Immanuel Wilkins | Spirit of Cecilia

To complement Brad, Tad & Carl’s fine “Best of” selections, herewith a sampler of favorites and notable releases from the year in both classical music and jazz. As often as I drift away from both genres, I return to them on a regular basis — and it happened again to fine effect in 2024! Listening links are included in the album titles.

Highlights in Classical Music

If you followed my series To the True North this past summer, you learned how impressed I was by Canada’s Elora Singers and their annual Festival. The Singers’ latest album In Beauty May I Walk was released in time for this year’s closing festival weekend; a collection of contemporary works drawing inspiration from the theme of revelation, it offers an absorbing balance of breathtaking precision and deeply felt emotion. Eriks Esenvalds “In Paradisum” and “Only in Sleep”, Jonathan Dove’s title piece and Stephanie Martin’s “A Frost Sequence” are highlights, but every composition (whether musing on nature, the search for God or time’s inevitable passage) draws in the listener and cuts to the heart. Never indulging in sentimentality, conductor Mark Vuorinen and the Singers nonetheless lay bare the human condition and affirm life’s inherent value; this is choral singing at its finest, and an official 2024 Favorite. (The Singers’ recent Christmas album Radiant Dawn is well worth hearing this time of year, too.)

This year was the centennial of John Culshaw, who pioneered stereo recordings of opera and classical music as a producer for Decca Records in the decades following World War II. Unbeknownst to me, Decca had already completed new high-definition transfers of two Culshaw classics: the first complete set of Richard Wagner’s marathon operatic cycle The Ring of the Nibelungs (with the Vienna Philharmonic plus a bevy of postwar vocal talent, conducted by a young Georg Solti; consistently considered one of the recording industry’s greatest achievements); and the recorded premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (the composer’s shattering anti-war masterwork, this album changed my life) — longtime Favorites which I snapped up new versions of straightaway. Now the actual centenary sees the release of John Culshaw, The Art of the Producer – The Early Years, 1948-1955. The first impression of this 12-disc set, recorded entirely in mono, is how fresh and vivid everything sounds; whether working live or in controlled conditions, Culshaw’s keen ear and finely honed production skills place you in the room with the performers. Wagner operas staged live at Bayreuth, Britten performing at his own Aldeburgh Festival and Samuel Barber conducting his music in the studio stand out, but even an underprepared Brahms German Requiem (with Solti squeezing the best he can out of overmatched forces) has its charms. Beyond sheer documentary value, this set demonstrates how essential Culshaw’s sonic discernment, organizational skills and empathetic rapport with artists was in developing the lifelike recorded sound we take for granted today.

Even as it’s been swallowed up by one multinational conglomerate after another over the decades, Decca has maintained its commitment to both vivid, dynamic sound and talented artists in development. The latest case in point: the youthful Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, who’s quickly made waves in the orchestral world with fully grounded yet remarkably fresh readings of 20th-century classics, from Jean Sibelius’ organically evolving symphonies to Igor Stravinsky’s kaleidoscopic early ballets. At the helm of the Oslo Philharmonic for Symphonies 4, 5 & 6 by quintessential Russian modernist Dmitri Shostakovich, Mäkelä reaches new heights: the 4th’s macabre, Mahlerian grotesquerie (suppressed for a quarter-century due to Soviet disapproval) and the 6th’s journey from ethereal beauty to dry, exhausted humor unfold relentlessly, while a less- pressurized-than-usual 5th revels in cool control that builds to an appropriately tumultuous climax, all captured for maximum impact. Recently headhunted to lead both Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony (where I’ll be seeing him conduct next spring), Mäkelä is a classical superstar in the making, and this double set (definitely on the Favorites list) shows both his already prodigious skills and his rich potential.

Finally, toward year’s end I stumbled across a wonderfully eclectic oratorio, Benedict Sheehan’s Akathist. Setting a lengthly Russian Orthodox prayer that literally thanks God for everything, Sheehan’s musical approach is anything but predictable: chant from both Western and Easter traditions rubs elbows with Baroque polyphony, Romantic impressionism, Gospel and jazz. And yet, the broad, inevitable arch of the piece readily encompasses the multiplicity of text and texture, gathering up protest against the wounds of the world, cameraderie as comfort amidst pain, and overwhelming gratitude for blessings great and small into a moving, integrated whole. The assembled forces of The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, Artefact Ensemble and Novus NY pull off this music with style and panache to spare. Not just a Favorite; if there’s an essential classical recording for 2024, I’d argue this is it.

(Highlights in jazz follow the jump . . .)

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Where are the great jazz saxophonists today?

The last of the giants of the 1950s and 1960s, Sonny Rollins and Wayne Shorter, have retired from live performance (though Shorter’s operatic collaboration with bassist Esperanza Spalding, Iphigenia, is just completing its debut run). The Young Lions who made their impact in the 1980s and 1980s — Branford Marsalis, Kenny Garrett, Donald Harrison, Joe Lovano and Greg Osby among them — continue to gig and record honorably, though without the boost they received from the recording industry before its post-Napster collapse. The flame kindled by Kamasi Washington’s ambitious remounting of 1970s spiritual jazz — two triple-disc sets, 2015’s The Epic and 2018’s Heaven and Earth — seems to have sputtered in the face of mass market fame, giving way to lower profile collaborations and soundtracks.

Who might carry that torch into 2022 ? I give you Immanuel Wilkins.

I gave Wilkins’ 2020 debut for Blue Note, Omega, a cursory listen when it came out, but missed the depths on display back then. Returning to it recently, I was belatedly blown away. Steeped in the music of the black church, Wilkins’ compositions offer a fresh take on spiritual jazz, leaner and more abstract; like Thelonious Monk’s best work, there’s an interior focus to his taut, angular writing. That interior emotion is unleashed via his playing; having thoroughly assimilated Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane’s vocabularies, Wilkins sends his solos spinning in freshly oblique directions. And he’s aided and abetted by his kinetic quartet (Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass and Kweku Sumbry on drums) who skitter as much as they swing, astonishingly flexible and in sync with their leader, whether at their knottiest or their most romantic.

The ambition of those compositions is noteworthy as well, though not surprising if you factor in Wilkins’ mentoring by both traditionalist par excellence Wynton Marsalis and cutting-edge postmodern pianist Jason Moran. Omega’s tunes run the gamut from the painful grief of “Ferguson: An American Tradition” through the fluid lyricism of “Grace and Mercy” to the dense, richly varied ideas of a four part suite composed during Wilkins’ time at the Julliard School of Music (“The Key”, “Saudade”, “Eulogy” and “Guarded Heart”). The absolute opposite of a blowing session, Omega laid down Wilkins’ impressive jazz credentials as a writer and a player — but also could have been an extremely hard act to follow.

To my delight, Wilkins’ new album, The 7th Hand, ups the ante! First, a six-part suite bookended by seething post-bop probes and modal riffing (“Emanation” and “Lighthouse”) that explores the polyrhythms of African percussion (“Don’t Break”), gospel music (“Fugitive Ritual, Selah”), the blues (“Shadow”) and folk hymnody (“Witness”). Then “Lift”, a half-hour of committed free exploration that broods, then snaps awake and howls in catharsis before it flutters to a soft, delicate landing. The concept behind it all: does the Holy Spirit have a role in what Wilkins, his quartet and his guests (the Farafina Kan Percussion Ensemble and flutist Elena PInderhughes) are creating in the moment? Given the consistent inspiration laid down here, I wouldn’t bet against it.

As always, your mileage may vary. But if you have any interest in the present and future of jazz saxophone, I strongly suggest you check out Immanuel Wilkins for yourself. Learn more about his Blue Note releases here.

— Rick Krueger

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