Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.
His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.
The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.
He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”
Vallejo Nocturno 2022 copyright- Abdul Wadud DC Space 1977
I remember seeing Abdul Wadud play numerous times at DC Space with Julius Hemphill. The two had great synergy and could improvise creatively for hours. Yes, I think in 1977 we knew the importance of both of those musicians and the sounds they created but still after those encounters I never ran into Abdul again, I believe. From The NYT:
For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently not available digitally.)
Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.
“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”
The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is currently out of print.
“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D.,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)
Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”
Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.
“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”
When Terry Jennings was 20 years old, in December 1960, he was invited to present his music in Yoko Ono’s Manhattan loft, along with fellow composers and close friends Richard Maxwell, Terry Riley and La Monte Young. Jennings obliged with nine pieces. We can now look back and consider this: that was more than half of his extant available compositions.
We can also do this: we can hear about 10 of his available works scattered across a clutch of CDs, and a few performances via YouTube and Ubuweb. All but the five piano miniatures found on the remarkable 2009 release Lost Daylight are of uneven audio quality, to put it generously. What we cannot do-and I have made every effort for the past year to do so- is discover more than a few pages of critical texts about his stunningly beautiful, prescient music. Nor can you avail yourself of but a few photographs telling even a part of his story.
Since hearing Winter Trees and the four other short pieces of Lost Daylight nearly ten years ago, I have periodically returned to Jennings’ music. Naturally, plumbing the 30 minutes of the resonant, floating world of those five pieces, breathed into the present moment by the extraordinary John Tilbury, I wanted to hear more. I began my search.
There is evidence, more or less, of 16 compositions, less than 10 available on CD. Outside of Lost Daylight, Jennings’ work can only be found on several anthology collections, mainly of the music of John Cale. The record of his public performances are few-as I said, several can be found streaming with poor audio quality. Jennings played numerous private concerts at Cal Arts with Charlemagne Palestine, as well as happenings like the Ono event. Fragments exist of those encounters.
This impoverished legacy has nagged at me- those who heard his music when the eighteen-year old stepped out of his parent’s strict upper class home into the company of the twenty-something avant gardists we now regard as the 60s West Coast minimalist constellation – Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Dennis Johnson and Harold Budd- to share his spare, transfixing pieces, were astonished. Young, in his 2006 program notes to a Cal Arts performance of Jennings’ String Quartet, called him “the most talented musician I know.” Riley described him as “a musician of great originality and expressive power.” Budd, asked about Jennings legacy by American Music editor Brett Boutwell, replied “Has any American composer done more than Winter Trees?” When Jennings visited England in 1970, his piano music was instantly embraced by Cornelius Cardew and John Tilbury; 39 years later, Tilbury would see his realization of five of Jennings’ piano pieces released by Another Timbre, the aforementioned Lost Daylight. Cale, Johnson and Riley have all stated in interviews over the years Jennings was a “natural”, who created brief, brilliant works that were studies in the play of time and memory, privileging silence and space, augurs of the concerns taken up by many composers three decades later.
Furthermore, João’s biggest and most impactful innovation was on the vocal realm. In clear defiance against the paradigm of the operatic style from the radios and casinos, João started to sing with a rather dry voice: clear, no vibrato, no sense of humor, with quiet volume and uniform tone. One more time we can notice the influence and similarity between João and American Jazz singers such as Chet Baker, as one can notice in the following video of a performance of the charming American singer after a street fight that cost him his central incisor (https://youtu.be/0ybMVHeJZ7w). The difference is that João became a master in displacing the melodies, delaying and anticipating it in relation to the original format, making his interpretations unique, surprising, fresh and elegant. Despite his emotional dryness, the friction between vocal melodic displacement and constant guitar syncopation opened a universe of expression and improvisation possibilities. This became the new “school” of Brazilian vocal and songwriting style, influencing generations of musicians such as Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Edu Lobo, Paulinho da Viola, Roberto Carlos, Milton Nascimento, Geraldo Vandré and many others.
My proposition is that what João didn’t do is at least as important, if not more important, than what he did do. His artistry is best understood in terms of the strict limits he imposed on himself and the soaring freedom he attained within them. João is the ultimate archetype of this time-honoured paradox. His musical process involved a search for what he called “the simple truth”. With his recordings and live concerts as our deep listening guide, we will try to find out what his truth means.
With a tenacity bordering on obsessive-compulsive, João delineated his stylistic perimeters, rejecting many of the characteristics most commonplace in music for voice and guitar. Through sheer stubbornness, he managed to set up an enclosed and rule-based system that nevertheless cultivates a specific kind of infinite freedom of phrasing. Beneath their surface layer of simplicity, his recordings are intricate, elusive and, above all, subtle. In other words, João unearthed the holy grail of music making: the transformation of extreme complexity into sounds that are simple, relaxed and clear. Sounds that just float into our minds.
João’s musical style balances exquisitely at the edge of a precipice: just a hint of lush orchestration plunges it into an abyss of queijo. On richly orchestrated and over-produced albums such as “João” and “Amoroso”, arrangers lead us by their grubby hands straight into the elevator: a sublime Japanese ink-drawing transformed into a sicky oil painting hung on a hotel room wall. To those who associate João with easy listening, I simply say, “your listening is too easy, try harder”. His musical essence is minimalist, single-minded, rigorous, unsentimental and child-like: “maybe I would like to go back to when I was a boy,” he said. “After that I learned too many things, and they came out in my music. So now I refine and refine until I can get back to the simple truth. Like when I was a boy”.
Instrumentation and Repertoire
Within João’s earliest work there are many exceptions to the claims set out below. But I’m going to be dealing with his mature solo albums: “JoãoVoz e Violão”, “In Tokyo”, “Live in Montreux”, “Live at Umbria Jazz” and “Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar”. To my taste, as soon as other instruments were added to his voice and guitar, the music very quickly got worse. My one exception to this rule are Sonny Carr’s narcotic hi-hats on the 1973 album “João Gilberto”, often referred to as the white album (which I will therefore add to my list). By purging everything from his percussion set except these essential hi-hats, Carr mirrors João’s stripped back musical proposition, blending perfectly with the guitar meanwhile. Whether it was Carr, producer Rachel Elkind or João himself who took this radical instrumental decision, it was a masterstroke that lends this hugely influential album its uniquely soporific atmosphere.
Apart from the odd song in Spanish (“Besame Mucho”), Italian (“Estate”), English (“’S Wonderful”), French (“Que Reste-T-Il De Nos Amours”) and the few pieces he composed himself such as “Bim Bom” and “Hô-bá-lá-lá“, João’s huge repertoire derived from three essential Brazilian sources. Having started his career as a drummer in Bahia, João broke through showcasing the radical songs of Tom Jobim/Vinicius de Moraes and other late ‘50s composers, before going on to combine these Bossa Novas with older tunes by composers such as Ary Barroso, Denis Brean and Dorival Caymmi, excavated from the forgotten past. To complete the triangle, the Tropicália movement from the late ‘60s and ‘70s – founded by young apostles such as Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil – provided João with the likes of “Coracão Vagabundo”, “Menino do Rio” and “Sampa”. To this extent, João encompasses the past, present and future. Yet it is remarkable that, filtered through his ultra-fine stylistic sieve, every song he interpreted sounded fundamentally the same. And I mean that as a great compliment. In precisely that way, João is a true minimalist.
Until his last performance in 2008, João continued to play the same hit songs. This insistence was not only generosity to his audience, always gagging for yet another version of “Desafinado”. It also speaks to the sense that, as in jazz, the process was more important and more interesting than the content. During the performance of a song, João would often repeat it over and over, more times than the average listener with limited concentration considered reasonable. Yet each round was phrased uniquely. His search for perfection was obsessive, devotional even; he could repeat forever without repeating himself. “Fazendo sempre a mesma coisa que nunca é a mesma” – always doing the same thing that’s never the same, said Caetano Veloso.“Refine and refine”, even within a six-minute song.
A musician difficult to classify Kornstad creates meaningful soundscapes with his saxophone, voice, and electronics. That is not all of course. A creative musician who mixes genres and has the right instincts is someone to listen to. Putting out music for the last 15 years and in the last two he has hit on two excellent recordings that capture his talents-listen to Out of the Loop and For You Alone and you will be convinced of his unique approach.
Kornstad says in the short liner note: “My own music will always thrive best in concerts, and I miss playing and singing for you all.” While it is true that he is at his best in live performance – I first heard him engaged in a bravura performance of his jazz saxophone/operatic “tenor battle” at the Victoria Nasjonal Jazzscene in Oslo – he can be seen as already well-prepared for solo creation, having worked before with just his saxophone, his voice and electronic looping devices.
It is those raw materials, along with flute, flutonet – a flute with a saxophone mouthpiece – and sansula, that he uses on these eight tracks.
The overall tone, again inevitably, is one of quiet reflection. Looped long tones from a tenor saxophone do lend themselves to the evocation of a trance-like state and to the impression of a world suspended in a kind of enforced stasis, holding its breath and waiting.
But Kornstad is adept at adding rhythm and groove to his loops with tongue slap on reed and a touch of sandpaper grain in the timbre. Bremen and the opener, Waking Arp, show this side of the recording.
Apart from some possible background harmonies – it is hard to distinguish tenor voice from tenor saxophone – he restricts his vocal input to one track, Sibelius, which is a saxophone improvisation over his singing of Jean Sibelius’ Demanten på Marssnön (The Diamond on the March Snow – Op36 No6) and forms the outstanding centrepiece of the album.
Strut has an atmospheric blend of saxophone and flute sounds, Nakai is a perfectly-judged tenor saxophone solo with minimal looped harmonies at the end, and the former librarian in me was delighted to find a track called Dewey Number. If I am slightly disappointed in the album it is only that there are not more examples of the split-tenor personality, epitomised here in Sibelius, that makes Håkon Kornstad such a unique and fascinating musician.
Håkon Kornstad was once a member of Wibutee, one of the best bands to follow into the space opened up by Bugge Westeltoft's New Conception of Jazz. Like Westeltoft, Wibutee – with Per Zanussi on bass and electronics and Wetle Holte on drums – used a savvy mix of electronics, beats and spontaneous improvisation that helped give momentum to the Nordic jazz explosion of the early millennium years, Kornstadt saying, “We liked the idea of being inspired by new things instead of having to be inspired by the old jazz”.
It's a maxim that subsequently became his guiding star as he set about developing a career as a solo artist while also formally studying voice/singing to release his inner Jussi Bjorling trapped inside. Both sax and voice play a part in this album, using tape loops to be sure, hence the album title, but thoughtfully conceived and aesthetically pleasing, this is surely his best album post-Wibutee. The years of trial and error, of experimentation have finally coalesced into something of genuine artistic substance.
In 2007, Kornstad released his first album under his own name, Single Engine, which featured a backing band and was well-received by Norwegian music critics. But it wasn’t until 2009’s Dwell Time that he produced a true solo album.
At this point in the Skype interview, Kornstad picks up his laptop computer and tilts it out the window of his apartment, angling down at the church next door where he recorded Dwell Time, alone, over the course of a few nights. Sofienberg Church, built in 1877, is a popular concert venue because of its impeccable acoustics, and the album sounds like the work of a tight, gloomy jazz band. Slap-tongue riffs mimic the pluck of an upright bass, key clicks provide the percussion, and some hushed low tones even simulate brushes on a snare drum.
In a review of Dwell Time, the jazz magazine DownBeat called Kornstad “one of Norway’s most original and daring musicians.” And he hadn’t even discovered opera yet.
Within a year after the release of Dwell Time, Kornstad says he already felt like he was stagnating musically. “I didn’t know what to do next. I’d done the solo saxophone for so long, and for me maybe that was the pinnacle of how difficult you can make it for yourself,” Kornstad says. “I was starting to think, should I do other combos, work with other people? What should I do now?”
Seeking to break out of his comfort zone, Kornstad stopped listening to jazz, took a trip to New York, and opened himself up to whatever new opportunities awaited him there. For months, nothing happened. Finally, he says, a friend called and invited him to the Metropolitan Opera, which was putting on Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. Kornstad says he scoffed at first. “I didn’t know if opera was anything for me. I thought it was really old music and nothing I would expect for something new to happen,” he says.
But when the music began, he was struck by the timeless grandeur. “There was just a new world that opened up to me with a new repertoire that I’d never checked out, new sounds and how the voice can sound,” Kornstad says. “Maybe I also wanted to sing.”
An album dripping in personal history for anyone of Latin descent. These boleros are of late nights with your partner or sitting with the family and getting down to that portion of the reunion when you put these legendary original songs on the turntable. Caribbean memories for me. Zenon and Perdomo are masters at squeezing all the meaning out of these classics.
As I write, it is alto saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón’s 44th birthday. He’s a MacArthur Fellow, has won a Guggenheim and, more important, has earned the admiration of his peers and a wide listening audience. Often drawn from his Puerto Rican heritage, his repertoire is unique, his writing wide-ranging. He has arranged Puerto Rican songs for orchestra, (on Alma Adentro) and written for alto saxophone and string quartet (on Sonero). He’s a founding member of the SF Jazz Collective and is currently working on a disc dedicated to the music of Ornette Coleman (Law Years: The Music of Ornette Coleman). I think that El Arte del Bolero — its bare-faced duets featuring the saxophonist with his longtime colleague, pianist Luis Perdomo — is in its way just as ambitious as the Coleman homage. When the touching title melody on Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook is played, it seems to be reaching for something just out of reach, surrounded by a large orchestra punctuated by drums and cymbals. The large ensemble approach drives Zenón toward ever more effectively impassioned statements. On his new collection, which was recorded as a concert on September 28, Zenón begins “Alma Adentro” on his own and at a slightly slower tempo. He sounds exposed, even when Perdomo comes in quietly behind him.
In his notes to El Arte del Bolero, Zenón explains his affection for “Alma Adentro”: “Sylvia Rexach, the composer of this piece, is a favorite of my mother’s, and I was exposed to her music as a young child. This is a song that always brings back feelings of longing and deep nostalgia, a yearning for things no longer there.” It seems that Puerto Rican songs, recorded by singers like Rexach, Benny Moré, and Cheo Feliciano, have a special meaning to Zenón and perhaps to his generation. About this recording, he says “we chose compositions from the Bolero era that we could just play right away, without giving it a second thought: songs from the times of our parents and grandparents…. When we play these songs, we can hear the lyrics in the back of our minds — something that provides a very deep connection, one that is hard to replicate in any other situation. It really is almost beyond familiar. These songs are part of us.”
You can be seduced by the lines an improviser plays, or you can be seduced by the sound of their instrument itself. Virtuosity has marked saxophonist Miguel Zenón’s work for the last two decades – the Puerto Rico native with the genius grant, Guggenheims and Grammy noms in his pocket has sounded like a prodigy from the get-go. Back in 2002, the solos on his first album made critics’ jaws drop; no one has ever questioned his skills as a soloist.
Those talents are front and center on this duet with longtime piano partner Luis Perdomo, but it’s the sound of Zenón’s horn that has made me continually return to this record. Working through a book of poignant boleros (a trad Latin form with folkish origins that’s occasionally been deemed “ballads with black beans on the side”), Zenón dedicates himself to the art of expression. Key to that tack is his instrument’s timbre. As ballads by Benny Moré, Aresnio Rodriguez and Bobby Capo float by with heart on sleeve, Zenón’s luminescence amplifies their romance. Aching trills, sentimental phrases, motifs that blow kiss after kiss – recorded live at New York’s Jazz Gallery last fall, the duo captures a warmth that has always been hinted at in the saxophonist’s work, but never presented so revealingly. Here, his playing is prettier than ever; each of his notes feels like it’s being vocalized. This is family music, tunes hummed and sung and played on guitars and parlor pianos by abuelas and tíos during informal family gatherings. In the liner notes, Zenón calls the tunes “beyond familiar.” Live with El Arte Del Bolero for a stretch, and they’ll become the same for you.
Zenon writes in the liner notes to the album: “As an instrumentalist, I spend a lot of my time working on making the saxophone an extension of my creative process. This process is always filtered through interpretation and expressiveness, and more often than not I find myself looking up to some of my favorite singers (people like Ismael Rivera, Cheo Feliciano and Andy Montañez) as sources of inspiration. In their individual voices I can hear a reflection of their unique personalities, all manifested at the highest level through their interpretation of songs. These melodies become vehicles for their creativity—a canvas on which they’ll portray their feelings and states of mind.”
These six selections are most familiar to both players, akin to doing an album of jazz standards but instead these are compositions from the Bolero era that they could just play right away, songs handed down from generations as essential to their development as the music of Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or Thelonious Monk, but perhaps even more familiar. The artists claim that they hear the lyrics in these tunes as they play them, that they are as natural as breathing or hopping on that bicycle one hasn’t ridden in several years. It all comes back right away. Zenon again comments, “We recorded this music as a live show, all in one take, without much preparation other than discussing tonalities and some basic elements on form. We were more than pleasantly surprised with the results and decided that they deserved to be shared. There is nothing like making music with someone else, finding a common language we can grab onto and then just going and exploring that together. We hope this comes across here, and that you enjoy the music.” Th music is gorgeously relaxed and even for those unfamiliar with the Bolero form, it should evoke a similar mood as Coltrane’s Ballads or Charlie Parker’s Charlie Parker with Strings. Perdomo’s sensitive, delicate playing is the perfect accompaniment for Zenon’s floating, ever sweet lyricism.
Here’s a brief synopsis of each selection. “Como Fue” was popularized by the great Benny Moré and has long become a Latin-American standard. Although the duo usually plays it in the key of Eb, they decided to play it in Db here, mainly inspired by a recent immersion into the music of Billy Strayhorn. “Alma Adentro” was previously recorded with a larger ensemble on a 2012 album of the same name. Sylvia Rexach, the composer of this piece, is a favorite of Zenon’s mother that he was exposed to as a young child and thereby brings back feelings of longing and deep nostalgia. “Ese Hastío” owes to Ray Barreto who recorded this under the title of “Piensa En Mi” on his legendary 1979 album Rican-Struction. Zenon had never played the song before, but Perdomo suggested it since he had recorded the piece as an instrumental on his album Pathways.
“La Vida Es Un Sueño” was written by Cuban Arsenio Rodriguez, a revolutionary artist who changed the course of Latin-American music forever. Blinded by a tragic accident as a child, Arsenio moved to the United States later in life in hope that doctors there could find a cure to his condition. Legend has it that, shortly after finding out from his doctors that this would not be the case, he wrote this song. The last verse says it all: “La realidad es nacer y morir / Porque llenarnos de tanta ansiedad / Todo no es mas que un eterno sufrir / El mundo esta hecho de infelicidad.” (“Reality is to be born and die / Because to fill us with so much anxiety / Everything is but an eternal suffering / The world is made of unhappiness.