‘Birth of the Blue’ by Miles Davis Review: A Classic Coming Into View
This archival album highlights a session by the trumpeter’s sextet from May 1958, a year before the recording of ‘Kind of Blue.’
By
Martin Johnson
Dec. 30, 2024 3:43 pm ET
Miles Davis in 1959. Photo: Getty Images
Some of the most crucial tracks by the jazz great Miles Davis have been hiding in plain sight for decades—four numbers, from a May 1958 session, set down by the sextet that the following year would record most of the trumpeter and composer’s “Kind of Blue.” This prequel to one of the greatest jazz recordings ever made is being released as “Birth of the Blue” (Analogue Productions), and it clarifies the multiple directions Davis was taking in one of his most fertile periods.
Until now, this music was tacked onto various reissues, most notably at the end of the six-disc or nine-LP set “The Complete Columbia Recordings of Miles Davis With John Coltrane,” which was released in 2000. But this is the first time it is presented in proper context, rather than as discographic filler primarily of interest to zealots.
The band—Davis, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, and pianist Bill Evans—had been together only briefly when these four tracks were made, but it’s easy to hear the unique, austere elegance of “Kind of Blue” emerging.
The sextet, which rarely entered the studio during its two-year run, followed Davis’s first great quintet, which recorded often during the mid-1950s and made music that defined the parameters of hard bop. Unlike the often gritty, gospel-influenced outfits of Art Blakey and Horace Silver, that Davis group, which features Chambers and Coltrane alongside pianist Red Garland and drummer Philly Joe Jones, was refined and graceful. But if the quintet was a plush California Cabernet Sauvignon, the “Kind of Blue” group was a delicate French Burgundy.
The key to this change was in the rhythm section. Cobb and Chambers were fluid and understated, and in Evans, whom Davis first heard playing intermission piano at New York’s Village Vanguard, Miles found a pianist who shared his interest in contemporary classical stylings. Evans’s framing is gentler than Garland’s and most mainstream jazz pianists of the era, and he nudges the music toward an almost meditative softness.
The 32 minutes of “Birth of the Blue” showcase the direction of this new ensemble. There are three standards—“On Green Dolphin Street,” “Love for Sale” and “Stella by Starlight”—and a Miles original, “Fran-Dance.” And each illustrates a move away from the bright colors of hard bop to the muted ambience of the masterpiece to come. “On Green Dolphin Street,” the first track, features solos by Adderley, Davis and Evans that sparkle without breaking the reserved temperament of the music. With its more deliberate tempo, “Fran-Dance” hints at the band’s future sound; it is highlighted by Evans and Davis’s introduction to the tune, which is followed by Adderley’s probing solo. Davis and Evans again collaborate ahead of the full band’s entrance for “Stella by Starlight,” their sublime opening in smart contrast to Coltrane’s serene but authoritative solo. After the intensely subdued playing that precedes it, “Love for Sale” feels like a brisk workout.
The intense restraint of these tunes may seem like an imposition compared to the popular approach, but it was a release for the band members. In the liner notes, Ashley Kahn—who wrote “Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece”—cites a 1979 interview with Evans where he said “that it confirmed my own identity to myself, that being myself was the only place to be.”
“Birth of the Blue” also fortifies the sense that this minimal style was beginning to have a moment. Adderley’s “Autumn Leaves” from his 1958 recording “Somethin’ Else,” which features Davis as a sideman, is similarly austere and refined, as are several of Evans’s tracks from the late ’50s and early ’60s. And these four tracks, with their interiority, are better previews to “Kind of Blue” than the musicians’ work on Davis’s “Jazz at the Plaza,” a live recording.
The new album’s title refers to another Davis classic, “Birth of the Cool,” which was released in 1957 from sessions recorded in 1949 and ’50. In addition to the work by his sextet, he was collaborating with Gil Evans, an arranger of the “Cool” sessions, on music that would lower the thermostat on orchestral jazz.
In November, the Miles Davis Bootleg Series released volume 8, “Miles in France—Miles Davis Quintet 1963/64” (Legacy/Columbia), which shows how Davis’s small groups adapted in the years following “Kind of Blue.” One can only hope that jazz archaeologists will discover more music from the sextet for us to dig; its impact goes well beyond one great record.
‘A Beautiful Day, Revisited’ and ‘Spring in Stockholm’ Review: Revealing Records From Jazz Masters
An elegantly complex large-ensemble album from pianist Andrew Hill receives an expanded and remastered reissue, while saxophonist Gerry Mulligan showcases his fierce yet lyrical playing in a previously unreleased 1959 concert.
Pianist Andrew Hill (1931-2007) and saxophonist Gerry Mulligan (1927-1996) were revered figures in their time, but as jazz in the 21st century progresses, their influence has grown—albeit in contrasting ways.
Hill’s penchant for thorny melodies and unusual harmonies has swayed a large number of young musicians on the scene today. His keyboard approach, which moved deftly between avant-garde and mainstream tropes without dwelling in either for long, is reflected in the music of contemporary pianists like Vijay Iyer, Marta Sanchez and Micah Thomas. The influence of Hill’s arrangements and infrequent orchestrations can be heard in the large-ensemble music of Rob Mazurek, Adam O’Farrill, Dan Weiss and many others.
Yet a formidable contingent can be found advocating for Mulligan’s clean lines and smooth yet complex harmonies. His instrument, the baritone saxophone, was not common in jazz during his lifetime and it’s rare now, but Mulligan’s restrained elegance is foundational to the work of bassists Thomas Morgan and Linda May Han Oh as well as vocalist Sara Serpa.
Hill’s “A Beautiful Day, Revisited” (Palmetto, Nov. 1 release) presents with new material and remastering a large-ensemble recording that was originally issued in 2002. Mulligan’s “Spring in Stockholm: Live at Konserthuset, 1959” (New Land, out now) features a previously unreleased performance of the saxophonist’s famed quartet. Both recordings show these masters at work in ways that still resonate.
Hill built his reputation during the ’60s, when he released one remarkable recording after another (and many albums remained in the vaults and were not released until much later). His final years were a career renaissance after nearly a decade in academia. “Dusk” (Palmetto, 2000) was a sextet recording that recalled the glories of “Point of Departure” (Blue Note, 1965), which is widely regarded as a masterpiece. For “A Beautiful Day” he brought 16 musicians into New York’s Birdland jazz club for three nights.
Andrew Hill Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The results are sensational. Rather than employing theme-solo-theme structures, the music swells and recedes with solos emerging from the mix. There are profound solos from reedman Marty Ehrlich on “Faded Beauty” and the title track (of which there are two takes included in the reissue), trumpeter Ron Horton on “Bellezza,” tenor saxophonist Greg Tardy on “Divine Revelation” and “5 Mo,” and baritone saxophonist JD Parran on “J Di.” But the music is so precisely arranged and the remastering so clear that the contributions of bassist Scott Colley and drummer Nasheet Waits are highlighted even when they are not soloing. The majority of the added musicians are either trumpeters or trombonists, and this yields brassy harmonies that border on dissonance and lend a sense of urgency to the music. The new release has divided the original program into two discs, and an extended version of the tune “11/8” is included.
Although Hill rarely performed with large ensembles, they were one of Mulligan’s calling cards. He was an important collaborator with Miles Davis on the seminal “Birth of the Cool” (Capitol 1957 release of sessions done in 1949 and ’50), and various iterations of his Concert Jazz Band highlighted contemporary jazz orchestration.
Another major facet of his career was piano-free quartets. In the early ’50s these bands, which Mulligan typically co-led with trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker, were astonishing in their lean, lyrical sound. The absence of a piano allowed the horn players unusual freedom and helped catalyze a trend toward more intimate ensembles. By the mid-’50s Baker, thanks to his matinee-idol good looks and virtuosity, had become a rising star. Mulligan found others to share the frontline, and one of the most simpatico matches was trumpeter Art Farmer. But their collaboration was infrequently documented, which makes Mulligan’s “Spring in Stockholm” a treat.
Farmer also had a supremely lyrical side to his playing, but he could dig into the blues. The recording begins with an uptempo workout, “As Catch Can,” which features both Mulligan and Farmer racing at classic bebop speed and complexity. The pace slows considerably for the Vernon Duke/Ira Gershwin standard “I Can’t Get Started With You,” and Mulligan moves to the piano. He’s a fine pianist—but it’s a slight disappointment, as he’s quite possibly the best baritone sax player in jazz history. Mulligan’s jaunty reed solo is the prime feature of the Jule Styne nugget “Just in Time.” The bluesy “Spring Is Sprung” offers significant space for bassist Bill Crow, a longtime associate of Mulligan, and drummer Dave Bailey.
Farmer’s “Blueport” is the high point of the program. Both horns interlock, and it spurs Mulligan toward his most aggressive and probing solo. Farmer responds at length, countering his bandmate with long, graceful lines.
Decades-old, newly discovered live and studio recordings of jazz greats have become an important part of the genre’s landscape in recent years. Such releases fill in gaps in stellar players’ discographies and shed new light on overlooked chapters of their careers. Unfortunately, relative to their stature, Hill and Mulligan have been underrepresented in this trend. Hopefully, both of these fine albums are the first of several from these influential artists.
‘Breaking Stretch’ and ‘Elements of Light’ Review: Vibrant Vibes
New recordings from Patricia Brennan and Simon Moullier further advance the vibraphone’s emergence as an essential instrument in contemporary jazz.
By Martin Johnson
Sept. 21, 2024 7:00 am ET
Simon Moullier Photo: Adrien Tillmann
Some of the most revered jazz musicians are vibraphonists; monuments could and should be built to honor Lionel Hampton, Bobby Hutcherson, Milt Jackson and Cal Tjader, and one of the most respected albums of the ’70s is “Crystal Silence” (ECM), a duet recording from pianist Chick Corea and vibist Gary Burton. Yet the vibraphone has largely remained a fringe instrument despite its importance on many classic discs. And great contemporary players like Stefon Harris and Steve Nelson notwithstanding, the number of notable vibists following in the footsteps of these legends had never compared with the armies of up-and-coming young trumpeters, saxophonists, bassists, drummers and guitarists.
In the past several years, however, a wealth of young vibraphonists—including Sasha Berliner, Patricia Brennan, Chris Dingman, Simon Moullier, Joel Ross, Yushan Su, Juan Diego Villalobos and Warren Wolf—have emerged, and some leading drummers like Tomas Fujiwara and Ches Smith are now doubling on the instrument. This reflects wider jazz trends in the 21st century. Rather than a succession of virtuoso solos, many songs are defined by complex ensemble passages filled with unique harmonies, innovative rhythms and unusual instrumentation. In this context, the rhythmic versatility and ringing tones of the vibraphone have become essential; it’s an instrument that can blend the sonorities and shifting functions within a band. Ms. Brennan and Mr. Moullier have new recordings that illustrate these capacities in exciting new ways.
“Growing up in Veracruz, Mexico, one of my earliest musical memories was watching the local marimba bands,” Ms. Brennan told me in a 2023 interview. “It was always exciting to watch two or three people with multiple mallets play this instrument and make it sound like a full band.” Her new recording, “Breaking Stretch” (Pyroclastic, out now), draws on those influences, as well as others from her youth—such as the horn-driven popular music of Blood, Sweat & Tears; Chicago; and Earth, Wind & Fire. She has added three horn players—saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Mark Shim plus trumpeter Adam O’Farrill—to the lithe, subtly rhythmic ensemble showcased on her acclaimed 2022 release, “More Touch,” which featured bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Mauricio Herrera.
Patricia Brennan’s septet Photo: Frank heath
The results are scintillating. Ms. Brennan’s septet plays with an impassioned urgency on uptempo tunes like “Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves),” “Palo de Oros (Suit of Coins),” and especially “Five Suns” and “Manufacturers Trust Company Building,” which resemble an artful soundtrack to the scenes at the climax of a crime thriller. The softer tracks deftly layer horn lines with percolating bass lines, shimmering drum licks and additional percussion. Throughout, Ms. Brennan, who just turned 40 years old, takes stunning solos that add intensity to the faster tracks and delicacy to the slower ones.
Like Ms. Brennan, Mr. Moullier, who is 30, was born and raised abroad. A native of Nantes, France, he was a drummer who turned to vibes when he was 17 and attended a five-week summer camp at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Mr. Moullier returned to the conservatory for undergraduate work and earned a master’s degree at the Hancock Institute of Jazz in Los Angeles. He was increasingly drawn to the fluid sounds of horns, and it’s evident in his elegant sound. At times on his early recordings, he seems to be quoting and varying saxophone lines from classic repertoire.
On his latest, “Elements of Light” (Candid, out now), he builds on this foundation by adding electronic elements. For instance, on the first track, “808,” he seamlessly melds electronic percussion (which is part of the inspiration for the title) with that of drummer Jongkuk Kim. On the title track, pianist Gerald Clayton guests in a unique piano, vibes and drums trio with synthesizer added in post-production. On Wayne Shorter’s “Oriental Folk Song,” bassist Rick Rosato and Mr. Moullier create sumptuous harmonies. Ultimately, though, “Elements of Light” presents an artist still exploring an impressive range of ideas that only begin to cohere into a singular vision.
Within this emerging panoply of vibraphonists, Ms. Brennan and Mr. Moullier offer contrasting styles on their instruments. She is very rhythmically precise, and her music both on the new recording and on her previous albums focused on percussive elements. Mr. Moullier has said in interviews that he was attracted to the melodic possibilities of his instrument. Each is contributing to an impressive diversity of approaches that range from Mr. Ross’s soulful harmonies to Ms. Berliner’s cutting-edge rhythms.
But the best proof of the vibraphone’s emergence may have come from a saxophonist. Last November, Ben Wendel presented “BaRcoDe,” a concert-length work commissioned by the Jazz Gallery in New York. He created a band with himself and four vibraphonists: Ms. Brennan and Messrs. Moullier, Ross and Villalobos. The results, especially the subtle rhythms and vibrant ensemble colors, were often mesmerizing. Afterward, he told me that he was attracted to the idea by the multitude of great vibraphonists on the scene, and the concert made him wish that he could tour with a band that featured such sounds.
‘Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions’ Review: Jazz Composers, Classical Form
Ryan Truesdell oversees and contributes his own music to this collection of pieces by 15 composers best known for their work in jazz, artfully blending the genre with chamber music.
Ryan Truesdell conducts a string quartet. PHOTO: LEO MASCARO
Composer and bandleader Ryan Truesdell has played a vital role in the revival of the jazz orchestra in the 21st century. He has received Grammy nominations for recordings by his band, the Gil Evans Project, which performs compositions by that jazz great. And he has won Grammys as a producer for Maria Schneider, an Evans protégée whose music—like that of her mentor—is a cornerstone of contemporary big-band jazz. Yet on his latest release, “Synthesis: The String Quartet Sessions” (ArtistShare, out June 21), Mr. Truesdell takes a different approach, presenting not only his own more intimate works but those of 14 other composers best known for writing for large ensembles.
The concept is ingenious. Some of the most innovative big-band music in recent years draws on European classical traditions and makes use of discrete and nuanced harmonies—essential ingredients in great string quartets. In addition, virtuosos like Regina Carter, Mat Maneri and Tomeka Reid have helped turn strings from an unusual aspect of jazz into an established one. The new album—which features, in various configurations, violinists Sara Caswell, Joyce Hammann and Lady Jess; violists Lois Martin and Orlando Wells; and cellists Jody Redhage Ferber and Noah Hoffeld—showcases the intersection of two potent trends.
While it clocks in at just under three hours, “Synthesis” is never a slog. But the most rewarding approach may be to group its composers for shorter listening sessions.
The recording begins with up-and-comers Nathan Parker Smith and Vanessa Perica. Mr. Smith is a Brooklyn-based composer whose 18-piece Large Ensemble has been playing around New York for several years, and his “Where Can You Be?” is full of tense figures, exciting counterpoint and stunning improvisations. Ms. Perica is based in Melbourne, and “A World Lies Waiting,” inspired by her yearnings for a post-lockdown Australia, begins slowly and elegantly as if part of a dream, the music gradually becoming more propulsive.
Jim McNeely and Bob Brookmeyer (1929-2011) are two major influences on Mr. Truesdell, and their works here contrast nicely. Mr. McNeely is a pianist who played with the great Stan Getz and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra (another foundational element of today’s large-ensemble jazz); his “Murmuration and Adagio” begins with stylish structures that mimic the sound of birds gathering, then finishes with a vibrant solo by Ms. Caswell. Brookmeyer’s previously unrecorded “Talking for String Trio” weaves three brilliant, knotty solos by Ms. Redhage Ferber, Ms. Hammann and Ms. Martin into brief interplay at the end.
Rufus Reid, Miho Hazama and John Hollenbeck often lead big bands internationally, and their contributions here spotlight a passion for dramatic results. Mr. Reid’s “String Quartet #1” is in three movements. The first is graceful, as if the soundtrack for a classic ballet; the second is full of percussive moments; and the third returns to the refined vibe of the beginning. Ms. Hazama’s “Chipmunk Timmy’s Funny Sunny Day” starts out ominously but emerges as playful and complex, full of vigorous musical dialogues. Mr. Hollenbeck’s “Grey Cottage String Quartets” began as a series of solo violin etudes written in 2008 and evolved into a quartet plus the composer accompanying on piano, marimba and drums. The seven movements reflect his experiences in the Adirondacks at the Blue Mountain Center.
Mr. Truesdell contributes three pieces, “Suite for Clarinet and String Quartet,” “Heart of Gold” and “Dança de Quarto.” The suite features stellar clarinetist Anat Cohen, and it was written while Mr. Truesdell, who is 44 years old, was studying with Brookmeyer at the New England Conservatory of Music. The second and third of its four parts—“Branches of Night” and “Fire and Flowers”—are especially compelling. “Branches” features beautiful give and take between Ms. Cohen and the members of the quartet. “Fire” showcases spiky back and forth between pizzicato from the strings and long lines from the clarinetist. “Heart of Gold” was inspired by the ringing resonances of Ms. Redhage Ferber, though a Neil Young fan would be forgiven for hearing echoes of his classic rock song in the melody. “Dança” began as a feature for Ms. Caswell and blossomed into a dance for a full quartet. Each piece is lush and romantic in its own way.
In the “Synthesis” press release, Mr. Truesdell says he was inspired by “the knowledge that many jazz composers derive inspiration from the string quartet writing of composers like Bartok, Brahms, and Ravel.” His album reflects those influences and pushes them forward.
‘Life Is Funny That Way’ by Fay Victor Review: The Timeless Songs of Herbie Nichols
The underappreciated composer of ‘Lady Sings the Blues’ receives a vibrantly contemporary tribute from the versatile jazz vocalist.
By Martin Johnson
March 30, 2024 7:00 am ET
Fay Victor PHOTO: DENEKA PENISTON
Although he wrote the music for one of Billie Holiday’s most renowned songs, “Lady Sings the Blues,” the work of pianist Herbie Nichols (1919-1963) is unduly obscure. He recorded only sporadically, and those albums have not consistently stayed in print. But a handful of exceptional musicians—the trombonist Roswell Rudd (1935-2017), the pianists Misha Mengelberg (also 1935-2017) and Frank Kimbrough (1956-2020), and the bassist Ben Allison—have obsessively championed his legacy over the decades. Ten years ago, vocalist Fay Victor created an ensemble to perform Nichols’s music, and now her group has released its first recording, “Life Is Funny That Way” (Tao Forms, out April 5), presenting his works in an exciting new light.
To contemporary ears, Nichols’s compositions sound vibrant, innovative and timeless. Like those of Thelonious Monk, with which they are often compared, they have an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility—combining meticulous qualities with a nonchalance that enhances their appeal.
Nichols was born in the San Juan Hill area of Manhattan to parents from Trinidad and St. Kitts back when the area was a Caribbean enclave, and it’s easy to hear traces of West Indian stylings in his oeuvre. He played at Minton’s, the Harlem club famous as an incubator for bebop, and although he failed to establish himself there, he did befriend Monk. Nichols made his first recordings as a leader in 1955, but they found neither popular nor critical success, and he spent most of the rest of his life playing in Dixieland bands.
Ms. Victor, who was born in Brooklyn two years after Nichols’s death, shares his Caribbean heritage and discovered his music in the ’90s while living in Holland. On her second recording, “Darker Than Blue” (Timeless, 2001), she recorded Nichols’s “House Party Starting” with lyrics she wrote. She sent a copy to Mengelberg, who encouraged her, and they began a series of collaborations of mostly original music, with a smattering of Nichols. This led to her working with Rudd, who had played with Nichols, and she learned more about the composer-pianist, which inspired her to create more lyrics for his music.
“Life Is Funny That Way” offers a rich portrait of Nichols, and it highlights the contemporary aspects of his music. Ms. Victor’s versatile band includes saxophonist Michaël Attias, pianist Anthony Coleman, bassist Ratzo Harris and drummer Tom Rainey. Their range is a good fit, and her vocals embrace straightforward singing, scat, vocalese and poetic recitation; it’s a style that enables her to explore deeper meanings in songs and broaden their cultural connections. Her influences include both classic jazz singers like Betty Carter and late 20th-century innovators like Jeanne Lee.
The album opens with the title track, which stuns with swaggering confidence, layered improvisations, and a puckish vibe that feels emblematic of the entire Nichols catalog. Ms. Victor also revisits “House Party Starting,” here retitled “Tonight,” and it is highlighted by wry solos and clever interplay by the ensemble. Her take on “Lady Sings the Blues” adds a chapter to the song’s evolution. The composition began as a midtempo instrumental piece, “Serenade,” but Holiday slowed it to a dirge, her lyrics capturing both sorrow and resilience. Ms. Victor slows it still further, making both elements more visceral, and the song becomes bracing.
“Life Is Funny That Way” continues a recent trend of tribute recordings that go beyond the notes on the page and aim to showcase the spirit of the music. It helped me to see how much the humor, punchy melodies and spiky rhythms in Nichols’s music are present in the work of pianists like Kris Davis, Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn and Micah Thomas.
The album also brought to mind two modern classics, “Carmen Sings Monk” (Novus, 1990) by Carmen McRae and “Change of Season” (Soul Note, 1985) from a collective quintet involving Mengelberg. McRae, a canonical vocalist, made Monk’s life more accessible by applying words to his idiosyncratic music; many of Ms. Victor’s lyrics provide stories for Nichols’s songs that show the enormous dimensions and possibilities of the works, a feat that she and her band also accomplish through their musicianship. This album—combined with the recent release of Mr. Allison’s “Tell the Birds I Said Hello: The Music of Herbie Nichols” (Sonic Camera)—suggests that interest in the great composer and his music is peaking.
‘Cloudward’ by Mary Halvorson Review: A Jazz Band’s Brilliant Complexity
The guitarist leads her sextet through a series of richly layered compositions and improvisations on this rewarding album.
By
Martin Johnson
Jan. 10, 2024 5:17 pm
Mary Halvorson PHOTO: JAMES WANG
Brooklyn, N.Y.-based guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson emerged on the jazz scene about 20 years ago with the one thing every young musician yearns for—an unmistakable sound. Whether via her stinging, pungent chords or her slippery playing abetted by electronic alteration, Ms. Halvorson’s guitar was remarkably distinctive. She’s nurtured that style in projects large and small—recording trio, quintet, septet and octet albums under her leadership; collaborating with Indie rocker John Dieterich of Deerhoof and jazz pianist Sylvie Courvoisier in duets; working in the superb collective trio Thumbscrew; and creating Code Girl, a group that straddles the previously obscure border between art rock and jazz.
Lately she’s been developing an equally idiosyncratic and superb composing voice. In 2022, she released a pair of recordings, “Amaryllis” and “Belladonna” (both Nonesuch). The former presented a new group—a sextet—and occasionally paired it with the Mivos Quartet; “Belladonna” was just strings and guitar. The music retained occasional spiky elements of her earlier music, but it was also strikingly elegant, lush and bright. It was as if after years along the back alleys of New York, she’d begun to dwell amid the lush pastoral greenery of Prospect Park, if not the rolling hills of rural settings. On Jan. 19, she’s releasing “Cloudward” (Nonesuch). And while it features more music from the sextet that moves in that direction, it introduces greater complexity.
Ms. Halvorson’s group presents some of the leading improvisors in jazz: vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, bassist Nick Dunston, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, trombonist Jacob Garchik and trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. She assembled the sextet for a summer 2020 engagement in Brooklyn that was canceled due to Covid-19 lockdowns, but she continued writing music for the ensemble. After recording that music in September 2021, she found, she told me, that she enjoyed the challenge of writing for its members’ individual styles and sought to give them greater freedom in shaping the music. But the motivation behind the compositions changed. The music on “Amaryllis” reflected the times with song titles like “Anesthesia” and “Side Effect.” With “Cloudward,” she seeks to project a return to some sort of post-pandemic normality, and the brilliance of the recording is how she maintains the grace of “Amaryllis” without the string quartet.
“Cloudward” opens with “The Gate,” which features Messrs. Garchik and O’Farrill, an unusual trumpet/trombone front line that yields darker horn lines and contrasts nicely against the lighter tones of the guitar and vibraphone. Ms. Halvorson dominates two tracks with her guitar solos. On “The Tower” she leads with a terse introduction that she loops into a long delay, which provides counterpoint for stellar work from her bandmates. On “Desiderata,” she begins with an aggressive and intense solo that gives way to a complex vibraphone solo. “Unscrolling” starts with a mallets solo from Mr. Fujiwara, and it transitions into a smoothly melodic flow from the group. Ms. Halvorson’s writing for her previous ensembles, especially her octet, displayed a stateliness offset by barbed segments. On “Tailhead,” the sextet revisits that sound. Composer and violinist Laurie Anderson guests on “Incarnadine,” which is complex and restrained.
As with a lot of 21st-century jazz, the music on “Cloudward” is most rewardingly heard as a series of layers that interlock and transition in unique ways, rather than taking the theme-solo-theme approach that has defined the genre since World War II. Ms. Halvorson and her bandmates contribute brief, fascinating commentary within each piece and not just when they are soloing in front of the band.
Earlier this month, Ms. Halvorson, who won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019, had a four-night residency at The Stone in Manhattan, and on the first two nights she performed with groups featuring younger performers. On Jan. 4, she dueted with the up-and-coming saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, and they motored through a series of passages that deftly alternated between lyrical and dissonant moments. On the evening before, she performed with Clone Decay, with trombonists Kalia Vandever (who has called Ms. Halvorson her idol) and Weston Olencki. In each performance, Ms. Halvorson led her bandmates through a labyrinth of stylistic alterations and gently coached them along the way; it showed another developing side of her musical personality—mentorship.
Maya Beiser Interview: ‘Bach is where everything started’
The fearless cellist on Infinite Bach, Bowie’s everlasting influence and the art of recording falling rain. by Martin Johnson
Credit: Courtesy of Islandia Music.
The cellist Maya Beiser has built a venerated career out of refusing to stay in the classical music lane. Her 2011 TED Talk “A cello with many voices” has garnered more than a million views. She’s recorded Led Zeppelin (“Kashmir”), Howlin’ Wolf (“Moanin’ at Midnight”) and Pink Floyd (“Wish You Were Here”), not as novelties or asides but as heartfelt repertoire. To hammer that point home, she recorded the entirety of David Bowie’s final opus, Blackstar. Beiser was the founding cellist in the pathbreaking Bang on a Can All-Stars, and has commissioned leading contemporary composers. In 2021, she released an acclaimed recording devoted to the music of Philip Glass.
So it was something of a surprise to learn that her new album, Infinite Bach, focuses on the canonical composer and his renowned Cello Suites. But Beiser did it her own sonically adventurous way, recording the music in a barn, replete with lingering overtones, expansive reverb and the sounds of rain. There are hundreds of recordings of the Cello Suites, but none that sound like this. Beiser recently met with TIDAL via video conference to discuss how Bach in a Barn came about and why Bowie remains a vital influence on her life and work.
This conversation was edited for clarity and length.
Why Bach, and why now?
Bach is kind of where everything started for me. I grew up in a commune in Israel, under constant threat of war; when I was young, we spent so much time in shelters. My father really wanted me to play the cello. He bought this recording of the suites [performed by] Pablo Casals, who was the greatest cellist, and who really kind of rediscovered the Bach Cello Suites. That was my earliest memory of music.
When I started to play the cello, Bach was the cornerstone of the repertoire, so I didn’t really question that. It was just what I learned, and it was what I performed as a young girl. As I became an independent thinker, and I’m starting to really think about my art and what it means to be a performer, what it means to be a musician, I decided I wanted to turn away from the classical repertoire. I felt really stifled by it. I felt that there was just this weight of the tradition. And a lot of it had to do with how we were being taught, which is, you had to copy other people. Being a rebel and being someone who always felt like I needed to find my own way into things, it felt very dogmatic.
I decided to create a different kind of repertoire and really explore other ways. A lot of it was about finding ways with my cello into different cultures, different genres. That being said, I have kind of a daily ritual, which is I meditate and then I pick up my cello and start playing, and Bach is always the music that I would play because it was like a grounding thing.
I never thought I wanted to record the Bach Cello Suites, or to perform it for an audience, because I always felt like there were plenty of beautiful recordings of it out there. And if I were to do it, I wanted to do it in my own way, because otherwise, what’s the point?
What happened was that in 2021, during the pandemic, everything stopped. And for the first time, I thought maybe I should get a country house, which I never really thought I wanted to, because I was happy living in New York City and I was mostly traveling.
But then all of a sudden, just being stuck in the same place for so long, my partner and I started to look for a place upstate and we mostly went up toward [the Hudson Valley], which is where a lot of our friends are. We couldn’t find anything there because the market was crazy, and then we ended up finding this magical place in the Berkshires of Massachusetts.
It was clear that I needed to be there. This place is incredible. And it has a converted barn that has the most amazing acoustics. The first day I was in the barn, I opened the cello and started to play Bach. As I was playing it, I thought, “Wow, maybe this is the place where I record the suites.” There was something about the sound there, and there was something about the idea of creating that music in that space and trying to let the space tell me where to go with it.
Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” was the first thing that came to my mind when I started to play. I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I play, and then start playing back what I’m recording into the room.” I wanted to do anything but the traditional way of recording. I wanted to see how we can make this space reshape this music, and in a way sort of recompose it. I wanted everything to be really organic.
I had so many other things I was doing at the time, but I decided to take a year. I work with this wonderful sound engineer, Dave Cook, who has been my collaborator for the last 15 years, and he’s not far from here, in the Woodstock area in New York. I said to Dave, “Let’s just create the studio here. Every time we have some time, let’s just come and experiment.” My original idea was to do 100 different versions of each one of those 36 movements, which we kind of did. But then we also experiment with all these different things.
To go back to why now and why Bach, it’s not like there is one reason. It really was serendipity. It just felt like the right moment for me. There are other things. I turned 60. … I think it’s funny, but it’s kind of an amazing age in many ways, because it’s so liberating.
Did the barn attract you because it removed the music from the academy?
Yes, very much. I always think about this, how we’ve created this pristine institution where we go to those concerts, and they feel so artificial in a way, so removed from our own personal experience. When I hear music, I want to do something. I either want to move, or go crazy, dance, or scream or cry or whatever. I always feel that there’s something so strange about this whole thing of needing to behave.
I just love the idea of creating in this super personal space, and bringing people into my own personal space, which I think is how we experience recordings. To me this is how you want to record your music, as opposed to going for three days to this studio where you’ve never been before and just sitting there in a windowless environment. I’ve done that, of course, many times, but I don’t love that. This was a different way. It felt great.
I think you could feel it in the music. One day we were recording the D-minor suite, which is one of my favorites, and it was raining really, really hard. My barn has glass ceilings and glass walls, and so you started to hear the rain. And we stopped, and I said to Dave, “Let’s just go outside and record the rain.”
I like that little bit of the messiness of the record; I just love to feel the human quality. I really care deeply, deeply about my sound, the sound of my cello. It’s more about feeling the immediacy of the sound, and that the sound brings you in. When I think of some of my heroes — Janis Joplin, Nina Simone — you feel that immediacy.
Can you talk a little bit about Alvin Lucier and his importance to you? How did his “I am sitting in a room” impact your approach?
It was a really important piece for me in terms of shaping my understanding of music in a larger context. He had a stutter, and it was his idea that he would talk [in the piece]. And eventually you couldn’t hear the stutter because of how he would play it back. It’s such a simple idea, but it’s so brilliant, because all he did was record himself, and then the recording was played back in the speaker once and then you record that, and then he would play it back in the speaker again until all that remains is just the overtones of the speaking voice. I have always been fascinated with the idea of reconfiguring and reshaping the space of the recording.
I’ve never actually 100-percent emulated him. I have done recordings where I just put multiple microphones around the room. And we did a recording a few years ago in the Hudson Opera House where we played everything back into the room, to the extent that it starts to become blurry and you lose the definition. Just the idea of replaying it in the room after you’ve recorded is such an interesting technique.
I wanted to take this [Bach] music that is like a sacred thing and do something somewhat subversive. I think what Lucier did was so important, just as much as Duchamp was in art.
What was the last David Bowie song you listened to?
The last David Bowie song that I’ve listened to? Oh, my God. I mean, I still listen to Blackstar. I cry because I miss David Bowie so much. He was such a virtual mentor. He was my hero because he refused to ever settle. He was constantly recreating himself as an artist, and that to me is such a great thing. It’s such an important thing, because I think it’s just so hard.
I think the tendency is that if you do something and it becomes successful, then everybody wants you to repeat that thing over and over. Because it’s easy. It’s like, “Just do that, because we know that’s working.” There’s everything else around it, right? There’s the marketing, and there’s this and that, and I’ve tried so hard to just kind of focus on what it is that I want to do and shut off all the others, which is not easy. And it’s a daily affirmation to ask yourself, “What do you really care about? What is really important to you?” And then shut all the other noise out. Especially these days, right? There’s so much noise. What does it mean to have a career and to be successful? So yeah, Bowie’s such a bright light.
For almost 60 years, Meredith Monk has made music that is both primal and pristine, guttural and graceful. She has created a unique style that draws on many types of vocal music but imitates no specific idiom; nor does it rely on language. As a composer, writing often for her group Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, she has won significant recognition for her vast portfolio of works, many of which involve a unique mix of music, dance and theater. In 1995 Monk earned a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” She holds numerous honorary doctorates, and in 2014 she received a National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
Although she is routinely categorized as a classical or contemporary classical musician, Monk’s sonic innovations have crossed over into many other camps. David Byrne collaborated with her for his film True Stories, and the Coen brothers used her music in The Big Lebowski.On DJ Shadow’s epochal Endtroducing, that’s her LP Dolmen Music sampled on the classic “Midnight in a Perfect World,” her “ah-woo” repeatedly offsetting the rhythm track. She went on to collaborate with other electronic musicians, and 10 years ago, Monk Mix: Remixes & Interpretations of Music by Meredith Monk was released.
In celebration of her recent 80th birthday, ECM Records, her home for decades, released a 13-disc box set of Monk’s music, including many of her most renowned works, such as Dolmen Music, Turtle Dreams and ATLAS. Another highlight of the box is a 300-page book with new and original liner notes, essays and photographs. Shortly before its release, Monk sat down for a Zoom call to discuss the roots of her visceral and diverse offerings, with topics ranging from Stravinsky to Janis Joplin and beyond.
Monk is one of the musicians whose work led to the coinage of “downtown” to describe the intrepid, often cross-disciplinary art created in Manhattan below 14th Street, but in conversation she proved pretty savvy in her appreciation of uptown icons like Duke Ellington and Paul Robeson, which wasn’t surprising. After all, she’s from a deeply musical family: Her mother, Audrey Marsh, was an accomplished singer during the golden age of radio, and the daughter of the operatic bass-baritone Joseph B. Zellman and the concert pianist Rose Kornicker. She was ready when I mentioned that I live around the corner from the Paul Robeson Residence in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
Meredith Monk: Ah! I just watched The Emperor Jones for the third time, because you want to be inspired by a human being that followed his path correctly and with total integrity. And I have a beautiful recording of him. He was a magnificent, magnificent human being. Wow, that’s amazing. What a place to live. You must feel all this energy.
TIDAL: Absolutely. And there’s lovely history in the area. I mean, from where I’m sitting, over my right shoulder, I see Duke Ellington’s building.
People say, “Well, what do you listen to?” I usually don’t listen to music when I’m working. But I do listen to a lot of recordings from the ’20s and ’30s — all the Cotton Club recordings I’ve got of Duke Ellington, Mildred Bailey. That period, I think, was a high point of American music.
Speaking of listening to music, was it difficult for you to go back through your ECM discography?
I was extremely touched when I heard that they were doing this. And I put a lot of work into doing some writing, because they wanted me to write liner notes for the albums that didn’t have liner notes at all. That wasDo You Be,Turtle Dreams and Mercy. It was really interesting to listen to that music again and see how I could write about it, and try to remember that time, but also write about it from the point of view of where I am now.
I think it’s interesting as a performing artist; I really love live performance. We’re not like writers, where we can look back and go, “Oh, I’ve really grown from that point.” So in a way the recordings are a little bit like that, where you can say, “I’ve seen my direction. It’s the same path, but I see the way that it’s branched out in different ways, and different ways that I’ve spiraled back around to some of the same ideas, but then they come out in a different way.” It’s very helpful.
Were there certain ideas that you revisited?
There are so many pieces where there’s a theme of the outsider, a kind of visionary character, like Book of Days and Education of the Girlchild. Some of that was in Dolmen Music. Inquiry — some that that theme goes through. I think redemption goes through it. Journey. Traveling. Certainly on something like Songs of Ascension.
There is flexible time and space, so that time is also a sculptural element. Also, time in the singing in relation to the instrumental music, I think it stretches, it compresses, it’s elastic. I think that goes through all my music.
What changes did you notice in going over the retrospective box? As it happens to most people as they go along in life, I think my later music is, in some ways, more objective and less dependent on personality. I think the earlier work was more dependent on me as a soloist. And I think it’s expanded because I’ve worked more incrementally.
In the early 2000s, Michael Tilson Thomas insisted that I write an orchestral work. I said no, for five years. I thought, “Well, I don’t know that much about the orchestra,” because I pretty much stayed with a keyboard and very small ensembles, so that the voice can have a lot of space to move.
I’ve always thought of the voice as an instrument. And if I think of the instruments as voices, then I think I’ll learn a lot, then I can go back to my own [work] and enrich the instrumental aspect of it. I think that’s another reason why the music in a way has expanded to a more global kind of feeling, in terms of objectivity.
You’ve worked with movement and dance and theater. Is composing still the primary base of your work? How does your work as a composer relate to your other disciplines? The music is the center of what I do, and the voice is the center of that. It just keeps on expanding. Because I am very happy with just hearing a record album or doing a music concert or having a composition played by other people. Whereas I think some of the, what I call the interdisciplinary pieces, are harder to mount. They’re much more dependent on the particular people in them. Music is the river of my life; it’s the heart of what I do. And everything branches from that.
Let’s discuss some of your influences. I understand that Janis Joplin is vital to you. I had started really exploring my own voice in a very primal way, a few years before I first heard her in the mid-’60s. And then there was a period where I pulled back from that and was much more intellectual and sort of conceptual in my work. I think that was just not a good place for me; I felt like it was sort of a dry place.
So when I heard her, it opened it back up. This much more primordial idea of the voice was something that I had found for myself, but her music gave me encouragement to go back — go back to the body, go back to the deep instrument of the voice that can express things for which we don’t have words.
And she was such a remarkable beauty, which is not just one little concept that the Western tradition has of what beauty is. No, her beauty is a kind of authenticity and power, and she was a magnificent musician. Her “Summertime” is one of the most beautiful “Summertimes” I’ve ever heard. She was a really, really extraordinary musician.
I understand that Henry Cowell’s Advertisement was also influential.
I was at Sarah Lawrence College, and I used to go to the library and get these big piles of vinyl of all 20th-century [classical] music, because when LPs came out, the first LP I ever had was [Stravinsky’s] Petrushka. I’ll never forget the first time that I heard The Rite of Spring, I went crazy. It opened up the universe to me, because I was always a very rhythmic person, and the rhythm was very deep for me.
That led to Henry Cowell, but first I heard John Cage, and I was like, “John Cage. That’s an interesting name.” I heard the String Quartet and The Seasons, which starts with a tritone, and I was like, “Wow, this is great.” And then Advertisement, it was like anarchistic energy, it was like Cecil Taylor or Albert Ayler. I was like, “This is pure energy. This is another idea of music.” I was blown away. I loved what he did, and the physicality of it.
It seems that you were influenced by a lot of jazz.
I think it was more broad. Music could be so much more than one tradition. I don’t think there is just one tradition in America. I feel closer to the American maverick tradition: one person going out into the woods and finding their own way. There is that tradition of people. I think a Thelonious Monk is like that; I felt like that’s a person who had this vision.
I love jazz, but I feel like I wasn’t really that. But the jazz musicians were the ones who gave me the most encouragement, like Sam Rivers, [and] later on Naná Vasconcelos and Don Cherry. They gave me so much encouragement. They were saying, “Go ahead. I know it sounds like it’s out, but keep going.” So they were very, very important to me.
I feel like I was not literate in the jazz traditions so much, and I had heard Monk a little bit, but not really studied him. This review said, “[Her music] has a bittersweet quality of her namesake Thelonious Monk,” and I was like, “Oh, God, I should listen more to this.” What I love about his music is he lays down the skeleton and you’ve got to fill in the flesh. You know what I’m saying? He laid down all that’s needed. He takes it down to the bone. And then you have that wonderful opportunity to fill it out. I’m crazy about that.
You were sampled on one of the most important hip-hop albums of all time. How do you feel about that?
I loved it. We did a whole remix album in early 2011. Some of the [artists] were more taking the composition and making new compositions, but some of them were classic remixes. Like DJ Rekha’s is one of my favorite remixes, of something from Vessel, that I thought sounds so great. I mean, it’s a good dance piece. What could be better than that?
In correspondence with the pianist, whose brand-new album is Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles, Martin Johnson thinks about the Fab Four’s place in jazz repertoire. by Martin Johnson
Credit: Elena Olivo
Seventeen years ago, I was on the opening team of a wine bar in the East Village, and we were approaching a big moment: We’d passed our inspections and were eagerly awaiting our first delivery of wine. As we anxiously passed the time, one of my teammates, Johnny Mac, asked if I’d heard of a jazz guy he’d just stumbled onto. He said the name was like “mildew or something.”
“Mehldau?” I asked. Johnny had been listening to a Radiohead station on internet radio, and in addition to the usual Britpop fare, it played the pianist’s version of the Kid A opener “Everything in Its Right Place.” Like any good music obsessive, John then spent much of his night down the rabbit hole, discovering Mehldau’s renditions of “Paranoid Android” and “Exit Music (For a Film).” But that wasn’t the real source of his excitement. He looked at me with bulging eyes and said, “They made so much music — just a piano, bass and drums.” In the following days and weeks, he’d announce new discoveries like Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris and some guy named Monk.
I relate that story every now and then to folks who begin wondering how to make jazz more accessible. You don’t. The music is fine; it doesn’t require technical analysis, just open ears. Given the large audiences Mehldau attracts, Johnny is far from the only jazz novice to take to his work. The pianist has built a repertoire ideally suited for the algorithmic age. Songs by Radiohead, Soundgarden, Sufjan Stevens and Nick Drake live in his arsenal, and they share equal billing with jazz standards. This isn’t pandering; in Mehldau’s hands, a grunge hit like “Black Hole Sun” becomes a 23-minute tour through post-bebop aesthetics in acoustic jazz.
Mehldau hasn’t so much revised the Great American Songbook as he has expanded it to include other music he adores. In fact, he’s written a book called Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part I, due out in March. The memoir details his tumultuous early life in New York, which included both heroin addiction and the chance to hear many jazz piano legends in intimate nightclubs and connect with them on the scene. It also details the way in which he developed a concept of pianism that’s one of the broadest in current jazz.
The book’s release dovetails with a new Nonesuch album, Your Mother Should Know: Brad Mehldau Plays the Beatles, that puts questions of repertoire front and center. Mehldau has performed Beatles tunes in the past: “And I Love Her,” “Blackbird,” “Martha My Dear” and “Mother Nature’s Son,” to name just a few. But on this solo-piano recording, he chooses a different tack than the one he described to me as “maximalist” in a recent email exchange. Here he takes a more nuanced approach.
The title track doesn’t swing in the Benny Goodman sense, but there’s an inflection of classic jazz, appropriate since that’s what Paul McCartney’s mum likely listened to. On “I Am the Walrus,” Mehldau includes little dissonances to reflect Lennon’s impassioned nasal tones and the other voices and instruments that turn up toward the end of the Magical Mystery Tour version. The program includes deeper Fab Four cuts like “Baby’s in Black” and George Harrison’s “If I Needed Someone.” Mehldau leans more toward McCartney songs. As he explained to NPR recently, he not only likes the melodies, for which Paul is famous, but the harmonies remind him of Schubert, one of the pianist’s beloved composers.
The recording concludes with, surprisingly, David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?” — a nod to the Beatles’ imprint on the music that followed their demise. Mehldau has said that one of his aims with the project is to demonstrate the Fab Four’s impact on keyboard-based pop. Growing up, he was a big fan of Billy Joel, Elton John and Supertramp; he’d heard the Beatles but didn’t take a scholarly dive until later.
The album’s conception began with a 2020 concert in Paris, part of a series of performances of Beatles songs. “I chose this selection, making it into a kind of recital,” Mehldau wrote to me. “I don’t know if I would have organized a program exclusively from the Beatles otherwise, but I’m glad that I did, because it led me to think about my solo-piano approach more generally, in the process of preparing the program.”
About those song selections, he added, “I tried to give a variety of moods so the listener could go on a journey and not just stay in one zone. That’s pretty easy with the Beatles, because their output was so varied. I toggled between some of the ‘weirder’ [in the best sense] songs from John, like ‘I Am the Walrus,’ and the more spiritualized output from Paul, like ‘Golden Slumbers.’ I included some of their more rhythm-and-blues-based earlier stuff, like ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ and ‘Baby’s in Black,’ and took a stab at Paul’s quirky zone in ‘Your Mother Should Know’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer.’ I wanted to do ‘The Fool on the Hill’ but just didn’t pull together an approach I could get behind.”
Ideally the recording will begin to recontextualize the Beatles. Despite their planetwide omnipresence, all too often their music is pigeonholed into the same old settings — easy listening, baby-boomer self-appreciation — when the catalog is so much richer than that. Their innovations continue to provide profound source material, and Mehldau’s choices resist the urge to nostalgize their work. Johnny Mac, who loved the Beatles and, by opening night, Brad Mehldau, would approve.
‘Black Radio’ Returns: Robert Glasper in Conversation
The keyboardist brings his best-selling, genre-bending concept back, offering hopeful grooves in a time of social turmoil. by Martin Johnson
Credit: Mancy Gant.
One warm winter afternoon 15 years ago, Robert Glasper sat with a reporter at an upscale café near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. It was the usual interview; Glasper was a rising star on the jazz scene, but his second Blue Note album, In My Element, argued that his vision stretched beyond the genre. After explaining how Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” fit so well in a mashup with Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage” and Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine,” Glasper paused and smiled broadly when asked about another track on the recording, “J Dillalude.” He looked down at his hands and gave a pat answer about Dilla’s enormous importance to the music of the 21st century. He seemed to have more to say, but the reporter, who was writing for an urban glossy, figured he had enough for his readers and moved on.
2007 was a good time to be a jazz pianist with ambition. Brad Mehldau, Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer, just to name a few, were all expanding their reach well beyond jazz’s city limits, and it appeared that Glasper had similar aims. He had the outlines of what would become Black Radio, but he didn’t want to spill the beans. Released five winters later, in 2012, Black Radio not only exploded Glasper’s career but changed the paradigm for how the borders between jazz and popular music function. Ten winters later, with Black Radio III about to drop, Glasper sat down with the same reporter, to look back and gaze ahead.
Glasper is 43 now and the father of two. He still has an excited gleam in his eyes, but his joy from making music is balanced with the pleasures and responsibilities of parenthood. This time the dialogue took place via Zoom, as Glasper relocated to Los Angeles a little over two years ago, just after he recorded Dinner Party with saxophonist Kamasi Washington, keyboardist/saxophonist Terrace Martin and producer 9th Wonder. “New York kind of became a hamster wheel for me,” he said. “I should have moved a while ago, but I’m glad I made it here now.”
Glasper and Yasiin Bey, a.k.a. Mos Def, backstage at New York’s Blue Note Jazz Club in 2018. Credit: Johnny Nunez/WireImage.
Glasper already had the rudiments of Black Radio in mind when he signed with Blue Note in 2005, but first he wanted to establish himself as a jazz pianist. Canvas and In My Element accomplished that, and 2009’s Double Booked featured contributions from Yasiin Bey, a.k.a. Mos Def, and Bilal, and split its offerings between Glasper’s acoustic trio and the electric Experiment band that would provide the baseline for his genre-bending pursuits. In earnest, he began shifting his energies toward the Black Radio concept, a name derived from a project between Glasper and Bey. “The premise was like the black box on the airplane survives the fire,” he explained. “So we were like, great music survives the fire. Great music gonna be around forever, the Black Radio, and that will stand the test of time.”
And indeed it may. The recording, which featured a stellar cast of guests including Bey, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Lalah Hathaway and Lupe Fiasco, climbed several Billboard charts simultaneously and won a Grammy for Best R&B Album. By that time the Houston-rooted musician had toured for years with giants like Maxwell and, as music director, Bey. The period also saw the keyboardist take part in the sessions that would result in Kendrick Lamar’s landmark 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly. Following the Grammy and an impressive set of remixes, there was a follow-up, Black Radio 2, with a few holdovers from the first volume plus heavy hitters like Common, Jill Scott, Snoop Dogg, Faith Evans and Norah Jones. Then Glasper had to give the concept a break.
In addition to his own recordings, he collaborated with an impressive roster of A-listers in R&B, hip-hop and jazz, and formed two supergroups: August Greene, with Common and drummer-producer Karriem Riggins; and R+R=NOW, with Martin, trumpeter Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, keyboardist/beatboxer Taylor McFerrin, bassist Derrick Hodge and drummer Justin Tyson. And the spirit of the Black Radio projects lived on in Fuck Yo Feelings, his debut for the Loma Vista label, a result of a marathon session with many esteemed guests stopping by to add their parts. Meanwhile, he won major awards for an August Greene song that appeared in Ava DuVernay’s 13th and for his score on Don Cheadle’s Miles Ahead.
Finally, with the world in lockdown due to the ravages of Covid-19, Glasper decided to revisit Black Radio. He built a studio in the back of his home and began sending out sound files. It was hard not to work alongside his collaborators in the flesh, but it was also hard because many of his associates were simply not feeling creative. Yet in the end, the times provided the motivation.
“When I made Black Radio one and two, that was on the heels of Obama,” he said. “And then making this was at the end of Trump, so it’s a different, different vibe out there. And with everything going on, with the police shootings and George Floyd and you name it, everything, [pauses] so many things are happening. As an artist, when these things are happening, you have a choice to make: It’s like, do I make an album and really address this stuff?”
To that end, Black Radio III begins with somber pronouncements from poet Amir Sulaiman that reveal the emotions he felt while watching Floyd’s murder. Other guests range from Q-Tip to Esperanza Spalding to Jennifer Hudson to India.Arie. The music has the same flow and vibe of its predecessors, traversing and melding jazz, R&B, hip-hop and more, again reminding listeners that genre barriers are mostly artificial constructs. Another topical track is “Black Superhero,” an ode to Black women everywhere, featuring Killer Mike, BJ The Chicago Kid and Big K.R.I.T. “My mom was a Black superhero. My aunt was a Black superhero. My grandmother was a Black superhero,” he said passionately. “We don’t give women that kind of title, you know what I mean? Yet women are the backbone of a Black community.”
Since moving west, his soundtrack agenda has grown. With Derrick Hodge he’s scored the TV series Run the World and, with Terrace Martin, he’s worked on the dramatic Fresh Prince reboot Bel-Air. Then he mentioned Winning Time, the upcoming series about the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, and saw the reporter smirking. It is quite possibly the most Los Angeles thing ever to move from New York, home of struggling hoops, and get involved immediately with the Lakers.
Glasper smiled back and, in a mock-defensive tone, pleaded that the prolific score composer Nicholas Britell reached out to him. “It was totally random,” he said with a grin that quickly dissolved into laughter.
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