JazzTimes

Exclusive Content The 26th Vision Festival in New York City (June 21-26) paid tribute to two giants of the avant garde: trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith and saxophonist/composer Oliver Lake. Regular JazzTimes photographer Alan Nahigian was in attendance for the entire festival, and our online gallery presents just a few of the images he captured. (Pictured L to R: Andrew Cyrille, Reggie Workman, and Oliver Lake.) Plus album and festival reviews, obituaries, our regular JazzTimes 10 lists, and more. JT News Many jazz fans might be surprised to learn not only that there’s a casino in Queens, N.Y. (the only such establishment within the borders of New York City), but that this summer it hosted an exhibit of artwork by longtime Queens resident Louis Armstrong, featuring some of the collages that he created on…

Our Legends Issue is a pleasure to compile every year for two main reasons: 1) It gives JazzTimes a chance to focus on celebrating artists, both living and departed, who have made an undeniable and lasting impact on jazz; and 2) It gives our illustrious contributors a chance to take a break from chronicling everyone’s latest projects and really sink their teeth into some historically oriented writing. This year, they’ve done a particularly bang-up job. Let’s start with our cover story. James Gavin, author of outstanding books on Peggy Lee, Lena Horne, Chet Baker, and most recently George Michael, sat down on our behalf for hours of in-depth conversation with a vocalist of a very different sort: Brazil’s estimable Flora Purim. Jim is one of the finest prose stylists I’ve ever…

In its first full edition since the onset of the pandemic, and with a new director of programming, the Festival International de Jazz de Montréal returned for a 42nd go-round from June 30 to July 9. With a revamped site and a solid, diverse program, the festival presented around 350 concerts featuring 3,000 musicians from 30 countries. Many of the artists commented on how good it was to reconnect with audiences after such a long, hard time of isolation, and the thousands of music lovers flocking to the city’s expansive festival district were clearly elated. This report focuses on the first six days of the event. Day 1 felt like an entire festival all in itself. A staggering 33 concerts were presented across the many outdoor and indoor stages, showcasing a…

On the enchanted evening of August 16, 1958, Ella Fitzgerald took to the stage of the legendary Hollywood Bowl. There, with a lustrous orchestra conducted and arranged by Paul Weston, she let her vocal stardust twinkle over composer Irving Berlin’s sturdiest toe-tappers, such as “Cheek to Cheek,” and mid-tempo numbers like “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm.” It was the one and only time she shared a public stage with Weston to perform his Berlin arrangements, which they had recorded together in March of that same year for the album Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Song Book. For the full, never-before-released recording of this concert, now available as Ella at the Hollywood Bowl: The Irving Berlin Songbook (Verve/UMe), Grammy-winning producer Gregg Field mixed the original live ¼" tapes…

Between December 2021 and October 2022, Josh Sinton will have released four albums on his Form Is Possibility imprint. Two feature him alone on baritone saxophone, while the others place him in the company of different bands. “I’ve never released this many records in such a short time,” he says via a Zoom call from his home in Brooklyn. “It just happened that this was material that I really cared about and have been working on—in the case of Adumbrations, you could argue—for 20 years.” “Hmm! I guess you can do it on the baritone!” That album, which came out in June, places Sinton’s baritone, bass clarinet and (for the first time on disc) flute in improvisations with pianist Jed Wilson and drummer Tony Falco. The three met in the ’00s while…

Grachan Moncur III, a trombonist, composer, and educator who forged a unique identity in the “new thing” of 1960s jazz, died of cardiac arrest June 3 in his longtime home city of Newark, N.J. It was his 85th birthday. In his work as a leader—most notably on the Blue Note albums Evolution (1963) and Some Other Stuff (1964)—and in the bands of Jackie McLean, Lee Morgan, Archie Shepp, Marion Brown, and Dave Burrell, among others, Moncur distinguished himself as an artist with one foot in the bebop tradition and another on the progressive frontier. Adelhard Roidinger, an Austrian bassist who collaborated with Joachim Kühn, Karl Berger, George Russell, and Anthony Braxton, died April 22 in Vienna. He was 80. As adept in the realm of computing (specifically as it applied to…