Tag: kennykirkland

Exfiltration Radio: Too Short

Wayne Shorter, photo by Francis Wolff

When Wayne Shorter died on March 2, 2023, it was like the closing of a book that you knew was going to run out of pages soon, but hoped it never would. Shorter had retired from performance in 2018 due to worsening health, but was still composing and releasing new music up until last summer.

Having already put together an Exfiltration Radio episode of Shorter’s music, I debated doing another—I could easily do twelve or thirteen episodes of his works. But I decided to dedicate this episode to his music by highlighting performances of his compositions by others. Most of the recordings here come from the last few years, but there are two from the 1990s and one contemporaneous with Wayne’s most productive period as a composer in the 1960s—albeit with a very different approach.

I considered doing the entire album with covers and performances of “Footprints,” the Shorter classic that was dramatically reimagined by the Miles Davis Quintet on Miles Smiles. In the end I settled for two very different approaches to the standard, starting with Herbie Mann’s 1968 version. Recorded with an unusually star-studded group—Sonny Sharrock on guitar, Roy Ayers on vibes, and a very young Miroslav Vitouš on bass, with drummer Bruno Carr—the recording will surprise those who primarily associate Mann with his notorious early 1970s record Push Push.

David Ashkenazy’s “Chief Crazy Horse” is a 2008 performance compiled on a 2021 tribute album on Posi-Tone Records. Drummer Ashkenazy leads a quartet with Matt Otto on tenor sax, Steve Cotter on guitar, and Roger Shew on drums, playing a version of the closing song from Adam’s Apple that manages to be at once familiar and new, thanks largely to Cotter’s sterling guitar work.

One of my favorite large-band renditions of Shorter’s work, David Weiss’s “Fall” comes from a live tribute to Wayne recorded in 2013 with a group that includes Ravi Coltrane on tenor, Joe Fiedler on trombone, and the great Geri Allen on piano. While the arrangement undoes the innovation of the original Miles recording, in which the horns repeat the theme while the rhythm section improvises underneath, the performance is not to be missed, especially for Weiss’s trumpet solo.

More “Footprints” follow, this time in a duo recording by Dave Liebman and Willy Rodriguez from the 2020 compilation album 2020. The album is credited to Palladium, an effort by Shorter’s social media rep Jesse Markowitz to get his music better known. The performances here run from more traditional to more avant-garde and this one is firmly on the latter side of the spectrum, with Liebman’s soprano sax and Rodriguez’s drums moving things along briskly.

Walter Smith III is having something of a moment, coming off several collaboration albums with Matthew Stevens as In Common, guesting with Connie Han on several of her excellent recent albums, and about to release his Blue Note debut. The performance of “Adam’s Apple” here from his 2018 release Twio foreshadows much of that greatness, including his impeccable taste in sidemen. I’m not sure how the studio didn’t explode with the fury of Eric Harland’s drums on this number, and Harish Ragavan’s bass is nothing to sneeze at either.

The vocalist Clare Foster recorded an entire album of vocal adaptations of Shorter’s work at the beginning of her career, in 1993. While some of the lyrics are flights of fancy only tangentially connected to the work, her “Iris” precisely captures the mood of Shorter’s ballad. This track is followed by the other 1990s performance on the mix, the great Kenny Kirkland’s take on Shorter’s “Ana Maria” from his sole outing as a leader before his untimely death in 1998.

We close with another performance from Shorter Moments, a 2009 performance of Wayne’s phenomenal “Infant Eyes” by Wayne Escoffery on tenor sax with Avi Rothbard on guitar. While Shorter did not only write ballads, there was arguably no one in the second half of the 20th century who was better at writing ballads, and this recording makes a persuasive case in favor of that argument.

Full track listing and link for playback are below. Enjoy!

  1. Footprints – Herbie Mann (Windows Opened)
  2. Chief Crazy Horse – David Ashkenazy (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)
  3. Fall (Live) – David Weiss (Endangered Species: The Music of Wayne Shorter (Live at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola))
  4. Footprints – David Liebman & Willy Rodriguez (2020)
  5. Adam’s Apple (feat. Eric Harland & Harish Ragavan) – Walter Smith III (Twio)
  6. Iris – Clare Foster (Clare Foster sings Wayne Shorter)
  7. Ana Maria – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
  8. Infant Eyes – Wayne Escoffery (Shorter Moments – Exploring the World of Wayne)

Do not attempt to adjust your radio; there is nothing wrong.

Old mix: the blue groove of twilight

One of the things that happened when I got to the University of Virginia was that I began to branch out in my musical tastes—or, maybe more precisely, I began to explore each of the branches I had already grown to like. In this case, it was jazz, and while I had made mix tapes containing jazz music before, this was the first to be (almost) entirely devoted to jazz.

I found my way into jazz from Sting, whose band in the mid to late 1980s was made up of jazz musicians; from summer concerts at Fort Monroe; and from my mom’s record collection. She had some Ahmad Jamal and Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis—nothing too outré but enough to convince me that I wanted to listen to more. I also knew, from U2, that I ought to listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. I didn’t really know anyone else who listened to jazz, so I had to find my own way in.

Because I liked to read liner notes, I found myself drawn to the Original Jazz Classics reissue series of classic jazz albums on CD when I was at UVA. There was so much context on the back of those albums! You could see who the players were, read reviews, and more without even opening the album. That’s how I started to dig back into some of the great ’50s and ’60s recordings. I also picked up the threads of Sting’s band, listening to Branford, then Wynton, then Wynton’s band and Kenny Kirkland.

Because I have never been able to focus exclusively, a couple of jazz-adjacent tracks snuck onto this mix. Most notably, “Escalay” from the Kronos Quartet Pieces of Africa appears. While this is nominally a classical or world music track, it has enough in common with the works around it—a strong rhythmic foundation, a modal scale, an improvised solo—to fit in nicely. The other, Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” was added to provide an anchor point for some of the other explorations of blues through the jazz idiom on Side 2. And I couldn’t figure out how to end the mix, so I dropped some Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo in; it fits better than you’d think because of the vocal improvisation and the general mood.

For the actual jazz tracks, there’s a pretty good range of stuff. Of course we touch on Kind of Blue, but there’s also Coltrane’s Sound and Ellington Indigos. I really like the tracks from Marcus Roberts, the pianist and composer who was the nucleus of Wynton Marsalis’s late-1980s/early-1990s band. And there are a couple of nice sets on the second side, with the early jazz workouts of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker and Sonny Rollins contrasting with the more abstract work of Branford Marsalis, Ornette Coleman and Kenny Kirkland.

  1. Brother Veal – Wynton Marsalis Septet (Blue Interlude)
  2. Nebuchadnezzar – Marcus Roberts (Deep In The Shed)
  3. Central Park West – John Coltrane (Coltrane’s Sound)
  4. Escalay – Kronos Quartet (Pieces of Africa)
  5. All Blues – Miles Davis (Kind of Blue)
  6. All the Things You Are – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
  7. As Serenity Approaches – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  8. The Jitterbug Waltz – Marcus Roberts (As Serenity Approaches)
  9. Love In Vain Blues (Alternate Take) – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
  10. Perdido Street Blues – Louis Armstrong (Louis Armstrong Of New Orleans)
  11. My Melancholy Baby [Alternate Take] – Dizzy Gillespie & Charlie Parker (Bird And Diz (+3))
  12. Paradox – Sonny Rollins (Worktime)
  13. Willow Weep For Me – Duke Ellington (Ellington Indigos)
  14. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born – Branford Marsalis Trio (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born)
  15. Simpatico – Misterioso – Howard Shore/Ornette Coleman (Naked Lunch)
  16. Chance – Kenny Kirkland (Kenny Kirkland)
  17. Big Trouble In the Easy (Pedro Pops Up) – Wynton Marsalis (Tune In Tomorrow… The Original Soundtrack)
  18. Crepuscule With Nellie (Take 6) – Thelonious Monk (Monk’s Music)
  19. Amazing Grace – Ladysmith Black Mambazo with Paul Simon (Journey Of Dreams)

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, you can listen to (most of) the mix here: