Tony Williams, Life Time

Album of the Week, October 5, 2024

Of all the members of Miles’ second great quintet, the one we’ve written the least about is the youngest member, drummer Tony Williams. Just 17 when he joined the quintet in the spring of 1963, he was already a modern jazz veteran, having begun playing with brilliant free jazz saxophonist Sam Rivers when he was just 13 years old. A gig with Jackie McLean at age 16, during which he recorded on Jackie’s pivotal album One Step Beyond, brought him to the attention of Miles Davis, and the rest is history.

Or so the story goes. But Williams continued to record sessions with other Blue Note artists, and shortly after he joined Miles’ quintet, he recorded his own sessions at Rudy Van Gelder’s home studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, on August 21 and 24, 1964. The earliest of those sessions, collected as Life Time, are our subject today, and they make for more adventurous listening than the work his bandmates in Miles’ group were recording (though some of those same bandmates joined him). The record features Sam Rivers on tenor sax (four months before Williams would join Rivers on his pivotal Fuchsia Swing Song), Bobby Hutcherson on vibes and marimba, and Herbie Hancock on piano, with Ron Carter, Richard Davis, and Gary Peacock joining on bass with the different configurations of players.

Album opener “Two Pieces of One,” true to its title, comes in two parts, “Red” and “Green,” that comprise the entirety of side one. A sparely led group featuring just Williams and Rivers backed by both Peacock and Davis on bass, the work highlights Williams the composer rather than the virtuoso drummer. It opens with the sax and basses playing the opening melody chords, opening up to a repeating figure in Richard Davis’s arco bass, and then closing down again with a splash of Williams’ cymbals. The two bassists duet, with Peacock’s fierce pizzicato over Davis. Then finally something approaching a “normal” post-bop sound, with Rivers improvising over a steady yet kaleidoscopically evolving beat from Williams. This segment closes with another duet between the basses, who seem to be discussing what’s just transpired, and a repetition of the opening chorus.

“Green” opens with a duet between Rivers and Williams, in which Rivers throws out at least six or seven melodic ideas around the central progression. Williams falls back to cymbals and accompanies Rivers as he slows in contemplation, then surges forward when Rivers finds a major melody. Williams takes a solo next that’s notable both for the rhythms and the timbres he explores across his snares, toms and cymbals. At the very end the basses rejoin as Rivers recapitulates what originally seemed to be an improvised idea from the opening but which actually turns out to have been the composed melody; the track closes with a fiercely propulsive solo from Williams.

“Tomorrow Afternoon” has something much more like a traditional melody, performed as a trio by Rivers, Williams and Peacock. Rivers leads the charge with a bright melodic statement, but underneath Williams and Peacock are constantly shifting, and a pulsing pattern from Peacock leads into his rapid solo, which is joined by Rivers before Williams swings the trio back into the opening theme. It’s a concisely argued bit of free jazz.

“Memory” is a different beast entirely. Williams and Bobby Hutcherson play polyrhythmically, trading ideas and beats, for the first part of the piece. Herbie Hancock steps in about three minutes in, improvising along Hutcherson’s melody in the right hand before jumping to another pattern. Hutcherson takes a solo that sounds like something out of Steve Reich’s “Six Marimbas,” which Hancock responds to with another idea, which seems to spur another recollection from Williams. The whole work plays out as these interchanges of ideas and melodies bounce from one instrument to the other.

Hancock introduces “Barb’s Song to the Wizard” with the telepathic Ron Carter, who plays the melody as Hancock provides a rhythmic chord progression in the upper octaves of the piano. The players switch roles as they break into something like a somber waltz, then a ballad. Ultimately the track comes to a delicate close as you realize that Williams only appears as the composer here—an unexpectedly generous gesture from the young artist on his first album.

Williams reveals himself on this inaugural outing to be an inspired composer, albeit not in a traditional mode. His other album for Blue Note, Spring, is perhaps better known precisely because it has more recognizable song structures, but it’s still more “out” than most of what the Second Great Quintet recorded during this time… at least until later in the decade. Next up, we’ll hear more from a Williams bandmate who made a practice of blending approachable and ambitious.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Wayne Shorter, JuJu

Album of the Week, September 28, 2024

Miles’ Second Great Quintet took a while to gel, and the hardest position to settle was the second horn. Miles had worked with John Coltrane in the first quintet, and whether through conscious comparison to that titan’s stature or by some other means, the saxophonists—including Hank Mobley and George Coleman—who joined the quintet would leave without making much of an impact. It took the arrival of Wayne Shorter in late 1964 to bring all the pieces together; we’ve listened to the document of that beginning, in the recording of a live performance of the quintet from September 1964 released as Miles in Berlin.

But Shorter was hardly sitting on his hands prior to joining the quintet. In April 1964 he recorded his first album as a leader for Blue Note Records, Night Dreamer. He followed this with today’s session, recorded August 3, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, just about six weeks after Herbie Hancock’s session that became Empyrean Isles. Unlike Hancock’s session, though, JuJu featured not his bandmates in Miles’ quintet, but the rhythm section of a different saxophonist entirely: McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and Reggie Workman, all of whom had worked with John Coltrane. In fact, Tyner and Jones had been in Van Gelder’s studio with Coltrane a week after Hancock’s band, on June 24, 1964, recording the tracks that would be released over fifty years later as Blue World.

The use of Coltrane’s rhythm section was controversial at the time for Shorter, who was fighting a mistaken impression in some quarters that he was only a Coltrane imitator. But JuJu would prove how wrong that impression was by foregrounding not only Shorter’s brilliant improvisation but also his compositional genius in a way that hadn’t been exposed to this point.

Shorter has said that “Juju” was inspired by African chant, which it may well have been, but what is most striking about it is its use of whole tone sequences in the descending opening note, over huge block chords from McCoy Tyner. Tyner takes the first solo, and it’s striking how without Shorter’s melodic line and that whole tone scale how normal everything sounds, at least until the head of the melody comes back. When I first heard this tune, on the Blue Note Best of Wayne Shorter compilation sometime in my early college years, I was struck by the echoes of Coltrane’s sound. Listening now, many years later, there’s definitely the sound of Coltrane’s band, but Wayne’s soloing is a completely different thing. He finds different corners of the melody and scale around which to improvise but never seems to disappear into the music the way that Trane was doing in 1964. The incredible moment for me in this work comes near the end, where after two minutes of intensely rhythmic soloing, Wayne surrenders to the harmonic imperative and simply blows a trill, then returns to his solo with octave jumps and shorter phrases as though he’s catching breaths. But he isn’t surrendering to the dance, as the inversion of the melody he plays at 5:30 shows; he continues to play consciously through the whole work. An intense drum break from Jones separates Shorter’s solo from the final choruses, and even here Shorter doesn’t bring the piece to a neat close; in the last 30 seconds he’s found a new melodic pattern, and Van Gelder fades out the end as the band still explores.

“Deluge” opens out of time, but quickly pivots into a swinging minor melody that is pretty conventional… until Shorter’s solo descends its scale from the supertonic and we’re reminded that we’re in the presence of a harmonic genius. Tyner’s solo remains grounded in the original chords. For a player who was himself no compositional slouch we can hear the difference in their imaginations and approaches to the music at this stage, as Tyner improvises across chords and rhythm while Shorter thinks melodically across a wide harmonic range.

“House of Jade” opens with a meditative arpeggio that might have appeared on one of Tyner’s later Blue Note albums, but was actually written by Shorter’s then-wife Irene. When Shorter’s saxophone enters it returns us to the moment with a 16 bar minor key melody that then transitions into a series of held suspensions, played as delicately as possible. The reverie lasts even as Shorter and the band take the melody into a double-time section, then back into the slower reflection to close.

“Mahjong” opens with that greatest of gifts, a sixteen-bar Elvin Jones drum solo in which we get to hear his full harmonic and rhythmic command of his instrument. Nat Hentoff’s liner notes point out that the tune is structured in a way—four bars melody, “4 rhythm, 4 melody, 4 rhythm, 4 bridge-type melody, 4 melody, 4 rhythm … the 4 bar sections of rhythm without melody suggest players pausing to think of their next move.” Mostly, though, the piece gifts us another brilliant Shorter improvisation, particularly at the end where his descending scales taper into a crepuscular hush…

… which makes the impact of the opening run of “Yes or No,” probably the second best known of the compositions on the album after the title track, all the greater. While the form of Shorter’s melody is blueslike, we’re definitely not in the harmonic language of the blues; the tune arpeggiates around a major triad but then leaps the octave and drops a minor third down to the 6th, repeats the pattern, and then climbs up a minor scale and descends down a set of minor triads to return to the tonic. All those words aside, it’s an immensely memorable melody and one that, even with the minor colors in the last four measures of the tune, is upbeat and exuberantly happy. McCoy Tyner follows, picking up from Wayne in the middle of a chorus, and playing through the changes with a gorgeous light touch, only occasionally falling back on the heavy clusters of chords that mark so much of his playing through the rest of the album. Elvin Jones’ extroverted drumroll at the end puts the cherry on top of what is a delightfully rich sundae.

“Twelve More Bars to Go” is, as Shorter says, both a nod to the 12-bar blues form of the piece and a picture of “someone having a very good time, going around to every bar in town.” The portrait plays out through the solo, as Shorter injects an inversion of the harmonic pattern at the very beginning, as he says, “to picture a man, slightly intoxicated, who, as he tries to go forward, backs up.” There are intermittent pauses, long stretches of fluent playing, repeated ideas — it sounds as though Shorter’s narrator has been having a wonderful time. As have we.

Wayne Shorter wasn’t done recording outstanding music with JuJu. On Christmas Eve 1964 he went on to record Speak No Evil, and the following month began recording E.S.P. with Miles. All told, Shorter and the other members of Miles’s band were on track to make the 1964-1965 period one of the most fruitful in modern jazz recording. We’ll hear another album from one of the members of the quintet that was also recorded at the same time, with some of the same players, next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Testament of Thompson

Randall Thompson at the piano at the University of Virginia with Glee Club members (including Paul Webb Bourjaily) and Glee Club director Stephen Tuttle

I enjoyed reading this essay on Randall Thompson and The Testament of Freedom by Honey Meconi, who is both the inaugural Arthur Satz Professor at the University of Rochester and Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music (as well as a former member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus).

In addition to summarizing the received critical wisdom about the work (“popular rather than original”), Meconi’s essay calls out a point that I missed: that the longevity of the work may in part be due to Thompson’s completing its symphonic orchestration in time for the Boston Symphony to use it in their memorial concert for Franklin D. Roosevelt at Carnegie Hall. She also notes the irony of the original TTBB setting, due to the fact that UVa’s undergraduate program was not coeducational at the time (though, as we know, the woman’s Madrigal Singers group, made of students from the University’s other schools, would perform with the Virginia Glee Club several times during the war years).

Anyway, the essay is worth a read, as are the other essays on her site, which she collectively calls “The Choral Singer’s Companion.”

Herbie Hancock, Empyrean Isles

Album of the Week, September 21, 2024

Herbie Hancock’s 1960s Blue Note records were often a study in contrasts, with pure soul hits alongside deeply complex improvisations. Today’s record, made on June 17, 1964 at Van Gelder Studios in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, is the best example, featuring one of his best-known hits alongside a thirteen minute free jazz odyssey.

For this outing Hancock brought along the rest of the rhythm section from Miles’ Second Great Quintet, with Ron Carter on bass and Tony Williams on drums. For a horn, he asked another member of the young Blue Note roster, trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, to join (this time playing cornet). We’ve listened to a lot of Hubbard’s 1970s output, but at the beginning of his career he was as melodically and technically advanced a player on his instrument as anyone in the world, and in many ways this record is a showpiece for his playing as much as it is for Hancock’s compositions.

“One Finger Snap” is a case in point. Opening with the trumpet and piano playing the slightly knotty theme together, the trumpet takes a brilliant solo turn, with Hancock supporting and anticipating him at every step, including Hubbard’s cascading “sheets of sound” like repeated arpeggios which show up as a motif at several points. Carter supports the proceedings with a walking bass line that hugs the high end of the octave and drops down to give a little more color under Hubbard’s line, then drops back down into the lower ranges when Herbie takes his solo. Hancock does some surprising things with his line, not content to merely arpeggiate or play scales (though he does some of this) when he can jump by thirds and sixths within the line; in the context of an ascending run causing the listener to mutter, “wait, what was that?” Throughout Tony Williams keeps the time and also adds accents as a kind of running commentary. When the melody returns, Hubbard finds a second tune for a moment before rejoining the group, only to fade away with everyone but Williams who provides a thunderous but tuneful solo before the final chords.

“Oliloqui Valley” begins with a bass obbligato from Carter that wouldn’t feel out of place on one of Freddie Hubbard’s 1970s CTI albums. The melody shifts from minor mode to major between the first and second chorus, and then gives over to a solo from Hancock that foretells some of the modes he would investigate on the very next Blue Note outing. Carter plays more freely here, supporting the major key choruses with an octave suspension and exchanging bursts of energy with Williams. When Hubbard enters, it’s in his melodic mode, demonstrating the brilliant clarity of tone and easy technique on swift runs that made him so in demand as a sideman at this stage of his career. Carter takes the next solo turn, with some pauses in the melody that he fills with portamento and chordal beats before the band takes a deep breath with him and re-enters the chorus.

“Cantaloupe Island” is far and away the most well-known track on this album. Opening with the familiar chords of Hancock’s piano opening over a simple bass figure by Carter and a straight ahead drum pattern on the cymbals and snare by Tony Williams, the main theme is Freddie Hubbard’s, a modal blues that circles around the minor root of the scale. Initially the trumpeter plays it cool, but as he goes through multiple choruses he gets increasingly fiery, ultimately carrying the tune into about four or five different modes. When Herbie Hancock’s solo comes he brings the temperature back down, as the rest of the band drops to a simmer around him. Hubbard’s return likewise plays it cool again on the chorus, which is one and out; the track fades out on the rhythm section continuing to stoke that magnificent bluesy engine. Special note must be paid to the snare hit that Tony Williams hits after each chorus (the first one is at around 34 seconds). Just a paroxysm of cool.

We’re in a different isle entirely for “The Egg,” literally. Aside: I’m not sure how I got this far into the review without mentioning the bonkers story by Nora Kelly that makes up the majority of the liner notes, literally laying out the mythology of the Empyrean Isles, but with “The Egg” I feel I have no recourse but to refer to Kelly’s description:

On clear, windy days, when the breezes are strong enough to dispel the vapours, it is possible to discern the smooth, shining, dome-shaped peak of The Egg, a mountain about which the strangest mists and tales are woven. Veiled, inscrutable bastion of strength, its silent presence suggests ever-present danger, dormant perhaps, but ominous in its potential. And occasionally, when some vast tremor from the bowels of the earth shakes the waves and sends towering mountains of water across the placid Eastern Sea, people say that The Egg is ripening and becoming impatient at its long confining.

Later reissues of the album have suggested that Kelly’s story came first and that Herbie wrote the tunes to match. I suspect that’s balderdash. Whatever the case, “The Egg” begins as a free improvisation in 9/8, with the rhythm section locked into a circling pattern as Freddie Hubbard pushes at the edges of it, as if trying to break free. The pattern eddies and shimmers, changing key and morphing into a four beat as Tony Williams finds new rhythmic patterns. Herbie and Freddie exchange patterns, then bleats, and there seems to be hope that the pattern will break—right up until the point that it reforms. Then a clearing: the bass drops out for a minute, then reenters with a bowed line that stops time, with occasional pings from the piano and Williams’ cymbals echoing off the chamber walls. The bass gives way to Hancock playing an almost sonata-like solo, followed by splashes of arpeggio, then a fast chase-like melody that almost feels like incidental music to a film noir. It’s slippery, though, and keeps morphing until it seems to melt into a puddle, then reforms into the film music, then into a careful exploration, the explorer’s snare-drum heart echoing in the silence. But then: the bass insistently starts back into a repeated pattern, the drums splash up around us, and the piano comes back to that circular motif from the beginning. And the trumpet, which once pushed against the gyre, now rides it as we realize there is no escape.

Empyrean Isles, maybe more than any of Herbie Hancock’s other 1960s Blue Note records, revealed the breadth and depth of his compositional and performing skills. The follow-up, Maiden Voyage, would cement this reputation through a combination of brilliant tune writing and fantastic arrangements. But Hancock was not the only great compositional mind in Miles’ second great quintet. We’ll hear from another such member next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Donald Byrd did a pretty funky version of “Cantaloupe Island” on his Up With Donald Byrd in 1964—with Herbie Hancock on piano and arrangements. Here it is:

BONUS BONUS: While Us3’s album Hand on the Torch arrived in the era of sampling, there were also some live horns to go with the band’s substantial re-purposing of “Cantaloupe Island” as “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”:

Herbie Hancock, Inventions & Dimensions

Album of the Week, September 14, 2024

When we looked at Herbie Hancock’s career before joining Miles Davis’s quintet before, we heard his first two Blue Note albums and then jumped to Miles in Berlin. But he had a very busy 1962 through 1964, releasing an album a year (or more) under his own leadership as well as touring with Miles. Today we look at the most unusual of the albums from that early Blue Note period, Inventions & Dimensions, recorded on August 30, 1963 at Rudy Van Gelder’s Englewood Cliffs studio.

While the album is far from atonal, it’s definitely one of Herbie’s more experimental outings. Rather than the more traditional hard bop small groups of Takin’ Off and My Point of View, this session finds him with Latin drummer and percussionist Willie Bobo. Bobo grew up in Spanish Harlem and studied with the great Mongo Santamaria and recorded with Mary Lou Williams, before joining Santamaria in Tito Puente’s band. The two percussionists left to work with vibraphonist Cal Tjader in the late 1950s but as of the time of this recording he hadn’t yet made a huge impact outside the bounds of the mambo craze. (That was soon to change.) Redoubtable Miles Davis bassist Paul Chambers and percussionist Osvaldo “Chihuahua” Martinez rounded out the group, but the majority of the interesting musical happenings here are between Hancock and Bobo.

That may very well be because, apart from “Mimosa” on side two, the entire album is made up of spontaneous improvisations by Hancock, with Bobo grounding him with inventive but in-the-pocket drumming while Martinez and Chambers provide color and a heartbeat, respectively. Chambers in particular doesn’t seem to light up in this format and seems content to stay in the background.

But Hancock more than makes up for any reticence on the part of the other band members. Opening track “Succotash,” like its namesake, combines the widely diverse ingredients of the band into a harmonious whole. It begins as an introduction to the band, with Bobo, Chambers, Martinez, and finally Herbie joining over the course of eight bars. The meter is complex in the opening, with Hancock playing triplet rhythms against what eventually turns out to be a straight four in the percussion, for an effect that seems straight out of Steve Reich’s playbook (though the great minimalist composer’s first experiments with phasing were over a year away). Herbie plays a bunch of different tricks with the track-length improvisation here, going back and forth from the triple meter to straight time before finally returning to a triple meter crescendo. The one moment that Herbie drops away gives Bobo and Martinez the chance to play against each other, and the rhythms are infectious and hypnotic. When Hancock returns, he finds another melodic line before returning to the original triple meter.

“Triangle” begins as a more straightforward blues, but Hancock’s creatively dissonant voicings on the opening chords, sounding like Vince Guaraldi’s “Charlie Brown” theme in two different keys at once, signal that this is going to be anything but routine. The band digs into the pocket anyway, leaving Herbie free to find some deeply soulful patterns over the chords. Chambers may still be somewhat backgrounded throughout but he acquits himself well anyway, the less crowded arrangement here giving him more room to contribute a solid walking bass line. Hancock is still the star here, though, moving from that opening blues line to a pounding improvised passage that sounds a lot like Dave Brubeck in a declaratory mode.

“Jack Rabbit,” true to its name, is a faster romp, and features Bobo on cymbals and Martinez on congas pushing the beat forward. While the opening melody sounds a lot like a faster version of that “Charlie Brown” theme, Herbie’s improvisation overall is freer here, jumping from idea to idea at high speed. This is one that wouldn’t have been out of place (with different percussion) on one of the early Second Great Quintet albums.

“Mimosa” is the sole arranged track on the album, and even it is on the loose side. Starting with a symphonic introduction out of time that feels a bit like Bud Powell’s “Glass Enclosure,” the percussionists take us back into time and lead into Hancock’s main melody, which feels both wistful and romantic in roughly equal proportions—a feat when the melody is arguably just a vamp on the main chord changes. He moves from the initial statement into more elegiac melodic improvisations, all while Martinez and Bobo keep the beat with a steady, gently lilting samba pattern kept fresh by Bobo’s continually evolving cymbal washes. Chambers gets a solo starting at the six-minute mark and it’s a wonder, moving from the slow samba pulse into a double-time excursion around the wobbly rail of the changing chords. Overall though the track stays just on this side of disappearing into the background.

The album closes with “A Jump Ahead,” which is impelled by the urgency and drive of Bobo’s drums and a recurring movable octave in Chambers’ bass that sounds on wherever Herbie’s melody lands. The improvisation appears to center around these jumps of the melodic path, from the tonic to the sixth to the minor third to the fifth, with various exciting things happening in between. Herbie’s solo is more like his later work with Miles here, the chordal structure notwithstanding, in that he organizes his improvisation around an increasingly widening gyre of a right hand solo with sparse left hand accompaniment. And it does seem to be deeply improvised; you can even hear him doing the Bud Powell/Keith Jarrett sung accompaniment, a tribute to how deeply he’s concentrating throughout. Before taking it back to the melody, he bangs out a high rhythmic pattern on a single tone (in octaves), and then closes it out with a vamp on the tonic to the supertonic. It’s high concept in composition, but almost funky in execution.

Inventions & Dimensions is misleading in its seemingly casual nature. While much of the material is clearly freely improvised, it has early-1960s Herbie Hancock doing the improvisation, and that’s worth two or three lesser composers’ worth of fully fleshed out material. While the four musicians here never worked together again, the album stands as testimony to Hancock’s willingness to go far afield—a tendency we’ll see in spades on his more “conventional” album next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Miles Davis, In Person Friday and Saturday Nights At the Blackhawk, San Francisco

Album of the Week, September 7, 2024

In the years following Kind of Blue, Miles’ great sextet dissolved, with both John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley choosing to begin their own careers as leaders. Perhaps responding to the change in personnel, Miles’ next album, Sketches of Spain, was another collaboration with Gil Evans in the mold of Miles Ahead (but even more so… we’ll have to review that record another day). We’ve seen how Miles convinced Coltrane to return, on Someday My Prince Will Come, recorded in March 1961. That record also featured Hank Mobley, who toured and recorded with Miles throughout 1961. We’ve heard his work on At Carnegie Hall; today we hear him with Miles, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Wynton Kelly in one of the great trumpeter’s more famous live recordings.

Recorded almost a month before the Carnegie Hall set, on April 21-22, 1961 at the Black Hawk nightclub in San Francisco, the album is significant as a document of Miles’ live set and repertoire following Kind of Blue, in the same way that his Jazz at the Plaza captured the 1958 band at its peak. The album has been issued in various formats ranging from individual LPs of selections from the Friday and Saturday night performances, to a box set documenting the entirety of both nights, to today’s record, a two-LP set combining the individual LP releases from later in 1961. The copy I’m reviewing today is a mono first pressing.

Because of the wide deviation in groupings and track orders, I’m going to deviate from my normal practice of commenting on the album track by track. (Also, the most readily available versions of the album feature slightly different edits of the songs, and I’m not going to get into the differences here.) What I’ll start with is the sound. While this set features many of the same players that were with Cannonball Adderley on his In Chicago, there’s little of the soul that lingered at the edges of that recording. There’s also surprisingly little of the modal, cool sound of the Gil Evans recordings or Kind of Blue. This is a hot band, and (perhaps due to the vagaries of live recording) a lighter, more nimble sounding band.

Some of the credit for the former surely accrues to Hank Mobley. His solo on “Walkin’” is a taut, athletic bit of genius that gets to stretch out across a vast swath of choruses. He writes a different melody into “Bye Bye Blackbird” that seems to borrow equal parts from Johnny Hodges and John Coltrane. But he also seems at times to be apart from the band. Where Miles’ arrangements for the first great quintet or his sextet would have the saxophone(s) sharing the lead in harmonic writing with his trumpet, here the solos and recapitulations are Miles’s alone. One imagines Mobley standing near the back of the bandstand listening, stepping forward to play his solo, and stepping back again. The exception as always is “No Blues,” but in that gem the interplay between the horns is a part of the tune.

The longer performances also afford an opportunity for the rest of the rhythm section to stretch out. We get an arco solo from Paul Chambers in “Walkin’,” something we hear in other appearances by him but which had grown rather rare by this point. We don’t hear too many solo moments from Jimmy Cobb, who always preferred to provide unswerving, steady support from the background, but he and Chambers are flawless together as a unit and maintain a high degree of attention to the other players, particularly Kelly.

Kelly’s touch on the piano is a common thread between the two recordings, but here you can hear how his conception was drifting apart from Miles’. Where the bandleader was throwing out fiery, straight edged solos, Kelly maintained some of his soul-jazz leanings. There’s an interesting tension between the approaches that brings some bluesy notes to “Walkin’” and (ironically) “No Blues,” but the two don’t seem to be quite as telepathically joined as Miles would be with other accompanists.

That’s not to say there aren’t moments. Kelly’s intro to “Bye Bye Blackbird,” a Miles stalwart for years, seems to belong to a different recording, but when Miles unexpectedly changes mode in his first statement of the chorus, Kelly returns the favor in the chord voices under the second chorus. They seem to be prodding each other on. But Kelly’s playing on other cuts is less simpatico; for instance, his accompaniment “All of You” falls into decorative chords that seem to clutter rather than respond to Miles’ line.

The other noteworthy thing here is the material. Many of the standards here lean toward a lighter melodic approach, as do the originals. Miles was playing “No Blues” on Someday My Prince Will Come, as well as “Teo” (here called “Neo”), but the faster live tempo on “No Blues” knocks some of the languor off and turns the piece into what it remains today, a flexible almost-nothing of a tune that could be a 30-second signal for a set break or a 15-minute joyous improvisation.

This is also a rare opportunity to hear “Fran-Dance,” a lovely Miles ballad whose only studio recording came on Jazz Track, an “odds and sods” release from 1959 that collected three tracks from the Miles Davis Sextet together with the miraculous soundtrack to the Louis Malle film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. Where the original studio version with the great sextet seems to straddle the line between mediative and lovely, the version here adds a touch of suggestiveness thanks to Mobley and Kelly’s more soulful playing. It’s a gift to have the recording; Miles stopped playing “Fran-Dance,” written for his first wife Frances Taylor (who also appears on the cover), after their separation in 1965.

The performances on In Person are an opportunity to hear Miles in a different place—not yet free of his harmonic conceptions from the Kind of Blue era, not yet with the new quintet that would take him to the birth of fusion. There are plenty of fantastic compositions and performances during this period, roughly from 1961’s Someday My Prince Will Come to 1964’s live masterpiece My Funny Valentine. But there was also darkness; Miles suffered from addictions to cocaine and alcohol that caused him to behave erratically, ultimately leading Frances Taylor to flee from him in 1965. He also began experiencing the hip pain that led to a series of operations in mid-1965; he finally recovered enough to return to recording in 1965, with E.S.P.

I don’t have more Miles recordings to dive into in this series, so we’ll let that thread of the story go; you can read more about what happened after this record starting with my review of Miles Davis At Carnegie Hall from the previous series. But I have lots more to talk about with the sidemen from that second great quintet; we’ll pick up with an album from one of them next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Cannonball Adderley Quintet, In Chicago

Album of the Week, August 31, 2024

Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley surely has the best nickname (and the best nickname story) of almost any jazz musician. The story goes that as an elementary school student, he had such a voracious appetite that the other kids in the class called him a “cannonball”—aka a cannibal. Either version of the name seems appropriate; hearing him on stage barreling through his solos, he sounds both as though he’s been launched into orbit, and as though he’s hungry for more.

We’ve heard Adderley before, but always in the company of Miles Davis—whether on the great trumpeter’s best known album as part of his sextet, or on an album that, while issued under Adderley’s name, was really a Miles session. But Adderley was very much a bandleader in his own right, and a month before he entered the studio with Miles to start recording Kind of Blue, he was playing this session in Chicago with many of the same musicians. The rhythm section featured Paul Chambers on bass and Jimmy Cobb on drums, with Wynton Kelly on piano (who would substitute for Bill Evans on “Freddie Freeloader”). The second horn player was none other than John Coltrane, whose name is added to modern versions of the album (like my copy) but who was here strictly as a sideman. Together they entered a Chicago studio on February 3, 1959; all of them would head into the Columbia studio on 30th Street in New York City on March 2 to record with Davis.

For coming so close before the landmark recording, there’s little of the modal masterpiece around the quintet here. Instead, we get a solid serving of straight-ahead jazz, starting with “Limehouse Blues.” The old British show hall tune gets a conventional reading right up until the end of the first chorus, when Adderley takes a flying run up into the stratosphere. In his solo he lays out a melodic trail that Trane, at first, refuses to follow, staying in the lower range of the tenor to emphasize the contrast between the two horns. But before long they’re both playing full out, in “sheets of sound” style, and the battle is a spectacular indication of just how talented both players were—especially as they trade fours at the end of the solos. The rhythm section is full out trying to keep up with the two of them, and Jimmy Cobb in particular eggs them on.

We’re in bluesier territory for “Stars Fell on Alabama.” Adderley’s blue playing is said to have been what led Davis to invite him to join his group, and it’s on full display here (Trane sits this one out). You can almost smell the smoke in the air, particularly in the second verse as he solos above the restrained sound of the rhythm section, here just a little bit of the high hat and Kelly comping the chords beneath. When Kelly gets his solo, he displays the versatility that would bring him into Davis’ band before leaving for a career leading this rhythm section as a trio; the melody gets a gentle airing before he takes it into higher realms, singing alongside in a manner not unlike Keith Jarrett’s style years later.

Adderley seems to have had quite the sense of humor about his nickname, as his composition “Wabash” suggests. The tune has flavors of a country dance and a 1950s sock hop rolled into one, but the solos are pure post-bop, especially Trane’s soaring flight above the chords. His descent down the scale in the second verse of his solo is breathtaking but almost insouciant, practically thrown away. He’s holding back the more dizzying blowouts that characterized his own works at the time; this session came less than two months before the first sessions for Giant Steps, but there’s little to betray what he would soon unleash. We get a great pizzicato solo from Chambers to round out the track.

“Grand Central,” one of two Trane originals on the album, gives us the feeling of being in the middle of the train station with the minor key melody which plays in parallel fourths between the horns. Adderley leads off with a fiery solo that explores the scaffolding that the chords build around the melodic line. Trane’s solo is a slower exploration of the lower end, at least until it bursts free into a flurry of arpeggios at the end. By comparison, Kelly’s solo is a more restrained statement, playing for just one chorus until the horns return to close out the track.

Trane gets a solo ballad statement on “You’re a Weaver of Dreams,” more in the spirit of the energetic ballads on Coltrane’s Sound than his more romantic sound heard on Lush Life. But it’s still a gorgeous sound, and one that’s over too soon. There are compensations aplenty, though, on the original closing track,“The Sleeper.” The other Trane original features a cockeyed minor key melody that has a built-in pause, as though the pianist falls asleep partway through! Trane and Adderley trade arpeggios over the rhythm section, which displays some of Kelly’s more soulful tendencies as he leans into blue notes throughout. Adderley gets the last word with an extended solo that extends over into the final chorus.

There have been a number of reissues of this album over the years; my copy, a 2010 European reissue, features Leroy Anderson’s “Serenata” as a bonus track. Recorded after Kind of Blue, on April 27, 1959 (five days after the second and last session), this is a quartet number with no Coltrane. Adderley’s playing is jaunty throughout with more than a hint of soul jazz throughout, foreshadowing the direction he would later take his groups of the 1960s.

In fact, Adderley’s best years were ahead of him. His early 1960s groups were stars, thanks in large part to the soul jazz originals penned by his new pianist, Bobby Timmons. He continued to play up until his unexpected death in 1975, at the age of 46. But he never played with Miles again following Kind of Blue. Next week we’ll hear how Miles’ group had evolved by 1960, with some of these same players plus a new saxophonist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Retrogaming and retro-disking in Rome

I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole this weekend, thanks to an online index of Open Source Game Clones—basically, freely available re-implementations of old paid games. The first game I looked up was Caesar III, which was one of a few games (along with Marathon and Myst) that I played a lot on nights that Lisa was attending grad school classes, in our apartment in McLean, Virginia. It’s a city building game that allowed you to experiment with, as my college friend attorney Tim Fox would say, zoning. Namely — if you make streets too long, if you fail to build adequate agriculture or mercantile or entertainment options, your city fails to thrive and stand up against invasion.

Lo and behold, Caesar III has a few open source clone projects, of which one, Augustus, is an active project with a Mac port. So I went to check it out. Like Devilution, Augustus emulates the engine of the game — the actual Mac application that runs the game, takes input, handles saves, etc. It does not attempt to recreate the original game assets (art, storylines, music); instead, it requires you to provide them.

I actually still have my original Caesar III CD-ROM, but found that I couldn’t get it to read with my Mac’s SuperDrive. That, it turns out, is because modern Macs can no longer read HFS file systems, which many CD-ROMs meant to be read by Macs in the 1990s used. HFS was replaced by HFS Plus in 1998, which is still supported today, but if you have old media (floppies or CDs) formatted with HFS, you can’t read them with modern drives—at least, not without the help of additional software.

I explored a couple options to get access to the disk (as well as a few other disks that were in the same binder). All options required using the Mac Disk Utility to create a disk image (.DMG) file from the CD-ROM. Once done, you can then find software to read the image. One option that seemed promising was a set of command line utilities called hfsutils, which can be installed via Homebrew and which promised access to mount and access HFS-formatted disk images. But you need to be very precise with the commands to copy these files and I couldn’t figure out a way to work with them other than one at a time. (There is, of course, a way, using the -f flag and the wildcard, but I didn’t find that until later.)

Enter a most useful utility, Kevin Brewster’s HFS. It is very simple: drag an HFS formatted disk image onto the app window and tell it where to save the files. And it works! … Except… it copied the Mac installer out, which Augustus can’t use, and I couldn’t get the installer to run from within my Classic Mac emulation environment.

So I went to plan B. It turns out that you can buy the Windows version of Caesar III on GOG for about $6, and Augustus can use those game files. So now I’m up and running again, and re-learning all the frustrating bits of Roman zoning law.

But the exploration of HFS utilities wasn’t wasted time. I think the HFS utility will turn out to be a great way to get content off old floppies… and that’ll be the next project.

Miles Davis, Bags Groove

Album of the Week, August 24, 2024

When we began listening to Miles over two years ago, we touched on the heroin addiction that nearly derailed his career just as it was starting. We then jumped ahead to 1955 when he began recording a series of pivotal albums for Prestige that led to his fame and fortune (and a bigger contract at Columbia). But starting at the beginning of 1954, Miles was coming back, having gotten clean from his addiction and recording newly disciplined and interesting music. Prestige released the results on 10″ LPs, and then, following Miles’ departure for Columbia, reissued them on 12″ records.

Two of those sessions, recorded June 29 and December 24, 1954 in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack, make up Bags Groove (the brilliant typographic album cover by Reid Miles omits the apostrophe, ducking the question of how to do a proper possessive, and I reluctantly follow suit). The players are a pretty significant who’s who. The first session (on side 2 of the record) includes Sonny Rollins and Horace Silver, while the second (side 1) features Thelonious Monk and “Bags” himself, Milt Jackson, on vibes. All tracks feature Percy Heath on bass and Kenny Clarke, a year away from expatriating to Paris, on drums.

“Bags Groove” comes in two versions, marking the first time in this blog series that we’ve run across a classic jazz LP that actually includes an alternate take. Both takes lean toward the “cool” side of Miles’ early repertoire, thanks to Jackson’s modal introduction and Miles’ Harmon mute. The liner notes by Ira Gitler say that Miles asked Monk to lay out during his solo, which must have aggrieved Monk to no end! But Monk does as asked; in the second take he drops out for the entirety of Miles’ solo, re-entering behind Milt Jackson, where he subversively adds different and unexpected chords until Bags himself drops out and Monk takes over. Hearing Monk do his thing has to be the principle pleasure of this arrangement, in fact, aside from the fluency of Miles’ solo over what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward 12-bar blues.

The numbers with Sonny Rollins are a different story. Sonny was apparently writing compositions on scraps of paper during the June 29 session, and three of his most enduring and most-covered compositions are the result. “Airegin” (“Nigeria” spelled backwards) has more than a little of the feel of “A Night in Tunisia” in the introduction, but it pretty swiftly shifts to its own thing—not yet as volcanic as it would be in another year with Miles and Trane on Cookin’, but a pretty hot groove nonetheless. The tempo is ever so slightly more relaxed here, perhaps in part due to Percy Heath, whose walking bass line sounds like it doesn’t want to be hurried.

That same sense of relaxed groove permeates the Charlie Parker-like “Oleo,” which again is a much more laid back take than that which the First Great Quintet would record on Relaxin’. But don’t tell Sonny; he and Monk get into some understated interplay during his solo, and there’s even a great moment where he single-handedly alters the chords on his way out of the solo with just one note. Monk is a little less demonstrative in this number, perhaps because no one told him not to play!

The sole standard on this session, “But Not For Me” appears in two takes, with take 2 first. Thanks to Monk, we don’t get a straight ballad, but a sort of wink at one; he doesn’t seem to accompany the other players as much as he comments on them. Rollins’ solo is a rollicking one, with more than a little swagger in its swing as he works in bits of “Doxy” into the second verse of his solo.

Speaking of “Doxy,” the third of the great Rollins standards here, Gitler calls out the “funky” character of the music; I’d prefer to call it “suggestive,” in a slightly exaggerated Mae West-style “come up and see me sometime” spirit. Interestingly, Rollins’ own solo is the only one that doesn’t feature any intimations of either hanky or panky.

We close with “But Not For Me (Take 1)”; are we suggesting that the doxy is not for us? Here the repetition of the performance is OK with me as the solos are anything but repetitive. Miles in particular takes a unique approach to the rhythm of his solo, playing a sly hemiola before dropping completely out of the last bar before Rollins picks things up. Monk is less oblique here than on Take 2, playing an unusually straight ahead solo before he develops into the idea of commenting on the other players on the last chorus. It’s a solid ending to a solid session.

Bags Groove gives us a great window into Miles the bandleader before he put his first great band together, as we get a fascinating glimpse of what an alternate quintet might have looked like (imagine Thelonious Monk on Milestones!). Next time we’ll check on some of the players that did become part of that quintet, and the one who made it a sextet, in a live setting.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

PS – A note on collecting vinyl: Sometimes you get lucky. I didn’t set out to find a copy of the 1958 second pressing of this early Miles set earlier this summer, but when I walked into the antique shop in western Massachusetts it was right there, and to my delight it was gorgeous and beautifully playable.

What’s next for the #albumoftheweek?

I was trying to figure out what I should write about after wrapping up our series on Johnny Hartman, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Kurt Elling, and it occurred to me that there were probably a few Miles Davis and Miles-adjacent records that had entered my collection since I did my series on the great trumpeter starting over two years ago.

I checked and there are more than a “few”; between Miles and his sidemen, I have enough to keep us going for a while. But why revisit ground I’ve already covered? Turns out there are a few reasons.

First, there are a few sidemen who merit a second look; we’ll get to one of those early in the project.

Second, there are projects by some of Miles’ sidemen (and by Miles himself) that are too outstanding not to cover, though I didn’t own them on vinyl when I was writing the series. Likewise, there are some fascinating twists and turns in their discographies that make for fun listening. Somehow those records have newly turned up in my collection, so I thought it would be fun to listen.

Third, I cut off the series with Miles going electric, but his sidemen kept going, and I think it’s interesting to talk about the music they made as they got older and the musicians they made the music with.

So get ready to talk about some musicians we’ve discussed before in some new places and new (and old) records! And after this series? Well, there are some very fun connections that will take us into types of music I haven’t reviewed yet as part of this project, so stay tuned.

Kurt Elling and Charlie Hunter, SuperBlue: The Iridescent Spree

Album of the Week, August 17, 2024

Sometimes a jazz record is as deep as the ocean, and sometimes it’s just fun. And sometimes, it can be deeply fun! Such has been the case with the music Kurt Elling has been releasing under the “SuperBlue” moniker. Started as a pandemic project, an initially virtual collaboration between Elling and Charlie Hunter, with DJ Harrison and Corey Fonville, the project appears to have taken on a life of its own and has seen a few releases. This week, as we (for now) wrap up this summer of jazz vocal music, we check in on the most recent release, 2023’s The Iridescent Spree.

Just because the music is fun doesn’t mean it has to be shallow. “Black Crow,” a cover of a Joni Mitchell tune from her 1976 album Hejira, definitely proves the point. Mitchell had increasingly moved in a jazz direction during the 1970s, and this cover returns the favor, reconfiguring the intense heat of the original into a cooler burbling groove. This is not Elling diving deeply into the psychodrama of a song; here he joyfully scats over the last verse until it abruptly ends, transitioning into “Freeman Square,” a Don Was tune with lyrics by Elling. If there’s a thesis statement for the album, it might be the closing chorus: “Unless you’re Miles Davis there’s always some brother / Some mother smoother than you./So don’t you worry ‘bout a thing. You’ve got plenty of bells to ring/Bring that bad thing you bring & swing on down to Freeman Square.” Elling swings hard here but it sounds effortlessly cool.

“Naughty Number Nine” might be familiar to aficionados of both composer Bob Dorough and Schoolhouse Rock—the original version can be watched on YouTube and is also part of the Multiplication Rock album. Here it’s a slightly boozy blues in 6 with a killer horn section and a hipper than hip vocal from Elling, echoing the brilliant original from drummer Grady Tate.

“Little Fairy Carpenter,” one of the full originals on the record, is a slow moving ballad that lets Elling stretch out a bit. “Finally life is hanging by a thread… the hourglass sands have run through your hands… your deadline calls you to fold or expand,” Elling’s narrator sings, returning to the carpe diem theme of earlier originals. The difference here is the brilliant harmony that Elling overdubs onto those chorus vocals, and the overall laid-back vibe that gives one the impression that he’s not just musically inclined but reclined (to steal a gag from an old Scooby Doo episode).

The side ends on an upbeat note. “Bounce It” made its debut as an instrumental track on the SuperBlue: Guilty Pleasures EP that accompanied the limited edition version of this record; this version adds lyrics and a certain cockeyed velocity to the seriously funky backing track (complete with horns).

“Only the Lonely Woman” invokes Ornette Coleman’s most famous ballad, with a sympathetic vocalese written by Elling atop skittering drums and atmospheric keys. “She’s just a lonely woman, hollowed out in despair,” he sings of an imagined woman in the throes of anguish; Coleman’s music, a show-stopping melody in any rendition, is the real star here.

“Right About Now,” a Ron Sexsmith tune from his 1999 album Whereabouts, is a faithful cover down to tempo and spareness of accompaniment; the original, as with many of Sexsmith’s tunes, needed little dressing up. This is blue-eyed soul, or at least blue-eyed R&B, at its most achingly desperate, and Elling does it justice.

“Not Here / Not Now” is a regretfully funky “no thank you,” as Elling informs a prospective partner that “though it’s clear / that we are smashing in a parallel sphere… there’s a price we’d pay for desire / so with regret / I’d better leave you with a quick goombye.” It’s less of a diss than “Can’t Make It With Your Mind” from SuperBlue, but it’s a “no thank you” nonetheless.

“The Afterlife” closes the album with a spoken word moment, as Elling narrates Billy Collins’ 1990 poem over a deeply funky groove. Elling returns here again to the subject of mortality and the regret that comes too late: “They wish they could wake in the morning like you/and stand at a window examining the winter trees…” But again, the main thing here is the groove, not the dead, and the song closes the album in this downtempo contemplation of the eternal.

Elling possesses a smoky voice, a deep groove and a voracious intellect, and sometimes his records lead more toward one of those three poles. In The Iridescent Spree, we get something approaching a balance, and a funky one, as we think about mortality even as the band has us chair-dancing. We may lean more into this balance between wit and rhythm in the not too far distant future; what is certain is that next week will be completely different.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

P.S. Here’s the bonus EP, Guilty Pleasures, which I recommend listening to with your mind wide open and your smile wider.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Mélusine

Album of the Week, August 10, 2024

If you’re going to listen to Cécile McLorin Salvant, and (as you can tell following my reviews of Ghost Song and her earlier albums) I highly recommend it, and you don’t speak French, you have to decide how to approach an album like Mélusine, which is entirely sung in French except for one song in English, another in Occitan (aka Provençal), and some in Haitian Kreyol. My recommendation: just listen. Her phrasing is impeccable; her vocal technique flawless, and she can catch you unawares in French just as she does in English. And then, after you’ve listened, find a good translation of the lyrics, and fall down the rabbit hole.

Mélusine refers to the legend of a woman cursed by her mother to turn into a half snake every Saturday, and the man who, distrusting her request for privacy on her reptile days, batters down the door only to see her become a dragon and fly away. As a metaphor—for the life of an immigrant, for the bitter failure of men and women to create authentic trust —it’s a rich one. This album, with its DNA half in jazz, half in French chanteuserie, seems another example of the metaphor. Also the personnel; the album opens with a pair straight ahead trio tracks with her first trio (Aaron Diehl, Paul Sikivie, and even an appearance by the late Lawrence Leathers on drums alongside Kyle Poole), and continues into more adventurous fare with Sullivan Fortner on piano and a seemingly never-ending set of combinations of Weedie Braimah on percussion, Luques Curtis on bass, Obed Calvaire on drums, Godwin Louis on alto sax and whistle, and Daniel Swenberg on guitar.

The album accordingly ranges across different moods and styles. “Est-Ce Ainsi Que Les Hommes Vivent?,” made famous by Yves Montand, here aches with despair but is given its heart by Cécile’s amazing voice, particularly in the chorus when her tone becomes pure and true. Aaron Diehl’s piano is similarly miraculous ranging from a rocking rhythm to twinkling stars to discordant bells within a few short moments. The band is similarly fluent on “La Route Enchantée,” bringing a subtle rhythm and a not-so-subtle joy to the Charles Trenet song.

Things go further afield on “Il M’a Vue Nue,” literally “he saw me all nude.” The song is given a jaunty cheerfulness by the whistling opening and winking narration, as well as the interchange between the rock solid drums and gently syncopated piano. “Dites Moi Que Je Suis Belle” shifts gears into a more percussive world; accompanied only by Weedie Braimah’s precise djembe, Salvant interprets the Yvette Guibert adaptation of Jules Massenet’s lyric from Thaïs with a kind of yearning demand: “tell me I am beautiful! Say I shall be lovely until the end of time!”

“Doudou,” a Salvant original, carries more than a hint of the Afro-Latin about it and is enlivened by both Godwin Louis’s saxophone and the New Orleans flavored percussion. Salvant has been performing this since 2017 when she premiered it with Wynton Marsalis at Marciac, and there are clearly elements of the original arrangement at play here, but it has an element of lightness and playfulness in this reading, especially in the stacked harmony vocals and seamless shift into a slow four in the last chorus.

With “Petite Musique Terrienne,” originally performed by Fabienne Thibeault, we are alone with Salvant and Fortner, even as the former stacks harmonies on the chorus, joined by a synthesizer line from Fortner on the final “Who will tell us what we’re doing here/In this world that doesn’t look like us?” “Aida” has a similar construction on even slighter lyrics, and here it’s all Cécile on both vocals and keys.

Both songs serve as a kind of prelude to “Mélusine.” We’re in English, but we aren’t in a straightforward narrative. Are we the woman, forever turning into a half-snake in her Saturday bath? Are we the wondering, distrustful lover? The classical guitar doesn’t tell us; the retelling of the Mélusine story in French in the last verse only adds to the mystery of the two worlds colliding.

“Wedo” is all Cécile again, the beat of a children’s song telling the very unchildish Voudoun tale of Ayida-Wedo, the half-male, half-female serpent that with her husband Damballa crossed from Africa to Haiti to bring the religion of the loa to the new world. The song rings out like an echo of “Mélusine,” telling the same story in a different time and language. “D’un feu secret” gives us Cécile in her purest tones, untouched by nasalized French vowels, even as Fortner’s synthesizer brings its squelchiest tones. The secret of Mélusine, she sings, is unknowable: “When we know… it will be well known that I have ceased to live.”

“Le temps est assassin,” originally performed by Véronique Sanson, is performed as a straightforward ballad singing an unstraightforward lyric: “Sometimes I feel the mysteries of all these things I can’t get my head around… I say that time is an assassin, and I don’t want anything anymore.” The death of desire and the duality of Mélusine and Aida Wedo flying—out the window, from Africa to Haiti—entwine together in “Fenestra,” which returns to the gently calypso-flavored rhythms of “Doudou,” finally begins to dig into the mysteries: “As for the women who seduced their angels, they will become sirens.” And the different strands of the record entwine into a single syncretic whole as we embrace the rhythm, the brilliant piano, the Haitian folk tales, the older European legends, all together given voice by Salvant.

The ending gives us a pair of mysteries: “Domna N’almucs,” originally by Iseut Da Capio, the voices of two Occitan noblewomen in dialog from medieval times (a scholarly paper talks about the substance of the exchange, with one woman asking the other to forgive her lover), accompanied by a subtle wash of synthesizers. And “Dame Iseut” returns us once more to the islands for a brief epilogue in Haitian Kreyol.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, at the beginning of her career, told stories through song. Now, after Grammy awards and a Genius Grant, she takes us on journeys across musical styles, time and space, personal and mythic, all in that magnificent voice. I’m looking forward to the next one when it comes out. But next week we’ll close out (for now) this series on jazz vocalists with one more from Kurt Elling.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Ghost Song

Album of the Week, August 3, 2024

When I saw Cécile McLorin Salvant live for the first time, in February 2020 at Jordan Hall, I thought I knew what to expect based on her last few albums. I had heard The Window and Dreams and Daggers, as well as her 2015 recording For One to Love. I figured we were in for a night of standards, brilliantly and sometimes hilariously interpreted. Then at one point in the middle of the concert, Sullivan Fortner stepped back from the piano and Cécile took the center of the stage, and began singing an unaccompanied Appalachian ballad. We were suddenly in a very different place.

Jordan Hall in February 2020, before Cécile McLorin Salvant and Sullivan Fortner took the stage.

Between that Jordan Hall concert and the release of Ghost Song, a lot happened. Cécile was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in October 2020. She left her longtime home at Mack Avenue Records, where she had recorded since winning the Thelonious Monk competition in the early 2010s, for Nonesuch, which in the 2000s had built a stable of jazz artists that included Brad Mehldau, Joshua Redman, Pat Metheny, Bill Frisell, Makaya McCraven, Ambrose Akinmusire, Mary Halvorson, and others. And of course there was the pandemic, which complicated everything.

In the end, Ghost Song is a richer, stranger album than anything Cécile had released to this point. In addition to appearances by both Sullivan Fortner on piano (and co-producer) and Aaron Diehl (on piano on two tracks and organ on “I Lost My Mind”), as well as bassist Paul Sikivie (who appears only on the first track), there is also percussion, lute, theorbo, flute, and even a children’s choir. And the content is a mix of jazz standards, originals by Salvant, pop songs, and the aforementioned Appalachian murder ballad.

The opening track of the album is a good example of the stylistic dislocation that Salvant achieves. Her opening unaccompanied melisma could at first be as old as medieval times; there is more than a little Hildegard von Bingen about the line. But there is also a strong influence from traditional Irish sean-nós singing, and by degrees as we come out of the echo of the church and closer to the singer, we realize that she is telling a story that another has told. If you’re like me, it might take until the chorus of “Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home” to recognize Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.” That Salvant pulls together so many different threads right at the very beginning is a “shots fired” moment, strongly laying claim to a new territory over which her incredible musicianship can roam.

And roam it does. We pivot directly into “Optimistic Voices/No Love Dying,” a medley of a Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg tune that crosses over into patter territory and is usually not included in musical summaries of The Wizard of Oz. There’s an almost imperceptible turn, and then we’re in traditional R&B territory with Gregory Porter’s “No Love Dying,” which Cécile performs as a straight ahead ballad.

And then comes “Ghost Song,” an original song by Cécile that combines a straight-up blues verse with R&B stylings on the chorus, as well as something more. It feels a little like the way Nina Simone described “Mississippi Goddamn”: “This is the theme to a musical but the musical hasn’t been written … yet.” The children’s chorus that enters at the point of the chorus further scrambles the brain. At this point it feels like anything could happen. And in “Obligation,” another original, seemingly it does. “What happens when the foundation of a sexual encounter is guilt, not desire?/Obligation!/Promises lead to resentment!/I’d let you touch me if only it would stop your pushing/And get you leaving/Is that desire?” We’re a long way from the Cécile who apologized to her mother after singing the Bessie Smith ribald ballad “You’ve Got to Give Me Some.”

In terms of unexpected covers on a Cécile McLorin Salvant album, a song by Sting would seem to be near the top of the list. But “Until” is one of those highlights from Gordon Sumner’s more mature songwriting phase and highlights the melodic and observational skills of the writer as he was nearing the 25th anniversary of his major label debut. The song, written as a soundtrack ballad for 2001’s Kate & Leopold, owes more than a small debt to Jim Croce’s “Time in a Bottle,” but the brilliance of the melodic line is such that you are inclined to merely nod your head at the allusion. And Cécile and her band do spectacular things with it, especially the mildly unhinged instrumental interlude for piano, flute and banjo that separates the two readings of the chorus, and Cécile’s hypnotic singing of the final lines of the chorus on a single note.

“I Lost My Mind” is a slightly different thing again. A Cécile original, it seems to open as a mid-1950s reverie, somewhere in Cole Porter ballad territory perhaps, before the turn happens and the pipe organ enters, playing as though evoking Philip Glass’s ghost, as a chorus of Céciles sing in harmony: “I lost my mind/can you help me/find my mind.” It’s more than a little eerie, and the tension builds as Cécile calls wordlessly above the din, until once more things turn and we are hearing what seems to be a French organ symphony, til that too cuts out and we are left in silence.

“Moon Song” is a considerably more traditional original, with Cécile singing a song of unrequited yearning accompanied only by the piano trio. The melody and arrangement are a moment for breathing deep and reveling in Cécile’s immaculate phrasing. We get another moment of respite next, with the piano original “Trail Mix”—but here it’s Cécile herself at the keys, giving us a tune that seems to follow a team of mules that refuse to walk in time with each other down a bumpy dirt road. She has written about the track: “I was messing around on the piano and Sullivan Fortner heard me and said, ‘You should record that.’ It was a green light from one of my favorite musicians, and even though I’ve never recorded a song where I’m just playing the piano, it ended up being fun and it lightened the record up a little bit. It is me pushing myself to do something that I’ve never done before, and if this album is a diary, then it would not be complete without ‘Trail Mix’ in it.”

Cécile has made songs from Kurt Weill, including “The World is Mean,” otherwise known as the first-act finale from The Threepenny Opera, staples of her live shows. Her performance on the recording has all the hallmarks of her genius for interpretation—the rapid-fire diction, lyrical intensity and total absorption into the character, here tinged with more than a little humor. The band gives it closing number intensity right up to the end, when it seems to segue seamlessly into “Dead People”—no small feat given that the latter song is an out-of-time melancholy love letter that seems to be almost out of love. Here Salvant set a love letter from Alfred Stieglitz to Georgia O’Keeffe to music, wanting to memorialize the vivid visual writing as well as to pay homage to both artists.

Cécile’s “Thunderclouds” might be the most direct acknowledgment of the pandemic on the record, as she seeks conscious gratitude for even the frightening and difficult things in the world. “Sometimes you have to gaze into a well to see the sky,” she repeats over and over on the bridge. The track ends with a brief coda from the children’s chorus, this time singing in French.

Then we arrive at “Unquiet Grave.” A song of the living seeking the dead in a graveyard, it feels as ancient and fresh as any other Child ballad (the text is Child #78) and is sung fully a cappella, shifting from full and present to a voice being enveloped in ghostly echoes, as the dead love tells her grieving living paramour: “The stalk is withered dry, my love/So must our hearts decay/So make yourself content, my love/‘Til death takes you away.” It is the mirror image of “Wuthering Heights”’ tale of the ghostly lover who comes back to haunt Heathcliff, and apparently the two were originally recorded as one song. Salvant has said that it was important that the album end with the entreaty that the living should forget the dead and continue to embrace life.

More than any other recording in her catalog to this point, Ghost Song showcases the astonishingly fearless side of Cécile McLorin Salvant’s artistic identity and presents a cohesive artistic statement that blends ghost stories, personal narrative, covers and originals into a potent brew. She wasn’t satisfied to leave it here, either; next week we’ll go even further afield with her on her most recent recording.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

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: