JazzTimes May 2022

Exclusive Content In honor of Charles Mingus’ centennial, Michael J. West chooses 10 of the Black Saint’s finest moments for our latest JazzTimes 10 list. Plus photo galleries, album and book reviews, obituaries, and much more. JT News Singer/songwriter Norah Jones has announced a 20-city tour that opens June 20 in Troutdale, Ore., and ends Aug. 4 in Forest Hills, N.Y. In addition, Jones will perform at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival on May 8. The tour celebrates the 20th anniversary of her debut album Come Away With Me, which has sold more than 27 million copies worldwide. On April 9, Blue Note is reissuing the album in an expanded 4-LP/3-CD “Super Deluxe Edition” that includes the familiar Arif Mardin-produced recording as well as 22 previously unreleased tracks: the original demos…

What is a jazz film? Does it have to be a film about jazz and the people who play it? Or can it also be a film that expresses at least some of the same spirit we find in the music, even if jazz isn’t its central subject? I’d say it can be either, as long as it’s good. And there’s the rub; as many of us know all too well, lots of movies that purport to be about jazz don’t capture enough of that spirit. The first movie I recall seeing that did both—told a jazz-related story and felt like jazz—was the Bertrand Tavernier classic that Colin Fleming celebrates in this issue. I still can remember trudging through the snows of Cambridge, Mass., sometime in the winter of 1986-87, my…

The legend of Lester Koenig—record collector, bon vivant, screenwriter, film producer, friend to Hollywood’s famous—looms larger than a hundred books, let alone a few words in JazzTimes. Yet it’s as the founder of Contemporary Records (in 1952) where he arguably made his most lasting mark, creating jazz recordings with a distinctive crispness, more often than not overseen by mysterious engineer Roy DuNann, whom Koenig hired away from Capitol in 1956. (Famously, the only music that DuNann really liked was country; he was an avid square dancer with his wife every weekend.) Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, Barney Kessel’s Kessel Plays Standards, Shelly Manne’s Bells Are Ringing, Ornette Coleman’s Something Else!!!!—the latter a focus of Contemporary’s 70th-anniversary deal with Craft/Concord Records and its first new offering, the Genesis of Genius box that…

5 MAY Astor Piazzolla: The American Clavé Recordings (Nonesuch): Three immensely influential 1980s albums by the Argentine composer, bandoneónist, and bandleader—Tango: Zero Hour, La Camorra: The Solitude of Passionate Provocation, and The Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night (Tango Apasionado)—are being reissued for the first time in a three-disc box with new liner notes. 13 MAY Mary Halvorson: Amaryllis and Belladonna (Nonesuch): The ambitious guitarist/composer makes her Nonesuch debut with not one but two albums. The first features trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, trombonist Jacob Garchik, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dunston, and drummer Tomas Fujiwara; on the second, Halvorson is backed by the Mivos String Quartet. 27 MAY Brian Jackson: This Is Brian Jackson (BBE): Given an Overdue Ovation in our January/February issue, keyboardist/composer Jackson is still best known for his 1970s work with Gil Scott-Heron—but…

Even through the narrow window of a smartphone-shaped FaceTime screen, it’s easy to see that the walls of Anders Koppel’s home outside Copenhagen are filled with art. The paintings and photos and such are inspiring on their own, the composer says—but even more so are the memories that they evoke. “What I have here in my room are mostly things from my long life, from friends and so on,” Koppel said. “It’s a life. It’s what you find on the beach after a storm.” Life and art intertwine majestically on Koppel’s new album, Mulberry Street Symphony. The double-CD is an epic suite for jazz trio and orchestra, featuring the composer’s saxophonist son Benjamin Koppel, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade with the Odense Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates. The piece’s…

Ron Miles, jazz’s foremost modern practitioner of the cornet, who became a revered and innovative figure while maintaining a career in his longtime home state of Colorado, died March 8 at his home in Denver of complications from polycythemia vera, a rare blood disorder. He was 58. Miles worked for many years with drummer Rudy Royston and guitarist Bill Frisell (both fellow Denverites), forming a trio with Frisell and drummer Brian Blade in the 2010s. He later expanded the trio into a quintet with pianist Jason Moran and bassist Thomas Morgan—still his working band when he passed away. In the last two years of his life, Miles achieved two long-desired career goals: releasing an album on Blue Note Records (2020’s Rainbow Sign) and headlining Manhattan’s Village Vanguard, the first artist…