v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Loopholes

From NYRB, Jake Berstein reviews several books on the Wealth Defense Industry that is controlling our futures:

Chuck Collins is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., who comes to this subject through personal experience. In The Wealth Hoarders, he argues that genuine change requires clamping down on what he calls the “Wealth Defense Industry,” its clients, and its self-serving ideology. Collins was an heir to the Oscar Mayer lunchmeat fortune. In the 1980s, while in his early twenties, he attended a weekend conference for millionaires held by a local family office and foundation. When he admitted that he was uncomfortable with the ethics of inherited wealth, attendees expressed alarm. Donate every penny of the interest, if it makes you feel better, but don’t touch the principal, they counseled. Instead, Collins decided that the benefits of his upbringing, skin color, proper nutrition, health care, and good education were privilege enough. Soon after the conference, he donated his entire inheritance to four progressive foundations.

The power of dynastic wealth has only concentrated since then, Collins writes. In 2019 there were more than 20,000 individuals in the US worth at least $100 million. He chronicles how the Wealth Defense Industry works to make taxes low and complex, collectively through campaign contributions and lobbying, and individually through trusts, foundations, and tax havens. The ultrawealthy have successfully bent the political system to their will. Not surprisingly, between 1980 and 2018 the tax burden on America’s billionaires decreased by 79 percent, despite the fact that most Americans believe the wealthy should pay higher taxes.

The issue will only grow in importance. In the coming decade, households with wealth over $5 million will transfer an estimated $15.4 trillion to the next generation. By 2050, this intergenerational transfer of wealth is expected to be as high as $68 trillion. The transfer will occur as humanity faces its greatest collective action challenge—a pandemic, global warming, a chasm of inequality.

It’s not only an American problem. A global elite has formed, unbound by the nation-state and aided by the secrecy of tax havens. Their assets are transnational, mobile, and inaccessible to governments that wish to tax and regulate them. The workforce that serves this elite has itself prospered and grown worldwide. Estimates of the number of family offices that manage concentrated wealth range from 7,000 to 10,000, with over half founded in the last fifteen years. Keeping money out of the hands of the government is big business. While the bulk of the activity consists of legal tax avoidance, criminals employ the same methods.

The system protecting the ultrarich poisons America by increasing inequality. When 640 US billionaires possess more than $3.5 trillion combined—equivalent to the total wealth of all 50 million US Latino residents—economic opportunity and social mobility become constricted. From South Dakota to Washington, D.C., the Wealth Defense Industry and its clientele write the rules in their own interest rather than that of the public, with the Trump tax cut only the most recent example.

At its most virulent, the Wealth Defense Industry adheres to a libertarian ideology that taxation is theft and the common good does not exist. It is they, the wealth creators, who are the oppressed of society. This ideology is not new to America. In 1933, during the Great Depression, Congress called J.P. Morgan Jr. to testify. Morgan, no stranger to underhanded means, had paid no income tax in the previous two years. The master financier argued that it was up to the government to fix the loopholes, and until they did, he would employ them. Nearly eighty-five years later, Gary Cohn, President Trump’s chief economic adviser, told Senate Democrats that “only morons pay the estate tax,” presumably so the senators wouldn’t fret over raising the eligibility for who pays it. Cohn later clarified that the morons in question were “rich people with really bad tax planning.”

Barefoot Records

From Denmark. Pretty good music. Listen to it.

Dumb and Dumber in Florida

From  Paul Krugman in the NYT today:

Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.

Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of C.R.T. are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.

I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”

Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed six million Jews.

What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naïve.

For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!

Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the G.O.P. base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?

Sofie Birch Live

Best Music of 2021-Linda Frederiksson

Pensive, subtle, strong, cohesive and hummable. . . as first time listener I was captivated by song-like structure to what in the end is a jazz rendition of music that could go in many more less adventurous directions but the path taken is the most adventurous one for us, the listener.

From Jazz Journal:

Composed over the course of several years and crystallised during lockdown, Juniper often resembles an audio-visual journey through a series of interconnected rooms. Melodies are instantly hummable, and Fredriksson’s expressive bass clarinet and alto and baritone saxes are always centre stage. Rather refreshingly there is little attempt to dazzle with untamed virtuosity, and by combining texturally layered field recordings, analogue keyboards, guitar and voice with remotely recorded contributions from a cast of familiar guests, Fredriksson manages to imbue each piece with its own distinct atmosphere.

Neon Light captures that familiar feeling when skies darken and a storm washes over the city. Downcast alto traces a long and graceful melodic arc before the track dissipates in a haze of multiphonics, and headphone listeners will hear the sound of falling rain recorded outside the saxophonist’s Helsinki studio. The title track’s ritualistic beats and floating theme momentarily recall the late Jon Hassell, before a burst of raucous baritone quickly returns the music back to earth.

Nana-Tepalle, dedicated to Fredriksson’s departed grandmother, moves through the full gamut of emotion, and Matti Bye’s Satie-esque piano is a near perfect coda. The rustic airs of Pinetree Song, introspective and longing, feature Fredriksson’s battered old acoustic guitar, while the intro to the shape-shifting Transit wallows in sheer melodic bliss. The elegiac Lempilauluni (“My Loved Song”) is carried by Fredriksson’s (wordless) voice, and the closing Clea seems to miraculously condense the scale and grandeur of Jarrett’s Arbour Zena into a mere six minutes.

From Uncut:

Saxophonist Linda Fredriksson is a product of Helsinki’s thriving contemporary jazz scene, epitomised by the label We Jazz. Their playful trio Mopo won the Finnish equivalent of a Grammy for 2014 album Beibe, and they’re also a member of the more avant-leaning Superposition. Two members of the latter play on Juniper, but this is very much a solo project in terms of vision and execution. While Fredriksson references sax greats Eric Dolphy and Pharoah Sanders, their approach here was equally influenced by Neil Young, Feist, and particularly Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, the 2015 album dedicated to his mother and stepfather. Touchstones don’t come more personal than that.

Fredriksson says they often write songs at home on their battered acoustic guitar before transposing them to the jazz idiom. But in this case, co-producer Minna Koivisto persuaded them that the demos were the essence of the whole project, and that they should build the recordings carefully around these scratch home recordings rather than simply overwriting them. Some tracks feature up to five additional musicians – Koivisto on synth, Tuomo Prättälä on keyboards, Olavi Louhivuori on drums, Mikael Saastamoinen on bass and Matti Bye on piano – but you can still sometimes hear the buzzing strings of Fredriksson’s old acoustic, the dry ambience of a living room and the glitching of the iPhone mic that recorded it. Other songs are enhanced by field recordings of seagulls or the sounds of wind on rocks, captured near Fredriksson’s family summer-house in Taalintehdas, on the Archipelago Sea. It makes for an album rich in small details, instantly welcoming and endearingly vulnerable, proud to wear its heart right on its sleeve.

From Clash:

Look at the artwork for ‘Juniper’. What do you see? In front of a lilac background there are some bushes, possibly juniper, painted in orange. In front for those are some purple, or dark blue depending on whether I’m looking on my phone or computer, petals that are falling. The mood it creates is one of serenity, but also of movement. If you have ever watched petals fall to the ground, you know that it doesn’t take long, but their descent isn’t a straight line either. They can be buffeted by the breeze and end up somewhere unexpected. This is exactly what Linda Fredriksson has created on ‘Juniper’. A slow descent to an unknown destination.  

Throughout the album Linda Fredriksson has created something that sounds like a traditional jazz album. Deep horns. Subtle repetitive motifs, which deliver massive emotional impacts. There are wailing solos and freak-outs. However, underpinning this is an electronic foundation made up of throbbing synths and frenzied bleeps. All the while rolling percussion fills in any gaps, while keeping things moving forward.

There are times during ‘Juniper’ where I think “These are some of the tenderest pieces of music I’ve heard for a long time”. ‘Neon Light [and the sky was trans]’ is filled with yearning and passion, but with these moments of aggression that bubble up, then slow dissolve. The final third features Fredriksson on sax. Sometimes melodic, others playing free. Many of the themes on ‘Juniper’ are executed expertly on ‘Neon Light [and the sky was trans]’. One theme feels like an inability to express what you are actually feeling. This is something we’ve all had to deal with over the past two years, or so. It's hard to get across how frustrated you feel, or the sadness when reading the news. Or the elation when seeing a friend by chance in town. You have so much you want to say, but all that comes out is something about work, or how you need new shoes. Here Fredriksson is trying to articulate their inner torments, but only painfully squeaky sax comes out. It is a fitting end to a glorious song, but also a fitting start to one of the strongest albums released this year. 

Best Music of 2021- Giovanni Guidi

 

When I heard this album months ago I thought it captured perfectly the delicious quality of Gato's energetic music. Lewis is definitely the right tenor to represent Gato's complex energy. Petrella channels Roswell Rudd and they bring the positive from the 70's up to now. Except these are Guidi's compositions which mimic the spirit of Barbieri. No problem-it's a fitting tribute to a musician who captured both the elegance and chaos of an era.

From Sound Contest:

Anticipato dal singolo Roma 1962, brano in rotazione radiofonica da venerdì 25 giugno 2021, Ojos de Gato è il nuovo disco dell’estroso pianista e compositore Giovanni Guidi, in uscita per la Cam Jazz venerdì 9 luglio 2021, sia in copia fisica che disponibile su tutti i digital stores. Ojos de Gato è un caloroso omaggio a una leggenda del jazz come Gato Barbieri, straordinario e compianto sassofonista argentino. Il CD consta di undici brani originali figli dell’ispirata vena compositiva di Giovanni Guidi, un album frutto di un’accattivante commistione che abbraccia free, contemporary jazz e latin jazz. Al fianco del pianista e compositore umbro, cinque stelle del jazz internazionale: James Brandon Lewis al sax tenore, Gianluca Petrella al trombone, Brandon Lopez al contrabbasso, Chad Taylor alla batteria e Francisco Mela alla batteria e alle percussioni. Il mondo del jazz sta rinascendo dopo un lungo periodo di torpore vissuto in isolamento, per cui nulla può confermare che sia sopravvissuto alla pandemia, con energia e coraggio, meglio del quinto album pubblicato dalla Cam Jazz dal pianista jazz e compositore italiano Giovanni Guidi. Ojos de Gato è un insieme straordinario di nuovi brani corali ed esaltanti che hanno l’accattivante caratteristica di suonare familiari, ma anche completamente nuovi.

From  Marlbank:

The eyes have it. You may never have heard the world-class Italian pianist Giovanni Guidi in such a fiery setting. The theme is a tribute to the Argentinian saxophonist Gato Barbieri who died in 2016 who is remembered for his huge spiritual tone and for his wildly expressive tango-influenced and Coltrane-inspired work on such albums as the sensuous soundtrack for the film Last Tango in Paris and albums on the Flying Dutchman and Impulse labels. And you may additionally fail to easily forgive yourself for any number of reasons say through lack of any publicity much hitherto if this does not gravitate to the top of your listening choices at the moment immediately.

In the Gato role is free-player James Brandon Lewis who is perfect here (his Live in Willisau drummer partner Chad Taylor is also on Ojos De Gato) and gets better and better year after year as his already titanic reputation goes deservedly into interstellar overdrive. Ojos De Gato was recorded at a studio in Astoria, New York, in February last year.

Guidi also ultilises Fender Rhodes on Ojos De Gato and has a different playing profile completely to his quietly intense piano trio on say his masterpiece This Is The Day. Gianluca Petrella's trombone sound makes a telling contribution through its sheer expressiveness in key passages. Francisco Mela adds very fine latinate percussion. An album that is extremely life-affirming and is certainly one of the best group records that I have heard all year. And Guidi magisterial on a highly charged 'Laura' complete with a forest of percussion is nothing less than the icing on the cake.

From Giovanni Guidis' Web Page:

I remember sitting in a McDonald's in New York - yes, a McDonald's restaurant, just across the street from Carnegie Hall. At the table with me were my father, Gato Barbieri and his son. This is the image I recall immediately when I think of the great Argentinian saxophonist - more than just an artist, he had become a family friend.
Ojos de Gato is an extremely important project for me: it's the last project I created together with my father before he passed away. It pays homage to Gato Barbieri 40 (now 41) years after the publication of The Third World. It's also deeply connected to what journalist Libero Farne described in an article on All About Jazz as my second spring.

The last few years of my life have been tumultuous ones, and the music I am drawn to now is more airy, lighthearted, although I hope it is no less serious and honest. The musicians I have chosen for Ojos de Gato have helped me create something vital and joyous, without abandoning Gato's concept of sound, which I consider among the most profound and intense sounds I've ever heard.

I am joined by extraordinary musicians, what I consider a dream band.
Let's begin with Gianluca Petrella, incredible musician and faithful companion of a thousand voyages, both personal and professional; James Brandon Lewis, incomparable saxophonist, raw and powerful; Francisco Mela's percussion, soaked in the culture of the Global South, in constant dialogue with the impeccable rhythmic concept of Chad Taylor, one of the greatest drummers of our time. And last but not least, free and original as the 1970's, the bass playing of Brandon Lopez.

I couldn't ask for better companions with whom to explore my second spring.

Ojos De Gato is music for the city, for the urban space, the theater and the cinema. I think of the cinema of Bertolucci and Pasolini, the music of Enrico Rava, Franco D'Andrea, Don Cherry and Aldo Romano, and - above all - Gato Barbieri. This project pays homage to the Argentinian saxophonist on the fortieth anniversary of the release of The Third World (1970).
And, just like all creations whose abstract origin is balanced by the visceral, their authenticity derives from the humanity they contain, the stories they have to tell. In this case, those are the stories of Mario Guidi and Gato, Giovanni and Laura Barbieri, who adopted the project as her own, and of all the incredible artists involved.
Let's begin with Gianluca Petrella, extraordinary musician and faithful companion of a thousand voyages, both personal and professional; James Brandon Lewis, incomparable saxophonist, raw and powerful; Francisco Mela's percussion, soaked in the culture of the Global South, in constant dialogue with the impeccable rhythmic concept of Chad Taylor, one of the greatest drummers of our time. And last but not least, free and original as the 1970's, the bass playing of Brandon Lopez.
In Ojos De Gato, I tried to unite all these elements in an intercontinental sextet, an ensemble that in my mind has its roots in Rosario, Argentina, just like Ernesto Che Guevara, Lucio Fontana and Gato Barbieri himself.

 

Some Early Photos

Not sure with what camera these photos were taken but it wasn't my father's Leica though he took most of these in the mid-late 60's. There is one here of my dad which I'm wondering if I may have taken it as there is a photo, taken a year or two later of my father reading a paper on the very sofa that he sits in this photo below. Anyway the one good thing about these photos is that a year and month when they were developed is printed on the side. Several are from Argentina with my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins. Fewer and fewer people are alive that knew these characters. One day it will be the same with me.

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- Family Photos from the 60's

The Winogrand Problem

From Gery Badger write ASX:

At his death in March 1984, Winogrand left some 2,500 rolls of film unprocessed. When John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York came to plan a major Winogrand memorial exhibition, he and his colleagues were faced with the daunting task of sifting through in excess of 300,000 images left unedited by the photographer. Such unbridled profligacy prompts a question, and points to the existence of what one might term the ‘Winogrand Problem.’ For that matter, it perhaps raises uncomfortable questions about the problem of photography in general.

Photographers all too frequently make pictures so conceptually casual and brainlessly superficial that their minimal meaning is exhausted at a glance. A great deal of film is wasted by even the best photographers, and almost criminally squandered by the bad and the mediocre. Garry Winogrand, however, was hardly mindless. He possessed one of the most acute of photographic intelligences, and the best of his pictures exhibit a truly virtuoso use of the 35mm camera, demonstrating a Rabelaesian formal energy that seldom has been equalled. Yet can we say that, if not mindless, much of the gargantuan amount of film he exposed was to somewhat meaningless effect? Did all this exuberant pointing of the camera, this machine gun clicking of the shutter on more than half-a-million occasions, have meaning, or enough meaning beyond a kind of automatic writing, a stream of consciousness tracing of fleeting sense impressions? This is the primary question that would seem to nag at John Szarkowski (in top authorial form) in his profound, disturbing, and moving essay to Figments From the Real World,3 the monograph accompanying MOMA’s retrospective tribute to one of the figures specifically nurtured by the museum’s photography department in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. It may be remembered that Szarkowski performed a similar memorialising function for another leading protegé, Diane Arbus, some dozen years or so earlier.4 Then, he was able to organise a brilliantly cogent overview of the photographer’s work. But Winogrand, so much broader in scope as well as so prolific, could not be rounded off so neatly. Despite external problems caused by her choice of subject-matter, Arbus worked within a relatively narrow, familiar photographic framework. Winogrand was by far the more puzzling, enigmatic, and genuinely ‘difficult’ photographer.

The work that clearly bothers Szarkowski emanates mainly from the vast amount of film shot by Winogrand in his latter years and left in an unedited state. The bulk of it was shot in Austin and Los Angeles, the photographer’s last two cities of residence. Faced by this accumulation of material, Szarkowski seems bemused by such first hand evidence of Winogrand’s wayward profligacy, and positively frustrated by the fact that no discernible grand theme emerges from the mass. Much of this late output seems aimless and repetitive, the photographer operating almost on automatic pilot, one might say. Reading between the lines of his essay, I feel that Szarkowski is troubled because photography itself might be implicated as much as a burnt-out, unhappy Winogrand, forcing himself to function in cities where clearly he did not feel at home, in contrast to the well remembered sidewalks of New York. Having proclaimed Winogrand as photography’s leading light for over twenty years, it must have been painful for Szarkowski to admit the following:

‘. . . it seems to me that Winogrand was at the end of a creative impulse out of control, and on some days a habit without an impulse, one who continued to work, after a fashion, like an overheated engine that will not stop even after the key has been turned off.’5

Occasionally, Szarkowski notes, Winogrand dragged himself back to something like his old form, but would seem to have gone beyond the usual artistic process of attempting to make ‘good’ pictures, impelled on a largely aimless course that was compulsively awful but nevertheless fascinating, like a slow motion nervous breakdown:

‘Yet to a biographer the most compelling of the late work would perhaps not be the work of the good days – work with which we are relatively familiar – but the doggedly repetitive, absent minded, oddly ruminative work of the other days.’6

The familiar work of the ‘good’ days – a ‘good Winogrand’, in other words – presupposes a lightning fast, usually candid street shot, a fusing of disparate visual elements into a characteristically choreographed melange of some complexity. This image cannot be foreseen. The motifs gathered together by the camera do not exist prior to their presentation in the frame, and they do not exist afterwards. They are sensed, felt . . . divined subliminally by the photographer and plucked, just as subliminally, out of a flux of shifting visual sensation. Their only existence, their reality, is the picture. Then, as the New York critic Max Kozloff has written, that piece of sensation so intuitively frozen can hopefully be assigned a useful role within the realm of culture – a meaning:

‘To be swayed by photography, it must create a dialogue, that is, enter culture and be assigned mutually enhancing relationships with its own kind. That desirable state, for all serious photographers, is embodied in the problem of recurrence, of recurrent imagery.’7

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Best Music of 2021-James Brandon Lewis

 

 

A prolific producer of high quality jazz, Lewis has a mature and complex sound on the tenor that makes anything he touches better. As a leader he surrounds himself with top notch talent that share his spirit for adventure which bodes really well for all of us who love the jazz tradition. He is building an important body of genuine work. Highly recommended.

From Something Else:

Every album by the saxophonist and composer James Brandon Lewis is a venture into an aspect of his unbound intellectual inquisitiveness. Jesup Wagon (May 7, 2021 by Tao Forms) explores the life and accomplishments of America’s most prominent botanist, George Washington Carver. But Carver was much, much more than a botanist; he was an inventor, educator and — like Lewis — an artist, who could paint and play several instruments. It’s that melding of art and science (and a keen curiosity) that draws Lewis to Carver and inspired Lewis to construct a set of songs that speak to the greatness of a major figure in African-American history. The ‘Jesup Wagon’ was a vehicle that Carver used to spread his innovations in agricultural methods to the Black farmers of the Alabama countryside around Tuskegee Institute in the early 1900s where Carver taught, researched and innovated for most of his life.

For Jesup Wagon, Lewis unveils the Red Lily Quartet, perhaps his most impressive band yet: William Parker (bass, gimbri), Kirk Knuffke (cornet), Chris Hoffman (cello) and Chad Taylor on drums. It’s not just about the talent, it’s knowing what to do with it, and Lewis has an innate sense of how to best deploy it in the service of his overall vision.

“Jesup Wagon” kicks off with Lewis alone, playing his sax not like any other sax player, but akin to singing a spiritual through his horn. That sets the stage for the rest of the band, keyed on Taylor’s loosened second-line march. The ingenuity in Lewis’ arrangement is already coming into view in the form of Hoffman’s repeating figure fitting right inside of the drums as Knuffke creates. After a brief theme statement, Lewis’ wholly original solo keeps nudging outside until he finally breaks free. The whole thing manages to reach back over a hundred years and forward at the same time.

From Free Jazz Blog;

He was a frequent subject of heroic paintings. It is doubtful, however, that anyone can ever produce a more beautiful tribute than James Brandon Lewis has in Jesup Wagon, his recording for the new label TAO forms. The latter is out of the gate with such artists as The Ivo Perelman Trio and Matthew Shipp.

Lewis composed the music and plays tenor saxophone. Most of the compositions are centered on dialogues between his sax and Kirk Knuffke on cornet. William Parker, in my opinion one of America’s greatest living jazz composers, plays bass on two tracks. Chris Hoffman is on cello. Chad Taylor plays drums and Mbira on one track, a traditional instrument from Zimbabwe that looks like a set of table knives packed for travel and sounds like a miniature metal drum.

The jazz is simply exquisite. Each theme is richly romantic and follows traditional form: the theme stated and used as portal to new realms of design space. Lewis’s horn reminds me of David Murray in albums such as Ming and The Hill. If you like Murray, you’ll like this.

Listening to “Fallen Flowers,” a call and response theme, did that avant garde thing to me, that feeling I had found it. There is a moment when a phrase that you expect will be played by a horn is instead articulated by the cello. That is a mark of genius in leader and composer.

If the former composition demonstrates Lewis’s surgical skills in the tissue of the human heart, the next one, “Experiment Station,” presents the raw power of his horn. Here is the hard boil of edgy jazz. The next cut, “Seer,” feels more in the mood of a church service. The mbira is a constant reminder of where we all come from. The last cut, “Chemurgy,” a term for the industrial use of raw materials, is a metaphor for jazz itself with an explicit Ornette Coleman vibe.

From New York Times:

When James Brandon Lewis plays the saxophone, he usually plants his feet shoulder width apart and bends a bit at the knee, swaying and tunneling into a rhythmic flow. As a bandleader, he almost exclusively performs his own compositions, which have melodies that roam, dart and soar but often stay grounded in a pulse.

Even when the music reaches a cruising speed, Lewis takes his time on the horn, more interested in making sure you get a clear taste of each note than in hurrying along to the next idea. Still, by the end of a song, you’ll feel as though you’ve traveled a good distance with him, put a few dozen miles on the odometer.

“Respect is important to me,” Lewis said on a recent Saturday morning, sitting in the sun at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village and explaining his commitment to clarity.

“There’s always this thing in the background with musicians, like, ‘Can you play?’” he said, referring to the strict meritocratic standards of the jazz bandstand. “But I put that into everything. If I’m going to write an essay, then I’ve got to be able to write well. It’s the same thing with poetry, same thing with teaching myself about visual arts: peeling back those layers.”

Since 2014, when he released “Divine Travels,” his second album, on Sony’s OKeh Records as a relative unknown, Lewis has earned a reputation as a pathfinder in jazz, and a guardian of tradition. Last year he won the rising star tenor saxophonist award in DownBeat magazine’s critics poll, putting an exclamation mark on his ascent.

In an artistically scattered age, when jazz is far too big and contested to be held in place, he has defined his own saxophone lineage — one that runs through Sonny Rollins, David S. Ware and J.D. Allen, constructed around ideals of deep seeking and rhythmic exchange — and kept building.

Best Music of 2021-Ben Goldberg

Prolific and always creative Goldberg's albums set the pace for new music in jazz. Though improvisation is at the heart of this music the compositions careful structures invite the expeditions into those other realms. There are several releases from Goldberg this year and all are very much worth enjoying.

From  All About Jazz-

The music of Ben Goldberg seems to come from a place outside of time—or maybe it comes from several times simultaneously. Maybe it's the instruments he chooses; while the clarinet family has been on the comeback trail in jazz for a quarter century, it's a sound that invariably invokes the New Orleans of a century ago. That's especially true when Goldberg picks up the mellow, woody, Albert-system E-flat instrument on "Cold Weather." That tune's sweet melancholy wobbles perilously close to Hoagy Carmichael, but by way of "Pannonica" by Thelonious Monk, another composer who had a soft spot for sentimental old tunes.

If you're interested in a nostalgia trip, you don't choose guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara to be your traveling companions, and the tension they create between the retrogressive and the transgressive gives Everything Happens To Be. a low-key charge. On paper, Goldberg is following in the great tradition of hiring the All-Star rhythm section of the moment. They are certainly that and as the cooperative Thumbscrew, also one of the formidable bands of the last decade. But Everything Happens To Be. isn't a Thumbscrew+horns date.

Goldberg has worked with Halvorson and Fujiwara as The Out Louds, and with Formanek in a variety of settings. Tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin is a long-time Goldberg collaborator who shares the leader's affection for putting new wine in old bottles. His big tenor sound, slippery but warm, hearkens back to players such as Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and Gene Ammons and fits right in on the almost-vaudevillian bounce of tunes such as "21" and "To-Ron-To." If you've always wanted to hear Halvorson strum four-to-the-bar, Freddie Green-style, cue the latter, which seems to be based loosely on "Sweet Georgia Brown." It ends in a collective, New-Orleanean tangle that resolves into something like a 21st-century updating of the Benny Goodman Sextet with Charlie Christian and Georgie Auld. It takes iron control to play this loose. But then there are knottier compositions such as "Fred Hampton," a lilting, 6/4 tune where Halvorson spins a songful line only to smudge it with a pedal effect, as if to say let's not make this too pretty. Yet beauty is never far away on Everything Happens To Be., though it seldom arrives in conventional fashion. Take "Chorale Type," which starts in church and detours to a middle-school gym where Goldberg and Halvorson circle each other warily like seventh graders at their first dance. The almost 10-minute cut ends in the mosh pit with Goldberg getting his metal on via a stomping bass line on contra-alto clarinet over Fujiwara's slamming 4/4. The exception is another chorale, "Abide With Me" which, inspired by Monk's 1957 septet version, is played straight in a single reverent chorus.

From Downbeat -

There’s a lovely stretchiness to the start of this album, as Ben Goldberg and his bandmates tug and squish the phrases of “What About” as if they were so much musical taffy. Goldberg’s clarinet leads the way, declaiming the melancholy lines with cantorial gravity as Ellery Eskelin’s tenor follows at a not-quite antiphonal distance.

Below them, the rhythm section loosely sketches the rhythmic and harmonic lines, with Michael Formanek’s bass gently pushing the beat as Mary Halvorson’s delay-leavened guitar invariably lingers behind.

But then, after a lyrical solo by drummer Tomas Fujiwara, whose fluttering brushwork has been the glue holding the ensemble together, the other four musicians return with a new melody — this one presented as a neat and tidy chorale, with Goldberg and Halvorson playing in such close unison you’d swear they were a single instrumental voice.

Those varied ways of playing together describe this album in a nutshell. Although the recording is firmly centered on Goldberg’s writing, the joy of the playing derives from the many different approaches these five take with the tunes. It can be playful, as on “Fred Hampton,” where Halvorson’s guitar disrupts the gently crepuscular melody with shimmery, burbling distortion; it can just as easily be delivered deadpan, as with their church-perfect rendition of the Henry Francis Lyte spiritual “Abide With Me.”

Mostly, though, it stays between extremes, playing off organized structures while ensuring the structure never entirely organizes the playing. “Chorale Type” is impressively ambitious, offering well-harmonized ensemble playing, group improvisations, an unaccompanied bass solo, a playfully conversational guitar and clarinet duet, plus an eloquent, semi-straightahead tenor solo.

For “Tomas Plays The Drums,” the theme is stated in a loose, Ornette Coleman-style unison as Fujiwara plays freely; for “To-Ron-To,” the horns and guitar repeat a giddily lilting riff built around a mispronunciation of that Canadian city’s name. In both cases, the setup is followed by collective improvisation that takes the band somewhere else entirely.

From  Free Jazz Blog-

And this is of course what makes Goldberg such an important presence in today’s creative jazz. His ability to locate his own work within the ongoing evolution of jazz and improvised music, and to find colleagues past and present who are also part of that development, is crucial to the lasting power of his artistry. Nowhere is this more evident than Everything Happens to Be, his latest release, featuring a star-studded lineup of musicians who have worked with Goldberg in recent years. The power-trio of guitarist Mary Halvorson, drummer Tomas Fujiwara and bassist Michael Formanek are here, and they’re joined by saxophonist Ellery Eskelin, who makes up the fifth member of the quintet. While Goldberg has done work with each of the four in different contexts, this is his first opportunity to bring all of them together on the same project. And it’s Goldberg’s remarkable sensitivity in knowing the distinctive strengths and dispositions of each musician that allows him to create an ensemble that works so well together.

While there are plenty of moments of collective conversation here, at the heart of the album are Goldberg’s compositions. Typically folksy in character, they have a winsome charm that will win you over on the first hearing, but a deeper appreciation will take place on subsequent listens, as one comes to perceive the logic behind Goldberg’s songcraft. Strong melodies always prevail, but there is always enough freedom to allow each member of the quintet to make their distinctive contribution. It might be Eskelin’s earthy tone on “Chorale Type,” almost sounding at times like he’s playing a baritone sax rather than a tenor, so deep does he go into the lower register; or maybe it’s Halvorson’s otherworldly licks on “21,” adding just the right degree of oddity to offset the tune’s jaunty playfulness; or perhaps it’s Goldberg’s own lyrical flights on the Monk-like “To-ron-to,” a fitting reminder of his prodigious talent as a clarinetist. Formanek’s nimble fluidity also finds an outlet, as his brilliant support on the album’s title track demonstrates, and Fujiwara gets his own moment to stretch out on the appropriately titled, prog rock-flavored “Tomas Plays the Drums.” Goldberg knows each of these musicians so well that it seems almost effortless for him to find ways of synthesizing their individual voices into the collective product.

In the end, it’s Goldberg’s ability to draw together so many different strands of the jazz tradition that most stands out here. The distance between Louis Armstrong and Ornette Coleman is closed dramatically on a piece like “Cold Weather,” which moves somehow from New Orleans swing to untethered freedom, all in the span of a few minutes. Goldberg’s cross-stylistic facility lends a certain timelessness to this music; after a while one simply stops trying to analyze it in favor of simply savoring its beauty. In this light, the brief closing coda, “Abide With Me,” serves as a reverent reminder that at the heart of Goldberg’s music lies the unmistakable power of melody. That he has found four colleagues here who fundamentally share that conviction renders this release the perfect vehicle for his creative efforts.