By Banning Eyre

Keith Jarrett is a jazz legend. His catalog of recordings includes solo piano improvisations, trio and quartet works, classical performances, early sessions with Charles Lloyd and late ones with Miles Davis. But there’s nothing quite like Jarrett’s new double-CD set No End: It was recorded in his home studio in 1986, and he plays all the instruments — notably drums, bass and electric guitar.

Leave it to Jarrett to keep a surprise like this up his sleeve for 27 years. His prodigious work is marked by virtuosity and rigor, and he’s famously fussy onstage. But as a longtime fan, I’ve always been drawn to a certain warmth, looseness and funkiness in Jarrett’s work. These qualities shine on No End.

Jarrett says he loves playing drums and guitar because they’re instruments you touch directly — unlike piano, where mechanisms intervene. Listening to No End is like eavesdropping on the maestro’s private world, where he’s truly at play. These aren’t compositions, just spontaneous creations with what he calls “hit or miss” beginnings and endings. We even hear the hiss of the cassette tape he used for the session. For all that, Jarrett’s singular melodic gift and rich sensitivity to musical textures are unmistakable.

With all his achievement, it’s brave of Jarrett to reveal himself in this youthful, experimental, even innocent light. Looking back, he shares a surprising fondness for the ecstasy of the ’60s, Haight-Ashbury and the nascent days of hippiedom. Jarrett’s home studio creations can sound like classic Grateful Dead jams.

These 20 tracks are really a single work by a one-man band. The harmonies are simple: often one-chord vamps set to steady grooves. The playing is competent, but never virtuoso. Yet No End remains a seductive time capsule. A different artist might have kept this to himself, but Jarrett seems to cherish rediscovering a side of his younger self, and wonders how he could have left it in the drawer all these years.

Originally published at NPR.org

By NPR Staff

Most music fans will recognize the title of Ben Allison’s new album, The Stars Look Very Different Today, as a reference to the song “Space Oddity,” itself a reference to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The era that birthed David Bowie and Stanley Kubrick’s respective masterpieces had a lasting effect on the bassist and composer — and, Allison says, on the crack team of musicians he currently has backing him up.

“The band has, I guess you could say, a decidedly rock feel, but there’s all these other sounds coming out of these guys these days: lots of kind of sci-fi sounds, which is what was happening on the scene at that time,” Allison tells NPR’s Arun Rath. “Electronics really hit the music scene, and it was a big influence on me, coming up as a young musician.”

The Stars Look Very Different Today features drummer Allison Miller, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and guitarist and banjo player Brandon Seabrook, all of whom lead bands of their own. Learn more about the making of the album, including what commonplace object Allison used to play its opening notes, by clicking on the audio link.

Originally published at NPR.org

By NPR Staff

Pianist Jonathan Batiste was born and raised in New Orleans as part of the Batiste jazz family dynasty there. He was playing with the family band by age 8. Eventually he took his talents to Julliard, and that’s where he met the rest of Stay Human: Joe Saylor on the drums, Ibanda Ruhumbika on tuba and Eddie Barbash on alto sax.

The band is all about avoiding formality — so with them, Batiste goes by Jon — and making jazz as accessible as possible. If that means fusing it with funk or rock or pop, no problem. Ditching the grand piano for a portable piano-harmonica hybrid? Sure. Playing parades on the streets and in the subways of New York? Of course.

Jon Batiste and Stay Human have a new album called Social Music, and they recently met up Weekend Edition Sunday host Rachel Martin to perform in NPR’s Washington, D.C. studios. Hear the music, and their conversation, at the audio link.

Originally published at NPR.org

Chico Hamilton, a drummer and bandleader who helped put California on the modern-jazz map in the 1950s and remained active into the 21st century, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 92.

His death was announced by April Thibeault, his publicist.

Never among the flashiest or most muscular of jazz drummers, Mr. Hamilton had a subtle and melodic approach that made him ideally suited for the understated style that came to be known as cool jazz, of which his hometown, Los Angeles, was the epicenter.

He was a charter member of the baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, which helped lay the groundwork for the cool movement. His own quintet, which he formed shortly after leaving the Mulligan group, came to be regarded as the quintessence of cool. With its quiet intensity, its intricate arrangements and its uniquely pastel instrumentation of flute, guitar, cello, bass and drums — the flutist, Buddy Collette, also played alto saxophone — the Chico Hamilton Quintet became one of the most popular groups in jazz. (The cellist in that group, Fred Katz, died in September.)

The group was a mainstay of the nightclub and jazz festival circuit and even appeared in movies. It was prominently featured in the 1957 film “Sweet Smell of Success,” with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. (One character in that movie, a guitarist played by Martin Milner, was a member of the Hamilton group on screen, miming to the playing of the quintet’s real guitarist, John Pisano.) And it was seen in “Jazz on a Summer’s Day,” Bert Stern’s acclaimed documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival.

Cool jazz had fallen out of favor by the mid-1960s, but by then Mr. Hamilton had already altered the sound and style of his quintet, replacing the cellist with a trombonist and adopting a bluesier, more aggressive approach.

In 1966, after more personnel changes and more shifts in audience tastes, Mr. Hamilton, no longer on top of the jazz world but increasingly interested in composing — he wrote the music for Roman Polanski’s 1965 film, “Repulsion” — disbanded the quintet and formed a company that provided music for television shows and commercials.

But he continued to perform and record occasionally, and by the mid-1970s he was back on the road as a bandleader full time. He was never again as big a star as he had been in the 1950s, but he remained active, and his music became increasingly difficult to categorize, incorporating elements of free jazz, jazz-rock fusion and other styles.

He was born Foreststorn Hamilton in Los Angeles on Sept. 21, 1921. His father, Jesse, worked at the University Club of Southern California, and his mother, Pearl Lee Gonzales Cooley Hamilton, was a school dietitian.

Asked by Marc Myers of the website JazzWax how he got the name Chico, he said he wasn’t sure but thought he acquired it as a teenager because “I was always a small dude.”

While still in high school he immersed himself in the local jazz scene, and by 1940 he was touring with Lionel Hampton’s big band. After serving in the Army during World War II, he worked briefly with the bands of Jimmy Mundy, Charlie Barnet and Count Basie before becoming the house drummer at the Los Angeles nightclub Billy Berg’s in 1946.

From 1948 to 1955 he toured Europe in the summers as a member of Lena Horne’s backup band, while playing the rest of the year in Los Angeles. His softly propulsive playing was an essential element in the popularity of Mulligan’s 1952 quartet, which also included Chet Baker on trumpet but, unusually, did not have a pianist. The group helped set the template for what came to be known as West Coast jazz, smoother and more cerebral than its East Coast counterpart.

The high profile he achieved with Mulligan emboldened him to try his luck as a bandleader, something fairly unusual for a drummer in the 1950s. His success was almost instantaneous.

He went on to record prolifically for a variety of labels, including Pacific Jazz, Impulse, Columbia and Soul Note. Among the honors he received were a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters Award in 2004 and a Kennedy Center Living Jazz Legend Award in 2007.

Although slowed by age, Mr. Hamilton continued to perform and record beyond his 90th birthday. He released an album, “Revelation,” in 2011 on the Joyous Shout label, and had recently completed another one, “Inquiring Minds,” scheduled for release in 2014. Until late last year he was appearing at the Manhattan nightclub Drom with Euphoria, the group he had led since 1989.

Mr. Hamilton is survived by a brother, Don; a daughter, Denise Hamilton; a granddaughter; and two great-granddaughters. His brother the actor Bernie Hamilton, and his wife, Helen Hamilton, both died in 2008.

Mr. Hamilton was highly regarded not just for his drumming, but also as a talent scout. Musicians who passed through his group before achieving stardom on their own include the bassist Ron Carter, the saxophonists Eric Dolphy and Charles Lloyd and the guitarists Jim Hall, Gabor Szabo and Larry Coryell. In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio, the saxophonist Eric Person, a longtime sideman, praised Mr. Hamilton for teaching “how to work on the bandstand, how you dress onstage, how you carry yourself in public.”

Mr. Hamilton taught those lessons as a bandleader and, for more than two decades, as a faculty member at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Teaching young musicians, he told The Providence Journal in Rhode Island in 2006, was “not difficult if they realize how fortunate they are.”

“But,” he added, “if they’re on an ego trip, that’s their problem.”

By Peter Keepnews

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

Originally published by www.nytimes.com

“Retire? You don’t retire from jazz . Some cats have died on the bandstand,” said drummer and educator Joe Chambers, during a phone interview from his home in Wilmington, North Carolina. “By the same token. I don’t have the desire to play the drums behind anybody that’s living today, with the possible exception of McCoy Tyner. All the cats I would want to play behind are all dead. I am tired of playing drums. I am writing more than anything else. I have always been a composer. In fact, there have been very few drummers in the history of jazz who were composers, except maybe my mentor Max Roach.”

Chambers, who was the first Thomas S. Kenan Distinguished Professor of Jazz in the Department of Music at The University of North Carolina at Wilmington, for three years, (2008-11), has worked with most of the jazz greats, including Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach and Max’s all-percussion group called M’Boom. As a sideman, a drummer, percussionist, vibes player, and as a leader, he has recorded more than 500 albums and CDs. His compositions have been performed at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Joe also contributed to soundtracks for several of Spike Lee films including “Mo Better Blues.” His most recent release “Joe Chambers Moving Pictures Orchestra Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola in New York City,” (Savant, 2012) was nominated for two Grammys.

“I just got back from a week residency in Los Angeles, at The University of Southern California that went very well.” Chambers said. “I have been doing quite a bit of those lately. I enjoy teaching. I also recently did a residency at Rutgers and will be at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) from November 20-22. I am looking forward to it because it’s a mostly African-American university and I feel that black schools, as the writer Stanley Crouch said, should bring jazz musicians to their campuses. I was in Atlanta last year for the Jazz Education Network (JEN) conference and I was approached by Dr. Ira Wiggins, (the director of the NCCU jazz studies department), who asked me was I available. I am looking forward to interacting with the students and telling them more about how jazz, to me, is social history.”

Joe Chambers, born in 1942, is a native of Stone Acre, Virginia, who was raised in suburban Philadelphia. He grew up in a musical family, and was performing in rhythm and blues bands, earning money, when he was a teenager. Later, he attended the Philadelphia Conservatory for one year. By the late 1950s and 1960s, he was a much-in-demand drummer in the jazz scene, and was based in New York City.

“Jazz was visible then,” Chambers said. “It’s not visible now. During those days, jazz music was played in the neighborhood clubs on the juke boxes. Most of the tables and booths in the clubs had little juke box selectors. And most of the music on them was jazz. I remember when Ahmad Jamal’s ‘Poinciana’ was a hit. And so was Lee Morgan’s ‘Sidewinder.’ People would play those tunes over and over in the neighborhood clubs, when there wasn’t live music. Jazz was also on TV, with shows Steve Allen, Peter Gunn. But, once the juke box industry faded out, then so did jazz.”

Later, Joe performed in the all-percussion group M’Boom! and taught at The New School in New York City. He was working at The New School before he moved to the calm coastal city of Wilmington, North Carolina to teach at The University of North Carolina. After leaving the university, he has had more time to compose.

“I am writing as we speak,” he said. “I am working on the next album. I call it ‘M’Boom with Strings.”. It’s a big project. It’s a way to get my music out there as an orchestra. I don’t know if it will be nominated for a Grammy like ‘Moving Pictures’, but we will see.”

For more information about Joe Chambers residency at North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and the November 22, 2013, concert, at B.N. Duke Auditorium, with the NCCU Jazz Ensembles, call (919) 530-6100.

Originally published at jazzcorner.com by Larry Reni Thomas

Ray Charles will be commemorated on September 23, 2013, his 83rd birthday, with a United States Postal Service Music Icons Forever® Stamp. Concord Records celebrates the occasion with the release of Ray Charles Forever, a deluxe CD/DVD collection on September 24th.

In addition, Concord Records will be producing a special edition of Ray Charles Forever with an exclusive bonus track, available at major Post Office™ locations across the country, as well as online at usps.com and ebay.com/stamps. Various launch events will be held across the U.S. to pay tribute to this momentous occasion, including at the GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles, CA and the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at Morehouse College in Atlanta, GA.

“Ray Charles was a musical genius whose fans spanned the globe. The U.S. Postal Service is delighted to partner with Concord Music Group to announce the release of this new CD featuring the legendary Ray Charles,” said Chief Marketing Officer Nagisa Manabe. “This CD, including an exclusive song never before released, serves as a stellar companion to the limited-edition Ray Charles Forever Stamp the Postal Service is issuing September 23, as the latest addition to the Postal Service’s music icons series,” Manabe said.

Ray Charles Forever features 12 remastered classics and unique gems including “A Song For You,” “Ring Of Fire,” “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Imagine,” “America the Beautiful,” and a previously unreleased recording of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.”

The 20-minute DVD features rare live performances of “Imagine” (Goodwill Games, 1998), “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” (Earth, 1992), and “A Song For You” (North Sea Jazz Fest, 1997) along with interview segments culled from the BBC’s “Live In London” (1986) and Norman Seeff’s “The Session Project” (1985).

“No matter how many awards and accolades he received, Mr. Charles was genuinely humbled by each and every honor. To him, it meant people appreciated what he loved doing so much—his music,” said Valerie Ervin, President of the Ray Charles Foundation and Executive Producer, of the collection. “Georgia On My Mind, “Hit The Road Jack,” “What’d I Say” and “I’ve Got A Woman” are among the many hits that are standards and meet the test of time. But to mark this momentous occasion, I selected songs that also exemplify the forever quality of his performances.” Ervin is co-Executive Producer of the album along with John Burk, Chief Creative Officer of Concord Music Group. Six-time GRAMMY-winning producer Gregg Field also contributed to the album, producing the unreleased “They Can’t Take That Away From Me,” among other tracks.

During a career that spanned some 58 years, Charles performed a total of more than 10,000 concerts, and starred on over 100 albums, many of them top sellers in a variety of musical genres. He received the Lifetime Achievement and the President’s Merit Award, is a recipient of the Presidential Medal For the Arts, Kennedy Center Honors, and France’s Legion of Honor, received the NAACP Image Awards “Hall of Fame Award in 2004, and is one of the original inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

He appeared in movies such as “The Blues Brothers,” and starred in commercials for Coca-Cola, Diet Pepsi and California Raisins, among numerous others. In 2004, the biopic Ray was released for the world to see the historic life and times of the “Genius.” The movie garnered six Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Jamie Foxx took home the Best Actor award for his portrayal of Ray. Charles’ last public performance was on July 20, 2003, in Alexandria, VA. In 1998, Charles received the Polar Music Award, an award given for significant achievements in music.

Referring to his gift Charles said, “I don’t call myself a blues singer or a jazz singer or a country singer. I just call myself a singer that can sing the blues, a singer that can sing jazz, a singer that knows how to sing country music, but in my own way.”

Click here to download music.

Ray Charles Forever Deluxe CD/DVD Track Listing

1. Song For You (4:16)
2. I’m Gonna Move To The Outskirts Of Town (3:42)
3. Ring Of Fire (3:11)
4. Come Rain Or Come Shine (3:42)
5. They Can’t Take That Away From Me (4:14)
6. Till There Was You (4:09)
7. Isn’t It Wonderful (4:08)
8. None Of Us Are Free (5:05)
9. Imagine (4:29)
10. If I Could (4:57)
11. So Help Me God (4:03)
12. America the Beautiful (3:35)

*Digital version includes the 12 music tracks only.

Online Media Kit: http://mediakits.concordmusicgroup.com/p/ray-charles-forever

In case you missed our labor day broadcast, please visit www.npr.org/series/newport-jazz-festival.

You can expect to hear the following on WNCU 90.7FM on Labor Day, Sept. 2.

• 7 am – Jon Batiste
• 8:15 am – Ray Anderson
• 9:07 am – Jim Hall
• 10:06 am – Terence Blanchard
• 11:03 am – Donny McCaslin
• 11:59 am – Dirty Dozen Brass Band
• 12:57 pm – Mary Halvorson
• 1:54 pm – Ali Amr
• 2:40 pm – Eddie Palmieri
• 4 pm – Detroit Jazz 2012
• 9 – 10 pm – Sarah Vaughn

You can also expect to hear:

• Sonny Rollins
• Steve Wilson
• Brian Lynch
• Jerry Gonzalez
• Marcus Belgrave/Harvey Thompson
• Terence Blanchard
• Mack Avenue Superband
• Wane Shorter
• Fred Hersch
• Poncho Sanchez
• Cecile McLorin Salvant
• Donald Harrison
• Preservation Jazz Band

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — A leading member of the Harlem Renaissance artists in the 1960s, Romare Bearden was born in Charlotte, but moved to New York with his family when he was 4-years-old. Many of his collages and paintings were drawn from memories of his home state. Bearden will be remembered by his home state with a N.C. Highway Historical marker, which will be dedicated Aug. 30, at 4 p.m., at Mint Street and Martin Luther King Boulevard in Charlotte.

Bearden graduated from New York University in 1935 and worked for the New York City Department of Social Services until 1969. After serving in the Army during World War II, he studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and also with German artist George Grosz, who greatly influenced the burgeoning artist.

By the early 1960s Bearden settled into the techniques of collage and photomontage. He practiced fracturing to bring generality to his work, which might include photographic images of African masks, animal eyes and even vegetation, for his subject’s faces. He believed that art must maintain a quality of artificiality which he achieved primarily through distortion and abstract colorization. Bearden claimed that photographs captured the essence of reality far better than an artist could hope to achieve. He was not inclined to paint about African-Americans in terms of propaganda and protest, choosing to express attitudes on the human existence instead.

Today his work is found in leading museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Studio in Harlem, and also at the N.C. Museum of Art. His publications include “A Painter’s Mind: A Study of the Relations of Structure and Space in Painting,” with Carl Holty and “A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present,” with Harry Henderson, published posthumously.

Bearden was awarded the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, in 1987. He died in 1988, leaving a legacy of artwork and literature that forever altered African-American art. A street and park in Charlotte are named in his memory. The marker dedication is part of the dedication ceremonies for the park.

For information about the dedication, please contact the Arts and Sciences Council at (704) 335-3261. For information on the N.C. Highway Historical Marker Program, please contact (919) 807-7290. The Highway Marker program is collaboration between the N.C. Department of Transportation and the N. C. Department of Cultural Resources.

Cape Town — Renowned jazz singer and composer Sathima Bea Benjamin has died, the South African Broadcasting Corporation has reported. Sathima returned to Cape Town from New York in 2011, where she was born in 1936 – continuing to work as a vocalist.

Benjamin had toured the world, first with husband and jazz legend Abdullah Ibrahim, then going on to record more than 10 albums. She became well-known in jazz and theatre circles in the early 1960s, also helping the African National Congress with fundraising concerts during the struggle for liberation.

In October 2004, South African president Thabo Mbeki bestowed upon her the Order of Ikhamanga Silver, a national honour,  in recognition for her “excellent contribution as a jazz artist” in South Africa and internationally, as well as for her contribution “to the struggle against apartheid.”

Sathima Bea Benjamin’s most recent CD, SongSpirit, was released on 17 October in celebration of her 70th birthday. A compilation record, it includes tracks from her earlier albums, starting with A Morning In Paris and going through Musical Echoes, plus a previously unreleased duet with Abdullah Ibrahim from 1973.

In 2007, Benjamin began the process of reissuing her now out-of-print back catalogue for download. Her life was the subject of a 2010 documentary film titled Sathima’s Windsong, directed by author and professor, Daniel Yon.

In December 2008, she brought an Apollo Theater crowd to their feet as the closing act of of the Jazz concert Bricktop at the Apollo, hosted by film director Jordan Walker-Pearlman.

A fortnight ago, Standard Bank Joy of Jazz awarded Benjamin with the Lifetime achievement award.

Originally published at AllAfrica.com