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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

This is billed as a celebration of the music of Miles Davis, which has become a sub-genre unto itself. This one caught my attention immediately, though, even against the usual cacophony of Virgin Records, in Times Square.
This recording could have very easily have wallowed in cheap gimmicks and left it at that. Instead, it’s bubbling with ideas, and interesting ones, at that. The set brings together Miles stalwarts like Ron Carter and John McLaughlin and Chick Corea (and many more) with a large cast of Indian performers. The musicianship is high throughout and all kinds of sparks emanate from the unusual instrumentation.

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Posted at 7:41 PM · Comments (0)

Sheer genius from master.

Man, you know I done enjoyed things that Kings and Queens will never have; in fact Kings and Queen ‘caint never get. And they don’t even know about. And good times, mmmmm.
I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. Ohhh, my health is fading on me. Oh yes, I’m going down slow…
… Please write my mother. Tell her the shape I’m in. Tell her to pray for me. Forgive me for my sins.

Learn more about "Goin’ Down Slow - Chess Blues: 1960-1967"

Posted at 12:16 AM · Comments (0)

Sweet Congolese Jazz from Tabu Ley from the 1960s and ’70s.
What a wonderful compilation. I listened to Kimakango Mpe Libala, just to pick one favorite, and was lofted high and carried far, far away. You close your eyes and you can see the sunsetting over the broad Congo River again, or if you’ve never had that pleasure, the music will conjure it for you.
The arrangements here are invitingly simple. With these recordings we’re on the cusp of the transition from mostly acoustic bands to the big, loud and lavishly choreographed shows that Tabu Ley and Franco and many others would soon make routine.

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Learn more about "The Voice of Lightness"

Posted at 7:59 PM · Comments (0)

From the recording New Ancient Strings, which is consistently sublime music from Mali played with the kora, a traditional West African stringed instrument whose sound is vaguely reminiscent of the sitar. This CD great strength are its duets, which are just magical.

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Posted at 7:18 PM · Comments (0)

Distilled languor. Brilliant and cool as can be.

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Posted at 7:02 PM · Comments (0)

Possibly the sexiest song I have ever heard. Definitely not the Blues. Transport me, Rosa! From the collection Samba Bossa Nova.

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Posted at 11:17 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve had a couple of this guy’s cds for a while now and had scarcely paid them any attention for some reason.
That changed last night when I was busy writing and had left my iTunes to play on and on without minding what I was hearing.
The volume was low, but about half way into this album I began to wonder what it was that I was listening to. Quiet, powerful, soulful Jazz piano played with an utter lack of cliche.
Bill Evans? No. I know his whole oeuvre. Couldn’t be. Brad Mehldau? No. There was too much bottom to this.
I looked at my iTunes to discover it was Gonzalo. I turned up the volume, too. Then I played the whole thing again.
This was a hidden gem.
Besame Mucho, which is deconstructed and played with such imaginative flair, was the giveaway that this was a Latin artist. Silver Hollow, too, more Bill Evans like in style, is also pure genius.

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Posted at 6:19 PM · Comments (0)

If Monk could sing, this is what he might have sounded like. Oh my, Abbey has got soul, and chops and smarts - this is above all music for the mind, so well is everything here conceived. And if that conveys even a little hint of coldness, banish the thought. You’ll shiver, yes, but in warmth. A word should be said, too, for the accompanyists, too, another reflection of Abby’s smarts.
Metheny and Hargrove and Charlie Haden and Kenny Barron are anything but revelations, but you can tell they’re drinking at the source with Lincoln and digging it. What to make of Julien Lourau and Rodney Kendrick, respectively tenor sax and piano. Hardly household names, these guys bring the highest art to the table.

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Posted at 9:05 PM · Comments (0)

Here, Wayne Shorter brings back the warm evenings, the liquid air of summer evenings, the big golden disk of the setting sun, red clay, sweat in the car waiting for Mom to make the last purchase in a round of errands, the crisp, lemon-tinged toast of a glass of perfectly chilled wine, an afternoon stroll in Paris in August with the French all away at the beach.
This is hard bob that gets away from the formulaic and earns its strips in the most beautiful and unflashy way.

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Posted at 12:54 AM · Comments (0)

Senegalese music helped define “World,” that strange and vaguely condescending category that roughly means everything that’s not from the USA, Canada, and Western Europe. As amorphous as the category is, the sound of Senegalese music is so distinctive as to help lend it a sort of foundation.
Youssou N’dour has been the most commercially succesful and easily recognizable of the Senegalese acts, with his extraordinary vocals strong enough to stand out in any crowd.
Baaba Maal, though, is sneakier. He grows on you, and in my book, his music has more bottom than any of the readily accessible Senegalese acts. His voice cannot compare to Ndour’s, but his ensemble sound has big chops - just check out the percussion here, which in my view is worth the admission all by itself.

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Posted at 12:42 AM · Comments (0)

I think I have a new favorite album.
I’ve been listening to Billie all of my life. Somehow I’d never heard this album. Yes, I knew most of the tunes, and indeed some of these renditions, but this collection itself had escaped me, and hearing it end to end I feel like I’ve rediscovered an old, brilliant friend, captured at the very height of her poignancy.
The recording quality is fantastic, as are the accompaniments, especially, although not exclusively by a magisterial Ben Webster. Hear track 3, Ill Wind, and just shiver.
This album is a must own.

Learn more about "All or Nothing At All"

Posted at 11:36 PM · Comments (1)

Una historia morena.
Cuba channeled through the Congo River Basin = glorious stuff.
Sam Mangwana is an rumba king. Can you listen and sit still?

Learn more about "Galo Negro"

Posted at 11:20 PM · Comments (0)

This album just goes from strength to strength, with terrific orchestration and, what else, killer guitar work from Carlos. Nothing is forced. All just right.
It also has the merit of bringing back memories of hot summer nights in high school, hanging at John’s house, or better, at Melanie’s.

Learn more about "Caravanserai"

Posted at 11:08 PM · Comments (0)

This amazing lady died the other day, deepening our collective loss of a generation or two of sheer and irreplaceable female vocal talent: Sarah, Ella, Dinah, Betty (Carter), Shirley (Horn). I’ll stop there. It’s too awful to contemplate.
Anita was a soul sister. Doubt it? Listen to this record, a bargain bin special that is one of the densest collections of great recordings you’ll encounter from any Jazz vocalist. The voice ranges from gritty sass to pure milk and honey, and it does so effortlessly, through drink and smoke and heroin.

“Say Joe, Have you been uptown,” she asks Roy Eldridge, who informs her his name ain’t Joe.

Great, great music from an amazing woman.

Learn more about "Compact Jazz - Anita O’Day"

Posted at 9:56 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Published September 22, 2006

For the entire article please see:

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THE alto saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman, one of the last of the truly imposing figures from a generation of jazz players that was full of them, seldom talks about other people’s music. People generally want to ask him about his own, and that becomes the subject he addresses. Or half-addresses: what he’s really focused on is a set of interrelated questions about music, religion and the nature of being. Sometimes he can seem indirect, or sentimental, or thoroughly confusing. Other times he sounds like one of the world’s killer aphorists.
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Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

Ornette Coleman in his apartment in Manhattan. At 76, he remains busy; “Sound Grammar” is the name of both his new album and his new record label.
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Tunes Worth Talking About (September 22, 2006)
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Lee Friedlander for The New York Times

“There is no bad music, only bad performances,” Mr. Coleman said. His current band includes his son.

In any case, other people’s music was what I wanted to talk to him about. I asked what he would like to listen to. “Anything you want,” he said in his fluty Southern voice. “There is no bad music, only bad performances.” He finally offered a few suggestions. The music he likes is simply defined: anything that can’t be summed up in a common term. Any music that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ ” he said. “But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea. The idea of music, without it being a style — I don’t hear that much anymore.”

Then he went up a level. “I would like to have the same concept of ideas as how people believe in God,” he said. “To me, an idea doesn’t have any master.”

Mr. Coleman was born, in 1930, and raised in Fort Worth, where he attained some skill at playing rhythm and blues in bars, like any decent saxophonist, and some more skill at playing bebop, which was rarer. He arrived in New York in 1959, via Los Angeles, with an original, logical sense of melody and an idea of playing with no preconceived chord changes. Yet his music bore a tight sense of knowing itself, of natural form, and the records he made for Atlantic with his various quartets, from 1959 to 1961, are almost unreasonably beautiful.

Following that initial shock of the new came a short period with a trio, then a two-year hiatus from recording in 1963 and 1964, then the trio again, then a fantastic quartet from 1968 to 1972 with the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman (who died three weeks ago), then a period of funk-through-the-looking-glass with his electric band, Prime Time. Mr. Coleman is still moving, now with a band including two bassists, Greg Cohen and Tony Falanga, and his son, Denardo Coleman, on drums.

He has a kind of high-end generosity; he said that he wouldn’t think twice about letting me go home with a piece of music he had just written, because he would be interested in what I might make of it. But there is a great pessimism in his talk, too. He said he believes that most of human history has been wasted on building increasingly complicated class structures. “Life is already complete,” he said. “You can’t learn what life is. And the only way you die is if something kills you. So if life and death are already understood, what are we doing?”

Learn more about "Listening With Ornette Coleman: Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music"

Posted at 6:05 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve got a Blues collection that runs into the hundreds of discs, and had somehow never come to understand until now, upon listening to this recording, what an essential genius Skip James is. Well, as they say, better late than never.
Its all Skip all the time here, solo guitar or piano — both brilliant — in accompaniment of his ambling, laconic vocals. This is simply great stuff.

“You know, I’d rather be ther devil. Rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man.
You know I’m so sorry. You know so sorry. That I ever fell in love with you.
Because you know you don’t treat me, baby like you used to do…

You know the woman that I love. The woman that I love. I stol’t her from my best friend.
But that man he got lucky and stole her back again.

You know you used to cut your kindling, and then baby I’d make you some fire.
Then I would turn on your fire. Way way away from the boggy bottom.

You know my baby don’t drink whiskey. My baby don’t drink no whiskey, and I know she ain’t crazy about wine.
No, it wasn’t nothing but the devil, he done changed my baby’s mind.

I could be right, and then again I could be wrong.
But it ain’t nothing but the devil got my baby in heat and gone.”

Learn more about "Devil Got My Woman"

Posted at 11:29 PM · Comments (0)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5452186

Learn more about "Impulse Records: The House that ‘Trane” Built"

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (0)

Great Googlie-mooglie. A masterpiece from Chess Blues - 1960-1967.

Man, you know I done enjoyed things that Kings and Queens ain’t never had. In fact Kings and Queens can’t never get. Don’t even know about! And good times? Ummmmm.
I have had my fun. If I don’t never get well no more. I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. Woah, my health is fading on me. Woah yes, I’m going down slow…
Please write my mother, and tell her the shape I’m in. Please write my mother, and tell her the shape I’m in. Tell her pray for me. Forgive me for my sins.

Learn more about "Goin’ Down Slow"

Posted at 1:38 AM · Comments (0)

This is a very well written and entertaining look at the work of the master. Highly recommended.

Learn more about "Appreciation: Thelonious Monk"

Posted at 12:03 PM · Comments (0)

Magisterial tenor work by Dexter Gordon. His solo here, long and loose-jointed is one of the most joyful I’ve ever heard on the instrument.

Learn more about "I was Doing Allright"

Posted at 5:51 PM · Comments (0)

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