JazzTimes July/August 2021

Exclusive Content Lee Mergner talks to Maria Muldaur about her new collaboration with New Orleans’ Tuba Skinny, and Michael J. West selects 10 outstanding Horace Silver recordings in our latest JazzTimes 10. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Among the 2021 inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is pioneering singer/songwriter and poet Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011), who made politically potent music in the 1970s that fused jazz with R&B and who—although he preferred to refer to himself as a “bluesologist”—is widely regarded as one of the earliest rappers. The induction ceremony will take place on October 30 in Cleveland, Ohio. Audio & Video Our new performance series Jazz in Europe, hosted by guitarist Dekel Bor, introduces a world audience to some of the most impressive voices on the…

When jazz guitarists step out on their own, leaving the security of accompanists behind, they face special challenges. Yes, they can handle chords and melody simultaneously, much like pianists. But their scope is way more limited, since they only have six strings and five fingers to work with (unless they’re doing a Stanley Jordan, which ups the complications considerably). Take it from someone who’s been playing guitar for nearly 40 years: Reharmonizing standards for a solo spotlight isn’t all that tough on paper, but when the time comes to consider what your fingers can actually play, your options diminish drastically. Clarity and precision often come at the expense of a full-bodied attack. Solo guitar performances that feature both are hard to come by. Of course, that certainly doesn’t mean such performances…

Almost everybody has seen it: Sailor Sabol’s spectacularly out-of-tune rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the February 2021 CPAC convention. Dozens of videos are circulating on social media, some of them presenting the performance a cappella as it was originally sung, some of them parodies with after-the-fact accompanists trying to follow Sabol as she wanders through at least four excruciating key changes. But the funniest of them all—and the one that went the most viral by far—was the brainchild of Larry Goldings, the much-admired L.A.-based pianist, organist, and composer. In it he portrays both a hapless keyboard accompanist who shows up late for the gig, having missed rehearsal and soundcheck, and the show’s exasperated director, whose voice is heard in the accompanist’s headphones saying, “You’d better not screw this up!” The…

To say that the recorder has no cachet in jazz is putting it mildly. But that never deterred Tali Rubinstein. In fact, the instrument’s status as a tabula rasa in that genre is part of what drives her artistry and development. “I think the fact that it hasn’t been explored very much is exciting because it’s open to discovery,” she says. “There are no rules. There’s no aesthetic for jazz recorder, so you have to be your own judge and develop your own tastes in order to decide what feels authentic.” Rubinstein, 36, has caused many to reevaluate the recorder’s station. Breathing new life into these duct flutes, she echoes the boundless enthusiasm that initially set her on this path some 30 years ago while growing up in Israel. “I started…

Like an ornery real-estate magnate, the work of Nick Millevoi screams, “Location, location, location.” Whether as a composer or as a guitarist, he makes music that holds a distinct sense of place wherever he roams. And so it’s no surprise that this human GPS chose to write a book of 25 compositions, Streets of Philadelphia, named after streets in his old Pennsylvania stomping ground. It was published in 2019; an album of the same name, featuring 10 pieces from the book, came out late last year. Millevoi’s “locations” teem with melody, feedback and, more often than not, non-traditional tunings—a mélange of shifting terrains. “Part of my desire to create a Streets of Philadelphia book relates to wanting to have my compositions live in different contexts,” says Millevoi, who not only penned…

British keyboardist Pat Thomas has performed alongside avant-garde luminaries for decades, but somehow has remained a relatively unknown quantity on this side of the Atlantic. At age 60, he has yet to play a live show in America. However, he’s increasingly been releasing music on U.S.-based imprints, including Nights on Saturn (communication), the most recent album by his quartet [Ahmed], issued in late March by Astral Spirits. While the group’s name pays tribute to Ahmed Abdul-Malik (1927-1993), a Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston compatriot, its work strays far from his swing, indulging instead in rhythmically acute free improv that rarely relents in its pounding explorations. [Ahmed] started as a coincidence. Several years back, Thomas and saxophonist Seymour Wright had individually begun playing with bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, when…