News of Past Guests, Summer 2017 Edition

As usual, RJA alumni are well represented in DownBeat's annual International Critics Poll, a survey of 155 prominent jazz writers from around the world. Rudresh Mahanthappa topped the alto saxophone column (Miguel Zenón was second) and Anat Cohen, the clarinet, while breakout singer Cécile McLorin Salvant was the runaway winner of the Female Vocalist category. Noah Preminger was named Rising Star tenor saxophonist; and Fred Hersch, Nels Cline, and Matt Wilson all had albums among the year's top 10 (#3, 5, and 8, respectively).

Speaking of Matt Wilson: the new album from his "Honey and Salt" project, Music Inspired by the Poetry of Carl Sandburg, gets a five-star review from DownBeat's Jim Macnie. (His colleague John Murph calls it a "stunning, melodically enriched, jazz-inflected avant-country album.")

Here's a promotional video:

and a preview track:

Meanwhile, Ambrose Akinmusire, who finished close behind Wadada Leo Smith as the critics' choice for trumpeter of the year, has a new double-live album, A Rift in Decorum, on Blue Note:



As it happens, Akinmusire is the subject of a cover story in the September issue of DownBeat, which also contains a feature story on Wilson, who leads off the 2017-18 RJA season on September 12. (That same issue also spotlights Fred Hersch, who releases his 11th solo album, Open Book, and publishes a memoir, Good Things Happen Slowly: A Life in and Out of Jazz, in September; and David Berkman's co-led New York Standards Quartet. The August issue of Jazziz, meanwhile, sports a feature on Ryan Keberle, who returns with his band Catharsis to round out the upcoming RJA season in April 2018.)

Also in September, Cécile McLorin Salvant (see above) will  have a 2-CD set, Dreams and Daggers, which you can pre-order--and preview--from her label, Mack Avenue. At the end of August, Vijay Iyer brings out Far from Over, a sextet date, on ECM. (Kevin Whitehead reviewed it on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross, while Iyer discussed the album with Scott Simon on Weekend Edition Saturday.) And in October, Iyer's former collaborator Rudresh Mahanthappa releases a new album, Agrima, with his trio "Indo-Pak Coalition" (featuring Rez Abbasi and Dan Weiss):



Two other records quietly appeared earlier this summer: Omer Avital and Avi Avital's (no relation) Avital Meets Avital, on Deutsche Grammophon, and guitarist Joel Harrison's The Other River, on Whirlwind Recordings.

Finally, drummer Tyshawn Sorey, part of Myra Melford's "Snowy Egret" project, was the subject of an appreciative profile by Alex Ross in The New Yorker and another by Giovanni Russonello in The New York Times.

News of Past Guests, April 2014 Edition

April 1st.  No foolin.  On NPR's A Blog Supreme today, Lara Pellegrenelli talks to guitarist Matt Stevens (who was just here with Linda Oh Sun Pictures) about his debut album, due out on Concord Jazz later this year. Stevens will also appear with his band on WBGO's The Checkout: Live on Wednesday, April 2 in a concert that will be webcast live (and archived) on NPR Music.


Drummer Rudy Royston (Tom Harrell Quintet, Miles-Versace-Royston Trio), whose new album 303 we noted back in January, is the subject of a feature article by John Murph in this month's Jazz Times.  And that DownBeat cover story on Ambrose Akinmusire we mentioned last month?  Now online.  Ambrose is also interviewed by Josh Jackson on the latest April 8th podcast of WBGO's indispensable The Checkout. (Meanwhile, drummer/bandleader John Hollenbeck [Claudia Quintet] appears with singer Theo Bleckmann on the April 15th edition of The Checkout, discussing their album Songs I Like a Lot.)


The uncategorizable new album of through-composed, Indian-beat-cycle-based, large-ensemble music by drummer Dan Weiss (David Binney, Rez Abbasi), entitled Fourteen, has appeared to rave reviews.

Also just out (on April 15th), the latest by Dave Douglas: Riverside, a collection of music inspired by Jimmy Giuffre, with Canadian brothers Chet and Jim Doxas and legendary bassist Steve Swallow (who played in one of Giuffre's trios).


Past (and future) RJA guests are well represented among this year's Jazz Journalists Association awardees: Joe Lovano took both the Multi-Reeds and Tenor Sax category, Anat Cohen won Clarinetist of the Year, Craig Taborn (Michael Formanek Quartet) was voted top pianist, and Regina Carter is primo--er, prima--among violinists.  Are we surprised?  Readers, listeners: we are not.

More RJA veterans on NPR Music:  saxophonist Chris Potter plays music from his ECM album The Sirens on JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater, while pianist/composer/MacArthur Fellow Vijay Iyer is featured on WQXR's Q2 Spaces (in which contemporary composers are interviewed in their own homes and studios).

Finally: Humboldt's own Bob Doran has gotten around to posting his complete set of photos--great ones--from February's concert by the Omer Avital Quintet.  See for yourself:

Post by Bob Doran.

News of Past Guests, March 2014 Edition

New albums:

• Vijay Iyer's ECM debut features music written not for his longtime trio but for piano, electronics and string quartet.  It's called Mutations.  Nate Chinen has a profile of Iyer in the Sunday, March 9 edition of the New York Times, and Chinen and fellow jazz critic Ben Ratliff discuss Iyer and the new album in the latest Times "Popcast."
• Ambrose Akinmusire's second Blue Note release, the imagined savior is far easier to paint, will be out on March 11th, but it's currently streaming (in preview) courtesy of NPR Music's "First Listen." (We hear tell It's official: Ambrose also graces the cover of the April DownBeat.  AND he was recently interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered.)
• And even though Omer Avital's new one, New Song, won't be out on CD in the States until summer, the digital-download version is available now from all the usual suspects (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play)--and, for audiophiles, in 24-bit/88.2 kHz "Studio Master" format from Qobuz.
• On his latest release, Multiplicity: Leave the Door Open, the prolific guitarist Joel Harrison co-leads a group with Indian sarod master Anupam Shobhakar. The rest of the band: Gary Versace (Miles-Versace-Royston, John Abercrombie Organ Trio), Hans Glawischnig (Miguel Zenon Quartet), and Dan Weiss (David Binney Group, Rez Abbasi's Invocation Quintet), plus special guests including David Binney.
• Finally: everybody's talking about the new album, Southern Comfort, by our final guest this season (in a co-presentation with Center Arts), violinist Regina Carter.  NPR ran a feature on All Things Considered, and the Wall Street Journal did a long review (well, okay--it's a double-review, of Southern Comfort and Vijay Iyer's Mutations).

Speaking of Omer Avital: it was great to see Friend of the RJA Bob Doran show up with the "big" camera slung over his shoulder for the first time since...oh, you know.  The preliminary evidence is right here.  (And here's hoping there'll be more!)

Rene Marie is always busy.  This time it's an appearance on NPR's Jazz Set with Dee Dee Bridgewater, as part of the vocal trio "Two Skirts and a Shirt," with Allan Harris and Carla Cook.

Nate Chinen Cannot Stop Talking about Ambrose

Our next featured artist is getting lots of notice in NYC.

Next Show Coming Up, April 26

We round off the season with another rising star: Oakland native, Berkeley High grad, Monk Competition winner—and now Blue Note recording artist—Ambrose Akinmusire.

The 28-year-old trumpeter’s quintet (with tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, pianist Gerald Clayton [replaced on this tour by Sam Harris], bassist Harish Raghavan, and drummer Justin Brown) is a close-knit group of longtime friends who over a dozen years have forged a remarkable collective identity. It's a band that "seems destined for much wider recognition," says The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times named Akinmusire one of its 2011 “Faces to Watch”: “With a chameleonic tone that can sigh, flutter or soar,” wrote the paper’s Emra Islek, “Akinmusire sounds less like a rising star than one that was already at great heights and just waiting to be discovered.”

As it happens, Akinmusire was “discovered” about a decade ago by saxophonist Steve Coleman, who was giving a workshop at Berkeley High and immediately heard promise in the young trumpeter, eventually hiring him as a member of his Five Elements band and embarking on an extensive European tour when Akinmusire was just 19. Coleman—considered by many to be the spiritual godfather of the current creative jazz scene—challenged Akinmusire on and off the stage. “Ambrose, what’s your concept?” Akinmusire remembers Coleman asking him on a train ride through Germany. “Concept? I’m 19, I don’t need a concept. It’ll just come one day,” shrugged Akinmusire, raising the saxophonist’s ire. “You’ve got to start thinking about it now,” Coleman told him. “Everything you don’t love, make sure that’s not in your playing.”

Akinmusire took the advice to heart, and returned to his studies at the Manhattan School of Music (on a full scholarship) determined to discover his own voice. “When I got back to school I wrote a list,” he explains. “It was very specific, it had things on it like ‘I don’t want to be confined by my instrument’ or ‘I want to have a sound like a French Horn player.’ I posted it on my wall so every day I was reminded of it. It caused me a lot of trouble because if a teacher told me to do something and it didn’t really fit what was on that list I didn’t listen to them. It really made me learn who I was because I had to defend that every day.”

Back on the West Coast for a master’s degree at USC, Akinmusire went on to attend the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz. In 2007, he entered and won the Institute's prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition (whose judges included Blanchard, Quincy Jones, Herb Alpert, Hugh Masekela, Clark Terry and Roy Hargrove). Later that year came his debut CD, Prelude…To Cora,on Fresh Sound New Talent, the label that first recorded such “new talents” as pianists Brad Mehldau and Ethan Iverson and saxophonist Mark Turner.

Moving back to New York, Akinmusire began making a name for himself, playing with jazz elders (Wallace Roney, Joe Henderson, Jimmy Heath, Herbie Hancock) and young mavericks (Jason Moran, Vijay Iyer, Esperanza Spalding, Linda Oh) while drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Chopin and Bjork. He also caught the attention of another discerning set of ears, those of Bruce Lundvall, President of Blue Note Records.

In view of the music industry's ongoing struggles, the news of a young artist jumping to a major label can seem almost quaint. But Akinmusire's signing to the storied Blue Note Records last summer sent ripples of excitement through the online jazz community. Co-produced by labelmate (and MacArthur "genius" grant winner) Jason Moran, When the Heart Emerges Glistening will be released April 5. In the lead review in this month’s DownBeat, John Corbett raves: “Akinmusire’s forceful outing is as noteworthy for the strength of the overall concept as for the individual accomplishments of its leader, head-turning as they are…the music and the band vibe are wonderfully original and current. Clearly something very special and personal is at work here, a vision of jazz that’s bigger than camps, broader and more intellectually restless than blowing sessions.”

(Adapted from Mariah Wilkins Artist Management and the Los Angeles Times.)

Tickets ($15 General Admission, $10 Students & Seniors) are available here at our website, or at Wildwood Music, People's Records, and The Works.

The Ambrose Akinmusire Quintet will also present a FREE public workshop the following day, Wednesday, April 27th, at 12:30 p.m. (location TBA). People of all levels of experience are welcome to attend.