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Chris Potter Quartet At The Village Vanguard

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May 23rd, 2013 – IMN Update:

from NPR

Chris Potter Quartet At The Village Vanguard

At the Village Vanguard, one flight down from the hubbub of New York City, in a tight space packed with people, we’re about to embark on a musical odyssey by sea. Our captain is saxophonist Chris Potter, who’s launching his Odyssey-inspired album The Sirens.

To listen to the full set click here

Stage-Play to Celebrate Ladysmith Black Mambazo

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May 22nd, 2013 – IMN Update:

From SABC Digital News

Stage-play to celebrate Ladysmith Black Mambazo

The story of world acclaimed acapella group, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, is taking to the stage. The production is the brainchild of Ekhaya Arts Centre in KwaMashu.

It’s expected to premier in October this year. “Isicathamiya” was originally known as iMbube. The music genre was established by Zulu migrant workers in Johannesburg and made popular by Joseph Shabalala.

In the 1960s, Shabalala and his friends in Ladysmith founded Schathamiya and named it after the town. The group entertained at weddings and parties -and it wasn’t long before Ladysmith Black Mambazo became a household name.

To learn more click here and watch the video below:

The Day the Music Died in Mali

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May 21st, 2013 – IMN Update:

From The New York Times

The Day the Music Died in Mali
By: Sujatha Fernandes

Everyone has heard of censored songs, like Billie Holiday’s “Love for Sale,” which was banned from ABC radio in 1956 because of its prostitution theme. Most are familiar with the censorship of artists, like the Dixie Chicks, who had their music blacklisted from country music stations across the country after they criticized President George W. Bush. But banning music in its entirety?

It has been almost nine months since Islamic militants in northern Mali announced that they were effectively banning all music. It’s hard to imagine, in a country that produced such internationally renowned music as Ali Farka Touré’s blues, Rokia Traoré’s soulful vocals and the Afro-pop traditions of Salif Keita.

The armed militants sent death threats to local musicians; many were forced into exile. Live music venues were shut down, and militants set fire to guitars and drum kits. The world famous Festival in the Desert was moved to Burkina Faso, and then postponed because of the security risk.

To read more click here

IMN

May 20th, 2013 – IMN Update:

from cultura.elpais.com

An Israeli Jazz Prophret
Bu: Seisedos Iker

Spread these days a kind in the world of jazz in Spain (as in need of good news) which tells of a prodigious Israeli trumpeter Avishai Cohen called (not to be confused with the bassist of the same name and nationality). He was able to give hope to fans during a successful tour that took in early May for six cities. It was due only to the good atmosphere of the concerts or the high artistic level of a trio completed by Reiner Elizarde The Negron on bass and Iago Fernandez on drums, was especially happy reunion with adventure club jazz. The instrumentalist struggled at the scene of lower Manhattan and now lives in Tel Aviv, a style that brings a contemporary style from Don Cherry, Clifford Brown or Ornette Coleman, whom Cohen used to visit at his home in New York since that day he addressed “as a fan either on a record company.”

At a recent meeting in Madrid, just before meeting for the first time with the bass would sign a brilliant concert, Cohen (Tel Aviv, 1978), vegetarian complexion brief, was as affable concerned about their pints style jazzmen old and past child prodigy. “I started playing as 10 years. Not sure if that makes me too early, I know that had a huge facility with the trumpet. I was very clear from the beginning that I would devote to this. So either I used too much time in studies. Today I wish I had “.

To read the original article click here

Joshua Redman's "Engaging" New Album

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May 20th, 2013 – IMN Update:

From Pop Matters

Joshua Redman: Walking Shadows
By: John Garratt

A blues guitarist once told me that, when judging the musicianship of others, he always paid close attention to how they finished their notes. This rule of thumb echoed around my brain as I watched two saxophones duke it out late one night at a club in my hometown. They played fast, they played with groove, but their notes were not pure from start to finish. The notes concluded either too raggedly or not at all, shifting all the emphasis to the start of the notes. But saxophonist Joshua Redman is not that kind of musician. Each note is created equally in the eyes of his horn, even the fast ones. And what better way to illustrate this virtue than on an album of ballads?

Joshua Redman and pianist Brad Mehldau have a working relationship that dates back to 1994’s Mood Swing (In the liner notes for Metheny Mehldau, guitarist Pat Metheny tells a charming tale of hearing Mehldau’s work on Mood Swing, causing him to pull over to the side of the road). Redman has handed the production reins for Walking Shadows to Mehldau, giving it a far different flavor than Redman’s past albums. Under the supervision of James Farber (or occasionally Redman himself), Joshua Redman’s albums took a more-or-less strict approach to the hard bop saxophone quartet. With Mehldau calling the shots, Walking Shadows unsurprisingly has more in common with a Mehldau album, from the unorthodox choice of covers, through the gentle orchestration, to the arrival of music that is not purely jazz but is genuinely jazzy.

To read more click here

Rokia Traoré: "World music was expecting me to be what I'm not"

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May 20th, 2013 – IMN Update:

From The Africa Report

Rokia Traoré- A path between multiple identities
By: Rose Skelton

“‘World music’ was expecting me to be what I’m not,” Traoré says. “I’m not a griotte [praise singer]. I’m not from Wassoulou. I have not been in a national orchestra. I am not able to make traditional Malian music”

Rokia Traoré has gone back to school. She is taking social sciences and anthropology, has considered journalism and thought about training as a translator.

In the meantime, she has made a new album, with the rather understated title – given the length and breadth of subjects, ideas and concepts covered within – Beautiful Africa.

The studies, on top of musical collaborations, worldwide touring, theatre performances, running a music training school in Mali and the success of her 2008 album Tchamantché, are the fulfilment of a promise she made to her father when she gave up studying to pursue a career in music.

To read more click here

Live Stream of Anat Cohen Quartet at the Blue Note Milan

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May 17th, 2013 – IMN Update:

Tune into ShowGo.tv tomorrow night and you can watch a live stream of the Anat Cohen Quartet’s set from the Blue Note Milano, 9pm local time (Milan, Italy). The live stream will be here

Live Review: The Bad Plus at Nottingham's Jazz Steps

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May 16th, 2013 – IMN Update:

from leftlion.co.uk

The Bad Plus at the Lakeside
By Ian Kingsbury

Begorrah, that was good. You know when you see a flock of starlings on the wing, swooping and swirling as one, and it’s both incomprehensible and sublime? Good, because that’s The Bad Plus.

I noticed Pinski Zoo founder and Nottingham resident Jan Kopinski in the house, so I had an inkling that this was going to be special. But at times the mind-melting brilliance of this whimsy loving jazz trio was more than my brain could handle. In a very good way. I felt like a Commodore 64 trying to run World of Warcraft, or a Casio calculator trying to sequence the human genome. A full house at the Lakeside Arts Centre was treated to a master class in why you’re a right git if you dislike jazz. Showcasing material from several of their 8 studio albums, including their latest ‘Made Possible’, the bass of Reid Anderson, piano of Ethan Iverson and drumming of David King is quite simply something else.

Pushing at the outer limits of the possible for a piano-bass-drum trio, they can smash it out with the best of them but are equally at home dropping things right down for a delicate lullaby. If you like a good tune, you might want to look elsewhere. To my ears The Bad Plus seem to be more about textures, time signatures and rhythms. Don’t get me wrong, they can be very melodic, as on For My Eyes and People Like You, but it’s their skill at whipping up a frenzied clutter of polyrhythmic awesomeness that really defines them. After a number of such tracks, the toe tappers amongst us were returned to more familiar ground with a swingy Latinate number written by drummer Dave King, called Thrift Store Jewellery.

To read the full article click here

Joshua Redman Brings 'Walking Shadows' to Life at Town Hall

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May 16th, 2013 – IMN Update:

From Broadway World

Jazz Saxophonist Joshua Redman Performs June 4th at Town Hall
By: BWW News Desk

Jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman’s May 7, 2013 release, Walking Shadows (Nonesuch), is a collection of vintage and contemporary ballads and Redman’s first recording to include an orchestral ensemble. Redman’s June 4 performance at the historic Town Hall will include the same quartet featured on Walking Shadows – longtime collaborators and close friends Brad Mehldau on piano, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Brian Blade on drums. The New York based orchestra The Knights will help bring the music of Walking Shadows to life. This is the first of a very limited number of Redman performances that will include a strings ensemble and the only engagement that will include the album’s all-star quartet.

Creating his own take on the classic jazz-with-strings album was the initial impetus for Joshua Redman’s Walking Shadows, a collection of ballads that Jeff Simon from the Buffalo News calls “sometimes exquisite and never less than exceptionally beautiful.” With his friend and frequent collaborator, pianist Brad Mehldau, on board as producer, Redman has retooled a familiar formula. The jazz-with-strings concept serves as a starting point, as foundation and inspiration, for Redman’s exploration of an ambitiously eclectic set of tunes performed in a variety of configurations. The strings themselves are an active, emotive presence on the six songs in which they are featured and their absence on other tracks only seems to heighten the drama of those more austerely arranged compositions.

“The strings add a richness and a lushness, a romanticism and even a touch of nostalgia to the music,” explains Redman. “We wanted the orchestra to feel like an essential element of the tracks on which it performs and sound as if it were genuinely a part of the improvisation and conversation, of the ebb and flow. It’s one of the reasons it was so important for us to record everything live, with the strings at the same time, as opposed to recording them in a session as an overdub, which might have been technically and logistically a lot easier. But musically, I think that would have made everything feel less natural and integrated. “

To read more click here

Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival begins final year as women-only showcase

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May 16th, 2013 – IMN Update:

washingtonpost.com

Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival begins final year as women-only showcase

The headline blared: “Why Women Musicians Are Inferior.” It was cringe-inducing even in 1938, when the respected jazz publication DownBeat printed the essay. A rebuttal from a female saxophonist — a “skirt swinger” — was further ridiculed when DownBeat slapped on the title “How Can You Blow a Horn With a Brassiere?”

Two generations passed before female bandleaders, instrumentalists and composers — long ensconced in jazz history but often marginalized or maligned — began being saluted at “women-in-jazz” festivals.

To read the full article click here:http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/mary-lou-williams-women-in-jazz-festival-begins-final-year-as-women-only-showcase/2013/05/15/6a6579ae-b672-11e2-aa9e-a02b765ff0ea_story.html

Interview: Richard Bona calls for revolt

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May 16th, 2013 – IMN Update:

from rfimusic.com

Richard Bona calls for revolt
Bonafied, an album of resistance
By Bertrand Lavaine

Fed-up with the phony playback performances of stars like Justin Bieber, Beyonce and Madonna, the Cameroonian Richard Bona champions authentic music on his new album Bonafied, while working on future collections by Lauryn Hill and Stevie Wonder. He may be a wizard on the bass and have music running through his veins, but whatever you do, don’t ask him to change a light bulb.

RFI Musique: What inspired you to take an artistic, rather than acoustic, approach to your new album, Bonafied?
Richard Bona: I already had this album prepared, and it was very electric, you know. But then I rebelled against the direction music is taking right now. I don’t mean in terms of creation, I mean live music: nine out of ten stage pop performances are sung playback. The audiences don’t even notice anymore. In today’s society, we consume without knowing where things come from. I don’t think that’s right. This album could have fitted in with my Mandekan Cubano project, but it was complicated because the Cuban nationals in my group, who live in foreign countries, can’t go back home. So, I decided that I’d start on an acoustic album, and go back to the way I worked on my first record. It’s a resistance album.

To read the full interview click here

Watch Kathy Mattea's 'My Coal Journey'

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May 16th, 2013 – IMN Update:

A dedicated arts and education advocate, Grammy Award winning singer Kathy Mattea is also deeply involved in social and environmental activism. She believes that music can influence social change by giving a voice to those who have none. Trained by Al Gore following An Inconvenient Truth, Mattea has traveled the country with her own lecture presentation: My Coal Journey, a reflection on her coal country heritage, her personal experiences as an activist, and her artistic journey. My Coal Journey is a one hour program of stories, illustrated through a PowerPoint slideshow, and enhanced by solo performances of select songs from Mattea’s hit album, COAL. The presentation traces Mattea’s motivation for beginning the recording project, her research into the musical genre’s history, her family’s ties to coal mining culture in Appalachia, and the environmental and social justice issues surrounding coal mining methods in today’s world.

Watch Kathy’s My Coal Journey presentation at Penn State from January 31, 2013:

Live Review: The Bad Plus at Colston Hall

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May 14th, 2013 – IMN Update:

from classical-music.com (The official website of BBC Music Magazine)

Neil McKim enjoys a Bristol concert by jazz misfits The Bad Plus
by Neil McKim

This was one of the most good-humoured concerts I have seen for a long time… and for the right reasons. The audience was in stitches after a five-minute meandering introduction to a song, apparently inspired by a 1960s stuntman who kept turtles… and who hung out with Steve McQueen… and who liked baloney sandwiches. I was pleasantly surprised at this mirth as I was watching The Bad Plus, an American jazz band that is best-known for its relentlessly aggressive musical approach.

Over the last decade The Bad Plus (pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer Dave King) has maintained a reputation for tearing up the rulebook when it comes to jazz trio performance. They are often portrayed as throwing aside older forms of jazz and instead recreating a contemporary format that is heavily influenced by other genres, as demonstrated by infamous cover versions, ranging from heavy metal’s Black Sabbath to Abba or to dance music’s Aphex Twin. Their tracks, whether cover versions or their own, have a beguiling ability to lull a listener into a calm state and then to rip up the floorboards in a ferocious audio assault.

As I sat watching the trio in Bristol last weekend I couldn’t really see what all the critical ‘fuss’ has been about. The band, although now older than when they first burst on to the worldwide scene in the early 2000s, has survived some very varied reviews in the UK over the years.

To read the full article click here

Live Review: Joshua Redman & Christian McBride at Wigmore Hall, London

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May 13th, 2013 – IMN Update:

from ft.com

The saxophonist and bassist duetted with clarity, control and fine detail
By Mike Hobart

American saxophonist Joshua Redman’s relationship with Christian McBride goes back 20 years, when Redman sought out the bassist in New York, soon after graduating from Harvard. They formed a fertile creative partnership, but here, both men seemed somewhat surprised that this was their first gig together for five years, and only their second in this format.

Duets leave little room for manoeuvre and, in the revealing acoustics of the Wigmore Hall, no room for error. With nerves a-jangle and each pitch and nuance laid bare, the temptation to overplay is strong. Both Redman and McBride pack a hefty punch, but at this concert, the emphasis was more on clarity and control, fine detail and the careful construction of emotional highs. It was an enormous pleasure just to hear Christian McBride walk through the common-stock cadences of jazz tradition, let alone the mighty strums and super-fast be-bop that came down the line.

Each musician comes with an extensive knowledge of lineage and style. They opened with the sly theme and soul-jazz vamp of Ray Bryant’s “Chicken and Dumplings” and chose “On the Sunny Side of the Street” as their encore. They took in modern blues, an early funk classic, Eddie Harris’s “Cold Duck Time” and added a slow and sensuous ballad, “Easy Living”. And mid-set, they captured the full force of Dizzy Gillespie’s Afro-Cuban big-band classic “Manteca” with overlapping beats and muscular lines. Extra riffs, sudden harmonies and short unison bursts added spice, while Redman’s development, for all the playful references and high-note virtuosity, had an iron logic that stayed in focus throughout the long single set.

To read the full article click here

Video: Jason Moran + Skateboarding

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May 13th, 2013 – IMN Update:

From Thrasher Magazine

Check out the video below by Thrasher Magazine from last weeks Jason Moran performance at the SFJAZZ Center featuring a skateboarding mini ramp session.

To view the video click here