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NEW YORK @ NIGHT The Hell’s Kitchen Cultural Center, Inc. Presents: The Seventh Annual “Rhythm in the Kitchen” Music Festival 2013 Wednesday, June 5th In Collaboration with Harvestworks 7pm - Hans Tammen & Denman Maroney 8pm - Lori Napoleon 9pm - Phillip Stearns 10pm - Peter Edwards Thursday, June 6th Hell’s Kitchen Cultural Center, Inc. Benefit 7pm - In Performance Music Workshop directed by Sean King with guest JD Parran 8:30pm - David Jimenez/Charles Evans Duo 9:30pm - York College Jazz Ensemble directed by Thomas Zlabinger 10:30pm - Elise Wood /Bruce Edwards Friday, June 7th 7pm - Eri Yamamoto Trio with David Ambrosio, Ikuo Takeuchi 8pm - Rob Reddy Ensemble with Charlie Burnham, John Carlson, Dom Richards, Guillermo Brown 9pm - Alex Garcia/AfroMantra with Ole Mathisen, Mike Eckroth, Ariel De La Portilla 10pm - Ernie Hammes Group with Pierre Alain Goualch, Paul Wiltgen, Jay Anderson Saturday, June 8th 7pm - Curtis Stewart PUBLIquartet with Jannina Norpoth, Nick Revel, Amanda Gookin 8pm - Michele Rosewoman with Liberty Ellman 9pm - William Hooker/Strings 3 with David Soldier and David First 10pm - Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. and Numinous with Ana Milosavljevic, Maya Bennardo, Hannah Levinson, Richard Vaudrey $15/$12 (students & seniors) The HKCC Benefit on June 6th is $20/$15 (students & seniors) $25 / 2 Evening Festival Pass - only for purchase on Friday, June 7th Church for All Nations 417 West 57th Street (9th & 10 Aves) NYC hkculturalcenter.org Facebook.com/rhythminthekitchen contact: dwhook@att.net / abrajazzbra@aol.com Ministere de la Culture, de l’Enseignement Superieur et de la Recherche, Luxembourg Lux Mux, Luxembourg 4 May 2013 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD Photo by Erika Kapin With the band name Voyager emblazoned on his bass drum head, drummer Eric Harland appeared at Jazz Standard (Apr. 13th) and played five powerful extended numbers straight through, speaking only to introduce his colleagues at the end: tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, guitarist Julian Lage, pianist Taylor Eigsti and bassist Harish Raghavan. Each of these mammoth musicians could have played a full solo set and left the crowd happy, but what they did was a sequence of unaccompanied virtuoso spots to introduce or transition the tunes - “Intermezzos”, as Harland termed them on his 2011 debut Voyager: Live By Night (Sunnyside). Following a bright and challenging opener with the provisional title “New Song”, Lage brought a ragged experimentalism and strategic effects-pedal tweaking to his intro on “Voyager”. Raghavan was nimble and deeply expressive as he segued into the lyrical waltz ballad “Trust the Light”. Eigsti destroyed at the piano but also brought a cool and glowing harmony to the band, taking the spotlight right before the irresistibly soulful “Eclipse”. Smith battled a little harder to be heard, but he shred the music to pieces consistently. Harland’s show-stopping solo before “Play With Me”, the catchy groove-based finale, might have topped the energy of all previous intermezzos combined. But Harland doesn’t seek to dominate: he picks players who can do what he does, transforming the moment in their own highly personal way. - David R. Adler Eric Harland @ Jazz Standard When trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Angelica Sanchez played duo at Greenwich House Music School (Apr. 6th), there were zones of deep concentration and silence, but also an outburst or two from car horns on the small West Village street just outside. Smith’s horn, too, shattered the calm, but with high musical intent and creative control. Three of the six untitled improvisations began with Smith solo, commanding the room with triple-fortissimo shouts, relaxed and poetic legato lines, coarse multiphonic timbres, breath tones and fast blurry runs. Receiving all this inspiration from a few feet away, Sanchez showed a great virtuosic reach, favoring a dark language with 20th-century echoes. At one point she strove to drown out the car horns with a dissonant crescendo, but in quieter moments one could hear her voice, singing the notes and melodies as they emerged. Her sparse rubato passages and harp-like string strumming had a way of bringing out Smith’s lyricism and introspection. “More” called out one listener after the fifth piece, but Smith grinned and turned the request around: “How much more?” Then began the stormy encore, with rumbling rhythms and patterns and a huge, long-decaying bass note from the piano as its final gesture. The rich harmonic bed of this collaboration sets it apart from Smith’s other recent duos with Louis Moholo-Moholo, Jack DeJohnette and others. There will in fact be more: Smith and Sanchez entered the studio the next day to record. (DA) The ICP Orchestra’s opening piece at Littlefield (Apr. 13th) could have been called “All The Things They Are” except it was Monk, not Jerome Kern, under an arrangement by pianist Misha Mengelberg. But with the array of fragments they worked through, from graceful minuets for the horns or strings to momentary, rousing free jazz to brief and blistering tenor solos from Tobias Delius to full band swing, it made for a show of prowess whether or not it was intended that way. It was the ensemble’s first US tour without Mengelberg, who co-founded the band some 45 years ago. “He’s just not up to touring right now, but he’s with us in spirit,” violinist Mary Oliver told the full house and few in attendance could have been unaware of the missing figure at the piano. Along with Mengelberg and Monk they played Basie and Ellington as well as compositions and arrangements by saxophonists Ab Baars and Michael Moore and cellist Tristan Honsinger and a couple by the late South African saxophonist Sean Bergin, with whom many of them worked. From a surgical perspective, the nonet wasn’t so different without its leader. Mengelberg - who was never one to play 20 notes where one would do - wasn’t usually heard so much as felt. His spirit of playful absurdism, of unhinged bop, was still instilled in the music forwarded by a talented pool of instant composers who have all played with him for years, if not decades - and with hope, in spirit or practice, for decades to come. - Kurt Gottschalk ICP Orchestra @ Littlefield The former New York percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani - who has taken up residence in Pennsylvania - and Chicago saxophonist Edward Wilkerson, Jr. stopped at Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center (as a part of the Arts for Art Evolving Music series) Apr. 5th during their tour playing music for the 2012 Japanese silent vampire movie Sanguivorous. But, as Nakatani pointed out, instead of the vampire they had William Parker. They conjured music with one foot in the Mali jungle, one in the Australian outback and a third downtown with Parker on kora and Wilkerson playing didgeridoo. Nakatani created a sonic bed with delicate blowing across a handheld cymbal and rigorous crushing of larger ones against his drumhead. They put another foot back home in Chicago once Wilkerson pulled out his tenor, sock in bell, and Parker picked up his bass. They played midtempo excursions while Nakatani kept in constant motion with brushes and bowls and cymbals and gongs. Wilkerson brought a nice constraint to the free formations, playing in boppish boxes and well-parsed phrases, faithful as Chicago saxophonists so often are to the spirit of Gene Ammons while working the array of hand percussion and small instruments trademark to a younger generation of Chicagoans. Announcing the band at the end of the set, Nakatani laughed, “Usually when free jazz improvisers play together for the first time, it is OK, then the second, third time it is good. This was the first time we played together - it was really pretty good.” (KG) Peter Gannushkin/DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET
Photo by Scott Friedlander One imagines when the quartet Conference Call came together in New York 15 years ago, the name was a cheekily oblique reference to group improvisation. But now that geography has separated the members across states and continents, the appellation is even more fitting. The foundation of the group is the remarkable communication between (now) North Carolina-based pianist Michael Jefry Stevens and Washington Heights bassist Joe Fonda - their partnership goes back twice as long as the quartet in question. At ShapeShifter Lab (Apr. 3rd), their pairing, particularly in the more quiet moments, is why one laments modern jazz’ dearth of longterm relationships. But those quiet moments were in the minority, no surprise given tenor saxophonist/ bass clarinetist Gebhard Ullmann, now returned to his native Germany, who evinces shades of both homes in his playing, especially a unique approach to the bass clarinet. His “Dreierlei” opened and took up over half of the set, a complex piece but not stultifyingly so, demonstrating Conference Call’s two best features: precisely harnessed energy and immediate and organic responsiveness. Drummer George Schuller (third in the chair after Matt Wilson and Han Bennink) drove the Township jive-like second piece, featuring a classic tenor tone from Ullmann. Stevens’ “What About the Future” closed the set in succinct fashion but ended up being the concert’s highlight, mainly due to some arco magic from Fonda, who makes everything he plays look easy. - Andrey Henkin Conference Call @ ShapeShifter Lab Seeing Art Lande at Jazz at Kitano (Apr. 10th), it is hard to reconcile the pianist’s early ECM efforts with Jan Garbarek or Gary Peacock, dour men of jazz, with the almost manic cutup slaying the audience while leading a quartet of Bruce Williamson (reeds), Dean Johnson (bass) and Tony Moreno (drums). When he wasn’t reading random snatches of poetry or jumping up from his piano stool, he was exhorting the assembled New Yorkers to come by his next gig...back home in Colorado. For a Wednesday night and an obscure figure such as Lande, Jazz at Kitano was packed, mostly with musicians, a testament to Lande the artful educator. But he wasn’t the only one teaching in a 70-minute set made up of 6 tunes, each oddly either 9 or 12 minutes. Williamson, a collaborator of Lande’s since the ‘70s when both were based in San Francisco, was a marvel on alto saxophone, clarinet and bass clarinet. Johnson and Moreno made up a gooey rhythm section, delicious like melted chocolate. There were standards like a slightly fractured take on “St. Thomas” and the plucky, clarinet-led “Moon River” encore or Lande originals like “Osloxica” (where Norwegian and Mexican music meet) or “Pitless”, written for trumpeter Don Cherry. The opening “Sass” was just that, courtesy of Johnson’s intro and Lande’s pushing-against-time solo while “Gallery Cool”, written by Paul Grabowsky, referenced art in the impressionism of Lande’s insidethe-piano musings and an elfin quality that could be subtitled “Evening of a Midtown Faun”. (AH) Having long ago shunned the word jazz to identify the sounds he creates - preferring his own neologism ‘autophysiopsychic’, meaning from the physical, mental and spiritual self - it was not surprising that the program for Yusef Lateef: Celebrating 75 Years of Music at Roulette (Apr. 6th) featured an expansive range of music by the 92-year-old multi-instrumentalist, little of which could be described with that term he has historically disdained. The evening’s first half showcased Lateef the composer, with three pieces - “String Quartet no. 2 2012”, performed by the Momenta Quartet; “Trio in December 1998 op. 2 No. 2 (Elan Vital)” featuring the saxophone trio of JD Parran, Marty Ehrlich and Allen Won and “Autophysiopsychic (variations for piano) 2012” with Taka Kigawa - that while best described as being in the European classical tradition, still evinced the engaging lyricism and rhythmic resourcefulness that distinguishes all of composer’s work. But it was the second portion of the concert, an hour-long duet between Lateef and longtime colleague/percussionist Adam Rudolph that was most rewarding. Seated center stage, the elder master blew tenor sax, flutes (both bamboo and metal) and oboe, weaving an intriguing panoply of ethereal and earthy tones into Rudolph’s percussive array of polyrhythms to create a bluesy Eastern-tinged sonic tapestry, made all the more dramatic with the solemn recitation of Lateef’s two poems “When” and “A Syllogism”. - Russ Musto Yusef Lateef & Adam Rudolph @ Roulette Peter Bernstein kicked off his first set at 54 Below (Apr. 2nd) with an upbeat “This Could Be The Start Of Something Big”, a suitably optimistic opener marking the inaugural night of the WBGO Jazz Series at the room called “Broadway’s Nightclub”. Following up, the young-yet-veteran guitarist introduced an easy grooving “Stairway To The Stars” with a knowing grin that recognized the ironic relationship between the song’s title and the subterranean location of the opulently appointed room where his stellar band of pianist Harold Mabern, bassist John Webber and drummer Jimmy Cobb was holding forth for the first time. Bernstein’s lyrical single-note stylings shined on the Victor Young classic “Delilah”, contrasting nicely with Mabern’s fluent harmonically rich solo. The pianist was featured on his own “Edward Lee”, a soulful dedication to his old bandleader boss Lee Morgan, showcasing his powerful parallel octave runs in conversational tandem with Bernstein’s mellifluous chording. The addition of guest Frank Wess added a classic jazz element to the group that seemed particularly at home in the old-style cabaret environment of the room. Swinging breezily on “The Street Where You Live” the saxophonist’s airy tone recalled the sound of his glory days with Count Basie. His unaccompanied intro to “How About You” launched the band into a medium-up tour de force outing, before bringing things home with a moving “Never Let Me Go”. (RM) Photo by Alan Nahigian WHAT’S NEWS The nominees for the 2013 Jazz Journalists Association Awards have been released. We are pleased to have been nominated for Best Print Periodical of the Year for the seventh time in the last eight years. Winners in musical categories will be announced on the JJA website May 1st. A celebration for the winners will take place at Blue Note Jun. 19th, where prizes in journalism/media categories will be announced. Additionally, the JJA has named its class of 2013 Jazz Heroes, which includes local activists Robbin Ahrold, president of Century Media Partners and past Vice President, Corporate Relations for BMI, and Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso, co-founders of the Creative Music Studio workshops in Woodstock. For more information, visit JJAJazzAwards.com. The 2013 Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame Inductees have been announced. Based on the results of a worldwide popular vote, Art Blakey, Lionel Hampton and Clark Terry will be the 43rd-45th members inducted and the first since 2010. For more information, visit jalc.org/learn/online-learning/hall-offame. Trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith was named a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his 10 Freedom Summers, released on Cuneiform Records and receiving its local premiere at Roulette May 1st-3rd. The 2013 Essentially Ellington Competition will take place at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Hall May 10th-12th. For more information, visit jalc.org/learn/ teachers-students/essentially-ellington. The late trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff is to be celebrated in his native Frankfurt, Germany by the naming of a small pond in the city in his honor. Mangelsdorff apparently visited the pond daily and was inspired by the many birds who frequented it. The Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, recordings that “are culturally, historically, or aesthetically important, and/or inform or reflect life in the United States” has added the following to its list: “Begin the Beguine” - Artie Shaw & His Orchestra (1938); Descargas: Cuban Jam Session in Miniature - Cachao Y Su Ritmo Caliente (1957); The Shape of Jazz to Come - Ornette Coleman (1959) and The Audience with Betty Carter - Betty Carter (1980). For more information, visit loc.gov/rr/record/nrpb/registry. Jazz at Lincoln Center has acquired the collection of Frank Driggs, including a massive archive of photographs, posters, sheet music, records and personal papers. Driggs was a longtime jazz record executive for Columbia and later RCA Victor. For more information, visit jalc.org. The film The Girls in the Band, a documentary on female jazz instrumentalists from the ‘30s onwards, will receive its theatrical premiere at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater May 10th followed by a week run at the Francesca Beale Theater, May 10th-16th. For more information, visit thegirlsintheband.com. Clarinetist Anat Cohen is the recipient of the 2013 Paul Acket Award, given annually by the North Sea Jazz Festival (and named for its founder) to artists “deserving wider recognition for their extraordinary musicianship.” For more information, visit northseajazz.com. Submit news to info@nycjazzrecord.com THE NEW YORK CITY JAZZ RECORD | May 2013 5
Page 1: May 2013 | No. 133 WILL CALHOUN You
Page 6 and 7: Photo by Bill Bernstein INTERVIEW D
Page 9 and 10: ON THE COVER In accepting one of tw
Page 11 and 12: MEGAPHONE Cornet and Lineage: Ron a
Page 14 and 15: CD REVIEWS HUSH POINT SSC 1358 In S
Page 16 and 17: GLOBE UNITY: ITALY Sin Fronteras Ac
Page 18 and 19: $18 ADVANCE $20 AT DOOR 9/20: Roy E
Page 20 and 21: Oye!!! (Live in Puerto Rico) Miguel
Page 22 and 23: 22 May 2013 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZ
Page 24 and 25: The View From Here Kyle Eastwood (J
Page 26 and 27: Haymaker Noah Preminger (Palmetto)
Page 28 and 29: Chants Craig Taborn Trio (ECM) by J
Page 30 and 31: LASZLO GARDONY / CLARITY SSC 4014 I
Page 32 and 33: 32 May 2013 | THE NEW YORK CITY JAZ
Page 34 and 35: Time Travel Dave Douglas Quintet (G
Page 36: BOXED SET Ten Freedom Summers Wadad
Page 39 and 40: Saturday, May 4 êCyro Baptista and
Page 41 and 42: Monday, May 13 êGil Evans Birthday
Page 43 and 44: Saturday, May 25 êMark Soskin Trio
Page 45 and 46: CLUB DIRECTORY • 54 Below 254 Wes
Page 47 and 48: KENNY BALL - The British trumpeter

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