Tag: jazz

Branford Marsalis, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

A free jazz outing for Branford’s trio yields more than a few whistleable melodies, and some fiercely ascetic improvisation.

Album of the Week, June 14, 2025

Branford Marsalis had built two brands by the time 1991 rolled around. He was still appearing periodically with Sting, most recently on the rocker’s concept album The Soul Cages, and in 1990 had started to perform from time to time with the Grateful Dead, even appearing on their 1990 live album Without a Net. But he also had an increasingly solid run of more traditional jazz albums to his name, and his most recent one, Crazy People Music, had hit Number 3 on the Top Jazz Albums chart and been nominated for a Grammy award for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance, Soloist (he lost to Oscar Peterson). In this context, his 1991 album, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, feels a bit like a statement that he had serious things to say about jazz.

In Branford’s earlier albums you can hear his influences at work, with a solid Wayne Shorter and Ornette Coleman, to say nothing of Ben Webster and Jan Garbarek, on display in Random Abstract. Those influences were consolidated into Branford’s own musical conception by the time of Crazy People Music, and on The Beautyful Ones we’re in an entirely new landscape, by turns bleak, playful and primal in its approach. We’re also in a land of burnout, in the sense coined by Ornette Coleman, in which the soloists take their improvisations as far as they can go rather than being constrained by bar counts. This record is as close to free jazz as Branford had gotten to this point in his career.

As with Trio Jeepy, he was without frequent collaborator Kenny Kirkland on this one;1 the trio included Branford, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums and Robert Hurst on bass. Younger brother Wynton shows up for a tenor/trumpet battle on “Cain and Abel,” and Courtney Pine appears on a CD-only bonus track. For the most part, though, you just get the trio, giving them an enormous amount of freedom to explore their sonic world.

“Roused About” opens with a Robert Hurst-penned tribute to Charlie Rouse, the tenor saxophonist who collaborated with Thelonious Monk from 1959 to 1970. Like the best of Rouse’s playing, Branford’s solo statement of the melody here is all angles and unexpected austere turns, but it’s also deeply swinging and convincingly melodic, in spite of the odd modal twists of the melody. Bob Hurst plays a sort of omnitonal walking bass that never stops moving but also seems to never settle down into one key. Likewise, Jeff “Tain” Watts gives us a sort of shambolic swinging pattern on cymbals and snare, what Branford’s brother Delfeayo calls in the liner notes his “‘stumbling drum’ technique.” But it’s a whistleable melody and a genuinely fun performance.

There’s also a strong melody in “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” but as the basis for a series of variations. Hurst’s bass provides single notes and chords of support, playing a gentle harmony in the head and then providing strummed, almost kora-like support under the improvisation. Branford improvises rhythmically, at first slowly but by the fourth peak in a spiraling frenzy. The title of the piece is taken from the 1968 novel of the same name by Ayi Kwei Armah, who wrote about conditions in a post-independence Ghana and the struggle of the narrator to find his way amidst corruption and decay. Branford’s work can be heard as a lament, if not a threnody, and by the time Tain’s drums crest like a wave under the soloist the lament has reached a fever pitch. Hurst’s solo plays melody and harmony at once, punctuated by the pulsing kora sounds as Branford returns to recapitulate the melody. It’s an engrossing listen even at 13+ minutes.

“Cain and Abel” sets up a conversation between two brothers, who by now had evolved to very different perspectives of what jazz could be. They play the head together, a melody that seems designed to disguise that it’s in 4/4 time, and quickly swing into a call-and-response, with Wynton making the opening statement and Branford responding—sometimes echoing, sometimes inverting, sometimes wryly commenting. At times it sounds like Wynton is winning some musical battle, but then Branford hits a lick back or inverts the harmony and we’re in a very different place. At the end Branford swings into a different key and mood entirely, and the horns end the piece in parallel harmonic descending arpeggios, landing in a different key as Bob Hurst supports them with a two-note ground that sounds as though they might be ready to start an entirely new tune. The whole thing swings all through thanks to Hurst and Tain’s shambolic rhythm work.

“Citizen Tain” has the strongest melody of the faster pieces on the record, consisting of a series of arpeggios in triple meter that swing into a fast four over Tain’s explosive drumming and Hurst’s ground bass. As the trio swings into the first variation, Hurst’s bass finally snaps out of its repeated accompaniment into a brisk walk, proving that basses can walk in time signatures other than 4/4. When the bassist takes a solo, it’s the first time we hear something other than the walk as he plays syncopated open fifths and sixths. The trio comes together at the end, doubling up on the triple-meter arpeggios into a fade-out.

“Gilligan’s Isle” is a free, slow ballad that bears no resemblance to the television show’s theme. The group’s musicianship means things are constantly in motion, but without a strong melody to latch onto it’s hard for me to find much to write about. “Beat’s Remark,” the other Bob Hurst tune on the record, has a stronger, wistful melody that’s doubled in the bass over a constantly moving roll of the tide of Tain’s drums. Hurst takes the first solo, sowing bits of the melody among a long swinging statement that ends in some high bass harmonics as Branford comes back in. The band double- and triple-times the melody but somehow seems to still shamble their way into a transformation, when at around the 7:45 mark Branford hits and holds a series of notes, playing a sort of “B” version of the original melody, and giving a quiet line interrupted only by one outburst note and supported by a series of suspended subtonics on the bass. The head returns, but the band seems to look around one more corner and find one more iteration of the melody to collectively improvise into, this time finding a rhythmic pattern that they ride into the end of the groove.

This is among the last of Branford’s run of recordings for Columbia Records that I can find on vinyl; the CD format had won by this point for many reasons, not least of which was the greater capacity offered. Case in point: the CD version contains two more tracks than present on this LP, “Xavier’s Lair” (continuing the X-Men theme begun in Crazy People Music, and “Dewey Baby,” a blistering tenor battle with English saxophonist Courtney Pine. The whole set is pure fire. I confess with some residual cringing that this is the second time I’ve reviewed this album; the first was for UVa’s alt-weekly The Declaration, and I am grateful that it has yet to be digitized because I seem to recall using words like “ceremonial dances around the fire” to describe how the music made me feel. Ultimately The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is about three musicians exploring how far they can take their music. It’s heady stuff, and I can only wonder what the Deadheads who might’ve picked it up thought.

Branford had a few other surprises in him, and we’ll check them out in a couple weeks, but first we are going to check back in one last time with Marcus Roberts and find him in a very different context.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Branford’s live album with this trio, Bloomington, provides a technicolor window into the power of his compositions (and the players). Here’s the title track in its live version.

  1. In late 1990 and early 1991, Kenny seems to have been quite busy producing and performing on Charnett Moffat’s solo debut Nettwork, appearing on Jeff “Tain” Watts’ solo debut Megawatts, backing up UK tenor sax sensation Courtney Pine, and recording his own self-titled solo debut. It’s a little hard to tell because these albums don’t list recording dates, but it’s a safe assumption he was pretty busy. ↩︎

Marcus Roberts, Deep in the Shed

A lesser-known but brilliant suite in the Ellingtonian tradition from Marcus Roberts and a bunch of Wynton Marsalis alumni.

Album of the Week, June 7, 2025

We’ve written a bit about the fights between the Wynton Marsalis side of 1980s jazz, of which Marcus Roberts was part due to his role as pianist in Wynton’s small groups, and the “old guard” then represented by Miles Davis and the fusion movement. Some of the pro-Wynton writings of critic and liner-note author Stanley Crouch seem in retrospect to be hysterically overblown. But one positive aspect of Wynton’s circle and their desire to conserve the jazz past was a fresh attention to composition and harmonic development, a path that led Wynton directly to Ellington.

The Marsalis association with Ellington is plain in hindsight, between the formation of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, his album-length (or double-album-length) composed suites, and the Essentially Ellington high school competition. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s the trend was revealing itself slowly, through a series of albums by Marsalis and his band, including today’s offering by Marsalis’s pianist and arranger Marcus Roberts.

Deep in the Shed presents a striking contrast with Roberts’ first album, The Truth is Spoken Here. There’s nary a solo piano work here, and little to remind us of the Miles Davis Quintet. Instead, the composer brings a suite of works full of harmonies so thick you could slice them like pie, full of tight solos and assembled like jeweled boxes.

The band he put together had more than a family resemblance to the Wynton Marsalis band. The horns—Wessell Anderson on alto, Todd Williams on tenor, Wycliffe Gordon on trombone—all were performing with Wynton’s larger group, and were joined or replaced on some numbers by Herb Harris on tenor and Scotty Barnhard on trumpet, also part of the Marsalis machine. Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley are both well known to us by now; the duo of Chris Thomas (bass) and Maurice Carnes (drums), both little known, perform instead on the first two tracks. And on trumpet for two of the tracks, one E. Dankworth—Marsalis, under a pseudonym due to his Columbia contractual commitments (or maybe just for fun).

“Nebuchadnezzar” opens with a flourish: a single note on the tonic, a modal solo in the piano, against a throbbing beat from Thomas, Carnes and Herlin Riley on percussion. The horns play the theme in a tight harmony that’s reminiscent of some of Duke Ellington’s finer big band writing. Wycliffe Gordon has the best moment, a growling trombone solo that starts at the low end of the instrument’s range as if telling a quiet joke at the back of the band room. Roberts’ solo is restrained, sounding a bit like his production on “Single Petal of a Rose” at first but growing in intensity through different rhythmic gestures. Throughout the bass from Chris Thomas stays almost entirely constrained to the pentatonic scale, continuing to drive that Middle Eastern feeling.

“Spiritual Awakening” starts with an almost Motown-inflected solo from Herb Harris followed by a restrained but church-inflected solo from Roberts. Thomas and Carnes are restrained to the point of invisibility, leaving room for Roberts to shift keys into Wycliffe Gordon’s wah-wah trombone solo. Gordon both elevates the proceedings with the unexpected texture and leaves a much-needed smile behind—and a small wash of applause, one of the only clues that some of the album was recorded live in concert (as the liner notes indicate, at the Saenger Theatre in New Orleans, on December 15, 1989). A concise solo from Scotty Barnhard follows, but Harris gets the last word, taking us out on a sigh.

“The Governor” has another modal theme in C, stated by the four horns together, this time with Todd Williams on tenor and Wessell Anderson on alto. No retiring Marcus here; his solo is fiery and his punctuated block chords are bold. Wessell Anderson gets a burning alto sax solo in A minor, bringing it back to C for Todd Williams’ solo. It’s overall a lesson in minor-key exuberance.

Side two opens with “Deep in the Shed,” and some seriously funky work on drums, cowbell and bass from Herlin Riley and Reginald Veal, whose arco bass on the tonic underscores the prelude. Herb Harris states the theme, with all the horns coming in on the chorus. The form, as Roberts states in the liner notes, is an extended blues, two four-bar sections followed by an elongated six bar closure on the head; for the solos we’re back in twelve bar form. Wycliffe Gordon again gives us a growly solo that arises from the depths, followed by Herb Harris, who takes two verses to rise from the low end of his instrument up to an extended series of interrupted utterances punctuated by the piano. The recap leads into Roberts’ first solo, and the first break in the funk groove as we swing hard through the blues. Throughout his solo he switches from swing rhythms to triplets to syncopation, growing in intensity throughout. Scotty Barnhard gives us a Marsalis-inflected solo with mute that then shifts into a high register for another run. The rhythm section leads us through a coda that slowly drops away until only Veal is playing over Roberts’ quiet chords. Underneath Roberts suddenly shifts from the swung chords into a triple meter in the lower reaches of the piano that becomes a concerto, ultimately crashing down to the very lowest note on the piano. It’s head-swiveling and powerful.

“Mysterious Interlude” starts with just Roberts, Riley and Veal again, with the theme stated by Williams, Anderson, Gordon, and “E. Dankworth.” Wessell Anderson takes a high yearning solo that circles us back to the theme. Roberts’ solo blends the blues and gospel across two verses, and back into a key change. Marsalis’s distinctive trumpet gives us a bluesy, lazy float down the river, leading into the final statement of the theme. It’s definitely an interlude in that it is full of anticipation without the payoff.

That payoff comes in “E. Dankworth,” as Marsalis tosses off a virtuosic high solo leading into a jitterbuggy blues. Roberts’ piano trio with Veal and Riley is in high spirits here, racing down the piano at breakneck speed. When Marsalis returns it’s in slightly more restrained form, but still swinging, throwing rhythmic variations and leaning hard against Veal’s swinging bass, until he returns once more to the head. The horns—Williams and Anderson—are there just as a Greek chorus to punctuate the theme, as Wynton rips the last phrases. Someone shouts out, “Homey, you was in there!” at the end.

Deep in the Shed hasn’t been always well recorded critically, with reviewers noting its relative darkness and “an excess of seriousness.” For me that darkness and seriousness is one of its strengths, leavened as it is with humor and humanity from the soloists, particularly Wessell Anderson. But for me the lasting impact was the compositional form. If the large format jazz suite was to ultimately become Wynton Marsalis’s greatest compositional legacy (beginning with the trio of albums under the name of Soul Gestures in Southern Blue, particularly the second volume, Uptown Ruler, moving on to In This House, On This Morning and Citi Movement, and culminating in his Pulitzer-winning oratorio Blood on the Fields and its sequel All Rise), it’s with records like this one by his band member Marcus Roberts that this musical direction had its origins. The move toward long form works also illustrated a fundamental difference in the approach to the art from Wynton’s older brother, Branford; we’ll hear a high point in Branford’s pursuit of his vision next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Not a listening, but a spectacular collection of writings about and interviews with Marcus Roberts courtesy of jazz critic Ted Panken.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the 2012 version of Deep in the Shed, this time minus Marsalis but with a full nonet, producing a sound that I think is more organic and lived-in than the original recording:

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:

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: 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:

Wynton Marsalis, J Mood

Cover to J Mood, illustration by Romare Bearden

Album of the Week, April 12, 2025

In the Bring on the Night documentary, there’s a brief interview with Kenny Kirkland at the very beginning in which he says, “I’m sure some people, some purists, jazz people, don’t like the idea of our doing this,” meaning being a jazz musician and playing with Sting. Kirkland was sure, all right; his former boss, Wynton Marsalis, had in fact kicked him and his brother Branford out of his quintet for joining Sting’s band. We’ve now heard some of the story about what happened next for Kirkland, but what about Wynton? Interestingly, the answer seems to be that he found his own voice.

One notable thing about Marsalis’s Black Codes (From the Underground) is the degree to which it resembles an album from Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet. That album was recorded in January 1985. His second album from that year, recorded in December, was a quartet with two new players: Marcus Roberts on piano and Robert Hurst on bass (Jeff “Tain” Watts returned from the old band). Both players would have a noticeable impact on Marsalis’s sound, but the biggest factor was Roberts.

Marthaniel Roberts, who goes professionally by Marcus, was born in 1963, two years after Wynton, to a longshoreman father and a gospel singing mother who went blind as a teenager. It ran in the family; by age 5, Roberts was blind from a combination of glaucoma and cataracts. Also at age 5, he learned to play piano, teaching himself on an instrument at their church. He attended the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, which had previously graduated Ray Charles, and studied piano formally beginning at age 12. This album was his first recording, and the style that he brought to Wynton’s band, anchored in gospel and ragtime rather than the post-bop influences that informed Kirkland, made a significant impact on Wynton’s sound.

The album opens with “J Mood,” which true to its name seems more like a mood—specifically, a blue mood—than a composition. Starting around this time, Marsalis’s compositions started to feature complex chord changes that could be downright Ellingtonesque, and this one is no exception; there’s also a thread of restraint, as though the music was moving in some mysterious underworld. The meter is complex, too, swerving from a slow 7/4 to bits of 4/4. The band starts out stating the theme together, with the trumpet playing over top of the changes in the piano, and Marsalis goes into a slow 4/4 blues in which he establishes a series of melodic phrases that don’t quite cohere to an actual melody. Tain and Bob Hurst anchor the low end, with Hurst keeping a “walking bass line” feel in his melodic progression but constantly swinging against the beat, and Tain exploding the harmonic envelope with inventive use of cymbals both soft and loud. When Roberts plays, it’s in a deceptively slow cadence that brings some melodic sense to the music, with hints of church in some of the low chords and his arpeggiated right hand, all the while swinging hard. The band finishes where they begin, with only a diminished seventh in the upper octave hinting at any of the development that has taken place.

Marcus Roberts’ sole compositional credit on the album, “Presence That Lament Brings” has a melody, but not an easy one (I am reminded a little of some of the twelve-tone solo lines in Bernstein’s Kaddish) and plenty of rubato to go around. Wynton is muted here, but the effect is less explicitly Milesian than on Black Codes; he seems to be finding his own expression and sound in which the combination of the soft tone of the mute and the growling of his note-bending playing combine to create a completely different emotional space. Space is the defining characteristic of Roberts’ solo, which has both that same deceptively unhurriedness and a sparser chord voicing than on “J Mood.”

“Insane Asylum,” composed by Donald Brown (who was the pianist in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers when Wynton was in the group), has a lazy intensity about it; there’s still that mute and that extreme swing that seems to wait until the last possible moment to move, and the melody descends chromatically like a swoon. Still, Tain’s cymbal work keeps insistently nudging us forward, and Wynton’s trumpet climbs to the highest heights as if urging us forward up a trail. The tune itself seems to circle back insistently to the the same chromatic descending motif over and over again, as if painfully fixated on it.

“Skain’s Domain” refers to Wynton’s childhood nickname; while you practically can’t refer to Jeff Watts without his rhyming “Tain,” “Skain” seems to be used principally only inside Wynton’s band, and mostly as a joke. The liner notes takes some pains to tell us that “the song is twenty seven bars long, with a two/four measure at the nineteenth bar.” What is true is that the playing is brisk and light enough that you don’t count the measures; though the tune, like everything else, keeps to the minor-key side of the equation, it feels almost sprightly. By contrast, “Melodique” is, rhythmically, a slow blues over a samba rhythm, and bears more than a family resemblance to Herbie Hancock’s “Mimosa.” It plays some of the same tricks with rhythmic pulse and stasis, with the added trick of a twelve-tone inspired melody from Wynton over the top. It’s a gorgeous track, regardless.

“After” is a wistful ballad by Wynton’s father Ellis Marsalis, albeit one that is amped up by Tain’s cymbal work, which urges the track along with splashes, washes, and marches of cymbal sound against the more meditative backing of the piano and the bass. It seems to capture a tender moment alone, where “Much Later” seems to find the couple jitterbugging the night away. The pulse is constantly moving eighth notes, Tain finding a way to swing even at high velocity. The track has a much looser feel, and the cough or sneeze at around the 40-second mark as well as the barely detectable fade-in suggest that it was a full band jam session during which the engineer just happened to be rolling tape. It sounds great and blows some of the sleepiness away, ending the album on a high note—as well as a simultaneous Wynton and Roberts quote of “If I Were a Bell”!

Marsalis was finding his way to the key ingredients of his compositional and performative voice: in addition to the bell-like tone of his early recordings, we get a variety of distinctive sounds through the mute here, along with a healthy dose of both Ellington and Armstrong—as well as the blues. On later albums of his own material for small group, Wynton would lean more heavily into one or another of these directions, particularly the blues—his trio of albums in the “Soul Gestures in Southern Blue” series is worth seeking out—but they play as elaborations of the musical language that was first captured here.

If Wynton was driving deeper into the jazz tradition, he wasn’t the only Marsalis brother to be recording jazz albums. About six months after the quartet wrapped up its sessions for the album in December 1985, Branford recorded his own set and second album, Royal Garden Blues, in New York. But Branford was also busy with some decidedly non-traditional endeavors, and we’ll pick up that story next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Sting, Bring on the Night

Album of the Week, April 5, 2025

You’re a rock star who’s just changed genres and shifted into a jazz-rock hybrid with a band of up and coming jazz legends who have played with the best. You’ve had a few hits from your first solo album with this group. What do you do next?

Well, if you’re Sting, you start touring the minute the album hits the streets, and you hire a film crew, complete with an award winning director, to document the formation of the band as a touring unit and to capture the band at its inception, rather than waiting until the band is at its peak or dissolving. Then you release that movie while the album is still on the charts, and follow it up the next summer with a live double album release in which the jazz is even more prominent. Welcome to Bring on the Night.

The one thing that struck me forcefully, listening last week in detail to The Dream of the Blue Turtles, was how much of it was clearly directly from Sting’s sequencers, the band (especially Kenny Kirkland’s fine playing) audible mostly as color or commentary. That’s not the case here. This is the sound of a jazz band (again, composed of Kirkland, Branford Marsalis, Darryl Jones, and Omar Hakim, with Janice Pendarvis and Dolette McDonald on backing vocals) taking a concert’s worth of material and making it thoroughly their own.

That said, the opening to “Bring on the Night/When the World Is Running Down, You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” is all Sting. With the reggae rhythms of the Police’s version of “Bring on the Night” banished, Sting gives us a brisk, running arpeggio down the song’s key changes on his guitar, accompanied by quiet keyboards and percussion as he sings the opening in an easy voice. When he comes to the chorus, the stacked vocals of Pendarvis and McDonald bring that richness that they added to the chorus of “If You Love Somebody Set Them Free,” with Kenny’s keyboards adding mercurial chord changes around the edges of the tune. The second verse features a Darryl Jones bass line that anchors the tune in even more funk; when the second chorus comes in, Branford Marsalis plays a counter-melody that riffs into a minor key vamp that the band plays for 64 bars, under the chorus of “Bring on the Night” and then wordless vocals—and then Sting sings the opening notes to “When the World is Running Down You Make the Best of What’s Still Around” over the same vamp. After two verses and two choruses, the rest of the band drops back and Kenny Kirkland takes an extended solo that manages to continue the riff, extend the chordal palette, play with rhythm, and build dynamic contrast, all over the course of about 16 choruses in a little over three minutes. (Narrator: “It was about at this time, at the age of fourteen, that I decided I needed to listen to more jazz.”) The band does a little call and response with the chorus, and then: a rap break. Yes, that’s Branford Marsalis shouting out the band with some early 1980s rhymes, in what I believe is the saxophonist’s only rap credit on record. The band continues to jam over the vamp as they return to the verse once more, this time with Branford playing a tenor obbligato over the sung chorus and into an explosive but brief solo over one last chorus.

By contrast to the immense jam of the first track, “Consider Me Gone” hews much closer to the arrangement on the record; what excitement there is comes purely from the interchanges of the musicians, starting with Sting trading phrases with Branford in the opening and Dolette, Janice and Omar Hakim building stacks of harmony over the bluesy “You can’t say that” pre-chorus. Here Kenny’s Synclavier, sounding like a Hammond organ, primarily simmers rather than boiling, and Branford builds intensity by punctuating each line of the verse, sometimes just commenting, other times spinning lines of melody that pull in different directions. Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim anchor the blues, coming to a slow boil finally in the last chorus as the band moves into the closing vamp.

“Low Life,” originally released as the b-side to “Spirits in the Material World” and dating all the way back to 1979, is an odd tune, a lyric that seems to be about the hazards of slumming it: “A fatal fascination for the seedy party of town…” The band gamely gives it a full treatment nonetheless, blooming out of another Sting arpeggiated guitar opening, with Omar Hakim’s muscular drumming bringing up the energy through two verses until Branford’s saxophone enters as if summoned. The ultimate pleasure of the song is again hearing the band sing those crunchy chords over the chorus: “Low life/is no life” is an odd refrain to have stuck in your head, but here we are.

“We Work the Black Seam” again closely follows the studio arrangement, albeit with the synths of the original supplemented by a more prominent solo keyboard part that’s echoed by Branford’s soprano sax. But there’s also a very slight swing to Sting’s vocal and the instrumentalists’ accompaniment that brings some relief from the insistent repetition of the programmed keyboard track, and Branford’s free saxophone lines over the second verse again pull at the tonality of the verse, bringing it to unexpectedly rich places. The extra half-verse that is added in the third feels actually moving, despite being a bit of a word salad: “Our conscious lives run deep/You cling onto your mountain while we sleep/This way of life is part of me/There is no price so only let me be.”

“Driven to Tears” takes the intensity of the Police’s statement of empathy for the impoverished world around them and stretches it into a seven-minute-long workout. It’s an engaging listen, but proves the rare case where this band couldn’t elevate the source material above its existing heights. That’s not for lack of trying; there are some intense moments in the arrangement, and the crowd energy is high as they clap along with the band on the opening vamp. Again, Kenny Kirkland is the hero of the arrangement, playing mostly acoustic piano and opening holes of light in the harmonics of the vamp. Branford enters in the second chorus and takes an extended solo as the chords change from the dark tonality of the opening to a higher key and Branford repeats a blues riff, hopping up to a blue note on the minor third. The band comes back to the original tonality for the last verse and seems to come to a conclusion, but then starts to build up again and drops right back into the higher key. This is where the arrangement falls flat for me, as Branford continues soloing even though he doesn’t bring forward any new ideas. Ultimately when the band brings it back to one last chorus it comes as a little bit of a relief.

“The Dream of the Blue Turtles/Demolition Man,” on the other hand, gives us a brisk romp through the Blue Turtles instrumental theme, complete with a quick dip into three in the verse and a brief Kenny Kirkland solo. The band then drops into a driving rock beat and gives us a fierce rave-up on the Police song, with some improvised clavier soloing from Kirkland and apocalyptic drumming from Omar Hakim. Where “Driven to Tears” feels stretched thin, “Demolition Man” feels muscular and energetic, as though it could go on for hours. Maybe it’s that riff; maybe it’s Janice and Dolette singing the hell out of that chorus. Maybe it’s even having Branford play a real saxophone part on the hook instead of Sting’s enthusiastic amateur work. Whatever, it is, as they say, a banger.

When I first heard the album, “One World (Not Three)/Love is the Seventh Wave” opened the second CD; on the vinyl version it opens the second record with an a cappella version of the repeated vocal hook to the Police’s song (“It may seem a million miles away/But it gets a little closer every day”), here given a reading that puts reggae energy back into the song thanks to the steel-drum-like Synclavier work of Kenny Kirkland and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Sting leads the arena in a singalong of the chorus, brings back an a cappella rendition of the vocal hook, then returns to the chorus with some vocal improvisation atop it, only to slam right into “Love is the Seventh Wave,” with Kirkland, Darryl Jones and Omar Hakim continuing to play the same arrangement across the new song’s chord changes. Branford takes another solo, sort of; his approach to these songs appears to mostly be to repeat one idea across eight bars, then switch to another idea and do it again, as though making sure the folks in the cheap seats get the picture. There’s some decent harmonic imagination going on, but not enough of it. The band settles into a new key for a sort of New Wave blues vamp, and Sting and the vocalists alternate singing “One world is enough” with the lyrics to “Love is the Seventh Wave” in the new minor key. The arrangement winds up back in the original key in a sort of summation, but due to the drop in energy during the blues vamp it feels more like the band climbs to its feet than a culmination in energy.

“Moon Over Bourbon Street” again aligns closely to its arrangement on the record, which isn’t a bad thing, since the original was a standout on Dream of the Blue Turtles. Again, we get Sting on upright bass and Branford on soprano sax, though in this arrangement without the full orchestra Branford and Kenny have to fill in, ably, for the classical interlude; we even get what sounds like a little timpani roll from Omar Hakim. It’s a nice version of the original song but not transformative.

The transformation comes with “I Burn for You.” From the paranoiac, tense version on Brimstone and Treacle, the tune’s rebirth as a torch song is something of a surprise. Arrangement-wise, this is another one that opens with an arpeggio on both piano and guitar under Sting’s gentle melody. But it grows in intensity into the bridge as Branford layers a counter-melody over the crashing drums and questing bass line. Sting improvises vocally on the chorus as the band floats into a dreamy version of the “Brimstone” theme, given an entirely different character by Branford’s harmonization, and the song extends into a sort of reverie over a deep chord progression in the keys and bass. A swell of cheering seems out of place in the midst of this section; viewing the concert film reveals that Sting has pulled out his custom upright bass and started to play the Brimstone theme on it. The record fades out here rather than break the spell; in the concert video the band shifts gears into a long, higher energy improv over the Brimstone vamp, in one of the most satisfactory moments of the whole show, complete with some seriously Copeland-esque drum work from Hakim and a saxophone solo from Branford that betters anything that made it onto the record.

The last side of the album opens with “Another Day,” here transformed from the synth-driven New Wave energy of the b-side to a jazzy acoustic arrangement anchored by Kenny Kirkland’s piano and Omar Hakim’s percussion. Branford gets a good solo between verses, and Janice and Dolette’s harmonies carry the chorus, but otherwise this is a straightforward reading of the song. But “Children’s Crusade” is another story. Like “Moon Over Bourbon Street,” this starts as a straightforward translation of the record’s arrangement to the bandstand, with Kenny Kirkland’s piano substituting for the keyboards of the original. When we get to Branford’s sax solo following the chorus, though, we’re in deeper territory. Here we hear reams of ideas unspooling from his soprano sax, with Coltrane-esque “sheets of sound,” playing against the rhythm, and a seamless transition into the heraldic motif of the final chorus. It’s easily his best moment on the record, and one could wish that the producers had captured more moments like this from the performances.

In “Down So Long,” we have a peek of some of Sting’s affection for old American R&B, as previously heard on the Party Party soundtrack. Written by blues guitarist J.B. Lenoir and Alex Atkins, the track is here given a straightforward blues romp with a tight keyboard solo from Kirkland and a quiet coda on the last verse. (The song previously appeared in a duet with Jeff Beck on the 1985 cancer research benefit compilation Live! For Life, which I hadn’t heard before today.) The album closes with “Tea in the Sahara,” which gets a swinging shuffle from Darryl Jones’ bass, transforming the arid feeling of the Synchronicity track into something of a victory lap for the band. Again, Branford’s saxophone uplifts the final outro, playing into some atmospheric guitar work from Sting and an off-kilter piano pattern from Kenny.

You can get by without having heard Bring on the Night; the live album doesn’t introduce any material not heard elsewhere. But it serves as a transformation of the material, shaped by the tremendous abilities of this band, even if the versions on the record are sometimes paler shadows of the energy of the live improvisations captured in the movie. In some ways the playfulness and energy of the performances make this my favorite of Sting’s recordings. He wouldn’t be this unmannered and spontaneous very often throughout his career; as Trudie Styler says in an interview early in the film, it’s down to the influence of these American jazz musicians that we get to see a Sting who laughs and engages in true band dynamics in these performances.

We’re going to briefly turn from his music back to the music of the jazz musicians who sparked this musical rebirth. But first we’re going to see what happened to Wynton Marsalis’s sound after he fired his brother and Kenny Kirkland for joining Sting’s band. That’ll come next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I strongly recommend watching at least the first half of Bring on the Night (the movie). Apted has a way of getting true things to come out of the mouths of the participants in the film and the band rehearsal scenes are a lot of fun to watch. But if you don’t watch anything else, you owe it to yourself to watch this bit as Sting and the band cook up a quick cover of the “Flintstones” theme:

Wynton Marsalis, Black Codes (From the Underground)

Album of the Week, March 22, 2025

It’s a little unfair to judge any artist by one album, and we picked an atypical one to start with for Wynton Marsalis. As I said of Hot House Flowers, “there might be a pretty good quintet performance here, if we could just get the orchestra out of the way.” Black Codes (from the Underground) gives us that, and more—a sharply modern small group record consisting almost entirely of Marsalis’s compositions, pointed (at least in title) at forces that Marsalis saw as keeping black Americans down.

The band had some familiar faces in it—literally familiar, with the return of Wynton’s older brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophone, and figuratively with Jeff “Tain” Watts behind the drums, Kenny Kirkland at the piano, and Ron Carter joining for one number. For the rest of the session, 18-year-old bass prodigy Charnett Moffett anchored the bottom end of the rhythm section. Moffett, a Philadelphia-born prodigy, joined his family’s band at age 8 for a tour of the Far East and at age 16 appeared on Branford’s solo debut, 1983’s Scenes in the City.

The point of departure for the sound of the album appears to have been the harmonic palette of Miles’ second quintet. Indeed, in the lengthy, all-caps liner notes by Stanley Crouch, we learn that Wynton had been listening to a lot of Wayne Shorter compositions: “In every era you have composers who stand out and who set up directions. Ellington and Strayhorn tower over everybody. Then you have Monk. Then Wayne Shorter. Right now, it is easy to see that Wayne took the music in a fresh direction because of his organic conception of the interaction of melody, harmony, and rhythm. … . Wayne Shorter knows harmony perfectly and, just like Monk, every note and every chord, every rhythm, every accent–each of them is there for a good reason.”

High praise, indeed, given that for much of Wynton’s professional life Shorter had been anchoring the most storied jazz fusion group around and had been engaging in the sort of “pressure of commercialism” that in Crouch’s mind reduced musicians to Roland Kirk’s “volunteered slavery.” Nevertheless, the Shorter influence is present throughout the album, alongside the inimitable stamp of the approaches of each of the musicians in the band.

“Black Codes” starts us off with a driving energy in 12/8 from the rhythm section, with Kirkland splashing Monk-like harmonies under the horns. Wynton and Branford play the opening melody in a frantic harmony, teasing a little rubato before shifting to a secondary theme. When Wynton comes in for his solo it’s with a high, piercing tone, accompanied by explosive blows in the drums. Wynton swings over Kirkland’s insistent, impeccably placed chords. His improvisation takes the form of long runs that bristle with unexpected flourishes at the corners. As Tain settles down we start to hear Moffett, who consistently digs at the action, leaning in with a dominant tone up to the tonic by way of the subtonic, repeatedly urging the action forward. When Branford comes in, by contrast, Kenny gives more space in the accompaniment to underscore his soprano lines, which tend to perch above the harmonies rather than dart among them like Wynton’s work. Kenny responds to the patterns in Branford’s solos with stabs of light, and takes a solo following the saxophonist’s recapitulation of the melody. There’s a huge bag of tricks at the pianist’s command—Hancock-like runs over left hand block chords, dancing moments of Jelly Roll Morton-inspired rhythms, moments of classical sonata, Stravinskyesque harmonics—and we hear them all here in a single absorbing conception. The band reprises the melody one more time, hits that rubato… and melts, glissandoing down a half step, as though slumping in defeat against the insistently oppressive codes. But there’s a pickup from the bass and the sound of the trumpet, echoing from the far side of the room, as if leading us out to another place.

“For Wee Folks” might just be that destination. Opening with the sounds of a ballad, the band changes direction into a minor swing that calls to mind Coltrane’s “Crescent.” Wynton and Branford take us back out of time, though, out of the swing and back into the ballad, before Branford takes a solo over the swing. Here he plays it safe on the lower end of the soprano sax, unspooling melodic lines that call to mind Wayne Shorter’s sound on In A Silent Way, but crucially minus the intensity of that masterpiece. Wynton plays tenderly, using rhythmic variation to take the same melodic directions into a more intense expression, before passing to Kirkland. Here the pianist uses some of that classical expressionism, alternating long lines with block chords that alternate between the right and left hand and pivoting through a long trill into a quietly meditative statement. Underneath it, Tain and Moffett keep everything on a simmer, with occasional pops of cymbal and tom from the drummer to signal the roiling energy kept just beneath the surface.

“Delfeayo’s Dilemma,” named for a younger Marsalis brother (#4 of 6, and the third of four to go into the family business as a trombonist and composer), begins with Branford and Wynton duetting in close harmony, exchanging runs with Kirkland on the piano. There’s more than a bit in the head melody that sounds like it was borrowed from Wayne Shorter, perhaps a faster track from Speak No Evil. But where that album’s Freddie Hubbard would have unleashed a piercingly pure glissade of notes in his solo, Wynton adopts a softer tone through his Harmon mute. The glissade is there, though, along with some off-beat asides. When Branford’s solo comes, it’s right in line with his brother’s approach, albeit with a greater use of sustained notes that heighten the suspensions and keep the energy moving forward. Kirkland, Tain and Moffett continually stoke the fires beneath, and when the trio moves forward into their solo moment it’s to a dazzling display of chromatic motion. When the horns return to the head once more it feels like the recap of Miles’s “Agitation,” albeit without the dizzying virtuosity of Tony Williams’s drums.

“Phryzzinian Men,” true to its name, gives us a melody in the Phrygian mode. The band’s energy seems to flow directly from “Delfeayo’s Dilemma” but gives us a more upbeat group energy, especially in Branford’s solo, which seems to play around the edges of the changes, giving a flavor of Wayne Shorter’s “Yes or No” melody. Kenny Kirkland gets the last word, repeating the striking modal broken arpeggio from the beginning into the fade-out into the next track.

“Aural Oasis,” one of the few songs on this album in a ballad tempo, opens in the same key as “Phryzzinian Men.” But this track sees Wynton and Branford exchange phrases in a wistful minor key over the piano, declaiming from minor into a hopeful major. Branford’s solo in particular is a standout, rooted in some of the chromatic joy of Shorter but with his own voice emerging through emotional intensity. This is one of Kirkland’s quiet moments, in a way that seems deliberately reminiscent of Shorter’s “Iris”—it’s even in the same key. But the band’s attentiveness to the music, their use of space—especially in Ron Carter’s bass line—and the emotive core of both brothers’ playing, lifts this above mere pastiche into a true highlight of the album.

“Chambers of Tain” takes us back to where we began, with a frantic opening that seems to recapitulate the opening “Black Codes.” But the Kirkland-penned tune gives Wynton the floor right away, and the trumpeter shows where he was pointing at the end of the opener—into a solo that blends swing, blues, and that impeccable technique into a statement of freedom. Branford’s solo seems contrarian, starting in a different mode but then soaring out of it when the key changes into a moment of affirmation. Underneath it Kirkland repeats the same pattern over and over again, leaving it to Tain and Moffett to drive the energy through continuous improvisation on the drums and bass. When Kenny takes a solo we get both the simultaneous rhythmic and chromatic improvisation and some thrilling frontal assaults on the chords, before Tain takes the final solo to drive things home into the final recap.

Black Codes (From the Underground) showed that Wynton not only had serious chops, he had something to say, and his band was uniquely positioned to help him say it. But that band wouldn’t be with him for very long. Several of them were already crossing over to more pop-oriented pursuits, joining up with alums from Miles’ band and Weather Report to support a newly minted solo artist who was ready to trade his old artistic direction for something more in line with his jazz roots. In fact, when they made the first recording with that artist, Wynton fired them from the band. We’ll hear that first recording, finally, next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Miles Davis, You’re Under Arrest

Album of the Week, March 15, 2025

We’ve heard Decoy, Miles’ 1984 attempt to equal Herbie Hancock at jazz-funk, and we’ve heard the alternate vision of jazz presented by Wynton Marsalis. But Miles was continuing to evolve his sound, even at this point in his career. The result was You’re Under Arrest, an album featuring original music and pop covers. It drove the Marsalis camp crazy.

I know this because when I saw Stanley Crouch (the critic who wrote the liner notes for Wynton’s albums) speak at the University of Virginia in 1991, following Miles’ death, he still insisted that Miles’ material from In a Silent Way on was garbage, saving special venom for You’re Under Arrest and its pop leanings.1 He spoke with horror of the cover, which showed Miles in a leather suit and hat, holding a Tommy gun. That there was role play here—Miles playing the part of the gangster, the well-off scofflaw—appears to have gone over Crouch’s head.

And yes, in some ways You’re Under Arrest is all about role play—the opening and closing tracks are scenes with dialog (and special guests). But there’s also role play of a different kind here. Miles still had plenty of funk in him, but he also appears to have been alert to what was going on in pop music, where a new embrace of melody was fueling the rise of a New Wave of musicians. Miles and his band, which for this outing included Darryl Jones on bass, Al Foster on drums, Robert Irving on synths, Bob Berg on tenor and soprano saxophone, and both John Schofield and—for the first time since the early 1970s—John McLaughlin on guitar, shifted direction and, improbably found their way inside that pop sound.

That’s not to say that the funk was gone. “One Phone Call/Street Scenes,” featuring dialog between a police officer who’s pulled Miles over in his Ferrari and Miles insouciantly responding, “Arrest some of this!” (with both voices done by Miles), features an incessant bass, drums and synth riff over which John Scofield wails and Miles plays a tight riff in the higher end of his range. At the end, another conversation, this time between a Spanish speaker, a Polish speaker, and a French policeman (played, improbably, by Sting), who issues a translation of the Miranda warning.

The second track is done with playing around, but it’s not heavy—in fact, it’s “Human Nature.” The track, written by Steve Porcaro of Toto, had caught the ear of Michael Jackson while Porcaro was assisting with the production of Jackson’s monster album Thriller. Jackson had John Bettis, a lyricist who had collaborated with the Carpenters (“Top of the World”), the Pointer Sisters (“Slow Hand”), Barbara Mandrell (“One of a Kind Pair of Fools”), and others,2 rewrite the lyrics. It became a top 10 hit, which is presumably why Miles had heard it. But listening to him play the melody, it’s clear that he found something deep in it. His clear trumpet plays it straight, as a ballad, giving the same sort of space to the track that he once found in “My Funny Valentine.” And his technique is at a much higher level than it was on Decoy, where he seemed to still be suffering from health challenges. Here the trumpet is front and center; indeed, if there’s anything to criticize about the track, it’s that the rest of the band is basically used only to provide a pop background. There’s very little of interest in the arrangement from a jazz perspective, but it’s very pleasant as pop music.

“Intro: MD1 / Something On Your Mind / MD2” takes us back into the funk, but thankfully gives the band way more to do. Scofield gets a few fierce solos, and the band’s pulse is tight beneath both him and Miles. The trumpeter’s solo splits the difference between the pure funk of “One Phone Call” and the pop melodicism of “Human Nature.” The track ends in a swirl of synthesizers and a hint of a march rhythm.

Miles’s trumpet introduces “Ms. Morrissine,” a relentlessly funky pop track that features washes of distinctively mid-1980s synthesizer sound (there’s a certain watery quality to some of the sounds, including the drums, that couldn’t come from any other time) beneath Miles’ lyrical playing. John McLaughlin, who hadn’t played with Miles since 1972’s On the Corner, adds hints of rhythm and brief guitar lines that twine around the edges of the band, but gets a proper solo at the end. A McLaughlin overdub introduces the tag, a brief excerpt from “Katia: Prelude” that fades out the first half.

“Katia” fades in to start the second half of the album, with McLaughlin stating the first melody and taking a lead role for the first two minutes. Miles’ improvisations here are less melodic, more funky, and the track feels more alive and less programmed; even where Irving’s keyboards take over, McLaughlin torches the edges of the track and takes over again. He and Miles trade leads throughout the second half of the song. It’s a workout but a fun listen.

“Time After Time,” written by Cyndi Lauper with Rob Hyman of the melodica-heavy band The Hooters, returns to the format of “Human Nature.” To my ears the effort here is less successful. Miles’ playing is solid but mixed lower relative to the backing track, and he finds less swing in his melody. There are hints of interest in some of Scofield’s contributions, but the synths ultimately swamp this one for me. Miles would revisit the track live throughout the rest of his life with more satisfactory results; I especially like the version from the 1991 Vienne Jazz Festival, recorded a few months before his death; Miles was playing a lot less, but the arrangement was sparser and gave each musical utterance room to shine.

“You’re Under Arrest,” credited to Scofield, returns to the jazz-funk well once more for a thorny blues. After the guitarist introduces the number, Miles unleashes a blistering set of runs, trading off with Scofield as he did with McLaughlin on “Katia.” The melody is recapitulated by Irving, then Bob Berg takes a brief solo on tenor sax before Scofield rips through a set of fiery improvisations. Throughout Jones plays fluidly beneath the brisk keyboard runs, providing an elastic low-end.

“Medley: Jean-Pierre/You’re Under Arrest/Then There Were None” closes as the album opens, with a conceptual piece. A wistful ballad is slowly covered by the sounds of catastrophe: a crying child, wailing women, the sound of a massive explosion, and a tolling church bell. It’s an unexpectedly somber end, left unexplained in the liner notes.

But the likely answer is that the track marked an ending; specifically, to Miles’ thirty-year-long association with Columbia Records. While on tour in early 1985, after recording You’re Under Arrest but before its release, he signed a contract with Warner Brothers, and recorded the rest of his career on the label. He moved on to new collaborators, with bassist Marcus Miller playing the arranger role that had been Irving’s for the first half of the 1980s. Other members of the band scattered, but several of them went on to non-traditional roles on the other side of the jazz/pop fence. We’ll hear about that in a few weeks. Next week, though, we’ll give a listen to another outing from the Marsalis brothers, this one considerably more successful than Hot House Flowers.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Miles was listening to a lot of pop music in the mid-1980s, and recording arrangements of it. Not all the covers from this session made it onto the album, though. Here’s his cover of Tina Turner’s comeback single, released for the first time in 2022 on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 7: That’s What Happened:

BONUS BONUS: Miles’ way with pop songs and his insistence in updating the American Songbook with more modern material influenced many later jazz musicians. One direct influence is the adoption by other jazz musicians of the material he covered in his 1980s albums. Eva Cassidy covered “Time After Time” on the posthumous album of the same name in 2000, and pianist and composer Vijay Iyer covered “Human Nature” on two separate albums, 2010’s Solo and 2012’s trio recording Accelerando. Here’s a live version with the trio:

  1. This lecture was my first attempt to ask tough questions of a speaker with whom I disagreed. I asked Crouch, regarding his words on Miles, how he felt about Branford Marsalis’s work with Sting, given that Marsalis had previously played more “straight” jazz with his brother. I recall Crouch gave a non-answer, which I suppose was inevitable. ↩︎
  2. Among other later collaborators, Bettis would work with Madonna on “Crazy for You,” Peabo Bryson on “Can You Stop the Rain,” and New Kids on the Block on “If You Go Away.” That’s what you call range. ↩︎

Wynton Marsalis, Hot House Flowers

Album of the Week, March 8, 2025

The good thing about being the hot young artist on a major label is that the label will sometimes throw a lot of resources at your recordings. The bad news is that’s maybe not always the best idea.

Wynton Marsalis burst out of the gates as a performer, performing with Herbie Hancock, signing a contract with Columbia Records (Miles’ home) in 1982 at the age of 20 and releasing three albums—two jazz, one classical—in the first year. In 1984, the Juilliard-trained Marsalis was the first performer in history to win Grammy awards in both jazz and classical. His technique and sound were undeniably wonderful; listening to the early recordings, you hear the soul of Louis Armstrong alongside the virtuosity of a young Freddie Hubbard.

He also had strong opinions, and wasn’t shy about sharing them. And he brought additional voices to the fight along with him. The strongest voice standing alongside him was Stanley Crouch, a one-time poet, avant-garde jazz drummer, and civil rights activist (he worked for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) turned fiercely neo-traditionalist jazz critic. Crouch felt that jazz fusion and avant-garde were ultimately empty, even phony, artistically and called for a return to more traditional jazz values. Marsalis felt the same, ultimately setting out a sort of manifesto for jazz. To be considered jazz in his eyes, the music had to have the following: the blues, the standards, swing, tonality, harmony, craftsmanship, and “a mastery of the tradition” going back to New Orleans times. The definition left out much jazz between 1960 and 1970 and everything from the fusion era; the albums I’ve reviewed from CTI and much of Coltrane’s work would be out of scope, as (notably) would all of Miles’ work starting with Bitches Brew. Wynton may have idolized Miles, but the reverse was not true; on meeting Wynton, Miles is said to have remarked “So here’s the police…”

With that as a background, Wynton’s third album feels deliberate, a sort of provocative retrenchment into standards, strings, and beautiful melodic playing, the polar opposite of Decoy. It could very well also have been Wynton deciding to record a standards album and the studio adding strings for commercial reasons; we’ll never know. At any rate, in addition to the orchestra there’s a proper group behind Wynton on the recording, and what a group! In addition to his brother Branford on tenor and soprano saxophones, the group featured Kenny Kirkland, who had played with Miroslav Vitouš before becoming Wynton’s pianist; Jeff “Tain” Watts, an often ferociously muscular (but here restrained) drummer from Pittsburgh who had gotten his professional start on Wynton’s first album; and the redoubtable Ron Carter on bass.

But all of that aside: how does it sound? Overall it’s beautiful, but careful. Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust” opens with strings backing Wynton’s note-perfect solo. Ron Carter’s bass begins the verse with a simple walking figure, but accelerates into something a little more adventuresome; he’s the only one of the quartet (Branford sits this one out) to come out of the background. Mostly we’re left to a reverie.

“Lazy Afternoon,” written by Jerome Moross and John La Touche for the 1954 musical The Golden Apple, is more band-forward. Kenny Kirkland takes a solo opening, setting up Wynton’s entrance. The trumpeter chooses a Harmon mute, the same that Miles used for much of his classic recordings, and the solo sounds deliberately evocative of Miles. The mood is abruptly changed by the swelling of the strings, who signal a change to a different space. Wynton plays a phrase or two on the unmuted trumpet, setting up Branford for a solo on the tenor which is considerably less pyrotechnic but more evocative than the work he did on Decoy. Ron Carter underscores the second verse with gravely chosen notes accented with slides and vibrato, descending to the lowest tonic as the strings reenter with a chromatic climax. The coda has Wynton playing pointillistic passages over a single harmonic from a plucked bass string. It’s among the more successful tunes on the session overall.

J. Fred Coots and Sam Lewis’s “For All We Know” gives us something roughly in between “Stardust” and “Lazy Afternoon.” There’s almost a duet between Wynton and Ron Carter being played out against the background of the orchestra. The string arrangement feels deliberate throughout, as though walking on eggshells in the adagio tempo, until suddenly Wynton and Carter break into a swing rhythm two-thirds of the way through, giving the tune sudden life. The strings try to get the last word, swooning into a major-key finish, but a portamento plucked note from Carter and a modal riff from Wynton close things out.

Leigh Harline and Ned Washington’s “When You Wish Upon a Star” is a welcome surprise: an uptempo introduction in the bass and drums, Tain finally given a little room which he uses to underpin the melody with massive snare hits and cymbal accents, and Carter providing a pedal point on the dominant and its octave. We’re not out of the lugubrious yet though, as the orchestra drags things down to a rubato with each entrance. On the third one, Wynton uses it as a way to switch to a hard-swung tempo that the strings punctuate rather than swamp. Branford takes a tenor solo that points up the rhythm, then swings into the strings and a sort of trading eights between the horns and Kenny Kirkland. If this kept on the same sort of boil as the opening it would be exhilarating, but the temperature cools down past a simmer as the musicians bring the work to a close. I’d love to hear a small-group reworking of this arrangement minus the strings and the rubato; the opening bars show just how much this particular group could cook when given the chance.

“Django” gets the same lento opening tempo as in the classic Modern Jazz Quartet version, but with just strings backing up Wynton’s introduction we don’t get the rhythmic imperative that drives the John Lewis classic until Carter, Kirkland and Tain swing into the verse. The band points up a tango-like rhythm under the solo, driving it forward to a climax and then a final orchestral swoon. Wynton gets the last word, as always, playing a tart tag.

Duke Ellington’s “Melancholia,” first recorded in a trio on his 1953 recording The Duke Plays Ellington, gets a muted introduction from Wynton leading into a rubato string section. There’s not much special going on here aside from some nice playing from Wynton throughout. “Hot House Flowers,” the sole original here, seems doomed to the same fate. There’s an orchestral swoon that’s interrupted by a series of puckish outbursts from the trumpet and drums, but we seem firmly stuck in low gear until about a minute and a half in when things get interesting. Carter and Kirkland propose a circling rhythmic figure that drives us forward to a bracing flute solo from Kent Jordan. Carter then takes a solo of his own, playing against the rhythm with a series of sallies, that circles to a conclusion with a final sting from the orchestra. As a composition from a 23 year old it’s highly promising start, and one wishes for more of it on this album.

“I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You)” starts with an orchestral jog into a swinging solo from Marsalis. Here the orchestra functions less as a blanket and more as a punctuation, with both Kirkland and Tain underscoring the melody. Wynton concludes his solo with a high stretto, leading into a solo for Kirkland. Kenny’s style is instantly recognizable, with block chords and runs in the right hand that give a percussive emphasis to the chord progressions while also making them more interesting with swerves into minor, blues, and modal moments. Branford takes a straightforward solo that swings its way around the melody before taking a run of off-beat hits. The band plays an intricate 12/8 interlude and then swings to the finish, with Wynton playing a 16-bar passage in triplets without a breath, and finishing with a run of deliberately breathless leading notes leaning into the submediant (6th) over Carter’s final pizzicato.

Hot House Flowers is a frustrating album. One can’t help but think there’s a pretty good quintet performance here, if we could just get the orchestra out of the way. But it’s not a bad way to hear why Wynton was both praised—that trumpet tone is extraordinary—and derided for what is ultimately an extremely buttoned-up sound. He would record far better records, and we’ll hear them soon. We’re going to give Miles one more word first, though.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Miles Davis, Decoy

Album of the Week, March 1, 2025

It was bound to happen. After two months of pop music we’re right back with Miles. That’s no accident; as Sting left the Police behind for a solo career, he sought out jazz musicians, and found several of them in Miles’ band.

The last Miles album, in his recording chronology, that we wrote about was Champions, recorded in 1971. Miles’ fusion years were musically exploratory and often fruitful—a listen to “He Loved Him Madly,” Miles’ tribute to Duke Ellington from the compilation Get Up With It, puts the lie to any assertion that Miles was slacking as a composer during this time. But by the same token, his worsening physical health was leaving him in constant pain, and his various addictions were taking a toll on his emotional state. Following appearances at the 1975 Newport Jazz Festival and the Schaefer Music Festival in New York, he dropped out of music.

He spent the next few years wallowing in sex and drugs, but also in finally getting a long postponed and much needed hip replacement. After a failed attempt to form a band with guitarist Larry Coryell, keyboardists Masabumi Kikuchi and George Pavilis, bassist T.M. Stevens and drummer Al Foster, he withdrew again. Finally getting back into the studio in 1980 and 1981, he released his first new album in six years, The Man with the Horn. Touring with a new group consisting of Foster, saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation), bassist Marcus Miller, and guitarist John Scofield, he recorded a few albums but suffered a relapse with alcohol that led to his having a stroke. His then-wife Cicely Tyson helped him recover and also helped him finally give up drugs and alcohol.

He also heard what his erstwhile collaborator Herbie Hancock had been doing in the studio. Realizing that Herbie had achieved mass success and a new audience by combining jazz and hip-hop on “Rockit,” Miles set out to do the same thing on his new album Decoy, adding more synthesizers and more prominent bass, this time played by Darryl Jones, who went by the nickname “Munch.” The band was also joined by saxophonist Branford Marsalis, Wynton’s older brother; the brothers had played together in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Branford was playing in Wynton’s quintet; he recorded his debut record Scenes in the City the same year that he joined Miles in the studio.

That said, it’s a synth bassline that greets us first on “Decoy,” played by Robert Irving III, who wrote this track. There’s not much tune here, but there’s a lot of funk. When Jones’ bass comes in, it anchors and propels the track along with Foster’s insistent drumming. Miles’ trumpet is in fine form, but he spends the track interjecting two bar riffs. About halfway through, Branford Marsalis takes a solo turn on soprano saxophone. Breaking free of the robotic rhythm, he seems to fly above the dense robot-funk texture. Scofield is just another part of that texture on this track until his solo, where he raises the interest as well, but ultimately the constrained modal scale doesn’t provide enough of a melody to make the whole thing work.

Miles seems determined to keep us in robot-funk land, with the appropriately named “Robot 415,” this one a scrap of a tune that nevertheless gets him a co-writing credit along with Irving. Here he gives us another not-quite melody over the difficult meter, one that comes and goes in less than a minute.

“Code M.D.,” while still on the robotic side, has a little more of a blues melody across the two-chord vamp. It helps that Scofield is let loose much earlier on the track; his first solo enlivens the song, lifting it from something that feels like mostly backing track to a blues inflected raga. When he steps back and it’s just the horns in the pocket on the track, it feels like a holding pattern. Branford’s solo doesn’t soar quite as much here; he’s only given about sixteen bars. But we finally hear Miles take a solo, and he essays up into the upper end of the horn range, tailing off into a wistful melody at the end, and playing a modal scale against the funk. He sounds properly enlivened, in fact, right up until the track’s fade-out.

“Freaky Deaky” is credited solely to Miles, and he’s at the synthesizer over Foster and Jones, as well as playing a trumpet run through an effects pedal joining to add a little textural interest. It’s a noodle, nothing more, a sort of aimless jam, but the melody played by the trumpet is at least ear-grabbing while it’s there. I don’t know why they put it on the record, to be honest, especially after hearing the recording session version on the Miles Davis Bootleg releases, a burning blues jam in two parts.

“What It Is” shifts us into a very different gear to open Side 2, which is entirely co-written by Miles and Scofield. Recorded live at the Montréal Jazz Festival in 1983, the energy level is off the chart, and if Irving seems to be leaning against the keyboard on his cluster chords, at least there’s plenty going on in that acrobatic electric bass part, providing a proper hook. It’s saxophonist Bill Evans (no relation) here rather than Marsalis, and he plays with more abandon and less piercing fire. Miles makes the interesting choice to overdub an additional trumpet line over his solo, setting up an almost-conversation. It thickens the texture and somehow strips back a little of the urgency from his actual solo. It stops abruptly.

“That’s Right” gives us the slow-jam version of the music that Irving has been providing throughout the whole album, with a slow but funky pulse in the bass and a drum hit that mostly stays out of the way. It’s all the better to let Miles rip out a melodic line that pushes against the weird tension between the bass line, which mostly hugs the dominant (the fifth) of the scale so that the rest of the players can shift between major and minor at will, and the synths, which hover on every other degree of the scale. Scofield’s guitar is a force of nature here, beginning the solo with a bluesy skronch but quickly shifting to a more virtuosic expression and then back again. When Branford comes in, he hews more toward the virtuosic, with an occasional blues lick near the top of the range to establish continuity with Scofield’s concept. What’s interesting is that, even in this context, Branford swings, playing against the rhythm in a way that the other players don’t. It’s an interesting collision of swing and funk, which insists on a strong rhythmic pulse on the One. When Miles comes in, it’s an echo of the soaring melodies that he would have played ten years prior on tunes like “Honky Tonk.” But there he was playing against a firm rhythmic footing and a halo of odd electric textures that translated to something that was 100% blues; here the timbre of the keyboards seems to sap some of that rhythmic energy at the end.

That’s okay, because “That’s What Happened” has energy in spades. Another live track from Montréal, this seems to pick up where “What It Is” left off, acting like a coda to the earlier track, and very much in the same spirit. It closes out the album with a funky flourish.

Miles may have set out to record “Rockit,” but that definitely didn’t happen; between Scofield’s virtuosity, Branford’s imagination, and the odd harmonic statements of Irving, this band was still firmly in a jazz space. But this material did keep him exploring the boundary between jazz and more popular forms of music—something he leaned into even further on his next release. Before we go there, we’re going to hear how other voices—and coincidentally another Marsalis—tried to pull the form back to something closer (perhaps) to its roots.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

Duke Pearson, Merry Ole Soul

Album of the Week, December 28, 2024

We’ve come across Duke Pearson twice before in this series, both times in Blue Note recordings by the great McCoy Tyner, where he was the producer on Tyner’s Extensions and Expansions. Pearson had been with Blue Note artists since the early 1960s, when he joined the Donald Byrd-Pepper Adams Quintet. In 1963, Pearson made his mark in two important ways: first, he was the arranger for four of the five tracks on Byrd’s A New Perspective, including “Cristo Redentor,” which became a hit.

Second, he became the chief A&R (artists & repertoire) man for Blue Note following the death of Ike Quebec. In this role he is credited with shaping the sound of Blue Note during the bulk of the 1960s. He also recorded seven albums between 1964 and 1969 on Blue Note, beginning with the auspiciously titled Wahoo! and ending with Merry Ole Soul, which as is traditional for Christmas albums finished recording in August of 1969 (and as is traditional for 1960s Blue Note albums was recorded at Van Gelder Studios). He was joined for the sessions by Bob Cranshaw (from Sonny Rollins’ band) on bass, Mickey Roker on drums, and Airto Moreira on percussion.

We’ve heard the opening track “Sleigh Ride” in this blog before; it kicked off my 2022 Christmas jazz hour on my Exfiltration Radio series, “Riding in a Wonderland.” At the time, I wrote, “This uber-cool take on “Sleigh Ride” is viewed through the prism of spiritual jazz, with a drone in the bass and drums that’ll knock your socks off.” Well, that’s true, but there are some really spectacular fine details in the arrangement as well that are worth expanding upon. The open chords in Pearson’s introduction, the pervasive swing, and the genius switch from piano to celeste for that opening melody: all perfection. And listen to what the bass is doing in that opening! That syncopated drone on that fifth of the scale, in octaves, remains the steady pulse throughout the entire intro, first verse, first solo, all the way into the bridge where suddenly the arrangement snaps into a more conventional bebop pattern, but only for sixteen bars! And the stride-influenced piano rumble that Pearson adopts on the second bar (“there’s a birthday party at the home of Farmer Gray…”)!

Pearson takes “The Little Drummer Boy” at breakneck speed, but still gives Mickey Roker plenty of time to make his mark in a way that the prior song didn’t really permit. Here the drummer gives a massive marching-band style introduction across the entire drum kit as the bass and the lower chords of the piano keep the drone going. When the full melody arrives, Cranshaw gets to cut loose a little, boogeying up and down the octave but still returning to that ground—and at the end of each verse, Roker returns to cut loose, here with a splashy cymbal, there with a roll.

Pearson plays Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” more straight, though there’s still more than a touch of the blues about his playing. Only the entrance of the celeste at the end signals Pearson’s imaginative rearrangements. The next track, “Jingle Bells,” is more freely adapted, with Airto’s Latin percussion (doubled by Roker on the wood blocks) signaling the brisk samba tempo. Cranshaw gets to join in the reindeer games with a wandering bass line throughout.

The duo of Roker and Airto get “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” going at something like a breakneck speed, as though a samba party were happening at 78 RPM instead of 45. Pearson follows suit, gleefully improvising atop Fred Coots and Haven Gillespie’s Christmas classic, and Cranshaw follows, briskly ripping through two choruses and a bridge. Santa has never samba’d so hard.

Pearson turns serious on one of the few non-secular songs on the album. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” is an African-American spiritual that was first collected in Religious Folk Songs of the Negro as Sung on the Plantations, compiled by Thomas P. Fenner, the first director of music at what is now Hampton University. Pearson brings church to the performance, with inflections of gospel and blues in its depths.

We’re back with the martial marching beat of “Little Drummer Boy” for “Wassail Song,” otherwise known as “Here We Come A-Wassailing.” Pearson and Cranshaw have an extended improvisation on the theme in the lower octaves before the main tune returns and the procession moves away. But “Silent Night” is back in the sound world of “Go Tell It on the Mountain” and gospel, as though Franz Gruber were a southern pastor.

“O Little Town of Bethlehem” is played as straight as it gets: a piano solo, with no blues around the edges. This might have been Pearson playing in church. It brings a quiet note to end a set that has gone in every other possible direction already.

Pearson’s collection was the only Christmas album released on Blue Note Records during the 1960s, and is lesser known compared to some of the great jazz Christmas classics like Ella Wishes You a Swinging Christmas. But it’s a great collection that spans a variety of styles and is well worth adding to your Christmas playlist.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: Here’s the playlist of Christmas jazz from 2022 that opens with Pearson’s rendition of “Sleigh Ride.” It might be time to make another one of these…