Review: Ahmad Jamal is ageless wonder at Yoshi's - San Jose Mercury News

Review: Ahmad Jamal is ageless wonder at Yoshi's - San Jose Mercury News

hmad Jamal turned 80 in July. One could be forgiven, however, for assuming he's 70. Or even 60.

He still looks great and his energy level is amazing. Then there's his handiwork on the piano, which -- in terms of most of the technical aspects, as well all of the artistic ones -- surpasses what the majority of players one-quarter his age could dream of delivering onstage.

Indeed, Jamal proved to be an ageless wonder on Friday, the first of three nights at Yoshi's at Jack London Square in Oakland. The jazz man -- best known for the '50s hit "Poinciana" and his influence on Miles Davis' music -- proved worthy of the title "living legend," though his set had less to do with nostalgia than it did with proving that

he still has plenty to offer.

The Pittsburgh native's focus was clearly on his new material, tracks from 2008's "It's Magic" and this year's "A Quiet Time." That was fine with the near-capacity crowd, since Jamal and his terrific quartet -- bassist James Cammack, drummer Herlin Riley and percussionist Manolo Badrena -- made nearly every new song sound like it was destined to be a classic.

Plus, it was undeniable treat to see Jamal -- one of the planet's most accomplished jazz artists -- play in a 300-capacity club. The last time he came through Northern California, mind you, it was to perform before thousands as a headliner at the Monterey Jazz Festival.

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Henry Threadgill Zooid: This Brings Us To – Vol II – review | Music | The Guardian

Image by volume12 via FlickrHenry Threadgill Zooid: This Brings Us To – Vol II – review | Music | The Guardian

Henry Threadgill, the Chicagoan saxophonist and composer, is by no means a jazz celeb, but he's a hero to many influential insiders for his adventurousness with structure and instrumentation, and for explorations of timbre that transform the jazz sound, while still leaving familiar clues from its roots. Threadgill's quintet Zooid has been his principle vehicle throughout the noughties, bringing rhythmically multilayered approaches to input from contemporary classical music, Latin jazz, free jazz, gamelan and the blues. The distinctive Liberty Ellman's guitar is sonorous and elegant on the moody Lying Eyes, before José Davila's trombone and the leader's airy flute lines strike a typical Threadgill contrast over a scurrying avant-funk pulse. On Polymorph, the composer's influence on both Tim Berne's conception and alto-sax sound are very clear. Sometimes Ellman sketches wraith-like lines around Stomu Takeishi's bass before Threadgill's imploring alto-sax swirls in; at others the leader fires atonal yelps across rhythm- patterns jointly established by tuba and drums. It's an economical and ascetic kind of music-making, but packed with the implications of its fast-shifting relationships, and warmer, more animated and accessible than you might expect.

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Randy Weston Links 'African Rhythms' To American Jazz : NPR

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I have had the wonderful experiencing of knowing Mr. Weston since 1981.  He is one of my teachers.  He is truly a great man.Randy Weston Links 'African Rhythms' To American Jazz : NPR

Pianist Randy Weston grew up surrounded by some of the greatest musicians in jazz. But it was his deep connection to Africa that inspired his personal style of music.

Weston recently sat down with NPR's Neal Conan to discuss the link between West African music and American jazz in his autobiography, African Rhythms. Traditional histories trace the history of American jazz to New Orleans, but not Weston.

"African people were taken from Africa, and taken to the States, and they came in contact with European culture and instruments," he says. Then, they "created a different kind of music" — jazz and blues.

Weston says he gives credit to his father for connecting him with music and the continent of Africa.

"He told me you have to study African civilization — when Africa was great," Weston says.

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Lou Donaldson Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard : NPR

Image via WikipediaLou Donaldson Quartet: Live At The Village Vanguard : NPR

By the time he started his latest weeklong run at the Village Vanguard, alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson was 84. He'd been based in New York for 60-odd years, during which time he became a jazz legend — the kind who made albums that are still remembered today, who recorded lines memorable enough to be sampled years later, who toured the country's back rooms back when a jazz musician could post up for two weeks at a time in, say, Dayton, Ohio. It bred in him a style that was solid, soulful and swinging, with a charismatically salty wit to match. It hasn't broke, and he hasn't felt the need to fix it.

When "Sweet Poppa Lou" descended into the basement and ascended to the stage, there were the japes, the blues singing, the exemplary straight-ahead jazz he's pursued for decades. ("No fusion, no con-fusion," he said — twice.) WBGO and NPR Music will be there to broadcast and webcast the first Nov. 3 set live; it will also be recorded and archived online on this page.

Since recording with organist Jimmy Smith in the late 1950s, Donaldson has often worked with a rhythm section of Hammond B-3 organ, guitar and drums. That instrumentation allows him to dish on funky, danceable grooves; not coincidentally, it was responsible for some of his most famous appearances on record. He reprised some of those greatest hits — "Blues Walk," "Alligator Bogaloo" — and called some favorites from the bebop and hard bop eras. He even sang some blues: his trademark "Whiskey Drinkin' Woman," with many embellishments by way of prologue. With him at the Vanguard was his current working band: Pat Bianchi on organ, Randy Johnston on guitar and Fukushi Tainaka on drums.

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The Santa Barbara Independent Ornette Coleman Quartet Plays UCSB

The Santa Barbara Independent Ornette Coleman Quartet Plays UCSB

From its inception, jazz has been associated with musical innovation. Ever since the juke joint cutting contests of the early 20th century encouraged players to compete for audience approval with surprising and unexpected riffs and rhythms, the music has carried the burden of making it new with refreshing panache and style. But for saxophonist Ornette Coleman, the adventure of revising previous genres and experimenting with sound has taken on a greater importance than for nearly any comparably important figure in the history of the music. No one, not even his celebrated contemporary John Coltrane, has done more to expand the sonic vocabulary of jazz or to extol the value of innovative thinking in the service of immediacy and communication. It’s Coleman’s peculiar combination of relentless searching for new sounds and total dedication to the primary task of accessing emotion that gives his music its inimitable profile. It’s not just that Coleman doesn’t sound like anyone else—it’s that he does it in order to discover the truth of his experience through his own journey.

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Nine Women In The Room: A Jazz Musicians’ Roundtable : The Record : NPR

Nine Women In The Room: A Jazz Musicians’ Roundtable : The Record : NPR

Over the summer, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington brought together some pretty high-profile musicians from all over the world to record The Mosaic Project: pianists Geri Allen, Helen Sung, and Patrice Rushen; bassists Esperanza Spalding and Mimi Jones; percussionist Sheila E.; woodwind players Anat Cohen and Tineke Postma; trumpeter Ingrid Jensen; violinist Chia-Yin Carol Ma; flutist Hailey Niswanger; and vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater, Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves, Carmen Lundy, Nona Hendryx, Patricia Romania, and Gretchen Parlato. Activist and author Angela Davis even contributes spoken word to one track.

You may have noticed they're all women. That was both the point of the session — and not the point.

After a full day of recording, eight of the musicians sat down with Lara Pellegrinelli for a conversation on the topic of women in jazz. They shared some of their own experiences and discussed the media, the music business, audience, mentors, and role models. But Carrington eventually broke in with a request: could they stop talking about gender issues and talk about the music?

The conversation illustrates some of the tensions in being a woman in jazz. At the same time that these players seem ready to celebrate the obstacles they've overcome, they say that the music itself comes first — it doesn't care if you're black or white, young or old, male or female. Could it be that this conviction, central to jazz, has made it difficult for women to speak up about the prejudice they've faced, as much as it has given them the faith that they will be heard?

You can read an edited transcription of the full conversation here, or download a PDF by right-clicking this link and selecting 'save link as'

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Master Yusef Lateef surrounds Grace Cathedral audience with world-spanning jazz - San Jose Mercury News

Image via WikipediaMaster Yusef Lateef surrounds Grace Cathedral audience with world-spanning jazz - San Jose Mercury News

Ninety years old this month, Yusef Lateef was greeted with reverent applause Friday at Grace Cathedral, where close to a full house awaited this master of jazz and world-spanning sounds. As the applause echoed through the cathedral, Lateef began to play, while strolling around the nave, encircling the audience with music, which floated up and through the void.

Pretty soon, the place was exceptionally quiet, except for the very quiet music: Lateef playing a small flute, something like a penny whistle, and Adam Rudolph, his percussionist, playing another flute and making soft whooshes with a length of plastic tubing, which he whirled while walking. They were populating the big sacred space with natural sounds: breath and wind, moans and night sounds, as if desert crickets were speaking through the flutes.

Going back to Duke Ellington's famous sacred concert with his orchestra at Grace in 1965, the cathedral atop Nob Hill has hosted much spiritualized jazz. Since the 1980s, SFJAZZ -- which presented Lateef as part of the ongoing San Francisco Jazz Festival -- has brought many preeminent instrumentalists to Grace for solo or duo concerts. Headliners have ranged from Anthony Braxton to Pharoah Sanders and Joshua Redman.

So it was only a matter of time before Lateef appeared at the cathedral. Along with John Coltrane, Don Cherry (who played at Grace some two decades ago) and a few others, he is a progenitor of jazz as a sacred language, expanding

to embrace the folk and sacred musical traditions of the world. Even before the release of his popular "Eastern Sounds" LP in 1961, Lateef was laying claim to this territory, and, Friday at Grace, he filled the Episcopalian cathedral with Eastern sounds and more.

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Jazz Articles: Jazz Saxophonist Marion Brown Dies — By Lee Mergner — Jazz Articles

Cover of Marion BrownJazz Articles: Jazz Saxophonist Marion Brown Dies — By Lee Mergner — Jazz Articles

Known for his association with Archie Shepp, Amiri Baraka, Ornette Coleman and other bright lights of the 60s avant garde jazz community, Marion Brown died on Monday, October 18, in Hollywood, Florida. He was 79. Brown had been ill for many years and had not performed publicly in a long time. Brown recorded over a dozen albums as a leader for Impulse!, ESP, Black Lion and ECM, but is perhaps best known for his appearance as a sideman on two seminal records of the ‘60s: John Coltrane’s Ascension and Archie Shepp’s Fire Music.

Brown was born in the Atlanta area. He left high school in the 10th grade and enlisted in the Army, where he quickly became a member of the Army band and was stationed for 18 months at Hokkaido, an obscure island of Japan. After he returned home to Atlanta, Brown enrolled at Clark College to major in music education. He went on to study at Howard University in Washington, DC and it was there that he became immersed in the new music played by artists such as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Amiri Baraka, Archie Shepp and others. Within a few years, several of these artists would become mentors or associates of Brown. Disenchanted with his academics at Howard, Brown moved to New York in order to play this new music professionally.

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Google logo is dedicated to jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, the father of bebop | TOP BUZZ NEWS

Google logo is dedicated to jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie, the father of bebop | TOP BUZZ NEWS

Who is Dizzy Gillespie? Well Dizzy Gillespie is the old style trumpetist, the father of bebop. Dizzy Gillespie, trumpetist of the jazz music is celebrated by Google in the honor of his work. Google is celebrating one of the greatest jazz musicians in the world, Dizzy Gillespie the trompetist on the anniversary of the birth. John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was born in fact in South Carolina October 21, 1917 and was a trumpet player, pianist, composer, singer, percussionist and bandleader. A musician at 360 ° together with Charlie Parker can be considered the father of bebop and modern jazz. “People do not care whether you play a chord of the thirteenth fractured, as long as can dance,” read Gillespie. In the late forties Dizzy Gillespie became interested also in the Caribbean music and South American rhythms mixing Afro-Cuban jazz. Yusef Lateef has in the past repeatedly expressed negative about the term jazz. The narrow definition of the word includes in his view not enough room to be creative and hybrid experiments indicate. However, the music of the American multi-instrumentalist deeply rooted in jazz, blues and even ethnic folk music. Someone in the past with Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus and Cannonball Adderley has cooperated, it can hardly deny that he played no part in the development of jazz music.A life dedicated to music, dies at the age of 75 years for pancreatic cancer. To his memory was a star in the Walk of Fame in Hollywood at 7057 Hollywood Boulevard. Dizzy Gillespie will live in our souls with his musc.

Mike Ragogna: From D.C.'s Kennedy Center to East Of Angel Town: Conversations with Branford Marsalis and Peter Cincotti

Mike Ragogna: From D.C.'s Kennedy Center to East Of Angel Town: Conversations with Branford Marsalis and Peter Cincotti

Legendary jazz pianist Ellis Marsalis has been accumulating a series of honors with the upcoming NEA's Jazz Masters Award being one of the most prestigious yet. He and his brood of familial, musical superstars recently played D.C.'s Kennedy Center, and that recording has been released as the album Music Redeems that unites The Marsalis Family with guests such as honorary offspring, Harry Connick, Jr.

The project's profits will fund The Ellis Marsalis Center for Music, a New Orleans-based organization dedicated to keeping the arts lively for young people. Speaking for the family is genre-versatile saxophonist Branford Marsalis who brings us up to date on the center, his father, the performance, and other topics including Miles Davis.

Also included in this post is an interview with Peter Cincotti who experienced one of the most surprising and best career 180s of the last few years. Originally produced and presented as a light "easy listening" artist and contemporary of singers such as Michael Bublé, Peter empowered himself through his very strong East Of Angel Town, one of the best pop singer-songwriter albums of 2009 in the States (it was released in 2007 overseas). Peter Cincotti is on the same playing field as Billy Joel, his keyboard chops giving The Piano Man a hard run for his money. The album's most solidly written and best performed tracks include "Lay Your Body Down (Goodbye Philadelphia)," "Cinderella Beautiful," "December Boys," "Another Falling Star," "Broken Children," and the title track whose dead-on description of the L.A. club scene is like "Zanzibar" on steroids. Peter discusses that project while taking us on a tour of his career and things East of Angel Town and beyond

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Music review: Trumpeter Tom Harrell's potent brew SF Gate.Com

Image via WikipediaMusic review: Trumpeter Tom Harrell's potent brew

Conflict and resolution. Tension and release. Contrast. Jazz students learn these concepts as the basic building blocks of musical expression. Few artists embody these concepts both inwardly and outwardly more starkly than trumpeter Tom Harrell, who brought his quintet to Yoshi's San Francisco on Wednesday night. It was refreshing to see a great many aspiring young musicians in the audience being schooled by one of the living masters of modern jazz.

Juxtaposition is not confined to the music at a Tom Harrell show. Harrell suffers from schizophrenia, and the sheer effort and courage required for him to take the stage and maintain his composure over the course of a performance are at once inspiring and unsettling.

On Wednesday, as always, Harrell emerged from behind the curtains slowly, deliberately, dressed in black, and made his way to his position onstage in silence. He opened a manila folder containing his charts and spent a few minutes organizing his music just so, then finally stood up straight, eyes closed, head down, still, though trembling slightly.

It is at this moment of every Tom Harrell show I've seen that I wonder if he'll be able to summon the inner strength to go ahead with the performance. Then, with a subtle tap of one foot, he cues the band, puts his trumpet to his lips, and as the first few notes flow out of his horn a miracle occurs.

While playing, and only while playing, Harrell is in complete control of his world and his surroundings. All symptoms of his illness disappear, replaced by one of the most recognizable, sophisticated and mature voices active in the post-bop tradition.

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Shirley Horn Trio Estate, Italian For Summer

Bill Cosby Discusses The Late Trumpeter Lester Bowie

I had the great fortune of managing Lester Bowie for a short period of time during the early 1980s. He was an extremely bright and funny man. He gave me advice which i still use today. May he rest in peace.
John H. Armwood

Music Review - The Jaki Byard Project Hits Brooklyn Lyceum - NYTimes.com

Music Review - The Jaki Byard Project Hits Brooklyn Lyceum - NYTimes.com

Jaki Byard was a jazz pianist of rumbling mastery, quick humor and sprawling erudition, never as prominent as he should have been, though he was hardly unheralded in his time. Since his death in 1999, his legacy has been burnished by some posthumous live recordings and, no less effectively, by the continuing testimony of his students, several generations of whom he mentored in music schools across the Northeast.

Yard Byard, which also calls itself the Jaki Byard Project, consists almost entirely of musicians who studied with him at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Formed recently by the flutist Jamie Baum with the drummer George Schuller, it features Adam Kolker on clarinets and tenor saxophone, Jerome Harris on guitar and Ugonna Okegwo on bass.

On Wednesday night the group played its third gig, at the Brooklyn Lyceum in Park Slope. (Its fourth is scheduled for later this month in Manhattan.) The music was all Byard’s, played lovingly and a bit loosely, though perhaps not as loosely as it should have been.

Most of the songs in the first set were fine examples of standard form gone just slightly haywire. (About half of them overlapped with the track listing on “The Last From Lennie’s,” a terrific live album from 1965, originally released on Prestige.)

“Strolling Along” had Ms. Baum on alto flute and Mr. Kolker on clarinet, playing its soulful melody in unison; it was during their solos that they flirted with irresolution. “Dolphy” — named after one of Byard’s kindred spirits, the multireedist Eric Dolphy — was more patently unsettled in its tonality, a 12-bar blues with commitment issues. And in the bridge to “Aluminum Baby,” arranged as a rumba of sorts, there was a brief rhythmic hiccup to accompany a restless harmonic turn.

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