Gary Graff for BILLBOARD- With this week’s arrival of a second album from his Big Fun Trio — Something Smells Funky ‘Round Here, whose title track premieres exclusively below — Elvin Bishop feels like he’s establishing the group as a going concern.

“It’s just what I do now, I guess,” the guitarist and Rock and Roll Hall of Famer (as a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band) tells Billboard, unapologetically reveling that the BFT has proven its initial doubters wrong. “It looked like the odds weren’t too good at it succeeding,” he recalls. “It’s funny; I think the first instinct a lot of people have is that when you downsize to a trio it’s because of financial reasons. That really wasn’t it. I took my seven-, eight-piece band as far as I could and I couldn’t think of anything more to do with it. I’m a democratic kind of guy, wanting to keep people happy. I gave a lot of solos to the other guys, and when you do that you stand around with your thumb up your butt waiting for the trombone player to finish.”

That, he says, is not the case with the BFT.

“Oh, no — the trio is a lot more fun,” Bishop says of the troupe he formed during 2015 with guitarist/pianist Bob Welsh and percussionist Willy Jordan. “With the trio you’ve got to be there all the time. There’s no place to hide. You’ve got to be kicking something in there. It keeps you interested.”

 

Read the rest of the interview and listen to new music on Billboard

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Larry Blumenfeld for The Village Voice – An uninformed listener attending a late set at the Subrosa club on a Monday in April — one who knew nothing of Eddie Palmieri’s long career shaping Afro-Latin jazz into a uniquely New York sound — might have thought the solo pianist onstage was a straight-up avant-gardist. Palmieri crafted abstractions with a heavily amplified Yamaha hybrid piano. Single notes were piercing pokes. Complex chords became brash tonal washes. The logic was rhythmic, suggested as much as stated, and always of Afro-Caribbean lineage. Palmieri’s improvisations moved from formal to funky to funny. Here and there, he gracefully stitched in a passage of startling beauty, as with the melody of “Life,” a tender ballad from his new album, Sabiduría/Wisdom.

Palmieri went on like this for more than twenty minutes, relentless and riveting. You’d never have suspected he turned eighty in December.

Born in Harlem to Puerto Rican parents, and raised in the Bronx, Palmieri is the reigning patriarch of Afro-Latin music in the U.S. On opening night of “Eddie Palmieri Presents Afro-Caribbean Mondays,” a weekly series that runs through August, some audience members seemed old enough to recall the hard-edged innovations of Conjunto la Perfecta, which Palmieri formed in 1961, or Harlem River Drive, through which, a decade later, Palmieri braided together Latin, jazz, funk and soul. Palmieri’s new album and Subrosa residency don’t amount to a victory lap. Rather, they’re evidence that he still sets the pace.

 

Find the full article at The Village Voice

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Pat Metheny has been elected into the prestigious Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The news comes just months after the guitarist, composer, and bandleader received the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award (the United States’ highest national award for a jazz artist) as well as Jazz FM’s “PRS- Music Gold Award” for lifetime achievement.

Founded in 1771 by King Gustav III, the Royal Swedish Academy of Music is one of the Royal Academies in Sweden. The academy’s purpose is to promote art music and musical life. It shall thus follow developments within Swedish and international music circles, take initiatives to advance musical culture as well as support education, research and artistic development in music’s various fields.

From The Royal Swedish Academy of Music Voting Board:

“The American Guitarist and Composer Pat Metheny is one of the world’s most significant living jazz musicians. He has an unmistakable sound and is an improviser with what appears to be an infinite flow of ideas. He has collaborated with most of the biggest names in the jazz, but also with composers and artists like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Joni Mitchell and David Bowie. His discography is extensive. Metheny has driven many types of projects in the course of his career, both traditionally and experimentally. Some with a wide, inclusive appeal, others with a narrower, more searching side. Pat Metheny is also a diligent writer in all topics that appeal to music.”

 

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Rich Juzwiak for JEZEBEL –

Today, Meshell Ndegeocello is debuting on Jezebel the video for her twangy cover of Ralph Tresvant’s simmering new jack swing classic “Sensitivity.” In a quietly radical decision, Ndegeocello keeps the gender-specific nouns of the original song in place, so that she sings things like, “You need a man with sensitivity, a man like me…” When Jezebel talked to her about the decision to faithfully cover the song in a wide-ranging conversation we had with her about her covers album Ventriloquism and career, this is what the out artist had to say:

 

“I mean, I’m called “sir” all the time, but if you know me, I’m a fragile flower. I forget that I’m a tatted up, braided, black person. I look like a dude. And sometimes I’m treated as such. I’m very aware of those realities. Also I love that song. Men need to have a conversation. What does it mean to be a man? I think we’re on a precipice right now. I just want to ask some other questions. What is it to be a compassionate human being in society and not be so influenced by our eyes? To really take time before we judge a person?”

 

Image credit: Charlie Gross

 

Watch the video on Jezebel

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Geoffrey Himes for PASTE – The 1960s were a time of upheaval in all corners of American culture, not the least in music. Lyricists such as Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Curtis Mayfield and Lou Reed were revolutionizing songwriting by introducing new subject matter and literary techniques. Instrumentalists such as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans and Charles Lloyd were upending all previous notions of harmony and rhythm.

Looking back, it seems strange that these two areas of innovation never merged. Occasionally a jazz soloist would sit in with bands such as Steely Dan and Grateful Dead, and jazz bands would sometimes cover the songs of Dylan and Simon. But you never had a major lyricist recording and touring with a true jazz band on an equal basis.

Joni Mitchell  did make a pair of studio records (Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter and Mingus) with Weather Report’s Wayne Shorter and Jaco Pastorius, and Sting made three (The Dream of the Blue Turtles, …Nothing like the Sun and The Soul Cages) with Branford Marsalis and Kenny Kirkland. But the albums were credited to Mitchell and Sting alone—and rightly so, for the jazz musicians were clearly sidemen and not full partners.

That’s what makes the new album, Vanished Garden, such a milestone. Not only is it credited to “Charles Lloyd & the Marvels + Lucinda Williams,” but the music within represents a true collaboration between the jazz musicians and the singer/songwriter. You can hear the saxophonist and his musicians respond to Williams’ words and melodies, and you can hear the vocalist react to the ever-shifting harmonies and rhythms beneath her. The collaboration is not compartmentalized into the jazz musicians cutting loose on the solos and the Americana musicians stepping forward in the vocal sections; it’s integrated from start to finish.

Image credit: Erik Jacobs, Ebru Yildiz for NPR

 

Find the full interview on PASTE

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