JazzLife

Billie Holiday was born in Philadelphia in 1915, grew up in Baltimore, moved to New York, started to sing while still in her teens and soon changed music history as the inimitable Lady Day. To honor Billie’s centenary year, Cassandra Wilson latest release Coming Forth By Day taps into her artistry and legacy, in a decidedly different musical way.

Holiday stated on many occasions that she saw herself as one of the instruments of the
band. She perfected her most famous songs with her singular sense of rhythm and improvisation skill. She never wanted to sing the same way the same way twice. In comments on NPR about her tribute to Holiday, Wilson remarked that it would be insulting to try to sing like Holiday, instead she wanted to explore Billie’s musically liberated approach.

Wilson enlisted producers by Nick Launay and Atom Greenspan. Launay is veteran producer of art – rock band Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. The album is a mix of Holiday classics, each with a different musical mood and all with the pulse of live sessions. Recorded last summer on the West Coast in studio sessions with a stellar line up with Martyn Casey (bass) Jon Cowherd (piano) Kevin Biert (guitar), Thomas Wydler (drums) and guest artists on some of the cuts. .

Among the many highlights~

What A Little Moonlight Can Do, shows Wilson’s time signature kinship with Holiday, who drove her own tempos. Wilson’s silvery vocal (and husky fades)  makes it her own. Breit’s steel echo guitar spins the magical atmosphere of These Foolish Things.  This is a completely thrilling performance by Wilson and these musicians.

For the Dorothy Fields/Jerome Kern standard The Way You Look Tonightfeatures Wilson’s gold tone mezzo vocals at their best.   The anvil heavy bass of Casey and Cowherd’s slide keyboard of Cowherd is make this sexy West Coast  roadhouse blues damp circa 1967.

The simmering arrangement of  All Of Me is made pillow talk confessions, in a steely martini lounge piano by Jon Cowherd, with a haunted harmonica – piano – string rewind fade-out. The 60s orchestration on the jazz standard You Go To My Head, turned into a retrodisco/samba number.

The Holiday penned song Don’t Explain, her lamentation about a woman dealing with a cheatin’ man, is transformed into an art-rock noir. On Billie’s Blues Holiday rejects that love ‘victim’ story line for a throw-that-cheatin’-man-out scenario. Wilson’s lusty vocal is framed by a rowdy blues-rock arrangement, featuring T. Bone Burnett’s sizzling baritone guitar and sublime voicing of Robbie Marshall on clarinet.

Marshall is also stellar on Crazy He Calls Me, essaying lusty blues, with Wilson’s pillow whispery vocal ala Marilyn. On the legendary song Strange Fruit (officially attributed to composer Lewis Allen), Wilson and company give this dramatic cinematic arrangement that builds to a shattering rock denouement .  It is sung with more melodic line than its art song origins, but Wilson’s vocal pathos just stunning. 

I’ll Be Seeing You has an ethereal adagio, accompanied by a steely bent note strings as counterpoint to Wilson’s ethereal vocal. Wilson herself wrote Last Song (For Lester) recounting Holiday leaving Paris when she heard of Lester Young’s death. ‘You are my morning star/forever rising/forever breaking my heart’ she sings.

Cassandra Wilson and this band entrance your jazz heart with this recording.

DanceMetros

Parsons Dance’s jazzy return to Philly

Miguel Quinones about to take permanent flight in the transcendent Parsons’ dance CAUGHT (photo B. Docktor)

The Dance Celebration series at the Annenberg Center is presenting one of the most diverse and stellar line-ups of companies for their 2014-15 season. The dance series has been struggling to maintain funding in its commitment to present all styles of dance from around the world. They kicked off with Britain’s BalletBoyz, Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance, Spain’s Soledad Barrio & Noche Flamenca, all attracting enthusiastic audiences, but still not enough to fill Annenberg’s spacious Zellerbach Theater.

The first week in December, the popular New York based troupe Parsons’ Dance returns with a mixed program of old and new repertoire.. Choreographer David Parsons is not only known for his athletic, sensual and diverse choreographies, but showing vastly different content each time out. His current tour is highlighted by his newest piece Whirlaway and dance-works by out choreographer Trey McIntyre and former Parsons dancer-choreographer Natalie Lomonte.

Whirlaway is scored to a song-cycle by jazz composer Allen Toussaint’s and had its premiere in New Orleans last spring in a sold out performance in a 2500 seat theater. “Everybody’s jaw dropped that we sold out,” Parsons said in a phone interview last week from the company’s studios in New York.

“Allen Toussaint is one of the most legendary singer-composers in the US. He played ‘Whirlaway’ live onstage behind us with a 12-piece band,” Parsons said. The choreographer collaborated directly with Toussaint “we sat around the studio and came up with the tracks for it and he was so great to work with. This is a fantastic piece closer for this Philly program. The music is more jazz-funk and it brings audiences together at the end. You feel like you are in New Orleans celebrating dance and beautiful bodies and music.

As he has done with other song suites, notably ’In the End’ scored to tracks from the Dave Matthews Band, Parsons often choreographs to popular music, usually with a cohesive narrative line. “There is always a thread that I like to communicate. I hate when people sit in a dance concert and have a question mark as to what it’s about. I like to bring something that has to do with their lives. “

Jazz scoring to contemporary dance is a rarity, but it is a standard method that Parsons is always experimenting with. His 2001 piece ’Kind of Blue’ set to Miles Davis’ ’So What’ (also on the Philly program) he describes as “improv based, there are segments where the dancers can go off, I don’t care. You know I like to have fun and I like them to have fun,” he assures. the dancers don’t have to stick to every choreographed move,” Parsons explains. “when we have time off on tour for instance, I get bored. So I would do these jazz improvs.”

Also in Philly, in sharp contrast, the troupe will dance Parsons’ ‘Bachiana’ (1993) scored to J.S.Bach’s Orchestral Suite no. 1, as you would expect is ” very balletic, Air on a G String section is the anchoring duet,“ Parsons describes, “it was first done on a French company and we‘ve danced it all over the world. . Now many other companies have danced it too.”

In addition to choreographing an average of two new pieces a year, David Parsons nurtures other dancer-choreographers with his creative support through Generation NOW Commission. On the current tour, he will be presenting former Parsons dancer-choreographer Natalie Lomonte’s preview of work in development. Lomonte teaches dance at Fordham University and also performs, most recently she dance captain and in the cast of “Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark.” Parsons said that he likes to “stay inside the family as much as we can. New choreographers need a place to show their work. Natalie knows the company and understands the physicality of our dancers.”

At every performance in Philly audiences have come to expect a performance of Parsons most dazzling signature piece ‘Caught‘ a solo work he created in 1982 that never looses its mystique or theatrical punch. Scored to trippy electronica music by Robert Fripp it is a tour de dance force that has been performed by both male and female members of the company. One of its amazing elements is the dancer’s breathtaking synchronization with a strobe light that gives the illusion of the dancer suspended in mid-air.

After Philly, the troupe is performing in Utah, then at the Joyce Theater in New York (Jan.21-Feb.1) before they embark on a six-week European tour.

Parsons Dance Dec. 4-6 at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts 3680 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA | http://www.annenbergcenter.org | 215.898.3900
http://www.parsonsdance.org

JazzPhilly

Photo: Peter Lueders

Jon Batiste stops in Philly for Social Music</

Crossing musical borders in jazz and classical, blues, rap and R & B is composer-pianist Jon Batiste, the New Orleans, Julliard trained virtuoso who brings cross-cultural audiences together in the streets and in the concert hall.

Jon Batiste is under thirty and part of the new vanguard in jazz, but he sounds like he has been performing and creating music for much longer. He returns to the Kimmel Center this week for one night only with Jon Batiste and Stay Human that will cap off a month of jazz programming in April, which Philly designates as jazz appreciation month. After Philly, the group will perform at International Jazz Day in Newport, RI April 30 and at the New Orleans Jazz Fest May 3.

The bandleader spoke by phone from New York this week about the concerts “I love touring. The music has to go where you are inspired to go. It’s one of those things you can’t replace, the live experience,” he observes. It is the essence of what composer-pianist Jon Batiste calls ‘Social Music’ the title of the band’s 2013 recording.

Batiste is not only a gifted pianist; he is a singer with sublime jazz-blues phrasing for someone so young. He grew up as part of a famed musical family in a suburb of New Orleans, starting out with percussion instruments, At 11 his mother suggested he try piano. He studied at Julliard School in New York and has since won prestigious awards, and has performed in more than 40 countries. He is also artistic director-at-large for the National Jazz Museum of Harlem.

He recalls “loving” playing hear a few years ago as vocalist Cassandra Wilson’s pianist for her appearance in Philly on her Silver Pony tour. For his current concert, Batiste will be joined onstage by regular band members who are part of the new vanguard in jazz- alto saxophonist Eddie Barbash (alto saxophone), Ibanda Ruhumbika (tuba), Joe Saylor (percussion, Barry Stevenson (bass, banjo) and Jameson Ross (vocals). Ross also creates what the bandleader calls “atmospheric imagery.”

He described the playlist as “a mixture of material from Social Music, older stuff, then there is the unexpected the newest stuff that we’ve written and what happens with the interaction, the human exchange, with the audience in our shows, which could be anything,” he assures.

The Stay Human band members are close friends offstage, and says that the music “is definitely part of how we relate to each other as people. The musicians share the same philosophy that social music is the next phase in where we are going. My conception of music changes over time, it is beautiful to follow that path with brothers.”

He says young audiences are moving away from staid music categories as jazz and classical. “it’s normal for people to think of music and musicians in terms of genres and categories, because that‘s how we purchase our music. Music based on the genre system I think is changing now with streaming and things like that, putting all these different styles of music together in one place, so people are genre hopping whether they realize it or not, just by the nature of digital mediums now,” Batiste observes.

The Kimmel Center has been increasing their jazz programming and has hosted regular free concerts of jazz featuring salsa, Afro-Caribbean, big-bands, just to mention a few. Their current ‘jazz in residency’ series of programs features Philly-based trumpeter Josh Lawrence, saxophonist Bobby Zankel and percussionist Pablo Batista a that will culminate in performances of the completed work.

Jon Batiste and Stay Human on tour | Perelman Theater, Kimmel Center, April 25 |for a complete listing of jazz events go to http://www.kimmelcenter.org

Poetries

LWpics)
Chet plays the Mercury L

Before the rain

Tore off baleful hearts

private pictures
Of sordid songs
other rooms
stolen cornet in
A dreamer’s dream
Running nails
In abandon hotels
Staring at broken
Table with sepia note cards
lipsticks
onyx cufflinks
silver cigarettes clips
Dented flasks
discarded tricks
loves under the smoke
Betrayed with cold promises
nightswimming
Echoed whispers
of a coma night.
Up, wet, clothed, out
Driving red ’55 chrome
Alfa with your blonde
Hair and scarf playing wind tide
On my lap
You make me hum ’Where or When’
And kick your shoes out
Of the window to feel
your arch and paint your toes pink.
I piss you off
you can’t chase him down
To the wrong door
To that empty hall
that lullaby
A damned psalm about
a fix melody
You think of playing but
Instead lets the mirror glide open
And all he sees is the black satin
Lapel against the mangled collar
Clinging to his fevered hair.
Then he stays
Away to complete
That unseen picture
Of lacquered eyes
On the wounded brow
Crouched over cobalt mirror notes
Ash and whiskey spilled all over the bed
She saw him cradling his trumpet in the flat
as she turned.

MetroScape

Nothing erases a Philly grey day, like a clouds breaking up & a misty over the Schuylkill River. Biking over the South St. Bridge, hard to keep my eyes on the road- stealing moments of the gorgeous skyline, mysterious and rather luminous tonight when that old devil moon, directly overhead, was breaking through those Universal Studio clouds. Then on the serenely beautiful Penn Campus for the Eddie Palmieri Latin Jazz Orch. concert at the Annenberg which was pretty much sold out. Great crowd & just master musicians. Even though there were sound/tech problems, it was bothering no one but the 75 year old master of Afro-Carribean music, who said that the audience and his superb band deserved that it should be correct. There were equalizing problems and feedback moments, but over-riding them with sheer musicianship, Mr. Palmieri & co. cut their losses and played one sizzling, scintillating and memorable set. Mr. Palmieri’s piano just wending every which way to take us to that silvery moon and back before we knew what was happening.