Author: Bash Daily Group Archive Feed

Eddie Lang Mural proposal

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
Guitarist and bandleader Richard Barnes is proposing a mural honoring South Philadelphia’s legendary musician, Eddie Lang. (Salvatore Massaro).
Richard will discuss this at the next community meeting Wednesday evening at the Palumbo Recreation Center, 10th and Fitzwater.

“This mural will depict Eddie Lang as the center piece, honoring him as a musician, local resident ( St Albans St) , Italian American.
I plan to incorporate elements of his life including a smaller photo of Venuti, Bing Crosby, Bessie Smith and the James Campbell School, as well as utilizing vintage photos I’ve found of the intersection from the 19teens/20s.”

I am attaching a rough first draft showing my ideas.

Richard Barnes
Richard Barnes Photography
RBarnesPhotography.com
PO Box 402 , Media Pa
c – 484.478.1638
e – RBarnesPhotography@comcast.net (mailto:RBarnesPhotography@comcast.net)

** Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 7 pm
————————————————————

** Palumbo Recreation Center @ 10th & Fitzwater
————————————————————

Come to learn more about your neighborhood and interesting things going on nearby too.
We are pleased to host the following guests who will speak about the latest:
* Richard Barnes: Mural proposal for 7th & Fitzwater.

Anthony DiFlorio
RLI – Dist 7
Rizzo Rink
1001 S Front St
Phila., PA 19147
215-685-1593
tony@rizzorink.com (mailto:tony@rizzorink.com)
267-240-5459

Jim Eigo Jazz Promo Services T: 845-986-1677 E-Mail: j (mailto:jazzpromo@earthlink.net) im@jazzpromoservices.com (mailto:jim@jazzpromoservices.com)
http://www.jazzpromoservices.com (http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/)

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269 State Route 94 South
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January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Eddie Lang Mural proposal

I am attaching a rough first draft showing my ideas.

Richard Barnes
Richard Barnes Photography
RBarnesPhotography.com
PO Box 402 , Media Pa
c – 484.478.1638
e – RBarnesPhotography@comcast.net (mailto:RBarnesPhotography@comcast.net)

** Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 7 pm
————————————————————

** Palumbo Recreation Center @ 10th & Fitzwater
————————————————————

Anthony DiFlorio
RLI – Dist 7
Rizzo Rink
1001 S Front St
Phila., PA 19147
215-685-1593
tony@rizzorink.com (mailto:tony@rizzorink.com)
267-240-5459

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Review: Donato Cabrera and California Symphony celebrate the swing that jazz gave to 20th-century music – San Jose Mercury News

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_29429816/review-donato-cabrera-and-california-symphony-celebrate-swing

** Review: Donato Cabrera and California Symphony celebrate the swing that jazz gave to 20th-century music
————————————————————
By Georgia Rowe
Audiences rarely see five saxophones onstage at a classical music concert, but there they were Sunday afternoon at the Lesher Center, as music director Donato Cabrera led the California Symphony in the original 1924 jazz band version of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” with the young, fast-rising pianist Charlie Albright as soloist.
The saxophones weren’t window dressing. They played essential parts in Gershwin’s great American score, and in the jazz-inspired pieces by Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, Leonard Bernstein and Kurt Weill that comprised the rest of the program.
Conventional wisdom tells us that jazz and classical works occupy discrete musical spheres. But there was a great deal of overlap throughout the 20th century, as Cabrera demonstrated with great enthusiasm in Sunday’s performances. Each work showed the ways that these composers — from France, Germany and the U.S. — admired, and were inspired by, the music of the Jazz Age.
Gershwin’s “Rhapsody,” presented in the concert’s second half, was the main event, and Cabrera led a dynamic reading, one that re-created the spirit, if not the complete instrumentation (where were the frying pans?) employed in the work’s premiere at New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1924, with the composer at the piano.
This performance brought the first local appearance of Albright, a recipient of the 2014 Avery Fisher grant, who dispatched his assignment with fervent emphasis and a mercurial touch. There were plenty of fireworks, too — the pianist’s encores were Mozart’s “Turkish March,” capped by another American classic, “Great Balls of Fire.”
Before that, there was Weill’s “Little Threepenny Music,” a 1929 suite drawn from “The Threepenny Opera” by the German composer and his frequent collaborator, Bertolt Brecht. Richly orchestrated — with instruments including guitar, banjo and bandoneon — and eminently theatrical, the score covers a wide stylistic range, from the insinuating “Moritat of Mack the Knife” to the lilting woodwinds of “Polly’s Song.” Cabrera drew crisp performances from the ensemble, with the dark-edged “Tango Ballad” sounding especially assured.
The music before intermission was just as engaging, beginning with the jazz version of Stravinsky’s “Scherzo a la Russe” — not the fully orchestrated one that the San Francisco Symphony premiered in 1945, but the composer’s earlier version, commissioned by Paul Whiteman for his symphonic jazz band the previous year. The score is only about four minutes long — just the right length, Cabrera noted, to fill one side of a 12-inch 78 rpm record — but it’s enormously characterful, and the conductor and his ensemble made the most of its jaunty rhythms.
Milhaud’s “La creation du monde” (The Creation of the World) followed, in a performance that represented the orchestra’s finest playing of the afternoon. Milhaud, who was born in France but spent much of his life in Oakland — he taught composition at Mills College — delivers music of exquisite tenderness in this sumptuous score, and Cabrera lavished considerable care and affection on it. Principal saxophonist David Henderson supplied a shapely solo.

The full saxophone complement returned for Bernstein’s “Prelude, Fugue and Riffs,” which brought the program’s first half to a raucous conclusion. Cabrera tore into the composer’s brassy Prelude, and held the swinging saxophone Fugue and Riffs for the full ensemble together with pinpoint timing and plenty of brio. Clarinetist Mark Brandenburg, featured in the part written for Woody Herman, sounded tremendous. So did those saxophones, and let’s name them all here: in addition to Henderson, they were Aaron Lington, Ricardo Martinez, Kevin Stewart, and Dale Wolford.

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Review: Donato Cabrera and California Symphony celebrate the swing that jazz gave to 20th-century music – San Jose Mercury News

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_29429816/review-donato-cabrera-and-california-symphony-celebrate-swing

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Review: Donato Cabrera and California Symphony celebrate the swing that jazz gave to 20th-century music – San Jose Mercury News

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.mercurynews.com/entertainment/ci_29429816/review-donato-cabrera-and-california-symphony-celebrate-swing

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/world/australia/brass-band-revives-bright-spot-from-yarrabahs-oppressive-past.html?_r=1

** Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community
————————————————————
By CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIOREJAN. 24, 2016

Men fishing at Wungu Beach in Yarrabah, Australia, recently. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

YARRABAH, Australia — This remote stretch of coastline in north Queensland has much to offer: pristine beaches dotted with mango and palm trees, tropical breezes, an azure ocean.

But the lush surroundings belie a troubled history. Yarrabah was settled as an Anglican mission in the 1890s, and Aboriginal and some South Sea island natives were forcibly relocated here from their traditional lands. Under mission rule, they toiled in agriculture, working on sugar and coffee plantations, for meager rations.

Children were separated from their parents and sent to church-run dormitories, their native languages banned and their freedom of movement curtailed and the Aboriginal community still struggles with this grim history.

There is, however, one aspect of the mission days that many older residents here remember fondly: the Yarrabah Brass Band. Established in 1901 to accompany hymns, it was one of eight indigenous brass bands in Queensland (brass, unlike string instruments, can survive humidity and heat). When the mission closed in the 1960s, the Yarrabah band also fizzled out.

Great

Barrier

Reef

Area

of detail

Indian

Ocean

Now, after nearly a half-century of silence, the band is making music. In an era when brass bands have fallen from favor in their mother country, Britain, the tradition has come to life here in the past few years. And in its own modest way, the band is helping to heal deep racial wounds.

The third annual Yarrabah Band Festival (http://qmf.org.au/whats-on/yarrabah-band-festival/) drew about 2,500 people in November. Many had made the journey from the city of Cairns, about an hour away, for the first time — settling on the grass to watch the band play with the well-known Australian jazz musician James Morrison.

“It sounds like here is an English tradition being foisted upon indigenous Australia (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/australia/index.html?inline=nyt-geo) — what a horrible colonial thing to do,” said Mr. Morrison, the former artistic director of the Queensland Music Festival, one of the project’s main supporters. “Nothing could be further from the truth. They loved it. It was a source of pride.”

Greg Fourmile, who plays the euphonium, is credited with reviving the tradition in 2012. He agreed that there was a sense of “ownership, and it’s a shared thing because music is universal.”
Continue reading the main story

On a recent hot afternoon, the band rehearsed as children scampered under palm trees. People lounged on wide porches, fanning themselves. Among the players was Paul Neal, a burly, bearded youth counselor who said he once had “trouble clapping, let alone playing an instrument.” Undeterred, Mr. Neal, 31, pitched up at the band tryouts, chose the tenor saxophone (one of 15 donated instruments) and learned his somewhat rough scales in six weeks.

All 13 of the band members are indigenous, with the exception of Tracey Radford, the conductor, who is white, and Lee Rogers, an African-American who plays the alto saxophone and is known as “the Texan.” Mr. Rogers, who served in the United States Navy, moved to Yarrabah in 1994 and married a local woman.

Greg Fourmile, Jackson Clarke, Lee Rodgers and Raymond Clarke practicing with the Yarrabah Brass Band at a community center. The brass band tradition has been revived in Yarrabah in the past few years.Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

With its amateur cast of players that includes schoolchildren and grandmothers, the Yarrabah Brass Band does not always hit the right notes, and its rehearsals can be faintly raucous.

But a polished performance is only one aim. More important, Mr. Fourmile said, is a hope that the band can act as an ambassador to bring the community together and show the outside world another side of Yarrabah.

“We’ve been on the map for all the bad reasons,” said Errol Neal, who is the mayor of Yarrabah and is Paul’s uncle. Residents still have “post-traumatic stress,” he said, “as a result of being taken away, forcibly removed.”

The band is “a big part of how we move forward,” he added.

Though it is just an hour’s drive down a winding road from Cairns, Australia’s gateway to the Great Barrier Reef, Yarrabah has not benefited from a similar boom. Yarrabah, which is wedged between mountainous rain forest and the Coral Sea, first got electricity in the 1960s, followed by its first bitumen road, residents say. During the 1970s and ’80s, a permit was required to visit.

The white man, locals often joke, is akin to Migaloo, an albino humpback whale, because it is rare to see either in Yarrabah.

Errol Neal, center right, the mayor of Yarrabah, with family members in the front yard of his childhood home on the Yarrabah waterfront. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

The area’s isolation contributes to the widespread poverty here. According to Mr. Neal, the unemployment rate in Yarrabah is 80 percent, with younger people the most affected. About 4,500 residents inhabit just over 400 houses; others live in makeshift bush shacks. Parts of town have a gritty, desperate feel.

Yarrabah is an alcohol-restricted zone as part of efforts by the state governmen (https://www.datsip.qld.gov.au/programs-initiatives/community-alcohol-limits/yarrabah) t to curb alcoholism in indigenous communities. There are high levels of domestic violence and drug use, with crystal meth making inroads.

To help counter those problems, Mr. Neal hopes to transform the coastal shire into a tourist destination: He has proposed a $250 million eco-tourism village and an $80 million cruise ship terminal. Yarrabah has received $7 million in government funding for a ferry jetty connecting it to Cairns.

“We have to get off the welfare — give our people a sense of hope,” he said. “We don’t want to be filling in rehabilitation centers, or correction centers, or being hooked up in dialysis, or going to the graveyard.”

Who will come is another question.

Many remain at best apathetic, and at worse hostile, toward their Aboriginal neighbors. Some assume you still need a permit to visit; for others there is a perception that if your car got stolen, “you’d be able to find it” here, said Ms. Radford, the conductor.

A birthday celebration on the beach. Yarrabah is an alcohol-restricted zone as part of a government effort to curb drinking in indigenous communities. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

Mr. Fourmile, whose wife is white, said the band was an instrument to combat racism. “To make people realize this is not a scary place where all the black fellas hang out,” he said. “Yarrabah is not Alcatraz — it is a community.”

“One way to break down barriers is to educate people — and what better way than to have an event based on music, because everyone understands music,” he added. “To show people that we are just like everyone else.”

In the 1990s, Yarrabah had a high suicide rate, said Mr. Neal, the saxophone player, who specializes in self-harm prevention. “The youths that graduate here don’t have a job to come back to,” he said. “They have trouble getting out of the community, let alone the state. Empowerment is low, self-esteem is low.”

The irony of gaining empowerment by returning to a culture introduced by British colonialists is not lost on the band’s members. Paul’s mother, Teresa Neal, a flute player, said the difference was that while band members were forced to play during the mission days, “now we’re freely picking up the instruments ourselves.”

During the mission, being a member of the band provided a rare route to escape the shire. The band members, wearing black caps and crisp cream shirts, toured Queensland.

Now, the band is providing a window on the world, performing at events like the “Tropical Jam (http://statements.qld.gov.au/Statement/2014/8/22/starstudded-line-up-for-g20-tropical-jam-celebration) ” at the Group of 20 finance ministers meeting in Cairns in 2014. The band also dreams of playing in New Orleans.

At the festival in November, Mr. Morrison played with Robert Patterson, a respected elder known as Uncle Bobby, and Yarrabah Brass Band member.

“The kids were mucking around and there was this great atmosphere — and Uncle Bobby stood there for a minute,” Mr. Morrison said of the crowd, where white and Aboriginal swayed together. “Then he looked at me and said: ‘That’s reconciliation.’ ”

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269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/world/australia/brass-band-revives-bright-spot-from-yarrabahs-oppressive-past.html?_r=1

** Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community
————————————————————
By CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIOREJAN. 24, 2016

Men fishing at Wungu Beach in Yarrabah, Australia, recently. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

YARRABAH, Australia — This remote stretch of coastline in north Queensland has much to offer: pristine beaches dotted with mango and palm trees, tropical breezes, an azure ocean.

Great

Barrier

Reef

Area

of detail

Indian

Ocean

With its amateur cast of players that includes schoolchildren and grandmothers, the Yarrabah Brass Band does not always hit the right notes, and its rehearsals can be faintly raucous.

The band is “a big part of how we move forward,” he added.

The white man, locals often joke, is akin to Migaloo, an albino humpback whale, because it is rare to see either in Yarrabah.

Errol Neal, center right, the mayor of Yarrabah, with family members in the front yard of his childhood home on the Yarrabah waterfront. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

Who will come is another question.

A birthday celebration on the beach. Yarrabah is an alcohol-restricted zone as part of a government effort to curb drinking in indigenous communities. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

During the mission, being a member of the band provided a rare route to escape the shire. The band members, wearing black caps and crisp cream shirts, toured Queensland.

At the festival in November, Mr. Morrison played with Robert Patterson, a respected elder known as Uncle Bobby, and Yarrabah Brass Band member.

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/world/australia/brass-band-revives-bright-spot-from-yarrabahs-oppressive-past.html?_r=1

** Aboriginal Brass Band Offers Burst of Hope in a Bleak Community
————————————————————
By CLARISSA SEBAG-MONTEFIOREJAN. 24, 2016

Men fishing at Wungu Beach in Yarrabah, Australia, recently. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

YARRABAH, Australia — This remote stretch of coastline in north Queensland has much to offer: pristine beaches dotted with mango and palm trees, tropical breezes, an azure ocean.

Great

Barrier

Reef

Area

of detail

Indian

Ocean

With its amateur cast of players that includes schoolchildren and grandmothers, the Yarrabah Brass Band does not always hit the right notes, and its rehearsals can be faintly raucous.

The band is “a big part of how we move forward,” he added.

The white man, locals often joke, is akin to Migaloo, an albino humpback whale, because it is rare to see either in Yarrabah.

Errol Neal, center right, the mayor of Yarrabah, with family members in the front yard of his childhood home on the Yarrabah waterfront. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

Who will come is another question.

A birthday celebration on the beach. Yarrabah is an alcohol-restricted zone as part of a government effort to curb drinking in indigenous communities. Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

During the mission, being a member of the band provided a rare route to escape the shire. The band members, wearing black caps and crisp cream shirts, toured Queensland.

At the festival in November, Mr. Morrison played with Robert Patterson, a respected elder known as Uncle Bobby, and Yarrabah Brass Band member.

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 26, 2016 / No Comments / More

REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016) | JAZZ LIVES

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/

** REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016)
————————————————————

By Michael Steinman

Often the latest jazz news is an obituary notice. It’s not surprising given the age of some of my friends and heroes, but I don’t always linger on such news: if I immersed myself in it, I might become too sad to continue stating confidently that JAZZ LIVES.

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-d-one/

But I will make an exception for William B. Dunham — known to me as Bill, known earlier in his life as Hoagy. For more than half a century he was the regular pianist with the Grove Street Stompers, who play on Monday nights at Arthur’s Tavern in Greenwich Village, New York.

Bill died on January 11: details here (http://www.reddenfuneralhome.net/book-of-memories/2346792/Dunham-William/service-details.php) .

Like most of us, Bill had many facets he showed to the world. Officially he was a New York City real estate eminence who signed his emails thusly:

William B. Dunham
Licensed Real Estate Broker
Barrow Grove Associates Inc.
P.O. Box 183, Cooper Station P.O.
New York, NY 10276-0183

But this serious signature was only one side of a man who was at heart puckish. I’d met him perhaps a decade ago and we had become friendly, so when I hadn’t seen or heard from him last year, I emailed him in August to ask if all was well, and got this response:

Hey Michael……………….Thanks for asking. For a couple of doddering old geriatrics we are doing OK – not quite at the strained food stage. I have had a little problem which has kept me out of Arthur’s. Getting better.

Blog recommendation. Every Sunday from 12:30 – 2:30 a great trio at Cafe Loup on 13th Street. Piano, bass and guitar. Not to be missed! Could you video there?

Our cat population has dwindled by 50%. We had to download Manning because he tended to bite. Love bites mind you. I used to enjoy the occasional love bite – but not by a cat!

Let me know if you ever want to visit Cafe Loup on a Sunday…………

Best……Bill

PS……….LOVE your blogs!!

That was the Bill Dunham I will always remember: the enthusiastic jazz-lover who turned up at gigs, always beautifully dressed, the man who marveled at the music and the musicians, who would email me to share his delight in a video I’d just posted. He and his wife Sonya were a reliable couple at New York City jazz gigs, cheerful and ardent.

I don’t remember whether I first met Bill at Arthur’s Tavern and then at gigs or the reverse, but our early correspondence was often his urging me to come down to hear the Grove Street Stompers on a Monday night, or telling me what wonderful things had happened the previous Monday. I am afraid I put him off fairly consistently, because I have taught early-morning Tuesday classes for thirty years and even when the GSS gig ended at ten, I yawned my way through my work. But I did make my way down there — with camera — one night in 2010, and recorded this performance, the regular band with guest stars Dan Barrett, cornet; J. Walter Hawkes, trombone (later in the evening Rossano Sportiello took to the piano):

Others in that band are Peter Ballance, trombone (seen here in front of the narrow bandstand, keeping track of the songs played that night); Joe Licari, clarinet; Giampaolo Biagi, drums; Skip Muller, string bass.

Here is a more recent still photograph of that band, with Scott Ricketts, cornet; Steve Little, drums:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-d-at-arthurs-ballance-ricketts-licari-little-perhaps-muller/As a pianist, Bill was an ensemble player who offered the plain harmonies as the music moved along. He knew this, and did not seek to inflate his talents: when I saw him at a gig where Rossano Sportiello or Mark Shane was at the keyboard, he spoke of them and their playing as versions of the unreachable ideal. He was proud of the Grove Street Stompers as a durable organism upholding the collective love of jazz, but modest about himself.

A digression. Bill became one of my most enthusiastic blog-followers but he often found technology baffling, which is the right of people who came to computers late in life. WordPress would inexplicably unsubscribe him from JAZZ LIVES, and I would get a plaintive telephone call and then attempt — becoming Customer Service — to walk him through the steps that would re-establish a connection. Once the complication was beyond my powers to fix on the telephone, and since I knew I was coming in to Manhattan, I offered to come to his apartment and fix things there, which he happily accepted. There I found out about the four cats — I don’t remember their names, and since I was a stranger, they went into hiding (perhaps they didn’t like something I’d posted on the blog?) and I never saw them.

Once I fixed the connection, because it was noon, Bill offered me a glass of iced gin, which I declined, and spoke of his other jazz obsession — Wild Bill Davison. Wild Bill, when he was in New York City in between gigs, would come down to Arthur’s and play, and Bill (Dunham) spoke happily of those encounters: he’d also become a WBD collector, but not in the usual way: Bill’s goal was to acquire a copy of every recording WBD had ever made, perhaps on every label and every speed. I was awe-struck, but perhaps tactlessly asked if this was like collecting stamps, because WBD’s solos had become more worked-out than not. To his credit, Bill agreed.

He also had a substantial collection of paper ephemera and memorabilia. However, by the time I’d met him and had this blog, any ideas of an interview were brushed aside, “Michael!” he’d say, laughing, “I can barely remember my wife’s name!”

Before I’d ever met Bill, though, I knew of him as a youthful eminence in ways more important to me. He had graduated from Harvard in 1952. To my mind, this made him a truly sentient being — even if gentlemen at Harvard those days aimed no higher than a C, I believe those C grades meant something. He was seriously involved with jazz before I was able to crawl.

Thanks to my dear friend John L. Fell, I heard a tape of Bill in 1951 as part of the Harvard jazz band, the Crimson Stompers — including drummer Walt Gifford — on a session where clarinetist Frank Chace, visiting Boston, had been the star. In Manfred Selchow’s book on Edmond Hall, I learned that Hall had been recorded at an informal session in 1948, and “Hoagy Dunham” had played piano on ROYAL GARDEN BLUES. I had a cassette copy of what remained of those sessions. At some point I copied these tapes onto another cassette and sent them to Bill, who was ecstatic. Through Jeanie Wilson, Barbara Lea’s dearest friend, I learned that Bill — for a very short time — had dated Barbara, and I got Bill to write his memories when Barbara died, which you can read here (https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/bill-dunham-remembers-barbara-lea/) . Here (https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2014/01/10/when-they-were-all-very-young-part-one-miss-leacock-mr-gifford-and-the-fellows/) is a post
in which Bill figures — both in a black-and-white photograph of himself, Barbara, and the Stompers, and a Harvard news story where he is “Hoagie” Dunham.

Another photograph of the Crimson Stompers, from drummer Walt Gifford’s scrapbook, tenderly maintained by Duncan Schiedt:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/jazz-studies-program-november-1948/crimson-stompers-11-48/

And here (https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/up-to-date-with-bill-dunham/) is Bill, as a JAZZ LIVES stringer or jazz town crier, with some New York news (hilariously).

A few memories from cornetist Scott Ricketts, seen above with Bill on the bandstand —

“At the end of a set, Bill would refer to Arthur’s as ‘The West Side’s Finest Supper Club’. But the only food I ever saw there was in the 25 cent glass peanut machine in the front.”

“Bill would always close the set (over Mood Indigo) by telling the audience, “Have a couple of Wild Turkeys, we’ll be right back.” At the band’s 50th anniversary party, I asked Bill if he was having a Wild Turkey? He said ‘No, I don’t drink that stuff!’”

And a neat summation from a cousin of Bill’s:

“Bill was a terrific guy, who served in the military in Korea and then came back to attend Harvard on the GI bill. He was a bit of a renaissance man; having gone to Harvard, worked on Wall Street, been a noted jazz musician (his real passion), and then into real estate. I was fortunate enough to get to see him just a few weeks ago, and we coaxed him to play some music on the piano in the front lobby of the assisted living home they were visiting with their daughter. He still had it then.”

How might people count their lives well-lived? To me (and the person who has made the transition can only know this in some spiritual way) if you’ve lived your life properly, people miss you when you are no longer there. I know I will from now on think, “I wonder if Bill will show up tonight?” when I am seated at a particular gig — and then have to remind myself that he won’t. I send my condolences to Sonya, and Bill’s daughter Amy.

My jazz universe and my personal universe are smaller and less vibrant because of Bill’s death.

Thanks so much to Alison Birch for her generous help in this blogpost.

And “this just in,” thanks to Joseph Veltre and ancestry.com (safari-reader://ancestry.com) — Bill’s picture from the 1952 Harvard yearbook:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-dunham-1952/

May your happiness increase!

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016) | JAZZ LIVES

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/

** REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016)
————————————————————

By Michael Steinman

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-d-one/

Bill died on January 11: details here (http://www.reddenfuneralhome.net/book-of-memories/2346792/Dunham-William/service-details.php) .

Like most of us, Bill had many facets he showed to the world. Officially he was a New York City real estate eminence who signed his emails thusly:

William B. Dunham
Licensed Real Estate Broker
Barrow Grove Associates Inc.
P.O. Box 183, Cooper Station P.O.
New York, NY 10276-0183

Blog recommendation. Every Sunday from 12:30 – 2:30 a great trio at Cafe Loup on 13th Street. Piano, bass and guitar. Not to be missed! Could you video there?

Our cat population has dwindled by 50%. We had to download Manning because he tended to bite. Love bites mind you. I used to enjoy the occasional love bite – but not by a cat!

Let me know if you ever want to visit Cafe Loup on a Sunday…………

Best……Bill

PS……….LOVE your blogs!!

Here is a more recent still photograph of that band, with Scott Ricketts, cornet; Steve Little, drums:

Another photograph of the Crimson Stompers, from drummer Walt Gifford’s scrapbook, tenderly maintained by Duncan Schiedt:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/jazz-studies-program-november-1948/crimson-stompers-11-48/

And here (https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/up-to-date-with-bill-dunham/) is Bill, as a JAZZ LIVES stringer or jazz town crier, with some New York news (hilariously).

A few memories from cornetist Scott Ricketts, seen above with Bill on the bandstand —

“At the end of a set, Bill would refer to Arthur’s as ‘The West Side’s Finest Supper Club’. But the only food I ever saw there was in the 25 cent glass peanut machine in the front.”

And a neat summation from a cousin of Bill’s:

My jazz universe and my personal universe are smaller and less vibrant because of Bill’s death.

Thanks so much to Alison Birch for her generous help in this blogpost.

And “this just in,” thanks to Joseph Veltre and ancestry.com (safari-reader://ancestry.com) — Bill’s picture from the 1952 Harvard yearbook:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-dunham-1952/

May your happiness increase!

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016) | JAZZ LIVES

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/

** REMEMBERING BILL DUNHAM (1928-2016)
————————————————————

By Michael Steinman

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-d-one/

Bill died on January 11: details here (http://www.reddenfuneralhome.net/book-of-memories/2346792/Dunham-William/service-details.php) .

Like most of us, Bill had many facets he showed to the world. Officially he was a New York City real estate eminence who signed his emails thusly:

William B. Dunham
Licensed Real Estate Broker
Barrow Grove Associates Inc.
P.O. Box 183, Cooper Station P.O.
New York, NY 10276-0183

Blog recommendation. Every Sunday from 12:30 – 2:30 a great trio at Cafe Loup on 13th Street. Piano, bass and guitar. Not to be missed! Could you video there?

Our cat population has dwindled by 50%. We had to download Manning because he tended to bite. Love bites mind you. I used to enjoy the occasional love bite – but not by a cat!

Let me know if you ever want to visit Cafe Loup on a Sunday…………

Best……Bill

PS……….LOVE your blogs!!

Here is a more recent still photograph of that band, with Scott Ricketts, cornet; Steve Little, drums:

Another photograph of the Crimson Stompers, from drummer Walt Gifford’s scrapbook, tenderly maintained by Duncan Schiedt:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2014/05/01/jazz-studies-program-november-1948/crimson-stompers-11-48/

And here (https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/up-to-date-with-bill-dunham/) is Bill, as a JAZZ LIVES stringer or jazz town crier, with some New York news (hilariously).

A few memories from cornetist Scott Ricketts, seen above with Bill on the bandstand —

“At the end of a set, Bill would refer to Arthur’s as ‘The West Side’s Finest Supper Club’. But the only food I ever saw there was in the 25 cent glass peanut machine in the front.”

And a neat summation from a cousin of Bill’s:

My jazz universe and my personal universe are smaller and less vibrant because of Bill’s death.

Thanks so much to Alison Birch for her generous help in this blogpost.

And “this just in,” thanks to Joseph Veltre and ancestry.com (safari-reader://ancestry.com) — Bill’s picture from the 1952 Harvard yearbook:

https://jazzlives.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/remembering-bill-dunham-1928-2016/bill-dunham-1952/

May your happiness increase!

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

Barnstable author’s new novel evokes the rich heritage of jazz – News – The Barnstable Patriot – Hyannis, MA

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.barnstablepatriot.com/article/20160124/NEWS/160129634/101352/ENTERTAINMENT

** Barnstable author’s new novel evokes the rich heritage of jazz
————————————————————
By Barbara Clark
bclark@barnstablepatriot.com
By Barbara Clark
bclark@barnstablepatriot.com

Posted Jan. 24, 2016 at 1:34 PM

Author and Barnstable Intermediate School teacher Mick Carlon is back in his element. His new young adult book, “Girl Singer,” follows on the heels of his two popular earlier novels, “Riding on Duke’s Train” (2011) and “Travels with Louis” (2012), which were aimed at younger middle-grade readers. All three novels place fictional adolescent protagonists in stories that mix in with the rich history of jazz music as it took the United States by storm in the 1930s.

Carlon’s popular books for young people have been added to the curriculum in more than 28 high schools here and across the country, and “Girl Singer” is being “piloted” for school distribution as well. According to the author, this means that “the schools are ‘testing the book out’ with several classes. If it then passes muster with the students and teachers, the book can be formally adopted by the school.”

First off, “Girl Singer” has an eye-catching cover. A young woman’s swirling skirt morphs into a 78-rpm record as she dances, presumably to the swingin’ tunes of Count Basie, who figures large in “Girl Singer.” The book continues and expands Carlon’s love of jazz and his affinity for young people, this time creating a young woman as the central character for the fiction.

The author evokes a gray winter day in the late 1930s, as young Avery Hall’s luck is about to change. While waiting tables in Big Joe’s Diner in Harlem, the young 18-year-old meets Lester ‘Pres’ Young, the real historical tenor sax player for Count Basie, and gets her big chance to sing with the band when Billie Holiday exits the group.

Avery gets on the bus with the Basie Band, and it’s the perfect vehicle for the author, who offers readers a chronicle of jazz music as well as the era of the late 1930s, seen through Avery’s eyes. The book describes an intense time of poverty and racial intolerance in the south, including the racism that band members have to endure as they travel – from verbal and physical violence to segregated concerts and overnight accommodations.

Along with Avery, readers also experience some of the events that have begun to evoke pride and a new sense of power for people of color, such as the famous Joe Louis-Max Schmeling fight in 1938, and the wide ranging effects of World War II in the black community.

Later in the book the author introduces a new character, a Dachau survivor who becomes Avery’s love interest, as the two meet and eventually marry. Karl Flach, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany whose character is based on an actual person in the author’s life, adds depth to the narrative, introducing the horrors of the Holocaust and the issue of interracial marriage.

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Jazz Promo Services
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Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

Barnstable author’s new novel evokes the rich heritage of jazz – News – The Barnstable Patriot – Hyannis, MA

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.barnstablepatriot.com/article/20160124/NEWS/160129634/101352/ENTERTAINMENT

Posted Jan. 24, 2016 at 1:34 PM

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

Barnstable author’s new novel evokes the rich heritage of jazz – News – The Barnstable Patriot – Hyannis, MA

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.barnstablepatriot.com/article/20160124/NEWS/160129634/101352/ENTERTAINMENT

Posted Jan. 24, 2016 at 1:34 PM

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 25, 2016 / No Comments / More

Vijay Iyer, the Harvard Professor Changing Jazz – The New Yorker

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/01/time-is-a-ghost

** Time Is a Ghost
————————————————————
BY ALEC WILKINSON (http://www.newyorker.com/contributors/alec-wilkinson)

http://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/160201_r27624-1200.jpg“No one ever told me not to do anything on the piano,” Iyer says. “So I always thought of my progress as a series of accidents.” Photograph by Ioulex for The New Yorker Vijay Iyer’s music can be jubilant and dramatic, but Iyer is not. He tends to stand slightly farther from someone he is speaking with than people usually do. Seated, he sometimes leans back from an engagement, as if the extra room allowed him more time to reach a judgment. His gaze is examining, and he occasionally looks at people askance, which makes him appear skeptical. In conversation, he seems cautious but precise and quietly determined. He stands with his feet spread and his knees locked, like someone in the military. He has a round, handsome face and a sharp nose. His expression is not fixed, but it doesn’t vary a lot. People usually take him for an accountant, he says.
Lately, Iyer, who is forty-four and a Harvard professor, has been the most lauded piano player in jazz. Reviewing Iyer’s record “Break Stuff,” his twentieth, released last February, the critic Steve Greenlee wrote, “He may be the most celebrated musician in jazz.” Iyer appreciates the sentiment, but it makes him uncomfortable, too. “I have never thought of myself as a great pianist,” he told me. “I thought of putting myself in the service of some larger trajectory. For me, every choice is to take us closer to the next choice. I never had formal training and no one ever told me not to do anything on the piano, so I always thought of my progress as a series of accidents.” The observation that one hears often about Iyer, and that is not usually made about a musician whose career is twenty years old, is that he hasn’t yet achieved his potential. A strain of traditional authority appears to have withheld its approval, however. He considers it significant that he has never been
invited to play at the Village Vanguard, for example. The history of jazz has white musicians and black musicians, but it doesn’t have brown ones, he said. Iyer is Indian-American. His surname is Raghunathan; he changed it to Iyer after college, at Yale, where he majored in mathematics and physics.
Iyer is currently the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s artist-in-residence, and in March he will perform during the course of eighteen days at the opening of the Met Breuer, the former home of the Whitney Museum. Iyer’s residency was Limor Tomer’s idea. Tomer oversees Live Arts at the Met, and she wanted to see “what a deep engagement with the Met’s galleries would look like to someone like Vijay.” For more than a year, Iyer and Tomer have been walking around the museum discussing what he might do. As one of his first events, on an evening last October, he played the pipe organ in the gallery where weapons and armor are displayed. The organ occupies a balcony at one end of the gallery. Iyer arrived a little before six. He hadn’t played a pipe organ before. Someone asked what the program would consist of, and he said, a little uncertainly, “All the hits.”
Iyer pressed several keys. “I’m an expert, because I watched the YouTube video on how to play the pipe organ,” he said. For a few minutes, he held down keys and pulled out stops and pressed a few pedals with his feet; then he stood. “It’s a little like sailing a yacht all by yourself, out there on the ocean, with all there is to take care of,” he said.
Tomer sat on a folding stool to one side of the organ, which was built by Thomas Appleton, a Boston craftsman, in 1830. “It’s the ultimate goyische instrument,” she said. “I love that he’s subverting it. It’s a reverse-colonial moment.”
Iyer was to play two programs, each twenty minutes long, and at six o’clock he placed his phone above the keyboard to keep track of the time. He played a single note, then another, then three together and held them. People began gathering on the floor among the armor and on a balcony at the far end of the gallery. The single-note figures lengthened into phrases and lines and began to swirl and spill over one another and form clusters that resolved periodically but did not come to rest. Iyer played mostly with his eyes closed, opening them only to find a stop.
He ended by holding down several keys, then he walked to the balustrade and waved. “I kept trying to play harder, as if that would make a difference,” he told me. “It’s like trying to turn on a light switch harder, but I can’t get that out of my arms.” For the second piece, he played three works of his own, which seemed more orderly. At the balustrade, he made a small bow.
Two of the first people to approach him were Andrea Morgan and Maria Castillo, whom he had gone to college with. “You looked very priestly when you bowed,” Castillo said. The three left the museum together to have a drink.
I asked if they had imagined at Yale that Iyer would become the musician that he has. “The idea of a professional jazz career then sounded fictional—even today,” Morgan said.
“It’s a bad idea,” Iyer said.
“I would never recommend it to any young person. We were very practical people.”
“A terrible idea,” Iyer said.
“You always had other stuff you were doing.” This was said in a consoling tone.
Iyer followed his sister, Pratima, to Yale—she is a scientist in Georgia who works in public health. Their parents’ marriage was arranged in India. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, Iyer’s father, Raghu, came to the University of Florida to obtain a doctorate in pharmacology. After a year, his wife, Sita, joined him. “Basically, the door was open to certain kinds of non-Western immigrants, ones with technical training—scientific, or medical,” Iyer said. “Hence all those stereotypes about Asians being doctors and engineers. They were curated by policy.”
Raghu got a job in Albany, New York, where Iyer was born, and then another, when Iyer was two, in Rochester. Iyer’s parents started him on the violin the next year. In high school, he was a member of a regional youth symphony that toured once a year. Pratima took piano lessons, and from as early as Iyer can recall he also “started banging on the piano.” As a teen-ager, he played keyboards in a band covering songs by the Police and Prince. At the end of tenth grade, he auditioned for the school’s jazz ensemble. There was already a piano player, so at first Iyer was assigned the vibraphone. The band director liked his playing but told him that he needed a deeper understanding of the music’s vocabulary. In the library, Iyer found records by Thelonious Monk, and was affected by his “staggering empathy, those pointed voids that he would finish with such a different sense of completeness.”
When Iyer began looking for colleges, he didn’t think he was fitted to attend a conservatory. “I was still figuring things out,” he told me. “I didn’t know that I would, or even could, be a musician.” He had skipped seventh grade, so he was sixteen when he arrived at Yale. He auditioned for the college symphony and didn’t get in, and he began to take the violin less seriously. There was a piano in the dining hall, and after dinner he would play it. In his second year, he was accompanied by Jeff Brock, a bass player who is now the chair of the mathematics department at Brown. “People were looking a bit askance—who are these guys playing dinner jazz?—but then we were sort of embraced,” Brock says. Iyer also began writing music, mainly in imitation of Monk and Billy Strayhorn, Ellington’s collaborator, whom he studied in a workshop taught by the musician Willie Ruff. Ruff, who had gone to Yale and was known for playing bass with Dwike Mitchell in the Mitchell-Ruff duo, remembers
Iyer as “quiet and industrious.”
There is permanent music and temporary music. Temporary music remains fixed in its period. Permanent music reflects its period but provokes responses deeper than nostalgia. It is no observation of my own that much of America’s permanent music has been made by African-Americans playing jazz, although “jazz” is a term that many musicians, including Iyer, tend to shun, partly in the belief that it has a commercial taint, as if the music were merely a commodity, and partly in the belief that it has a dismissive taint, as if it stood for music made by untrained musicians who groped their way toward expression. Iyer doesn’t care to have his music labelled at all, but he sometimes calls it “creative music.” Improvisation, whether artistic, social, or cultural, as in the manner of a diaspora, involves “the ability to perceive, think, decide, and act in real time,” he says. For more than ten years, Iyer has also written chamber music, usually for commissions, a process that he
describes as “slowed-down improvisation.”
Iyer’s music sounds modern, but he feels that he is embedded in the traditions of improvised music. As a piano player, he regards his lineage as descending through “James P. Johnson, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Randy Weston, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner, Andrew Hill, Alice Coltrane,” he told me. The drummer Tyshawn Sorey, with whom Iyer has often worked, sees the music they have made together as both historical and contemporary. “It’s not really about the concept of trying to do anything new,” he said. “I think it comes more from the idea of history. We’re dealing with things in our time. What we’re exploring is stuff people have been dealing with for centuries: the mystical and transcendent powers of music.”
Iyer’s main engagement is with the Vijay Iyer Trio, whose other members are Stephan Crump and Marcus Gilmore. Crump plays bass, and Gilmore plays drums. Iyer is interested in “what happens from the shoulders down” among listeners, and he cares more for a musician’s ability to listen intently and for his or her ideas than for what he sometimes calls “the athletic rigor of playing.” Jeff Brock says that Iyer looks less for virtuosos than for musicians whose playing is “intensely personal. He gravitates to musicians who have a certain kind of cry, a howl. He’s trying to rend the fabric of whatever restraints are being placed upon them by the idiom.”
Iyer does not think of Crump and Gilmore as accompanists—the trio has “a non-soloistic way of improvising together,” he said. Onstage, Iyer decides “how to start, how to continue, and how to end, and I’m constantly assessing the shape of the performance—I have a sense of where I’m going and where the other musicians are going to meet me”—but he seeks a group exchange. “Vijay is interested in the collective dynamic,” Crump told me, meaning that he and Gilmore, while carrying out tasks, devise their parts according to what they hear the others playing. Gilmore told me that he approaches the drums from “a harmonic and melodic base.” He likes the examples he finds in Yoruban and Afro-Cuban music, where, he said, “the drums are melodic, they’re talking, it’s linguistic.” In other trios, the rhythm section might receive a map, in the form of chord changes, that lays out a route to a destination. With Iyer, the musicians might receive a map, but the route is a matter for discussion
. “When people ask me what the music sounds like, I just say, ‘I play free,’ ” Gilmore says.
One morning, I had breakfast with Iyer at the Astor Row Café, in Harlem, near where he lives with his wife, Christina Leslie, a computational biologist, and their ten-year-old daughter. A song began playing, and he said, “That’s Jimmy Smith on the organ. The drummer is Donald Bailey, whom I played with in Oakland when I was in graduate school.”
In 1992, Iyer went to the University of California at Berkeley for a doctorate in physics. He lived in Oakland, across the street from a club called the Bird Kage, where there were jam sessions on Sundays. The Bird Kage’s piano was in disrepair. Iyer brought his own keyboard, and when the bandleader learned that he lived across the street he started paying Iyer forty dollars to bring the keyboard and play in the house band. “Most of the musicians were middle-aged and older African-Americans who cherished that era of music,” Iyer said. “The horn players would play chorus after chorus, and you’d have to accompany all of them. Some of them were great, but, more to the point, among all of them there was a real love of the music.” Bailey came now and then. He asked Iyer to be in his rehearsal band, an octet that he called Eight Misbehavin’, which met at his house, where “we’d really stretch out,” Iyer said.
Iyer was becoming more interested in music and less interested in physics, and in 1994 he gave up physics altogether. He began studying with a professor named David Wessel, who was also a musician. Wessel, who died in 2014, had a computer-music research facility, the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. He taught music perception and cognition and computer music. “He was welcoming and generous, and a genius who created opportunities for people to flourish, and he took an immediate interest in me, because I was a bit weird,” Iyer said. With the oversight of a committee that Wessel assembled, Iyer began a Ph.D. based on “the study of how music works, not just how in the abstract but in our bodies. How we do it. How we hear it.” The study, then nascent, is known as embodied cognition. It proposes that the body is involved in thinking, and that the perception of rhythm is itself a form of intelligence.
In entering African-American music “and trying to figure out what my position is and striving for some place within it,” Iyer said, his status “has frequently been called into question. Since childhood, he has been aware of his racial identity—of being, as he has said, neither white nor black, and having a different-sounding name. As an Asian-American, he regards himself as existing “on the boundary of what it means to be American,” he said. He sees himself as someone of color but, as the child of parents who came willingly to the country, as being in a different position from people whose ancestors arrived as captives.
“To be a jazz musician is to express some American project, to be part of American history, to take in those rugged ideals to which improvisation is central,” he said. “Critical writing used to attempt to place me by othering me, by putting me outside the history of jazz. Everything I did was seen as different and not as the continuity of a tradition. Critics never describe black music as rigorous or cerebral or mathematical, although Coltrane was interested in mathematics. Since I was Asian, I was seen as having only my intellect to use.”
In San Francisco, Iyer encountered a group called Asian Improv, whose members “were committed to radical African-American traditions, but they were incorporating instruments from Japan and China, and dealing with issues of their own,” he said. “It became apparent to me that the history of this music is a history of communities where music was an uplifting force, and that situating myself in relation to that history was what mattered. It wasn’t about me trying to sound black. It was me figuring out my relationship to those histories.”
In California in 1994, Iyer met Steve Coleman, the bandleader and eventual MacArthur Fellow, at Yoshi’s, a club in Oakland. Coleman is a saxophone player and composer, whose complex, exacting music draws on African traditions and on elements of the African diaspora. Iyer, still a student, was unsure about whether to try and be a musician, Coleman told me. “His parents weren’t really in favor of it—they wanted him to stay in the sciences. He was going through this uncertainty over whether he could do this, and I was: ‘You can do whatever you want.’ He started to gain confidence, and we had confidence in him that he could join in.” Iyer says that Coleman’s view is “pleasantly revisionist.” Cartoon “That’ll be best if used by 15FEB16.”Buy the print » (http://www.condenaststore.com/-st/New-Yorker-Current-Issue-Prints_c148582_.htm) Coleman invited Iyer to go to Europe with his band. “At the time, I thought of myself as an amateur, and to be invited was a profound turning point for
me,” Iyer said. “In his music, there’s a real gravity and rigor, and rhythm is at the center of everything. These are some of the best musicians in the world, I thought, so I better step up. It’s not a hobby anymore. I was in way over my head, and I felt like I was always messing up—I think I had something like impostor syndrome. But seeing what he worked on, how he worked on it, the scope of his knowledge was a tremendous education for me.”
Iyer received his Ph.D. in 1998. His dissertation’s title is “Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics.” At Harvard, among career scholars, he feels a little self-conscious—“my so-called Ph.D.,” he said. “I think of it as a hustle.” Ingrid Monson, a professor of ethnomusicology at Harvard, said, though, that “Vijay’s dissertation was one of the first to talk about embodied cognition. It foreshadowed the development of a now prominent direction in musical studies, called ‘embodiment studies.’ The field is less interested in scores and musical theory and more in the cognitive and embodied underpinnings of music. Vijay’s work was very important, and is frequently cited.”
After breakfast, Iyer and I stood on the corner of Lenox Avenue and 130th Street, and I said something trivial about how the sheer richness of things in view seemed hospitable to jazz during the period when New York was its main home, and he said that for him it was instead the nervous rhythm of the city that fed the music. Iyer made two records in California, but he said that when he moved to New York, in 1999, his music changed. “There was an intensification, the rhythms of the city and the street and how that influences you, there was a ratcheting up,” he said. Jeff Brock said that when he and Iyer rehearsed “we would play the same piece for an incredibly long time, until it started to feel natural. It was always an extreme experience playing with him, and you were almost exhausted at the end.”
“Historicity,” made in 2009, brought Iyer more notice than was customary for him. The first, title track, which he wrote, begins with an asymmetrical line in the left hand, and a darting, lithe one in the right. The right hand begins finding the spaces between the left hand’s wobbly progress. While some musicians give the sense that they are offering ideas as they arrive, almost fortuitously, Iyer’s ideas seem to come from a wide and deep reserve. He has a gift for narrative, for making a song feel like a procession of suspenseful events. The album’s third song is “Galang,” a rendition of a dance track by Maya Arulpragasam, who performs as M.I.A. Her version is spare, hypnotic, and urban. Iyer’s sounds wildly pagan, as if it took place in a warehouse on the edge of town.
Three things figure prominently in Iyer’s music: the acuity of his attention, the coherent template of his improvisations, and his touch on the piano. Improvised collective music is the sound of negotiation, according to George Lewis. Lewis, a MacArthur Fellow, is a composer, a trombone player, a musicologist and writer, and a professor at Columbia. “In any collective improvisation, you hear people staking out positions,” he told me one day, in his office. “Sometimes they try to take power, sometimes they advocate for their positions—where the music should go. Other people decline; they make collective decisions through sound alone. You don’t have to watch. You can have your eyes closed and hear it. Improvisers listen to the forms, notes, chord structures, and rhythmic cycles that are basically carriers of the fundamental signals. With the great ones, you can dialogue with the music and hear where it’s going—what the person’s definition of the current situation is, and
sometimes possible futures. All of this is audible to Vijay.”
Iyer says that while improvising he makes a lot of “micro-decisions,” and that each moment involves “a set of potentialities.” Sometimes he finds solutions within the range of his right hand, discovering melodies that have a folklike character, and sometimes he spreads his hands to the ends of the keyboard, which is an Ellington gesture.
An Iyer improvisation has a shapeliness that involves holding in mind possible serial forms and evoking them. When I said something like this to him, he said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Then, “I honestly don’t know how a lot of what I do happens.” Improvising musicians are often taught to rid their minds of thoughts, which Iyer regards as “an impoverished view of thought.” George Lewis said, “I’m suspicious of people who say they blank their minds to play. With Vijay, I think he’s looking at the situation and making small tests. He’s being careful and deliberative, even in the most ecstatic moments, which I find attractive. The ones who blank their minds, I’m always thinking, How can we get your attention? Someone who can operate like Vijay, on multiple levels of consciousness, that’s what I admire.”
When Iyer was younger, he thought more consciously about rhythm, and he played with a heavier hand. Then he began to consider “the expressive variation of sound in time, the flow of sensation,” he said one evening at dinner. Something Crump thought when he first played with Iyer was that Iyer appeared to “have developed his own language with the piano. The overtones and harmonies, the polarities in the sound, the physicality of the instrument, the unparalleled touch—harnessing the beast that is, and can be, a grand piano.”
Jeff Brock told me, “The piano is this almost baroque machine, with mechanical linkages and hammers. It has to be hit strong.” Iyer’s tone, Crump said, is “extremely powerful, but it’s also sensitive and refined. It’s not just about getting quieter. It’s maintaining a control. There’s a ceiling to how loud you can get, but if you engage instead at the lower dynamic range you find it’s like the ocean, almost infinite.”
Iyer’s tone has a warmth and a clarity, like that of a singer who enunciates carefully. The notes go by so quickly that it is difficult to distinguish all the technical means at work, but part of the richness comes from the way he uses the pedals. “People treat the pedals as if they were binary—down or up,” he said. “But there’s a continuum of variation between all on or all off. Half pedal, it’s called. Controlling the duration has a lot to do with how you get the instrument to resonate, which then has to do with how different notes relate to each other, which is harmony. So harmony and timbre and other variables, such as time, are related. I kind of knew that, I guess, but I learned how to control it or ride it a little more.”
Iyer’s left hand occasionally comes halfway to his shoulder, as if recoiling. It is a characteristic gesture. Pianists usually care more about the force with which they bring their hands down. Watching drummers, Iyer learned about release. “A lot of what drummers practice when they’re warming up is uptick, or rebound,” he said. “On a piano, you can affect the upper edge of the spectrum a bit with the velocity in which you leave, at least on a good piano. On really nice instruments, all these extra variables reveal themselves.”
The period of immersion in technical prowess, which is common to musicians of all types, is absent in Iyer’s training. Brock noticed earlier in their friendship that “his record collection was enormous. He was doing a lot of listening and thinking about music, without necessarily taking the monastic approach. He decided late to be a musician, but at the same time he knew that, to do that, he was going to have a slightly different narrative. I think what he found is that people are as receptive to somebody speaking in multiple tongues as they are to someone clearly just focussed on the instrument.”
In early December, Iyer visited the Met Breuer building, using the entrance on a side street which construction workers use, and produced his driver’s license for a security guard. In the gallery on the first floor, where he will perform, he said, “My home away from home.” He wore a trenchcoat over jeans and a shirt, and stood in his soldier stance. He said that he hadn’t yet established all that he would do during his residency. “It’s not quite like Marina Abramović living in the galleries and staring at people,” he said. “But I’m going to be there almost every day, playing.”
His practical questions were answered by Kwabena Slaughter, the associate general manager of production and technical operations at the Met, who had come to meet him. Would there be a door to keep the noise made by people in the lobby from interfering? It might be possible to hang a theatrical curtain, Slaughter said. A screen to project images onto? Usually, they were projected onto the wall itself.
Iyer wondered where his musicians should be placed. If they set up flat to the wall, the sound would reverberate.
“Are you going to be loud?” Slaughter asked.
“Some stuff might be more chamber music, and some might be heavier,” Iyer said.
A centerpiece of Iyer’s tenure at the Met is a suite of improvisatory duets made with the master trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith in response to the drawings of Nasreen Mohamedi, an Indian artist who was born in 1937 and died in 1990. Her drawings of abstract geometric forms are so painstaking that it is as if each line were scored rather than drawn. In the second half of Mohamedi’s life, a neurological affliction made her hands tremble. In a journal, she wrote, “Difficult this tremor / I almost faint with exhaustion— / I lie still / It is difficult / Nearly all the time / Within the greatest despair / calm and truth are found.”
Mohamedi wrote in a journal, “Music—abstract quality yet real to such a degree that it is almost life.” This notion seems threaded through the suite, which has seven pieces and is called “A Cosmic Rhythm with Each Stroke,” echoing a phrase from one of Mohamedi’s journals. The suite begins with Smith playing a bright, rising phrase, like a herald, that seems to announce a character’s taking the stage. What follows might be a two-figure play in which the exchanges involve mortality or impermanence or divinity. The musicians seem to trade remarks, and sometimes talk along with one another, as if each were reciting a text—a poem or a scripture—which they then consider. Sometimes they appear to reflect on an exchange, and sometimes they brood separately. The discourses are both cultivated and passionate. The occasional spareness of their playing and the stillness that sometimes surrounds their remarks suggest a region distinct from ordinary existence. The narrative reaches a
climax in the sixth and seventh movements, which have the feeling of a leave-taking or a resolution, an acknowledgment that they have said what they wish for the moment to say.
There was no plan for how many movements the suite would include, and there was no score, but it wasn’t so much improvised as decided on after months of looking at Mohamedi’s drawings and discussing them. Iyer and Smith read Mohamedi’s journals as well as two penetrating commentaries on her work, by Geeta Kapur and Roobina Karode, that will be published in the show’s catalogue. By the time Smith and Iyer met to record the suite, in November, “there was a certain understanding, a certain set of governing ideas,” Iyer said. “It wasn’t necessarily about being in complete agreement but in being in conversation about them.”
They recorded everything in a day, in a studio in midtown on the far West Side. The album will be released in February. The version they will play at the Met Breuer in March will reproduce the entire suite, but not faithfully.
Iyer became a professor at Harvard in 2012. The music department wanted to hire a classical composer, but it couldn’t agree on one. Ingrid Monson encouraged Iyer to apply. “It’s always been my dream that we have a prominent jazz artist on the faculty,” Monson told me. “I sit at a table at a faculty meeting and can’t believe I’m looking at Vijay Iyer.”
Iyer usually leaves for Boston early Monday morning on the train, and he returns Tuesday or Wednesday. He prefers the train to flying, because he can sleep more easily on a train. After two days of committee meetings, teaching—which includes student ensembles and his graduate seminar, called “Theorizing Improvisation,” which has readings from sociology, cognitive science, anthropology, and cultural studies—and dealing with brainy kids who have avid minds, he is worn out.
Iyer’s office at Harvard occupies a windowless room in the basement of the music building. Along the walls are sliding panels built for Iyer to manage the sound, which might be brittle if left to reflect off the bare walls. There is a piano, a drum set, and two amplifiers. The students, mostly young men, prepare ensemble pieces. A typical ensemble has drums, a bass, a piano, and some combination of guitar, trumpet, saxophone, and possibly a vocalist. Iyer sits in a chair and often closes his eyes while he listens. The less confident students steal glances at him. An ensemble plays, and Iyer says, “It’s a little hard to know, as a listener, where to, or how to, distribute my cognitive resources. There’s kind of no center. That’s O.K. for a while, but hard to sustain.” And, “Sometimes, you might want to make a radical choice and drop out for a while. The cliché is you have to build, everyone building in with more notes. If you listen to Monk, there’d be stabs and silences, but
that silence was filled with other things. You can build by not building. What that means is you build in the imagination of the listener by actually refusing to build, which arouses an expectation.”
One afternoon recently, Iyer met with a doctoral student named Rajna Swaminathan. Swaminathan plays a two-headed drum called the mridangam, which is from southern India. She and Iyer were working on a piece involving a complicated rhythmic pattern that Iyer has been struggling to grasp. The pattern has five parts, each shorter than the one before it. “Generally, in South Indian music we improvise in reductions,” Swaminathan said, for my benefit. Iyer said that he had to relearn the pattern every time they played it. Swaminathan sat on the floor with one leg bent and the drum against her knee, and the other leg forward with the drum against it. They started, and immediately Iyer said, “It’s too fast for me; sorry, I can’t hang.” Swaminathan set a slower tempo. They played for about twenty minutes, with Iyer striking percussive clusters of tones and Swaminathan slowly increasing the tempo. When they finished, Iyer said, perhaps disingenuously, “I’m not doing anything but
re-orchestrating the same parts.” Swaminathan said, “What if you turned it into something more like a melody?”
It was near the end of Iyer’s second day, and he sat at the piano rubbing his eyes like a tired child. That night, he had dinner with a group of students as their guest, at a restaurant in Harvard Square. The train he caught arrived in Penn Station at two-thirty in the morning. Somewhere outside Providence, at around ten-thirty, he talked about a discussion in class which had involved the psychologist J. J. Gibson.
“Gibson advanced what he called an ecological approach to perception and cognition,” Iyer said. “It’s not that we just hear sounds. We hear the sources of the sound, and we’ve evolved to identify them. He also talks about time and events. There’s an article called ‘Events Are Perceivable but Time Is Not.’ We experience this tumult of events, and time is a ghost of what we actually experience. What we call time is really the feeling of eventfulness, so this kind of makes music a matter of events and our perception of those events. Music is made of us listening to each other.” I nodded, and he leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. ♦
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Kamasi Washington Awol Erizku for The New York Times

On a late October afternoon in South Central Los Angeles, Kamasi Washington was facing what is for him an increasingly familiar problem: making a lot of big ideas fit into a single space, even one as large as the nearby Club Nokia, a rock-star-size venue where he would be performing in December. His recent triple album, ‘‘The Epic,’’ is a nearly three-hour suite for a 10-piece jazz band, backed by a 32-piece orchestra and a 20-person choir. Washington’s show promised to be a typical swirl of activity, a sprawling procession of dancers, musicians, DJs and singers unified by the magisterial sound of Washington himself, a 34-year-old tenor saxophonist who has emerged as the most-talked-about jazz musician since Wynton Marsalis arrived on the New York scene three decades ago.

At that moment, Washington was at his aunt’s dance studio, trying to figure out where to put all the dancers. Lula Washington — whose troupe would be doing the dancing, at least if her nephew could convince her — knew that there would be a crowd onstage, and she didn’t want her people to get lost in it. Kamasi listened patiently, then got down on the floor and sketched the Nokia stage, insisting that it was more spacious than she imagined. Maybe a riser here? She looked skeptical. They would work it out somehow, she said, but she did not seem persuaded. (As it turned out, Kamasi’s vision exceeded the limits of this particular stage: Lula’s dancers did not perform in the show.)

Near the end of our visit, I asked Lula if she knew what the ‘‘epic’’ in the album title referred to. ‘‘As a matter of fact, I don’t,’’ she said. ‘‘Please, do tell.’’ I was relieved: Washington had been promising to tell me the story for several days. Since the release of ‘‘The Epic’’ last May, Washington has gone from being a well-known local musician to that rarest of musical species: a jazz celebrity, praised by critics and featured on ‘‘The Tavis Smiley Show.’’ (http://www.pbs.org/video/2365562762/) The timing of the release was providential: Only months earlier, Washington played saxophone on Kendrick Lamar’s ‘‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’’ for which he also wrote the string arrangements. Lamar’s landmark hip-hop album, a harrowing coming-of-age memoir, featured the contributions of several of Washington’s bandmates, young Los Angeles musicians for whom the boundaries between jazz and more popular genres are so porous as to be nonexistent. On social medi
a, ‘‘The Epic’’ was promoted as a kind of jazz sequel to ‘‘To Pimp a Butterfly.’’

I assumed that ‘‘The Epic’’ referred to some momentous story from the past or, more broadly, to the sweep of the album’s musical ambitions. But as far as I could tell, Washington had never told the story in public before, nor (apparently) had he told his own aunt. We looked at him expectantly.

The answer was more involved than I had guessed. ‘‘After I recorded the music,’’ he began, ‘‘I had this dream about a group of young warriors living in a village beneath a mountain.’’ He went on: ‘‘At the top of that mountain, there’s this gate, protected by a guard. The warriors spend all their time training to kill the guard and seize control of the gate. One by one, they are defeated by the guard. But the last warrior has the power to win, and the guard hesitates for the first time, because he sees that the warrior’s heart is good and that his own time has come.’’

‘‘That was all in one dream?’’ Lula asked.

Kamasi nodded. Actually, he said, he went on to have a series of interrelated dreams, a hall of mirrors in which it turns out that the guard wasn’t really killed by the young warrior. He said it would take him three hours — no, days — to tell us the whole thing. He planned to turn it all into a graphic novel with an illustrator friend.

I asked what all this had to do with jazz. Kamasi again nodded.

‘‘The guard is the person who protects the music and pushes it forward,’’ he said. The hope of the young warrior, he continued, is to take his place and impose his own standards. This explained, perhaps, why the first track of ‘‘The Epic’’ is called ‘‘Change of the Guard.’’ It begins with a bright series of chords laid down by the pianist Cameron Graves, followed by a tidal wave of reeds, choir and strings. A brash and infectiously bombastic wall of sound, the opening stirs memories of the grand, modal style that John Coltrane patented in the 1960s. When I first heard ‘‘Change of the Guard,’’ I was struck by its unabashed evocation of an era that Washington never experienced directly.

Unaware of the manga-style story that inspired the title, many listeners heard it as an allegory of that greatest of American epics, the African-American freedom struggle since slavery. Certainly Washington looked well cast for the part, a bearded, dashiki-clad man with an Afro whose sheer size seemed to convey the magnitude of his ambitions. ‘‘The Epic’’ tapped into an intense nostalgia for an era when, as Washington puts it, ‘‘music was a sword of the civil rights movement.’’ But it has awakened those feelings in listeners who, in most cases, were not alive to know that era. The audiences lining up to see his band have been unusually large (Washington plays in concert halls, not small jazz clubs), unusually multiracial and unusually young. And they do something that people at jazz concerts seldom do anymore: They dance. When I saw him perform in Brooklyn, the audience roared when he came onstage, as if he were a rock star. (He will, in fact, be joining Guns N’ Roses in the
lineup at the Coachella festival in April.)

This kind of feverish response explains the hysteria — and occasional bewilderment — that Washington’s name provokes among jazz people. ‘‘People are talking about this in a way that I haven’t heard them talking about anything in a long time,’’ the jazz pianist Jason Moran told me. ‘‘It’s a moment when black L.A. has something to say, and people are listening.’’ He added: ‘‘Our relationship with this country has always been documented through how the music changes. This is a time when black America is on fire, and Kamasi is adding fuel to the flames.’’

Like the dream that inspired ‘‘The Epic,’’ Washington’s own story is a tale of guards and warriors. Every young jazz musician has had to wrestle with the gatekeepers of tradition; jazz celebrates youthful originality, but it also prizes respect, even reverence, for the music’s founders. Washington is no less sensitive to the spirits of the past than Wynton Marsalis and the so-called Young Lions who burst onto the scene in the early 1980s, playing a somewhat updated version of 1960s-era small-group jazz in Brooks Brothers suits. Marsalis wanted to revive the fundamentals of blues and swing, which he believed jazz musicians had forgotten during the 1970s, an era of avant-garde and fusion experimentation. Washington, by contrast, conjures the ghosts of 1960s and ’70s black-consciousness jazz, of the ecstatic, expressive Coltrane and his successors.
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It would be unfair, and a little silly, to ask whether Washington might be the next Coltrane. In any case, there’s room for only one Coltrane in the theology of jazz. But with his overt spiritualism and his humble bearing, Washington has reawakened the widespread longing for a Coltrane-like figure who might lead jazz out of the desert of obscurity and restore its spiritual purpose. He is not the first such figure — Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and David S. Ware have been cast as prophetic messengers in the wake of Coltrane’s death in 1967 — but he is the first to come along in some time. Stranger still, he comes from a city that few people even associate with jazz.

In fact, Los Angeles has a venerable jazz tradition, going back to the Central Avenue scene of the 1940s and the West Coast ‘‘cool’’ of the 1950s. But most of the city’s better-known players (Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Dexter Gordon) had to head East to make a name for themselves. Washington’s father, Rickey, a saxophonist and flutist, was one of those who stayed behind. In early October, shortly after I arrived in Los Angeles, I had lunch with Rickey and Kamasi at a vegan soul food restaurant in Inglewood, a working-class, predominantly black bedroom community near Los Angeles International Airport. They mostly talked about jazz. Actually, Rickey did most of the talking. He reeled off the names of the great musicians who made Los Angeles, his Los Angeles, such a vibrant jazz scene. Men like the pianist Horace Tapscott, the leader of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, who used his art to raise the political consciousness of the black community in the 1960s and ’70s, and the
drummer Billy Higgins, who came home to build the World Stage, a performing-arts center in South Central. These were the musicians who nurtured him and prepared the way for his son. His pride in Kamasi was obvious, but I thought I also detected a rueful note: Rickey supported his family as a music teacher and never earned more than a local reputation. Kamasi didn’t say much, until a noisy piece of jazz fusion came on the stereo.

The only tenor saxophone that Kamasi Washington has ever played was once his father’s. Awol Erizku for The New York Times

‘‘You know what record this is?’’ he asked.

‘‘Yeah, yeah. . . .’’ Rickey hummed the tune. ‘‘I don’t know who’s playing, though.’’

‘‘The drummer played in your band. He used to dye his hair blond.’’

‘‘Blond hair and played in my band?’’

‘‘It’s Ronald Bruner Sr.’’

Bruner Sr., who played with the Temptations, is the father of two of Kamasi’s bandmates: Ronald Bruner Jr., also a drummer; and the bassist and singer Stephen Bruner, who makes brooding, ethereal indie-funk under the name Thundercat and whose nimble playing is all over Kendrick Lamar’s latest album. Like the Marsalis brothers, many musicians in the Los Angeles scene come from musical families. Kamasi told me that ‘‘Change of the Guard’’ is a tribute to men like his father and Bruner Sr., musicians who ‘‘had something to say but never had a chance to say it’’ beyond Los Angeles. Throughout the 1980s, Rickey Washington led a Christian jazz band, which Bruner joined after giving up secular music. When Kamasi first expressed a desire to play, his father sent him to church. ‘‘It’s the best place to learn,’’ Rickey said. ‘‘You play every week, and you’ve got to play a groove. It doesn’t come any other way but with a groove. They’re clapping on two and four, and you’re movi
ng to the music. If you listen to Kamasi, you know what the groove is, because it’s right in his body.’’

I went to hear Washington play gospel a few days later at a Nigerian evangelical church. The stage was bathed in pink and purple lighting worthy of a Prince show. Hundreds of parishioners, overwhelmingly Nigerian, many in African ceremonial clothes, swayed to gospel songs made faster and funkier by Nigerian highlife beats. Washington’s solos were modest in length, as befit a sideman, but he kept his big, preacherly sound. Whenever he played, the music came into stirring focus, and his flowing African robes gave him the air of a griot or medicine man.

‘‘I always noticed that ’Trane thing, that spirituality, in Kamasi’s playing,’’ said the guitarist Greg Dalton, who performs under the name Gee Mack and who once employed Washington in a band. ‘‘You can have all the technique in the world, but if you can’t connect with an audience, it doesn’t matter. And this man, Kamasi, is a poet.’’ The church’s pastor wasn’t aware that Washington is a rising star of the tenor sax, but as we left the church, a young boy came up to tell us that he had just seen him on television. Washington smiled at the boy. ‘‘Do you play an instrument?’’ he asked.

Washington lives in Inglewood, in the same house where he grew up. He now rents it from his father. The lawn is immaculately manicured, the yellow-stucco front entrance nearly hidden by flowerpots. He works on his music in the garage, which he converted with his father into a home studio furnished with a keyboard, a drum set and recording equipment. There are Christian inspirational illustrations on the wall; a dog-eared copy of the score of ‘‘The Rite of Spring’’ lies on his desk, and stacks of old vinyl cover the floor. Washington moved back to Inglewood a few years ago, after living in Westwood and Culver City, where he felt ‘‘an undercurrent of racism, like you don’t want me here.’’ He added, ‘‘This is home, whereas there, I felt like I was in someone else’s home.’’

That sense of home, of African-American pride and identity, reverberates throughout ‘‘The Epic.’’ It’s not just the tributes to his grandmother and great-grandmother, or the concluding hymn to Malcolm X, which incorporates Ossie Davis’s eulogy as well as one of Malcolm’s speeches. It’s the album’s soaring panorama of black American musical history, from gospel and blues to jazz, doo-wop and funk, offered as a celebration of black beauty in the face of adversity. Its sound is particularly evocative of the early 1970s, when Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder were composing their own epics and jazz musicians like Max Roach were playing spirituals with gospel choirs. The Afro-futurist cover of ‘‘The Epic,’’ too, suggests an early ’70s LP: a picture of Washington in a black dashiki against an interstellar backdrop, saxophone in hand.

That blend of rebellious intent and retro self-fashioning is hardly unique to Washington. It permeates the cultural renaissance spawned by Black Lives Matter, a movement that has combined Black Power nostalgia with an exuberant faith in the revolutionary potential of technology and social media. ‘‘The Epic’’ is arguably the most ambitious expression thus far of this renaissance, whose touchstones also include Claudia Rankine’s prose-poem ‘‘Citizen,’’ Ta-Nehisi Coates’s memoir ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ D’Angelo’s album ‘‘Black Messiah’’ and Kendrick Lamar’s ‘‘To Pimp a Butterfly,’’ with its indelible refrain, ‘‘We gon’ be alright.’’ Not surprisingly, ‘‘The Epic’’ has found a particularly receptive following among black intellectuals. As Robin Kelley, a historian at U.C.L.A. and a biographer of Thelonious Monk, puts it, ‘‘In a world where you feel like blackness is under assault and you’re looking for a way to express joy, pain and p
ossibility, ‘The Epic’ speaks to what black people feel inside.’’ The writer Greg Tate, who calls Washington the ‘‘jazz voice of Black Lives Matter,’’ told me that his music offers ‘‘a healing force, a place of regeneration when you’re trying to deal with the trauma of being black in America.’’

‘Becoming a musician is
a strange thing. It’s not
all cupcakes and ice
cream. You’re trying to
master an instrument, and
you sometimes can’t tell if
you’re getting better. You
love it, but you also hate it.’

I mentioned Tate’s assessment to Washington as we stood in the midday heat on Crenshaw, a main boulevard in South Central, in front of a Senegalese shop where he has his dashikis made. At the mosque next door, a small group of men was gathered, and an old man was selling baked chicken and cornbread from a cart. ‘‘Music is an expression of who you are, and — at least in that sense — I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m a big black man, and I’m easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.’’ He scratched his beard and paused to reflect. ‘‘The harsh reality in our communities is that the greatest representatives of order, the police, are basically against you, so you feel as if you live in a society without order.’’

Washington grew up with a constant fear of violence. The middle child of his parents’ three sons, he was born in 1981, at the beginning of an era plagued by crack cocaine, gang warfare and police brutality that culminated a decade later in the Rodney King riots. The first house he lived in, on 74th and Figueroa in South Central, was, he said, ‘‘deep in the hood.’’ (At one point, Rickey found the body of a prostitute in the backyard.) When he was 3, his parents divorced, and his mother, a chemistry teacher, moved to a better part of South Central. Soon Rickey Washington left, too, moving to Inglewood, and Kamasi split his time between the two homes. Both neighborhoods were a considerable step up from 74th and Figueroa, Kamasi said, but still ‘‘there were gunshots and sirens every night.’’

A gifted student in math and science, Washington was at once scared of the gangs and enamored of them. The Bloods and the Crips had emerged after the decline — or destruction, as many in South Central would say — of nationalist organizations like the Black Panther Party and exerted an almost irresistible mystique. Some of Washington’s friends in junior high school carried guns, and he flirted with gangster style and speech. ‘‘I don’t think my parents understood how off I was,’’ he recalled. What dispelled the glamour of the gangs for him was ‘‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X.’’ He was given a copy by a group of men who visited his school; they were from a nationalist organization called Ujima, Swahili for the principle of collective work and responsibility. ‘‘I saw that these ideas weren’t random, that there was a force behind them,’’ Washington said. ‘‘I realized I didn’t want to be a part of our self-destruction. I wanted to be a positive force in the world.’’

His turn to jazz was hardly unexpected. ‘‘Kamasi was hearing ‘A Love Supreme’ before he even knew what he was listening to,’’ his father told me. He started out on drums at 3 and began studying the clarinet at 9. But Kamasi says he mostly listened to hip-hop until he was 11, when a friend of his older brother gave him a mixtape of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers with the trumpeter Lee Morgan. (That friend, Lamar Van Sciver, is now a hip-hop and R&B producer.) ‘‘That’s when I finally got into jazz,’’ he said. ‘‘All of a sudden, I became aware of all this music I had around me at home.’’ He studied his father’s vinyl collection and taught himself to play Wayne Shorter songs on soprano saxophone.

At 13, Washington announced to his father that he wanted to be a jazz musician. To test his seriousness, Rickey asked his son to sing a Charlie Parker solo. (‘‘I knew if you couldn’t sing it, you couldn’t play it,’’ Rickey said.) Kamasi sang the head and solo of Parker’s 1951 bop classic ‘‘Blues for Alice’’ note for note. His father’s reward was a Conn 6M alto saxophone, the same model Parker played. He played the alto in church for nearly a year, then switched to tenor — his father’s. ‘‘He took my tenor!’’ Rickey said. ‘‘A Selmer Mark VI, the best saxophone they make. He didn’t realize how valuable it was.’’ It’s the only tenor Kamasi has ever played.

Coltrane became his obsession. His favorite record was ‘‘Transition,’’ a defining work of Coltrane’s classic quartet. It was avant-garde yet still melodic, exhilaratingly expressive but never chaotic. ‘‘He was just treading a line in a way that was powerful,’’ Kamasi said. ‘‘ ‘Transition’ was like the rarest of the rare steaks without being raw. You could still eat it.’’ He modeled himself on Coltrane, not just his sound but also his legendary practice regimen — as long as 12 hours a day, with sometimes hours spent on a single scale or even a single note. Washington was soon averaging nine hours a day; as if to summon the master’s spirit, he often worked on Coltrane tunes. He and Cameron Graves, who is now his pianist, ‘‘used to compete with each other to see who could practice the most.’’ It was a monkish existence, Washington said. ‘‘Becoming a musician is a strange thing. It’s not all cupcakes and ice cream. You’re trying to master an instrument, and you
sometimes can’t tell if you’re getting better. You love it, but you also hate it.’’

It was not long after he took up the tenor sax that Washington met another jazz ‘‘guard’’: Reggie Andrews, a music teacher at Locke High School in Watts. Andrews, whose former students included Rickey Washington, had grown frustrated that the city’s magnet schools had poached the best young musicians — including Kamasi Washington, who was discovering Prokofiev and Stravinsky at Alexander Hamilton High School, a prestigious musical academy near Culver City. Andrews began visiting nearby schools and asking the music teachers to identify their best pupils. His idea was to pick them up in his van after school, drive them to Locke and turn them into a group. He called it the Multi-School Jazz Band, and before long it was performing throughout the city. I drove with Washington to Locke, a squat structure surrounded by a wire fence that made it look more like a prison than a school. ‘‘The amazing thing is that white kids were coming down to Locke to rehearse because the band was so
good and they wanted to be in it,’’ he remembered. ‘‘It was kind of ironic, since we were being bused to their schools.’’ Seeing young whites flock to Locke gave Washington a taste of power, an awareness of the cachet he possessed as an African-American musician. In spite of the ‘‘denial of our humanity,’’ he realized, ‘‘everybody wants to dress and talk like us.’’

The Multi-School Jazz Band reunited Washington with the Bruner brothers and introduced all three to the musicians with whom they would eventually form the Los Angeles jazz underground, including the alto saxophonist Terrace Martin (who wrote and produced much of the music on Kendrick Lamar’s latest album), the pianist Cameron Graves, the bassist Miles Mosley and the trombonist Ryan Porter. ‘‘Reggie Andrews realized that there was a brain drain from the community and that we were losing the advantages of being connected to one another,’’ Washington told me. After band practice, Washington would go home with Ronald Bruner Jr. and jam in his father’s shed. Like Washington, Bruner was driven partly by a sense that his own father hadn’t achieved his potential as a musician. ‘‘My father was on the way to becoming the guy, and then he gave it up to play Christian music,’’ he told me.

Music was not the only thing Andrews’s students had in common: Most of them were growing up black, male and at risk in Los Angeles. ‘‘We could have gone into gangbanging,’’ Bruner told me. ‘‘That model was available to us. I was in a situation that got out of control, and a friend of mine died. But that difficulty made everyone stronger. The threat of being caught up in that makes you push harder.’’

They had Andrews to keep them on track. A tall, solidly built man now in his late 60s who wears a mustache and a Tuskegee baseball cap, Andrews radiates self-confidence, drive and impatience with excuses. Over breakfast one morning at a local soul-food restaurant, he told me how he made sure his players kept their grades up and emphasized the importance of craftsmanship and professionalism. ‘‘Kamasi can do the Archie Shepp thing or the ’Trane thing and ride that note,’’ he said, ‘‘but he knows how to take it back.’’

Washington received a different kind of mentoring in Leimert Park, where he and his friends went to after-hours jam sessions. Leimert Park was designed by the Olmsted firm in the late 1920s as a whites-only planned community, but by the 1960s it had become an African-American neighborhood. After the 1965 Watts riots, Leimert Park became a center of the Black Arts movement, a cultural offshoot of the Black Power movement. Lined with fig trees and exuding community pride, Leimert Park was as close to an oasis as you could find in South Central. Even during the crack epidemic, it remained a home to black-owned art galleries, bookstores and clothing shops.

Washington at the World Stage performing-arts gallery with his father, Rickey (far left), and his mentors Reggie Andrews (center), a music teacher, and Kamau Daáood (far right), a poet. Awol Erizku for The New York Times

When Washington began going there in the mid-1990s, it was in the middle of a revival. Its mecca was the World Stage, the nonprofit performing-arts gallery established by Billy Higgins and the poet Kamau Daáood, a leader of the Black Arts movement. Higgins and Daáood envisioned the World Stage as an extension of the ’60s jazz activism pioneered by Daáood’s mentor, Horace Tapscott. It could barely seat 50 people, but it attracted some of the greatest musicians in jazz and helped inspire a scene that cut across divisions of generation and genre. ‘‘We were in Leimert Park every night,’’ Washington says. ‘‘We’d get in everywhere without money. I still don’t know how we did it.’’

In 1999, Washington began studying at U.C.L.A. with the composer Gerald Wilson, who had written charts for Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. But in his first year, Marlon Williams, Snoop Dogg’s musical director, invited Washington to go on tour with the rapper. A former guitarist in the black rock band Fishbone, Williams had already recruited Washington’s friend Terrace Martin to put together Snoop’s horn section, and Martin immediately called Washington. ‘‘I was a big Snoop Dogg fan, and I knew the repertoire — I mean, this was dope,’’ Washington recalled. Although ‘‘it was cool to make money,’’ financial considerations were far less compelling than the promise of adventure. ‘‘I had never been on the road,’’ he said. ‘‘I’d been to New York and D.C. once, so it was a chance to go on tour. I was young and on a full scholarship, so I hadn’t even gotten to the point of thinking about the economics of the music business.’’ Washington continued his studies with Wilson
, but he received an equally important education with Professor Snoop.

At the point when Washington got the call, he had been spending most of his time trying to master harmonically demanding songs like Coltrane’s ‘‘Giant Steps.’’ Now his job was to play apparently simple riffs to ‘‘line up with the groove.’’ Playing those riffs, however, was tougher than it looked: Hip-hop was a miniaturist art of deceptive simplicity. ‘‘When you play jazz in school, you talk about articulation, but it’s a very light conversation,’’ he said. ‘‘The question was about what you were playing, not how you were playing it. But when I was playing with Snoop, what I was playing was pretty obvious — anyone with ears could figure it out. The question was how to play it, with the right articulation and timing and tone.’’ Snoop didn’t come to rehearsals or even really explain what he wanted. ‘‘It was all very unspoken. You had to use your intuition to figure out why it didn’t sound right. We had to have it right before he got there, because if it was wrong,
he’d veto it, and we’d have to just sit there.’’

Snoop was particularly demanding when it came to the placement of notes in relation to the beat, and Washington struggled at first to hear the beat the way Snoop did. After a while, though, he began to discern what he calls ‘‘the little subtleties,’’ the way, for example, ‘‘the drummer D-Loc would lock into the bass line.’’ He continued: ‘‘It wasn’t like the compositional elements in Stravinsky. It wasn’t about counterpoint or thick harmonies. It was more about the relationships and the timing, the one little cool thing you could play in that little space. It might just be one little thing in a four-minute song, but it was the perfect thing you could play in it. I started to hear music in a different way, and it changed the way I played jazz. Just playing the notes didn’t do it for me anymore.’’ He came to see hip-hop as a relative of jazz. ‘‘All forms are complex once you get to a really high level, and jazz and hip-hop are so connected,’’ he said. ‘‘In hip-hop you
sample, while in jazz you take Broadway tunes and turn them into something different. They’re both forms that repurpose other forms of music.’’

Washington often skips in conversation from Kendrick Lamar to Coltrane, and from Charlie Parker to Stravinsky. The reason that we don’t see these connections, he says, is that we’re captives of ‘‘preconceived notions,’’ the most confining being the very idea of ‘‘jazz.’’ Some musicians complain that even the word ‘‘jazz’’ deprives them of a popular audience; others see it as an insult. As the trumpeter Nicholas Payton recently put it, ‘‘ ‘Jazz’ is an oppressive, colonialist slave term.’’ For musicians like Payton, ‘‘jazz’’ is a white establishment label that cuts their music off from other black musical forms; they prefer terms like ‘‘black art music,’’ ‘‘black classical music,’’ ‘‘black creative music’’ or simply ‘‘black music.’’

But Washington’s criticism of musical categories is at once more expansive and more subtle than Payton’s. For Washington, the problem is not merely that categories ghettoize forms of music, but that they prevent us from fully listening. All music, he believes, deserves a fair hearing — even much ridiculed forms like ‘‘smooth jazz.’’ I had brunch one morning with Washington and his girlfriend, Tiffany Wright, an earnest young woman with long braids who established a private elementary school in Wilshire under her own name, the Wright Academy. An insidiously saccharine ballad by the smooth-jazz saxophonist Najee came on. I asked Washington if it bothered him that some people mistook this sort of jazz for the real thing.

‘‘I don’t have an aversion to it,’’ he said. In fact, he went on, he liked some smooth jazz, notably the saxophone player Grover Washington Jr. (no relation). Gently taking me to task for my snobbery, he noted that Najee, like many smooth-jazz players, had roots in gospel — and that in any case, no musical genre is entirely devoid of value.

‘‘You want my layman’s interpretation?’’ Wright volunteered. ‘‘Kamasi is totally nonjudgmental, in all areas. It makes life a lot less stressful.’’

That mellow, West Coast inclusiveness is another pointed contrast between Washington and the young Wynton Marsalis, who once declared, ‘‘There is nothing sadder than a jazz musician playing funk.’’ When Washington and his trombonist, Ryan Porter, trade riffs, they make no secret of their love of Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley, two of the horn men in the James Brown band. ‘‘It wasn’t a mistake to call James Brown’s music funk, but I’m not sure it was good for jazz,’’ Washington told me. Jazz, as he sees it, is not so much a genre as a way of styling music. Which means that if he is playing Debussy’s ‘‘Clair de Lune’’ — as he does in a languorous, brazenly sentimental arrangement on ‘‘The Epic’’ — it’s jazz.

Surprisingly, given that Washington toured with Snoop and later Lauryn Hill, one genre you don’t hear on ‘‘The Epic’’ is hip-hop. ‘‘I was already playing all that,’’ he explains. ‘‘When I got to do my music, I wanted to play like me.’’

As it happened, his friends from the Multi-School Jazz Band felt the same way, and in 2009 they did what independently minded jazz musicians have done since the 1960s: They organized themselves into a collective, the West Coast Get Down. They started out playing at a Hollywood cocktail lounge called Piano Bar, developing a repertoire in front of crowds of 20-somethings who had no interest — or at least no prior interest — in jazz. (Eventually the crowds grew so large that the fire marshal was called in.) The collective’s founder was Miles Mosley, who plays an upright bass through a wah-wah pedal, but Washington soon established himself as the charismatic leader. He was playing jazz, but it was jazz imbued with the vibrations of the church and the ‘‘little subtleties’’ of pulse and timbre that he picked up from Snoop Dogg. It was, in other words, a groove-based jazz, adjacent to the Afro-futurist psychedelia of his friend and collaborator Steven Ellison, a musician who records
under the name Flying Lotus. (Ellison is the grandnephew of Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s second wife and a major pianist and composer in her own right.) You didn’t have to be a jazz geek to appreciate it; in fact, it was easier to appreciate if you weren’t.

‘Kamasi is a messenger,
and his message speaks to
something deep within me.’

In 2011, after two years of testing their ideas at Piano Bar, Washington and his friends decided that it was time to go into the studio. They all pitched in to rent the Kingsize Soundlabs in Echo Park, canceled all their gigs for December and barely left except to sleep. The musicians weren’t paid for their work, because they were all playing on one another’s records. By the end of the month, they had 192 songs; 45 were under Washington’s leadership. He chose 17 for ‘‘The Epic,’’ 14 of them his own compositions. The album came out on Brainfeeder, an independent label run by Ellison.

Ellison didn’t blink when Washington told him that his album for Brainfeeder was going to be three hours of music. ‘‘Kamasi is a murderer on the saxophone,’’ Ellison said when I ran into him at a concert in downtown Los Angeles.

The music on ‘‘The Epic’’ was already quite dense, with three people on horns, two drummers, two bassists, two keyboardists and a singer, but Washington wasn’t done tinkering. While touring with Chaka Khan, he began to write choir and string parts. Washington told me that he wanted to evoke Stravinsky’s ‘‘Symphony of Psalms’’ in the choir and string arrangements, but they’re equally reminiscent of Marvin Gaye’s ‘‘What’s Going On’’ and Curtis Mayfield’s ‘‘Superfly.’’ Above all, ‘‘The Epic’’ breathes new life into the black consciousness or ‘‘spiritual’’ jazz of the early 1970s, when saxophonists like Pharoah Sanders, Gary Bartz, Joe Henderson and Billy Harper grafted free jazz sonorities onto hard-bop melodies and danceable grooves, often embroidering them with African percussion as well. An expression of the cultural nationalism that spread across urban black communities in the 1970s, spiritual jazz has often been dismissed as Afrocentric kitsch in
histories of jazz, but it was popular in black America, and it was the jazz that Rickey Washington played on the stereo at home. It aimed to move the audience but also instruct them. If they didn’t get the message, the album titles spelled it out: ‘‘Black Unity,’’ ‘‘Black Saint,’’ ‘‘In Pursuit of Blackness,’’ ‘‘Power to the People.’’

In a 1966 essay, ‘‘The Changing Same (R&B and New Black Music),’’ Amiri Baraka called for a new ‘‘unity music,’’ a synthesis of jazz and black vernacular styles that would ‘‘include all the resources, all the rhythms, all the yells and cries, all that information about the world, the Black ommmmmmmmmmmmmmm, opening and entering.’’ Kamasi Washington is far from being the first musician of his generation to set off in search of that om. Jason Moran, Robert Glasper, Steve Coleman and other East Coast musicians have been working toward such a synthesis for years. But Washington and the West Coast Get Down have managed to strike a chord with audiences in a way that has eluded most of their peers on the East Coast.

Serendipity, of course, has been an important ingredient in their success. As Greg Tate told me, ‘‘You have to go to mysticism to explain how these things come together at the same time: the best heroic jazz origin story since the Marsalis brothers, being on Kendrick Lamar’s record and Flying Lotus’s label, and Black Lives Matter.’’ But the Los Angeles scene would not have had the same impact without Washington’s personal charisma, his deeply spiritual sound and his welcoming, Buddha-like aura. He may not be a major innovator, but he is a remarkably forceful communicator: in the words of Kamau Daáood, ‘‘a perfect vessel for the coming together of generations in his music.’’

In October, a couple of weeks before Washington would fly to Tokyo on his first world tour, his father organized a dinner with a group of distinguished older jazz musicians. ‘‘When you are chosen,’’ Rickey explained to me, ‘‘you need the blessings of your elders.’’ (Reggie Andrews had a more down-to-earth explanation: ‘‘Kamasi’s about to step into the fast lane, so Rickey wanted him to receive some advice from people who’ve been there.’’) This ‘‘change of the guard’’ ceremony took place at the Ladera Heights home of Curtis Jenkins, who runs a business that provides care for disabled children in South Central. In a flight of enthusiasm, Rickey had invited me to attend the dinner. The next day, Kamasi’s manager, Banch Abegaze, disinvited me; she said it was for only close friends and family. But she suggested that I stop by later in the evening.

When I arrived, the shades were fully drawn, as if a séance were in session, but inside I found a group of nine older men nibbling on plates of Ethiopian vegetarian food. (The only women there were Kamasi’s manager and his girlfriend.) There were paintings of Miles Davis, African-themed artworks and framed photographs of Jenkins with the Obamas and the Clintons. Jenkins, a small, excitable man who grew up in Compton at the time of the Watts riots and studied filmmaking at U.C.L.A., told me that when he first heard ‘‘The Epic,’’ it struck him as ‘‘an announcement.’’ Not since the days of Davis and Coltrane had he been so moved by a work of jazz. When he read in The Los Angeles Times that Kamasi Washington was the son of his old acquaintance Rickey Washington, he contacted Rickey, who asked him to document Kamasi’s concerts on video. He has been traveling with the band off and on ever since. ‘‘Kamasi is a messenger, and his message speaks to something deep within me.’’ I asked
him what the message was. ‘‘Freedom of thought and action,’’ he replied.

After dinner, the men gathered on sofas around Kamasi, who sat in a chair in front of a fireplace. He was wearing a dashiki and a knitted Jamaican cap; he seemed to be deep in thought, his eyes in some far-off place. The first speaker was Bennie Maupin, who played bass clarinet on Davis’s ‘‘Bitches Brew’’ and a variety of reed instruments in Herbie Hancock’s fusion band Headhunters. He began by asking Kamasi to explain the meaning of his name.

‘‘It was intended to be Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti tribes in Ghana,’’ he said. ‘‘To be under the kuma tree is to bring people together, to bring peace.’’ Rickey Washington and a friend had gotten lost one night in Kumasi while they were on tour in Ghana in the late 1970s. ‘‘A guy came out of his house and gave them a place to stay for the night,’’ Kamasi said. ‘‘The hospitality was higher than anything he’d experienced in Watts, where you might just get robbed. He wanted to name me after that city, but since this was before Yahoo and Google, he misremembered what it was called.’’

‘‘Yeah, I was into that whole consciousness thing when I named him,’’ Rickey said. ‘‘The kuma tree brings shade, and I prayed that Kamasi would be a person who brings people together.’’

‘‘The energy in this music is a healing energy,’’ Maupin continued, praising Kamasi’s wisdom and kindness, promising to stand behind him and urging him to choose his friends carefully and be mindful of his health. Coltrane, he recalled, had regretted ‘‘wasting so much time’’ at the end of his short life.

The composer and flutist James Newton, a burly man with long, graying dreadlocks, was next. ‘‘To have this group of men here for you: Do you realize how heavy that is? And do you realize that Art Tatum, Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were all once living in a 20-mile radius, here in Los Angeles? Most of these things you know already, but now you’ve been put in the position of being a great hope. Don’t let your children become a casualty of your career or the industry. As Bennie said, we’d all go to war for you.’’

Reggie Andrews spoke briefly, reminding Washington that his most successful students had always taken care of their bodies. It was one of several pointed warnings about health: The one white man at dinner was Washington’s nutritionist, whom Rickey hired to help Kamasi lose weight. (Two months later, while on tour in Stavanger, Norway, Kamasi would slip on a snow-covered cobblestone road and fracture his fibula, making these warnings seem even more urgent.) Kamau Daáood, a soft-spoken and contemplative man with a white goatee and light-brown eyes, remembered his own mentor, Horace Tapscott, who had ‘‘brought together all the outcasts, all the renegades’’ in the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. He paid elegiac tribute to Tapscott’s project, but he also alluded to the failures of his own generation and spoke of the importance of family and responsibility. ‘‘In Horace’s band, one section was vegetarian and meditating, but the other was nodding off’’ on heroin.

The speeches went on for more than an hour. They were stories of the jazz life, pitched somewhere between sermon and self-admonishment. These elder statesmen were welcoming their friend’s son into a very exclusive fraternity, but also warning of the dangers in store. ‘‘This really felt like being down South,’’ Newton said. ‘‘Yeah, South L.A.,’’ another guest corrected him.

Kamasi listened attentively, speaking only when spoken to: If the young jazz warrior was carrying a weapon, he kept it well hidden. ‘‘It takes some of the pressure off to hear from these men who have been down this road before,’’ he told me later, ‘‘since I’m on this journey and I don’t know where I’m going.’’ But as I watched him that evening, I was struck by how small he suddenly looked, surrounded by the guardians of Los Angeles jazz. At the end of the ceremony, Rickey Washington faced his son and said: ‘‘You have now received the wisdom of your elders. What you do with it is on you.’’

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January 21, 2016 / No Comments / More

Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/kamasi-washingtons-giant-step.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160121

** The New York Times
————————————————————
By ADAM SHATZ

Kamasi Washington Awol Erizku for The New York Times

‘‘That was all in one dream?’’ Lula asked.

I asked what all this had to do with jazz. Kamasi again nodded.

The only tenor saxophone that Kamasi Washington has ever played was once his father’s. Awol Erizku for The New York Times

‘‘You know what record this is?’’ he asked.

‘‘Yeah, yeah. . . .’’ Rickey hummed the tune. ‘‘I don’t know who’s playing, though.’’

‘‘The drummer played in your band. He used to dye his hair blond.’’

‘‘Blond hair and played in my band?’’

‘‘It’s Ronald Bruner Sr.’’

‘‘You want my layman’s interpretation?’’ Wright volunteered. ‘‘Kamasi is totally nonjudgmental, in all areas. It makes life a lot less stressful.’’

‘Kamasi is a messenger,
and his message speaks to
something deep within me.’

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

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Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
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January 21, 2016 / No Comments / More

Kamasi Washington’s Giant Step – The New York Times

http://www.jazzpromoservices.com/
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/magazine/kamasi-washingtons-giant-step.html?emc=edit_tnt_20160121

** The New York Times
————————————————————
By ADAM SHATZ

Kamasi Washington Awol Erizku for The New York Times

‘‘That was all in one dream?’’ Lula asked.

I asked what all this had to do with jazz. Kamasi again nodded.

The only tenor saxophone that Kamasi Washington has ever played was once his father’s. Awol Erizku for The New York Times

‘‘You know what record this is?’’ he asked.

‘‘Yeah, yeah. . . .’’ Rickey hummed the tune. ‘‘I don’t know who’s playing, though.’’

‘‘The drummer played in your band. He used to dye his hair blond.’’

‘‘Blond hair and played in my band?’’

‘‘It’s Ronald Bruner Sr.’’

‘‘You want my layman’s interpretation?’’ Wright volunteered. ‘‘Kamasi is totally nonjudgmental, in all areas. It makes life a lot less stressful.’’

‘Kamasi is a messenger,
and his message speaks to
something deep within me.’

HAVE A JAZZ EVENT, NEW CD OR IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE JAZZ COMMUNITY YOU WANT TO PROMOTE? CONTACT JAZZ PROMO SERVICES FOR PRICE QUOTE.

CHECK OUT OUR NEW YOUTUBE VIDEO (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDvUe6fkNLU)

Jazz Promo Services
269 State Route 94 South
Warwick, Ny 10990
USA

January 21, 2016 / No Comments / More

Kansai jazz act Golden Senior Trio sets Guinness record as the world’s oldest | The Japan Times

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http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2016/01/21/music/kansai-jazz-act-golden-senior-trio-sets-guinness-record-worlds-oldest/#.VqEhfzYZO1B

** Kansai jazz act Golden Senior Trio sets Guinness record as the world’s oldest
————————————————————

BY YUI YAMAZAKI (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/author/yui-yamazaki/)

Osaka – After more than 60 years of passion for jazz music, a Japanese jazz trio has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the band with the world’s oldest average age — 83 years.

The group, Golden Senior Trio, is based in the Kansai region. Its members are vibraphonist Naoteru Nabeshima (89), pianist Zensho Otsuka (81) and bassist Naosuke Miyamoto (79).

The musicians each have their own separate groups, but formed the trio in 2008 in response to calls from their fans.

To win recognition for the record, the band had to submit evidence such as proof of having played more than 20 gigs in five years. The official thumbs-up came in July last year.

Previously, the record was held by a band from China, which had an average age of 76 years, according to Guinness World Records.

Nabeshima, the oldest member, comes from a musical lineage. His father was a violinist and mother was a pianist, both artists of classical music.

Nabeshima kept his passion for music alive even during World War II, when Japanese people were not allowed to play Western music. The veteran musician, who was in the navy at the time, recalled that he would stare at music scores so he would not forget how to play.

After the war, he became a vibraphonist, introduced to the instrument by American artist Emil Richards at a U.S. military base in Sendai, northeastern Japan, and pursued jazz music despite strong opposition from his parents.

Otsuka, who is also the chair of the Kansai Jazz Society, says he developed a good ear for music from a young age as he got to play on an organ that his Christian grandmother used to play for practicing carols.

When he was a high school student in Osaka, he composed a song that was chosen as a school anthem. It remains so until now.

In around 1956, Otsuka met Miyamoto — who has been known as a skillful bassist since he was a student — in a jazz cafe in Kobe near Osaka.

The group does not need a drummer as Miyamoto’s bass rhythm is so reliable, the other two members said.

The group pitches itself as straddling genres and its repertoire includes a jazz version of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Pathetique.

“I’d also like to express the beauty of melodies of old Japanese music through jazz,” Nabeshima said.

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