Monthly Archives: October 2018

KUDOS: Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, Joey DeFrancesco, Pat Metheny, Béla Fleck, Kurt Elling and Lizz Wright are Winners in Downbeat’s 83rd Annual Readers Poll

The December 2018 issue of DownBeat announces the winners of the 83rd Annual Readers Poll. TKA is proud to congratulate Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, Joey DeFrancesco, Pat Metheny, Béla Fleck, Kurt Elling and Lizz Wright for the following accolades:

Chick Corea winner of the Jazz Album category for Chinese Butterfly (Concord) with Steve Gadd Band and winner of the Jazz Artist category

Wynton Marsalis winner of the Trumpet category

Joey DeFrancesco winner of the Organ category

Pat Metheny winner of the Guitar category

Béla Fleck winner of the Miscellaneous Instrument category (banjo)

Kurt Elling winner of the Male Vocalist category

Lizz Wright winner of the Beyond Album category for Grace (Concord)

 

 

Read the full list of winners on DownBeat

Chick Corea on TKA

Wynton Marsalis on TKA

Joey DeFrancesco on TKA

Pat Metheny on TKA

Béla Fleck on TKA

Kurt Elling on TKA

Lizz Wright on TKA

 

 

REVIEW: PopMatters States “Cécile McLorin Salvant Sings with Control, Art, and Knowledge of Jazz Vocal History on ‘The Window'”

Will Layman for POPMATTERS –  “Cecile McLorin Salvant sings with control, art, and a knowledge of the jazz vocal tradition that is vast. Her instrument is rich: with a large range, many tonal colors, and superb rhythmic placement. She also works with a great range of repertoire: jazz standards, Tin Pan Alley classics, rock era classics, and original songs. Among contemporary jazz singers, she is among the most technically brilliant, almost as if an engineer drew up the plans for the perfect jazz vocalist circa 1965.

So, yes, there is a brilliance about McLorin Salvant as well as a retro cage in which she sometimes seemed trapped. Her latest, The Window, however, makes her feel fresh and present at the moment, less self-conscious. More immediate in every way.

The Window finds McLorin Salvant appearing with pianist Sullivan Fortner in the studio and live at the Village Vanguard, strictly in a duo format. Fortner is a gentle, detailed, superb accompanist, crafting original arrangements that never settle for just laying down the chord changes. Fortner plays specific parts, lines, colors, and feelings—and on two tracks he works in some organ. His solo sections are imaginative and fully equal to the creativity of the singer. McLorin Salvant’s performances, with a couple of exceptions, are her best work—controlled and artful without being over-sung. It is a set of tiny pleasures.

Many of the tracks on The Window are miniatures, quick and clever settings for standards that are lesser known. “By Myself” is a bouncing two minutes-plus that nevertheless provides Fortner with a chorus on which to show off his stride piano style, which he carries though on the bridge as McLorin Salvant rejoins him—it’s hip and fun as if Sarah Vaughan had recorded an album with Art Tatum. “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You” is less than 90 seconds long, but it pops with an impish swing, with McLorin Salvant showing that has put an ear on Blossom Dearie as well as on Betty Carter and Ella Fitzgerald. It’s over in a blink, but that’s why this disc has room for 17 tracks.

The duo is not always playful. “Every Since the One I Love’s Been Gone” is a dramatic ballad by Buddy Johnson, and Fortner plays it in a serious, dark, slow stride, with McLorin Salvant getting plenty of room above the accompaniment to bend her notes and twist her tone for emotional effect. She particularly digs into her lower register on “I’m gone”, before coyly twisting the song’s title just before the piano solo. Jimmy Rowles’s “The Peacocks” (with words by singer Norma Winstone) almost makes it to ten minutes in a creepingly beautiful trio that adds tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana. Each musician stays completely inside the song, with Fortner playing a quiet bed of atmosphere and Aldana sticking to long tones that eventually overlap with the vocal in harmony that shudders with feeling.

The critical strength of this live performance is not just in McLorin Salvant’s subtlety but also in her ability to pull back from using every one of her sounds and strengths all across the nine-plus minutes. We get to hear this great singer “performing” less and allowing the song to express itself more purely. That is not the case on some tunes where McLorin Salvant, for better of worse, emotes on STUN.

The version of Bernstein’s “Somewhere” (from West Side Story) is an example—heavy. Fortner’s introduction is a tiny overture for the show, moving through several WSS tunes before the vocal enters. His solo is set over a thrumming left hand that shudders with a kind of aria-like weightiness. McLorin’s vocal begins in one of her frequently-heard modes—with twisting timbre and pronunciation on every other syllable. It is not out of control or amateurish—it is done with incredible care and control—but it is not at all clear why the second “us” of the lyric gets a bluesy warble and timbral sneer when that gesture isn’t used on any other note. Who knows why she chooses whooshing downward glissando on “We’ll – find – a – way – of” before “forgiving”. Each choice is gorgeously, flawlessly performed but why these choices and why a different choice on practically every phrase in the song? It’s not that she is showing off technique as much as cramming the song with too many dramatic singing affections. Tremulous and infused with INTERPRETATION, the song itself, the words, and the feeling almost disappear from your consciousness.

But on this set, “Somewhere” is the exception rather than the rule. The Stevie Wonder tune “Visions” gets a less loaded treatment, with McLorin Salvant cracking her voice slightly on “mi-i-ind” in the opening phrase, for example, but generally keeping her vocal trickery much less foregrounded. Fortner’s piano solo is voiced with so much originality and care that it sounds only partly improvised, but who cares—it’s that good. “Obsession” is a gently, conversationally articulated song that exudes casual grace while still allowing McLorin Salvant’s voice to show off moments of rich tone and depth. “Wild Is Love” is more playful, with a flirtatious and long Forter introduction and then a dancing play between the melody and the piano. McLorin Salvant plays with the song like it is a beach ball high in the air. The duo’s readings of “The Gentleman Is a Dope”, “Trouble Is a Man”, and “Were Thine That Special Face” are also modulated in this space: with Fortner sympathetic but original and the leader pulling back from the pyrotechnics she’s capable of to deliver the song with interpretation and heart.

In the end, The Window wins you over with its moments of greatest simplicity and emotion, like all the very good art. If you’ve ever been in love, you will need to listen to “Tell Me Why” on repeat, with its clean, timeless combination of graceful piano movement and McLorin’s Salvant’s dead-on perfect combination of artful embellishment and straight-from-the-heart clarity. Only artists capable of much more can provide the kind of less that makes this song work. And perhaps it helps that the song is rarely enough performed that you cannot find another version on the internet. It seemingly comes straight at you without history—of the song or of the jazz singers to whom Cecile McLorin Salvant is so often compared—haunting it.

The Window is the recording of this singer most likely to haunt you rather than just blow you away.”

Read the full article on PopMatters 

PREMIERE: The Claudettes Deliver a Macabre Visual Feast With ‘Taco Night Material’ Video via Billboard

Gary Graff for BILLBOARD –  The Claudettes’ Johnny Iguana had a feeling his sister-in-law Kate Stone, a Brooklyn-based graphic artist, could do something special with one of the band’s songs.

And her stop-motion animation video for ‘Taco Night Material,’ premiering exclusively below, shows his instinct was spot-on.

The fast-paced clip, which Stone created using photographic cut-outs and a diorama-style set, is an energetic, nonstop visual feast of images, including a singing stove, a birthday cake, taco bowls, skeletons, insects, dead tree trunks growing through the floor and scores of other effects. ‘It was entirely made by hand, with no digital manipulation,’ Stone tells Billboard. ‘It took about eight hours to animate every 30 seconds of the video — a time-consuming but very rewarding process, and we’re all very excited about the results.’

It’s not just art for art’s sake, either. The video interprets the song’s story, inspired by a friend of Iguana’s whose marriage lasted just a few months. ‘I hadn’t seen him in that whole time, so invited him over for a drink in my basement and asked him what happened,’ Iguana recalls. ‘He didn’t want to talk about it, but his answer was ‘I realized I wasn’t exactly taco night material’ — meaning the whole domestic husband and wifey thing was not for him.’ But Iguana twisted that inspiration into a psychobilly murder ballad about marital resentment that turns fatal.

‘The song is the confession of a woman who finds herself trapped in an oppressively dull marriage,’ Stone explains. ‘Facing a future of agonizingly domestic ‘taco-night Tuesdays,’ she chooses murder over a life of never-ending wifey responsibilities. It’s a Women’s Empowerment anthem…’ The clip also includes some imagery drawn from 16th-century Vanitas paintings, ‘but here the still lifes are not still at all,’ she notes.

The video serves as a bridge between the Claudettes’ latest album, Dance Scandal At The Gymnasium!, and its next project, which the group has just started recording with producer Tedd Hutt (Flogging Molly, the Gaslight Anthem, Old Crow Medicine Show) in Chicago. ‘We made 18 demos to send to him, and he asked me from the beginning if I was up for real discussion about each and every song,’ Iguana says. ‘He has a lot of strong feelings about composition and arrangement — and that’s what we want. All I know is that all his records that I can find sound really good and cohesive, so I’m really excited to see what he can do with us.'”

 

Watch the video and read more on Billboard

The Claudettes on TKA 

 

REVIEW: Rolling Stone proclaims Cécile McLorin Salvant Transcends Nostalgia on Radically Spare ‘The Window’. 4 Stars

Hank Shteamer for ROLLING STONE – “The Grammy-winning jazz singer’s duets with pianist Sullivan Fortner tease out the Great American Songbook’s tougher truths.

The most radical thing a jazz singer could do in 2018 is stick to the basics. One might expect Cécile McLorin Salvant, who picked up Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammys for each of her past two albums and is riding a wave of mainstream acclaim, to team with a buzzy producer or attempt some other kind of savvy crossover. But on The Window, the wise, virtuosic and subtly subversive 29-year-old singer opts for a setting so stark it can almost seem abstract: For the majority of this part-studio, part-live LP, she’s accompanied only by pianist/organist Sullivan Fortner. While the tunes here (plenty from Salvant’s Great American Songbook wheelhouse, plus Stevie Wonder’s “Visions,” and two sung in French, including one written by the singer) are mostly love songs of a sort, Salvant rarely seems interested in setting a mood of cozy romance.

On Buddy Johnson’s “Ever Since the One I Love’s Been Gone,” she moves daringly between high and low registers, even sneaking in a hint of a growl, as she embodies a state of desperate pining. And on West Side Story‘s “Somewhere,” Fortner’s remarkable accompaniment helps to bring the song from a dreamlike hush to a dramatic, impressionistic instrumental peak and back. Saxophonist Melissa Aldana, Salvant’s bandmate in the formidable collective Artemis, turns up on lengthy album closer “The Peacocks,” heightening the album’s searching mood with a breathy, poetic solo and shadowing the singer during the song’s swooping climax.

There’s playful material here too (“I’ve Got Your Number,” Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Gentleman Is a Dope” and Rodgers and Hart’s “Everything I’ve Got Belongs to You”), but overall Salvant seems intent on teasing out the grey areas and tougher truths in these songs — the way love can sting as much as it soothes, for example — to generally stunning effect.

‘I am not interested in the idea of relevance,’ Salvant said in a press release for The Window. ‘I am interested in the idea of presence.’ In refusing to pander, either to easy nostalgia or to current trends, she touches on something timeless.”

Read the full article on Rolling Stone 

Cécile McLorin Salvant on TKA