The Years Have Changed You, Somehow

Is jazz corny?  The many people who think so aren’t necessarily wrong.  I regularly publish counterproductive screeds about wack forms of jazz.  Yet I’ve taken great pleasure in willy-nilly dips into a few of the ostensibly squarest recesses of the jazz archives during the pandemic.  Here’s a sampling of my rewarding discoveries.

Speaking of corny, get a load of this album title: A Singer, A Swinger, A Gasser!.  Yet there’s nothing hokey about vocalist Annie Ross’ 1959 collaboration with saxophonist Zoot Sims.  A straightforward reading of “I Don’t Want to Cry Anymore" is among the astonishingly moving tracks.

I’ve never hidden my distaste of organ jazz.  Yet Departures, the recently reissued 1969 album by British organist Don Shinn, is an unlikely mashup of Martin Denny-style exotica and Ray Manzarek-esque pomp.  The three newly recorded bonus tracks are less essential.

More exotica: the unfortunately titled “Chung King” from Guitar/Guitar, a 1963 pairing of Charlie Byrd and Herb Ellis, is an unorthodox trip.

A profound interpretation of “Sophisticated Lady” induced tears of ecstatic joy the first time I heard The Duo.  The privately commissioned 1999 meetup of pianist Mulgrew Miller and bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen was recently made available to the general public.

My sincere admiration for Mac Miller’s new posthumous album Circles reflects my morbid fascination with recordings by dying musicians.  The jazz canon is loaded with devastating death knells.  I recently happened upon Lester Young’s Laughin’ to Keep from Cryin’, a session recorded 13 months before the saxophonist’s death in 1959.  The heroics of pianist Hank Jones can’t disguise Young’s agonizing frailty on “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”.


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Four months ago, I bragged about buying a deeply discounted ticket to a Daniil Trifonov concert.  The presenter announced a date for the rescheduled performance: April 24, 2022!  Here’s hoping I’m still alive 21 months from now.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)

Penance

Artists occasionally evolve more quickly than my perspectives about their music.  I failed to stay up to speed with Post Malone and Mac Miller.  In continuing to judge each man by his early output, I mistakenly held on to my first impressions more than a year past their respective artistic maturations.

I was infuriated by the popularity of Post Malone’s wretched initial work, yet his appearance at the Sprint Center earlier this month is one of my favorite performances of recent months.  Stoney hasn’t merely come a long way.  I belatedly realized he’s a pivotal figure in the history of popular music.

Just as Post renders genre distinctions meaningless, Miller’s posthumous album Circles is an intoxicating cocktail of hip-hop, jazz, R&B and pop.  The inviting sound makes his confessional songs about addiction and exhaustion all the more painful.  Worlds removed from the moronic juvenilia that characterized his first recordings, the profound Circles acts as a weary farewell. 

I’ve written positively about Post for a couple years.  He knows I’ve come around.  Sadly, my mea culpa is too late for Miller.  He was just 26 when he died 17 months ago.  I’m so sorry.


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I write weekly concert previews for The Kansas City Star.

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I reviewed the essential new Charlie Parker box set The Savoy 10-Inch LP Collection at Plastic Sax.

(Original image captured at the entrance of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre by There Stands the Glass.)

I Can't Be Satisfied

Unless your name is Pat Metheny, I probably don’t want to hear you play a three-minute guitar solo. 

The ingratiating Marcus King, 20, did a credible impression of the late guitar hero Duane Allman at his band’s in-store performance at Vinyl Renaissance on Sunday.  I was far more impressed that he sang almost as well as Gregg Allman. 

But so what?  Blues prodigies are a dime a dozen.  Few things interest me less than a flashy blues-rock guitar virtuoso.

That’s partly why the Rolling Stones’ new rough-and-tumble album Blue & Lonesome is so impressive.  Only one song is longer than five minutes and nine selections clock in at less than four minutes. The absence of tiresome guitar solos on the informal tribute to Chess Records puts the vast majority of younger blues-rock artists to shame.


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I reviewed the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s concert at the Midland theater for The Kansas City Star.

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I wrote an extended concert preview about Mac Miller for The Kansas City Star and Ink magazine.

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I discussed the Snow Globes on KCUR last week.

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I wrote an extended preview for a benefit concert featuring the Fray and David Cook for The Kansas City Star and Ink magazine.

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I ranked my favorite jazz performances of 2016 at Plastic Sax.

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I write weekly music previews for The Kansas City Star and Ink magazine.

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Childish Gambino’s outstanding Awaken, My Love! is RIYL: Funkadelic, wanting to get funked up, Sly & the Family Stone.  Here’s ”Redbone”.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)