Julia Hulsmann, Theo Bleckmann and Kurt Weill – Beat! Beat! Drum!
Writing about Kurt Weill in that 20th-century music bible The Rest Is Noise, the New Yorker critic Alex Ross invoked a 1928 Weill essay called On the Gestic Character of Music – a reference to musical gestures, in which the audience’s attention is suddenly grabbed by a familiar sound. Weill was brilliant at that. His classical education and precocity as a young composer in Germany gave him an eclectic understanding of structure, harmony and narrative development, and his absorption of American popular music following his flight from the Nazis in 1933 provided a bold counterweight to his complexities. That tension has fascinated Weill interpreters from his own day to now – artists all the way from Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald or Lotte Lenya, to Tom Waits, Marianne Faithfull and John Zorn. Two German contemporary musicians, the jazz pianist Julia Hulsmann and the cross-genre singer Theo Bleckmann, give Weill’s songs (famous and not-so-famous) a grippingly unfamiliar, slow-turning spin on the new ECM Records release A Clear Midnight this month. Listen to the Weill tune for the Walt Whitman poem Beat Beat Drum below.
Miles Davis in the 80s
The music of Miles Davis is rarely off the radar of jazz listeners and players. We all keep coming back to the dark magus of jazz, not just because of his beautiful sound and uncanny timing, but because of his conviction that a collaborative music cooked up in the moment can produce results that last for ever. That’s why the final decade of Miles’s life – the 1980s, when he seemed to be urgently in search of the tipping point between creative music and popular success – still sparks controversy. Were his pop-fusion collaborations with bassist/producer Marcus Miller on albums such as Tutu and Amandla any good, or did they shortchange his fans and his own huge talent? Presenter Jez Nelson, journalist Chris May and I discussed this on the Jazz on 3 radio show this month. Time didn’t permit the inclusion of one of my favourite Miles tracks from that era – guitarist John Scofield’s compulsively climbing, harmonically devious composition You’re Under Arrest, from the 1985 album of the same name that also included haunting performances by Miles on Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time and Michael Jackson’s Human Nature. It’s always foxed me why You’re Under Arrest never became a jazz-fusion standard.
Cutting Rachmaninov down to size
Almost every time I’ve turned on the car radio in the past couple of weeks a Rachmaninov piano concerto seems to have been playing, and I’ve caught myself humming those smoochy melodies all over the place. On the shaky basis that jazz buffs are supposed to think sentimentality is a serious health hazard, I have turned to the antidote before getting sucked too far in, so here are those no-nonsense virtuosos Aleksey Igudesman and Richard Hyung-ki Joo showing how to purge late-Romanticism before it’s too late.
Gregory Porter and Laura Mvula
The jazz festival season is imminent, with Gateshead’s annual weekender at the Sage including star US saxists David Sanborn and Joshua Redman in early April, and the Cheltenham jazz festival close on its heels. Cheltenham runs from 29 April to 4 May, and as usual there’s plenty of sharp jazz in it, from the Sun Ra Arkestra and legendary saxist Lee Konitz’s partnership with trumpeter Dave Douglas, to guitarist John Scofield’s encounter with young German pianist Pablo Held, and that thrilling multinational piano trio Phronesis. Two elegantly emotional vocalists, Gregory Porter and Laura Mvula, celebrate the music of the Gershwins on 4 May, presenting the most popular face of the festival for many. Here they are on an earlier meeting, singing Porter’s soul-ballad Water Under Bridges.
Joe Lovano Village Rhythms Band
That walking history book of jazz saxophone, Joe Lovano, arrives with his Village Rhythms Band for gigs at Ronnie Scott’s on 30 April and 1 May, and at Cheltenham on 2 May. Lovano jammed in Nigeria with afrobeat giant Fela Kuti in the 80s, and though he travelled remarkably diverse jazz landscapes thereafter – orchestral music, Frank Sinatra tributes, Cuban jazz, the Cool School, free improv – the experience left an impression on him that has never faded. The Village Rhythms group, tracing links between west African music and American jazz, features guitarist Liberty Ellman, bassist Michael Olatuja, percussionist/African harpist Abdou Mboup, and drummer Otis Brown III. Here they are at The Stone in New York.
The bass clarinet and God Bless the Child
British reeds star Courtney Pine and that fine pianist Zoe Rahman are on tour as a duo until July, with pieces from Pine’s new album Song (The Ballad Book). Speaking at London’s Kings Place last week, Pine engagingly described the music of this new venture as “shy”, compared with the bravura and crowd-rousing intensity of much of his work of the past three decades. He also touched on the songs that have meant a lot to him (from Amazing Grace to R&B star Brian McKnight’s One Last Cry), and the jazz creators who have given familiar songs new identities. Eric Dolphy surely falls into the latter category; he did much to give the bass clarinet – Pine’s current instrument of choice – such a powerful role in contemporary jazz. Pine plays the moving Billie Holiday classic God Bless the Child on the new album. Here’s where that story began, with Dolphy’s bass clarinet solo on it, from New York’s Five Spot in 1961.
Selma
As he showed at the London jazz festival in a piano duet with Robert Glasper last November, the American pianist/composer Jason Moran can conjure big impressions from the simplest circumstances, and his work consistently suggests rich resources held in reserve. But, catching up late with Ava DuVernay’s inspirational civil rights movie Selma, I discovered what happens when he lets those resources show. Moran has referenced Duke Ellington, early-jazz stride-piano giants Thelonious Monk, Afrika Bambaataa and a whole lot more in his projects since the late 90s, and he subtly applied everything he knows to his intelligent and sensitive soundtrack debut. Here’s Bloody Sunday Walkup, from Moran’s Selma score.
Arun Ghosh and Jazz for Labour
They kept the speeches to a minimum and prolonged the music for over three hours at the upbeat Jazz for Labour concert at the Barbican a few weeks back. The point was made that if views on immigration prevailing in some corners of British politics found their way into law, the vivacious Manchester clarinetist Arun Ghosh (winner of the Parliamentary jazz awards’ instrumentalist of the year prize in 2014) might well not be around to spread as much goodwill as he does. Here’s Ghosh with Caliban’s Revenge, a tune he wrote for the late Lancashire actor Pete Postlethwaite, and exhilaratingly played at Jazz for Labour.
Hakon Kornstad and Jazzland
Norway’s Jazzland, the record label founded by pianist Bugge Wesseltoft in 1997 to document a wider and quirkier range of the country’s experimental jazz and nu-fusion than Jan Garbarek devotees might be aware of, is running a trilogy of showcase gigs at London’s Kings Place. The saxophonist Hakon Kornstad is there with his one-man show on 25 March, and he returns to the UK for the Gateshead international jazz festival on 10 April. Kornstad has updated an early fascination with John Coltrane’s sax-playing with cutting-edge electronics and sampling, and then thrown in grand opera for good measure. Here’s a taste of the work of a real one-off.
Nigel Kennedy plays Hendrix
There’s a connection between jazz and that force-of-nature improviser Jimi Hendrix that was derailed by his early death. Hendrix’s last live performance was at Ronnie Scott’s, and he might have gone on to work with Miles, or played lead with a Gil Evans band – or he might have jammed with the virtuoso violinist Nigel Kennedy, one of his most musically eloquent fans. Hendrix was there in spirit this month on the very stage he departed in 1970, conjured up by Kennedy in a mix of scalding and tender interpretations. One of the set’s highlights was the entrancing ballad Little Wing.
