension, as
well as the young Stanley Cowell on piano and littleknown tenor saxophonist Ramon Morris (who had abrief tenure in Art Blakey’s early ‘70s Jazz
Messengers). Of these three Cowell plays the mostconsistently interesting solos, though honestly bassist
Reggie Johnson threatens to smoke everyone when
his turns come around. If Dewey Johnson’s Ascension
cameos left us wanting more, his longest solos hererisk having the opposite effect, not so much because
he lacks imagination as because he doesn’t seemconcerned with pacing the development of his ideas,
which often come at us as a series of brief, abstractstatements that are all but disconnected. When hedoes find the magic to make this demanding approachbuild, the results are arresting (his Side D solo is thebest example).
Morris at this stage was a late-period Coltrane
disciple with a strong sound and impressive technicalcommand, but even though he seems to do everythingright, the listener may again find attention wandering
after four or five minutes. Both horns do alter theirapproaches for “Ballade” to good effect. Morris’ soloon this is not only engaging but, in places, downrightmoving. Here again, though, Reggie Johnson seems
to be operating on a different level from the preceding
soloists. The horn players benefit greatly from Ali’s
support throughout, but it’s hard to hear much of the
piano and bass accompaniment except on this quiet
track because the recorded balance favors the drums.
Caveats aside, First Time Out is easy to recommend toserious free jazz fans, especially those who arefocused on Ali or the two Johnsons.
While this previously-unissued record will bewelcomed by devotees of the genre, Duo Exchangewith Frank Lowe is a masterpiece and having it
expanded to two-LP length qualifies as an event,particularly since the 1999 CD reissue was, for some
unknown reason, shorter than the original LP by ten
minutes. People seem to have been confused by thefact that, while the LP listed Side A as “Exchange Part1” and Side B as “Exchange Part 2”, each side had two
tracks, so simply looking at the track listings for the
rerelease doesn’t warn listeners that two shorter
pieces were excluded. These provided a change ofpace from the fury of the longer tracks, one featuring
Lowe on Japanese flute (“Movement IV” here), andthe other (now “Movement II”) on tenor, evoking thegrowls of Ben Webster.
This was the first release on Survival Records,
which was intended to be a joint enterprise for Ali
and Lowe. After this initial release, however, thesaxophonist left the label to the drummer (though it’s
possible that a 1974 session of Lowe’s that was issued
on Triple Point in 2014 was originally intended forrelease on Survival). Duo Exchange was recorded in1972, released the following year, and enthusiasticallyreceived by free jazz listeners, but before the dust had
settled, Interstellar Space was out and Ali and Lowewere no longer looking to build on what they had
done together. All of this helped keep Duo Exchange
from getting the attention it deserved.
Since comparisons to Interstellar Space areprobably inevitable, the first thing we should observe
about this exercise is that Lowe does not suffer fromthe juxtaposition. For one thing, he comes as muchout of John Gilmore, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah
Sanders as he does out of Coltrane and, for another,Ali mixes in other approaches here besides the multidirectional rhythms we hear on Interstellar Space (evenincluding straight timekeeping), so the comparison is
not as direct as it would seem.
But the main point is that Lowe was a giant in his
own right, someone whose own voice was alreadystrong and would become more defined with thepassage of time. Of course, it really would be unfair tocompare this or almost any other record to one of thegreatest statements left by one of our greatest artists,
but the Lowe-Ali duo isn’t about carefully crafted
artistic statements so much as a volcanic outburst of
raw feeling, guided by fearless musical instinct andintelligence. Not a summing-up, but a declaration of
intent. The feeling does include reflective moments,
like both takes of the previously unreleased ballad thatis called “Movement V”, but the lasting impression isof full-on wailing and this is enhanced by the recording
itself, which was pushed to the brink of distortion byengineer Marzette Watts. Some think that this wasdone deliberately, to underline the galvanic nature of
the music, but it’s also possible that Watts was simply
not as accomplished behind the board as he was witha saxophone. The added material really enhances ourappreciation of the record. The alternate takes,
fragments and breakdowns help us see what wasplanned and what was improvised and basicallydouble the amount of great music we have.
Both sets are beautifully produced and packaged,
with immaculate mixing, mastering, informative
liners and superior vinyl pressings.
For more information, visit rashiedali.org

For more information, visit roguart.com and nottwo.com

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 21

on screen

Live at the Apollo Theater
Kamasi Washington (Amazon Prime)by Eric Wendell“It’s just fun creating with people that can create…

that can create themselves.” So says bandleader
Kamasi Washington 22 minutes into the concert
film/documentary Live at the Apollo Theater. The
quote is a fitting description of not only the film but
the generosity and respect that Washington has forhis band and for the creative spirit of jazz.
When Washington released his debut album The
Epic in 2015 he wasn’t kidding: the sheer spectrumof sound that he created included jazz, psychedelicrock and contemporary concert music. With thefilm, director Michael Garber brilliantly shows said
spectrum of sound along with a visionary flair thatbeautifully showcases Washington and Co.’s talents.
Filmed on Feb. 23rd, 2019, the concert footage isintercut with Washington exploring Harlem, where
he speaks about the importance of the neighborhoodand its cultural heritage. While the documentary
portion of the film shows Washington as the human,as the proponent of jazz as an art form, the precious
time away from the concert portion of the film is felt
at every moment.
Washington begins the film with “Show Me The
Way” from his latest release Heaven and Earth. The
future-bop feel excellently showcases Washington’ssolo style: a swashbuckling blend of classic bebop
phrasing with next-level funk flavors. On thesubsequent “Connections”, Washington’s slow burnof gentle neo-soul to midtempo R&B shows how
adept he is at allowing the music to breathe, to let
the sonority of the players bring it all to life.
What is most striking is how warm and generous
Washington is to his bandmates, giving several ofthem their time in the spotlight to shine. Most
notable is his father, flutist/soprano saxophonist
Rickey Washington, who takes an extended solo
during the dub-influenced song “Askim”. As
Washington states, “My dad made a lot of sacrifices
to really take care of myself and my brothers andsisters. I remember being a kid and wishing that mydad would go out and play more.” The sentiment
could not be truer as the elder Washington’s
beautiful tone and Washington’s sincere comments
about his father are lovingly sentimental to say theleast.
While the documentary portion does notprovide much to the overall film itself as the concert
footage is so captivating, it does show that
Washington’s heart and soul is as forward-thinking
as his music. In his words, “I am trying to pull up
things deep inside myself more so than discoverthem. I don’t look at it as a journey that I am trying
to complete. I don’t look at it as a journey that I am
trying to enjoy. Whatever I am doing for whatever it
is worth, it’s important to create something that canbe passed on, that can be left. To leave something
behind of value on this Earth with the people of the
future.”For more information, visit amazon.com/KamasiWashington-Live-Apollo-Theater/dp/B083ZLQNF2

Codes/Myths
Dave Rempis/Frank Rosaly (Aerophonic)
Triple Tube (Live at Tube’s 2019)
Dave Rempis/Elisabeth Harnik/Michael Zerang(Not Two)by John Sharpe

The work of Chicago reedplayer Dave Rempis enjoysa regular place in these pages. He allies a prodigious
talent to a fervent work ethic, manifest in extensive
curatorial activity, a normally hectic touring schedule,
exponentially multiplying collaborations and aconsequent plethora of documentation. For the last, hereaps the benefits of running his own Aerophonic
Records, giving him flexibility and creative control
over what makes it into the public domain. But whether
partnerships come long established or freshly minted,
his improvised encounters are always worth hearing.
It’s almost 20 years since Rempis first met drummer
Frank Rosaly. In spite of multiple hookups, Codes/
Myths represents only the duo’s second recording inthat period. It’s a 2018 live date from Chicago’s Elastic
Arts, captured during Rosaly’s brief return to The
Windy City after relocating to Amsterdam in 2016. The
double-album contains two sets, each disc comprising
one lengthy excursion, around the half-hour mark, andone shorter, around ten minutes. Rempis displays all
the tools in the avant reed player ’s armory, but uses
them as means to an end, making music with tension
and release, light and shade, overblown excitement
and freewheeling narrative drawing on the tradition.
Rosaly attends to detail and variety of resonance, pitchand surface but alchemically creates a waxing andwaning pulse from sometimes unlikely components.
Rosaly has been part of Rempis’ Percussion Quartet
since its inception so their simpatico approach comesas no surprise. They develop the pieces organically.
“Pattern In Distance” begins in a delicious elongatedcall and response between Rempis’ chuntering baritone
and Rosaly’s sudden rejoinders, which speaks volumes
about their masterful pacing on these long forms.
Throughout the pair alternate between the expected
drum/saxophone duties and timbral explorations asmuch a meeting of personalities as about instrumentalroles. In fact it’s the latter that dominates on this set.
That’s especially the case on the second disc on which“Air In Between” is stretched out until almost
translucent while “Aletheia” incorporates passages ofmournful lyricism and only works up to something ofa crescendo at the very end of its 32-minute span.
On Triple Tube (Live at Tube’s 2019), recorded at thetitular club in Graz, Austria, Rempis reunites with ahometown familiar, drummer Michael Zerang,
Austrian pianist Elisabeth Harnik completing the trio.
She has made a name for herself with her appearancesalongside Rempis’ erstwhile employer Ken Vandermark
in the DEK Trio, as well as in duo with bassist Joëlle
Léandre. Each performer possesses an individual
sound, which they deploy with sensitivity and flair.
Zerang imparts non-linear momentum with his
patented patter, rumbles and scrapes while Rempis isfluent and exciting, his whickering cries laden withemotion. Harnik and Zerang in particular combine
in percussive textures and episodes of synchronized
pounding. Harnik proves notably adept at jagged Cecil
Taylor-inspired hammered lines that forge knotty
substructures and ratchet up the intensity. She often
takes responsibility for moving on from the tonal
interplay that opens three of the four improvisations
into meatier territory. “Triple Tube II” starts withmetallic shimmers on the piano strings, staccato

22 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD

plosives and yelps and indeterminate clatter.
Development, when it arrives, is unforced, quickchanging and unpredictable, with cues taken or
deflected in a constant recalibration. While there areflareups, there are no conflagrations. Between times,
periods of saxophone investigations, ambivalentrattling and left-field pianistics serve to refuelscurrying exchanges in a series of peaks and troughs.
They rarely go for full-out assault and even when they
do, as in the final installment of “Triple Tube III”, it canbe short-lived, sparking another unexpected turn.
For more information, visit aerophonicrecords.com andnottwo.com. Rempis livestreams Wednesdays at daverempis.com.

Radio Inderberg
Jon Pål Inderberg Trio (AMP Music)
by Donald Elfman

Baritone saxophonist Jon Pål Inderberg, who turns 70
this month, is a veteran of the Norwegian jazz scene
and this album documents his most recent trio,a sterling group that made its recording debut in 2016.
They expand the frame with a collection of sounds thatcelebrate both the jazz and Nordic traditions, all witha sense of adventure. Thus, despite the fact that there is
traditional music of several stripes—from the jazz
world there is music by the recently departed alto
saxophonist Lee Konitz (with whom Inderberg worked
and released a live album from the 2005 Oslo Jazz
Festival), late Swedish baritone saxophonist Lars
Gullin and pianist Thelonious Monk—it sounds freshand different.
The two tunes from Konitz are ‘typical’ takes ofcontrafacts, the kind that the late saxophonist did on
the changes of standards. “No Splice” is derived from“You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to”, opening with arichly pulsing solo from bassist Trygve Waldemar
Fiske and moving out into a dancing, boppish play on
the Cole Porter standard. Drummer Håkon Mjåset
Johansen enters in a flurry and the tune is pushed into
spirited improvisation, with a dazzling solo byInderberg that leads all the way to the close. A similar
kind of play happens in “It’s You” (on “It’s You or NoOne”) with bass leading the way again and all threecapering over the Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn classic.
Monk’s light, swinging “Pannonica” is a breezy affair
with a pointed bass solo and more inspired work allover the baritone while Gullin’s delicate ballad“Merlin” emerges from Inderberg’s dark and richplaying on the traditional Norwegian tune “Sorglat”.
And there’s more rich variety from the Norwegianfolk tradition: the opening “Den Lyse Dag ForgangenEr” throbs with energy as Inderberg sails over drums
with a plaintive air; two “Bykle” tunes pay tribute to avillage in the country and “Draumvkvedtonar Del 1”
and “Draumvkvedtonar Del 2” are related to a
medieval Norwegian poem and suggest the mysticalwith delicately pounded toms and Inderberg’s
visionary improvisation, ranging from the full-throatedto the whispering.
The album ends with a gloriously playful duo
compositionbyInderberg
andJohansen,“Presentasjon”, in which the leader is all over his
baritone combined with some truly wacky vocalizing.
It’s a dazzlingly animated close to this beautifully
concise undertaking.
For more information, visit ampmusicrecords.com

boxed set

The Anthony Braxton Project
Thumbscrew (Cuneiform)
Even Better
Michael Formanek Very Practical Trio (Intakt)
by Tyran Grillo

Thumbscrew is the collective name of Tomas Fujiwara(drums and vibraphone), Mary Halvorson (guitar) andMichael Formanek (bass). This latest album, dedicatedentirely to composer Anthony Braxton, grew out of anartist residency at Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum andunder its auspices takes on the darkest implications of
the trio’s moniker, which in these divided times feel
more relevant than ever. Implications of history, andall the violence and trauma that go along with it, feel
relevantly addressed. Whether by design or accident(or both), such confluences of the actual and its
interpretation walk hand-in-hand down roads pavedin self-reckoning. Such is the power of Braxton’s
portals, through which the trio step with one eye open.
Between the jaunty edges of “Composition No. 52” andnocturnal swing of “Composition No. 79”, there is somuch to chew on that you’ll want to dry the rest andsave it for treks yet to be taken. Throughout, drums
and bass create a tactile foundation for guitar ’s
exegeses, which are the veritable nervous system ofthis nascent organism. Whether setting up the inhale of“Composition No. 68”’s exhale via electronicenhancements or stirring the waters of “Composition
No. 61” as if said waters might evaporate and therefore
lose their nutritional value if not gulped down,
Halvorson absorbs every last drop of inspiration athand. Despite these explosions of virtuosity, however,
the most astonishing moments are to be found in thequieter strains of “Composition No. 61”. “Composition
No. 14” makes three appearances, thus showing themalleability not only of the pieces themselves, but alsoof the trio interpreting them. Of these, Fujiwara andFormanek’s solo takes are especially moving. Like thediagrammatic titles adorning the digipak, they are
conduits of synesthetic reckoning.
Formanek’s Very Practical Trio carries the one of
Halvorson and adds alto saxophonist Tim Berne. On
debut Even Better, the band examines challenging yet
welcoming soundscapes with bare acoustic means.
Hearing this album alongside The Anthony Braxton
Project is like finding that lone diamond of hope in therough of hardship that has become our new normal. The
same gnarled roots are there, but are watered by thepresent trio with the comforts of camaraderie, dialogic
listening and complementary language. Here thecontributions are more triangulated. Berne’s lyricism is
as Popeye-armed as ever, making snappy work of “The
Shifter” and “But Will It Float” while Formanek flexes
the bluesy backbone of “Like Statues” and slaps thecheek of “Apple and Snake”. Halvorson, for her part,
spider-crawls across “Still Here” with intuitive integrity,
strums and distorts her joyful way through “Bomb theCactus” and caresses the wounded heart of “Shattered”,
the latter written in memory of those who died in the2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting, also in Pittsburgh.
Whereas “Suckerpunch” sets the tone in the above
regard and more with its jagged beauty and free
precision, Scott LaFaro’s “Jade Visions” closes out withthe only tune not composed by Formanek. As an echochamber of the past, it gives us a glimpse of a time when
the only masks worn were by those who wished neverto reveal their love for the creative process.
For more information, visit cuneiformrecords.com andintaktrec.ch

The Complete Fontana Albums 1961-69
Tubby Hayes (Fontana - Decca/Universal)
by Scott Yanow

Edward Brian “Tubby” Hayes (1935-73) was arguably
the top British jazz musician of 1955-65. During aperiod when British players had to move to the U.S.
in order to be accepted as world-class musicians(most notably George Shearing, Marian McPartland
and Victor Feldman) and when its modern jazz scene
had a general inferiority complex, Hayes, who madea strong impression during his infrequent visits to the
U.S., chose to stay in England and be the biggest fishin a small pond.
A tenor saxophonist who could play as fast as
Johnny Griffin and whose ability to articulate
individual notes at rapid tempos is a bit reminiscentof Sal Nistico (whom he preceded), Hayes was also askilled vibraphonist, flutist, soprano saxophonist,
big band arranger and composer. A professionalmusician by the time he was 15, he co-led The Jazz
Couriers during 1957-59 with the slightly older
Ronnie Scott, who was considered England’s top
tenor before Hayes’ arrival. While his boppish
recordings from the ‘50s have mostly been reissued,
Hayes’ important work for the Fontana label in the‘60s has, with only a few exceptions, been scarce eversince their original release.
The Complete Fontana Albums 1961-1969 is acompact but attractive 13-CD boxed set with
impeccable sound quality and packaging, including a
148-page booklet with very extensive notes by Hayes’
biographer Simon Spillett. The artwork for the ten
original LPs is reproduced in miniature with alternate
takes from the sessions added. The 100% Proof album
with its extra material becomes a two-CD set and thebox also includes the twofer Grits, Beans and Greens,which was only recently discovered.
Tubbs serves as a perfect start for the collection
and a sampling for Hayes. With his regular quartet of1961 (pianist Terry Shannon, bassist Jeff Clyne anddrummer Bill Eyden, the rhythm section for the lastrecorded iteration of The Jazz Couriers), Hayes reallyrips through the opener (“The Late One”). He also
plays vibraphone on two relatively mellow numbers
in a group with five woodwinds, writes for a 13-piecebrass-dominated orchestra and on tenor caresses the
melody of a few standards before launching into
heated double-time runs.
Tubbs In New York finds Hayes holding his own
during his first visit to the U.S. with a top-notch
rhythm section (pianist Horace Parlan, bassist George
Duvivier and drummer Dave Bailey) and (for threeappearances apiece) vibraphonist Eddie Costa andflugelhornist Clark Terry. A roaring version of“Airegin” and Hayes’ fearless tradeoffs with Terryare highlights. Nothing about this music would alert
listeners that Hayes was not a New Yorker.
Hayes shared two albums with other leaders(American conga player Jack Costanzo and British
vocalist Cleo Laine) so his portions are released on
CD #3. Equation In Rhythm has him showcased witha big band on the two-part “Southern Suite” while
Palladium Jazz Date has excellent performances by thesame quartet as appears on Tubbs. As a bonus, Hayes’quintet is heard on two numbers previously only
available as a 45.
Return Visit from 1962 is the best known of thesealbums since it features Hayes back in the U.S. in an
allstar set with tenor saxophonist/flutist James
Moody (listed as “Jimmy Gloomy”, as if that would
hide his identity), the always-remarkable reedplayer
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (who somehow takes a solo on“Alone Together” with no reed on his tenor!), pianist
Walter Bishop, bassist Sam Jones and drummer Louis
Hayes. The playing is loose (no prior planning took
place) and the set falls short of expectations but
Hayes sounds fine. If he had chosen to stay in New
York, his career and life would have been completely
different and perhaps he would be a name (in jazzhouseholds) today.
Down In The Village and Late Spot At Scott’s aretaken from the same two-night engagement at Ronnie
Scott’s in London from 1962. Hayes leads a quintet
with the excellent Scottish trumpeter Jimmy Deuchar,
pianist Gordon Beck, bassist Freddie Logan anddrummer Allan Ganley. He plays credible soprano on
one number, is featured on vibraphone for threesongs and otherwise swings hard on tenor. These sets
give one an idea what it must have been like to see
Hayes in his prime performing in a small club.
Hayes occasionally led a big band in the ‘60s
filled with many of Great Britain’s finest players(Ronnie Ross, Bobby Wellins, Peter King, Ian Hamer,
Les Condon, et al.). 1964’s Tubbs’ Tours has nine songs(all originals other than Bud Powell’s “ParisianThoroughfare”), each of which pay tribute to adifferent country, mostly European but also including
India and Israel. While that music is pleasing, 100%
Proof from 1966 is the classic. Most of the selections
are fresh versions of jazz standards including a
blazing “Sonnymoon For Two” (featuring both Hayes
and Scott on tenors), “Bluesology” and “Milestones”.
The lengthy title cut is an exhilarating tour de force
for Hayes, one of the recorded highpoints of his
career. A second disc of previously unreleased music(with alternate takes, edits and three new pieces) is awelcome addition.
Mexican Green from 1967 finds Hayes (like Stan
Getz of the era) successfully exploring aspects of freejazz and postbop with a young rhythm section(pianist Mick Pyne, bassist Ron Mathewson anddrummer Tony Levin) while still holding on to his
hardbop roots and musical identity. He really
stretches out on the frequently free 14-minute title
cut, one of the gems in the last of the great Hayes
Fontana albums. In contrast, The Orchestra has his bigband playing pop tunes of the era and, althoughpleasant, their versions of such songs as “Hey Jude”,“Up Up And Away” and “These Boots Are Made For
Walking” will not excite anyone. This is typical ofwhat record labels were expecting of creative jazzartists by the late ‘60s, trying hard to jump on the rockbandwagon no matter how instantly dated it sounded.
The rise of rock and avant garde jazz, his drug
problems and gradually worsening health due to a
weak heart resulted in Hayes losing his recording
contract and passing away when he was just 38. The
last two CDs in this set, Grits, Beans and Greens (alsocalled The Lost Fontana Studio Sessions 1969 and notreleased until recently) hint at a future that neverwas. It features Hayes and his quartet of Pyne,
Mathewson and drummer Spike Wells on 18
performances that only comprise five different songs
with quite a few alternate takes, mostly holding one’s
interest throughout. It shows that, if his health had
held out, Hayes still had a great deal more tocontribute. He deserves to be remembered and thisperfectly conceived Fontana set (little publicized in
the U.S.) should be on many Top-10 lists.
For more information, visit decca.com

THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | AUGUST 2020 23

M ISCELLANY
ONbyTHISDAYAndrey Henkin

Hamp and Getz
Lionel Hampton/Stan Getz (Norgran)August 1st, 1955

Tears for Dolphy
Ted Curson (Fontana)
August 1st, 1964

The First Cycle
Bill Cole (Music from Dartmouth)
August 1st, 1975

Live At Pit Inn
Elvin Jones (Polydor)
August 1st, 1985

Masada Het
John Zorn (DIW)
August 1st, 1996

While the life/career of vibraphonist

Trumpeter Ted Curson made two
albums for Dutch Fontana in the mid‘60s, each with a variation of theMarte Röling lithograph for a cover.
The first is with Curson’s partner ofthe era, tenor saxophonist Bill Barron,plus the rhythm section of bassist
Herb Bushler and drummer Dick Berk
that appears on Curson’s 1965 Atlantic
album The New Thing & The Blue Thing(with Barron plus French pianist
Georges Arvanitas). The setlist is twopieces by Barron and four by theleader, three of them future staples of
his repertoire, including the title track.

Bill Cole is notable for his work on
a world—literally—of reed and wind
instruments. For this DartmouthCollege concert, Cole restricts himself
to Ghanian flute, Chinese musette,
Indian shenai and vocals. His matesare equally flexible: tenor saxophonist
Sam Rivers also plays piano while
drummer Warren Smith adds kettle
drums, marimba and percussion for a
panoply of textures across the nearly
43-minute title improv, named after
the fact for this 1980 release. Of note:
this is the first of only two LPs issued
by the college’s in-house imprint.

Elvin Jones’ Jazz Machine hardly had
the longevity of fellow drummer Art
Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, existing
only from 1978-92 on record. But itcompetes when it comes to members,
a total of eight saxophonists and fourbassists on eight albums. For this live
set from Tokyo’s Shinjuku Pit Inn,the lineup is Sonny Fortune (tenor
saxophone, flute), band stalwart Pat
LaBarbera (tenor/soprano), Fumio
Karashima (piano, its first use in theband) and old pal Richard Davis(bass) on a piece by Jones, two by wife
Keiko and “My One And Only Love”.

When the case on jazz is closed, John

Lionel Hampton encased that of tenor
saxophonist Stan Getz (the former
born nearly 19 years earlier than thelatter and dying 11 years later), thepair were active across so many of thesame decades it is quite surprising
they only recorded together once, this10” LP for Norman Granz. They are
joined by the very West Coast rhythm
section of pianist Lou Levy, bassist
Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Shelly
Manne for a program of jazz classics,
including a ballad medley where theprincipals each get a pair of features.

Zorn’s Masada Quartet should beamong the Top 10 seminal groups,
not only for its longevity (1994-2018)or over a dozen albums made for DIW
and Tzadik, but also for beginning
Zorn’s massive Masada composing
project, 613 pieces across three books.
The quartet of Zorn (alto saxophone),
Dave Douglas (trumpet), Greg Cohen(bass) and Joey Baron (drums) made10 CDs in quick succession from 199497, named for the first ten letters ofthe Hebrew alphabet, of which this is
the eighth, comprising 10 Zorn pieces.

August 6†Norman Granz 1918-2001†Buddy Collette 1921-2010†Dorothy Ashby 1932-86
Joe Diorio b.1936†Charlie Haden 1937-2014†Baden Powell 1937-2000†Byard Lancaster 1942-2012
Joseph Daley b.1949
Victor Goines b.1961
Ramón López b.1961
Ravi Coltrane b.1965
Andrew Bemkey b.1974

August 2†Big Nick Nicholas 1922-97†Albert Stinson 1944-69†Naná Vasconcelos 1944-2016
David Binney b.1961
Billy Kilson b.1962
Zach Brock b.1974
August 3†Charlie Shavers 1917-71†Eddie Jefferson 1918-79†Dom Um Romao 1925-2005
Tony Bennett b.1926†Ray Draper 1940-82
Roscoe Mitchell b.1940
Hamid Drake b.1955
Tom Zlabinger b.1971

August 11
Peter King b.1940
Steve Nelson b.1954
Russ Gershon b.1959
Donny McCaslin b.1966
August 12†Bent Axen 1925-2010
Dave Lee b.1930
Pat Metheny b.1954
Phil Palombi b.1970

August 7†Idrees Sulieman 1923-2002†Rahsaan Roland Kirk 1936-77
Howard Johnson b.1941
Marcus Roberts b.1963
August 8†Lucky Millinder 1900-66†Benny Carter 1907-2003†Jimmy Witherspoon 1923-97†Urbie Green 1926-2018†Don Burrows 1928-2020†Vinnie Dean 1929-2010

August 4†Louis Armstrong 1901-71†Bill Coleman 1904-81†Herb Ellis 1921-2010
Sonny Simmons b.1933
Bobo Stenson b.1944
Terri Lyne Carrington b.1965
Eric Alexander b.1968
Michäel Attias b.1968

August 14†Eddie Costa 1930-62
Jimmy Wormworth b.1937
Tony Monaco b.1959
Walter Blanding b.1971
August 15†Oscar Peterson 1925-2007
Bill Dowdy b.1933
Stix Hooper b.1938
Art Lillard b.1950
Dennis Gonzalez b.1954
Stefan Zeniuk b.1980

August 9
Jack DeJohnette b.1942
August 10†Arnett Cobb 1918-89
Chuck Israels b.1936
Denny Zeitlin b.1938
Mike Mantler b.1943†Fred Ho 1957-2014
Akiko Pavolka b.1965
Cyrille Aimée b.1984

August 5†Terry Pollard 1931-2009
Sigi Schwab b.1940†Lenny Breau 1941-84
Airto Moreira b.1941
Phil Wachsmann b.1944
Jemeel Moondoc b.1951

August 13†Stuff Smith 1909-67†George Shearing 1919-2011†Benny Bailey 1925-2005†Joe Puma 1927-2000†Mulgrew Miller 1955-2013

August 16†Mal Waldron 1926-2002†Bill Evans 1929-80
Alvin Queen b.1950
Cecil Brooks III b.1959
Ellery Eskelin b.1959

August 17†Ike Quebec 1918-63†George Duvivier 1920-85†Derek Smith 1931-2016†Duke Pearson 1932-80
Peter Martin b. 1970
Jeb Patton b.1974
August 18†Eddie Durham 1906-87†Don Lamond 1920-2003†Chuck Connors 1930-94
Adam Makowicz b.1940
John Escreet b.1984
August 19†Jimmy Rowles 1918-96
Danny Mixon b.1949
Tim Hagans b.1954
Marc Ducret b.1957

August 22†Malachi Favors 1937-2004
Warren Daly b.1943
Vernon Reid b.1958
Aruán Ortiz b.1973
August 23
Martial Solal b.1927†Gil Coggins 1928-2004†Danny Barcelona 1929-2007
Terje Rypdal b.1947
Bobby Watson b.1953
Brad Mehldau b.1970
August 24†Al Philburn 1902-72†Buster Smith 1904-91†Alphonso Trent 1905-59

August 20†Jack Teagarden 1905-64†Frank Rosolino 1926-78†Jimmy Raney 1927-95
Enrico Rava b.1939
Milford Graves b.1941
Jiggs Whigham b.1943
Terry Clarke b.1944
John Clayton b.1952
Reto Weber b.1953

August 25†Bob Crosby 1913-93†Leonard Gaskin 1920-2009†Rune Gustafsson 1933-2012
Wayne Shorter b.1933†Carrie Smith 1941-2012
Günter “Baby” Sommer b.1943
Pat Martino b.1944†Keith Tippett 1947-2020
Michael Marcus b.1952
Karriem Riggins b.1975
Michael Dease b.1982

August 21†Count Basie 1904-84†Art Farmer 1928-99†Malachi Thompson 1949-2006
Peter Apfelbaum b.1960
Oscar Perez b.1974
Chris Dingman b.1980

August 26†Jimmy Rushing 1903-72†Francis Wayne 1924-78†Peter Appleyard 1928-2013†Clifford Jarvis 1941-99
Andrew Lamb b.1958
Branford Marsalis b.1960

August 27†Lester Young 1909-59†Tony Crombie 1925-99†Rudolf Dašek 1933-2013†Alice Coltrane 1937-2007†Sonny Sharrock 1940-94
Edward Perez b.1978
August 28†Phil Seaman 1926-72†Kenny Drew 1928-93
John Marshall b.1941
Stephen Gauci b.1966
Christoph Pepe Auer b.1981
Robin Verheyen b.1983
August 29†Charlie Parker 1920-55†Dinah Washington 1924-63
Jerry Dodgion b.1932
Bennie Maupin b.1940
Florian Hoefner b.1982
August 30†Kenny Dorham 1924-72
John Surman b.1944
Bronislaw Suchanek b.1948
Anthony Coleman b.1955
Rodney Jones b.1956
August 31†Edgar Sampson 1907-73†Herman Riley 1933-2007
Gunter Hampel b.1937†Wilton Felder 1940-2015
Bengt Berger b. 1942
Stefano Battaglia b.1965
Evan Christopher b.1969
Tineka Postma b.1978©Florence ducommun

BIRTHDAYS
August 1†Luckey Roberts 1887-1968†Elmer Crumbley 1908-93

ramón Lopéz

August 6th, 1961
The Spanish drummer andpercussionist, long basedin France, has been active
since the ‘80s across a wideswathe of genres, including
improvised music with alarge cast of international
collaborators. He debuted
as a leader with a solo
drum album, Eleven Drums
Songs, for Leo Lab in 1997
after work with François
Cotinaudand
ClaudeTchamitchian. He has mademore records for Leo, plus
dates for Xàbia Jazz,
Creative Sources, Maya
and Not Two with various
groups while working with
Hans Koch, Barry Guy,
Agustí Fernández, Joachim
Kühn, Sylvain Kassap,
George Lewis, Joe Fonda,
Guillermo Gregorio, Mark
Feldman, Satoko Fujii,
Jean-Marc Foussat andmany others.
—AH

CROSSWORD
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By Andrey Henkin 			

ACROSS

DOWN

1. Org. that presents the Vision Festival
4. Old Dixieland standard “Let’s Sow a Wild ____”
7. Pharoah Sanders’ song from Jewels of Thought“Hum-____-Hum-____-Hum-____”
10. Musicians’ office?
12. Saxophonist Michaël Attias’ birthplace
13. West Coast vibraphonist/drummer/percussionist
Gene
14. Earl Grubbs’ fellow saxophonist brother
15. Like all the participants on Billy Bang’s Vietnam:
The Aftermath
16. Saxophonist Boris Midney and bassist Igor Berukshtis
18. Like Director and DJH models
19. What a musician does for a week at The Stone
21. Singers Auer, Bowman and Lader
22. Notes of a Fmaj7 chord
24. Japanese saxophonist Watanabe
25. British saxophonist Dean
27. John Zorn has presented projects at her Brooklyn
warehouse
28. Where Zoot Sims is buried
29. New York Eye and ____ Control
30. Rune Grammofon and Hubro cntr.

1. Monogram of this gazette’s Editorial Director
2. Type of sound file
3. Percussionist Don’s real name?
4. Vanguard Jazz Orchestra saxophonist Dick
5. 1991 Sonny Sharrock Axion album Ask The ____
6. 1970 Alan Shorter America album ____ Esat
8. Style of jazz pioneered by Mario Bauzá and Frank Grillo“Machito”
9. She has two of the six thumbs in Thumbscrew
10. A double-undectet minus a quintet has how manymembers?
11. Martin Denny and Jon Irabagon both have songs
named for this Sleeping Sickness-causing insect
17. Miles Davis 1969 Columbia album ____ Silent Way
19. This pianist can prevent moths from eating yourclothes?
20. Mundell Lowe wrote the soundtrack for the 1962 film____ in High Heels
21. Dutch label of improvised music
23. 1980 Irakere JVC album El ____
24. Jazz at Kitano to Jazz Standard dir.
26. n.UR-Kult catalogue prefixes

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visit nycjazzrecord.com for answers

24 AUGUST 2020 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD