WGBH – Cuban jazz pianist HAROLD LÓPEZ-NUSSA performs live at WGBH’s Fraser performance studio in Boston with his brother, Ruy López-Nussa on drums, and longtime friend and collaborator, Gastón Joya, on bass. WGBH Jazz 24/7 host Tessil Collins sat down with Harold before his set to talk about performing with this particular trio, following the jazz scene in the U.S. while living in Cuba, and making the transition from playing Classical music to jazz.
Nick Millevoi for PREMIER GUITAR – Meshell Ndegeocello believes people connect with the most essential elements of songs: melodic hooks, words, rhythms. This utilitarian mindset is a big part of what makes up Ndegeocello’s signature sound as both a songwriter and as a player. Whether recording her own compositions, taking on cover material, collaborating with other musicians, or doing studio work, she consistently follows her own artistic vision.
As an accomplished collaborator and session artist, she’s worked with big-name artists across genres, including Herbie Hancock, Madonna, Chaka Khan, and the Rolling Stones, and has brought her personal touch to those sessions with the same gusto she delivers in her own work. Her bass tone and playing style is instantly recognizable, likely due in some part to her no-frills attitude about gear. “I learned early because I was poor,” she told Premier Guitar during our interview. “You can’t have any excuses. You play well and the tone is in your hands.”
Over the course of the last two and a half decades, Ndegeocello has been a prolific songwriter, from her first release—1993’s Plantation Lullabies, which featured the single “If That’s Your Boyfriend (He Wasn’t Last Night)”—through 2014’s Comet, Come to Me. She’s also explored cover material throughout her career, including one-off tracks like her 1994 collaboration with John Mellencamp (a version of Van Morrison’s “Wild Night”) and tribute albums such as her 2012 record, Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone.
On her newest record, Ventriloquism, Ndegeocello takes the essential elements of songs popularized by artists such as Prince, Sade, George Clinton, Tina Turner, Janet Jackson, and TLC, and rebuilds them in her own musical voice. But the bassist is not willing to take all of the credit. She’s quick to mention that “Meshell Ndegeocello is a band,” and that her bandmates are a part of the creative process. In addition to her long-time collaborators in Chris Bruce on guitar, drummer Abe Rounds, and Jebin Bruni on keys, Ndegecello also called on a few hot-shot guitarists to contribute, including Adam Levy, Jeff Parker, and Doyle Bramhall II.
During our phone interview, Ndegeocello chatted about Ventriloquism and her longtime career as an artist, but also took some time to talk about making albums, whether there is still room for mistakes on records, and the value of honest performances.
Find the full interview at Premier Guitar
Gil Green for STEREOGUM – Like always, New York’s Red Baraat delivers an explosion of sound. I first heard the six-piece party band’s frenzy of funk, jazz, hip-hip, and Indian bhangra at Bonnaroo in 2012. That always seemed like the perfect setting for them: hot, sweaty, uncontrollable dancing.
It’s a whole new experience listening through headphones, but the new title track off their upcoming album Sound The People — produced by Run The Jewels collaborator Little Shalimar — still carries the same power. The single, which features Heems of Das Racist and Swet Shop Boys, is a politically soaked display of energy. Against a current of knocking drums and the ominous, dissonant hum of horns, his lyrics are striking. Heems is intense as he raps the song’s hook, “Together we sound, together we down, together we frown, forever we brown, sound the people, sound my people.” Look out for his Robin Williams Flubber reference too.
Betsie Freeman for OMAHA WORLD-HERALD – So you thought you were going to a mere trumpet concert.
Boy, I bet you were surprised at Arturo Sandoval’s performance in Omaha on Thursday night.
“Is there anything he can’t do?” I thought as Sandoval dazzled the crowd not only with his extensive prowess on the horn but with his versatility.
He effortlessly played driving rhythm lines on a small set of drums. He added layers to his six-piece band on an electric keyboard, which produced a variety of sounds. He belted out some of the most intricate scat singing I’ve ever heard. He sang a heartfelt solo, “Dear Diz: Every Day I Think of You,” dedicated to his friend and mentor Dizzy Gillespie, a nod to the concert’s “Dear Diz” theme.
And just when you thought he’d done it all, he sat at the piano and played a beautiful Cuban-tinged jazz solo he composed himself, enhanced by terrific work on the maracas and drums by percussionist Ricardo Pasillas.
Just like Gillespie, Sandoval is a consummate musician, a true virtuoso with more talent on several instruments than most have on one. And he’s funny, personable and downright irresistible as he banters with the audience. His concert was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen at the 13-year-old Holland Center.
Nate Chinen for WBGO – If you happened to be wandering the streets of upper Manhattan one night this winter, you could have stumbled onto a video shoot for pianist Joey Alexander.
The video — for a version of “Moment’s Notice,” by John Coltrane — features an intepretive performance by dancer Jared Grimes, with Joey and a boombox on the sidelines.
The director is Yas Rowan, who has worked on several of Joey’s previous videos. He came up with the premise for the shoot after considering a suggestion from Joey’s father and manager, Denny Sila. “I knew all we needed was the right dancer, and the right location, after that everything would come together, and it did,” Rowan says. “Jared was a no-brainer. He had the right style, the right look, and he had the talent. He was perfect. He liked the piece, he wasn’t intimidated by the idea of improvising, and he was very excited about the whole project.”
“The location was a bit more difficult,” Rowan adds. “I spent a couple of days trekking all over the city to find the right spot.” What he settled on was a spot beneath Riverside Drive, where an overpass connects Manhattanville to Hamilton Heights.
Rowan’s direction to Grimes was minimal. “My goal was to get him to feel and not overthink,” he says. “Once I explained to him that Lindy hop was just the platform, and that he was free to use any style he need to express the music, he took off with it, and he nailed it. 100% improvised. He didn’t even get the cut of the song until the night before. And it was freezing that night. He was a real trouper.”
Jed Gottlieb for BOSTON HERALD – Not everyone likes, or even knows, bluegrass. But the Beatles? The Fab Four are pretty universal.
This is part of the reason Boston bluegrass/Americana act Twisted Pine included a lullaby-like take on “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” on its upcoming covers EP, “Dreams,” out June 8.
“We had a couple covers we started doing for fun and found them a good way to reach out to non-bluegrass audiences,” bassist Chris Sartori said. “But they also help us get some different grooves under our fingers and are helping us stretch our sound.”
Sartori, fiddler Kathleen Parks, guitarist Rachel Sumner and mandolinist Dan Bui have graduated to Boston’s big rooms — the quartet plays at City Winery on Wednesday. But Twisted Pine started as a more traditional string band in the trenches of Massachusetts’ Americana scene. They cut their teeth at the Cantab’s bluegrass night, and the International Bluegrass Music Association nominated them for its 2015 Momentum Award.
Since then, especially with the release of their 2017 debut LP, the band has assertively moved toward pop songcraft and arrangements that flirt with folk, jazz and rock. Twisted Pine actively blurs genre lines on “Dreams,” with strange, appealing takes on bluegrass icon Bill Monroe, alt rockers the Cranberries, new wave pioneers Blondie and modern disco heroes the Scissor Sisters.
“For the whole first part of the recording session, we weren’t even sure what would happen. It was all in an experimental phase. We were thinking, ‘Are we even going to pull this off?’ ” Sartori said. “But after a week in the studio, the groove settled it. A song like (the Scissor Sisters’) ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancin’,’ it was really hard to incorporate all the musical elements, but as we worked with the material, everything started to work.”
James Sullivan for THE BOSTON GLOBE – During a recent visit with his friend George Wein in New York City, the jazz composer Charles Lloyd excused himself to go to the john. Inside the bathroom in Wein’s apartment, Lloyd was mesmerized by a huge print of Herman Leonard’s iconic photograph of the piano great Art Tatum.
“Something happened in there,” Lloyd told Wein when he returned.
His host didn’t look up. “Oh,” he replied. “You saw God.”
Lloyd, the tenor saxophonist who cut his first album as a bandleader in 1964, has been trying to see God through the music since he first picked up a horn more than 70 years ago. To mark his recent birthday, his 80th, he’ll be the guest of honor at this year’s Newport Jazz Festival, the weekend-long event that Wein helped launch in 1954.
At Wein’s suggestion, Lloyd will headline all three days, with sets from his New Quartet with pianist Jason Moran; Sangam, his Hindu-flavored project with tabla virtuoso Zakir Hussain; and an all-star finale featuring vocalist Lucinda Williams. Though Wein, at 92, is no longer the daily mastermind behind the festival he created — executive producer Jay Sweet is credited with resurrecting Newport from its doldrums of a decade ago, and bassist Christian McBride now serves as artistic director — he still gets his say.
“They all know who the master chef is,” Lloyd jokes.
Besides Lloyd, big names set for this year’s festival include Pat Metheny, George Clinton, Laurie Anderson, and Jon Batiste. As the festival strays some from the pure jazz of its heyday, Lloyd represents one of the few vital survivors of the post-bop and avant-garde jazz era.
“He’s being accepted as one of the last of the great ones,” says Wein. “He’s the last of an era.”
ALLIGATOR RECORDS – Texas-born, Louisiana-raised pianist, songwriter and vocalist — and official 2018 Texas State Musician — Marcia Ball will be inducted into the Austin City Limits Hall Of Fame on October 25, 2018. This will be the fifth anniversary class of Hall Of Fame inductees, which also includes Los Lobos and Ray Charles. Previous inductees include Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, Asleep At The Wheel, Loretta Lynn, Townes Van Zandt and others.
The ceremony will be hosted by Chris Isaak and will take place in Austin, Texas at ACL Live At The Moody Theater. Guests announced so far include Dan Auerbach, Irma Thomas and Tracy Nelson. Musical highlights and inductions from the ceremony will air nationally on PBS in a special New Year’s Eve broadcast of Austin City Limits.
According to Ball, this is among the biggest honors of her 50-year career. “Austin City Limits put Austin on the map all over the country. Whenever we are touring, when I say where we are from, the immediate response from our fans is, ‘Austin City Limits.’ People in outlying towns wou ld drive to major cities, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Atlanta, because they had seen us on the show. In the years when my broadcasts were current, I could have filled a 90 minute tape with the words, ‘I never heard of you before, but I saw you on Austin City Limits.’ ACL opened the door into millions of homes for us and other regional bands. Some of my most memorable musical moments have been as a performer or in the audience at an Austin City Limits show. I was always honored to be asked to play ACL and I am thrilled and grateful to be inducted into the Hall Of Fame.”
Currently celebrating 50 years as a professional musician, Ball has won worldwide fame and countless fans for her ability to ignite a full-scale roadhouse rhythm and blues party every time she takes the stage. Her rollicking Texas boogies, swampy New Orleans ballads and groove-laden Gulf Coast blues have made her a one-of-a-kind favorite with music lovers all over the world. The New York Times says, “Marcia Ball plays two-fisted New Orleans barrelhouse piano and sings in a husky, knowing voice about all the trouble men and women can get into on the way to a good time.”
With 2018 release, Shine Bright, Ball set out to, in her words, “Make the best Marcia Ball record I could make.” In doing so, she has put together the most musically substantial, hopeful and uplifting set of songs of her five-decade career. Produced by Steve Berlin (Los Lobos) and recorded in Texas and Louisiana, Shine Bright contains twelve songs, including nine originals. “It is a ridiculously hopeful, cheerful record,” she says, in light of some of the album’s more serious subject matter. The secret, according to Ball, “is to set the political songs to a good dance beat.”
Born in Orange, Texas in 1949 to a family whose female members all played piano, Ball grew up in the small town of Vinton, Louisiana, right across the border from Texas. Seeing an Irma Thomas performance in 1962 and falling under the spell of Professor Longhair’s piano playing convinced Ball to seek out a career in music. She led a couple of early psychedelic country rock bands before pursuing her solo career from her adopted hometown of Austin, Texas.
After her 1978 Capitol Records debut, Circuit Queen, and a series of successful albums on Rounder Records, Ball joined Alligator in 2001 with the release of the critically acclaimed Presumed Innocent, the first of her six releases for the label, four of which have been Grammy nominated. Altogether she holds ten Blues Music Awards, ten Living Blues Awards, and five Grammy Award nominations. She has been inducted into both the Gulf Coast Music Hall Of Fame and the Louisiana Music Hall Of Fame. The Texas State legislature named her the official 2018 Texas State Musician. According to The Houston Chronicle, “Marcia Ball’s brand of blues lifts the spirit. She’s as perfect an artist as could be.”
MACK AVENUE – After a dynamic 2017, filled with international touring and the release of his critically acclaimed Mack Avenue Records debut album REACH, singularly talented pianist, GRAMMY® Award-nominee, and Steinway artist Christian Sands is expanding on his story with REACH FURTHER EP. This outing features live performances of three tracks from his latest album, recorded on March 7, 2018 at the popular Los Angeles jazz club Blue Whale, as well as two unreleased tracks from the original studio recording sessions. This digital-only release will be available on May 18, 2018 via Mack Avenue Records.
REACH FURTHER EP serves as a natural platform to showcase Sands’ captivating live performances, as well as a glimpse into what is to come from the ever-evolving and multifaceted artist. “People react to different things musically in a live setting, and that influenced how we play these songs. But for us, mainly there are more chord changes now,” laughs Sands. “We’ve added different pulses and more grooves after playing in Europe and the United States.”
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REACH FURTHER EP
* w/ bassist Yasushi Nakamura & drummer Marcus Baylor ** w/ bassist Yasushi Nakamura & drummer Jerome Jennings
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Sands used what little free time he had between touring and recording to lend a hand to the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, (officially becoming the Creative Ambassador for Octave Music) producing the upcoming never-before-heard live album Erroll Garner: Nightconcert. The album is a continuation of the work Sands has done with his mentor, the late and deeply lamented Geri Allen, to ensure Garner’s legacy is never forgotten.
“Geri was one of my teachers. I was studying with her during the same time I was studying with Dr. Billy Taylor. To watch her vision was incredible. When she introduced me to the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, I discovered the deeper idea of Erroll: his time, his phrases,” recalls Sands. “Being the Creative Ambassador to the Erroll Garner Jazz Project is a true honor and to be able to produce this record is something extremely heavy, yet humbling.”
Christian Sands continues to expand into previously unexplored areas of his artistry, continuing to push the boundaries of the “jazz-norm.” Furthering that sentiment and looking to the future, Mack Avenue Records plans to release Sands’ next album this coming fall. Incorporating elements of acoustic piano, Fender Rhodes, and Hammond B3, the upcoming album displays his ability to look at the instrument as a tool of orchestration.
Those talents will be further applied with his upcoming Music Director position for the 2018 Monterey Jazz Festival On Tour band this year with Cécile McLorin Salvant, Bria Skonberg, Melissa Aldana, Yasushi Nakamura, and Jamison Ross. With so many elements and projects coming from his young inspired mind, the REACH FURTHER EP solidifies that this is Christian Sands’ world and we are just blessed to be a part of it.
Christian Sands’ Upcoming U.S. Performances:
Jun. 14 / McCarter Theatre Center (The Berlind Theater) / Princeton, NJ Jun. 23 / Freihofer’s Saratoga Jazz Festival / Saratoga Springs, NY Jun. 24 – 25 / Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival / Rochester, NY
Jun. 26 – 27 / Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (JALC) / New York, NY July 3 – 20th: European Tour
Sept. 3 / Detroit Jazz Festival / Detroit, MI
Sept. 21 / Monterey Jazz Festival / Monterey, CA
Sept. 29 / Hyde Park Jazz Festival / Chicago, IL
Oct. 9 / Kuumbwa Jazz Club / San Jose, CA
Oct. 22 / Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley / Seattle, WA
Oct. 25 – 28 / Jazz Standard / New York, NY
Nov. 2 / Christina Cultural Arts Center / Wilmington, DE Nov. 3 / Montgomery County Community College / Blue Bell, PA
Christian Sands · REACH FURTHER EP
Mack Avenue Records · Release Date: May 18, 2018
Bob Boilen for NPR – A very pregnant Abigail Washburn points to Bela Fleck at the Tiny Desk and says “and just so you know, this is his fault.” I won’t spoil the video by telling you his response.
Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn are two American musical treasures. This husband-and-wife banjo duo write original tunes steeped in the roots of folk music. Their playing is sweetly paced with melodies interweaving through their intricate, percussive picking all while Abigail soars above it all with her discerning, yearning voice.
Their first tune, “Over the Divide,” was written at the height of the Syrian Refugee Crisis. They’d read a story about a Jewish, yodeling, Austrian sheep herder who helped Syrians out of Hungary, through the backroads that likely only sheep herders know.
The second tune, “Bloomin’ Rose,” is a response to Standing Rock and the Dakota pipeline that is seen as a threat to water and ancient burial grounds. The intensity and thoughtfulness in Bela Fleck’s and Abigail Washburn’s music is why it will shine for a good long while, the way great folk tunes stay relevant over the ages.
For the third tune, Abigail waddled over to a clogging board. And before she began her rhythmic patter, told us all that “my doctor said that what I’m about to do is ok! I have compression belts and tights on that you can’t see.” They then launched into “Take Me To Harlan,” another one of their songs from their 2017 album Echo In The Valley.
Both Bela and Abigail have come to the Tiny Desk separately in different musical configurations: Bela with Edgar Meyer on bass fiddle and Zakir Hussain on tabla, and Abigail with her band celebrating both American and Chinese traditions. But together they are a timeless power that must be witnessed.