Sunday Session: August 15, 2021

Gerald Cleaver

Here's this week's roundup of various music-related items of interest:

* Gerald Cleaver about Griots, Ghost Orbits and Modular Synthesis (15Questions.net)
* De La Soul Have Finally Acquired Their Masters, According to Talib Kweli (Consequence.net)
* Inside look: How Sun Studio's music and magic have carried on for almost 70 years (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
* Staunchly Original: Marking 20 Years of Pi Recordings (WBGO)
* Chronology: Quincy Jones in the 1950s (Jazz Times)
* Jazz Fest Canceled; New Orleans Reacts (DownBeat)
* This Musician's Unlikely Duet Partner? The Golden Gate Bridge (NPR)
* Famous Harlem Block Renamed Art Kane Harlem 1958 Place (Jazz Times)
* SFJAZZ Collective: Reflecting the Moment (SFJAZZ.org)
* Chops: Min Xiao-Fen on the Pipa (Jazz Times)
* Tony Bennett Cancels Fall 2021 Tour (Variety)
* Tony Bennett retires from performing (AVClub.com)
* The New York Jazz Museum: 1972-1977 (AllAboutJazz.com)
* Living Spaces: Preserving Jazz Homes (Jazz Times)
* AEG To Require Proof Of Full Vaccination At All U.S. Venues Beginning October 1st (LiveForLiveMusic.com)
* Sonic Temples - The resurgence of Memphis’ classic recording studios. (MemphisMagazine.com)
* Historic St. Louis Church Could Become National Center For Gospel Music (StLouisPublicRadio.org)
* Are NFTs The New Napster? This Time The Music Industry Isn’t Taking Chances (Forbes.com)

Sunday Session: December 22, 2019

Gerald Cleaver

Here's this week's roundup of various music-related items of interest:

* Mars Williams brings his Albert Ayler Xmas across Europe and back home to Chicago (Chicago Reader)
* Gershon Kingsley, Moog Synthesizer Pioneer, Dies at 97 (Billboard)
* Wayne Shorter Continues to Forge Ahead (DownBeat)
* 'We loved each other': America’s first racially integrated all-girl swing band (The Guardian)
* A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people’s CDs, then suddenly vanished (TheVerge.com)
* Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Finally Recognizes Woman Who Practically Invented Rock and Roll (Jezebel.com)
* Dave Brubeck’s Legacy Enters a New Era (DownBeat)
* The Siren Sound of the Clash’s ‘London Calling,’ 40 Years Later (TheRinger.com)
* How Many Spotify Streams Do You Need To Live Above The Poverty Line? (HaulixDaily.com)
* Terence Blanchard, American jazz trumpeter weaving opera history (Prothomalo.com)
* Don Was On The Past, Present, And Future Of Blue Note Records (ClashMusic.com)
* On The Scene: Tony Bennett—The Visual Artist (The Aquarian)
* Why Are There No New Christmas Songs? (NPR)
* George Benson: the album that changed my life (Jazzwise)
* Gerald Cleaver Bridges the Divide Between Structure and Freedom (DownBeat)
* Chamber Music America Grants $180,000 to Female-Led Jazz Ensembles (Jazz Times)
* The South African Songbook: Jazz Musicians Who Stayed During Apartheid (NPR)
* Tony Bennett Brings the Holiday Spirit With His Animated Yule Log (Parade)
* A Major Music Distributor Has Stifled Vinyl Sales for Record Stores and Indie Labels, Sources Say (Pitchfork.com)
* 'It's a Total Nightmare': Problems at Direct Shot Distributing Have Made New Vinyl and CDs Scarce (Billboard)
* No Other Love Is the B-Side of the Chicago Gospel Story (Chicago)
* How headphones are changing the sound of music (QZ.com)
* A Bessie Smith Christmas (Jazz Times)

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's the latest wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:

* If you missed last Saturday's concert by drummer Gerald Cleaver (pictured) and his band Black Host (or just want to revisit it), you can see photo sets from the show on the KDHX website and on the Facebook page of presenters New Music Circle.

* One of last week's performances by the Robert Glasper Experience at Jazz at the Bistro was reviewed by Kenya Vaughn of the St. Louis American.

* After two years purveying smooth jazz, R&B and pop to local listeners, HD radio station Hip 96.3 finally has an official website of its own.

* Jazz St. Louis education director Phil Dunlap and student bassist Nathan Pence were interviewed about JSL's JazzU program on St. Louis Public Radio's "CityScape."

* Don Wolff talked about his work as a jazz broadcaster and his recent "Jazz Hero" award from the Jazz Journalists Association in an interview this week with KTRS' John Carney.

* Saxophonist and St. Louis native Eric Person's big band will be back in action this weekend in NYC, with a concert on Sunday, May 3 for First Presbyterian Church's ArtsWestchester series.

* Jazz radio update: On this Saturday's episode of his Radio Arts Foundation - St. Louis program  “Somethin’ Else,” Calvin Wilson will highlight the compositions of Burt Bacharach as interpreted by musicians such as Wallace ROney, Nellie McKay, and Mulgrew Miller.

Immediately following on "The Jazz Collective,"  Jason Church will feature new music from Boney James, Sun Soul Orchestra, and Rhonda Thomas, along with tracks from Ronnie Laws, Joe Sample, Pieces Of A Dream, Ramsey Lewis, Clave Sol, Tim Cunningham, The Bosman Twins, and Groovethang.

"Somethin' Else" can be heard at 8:00 p.m. Saturdays, followed by "The Jazz Collective" at 9:00 p.m. on 107.3 FM, 96.3 HD-2, and online at http://www.rafstl.org/listen.

Jazz this week: Robert Glasper Experiment with Keyon Harrold; Black Host; and more

As Jazz Appreciation Month swings on, it's a big week for jazz and creative music in St. Louis, with the local debuts of two significant contemporary ensembles offering two different takes on the jazz diaspora, and more.

Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, April 22
First up is the much-talked-about Robert Glasper Experiment, with St. Louis native Mark Colenburg on drums and featuring fellow St. Louisan, trumpeter Keyon Herrold, as special guest.

Although Glasper has played here before with his piano trio, the Experiment will be making their debut at the new Jazz at the Bistro with a special midweek two-night engagement, with two sets on Wednesday and again on Thursday.

And while the Experiment's blend of jazz with hip-hop, funk and neo-soul influences may not suit all the purists out there, they've managed (with help from a couple of Grammy wins) to attract a considerable number of fans from outside the core jazz audience.

Given that, plus the presence of hometown success stories Colenburg and Harrold, advance reservations are highly recommended. For more about the Robert Glasper Experiment and some video samples of the band in action, check out this video showcase post from a couple of weeks ago.

Elsewhere around town, the touring musical production In The Mood, featuring a live band with singers and dancers performing Swing Era favorites, returns for matinee and evening shows at the Touhill Performing Arts Center; and singer Erin Bode will perform at Nathalie's.

Thursday, April 23
Denise Thimes inaugurates a new concert series for Radio Arts Foundation-St. Louis with an early evening performance at Centene Auditorium, 7700 Forsyth in Clayton; pianist Ptah Williams, guitarist Eric Slaughter and bassist Darrell Mixon begin what's billed as a new weekly residency at The Dark Room in Grand Center; and guitarists Tom Byrne and William Lenihan will duet at Remy's Kitchen & Wine Bar.

Friday, April 24
Guitarist and singer Tommy Halloran and his band Guerrilla Swing have been performing weekly for Sunday brunch at Jazz at the Bistro for a couple of months now, and this weekend, they'll make their official evening debut on the Bistro stage with performances on Friday and Saturday night.

Also on Friday, the Webster University New Music Ensemble will perform "The Music of Brian Eno" at the Community Music School on the Webster campus; Tim Cunningham will take the stage for what's billed as the first of two nights of live recordings at Troy's Jazz Gallery; and Herman Semidey and Orquesta Son Montuno will play for Latin and salsa dancers at Casa Loma Ballroom

If swing dancing is more your style, there's also the monthly "West End Stomp" at the Mahler Ballroom, with music this month from The Sidemen; and if you're in more of a "sit and listen" mood, Jim Manley and Randy Bahr will be performing on trumpet and guitar, respectively, in the relatively intimate confines of Thurman Grill.

Saturday, April 25
Although at this point they've got only a fraction of the public profile of Robert Glasper and the Experiment, drummer Gerald Cleaver's group Black Host arguably are of equal potential significance in indicating a possible way forward for improvised music, and so their concert presented by New Music Circle at The Stage at KDHX should be of significant interest to music fans wondering what could be next.

With Cleaver providing compositional frameworks that draw on a variety of influences, Black Host blends jazz with loud, rock-guitar textures, free improv, and more into something that's hard to pigeonhole but certainly offers vast sonic possibilities. You can see them on video, and find links to a couple of extended interviews with Cleaver, in this post from last Saturday.

Also on Saturday, singer Joe Mancuso will return to Nathalie's; Wack-A-Doo will perform at the house concert venue Kinda Blue, 6101 1/2 Idaho; and Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes will be playing swing, hot jazz and blues at the Venice Cafe.

Sunday, April 26
Sarah Jane and The Blue Notes won't have much time for rest after Saturday night's gig, as they'll be filling in for Sunday brunch at Evangeline's,  Meanwhile, Tommy Halloran and band will be right  back on stage at the Bistro, while the rest of the weekly Sunday brunch gigs around town proceed (we hope) as usual.

Also on Sunday evening, Sound Unlimited, aka multi-instrumentalists Gary Presley and John Pyatt plus assorted guests and friends, have begun what's anticipated to be a weekly Sunday dinner-hour gig at Candicci’s Restaurant, 100 Holloway Rd in Ballwin.

Monday, April 27
Saxophonist "Blind" Willie Dineen and the Broadway Collective will be back for their monthly gig at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

Tuesday, April 28
Eclectic instrumental band The 442s will play at the Tavern of Fine Arts.

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Gerald Cleaver & Black Host

Today, let's have a look at some videos featuring drummer, composer and bandleader Gerald Cleaver, whose group Black Host will be in St. Louis next Saturday, April 25 for a New Music Circle concert at The Stage at KDHX.

Cleaver is a Detroit native known for his work with a wide range of artists in jazz and improvised music, including Joe Morris, Roscoe Mitchell, Miroslav Vitous, Michael Formanek, Tomasz Stanko, Lotte Anker, Craig Taborn, and many more. Black Host, just one of several ensembles he leads, was formed in 2011 and is said by their record label Northern Spy to "blend modern jazz, free music, psych, post-punk and electrified noise with painstaking detail and heady abandon."

When asked to characterize the group's sound, Cleaver has said, "The music is not written as a tribute to anyone, but if I were to engage in a fanciful description, I’d say I’m trying to embody the passionate empiricism of Roscoe Mitchell, the power and scary joy of Black Sabbath, and the smart, bad-assed and rocking songwriting of PJ Harvey (in addition to a hundred other references)."

In addition to the drummer/leader, Black Host also includes alto saxophonist Darius Jones, guitarist Brandon Seabrook, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, and multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore, who concentrates mostly on piano and/or electric keyboard.

So far they've released one album, 2013's Life In The Sugar Candle Mines, which NYC music writer Hank Shteamer described as "discrete tunes that satisfy in the manner of good pop or funk or even (dare I say?) jazz fusion, but that are constructed from and defined by the timbres and rhythmic interplay most often associated with freely improvised jazz and experimental electronic music."

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of video of Black Host online, but they did do a couple of shows in 2013 at the Brooklyn house concert venue Seeds that were live-streamed on video and later posted on YouTube. One of those shows, from May 28 of that year, can be seen in the embedded window up above.

The other, from the next night, was posted here on StLJN a few weeks ago as part of the "bonus edition" of our spring jazz preview, and since there's really not much other live footage of the band available, that clip is reposted after the jump.

Below that are a couple of short music videos released by Northern Spy to promote the tracks "Hover" and "Test-Sunday" from Life In The Sugar Candle Mines. While these don't necessarily tell you much about Black Host's live show, they do convey a sense of the group's overall aesthetic.

Lastly, just to fill out our quota of clips, there are a couple of videos featuring Cleaver improvising with Black Host's bassist and some other collaborators. Specifically, the fifth video is an excerpt from a show last year for the Evolving Music Series in NYC, featuring Cleaver, Niggenkemper, clarinetist and saxophonist John Dierker, and drummer Ches Smith, while the sixth is from a 2013 show at JACK in Brooklyn, and shows him with saxophonist Lotte Anker (with whom he played here in St. Louis a couple of years ago), saxophonist Tim Berne, and bassist William Parker.

For more about Black Host, you can read a review of one of the band's early live shows from Hank Shteamer, as well as reviews of Life In The Sugar Candle Mines from Shteamer for Pitchfork, Something Else's S. Victor Aaron, and the Free Jazz blog's Paul Acquaro. Gerald Cleaver also talks quite a bit about Black Host in the 2013 interviews he did with Point of Departure and BlouinArtInfo.com.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Spring 2015 jazz preview, bonus edition

With both New Music Circle and Jazz at the Bistro recently announcing some additions to their respective spring schedules, today let's check out some some video samples of those bands and musicians coming here in those just-announced performances.

First up are pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Michael Bisio, who will be playing a concert presented by NMC on Saturday, March 28 at The Stage at KDHX. The video at the top of this post shows them performing a full set in September 2015 at the Bop Shop in Rochester, NY.

After the jump, it's the Robert Glasper Experiment, who will bring along trumpeter and St. Louis native Keyon Harrold as a special guest for shows on Wednesday, April 22 and Thursday, April 23 at Jazz at the Bistro.

You can see a complete concert by Glasper, the Experiment and the Metropole Orkest, recorded in 2014 at the North Sea Jazz Festival in The Netherlands, followed by a clip from Harrold's YouTube page, showing him jamming with the Experiment and trading licks with saxophonist Casey Benjamin in an excerpt from a show last January at the Troubador in Los Angeles.

The fourth video features Black Host, the group led by drummer Gerald Cleaver who will be playing a New Music Circle concert on Saturday, April 25, also at The Stage at KDHX. It's a full set of theirs recorded in May, 2013 at SEEDS::Brooklyn, a house concert venue in the NYC borough of the same name.

Next up is percussionist Pedrito Martinez and his group, who will play a one-nighter at the Bistro on Thursday, May 7. They're seen here at the 2015 Panama Jazz Festival playing "Buscando Guayabas," which you might know from the late 1970s version by Willie Colon and Ruben Blades.

Last but not least, there's a full set from trumpeter Avishai Cohen's trio Trevini, recorded April 30, 2013 at Duc Des Lombards, Paris for International Jazz Day. Trevini also will be playing a one-nighter at the Bistro, on Thursday, May 21.

Tickets for the New Music Circle concerts are on sale now via Brown Paper Tickets. Tickets for the Jazz at the Bistro shows are available now for purchase by Jazz at the Bistro subscribers, and will go on sale to the general public at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, March 11 via phone at 314-571-6000 and online.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

New Music Circle reschedules On Fillmore, adds concerts from Shipp & Bisio, Black Host

New Music Circle has rescheduled one of their previously announced concerts this spring and also added two more concerts, both co-presented with KDHX at The Stage at KDHX.

The performance by bassist Darin Gray and percussionist Glenn Kotche, aka On Fillmore, which had been scheduled for Saturday, March 14 at The Stage at KDHX, has been moved to Friday, April 3 at the same venue. (Presumably, tickets purchased for the original date will be transferable to the new one, but we're waiting for someone from NMC to confirm that and will update this post when they do.)

The first of the additional concerts will feature pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Michael Bisio at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, March 28 at The Stage at KDHX. Shipp played here most recently in October 2011 at 560 Music Center with his trio, which includes Bisio and drummer Whit Dickey. Shipp and Bisio released a duo album, Floating Ice, back in 2012.

The second added concert will present the St. Louis debut of Black Host, a quintet led by drummer Gerald Cleaver, at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 25, also at The Stage at KDHX. Cleaver, in addition to leading his own groups, is known for his work with Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, Joe Morris, and other significant improvising musicians. He played here a couple of years ago in another NMC concert with saxophonist Lotte Anker and keyboardist Craig Taborn.

Black Host (pictured) also includes pianist Cooper-Moore, alto saxophonist Darius Jones, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper and guitarist Brandon Seabrook. Their first recording, Life in the Sugar Candle Mines, was released last year on the Northern Spy label. It features original music described as combining "modern jazz, free music, psych, post-punk and electrified noise with painstaking detail and heady abandon."

Tickets for both Shipp & Bisio and Black Host are priced at $20 for general admission, $10 for students and "struggling music lovers," and are on sale now via Brown Paper Tickets.

(Edited after posting.)