Tag Archives: Jeff Parker

Music, Republic of Letters

Some Jazz Quick Takes

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It’s a glorious Memorial Day afternoon – and, on this American holiday weekend, I’m looking back on five months of hearing and reflecting on America’s greatest musical invention. As always, there are plenty of worthwhile jazz albums (whether new or archival) easily in your reach; these are notable selections from what’s come to my attention so far this year. I’ve included listening links within album titles where available, along with a purchase link after my review where necessary.

The album I’ve turned to the most (despite being released only this past month) is the Jeff Parker ETA IVTet’s Happy Today. Recorded live at a congenial Los Angeles haunt, guitarist Parker, saxophonist Jeff Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose conjure two generous portions of sheer music from silence. Guitar riffs circle and morph; sax lines are looped into shimmering chords and textures; hovering above capacious, confident rhythm work, all four players constantly listening and reacting, moving together through gradual builds and sudden tempo shifts. Whether weaving around each other’s contributions in a supple dance (“Like Swimming”) or ascending a rainbow of tone colors to a light, sweet shuffle (the title track), there’s no hurry, no contention – just a collaborative climb to lofty, inspired heights. It’s a measure of how rich this album is that every time I listen, I want to hear it again!

Parker, Johnson and Buttress also lay down understated foundations on Flea’s solo album Honora. The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist returns to his heritage as a jazz trumpeter here, and while he’s boned up in recent years, he knows he’s running with thoroughbred players. Flea’s vocal features on the album’s noisier bookends “A Plea” and “Free as I Want to Be” push straight to hot emotional extremes, but his trumpet work is cool and controlled (reflecting the influence of Chet Baker); his original compositions combine understated tension with winning introspection; and his choices of cover tunes (Funkadelic to Glen Campbell to Franks Ocean & Sinatra) and guest vocalists (Thom Yorke backed by a horn section! Nick Cave singing “Wichita Lineman”!) are uniformly surprising and superb. Not what you might have expected, and all the better for it.

Four years ago, I thought Immanuel Wilkins might be part of jazz saxophone’s future; after hearing his quartet’s breathtaking Live at the Village Vanguard, Vol. 1, I’m convinced he’s now the present, in every sense of the term. Taking one of NYC’s most famous clubs by storm, Wilkins and his quartet (endlessly inventive pianist Micah Thomas, rock-solid bassist Ryoma Takenaga, masterful drummer Kweku Sumbury) are all in their 20s and 30s, but they’ve already lit out beyond previously explored territory to map their own exuberant course; through the modernistic postbop of “Warriors”, the Bachian interplay of “Composition XII”, the deep-rooted, ecstatic gospel of Alice Coltrane’s “Charnam” and the two-part “Eternal” (a time-bending workout that collapses into hypnotic sub-toned minimalism), there’s elegance and earthiness, mind and heart in constant dialogue. The applause after each track is unforced, the audience reacting to the Quartet’s potential unfolding into assured maturity before their ears. (Vol. 2 & Vol. 3 are equally fine, but only available via downloads or streaming. Buy Vol. 1 at Blue Note Records, — or lobby ’em for a complete box set!)

In case you hadn’t heard, Miles Davis’ centennial is this year – this week in fact. There are plenty of reissues already out and still to come, with tributes aplenty following in their wake. The best of the latter I’ve heard so far is Gregory Hutchinson’s Kind of Now: The Pulse of Miles Davis. Drummer Hutchinson’s style as a Young Lion has blossomed into a strong yet tempered sense of groove, thoroughly assimilating the work of the amazing drummers who backed up Davis; here, he leads an all-star group on a wild ride from early bebop (“Ah-Leu-Cha”) through cool school (“Fran Dance”, “Seven Steps to Heaven”) and a quartet of enigmatic Wayne Shorter tunes (including “Orbits” and “Water Babies”) to the pioneering days of jazz-rock fusion (“Bitches’ Brew” and “Circle in the Round”). Ambrose Akinmusere’s thick, liquid trumpet, Ron Blake’s consummately attentive sax work, and Gerald Clayton’s versatile, tasty piano delight throughout; it’s impossible to know what they’ll do at any given moment, but always satisfying in the aftermath. Around and through it all, there’s Hutchinson’s drive, color and sense of space. This is a thoughtful take on the breadth of Miles’ achievement that’s consistently focused and gracious, but marvelously abstract and unpredictable as well. (Buy the CD from Amazon.)

And as always, Record Store Day has brought a clutch of archival releases courtesy of jazz detective Zev Feldman. On Feldman’s 15th production of Bill Evans, At the BBC, the music is exquisite as always, despite severe sonic limitations inherent in the original 1960s television broadcast. Evans and his current trio with Chuck Israels and Larry Bunker shift moods on a dime, using dynamics as a key component in their mutual ebb and flow. Even when they take an uptempo tune like “Nardis” or turn “Waltz for Debby” into a 4/4 swinger, the rapt contemplation at the core of ballads like “My Foolish Heart” and “Who Can I Turn To?” are still winningly present. (Buy the CD from Amazon.)

Pursuing an idiom 180 degrees away from Evans, Cecil Taylor demanded the same level of attentive listening via radically different means – a sidelong take on the jazz piano tradition that reveled in fractured time and tonality, extended compositional statements and improvisations, a nigh-incessant, athletic tsunami of notes too fast to separate. On Fragments, recorded live at a French festival in 1969, Taylor prowls the keyboard like a roaring lion, endlessly pouring out riffs, chords, clusters; saxophonists Jimmy Lyons and Sam Rivers dialogue with and echo Taylor and each other, overblowing and piling up hyperspeed motifs at a frenetic pace; drummer Andrew Cyrille miraculously cooks up a flow in the absence of any downbeat – turning, shifting, reacting, leaping ahead. The two takes of Taylor’s “Fragments of a Dedication to Duke Ellington” are 50 and 90 minutes long, and you’ll feel like you’ve run a marathon after you’ve listened. This isn’t for the faint of heart or the squeamish, but trust me: Taylor’s pioneering free jazz will open up your ears and brain even as they wear them down and possibly out. (Buy the CD from Amazon.)

— Rick Krueger

Faith, Music, Poetry, Republic of Letters

kruekutt’s 2025 Classical & Jazz Highlights

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(Please note that links to online listening are included below, usually in the album title!)

I spent a good chunk of this year digging into the music of Dmitri Shostakovich (2025 was the 50th anniversary of his death). Living in Soviet Russia under Stalin’s iron regime, Shostakovich’s modernistic compositions faced unending attack from jealous rivals and government bureaucrats; public dissent would have been futile, resulting in imprisonment or death for himself and his loved ones. So his 15 symphonies (conducted by Latvian maestro Mariss Jansons in a splendid bargain reissue) walk a thin line between deadpan conformity laced with mocking undertones (#2 “The Fifth of May”, #11 “The Year 1905” and even #5, his most popular work) and striking outbursts of grief in the wake of World War II’s human costs (#7 “Leningrad”, #13 “Babi Yar”). Meanwhile, Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, composed “for the desk drawer”, were where he let himself go, taking his tragic/satiric outlook to agonized, bleak extremes. In The Soviet Experience, an engrossing bargain box on Chicago’s Cedille label, The Pacifica Quartet (currently resident at Indiana University) provide forceful, rhapsodic performances of Shostakovich’s early quartets #1-4, the expressive, moving #5-8 and #9-12, and the ghostly, late #13-15, plus selected, comparable quartets by Russian contemporaries. If Shostakovich’s music sounds intriguing to you, either of these sets would be excellent ways to gain your footing for further exploration.

While my most memorable live classical experiences this year (first in Chicago, then in Cleveland) were orchestral, my favorite classical recording was choral: A Prayer for Deliverance, recorded live by the British choir Tenebrae under the direction of Nigel Short. Organized around rich, resonant settings of the Psalms and other texts of mourning and memorial, the program spans two centuries of music and a vast swath of feeling, from the brand-new title work (an anguished interpretation of Psalm 13 by African-American composer Joel Thompson) to Herbert Howells’ peacefully luminous Requiem (incorporating Psalms 23 & 121). It’s a powerful journey from the shock of death to the peace of acceptance — and the hope of resurrection. And since I was privileged to hear the choir of St. John’s College Cambridge when their US tour came to Grand Rapids last spring, I can heartily recommend their fine new Christmas disc O Holy Night (the first spearheaded by the choir’s current director Christopher Gray), centered on Howells’ lush and gorgeous Three Carol-Anthems and Francis Poulenc’s solemnly beautiful Christmas Motets.

Moving to jazz, my favorite disc of the year has to be pianist Brad Mehldau’s deep dive into the songs of acoustic-grunge cult figure Elliott Smith, Ride into the Sun. Laying down a marker in his eloquent liner notes, Mehldau describes Smith’s work as “sublime music that holds a mirror to our sadness and breathes beauty and meaning into it”. And from a breath-snatching opening take on “Better Be Quiet Now” to the serene two-part title track (plus side quests into similar cult faves Big Star and Nick Drake), Mehldau and his numerous guests prove the point again and again; steeped in late Romantic harmonies and subtly swinging all the while, they unerringly steer Smith’s melodies through the heart of darkness to the sweet consolations of art reflecting on that pain. (Want to hear Smith’s originals? I highly recommend his 1997 indie release Either/Or, where you can hear him straining at the expressive limits of low-fi, and his 1998 major label debut XO, where he unleashes his inner McCartney/Brian Wilson in a dizzying display of studio shock and awe.)

But I have to say that Somni, the latest live collaboration between jazz-fusion big band Snarky Puppy and The Netherlands’ Metropole Orkest isn’t far behind Mehldau’s tribute to Smith. A more noir take on the filmic funk of previous collaboration Sylva (reissued last year, alongside the Puppy’s most popular live-in-studio recording We Like It Here), there’s an embarrassment of riches here, with band and orchestra deployed like interweaving chamber groups, ear-catching fades and dissolves between themes, scorching virtuoso solos on every track, and an endless variety of rhythms. The CD/BluRay version brings the added dimension of watching the musicians (playing in the round) in the moment, from a gently grooving Metropole harpist to Bobby Sparks II’s scorching clavinet/whammy bar solo on “Chimera” to Snarky’s four (!) drummers and three (!) percussionists playing off each other to ecstatic effect on postmodern blues “Recurrent”. The best capture of how immersive live music can be that I’ve seen and heard all year.

And crowding in just behind Mehldau and the Puppy is Touch, the return of Chicago arty post-rock pioneers Tortoise after a nine-year hiatus. Crisply, consistently melodic, the veteran quintet (including avant-jazz guitar ninja Jeff Parker) is subtly beguiling, even gentle at times; but the taut, understated rhythms and layers of textural grit underneath are what hold your attention. From the tolling “Layered Presence” through the ear-grabbing gear shifts of “Axial Seamount” and the squiggly/snarly/wispy “Oganesson” to the levitating movie-theme finale “Night Gang”, this is a fully collaborative vision, always straining toward unlimited vistas, pushing beyond the horizon of what most instrumental groups can conceive. Explore it along with Tortoise’s back catalog; I have a hunch you won’t be sorry!

And these other releases well worth checking out:

  • Disquiet, three discs of extended, hypnotic studio improvs from the minimalist/ambient/jazz Australian piano trio The Necks.
  • Motion II, where Blue Note Records all-star quintet Out Of/Into return with a fabulously consistent, frequently thrilling follow-up to last year’s excellent debut.
  • Off the Record, the newest mash-up from drummer/beatmaster Makaya McCraven, collecting four digital EPs that span a decade. Taking live improvs alongside Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, Out Of/Into’s Joel Ross on vibraphone and British tuba virtuoso Theon Cross (among other huge talents) into the studio, McCraven works hip-hop production magic on dates from Los Angeles (PopUp Shop), hometown Chicago (Hidden Out!), London (Techno Logic) and New York (The People’s Mixtape) recomposing, overdubbing, flying in other instruments and looping key beats for maximum impact. The results are unstoppably propulsive, coolly thoughtful and thoroughly enjoyable even at their wildest.
  • Joni’s Jazz, a four-disc offshoot of Joni Mitchell’s ongoing Archive series. Mitchell comes by her jazz pretensions honestly, claiming Miles Davis as an early muse, working with bass titan Charles Mingus in his final months, and regularly collaborating with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter over the decades. There are more than a few tedious moments here, where Mitchell swaps out her melodic gift to climb on her lyrical soapbox;, but there are numerous highlights that compensate: check the loose swing of early classics like “Marcie” or “In France They Kiss On Main Street”; the numerous peaks of Mitchell’s genre explorations from Court and Spark through Mingus; later big-band collaborations (“Both Sides Now”); and oddities like “Love” and “The Sire of Sorrow (Job’s Sad Song)” where Mitchell languidly chants paraphrased Scripture while Shorter takes flight above her.

— Rick Krueger

Music, Republic of Letters

A 2024 Coda: kruekutt’s Highlights in Classical & Jazz

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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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