James Moody
‘80 Years Young: Live at The Blue Note, March 26, 2005’
Origin Records

‘The Complete James Moody Septet • 1951-1955’
Fresh Sound Records

Blue Note Jazz Festival
Various Venues, Through July 2

Somehow, my favorite bebopper, James Moody, was also my favorite rapper. In 1946, the 21-year-old veteran of the Army Air Corps joined Dizzy Gillespie’s pioneering big band, which even then was recognized as the greatest modern jazz orchestra, and within a few years Moody would become identified as Gillespie’s most storied musical partner after Charlie Parker. 

Soon enough, he would also be established as a major bandleader as well as a great soloist in his own right. Making his achievement all the more remarkable, Moody suffered from a hearing impairment as a youngster and didn’t even start studying music and the saxophone until he was 16, shortly before he was drafted.

Spring 2025 marks the centennial of the jazz great, who was born in Savannah and raised by a single mother in Newark, which is why that city’s performing arts center names its annual fall jazz festival in his honor. Moody was a perfect foil for Gillespie because he not only was one of jazz’s most distinguished improvisers — a true first-generation modernist with no connection to the earlier swing bands — but also, like Dizzy, he was a highly charismatic entertainer and an irrepressible funnyman.

The big birthday was celebrated in an all-star concert on Tuesday evening at Sony Hall, thus officially kicking off the 2025 Blue Note Jazz Festival, and Moody’s estate is also releasing a live recording of the great man’s 80th birthday celebration at the Blue Note in 2005.

There’s a definite tie-in between the 80th (on record) and the 100th (live at Sony Hall) birthday celebrations, as both start with Moody’s regular rhythm section, with bassist Todd Coolman and drummer Adam Nussbaum. The major difference is that pianist Renee Rosnes, who played with this group for roughly 20 years, was at the concert whereas it’s David Hazeltine on the album.  

The guest stars include trumpeters Jon Faddis and Randy Brecker, alto saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera — all of whom were also present at Sony Hall — as well as two more jazz colossi who, like Moody himself, have since joined the great band in the sky: trombonist Slide Hampton and pianist Cedar Walton. The concert was hosted by bassist Christian McBride and co-directed by Mr. McBride and Ms. Rosnes. 

The role of Moody was filled by three musicians who were too young to have heard the man himself live, tenor saxophonist Birsa Chatterjee, recipient of the Moody Scholarship and graduate of Mr. McBride’s Jazz House Kids program, the dynamic flautist Elena Pinderhughes, and vocalist Tyreek McDole, the most recent winner of the Sarah Vaughan vocal competition.
No one tried to specifically imitate Moody’s sound, but Mr. Chatterjee played with a big, exuberant tone and a predilection for the blues that would have stood Moody proud, and Mr. McDole more than delivered with the great man’s two most familiar vocal numbers, the parody “Benny’s From Heaven” and the classic vocalese variation on a familiar standard, “Moody’s Mood for Love.” 

Mr. McDole was joined on the latter by Roberta Gambarini, the singer most enthusiastically championed by Moody himself in the latter part of his life, singing the female part of Eddie Jefferson’s iconic lyric as introduced by Blossom Dearie and inspired by a Swedish pianist, Thore Swanerud.

Messrs. Faddis and D’Rivera were particularly strong partners for Moody — both on the 80th and 100th celebrations — because of their own close ties to Gillespie and because they possess senses of humor well beyond most contemporary musicians. Mr. Faddis is a trumpet powerhouse of extraordinary chops, but his most memorable moment was an introspective muted solo introducing the evening’s third vocalist, the veteran Madeleine Peyroux, on “The Mood That I’m In.”  

Mr. D’Rivera likewise shined on clarinet on a Bach-inspired intro to Gillespie’s “Con Alma.” The Sony Hall event was also a particularly brilliant one for Ms. Rosnes; even though she left it to Mr. McBride, with his distinctive baritone, to do the talking, she turned in one brilliant piano solo after another. 

Moody’s centennial is also being celebrated with the release of a lesser-known group of his recordings, made with his seven-piece working band for various labels between 1951 and ’55. At the time, Moody, who had just returned from a long stay in Scandinavia, led this group that very carefully threaded the needle between bebop and rhythm-and-blues.  Critics somehow didn’t get it at the time, but the 50 or so tracks that Moody’s septet cut in these years sound brilliant today.

The Sony Hall event featured several of Moody’s originals, his somewhat baroque blues, “Darben The Redd Foxx,” and “Last Train from Overbrook,” a 1958 piece commemorating his return from Overbrook Asylum, in which he conquered his addiction problems — a key moment in his life that essentially empowered him to become one of the great elder statesmen of modern jazz. To the end, Moody kept playing the quintessential bebop classics like “Cherokee,” heard on the album and during the concert.

There was one Moody bit that they didn’t try to recreate; in later years, when he sang “Moody’s Mood for Love,” he would finish by detouring into a comedy rap about watching TV. I saw him do it live dozens of times, but now hearing it on the 80th birthday album, I’m reminded again of how funny and hip Moody was. “Click to click, from station to station / television is my only salvation,” he chants amid a few dozen references to vintage soap operas and other daytime programs. He would then go into a yodel — yes, a yodel — before the rhythm section ended with a grandiose classical flourish.

I always left a Moody performance feeling like I was walking 10 feet off the ground. How gratifying to know that even 15 years after he left us, he still has the same effect on me.