Rockin’ Gateway: The Makanda Project featuring Michael Gregory Jackson

A homecoming for guitarist and vocalist Michael Gregory Jackson and a return Valley engagement for the Boston-based Makanda Project came together to rock Gateway City Arts in Holyoke on Saturday, January 26 as Season 7 of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares rolled on.

The guitarist, who has reclaimed his last name after dropping it years ago, lived in the Valley for decades, and there were lots of old friends among the 130 people transfixed by some powerful, blues-drenched music. I suspect Jackson also made more than a few new friends over the course of the evening.

The 13-piece Makanda Project was founded in 2005 by pianist and arranger John Kordalewski to expand the legacy of the Boston-born, internationally-recognized reed player and composer, Makanda Ken McIntyre (1931–2001.) They gave a riveting Jazz Shares concert at the Springfield Community Music School in 2014. In recent years they have begun to reach out to a few special guests such as Ricky Ford to collaborate with the ensemble. Concerts this spring in Roxbury, featuring Marty Ehrlich and Chico Freeman, are on tap. Long-live the large ensemble.

Over his 40-year career, Jackson has had one foot in the avant-garde jazz world (Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake are two long-time associates), and one foot in pop/singer songwriter territory. Kordalewski used Duke Ellington’s oft-cited phrase, “beyond category” to describe Jackson’s place in the music. Even so, I was unprepared, but very pleased, that the program contained so much blues.

On Jackson originals such as “Heart and Center” and Ku-umba Frank Lacy’s “Settegast Strut”, I heard echoes of Magic Sam blowing over a horn section, full of funk, jump blues, and that great wail. The evening closed in dramatic fashion as all of the horns: Paavo Carey, Jason Robinson, Charlie Kohlhase, Kurtis Rivers and Sean Berry (saxophones), and Haneef Nelson, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, Alfred Patterson, Bill Lowe and Jerry Sabatini, (brass), left the stage to wind through the crowd towards the end of Jackson’s “Blue Blue”, leaving the excellent rhythm section, John Lockwood (bass), Yoron Israel (drums), Kordalewski and Jackson alone on the dais. It was a joyful, life-affirming moment.

What made things even more exciting was the creative riffing of horns behind Jackson’s solos. Often, baritone saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase, bass trombonist Bill Lowe or Kordalewski would increase intensity by conjuring odd little figures for their mates to play while Jackson tore it up. Excitement was further amplified by consistently excellent horn solos. Typical blues bands allot highly prescribed 8 to 16 bar solos for instrumentalists. Because the Makanda Project is populated by accomplished jazz musicians, individual statements transcended the perfunctory, adding fervor and a surfeit of interesting ideas.

Jackson’s two other original compositions, “Just Another Day” and “We Are”, featured dulcet vocals from the New Haven-born guitarist, providing beautiful sonic respite from the extroverted drive of the rest of the offerings. That I could clearly hear the lyrics was a testament to both the sensitivity of the band and the engineering acumen of sound man Jared Libby.

The evening’s penultimate piece, McIntyre’s “Spectrum”, provided a welcome cacophony. The tricky head quickly gave way to a jarring slab of sound that pinned us to the back wall. After spending all evening in a feel-good place, the dissonant energy was oddly refreshing, invigorating even.

Kudos to John Kordalewski, who despite current trends and against all odds, has managed to keep a top-level big band together for over a decade, while spreading the gospel according to Makanda.

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.