Cécile McLorin Salvant Premieres Her Macabre, Majestically Relevant New Suite at the Met
“The man is lying!”
Cécile McLorin Salvant’s voice rose with an ineluctable, fearsome wail through that accusatory phrase as the orchestra behind her reached hurricane force. In the year of Metoo, fake news emanating daily via Twitter from the nation’s highest office, and Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers risking their lives to deny rape culture a seat on the nation’s highest court, Salvant could not have picked a more appropriate time to sing that.
The character she was voicing in that moment, the most fervent in a night full of metaphorically-charged, magic realist narrative, was a robin. It was warning the protagonist in Salvant’s new suite, Ogresse, to beware of a would-be suitor’s ulterior motives. It was possibly the highest peak that Salvant and the band reached in almost two hours of lush, sweeping big band jazz drawing on a hundred years’ worth of influences.
Yet the world premiere of the work, performed to a sold-out crowd last night at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, turned out to be juat as firmly rooted in the here and now. Many of the suite’s themes mirrored Rachelle Garniez’s fabulist reinventions and Rose Thomas Bannister’s great plans gothic as much as they did Billy Strayhorn, or Cole Porter, or Ellington.
The book on Salvant is that she can personify just about any singer from jazz’s golden age. That may be true, but as much as the night’s more coy moments brought to mind Dinah Washington, along with Sarah Vaughan in the more somber ones and Ella Fitzgerald when the music swung hardest, Salvant was most shattering when she sang without the slightest adornment. Knowingly, she went to that calm purity at the night’s most telling junctures.
The suite began with a hypnotically atmospheric, practically Indian lustre and ended with a bittersweetly low-key glimmer. In between, In between, Salvant bolstered her chameleonic reputation with expertly nuanced, torchy ballads, stark delta blues, epic swing anthems and a couple of detours into French chanson and all sorts of blue-neon Lynchian luridness. Late in the score, the band finally alluded to the Twin Peaks theme for a couple of bars.
Darcy James Argue conducted and also arranged the suite. Having seen him many times in the former role over the last few years, he seemed to be having more fun than ever before – then again, he plays his cards close to the vest onstage. Whatever the case, Salvant’s songs have given him fertile territory for his signature, epic sweep and counterintuitive pairings between individual voices in the ensemble.
Helen Sung’s poignant, lyrical piano traded off with David Wong’s similarly inflected bass during a graveyard waltz. Tenor saxophonist Tom Christensen’s plaintive oboe, vibraphonist Warren Wolf’s sepulchrally sprinting marimba, and trombonist Josh Roseman’s surprisingly lilting tuba all rose to the surreal command demanded by Argue’s wicked chart. The solo that drew the most awestruck applause was from Alexa Tarantino’s soprano sax, a particularly poignant, emotionally raw salvo.
Brandon Seabrook began the show on Strat but quickly switched to banjo, which anchored the 19th century blues-inflected interludes. Yet he never picked with traditional three-finger technique, hammering on enigmatic open chords or aggressively tremolo-picking his phrases. Maybe that was Argue’s decision not to dive deep into the delta swamp.
Salvant’s lyricism is as deep and vast as her music. The suite’s plotline involves a rugged individualist who has her own grisly way of dealing with the menace of the townspeople outside – we learn toward the end that she’s no angel herself, either.
Father had flown away sometime ago
My face was all he left behind
But soon he left my mother’s mind
She remarried a shadow
That set the stage for the grim ramifications of that particular circumstance, which Salvant and the group slowly unveiled, up to a literal forest fire of a coda. The conclusion, which Salvant had been foreshadowing all along, drew a fervent “Yessssss!” from an alluring, petite brunette in glasses and a smart sweater seated to the author’s immediate right. The audience echoed sentiment that via three standing ovations, a triumph for a group that also included purposeful trumpeter Kirk Knuffke, percussionist Samuel Torres and the sweeping strings of the Mivos Quartet.
This could have been the best concert of the year – and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has many more. Some of them are free with museum admission: you could see plaintive Armenian duduk music played by the duo of Gevorg Dabaghyan and Vache Sharafyan in Gallery 199 at 5:30 PM on Oct 26.
Potential Fireworks at the Jazz Gallery This Wednesday
This Wednesday night, Aug 1 there’s an especially auspicious show at the Jazz Gallery for people who like adventurous but purposefully tuneful improvisation. Pianist Mara Rosenbloom, whose aptly titled trio album Prairie Burn ranked high among the best jazz albums of 2016, leads an unusual trio with singer/percussionist Anais Maviel and bassist Adam Lane. It’s an especially interesting lineup considering that Rosenbloom’s work, prior to that incendiary release, leaned toward Sylvie Courvoisier-esque elegance. Maviel is a similarly purposeful improviser and shares that low-key sensibility: contrasts in styles may create some memorable fireworks at this gig. They’ll be exploring themes inspired by Adrienne Rich poetry. Sets are at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $15.
Maviel’s latest album, spelled hOUle, is streaming at Bandcamp. The song titles are in the multilingual Maviel’s native French. Much of the music sounds ancient, although it may be completely improvised. There’s a shamanic, hypnotic quality to her spare, blues-infused melodies, just wordless vocals and percussion. It’s a more direct and somewhat darker counterpart to Sofia Rei’s playful adventures in vocalese.
The first track, Animots contrasts Maviel’s blithe, blippy scat-like delivery with a boomy, staggered, gnawa-esque beat. She begins the almost thirteen-minute epic Blues Feraille with nuanced variations on a simple minor-key riff with echoes of 19th century African-American gospel. From there she subtly shifts to uneasy chromatics as the rhythm coalesces, then goes in a sunnier but similarly hypnotic direction before bringing the music full circle with a muted suspense.
Bois, Or (Wood, Gold) #2, for vocals, bell and frame drum is quieter, more spacious, veering in and out of hypnotic rhythms. Scat-style vocals also take centerstage in the more spare, kinetic variations of the next track, Bois, Or #1. Le Vent (The Wind), a bodymusic piece, has a leaping, Nordic-tinged melody.
The album’s most trancey number is Gens de la Mer (Sea People) #1. Gens de la Mer #3, the album’s closing cut, features some neat implied melody and Maviel’s most dynamically varied delivery: it’s less watery than a series of sea breezes. This is good rainy-day chillout album.
A Rare Reunion from New York’s Best Underground Swing Jazz Supergroup
The Tickled Pinks almost played Club Cumming. Ostensibly, liquor license issues derailed one of the few events that could have transcended any issue concerning tourist hordes in the East Village on a Saturday night. But the irrepressible underground swing jazz supergroup did get to play two iconic Brooklyn venues, Hank’s and Pete’s last month, in one of the funnest reunions of any New York band in recent years.
Among other harmony vocal acts, only John Zorn’s Mycale chorale have the kind of individualistic power and interplay that the Pinks showed off during what was a pretty good run. They made it as far as Joe’s Pub – and got the key to the city of Olympia, Washington on their most recent tour. Whether the key works or not is unknown.
It would be overly reductionistic to say that with her spectacular range, Karla Rose Moheno handles the highs, the more misty Stephanie Layton handles the mids and Kate Sland handles the lows – all three women can span the octaves enough to take their original inspiration, the Andrews Sisters, to the next level. Although that basic formula seemed to be the strategy for night one of a reunion weekend stand that began with an Elvis cover night at Hank’s.
The idea of three women harmonizing Elvis tunes is a typical Pinks move, although one they never did before. And they weren’t the only ones who sang. Guitarist Dylan Charles took a break in between elegant expanses of jazz chords, snazzy rockabilly and some machete tremolo-picking to narrate a tongue-in-cheek version of Are You Lonesome Tonight. There were also a handful of cameos from friends of the band invited up to do their versions of the hits.
Moheno switched out her trusty Telecaster for an acoustic guitar; Sland played snappy bass and Layton held down the groove behind the drumkit. John Rogers’ ornate electric piano and organ lit up several of the songs; trumpeter Mike Maher gave a mariachi flair to several numbers as well.
The set wasn’t just familiar favorites, either. As much as hearing what this crew could do with Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock and Suspicious Minds, the best song of the night was an obscure, ominous noir number, Black Star. On one hand, it’s hard to imagine that Elvis knew what kind of an end he’d come to when he sang this in the mid-60s…but this group’s stalking, low-key version left that question hanging. From this point of view, it would have been even more fun to be able to catch the whole set, but it was impossible to walk out of Moroccan saxophonist Yacine Boulares’ absolutely haunting Lincoln Center set earlier that night.
The Pinks wound up their weekend with a serpentine set of swing at Pete’s. Since they started in the late zeros, they’ve expanded their songbook far beyond 30s girl-group material to jump blues and beyond. Case in point: an absolutely accusatory version of Straighten Out and Fly Right. They went deep inside to find the bittersweetness in the Kinks’ Sunny Afternoon, then pulled out all the smoke and sultriness in Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby. And the old 20s hot swing standard Why Don’t You Do Right outdid both the Moonlighters and Rasputina’s versions in terms of both energy and righteous rage.
The Pinks are back on hiatus now while everybody in the group is busy with their own projects. Layton and Charles continue with their torch jazz band Eden Lane, with a gig on June 3 at 7 PM at Caffe Vivaldi, one of the Pinks’ old haunts. Sland continues to do unselfconsciously heroic work in hospice medicine in California. And Moheno continues with recording her next noir rock album, under the name Karla Rose – if the track listing remains as originally planned, that record would top the list of best albums of 2018 if she released it now.
A Rare Bass-and-Vocals Album and a Joe’s Pub Release Show from Kavita Shah and François Moutin
Considering that singer Sheila Jordan has made bass-and-vocal duets such an integral part of her hall of fame career, it’s no surprise that her protegee, Kavita Shah would release an album full of them. Most of the tracks on her latest release, Interplay – streaming at Spotify – are duo arrangements with bassist François Moutin. The two are playing the album release show this May 30 at 7 PM at Joe’s Pub; cover is $20.
Beyond Jordan’s obsession with the format, recordings of just bass and voice are rare. It’s impossible to know for sure, but bass-and-vocals albums are even rarer: Jordan’s catalog included, it’s hard to imagine more than a couple dozen of them ever having been made. Two from recent years are especially noteworthy. Singer Lauren Lee’s Velocity Duo with bassist Charley Sabatino put out an especially playful one, Dichotomies, in 2015. The benchmark for the format, at least in this century, belongs to singer Jen Shyu and bassist Mark Dresser’s transcendent, phantasmagorical 2011 release, Synastry. How does the new one by Shah and Moutin compare?
For one, it’s more of a study in contrasting voices – Moutin percolating and Shah simmering alongside – than an attempt to pull together a cohesive whole. And it’s a mix of originals and standards. The duo open with one of the latter, You Go to My Head, which is all about dichotomies, in this case Shah’s assertively full-throated, bittersweet delivery against Moutin’s tightly unclustering lines that veer in and out of swing time. Their take of La Vie En Rose follows the same format, if more swingingly, at least until Shah starts scatting and then Moutin takes a bubbly, straightforward solo.
The first of the originals, Coming Yesterday pairs Shah’s energetic airiness against ageless nonagenariian pianist and longtime Moutin collaborator Martial Solal’s alternately saturnine and sprightly piano. Moutin incisively shadows Shah’s stately delivery throughout the catchy, recurrent vocal riffage of Bliss. The contrast in Falling in Love with Love, one of the more contiguous numbers, is between Shah’s blissful interpretation versus Jordan’s grittier approach – at 89, she can still hit the high notes!
A Shah original, Aigue Marine also features Solal’s uneasy close harmonies behind her tropical angst; it’s the album’s strongest track. Her resonance and melismas over Moutin’s stabbing pulse in Dafnis Prieto’s Blah Blah carry its tango-jazz intensity with full-band power. Similarly, the album’s most retro number, Utopian Vision, has plenty of swing and gusto despite the stripped-down setup.
Shah’s steady vocalese pairs with Moutin’s strolling lines in the album’s title track, up to a jauntily flurrying bass solo. Shah vamps on ukulele in the tropical-flavored The Provider’s Gone. The album closes with Peace, another collaboration with Jordan, shifting in and out of waltz time, Shah the ingenue alongside her mentor’s calm, wise intonation.
A Rare Christmas Album That’s Not Cloying and Annoying
Christmas music rots your brain. It’s true! Scientific studies have confirmed what most of us have known all along. No wonder, considering how repetitive, unsophisticated and utterly lacking in dynamics most Christmas songs are.
Into this musical wasteland swings Champian Fulton, one of the great wits in jazz, with her irresistible and stunningly dynamic new album Christmas With Champian, streaming at Spotify. There hasn’t been a Christmas record this fun or this subtly irreverent since dub reggae band Super Hi-Fi’s two woozy instrumental albums of “holiday favorites.”
Fulton is the best singing pianist in jazz. There isn’t another instrumentalist out there with her mic skills, nor a singer with her fearsome chops at the keys. More than anything else, this is a great jazz record in a Santa hat. Fulton never ceases to find both poignancy and exuberant fun in the least expected places. For the latter, check out how she Sarah Vaughns White Christmas, the album’s opening track. Better watch out if you don’t want that snow, because Fulton sounds like she might smack you upside the head! It’s a good guess that Irving Berlin, who cut his teeth in ragtime, would approve of this jaunty, bluesy arrangement.
Fulton’s take of Pretty Paper, recast as a brisk jazz waltz, has to be the saddest version of the song ever recorded. That vendor girl, out there in the cold with all that merch she has to unload before the 25th of the month or she loses all her money! Likewise, the solo piano-and-vocal version of I’ll Be Home for Christmas is balmy and plaintive: when Fulton hits the end of the chorus, “if only in my dreams” packs a wallop.
Walking in a Winter Wonderland gets reinvented as wry viper swing, with some coyly emphatic trumpet from her dad, Stephen Fulton, who also lights up a carefully articulated version of Gracias a Dios. She sings that one in Spanish, hardly a stretch considering her Mexican heritage – and the point where she follows her dad’s solo with a deadpan jinglebell solo of her own is subtly priceless. Drummer Fukushi Tainaka’s elegant brushwork and David Williams’ terse bass add subtle bolero hints.
The Christmas Song – better known as Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire – is one of only a couple of tracks here with a genuine jazz pedigree, but Fulton goes for devious, tongue-in-cheek humor rather than trying to follow in Nat Cole’s footsteps. She reinvents Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas as midtempo swing, with hints of Dinah Washington and an unexpectedly dark intro that edges toward barrelhouse.
Daughter and father team up to remake Christmas Time Is Here as a bittersweet, lustrous, languidly tropical instrumental ballad. Likewise, she transforms A Child Is Born into a bluesy waltz, with a melismatic, insistent bass solo. Her piano solo in a wee-hours take of The Christmas Waltz goes in the opposite direction, with enough droll ornamentation for a fifty-foot tree.
Her version of Sleigh Ride pairs a boisterous trumpet solo with an unexpectedly seductive vocal and teasingly allusive piano, an approach she revisits in Let It Snow. The Dinah-inspired piano-and-vocal final number, Merry Merry Christmas, is the only Fulton original here, but could easily date from sixty years ago – and might make it to your local supermarket someday.
Entertainment and Formidable Piano Chops at an Unexpectedly Contemplative Spot with Champian Fulton
Champian Fulton brings a rare blend of daunting piano and vocal chops to the final nights of her indian summer Radegast Hall residency this Sept 18 at 8 PM. She’s also here on the 25th. Either way, it’s Monday, and it’s professional night, and while you might not expect people to come to listen, they do. Remember, every bar on a Monday could be the best bar in town.
Fulton’s latest album is The Things We Did Last Summer, a collaboration with suave tenor saxophonist Scott Hamilton recorded live onstage in Spain last year and streaming at Spotify. It’s a mix of instrumental and vocal numbers, and despite the fact that it’s mostly standards, it’s arguably the high point of Fulton’s career so far. She makes solid studio albums – her all-instrumental collection, Speechless, is a party in a box – but both co-leaders do their best work onstage. More artists – particularly players who can improvise at the level the band reaches here – should be making live records.
Fulton’s subtle, tantalizingly melismatic vocals and entertaining stage presence are what she’s best known for, but she’s also a hell of a pianist. To open the album, she brings a moody been-there, done-that, know-your-pain feel to When Your Lover Has Gone, contrasting with a spacious, playfully jaunty, ragtime-tinged piano solo. Hamilton brings in the mist from there; Fulton really works the blue notes at the end.
The ten-plus minute take of Basie’s Black Velvet is a classic example of the kind of extended excursion Fulton excels at when the night is winding down, but she’s not ready to call it quits. Bassist Ignasi Gonzalez and drummer Esteve Pi settle into a comfortable midtempo stroll as Fulton winds her way up from gimlet-eye glimmer toward jubilation, Hamilton echoing her as he takes the long way in through the fog.
Fulton gets back on the mic with a barely restrained vengefulness for I Cried for You, which the band takes scampering, Gonzalez’ wry, brisk bass ballet contrasting with Fulton’s clenched-teeth attack on the keys. There’s a Sarah Vaughan-ish told-your-so quality to the vocals, but it’s not derivative.
The album’s instrumental title track brings back the wee-hours serenity, Hamilton plush and balmy over Fulton’s lingering phrases. Then the two offer contrast, floating sax against Fulton’s lowdown bluesy vocals and joyous staccato piano in Too Marvelous For Words.
Allusive, understated bluesy angst pervades an expansive vocal take of My Future Just Passed, this one closer to the Shirley Horn version. Then the band picks up the pace with the hot jazz standard Running Wild before going back to the “Great American Songbook” for a lush excursion through The Very Thought of You, Fulton ending the night with misty suspense that Hamilton works for all it’s worth before her fingers finally bust it through the clouds. It’s a good bet she’ll do something a lot like this during the Williamsburg stand.
For those in Jersey, she’s also at the Gruin Center for the Arts on College Drive on the Ocean County College campus in Toms River on Sept 19 at 8; tix are $24/$20 srs.
Vocal Sensation Camille Bertault Brings Her Wit and Eclectic Chops to the Jazz Standard
Conservatory-trained as a pianist, Camille Bertault became a social media sensation a couple of years ago for her vocal versions of classic jazz solos. It turns out that she’s not only an inventive singer but a clever, playful songwriter as well. The title of her debut album En Vie – streaming at her music page – is a pun which translates essentially as ‘lust for life.” Although she can do all sorts of things with her voice, Bertault sings with restraint and a sharp sense of irony here: she doesn’t overemote and lets the lyrics speak for themselves. She and her combo are bringing that French charm to the Jazz Standard tomorrow night, Sept 14, with sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM; cover is $25.
The album’s cynical opening track, Quoi de Plus Anodin (Nothing More Harmless: we’re sticking to English title style here for consistency’s sake, ok?) is fueled by pianist Olivier Hutman’s terse, insistent phrasing over the briskly shuffling drive of bassist Gildas Boclé and drummer Antoine Paganotti. The cheery tune contrasts with Bertault’s lyrics for an age of austerité:
Pas de dimanche
Pour les paluches qui s’épanchent
Plutôt crever que d’ faire la manche
Meme si y’a pas de fric en avalanche
[No day off for these poor sods; better to kick the bucket than put your hand out, even if there isn’t exactly an avalanche of dough on the way…]
Gritty, bustling bass, scrambling piano and bracing doubletracked vocalese harmonies percolate through the second cut, Course. Then Bertault hints at a cornet in the distance, then offers a bittersweet look at seeing through a child’s eyes in her lustrous, resonant soul-jazz reinterpretation of the Wayne Shorter ballad Enfant Eyes.
The album’s title track, another vocalese number, shifts between a balletesque grace, clenched-teeth intensity and syncopated swing behind Hutman’s crushing chordal attack. Cette Nuit, Bertault’s version of the Jimmy Rowles epic The Peacocks, offers contrasting, starry ambience, a lingering tone poem that springs into action when the bass and drums kick in and Bertault takes a purposefully scatting solo. Hutman’s cascades and Paganotti’s elegant tumbles top it off expertly.
The steady, expansively moody ballad A la Mer Tume (an oceanic pun on “bitterness”) provides a launching pad for a balletesque bass solo. The band reaches toward a scamper but then pulls back throughout the catchy, vamping, latin-tinged Double Face, the last of the vocalese numbers
Bertault kicks off Tatie Cardie with a coy spoken word and drum duet and then relates a hilarious, Spike Jones-style account of unexpected events at a prim and proper aunt’s tea party, the whole band getting in on the joke. She opens her take of Prelude to A Kiss a-cappella, then the band take their moody time with it, Boclé adding a melancholy bowed solo. The final cut is Satiesque, a title that should have been taken long ago. It’s a syncopated, lyrical salute to the great surrealist composer:
Satie, est-ce que les fous ne sont pas
Plus sages qu’ils n’en ont l’air?
L’endroit est peut-être l’envers?
[Satie, are crazy people smarter than the ones who don’t let it show? Or is it the other way around?]
Lots of flavors here, all of them worth savoring. Few other artists can make phrases like “ba da da” as consistently surprising and interesting as Bertault.
Singer Sara Serpa’s New Multimedia Project Examines the Aftereffects of Imperialism
Sara Serpa is one of the most haunting singers in any style of music. She got her big break collaborating with iconic noir pianist Ran Blake – their 2010 album Camera Obscura is a masterpiece of menacing nocturnal music across all genres. Since then, her work has encompassed her own cinematic, often lush compositions, her role in John Zorn’s otherworldly Mycale chorale and an endless series of rewarding new projects and collaborations: there’s a restlessness in most everything she does. Her latest project was springboarded when she discovered a family archive of material relating to her native Portugal and its former colony, Angola, in the 1960s. You want uneasy? Serpa’s bringing that to a multimedia performance this Saturday night, Sept 16 at 7:30 PM in a trio show with harpist Zeena Parkins and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner at the Drawing Center at 35 Wooster St. in SoHo. This is one of the increasingly frequent series booked by Zorn around town; cover is $20.
Like every other major jazz artist, Serpa has to spend a lot of time on the road. Her most recent New York concert was a beguiling and unexpectedly amusing duo performance with her Mycale bandmate and longtime vocal sparring partner Sofia Rei in the West Village back in June. Completely a-cappella, the two made their way methodically through constant dynamic shifts, in a mix of originals, a handful of south-of-the-border folk tunes and several numbers from Rei’s album of radical reinventions of Violeta Parra classics, El Gavilan.
It’s easy to see why Rei and Serpa are friends. Rei is a cutup and will go way outside the box without any prompting, to the remote fringes of extended vocal technique. And she can sing anything. Serpa is serious, focused, purposeful to the nth degree: she doesn’t waste notes and has an instantly recognizable sound. Yet she’s always pushing herself. “Welcome to our crazy project,” she told the crowd with a wry grin. And at one moment late in the set, while Rei swooped and dove and shifted into what could have been birdsong, Serpa rolled her eyes, echoing the melody further down the scale, as if to say, “I can’t believe I just sang that.”
Unlik what they do in Mycale, the two didn’t harmonize much. Instead, they took contrasting roles, often exchanging rhythmic blips and bounces, a funhouse mirror of gentle, emphatic, wordless notes. Without Marc Ribot’s guitar, the material from El Gavilan often took on more gravitas: for example, a less rhythmic, more stately take of Casamiento de Negros, and a considerably condensed, airy version of the title track. And when there were harmonies, they were acerbic, and bracingly astringent, and warily rapturous. At the end of the set, another of Mycale’s brilliant voices, Aubrey Johnson joined them and added her signature lustre to the mix. Not having seen Johnson sing her own material in a long time, it would have been an awful lot of fun to stick around to see her lead her own band. But by then it was time to head to Brooklyn.
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