JazzTimes June 2021

– Exclusive Content Michael J. West explores the best of New Orleans jazz in our latest JazzTimes 10, with nods to (among others) Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and some guy named Louis. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. – JT News The Detroit Jazz Festival has announced its 2021 lineup, which will include this year’s artist in residence, Dee De Bridgewater, as well as Herbie Hancock, Kenny Barron, Abdullah Ibrahim, Anat Cohen, Sean Jones, Kenny Garrett, and Gregory Porter. The festival will decide by July whether the 2021 edition will be virtual or in person. – Audio & Video The second season of Speakin’ My Piece, our weekly conversation series hosted by Dekel Bor, is now underway. Watch interviews with Jack DeJohnette, Peter Bernstein, Ben Wendel, Jeremy…

Listen In For more than three decades—ever since Leonard Feather started writing them for us in 1989—our Before & After listening-session articles have been a firm favorite of JazzTimes readers. Sometimes the sessions were conducted in front of audiences on festival stages or in college lecture halls. More often they were one on one in a room, journalist to musician (or musician to other musician). But one thing was consistent: They always happened in person. Listening to recorded music just doesn’t work as well over the phone; too many nuances get lost. Then along came the coronavirus. All of a sudden it was no longer advisable to put two strangers together in a room for an extended period of time, and we were forced to contemplate the likely demise of Before &…

In the late 1960s, the San Francisco sound was all the rage. Local rock bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Sly and the Family Stone, Santana, and Big Brother & the Holding Company (with Janis Joplin) were already famous or about to be. But one new band, Tower of Power, found themselves on the outside looking in. For one thing, they were from Oakland; although located directly across the bay from San Francisco, it might as well have been a suburb of Chattanooga as far as the rock audience was concerned. And second, Tower of Power didn’t play psychedelic rock—from the start, they were all about soul and funk. “It was pointed out to us early in our career that we were not a San Francisco band,” says Tower of…

Our Highway, the new album by New York-based quintet Cowboys & Frenchmen, invites listeners to recall busier days. The 43-minute suite harks back a couple years to a time when a jazz quintet was safe to pile into a minivan and hit the road, soaking up the sights around the U.S. as they traveled between gigs. Cowboys & Frenchmen took three such trips over as many years, traveling through the Northeast, West Coast, and Southeast. The somewhat frantic pace of their do-it-yourself tours comes across in both the suite itself and the full-length video that the band assembled to complement it, but they also feel upbeat and reflective at times. The music, recorded live in 2019 at Manhattan’s SubCulture, plays continuously throughout the video. The screen frequently splits or cuts directly…

If the red lily signifies passion, then the melodic acuity and rhythmic dexterity displayed by the James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet seem to have been collected under the proper auspices. For Jesup Wagon, the ensemble’s first recording, Lewis aimed at detailing the nuances of American renaissance man George Washington Carver’s life. And he did. But in the process, the bandleader also revealed portions of his own inner life. “The story of a lotus or lily, just coming up from the mud, the muck and mire to bloom on the surface—it was my whole thought process and psychologically where I think I am as an artist. I’m from Buffalo, and we’re the underdog,” the saxophonist said in March over Zoom from his home in New York City. Jesup Wagon follows Lewis’ 2020…

Nobody can do this but you.” Those were the words of encouragement received by Jacques Schwarz-Bart when he first brought his compositions mixing jazz and Gwoka music to a Berklee professor in the early ’90s. The instructor meant to light a fire under the saxophonist, but he was also merely stating the facts. Born and raised in Guadeloupe, Schwarz-Bart became interested in his country’s native music at a young age, swept up by the drum-and-voice conversations it offered. And in a career that has seen him move between jazz with Jean Michel-Pilc and Ari Hoenig and neo-soul with Erykah Badu and D’Angelo, Schwarz-Bart has returned to Gwoka repeatedly. His initial attempt at fusing jazz and Gwoka in the studio was 2006’s Soné Ka-La, the title of which translates to “let the…