JazzTimes September 2021

Exclusive Content Lee Mergner celebrates the reopening of New York jazz clubs with a weeklong series of live reviews, and Alan Nahigian presents a gallery of images from a recent live tribute to Wayne Shorter at the River to River Festival, featuring Esperanza Spalding and Terri Lyne Carrington. Plus album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Germany’s MPS Records, which issued jazz records from 1968 to 1983 and had a reputation for high-quality recordings, is reissuing key catalog items on CD and limited-edition vinyl. Titles include Ella Fitzgerald’s Sunshine of Your Love (1969); Freddie Hubbard’s The Hub of Hubbard (1970); the Oscar Peterson Trio/Voices Unlimited’s In Tune (1971); Bill Evans’ Symbiosis (1974); and Joe Henderson’s Mirror Mirror (1980). Audio & Video Check out violinist Curtis Stewart’s solo take on Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple…

You may notice a few changes in this issue of JazzTimes. Our design team has been hard at work again, coming up with a revised look for our department pages. The alterations are probably most obvious in the Reviews section, which is now rooted in a six-column grid format that goes at least a little way toward remedying a longstanding problem around these parts: too many albums to review and not enough space. The changes aren’t only visual; there have been a few tweaks on the content side too. One important development actually happened last issue, but I’ll belatedly mention it now. Veteran arts journalist Mark Stryker has taken over the Chronology column from its founder and sole author for the past two-plus years, Ethan Iverson. Mark is the author of…

“This is a voice right out of them cotton fields, out of the neighborhood.” In the concluding section of Marty Ehrlich’s gold-standard booklet notes for The Boyé Multi-National Crusade for Harmony (New World), a seven-CD extravaganza culled from the 180 audio and visual documents contained in the Julius Hemphill Archive at NYU’s Fales Library, Ehrlich reminds us that Hemphill (1938-1995)—with whom he collaborated closely for a decade, and whose music he played and organized posthumously with the Julius Hemphill Saxophone Sextet—“would never tell you what his music meant.” No back stories or provenance are required to appreciate Hemphill’s homegrown, novelistic corpus, herein represented with 46 tracks, including 35 original compositions (25 of them previously unreleased) by 16 different configurations recorded at 18 different locations. The collection substantially augments the Fort Worth, Texas…

“I feel like it’s my passion to uncover these forgotten gems.” Since her early days during the folk revival of the 1960s, Maria Muldaur has been immersed in American roots music of the past—the often quite distant past, at that. A native of New York City, specifically the West Village, Muldaur got her start playing with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band along with her then-husband, singer/guitarist Geoff Muldaur. “We’d spend all our spare time listening to old jug band recordings looking for stuff to play ourselves,” she explains. “We were also listening to a lot of jazz, like Fletcher Henderson, Paul Whiteman, the Dorsey Brothers, the McKinney Cotton Pickers … We’d spend hours listening to those old records. It’s really a part of me.” Muldaur recorded her first solo album in 1973,…

“Going back helps with the process of moving forward.” Simon Moullier’s respect for standards runs deep. “I think they’re an important part of the culture of this music,” he says. “I’ve always learned and will continue to learn from these great composer/musicians who left us such a large body of work to explore and play within.” The French-born, New York-based vibraphonist’s debut, 2020’s quintet-centric Spirit Song, only hinted at that appreciation with the inclusion of a shimmering, odd-metered take on “I’ll Remember April”—the album focused mostly on expansive originals aglow with modernistic promise. But its follow-up goes all in. Countdown, released this past June, speaks to both the durability and malleability of standards. Capitalizing on a kinship with the rhythm section from his initial offering (bassist Luca Alemanno and drummer Jongkuk Kim),…

This writer has always disliked first-person criticism. Readers don’t care about a writer’s subjective experience of art. The Leopolis Jazz Fest, however, has put me in a singular position—one that even I can’t generalize. The past 15 months of watching concerts on Zoom would likely have rendered any live, in-person festival incerta terra. I want to acknowledge that before I state for the record that the 2021 Leopolis Jazz Fest—held in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, whose historical Latin name is Leopolis—was both my first jazz festival since the COVID-19 pandemic and the strangest I have ever encountered. On the one hand, the programming was superlative. Artistic director Alexei Kogan, recognized as Ukraine’s nonpareil jazz authority, takes great pains to bring international talents to an international setting. (The only major ex-Soviet city…