Branford Marsalis, Crazy People Music

Summing up where Branford had been and pointing to where he was headed.

Album of the Week, May 31, 2025

Around the recordings of Random Abstract and Trio Jeepy, Branford had been busy flirting with Hollywood—albeit a very specific version of it. He made a memorable appearance as one of Laurence Fishburn’s Greek-baiting fellas in Spike Lee’s School Daze, and played on the soundtracks of Lee’s Do the Right Thing. He also played saxophone on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” recorded for the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing. But he didn’t leave serious jazz alone, and by January 1990 he was entering the studio for the first of what would eventually be three recording sessions for Crazy People Music.

I remember the day in the summer of 1990 that I picked up this album. I had just gotten my first personal CD player (a Sony CD plus cassette combo that served through most of my undergraduate years), and headed to the local independent music store in my neighborhood of Denbigh. I hadn’t ever really bought much jazz music before, though I had listened to some, but after …Nothing Like the Sun I was curious. A small step of curiosity that led me to a lifetime of jazz listening, for which I am grateful.

Of note, that purchase was not the LP above. I bought my copy of Branford’s Crazy People Music on CD, as I purchased all my music back then. I valued the convenience and low noise level, and perceived higher audio resolution more than the readability of liner notes or analog warmth of the vinyl format. I was not alone, of course; by 1990, fewer and fewer releases were appearing on vinyl. Crazy People Music only received a vinyl release in Europe (my copy is a promo).

In contrast to our last few releases, note the graphic design on the album cover; rather than positioning the album as an affluent luxury product, there’s at least an attempt to make the music seem more contemporary. As played by this quartet, which featured Kenny Kirkland and Jeff “Tain” Watts returning on piano and drums and bassist Robert Hurst joining from Wynton’s band, the music certainly was more playful and risk-taking, even if the sequencing was familiar. In some ways Crazy People Music feels like a summing up of Branford’s work to that date, to the point that you can call out the analogue to several of the tracks from a prior release.

“Spartacus” is a Branford Marsalis composition, but its modified blues form and chord progressions hearken back to Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” as recorded by the quartet on Random Abstract. Both songs feature a twelve-bar blues structure in which the tenor sax makes a statement, followed by a held note while the piano comps, all over four bars; this is repeated with a different base chord, and then the cycle comes back with a more complex tenor statement in the final bars. In the case of “Yes or No,” the initial statement is a complex sixteenth-note pattern, but in “Spartacus,” it’s just three descending eighth notes, the melody stripped down to the basics. (Aside: Branford’s melodies seem increasingly to hew toward the simple and unfussy, a trend that started with his “Housed from Edward” on Trio Jeepy.) After the initial 12-bar head, he jumps immediately into a solo over Bob Hurst’s running bass line, with eruptions from Tain and bursts of chords from Kenny Kirkland keeping things moving along. Throughout the solo he plays with both the melody and with the rhythmic patterns he uses to express it, changing things up frequently. Kenny’s solos are always notable for his combination of harmonic complexity and aggressive melodic lines, and this one is no exception. When Branford comes back on the head, again we hear it just once, and then the band swings into a coda characterized by a syncopated two-note pattern in the piano over which the band solos until finally everyone locks into place on the two-note vamp at the end, followed by a fade into a six-note melodic fragment from the saxophone on a suspension, leading us directly into…

“The Dark Knight.” I have to confess that as a young recently-employed comic book store clerk I was thrilled with the evidence that Branford and his band were reading the good stuff. This Bob Hurst tune explores the moody darkness with a repeating bass line that is worthy of some of the best from Jimmy Garrison or Paul Chambers and a series of misty chord changes. The overall effect is a little like “Crescent,” and Branford appropriately blows some sheets of sound across his solo. But my favorite part of “The Dark Knight” is probably a toss up between Kenny’s piano solo, in which we get both his best McCoy Tyner impersonation and his distinctive chord voicings, and Hurst’s bass solo, which explores the tune’s harmonic corners before falling back into the bass line to signal the recapitulation. The band cooks on the recap, then plays out into a coda that seems to fade away into the night. Who was that masked man, anyway?

We get a different type of comic-book flavor on “Wolverine,” which is structurally reminiscent of “Broadway Fools” from Random Abstract and has the same happy-go-lucky soprano sax wandering-down-the-boulevard feeling, until the inevitable fight breaks out, here sketched as an explosion of free playing that gives Tain a place to stretch out. But where “Broadway Fools” was tightly swung, this one has a little more of a feeling of rhythmic freedom, truer to the Ornette Coleman conception in many ways. Kenny finds some joyous church amid some fairly abstract playing throughout his solo. The final recap of the head threatens to spiral out of control, with players shouting at each other and even with a sneaky overdubbed second saxophone line at the very end, before the berserker is caged once more. There’s a final recapitulation ending with a blown harmonic, hinting that the wildness isn’t gone.

“Mr. Steepee,” a play on Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.,” is effectively a rearrangement of the Trane number filtered through Kenny Kirkland’s McCoy Tyner-influenced harmonic sensibility. Which is to say, it’s played brilliantly, briskly (at a touch over six minutes long, it’s the second shortest track on the album!), and reverently. And then there’s the outro, in which Bob Hurst plays a few familiar Jimmy Garrison inspired bass notes, only to have Branford lean in and say, “Uh, no, Bob, that’s the next album.” Ironically, this quartet never quite did a full version of A Love Supreme, though they did record some of the music; Branford wouldn’t revisit the Coltrane work in earnest until his 2002 release Footsteps of Our Fathers, with a later incarnation of his quartet.

Instead, the band segues into “Rose Petals.” Occupying the same position on this album as “Lonely Woman” did on Random Abstract, while the earlier recording was Ornette Coleman played in the Keith Jarrett European Quartet style, this is a full on Keith Jarrett American Quartet cover, featuring a work that originally appeared on his 1976 Impulse! album Shades. The playing is romantic, full of rubato and grand pauses and big rolls on the drums and cymbals, but also the quiet romanticism of Kenny Kirkland’s Chopin-inspired classicism. It’s gorgeous and to my ears more successful than the earlier record’s romanticism. It sounds more lived-in and organic, less an imitation and more an homage.

The gear shift into “Random Abstract (Diddle-It),” a full quartet rendition of the earlier “Tain’s Rampage” from Trio Jeepy, puts more of its scamper in the piano, though there’s plenty of burnout happening in the saxophone as well. Indeed, all four musicians seem to be exploring at once, with Branford alternating between fierce sheets of sound and romantic tails of melody, while Kenny appears to be in the throes of a Shostakovich piano sonata. With a cry the musicians seem to head over the cliff…

… and into “The Ballad of Chet Kincaid,” a rearrangement of Quincy Jones’ classic funk theme for the first Bill Cosby Show, “Hikky-Burr.” This version is less bonkers, thanks largely to the absence of Cosby’s insane voice-over, but retains much of the fun, albeit with the funk bass replaced with a more conventional walk and with Kenny’s distinctive post-Tyner keys keeping it firmly modal even as it keeps things moving along. It’s a great cover, playful and joyful but also seriously listenable. There’s even a section or two where the band swing into full funk mode, Branford’s pop sensibility shining through and seamlessly shifting back to post-bop. A “Whoo Lord! Hikky-burr!” wraps up the proceedings.

I could have picked a worse album with which to start my journey into jazz. Crazy People Music is melodic, searching, and extroverted. It’s also just plain fun. It doesn’t exude the level of seriousness that a Wynton album from the period did, but that’s OK. Branford could play that game too, and we’ll hear one of those albums soon. But next week we’ll hear another musician from the Marsalis brothers’ orbit get very serious—and playful—indeed.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Kenny Kirkland played with Branford, off and on, for the rest of his life, following him to the Tonight Show and playing on his other ventures (one of which we’ll hear in a few months). Here’s the quartet, with Eric Revis sitting in the bass chair alongside Kenny and Tain, in Basel in 1998 playing a monumental version of “Spartacus”:

BONUS BONUS: This particular configuration of the Quartet didn’t make a ton of recordings, but it’s pretty well documented live. Here’s an hour-plus set from Munich just after the album was released, playing a bunch of tunes from Crazy Pe0ple Music along with some treats from earlier albums.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: In between the hint about A Love Supreme at the end of “Mister Steepee” and the 2002 recording with the later trio, we did get a Branford version of the composition, but in abbreviated suite form, and not on his own record. The brilliant jazz + hip-hop AIDS benefit compilation Red Hot + Cool had a second CD enclosed which featured Alice Coltrane’s hallucinatory 1971 take on the great work, and this 18 minute long condensation of the suite:

When the notifications stop

I used to use this blog as my backup brain for all sorts of things, a practice I’d gotten away from, but this one feels like it needs memorializing: what to do when the notifications stop coming on a modern (Sequoia-era) Mac, or when the widgets don’t show there.

I noticed a while ago that I could no longer quickly bring up the sidebar, which I use regularly to peek at the calendar, and that I wasn’t getting notifications showing up any more, but I couldn’t figure out why, only that there was probably some preference file corrupted somewhere. This morning I found the trick, or more specifically, where all the preference files live. Turns out that if you remove all files and directories from this folder it does the trick:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.UserNotifications/Library/UserNotifications/Remote/default

Hat tip to Reddit for finding the right directory.

(On a general note, the good news is that there are several cases on the Mac where clearing the application state and letting the Mac rebuild it just works, and the application state is almost always saved somewhere in the Library. The bad news is that there is definitely some fragility that caused the problem in the first place and I don’t know what it is. Also, finding where in the thousands of folders in the Library that state is preserved is, to put it lightly, a problem.)

Brent Simmons on corporate developers

Brent Simmons: “My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers.” Great blog post from Brent, who I had a beer with once, long ago, in Seattle, and whose work in the early days of this blog I frequently followed and linked to. (I had written an AppleScript based blog posting client for my old blog platform, which he had worked on, and he wrote a modern blog posting client (MarsEdit) and blog aggregator (NetNewsWire), so he was on my radar a lot. Also he’s a nice guy.)

I don’t actually have a ton of experience being an indie developer, nor have I worked with a lot of them, but I can say with 100% certainty that his description of corporate developers rings true. They’re not all as great as Brent describes, but the ones who don’t rise to the level of excellence don’t tend to stick around—and if your company prioritizes good management as well, you won’t see many of the bad ones because good interviewing and hiring tends to weed them out.

Congrats on your well-deserved retirement, Brent—though is it really retirement if you’ll “have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire”? 🙂

Wynton Marsalis, Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution of Romance

Is there such a thing as too much beauty in jazz? This Wynton Marsalis album trades perfection for risk-taking, in a different approach to the standards album.

Album of the Week, May 26, 2025

Wynton Marsalis released an album called Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1 in 1987, following the release of J Mood. Recorded with the same band as the earlier album, it brought the same post-bop sensibility to the collection of standards, almost as if a later incarnation of a Miles Davis group had done the recording. Fast forwarding about two or three years, we get Standard Time Vol. 3, skipping Volume 2,1 and it’s a completely different animal.

Let’s talk about cover photos for a second, because Columbia’s marketing folks had clearly changed their minds about how to position the new young lions of jazz in the market. Marsalis Standard Time featured Wynton looking severe in a tux — signifier of authority and of the canon. If you took the text off and showed it to someone who knew that Wynton had recorded both jazz and classical albums in the 1980s, I think they’d have been just as likely to guess that Vol. 1 was a classical album. If you look at the cover of Vol. 3 (above), there’s a more relaxed, almost casual Wynton, smiling and listening to his father play the piano. Both men are well dressed, but in expensive suits rather than formal wear. The background looks like an extremely upscale hotel lobby. (See also the cover of last week’s Trio Jeepy, also on Columbia, by Wynton’s older brother Branford.) Columbia was positioning Wynton as respectable, upper class, yet approachable—a very different position than the rock and funk iconography that they used to sell Miles’ last albums for the label.

Oh yes, Wynton’s father. This particular quartet album featured the Marsalis patriarch, Ellis Marsalis Jr., on the piano. Ellis was the son of a Louisiana businessman—Ellis Sr. owned the first Black-owned gas station in Louisiana and ran a hotel that catered to African Americans who could not stay at white-only hotels in nearby New Orleans—turned civil rights activist. Ellis Jr. served in the Marines for a year, graduated from Dillard University with a degree in music education, and played with the Adderley brothers (separately), Ed Blackwell, and Nat Hirt.

But his biggest impact, at least until his sons transformed the jazz landscape in the 1980s, was as a music educator; he instructed the likes of Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Marlon Jordan and even Harry Connick Jr. from his studio at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. This was father and son’s second appearance together, having previously performed together with Branford on Side 1 of the anthology recording Fathers and Sons. They were joined by two new (to us) faces to the Marsalis group, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums. Both musicians hailed from New Orleans, and both had joined Marsalis for the two preceding albums, 1990’s Crescent City Christmas Card and 1988’s simultaneously great and off-putting The Majesty of the Blues (I’ll be reviewing that one someday); they would make many more recordings with him in the future.

There are 21 tracks on this album! Across all of them there are some common threads: a sense of bounce and energy, courtesy of Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal, pervades the uptempo tracks, and a focus on melodic clarity, courtesy Wynton’s pristine trumpet technique, pervades the others. You get both in the opener, Wynton’s tribute to early New Orleans jazz, “In the Court of King Oliver.” His composition captures some amount of the energy of early New Orleans jazz as played by King Oliver and his disciple Louis Armstrong, without exactly parodying any of the many tunes from which the music originates. The whole thing is played muted, leading to a growly trumpet solo at the end that hints at something much more visceral and bluesy. (Wynton could, and did, take this to great lengths in live performances.) But the backbone of the performance is definitely the “engine room” of Veal’s rock-steady bass and Herlin Riley’s swinging, stuttering, wondrously multi-tonal drums. Riley, who has had a productive career (including a stint as the drummer in Ahmad Jamal’s most sensational late-career trio) has a distinctive way of wringing more color out of the drums than one would think possible, to the point that he is one of the few drummers whose work I can reliably identify by ear.

Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s “Never Let Me Go” is played briefly, just the chorus, as though a prelude to Victor Young’s “Street of Dreams.” Ellis takes a solo that is relaxed and classy, with enough New Orleans around the edges to keep it from lapsing into background music. Wynton then takes a brief solo before his father reclaims the spot, playing the song out.

Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When” is given the chorus-and-verse treatment, but here Ellis’s development of the chords under his son’s restrained solo is the focal point. The tone of the trumpet on that slow climb to the peak at the end is gorgeous, as is the unaccompanied solo Wynton takes in the quiet range of the trumpet’s sound. This leads to a pair of Wynton originals: “Bona and Paul” gets some of his by-now-distinctive harmonic complexity with a deceptively simple solo line and a spare piano accompaniment, while “The Seductress” is an exercise in control on the plunger mute, in which the trumpeter achieves vocal tones across the range of the instrument.

“A Sleepin’ Bee,” a Harold Arlen number with lyrics, improbably, by Truman Capote, gets a trio rendition with bouncy snare and forthright bass under Ellis’ masterful elicitation of the melody. The Louis Armstrong standard “Big Butter and Egg Man” follows, beginning as a pianoless trio. Most of the first verse is played as a duet between Wynton and Veal; the bassist gets an assertive but supportive role courtesy of his high octave improvisation, which stands up nicely to the trumpet. Ellis provides muted harmonic cover under the second verse and takes a solo with those bouncing Herlin Riley snares accompanying. The best part might be Veal’s bass solo, which spelunks its way across the instrument’s whole range with spare accompaniment from Riley and Ellis.

Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You” gets a tender duet treatment by father and son, accompanied unobtrusively by Riley and Veal; Ellis’s solo reaches quiet heights of lyrical sincerity without ever breaching the late-night volume limit. Edward Heyman’s “I Cover the Waterfront” is a more “daytime” number; the tone of the piano is brighter and the solos more sprightly. When Wynton enters, playing a bucket muted solo, it’s jovial but still controlled.

I have to give points to this record for dipping deeply into the standards well and pulling up some rarities. “How are Things in Glocca Mora?” is a Burton Lane tune with words by Yip Harburg from the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about an elderly Irishman, his pot of gold, and the leprechaun that follows him to the States (you can’t make this stuff up). It has relatively few jazz recordings; one of the first was by Sonny Rollins and Donald Byrd, with Marsalis’s namesake Wynton Kelly on the piano. The performance here borrows heavily from that version, albeit with Wynton’s standard rubato approach to the ballad; it’s gorgeous, and an entirely different approach to the ballad than the weepy version in the 1968 film, which featured Petula Clark, the last movie-musical appearance of Fred Astaire, and a young Francis Ford Coppola as the director. (Again, you can’t make this stuff up.)

Rodgers and Hart are the only composers represented with more than one tune on this collection; their second, “My Romance,” gets a straightforward solo piano rendition that turns poignant in the final chords. Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens to Me” is a gorgeous song that gets a little bluesy in Ellis’s solo, and an extended trumpet cadenza that takes us out to the end of the tune. Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo” is one of the few non-Broadway standards on the album, originally a popular song recorded by Duke Ellington’s band, features a touch of samba rhythm from the band and a glorious vocal line from the trumpet, which I may have sung a few times when we visited the Camargue in southern France to see the mysterious birds.

Mort Dixon’s “You’re My Everything” gets a straightforward rendition, as does Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and the last Rodgers and Hart tune, “It’s Easy to Remember.” Indeed, as the record goes on, the gorgeousness threatens to rise like a somnolent tide.

Thankfully, Vernon Duke’s “Taking a Chance on Love” gets a faster tempo and some of that Herlin Riley bounce to set it apart, and Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” gets a pianoless trio that feels like a pure jaunt, complete with high trumpet flourishes and low buzzy growls. The album closes out with two woozy ballads, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and Burton Lane’s “It’s Too Late Now.” Throughout, true to the brand promise implied in the cover art, everything stays on the polite side of jazz: pretty, even keeled, and by the book.

So we’ve heard Wynton’s approach to the standards album. And while there might not be a lot in the way of original improvisation here, it’s still a beautiful listen. I should be clear—I actually really like this album for quiet listening. It’s just that sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Kenny Kirkland or Marcus Roberts had played a few of the numbers. There’s sometimes such a thing as too reverent. Turns out that won’t be an issue on next week’s record.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

  1. I think I remember hearing, back when this album was released in 1990, that they pushed out Volume 3 before Volume 2 because they thought the “father and son” angle would sell better. It’s pretty clear that Wynton, like Miles, was recording faster than Columbia could put records on the market. In the years following J Mood, the Marsalis band went from The Majesty of the Blues to his three volume Soul Gestures in Southern Blue series, which were all pretty great but which weren’t released until 1991-1992. ↩︎

Branford Marsalis, Trio Jeepy

In this trio setting, Branford makes a playful standards album that’s still profoundly original, with help from The Judge.

Album of the Week, May 17, 2025

Branford Marsalis kept pretty busy in 1987 – 1988. The recording sessions for Sting’s … Nothing Like the Sun ran from March through August, at which point he ducked into the studio to record his own Random Abstract. He headed to the Newport Jazz Festival to perform a set at the end of August, then headed to New York to join Sting in October to kick off the world tour. Between October and the end of December the band played in Brazil and Argentina, then settled in for a five night residency at the Wembley Arena in London. The band took a break before heading back on the road on January 20 to tour up and down the East Coast; they made a stop at William and Mary Hall on January 29, 1988, where I saw the tour (and watched Sting live for the first time). And during the break, on January 3 and 4, Branford convened a group of musicians at the Astoria Studios in Queens, NY to record his next album.

As the name implies, Trio Jeepy is a trio album, but it’s not the same trio all the way through. The big news on the album was the participation of Milt Hinton, also known as “the Judge,” who at the time of the recording was the most-recorded musician in history, and who had played with everyone from Art Tatum, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie to Paul McCartney, Frank Sinatra, Leon Redbone, and Barbara Streisand. He was 78 at the time he made this recording with Branford (whose jazz nickname at the time was the inspiration for the title; he also went by “Steeplone,” “Steep,” or “Steepy,” apparently) and Jeff “Tain” Watts, who had appeared on his first and second albums in a few sessions, but who here settled into a regular chair in Branford’s group for the first time. But the Judge isn’t on every song here; Branford’s bassist from the Random Abstract group, Delbert Felix, plays on three tracks.

As producer (and younger brother) Delfeayo Marsalis observes in the liner notes, the pianoless saxophone trio has roots back to at least Sonny Rollins, and we’ve also heard the line-up with John Coltrane on his Lush Life. But in both cases the leaders were playing in a particular sound. Here, Branford seems to be triangulating his own sound and approach, by taking the trio through a combination of standards and his own acerbic originals.

“Housed from Edward,” an original composition, opens with a scrap of studio chatter, with the Judge saying “Play ‘em one more game! … Rack ‘em up, Joe! He’s tough, though. But I’ll play him one mo’…” Delfeayo announces this is take 3, and Branford starts by playing single tones, always on the two, against the Judge’s walking bass line, in what appears to be a straight twelve-bar blues. But appearances can be deceiving; while the rest of the band keeps the blues form going, Branford shifts his playing from being on the two to the one to the three, to playing eight note runs both swung and unswung. As Branford’s playing gets more dramatic, at one point opening up into “sheets of sound,” Tain’s drums push hard as though the heavens are opening up, freed by the Judge’s rock-steady beat to explore and shift his rhythmic emphasis from bar to bar. The Judge’s solo is really more of a duet with Tain, as he innovates on the pattern of his walk over a rhythm that shuffles and pops. Branford’s return steams in with a blue riff for two verses, then returns to that single-note discipline with which he opened, this time on the one. After a verse, he turns to playing almost entirely single notes on the tonic, then climbs up a major scale to the fourth, and closes out playing enormous jumps on the tiniest possible note values. It’s funny, and fun to listen to. In the outro there’s a trumpet playing very quietly in the background; I wonder who was hanging out in the studio to watch the session?

In contrast to the playfulness of “Housed from Edward,” the trio plays “The Nearness of You” very straight, with Steepy playing the tune over an arco bass line from the Judge. After the first chorus, Tain announces his presence with a gentle cymbal as the Judge switches to pizzicato; Branford improvises the melody, going into swinging eighths, hitting a honking low note, and then swinging even harder, shifting from the melody line into quick exclamations and then back to the gentle song again. The improvisations feel a bit like a class in rhythmic variation as Branford finds different modes of expression, here taking a step back from the microphone to pick up more studio resonance, there playing in a not-quite-growly lower register. The entire thing is a pretty wonderful love letter to the sound of the saxophone, with gentle support from Hinton and Watts.

There’s a false start on “Three Little Words,” with Branford and the Judge exchanging some sharp words about whether what Hinton is playing is in the chord changes, but then they’re off to the races, with a quick rip through the tune and then a handoff to the Judge, who takes a slapping tour of the song for two verses, extracting a whoop from Branford in the background. When Steepy returns it’s with a solo that feels like it’s on the brink of speeding off the road at the curves but still hangs together. The whole thing is a lot of fun, with the two musicians effectively playing as a trio—the Judge providing both the melody line and the rhythm with the slapped strings.

After a false start with “Makin’ Whoopee,” the band swings into “U.M.M.G.” The Billy Strayhorn classic is taken at something just slower than breakneck speed, with Tain urging things along with the occasional crack on the snare or explosion from the general direction of the tom and the cymbals. This is about the interplay between saxophone and drummer, with the bass holding things steady between the two of them. Just as Branford swings his way up to a high finale of the chorus, he steps out and Tain takes a 32 bar solo; when Steepy returns he swings the trio into an almost-sambaesque finale, then into something that feels a bit like Ornette Coleman.

The other Branford original on the record, “Gutbucket Steepy” opens with a bit of studio chatter as he tells the Judge “By yourself… play it however you want to. On your own!” The resulting slow blues has a twist at the beginning of the second four-bar pattern but otherwise settles into a deep swing. When the Judge takes a second solo to close things out, it’s as if the rest of the piece never happened and that bass line was eternal.

Delbert Felix steps in for Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy,” though you’ll have to look at the track listing to know the song as the band doesn’t pick up the melody in its entirety until the very end. You can tell the difference here immediately; while Felix is very good, there’s not quite the same metronomical authority that Hinton brings to the instrument. Instead, he’s improvising hard on the changes throughout even as Branford plays his own, seemingly unrelated, improvisation above. (The liner notes call this style “nebula,” or “neb,” a term I haven’t come across anywhere else.)

“Makin’ Whoopie (Reprise)” is a full run through of the Gus Kahn/Walter Donaldson classic. Branford takes the opening as a straight swing before accelerating into the stratosphere , playing sheets of sound and then back to a steady swing again. He steps away from the mic long enough for us to get a good listen to the Judge’s rock-steady tempo. The whole thing swings hard throughout, and feels just saucy enough to live up to the title.

Branford thanks Hinton at the end of “Makin’ Whoopie,” which makes the next bit even more surprising: a bonus track with Hinton! I’ve had this album for 35 years on CD, and never realized I had missed out on hearing the vinyl-only bonus track, Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” After a false start with a fast count-in, Branford plays the evocative melody solo through once, and the rest of the band swoons in after a brief pause. If the tempo on “The Nearness of You” was deliberate, this one feels downright leisurely. It’s more of the same delightful trio work that we got on “The Nearness of You,” and as such is technically a little redundant to the album’s overall conception, but it’s still a lovely performance.

Delbert Felix is the bassist on the last two numbers, starting with Ornette Coleman’s “Peace.” After he and Branford essay the opening together, he takes a brief solo before the head returns, and then the fun begins. As Delfeayo dryly notes, “In addition to the complex solo form, the chord changes may be altered by either the soloist or bassist, thus allowing each individual the maximum amount of melodic freedom possible in a structured environment.” In practice the players seem to circle each other dancelike, anchored only by the shuffle of Tain’s drums. Steep isn’t as out there melodically as Coleman, staying more closely anchored to the fundamental melodic direction.

Delfeayo announces, “This is ‘Random Abstract (Tain’s Rampage),’ take one,” and we’re off. Branford plays an opening melodic statement built around an octave leap and a third, then a fourth, and then unspools a melodic improvisation as Tain crashes beneath. Delbert Felix’s bassline seems to scamper like a small furry mammal beneath the crashing feet of the drums as the saxophone darts above. The collective improvisation, or “burnout” as it’s called in the liner notes, threatens to crest over, until at the end we get the fully unleashed power of a fully operational Tain. It’s something else. Branford has to yell to bring the band back to the top, and they’re out with a quick repetition of the head. It’s a profoundly different atmosphere from anything else on the album, but a good representation of an important facet of Branford’s sound.

In diving deep into standards with a smaller group, Branford emerged with a more distinctive voice: a straightforward melodic instinct, sometimes verging on the terse, sometimes on the lyrical, but always tinged with a deep sense of humor. It was a sound that would characterize many of his recordings for the following years. We’ll hear the next one soon; next time, we’ll see what we can learn from another brother’s embrace of jazz standards.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Exfiltration Radio: it sends a shock right through me

How much can the sound of one instrument influence popular music? If the instrument is the Roland TR-808, the answer is: a lot. An hour of electro funk and hip-hop on Exfiltration Radio.

I had an idea to make an Exfiltration Radio show all about the hip-hop/electronic music style called electro. Days later, I feel like I’m deep in the rabbit hole and just starting to scratch the surface of this music.

What to know: electro is rooted in the rhythms and sounds produced by the Roland TR-808, a budget-oriented drum machine that substituted synthesized drum sounds for the fully sampled sounds of its market competitor, the Linn LM-1 (which at the time cost almost 10x more). While the 808 was a market failure, its fully synthesized drum sounds created a ruckus that could be felt across the dance floor, and its distinctive sound created an effect that felt futuristic in 1983.

Combine that with an esthetic borrowed from pioneers like Gary Numan and Roger Troutman of Zapp, with sizzling synthesizer sounds and vocoder-processed vocals, and you had a sound that enjoyed a huge amount of chart karma, picking up momentum from both the aftermath of disco and funk and the rise of hip-hop, and only losing popularity when Prince’s more florid Minneapolis sound elaborated it out of existence. But you can hear electro’s impact in some of Prince’s early material as well as in bands like Flyte Tyme (where Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis got their start).

There are two songs in this mix that are arguably iconic: “Planet Rock” is an early hip-hop classic that is still referenced in unexpected ways, and “Freak-A-Zoids” has become a Tiktok meme. Beyond that, I don’t know if anyone other than certain GenXers remember “Freaks Come Out at Night,” but I certainly do, and “Computer Games” showed that George Clinton had a creative life beyond Parliament/Funkadelic.

As for the rest? Ryuichi Sakamato’s “Riot in Lagos” predates the rest of the material here by at least two years, showing that things really did happen earlier in Japan. Warp 9’s “Nunk (New Wave Funk)” was an early electro track that bubbled up in New York in 1982, as was Man Parrish’s “Hip-Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop),” which ran afoul of identity politics when African-American hip-hop influencers found out that Parrish was white and gay. Cybotron’s “Clear” brings a strain of Detroit to the melting pot, courtesy of band member Juan Atkins, now considered a co-founder of the techno sound. Elektrik Funk’s “On a Journey” was a one-off single from the depths of 1982 electro heaven, and Hashim’s “Al-Naafyish” was a 1983 one-off from a New York DJ.

Friends, this could have been a three-hour mix. There are so many threads to follow in this sound. Phil Collins used the TR-808 on No Jacket Required, for heaven’s sake. But we’ll start here, with the famed battle cry: Freak-a-zoids… report to the dance floor!

Track listing:

  1. “Drummers, they kind of get bored…” – Phil Collins (Exfiltration Radio: the bumpers)
  2. riot in Lagos (2019 Remastering) – Ryuichi Sakamoto (B-2 Unit (2019 Remastering))
  3. Planet Rock – Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force (Smithsonian Anthology Of Hip-Hop And Rap)
  4. Nunk (New Wave Funk) – Warp 9 (12 Inch Classics)
  5. Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop) – Man Parrish (Hip Hop, Be Bop)
  6. Freak-A-Zoid – Midnight Star (No Parking On the Dance Floor)
  7. Clear – Cybotron (Enter (Deluxe Edition))
  8. On a Journey (I Sing the Funkelectric) – Elektrik Funk (Rare Preludes, Vol. 1)
  9. Freaks Come Out At Night – Whodini (Funky Beat: The Best of Whodini)
  10. Al-Naafyish (The Soul) [Radio Version] – Hashim (Al-Naafyish (The Soul) – EP)
  11. Computer Games – George Clinton (Computer Games)

Exfiltration Radio: causally connectible

Is jazz just cover songs? If so, why stop with songs written 80 years ago?

Time for a little Hackathon radio show. This latest episode of Exfiltration Radio crosses between jazz and pop music and asks the question, “what if modern jazz is just cover songs?”

Of course, the answer is that most of jazz is just covers, it’s just a question of the age of the material. The revered Great American Songbook started off as pop music, after all—songs from movies and Broadway. All this show does is to update the material a touch. The oldest song covered here dates from the mid-1960s (it’s impossible to avoid the Beatles in an exercise like this, and very hard to avoid Burt Bacharach), while the newest is from the mid-2010s. A little about each one below:

Cécile McLorin-Salvant, “Wuthering Heights” (Ghost Song): I wrote about this cover at length in my article about Cécile’s album Ghost Song. I still love this reflection on the Kate Bush original, which locates the song somewhere around the Appalachians en route to the blasted heath.

Ahmad Jamal, “I Say a Little Prayer” (Tranquility): I could have done a full hour of Burt Bacharach covers (and may still someday). This one comes from a record that was in my Mom’s collection, hence the dust in the grooves. Great album, great song, and I love the way that Jamal got that percussive sound to swing. Makes you want to sit up and listen.

Cal Tjader, “Tra La La Song” (Fried Bananas): OK, so finding Cal Tjader, who made a career out of playing Latin-inflected soul jazz with a band he led from his marimba, covering pop songs is not surprising. That it was the “Tra La La Song” from The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is slightly more surprising, but it actually works. (Side note: I am not one of the GenX elders, so it took me until sometime after I graduated high school to understand why my team of middle school teachers called themselves the Banana Splitz. And once I saw the show—an early Sid and Marty Krofft/Hanna Barbera team up—I began to wonder how it was that there were any drugs left in the world, because it seems like the folks in the 1960s took them all.)

Matt Jorgensen + 451, “Everything In Its Right Place” (The Sonarchy Session): Jorgensen is a drummer from Seattle who I heard on the KEXP show Sonarchy Radio—or maybe more precisely streamed from their website. There are some pretty solid covers in that set, available on iTunes as The Sonarchy Session, including “Tomorrow Never Knows” and a solid version of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” but this version of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” is my favorite, thanks to the sax work by Mark Taylor as well as some really tasty Fender Rhodes (played by Ryan Burns).1

Freddie Hubbard, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” (First Light): this is the other track I’ve written about already in the context of Hubbard’s great First Light. Still one of my all time favorite bonkers jazz covers (of a fairly bonkers Paul McCartney original).

Bill Frisell, “Live to Tell” (Have a Little Faith): This one’s an epic. Frisell, who like Jorgensen moved back to Seattle from New York shortly before making this album, creates a lengthy psychedelic wonderland from this Madonna song.

Johnathan Blake, “Synchronicity I” (Trion): Blake’s trio with Linda May Han Oh (bass) and Chris Potter (sax) put out one of the most engrossing jazz albums of the last five or six years in Trion, and the burnout cover of the Police’s “Synchronicity I” is one of the highlights.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, “Videotape” (The Emancipation Procrastination): This isn’t the first Radiohead-adjacent cover that Christian Scott recorded; I liked his cover of Thom Yorke’s “The Eraser” enough to put it on a mix back in 2012. But this cover of the last track on In Rainbows carries an extra punch of alienation and longing.

Dr. Lonnie Smith with Iggy Pop, “Sunshine Superman” (Breathe): This is the track that all the reviews of Dr. Lonnie Smith’s final album talked about, and it’s easy to see why. Iggy Pop has aged into an unlikely vocal interpreter, as apt to shout out his musical collaborators in the middle of the song as he is to provide an utterly straight-ahead take on the song. And that’s Johnathan Blake again on the drums, alongside one of the great 21st century Hammond organ solos on the Donovan classic.

Jeremy Udden, “Fade Into You” (Wishing Flower): due to time constraints I could only fit only get a little of this in the outro. A crispy fried jazz guitar version of the great Mazzy Star song.

Do not attempt to adjust your set!

  1. About 15 years ago I linked to a NY Times article about the Seattle jazz scene that shouted out Jorgensen, which led me down a rabbit hole to a YouTube video about a Seattle high school jazz band competing in Essentially Ellington; they took home the trophy and the trumpet soloist, Riley Mulherkar, went toe to toe with Wynton Marsalis on the stage. He’s since gone on to form the jazz/new classical/bluegrass ensemble The Westerlies. This happens when I point to Seattle musicians; the rabbit holes tend to be very deep indeed. ↩︎

Marcus Roberts, The Truth is Spoken Here

A debut album for a remarkable performer and a seriously talented ensemble, and a perfectly lovely set of straight-ahead jazz.

Album of the Week, May 10, 2025

Some young artists get their start playing with other young artists, and their eventual first record captures them coming up together as a unit. That’s usually the way it goes with rock and pop artists; jazz has often been another story. The first recordings of artists like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and others put the young lions in combination with older, more experienced players. You can especially see this on Blue Note Records. Alfred Lion’s trick accomplished a few things: it provided the young player with backup from players who had more experience recording and playing, who could challenge them improvisationally; but it also ensured that there was a certain continuity of sound between the new player’s album and the others on the label—or more generally in that generation of sound.

I don’t know if the Blue Note model was on the mind of Delfeayo Marsalis, who produced Marcus Roberts’ debut session as a leader, The Truth is Spoken Here. But the band assembled for the session followed the model, combining some new players with the proponents of the “house sound”—the Wynton Marsalis combo—and a few veterans. Alongside Roberts were his erstwhile bandleader Wynton (on three tracks), bassist Reginald Veal and tenor saxophonist Todd Williams (on two tracks) who were both to begin performing with Wynton’s band, Charlie Rouse (appearing on three tracks, best known for his long collaboration with Thelonious Monk), and Elvin Jones, who had spent the years since his collaborations with John Coltrane leading his own combos. The choice of veterans must have been a deliberate choice; Roberts wore his indebtedness to Monk on his sleeve, and the influence of Trane’s pianist McCoy Tyner cast a long shadow over his playing as well.

The first track, “The Arrival,” demands close listening to get the exciting bits; I recommend headphones because Jones is an extremely vocal player, and hearing his grunts as the band plays through Roberts’ composition makes it come alive in a way that the playing (sadly) doesn’t. We’re hearing Wynton in his Miles phase, playing through a Harman mute, and while the tone is impeccable the whole solo feels like it happens all on one level, with little variation in intensity. Roberts gives the other players a lot of space, primarily letting Wynton, Elvin, and Reginald Veal drive the development of the track during Wynton’s solo. Veal is eye-opening here; his bass lines are acrobatic, but he’s not content just to walk them; we get rhythmic variation and counter-melody from him as well as some suspensions that build tension. When Roberts takes his own solo we start to hear a little more flash. There’s some stride in his playing in the way the left hand shifts the beat, and some Liszt around the edges of his chord voicings. You can hear the debt to Tyner in the harmonic vocabulary, but the touch (particularly when Wynton plays) is lighter. The outro for Elvin Jones is a shot of adrenaline even without the great drummer’s grunts signaling the beats.

If the opening showed what Roberts could do in a group context, “Blue Monk” is pure solo, and offers him the chance to really show off. He takes the Monk standard to church: while the opening is pure Monk, once he gets past the head we get some gospel around the edges, and more than a hint of the blues and ragtime that are always just under the corners of any Monk composition—especially what those left hand chords do to the time as he shifts freely from 4/4 to 6/4. It’s way more interesting than what he played on the first track; one wants more of it.

“Maurella” is another Roberts original, and it has the marks of the compositional direction he brought to his time in the Wynton Marsalis group on albums like J Mood: a series of suspended chords, taken so slowly in the head that it almost feels out of time, that ultimately fail to resolve. Roberts loved these chord suspensions so much that you can hear traces of them in other tracks, including the title track on the second side. In this setting, the progression seems to open up melancholy vistas behind the melodic trail blazed by Todd Williams, a tenor player from St. Louis who would spend about ten years in Wynton’s band and related projects before withdrawing from jazz performance to take the music director role at the Times Square Church. His tone is well suited for this work; he sells the odd chord progressions but doesn’t do much showy improvisation. There’s sensitive accompaniment from Jones and Veal throughout.

“Single Petal of a Rose” is the second solo number by Roberts, this time paying homage to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. He plays the Strayhorn composition with delicacy and nuance, but with a power in the left hand that gives the work a deep dynamic range. When he gets to the bridge, you can almost get swept away on the wave of impassioned music making that pours out of the piano. Like “Blue Monk,” this one also leaves you wanting more of his solo work.

When we flip to the second side, we have shifted gears again and are in a straight-ahead post-bop number. “Country by Choice” features Charlie Rouse. Rouse played as Monk’s sideman from 1959 through 1969, including on some of the most famous Columbia Records recordings (Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk’s Time, Straight, No Chaser). Here on more straightforward harmonic material he tempers some of his more eccentric harmonic tendencies, but he still brings a big tenor sound to the party. Roberts’ solo feels a little tentative through bits of the middle; he’s on firmer ground when he shifts the meter to something more syncopated and shouting, and Veal and Jones follow him the whole way. We get a shouting, snarling solo from Jones to bring us through into the recap, and Veal and Jones bring us out into a coda.

“The Truth is Spoken Here” brings the chord progressions first heard on “Maurella” to a quintet voicing with the addition of Wynton’s trumpet. Wynton takes a good deal more rubato than was present in the earlier iteration of the tune, and plays off Todd Williams’ high tenor notes with aplomb. This time Roberts takes the first solo, and his anticipatory downbeats combined with Jones’ growl lighten up the proceedings considerably compared to the earlier song. The trio cooks its way through the end of the solo and into the reprise. It’s a great performance, lessened only by the puzzling near-repetition on the first side of the record.

“In a Mellow Tone” brings back Rouse for a seriously swinging run at the Ellington classic, and the combination of Rouse’s tenor and Jones’ vocalizing recall nothing so much as the collaboration between Ellington and Coleman Hawkins that produced “Limbo Jazz” (particularly the echo of Aaron Bell’s spontaneous vocals on the latter tune). Veal stays particularly tight in the pocket, letting Roberts unspool melodic lines and shifts of rhythmic emphasis against an always-solid metrical backbone.

“Nothin’ but the Blues” gives us a staggering blues, with a tricky triple meter laid over the traditional twelve bar form. This track is the only time that I’m aware that Rouse and Wynton collaborated (Rouse would pass away only five months after this session, his last, was completed), and their off-kilter harmonic imaginations light up sparks on the head. Roberts may have called this “nothing but the blues,” but there’s more than a little Monk in it too, particularly in his solo, which gets more interestingly ornery the longer it goes. Wynton’s solo straightens out some of the brilliant corners, but it’s a more committed improvisational gesture than on the rest of the record, and it pairs well with Rouse’s sly around-the-corner elaboration of the chords. The outro gives each of the players a plausible claim to having gotten the last word.

As a debut album, The Truth is Spoken Here does a good job of showcasing Roberts as a performer, particularly in the two solo numbers and “In a Mellow Tone.” It’s less good at showcasing his compositional skills, but does a great job of highlighting his influences and demonstrating how his gospel, soul and classical background helped his perfoming conception transcend those influences. Like a good Blue Note album, the end result is a great listen, if not groundbreaking. As for his composition, the follow-up album would show a much broader range of his talents. We’ll hear that one in a bit; next time we’ll hear a different musician tackle traditional repertoire alongside a storied collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: With Wynton guesting on the album and given their close working relationship in his small group, it was only natural that some of Roberts’ originals would end up on a Wynton album. The title track appeared on Wynton’s 1991 album Uptown Ruler in a quintet performance:

Branford Marsalis, Random Abstract

In this 1987 album, recorded at the tail end of the sessions for Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun, Branford finds ways to express himself in straight-ahead jazz that are as adventurous as anything he recorded with Sting.

Album of the Week, May 3, 2025

To be a jazz fan in the 1980s felt like you were sorting yourself into a camp. You were either a fan of Miles Davis, Weather Report and the other jazz-rock fusion artists that were still big on the landscape, or you leaned hard into the traditionalist camp of acoustic jazz, spearheaded by Wynton Marsalis and his artistic collaborators. Like all artistic yes/no decisions, this one was really more a false choice imposed by marketing—ironically, much of which was led by Miles’ old label, Columbia Records. For me, Branford Marsalis represented a kind of third path—someone who honored the traditions but who looked beyond them, as comfortable leading a post-bop quartet as he was playing with Sting. Random Abstract, his fourth album as a leader for Columbia, falls into the former category, an album of straight ahead acoustic quartet jazz that, even as it explores the young saxophonist’s influences, nonetheless presents a distinctive voice that stands apart from what his brother was doing in his own small group.

The quartet that played with Branford this time around was a combination of familiar and new faces. Kenny Kirkland had been with Branford since his first album for Columbia, 1984’s Scenes in the City and also was a trusted collaborator in Sting’s band. Drummer Lewis Nash had worked with both Ron Carter and Betty Carter prior to joining Branford for this session, the only one he ever played with Branford. And this was bassist Delbert Felix’s first major label credit, though he had played with the band in some live gigs prior to the recording.

“Yes and No” starts us off, a lightly retitled version of Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” from JuJu. The liner notes, by Branford’s brother Delfeayo, talk a great deal about the influences on Branford’s stylistic development, but Shorter was the most significant and obvious influence at this time, as seen in his embrace of jazz fusion and the soprano sax as well as his tone. One misses the originality, not to mention occasional weirdness, of Wayne’s improvisations, but there’s no denying the depth of Branford’s affection for the Blue Note Wayne Shorter sound here. In this rendition you can really hear Shorter’s compositional structure, which reveals itself to be rooted in the twelve-bar blues: as Branford’s saxophone plays two long phrases and a third phrase that circles around the tonic, Kenny Kirkland exuberantly points up the chords beneath, creating an effect not unlike the proverbial duck (busy paddling beneath the surface of the water while all seems smooth above). Branford and Delfeayo made an aesthetic choice to record Delbert Felix’s upright bass through an external microphone, rather than the “dreaded bass direct” used by Ron Carter and others; it may indeed have “obtained more wood sound from the bass” but also means that the bass is mixed rather low in the final recording (this may have also been “due to miscommunication” as the liner notes indicate that the track was inadvertently recorded direct to 2-track digital), so that you have to strain a bit to hear Felix’s constantly moving bass line. Lewis Nash’s drums have no such challenge being heard, as he keeps thing moving along through phrases that keep time with running hits on the hi-hat and occasional snare explosions.

The band segues into “Crescent City,” a Branford original, which opens in a major key version of the famous opening track to John Coltrane’s Crescent but quickly shifts into the modal minor blues. Where Trane’s original swirls around freely for the opening before landing in a slow four, Branford’s iteration stays fairly metrical throughout the opening, including a lovely four-bar solo statement from Delbert Felix, and shifts into a slightly more deliberate meter as Kenny Kirkland takes the first solo over Felix’s walking bass. Kirkland’s solo plays with meter, shifting back and forth between swing, triple meter, and syncopated patterns throughout. Branford’s solo is similarly fluid in its approach; though it stays close to the chord changes throughout, the rhythmic pattern shifts from quarters to sixteenths freely. Early on in the solo we don’t hear “sheets of sound” in the Coltrane sense—even the most rapidly moving passages are swung, creating an effect of being just slightly behind the beat even though he’s right in the pocket throughout. It’s only as he takes his third verse through the changes that we hear that roiling Coltrane blister of sound, but it shifts back into another swinging pattern. If, as Delfeayo suggests in the liner notes, he is paying homage to Trane here, the elder’s influence feels completely internalized and absorbed into his own musical approach.

“Broadway Fools,” another Branford original, starts with a false start and a count-in announcing itself as “Take 1.” The tune consists of a suspended intro and a melody that lopes up the scale as though the unserious quartet were joking and swaggering their way down the street. When Branford takes the first solo on his soprano sax, Kenny drops out and the trio continues on, apparently without reference to chord changes or anything other than that swinging beat. As Delfeayo notes, the whole effect is very much like a swinging Ornette Coleman. He swings his way up the scale into a higher octave but comes back down again, modulating through the tune and finally quoting the opening intro, trailing off into a series of descending quarter notes. Kenny Kirkland picks up the pattern and lopes down the block, accompanied by Delbert Felix. Along the way he finds a few patterns that he repeats, sounding a bit like Thelonious Monk trailing off into a reverie. The loping melody returns at the end for two repetitions, hitting a false ending with a Lewis Nash explosion, and then repeating the suspended intro after a few seconds, with just enough smearing of the notes in the saxophone to make it sound as though the tape was restarted just to catch the last bit. The whole effect is to show a side of Branford completely unlike what we hear from Wynton’s albums—namely, that he’s funny.

Opening side two is “LonJellis,” Kenny Kirkland’s compositional contribution to the album. It pays tribute in name to Ellis Marsalis, but after Lewis Nash gives us the rhythmic opening over a rumble of low notes from Kirkland, Branford plays a melody that rolls through a rapid series of chords—according to an online transcription, those are F♯7 alt, Am7, G7, A♭Δ♯5, F/G, and Cm7 (!)—but still remains hummable. Branford picks up and improvises at something approaching breakneck speed over Felix’s walking bass and the roll and crash of Lewis Nash’s drums. The solo does not appear to be hindered by the opening chords; Branford is just “burning out” (in the jazz sense) for the first half of the piece until he brings us forcefully around to a recapitulation. Kenny takes the second solo in trio form, and here we can see that despite the freedom of the improvisation there is some reference to the underlying chordal structure, even as he splashes discordant chords and runs down the scale. One is reminded, listening to his solo, of the story that Herbie Hancock tells about hitting a note that he perceived as a mistake, but to which Miles listened and played other notes that turned it into a chord; there are no wrong notes here.

From the freely discordant romp of “LonJellis,” we flip into Johnny Mercer’s “I Thought About You.” Here again Branford wears his influences on his sleeve, transparently channeling the great Ben Webster. The band follows Branford through the tune for a complete verse and chorus, with Kenny taking the second verse and Felix taking a gutbucket solo on the third. Delfeayo characterizes this as a “farewell” to Branford’s explicit emulation of Webster on some of his earlier records, but while we get some of the tone of Webster throughout, there’s just as much of Branford’s own tone and harmonic imagination at work here. It’s a deep breath, a joyfully straight take on the classic tune and a welcome respite from the intensity of the rest of side 2.

Which takes us into “Lonely Woman.” While a faithful reflection of the great Ornette Coleman composition, there’s another voice in Kirkland and Branford’s approach, the lyrical and emotional depth of the Keith Jarrett—Jan Garbarek partnership as heard in Jarrett’s 1970s European Quartet. Jarrett appears not to have recorded “Lonely Woman,” but Garbarek did on an orchestral album and his playing of the theme has the hallmarks of Branford’s interpretation here—a deep melodic intensity, a passionate leaning into the high corners of the melody, and a continued circle around the core of Coleman’s melody. The intensity that Garbarek summoned on a full-orchestra rendition is here brought forward just in Kirkland’s rolling chords and constantly moving accompaniment. The performance plays with jazz conventions in a similar way that Miles’s second great quintet did, eschewing head/solo/solo/head forms and continually circling back to the tune, the horn constantly staying focused on that deeply evocative melody as the rhythm section continues to evolve its improvisational concept underneath. There’s some Chopin in Kirkland’s moving notes, and yes, some Keith Jarrett as well. Which isn’t to say that Branford just plays the tune; particularly in the bridge and in the transition from chorus to verse, he takes some powerful improvisational moments that extend time and shift the meter. The overall effect is powerful and, at over fifteen minutes, somewhat overwhelming with the relentless return of the core melody. Branford solos for over ten minutes before yielding the floor to Kenny Kirkland, who again finds a legion of melodic and rhythmic approaches to the material in his short essay at the music. It’s also in this piece that we most hear the contributions of Lewis Nash, whose approach ranges from the most delicate filigree of cymbals to crashing thunder on the tom and the snare. When the band finally breathes and lets the intensity trickle away in the closing moments, it has the feeling of the cessation of a thunderstorm. Closing out the side, “Steep’s Theme” is a tag, a short bit in the spirit of the great Miles Davis theme, here truncated with a rueful laugh.

The variety of influences on display in this album shows that Branford was an intense student of a wide array of teachers, from the traditional to the avant-garde. At this stage in their development, you wouldn’t ever have heard Wynton essaying Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, or Jan Garbarek, and certainly not all in the same set. But for all the wide array of sounds, the album has the feeling of an anthology more than a complete, coherent statement. In his next few outings, Branford would refine this sound into something that was more unambiguously his own. We’ll hear that in a few weeks; next week we’ll get to listen to another young player who steps out from his place in a Marsalis brother’s band to reveal his own musical and compositional voice in his debut album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The CD version of the album also included two bonus tracks, Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s “Yesterdays” and a version of Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie,” which for me was a gateway to all things Thelonious. “Crepuscule” is composed, not improvised, so the performance on record is faithful to the version that debuted on Monk’s Music, except that Branford swings the melody ever so gently. It’s a great tune in any rendition, including this one from the 1987 Newport Jazz Festival:

Sting, …Nothing Like the Sun

Sting’s double-LP 1987 release is his last to feature a heavy jazz influence, and he goes out in strong form, with Branford Marsalis, Kenny Kirkland, Manu Katché, Mino Cinelu, and a guest appearance from Gil Evans.

Album of the Week, April 26, 2025

So it is that we come to Sting’s second solo album, and I have to warn you that I’m not sure I can be objective about this one. I was fourteen, almost fifteen when …Nothing Like the Sun, complete with its elliptical title, was released, and it pretty much consumed me. My parents gave me a copy on cassette; I joined a CD club, in part, to get a copy on CD. The tour was my first rock concert, at William and Mary Hall. For goodness’ sake, it was “Sister Moon” that got me attention from girls when I sang at a talent show at the Governor’s School for the Sciences in the summer of 1989.

So let’s dive right in. “The Lazarus Heart” opens the album at full tilt and with seemingly every musician (as noted last week, both Omar Hakim and Darryl Jones did not return from Sting’s first solo album) making themselves known in the first couple of bars. There’s an arpeggiated guitar riff from none other than Andy Summers, over layers of more guitar and keyboards, percussion from Mino Cinelu and a bass pattern that seeks up to the supertonic. After four measures, Manu Katché’s snare and cymbals announce the start of the song. Branford and Kenny Kirkland play the opening hook together on soprano saxophone and a keyboard that sounds an awful lot like a flute. Sting’s vocals are syncopated and push and pull against the tempo as he tells the story of a dream of his mother and a wound in his heart. Even had Sting not dedicated the album to his mother’s memory, you would be able to tell that she loomed large in his subconscious still, seven years after he hurt both his parents with his words in a Rolling Stone interview. The arrangement itself feels dreamlike, with Andy Summers’ guitar and Kenny Kirkland’s keyboards echoing and washing around the corners of the song. There’s a brilliant moment at the bridge where Branford takes the tune out of the syncopated beat it’s been in since the start and pulls it into straight measure for about eight beats, and another in the last chorus where everyone but Mino Cinelu’s percussion drops out, revealing the richness of the arrangement by its absence.

Andy Summers sticks around for “Be Still My Beating Heart” (Sting asks in the liner notes, “Why does tradition locate our emotional center at the heart and not somewhere in the brain?”). This is a gentler song, but not a ballad, driven by a bass figure (doubled in the keyboards) that runs up from the dominant to the tonic, and washes of Andy Summers guitar that blend into saxophone obbligatos, all driven by the pulse of the percussionists. There’s subtle vocal harmony on the chorus and almost subliminal piano parts happening under the pre-chorus; the latter becomes apparent when the vocals drop out in the second chorus. The whole thing is the closest Sting ever got to writing a Sade song.

“Englishman In New York” stands as another in a long line of early Sting songs that are driven on the back of a busy synthesizer part, in this case a pizzicato string part that makes up the majority of the arrangement for the first verse of the song (turning into synth strings for the bridge). Thankfully there’s also a fantastic Branford Marsalis through-line on the soprano sax, as well as some top-notch contributions by Manu Katché (the hi-hat! the snare work on the first verse!) and Mino Cinelu (a fine use of the cuíca throughout the chorus). Branford gets a properly swinging solo verse after the bridge, with fine support from Kenny Kirkland. The whole thing was written as an homage to Quentin Crisp, as Sting reports in the liner notes.; there was a movie made of the gay icon’s last years in New York titled after the song, starring John Hurt.

“History Will Teach Us Nothing” is the one reggae-inflected song on the album, Sting having mostly moved well beyond the days of Reggatta de Blanc by now. The groove, with guitar, bass, drums and percussion, is tight, but unfortunately the trick of doubling the sax with the keyboards seems to water down both here. Sting is in verbose mode, working on the theme of “Spirits in the Material World” and “Love is the Seventh Way,” calling for us to stop repeating history’s mistakes in the most provocative way possible—telling us to stop listening to it. Alas, we now know what happens when you ignore signs that history is repeating itself… I would say, though, that the outro chorus (“Know your human rights/be what you come here for”) is now perhaps more relevant than ever.

This takes us into the most topical song on the album, which I spent years thinking was on the wrong side of topicality until this year. Sting has talked about his writing process for the album following the death of his mother, as he retreated to an apartment in New York in a monastic existence; when he debuted this song and others to friends, they were powerfully moved but he didn’t feel it, having been locked inside his head for too long. “They Dance Alone (Cueca Solo)” is potentially a moving song, and certainly made more powerful by Sting’s focus on the “mothers of the disappeared,” who danced by themselves in anguished protest against the abductions and murders of their loved ones by the regime of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. After years of performing in Amnesty benefits, he had fully inhabited the grief as well as the outrage of this cause. It’s unfortunate that this performance is the most adult contemporary of all the songs on the album; stretching to over seven minutes long, the song doesn’t even get Branford Marsalis until the last verse, and it wastes guest guitarists Eric Clapton, Fareed Haque, and Mark Knopfler, who seem to disappear into the texture of the song. I would totally write this one off, but for two things: the brilliant outro, when Kenny Kirkland finally can kick things into high gear by going into double time and Branford is let off the leash; and the fact that we now have more than enough opportunities to dance alone, without having to go to Chile.

“Fragile” ends this topical segment of the album with one of Sting’s finest ballads, written in memory of Ben Linder, an American civil engineer killed by the Nicaraguan contras in 1987 while he was working on a hydroelectric project. It succeeds where “They Dance Alone” fails by virtue of its brevity and restraint, with the majority of the song carried by the gentle percussion of Cinelu and Katché and by Sting’s remarkable Spanish-style guitar work. “Fragile” has been the touchstone to which Sting has returned in his career at times of national grief; it took on extra resonance as the lead-off song of All This Time, an acoustic set from his Tuscan villa that was recorded on September 11, 2001 as the musicians became aware of the facts of the attacks.

I wrote about “We’ll Be Together” last week at least in part so I wouldn’t have to this week. (There are a lot of songs on this album!) So let’s skip ahead. “Straight To My Heart” is another straight-up love song, and another one built on a programmed keyboard riff, but again it’s substantially improved by the percussion; here Katché and Cinelu play polyrhythms throughout, and the cuica makes another appearance. There’s another of those whistly synth lines throughout the chorus, but it works better here, and the whole thing has the feeling of a sonnet in 7/4. It’s a great band-kid song by virtue of the unusual meter; when I saw Sting live for the third time in Richmond in 1993 with my sister and her friends Jeremy and Christina, we made his band double-take as we bobbed our heads in perfect 7/4 time to this song.

“Rock Steady” is that rarity, a Sting song with a sense of humor. Despite the name, this is more a blues than a reggae number. As Sting retells the story of Noah’s Ark in a modern setting, we get imitations of the cries of the animals, whether by the sampler or by members of the band I’ve never quite been clear. Sting tells the story of two young lovers who get dragooned into helping Noah with the animals during the flood; once they’ve finally found dry land at the end and are leaving the boat, one of the backing vocalists (I’ve always imagined it’s Janice Pendarvis) teasingly asks, “Got any more bright ideas?” We don’t get too many laugh-out-loud moments in Sting’s oeuvre, so I take this one while I can.

“Sister Moon” is a saxophone feature and a dark ballad, in some ways reminiscent of “Moon Over Bourbon Street.” But where that song’s arrangement builds from acoustic bass to keyboard and saxophone, here the track builds on washes of synthesizer sound, with only Branford’s playing to break it up. Thankfully he gives a bravura performance. I somehow found a saxophone player at the Governor’s School for the Sciences at Virginia Tech in July of 1989 and he learned the part by ear. We performed it twice, and by the time we were done I had decided I wanted to sing for the rest of my life.

Ironically, “Little Wing” is the other song I’ve performed from this album, about 21 years and change ago. The arrangement on this album is pretty special, marking Sting’s first collaboration with the great Gil Evans, whom we last saw working with Miles Davis in Carnegie Hall, and whom I mentioned had cut a killer version of “Murder by Numbers” with Sting in the late 1980s. This is where that collaboration started, though apparently Sting had met him years previously at Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club in London. The arrangement is an endorphin overload, with Evans’ orchestra and keyboards supporting Sting’s vocals as he sings the hell out of the Jimi Hendrix standard. Mostly what you hear, though, is Hiram Bullock’s guitar, which gets a great solo that transitions into a cool take from Branford before Sting recaps the verse once more at the end. (Bullock, who died in 2008, had played on a variety of rock and fusion recordings, including playing on Steely Dan’s “My Rival” from Gaucho and Paul Simon’s “That’s Why God Made the Movies” from One Trick Pony.)

On this album, “Little Wing” serves as the center of a three-song set about love, moving from the inchoate mooning of “Sister Moon” into a declaration of love that seems to combine muscular feats of strength with moments of heavenward striving. The last song on the album moves into something considerably more intimate. “The Secret Marriage” was written to a tune by blacklisted German composer Hanns Eisler, who partnered with Bertolt Brecht in both Weimar Germany and in the United States and who composed scores for some 40 films, before being run out of American on a rail by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Sting performed one of the duo’s songs, “An Den Kleinen Radio-Apparat,” in 1987 and adapted the song’s melody for “The Secret Marriage.” It’s an intensely private statement of love, and is a striking note on which to end …Nothing Like the Sun, as if declaring an end to the rule of the King of Pain.

The album cycle for …Nothing Like the Sun, from its release through the tour and the eventual follow-up, lasted for almost four years. During that time a great many things changed, including the almost complete cessation of new music releases on vinyl in the United States. You can find a copy of the follow-up, The Soul Cages, on LP but you have to really look hard, and the subsequent albums weren’t released in vinyl form in the US, or at all. (There’s still no US release of Ten Summoner’s Tales on vinyl, to my surprise.) Sting also played less jazz following the completion of this song cycle; though Kenny Kirkland played on The Soul Cages and Branford guested on a few songs, for the most part Sting has stayed straight on in the pop lane ever since. But Branford’s career as a bandleader was just taking off; we’ll hear one of his quartet’s albums next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: There were some really interesting b-sides from this album. Last week we heard “Conversation with a Dog,” but there was also the jazz piece “Ghost in the Strand,” a pop song that maybe should have made the album (“If You There”), Sting’s well-done cover of Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and an adventurous collaboration with Gil Evans on Jimi Hendrix’s “Up From the Skies.” (I wrote about getting “Someone to Watch Over Me” and “Up From the Skies” off a 3-inch CD single, with some difficulty and an adapter, some time ago.) The last spawned a full concert collaboration between Sting and the septuagenarian arranger/bandleader at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy in 1987; you can watch that widely bootlegged performance below:

BONUS BONUS: There’s a popular but as far as I can tell apocryphal story that the song “The Lazarus Heart” was written for the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, to be played over a scene that would have come from the original novel in which Roger is killed at the end of the movie. Sad to say, there is no footage combining the two.

Sting, We’ll Be Together

Sting got up to a lot between his first and second album, including reuniting with the Police, saving the world, and … making beer commercials? The #albumoftheweek checks out the road to “We’ll Be Together.”

Album of the Week, April 19, 2025

I’m going to talk about the lead off single from Sting’s second solo studio album in this post, but it’s going to take me a while to get to it, because Sting took almost two and a half years to make the song. And what he was doing in the meantime kept him very busy.

The last we heard from Sting, he had followed his debut solo album with a documentary and live album, covering the formation of the jazz-rock combo that accompanied him through both those projects (and the birth of his son Jake). Those projects took up a good portion of 1985, though the Bring on the Night live album would not see release until the summer of 1986. So what was he doing in the meantime? Well, first of all he had to save the world. He appeared in a series of six concerts for Amnesty International known as the Conspiracy of Hope tour alongside Peter Gabriel, U2, Lou Reed, Joan Baez, Bryan Adams and the Neville Brothers. A number of Very Significant Things happened in these concerts. First, it solidified Sting’s association with Amnesty and his commitment to the cause of prisoners of conscience.

Second, the concerts served as a venue for an unexpected reunion of the Police, who hadn’t played together since their Synchronicity tour ended in March 1984 in Australia. The band wrapped up the Conspiracy of Hope tour by reuniting during the last three concerts; on June 15, 1986, they played a set at Giants Stadium in New Jersey in which they closed their set with “Invisible Sun.” U2’s earnest lead vocalist Bono joined that performance, and at the end, the Police members handed their instruments to the members of U2 as they joined the all-star finale version of “I Shall Be Released.” Bono, naturally regarded it as “a very big moment, like passing a torch.”

Sting and the band weren’t quite prepared to pass the torch, though, and they made arrangements to reconvene in the studio in July to start working on songs for a new album. Fate might have looked very differently if that project had gone ahead as planned, but the night before the recordings Stewart Copeland fell from a horse and broke his collarbone. Without the ability to effectively play together in the studio, the band did not gel as a writing and performing unit and they left after only recording two songs, both re-recordings of hits from Zenyatta Mondatta. “Don’t Stand So Close To Me ’86” would feature on their Every Breath You Take: The Singles compilation (and be played endlessly by me), but “De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da ’86” wouldn’t be officially released until 2000.

So much for the Police, alas. So what happened to Sting next? Well, the next thing he released was also associated with Amnesty; the “Conspiracy of Hope” tour begat a compilation record, also called Conspiracy of Hope (at least in the UK; the US version received the less euphonious name Rock for Amnesty). Other participants shared previously recorded album tracks (inevitably and appropriately, Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” from his third self-titled album leads the first side) or studio rarities like the re-recorded version of Tears for Fears’ “I Believe.”

Sting chose to go into the studio to record something specifically for the compilation. That he chose to cover Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” seems a little incomprehensible now, but in the context of Amnesty’s work for justice, a pointed callout to America’s own history of racial injustice can be perhaps forgiven. The performance itself is brief but memorable; Sting’s vocals are in fine fettle and he is accompanied mostly by his own upright bass, with some subtle cymbals and keyboards.

After that, in late 1986, Sting’s mother died. They had not been especially close; in fact, Sting was at this point all but estranged from his family, having made some impolitic remarks in 1980 to a Rolling Stone interviewer: “I come from a family of losers – I’m the eldest of four – and I’ve rejected my family as something I don’t want to be like. My father delivered milk for a living and my mother was a hairdresser. Those are respectable occupations, but my family failed as a family, I grew up with a pretty piss-poor family life. I lived in Newcastle, which would be like living in Pittsburgh, and the whole thing for me was escape.” Though he was penitent in a 1983 interview, the family did not appear to have reconciled before his mother’s death. Years later, he confessed that he threw himself directly into work as a way to cope.

And the work that he found, at least for the time being, was a beer commercial. If you ever thought that “We’ll Be Together” sounded a little slick compared to the rest of Sting’s second album from which it was drawn, that might be because it was literally composed on spec: the Japanese brewing conglomerate Kirin Brewing Company asked him for a song for a commercial, to include the word “together” in the lyrics. Sting apparently wrote the song in a few minutes, the producers liked it, and he went and recorded it with Eric Clapton on guitar. A tidy payday.

Apparently Sting felt some remorse or at least dissatisfaction with the track, because he re-recorded it for its single release and album incarnation, this time with session guitarist Bryan Loren (best known for authoring and performing the song “Do the Bartman” from the album The Simpsons Sing the Blues, with an uncredited Michael Jackson on backing vocals. You can’t make this stuff up). But you can hear the original version with Clapton on the expanded edition of his second album, or on the b-side of the 12″ single. The 12″ also features the original album version, an extended mix that elongates the intro and adds a few extra bars, and an instrumental version.

All the non-Clapton versions feature the same band: Sting on bass and vocals, Kenny Kirkland on keys, Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Dolette McDonald and Janice Pendarvis on backing vocals, and some new faces—French drummer Manu Katché, who had played with Peter Gabriel on So, percussionist Mino Cinelu who had played with Miles and Weather Report, and backing vocalists Renée Geyer and Vesta Williams (who scored six top-10 Billboard R&B hits in the 1980s and 1990s in her own right). Missing from the mix: Omar Hakim, who was busy with other commitments, and Darryl Jones, who had presciently observed in an interview segment in Bring On the Night that “I’m not so totally sure yet that this is a band, in that everyone has… a totally equal say in what happens.” He would not record again with Sting, though he went on to a long career as the bassist in The Rolling Stones.

The other song on the single is a true curiosity in Sting’s work. “Conversation with a Dog” features a tight bass groove, some robotic sequencing and funky keyboards, and some of Sting’s most philosophical lyrics, cast as a Socratic dialog with his dog: “What about our politics, philosophy, our history?/ ‘If something’s admirable in these, it is a mystery.’” It’s a great showcase for Kenny Kirkland, if nothing else, and for Sting’s moderately believable impression of a barking dog. And I must confess I continue to have in the back of my mind the couplet “There must be something in our scientific treasure/ ‘Despair,’ he said, ‘of which your weapons are the measure.’” “Conversation with a Dog” hinted that Sting had deeper preoccupations on his mind than beer commercials, and we’ll check more of those out next time.

You can see the original music video for “We’ll Be Together,” set to the extended mix of the song, here:

Sadly, there was no video for “Conversation with a Dog.” But! It turns out there were several Kirin beer commercials as part of the epic advertising campaign, all featuring Sting looking smoldering. You’re welcome.

PS: I have yet to forgive the graphic designer of this record sleeve for not knowing the difference between a straight quotation mark and a proper apostrophe. I haven’t been able to prove it, but I’ve long suspected that this cover was a contributing factor leading to Robin Williams’ creation of her groundbreaking work The Mac Is Not a Typewriter. Still worth a read, if only to clear up the mystery of the number of spaces after a period (one).

Wynton Marsalis, J Mood

Cover to J Mood, illustration by Romare Bearden

Album of the Week, April 12, 2025

In the Bring on the Night documentary, there’s a brief interview with Kenny Kirkland at the very beginning in which he says, “I’m sure some people, some purists, jazz people, don’t like the idea of our doing this,” meaning being a jazz musician and playing with Sting. Kirkland was sure, all right; his former boss, Wynton Marsalis, had in fact kicked him and his brother Branford out of his quintet for joining Sting’s band. We’ve now heard some of the story about what happened next for Kirkland, but what about Wynton? Interestingly, the answer seems to be that he found his own voice.

One notable thing about Marsalis’s Black Codes (From the Underground) is the degree to which it resembles an album from Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. That album was recorded in January 1985. His second album from that year, recorded in December, was a quartet with two new players: Marcus Roberts on piano and Robert Hurst on bass (Jeff “Tain” Watts returned from the old band). Both players would have a noticeable impact on Marsalis’s sound, but the biggest factor was Roberts.

Marthaniel Roberts, who goes professionally by Marcus, was born in 1963, two years after Wynton, to a longshoreman father and a gospel singing mother who went blind as a teenager. It ran in the family; by age 5, Roberts was blind from a combination of glaucoma and cataracts. Also at age 5, he learned to play piano, teaching himself on an instrument at their church. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, which had previously graduated Ray Charles, and studied piano formally beginning at age 12. This album was his first recording, and the style that he brought to Wynton’s band, anchored in gospel and ragtime rather than the post-bop influences that informed Kirkland, made a significant impact on Wynton’s sound.

The album opens with “J Mood,” which true to its name seems more like a mood—specifically, a blue mood—than a composition. Starting around this time, Marsalis’s compositions started to feature complex chord changes that could be downright Ellingtonesque, and this one is no exception; there’s also a thread of restraint, as though the music was moving in some mysterious underworld. The meter is complex, too, swerving from a slow 7/4 to bits of 4/4. The band starts out stating the theme together, with the trumpet playing over top of the changes in the piano, and Marsalis goes into a slow 4/4 blues in which he establishes a series of melodic phrases that don’t quite cohere to an actual melody. Tain and Bob Hurst anchor the low end, with Hurst keeping a “walking bass line” feel in his melodic progression but constantly swinging against the beat, and Tain exploding the harmonic envelope with inventive use of cymbals both soft and loud. When Roberts plays, it’s in a deceptively slow cadence that brings some melodic sense to the music, with hints of church in some of the low chords and his arpeggiated right hand, all the while swinging hard. The band finishes where they begin, with only a diminished seventh in the upper octave hinting at any of the development that has taken place.

Marcus Roberts’ sole compositional credit on the album, “Presence That Lament Brings” has a melody, but not an easy one (I am reminded a little of some of the twelve-tone solo lines in Bernstein’s Kaddish) and plenty of rubato to go around. Wynton is muted here, but the effect is less explicitly Milesian than on Black Codes; he seems to be finding his own expression and sound in which the combination of the soft tone of the mute and the growling of his note-bending playing combine to create a completely different emotional space. Space is the defining characteristic of Roberts’ solo, which has both that same deceptively unhurriedness and a sparser chord voicing than on “J Mood.”

“Insane Asylum,” composed by Donald Brown (who was the pianist in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers when Wynton was in the group), has a lazy intensity about it; there’s still that mute and that extreme swing that seems to wait until the last possible moment to move, and the melody descends chromatically like a swoon. Still, Tain’s cymbal work keeps insistently nudging us forward, and Wynton’s trumpet climbs to the highest heights as if urging us forward up a trail. The tune itself seems to circle back insistently to the the same chromatic descending motif over and over again, as if painfully fixated on it.

“Skain’s Domain” refers to Wynton’s childhood nickname; while you practically can’t refer to Jeff Watts without his rhyming “Tain,” “Skain” seems to be used principally only inside Wynton’s band, and mostly as a joke. The liner notes takes some pains to tell us that “the song is twenty seven bars long, with a two/four measure at the nineteenth bar.” What is true is that the playing is brisk and light enough that you don’t count the measures; though the tune, like everything else, keeps to the minor-key side of the equation, it feels almost sprightly. By contrast, “Melodique” is, rhythmically, a slow blues over a samba rhythm, and bears more than a family resemblance to Herbie Hancock’s “Mimosa.” It plays some of the same tricks with rhythmic pulse and stasis, with the added trick of a twelve-tone inspired melody from Wynton over the top. It’s a gorgeous track, regardless.

“After” is a wistful ballad by Wynton’s father Ellis Marsalis, albeit one that is amped up by Tain’s cymbal work, which urges the track along with splashes, washes, and marches of cymbal sound against the more meditative backing of the piano and the bass. It seems to capture a tender moment alone, where “Much Later” seems to find the couple jitterbugging the night away. The pulse is constantly moving eighth notes, Tain finding a way to swing even at high velocity. The track has a much looser feel, and the cough or sneeze at around the 40-second mark as well as the barely detectable fade-in suggest that it was a full band jam session during which the engineer just happened to be rolling tape. It sounds great and blows some of the sleepiness away, ending the album on a high note—as well as a simultaneous Wynton and Roberts quote of “If I Were a Bell”!

Marsalis was finding his way to the key ingredients of his compositional and performative voice: in addition to the bell-like tone of his early recordings, we get a variety of distinctive sounds through the mute here, along with a healthy dose of both Ellington and Armstrong—as well as the blues. On later albums of his own material for small group, Wynton would lean more heavily into one or another of these directions, particularly the blues—his trio of albums in the “Soul Gestures in Southern Blue” series is worth seeking out—but they play as elaborations of the musical language that was first captured here.

If Wynton was driving deeper into the jazz tradition, he wasn’t the only Marsalis brother to be recording jazz albums. About six months after the quartet wrapped up its sessions for the album in December 1985, Branford recorded his own set and second album, Royal Garden Blues, in New York. But Branford was also busy with some decidedly non-traditional endeavors, and we’ll pick up that story next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Sting, Bring on the Night

Album of the Week, April 5, 2025

You’re a rock star who’s just changed genres and shifted into a jazz-rock hybrid with a band of up and coming jazz legends who have played with the best. You’ve had a few hits from your first solo album with this group. What do you do next?

Well, if you’re Sting, you start touring the minute the album hits the streets, and you hire a film crew, complete with an award winning director, to document the formation of the band as a touring unit and to capture the band at its inception, rather than waiting until the band is at its peak or dissolving. Then you release that movie while the album is still on the charts, and follow it up the next summer with a live double album release in which the jazz is even more prominent. Welcome to Bring on the Night.

The one thing that struck me forcefully, listening last week in detail to The Dream of the Blue Turtles, was how much of it was clearly directly from Sting’s sequencers, the band (especially Kenny Kirkland’s fine playing) audible mostly as color or commentary. That’s not the case here. This is the sound of a jazz band (again, composed of Kirkland, Branford Marsalis, Darryl Jones, and Omar Hakim, with Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald on backing vocals) taking a concert’s worth of material and making it thoroughly their own.

That said, the opening to “Bring on the Night/When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” is all Sting. With the reggae rhythms of the Police’s version of “Bring on the Night” banished, Sting gives us a brisk, running arpeggio down the song’s key changes on his guitar, accompanied by quiet keyboards and percussion as he sings the opening in an easy voice. When he comes to the chorus, the stacked vocals of Pendarvis and McDonald bring that richness that they added to the chorus of “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” with Kenny’s keyboards adding mercurial chord changes around the edges of the tune. The second verse features a Darryl Jones bass line that anchors the tune in even more funk; when the second chorus comes in, Branford Marsalis plays a counter-melody that riffs into a minor key vamp that the band plays for 64 bars, under the chorus of “Bring on the Night” and then wordless vocals—and then Sting sings the opening notes to “When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” over the same vamp. After two verses and two choruses, the rest of the band drops back and Kenny Kirkland takes an extended solo that manages to continue the riff, extend the chordal palette, play with rhythm, and build dynamic contrast, all over the course of about 16 choruses in a little over three minutes. (Narrator: “It was about at this time, at the age of fourteen, that I decided I needed to listen to more jazz.”) The band does a little call and response with the chorus, and then: a rap break. Yes, that’s Branford Marsalis shouting out the band with some early 1980s rhymes, in what I believe is the saxophonist’s only rap credit on record. The band continues to jam over the vamp as they return to the verse once more, this time with Branford playing a tenor obbligato over the sung chorus and into an explosive but brief solo over one last chorus.

By contrast to the immense jam of the first track, “Consider Me Gone” hews much closer to the arrangement on the record; what excitement there is comes purely from the interchanges of the musicians, starting with Sting trading phrases with Branford in the opening and Dolette, Janice and Omar Hakim building stacks of harmony over the bluesy “You can’t say that” pre-chorus. Here Kenny’s Synclavier, sounding like a Hammond organ, primarily simmers rather than boiling, and Branford builds intensity by punctuating each line of the verse, sometimes just commenting, other times spinning lines of melody that pull in different directions. Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim anchor the blues, coming to a slow boil finally in the last chorus as the band moves into the closing vamp.

“Low Life,” originally released as the b-side to “Spirits in the Material World” and dating all the way back to 1979, is an odd tune, a lyric that seems to be about the hazards of slumming it: “A fatal fascination for the seedy party of town…” The band gamely gives it a full treatment nonetheless, blooming out of another Sting arpeggiated guitar opening, with Omar Hakim’s muscular drumming bringing up the energy through two verses until Branford’s saxophone enters as if summoned. The ultimate pleasure of the song is again hearing the band sing those crunchy chords over the chorus: “Low life/is no life” is an odd refrain to have stuck in your head, but here we are.

“We Work the Black Seam” again closely follows the studio arrangement, albeit with the synths of the original supplemented by a more prominent solo keyboard part that’s echoed by Branford’s soprano sax. But there’s also a very slight swing to Sting’s vocal and the instrumentalists’ accompaniment that brings some relief from the insistent repetition of the programmed keyboard track, and Branford’s free saxophone lines over the second verse again pull at the tonality of the verse, bringing it to unexpectedly rich places. The extra half-verse that is added in the third feels actually moving, despite being a bit of a word salad: “Our conscious lives run deep/You cling onto your mountain while we sleep/This way of life is part of me/There is no price so only let me be.”

“Driven to Tears” takes the intensity of the Police’s statement of empathy for the impoverished world around them and stretches it into a seven-minute-long workout. It’s an engaging listen, but proves the rare case where this band couldn’t elevate the source material above its existing heights. That’s not for lack of trying; there are some intense moments in the arrangement, and the crowd energy is high as they clap along with the band on the opening vamp. Again, Kenny Kirkland is the hero of the arrangement, playing mostly acoustic piano and opening holes of light in the harmonics of the vamp. Branford enters in the second chorus and takes an extended solo as the chords change from the dark tonality of the opening to a higher key and Branford repeats a blues riff, hopping up to a blue note on the minor third. The band comes back to the original tonality for the last verse and seems to come to a conclusion, but then starts to build up again and drops right back into the higher key. This is where the arrangement falls flat for me, as Branford continues soloing even though he doesn’t bring forward any new ideas. Ultimately when the band brings it back to one last chorus it comes as a little bit of a relief.

“The Dream of the Blue Turtles/Demolition Man,” on the other hand, gives us a brisk romp through the Blue Turtles instrumental theme, complete with a quick dip into three in the verse and a brief Kenny Kirkland solo. The band then drops into a driving rock beat and gives us a fierce rave-up on the Police song, with some improvised clavier soloing from Kirkland and apocalyptic drumming from Omar Hakim. Where “Driven to Tears” feels stretched thin, “Demolition Man” feels muscular and energetic, as though it could go on for hours. Maybe it’s that riff; maybe it’s Janice and Dolette singing the hell out of that chorus. Maybe it’s even having Branford play a real saxophone part on the hook instead of Sting’s enthusiastic amateur work. Whatever, it is, as they say, a banger.

When I first heard the album, “One World (Not Three)/Love is the Seventh Wave” opened the second CD; on the vinyl version it opens the second record with an a cappella version of the repeated vocal hook to the Police’s song (“It may seem a million miles away/But it gets a little closer every day”), here given a reading that puts reggae energy back into the song thanks to the steel-drum-like Synclavier work of Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Sting leads the arena in a singalong of the chorus, brings back an a cappella rendition of the vocal hook, then returns to the chorus with some vocal improvisation atop it, only to slam right into “Love is the Seventh Wave,” with Kirkland, Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim continuing to play the same arrangement across the new song’s chord changes. Branford takes another solo, sort of; his approach to these songs appears to mostly be to repeat one idea across eight bars, then switch to another idea and do it again, as though making sure the folks in the cheap seats get the picture. There’s some decent harmonic imagination going on, but not enough of it. The band settles into a new key for a sort of New Wave blues vamp, and Sting and the vocalists alternate singing “One world is enough” with the lyrics to “Love is the Seventh Wave” in the new minor key. The arrangement winds up back in the original key in a sort of summation, but due to the drop in energy during the blues vamp it feels more like the band climbs to its feet than a culmination in energy.

“Moon Over Bourbon Street” again aligns closely to its arrangement on the record, which isn’t a bad thing, since the original was a standout on Dream of the Blue Turtles. Again, we get Sting on upright bass and Branford on soprano sax, though in this arrangement without the full orchestra Branford and Kenny have to fill in, ably, for the classical interlude; we even get what sounds like a little timpani roll from Omar Hakim. It’s a nice version of the original song but not transformative.

The transformation comes with “I Burn for You.” From the paranoiac, tense version on Brimstone and Treacle, the tune’s rebirth as a torch song is something of a surprise. Arrangement-wise, this is another one that opens with an arpeggio on both piano and guitar under Sting’s gentle melody. But it grows in intensity into the bridge as Branford layers a counter-melody over the crashing drums and questing bass line. Sting improvises vocally on the chorus as the band floats into a dreamy version of the “Brimstone” theme, given an entirely different character by Branford’s harmonization, and the song extends into a sort of reverie over a deep chord progression in the keys and bass. A swell of cheering seems out of place in the midst of this section; viewing the concert film reveals that Sting has pulled out his custom upright bass and started to play the Brimstone theme on it. The record fades out here rather than break the spell; in the concert video the band shifts gears into a long, higher energy improv over the Brimstone vamp, in one of the most satisfactory moments of the whole show, complete with some seriously Copeland-esque drum work from Hakim and a saxophone solo from Branford that betters anything that made it onto the record.

The last side of the album opens with “Another Day,” here transformed from the synth-driven New Wave energy of the b-side to a jazzy acoustic arrangement anchored by Kenny Kirkland’s piano and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Branford gets a good solo between verses, and Janice and Dolette’s harmonies carry the chorus, but otherwise this is a straightforward reading of the song. But “Children’s Crusade” is another story. Like “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” this starts as a straightforward translation of the record’s arrangement to the bandstand, with Kenny Kirkland’s piano substituting for the keyboards of the original. When we get to Branford’s sax solo following the chorus, though, we’re in deeper territory. Here we hear reams of ideas unspooling from his soprano sax, with Coltrane-esque “sheets of sound,” playing against the rhythm, and a seamless transition into the heraldic motif of the final chorus. It’s easily his best moment on the record, and one could wish that the producers had captured more moments like this from the performances.

In “Down So Long,” we have a peek of some of Sting’s affection for old American R&B, as previously heard on the Party Party soundtrack. Written by blues guitarist J.B. Lenoir and Alex Atkins, the track is here given a straightforward blues romp with a tight keyboard solo from Kirkland and a quiet coda on the last verse. (The song previously appeared in a duet with Jeff Beck on the 1985 cancer research benefit compilation Live! For Life, which I hadn’t heard before today.) The album closes with “Tea in the Sahara,” which gets a swinging shuffle from Darryl Jones’ bass, transforming the arid feeling of the Synchronicity track into something of a victory lap for the band. Again, Branford’s saxophone uplifts the final outro, playing into some atmospheric guitar work from Sting and an off-kilter piano pattern from Kenny.

You can get by without having heard Bring on the Night; the live album doesn’t introduce any material not heard elsewhere. But it serves as a transformation of the material, shaped by the tremendous abilities of this band, even if the versions on the record are sometimes paler shadows of the energy of the live improvisations captured in the movie. In some ways the playfulness and energy of the performances make this my favorite of Sting’s recordings. He wouldn’t be this unmannered and spontaneous very often throughout his career; as Trudie Styler says in an interview early in the film, it’s down to the influence of these American jazz musicians that we get to see a Sting who laughs and engages in true band dynamics in these performances.

We’re going to briefly turn from his music back to the music of the jazz musicians who sparked this musical rebirth. But first we’re going to see what happened to Wynton Marsalis’s sound after he fired his brother and Kenny Kirkland for joining Sting’s band. That’ll come next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I strongly recommend watching at least the first half of Bring on the Night (the movie). Apted has a way of getting true things to come out of the mouths of the participants in the film and the band rehearsal scenes are a lot of fun to watch. But if you don’t watch anything else, you owe it to yourself to watch this bit as Sting and the band cook up a quick cover of the “Flintstones” theme:

A new home for Exfiltration Radio

A quick site maintenance note. I got a peek at the bandwidth usage for this blog today, and pretty quickly decided I needed to move the MP3 files off the site and onto something that is better suited for streaming. So as of now, all the Exfiltration Radio posts now link out to the new home for the radio shows… on Soundcloud.

Everything should still work as it did before, but drop a comment here if something is screwy.

Mozart Requiem, and the Promisistini

Last night, my friends in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and I wrapped up a series of performances of the Mozart Requiem with the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Dima Slobodeniouk conducting—we had previously sung Grieg’s Peer Gynt with him; Erin Morley, soprano; Avery Amereau, mezzo; Jack Swanson, tenor, substituting for Simon Bode who couldn’t get a visa; and the redoubtable bass Morris Robinson returning after performing it with the BSO in 2017). I had last sung the Requiem with Michael Tilson Thomas at Tanglewood in 2010 and in Symphony Hall in 2009 (with Shi-Yeon Sung substituting for an ailing James Levine), and before that in 2006 at Tanglewood with Levine; before that, I performed it in Bellevue, Washington, with the Cascadian Chorale in 2002 as part of a commemoration of the first anniversary of 9/11.

Which is to say, the piece and I have history.

What was distinctive this time (as my colleague Jeff Foley notes) was the amount of time we were able to spend refining our approach to the music and making effortless parts that often end up barked or belted in other performances. The work appears to have paid off, as the Globe specifically cited the sound of the tenors as a highlight of the performance: “With the ‘Requiem,’ the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gave a stunning and profound display of unity. Their quality of performance has been on a distinct upswing lately, and the fruits of their work showed in the precise intonation in the ‘Kyrie,’ explosive dynamic variation in the ‘Dies Irae,’ and elegant phrasing in the ‘Lacrimosa’ — staples of the choral repertoire where rough patches tend to make themselves visible. The tenor parts of the ‘Requiem’ choral book can be especially punishing, and the TFC tenors deftly shouldered the demands, letting their high notes bloom.”

Which is to say, that calls for a cocktail! This one borrows its title from the “Quam olim Abrahæ” fugue, which appears at the end of both the “Domine Jesu” and the “Hostias,” and I couldn’t resist a Martini variant. This is based on Louis Muckensturm’s “Dry Martini” from 1906, one of the only ones I know that uses curaçao.

The Promisistini can be as dry as you like, depending on the ratio of vermouth to Curaçao.

As always, you can import the recipe card photo into Highball. Enjoy!