JazzTimes March 2021

Exclusive Content What will the Biden administration do to protect the performing arts? Guitarist David Stern, a member of AFM Local 802 and the Music Workers Alliance, makes strong suggestions and provides deep historical context in a thoughtful, timely essay. Also, Emily Olcott, a longtime server at the Jazz Standard in New York, offers her memories of the much-loved club. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT Blog New York’s Winter Jazzfest, the first major jazz event of the calendar year, is continuing its 17-year tradition. It will not, however, be presented in person in its 2021 edition, and its schedule this year will extend from January into March. At press time, one concert and six talks/panel discussions had been announced, with more on the way. For further information, please…

At a press conference five hours after the World Trade Center’s twin towers fell on September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor of New York City, said something that no one who was listening will ever forget: “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.” In January 2021, as I write this column, more Americans are dying every day than perished at the southern tip of Manhattan on that horrible morning nearly two decades ago. Every day is more than any of us can bear. In the spring of 2020, the jazz community suffered blow after devastating blow in the COVID-19 pandemic. The March 31 passing of Wallace Roney, who is beautifully memorialized in this issue by Ashley Kahn, now strikes me as the…

When Ellis Marsalis and his son Jason went into a New Orleans studio in mid-February 2020 to make a duo album for Newvelle Records, they had no inkling that it would be the elder man’s final recording. “In fact,” says the younger Marsalis, “we were talking about going back to record some more things, put some more tunes down, and we were looking forward to doing it.”” Alas, it was not to be. Ellis Marsalis Jr., the patriarch of jazz’s most famous family, passed away of complications from COVID-19 on April 1 at the age of 85. For All We Know, the session that the pianist and his vibraphonist son had made six weeks earlier, stands as his last musical testament. “I miss him a lot,” says Jason, 43, who still lives…

Before his passing in September 2015, saxophonist/composer Phil Woods collaborated with regular JT contributor Ted Panken on a memoir, which was recently published by Cymbal Press as Life in E Flat: The Autobiography of Phil Woods. The following exclusive excerpt takes us to the spring of 1968, when Woods, his wife Chan (Charlie Parker’s widow), and their family decided to make an escape from America—but found that America had, in a sense, followed them across the Atlantic. The jazz scene was drying up for me. I started thinking seriously about a major move to Europe. I’d had enough of life in E-flat in the United States. Chan was ready to leave too—she hated America with a vitriolic passion. With the assistance of Bobby Colomby, who had managed Monk’s 1967 big-band tour, I…

If nothing other than John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme had been recorded there, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.’s Van Gelder Studio would still indisputably qualify as a jazz shrine. But that cornerstone album was only one of thousands cut within the spacious room favored by everyone from Miles Davis to Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, Wes Montgomery, McCoy Tyner, and too many others to count. The studio, designed by David Henken—an acolyte of Frank Lloyd Wright—and famous for its wooden beams, brick tiles, and 39-foot ceiling, was opened by the celebrated audio engineer Rudy Van Gelder in 1959. From then until Van Gelder’s death in 2016 at age 91, barely a week went by when jazz wasn’t being created in the renowned studio, set within an acre of wooded land. In his will, Van Gelder…

There are things that Great Britain’s Nubiyan Twist is, and there are things that the Leeds-born nonet-plus decidedly isn’t, according to its founder, co-composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Tom Excell. What Nubiyan Twist isn’t is stodgy, boring, or simple. It also isn’t strictly jazz. Together for 10 years at the top of 2021, and on the cusp of releasing its most vocal-oriented album, Freedom Fables (Strut), this large-scale, cinematic, multi-genre outfit is, now, “absolutely everything I wanted it to be when I started studying music production at Leeds College [of Music]—from what I heard in my dad’s jazz album collection to Pan-African, trance, hip-hop, highlife, electronica, and dub.” Calibrate such genre-jumping with Excell’s childhood classical guitar studies, and you could justifiably say that his creative output was destined to be restless and vibrantly…