New Jazz & Blues – 3/22/2022
By Dave Rogers
New Jazz & Blues – 3/22/2022
New Jazz Adds:
Michael Bisio Quartet – MBefore (Tao Forms): “This Michael Bisio Quartet is a new kindred-spirit assembly featuring the veteran bassist alongside Mat Maneri (viola), Karl Berger (vibraphone) and Whit Dickey (drums). Their melodiously alluring debut album, MBefore, features the four virtuoso improvisers communing on a set of original compositions by Bisio & Berger, plus a free-minded take on the standard ‘I Fall in Love Too Easily’. Michael Bisio has earned just praise for his textured solo performances as well as collaborations with the likes of veteran multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee. But it’s perhaps his 13-year membership in the Matthew Shipp Trio that has earned him widest renown, having toured on both sides of the Atlantic along with recording numerous albums with the pianist. Cadence magazine marveled over the way Bisio’s playing ‘seems to be produced by sorcery.’ From the liner notes by Matthew Shipp: ‘Michael Bisio is one of the greatest bassists on the planet — but this album isn’t about his bass playing. It’s about his humanity. Bisio is a thoughtful group leader who has a knack for bringing the right people together and setting them up in such a way that they feel at one with the group dynamic.’ MBefore is about the ensemble and its collective consciousness — it’s about the group aesthetic, with the resulting sound having a transparent quality. With vibes and viola, there’s a sonic clarity, even a kind of sweetness. That clarity and transparency allows the contrapuntal quality of the music to be fully revealed — you can hear everyone’s lines at once, and the subtle harmonies created by the crossing of those individual lines. On that clarity and transparency… there’s no more compelling improviser on a stringed instrument than Mat Maneri, and his viola sings darkly with light throughout MBefore. As for Karl Berger — the illustrious octogenarian vibraphonist who brought two new compositions to this album as well — he remains profoundly on top of his game. Bisio has worked with him regularly since moving a decade ago from NYC up to Berger’s neck of the woods in the Hudson River Valley. As Shipp notes, Berger is ‘a master of space, a master of restraint, a master of melding his sound in the sonic ambient.’ TAO Forms is honored to present his very latest work as performer and composer here on MBefore.” “This is a banquet, a true feast. It was created by people who gave themselves over to the concept and reveled in the generation of beautiful sound.” (Matthew Shipp) Click here to listen to songs on this disc.
James Brown – Song Within The Story (NGP Records): “A decade is a long time between albums, and for Canadian jazz guitarist James Brown the wait has been well worthwhile. A prolific composer with a highly cohesive working trio, he’s spent his time honing the harmonically intricate material on Song Within the Story, a consistently engaging program that documents the next step in his ongoing synthesis of jazz and European classical music. This new album, his fourth, is the work of an artist who has found some intriguing answers to longstanding musical puzzles. Featuring bassist Clark Johnston and drummer Anthony Michelli, Brown’s trio has gained respect in recent years as one of Toronto’s top jazz combos. They’re joined on three tracks by renowned tenor saxophonist Mike Murley, whose improvisational prowess has been duly recognized over the past three decades via his contributions on 14 Juno Award-winning recordings (seven as a leader or co-leader and seven as a sideman).” Click here to listen to the songs on this disc.
Roxy Coss – disparate parts (Outside In Music): “In 2018, the Roxy Coss Quintet established its sound. Today, the band is evolving its concept. Disparate Parts (Outside in Music), the anticipated follow up to Coss’ acclaimed quintet release Quintet (2019), features familiar personnel in a brand new context: Coss on tenor and soprano saxophone, Alex Wintz on guitar, Miki Yamanaka on piano and keyboards, Rick Rosato on bass and Jimmy Macbride on drums. Known for their conversational expression, the artists approach fresh ideas with a sacred connection to their tradition-informed identity. Together, they navigate new harmony, rhythmic modulations and wildly diverse textures across 14 tracks of original music framing the impetus for the album: Coss’ four-movement suite, “The Body,” “The Mind,” “The Heart” and “The Spirit…The release of Disparate Parts reveals a new phase of Coss’ life and her creative expression, and puts forth layered, new concepts for her quintet to explore. “I’m still feeling this idea of having disparate parts of myself represented in different areas of my life, but it is even more prevalent now that I’m a new mom,” she says. “I’m exploring and expressing this idea through my music — especially in this particular moment.” (https://www.outsideinmusic.com/pressreleases/roxy-coss-disparate-parts) Click here to listen to Disparate Part 1: The Body.
The Grace Fox Big Band – Eleven O’ Seven (Next Level): “In the long history of jazz, it is rare for a teenage musician to establish a big band, let alone lead one. In fact (historians will have to verify this), it may never have happened. One thing is certain—no teenage woman has ever formed a big band and become its leader. Until now. Meet trumpeter Grace Fox, a nineteen-year-old student at the Manhattan School of Music, founder and leader of the seventeen-member, all-female Grace Fox Big Band, which has recorded and released (as of March 2022) its debut album, Eleven O’ Seven. To stock the band, Fox scanned social media to find musicians of various ages and backgrounds from across the USA. As role models for the ensemble’s vision, she used the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and the New York-based DIVA Jazz Orchestra. As composer and arranger, she employed the services of one Grace Fox. So, how did everything work out? The answer lies somewhere between pleasing and passable.” (https://www.allaboutjazz.com/eleven-o-seven-grace-fox-big-band-self-produced) Check it out for yourself.
Larry Goldings / Peter Bernstein / Bill Stewart – Perpetual Pendulum (Smoke Sessions Records): Larry Goldings is a Grammy-nominated pianist and composer. His organ trio with Peter Bernstein and Bill Stewart has been recognized in the New York Times as “the best organ trio of the last decade.” Goldings’ musical inspirations draw from a lifetime of absorbing jazz, pop, funk, R&B, electronic and classical music. As a performer and recording artist, he is known for long-term collaborations that straddle the realms of jazz and pop with such artists as Jim Hall, Maceo Parker, John Scofield, Steve Gadd, Jack DeJohnette, Pat Metheny, Michael Brecker, Sia Furler, John Mayer, and others. Goldings has been recording and touring with singer-songwriter James Taylor since 2001, and is the featured musician on Taylor’s One Man Band CD/DVD, the culmination of a two year world-wide tour with James and Larry in duet. In 2007, Scofield/Goldings/DeJohnette’s Trio Beyond – Saudades (ECM) was recognized with a Best Instrumental Jazz Album Grammy nomination for their searing live recording at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. Goldings’ music graces the soundtracks of many film and television projects. He contributed to the jazzy fabric of Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys and enhanced John Madden’s Proof and Judd Apatow’s Funny People with original compositions, as well as providing ghoulish organ music for “Lurch” to play in the animated film, The Addams Family. Goldings’ Nino Rota-inspired score to Jeff Garlin’s Dealin’ With Idiots is the backdrop to this hilarious film about the zany parents of a Little League baseball team. Listeners of NPR’s This American Life can hear Goldings’ music underscoring many of its dramatic stories. Larry scored the Netflix series, Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker, infusing the drama with shades of ragtime and early jazz, in combination with modern, back-beat oriented cues, in which early jazz meets hip-hop. The soundtrack has been released by Warner Bros. through Watertower Music.” (https://www.larrygoldings.com/#) Click here to check out a few samples.
Xose Miguelez – Contradictio (Origin): “Contradictio‘ feeds from tradition – evoking Galicia, Paris, New York – although it does not stop to search for limits but tries to reach for infinity. (From the Galicia region of Spain, saxophonist Xose Miguélez celebrated the traditional melodies of his family, viewed through a modern jazz lens, for the 2019 release Ontology. On Contradictio, Miguélez features the virtuosic French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc, and the music they’ve been developing together over the last several years with the Portugal-based rhythm team of bassist Carlos Barretto and drummer Marcos Cavaleiro. Together, they deliver prominently contemporary timbres within an organic classic jazz setting. Through a mixture of standards, originals by Miguélez, and a Pilc original dedicated to Galicia, the music unfolds with a spontaneity and life that inspires feelings of a live music experience.” (https://originarts.com/recordings/recording.php?TitleID=82842) Magnificent players! Click here to listen to samples.
Danilo Perez w/ The Global Messengers – Crisalida (Mack Avenue): “GRAMMY® Award-winning pianist, composer and educator Danilo Pérez hopes to usher in a new era of enlightenment that will unite all of humanity with his epic new album, Crisálida, which in English translates to “chrysalis.” Incorporating multiple artistic disciplines that include works from Panamanian painter Olga Sinclair, Panamanian photographer Tito Herrera, and spoken word from his Chilean wife and saxophonist Patricia Zárate, Crisálida is a holistic inter-disciplinary package that invites listeners to reimagine a world in which we all create our own crisálida so that our individual light and humanity radiates regardless of gender, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. And, in turn, we nurture that prismatic iridescence to better care for the environment and human race. “I envision Crisálida as a protected space where we all come together, whether we’re addressing immigration issues, climate change, environmental justice, science, interconnecting different art forms,” Pérez explains. “We need to work together to build our new crisálida, which, to me, is the emotional, mental and physical state of protection in our early development.”
Crisálida is composed of two engrossing suites on which he leads the Global Messengers, an intrepid new ensemble, consisting of alumni from Berklee College of Music’s Global Jazz Institute. Similar to Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra, which helped launched Pérez’s international career, the Global Messengers is a multicultural combo that features percussionist Tareq Rantisi (Palestine), laouto player Vasilis Kostas (Greece), violinist and vocalist Layth Sidiq (Iraq, Jordan), cellist Naseem Alatrash (Palestine) and singer Farayi Malek (United States). Guest appearing on several cuts are batá drummer Román Diaz (Cuba), Ney flutist Faris Ishaq (Palestine), Zárate (Chile), singer Eirini Tornesaki (Greece) and the Kalesma Children’s Choir of The Ark of the World (Kivotos tou Kosmou) (based in Greece). “These musicians are very interested in cultivating their gifts to become role models for the betterment of humanity. I love this openness of wanting to explore and connect,” says Pérez, who in addition to being the founder of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, is a UNESCO Artist for Peace, the Cultural Ambassador to the Republic of Panama, and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Panama Jazz Festival. “In the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, we talk a lot about finding new sounds through the blues and connecting to your roots – expanding the folkloric elements of where you come from,” he adds. “The Global Messengers are a new family that explores the power of music as a tool for inter-cultural dialogue.”(https://dlmediamusic.com/press-releases/danilo-perez-crisalida-mack-avenue-records/) Click here for the opening piece in these suites.
Diego Rivera – Mestizo (Positone): “With a stunning mixture of grace and power, tenor saxophonist Diego Rivera transcends cultural boundaries to deliver an emphatic message of intelligence and inclusivity on his 2022 release “Mestizo.” Critical listeners may appreciate these performances as a series of engaged discussions employing the repartee of context and contrast between the leading voices of the horns and the affectionate support and retort from their immaculate rhythm section of pianist Art Hirahara, bassist Boris Kozlov, and drummer Rudy Royston. This assemblage of bright moments is also admirably enhanced by the presence of trumpet phenomenon Alex Sipiagin, who joins Rivera as his front line aide-de-cam, providing musical offerings of incisive intensity that steadily serve to escalate the entire proceeding unto another level. Nonetheless, if we overly focus on the interplay of elements, then we risk missing out on the point of the dialogue and mistake the medium for the message. Rivera’s unmistakable talent as a songwriter is the real story, as he deftly transforms this dynamic quintet into a unified instrument and unleashes a powerful combination of swinging blasts juxtaposed with forays into the emotional parlance of subtle conversation. From the opening salvo to the last hurrah, the melodic message of “Mestizo” moves effortlessly straightforward and affirms that Rivera is a shining star of unlimited brilliance to keep an eye on for many years to come.” (https://diegorivera.bandcamp.com/album/mestizo) Click here to listen to the songs on this release.
Cecile McLorin Salvant – Ghost Song (Nonesuch): “Ghost Song features a diverse mix of seven originals and five interpretations on the themes of ghosts, nostalgia, and yearning. Salvant says, “It’s unlike anything I’ve done before—it’s getting closer to reflecting my personality as an eclectic curator. I’m embracing my weirdness!”
Ghost Song opens and ends with a sean-nós (traditional Irish unaccompanied vocal style) performance by Salvant, recorded in a church. On track one, she transitions into Kate Bush’s 1978 classic “Wuthering Heights.” Salvant says of the song, “Wuthering Heights is a book that really struck me to my core as I was making this album, during the pandemic. And the best interpretation of the novel is Kate Bush’s song.” She continues, “It’s the most classic ghost story. I decided I wanted to do an album called Ghost Song, and I knew that one had to be on it. Then I had the idea to mix it in with the sean-nós ‘Cúirt Bhaile Nua,’ which binds it to the traditional ‘Unquiet Grave,’ the last track on the album. The ghost is not haunting me; now I am haunting the ghost. They parallel each other so well and they’re such different time periods. I wanted the album to be a circle, with the sean-nós reference at the beginning and at the end. So it is the first track but it’s also the last track and it’s also the middle track, which is how I listen to music, walking around my neighborhood, on a plane, traveling somewhere, putting stuff on repeat.”
“All the songs on the album kind of mirror each other. I tried to create this strange symmetry. So as you go in from both ends, the songs are sort of matched together,” Salvant says. “‘I Lost my Mind’ is the center of the Russian doll. I wrote that in the middle of the pandemic. There were nights when I wanted to just scream. It was this deeper part of me saying, ‘It’s OK if this sounds completely crazy, OK to just go with the completely crazy thing and not worry if people think you have lost your mind for doing it.’
“The bands also mirror each other from top to bottom. In terms of the instrumentation, everything,” Salvant explains. “That’s why the songs are there in that relationship: they match each other, they’re like fraternal twins, or one is the evil twin of the other. I, as the living, am visited by the ghost, and then I go visit the ghost in turn. I am haunting the ghost and annoying the ghost, which is saying, ‘Get out of here and go live.’” Click here to listen to the songs on this disc.
Idit Shner & Mhondoro – Heat Wave (OA2): “Its name meaning “the lion spirit” in Shona, a language of Zimbabwe, MHONDORO has produced a powerful first album, full of joy and brimming with the force of life. Melding traditional Zimbabwean music, American jazz, and an unmistakable dose of the Pacific Northwest, Heat Wave celebrates the culmination of its diverse roots. Born during the pandemic as Israeli saxophonist Idit Shner, Zimbabwean vocalist & percussionist John Mambira, and the Oregon-bred rhythm section of pianist Torrey Newhart, bassist Garrett Baxter, and drummer Ken Mastrogiovanni formed a “parent pod” to allow their children to attend virtual school together while the parents jammed in the living room. Realizing that put together, the music created was both global and hyper-local—truly American, in the best sense of the word—it provided a thrilling artistic escape from the times and exciting possibilities for the future.” (https://www.hbclub.org/3137953001-idit-shner-amp-mhondoro-heat-wave-2022.html) Click here to listen to the songs on this disc.
Katriona Taylor – Blind Passion (Self-produced): “Katriona Taylor’s album “Blind Passion”, in which she celebrates the music of blind artists such as Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Diane Schuur and José Feliciano, is such a wonderful project. With her top-flight band she has made a real success of it.” Sebastian Scotney – Editor, London Jazz News Blind Passion features: Katriona Taylor (vocals), Vasilis Xenopoulos (tenor & soprano saxes, flute), Robin Banerjee (guitar), Dominic Ashworth (Spanish guitar), John Crawford (piano, percussion), Peter Hammond (piano, electric piano, Hammond organ), Dave Jones (bass) and Chris Nickolls (drums). Blind Passion is Katriona Taylor’s fifth album to date, available here and released on all digital platforms and on CD through Cadiz Music & Digital Ltd. Visually impaired all her life, singer/songwriter Katriona celebrates the music associated with blind artists, such as Stevie Wonder, José Feliciano, Diane Schuur and Ray Charles, as well as some of her own original songs. This superb album is a blend of Jazz, Latin & Soul, for which Jools Holland has kindly contributed one of his own songs. Katriona has performed with the likes of George Benson and The James Taylor Quartet and her silky smooth vocals compliment her outstanding arrangements. The album features an array of the UK music industry’s finest musicians.” (https://www.katrionataylor.com/product/blind-passion/) Click here to listen to Taylor’s songs.
Skip Walker – Tina’s Contemplation (Self-produced): Drummer Skip Walker offers “A Reflection on the Genius of Tina Brooks” with backing by Travis Shook and Essiet Okon Essiet offering four songs from Brooks and two of his own with a wonderful performance. Click here to listen to a sample of a song from this set.
New Blues:
Bob Corritore & Friends – Down Home Blues Revue (Swmaf.org): Blues produced by Bob Corritore, Clarke Rigsby and John Wroble between 1995 and 2012 with players like T-Model Ford, Henry Townsend, Smokey Wilson, Honeyboy Edwards and Bob Corritore among others offering the straight ahead electric blues. Click here to listen to samples of the straight-down blues.
Mike Guldin – Tumblin’ (Blue Heart Records): “Two-time International Blues Challenge competitor and Bucks County, PA’s master of the “butt shakin'” blues, Mike Guldin presents his latest opus, Tumblin’. A collection of 13 diverse originals penned by Guldin and project partner Bill Sharrow, prominent metro Philadelphia area musicians Mikey Jr, Roger Girke, Will Hodgson, Craig Thatcher, and Kevin Vannoy also add their talents as co writers. Special guests include Kevin McKendree, James Pennebaker and Lewis Stephens.” (https://mikeguldin.com/music) Click here to listen songs on this set.
Trudy Lynn – Golden Girl (Nola Blue Records): “Houston’s living blues legend, Ms. Trudy Lynn, heralds her 75th birthday with the aptly titled Golden Girl, derived from the self-penned track, “Golden Girl Blues.” Producer Terry Wilson (Teresa James & The Rhythm Tramps) enlisted noted musicians including Grammy winning Kevin McKendree (keyboards) and Brannen Temple (drums, percussion) to bring fresh arrangements to life for Lynn’s soulful sound. The blues legacy of The Lone Star State is masterfully advanced in this collection of musical gold.” (https://trudylynn.bandcamp.com/album/golden-girl) One of the greatest blues and soul singers of all time! This set is a certified Professor Bebop “Wax Devoid of Cracks”! Click here to listen to the solid sound of Trudy Lynn!
Tom Principato – It’s Tele Time! (Powerhouse): “I have never thought of myself in the same category as Roy and Danny–these guys were my heroes, and through them I heard the playing of some of my other heroes like Les Paul, Chet Atkins, Roy Nichols, Charlie Christian and James Burton. And although I have played different models of Fender and Gibson guitars over the years, (Roy and Danny didn’t always play a Telecaster either), I have always thought of myself in my own way, as being part of the “Washington D.C. Telecaster tradition”. I always brought more than one guitar on a tour or to a concert, and one of them was usually a Telecaster. There would be a part of the show where I would strap on a Telecaster, joke about “it’s Tele time!” and “unleashing the chickens”, and for a part of the night everything that I learned or absorbed from Roy and Danny would come pouring out., and is shown here in a collection of live performances…
(Tom Principato) Dedicated to Danny Gatton from Tom Principato.
Richard Wilkins – Life’s For Livin’ (Self-produced): “Portland, Oregon blues singer/songwriter, bass guitar/tenor sax player. Richard Wilkins has been performing and recording most of his life. Starting back in San Francisco in 1967 to New York City in 1969 than Los Angeles, Orange County, and now to the Portland< Oregon area.” Click here to listen to the songs on this release.
Kopacetically,
Professor Bebop
