Sunday Session: November 4, 2018

Roy Hargrove

Here's a roundup of various music-related items of interest that have shown up in one of StLJN's various inboxes or feeds over the past week:

* Sonny Fortune, Stalwart Saxophonist Of New York, Dies At 79 (NPR)
* Open Land: Meeting John Abercrombie (ECM) - The late guitarist's gentle spirit is captured in a moving documentary (Jazz Times)
* Nate Wooley: Plays Whole With Others (NationalSawdust.org)
* Big in Japan: A History of Jazz in the Land of the Rising Sun, Part 1 (AllAboutJazz.com)
* This Danish Band Plays Music Underwater. The Results Are Eerily Spectacular (Time)
* REPORT: 35th Conference of the Radio Jazz Research Group, Salzburg. – " Improvisation: New Perspectives (London Jazz News)
* Guitarist Jimmy Page looks back at 50 years of Led Zeppelin (Associated Press)
* Even Classical Music Is Getting Faster These Days (Rolling Stone)
* Did the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame wait too long on Bob Marley? (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
* The Residents’ Co-Founder Hardy Fox Dead at 73 (Rolling Stone)
* Meet The Women Pushing UK Jazz Forward (ClashMusic.com)
* Festival Jazz International Rotterdam 2018 (AllAboutJazz.com)
* Jason Moran: The Harlem Hellfighters review – the soldiers who brought jazz to Europe (The Guardian)
* Is Christone ‘Kingfish’ Ingram the Future of the Blues? (Rolling Stone)
* The Secret Jewish History Of Queen (The Forward)
* Bluesman Chris Thomas King says he’s been banned by the GRAMMYs (Offbeat)
* Adam O’Farrill Does Not Play Latin Jazz (Jazz Times)
* Resonance Records Marks 10-Year Anniversary at Birdland (DownBeat)
* Tuba in the House (Jazz Times)
* An Indie Music Expert Explains Why Artists Are Turning Away From Record Deals (Rolling Stone)
* Bob James Returns with Acoustic Trio Disc (DownBeat)
* Andrew Cyrille, Lifetime Achievement Honoree at the Vision Fest, Isn't Resting on His Laurels (WBGO)
* These Duck-Billed Dinosaurs Wore Their Instruments on Their Heads (LiveScience.com)
* What is All the Fuss About? Kenny Barron Takes Years of Experience and Plays in the Moment (VoiceOfOC.org)
* Life In Frank Zappa's Pad, 1968 (PleaseKillMe.com)
* Too much Christmas music can mentally harm you (BigThink.com)
* “The tyranny of collecting” – why I gave away my entire record collection (GetIntoThis.co.uk)
* Roy Hargrove, Grammy-Winning Jazz Trumpeter, Dies At 49 (NPR)
* Inside the Secretly Lucrative World of Solo Piano Music (Rolling Stone)

Sunday Session: June 24, 2018

Eric Dolphy

Here's a roundup of various music-related items of interest that have shown up in one of StLJN's various inboxes or feeds over the past week:

* Back in Swing: The Secret Subculture of Jazz Cafes (Japan Forward)
* The home of timeless music (CNet.com)
* George Clinton: ‘If people don’t like funk, it’s just the wrong time for them’ (The Guardian)
* Lorraine Gordon, 1922 — 2018 (EthanIverson.com)
* How Herbie Hancock Charted New Territory With ‘Empyrean Isles’ (UDiscoverMusic.com)
* This simple robot offers more cowbell (TechCrunch.com)
* Rutgers Acquires Count Basie Collection (Jazz Times)
* Gregg Allman's Son Devon Talks Carrying on the Family Legacy (Rolling Stone)
* Herbie Hancock Looks Back on Work with Indy Jazz Legends (Nuvo.net)
* Warner to Launch Elektra Music Group as Standalone Company (Variety)
* Nina Simone’s Childhood Home Named National Treasure (Pitchfork)
* 16 Years Late, $13B Short, but Optimistic: Where Growth Will Take the Music Biz (Redef.com)
* The Sound Of Silence: Female Composers At The Symphony (NPR)
* Eric Dolphy: Gone In The Air (AllAboutJazz.com)
* Systems Two Recording, A Prolific and Pivotal Studio in Brooklyn, Quietly Closes Its Doors (WBGO)
* Arturo Sandoval Features Pharrell, Grande and More on ‘Ultimate Duets’ (DownBeat)
* Clatskanie native Nate Wooley translated musical passion into thriving New York career (TDN.com)
* Revered Drummer Brian Blade Draws a Through-Line from Jazz to Gospel (KQED)
* Archaeologists Just Sifted Through the Woodstock '69 Festival Field (Billboard)
* Brötzmann Reflects on ‘Machine Gun’ as it Hits 50th Anniversary (DownBeat)
* Jazz Commentary: Greg Hopkins Big Band at Ryles — Whither Big Bands? (ArtsFuse.org)
* Crosscurrents: Converging Jazz And Indian Classical Music (NPR)
* A Lot of Energy—Remembering Cecil Taylor (1929-2018) (New Music Box)
* Meet the Italian composer who conducts the world’s biggest all-robot orchestra (KXXV)
* The Axe Murderer Who Loved Jazz (WBUR)
* Can You Measure How Good a Song Is? (New Republic)

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

After an extended hiatus, yr. StLJN editor is pleased to once again be able to offer a wrap-up of the week's assorted links and short news items of local interest:

 * Trumpeter Nate Wooley talked with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Calvin Wilson about his performance with electronic musician Ikue Mori tomorrow night at The Luminary.

* Abdul Hamid Royal, pianist and music director for the production of Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill playing through March 4 at the Kranzberg Arts Center, was interviewed by the St. Louis American's Kenya Vaughn.

The play-with-music by Lanie Robertson recounts the story of singer Billie Holiday using one of her nightclub performances as a framing device, and stars Alexis J. Roston (pictured) as Holiday. Roston and Royal also spoke with St. Louis magazine's Rosalind Early for a brief feature story, which you can read here.

* The Dark Room's new space at the Grandel Theatre, which opens for business next week, was the subject of a feature by the Post-Dispatch's Kevin Johnson

* The website St. Louis Musicians Unite has compiled Spotify playlists of local music by genre, including a playlist for St. Louis jazz artists. You can see all the lists here.

* Organizers of the Hermann Wine and Jazz Festival have announced their date and lineup for this year. The 2017 event will be held on Saturday, August 19 at the Clara Eitmann Messmer Ampitheater in Hermann, and will feature music from Funky Butt Brass Band, Bach to the Future, The People's Key, singer/songwriter Sean Coray, and the Nick Savage Quintet.

* Speaking of the Funky Butt Brass Band, they have just recorded a version of "St. Louis Blues" and posted it to BandCamp, with the proceeds from downloads of the song going to support "Blues For Kids," the charity organization of the St. Louis Blues hockey team. You can get a copy and support the cause here.

Jazz this week: Mike Stern & Kimberly Thompson, George Sams, Ralph Towner, Ikue Mori & Nate Wooley, Russell Gunn, and more

As you might be able to deduce from looking at the headline for this post, it's very busy week for jazz and creative music in St. Louis.

Over the next few days, there will be a plethora of visiting performers on local stages, plus the opening of a play about one of the most famous jazz singers ever, free master classes from two guitar greats, and more. Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, February 15
Guitarist Mike Stern performs for the first of four nights continuing through Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro, joined by drummer Kimberly Thompson, saxophonist Bob Franceschini, and bassist Teymur Phell.

It's been nearly seven years since Stern (pictured, top left) last headlined a show at the Bistro, and with St. Louis native Thompson on the gig, demand for tickets should be brisk, so advance reservations are strongly recommended.

Also on Wednesday, Cabaret St. Louis presents their monthly "Open Mic Night" at The Emerald Room at The Monocle.

Thursday,
February 16
On Thursday afternoon, Mike Stern will present a free jazz guitar clinic sponsored by Mozingo Music at Lindenwood University's J. Scheidegger Center for the Arts.

Thursday evening, trumpeter George Sams (pictured, center left) will perform for the "Not So Quiet" concert series at the St. Louis Public Library's main location downtown with a group including poet Shirley LeFlore, percussionist Henry Claude, cellist Tracy Andreotti, and violinist Alyssa Avery.

Also on Thursday, singer Erin Bode returns to Cyrano's; and the first preview performance of Max and Louie Productions' staging of Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill, the Tony Award-winning play-with-music about Billie Holiday, will be presented at the Kranzberg Arts Center.

The show, which features Chicago-based actress and singer Alexis J. Roston reprising her award-winning performance as Holiday, opens officially on Friday night and continues through Saturday, March 4.

Friday, February 17
Friday afternoon, the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University presents a "Symposium on the Music of Ralph Towner" with Towner, William Lenihan and Steve Schenkel at the Goldberg Formal Lounge in the Danforth University Center on the Wash U campus.

That evening, funk legends Tower of Power will perform at River City Casino. Although drummer David Garibaldi and substitute bassist Marc Van Wageningen are still recovering from serious injuries suffered in an accident before a gig last month in Oakland, TOP's current tour is continuing, with original bassist Francis "Rocco" Prestia back on the bandstand and former drummer Herman Matthews, who played with the group for several years in the 1990s, filling in for Garibaldi.

Also on Friday, trumpeter Byron Stripling will be guest soloist with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra as they present their Black History Month program "Lift Every Voice and Sing," at Powell Symphony Hall.

Elsewhere around town, trumpeter Jim Manley returns to Evangeline's; trumpeter Kasimu Taylor and pianist Ptah Williams perform duets at Thurman's in Shaw; and Second Generation Swing plays for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom.

Saturday, 
February 18
New Music Circle presents electronic musician Ikue Mori and trumpeter Nate Wooley at The Luminary.

For more about that, and some videos of Mori and Wooley (pictured, bottom left) in performance, see this post from last Saturday.

Also on Saturday, the Jazz at Holmes series presents a solo concert by Ralph Towner at 560 Music Center. Towner has just released a new album of solo guitar performances, and you can read more about that and see and hear some videos of him in this post from a couple of weeks ago.

Sunday, February 19
Trumpeter and East St. Louis native Russell Gunn, now living in Atlanta, will be back home to headline Community Women Against Hardship's "Black History Benefit" at Jazz at the Bistro, accompanied by pianist Adam Maness, singer Anita Jackson, bassist Jeff Anderson and drummer Montez Coleman.

Also on Sunday afternoon, St. Louis Jazz Club presents pianist Bob Row and friends at the Elks Lodge #9 in Creve Coeur.

Monday, February 20
Webster University Jazz Collective will perform at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster campus.

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: Ikue Mori & Nate Wooley

This week's grab-bag of videos features electronic musician Ikue Mori and trumpeter Nate Wooley, who will be performing in a concert presented by New Music Circle next Saturday, February 18 at The Luminary.

Mori, 63, is a Japanese native who first gained recognition in the late 1970s as the drummer for the NYC-based "No Wave" band DNA. She subsequently began working with drum machines and electronics, eventually abandoning the drums entirely for a laptop computer, which remains her preferred instrument. She has collaborated live and on record with many well-known improvising musicians, including Zeena Parkins, Dave Douglas, Fred Frith, and perhaps most notably, saxophonist/composer John Zorn, with whom Mori has made 20 recordings over the last 30+ years.

Wooley, who at 43 years old is a generation younger than Mori, grew up in a small town in Oregon and moved to NYC in 2001. He has performed with Zorn, Frith, Anthony Braxton, Ken Vandermark, Evan Parker, Chris Corsano, Peter Evans, and Halvorson and numerous others, and has earned recognition for a distinctive style of solo performances informed by the relative stillness of his rural upbringing that incorporates "vocalization, extreme extended technique, noise and drone aesthetics, amplification and feedback."

Wooley also is curator of the Database of Recorded American Music and editor of Sound American, which are "dedicated to broadening the definition of American music through their online presence and the physical distribution of music through Sound American Records."

For their St. Louis show, Mori and Wooley will perform individually and as a duo. Although there doesn't seem to be any video online of previous collaborations between the two of them, you can get something of an idea of what to expect by checking out the videos below, in which both are featured performing in three different contexts.

First up is an excerpt from a show by Wooley's quartet last July at a venue called Rye Bar in Brooklyn, NYC. In addition to the leader, the band includes alto saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos, bassist Brandon Lopez, and drummer Dre Hocevar.

After the jump, you can see an excerpt from a duo performance featuring Wooley and Australian-born improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee in November 2016 at Gallery 456, the venue of the Manhattan-based Chinese-American Arts Council.

Below that, you can see a solo performance by Wooley titles "For Kenneth Gaburo" recorded in January 2015 at Avant Media, which is also in Brooklyn.

The fourth clip features Ikue Mori with drummer Yoshimi Yokota from the Japanese rock band THe Boredoms and cellist Okkyung Lee performing in December 2016 at Saint Vitus in Brooklyn.

Next is an excerpt from from a show by Phantom Orchard, Mori's duo project with harpist Zeena Parkins, recorded in November 2015 at the Zorn-curated NYC performance space The Stone.

The final video is from a solo performance by Mori in 2009 at the Unlimited Festival in Wels, Austria. Entitled "Nymphs, witches and fairies," it's a live realization of a soundtrack she composed for a marionette theater performance, augmented here by "film sequences," also by Ikue Mori.

For more about Ikue Mori, check out "In Conversation: Ikue Mori & Okkyung Lee," her 2012 interview with ATTN, and her interview with A Liminal, also from 2012.

For more on Nate Wooley, check out his recent interview on the website of Ars Nova Workshop, and his 2016 interviews with Point of Departure and Bandcamp.com's Bandcamp Daily.

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

Sunday Session: August 7, 2016

Kendrick Scott

Some interesting music-related items that have landed in StLJN's inbox over the past week:

* Ten Louis Armstrong Landmarks (Offbeat)
* Quantum Computers Don’t Make Sense. But This One Makes Music (Wired)

* See John Coltrane, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie As You've Never Seen Them Before (Vanity Fair)
* Why Festivals Are More Popular Than Ever (DigitalMusicNews.com)
* Classic and unreleased Sun Ra tracks pressed to coloured 10″ EPs (TheVinylFactory.com)
* JT Essentials: Forgotten Fusion Classics - The Gary Burton Quartet, Jack DeJohnette and more (Jazz Times)
* Nate Wooley’s guide to American weirdos (The Wire)
* Sound Art Shows You What Musical Notes Actually Look Like (Gizmodo)
* Are corporate music festivals killing local venues? (AL.com)
* Kamasi Washington Talks Jazz-Ambassador Status, Life on the Road (Rolling Stone)
* Shopping for classical music: A remembrance (Philly.com)
* Scott Injects Dramatic Political Message into Drum Showcase (DownBeat)
* From Bowie to Prince: 10 Weird Video Games About Musicians (ElectronicBeats.net)
* Inside the Zappa Family Feud (Rolling Stone)
* Playing outside the box (The Economist)
* Herbie Hancock On His Next Album, Flying Lotus And Jupiter's Satellite (NPR)
* Headhunter Mike Clark Brings The Rhythm To The Checkout (WBGO)
* Roland: Moving forward (ResidentAdvisor.net)
* Audio-fail: why is so much sound art so bad? (The Guardian UK)
* Pete Fountain, New Orleans' clarinet-playing musical ambassador, dies at 86 (NOLA.com)