Tag: SFJAZZ

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"Hey, Fred!" live music

Things I’ve Been Digging – 01/04/2021

Welcome back, anyone still reading this. I appreciate the kind words about the year-end wrap-up posts more than I can ever say, and I always appreciate all of you. Hoping we’re only a few months away from easing into my bending some of your ears in person, but I hope and intend to keep this up even when most of the things I love in a week are back out in the world. Keep the faith, stay safe, burn your lanterns of hope.

I started 2021 strong on the New Year’s Eve weekend with three shows that reminded me that music and storytelling are frequently social forms. Instead of making me despair at being so far away from the people I’d be seeing shows with – and the bands I’d be dancing to – it made me feel warm and close to that vibration.

Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Derry deBorja, taken from stream and edited

Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, Brooklyn Bowl Nashville, 12/31/2020

I prepped for a round of Zoom New Year’s Eve celebrations by getting dressed and dancing in the living room to Isbell’s finely tuned band’s perfect mix of rocking wistfulness, ass-shaking melancholy, soulful empathy, and hope for the world.

Isbell’s 2020 record Reunions played with cleaner, shimmering textures and rhythms than his last few and continued the more open arrangements and space for the band to make their mark started with The Nashville Sound. For many of us, even those of us who are sick of that sparkling Dire Straits guitar, those tones cut a distinct tunnel to nostalgia, and Isbell used that with a perfect set of songs about his (and our) growing up and also about living in the world now.

For someone who’s written so many stirring crowd-pleasers, I enjoyed seeing how these new songs held their own and made space in dialogue with tunes we’ve been singing along to for years. Wrapping the encore with his surging anthem to questioning and rejecting complacency, to the implacable sense we can all always be doing better, “What Have I Done To Help,” felt like a perfect hymn for the coming year. It also felt like the character’s direct evolution from his breakout hit “Cover Me Up” played right before.

The melancholy of nostalgia and longing for absent friends in songs like “Dreamsicle” and “Only Children,” bloomed in three dimensions, a reminder that memory and paying witness are celebrations even when we’re sad. The surge of the rhythm section helped keep anything – even songs in a quieter space like “Something More Than Free” – from being staid or stiff, and there was always air for the melodic flights of Amanda Shires’ violin and Sadler Vaden and Isbell’s dueling guitars to spark off one another. 

Weird as it was seeing the full Brooklyn Bowl light show cut through the shadows of their cavernous, empty Nashville outpost, this never felt like a rehearsal. Nothing seemed phoned in or rushed, nor was it too slick. This set reminded me of the promise of a great, muscular rock band on a good night. It made me hungry to be in the room for the real thing but grateful for this marker until we can do that.

Maceo Parker, Bruno Speight, and Will Boulware, taken from stream and edited

Maceo Parker, SFJAZZ, 01/01/2021 (archival from 2015)

Maceo’s horn has defined American music from the early 1960s on. I was lucky enough to see him with Prince, with Ani Difranco (in a double bill that still feels like the most fun I’ve ever seen two bands have on stage with one another), and tearing up the Scioto Mile on a ferocious free summer set. 

I’ve rhapsodized about the SFJAZZ streams for members in this space, and we were treated to an exquisite example from Parker’s 2015 NYE run. I marveled at the way Parker builds and sustains these relationships, how much gratitude he brings to this band, and in return, how tight they are as a unit, following through the kaleidoscopic range of moods and tones he calls out.

He reached back through pieces of his (and the nation’s) history in a tight hour and ten set. He briefly touched on the jazz of the booking’s name with a sweet duet on the Ellington classic “Satin Doll” as a duo with keyboardist Will Boulware. His JBs days got sultry, hard-edged workout on “Make It Funky,” featuring a flame-licked trombone solo from Greg Boyer (who he met in his days with George Clinton) and a closing tent-revival version of “Pass the Peas.”

Nikki Glaspie from Dumpstaphunk and the Nth Power kicked Parker’s classic Prince collaboration “Baby Knows” from Dial M-A-C-E-O into high gear with a crackling drum intro. She threw that same explosive energy into the slightly smoother shine of their arrangement on The Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-Way.” 

Her hookup with P-Funk bassist Rodney “Skeet” Curtis shone throughout the set, especially on moments like her perfect, surprising comping behind his melodic slap solo on the Parker original “Off The Hook.” The band worked just as well when the energy slipped into a simmer, especially on an instrumental cover of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Let’s Get It On” the let Parker show off that sweet but never too sugary tone in full undulating pillow talk mode.

In addition to shouting out the band and creating showcase spots for them, Parker even made time to shout out and thank the crew from the stage, many of them by name. That love for people lit up the band and the music, bringing a tear to my eye.

Lenny Kaye and the Lonesome Prairie Dogs, taken from the stream and edited

Various Artists, Hank-O-Rama, Bowery Electric, 01/01/2021

For the last 17 years, Brooklyn roots band The Lonesome Prairie Dogs have honored Hank Williams with a set on the day he died, making up for the Canton Ohio show he missed. This year, they marked the anniversary with a stream from Bowery Electric.

Lenny Kaye played pedal steel on almost everything. The Lonesome Horns (a trio of brass players from Antibalas led by Jordan McLean) augmenting several songs enhanced this hard-swinging four-piece core. This seasoned NYC institution tore through raging party classics like “Settin’ The Woods On Fire” and aching ballads like “Cold, Cold Heart” with equal aplomb.

A rotating set of other lead singers fleshed out the visions of Hank here, with East Village organizer and singer-songwriter Tom Clark, MC Lindy Loo, and Sean Kershaw all taking turns at the mic, along with Kaye stepping out from behind the steel for his tribute to Williams’ alter ego Luke the Drifter (from his 1984 Lenny Kaye Connection record) and the Lonesome Horns’  rotating lead vocals on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

These Bowery Electric shows always remind me of what I love most about New York, the way scenes feel malleable and overlap and this sense of “Kids putting on a show” but with the highest caliber of musicians you’ll find anywhere. Even some technical rough spots – moments where multiple singers worked together, as the finale “I Saw The Light” exposed some serious monitor problems – made this feel like home.

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"Hey, Fred!" live music

Things I’ve Been Digging – 10/12/2020

Bethany Thomas and band, screenshot taken from livestream and edited

Music: Bethany Thomas album release show, The Hideout

The Hideout is another of those clubs I mentioned in an earlier column trying to convert itself to a subscription model for subsistence in these keep-away times. And while I’m rooting for every single place (and person) I love, I might be rooting the hardest for the Hideout. 

It’s not the first club I went to in Chicago (that would be Schuba’s or The Empty Bottle) but it’s the place I’ve had the best batting average of life-altering shows, happy hours, and the place that most feels like Chicago to me. It’s not really a trip if I don’t darken that dance floor at least once.

That feeling flooded my bones with this week’s release party for Bethany Thomas’s triumphant rock record BT / She / Her. I learned about Thomas with Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls project. Once I picked my jaw off the floor, I dug deeper and found she’s representative of so much I love about the intertwining, us-against-the-world, everyone-together scene in Chicago. She’s worked with so many people I’m a massive fan of including JC Brooks and Robbie Fulks and set their world-class theater scene on fire in classics like Into the Woods and A Moon for the Misbegotten.

This first taste of her work as a songwriter and bandleader cracked my rib cage open. With a tight five-piece band that could go anywhere she led them, spread out on the floor for appropriate distancing, she unfurled what would be hit after hit in a just world. The snarling, volcanic Cramps riffs underpinned the righteous declarations of “I’m Not Sorry and I’m Not Scared.” “De-Escalator” took a slow-burning, taunting waltz dripping in drama worthy of classic Marc Almond, “You can’t walk this line forever” burned right onto the back of my skull. 

“70th Long Song” dragged a castanets-keyed Spector-style stomp by its collar into the here and now. “Walls + Ceilings” builds from haunting Led Zeppelin/Fairport Convention-style rolling acoustic guitar into a crashing tidal wave. She plays with classic Thin Lizzy/Aerosmith guitar dueling and drum triplets on the infectious “Smoke” and haunting soul cries the expansive, cinematic “The Waves.” 

There wasn’t a weak tune here, maybe my favorite new artist of the year.

Kris Davis, screenshot taken from livestream and edited

Music: Thelonious Monk Birthday Celebration – Helen Sung, Kris Davis, and Joanne Brackeen at SFJAZZ.

SFJAZZ pulls another astonishing set out of the archive for their Fridays at Five series. This, the night before Monk’s birthday, from one of their recurring Thelonious Monk tributes a few birthdays ago, linked three exemplars of contemporary jazz piano for a night of deep fireworks: Helen Sung, Kris Davis, and Joanne Brackeen.

The direct collaborations – two pianos were on stage at all times – dazzled me most. Sung and Davis teamed up on an expansive, rich, and twisting “Blue Monk.” That tune was the first taste that got me hooked, the song where I knew I was listening to Monk, this was what everyone was talking about, and I fucking love it present tense. So I have high expectations. Similarly, high expectations played into this because Davis might be my favorite my-age-or-younger piano player, she’s blown me away for a lot of years in a lot of rooms as anyone who’s read a best-of of mine can attest. This soared right through the membrane of those hopes, as maybe my favorite version of the tune burst before my eyes.

The finale on “Straight No Chaser” with Brackeen at one piano and Sung and Davis four-handing the other, took that chestnut into the wild flights of invention that only happen when a great artist grapples with material they love on the same level. 

That love also bubbled out of a brilliant mosaic version of “52nd Street Theme” by Davis. For a heart-stopping “Rhythm-a-ning” by Brackeen, she reminded us of her first-hand experience with this history, “Did anyone ever see Thelonious Monk? He danced on the bandstand,” and, grinning, reminded the room of her playing the tune with Freddie Hubbard in the early ‘80s, “I thought I should play the melody this time,” instead of leaving it to a horn.

A phenomenal set of some of the finest compositions of the 20th century played as well as we’re likely to ever be lucky to hear. And a reminder to do what we can – and agitate the powers that be – to make sure temples to culture like this survive these times along with us.

Joanne Brackeen and Kris Davis, taken from livestream and edited
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Things I’ve Been Digging – 09/21/2020

A grey sky and a choppy sea, like I’ve been feeling

It feels like not a week goes by that doesn’t give most of us a reason to go, “It’s a dark week. Things look bleak.” Losing Justice Ginsburg was one of the hardest of those hits in this fucked-up time. A beacon of how to live, passionate about your work but also the greater world and your friends and your greater community and a way to harmonize all of those things I constantly strive for and frequently fail at. One of the best of us and another reminder to keep trying. Keep working.

As always, one of the biggest things that pulls me back from those whirlpools of despair is art. The other is friends. I hope you’re also finding something that gives you light in this darkness and my sharing this is always tied to the hope you’ll share those things with me and your own community.

From left: Wayne Shorter, John Patitucci, Teri Lyne Carrington, taken from livestream and edited

Music: Wayne Shorter Quartet at SFJAZZ.

I’ve waxed rhapsodic here a few times about SFJAZZ’s essential work and their breathtaking pivot to digital with their site closed due to the pandemic. Their monthly Wayne Shorter tributes have been a key part of this – the first four monthly, featuring a different frontline each time backed by Shorter’s rhythm section of Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass, and Brian Blade on drums were all special. 

This week, they ended with maybe even more of a bang: a 2017 performance of Shorter with his quartet featuring Teri Lyne Carrington on drums instead of Blade. Shorter’s universes beguiled me almost since I knew what music was, his intricate compositions that feel like nothing I’ve ever heard at the same time they feel as familiar as the blood in my veins, his ability to write for specific band contexts that still work generations removed. 

This presented an example of one of the great working ensembles with that uncanny communicative empathy that jazz is based on, that conversation so many of us use as a metaphor for collective improvisation, everyone building up a situation by listening to one another and finding a new angle on whatever’s happening. 

As Herbie Hancock said in the YouTube chat (if I haven’t mentioned it before, one of the excellent things SFJAZZ does is engage artists and listeners in the chat while the video plays) during their hypnotic dive into Arthur Penn’s early 20th century standard “Smilin’ Through,” there’s a great, shifting parallel quality with Patitucci and Carrington dialoguing on a related but separate plane to Shorter and Perez. A rich, swirling take on the Fairport Convention-popularized folk standard “She Moves Through the Fair” detonated landmines of surprise and delight. The entire set beguiled and charmed and sometimes baffled me in the best way.

Kate Hutchinson, Lonnie Holley, Immeasurable Explosions – taken from Livestream and edited.

Music: Immeasurable Explosions (Knoel Scott and Marshall Allen), Chiminyo, Lonnie Holley, and Kate Hutchinson, from the Boiler Room with Night Dreamer and Worldwide FM.

The Boiler Room – known for hard-hitting, cutting edge DJ nights – has become a vital livestream player in the last few months and is always something I’m glad to see pop up on my YouTube subscription reminder. This week’s was a truly delightful surprise. On a sunny afternoon with the first chill of the season in the air – anyone who knows me knows how much I love Fall – they put together the perfect lineup for straddling these seasons. 

Kate Hutchinson kicked off the night with a perfect DJ set hitting on light reggae, tropical house, throwback disco, horn-drenched drama, electro hip-hop… summer beats with just enough of a chill. Just enough dashes of melancholy, enough grit in the oyster (or cynar in the fizzy champagne) for a tribute to the sunshine and the long shadows. Hutchinson also contributed excellent, insightful introductions to the broad spectrum of artists.

Lonnie Holley gets a lot of praise for the spiritual, incantory quality of his work, and the use of the materials of his life in a way that merits comparisons to his work as a sculptor; all of that remains true and was clear here. But there’s also an autumnal quality, a sense of honoring people around him and the people who’ve gone before, the changing of seasons in a lot of senses, that felt rich in this short set. Anytime I see him, even over a screen, I feel like I’m bullshitting and need to try harder.

Chiminyo previewed a marvelous record out later this week – I Am Panda – with a combination of tracks and live percussion: light dub, classic spiritual jazz, and early 80s synth textures flow together into roiling, stormy anthems. Sun Ra Arkestra alums and longtime friends and collaborators Knoel Scott and Marshall Allen teamed up for a mix of poetry and multi-instrumental duets that recalled nature and cracked the thought of nature open to the “Other worlds they have not told you of” in their old bandleader’s parlance.

Aoife O’Donovan, taken from livestream and edited

Music: Aoife O’Donovan at the Church of the Sacred Heart in Barrytown, New York, presented by Dreamstage

Anyone who’s ever read any of my writing – best of lists, etc – knows what a massive fan I am of Aoife O’Donovan. This stream, on a new-to-me platform called Dreamstage, took excellent advantage of a gorgeous-sounding church in the Hudson River Valley that let her voice and guitar (and piano on a couple numbers) breathe.

O’Donovan might be our finest current songwriter of the key decision, that moment when a character is on a precipice that will change their life. She has a fine eye and ear for those details when everything about to change, how it feels in the moment and how it feels when recollected. Prime examples of that here were the opening one-two punch of “Hornets” with its cautious reassurance “I’ll be there to have and to hold you” on the chorus but also the verse, “Turning back’s the only way to go;” and “Porch Light,” maybe my favorite of her songs, with the weary, imploring taunt “You want to live a life of loneliness? Baby, so do I. I want to sit under the porch light and watch the yellow moon rise.” Just a devastating as the first time I heard both those songs, maybe more, as her voice has found new contours and places to shine the light in a few years of touring them.

She also hit songs from previous bands of hers: a lovely, rippling, Sometymes Why tune, “Clover,” and two standards she did with her first widely known band, Crooked Still, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” and “Lakes of Ponchartrain,” in new arrangements. That knack for rearrangements also shone in her settings of Peter Sears poems, “Night Fishing” (dedicated to the late Justice Ginsburg) and “The Darkness.”

The centerpiece of this dazzling hour of music was two of the lustiest songs in her catalog. “Ryland,” which she performed in the supergroup I’m With Her, with its silky chorus  “Just let me lie, under the apple tree, I planted for my love and me.” She segued that – with a laughing, “Of course I pair the song about apple cider with the song about bourbon,” – into the aching, affectionate standout from Fossils, “Oh Mama,” with its infectious sing-along chorus: “Oh Mama, sing me a love song, pour me some bourbon, and lay me down low.”

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Things I’ve Been Digging 09/14/2020

George Cables Trio, taken from livestream and edited

Music: George Cables Trio at Village Vanguard

In the wake of Gary Peacock – one of the great bassists, especially in a piano trio format – an exemplar of classic post-bop piano jazz George Cables played a Vanguard set with nothing to prove and everything at his disposal, backed by as good a rhythm section for this kind of heart-filling music as you could hope for, Essiet Okon Essiet on bass (who I last saw live with the late, great Harold Mabern, one of Cables’ few peers in this lane) and the almighty Billy Hart on drums.

Cables took us on a mesmerizing journey through the history of modern jazz piano with a rapturous version of McCoy Tyner’s “You Taught My Heart to Sing” with tumbling darkness threading the chords, a righteous dive into Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil,” and a version of Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy” that made me forget every other version for a little while. 

He also restated his unshakable command and glittering crown on standards, with jaw-dropping versions of “All The Things You Are” and “Body and Soul.” Just as good as those unassailable classics were originals of his like “Traveling Lady” with fiery propulsion underneath its deceptively light touch and the touching elegy “Farewell Mulgrew,” 

Jason Moran, screenshot taken from Livestream

Music: Jason Moran Cecil Taylor Tribute at Harlem Stage

For fans my age, Jason Moran did more to turn us on to a spiky, rich legacy of jazz piano that felt in danger of being sidelined or marginalized in the early ‘00s: Geri Allen, Jaki Byard, and especially Cecil Taylor. He’s still one of my favorite players, as evidenced by him appearing on several of my favorite sets at the last Big Ears I made it to.

Almost as valuable as live streams in this isolated age are institutions digging into their archives and this Harlem Stage tribute to Taylor they brought back the Moran set from is an event I distinctly remember wanting to go to and the logistics and timing of travel just wouldn’t work. It’s not as good as being in a concert hall but sitting here watching the sunset out of my office window, I feel the magic in this brand of witnessing and giving thanks.

Maybe the greatest night of jazz I ever had in my life was watching Taylor lead a large ensemble on my birthday at the Iridium. Moran conjures that impossible-to-replicate quality while sounding like himself. He makes the piano sing with nods to Taylor, the way those spikes are flecked with a romanticism that’s born of being in touch with a greater mystery. The cracks in the very sky. It’s a breathtaking 15 minutes that made me end a long day (an exhausting 11 hour workday, an excellent meal) feeling like I was flying.

Red Baraat, taken from livestream and edited

Music: A Friday Night Despair Reprieve (or Turning Despair Into Gold): Red Baraat, archived from SFJAZZ Fridays at Five; Lucero Livestreamed from Minglewood Hall with Jade Jackson and Laura Jane Grace streaming from venues near their homes.

Even for those of us who (in the before times) try not to live our lives desperate for Friday or a vacation or some great disruption, who know it’s important to include joy throughout the week, Friday night feels sacred and that specialness has eroded some with most of us having another night we only see the members of our household after getting off a zoom call with the same people from work.

Had a little frisson of that specialness this Friday, logging off of work and tuning into bands who mine their past and even when they look at uncomfortable truths, they never, ever despair. Started with the weekly Wussy broadcast – one of these days I’ll do a deep-dive on these regularly scheduled streams that make my heart sing and whose joys aren’t as easily summed up looking at any one episode, but this was a particularly good installment.

I bounced after an hour of Wussy to the essential SFJAZZ Fridays at Five series that’s shown up here before. This time was the great Red Baraat, which stirred a lot of personal feelings for me – they played one of my best friends’ wedding years ago, and I was texting that friend earlier in the day, worried about the fires in Portland.

Led by Sunny Jain – also on the personal tip, I was glad I made it out to see his electric Wild Wild East band in NYC for APAP in January – Red Baraat plays ecstatic, spiritual party music that’s rich in community. Melding long rock guitar lines with traditional bhangra, Latin claves, and go-go, they’ve found a way to honor the differences in these various dance musics and cultures without ever feeling appropriative or like they’re using something as garnish. In a rippling set, they hit all their major hits from “Tunak Tunak Tun” to “Gaadi of Truth” to “Shruggy Ji” including a dance competition in the middle of the latter. If you get a chance – in whatever form the aftertimes looks like – to see Red Baraat, don’t miss it. It will make your heart full.

Another band that digs into their own history and kept their eyes open, but even when they confront disappointments and disillusionment their songs always leave room for hope and possibility. Lucero’s the rare band that got more interesting to me as they added elements, keys and horns, as they took on the burdens and benefits of their Memphis lineage, giving Ben Nichols’ voice (the raw tonal quality of his physical instrument and also his history-drenched songwriting).

Lucero, taken from Livestream and edited

Part of what makes Lucero interesting is their perpetually open ears, and this show drove that home with the openers. Northern California’s Jade Jackson’s set took the sharply observed and lived-in songs off her two records and sent them into the world with such authority I’d be shocked if kids in bands aren’t already playing them in their garages, especially “Motorcycle” and “Bottle It Up.” 

Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace gave us the stunning intensity she’s known for on classics like “True Trans Soul Rebel” and brand new songs that already sound like classics, including “The Mountain Song” which was a lilting lullaby for a life going wrong with tenderness for the choices taken and the choices never offered, and the chunky, dancing “Apocalypse Now and Later.”

This stream, playing a fan-chosen set list, prompted witty banter “Apparently, our fans don’t think most of our fans know what they’re talking about” as they went through a cross-section of exactly what makes them beloved in a perpetually replenishing ocean of bands born out of the raw material of The Replacements and Social Distortion. 

Surprises for me included a lovely cover of Jawbreaker’s “Kiss The Bottle” and two of the songs that always feel like Memphis to this regularly visiting outsider. “Smoke” roared through its keening, empty-streets melody as Nichols exhaled that for-the-ages dialogue in the chorus: ‘He said, ‘Lesser men than me have put up better fights.’ She said, ‘We’re doing pretty good if we can just get out alive.’” “Downtown” featured Brian Venable’s guitar playing that sticky horn riff, giving the lyric’s pleading at the start of the night a foreshadowing of a party going out of control.

This was a night – including a stop at Goner Records’ Goner TV with a reading by the great Ross Johnson from his new memoir – that reminded me there’s good if you’re looking, it’s not all always dire.