News of Past Guests, New Year 2020 Edition

Where did the holidays go?  Let's catch up quick for Auld Lang Syne, shall we?

In the jazz mediasphere:

• In "Two Become One" (Jazz Times December 2019), Jeff Tamarkin writes about bassist Chris Lightcap's "supergroup," Super-Bigmouth.
• Meanwhile, in the November Jazz Times, Shaun Brady gives clarinetist/multi-reedist Ben Goldberg an "Overdue Ovation."
• And way back in October, Jazz Times writer Geoffrey Himes profiled guitarist Ben Monder in "The Understated Appeal of Ben Monder."
• For the December issue of DownBeat, drummer Antonio Sánchez subjected himself to the "Blindfold Test"--and passed with flying colors. The print version hasn't yet been made available online, but you can listen to it as it was recorded at this year's Monterey Jazz Festival:

A lot of people have sworn off the hoary "Top 10 List" this year, but...

• Jazz Times compiled its writers' Top 50 picks for 2019, and that list reads like a Who's Who of RJA alumni: Camila Meza's Ámbar (#4), Tom Harrell's Infinity (#6), Johnathan Blake's Trion (#9), Linda May Han Oh's Aventurine (#10), Dave Douglas/Uri Caine/Andrew Cyrille's Devotion (#12), the Fabian Almazan Trio's This Land Abounds With Life (#13), Miguel Zenón's Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (#16), Ralph Alessi's Imaginary Friends (#17), the Anat Cohen Tentet's Triple Helix (#18), Melissa Aldana's Visions (#22), Frank Kimbrough's Monk's Dreams (#25), Ryan Keberle & Catharsis' The Hope I Hold (#26), Tyshawn Sorey & Marilyn Crispell's The Adornment of Time (#27), Fred Hersh & WDR Big Band's Begin Again (#36), and Allison & Miller's Boom Tic Boom's Glitter Wolf (#37).
• The Ottawa Citizen's Peter Hum, one of the smartest, most sympathetic jazz writers around, also includes Meza, Oh, Almazan, and Blake (3, 2, 4, and 16) in his year-end list, along with Ben Monder's Day After Day (14) and Jason Palmer's Rhyme and Reason (15).
• Those names--and other past RJA guests (Parlour Game, Noah Preminger, Scott Robinson)--show up again and again on other lists (LA Times, NextBop.com, AllAbout Jazz, the Jazz Journalists' Association, PopMatters, the Chicago Tribune).  See for yourself here.

News of Past Guests, Fall 2019 Edition

Let's start with bassist Linda May Han Oh, who performed her double-quartet chamber jazz project "Aventurine" on the September 19th episode of NPR's Jazz Night in America.



The album, which we previewed in a previous post (and which you can get on Bandcamp) is getting great buzz.

Pianist Helen Sung, meanwhile, contributed to the episode of the NPR series Turning the Tables: 8 Women Who Changed American Popular Music devoted to piano icon Mary Lou Williams.  Her video segment is entitled "How to Swing Like Mary Lou Williams."

In a recent newsletter, Helen also mentions how proud she is to be part of the album Shoulder to Shoulder: Centennial Tribute to Women's Suffrage (released August 30th) where she "joins the Karrin Allyson Sextet (and some very special guests!) to perform creatively reimagined songs from the Suffragette Movement." Billboard wrote about the project here.

Speaking of iconic pianists: Fred Hersch, renowned for his intimate trio work, has a new big band album (with Hamburg, Germany's NDR Bigband), Begin Again, that was recently reviewed by Kevin Whitehead on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

A week or so later, Whitehead also reviewed a new record by Ben Goldberg (Plays Monk, Myra Melford's Be Bread), A Good Day for Cloud Fishing, built around the poetry of Dean Parks and featuring guitarist Nels Cline and cornetist Ron Miles.  (You can buy the album from a number of online venues, including Bandcamp.)

And speaking of big bands: our first guest of the 2019-20 season, Emilio Solla, has a special talent for writing and arranging for large ensembles.  He debuted his own big band, the Tango Jazz Orchestra, at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola earlier this year, and now his debut big band album has dropped.  It's called Puertos: Music from International Waters, and you can get it from all the usual online vendors, including the artist-friendly CD Baby (want a high-resolution format? try Qobuz).

Other new albums:

• Tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger's 15th album as a leader, Zigsaw: Music of Steve Lampert, is available for pre-order (CD or download) at his website.  It includes the talents of John O'Gallagher, Jason Palmer, Kris Davis, Rob Schwimmer, Kim Cass, and Rudy Royston.
• Alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón's latest is dedicated to a legendary Puerto Rican singer, Sonero: The Music of Ismail Rivera. (Miguel also did his first "Before and After" listening session for the September issue of Jazz Times.)
  
• Saxophonists (and longtime friends) Donny McCaslin and David Binney team up with fellow reedmen Dave Liebman and Samuel Blais for a sax quartet project called Four Visions:
• Bassist Chris Lightcap (who was recently interviewed for the Burning Ambulance podcast and the Jazz Gallery's "Jazz Speaks" series) combines his ensembles Bigmouth and Superette into a large ensemble called--you guessed it--SuperBigmouth, featuring two tenors, two guitarists, and two drummers.  "With whatever band Lightcap is leading," says the New York Times, "he strikes a masterly balance between urgent, punctuated bass playing and smooth, sighing melodies on top."  "SuperBigmouth commingles prog rock, spiritual jazz and the indie-lounge vibes of Stereolab, resulting in something altogether new." You can pre-order--and listen--on Bandcamp:  
• Bassist Ben Allison's new disc is the second with his collective trio "The Easy Way," featuring saxophonist Ted Nash and guitarist Steve Cardenas; it's called Somewhere Else: West Side Story Songs (preview | order)
• Guitarist Joel Harrison teams up with Anupam Shobakhar and the Talujon Percussion Quartet for Still Point: Turning World (order & preview on Bandcamp):
  
• Guitarist Rez Abbasi, meanwhile, is coming out with two new albums, one a soundtrack for the 1929 silent film A Throw of the Dice (interview in DownBeat), the other a collaboration with French harpist Isabelle Olivier, Oasis.  Here's a preview track:
  
• Drummer Harris Eisenstadt has a new live album with his quartet Canada Day (pre-order it at Clean Feed Records), as well as a new studio album with his other quartet Old Growth Forest (pre-order it--and preview it--on Bandcamp)
• Drummer Dan Weiss (who has played for the RJA multiple times as a sideman) returns as leader of a "Trio +1" with Utica Box
• Drummer Gerald Cleaver (Michael Formanek Quartet) leads his band "Violet Hour" (which includes Chris Lightcap) on a live date for Firehouse 12 Records entitled, strangely enough, Live at Firehouse 12 
• And pianist Uri Caine has written an oratorio, The Passion of Octavius Catto, dedicated to the 19th-century Philadelphia civil rights activist.  Order it from Caine's website with the link above, or from CDBaby. Here's a review, and here's a promotional video:

Myra Cures the Summer Doldrums

The vernal flood of new releases (see the last two posts) has slowed to a trickle--appropriate for our drought-stricken state, I suppose.  But thankfully, Myra Melford is quenching our collective thirst with a series of videos from her spring residency at the Stone (John Zorn's famous performance space on New York City's Lower East Side), releasing them at the rate of one per week. Here's an introduction:

And here she is with drummer Allison Miller:

And with flutist Nicole Mitchell and drummer Tyshawn Sorey:

And with multi-reedist Ben Goldberg:

And with Miya Masaoka and Mary Halvorson:

And with the Crush Quartet:

And with the Be Bread Sextet:

And with The Same River, Twice (Chris Speed, Dave Douglas, Erik Friedlander, Michael Sarin):

And with her latest band, Snowy Egret:

And a second tune from The Same River, Twice:

And with Marty Ehrlich:

And finally, her old trio with Lindsey Horner & Reggie Nicholson:

News of Past Guests, Spring Supplement

Too many things going on for one (March) blog post, it being the season of renewal and rebirth and all.

First: our old friend Myra Melford is only the latest RJA alum to be asked to program a week's worth of shows at John Zorn's performance space The Stone, a tiny venue of outsize prestige on Manhattan's Lower East Side.  Call it a mid-career retrospective: duets with Allison Miller, Ben Goldberg, and Marty Ehrlich.  Reunions of her 90s Trio, her Crush Quartet, The Same River, Twice (her quintet with Dave Douglas), and the Be Bread Sextet. And a release party for her newest CD, whose name, like the group that plays on it, is "Snowy Egret" (Ron Miles, cornet; Liberty Ellman, guitar; Stomu Takeishi, bass guitar; and Ted Poor sitting in for Tyshawn Sorey on drums).  Man, we wish we could be there!  Consolation: two tracks from the new album--"The Strawberry" and "Language"--are streaming at Fully Altered Media.

Next RJA vets at The Stone, by the way: weeklong residencies by Scott Amendola and Ben Goldberg in April.

Speaking of Ben Goldberg: he, too, has a new album out--a recording of Orphic Machine, a song cycle commissioned several years ago by Chamber Music America and the Jewish Music Festival. The players include lots of old friends, starting with...Myra Melford and Ron Miles, plus David Breskin, Greg Cohen, Nels Cline, Carla Kihlstedt, Ches Smith, Rob Sudduth, and Kenny Wollesen.  Check out "Line of Less Than Ten" and "Care," also courtesy of Fully Altered Media. Here's a video on the making the album:



And here's "Care" performed live at Freight & Salvage in Berkeley in 2012:


(Details: Ben Goldberg's Orphic Machine "Care" from Black Parrot Productions on Vimeo)

And speaking of publicists and streaming: the set by Dafnis Prieto's Sextet (say that three times fast!) at the Zinc Bar may be the best thing we heard at this year's WinterJazzFest in New York. Thanks to Two for the Show Media, you can preview the group's new album, Triangles and Circles, in its entirety:



Other new albums: saxophonist Tony Malaby (Ralph Alessi's This Against That, Chris Lightcap's Bigmouth) has a new one, Scorpion Eater, with a new quartet, Tubacello. (Sitting in the quartet's drum chair: John Hollenbeck.) Kevin Whitehead reviewed it for NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross:



(If you're a Spotify sort of person, you can preview the whole album at Clean Feed's website.) Also: saxophonist Donny McCaslin has a new one, Fast Future, with an old quartet--or at least the same one that played on his last album, the superfunked-up Casting for Gravity. Hear the title track and order the album at Greenleaf Music's Bandcamp Store, and hear Donny talk about making it with Dave Douglas on the Noise from the Deep podcast.

Finally (for now): Anat Cohen, whose new album we told you about last time, appears on NPR's Jazz Night in America with her band Choro Aventuroso on Wednesday, April 1 (no foolin'!).  And Uri Caine was at New York's newest jazz club, Mezzrow, recently, playing a duet with bassist Mark Helias. The club, started by Small's impresario Spike Willner, specializes in piano-bass duos. Here's the evidence (thanks to Karen for the tip!):

Go Home, on February 9th

Next up: "Go Home"

Ben Goldberg, Ron Miles, Charlie Hunter, and Scott Amendola

Monday, February 9, 2009 (8 p.m.) | Kate Buchanan Room, HSU

Guitar virtuoso Charlie Hunter comes “home” for a reunion with some old Bay Area mates—drummer Scott Amendola (T.J. Kirk, Nels Cline Singers) and clarinetist Ben Goldberg (Tin Hat Trio, New Klezmer Trio)—in a brand-new quartet rounded out by the sublime cornetist Ron Miles, a frequent collaborator of guitarist Bill Frisell. Together they lay down rootsy, hard-driving grooves and dynamic interplay, perfectly structured by Goldberg’s lyrical compositions.

Plays Monk warms up.

September 27, 2007, the trio calling itself Plays Monk, Scott Amendola, Devon Huff and Ben Goldberg, prepare for the premier concert of our first full season. The show took place in the rotunda at the Graves Museum in Eureka, California. It were great!