Rolling Jazz Thread 2022

Wait, Louis Cato is now the leader of The Late Show Band?

Joey deFrancesco, what the fuck!

I was just recently going deep on that Miles Davis local TV interview where he first heard Joey play on high school, and listening to some of his records. And a Questlove interview with Christian Mcbride where they both say that Joey was the real prodigy in their arts high school (which included Kurt Rosenwinkel and Boyz II Men).

Good ol' CAPA still graduates gifted and strange kids, from what I've been told

I had McBride on my podcast last year and he talked a lot about his friendship with DeFrancesco (they had just put an album out together at the time).

Still at it!

Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya tonight in NYC pic.twitter.com/tn2Jj4bLKz

— jeff (@jazyjef) August 28, 2022

This was some nice skronk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmC4DGkUEAM

Young fresh skronk, thanks!
Reminds me:

#HBD to the legendary guitarist Sonny Sharrock, born this day August 27, in 1940. To celebrate link in bio for a short audio interview from 1993.#freejazz #jazzbirthdays #sonnysharrock pic.twitter.com/pdd4xyKUhL

— Arts for Art / Vision Festival (@artsforart) August 27, 2022

HB Sonny!

Joey DeFrancesco has passed.

RIP. I was lucky enough to see him play once with John McLaughlin and Dennis Chambers in San Sebastian, something like 30 years ago. Time flies ...

Zoh Amba is getting a lot of (IMO undeserved) push. Apparently there's a NY Times feature in the works.

Somebody I *still* need to check out

An early champion of “free form” jazz, Joe Harriott is now widely recognised as a major British Caribbean innovator. Here are five key albums from Harriott's catalogue 👀 https://t.co/Q3IdGpmp3n

— Jazzwise (@Jazzwise) August 30, 2022

the Indo-Jazz Suite is not a bad place to start at all

I have a 2CD set that has 4 of his albums but have never listened to it.

Hum Dono is fantastic, surprised it's not in that list.

yeah indeed

This week's Burning Ambulance newsletter contains the full, previously unpublished transcript of my 2019 interview with Jaimie Branch.

Zoh Amba is good and will only get better. She's been doing stuff with Luke Stewart and gabby fluke mogul, who are both powerhouses, so can't complain. Rather her getting hyped than some of the bland coffee table Gilles Peterson jazzers too many critics are going wild for.

This SSWAN album has been getting heavy rotation. Bit of a new generation supergroup with Jessica Ackerley, Patrick Shiroishi, Luke Stewart, Chris Williams and Jason Nazary. One of the most exciting things about these guys is their interest in sound based free improvisation, but imbued with a punky energy.

https://577records.bandcamp.com/album/sswan-invisibility-is-an-unnatural-disaster

Zoh Amba is good and will only get better. She's been doing stuff with Luke Stewart and gabby fluke mogul, who are both powerhouses, so can't complain. Rather her getting hyped than some of the bland coffee table Gilles Peterson jazzers too many critics are going wild for.

That YouTube clip with her and fluke-mogul is better than anything she's committed to disc thus far. I don't hate her by any means, but I've definitely had conversations with some elder free jazzers who are like "who is this little girl and in what universe does she deserve this hype-wave?"

She’s not originally from Tennessee is she? I just heard a YouTube clip of her talking and she sounds Yurpean as much as anything

I think it's good and natural for people to be excited about new players coming up - and it's kind of inevitable that the media will pick up on that. I know that can cause some resentment among others who have paid their dues for years and undeservedly been overlooked, but those dismissing her as a "little girl" sound pretty sexist tbh!

Yes, from Tennessee. Must admit the PR stuff about her growing up playing saxophone in the woods sounds a bit too mythic, but then if you've got the space, then it's a pretty good place to practice ha!

Advance track from the upcoming Thumbscrew is good: https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/multicolored-midnight-hd-24-96

checking how old abdullah ibrahim is (87) i discover that his birthname was "adolph" lol: hence "dollar" when he first lived and performed in europe in the 60s

Thumbscrew played a surprise show at Blues Alley in DC a couple months ago so so good. Three great composers: Mary Halvorson, current and future legend. Love Mike Formanek, his ECM albums were great and un-ECM. Tomas Fujisawa always impresses me.

checking how old abdullah ibrahim is (87) i discover that his birthname was "adolph" lol: hence "dollar" when he first lived and performed in europe in the 60s

― mark s, Thursday, September 1, 2022 7:25 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm just putting together abDULLAh / DOLLAr and it's blowing my mind ...

Woah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMwDdEGrt8E

Has anyone mentioned new Ron Carter doc coming soon on PBS?

Don't think so---will check local listings, thx

This guy! Bout time for collected works.

Phil Ranelin was born in Indianapolis in 1939, made a lot of creative music in Detroit (John McEntire remastered some of it), then relocated to Los Angeles in 1977, where he currently lives. Turned 83 in May.

Respect to the indie labels that have documented him over the years. pic.twitter.com/AmvdpcGwOQ

— jeff (@jazyjef) September 3, 2022

Correction: Phil Ranelin moved back to Indianapolis.

— jeff (@jazyjef) September 4, 2022

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFZ3e08BZ8YNWN-5BqyKXVggX69k9QfJHvQ-ke9stbnFVUBUi0f6rMkPav8KryVpbUohJt5VoftkUVvt3_iSJAZWtrCJs9c_r1hyVw-8yPxit11aQt9moVtyvG1FG2cxvxG5GsFDrwuFl1Kg6_BGhqRUOSysICx5cmxoUgf3vFEf43kEfr-nv5C03q5w/w400-h400/R-3806338-1392135791-9081.jpg
Survival Themes: Reggie Lucas solo album, w Mtume input, in the wake of Miles, but I like that the poster cautions us against expecting too much, so maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised, Description lays out Milesian-enough perimeters. anyway (but no they don't have a guy playing trumpet, wisely enough). Link is in comments:
https://zensurfingarcher.blogspot.com/2022/09/reggie-lucas-1975-survival-themes.html
And here's 23:12 of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5a6n9DJRoA

Remembering double bass master Wilbur Ware, who was born on this day in 1923. You could pick highlights with Thelonious, Sonny, Clifford, and others, but let’s hear it for ace The Chicago Sound, the only album he released as a leader during his lifetime. pic.twitter.com/vShI0alLXX

— Chris Monsen (@chris_monsen) September 8, 2022

It's finally here! Check out my new interactive discography at https://t.co/nEoSpeSI6W.
Listen to nearly 1,000 albums and get behind-the-scenes stories from yours truly. It's called the Ron Carter Universe - where Planet Elegance resides! #roncarterbassist #planetelegance pic.twitter.com/VUQZK5HK9i

— Ron Carter (@RonCarterBass) September 8, 2022

Listening a fair bit to the Jamaladeen Tacuma/Mary Halvorson collab; they connect p well:
https://jamaaladeentacuma.bandcamp.com/album/jamaaladeen-tacuma-mary-halvorson-strings-things

Have you heard the Young Philadelphians? Halvorson, Tacuma, Marc Ribot, and G. Calvin Weston on drums:

https://marcribot.bandcamp.com/album/the-young-philadelphians-live-in-tokyo

I hadn't! Hm, songs with Ribot singing (or vocalizing)? Might try it.

So that Titan to Tachyons album mentioned upthread comes out in... (checks notes)... three days, and I'll be damned if I can find a way to order it. It's not on the artist's bandcamp page, it's mentioned on the band's website but without a single link to where to buy it and the banner ad at the top of the page that looks like it will lead you to that simply routes you back to the exact page you were already on. It's mentioned at the bottom of the home page of Tzadik's website but, again, not a single link to where it can be ordered.

Can't say I've sought out a lot of Tzadik stuff, so maybe this is just par for the course, but this seems... less than optimal. I'd be pretty annoyed if I had a new album coming out in not only one single physical format, but without a place from which it could be ordered.

incl download and youtube

50 years ago tonight, Miles debuts a new 9-piece band with a scorched-earth closing set at the Ann Arbor Blues & Jazz Festival.

With On the Corner still unreleased, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the crowd was remotely prepared for this music.https://t.co/FPyAp404sc

— Jeremy Erwin (@theheatwarps) September 11, 2022

Jeremy Erwin@theheatwarps
·
Sep 10
Replying to @theheatwarps
This is also the date on which Miles first encountered Pete Cosey, who helped engineer the previous day’s set from Art Ensemble of Chicago.

The complete interview with Cosey is a must-read. https://t.co/gpbqKB4lGl https://t.co/yAJoxVSP6z

— Don Allred (@0wlred) September 15, 2022

The amazing French label RogueArt is starting to put its catalog on Bandcamp. Only two titles so far; I hope they get the rest up soon.

https://rogueart1.bandcamp.com/

Fantastic interview. Zigaboo was going to play with Miles! Can't believe he (Cosey) was in Chicago this whole time.

https://www.halleonard.com/product/369515/new-standards-101-lead-sheets-by-women-composers

Interviewed Terri Lyne Carrington about that book for my next Stereogum column, which should be out next week.

Cool!

New Jeff Parker quartet live record from Eremite next month sounds really good atm— sample track here :

https://eremite.com/album/mte-76-77

Khan Jamal's "drum dance to the motherland" is being reissued (again). don't sleep on it. for US folks, i know it's available via stranded

https://www.aguirrerecords.com/products/khan-jamals-creative-arts-ensemble-drum-dance-to-the-motherland-lp

I'm interested in that Jeff Parker album for having Jay Bellerose on drums (if people don't know, he's a great studio drummer who's into minimalism, texture, and old weird drums), very 'west coast quartet'.

Yeah, and he was on Parker's International Anthem album The New Breed in 2016, also Allen Toussaint's remarkable jazz venture The Bright Mississippi in 2009---but hadn't taken in that he's also worked with allll these singers---what a discography:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bellerose

Also Anna Butterss on bass on that new Parker record, which is cool

For this week's BA email, I wrote about the V.S.O.P. quintet (Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams) and the late 70s phenomenon of "stadium jazz":

The group was seemingly determined to prove that they were not there to rehash their achievements as the Miles Davis Quintet. The album contains only one relatively less-well-known piece from the Davis repertoire, “Dolores” from Miles Smiles. The rest of the set consisted of two pieces from Third Plane, the title track and the Williams composition “Lawra”; “Jessica,” from Hancock’s Fat Albert Rotunda; Hubbard’s “Byrdlike” (from 1962’s Ready For Freddie) and a new piece, “One of a Kind”; and another Carter composition, “Little Waltz,” from his Piccolo album, also released in 1977. The performances are explosive, a million miles from the abstract free bop they had been delivering a decade earlier. It’s not just their style of playing, either; it’s the sound. Carter’s bass has that gross ’70s rubber-band boing, and Williams sounds like he’s playing on Billy Cobham’s kit, just demolishing the audience with thunderous cannonades. Hancock is sweeping across the keys at breakneck speed, and the horns are going off like Roman candles, one squealing, screaming climax after another. I first encountered the term “stadium jazz” on Ethan Iverson’s site; on Twitter, he said he heard it from bassist Larry Grenadier. I can’t think of a better description of V.S.O.P.’s music than that. This is music meant to be heard in a crowd of thousands, preferably outdoors on a summer night. Within the intimate confines of a jazz club, it would be somewhere between simply overpowering and terrifying.

That’s not to suggest that it’s bad music; it’s just big, garish music. V.S.O.P. made two more live albums, Tempest In The Colosseum (recorded just a week after the California concerts, on July 23, 1977 in Tokyo) and Live Under The Sky, from the Japanese festival of the same name in July 1979. The group played on two consecutive days that year, July 26 and 27, and only the first night’s performances were released at first; the second set was appended to a CD reissue in 2004. All of it is well worth your time, as long as you’re in the mood to get blown back in your chair like that old Maxell advertisement.