A Vividly Symphonic, Epic Big Band Album and a Chinatown Gig From Pianist Manuel Valera
Pianist Manuel Valera has been a reliably tuneful fixture on the New York jazz stage, best known for his monthly residency with his New Cuban Express at Terraza 7, which ran for years until live music was criminalized here in 2020. His latest big band album, Distancia, counts as one of the millions which would have been released sometime that year if we all hadn’t been rudely interrupted. The good news is that he managed to finish it – that fall, restrictions be damned – and it’s streaming at Spotify. Valera and his New Cuban Express are at the Django on Jan 10 at 7 PM; cover is $25. For those who want to make a whole night of it, the 10:30 PM act, Sonido Costeno, play fiery guitar-fueled salsa dura and are also a lot of fun.
Like a lot of his countrymen, Valera has both a lyrical neoromantic side and a love for slinky beats, and his arrangements are nothing short of symphonic. Pretty much everything here is past ten minutes or close to it. He opens the record with Expectativas, the percussion answering the trombones to set up a catchy modal piano vamp and some cleverly lush exchanges by massed brass. Soprano saxophonist Charles Pillow ranges from allusive chromatics to a wicked downward spiral in a tantalizingly brief solo; trumpeter Brian Pareschi takes his time choosing his spots, then backing away for a light-fingered Samuel Torres conga solo artfully echoed by drummer Jimmy Macbride with a flick of his cymbals. It sets the stage for the rest of this absolutely brilliant, consistently gorgeous album.
The riffage in the interplay among the brass in the second number, Gemini, is a lot punchier, Valera hinting at a rhythmic shift before the group backs off for a cheery, spaciously paced Pareschi solo matched by baritone saxophonist Andrew Gutauskas. Valera keeps the pulse going with an incisive, rhythmic solo as Macbride shadows him; the band bring the tune full circle, guitarist Alex Goodman tantalizing with his pensive solo out.
Camila Meza’s signature lustrous vocalese mingles within catchy, fugal brass to introduce From Afar, the group developing a slow, orchestral sway, dipping to a spare, somewhat wistful trumpet solo. The way Valera sneaks Meza and the band back up into the mix is as artful as it is unselfconsciously gorgeous. It ends unresolved.
The tradeoffs are faster and lighter in Pathways: it’s a goodnatured joust, up to a meticulously articulated Valera break and a flurrying Michael Thomas alto sax solo. Meza carries the big riff through a fleeting piano/alto conversation. The horns give way to a moody moment as From the Ashes grows into a nimbly orchestrated salsa tune, but without the usual rumble on the low end. Trombonist Matt Macdonald flickers allusively; Valera tumbles and ripples, Macbride firing off a shower of cymbals. Pillow punches in as the forward drive grows funkier; the bandleader’s sudden turn toward the shadows will grab you by surprise. Lots of that on this record.
Impressionistic Romance is intriguingly allusive and tinged with the High Romantic, fueled by Valera’s steady cascades, a hint of a grim march and Bernard Herrmann. Echo effects move into the center as the low brass simmers and punches, Valera following a determined, unresolved tangent that the horns bring back to an uneasy landing.
Valera stays in brooding mode to open the album’s title track, Pillow pushing the group toward a warmer morning theme, then taking a more pensive break. Valera teams up with singer Bogna Kicinska’s resonant vocalese to build a glistening nocturnal tableau on the way out. He winds up the album where he started with the steady counterpoint and implied, vampy salsa groove of Remembere. It’s more straight-up big band jazz than it is traditionally Cuban; whatever the case, this is one of the most delicious big band albums of recent months.
A Gorgeously Translucent, Welcome Return For Pianist Marta Sanchez
Before the 2020 lockdown, pianist Marta Sanchez built an avid following for her incisively melodic compositions and earned a reputation for incandescent performances throughout New York and beyond. Fast forward to 2022: she was able to pull a first-class band together and make a new album, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), streaming at Bandcamp.
Empowerment is a recurrent theme here, no surprise considering the mass disempowerment of the past two years. The first track is The Unconquered Vulnerable Areas: a glimmer from Sanchez’s piano and then the band are off on a determined, loose-limbed scramble fueled by bassist Rashaan Carter and drummer. Allan Mednard. A strange and disquieting dichotomy appears between the chords of the pianist and alto saxophonist Alex LoRe’s off-center phrasing, as if the two are in completely different realities. A societal parable maybe? LoRe straightens out in a dip to harmonize with tenor saxophonist Roman Filiu, then Sanchez takes it out with an anthemic, bristling coda.
A similar sax/piano contrast reappears in the ballad Dear Worthiness: spare. questioning introductory harmonies expand to a sober triangulation, LoRe’s long solo rising from the mist to balletesque leaps as Sanchez punches harder and then delivers a nimble, glistening solo of her own.
Does the title track relate to Goya, or Sequeiros, or Kahlo? Good question. Picasso, maybe? It’s little contiguous for cubism, Sanchez’s purposeful forward drive setting up a similarly edgy Filiu solo as Mednard takes a machete to the underbrush, LoRe resuming a persistent bad-cop role.
The Eternal Stillness is hardly a study in calm, with wistfully soaring sax harmonies and an almost frantically clustering Carter solo. Sanchez follows her wryly spaced chords beneath with a characteristically, gorgeously allusive, Romantically-tinged concluding solo.
She expands the group with Camila Meza on vocals and guitar, Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet and Charlotte Greve adding subtle keys in Marivi, a tender, understatedly poignant tribute to her mom, whom she lost during the lockdown. Gentle trumpet spirals and eventually a glisteningly determined solo from Sanchez testify to what was obviously a deep love between the two women.
The album’s most trad number is If You Could Create It, Filiu’s steady. smoky flutters over Sanchez’s crescendoing modal chords: her chromatically-charged, gleaming solo afterward is one of the album’s high points. The Hard Balance – a work/life dichotomy – seems like a tough one for Sanchez, judging from the song’s moody, slow sway: LoRe gets to be good cop this time. Carter tries to get the party started but this crew is dealing with issues.
December 11th – the day Sanchez lost her mom – is the most serious of them, memorialized via a spare fugue, striking tango inflections, and an maticulously articulated Sanchez solo built around the opening theme. The album’s final cut is When Dreaming Is the Only – the only what? Sanchez makes her point, orchestrating a series of increasingly close, febrile exchanges between Filiu and LoRe over a constantly shifting backdrop with what could be a sly Terry Riley reference.
It’s early in the year to be talking about the best jazz albums of 2022, but right now this is on the shortlist.
Dafnis Prieto Brings His Lush, Gorgeous Latin Big Band Sounds to the Jazz Standard Next Month
Over the course of his career, drummer Dafnis Prieto has immersed himself in an enormous number of influences. So it’s no surprise that the new album by his explosive Big Band, Back to the Sunset – streaming at Spotify – is a salute to every latin jazz artist he’s drawn inspiration from, sometimes three composers in a single song! That mammoth ambition pays mighty dividends throughout the album’s nine epic tracks. Prieto’s compositions are very democratic, with tons of animated call-and-response and counterpoint, and everybody in the band gets time in the spotlight. This seventeen-piece crew are playing a short stand at the Jazz Standard June 6-10, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $30.
Trumpeter Brian Lynch takes centerstage on and off, with and without a mute, in the blazing opening number, Una Vez Más. Pianist Manuel Valera tumbles and then delivers a contrastingly elegant solo; the rest of the trumpet line (Mike Rodríguez, Nathan Eklund, Alex Sipiagin and Josh Deutsch) build a conflagration over a slinky Afro-Cuban groove; the band storm up to a catchy four-chord riff and a blast of a coda. Prieto dedicates all this to Lynch, along with Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri.
Is The Sooner the Better a mashup of bossa nova and Fort Apache flavor, since it’s a shout-out to Jerry Gonzalez and Egberto GIsmonti? With its rising exchanges throughout the band and relentlessly suspenseful pulse, it’s closer to the Brazilian composer’s most broodingly cinematic work. Baritone saxophonist Chris Cheek gets a tantalizingly brief, gruff solo, tenor saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum keeps it dark but gets more expansive, then piano and brass carry it away,
Cheek takes a wryly jovial solo to open Out of the Bone, whidh begins as a stunning, slashing mashup of Ethiopiques and Afro-Cuban styles. Massed brass carries the tune into more symphonic territory, then a droll, chattering interlude, and finally a round of trombones: Tim Albright, Alan Ferber, Jacob Garchik and Jeff Nelson.
Interestingly, the album’s gorgeously lingering, lavish title track is dedicated to Andrew Hill and Henry Threadgill, who takes a wryly spacious, peek-a-boo cameo on alto sax. The album’s longest number, Danzonish Potpourri, shifts suddenly from bluesy gravitas, to lush sweep, hushed piano-based glimmer and then a towering bolero spiced with shivery horn accents. How do they end this beast of a tune? With a coy Apfelbaum melodica solo.
Guest altoist Steve Coleman bubbles brightly, then hands off to trumpeter Nathan Eklund in Song for Chico, a cheery Veracruz-flavored number, much of which sounds like a long, joyous outro. Individual voices leap out from every corner of the sonic picture in the triumphantly shuffling Prelude Para Rosa, which like so many other tracks here morphs unexpectedly, in this case to a moody cha-cha with a spiraling Román Filiú alto sax solo.
The no-nonsense, bustling Two For One has similarly vast scattershot voicings, a smoky Apfelbaum solo followed by Valera’s scrambling attack and then a wry wind-down from Prieto and multi-percussionist Roberto Quintero. The album’s final number is the aptly titled The Triumphant Journey, dedicated to Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, with fiery cascades of Ethiopian riffage and a sudden shift to trumpet-fueled clave.
What a blast this album must have been to make, for a lineup that also includes trumpeters Mike Rodríguez, Alex Sipiagin and Josh Deutsch; alto saxophonist Michael Thomas and bassist Ricky Rodríguez.
Pianist Marta Sanchez Brings Her Elegant, Lustrous Tunefulness to the West Village
Lustrous atmosphere and elegant glimmer at the top of the keys introduces the opening track on pianist Marta Sanchez’s latest album, Danza Imposible, streaming at Bandcamp. Is it impossible to dance to? Not necessarily. Does the music itself dance? A fair amount. What’s very, very possible about it is that you can hum along. Sanchez is a strong tunesmith and doesn’t fall for postbop cliches. She has a thing for syncopated Philip Glass-like variations on a central, circular hook; a sense of angst lurks in the background throughout many of the numbers here. She’s leading her quintet this Nov 22 at Cornelia St. Cafe, with sets at 8 and 9:30 PM; cover is $10 + a $10 minimum.
Copa De Luz (Bolt of Light), the opening song, rides Sanchez’s catchy,, confident clusters as drummer Daniel Dor adds similarly flashes of color, the two-sax frontline of Jerome Sabbagh and Roman Filiu providing wafting harmonies. The Glass-ine phrase and variations that open the album’s title track make way for an unexpectedly lush, lingering interlude, Sabbagh’s airy lines over spacious piano chords; then they pick up the pace with lively solos from Filiu and the bandleader. A little later on, the band revisit a similar dynamic in Nebulosa, but more spaciously and minimally, pensively fluttering horns juxtaposed with enigmatically sparkling piano.
Uneasily twinkling minimalism pervades Scillar, a gloomy tone poem, Sanchez’s moody ripples finally congealing back against the horns’ tense close harmonies. As its title suggests, El Girasol (Sunflower) alludes to a brisk, carefree stroll, Filiu kicking in an expansive, sailing solo before Sanchez goes cascading. She returns to circling variations with Board, shifting subtly from a low-key clave toward funk and back as bassist Rick Rosato maintains a low-key pulse, Dor having fun as he edges toward a second-line groove.
Flesh mashes up kinetic, Monk-like phrasing and neoromantic majesty echoed by Dor’s subtly crescendoing toms and cymbals; Rosato’s spare solo appears out of nowhere. The sarcastically titled final number, Junk Food morphs from spare and pensive to a funky triplet groove. Purposeful and vivid music played with intense focus.
David Murray Rips the Roof Off Lincoln Center with His Nat “King” Cole Latin Jazz Project
On face value, the idea of David Murray tackling the latin side of the Nat Cole songbook is like Gogol Bordello covering Hector Lavoe. But Murray and his ten-piece, all-star Cuban-American band springboarding off this less-than-likely repertoire at Lincoln Center Thursday night turned out to be lightning in a bottle – and that lightning escaped the bottle seconds after the show began. On one hand, it was typical Murray at the top of his explosive game. But what a ride – and with some unexpected flavors. Lincoln Center impresario Jordana Phokompe sat and listened with eyes closed, blissed out – she knew she’d scored a coup staging this, and the sold-out crowd agreed.
Barely a minute into Murray’s opening epic, Black Nat, he was already up to his usual tricks, veering in a split-second between expressive lyricism and wildfire hard bop, a characteristically jaw-dropping display of speed, power and valve-wrenching extended technique. Conducting from behind his tenor sax, he drove the band to a coda with an intricately polyrhythmic. bracingly chattering interweave of voices, a popular trope with his big band, akin to a less nebulous Art Ensemble of Chicago, The group – call them Murray’s Orquesta Pequeña Cubana, maybe? – rose to similarly uneasy, majestic heights several times throughout the evening.
The storefront soul of El Bodeguero began with a rat-a-tat conga solo from Yusnier Sanchez followed by trombonist Darius Jones’ jaunty, punchy feature. You wouldn’t ordinarily expect a trumpeter to take the song into twilit territory, but that’s exactly what Kali Rodriguez-Pena did before bringing the strut back
Quizas Quizas Quizas (it’s Spanglish – say it slowly and you’ll get it) slowly coalesced to a brightly blustery cha-cha, Murray working the dynamics back and forth, Pepe Rivero’s neoromantic piano glimmer underscoring bright trumpet, sax and trombone solos. The irrepressibly witty, Cuban-born, Spanish-based pianist was having a blast all night long, a nonstop festival of polyrhthms, playing against the beat for bar after bar until Jones looked at Murray, who just grinned back,: “That’s his steez!” This time around, left to his own devices, Rivero started out in 1880s Havana and took it all the way to Arverne Avenue in the Bronx a hundred years later.
A steady, bouncing solo from bassist Yunior Terry – who pushed the clave with his woody tone and sinewy purposeful melodicism – opened Cachito, which Murray approached as pretty staright-up salsa-jazz, spiced heavily with his own pyrotechnics and Rodriguez-Pena’s artfully spacious, yet most adrenalizing solo of the night. Then the group made a glittering, tropical river out of the allusively bolero-flavored Tres Palabras. The band – which also included the warmly soulful Roman Filieu on alto sax, Kazemde George on tenor and Keisel Jimenez on drums – closed with a lyrical take of the ballad Piel Canela.
The only thing missing was…well…Nat Cole. Tony Hewitt is a first class singer, and to his credit, without any prompting, copped to not having much command of Spanish, something he shares with Cole. But in a city with millions of native Spanish speakers and a similarly vast talent base, to not have someone up there who could really drive the lyrics home was a real head-scratcher. They couldn’t have put out a call to Austin to fly in Lincoln Center regular Pete Rodriguez – son of El Conde – for a cameo? Or imagine what Marianne Solivan – who really sparkles in front of a big band – could have done with this.
The next jazz show at the Lincoln Center atrium space is tomorrow, Dec 8 at 7:30 PM with Lakecia Benjamin, who’s earned a reputation as a formidable alto saxophonist but is also an impressively eclectic bandleader and composer who’s just as adept with oldschool JB’s style funk as she is at shapeshiftingly psychedelic 70s-style soul grooves. Early arrival is always a good idea here.
Winter Jazzfest 2014: The Best One Yet, At Least From a Saturday Perspective
The lure of Winter Jazzfest over the last decade or so has been the potential for serious bang for the buck: a marathon of jazz festival stars, cult heroes and heroines jammed into two nights on the Bleecker Street strip. Like the best jazz improvisation, Winter Jazzfest can be transcendent. By the same token, recent years have had many maddening moments, lines outside the clubs gowing to ridiculous proportions, especially as crowds armed with ostensibly all-access passes reached critical mass during the Saturday portion of the festival.
Solution: move the bigger draws to bigger venues. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society sure to sell out a Saturday night gig (which they did, no surprise)? Move ‘em to the expansive, sonically exquisite confines of Subculture. Henry Threadgill leading a new ensemble through an American premiere? No problem. Stick ’em in Judson Church, a comfortable stone’s throw from the West 4th Street subway. This may have been a long overdue move on the part of the festival’s producers, but it couldn’t have been more successful. By midnight, a couple of venues were filled to capacity, but although crowds at the other spaces were strong, there was plenty of room for everybody who was still up for more music.
Argue’s big band threatened to upstage everything else on Saturday’s bill. How does the composer/conductor keep so much suspense and intensity going when his changes tend to be so static and often so far between? With endlessly surprising, constantly shifting voices, subtle rhythmic variations and a voracious approach to blending genres: the foundations of his songs may go on for what seems forever, but there are a million tunes wafting overhead. They opened with All In, a steadily strolling, spicily brassy homage to the late trumpeter Laurie Frink, its centerpiece being a thoughtfully energetic Nadje Noordhuis trumpet solo. From there they dove into the opening suite from the ensemble’s latest album Brooklyn Babylon (rated #1 for the year at this blog‘s Best Albums of 2013 page). The whole group reminded how much fun, not to mention aptitude, they have for Balkan music, trumpeter Ingrid Jensen wowing the crowd with her blazing chromatics. From there, Adam Birnbaum’s creepy music box piano kicked off the jackhammer optimism of The Neighborhood, roaring boisterousness juxtaposed with uneasily flitting motives from the reeds. Argue brought that disquiet front and center by fast-forwarding to the brooding Coney Island; they closed with a pastoral Levon Helm dedication, Last Waltz for Levon, featuring a moody, wistful Ryan Keberle trombone solo and a similarly bittersweet duet for Sebastian Noelle’s strummed acoustic guitar and Matt Clohesy’s bass..
Over at Judson Church, the crowd gathered slowly in anticipation of Threadgill’s set and was treated to a magically crepuscular one from pianist Sylvie Courvoisier and violinist Mark Feldman, the duo alternating compositions. He built to a bracing series of glissandos and trills on his opening number over her hypnotic, harplike inside-the-piano brushings; she followed with a resonant, lingering piece that rose to a creepy altered boogie of sorts. They gave a Feldman suite based on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth a dynamic intensity, brooding sostenuto up against angst-fueled swells and ebbs and ended on a quieter, more suspenseful note with a Courvoisier work.
Threadgill was on the bill to conduct the American premiere of his Butch Morris tribute Old Locks and Irregular Verbs with his new Ensemble Double Up. This turned out to be very much like Morris at the top of his game. Rather than playing purely improvised music, Morris’ larger ensembles would develop variations on a theme or two, sometimes utilizing a couple of pages of composition, and this suite had that kind of ring. Pianist Jason Moran opened with a mournfully elegaic, spaciously funereal, bell-like introduction that rose from stygian depths toward the kind of blues/gospel allusions that Morris liked to employ. From there Threadgill introduced a classically-tinged, anticipatory theme that Jose Davila’s tuba propelled upward in methodical stairstepping waves in tandem with Craig Weinrib‘s trap drums, Curtis Macdonald and Roman Filiu’s alto saxes blustery and atmospheric in turn over cellist Christopher Hoffman’s uneasy ambience. The group followed the long first movement with two shorter variations, the first opening with dancing, bubbly reeds and fluid upper-register piano, the second kicking off with glimmering resonance from pianist David Virelles, moving toward a distant overture of sorts and a bittersweetly triumphant if somewhat muted coda. It made for an aptly elegant sendoff for a guy who did so much, so elegantly, for largescale improvisation.
Over in the boomy sonics of Vanderbilt Hall at NYU Law School, Mostly Other People Do The Killing had some of the crowd doubled over laughing and some of the older attendees scratching their heads. New York’s funniest, most entertaining band in any style of music, never mind jazz, have a new album out, Red Hot, which parodies every 20s hot jazz trope ever ground into shellac, and the group aired out several of those tunes with characteristically unstoppable verve. What makes MOPDtK so funny is that they really know their source material. For fifteen-second intervals, it was easy to get into toe-tapping mood…but then the band would do something wry or droll or ridiculous and throw a wrench in the works. Trumpeter Peter Evans built an echoey, reverb-infused vortex with endless swirls of circular breathing early on, which bass trombonist David Taylor took to vastly greater deep-space extremes later in the set.
Pianist Ron Stabinsky got plenty of laughs out of a solo that was mostly pregnant pauses, then got people howling with a medley of licks that began in the jazz pantheon but then spanned from Billy Joel to Foreigner…and then to Bach and Beethoven. Bassist/bandleader Moppa Elliott, drummer Kevin Shea and guest guitarist Jon Lundbom seemed preoccupied with getting the brief period-perfect bits back on track while Evans and alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon (who’d just played tenor and bass clarinet for Argue) engaged in characteristically snide, mealymouthed banter. It wouldn’t be fair to give away the rest of the jokes that continued throughout compositions with titles like Seabrook. Power. Plant. (named after frequent MOPDtK guest Brandon Seabrook’s band as well as three towns in Pennsylvania), the Shickshinny Shimmy, Turkey Foot Corner and King of Prussia.
Eyebone, guitarist Nels Cline’s eclectically assaultive, swirling power trio with drummer Jim Black and pianist Teddy Klausner was next and made a similarly energetic alternative to Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog, who were scheduled to hit around the same time at the church up the block. They opened with jarringly percolating, fleetingly leaping phrases from Cline’s loop pedals and then hit a deep-water ominousness, went into atmospherics and then a riff-driven, metalish interlude. Klausner followed a Cline descent into messy, muddy terrain with one of his own, then the band brought it up with a roar, ending their set with an aggressiveness that made a great segue with Elliott Sharp’s Orchestra Carbon.
E-Sharp didn’t even play guitar in this set, but his tenor sax work mirrors what he does on the frets. It was cool to see the man of a million notes and ideas leading the group through a defly animated workout on minimalist chamber themes. His vigorous, emphatic direction and playing were mirrored by the ensemble, heavy on the low end with twin basses and trombones, Jessica Pavone and Judith Insell on violas plus Jenny Lin on piano and Danny Tunick nimbly negotiating between drums, various percussion and vibraphone. They kicked off with a mighty, Zarathustra-ish theme punctured by the occasional squall or shriek, blustery diversion or Braxton-esque atmospheric swell. Sharp carved out lots of pairings: Pavone an anchor to Lin’s rapidfire knuckle-busting octave attack, the trombones channeling a stormy orchestral bustle, filling the sonic picture from bottom to top, the basses doing the same later on. Sharp filled the brief spaces between movements with fleeting, supersonic upper-register passages and frantic flurries of bop, eventually bringing everything full circle with a series of long, suspenseful, almost imperceptibly crescendoing waves upward.
And that’s where the night ended on this end. There was still plenty going on – fusiony funk downstairs at le Poisson Rouge, and was that Craig Handy coincidentally leading that organ groove outfit at Groove? The place was packed; it was hard to see. And the line for the Marc Cary Focus Trio at Zinc Bar stretched around the block – good for him. Matthew Shipp’s trio set back at Judson Church wasn’t scheduled to start yet, but by this time, the prospect of a third consecutive marathon evening of music looming on the horizon and the rain having finally let up, it was time to take advantage of a grace period from the skies and call it an evening. Here’s looking forward to Winter Jazzfest 2015.
Lucid Culture 