Music

DownBeat magazine has assembled into a 350-odd-page book nearly all of its Miles Davis coverage in three sections devoted to news, features, and reviews. No artist was covered so thoroughly in the magazine; Miles's intelligence, talent, charisma, and charming pugnacity always made him a fascinating subject.

And who could blame him for his defensiveness? The earliest news items in "The Miles Davis Reader" recount a 1959 altercation involving Miles and a police officer. The episode escalated into a threatened wrongful arrest suit against the City of New York. Fearing future harassment should the suit be pursuit, Miles let the matter drop when he was cleared of all charges.

Miles was an irrespressible critic in the several "Blindfold Tests" he submitted to over the years. In a particularly spiky 1964 encounter, he brutalizes Les McCann and the Jazz Crusaders ("What's that supposed to be? That ain't nothin'"), Clark Terry ("I've always liked Clark. But this is a sad record"), and a trio consisting of Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach ("Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke") in the course of a single session.

One writer visited Miles at the Johnny Coulton Physical Training Club, where he boxed, and the interview got physical. Another saw Miles at home and described a bedroom he'd never want to leave. A third wondered what Davis had been listening to lately. "Nobody—I listen to Stockhausen," Miles replied, referring to avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died on Dec. 5, 2007. Reviews range from enthusiasm to adulation, except for an early-'70s valley of disdain for Miles's electric experiments. However, this was rectified when the performances were reissued during the '80s via some inciteful reconsiderations.

Davis's evolving sartorial panache can be appreciated in DownBeat's cover designs, which likewise devolved from cool to groovy to gaudy.

An alternate jazz universe has long been bubbling along nicely in Amsterdam, as chronicled in Kevin Whitehead's "New Dutch Swing." Among that scene's stars is the Willem Breuker Kollektief, formed in 1974 by clarinet and saxophone player Breuker, who also writes most of the group's music. The ten-member Kollektief (consisting of three saxophones, four horns, and rhythm section) finished its short American tour Monday with a show at Joe's Pub in Manhattan. There were a couple of disappointments from the get-go. Unfortunately, the band wasn't performing Breuker's new music for F. W. Murnau's 1926 silent film, "Faust," as they had been elsewhere on the tour, and Breuker himself was absent due to illness.

Breuker's absence toned down the onstage zaniness and physical high jinks that have long characterized the group. Like Frank Zappa, Breuker is a strong advocate of humorous music, and, again like Zappa, his writing is a rapid-fire collage of styles, keys, time signatures, and free improvisation. Rather than being based on African-American blues, however, Breuker's roots lie in European classical music, cabaret songs, and music-hall rhythms. The highlights of the somewhat subdued tentet's show at Joe's Pub included pianist Henk de Jonge's long, wild piano solo blending Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" with Dave Brubeck's "Take Five"; Hermine Deurloo's harmonica and alto-sax solos (unlike the rest of the band, she is both female and relatively young); and a gorgeous fugue. They came, they swung, and they headed home. Get well, Willem.

Everything changed for jazz giant John Coltrane when he sobered up and kicked heroin in May 1957. Having been fired by Miles Davis for unprofessional behavior in April, the saxophonist turned his life around and joined Thelonious Monk's quartet that summer. (Blue Note has sold more than 370,000 copies of the thoroughly enchanting "Thelonious Monk Quartet With John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall" since its 2005 release.) Ben Ratliff, jazz critic for The New York Times, offers his own sober assessment of Coltrane's sound, style, and influence in "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound," a two-part tale. Part one is a fairly standard biography concentrating on Coltrane the working musician. Part two, however, focuses first on Coltrane as a musical sponge, soaking up the influences around him. He distilled them into the most influential sonic essence of his generation up to and following his premature death in 1967 at age 40.

Coltrane evolved from a lucid bebopper and cool swinger into a pop experimentalist (with "My Favorite Things") before cutting a thoroughly original path into the spiritual beyond in records such as "A Love Supreme." Coltrane, according to Ratliff, was driven to express the sounds he heard in his head, no matter what the consequences or cost. Fortunately, Coltrane found the band to execute those sounds. He may have been obsessed, not to mention a little depressed, but he left an apparently unalterable signature of fleeting notes on the way jazz is heard and performed today.

I'm getting a kick out of Coltrane, the sideman, as heard on "Interplay," a five-CD box set of under-rehearsed sessions he recorded for Prestige between 1956 and 1958 with the so-called Prestige All-Stars, pianist Mal Waldron and guitarist Kenny Burrell. Coltrane's famous recovery took place between discs three and four, so compare and contrast.

Saxophonist Dexter Gordon saunters off a Holland street and onto a small club's stage, where he wryly introduces and then performs a sizzling "Night in Tunisia." Gordon's is just one of the mesmerizing performances captured on the second series of seriously wonderful Jazz Icons DVDs released by Reelin' in the Years Productions and Naxos Records. The seven new volumes are devoted to John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck, Sarah Vaughan, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, and Wes Montgomery, in addition to Gordon, and were filmed in Europe between 1958 and 1966. Much of this footage has never been seen before; most of the albums include a few different dates, sometimes filmed years apart; and all were shot in vintage black and white. Even the liner notes are better than average. Who wouldn't want to read Pat Metheny on Wes Montgomery? Or Darius Brubeck on his father, Dave?

Every volume suggests historical import. In Germany in 1960, Coltrane was playing, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, with Miles Davis's quintet sans Miles; a year later, Coltrane returned with his own band and genius in full flight. From the "Black and Tan Fantasy" that opens Duke Ellington's 80-minute 1958 Copenhagen concert to the 11-minute "Diminuendo in Blue and Crescendo in Blue" that closes it, both audience and band seem tuned into the same exuberant vibe (stick around after the credits and watch the band members pack up their instruments at show's end). And Wes Montgomery comes off as an immensely patient leader as he banters genially and teaches his material to three different, fresh rhythm sections in 1965. It's long been a cliché that American jazz stars received more love in Europe than at home. The Jazz Icons series almost proves it.

Jazz-rock guitar icon John McLaughlin recently completed his first North American tour (at least with an electric band) in nearly a decade. And John Kelman, along for much of the ride with McLaughlin's quartet 4th Dimension (pushing the envelope here), has published a remarkably detailed seven-part account of the trip for All About Jazz. It includes extensive interviews with McLaughlin, snapshots (both literal and journalistic) from the tour, and more about what a road manager does than you probably need to know. McLaughlin released such excellent albums as Extrapolation in England before relocating to America to work with drummer Tony Williams and Miles Davis, whom he joined for In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, On the Corner, Big Fun, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. After becoming a follower of Indian spiritual guru Sri Chinmoy, McLaughlin formed the very loud and fast original version of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, which existed in three different incarnations between 1971 and 1987.

Asked for his take on the current jazz scene, McLaughlin told Kelman,

"Over the last 15 years I've been somewhat disenchanted with what's coming out of the jazz world. I know we don't like to make comparisons, but nevertheless I have to, the comparisons are there all the time. When I think of the '60s, I think of the fabulous innovations that came out—those shining, brilliant minds and hearts and souls coming out and expressing themselves in music. If you ask me, pure jazz was crystallized with [Miles Davis's] Kind of Blue."

McLaughlin leads the second and third versions of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the two radically different concerts of impure jazz captured on the double-disc DVD album Mahavishnu Orchestra: Live at Montreux 1984/1974. The earlier performance features McLaughlin at the height of his devotional phase, dressed in white and wielding his double-necked instrument like a fiery scepter. The 1984 show produces fewer decibels and has influences ranging from Brazilian and Indian styles to flamenco, electronics, and Stevie Wonder's funk-rock. It's smooth yet dynamic.

At a crawfish boil during last years New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, I asked Paul Sanchez of rambunctious local rock group Cowboy Mouth which New Orleans musician he thought was most deserving of attention outside the Crescent City. "John Boutté," he said without a moment's hesitation. "He's the best singer in town." I didn't get a chance to hear Boutté until this year's Jazz Fest, where, backed by a jazz group, he sang tunes like Stevie Wonder's "You Haven't Done Nothin'" to a big crowd. I was highly impressed, if not overwhelmed, and looked forward to hearing him in a smaller room.

I was overwhelmed Friday night in Central Park's outdoor Delacorte Theater, however. In front of an audience thinned by an earlier shower, accompanied only by a guitarist and occasionally banging a tambourine, John Boutté sang a devastating set of tunes inspired in large part by Katrina and its aftermath. Boutté sings in a rough sweet voice that can take you places no other vocalist can. He sings jazz like a soul singer, and soul, folk, and rock tunes like the jazz virtuoso he is. His impeccable taste helps. Boutté opened his set with Rogers and Hammerstein's ironic antiracist song "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught" (from South Pacific) and continued with Neil Young's unironic antiracist statement "Southern Man." He also sang Arlo Guthrie's "City of New Orleans," a heartbreaking "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans," and Randy Newman's eerily prophetic "Louisiana 1927" (which you can see him perform with Paul Sanchez here). Somewhere in the middle he lightened up with Allen Toussaint's "Lipstick Traces (on a Cigarette)," a hit for r&b singer Lee Dorsey. Mr. Toussaint, who relocated to New York after Katrina and happened to be sitting behind me, beamed his approval.

Alto saxophonist Art Pepper was a piece of work. An emotional bebop improviser with TV-star, if not movie-star, looks, Pepper acquired a world-class heroin habit while playing in Stan Kenton's big band during the forties. He nonetheless managed to record more than a hundred albums during a career punctuated by drug-related prison stays, including a five-year stint in San Quentin. He met his second wife, Laurie Pepper, in the Synanon rehab program, and she helped put him on track for a robust later-life career that ended with his death in 1982 at age fifty-six. The Peppers began recording an oral account of Art's tumultuous life after leaving Synanon in 1972. The resulting book, 1979's Straight Life, is as eloquent as his saxophone playing, and practically begs to be filmed with someone such as Johnny Depp in the lead role.

It turns out that many people in the film industry, including Mr. Depp, have approached Laurie Pepper about translating Art's words into film. Frustrated by the compromises they would have her make, e.g. selling the story and walking away from any other participation in the project, Laurie has bravely, and perhaps foolishly, opted to film it herself on digital video with an Apple computer. "They thought they knew who Art was," Laurie says of her Hollywood suitors. "A tragic wild man, a junkie hipster. Art was way more interesting than that. I wasn't going to let them lie about him."

Clips of her early results can be seen at Straight Life: The Movie. Using audio from the cheap, noisy tapes they used to write the book, a glorious selection of Pepper's music, and a visual style reminiscent of Monty Python animation, Pepper appears to be on her way to creating one of the most honest and uncompromising, i.e. straight, jazz films ever.

Tom Petty's version of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" (listen here) is part of Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino, due out Tuesday. John Lennon, Elton John, Dr. John, Neil Young, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, and others perform Domino's bumptious R&B on a double-CD set benefiting the Tipitina's Foundation, which purchases instruments for New Orleans school children and funds other community programs.

Joni Mitchell reworks "Big Yellow Taxi" for Shine, her first release since 2002's Travelogue. Mitchell's 1970 hit fits her politically engaged new album perfectly, and you can hear it here.

Michael Jackson's famous "Thriller" video, directed by John Landis, was great creepy fun when it hit MTV in 1983, and many still consider it the best video ever. But you're in for a shock if you still haven't seen the version performed by inmates of the Cebu Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines, which has been racking up millions of views on YouTube. The inmates have also performed "Sister Act" and "Jailhouse Rock," but "Thriller" is their masterpiece. Watch and read more about it here.

Grateful Dead fans will swoon over this intimate onstage seven-minute version of "Dark Star" from 1970.

Listening to Easy Living this morning while running reminded me how much I love the quintessential cool playing of saxophonist Paul Desmond. Watch him perform his beautiful ballad "Emily" at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1975.

Jazz pianist Joe Zawinul's late-life artistic surge was cut short last month, when he was unexpectedly hospitalized following a six-week tour of Hungary, and he died yesterday of Merkel cell carcinoma. He was classically trained, and performed with Dinah Washington, Maynard Ferguson, and Cannonball Adderley after immigrating to the United States in 1959. His composition "Pharaoh's Dance" took up an entire side of Miles Davis's electric breakthrough double album, Bitches Brew. As founder of Weather Report in 1970 along with saxophonist Wayne Shorter and bassist Miroslav Vitous, Zawinul expanded jazz's parameters to include rock rhythms, electronic keyboard effects, and the musics of Brazil, India, and Africa. Although Weather Report was pigeonholed as "jazz fusion," it seemed to exist in order to defy any simple categorization. Earlier this year he released Brown Street, a live double CD containing expansive big-band versions of "In a Silent Way," which he also composed, and Weather Report material such as "Black Market." It's a terrific album, and I looked forward to his next pass through town.

Jazz pianist Herbie Hancock aims to interpret Joni Mitchell's lyrics as well as her music on River: The Joni Letters, out September 25, and you can listen to Hancock's instrumental take on "Both Sides Now" here (Mac stream) or here (PC stream). Regarding his slow, sensuous take on the tune, Hancock said (in a press release), "There are places I decided would be resting places before I went to the next phrase, which Joni doesn't have on her recording of the song. Completely reharmonizing 'Both Sides Now' seemed appropriate to the lyrics." Beside its four instrumentals, Rivers also includes guest vocals by Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, and Mitchell herself. Hancock's band includes Wayne Shorter (saxophone) and Dave Holland (bass). Hancock performed with Mitchell on her 1979 album Mingus. He told the Washington Post recently, "It occurred to me that this would be the perfect opportunity to learn something that eluded me for so many years, which is putting lyrics into real focus on one of my records."

Smooth Louis Balfour brings you "all that's best in the world of jazz," which turns out to be every jazz cliché under the sun, on the "Jazz Club" segments of the BBC's "Fast Show." Enjoy trumpet sucker Jackson Jeffrey Jackson ("Tune? This is jazz"), Doodles Bronson, the dinner jazz delights of "Crazy Nights and Lazy Days," John Cage's 4'33" of jazz, and lots more. Soo-perb.

The great jazz drummer Max Roach died in his sleep Wednesday night. Roach created a new kind of drumming as bebop's preeminent percussionist during the forties, and reinvented himself consistently throughout his career without ever losing the drive and lilt on display here. Roach performed with Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, and Cecil Taylor, but his best group was arguably the quintet he led in the early fifties with trumpeter Clifford Jordan, who died in a car crash in 1956. Pete Hamill wrote in The New Yorker that Roach once told him that he never got over it.

I always loved Roach's unorthodox approach to arranging, especially his all-percussion ensemble M'Boom, with whom he worked during the seventies, and his "double quartet" featuring four string players. His most important recording, however, may well be We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. Featuring singer Abbey Lincoln, Roach's musical interpretation of the civil rights movement and hundreds of years of African-American history was an uncompromising tour de force that sounds as powerful today as when he released it in 1960. You can see him perform the angry and powerful music that eventually led to his being blacklisted by the American music industry here and here.

Jackie Greene, who I caught at Joe's Pub (NYC) Sunday night, is a great-looking twenty-six-year-old Californian who could pass for a decade younger. Greene's claim to fame these days is his recent recruitment in Phil Lesh & Friends, a Grateful Dead repertory band led by its former bassist, and the club was a little loopy with assertive Dead fans eager to hear Greene's version of the canon. And while Greene, accompanied by guitarist Tim Bluhm, delivered perfectly adequate renditions of "Friend of the Devil" and "Sugaree," the problem was that his original material, which he performed on guitar, piano, and harmonica, was equally adequate except not, you know, written by Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter. Songs like "About Cell Block #9," "Farewell, So Long, Goodbye," and "The Rusty Nail" sounded unlived-in even as Greene cranked up the passion for these old-fashioned verses featuring jealous rages and do-wrong mamas. His records are a little more convincing, and he'll definitely make a certain type of Deadhead happy.

Same venue, following night, completely different story. My admiration for violinist Jenny Scheinman grows with every Tuesday she performs at her usual hangout, Barbès. But tonight she was enjoying a bigger stage and better sound system with a quartet, performing an unusually personal form of jazz-rock definitely in the spirit, if far from the letter, of the early ultraexperimental Grateful Dead (or Pink Floyd, in the case of one spacious epic). Scheinman was accompanied by her own low-key rock star, guitar experimentalist Nels Cline of Wilco, along with the nervously urgent rhythm section of bassist Todd Sickafoose and drummer Jim Black. And verily these cats did smoke. Scheinman has performed country, jazz, pop, and samba with the likes of Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Bill Frisell, and the Hot Club of San Francisco. All these experiences appear to blend together in compositions both serenely pastoral and anxiously urban. Yet it always sounded intensely intimate, of the moment, and resolutely nostalgia-free. I can't wait to hear what she does next.

No music is more conversational than small-group jazz, so it isn't surprising that the many great jazz musicians Ben Sidran interviewed during the five years he hosted the public-radio program "Sidran on Jazz" (1985-89) turn out to be quite a conversational bunch. A well-regarded jazz pianist himself, Sidran asked the right questions of the music's best players and recently released the results. Talking Jazz: An Oral History is a boxed set of twenty-four-CD boxed set containing conversations with sixty musicians. Talking Jazz is available online for the time being, and here are some highlights:

Miles Davis: "[John Coltrane] could play under the chord, over the chord, a minor third up from the fifth of the chord....[A] dramatic player like Trane...could just turn you on to the sound of one note. The only people I heard who could you do that was Charlie Parker and Coltrane. That's the only two I heard in my entire life."

Betty Carter: "It's a shame, too, that I and Art Blakey are the only two people that will really take that shot with the young twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds when there are so many musicians, my contemporaries, who work, who have not yet made the sacrifice to educate young players. We need more people like me and Art Blakey who will give these young musicians a job."

Dr. John: "You got three inside [rhythms] goin'....What I think was unique within the New Orleans thing was that people danced all three ways: slow, fast, or 'half-fast,' as the joke went."

Keith Jarrett: "This category thing always comes up because I seem to skirt them. But the simple truth of it is, once a category exists, what's in it is impotent....The only thing I've been interested in all along are the potentials that are missed in any given scene. The things that are forgotten by a whole audience in any given hall."

Michael Brecker: "Well, this might sound strange, but I believe strongly in commitment. That has worked out well for me....[Steps Ahead] allowed me to be myself, with all the good and bad.... I was comfortable in the shadows, trying to be kind of a mysterious soloist, and not have to really expose myself more than I had to....It just seems in the past few years I've been finally ready to venture out on my own, which is scary for me but has been very rewarding."

Wynton Marsalis: "Before I started playing with Art Blakey, I didn't even see how it was possible to play jazz. How could you make a living doing that?...I can honestly say that when I was playing with Art Blakey, I didn't know what you were supposed to be trying to do when you played a solo."

"I feel like I'm on the catwalk up here with all these cameras," pianist Brad Mehldau said from the stage of Carnegie Hall's Stern Auditorium Wednesday night as the flash photography continued. "Why don't we pretend I'm Alfred Brendel instead of some jazz musician?"

Until that point, Mehldau had been doing a pretty good imitation of an impeccably capable classical player in harmonically ravishing duets with guitarist Pat Metheny and then with a quartet filled out by the consistently inventive rhythm section of bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard. Near the end of a month-long tour, the foursome was performing music they recorded in 2005, for last year's Metheny Mehldau and this year's Metheny Mehldau Quartet with technically awesome neoclassic cool.

The tunes may eventually grow on us, but the focus was definitely on Mehldau's subtle impressionism and Metheny's fast, fluid guitar line drawings. But lots of notes didn't necessarily add up to a transcendent experience. Metheny mixed things up by switching from his main instrument, an Ibanez jazz box, to acoustic guitar for the duet titled "Make Peace." He whipped out his forty-two-string, triple-necked Pikasso electric guitar for the aptly titled "Sound of Water." He also slung on his guitar synth for "Ring of Life" and "Towards the Light" (a rocking change of pace), using the same thin trumpet tone for each. Which was a little odd, considering he has an entire digital orchestra's worth of sounds at his fingertips.

From the funky "A Night Away" to the introspective "Secret Beach," the group certainly covered a lot more stylistic and emotional ground than most classical players would in an evening. So what's the crime in being a mere jazz great?

Where most small jazz groups establish a melody or theme (the so-called head) prior to passing solos from one player to the next over the course of a song, Trio 202 weave melody, harmony, and rhythm into more delicately colored and remarkably buoyant musical tapestries. Trio 202 consists of three Brazilian acoustic-instrument virtuosos -- pianist Nelson Ayres, guitarist Ulisses Rocha, and accordionist Toninho Ferragutti -- who made their US debut together last night at New York's Jazz Standard. Rather than simply ripping through melodies to get to the all-important solos, the threesome scrupulously dissolved and reconstituted such themes as Tom Jobim's "Caminhos Cruzados" (Crossed Paths) or Ferragutti's lighter-than-air "Helicóptero" (Helicopter).

Emerging as MVP over the course of the set, Ferragutti added a novel and updated lexicon of Brazilian dance music - including choro, forró, and gafiera - to the group and made his instrument sing on waltz-like originals such as "Sanfoneon." Rocha dazzled with intricate finger-picked solos (check out his fluidly rocking electric playing on his solo album Fractal, if you can find it), while Ayres seems to have one of the lightest touches in all pianodom. Like a lilting musical antidepressant, Trio 202 produce a lightheaded sense of awe at the skill and restraint this fine and fizzy extension of tropical dance music demands.

Ayres, Ferragutti, and Rocha apparently rushed back to Sao Paolo today, alas. But my source tells me they may be returning to the states in eight months. Don't miss them if they do.

I missed pianist Andrew Hill's free concert in lower Manhattan's historic Trinity Church yesterday afternoon, alas. But I just discovered a wonderfully shot and recorded video steam of Hill's inspired hour here, so huzzah! My real consolation prize, though, was the first set of guitarist Nels Cline's two evenings at the Jazz Standard, where he's leading a sextet in raucously illuminating interpretations of Hill's music.

An undersung jazz giant, Andrew Hill released a beautiful album titled Time Lines on Blue Note last year as he was (and still is) battling cancer. Cline's quintet took apart, reassembled, and electrified Hill's often labyrinthine compositions. Cline is a contemporary guitar god, a longtime jazz experimentalist enjoying semipopular adulation as a recent addition to Jeff Tweedy's constantly evolving country-rock band, Wilco. Last night's band, an augmented version of the (strictly instrumental) Nels Cline Singers, added trumpeter Bobby Bradford, electronic accordionist Andrea Parkins, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg to Cline's usual rhythm section of bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola. You can hear them do what they do on New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill.

It was hard to tell when compositions ended and improvisation began, particularly since Cline had arranged several Hill tunes into long suites. Shards of Hill's melodies were passed between players like beautiful yet fractured balls of energy. The last of the set's three works, "McNeil Island"/"Pumpkin," worked up to a thoroughly rocking conclusion. It was Hill's music, alright, but it had never been played like this before.