Tag Archives: Charles Mingus

Jazz thrives in Milwaukee’s “music alley” a.k.a. Center Street

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Baritone saxophonist Anders Svanoe

ASTRO (Anders Svanoe’s Teleporting Rhythmic Orchestra), Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center St., 7 p.m. tonight, May 17, ($10)

The Ethan Philion Quartet, 8-10:30 p.m., May 24, Bar Centro,  ($10)

The Tlalok Rodriguez Quartet. Bar Centro, 8-10:30 p.m. , May 25 (free)

Donna Woodall, Bar Centro, 8-10:30 p.m., May 30

The Anthony Deutsch Trio with Juli Wood, 8-10:30 p.m., Bar Centro, May 31 ($25)

“Since the 1980s, Riverwest has moved like the river it borders—a place of restless culture and commingling social currents.”

That’s how I described my neighborhood for a Shepherd Express survey of distinctive Milwaukee neighborhoods in 2022. Nothing epitomizes that vitality more than E. Center Street, perhaps the commercial heart of Riverwest and pretty close to the geographic center of Milwaukee.

The next few weeks will demonstrate the jazz side of Milwaukee’s “Music Alley.” Center Street boasts at least six music venues, active to varying degrees.

There are comparable weeks of activity at any given time, but I decided that attention must be paid as “Up Jumped Spring,” as jazz trumpeter Freddie Hubbard might’ve put it. Such artistic buoyancy is important because, after all, “Spring can really hang you up the most,” as another memorable jazz standard puts it.

The space with by far the longest jazz-performance pedigree is The Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, 926 E. Center, located just one block west of the beginning of Center Street, which is North Humboldt Blvd.

It’s storied history is primarily “centered” on its first incarnation as the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, which ran from 1978 to 1984, as a bastion of both national and local talent that a Milwaukee venue the size of an intimate nightclub has rarely equaled.

The venue’s new incarnation, the JGCA has endured financial ups and downs as did its namesake and has survived in recent years largely thanks to being a non-profit and its well-marketed art exhibits. But tomorrow night will exemplify the type of cutting-edge jazz and improv-oriented music the center now exemplifies.

A relatively new Madison-based ensemble called ASTRO will perform Friday, May 17 in support of their new album Eclipse, the ensemble is conceptually and somewhat nominally inspired by avant-bandleader and musical visionary Sun Ra and his Myth Science Arkestra, and is led by baritone saxophonist and composer Anders Svanoe (the band’s name is an acronym for Anders Svanoe’s Teleporting Rhythmic Orchestra, which soars to the spirit of the outrageously and blissfully transcendent Sun Ra, whose band was always ably ballasted by powerful if pliant and fleet baritone saxophonists, including Pat Patrick and Danny Thompson for many years.

Eclipse is subtitled State of the Baritone, Volume 6, a concept nominally and somewhat aesthetically derived from the late saxophone giant Joe Henderson’s acclaimed two-volume live recordings State of the Tenor. However, those were magisterial and somewhat summative statements from a restlessly creative artist nearing his autumnal years. Svanoe, by contrast is a substantially younger musician, though clearly in his prime. And he’s absolutely dedicated to advancing the artistry and visibility of his primary axe.

Thus, Svanoe has now produced the sixth volume of albums that strive to define the aesthetics of the still underexposed and appreciated baritone saxophone for the present and future. He does so with all the authority of bop and post-bop masters like Pepper Adams, Nick Brignola, Gary Smulyan, and James Carter, and pathfinders like Ra’s bari travelers, Roscoe Mitchell (with whom he still performs), and fusion pioneer John Surman.

Eclipse opens fearlessly and auspiciously with “Klokka Er Fem,” a brief, flat-out free-jazz kaleidoscope, followed by the funky and propulsive “Whistle Stop,” evoking a bustling train loaded with musicians, like what you’d imagine a traveling swing orchestra might sound like jamming on the rails while on a cross-country concert tour of venues both grungy and glorified. Geoff Brady’s vibes riffing give this driving urgency, while Svanoe’s baritone lends it the sort of hard-driving swiftness that makes such time fly by.

Then Svanoe’s honors another truly historic Madison jazz musician who recently passed away, bassist Richard Davis. The small ensemble blending angular cubism and spacious pointillism with Bobby Hutcherson-esque vibes evokes two classic mid- ’60s modern jazz masterpieces, Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! and Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure. and Svanoe hardly eases up on meaty free full ensemble interludes. Bassist Davis played on both of these ever-engaging and challenging Blue Note albums, and always proved supportive yet as artful and provocative as any of his co-players.

“Long Road” seems to gaze down to the horizon with an eloquently anthemic theme and highly musical horn riffing keyed by Svanoe’s improvised through-playing and a piquant guitar solo by Louka Patenaude. It lights the way with a reflectively lyrical theme, a piece that’s an album highlight. “Images” is free-playing again and seems to honor saxophonist Albert Ayler, who often used metaphysical beings in his titles, with big heart-bursting tenor sax playing from Pawan Benjamin. The players then seem to wander through the sonic haze, searching for, or perhaps embodying, ghosts of a genuinely spooky sort.

This leads to “Ghosts,” another sumptuous and regally outward-bound theme, promenading through fulsome whole notes, al a Sun Ra at his most magisterial. The processional closing harmonies are astringent yet spacious, almost hallowed.

The album ends, in utter irreverence, with a rock ‘n’ roll riff groove called “Memories” and Svanoe quickly drives it into a burn-out-the gears heat. Trumpeter Jon Ailabouni almost evokes a crazed-elephant trombone bleating in comic grotesquery, as does tenor sax player Benjamin. Guitarist Patenaude adds saber-slashes of crunching power chords, before the sax-heavy front line band brings it home breathlessly.

This should be great stuff live even if the Milwaukee band will be smaller than the album’s medium-sized big band.

Chicago bassist Ethan Philion (background) will lead a quartet including trumpeter Russ Johnson (foreground) next Friday at Bar Centro.

A week from Friday on May 24th, Center Street other leading jazz venue, Bar Centro,, now the area’s premiere place for straight-ahead modern jazz, will present The Ethan Philion Quartet. His name may still not ring bells with many Milwaukee area jazz fans, even if I’ve done my modest part to hop Quasimodo-like onto those resounding ropes.

I was deeply impressed by the Chicago-area bassist-bandleader’s dedication album to a great musical hero. And, for sure, it had been so long since I’d heard great new music in the letter and spirit of mighty Charles Mingus — that I did feel some of Quasimodo’s astonished gratification, when he says of Esmerelda, “She gave me water!”

In fact, I was so struck that I chose Philion’s Meditations on Mingus as the best album of the year in the NPR jazz critics poll bthat year, which I can’t say much more for, especially for a musician I hadn’t heard of before. Here’s my review: https://kevernacular.com/?p=14938

Meditations was recorded with a ten-piece band. Centro will present The Ethan Philion Quartet, featuring Greg Ward on alto saxophone, Russ Johnson on trumpet), and Dana Hall on drums. Their debut album, Gnosis, was released on October 6th on Sunnyside Records and drew praise from DownBeat Magazine, Chicago Jazz Magazine, JAZZIZ and more. Critic Larry Applebaum praised the ensemble’s “deep listening and open-ended solos” in his four-star review of Gnosis in DownBeat.

This should be a heavyweight group that floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. For my money, Chicagoan Ward and Milwaukeean Johnson are currently the best soloists on their respective instruments in the upper Midwest, yes, alto sax and trumpet. As for Philion the player, he was the winner of the 2019 International Society of Bassists Jazz Competition.

If Philion is still mining Mingus, the instrumentation suggests one of the bassist’s greatest small bands, with Eric Dolphy on alto sax and Ted Curson on trumpet, renowned for the 1960 Candid label album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus.

The ten-spot cover charge might be a steal.

Philion also leads an acoustic trio featuring arrangements of jazz standards in the Nat King Cole Trio style.

*****

Bar Centro will present Tlalok Rodriguez Quartet on Saturday May 25. The bassist-bandleader is a bilingual singer / songwriter and multi-instrumentalist based in Milwaukee. I don’t know him but Centro explains “Originally a Chicago native, he comes from a long line of musicians dating back to his great-grandfather who was a composer from Vicente Guerreo, Mexico.  A century later he keeps the family tradition alive through boleros, bossa novas, and vibrant performances channeling the passion of his ancestors.”

Thursday May 30 Centro will feature perhaps Milwaukee’s leading female jazz singer, Donna Woodall, who probably needs less introduction than any live performer in this column. She won the 2023 WAMI for best female vocalist. Period.

Pianist-vocalist Anthony Deutsch

Then on the following Friday May 31st, The Anthony Deutsch Trio with saxophonist-vocalist Juli Wood will play Bar Centro. Deutsch, now based in Viroqua in the Driftless region in Western Wisconsin,  developed in Milwaukee as a sophisticated jazz pianist who also has a powerful streak of nature-loving folk artist in him, in his original songwriting and singing, in the the guise of Father Sky. So expect some sort of vocals from him, but here probably jazzier than folkier. Wood is a versatile and popular performer best known for her long association with singer-bandleader Paul Cebar.

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Zev Feldman: “The Jazz Detective” is haunted by the greatest ghosts of the music

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Zev Feldman’s reputation in the jazz world has spread to where he is a consulting producer for the legendary Blue Note label. Here he is with Blue Note president Don Was (left) in the label’s tape archives. All photos courtesy of Zev Feldman

. The name Monk for decades meant jazz giant Thelonious Monk. Then a Emmy-winning TV detective named Monk became the star of a popular series called Monk, claiming new first association for the name in popular culture.

And now, along comes Zev Feldman, to take the detective role back from the TV guy, and for the sake of jazz. So now Feldman is known as “The Jazz Detective.” Detective Monk’s mystical raised hands might have a counterpart in Feldman’s internal musical dowsing rod, sensing the jazz dead, who gravely whisper, “Over here lies my best undiscovered work.”

Hearing such spectral vibes over and over, the researcher-record producer has become one of the most important non-jazz musicians in the art form, responsible for an astonishing bounty of recordings that are helping reshape the legacy of jazz history.

And his musical roots are deep, if not pure, Milwaukee.

The GRAMMY-nominated independent record producer, and the Co-President of Resonance Records, is now also a consulting producer of archival and historical recordings for Blue Note Records, the quintessential jazz label. He’s been dubbed “the Indiana Jones of Jazz” in Stereophile magazine and is widely known as the “Jazz Detective.” Over the last 25 years, he has worked for PolyGram, Universal Music Group, Rhino/Warner Music Group, and Concord Music Group, among others. In 2016, he was voted “Rising Star Producer” in Down Beat Magazine’s International Critics Poll, and he was voted “Producer of the Year” in 2022.

He’s co-produced several other labels’ important historic projects, including the acclaimed Thelonious Monk discoveries Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Palo Alto.

He also co-produced the monumental 2021 release of John Coltrane, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle on Impulse! Records.

Amid this auspicious career in the music’s archeological byways, Feldman found his seeming destiny when he crossed paths with “my dear friend and mentor (producer) George Klabin at Resonance Records,” he says. “Since Resonance, my life was forever transformed. I was given an intriguing proposition: if I found unreleased jazz recordings, not just reissues, but newly unearthed material, George said I could produce it for release on the label. That was like putting fire on gasoline and led directly to what I’m doing now.”

Feldman with his mentor, Resonance Records president George Klabin

But Feldman’s back story shaped who he would become. He was born in Los Angeles, but his family moved to Madison shortly afterwards and Feldman’s passion for jazz goes to deep Milwaukee familial roots. His great uncle was the stellar Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Alvin “Abe” Aaron, who worked and toured with Les Brown (on all those famous USO tours with Bob Hope and in the studio), Dave Pell, Jack Teagarden, and others. Another uncle, Joe Aaron, also played reed instruments. Feldman’s cousin is longtime Milwaukee flutist Rick Aaron, now based in Florida. His Aunt Dora played guitar in an all-female jazz band in Milwaukee around ‘20s and ‘30s called The Bachelor’s Delight.

Feldman’s Aunt Dora (second from right) played guitar in the all-female jazz band Bachelor’s Delight in the 1920s and ’30s.

“Music, especially jazz, was always around and was passed down from the elders,” Feldman says. “It’s been part of our family’s language since I was a child.

“My mother and father (who were Milwaukee natives) had an awesome record collection in all genres of music. In high school I was all about classic rock from the Beatles, the Stones, Hendrix, the Who, but was also really digging Miles and Coltrane, and eventually the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and so much more. My most memorable live music experience in Milwaukee was seeing my great uncle Joe Aaron perform at a club when I was 18 years old and went with my great aunt, Shirley, and my grandmother. I even had a couple of Heinekens, which was very exciting.”

Feldman’s great uncle was the noted Milwaukee tenor saxophonist Joe Aaron.

 Joe Aaron’s and the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins (left)

“Growing up, my grandparents lived right behind Peaches record store in the Silver Spring shopping center. I spent so many vacations visiting their house, and countless hours in Peaches, which eventually became a Mainstream record store. Milwaukee has always been a second home for me and I’m very lucky to be able to say so,” says Feldman, who’s formulative detecting fuel may be his passion for Kopp’s hamburgers.

Talent and Chutzpah

Since becoming a jazz music host and music director at his college radio station, Feldman’s talent and chutzpah led to progress impressively in the music business, at Polygram Records in Maryland as early as age 20 as a merchandiser and marketing specialist. He later went to Rhino Records, the reissue company, and finally national director of catalog sales for the Concord Music Group.

After a period of freelancing, he met producer George Klabin of Resonance Records in 2009. “George pulled me out of the sales and marketing realm and put me on the production highway and I’m eternally grateful.”

Since his ground-breaking success at Resonance, Feldman has co-founded a similar label, Elemental Records, and is now releasing with his own “Jazz Detective” imprint. Among the other dazzling array of historical recordings Feldman has dug up over the

The Jazz Detective label logo

years for either label are no less than eight recordings by the beloved, influential pianist Bill Evans, and five by iconic guitarist Wes Montgomery, as well as recordings by Sonny Rollins, Sarah Vaughan, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd, Eric Dolphy, Jaco Pastorius, Grant Green, Shirley Horn, Woody Shaw, The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchesatra, and Larry Young, among others. Most recently the acclaimed finds have included “The Lost Album from Ronnie Scott’s” by Charles Mingus for Resonance.

From Elemental has come the massive five-LP, three-CD set of Albert Ayler’s Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. Jazz Detective has recently released two double-disc sets of Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Night: Live at the Penthouse, Sonny Stitt’s Live in Baltimore and Chet Baker’s Blue Room: The 1979 Vara Studio Sessions in Holland, which followed a superb Baker Live in Paris trio album from 1983-84. Both Baker sets give a good idea what the often-sublime trumpeter-singer sounded like when he performed between those two dates at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery in 1981, which this writer reviewed. 1

No Bootlegs

It’s important to understand the consistent quality of Feldman’s recordings. He never settles for crudely recorded “bootlegs” no matter how great the artists. Rather, he finds tapes done on high-grade recording equipment or, as with Baker’s Live in Paris, professionally recorded for Radio France, but never released as albums. And his packaging always includes substantial critical liner notes, unpublished photos and interviews with artists, often conducted by Feldman.

“For me, it’s literally about pulling out all the stops, and bringing a story to life,” Feldman says. “I truly want to elevate the art of record making…We brought a style, sensibility and classiness to the presentation, and made it completely legal and official with all the rights holders being cleared and compensated.”

A recent Zev Feldman unearthing, a recording of trumpeter-singer Chet Baker live in Paris.

The multiple Evans and Montgomery projects have been memorable experiences for Feldman, as well as historically redefining the artists’ oeuvre.

“Getting a chance to know the families of Wes Montgomery and Bill Evans has been a blessing,” Feldman says. “We’ve done numerous projects together and have become good friends as well. It’s also been a thrill to work directly with Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd, and Ahmad Jamal, who just passed away recently. It’s so interesting because they have a chance to share their experiences and weigh in on all the elements that go into a project.”

Globetrotting “jazz detective” Zev Feldman relaxing in his music library.

No End in Sight

What’s on Feldman’s horizon?

“I’m working with the great Sonny Rollins on a four-LP box set, and he’s looking at everything that comes through and playing such an important role.” Upcoming there’s also unissued live recordings from Les McCann in 1966 and 1967. Feldman is especially excited to have recordings of Wes Montgomery with the Wynton Kelly Trio from the Half Note jazz club in New York City in 1965 (a collaboration which produced what Pat Metheny calls “the absolute greatest guitar album ever made,” Smokin’ at the Half-Note). 3.

Also, “George Klabin and I have been looking for a long time for unissued Art Tatum recordings, and we have a glorious three-LP and 2-CD package coming soon of three hours of unissued recordings.”

The sky is the limit? For Feldman, the deepest buried treasures are the limit. How many jazz ghosts would disagree?

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This article was originally published in slightly different form in The Shepherd Express, here:  https://shepherdexpress.com/music/music-feature/the-jazz-detective-searching-for-vintage-music/

1. My review of (and an interview feature with) Chet Baker (Aug. 7 and Aug. 12, 1981) are both in Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984, an anthology of the venue’s press coverage and more:

2. The Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Lights sets and the Baker Blue Room set are reviewed in a separate Culture Currents blog, here:

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

3. A previous 2005 release from 1965 called The Complete Live at the Half-Note (Wynton Kelly Trio with Wes Montgomery) appears to be an incomplete misnomer.

from NPR feature

REVIEW

MUSIC REVIEWS

Albert Ayler made sublime music. The world was not ready

The saxophonist’s last recorded concerts appear on ‘Revelations’

“Music is the Healing Force of the Universe” begins and ends Revelations: The Complete ORTF 1970 Fondation Maeght Recordings. The gorgeous box set — one of many archival jazz gems recently released under the care of producer Zev Feldman — features unseen photos, extensive liner notes and commentary from Ayler’s daughter, critics, producers and musicians. But more importantly, Revelations restores two full sets performed by the tenor saxophonist’s band, just months before Ayler was found floating in New York City’s East River. The circumstances around his death remain a mystery, but listening to these concerts — recorded July 25 and 27, 1970 — there’s a sense that Ayler was a musician in transition, the primordial yawp of his saxophone sparkling anew from the music of his youth.

 

 

Reviews of two notable “Jazz Detective” albums by Ahmad Jamal and Chet Baker

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ALBUM REVIEWS:

Ahmad Jamal, Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-1964

and Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1965-1966 (Jazz Detective)

and Chet Baker Blue Room (Jazz Detective)

Jazz producer and executive Zev Feldman has long had the nickname of “the jazz detective” for his uncanny skill at finding previously unreleased tapes from the genre’s greats to release as high-profile archival releases. (See related feature article). Now he’s putting that moniker to use for his own label, Jazz Detective, with a distinctive fingerprint logo, along with his typically highest-quality recording and packaging. Plenty of national media, from Variety, The Washington Post, NPR etc., have paid attention.

As a jazz piano aficionado, I’ll testify that the various Bill Evans albums are all treasures, expanding a deep catalog of one of the most beloved and influential modern jazz pianists. But I want to focus on Feldman’s 2022 “Jazz Detective” albums of Ahmad Jamal, a more controversial artist in serious jazz circles. Snobbish naysayers would sniff “cocktail pianist,” as Ahmad Jamal rose to rare jazz popularity with his hit album But Not for Me: Live at the Pershing in 1958. Yes, he’s capable of dazzling ornamentation and glittering fills, but, for the most part, done with stunning grace rather than excess. He’s also a deft and sometimes breathtaking employer of grace notes, of space and silence.

Far more than even that classic album could convey, these two Jazz Detective double-discs prove revelatory. Emerald City Nights: Live at the Penthouse 1963-64, and a same-titled one, recorded in 1965-66, provide vast and varied musical protein. Jamal is technically muscular, and expansive, yet exquisite, dynamic and capable of piston-like, two-handed chording, and hard-swinging (eg. “Bogota” and Johnny Hodges’s “Squatty Roo”). Yet he’s always a master of the grace note, poised with a wizardly sense of silence and space, even building drama with it.

You come to understand how Miles Davis learned the art of lyrical-yet-incisive understatement from him: “All my inspiration comes from him,” Miles wrote in his autobiography, an unusual thing for a trumpeter to say about a pianist. You hear, in these four nights recorded over four years, how, riding chops-to-die-for, Jamal expands his sonic, conceptual and harmonic canvas to mural-like dimensions. Jamal’s deep-in-the-night take on “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” becomes a musical joke, as he nurses a Hamlet routine for over 15 stunning minutes, yet you want to shadow his musical genius every step of the way, as it’s filled with dynamic surprises, a la his radical 1965 composition “Extensions.” Has this evergreen ever been played better, ever fresher?

By superb contrast, Anthony Newley’s “Feelin’ Good” plays out in low registers, funky and freewheeling, repeatedly quoting “Workin’ on the Chain Gang,” and the enduring strength of the blues and spirituals. And worry not, there’s a splendid version of his trademark superhit “Poinciana” in the second volume. Suffice to say, this was one of my three choices for historic album of the year in the 2022 Francis Davis jazz poll.

Annotator Eugene Holley Jr. aptly explains the range of classically-trained Jamal’s sources: “a protean and profound pianism that ingeniously melded pianist Art Tatum’s swing-at-the-speed-of-sound and his hometown (Pittsburgh) hero Erroll Garner’s tender and torrid touch, with Franz Liszt’s boundless keyboard technique and the azure French impressionism of Ravel and Debussy.” He has influenced Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Jacky Terrasson and Aaron Diehl (The Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra’s “artistic partner,” who soloed in his orchestral adaptation of Mary Lou Williams’ Zodiac Suite May 26-28 with the MSO).

***

Also, I’ll note that the new Jazz Detective Chet Baker studio set Blue Room, from Holland in 1979, reminds us vividly of the sublimely cool trumpeter’s personalizing of Miles Davis’s style. 1 Yet no trumpeter had a more buttery-golden horn tone, on the verge of melting, right from the opening Wayne Shorter tune “Beautiful Black Eyes.” Over the years of an extraordinarily tough, heroin-burdened life (he once spent a year and year a half in an Italian jail, as did his newlywed wife), his solos were consistently shapely, lyrical and swinging.

Elsewhere here, Baker again demonstrates how he was as emotionally affecting a jazz singer as we’ve ever had, on songs like “Oh, You Crazy Moon,” “Candy,” and “My Ideal,” by singing almost despite himself. He sounds like a shy introvert vocalizing to a loved one’s photograph. So, while not overtly expressive, his warm vocal tones unfold rounded, often liquidly limpid, and tender, with whimsy, pain and loss, delicately vulnerable. Yet he also scat-sings several choruses of “Candy” and one of “Crazy Moon” superbly.

Blue Room also reveals how underappreciated Phil Markowitz is as a crystalline, hard-swinging, harmonically deep and potent pianist. 2. As a bonus, Baker, in effect, steals something right from under Miles Davis’s embouchure. Miles wrote the superb tune “Nardis” but, mystifying, never recorded it, instead allowing Bill Evans to appropriate it, often as a centerpiece of the great pianist’s repertoire. Ah, but Baker smartly saw the opportunity, so here we finally hear the austere, lonely beauty of “Nardis” as a Miles-esque trumpeter would handle it. However, one also suspects pianist Markowitz, a deeply Evans-influenced player, and a master re-harmonizer, might’ve suggested this tune to Baker.

Blue Room follows a Feldman’s marvelous 2022 Elemental label’s two-album set Chet Baker Trio (with a French pianist and bassist) Live in Paris.

The Jazz Detective catalog and Feldman’s Resonance and Elemental label dates accumulate, both as limited-edition CDs, and historical vinyl packages. These include two 1970s concerts by pianist Bill Evans in Buenos Aires; a long-lost 1972 recording of bassist Charles Mingus at London’s Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club; French radio broadcasts of Baker in 1983-1984; and, the prize package, a five-disc box featuring Parisian concerts from July 1970 by free jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler — some of his last recordings before his death the following November.

The Ayler recordings especially underline how Feldman’s pioneering globe-trotting research and development is contributing to expanding jazz history with recordings by artists with strong influence but unjustly low historic profiles, like pianist Walter Bishop Jr. and Shirley Scott, one of the first female jazz organists to ever record. A third album features saxophonist Sonny Stitt, a prolific recording artist in his day who still doesn’t quite get his due.

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1 Actually it’s debatable who influenced whom, Chet Baker or Miles Davis. Miles was still a bebopper, though with modest technical facility, until his transformation into the deft poet of Birth of the Cool, recorded in 1949. But it wasn’t released until 1958. However, Miles did partake in the less-heralded cerebral all-star “cool jazz” album Conception in 1951, with Stan Getz, Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan. When was the real birth of the cool? Baker had been playing a very similar style at least since he began recording as a leader in 1952.

  1. The 1979 Blue Room recordings vividly brought to mind Baker’s live performance in 1981 at the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery. At the time, this reporter described him thusly: “Baker’s music glows with a moody romanticism, which takes his trumpeter into a role uncharacteristic of the normally declamatory instrument…But Baker’s playing is more than moody wafting. The intelligence displayed on the venerable “’Round Midnight” was engineered with skill and imagination. Like a ghost slipping through the crack of a door, Baker slid into the familiar shrouded melody, stripped his second chorus to an elegant spareness, then overlaid it with several plush phrases.

“Baker’s singing reveals an even closer view of his personal expression – lyrics of broken love flowing from a tenor feathered with soft gray textures.”

The Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 12, 1981. from the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery 1978-1984 anthology (For those interested in a copy of the anthology at a retail outlet, I’m aware of only of a single copy remaining at Woodland Pattern, in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood).

 

Remembering Wayne Shorter, a jazz traveler as mysterious and beautiful as any in the music’s history

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Wayne Shorter, who turned 80 in 2013, won the NPR Music Jazz Critics Poll by a large margin.

Wayne Shorter is gone, finally departed this planet and though, as a Buddhist, his sense of the beyond seemed intellectual, who knows how that translates at this point of metaphysical morphing? As a science fiction buff who increasingly incorporated that far-minded sensibility into his own art, he even co-created a 74-page sci-fi graphic novel for his most ambitious work, the three-album Emanon, an extended concerto grosso of sorts, with his jazz quartet and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He grew into a larger, more capacious self over his 89 years, as much as any jazz musician. Here’s where he stepped beyond even this open-minded writer to be honest. Before he died, I’d paused in listening to the demanding epic, and now still have never fully taken in all of Emanon, yet.

Though much great music ensued, I’ll concur with the consensus that the Blue Note album Speak No Evil, recorded at age 31, remains his masterpiece, billowing with shades of mystery and humanity, inspected and illuminated with a forensic sensitivity. I mean, “Dance Cadaverous”? The title tune’s swaggering swing conveys both awareness, and characterization, of evil, haunted by its spread-winged whole notes. That album’s exquisite ballad “Infant Eyes” was a favorite of mine to play on piano before becoming manually disabled. Of course, Shorter’s tenor sax rendering is impossibly tender.

“Speak No Evil” album cover courtesy uDiscover

By then, he was commenting as a kind of “cosmic philosopher,” as he did with “Infant Eyes,” written for his daughter Miyako: “I saw all infancy in her eyes, everyone who’s ever been an infant. An infant being a new start. People reminisce about past stuff, let it take over the present, but with every moment, you’re born.” Such insight feels especially apt now, as perhaps he’s being reborn somewhere, as a star child. Thus, Speak No Evil proved as communicative and heartfelt as is was captivating and challenging.

Other albums from his mid-1960s frieze of noirish Blue Note masterworks include Night Dreamer, Juju, Adam’s Apple, The All-Seeing Eye, Schizophrenia, and The Soothsayer, all necessary listening to gain a sense of the compositional and conceptual talent that sculpted an unfolding progressive profile of modern jazz. Though a bit of an outlier compared to his other Blue Notes, Super Nova is memorable for Antonio Carlos Jobim’s “Dindi,” sung by Maria Booker who was, at the time, splitting up with her husband Walter Booker, who accompanied her on guitar. She dissolved into tears amid the recording, which was retained, and the interpretation quivers with poignancy. Part of the lyric:

Oh Dindi…
Like the song of the wind in the trees
That’s how my heart is singing Dindi, happy Dindi
When you’re with me
I love you more today
Yes I do, yes I do
I’d let you go away
If you take me with you

It’s hard to encompass Shorter’s career, and recording-wise that may remain for a major retrospective project or two, surely to come. For now, Columbia’s two-album set Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter suffices as an admirable overview of his output, at least to 2004. It complements Michelle Wallace’s same-titled biography, capturing the life of a classification-defying original. And yet his music always had an innate way of redefining lyricism, often contrasting heavy-breathed whole notes with vivid yet eccentric eighth-note phrases. Critic-author Gary Giddins commented on the book, “It makes the case that Wayne Shorter was the representative jazz artist of the past forty-five years, from hard-bop to Miles to fusion to a planet that is too often but inevitably defined as Wayne’s World.”

Album cover to “Footprints: The Life and Music of Wayne Shorter” courtesy Aika Kawasumi 

It’s difficult to argue too much with that artistic range and authority, even given the eminence of relative contemporaries as Miles Davis, Coltrane, Mingus, Monk and others.

Mainstream acceptance followed at a respectful distance as Shorter eventually won 12 Grammy awards.

Live performance is the essence of jazz, and I was too young to see the Miles Davis Quintet’s boundary-expanding multi-night 1965 stand at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel nightclub, thankfully preserved on record. Here’s where “free-bop” was sparked and nourished. Shorter’s trademark tune “Footprints” (if any single one can define him) thrives in live performance beyond intimation on the Davis quintet’s Live at Newport 1955-1975 recording on Columbia. Shorter’s tenor solo slows down the band’s rush and casts odd, glancing shadows across the implied footprints — presence and disappearance — even as it rises to an ominous life-force by the solo’s end.

Shorter found the larger pop-rock-funk audience by slipping into the lurking darkness of Miles’s pioneering electric period, notably on Shorter’s “Sanctuary,” on the genre-shattering album Bitches Brew in 1970. This keyed his transition to join Joe Zawinul and uber-bassist Jaco Pastorius in the original Weather Report, which I did see at the Plugged Nickel. Even live, with Zawinul’s electronics and Shorter’s imaginative reinvention of the soprano sax as a soaring, diving falcon-like creature, the band expanded the sonic parameters of jazz while elevating a standard for jazz-fusion which few bands ever equaled. It ranged from the avant-ish debut album to the exotically cinematic “Mysterious Traveller” to Shorter’s “Palladium” a gleaming, exalted, high-flying celebration, the funk-romp jam “Sweetnighter,” and their cloud-hopping hit “Birdland.”

His soprano work with Weather Report was a harbinger, as he’d go on to advance that difficult-to-play-in-tune instrument as far as anyone has, usually to striking and powerful effect.

Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter, the two masterminds and master musicians behind Weather Report, the non-pareil fusion band. courtesy Pinterest

Yet Zawinul was the group’s dominant personality, so inevitably the taciturn, oracular Shorter found his own visionary ways, and soon, with 1974’s Native Dancer, the gloriously gorgeous collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Milton Nascimento. This redefied the jazz-Brazilian connection — songs like “Ponta de Areia” and “Miracle of the Fishes” (an allusion to Jesus?) are uncannily heaven-on-earth in their lush yet humane expansiveness. Sung in Portuguese, both were written by Nascimento and suggest how, though celebrated justly and foremost as a composer, Shorter understood the value of others’ work, including various classical composers, interpreting over the years Villa-Lobos, Sibelius, Mendelssohn, Leroy Anderson, and others.

Another example that early fed his sense of jazz orchestration was playing on Gil Evans’ “Time of the Barracudas.” This restless piece flowed on the dazzling drumming of Elvin Jones in similar effect, if different style, of how Tony Williams fueled the great ‘60s Davis Quintet, and Jack DeJohnette in the first electric Miles band. Jones had played on most of Shorter’s masterful Blue Notes. Of course, Shorter first made his name in the early ‘60s as the precocious music director of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

Such great drummers informed Shorter’s brilliant rhythmic sense in the uniquely and beautifully elliptical way he thought and played. Another career highlight in another composer’s piece was Steely Dan’s deliciously hip “Aja,” perhaps the jazzy pop-rock group’s career musical peak, and there, atop its crest, unfurled a Shorter tenor solo that breathed and exhaled like a celestial god but with his feet on terra firma. The suite’s co-composer Walter Becker commented, “Wayne was very intent on forging a novel approach to the piece. He was influenced by the contour of sections other than the section that he actually played over,” which was basically a single modal-like chord vamp.

This solo and most all of his career reflect his composerly sense of form, even at fast tempos. His improvisational line is ever-shapely yet unpredictable. On a piece like “In Walked Wayne” with trombonist J.J. Johnson, you get a sense of ever replenishing melody and harmony as unfolding. That sculptor’s sense of shape reveal the depth and seeming boundlessness of his genius.

This album cover conveys some of Wayne Shorter’s oracular quality. Courtesy ebay

He played like a fire dragon on the Footprints Live! version of “Masquelero” with his intrepid late-career quartet, pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci and dummer Brian Blade. How many musicians his age would still pushing the boundaries of music, flirting with a black hole and a quasar?

His sense of the beyond had come heart-breakingly face-to-face with tragedy when his wife Ana died in the in the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800. He responded by turning to perhaps his closest musical friend, pianist Herbie Hancock. They produced 1+1, the duo album which elicited “Aung San Suu Kyi,” something focused yet transcendent, with a limpid Shorter soprano solo, a shortcut to wonder and possibility.  It was dedicated to and named for the exiled Burmese leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner. “Because we affect lives of those who are here,” Shorter said, “the best way to honor Ana’s life is to become the happiest man alive.” Mercer, writing in the liner notes to the Footprints anthology, comments, “Wayne’s courageous response to his grief was the product and culmination of his Buddhist practice.”

Cover of Shorter’s 3-album with graphic novel set “Emanon.” courtesy WFDD

Of course, later Emanon arose, breaking conceptual ceilings, Wayne Shorter, the star-gazer, at age 85. Wherever he is now travelling, ageless in mystery and in light, we can only hope to imagine and follow.

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A jazz giant speaks to our times on Ethan Philion’s “Meditations on Mingus”

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Album review: Ethan Philion Meditations on Mingus (Sunnyside)

Ethan Philion will present the full-ensemble “Meditations on Mingus” at the Chicago Jazz Festival on Sept. 2, and at the North Street Cabaret in Madison on Sept. 10, and a quartet version at Bar Centro in Milwaukee on Sept. 11.

Imagine a sculptor laboring over the Mount Rushmore of modern jazz giants and, somehow, forgetting about Charles Mingus. Through some boisterous psychic phenomenon, Mingus would barge into the artist’s consciousness and muscle his way into the layout of great granite figures. Mingus had a personality as large as his talents, and his social consciousness. These qualities all arise in a simmering stew called Meditations on Mingus by Chicago bassist-arranger and bandleader Ethan Philion.

Key to this project’s accomplishment is Philion understanding how pointedly Mingus’s 1960s music addresses America’s open societal wounds and flaws of today. This 10-piece band (including Milwaukee trumpeter Russ Johnson) bristles, wails, and swings like a 10-headed-demon inspired by the jazz gods. Mingus emerged from jazz god Ellington, retaining The Duke’s gifts for lyricism and fine detail. Yet Mingus upped the quotient of fiery, chest-pounding large-ensemble jazz.

Ethan Philion’s Mingus Big Band live at the Green Mill in Chicago. Courtesy ethanpilion.com

For example, on the opening “Once Upon a Time in a Holding Corporation called Old America,” the music ripples and reaches for the sky while keeping its collective feet deep in the funky earth. It evokes the profound income inequality that is worse today than ever. “Haitian Fight Song” boils and stomps, exemplifying how Mingus horn ensembles could mutate into one strangely beautiful creature of defiance.

“Pithecanthropus Erectus” is a striking musical portrait of homo sapiens rising from ape to human; it’s superbly orchestrated myriad voices, from cacophony to harmonized reason (and back), comments on the struggles of “man” to truly achieve humanity. Philion’s liner notes include an ominous Mingus quote to help signify the tune: “His own failure to realize the inevitable emancipation of those he sought to enslave…deny him not only the right of ever being a man, but finally destroy him completely.”

Bassist-arranger-bandleader Ethan Philion with trumpeter Victor Garcia. Courtesy Ethan Philion

Blues-infused, mournful and dramatic, “Meditation on a Pair of Wire Cutters” is a vivid small-picture evocation of a man’s incarceration, strengthened and sustained by dreams of freedom.

By contrast, “Remember Rockefeller at Attica,” is an ironically titled big picture on prison’s institutional racism. In 1971, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller notoriously rejected a requested visit to Attica Prison to address the black inmates’ grievances, thus spurring a prison uprising, which 1,000 white state troopers smashed by killing 33 inmates and 10 hostages. President Richard Nixon spun the tragedy as a triumph of governmental justice. Medical examiners confirmed that all but the deaths of one officer and three inmates were caused by law enforcement gunfire.[1][10] The New York Times writer Fred Ferretti said the rebellion concluded in “mass deaths that four days of taut negotiations had sought to avert”. The Attica Uprising has been described as a historical event in the prisoners’ rights movement.

Throughout Meditations, Philion conveys Mingus’s brilliance with tight-yet-liberated ensembles, bounding with call-and-response passages, and an inner fire that spurs soloists to heights of fire and ardor (especially alto sax player Rajiv Halim, on the bracing “Prayer for Passive Resistance”).

In referring back to the music as I wrote this, I’m continually captivated by the richness of the compositions, arrangements and the colorful soloists. Jazz doesn’t get any better.

Remember Rockefeller, sure, but remember Mingus indeed – hearing this album he’s as alive as a man breathing right down your neck.

Charles Mingus. Courtesy New England Conservatory of Music

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This review was originally published in shorter form in The Shepherd Express, here: Mingus music review

For information on, and to purchase, this album, visit: https://ethanphilion.com/home

 

 

 

 

 

Milwaukee’s premiere trumpeter-composer Russ Johnson to play Chicago Jazz Festival September 2

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  • Trumpeter-bandleader Russ Johnson. Courtesy Chicago Reader
  • Let’s give it up for Milwaukee trumpeter (Shorewood resident) Russ Johnson, who may be the finest jazz trumpeter living in the upper Midwest. He will be leading a quartet at Chicago Jazz Festival on at 1:50 p.m., Saturday, September 2 at the Von Freeman Pavilion, named for legendary Chicago saxophonist.
  • You can catch Russ in town regularly, as he plays most Tuesday evenings in the Dave Bayles Trio at the uptown or Tavern, at the corner of Humboldt and center Street, in Riverwest.
  • The Russ Johnson Quartet will do a warm-up for the Chicago fest at The Sugar Maple, 441 E. Lincoln Ave, at 8 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 27 in Bay View. The quartet includes Johnson, violinist Mark Feldman, bassist Ethan Philion and drummer Tim Daisy.
  • Mark Feldman. Courtesy Soapbox Gallery
  • Feldman is a vastly experienced musician as a symphony orchestra player and has played with country stars, and a wide array of jazz and avant-garde musicians. including recording with Michael Brecker, Lee Konitz, Joe Lovano, and Chris Potter.
  • Though I haven’t heard Philion, he’s notable as the leader of a new Sunnyside recording Meditations on Mingus, leading a ten-piece band in a sequence of substantial Charles Mingus compositions. Johnson is a trumpeter on that recording,
  • Johnson says his festival quartet is also recording this fall, and that a prominent European label has already expressed interest.
  • Don’t miss the quartet in Milwaukee, if you can’t make it for the big Chicago event.
  • The Chicago Jazz Festival, sponsored by the city and others, is still a free event, though you need tickets to some events.
  • At bottom is one more recommendation for the fest, and a link to the fest schedule, ticketing and website.
  • (FWIW, here’s my review of Johnson’s 2014 album Meeting Point) :

    Trumpeter Russ Johnson opens new vistas in jazz conversation

  • September 2 Chicago Jazz Festival 
  • Von Freeman Pavilion (North Promenade)
  • 11:30am-12:25pm – Regina Harris Baiocchi (Jazz Institute of Chicago’s New Works, Fresh Voices)
  • 12:40-1:35pm – Arman Sangalang Quartet
  • 1:50-2:45pm – Russ Johnson Quartet
  • 3:00-4:00pm  – Adam O’Farrill’s Stranger Days

Here’s a YouTube of a set of the quartet, recorded live in March:

  • Milwaukee trumpeter Russ Johnson at the Uptowner Tavern with the Dave Bayles Trio (above and below) Photos by Kevin Lynch
  • Another recommendation for the Chicago Jazz Festival is the alto saxophonist-composer Miguel Zenon who’s riding his new superb recording Musica De Las Americas.
  • He performs at 8 p.m. in Millennium Park, 201 E. Randolph St., on Sunday, September 3.
  • Miguel Zenon. Courtesy Wikipedia
  • The album further deepens his creative resourcing of his Puerto Rican music roots, this time with all originals rather than doing historic reclamation of underexposed Puerto Rican composers as he’s done several times in recent years.
  • His work amounts to a profound excavation and bridging of the Latin connection in music of the Americas.
  • Plus, Zenon has as dynamically charged and cohesive a quartet, including Luis Perdomo one of my favorite pianists, as you’ll hear in jazz. Musica De Las Americas is augmented by the percussion and vocal quartet Los Pleneros De La Cresta.
  • Zenon’s new music is pensive, probing, lyrical and exhilarating, by turns. It raises and musically waves a rippling flag of identity while conveying that identity’s universality as a musical language.
  • Here’s a link to the festival info: Chicago Jazz Festival 2022

 

Jazz has led the way in integration as a social and cultural model at least since 1938

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George Shearing, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Buddy Rich, at the Madison Square Garden Jazz Festival in New York, in 1959. Photo: Herb Snitzer /MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVE/GETTY

Sure, pianist George Shearing (pictured, above left) was literally blind, to color and everything else (and once made an album with all three Black Montgomery brothers –Wes, Buddy and Monk). Nevertheless, this photo – which prompted this brief essay – signifies, for me, the pan-racial solidarity of jazz as a social model, including brash, super-egotistical Buddy Rich — in 1959. 1

I’m no Rich expert but, a cursory examination of his noteworthy 1967 album Speak No Evil, reveals how integrated his sensibilities and practices were by then. The title tune is by the great African-American saxophonist composer Wayne Shorter. The album also includes compositions by black artists Earth, Wind and Fire; Natalie Cole; The Pointer Sisters; and The Isley Brothers. His band at the time featured these black musicians: arranger Richard Evans, piano soloist Kenny Barron, bassist Bob Cranshaw, tuba player Howard Johnson, and vocalist Retta Hughes. Speak no evil, indeed.

There were certainly plenty more of integrated jazz bands by 1967, but let’s especially note examples of pioneering pre-’60s white bandleaders whom one might assume could travel and work easier in racially charged regions of America without the “white man’s burden” which is actually “the black man’s burden,” (as author/editor Greg Tate has eloquently documented 2.) of conforming to societal restrictions on integration, and thus helped advance the burgeoning civil rights movement.

The integration saga begins with Benny Goodman who hired star soloists from the Ellington and Basie Orchestras for 1938 at his epic Carnegie Hall concert, and his contemporary quartet with pianist Teddy Wilson and vibist Lionel Hampton. Earlier in the ’30s, he’d hired Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, and arranger Fletcher Henderson. In the ’40, Goodman hired guitarist Charlie Christian, trumpeter Cootie Williams, and saxophonist Wardell Gray.

Among notable 1950s Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz musicians and bands and musicians were Chano Pozo, Machito, Chico O’Farrell, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaria, Cal Tjader, Prez Prado, Astor Piazolla, Xavier Cugat, singer Harry Belafonte and, yes, that the eclectic Brit George Shearing.

Then in the ’50s, among the most noatable integration developments came from Milwaukee-native and big band leader Woody Herman. He hired a variety of African American musicians in the 1950s, including vibraphonist Milt Jackson, trumpeters Ernie Royal, Reunald Jones, Nat Adderley, and Howard McGee, and bassists Keter Betts and Major Holley bass. Charlie Parker was guest soloist with the band in early ’50’s.

Herman also hired (white) trumpeter-singer Billie Rogers, one of the first female instrumentalists in a male-dominated band who wasn’t a singe or pianist. *

Speaking of women, in the 1940s, we can’t forget the integrated all-woman big band The International Sweethearts of Rhythm.

The saxophone section of the 1940s tri-racial orchestra The International Sweethearts of Rhythm Courtesy Rosalind Cron 

Besides Shearing, Herman and Buddy Rich, integrated bands with white leaders included The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Lennie Tristano, Art Pepper, The Gerry Mulligan Quartet, Stan Getz, the black and white co-leadership and integrated personnel of the standard-setting Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra and The J.J. Johnson-Kai Winding Quartet.

Among integrated black leaders of the late 1950s: Miles Davis (famously on Birth of the Cool, and Kind of Blue), Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, 3 John Coltrane, George Russell, Sarah Vaughan and Bud Powell, who recorded with Buddy Rich back in 1951.

Also, pioneering Black pianist-composer Mary Lou Williams worked with white trombonist Jack Teagarden, and had arranger Milt Orent assist in arrangements for her ambitious 1940s Zodiac Suite.

I know I am forgetting other “integral” leaders from both races.

l’ll just touch lightly on matters of early modern jazz “influence.” Bebop rose as a virtuosic, self-consciously Black-innovated style (like most all major jazz idioms) to deter whites from “stealing” and profiting by mimicking and marketing their style — as happened profligately with swing. Still, bop had a few notable Bud Powell-influenced white pianists, such as Dodo Mamarosa, Joe Albany, and Al Haig. Among 1950s white pianists influenced by Thelonious Monk (and perhaps Herbie Nichols) was the tragically-short-lived Richard Twardzik. 4.  

Perhaps an efficient way to enhance and conclude this brief historical integration story is to note the 1950s phenomenon of “cool jazz,” and here I’m plucking straight from Wikipedia, to dispel the notion this popular genre was the exclusive realm of white West Coast musicians: “Some observers looked down upon West Coast jazz because many of its musicians were white, and because some listeners, critics, and historians perceived that the music was too cerebral, effete, or effeminate, or that it lacked swing.[12][13][14] However, African American musicians played in the style, including Curtis Counce, John Lewis, Chico Hamilton, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Buddy Collette, Red Callender, Harold Land, Eugene Wright and Hampton Hawes.”

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* Thanks to Curt Hanrahan, music director of The Milwaukee Jazz Orchestra, for information on Woody Herman.

  1. Thanks to my good friend, Stephen Braunginn, formerly jazz program host of WORT-FM radio in Madison, and of the Jazz Enthusiasts Facebook group, for posting this photo (at top).
  2. Everything but the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, edited by by Greg Tate, Broadway Books 2003. This book addresses what is now known in P.C. terms as cultural appropriation. But it seems to me that white jazz artists who cover and pay royalties to black composers, and who fairly hire black musicians are, as Spike Lee would put it, “doing the right thing.”
  3. Though most famous for his piano-less “free jazz” Ornette Coleman used white pianists on his important earliest recordings, the Live at the Hillcrest date with Paul Bley (a true quiet giant) and Walter Norris on Coleman’s Contemporary label recordings, recently re-released as a 2-CD box set.
  4. Twardzik’s composition “Yellow Tango,” is a Latin-flavored small masterpiece of offbeat jazz, well represented on The Chet Baker Quartet featuring Dick Twardzik Live in Koln.

Mary LaRose the singer resurrects Dolphy; LaRose the artist captures many jazz musicians in pastel

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Reviews: Mary LaRose – Out Here (Little i Music), and Out There: Visions of a Sound, jazz portraiture art book by LaRose

Jazz singer/visual artist Mary LaRose embarked on one of the most daring and enlightening projects I’ve heard in a long time. Out Here lovingly reimagines compositions by, an associated with, Eric Dolphy, the supremely gifted multi-instrumentalist who died tragically at 36, in a Berlin hospital, of a diabetic coma after physicians presumed him merely a drugged-out jazzer. 1

LaRose and an excellent quintet resurrect Dolphy. 2 Jeff Lederer’s clarinets superbly evoke Dolphy’s exclamatory, sinuous playing style. Drummer Matt Wilson goes “out there” like a dancing tightrope walker. LaRose ingeniously sets Dolphy’s music to vocalese and scatting. She reveals the meaning of tune “245” — the Carlton Street address in Brooklyn, where many jazz musicians resided. She’s a “fly on the wall” in this hippest of abodes.

She shows that Dolphy’s “Out There” — “You’ve got to push yourself, get out there.” — is cutting-edge but not free jazz, sustained like a gyrating thread of many colors. Her singing lends warm humanity to Dolphy’s wide intervals, his way of releasing, and containing, musical expression. “Music Matador” revels in Dolphy’s underexposed roots in lilting Panamanian rhythms.

“Serene,” is a Zen-like meditation on the sublime relationship between syncopation and relaxation. “Love Me” (a Victor Young standard Dolphy recorded in duet with Madison-based bassist Richard Davis), is here a duet between LaRose and bass clarinetist Lederer, who are married, and they radiate nearly erotic sensual interplay.

Finally, a Mal Waldron tune that Dolphy debuted, “Warm Canto” glows, accompanying LaRose’s poetic ode to death, as strangely moving as anything modern jazz song has produced: “When I am dead, make art of my bones, bleach and dry them in the sun/ pure white, startling as stars…”

LaRose recites these lyrics, in the first person, in a tender yet declamatory tone. She seems to strive to both honor and inhabit Dolphy’s long-passed but ever-present spirit. A vividly-imagined, wholly-personalized evocation of the man and the artist.

Give thanks that time has allowed her, and the sun Out Here, to rise and shine on his legacy, to lengthen it to more proper fulfillment.

This album review Was lowercaseriginally Published in the Shepherd Express in slightly shorter form:https://shepherdexpress.com/music/album-reviews/out-here-by-mary-larose-little-i-music/

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Jazz singer-songwriter-artist Mary LaRose in her studio, where she produced the art for her new book “Out There.” Courtesy Jazz Times

During LaRose’s period of this creativity, largely the pandemic, she produced far more than just a great album of music. She is also an accomplished visual artist, who studied with the famous realist painter Philip Pearlstein. She has also published, in conjunction with the album Out Here, a book of her portraits of jazz saxophonist’s, titled Out There: Visions of a Sound, (the main title is also the title of a well-known Eric Dolphy album).

The book is a limited edition of 100 copies, and at least as comparable an accomplishment as the album, in its own way. It’s one of the finest collections of jazz portraiture artwork I’ve seen, given that jazz portraits are far better-known in photography. 3 How many people can say they transmuted the year of the plague into so much quality productivity? 

LaRose consciously chose to set her work apart from jazz photography by not basing her portraits on photographs, but rather on videos of the musicians. That way, she could strive to capture more of the dynamic essence of the musician, without venturing far beyond her realistic discipline. Rather than hard-edged realism, she uses pastel crayons on black paper to highly evocative effect, on all of the portraits except for the color cover portrait of Dolphy, which is oil on canvas, and also the cover of the album.

That painting is much more of a painterly exercise, with dancing red tones around Dolphy and his flute, which seems to evoke, and perhaps defy, Dolphy’s famous quote, “When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone in the air; you can never recapture it.”

Otherwise, she contains her interpretive and expressive skills in the depiction of the musician himself. In the No. 9 portrait of Yusuf Lateef, the musician who first inspired her to do this series, his eyes glint amid his most prominent features, all hovering in darkness, as striking as the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

Yusef Lateef, by Mary LaRose, pastel on textured art paper, 2021

Pastel crayon is a still-underappreciated medium (which I myself have used extensively). It provides a palpable presence that is perfectly enhanced by the textured black art paper. This embraces the blackness of most of these musicians, but these could be called “noir jazz” portraits, given that noir aesthetics in film, typically accompanied by jazz scores, emerged in the 1940s and ’50s, when most of these musicians got their starts. Time after time, LaRose reveals how shadows haunt and mystify, to varying degrees, each musician, even as her colors render the face vibrant. Most features a distinctly sculpted, though alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who played for years with the great pianist Cecil Taylor, is almost abstracted into a dream of a jazz face on Mount Rushmore.

Overall though, there is little mistaking most every musician. So, a fun game to play — for those knowledgeable of jazz reed players from the ’60s and beyond — is to see how many you can identify, without seeing the name on the facing page.

However, the greater value of the book is the expressive artistry LaRose brings to her rough-hewn realism. She superbly she captures the facial traits along with the physical effort and technique necessary to play a reed instrument. In other words – – as her reed-playing husband and musical collaborator Jeff Lederer notes in the book’s introduction – she focuses on the embouchure of each musician, a fair assessment.

Still, it is her hand and eye, guiding the meandering line of pastel crayon on black paper that lends the vitality to these interpretive portraits. That attuned line and mottled texture almost work like a lasso, whirling and catching each subject or, as Miles Davis once put it, “chasing down the voodoo.” This cumulative effect renders them as “black saints,” the title character-type whom Charles Mingus addressed in his masterful album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. That titular character was reportedly inspired by Dolphy.

Among her most haunting portraits are two successive ones of the late Albert Ayler, who was found dead in New York’s East River in 1971, a mysterious “drowning” to this day. Ayler possessed a large-eyed countenance of radiant spiritual innocence. In the first portrait, Ayler is not playing. Rather he gazes directly into the viewer’s eyes, possessing here a curious serenity. In the second rendering (below), he’s playing his tenor sax but the eyes still remain riveted on the viewer. Does he see his darkly looming destiny? Or is it a spirit, reflected in you, the recipient of his fire music?

Albert Ayler, by Mary LaRose. Pastel on textured our paper 2021

There are many monochromatic portraits executed in white pastel, and others amount to lively masks of many colors. One of the most striking of those is of Guiseppe Logan who, in a life-worn face of crevasses and cavities, seems to feel “the black man’s burden” Here for every day that his life of abject obscurity subject him to.

Guiseppe Logan, By Mary LaRose, Pastel on textured our paper, 2021

There are six more portraits of Eric Dolphy’s handsome and sensitive face, aside from the cover painting, signifying the importance he holds in LaRose’s eyes. Here we see the range of his virtuosity on flute, alto sax, and bass clarinet. That brings a measure of justice to this musician, especially considering how his career was cut short – by what may have been racist stereotyping judgment by attending doctors when he died, just as this refined man was reaching full maturity as an artist. Not all these men are dead. Yet, such superb portrayals of such blacks saints who were, to varying degrees, “Invisible Men” in their lifetimes, amount to a tender, precious honor to them. With the music, it’s almost as if we can freeze-frame them in our mind’s eye – a moving image of musical life in the very breath of creative ferment.

The book also includes an artist’s statement, an introduction by Lederer, and an index of the video sources for each of the portraits.

Along with the innovative album Out Here, the book Out There is a treasure trove I will revisit often, and learn from, as a visual artist working in the same medium. Yet Out There has traveled far further than any mere academic exercise.

Both the album Out Here and the portrait book Out There are available at the record label’s Bandcamp page, here: https://littleimusic.bandcamp.com/merch

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1 Apparently unbeknownst to doctors, Dolphy was a teetotaler who didn’t smoke cigarettes or take drugs.[11]

Ted Curson, a trumpeter who worked with Dolphy in Mingus’s band, remembered: “That really broke me up. When Eric got sick on that date [in Berlin], and him being black and a jazz musician, they thought he was a junkie. Eric didn’t use any drugs. He was a diabetic—all they had to do was take a blood test and they would have found that out. So he died for nothing. They gave him some detox stuff and he died, and nobody ever went into that club in Berlin again. That was the end of that club”.[62] Shortly after Dolphy’s death, Curson recorded and released Tears for Dolphy, featuring a title track that served as an elegy for his friend.

2. LaRose previously did an excellent album titled Reincarnation, taking the same approach to compositions of Charles Mingus, the great bassist, composer and bandleader, who was Dolphy’s longest employer before he went solo.

3. The only recent jazz portrait artist I can think of with comparable quality is Madison-based Martel Chapman, who works in a very different, cubistic style of portraiture.