July 2024 – Jarrett House North

Kurt Elling, SuperBlue

Album of the Week, July 27, 2024

After winning his second Grammy award for Secrets are the Best Stories, what did Kurt Elling do? He could easily have repeated the formula or continued collaborating with Danilo Pérez. He could’ve made another album with Branford Marsalis. He could’ve even taken some time off. Instead—in the depths of the pandemic—he made a sharp left turn into a completely different sound.

SuperBlue has some similarities to Elling’s earlier albums. There are sharp lyrics in his vocalese. There’s a top notch band—though its composition is markedly different than what went before. There’s also genius adaptations of unadaptable instrumental jazz tunes into singable melodies, in this case an astonishing cover of a late Wayne Shorter tune.

But those differences… The biggest is the presence of guitarist Charlie Hunter. Hunter’s an innovator not just in guitar technique but in the design of the instrument. He began his career playing seven-string guitar in the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy; the custom-built instrument allowed him to provide both guitar and bass lines simultaneously, a trick he also used on his Blue Note Records debut in 1995 (this time on an eight-string guitar). Add drummer Corey Fonville, who has collaborated with traditional New Orleans trumpeter Nicholas Peyton and genre bender Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, and Richmond, VA based keyboard player and producer DJ Harrison, and you have a very different foundation for a Kurt Elling album. Think less jazz contemplation and more jazz-funk.

But the band didn’t get together in the studio; due to COVID-19, they initially exchanged tracks and ideas online, building the basic tracks asynchronously; eventually Elling and Hunter met up in a barn in Illinois to add vocals and guitar. You can’t tell; the band sounds tight and funky throughout from the first notes of “SuperBlue,” as they give an out of time introduction before they drop into the funky pocket and Elling intones “The important thing is to pull yourself up by your own hair to turn yourself inside out and see the world with fresh eyes” (quoting Marat/Sade). Makes a pretty good manifesto for the experiment!

“Sassy” is a recasting of Manhattan Transfer’s tribute to Sarah Vaughan from their 1991 album The Offbeat of Avenues, and both Elling’s upper range and his inner beatnik poet get a workout. There’s some great Fender Rhodes work from Harrison here too. The Fender shows up on the next track too, the original “Manic Panic Epiphanic,” and it’s a great funky ballad that interpolates falsetto choruses and “He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands.” The statement of hope at the core of the song is striking even before you realize that it was written in the darkest days of the pandemic.

Elling doesn’t abandon his bag of tricks, and he goes to the vocalese well for “Where To Find It,” improbably written atop Wayne Shorter’s Grammy-winning “Aung San Suu Kyi.” Hunter finds the groove in the underbelly of Shorter’s tune, and he and Fonville stay in the engine room, stoking the fires from the pocket. Meanwhile Elling’s lyrics veer from the philosophical to the poetic to the downright Buddhist: “The snowfall tracks speak to one other… Find it in becoming/drumming like a running wind horse carrying your foreshadowing…”

“Can’t Make It With Your Mind” veers into a different lane, with Elling delivering a fast-paced diss track to an attractive woman in a bar who immediately turns off the narrator when she reveals she’s a Q-Anon true believer: “I wish you’d kept it on the physical plane/‘Cause I can’t make it with your brain.” Elling follows up the story with a series of imagined tabloid headlines, underscoring the looney tunes credulity of the conspiracy theorist.

Cody Chesnutt’s “The Seed” would seem an odd choice for an ordinary jazz musician, but it’s right up this band’s alley. The SuperBlue version feels like an old school soul number with a little extra abrasive guitar for color. The original tune “Dharma Bums” brings the beatnik back, with a hefty dose of Kerouac mixed in alongside some straight up silliness. “Cause when the night falls & stars shed their sparkler dims & don’t you know that God is Pooh-Bear
holding out his honeyed paws to both of us from way out there?” Well, no, I didn’t know that, actually.

“Circus” provides a new soundtrack for the Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan short story from his 2004 album Real Gone. Elling narrates the story with a straight face, despite the references to “Horse Faced Ethel” and “One Eyed Myra.” The backing track is a frantic funk groove fueled by Hunter’s guitar and Fonville’s kit, and the band sounds like they could stay there all day.

The mood shifts for “Endless Lawns,” a reworking of an earlier Elling song (based on a Carla Bley tune from her 1987 album Sextet) from his 2018 album The Questions. There’s more funk and grit in this version, and a hefty shot more swing too—and an interpolation of Judith Minty’s poem “Sailing by Stars.” It sounds like an overloaded mess, but it all fits together thanks to the band’s delicate touch and Elling’s soulful delivery. “This Is How We Do,” the closing track, feels a bit like a band theme, an endless loop of a motto. It’s fit for purpose, and you can imagine the band closing out a set in a club with it.

Throughout SuperBlue, Elling sounds like he’s having a blast, as though he’s floating free from the weighty concerns of his last few albums. That might be why he didn’t zag after this zig; he kept working with the SuperBlue group, as we’ll hear in a few weeks. Next week, though, we’ll check in with Cécile McLorin Salvant and see how she spent the pandemic.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Kurt Elling, Secrets are the Best Stories

Album of the Week, July 20, 2024

Kurt Elling was stretching out. The jazz singer had started his career with a bang, signing with Blue Note in the early 1990s and recording a string of Grammy nominated albums (winning for 2009’s Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) that were informed by a unique combination of dramatic sense, beat poetry, and vocalese — taking compositions without words and scatting or even writing new lyrics for them. This formula worked across six albums for Blue Note and five for Concord Records from 1995 to 2015.

But by the end of that period the singer was starting to show signs of restlessness. He parted ways with pianist and arranger Laurence Hobgood, who had been with him from the first Blue Note album. He collaborated with saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet, recording the album The Upward Spiral, and with pianist Brad Mehldau, appearing on his album Finding Gabriel. And he changed labels again, to UK independent Edition Records. Secrets are the Best Stories, recorded with pianist Danilo Pérez (known for his long collaboration with Wayne Shorter), alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, bassist Clark Sommers, drummer Johnathan Blake, guitarist Chico Pinheiro, and percussionists Rogerio Boccato and Román Diaz.

Secrets are the Best Stories opens with the first three songs written over existing jazz tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. “The Fanfold Hawk” is dedicated to poet Franz Wright, and Elling adapts parts of Wright’s poem “The Hawk” for the lyric, imaging abandoning the “crazed, incessant sounds” that drive us toward, as the poet writes, “what makes me sick, and not/what makes me glad.” The song is performed with minimal accompaniment by Sommers, with Elling navigating the thorny vocal line above Sommers’ countermelody. The poem transitions seamlessly into “A Certain Continuum,” also based on a Pastorius melody, his “Continuum” from his first album. Elling’s lyrics capture the mystery of the ever changing world as well as the mysteries of life. The fuller band arrangement here gives us the first of Danilo Pérez’s improvisational moments in a brilliant solo.

“Stays” is a full-on story, set to Wayne Shorter’s “Go” from his seminal 1960s album Schizophrenia. Elling sets the story of a mysterious upstairs neighbor with a secret past to Shorter’s twisting saxophone line, but Pérez’s arrangement strips back the chordal complexity of Shorter’s original sextet to the bare minimum of the piano trio. “Go,” as I wrote in 2022, is a subtle melody that “sneaks under the blankets of your mind”; here the melody is put to good service in delivering the story of a man haunted by ghosts.

“Gratitude (for Robert Bly)” adapts and continues the story in the poet’s “Visiting Sand Island,” shaping a tale of a man who thinks himself unlucky despite his poetic gifts. Pérez and Sommers exchange salsa patterns above a gentle 6/8 sussuration from the drums and percussionists. This leads into “Stage I,” composed by Django Bates with lyrics by Sidsel Endresen from the latter’s 1994 ECM album Exiles. The song creates a sense of disassociation and exploration of self around a series of similes: “Like being in a story/like starring in a play/acting out some destiny/far, far away from anywhere… Like watching people watching you/Like hanging out in No Town/Like you knew the lingo/ Like flying kites from a basement window.” It’s deeply moving in a tentative, delicate sort of way.

This leads into “Beloved (For Toni Morrison).” Elling tells a story of the inhumanity of the chattel slavery system in the pre-Civil War American South. Drawing on an 1857 poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” he illustrates the dilemma of slavery with the story of a mother who fails to protect all her children as they try to escape their captors. While marginally more hopeful than his source material (in the original poem, the mother kills her own children rather than let them be returned to slavery), it’s still a dark tale with no happy endings, albeit beautifully sung. The concluding movements, “Stages II, III,” of the Bates and Endresen poem frame the tale with a ghostly story of a narrator who has disappeared from her own life.

“Song of the Rio Grande (for Oscar and Valeria Martinez-Ramirez)” is a companion to “Beloved,” telling the story of the 2019 drowning death of Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria as they sought to cross the Rio Grande after despairing of legally immigrating to the United States. It’s a mournful song, but coldly precise after the churning emotion of “Beloved.” He follows this with Silvio Rodriguez’s “Rabo de Nube”; sung in the original Spanish, he wishes for a whirlwind to sweep everything away, to remove the sadness and provide revenge.

“Esperanto” switches gears back to the power of hope. Singing over a Vince Mendoza melody, Elling calls out the power of letting one’s own actions and existence be sufficient to protect against the horrors of the world: “It’s a hope / a sign / a measure of quiet rapture / of love and what might come after
It’s letting go / and letting no answer be an answer.” The album closes with Pérez’s quiet “Epilogo,” which ends on a unresolved suspension as if to say: who can tell how things will end?

Secrets are the Best Stories is that rare jazz vocal album, an easy surface listen that reveals deeper layers the more you listen. Little wonder it won a Grammy for best jazz vocal album in 2021; Elling’s deep heart and challenging social vision, along with his mind-boggling ability to invest impossible melodies with ease and grace, created something deeply powerful here. He would change gears again with his next album, a collaboration that took him in a very different direction; we’ll hear that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Old mix: Run on for a long time

I previously posted about the sister mix to this one, Duckin’ and Dodgin’, and so a lot of the context for this mix tape can be found there. But there are a few other things I didn’t talk about.

Starting in 1997, I had begun making double-length mix tapes, with parts 1 and 2. It was fun to explore that much music, and great for long car trips, but it was also exhausting, and I had the idea that I should try to reduce the sprawl just a little bit. I couldn’t fully let the double tape format go, though, and there were a number of touchpoints that connect this tape to the prior one.

Most notable, of course, is the title track. I remember when I first listened to the Moby Play album, how impressed I was with the depth of the gospel and blues material he had tapped and how fresh sounding (at the time) he had made it. Then I found a copy of There Will Be No Sweeter Sound: The Columbia Okeh Post War Gospel Story, a really fantastic 2-CD compilation that came out in February 1998, and listened to the original that he had drawn “Run On” from, Bill Landford and the Landfordaires’ “Run On for a Long Time.” I was considerably less impressed with his work after that. As opposed to a transformative composition, “Run On” proves itself to be a more or less straight remix of the Landfordaires original, and going back to the 1949 recording you find all the charming irregularities and brilliant vocal performances that are flattened out in Moby’s version. (I find myself wondering whether Moby dug up the 78 of “Run On For a Long Time” or if he just nicked the song from the compilation, but that’s a different story.)

There were other things of note on this mix. Morphine’s “The Night” was a somber opener but I was feeling somber about the death of Mark Sandman on an Italian concert stage the prior year. The Night, the band’s posthumous final album, was a bittersweet gift, a nearly perfect summation of their “low rock” sound. Pairing it with my college friend Justin Rosolino’s “Legacy,” an again near perfect combination of acoustic guitar brilliance and vocal excitement (that “everything and everything” part gets me every time), puts some hope back into the atmosphere after “The Night.”

A lot of my playlist construction could be traced to the CDs I had bought in the preceding months. Pulp’s This is Hardcore, the R.E.M. odds and sods collection Dead Letter Office, and the latest Sleater-Kinney all play a pretty big role in this compilation, as did the Flaming Lips and Beck’s Midnite Vultures (many of which already appeared on the prior compilation). I also had picked up my first Elliott Smith album, Figure 8, a few months prior when it came out, and the uncharacteristically simple “Somebody That I Used to Know” made it on here. A few other songs owed their inclusion to my finding them on long car trips. Such was the case with Willie Nelson’s “Somebody Pick Up My Pieces” off his Daniel Lanois produced album Teatro, which is for some reason controversial (I loved it), which I listened to a lot on a drive down to the Outer Banks.

And such was the case with Nat “King” Cole’s “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” which Lisa and I listened to for the first time disbelievingly on WKCR in what must have been hour 7 of a normally five hour drive up to see her parents in Lakewood, on a night that turned into a blizzard. Released in 1947, this was a duet with Johnny Mercer that inevitably cracks both of us up when we hear it today, and we’ve passed it on to our kids as well.

The end of the mix has one of the most emotional one-two punches I’ve put on a mix tape, the part where our impending move to Boston was really kicking in: the Flaming Lips’ “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” and Sleater-Kinney’s “Leave You Behind.” Due to the limitations of the tape format, I only managed to capture part of the last song; it cuts off partway into the bridge as the band sings “There’s nothing left for you to lose,” leaving the song tantalizingly unfinished, which is appropriate for how I felt about my departure from Virginia.

The Night – Morphine (The Night)
Legacy – Justin Rosolino (Music: The Live Recordings)
Wolves, Lower – R.E.M. (Dead Letter Office)
Ballad of a Ladyman – Sleater-Kinney (All Hands on the Bad One)
Dishes – Pulp (This is Hardcore)
Get Real Paid – Beck (Midnite Vultures)
A Spoonful Weighs a Ton – The Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin)
Somebody That I Used to Know – Elliott Smith (Figure 8)
Fight Against Drug Abuse (Public Service Announcement) – James Brown (Funk Power 1970: Brand New Thing)
Save the Bones for Henry Jones – Nat “King” Cole (Jazz Encounters)
Somebody Pick Up My Pieces – Willie Nelson (Teatro)
Cursed Male – Porno for Pyros (Porno for Pyros)
The First Time (Reprise) – Daniel Lanois & MDH (Million Dollar Hotel (Soundtrack))
I Know It’s Over – The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead)
The Big Fellah – Black 47 (Home of the Brave)
I Will Follow – U2 (Boy)
Run On For a Long Time – Bill Landford and the Landfordaires (There Will Be No Sweeter Sound)
Pony – Tom Waits (Mule Variations)
Hollywood Freaks – Beck (Midnite Vultures)
Couldn’t Cause Me Harm – Beth Orton (Central Reservation)
Jealous Guy – John Lennon (Imagine)
Gigantic – The Pixies (Surfer Rosa)
Nevermind (What Was It Anyway) – Sonic Youth (NYC Ghosts & Flowers)
Feeling Yourself Disintegrate – Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin)
Leave You Behind – Sleater-Kinney (All Hands on the Bad One)

You can listen to (most of) this playlist in Apple Music (inexplicably not including “Run On For a Long Time”):

Cécile McLorin Salvant, The Window

Album of the Week, July 13, 2024

Cécile McLorin Salvant was on a roll. She had just picked up her second Grammy award for best jazz vocal album for Dreams and Daggers. No less a luminary than Wynton Marsalis had tapped her to tour with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, saying, “You get a singer like this once in a generation or two.” You’d be forgiven for thinking that she would rest on her laurels, or at least continue in the same path that had brought her to this point of success.

But being Cécile McLorin Salvant, this must have looked like a good time to start to make some changes. She began booking and playing dates without her longtime trio (Aaron Diehl on piano, Lawrence Leathers on drums, Paul Sikivie on bass)—instead, she and Sullivan Fortner appeared as a duo.

Fortner’s arrangements, orchestral in imagination and execution, meant that her musical horizons were not constrained; on the contrary, her new sound was freer and more wide ranging, borrowing from cabaret and stage even as she reached beyond the Great American Songbook for material. So Stevie Wonder’s “Visions” becomes something like lieder, her vocals alternately fierce and tender as Fortner’s piano sounds echoes of Brahms and Schubert, while “One Step Ahead” resonates with the sound of the R&B club with Fortner’s Hammond B3 organ, swinging against the merry waltz of the piano. We get a scampering, ominous undercurrent in Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz’s “By Myself” that turns into a solo that sounds like both parts of Bill Evans improvising in overdubs on Conversations With Myself. And Richard Rodgers’ 1962 song “The Sweetest Sounds” (from No Strings) has healthy dollops of boogie-woogie and Brahms forming a substantial solo number, introduced by Salvant’s wistful introductory reading of the tune.

This isn’t to say that the album is all Fortner, all the time. Indeed, Buddy Johnson’s “Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone” provides a vehicle for Cécile’s voice to spin a dark tale of sorrow and regret with subdued accompaniment in a live performance from the Village Vanguard, while the original “À Clef” hypnotizes with Salvant’s chanson performance, balanced with a touch of Nadia Boulanger in the accompaniment. Dori Caymmi’s “Obsession” is a breathtaking miniature of desire. And Dorothy Wayne and Ray Rusch’s “Wild Is Love” balances a nonchalant vocal delivery against the sound of an accompaniment that seems at imminent risk of tumbling down the stairs.

The jaunty organ of “J’Ai L’Cafard,” a 1930 French song by Louis Daspax and Jean Eugene Charles Eblinger, belies the darkness in Salvant’s performance of the desperate tale of a drug addict, a darkness that appears only in the final snarl of the chorus. For my ear, Salvant’s live reading of “Somewhere” could use a little of that snarl; for my taste, there’s a little too much portamento and rubato in her reading. But there are pleasures aplenty in Sullivan’s accompaniment, which finds an Ornette Coleman-like intensity in the long solo, and in Salvant’s hushed, unaccompanied final verse.

“The Gentleman is a Dope” finds Cécile back in delightfully familiar territory, with a swinging accompaniment underscoring a scornfully joyous narration over the Rodgers and Hammerstein original; the tune could easily have fit on any of her earlier albums, save for the thunderously cockeyed sonata of a solo between the first verse and the reprise. Alec Wilder’s “Trouble is a Man” is in more mature territory, a straight-up ballad sung with defiance and heartbreak in approximately equal measures. Cole Porter’s “Were Thine That Special Face” falls somewhere in between, as Salvant’s Petruchio attempts but fails to woo his Kate. “I’ve Got Your Number” starts as a cool rebuff that breaks down Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh’s cocky narrator before proposing that the two join forces; it’s enhanced by Fortner’s solo, which sounds a bit like Thelonious Monk sideswiping Bill Evans on a bicycle before riding off into the wobbling night.

“Tell Me Why,” the old Four Aces song, is given a tender balladic performance here, with Salvant’s reading of the line “Suddenly I’m feeling happy, so happy I want to cry, oh tell me why” shifting from joy to lump in the throat within the same phrase. Salvant returns to Rodgers and Hart for “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You,” digging into lines like “I’ve got a powerful anesthesia in my fist/and the perfect wrist to give your neck a twist” with relish.

The album finishes with an ambitious live reading of “The Peacocks” that is both helped and hurt by Melissa Andana’s presence on saxophone; both she and Cécile want to take a fair amount of portamento on the chorus and they aren’t quite in sync, resulting in some clashes. But Andana’s saxophone solo is simpatico and gorgeous, and thematically the song, presenting the clash between the beautiful surface and the unknowable inner life of the loved one, is a good summation of the album. With it Salvant rounds out her survey of different modes of failure and joy from romantic love, presenting a more cohesive and wilder artistic statement than on her previous outings.

This was Cécile McLorin Salvant’s last album for Mack Avenue. As she won a Grammy for each of her preceding albums as well as this one, you could be forgiven for thinking that the world was running out of superlatives to give her. And you’d be wrong, but she shifted to a new label before we would learn about it. We’ll hear about that journey soon. Next time, we’ll talk a bit about another jazz vocalist who was shaking up his career, and his band.

You can buy or stream this week’s album on Bandcamp or listen to it on YouTube:

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dreams and Daggers

Album of the Week, July 6, 2024

A lot of vocal talents took the stage from the 1980s, when we checked in on the end of Johnny Hartman’s career, to the 2010s when we continue our story. Zion this series I’m skipping over a bunch of talented performers, including Diana Krall, Melody Gardot, and others, but an awful lot of those intervening vocalists were relegated to the easy-listening side of the charts. Cécile McLorin-Salvant is not easy-listening. Brilliant, yes, with a gorgeous voice, but not easy.

Salvant grew up in Miami to Haitian and French parents, and was bilingual from a young age. Studying law and voice in Aix-en-Provence, she quickly built a career as an innovative singer, winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition. She made a series of albums that won critical acclaim; by the time this album was released in 2018 she had a Grammy nomination and an award for Best Vocal Jazz Album, for her 2016 For One to Love, under her belt. She was by this time steadily working with a piano trio featuring Paul Sikivie on bass and Lawrence Leathers on drums, and led by Aaron Diehl.

Dreams and Daggers serves as a live document of Salvant’s evolution with this working band… with some tantalizing hints of bigger things to come. Not all of the 23 tracks on this triple album are live, and the studio recordings, like “And Yet” which opens the album, often feature a string quartet instead of the trio. But the bulk of the album is devoted to the interplay of the trio with Salvant’s voice, and it’s glorious.

I’m not going track by track through this album, but there are a few numbers that merit special mention. Bob Dorough’s “Devil May Care,” one of two Dorough numbers on the album, is given an off-kilter propulsive energy thanks to Salvant’s delivery, which tumbles headlong past bar lines and stretches out the chorus until it lands at Diehl’s feet. He plays with tempo but also with quotations, dropping a little Ferde Grofé (which to be fair is more than implied by Dorough’s melody) before proceeding into a sonata-like improvisation that concludes with a quotation from Beethoven’s Fifth (not the most famous motif, but part of the development). Bassist Sikivie plays with meter, going from common time to a version of Salvant’s skewed bars, before handing to Lawrence Leathers for a solo that calls up hints of New Orleans amid the general bombast. The group comes back, finishing in a different key, to general applause.

One of the numbers with strings alongside the trio, “You’re My Thrill” takes the Sidney Clare/Jay Gorney standard from a pretty but restrained opening to an increasingly naked expression of desire and longing, all on the strength of Salvant’s emotional range and the the spiraling tonality of the string arrangement, which seems to shift from one key to another with each bar. As does Salvant; one moment she’s Sarah Vaughan, the next she’s Marlene Dietrich. It’s gorgeous and over too soon.

And then there’s “You’ve Got to Give Me Some,” a bald faced reading of the bawdy Spencer Williams blues standard that was originally recorded by the great Bessie Smith. A big part of Salvant’s book to this point has been taking standards and reading them deeply through a woman’s perspective, and this fits that formula, and then some. This is the only number in which the piano is played by Sullivan Fortner instead of Aaron Diehl; he would go on to be her principal collaborator following this album, and he follows her closely throughout the verses and then turns into a complete beast on his solo. Of course, that’s not the reason to listen to this rendition; it’s her knowingly (and winkingly) horny delivery of every double entendre in the books, and then some. (Actually, the very best part might be her thanking her mother at the end for supporting her through eight shows, and then saying, “and I’m sorry, Mom, I’m sorry, Mom! Sorry.”)

Dreams and Daggers is a great summation of the first part of Salvant’s career, a sprawling survey that captured her unique voice, idiosyncratic taste, and ability to see deeply into the Great American Songbook. She was to dial all of those strengths up in her next album for Mack Avenue, which we’ll listen to next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

* PS – I try to keep to a regular schedule with these, but a one-two punch of vacation travel following business travel, plus a strained right elbow, made me decide that I would ultimately take a mulligan for last week. But I’ll see you in a week with the next album.