Paul Burt – July 2, 2015
There’s not too much to write about this one. Burt is my Big Island buddy for various capers, also a bowl turner. I’d hoped to catch him in action carving out curlicues on the lathe in his home workshop; instead he was doing a relatively un-flashy operation, sanding a bowl. Which generated so much dust (he is masked!) that I didn’t stick around long enough to go into details on the sketch.
Paul Burt
Christine Lavin / Don White – Cole Auditorium, Greenwich Library – May 17, 2015
This was a weird hybrid kind of gig. Lavin was the known quantity going in, and the obvious draw; White much less so. Each is an independent performer, with a fair amount of humor in the songs, or is it music in the jokes? They recognize themselves as kindred souls, and it makes its own kind of sense; the collaboration is minimal, it’s more like a tag-team approach. We sat in the front row, so were fair fodder for the onstage antics. Toots got dragooned into coming up to turn the pages of a giant picture book; I interrupted the sketching to join the on-stage chorus for the major production number, Lavin’s “Sensitive New-Age Guys”.
Christine Lavin
Don White
José James – Prospect Park – June 12, 2015
Our attendance at this concert was partly nudged along by Jake. He knows he has to be careful about what he touts to me, and exercises appropriate restraint (especially if I gotta go Brooklyn!); this one worked out well, considering. The thing to consider is that the headliner was Esperanza Spalding. It goes without saying that it will be too dark to sketch any second acts at the PP Bandshell. She’s waaaaay into her concept albums at this point in her career. And that set was, well if you can’t say something nice, retreat to “I don’t get it!”, totally the case here. And the bass was too loud (I know it’s your instrument, honey, but you need someone to advocate for the balance!). I had primo seat for sketching while cooler heads were back there laying on blanket on the grass. So by the middle of her set, when I (and the others) wanted to leave, I physically couldn’t get to them, as the crowd had swelled to clog up all outward access (note to safety managers at the bandshell – aisles must stay clear!) Sorry for all the rant, and that doesn’t even include the driving logistics nightmare tales (yes, plural!). James, though, was a revelation. I’ll be more than a bit skeptical about someone who got to jazz via hip-hop (and more so if he thinks, as stated in an interview that he didn’t necessarily want to be “labeled” as jazz because people would think ….. wait for it…… Michael Bublé!) But he pulled it off, and even slung some guitar in the process. The band was all players, no scratchin’, etc., and the set included a far-ranging blend of styles, all delivered with suitable reverence. So that was nice. Even before I did my post-gig research, James had scored some Gambino cred points by having Nate Smith as the drummer; I’d caught him long ago as part of a Dave Holland combo, and remain impressed with his chops. Unfortunately, once again I cannot find the name of a player (the keyboard) for correct credit, oh well.
José James
Nate Smith
Solomon Dorsey and
Takuya Koroda
Ku-umba Frank Lacy / 10³²K – Rubenstein Atrium – February 26, 2015
Much as I resist quoting from official promo materials, this concert was so far out on the unique scale that I’ll relinquish. First, the name of the trio, “10³²K ” refers to “the Planck temperature, at which matter ceases to exist, and conventional physics breaks down, when strange things, unknown things, begin to happen to phenomena we hold near and dear, like space and time”. Their shtick is to select a historic but perhaps overlooked figure influential on modern jazz as a touchstone, and compose based on this inspiration. For this gig, the starting point was Skip James, “a Mississippi Delta blues artist who recorded a hit album in 1931, and then disappeared from the music world for the next 33 years. Discovered in a hospital in 1964 by three young blues enthusiasts, James spent the last five years of his life as one of the most celebrated figures of the mid-60s folk-blues revival”. So this throws up a whole bunch of dots to connect; the resulting suite hardly fits my conception of delta blues, but that’s not the idea. The addition of vocalist Justin Hicks and his powerful blues moanings somewhat clarified the musical pedigree, but that was but one of several dimensions explored on this night.
Ku-umba Frank Lacy
Justin Hicks
Andrew Drury
Kevin Ray
BackCountry Jazz – Cole Auditorium – February 21, 2015
Once again Bennie Wallace has put together a sterling presentation, this year focusing on the music of Duke Ellington.
Bennie Wallace
Donald Vega
George Mraz
Billy Drummond
Luisito Quintero
Bobby Broom
Charenee Wade
Manuel Valera New Cuban Express – Bronx Museum of the Arts – November 7, 2014
One more new venue for me, hooray for the Bronx. I’d earlier caught a permutation of parts of this combo under Yosvanny Terry’s leadership; here the gig was Valera’s (who actually remembered me sketching him back in 2012). The Cuban jazz angle was enough to rope me in, but the repertoire had a more wide-ranging complexity. There was an extended song-cycle segment “Marti en Nueva York” based on José Martí’s poetry (yes, the Cuban revolutionary was also a poet and journalist, and lived for a time in NYC) that brought in the vocalist Sofía Rei. It was not necessary to understand a word of Spanish to have a robust appreciation of this moving work. It was fun to watch the percussion interplay between Calvaire and Herrera; one would suggest a figure, and it would then bounce back and forth, embellished, as their grins widened.
Manuel Valera
Sofia Rei
Luques Curtis
Obed Calvaire
Yosvanny Terry
Tom Guarna
Mauricio Herrera
Bertha Hope – Morris High School – October 26, 2014
Here’s someone who was totally not on my radar screen at all; Hope was married to a minor NYC player, Elmo Hope, also a pianist. For a while they shared an apartment with Thelonius Monk! I wonder how they decided who got to use the piano at home. Well, Bertha is still keepin’ on, leading/mentoring a small combo of mostly younger players. And she’s a Bronx treasure which is a plus for me. I’ve gotta comment on the venue, where I’d never been before. Morris High School is the first high school built in the Bronx, and its auditorium is a designated NYC landmark. I’m unfamiliar with the ‘hood so it took some (time-consuming) navigating to get in and out. The school has gone the way of many, being subdivided into three separate entities, but I don’t care, I’m calling it by it’s original name.
Bertha Hope
Kim Clark
Angeleisha Rogers
Jure Pukl
Abdullah Ibrahim – Schomburg Center – October 20, 2014
I just love these old jazz masters whose command of technique is so thoroughly transparent that impediment-free channeling from their consciousness to mine is achieved; Ibrahim certainly fills the bill. He started with an extended solo full of spaces, dynamics, nuances, digressions. Next he worked with a smaller combo, with the bass player (I learned afterwards that his parents had come in from Detroit to see this gig) doubling for some of the segment on cello during a more classical-oriented excursion. Ibrahim was content to lay back for extended intervals, offering minimal subtle guidance while seeming to bask along with the audience in the creativity of the players. After intermission the band filled out with plenty more horns (it was billed as “and friends”), the polyphony got more complex, and the role of conductor for some of the horn section entrances and endings passed partially to Cleave Guyton. The South African (or Ibrahim’s particular) ensemble concept of playing together became more evident, even as the charts allowed the leader to add less on the piano – in a sense reminding me of Ellington’s approach. A companion concert at Carnegie Hall was in honor of Ibrahim’s 80th birthday – here he told us that this (freebie) was his birthday gift to NYC, and it was awesome!
Abdullah Ibrahim
Cleave E. Guyton Jr. & Lance Bryant
Noah Jackson
Andrae Murchison
Alex Harding
Sketchcrawl 45 – The High Line – October 18, 2014
On The High Line (515 W. 23rd St.)
La Lunchonette
Junot Diaz – SUNY Purchase – October 7, 2014
Diaz is the latest of the MacArthur “genius” grant recipients that I’ve captured. My experience of reading him is limited to shorter excerpts that he has published in The New Yorker magazine. Advanced notice of this gig was scant, so we got lucky with the scheduling. For the majority of his presentation he roamed the stage, and even for the shorter segment of him reading he didn’t hold too still of a pose for my sketching. Diaz uses his fabulous sense of humor to arrive at profound destinations regarding the immigrant and broader American experience. And he made clear that his character Yunior is not a proxy for his own self. He expertly managed the autograph line afterwards to keep things moving along, keeping it from turning into an endurance ordeal, which I appreciated.
Junot Diaz
