Vocalist Faye Victor accepts the ingenious challenge of singing pianist-composer Herbie Nichols

This ambitious concept grabbed me: a jazz singer adapting tunes of iconoclast bop-era pianist-composer Herbie Nichols. He’s a fascinating, under-sung, short-lived jazz hero (dead at 44). But I never thought of him as vocalist material. 1 Well, leave that to Victor, who knew her idea demanded a leap, imaginatively and technically, a leap as serious — and playful — as Nichols was. 2.

So, failing to find the block of listening space I felt the two-album set deserved, I finally put it on while I was doing something else at the computer. Almost instantly Victor, and her concept band Herbie Nichols Sings, began insinuating themselves into my consciousness. There was something almost intoxicating to hear her lovely voice wrap itself around the asymmetric intervals of Nichols’ “Double Exposure” which, with lyrics, she’d re-dubbed “Life is Funny that Way.” More, she’d swallowed the tune whole and made it her(bie) Herbie.

Then she scats the second chorus of “Life,” totally embracing its pure musical powers, just as she purely scats throughout “Shuffle Montgomery,” the one tune she doesn’t rename. By then you know how brilliantly she’s inhabited Herbie’s “Third World” of Calder-esque, mobile-like sound constructions deeply dipped in the blues. She succeeds because she, like a major influence Betty Carter, is always right with her fellow musicians, never merely “accompanied by.” Yet Victor, for the average listener, is more listenable than Carter, for having a pearlescent voice. On “The Culprit is You” and “Sinners, All of Us!” she pursues themes of honesty. “Culprit” embraces the courage to be yourself, not what you think others think you should be. “Sinners” calls out those too hip to think they’re not guilty of snobbery. Victor’s wisdom radiates in unsurpassed beauty and strangeness, and conviction, demonstrating the value of her philosophy better than mere words could ever.

On disc 2, “Tonight” is about a “House Party Starting,” a swaggering minor-key affair with Michael Attias’s baritone sax lending sly gravitas, and pianist Anthony Coleman painting slashing lines while swinging hard. Then, an oozingly mordant take on “Lady Sings the Blues,” first recorded by Billie Holiday, and “Descent into Madness” is exactly that. But it ends in two offbeat, upbeat Herbie tunes.

Here’s a concert video of the quintet that recorded the album:

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1 However, trombonist Roswell Rudd, a great Nichols friend/interpreter/expert, asserts that Herbie’s music is meant to be sung, even if virtually nobody has until now. Aside from Nichols’ own recordings of his cubist-bop, mainly on Blue Note, also worth investigating are three recordings by the Nichols tribute band The Herbie Nichols Project. An all-star band of sorts, it was co-founded by recently deceased pianist Frank  Kimbrough and bassist Ben Allison, and featured trombonist Wycliffe Gordon, saxophonist Ted Nash, drummer Matt Wilson, and others. The most revelatory and even poignant album is the last, Strange City which, except for two, comprises tunes Nichols never got a chance to record himself.

The aforementioned Rudd recorded two albums, The Unheard Herbie Nichols, Vol. 1 and 2, of unrecorded Nichols work. Floodwater had destroyed much of Nichols’ possessions and undocumented compositions. He was a modernist who played all types of jazz, except that which he loved, to make a living. He died in 1963 at age 44. See A.B. Spellman’s classic study Black Music: Four Lives.

  1. I previously knew Faye Victor only from her 2004 album Lazy Old Sun: Live/Life in the Lowlands, which I hadn’t paid enough attention to at the time. I went back to listen again and recommend it, too. It was recorded in Amsterdam after eight years of living in The Netherlands, another prophet-without-honor jazz story. It’s ingeniously unpredictable, ranging from interpretations of Johnny Mercer’s “Laura” to the Doors’ “People are Strange” to Randy Newman’s “Last Night I had a Dream” to “Heading West” from Sonny Rollins’ classic Way Out West, to a 100-proof shot of Jackie McLean dissonant-bop.

 

Whether Jazz, Hip-Hop or Electronic, trumpeter Jamie Breiwick rides the waves

Jazz artist Jamie Breiwick’s voice and vision have steadily grown, like rippling concentric circles, since he first caught the attention of fellow musicians, critics, and the public. The wind of his trumpet blowing plays a factor, but the wavelike depths arose from his extraordinary knowledge and honoring of the modern jazz tradition, while finding places in contemporary pop vernaculars for his voice, and realizing the wellsprings of his own creative identity.

That analogy seems apt as his seminal inspiration was Miles Davis, who shaped the tides of jazz time for decades, with an uncanny, lyrical and impressionistic sensibility, even as funky as he could get. “I had a Miles t-shirt in high school that I wore constantly,” Breiwick recalls. “The breadth of music he made is really staggering, whether bebop, free, rock, fusion, electronic, experimental, pop, hip-hop. He really blazed a lot of trails and left us with a lifetime of inspiration.”

Right now, Breiwick ranks among the four or five most important jazz musicians in Wisconsin and, among them, the youngest one on a still-rising arc of creative possibility. His prolific recorded output includes with De La Buena, and the influential 25-year band Clamnation. The pandemic threw many artists askew, but Breiwick pressed full-speed ahead, with voluminous recording and releasing on his own B-Side Recordings label.

The group KASE: Jamie Breiwick, trumpet and electronics; John Christensen, bass; knowsthetime, turntables and electronics. 

Breiwick’s graphic design talents sped this output. He creates all his own album covers (and those of others) with an imaginative but clean, post-1960s Blue Note Records compositional style. He just published a book of his jazz cover designs concurrently with an emblematic album, KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House. His jazz-hip-hop-electronics trio, with bassist John Christensen and turntablist Jordan Lee, joined Klassik, perhaps the region’s most musically gifted improv hip-hop singer-song maker, who also plays keyboards and saxophone. KASE logically expands Breiwick’s creative ripples into exploring “sonic landscapes” – Miles ahead, atmospheric, wonder-inducing.

The cassette cover of “KASE + Klassik Live at the Opera House,” designed by Jamie Breiwick. Courtesy B-Side Graphics

Breiwick’s recorded and group projects have probed ground-breaking jazzers, including Davis, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and world-music traveler Don Cherry. He’s also played and recorded transcribed Davis solos for two Hal Leonard play-along books, among six various he’s recorded.  He values innovative contemporaries like Jason Moran, Ambrose Akinmusire and Nicholas Payton, “an incredible trumpet player and musical conceptualist,” and “a thought leader and outspoken BAM (Black American Music) advocate.” He also teaches music at Prairie School, near Racine. How good is Breiwick teaching music? In 2013, he was nominated for the first-ever Grammy Music Educator Award, selected as one of 200 semi-finalists among over 30,000 nominees.

The cover of The Jewel: Live at the Dead Poet.

Shortly before the pandemic, Breiwick recorded The Jewel: Live at the Dead Poet, a New York trio recording on the leading independent label Ropeadope, with internationally acclaimed drummer-bandleader Matt Wilson, thus extending his national modern-jazz bona fides.

Breiwick plays a live date (here and in photo at top) with renowned drummer Matt Wilson and bassist John Tate.

Breiwick leaves popular success largely to his evolution and artistic authenticity.

“I think it is all in the delivery – people can tell if you are sincere or not. I try to create music and art that I would like myself and try not to be too corny or contrived, while at the same time recognizing my influences. What did Coltrane say? ‘You can play a shoestring if you are sincere,’ I think that is perfect.”

But he knows jazz musicians always need help in America’s capitalist society. Today they can increasingly help each other with online resources. In 2010, Breiwick co-founded Milwaukee Jazz Vision, an online organization that promotes jazz and its community in the Milwaukee area.

His visual-designer talents suggest deeper creative destinations. “It is a similar path of discovery. Visual art and music relate in so many ways – texture, structure, organization, color, tone. Five or six of my favorite designers are also musicians. There’s some sort of elemental connection between the two disciplines…Miles Davis was an incredible painter. Jean-Michel Basquiat deeply loved music and often used musical imagery or references such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie in his works.”

Perhaps his most daring recent recording is Solve for X, duets with a longtime collaborator. Guitarist-synthesist Jay Mollerskov took samples of Breiwick’s own trumpet solos, to create sonic counterpoints and textural backdrops for Breiwick to play against. It works like a musical mosaic – outward refracting, rather than narcissistic. That’s because Breiwick knows of whence he came, as a trumpeter and creator.

“I’m inspired by a lot of things, all sorts of music, visual art, architecture, history, stories, traveling,” he says. “I am just trying to better find out who I am, and ultimately just trying to keep moving forward.”

“Like (trumpeter) Clark Terry said, ‘Emulate, assimilate, innovate.’”

So, Breiwick’s self-discovery proceeds. As to forward progress, only time, his seemingly ever-expanding wave, will tell.

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This article was originally published in slightly shorter form in the May 2022 print magazine edition of The Shepherd Express, available free at many locations around Milwaukee County.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

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.

 

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick’s hungry brain cooks up another musical feast


He’s the father of four young children, an educator and jazz musician, but Jamie Breiwick is one artist who didn’t let the Pandemic slow him down. He’s about to release his third album in recent months, and more is right around the bend. And yet, it’s not nearly as repetitive as it might seem, as all three albums have different instrumentation, personnel and varying styles.

The Jamie Breiwick Trio presents a trio of album release events in Milwaukee and Chicago, this weekend.

The events highlight the new album The Jewel, recorded live at The Dead Poet in New York, with drummer Matt Wilson and bassist John Tate, and available to purchase at the events.

The first event is in Milwaukee at Blu, at the scenic top of The Pfister Hotel, 424 E. State Street, on Friday from 7 to 11 p.m. The second Milwaukee performance will be at Saint Kate — The Arts Hotel, 139 E. Kilbourne Ave., at 7 p.m. Saturday. 

The third event is at The Hungry Brain, 2319 Belmont Avenue, at 9 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 19, in Chicago.

Breiwick also released, in recent months, albums with his jazz-hip-hop trio KASE and and Duets with bassist Tim Ipsen, and with more coming soon. Quite clearly, this artist is eating up musical real estate right now like a hungry-brained monster.

The trio at Blu will be bassist John Tate, who recorded the album, and drummer Devin Drobka, one of Breiwick’s most gifted and loyal collaborators. Leading Milwaukee drummer Dave Bayles will perform at Saint Kate.

The trio at Hungry Brain will be all three recording participants including bassist Tate and acclaimed drummer-bandleader Matt Wilson.

Trumpeter Jamie Breiwick has demonstrated great versatility with recent recordings with his hip-hop jazz ensemble KASE (pictured above), the album “Duets” with bassist  Tim Ipsen, and the new album “The Jewel,” a straight-ahead collection with acclaimed drummer Matt Wilson, focusing on compositions by many jazz greats.  Courtesy OnMilwaukee.com Above photo by Brian Mir

Wilson is a prolific recording artist as a leader, with his latest album, Honey And Salt (Music Inspired By The Poetry Of Carl Sandburg), receiving a myriad of accolades. As an accompanist he’s recorded with, among many others, Charlie Haden, Wynton Marsalis, Pat Metheny, Andrew Hill, Bobby Hutcherson, Lee Konitz, Hank Jones, Frank Kimbrough, Larry Goldings. Anat Cohen, and Paul Bley.

This blogger (Kevin Lynch) had the honor of writing the liner notes to the recording, so I know how good the music is (I’ve also heard Breiwick’s Duets album and the one with KASE.).

At this point, the album, on Ropeadope Records, will be available at the events as download cards. Physical CDs will be available at a later date.

Breiwick’s new album is distinguished by one of the most diverse and fascinating collections of compositions by modern jazz composers in recent memory, including Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, Carla Bley, and longtime Milwaukee jazz star Buddy Montgomery. Breiwick added one original, the title tune, The Jewel. 

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