Rolling Jazz Thread 2024

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 Three years later, they reconvened for From Untruth, but Lopez had been replaced by Nick Dunston and both Kidambi and Nelson were playing synths, while Jaffe had added electronic percussion to his toolkit.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”.

Try Nout's Live Album:

https://gigantonium.bandcamp.com/album/nout-live-album

Flute, electric harp fed through a shitload of pedals, drums. Mats Gustafsson guests on three tracks.

an almost Christgau-ian reduction of its virtues: its politics are right on, therefore it's a good record

that's not even remotely what piotr/dada strain is saying.

You're right Cuz. Piotr/Dada Strain clearly hailed the music first - and mentioned the politics last.

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”.

thanks for the Nout suggestion, unperson

like, the Konjur Collective record from 2022 is more what I think of when I think of recent “jazz punk,” but that’s more because it is raw as fuck, not because it has much “rock “ in it

another shout for Black Classical music - thanks to upper mississippi sh@kedown for the rec! never heard anything like this

My latest Stereogum column is out — I interviewed alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and reviewed 10 great new albums, including some by artists I've hated in the past (Kurt Rosenwinkel).

Nice, I'm extremely psyched about the Rosenwinkel album.

I was shocked by how much I liked it. Apparently Rosenwinkel played Smalls every Tuesday night for eight years(!) back in the 90s/early 00s.

TT 422: Ornette, Dewey, Charlie, Blackwell
video from 1971 surfaces at last
ETHAN IVERSON
Aug 07, 2024

A tantalizing excerpt of this concert was seen in the Charlie Haden documentary Ramblin’ Boy. Now 44 minutes of this Berlin concert is finally on YouTube.

xps I enjoyed that live album too. I alluded to this in another thread, but per Rosenwinkel, his wife gave him the idea to reunite the quartet that recorded The Next Step and do a celebratory world tour this year. Not sure if she was inspired by pre-existing plans to release the live album or if her suggestion inspired them to release that recording, but regardless, they kicked off the tour in May with a weeklong residency at the Village Vanguard.

Truth be told, I never heard his records before, but a friend got excited when he saw Rosenwinkel was playing, and after he told me he was his favorite guitarist, I picked up a CD of The Next Step to see if I'd be interested. The answer was a resounding yes and I even brought it along and got all four members to sign it. Coincidentally, I just got back from Korea and the group made their latest stop in Seoul right before I was scheduled to fly back - I thought it would be amusing to show up and see if they'd remember me ("are you following us around the world?") but my partner was set on us having dinner elsewhere. I haven't explored his later albums yet, but hearing that he could be "more showy than emotional" does make me wince - would be massively disappointing to hear him go in that direction over the 20+ years since The Next Step. Maybe it's something to do with that album and how he conceived the music, but when I saw him at the Vanguard, he actually played with great discipline and restraint, leaving most of the pyrotechnics to Mark Turner (who was pretty amazing - they all were).

On another note, I've been listening to a lot of Woody Shaw lately, and I didn't realize what had happened to him. I think the subway station where he had his tragic accident is DeKalb, which I've been to many times (and regularly pass through to see a friend nearby). It's going to feel pretty chilling the next time I walk down that platform.

xpost first listen to Ornette show: perfect audio and even video, even on sub-sub audiophile cans x elderly win 7 laptop---fro Iverson's always cogent comments:

Ornette is about drive and forward motion. This whole wonderful concert offers a headlong tumble of melody and blues. To state the exceptionally obvious, this quartet is also a collective of unique personalities...The band is loud. They couldn’t play this way in a jazz club. However, the expanded dynamic range of a concert hall suits the naturally epic music of Ornette Coleman. (This unlike bebop or hard-bop, two genres that are almost always best-suited to a close and contained environment.)

On “Whom Do You Work For?,” “Street Woman,” and “Happy House,” the melodies are catchy, the improvisations are robust, and the swing undeniable. There are no preset chord changes, it is up to Haden to harmonize the sax solos with pedal points or walking. Ed Blackwell delivers his peerless uptempo jazz drumming; Max Roach meets NOLA parade.

Ornette is about drive and forward motion. This whole wonderful concert offers a headlong tumble of melody and blues. To state the exceptionally obvious, this quartet is also a collective of unique personalities...The band is loud. They couldn’t play this way in a jazz club.

All this was equally true of the Carnegie Hall show I saw in 2003 (with Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen on bass, and Denardo Coleman on drums). Ornette's trademark melodies delivered at punk-rock tempos, and the drums were behind a wall of plexiglas to keep him from being the only thing you could hear.

Very cool---and I just now saw this on Ethan's blog:

author
ETHAN IVERSON
21 hrs ago
Author

I first wrote above that this was the only video of Ornette with another horn that I knew about. Ted Panken let me know about a Barcelona set with Cherry, Haden, and Billy Higgins from 1987

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPLLhF84SZg

xp unperson I was at that show too!

It was fucking wild, wasn't it? It was like he'd listened to John Zorn's Spy Vs. Spy and thought, "Shit, I'll show him something..."

Yeah it was punk as fuck.

Ethan Iverson just published a really good essay on a school of musicians making what Vijay Iyer has apparently dubbed the "New Brooklyn Complexity" — Matt Mitchell, Anna Webber, Miles Okazaki, Kim Cass and others. I've reviewed albums by Mitchell, Webber, Cass and others in their group in the past, and have made some of the same connections Iverson does (tracing it back to Tim Berne and Steve Coleman — Iyer himself was in Coleman's band at one point), but I can't even read music, so obviously there are things I can't talk about that he can, and he does it while leaving his usual small-c aesthetic conservatism to the side and taking the work on its own terms, something Stanley Crouch would never have been able to do. Definitely recommended reading.

xxxpost Barcelona, yow (did they go check out all the Gaudi? Music fits right in): mix is erratic at first, sometimes almost all in left channel, but bass & drums, especially, maintain throughline-expressway. For me, Haden often sounds like the lead player/most consistently compelling here, but no showboating, just surging along in a crisply defined fullness, with occasional solos part of the call-and-responsive flow. Pretty much a Coleman-Higgins duo in there eventually, and grand finale is Higgins solo w occasional punctuation etc. from others. Was hoping for pocket trumpet and regular trumpet together, but no. Cherry's solos are pretty quiet, and could be because pocket t. in that room, though also looks kinda haggard in long shots. Very strong overall, duh.

Ornette Coleman & Prime Time w Pat Metheny, Montreal, 1988:
Like the Barcelona recording, this opens w odd sound: here, Ornette seems down in the mix, with busy guitar pickers way up front--mainly seeing and seems like hearing guests Chuck Rosenberg and Ken Wessell, although Ellerbee and Nix are in credits at end of this apparently pro-shot set---Badal Roy sounds like he's playing glass blows more than tabla. also loudly(he's not that noticeable later, okay by me)--but Ornette pushes, effectively acid, sand in the craw. Then Denardo goes to a backbeat. Ornette drolly leads. and this is "Bourgeois Boogie," I think. Good, and then Metheny appears, fits perfectly with Ornette, who eventually I could swear has switched to violin, but no, he's just standing there listening to PM--who comes back later for that Skies of America, Dancing In Your Head theme: he and other guitarists decorating the margins while alto, bass and drums rule, also Metheny's solo seems predictable, but Ornette takes whole thing toward delirium---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exla6Yi7OnI

playing glass bowls, I meant.

Ornette Coleman & Prime Time, Live in Palalido, 1980:
Opener is ok, not compelling, then thick veins ov fever spread around that xpost theme, as mainteined by blithe spirit Ornette--drum duets help make porous doubled visions into a hellish "Sing Sing Sing" from Sing Sing--them more stuff happens (have I gotten too spoilery before?)

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

Really strong release, great melodies (composed by the bassist). Matt Gold on guitar, Tony Barba on saxophone, don't know the drummer but he's great.
https://shiftingparadigmrecords.bandcamp.com/album/soft-rock

really liking Malcolm Jiyane Tree-O's album True Story

His album from 2022 is dope too. Maybe I should put this in South African jazz thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enULchNtTt4-

Tyshawn Sorey's trio with pianist Aaron Diehl and bassist Harish Raghavan has a new disc, The Susceptible Now, coming out October 11. Four long (the shortest is 15:22, the longest 26:07) versions of other people's tunes: McCoy Tyner's "Peresina," Charles Mingus and Joni Mitchell's "A Chair in the Sky," Brad Mehldau's "Bealtine," and "Your Good Lies," a soul song by the group Vividry. I like this trio a lot so I'll definitely be buying a physical copy of this.

Man, Charlie Haden on that Ornette video above. That got me to listen to all of the Old & New Dreams, which are fantastic.

I'm so fucking tired of this shit. I tried listening to Bill Charlap's new album tonight and made it halfway through the second track before bailing. Here's the track listing for a live piano trio album on Blue Note in 2024:

1. And Then Again (an original song, if you can call a generic blues theme original)
2. All the Things You Are
3. Round Midnight
4. In Your Own Sweet Way
5. Darn That Dream
6. Sometimes I'm Happy
7. The Man I Love
8. I Don't Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You

For fuck's sake. Write your own music or just fuck off. You want to include ONE standard in your set, because it's a song you absolutely love? Fine. But entire albums of standards can go straight in the fucking dumpster out back.

🤔

of course you realize the very history of jazz is built on so-called standards

Those songs were new then, and traditions change. Like not many rock bands are recording Chuck Berry covers this year.

of course you realize the very history of jazz is built on so-called standards

WHAT? REALLY? I've never heard anything about this! Say more, please!

You’ve never said anything before yourself about your feelings with regard to this topic. Do go on, please.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1xvz50JtGUQdYuJLBMKA13

I listen to this on shuffle sometimes, good stuff

You want to include ONE standard in your set, because it's a song you absolutely love? Fine. But entire albums of standards can go straight in the fucking dumpster out back

Whoops, don't tell Anthony Braxton.

this is great! totally stealing this CD from my dad...

https://i.discogs.com/RSwtqqBnWi3KjJkcmTWinBRxOLw2QR62ZgjAuUFf4Jk/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:595/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTQwNTE4/MjgtMTYzNjkzNzI3/MS03Nzg1LmpwZWc.jpeg

My latest Stereogum column is up. I interviewed author Mike Smith about his new book In With The In Crowd: Popular Jazz In 1960s Black America, which is one of the best jazz books I've read in forever, and then I wrote about a bunch of new records, including the Wayne Shorter posthumous live album which contains all the virtues and flaws of his quartet's work.

i'm also confused by the anti-standards stance— what did you make of the Sorey records of a few years ago? to my mind they were some of the best records of the year, tho I know you don't like Osby.