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DOWNBEAT CHRISTIAN SCOTT // KURT ROSENWINKEL // ROBERT GLASPER // FAVORITE BIG BAND ALBUMS 

APRIL 2010 

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April 2010 

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DB Inside 

Departments 

8 First Take 

10 Chords & Discords 

13 The Beat 

19 European Scene 

20 Caught 

22 Players 

Danny Grissett 

Dana Hall 

Luis Bonilla 

Steve Colson 

47 Reviews 

74 Master Class 

76 Transcription 

78 Jazz On Campus 

82 Blindfold Test 

Dafnis Prieto 

6 DOWNBEAT April 2010 

JOEY L. 

Features 

Robert Glasper 

26 Christian Scott 

Shows His Teeth | By Jennifer Odell 

Christian Scott’s appreciation for the ability of music to tell stories and to make 

social commentary is rare. The trumpeter’s company, like his music, has a comfortable 

intensity to it—an easy warmth that wins you over even when he’s on a 

mission to change your mind about something. Though gracious and polite, 

Scott presents his point of view with the same confident authority he puts into 

his live shows. And even when what he says rubs folks the wrong way, his honest 

expression comes with a grain of erudite salt. 

32 Kurt Rosenwinkel 

Making Magic 

By Ted Panken 

36 Robert Glasper 

Iconic Impulses 

By John Murph 

40 ‘My Favorite Big Band Album’ 

25 Essential Recordings 

By Frank-John Hadley 

68 Musicians’ Gear Guide 

Great Finds From The 

NAMM Show 2010 

50 Philly Joe Jones 50 Agustí Fernández/Barry Guy 54 Christian Wallumrød 60 Paul Motian 

36 

Cover photography by Jimmy Katz. Special thanks to Blue Smoke and Jazz Standard in New York City for their generosity in letting DownBeat shoot on location.


First Take 

Organic Orchestration 

by Ed Enright 

This issue of DownBeat, 

featuring Christian Scott on 

the cover, came together 

over a period of several 

months. In fact, it was a full 

year ago that we originally 

planned to give Scott top 

billing in the magazine, only 

to be pre-empted by the 

death of Freddie Hubbard. 

But being bumped from his 

cover spot turned out to be 

not such an unfortunate 

thing for Scott, whose highly 

anticipated CD Yesterday 

You Said Tomorrow, the 

most important of his young 

career, hasn’t been ready for 

commercial release until Christian Scott 

now, anyway. 

During his interview with writer Jennifer Odell, Scott emphasizes his 

fondness for the sounds and social vibes of the 1960s and explains how 

that mindset inspired and shaped the 10-song collection, recorded at the 

renowned Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., and engineered 

by Rudy Van Gelder—the man largely responsible for the emergence of 

the legendary “Blue Note sound,” which has graced hundreds of jazz 

albums dating back to the 1960s. Among those are several landmark sides 

recorded by none other than Hubbard himself. 

Research for our feature story on Kurt Rosenwinkel began late last 

summer, when the guitarist was just beginning the recording sessions that 

eventually led to the release of his new CD, Standards Trio: Reflections. 

As Rosenwinkel told writer Ted Panken, the resulting ballads-driven 

album emerged over the course of the sessions and developed gradually 

over time, only to reveal itself in the later stages of editing, after all the 

dozens of takes were completed. 

The organic way these artists’ recording projects and writers’ feature 

articles unfold and take shape over time reminds me of the way a composer 

or orchestrator crafts a musical chart. Which brings us to Frank-John 

Hadley’s article “My Favorite Big Band Album,” an ambitous piece that 

required months and months of reporting as Hadley polled nearly 200 

musicians around the world about their top five picks within the genre. 

With so much material, we had a tough time deciding where to draw the 

line (at the top 25 albums) and which of the insightful quotes to use or discard. 

There was no way we could print all the responses we received in the 

space allowed, so I’ll take this opportunity to add some background on the 

results published on pages 40–45. 

Hadley reports that a Duke Ellington record appeared on 75 percent of 

respondents’ lists—47 different recordings, including a few compilations. 

Count Basie was the second most popular choice, with 98 picks going to 

30 albums. Sun Ra would have placed if there had been any sort of agreement 

over what one record of his most persuasively explored the cosmos—11 

albums were chosen. Just a short drop from the top-25 tier were 

Basie’s The Original Decca Recordings, Miles Davis & Gil Evans’ 

Sketches Of Spain, George Russell’s New York, N.Y., Stan Kenton’s City 

Of Glass and—a surprise—Bill Potts’ The Jazz Soul Of Porgy & Bess. 

We hope you find this issue of DownBeat to read and play out like a 

great big band arrangement, one that has evolved in proper time, where 

every detail falls into place and forms a bigger picture complete with 

information, perspective and a certain intangible edge we like to call 

“swing.” DB 

JIMMY KATZ

Chords & Discords 

Jamal’s Constellation 

A five star rating for your March issue’s 

cover, feature and photos. And 100 stars for 

pianist Ahmad Jamal! 

Dennis Hendley 

Milwaukee, Wis. 

Offensive Language 

I was surprised by Eldar Djangirov’s offensive 

language in DownBeat’s “The Question Is…” 

section (March). His use of the word “retarded” 

to describe something negative regarding 

a jazz video game is just plain juvenile. This 

sort of language should be completely 

removed from our vocabulary as a descriptive 

for things that are sub-par. It is akin to using 

the “n-word.” As jazz musicians, we’re supposed 

to be hipper than that, and be sensitive 

to different abilities, races and cultures. “Boy 

genius” is a good descriptive for Eldar. 

Emphasis on the “boy.” 

Bennett Olson 

bennettolson@wi.rr.com 

Pure Duke 

As one who has listened deeply to George 

Duke, I gained insight into his harmonic 

vocabulary when I recently heard Bela 

Bartok’s “Second Concerto For Piano.” The 

second movement (Adagio) is pure Duke! It 

would have been great to hear his reaction to 

this piece in February’s Blindfold Test. 

Doug Parham 

Lancaster, Calif. 

Don’t Slight The South 

John Ephland’s review of Steve Hobbs’ Vibes, 

Straight Up (“Reviews,” March) contains several 

oversights. Primarily, it slights the very 

spirit of the album: songs from or about the 

Southern United States. Thankfully, the entire 

quartet captures that spirit eloquently. 

Dean Arnold 

arnie60@hotmail.com 

Descriptive Praise 

I love how DownBeat not only has a way to 

appreciate the music through words but also 

to get in-depth with the analyses through the 

transcription page. Keep it coming! 

Irina Makarenko 

danielmandrychenko@yahoo.com 

Shallow Appraisal 

I was disappointed in your “Best CDs of the 

2000s” issue (January). A bare list of past 4.5and 

5-star ratings without current critical 

appraisal is not worth taking seriously. 

Paul Chastain 

cathpaul@bellsouth.net 

Burrell, Grimes Shine 

Eric Fine’s review describing the Memorial 

Tribute to Rashied Ali in Philadelphia shows 

no awareness of how improvised music 

works (“Caught,” March). That Fine would 

characterize Dave Burrell’s piano work as 

“undistinguished” and question Henry 

Grimes’ violin technique is a measure of 

Fine’s lack of sensitivity, making me wonder 

if he had any idea of the scope of Ali’s 

influence in the first place. 

Lyn Horton 

Worthington, Mass. 

Keep Trad Alive! 

After I read through the October 2009 issue, I 

came back to Michael Bourne’s intro to “Why 

Jazz Endures” and his reference to Louis 

Armstrong’s solo intro to “West End Blues.” 

Steven Bernstein’s comment that “jazz is 

everywhere now” is the reason I’m writing. 

There are still musicians, vocalists and listeners 

who are devoted followers of traditional 

jazz. There are jazz festivals all over promoting 

that kind of music. The music of Louis 

Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Bessie 

Smith is not dead. There are jazz programs 

that teach people to play that kind of music. It 

is my hope that you will, in the future, devote 

more space to trad jazz. 

Leon Friedman 

mfried3248@cox.net 

Corrections 

Pianist Bill O’Connell was misidentified in 

the review of Hobbs’ CD Vibes, Straight Up. 

Violinist Joe Kennedy Jr. was misidentified 

in the feature on Ahmad Jamal (March). 

DownBeat regrets the errors. 

Have a chord or discord? E-mail us at editor@downbeat.com.

Game 

Changer 

Saxophonist Ted Nash’s 

disc marks new direction 

for the Jazz at Lincoln 

Center Orchestra 

At the beginning of March, the Jazz at Lincoln 

Center Orchestra (JLCO) set out on a tour much 

like any other—a 21-concert, 19-city sojourn 

that launched in Washington, D.C., and would 

take the group across the United States. But this 

event signified an important transition in the 

Jazz at Lincoln Center business model. 

For the first time since Big Train, from 

1999, JLCO was backing a new CD, Portraits 

In Seven Shades, a kaleidoscopic suite by saxophonist 

Ted Nash, on its eponymous signature 

label, also brand-new, to be distributed in both 

physical and digital form through the Orchard, a 

publicly traded mega-aggregator of independent 

labels that holds close to 14,000 jazz titles. Not 

inconsequentially, Portraits is the first-ever 

JLCO release devoted to original music by a 

band member not named Wynton Marsalis 

(Don’t Be Afraid [Palmetto], from 2003, comprises 

Ronald Westray’s arrangements of 

Charles Mingus repertoire). 

“The band is an institution, and to be viable, 

the institution has to grow,” Marsalis said. “I 

was one of the founders, so at first it was based 

on me. As we’ve refined the sound and concept, 

we’ve incorporated more people into our 

voice.” 

Partly due to this policy, the orchestra’s 

identity is less dependent on the presence of its 

most celebrated figure, who positions himself 

not facing the band, but in the trumpet line. To 

wit, JLCO didn’t skip a beat on the several 

occasions between 2004 and 2006 when a 

recurring lip inflammation sent Marsalis to the 

sidelines, and it has sold out several Rose 

Theater concerts—most recently a Carlos 

Henriquez-led homage to Dizzy Gillespie and 

Tito Puente—in which he did not participate. 

During a 2005 tour of Mexico, Marsalis 

commissioned Nash—whose prior contributions 

to the band book included charts on such 

repertoire as “My Favorite Things,” “Tico, 

INSIDE THE BEAT 

14 Riffs 

19 European 

Scene 

20 Caught 

22 Players 

Saxophonist Ted Nash performing with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra 

Tico,” Wayne Shorter’s “Fe-Fi-Fo-Fum,” and 

Ornette Coleman’s “Kaleidoscope” and “Una 

Muy Bonita”—to compose a “big form piece” 

around a theme of his choosing. Nash decided 

to base each chart on his response to a different 

painting from the collections of the Museum of 

Modern Art, with which JLCO has fostered a 

reciprocal relationship. Allowed to absorb 

MOMA’s holdings on various off-hours visits, 

Nash eventually winnowed down to works by 

Claude Monet, Salvador Dali, Henri Matisse, 

Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Marc 

Chagall and Jackson Pollock. 

In imparting to each movement its own flavor, 

Nash wields a vivid palette of orchestral 

and rhythmic color. On “Monet,” a lilting, 

impressionistic work in 3/4, he juxtaposes 

higher-pitched instruments with the bass, 

extracting beautiful colors from the trumpets 

by deft use of various mutes. Violin and accordion 

infuse “Chagall” with a klezmer feeling, 

FRANK STEWART/JAZZ AT LINCOLN CENTER 

April 2010 DOWNBEAT 13

Riffs 

Wild Wertico: Drummer Paul Wertico 

is now hosting a radio show, “Paul 

Wertico’s Wild World of Jazz,” on 

Chicago radio station 87.7FM, WLFM. 

Although a smooth-jazz station, 

Wertico’s show will include traditional 

and other formats. Details: wlfm877.com 

Bolden Tribute: Composer Dave Lisik 

has created a 10-movement orchestral 

work celebrating the life of Buddy 

Bolden. The recording, Coming Through 

Slaughter (Galloping Cow), features Tim 

Hagans, Donny McCaslin and Luis 

Bonilla. Details: gallopingcowmusic.com 

Clayton Moves: Pianist Gerald Clayton’s 

CD, Two-Shade, which had been available 

through ArtistShare, has been rereleased 

through EmArcy. 

Details: umusic.com 

Brother Ray Returns: Ray Charles’ 

1960s and ’70s jazz albums have been 

reissued as a two-disc compilation, 

Genius + Soul = Jazz (Concord). The collection 

includes the 1961 album of the 

same name, as well as the followups, 

My Kind Of Jazz, Jazz Number II and My 

Kind Of Jazz Part 3. 

Details: concordmusicgroup.com 

Adult Trad Camp: The first annual 

New Orleans Traditional Jazz Camp 

For Adults will be held Aug. 1–6 in the 

city’s Bourbon Orleans Hotel. Along 

with lectures and lessons, the camp 

will include a birthday celebration for 

Louis Armstrong at Preservation Hall. 

Faculty includes trumpeter Connie 

Jones and vocalist Banu Gibson. 

Details: neworleanstradjazzcamp.com 

RIP, Dankworth. British saxophonist Sir 

John Dankworth died on Feb. 6. He was 

82. Dankworth, who worked with Nat 

King Cole, Oscar Peterson and Ella 

Fitzgerald, also composed the scores for 

numerous British films and television 

shows. His wife, and performing partner, 

singer Cleo Laine, survives him. 


while he opens “Picasso” with a distillation of 

a Spanish progression, sandwiching a long section 

in which Nash transfuses Cubist aesthetics 

into notes and tones by deploying McCoy 

Tyner-esque fourths as “an integral component 

of the thematic material, the harmony and the 

voicings.” 

On “Pollock,” Nash emulated the abstract 

expressionist’s paint-splattering techniques by 

conjuring piano fragments and coalescing them 

into a line that evokes a jagged Herbie Nichols 

theme, while giving the blowing section an 

open Ornette Coleman-like quality with background 

passages composed of unassigned noteheads. 

He conjures the melted clocks and 

parched mise en scene of Salvador Dali’s “The 

Persistence of Memory” with a 13/8 groove, 

melodic tonalities that evoke what he calls “a 

lost creature searching,” and simultaneous 

improvised solos on trumpet and alto on which 

the lines flow one into the other. 

Like Marsalis, Nash, now 50, blossomed 

early, a “young lion” before the term became 

marketing vernacular. The son of eminent Los 

Angeles studio trombonist Dick Nash and the 

namesake nephew of studio woodwind player 

Ted Nash, he moved to New York at 18, after 

spending much of his teens working for Lionel 

Hampton, Quincy Jones, Don Ellis and Louis 

Bellson. Before signing up with the Lincoln 

Center Jazz Orchestra, as it was known until 

2007, Nash accumulated a resume marked by 

consequential stints with the Mel Lewis 

Orchestra, Toshiko Akiyoshi, Gerry Mulligan, 

the Carnegie Hall Big Band and various configurations 

of the New York’s Jazz Composers’ 

Collective. On Portraits, Nash draws vocabulary 

from all these experiences, not neglecting 

the predilections of each JLCO member when 

they improvise and play ensemble. 

“JLCO has a distinctive quality, not necessarily 

in the older styles of music that we’ve 

received the greatest exposure for playing, but 

in the stuff we’re writing now and play in New 

York or on the road,” Nash said. “With Mel, 

we’d swing on Thad Jones and Bob 

Brookmeyer, and then open up the solos so it 

became a kind of quartet. Here the solos are less 

extended, and seem more to address the music; 

everyone is committed to making a statement 

from beginning to end of a piece. The ensemble 

becomes almost its own voice—not the clean 

style of the ‘New Testament’ Basie band, but 

more like Ellington’s approach, with different 

timbres, different individuals. 

“There’s a soulful feeling, a support system 

I’ve never felt before, like a quest for truth,” 

Nash continued. “We cover more ground than 

any band I’ve been with, too—Wynton’s opuses 

like All Rise and Congo Square, stuff that’s 

completely free and out there, stuff that’s the 

very beginning of jazz.” 

Perhaps the sprawling, impossible-to-pinpoint 

scope of JLCO’s repertoire is a reason 

why it has not translated its enviable worldwide 

visibility and Marsalis’ enormous prestige into 

strong unit sales on prior recording projects. 

The institution hopes to ameliorate this situation 

in their partnership with the Orchard by using 

its international digital network—it services 700 

stores and has representatives in 25 countries— 

to effectively target their buyers. With Portraits, 

this entailed securing placements on such usualsuspect 

store pages as iTunes, eTunes, Amazon 

and bn.com, as well as international outlets like 

Fnac and Virgin. Furthermore, in the weeks 

leading up to the release, Nash did considerable 

promotional activity, while the Orchard conducted 

outreach and contests via social media— 

email lists, Facebook, Twitter, the Jazz at 

Lincoln Center and MOMA subscriber bases. 

“Everything in the digital world works the 

same way,” said Richard Gottehrer, the 

Orchard’s co-founder and chief creative officer, 

who knew the ancien regime as a songwriter 

(“My Boyfriend’s Back”), producer (“Hang On 

Sloopy”), label-owner (Sire) and talent manager 

(Blondie, The Go-Gos, Joan Armatrading). 

“You try to engage the fans, and the fans 

become the vehicle for spreading the word as 

opposed to radio.” 

“We’re classic long-tail territory,” said 

Adrian Ellis, JLC’s executive director. “Jazz is 

niche music, and clearly, the wider the distribution 

of your catalog, the greater chance that 

your fans around the world can find it.” 

Although the label’s primary purpose is to 

exploit its massive archive, comprising every 

JLC concert over the past two decades, JLC 

intends to make full use of its on-site studio 

and recording facilities to document new work 

going forward in a timely manner. Ellis estimates 

four to five releases each year; the format 

decisions will be key to perceived sales 

potential. 

Neither Ellis nor Ken Druker, JLC’s director 

of intellectual property, were prepared to state 

what the next releases would be. 

“We’re working through the rights issues, 

the mixing and mastering,” Ellis said. “The 

Orchard appears to offer an easy, cost-effective 

distribution route for getting things out at an 

appropriate pace.” 

What is clear is that Jazz at Lincoln Center is 

in the digital marketplace for keeps. 

“I believe in the ultimate integration of all 

aspects of what you do,” said Marsalis, whose 

own separate deal with the Orchard stipulates 

that they will co-produce as well as distribute 

his projects. “We’re a non-profit, and we create 

nothing but content all the time. We have 

an opportunity to use that content to expand 

our audience, to turn people around the world 

on to jazz, and raise money. Our dream was to 

have a space—I call it a ‘cloud’—where 

there’s radio, video and digital content, which 

can be streamed, downloaded, or purchased. 

The money we make can go directly back into 

providing some type of public service.” 

—Ted Panken

Germany’s Jazzahead Builds On International Networks 

Although Germany’s Jazzahead started back in 

2006, two years before bankruptcy shuttered the 

International Association of Jazz Educators 

conference, this organization now stands poised 

as one of the largest jazz business meetings on 

the planet. Though smaller than the IAJE event 

and lacking the emphasis on jazz education, this 

year’s installment of Jazzahead, to be held in 

Bremen April 22–25 in the city’s Congress 

Centrum, has become an increasingly valuable 

platform for jazz professionals of all stripes to 

meet face-to-face. There’s a large exhibition 

hall, conferences and symposiums, and a mini 

festival with more than 40 short concerts, with a 

clear focus on young European musicians (program 

information is listed on jazzahead.de). 

The event is the brainchild of Peter Schulze, 

a veteran of German radio and a respected festi- 

Norma Winstone 

performing at the 

2009 Jazzahead 

val organizer, and Hans Peter Schneider, director 

of Messe Bremen, the city’s trade organization. 

Schulze had been lobbying to create a 

German Jazz Meeting, an idea inspired by the 

Dutch Jazz Meeting as a showcase for jazz talent 

from the Netherlands, but it came to life as 

something bigger. 

“The basic idea of Jazzahead is that we 

should put jazz at the center,” Schulze said. 

“These kinds of exhibitions, like Womex, 

Midem, or Popkomm—they all had jazz at a 

certain time, but it kind of faded out after a couple 

of editions. We wanted to put jazz in the 

center to see what we can do from inside.” 

In order to open up potential audiences, 

Schulze has also presented some tangential 

symposiums that borrow ideas from jazz, 

despite being worlds apart. 

“This past year we had a medical symposium 

with 150 doctors on the neurological perception 

of improvisation—how it relates to neurological 

processes,” he said. “They don’t relate 

to jazz at all, but they become a part of it.” 

Still, networking remains a primary focus. 

“For us booking agents living high up in the 

mountains of Norway, it’s good that there is a 

conference where we can attend and meet all 

COURTESY JAZZAHEAD 

these people we only have spoken to on the 

phone,” said Per-Kristian Rekdal, of the Oslo 

booking agency Mussikprofil. “It is often easier 

to be open and honest when you first have met 

people, and then we can speak more freely and 

relaxed next time.” 

Huub van Riel, who programs Amsterdam’s 

prestigious Bimhuis, concurs: “Meeting many 

professionals face-to-face was valuable and productive. 

I had a number of first time meetings, 

both with relatively new contacts and some I’ve 

worked with for many years.” 

Last year’s event attracted about 5,000 attendees 

from more than 30 countries, up from 

3,000 in 2006. 

“We do not want to expand it too much,” 

Schulze said. “You have to control your program. 

And you hardly hear any mainstream 

music here, which is what so many festivals are 

all about.” —Peter Margasak 


EUROPEAN SCENE 

By Peter Margasak 

German impresario Ulli Blobel 

has long been an important, 

sometimes controversial, figure 

in European jazz—concert promoter, 

artist manager, booking 

agent, label owner, record shop 

proprietor and distributor— 

stretching back four decades. He 

started booking jazz concerts in 

1969 in his hometown of Peitz, 

south of Berlin, in what was 

then East Germany. Occasional 

concerts grew into Jazzwerkstatt 

(Jazz Workshop) Peitz, which 

began in 1979. It’s the biggest 

festival in Germany outside of 

Berlin’s annual event. Blobel 

was presenting between six and 

eight concerts annually in addition 

to the workshop, bringing 

in artists from throughout the 

continent. 

“Everything was not always 

in agreement with the official 

cultural politics of the Communist 

dictatorship, and sometimes 

it led to problems, sometimes 

not,” he said. 

In 1984, Blobel moved on. In 

an unusual situation, the government 

allowed him to move 

to Wuppertal, in West Germany. 

“The Jazzwerkstatt Peitz was 

forbidden by the Communist 

government,” Blobel said. 

“Our outdoor festival was, for 

their eyes, too big. It had developed 

into a festival with 3,000 

visitors.” 

Blobel worked extensively 

with heavies like Peter Brötzmann 

and Peter Kowald, and 

began ITM Records—the source 

of his controversy. Many artists 

have accused him of releasing 

music without proper agreements—notably, 

Anthony 

Braxton—but as he told writer 

Francesco Martinelli for the 

Web zine Point of Departure a 

couple of years ago, subsequent 

court cases exonerated 

him. And it’s his current work 

that’s indisputably valuable. 

After spending most of the 

last two decades working in 

record distribution, he returned 

to a more direct involvement, 

with Jazzwerkstatt Berlin- 

Brandenburg. He started the 

organization in 2007 and since 

then he produces around 120 

concerts each year along with 

three festivals—including the 

acclaimed European Jazz 

Jamboree. More recently he 

opened the Jazzwerkstatt + 

Klassik record store, which 

includes a cafe that presents 

concerts. But to American listeners 

his most valuable service 

has been the Jazzwerkstatt 

label, which has quickly become 

a crucial documenter of Berlin’s 

thriving contemporary scene 

(although the label has also 

released superb archival work 

from Blobel’s Peitz days). 

The main thrust is on younger 

musicians, from staunch avantgardists 

to more mainstream 

players, but there is a focus on 

veterans (Rolf Kühn, Ulrich 

Gumpert and Alexander von 

Schlippenbach) intersecting with 

their artistic heirs. He’s also put 

out fine recordings by plenty of 

non-Germans including David 

Murray, Max Roach and Urs 

Jazz’s roots in Europe are strong. This column looks at 

the musicians, labels, venues, institutions and events 

moving the scene forward “across the pond.” For 

questions, comments and news about European jazz, 

e-mail europeanscene@downbeat.com. 

Longtime Jazz Impresario Captures Berlin’s Musical Evolutions 

Clark Terry Snags Lifetime 

Achievement Grammy 

The week leading up to the 52nd 

annual Grammy Awards show 

unleashed a flurry of activity in 

Los Angeles at the end of January. 

One special gathering took place at 

the Wilshire Ebell Theatre the 

night before the formal Grammy 

show, as trumpeter Clark Terry 

was among the recipients of the 

Recording Academy’s 2010 

Lifetime Achievement Awards 

(that group also included blues legend 

David “Honeyboy” Edwards). 

Recording Academy President 

and CEO Neil Portnoy praised the 

honorees for their “outstanding 

Ulli Blobel 

accomplishments and passion for 

their craft.” He went on to add that 

the recipients have created a legacy 

“that has positively affected multiple 

generations.” 

Bandleader Gerald Wilson has 

known St. Louis native Terry since 

the two were stationed at the Great 

Lakes Naval Station during World 

War II, before Terry’s star rose in 

the Duke Ellington and Count 

Basie orchestras. 

“Clark should have got that 

award years ago,” Wilson said. 

“When I met him, I’d never heard 

such a complete trumpet player. 

Clark Terry and 

his wife, Gwen 

Terry, receive the 

Grammy from 

Neil Portnoy 

He knew all the chord progressions 

and the scales, could read and execute 

anything, and his solos were 

just great.” 

“The award was a complete 

surprise,” Terry said from his 

Leimgruber. Judging from label 

releases by bass clarinetist Rudi 

Mahall, alto saxophonist Silke 

Eberhard and reedist Daniel 

Erdmann, Berlin’s scene is 

stronger than ever. 

“I fall back on the old casts 

and also inspire new things,” 

Blobel said. “But I am also listening 

to what the musicians recommend 

to me. I don’t go into 

the studio with them, but all of 

the projects are discussed in 

advance. The artists are then 

free in their development.” 

Fifteen new titles on CD and 

DVD are already planned for the 

first half of 2010. While Blobel 

acknowledges that in the current 

economy the label relies on private 

money and public funding 

to survive, he remains wideeyed 

about the future, even 

gearing up to launch two more 

labels. Klassickwerkstatt/phil.harmonie 

focuses on chamber 

music with players from the 

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Morgenland will release Jewish 

and Eastern European styles. 

He’s also writing a book that 

should detail his early difficulties 

presenting jazz behind the Iron 

Curtain. DB 

home in Pinebluff, Ark. “It makes 

me feel good about playing jazz all 

my life. Something about the St. 

Louis trumpet players always 

made you feel good about life.” 

—Kirk Silsbee 

RICK DIAMOND/COURTESY RECORDING ACADEMY 


� 

Caught 

Pérez Masterfully Plays, 

Organizes Panama Jazz Festival 

At some point during the seventh annual Panama Jazz Festival, it became 

clear that Danilo Pérez’s primary instrument was Panama itself, and he 

played it like a master. Invariably clad in the blue vest indicating his status 

as a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, Pérez—a tireless lobbyist for the 

cause of music as a tool for social change—seemed to be everywhere in 

his native Panama City during the event (which ran Jan. 11–16). He carried 

that message from the stage of the ornate Teatro Nacional to a meeting 

with the president of the Panamanian Congress to the Panama Canal, 

where he pressed the button that opened the gates of the Pacific-side locks 

at a private ceremony. 

Pérez shared that latter distinction with Roger Brown, president of 

Berklee College of Music, who announced the formation of the Berklee 

Global Jazz Institute (BGJI), a program headed by Pérez that teaches students 

with a multi-cultural scope. 

At a gala concert at the Teatro Nacional, the torch was passed in dramatic 

fashion from the BGJI faculty to its students. After opening with a 

spirited “Star Eyes,” an all-star quintet composed of the new program’s 

instructors (Pérez, Joe Lovano, John Patitucci, Terri Lyne Carrington and 

Jamey Haddad) followed up with Thelonious Monk’s “Rhythm-A-Ning,” 

only to be gradually replaced by BGJI students, who took over for the rest 

of the evening. 

For a debut on such a grand stage, the two ensembles formed by the 14 

young instrumentalists strode with fairly steady legs. Standouts included 

saxophonist Hailey Niswanger from Portland, Ore., who wielded a steely 

soprano on her own composition, “Balance,” and Japanese-Austrian guitarist 

Kenji Herbert, who exuded a relaxed confidence at the head of the 

first group. 

Though the evening was the official public kick-off for both the festival 

and the BGJI, both had already been underway for almost three days 

as a series of clinics at the Panama Canal Authority’s Centro de 

Capacitaciones de Ascanio Arosemena. On the first day alone, Niswanger 

and fellow BGJI saxophonist Jesse Scheinin had guided a dozen local 

reedists through a rudimentary blues, while Patitucci engaged a roomful of 

Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout’s words from this past 

summer hovered over New York’s Bleecker Street on two early January 

nights, as the sixth annual Winter JazzFest occupied five venues in the 

West Village. 

To stir reaction, more than one artist referred to Teachout’s mid- 

August assertion that young people aren’t 

listening to jazz. The crowds—estimated 

at 3,700 for the 55 acts—were predominantly 

young and boisterous, cheering 

loudly for short sets by favorites like 

Vijay Iyer and Darcy James Argue, and 

filling the clubs to capacity both nights. 

Indeed, the festival’s lineup seemed like 

an in-your-face retort to anyone who 

thinks that jazz doesn’t transcend generations, 

with fresh voices like guitarist Mary 

Halvorson, singer Gretchen Parlato, trumpeter 

Ambrose Akinmusire and bassist 

Linda Oh prominently featured. 

Playing to an elbow-to-elbow audience 

at Le Poisson Rouge, Argue’s 18- 


bass aspirants on both acoustic and electric axes, invoking a pedigree of 

influences from Paul Chambers to James Jamerson. 

Patitucci was a constant presence throughout the festival. Music from 

the bassist’s latest CD, Remembrance, made up the bulk of the set at the 

Teatro Anayansi that began as a trio with Lovano and Carrington but 

wound up as a quintet with Pérez and Haddad. The set closed with an exuberant 

run through a new Pérez piece entitled “Panama Galactico,” all the 

more remarkable for being penned just that afternoon. 

Earlier that evening, pianist Ellis Marsalis’ trio set was an amiable 

stroll through the New Orleans patriarch’s usual fare, drawing heavily 

from his recent tribute to Monk, whose influence was also felt on a sharply 

angular “Sweet Georgia Brown.” Son Jason brought intriguing hip-hop 

inflections to the table, particularly via the jittery groove he applied to 

Monk’s “Teo.” 

After an exhausting 90-minute set by Minnesota-born flamenco guitarist 

Jonathan Pascual that amounted to little more than a fireworks display 

of virtuosity both musical and physical (the hefty dancer Jose 

Molina), it was announced that Dee Dee Bridgewater was unable to make 

her scheduled appearance. The audience’s collective sigh of disappointment 

was soon hushed by last-minute replacement Lizz Wright’s a cappella 

“I Loves You, Porgy,” showcasing the dusky melancholy of her 

voice. Festival honoree Sonny White, Billie Holiday’s Panama-born 

accompanist, was honored not with his most notable composition, 

“Strange Fruit,” but with a warm duet of “Embraceable You” performed 

by Wright and Pérez. —Shaun Brady 

Winter JazzFest Offers Retort to Genre’s Premature Obituary 

Darcy James Argue’s 

Secret Society 

Danilo Pérez 

piece Secret Society spanned generations of big band orchestration, mixing 

aggressively rising brass with Sebastian Noelle’s razor-edged guitar, 

and backing age-old trumpet and reed solo spots with off-center ostinatos 

or strident backbeats. The band’s sandpaper textures and ability to raise 

the volume without resorting to high-note cliches place it firmly in a contemporary 

setting. 

Likewise, Iyer and his bandmates Stephan 

Crump and Marcus Gilmore have updated the 

sound of the piano trio without losing the critical 

balance that marked the threesomes of forerunners 

from Bill Evans to Keith Jarrett. Answering the 

expectations of the capacity audience, Iyer pulled 

off a live premiere of MIA’s “Galang”—the jittery, 

attention-grabbing highlight of his album 

Historicity—despite his stated concern that playing 

it might result in a repetitive-strain injury. 

Gilmore, who delivers enough of a wallop to 

make “Galang” sound like something off The Bad 

Plus’ playlist, can also churn sinuously, chopping 

and stirring time in imaginative ways. 

Several blocks north, at Zinc Bar, saxophonist 

JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONTROWPHOTOS 

TODDI NORUM

SHIRA YUDKOFF 

Jaleel Shaw was carving sinuous lines, fueled by his rhythm section of 

bassist Ben Williams and drummer Johnathan Blake, and abetted by 

Aaron Goldberg on Fender Rhodes. Back on Bleecker, at the venerable 

Kenny’s Castaways, Halvorson’s trio was doing very different things with 

tempo: swirling storms of hard-strummed chaos, revving up time signatures 

and leaving them dangling over octave-shifted chords. 

Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa—still sweating from his appearance 

uptown with drummer Jack DeJohnette—provided an exciting set 

change after Halvorson. With Dan Weiss on minimal drum kit and tablas, 

and Rez Abassi on guitar, the Indo-Pak Coalition created a seamless synthesis 

of bebop and South Asian music. The contrast between 

Mahanthappa’s tart alto and Abassi’s rounded tone was particularly acute, 

and Weiss’ adroit switches between rhythmic elements created a breathless 

urgency. 

At Sullivan Hall—the least conducive of the venues—Parlato worked 

the other end of the energy scale, delivering a languid set that seldom rose 

above an intimate whisper. — James Hale 

Chris Chew (left), Robert Randolph and Luther Dickinson 

Reunited Word Emphasizes 

Tumult Over Groove 

The Word’s take on gospel bears a closer resemblance to secular pop 

music than to anything devotional. Thunderous downbeats provide an 

underpinning for meandering guitar solos that typify a jam-band tribe 

gathering. The group, which debuted in 2001 with its lone self-titled 

album release and last toured in 2007, reunited for five dates beginning 

Dec. 30 at Philadelphia’s Theatre of Living Arts. 

The band’s lineup has remained intact. It features the North Mississippi 

Allstars with two high-profile guests: organ player John Medeski and 

pedal steel guitarist Robert Randolph. 

Much of the repertoire performed during the three-hour concert was 

similar, but never vapid. The gospel songs functioned as a starting point. 

Only a few featured vocals; the spotlight stayed on the pairing of 

Randolph and Allstars guitarist Luther Dickinson. Medeski played only a 

supporting role. 

The Word began the first set with “Stevie.” After establishing the 

groove, the group evoked Gov’t Mule and possibly Little Feat. 

“Trimmed” was lean and suggested a range of blues styles: straightforward 

country blues at the beginning, the barbed-wire electricity of R.L. 

Burnside and Junior Kimbrough by the end. 

From this point on the instrumentals bled into one another, making it 

difficult to distinguish one from the next. Some evoked Woody Guthrie, 

or even a hybrid of Guthrie and James Brown. The formula remained evident 

even during Randolph’s vocal turn on “Glory, Glory.” However, the 

song’s spiritual intent was lost in a hailstorm of guitars. 

Yet with “Wings,” which ended the second set, the band reached 

beyond this horizon. Dickinson’s guitar incorporated modal harmony, creating 

a trance-like effect as it embarked upon a prolonged crescendo. In 

the meantime, Randolph manned Cody Dickinson’s drum kit as Cody, in 

turn, donned an amplified washboard. Luther Dickinson then replaced 

Randolph on drums, and Cody Dickinson traded the washboard for some 

shakers; the brothers later pounded the drum kit in tandem. —Eric Fine

Players 

Danny Grissett ; 

Leader’s Languages 

Pianist Danny Grissett has called his performance 

of the Joe Zawinul songbook “a great 

study.” After playing the repertoire at New 

York’s Jazz Standard as part of Steve Wilson’s 

quintet last December, Grissett reflected on one 

particularly telling moment: After a bravura 

interpretation of “From Vienna With Love,” a 

classically flavored ballad, rendered with imaginative 

voicings and an endless stream of 

melody, he switched to the Fender Rhodes for 

“Directions,” sustaining the smoky flow with 

imaginative textures and strongly articulated 

rhythmic comp. 

“It was challenging to draw from all the 

periods of Zawinul’s life,” Grissett said. “He 

wasn’t playing all these styles at one time. His 

musical thinking changed, as did his life experiences, 

and the people he worked with and 

who were influencing him. In the bands I play 

with—let’s say Tom Harrell—the music is current, 

what Tom is writing now. Another challenge 

is that Joe played synth on tunes like ‘A 

Remark You Made,’ and the sound of the 

Rhodes is completely different. I’ve written 

some electric things, which hopefully I’ll have 

a chance to record. But I’ve written so many 

things acoustically that are more current.” 

Best known to the jazz public as a first-call 

sideman (Harrell’s steady pianist since 2005, 

he also performs with Jeremy Pelt, Wilson, 

David Weiss’ New York Jazz Composers 

Octet and Vanessa Rubin), Grissett presents a 

large slice of his acoustic repertoire on three 

recent Criss-Cross albums. On Promise and 

Encounter, he reveals himself as an emerging 

master of the piano trio with bassist Vicente 

Archer and drummer Kendrick Scott. 

Possessing abundant technique, he parses it 

judiciously throughout, triangulating strategies 

drawn from Mulgrew Miller, Herbie Hancock 

and Sonny Clark to tell cogent stories that 

carry his own harmonic and rhythmic signature. 

On Form, a late 2008 production, he augments 

that trio with trumpeter Ambrose 

Akinmusire, saxophonist Seamus Blake and 

trombonist Steve Davis. 

Each territory that Grissett navigated on the 

Zawinul project correlates to a component of 

his own personal history. Jazz is not his first 

language—raised in the South Central area of 

Los Angeles, Grissett began classical lessons at 

5 years old. He remained on that track through 

high school and into college at California State 

University, Dominguez Hills. Flutist James 

Newton put him in touch with Los Angeles 

pianist Kei Akagi, who gave Grissett a handful 

of lessons, which he piggybacked into intense 


analysis of iconic recordings by his sonic mentors. 

As he completed the first year of a twoyear 

masters program at Cal Arts, he attended 

the Thelonious Monk Institute (1999–2001), 

commuting an hour every day to fulfill both 

obligations. Meanwhile, Grissett was assimilating 

real-world information on freelance jobs 

with such California hardcore jazz mentors as 

drummer Billy Higgins, tenor saxophonist 

Ralph Moore and trombonist Phil Ranelin. He 

also had a long-term weekend gig with bassist 

John Heard and drummer Roy McCurdy. 

“I was working at least five times a week 

pretty steadily,” Grissett said. “Hip-hop and 

r&b gigs with Rhodes and synth, and a lot of 

solo piano at private parties. About nine 

months into the gig with John and Roy, they 

told me, ‘You’ve got to get out of here and go 

to New York.’ I knew I’d grow a lot faster and 

have more opportunities to play original music. 

I saved a nice chunk of money that would last 

me four five months—it was always in mind 

that if things got really hard, I could return.” 

Within weeks of his 2003 arrival, Grissett 

was working steadily with Vincent Herring, 

with whom he recorded twice. By early 2004 

he was Nicholas Payton’s keyboardist. 

“I grew through seeing how flexible his 

approach was, like a fresh start every night,” 

Grissett said. “It made me learn the level of 

concentration it takes to play this music at a 

consistently high level.” 

Grissett continues to flourish in Harrell’s 

more structured environment. 

“Tom doesn’t dictate how we’re going to 

play, but he writes piano parts, so he usually 

has something he wants to hear—or some starting 

point to build on,” Grissett said. “The content 

is so strong that the notes on the page 

guide the music; the harmony forces me to play 

different melodic contours in approaching my 

own music and standards.” 

Ensconced in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill section 

and a recent father, Grissett anticipates remaining 

an East Coaster. “Artistically speaking, I feel 

comfortable,” he said. “I always feel like I’m a 

bit behind my peers, but less so now. I want to 

pool my resources and make something happen 

as a leader. It’s about time, already.” 

—Ted Panken 

JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONTROWPHOTOS

Dana Hall ; 

Illuminating 

Space 

When Dana Hall talks about global 

connections or musical nuances, 

his words convey a quiet authority. 

The drummer’s background— 

which embraced equally intense 

levels of science and technology 

alongside music and scholarship— 

has provided him with a unique 

perspective on those large and 

small concepts. And Hall’s recent 

CD debut as a quintet leader, Into 

The Light (Origin), shows how he 

blends those disparate ideas. 

Today, Hall is mainly known 

for directing the Chicago Jazz 

Ensemble, playing prominent 

sideman gigs and teaching at the 

University of Illinois at Urbana- 

Champaign. But when he first 

arrived in the Midwest from 

Philadelphia in the late ’80s, it 

was to study aerospace engineering 

and percussion at Iowa State 

University. Hall went on to help 

design propulsion systems and aircraft 

for Boeing, later to give up 

this potentially lucrative career for 

a riskier life in jazz, but he stresses 

the internal affinities. 

“A certain interest in the minutia 

comes from studying engineering, which is 

helpful when you’re performing music,” Hall 

said. “Because you’re thinking peripherally—in 

a circular fashion, rather than just what you’re 

playing or another soloist is playing. And I’m 

interested in creating formulas to come up with 

something new and interesting, whether it’s a 

flight mechanics problem or a new harmonic 

progression.” 

Hall kept that mindset when he left Seattlebased 

Boeing for New York in 1991 to complete 

his music degree at William Paterson 

University. But he also knew that skills, rather 

than theories, would open doors on the jazz 

scene. His abilities became clear as he worked 

with prominent leaders representing a range of 

generations: from Betty Carter and Ray Charles 

to Roy Hargrove and Joshua Redman. Although 

he found these experiences invaluable, Hall felt 

that a move to Chicago in 1994 would be key to 

developing his own personality. 

“In New York, I could walk down a path and 

not know where I wanted to go,” Hall said. “Be 

a swinger or on the downtown scene? Down this 

particular path and play like Milford Graves? Or 

play like Billy Higgins? Or play like Dana Hall? 

Moving to Chicago afforded me the opportunity 

to have that growth.” 

Chicago’s musical community sped up the 

evolution. 

JACOB HAND 

“The first time Von Freeman counted off a 

fast tempo, no one ever asked me to play that 

fast before,” Hall said. “But I knew he had my 

back and there was this love, and I never had 

that in New York.” 

Numerous opportunities followed—musical 

and educational. Hall is currently working on his 

Ph.D. in ethnomusicology at the University of 

Chicago, where his dissertation is on 

Philadelphia soul music of the ’70s. 

“The entire idea of diaspora is central to my 

thinking about my own music and my own work 

as a scholar,” Hall said. “It’s exciting that there’s 

a connection to the music you hear in Senegal to 

the music that you’d hear in Panama, New York, 

Chicago or Philadelphia. There are rhythmic and 

harmonic elements that fuse them together. The 

more I look at the late Teddy Pendergrass or 

Otis Redding, I get a sense that it’s connected to 

John Coltrane or Fela Kuti.” 

In particular, Hall points to combinations of 

complexity and simplicity throughout African 

music and in Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes. 

He’s after the same ideals on his compositions, 

like “The Path To Love” from Into The Light. 

“There’s a singability on the surface, but 

below the surface there’s something going on 

that has more depth. This sweet and sour, salt 

and pepper, yin and yang is something I’m trying 

to illuminate.” —Aaron Cohen 


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Players 

Luis Bonilla ; 

Angst-Free 

Brass 

Luis Bonilla, who boasts a broad 

range of credits with established 

bands, has turned his attention to 

becoming a bandleader in his 

own right. The trombonist has 

assembled a group of his peers 

for the recent album I Talking 

Now (Planet Arts), and he has 

already booked studio time for a 

sequel. 

“It’s complete commitment 

to my own groups from this 

point on,” Bonilla said. “I was 

extremely busy freelancing and 

playing with a lot of different 

people, and I just can’t spread 

myself so thin now.” 

I Talking Now (Planet Arts) 

features Bonilla’s working quintet 

of pianist Arturo O’Farrill, 

drummer John Riley, bassist 

Andy McKee and tenor saxophonist 

Ivan Renta. The album grew out of associations 

with musicians in the Vanguard Jazz 

Orchestra, O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra 

and various Charles Mingus tribute bands. 

Bonilla’s career encompasses Latin music and 

free-jazz, but the new release focuses mostly on 

hard-bop while showcasing the leader’s big, 

brassy tone and store of ideas as a soloist. 

“For the way I like to present music, the 

intent is to be as accessible as it is challenging to 

not only the musicians themselves, but [also for] 

the listener,” Bonilla said. “It’s really unapologetic—just 

constant risk-taking. Just five confident 

voices with the sole intent of really playing 

together and really trying to get a big band 

sound from a small group setting.” 

Bonilla freely admits to eclectic tastes 

extending well beyond jazz, not to mention his 

chosen instrument. He refers to Led Zeppelin as 

his favorite band, and also expresses a penchant 

for everything from Brazilian music to 

American funk bands. 

“It’s not that I’m speaking different languages—it’s 

the same language, just different 

dialects,” he said. “If we limit ourselves to one 

kind of music, then we may be shortchanging 

ourselves. I always was taught and encouraged 

to create my own scene and create my own 

voice. The fact that I’m so versatile makes it 

even better because I carry a little bit of each of 

those influences, whether they’re rock, funk, 

jazz, soul, salsa or Brazilian.” 

Saxophonist Donny McCaslin admires 

Bonilla’s technique, especially how he applies it. 

“He’s a very natural player; you never feel 

him laboring on the instrument,” said McCaslin, 

who has known Bonilla since high school. “He’s 

got so much talent that there are many things 

that are going to be possible for him.” 

Bonilla attended California State University, 

Los Angeles, and gained experience in salsa 

bands and big bands (including Gerald Wilson 

and Pancho Sanchez) during the latter half of the 

’80s. He moved to New York in 1991, where he 

earned a graduate degree at Manhattan School of 

Music. He attracted attention while performing 

with Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and by the 

late 1990s had become a first-call sideman with 

the likes of McCoy Tyner, Willie Colón, Astrud 

Gilberto, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Dave Douglas. 

Bonilla teaches at Temple University, 

Manhattan School of Music and Queens 

College. His first two albums, Pasos Gigantes 

(1998) and ¡Escucha! (2000), focus on more 

traditional Latin jazz repertoire. In 2007 he 

released Terminal Clarity (2007), a live 

recording that combines Latin music with freejazz. 

The group, Trombonilla, has performed 

sporadically since the late 1990s with a host of 

musicians. 

Bonilla’s quintet, I Talking Now, features a 

set lineup, a first for Bonilla. 

“The true benefit of using musicians who are 

this experienced and who are my peers is they 

understand my music and they understand my 

intent,” Bonilla said. “It puts me at ease, which 

greatly benefits the music because I’m no longer 

distracted by unnecessary drama.” —Eric Fine 

SURESH SINGARATHAM

Steve Colson ; Self-Sufficient Gifts 

Even though pianist Steve Colson has yet to 

become a household name after more than 30 

years in jazz, the title of his latest disc, The 

Untarnished Dream (Silver Sphinx), speaks 

volumes. The name comes from one of the 

song’s lyrics about life itself as a gift. 

“A lot of time we can get too wrapped up in 

the commercial aspect of music and life,” 

Colson said. “We don’t really stop and appreciate 

life and being able to share with others.” 

Colson has been sharing his musical gifts 

with a wide cast of musicians, thanks, in part, 

to his long involvement with the Association 

for the Advancement of Creative Musicians 

(AACM). For his new disc, Colson called 

bassist Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille 

to play along with his singing wife, Iqua 

Colson. Casting a balance between post-modern 

bebop and free-jazz, Colson recasts songs 

that were originally composed for larger 

ensembles. He says that when he writes, he 

often hears elaborate harmonies and contrapuntal 

melodies that call for different voices. “In 

terms of thinking of the content, I try to get the 

most bang for the buck,” he said. 

The AACM also taught Colson self-sufficiency, 

a quality that comes through nearly 

every aspect of The Untarnished Dream, from 

the disc artwork that the pianist created to his 

ownership of the label (along with his wife). 

“The AACM taught us that you have to pursue 

your own vision even if you have to fight 

an uphill battle,” Colson said. 

Colson was familiar with uphill battles, 

though, before joining the AACM in 1972. 

When he arrived in Chicago from East Orange, 

N.J., in 1967, he attended Northwestern 

University to study classical piano during a 

time when the institution was deciding to allow 

more black students on its campus. The school 

didn’t have a program for jazz when he arrived. 

“You couldn’t practice jazz at Northwestern,” 

Colson laughed. “If someone heard me 

playing jazz in the practice room, they would 

bang on the door.” 

Still, he met some kindred spirits, most 

notably Chico Freeman, with whom he formed 

a jazz band that played at various local events. 

It was with Freeman in 1968 that he first discovered 

the AACM through a poster advertising 

a Fred Anderson concert. 

Colson and Freeman explored more AACM 

concerts and eventually joined. At the same 

time, Northwestern started a jazz program. 

Colson remembers trying out: the director 

asked him to play a song and improvise but it 

couldn’t be a blues. Colson played Bobby 

Timmons’ “Dat Dare” and was disqualified 

because the teacher said to not play the blues. 

“But it wasn’t a blues tune—it’s bluesy,” 

Colson said. “This guy didn’t know the difference 

between a blues and a popular song structure. 

One of the guys who did get in the band 

would call me and ask how to play the piano 

changes on the charts that they had.” 

Which is something else he can laugh about 

now. —John Murph 

SHARON SULLIVAN RUBIN

christian 

SCOTT 

SHOWS HIS TEETH 

By Jennifer Odell // Photo by Jimmy Katz 

During Jazz Fest in New Orleans, trumpeter Christian Scott 

was driving home after playing a late-night gig with Soulive 

when he noticed a car trailing him by the Claiborne Street 

underpass. At first he was afraid he was going to be the 

target of a robbery. When the sirens came on, he realized 

he was being pulled over. 

In the moments that followed, he says, nine police officers 

drew their guns on him, and he was dragged from the car 

and thrown on the hood. Not wanting to become the next 

Amadou Diallo, he suggested the officer get his ID out of his 

wallet while he kept his hands in the air. 

“ Oh, we got one of these type of niggers,” quipped a cop. 

In the course of reacting to the use of that word, the slight, 

25-year-old musician was told to shut up unless he wanted 

his mother to pick him up “ from the morgue.” 

Log on to concordmusicgroup.com/cscottjazz to hear 

full streaming audio of “The Eraser” from Christian 

Scott’s CD Yesterday You Said Tomorrow.

Two years later, Scott is fighting back—and 

he’s using music to do it. 

“It stands for Ku Klux Police Department,” 

he said, explaining “K.K.P.D.,” the title of the 

first track on his new album, Yesterday You Said 

Tomorrow. 

The disc is Scott’s third album for Concord 

and maybe the first one on which he lives up to 

that ineffable “potential” his critics have pined 

for since his 2005 debut, Rewind That. That 

album polarized audiences, earning him a 

Grammy nomination on the one hand, and on 

the other, reviews like the New York Times’ 

accusation that his “toothless fusion … never 

coalesces into a worthy showcase for his considerable 

talent.” 

Five years later, Scott’s music is anything 

but toothless—a point affirmed last summer 

when he won the Rising Star–Trumpet category 

of DownBeat’s International Critics Poll, 

well before Yesterday You Said Tomorrow 

was released. 

“K.K.P.D.” is somewhat of a benchmark for 

what he’s done with the entire album, which is 

to use music the way Keith Haring used graffiti—as 

a soapbox. 

He puts it a different way, of course. 

“The impetus behind the [album] was to illuminate 

the fact that the same dilemmas that 

dominated the social and musical landscape of 

the ’60s have not been eradicated, only refined,” 


he said from a London hotel room in November, 

summarizing a statement he was writing about 

the album for his team at Concord. 

“The record seeks to change this dynamic by 

re-engaging these newly refined, pre-existing 

problems in our social structure in the same 

ways that our predecessors did.” 

With an opening track about racial profiling 

and discrimination, a mid-point tune about 

Proposition 8 and a closing aria about the legacy 

of Roe vs. Wade, Scott, 27, meets the challenge 

he set for himself and then some. 

His meticulously executed musical choices 

give the whole album an almost operatic quality, 

as dramatic tension unfolds between guitar and 

drums or piano and bass, while Scott’s unnervingly 

controlled trumpet sounds an alarm that 

either polarizes or lulls the other parts into a 

comforting common ground. 

In retelling the story of his near-arrest in 

New Orleans, Scott says he constructed personas 

for each of the parts on “K.K.P.D.” Matt 

Stevens’ guitar alludes to a strain of country 

music popular decades ago in Tennessee, 

where the Klan was founded. In the song’s 

intro, a country-tinged melody brushes up 

somewhat disruptively against Jamire 

Williams’ West African drum rhythms before 

the lull of Scott’s horn trains your ears to disregard 

the earlier musical conflict. 

This is all delivered with the hauntingly 

deep tone that initially caught critics’ attention 

back in 2005. 

“I wanted to create a palette that referenced 

the ’60s’ depth and conviction and context and 

subject matter and sound,” he said. “But in a 

way that illuminated the fact that my generation 

of musicians have had the opportunity to 

study the contributions of our predecessors, 

thus making our decision-making process 

musically different. 

“That dynamic was then coupled with superimposition 

of textures from our era, so that textures 

from my generation were sort of married 

with the ones from the past. 

“And then the last part, which is probably of 

paramount importance, was that I wanted it to be 

recorded as if it was in the ’60s.” 

As Scott reads from the beginnings of a 

prepared statement over the phone, a 

quote from an interview that took place 

some 18 months earlier—when he’d been shooting 

equally high as far as the ambition of his 

thoughts about the new music—comes to mind. 

“If I can get this [album] to be what I want it to 

be,” he’d said, “I feel like it can change the 

scope of everything that’s happening.” 

Whether the album will affect the direction 

of new music in general remains to be seen. But 

what stood out back in 2008 as he chatted informally 

at a Thai restaurant near his Brooklyn

apartment is even more apparent now. Scott’s 

appreciation for the ability of music to tell stories 

and to make social commentary is rare, and 

the way in which he follows through on those 

ideas is unique. 

Scott’s company, like his music, has a comfortable 

intensity to it—an easy warmth that 

wins you over even when he’s on a mission to 

change your mind about something. 

Though gracious and polite, Scott presents 

his point of view with the same confident 

authority he puts into his live shows. And even 

when what he says rubs folks the wrong way, 


his honest expression comes with a grain of 

erudite salt. 

Take his position that the neo-classicist 

movement has such an overbearing presence in 

jazz education and contemporary music that 

young players are discouraged from trying to 

move past it. Yes, that means he thinks it’s time 

to find a new, post-Wynton Marsalis era. 

But his new album is at its core a contemporary 

riff on bebop and post-bop. And so was 

Marsalis’ self-titled 1981 release. 

“He’s very diligent in trying to learn and do 

new things,” said McCoy Tyner, who featured 

Scott as a special guest on the road in 2008. 

“He’s considerate of the tradition of the music 

and what happened before and moving ahead to 

what’s happening in the future.” 

Tyner’s right. The second track on Yesterday 

You Said Tomorrow is a cover of Radiohead’s 

“The Eraser,” but its washed production—courtesy 

of Rudy van Gelder—gives it a sepia-toned 

sound that matches the gritty quality of the otherwise 

all-original album. 

“I know he’s made some comments about 

certain things,” Tyner says. “He’s opinionated, 

but he has a right to have his own opinion. I give 

him credit for that. It’s reflected in his playing.” 

Tyner and Scott met in 2006, when the 

young trumpeter was tapped for Tyner’s The 

Story Of Impulse. Tyner heard something in 

Scott’s sound that reminded him of “what cats 

were doing in the ’60s,” as Scott tells it. 

Scott began bouncing ideas off Tyner, while 

Tyner shared with him new ways of thinking 

about harmonics. Scott was already preparing to 

record the material on Yesterday You Said 

Tomorrow back then, and knew he wanted an 

analog aesthetic—in Scott’s words, “visceral, 

dirty type of recording”—that would meld harmonic 

tension with some of the post-rock concepts 

that appeared on his 2007 release Anthem. 

The time he spent with the pianist seemed to 

turn on a few lightbulbs on his creative path to 

the new release. 

“I like that spirit he has, his dedication to 

music; he’s really in love with what he’s doing,” 

Tyner says. “He knows the traditions that exist 

in this music.” 

Indeed, Scott came up steeped in a world 

of musical traditions. After his mother, 

Cara Harrison, heard her grade schoolaged 

son correctly identify the sound of a coin 

dropping to the floor of their New Orleans 

home as “F-sharp,” she says she knew he was 

bound for a future in music, like so many others 

in her family. 

It wasn’t long before most of Scott’s mornings 

started out with a wake-up call from his 

grandfather, Big Chief Donald Harrison Sr., 

directing him to report to the kitchen table 

with his trumpet to perform “Bag’s Groove” 

and other tunes. If he missed a note, his grandfather, 

a folk singer and an important cultural 

force in the Mardi Gras Indian community, 

would sing the bar to Scott, who would play it 

back until he got it right. The next morning, 

the ritual would repeat. 

The name Harrison is one of music royalty in 

New Orleans. Scott’s mother has been a singer 

all her life. His maternal grandmother played 

piano and clarinet. His uncle is the acclaimed 

saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr. And his aunt 

Cherice Harrison-Nelson runs the Mardi Gras 

Indian Hall of Fame, a cultural center devoted to 

one of the most unique and influential elements 

of the city’s heritage. 

Soon after he got his start in music, Scott 

began gigging regularly with Donald Harrison

Jr. He attended NOCCA, New Orleans’ celebrated 

performing arts school, and went on to 

graduate from Berklee’s six-year double degree 

program in just two years. 

Despite his background and strong ties to the 

Crescent City, Scott, who now lives in 

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is honing a musical 

identity that transcends region. A student of 

musical history and New Orleans culture, he is 

focused nonetheless on making something new. 

While on tour with his uncle as a young 

teenager, Scott learned how to use warm air to 

create a fuzzy, Ben Webster-like tone. That idea 

fell dormant until one of his teachers, Clyde 

Kerr, echoed similar advice. Finally, one day 

(his birthday, Scott remembers), he sat in the 

practice room at school trying to hear what tone 

he was going for. “I started thinking about trying 

to make the horn sound like my mom’s voice,” 

he says. “And that did it. Boom.” 

“He means my singing voice,” says his 

mother. 

The result is a tone that breathes warmth and 

emotion. His improvisation seems to bask in the 

tangle of what’s in his heart, while full compositions 

are often based on events of the past, 

whether historic or from his own life. 

The apocalyptically dark “Anthem” tackled 

the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 

his 9th Ward neighborhood. 

When Scott performed “Died In Love”— 

which he wrote in memory of a friend he lost to 

gun violence as a child—onstage at Newport in 

2008, he was moved to tears. Afterward, a handful 

of reporters questioned his professionalism 

for having cried. 

“If I can’t be vulnerable in front of listeners, 

then this is not for me,” he said later. 

Such strong emotions likely have something 

to do with Scott’s affection for 

branching outside of the jazz tradition: He 

has recorded with Prince and performed with 

Mos Def and Jill Scott. 

DJ Logic first saw Scott perform in New 

Orleans and was immediately taken by his openminded 

approach to music, and his ability to 

reflect a love of jazz, hip-hop and music from 

other parts of the world in his writing. Logic 

invited Scott to sign onto the Global Noize project 

he was recording with keyboardist Jason 

Miles. The turntablist was moved by the trumpeter’s 

emotive sound and the deep feeling that 

came through in his performances on two tracks. 

“I could hear that in his playing,” Logic recalled. 

“You could close your eyes and hear something. 

He would take me on a journey, and I could just 

follow it.” 

Director Mitch Glazer is hoping Scott’s playing 

has the same effect on audiences for Passion 

Play, a new film starring Mickey Rourke as a 

hardscrabble trumpeter who falls in love with a 

winged woman (Megan Fox) as he tries to 

dodge a gangster (Bill Murray). 

Scott, who also appears in the film and on the 

soundtrack, has been enlisted to teach Rourke to 

appear to be playing the trumpet. 

In the last few years, Scott’s music has also 

been tapped for the films Leatherheads, starring 

George Clooney, and the indie blockbuster 

Rachel Getting Married. 

But Scott hardly seems star-stuck by these 

opportunities. He’s prone to staying up most of 

the night working, which may be one reason for 

the effervescent honesty that tends to flow from 

him. He’s decidedly more interested in the group 

dynamics of his band—which includes Williams 

on drums, guitarist Matt Stevens, bassist 

Kristopher Funn and Milton Fletcher on piano— 

than he is in the gigs with movie stars. 

Scott almost seems to relish his glimpses 

into the dark side of human nature, whether on 

a personal or political level, and that may be 

because it incites his creative impulses in such 

a focused way. 

After all, his mother says she always 

encouraged her children to use art to rise above 

hardship. 

“My mother taught me if you see an injustice, 

you speak up,” Cara Harrison said. “You’re 

never supposed to lie down in the face of adversity. 

It’s about how you overcome it.” DB 


K U R T R O S E N W I N K E L 

MAKING 

MAGIC By Ted Panken 

Late one afternoon last September, Kurt 

Rosenwinkel sat on a sofa in his New 

York hotel suite, D’Angelico guitar by 

his side, his feet surrounded by various electronic 

boxes, guitar strings and sheet music. Clad in 

a pullover sweater, black jeans and blue worker’s 

cap, Rosenwinkel was awaiting a phone call 

from his stepfather, who he hoped could state a 

correct jacket size to give the wardrobe department 

of The Jimmy Fallon Show. The guitarist 

was preparing for an appearance the following 

evening with the show’s house band in response 

to a request from bandleader Ahmir “Questlove” 

Thompson, his classmate and jamming partner 

at Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and 

Performing Arts during the mid-1980s. 

Thompson had spontaneously offered the invitation 

the night before after hearing the first set of 

Rosenwinkel’s weeklong run at the Village 

Vanguard in support of his new CD release, 

Standards Trio: Reflections (Womusic). 

Something about the moment made it impossible 

to avoid the kind of question the 39-yearold 

guitarist might face on a show like Fallon’s. 

Which is to say, how does Rosenwinkel deal 

with the quasi guitar-god stature he commands 

among post-Generation X jazz devotees, who 

regard him as a kind of bridge between such 

Baby Boomer icons as Pat Metheny, John 

Scofield and Bill Frisell and increasingly visible 

just-thirties like Mike Moreno and Lage Lund? 

Rosenwinkel responded with an anecdote. A 

few weeks earlier, off the road after a summer of 

touring, he went to a bar in Berlin, where he 

teaches guitar and improvisation as a tenured 

professor at the Jazz Institut, and was engaging 

in convivial discussion with a fellow patron. At 

a certain point, his new acquaintance said, 

“Yeah, so what’s your name?” 

“Kurt.” 

“What’s your last name?” 


“Kurt Rosenwinkel.” 

“Get out of here! Don’t bullshit me!” 

“I said, ‘Well, I am.’ He was like, ‘No way. 

Kurt Rosenwinkel doesn’t talk like that!’” 

Rosenwinkel laughed. “I don’t know how I 

was talking. I had to show him my credit card, 

just to shut him up, because he was a pain in 

the ass. 

“People acknowledge me, and it’s cool,” he 

continued, directly addressing the matter. 

“When I first started to hear guitarists I’d influenced, 

I felt bad inside. I said to myself, ‘If this 

is what people think I sound like, then I’d better 

practice—if I’m influencing people, I’d better at 

least be better.’ It motivates me, because I see it 

as a responsibility, in a way. Not a big responsibility. 

I’m just doing what I’m doing.” 

What Rosenwinkel has done on Reflections, 

on which he navigates eight ballads culled from 

various nooks and crannies of jazz and the Great 

American Songbook, is a point of departure 

from his musical production of recent years, 

documented on such widely pored-over albums 

as The Remedy (ArtistShare) and such prior 

Verve releases as Deep Song, Heartcore, The 

Next Step and The Enemies Of Energy. On these 

ensemble offerings, comprising predominantly 

Rosenwinkel’s original music, the guitarist 

sculpts a pan-stylistic world of his own, deploying 

grooves and lines drawn from rock and 

urban vernaculars and a distinctive harmonic 

language informed by the canons of classical 

music and hardcore jazz. He elaborates his 

vision with ecstatic, cathartic solos, sculpting the 

raw materials with high melodic sensibility, executing 

them with immaculate chops and individualizing 

them with an instantly recognizable 

tone defined by his ability to weave both electronic 

effects and his signifying voice seamlessly 

into the flow. 

During the week at the Vanguard, spurred by 

bassist Eric Revis’ melodic, resonant lines and 

drummer Rodney Green’s crisply stroked, 

dynamics-attentive swing patterns, Rosenwinkel 

followed and expanded the template of 

Reflections. The previous evening, he began the 

second set with “Backup,” a smoldering, medium-groove 

inner-city blues that debuted on the 

1964 Larry Young recording Inta Somethin’! 

There followed a rubato-to-brisk reading of 

Thelonious Monk’s “Reflections” and a tour de 

force treatment of “Invitation” on which 

Rosenwinkel stated the melody over a crisp 5/4 

vamp before launching into an ascendent declamation. 

Despite the furious tempo, he allowed 

each note to ring out clearly, executing multiple, 

independent lines, phrased unpredictably, as 

though he and Green were conducting an ongoing 

rhythmic chess match. 

On a rubato intro to “More Than You 

Know,” Rosenwinkel exploited his ravishing 

tone, allowing the silence to speak, then stated 

the melody with a Spanish feel. He initiated an 

improvised dialogue with Revis before morphing 

into a double-time solo notable for an abundant 

stream of melodic variation within the line. 

His solo on John Lewis’ bebop-era “Milestones” 

was surging and idiomatic, while on “When 

Sunny Gets Blue” he followed another long, 

abstract intro with a soulful, cut-to-the-chase 

declamation. He ended the set with Charlie 

Parker’s “Chasin’ The Bird,” again transforming 

his guitar into a de facto lap keyboard on which 

to carve out the contrapuntal phrases necessary 

to render the song. 

In point of fact, over the three-day recording 

session in Brooklyn Studio last June that resulted 

in Reflections, Rosenwinkel had played similarly 

diverse repertoire, arriving at the ballads 

format in the manner of a film director creating 

a final cut in the editing room. 

“It was a big surprise to realize that we had

MICHAEL JACKSON

made a ballad record,” he said. “We recorded 

20 or 25 songs, about 70 takes. I listened to it all 

and selected songs I thought were good, with 

the idea of making a normal standards record 

where you have a couple of ballads, a couple of 

mediums and some fast, higher energy things. 

But as I started to mix, I felt the ballads were 

the music I wanted to listen to over time. I 

thought that they had something magical about 

them, and the other performances, although 

they were good, weren’t necessary to put out. I 

don’t want to put out music that doesn’t have 

magic. And I think that I’m a good judge of 

whether it has that or not.” 

After the aforementioned set, Revis 

opined that for Rosenwinkel to play 

such repertoire was a sort of reality 

check for his fan base, which responds more to 

the esoteric trappings of his tonal personality 

than to his foundational grounding in the tropes 

of hardcore jazz. In short, even though he lives 

abroad, Rosenwinkel, a New York resident 

from 1992 until 2003, continues to regard himself 

a New York musician, one “exposed to the 

history of bebop and modern jazz that I’ve really 

only found in New York.” 

“My music is very otherworldly at times and 

comes from places that don’t have anything to 

do with the explicit jazz tradition,” he said. “But 

that’s just that music being true to itself, as every 

music should be. When I’m playing bebop, 

which I love, it works because of certain things, 

the walking bassline and swinging drums played 

by a drummer who has the wisdom that comes 

from understanding what Max Roach, Philly Joe 

Jones and Art Taylor were doing.” 

He recalled “learning what jazz was” as an 

underage Philadelphia teenager sitting in at 

such clubs as the Blue Note and Slim Cooper’s 

Lounge, “where everything was swinging, and 

the whole audience was dancing, and everybody’s 

feeling really good. That’s what I want 

to draw from when I’m playing swing-based 

music. Or any music, really—whether I’m 

playing rock or jazz, the essential ingredient is 

that it’s real, that it reaches out and grabs you, 

that it hits you where it hurts.” 

In this regard, Rosenwinkel references as 

core inspirations Bud Powell (“when I hear 

him play, I feel the almost tragic beauty of his 

genius struggling to come out; the soulfulness 

of his line is almost painful, like he’s playing 

for his life every time”) and the obscure Powell 

acolyte Frank Hewitt, who spent much of the 

’90s hunkered down at Smalls, three blocks 

down the street from the Vanguard, mentoring 

Rosenwinkel and a host of other now-prominent 

former Smalls habitues. 

“People often think of the tradition as some 

static thing that you can either do or not do,” 

Rosenwinkel said. “But I listened to Frank 

Hewitt every night, playing bebop in the spirit 

with which it was played in the ’40s and the 

’50s, reinventing the harmony as it’s happening, 

like a living, magical world where any- 


thing is possible. I play piano, and I can understand 

what people are playing when I watch 

them. But I watched Frank Hewitt’s fingers as 

he played, and he would play things that I just 

did not understand. I felt that the secret was not 

some theoretical thing that he knew and I 

didn’t. I thought it was a secret of soul, a secret 

of music that doesn’t come from theoretical 

knowledge, but from magical knowledge, magical 

thought, magical understanding. That’s 

where the life of bebop intersects with my life 

of playing music and being alive, feeling like 

it’s part of my world, too. 

“I experience music in esoteric terms—in 

terms of energy, and how energy flows either 

to create harmony or dissonance, or positivity 

or negativity. As a magical being, I recognize 

that when I’m performing I can have an energetic 

effect on the space that I’m in. Sometimes 

when I go up on stage, I imagine the room 

being only composed of pluses and minuses. 

No people, no instruments, no sound system, 

no lights. Only positives and negatives in the 

space, and I have the power to change negatives 

to positives through playing music.” 

This sounds analogous to ritualistic notions 

of music-making, in which masters of the 

idiom develop techniques to perform the function. 

As Rosenwinkel puts it, “Technique is to 

get better at those esoteric things—to be able 

to be a magical being, to manifest energy, 

manifest the vibrations that you want to put 

out to express yourself.” 

Ask Rosenwinkel about his formative influences, 

and he’ll mention Kevin Eubanks, Pat 

Metheny, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Tal Farlow 

and rockers Alex Lifeson and Jimmy Page. But 

his first-among-equals role model seems to be 

seven-string guitarist George Van Eps, whom he 

cites, along with the “Lute Suites” of Bach, as 

his source for creating multiple independent 

lines. “The possibilities that Bach’s music contains 

for the left hand are astounding—how it’s 

possible to play a fugue with three lines going in 

different directions at the same time, all contained 

within the finger mechanics of the left 

hand. George Van Eps was also dealing with 

moving lines inside of chords and cadences 

within a voice through left-hand finger mechanics. 

What he and Bud Powell have in common is 

a thorough and deep knowledge of the way that 

harmony connects in terms of the inner voices.” 

Toward this end, Rosenwinkel has made it 

his custom to gear up with a discreetly fastened 

clip-on mic that allows him to deploy his voice 

as a component of his sound. “If I want to bring 

out a note of a chord after I play it, I can feed it 

with the voice,” he said. “When I started to 

record during the ’90s, I was unhappy with the 

result of the sound—something was always 

missing. Then it dawned on me that the voice 

was part of the sound. While I played, I’d be 

singing to the sound coming out of the amplifier—I’d 

intercept it, alter it and make it right. 

“If I’m feeling comfortable with my voice, 

then I can play melodically. But there’s an 

internal voice as well. In my musical conception, 

I have realized that physicality is the 

underlying principle of rhythm, mental focus is 

the underlying principle of harmony, and the 

voice—the internal resonance of the voice—is 

the underlying principle of melody.” 

It was time for Rosenwinkel to prepare for 

the evening’s gig, but before winding up, 

perhaps spurred by his impending reunion 

with Thompson, he reminisced about his teen 

years in Philadelphia. 

“In high school, Ahmir and I would go into 

a room and jam out, and then extend that and 

improvise in this [Frank] Zappa-esque way,” he 

recalled. “The idea of improvisation as a pure 

concept—not even limited to making notes, but 

just improvising in general—was such an inspiration 

for me. My mother took me to performances 

all the time, including one by the 

Ganelin Trio, a Russian avant-garde group, 

which had a wonderful effect on me. And 

WRTI, the great radio station, played amazing 

music—late Trane and Sun Ra, really dark 

shit—that opened my mind.” 

It was again observed that Rosenwinkel and 

his generational cohort are no longer young, 

developing musicians, but have themselves 

evolved into original thinkers. 

“Generation X, that’s us,” he said with a 

laugh. “Nobody thought we would end up 

doing anything. I think everyone I know who’s 

my age shared a certain seriousness about the 

work ethic of what goes into being able to play 

jazz music. We had a lot of conversations about 

the generation that followed us, where it 

seemed a lot of players felt a sense of entitlement—that 

they could just come to New York 

and think that if they could play a decent solo, 

they should automatically be successful as jazz 

musicians. If that didn’t happen, they’d become 

jaded and put off, and even rebel and stop practicing, 

or change idioms and become rock players. 

But I think the generation after that, which 

includes people like Aaron Parks, Lage Lund, 

Will Vincent and Lionel Loueke, have the right 

attitude.” 

Such crusty, old-school comments notwithstanding, 

Rosenwinkel seems, for the moment, 

to have satisfied his aspiration to make a trio 

statement. “There’s so much to do,” he said. “I 

don’t want to wait two years between each 

record. I have too much music that’s going to 

pass by if it’s not recorded.” He cites a forthcoming 

release of a big band presentation of 

his music, an “ethereal” solo-guitars-withvoice 

project, and a pair of in-progress projects 

with Black Crowes-Oasis producer Paul Stacy, 

one addressing Brazilian-flavored music, the 

other “working on songs I’ve written with 

lyrics that I sing.” 

But these projects are for the future. 

Summing up the here and now, Rosenwinkel 

concluded: “Playing on the bandstand with Eric 

and Rodney has made me grow and fortified my 

musicality. I’m in the best place possible.” DB

JOEY L.

ROBERT GLASPER IS CHANNELING 

THELONIOUS MONK SERIOUSLY NOW. 

Not musically, necessarily, but visually. As we sit on the dingy 

furniture inside Soda Bar, a popular Brooklyn dive, Glasper’s 

attire—chocolate corduroy blazer, baggy demin jeans, vintage Tshirt 

and charcoal driver cap—suits the black boho chic of the 

Prospect Heights neighborhood. Still, it’s difficult to ignore the 

striking resemblance between 32-year-old Glasper, who’s steadily 

advancing to becoming one of the more recognizable pianists and 

composers of his generation, and Monk, the iconic modernist of 

the bebop era. 

Perhaps it’s the way that the cap frames Glasper’s strong, mocha-hued face and 

scruffy beard that recalls Monk. Or it could be Glasper’s large, knowing eyes, wide 

Cheshire cat smile and brawny physique. “You’re not the only person who says that, 

dude,” Glasper laughs, abruptly taking a break from the plate of buffalo wings that he’s 

demolishing. He goes on to explain that even the family members of his girlfriend, who 

happens to be Monk’s great niece, make similar comments. “They even say that our 

mannerisms are the same.” 

Had he not become a formidable jazz musician, Glasper could nail a successful career 

as comedian. In conversation, he’s not so much prone to telling knock-knock jokes as he 

is to enlivening discussions with hysterical asides, reflections and observations. Take, for 

instance, his thoughts on why he’s such a rhythmic pianist. “Just being black,” he snaps, 

with a huge guffaw. “Granted, there are exceptions where some black people don’t have 

rhythm. But the overall consensus is I’m born with it. I didn’t practice rhythm. I just know 

it. When I was in church, Sister Smith was playing the tambourine, killing that shit. That’s 

just some embedded stuff; she didn’t have study or practice it.” 

For all of Glasper’s rhythmic agility, though, melody reigns supreme throughout his 

music. It’s an influence from growing up in Houston with his late, gospel-singing and 

church piano-playing mother, Kim Yvette Glasper, to whom he dedicated his first Blue 

Note disc, Canvas (2005), and whom he saluted on “Tribute” from In My Element (2007). 

“I love melody,” he says. “Most of my songs start out as melodies. Then I run to the piano 

and try to figure out the chords underneath them.” 

On this chilly, rainy afternoon, Glasper is taking a late lunch break from rehearsing 

with Maxwell at a studio just spitting distance away. Maxwell, an acclaimed modern soul 

crooner who has embarked on a major comeback with the release of BLACKSummers’ 

Night (Columbia), his first disc in eight years, recruited the pianist after several of 

Glasper’s band members—including drummer Chris Dave and bassist Derrick Hodge— 

recorded with Maxwell on the disc and later joined the touring band. 

“He knows so many people whom I’ve come in contact over the years,” Maxwell says 

of Glasper. “He’s a tour-de-force.”

Since arriving to New York from Houston in 1999—first to attend 

Manhattan’s New School of Music, then quickly securing gigs with 

Christian McBride, Terence Blanchard, Mark Whitfield and 

Russell Malone—Glasper has built a slightly under-the-radar reputation 

for not only solidifying the bridges between jazz and r&b and hip-hop, 

but also as a remarkable talent scout. From working with musicians such 

as Q-Tip, Mos Def, Ali Shaheed Muhummad, Bilal, Meshell 

Ndegeocello and J Dilla, Glasper has become an A-lister among the r&b 

and hip-hop cognoscenti. “I’ve always been like that,” Glasper insists. 

“I’ve never been just a jazz nerd. I’ve always had my hands in different 

kinds of shit.” 

Even while growing up as an only child immersed in gospel, Glasper 

was attuned to different music. He started pecking at the piano when he 

was 12 at Houston’s East Wing Baptist Church, which he describes as a 

small storefront operation near a laundromat. “It might, at the most, have 

had 15 members on a good Sunday,” he jokes. Oscar Peterson was 

Glasper’s first jazz hero, after listening to his mother play a Peterson and 

Ella Fitzgerald recording around the house. By the time he reached 11th 

grade, he advanced greatly, performing in the grand Brentwood Baptist 

Church, which had up to 10,000 members. At the same time, he attended 

Houston’s High School of the Performing and Visual Arts, following in 

the footsteps of Jason Moran, who graduated in 1991. “Jason left this big 

legacy,” Glasper recalls. “I was the next guy—especially a black guy—to 

play piano and jazz and be good.” 

That said, Glasper’s music avoids the pitfalls of pastiche. He employs 

his gospel, hip-hop, r&b, pop and electronica touchstones more discreetly 

than others, opting for an organic sensibility that rhythmically can suggest 

the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, the impressionistic improvisations 

of Herbie Hancock and the orchestral approach of Erroll Garner. 

Sometimes, Glasper can become to the piano what Ahmir “Questlove” 

Thompson of the Roots is to the drums: He can emulate the technological 

sounds of hip-hop productions organically. He has an uncanny way of 

sounding like a sampled loop with all the repetitive nuances, much like 

Thompson can replicate the sound of a drum machine. 

Several years ago, Glasper proclaimed that he would be the first to 

bridge the worlds of jazz and hip-hop successfully. Given that in the last 

two decades musicians such as Herbie Hancock, Roy Hargrove, Q-Tip, 

Guru, Soweto Kinch, Soulive, Madlib and a host of others have taken on 

similar challenges with varying degrees of success, Glasper’s swaggering 

statement makes for a tall order. “There’s always a key element that is 

missing, either in hip-hop or the jazz stuff,” Glasper argues. “It’s never a 

100 percent [for] each of them. It’s always 100 percent this and 75 percent 

that. You seldom find guys who are genuinely 100 percent everything.” 

When it comes to defining what distinguishes musicians playing at 

hip-hop and those who can actually play it, Glasper cites “the feeling.” 

“You can tell when a drummer really plays hip-hop or not,” he says. 

“It’s the phrasing; it’s the beat; it’s the feel. There’s a feel that’s always 

there, especially when you get into J Dilla. Dilla is the hardest kind of 

hip-hop to play. When you play some old-school stuff, everything is kind 

of on the beat, pretty much like a metronome,” he explains, as he pounds 

out the static “boom, bap, boom-bap” beat from Afrika Bambaataa’s 

seminal hip-hop classic “Planet Rock” on the table. “But when you get 

into stuff where the bass is laid-back, the snare is early [in the groove] 

and the bass drum is late, and the piano player is in the middle, that’s a 

feel thing.” He uses hand gestures to illustrate Dilla’s keen spatial awareness 

and rhythmic ingenuity. “A lot of people try to play hip-hop and it 

comes out sounding like funk. Just because you put a backbeat to it 

doesn’t make it hip-hop.” 

Glasper often compares his formative years in Houston, where 

he was often the lonely musical mutt between jazz and gospel 

camps, to his early years in Gotham City, where he initially 

found it difficult to discover kindred spirits who could easily play jazz 

and hip-hop. “Now you have jazzheads who are influenced by hiphop. 

And that’s great, but you can tell who’s just jumping on the band-

wagon and trying to do it because it’s hip,” he says. “There are some 

hip-hop people who try to mix it up with jazz, but a lot of [the music] 

comes out corny.” 

“Then I found these cats and we just ended up linking up together,” 

Glasper continues, referring to Dave, Hodge, bassist Vicente Archer, 

drummer Damion Reid and saxophonist/vocoder player Casey 

Benjamin—all of whom have played with Glasper’s acoustic trio and his 

electric ensemble, The Robert Glasper Experiment. 

Last year’s Double-Booked, Glasper’s third Blue Note disc, is his 

first official release documenting the Experiment band. Still, he dedicated 

the disc’s first half to the trio with Archer and Dave because he didn’t 

want to depart dramatically from his previous discs. “I like to do stuff in 

good timing,” he says. “I know hardly any other records that did an 

acoustic thing and an electric thing the way that I’m doing it.” 

Indeed, the Grammy-nominated Double-Booked exhibits a seamless 

aesthetic instead of an acoustic (jazz) and electric (hip-hop) dynamic. 

Listening to how Glasper’s tumbling melody falls gracefully across the 

7/4 metered groove and behind the beat on the acoustic “Downtime” is 

like discovering some lost Dilla track. In fact, Glasper references Dilla 

even more subversively on an inventive reading of Monk’s “Think Of 

One,” on which he quotes Ahmad Jamal’s “Swahililand,” from which, 

in turn, Dilla borrowed the chord progression when producing De La 

Soul’s 1996 hip-hop joint “Stakes Is High.” 

Glasper retains the improvisational spark and vigorous dialog endemic 

of modern jazz on the Experiment half, best illustrated on the dazzling 

makeover of Hancock’s “Butterfly,” which bounces with an improvised 

rhythm informed by a Dilla track. The frisky, Latin-tinged “Festival” 

finds Glasper engaging in his most invigorating playing on the disc as he 

switches back and forth between acoustic piano and Fender Rhodes 

without overdubs. 

Glasper says that when he’s with the trio, the setting forces him to 

become the lead voice throughout the set. But with the Experiment, 

he’s afforded more opportunity to nestle inside the groove. “I love just 

sitting there and not soloing,” he says. “That’s why I can play hip-hop, 

because I don’t mind not soloing. Jazz cats generally like to play a lot. I 

can sit and play three chords all day long and not be mad because I love 

the groove.” 

With the Experiment, Glasper often shares the lead voice with 

Benjamin, who helps bring an electric flavor to the proceedings through 

his engaging use of the vocoder. “The vocoder was around before [rapper] 

T-Pain, so it’s really a history lesson,” he says. “I’m not going to 

lie: I know some of T-Pain’s melodies. Some of his melodies are actually 

good. The content of his songs is another thing, but I’m not mad at 

everything he does.” 

Glasper formed the first edition of the Experiment in 2003. The 

members were interchangeable, but eventually Glasper found regulars 

such as Dave, Hodge and Benjamin. “There’s a collective approach,” 

Hodge explains. “We don’t even have playlists. Songs may float into 

the next.” 

Hodge not only praises Glasper as a strong bandleader and pianist but 

also as a composer. “He’s honest,” Hodge enthuses. “He’s not trying to 

emulate someone else. I know that sounds cliche, but he’s one of those 

musicians who isn’t trying to regurgitate the past. He’s not only one of 

the biggest supporters of jazz, but for the New York music scene, period. 

He’s one of the guys who you’ll always see sitting in the back of a club, 

supporting an artist and many of his heroes. But when you hear Robert’s 

music, you hear that honesty. Sometimes it’s hard for people to do that 

after checking out so much of other people’s music.” 

“I always try to be myself in everything I do,” Glasper reflects. “I 

think that’s where my individuality comes from. You have to learn the 

differences between all kinds of music. Learn the differences and be able 

to play differences, then let it all influence you. I don’t ignore any part of 

what I heard growing up or anything else that’s a part of me. I just stay 

open. When you let music lead you, you go to places that you’ve probably 

never thought of. Music is way smarter than us.” DB

Miles Davis (above) & Gil Evans 

DOWNBEAT ARCHIVES 

‘My 

Favorite 

Big Band 

Album’ 

25 Essential 

Recordings 

By Frank-John Hadley 

Cornet player and composer Taylor Ho 

Bynum, who leads the little big band Positive 

Catastrophe in New York, was candid in his 

response to a question about what big band 

jazz albums he valued the most. “It’s so hard 

to nail down just five favorites since there’s so 

much spectacular stuff out there.” All the 

same, he handed over his list, with perceptive 

remarks about each pick. So did trumpeter 

Scotty Barnhart, first commenting, “These five 

are the ones that really define what a big band 

is all about for me and are amongst my all-time 

favorites.” Multi-instrumentalist Scott 

Robinson said, “It’s hard to name ‘absolute 

favorites,’ so let’s call these ‘some special 

favorites.’” Also succeeding in the Herculean 

task was a battalion of musicians, arrangers, 

composers, educators and film scorers from 

around the world, of all ages and of various 

jazz dispositions, almost 200 strong. 

For percussionist Kahil El’Zabar, whose 

Chicago bands include the Infinity Orchestra, 

the personal selection process inspired awe. 

“As I reflect on the legacy of the big bands, I 

find myself truly humbled by the sheer 

elegance and pageantry of these magnificent 

ensembles.” Lew Soloff narrowed the 

meaning of the word magnificent: “Ellington is 

just it, period!” 

Tony Bennett told DownBeat, “I would like 

to quote my brother Louis Bellson on his 

favorite big bands: ‘Count Basie’s music is the 

soul of the earth, and Duke Ellington’s is the 

impression of the universe.’ I agree with him.” 

Sonny Rollins favored an unspecified collection 

of Buddy Johnson singles—“Johnson was so 

important but is often overlooked.” What 

came first to Maria Schneider’s mind? “Claude 

Thornhill’s The Real Birth Of The Cool, 

featuring Gil Evans’ arrangements, is one of 

the most startling [albums] I’ve ever 

encountered.” 

The 25 albums featured here are the ones 

that appeared on the most lists. These 

favorites, with Porgy And Bess in first place by 

a wide margin, topped 225 other albums that 

received at least one mention.

1 Miles Davis 

Porgy And Bess 

(Columbia, rec. 1958) 

“Somehow all the different 

elements here—Gershwin’s bluesinflected 

songs, Gil Evans’ writing, 

the band’s performance, and the 

sound and feeling of Miles’ trumpet 

and flugelhorn—when all put 

together make it seem greater than 

the sum of its parts.” —Peter Hand 

“Gil Evans was a true impressionist. 

He used the instruments in a way 

that no other arranger ever had. On 

Porgy And Bess, his innovative 

arrangements retain the essence of 

Gershwin’s original opera, but the 

resulting music is a true three-way 

collaboration between Gershwin, 

Evans and Davis. Gil called Miles 

one of the greatest ‘singers,’ and 

that couldn’t be truer throughout 

this recording.” —Renee Rosnes 

“Evans takes Gershwin’s music and 

makes it his own. It is the definitive 

of the composer working in service 

of the jazz soloist in a colorful and 

inspiring way.” —Vince Mendoza 

“This is a great statement on 

dynamics and acoustic interaction. 

The brass and ensemble are at a 

rare, high level, and it is instructive 

to listen to in terms of the way it 

was engineered. Miles’ effect on 

the session was powerful, subtle, 

clear to hear.” —Josh Roseman 

“As delicious as it all is, it’s ‘Oh 

Bess, Where’s My Bess’ that I 

played over and over again.” 

—Mike Gibbs 

“The ensemble on this recording 

might not be thought of technically 

as a ‘big band’ in the strictest sense. 

But considering the presence of a 

standard brass section in the 

ensemble, and with the sounds of 

various woodwinds commonly 

heard in modern big bands today, it 

still feels to my ears to generally be 

within the genre. Though I love all 

the recordings Miles and Gil did 

together, this one seems to move 

me the most.” —Pete McGuinness 

2 Thad Jones & 

Mel Lewis 

Live At The Village Vanguard 

(Solid State, 1967) 

“The effect of Thad’s music and 

personality is still with us. His 

importance as a composer has been 

marginalized, but his expression and 

absolute craftsmanship will, in the 

long run, carry the day. I think Thad 

Jones could be considered our late- 

20th century Ellington.” 

—Mike Patterson 

“The whole album is incredible. 

But to this Midwestern boy, the 

live version of ‘A-That’s Freedom’ 

made New York City seem like a 

wonderful place, so within a few 

years I packed up and went East. 

Thad’s three choruses of tutti are 

probably the greatest of his many 

hair-raising short choruses.” 

—Jim McNeely 

“This band was the pinnacle of 

small band meets big band, with 

colorful writing and lots of musical 

conversation. This was one band 

where, as a saxophonist, it didn’t 

matter to me if I soloed or not. It 

was inspiring to sit in the band and 

be part of the music.” —Bob Mintzer 

“Thad and Mel’s band swings like 

crazy on this recording, especially 

during Thad’s iconic treatment of 

‘Rhythm’ changes on ‘Little Pixie II.’ 

Mel’s drumming is swinging, 

sublime and perfect.” —Peter Erskine 

“Thad’s writing remains the 

standard of excellence for melodic 

and harmonic sophistication. Thad 

was a fountain of creativity and he 

took a lot of chances, for which we 

are all rewarded.” —Michael Weiss 

“This band has such a unique swing 

feel, energy and harmonic language. 

Their condensed close voicing and 

distinguished phrasing are so 

special and recognizable. It’s great 

to hear that Basie kind of swing 

tradition in their music while 

evolving it and taking it another 

step further.” —Eyal Vilner 

“I heard this band for the first time 

on this album and never in my 

wildest dreams ever thought I 

would actually play in it, let alone 28 

years. For me, this is the band’s 

quintessential live recording and an 

authentic depiction of how the 

orchestra sounds at the Village 

Vanguard, which is in my opinion 

still the best place to hear the 

band.” —Gary Smulyan 

Thad Jones (left) & Mel Lewis 

3 Thad Jones & 

Mel Lewis 

Consummation 


“Thad’s arrangements really have a 

sound of their own—he was a 

master of sound, knowing the 

optimum combination of 

instruments—and Mel’s feel and 

touch really brought life to them. 

Nothing feels like filler. Masterful.” 

—Terri Lyne Carrington 

“Virtually all of these charts became 

staples in the big band tradition, and 

with good reason. Thad’s writing 

was fresh and innovative, and the 

performances by his band were 

enthusiastic yet controlled, honed 

by all those Monday nights at the 

Village Vanguard. I’m especially fond 

of the fluid saxophone work, textured 

background lines, occasional 

full band unisons, attention to 

subtleties and the fact that the 

charts always swing even when 

they’re complex.” —Gary Urwin 

“I could sing to you every single 

note of this record right now if I 

had to.” —Gordon Goodwin 

“‘A Child Is Born’ is one of Thad’s 

genius creations.” —Billy Harper 

4 Miles Davis 

Miles Ahead (Columbia, 1957) 

“What strikes me so deeply about 

this record is the coming together of 

two such distinct voices to create a 

whole new sound for the time. Gil 

Evans understood Miles’ sound, 

time and space; and Miles knew 

how to respond. It wasn’t just Gil 

writing backgrounds for Miles, it 

was a real interplay within that time 

and space.” —Ralph Lalama 

“I love all the Davis–Evans 

collaborations but will single this one 

out as I lived with it more than the 

others due to Miles’ incredible 

lyricism.” —Donny McCaslin 

“[Here’s] the blossoming of the cool 

approach to playing and writing by 

its two masters.” —David Berger 

“For me, it was one of the most 

important albums as far as large 

ensembles and big bands. All the 

tunes, the way Miles played 

throughout, had such a beautiful and 

incredible lead trumpet player 

without being a screamer. Just that 

whole concept of lead trumpet—the 

way you express a melody within a 

large ensemble, keeping it 

intimate.” —Joe Lovano 

“This is my favorite of the Gil 

Evans/Miles Davis collaborations. 

Every time I listen to it, it’s like the 

first, it feels so fresh. Gil opens the 

color palette for everyone to follow, 

and Miles’ playing is so pure and 

honest.” —Mike Holober 

5 Count Basie 

The Complete Atomic 

Mr. Basie (Roullette, 1957) 

“Incredible tension exists on this 

album, between the looseness of 

the band’s conception and the 

tautness of the ensemble work, a 

seeming contradiction that all the 

very best bands seemed to 

generate.” —Russ Little 

“I heard this band, playing Neal 

VERYL OAKLAND 


Hefti arrangements, night after night 

when I worked as a cigarette girl at 

Birdland. I still remember every 

note.” —Carla Bley 

“The grammar of big band jazz. The 

absolute perfection.”—Mathias Rüegg 

“Basie is Mr. Swing. Each sideman 

is a star all on his own, whether it be 

Joe Newman, ‘Lockjaw’ Davis or 

just the top sound in the sax section 

that tells you it’s Marshall Royal.” 

—John Burnett 

6 Duke Ellington 

… And His Mother 

Called Him Bill (RCA 1967) 

“This is special not only for the great 

Strayhorn compositions but also for 

the fact that it was recorded three 

months after Strayhorn’s death, and 

you can hear mourning for the loss 

of a great friend in the 

performances.” —Bob Nieske 

“It is so swinging and alive that I 

feel like I am in the studio with them 

every time I hear it. Shut your eyes 

and you can see the floor tiles of the 

studio and smell the coffee brewing 

in the studio lounge.” —Matt Wilson 

“It’s Johnny Hodges’ last recording, 

and he seems to be playing his own 

eulogy as well as Strayhorn’s— 

amazing!” —Roy Nathanson 

“I loved the band sound, and realized 

later that part of my developing a 

conception as a vocalist with a high 

register came from hearing trumpeters 

like Cootie Williams and 

Cat Anderson.” —Judi Silvano 

“The way Johnny Hodges played, 

whew! Johnny would play a melody 

like a lead voice but so expressive 

within a band. It made you feel like 

he was playing with just a rhythm 

section. Those kinds of things really 

taught me a lot about how to it in 

with a larger ensemble and try to 

get an intimacy within it.” 

—Joe Lovano 

7 Count Basie 

Chairman Of The Board 

(Roullette, 1958) 

“This record just makes me happy. 

The writers are great: Frank Foster, 

Thad Jones, Frank Wess and Ernie 

Wilkins. The band swings so hard, 

the dynamic contrasts are amazing, 

and then, of course, there is Sonny 

Payne’s drumming.” —Dave Rivello 


Count Basie (left) & Duke Ellington 

“It just doesn’t get groovier than the 

shout chorus to ‘Blues In Hoss’ 

Flat.’” —Jeremy Pelt 

“Phenomenal swing and attitude is 

the order of the day for this 

consummate album. Marshall 

Royal, Snooky Young and Sonny 

Payne set such strong examples for 

how the music will sound and be 

interpreted.” —Jim Ketch 

“I first heard this album when I was 

12 or 13, and it just knocked me “The biggest reason I love this CD 

out. It reminded me of the Martin is the feel and energy that was 

Luther King Choir at Ebenezer captured—and it still sounds so 

Baptist Church where I grew up.” spirited today. What happened was 

—Scotty Barnhart magical, and Sam Woodyard and 

Jimmy Woode were totally locked 

“‘Blues In Hoss’ Flat’ grabbed me. and had such a special sound 

The band was swinging so hard, I together over the five or so years 

had to get up and dance around. I they played together with Ellington. 

feel the same way about The This recording embodies a high level 

Complete Atomic Mr. Basie.” of emotional exchange between the 

—Jeff Hamilton players and the audience, with 

some great composing captured as 

well.” —Terri Lyne Carrington 


Ellington At Newport 

(Columbia, 1956) 

“Few recordings can still send chills 

up my spine after listening to them 

for 30 years, but when those low 

clarinets come in after Paul 

Gonsalves’ solo on ‘Diminuendo 

And Crescendo In Blue,’ I still get 

goosebumps. By the time the last 

chorus is played and Cat Anderson 

is screaming over the top, I’m gone. 

And I like the first side even more.” 

—Gary Smulyan 

“The groove of the entire 

performance floors me. The cats are 

playing so hard and clean! The 

Maestro is truly at the helm, and 

Paul Gonsalves ... wow!” 

—Kahil El’Zabar 

“I love a near-riot breaking out at an 

outdoor big band gig. I love to feel 

the steam pressure build up from 

the top of the set all the way to its 

freak-out pinnacle to its all-toonecessary 

encore-forced 

denouement.” —Kurt Elling 

“A jewel. The band expresses the 

whole mode and mood of the world 

at that time. Music tells a story.” 

—Marcus Belgrave 

“Paul Gonsalves on ‘Diminuendo’ is 

astonishing. My high school band 

went to Europe in the summer of 

my freshman year and, 

unfortunately for me, once we got 

to Europe I had to have my 

appendix removed. I missed most 

of the tour but sat in that hospital 

bed listening to that track over and 

over again. I remember feeling the 

energy of the band and of the 

audience on the recording and just 

loving how good it all was.” 

—Donny McCaslin 


The Far East Suite (Bluebird,1966) 

“This swings hard and smooth, 

displays all the beautiful melodies 


and textures of early Ellington and 

has a very contemporary feel due to 

the younger rhythm section players 

and the hi-fi recording.” 

—Russ Gershon 

“Ellington is in a more reflective and 

introverted mood here, and I love it. 

The piano is a bit more prominent 

than on most of his recordings. The 

music is so varied emotionally, 

dynamically, harmonically and in 

timbre that listening to the whole 

album is a very exciting voyage 

through human feelings.” 

—Pedro Giraudo 

“This has some of the highest level 

of writing for big band one could 

hope to attain, and Jimmy 

Hamilton’s clarinet playing never 

ceases to inspire me.” 

—Ken Peplowski 

“I chose this record because of its 

completeness, mood and 

compositional approach. Although 

there were two compositions pulled 

from other material—Billy 

Strayhorn’s ‘Isfahan’ and Duke 

Ellington’s ‘Ad-Lib On Nippon’—this 

is a perfect example of how jazz 

composition can capture the beauty 

and essence of other cultures 

without losing its singular American 

character rooted in the blues.” 

—Marcus Shelby 

“‘The Suite’ contains moments of 

truly superb orchestration, and the 

band’s performance—especially 

the interplay between bassist John 

Lamb and drummer Rufus Jones— 

was simply breathtaking and totally 

committed to Duke’s vision.” 

—Russ Little 


Never No Lament— 

The Blanton-Webster Band 

(RCA, 1940–’42) 

“A peak for Duke, with Ben 

Webster, Jimmy Blanton, Barney 

Bigard, Juan Tizol; not to mention 

that Billy Strayhorn was writing for 

the band. Required listening.” 

—Paul Carlon 

“Ellington’s most productive period 

and maybe the greatest big band 

ever.” —David Berger 

“Some people call this the Webster- 

Blanton band, but I call it the Cootie- 

Rex band. Every piece is a 3-minute 

magical journey into sound, melody,

harmony and improvisation. This 

opened my ears into the world of 

Ellington and the infinite possibilities 

of combining musicians and musical 

elements, from the drive of ‘The 

Flaming Sword’ to the mystery of 

‘Sepia Panorama.’”—Steven Bernstein 

“This album is sweet, soulful and 

incredibly sophisticated for its time. 

Along with the genius arranging and 

compositional prowess of Ellington 

and Strayhorn, there is a beautiful 

and characteristic soloist 

everywhere you turn. Yet despite 

the virtuosity and compositional 

sophistication, there is a remarkably 

charming and relaxed feel to the 

entire album.” —Jacam Manricks 


Such Sweet Thunder 

(Columbia/Legacy, 1956–’57) 

“The greatest lesson that 

composers/bandleaders can take 

from Ellington is in writing to the 

strengths and personalities of your 

musicians. Nowhere is that more 

evident than on this recording, 

which brilliantly takes its inspiration 

from a non-musical source, the 

writings of William Shakespeare.” 

—Gregg Bendian 

“This is one of the greatest longform 

jazz compositions. ... Johnny 

Hodges gets to blow a Strayhorn 

ballad, ‘The Star-Crossed Lovers,’ 

Ray Nance and Clark Terry have a 

feature and Britt Woodman plays 

the shit out of his trombone.” 

—Andy Farber 

“This album is a beautiful example 

of the way Ellington wrote to his 

players’ strengths, which is 

something I’ve always tried to do.” 

—Hazel Leach 

12 Frank Sinatra & 

Count Basie 

Sinatra At The Sands 

(Reprise, 1966) 

“Arranged and conducted by 

Quincy Jones. Well, what can I tell 

ya? Ol’ Blue Eyes and the Count 

together equals swing at its best, 

doesn’t it?” —Paquito D’Rivera 

“Pure unadulterated swing!” 

—Dave Liebman 

“A perfect mix of precision, grit and 

grace. When my band plays Basie 

half as well as Basie, I am a happy 

man.” —Bob Sands 


“This is required listening for any big 

band aficionado, or anybody with a 

pulse for that matter. The Basie 

band, conducted by Quincy Jones, 

comes out swinging ferociously 

from beat one (driven by the great 

Sonny Payne on drums), and Frank 

responds with one of the most 

inspired vocal performance I’ve ever 

heard.” —Alan Ferber 

13 Kenny Wheeler 

Music For Large & 

Small Ensembles (ECM, 1990) 

“What strikes me most about this 

album is Wheeler’s sense of 

melody and its paramount status in 

his writing. There are long, beautiful, 

flowing melodies that dance above 

the orchestration and pull the 

listeners through the pieces. They 

are at once unpredictable and 

familiar, even comforting at times. 

Combine this with his use of the 

amazing Norma Winstone within 

the ensemble textures, and the 

results are quite haunting.” 

—David Schumacher 

“Color and unique harmonic style, 

anyone? This record definitely drips 

of both. Each chart carries Kenny’s 

voice so clearly, yet manages to 

maintain variety while still being part 

of a large suite.” —J.C. Sanford 

“My all-time favorite: ‘The Sweet 

Time Suite.’ Music that opens your 

ears and heart right away. A unique 

sound concept.” —Christine Fuchs 

14 Dizzy Gillespie 

The Complete RCA Victor 

Recordings (RCA, 1937–’49) 

“Probably my all-time favorite big 

band for a number of reasons: the 

energy, super-innovative, exciting, 

edgy, fun, weird, swinging hard. 

And this band sounds like New York 

City, like car horns, skyscrapers, 

nightlife. That’s why I’ve always felt 

especially connected to this music.” 

—Jason Lindner 

“The translation of the revolutionary 

musical language of bebop from 

small group to jazz orchestra 

[1946–’49] was brilliantly achieved 

by Gillespie and these great 

composers and arrangers. This is 

the big band liberated from all 

commercial and artistic/high art 

constraints. And it worked—through 

the unique personality and great 

musicianship of Dizzy.” 

—Mike Westbrook 


15 Thad Jones 

& Mel Lewis 

Central Park North 


“I played ‘Groove Merchant’ and “Maria’s first album, and you can 

‘Big Dipper’ every day for a year. feel the energy of the band wanting 

Playing to Mel Lewis finally got to be a part of what this important 

me into a band at Indiana 

new voice in jazz arranging was 

University in 1971.” —Jeff Hamilton doing at the time. Harmonies that 

are complex but work—she knows 

where the edge is, which appeals a 

lot to me.” —Gary Urwin 

“Thad Jones’ brilliant writing and 

playing, Mel Lewis’ nonpareil 

drumming and the way soloists 

were encouraged made playing 

with and hearing the band live a 

very special pleasure.” —Mike Nock 

“To this day, there isn’t one of 

Thad’s charts that doesn’t sound 

modern and contemporary. The sax 

soli on ‘Groove Merchant’ is just 

amazing. ‘Big Dipper’ is a very 

interesting piece because it 

showed how Thad transitioned 

from Basie’s band to doing his own 

thing. Unreal.” —John Allmark 

16 Maria 

Schneider 

Evanescence (enja, 1992) 

“Another step forward in the 

evolution of big bands. Maria’s 

music is all about orchestral 

textures and colors (something she 

got from Ellington and Evans). She 

also continues the Thad Jones/Mel 

Lewis example of seamlessly 

integrating the solos with the 

written material. Her compositions 

are beautiful and finely crafted 

while still retaining the spontaneity 

and excitement of big band jazz.” 

—David Springfield 

“I love everything Maria has written 

since this first album, but because 

this was the first, it was new, 

exciting, and incredibly beautiful. 

The flowing modal harmonies, the 

way solo improvisations are 

Charles Mingus 

integrated into the arrangement, 

the brilliantly colored voicings ...” 

—Hazel Leach 

17 Woody Herman 

Woody Herman 1963 

(Philips, 1962) 

“My preference is for big bands 

with small group sensibilities as well 

as the expected power of a large 

ensemble. Woody loved to hear his 

guys blow as long as they wanted 

to. Sal Nistico is outstanding on 

this.” —Joe LaBarbera 

“‘The Swingiest Big Band Ever,’ 

when Sal Nistico was in the band 

and they played ‘Sister Sadie’ and 

Sal took the extended solos. He 

was a legendary name I knew 

growing up in Cleveland. I found 

myself in Sal’s chair 10 years later. 

That was one of the first heavy 

challenges for me.” —Joe Lovano 

“Having worked with Woody 

Herman for seven years and 

eventually becoming his chief 

arranger and musical director, I 

became familiar with every possible 

edition of the band and its library. 

Over the years, I heard accounts 

from many players about all the 

Herds, but it was the 1963 band 

that became the stuff of legends. 

That band was just plain scary. It 

had all the swing and excitement of 

the early Herds, but was now 

drawing upon hard-bop vocabulary 

both in its charts and with its 

soloists.” —John Fedchock

JIMMY KATZ 

18 Gil Evans 

The Individualism Of Gil 

Evans (Verve, 1963–’64) 

“Some people consider me a pretty 

good composer/arranger. When I 

start to believe them, I put on 

‘Barbara Song.’ To this day I am 

reduced to tears. It’s a humbling 

experience.” —Jim McNeely 

“This recording stands alone as an 

unique combination of organization 

and mystery, swing music and 

abstraction, and it features Maynard 

Ferguson’s star tenor player, Wayne 

Shorter.” —Steven Bernstein 

“When I first heard this record, it 

changed my life. Gil’s sound is so 

personal. It seems almost like when 

you listen to it, you are peering into 

his mind. The dark, rich textures that 

he weaves are very enthralling.” 

—Dave Rivello 

“Here is a great example of small 

band meets big band, with Elvin 

Jones and Wayne Shorter 

expounding over the lush writing of 

Gil Evans. Gil had the distinct ability 

to stay out of the way of the 

musical interaction and inspire the 

players with amazing 

orchestration.” —Bob Mintzer 


& Count Basie 

First Time! Count 

Meets The Duke 


“I love listening to both bands 

swinging hard on ‘Wild Man Blues.’ 

Damn!” —Jeremy Pelt 

“Both orchestras at their peak and 

ridiculously swingin’ while playing 

each other’s compositions and 

together. The solo space is shared, 

Maria 

Schneider 

and the precision of the arrangements 

is simply superb. It also 

shows you that ego is never 

present in the greatest artist 

collaboration.” —Scotty Barnhart 

20 Maria Schneider 

Concert In The Garden 

(ArtistShare, 2004) 

“The wispy title track introduces 

Gary Versace’s accordion and 

Luciana Souza’s voice as distinctly 

new colors in Maria’s palette, and 

the dance suite ‘Three Romances’ 

rides the wave of a reinvigorated 

rhythmic vocabulary. But nothing 

quite prepares you for the 18minute 

flamenco-inspired epic 

‘Buleria, Solea y Rumba,’ which has 

at its heart a devastating slow burn 

from Donny McCaslin.” 

—Darcy James Argue 

“When [Schneider] adds 

instruments such as the accordion 

and voice, it basically screams out 

her name. She has made those 

colors her own. Her writing is so 

imaginative with many layers of 

sounds and unique voicings. Even 

as dense as the music gets, it never 

gets cerebral.” —Grace Kelly 

21 Don Ellis 

Electric Bath (Columbia, 1967) 

“This was a totally new concept at 

the time that took the sound of the 

big band and made my head spin. 

The music was eclectic and oddmetered, 

but it was at the same 

time very musical.” —Dave Siebels 

“Don was the ultimate hipster and 

futurist. This album gives you a 

good idea what the crew of the 

Starship Enterprise listens to.” 

—Bobby Sanabria 

22 Count Basie 

Breakfast Dance & Barbecue 

(Roullette, 1959) 

“This live recording at the Disc 

Jockeys of American convention in 

Miami features the Basie Band at 

the height of their power. It was 

recorded in the wee hours of the 

morning and the band is clearly 

having a ball. ” —Gary Smulyan 

“This band had been on the bus and 

the bandstand for months on end, 

arguing and laughing, eating and 

drinking together, and this music 

achieves a tightness and unity that 

no band these days could hope for.” 

—Carla Bley 

“Among the many highlights on this 

album is Thad Jones’ composition 

‘Counter Block’—you can hear the 

genesis of the band he shared with 

Mel Lewis a few years later. It’s 

fascinating to listen to Sonny Payne 

play this.” —Peter Erskine 

23 Count Basie 

April In Paris (Verve, 1956) 

“I grew up with this one long before 

I had any inclinations to big band 

compositions. No fancy 

justifications here, this one just 

rocks.” —Tyler Gilmore 

“The soloists—Frank Foster, Frank 

Wess, Thad Jones, Joe Newman, 

Harry Coker—are amazing, and the 

charts—Foster, Jones, Ernie 

Wilkins—are masterpieces of 

swing.” —Brent Wallarab 

“With Basie’s inimitable fills, 

Freddie Green’s driving rhythm 

guitar and brilliant soloists like Thad 

Jones, Joe Newman and Frank 

Wess, this album has to be one of 

the hardest-swinging big band 

recordings ever made. If I had to 

choose a favorite track, it would be 

Frank Foster’s classic ‘Shiny 

Stockings.’” —Renee Rosnes 


The Great Paris Concert 

(Atlantic, 1963) 

“This is one of the best 

representations of everything Duke 

(and Strayhorn) were noted for: an 

unerring sense of showmanship 

combined with style, taste and 

swing, fantastic soloists with 

unique styles, and a fascinating 

way of presenting the audience 

with both the hits and the more 

difficult works without alienating 

anyone.” —Ken Peplowski 

“The quintessential road band 

swings and sings during this 

incredible concert. The writing is 

still modern to today’s ears and 

predicts sounds we still have not 

heard.” —Tim Hagans 

25 Charles Mingus 

Let My Children Hear Music 


“Mingus himself referred to this 

recording as the best in his life. 

Certainly, this album held me with 

intrigue upon my first listening. 

Every part of this treasure is 

absolutely remarkable. The writing, 

soloing and expression presented in 

this album is so commanding and 

rich that it creates a category of its 

own.” —Harry Skoler 

“This is a great album with some 

truly imaginative arranging by 

Mingus and Sy Johnson. My favorite 

track is ‘I Of Hurricane Sue,’ which 

comprises a brilliantly creative set of 

chord changes. ‘The Chill Of Death’ 

is every bit as beautiful as it is utterly 

frightening.” —Ed Palermo 

“Can’t say I am a big band cat, but 

for me a very touching record is Let 

My Children Hear Music. There is a 

poignancy and depth that is rare.” 

—Dave Liebman 

DownBeat thanks all of the ‘My Favorite 

Big Band Album’ participants: 

Eddie Allen, John Allmark, Darcy James 

Argue, Scotty Barnhart, Django Bates, 

Marcus Belgrave, Gregg Bendian, Tony 

Bennett, Gene Bensen, David Berger, 

Chuck Bergeron, Steven Bern-stein, Terry 

Blaine, Ran Blake, Carla Bley, Luis Bonilla, 

Janice Borla, Carmen Bradford, John 

Burnett, Taylor Ho Bynum, Paul Carlon, 

Terri Lyne Carrington, Allan Chase, Terry 

Clarke, Mike Clinco, Eddie Daniels, Jami 

Dauber, Pierre Dørge, Paquito D’Rivera, 

Paul Dunmall, Bill Easley, Kurt Elling, Kahil 

El’ Zabar, Peter Erskine, Laika Fatien, John 

Fedchock, Andy Farber, Alan Ferber, Henry 

Ferrini, Ricky Ford, Rodger Fox, Christina 

Fuchs, Michael Garrick, Giacomo Gates, 

Russ Gershon, Mike Gibbs, Tyler Gilmore, 

Pedro Giraudo, Gordon Goodwin, Drew 

Gress, George Gruntz, Barry Guy, Brian 

Haas, Tim Hagans, Jeff Hamilton, Peter 

Hand, Billy Harper, Brian Haas, Thomas 

Heberer, Carlos Henriquez, Conrad 

Herwig, Jim Hobbs, John Hollenbeck, 

Mike Holober, Greg Hopkins, Wayne 

Horvitz, Susi Hyldgaard, Sunny Jain, 

Christine Jensen, Chris Jentsch, Howard 

Johnson, Phillip Johnston, Darrel Katz, 

Grace Kelly, Juliet Kelly, Jim Ketch, Jim 

Knapp, Bob Koester, Hilary Kole, Joe 

LaBarbera, Ralph Lalama, Bob Lark, Hazel 

Leach, Oded Lev-Ari, Dave Liebman, 

Jason Lindner, Russ Little, Chuck Loeb, 

Frank London, Joe Lovano, Dennis 

Mackrel, Jacam Manricks, Mark Masters, 

Donny McCaslin, Kate McGarry, Pete 

McGuinness, Dave McMurdo, Jim 

McNeely, Vince Mendoza, Bob Mintzer, 

Big James Montgomery, Roy Nathanson, 

Hankus Netsky, Bob Nieske, Paal Nilssen- 

Love, Mike Nock, Billy Novick, Arturo 

O’Farrill, Don Olivet, Chuck Owen, Ed 

Palermo, Evan Parker, Ed Partyka, Joanna 

Pascale, Greg Pasenko, Mike Patterson, 

Jeremy Pelt, Ken Peplowski, Charli Persip, 

Charles Pillow, John Pizzarelli, Dave Post, 

Chuck Redd, Kim Richmond, Dave Rivello, 

Scott Robinson, Sonny Rollins, Josh 

Roseman, Renee Rosnes, Mathias Rüegg, 

John Rutherford, Felipe Salles, Massimo 

Sammi, Bobby Sanabria, Bob Sands, JC 

Sanford, Horst-Michael Schaffer, Ken 

Schaphorst, Maria Schneider, Gunther 

Schuller, David Schumacher, Marcus 

Shelby, Dave Siebels, Chris Siebert, Judi 

Silvano, Harry Skoler, Lavay Smith, Gary 

Smulyan, Lew Soloff, David Spring-field, 

Marvin Stamm, Mike Stewart, Dennis 

Taylor, Charles Tolliver, Colin Towns, Gary 

Urwin, Frank Vaganée, Mike Vax, Eyal 

Vilner, Erica von Kleist, Brent Wallarab, 

Michael Weiss, Mike & Kate Westbrook, 

Jiggs Whigham, Matthew White, Scott 

Whitfield, Jim Widner, Matt Wilson. DB 


MICHAEL WILSON 

Masterpiece AAAAA Excellent AAAA Good AAA Fair AA Poor A 

Mose Allison 

The Way Of The World 

ANTI- 87059 

AAAA 

A new generation may hear Mose Allison’s first 

studio album in a dozen years (he recorded live 

in London for Blue Note in 2000) and find in 

his genial earthiness and down-home barroom 

lope reminders of, say, Randy Newman. It’s a 

fair comparison and certainly captures a general 

sense of his wry, sometimes mordant musical 

manner. But it’s a little backwards. At 82, 

Allison is more properly the man behind 

Newman, and many others. After his emergence 

in the late ’50s as a straight jazz pianist 

behind Stan Getz, Al Cohn, and on his own in a 

few Prestige LPs with only the occasional 

vocal, he evolved into the great folk essayist 

and singer he’s been for most of the last half 

century. 

No one will be disappointed in the subversive 

mix of irony and cracker-barrel attitude he’s 

pulled together here, except perhaps for its 

brevity. An authentic Mississippi-bred bluesi- 

ness plays against a deceptively oblique and 

down-to-earth intelligence, reminding us that a 

deep Southern drawl isn’t always synonymous 

with back-country, tea-bagger primitivism. The 

irony is not necessarily in the material itself. 

When Allison sings “Let’s give God a vacation” 

in “Modest Proposal,” he means exactly what he 

says. It’s that one normally doesn’t hear such 

sentiments posed in such a good-ol’-boy vernacular. 

It’s a smart alliance of opposing sensibilities 

that strengthens the appeal to reason. Also, 

Allison’s weathered voice infuses it all with the 

added credibility of experience. 

Seven of the tunes are Allison’s own, simple 

and rife with his accustomed, rather passive 

fatalism (“Ask Me Nice”) and other assorted 

mockeries—the faux forgiveness, for example, 

of “I Know You Didn’t Mean It” (“I know you 

didn’t mean it when you slit my throat”). His 

homage to his own brain also has a certain overthe-shoulder 

charm (“a cool little cluster”). 

Daughter Amy serves her father’s worldview 

nicely with her own dissertation on the deceptiveness 

of masks (“Everybody Thinks You’re 

An Angel”). And Allison wears Loudon 

INSIDE REVIEWS 

53 Jazz 

56 Blues 

60 Beyond 

62 Historical 

64 Books 

Wainwright’s “I’m Alright” as if it were his 

own. The only song that doesn’t quite seem to 

fit the sardonic environment is “Once In A 

While,” a 1937 pop tune introduced by Tommy 

Dorsey. Maybe he just liked it. 

Allison’s piano playing is traditional in tone, 

thumping discreetly in self-accompaniment and 

occasionally taking over in long serpentine lines 

with percussive markers (“Some Right, Some 

Wrong,” “My Brain”). “Crush” is the lone 

instrumental, a straight-ahead exercise in propulsion 

taken at two tempos. Walter Smith’s tenor 

solos add an welcome extra voice, fattening the 

trio format. After a decade of silence, it’s a treat 

to have Allison back in action and in form, even 

if for only a modest, LP-style 35 minutes. 

—John McDonough 

The Way Of The World: My Brain; I Know You Didn’t Mean 

It; Everybody Thinks You’re An Angel; Let It Come Down; 

Modest Proposal; Crush; Some Right, Some Wrong; The Way 

Of The World; Ask Me Nice; Once In A While; I’m Alright; The 

New Situation. (35:12) 

Personnel: Walter Smith, tenor saxophone; Mose Allison, 

piano, vocals; Greg Leisz, Anthony Wilson, guitar, mandolin; 

David Piltch, bass; Jay Bellerose, drums; Amy Allison (12), vocal. 

» 

Ordering info: anti.com 


Jamie Cullum 

The Pursuit 

VERVE FORECAST 1698 

AAA 

He nudges James Blunt off of gigs, jams with 

Spinal Tap and does a better job on Rihanna 

tunes than the “Umbrella” sorceress herself—all 

while forwarding nifty ideas like using 

Thelonious Monk’s “Epistrophy” theme as a 

baseline riff for a gaudy yet winsome “Just One 

Of Those Things.” No doubt about it, Jamie 

Cullum is adept at the balancing act he’s placed 

in the center of his career. Sliding between Tin 

Pan Alley material and feisty soft-pop originals, 

he does a decent job at placating a couple different 

demographics. That’s important in a “new 

economy” that finds jazz labels dumping improvisers 

and pushing singer-songwriters. 

Actually, on his first album in four-and-ahalf 

years, Cullum pretty much says au revoir to 

the jazz side of the equation. Sure, there are 

some bouncy rhythms and agile vocal maneuvers, 

but like Norah Jones fully embracing modern 

pop on last year’s The Fall, Cullum lets a 

mere handful of jazzy elements—inflection, attitude—through 

the door of The Pursuit. No complaint 

there; I’ve always had a little time for the 

somewhat shallow fun of the 29-year-old Brit’s 

fluff. Now that Billy Joel is writing classical 

Plunge 

Dancing On Thin Ice 

IMMERSION RECORDS IRM09-05 

AAAA 

The innovative trio Plunge apparently subscribes 

to the altogether attractive idea that 

avant-garde music need not be abrasive, 

iconoclastic or frenzied. In fact, it can be 

swinging, listener-friendly and—heaven 

forefend!—beautiful. Such a deal. The last 

time this trombone-led group dove in, it was 

a low-leaning quartet with bass, tuba and 

drums. This time, trombonist Mark McGrain 

teams up with saxophone and bass, a trio 

configuration that recalls, in its spare sound and 

judicious use of space, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio 

with Jim Hall and Bob Brookmeyer—though in 

Plunge’s case, the driving force is percolating 

New Orleans brass band music, not West Coast 

cool. I liked the first album (Falling With Grace) 

and I like this one even better, in part because, 

without drums, the marching pulse is subtly 

implied instead of spelled out. 

For only three instrumentalists, Plunge covers 

a lot of sonic territory. Funky saxophonist 

Tim Green plays tenor, bari and soprano, bassist 

James Singleton bows and plucks, and McGrain 

feeds his bone through various electronic 

devices, as well as playing all over the horn, 

from the basement to the attic, including vocalized 

multiphonics. The tunes boast conceptual 

variety, as well, from textural explorations and 


scores, Cullum slides right into a persona the 

Piano Man once held tight: amiable keybs peacock 

with a big pile of hooks in his pocket. 

The Pursuit is by turns impressive and lackluster. 

Cullum has a knack for turning ordinary 

tunes into epics, and the five minutes of 

“Mixtape,” which finds him seducing an 

acquaintance via other people’s music (“from 

Morrissey to John Coltrane”) while a Steve 

Reich motif gets a disco ride, can be both fetching 

and tedious. Better is his romp through 

Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music,” where a 

truly exhilarating sense of dynamics is established. 

The relatively hushed “I Think, I Love” 

movie-suspense atmospherics to angular postbop 

and raucous rock. Many of the tunes are 

memorable (how often can you say that about a 

jazz album these days?), solos are to the point 

and players interact intelligently with one another, 

using understated dynamics. 

I especially enjoyed the lightly dancing opening 

track, “Friday Night At The Top.” Green’s 

piping tenor sound and graceful glances into the 

altissimo and McGrain’s mix of wheezy highs, 

didgeridoo throbs and tasteful electronic distortions 

are highlights. Though not overbearing, the 

electronically generated splayed-foghorn sound 

of the driving “One Man’s Machine” sounds 

like something out of heavy metal, leavened 

with a sort of baby goo-gooing effect topping 

McGrain’s live trombone. “Opium” showcases 

a gamboling tenor solo and swings with a cheer- 

is his attempt at recrafting a yesteryear chestnut, 

and it’s a bit too meager to be memorable 

(Harold Arlen he ain’t). But the infectiousness of 

“I’m All Over It” is obvious—an Elton John 

homage that Ben Folds or Keene would be 

proud to call their own. 

Me, I think I’ll cross my fingers that Cullum 

never fully banishes the classics from his book. 

He sounds too compelling on the Sweeney Todd 

ballad and the Cole Porter rave-up. Hope that 

new demographic has big ears. They might just 

learn something. —Jim Macnie 

The Pursuit: Just One Of Those Things; I’m All Over It; Wheels; 

If I Ruled The World; You And Me Are Gone; Don’t Stop The 

Music; Love Ain’t Gonna Let You Down; Mixtape; I Think, I 

Love; We Run Things; Now While I’m Around; Music Is 

Through. (54:12) 

Personnel: Jamie Cullum, piano, vocals, organ (2, 5, 7, 8), Fender 

Rhodes (10), celeste (8), hurdy gurdy (11), bass (3), guitar (4), 

arrangements (4, 6), horn arrangement (10); Greg Wells, guitar 

(4, 7, 12), organ (2, 7), bass (2, 7, 8), drums (2, 3, 7, 10, 12); The 

Count Basie Orchestra arranged by Frank Foster (10); John 

Benson, guitar (10); Paul Buckmaster, string arrangements (8, 9, 

10); Matt Chamberlain, drums (5, 8, 11); Ben Cullum, bass (12), 

programming and vocals (10); Karl “K Gee” Gordon, drum and 

bass programming (10); Gary Grant, trumpets (7); Jerry Hey, 

trumpets (7, 8, 10); Dan Higgins, saxophones (7, 8, 10); Tim 

Lefebvre, bass (1); Chris Mann, backing vocals (2); Marc McLean, 

drums (1); Charisa Nielsen, backing vocals (2); Bill Reichenbach, 

trombone (7), Tom Richards, bass clarinet, flute (10); Sebastian 

Steinberg, bass (4, 5, 11); Martin Terefe, Wurlizter (6); Brad 

Webb, drums (6); Natalie Williams, backing vocals (10). 

» 

Ordering info: umusic.com 

ful, happy flow, while also suggesting the secret, 

dreamy place its name might take you to. 

On the title track, McGrain inserts an ironic 

quote from “Fascinatin’ Rhythm,” an appropriate 

commentary on this oddly angular, swinging 

melody—doubly so when the trio sets aside a 

regular pulse during their solos. “Missing 

Mozambique,” a gorgeous slow waltz that suggests 

the feeling of a hymn, features another 

spectacular trombone solo full of sparkling 

bursts. “The Praise Singer” carries on the African 

mood with soaring, outdoor, anthemic elation. 

I’m not sure why the band inserted a 58-second 

interlude between these two tunes, but it 

easily could have been omitted. Other than that, 

the only minor complaint I’d make is that 

Green’s soprano sax sound (on “Orion Rising”) 

is a bit scrawny, though his baritone on “Life Of 

A Cipher” is sweet and lovely. I love the way he 

and McGrain bob and weave on the final track, 

“Skickin’ Away.” 

It takes a great deal of poise and confidence to 

make music this deft and new. What a pleasure 

to have an innovative album one also wants to 

rush out and play for friends. —Paul de Barros 

Dancing On Thin Ice: Friday Night At The Top; Life Of A Cipher; 

Orion Rising; Luminata No. 257; One Man’s Machine; Opium; 

Dancing On Thin Ice; Missing Mozambique; Jugs March In; The 

Praise Singer; Skickin’ Away. (51:49) 

Personnel: Mark McGrain, trombone, electronics; Tim Green, 

tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, soprano saxophone; 

James Singleton, bass. 

» 

Ordering info: plunge.com

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron 

Let’s Call This … Esteem 

SILTA 0901 

AAAA 1 /2 

First things first: Go buy this disc, if you still 

can. It’s been reissued in a numbered, limited 

edition of 999, and they won’t last long. The 

music is strong enough to justify the as-yet rare 

reissuance on CD from original issue on CD 

(first released on George Haslman’s SLAM 

records back in 1993, the year it was recorded). 

No idea why the Italian label Silta is making 

such a small batch, but that makes getting it soon 

that much more imperative. 

Lacy and Waldron worked together very 

often, made wonderful records frequently, commencing 

with the pianist’s role on Lacy’s 1958 

Prestige LP Reflections and stretching through 

various Waldron-led bands in the ’70s up to a 

couple of trios with bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel 

in 2002. Their first duo recording was in 1971, 

and it was in that perfectly reduced setting that 

they made the majority of their recordings. 

What made this pairing so ideal was a 

shared aesthetic sensibility, a profound love of 

mystery and, of course, a deep understanding 

of Thelonious Monk. The dark, enigmatic 

character of Waldron’s piano is a neat foil for 

Lacy’s systematic, intellectually rigorous 

soprano. Here they approach familiar material: 

Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Dream,” 

“Evidence,” “Epistrophy,” as well as Ellington 

gems “In A Sentimental Mood” and “Johnny 

Come Lately,” Lacy’s “Blues For Aida” and 

Waldron’s “Snake Out.” The latter, a 14minute 

opus, offers much of what makes the 

twosome so special, a particularly searing saxophone 

solo urged on by Waldron’s probing, 

dramatic, richly chromatic and persistently 

churning piano. Waldron’s askew funk piece 

“What It Is” (incorrectly listed as “What Is It”) 

finds him hitting the pedal tone, building fantastic 

tension as only he could. —John Corbett 

Let’s Call This … Esteem: Introduction And Let’s Call This; 

Monk’s Dream; In A Sentimental Mood; Snake Out; Blues For 

Aida; Johnny Come Lately; What It Is; Evidence; Epistrophy; 

Esteem. (78:14) 

Personnel: Steve Lacy, soprano saxophone; Mal Waldron, piano. 

» 

Ordering info: siltarecords.it 

CDs CRITICS» 

» 

Mose Allison 

The Way Of The World 

Jamie Cullum 

The Pursuit 

The HOT Box 

Plunge 

Dancing On Thin Ice 

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron 

Let’s Call This ... Esteem 

Critics’ Comments 

Mose Allison, The Way Of The World 

John John Jim Paul 

McDonough Corbett Macnie de Barros 

AAAA AAA 1 /2 AAA 1 /2 AAA 

AAA A AAA AAA 

AAA AAA 1 /2 AAA AAAA 

AAAA 1 /2 AAAA 1 /2 AAA AAA 1 /2 

Some good new songs (“Modest Proposal,” “Ask Me Nice”) from the master of wry, though some of them 

could use another verse or two. Great backup band, and the sometimes garrulous Mose mostly behaves 

himself on piano. When he sings “Once In A While,” he makes you stand up and listen. —Paul de Barros 

Not trying to be anything else, this is a straight-up solid Mose Allison record. That’s a good thing in my 

book—he’s a master of cool message delivery, George Carlin as jazz singer, the observing hepcat dizzied by 

a world akimbo. —John Corbett 

Time has corrupted that sleek voice a bit, but this affair puts all the classic Allison elements in a row. From 

idiosyncratic vernacular (how many jazz songs mention “neurons”?) to offhand rhythmic motifs (the blues 

don’t get much jauntier than Mose), it works just like his classic stuff does; sweet, sharp and seductive. 

—Jim Macnie 

Jamie Cullum, The Pursuit 

With his poised, finger-snapping swagger and classy voice, Cullum’s Darrin-esque talents are made for the 

kind of terrific penmanship Frank Foster offers him on “One Of Those Things.” Alas, it’s a mirage, followed 

by a series of overmixed, pop-oriented non-sequiturs. —John McDonough 

Uneven album with some tastelessly overproduced tracks, but Cullum gets extra points for having forged a 

distinctive, youthful style that projects plausible emotions and doesn’t just retro-mimic Sinatra and company. 

The upbeat drive of “You And Me Are Gone” is a good example. —Paul de Barros 

Each time I listen to The Pursuit, I find it more distasteful. From the faux Rat Pack opener to the terrible lyrics 

of “Mixtape” and “Wheels” to the cloying contemporary Billy Joel/Sting upbeatness. It doesn’t know what it 

wants to be, but each of its possible identities is worse than the last. —John Corbett 

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron, Let’s Call This ... Esteem 

An excellent dialog between two charter avant-garders in maturity. Anchored in Duke Ellington and 

Thelonious Monk much of the way, Lacy’s lonely lyricism is astringent and unsentimental without being 

harsh. Nowhere lonelier than on “Aida,” which is so atomized it almost evaporates. Otherwise, a crackling 

and fully engaged partnership. —John McDonough 

At first I thought it was a tad stiff, but then I recalled how Waldron’s left hand and Lacy’s linear quacking 

always did have an odd symmetry. Their rapport isn’t in question, however—each knows where the baton 

has to be handed off—and the good fortune of having this once ultra-rare title back in availability land is 

sweet. —Jim Macnie 

I always thought Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter could have benefited by listening to these guys, just to 

hear how high the bar had already been set for a truly thoughtful, improvised piano/soprano duo. In this 

good but not stunning 1993 live set from England, the pair shines on Monk’s “Let’s Call This,” “Evidence,” 

which sounds downright romantic, and Waldron’s dervishy “Snake Out.” —Paul de Barros 

Plunge, Dancing On Thin Ice 

McGrain, Green and Singleton make good use of the unusual format, two horns temperamentally and tonally 

matched, bassist capable of pushing. The tunes have interest aplenty, but it would be nice to leave the 

tonality behind a bit more and venture out into the open terrain the compositions imply. —John Corbett 

The more I listened, the more found it to be wan. The playing is a bit measured and the dynamics a bit staid. 

Then all of a sudden the kaleidoscope turned and I began hearing it as chamber music—texturally daring, 

rhythmically dapper chamber music. Under that awning the ensemble’s earthiness was impressive, unmistakable. 

Wonder how others hear it? —Jim Macnie 

Tenor and trombone create a scrupulously pristine musical pastel, reminiscent of Stan Getz and J.J. 

Johnson, perhaps, but with a far more risky and adventurous agenda. In both harmony and counterpoint, 

the music moves inside a structured sense of miniature ensemble, all nicely motorized by Singleton’s bass. 

But the electronics of “Machine” are ugly and boring. —John McDonough 


Philly Joe 

Jones 

Dameronia 

Look, Stop And 

Listen 

UPTOWN 27.59 

AAAA 1 /2 

One reason the 

early 1980s was a 

very fertile period 

for repertory projects 

was that the 

ensembles were often led and manned by colleagues 

of the celebrated composer, musicians 

who were legends in their own right. That was 

the case with Dameronia, initiated by Philly Joe 

Jones, the drummer on three of Tadd Dameron’s 

most enduring albums. While Jones provided 

inspired leadership and made deft personnel 

choices (including Cecil Payne, who played on 

Dameron’s early benchmark, 1949’s Cool 

Boppin’), his best decision was having Don 

Sickler recover Dameron’s lost charts from 

recordings. 

Dameron did two things as a composer/ 

arranger with singular grace: He could make a 

six-horn ensemble sound twice as big, and his 

horn parts were so well blended that it is often 

treacherously difficult to sort them out on 

recordings. Sickler’s painstaking efforts paid off 

handsomely on all three Dameronia albums, 

Look, Stop And Listen being the second. Even 

with great soloists like guest artist Johnny 

Griffin (who played on Dameron’s last album) 

lighting up the proceedings, the charts are the 

thing with Dameron, and Sickler’s transcriptions 

Gary 

Peacock/Marc 

Copland 

Insight 

PIROUET 3041 

AAA 1 /2 

This aptly titled duo 

recording revels in the 

graceful intuition and 

empathy bassist Gary 

Peacock and pianist 

Marc Copland share 

with one another. 

Insight is an exquisitely tender and sensitive 

piece of work, where feather-stroke give-andtake 

elevates the proceedings to a genuine 

ensemble effort. There’s a good reason the 

bassist has worked so long in Keith Jarrett’s 

vaunted trio; with weightless facility he provides 

the necessary harmonic anchor, but at the same 

time he engages in rich dialogue. It proves to 

also be a simpatico match for Copland, whose 

rigorous hybrid of post-Bill Evans lyricism and 

harmonically detailed impressionism has 

become one of the more unique, if subtle, 

sounds in jazz. 


retained their sleekness and shimmer. 

Jones was wise to emphasize 

Dameron’s lesser-known compositions; 

of the seven recorded on this 

’83 date, only the yearning ballad “If 

You Could See Me Now,” featuring a 

stellar Griffin turn, is among his most 

widely played pieces. This lot gives 

an even-handed representation of the 

devices that gave Dameron’s charts 

their charm—the chiming piano 

chords that punctuate the gliding 

horns on “Focus”; the flute flourishes of the title 

tune—and unusual structural elements like the 

lengthy solo piano interlude that commences 

just seconds into “Dial B For Beauty” (rendered 

sensitively by Walter Davis Jr.) and the modulation 

of mood between the introduction and main 

theme of “Our Delight” (which features muscular 

banter between Jones and Charles Davis, 

heard on tenor throughout the album). 

Dameron’s fastidiousness in avoiding the generic 

also benefits soloists; with players such as 

Virgil Jones, Benny Powell and Frank Wess to 

call upon, the set is brimming with smart, rousing 

solos. —Bill Shoemaker 

Look, Stop And Listen: Look, Stop And Listen; If You Could 

See Me Now; Choose Now; Focus; Killer Joe; Dial B For 

Beauty; Our Delight; Theme Of No Repeat; If You Could See 

Me Now (1st take); Look, Stop And Listen (1st take). (55:17) 

Personnel: Philly Joe Jones, drums; Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophone 

(1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10); Don Sickler, trumpet, tenor saxophone 

(2, 9); Virgil Jones, trumpet; Benny Powell, trombone; Frank 

Wess, also saxophone, flute; Charles Davis, tenor saxophone, 

flute; Cecil Payne, baritone sax; Walter Davis Jr., piano; Larry 

Ridley, bass. 

» 

Ordering info: uptownrecords.net 

While Peacock firmly 

traces the indelible 

opening lines from Miles 

Davis’ classic “All 

Blues” and draws the 

attention with a frenetic 

bob-and-weave line on 

the evocative “Rush 

Hour,” the improvisational 

content is woven 

so deeply into the performances—not 

coming in 

strings of solos, but as 

fluid knots and melodic 

ornaments—that parsing which is which is as 

useless as isolating the contributions of either 

musician. Together they’ve created a dazzling 

harmonic tapestry, quietly veiling simmering 

invention with a gorgeously meditative, almost 

placid veneer. But dig deep and there’s nothing 

docile about this music at all. —Peter Margasak 

Insight: All Blues; The Wanderer; Blue In Green; Rush Hour; 

River’s Run; Matterhorn; The Pond; Goes Out Comes In; Late 

Night; Cavatina; In Your Own Sweet Way; Benediction; Sweet 

And Lovely. (58:26) 

Personnel: Gary Peacock, bass; Marc Copland, piano. 

Agustí Fernández/ 

Barry Guy 

Some Other Place 

MAYA 902 

AAAA 

It’s little wonder the Catalan pianist Agustí 

Fernández and English bassist Barry Guy have 

been steady collaborators over five years or so. 

While they’re both rigorous improvisers with 

stunning facility for extended technique, 

they’re also devoted to classical music, from 

the bassist’s deep engagement with baroque 

material and more contemporary composers to 

the pianist’s studies at Darmstadt with Iannis 

Xenakis and Carles Santos. 

On their first duo album those twin sensibilities 

mesh beautifully, more in sensibility and 

structural logic than stylistic reference. Guy’s 

astonishing tonal control, for instance, almost 

makes his instrument sound like a harp in the 

opening seconds of his “Annalisa,” one of the 

album’s broodingly lyric highlights, dispensing 

with idiomatic purity. Halfway through that 

piece the pair surge abruptly into a passage of 

violent percussiveness, with Guy throttling his 

instrument and Fernández pounding out splattery, 

kaleidoscopic clusters. 

In a way, those two sonic extremities are 

revisited throughout the album, although not 

always in a single piece. The brief but explosive 

kinetic energy of “Rosette,” for example, 

is followed by the meditative, slowly unfolding 

beauty of “Blueshift (for M.H.),” and it’s to the 

duo’s credit that they can make such radical 

shifts sound utterly natural, as a kind of organic 

process of acceleration and deceleration where 

haunted melody and abrasive texture feel intimately 

connected. Despite the muscular technical 

rigor routinely on display here, the real 

heart of Some Other Place is emotional, hitting 

the listener with a dazzling range of sensations. 

—Peter Margasak 

Some Other Place: Annalisa; Barnard’s Loop; How To Go Into 

A Room You Are Already In; Rosette; Blueshift (for M.H.); 

Boomerang Nebula; Crab Nebula; Some Other Place; Dark 

Energy; The Helix. (54:17) 

Personnel: Agustí Fernández, piano; Barry Guy, bass. 

» Ordering info: pirouetrecords.com 

Ordering info: maya-recordings.com 

»

Mat Marucci & 

Doug Webb Trio 

Change-Up 

CADENCE 1211 

AAA 1 /2 

Mat Marucci & 

Doug Webb Trio 

Partners In Crime 

CIMP 356 

AAA 1 /2 

Saxophonist Doug Webb and drummer Mat Marucci team up with, 

alternately, bassists Ken Filiano and Joe Dolister, for some high-powered 

playing on Change-Up and Partners In Crime. Both are live 

recordings, Change-Up taking place at the Spirit Room in Rossie, 

N.Y., back in 2006, Partners In Crime at Savanna’s Lounge in 

Sacramento two years earlier. 

The spirit of these sessions point to ventures taken by both John 

Coltrane and Elvin Jones individually, Coltrane with his late-’50s trio 

sides for Atlantic where he concentrated on the blues and his thennewfound 

love the soprano saxophone, and Jones when he fronted a 

band in 1972 that featured two saxophonists. What linked these explorations 

was the lack of a chordal instrument, as is the case with these 

Webb/Marucci recordings. 

Change-Up is made up of 10 songs, eight of which were written by 

Marucci, the other two a trio composition (“Spirit Room”) and Johnny 

Green’s standard “Body And Soul.” In fact, “Body And Soul” (played 

straight down the middle) ends the program even as it flips its cards in 

the direction of Coltrane’s spirit. As trio music, the songs are long 

enough and the writing interesting enough to keep the improvising listener 

engaged. “The Gamemaster” introduces all three members with 

solos of their own with this up-tempo romp. The subtler side of the 

group (Webb remaining on soprano) comes across with the gently 

swinging blues “Waltz For Therese,” a song that is full and open, 

Webb’s solo building chorus by chorus with more speed and emotion, 

Marucci and Filiano following his every step. On tenor, Webb’s muscular 

approach to the somewhat more abstract blues “Riff For Rusch” 

avoids overpowering his bandmates, Marucci in particular matching 

Webb with his own surefire punctuations. 

As with Change-Up, Partners In Crime is loose, the kind of jazz 

gig you’d be lucky to hear at your local club or bar. The title track 

kicks things off just like Change-Up with an utempo blues, this time 

with Webb playing tenor, Webb and Marucci dueting at points for dramatic 

affect. A couple of turned-upside-down standards add a dash of 

humor and pluck to the date as the leaders upend with “All The Things 

You Could Have Been” and “Lunar” (a reworking of Miles Davis’ 

“Solar”), Webb on tenor sounding more like Warne Marsh than 

Coltrane on the former, more Trane-ish on the latter, both played at 

easy-going paces. “Slow Cookin’” comes about as close to Coltrane 

Plays The Blues as these two discs get, the title telling you what’s in 

store, Webb slowly singing on soprano, the band getting a little funky 

halfway through. 

These sides are recommended for the crowd that likes to dig in and 

listen to players blow, jam and stretch out, with an emphasis on 

Webb’s horn playing; it’s music that creates the illusion of something 

more in smaller packages. —John Ephland 

Change-Up: The Gamemaster; Waltz For Therese; Riff For Rusch; Change-Up; Hard Times; Alex- 

Dee; Festival; Spirit Room; Upstate Connection; Body And Soul. (56:43) 

Personnel: Mat Marrucci, drums; Doug Webb, saxophones; Ken Filiano, bass. 

» 

Partners In Crime: Partners In Crime; All The Things You Could Have Been; Slow Cookin’; Have You 

Met Miss Jones?; Stanley Hills Drive; I Love You; Lunar; Alone Together; Blues Outside. (63:49) 

Personnel: Mat Marrucci, drums; Doug Webb, saxophones; Joe Dolister, bass. 

» 

Ordering info: cimprecords.com 

Ordering info: cadencejazzrecords.com 


Sonore 

Call Before You Dig 

OKKA DISK 12083 

AAA 1 /2 

Call Before You Dig puts 

paid to any notion that 

Peter Brötzmann might 

mellow as he comes to the 

end of his sixties. This 

half studio, half concert 

set comprises two-andone-quarter 

hours of 

mainly improvised reed trios. It demands plenty 

of stamina from the listener, but nothing like 

what it required of its makers, who recorded it in 

just two days near the end of a two week-long 

European tour. Brötzmann’s confederates in 

Sonore are Mats Gustafsson and Ken 

Vandermark, each of whom has made the transition 

from being a disciple shaped by 

Brötzmann’s example of artistic doggedness and 

sonic extremity to a recurrent collaborator. 

Collectively their aesthetic might be characterized 

as “nothing but the strong stuff”; much 

of this music is delivered at a roar, and even in 

its quietest moments it is stark and stern. At 

lower volume it takes on a dark blue caste, as 

tragic as a mourner’s spontaneous song at a 

friend’s wake. But that is also where the music 

is most tuneful, with melodies as simple and 

sturdy as oaken furniture. 

Jeremy Pelt 

Men Of Honor 

HIGHNOTE 7203 

AAA 1 /2 

Jeremy Pelt certainly 

has what it takes to 

become a major star — 

whatever that amounts 

to in these commercially 

downturned days. 

His heroic, wide-body 

attack and lyrical fluency 

on trumpet have 

drawn him comparisons to the likes of Freddie 

Hubbard, Clifford Brown and Lee Morgan. But 

as the 33-year-old California native demonstrates 

on Men Of Honor, he is after something 

deeper and more sustainable than stardom, 

achieving power through what he holds back as 

much as what he pushes forward. 

Pelt’s dynamic working quintet, boasting an 

ideally matched frontline partner in tenor saxophonist 

J.D. Allen and a lock-solid rhythm section 

in pianist Danny Grissett, bassist Dwayne 

Burno and drummer Gerald Cleaver, resides 

with knowing intimacy in postbop style. 

Listening to Men Of Honor, their second album 

together, you may feel like you’re sinking into a 

favorite chair in Rudy Van Gelder’s living 

room. There is no absence of bold strokes, but 


Elsewhere, especially on 

the concert disc, the trio 

goes full blast, with each 

player sustaining bruising 

blasts that sound like they 

are intended to reduce the 

walls to powder. But the 

most extreme moments 

come when clarinets and 

flutophone (a flute fitted 

with an alto saxophone 

mouthpiece) join in a 

writhing tangle of top-register 

forays that seem to expand exponentially as 

the difference tones created by closely pitched 

tones become one with the sounded notes. 

Sonore’s music may sound brutal, but it couldn’t 

exist without each player’s highly sophisticated 

understanding of the elemental forces at his 

command. —Bill Meyer 

Call Before You Dig: Disc 1: The Cliff; Mountains Of Love; 

Shake_Horn; Unrecognized Reflections; Charged By The Pound; 

Mailbox For An Attic; Call Before You Dig (74:19). Disc 2: The 

Ravens Cry At Dawn; Better A Bird Than A Cow; Human Fact; 

Iranic ; A Letter From The Past; The Bitter The Better; The 

Longer The Lieber; Birds Of The Underworld; Waiting For The 

Dancing Bear; A Dyed String; Hellpig; Zipper Backwards; Dark 

Cloud Blues; Blue Stone; Hardline Drawing; Rat Bag; Hard To 

Believe But Good To Know (58:35). 

Personnel: Peter Brötzmann, alto/tenor/bass saxophones, taragato, 

clarinet; Ken Vandermark, tenor/baritone saxophones, Bflat 

and bass clarinets; Mats Gustafsson, tenor/baritone saxophones, 

flutophone. 

Ordering info: okkadisk.com 

» 

the solos are smartly contained, 

the soloists intuitively 

connected, the better to 

draw cohesive meaning 

from the themes. 

There are times when 

you wish the songs would 

push against the format 

more in the manner of Pelt’s 

wide open “Danny Mack,” 

which Grissett animates 

with jabbing lines and dark 

pulsing patterns punctuated 

by high accents. You may 

wish that Allen flashed more of the gritty abandon 

he does on his terrific trio recordings. But 

whether engaging in the jaunty urgency of 

Burno’s fetching “Backroad” or the luminous 

warmth of Cleaver’s “From A Life Of The 

Same Name,” Pelt and his honorable cohorts are 

in command. The music deepens with repeated 

listenings, making you appreciate the risks that 

are being taken, however subtle they may be. 

—Lloyd Sachs 

Men Of Honor: Backroad; Milo Hayward; Brooklyn Bound; 

Danny Mack; From A Life Of The Same Name; Illusion; 

Us/Them; Without You. (45:59) 

Personnel: Jeremy Pelt, trumpet and flugelhorn; J.D. Allen, 

tenor saxophone; Danny Grissett, piano; Dwayne Burno, bass; 

Gerald Cleaver, drums. 

Makoto Ozone 

Jungle 

VERVE 01691 

AAA 1 /2 

After 30 years and 24 albums of typically pleasant, 

extremely well performed and smartly conceived 

piano jazz, Japan’s Makoto Ozone has 

recorded the greatest album of his career, and 

it’s anything but pleasant. 

Jungle, featuring an energetic big band that 

goes under the name No Name Horses, is an inyour-face, 

Latin-drenched monster. Ozone’s 15piece 

all-Japanese big band (save percussionist 

Pernell Saturnino) plays with the energy of a 

college ensemble, but with the professionalism, 

power and soloist creativity of seasoned veterans. 

Every track is slightly this side of forward, 

tempo-wise, resulting in an exhilarating 63minute 

CD that never lets up. Already a massive 

hit in Japan, Jungle’s nine tracks cover samba, 

mambo, rumba and montuno, and it all swings. 

Ozone, trombonist Eijiro Nakagawa, trumpeter 

Eric Mayashiro and tenor saxophonist 

Toshio Miki contribute the compositions, which 

are thoroughly contemporary without relying on 

modern cliches. There are no funk interludes or 

annoying attempts at vocal recognition, just taut, 

relevant performances. Granted, there is nothing 

here approaching the more adventurous big band 

productions of some New York-based ensembles, 

and the music is all fairly “inside,” but that 

never detracts from its enjoyment. You know 

what you are paying for upfront, and there are 

no disappointments. Highlights include Ozone’s 

thunderous solo on “La Verdad Con Los 

Caballos,” Saturnino’s fiery percussion throughout 

and the ensemble sections in “Jungle,” “No 

Siesta” and “Safari.” —Ken Micallef 

Jungle: Jungle; Coconuts Meeting; No Siesta; Cave Walk; Safari; 

B&B; Moon Flower; La Verdad Con Los Caballos; Oasis. (63:53) 

Personnel: Eric Miyashiro, Mitsukuni Kohata, Sho Okumura, 

Yoshiro Okazaki, trumpets/flugelhorns; Eijiro Nakagawa, Yuzo 

Kataoka, trombones; Junko Yamashiro, bass trombone; 

Kazuhiko Kondo, alto and soprano saxophone, flute, piccolo; 

Atsushi Ikeda, alto saxophone, flute; Toshio Miki, Masanori 

Okazaki, tenor saxophones; Yoshiro Iwamochi, bari saxophone; 

Kengo Nakamura, bass; Shinnosuke Takahaski, drums; Pernell 

Saturnino, percussion. 

» Ordering info: jazzdepot.com 

Ordering info: ververecords.com 

»

JAZZ 

Blue 

Soaring 

by James Hale 

Marco Pereira: 

Brazilian drama 

The stakes were high, 

given the audacious name 

chosen by Switzerland’s 

Kind Of Blue Records 

when it launched in 2006, 

but the label has established 

itself for the quality 

of its studio recordings 

and the range of artists it 

presents. 

That devotion to superior 

sound is evident on 

Essence (Kind Of Blue 

10018; 53:23) AAAA a 

sparkling-sounding 2006 

outing by Brazilian guitarist 

Marco Pereira. Accompanied by accompaniment by Nussbaum. Again and 

bassist Natallino Neto and deft percussion- again, the quartet finds ways to go deeper 

ist Marcio Bahia for eight of the 10 perfor- into these familiar tunes. Which is not to 

mances, Pereira adds Paul McCandless for say that everything works; some may find 

four tracks—featuring a different horn for Liebman’s wooden flute on “Besame 

each. Of these, the highlight is Zé do Mucho” annoyingly nasal and thin, for 

Norte’s “Mulher Rendeira,” which example. But this is the type of project 

McCandless enlivens with a soaring oboe where musicians make personal statements 

part, while on Nelson Cavaquinho’s bossa without commercial considerations, and 

“Luz Negra” the reed player adds the rough there’s no faulting that. 

texture of his bass clarinet to Pereira’s sleek One of the challenges of interpreting the 

lines. Pereira’s arrangements are filled with music of John Coltrane is replicating the 

drama and movement, most evident on a thrust and lift that Trane’s horn added to the 

flowing suite of three Baden Powell songs estimable power of his quartet’s rhythm 

that concludes with a hard-driving take on section. Without a stentorian wind instru- 

“Deixa.” The guitarist and Bahia also lock ment, the challenge grows, but the quintet 

into uplifting dialogue on “Xódo da that Bobby Hutcherson leads on Wise One 

Baiana,” which contrasts well against a (Kind Of Blue 10034; 53:58) AAAA man- 

multi-tracked solo interpretation of Jobim’s ages to get over with shimmering sustained 

“Eu Te Amo.” 

notes and tart guitar from Anthony Wilson. 

You could call Something Sentimental The balance between Hutcherson, Wilson 

(Kind Of Blue 10032; 58:52) AAA a concept and pianist Joe Gilman is particularly 

recording, but it’s a concept that comes good—carrying over from the seven com- 

from the heart. It was inspired by a memoripositions by or associated with Coltrane to 

al concert that Adam Nussbaum, Dave two mellower standards. There’s balance, 

Liebman, John Abercrombie and Jay too, between drummer Eddie Marshall’s 

Anderson played in 2007 to celebrate the pair of mallets and Hutcherson’s four— 

life of Nussbaum’s mother, who had died thunder on the one hand and silvery rain on 

that spring. The concept was to play songs the other—on the opening title piece and a 

that Muriel Nussbaum enjoyed during her taut, dramatic version of “Spiritual,” the 

83 years. They are songs you might hear most successful of the Coltrane covers. 

any cocktail bar band play, but that is Seen through the lens of album pacing—so 

Liebman and Abercrombie in the front line outdated to some in this Shuffle Age—one 

and a great rhythm team, after all, so could make a case that making bookends of 

“Poinciana” ripples with coiled energy and “Wise One” and “Spiritual” would’ve made 

the solos by Liebman and Abercrombie for a better construction. As it is, the band 

go places that cocktail bar musicians fear lopes out on relatively jaunty takes of “Out 

to tread. On “I Hear A Rhapsody,” Of This World” and “Dear Lord,” just a 

Abercrombie spins a complex skein of slight letdown from the pinnacle the band 

notes over a meandering bass pattern by reaches on “Spiritual.” DB 

Anderson and increasingly assertive Ordering info: kindofbluerecords.com 

KIND OF BLUE 


Jon Mayer 

Nightscape 

RESERVOIR MUSIC 197 

AA 1 /2 

Nothing satisfies like a 

well-executed musical 

performance … except, 

maybe, a night out for 

dinner. Of course, it’s 

one thing to celebrate a 

special occasion at some 

top-of-the-line establishment. Think of these 

events as the gustatory equivalent of, say, catching 

a young Miles Davis at Newport in 1958. 

More often, we’ll settle for comfort and familiarity. 

A neighborhood cafe, maybe even part of 

a restaurant chain, a burger instead of boeuf 

bourguignon—that’s good, too, and usually it’s 

enough to send us home with a smile. 

That is what Nightscape brings to mind. 

Throughout this outing, Mayer, Rufus Reid and 

Roy McCurdy dish up several satisfying courses 

of post-bop performance, with taste and style. 

Each is an outstanding team player, with Mayer 

assuming the prominence that traditionally 

devolves to the pianist but plenty of room for his 

colleagues to step out both in accompaniment 

and solo moments, including Reid’s marvelously 

fluid lines on “Once I Loved.” 

The ingredients balance well: When Mayer 

takes his right-hand line a little outside on his 

tune “Blues Junction,” Reid and McCurdy fall 

back into a straighter groove, a little less free 

and interactive than they might be during the 

head or recapitulation. When he plays a brief 

ascending series of chords during “Rapture,” it 

takes the bass and drums only one iteration 


before they track his triplet 

rhythm together; later in the 

same piece, they do it again as 

Mayer plays a descending line, 

in effect book-ending that segment 

of his solo. 

This, of course, is how small 

groups are supposed to play, 

with everyone listening and 

locking in on the spur of the 

moment. But more is required 

to turn a satisfactory performance 

into a pièce de résistance, and that extra 

something is missing here. Part of the problem 

becomes apparent when Mayer blows through a 

long series of choruses; the more he digs into 

Horace Silver’s “Room 608,” the more apparent 

his hesitancies become, with unevenness even in 

repetition of a simple 16th-note figure, a few 

fudged notes during attempts at faster passages 

and a feeling that he’s playing behind the beat 

not as a phrasing decision but because that’s 

what he can manage. These same issues persist 

even at a mellower clip, as on “Dancing In The 

Dark,” not to the point of losing the groove but 

never driving it to a higher level, either. 

In harmonically denser settings, though, and 

in his introspective interpretation of Fred 

Lacey’s “Theme For Ernie,” Mayer’s insightful 

maturity is easier to savor. And taken as a 

whole, Nightscape does deliver a pleasing if not 

gourmet experience. —Robert L. Doerschuk 

Nightscape: The Touch Of Your Lips; Blues Junction; Day By Day; 

Nightscape; Rapture; Room 608; Dancing In The Dark; Bohemia 

After Dark; Theme For Ernie; Once I Loved; So In Love. (59:06) 

Personnel: Jon Mayer, piano; Rufus Reid, bass; Roy McCurdy, 

drums. 

Ordering info: reservoirmusic.com 

» 

Christian Wallumrød 

Ensemble 

Fabula Suite Lugano 

ECM 2118 2711269 

AAAA 

The Norwegian pianist and composer Christian 

Wallumrød has long explored unexpected and 

self-devised intersections of improvisation, 

Scandinavian folk and classical music, and with 

this latest salvo his creations have never sounded 

more bewitching and elusive. Between the wonderfully 

peculiar instrumentation of this sextet— 

which reflects those three discreet musical 

worlds, and now features the superb young trumpeter 

Eivind Lønning ably filling the big shoes of 

Arve Henriksen—and malleable arrangements 

that brilliantly use deeply varied timbral combinations, 

the luminescent sound of the group is 

practically enough to dazzle the ears for hours. 

But Wallumrød’s slippery compositional style 

ultimately gives the group its real depth. 

His familiarity with and his ensemble’s facility 

for various traditions prevents Fabula Suite 

Lugano from sounding like a series of glib mashups. 

From “Quote Funebre” which nicks terse, 

isolated melodic cells from compositions by 

Morton Feldman and Olivier Messiaen to sculpt 

a meticulously pitched minimalist delicacy, or 

the two versions of “Jumpa,” where an improvised 

melodic phrase created in rehearsal is built 

into a piece suggesting a Swedish folk dance 

played by a baroque ensemble, the pieces work 

because the various traditions are all treated with 

respect, even when they’re deliciously subverted. 

A number of short improvisations—solos by 

percussionist Per Oddvar Johansen and the 

pianist, and duets by Lønning and fiddler 

Gjermund Larsen and cellist Tanja Orning and 

harpist Giovanna Pessi—fit neatly within the 

track sequencing, further complementing the 

experiments with scale undertaken in pieces like 

“Solemn Mosquitoes” and “Pling,” where vivid 

contrasts in density add a subtle layer of drama. 

—Peter Margasak 

Fabula Suite Lugano: Solemn Mosquitos; Pling; Drum; Jumpa; 

Dancing Deputies; Quote Funebre; Scariatti Sonata; Snake; Knit; 

Duo; I Had A Mother Who Could Swim; Blop; The Gloom And 

The Best Man; Jumpa #2; Valse Dolcissima; Glissando; 

Mosquito Curtain Call; Solo. (65:10) 

Personnel: Christian Wallumrød, piano, harmonium, toy piano; 

Eivind Lønning, trumpet; Gjermund Larsen, violin, hardanger fiddle, 

viola; Tanja Orning, cello; Giovanna Pessi, baroque harp; Per 

Oddvar Johansen, drums, percussion, glockenspiel. 

Ordering info: ecmrecords.com 

»

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877-904-JAZZ 


BLUES 

Far North 

By Midwest 

JT Lauritsen & The Buckshot 

Hunters: Live (Hunters 00309; 

69:52) AAA Bayou? Fjord? 

They’re all the same to Norwegian 

musician Lauritsen; his first 

concert album is a good advertisement 

for his brand of roots 

music with its blues bias. The 

bandleader has an appealing 

singing voice, much improved 

over six albums, and he displays 

self-possession when playing his 

diatonic accordion. Likewise, 

keyboardist Iver Olav Erstad and 

the other Hunters seem familiar 

with the lie of the American 

Southland, enthusiastically performing 

a solid bunch of original songs and 

covers (Jimmy Reed, Earl King, Dwight 

Yoakum). Guest harmonica man Billy 

Gibbons is from Memphis. 

Ordering info: jtlauritsen.com 

Dave Keyes: Roots In The Blues (Keyesland 

1007; 49:42) AAA 1 /2 Always dependable 

as a pianist and organ player, Keyes 

surprises on his third album for the range 

and richness of his singing and for his ability 

to draw out the best from his sidemen 

(among them, guitarists Larry Campbell, 

drummer Frank Pagano). These New 

Yorkers sock home Keyes’ hybrid-tunes of 

blues, rock and soul, as well as lively covers 

of Marie Knight’s “Didn’t It Rain” and Ray 

Charles-identified “Angels Keep Watching 

Over Me.” Enjoyable all the way. 

Ordering info: davekeyes.com 

RJ Spangler’s Blue Four: The Bill Heid 

Sessions (Eastlawn 019; 46:11) AAA 1 /2 

Harking back to their time together in ’80s 

Detroit clubs, Grade A pianist Heid and 

steady drummer Spangler with a string 

bassist and saxophonist size up, in a 

Michigan studio, some of their favorite 

songs from heroes like Jimmy Witherspoon 

and Lieber & Stoller. Blues, jazz—the 

music’s both, and it’s plenty good. Heid 

sings capably, with character. He’s not the 

Mose Allison clone some detractors suggest 

he is. To hear the man’s B-3, go to his 

albums on the Doodlin’ label. 

Ordering info: www.eastlawnrecords.com 

David Maxwell & Louisiana Red: You Got 

To Move (Vizztone/BlueMax 002; 46:48) AA 

Thirty years of friendship between the 

Europe-based bluesman, who has historic 

ties to John Lee Hooker’s Detroit, and 

Bostonian Maxwell bring a certain intimacy 

by Frank-John Hadley 

to this recent studio pairing. But singer-guitarist 

Red’s no longer so limber and stout, at 

age 75, and Maxwell’s keyboard phrasing 

often sounds mannered and glib. Highlight: 

Red discusses his colleague Homesick 

James and the art of bending strings. 

Ordering info: vizztone.com 

Roy Powers: Firing Line (Blues Destiny 

1067; 25:46) AA Powers came of age on the 

’70s Southern chitlin’ circuit and has been 

unleashing sprays of trilled ostinatos in 

Florida clubs since the mid-1980s. An adequate 

singer, he offers an album of bluesrock 

with zydeco and country garnishes that 

affords modest pleasure while posing the 

question why his prowess on piano takes a 

backseat to generic, overblown blues-rock 

guitar. Given the right producer, Powers has 

a good album in him. 

Ordering info: bluedestinyrecords.com 

Various Artists, Boogie Woogie Kings 

(Delmark 804; 53:11) AAA Vinyl archaeologist 

Bob Koester has uncovered 19 sides 

from the Euphonic Sounds label (most dating 

to 1939, some later) featuring a half 

dozen boogie-and-blues piano pharaohs. 

There are brief looks at Albert Ammons, 

Meade Lux Lewis and Pete Johnson—just 

five tracks among them—while the erratic 

Clarence Lofton pounds or caresses the 

ivories on six others. Imagine Henry 

Brown doing “Deep Morgan” and two 

more on a riverboat or in a roadhouse, and 

relish the devilish excitement that informs 

Speckled Red’s raggedy procession of 

ideas on four artifacts, including “Dirty 

Dozens.” Multi-handed, mind-blowing 

preaching: Ammons, Lewis and Johnson’s 

“Boogie Woogie Prayer.” DB 

Ordering info: delmark.com 

Bill Heid: In character 

WU BIN

Oscar Feldman 

Oscar e Familia 

SUNNYSIDE 

AAA 1 /2 

With five of the 10 songs on 

Oscar e Familia played as dedications, 

saxist Oscar Feldman might 

as well have listed the others as 

same. His crack band is rife with 

attitude and knows this music 

inside and out, playing a mix of 

all things Latin jazz with elements 

of funk, fusion and swing to spice 

things up. 

Perhaps tipping his hand, 

Feldman kicks things off with a 

zesty spin in dedication to (one 

must assume) his wife with “Mrs. 

Tangoholic,” “The Improvisors” following it 

up in a similar spirit (dedicated to Hermeto 

Pascoal). These are songs that blend Latin jazz 

with horn charts and the light grease of electric 

piano (the tango plays an inverted role on the 

opener, the 7/4 beat on the latter keeping 

things a tad off-kilter). Playing alto, Feldman 

leads the charge with featured players Manuel 

Valera (on piano and Fender Rhodes throughout), 

bassist John Benitez and drummer 

Antonio Sanchez the basic fulcrum. His jazz 

chops are truly on display with another of his 

dedications, this one to fellow altoist Lee 

Konitz with “So Tenderlee,” played at a medium-tempo 

swing pace. Sharing solo turns with 

tenorist Mark Turner, Feldman shows that he 

knows and loves to swing. 

Along the way, Feldman adds percussion 

and a string quartet, perhaps the most poignant 

dedication being the one he writes for his 

father, “Coco Da Bahia,” which starts out slow 

and full of feeling only to lead into a spirited 

Latin samba, Feldman’s horn likewise full of 

feeling, strangely reminiscent of Lee Konitz. 

Feldman’s use of the strings has them sounding 

both subdued and orchestral, the recording 

giving them almost equal billing sonic-wise, 

Valera’s turn on piano both slightly funky and 

eloquent. This is pretty music with an edge. 

While most of the program is written by 

Feldman, three are written by others, namely 

Astor Piazzolla’s “Truinfal,” Wayne Shorter’s 

“Children Of The Night” and Guillermo 

Klein’s “El Minotauro” (Feldman co-composed 

the gentle closer “Peace To Find” with 

Klein). If you want to hear original takes on 

these three significant composer/players, 

check out Feldman’s passionate approaches to 

their music. “Triunfal” is clothed in a jazzy 

tango wardrobe, while “Children Of The 

Night” and “El Minotauro” are full of personality 

as well as Latin spunk. —John Ephland 

Oscar e Familia: Mrs. Tangoholic; The Improvisers; So 

Tenderlee; Oscar e Familia; Coco Da Bahia; New Tango; Triunfal; 

El Minotauro; Children Of The Night; Peace To Find. (64:06) 

Personnel: Oscar Feldman, alto and soprano saxophones; Diego 

Urcolo, trumpet (1), trombone (2); Manuel Valera, piano, Fender 

Rhodes; John Benitez, bass; Antonio Sanchez, drums; Pernell 

Saturnino, congas, cajon; Mark Turner, tenor saxophone (3); 

Xavier Perez, tenor and baritone saxophone (4); Pablo Aslan, bass 

(4, 7, 8); Cuartetango String Quartet (5, 6); Octavio Brunetti, piano 

(7); Tito Castro, bandoneon (7); Luis Alberto Spinetta, vocal (10). 

» 

Ordering info: oscarfeldman.com.ar 


Han Bennink Trio 

Parken 

ILK 156 

AAAA 

Although he’s been a creative force in 

jazz and improvised music for more than 

five decades, Parken, technically, marks 

the first group recording led by the singular 

Dutch drummer Han Bennink. I say technically because Bennink 

doesn’t really alter his modus operandi here any more than he does on the 

countless other recordings he’s played on. 

As usual, he plays with jazz fundamentals like putty, warping his for 

the tradition in service of spontaneous inspiration. Joined by two excellent 

young musicians—Belgian clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst and Danish 

pianist Simon Toldam—Bennink flips between crisp, infectious swing and 

explosive chaos; sometimes fluidly, sometimes jarringly. 

While such transitions are gripping and unpredictable, what the drummer 

does in each sphere is just as compelling, riding his cymbal to produce 

the most basic pleasure in jazz to loudly cavorting over his kit like a 

jungle gym. His partners here clearly share his aesthetic predilections, so 

the leaps from knotty dissonance to buoyant lyricism in Toldam’s “Music 

For Camping” to the terse, screaming jerkiness of “Myckewelk” arrived in 

unified ebbs and flows. Like so much of the best Dutch jazz, this trio lovingly 

reveals its affection for the tradition while simultaneously rejecting 

any suberservience to it. —Peter Margasak 

Parken: Music For Camping; Flemische March; Lady Of The Lavender Mist; Myckewelk; Isfahan; 

Reedeater; Fleurette Africaine; After The March; Parken. (48:43) 

Personnel: Han Bennink, drums; Joachim Badenhorst, bass clarinet, clarinet; Simon Toldam, piano. 

» 

Ordering info: ilkmusic.com 


Greg Reitan 

Antibes 

SUNNYSIDE 1238 

AAA 1 /2 

A cursory glance at the selections 

on Antibes reveals that pianist Greg 

Reitan is involved in the music of 

Bill Evans, and not in a casual way. 

A superficial listen imparts the 

sense of a stylistic bond between 

the two. But spend serious time 

with this collection and you’ll hear an important emerging pianist dealing 

not only with legacy and homage, but with identity and ownership as well. 

Reitan’s low-level dynamics, lyricism and probing treatments are legitimate 

bonds with Evans. But the run-and-gun right hand excursions on 

“Time Remembers” and the out-of-tempo interludes and punching percussiveness 

on Reitan’s own “September” are all his own. 

Reitan has an ease and natural quality to his playing, no matter the 

tempo or the pitch of the trio interaction. The phrasing and design of his 

theme and variations on the lazy “For Heaven’s Sake” brings to mind 

unforced breathing. The floating time quality of Wayne Shorter’s 

“Fall”—with Reitan’s liquid movement and jewel-like grace notes—is 

the work of both a thinker and a conjurer. —Kirk Silsbee 

Antibes: Antibes; For Heaven’s Sake; Waltz For Meredith; One Step Ahead; Fall; Time 

Remembers One Time Once; Sympathy; September; Re: Person I Knew; Late Summer 

Variations; Salinas; In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning. (60:01) 

Personnel: Greg Reitan, piano; Jack Daro, bass; Dean Koba, drums. 

» 

Ordering info: sunnysiderecords.com 

Wadada Leo Smith 

Spiritual Dimensions 

CUNEIFORM RUNE 290/291 

AAA 1 /2 

Trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo 

Smith and the two aggregations he 

fields here juggle the impulse of the 

moment with self-restraint to varying 

degrees. This double album contains 

some beautiful ensemble conclaves but also some overly long meditations. 

The two-drummer Golden Quintet knows how to stick and move. 

The three-guitar Organic band, while allowing great solo freedom, can 

bog down in repetition. 

Smith shows a marked distillation in his playing and the frameworks 

he chooses. He plays in short bursts and phrases, made of brilliant tones, 

startling sounds, pungent runs and lyrical asides. He’s a minimalist who 

doesn’t waste anything, preferring to let the ensemble define the form. 

He waits for just the right moment to call the assembly to order, accent 

or incite. These are rhythm- and tonal center-oriented pieces, rather than 

chordal forms. 

The Organic band is long on electronic effects and playing times, 

short on programmatic variety. This outfit’s “South Central” is a slow 

ride through a funk funhouse. The heavily pedaled guitars of Nels Cline, 

Michael Gregory and Brandon Ross pop in and out of the landscape, 

alternating fright with mirth. “Angela Davis” is a cavalcade of sound but 

wears out its welcome at nearly 20 minutes. —Kirk Silsbee 

Spiritual Dimensions: CD 1: Al-Shadhili’s Litany Of The Sea: Sunrise; Pacifica; Umar At The 

Dome Of The Rock, parts 1 & 2; Crossing Sirat; South Central L.A. Kulture. (54:21) CD 2: South 

Central L.A. Kulture; Angela Davis; Organic; Joy : Spiritual Fire : Joy. (63:36) 

Personnel: CD 1: Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet; Vijay Iyer, piano, synthesizer; John Lindberg, bass; 

Pheeroan AkLaff, Don Moye, drums. CD 2: Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet; Michael Gregory, electric 

guitar; Nels Cline, six- and 12-string eclectic guitars; Lamar Smith, electric guitar (1, 4); Okkyung 

Lee, cello; Skuli Sverrisson, electric bass; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan AkLaff, drums 

» 

Ordering info: cuneiformrecords.com

Benjamin 

Koppel/Bobby 

Watson 

At Ease 

COWBELL MUSIC 49 

AAA 1 /2 

Benjamin 

Koppel/Kenny 

Werner 

Walden 

COWBELL MUSIC 51 

AAAA 

This brace of releases from Danish saxist Benjamin Koppel showcases his 

sharphooting bebop side (At Ease) and a less angular, chaste lyricism 

(Walden). 

The sparring vehicle “Groovin’ Altos,” which kicks off At Ease, is heralded 

by Boussaguet’s headnod-inducing bass and a klaxon intro from 

Kenny Werner. Former Jazz Messenger Bobby Watson is an old hand at 

generating excitement, but Koppel knows the game plan and matches the 

American lick for lick—so well, in fact, that is often difficult to tell them 

apart (absence of liner info on solo order doesn’t help). In the last of the 

eights the two altos exchange before cutting to fours, Koppel plays a highregister 

phrase out of Bunky Green’s bag. Unconscious extracts of “Flight 

Of The Bumble Bee” from Werner push each E-flat horn to outdo the 

other before a dropout into Alex Riel’s solo, quarter notes marked by bass 

drum. The hard swing spills into the overlong chill of the title track 

(maybe that’s the point) before the Adderley Brothers-styled head of “At 

Large.” The Europeans reveal their deep respect for American mainstream 

jazz. Riel was resident drummer at Copenhagen’s Montmartre in the ’60s 

and has a wealth of experience fielding this kind of encounter. 

The altos tail each other with fluttering phrases, and we realize how 

much they have in common amidst the melancholic empathy of “Con 

Alma” (not the Dizzy version). But it’s the burners that this is hung on, and 

“At Stake” sees the horns unspooling grandstanding lines such that, together 

with the hall-like reverb, it’s hard to believe this is a studio date. Listen for 

Werner’s uncanny responses here—he can anticipate what the saxes will 

play—offering humorosly dissonant, simultaneous commentary. Koppel’s 

balladeering on “Mother’s Song,” which shares the gravitas of Mal 

Waldron’s “Soul Eyes,” suggests David Sanborn as an early influence. 

The straightforward virtuosity of his playing in places might not win 

over Koppel with more progressive listeners, but there are moments of 

sheer beauty on the Thoreau-inspired conceptual disc Walden. The 

Scandinavian saxophone tradition of rich, piping dynamics pioneered by 

Jan Garbarek is evident in the pains Koppel takes with breath control and 

his upward scoops at note-ends. Werner is a brilliant accompanist and 

paints rich details of his own over Koppel’s compositions while offering 

concurrent support to the Dane’s empassioned exhortations. “Rumors 

From An Aeolian Harp,” sung by Koppel’s pitch-steady soprano, is quite 

exquisite, and the compositions inspire a communion open to natural 

occurrences; even when meandering occurs, such as on “Life In The 

Woods,” there’s conceptual relevance. “The Poet’s Delay” is lovely, and 

fans of Kenny G wouldn’t be offended by “Paradise (To Be) Regained,” 

until Werner starts burrowing for ideas, Koppel flashes triple-time chops 

and the two take a foray through remote keys, evoking Thoreau’s 

thoughtful peregrinations in the forest around his legendary sanctuary. 

—Michael Jackson 

At Ease: Groovin Altos; At Ease; At Large; Con Alma; At Stake; Mother’s Song; Alto Stratos. (63:27) 

Personnel: Bejamin Koppel, Bobby Watson, alto saxophones; Kenny Werner, piano; Pierre 

Boussaguet, bass; Alex Riel, drums. 

Walden: Walden; Rumors From An Aeolian Harp; Cows In Emerson’s Pasture; Where I Lived 

And What I Lived For; Life Without Principle; Life In The Woods; The Poet’s Delay; Paradise (To 

Be) Regained; Walden (In Early Winter). (58:16) 

Personnel: Benjamin Koppel, soprano and alto saxophones; Kenny Werner, piano. 

» 

Ordering info: cowbellmusic.dk 


BEYOND 

Haiti Lives 

Music was the first responder. 

The earliest credible information 

I received out of Haiti 

in the hours after the earthquake 

was a series of tweets 

from Port-au-Prince bandleader 

Richard Morse. “Much 

singing and praying in large 

numbers,” he texted. Then 

came the sad spectacle of 

mainstream media floundering 

to interpret the tragedy in the absence 

of any knowledge of Haiti’s history and culture, 

to say nothing of the near-total 

absence of an identifiably Haitian music 

style in the grim, doggedly earnest “Hope 

For Haiti” telethon. Haitian music history 

became more knowable recently with the 

release of Alan Lomax In Haiti (Harte 

Recordings 103; 10 CDs; AAAA). 

This massive set is beyond entertainment. 

These never-before-available recordings are 

the beginning of Haitian music history. To 

make them, folklorists Alan and Elizabeth 

Lomax lugged 155 pounds of gear on a boat 

to Haiti in 1936. They stayed from Christmas 

to Easter, documenting seasonal celebrations 

(at a time when vodou was in theory 

banned, by Haitian law), setting up recording 

sessions, even getting married there. 

Alan Lomax also shot dance footage with a 

silent film camera. 

Pre-revolutionary 18th century Haiti 

(known as Saint-Domingue) had the densest 

concentration of Africans ever assembled 

on a piece of ground up to that point. 

At the time of Boukman’s uprising in 1791, 

two-thirds of the half a million slaves in the 

rich plantation colony had been born in 

Africa. Urbanites, farmers from the forest, 

professional soldiers, ritual experts—people 

from disparate African cultural regions 

were compressed together in labor camps, 

then exploded as a concomitant part of the 

French Revolution. Haiti was the country 

that rose up and killed slavery, singing as it 

did so. With the full power of Africa flowing 

through it, the Haitian uprising became one 

of the generative explosions of popular 

music in the hemisphere, dispersing an 

original cultural synthesis that was complex, 

specific and highly artistic. 

Unfortunately, the sound of the aluminum 

discs Lomax recorded was so horrible 

that they were pretty much unlistenable 

until the age of digital cleanup. So zero stars 

for the audio, but five stars that it exists at 

all and five more for Steve Rosenthal’s 

painstaking restoration work. This isn’t 


by Ned Sublette 

exactly fun listening; it’s grating when the 

harshly tuned rustic voices distort, and 

since much of the music is repetitive, that 

can be jarring at length. But this is more 

than fun, and discoveries lurk. 

Adding significant value to the package 

is an 85-page book with Gage Averill’s 

detailed notes, which constitute a truly 

impressive scholarly achievement and do 

much to make the music comprehensible. 

Hard-to-hear song texts are rendered the 

right way, in full Kreyol/English bilingual 

form. After listening to all 10 discs’ worth 

of music on headphones, Averill’s book 

became an indispensable organizing aid. 

A handsome book of Lomax’s notes and 

field drawings further augment the package’s 

value. 

The wide range of Haitian music that 

Lomax documented is arrayed into 10 thematic 

discs that include Haitian jazz bands 

of the ’30s, Cuban-influenced troubadours, 

Mardi Gras music, French romance (since 

disappeared), colonial contredanse and 

bawdy work songs. Needless to say, there 

is also the energy of vodou, whether in duet 

songs of the Rada branch with ason (rattle) 

and klòch (a small, sweet bell) or with the 

spirit heating up as Kongo/Petwo drummers 

push the envelope in drumtongue, 

still exhorting the spirits that more than two 

centuries ago spoke in flames. 

There is ample continuity between these 

voices of more than 70 years ago and the 

present day. Thank God (Bondye, if you’re 

Haitian) they were made, and thank Anna 

Lomax Wood for her determination to 

make her father’s scholarship come to 

fruition. It’s newly available primary source 

material that has heretofore been inaccessible, 

even to scholars, and is now instantly 

essential. 

Donations to help send material aid to 

young Cuban-trained Haitian physicians on 

the front lines in public hospitals and clinics 

alongside the Cuban medical team in Haiti 

can be made at medicc.org/ns/. DB 

Ordering info: harterecordings.com 

HARTE RECORDINGS 

Paul Motian 

Trio 2000 +Two 

On Broadway, Vol. 5 

WINTER & WINTER 910 148 

AAAA 

The musicians have changed on the handful of 

On Broadway releases Paul Motian has 

recorded since 1988, but the music has largely 

stayed the same. Anyone working with the 

master drummer and improviser can’t help but 

be drawn into his lazy, hazy orbit. 

As Motian massages the kit—cymbals 

playing irregular, at times humorous beats, his 

drums similarly dancing and darting (and 

occasionally dumping) in truly unique fashion—the 

musicians must conform to his flagrant 

non-conformity. Here, it’s flow with the 

flow, or be damned. Vol. 5 of the series focuses 

on classic ballad material from Sammy 

Fain, Frank Loesser, Lionel Hampton and others, 

though you would never know that purely 

by listening. The melodies are sometimes 

unrecognizable, but it doesn’t matter. This is 

the unfettered spirit of loose limbed, if abstract 

bop: timeless, rambunctious, adventurous and 

in the moment. Motian’s musicians play gorgeously, 

especially pianist Masabumi Kikuchi 

on “Something I Dreamed Last Night,” and 

saxophonist Loren Stillman on “Just A 

Gigolo,” but your ear always returns to the 

unusual, playful drumming that glues it all 

altogether. 

Motian invents then gets away with things 

that no other drummer would attempt, much 

less pull off. It’s not that he makes his pitterpatter, 

Marcel Duchamp-like rhythms simply 

work; he’s got nothing to lose and, more 

importantly, nothing to prove. Motian’s drumming 

is ego-free, childlike and the very 

essence of swing, melody and rhythm. He’s 

irresistible. —Ken Micallef 

On Broadway, Vol. 5: Morrock, Something I Dreamed Last 

Night, Just A Gigolo, I See Your Face Before Me, A Lovely Way 

To Spend An Evening, Midnight Sun, Sue Me. (56:18) 

Personnel: Paul Motian, drums; Thomas Morgan, bass; Loren 

Stillman, Michael Attias, saxophones; Masabumi Kikuchi, piano. 

» 

Ordering info: winterandwinter.com

Mike Longo Trio 

Sting Like A Bee 

CONSOLIDATED ARTISTS PRODUCTIONS 1018 

AA 

Three masters at work, each schooled 

fully in his art and none driven by 

any lingering need to prove himself: 

That pretty much wraps up Sting Like 

A Bee, not to mention a good number 

of piano/bass/drums trio albums by 

artists comparable to these in stature. 

Digging a little deeper, this 

means that the trio format is well 

suited to allowing musicians to 

stretch; whether that means to challenge themselves 

or to enjoy a leisurely idyll is up to the 

participants. Sting Like A Bee fits into the latter 

category, with loosely arranged tunes breezing 

along the roadmap of head, blowing choruses, 

some drum fours (which Nash plays crisply 

and caps with a brisk, brief solo “Daahoud”), 

reprise and finish. There are closing cadences 

so embedded into the canon that their familiarity 

substitutes effectively for the absent thrill 

of the unexpected, from the bluesy walk-up at 

the end of “Checked Bags” to the lick, slightly 

botched, that wraps “Love For Sale.” 

Which brings to mind perhaps the one challenge 

that all who want to credibly follow this 

approach have to honor: When playing standards, 

effort should be made to cast the tune in 

an even slightly different light than usual. 

“Love For Sale” is one such track in this set: 

Right at the top, it sashays into a swiveling, 

seductive funk, switching to a complementary 

swing on the bridges, which perfectly suit the 

theme of the tune. Similarly, “Speak Low” is 

presented as an intimate ballad, nicely harmonized 

and buoyed by Cranshaw’s and Nash’s 

discreet, spacious support. Beyond their agreement 

on this feel, the only sign of preconceived 

arrangement here is a set of descending triplets, 

played together by all three participants, which 

leads from each second ending into the next 

verse. And that’s it: Players this seasoned and 

skilled can trust their instincts to deliver the 

goods once the tape rolls. 

Sometimes, in fact, that works better than 

building on a more ambitious foundation. 

Inspired by Longo’s study with Oscar 

Peterson, “Westside Story Medley” actually 

features some of the album’s best blowing, 

especially in the driving treatment of the first 

section, “Tonight.” But slamming on the 

brakes and veering suddenly to a rubato, solo 

piano rumination on “Maria” subverts that 

energy, and when Longo slips into the waltz “I 

Feel Pretty” those several seconds of “Maria,” 

in turn, become superfluous. It might have 

been better to just pick any one of the Bernstein 

pieces and live with them for a while. Far more 

satisfying, and unexpectedly so, is Longo’s 

solo exploration of Dizzy Gillespie’s “Kush,” 

which closes Sting Like A Bee as a dramatic 

reminder of how profound an interpreter and 

penetrating an improviser he is when he chooses 

to be. —Robert L. Doerschuk 

Sting Like A Bee: Speak No Evil; Love For Sale; Daahoud; Tell 

Me A Bedtime Story; Someone To Love; Westside Story 

Medley; Dance Cadaverous; Morning; Speak Low; Bird Seed; 

Checked Bags; Kush. (72:53) 

Personnel: Mike Longo, piano; Bob Cranshaw, bass; Lewis 

Nash, drums. 

» 

Ordering info: jazzbeat.com 


HISTORICAL 

Intimate Ella 

Ella Fitzgerald played to millions in 

big outdoor venues like the 

Hollywood Bowl during her last 

four decades, and if you ever 

caught her there or some place 

similar you get bragging rights 

that your “saw” the great Ella in 

person. But you couldn’t really 

know her unless you encountered 

her in her natural habitat. That’s 

the thing about Ella Fitzgerald: 

Twelve Nights In Hollywood 

(Verve Select B0012920; 60:23/ 

53:22/75:19/62:30 AAAAA), a 

four-CD compression of about 30 

shows producer Norman Granz 

and engineer Val Valentin taped in 

May 1961 and June 1962 in a 

small club on Sunset Boulevard 

called the Crescendo. It was a 

snug chamber in which carpets, 

drapes, tablecloths and a low ceiling 

trapped the sound and made it 

touchable. The audience-to-performer 

ratio was a close and cozy 

200-to-1, more or less—practically 

a lap dance by stadium standards. 

Hard to believe that this was how 

the biggest stars in show business still 

worked then: playing to audiences a few 

hundred at a time, two or three times a 

night. The patter of the applause is eager 

and intimate; the 75 songs, the cream of 

the American songbook, which she, Buddy 

Bregman and Nelson Riddle had recently 

raised to the pedestal of high art. 

Collections like this—the kind that make 

such quality look so damn easy—are why 

the best jazz remains the most rarified and 

elite of American cultural experiences. 

Perhaps the small audiences explain the 

collegial, almost careless atmosphere, as if 

the scale of intimacy put so little at stake. 

Part of the charm of any live recording is its 

unexpectedness, something Granz was perhaps 

the first to recognize when he recorded 

the first JATP concerts in 1944. There are 

marvelous moments here so sui generis 

they seem plucked from a private party. 

After the first sentence of the verse to “I’ve 

Got A Crush On You,” Fitzgerald interrupts 

herself, as if missing a remark from someone 

in the audience—“huh”—then goes on. 

Or when she happens to spot Carl Reiner 

and Mack David at a table and favors them 

with an impromptu, half-improvised lyric to 

David’s own “Candy.” Occasional quips feel 

in the moment, not like boilerplate. “Can I 

have a sexy light,” she asks before one bal- 


Ella Fitzgerald: 

impromptu 

mastery 

by John McDonough 

lad. “Doesn’t help. But anyway...” Some 

references have grown obscure with time. 

“Hi-ho Steverino,” which she injects into 

“Alamo,” was a familiar catchphrase out of 

“The Steve Allen Show.” The tacky cha-cha 

beat of “Driving Me Crazy” and pop-rock 

rhythm of “Blue Moon” are intended as 

acerbic asides to the contemporary kiddiekitsch 

of fleeting fads. But Fitzgerald is utterly 

immutable—her instincts beyond the 

reach of time, her vocal powers scaling the 

heavens. 

Music director and pianist Lou Levy carried 

a thesaurus of musical references in 

his head and drops them shrewdly into 

unexpected places. You’ll hear Artie 

Shaw’s “Nightmare” setting up “Accentuate 

The Positive.” And he interpolates 

Dizzy Gillespie’s “Bebop” riff as a kind of 

intro/refrain into a much-too-short “I Found 

A New Baby,” which hungers to be opened 

up with a few scat choruses. It also makes 

one wonder why this is her only recorded 

performance of this classic jam session staple. 

The same is true of “The Lady’s In 

Love,” “My Kind Of Boy/Girl” and, incredibly, 

“It Had To Be You,” which she sings to 

columnist Walter Winchell, sitting ringside. 

Together, this set is likely to become one of 

Fitzgerald’s defining collections. DB 

Ordering info: vervemusicgroup.com 


Joe Locke 

For The Love Of You 

E1E 2046 

AAA 1 /2 

Vibist Joe Locke does a nice job of mixing the 

variety of music up with For The Love Of You. 

A kind of project that started with his interest 

in Henry Mancini’s music back in 1994 

expanded into a varied repertoire that’s been 

played out specifically at Dizzy’s Club Coca- 

Cola (at Jazz at Lincoln Center) in New York 

City. For The Love Of You is a satisfying collection 

of tunes that blend standards with originals 

in an original way. 

For starters, there’s the inclusion of singer 

Kenny Washington (not the drummer), who 

blew Locke away when he first heard him. 

Now, as a member of his band, Washington 

adds depth to the sounds of certain songs heard 

on For The Love Of You, including the opener, 

a sweet rendition of Mancini's bittersweet 

“Two For The Road.” But it gets better with 

novel arrangements that smack of attitude, as 

with the band’s sharpshooter approach to the 

standard “Old Devil Moon.” Reinvigorating 

that song’s gusto with more gusto, Locke 

opens the barn door with talents Geoff Keezer 

on piano, bassist George Mraz and drummer 

Clarence Penn. The only sad part of this story 

is that Locke doesn’t let Keezer fly akin to former 

boss Benny Golson, instead keeping him 

more as a secret weapon through songs that 

reflect the eclectic flavors of this release such 

as Neil Young’s “Birds,” Ennio Morricone’s 

“Cinema Paradiso” and Locke’s own “I Miss 

New York.” 

For The Love Of You is a great introduction 

into how to lead a band from the vibes, everyone 

swinging and singing with a mix of originals 

and standards, all inspired, it seems, from 

the pen of Henry Mancini. —John Ephland 

For The Love Of You: Two For The Road; Old Devil Moon; For 

The Love Of You; Verrazano Moon; I Miss New York (When I 

Been Gone Too Long); Birds; The Shadow Of Your Smile; 

Cinema Paradiso; Pure Imagination; Bright Side Up. (59:01) 

Personnel: Joe Locke, vibes; Geoffrey Keezer, piano; Goerge 

Mraz, bass; Clarence Penn, drums; Kenny Washington, vocals. 

» 

Ordering info: joelocke.com

BOOKS 


by Eric Fine 

New Biography Balances Armstrong’s 

Musical Brilliance, Historical Detractors 

Terry Teachout’s Pops: A Life Of Louis 

Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) 

tracks Armstrong’s rise from the slums in 

New Orleans, to innumerable bookings at 

mob-controlled clubs and segregated 

hotels, to the bright lights of Broadway and 

Hollywood. For many, such a journey 

would more than adequately 

fill a book; in 

Armstrong’s case it 

merely covers the first 

half of his life. His story 

has been well chronicled 

in biographies such as 

Robert Goffin’s Horn Of 

Plenty and Gary Giddins’ 

Satchmo, not to mention 

Armstrong’s memoir 

Satchmo: My Life In New 

Orleans. 

So why another book 

about Armstrong? 

Pops looks closely at 

Armstrong apart from his 

music. The trumpet player 

and singer was the 

first black crossover artist of note, and the 

first virtuoso to perform popular music 

rather than classical. He also personified a 

cultural diaspora originating in the 

American South that changed the perceptions 

of not just music, but also race, sex, 

language and sports. Yet Armstrong’s bittersweet 

legacy serves as a reminder of the 

narrow divide separating groundbreaking 

achievement from hokum. 

“We must take [Armstrong], like all great 

artists, as he was, and it is no sacrifice to do 

so, for even when he was at his most trivial, 

seriousness kept breaking in,” writes 

Teachout, drama critic at The Wall Street 

Journal. True to this statement, he allows 

Armstrong’s pandering to stand alongside 

his genius: his refusal to alter solos once 

they became familiar, his many cameos in 

mediocre films and his endless grinning 

and clowning. 

Armstrong paid dearly for this, particularly 

later in life when Dizzy Gillespie, Miles 

Davis, Gunther Schuller and James 

Baldwin would take umbrage with his 

music and manner. The first slight occurred 

early on: John Hammond excluded 

Armstrong from the 1938 concert “From 

Spirituals To Swing” at Carnegie Hall, a 

landmark showcase for jazz and other black 

music that had remained noncompromised 

by commercial demands. Even though 

were it not for Armstrong, Teachout 

argues, there would have been no audience 

for jazz at concert halls, much less 

Carnegie Hall. 

Still, Armstrong was an easy target. For 

all his brilliance he remained stagnant for 

long segments of his 

career. This was conspicuous 

during World 

War II, when swing 

bands returned jazz to 

a place of prominence. 

Armstrong, however, 

stuck with dance 

bands—and secondrate 

ones at that—and 

also an unchallenging 

repertoire whose tired 

songs he likened to 

“good ol’ good ones.” 

Teachout attributes 

some of the blame to 

Armstrong’s manager, 

Joe Glaser, who had 

ties to organized crime 

in Chicago. Armstrong signed over his 

career to Glaser in return for a steady 

salary and assurances that mobsters would 

no longer threaten his life over contracts he 

allegedly had broken. Armstrong endured 

some hardship in the early 1940s, his marriage 

to his fourth wife, Lucille, notwithstanding. 

Years of continuous gigging and 

poor embouchure technique had taken 

their toll on his chops, resulting in a succession 

of split lips. It forced Armstrong to rein 

in his flamboyant use of the trumpet’s 

upper register that had long served as a 

calling card. 

After World War II ended and big bands 

had fallen out of favor, a sea change had 

begun for Armstrong. A promoter’s decision 

to book the trumpeter at New York’s 

Town Hall in 1947 marked his first smallgroup 

concert of consequence in two 

decades and heralded Armstrong’s rebirth 

as a combo leader (albeit one who 

eschewed bebop). 

The rest of the biography is just as compelling. 

Aside from the occasional overanalysis 

of Armstrong’s solos, the candid 

narrative stays on course, rife with fascinating 

anecdotes and historical data; the generous 

space doled out to Armstrong’s critics 

provides an effective counterweight. DB 

Ordering info: hmhbooks.com 

Paul F. 

Murphy/ 

Larry 

Willis 

Foundations 

MURPHY RECORDS 

AAAA 

Following up 

on the experiment 

they undertook with The Powers Of Two, 

Murphy and Willis build a complex structure 

on Foundations through their pairing of piano 

and drums and the application of their formidable 

musicianship to the process of invention 

through total improvisation. 

Each of these tracks starts from scratch. 

Absent predetermined themes or chords, the 

foundation alluded to in the title most likely 

alludes to the process of conjuring something 

from nothing. But this is a little misleading, 

since there is always something there, in the 

moment of their performance. In the opening 

track, it’s the single tonic note that Murphy 

rapidly repeats to begin the process. There’s 

something thrilling in the decision by Willis to 

respond not on his kit but by switching to a 

bongo drum, on which he echoes the velocity 

and staccato of the piano motif. With this gesture, 

the two musicians suggest they are interacting 

fully, listening intently and opening themselves 

to any and every type of possibility. 

Almost all of Foundations is non-metrical 

yet highly rhythmic, with an almost constant 

rushing momentum interrupted occasionally by 

reflection or just catching one’s breath. The most 

obvious analog to Murphy’s approach would be 

Cecil Taylor, with his muscular, dense texturing 

and displays of sheer energy. But Murphy is also 

somewhat less abstract; fragments of possible 

song structures pop up amidst his heavily pedaled 

rumblings. 

Willis not only tracks these tidal shifts, he also 

contributes mightily to their direction. “Khafre” 

starts with a delicate cymbal pattern, sounding at 

first like a wash of rain but quickly intensifying 

as the impact of the sticks grows more pronounced 

and then expands to include an urgent 

throb of snare and kick. It’s Murphy who does 

the answering this time, with sprightly smears 

and jabs that soon root in quartal harmonies similar 

to those of McCoy Tyner, though played with 

less sustain and framed by ample space to allow 

commentary from the drums. 

At other times, Murphy and Willis work 

together with a quirky, almost comic synchronicity. 

“Preeter” starts with a three-note 

statement from the piano; the drums answer with 

a single thwack, like a punchline following the 

straight man’s setup. —Robert L. Doerschuk 

Foundations: Foundations; Epigraph; Khafre; Preeter; Morel, M- 

LB; Paean; Dance Pointe; East Turn Alt; Composite Drive; June 

Jump; Equinox. (67:43) 

Personnel: Paul F. Murphy, piano; Larry Willis, drums, percussion. 

» 

Ordering info: pfmjazz.com

Curtis Brothers Quartet 

Blood•Spirit•Land•Water•Freedom 

CURTIS BROTHERS MUSIC LLC/TRUTH REVOLUTION RECORDS 

AAAA 

I like these guys and concur with the passionately 

intense essay printed in the CD gatefold supporting 

the lofty title to this collection of (primarily) 

originals, successfully blending classical, 

Latin and bebop influences. 

The eponymous brothers are Zaccai, a 

resourceful, accurate and inquisitive pianist, and 

Luques, who is steeped in the art of laconic 

Latin bass playing having worked with Eddie 

Palmieri and Jerry Gonzalez. The core group is 

unusual in that it uses drums and percussion, 

rather than guitar or horns, but the disc is not 

short on guests, including the unusual voice of 

Giovanni Almonte, who comes across as an 

androgynous marriage of Johnny Mathis and Al 

Jarreau on “Thoughts Not My Own,” which, 

during a brief rap section, bemoans peer pressure 

or general oppression in the Latin ghetto. 

On the opener, a cascading line early in 

Zaccai’s solo sounds like a phrase from a West 

African kora, but the pianist backs up his talent 

for filigree fingerwork (evident on the gorgeous 

melody “Maria Cervantes”) with rock-hard 

montunas behind congas, bata drums and 

Luques pendulum bass. “Yuba Citrico,” written 

by conguero Reinaldo de Jesus, recalls grooves 

favored by bassist Avishai Cohen; Mark 

Whitfield features on the smooth “Solutions,” 

and there is nice soprano from lesser-known 

Frank Kozyra on “Song To Break The Spell,” 

which features a Pat Metheny-like vocal choir. 

Award-winning as Zaccai’s compositions are 

(he’s picked up several ASCAP gongs), and not 

discounting a pastoral ballad from Luques, interestingly 

titled “Alkalinity,” the Latin treatments 

of Bud Powell’s “Bouncing With Bud” and 

Chopin’s “Op 25 No. 2” stand out. 

—Michael Jackson 

Blood•Spirit•Land•Wate•Freedom: Curtis Anew; Thoughts 

Not My Own; Twisted Histories; Yuba Citrico;Taino Revenge; 

Bouncing with Bud; Memories in Ether; The Spoiler; Op.25 

No.2; Take That Seat; Maria Servantes; Alkalinity; Solutions; 

Song to Break The Spell; El Calderon. (68:89) 

Personnel: Zaccai Curtis, piano; Luques Curtis, bass; Reinaldo 

DeJesus, congas; Richie Barshay, drums; Michael Dease, trombone 

(1, 10); Frank Kozyra, soprano sax (1, 10, 14); Mark 

Whitfield, guitar (7); Camilo Molina Gaetan, bata (10); Giovanni 

Almonte, vocal (2); Julie Acosta, vocal (10); Jee Youn Hong, cello 

(5); Sung Hee Choi, viola (5). 

» 

Ordering info: truthrevolutionrecords.com 


Ben Goldberg 

Speech 

Communication 

TZADIK 8146 

AAAA 

Go Home 

BAG 001 

AAAA 

Over the last two 

decades the Bay Area’s 

Ben Goldberg has had 

few rivals as one of the 

most vibrant, flexible, 

and inventive clarinetists 

in jazz and improvised music. From his 

membership in the pan-stylistic collective Tin 

Hat to rigorous sideman work with pianist Myra 

Melford or guitarist Nels Cline, he’s able to 

adapt his playing perfectly to each given context 

without surrendering his personality as a tough 

sonic explorer. 

On Speech Communication he revisits the 

instrumental format of the band where he first 

made his mark, New Klezmer Trio. He’s joined 

by old bandmate Kenny Wollesen on drums and 

the trusty Greg Cohen on bass (replacing original 

bassist Dan Seamans), and together they 

embrace that wonderful old sound, building 

mostly improvised performances from scant 

written themes that draw 

loosely from the melodic 

shapes, mood and harmony 

of old Jewish 

music. 

It’s in this setting 

where Goldberg really 

pushes the sonic envelope 

of the clarinet, 

unleashing penetrating 

long tones, high velocity 

trills and hypnotic circular 

riffs, while consistently 

maintaining control 

of the unwieldy 

instrument and weaving such abstractions into 

lyric, touching solos. The adept rhythm section 

alternates between unobtrusive grooves and coloristic 

probing without distracting from 

Goldberg’s extended solos, even when he 

unleashes the cumbersome sound of the contraalto 

clarinet. 

For the album Go Home Goldberg reached 

back even further, writing a blues-imbued set of 

tunes heavy on rhythm and elegant simplicity— 

qualities that first engaged the clarinetist with 

jazz years back. With drummer Scott Amendola 

and seven-string guitarist Charlie Hunter 

(who’ve worked together in numerous contexts 

in the past) both laying down fat grooves and 

constructing lithe armatures, Goldberg and trumpeter 

Ron Miles shape beautiful, sometimes pensive 

melodies out front, much of them marked 

by ebullient contrapuntal generosity. 

As gritty as things get—on “Wazee” 

Hunter seems to be channeling Albert King— 

the band can also play it subtle, as on the sorrowful 

“Lace,” where amid the quietly churning 

emotion Miles taps into some unpitched 

growls that recall Axel Dörner, a nice contrast 

to his deeply tuneful, sanguine improvisations. 

While Goldberg’s remarkable control and 

compositional logic have always shaped even 

his most extreme playing, the music on Go 

Home represents some of his most accessible 

and joyful work, but like everything he undertakes 

there’s an unabashed undercurrent of 

deep consideration. —Peter Margasak 

Speech Communication: Language Behavior; Habituary; Amr; 

Head And Tails; Avodyah; Song #1; Papermaker; 

Drops Off; Palindromic; Snow Note; Epilogue–Bongoloid Lens. 

(59:06) 

Personnel: Ben Goldberg, clarinet; Greg Cohen, bass; Kenny 

Wollesen, drums. 

Ordering info: tzadik.com 

» 

Go Home: TGO; Wazee; Lace; Root And Branch; Head And 

Tails; Ethan’s Song; Inevitable; Isosceles; Reparation; 

Papermaker. (72:19) 

Personnel: Ben Goldberg: clarinet; Charlie Hunter: seven-string 

guitar; Scott Amendola: drums; Ron Miles: cornet, G trumpet. 

Ordering info: bengoldberg.net 

» 


Toolshed 

DOWNBEAT 

MUSICIANS’ 

GEAR GUIDE 

Best of The NAMM Show 2010 

PRO AUDIO 

Mix Me 

MyMix from Movek lets musicians create 

their own personal mixes and record 

multitrack audio at the same time. Its 

iPod-esque, user-friendly interface 

and full-color LCD display make it 

easy to control the volume, tone and 

effect level of everyone in a band. 

Separate MyMix systems can be linked up 

via standard Ethernet switches. Also, recorded 

audio can be imported into any recording software for 

overdubs, mixing and mastering. More info: mymixaudio.com 

Ride That Wave 

Waves’ new Vocal Rider plug-in eliminates 

the problem of having to overcompress a 

vocal to get it to sit right in a mix. Users set 

the target range of the vocal level in relation 

to the rest of the mix; Vocal Rider then compensates 

for all deviations from the target, 

raising or lowering the volume instantly without 

coloring the vocal with compression or 

limiting. It also includes a Spill control to differentiate 

the vocal from background instrumentation 

and noise for better tracking and 

performance. MSRP: Native, $400; TDM, 

$800. More info: waves.com 

Preamp Power 

With the new PowerPre, Radial offers a 

500-series mic preamp that’s sensitive to 

the needs of different applications. The 

front-panel voicing switch delivers three 

unique personalities. The Breath setting flatters 

vocals and instruments requiring extra 

detail; the Punch setting helps fatten up sounds; 

and the Normal setting delivers natural sound 

without hype. MSRP: $500. More info: radialeng.com 

Tiny 8-Tracker 

Tascam gave new meaning to “Portastudio” with the DP-008, a tiny 

eight-track recorder that can record up to two tracks at a time. 

Featuring 24-bit, 96 kHz audio, the unit’s built-in effects include reverb 


Movek 

MyMix 

Waves Vocal Rider 

Novation 

Launchpad 

Korg Sound 

On Sound 

The NAMM Show brings together 

the entire musical instruments 

industry for four days of product 

showcases, business-to-business 

marketing, inventory ordering and 

plenty of joyful noise every winter. 

This year’s event, held Jan. 14–17 

at the Anaheim Convention Center, 

saw the release of thousands of new 

instruments and audio equipment— 

some of which shows promise to 

become essential gear for players 

at all levels, from amateurs to pros. 

send and two-band EQ on each track. It has built-in mics and 

XLR inputs with phantom power, as well as a built-in kickstand 

for placing the recorder where you want it. The DP-008 records 

to MicroSD media. More info: tascam.com 

Unlimited Sound 

Korg’s Sound on Sound Unlimited Track 

Recorder deserves props for concept alone: a 

pint-sized recorder with a built-in stereo mic 

that allows for an infinite number of overdubs 

and alternate takes. This doesn’t even take into 

account its 16-bit, 44.1 kHz audio; built-in 

tuners; 50 internal rhythm patterns; and sound 

stretch function, which lets users alter the playback 

speed without affecting the pitch. And users 

can dump their tracks down into a computerbased 

DAW system for further editing, mixdown and 

playback. MSRP: $400. More info: korg.com 

Handheld Audio-Video 

Alesis has jumped into the new hand-held video recorder product category 

with the VideoTrack. It creates Web-ready video ideal for 

YouTube and Facebook. It comes with a high-quality stereo condenser 

microphone set and advanced DSP image-processing technology. The 

VideoTrack records to standard SD and SDHC cards, and it connects 

via USB to Macs or PCs. More info: alesis.com 

USB Blues 

The Yeti microphone from Blue has been sighted in the rapidly 

growing USB mic category. In addition to its otherworldly 

design, this addition to Blue’s new consumer line is THXcertified. 

The USB mic offers Blue’s premium condenser 

capsules in a proprietary triple-capsule array for highquality, 

versatile audio recording capability. 

More info: bluemic.com 

Prepare For Liftoff 

With a multicolor 64-button grid and dedicated scene launch buttons, 

Novation’s Launchpad is a compact, interactive controller made for 

triggering and manipulating clips in Ableton Live. It communicates 

bidirectionally with the software to give users real-time session feedback. 

The device is bus-powered from a single USB connection. 

MSRP: $199. More info: novationmusic.com

BAND & ORCHESTRA 

Hep Sax Straps 

Rico Reeds and Blue Note Records have entered 

into a licensing agreement in which Rico will 

produce saxophone straps featuring Blue Note 

session photography. Each sax strap features 

time-honored artwork from Blue Note’s classic 

recordings and album covers. Straps include 

True Blue, the 1960 classic featuring saxophonist 

Tina Brooks; Afro-Cuban, the 1955 recording by 

trumpeter Kenny Dorham that featured the Jazz 

Messengers ensemble including Hank Mobley 

on tenor sax and Cecil 

Payne on baritone sax; 

and Black Fire, the 1963 

Blue Note debut recording of 

pianist Andrew Hill featuring Joe 

Henderson on tenor sax. Each strap 

includes Rico’s unique curved hook and 

easy slide adjustor. Straps are available 

in two lengths, one for soprano/alto and 

one for tenor/bari. MSRP: $35. 

More info: ricoreeds.com 

Homegrown Brass 

The Andreas Eastman line of handcrafted 

brass and woodwind instruments is 

made in the United States to high-quality 

standards. The 800 series trumpets 

feature yellow or gold brass bells in 

standard or light weights with a 

lacquer or silver finish. 

More info: eastmanmusiccompany.com 

Brass Family 

Jupiter has added low brass, bass 

trombones and a lead trumpet to its 

XO series of professional horns. The 

1240L-T bass trombone features a 

.571-inch bore, open wrap design and 

an independent Dual Thayer rotor 

valve assembly. The 1242L bass trombone 

has a .562-inch bore, open 

wrap, offset dependent 

rotor and mechanicallink 

tapered rotary 

valves. The 1600I trumpet 

features a .453-inch 

bore, silver-plated yellow 

brass body and a 4.8-inch 

handcrafted B1 bell with 

heavy bead to provide additional 

mass and resonance. The 1284 CC 

tuba features a graduated .732–.787-inch 

bore, an 18-inch yellow brass bell 

and rose brass leadpipe. 

More info: jupitermusic.com 

Good Vibrations 

The JodyJazz Ring’s self-locking 

CNC-machined taper 

touches the saxophone reed 

Yamaha 

YAS-875EXW 

alto sax 

Rico/Blue 

Note sax 

straps 

Eastman 

800 series 

trumpet 

Jupiter XO 

series bass 

trombone 

JodyJazz Rings 

on three points only. It has no moving or added parts, 

increasing the efficiency of its vibration. Optimal wall 

thickness allows the most freedom for the reed, which 

increases the amount of harmonics present in the 

sound. MSRP: $69.95–$79.95. More info: jodyjazz.com 

Refined Sax Sound 

The Yamaha YAS-875EXW alto saxophone with white 

and gold lacquering features a smooth response along 

with a deep, refined sound. It has nimble action, quality 

projection and an authoritative tone. All EX saxophones 

have custom necks to enhance tonal resonance and give 

a quicker, more comfortable response. 

More info: yamaha.com 

Go For The Sound 

P. Mauriat’s PMT-700 professional B-flat trumpet combines 

the ease of a lightweight bell with the strength of a 

heavyweight mid-section. Its light finger buttons, 

recessed valve caps and heavyweight bottom 

caps surround stainless steel hand-lapped 

valves to provide stability. A lightened 4.8-inch 

yellow brass bell and gold brass leadpipe support 

the direction of the player’s sound. 

Coming soon is the PMT-655 trumpet, featuring 

a 5-inch bell and designed for a 

broad, open sound. 

More info: pmauriatmusic.com 

Upright Bass Pickup 

David Gage and Ned Steinberger have 

worked together to build a clip-on version 

of the Realist pickup for acoustic bass. 

Called the SoundClip, the pickup clamps 

easily on the bridge of any string bass and 

features an on-board volume knob so 

players can adjust output on the spot. 

More info: realistacoustic.com 

Synthetic Signature 

Légère Reeds has come out with Signature 

series synthetic reeds for tenor saxophone. 

Made of a polymer compound with a fine 

microtexture that mimics the properties of 

high-end moist cane, the reeds respond 

quickly and maintain their consistency 

over a long period of time. 

More info: legere.com 

Rubber-and-Metal Mouthpiece 

Bari Woodwind Supplies now offers a 

Hybrid saxophone mouthpiece that 

combines properties of metal and 

hard rubber for a comfortable feel 

and versatile sound. Suitable for 

jazz and studio players, the Hybrid 

provides excellent intonation 

and projection and is available 

in two finishes: hand-polished 

high-gloss and vintage matte. 

More info: bariwoodwind.com 


DRUMS & PERCUSSION 

Convertible Drum Set 

It looks, sounds and feels like an 

acoustic drum kit, but Pearl’s e-Pro 

Live is much more. Featuring the 

r.e.d. box drum module, the e-Pro 

can be converted into an electronic 

drum set with 100 high-definition 

sounds and kits, along with 

space for 100 user-created kits. 

And Pearl’s Tru-Trac electronic 

heads feature dual zones that 

reproduce the intricacies of playing 

an acoustic drum. Its e-Classic 

high-end electronic cymbals are 

made with real brass. 

Zildjian K 

More info: pearldrum.com 

Constantinople 

Bounce ride 

Global Percussion 

Remo’s new Global Frame Drums 

and Tambourines are manufactured 

using the company’s synthetic 

Skyndeep graphic film drumheads 

and Acousticon drum shell technologies. 

Supported by Remo artists, the 

new collection includes Irish Bodhráns, 

several Pandeiros, various sizes of tar 

frame drums, a riq, a tamburiq and a 

Persian daf drum. MSRP: $89–$259. 

More info: remo.com 

2 Tones In 1 

LP’s new percussion combo 

gives players an extra hand by 

delivering two tones in one 

instrument. A fusion of a tambourine 

and wood block sound, 

the Percusso can easily toggle 

between tones or be played simultaneously 

in perfect sync. The new instrument 

pulls off wood block and tambourine 

combinations with split-second 

precision. More info: lpmusic.com 

Sparkling Shell Pack 

Gretsch’s Catalina Club Jazz shell pack is now available 

with a copper sparkle finish. Reminiscent of 

champagne sparkle, copper sparkle offers a unique 

look with a vintage twist. The pack features 

mahogany shells with 30-degree bearing 

edges and natural interiors for a classic 

sound. Other features include 1.6 mm 

flanged hoops, a mini GTS tom suspension 

system, a Gretsch ball-socket 

single tom mount with 12.7 mm tom 

arm, wood bass drum hoops with 

matching inlays and coated single-ply 

Gretsch/Evans batter heads. A 14- by 

18-inch bass drum, 8- by 12-inch rack 

tom, 14- by 14-inch floor tom and 

5- by 14- inch snare are included. 

MSRP: $990. More info: gretschdrums.com 


Mapex 

Falcon 

pedal 

Remo Global 

Frame Drums 

Evans Inked 

By Evans 

Gretsch 

Catalina 

Club Jazz 

Shell Pack 

Graphic Details 

Evans’ “Inked by Evans” program gives 

drummers the power to customize their 

bass drumheads with color graphics. Players 

can go with the company’s existing 

graphics, including Alchemy Gothic, 

Lethal Threat, Al McWhite, Woodstock 

art and multiple gallery designs, or 

upload their own graphics and text. 

More info: daddario.com 

Tighten Up 

The Falcon drum pedal from 

Mapex is the company’s newest 

entry in the drum accessory market. The 

Falcon’s standout feature is its smaller footprint. 

Its easy-to-reach, resistance-free Talon clamp 

adjustment can be tightened with one hand 

from a seated position, making setup easy 

in tight spaces. More info: mapexdrums.com 

Responsive Crash 

The sound of the Vault Artisan Crash from 

Sabian has been enhanced through several 

subtle design changes to produce a richer, 

fuller and faster response. The cymbal features 

traditional high-density hand hammering and 

provides a dark, complex tone that can fit into 

most setups. More info: sabian.com 

Ride-Alongs 

The new Zildjian 22-inch K 

Constantinople thin ride provides 

a dark pitch and tons of 

wash. An additional series of 

over-hammered marks on top of 

the traditional K Constantinople hammering 

yields a slightly drier sound 

with excellent stick definition for marking 

time. Zildjian’s 20-inch K light flat 

ride is a thin-weight cymbal with 

extreme stick definition and a palatable 

level of wash. Zildjian also added the 22-inch 

K Constantinople Bounce ride—designed 

in conjunction with trapsman Kenny 

Washington—to its line of high-end 

jazz ride cymbals. 

More info: zildjian.com 

Shakeup & Shakedown 

The Toca Jingle-Shake 

combines a tambourine and 

shaker in one easy-to-hold 

package. Shake it up and down, 

and it sounds like a tambourine. 

Shake it from side to side, and 

it sounds like a shaker. The shaker 

container can be removed from the 

tambourine frame, enabling the two 

components to be played separately. 

More info: tocapercussion.com

PIANO/KEYBOARD 

More Nord 

The Nord Piano Library has been expanded with the addition of three 

uprights, one grand and two electric vintage pianos. The Black Upright 

is a Petrof 132 upright piano with hammers voiced for a soft tone. On 

the Romantic Upright XLR, touch and tone are harmonized perfectly 

from the powerful bass notes up to the sparkling treble register. The 

action and keyboard on the Queen Upright XLR are adjusted to ensure 

an ideal touch and the best possible transfer of power with a maximum 

degree of control. The Grand Lady XLR is a carefully voiced 

Steinway Model D that has been selected for its special tonal characteristics. 

The Bright Tines XL and Sparkle Top XL feature vintage electric 

piano sounds. 

Nord Piano Library 

sounds can be 

used in the company’sperfor- 

Nord Piano 

mance-oriented 

keyboards, including 

the Nord Stage, Nord Stage EX, Nord Electro 3 and the all-new 

Nord Piano. More info: nordkeyboards.com 

Tone & Projection 

All three pianos in Yamaha’s CF series—the 9-foot CFX full concert 

grand, 6-foot 3-inch CF4 and 7-foot CF6—offer expressiveness and 

singing legato tone combined with unprecedented power and tonal 

projection. The instruments 

were evalutated during topsecret 

meetings with artists 

in New York, Paris and 

Tokyo. More info: yamaha.com 

Beyond Natural 

Roland’s HP-Series 

SuperNatural pianos feature 

a new sound engine that 

unites the company’s V- 

Roland HP307 SuperNatural piano 

Piano technology and 88key 

stereo multisampling technology. This results in seamless sound 

transition from note to note across the keyboard, as well as decaying 

sounds that linger and fade naturally without looping. Plus, the natural 

touch of the PHA III (HP-307) and PHA II (HP-305 and HP-302) keyboards 

come from the use of hammer mechanisms that accurately 

reproduce the touch of an acoustic grand. More info: rolandus.com 

Sample Power 

Utilizing new sample Flash technology, the Kurzweil PC3K lets user 

samples remain intact after a power cycle, with zero load time upon 

powering back on. The PC3K can load .WAV files and Kurzweil .K files 

from the K2000, K2500 and K2600 keyboards. Players can now combine 

the PC3K’s Dynamic V.A.S.T. synthesis engine with the immense 

library of K series samples generated by users and developers for 

more than 15 years. More info: kurzweilmusicsystems.com 

Improved Piano Library 

Ivory II is the new custom engine for Synthogy’s line of virtual pianos, 

which now include expanded sample sets to provide performers with 

more expressive detail. New piano-related features have been added 

to the Ivory II engine, including sympathetic string resonance, half pedaling, 

lid position, pedal noise and tuning tables. Additional features 

like timbre shifting, parametric EQ and Synth Layer control offer sound 

sculpting capabilities for custom piano programming. More info: ilio.com

GUITARS 

Polyphonic Tuner 

TC Electronic’s PolyTune polyphonic 

guitar tuner shows users 

which strings are out of tune 

with a single strum. The unit 

features a chromatic tuner 

that boasts plus or minus 0.5 

cent accuracy. And MonoPoly, 

a new TC technology, recognizes 

whether the guitarist has played 

one or more strings and switches 

between the polyphonic and chromatic 

tuner on the fly. The bright 

LED display with ambient light sensor 

offers visibility in any lighting 

situation. MSRP: $149. 

More info: tcelectronic.com 

Fender 50th 

Anniversary 

Body-Builders 

Jazz Bass 

Taylor is giving consumers 

the power to 

customize SolidBody 

guitars. All Classic, 

Standard and Custom 

SolidBodys can be built 

with your choice of pickup 

configurations and colors. 

You also have the option 

of adding a Taylordesigned 

tremolo. 

Each SolidBody features 

a five-way pickup 

switch and Taylor’s T- 

Lock single-bolt neck. 

MSRP: Classic starts at 

$1,748; Standard starts at 

$2,398; Custom starts at $3,098. 

More info: taylorguitars.com 

French Guitar Range 

Lâg Guitars, a France-based company, 

showed Tramontane acoustic and 

acoustic-electric models. The entry-level 

Stage Range redefine bang-for-your-buck 

with their smooth playability and sound. 

The higher-end Master Range guitars are 

appointed with fine details and select 

woods. All instruments feature a detailed 

rosette design with the Occitan cross. 

MSRP: $280–$2,100. More info: lagguitars.co.uk 

Bass-ic Ukulele 

Riding the growing ukulele craze, the Kala 

U-Bass produces a rich sound that is similar 

to an upright bass but in a compact 

size that’s fun and easy to play. It’s 20 

inches long and features polyurethane 

strings and 16 frets. Made to be amplified, 

the U-Bass is also a suitable addition to 

any unplugged jam session. 

More info: kalaukulele.com 


Taylor 

customizable 

SolidBody 

guitars 

Ampeg Heritage 

Custom Voicings 

Artioli Designs’ Voice capo lets guitarists 

change the open voicing of 

their instruments without retuning. 

It fits over the first four frets of a guitar, 

letting you create custom chords 

while freeing your fingering hand to 

accentuate over the chords. Voice 

fits all standard sized acoustic guitar 

necks and all guitar necks between 

1.65 and 1.8 inches. 

More info: voicecapo.com 

Gearhouse 

IK Multimedia’s Amplitube 3 is a virtual 

gear warehouse for guitarists. It 

features models from both vintage 

collections and modern workhorses, 

including 51 stomp boxes and 

effects; 31 amplifier, pre-amp and 

power sections; 46 speaker cabinet 

models; 15 stage and studio mics; 

and 17 post-amp rack effects. 

AmpliTube 3’s open architecture also 

lets users add more packages as 

needed, including AmpliTube Fender. 

Plus, special attention has been put into 

reproducing a player’s dynamics and feel. 

More info: ikmultimedia.com 

Jazz Bass at 50 

Fender’s 50th Anniversary Jazz Bass 

brings design elements from several 

important periods in the model’s history 

together in one instrument. In addition to the 

slim neck, offset waist and midrange growl 

the Jazz Bass is known for, the anniversary 

model includes a ’60s-era nitrocellulose finish 

in Candy Apple Red, headstock logo, 

chrome pickup/bridge cover, “C” neck shape 

and white Pearloid block fingerboard inlays. 

It also features a ’70s-era bridge pickup 

placement and bass-side thumb rest, as well 

as modern tuning machines, a highmass 

vintage-style bridge and 

Posiflex neck support rods. 

More info: fender.com 

Ultimate Gig Axe 

The Fender Acoustasonic Tele is the 

ultimate gigging guitar for players 

who need an acoustic and electric 

in one package. Featuring a 

chambered body and rosewood 

bridge, the Acoustasonic Tele 

uses Fishman’s Aura technology 

to give it four different, convincing 

acoustic guitar sounds. 

Switch to the Twisted Tele neck 

pickup, and you get a punchy electric. 

More info: fender.com

Voice Capo 

American Heritage 

Responding to consumer demand, 

Ampeg designed and assembled its 

new Heritage series heads and cabinets 

in the United States. The line, which 

includes the Heritage SVT-CL, SVT-810E and 

SVT-410HLF, delivers premium upgrades, 

including high-end tubes and custom U.S.-made drivers. 

The enclosures are built using 15 mm plywood. MSRP: 

$1,249.99–$3,299.99. More info: ampeg.com 

American English 

A marriage of the Sweet 16 Combo and the Dallas Amp in a 30-watt 

version, the PRS 30 Combo offers an English sound with an 

American twist. The combo features a quartet of EL84 tubes with a 

control layout similar to PRS’s Dallas model. Other features include 

reverb, bright switch and a special master volume that is dialed out 

of the circuit as the amp’s volume approaches the max setting. 

More info: prsguitars.com DB 

PRS 30 Combos 

Reporting by Aaron Cohen, Ed Enright, Jenny Domine, Katie Kailus and Zach Phillips. 


Woodshed 

Invention, Design, 

Technique In 2 Bars 

Pianist Danny Grissett’s beautiful tone, expressive 

lyricism and exquisite time seem to stem 

from a musicianship that is made up of equal 

parts intellect and intuition (see “Players,” page 

22). I find gems of inventiveness and design at 

all levels of his playing, and a few bars of a 

Grissett solo can keep a music analyst like me 

occupied for a long time. 

Accordingly, this article’s analysis will look 

at but two measures of a passage that begins at 

the 4 minute, 56 second point on Grissett’s 

“Waltz For Billy” (hear the passage at thinkingmusic.ca/grissett, 

and the tune itself at 

tinyurl.com/grissett). Although the passage 

sounds utterly effortless and blows by in an 

instant, it is brimming with invention, design 

and technique. Figure 1a illustrates it, as performed 

by Grissett (piano), Vicente Archer 

(bass) and Kendrick Scott (drums, omitted from 

this transcription). 

The melody is a highly elaborated threestage 

sequence in which arpeggiated triads, 

each a major third above the other, form the 

basis of the design. Figure 1b shows how it 

appears when stripped of all rhythmic and 

melodic embellishment: The melody’s threestage, 

sequential structure is clearly visible, as 

are the arpeggiated triads of which it consists: 

A♭m, Cm and E (F♭). Grissett elegantly integrates 

these as chord extensions within the 

IV–II–V (A♭m/add2–Fm11–B♭7♭9♭5) progression. 

We see that while the melody moves in 

ascending major thirds, the harmony does not, 

making this a purely melodic sequence. 

We also see that the sequential stages naturally 

articulate the melody in groups of two 

beats each, rather than the accompaniment’s 

three-beat meter. Grissett has placed his 

sequence within a polymetric framework: The 

two-bar melodic phrase is really one bar (of 

3/2) that sounds against the accompaniment’s 

3/4 (fig. 1c). This juxtaposition creates an 

entirely new and rich musical dimension; it 

imparts a special magic to the solo, while creating 

new relationships on all levels. 

Meanwhile, Archer’s bass and Grissett’s 

chord voicings (second bar) employ rhythms 

that, while clearly in 3/4, are also suggestive of 

yet another polymeter: 6/8 against 3/4. While 

their swing eighths don’t align perfectly with 

6/8, their rhythms are close enough to suggest it 

(fig. 2a). While 3/4 and 6/8 have a three-againsttwo 

relationship (3/4’s three beats to 6/8’s two), 

6/8 creates a more intricate three-against-four 

relationship with the melody’s 3/2 (fig. 2b). The 

resulting triple polymeter is very rich. 

This sophisticated design is where Grissett 


Figure 1 

Figure 2 

begins. Let’s now look at the techniques he 

uses to develop his basic melodic content, elevating 

it from the commonplace to the exquisite 

(fig. 3): 

1) Grissett pulls the entire first stage of his 

sequence back by a third of a beat so that it 

begins just before the downbeat. But rather 

than play its first note as a pick-up, he articu- 

MASTER CLASS 

by Michael Leibson 

lates the figure as though it had never been 

shifted. The result is not a redefining of each 

note’s role (something that would have weakened 

his melodic sequence), but rather the creation 

of a metric conflict that generates 

momentum, engages our attention and provides 

the rhythmic geometry necessary for the phrase 

ending that Grissett has in mind.

Figure 3 

2) Grissett gives this note (E♭) double the 

duration it usually receives within the motive. 

This shifts everything forward by a third of a 

beat, and thus cancels the phase shift. The 

effect is brilliant: First, it places the subsequent 

note (G, the first note of “stage 2”) 

squarely on the beat, which—being beat two 

of the melody’s 3/2—provides enough of that 

metric design to allow its perception. Second, 

the return-to-phase itself creates an asymmetry 

that, like a sudden video edit, accelerates 

our forward movement. Last, the lengthened 

E♭ has more rhythmic weight, which reveals 

that it is also the last note of a hidden quarternote 

triplet rhythm (fig. 2c). The quarter-note 

triplet drives us powerfully forward to the 

beginning of stage 2; in fact, it acts as the 

pickup to stage 2. 

3) Grissett heightens the acceleration to 

phrase climax by using a 3/4–6/8 hemiola to 

move to shorter beats and faster time values. 

4) He adds two notes to the pickup, which 

lengthens stage 2 by 25 percent, and makes us 

wait for that climax, at C♭—the highest pitch of 

the phrase, and the beginning of stage 3. 

5) He applies diminution to the motive and 

closes the cadence with additional notes. 

Through these “local” techniques—phase 

shift, quarter-note triplets and 3/4–6/8 hemiola—Grissett 

really performs a series of rapidly 

changing time signatures and tempi, and he 

does it fluidly, with coherence and rhythmic 

meaning. Musical time is perhaps jazz’s most 

esoteric dimension, and Grissett has clearly 

mastered it. 

This passage contains as much creative 

invention in terms of pitch as it does of time — 

a topic that we’ll have to leave for another 

Michael Leibson 

occasion. However, as I’m a music teacher, I’ll 

end this Woodshed session with both a hint and 

an assignment: Grissett employs a particular 

scale-type in a most sophisticated way—can 

you spot it? (Email your discoveries to 

michael@thinkingmusic.ca.) DB 

Michael Leibson is a composer, music analyst 

and music educator who specializes in jazz and 

classical harmony. For more analyses (including 

more on Grissett), bio and information on studying 

with Leibson, please visit thinkingmusic.ca 

and thinkingmusic.ca/students. 



Woodshed 

The year 1964 was significant in jazz history, as 

John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, Art Blakey 

and the Jazz Messengers’ Free For All and Eric 

Dolphy’s Out To Lunch—each a milestone 

achievement—were all recorded. It was also the 

year that Miles Davis completed the formation 

of what was to be known as 

his classic 1960s quintet by 

adding saxophonist Wayne 

Shorter. 

No mere newcomer to 

the jazz scene, Shorter had 

just finished playing with 

Blakey’s group and had 

made important recordings 

as a leader on Blue Note. 

While his playing style at 

the time was often aggressive 

and technical, Shorter 

was (and still is) a master of 

utilizing musical space. 

This less-is-more approach 

(often associated with 

Davis) is vital to every jazz 

musician, and developing it 

is a never-ending project. 

The trick is not simply 

playing fewer notes, but 

knowing which notes to 

play and not to play. 

Davis’ first studio album 

with this group, E.S.P., was 

recorded in January 1965. 

On the album’s uptempo 

title track, Shorter takes two 

choruses and uses a variety 

of techniques ranging from 

the conventional to the 

more sophisticated. It 

should be noted that the letter markings that 

occur every eight measures are to help the reader 

and are not meant as a reflection of the song’s 

form. At the beginning of the solo, Shorter uses 

A# Aeolian mode, an unusual choice for an 

F#7alt chord because it emphasizes an E# when 

the chord contains an E-natural. Given the fast 

tempo and rhythm of this phrase, though, the E# 

is heard for only a fraction of a second, minimizing 

the harmonic clash. When the F#7alt chord 

occurs later in the chorus, Shorter uses either the 

chromatic or the whole-tone scale. 

In the second chorus (which starts at letter 

“E”), Shorter uses some conventional approaches. 

For instance, over the Em9 four measures 

before letter “G,” he plays a descending scalar 

pattern starting on the fifth of the chord. Later he 

uses motivic development, first in the second bar 

after letter “G” and then in the first few measures 

after letter “H.” 

What is important to take into consideration 

SOLO 

by Matt Shevitz 

Wayne Shorter’s Less-Is-More Solo On ‘E.S.P.’ 

for the entire solo is not just the level of sophistication 

of Shorter’s harmonic choices, but how 

he plays them. In the second and third measures 

after letter “E,” Shorter’s harmonic choice is not 

very sophisticated, but it is very effective at 

emphasizing the importance of phrasing and the 

Wayne Shorter 

value of a less-is-more approach. There are 

phrases that show Shorter’s harmonic depths, 

but what makes this solo worthy of study is how 

he executes each idea in a manner that sounds 

fresh and new. 

Too often, jazz education focuses on harmony, 

leading the student to try to avoid more basic 

harmonic approaches. While an in-depth knowledge 

of harmony is important to improvisation, 

musicians need to be open to playing melodies 

regardless of how advanced the harmonic 

approach may be. To paraphrase the old adage: 

it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. DB 

Matt Shevitz is a saxophonist and educator 

based in Chicago. He teaches at Harold 

Washington College, where he is also the Music 

Program Coordinator. Shevitz completed his doctoral 

degree in May 2009 at the University of 

Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. For more information 

on Matt go to mattshevitz.com. 

FRANCIS WOLFF/MOSAIC IMAGES



Jazz On Campus 

Eastman 

School 

Establishes 

Niewood 

Scholarship 

After saxophonist Gerry 

Niewood died in an airplane 

crash last winter, his wife, 

Gurly, began to look for ways 

to honor his memory. 

She began consultations 

with Bob Sneider, who played 

guitar alongside Niewood in 

Chuck Mangione’s Band from 

1994 to 1997 and who is now 

the instructor of jazz guitar at 

Eastman School of Music in 

Rochester, N.Y., and chair of 

the Eastman community 

music school jazz studies 

department. Both Gurly and 

Gerry Niewood graduated from the school. An 

initial wave of generosity from the Glen Ridge 

Congregational Church in New Jersey led Gurly 

Niewood and Sneider to establish a scholarship 

fund in Niewood’s memory at Eastman. Gurly 

explained that scholarship money had enabled 

Niewood as well as his two children to attend 

college, and that now the family “had a chance 

to create a scholarship where a young musician 

can start down the path to realize their own 

dreams,” she said. 

After discussions with Eastman’s development 

office and the jazz studies department, the 

Gerry Niewood Memorial Scholarship fund was 

established to provide support for a deserving 

undergraduate student pursuing a major in jazz 

studies and performance at the Eastman School 

of Music. With a goal of raising $50,000 as an 

endowment, the jazz studies department began 

looking for ways to kick-start the campaign. 

They hit upon the idea of presenting a concert 

of Niewood’s music, arranged by his colleagues 

for the Eastman Jazz Ensemble and the 

Eastman New Jazz Ensemble. Both ensembles 

had a shared concert date already on the books 

(Oct. 14) and turned it over to the scholarshipraising 

efforts. The date also coincided with the 

first week of celebrations in the newly 

redesigned and acoustically refined Eastman 

Theatre. 

More than $40,500 was raised at the concert. 

Eastman music dean Douglas Lowry said the 

scholarship would ensure that “generations of 

promising jazz musicians will have the same 

opportunity Gerry had.” 

“I’m hoping this is the seed that will plant 

things with people close to Gerry,” said jazz 

Adam Niewood (left), Kay Niewood and Gurly Niewood 

department chair and pianist Harold Danko. 

“We’re just starting to see what we can do 

with it.” 

The memorial concert idea was expanded to 

include an afternoon panel discussion where 

many of Niewood’s school friends and professional 

associates reminisced about his contribution 

to the establishment of the Eastman jazz 

program. Panelists included Chuck Mangione, 

Niewood’s childhood friend from Rochester and 

director of the first official Eastman Jazz Big 

Band; Gap Mangione, a mainstay of the 

Rochester jazz scene; saxophonists Rick Lawn 

and Pat LaBarbera; and trumpeter Lew Soloff 

and Sneider. Niewood was the jazz ensemble’s 

first lead alto saxophonist as well as an active 

participant in numerous unofficial on-campus 

sessions that helped jazz gain a foothold in the 

traditional conservatory environment. The participants 

acknowledged Niewood’s work ethic 

and musical marksmanship. 

“I never heard him play a ‘bad’ note, let 

alone a wrong note,” Danko said. 

The concert began with a backdrop of slide 

projections of Niewood playing sax and alto 

flute or mugging for the camera; it closed with 

an empty stage and a recording of Niewood 

playing flute and soprano sax on his tunes 

“Essence” and “Prelude To A Vision.” 

The program featured original Niewood 

compositions that had never been played in public. 

Arranger Rich DeRosa selected 10 songs 

that formed the basis of a suite titled, “Treasures 

From The Attic”—a reference to his private 

space at his home in New Jersey, where he 

would often practice for 14 hours straight. 

—Peter Rothbart 

GERRY SZYMANSKI

School Notes 

George Colligan 

Colligan’s Canada: Pianist George Colligan 

has joined the faculty of the University of 

Manitoba in Winnipeg. Details: umanitoba.ca 

Percussive Anniversary: The 20th annual 

Day of Percussion at Concordia College in 

Moorhead, Minn., will be held on April 17. 

Along with the school’s jazz ensemble 

and marimba choir, guests will include 

xylophone player Bob Becker. 

Details: concordiacollege.edu 

Texas Tribute: The Booker T. Washington 

High School for the Performing and Visual 

Arts’ jazz combo has released Tribute, a 

memorial album for student James Kings 

Jr., who was killed in 2008. Along with the 

student band (under Bart Marantz’s direction), 

Carl Allen and Jeff “Tain” Watts 

make guest appearances. 

Details: btwhsptsa.org/jazz.htm 

Blues Talk: Dominican University in Oak 

Park, Ill., has opened registration for its 

Blues and the Spirit symposium, which 

will be held on June 9 and 10 to coincide 

with the centennial of Howlin’ Wolf’s birth. 

Panelists will also speak about the connections 

among American musical roots. 

Details: dom.edu/blues 

Schneider Guests: Maria Schneider will 

join William Paterson University’s jazz 

orchestra to serve as guest conductor for 

its April 23 concert at Shea Center. Her 

longtime collaborator and Paterson faculty 

member, saxophonist Rich Perry, will also 

perform. Schneider will also premiere a 

new work with the Kronos Quartet at 

Duke University on April 10. 

Details: wpunj.edu; dukeu.edu 

Howard Sings: The Howard University jazz 

choir, Afro Blue (under Connaitre Miller’s 

direction), appears on violinist John Blake 

Jr.’s new disc, Motherless Child (ARC). 

Details: johnblakejr.com 


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Lisa Hilton Music 54 lisahiltonmusic.com 

Litchfield Performing Arts 65 litchfieldjazzfest.com 

Loveland Records 46 jakobbro.com 

Mack Avenue Records 57 mackavenue.com 

Montreal International Jazz Festival 55 montrealjazzfest.com 

Motéma Records 10,11 motema.com 

Music Dispatch 29 musicdispatch.com 

Music Minus One/Pocket Songs 16-17 musicminusone.com 

New School 8 newschool.edu/jazz3 

Oleg Products 58 olegproducts.com 

P.Mauriat Saxophones 9 pmauriatmusic.com 

Plus Loin Music 51 plusloin.net 

Rico 7 ricoreeds.com 

Sabian 15 sabian.com 

Sam Ash 76 samash.com 

Samson 83 soundmakesthemovie.com 

Schilke Music Products 25 schilkemusic.com 

Sonaré Winds 79 sonarewinds.com 

Steve Hobbs 39 stevehobbs.com 

Sunnyside Records 53 sunnysiderecords.com 

Telluride Jazz Celebration 59 telluridejazz.com 

Theo Wanne 78 theowanne.com 

Tri-C Jazz Festival 12 tricjazzfest.com 

Vandoren 3 vandojazzusa.com 

YoungArts 61 youngarts.org 


Blindfold Test 

With The Si O Si Quartet and Taking The Soul For A Walk (Dafnison), 

Dafnis Prieto has reinforced his stature as one of the superior drummercomposers 

of his generation and as an innovator in late-’90s post-timba 

Cuban jazz. This is his first Blindfold Test. 

E.J. Strickland 

“Asante (For The Tribes Of Ghana)” (from In This Day, StrickMusik, 2009) 

Strickland, drums; Marcus Strickland, tenor saxophone; Jaleel Shaw, alto 

saxophone; Luis Perdomo, piano; Hans Glawischnig, bass. 

It’s nice to hear a 6/8 pattern really light. Luis Perdomo? It is Luis, but not 

his record? David Sánchez? Miguel Zenón? Then I can’t recognize it. The 

drumming and percussion support the tune, which is a vamp, kind of tender. 

I like it, but it sounds like an excuse to improvise—there’s a specific 

idea of what the horns do against the pattern, but no real “B” section or 

sophisticated compositional elements. And there’s a lot of improvising, 

nice trading by the horns. 3 1 /2 stars. 

Yaron Herman 

“Isobel” (from Muse, Sunnyside, 2009) Herman, piano; Matt Brewer, bass; 

Gerald Cleaver, drums. 

Very groovy, the drummer and the bassist, who has a great sound. Is it 

Jason Moran on piano? Jean-Michel Pilc? Whoever it is, the pianist is 

very together: It’s a very rhythmic line, and the trio is locked in. The bass 

drum is tuned with the skin loose. I can’t think of anyone who plays this 

style that [uses] this kind of bass drum. The drummer sounded great, very 

supportive of the tune. 4 stars. 

Arturo Stable 

“Call” (from Call, Origen, 2009) Stable, percussion; Francisco Mela, drums; Javier 

Vercher, tenor saxophone; Aruán Ortiz, piano; Edward Perez, bass. 

It’s a blues form on top of a bata rhythm. It sounds like a Coltrane tune, 

with a 7/4 pattern on top of the 6/8 bass line. I like the tension of contradiction 

that comes from this loose sound with the drummer on top of the 

batas, and free adventures in the soloing—but not in the tune—over the 

steady rhythm. David Sánchez comes to mind, but it doesn’t sound like 

David. 3 1 /2 stars. 

Dave Douglas 

“Bowie” (from Spirit Moves, Greenleaf, 2009) Douglas, trumpet; Luis Bonilla, 

trombone; Vincent Chancey, French horn; Marcus Rojas, tuba; Nasheet 

Waits, drums. 

That’s Dave Douglas’ brass and drumset thing. So Nasheet is playing 

drums. Nasheet always looks for polyrhythmic possibilities, playing two 

sounds simultaneously, like the bass drum and the snare drum. It’s very 

compositional. Everything was arranged until the trombone solo comes in 

over the swing. The experimental thing with the tuba reminds me of working 

with Henry Threadgill. It sounds very European, connected to the 

music you see in the parks in Europe, like open parade music. 4 stars. 

The Monterey Quartet 

“Treachery” (from The Monterey Quartet: Live At The 2007 Monterey Jazz 

Festival, Concord, 2009) Eric Harland, drums; Dave Holland, bass; Gonzalo 

Rubalcaba, piano; Chris Potter, tenor saxophone. 

That’s Chris Potter, and it’s the band with Dave Holland, Gonzalo and 

Eric Harland. Eric is one of my favorite young drummers. I like how he 

uses different textures and techniques to interact with what is happening 

in the moment. He can play very open or very straight. I like Gonzalo 

here, but lately I always want more from him, more digging in on an 

emotional level. Chris Potter is expressing himself here, putting it out. 

Obviously, Gonzalo plays great piano, but lately I think his playing deals 

more with conceptualized things and ideas. I miss the old Gonzalo sometimes. 

4 1 /2 stars. 


Dafnis 

Prieto 

By Ted Panken 

Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez 

“Free Latin” (from Italuba, Pimienta, 2004) Hernandez, drums, composer; Ivan 

Bridon Napoles, keyboards; Daniel Martinez Izquierdo, bass; Amik Guerra, trumpet. 

El Negro. He uses big drums, and the drum sounds big! Sounds like a 

Cuban band. The tune itself reminds me of the sound of jazz in Cuba in 

the late ’80s, an influence from Chick Corea, Gonzalo [Rubalcaba]’s thing 

of using the keyboards, having the same pulse but incorporating different 

things with the bass and the drums in different places than the melody line, 

and sometimes joining them together. 4 stars. 

John Escreet 

“Somewhere Between Dreaming And Sleeping” (from Consequences, Posi-Tone, 

2008) Escreet, piano; David Binney, alto saxophone; Ambrose Akinmusire, 

trumpet; Matt Brewer, bass; Tyshawn Sorey, drums. 

I love the drummer. Very sensitive, very swinging. Sounds like Jeff 

“Tain” Watts. It’s not? This drummer has that powerful, aggressive sound 

like Tain. I liked how the piece unfolded, the different sections, and the 

surprise factor. The beginning reminded me of Muhal Richard Abrams. I 

don’t know if the drummer is Tyshawn or Marcus Gilmore, but I think it’s 

one of them. They are very different, but certain music makes you feel 

more aggressive, and then it becomes confusing to identify who it is by the 

sound. It’s Tyshawn? 4 1 /2 stars. 

Vijay Iyer 

“Smoke Stack” (from Historicity, ACT, 2009) Iyer, piano; Stephan Crump, bass; 

Marcus Gilmore, drums. 

Very Monk-influenced playing. The three musicians work beautifully 

together. It’s hard to tell whether it’s Vijay or Jason Moran—they sometimes 

occupy a mutual place. But I think the drummer is Marcus Gilmore, 

which means it’s Vijay’s record. The tune is very involved, and the drummer 

really has to be on top of it to make it happen—Marcus is very supportive. 

I really like his drumming, and I liked the piece. 4 stars. DB 

The “Blindfold Test” is a listening test that challenges the featured artist to discuss and identify 

the music and musicians who performed on selected recordings. The artist is then asked 

to rate each tune using a 5-star system. No information is given to the artist prior to the test. 

JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONTROWPHOTOS

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