The Spirit of a Jazz Great, Wayne Shorter, Is Carried Forward by an All-Female Band, Artemis

Artemis‘In Real Time’Blue Note RecordsArtemis may be our generation’s equivalent of Weather Report. The contemporary jazz ensemble founded by pianist Renee Rosnes, which was a major hit at Newport last week, has at least a few abstract points in common with that now-legendary group. Both are all-star collectives, and one aspect that they share is that people frequently misunderstand the basic concept of the bands. Fifty years ago, most everyone — myself included — assumed that the driving idea behind Weather Report was to lead the world in the performance of the music then known as “jazz-rock fusion.” Likewise, people now assume that the central idea of Artemis is that it is an all-female band. Both points are true, but not the whole truth. Joe Zawinal and Wayne Shorter founded Weather Report because they wanted to create an all-star group that would benefit from the collective playing and composing talents of the entire ensemble, starting with the two co-leaders themselves. That, fundamentally, is the same basic idea underlying Artemis.Rather than simply being Ms. Rosnes’s group, she makes a point of playing original compositions from all of the group’s members. Yes, Weather Report used electronic keyboards and basses, and yes, all the members of Artemis are women, but neither would be very interesting if that were all there was to it.Artemis has a further connection with Weather Report in that their primary compositional inspiration would seem to be the late Wayne Shorter. As a young player, Ms. Rosnes apprenticed with Shorter on several of his post-Weather Report projects, and she, like many 21st century jazz creators, seems profoundly influenced by him. Artemis’s second and most recent album, “In Real Time,” concludes with a lovely reading of Shorter’s 1965 ballad “Penelope.”The name of the ensemble derives from the ancient Greek “Goddess of the Hunt,” which is the title of the opening track on their first, self-titled album from 2020. Over the five years or so that Artemis has been together, they’ve kept four of their six members, in trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, bassist Noriko Ueda, and drummer Allison Miller in addition to Ms. Rosnes. The current line-up also features two saxophonists, Alexa Tarantino on alto and Nicole Glover.“In Real Time” is actually framed by two late jazz composer-instrumentalists, the pianist Lyle Mays, best known for his longtime association with Pat Metheny, wrote “Slink,” which Artemis infuses with a shot of boppish energy — even more so than on the premiere version, from the 1986 album “Lyle Mays.” The other tracks include Ms. Rosnes’s “Empress Afternoon” and “Balance of Time” along with Ms. Jensen’s “Timber,” which spotlights Ms. Rosnes making a rare foray on electric keyboards, and Ms. Tarantino’s “Whirlwind,” which gradually comes into focus as a swirling, somewhat hesitating melody that features the composer on flute.The album builds to “Penelope,” which starts with a harmon-muted trumpet intro by Ms. Jensen that is offset by dark chords from Ms. Rosnes. It’s a masterful arrangement by the pianist in which individual soloists and the entire ensemble rise and fall seamlessly, in a way that seems at once carefully orchestrated and yet spontaneous.I’ve been privileged to catch three live sets by Artemis this year, including at Birdland and then, in May, closing out the season at the Appel Room for Jazz at Lincoln Center. The show at Newport was the capper; perhaps not coincidentally, the six-piece band followed a set by a Wayne Shorter tribute quartet, which essentially was Shorter’s final working trio plus tenor saxophonist Ravi Coltrane in for the late leader.Although there was a slight pause between the two groups as the stage was reset, they did indeed seem like two halves of the same concert. Even though no one was promoting it as such, Artemis’s 60-minute show was very much in the spirit of the late and iconic saxophonist-bandleader-composer. A case in point was “What the World Needs Now,” which was almost immediately picked up by jazz artists such as Sarah Vaughan. The band, which has been including this 1965 Burt Bacharach/Hal David standard in recent concerts, slowed it down and stretched it out, playing it with a bloggy, amorphous feeling while yet keeping it a jazz waltz. In general, the band stressed those aspects that Bacharach and Shorter have in common in a way that surely would have made both composers happy.At Newport, Artemis performed during the early Saturday afternoon, when the sun was at its height and the thermometer was around 90, with the heat and the pounding sun helping shape the tempo of the music. Fittingly, the set concluded with one of Shorter’s most celebrated works, “Footsteps,” famously written for Miles Davis’s great ’60s quintet. Both the Shorter and the Bacharach works were slowed down to catch the mood of a moment when nobody, whether on stage or in the vast sun-drenched lawn in front of it, seemed to want to move. Ms. Rosnes and company showed us that the twocomposers, who worked extensively in odd meters usually not employed in jazz or pop, have much in common.Just like Artemis itself isn’t about gender, any more than Weather Report was about electricity, the former now shows us that a great piece of music isn’t about category, either.

The Spirit of a Jazz Great, Wayne Shorter, Is Carried Forward by an All-Female Band, Artemis

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