Blame It On My Youth

My Twitter feed was inundated with posts about Kind of Blue and Time Out for International Jazz Day yesterday.  Refusing to play into the hands of cynical marketers and self-serving institutions, I didn’t write any replies.  Yet the clickbait posts soliciting answers to questions like “which jazz records changed your life?” prompted me recall becoming a discerning jazz enthusiast in the 1980s.  Then, as now, my ears were open to all genres, so jazz albums had to be just as exciting as groundbreaking music by the likes of the Clash, Prince, Public Enemy and Talking Heads.  The ten albums on the following list that I purchased as new releases in the 1980s met that standard.  Without these titles in my life during that formative decade, I may not have made a lifelong commitment to jazz.

1. Jack DeJohnette- Special Edition (1980)

2. Pat Metheny- 80/81 (1980)

3. James Blood Ulmer- Free Lancing (1981)

4. Miles Davis- Decoy (1983)

5. Wynton Marsalis- Black Codes (From the Underground) (1985)

6. John Zorn- The Big Gundown (1985)

7. Ornette Coleman- In All Languages (1987)

8. Henry Threadgill- Easily Slip Into Another World (1988)

9. Bobby Watson & Horizon- No Question About It (1988)

10. Chet Baker- Plays and Sings from the Film “Let’s Get Lost” (1989)

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I write weekly concert previews for The Kansas City Star.

(Original image of the Tennessee Theater at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, by There Stands the Glass.)

I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say

The New Yorker published a cartoon in 1992 that depicts excited children shouting “Dad! Dad! Wake up! They just discovered another Marsalis!” as they invade the bedroom of a sleeping man.  The gag remains relevant 27 years later.  I recently learned that Wynton Marsalis’ son Jasper creates musique concrète as Slauson Malone.  The fascinating A Quiet Farwll, 2016-2018 alludes to the jazz, classical and funk associated with his famous family but is more closely aligned with rap-adjacent sonic experiments like Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs.  Where A Quiet Farwll, 2016-2018 acts as nightmare fuel, Wynton Marsalis’ soundtrack for the the biopic Bolden is suffused with joy.  Marsalis was the obvious candidate for the task of bringing the music of the unrecorded Buddy Bolden to life.  As with the initial recordings of Louis Armstrong, Marsalis' presumably accurate rendering of Bolden's joyfully defiant party music foreshadows much of what would follow, including the eerie sonic collages of one of the youngest members of America’s foremost musical dynasty.

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I reviewed the Chicago Plan’s appearance at the Blue Room for Plastic Sax.

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I suspect that the cover art of Ayanna Witter-Johnson’s Road Runner is a tribute to the image that adorns Joan Armatrading’s Track Record.  The art-pop collection is recommended if you like Esperanza Spalding, the new sound of London, Sting.  Here’s “Nothing Less”.

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White Denim’s Side Effects is a potent dose of jam-soaked psych-rock.  RIYL: Syd Barrett, kaleidoscopes, Umphrey’s McGee.  Here’s “NY Money”.

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As a spot-on replication of vintage soul, Kelly Finnigan’s new The Tales People Tell surpasses Durand Jones & the Indications’ impressive 2019 album American Love Call.  

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Schoolboy Q’s Crash Talk is evenly divided between despicable trash and memorable brilliance.  “Numb Numb” Juice” reveals the rapper’s worst and best impulses.

(Original image by There Stands the Glass.)