On March 29, Blue Engine Records, the recording arm of Jazz at Lincoln Center, launched singer Betty Carter’s first posthumous album, The Music Never Stops (BE 0014; 1:16:05; HHHH). The album chronicles one of JALC’s early concerts—Carter in a whirlwind stage performance from 1992, on the same date as that of the release, backed alternately by a jazz orchestra, a string section, and three different piano trios. It’s Carter toward the end of her career, at her expressive and technical best. As a singer Carter dug deep into the text of her material: on ballads she pulled phrases out like taffy to enhance their meaning, and on up-tempos she nailed each note with dead-center precision no matter what the speed. Her distinctive melodic alterations—sliding melisma, bent notes, and the final dip at the end of a line—not only engage musically but emotionally. It’s hard to remain detached listening to Carter. The 13 selections on this recording capture all of this and more—Carter’s banter on “Most Gentlemen Don’t Like Love”; Cyrus Chestnut’s fierce piano solo on “Why Him?/Where or When/What’s New?”; and the palpable heartbreak on “Make Him Believe.”
Ordering info: https://store.jazz.org/collections/music/products/the-music-never-stops
In 1973 Viennese trumpeter and composer Franz Koglmann recorded and released his first album, a sometimes random, sometimes structured experimental effort featuring American saxophonist Steve Lacy. The reissue of Flaps (BMCD-01; 37:15; HHH) recalls the halcyon days of electronic free improv, as Koglmann and Lacy play in duet over early computer-manufactured sounds. Lacy wrote the title cut, dedicated to clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, a Dixieland player with a fondness for the avant garde. This tune encapsulates the duo’s whimsical approach to the new trends in improvisation: a catchy lick repeated in unison in the horns, offset by whirrs, buzzes, and squeaks from a machine, with only the clicking sound of fingers on valves as an outro. Koglemann’s compositions, too, tap into the fanciful: Check out “Homage To An Old Raincoat (To Fritz Kotrba)”, a bass-heavy swing tune with a traditional trumpet solo over screeching signals seemingly from outer space. Not so much high concept as advanced play.
Ordering info: http://www.blackmonk.at/blog/franz-koglmann-flaps-bmlp-01-bmcd-01
Warsaw-born Hammond organ player Wojciech Karolak rose to prominence as a composer and bandleader in the 1960s and was one of the first jazz recording artists in Soviet-era Poland. During this time he played with some Western musicians—his trio backed singer Annie Ross on a Polskie Nagrania Muza release in 1965, for instance—but it was on his 1975 album Easy! (01902 9 55881 8 2; 44:45; HHH1/2), a recent re-release by Warner Music Poland, that Karolak reveals how deeply he felt the American roots aesthetic. This funk-jazz recording contains tunes that run the gamut from the bluesy soul groove of the title cut to the 1970s layered pop sound of “A Day In The City” (with the late trumpeter Tomasz Stańko on a sweeping solo) to the animated, just-shy-of-disco “Strzeż Się Szczeżui” (“Beware of Szczesż”). Almost 45 years on, these tracks still go down easy.
Ordering info: http://polskienagrania.com.pl/2019/01/04/wojciech-karolak-easy/
In 1974, pianist and free jazz icon Cecil Taylor was among the headliners at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. He played a solo set, his five-movement composition “Silent Tongues,” which the British label Freedom released the following year as a live album. Now remastered and back in print after years of omission, Silent Tongues (ORGM-2119; 33:57; HHHH) seems almost prescient. Throughout the recording—such as on the opening piece, the 18-minute-long “Abyss (First Movement)/Petals & Filaments (Second Movement)/Jitney (Third Movement)”—Taylor doesn’t abandon harmony as much as exploit it as a tool of ardent self-expression. But the multi-lateral musical freedom that Taylor espoused five decades ago—and that so alarmed jazz aficionados then—today stands as a basic tenet of modern jazz. Taylor may have broken the rules, but in doing so he set some new ones. In many ways, Silent Tongues lays them out.
Ordering info: https://orgmusic.com/releases/cecil-taylor-silent-tongues/
(Reprinted from the June 2019 issue of Downbeat magazine.)