By Matt Silver
Kenny Garrett, Sounds from the Ancestors (Mack Avenue)
In 1995, the highly respected alto saxophonist Steve Wilson told The New York Times everything you need to know about fellow altoist Kenny Garrett’s approach to playing music. “He’s the first one of us to really encompass the whole tradition of Black music with his sound. You can hear Johnny Hodges, Bird, Sonny Stitt and Maceo Parker in there. And the church and blues are in everything he plays. He’s been able to take all these elements and make them integral to his conception.”
Over 25 years and dozens of Grammy-nominated albums later, Garrett’s sound has evolved but the foundations of his approach haven't changed. Just take a listen to Sounds from the Ancestors. The album’s dedicated to his myriad musical influences, a veritable universe that includes seemingly every notable piece of music with ancestral ties to the Americas’ African diaspora.
That’s a lot to take on.
Coming up, Garrett played with Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. He played in Duke Ellington’s Orchestra under Ellington’s son, Mercer. And the Coltrane influence in his compositions is undeniable. A retrospective focusing just on these guys would’ve pleased critics and fans alike.
But for the sake of presenting a complete musical autobiography, Garrett goes further here. That doesn’t mean you’ll have to work hard to find affirmative nods to mentors like Blakey — see the appropriately percussive “For Art’s Sake,” a showcase for drummer Ronald Bruner — or sax idols like Coltrane and Jackie McLean — see “What Was That.” But it does mean that Sounds goes way beyond hard bop hagiography.
Take the album’s opener, “It’s Time to Come Home.” You’re hit immediately with multiple percussionists playing an Afro-Cuban rhythm in six. Perhaps Garrett’s collaborations with famed Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés come to mind — that’s no accident. But, while referential, you’ll notice that Garrett’s eight originals here exist not as honorifics but, rather, are full of their own ideas.
In this case, pianist Vernell Brown, Jr.’s recursive chordal ostinato couples with a playfully antagonistic theme from Garrett that will either have you sharing in the songwriter’s reverence for the rituals of childhood or slowly drive you crazy.
“When the Days were Different” is similarly evocative, but instead of calling you back to childhood, Garrett ushers listeners into an expansive house of worship, where the organ’s always in tune and the sun always hits the stained-glass windows at just the right angle to ensure the choir is fully illuminated.
Bringing to mind everything that people used to love about Bruce Hornsby/Branford Marsalis partnerships, this one’s totally free of irony, cynicism and self-consciousness. And while its schmaltziness makes it a prime target for gratuitous snark, that’s really just the spiritual emptiness of our contemporary culture talking.
The references to John Coltrane here are several but subtle. You can catch Trane’s polyrhythmic influence on the blistering “What Was That” and a late stretch of “Hargrove,” the appropriately fusiony send-up to late trumpeter Roy Hargrove, digresses into a seemingly impromptu remix of “A Love Supreme.”
But if you’re really looking for the essence of Coltrane in Garrett’s playing, check out the penultimate title track, which struck me as a musical portmanteau of Mongo Santamaria’s version of “Afro Blue” and Coltrane’s, replete with percussionist Pedrito Martinez singing and chanting in the West African language of Yoruban and a contemplative prologue on piano by Garrett himself.
The signature accomplishment of Sounds, though, has to be “Soldiers of the Fields/Soldats des Champs.” At 11 minutes, it’s nearly as long as the Haitian Revolution whose victors it celebrates. But with the great Lenny White playing snare drum with a combination of precision and explosiveness that shouldn’t be physically possible, you’re left wanting more. You won’t find Garrett in any better form either—like L’Ouverture’s soldiers over two centuries ago, he triumphs.
Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge Feat. Doug Carn, Jazz Is Dead, Vol. 5 (Jazz Is Dead)
If you take the fabric of time apart and stitch it back together, you might just find yourself in the realm occupied by Jazz Is Dead, the time and genre-bending album series produced by Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammad. The latest installment in the Jazz Is Dead series is centered around one of the baddest Hammond organists from the ’70s, who generated a cult following for the albums he released on Oakland’s Black Jazz label.
His name is Doug Carn (notably, Doug's ex-wife, Jean Carn, was a vocalist who’d become a solo R&B star for Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International Records in the 1970s). Younge and Muhammad, long fans of Carn’s work, call his Black Jazz releases, “All-time classics of Black consciousness as expressed through jazz.” So they jumped at the chance to work with him; Doug Carn JID005 is the result.
The multi-volume Jazz Is Dead project is one where worlds don’t collide so much as they sort of naturally coalesce, like globules of wax in a ’70s-era lava lamp. The result, especially here, is a thrilling, sometimes dizzying, often mesmerizing opportunity to occupy the past, present, and future all at once.
The music itself is spirited and evocative, and both nostalgic and futuristic — but much of the credit must go to Younge and Muhammad for making this clever concept a reality. These are two guys best known in hip-hop circles — Younge for having produced projects for acts like Ghostface Killah, Kendrick Lamar, and Souls of Mischief and Muhammad for his jack of many trades role in A Tribe Called Quest.
But many of their musical heroes are jazz musicians, and for years, they’d been involved in a hip-hop milieu that’s given second life to jazzers’ music through sampling the latter’s work from the ’60s and ’70s. But with the Jazz Is Dead series, Younge and Muhammad have flipped the script, ceding the foreground to the jazz musicians while retaining a hip-hop sensibility that traces part of its ancestry to organ-driven soul-jazz. It’s one of the those trippy everything-is-connected-if-you-just-listen-closely type things.
Does it work? It most assuredly does. Call it groove jazz, soul jazz, a fusion of hip-hop and funk-noir, or anything else — Younge, Muhammad, and Carn seem less concerned with the labels and more concerned with atmosphere.
From the opening cut, Doug Carn JID005 is a trip; every tune takes you someplace new and world-builds like a good piece of fiction. On the opener, “Dimensions,” Younge introduces an ascending chromatic scale on the Fender Rhodes electric piano that comes to permeate the entire piece. He’s soon joined by Shai Golan (sax) and Zach Ramacier (trumpet), who riff on that theme while Carn swells gradually and mischievously behind them and Muhammad (electric bass) and Malachi Morehead (drums) work together like The Roots’ Hub and QuestLove. As a listener, it’s like touring a psychedelic chocolate factory with a hip-hop Willy Wonka.
Meanwhile, “Processions,” the third track, opens similarly, with the horns playing ascending chromatics that make everything feel just slightly off-kilter, which is both deliberate here and par for the course. But the horns soon give way to the rhythm section’s steady groove, a sure-footed platform from which Carn solos while Younge supports with buttery Rhodes fills. By the time Morehead and Muhammad lay down cover for a Ramacier trumpet solo, I find myself, as a listener, injected into the storyline of a contemporary noir film set in early ’70s Southern California. If only this had been written before Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Inherent Vice for the screen.
“Windfall” comes off darker and more sinister; it’s also a little steadier. There’s nothing off-kilter to wrong foot the listener into a state of disorientation. Yet, a noirish quality remains. Though the atmosphere here is much more Frank Serpico’s New York City than Pynchon’s Manhattan Beach. The tune is highlighted by expressive solos and unison playing from Golan and Ramacier.
The heat really picks up, though, about halfway through; that’s where you’ll find the record’s first single, “Desert Rain.” Shot through with hip-hop style drum triplets and accents, Carn seems born again playing alongside these two horn players. All the while, Younge and his Rhodes are garnishing Carn’s runs on organ with electric stardust.
But all of the foregoing have just been appetizers, energy-wise, compared to “Underwater,” “Nunca Un Malandro,” and “Lion’s Walk,” three late-album tracks.
Fans of the Native Tongues, the loosely organized collective of ’90s hip-hop groups with a jazzy, intellectual bent, will love “Underwater,” a showcase for Morehead whose chemistry with Carn and Muhammad is as strong or stronger here than anywhere else on the record. Something about this one has the unmistakable flavor of a rowhouse party or a basement recording studio session, where one guy wearing headphones mouths to another guy wearing headphones: “THIS is the sound.”
“Nunca Um Malandro,” underscores the notion that Brazilian influence on American music will never die — it’s been so influential to both Carn’s generation and Younge and Muhammad’s. This isn’t just house-party samba at its finest, it’s Younge and Carn’s most dialed-in partnership of the album, too. In general, I’m totally cool with the way Younge and Muhammad have arranged this album, though I’d have made this one my closer.
“Lion’s Walk,” meanwhile, brings Younge and Muhammad’s Jazz Is Dead concept full circle by featuring another of their heroes, alto saxophonist Gary Bartz. Carn is enlivened by the presence of a contemporary, while Morehead and Muhammad keep things sufficiently steady foundationally to allow the two vets to dialogue at a level of heightened sophistication and mutual understanding.
In many ways an unabashed nostalgia play, this one may not be for jazz lovers of all stripes, but the kids of the ’70s and ’90s are really going to dig it.
Black Art Jazz Collective, Ascension (HighNote)
If the 2020s have found you nostalgic for that early-to-mid ’60s lineup of Jazz Messengers featuring trombonist Curtis Fuller teaming up with legendary names like Hubbard, Shorter, Walton, Merritt, and Blakey, then you owe it to yourself to get acquainted with the Black Art Jazz Collective (BAJC).
Formed in 2012 by tenor saxophonist Wayne Escoffery and trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, BAJC is no mere replication of one of Blakey’s most celebrated lineups; culturally and politically they are very much of the present, as you’ll notice from the issues addressed by the song titles on Ascension. But these guys know their history, musically and otherwise; they know every time they tour Europe or play at Lincoln Center, they do so standing on the shoulders of giants — like Blakey, sure, but also guys like the late alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the late pianists Harold Mabern and Larry Willis. Ascension features inspired tributes to all three.
Plus, you know, they’re a jazz sextet with a trombonist. So there’s that.
And speaking of that man playing the Curtis Fuller role here — the regally styled James Burton III — he’s written a quarter of the album’s eight original compositions, a creative workload split almost evenly among Escoffery, Pelt, Burton III, and the supremely talented and versatile Simi Valley, CA native, pianist Victor Gould.
It’s a Gould composition, the album’s title track, that leads things off here. Gould’s opening vamps set the foundation for tightly orchestrated horn-section harmonies that weave through and alongside the piano-propelled theme. When the horns — Burton, Escoffery, and Pelt — come together to play in unison with Gould’s chords, it’s like the precision and hard-bop authority of the best of Blakey’s Messengers are reincarnated.
In keeping with the truest form of jazz democracy, the tune’s composer (Gould) takes an extended solo after the opening theme’s restatement, accompanied by drummer Mark Whitfield, Jr. (son of guitarist Mark Whitfield), who, stylistically, resides somewhere between Blakey and Blakey’s hip-hop reared great grandson. Escoffery and Pelt follow in due course, clean as a freshly pressed suit. But on an album that might rightly or wrongly be criticized as too predictable and straight-ahead, it’s Whitfield, Jr., the band’s youngest member, who most clearly lends contemporary credibility to this session.
“Mr. Willis” is Burton’s tribute to an arguably overlooked pianist who made his break as a sideman for another of BAJC’s inspirations, Jackie McLean — we’ll get to McLean in a second. For now, it suffices to say that the aforementioned Larry Willis is accorded all due propers here, as Whitfield seamlessly guides the band from a Latin feel to conventional swing and then back again, all while providing ample space for Burton to collect his pay for writing the tune: ample space to solo. Knowing Jeremy Pelt’s back there, it’s no wonder why Burton wanted to go first — who in their right mind would want to follow this guy?
Pelt, refreshingly, doesn’t feel the need to break conversation with Gould’s chord changes to say something inventive; he’s so adept at finding new lanes on the already groomed portion of the hill, there’s no need for him to venture off-piste. When Escoffery merges back into traffic right alongside a Pelt who’s hit the turbo, and the two of them, now playing in unison, restate the theme, it’s understandable if that jolts you upright from a reclining position to shower an unsuspecting Bluetooth speaker with applause in an empty apartment.
Burton’s other composition “Tulsa,” is meant to reference the racially motivated violence that led to the destruction of a prosperous neighborhood in that Oklahoma city once known as “Black Wall Street.” It was 1921 when the Greenwood neighborhood was completely destroyed and over 300 of its residents were killed, yet the incident wasn’t allowed to be taught as part of the public school history curriculum in that state until earlier this decade.
Whitfield, Jr’s unyielding backbeat underscores not so much an urgency but an unbreakable spirit, and the same can be said for Escoffery’s tenor solo — full of soul, full of faith, but, most of all, full of muscle.
“Involuntary Servitude,” penned by Escoffery, might be seen as a companion piece, a show of force against institutionalized restraints on liberty and dignity. And ever-dignified here is bassist Rashaan Carter who, like the Ents of Middle Earth, hops out front but sparingly but when he raises his voice from the deep, filled with that ancient wisdom that only he can speak, the others know to listen well.
The highlight of the record, though, may be the one non-original composition on the menu, Jackie McLean’s “Twin Towers.” Escoffery studied under McLean in the jazz program that the latter founded at the University of Hartford. Escoffery and classmate Jimmy Greene, another tenor sax player, were both over 6’3”, so McLean dubbed them the “Twin Towers” and formed a band around them, with the goal of attracting a record deal. They even cut a demo, a demo on which a young trumpet player by the name of Jeremy Pelt can be heard. The band disbanded after the musicians left school, but McLean continued to play the tune he’d written for them on gigs. It hadn’t been recorded until BAJC recorded it here.
If you only have time to listen to two tunes on the album, make them this one and “Iron Man,” Gould’s tribute to Harold Mabern that’s the closest thing this record has to a straight-out-of-the-box jazz anthem. Pelt’s two compositions that close the album, “For the Kids” and “Birdie’s Bounce” are light and funky and fun, especially with Gould on the Nord electric piano for both and Pelt and Gould channeling ’70s-era Woody Shaw/George Cables partnerships on the latter. But the tributes to McLean and Mabern tell you more about the liminal space this group occupies, somewhere between past and present, where, somehow, they brake for all their old heroes to hop aboard without ever losing forward momentum.
Marlene Rosenberg, MLK Convergence (Origin)
Inspired by the protest music of the '60s that helped dismantle the codified racism of that era, bassist Marlene Rosenberg’s MLK Convergence presents a new catalogue of socially conscious compositions with our current moment in mind, taking aim at the vestiges of institutionalized prejudice that continue to link America to its original sin.
There are seven original compositions by Rosenberg, two arrangements of Stevie Wonder tunes, and one take on a composition by legendary jazz pianist Kenny Barron.
Barron constitutes one-third of the core group, joining Rosenberg and the great Lewis Nash on drums. Nash played for years with bassist Ron Carter, one of Rosenberg’s most influential mentors; the three have traveled in similar musicians’ circles and known each other for years but hadn't cut an album together before this one.
That’s what’s meant primarily by the album’s title, MLK Convergence—it’s Marlene, Lewis, and Kenny all recording together for the first time. M, L, and K. Though whenever those letters appear in that sequence, you know the conversation is in no small part about Rev. King and the ideas he fought and died for.
The first cut, “American Violet,” takes its title from the 2008 film of the same name that tells the story of 15 black residents of Hearne, Texas who were wrongly indicted as drug dealers during a drug sweep orchestrated by the local district attorney and the triumph of their resulting civil rights law suit.
Rosenberg’s the first one in here, introducing a bold, muscular theme in an uncommon meter, 9/8. Nash then lets himself in, keeping everyone on time and in time, followed by Barron who plays the head in unison with Rosenberg before descending to bluesier depths.
“Togetherness” begins with Barron chord progressions that call to mind “My Favorite Things.” Like the Rodgers and Hammerstein’s standard, “Togetherness” is played, for the most part, in three. It’s not the most memorable tune on the record, but there’s a difficult-to-articulate joy in the playing here that lends credence to the tune’s name. Such great individual talent on display and so little ego in the playing. That’s the point: Unity is attainable if we can manage just a little bit of humility.
On “Not the Song I Wanna Sing,” the latent undercurrent of exigency and discontent permeating the album bubbles to the surface, propelled by the first of two bass duets featuring Rosenberg and special guest (and co-producer of the album), the anointed one, Christian McBride.
Rosenberg, Tom Burrell, Robert Irving III (another of the record’s co-producers) lay down poetic verse decrying recent indignities felt by minority communities at the hands of local authorities.
This is not the song they prefer to sing, they say; it’s the song that circumstances compel them to sing.
Or rap, as it were.
Rosenberg references Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old shot 16 times by police in her hometown of Chicago in 2014 and the subsequent three-year prison term to which the officer was sentenced. “Two shots ends the first quarter, makes 16 points for Lebron,” Rosenberg intones, “two shots plus 14 more bring 3 years for the life of Laquan.”
The second Rosenberg-McBride bass duet happens on arguably the most memorable tune of the whole album, the penultimate “And Still We Rise.” McBride is at his funky best showing off his bowing prowess, while Barron’s playing is equally funky, radiating hardened resilience and joyful defiance, just like the poem from which the song takes its name, Maya Angelou’s “And Still I Rise.”
Barron’s “Rain” is the album’s lone true ballad; in it, the NEA Jazz Master gives Rosenberg plenty of room to set a mood that’s initially somber and bespeaks pain but is ultimately cathartic and rejuvenating and necessary, like a good cry or a river overflowing in an agricultural area during flood season. Circle of life type stuff.
Speaking of which, “The Circle Story,” is almost a call-back to the cyclical riff established earlier on “American Violet.” Call it focused searching or desultory freelancing, there’s some fun musical meandering by Barron and Rosenberg here within the circular framework.
But if you want to hear Barron and his swinging best, don’t check out before you’ve checked out “The Barron,” Rosenberg’s composition that indulges the penchant for Latin grooves that so many think of as Barron’s bread and butter. And with good reason: Barron’s great throughout, but his verve and exuberance for playing is more prominently displayed here than anywhere else on the record.
Immanuel Wilkins, Omega (Blue Note)
At just 23, alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, fresh out of Juilliard, released one of the most sophisticated and mature debut recordings in recent memory — on the immortal Blue Note record label, no less.
Omega is something to behold not just because of Wilkins’ surplus of musicality and technique, but because of his precocious sense of history and his acute sense of the role that sometimes only music and art can play in baring certain emotional truths that attend anguish and triumph.
At times, we get the bold and raw expressionism of pieces like “Ferguson” and “Mary Turner.” Both are subtitled “An American Tradition.” And both are musical interpretations of horrors visited upon Black communities in America. The former refers to the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, Jr., the young, unarmed Black man shot by police in Ferguson, Mo.; the latter refers to the 1918 lynching of a young Black woman in Georgia.
Mary Turner was eight months pregnant when she had the audacity to vocally protest the lynching of her husband. As punishment, a mob strung her up by her ankles and subjected her and her unborn baby to deaths so horrifying and brutal that they almost have to be rendered in the abstract, through art, to be understood at a certain, more visceral emotional level.
The most apt comparison may be to Picasso’s treatment of the Nazi bombing of Guernica.
Wilkins and pianist Micah Thomas wondered whether they could distill the essence of horror as effectively through music. I think we have our answer.
To call “Mary Turner” a jazz tune is to miss the point; it’s narrative, with beats and plot points and movements. It does tragedy in a way that’s almost operatic. Wilkins’ alto cries — a manner of playing he internalized after, at Wynton Marsalis’ urging, he began listening to old Ornette Coleman albums.
There’s a low-level terror at first generated by Kweku Sumbry’s steady, almost chant-like beat that sets the heart racing. Wilkins’ wet, whispering, discordant phrases on alto soon join in over top and gradually increase in volume and intensity until we know that Turner’s effort to flee the mob must’ve ended tragically. Wilkins’ alto strains like the metal hull of a ship sinking to depths and pressures it was not made to withstand.
Thomas adds circular dark and stormy trinkles and percussive chords of stabbing discordance until the brutal, murderous deed is done, at which point the tone shifts again.
Above the fray now, up at 30,000 feet, Wilkins playing seems to replay the entire nauseous chain of events but at something like warp speed, and with a sad sense of detachment, as though he were a larger-than-life being up in the sky looking down at all the misery we’re capable of inflicting and penning his sad soundtrack from a lonely but exalted perch.
Fear not, though, Omega is not all emotional evisceration. Viewed as a whole, the record is an emotional rollercoaster — purposefully so. One of Wilkins’ goals was to juxtapose the gut-wrenching with the sublime, the absolute depth of despair with the feelings of unalloyed joy that derive from love, friendship, nostalgia, and music — humanity’s better angels, in other words.
The effect of such a stark dichotomy may be jarring, but it’s not employed for any kind of empty, gratuitous, emotionally manipulative effect. Rather, Wilkins says, this is the dichotomy that has defined so much of the Black experience in America, and, to be rendered in full, the sublime must take up residence next door to the grotesque. From Wilkins’ perspective, they are inextricable; two sides of the same coin.
Omega’s opener, “Warriors,” the first single from the album, is the other side of that coin. “It’s about family and friendships,” says Wilkins, “your hood, your community.” Perhaps the brightest composition on the album, “Warriors” is just as uplifting as the next tune, “Ferguson,” is a sobering gut punch.
One of Wilkins’ mentors, the legendary drummer and KSDS's very own Jazz Maniac, Kenny Washington, who played with Dizzy Gillespie among so many others, made sure that his pupil was just as steeped in the bebop phrasing, in Bird’s vocabulary, as in Ornette Coleman’s. Wilkins’ playing here proves that Washington’s lessons found a receptive student, though those lessons manifest themselves here within the context of a decidedly contemporary post-bop composition.
That’s why it’s fair to say that Wilkins’ sound is neither straight-ahead nor avant-garde. In being both, one might say it’s neither — or vice versa. Parker’s melodic ideas, the improvisational lightning, Wilkins’ has it all, but he solos with that authoritative quality, that fire and astringency of someone like Gary Bartz.
That’s Wilkins’ Old Testament side.
But it’s his New Testament side that might be an even bigger part of his identity.
Outside of legendary Philadelphia mentors like Lovett Hines (Philadelphia's Clef Club), Sun Ra’s Marshall Allen, and the late legendary drummer Mickey Roker, Wilkins has always derived much of what inspires him musically from church. He still plays piano for a congregation, claiming it not only enriches his soul but is invaluable to his compositional process.
“The Dreamer,” sandwiched between the two “American Tradition” tunes, and “Grace and Mercy,” the record’s second single, serve together as the musical embodiment of Wilkins’ testimony.
Intertwined with the album’s two most emotionally challenging pieces, these tunes are more than just palate cleansers; they are perspective recalibrators. It’s that whole purposefully constructed dichotomy again. Wilkins and producer Jason Moran (the terrific pianist, who is another of Wilkins’ closest mentors) take you high, low, reverential, nostalgic…. I’d let these guys program an hour of radio for me any time. What a ride!
And that’s to say almost nothing of the latter half of the album, 80% of which is composed of a four-part, 20-plus minute suite. Arguably the centerpiece of the entire session, the suite facilitates a return to equanimity after the intense sensory and emotional experience that is Omega’s first half.
My favorite movement in the suite is “Part 2. Saudade,” which sounds like it might share some genetic material with “DGAF,” one of the more thrilling cuts from Joshua Redman’s Come What May (2019). Redman’s tune served as a showcase for Gregory Hutchinson, and “Part 2” does much the same here for drummer Kweku Sumbry.
But if the two tunes share genetic material, it’s Wilkins’ composition that is the evolutionary step forward. A gorgeous solo intermezzo from pianist Micah Thomas brings the temperature all the way down, paving the way for the most intense, soul-baring segment from Wilkins on the entire recording. Seriously, come for the first two-and-a-half minutes of this one, but stay for the last five; it’s where you’ll hear a new great one being born.
