The balance between groove and sophistication is arguably at the center of jazz, whatever the era. Traditional organ trios (those bands from the 1950s and 1960s with no bass player, a great drummer, and then a guitar and/or saxophone riding atop a great Hammond B3 player) leaned toward groove. But the venerable trio co-led by guitarist Peter Bernstein, organ master Larry Goldings, and drummer Bill Stewart gets the balance just right for the new century.

Here is my review of the trio’s new album, RHOMBUS.

I’m not a fan of quoting the material that gets sent to critics by publicists, but I will say this: the band is being sold as not being particularly interested in innovation or breaking norms. Okay, that’s true as far as it goes. This is music that colors within the post-bop/modern jazz lines.

But I think they are sneaky about reminding listeners that the “organ trio” genre didn’t end with Jimmy Smith and Charles Earland, great as those bands were. I also think that Bernstein/Goldings/Stewart evoke the sounds of organist Larry Young (maybe not his wildest jazz-rock stuff with Tony Williams Lifetime, but …) and the sound of the stylistically modern trio of John Abercrombie, Jan Hammer, and Jack DeJohnette that first hipped me to the organ on the album Timeless.

The moody drama of this title track from that band is one I got lost in those years ago.

What Bernstein, Goldings, and Stewart do is not quite the same, but there are similarities, and the connection is strengthened by the fact that the band chooses some repertoire that comes from the same late-’60s/early-’70s era. Dig this moody version of a Keith Jarrett song, “Everything That Lives Laments.”

This band has been playing together for three decades. You can hear it in how they listen, how they know each other, and how there truly is no leader.

The balance is audible. It’s an organ trio, but the guitar plays most melodies. As guitar-forward as most bands can be, the most “famous” member might be drummer Bill Stewart, given that he plays often with jazz “star” John Scofield, who is beloved by the jam band set. But on top of all that, the recording here is pristine: each cymbal hit is audible, accompanying figures are at the perfect level, and the Hammond swells like it should just as Bernstein’s tone rings but never sounds generic.

Like most other boys I knew growing up, I watched lots of American football on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights. I came of age just as the National Football League was rising to a state of national athletic dominance. From my New Jersey hometown, I watched Broadway Joe Namath win Super Bowl III on the first color TV I had ever seen.

My favorite player was the New York Giants’ scrambling quarterback Fran Tarkenton — who seemed like a string bean as he darted around behind the line of scrimmage, trying to evade having his clock cleaned by monster defensive linemen and linebackers. I kept up this habit for decades, from my 1970s adolescence through the early 2000s. As the monoculture faded, many of us still had football.

Two decades ago, it started to become clear that NFL players had been paying a price in brain health for the repeated head trauma caused by the game, despite those gladiatorial helmets. Just like boxers, the repeated concussing of their brains against the inside of their skulls was causing them to develop Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. This week, a peer-reviewed study was published showing that, “of football players who appeared in at least one NFL game in their careers and who died between 2016 and 2021, … a minimum of around 25% had CTE upon their death.” CTE causes a slew of awful symptoms, including memory loss, mood swings, and early death.

When Dr. Bennet I. Omalu made news (and was pilloried by the NFL and many football fans) by demonstrating that Pittsburgh Steelers offensive tackle “Iron Mike” Webster suffered from this condition, I started to lose my interest in watching the game.1 I still admire the drama of football, the elegance of a long completed pass downfield, the speed and agility of a running back cutting back through a hole. But I now prefer the jazz-ballet of basketball, the mindful tension of baseball, or even the (new to me) athletic dazzle-patience of soccer.

Damage to the Head, Damage to the Child (Actor)

Not a day after reading the news of the new CTE study, I read an editorial in The New York Times by actor (and former child actor) Alison Pill titled. (Here’s a gift link to the article.)

Alison Pill as an adolescent actor, as an adult, and starring with Steve Carell in the 2024 production of Uncle Vanya at Lincoln Center.

Pill makes the simple argument that child actors are (1) subject to the stresses of a workplace that doesn’t properly protect them, and (2) lose the experience of having a childhood or adolescence that allows them to grow up in a healthy way.

Nearly 100 years ago, the United States largely banned child labor. No longer would we abide small children working in factories for long hours; we agreed children should be in school.

…

At a time when kids are supposed to be forging our own identities, child actors have ours chosen for us by agents, casting directors and the public. We are stuck as the hot one, the nerd, the bad seed, the cute ingénue. It is difficult, if not impossible, to develop an independent sense of self when what feels like the entire world pillories you for deviating from your type and heaps praise on you when you conform to it.

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She is not claiming that a quarter of child actors die early or develop an organic brain disease, but she properly notes real harms: “I … know what happens when kids don’t get childhoods: We typically struggle when we make it to adulthood. With substance abuse, with eating disorders, with mental illness. With messed-up families, with a stunted sense of self, with self-harm in various forms. As adults, we often can’t drive a car or pay a bill, but we also can’t abide the thought that our acting careers and personal worth might have peaked when we were tweens.”

The Connection Between These Stories is Important

Of course, the standard defense of football includes the fact that players in the NFL are aware that they are engaging in dangerous behavior, and that they are doing it for a lot of money. But this argument stinks. And it is flawed because football players all get started when they are young.

• Young people play tackle football from an early age, and the medical understanding of CTE is that it is caused by a cumulative lifetime of head traumas.

• Young people playing football in middle school, high school, and college are being taught the glory of the game long before they are capable of consenting to sacrificing their long-term health and long before they make any money from taking the risk.2

In short, football players are not really adults when the damage begins — and are very young adults when it ends. The incredible brevity of football careers (hardly anyone makes it to the NFL and those careers are short) means that few men over 28 are playing real football. The CTE problem in football, at its core, is a question of whether parents should be letting their KIDS play the game.

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Football is huge entertainment. Americans love it like they love watching Euphoria or Love Island. How different is the damage done to football players and child actors, in kind if not in purely medical severity?

Which, I think, raises the question3 of how much damage we do to other young people when we pressure them to focus on a specialized adult pursuit when they are very young.

Young Artists, Young Professionals, Baby Adults

The collision of these two stories has me wondering: when is it counter-productive to encourage kids to take very seriously and work tirelessly developing an adult craft? The head trauma of football is horrifying, and the damage to a child actor may be no different from outlawed child labor. But how should we feel about pushing a ten-year-old to practice an instrument for two hours every day?

I didn’t practice the piano nearly enough when I was young, and I am manifestly only an average musician by most professional standards — I didn’t put in the work to become Orrin Evans or Matt Mitchell, Herbie Hancock or Kris Davis, Brad Mehldau or Angelica Sanchez. I’m not trying to suggest that kids should be lazy or unfocused as a rule.

Don’t get me wrong, I probably wasn’t going to rise to the elite level of jazz piano, regardless of how much I practiced when I was 13. But this is the unanswerable question — how much pressure to achieve at a young age is good for us? Our culture simultaneously celebrates a past when young people had carefree summers playing in the woods or riding their bicycles AND openly hopes that young people will get serious about a medical career while in ninth grade. What is the right balance?

In the jazz world that I write about so much, there are child prodigies every so often. Pianist Joey Alexander was playing in competitions when he was nine and released his first album at 11. I’m not criticizing him (or his dad, who encouraged him in his love for music), but I’m fairly certain that Joey didn’t have a typical childhood.

Four years ago, I wrote a column reviewing two new albums by Alexander and another jazz prodigy, vocalist Nicky Yanofsky. There, I suggested that maybe trying to be professional musicians at young ages not only may have kept them from having “normal” childhoods, but also may have stunted their growth into more daring or original adult artists. Before they were adult artists, they were “baby adult” artists who could really be expected to have original ideas.

In an era when many critics complain that creative music is dominated by “jazz school” graduates who all sound the same, these two musicians sound more tied to tradition, more “samey” than the young players incubated in conservatories. The musicians mentored in jazz school by performers/professors like Ben Allison and Terri Lyne Carrington, Fay Victor, and Dave Douglas are hardly being turned into bebop robots. They get to grow out of the spotlight until they are closer to being ready to do original thinking on the bandstand.

Nikki Yanofsky and Joey Alexander are fine mainstream artists working with incredible tools at their disposal. But I can’t help feeling that the somewhat safe approach that each represents is the product of being forced to present their art before they had the confidence and imagination to escape the influences that they started out aping.

Today’s world pushes young people to become serious and career-minded sooner and sooner.4

I don’t mean to suggest that this is damaging their brains like a helmet-to-helmet tackle. I’m not making an argument here as much as asking a question.

Does keeping young people relentlessly ‘on task’ risk trading a degree of early accomplishment for later compromises to their imaginations, narrowness to their dreams, and the sacrifice of both happiness and curiosity — the very human elements that make people into better artists, parents, friends, and thinkers?

Pianist Jon Batiste has just released three albums in his “Batiste Piano Series.” They are successors to 2024’s Beethoven Blues, a commercially successful recording on which Batiste combined classical music with jazz.

Every generation seems to produce an artist or recording that re-explains jazz to a public that can’t hear its value. I don’t mean the crossover artists like Kenny G (ugh, and I’ve said enough about him already1), Chuck Mangione (respect, actually), or Snarky Puppy (I remain unmoved) who make a kind of “jazz” that plays to pop audiences of one kind or another. That is always going on.

The music I’m talking about is an often deliberate attempt to translate the magic of jazz language to people who have never heard or understood it. We all know folks who say, Yeah, jazz, it’s just so many notes, and I don’t even know what to listen to. They think it’s neither fun pop nor “serious” music. It’s just folks messing around, noodling — not The Beatles/Taylor/Whatever You Think Is Fun but also not Mozart.

When I was first getting into jazz in the 1970s, one of the “translators” of the music was the French jazz pianist and film composer Claude Bolling. In 1975, his “Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano” featuring classical flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal was an unlikely hit album that you might hear in a thousand suburban living rooms that had never been filled with even a hint of Oscar Peterson before. It said to people: This jazz stuff is legit. The musicians aren’t faking it.

I liked this Bolling/Rampal album as much as anyone. It is catchy and beautifully crafted, but (even as a teenager) I knew that the “jazz content” was pedestrian. Bolling was a decent bebop player, I suppose, but I was more interested in listening to Bud Powell or Cedar Walton or Thelonious Monk. But now I knew that if I did play those records in the home of a Bolling fan, they might “get it.”

A Brief History of “Explained Jazz”

There is a notable history of jazz/classical crossover music, and most of it wasn’t about explaining jazz to non-fans. The “third stream” music of the 1950s was an artistic project to genuinely integrate classical composition and jazz practice, and more recent work in this vein has been even more successful — I am a huge fan of pianist Uri Caine’s Urlicht/Primal Light (1997), which is bold and uses not only jazz and classical music but also electronics, klezmer music, and more. Caine’s subsequent discography is filled with additional work that integrates jazz and classical music, but it is bold, daring music, not music that would help a jazz novice get acclimated.

The real granddaddy of jazz being packaged for explanation to the world, perhaps, is Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which he wrote on a commission for Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. It was premiered in 1924 by the Whiteman band (and with Gershwin himself playing the piano — including significant improvisation) at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan during a program that Whiteman termed “purely educational.” Here’s jazz, he was saying. But, you know, classed up by a whole bunch of classical-ish stuff!

Of course, in short order jazz became the popular music of the world, with little need to be explained to anyone. But after rock ‘n’ roll came along in the mid-’50s, it started to get tricky to sell the stuff again. The “new” form of jazz that came along in the ‘40s wasn’t nearly as danceable, and musicians got busy “translating” it. For example, the vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross started writing out bebop solos and putting them to lyrics, helping the new style to make more sense to people who liked “jazz” singing.

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The obvious precursor to Claude Bolling’s classical-meets-jazz approach was a series of albums recorded by another French pianist, Jacques Loussier, who played jazz in bars to finance his conservatory education.2 Play Bach (1959) was a hit, and Loussier made a string of these records, and let me tell you they include some sad stuff. The first track on the first album uses pipe organ, with Loussier’s trio swinging in the background and various uninteresting improvisations coming around the edges.

But you get the idea: to get some people to accept jazz in the rock era, it was helpful to dress it up a little. Those kids were listening to rock and pop, and adults were supposed to be “serious.” Jazz could be serious too. It wasn’t just “a bunch of notes.”3

By the 1980s, jazz was even less in the mainstream, except for the fusion (and, eventually, smooth jazz) that could be sold. But if you wanted to take it seriously, hey, check out this kid from New Orleans who plays it but can also play classical music.

Wynton Marsalis got real credibility from playing classical music while he was playing jazz. In both 1983 and 1984, Marsalis won Grammy awards in both jazz and classical categories. Now, surely this kid was not just playing a bunch of random notes.

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Jon Batiste: Musical and Entertainment Polymath

Pianist Jon Batiste, like Marsalis, was born in 1986 in the New Orleans area as part of a famous musical family — shortly after Marsalis had won those double Grammys. And like Marsalis, Batiste got a quick start as a musician, releasing his debut album at 17, getting training at Juilliard, and traveling the world. In 2015, he and his band Stay Human were hired for Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show on CBS.4 Batiste appeared as an actor (as himself) on HBO’s Treme, set in New Orleans; he started recording mature jazz;5 and he also produced grooving popular music.

And then in 2024, Batiste became the latest “translator” of jazz, making the album Beethoven Blues.

What seemed to crack it into the public consciousness was a short clip, shared over and over on social media, of Batiste demonstrating to journalist Chris Wallace how he could take classical music and use it as inspiration for improvisation. The first time I saw it, it reminded me of a classic interview (at the piano) of Oscar Peterson by Dick Cavett. Peterson “explains” jazz on TV.

Here is the Wallace/Batiste clip. People just went NUTS for it. And Beethoven Blues sold like hotcakes.

My Reaction to Batiste’s Classical Jazz (or Is It the Other Way Around?)

My initial reaction to Batiste’s mashup stuff was lukewarm. I have always been a fan of his, but the notion that a highly trained jazz musician like Batiste (or, frankly, most serious jazz musicians alive today) can take “Fur Elise” and play some blues or gospel on and around it didn’t awe me the way it awed Wallace. And Batiste is not only a good musician, but he is also a charming guy who understands television.

Ho hum, I thought. But the three new albums are an interesting outpouring of permutations of this idea.

Black Mozart

On Black Mozart, Batiste uses Mozart as he used Beethoven before. At the start of “Facile-Batiste,” he plays the opening movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C major fairly straight, then begins embellishments, little blues licks, dips into jazz harmony. Other tracks follow different paths — it is not always a straight classical piece that gets a bit hairier. “Molto” is the famous theme from the 41st Symphony without much alteration, but it flows without interruption into “Molto in Cayo Hueso,” which is seven-and-a-half minutes of improvisation that moves through habanera patterns and blues, only peppering in the original theme occasionally.

The two other albums reverse the concept, as they are centered around music written by jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. But they are extremely different. And this is where Batiste’s act of jazz translation gets more interesting to me.

Monk Movements

Monk Movements starts with a slightly strange “classical”-sounding take on Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” with leaden left-hand arpeggios that drag the typically spritely theme DOWN. Uh-oh, I thought. This is not promising.

Once through the theme in this style, however, Batiste the jazz pianist emerges, improvising with imagination over a jagged chordal left hand. The classical conceit does not return. It is as if Batiste was telling the listener: Monk does not need THAT treatment. Classical trappings will not be necessary because Monk is classic.

And the album proceeds in that spirit, with a thumping version of “Blue Monk,” a slow and chiming “Brilliant Corners” with a wonderful rhythmic daring, and a deep version of “Ugly Beauty.” The album ends with a longer meditation on “Blue Monk” that travels to every corner of the globe, putting Monk’s signature blues theme through a series of thoughtful transitions and, yes, translations.

Is Monk Movements another classical/jazz mashup? Not at all. It feints in the direction and then rejects the idea. It is just a fine solo jazz piano album.6

Monk Meditations

The second Monk album is the best and most original of the four albums in this series. Here, Batiste takes themes and elements of Monk compositions and transforms them not through standard jazz improvisation or through a forced collision with classical music but by a more contemporary and open-ended kind of re-visioning.

Most of the performances here take the album title literally, refracting Monk’s music through a meditative lens. “Midnight Movement” is perhaps the most obvious yet delicate translation. Batiste takes Monk’s most famous song, “Round Midnight,” and plays it amidst a repeated set of treble arpeggios that outline a fairly simple harmony. He turns his piano into something sounding like a harp and, before the melody enters, uses a subtle low note (from a synth or possibly a bowed bass violin?) to give the beautiful texture a touch of pathos. Recorded with gauzy reverb, the melody enters and joins this web of intrigue, and Batiste subtly changes the arpeggios to give Monk’s composition more harmonic interest. “Enlightment of Ruby” is similar, setting Monk’s tune into a contemplative set of chiming, impressionist harmonies, indeed making it sound like it is from within.

“Reflections” and “Monk’s Mood” are my favorite of these tracks. Both start with a reading of Monk’s tunes and harmonies that are faithful and let the light in more indirectly. The performances would have fit into Monk Movements, but for their last sections. On “Reflections,” Batiste worries the very last phrase of the tune, repeating it over an ambiguous harmony and letting in a shiver of synth. “Monk’s Mood” goes the opposite way, as Batiste concludes it with a bouncing chordal pattern that he builds off of a bass line inspired by Monk’s material.

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“Eternity Around the Corner” takes a different path. Here, Batiste has taken just one important phrase (the opening lick) from Monk’s “Brilliant Corners” and made it the basis for an entire track. He simplifies and makes the chords underlying this phrase more transparent, and he then improvises over the cycle in a delicious, slow vamp. If some ears are tempted to hear this as too simple, I think that Batiste makes it work — improvising dissonances and darkness over the vamp, drawing out of it real richness.

The opening and closing of Monk Meditations is a Batiste original, “Always Know,” from a favorite phrase of Monk’s. It suggests the way in which this utterly contemporary jazz pianist moves around the ideas he has gotten from an ancestor with his own sensibility.

For me, Batiste is doing his best work to “explain” jazz to people who don’t know it well on this album, technically the third in his Piano Series. Here is one of the greatest jazz composers, seen through the heart and fingers of a relatively young master of the music.

I love that Jon Batiste works across so many musical styles and platforms while, most certainly, not leaving “jazz” behind. He can be a pop star, a TV personality, a classical musician of some kind, and so much more. That he has taken on a role of jazz ambassador to many is cool with me, even if the music he makes isn’t at the cutting edge. That’s not the ideal place for every musician.

Hey, with Wynton Marsalis stepping down as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is there any reason that Batiste shouldn’t be considered for the role?

Bassist Linda May Han Oh and tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana are in the top tier of today’s mainstream jazz — masters of the full language of the music from swing to contemporary “new jazz.” Their new recording is a set of duets (with some solo bass pieces as well) that center on compositions by jazz masters from Charlie Parker to Sam Rivers.

Here is my review of Beneath Lifted Skies.

The unique feature of this album is its incorporation of three full improvised duets. They are dramatic, tonal, melodic, and also “in the tradition” even though they are spontaneous. In so many ways, this is what makes contemporary jazz masters so dazzling: they are equally fluent in bebop, post-bop, and the harmonic and rhythmic grammar that came after the so-called “free jazz” of the 1960s.

That Aldana and May Han Oh are also both women from other continents (though now based in New York) underlines both the changes and the continuities of the music.

Trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and guitarist Mary Halvorson are two of the artists who have rewritten what “jazz” sounds like in the new century. They are products of different finishing schools or mentorships than the old mainstream, and their brand of dreamy jazz impressionism has become critically acclaimed.

Here is my review of their first album of duets.

Akinmusire (44) is from Oakland, California, where he was part of the famed jazz ensemble at Berkeley High School.1 Saxophonist Steve Coleman met him there and hired him to join his band, Five Elements. He won the Monk competition at 25, played with Aaron Parks, Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, and esperanza spalding, then released his second album on Blue Note in 2011, a recording that bowled over this critic and plenty of others.

Halvorson (45) is from Massachusetts and was on track to major in biology at Wesleyan University when she sat in a class there taught by Anthony Braxton, the visionary saxophonist and composer. Braxton encouraged her to find her own sound on the guitar, and by her early 20s she was in New York doing exactly that. The same year I lost my mind for Akinmusire’s Blue Note debut, I wrote a column reflecting on Halvorson’s 2010 album Saturn Sings, and declaring her a promising light in the music.

You can surely find descriptions of these musicians as “avant-garde” — because they are not playing bebop or post-bop or whatever was the jazz mainstream as it navigated out of the 1960s and around the more commercial strains of the 1970s. But they are decidedly not “free jazz” players in the old sense. In fact, both came up through mentorships with musicians (Coleman, Iyer, Braxton, others) who compose detailed music that sets the stage for improvisation. The improvisation doesn’t follow the rules of bebop, necessarily, but it spins out of specific environments and new kinds of systems that are anything but random.

This kind of music (and I am fine calling it jazz — what else should we call music that combines composition and improvisation in this tradition?) can be challenging compared to Kind of Blue, I know. But it is carefully crafted in its own way — an art form that leans ahead, extending the craft and tradition of Miles Davis or Kenny Burrell. Here is a track from the new album that I think puts their style in the context of jazz duets from the past, “Nice to meet you again for the first time.”

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You can hear them playing the theme in careful unison, depart from precision, and then chase each other around in playful improvisation like they were Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines playing “Weather Bird.”

That said, my rating for this album is just 6 out of 10.2 That “score” suggests I didn’t like Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings, which isn’t true. It is accurate to say that I found it slightly disappointing, with Halvorson playing a lot of folk-ish arpeggios and the album having a limited dynamic and stylistic range. It is beautiful and intimate while still challenging. I look forward to hearing another duet outing from these musicians.3

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George is his latest band, brought together during the pandemic.

In his explanation of the band’s name, Hollenbeck provides this list of people (plus a literary monkey, two geographic locations, and a magazine), which suggest the wide variety of interests and influences that might be relevant:

George Washington Carver, George Gervin, George Clooney, George Floyd, George Wein, Georgia (the state and the country), Georgia O’Keefe, Saint George, George Saunders, George Michael, George Carlin, George Clinton, George Frideric Handel, George Orwell, Boy George, Curious George, George the magazine …

All of Hollenbeck’s music is happy to collide genres — maybe to press pop songs up against jazz up against modern composed music. I heard his Large Ensemble perform the song “Witchita Lineman” at the Atlas in Washington D.C. more than a decade ago, and it is still imprinted on my heart — with Bleckmann and McGarry harmonizing and the band playing a set of textures that shuffle Philip Glass with Bob Brookmeyer. Here is that arrangement, played by the Frankfurt Radio Big Band:

My 2013 review of Songs I Like A Lot. the album containing that arrangement, explains so much of what I adore about Hollenbeck’s musical alchemy. The band went on to complete a trilogy of diverse kinds of “songs” with albums in 2015 and 2020. The 2018 album, All Can Work, by the Large Ensemble is also astonishing in its beauty, colors, and innovation.

The new band, George, is at the opposite end of the Hollenbeck spectrum — small and driven by synthesizer textures (courtesy of Isis Giraldo, better known as Chiquita Magic) in combination with saxophones and flutes from Anna Webber, and the voice of Sarah Rossy. The band grooves and buzzes at times, then it can turn around and paint with the gentlest pastels. The band nods in the direction of Wayne Shorter’s 1990s music on some tracks, but it also sounds as 2026 as the new DOMi &JD Beck album at times too.

But the point is this: Hollenbeck’s interest in creating fresh and fascinating sounds isn’t tied to one band or another, one set of instruments or another. George is another incarnation of his art. Maybe it hits you differently with its mainlined electricity, but it is pure John Hollenbeck.

When the duo DOMi & JD debuted on Blue Note Records in 2022 with Not Tight, I was immediately won over. I think these young (Domi Louna is now 26; Beck is 23) and spectacular players have more to say than most other virtuosos. Maybe it is in the intriguing partnership they have — his sharp and precise breakbeat drumming is equal parts Chris Dave and Tony Williams, while her pianism is Franz Liszt meets Herbie Hancock. What they have in common is fascination, curiosity, and talent that takes in rock, electronica, pop, jazz, classical (of all kinds), international music, and seemingly just about everything else.

Read my review of the new album here.

The thrill with this “band” is not just the chops but the concept. Who Asked? is an exceptionally focused project — different from the debut but exhibiting the same killer musicianship. Here, they have conceived a 15-part suite that combines their drums and keys with a small orchestral ensemble of strings, woodwinds, and brass. Written on the software Sibelius and then carefully recorded with excellent musicians, it sounds truly integrated. The vocabulary is not that of reheated “classical” bits or jazz with strings but instead their singular harmonic and melodic voices, presented differently.

When I first listened to the album, I was struck by the decision they made (late in the process of making the album) to add their own vocals — creatively harmonized and processed electronically — to all but three of the tracks. The result makes the album a bit more “pop” but sounds like no other pop. And I think it works. Your ear can feast on so many elements on each track: the sung melodies, the ensemble, the shifting and swirling rhythm patterns, DOMi’s breathtaking improvisation, and the interaction of it all.

DOMi and JD Beck are hearing music in a fresh and original way.

Here’s what I had to say about the duo back in 2022, edited a bit.

I stand by that first reaction, and am happy to report that DOMi & JD Beck are exploring new fields, playfully and exuberantly.

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Their recent interview with Rick Beato is great. He is a fan too. You learn that, as they get ready to play the music from Who Asked? in concert, it will likely be presented without the vocal elements. And you can hear them play the tracks here in front of Beato. In short, the music works just as well but differently when presented in this way.

Will we have to wait another four years for their next exploration? That’s okay. This one was worth the wait.

The most recent pianist from South Africa to gather jazz attention is Nduduzo Makhathini, whose first American recording was on Blue Note in 2020: Modes of Communication: Letters from the Underworlds. The latest, also on Blue Note, is The Myth We Choose.

Here is my review of the latest from Makhathini.

This is a pleasing album that mixes Makhathini’s strong jazz playing with both contemporary production (subtle synth pads, groove drumming, and soul singing) and more traditional vocals. There are a bunch of moments on the album when you hear the producer fade the tracks just as they seem like they might be taking off. What’s here is nice, but … The marketing by Blue Note stresses Makhathini’s identity as a “healer” and spiritual leader, and I will confess that I am skeptical of all uses of the term “spiritual jazz.”

“Spiritual Jazz” Means … What?

In the 1960s, John and Alice Coltrane both focused some of their music on the metaphoric search for religious or “spiritual” meaning. A Love Supreme is not about romantic love, and the first movement of the suite ("Acknowledgement") is a, er, divinely memorable piece that includes limited written harmonic movement, a clattering Afro-Cuban groove by drummer Elvin Jones, and modal piano accompaniment by McCoy Tyner that inspired many other musicians to record similar pieces. The tenor saxophone solo by Coltrane is a brilliant extended improvisation that finds him playing with motifs like a magician and juggler, working his way toward what sure sounds like enlightenment. The musicians chant “A love supreme” to the four-note melodic motif of “Acknowledgement” — and a temple emerged.

John’s wife, pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane, was also a prolific musician. After her husband died in 1967, she became increasingly active as a Hindu spiritual leader, and her early 1970s recordings focused on this practice as a theme. Around the same time, musicians associated with and influenced by John Coltrane recorded work that explored these ideas, musically and thematically.

A good example would be “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” from Karma (1969) by saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, a 32-minute track that festoons its two-chord vamp with hand percussion, delicious flute playing by James Spaulding, and its own religiously themed vocals from Leon Thomas.

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This music was connected not only to the Coltranes but also to the soul jazz and free-blowing jazz of the 1960s. And it helped to generate some of the best crossover jazz of the 1970s, such as this killer 1975 track from keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith, “A Chance For Peace.” It ain’t “spiritual” exactly, but more “peace and love”-oriented. That is spiritual enough for me, I guess, but you will see what is happening if you listen to this music. Jazz is discovering the joys and commercial appeal of simplicity and soulful groove. Coltrane and Stevie Wonder are both in this track:

There are plenty of reasons for 21st-century musicians to go back and rediscover this rich vein of music that goes back about 60 years. And in 2015, saxophonist Kamasi Washington did exactly that. Here is the opening track to his album The Epic, which explores the genre with the help of strings, a choir, soul vocals, and lots of McCoy Tyner-derived piano (as well as the leader’s Pharoah-esque tenor saxophone solos).

I admire this album but think it owes so much to, for example, Sanders’s Journey to the One that I didn’t think it was one of the best of that year (a debate for another column, probably). It was, however, a huge critical and popular “hit” in jazz terms. And since then, the term “spiritual jazz” has been just about everywhere, meaning less with every repetition.

But Another South African Jazz Pianist Might Just Deserve the Label

Adolph Johannes Brand was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1934. He was a mixed-race kid in apartheid South Africa, making him an affront to leadership — and by the time his piano lessons blossomed into a jazz trio in the late 1950s, there was already pressure on this musician to get out of the country. He met a hero, Duke Ellington, in a Zurich jazz club in 1962, and Ellington helped him get recorded and come to the United States. He studied at Juilliard, subbed a few times on piano with the Ellington band, and met American musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s who expressed Black pride through their music.

Soon, elements of church music, traditional South African music, and urban South African “township” music were part of his jazz playing. One such tune, “Mannenberg” (recorded in 1974 and known in the United States as “Cape Town Fringe”), became the unofficial anthem of the anti-apartheid movement — a recording that Nelson Mandela reported kept his spirits up during his long imprisonment. A lilting and simple melody set atop a dancing piano line and traditional South African drum pattern, the song is simultaneously a cry of anguish, freedom, defiance and joy.

Here is the original:

Ibrahim went on to have a long and celebrated career around the world. He died just two months ago, an international treasure grounded, somehow, in the music of his native land (Mandela called him “our Mozart”), and in the mongrel thing that is jazz.

For my money, he is as spiritual as music gets.

My favorite Ibrahim album is Water From an Ancient Well, recorded by his band "Ekaya” (which means “home”) in 1985 at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The band is a septet with baritone saxophone (Charles Davis) and trombone (Dick Griffin) giving the band a low burnish in rich harmony with Carlos Ward’s alto sax and Ricky Ford on tenor. Ibrahim is joined in the rhythm section by Ben Riley’s drums and David Williams on bass.

All eight tracks are Ibrahim originals, from the jaunty “Mandela” to “Sameeda,” with gorgeous orchestration for the five horns without rhythm, and then solos over bass and drums with no piano at all. There is a gorgeous balance to the ensemble from track to track, with light shot through the music even though the ensemble leans toward deep notes. My favorite track is “Song for Sathima,” which takes a page from Ellington without sounding derivative at all. The last solo, by frequent collaborator Carlos Ward, is lyrical and blues-drunk.

The album also includes a rerecording of “Mannenberg” (“Mannenberg Revisited”), taken at a slower, more contemplative pace. Rather than include improvisations by the new horn players, Ibrahim wrote out parts of the solo from the original for Ford and Ward to play, in unison, on tenor and flute, respectively. It is as if Ibrahim were saying, Yes, the original is a classic. I have memorialized it.

All great music is spiritual. It all contains the spirit of its creator and speaks to others, across space and time. It travels through prison bars and walls. It topples evil regimes. It lifts us higher.

Spiritual jazz is Bird and Pops and Abdullah Ibrahim. And so much more. It’s not a marketing ploy. Check out Water From an Ancient Well to understand it for real.

When I sent my ballot in for the 2026 mid-year version of the Francis Davis/Tom Hull poll of jazz critics, I had listened to Tyshawn Sorey’s new Members … Don’t! only once and without great care. It sounded amazing, but I hadn’t given it my focus. I ranked it at #10 because … I projected MY lack of focus onto the album.1

Read my review of MEMBERS … DON’T! here.

In fact, this recording of a live concert is my favorite recording of the year. Read the review to find out why, with all the particulars.

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What I want to briefly address here is what it means to give music your full attention.

I know that an album like this one is not a casual listening experience. Among other things, the tracks are long (between 11 and 26 minutes each), and they consist of brief statements of the melodic themes (at the end of tracks rather than at the start) and long stretches of improvising. If you put this album on while doing something else — reading, even doing the dishes — you just aren’t giving it a chance.

Yesterday, my wife and I hosted five of her colleagues for barbecue on our urban deck. I chose to play a mixture of songs by Sergio Mendes. Mendes, the Brazilian pianist and bandleader who became a 1960s pop star of a sort in the United States with grooving interpretations of bossa nova songs. Mendes is not anybody’s idea of a pure jazz or authentic bossa musician. He was making really good pop albums that took songs, many by Jobim, and packaged them for American ears.

If you don’t remember his music, here is a favorite track, used as the background for these two amazing Nike ads featuring the Brazilian national futbol teams in 1998 and 2006. The song is “Mas Que Nada” by Jorge Ben but made huge by Mendes. The second video uses a version of the tune redone with the Black-Eyed Peas.

With Mendes on in the background, the party percolated a little more easily. If you wanted to tune into the music, sure, you might hear the sublime Jobim song “The Waters of March,” which he wrote in 1972 and features lyrics that he wrote in both Portuguese and English.

Here are two versions of this sublime song, the first featuring Elis Regina and “Tom” Jobim himself singing it as a duet, the second being the Sergio Mendes version from 1974 in English. Mendes would perform this song (and record it in 2008 with the singer Ledesi) for the rest of his career. It is art however you hear it, but some versions simply require more attention to love.

Tyshawn Sorey’s reinterpretation of Max Roach’s 1969 album Members, Don’t Git Weary asks more of your ears and attention than the original. That doesn’t make it better or worse. It is simply in a style or format that isn’t so easily digested.

Listen to the 1968 Roach version of “Effi” (by pianist Stanley Cowell), a catchy theme in 6/8 that gallops along with a series of pleasing mode changes, as trumpeter Charles Tolliver and alto saxophonist Gary Bartz trade improvised statements in a casual, hip conversation. The performance, if you are a jazz fan, sounds like the 1960s, evoking Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things” and suggesting a funky modernism that wedded melody to exploration.

YouTube doesn’t have a version of the song right now, but here is a video that tells the story of the album, which will give you a taste of how much more abstract Sorey’s interpretation is.

I know that some listeners simply don’t have a taste for music that is more atonal of adventurous, and that’s cool. And even if you don’t mind some dissonance, there are plenty of bold music fans who don’t have the patience to listen to long stretches of improvisation. That’s cool too.

But for listeners who may not be aficionados of contemporary jazz but don’t mind a long Phish jam or a tune where Medeski Martin & Wood get weird, you should listen to Members, … Don’t! by this extraordinary quintet led by Tyshawn Sorey. Inside the music there is excitement, humanity, beauty, brashness, and a message.

Here are this year’s mid-year poll results.

Getting the email from THE Francis Davis, asking you to participate, well … Davis, who passed last April after a long illness, was a music writer who made it into art. And he had been running this poll, which was posted in various places through the years, including at National Public Radio1, for nearly 20 years. I got invited by him in 2005 for its fifth outing — at a time when it was for the Village Voice. This was validation and gratitude, some kind of payment for the work.

I still feel that way. The poll is now run with great care and intelligence by Tom Hull, who had been assisting Davis for a while. He also polls the critics halfway through the year — that’s what has just been published, now at the magazine The Arts Fuse. Thank you, Tom.

The top ten for the year so far are:

1. Tyshawn Sorey, Members . . . Don’t! (Pi)

2. The Tomeka Reid Quartet, Dance! Skip! Hop! (Out of Your Head)

3. Adam O’Farrill, Elephant (Out of Your Head)

4. أحمد [Ahmed], Play Monk (Otoroku)

5. Ambrose Akinmusire & Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings (Nonesuch)

6. Bill Frisell, In My Dreams (Blue Note)

7. Immanuel Wilkins Quartet, Live at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note)

8. Angelika Niescier, Chicago Tapes (Intakt)

9. Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Happy Today (International Anthem/Nonesuch)

10. Mark Turner, Patternmaster (ECM)

Here was my ballot for the top ten, submitted at the end of June, before I had heard (and/or reviewed) everything that is on the larger list:

1. Adam O’Farrill, Elephant (Out of Your Head)

2. Jon Irabagon, Focus Out (Irrabagast)

3. Georgia Anne Muldrow & Harriet Tubman, Electrical Field of Love (Pi)

4. Tomeka Reid, dance! skip! hop! (Out of Your Head)

5. Gabrielle Cavassa, Diavola (Blue Note)

6. Dave Douglas, Transcend (Greenleaf)

7. Craig Taborn, Dream Archives (ECM)

8. Virginia MacDonald, In Search of ... (Cellar Music)

9. Ambrose Akinmusire/Mary Halvorson, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings (Nonesuch)

10. Tyshawn Sorey, Members ... Don’t! (Pi) — NOTE: This album would likely top my list today, now that I have really dug into it.

Polls are Useful, Ratings are Dumb

Ranking, comparing, rating — I don’t like it. The outlet I most often write for, Popmatters.com, asks (requires?) that we rate albums from one to ten. A “10” is essentially forbidden: reserved for Kind of Blue or Blood on the Tracks. A “9”, to me, means the album is assuredly in your top-five of the year. For example, I believe I have given two “9”s this year so far. If a recording deserves lower than a “6,” then I won’t put in the work and analysis to write about it.2

I can’t really tell you the difference between a Popmatters “6” and “7.” I’d happily stop my ratings, and I don’t do them on reviews that are only posted here on Substack.

Ranking albums for year-end lists or polls, however, is okay with me. I like the exercise of looking back at recent work and deciding what has stuck with me, what feels like I will love for years to come. And deciding the order forces me to reckon with this in a granular way. It’s bullshit too, I know — how can works of art compete with each other, really?

But for readers who look to critics to point them toward the best stuff, these year-end lists and polls are useful. Check this stuff OUT! The Davis/Hull Poll creates a long list of great stuff, with many opinions in the mix.

The top ten of this year’s mid-year poll includes two albums I haven’t heard (now I must) and three I haven’t reviewed. That seems..., okay, I think. Should there be more variance? I consider myself well-informed about the new jazz that is coming out, but I do worry that the poll shows just a little too much agreement.

Are some record labels over-represented because they have promotional muscle (Blue Note, ECM, Nonesuch)? Are other artists over-represented because they can afford publicists who get the recordings into critics hands? But look at little Out of Your Head Records, with two albums in the top three, despite being based in Richmond, VA, and having nearly all publicity done by Adam Hopkins, a label founder and musician who also has a regular day job.3

There are plenty of folks who denigrate “the critics” for having a hivemind, for being bought off in some way, for taking their cues from the music that is fed to them rather than music they have sought out on their own.

I hear these concerns and don’t dismiss them.

I aim to write about and assess the music with detail, honesty, and creativity. I promise to try, always, to have independent, open ears.

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I am all for it. Jazz musicians are inherently versatile and can play many styles. Let them feast (and earn a bit of what they are worth). In the case of all four guitarists mentioned above, they regularly play in a manner that sounds accessible because it draws on rock, folk, country, or other styles not coded as “too hard to understand,” as jazz often is.

On Boomtown, Miles Okazaki slinks into that territory a bit, though he does it with daring. The writing here is gorgeous, the music is often breathtaking, and the improvising is astounding.

Read my review here.

The band on Boomtown is stocked from the best improvisers on the New York scene. A diverse and dazzling group. New jazz dorks like me can name just about all of them from a photo (Irabagon! Webber! Mitchell! Garchik! Davis! Weiss!), but there are some younger players who are also making great music: bassist Hannah Marks and trombonist Kalia Vandever, for example.

When I saw Okazaki perform at the 2026 Big Ears Festival, he was casually jaw-dropping. He played with a version of his Trickster band, solo guitar versions of the Thelonious Monk catalog (he has recorded every known Monk composition in this format, no joke), and in pianist Matt Mitchell’s band. He approaches the most complex modern jazz like the beboppers treated "I Got Rhythm” — flowing, relaxed, and creatively fluent.

Are you a guitar fan? Do you want to hear modern jazz that is grooving but up to date? Listen to Miles Okazaki!

Here is the track “Boomtown Girl” from the new album.

His “Trickster” band gets a different sound, four pieces playing intricate material that recalls his time playing with Steve Coleman. But for all the intricacy, the music grooves. Here is a version of the band (with Craig Taborn on piano, Anthony Tidd on bass, and Sean Rickman on drums) playing the aptly titled “Box in a Box.”

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Okazaki’s Monk recordings are on a huge set called Work. But because I saw the saxophonist Ben Wendel at the Village Vanguard last week with a great quintet (more on that to come), let’s hear Okazaki playing Monk’s “Off Minor” in duet with Wendel.

Finally, because I mentioned Julian Lage above, here is Lage, Okazaki, and Mary Halvorson playing an off-the-cuff blues together — and one that finds its way to Thelonious’s “Blue Monk.” Dig the range of jazz guitar sounds, from Halvorson’s vanguard pedal work to Lage’s genial virtuosity. To my ear, Miles Okazaki can go both ways. Mr. Versatility. Musical always.

Seven Bernstein is a composer, arranger, and trumpet artist — and too often I think of him in that order. His projects, discussed in my new review, tend to groups, large and small, that focus on concepts and conceits rather than just his playing. I love the big ideas Bernstein puts in his projects. But his two new albums, simultaneously released, go in both directions at once.

Read my review of Resonation Trio and Ultra Resonance right here.

What a joy to hear this amazing artist play his ass off and then team up with producer Scott Harding (aka “Scotty Hard”) to take his own live trio recording and refract it in the style of Miles Davis and Teo Macero to create a pulsing electronic work of new art.

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of playing a concert in Bethesda, MD, that commemorated the famous “Summer Jam” concert on July 28, 1973, in Watkins Glen, New York, featuring the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band. I played Hammond organ and alto saxophone — and when in the small horn section, I was adding brass licks to these classic rock tunes, in the style of what The Band did at their “Last Waltz” and “Rock of Ages” concerts.

While playing these charts, I thought about Steven Bernstein, who has been a critical part of the Levon Helm Band that played for years at his legendary “Midnight Rambles” and has played with the band still, as it has been carried on by Levon’s daughter, Amy Helm, after the master drummer and singer passed.

Bernstein has played with and constructed arrangements for a huge array of pop, rock, and hip-hop artists through the years. He is about as far from a “jazz purist” as a trumpet player can be, while still making jazz records that deserve to be on jazz “top ten” lists. His music simply works across genres and blends into the great American tradition that does not respect boundaries. Here is playing “Up on Cripple Creek” with Amy Helm and the Helm Family Band.

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These kinds of arrangements go hand-in-glove with the music of The Band, which was the deepest kind of rock, in my opinion: grounded jump blues, soul, Motown, and blues as much as it related to Dylan or Little Richard.

Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra is that kind of band, too, and all their albums are must-listens. Here they are playing Sly Stone’s “Stand” in 2011. Very nearly this exact band played the same tune and arrangement when I saw them at the 2026 Big Ears Festival a few months ago. Dig it: jazz, soul, rock, brilliant singing, astute and gritty improvising.

Thanks, Maestro Bernstein, for all the music in all its permutations, including the two new albums.

When I saw her Breaking Stretch band live at this year’s Big Ears Festival, she had a huge room of listeners dancing to wild improvisation. The music was joyous, racous, adventurous, and FUN. Yes, you read that correctly: new-century jazz can be A GREAT TIME. (I also got to meet her, and she was kind, cool, sweet, and humble.)

Here she is playing live with a quartet. Please check out everything she does.

Her new album, Talamanti, is for her duo project with the Swiss pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. Wonderful. All vibes/piano duets tend to nod toward the long-tenured pairing between Gary Burton and Chick Corea. But the recording that Talamanti reminds me of more is a largely forgotten set of duets for vibes player Walt Dickerson and pianist Sun Ra: Visions.

Visions came out on Steeplechase and, with all seven compositions (five from the original LP and two bonus tracks from the CD reissue) written by Dickerson, it is really his date (though subsequent reissues are under Sun Ra’s name).

For Sun Ra fans, this is a superb chance to hear him as a virtuoso pianist, playing both tonally and freely. By 1978, “free” jazz wasn’t news any more, and players were routinely finding a middle ground with the mainstream — before the Reagan/Marsalis years made retro-bop the thing. Just dig into “Space Dance” to hear these two players really explore the sonic space, improvising freely but beautifully.

Dickerson was born in Philadelphia but wound up in California after two years in the military. He played with pianist Andrew Hill and drummer Andrew Cyrille on the west coast — and Cyrille would appear on most of his recordings over the years.

Dickerson is doing really cool things with his instrument — not playing in the shadow of Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, or Bobby Hutcherson here. Dig “Utopia” with it unconventional technique at the very start.

Dickerson died in 2008, but he should be remembered as a notable player on his instrument. Patricia Brennan, do you know Dickerson’s work? What do you think?

The pop star and the football champion managed not to directly upstage the 250th birthday of our Declaration of Independence, but barely. It all tempts me to cynicism1, but that’s an emotion I usually avoid on Independence Day.

July 4th is a favorite holiday of mine because it is the truest expression of America’s secular religion, based on a hallowed text. Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant declaration contained lots of complaining about the English king, but it wisely started with our American idealism: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s our religion because, as with the teachings of prophets, we haven’t lived up to those words, but, at our best, we try, we try.

Every July 4th, I get up and play and sing three songs at the piano. I’m no Taylor Swift, so I don’t perform them for a stadium or arena-sized audience — I just perform them for my dog, a great listener, whose day of birth was July 4, 2020. (Happy birthday, Rosalita.)

I sing “God Bless America,” written in 1918 by the Jewish, Russian-born Irving Berlin, while he was serving in the U.S. Army (at a base in New York State but during World War I). In 1938, as Hitler advanced on countries in Europe, he rewrote the lyrics to make it a “peace song.“

I sing “This Land is Your Land,” written by Woody Guthrie in 1940 as a critical response to Berlin’s song. Not only do I enjoy the conversation between these songs, but I think it is precisely why I need to sing them both. What is more American?

Born in Oklahoma to poor parents who named him after the American president Woodrow Wilson, Guthrie was an exemplary artist, but not a perfect human being. Who is?

The third song I sing is “America the Beautiful,” written before 1900 by Katherine Lee Bates, a graduate of Wellesley College, who was an English professor at Colorado College when she wrote the lyrics, to music composed by church organist Samuel Ward, from Newark, New Jersey.

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Every American artist you can imagine has recorded this song — Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, on and on — but there is only one version that captures the grandeur and real meaning of the song for me.

You can play and sing it any way you like, but I try to get that gospel feeling. Try. Ray Charles recorded it in 1972, and the version above is from an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show that year. Nixon was president, the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and RFK were fresh memories, and the Vietnam War was still killing many people every year for no good reason.2

“I’m talking about America, sweet America,” Ray sings. “America, I love you, America, because God done shed his grace on thee. And you oughta love it too — cuz he, he crowned thy good, he told me he would, saving brotherhood, from sea to shining sea.”

The history of every country contains tragedy, injustice, violence, and hypocrisy. Like Ray, Woody, Irving, Taylor, and Thomas (Jefferson), we are all human, endowed by our creator with imperfections too. Add our country to the list.

But I think that Ray Charles sang “America the Beautiful” with an honest passion for our pursuit of the American ideals put on parchment in 1776. And when I hear him put his heart into Bates’s descriptions of the land and Ward’s simple, sweeping music, I feel the best of this country.

Be a patriot in any way you choose, but I do inside this musical conversation.

I well remember the first time I disappeared down the curving staircase into the Village Vanguard, the tiny basement jazz club in New York City’s Greenwich Village. I was 16 at a time when the drinking age was 18, and no one was seriously going to sneak into a jazz club just to drink underage.

The band was the Horace Silver Quintet, and details beyond that elude me — except that the music was just what I had hoped to hear: funky in the Silver hard-bop tradition, everything as ripe as a peach. My memory is more complete regarding the physical environment of the club, maybe because it has barely changed in the almost five decades I have been visiting it: the photographs of jazz legends on the walls, the rickety tables and chairs, the hallway leading to the bathroom where you might rub shoulders with Kenny Barron or Max Gordon, the bar in the back where it was probably cooler to sit, the tourists from Japan who had traveled 6,500 miles to make the pilgramage, the velvet curtain across the back of the stage, the raised seating area on the opposite side from the staircase where you seemed to be on top of a great drummer.

I have waited outside in the cold, near the famous awning, hoping to get in without a reservation. I have herded classes of high school and college students down the steps during trips from DC to New York to learn about the power of music. One student was the niece of, guess who?, Horace Silver — I explained this to Lorraine Gordon (Max’s wife, who ran the club from 1989-2018 after he passed — a passionate jazz advocate who had previously been married to Blue Note Records co-founder Alfred Lion) — who took us back to her office to show the student a photo of her uncle.

The last time I was standing on those stairs (on the eve of my 65th birthday), an extraordinarily young woman pardoned herself as she moved past the crowd waiting for a late set. “I’m one of the musicians,” she explained. Wow, I thought, imagine being the young flautist Elena Pinderhughes. squeezing past the crowd that you are about to astonish as you go to work in the Carnegie Hall of Jazz.

Of course, the Vanguard has become a legend in part because there is a series of jazz albums that were recorded there during live engagements — a group of recordings that seem to have magic attached thanks to the history and gravity of the club. I won’t try to list all the great ones, but I am currently reveling in the most recent, a set of three discs from the quartet led by alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins.

The legacy of “Live at the Village Vanguard” recordings is especially heavy for saxophone players. Sonny Rollins recorded there with two different trios in the late 1950s, setting the bar extremely high. I have listened to these tracks over and over again, and the club itself is there in the sonic tapestry — not just in the applause at the end of songs, but in the music itself. “Softly As In a Morning Sunrise” with Wilbur Ware on bass and Elvin Jones on drums is a favorite.

When I built up the courage as a young listener, I listened to all the recordings of John Coltrane at the Vanguard — the first being pretty easily digestible and the later ones challenging me. But they are all daring, all super-charged.

This 1961 version of “Impressions” still just about defines Coltrane in my heart.

A young saxophonist like Immanuel Wilkins surely knows these records better than I do. In fact, in a recent Jazz Times interview, Wilkins said that, before bring his quartet into the club, “I spent a whole lot of time studying some Vanguard recordings, namely Sonny Rollins’s live Vanguard record. Obviously, Trane’s Vanguard albums.” Well, there you go.

And when you listen to these three hours of music, it is plain that the spirit of Rollins and Coltrane is ringing in the heart of this (only) 28 year-old saxophonist. The first installment begins with “Warriors,” a composition from his debut album Omega (on Blue Note, just like the three Vanguard discs) but expanded by a band that is years into the development of its own language and technique. Micah Thomas (piano), Ryoma Takenaga (bass), and Kweku Sumbry (drums) join Wilkins in playing comtemporary acoustic jazz that balances on the knife’s edge between precision and emotional release.

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The live “Warriors” outlines its theme with care, to be sure, a stop-start melody that hooks you as it swirls and repeats a couple of catchy elements. But as the saxophonist begins to unspool a long improvisation, Takenaga finds his way to playing a fast walking pattern in 4/4, and the whole band is simply cooking. Rollins or Coltrane would absolutely understand. As an alto player, Wilkins never sounds like he was birthed straight out of Charlie Parker, Cannonball Adderley, or another bebop legend. He builds up steam inexorably, spinning and deepening his lines, sometimes seeming at fiery as Kenny Garrett or as liquid as Steve Wilson, as bracing as Henry Threadgill or as melodic as Ornette Coleman. Eventually, Thomas drops out to let the trio play with a piano-less freedom for the rest of Wilkins’ solo.

When the the pianist takes over, no intensity is lost. Micah Thomas is every bit the monster player than Wilkins is — like his colleague, he is under 30, studied at Juilliard with brilliant mentors, and has the kind of fluent technique that means he doesn’t feel the need to show it off. To hear him at his best on At The Village Vanguard, Vol. 1, check out the quartet’s take on Alice Coltrane’s “Charanam.” Thomas starts it with a Jarrett-adjacent bit of grooving-gospel solo piano, invites the band in, stokes serious flames under the leader’s solo and then takes off an improvisation that has no real precedent. He stretches the harmonies, yes, but he creates fresh registers, textures, and the contrasts along the way.

On the second volume, I am enraptured by a new Wilkins composition, “The Big Country,” which is brief, engaging, and then gets out of the way. This is a blowing moment, as the quartet locks into a rotating harmonic pattern and gets down to communicating. There is a steamy vamp, an irregular and long section of relentless swing, and plenty of room for Wilkins to achieve daring freedom. The reference here, of course, are those Coltrane nights at The Vanguard, when it seemed like boundaries did not so much get hopped over but actually disappeared.

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Also great is a looping tune called “Go ‘Head Get Down,” which sounds less like ‘Trane than Steve Coleman or Greg Osby, letting Thomas and Wilkins grab an inviting figure and let it rotate and circulate like a top while Sumbry and Takenaga turn the repetition into a group jam. Just when you think the performance has become monotonous, it reinvents itself. Astonishing.

Here is a cool version of the tune (and two others) with the quartet playing on a YouTube broadcast, with Thomas killing it all on Fender Rhodes electric piano.

Volume 3 of the series is no less interesting. I love hearing the band cool down for a relaxed blues (“Dolla$”) and play almost entirely free on “Composition IX”. The latter is a 23-minute track that chatters and rambles its way to rapt decrescendo, then Wilkins and Sumbry play a saxophone/drums duet that evokes Coltrane with Elvin Jones without seeming like a copy. Does it build to a glorious climax? Well, Wilkins said that he had studied the history of the room, didn’t he?

Here is a different performance, live also.

Immanuel Wilkins Quartet: Live at the Village Vanguard does everything an album recorded in that hallowed basement should do. It can whisper as appropriate (because Bill Evans whispered down there with the best of them) — check out “Composition II,” a ballad that still emphasizes group interplay. It is not afraid of a rave up. The group is hearing itself perfectly on every song (From the Jazz Times interview: “There’s just something so dope about the room. Once you get on the stage, the sound… the room is at once dry where you can hear everything, and reverberant in these really beautiful ways. It’s a unique sound. We didn’t need any monitors on that stage.”)

Had you been there with them, you’d have heard it all too. Jazz, of course, is intimacy rather than arena. Jazz is conversation, never yelling, even if the words get loud.

Jazz is history, even if it is brand new. It carries the ancestors forward.

Immanuel Wilkins, Micah Thomas, Ryoma Takenaga, and Kweku Sumbry do all of this, together.

In celebrating Miles Davis’s centennial, I wrote only about his last two chapters, his ‘70s bands that shot rock and funk into his music, and his “pop” comeback in the 1980s. Those ‘70s bands were not the first time that “rock” guitar appeared on the albums of a jazz icon, but they did two important things: they made it more legitimate and, with Miles hiring Pete Cosey and Reggie Lucas, Miles showed that jagged, post-Hendrix guitar could be a useful voice in jazz.

It did not take long for this musical expression to break into a glorious flowering.

Ornette Coleman eventually formed his Prime Time band in the second half of the ‘70s, with twin guitars in the mix, but before that time, he had started collaborating with James Blood Ulmer, born in South Carolina and active in soul jazz bands in Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, in the 1960s before arriving in New York, where he met Coleman. The first recorded evidence of what they sound like together is the Coleman-produced Tales of Captain Black from 1978. This is, essentially, Coleman’s band, with his son Denardo on drums and Jaamaladeen Tacuma on bass.

I didn’t hear this singing but disruptive music until after I got hipped to Ulmer through his appearance on the 1979 album Lenox Avenue Breakdown by alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe — one of the best and maybe least likely recordings of that decade. Ulmer is the only chording instrument in a band featuring tuba (not bass), flute (the game-changing James Newton), and a jazz rhythm section to end any conversation: bassist Cecil McBee, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and percussionist Guillermo Franco.

This Hip Music Was (Momentarily) the Mainstream

While Captain Black was on the Artists House label, Lenox Avenue Breakdown was the second album from Arthur Blythe on Columbia — Miles Davis’s label and soon-to-be the label of Wynton Marsalis (more on that in a moment), and just about the most mainstream around, home to Barbra Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Earth, Wind & Fire, not mention the jazz fusion bands of Herbie Hancock and Weather Report.

Soon enough, Columbia1 signed Ulmer as well, where he released three brilliant and uncompromising albums of fiery material very quickly: Free Lancing (1981), Black Rock (1982), and Odyssey (1983).

Columbia was releasing plenty of jazz back then, and it was betting with equal fervor on some exciting acoustic music (check out the great run of albums by trumpeter Woody Shaw, starting with 1978’s Rosewood), the “young lion” jazz not just of Wynton Marsalis (his debut came out on Columbia in 1982), a bunch proto-“smooth jazz” (for example, a string of albums by keyboardist Bob James, as well as albums that might have been released, a decade earlier, on CTI), and this funk-forward avant-jazz. Why not? The market would decide, they must have figured.

Ulmer’s resume included music that was soulful and blues-drenched, and guitar histrionics had history at the label (see five Columbia albums by John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, not to mention the work of Carlos Santana). But Ulmer’s more telling collaborations were with Ornette Coleman (quickly dropped by Columbia in the 1960s), members of St. Louis’s Black Artist Group (Oliver Lake), West Coast jazz mavericks (saxophonist David Murray, and players connected to Cecil Taylor and Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in various ways. More to the point, Ulmer’s playing was, on the face of things, raw.

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Columbia was figuring it out, I suppose. The first Arthur Blythe album on Columbia was some kind of canny compromise by the full-bodied horn player, In the Tradition. There he is on the cover in a top hat and striped suit, coming out of a 1940s car — and playing Fats Waller, Ellington, and Coltrane (and also some original material like my favorite track here, “Hip Dripper.” But Blythe’s rhythm section was drummer Steve McCall and bassist Fred Hopkins of Henry Threadgill’s avant-traditional trio, Air.

Around 1980, in short, the future of “mainstream” jazz wasn’t quite so mainstream. Like the politics of the time, there was still a 1970s sense of forward momentum, not yet blunted by the Reagan years. In politics, there followed a “Greed is good” decade of deregulation and, in jazz, the more conservative approach of certain “young lions” meant a stretch during which Columbia let go of Blythe and Ulmer.

But the music itself was too exciting and strong to go away. And Ulmer’s sound, which had never compromised, just grew more distinctive.

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James Blood Ulmer Ascendant

From his first Columbia album, Free Lancing, through his most recent albums from the 2010s, Ulmer never lost his footing or his nerve. “Hijack,” from 1981 puts his guitar behind a slapping horn section featuring Murray, Lake, and trumpeter "Olu Dara (yeah, that’s Nas’s dad) —danceable but weird.

Then his Odyssey band dared to put his guitar in conversation with a fiddle from Charles Burnham — continuing to advance the idea that this music is, root and core, the blues, connected to jazz and country music, connected to a tradition of freedom. All the while, Ulmer’s song titles would have something to say. “Are You Glad to Be In America?” “Election.” Critic Bill Milkowski used the phrase “avant-gutbucket” to describe the music of this band. When he sang, it wasn’t like Joe Williams but more like Muddy Waters.

Here is “Church.”

Another band, his Music Revelation Ensemble, usually featured David Murray’s tenor saxophone out front. But how about the band playing sweet but still raw with Same Rivers on flute? The music is lyrical but then wild, the kind of beautiful that isn’t cute or cloying but bracing.

Ulmer made some “straight” blues albums over the years, and I have to tell you, he was genuinely great at that material. Listen to this version of “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” live with Allison Krauss as the fiddler. (To my Deadhead fans: yes, it’s THAT song, written by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon.)

But most often, Ulmer cycled back to the kind kinda of avant-groove music that was able to sit right in the middle of the American span of its greatest music. Over time, I think that Ulmer’s music proved itself to be the canniest stuff that emerged 45 years ago.

Here’s how I put it when I reviewed Back in Time, the Ulmer record featuring his Odyssey Trio’s reunion recording on Pi, back in 2006:

The music of the Odyssey Band (Ulmer now calls it Odyssey the Band) was a canny blend of Ornette Coleman’s Harmolodic style (picked up by Ulmer in Ornette’s electric Prime Time band), delta blues styling, a dash of country picking and folk strumming, and a tablespoon or two of world music spice. In 1983, it seemed almost other-worldly, but it became clear over time that Odyssey‘s relationship to jazz was akin to where the Band and Bob Dylan stood next to rock: it was a very sophisticated form of primitivism, a way to correct the music’s excesses by pointing back to roots and ahead to innovation at the same time.

I rated that album 8/10 on the Popmatters scale (10 is reserved for albums like Sgt. Pepper’s and Kind of Blue, so 9 is realistically the best rating. And, looking back, maybe I was too conservative. I now think it is a modern masterpiece.

I also commend you to the 2008 album In and Out, one of Ulmer’s last records, where he — at times, if you squint — almost seems like the conventional jazz guitarist I am so glad he did not become. And, because life is exciting, he plays some mad flute too.

Ulmer died this month at 86 in New York. I’m missing him now.

Brandon Seabrook is hardly just another vanguard jazz guitarist. Including the fact that he supplements his guitar with the wildest banjo in creative music. His new Hellbent Daydream, however, is not mainly about this unique side of Seabrook. It features a quartet (including violin, keyboards, and bass) that draws up a set of quirky, creative soundscapes.

You can read my review of Seabrook’s new album HERE.

There isn’t much other music to which you can compare Seabrook’s material. In my review, I name-check Frank Zappa — so you can see right there that Seabrook is not just another jazz guitarist. There are slices of bluegrass and Americana, and I also mention Bill Frisell. But you should listen and decide for yourself.

Contemporary Jazz Banjo?

And I certainly can’t compare Seabrook to any other jazz banjo players. Partly because there are so, so few in contemporary music. Of course, New Orleans jazz included virtuoso players like Johnny St. Cyr (with Louis Armstrong’s early bands) and Danny Barker (with Cab Calloway), and there were some players in swing music and various revivals. But (as I noted last week regarding the clarinet), bebop drove the instrument almost entirely out of the music. No one had invented an electric banjo? Limited sustain? It just wasn’t cool? Do you need more reasons?

Of course, there is Béla Fleck.

Fleck is from New York City and went to the famous High School or Music and Art, starting out on French Horn. What he really loved was the banjo, though, and soon enough he was playing it full time, joining the band New Grass Revival. His inspirations were more Earl Scruggs than Wes Montgomery. But in 1988 he started his own band, The Flecktones, along with bassist Victor Wooten and his brother, Roy Wooten, who played an electronic drum kit as “Futureman,” along with the harmonica master, Howard Levy.

It is often dazzling music, but — to me — it is miles away from “jazz.” Fleck combines bluegrass playing with classical elements, music from around the world, and the sense of adventure that jazz represents, but not jazz.

Fleck recorded three albums with jazz pianist Chick Corea, and in 2012 he released Across the Imaginary Divide with jazz pianist Marcus Roberts and his trio.

But Fleck’s music — marvelous in many ways (though my feeling about “Futureman”’s electronic drums is … not positive) — always sounds to me it looks at “jazz” from the other shore of a huge body of water, never having its toes actually in the water. It lacks a feeling for blues and Tin Pan Alley harmony? Its fusion elements are superficially similar to those of The Pat Metheny Band, but don’t have the backbone of jazz feeling with which Metheny always plays.

It reminds me of Jerry Garcia in many ways — Jerry loved jazz, and he played “So What” a bunch of times, but his “So What” just never sounded like jazz.

Brandon Seabrook plays the banjo, and his playing doesn’t sound anything like “So What” either. But Seabrook’s playing, on guitar or banjo, doesn’t lean back on bluegrass or rock or urban blues. It sounds, to me, profoundly liberated. It doesn’t sound like Wes Montgomery either, but it has the feeling of exploration and movement into the unknown that Wes, James “Blood” Ulmer (RIP), John McLaughlin, and Miles Okazaki all have.

Carter is famously well-recorded, presumably because every musician you can imagine wanted that sound on their album. Miles Davis wanted it (and got it for about six years), but so did Eric Dolphy and Stan Getz, Roberta Flack and Tom Jobim, Wayne Shorter and Joe Henderson, The Rascals, Aretha Franklin, and A Tribe Called Quest. The list is so much longer than I can even hint at here.

I will make my meditation on Ron Carter brief — a personal reflection and one single example.

Mr. Ron Carter and My Jazz Education

I started to understand jazz in my adolescence, but it took a long time to really understand what was going on. There are written melodies, but there is improvisation. But even the “written” part seems to have the rhythm section inventing accompaniment that isn’t perfectly scripted. Chords, lines, grooves … how does it all fit together?

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On so many of the records I loved, there was one musician who glued so much together: this guy Ron Carter on bass. A big, elastic upright bass, but sometimes a Fender electric. Either way — bringing in the Miles Davis Quintet on the live “My Funny Valentine” or laying down the bottom of Freddie Hubbard’s “Red Clay,” I could hear that Carter was the flexible, astonishing spine of the music.

Listening to his playing could teach me just about everything: the harmonies of jazz are different than those or pop or rock (listen to what Carter is playing!), the rhythms of jazz are different — they are pliant and complex, with rhythms washing over each other and flexing (LISTEN to what Carter is playing!), the musicians are listening intently to each other constantly — listen to Mr. Carter do it in real time!

In addition, Ron Carter defies every negative cliche about jazz musicians. He started on the cello and had classical chops. He lovingly plays pop music as well as jazz. He is an erudite man of elegance and learning. If I were ever to meet Ron Carter, I would not presume to call him “Ron” as my jazz friends and I did as we listened: it would be Mr. Carter, Professor Carter, … Maestro.

He is the paragon, and he is the finest.

The jazz clarinetist Virginia MacDonald is reminding us all how hip her instrument can be — if your impression of it still has a throwback element, Benny Goodman or even older music from the music’s pre-swing era, then MacDonald offers a must-listen debut album, In Search Of…

Read my review HERE.

Other Clarinetists to Dig

As I mention in my review, she is hardly the only clarinetist with a contemporary vision. Anat Cohen has modern technique and a unique vision. She has been at the top of the “Best Clarinet” polls for decades, and deservedly so. Her tone and facility are exceptional, and she presents music from an original perspective.

Anat Cohen

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel, Cohen is a wonderfully global player. Her debut album, Place and Time, included not only her brother (trumpeter Avashai Cohen), but a superb rhythm section of that moment: Jason Lindner on piano, Ben Street on bass, and drummer Jeff Ballard. There, she plays clarinet on only a couple of tracks.

Over time, however, her clarinet playing has become a focus (though she is a very strong tenor and soprano saxophonist), and her most recent albums, by her Quartetinho, feature only her work on clarinet and bass clarinet. These albums are delights — blending a focus on Brazilian music with other influences. I dare you not to dig her “Boa Tarde Povo,” with its whimsy, Fender Rhodes vamp, and her layered clarinets create a funky orchestra.

Todd Marcus

Todd Marcus is local to my area — he moved to Baltimore (from Northern New Jersey: yeah, baby!) to study at Loyola University, where his jazz education really kicked in and where he still lives and plays. Marcus focuses on the bass clarinet, and he combines his music with righteous work in his community.

Marcus leads bands from trios up to a large ensemble, and he is clearly inspired by the modern sensibility of the undersung, quirky greatness of Eric Dolphy, as well as the full range of modern jazz horn players.

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Among other wonderful things about Marcus, he is musically generous — I first heard about Virginia MacDonald because Marcus featured her in a quintet. Here they are from just last year, along with a killer rhythm section of Bruce Barth on piano, bassist Blake Meister, and drummer Eric Kennedy (who played at my wedding), on Marcus’s original, “AmyPookie.” Marcus gives MacDonald the first solo because that’s who he is. But they both shine, flying over these “I Got Rhythm” chord changes.

Seth Kibel

New York gets the most attention, I know (even from me), followed by Los Angeles, London, Chicago, and so on. But I am lucky to live in the MidAtlantic region (from Richmond, VA — more on that soon — through DC and up to Baltimore), where there are a ton of great local musicians. And another terrific clarinet master whose new album deserves attention.

Seth Kibel plays with just about everybody in any style in the DC-Baltimore corridor, and he always sounds amazing. Though he is equally adept on flute and tenor saxophone, it’s the clarinet that is closest to his heart. What Seth does as well as anyone I’ve met is adapt his instrument to every kind of music that speaks to him.

His brand-new album, Clarinet, Without a Net, finds him backed by two bands — one with a string band, guitar/dobro/mandolin, and tuba, another with trombone, accordion, bass, mandolin, and … tablas. Six original tunes blend his eclectic tastes, and Kibel adds four winning covers. We all know the Carole King tune “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” either from the Shirelles or from her version on Tapestry. Kibel remakes it as a soulful thing shot through with Appalachian and New Orleans roots — not ironically but sincerely. It’s like all American music got together in one place.

I like his version of “Wild Horses” just as much. Kibel imbues the clarinet with personal meaning — you hear it carrying his heart on every tune. In person, Seth is hilarious, silly, serious, all kinds of human things. He knows just about everything you can imagine about Klezmer music, but that is not his niche.

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Particularly on this new album, the music puts some of his Klezmer clarinet technique (the kind of thing you don’t really hear, for example, in Virginia MacDonald’s playing) — the piping sound in the upper register, some expressive vibrato — into music from American idioms. Here is his “You’d Never Believe the Sh*t You’re Missing,'“ live. Go check him OUT!

Don Byron

If you’re reading my work, you probably already know about the clarinet specialist Don Byron, whose explosion onto the scene in New York in the early 1990s was a clarinet revolution. He was a Black musician who famously played Klezmer (and focused on it for his second album) but had equal facility with the range of modern jazz. I heard him with Bill Frisell playing music from his first album at the old Knitting Factory, and it’s been buzzing in my head ever since.

Listen to Byron’s brilliance in this tune, “I’ll Chill on the Marley Tapes,” from Music For Six Musicians from 1995 — a refraction of Latin jazz that brings in funk, wild free piano from Edsel Gomez and overdriven guitar from Bill Frisell. Wow.

Byron recorded for Nonesuch, then for Blue Note, making strong, forward-looking jazz. His last Blue Note found him playing lots of tenor sax on a tribute to Junior Walker, then he made a set of gospel covers featuring vocalists as well as guitarist Vernon Reid in 2011 for Savoy.

At some point, Byron stopped recording with any frequency. I like his album of duets from 2019 with Cuban-American pianist Aruan Ortiz, Random Dances and (A)Tonalities. But I wish he were still a huge part of the scene. He remains my favorite clarinet player.

Here he is with Todd Marcus from more than a decade ago, playing a hip, modern arrangement of “Bye Bye Blackbird. I miss you, Don Byron.

I was a young teenager in the NJ suburbs of New York City, falling in love with jazz because a local radio station made it sound like the music of the world in my dreams. I knew that the city, only 35 minutes away from my only-child bedroom with its carefully attended to clock radio, was where so many of my heroes lived.

When I saw an advertisement in the New York Times “Arts and Leisure” section one Sunday for a Sonny Rollins concert at Carnegie Hall (I think it was 1973 or 1974), I asked my mom if a pair of tickets could be my birthday present.

My earliest memories of hearing Rollins came on records — his early dates with Miles Davis playing his tunes “Oleo” and “Doxy”, his band with Max Roach and Clifford Brown playing his “Pent Up House, and his 1956 dates as a leader: Saxophone Colossus and Tenor Madness. What an introduction. He sounded like jazz incarnate.

Walking into Carnegie Hall to hear a great improviser in person for the first time was one of the greatest thrills of my life. Tony Williams was the drummer, and his kit was canary yellow, set up on the stage like a great sun. When the music started, I felt like a huge blanket was surrounding me and also keeping me wide awake. Rollins himself was a big man at the time, and the horn seemed small and, frankly, like an extension of his arms and breath.

When he was playing, there wasn’t a moment that didn’t seem like a revelation.

The list of additional Rollins albums I bought after that is long, and I recommend so many of them. A short list would be:

• Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins (1956)

• Way Out West (1957)

• Sonny Rollins (on Blue Note, both volumes, 1957)

• A Night at The Village Vanguard (1958, just a trio with two different rhythm sections)

• The Sound of Sonny (1958, with pianist Sonny Clark)

• Freedom Suite (1958, just a trio with Max Roach and Oscar Pettiford)

• The Bridge (1962, with Jim Hall’s astonishing guitar)

• Our Man in Jazz (1963, recorded live at The Village Gate with Don Cherry on cornet and Billy Higgins on drums — flirting with the avant-garde)

• East Broadway Run Down (1967, a pianoless quartet with Freddie Hubbard)

• Sonny Rollins’ Next Album (1972, with an astonishing version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and Rollins on soprano for one tune)

• Milestone Jazzstars in Concert (1978, with McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, and Al Foster)

• Sonny Rollins + 3 (1995, with Al Foster on drums sounding superb)

• Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert (2001, released in 2005)

I know that is a lot of music to put on a “short list,” but Rollins was just that great. There is not much I can write about his playing today other than to suggest that you listen. He was hailed as the most complete and fluid improviser in the world for most of his career.

That list leans heavily, I know, on music from 1972 or earlier. Rollins was a victim, perhaps, of the trends of the 1970s, playing some music that leaned more heavily into backbeat and his beloved calypso groove — beloved by audiences but maybe not “innovative” in the manner of his contemporary (and today’s birthday boy) Miles Davis. The band he led from the 1980s through the end of his playing days was very good but, to my ears, not one that pushed him to the heights. For a long time, it featured his nephew, Clifton Anderson, on trombone, Stephen Scott on piano, and Bob Cranshaw’s electric bass. In concert, they could take off, but the albums were rarely top-shelf Rollins.

Who cares? The great albums are legion, and everybody knew: hear Newk1 live. It was life-changing.

Searching for something to write as my “personal essay” in applying to colleges in 1978, I turned to Sonny Rollins.

I wrote about my hope that I would someday develop a skill that was as purely beautiful as his. I was not suggesting that I wanted to be an improvising saxophonist (though I was flailing at doing it, as well as trying desperately and unsuccessfully to sound like Bill Evans on piano). But what I heard in Rollins was an artist who had completely erased the barrier between himself and his creative tool. To me, it sounded as if the mouthpiece of his tenor, the keys of the horn, the reed, the brass itself, had melted under or into fingers and breath.

What Rollins thought, felt, or heard came out of his horn — and he never, ever sounded like anyone else. I dreamed of studying, reading, practicing, and living with enough grace to develop that fluency.

Here is what Sonny Rollins sounded like, playing Duke Ellington’s “In Sentimental Mood” with McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, and Al Foster, the year that I wrote my essay.

I’m still working on developing that Rollins grace. Thanks, Sonny, for the music and the inspiration.

1

Rollins got the nickname “Newk” because he looked quite a bit like Don Newcombe, who pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1949 until 1958 (shortly after the team moved to Los Angeles). Newcombe was the third African American pitcher in the major leagues and was named to the All-Star squad along with his teammate, Jackie Robinson