New Music, Old Friends

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The diversity of contemporary jazz musicians is astonishing. You don’t see modern rock stars creating new works that sound like 1950s doo-wop. Yet in jazz we have new bebop, new free jazz, new swing. The musicians that most grab my attention are the ones who not only have a distinct, commanding voice on their instruments but who play with genre, just as they play with blues and song form. Compositions in and of themselves are a primary criteria – the best new records are the ones with the melody lines you remember.


So, in no particular order, I’d like to highlight:


HUGH RAGIN
“Revelations”


Mr. Ragin is all over the map – literally. He was born and raised in Houston, earns his living as director of Jazz Studies at Metropolitan State College in Denver, and recorded this album (JTR 8502) in Brooklyn for release on a Canadian label. Stylistically, he’s avant-garde, but it’s hard to imagine a jazz fan who wouldn’t love Mr. Ragin’s music immediately. His playing is engagingly extroverted and his tunes – especially the R&B-like “Kamal’s Gift” – are so catchy they grab you from the first note. This is avant-garde music you could play at your prom.


DAVID WEISS
“The Mirror”


The latest in a rewarding series of albums for the Barcelona-based Fresh Sound New Talent (FSNT 204),this was released both under Mr. Weiss’s name and as the New Jazz Composers Octet. Mr. Weiss’s music, which in this case was inspired by the films of Russian moviemaker Andrei Tarkovsky, is very complex: Firmly in the bop tradition, he composes intricate melodies in unusual forms on top of rich chord progressions. Yet his presentation is comparatively simple: He comes up with memorable tunes and assembles tight bands full of the best young musicians in the city to play them. These include Myron Walden on alto saxophone, Marcus Strickland and Craig Handy on tenor saxophone, Xavier Davis on piano, and Dwayne Burno on bass.


ALICE COLTRANE
“Translinear Light”


Keyboardist Alice Coltrane has always been a woman in the middle, in between her late husband, John Coltrane, and her son, rising tenor star Ravi Coltrane. (Mr. Coltrane co-produced this album with Universal’s Ken Druker.) She shared John Coltrane’s fascination with spiritual music, and it became a lifelong preoccupation. The flavor here, as with most of her albums, is of Indian-Hindi religious music – she makes her Wurlitzer organ sound mysteriously like a sitar. Ms. Coltrane remains in the middle, this time between major bassists and drummers from the generations of Coltrane Senior (Charlie Haden, Jack DeJohnette) and Coltrane Junior (James Genus, Jeff Watts.)


MATT WILSON’S ARTS & CRAFTS
“Wake Up”


One of several recommended new releases on Palmetto – among them Bobby Watson and Horizon’s “Horizon Re assembled,” and Ben Allison and Medicine Wheel’s “Buzz” – “Wake Up” (PM-2104) uses a trumpet and rhythm format, putting the spotlight on the fine brassman Terrell Stafford, with veteran bassist Dennis Irwin and Larry Goldings on piano and organ. Drummer Wilson doesn’t hog the spotlight either as soloist or composer, functioning mainly as maestro, putting together a program of diverse tunes. that, as he says, are approached with the same kind of “innocent playfulness” he sees in his own children.


DAVID BERGER
“Marlowe”


An outstanding original composition for full jazz big band (SST 1003), this is also imaginatively presented, although I wonder if the name of his ensemble (The Sultans of Swing) and the faux-1940s packaging may remind potential listeners of the retro-swing movement of a few years ago and scare them away. Mr. Berger’s use of Ellingtonian textures – the romantic minor seconds from the piano, alto saxophonist Jerry Dodgion doing Johnny Hodges – is so assured he could have worked as one of the Duke’s own aides-de-camp. But as “Marlowe” develops, it becomes clear the composer is his own man. He mixes in elements of classical form and wartime pop (big band jazz and film noir scores), laced with just enough dissonance to remind us when and where we are.


To recap some of the outstanding albums already mentioned in these pages: Joe Lovano’s “All For You” (Blue Note-91950), a solid set of ballads with the great Hank Jones at the piano and drummer Paul Motian injecting an element of menace; “Ivey-Divey” (Blue Note-78215) Don Byron’s rumination on the classic collaboration of Lester Young, Nat King Cole, and Buddy Rich; Mark Turner’s “Fly” (Savoy-17325), by another outstanding trio that raises the bar for collective improvisation; Clark Terry’s “Porgy and Bess” (A440-9002), which shows how well the orchestrations written by Gil Evans for Miles Davis work with the trumpet guru who was Davis’s initial inspiration; Tony Bennett’s “The Art of Romance” (Columbia-693571), which takes the love song to deeper levels than anyone could have imagined; Wynton Marsalis’s “Magic Hour” (Blue Note-91717), a set that makes it delightfully clear that the less ambitious the trumpeter-composer gets the more enjoyable his music becomes; Bill Charlap’s “Somewhere: The Songs of Leonard Bernstein” (Blue Note-94807) re-establishes the young pianist as one of the most commanding interpreters of the Great American Songbook.


Finally, we can’t leave 2004 behind without mention of a few who have passed away: Cy Coleman, Robin Kenyatta, Joe Bushkin, Steve Lacy, and John R.T. Davies. In case you’ve never heard the last name, he was the greatest “restoration engineer” that ever was – a man who could take a pile of beat up shellac and make you feel like you were in the same room with King Oliver or Jelly Roll Morton. Like the great musicians mentioned above, he made you feel the living presence of the music’s history.


The New York Sun

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