JazzTimes January/February 2022

This month’s musings were prompted by the arrival of a new book, Phil Freeman’s Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, and word of two others that are due to be published later in 2022, a biography of Bill Frisell by Irish journalist Philip Watson and a memoir by Henry Threadgill. You’ll read more about all three of these books in future issues of JazzTimes; I’m just using them here as a platform for arguably pointless but enjoyable speculation. Freeman’s book—much like Nate Chinen’s Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century (2018), which covers much of the same time period and some of the same topics—has an episodic structure. Vijay Iyer gets a chapter, followed by a chapter on Taylor Ho Bynum. There’s a chapter on Shabaka Hutchings, and one on…

→ Exclusive Content You may have noticed, perhaps with some annoyance, that our recent JazzTimes 10 list of essential tracks from the Swing Era didn’t include anything by Count Basie. This was intentional; you just can’t limit the Count to one cut. So Michael J. West has followed up with an all-Basie JazzTimes 10. You’re welcome. Plus photo galleries, album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. → JT News At press time, we were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Greg Tate—writer, musician, and past contributor to JT—on Dec. 6. From 1987 to 2005, Tate was one of The Village Voice’s leading music and culture critics; in 1985, along with guitarist Vernon Reid, among others, he founded the Black Rock Coalition, which targeted racism and unfair treatment of Black musicians…

The jazz press noted the death of pianist Frank Kimbrough, who succumbed to an apparent heart attack at 64 on December 30, 2020, but gave it little fanfare. That’s to be expected. Kimbrough, one of dozens of jazz casualties since the COVID-19 pandemic began, would always be overshadowed in his passing by that of Chick Corea or Lee Konitz or Wallace Roney. But we may not appreciate who—and what—we lost. Audiences knew Kimbrough best as the pianist for the Maria Schneider Orchestra. Some savvy observers also recognized him from sideman gigs with Ben Allison or Ted Nash, or were aware of his work in the Herbie Nichols Project, or his 2018 release Monk’s Dreams, in which he interpreted all of Thelonious Monk’s compositions. In short, for most jazz fans, Kimbrough was…

On Southside Sounds, her self-released 2017 debut, pianist Alexis Lombre deftly balanced her instrument’s dual rhythmic and melodic roles. Her percussive, wide-fingered lower-register splays created the impetus for freedom-bound explorations that were chordal in conception yet dancing in execution; on ballads, she demonstrated an emotional maturity well beyond her years, invoking deep sentiment without crossing into bathos. Honoring such role models as McCoy Tyner, Duke Ellington, Bobby Timmons, and her mentor, the late Willie Pickens, she revealed herself to be an “old soul” (as she puts it), but also a free spirit, at ease with conventional jazz syntax yet restless and unwilling to be tamed. Southside Sounds, it seems, was just a warm-up. Lombre’s 2021 digital single, “Come Find Me,” owes as much to contemporary R&B and hip-hop, with its programmed…

Today there are more important jazz musicians who come from outside the United States than ever before. Some stay home and strengthen their local scenes. Some emigrate to the U.S., thereby enriching jazz in its native land. Misha Tsiganov is in the second category. In “Misha’s Story,” published in 2007 in Jazz.Ru, Russia’s primary jazz magazine, he tells what it was like to arrive in the U.S. from St. Petersburg in 1991 and start at “point zero.” He had been offered a scholarship to Berklee, but when he arrived in Boston he discovered that there had been a misunderstanding about the numbers. The scholarship paid most but not all of his tuition, and Tsiganov could not make up the shortfall. Almost broke, in a foreign country with no work permit, he made…

Earl Newman wasn’t much of a jazz fan back in 1963 when he was hired to produce a poster promoting the Monterey Jazz Festival; the blues was more his style. He wasn’t going to let that stop him, though. The Massachusetts-to-California transplant went to work, applying his hand-silkscreen technique to a black-and-white piece based on a sketch he’d made of trumpeter Joe Gordon blowing. Jimmy Lyons, the festival’s founder, was so impressed with it that he invited Newman back—for the next 50 years. During his five decades as the official poster artist for the annual Monterey event, Newman not only designed some of the festival’s most enduringly popular artworks but also came to love the music—and to know many of the artists whose visages graced his work. “I met Dizzy [Gillespie] half…