The Future of Jazz is Now: James Brandon Lewis & Chad Taylor in Concert

A great bubbling up. That’s the feeling I had as tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis and drummer Chad Taylor shared their music on Friday, December 14 at a concert produced by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares at the 121 Club in Easthampton. Lewis and Taylor have absorbed the lessons and shared traditions of this music, and are at a point in their art where ideas and spirit seem to flow without restraint.

I’ve heard Lewis play twice at the Vision Festival in New York, once with his trio and last year in the company of Dave Burrell, Kidd Jordan, William Parker, and Andrew Cyrille. I was super impressed both times. But it was a treat to spend time with him and hear his music in such an intimate setting. The 35-year old, Buffalo, NY native is self-directed and very serious about his music. Although he was in the Valley for less than 24 hours, he brought two large books by Walter Piston, “Harmony” and “Counterpoint”, with him. Over dinner, he told us about feeling inspired and validated after spending time with the Sonny Rollins archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Seeing Rollins’ own thoughtful writings concerning fingerings, breath, exercises, and other details of his craft, confirmed for Lewis that gifts from God only bloom when coupled with the dogged pursuit of knowledge.

Although he attended Howard and holds an MFA from CalArts, Lewis strikes me as someone who has figured out a lot of stuff on his own. I kind of like that he doesn’t double on any other horn. His playing was strong, confident, and filled with emotion. There was something old-school about his sound, even as he explored the tenor’s outer reaches. He was equally compelling whether he was whispering or wailing, a sure sign of command.

This was Lewis’ first trip to western Massachusetts. Chad Taylor was making his third appearance in the Valley in two months. He played with Jason Stein and Paul Giallorenzo as Hearts & Minds (Oct. 13, Shea Theater,) and was one-fourth of Darius Jones’ Shades of Black (October 25, UMass.) His previous trips to the area include encounters with Fred Anderson and Rob Mazurek (Chicago Underground Duo.)

In an era of drum master bounty, Taylor is royalty. Throughout the evening, he moved the music by shifting time and mood, but he also served as accompanist, creating structure, songs in effect, for the saxophone to solo over. His unaccompanied solo mid-way through the 80-minute set, grew to a ferocious, Blakey-like avalanche; within seconds of Lewis’ re-entry, however, they ended on a sweet, fading note. The two pieces featuring Taylor’s mbira, or thumb piano, gave the duo a chance to access ancestors and luxuriate in deep vibration. The bass note of the instrument resonated with me in a literal sense.

The spirit of John Coltrane was felt all evening. Strains of “Impressions” and “Lonnie’s Lament” were heard. Thoughts of Trane’s duets with drummer Rashied Ali circulated. “In and out of jazz, Coltrane tributes are legion;” writes Hank Shteamer in Rolling Stone about Lewis and Taylor’s duo recording, Radiant Imprints, “this was the rare one that put forward a highly developed, refreshingly personal perspective in place of run-of-the-mill reverence.”

The recording has been listed among the Top 20 Jazz Records of 2018 in Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and elsewhere, confirming what we know from first hand experience: James Brandon Lewis and Chad Taylor are forces to reckon with.

Lewis and Taylor. They could be explorers. Yes, they’re explorers.

Out of the Mire: Duende Winds

Is chamber jazz a real thing? The term, like most terms, is clumsy and imprecise. It conjures certain instrumentation, a particular configuration on stage, large amounts of written music, precise execution and European Classical sound production.

Duende Winds plays chamber jazz, I guess. They check some of the boxes. The quartet features Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon, Tomeka Reid, cello, Nicole Mitchell, flutes, and the leader, Marty Ehrlich, clarinets. They entranced 120 listeners shoehorned into Hampshire College’s Music & Dance Building on Saturday, December 1, as Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares continued its seventh season. Although bassoon, cello, flute and clarinet are common chamber music instruments, they are rarely heard together, perhaps never in a jazz context. Despite the presence of written scores, the amount of improvising we heard on Saturday was substantial. The band was seated on stage in a typical Classical quartet semi-circle, but the range of music, and the techniques used to produce it, were far from the buttoned-down formality so highly valued in “concert” music.

By way of explaining the ensemble’s name, Professor Ehrlich, who teaches at Hampshire College, referenced Federico García Lorca’s influential essay, “Theory and Play of the Duende”, which declares, “All that has dark sounds has duende.” The essay goes on to say, “Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art.”

Duende Winds, which made its world premiere at Hampshire, is the logical extension of Ehrlich’s Dark Woods Ensemble, which also mined the nexus between chamber music and jazz. They performed Julius Hemphill’s “The Painter,” and three older Ehrlich compositions, “Sojourn,” “Rites Rhythms,” and “News on the Rail”; the rest of the 80-minute performance featured newly written music for the occasion by the 63-year old reedman.

Tomeka Reid is the most important cellist to emerge in the past 10 years. She works constantly, and her self-titled 2015 debut recording on Thirsty Ear garnered a massive amount of well-deserved praise. Reid played a borrowed fiberglass cello lent to her by Yo-Yo Ma, producing a rich sound that is the instrument’s birthright. As befits someone who came up through Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), she easily navigated different roles. Over the course of the evening, she alternated bass line duties with Shoenbeck’s bassoon and Ehrlich’s bass clarinet, she was the lead “gospel” voice on “Sojourn,” she plucked, bowed, and slapped her way into our hearts. This was her first visit to the Pioneer Valley; we hope many more follow.

Nicole Mitchell and Sara Schoenbeck were last in the Valley in 2013 when they performed at the Institute for the Musical Arts with Harris Eisenstadt’s Golden State. In my humble opinion, they are each the premier improviser on their instruments. Mitchell was so creative and played with such authority. The technique of vocalizing while playing flute, sometimes called “throat tuning,” is no longer unique among creative musicians. But Mitchell has developed her own sound with it, and employs it liberally. At times she filled the music with mystery, other times she buoyed the bandstand with joy. Mitchell will lead her project, Mandorla Awaking II, at Amherst College’s Parallel Series on February 22.

Many people commented what a treat it was to hear a bassoon. When was the last time you heard one outside of the symphony stage? I remember the bassoon solos in Ravel’s “Bolero” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf”, but Sara Schoenbeck has brought the instrument into the 21st century, using its unique sound to color and probe. A lot of her professional work entails notated music, but she is a brilliant improviser. She’ll be back next year in a duet with pianist Wayne Horvitz.

The concert was the culmination of two full days of workshops and symposia that Ehrlich organized at Hampshire. Mitchell gave an inspiring talk by about her musical process and her personal history as it relates to the work of writer Octavia Butler. Harvard professor Ingrid Monson gave a highly informative lecture by about Yusef Lateef that she hopes to expand upon.

Ehrlich is a Valley jewel, raising the region’s level of musicianship, pedagogy and collegiality. I first engaged Mr. Ehrlich in 1997 (with Tony Malaby, Michael Cain, Michael Formanek and Bobby Previte) for the Magic Triangle Jazz Series, and I’ve been lucky enough to present his quartet and large ensemble in recent years. It was a treat to help advance this side of his musical persona. He mostly played clarinet and bass clarinet, with one turn each on flute and soprano saxophone. His writing, playing, and bandleading led to an evening full of excellent music making and resonant possibilities.

The Inner World of Shelley Hirsch

Certain artists are conduits. Spirit flows through them. They have easy access to memory and the subconscious, with all the freedom that implies. Their stories, full of fine particulars, reveal enduring truths. They are natural improvisors, allowing characters and emotions to mingle and merge organically, like they do in dreams.

Shelley Hirsch is such an artist. On Wednesday, November 7, as she created – with words, music and movement – discreet, detailed, slightly ambiguous worlds, I thought of the assembled shadow box universes of Joseph Cornell. Like all great storytellers, the 66-year old vocalist was able to transport 60 participants into a fantastically collaged world of people and places. The concert, held in the UMass Old Chapel, concluded the first half of Season 30 of the Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series.

Alone on stage, Hirsch used text, theatrics, fashion, movement, recorded sound, and all manner of vocalizing to create unique sound worlds. Her free mixing of form recalls the creative tumult of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s and 80s, a scene Hirsch was very much a part of.

After a rich childhood in Brooklyn (chronicled brilliantly on her recording, O Little Town of East New York,) Hirsch dropped out of the High School of the Performing Arts and began a career that took her to San Francisco, Amsterdam, and finally, Tribeca. Her work is shaped by an intense intake of both the natural and created worlds, as well as her interactions with an incredible number of actors, visual artists, dancers and musicians. The list is long, but includes Christian Marclay, Sigourney Weaver, Ned Rothenberg, Jim Hodges, Anthony Coleman, John Zorn, Ikue Mori, and Butch Morris.

During her two days in western Massachusetts, we repeatedly stopped to marvel at popping red and yellow leaves. She listens intently to the sounds around her, Hirsch told Jason Robinson’s Amherst College students, and tries to reproduce them in her mouth and body. “The body is the world’s largest recorder,” she said. When drawn to something – Butoh, Romanian Gypsy music, wind through trees – she “would not try to imitate it, but try to inhabit it.”

Hirsch’s voice is an incredible instrument, able to produce a wide range of sound and accents. She had a couple of years of opera training, but is largely self-taught. She told us that early on, she didn’t want to be “the singer” in the band, but wanted to be thought of as “one of the instrumentalists.” She developed a prodigious technique and a unique vocabulary. But over time, she’s become less interested in being a virtuoso and has come to place a higher value on words and stories.

She “read” (much too dry a word) three untitled poems, including a hilarious one about the double meaning of the word “boner.” But the center pieces were “Power Muzak” and “States,” two longer compositions that saw Hirsch in highly interactive engagement with pre-recorded music that included kitsch, Latin, drones, abstract soundscapes, and stretched versions of “Blue Skies,” “Tenderly” and “Blue Moon.”

As a child she was drawn to the reverberations in her apartment hallways; in concert she used reverb to draw us into a hazy past, lending a feeling of indeterminacy and faded memory. Hirsch is a memoirist, using her past to create very contemporary music. At the end of O Little Town of East New York, she goes back to the old neighborhood and tells her friend’s mother all the things she remembered growing up. “How do you remember all these things?” Mrs. Calabro asked in thick Brooklynese, “How do you remember?”

We felt so thankful to have witnessed the inner reach of Shelley Hirsch’s far out world.