Jazz this week: Kurt Elling, Nicole Mitchell, Lubambo, Alves & Ribeiro, and more

This week's calendar of live jazz and creative music in St. Louis brings sounds from all over, including two prominent performers who each got their start in Chicago, one who made his name on Broadway, and three coming from Brazil via NYC. Let's go to the highlights...

Wednesday, March 13
Singer Kurt Elling - one of the aforementioned Chicagoans, though he now lives in New York - performs for the first of five nights, continuing through Sunday at Jazz St. Louis.

Elling (pictured, top left) returns here for the first time since the release in 2018 of his most recent album The Questions, so it seems likely that a good portion of material from that recording will be part of his sets here. You can see videos of live performances of several of those tunes, and find out more about what Elling has been up to more recently, in this post from last Saturday.

Elsewhere around town, clarinetist and former St. Louisan Chloe Feoranzo, now residing in New Orleans, will be back in town for a concert with her quartet at Focal Point, and guitarist Brian Vaccaro leads a trio at Evangeline's.

Thursday, March 14
Pianist Jim Hegarty returns with his quintet to the The Dark Room; guitarist Dave Black and singer Erika Johnson perform at The Pat Connolly Tavern; and pianist Adam Maness' trio is back at Thurman's in Shaw.

Friday, March 15
Pianist, singer and Tony Award-winning musical theater composer Jason Robert Brown performs in concert at the Grandel Theatre; and the Original Knights of Swing play for dancers at Casa Loma Ballroom.

Saturday, March 16
Flute player and composer Nicole Mitchell’s Liberation Narratives, featuring poet Haki Madhubuti, performs in a concert presented by New Music Circle at Xavier Hall on the St. Louis University campus.

A composer and conceptualist with wide-ranging interests, Mitchell (pictured, bottom left) is a past president of Chicago's Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and recently was appointed head of the jazz program at the University of Pittsburgh, succeeding the late Geri Allen.

Mitchell has been involved in a constantly evolving variety of musical projects over the years, with her latest collaboration with poet Haki Madhubuti offering "an unabashed take on the state of the nation" via her compositions and the poet's spoken word performances.  For a bit more about that, plus some videos of Mitchell performing in various contexts, see this post from a couple of Saturdays ago.

Elsewhere around town, pianist Peter Martin's Open Studio will present a concert of Brazilian jazz featuring guitarist Romero Lubambo, pianist Helio Alves, and drummer Edu Ribeiro, along with St. Louis' own Bob DeBoo on bass.

Also on Saturday, the Coleman Hughes Project celebrates six years as a band with a gig at Lowes Entertainment; and trumpeter Jim Manley and keyboardist Chris Swan will play at One 19 North Tapas & Wine Bar.

Sunday, March 17
Friends have organized a benefit for saxophonist Fred Walker, who no longer can perform due to recent health issues, for late Sunday afternoon at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups, with announced performers including Walker's former band Mystic Voyage, saxophonist Kendrick Smith, blues singers Kim Massie, Eugene Johnson, and Lady J Huston, and more.

Monday, March 18
Pianist Carol Schmidt and saxophonist Paul DeMarinis will team up for a concert of duets at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster University 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: Spotlight on Nicole Mitchell

Today, let's look at some videos featuring flute player and composer Nicole Mitchell, who's coming to St. Louis to perform in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, March 16 at Xavier Hall on the St. Louis University campus.

Mitchell, who just turned 52 a couple of weeks ago, grew up in New York and California, studying piano and viola before taking up the flute. She attended University of California in San Diego and Oberlin College before moving to Chicago in 1990. There, she connected with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, playing with the all-women AACM ensemble Samana and going on to collaborate with many other affiliated musicians, such as George Lewis, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Muhal Richard Abrams. Mitchell also served a two-year term as chairwoman of the AACM from 2009 to 2010.

She completed her BA at Chicago State University in 1998 and earned her a master's degree at Northern Illinois University two years later. Mitchell began teaching in the late 1990s, first at various universities in the Chicago area and later at University of California, Irvine. She was appointed last year to an endowed chair at the University of Pittsburgh, where she follows the late Geri Allen as head of the jazz studies department.

In addition to performing and teaching, Mitchell also has been a prolific recording artist, releasing more than 20 albums as a leader with various ensembles. Here in St. Louis, she'll be performing with Liberation Narratives, a group featuring the renowned poet Haki Madhubuti.

Though Mitchell and Madhubuti made an album called Liberation Narratives together in 2017, there doesn't seem to be any live performance footage of the group available online. So instead, today you can peruse videos of Mitchell demonstrating her musical range in several different contexts, starting up above with a a solo flute performance shell did in 2014 for the New York Flute Club.

After the jump, you can see Mitchell's set from the 2017 Ojai Music Festival, starting with her playing solo and later performing with members of the Chicago-based International Contemporary Ensemble.

Next, there's a video of Mitchell and trumpeter Christian Pruvost playing a duo set (in the rhythm-section-less AACM tradition) in 2017 at Hyde Park Records.

That's followed by clips of Mitchell playing with three different bands.

First, there's Tiger Trio, with bassist Joelle Leandre and pianist Myra Melford, as recorded in October of last year at Teatro Latea, NYC. Then, it's Sonic Projections, recorded at the 2014 Vision Festival at Roulette in Brooklyn with Mitchell, tenor saxophonist David Boykin, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Chad Taylor.

Finally, there's a sample of what probably is Mitchell's best known band, the Black Earth Ensemble, seen here performing "Meadow Sunlight in the Swinging Fields" in 2012 at Teatro Manzoni in Milano, Italy.

For more about Nicole Mitchell, read the feature about her published in January 2018 by the New York Times; and her interviews with JazzRightNow.com and ICareIfYouListen.com, both from 2017.

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

Sunday Session: January 20, 2019

Nicole Mitchell

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:

* Why the ‘BlacKkKlansman’ score could (and should) earn Terence Blanchard his first Oscar nod (Los Angeles Times)
* A conversation with Bill Frisell: making music in 2019 and the upcoming concert in Fallon (NevadaCapitalNews.org)
* Javon Jackson Extends the Tradition (DownBeat)
* Winter Jazzfest 2019: 10 Best Things We Saw (Rolling Stone)
* Pitt names Nicole Mitchell as head of jazz studies department (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)
* Carlos Santana on the Power of ‘The Mona Lisa,’ Today’s New Hippies (Rolling Stone)
* Q&A with Vibraphonist Joe Locke: Between the Heart and Mind (Jazziz)
* 'Green Book' Composer on Playing Mahershala Ali's Double: "My Life Prepared Me Perfectly" (Hollywood Reporter)
* Melissa Aldana & Sonny Rollins (Burning Ambulance)
* TIDAL ‘fake streams’: Criminal investigation underway over potential data fraud in Norway (MusicBusinessWorldwide.com)
* Threadgill Premieres New Composition at Cleveland Museum of Art (DownBeat)
* A History of American Protest Music: Come By Here (LongReads.com)
* Once a Year, Over 27,000 Elvis Fans Flood This Small Australian Town (Smithsonian)
* Double Vision: Winter Jazzfest Fosters Co-Led Ensembles (DownBeat)
* In Memoriam: Joseph Jarman (DownBeat)
* Nina Simone's 'Lovely, Precious Dream' For Black Children (NPR)
* Blue Note Launches Limited Edition Wall Art Series Of Classic Album Designs (UDiscoverMusic.com)
* Drummer Nate Smith’s Universe of Beats (DownBeat)
* Is Spotify’s Model Wiping Out Music’s Middle Class? (TheRinger.com)
* The economics of streaming is making songs shorter (QZ.com)
* Remembering jazz great Perry Robinson, Hoboken's 'most famous non-famous person in music' (NJ.com)
* REPORT: Winter Jazzfest Marathon Weekend in New York (London Jazz News)
* Legendary guitarist Reggie Young — key sideman to Elvis, Waylon, Willie and more — dead at age 82 (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
* Live Review: New York Winter Jazzfest 2019 (Jazz Times)
* Battle of the Ax Men: Who Really Built the First Electric Rock 'n' Roll Guitar? (Collector's Weekly)
* Different Ways To See And Be: The Lives Of Joseph Jarman And Alvin Fielder (NPR)

Sunday Session: September 2, 2018

Wadada Leo Smith

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:

* Meet the Company Preparing to Be the Last CD Distributor Standing (Billboard)
* The 100 Best Selling Albums of All Time (Updated for 2018) (DigitalMusicNews.com)
* The World’s Greatest Living Jazz Composer Celebrates His Eighty-fifth Birthday (The New Yorker)
* ‘Go’: How Dexter Gordon Raced Into The Jazz History Books (UDiscoverMusic.com)
* Esperanza Spalding Is The 21st Century's Jazz Genius (NPR)
* Walking to New Orleans: Davell Crawford's Tribute to Fats Domino (WNYC)
* Wadada Leo Smith's Defiant And Fearless Elegy For Emmett Till (In 360° VR) (NPR)
* Aretha Franklin Finally Gets Credit for the Term She Popularized (The Atlantic)
* Bob Dylan’s 2018 Setlists Are Starting to Get Interesting (Rolling Stone)
* 10 Afro-Latino Bands You Need to Check Out (OkayAfrica.com)
* Setting the Tempo (Slate)
* Alice Coltrane Concluded Trilogy with ‘Lord Of Lords’ (DownBeat)
* Flutist Nicole Mitchell uses music to map a possible paradise (Chicago Reader)
* 24-Carat Black Were Sampled by Pusha-T, Kendrick Lamar, Nas, JAY-Z—And They’re Still Broke (Pitchfork.com)
* New Orleans at 300: In Search of Jazz (Something Else)
* Hacking and 3D printing the future of violins, in a growing community (CDM.link)
* 'We're Not Just Bebop': Birdland Searches For Fresh Audiences With New 100-Seat Theater (Billboard)
* From musician to physician: Why medical schools are recruiting for musical ability (CBC)
* Bland on Blonde: why the old rock music canon is finished (The Guardian)
* “It Was Us Against Those Guys”: The Women Who Transformed Rolling Stone in the Mid-70s (Vanity Fair)
* Jazz's 'musical value is nil' (1918): An editorial we regret (New Orleans Times-Picayune)
* Show Tunes - Instead of selling albums, the music industry today sells fandom (RealLifeMag.com)
* Mondo Jazz Ep. 38: Aretha in Jazz & New Releases (AllAboutJazz.com)
* History of American Protest Music: Which Side Are You On? (LongReads.com)
* Pianist Randy Weston, An Eloquent Spokesman For Jazz's Bond with African Culture, Dies at 92 (WBGO)

Sunday Session: July 8, 2018

David Murray

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:

* Julian Lage Takes a ‘Page from the Rock ’n’ Roll Book’ (DownBeat)
* 50 Years On, The Band's 'Music From Big Pink' Haunts Us Still (NPR)
* Rain Can’t Wash Out Saratoga Jazz Fest (DownBeat)
* Ry Cooder ‘Spellbound’ by Gospel Music (DownBeat)
* Trump Tariffs Could Kill U.S. Synth Manufacturing, Says Moog (Synthtopia.com)
* Moog Says Chinese Tariffs May Force A Move Overseas (NPR)
* The Counterfeit Queen of Soul (Smithsonian)
* The Band's 'Music From Big Pink' Turns 50: How Upstate New York Informed the Americana Classic (Billboard)
* The End of Owning Music: How CDs and Downloads Died (Rolling Stone)
* Shabaka Hutchings: Britain’s Best Export (DownBeat)
* How Alan Braufman’s “Valley of Search” Brought Shine to New York’s Loft Jazz Scene (Bandcamp.com)
* Pianist Henry Butler Has Passed Away After Cancer Battle (Offbeat)
* In Chicago, the sound of the blues is fading (The Economist)
* Finding The Light with Bass Icon Dave Holland, on The Checkout (WBGO)
* Radical Transparency: A Review of Jason Moran’s The Last Jazz Fest (WalkerArt.org)
* Public Enemy Talks 'It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back' on Its 30th Anniversary (Billboard)
* Before & After With Nicole Mitchell (Jazz Times)
* Bright Moments with David Murray (Jazz Times)
* Montreal Jazz Festival Cancels Slave Songs Show After Backlash (Hollywood Reporter)
* Trombonist Bill Watrous Dies at 79 (Jazz Times)
* This Artist Reimagined Pop Songs as Beautiful Infographics (Vice.com)
* Pianist Erroll Garner Lights Up Late Night In Amsterdam (WBGO)
* Lalah Hathaway, Questlove, Robert Glasper & More On the Impact of PBS’s ‘Soul!’ (OkayPlayer.com)
* Mickey Hart talks music, Grateful Dead, rhythm 'trancing' and giving Tipper Gore drum lessons (San Diego Union Tribune)
* Buster Williams Still is on the Upswing (DownBeat)
* Protest Voices Enrich Montreal Festival (DownBeat)
* How Innovative Jazz Pianist Vince Guaraldi Became the Composer of Beloved Charlie Brown Music (OpenCulture.com)
* What Is the Most Nostalgic Song of All Time? (Village Voice)
* How a Young Lower East Side Jazz Group Became Cult Favorites (Vulture.com)
* Billboard’s charts used to be our barometer for music success. Are they meaningless in the streaming age? (Washington Post)
* How George Clinton Made Funk a World View (The New Yorker)

Sunday Session: January 14, 2018

The Bad Plus

Here's the 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:

* Jazz, but not as you know it (Vice.com)
* Record Bin: How Herbie Hancock subverted jazz traditions and asserted his funk dominance on “Head Hunters” (Nooga.com)
* And Look—She’s a Star! (The Nation)
* Music fans bought a lot of cassettes last year (NME.com)
* Why I Still Buy Music in the Age of Spotify (DigitalMusicNews.com)
* Wes Gets Royal Treatment (DownBeat)
* 'Dock Of The Bay' At 50: Why Otis Redding's Biggest Hit Almost Went Unheard (NPR)
* The musical secrets of FAME Studios legend Rick Hall (Birmingham News)
* A Cabaret Star’s Comeback (Wall Street Journal)
* Ice Music: Building Instruments Out Of Water (NPR)
* White Noise Story Generates White Noise on Copyright (IllusionOfMore.com)
* Just How Similar Are Radiohead's 'Creep' and Lana Del Rey's 'Get Free'? (Esquire)
* Inside the Amish town that builds U2, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift's live shows (Wired)
* Funk Carves Out A Groove At The Funk Music Hall Of Fame In Ohio (NPR)
* Mitchell Takes Homage to Winter Jazzfest (DownBeat)
* Why this awful-sounding album is a masterpiece (Vox.com)
* Surprise! The ‘Music Modernization Act’ Prohibits Litigation Against Streaming Services (DigitalMusicNews.com)
* First Listen: The Bad Plus, 'Never Stop II' (NPR)
* Why music venue closures 'make all of our lives poorer' (BBC)
* Lester Bangs Play 'How to Be a Rock Critic' Captures Writer's Wild Spirit (Rolling Stone)
* At Peabody jazz: discrimination allegations, a forced ouster — and new hope (Baltimore Sun)
* ********, ∆, †‡† ... the most unpronounceable band names ever (The Guardian)
* Spotify Is in the Business of Selling You Spotify, Not Music (TrackRecord.net)
* Q&A: Chick Corea on his regrets, Grammys, future plans and more (Creative Loafing - Tampa)
* Portrait Of: Eddie Palmieri (LatinoUSA.org)
* Roy Hargrove’s rousing Showcase residency (DownBeat)
* The “True” Story Of How Brian Eno Invented Ambient Music (OpenCulture.com)
* Chartmania!! I Broke Down Every Song That Reached the Billboard Top 5 in 2017 (Soundfly.com)
* Life’s Work: An Interview with John Adams (Harvard Business Review)
* Dr. Demento, comedic song hero and unsung punk rock legend, gets his due on new album (Los Angeles Times)
* Preservation Hall’s Musical Mission (Garden and Gun)

Sunday Session: May 7, 2017

David Murray

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

* Jonathan Demme's 'Stop Making Sense' Is the Past, Present, and Future of Concert Films (Vice.com)
* The perfect score? How composers are taking pop festivals by storm (The Guardian)
* Henry Threadgill: Dirt, and More Dirt (WQXR)
* Jazz Flutist Nicole Mitchell’s New Concept Album Asks, “What is Progress?” (Bandcamp.com)
* The greatest music teacher who ever lived (BBC)
* R.I.P. Pono, Neil Young Kills Off His Digital Player (Noise11.com)
* ‘Unless you’re 100% sure your artist is wrong, go with their vision’ (MusicBusinessWorldwide.com)
* The Unsettling Performance That Showed the World Through AI’s Eyes (Wired)
* The 2017 International Jazz Day Global Concert - Art, people before politics at this all-star show in Havana, Cuba (Jazz Times)
* A Confluence of Vibrant Rhythm and Hopeful Goodwill in Havana, For International Jazz Day (WGBO)
* Revisiting Alice Coltrane's Lost Spiritual Classics (Rolling Stone)
* Herb Alpert talks back (Offbeat)
* Jazz at Lincoln Center Gala Celebrates Fitzgerald, Features Diverse Lineup (DownBeat)
* The Evolutionary Vocabulary of the Human Voice (PopMatters.com)
* Iggy Pop on Singing Jazz, Turning 70 (Rolling Stone)
* Millennials Are Buying Vinyl, But Not From Record Stores (MusicThinkTank.com)
* Butch Morris’s workbook for spontaneous composition published (Jazz Beyond Jazz/ArtsJournal.com)
* Interview Series: Michael Heller, Loft Jazz (IASPM-US.net)
* On the Record with Pianist Vijay Iyer (OberlinReview.org)
* A Huge Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music (1920-2007) Featuring John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart & More (OpenCulture.com)
* Overdue Ovation: John Lindberg - A circle still in progress (Jazz Times)
* Guitarist John McLaughlin Talks Mahavishnu, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Yoga (Newsweek)
* Trevor Watts & Other Intakt Artists Go Exploring in Vortex (DownBeat)
* Marc Ribot: Barriers to Participation (Guernica)
* John Coltrane Documentary Chasing Trane Is a Flub Supreme (Miami New Times)
* Interview: Cooper-Moore on Lifetime Achievement Award From Vision Festival & More (Free Jazz Blog)
* This Record Label Releases Albums That Are Almost Impossible to Play (Vice.com)
* A Young Saxophonist Channels His Inner Jedi, With Music, For International Star Wars Day (WBGO)
* Patti LaBelle on Her First-Ever Jazz Album: ‘It Sounds More Beautiful Than I Ever Imagined’ (Variety)
* Napster, Spotify and the Fall of the 'Middle-Class Musician' (Rolling Stone)
* Chicago musicians speak up about the Affordable Care Act (Chicago Reader)
* Tenor Titans Unite to Honor Sonny Rollins (DownBeat)
* How The Music Industry Is Putting Itself Out Of Business (Forbes)
* David Murray Is Back in Town (Stereophile)
* Trumpeter Sean Jones Aims for ‘Raw’ Sound with Live Album (DownBeat)
* New Orleans Jazz Festival: 1st Weekend Photos (Jazz Times)
* How Star Wars Influenced Funk and Disco, in 7 Songs (Pitchfork.com)
* Remembering Jazz's Greatest Year With the Living Legends of 1959 (Billboard)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Spotlight on Tomeka Reid

This week, let's get acquainted via video with the Chicago-based cellist and composer Tomeka Reid, who will perform in a concert presented by New Music Circle next Saturday, December 3 at Joe's Cafe.

Reid, who grew up in Maryland near Washington DC and is now in her late 30s, is an active participant in Chicago's busy jazz and improvised music scene, moving freely between various musical projects of her own and those led by others. She also has significant classical training, having earned music degrees at the University of Maryland, College Park and DePaul University, and currently is working on a doctor of music from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

In addition to leading several groups under her own name, Reid has worked with Dee Alexander's Evolution Ensemble, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble/Strings, Mike Reed's Loose Assembly, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Great Black Music Ensemble, and co-leads the string trio Hear in Now.

Reid's Artifacts Trio, the group she'll perform with here in St. Louis, takes its name from an album she recorded last year with flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Mike Reed. The three have known each other for 15 years, performing together in various combinations and all serving on the executive board of the AACM, so when Reid wanted to put together a program of music by composers associated with the AACM in conjunction with the organization's 50th anniversary, Mitchell and Reed were natural choices as collaborators.

Since the release of Artifacts, there's been a good deal of interest in the group, resulting in a number of festival dates overseas plus some one-off domestic gigs like the one they'll do in St. Louis. Unfortunately, none of those shows seem to have been captured on video and made available online yet.

So instead today, you can sample several recent performances by Reid in a variety of musical settings, starting up above and continuing after the jump with two excepts featuring what one might call an alternate version of the Artifacts Trio, with Reid, Mike Reed, and British pianist Alexander Hawkins, recorded in September at the Brighton Alternative Jazz Festival in England.

Below that, you can see two solo performances by Reid - one recorded in April at the Block Museum of Art, the other from a concert in July at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in which Reid combined composed and improvised materials in reaction to artist Fo Wilson’s installation "Eliza’s Peculiar Cabinet of Curiosities."

The fifth clip features Reid's String Ensemble performing her extended work "Tokens" in September at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in Chicago, and the final videois an excerpt from a show by a quartet led by Reid, with bassist Silvia Bolognesi, vibraphonist Pasquale Mirra, and drummer Cristiano Calcagnile, recorded in September at a concert in Lafayette, IN.

For more about Tomeka Reid, check out the profile of her published in 2013 by the Chicago Reader; and her 2015 interview in Point of Departure.

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