Blue Note Records

Jan 24 2020

Best of 2019 #44: Joel Ross – “KingMaker”

 

It was just a few years ago that I was catching Joel Ross perform on the Young Lions stage at the Chicago Jazz Festival.  This, after the previous night, when he was a featured soloist for Orbert Davis’s festival opening performance.  It was a great show, and he and his band ripped through some tunes, whispered out a ballad, and basically reminded everyone around how high the talent level is for jazz musicians still in the nascent stage of their evolution.  It is bewildering but also not surprising at all to be writing about his debut as part of the Best of 2019 countdown.  The spirit of that Chicago Jazz Festival performance is captured in Kingmaker, and its bolstered by a few years of growth manifesting as some very thoughtful composing.  Ross also wrote these songs about different people and events in his life to date, an attempt at encapsulating the influences that led him to this point.  For most of us, however, this album is all about the future, and how much we have to look forward to as the vibraphonist continues to evolve and record and delight.

Your album personnel:  Joel Ross (vibraphone), Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), Jeremy Corren (piano), Ben Tiberio (bass), Jeremy Dutton (drums), and guest: Gretchen Parlato (vocals)

Released on Blue Note Records.

Music from New York City.

Listen | Read more | Available at: Amazon

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Jan 19 2019

Best of 2018 #6: Ambrose Akinmusire – “Origami Harvest”

 

This album is stunning.  It’s stunning, and it comes from all directions, in all contexts.  Ambrose Akinmusire brings together an exquisite unity of modern jazz, hip hop, chamber music, R&B, pop, rap and spoken word that is unlike anything else out there.  The influences are like swirling tides in a single body of water, entering confluences and then breaking apart and colliding.  The themes of racism, political divides, and societal barriers possess an immediacy that never goes away even as you drift away to the beauty of the music.  The motion of the music incites the image of dance, elicits it from the listener.  Rarely does spoken word and rap merge so well in a jazz setting as it does here, where the powerful meaning of the words melts lovingly into the flow of the instruments, one not taking a dominant role over the other, while also allowing the cadence of the vocal delivery to behave, too, as an additional percussive instrument.  This album is stunning in that way it brings classic forms of expression into the fold with those modern, as if attempting to prove that the passing of time is merely a device of perception and that all music of all ages truly exists all in the same breath.  Origami Harvest is stunning, and it is sublime, and with the passing of time and opportunity for contemplation, those qualities are likely to resonate with ever increasing strength.

Released on Blue Note Records.

Music from New York City.

Read more on Bird is the Worm.

Available at:  Amazon

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Dec 28 2018

Album of the Day: “Origami Harvest” by Ambrose Akinmusire

 

Artist:  Ambrose Akinmusire

Album:  Origami Harvest

Label:  Blue Note Records

Style:  Unconventional protest / Transcendent poetry

Favorite Track:  “Americana/The Garden Waits For You To Match Her Wilderness”

Music from:  New York City

What I like about it:  This album possesses an immediacy.  It hangs over every other quality, and it bleeds out of every note.  The immediacy is omnipresent, and this is never more evident than how the themes of racism, political divides, societal barriers and all those things that keep us apart stay right there in your face no matter how often the music shifts phases of influence between those of modern jazz, hip hop, chamber music, R&B, pop, and spoken word.  It’s as if Ambrose Akinmusire is stating that there will be no refuge from these problems, that they follow no matter where we go, either physically or allegorically via our choices in music.  Except, perhaps, the album itself.  Because, I like (love) how Origami Harvest is almost a refuge from all of the pain and fear and despair that hangs over us these days, even as the trumpeter’s ensemble goes about addressing it in a way that is as direct as it is poetic.

I like how wild and frenetic the music gets while never giving any other impression than everything is under control… a focused and concentrated chaos that is allowed to fully realize its preordained randomness but will always be framed in a specific point of view that calmly advises, “We got this.”  On past recordings, Akinmusire has incorporated a roll call of victims of the structural racism that poisons this society, and while it was always a powerful moment just by way of the memories their naming invokes, the current iteration of that device on “Free, White and 21” hits an entirely new plateau.  As the names of the deceased are read off, there are cries and shouts that strike through the heart of the song.  There is something terribly unnerving about them.  They’re raw and unguarded, and they border on theatrical, and surreal in that way only the most vulnerable displays of emotion can present themselves… where things are too real and we’re forced to interface with them through disbelief.  At the other end of spectrum but creating the same effect are the calm, painfully deadpan vocals on “Americana/The Garden Waits For You To Match Her Wilderness” that are disconcertingly out of place for the subjects addressed.  I like all of that.

I like that this album just smacked me right in the face even as it filled my heart with the hope and joy music is capable of delivering even during the hardest times.  I like how this album keeps finding new ways to surprise, new details that emerge, and I love how it makes me want to keep writing about it, even long after I type the words The End.

Your album personnel:  Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet, voice), Marcus Gilmore (drums), Sam Harris (piano, keyboards), Walter Smith III (tenor sax), Kool A.D. (voice), Michael Aaberg (keyboards), LmbrJck_t (voice) and Mivos Quartet of Olivia De Prato (violin), Lauren Cauley Kalal (violin), Victor Lowrie Tafoya (viola) and Mariel Roberts (cello).

Available at:  Amazon

Be sure to check out the artist’s site.

And check out this amazing video:

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Dec 9 2018

Album of the Day: “Vanished Gardens” by Charles Lloyd & The Marvels

 

Artist:  Charles Lloyd & The Marvels

Album: Vanished Gardens

Label:  Blue Note Records

Style:  Jazz Americana

Favorite Track:  Vanished Gardens

Music from:  Los Angeles, CA

What I like about it:  Lucinda Williams adds her vocals to half of the tracks on this live performance, and I like that the band’s sound doesn’t change with her presence.  They coalesce around her, like the current navigating the circumference of a small island at sea.  I like that everything is melodically focused, which is implied on the instrumental tracks, and made perfectly clear on the vocal ones.  I like how Bill Frisell’s guitar and Charles Lloyd’s sax just melt into one another, indistinguishable as sunbeams on a cloudless day.  I like how the group generates an intensity from a casual delivery, that every passage, every phrase has that feel.

Extra notes:  Hi, Bill & Lucinda, please feel free to adapt “Are You Alright?” for this or any similar project, thanks.

Your album personnel:  Charles Lloyd (tenor sax, flute), Bill Frisell (guitars), Greg Leisz (pedal steel, dobro), Reuben Rogers (bass), Eric Harland (drums) and Lucinda Williams (vocals).

Available at:  Amazon

Be sure to check out the artist’s site.

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Dec 22 2017

Best of 2017 #31: Tony Allen – “The Source” (Blue Note Records)

 

It’s been a fruitful collaboration between Tony Allen and Blue Note Records.  The drummer’s first release for the label was a tribute to Art Blakey, and it captured the high-voltage nature of the hard bop drummer’s classic sound while remaining true to his own voice on drums.  Allen’s second 2017 recording for Blue Note is The Source, and, remarkably, it somehow eclipses his first.  Bringing together afro-beat, post-bop, hard-bop, electronica and Afro-jazz speaks to the creative elasticity Allen has employed throughout a career of varied projects.  The electricity that’s generated by this thrilling music, Allen makes it seem as natural as breathing.

Music from Paris, France.

Read more at Bird is the Worm.

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