The Penguin Jazz Guide 1000 Best Albums

评语：Steve Davis says: ‘When I found out Roy Hargrove was available for the date, I wrote him “Grove’s Groove”. Benny Golson heard Update and called me one day, out of the blue. He loved that tune so much he asked me to join the New Jazztet. We recorded the tune and opened every performance with it! So I thank Roy, Peter, Anthony, Nat and Joe for swinging so hard that snowy day in 2005. They got me a gig with Benny Golson!’ The last-ever recruit to the Jazz Messengers in 1989, he’d previously studied with Jackie McLean and now represents the purest lineage of hard bop, with a string of fine CDs on Criss Cross, the Blue Note of its day. Davis is an adept, articulate musician who doesn’t overplay but is always generous with his lines and even when at his most intense always plays for the band. There’s nothing revolutionary in his technique and his evolution has been so steady that there are no obvious epochal moments along the way, just the steady maturation of a strong talent. The albums are relatively conventional but full and satisfying. In 2004, Davis made Alone Together for Mapleshade, working as sole horn and showing surprisingly often how important Miles Davis – Steve actually started out as a trumpet-player – was to his conception; the Miles, that is, of the modal period rather than On The Corner. Something seemed to open up in the sound around this time. While not exactly a huge leap, Update sounds like aspects of the technique have been subtly tweaked. Right from the off, Shorter’s ‘Marie Antoinette’, Davis seems to be adding harmonics, embellishing the basic line, taking chances with his trajectory through the song. When he plays with Hargrove, as on Jackie McLean’s ‘Bird Lives’, and the edgy ‘Grove’s Groove’, there’s an itchy excitement. The set includes a second Shorter line in ‘Wildflower’ and ends with a version of Ray Drummond’s seldom-covered ‘Leanin’ and Preenin’’ that could be off a late-’50s Prestige date.

评语：François Houle says: ‘It was recorded all in one take. The only editing done was to create the three separate tracks on the CD. We played for less than an hour, looked up and knew we were done! No edits, no alternate takes, no doubts about the music. Just a strong feeling of joy in playing together.’ Based in Vancouver, Houle is a classically trained clarinet specialist who was turned on to improvised music by Evan Parker and Steve Lacy. This is, of course, a trio record and very much the work of equal partners. Houle has a highly distinctive approach, often working with the components of his clarinet to create a sound that is not just original but also remarkably self-consistent. It’s unusual to hear Parker as something like a third wheel, but the relationship between Houle and Delbecq – a real empathy – is so close that there are times here when he continues musing as if to himself. It’s strikingly effective, though: the idea of improvised music as a ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue’ is so redundant as to be pernicious and should be avoided in all but a few special circumstances. Parker’s role doesn’t necessarily resonate with risk and danger, but his relative reticence here provides the fulcrum for the music and much of the interest of the date comes in the interaction between clarinets and (minimally) prepared piano.

评语：Wayne Horvitz says: ‘Creating this band was the culmination of something I’d been looking for my entire career. I finally felt that I had a concept, an ensemble, and the right players and instrumentation to create a music that didn’t go beyond the categories of classical versus jazz but simply avoided them altogether.’ Horvitz was one of the leading personalities of the New York downtown circle but has now based himself in Seattle. A strong, even idiosyncratic, player and composer, he roves back and forth between situationist improvisation and more generic grooves. He got off to a brisk start as a recording leader with Some Order, Long Understood and Miracle Mile, the first a trio with Butch Morris and William Parker, the latter by his savvy electro-acoustic band The President; other discs seemed to drift out of circulation rather quickly, a sure sign that an artist isn’t running in commercial tram-lines. Other records followed in short order but it was only with 2005’s Way Out East that Horvitz delivered a record – this time determinedly acoustic – that seemed to offer a generous pay-off for his efforts. Exquisitely conceived and executed, this is by no means the ‘chamber-jazz’ date the instrumentation might lead you to believe. Horvitz is still in swinging form, especially when he takes to Hammond organ and when he throws elements of boogie and ragtime into the mix. The sequence that contains ‘Between Here And Heaven’, built around rich drone shapes, and the long ‘Berlin 1914’ around the middle of the album is classic contemporary music, lyrical, uncategorizable, but with a tough improvisatory edge. ‘World Peace And Quiet’ closes the set, and it wouldn’t be surprising to find it taken up by an enterprising lyricist.

评语：Dave Liebman says: ‘Quest was and is for me a gift because that rhythm section can literally do anything. The emotional range from awesome power to tranquillity is quite dramatic.’ Dave Liebman and Richie Beirach share a rich vein of musical understanding that, put together, always seems to create a fresh entity, a kind of collective spirit. That is reflected in the music of Quest. Though Liebman was the driving force in organizational terms, it was a group of equals and all four members contributed compositions. There were some early changes of personnel, with original bassist George Mraz subsequently replaced by Ron McClure, a formidable stylist and composer. His presence somewhat heightens a resemblance – more than fancied, more than passing – with the classic ’60s Charles Lloyd Quartet and Quest often delivers something of that rich eclecticism – part post-Coltrane modal harmony, part rock excitement – that made the Lloyd group such a powerful draw and such an influential component of modern jazz. The early Quest records are hard to find now, but the group reconvened after a 15-year break and the live tapes were impressive enough to merit a second life on disc. We are usually sceptical about such reunions, usually undertaken at the behest of promoters and with nostalgia as a subtext. There’s no hint of that here. Playing together again after so long was clearly a happy experience for all involved. Liebman’s work, like Beirach’s, has gone through some considerable changes. That said, surprisingly for a group invested with so many fine composers, much of the material played is from the modern repertory, opening with ‘Round Midnight’, a perfect vehicle for the pianist, and continuing with Coltrane’s all too rarely covered ‘Ogunde’, a telling sign of Liebman’s searching interrogation of that legacy. There is also a fine short version of Ornette’s ‘Lonely Woman’. Liebman’s tribute to the destroyed World Trade Center, medleyed with Beirach’s similarly inspired and equally powerful ‘Steel Prayers’, touches on some notably raw emotion, an instant standard that one hopes to hear approached by other musicians. So, too, with Hart’s title-track, which rounds out a superb disc. Again, the recording quality is easily equal to a group of such subtlety, with every inflection of all the instruments precisely registered. Strongly recommended, and if you missed them first time round, Quest hasn’t lost its exploratory edge.

评语：Ralph Towner said (1999): ‘Don’t ask me too many questions about the music. I just write it. It’s intuitive, and I get completely lost in the process, much as I do in playing, but probably more so. But don’t ask me to articulate about it.’ ‘Only tenuously connected with jazz’, it says in Grove, so what’s he doing here? For our money, there has never been any question about Towner’s importance as a contemporary improviser. He was, admittedly, a gift to the ECM label or to what has sometimes been parodied as ‘the ECM sound’ – cool, acoustic, European, very spacious and classical in intent. On the 1972 Trios/Solos he marshalled three quarters of Oregon for a lovely record of unaccompanied and group pieces, including Bill Evans’s ‘Re: Person I Knew’; he once told Joachim Berendt that his aim was to play his guitar ‘pianistically’ as if it was a piano trio, like Evans’s. His ability to work simultaneous lines, sustain rich harmonics and drones (especially on the 12-string), and even get a percussive counterpoint out of the snap of the strings and the thud of the sound-box is what makes his solo playing so rich and multi-dimensional. Diary (1973) was a genuine solo performance that found him trying to cut a trail between the two great ‘twelves’ of modern music: the blues and Viennese dodecaphony, which he studied in Europe in 1963 and 1967; the addition of 12-string guitar gives the mix an almost mystical quality. Diary is for some fans the Ralph Towner record. But it palls somewhat when set alongside the stunning solo records of more recent years. Time Line is a supremely professional record, mostly done in miniatures which couldn’t be improved by so much as a note. An opening sequence of brief songs and sketches has the exact trajectory and weight of an old LP side, a definite chapter-end. Titles like ‘Oleander Etude’ may curl the toes, but it’s a far more substantial thing as played than it looks on paper. Similarly the ‘Five Glimpses’, only the first of which breaks a minute, and even then only 61 seconds. These are almost sublimely good and the koto-like final one is the most unexpected thing Towner has ever put on a record. After that the album changes direction again. ‘The Lizards Of Eraclea’ is something of a technical exercise, but this final section includes two standards, a still relatively unusual practice for Towner. ‘Come Rain Or Come Shine’ is deeply influenced by Bill Evans’s versions. It emerges over a softly rocking rhythm and subtle harmonics, both greatly enhanced by the acoustic at Propstei St Gerold, now a favourite ECM location. The real clincher, though, is ‘My Man’s Gone Now’, which is soaked in the blues but surrounded by chords of orchestral richness that bears comparison with Miles Davis’s and Gil Evans’s Porgy & Bess.

评语：Matthew Shipp says: ‘This was a return to recording acoustic jazz after my electro improv CDs. It was cool to rediscover the joy of acoustic jazz. The session had a freshness for that reason. The only problem I remember is before the session the piano tuner sat playing a bunch of Chick Corea tunes as if trying to impress me with it and it took a little time in the session to get those out of my head.’ A musician whose sense of adventure is impressively balanced by a steady thoughtfulness, Shipp didn’t begin recording until the ’90s, after periods of study at Berklee and the New England Conservatory. There is probably no more intelligent and well-versed player on the contemporary scene. He was a member of David S. Ware’s group but began appearing in challenging contexts with a wide range of others, including William Parker, whom he met after coming to New York in the mid-’80s. In recent years, Shipp has been curator of the Thirsty Ear label’s highly eclectic Blues Series, which reflects his own explorations beyond post-bop jazz. He acknowledged this most explicitly on Nu Bop, one of a number of fine records made for Thirsty Ear since the turn of the decade. It was a record which combined solo piano with group material and electronic processing. There is no implication that either Shipp or his admirers considered this line of enquiry to be exhausted, but there was a stir of excitement when in 2005 he returned to solo piano recording (a 2002 disc was released in Italy). However senior he might now be, Shipp isn’t above revisiting his influences and on this extraordinary solo set, his first since Songs, he delves into the worlds of Cecil Taylor, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, but without ever once referencing any of these ancestral presences directly. It is as if the terms of the cult forbid those great names from being spoken. In keeping with his instinct for form, these relatively short pieces all seem to have an internal logic and structure, palpable but resistant to analysis. ‘Arc’ works slowly and by increment, each chord taking on new harmonic colours with each return. ‘Patmos’ is a delirious, almost evangelical thing, an agglutination of single-line testimonies that leads towards a moment of revelation. The longer cuts, ‘The Encounter’, ‘Gamma Ray’ and ‘Module’, are the most successful, and the middle one of the group has a flayed excitement that both invites and dismisses comparison with Cecil Taylor. A major contemporary presence, Shipp is one of the select group of current players and composers one would have to tag ‘essential’.

评语：Ran Blake said (2005): ‘Am I in the film or am I directing the film? All I know is that when I’m at the piano and improvising, what I’m really doing is storyboarding, and doing it in real time. I don’t write film music because I don’t write well, but I can turn down the light and let the images flicker.’ Blake was 70 when this was made. He had released some 35 albums, but this was his first proper solo disc for some time. It is a quiet masterpiece, marked by the same almost mystical approach to harmony and melody that has marked recent projects. It is wrong to call Blake an eclectic. He assimilates his influences and passions too thoroughly for that. The opening track here, actually written by producer Jonah Kraut, opens quietly, almost musingly, before breaking off a huge, complex discord. Like the remainder of the album, the track remains quiet, contemplative and patient, gradually working through the ramifications of Blake’s astonishing grasp of harmony. ‘Thursday’ seems to quote ‘Lover Man’ towards the end, leaving the listener with the thought that perhaps the whole thing had been a meditation on those changes from the start; probably not, but Blake’s mind works in widening circles of association. ‘Impresario Of Death’ is magnificently moody and intense, but with a Messiaen-like delicacy. The only moment where the pace picks up significantly is on ‘Church Of Latter Rain Christian Fellowship’, whose gospelly roll is deeply infectious. A magnificent record from an American master.

评语：Mark Feldman says: ‘What Exit was my first “jazz” recording leading my own group, playing my own music. I was 50 years old when I recorded it. In the next 25 years or so I have decided to procrastinate less and be more ambitious.’ Feldman might seem like a late starter in jazz terms. He certainly wasn’t a late starter as a musician, already playing bars as a teenager, having picked up the violin in childhood. He moved to Nashville and worked on scores of country sessions there before removing to New York, where he became a significant downtowner. He was a member of the Arcado string trio, the only significant rival to the String Trio Of New York. As he implies, there’s precious little under his own name, and certainly nothing that sat easily in a ‘jazz’ bag. Music For Violin Alone was a solo set for John Zorn’s Tzadik in 1994, a programme with a strong new-music tinge. There was also a 1997 record called Chromatic Persuaders, which featured a superb interpretation of Scott LaFaro’s ‘Gloria’s Step’, but Feldman, who’s since recorded brilliant work in a jazz context with guitarist Michael Musillami and others, doesn’t seem to regard this as a jazz date, or his date, or worth mentioning; it did initially appear on a very small label. What Exit was worth the wait. Feldman doesn’t so much bathe in the wonderful sound Manfred Eicher and engineer James Farber lay out for him as rise to the challenge of it. Feldman’s violin has become a compelling improvisational voice and the huge opening ‘Arcade’ is a virtuoso exploration of musical space. Nothing else on the record quite matches up to it, either in scale or in beauty, though the small title-piece is the perfect finish and the double-stopped dirge of ‘Elegy’ is pretty unforgettable. Taylor sounds more unguarded than usual and Jormin and Rainey find a real empathy, with the drummer particularly responsive to his leader’s moves.

评语：Mario Pavone remembers: ‘It was recorded on the Mexican celebration of “Cinquo de Mayo” and early in George W. Bush’s disastrous second term. Bernstein and Burnham cracked us up all day with jokes, quips and asides, where to order the upside-down cakes, a reference to my description of the compositional intent. Later, the humour and the vibrant colours of the music knocked me out.’ It was going to John Coltrane’s funeral that persuaded Pavone to make music his career. He had trained as an engineer and taken contrabass lessons with Bertram Turetzky, and was already gigging quite extensively when he had his epiphany. Pavone has a big, ringing sound and a seemingly bottomless supply of ideas. A regular in the late Thomas Chapin’s trio (he recorded a moving tribute after the saxophonist’s early death), he has also worked with Bill Dixon, Anthony Braxton and Paul Bley. One distinctive feature of his own albums has been the prominence given to trombone or other low brass. Unlike so many of the dashed-off themes that pass for contemporary jazz ‘compositions’, Pavone’s are built from the ground up, with solid foundations and durable architecture. The engineering background hasn’t been thrown away. Even after a dozen fine records, he still wouldn’t have been on many non-New Yorkers’ list of most important contemporary composer-leaders, but it’s hard to think who else has delivered so much consistently high-quality new jazz since the turn of the decade. This is his masterpiece to date, not so much a return to the ‘old’ sound of the septet Song For or the fiercely engaged Sharpeville but an affirmation of its continuing potential. The richness of the voicings on ‘Xapo’ and ‘Zines’ is immediately intoxicating, though it takes a couple of hearings to pick up on Pavone’s compositional subtleties. It’s an exquisitely voiced ensemble, with trumpet, Johnson’s horns and violin all given distinct roles, but combining with the bass to produce a thick, rich ensemble stew. Through it all, Pavone throbs, sings, keeps time, marches and dances. An essential contemporary record.

评语：Robert Glasper says: ‘I did my first record for Fresh Sound, and basically the feeling was “It’s Fresh Sound; no one’s going to hear that.” I treated it as a gig. You can’t do that on Blue Note, so that record was very much about the compositions, and thinking about them.’ It’s encouraging to find Blue Note still signing artists like Robert Glasper. Canvas is a fine record, basically an orthodox, but by no means dull, piano trio with some guest spots, and it sounds very much as if he’s conceived it as a white space on which to inscribe some of his strongest thoughts. His mother was the distinguished gospel and blues singer Kim Yvette Glasper, and Glasper studied at the High School for the Performing Arts in his home town, so there’s a lot of heredity and training pushing from behind. On the Blue Note debut, he has a close, at moments almost uncanny, understanding with Archer and Reid that allows the group to move efficiently, sometimes startlingly, as on the well-named ‘Rise And Shine’, but above all as a unit. Archer often takes a strong initiative and pulls the line away from the piano; Reed responds in kind, giving the whole a centrifugal – or just plain fugal – character that is highly appealing. The title-track has a rich palette as well but the surprises come later, in the tiny ‘Centelude’ and on ‘Chant’, where Bilal’s wordless vocalizing serves as a horn part. Turner also thickens up the mix, but while the variety is welcome, there’s nothing wrong with what Glasper and his two stalwarts are doing. The only non-original is Herbie Hancock’s ‘Riot’.

评语：Stefano Battaglia says: ‘Pasolini was the complete artist, because he brought opposites together and united them without losing their separate character: the sacred and profane, different art forms, images and words, academic culture and popular culture. He is the model for this music, not just its dedication.’ Classically trained, and also active in that realm, Battaglia moves between free and post-bop structures with a rare elegance. His joining the ECM label put a deeper focus on his music. The Book Of Jazz was an encyclopedic survey of the major composers, neither deconstructions, nor reinventions, but rather interpretations of such elegant understanding that they seem to reposition the originals and remove all the spurious authority of authorship. Which brings us neatly round to Pasolini, whose sense of personal identity always hovered on the edge of extinction. Pasolini’s terrible murder remains an unanswered question in Italian culture, largely in that it snuffed out a writer, film-maker, political activist, poet and thinker who seemed to embody much of the Italianness of contemporary Italian culture in its most contradictory forms. Over two discs, Battaglia tries to give the life and work some kind of musical correlative. He opens with a wonderful song dedicated to Pasolini’s muse, Laura Betti, continues with evocations of the Italian countryside as viewed through the prism of Pasolini’s verse, and using a sextet with strongly canonical connotations establishes a dialogue between the formal and improvised, (neo-)classical and romantic elements of Pasolini’s art. The second disc, featuring players most closely associated with Louis Sclavis (Pifarély, again), has a more agitated and improvisational quality, culminating in the bleak sonics of ‘Ostia’, where Pasolini was gruesomely murdered on the beach. Following that, there is only a brief musical headstone and then silence. A demanding listen over two long discs, but absolutely essential modern music; whether all of it jazz or not hardly seems the issue.

评语：Louis Sclavis said (2004): ‘Words and language come to me and then recede. I write things down in a notebook and then lose the notebook, but by being lost the words acquire some importance in the music that follows, I think.’ Having set out his vision of an ‘imaginary folklore’ in music in the ’80s, Sclavis in the next decade established a core ensemble of players around violinist Dominique Pifarély, bassist Bruno Chevillon and drummer François Merville, though not a regular group, and signed up with the ECM label to produce a string of highly original and successful albums that were like nothing else of the time. Les Violences De Rameau, Napoli’s Walls and L’Affrontement Des Prétendants are all marvellous records, but in 2005 and with a new group, Sclavis created something exceptional. Enjoying a new-found openness in his approach, Sclavis decided to take on a new commission from the Spring Arts Festival in Monte Carlo with an almost entirely new band. Merville is the only one here who has served much time with Sclavis. Baron is a ferociously talented 23-year-old, while Delpierre has a buzz-saw guitar style very different to anything else in the previous Sclavis canon. It would have seemed perverse to give a group convened in this way very formal charts, so Sclavis set about writing basic themes and ideas that would challenge his improvisational imagination in new ways. Ironically, the death of Prince Rainier led to the cancellation of the Monaco festival, so Sclavis took his group and new charts into the studio instead. It’s a powerful, very spontaneous performance, some of it deliberately sketchy, but featuring some fascinating ideas that might be blues, might be folk tunes, might also be classical tone rows, all transformed by a mint-fresh ensemble. Many of the tracks are quite short and some have noted a resemblance – perfectly convincing – to early Soft Machine in the rhythms and song-like forms. It’s a near-perfect record, whatever its provenance, and testimony to Sclavis’s importance to jazz composition in the new decade. ‘Le Verbe’ is a classic.

评语：Ingrid Jensen says: ‘A magical and mystical adventure into many of my past and present life influences. Through the music we made, I still hear and feel things that I never thought I could translate into sound: the ocean I grew up near, the open trail that I spend hundred of hours horseback riding on, all of the many powerful voices of song and groove I’ve heard and responded to – we just channelled it all.’ At 25, Jensen became the youngest faculty member at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz. Early recognition came in Europe partly because she had chosen to study there, initially with Austrian pianist Hal Galper. In terms of trumpet sound, she is a cross between Woody Shaw (an acknowledged hero) and Art Farmer, with whom she also took classes; the latter debt is predictably most evident when she switches to flugelhorn, a warm, ringing sound but with a solid-metal core. Jensen’s early recordings on Enja were consistently impressive, and Here On Earth in particular is worth tracking down. However, her work matured rapidly during the early years of the new decade, not so much in terms of playing skill as in maturity of conception. At Sea, released on the estimable, fan-supported ArtistShare, is an altogether more impressionistic record than its predecessors, but in the most positive sense. The opening is a moody soundscape with the trumpet heavily reverbed over piano, keys and cymbals. Keezer’s ‘Captain Jon’ and ‘Tea And Watercolours’ are driven along more familiar grooves. ‘There Is No Greater Love’ has a mournful, elegiac quality. Then the tracks become longer and more exploratory, with ‘Everything I Love’ coming in over nine minutes, the original ‘Swotterings’ and ‘KD Lang’ (with wah-wah Rhodes from Keezer (!) and Ingrid double-tracked) at ten and 12 respectively. It’s a powerful final section. Jon Wikan’s production and Eric Troyer’s deft engineering lend the trumpet immense presence, accurately pitched but with delightful little burrs of overtone round the edges. A simply beautiful record.

评语：More Is More appeared on saxophonist Evan Parker’s label: ‘I asked Peter what was the longest period he’d taken off from practice since he started at the age of seven, and he told me: “Five days.” ’ A new star. Evans studied at Oberlin and has since turned up in some of the most exciting projects around, including the warped (non-)repertory group Mostly Other People Do The Killing, Histrionics, Carnival, and the Sparks duo with Tom Blancarte, who also plays in Evans’s quartet. However, he first made a wider impact in that most difficult of all forms, a solo trumpet recital. More Is More is jaw-droppingly good, a calmly studied deconstruction of jazz trumpet that makes for one of the most exciting records of recent years and one that at a stroke proposes new directions for the instrument. It is not so much that Evans dives deep into ‘extended technique’, more that he harnesses the instrument’s untapped potential for ideas and procedures that immediately affect how a ‘lead horn’ might sound in a group situation. Evans made those implications clear in his first quartet record a year or so later, where the usual hierarchies of horn and rhythm and the familiar parameters of melody, harmonic architecture, pulse are not so much subverted as cheerfully circumvented: a brand-new jazz sound, equalled for freshness and invention only by someone like guitarist Mary Halvorson. Though it is far more than a set of exercises, the technique on More Is More is extraordinary, whether on piccolo trumpet (his apparent preference) or a concert instrument: notes are bent, stretched, pulled through timbral spectra and sometimes stabbed into the air with an almost physical intensity. It might not grab someone whose expectations are based on Lee Morgan or Miles Davis, but consider how close to the early jazz masters he sometimes sounds. This is music in a powerful lineage, not on a blank page.

评语：Trumpeter Dave Douglas says: ‘He has a unique writing style, with very long lines and very intricate in rhythm, to an extent that you can’t believe it was written down like that, but it was. He has the ability to make very complex things swing, in a way that is quite unique.’ Solal has just got better, steadily developing his compositional approach in ever more subtle ways. A duo album with Dave Douglas made around the same time as Solitude and for the same label is testimony to his continuing interest in new directions in jazz. But this CamJazz record is a near-perfect solo piano recital that combines favourite standards with a central section of originals. ‘Darn That Dream’ is broodingly romantic, but the romanticism is grounded in complex harmonic development and a deceptively loose metre that gradually pulls together towards the end. The alternate that bookends the record doesn’t have quite the same architecture, but it’s bolder still in terms of repositioning the original song and chords. Any sense that this is an old man – he was nearly 80 – musing quietly on well-trodden themes and declining to exert himself is quickly dispelled by the next three tracks. ‘Caravan’ is breathtaking, spilled out with dash and a kind of dangerous glamour. The fulcrum of ‘Our Love Is Here To Stay’ is a descending chordal pattern that is all the more dramatic for being so utterly right in context. Then, cleverly, he programmes three originals. ‘Chi Va Piano …’ is all angles and determined purpose. ‘Medium’ might almost be Monk in places, but with hammered chords and sharp left-hand chimes that could be boxing bells. And then ‘Bluesine’, which remains perhaps the one Solal composition that everyone knows. On that score, he’d be entitled to indulge himself a little, but he takes the pace right down and lets it merely … happen, brisk triplets, tightly pedalled chords and low, low bottom-end accents. You realize that much as he loves trio playing he can do bass and drums parts pretty much on his own. Superb.

评语：Steve Lehman says: ‘I had Craig Taborn’s Junk Magic and Braxton’s Fall 1974 knocking around my subconscious. I remember being able to write dense and challenging pieces like “Demian” knowing that they would be executed with precision by a combination of sequenced instruments and Tyshawn’s remarkable drumming. It was good to sneak in a chamber work for saxophone quartet, percussionist and live electronics, and to present compositions from multiple vantages (Cognition, Damage Mobility, Logic).’ A pupil of both Jackie McLean and Anthony Braxton, the impressive New Yorker works in an advanced post-bop vein. He first came to notice in Braxton’s ensemble, but has made rapid progress on his own account and as a member of Fieldwork. Lehman’s breakthrough record was Interface in 2003, a spare, exposed trio with bassist Mark Dresser and percussionist Pheeroan akLaff (also a teacher at Wesleyan, where Lehman studied). As the sole horn, he sometimes over-elaborates ideas, notably on the long ‘Motion’, but a new emphasis on sopranino saxophone sets some stern harmonic hurdles which he clears without seeming effort and with some aplomb. The writing is hugely impressive. Demian As Posthuman (the name is a Hesse reference) took him on a somewhat different course. Basically a set of duets with the brilliant Sorey, some pieces are reworked with almost a hip-hop sensibility. There was to have been a hip-hop track on the disc but copyright problems meant it was withdrawn. Lehman treats ideas like ‘Damage Mobility’ in a neo-Cubist way, using multiple saxophone perspectives and tough harmonizations in the overdubbing. Some tracks are played over strong bass vamps from Ndegeocello, but the drama always returns to Lehman’s work with the drummer. Everything he has done since confirms his standing as a star of some magnitude. This one, though, stands out strongly.

评语：Kahil El’Zabar says: ‘A very emotional recording for me: the music acknowledges the spirit of my friend and mentor Malachi Favors, who taught me the importance of perseverance. I believe Malachi would have been proud of us, for the music represents something he was fond of repeating: “Ancient to the Future, a Power stronger than itself.” I felt very much in the moment and very much alive. The spirit expressed in our Oneness amplifies the baptismal ritual in living for the arts!’ A leading light among the spirits who emerged from AACM, the Chicagoan’s small groups, the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and the Ritual Trio, seek big-scale results in terms of creating new African-American fusions. He once designed dresses for Nina Simone, played with rock groups and has more recently done the musical arrangements for the stage version of The Lion King. Above all, he upholds the communitarian values that framed and sustained AACM. Somewhat like the Art Ensemble Of Chicago, El’Zabar’s groups are almost always best experienced live, something that Delmark’s DVD imprints are making possible. However, none of his records are anything less than exciting and intensely colourful, with a smack of spiritual uplift. Earlier records like Renaissance Of The Resistance and Big Cliff had involved Favors and Bang, and after the bassist’s death Bang rejoined for this tribute. There is, incidentally, a second tribute disc on Delmark, called Big M, but we find it strangely lacklustre. The River East recording begins with a long, long El’Zabar intro on ‘Big M’, brilliant on kalimba, with Brown and Bang only coming in well through the track. The sound isn’t pristine, but the sense of occasion is palpable. The man with the hardest job on the night, new bassist Israel, has an opportunity to stake his claim at the start of ‘Return Of The Lost Tribe’, a deceptively easy-going jazz piece originally on the Bright Moments CD with Joseph Jarman and Kalaparush Maurice McIntyre, pushed along by El’Zabar’s solid kit-playing. ‘Where Do You Want To Go?’ has a curious mixture of poignancy and anger, also reflected in Kahil’s vocal contributions. He testifies exuberantly on ‘Be Exciting’, a memorial testimony to Favors but also a jeremiad on the post-9/11 world. El’Zabar always holds the centre, with Israel as his anchor, but it’s Bang and the outrageously underrated Brown who make this fine record. The crowd buzz merely adds to the party atmosphere and we’re not persuaded you really need the DVD to catch the mood of the event.

评语：David Hazeltine says: ‘I was worried how some of the tunes/arrangements such as “How Deep Is Your Love” would actually work and then go over with jazz fans. I remember listening to it months later and thinking: “Mission accomplished”, mostly because of how David and Joe brought things to life!’ Hazeltine’s list of influences includes Oscar Peterson, Barry Harris, Buddy Montgomery, Cedar Walton. He’s a communicator in the Peterson manner, voicing melodies in a recognizable yet inventive way, adding just enough rhythmic nuance to take an interpretation out of the ordinary and placing absolute trust in his musicians, and he himself always works for the band. Though he says he prefers to work with more modern material (‘Betcha By Golly Wow’ is on the debut Criss Cross), he still does very well out of more familiar standards when the need arises, an unerring sense of tempo helping to swing the melodies and set the pace for constructions that are intricate without seeming fussy or deliberately complex. There’s an easeful consistency to Hazeltine’s music that might threaten to consign it to the background if he weren’t shrewd enough to keep the material fresh. The move away from Criss Cross – though Teekens had done him proud – was positive and well-timed. Modern Standards is, if anything, better even than the earlier Classic Trio, and merits every enthusiasm. Impeccably produced by Marc Edelman, the trio gets a full, rounded sound which maximizes its virtues. The tunes are familiar but not hackneyed, and Hazeltine bites the bullet on pop material: ‘Yesterday’, ‘How Deep Is Your Love’ and ‘For The Love Of You’ are all shaped with logic and finesse.

评语：John Butcher says: ‘Live situations can stimulate playing intentions as varied as thinking about Derek Bailey, making sense of multiple reverberations and taming feedback into song. The CD is a virtual solo concert from different mental and geographical states.’ Often hailed as a successor to Evan Parker, Butcher has moved on a parallel path, exploring solo saxophone improvisation, joining a latter-day configuration of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and diversifying into electronic manipulations. He is, however, a distinct and highly independent musical thinker who began his career as a theoretical physicist, researching quarks and their mysterious property of ‘charm’. His first forays into music were with pianist Chris Burn’s group and playing Stockhausen’s ‘intuitive’ scores. Since then, he has worked in a wide variety of contexts, extending contemporary saxophone language in free music, scored composition and electronic context, but with a growing interest in the properties of feedback and site-specific resonances. Now a prolific recording artist, under his own name and with ensembles as various as Polwechsel and the London Improvisers Orchestra, Butcher first came to wider notice with the 1991 solo record Thirteen Friendly Numbers. One of the most remarkable developments of his music since that time has been his ability to blur the distinction between ‘acoustic’ and electronic sounds, and those produced in conjunction with the playing environment. The first two and the last of these quite extraordinary performances were made respectively in the Ova Stone Museum at Utsunonimaya in Japan, and in a rebuilt gasometer at Oberhausen, Germany. The latter deal with elements of delay and decay in a way that other instrumentalists have also examined, but the Japanese recordings make use of the location’s strange, square-cut space in a quite unique fashion, yielding a sound radically divorced from any conventional – or ‘extended’ – saxophone language. On ‘A Short Time To Sing’, the use of amplification/feedback yields a curious percussive effect. The other piece which uses this approach is ‘Soft Logic’, from the same London performance. Perhaps the most straightforward saxophonic playing on the set comes on ‘But More So’, recorded in Paris in November 2006 in tribute to Derek Bailey.

评语：Bernardo Sassetti says: ‘I’ve met a lot of people in my life and a lot of musical instruments, but I never thought there were so many until I first went into Drumming’s percussion room. It changed my life. It was almost shocking to see hundreds of small instruments, dozens of huge ones. It was then I decided to go ahead with Unreal: Sidewalk Cartoon.’ Sassetti spent some time in London in the ’90s and became familar to British audiences from his work in the Guy Barker group. You may have seen him as a member of the Napoli Jazz Sextet in the Anthony Minghella movie The Talented Mr Ripley. He’s now back in Lisbon and thriving in the burgeoning live and recording situation there. An early recording is out of circulation but Sassetti has found a niche with Clean Feed and his previous records, Nocturno (an astonishingly mature self-assessment) and Indigo, should be checked out for a glimpse of his elegant pianism and compositional vision. A hugely ambitious project that unites Sassetti’s jazz-based work with his cinematic projects. It’s a collaboration with percussion ensemble Drumming (GP), and on some tracks the Quarteto Saxofinia and Cromeleque Quinteto; the basic group is a fine but unorthodox sextet comprising reeds, flute, tuba, double bass and drums. Sassetti himself works at the keyboard and inside his Kawai concert grand and also plays marimba, glockenspiel, steel drums and gongs. The sound is rich, delicate, flowing and constantly inflected in new ways, all laid over a pattering, softly ringing accompaniment. If jazz is largely concerned with line, trajectory and movement, this is much more like that contemporary cliché, an ‘immersive’ experience. Nothing clichéd about Sassetti’s approach, though, and in the final analysis it is still essentially a jazz record. Sambeat’s exquisite line on ‘Conjuntivo Plural Do Iniciativo’, which follows the abstract prologue, is reminiscent of some of Carlos Ward’s spacious, folk-tinged solos. There’s even a reading of Monk’s ‘Evidence’, a stop/start interpretation that opens up the original metre and finds acres of new territory to explore. The closing ‘Sidewalk Cartoons’, which is listed separately to the main course of tracks and begins with what sounds like studio chatter, is almost a new-music piece, and testimony to the precision and careful integration of the ensemble. It’s possible to fake an entry on a woodwind instrument, sliding in behind the beat, but quite impossible on percussion – either it’s there or it’s not. The pianist’s own finest moment comes on the lyrical ‘I Left My Heart In Algandros De Baixo’, a graceful ballad. Quite the finest work from Sassetti to date, this is music beyond category and, for us, pretty much beyond criticism. The pianist is also responsible for the booklet artwork, a mysterious collage which reflects the aesthetic of the music perfectly. A moving, involving experience.

评语：Marty Ehrlich says: ‘The title comes from a phrase Jerome Harris heard in North Carolina. “I’m wondering what’s waiting on the rail for the lizard.” Howard Johnson thought the emphasis should be on the second syllable of “lizard”. Every player on this recording has their own vernacular dialect, with rich blues roots. A lot of flavours to write for, luxuriate in, and give context to.’ Ehrlich studied with Ran Blake and others at the New England Conservatory and after establishing himself in New York at the end of the ’70s became an indispensable figure on the scene there, his multi-instrumentalism a huge asset to any group. He’d begun his professional career with Human Arts Ensemble before starting to develop a line of work of his own that seems to us to pick up where Eric Dolphy laid off. Some of Ehrlich’s previous records were marred by inconsequential writing. An earlier Palmetto session, Line On Love, fails on this account. What’s immediately striking right from the opening of News On The Rail is how confidently this sextet crackles along on the vivid charts for ‘Enough Is Enough’. A relatively unusual instrumentation comes into its own on ‘Hear You Say’, with the redoubtable Johnson setting down a righteous groove for Ehrlich’s stunning alto solo. Elsewhere the leader favours his clarinet, interweaving with more unique ensemble effects; melodica’s not often strongly featured in jazz, but it has its place and Weidman makes the strongest possible case for it. Miller keeps everything tight but not regimented and Cohen, who plays a sweeping intro to the title-track, is in excellent supportive form.

评语：Evan Parker says: ‘We played together for the first time in Chicago, at a club called The Hot House – it was summer and the landlord had switched the air conditioning off in a battle with Marguerite Horberg, the tenant and owner of the club, so it was hot. We decided to try to work together after that, but it took the Transatlantic Art Ensemble project in Munich to galvanize things. The connection between London and Chicago is strong.’ In the autumn of 2004, Mitchell and Evan Parker came together in a Munich concert hall to record a grouping that involves members both of the Englishman’s ensemble and of the Note Factory, as well as others, under the ad hoc title The Transatlantic Art Ensemble. The immediate feel is very much of a classical group, with strings, tymps and piano generating a sound-world reminiscent of European art music. Indeed, there is little obviously improvised about the longish opening track. Mitchell plays soprano saxophone throughout, while Parker also deploys his tenor, but what defines this music most clearly as the American’s is not the sound of his horn per se, but something about the way the music organizes itself, periods of intense activity bracketed by silence, duos (beginning with Lytton and Tabbal in the second section) breaking out of the ensemble. The sequence of ‘movements’, nine in all, and the title reference to three parts don’t quite seem to square unless one checks the sleeve frequently, but that is why the title is not given as Composition & Improvisation (as if a set of themes and variations) but with a slash that more or less suspends any fundamental distinction between the two. As with much of Mitchell’s work, the delivery is mostly rather quiet and unemphatic, with a tendency to dwell not just on exact pitchings but also on the precise tone-colour of particular sounds. Taborn’s role is fascinating. At moments, he seems to be articulating some approximate tonal centre for the music, some gravitational point of reference that never quite manages to resist the centrifugal energy of the strings and horns; at others, he is the archetypal pianist-as-percussionist, banging out sharp attacks that are more reminiscent of Cecil Taylor’s famous ‘88 tuned drums’ definition than most of the work lazily and misleadingly attributed to Taylor’s influence. The long ‘Movement III’ moves into something like ‘free jazz’, but while there is considerable exhilaration in the playing, this is arguably the least typical and least successful aspect of the performance. After some more short sequences, there are two extended movements – ‘VII/VIII’ – in which the integration of elements seems more complete though not subject to any discernible logic or determination. The coda is deliciously ambiguous. Far from reaching a climax, the sequence dissolves into a shimmer, as if some tiny subset of the whole cosmological process has gone into reverse, solids turning to gas, orbits no longer regular or fixed, location and velocity uncertain. Nothing in the canon of 20th-century Western art music conveys so much satisfying mystery.

评语：Maria Schneider says: ‘That recording will always be close to my heart. It was my first record that felt like one cohesive musical statement. I got exactly the sound I wanted on it (our engineer, David Baker, died shortly after it was mixed, and it was the last record found in his CD player), it was my first record on ArtistShare that was completely funded by listeners, it brought us our first Grammy.’ After lessons from Bob Brookmeyer and a stint as assistant to Gil Evans, she had the best possible grounding in big-band jazz, and yet setting out on her own, as she did in 1989, was brave in the extreme; but a Monday night residency at Visiones in New York gave her a platform. Schneider’s characteristic voice is closer to Brookmeyer’s than to the more obvious Svengali, a rich fabric of sound that is alert to nuance but still capable of great power. Her use of a relatively straightforward rhythm section belies the sophistication of the metre, and often the horns are playing improbable counts over a basic 4/4. Schneider was blessed from the very start by a team of time-served craftsmen with enough musical individuality to temper the slightly too accurate placing of the charts. Concert In The Garden is the great achievement of her career so far, a flowing, sometimes enigmatic, more often uplifting set that finally brings together all of Schneider’s strengths. A Grammy win helped put the seal on things. The closing ‘Buleria, Sole Y Rumba’ is the most obvious acknowledgement of all she learned from Gil Evans, but the ‘Three Romances’ which make up the middle of the record, with wonderful wordless vocalizing from Luciana Souza, are remarkable too. The only slight disappointment is the long opening title-track, which meanders, though Monder, Kimbrough and Versace trace a lovely path through it. Jensen’s ‘Pas De Deux’ with Pillow is another highlight, while McCaslin (who got a Grammy nomination, too) and Gisbert star on that amazing final track. A contemporary masterpiece.

评语：Ben Goldberg says: ‘This music is for my hero, Steve Lacy, written after I learned he had cancer. I idolized Steve and used to listen four times a day to Evidence, made in 1961 with Don Cherry. I memorized his solos. What was he doing? The note that lifts all other notes up into the world. Punctuation. The line that’s backwards and forwards and the pop of logic more logical than logic. He gave me a lesson once. Steve said you had to know the difference between materials and material. He talked matter of factly about the invisible. I worked on his exercises for ten years. I had booked the studio for June 7th; Steve passed away June 4th. We had a rehearsal and then made the record. It was a sad time.’ Goldberg is an experienced voice in and out of jazz. He’s an adept of klezmer as well and savvy about modern composition. At heart, he’s an improviser, despite the ‘correct’ tonality and very accurate pitching. Few players in this realm dare to let the note-choices do the work, without ‘expressive’ contortions, and he’s to be commended for it. The trio record Almost Never is reminiscent of a latter-day Jimmy Giuffre project, albeit the reed tone is different, but Goldberg has an even more ambitious game to follow. After 2000, Goldberg seemed to look around and take stock. There seemed to be a break of almost five years in recording under his own name. His return came freighted with emotion following the death of his inspiration, Steve Lacy. The great man’s personality is woven through these mournfully effervescent tracks. The title comes from Lacy’s favourite poet, Robert Creeley. The most explicit tribute is Lacy’s own ‘Blinks’, which then informs writing of a markedly numinous sort. The playing is outwardly chaotic, with the three leads vying for space, but there’s a stern inner logic, even if it doesn’t present in logical forms. This seems to be the album’s subtext. There is ‘Cortège’, but there is also ‘Song And Dance’, though not in the expected order. It’s a record full of complex messages and stunning play. Hoff and Smith create an intricate web of rhythm patterns, leaving the front three, with Kihlstedt doubling on vocals, to create a rich, ambiguous drama.

评语：Rudresh Mahanthappa says: ‘This was an attempt to humanize and even beautify the perceived coldness of cryptography, data encryption and the mathematic concepts behind both. Engaging such methodology in music composition is nothing new but my goal was to be blunt with it while putting forth something emotionally varied and aesthetically complete that is worthy of multiple listens.’ An Indian-American based in NY since 1997, Mahanthappa addresses questions of identity and culture within his own jazz idiom. Tired of being asked: ‘Do you speak Indian?’, he gave a powerfully direct answer in Mother Tongue, a sequence of compositions that are ‘directly based on melodic transcriptions of Indian-Americans responding to such questions in their native Indian tongues’. It was a high-concept project compared to the usual jazz date, but he delivered a convincing statement, somewhat reminiscent of some of Greg Osby’s small-group music, punctuated with bittersweet episodes and steep contrapuntal inclines. A couple of limited-circulation CDs, Yatra and Black Water, preceded Mother Tongue, but it was what came after that consolidated his reputation as one of the most interesting younger players on the New York scene. He arrived in the Big Apple in 1997. Mahanthappa can be terse and inward in his delivery, but he has a fine, wounding sound on the alto and on Codebook he seems to have got past all vestiges of polemic and into an idiom that bids for nothing less than a rich new musical metalanguage. One sees immediately how these concerns arise out of those of Mother Tongue, but the music, peppery and sometimes confrontational, is rich and inclusive, with every note there for a purpose, and no fat. It might sound belittling to liken this to logic and algorithms, but there’s something of that cleanness. ‘The Decider’ and ‘Refresh’ make for a fine opening, but the set ends on ‘My Sweetest’, and if ‘ballad’ playing is the ultimate test of a saxophonist’s skill and vision, Mahanthappa passes here too: it’s a subtle but by no means cloying statement, worthy of Stan Getz.