Jazz in the New Millennium: Live and Well

By Rick Mitchell

This book offers the first comprehensive overview of jazz in the 21st Century, with nearly 60 conversational profiles of major jazz artists, from living masters such as Wayne Shorter to rising stars such as Esperanza Spalding. The artists discuss their lives, their music, and the state of the art form. In his 6000 word introduction, author Rick Mitchell concludes that despite economic struggles, jazz is continuing to thrive creatively 100 years after its birth. In addition to black and white photographs of each artist, the book includes approximately two dozen color photographs of the artists in performance at the DaCamera Jazz Series in Houston. The book is intended for musicians and fans, and should be of special interest to jazz studies programs at high schools, colleges and universities.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9780990514817

Book preview

Dharma Moon Press, Houston

Jazz In the New Millennium: Live and Well

Rick Mitchell

Copyright ©2014 by Rick Mitchell/Dharma Moon Press

All Rights Reserved

Color Photos by Pin Lim

Layout and cover design by Alisa Kline

This book was published by Dharma Moon Press in partnership with Da Camera of Houston. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without the expressed permission of the authors. This includes reprints, excerpts, photo- copying, recording or any future means of reproducing text.

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this book should be sent to: [e-mail]

Published in the United States by Dharma Moon Press, Houston, Texas

www.dharmamoon.net

www.rickmitchell.us

Print ISBN-978-0-9905148-0-0

eBook ISBN-978-0-9905148-1-7

Library of Congress 2014944909

This book is dedicated to the great jazz deejays

Ed Beach, who shared with me the treasure of his vast record collection,

and George Page, who allowed me to sit at his knee and watch him work.

Jazz in the New Millennium

Live & Well

Foreward

By Dr. Robert Morgan is

Introduction

By Rick Mitchell

Living Masters

Randy Weston: The Spirits of our Ancestors

Roy Haynes: Now Is the Time

Dave Holland: Points of View

Pat Martino: Remember

Andy Bey: Tune Up

Ray Barretto: Time Was

Kenny Barron: Give It Space

Charles Lloyd: Sunrise and Sunset

Dee Dee Bridgewater: Keeping Tradition

Chucho Valdes: Chucho’s Steps

The Cookers: Believe

Wayne Shorter: Without a Net

Prime Time Players

Danilo Perez: Motherland

Jane Ira Bloom: Chasing the Paint

Kevin Mahogany: Still Swingin’

Joshua Redman: Elastic

Jacky Terrasson: À Paris

Joe Lovano: Rebirth of the Cool

Kurt Elling: Man In the Air

Bobby Sanabria: Aché

Dave Douglas: Strange Liberation

Omar Sosa: Afreecanos

Regina Carter: Rhythms of the Heart

Greg Osby: New Directions

Cyrus Chestnut: Revelation

Roy Hargrove: Earfood

Kenny Garrett: Beyond the Wall

Dianne Reeves: When You Know

Stefon Harris: Black Action Figure

Russell Malone: Jazz Standards

Ravi Coltrane: In Flux

Christian McBride: Gettin’ To It

Cassandra Wilson: Southern Cooking

Don Byron: Love, Peace and Soul

Terri Lyne Carrington: Beyond Category

Rising Stars

Jason Moran: Modernistic

Luciana Souza: North and South

Lizz Wright: In the Spirit

Hiromi: Big Energy .

Pablo Aslan: Avantango .

Robert Glasper: The Circle .

Vijay Iyer: Blood Sutra .

The Bad Plus: Make the Grade .

Miguel Zenón: Awake .

Dafnis Prieto: Taking the Soul for a Walk .

Esperanza Spalding: The Audacity of Esperanza .

Ben Allison: Think Free .

Brandon Lee: 21st Century Blues .

Anat Cohen: Clarinetwork .

Tierney Sutton: Desire .

Lionel Loueke: African American Music

Tia Fuller: Decisive Steps 155

Ambrose Akinmusire: What’s New

Eric Harland: Oilin’ Up

Darcy James Argue: Workin’ and Steamin’...

Gerald Clayton: All in the Family

Manuel Valera: New Cuban Express

Playlists

Acknowledgments

Foreword

One of the side benefits of writing a thesis or dissertation is the discovery of alternate sources for interesting reading, one obvious example being the program notes for the New York Philharmonic. Perhaps less obvious – unless one lives in Houston – is the program notes for Da Camera, Houston’s leading presenter of distinguished chamber music and jazz since 1987.

It is well-known that Da Camera’s 20-year Artistic Director, Sarah Rothenberg, is nonpareil as a musician and visionary programmer. Less well-known is the other hat she wears as Da Camera’s General Director, with a microscopic eye attuned to all of the day-to-day matters, grand or mundane, encountered in an organization whose yearly budget is approaching $2 million. I would say the choice of program annotator is closer to grand than mundane. Sarah has been known to venture way beyond Houston to secure an expert annotator for a particular concert/composer/theme/etc.

In regard to jazz, however, she has had to venture no farther than her backyard to secure the superb services of Rick Mitchell.

I first encountered Rick when he served as jazz and popular music critic for The Houston Chronicle, 1989-1999. I enjoyed and appreciated his musical insights and flair for the written word, and even in the instances when I did not agree with his point of view, I understood where he was coming from and gained food for thought. In later years, we became more collegial when he cast his reporter’s eye on the burgeoning jazz activities at Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts, where I served as Director of Jazz Studies from 1976-1999. I was pleased to find Rick to be as interesting and engaging in person as he was in print.

I think it is not irrelevant that Rick also covered blues and country music for the Chronicle, in that this has given his serious jazz writing an informal accessibility that helps engross the casual listener as well as the connoisseur. I further think it not irrelevant that he served as Artistic Director for the Houston International Festival, entailing countless business and personal contacts with hundreds of musicians and dancers of all stripes from all over the world, unusual for a critic. Such encounters can’t help but add a layer to his writing of what I’ll call warmth, for lack of a better word. A drummer, Rick hears music like a musician, writes about it like a writer, and has an insider’s understanding of how the music business operates. In other words, he talks to musicians in their own language.

I have read, contemporaneously, every one of Rick’s Da Camera program essays – to call them notes is too casual – from Chapter 1, fall, 2000 (Randy Weston: The Spirits of Our Ancestors) to Chapter 57, spring, 2014 (Wayne Shorter: Without a Net). I look forward to leisurely re-reading them all, and suspect that I’ll especially enjoy re-reading the chapters on Jason Moran (Modernistic), Robert Glasper (The Circle), Brandon Lee (21st Century Blues), and Eric Harland (Oilin’ Up), distinguished HSPVA alumni all. They were Rising Stars when Rick first wrote about them, but they are now Prime Time Players and on their way to becoming Living Masters.

As the patriarch of the HSPVA jazz family, I am equally proud of alums André Hayward (trombone), Corey King (trombone), Mike Moreno (guitar), Reggie Quinerly (drums), Kendrick Scott (drums), and Walter Smith III (tenor saxophone), all of whom have graced the Da Camera jazz stage as supporting musicians. (Walter is pictured in this volume with Ambrose Akinmusire.) Kendrick Scott will be next to return home as headliner, joined by his band, Oracle (2014/2015 season), and I look forward to Kendrick’s inclusion in a future edition of this book.

Finally, in addition to the selected discographies at the end of each chapter, there are Rick’s excellent playlists, comprising his recommendations of one downloadable, post-2000 track for each of the 57 subjects in this volume, arranged on five CD-length playlists, with annotation. These can perhaps be seen as the first attempt at a 21st-century analogue to the late Martin Williams’ influential 1973 Smithsonian Collection of ClassicJazz, which helped solidify the 20th Century jazz canon. I know that Rick thought long and hard over each of these choices. By now, it must be obvious that I trust his brain and ear implicitly, and I promise that a reader’s appreciation for the music we call jazz will be enriched by embracing as many of these playlist tracks as possible.

On behalf of musicians, educators, and listeners de- voted to keeping the jazz tradition alive and well in the 21st Century, I would like to offer sincere thanks and congratulations to Rick Mitchell and Da Camera of Houston for the invaluable addition of Jazz in the New Millennium to the jazz scholarly canon.

Dr. Robert Morgan

Director of Jazz Studies Emeritus

High School for Performing and Visual Arts Houston, Texas Member

Advisory Board Da Camera of Houston

Introduction

By Rick Mitchell

In his definitive Encyclopedia Britannica entry on jazz, the estimable composer, conductor, historian and author Gunther Schuller concluded with a brief essay called Jazz at the End of the 20th Century.

Whether the past was inherently better than the present is questionable, wrote Schuller. "Something was gained and something was lost. The personal, instantly recognizable distinctiveness of the great jazz players of the past was replaced by an astonishing technical assurance and stylistic flexibility...

Whereas later players functioned well in any stylistic context – even beyond jazz in ethnic and classical realms – the earlier players, great as they were, could not reach out into other stylistic regions. The players of yore did not, could not, in most cases, go to music schools and were in essence, self-taught, having learned on the job and to a large extent from each other and from their seniors. At the top of his entry, Schuller offered this succinct definition of jazz; musical form, often improvisational, developed by African Americans and influenced by both European harmonic structure and African rhythms. It was developed partially from ragtime and blues and is often characterized by syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, often deliberate deviations of pitch, and the use of original timbres.

For the first half-century or so of its existence as a recognized art form, from roughly 1915 to 1975, jazz evolved at an amazingly rapid pace. Every decade, or half-decade, a new approach to playing the music would emerge from the smoke of the afterhours jam sessions in Harlem, or Kansas City, or Central Avenue in Los Angeles. These new styles were identifiable as belonging to the African American tradition described above by Schuller, yet they felt unmistakably hip and fresh and vibrant, and with a secret code that was designed to keep the squares off the stage.

And so rapid evolution came to define the tradition, to the point where one could argue that innovation is the real living tradition of jazz. New Orleans jazz and stride piano of the Twenties led to big band swing and boogie-woogie in the Thirties, which led to bebop and jump-blues in the Forties, which led to cool jazz and hard bop in the Fifties, which led to free jazz and fusion in the Sixties. And this is not to mention all the regional variations, sub-genres and cross-cultural expressions such European gypsy-swing, Afro-Cuban Latin jazz, Brazilian bossa nova, and the Third Stream mating of jazz improvisation and classical orchestration in which Gunther Schuller was an active participant in the mid-’50s.

During this 60-year Golden Age, it was possible for a jazz listener to see and hear many of the greatest living musicians of earlier generations continuing to make vital music simultaneously with those who had come after them. New Orleans’ innovators Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet shared space and time and sometimes festival stages with post-bop innovators Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Big band leaders Duke Ellington and Count Basie co-existed with free jazz radicals Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. Lyrical acoustic masters Stan Getz and Bill Evans overlapped with electric ensembles such as Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever.

At the risk of challenging Schuller’s authoritative account, there were cross-generational connections and musicians capable of playing in multiple styles. Duke Ellington recorded with John Coltrane. Miles Davis alone was instrumental to the development of four new trends in jazz – bebop, cool jazz, modal jazz, and jazz-rock fusion. And it was possible to experience the entire historical span of the music, from New Orleans polyphony, blues and boogie to swing, bebop and avant-garde free improvisation, in one composition by Charles Mingus, or one piano solo by Thelonious Monk.

Indeed, this enormous outpouring of creative expression is why jazz is often considered to be the 20th Century’s most vital modernist art music. It is, as others have observed, one of the tragic ironies of history that such a beautiful and life-affirming art form was made possible as a result of the unprecedented cultural miscegenation of European and African musical concepts that began during centuries of American slavery, which ended only a few decades prior to the birth of jazz.

And then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it alls lowed down. The initial wild, creative impulse of jazz-rock and funk-jazz fusion devolved into commercially minded streamlined compromises that eventually begat the radio marketing format known as smooth jazz. Avant-garde free improvisation became a historical style of its own – exhilarating at times, yet also inescapably identified with the revolutionary mood of the 1960s, at least among American audiences.

Meanwhile, the audience for the mainstream, straight- ahead tradition, encompassing swing, bebop and post-bop styles, was in decline, as young audiences increasingly looked to rock and rhythm and blues and then hip-hop for creative,cutting-edge cultural validation. The independent record labels that had provided opportunities for talented young musicians who had shown potential as sidemen to launch careers as recording artists were dying off, and so were the inner city afterhours clubs where the jazz elders could pass on the secret code to gifted young players.

It is not as if there were no jazz artists making definitive and forward-looking personal statements at the music’s cut- ting edge. Bands such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the World Saxophone Quartet (featuring David Murray, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill and Hamiett Blueitt), and Old and New Dreams (with Don Cherry, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell) were making music rooted in Sixties free-improvisation with a sophisticated historical awareness and skillful refinement that compared favorably with the best creative impulses of any era of jazz. Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, with the alto saxophonist standing in the vortex of two interlocking guitar, bass and drum trios, combined the radical liberation of free jazz with the funk-based groove and electronic textures of fusion.

Also, although often snubbed by critics and bebop purists, jazz-based artists such as the Crusaders, George Benson, Grover Washington, Jr. and David Sanborn were making music of quality that deserved to be called con- temporary jazz, which is how it came to be marketed, and which employed the innovative use of rhythms, song craft, instrumental polish and state-of-the-art studio techniques to crossover to pop and rhythm and blues audiences.

But from the historical perspective afforded to us now, these innovations can be seen more as individual extensions of previously existing forms – free jazz, soul jazz and fusion – rather than the sort of tectonic stylistic shifts that had occurred in the previous decades. The one clearly delineated stylistic trend to have emerged in the late 20th Century is so-called smooth jazz, which in terms of commercial form and content is closer to instrumental R&B than to the lineage of improvisational genius as represented by Armstrong and Ellington through Weather Report and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Perhaps a retrenchment was in order. In the 1980s, a generation of new traditionalists, spearheaded by Wynton and Branford Marsalis, arrived to reclaim the acoustic main- stream. The Marsalis brothers grew up in New Orleans in a musical family, they’d studied jazz and classical music in college, and they earned their stripes with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – the same hard-bop finishing school that had produced Freddie Hubbard and Wayne Shorter twenty years earlier – before heading out on their own.

The brothers, especially Wynton, held strong opinions about what did and did not constitute the jazz tradition, and what did not and what did constitute good music (the jazz tradition, as he understood it), and they were not shy about expressing them. Wynton was particularly pointed in his criticism of Miles Davis, who had launched a successful comeback in the early ’80s with a band that was unapologetically closer to instrumental funk than straight-ahead jazz the way Miles had played it in the Fifties and Sixties. (In 1986, I was at the Vancouver Jazz Festival in British Columbia when Wynton came out, apparently uninvited, to sit in with Miles. Everyone in the amphitheater could read Miles’ lips as he ordered Wynton to get off the stage, adding a familiar four-syllable term of endearment.)

By the early ’90s, it seemed like the jazz divisions of major record labels were signing any young jazz musician who looked good in a suit, not all of whom had paid their dues in the time-honored apprentice system as had Wynton and Branford, and most of whom lacked the immediately distinctive individual instrumental voices that were considered essential for earlier generations of jazz masters.

Older musicians, many of whom had been keeping the torch for straight-ahead jazz in near-obscurity for the previous two or three decades, were understandably resentful. And musicians, young and old, who did not fit or did not want to fit into a definition of real jazz that viewed with suspicion any music made post-1965 or which did not swing in the conventional meaning of the term still found themselves commercially marginalized, except for those who catered to the smooth jazz market, which might in some instances have had merit as instrumental pop or rhythm and blues but which was not considered jazz at all by critics and serious listeners.

The identity crisis – tradition vs. innovation, or more precisely, tradition as looking to the past for validation vs. tradition as looking to the future for validation – came to a head after Wynton Marsalis assumed the creative directorship of the Jazz at the Lincoln Center programming and began focusing on repertory tributes to heroes from the Golden Age of Jazz, while largely shunning any developments that had occurred after the early or mid-‘60s specifically, free jazz and fusion.

In 2000, Ken Burns’ PBS documentary mini-series Jazz was aired, leaning heavily on archival footage of Armstrong, Ellington, Parker and Gillespie and featuring plenty of commentary from Wynton Marsalis and critics Stanley Crouch and Gary Giddins. The critical response split largely along the same lines – tradition as tradition vs. innovation as tradition. Some musicians and critics also felt that the documentary unfairly downplayed the contributions white musicians had made to the art form.

Such was the uncertain cultural context from which Gunther Schuller pondered the continuing evolution of the art form at century’s end.

Where this leaves jazz and where jazz goes in the future indeed, whether jazz can endure as a distinct musical idiom or language – were unanswerable questions at the end of the 20th Century, he wrote in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Sagely, Schuller concluded his essay with a guardedly optimistic declaration; The one truism about jazz is that it remains distinguishable not by what is played but how it is played.

I began writing this book 15 years ago. I just didn’t know it until a few months ago.

In 2000, not long after I had left my post as the jazz and popular music critic for The Houston Chronicle to become a full-time teacher and a part-time programming consultant to the Houston International Festival, Da Camera of Houston asked if I would be interested in writing the program notes for the Da Camera Jazz Series. I had covered the series for the Chronicle from its inception in the early ’90s, when Da Camera artistic director Sergiu Luca – with advice and encouragement from the newly launched Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York – had the inspiration to try presenting jazz and classical chamber music on the same program.

That concept lasted only a couple of seasons – though long enough to include a memorable dinner party at which I shared a table with the late Houston arts patron and famously gracious Dominique de Menil and the famously contrary New York jazz writer and newspaper columnist Stanley Crouch. (They got along fine, by the way.

Fortunately, the jazz series survived on its own, providing jazz listeners in Houston with a lifeline to the best and most buzzworthy music coming out of New York. The series took on added significance with the closing of Rockefeller’s in the late 1990s, leaving the fourth largest city in America without a showcase club regularly presenting touring jazz acts – a sad state of affairs that still exists.

I agreed to write the notes, joining a team of annotators that included former Houston Post classical music critic Carl Cunningham and University of Houston professor and author Howard Pollack. And, with a handful of exceptions, since 2000 I have interviewed and profiled all of the jazz artists Da Camera has brought in to play the series, which usually consists of six concerts spread over the months between September and April. The pieces are typically about 1500 words in length, and consist of me engaging in conversations with the artists about their art and careers while also filling in their biographical details and sometimes quoting what other writers and critics have said about them.

It is a testament to the programming of artistic director Sarah Rothenberg and Da Camera that since I began doing the notes, the jazz series has presented many living legends and major players of the music carrying over from the 20th Century, as well as nearly all of the most significant new artists to have emerged since 2000.

I suppose Da Camera could be criticized for not taking more chances with the jazz avant-garde, although what is now meant by avant-garde is typically music played in a context of free improvisation that is 50 years old. On the other hand, there is no vapid smooth jazz to be found on Da Camera’s schedule. Even non-profit arts organizations have to sell tickets. But the Da Camera Jazz Series is cu- rated for the qualities that inform the best jazz of any era; innovation and integrity, timeliness and timelessness. If it were otherwise, I would not still be writing the notes.

These pieces were originally edited by Leo Boucher, Da Camera’s director of marketing and audience development. At some point not so long ago, Leo and I realized that while the pieces were written for a specific purpose – to give concert-goers and potential concert-goers an idea of what they might expect at a given show – when added together, the 60 or so profiles I’ve written for Da Camera constitute a remarkably comprehensive survey of what is taking place at the creative epicenter of mainstream jazz in the 21st Century.

And so the idea for this book was born: Jazz in the New Millennium: Live & Well. Our hope is that it will be of use to readers – students, teachers, musicians and the listeners who support the music – who wish to know more about jazz; where it came from, where it is going, and most importantly, where it is now 100 years after its birth. As of this writing, there is no other book providing such a broad overview of the current state of the art form, and with so many of our most important living musicians contributing to the discussion.

If the book also helps to raise national awareness of the Da Camera Jazz Series, so much the better. As mentioned above, the series has been a lifeline for jazz fans in Houston, who otherwise might have to travel to New York (or Tokyo or Paris) to see and hear many of these artists. It is also a lifeline for the artists, who otherwise would have no place to play in one of the largest cities in America. While jazz was born and raised in bars and nightclubs, and that remains the environment in which it is most often encountered (and, I might add, in which I personally most enjoy encountering it), by presenting the music in concert halls designed for chamber music, Da Camera as a non-profit fine arts organization is sending a subtle message that this music is worthy of respect, and funding, equal to that long accorded European art music.

Jason Moran, a Houston native who in 2011 replaced the late Dr. Billy Taylor as only the second Artistic Advisor for Jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., began attending Da Camera jazz concerts in the Nineties while a student at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. I know what the concerts meant when I was in high school, going to see Cedar Walton and Jimmy Heath, says Moran. I never forgot that.

The book is organized into three sections: Living Masters, Prime Time Players, and Rising Stars.The chapter-length profiles have been assigned to these sections somewhat arbitrarily. For example, Jason Moran is most definitely a prime-time player at this point in his career, and he is on his way to becoming a living master. But at the time I interviewed him in 2002, he was a rising star, and so that is where you will read about him here. (Moran returns to the Da Camera Jazz Series in 2015 for the world premiere of The Rauschenberg Project, commissioned by Da Camera.) In the case of artists I have interviewed more than once – I think Dee Dee Bridgewater holds the record for most appearances in the Da Camera Jazz Series with three – I used the most recent of the profiles.

As a rule, artists whose careers were well-established by the 1960s and Seventies are considered Living Masters. Although there are some borderline cases, those artists who established themselves as bandleaders and recording artists during the 1980s and Nineties are considered Prime Time Players. Artists who have come into their own post-2000 are considered Rising Stars, although several, including Moran and fellow Houstonians Robert Glasper and Eric Harland, are now clearly at the forefront of the music.

As of this writing, all but one of the artists profiled here – including such venerable elders as Randy Weston and Roy Haynes – are still alive and still playing. The exception is the great conguero Ray Barretto, who died of a heart attack shortly after I spoke with him in 2006. As a result, this interview, the last he gave to anyone, never has appeared in print until now.

In a few cases, I have made minor revisions to correct inaccuracies or typos that slipped through the first time. In a few more cases, I have added editor’s notes when someone mentioned in the conversation – usually an important teacher or influence – has died or when the artist being interviewed has undergone a career change since the interview that needs to be acknowledged.

For the most part, however, I have left the pieces as I wrote them, and as such, they comprise a running commentary on the changes in the music business over the last 15 years as well as a running commentary on the state of the art form we call jazz in the 21st century. I also added a selected discography for each artist. These are not intended to be complete discographies – you can get that from Wikipedia. These are recordings from my own collection – in many cases, longtime favorites – that I recommend as representing definitive artistic statements from each of these artists. To narrow down the complete recordings of Randy Weston, or Wayne Shorter, or Joe Lovano, or Dianne Reeves, or Chucho Valdes, to four or five favorites was not easy. But I will say it was both stimulating and relaxing to go back and listen to albums and CDs that have been in my collection for decades to be sure my memory was not playing tricks on me, and to call that listening work was one of the supreme pleasures of finishing this book

There are, as you may have already noticed, some no- table omissions in the survey. Among Living Masters, Chick Corea, Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny are not to be found, though Corea, who is booked for the 2014/2015 Da Camera jazz season, could be added to the next edition of this book, if there is one. There are a few other Living Masters who have played the Da Camera Jazz Series in the last 15 years, among them McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock, that for whatever reason I was unable to speak with at the time and so we did the notes without an interview.

Among Prime-Time Players, no one here is named Marsalis. That also could change in the next edition of this book, however, as Branford Marsalis is booked for the coming season. Among others whose careers have carried over from the late 20th Century into the new millennium who stand out by their absence, I must acknowledge pianist Brad Mehldau and guitarist Bill Frisell. Without going into details, I will only say that if these players have not appeared in the Da