Adjuah’s new album Bark Out Thunder, Roar Out Lightning gives us a glimpse of what a free, forward-looking Black musical form can be. With his voice and a self-designed electric bow/harp at the forefront, the music on Bark Out Thunder is deeply rooted in African tradition and unfettered by the constraints of any Western concept of genre. The hypnotic opener “Blood Calls Blood” is followed by “Trouble That Mornin’,” a tune where propulsive hand drumming anchors soaring vocals. Here, the song’s lyrics remind listeners that it has been 500 years since the onset of colonialism and the slave trade while evoking the names of the Yoruba orishas Shango and Yemaya. “On To New Orleans (Runnin’ in 7s Redux)” strips things down to the core with a complex mixture of percussion elements that display African drumming in all its orchestral glory. 

A powerful melding of West African and Black American sensibilities, Bark Out Thunder, Roar Out Lightning speaks to the multitudinous nature of our diaspora. Both the blues and jazz live inside these songs while Malian ngoni music whispers throughout like a distant memory. Although fully grounded in the past, this is a daring contemporary work that reminds us of all the things that our ancestors cherished and kept safe for us to have in the future.

from https://daily.bandcamp.com

Renowned fusion guitarist Larry Coryell died on Sunday 19 February aged 73. He was staying in a New York hotel and, according to his publicist Jim Eigo, passed away due to natural causes – the news coming just days after his last two concerts at the city's Iridium Jazz Club.

One of the most individual guitar stylists in jazz, Coryell's career spanned over 60 albums, incorporating elements of rock and blues with the finesse of a bebop virtuoso. Born in Galveston, Texas in 1943, he played piano from age four, but switched to guitar in his teens and had an early love of rock music. He studied journalism but his move to New York from his family home in Washington in the mid-1960s saw his reputation as a musician grow on the NYC jazz scene, eventually going on to replace Gabor Szabo in Chico Hamilton's band, with whom he made his debut recording on the drummer's 1966 album, The Dealer. His status as a gifted guitarist was consolidated through his solo albums Lady Coryell, Coryell and 1969's Spaces, which also featured preeminent fusion maestro John McLaughlin on a guitar-heavy summit.

Coryell was to make an indelible mark as a pioneer of jazz fusion with his 1970s band Eleventh House, which pre-dated Return to Forever and Weather Report, the group also featuring keyboardist Mike Mandel and the earth-shattering drumming of Alphonse Mouzon. The success of his fellow fusioneers eluded him, yet Coryell changed tack and explored acoustic territory in a wide range of high-level collaborations with the likes of Phillipe Catherine, John Scofield, Joe Beck and notably a memorable trio with McLaughlin and Paco De Lucia. He also recorded with such luminaries as Stéphane Grappelli, Charles Mingus and Sonny Rollins, while his later years saw a return to his fusion roots with several new line-ups alongside players such as Paul Wertigo, Chester Thompson, Victor Bailey and Lenny White, and even a reformed Eleventh House with original bandmate, trumpeter Randy Brecker.

He is survived by his wife, Tracey, his daughter Annie, his sons Murali and Julian, and his daughter Allegra, as well as six grandchildren. A memorial service is being planned on Friday 24 February 24 at the S.G.I-USA Buddhist Cenre, New York at 7 p.m.

– Mike Flynn

– Photo by Tim Dickeson

from www.jazzwisemagazine.com

Damien Chazelle, the talented young writer and director behind ‘Whiplash’, is back with a second movie centred around a jazz musician – and it’s already generating Oscar-buzz. In this case, Sebastian is a pianist played by Ryan Gosling who’s trying to follow his dreams in Los Angeles, with aspirations to open his own jazz bar. He’s studied the great players like Monk and Brubeck but is frustrated playing cheesy Christmas songs in a restaurant and eighties pop covers at pool parties. John Legend makes an appearance as a gifted jazz guitarist who’s moved his music into the mainstream, advising Sebastian to do the same.

Gosling stars opposite a young actress, played by Emma Stone, who also has to compromise to make a career. They have a shared love of classic movies and this is reflected in Chazelle’s direction – with obvious nods to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and ‘Rebel Without a Cause’. The film was shot in classic CinemaScope and moves as easily between speech and music as between real life and fantasy sequences.

The soundtrack is composed by Justin Hurwitz who also worked with Chazelle on Oscar-winning ‘Whiplash’ (the two friends were roommates at Harvard). Ryan Gosling is understood to have learned all the piano pieces by rote ahead of the shoot.

This week, ‘La La Land’ leads the Golden Globe nominations with 7, including Best Picture.

Damien Chazelle joins Nigel Williams to talk all things jazz on his Saturday morning programme on December 17^th at 10am.

‘La La Land’ gets its full UK release on January 12^th 2017.

from www.jazzfm.com

Jack DeJohnette, one of the most celebrated drummers in jazz history, is also a pianist, and will release his first solo piano recording this week on the vinyl-only Newvelle label. Titled Return, the album features two brand new compositions as well as reinterpretations of compositions recorded with earlier bands and projects.

Nine of Miles Davis’ earliest albums on Columbia Records, encompassing music that he recorded for the label in monaural sound from 1956 to 1961 (and released from 1957 to 1964), will be issued together on CD for the first time asMiles Davis: The Original Mono Recordings. This historic box set, comprising nine CDs in mini-LP replica jackets, will be available everywhere November 11, 2013 through Columbia/Legacy, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. Pre-order at http://smarturl.it/milesmono_amzn. On November 29th in celebration of Record Store Day, Columbia/Legacy will follow up with vinyl mono editions of Kind Of Blue, Miles & Monk At Newport, and Jazz Track -- capping a series of recently released mono LPs including ‘Round About Midnight, Miles Ahead, Milestones, Porgy and Bess, Sketches of Spain, and Someday My Prince Will Come.

Miles Davis: The Original Mono Recordings is a true landmark collection, with every album newly remastered in 2012-13, from the original analog master tapes. CD consumers will be able to hear Miles’ early music in mono, the way virtually all popular music was recorded, marketed and intended to be heard in the 1950s and early 1960s. Mono was the norm before the home, broadcast and film stereo era began to develop fully in the mid-’60s, leading to stereo’s all-encompassing takeover by the early ’70s.

The Original Mono Recordings by Miles Davis includes:

• The six albums that trace the development of Miles’ “first great quintet” at Columbia, all notably featuring John Coltrane, namely ’Round About Midnight, Milestones, Jazz Track, Kind Of Blue (at 4-times RIAA platinum, the greatest selling jazz album of all time), Someday My Prince Will Come, and Miles And Monk At Newport; and
• The three albums that placed Miles (and various group members) in sophisticated orchestral settings at Columbia, all notably arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, namely Miles Ahead, Porgy And Bess, andSketches Of Spain.

Two of the albums included in The Original Mono Recordings are exciting rare editions that have never appeared in any Miles Davis CD collection in the U.S., and have not been generally available for many years:

• Jazz Track, presenting 10 improvised tracks that Miles recorded in Paris with European musicians in 1957, for director Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator To the Gallows), combined with three tracks by Miles’ own sextet in New York -- featuring Davis, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb -- from their only other studio recordings of 1958, prior to the Kind Of Bluesessions in ’59; and
• Miles And Monk At Newport, featuring four jazz classics recorded live by the Miles Davis Sextet at the jazz festival in 1958, followed by two classics recorded at the festival in 1963 by Columbia’s newly-signed Thelonious Monk Quartet.

The Original Mono Recordings will be housed in a slipcase similar to Bob Dylan's The Original Mono Recordings box released in 2012. The new box will contain a fully-annotated 40-page booklet with complete discographic information including personnel and production details, plus a 2,000-word essay by author and Wall Street Journal writer Marc Myers. The liner notes add in-depth, album-by-album comments on the new remastering processes, as told to Myers by three-time Grammy Award®-winning mastering engineer Mark Wilder.

Over the course of these nine albums, whose principal recording spanned barely a half decade (from June 1956 to March 1961), The Original Mono Recordings presents a clear vision of Miles’ evolution as musician and bandleader, and as a composer graduating from hardbop to modal creations. He was famously signed to Columbia Records by George Avakian in the summer of 1955, after the A&R staff producer witnessed Miles’ showstopping solo on a jam session of “’Round Midnight” at the Newport Jazz Festival. Jazz critics acclaimed the performance as the “return of Miles,” who was considered a difficult artist to work with, who did not even have a regular working group at the time.

Taking Avakian seriously, Miles assembled a group around bassist Paul Chambers and drummer “Philly” Joe Jones, with Red Garland on piano and, after several early contenders (Sonny Rollins, Hank Mobley), Philadelphian John Coltrane on tenor saxophone. This lineup cut four LPs’ worth of material in late ’55 and ’56 to satisfy Miles’ contractual obligations to Prestige Records. They also began to record the first Columbia LP, ’Round About Midnight, named for the paraphrased Monk title tune. The LP, produced by Avakian, consisted of jazz and popular standards done in Miles’ inimitable style.

Most significantly, in terms of The Original Mono Recordings, Myers writes, “the word ‘mono’ did not appear on the cover. Instead, the jacket announced that the music inside was ‘360º Sound, Guaranteed High Fidelity.’ Stereo technology wouldn’t be in place at Columbia until 1958, so there was no need to add the word ‘mono’ to delineate a difference. ‘Mono has always been truer to the studio sound and the original intent,’ said Avakian. ‘Mono featured less audio trickery and fewer audio distractions, so you can actually hear the musical conversation between Miles and the other musicians as it occurred in the studio.’”

For the second album, Avakian realized his intention to feature Miles in the presence of a jazz orchestra: horns, trumpets, trombones, bass trombone, tuba, alto sax, bass clarinet, flutes, and clarinets, along with bassist Chambers and drummer Art Taylor. Most significantly, Miles Ahead by Miles Davis + 19 reunited Miles with his late-1940s Birth of the Cool collaborator, arranger Gil Evans. With the exception of the title track, composed by Miles and Evans, the program again consisted of jazz and popular standards done Miles’ way.

Although the third album, Milestones, was recorded in two productive days of sessions in February and March 1958, it proved to be Avakian’s final LP with Miles. It reintroduced the quintet (Coltrane, Garland, Chambers, Jones) along with a new member from Florida, former schoolteacher Julian “Cannonball” Adderley on alto sax. Some of Miles’ most iconic music is heard on Milestones: the quintet (sextet’s) versions of Jackie McLean’s “Dr. Jekyll,” Dizzy Gillespie’s “Two Bass Hit,” and Monk’s closing “Straight, No Chaser.” At the same time, the album upped the ante of Miles’ originals with two, “Miles” and the 13-minute “Sid’s Ahead,” which hinted at things to come from the inspired young (32-year old) artist.

Two months after the Milestones sessions, the quintet (sextet) was back in the studio for a day of recording with a new Columbia staff producer, Cal Lampley. The session yielded four classics, three of which, due to length, made Side B of Jazz Track: Miles’ original “Fran-Dance,” and two American Songbook standards, “On Green Dolphin Street” and “Stella by Starlight.” (The fourth, “Love for Sale,” running over 11 minutes, is included on Columbia/Legacy’s Kind Of Blue 50th Anniversary sets.) The year before (December 1957), Miles had temporarily disbanded his group and gone to Paris to perform. There he was hired to create a soundtrack for French film director Louis Malle’s suspenseful murder mystery Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator To the Gallows in the U.S.). Miles and several European jazz musicians improvised the music while seeing the film on a screen. The music, barely 25 minutes, was issued on LP in France in 1958, and was subsequently coupled with the three Lampley tracks on Columbia as the cleverly titled Jazz Track, one of Miles’ most elusive and collectible LPs.

In between, Miles got back together with Gil Evans in July and August 1958, for the jazz orchestral masterpiece, the Gershwins’ Porgy And Bess, the final LP with Lampley. The scene was then set for the March-April 1959 Kind Of Bluesessions, with Columbia's Irving Townsend historically attributed as having overseen the recording, with a slightly revamped quintet (sextet) lineup, as Jones was replaced by Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Garland was replaced on piano by Bill Evans (on “So What,” “Blue In Green,” “All Blues,” and “Flamenco Sketches”) and by Wynton Kelly (“Freddie Freeloader”). The impact of Kind Of Blue, not only on jazz but on popular (even classical) music in general, continues to reverberate. It is part of the Library Of Congress National Recording Registry, it is #12 on the Rolling Stone list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, and it was even honored by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009, the album’s 50th anniversary.

Kind Of Blue’s closing track, “Flamenco Sketches,” might have hinted at the next project, the jazz orchestral Latin-tinged modal masterwork, Sketches Of Spain, the third of Miles’ collaborations with Gil Evans. Under Columbia’s staff producer Teo Macero (who would remain Miles’ exclusive producer at Columbia through the 1980s), two standards of the Spanish national repertoire, Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” and de Falla’s Will o’ the Wisp (from “El amor brujo”) were juxtaposed with three Evans originals, “The Pan Piper,” “Saeta” and “Solea.” Myers characterizes the conceptual framework as, “Davis’ piercing, crying solos supported by Evans’ sighing, sophisticated orchestrations that both provoked and mirrored Davis’ lines.”

The quintet lineup was again fine tuned in 1961 for Someday My Prince Will Come, Coltrane’s final Columbia recording with Miles (on the opening title track, from Disney’s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, and a Miles original, “Teo”). Tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley actually doubles with Trane on the title track, but has the tenor chair to himself on the other tracks, Miles originals (“Pfrancing,” “Drad-Dog”), and American Songbook staples “Old Folks” and Johnny Mercer’s closing “I Thought About You.”

Though separated in time by five summers, the Newport Jazz Festival performances by Miles’ sextet in 1958 (Adderley, Coltrane, Evans, Chambers, Cobb), and Thelonious Monk’s quartet in 1963, as heard on Miles And Monk At Newport, are remarkably seamless. As Mark Wilder told Myers, “I originally assumed that this album was going to need the most work to capture the original mono sound. After all, the Davis cuts were recorded in 1958, Monk’s in 1963, and both were recorded outdoors. Surprisingly, though, the master tapes were exactly like the original LP pressing and needed no fine-tuning.”

“For the producers and engineers who toiled on Davis’ albums between 1955 and 1963, mono was considered the purest and most unadulterated recorded expression of the trumpeter’s genius,” Myers writes. “Stereo versions of Davis’ albums weren’t made available until Kind of Blue in August 1959, and even then mono continued to be a priority since stereo LPs were marketed initially only to the small number of upscale consumers with stereo systems.”

The Original Mono Recordings follows in the tradition of the eight-time Grammy Award®-winning Miles Davis Seriesof multiple-CD box sets that began in 1996. The series culminated in the 2009 box set of 52 mini-LP replica jacketed albums, The Complete Miles Davis Columbia Album Collection, whose contents were all heard in stereo.

The Original Mono Recordings was produced for release by multiple Grammy Award®-winners Steve Berkowitz and mastering engineer Mark Wilder, who have overseen the Miles Davis Series since its inception more than 18 years ago, and the Miles Davis Bootleg Series since it was introduced in 2011.

The Original Mono Recordings by Miles Davis
(Columbia/Legacy 88883 75664 2)

Disc One:
’Round About Midnight by The Miles Davis Quintet (originally issued March 4, 1957, as Columbia CL 949) Selections: 1. ’Round Midnight (recorded 9/10/56) • 2. Ah-Leu-Cha (10/27/55) • 3. All of You (9/10/56) • 4. Bye Bye Blackbird (6/5/56) • 5. Tadd’s Delight (6/5/56) • 6. Dear Old Stockholm (6/5/56).

Disc Two:
Miles Ahead by Miles Davis + 19 (originally issued October 14, 1957, as Columbia CL 1041) Selections: 1. Springsville (recorded 5/23/57) • 2. The Maids of Cadiz (5/6/57) • 3. The Duke (5/6/57) • 4. My Ship (5/10/57, from the Broadway musical, Lady in the Dark) • 5. Miles Ahead (5/10/57) • 6. Blues for Pablo (5/23/57) • 7. New Rhumba (5/23/57) • 8. The Meaning of the Blues (5/27/57) • 9. Lament (5/27/57) • 10. I Don’t Wanna Be Kissed (By Anyone But You) (5/27/57).

Disc Three:
Milestones by Miles Davis (originally issued December 1, 1958, as Columbia CL 1193) Selections: 1. Dr. Jekyll (recorded 3/4/58) • 2. Sid’s Ahead (3/4/58) • 3. Two Bass Hit (2/4/58) • 4. Miles (2/4/58) • 5. Billy Boy (2/4/58) • 6. Straight, No Chaser (2/4/58).

Disc Four:
Jazz Track by Miles Davis (originally issued October 19, 1959, as Columbia CL 1268) Selections: 1. Générique • 2. L’assassinat de Carala • 3. Sur l’autoroute • 4. Julien dans l’ascenseur • 5. Florence sur les Champs-Elysées • 6. Dîner au motel • 7. Evasion de Julien • 8. Visite du vigile • 9. Au bar du Petit-Bac • 10. Chez le photographe du motel • 11. On Green Dolphin Street (recorded 5/26/58) • 12. Fran-Dance (5/26/58) • 13. Stella By Starlight (5/26/58). (Tracks 1-10, music from the Louis Malle film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud, recorded in Paris, 12/4 & 5/57.)

Disc Five:
Porgy And Bess by Miles Davis (originally issued March 9, 1959, as Columbia CL 1274) Selections: 1. The Buzzard Song (recorded 8/4/58) • 2. Bess You Is My Woman Now (7/29/58) • 3. Gone (7/22/58) • 4. Gone, Gone, Gone (7/22/58) • 5. Summertime (8/18/58) • 6. Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess (8/4/58) • 7. Prayer (Oh, Doctor Jesus) (8/4/58) • 8. Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab (7/29/58) • 9. My Man’s Gone Now (7/22/58) • 10. It Ain’t Necessarily So (7/29/58) • 11. Here Come de Honey Man (7/29/58) • 12. I Loves You, Porgy (8/18/58) • 13. There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York (8/18/58).

Disc Six:
Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis (originally issued August 17, 1959, as Columbia CL 1355) Selections: 1. So What (recorded 3/2/59) • 2. Freddie Freeloader (3/2/59) • 3. Blue In Green (3/2/59) • 4. All Blues (3/2/59) • 5. Flamenco Sketches (4/22/59).

Disc Seven:
Sketches Of Spain by Miles Davis (originally issued July 18, 1960, as Columbia CL 1480) Selections: 1. Concierto de Aranjuez (recorded 11/20/59) • 2. Will o’ the Wisp (3/11/60, from “El amor brujo”) • 3. The Pan Piper (3/10/60) • 4. Saeta (3/11/60) • 5. Solea (3/11/60).

Disc Eight:
Someday My Prince Will Come by Miles Davis (originally issued December 11, 1961, as Columbia CL 1656) Selections: 1. Someday My Prince Will Come (recorded 3/20/61, from the Walt Disney film, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs) • 2. Old Folks (3/20/61) • 3. Pfranc¬ing (3/7/61) • 4. Drad-Dog (3/7/61) • 5. Teo (3/21/61) • 6. I Thought About You (3/21/61).

Disc Nine:
Miles And Monk At Newport (originally issued May 11, 1964, as Columbia CL 2178) Selections: 1. Ah-Leu-Cha • 2. Straight, No Chaser • 3. Fran-Dance • 4. Two Bass Hit (tracks 1-4 by the Miles Davis Sextet, recorded 7/4/58) • 5. Nutty • 6. Blue Monk (tracks 5-6 by the Thelonious Monk Quartet, recorded 7/4/63).

from http://www.milesdavis.com

Billy Hart, 'All Our Reasons'

• Album: All Our Reasons
• Song: Imke's March [Instrumental]

Among the cooler things about learning to play jazz is that you can often call up your elders, and sometimes even your idols, and see if they will perform with you. That's what saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Ben Street and The Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson did when they asked veteran drummer Billy Hart to sit with them. Now that it's officially Hart's band — it was a friendly takeover — and now that he's got a record deal, it turns out he's more modern than the modernists. On All Our Reasons, he gets a little breathing room to indulge all his percussive fancies and the rest of the band floats along for the ride. There's wisdom here: It seeps into every open space, and neat turn of phrase, and tapered ending, and unexpected fill. Occasionally, there's catharsis too.

US musician Herbie Hancock has announced the inception of International Jazz Day as part of his role as a Unesco Goodwill Ambassador.

The day will include concerts in Paris, New Orleans and New York, and jazz-related events across the world.

Pianist Hancock said the annual event will mark the "international diplomatic aspect of jazz" and how it brings countries and cultures together.

International Jazz Day will take place on 30 April.

The date coincides with the last day of what has been celebrated as Jazz Appreciation Month in the US.

The Grammy-award-winning musician was named the Unesco ambassador for the promotion of Intercultural Dialogue last year.

He plans to kick off the musical day with a sunrise concert at New Orleans' Congo Square, the birthplace of jazz.

Local jazz musicians, such as Terence Blanchard and Ellis Marsalis, are also set to participate.

Hancock will then fly to New York for a sunset concert, which will be hosted by Morgan Freeman, Robert DeNiro, Michael Douglas and Quincy Jones.

"I'm really excited about International Jazz Day because so many artists from various countries and genres have a connection to jazz and will be able to honour this music that has had a profound effect on them," Hancock said.

"I hope that this day spreads the joy of spontaneous creation that exists in this music."

"Jazz has been the voice of freedom for so many countries over the past half century," he added.

Saxophonist Red Holloway Dead at 84

Chicago tenor was prolific leader and sideman for six decades

By Jeff Tamarkin