NEA Jazz Master Sheila Jordan, now 91, always has a smile at the ready. Since the beginning of the New York City lockdown, her Facebook newsfeed has been active with posts to and fro as friends, instrumentalists, and other singers check in, and she’s been quick to respond with cheery messages of hope. One of the more popular posts is a video of Jordan performing her original, “The Crossing,” from her 1986 Black Hawk album by the same title. The video replay is from a May 2010 duo performance with Jordan’s longtime bassist Cameron Brown; in this simple format, Jordan’s frank words about how she overcame alcohol and drug addiction stand all the more exposed. The tune’s timely message: Music encourages us in the face of seemingly intractable hardship.
As of this writing, Jordan is scheduled to participate on May 6 in the National Jazz Museum in Harlem’s version of Desert Island Discs, a series of lectures in which jazz greats discuss the eight albums they’d bring with them to a desert island. Renowned jazz journo Ted Panken leads the discussion. It’s too soon for ironic observations, but one can appreciate the topical relevance of the exercise. (Check museum website event changes.) Unfortunately, the Made in New York Jazz Competition Gala at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center—originally planned for May 6 as a centennial celebration of Charlie Parker’s birth, featuring Jordan as host—is postponed until May 15, 2021.
The Portuguese word saudade describes the melancholic longing for things past, a rife sentiment these days. Drawing on this, last month award-winning vocalist Alexis Cole launched an online video series, Saudade de Sauna; each day she presents a different music video taped—you guessed it—in a sauna. (It has great acoustics, she says.) Swathed in one demure towel, she sings standards like “For All We Know”, “Give Me The Simple Life”, and “A Beautiful Friendship”. This last she dedicated to the late Bucky Pizzarelli, who succumbed to the coronavirus on April 1. In 2015 Cole and Pizzarelli had partnered on an album named after that tune; her a cappella tribute to the legendary guitarist swings with warmth, gratitude, and a respectful amount of saudade.
Singer Jocelyn Medina continues to host her Vocal Jazz Jam Series for Room 623, Harlem’s newest speakeasy, via Zoom on Facebook each Sunday. The structure of the real life edition remains unchanged: a headliner, followed by a jam for singers at all levels of expertise. Props to Medina for figuring out how to do this. She debuted the virtual jam on March 22—the first day of the New York lockdown—and celebrated the jam’s five-year anniversary and the club’s one-year anniversary on April 5 remotely (Cole was the headliner that evening, sans sauna). The live event maxed out at the Facebook limit of 100 attendees, bringing together self-quarantined musicians and listeners from all around the world.
Pandemic notwithstanding, album releases continue unabated, even with live events rescheduled for the fall or on hold for the foreseeable future. Vocalist Kat Edmonson had to cancel the release tour for her newest record, Dreamers Do (Spinnerette Records), which included an April run at Birdland Theater. But she, too, has been reaching out to fans via social media—Reddit and Facebook specifically. On the latter, you can watch her perform some of the tracks from the new album—including the lilting waltz, “Is It Too Late To Dream”, the original that inspired the album. On this tune’s impromptu, DIY video, taped in Edmonson’s Brooklyn apartment over the deliciously orchestrated track, the singer holds up handwritten cards that talk about heartbreak, wanting to give up—and soldiering on. The rest of the album is similarly endearing: 19 other tunes present dreaming as their theme and uplift as their mission.
Concord Records just released Ella 100: Live At The Apollo!, a recording of the 2016 concert memorializing what would have been Ella Fitzgerald’s 100th birthday. The album reverberates with top-tier vocal talent on contemporary renditions of Fitzgerald classics, singers David Alan Grier, Patti Austin, Andra Day, Lizz Wright, Ledisi, Monica Mancini and Cassandra Wilson among them. Two vintage recordings of Ella in her prime bookend the program—her winning Apollo performance of “Honeysuckle Rose” and a scat-free “People,” the Jule Styne/Bob Merrill heart-breaker. The album closes with Fitzgerald’s imrovised lyrics: “I’m so lucky I got people like you,” she sang.
(Reprinted from the May 2020 edition of The New York City Jazz Record.)