Sunday Session: March 11, 2018

Herbie Hancock

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:

* Ben Sidran Remembers Tommy LiPuma (Jazz Times)
* An ‘Astral Weeks’ origin story, told 50 years after Van Morrison fled to Boston (Boston Globe)
* Big Ears 2018 – Q&A With Milford Graves (ArtsKnoxville.com)
* McCoy Tyner In The ’70s: Part 1 (BurningAmbulance.com)
* Herbie Hancock 'still learning,' as eclectic music icon works on new album with Kendrick Lamar, Wayne Shorter and more (San Diego Union Tribune)
* Why are concert tickets going on sale so early? And where does all that cash go? (Kansas City Star)
* 7 Candid Photos of Jazz Legends (BBC)
* Like A Cosmic Newspaper: Val Wilmer On Sun Ra (TheQuietus.com)
* How the classical took control of the jazz in ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ (San Francisco Chronicle)
* Mere Virtuosity - Variations on a Slippery Idea (VQROnline.org)
* Inside the Bizarre, Booming Business of Turning Hit Songs into Baby Lullabies (Thrillist.com)
* Q&A with Steven Bernstein: On Respectability (DownBeat)
* Founder of Tower Records dies at 92 while drinking whiskey and watching the Oscars (Sacramento Bee)
* Herbie Hancock Taps Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat for New Album (Rolling Stone)
* NPR’s Tiny Desk Is Actually Not Tiny at All (Vice.com)
* NME to close print edition after 66 years (The Guardian)
* Big Ears Announces Full 2018 Lineup (DownBeat)
* An Impressive Audio Archive of John Cage Lectures & Interviews: Hear Recordings from 1963-1991 (OpenCulture.com)
* There’s a Tuba Crime Wave Sweeping America (Wall Street Journal)
* The Many Dimensions of Drummer, Composer and Bandleader Allison Miller (WBGO)
* Van Morrison teams up with Hammond hero Joey DeFrancesco on new album You’re Driving Me Crazy (Jazzwise)
* A Cherished BBC Radio Show Asks Celebrities to Pick a Desert Island Survival Kit (AtlasObscura.com)
* For iconic jazz club Village Vanguard, music rather than food is its main gig (New York Business Journal)
* Taylor Ho Bynum Presents New Suite in Hartford (DownBeat)
* Linda Ronstadt: From Tucson to Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, her lifetime love affair with music (AZCentral.com)
* The Original Noise Artist: Hear the Strange Experimental Sounds & Instruments of Italian Futurist, Luigi Russolo (1913) (OpenCulture.com)
* An Interview with Billy Cobham, Genius Drummer with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Miles Davis, Peter Gabriel, Etc. Etc. (The Stranger)
* Kobalt invests $150m in independent artists to challenge ‘stupidity’ of traditional major label deals (MusicBusinessWorldwide.com)
* Her Tiny Apartment is New York’s Most Secret Jazz Club (MessyNessyChic.com)

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

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

* The indefatigable Clark Terry has posted New Year's greetings on his blog.

* Jan Shapiro, singer and former St. Louisan who now heads the vocal program at Berklee College of Music, has a new CD called Piano Bar After Hours. The album (pictured) features a varied program of songs, from well-known tunes such as "If I Were A Bell" and Horace Silver's "Doodlin'" to more obscure numbers. Although the "official release" isn't until April 2013, both the CD and single tracks already can be purchased via CDbaby, iTunes, and Amazon.com.

* In a year-end interview, Euclid Records' Joe Schwab told KWMU's Maria Altman that 2012 was a good year for music on vinyl.

* New Music Circle has posted online a brief video clip from the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet's concert in November at Luminary Center for the Arts.

* The Facebook page for Joe's Cafe and its associated gallery linked to a set of vintage photos of Gaslight Square, annotated by Jack Parker of O'Connell's Pub fame.

So What: Local News, Notes & Links

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

* Cornetist and composer Taylor Ho Bynum had a few words with the Post-Dispatch's Calvin Wilson for a concert preview story now published online. Bynum also answered a few questions about his music during another interview that's now posted on New Music Circle's website. NMC will present Bynum and his sextet in a performance tomorrow night at the Luminary Center for the Arts.

* Nevermore Jazz Ball has added another public event to this weekend's menu of happenings: a happy hour meet-and-greet with some of the festival's dance instructors, dancers, and musicians, held today at Rue Lafayette.

* Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra's recent visit to St. Louis included some time mentoring and performing with students from the East St. Louis High School jazz band in a concert at Washington University's 560 Music Center. Wash U's news service has a short article about the visit, along with a YouTube video, here.

* Electronic musician and composer Eric Hall has posted online his set from last weekend's Noisefest at Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center.

* When he comes to town at the end of this month to play at Jazz at the Bistro, guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli (pictured) also will plug his new book World on a String: A Musical Memoir on the airwaves of KMOX radio. Pizzarelli's tome is the November selection for the KMOX/Fontbonne University Book of the Month Club, and he'll visit in person with the station's Charlie Brennan and listeners at an event at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, November 27 at the Heagney Theatre on the campus of Nerinx Hall, 530 East Lockwood in Webster Groves. There's no charge to attend, but reservations are required, and can be made by calling 314-444-1827. The interview also will be taped for airing on Brennan's program in December.

* The Metropolitan Artists Lofts in Grand Center will have a grand opening ceremony next Thursday, November 8. The building, just a short walk from Jazz at the Bistro, the Sheldon Concert Hall, Powell Symphony Hall and other venues in the district, has 72 units specifically designed as affordable housing for artists and musicians.

* Down Beat magazine has published their list of 2012 Reader's Poll winners, and as it turns out, a substantial number of them have played in St. Louis during the last couple of years. However, the only local actually to win an award this year was the late Miles Davis, who copped the "Historical Album" trophy for Miles Davis Quintet, Live In Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series Vol. 1 (Columbia/Legacy). See the complete results of the poll here.

Jazz this week: Terell Stafford, Nevermore Jazz Ball, Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet, Cornet Chop Suey, and more

The autumn parade of jazz trumpeters in St. Louis continues this week with two more well-known touring musicians, even as the complete menu of upcoming local jazz and creative music events offers a variety of styles from avant to trad. Let's go to the highlights....

Tonight, trumpeter Terell Stafford opens a four-night engagement that continues through Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro. Stafford and his quintet are expected to showcase material from his album The Side of Strayhorn, a tribute to the music of composer and Duke Ellington associate Billy Strayhorn released last year on the St. Louis based MAXJAZZ label. In addition to the leader, the band includes Stafford's longtime associate Tim Warfield on saxophone, Bruce Barth on piano, Rodney Whitaker on bass and Dana Hall on drums. For more about Stafford and the Strayhorn project, check out this post from last Saturday.

Tomorrow night, saxophonist Rob Nugent and singer Kim Fuller will headline a free concert for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University. They'll play music primarily drawn from the collaborations between saxophonist Cannonball Adderly and singer Nancy Wilson, both of whom recorded for Capitol Records back in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Thursday also is the first night of the Nevermore Jazz Ball, a weekend-long series of events for swing dancers and fans of traditional jazz presented by Lindy Hop St. Louis. The Ball gets underway Thursday evening with the Sidemen performing at Atomic Cowboy. On Friday, Miss Jubilee and the Bella Rue Jazz Band will play for dancers at Casa Loma Ballroom.

The NJB's Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl on Saturday afternoon will present free live music from a dozen different acts at various venues and businesses along Cherokee St. Then on Saturday night, the New Orleans-based Meschiya Lake & Dem Little Big Horns will headline another evening of music for dancing at Casa Loma. Lake and her band also will play on Sunday evening at Atomic Cowboy for the Festival's "lagniappe." The Nevermore Jazz Ball also includes a number of dance classes and contests as well as other events; see the website for the complete schedule.

Elsewhere on Thursday, saxophonist Paul DeMarinis will play at Robbie's House of Jazz, with basically the same band that gigged at Jazz at the the Bistro a couple of weeks ago billed under the co-leadership of DeMarinis and guitarist Dave Black. Joined by pianist Nick Schlueter, bassist Ben Wheeler, drummer Kyle Honeycutt, and singer Debby Lennon, DeMarinis and Black will feature primarily original compositions from the various members of the group.

On Friday, Indianapolis-based jazz harpist Jan Aldridge Clark will play at Robbie's, backed by Bob DeBoo on bass and Kyle Honeycutt on drums; and drummer Paul Shaw leads a trio with vibraphonist Tom Rickard and bassist Bob DeBoo at Cigar Inn in Belleville.

On Saturday afternoon, Terell Stafford will present a free performance and workshop at Saxquest.

Then on Saturday night, cornet player and composer Taylor Ho Bynum's Sextet (pictured) will perform in a concert presented by New Music Circle at Luminary Center for the Arts. Adventurous yet relatively accessible, the group brings together a diverse lineup musicians who all are bandleaders in their own right, including Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jim Hobbs (alto sax), Bill Lowe (bass trombone & tuba), Ken Filiano (bass), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). For more about Bynum and some extended video footage of the Sextet in concert, see this post from a couple of weeks ago.

Also on Saturday, singer Joe Mancuso leads a quintet at Jazz on Broadway in Alton, and singer/pianist Curt Landes will front a trio at Robbie's.

On Sunday afternoon, Saxquest will host another workshop and performance featuring the Oasis Saxophone Quartet, while the St. Louis Jazz Club will present their monthly concert, this time featuring traditional jazz and swing from Cornet Chop Suey at the Doubletree Hotel in Westport.

Looking beyond the weekend, on Monday guitarist Tom Byrne and Have You Heard? will do their Pat Metheny-inspired thing at BB's Jazz, Blues and Soups, and Webster University's student jazz combos will perform at the college's Community Music School, located at 535 Garden Ave in Webster.

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: Meet the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet

This week, let's get acquainted with the Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet, who will be making their St. Louis debut in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, November 3 at Luminary Center for the Arts.

Bynum, a 37-year-old cornet and trumpet player from Boston, first became widely known in the jazz world for his association with multi-instrumentalist and composer Anthony Braxton, with whom he studied while attending Wesleyan University in the 1990s. In addition to his work with Braxton and leading his own bands, Bynum also is a member of The Fully Celebrated Orchestra, which has been named Boston's best jazz group in several polls, and a co-founded of the collective ensembles Paradigm Shift and Trio Ex Nihilo.

His other credits include work with Ghanaian drummer Kwaku Kwaakye Obeng, "avant-salsa" group Zemog el Gallo Bueno, the Boston Jazz Repertory Orchestra, and the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, as well as Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Fred Ho, Alan Silva, J.D. Parran, Elliot Sharp, Jay Hoggard, The Sound and Vision Orchestra, Alvin Batiste, Pheeroan akLaff, and many others. Bynum also is known for his interest in interdisciplinary collaborations, working with dancers, filmmakers, visual artists and others on a variety of projects.

The Sextet, which has been Bynum's main working band for the last few years, currently includes Mary Halvorson (guitar), Jim Hobbs (alto sax), Bill Lowe (bass trombone & tuba), Ken Filiano (bass), and Tomas Fujiwara (drums). Though their music includes both free improvisation and compositional elements suggesting Braxton's influence - such as melodies containing dissonance, odd intervals or big jumps, and asymmetric song forms - they also can swing pretty hard for a band usually labeled "avant-jazz," making for a sound that can be surprisingly accessible.

Today, we've got videos from two different concerts by the Sextet. The clip up above is the first part of about 19 minutes' worth of video from their show in 2010 at the jazz festival in Saalfelden, Germany, with the second part down below.

Below that, you can see an entire concert, recorded during the Crosscurrent Festival on September 11, 2011 at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, and available here in five parts. The lineup is the same as above, except that Michael Formanek is in for Filiano on bass.

For more about Taylor Ho Bynum and the Sextet, check out this article published last year in the Boston Globe; this interview Bynum did in September to promote the annual Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT Music); and this post from Destination: Out in which Bynum expounds about his bandmate and teacher Bill Lowe.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Fall 2012 jazz preview, part 2

This week, we present part two of StLJN's fall jazz preview, featuring video samples of some of the musicians who will be coming to St. Louis to perform between now and the end of the year. (You can see part one of the preview here.)

Today's first video up top features guitarist John Scofield playing "Trio Blues" with bassist Steve Swallow and drummer Bill Stewart in November 2010 in Leverkusen, Germany. Scofield will be back here in St. Louis to perform Friday, September 28 and Saturday, September 29 at Jazz at the Bistro

Down below, you can see and hear singer Bett Butler (vocals) performing an excerpt from "Come Rain or Come Shine" at the Elephant Room in Austin, TX during this year's SXSW festival. Though she's accompanied here by Joël Dilley (bass), Paul Klemperer (sax), and Philip Marshall (drums), Butler will be in St. Louis with writer Pam Houston to present a collaborative program called "Words and Music" on Sunday, September 30 at the Ethical Society.

Below that , it's pianist Billy Childs playing a solo piece called "The Red Wheelbarrow" in May 2010 at WNYC radio in New York. Childs is coming to St. Louis to perform Wednesday October 3 through Saturday October 6 at Jazz at the Bistro with an all-star quartet that also will include drummer Brian Blade, saxophonist Steve Wilson, and bassist Scott Colley.

Next up, we've got a clip showcasing the first of four stellar trumpeters who will be visiting St. Louis during a four-week stretch this fall. It's the Cuban-born virtuoso Arturo Sandoval, playing "There Will Never Be Another You" in January of last year in the studios of Seattle radio station KPLU. His band in the clip includes Mahesh Balasooyria (piano:) Zane Musa (saxophone), John Belzaguy (bass) and Johnny Friday (drums). Sandoval returns to St. Louis for a concert on Saturday, October 6 at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Then, it's New Orleans native and trumpeter Christian Scott, doing his tune "Spy Boy" last November at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Scott's band here features Berklee grad and St. Louis native Lawrence Fields on piano, plus Matthew Stevens (guitar), Kris Funn (bass) and Jamire Williams (drums). He'll be in St. Louis to perform Wednesday, October 17 through Saturday, October 20 at Jazz at the Bistro.

Right on Scott's metaphorical heels is trumpeter Terell Stafford, seen here with his quintet playing "Blues for J.T." at the 2006 Jazz Baltica festival in Salzau, Germany. Stafford's accompanists in the clip include Tim Warfield (tenor sax, soprano sax), Martin Wind (bass), Matt Wilson (drums) and Mulgrew Miller (piano). For his upcoming St. Louis gig, which will take place Wednesday, October 31 through Saturday, November 3 at Jazz at the Bistro, Stafford will be showcasing music from This Side of Strayhorn, his 2011 release on St. Louis' MAXJAZZ label.

Today's final video features cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum's sextet performing a piece called "Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths" at the 2010 Saalfelden Jazz Festival in Germany. Along with Bynum, the group's current lineup includes Jim Hobbs (alto saxophone), Bill Lowe (bass trombone, tuba), Mary Halvorson (guitar), Ken Filiano (bass) and Chad Taylor (drums), and they'll be playing Saturday, November 3, at the Luminary Center for the Arts in a concert presented by New Music Circle.

Join us again in this space at the same time next week for the third part of StLJN's Fall 2012 jazz preview...

Previewing New Music Circle's next season

New Music Circle ended their current presenting season on Friday night with a concert and combination wrap party/fundraiser, and as part of the event, the organization also revealed the roster of musicians they're bringing to St. Louis to perform during the 2012-13 season.

While NMC board member Jim Hegarty cautions that the dates and venues are not confirmed yet, the lineup of bands and musicians for the organization's 54th season looks quite impressive. It includes:

* Trombonist and electronic musician George Lewis and composer/sound artist Marina Rosenfeld, doing their piece “Sour Mash,” a collaborative work using turntables and computers that originally was recorded in 2009 for the Innova label;

* A trio featuring Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker, drummer Gerald Cleaver and keyboard player Craig Taborn (pictured, top left);

* Mephista, a trio with percussionist Susie Ibarra (pictured, center left), pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and electronic musician Ikue Mori;

* Pianist Kris Davis' quintet with violist Mat Maneri, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock, bassist Trevor Dunn, and drummer Tom Rainey.

* The sextet of cornet player (and Anthony Braxton acolyte) Taylor Ho Bynum, which recently has included bass trombonist/tubist Bill Lowe, guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Ken Filiano, drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and alto saxophonist Jim Hobbs (pictured, bottom left);

* Caboladies, a Chicago-based electronic music duo comprised of Chris "Flower Man" Bush and Eric "Carl Calm" Lanham whose work might variously be categorized as experimental, ambient, noise, or something else entirely;

* A program presented in conjunction with the Center for Visual Music, a Los-Angeles based nonprofit film archive dedicated to visual music, experimental animation and avant-garde media;

* Another showcase of regional and local musicians that will include St. Louis' Trinity Piano Trio, featuring Amanda Kirkpatrick (piano), Tracy Andreotti (cello) and Manuela Kaymakanova (violin).

Hegarty told StLJN that NMC also has initiated an artistic advisory board comprised of "noted artists who have agreed to be consultants and idea people for us in terms of helping us with programming and artistic vision." The board will include several musicians who have performed in NMC-sponsored concerts in recent seasons, such as violinist, video artist and filmmaker Tony Conrad, multi-instrumentalists Douglas Ewart and Joe McPhee, and saxophonist Larry Ochs. "I'm very excited about the prospect of having their input," said Hegarty.

When NMC announces their final 2012-13 schedule with confirmed dates and venues, we'll have the info for you right here.

(Edited 5/15/12 to correct the names of Kris Davis' band members.)