JazzTimes April 2022

– Exclusive Content For our latest JazzTimes 10 list, Colin Fleming selects 10 gems from the catalog of New Orleans jazz pioneer Jelly Roll Morton. Plus photo galleries, album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. – JT News The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF) has announced the launch of its Creative Inflections program, a new initiative to provide grants to jazz artists for innovative collaborations with performing-arts presenting organizations. Its inaugural class of five organizations and seven artists—including Wayne Shorter, Esperanza Spalding, Cécile McLorin Salvant, Samora Pinderhughes, and Jen Shyu (pictured)—have received grants of up to $200,000 to develop multidisciplinary works that focus on social-justice themes. – Audio & Video Grammy-nominated pianist, composer, arranger, and producer David Benoit works with a big band—featuring trumpeter Wayne Bergeron and saxophonists Eric Marienthal and Gordon Goodwin—on his…

I was all ready to spend the duration of this column politely crowing. I had good reason. In December 2021, jazztimes.com reached an unprecedented peak of readership, with more than 1.1 million page views. This was an achievement worth celebrating, and it offered an excellent opportunity to thank our staff, management, contributors, and readers; proudly review the improvements we’ve made to our online presence over the past three years or so; and note with pleasure that there’s more to come. And then some other news came down the line, news that took this positive development and put it in perspective— “too much fucking perspective,” as Spinal Tap’s David St. Hubbins once famously said in front of Elvis’ grave. The news was that Don Heckman, an internationally respected critic (and a gifted…

Black, Brown and Beige, the jewel of Duke Ellington’s extended jazz compositions, “is probably less heard [than] any musical work of comparable reputation,” wrote critic Gary Giddins in his 1977 treatise “In Search of Black, Brown and Beige.” But, he added, it wouldn’t realize its potential “until a conductor with as intransigent a vision as Ellington’s is commissioned to prepare [it] for performance.… So far, no one from the jazz or symphonic worlds has measured up.” Those words represented a challenge for composer/arranger Randall Keith Horton, who had worked in 1973-74 as Ellington’s composing and conducting assistant (and later orchestrated and conducted his sacred music at the behest of Ellington’s sister Ruth). A colleague read Giddins’ article to Horton over the phone. “He said, ‘Randall, you should write the version of…

The bass guitar and the symphony orchestra may strike some as strange bedfellows. But it’s not like they’ve never met before. Every now and again, they connect over a concerto on stages typically home to classical musicians. John Patitucci recorded such a piece written for him by Jeff Beal, while Finland’s Lauri Porra, great-grandson of composer Jean Sibelius, composed and played a bass-guitar concerto, and Ramon Vazquez performed one by Alfonso Fuentes, to name just a few examples of a field that’s still small, if growing. “People don’t expect to have bass players get together and sound like music and not just like a bunch of elephants.” Now Victor Wooten has entered the fray with La Leccion Tres (“Lesson Three”). The Nashville-based bass virtuoso, best known for his work with Béla Fleck…

Those who are only familiar with bassist Martin Wind’s jazz credentials—both as a leader and as a first-call sideman for Bill Mays, Dena DeRose, Ken Peplowski, Ann Hampton Callaway, and numerous other A-listers—may be surprised to hear him showcase Baroque bona fides on the bookends of his latest release: two different performances of J.S. Bach’s “Air.” But a broad embrace of classical music is of a piece with his background. A onetime student of Wolfgang Güttler, former bassist with the Berlin Philharmonic, Wind played under legends like Gidon Kremer and Mstislav Rostropovich; built his sterling technique by approaching orchestral opportunities and jazz work with equal measures of enthusiasm; and later used his pen to marry both passions, bowing to Bill Evans with a quartet and the Orchestra Filarmonica Marchigiana on…

Growing up in Brazil, Gui Duvignau says that he couldn’t help but be influenced by the music of guitarist/composer Baden Powell. “He’s not that well-known here [in the States], but in Brazil you can’t really avoid him—in a good way!” Following two albums of original music, however, a tribute to Powell wasn’t necessarily the obvious next step for Duvignau. Born in France to a self-described “family of travelers,” the bassist inherited a restless spirit that led him to study jazz at Berklee and make temporary homes in Portugal and Paris before ending up (for now, at least) in Brooklyn. And so, although Baden (Sunnyside), Duvignau’s latest album, is in one sense a homecoming, it’s also a further evolution of the harmonically rich, searching approach that made last year’s 3, 5, 8…