Tag: johnathanblake

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. ↩︎

Kurt Elling, Secrets are the Best Stories

Album of the Week, July 20, 2024

Kurt Elling was stretching out. The jazz singer had started his career with a bang, signing with Blue Note in the early 1990s and recording a string of Grammy nominated albums (winning for 2009’s Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman) that were informed by a unique combination of dramatic sense, beat poetry, and vocalese — taking compositions without words and scatting or even writing new lyrics for them. This formula worked across six albums for Blue Note and five for Concord Records from 1995 to 2015.

But by the end of that period the singer was starting to show signs of restlessness. He parted ways with pianist and arranger Laurence Hobgood, who had been with him from the first Blue Note album. He collaborated with saxophonist Branford Marsalis and his quartet, recording the album The Upward Spiral, and with pianist Brad Mehldau, appearing on his album Finding Gabriel. And he changed labels again, to UK independent Edition Records. Secrets are the Best Stories, recorded with pianist Danilo Pérez (known for his long collaboration with Wayne Shorter), alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, bassist Clark Sommers, drummer Johnathan Blake, guitarist Chico Pinheiro, and percussionists Rogerio Boccato and Román Diaz.

Secrets are the Best Stories opens with the first three songs written over existing jazz tunes by Jaco Pastorius and Wayne Shorter. “The Fanfold Hawk” is dedicated to poet Franz Wright, and Elling adapts parts of Wright’s poem “The Hawk” for the lyric, imaging abandoning the “crazed, incessant sounds” that drive us toward, as the poet writes, “what makes me sick, and not/what makes me glad.” The song is performed with minimal accompaniment by Sommers, with Elling navigating the thorny vocal line above Sommers’ countermelody. The poem transitions seamlessly into “A Certain Continuum,” also based on a Pastorius melody, his “Continuum” from his first album. Elling’s lyrics capture the mystery of the ever changing world as well as the mysteries of life. The fuller band arrangement here gives us the first of Danilo Pérez’s improvisational moments in a brilliant solo.

“Stays” is a full-on story, set to Wayne Shorter’s “Go” from his seminal 1960s album Schizophrenia. Elling sets the story of a mysterious upstairs neighbor with a secret past to Shorter’s twisting saxophone line, but Pérez’s arrangement strips back the chordal complexity of Shorter’s original sextet to the bare minimum of the piano trio. “Go,” as I wrote in 2022, is a subtle melody that “sneaks under the blankets of your mind”; here the melody is put to good service in delivering the story of a man haunted by ghosts.

“Gratitude (for Robert Bly)” adapts and continues the story in the poet’s “Visiting Sand Island,” shaping a tale of a man who thinks himself unlucky despite his poetic gifts. Pérez and Sommers exchange salsa patterns above a gentle 6/8 sussuration from the drums and percussionists. This leads into “Stage I,” composed by Django Bates with lyrics by Sidsel Endresen from the latter’s 1994 ECM album Exiles. The song creates a sense of disassociation and exploration of self around a series of similes: “Like being in a story/like starring in a play/acting out some destiny/far, far away from anywhere… Like watching people watching you/Like hanging out in No Town/Like you knew the lingo/ Like flying kites from a basement window.” It’s deeply moving in a tentative, delicate sort of way.

This leads into “Beloved (For Toni Morrison).” Elling tells a story of the inhumanity of the chattel slavery system in the pre-Civil War American South. Drawing on an 1857 poem by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, “The Slave Mother: A Tale of the Ohio,” he illustrates the dilemma of slavery with the story of a mother who fails to protect all her children as they try to escape their captors. While marginally more hopeful than his source material (in the original poem, the mother kills her own children rather than let them be returned to slavery), it’s still a dark tale with no happy endings, albeit beautifully sung. The concluding movements, “Stages II, III,” of the Bates and Endresen poem frame the tale with a ghostly story of a narrator who has disappeared from her own life.

“Song of the Rio Grande (for Oscar and Valeria Martinez-Ramirez)” is a companion to “Beloved,” telling the story of the 2019 drowning death of Oscar Ramirez and his daughter Valeria as they sought to cross the Rio Grande after despairing of legally immigrating to the United States. It’s a mournful song, but coldly precise after the churning emotion of “Beloved.” He follows this with Silvio Rodriguez’s “Rabo de Nube”; sung in the original Spanish, he wishes for a whirlwind to sweep everything away, to remove the sadness and provide revenge.

“Esperanto” switches gears back to the power of hope. Singing over a Vince Mendoza melody, Elling calls out the power of letting one’s own actions and existence be sufficient to protect against the horrors of the world: “It’s a hope / a sign / a measure of quiet rapture / of love and what might come after
It’s letting go / and letting no answer be an answer.” The album closes with Pérez’s quiet “Epilogo,” which ends on a unresolved suspension as if to say: who can tell how things will end?

Secrets are the Best Stories is that rare jazz vocal album, an easy surface listen that reveals deeper layers the more you listen. Little wonder it won a Grammy for best jazz vocal album in 2021; Elling’s deep heart and challenging social vision, along with his mind-boggling ability to invest impossible melodies with ease and grace, created something deeply powerful here. He would change gears again with his next album, a collaboration that took him in a very different direction; we’ll hear that next time.

You can listen to this week’s album here: