Rolling Jazz Thread 2024

I think “Fire” was filmed by the Met for its Live In HD Program so it may rerun at a movie theater near you or a DVD come out.

I would have gone but I saw Marc-Andre Hamelin play at the Library of Congress last night doing Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, an essential trip for me.

Not particularly interested in the opera but I've enjoyed Blanchard's last couple of albums with his group.

I wrote about the new Tomeka Reid Quartet album in this week's Burning Ambulance newsletter.

"I like in and out."

me too! lol

I interviewed Kamasi Washington for Stereogum. I love the fact that the longest section of this interview is him talking about working with Gerald Wilson.

Nice.

I don't know if I've ever seen this much effort put into a video by a jazz (adjacent) group:

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

All my Bandcamp purchases today are old albums from the 80s on Italian jazz labels:

Hamiet Bluiett, Resolution
Baikida Carroll, Shadows And Reflections
Billy Harper, Black Saint and In Europe
Beaver Harris, Beautiful Africa
The Leaders, Unforeseen Blessings
Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Peace And Blessings
Dannie Richmond, Dionysus
Woody Shaw, Time Is Right

not from this year but i'm digging pianist Rodney Franklin's album In the Center. i had never heard of him. sounds like he veered pretty quickly to smooth jazz, but this album, his first, is really cool and varied. most of it would fit well with late 70s soul jazz like lonnie liston smith - some disco-funk, one with vocals, a couple spiritual jams. the closer, "life moves on" is a killer

Does Tomeka Reid still live in DC? Had no idea she released something on Cuneiform.

I saw Reid a couple weeks ago doing a great composed tribute to Duke Ellington at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater.
Right now I’m in Brooklyn at the Long Play festival and saw a fantastic set by Darius Jones doing his Fluxtet music. He killed it was so great. At the end he did some Pentecostal vocalizations over a string ostinato. Very moving.

Having dinner right next to Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey

!

Incredible interview with Charles Gayle from a Buffalo, NY newspaper in 1970(!). Reveals more about his early life than I ever knew before. I wonder if the tapes he talks about are still in the ESP archives?

RE: Laubrock/Rainey, I was in Brooklyn for Bang On A Can's Long Play Festival, where both were on the bill: Rainey in the DoYeon Kim Quartet and Laubrock had written a string quartet that was premiered there. Great festival, a smaller more manageable Big Ears in a cooler city (Sorry, Knoxville).

I kicked off this month's Stereogum column with a deep dive into the history of Last Exit (Bill Laswell's jazz-metal improv band featuring Peter Brötzmann, Sonny Sharrock, and Ronald Shannon Jackson), since their catalog has basically doubled in size in the last couple of years thanks to a half dozen live recordings he's put up on Bandcamp for subscribers. Lots of great albums reviewed, too.

Reid is Chicago-based but moving around a lot due to visiting professorships and touring. I'd love to hear the Ellington material and also the expanded Stringtet. 3x3 is absolutely superb.

Finally got to the new Charles Lloyd, wow it's great. Listened to it twice straight through.

Some Charles Lloyd videos available here from 1994 at the North Sea Jazz Festival. They seem to be opening up their archive. There's also a great video of Joe Henderson playing "Recorda-me" from the same year, but it's cut off when the bass solo starts. The entire playlist is being updated regularly.

First listen of Ghosted II (Ambarchi / Berthling / Werliin): long and drifting percussive pieces, pleasant reverie, Afro-jazz style bass and fuzzy keyboards, some pulse but could have more, the two pieces after the first are more peaceful and astral, the fourth is some kind of synthesis. Not particularly going anywhere but still good headphone music.

This new Charles Lloyd is probably my favourite since 'Canto'

The new Nubya Garcia album, Odyssey, is being announced tomorrow. It comes out September 20. It features strings and a few guests including Georgia Anne Muldrow and esperanza spalding, and I have to say after listening to it once or twice that it sounds astonishingly like Kamasi Washington's music. But not what he's doing now, with the synths and stuff; this sounds like rehashed The Epic, minus the choir. Even Garcia's playing is simpler, more KW and less Dexter Gordon than it used to be. I get it; she's toured opening for Khruangbin and now she wants to move into those big rooms on her own, and this is a legit way to aim for that kind of crossover success. But it's surprisingly blatant.

Okay, so I'm playing that Beings album I mentioned upthread (Zoh Amba, Jim White, Steve Gunn, Shahzad Ismaily) and it is fantastic, I love this.

Agree, it's very good

The Wire has published an excerpt from my upcoming Cecil Taylor book, all about the making of the Dewey Redman/Cecil Taylor/Elvin Jones album Momentum Space. Includes stories of Taylor being a manic cokehead and a catty bitch. Here's the link — enjoy!

I got to imagine the hardest part of writing a book on Cecil is choosing which manic cokehead/catty bitch stories to tell

Is there going to be a US distributor for the book or will I have to mail order it from Germany?

Working on that now — Wolke doesn't currently have a US distributor. I will have 20 contributors' copies, though, some of which I will absolutely sell to people.

Loved that excerpt, lol. Will definitely need to hear that album, and congrats again on the book.

Currently into Molly Miller Trio - The Ballad of Hotspur, fantastic L.A. guitar record with Jay Bellerose on drums. Folky & spaghetti western-y at times, recommended if you were into the recent Jeff Parker or Dave Easley records with Bellerose.

Previous records are great too! Also very Ribot-esque at times.

It's a cliche but every L.A. jazz record seems like it could be part of a movie soundtrack.

really annoying to hear him knock dewey redman like that

(many xps)

i'm guessing eye rolls abound throughout the book

still excited to read it

Really enjoying this new live record by Johannes Enders (Tied + Tickled Trio, German saxophonist, beautiful sound), Renato Chicco (organ player I'm not familiar with), and Jorge Rossy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkuNIiQO5v8

My latest Stereogum column is up. I interviewed Nasheet Waits, and reviewed albums by Julius Rodriguez, Nduduzo Makhathini, the Jihye Lee Orchestra, and a bunch of other folks, including that incredible archival Charles Gayle/William Parker/Milford Graves live set.

Will have to check out Nasheet, he's incredible and mysterious of course. Mark Turner's Dharma Days is a big Nasheet album for me.

That William Parker/Cooper-Moore/Hamid Drake preview track rules.

(I mean the Nasheet Waits solo album)

Love Nasheet Waits, not mentioned in the piece but he's great in McBride's New Jawn band

Yeah, those New Jawn records are great — we talked about that, and how it shows a whole different side of McBride, but there wasn't space.

I have no idea that McBride could or would go that hard until their Tiny Desk set

Huh, it wasn't surprising to me! He's always had some out stuff on his records and can clearly do it all/is interested in it all, but maybe he gets pigeonholed as a traditionalist?

Yeah, he absolutely does get pigeonholed that way, including by me. And I mean, I should know better — the only time I ever saw him live was at Sonny Rollins' 80th birthday concert, where he held it down with Rollins, Roy Haynes, and Ornette. But I still think of him as basically a really good swinging bassist, not someone with a real interest in the fringes. The guy I always think of as a real can-do-anything type is Eric Revis, who's been in Branford Marsalis's band for twenty-plus years but also worked with Brötzmann, is in Tarbaby, has done some really wild shit on his own records, etc., etc.

i really like christian mcbride

Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music is pretty incredible

Yeah I was surprised that didn’t get any votes in the year end poll, I half expected a whole thread about it. It’s really good.

Piotr Orlov in his Dada Strain substack says :

Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, New Monuments (We Jazz) - 2024’s best punk-jazz album is also its best prog-jazz album, and its most unabashed political jazz album

It's a good record but that's an almost Christgau-ian reduction of its virtues: its politics are right on, therefore it's a good record. Here's what I said when I reviewed it for The Wire:

Vocalist and keyboardist Amirtha Kidambi formed Elder Ones in 2016. The first lineup, heard on Holy Science, featured saxophonist Matt Nelson, bassist Brandon Lopez, and drummer Max Jaffe. Three years later, they reconvened for From Untruth, but Lopez had been replaced by Nick Dunston and both Kidambi and Nelson were playing synths, while Jaffe had added electronic percussion to his toolkit. The biggest change, though, was in the vocals. On Holy Science, Kidambi had embraced wordless abstraction, inspired by her work with Darius Jones on his album The Oversoul Manual, but now she was writing lyrics explicitly — even stridently — concerned with “issues of power, oppression, capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, violence and the shifting nature of truth.”

The third Elder Ones album continues down this path of avant-chamber-jazz agitprop. Each release to date has contained just four long compositions, lasting between eight and 20
minutes, with Kidambi establishing a foundation on harmonium and occasionally synth, as the other players whirl around her like a leaf storm. The lineup has been almost entirely revamped since 2019, though; Nelson and Kidambi are the only constants, now joined by cellist Lester St. Louis, bassist Eva Lawitts, and drummer Jason Nazary. As a consequence, the new music has a deep, pulsing groove that strongly recalls the late jaimie branch’s Fly Or Die ensemble (in which St. Louis also played). On the title track, Nelson does some spiritual-jazz soloing, and St. Louis and Lawitts deliver a dark, unnerving bowed duo. Kidambi’s vocals embrace a punk-rock desperation one moment, Carnatic wailing with echoes of Diamanda Gálas the next, but always displaying exquisite control. Her lyrics are deeply felt meditations on bias, violence, and those written out of conventional history, but it’s the wordless and instrumental ecstasy that will keep listeners returning to this album over and over.

Question: so let’s say I dig the weird noise gurgling and sax of JD Allen’s “THIS” from last year, but honestly really can’t get into any of these “jazz-punk” records that have been coming out. What’s coming out that’s more like the former and less like the Messthetics with JBL stuff.

I like JBL a lot and was disappointed that the Messthetics record (and their live performances) weren’t jammy/improvisatory as I would have liked. More rather “rock with sax”.