THE JAZZ CHILL CORNER John Finbury | "Quatro" |  |
- John Finbury | "Quatro"
- Junk Magic | "Compass Confusion"
- Pianist Emmet Cohen To Release "Future Stride"
- New Music Releases: Nicole Mitchell & Moor Mother, Spontaneous Groovin’ Combustion, The Society Hill Orchestra
| Posted: 26 Oct 2020 12:59 PM PDT  Alternating vocal and instrumental tracks, the album was produced by Latin Grammy winner Emilio D. Miler, and features Magos Herrera on vocals, Chano Domínguez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Antonio Sánchez on drums. Recorded over two sessions in New York in 2019, "Quatro" is both a celebration of cultural diversity and immigration, and a condemnation of those who seek restriction based upon prejudice. The album opener, "Llegará El Día" ("The Day Will Come"), is a "Freedom Song" and a fierce assertion of the album's concept, with influences of Peruvian Festejo and Mexican Huapango. The lyrics, penned by producer D. Miler, knit a poetic landscape with references to Mexican iconography and to someone, unnamed, who will soon disappear. The pianist offers a solo cadenza to present the first instrumental, "Independence Day", Finbury's take on Spanish Flamenco, specifically Bulería. With John Patitucci on electric bass, the trio flies high, with Chano taking more solo spots throughout the song. "La Madre De Todos Los Errores" ("The Mother Of All Mistakes") features an intricate melody delivered with passion by Magos, which develops over a driving bass ostinato. The lyrics, written by Roxana Amed, are directed at someone whose assumptions and narcissism overlook the beauty that lies in the details which shape identity. "All The Way To The End", featuring lyrics by Patty Brayden, is a sultry Son-Bolero dance around the pledge of eternal love, sung in English with Spanish Flamenco ornaments. Chano Dominguez's solo enters, piercing and playful, becoming the other 'tease' in this conversation. When the song appears to be over, a final section emerges featuring a melancholic vocalise in exquisite interplay with the band. A solo acoustic bass cadenza resolves into an a capella vocal, and so "Comenzar" ("To Begin (again)" ) is born. With lyrics penned by Magos Herrera herself, the song is a homage to our capacity to reinvent ourselves and find new beginnings within the same story. The music displays influences of Argentine Zamba, and other folkloric music from the Andes that share similar rhythms. Reminiscent of old school dance halls "Salón Jardín" ("Garden Ballroom"), is the trios's take on a slow Bolero, fertile territory for an outstanding acoustic bass solo by John Patitucci. Chano Domínguez's reprise of the melody is so personal that it feels like a solo in its own right. Antonio Sánchez's solo cadenza at the beginning of "Romp" feels like a disruption of the smooth tone set by the previous track… and it isn't the last one! A clave-based, New Orleans Second Line groove takes shape, a musical reminder that the South of the United States was once part of the same melting pot as the Spanish Antilles. "Romp" is the jam after the party, when musicians and a few lucky guests blend together in a celebration of togetherness. John Finbury redefines his being American, not just as a native of the United States, but as a citizen of the Americas. His music on QUATRO often defies strict stylistic classifications, and finds unity in organic, intense renditions by a world-class band. Make no mistake: "Quatro" is a political statement; a musical and poetic expression of freedom and the power of collaboration to contradict the fiction that those who are different should remain apart. Though written and recorded before the world was stunned by a pandemic that has hindered our ability to gather and celebrate, "Quatro" presents a musical meeting place that strives to bridge that distance, and convey the certainty that we are better together.   |
| Junk Magic | "Compass Confusion" Posted: 26 Oct 2020 12:52 PM PDT  Compass Confusion – issued October 30 on Pyroclastic Records – presents a holographic snapshot of the Junk Magic sound. "Everything is warped by something else," says Taborn, who serves as album com- poser and producer. "You're still trying to capture things 'in a moment,' in a certain sense. But then also, because of how the process works, you're not. There's a lot of time to craft things after the fact." Compass Confusion features Chris Speed on saxophone, Erik Fratzke on bass, Mat Maneri on viola, Da- vid King on drums and Taborn on piano, keyboards and synthesizer. Together, they disarticulate boundaries that imply separation of live music and digital production. "I don't really view using creative methods in ambient techniques as a 'different side' of musical expression," says Taborn. "It's all the same expression. But this album is definitely leaning in to the production process as opposed to relying more heavily on the live playing." Compositional and textural layers, as well as pacing and extended ebb and flow, emerge intentionally throughout the recording. The artists honor space. They harness movement through time. Using methods that challenge perception and embrace subversion, they develop sound narratives unique to each track that create a story arc across the entire album. The interplay's the thing. "Laser Beaming Hearts" introduces a cast of characters, layering and mingling their identities, not only through sound design but melody. "Whenever I hear a melody, it really does set up an identity, a character," says Taborn, who seeks, at times, to subvert a character's initial impact by elevating a textural element or an ambience. Often, that relationship inverts. First conjuring an ocean inside a seashell alongside echoing heartbeats, "Dream and Guess" soon moves into a new melody — beautiful, mysterious and primed for sonic disruption. Rather than disorient — despite its title — the album constantly reorients the listener. Many tracks, including "The Science of Why Devils Smell Like Sulfur," feature sound chambers, through which the artists freely move. Within these chambers, textures layer, flicker, persist, and stories develop; sound collage may enhance as melody recedes. "There are different methods of attending compositionally," says Taborn. "If I were writing a traditional tune, it would be melody and some chord changes; if I were writing a hip hop track, I would focus more on beats, loops and sound design; ifI were writing strictly ambient music, I would focus on the sound relationships, how the shapes are evolving with certain sonic elements. On a lot of these pieces, I'm really playing with the foreground and background of all those things." While Taborn's process serves a fixed vision, his approach preserves spontaneity. He populates each chamber by listening and responding to what he hears. "Each tune kind of has a radically different process," he says. "I do think about narrative, because it moves through time, but it's the narrative of these sound worlds, moving between them." The artists entered sessions in Minneapolis and Brooklyn knowing each studio hit would be one step of the process. Most of the album's construction would come together away from mics and amps. Still, Taborn asserts an aesthetic throughout Compass Confusion that reflects his expansive foundation in live, improvised music. Deep admiration for hip hop and EDM production techniques notwithstanding, Taborn seeks to preserve solo performances artists throw down in the studio. "To a large extent, what you hear is what people played in the order that they played it," he says. "I don't cut up performances. And that's not an ethos, it's just an aesthetic. I'm not cutting up a drum solo and making loops, but I'm doing other things that might trick you into thinking it's looped." Mixed and mastered in Taborn's native Minneapolis by Brett Bullion (The Bad Plus) and Huntley Miller (Bon Iver, Kassa Overall), respectively, Compass Confusion presents a confluence of expressions within a collective sound. "We're improvisers," says Taborn. "While a lot of this material is written, there's so much improvising in the playing. Even in my approach to making tracks, making beats in the studio, it's still improvisational. You're working on things in the moment." Junk Magic, over the years, has featured countless acclaimed artist-composers, including Craig Taborn, Chris Speed, Erik Fratzke, Mat Maneri, Aaron Stewart, Mark Turner and David King (The Bad Plus). Bonding improvisational aesthetic with digital production and electronic music tech- niques, the project ethos challenges existing perceptions of sound design. A 2004 self-titled release gar- nered praise from Pitchfork, PopMatters and All About Jazz, which acknowledged the sound's "stagger- ing futuristic potential." Anticipated followup Compass Confusion, released on Pyroclastic Records, positions Junk Magic on the rolling crest of acoustic wave expansion. Pianist-composer Kris Davis founded Pyroclastic Records in 2016 to serve the release of her acclaimed recordings Duopoly and Octopus with the goal of growing the label into a thriving platform that would serve like-minded, cutting-edge artists. In 2019, Davis launched a nonprofit to support those artists whose expression flourishes beyond the commercial sphere. By supporting their creative efforts and ensuring distribution of their work, Pyroclastic empowers emerging and established artists — including Cory Smythe, Ben Goldberg, Chris Lightcap, Angelica Sanchez and Marilyn Crispell, Nate Wooley, Eric Revis and Craig Taborn — to continue challenging conventional genre-labeling within their fields. Pyroclastic also seeks to galvanize and grow a creative community, offering young artists new opportunities, supporting diversity and expanding the audience for noncommercial art.   |
| Pianist Emmet Cohen To Release "Future Stride" Posted: 26 Oct 2020 12:47 PM PDT  On his latest album, Cohen revisits one of the music's earliest forms without a trace of quaintness or throwback pastiche by meticulously covering the genre's lexicon spanning the past century and melding its context with "modern" music. With Future Stride, due out January 29, 2021 via Mack Avenue Records, he instead finds the immediacy in a stylistic approach that can speak volumes to modern listeners open to recognizing its thrilling vitality. The new album comes following Cohen's win at the 2019 American Pianists Awards. He received a cash prize and two years of career advancement and support valued at over $100,000, making this one of the most coveted prizes in the music world and the largest for American jazz pianists. Cohen's recording contract with Mack Avenue Music Group was a part of the prize from the American Pianists Association as well. Cohen joins illustrious past winners including Sullivan Fortner, Aaron Diehl, Dan Tepfer, Aaron Parks and Adam Birnbaum, among esteemed others. Though he's made a point of connecting with masters from the past throughout his still-young career, Cohen pointedly invites a group of his peers to realize this project, including his longtime rhythm section partners, bassist Russell Hall and drummer Kyle Poole, along with two of modern jazz's most progressive voices, trumpeter Marquis Hill and saxophonist Melissa Aldana. "I find that all great art can be considered modern," Cohen explains. "Whenever you listen to Stravinsky or watch Stanley Kubrick, when you read Shakespeare or look at Picasso, it remains the most modern, genius art that you can find. It allows people in every time period to feel and experience the same emotions relevant to the period that they live in. For me, stride piano belongs in that category; the music of Art Tatum and Earl 'Fatha' Hines and Willie 'The Lion' Smith has implications that can affect people today in a very deep manner." In that sense, the music of Future Stride viscerally connects our century's second decade with the last, dissipating the mists of time that shroud the era of early jazz. For anyone who might relegate the music's pioneers to some antiquated past, Cohen makes a bracing argument from the outset with "Symphonic Raps," a piece that Louis Armstrong recorded with the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra in the late 1920s and has been rarely, if ever, revived since. The trio's breakneck rendition ensures there's no dust left on the tune, which Cohen likens to "a hip-hop groove. That tune sums up how our trio communicates joy." The mood shifts drastically with the album's second track, Cohen's haunting original "Reflections at Dusk," with the pianist's shimmering keys underlying the aching melody essayed by Hill and Aldana. Cohen wrote the piece while contemplating a series of personal changes that had affected his own life in the months leading up to a global pandemic altering everyone's lives. "I had started to take a lot of time for reflection even before the world stopped," he says. "I think everyone is going through some version of that now, finally taking advantage of the chance to stop and listen to their own voices and thoughts. This piece is about taking time for yourself, which can be very difficult sometimes." The beloved drummer Lawrence "Lo" Leathers, who died tragically in June 2019, is given a deeply felt farewell on "Toast to Lo." Leathers had been an influential figure in the lives of all the members of the quintet, Cohen recalls. "We miss him very dearly. He became like the mayor anywhere he went; he knew everyone. He reminded me of a jazz musician from the past. Russell and I played our first gig ever in Paris with him, and we watched as he even became the jazz mayor of Paris. We saw him cultivate his outlook on the world, which was one of power, beauty, and equality." The title track – written by Cohen and Poole – provides Cohen's own contribution to the stride tradition, with the pianist engaging in a time-warping dialogue with his triomates, embodying the concept of the album in daring and spirited fashion. The classic Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen ballad "Second Time Around" makes a similar point from a very different perspective, tapping into a timeless emotion with a profound tenderness. "Dardanella" is something of a rite of passage for stride pianists; with a wide breadth of pianists throughout history having put their own twist on the oft-recorded tune. Cohen foregoes the usual solo approach to take it for a lilting spin with the trio all contributing to its sparkling vivacity. Cohen wrote "You Already Know," a tune quickly achieving newfound standard status, shortly after moving to New York City, and the quintet's version captures his wide-eyed response to the city's hectic pace. Duke Ellington wrote "Pitter Panther Patter" as a showcase for his Orchestra's mighty bassist, Jimmy Blanton, and Cohen uses it to similar ends, shining a well-deserved spotlight on Russell Hall's agile talents. The Rodgers and Hart standard "My Heart Stood Still" was a last-minute call as the session neared its end, allowing the trio to show off its breezy but scintillating camaraderie. The album ends with another Cohen original, "Little Angel," a tale of heartbreak brilliantly illustrated by Hill's gorgeous, hushed melodicism. Where Future Stride began with a piece revived from nearly a century ago, it ends with a tune that explicitly points to the future, with a supple R&B influence that colors much of Cohen's original music but has become one bold path for modern jazz to explore. The fact that a listener would be hard-pressed to point to one or the other of those poles as more "old-fashioned" or more "forward-looking" makes Cohen's point more eloquently than words ever could: if emotion is conveyed from musician to listener, that emotion lives in the eternal now and the sound is always past, present and future.   |
| Posted: 26 Oct 2020 12:40 PM PDT  Nicole Mitchell is an artist who made us sit up and say "wow" when we first saw her perform on the south side of Chicago 25 years ago – and she continues to make us express the same sort of surprise as the years go on – ever shifting her music, changing her focus, and continuing to get involved with really creative projects like this! The record is part of Mitchell's new sense of cosmic exploration – and features Nicole on flute and electronics, working alongside a lot more electronics from Moor Mother, who also delivers spoken passages on the album's all long tracks – which maybe make the whole thing come across like some Afro-Futurist blend of jazz, spoken word, and science fiction music – something that must have been amazing to see when it was performed live for this recording. Titles include "Up Out Of The Ugly", "Vultures Laughing", and "Prototype Eve". ~ Dusty Groove  While fans of Spontaneous Groovin' Combustion chomp at the bit for the perfectly named urban jazz fusion ensemble's debut album – due in February 2021 – group leader and saxophonist Warren Keller (a one-time NYC rocker) whips up a hypnotic, freewheeling blast of cool melodic funk on "Double Deuces," their gem of a fourth single. The track builds slowly from a soulful atmospheric simmer, alternating Keller's punchy sax lines and improvisations with Luigi Pistillo's crisp, crackling electric guitar and incorporating colorful flute and vibes harmonies as the tune shines brightly and inspires excitement!  There has been a long running tradition in soul music regarding the area of Philadelphia and its surrounding towns. The "Philly Soul" sound has never really gone away – certain vocalists or bands may come and go, but it seems like someone is always there to take their place and carry on the tradition. One of the organizations still carrying the torch has been one that has seemingly never faded away - the best way to describe it is not as an organization, but rather an institution, and that tireless entity is known as Society Hill Records - named after the historic neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia. Today, after all the years of great music that has emanated from the label, artists old and new carry on the great tradition with music that has never strayed far from the source. On the new compilation, The Society Hill Orchestra Revisit Philly Classics, that promise is glaringly evident. Led by the first family of Philly Soul, the Ingram Family band - that has played on so many Philly soul hits for decades, is once again at the helm of this new project. Together with the Society Hill Orchestra are artists/friends that are faithfully carrying on the tradition such as Benny Barksdale, Donnie Tatum, Mary Harris, Sugarbear, TRU, Baxter and Jimmy Lee, and the music sounds as fresh today as it did over 40 years ago. Producer Butch Ingram has picked some of the biggest hits of Philly soul music over the decades and once again proves the vitality of this genre of music will live on for decades to come.   |
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