Month: May 2025

Branford Marsalis, Crazy People Music

Summing up where Branford had been and pointing to where he was headed.

Album of the Week, May 31, 2025

Around the recordings of Random Abstract and Trio Jeepy, Branford had been busy flirting with Hollywood—albeit a very specific version of it. He made a memorable appearance as one of Laurence Fishburn’s Greek-baiting fellas in Spike Lee’s School Daze, and played on the soundtracks of Lee’s Do the Right Thing. He also played saxophone on Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power,” recorded for the soundtrack of Do the Right Thing. But he didn’t leave serious jazz alone, and by January 1990 he was entering the studio for the first of what would eventually be three recording sessions for Crazy People Music.

I remember the day in the summer of 1990 that I picked up this album. I had just gotten my first personal CD player (a Sony CD plus cassette combo that served through most of my undergraduate years), and headed to the local independent music store in my neighborhood of Denbigh. I hadn’t ever really bought much jazz music before, though I had listened to some, but after …Nothing Like the Sun I was curious. A small step of curiosity that led me to a lifetime of jazz listening, for which I am grateful.

Of note, that purchase was not the LP above. I bought my copy of Branford’s Crazy People Music on CD, as I purchased all my music back then. I valued the convenience and low noise level, and perceived higher audio resolution more than the readability of liner notes or analog warmth of the vinyl format. I was not alone, of course; by 1990, fewer and fewer releases were appearing on vinyl. Crazy People Music only received a vinyl release in Europe (my copy is a promo).

In contrast to our last few releases, note the graphic design on the album cover; rather than positioning the album as an affluent luxury product, there’s at least an attempt to make the music seem more contemporary. As played by this quartet, which featured Kenny Kirkland and Jeff “Tain” Watts returning on piano and drums and bassist Robert Hurst joining from Wynton’s band, the music certainly was more playful and risk-taking, even if the sequencing was familiar. In some ways Crazy People Music feels like a summing up of Branford’s work to that date, to the point that you can call out the analogue to several of the tracks from a prior release.

“Spartacus” is a Branford Marsalis composition, but its modified blues form and chord progressions hearken back to Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” as recorded by the quartet on Random Abstract. Both songs feature a twelve-bar blues structure in which the tenor sax makes a statement, followed by a held note while the piano comps, all over four bars; this is repeated with a different base chord, and then the cycle comes back with a more complex tenor statement in the final bars. In the case of “Yes or No,” the initial statement is a complex sixteenth-note pattern, but in “Spartacus,” it’s just three descending eighth notes, the melody stripped down to the basics. (Aside: Branford’s melodies seem increasingly to hew toward the simple and unfussy, a trend that started with his “Housed from Edward” on Trio Jeepy.) After the initial 12-bar head, he jumps immediately into a solo over Bob Hurst’s running bass line, with eruptions from Tain and bursts of chords from Kenny Kirkland keeping things moving along. Throughout the solo he plays with both the melody and with the rhythmic patterns he uses to express it, changing things up frequently. Kenny’s solos are always notable for his combination of harmonic complexity and aggressive melodic lines, and this one is no exception. When Branford comes back on the head, again we hear it just once, and then the band swings into a coda characterized by a syncopated two-note pattern in the piano over which the band solos until finally everyone locks into place on the two-note vamp at the end, followed by a fade into a six-note melodic fragment from the saxophone on a suspension, leading us directly into…

“The Dark Knight.” I have to confess that as a young recently-employed comic book store clerk I was thrilled with the evidence that Branford and his band were reading the good stuff. This Bob Hurst tune explores the moody darkness with a repeating bass line that is worthy of some of the best from Jimmy Garrison or Paul Chambers and a series of misty chord changes. The overall effect is a little like “Crescent,” and Branford appropriately blows some sheets of sound across his solo. But my favorite part of “The Dark Knight” is probably a toss up between Kenny’s piano solo, in which we get both his best McCoy Tyner impersonation and his distinctive chord voicings, and Hurst’s bass solo, which explores the tune’s harmonic corners before falling back into the bass line to signal the recapitulation. The band cooks on the recap, then plays out into a coda that seems to fade away into the night. Who was that masked man, anyway?

We get a different type of comic-book flavor on “Wolverine,” which is structurally reminiscent of “Broadway Fools” from Random Abstract and has the same happy-go-lucky soprano sax wandering-down-the-boulevard feeling, until the inevitable fight breaks out, here sketched as an explosion of free playing that gives Tain a place to stretch out. But where “Broadway Fools” was tightly swung, this one has a little more of a feeling of rhythmic freedom, truer to the Ornette Coleman conception in many ways. Kenny finds some joyous church amid some fairly abstract playing throughout his solo. The final recap of the head threatens to spiral out of control, with players shouting at each other and even with a sneaky overdubbed second saxophone line at the very end, before the berserker is caged once more. There’s a final recapitulation ending with a blown harmonic, hinting that the wildness isn’t gone.

“Mr. Steepee,” a play on Coltrane’s “Mr. P.C.,” is effectively a rearrangement of the Trane number filtered through Kenny Kirkland’s McCoy Tyner-influenced harmonic sensibility. Which is to say, it’s played brilliantly, briskly (at a touch over six minutes long, it’s the second shortest track on the album!), and reverently. And then there’s the outro, in which Bob Hurst plays a few familiar Jimmy Garrison inspired bass notes, only to have Branford lean in and say, “Uh, no, Bob, that’s the next album.” Ironically, this quartet never quite did a full version of A Love Supreme, though they did record some of the music; Branford wouldn’t revisit the Coltrane work in earnest until his 2002 release Footsteps of Our Fathers, with a later incarnation of his quartet.

Instead, the band segues into “Rose Petals.” Occupying the same position on this album as “Lonely Woman” did on Random Abstract, while the earlier recording was Ornette Coleman played in the Keith Jarrett European Quartet style, this is a full on Keith Jarrett American Quartet cover, featuring a work that originally appeared on his 1976 Impulse! album Shades. The playing is romantic, full of rubato and grand pauses and big rolls on the drums and cymbals, but also the quiet romanticism of Kenny Kirkland’s Chopin-inspired classicism. It’s gorgeous and to my ears more successful than the earlier record’s romanticism. It sounds more lived-in and organic, less an imitation and more an homage.

The gear shift into “Random Abstract (Diddle-It),” a full quartet rendition of the earlier “Tain’s Rampage” from Trio Jeepy, puts more of its scamper in the piano, though there’s plenty of burnout happening in the saxophone as well. Indeed, all four musicians seem to be exploring at once, with Branford alternating between fierce sheets of sound and romantic tails of melody, while Kenny appears to be in the throes of a Shostakovich piano sonata. With a cry the musicians seem to head over the cliff…

… and into “The Ballad of Chet Kincaid,” a rearrangement of Quincy Jones’ classic funk theme for the first Bill Cosby Show, “Hikky-Burr.” This version is less bonkers, thanks largely to the absence of Cosby’s insane voice-over, but retains much of the fun, albeit with the funk bass replaced with a more conventional walk and with Kenny’s distinctive post-Tyner keys keeping it firmly modal even as it keeps things moving along. It’s a great cover, playful and joyful but also seriously listenable. There’s even a section or two where the band swing into full funk mode, Branford’s pop sensibility shining through and seamlessly shifting back to post-bop. A “Whoo Lord! Hikky-burr!” wraps up the proceedings.

I could have picked a worse album with which to start my journey into jazz. Crazy People Music is melodic, searching, and extroverted. It’s also just plain fun. It doesn’t exude the level of seriousness that a Wynton album from the period did, but that’s OK. Branford could play that game too, and we’ll hear one of those albums soon. But next week we’ll hear another musician from the Marsalis brothers’ orbit get very serious—and playful—indeed.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Kenny Kirkland played with Branford, off and on, for the rest of his life, following him to the Tonight Show and playing on his other ventures (one of which we’ll hear in a few months). Here’s the quartet, with Eric Revis sitting in the bass chair alongside Kenny and Tain, in Basel in 1998 playing a monumental version of “Spartacus”:

BONUS BONUS: This particular configuration of the Quartet didn’t make a ton of recordings, but it’s pretty well documented live. Here’s an hour-plus set from Munich just after the album was released, playing a bunch of tunes from Crazy Pe0ple Music along with some treats from earlier albums.

BONUS BONUS BONUS: In between the hint about A Love Supreme at the end of “Mister Steepee” and the 2002 recording with the later trio, we did get a Branford version of the composition, but in abbreviated suite form, and not on his own record. The brilliant jazz + hip-hop AIDS benefit compilation Red Hot + Cool had a second CD enclosed which featured Alice Coltrane’s hallucinatory 1971 take on the great work, and this 18 minute long condensation of the suite:

When the notifications stop

I used to use this blog as my backup brain for all sorts of things, a practice I’d gotten away from, but this one feels like it needs memorializing: what to do when the notifications stop coming on a modern (Sequoia-era) Mac, or when the widgets don’t show there.

I noticed a while ago that I could no longer quickly bring up the sidebar, which I use regularly to peek at the calendar, and that I wasn’t getting notifications showing up any more, but I couldn’t figure out why, only that there was probably some preference file corrupted somewhere. This morning I found the trick, or more specifically, where all the preference files live. Turns out that if you remove all files and directories from this folder it does the trick:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.UserNotifications/Library/UserNotifications/Remote/default

Hat tip to Reddit for finding the right directory.

(On a general note, the good news is that there are several cases on the Mac where clearing the application state and letting the Mac rebuild it just works, and the application state is almost always saved somewhere in the Library. The bad news is that there is definitely some fragility that caused the problem in the first place and I don’t know what it is. Also, finding where in the thousands of folders in the Library that state is preserved is, to put it lightly, a problem.)

Brent Simmons on corporate developers

Brent Simmons: “My Wildly Incorrect Bias About Corporate Engineers.” Great blog post from Brent, who I had a beer with once, long ago, in Seattle, and whose work in the early days of this blog I frequently followed and linked to. (I had written an AppleScript based blog posting client for my old blog platform, which he had worked on, and he wrote a modern blog posting client (MarsEdit) and blog aggregator (NetNewsWire), so he was on my radar a lot. Also he’s a nice guy.)

I don’t actually have a ton of experience being an indie developer, nor have I worked with a lot of them, but I can say with 100% certainty that his description of corporate developers rings true. They’re not all as great as Brent describes, but the ones who don’t rise to the level of excellence don’t tend to stick around—and if your company prioritizes good management as well, you won’t see many of the bad ones because good interviewing and hiring tends to weed them out.

Congrats on your well-deserved retirement, Brent—though is it really retirement if you’ll “have a lot more time for working on NetNewsWire”? 🙂

Wynton Marsalis, Standard Time Vol. 3: The Resolution of Romance

Is there such a thing as too much beauty in jazz? This Wynton Marsalis album trades perfection for risk-taking, in a different approach to the standards album.

Album of the Week, May 26, 2025

Wynton Marsalis released an album called Marsalis Standard Time, Vol. 1 in 1987, following the release of J Mood. Recorded with the same band as the earlier album, it brought the same post-bop sensibility to the collection of standards, almost as if a later incarnation of a Miles Davis group had done the recording. Fast forwarding about two or three years, we get Standard Time Vol. 3, skipping Volume 2,1 and it’s a completely different animal.

Let’s talk about cover photos for a second, because Columbia’s marketing folks had clearly changed their minds about how to position the new young lions of jazz in the market. Marsalis Standard Time featured Wynton looking severe in a tux — signifier of authority and of the canon. If you took the text off and showed it to someone who knew that Wynton had recorded both jazz and classical albums in the 1980s, I think they’d have been just as likely to guess that Vol. 1 was a classical album. If you look at the cover of Vol. 3 (above), there’s a more relaxed, almost casual Wynton, smiling and listening to his father play the piano. Both men are well dressed, but in expensive suits rather than formal wear. The background looks like an extremely upscale hotel lobby. (See also the cover of last week’s Trio Jeepy, also on Columbia, by Wynton’s older brother Branford.) Columbia was positioning Wynton as respectable, upper class, yet approachable—a very different position than the rock and funk iconography that they used to sell Miles’ last albums for the label.

Oh yes, Wynton’s father. This particular quartet album featured the Marsalis patriarch, Ellis Marsalis Jr., on the piano. Ellis was the son of a Louisiana businessman—Ellis Sr. owned the first Black-owned gas station in Louisiana and ran a hotel that catered to African Americans who could not stay at white-only hotels in nearby New Orleans—turned civil rights activist. Ellis Jr. served in the Marines for a year, graduated from Dillard University with a degree in music education, and played with the Adderley brothers (separately), Ed Blackwell, and Nat Hirt.

But his biggest impact, at least until his sons transformed the jazz landscape in the 1980s, was as a music educator; he instructed the likes of Terence Blanchard, Donald Harrison, Nicholas Payton, Marlon Jordan and even Harry Connick Jr. from his studio at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. This was father and son’s second appearance together, having previously performed together with Branford on Side 1 of the anthology recording Fathers and Sons. They were joined by two new (to us) faces to the Marsalis group, Reginald Veal on bass and Herlin Riley on drums. Both musicians hailed from New Orleans, and both had joined Marsalis for the two preceding albums, 1990’s Crescent City Christmas Card and 1988’s simultaneously great and off-putting The Majesty of the Blues (I’ll be reviewing that one someday); they would make many more recordings with him in the future.

There are 21 tracks on this album! Across all of them there are some common threads: a sense of bounce and energy, courtesy of Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal, pervades the uptempo tracks, and a focus on melodic clarity, courtesy Wynton’s pristine trumpet technique, pervades the others. You get both in the opener, Wynton’s tribute to early New Orleans jazz, “In the Court of King Oliver.” His composition captures some amount of the energy of early New Orleans jazz as played by King Oliver and his disciple Louis Armstrong, without exactly parodying any of the many tunes from which the music originates. The whole thing is played muted, leading to a growly trumpet solo at the end that hints at something much more visceral and bluesy. (Wynton could, and did, take this to great lengths in live performances.) But the backbone of the performance is definitely the “engine room” of Veal’s rock-steady bass and Herlin Riley’s swinging, stuttering, wondrously multi-tonal drums. Riley, who has had a productive career (including a stint as the drummer in Ahmad Jamal’s most sensational late-career trio) has a distinctive way of wringing more color out of the drums than one would think possible, to the point that he is one of the few drummers whose work I can reliably identify by ear.

Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s “Never Let Me Go” is played briefly, just the chorus, as though a prelude to Victor Young’s “Street of Dreams.” Ellis takes a solo that is relaxed and classy, with enough New Orleans around the edges to keep it from lapsing into background music. Wynton then takes a brief solo before his father reclaims the spot, playing the song out.

Rodgers and Hart’s “Where or When” is given the chorus-and-verse treatment, but here Ellis’s development of the chords under his son’s restrained solo is the focal point. The tone of the trumpet on that slow climb to the peak at the end is gorgeous, as is the unaccompanied solo Wynton takes in the quiet range of the trumpet’s sound. This leads to a pair of Wynton originals: “Bona and Paul” gets some of his by-now-distinctive harmonic complexity with a deceptively simple solo line and a spare piano accompaniment, while “The Seductress” is an exercise in control on the plunger mute, in which the trumpeter achieves vocal tones across the range of the instrument.

“A Sleepin’ Bee,” a Harold Arlen number with lyrics, improbably, by Truman Capote, gets a trio rendition with bouncy snare and forthright bass under Ellis’ masterful elicitation of the melody. The Louis Armstrong standard “Big Butter and Egg Man” follows, beginning as a pianoless trio. Most of the first verse is played as a duet between Wynton and Veal; the bassist gets an assertive but supportive role courtesy of his high octave improvisation, which stands up nicely to the trumpet. Ellis provides muted harmonic cover under the second verse and takes a solo with those bouncing Herlin Riley snares accompanying. The best part might be Veal’s bass solo, which spelunks its way across the instrument’s whole range with spare accompaniment from Riley and Ellis.

Ray Noble’s “The Very Thought of You” gets a tender duet treatment by father and son, accompanied unobtrusively by Riley and Veal; Ellis’s solo reaches quiet heights of lyrical sincerity without ever breaching the late-night volume limit. Edward Heyman’s “I Cover the Waterfront” is a more “daytime” number; the tone of the piano is brighter and the solos more sprightly. When Wynton enters, playing a bucket muted solo, it’s jovial but still controlled.

I have to give points to this record for dipping deeply into the standards well and pulling up some rarities. “How are Things in Glocca Mora?” is a Burton Lane tune with words by Yip Harburg from the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about an elderly Irishman, his pot of gold, and the leprechaun that follows him to the States (you can’t make this stuff up). It has relatively few jazz recordings; one of the first was by Sonny Rollins and Donald Byrd, with Marsalis’s namesake Wynton Kelly on the piano. The performance here borrows heavily from that version, albeit with Wynton’s standard rubato approach to the ballad; it’s gorgeous, and an entirely different approach to the ballad than the weepy version in the 1968 film, which featured Petula Clark, the last movie-musical appearance of Fred Astaire, and a young Francis Ford Coppola as the director. (Again, you can’t make this stuff up.)

Rodgers and Hart are the only composers represented with more than one tune on this collection; their second, “My Romance,” gets a straightforward solo piano rendition that turns poignant in the final chords. Tom Adair and Matt Dennis’s “Everything Happens to Me” is a gorgeous song that gets a little bluesy in Ellis’s solo, and an extended trumpet cadenza that takes us out to the end of the tune. Ted Grouya’s “Flamingo” is one of the few non-Broadway standards on the album, originally a popular song recorded by Duke Ellington’s band, features a touch of samba rhythm from the band and a glorious vocal line from the trumpet, which I may have sung a few times when we visited the Camargue in southern France to see the mysterious birds.

Mort Dixon’s “You’re My Everything” gets a straightforward rendition, as does Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark” and the last Rodgers and Hart tune, “It’s Easy to Remember.” Indeed, as the record goes on, the gorgeousness threatens to rise like a somnolent tide.

Thankfully, Vernon Duke’s “Taking a Chance on Love” gets a faster tempo and some of that Herlin Riley bounce to set it apart, and Harold Arlen’s “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” gets a pianoless trio that feels like a pure jaunt, complete with high trumpet flourishes and low buzzy growls. The album closes out with two woozy ballads, “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” and Burton Lane’s “It’s Too Late Now.” Throughout, true to the brand promise implied in the cover art, everything stays on the polite side of jazz: pretty, even keeled, and by the book.

So we’ve heard Wynton’s approach to the standards album. And while there might not be a lot in the way of original improvisation here, it’s still a beautiful listen. I should be clear—I actually really like this album for quiet listening. It’s just that sometimes I wonder what would have happened if Kenny Kirkland or Marcus Roberts had played a few of the numbers. There’s sometimes such a thing as too reverent. Turns out that won’t be an issue on next week’s record.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

  1. I think I remember hearing, back when this album was released in 1990, that they pushed out Volume 3 before Volume 2 because they thought the “father and son” angle would sell better. It’s pretty clear that Wynton, like Miles, was recording faster than Columbia could put records on the market. In the years following J Mood, the Marsalis band went from The Majesty of the Blues to his three volume Soul Gestures in Southern Blue series, which were all pretty great but which weren’t released until 1991-1992. ↩︎

Branford Marsalis, Trio Jeepy

In this trio setting, Branford makes a playful standards album that’s still profoundly original, with help from The Judge.

Album of the Week, May 17, 2025

Branford Marsalis kept pretty busy in 1987 – 1988. The recording sessions for Sting’s … Nothing Like the Sun ran from March through August, at which point he ducked into the studio to record his own Random Abstract. He headed to the Newport Jazz Festival to perform a set at the end of August, then headed to New York to join Sting in October to kick off the world tour. Between October and the end of December the band played in Brazil and Argentina, then settled in for a five night residency at the Wembley Arena in London. The band took a break before heading back on the road on January 20 to tour up and down the East Coast; they made a stop at William and Mary Hall on January 29, 1988, where I saw the tour (and watched Sting live for the first time). And during the break, on January 3 and 4, Branford convened a group of musicians at the Astoria Studios in Queens, NY to record his next album.

As the name implies, Trio Jeepy is a trio album, but it’s not the same trio all the way through. The big news on the album was the participation of Milt Hinton, also known as “the Judge,” who at the time of the recording was the most-recorded musician in history, and who had played with everyone from Art Tatum, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie to Paul McCartney, Frank Sinatra, Leon Redbone, and Barbara Streisand. He was 78 at the time he made this recording with Branford (whose jazz nickname at the time was the inspiration for the title; he also went by “Steeplone,” “Steep,” or “Steepy,” apparently) and Jeff “Tain” Watts, who had appeared on his first and second albums in a few sessions, but who here settled into a regular chair in Branford’s group for the first time. But the Judge isn’t on every song here; Branford’s bassist from the Random Abstract group, Delbert Felix, plays on three tracks.

As producer (and younger brother) Delfeayo Marsalis observes in the liner notes, the pianoless saxophone trio has roots back to at least Sonny Rollins, and we’ve also heard the line-up with John Coltrane on his Lush Life. But in both cases the leaders were playing in a particular sound. Here, Branford seems to be triangulating his own sound and approach, by taking the trio through a combination of standards and his own acerbic originals.

“Housed from Edward,” an original composition, opens with a scrap of studio chatter, with the Judge saying “Play ‘em one more game! … Rack ‘em up, Joe! He’s tough, though. But I’ll play him one mo’…” Delfeayo announces this is take 3, and Branford starts by playing single tones, always on the two, against the Judge’s walking bass line, in what appears to be a straight twelve-bar blues. But appearances can be deceiving; while the rest of the band keeps the blues form going, Branford shifts his playing from being on the two to the one to the three, to playing eight note runs both swung and unswung. As Branford’s playing gets more dramatic, at one point opening up into “sheets of sound,” Tain’s drums push hard as though the heavens are opening up, freed by the Judge’s rock-steady beat to explore and shift his rhythmic emphasis from bar to bar. The Judge’s solo is really more of a duet with Tain, as he innovates on the pattern of his walk over a rhythm that shuffles and pops. Branford’s return steams in with a blue riff for two verses, then returns to that single-note discipline with which he opened, this time on the one. After a verse, he turns to playing almost entirely single notes on the tonic, then climbs up a major scale to the fourth, and closes out playing enormous jumps on the tiniest possible note values. It’s funny, and fun to listen to. In the outro there’s a trumpet playing very quietly in the background; I wonder who was hanging out in the studio to watch the session?

In contrast to the playfulness of “Housed from Edward,” the trio plays “The Nearness of You” very straight, with Steepy playing the tune over an arco bass line from the Judge. After the first chorus, Tain announces his presence with a gentle cymbal as the Judge switches to pizzicato; Branford improvises the melody, going into swinging eighths, hitting a honking low note, and then swinging even harder, shifting from the melody line into quick exclamations and then back to the gentle song again. The improvisations feel a bit like a class in rhythmic variation as Branford finds different modes of expression, here taking a step back from the microphone to pick up more studio resonance, there playing in a not-quite-growly lower register. The entire thing is a pretty wonderful love letter to the sound of the saxophone, with gentle support from Hinton and Watts.

There’s a false start on “Three Little Words,” with Branford and the Judge exchanging some sharp words about whether what Hinton is playing is in the chord changes, but then they’re off to the races, with a quick rip through the tune and then a handoff to the Judge, who takes a slapping tour of the song for two verses, extracting a whoop from Branford in the background. When Steepy returns it’s with a solo that feels like it’s on the brink of speeding off the road at the curves but still hangs together. The whole thing is a lot of fun, with the two musicians effectively playing as a trio—the Judge providing both the melody line and the rhythm with the slapped strings.

After a false start with “Makin’ Whoopee,” the band swings into “U.M.M.G.” The Billy Strayhorn classic is taken at something just slower than breakneck speed, with Tain urging things along with the occasional crack on the snare or explosion from the general direction of the tom and the cymbals. This is about the interplay between saxophone and drummer, with the bass holding things steady between the two of them. Just as Branford swings his way up to a high finale of the chorus, he steps out and Tain takes a 32 bar solo; when Steepy returns he swings the trio into an almost-sambaesque finale, then into something that feels a bit like Ornette Coleman.

The other Branford original on the record, “Gutbucket Steepy” opens with a bit of studio chatter as he tells the Judge “By yourself… play it however you want to. On your own!” The resulting slow blues has a twist at the beginning of the second four-bar pattern but otherwise settles into a deep swing. When the Judge takes a second solo to close things out, it’s as if the rest of the piece never happened and that bass line was eternal.

Delbert Felix steps in for Sonny Rollins’ “Doxy,” though you’ll have to look at the track listing to know the song as the band doesn’t pick up the melody in its entirety until the very end. You can tell the difference here immediately; while Felix is very good, there’s not quite the same metronomical authority that Hinton brings to the instrument. Instead, he’s improvising hard on the changes throughout even as Branford plays his own, seemingly unrelated, improvisation above. (The liner notes call this style “nebula,” or “neb,” a term I haven’t come across anywhere else.)

“Makin’ Whoopie (Reprise)” is a full run through of the Gus Kahn/Walter Donaldson classic. Branford takes the opening as a straight swing before accelerating into the stratosphere , playing sheets of sound and then back to a steady swing again. He steps away from the mic long enough for us to get a good listen to the Judge’s rock-steady tempo. The whole thing swings hard throughout, and feels just saucy enough to live up to the title.

Branford thanks Hinton at the end of “Makin’ Whoopie,” which makes the next bit even more surprising: a bonus track with Hinton! I’ve had this album for 35 years on CD, and never realized I had missed out on hearing the vinyl-only bonus track, Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust.” After a false start with a fast count-in, Branford plays the evocative melody solo through once, and the rest of the band swoons in after a brief pause. If the tempo on “The Nearness of You” was deliberate, this one feels downright leisurely. It’s more of the same delightful trio work that we got on “The Nearness of You,” and as such is technically a little redundant to the album’s overall conception, but it’s still a lovely performance.

Delbert Felix is the bassist on the last two numbers, starting with Ornette Coleman’s “Peace.” After he and Branford essay the opening together, he takes a brief solo before the head returns, and then the fun begins. As Delfeayo dryly notes, “In addition to the complex solo form, the chord changes may be altered by either the soloist or bassist, thus allowing each individual the maximum amount of melodic freedom possible in a structured environment.” In practice the players seem to circle each other dancelike, anchored only by the shuffle of Tain’s drums. Steep isn’t as out there melodically as Coleman, staying more closely anchored to the fundamental melodic direction.

Delfeayo announces, “This is ‘Random Abstract (Tain’s Rampage),’ take one,” and we’re off. Branford plays an opening melodic statement built around an octave leap and a third, then a fourth, and then unspools a melodic improvisation as Tain crashes beneath. Delbert Felix’s bassline seems to scamper like a small furry mammal beneath the crashing feet of the drums as the saxophone darts above. The collective improvisation, or “burnout” as it’s called in the liner notes, threatens to crest over, until at the end we get the fully unleashed power of a fully operational Tain. It’s something else. Branford has to yell to bring the band back to the top, and they’re out with a quick repetition of the head. It’s a profoundly different atmosphere from anything else on the album, but a good representation of an important facet of Branford’s sound.

In diving deep into standards with a smaller group, Branford emerged with a more distinctive voice: a straightforward melodic instinct, sometimes verging on the terse, sometimes on the lyrical, but always tinged with a deep sense of humor. It was a sound that would characterize many of his recordings for the following years. We’ll hear the next one soon; next time, we’ll see what we can learn from another brother’s embrace of jazz standards.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Exfiltration Radio: it sends a shock right through me

How much can the sound of one instrument influence popular music? If the instrument is the Roland TR-808, the answer is: a lot. An hour of electro funk and hip-hop on Exfiltration Radio.

I had an idea to make an Exfiltration Radio show all about the hip-hop/electronic music style called electro. Days later, I feel like I’m deep in the rabbit hole and just starting to scratch the surface of this music.

What to know: electro is rooted in the rhythms and sounds produced by the Roland TR-808, a budget-oriented drum machine that substituted synthesized drum sounds for the fully sampled sounds of its market competitor, the Linn LM-1 (which at the time cost almost 10x more). While the 808 was a market failure, its fully synthesized drum sounds created a ruckus that could be felt across the dance floor, and its distinctive sound created an effect that felt futuristic in 1983.

Combine that with an esthetic borrowed from pioneers like Gary Numan and Roger Troutman of Zapp, with sizzling synthesizer sounds and vocoder-processed vocals, and you had a sound that enjoyed a huge amount of chart karma, picking up momentum from both the aftermath of disco and funk and the rise of hip-hop, and only losing popularity when Prince’s more florid Minneapolis sound elaborated it out of existence. But you can hear electro’s impact in some of Prince’s early material as well as in bands like Flyte Tyme (where Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis got their start).

There are two songs in this mix that are arguably iconic: “Planet Rock” is an early hip-hop classic that is still referenced in unexpected ways, and “Freak-A-Zoids” has become a Tiktok meme. Beyond that, I don’t know if anyone other than certain GenXers remember “Freaks Come Out at Night,” but I certainly do, and “Computer Games” showed that George Clinton had a creative life beyond Parliament/Funkadelic.

As for the rest? Ryuichi Sakamato’s “Riot in Lagos” predates the rest of the material here by at least two years, showing that things really did happen earlier in Japan. Warp 9’s “Nunk (New Wave Funk)” was an early electro track that bubbled up in New York in 1982, as was Man Parrish’s “Hip-Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop),” which ran afoul of identity politics when African-American hip-hop influencers found out that Parrish was white and gay. Cybotron’s “Clear” brings a strain of Detroit to the melting pot, courtesy of band member Juan Atkins, now considered a co-founder of the techno sound. Elektrik Funk’s “On a Journey” was a one-off single from the depths of 1982 electro heaven, and Hashim’s “Al-Naafyish” was a 1983 one-off from a New York DJ.

Friends, this could have been a three-hour mix. There are so many threads to follow in this sound. Phil Collins used the TR-808 on No Jacket Required, for heaven’s sake. But we’ll start here, with the famed battle cry: Freak-a-zoids… report to the dance floor!

Track listing:

  1. “Drummers, they kind of get bored…” – Phil Collins (Exfiltration Radio: the bumpers)
  2. riot in Lagos (2019 Remastering) – Ryuichi Sakamoto (B-2 Unit (2019 Remastering))
  3. Planet Rock – Afrika Bambaataa & The Soulsonic Force (Smithsonian Anthology Of Hip-Hop And Rap)
  4. Nunk (New Wave Funk) – Warp 9 (12 Inch Classics)
  5. Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop) – Man Parrish (Hip Hop, Be Bop)
  6. Freak-A-Zoid – Midnight Star (No Parking On the Dance Floor)
  7. Clear – Cybotron (Enter (Deluxe Edition))
  8. On a Journey (I Sing the Funkelectric) – Elektrik Funk (Rare Preludes, Vol. 1)
  9. Freaks Come Out At Night – Whodini (Funky Beat: The Best of Whodini)
  10. Al-Naafyish (The Soul) [Radio Version] – Hashim (Al-Naafyish (The Soul) – EP)
  11. Computer Games – George Clinton (Computer Games)

Exfiltration Radio: causally connectible

Is jazz just cover songs? If so, why stop with songs written 80 years ago?

Time for a little Hackathon radio show. This latest episode of Exfiltration Radio crosses between jazz and pop music and asks the question, “what if modern jazz is just cover songs?”

Of course, the answer is that most of jazz is just covers, it’s just a question of the age of the material. The revered Great American Songbook started off as pop music, after all—songs from movies and Broadway. All this show does is to update the material a touch. The oldest song covered here dates from the mid-1960s (it’s impossible to avoid the Beatles in an exercise like this, and very hard to avoid Burt Bacharach), while the newest is from the mid-2010s. A little about each one below:

Cécile McLorin-Salvant, “Wuthering Heights” (Ghost Song): I wrote about this cover at length in my article about Cécile’s album Ghost Song. I still love this reflection on the Kate Bush original, which locates the song somewhere around the Appalachians en route to the blasted heath.

Ahmad Jamal, “I Say a Little Prayer” (Tranquility): I could have done a full hour of Burt Bacharach covers (and may still someday). This one comes from a record that was in my Mom’s collection, hence the dust in the grooves. Great album, great song, and I love the way that Jamal got that percussive sound to swing. Makes you want to sit up and listen.

Cal Tjader, “Tra La La Song” (Fried Bananas): OK, so finding Cal Tjader, who made a career out of playing Latin-inflected soul jazz with a band he led from his marimba, covering pop songs is not surprising. That it was the “Tra La La Song” from The Banana Splits Adventure Hour is slightly more surprising, but it actually works. (Side note: I am not one of the GenX elders, so it took me until sometime after I graduated high school to understand why my team of middle school teachers called themselves the Banana Splitz. And once I saw the show—an early Sid and Marty Krofft/Hanna Barbera team up—I began to wonder how it was that there were any drugs left in the world, because it seems like the folks in the 1960s took them all.)

Matt Jorgensen + 451, “Everything In Its Right Place” (The Sonarchy Session): Jorgensen is a drummer from Seattle who I heard on the KEXP show Sonarchy Radio—or maybe more precisely streamed from their website. There are some pretty solid covers in that set, available on iTunes as The Sonarchy Session, including “Tomorrow Never Knows” and a solid version of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter,” but this version of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” is my favorite, thanks to the sax work by Mark Taylor as well as some really tasty Fender Rhodes (played by Ryan Burns).1

Freddie Hubbard, “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” (First Light): this is the other track I’ve written about already in the context of Hubbard’s great First Light. Still one of my all time favorite bonkers jazz covers (of a fairly bonkers Paul McCartney original).

Bill Frisell, “Live to Tell” (Have a Little Faith): This one’s an epic. Frisell, who like Jorgensen moved back to Seattle from New York shortly before making this album, creates a lengthy psychedelic wonderland from this Madonna song.

Johnathan Blake, “Synchronicity I” (Trion): Blake’s trio with Linda May Han Oh (bass) and Chris Potter (sax) put out one of the most engrossing jazz albums of the last five or six years in Trion, and the burnout cover of the Police’s “Synchronicity I” is one of the highlights.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, “Videotape” (The Emancipation Procrastination): This isn’t the first Radiohead-adjacent cover that Christian Scott recorded; I liked his cover of Thom Yorke’s “The Eraser” enough to put it on a mix back in 2012. But this cover of the last track on In Rainbows carries an extra punch of alienation and longing.

Dr. Lonnie Smith with Iggy Pop, “Sunshine Superman” (Breathe): This is the track that all the reviews of Dr. Lonnie Smith’s final album talked about, and it’s easy to see why. Iggy Pop has aged into an unlikely vocal interpreter, as apt to shout out his musical collaborators in the middle of the song as he is to provide an utterly straight-ahead take on the song. And that’s Johnathan Blake again on the drums, alongside one of the great 21st century Hammond organ solos on the Donovan classic.

Jeremy Udden, “Fade Into You” (Wishing Flower): due to time constraints I could only fit only get a little of this in the outro. A crispy fried jazz guitar version of the great Mazzy Star song.

Do not attempt to adjust your set!

  1. About 15 years ago I linked to a NY Times article about the Seattle jazz scene that shouted out Jorgensen, which led me down a rabbit hole to a YouTube video about a Seattle high school jazz band competing in Essentially Ellington; they took home the trophy and the trumpet soloist, Riley Mulherkar, went toe to toe with Wynton Marsalis on the stage. He’s since gone on to form the jazz/new classical/bluegrass ensemble The Westerlies. This happens when I point to Seattle musicians; the rabbit holes tend to be very deep indeed. ↩︎

Marcus Roberts, The Truth is Spoken Here

A debut album for a remarkable performer and a seriously talented ensemble, and a perfectly lovely set of straight-ahead jazz.

Album of the Week, May 10, 2025

Some young artists get their start playing with other young artists, and their eventual first record captures them coming up together as a unit. That’s usually the way it goes with rock and pop artists; jazz has often been another story. The first recordings of artists like Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter and others put the young lions in combination with older, more experienced players. You can especially see this on Blue Note Records. Alfred Lion’s trick accomplished a few things: it provided the young player with backup from players who had more experience recording and playing, who could challenge them improvisationally; but it also ensured that there was a certain continuity of sound between the new player’s album and the others on the label—or more generally in that generation of sound.

I don’t know if the Blue Note model was on the mind of Delfeayo Marsalis, who produced Marcus Roberts’ debut session as a leader, The Truth is Spoken Here. But the band assembled for the session followed the model, combining some new players with the proponents of the “house sound”—the Wynton Marsalis combo—and a few veterans. Alongside Roberts were his erstwhile bandleader Wynton (on three tracks), bassist Reginald Veal and tenor saxophonist Todd Williams (on two tracks) who were both to begin performing with Wynton’s band, Charlie Rouse (appearing on three tracks, best known for his long collaboration with Thelonious Monk), and Elvin Jones, who had spent the years since his collaborations with John Coltrane leading his own combos. The choice of veterans must have been a deliberate choice; Roberts wore his indebtedness to Monk on his sleeve, and the influence of Trane’s pianist McCoy Tyner cast a long shadow over his playing as well.

The first track, “The Arrival,” demands close listening to get the exciting bits; I recommend headphones because Jones is an extremely vocal player, and hearing his grunts as the band plays through Roberts’ composition makes it come alive in a way that the playing (sadly) doesn’t. We’re hearing Wynton in his Miles phase, playing through a Harman mute, and while the tone is impeccable the whole solo feels like it happens all on one level, with little variation in intensity. Roberts gives the other players a lot of space, primarily letting Wynton, Elvin, and Reginald Veal drive the development of the track during Wynton’s solo. Veal is eye-opening here; his bass lines are acrobatic, but he’s not content just to walk them; we get rhythmic variation and counter-melody from him as well as some suspensions that build tension. When Roberts takes his own solo we start to hear a little more flash. There’s some stride in his playing in the way the left hand shifts the beat, and some Liszt around the edges of his chord voicings. You can hear the debt to Tyner in the harmonic vocabulary, but the touch (particularly when Wynton plays) is lighter. The outro for Elvin Jones is a shot of adrenaline even without the great drummer’s grunts signaling the beats.

If the opening showed what Roberts could do in a group context, “Blue Monk” is pure solo, and offers him the chance to really show off. He takes the Monk standard to church: while the opening is pure Monk, once he gets past the head we get some gospel around the edges, and more than a hint of the blues and ragtime that are always just under the corners of any Monk composition—especially what those left hand chords do to the time as he shifts freely from 4/4 to 6/4. It’s way more interesting than what he played on the first track; one wants more of it.

“Maurella” is another Roberts original, and it has the marks of the compositional direction he brought to his time in the Wynton Marsalis group on albums like J Mood: a series of suspended chords, taken so slowly in the head that it almost feels out of time, that ultimately fail to resolve. Roberts loved these chord suspensions so much that you can hear traces of them in other tracks, including the title track on the second side. In this setting, the progression seems to open up melancholy vistas behind the melodic trail blazed by Todd Williams, a tenor player from St. Louis who would spend about ten years in Wynton’s band and related projects before withdrawing from jazz performance to take the music director role at the Times Square Church. His tone is well suited for this work; he sells the odd chord progressions but doesn’t do much showy improvisation. There’s sensitive accompaniment from Jones and Veal throughout.

“Single Petal of a Rose” is the second solo number by Roberts, this time paying homage to Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. He plays the Strayhorn composition with delicacy and nuance, but with a power in the left hand that gives the work a deep dynamic range. When he gets to the bridge, you can almost get swept away on the wave of impassioned music making that pours out of the piano. Like “Blue Monk,” this one also leaves you wanting more of his solo work.

When we flip to the second side, we have shifted gears again and are in a straight-ahead post-bop number. “Country by Choice” features Charlie Rouse. Rouse played as Monk’s sideman from 1959 through 1969, including on some of the most famous Columbia Records recordings (Criss Cross, Monk’s Dream, It’s Monk’s Time, Straight, No Chaser). Here on more straightforward harmonic material he tempers some of his more eccentric harmonic tendencies, but he still brings a big tenor sound to the party. Roberts’ solo feels a little tentative through bits of the middle; he’s on firmer ground when he shifts the meter to something more syncopated and shouting, and Veal and Jones follow him the whole way. We get a shouting, snarling solo from Jones to bring us through into the recap, and Veal and Jones bring us out into a coda.

“The Truth is Spoken Here” brings the chord progressions first heard on “Maurella” to a quintet voicing with the addition of Wynton’s trumpet. Wynton takes a good deal more rubato than was present in the earlier iteration of the tune, and plays off Todd Williams’ high tenor notes with aplomb. This time Roberts takes the first solo, and his anticipatory downbeats combined with Jones’ growl lighten up the proceedings considerably compared to the earlier song. The trio cooks its way through the end of the solo and into the reprise. It’s a great performance, lessened only by the puzzling near-repetition on the first side of the record.

“In a Mellow Tone” brings back Rouse for a seriously swinging run at the Ellington classic, and the combination of Rouse’s tenor and Jones’ vocalizing recall nothing so much as the collaboration between Ellington and Coleman Hawkins that produced “Limbo Jazz” (particularly the echo of Aaron Bell’s spontaneous vocals on the latter tune). Veal stays particularly tight in the pocket, letting Roberts unspool melodic lines and shifts of rhythmic emphasis against an always-solid metrical backbone.

“Nothin’ but the Blues” gives us a staggering blues, with a tricky triple meter laid over the traditional twelve bar form. This track is the only time that I’m aware that Rouse and Wynton collaborated (Rouse would pass away only five months after this session, his last, was completed), and their off-kilter harmonic imaginations light up sparks on the head. Roberts may have called this “nothing but the blues,” but there’s more than a little Monk in it too, particularly in his solo, which gets more interestingly ornery the longer it goes. Wynton’s solo straightens out some of the brilliant corners, but it’s a more committed improvisational gesture than on the rest of the record, and it pairs well with Rouse’s sly around-the-corner elaboration of the chords. The outro gives each of the players a plausible claim to having gotten the last word.

As a debut album, The Truth is Spoken Here does a good job of showcasing Roberts as a performer, particularly in the two solo numbers and “In a Mellow Tone.” It’s less good at showcasing his compositional skills, but does a great job of highlighting his influences and demonstrating how his gospel, soul and classical background helped his perfoming conception transcend those influences. Like a good Blue Note album, the end result is a great listen, if not groundbreaking. As for his composition, the follow-up album would show a much broader range of his talents. We’ll hear that one in a bit; next time we’ll hear a different musician tackle traditional repertoire alongside a storied collaborator.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: With Wynton guesting on the album and given their close working relationship in his small group, it was only natural that some of Roberts’ originals would end up on a Wynton album. The title track appeared on Wynton’s 1991 album Uptown Ruler in a quintet performance:

Branford Marsalis, Random Abstract

In this 1987 album, recorded at the tail end of the sessions for Sting’s Nothing Like the Sun, Branford finds ways to express himself in straight-ahead jazz that are as adventurous as anything he recorded with Sting.

Album of the Week, May 3, 2025

To be a jazz fan in the 1980s felt like you were sorting yourself into a camp. You were either a fan of Miles Davis, Weather Report and the other jazz-rock fusion artists that were still big on the landscape, or you leaned hard into the traditionalist camp of acoustic jazz, spearheaded by Wynton Marsalis and his artistic collaborators. Like all artistic yes/no decisions, this one was really more a false choice imposed by marketing—ironically, much of which was led by Miles’ old label, Columbia Records. For me, Branford Marsalis represented a kind of third path—someone who honored the traditions but who looked beyond them, as comfortable leading a post-bop quartet as he was playing with Sting. Random Abstract, his fourth album as a leader for Columbia, falls into the former category, an album of straight ahead acoustic quartet jazz that, even as it explores the young saxophonist’s influences, nonetheless presents a distinctive voice that stands apart from what his brother was doing in his own small group.

The quartet that played with Branford this time around was a combination of familiar and new faces. Kenny Kirkland had been with Branford since his first album for Columbia, 1984’s Scenes in the City and also was a trusted collaborator in Sting’s band. Drummer Lewis Nash had worked with both Ron Carter and Betty Carter prior to joining Branford for this session, the only one he ever played with Branford. And this was bassist Delbert Felix’s first major label credit, though he had played with the band in some live gigs prior to the recording.

“Yes and No” starts us off, a lightly retitled version of Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” from JuJu. The liner notes, by Branford’s brother Delfeayo, talk a great deal about the influences on Branford’s stylistic development, but Shorter was the most significant and obvious influence at this time, as seen in his embrace of jazz fusion and the soprano sax as well as his tone. One misses the originality, not to mention occasional weirdness, of Wayne’s improvisations, but there’s no denying the depth of Branford’s affection for the Blue Note Wayne Shorter sound here. In this rendition you can really hear Shorter’s compositional structure, which reveals itself to be rooted in the twelve-bar blues: as Branford’s saxophone plays two long phrases and a third phrase that circles around the tonic, Kenny Kirkland exuberantly points up the chords beneath, creating an effect not unlike the proverbial duck (busy paddling beneath the surface of the water while all seems smooth above). Branford and Delfeayo made an aesthetic choice to record Delbert Felix’s upright bass through an external microphone, rather than the “dreaded bass direct” used by Ron Carter and others; it may indeed have “obtained more wood sound from the bass” but also means that the bass is mixed rather low in the final recording (this may have also been “due to miscommunication” as the liner notes indicate that the track was inadvertently recorded direct to 2-track digital), so that you have to strain a bit to hear Felix’s constantly moving bass line. Lewis Nash’s drums have no such challenge being heard, as he keeps thing moving along through phrases that keep time with running hits on the hi-hat and occasional snare explosions.

The band segues into “Crescent City,” a Branford original, which opens in a major key version of the famous opening track to John Coltrane’s Crescent but quickly shifts into the modal minor blues. Where Trane’s original swirls around freely for the opening before landing in a slow four, Branford’s iteration stays fairly metrical throughout the opening, including a lovely four-bar solo statement from Delbert Felix, and shifts into a slightly more deliberate meter as Kenny Kirkland takes the first solo over Felix’s walking bass. Kirkland’s solo plays with meter, shifting back and forth between swing, triple meter, and syncopated patterns throughout. Branford’s solo is similarly fluid in its approach; though it stays close to the chord changes throughout, the rhythmic pattern shifts from quarters to sixteenths freely. Early on in the solo we don’t hear “sheets of sound” in the Coltrane sense—even the most rapidly moving passages are swung, creating an effect of being just slightly behind the beat even though he’s right in the pocket throughout. It’s only as he takes his third verse through the changes that we hear that roiling Coltrane blister of sound, but it shifts back into another swinging pattern. If, as Delfeayo suggests in the liner notes, he is paying homage to Trane here, the elder’s influence feels completely internalized and absorbed into his own musical approach.

“Broadway Fools,” another Branford original, starts with a false start and a count-in announcing itself as “Take 1.” The tune consists of a suspended intro and a melody that lopes up the scale as though the unserious quartet were joking and swaggering their way down the street. When Branford takes the first solo on his soprano sax, Kenny drops out and the trio continues on, apparently without reference to chord changes or anything other than that swinging beat. As Delfeayo notes, the whole effect is very much like a swinging Ornette Coleman. He swings his way up the scale into a higher octave but comes back down again, modulating through the tune and finally quoting the opening intro, trailing off into a series of descending quarter notes. Kenny Kirkland picks up the pattern and lopes down the block, accompanied by Delbert Felix. Along the way he finds a few patterns that he repeats, sounding a bit like Thelonious Monk trailing off into a reverie. The loping melody returns at the end for two repetitions, hitting a false ending with a Lewis Nash explosion, and then repeating the suspended intro after a few seconds, with just enough smearing of the notes in the saxophone to make it sound as though the tape was restarted just to catch the last bit. The whole effect is to show a side of Branford completely unlike what we hear from Wynton’s albums—namely, that he’s funny.

Opening side two is “LonJellis,” Kenny Kirkland’s compositional contribution to the album. It pays tribute in name to Ellis Marsalis, but after Lewis Nash gives us the rhythmic opening over a rumble of low notes from Kirkland, Branford plays a melody that rolls through a rapid series of chords—according to an online transcription, those are F♯7 alt, Am7, G7, A♭Δ♯5, F/G, and Cm7 (!)—but still remains hummable. Branford picks up and improvises at something approaching breakneck speed over Felix’s walking bass and the roll and crash of Lewis Nash’s drums. The solo does not appear to be hindered by the opening chords; Branford is just “burning out” (in the jazz sense) for the first half of the piece until he brings us forcefully around to a recapitulation. Kenny takes the second solo in trio form, and here we can see that despite the freedom of the improvisation there is some reference to the underlying chordal structure, even as he splashes discordant chords and runs down the scale. One is reminded, listening to his solo, of the story that Herbie Hancock tells about hitting a note that he perceived as a mistake, but to which Miles listened and played other notes that turned it into a chord; there are no wrong notes here.

From the freely discordant romp of “LonJellis,” we flip into Johnny Mercer’s “I Thought About You.” Here again Branford wears his influences on his sleeve, transparently channeling the great Ben Webster. The band follows Branford through the tune for a complete verse and chorus, with Kenny taking the second verse and Felix taking a gutbucket solo on the third. Delfeayo characterizes this as a “farewell” to Branford’s explicit emulation of Webster on some of his earlier records, but while we get some of the tone of Webster throughout, there’s just as much of Branford’s own tone and harmonic imagination at work here. It’s a deep breath, a joyfully straight take on the classic tune and a welcome respite from the intensity of the rest of side 2.

Which takes us into “Lonely Woman.” While a faithful reflection of the great Ornette Coleman composition, there’s another voice in Kirkland and Branford’s approach, the lyrical and emotional depth of the Keith Jarrett—Jan Garbarek partnership as heard in Jarrett’s 1970s European Quartet. Jarrett appears not to have recorded “Lonely Woman,” but Garbarek did on an orchestral album and his playing of the theme has the hallmarks of Branford’s interpretation here—a deep melodic intensity, a passionate leaning into the high corners of the melody, and a continued circle around the core of Coleman’s melody. The intensity that Garbarek summoned on a full-orchestra rendition is here brought forward just in Kirkland’s rolling chords and constantly moving accompaniment. The performance plays with jazz conventions in a similar way that Miles’s second great quintet did, eschewing head/solo/solo/head forms and continually circling back to the tune, the horn constantly staying focused on that deeply evocative melody as the rhythm section continues to evolve its improvisational concept underneath. There’s some Chopin in Kirkland’s moving notes, and yes, some Keith Jarrett as well. Which isn’t to say that Branford just plays the tune; particularly in the bridge and in the transition from chorus to verse, he takes some powerful improvisational moments that extend time and shift the meter. The overall effect is powerful and, at over fifteen minutes, somewhat overwhelming with the relentless return of the core melody. Branford solos for over ten minutes before yielding the floor to Kenny Kirkland, who again finds a legion of melodic and rhythmic approaches to the material in his short essay at the music. It’s also in this piece that we most hear the contributions of Lewis Nash, whose approach ranges from the most delicate filigree of cymbals to crashing thunder on the tom and the snare. When the band finally breathes and lets the intensity trickle away in the closing moments, it has the feeling of the cessation of a thunderstorm. Closing out the side, “Steep’s Theme” is a tag, a short bit in the spirit of the great Miles Davis theme, here truncated with a rueful laugh.

The variety of influences on display in this album shows that Branford was an intense student of a wide array of teachers, from the traditional to the avant-garde. At this stage in their development, you wouldn’t ever have heard Wynton essaying Ornette Coleman, Wayne Shorter, or Jan Garbarek, and certainly not all in the same set. But for all the wide array of sounds, the album has the feeling of an anthology more than a complete, coherent statement. In his next few outings, Branford would refine this sound into something that was more unambiguously his own. We’ll hear that in a few weeks; next week we’ll get to listen to another young player who steps out from his place in a Marsalis brother’s band to reveal his own musical and compositional voice in his debut album.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: The CD version of the album also included two bonus tracks, Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s “Yesterdays” and a version of Monk’s “Crepuscule with Nellie,” which for me was a gateway to all things Thelonious. “Crepuscule” is composed, not improvised, so the performance on record is faithful to the version that debuted on Monk’s Music, except that Branford swings the melody ever so gently. It’s a great tune in any rendition, including this one from the 1987 Newport Jazz Festival: