List: Jazz and the Single Man

Floating around social networks this week was an essay by Jason Moran listing five essential jazz albums (recorded by living musicians - so you could actually see them live) every man should own. Why should he own these albums? To impress women,* of course. Here is Moran's list. I think it's a good start, but it veers into jazz boyfriend territory (Ornette? Free Jazz? I don't know many people of either sex who can handle Ornette, bless their simple hearts and minds). So in the interest of choice, here's my list of 5 jazz albums every single man should own.


Robert Glasper, Double Booked. Moran and I agree on this one. Glasper's deftly amalgamated jazz, with flourishes of hip hop, fusion, funk, and postbop, can hook anyone who claims ignorance on modern jazz. I've been touting this album to my friends for the past two years, and it connects with just about everyone. Plus, Glasper tours with Maxwell, a spoonful of sugar to hide preconceived notions about jazz if ever there was one.

Greg Osby, Jason Moran, et al, New Directions. Sadly out of print, but there are copies to be had on Amazon. Not a bad choice to play for someone who is at least a little familiar with jazz, since they would likely recognize a few of the reworked classics from the Blue Note era on this disc. I highly recommend the Moran-Stefon Harris duet on Sam Rivers' Beatrice.

Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus. Moran picks a great Wayne Shorter album, but I was always more of a Sonny guy myself, and if a lady can't dig Newk, then she is most definitely not worth your time.

Paul Motian, Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell, Time And Time Again. For quiet moments, you can't beat the master of subtle intensity. Frisell's atmospheric guitarisms set the mood for Lovano's gruff tenderness. This trio to me embodies a particular strain of masculinity that is equal parts vulnerable and assertive.And no other group better demonstrates the sublime intensity of free improvisation, despite playing such pretty music.

Medeski Scofield Martin & Wood, Out Louder. Sometimes you have to dance. This should do the trick.

*Would a list of jazz albums for women to impress men look a lot different? What about jazz for gay men or lesbians? Obviously the answer is yes, but I'm pleading ignorance here.

Sonny and Ornette

Lest you forget that the modern world is a wonderful place, here is a video from Friday night's Sonny Rollins birthday extravaganza with special guest Ornette Coleman. Roy Haynes is on drums, Christian McBride is on bass. Read Jason Crane's review of the evening here.

Happy Birthday Sonny

Friday Album Cover: Rugged Individualism

Sonny Rollins
Newk's Time


--

Christian Scott
Anthem

December Links

It's the holidays again. You may want to buy some books and music for your friends. On to the links...

• Patrick Jarenwattananon reflects on seeing Sonny Rollins for the first time. Also at A Blog Supreme, Felix Contreras offers a suggestion for the White House's hold music.
  
• Dave Brubeck was awarded with the Kennedy Center Honors earlier this month in Washington. President Obama recounted how his first experience with jazz came when he attended a Brubeck concert in Hawaii as a ten-year-old in 1971. Peter Hum has a recap, and you can watch a video of Obama's remarks here.
• Chris Kelsey offers some words of wisdom on buying a new saxophone.
• Possibly coming soon: a Fela Kuti biopic.
  
• Tim McCarver: More than a subpar baseball analyst. You can buy his album here, it's a perfect gift for the baseball fan who kind of annoys you.
• Doug Ramsey was interviewed on NPR to discuss the musical contributions of Vince Guaraldi to the famous A Charlie Brown Christmas. I'm not a huge fan of Christmas music, but I will always make an exception for Guaraldi's soundtrack. Christmas Time Is Here is a great ballad, and Skating is one of my all-time favorite melodies. Guaraldi's renditions of Greensleeves and O Tannenbaum are also sublime.

November Links

• Via One Working Musician, Nas mashed up with the Jason Parker Quintet. Be sure to also check out Jason's 100 CDs Project. I'll be reviewing his new album in this space soon.
• Also to be reviewed soon, Robin Kelley's exhaustive new Thelonious Monk biography. I would review it sooner, but I'm taking my time with the book and enjoying it. In the meantime, Kelley was a guest on NPR's On Point last month.
• WTF: Louis Armstrong Sings Pharoah Sanders, via D:O. Also at D:O this week, a special guest post from Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus, on Paul Bley.
• Someone discovers jazz from an unlikely source. Whatever it takes, right?
• On The Jazz Session, Jason Crane asks Sonny Rollins if jazz is still relevant. Sonny answers the question better than I could ever hope to.
• Chris Albertson recounts a lunch interview with Miles Davis in 1971.
• More 1971 Miles:

Happy Birthday Sonny

Friday Album Cover: Prestige Records

Blue Note Records has often been the subject of Friday Album Covers, but Blue Note was not the only label creating beautiful album art during the 1950s and 1960s. Below are two of my favorite covers from Prestige Records, which produced plenty of great hard bop albums by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, and Thelonious Monk, among many others.

Sonny Rollins
Saxophone Colossus

Saxophone Colossus very much resembles the Blue Note Special, except the image of Rollins looks more like a silhouette than a tinted black-and-white photo.

Miles Davis
Walkin'

Featuring a crisp image of a stoplight with clean typography, Walkin' is distinctive much in the same way so many Blue Note albums were.

Review: Compass

Joshua Redman
Compass

In 2007, when he released Back East, Joshua Redman automatically drew comparisons to Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman for his use of a pianoless rhythm section. Daunting as these comparisons may be, he was nonetheless hailed for making "the most agile and personal record of his career," in the words of Ben Ratliff. Having found artistic success in this format, Redman returns to the pianoless trio for his latest album, Compass. Leaving out the piano adds spontenaity to his music, as he told NPR in 2007:

It's a tremendously liberating format, because there's no piano, no dedicated melodic instrument, it gives me and the other musicians so much room to experiment and explore, both melodically and harmonically. But with that freedom comes an awful lot of responsibility.

On Compass, Redman ups the ante by doubling the bass and drums on some of the tracks, platooning Larry Grenadier and Rueben Rodgers on bass and Gregory Hutchinson and Brian Blade on drums. As with Back East, Redman's goal is to free up his own playing, eliciting spontaneous explorations of harmony and melody. On many tunes, Redman adroitly toes the line between outside and inside playing, stepping just outside the chord changes long enough to make the listener notice, but returning to the changes in enough time to keep the tune's melody within sight.

As with many current saxophone records, Compass can at times sound a bit too much like some of its influences. "Hitchhiker's Guide" sounds suspiciously like the opening of Sonny Rollins' Freedom Suite. "Identity Thief" sounds like the kind of tune Ornette Coleman would have written in the early 1960s. This would be a problem if Redman did not leave his personal stamp on the tunes, but by the end of each tune, you are left with no doubt who is on saxophone.

A highlight of the album is "Insomnomaniac," a melody featuring repeated, clipped phrases played over a manic groove. It is an apt title, as the melody features a pastiche of thoughts and phrases familiar to anyone who has lied awake at night for hours at a time. The tune shifts between multiple tempos, and Redman's trio constantly refers to the main melody, like someone with a troubling thought on his mind. He brings a heightened sense of drama to his solo which serves the tune well.

"Identity Theif" also struck my interest. Redman utilizes both bassists and both drummers on this tune, which sounds practically harmolodic to my ears. Grenadier and Rogers play off of each other nicely, as do Blade and Hutchinson. In fact, if you were to listen to this tune on a monaural sound system, you might not be able to tell that there are four rhythm players on the track due to the cohesiveness of the group.

However enjoyable these tracks are, though, I cannot escape the feeling that something was lost in the process of recording the album. This weekend, I saw Terence Blanchard play a guest-artist concert with the University of Virginia jazz ensemble, and the experience reminded me how little of an impression his studio albums left on me compared to seeing him live. There is some quality to his studio work that prevents his albums from leaving much of an impression on me. Compass shares this trait, unfortunately. I can listen to it and enjoy it, but the album does not captivate me. This is not intended as a criticism of Redman. Indeed, maybe the problem is me. Nonetheless, when I listen to Compass, I can't help but think that I don't enjoy the album as much as I should. Such are the idiosyncracies of life sometimes...


Track Listing: Uncharted; Faraway; Identity Thief; Just Like You; Hitchhiker's Guide; Ghost; Insomnomaniac; Moonlight; Un Peu Fou; March; Round Reuben; Little Ditty; Through the Valley
Personnel: Joshua Redman, saxophone; Larry Grenadier, Reuben Rogers, bass; Gregory Hutchinson, Brian Blade, drums

List: 1959: Before and After

Being that 1959 saw the release of so many landmark jazz albums (Kind of Blue, Time Out, Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come, etc.), plenty of writers will be profiling the golden jubilees of all these albums throughout the year. But focusing on 1959 misses the point of that era. While 1959 was certainly a great year for jazz, the years surrounding 1959 all created their fair share of classics canonized in The Jazz Tradition. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s were a veritable golden age for jazz, when young lions like Coltrane and Coleman were reshaping the music while older stars like Ellington and Hawkins were still thriving, lets not limit ourselves to remembering 1959 as a watershed moment. Below are some great albums from 1958 and 1960 which are sometimes overshadowed by the weight of 1959.

A quick note: I am classifying these albums by the date they were recorded. Some were released the year after they were recorded, but the way things were changing in the jazz world at this time, a musician could sound much different over the space of a year (such is the case especially with John Coltrane).

1958:

1. Bill Evans, Everybody Digs Bill Evans. Featuring an interesting album cover, Everybody Digs Bill Evans effectively introduced Evans to the jazz world just as he was to join Miles Davis' quintet at the piano chair.
   
2. Cannonball Adderley, Somethin' Else. One of the classic hard bop records, Cannonball was joined by a veritable all-star band featuring Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Hank Jones, and Sam Jones. Adderley firmly established his reputation as a prominent figure in jazz with this record.
   
3. Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!. One of the few albums in which Coleman used a piano player (Paul Bley in this case), Something Else introduced the world to Coleman before his infamous residency at New York's The Five Spot in 1959.
   
4. Miles Davis, Porgy and Bess and Milestones. Porgy and Bess reinforced Miles' image as the biggest star in jazz, selling countless copies, while Milestones set the stage for 1959's Kind of Blue.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, Moanin'. The title track was, in my estimation, the quintessential hard bop tune, the definitive example of the style I play when trying to explain what hard bop was.
   
6. John Coltrane, Blue Train. Hard to believe Blue Note Records only got Coltrane in the studio as a leader once in his life.
   
7. Sonny Rollins, Freedom Suite. Some say this is Rollins' best studio album. Hard to argue against that, but the album is also important for the brief liner notes written by Rollins which draw light to the status of African Americans in the land of the free.
   

1960:

1. Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain. Though plenty of people will tell you that this is not really a jazz record, it nonetheless introduced jazz to a lot of people over the past five decades. I remember when I bought this album eight years at a music store in Toronto. When I paid for it, the cashier, a guy in a Slayer t-shirt with multiple piercings, simply said to me, "great album." This was not the kind of person you'd expect to make that comment.
   
2. John Coltrane, My Favorite Things and Olé Coltrane. While My Favorite Things propelled Coltrane into stardom, Olé Coltrane is an underrated album in the Coltrane canon, featuring a young Freddie Hubbard in addition to the dueling basses of Reggie Workman and Art Davis.
3. Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz. In which Ornette ups the ante and firmly opens Pandora's Box, cementing the enfant terrible reputation he began to earn with Something Else.
   
4. Charles Mingus, Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus. The opening track, "Folk Forms No. 1," perfectly fuses the blues with improvised contrapuntal composition, while "Original Faubus Fables" unleashes Mingus' contempt for a segregationist Arkansas Govern0r Orval Faubus.
   
5. Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers, A Night in Tunisia and Roots & Herbs. Featuring one of the best editions of the Messengers (Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Jymie Merritt, and Bobby Timmons), Blakey recorded a lot of albums in 1960. These two are my favorites of the bunch.
   
6. Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring a photo of black college students at a sit-in, Roach's Freedom Now Suite presented a musical history of African Americans, featuring the vocals of Abbey Lincoln.
   
7. Wes Montgomery, The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery. Montgomery lays down some choice hard bop and shows all who care to listen that he is the guitar boss of the jazz community. His version of Airegin is my favorite recording of the Sonny Rollins standard.

UPDATE 1: The lists have already begun. Here's one from acompleteunknown at The Good, The Bad, and The Unknown. They've made some good choices, though I would replace Mingus' Ah Um with Blues and Roots, and would not have left off Giant Steps...

UPDATE 2: Kevin Kniestedt offers his thoughts on 1959 at Groove Notes.

Out of Office

I'm off to Miami for Thanksgiving weekend. Enjoy your holiday, here are some links...

• Jazz Lives posted a copy of a letter Sonny Rollins sent to Coleman Hawkins in 1962.
• On Rifftides, Doug Ramsey unearthed a great YouTube clip of the Bill Evans Trio in a 1966 Swedish television program. Bill speaks about the groups approach to improvisation, and the trio follows with a wonderful performance of "Emily."
• The New Yorker briefly covers a lecture on cell biology, evolution, and cancer by Harold Varmus, which is accompanied by a jazz quintet led by his son Jacob Varmus. Perhaps next time he could arrange for the Giant Steps robot to open...
• Over on Do The Math, The Bad Plus posted some choice photos from the Life Magazine collection newly hosted on Google. Here's one of my favorites after browsing the collection briefly: Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie on stage at the 1958 Monterey Jazz Festival.

• NPR's All Songs Considered takes a look at the Beatles' White Album, which was released forty years ago this week. Host Bob Boilen interviews Beatles scholar Bruce Spizer, and shares some wonderful demos of songs from the album recorded in May of 1968 at George Harrison's house. Though they were not a jazz group, they were certainly influenced by jazz and left a sizable influence on jazz (would there have been fusion without the Beatles? Probably, but it would have been different, I think).
• Again at Rifftides, here's a retelling of Paul Desmond's final birthday in 1976, which fell on Thanksgiving. He spent it with Jim Hall at Hall's daughter's apartment in New York City. After dinner, the two went to see Thelonious Monk at the Village Vanguard, later hanging out with Monk in the Vanguard's kitchen. I am a sucker for jazz-legends-as-regular-dudes stories like this, they make Desmond and Hall seem like Jerry and George meeting Kramer at the coffee shop...
  
• Sharing a birthday with Desmond on Tuesday was Willie "The Lion" Smith (1897-1973). Here he is in Germany in 1966:

Sonny and Barack

With his election to the Presidency of the United States, Barack Obama is in some ways our first jazz president. Apart from the obvious metaphorical links between Obama and jazz (his cultural hybridity being foremost among them), Obama's intellectual and rhetorical style in some ways are reminiscent of the improvisational style of one of the few remaining old lions of jazz, Sonny Rollins. He may not be able to play a blues like Bill Clinton, but Obama's prose and oratory both bring to my mind the searching, spontaneous style often associated with Rollins.

In Sunday's New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote of Obama,

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites.

Similarly, when discussing a series of sample answers to law exams Obama gave as a law professor at the University of Chicago Slate's Emily Bazelon observed,

Obama's exam answers offer complex ruminations on some of the most contentious social and legal questions out there.

Both on the stump and in his writings, Obama offers a thoughtfully intellectual style which attempts to synthesize competing and contradictory thoughts into a coherent whole. Instead of glossing over evidence that works against him, Obama would often tackle these subjects head-on. His speech on race from earlier this spring is a prime example. While addressing his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama tackles the complexities of race in a country where he can be considered "too black" by some and "not black enough" by others. In the speech, he notably drew similarities between his own white grandmother and Wright by commenting on acts of each that could easily be construed as racist:

I can no more disown [Wright] than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

This statement is no garden-variety observation on race. Obama acknowledges the complexity of America's tangled racial past and reveals a thought process which allowed him to view the actions of others through multiple points of view before giving his opinion on those actions.

Obama's ease with which he weaves common themes between seemingly disparate subjects resembles the manner in which Sonny Rollins could fuse varied improvisational themes within a common thematic framework. Additionally, Obama's interrogatory thought process is mirrored in Rollins' improvisational method of parsing a phrase until he has exhausted its musical potential. The opening cadenza in the video below is a great example of Rollins' improvisational style. Listen to Sonny play with his phrases, modulating into different modes and segueing seamlessly between phrases.

Similarly, the improvisational style of Sonny Rollins combines the quintessence of spontaneity with an encyclopedic background knowledge. Rollins is noted for inserting surprising quotes into his solos in a way which suits the mood of the music at that specific moment without feeling forced. Here, too he shares this ability with Obama, who could stop on a dime to deliver an extemporaneous remark or sly observation. When discussing Dick Cheney's endorsement of John McCain last week, Obama paused as it began to rain at an outdoor rally in Ohio, "You notice what happened when I started talking about Dick Cheney. But a new day is dawning. Sunshine is on the way." This, to me is the rhetorical equivalent of one of my favorite moments of the Ken Burns jazz documentary, when a musician (I forget who) recounts a Sonny Rollins performance on the night before Easter. Well into a set, Sonny sees out of the corner of his eye that the clock has struck midnight, so he works in a quote from "Your Easter Bonnet." Obama shares with Rollins the improvisational wit which makes jazz the "sound of surprise."

I should be careful not to overstate these similarities. Indeed, I could simply be more likely to make this comparison between an intellectual politician and an intellectual musician simply because President-elect Obama's predecessor is singularly infamous for his anti-intellectualism. However, I like to think that these sensibilities that Obama shares with Rollins are indicative of a thoughtful approach to statesmanship and governance that hopefully will pay dividends in the years to come.

Friday Album Cover: Way Out West

Sonny Rollins

Way Out West

This week's album cover is Sonny Rollins' Way Out West, featuring Sonny as a western gunslinger. Sonny included some western-themed tunes like "I'm an Old Cowhand" and his own original, "Way Out West" on the album. For the cover, photographer William Claxton completed the motif, with Sonny wielding his tenor like a six-shooter, sure of his place as the top tenor saxophonist in jazz when the album was released in 1957.