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CoffeeBar Kid at the Wellington Jazz Festival 2019
Born and raised in Oakland, California, intrepid trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire was as a member of the Berkeley High School Jazz Ensemble, where he caught the attention of saxophonist Steve Coleman who hired him as a member of his Five Elements band for a European tour. From there Akinmusire went from strength to strength, playing in the Monterey Jazz Festival's Next Generation Jazz Orchestra. Studying at the famous Manhattan School of Music before returning to the West Coast to take a master's degree at the University of Southern California and the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in LA.
He’s racked up a stash of industry awards and released a bunch of very ambitious discs starting in 2007 with his debut recording Prelude... to Cora. He’s a man to hire having worked with Vijay Iyer, Aaron Parks, Esperanza Spalding, and Jason Moran. In 2011 Blue Note snapped him up and released his ground breaking album When the Heart Emerges Glistening. Four years ago he dropped The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint, followed by appearances on Kendrick Lamar's 2015 big effort To Pimp a Butterfly.
Critics agree, when last year he pulled off something of a small miracle of synthesis with Origami Harvest combining state-of-the-art improvisation with stylish, sophisticated pieces for string quartet, experimental electronics, and a dialogue of politically charged spoken word ‘beat poetry‘ performances. With a wind up like that I was fully charged with anticipation.
Photo: Tim Gruar
But first up NZ School of Music Big band, conducted by Roger Fox, gave us a short set played by 15 students, mainly horns. They blasted through a rapid paced selection from Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock and a couple of other standards. Sadly, Fox’s break neck speed interpretation of Cheek To Cheek completely ran over it’s fledgling vocalist, leaving her in dishevelled heap on the side of the road.
Ambrose Akinmusire has been up at the school teaching and mentoring the trumpeters today. Many in the band were clearly looking well pleased with their day. He'd graciously given some stage time for the students to get a bit of large hall experience. While it’s clear these kids were nervous they had potential and it showed. It was great to see our musical future is in good hands.
After a quick reset, we're underway with the main act. Tonight's audience was smaller and more intimate than last night with Herbie Hancock but still enthusiastic and engaging. A younger set but that's no surprise given that his latest album is such a wide ranging selection incorporating everything from chamber music to rap and hip hop.
I’d hoped the night would include some of the material from Origami Harvest but that wasn’t on the agenda. Instead, the show drew inspiration from When the Heart Emerges Glistening and The Imagined Savior is Far Easier to Paint. I say ‘inspiration” because none of these loose, free jazz approximations were announced. Even the most ardent fan would have trouble deciphering what belonged on wax and from which record it came from.
The first thing that strikes you is how incredibly coherent and tight this quartet is. No surprise, given that they’ve been operating as a working unit for nearly seven years. Individually, any one of these players could hold their own. But working together with this alchemist, Ambrose, Sam Harris (piano), Harish Raghavan (bass) and Kweku Sumbry (drums) reach a considerably higher plain.
Watching this team at work, it seems to me more logical to describe how they operate rather than how they are lead.
Photo: Tim Gruar
In fact, it’s not really clear who’s in charge. Raghavan and Sumbry are a uniquely potent force and constantly show their singular ability to design and deliver the structure and the shape of each a piece. Over that there are textures of light and rough, delicacy and harshness from Harris’s piano and Akinmusire’s trumpet.
At just 21 and only recently graduated, Sumbry proved himself to be the real the star tonight. He gave us a relentless onslaught of multi cadenced rhythms and counter rhythms. There were times when his left and right hand, left foot and right foot were all travelling in different directions that made no sense but were perfectly aligned to navigate this twisted landscape designed and laid down by the other three.
I’d heard that Akinmusire is the future of trumpet playing in the jazz world, so tonight I was expecting great things. But somehow I felt a little bit let down. He seemed to be leading an the unremitting search for contrast, for tonal texture, to take the listener somewhere unexpected. Yet at the same time, he seemed to get a bit lost. His unstructured playing sometimes fell a bit flat to these ears. And a bit pointless. Still I’m not a player. Sometimes abstract playing is about the sculptures they create in your ears, rather than a simple melody abstracted and manipulated. Perhaps it was the odd, tuneless squeaks and blasts that didn’t go with the rest of the composition.
Occasionally, I thought he was playing bad, unintentional notes, as if his trumpet was malfunctioning. Only once did we get a proper solo section, which was simply a selection of random arpeggios, a re-imagining of a Bach prelude, or something like that. Other times he teased us into more conventional rich atonal moments that were more familiar to conventional jazz playing. It was only then that I really saw the skill bubble up. Yet playing this was seemed like a cop out. Where was the brash experimentation of his recorded albums? Ultimately I felt dissatisfied.
I’d like to say our attention was fully held through out the night but this wasn’t entirely true. I don’t want to write off the night as mediocre but I did come away feeling like there was more to this than I’d received. Akinmusire is clearly a musician’s musician and there were several mesmerising solos, especially from young Kweku Sumbry who is definitely one to watch, but beyond there seemed to be little more than a sustained intention to preserve a level of the Avant Guard within the confines of conventional modern jazz.
Second Unit needs you. Like, urgently. Before sunset preferably.
Come and explore, investigate, party and play on a live-action film set where nothing is quite as it seems...
What is Second Unit you ask?
Take a film set, a music festival, a comedy gig and a choose-your-own-adventure game for good measure. That’s Second Unit – not your average night out.
You and a cast of humans are needed for this supernatural misadventure into the world of film, inspired by vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. You’ll be assigned the role of a film extra and be enlisted to help wrap this film shoot of unholy proportions.
Buy your ticket and you'll gain access to an amazing and anarchic world built specially for this event on Wellington's waterfront. Allow yourself 90 minutes to explore, but don't be surprised if you want to stay...
The season opens on Thursday 13 June and has a strictly limited season until Sunday 30 June.
Tāmaki Makaurau's Karangahape Road district will come to life this August 30th with some extra flavour as The Others Way Festival returns for its fifth year running. Save the date, and stay tuned for more festival news over the coming weeks!
Early bird passes go on sale at 9.00am, Friday 31st May. Get in before the pack by securing your passes from the spiritual home of The Others Way, Flying Out (online or in store: 80 Pitt Street, Newton) or from Undertheradar. Limited to 2 x tickets per purchase.
Since the event’s inception in 2014, the beloved grassroots music festival has become somewhat of an institution in the independent music scene of the city, attracting swarms of music-loving festival goers each year as Karangahape Road and the surrounding streets host a magical night of music and good vibes.
For 2019, the multi-venue extravaganza will take place across beloved venues such as The Wine Cellar, Whammy! Bar and its adjoining Whammy! Backroom, Neck of the Woods, The Fale at Samoa House, Cross Street Market, Galatos, The Studio, The Thirsty Dog, and Audio Foundation.
Joining the venue bill this year, The Others Way Festival organizers are proud to announce the addition of two new venues; the majestic Hopetoun Alpha and iconic Mercury Theatre.
The annual event is hosted by Flying Out, an Auckland-based record store, distributor and home to Flying Nun Records, Arch Hill and numerous other local and international labels.
Follow Flying Out on social media to keep updated with festival lineups,
artist info and more!
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
The annual Wellington Jazz Festival is the highlight of Aotearoa’s mid-winter music calendar, featuring some of the finest musicians from across New Zealand and around the globe.
Jazz aficionados and intrepid newcomers can explore more than 100 gigs across the city, with five days of serious play bringing the sounds and spirit of jazz to the capital’s streets, cafes, bars and live music venues.
Jazz Legend Herbie Hancock headlines this year’s programme. Winner of 14 Grammy Awards during his illustrious career, Hancock has had an unparalleled influence on acoustic and electronic jazz and R&B for more than five decades.
The author of modern day standards such as Cantaloupe Island, Chameleon and Rockit, Hancock's appeal transcends genres while maintaining an unmistakable style.
From his early beginnings with the Miles Davis Quintet, to collaborations with the likes of Wayne Shorter, Stevie Wonder and and Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock is equally at home performing with contemporary artists including Annie Lennox, Christina Aguilera, Paul Simon, Pink and more recently with Kendrick Lamar, Thundercat and Kamasi Washington. In 2019, the 79-year-old maestro remains at the forefront of world culture, technology, business and music.
The Festival also features the explosive funk ensemble Ghost Note. Headed by Snarky Puppy’s multi-Grammy Award-winning percussion duo of Robert ‘Sput’ Searight and Nate Werth, this dynamic ensemble is pushing funk music into the future, building on the uplifting pioneering foundations laid out by the likes of James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone, and infusing their fresh take with tastes of afrobeat, hip-hop, psychedelia, world folklore and more.
Another visitor will be ground breaking trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. Motivated by the spiritual and practical value of art, Ambrose Akinmusire aspires to create richly textured emotional landscapes that tell stories of the community, record the time, and change the standard.
On a perpetual quest for new paradigms, Ambrose masterfully weaves inspiration from other genres, art and life in general, into compositions that are as poetic and graceful as they are bold and unflinching. His music is an active response to societal divides, the way our politics hold us emotionally hostage, and the ever-growing list of black lives ended by structural racism.
A powerful performance of genre-defying music, that sits within the centre and at the periphery of jazz, while intersecting the circles of hip-hop and classical music.
And then there's the exquisite vocals of Alicia Olatuja. Praised by the New York Times as ‘a singer with a strong and luscious tone and an amiably regal presence on stage’, Alicia Olatuja has been astounding audiences with her exquisite vocals, artistic versatility and captivating demeanor.
Her critically-acclaimed album Intuition: Songs from the Minds of Women, celebrates the achievements of esteemed female composers including Brenda Russell, Sade, Tracy Chapman, Kate Bush, Angela Bofill, Joni Mitchell and Linda Creed. Olatuja first gained international attention as the featured soloist with the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
She recorded her first solo album, Timeless in 2014 and has since performed at Newport, Monterey and Montreal Jazz Festivals, among others.
Further highlights include a collaboration between composers Lex French and Christine Jensen, along with perennial favourite the Rodger Fox Big Band spearhead the distinct sounds of New Zealand jazz. The full programme is available now at: https://www.jazzfestival.nz
HOPESTREET RECORDINGS 2009 - 2019 Anniversary Showcase June 6 @ Darebin Arts Centre Melbourne International Jazz Festival
Waaay back in 2009, a funky new Melbourne record label was launched with a seven-inch vinyl single by The Putbacks. Ten years and thirty-four records later, The Putbacks and Emma Donovan headline a showcase event at the Darebin Arts Centre featuring our founding artists as well as our latest additions The Montgomery Brothers, Parvyn and Karate Boogaloo. Hopestreet have provided Groove with many funky tunes over the years, especially the sublime Bombay Royale and The Cactus Channel.
The best in Aotearoa jazz will be at the at the 2019 New Zealand Jazz Awards Sunday 9 June 2019. The nominations for this year are:
Recorded Music NZ Best Jazz Artist 2019 Finalists: Good WinterbyAntipodes (Luke Sweeting, Jake Baxendale and Callum Allardice, No Dogs Allowed by DOG (Kevin Field, Ron Samsom, Roger Manins and Olivier Holland) and The Thing by GRG67 (Roger Manins, Michael Howell, Mostyn Cole, and Tristan Deck).
APRA Best Jazz Composition Award 2019 Finalists: Chungin' by Callum Allardice, Follow The Sugar To The Gee by Grant Hughson and Cerulean Haze byJasmine Lovell-Smith.
Doris Day, the freckle-faced movie actress whose irrepressible personality and golden voice made her America’s top box-office star in the early 1960s, died on Monday 13 May at her home in Carmel Valley, Calif. She was 97.
The Doris Day Animal Foundation announced her death.
Ms. Day began her career as a big-band vocalist, and she was successful almost from the start: One of her first records, “Sentimental Journey,” released in 1945, sold more than a million copies, and she went on to have numerous other hits. The bandleader Les Brown, with whom she sang for several years, once said, “As a singer Doris belongs in the company of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.”
But it was the movies that made her a star.
Between “Romance on the High Seas” in 1948 and “With Six You Get Eggroll” in 1968, she starred in nearly 40 movies. On the screen she turned from the perky girl next door in the 1950s to the woman next door in a series of 1960s sex comedies that brought her four first-place rankings in the yearly popularity poll of theater owners, an accomplishment equaled by no other actress except Shirley Temple.
In the 1950s she starred, and most often sang, in comedies (“Teacher’s Pet,” “The Tunnel of Love”), musicals (“Calamity Jane,” “April in Paris,” “The Pajama Game”) and melodramas (“Young Man With a Horn,” the Alfred Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “Love Me or Leave Me”).
James Cagney, her co-star in “Love Me or Leave Me,” said Ms. Day had “the ability to project the simple, direct statement of a simple, direct idea without cluttering it.” He compared her performance to Laurette Taylor’s in “The Glass Menagerie” on Broadway in 1945, widely hailed as one of the greatest performances ever given by an American actor.
She went on to appear in “Pillow Talk” (1959), “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “That Touch of Mink” (1962), fast-paced comedies in which she fended off the advances of Rock Hudson (in the first two films) and Cary Grant (in the third). Those movies, often derided today as examples of the repressed sexuality of the ’50s, were considered daring at the time.
“I suppose she was so clean-cut, with perfect uncapped teeth, freckles and turned-up nose, that people just thought she fitted the concept of a virgin,” Mr. Hudson once said of Ms. Day. “But when we began ‘Pillow Talk’ we thought we’d ruin our careers because the script was pretty daring stuff.” The movie’s plot, he said, “involved nothing more than me trying to seduce Doris for eight reels.”
(Ms. Day and Mr. Hudson remained close. Not long before his death from AIDS in 1985, he appeared with her on her television show “Doris Day’s Best Friends” and at a news conference. “He was very sick,” Ms. Day said. “But I just brushed that off and I came out and put my arms around him and said, ‘Am I glad to see you.’ ”)
Following “Pillow Talk,” which won Ms. Day her sole Academy Award nomination, she was called on to defend her virtue for the rest of her career in similar but lesser movies, while Hollywood turned to more honest and graphic screen sex to keep up with the revolution sweeping the world after the introduction of the birth control pill.
Ms. Day turned down the part of Mrs. Robinson, the middle-aged temptress who seduces Dustin Hoffman, in the groundbreaking 1967 film “The Graduate,” because, she said, the notion of an older woman seducing a young man “offended my sense of values.” The part went to Anne Bancroft, who was nominated for an Academy Award.
By the time she retired in 1973, after starring for five years on the hit CBS comedy “The Doris Day Show,” Ms. Day had been dismissed as a goody-two-shoes, the leader of Hollywood’s chastity brigade, and, in the words of the film critic Pauline Kael, “the all-American middle-aged girl.” The critic Dwight Macdonald wrote of “the Doris Day Syndrome” and defined her as “wholesome as a bowl of cornflakes and at least as sexy.”
But the passing decades have brought a reappraisal, especially by some feminists, of Ms. Day’s screen personality, and her achievements. In her book “Holding My Own in No Man’s Land” (1997), the critic Molly Haskell described Ms. Day as “challenging, in her working-woman roles, the limited destiny of women to marry, live happily ever after and never be heard from again.”
Ms. Day in fact was one of the few actresses of the 1950s and ’60s to play women who had a real profession, and her characters were often more passionate about their career than about their co-stars.
“My public image is unshakably that of America’s wholesome virgin, the girl next door, carefree and brimming with happiness,” she said in “Doris Day: Her Own Story,” a 1976 book by A. E. Hotchner based on a series of interviews he conducted with Ms. Day. “An image, I can assure you, more make-believe than any film part I ever played. But I am Miss Chastity Belt, and that’s all there is to it.”
Doris Day with Roger Maris, left, and Mickey Mantle, who appeared in the 1962 film “That Touch of Mink,” in which she fended off the advances of Cary Grant.
Doris Day was born Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff in Cincinnati on April 3, 1922. (For years most sources gave her birth year as 1924, and so did she. But shortly before her birthday in 2017, The Associated Press obtained a copy of her birth certificate from the Ohio Office of Vital Statistics and established that she had been born two years earlier. After Ms. Day was shown the evidence, she said in a statement, “I’ve always said that age is just a number and I have never paid much attention to birthdays, but it’s great to finally know how old I really am.”) She was the second child of Frederick William von Kappelhoff, a choral master and piano teacher who later managed restaurants and taverns in Cincinnati, and Alma Sophia (Welz) Kappelhoff. Her parents separated when she was a child.
Ms. Day never wanted to be a movie star. At 15 she was a good enough dancer to win the $500 first prize in an amateur contest. Her mother and the parents of her 12-year-old partner used the money to take them both to Los Angeles for professional dancing lessons. The families intended to move west permanently, but Doris’s right leg was shattered when the automobile in which she was riding was hit by a train.
To distract Doris during the year it took the leg to mend, her mother — who had named her after a movie star, Doris Kenyon — paid for singing lessons. She was a natural.
Ms. Day won her sole Academy Award nomination for her role in the 1959 film “Pillow Talk,” one of three movies in which her co-star was Rock Hudson
Ms. Day told Mr. Hotchner that another important thing happened during her year of recuperation: She was given a small dog. “It was the start of what was, for me, a lifelong love affair with the dog,” she said.
That first dog, Tiny, was killed by a car when Ms. Day, still on crutches, took him for a walk without a leash. Nearly 40 years later she spoke of how she had betrayed him. During the last decades of her life, through her foundation, Ms. Day spent much of her time rescuing and finding homes for stray dogs, even personally checking out the backyards and fencing of people who wanted to adopt, and she worked to end the use of animals in cosmetic and household-products research.
After the accident, Ms. Day never went back to school. At 17, having traded her crutches for a cane, she sang in a local club where the owner changed her name because Kappelhoff wouldn’t fit on the marquee. After a few months as a singer with Bob Crosby and His Bobcats in Chicago, she joined Les Brown and His Blue Devils.
Singing was just something to do until she married. “From the time I was a little girl,” she told Mr. Hotchner, “my only true ambition in life was to get married and tend house and have a family.”
But while Ms. Day was instantly successful as a singer and a movie actress, she was fated always to marry the wrong men. By the time she made her first movie she had been married and divorced twice.
Her first husband, Al Jorden, a trombone player, was violently jealous and had an uncontrollable temper. He hit her on the second day of their marriage and continued to beat her when she became pregnant and refused to have an abortion. She was married at 19, divorced and a mother at 20.
But she was undaunted. “All my life,” she told Mr. Hotchner, “I have known that I could work at whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.”
Her second husband, George Weidler, a saxophonist, was a gentle man. She was happily living with him in a trailer park in Los Angeles when he left, after telling her that he thought she was going to become a big star and that he didn’t want to be Mr. Doris Day.
She was approached at a Hollywood party by the songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, who had written the score for “Romance on the High Seas,” a movie planned for Judy Garland. But Garland had turned the role down and Betty Hutton, her replacement, was withdrawing because she was pregnant. Warner Bros. was desperate, and the songwriters insisted that Ms. Day audition for the part.
Ms. Day with her dog in 1960. She spent much of her time rescuing and finding homes for stray dogs, and she worked to end the use of animals in cosmetic and household-products research.
“Acting in films had never so much as crossed my mind,” she later said.
As candid in real life as her perky screen characters, Ms. Day admitted to the movie’s director, Michael Curtiz, that she had never acted before. But “from the first take onward, I never had any trepidation about what I was called on to do,” she said. “Movie acting came to me with greater ease and naturalness than anything else I had ever done.”
Reviewing “Romance on the High Seas” in The New York Herald Tribune, Howard Barnes wrote, “She has much to learn about acting, but she has personality enough to take her time about it.”
Playing the Wholesome Girl
Under personal contract to Mr. Curtiz, Ms. Day followed “Romance on the High Seas” with a series of musical comedies in which she played the pert and wholesome girl with hair and personality the color of sunlight. But even in the early 1950s she was nobody’s fool, and her characters had an unusual resilience, cockiness and competence.
In “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” (1953), about the trials of a small-town family, Ms. Day is first seen repairing her boyfriend’s car. If her fearless sharpshooting title character in “Calamity Jane” (1953) is finally induced to exchange her buckskins for a dress to wed Howard Keel’s Wild Bill Hickock, she still slips her six-shooter into her pocket to take along on the honeymoon.
And when Ms. Day opened her mouth to sing, the effect was magical. She had a perfectly controlled voice that brimmed with emotion. “It’s Magic,” which she sang in “Romance on the High Seas,” and “I’ll Never Stop Loving You,” which she sang in “Love Me or Leave Me,” were nominated for Academy Awards for best song. The two with which she is especially identified, “Secret Love,” from “Calamity Jane,” and “Que Sera, Sera,” from “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” won Oscars.
“Doris Day was the most underrated film musical performer of all time,” said Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical. “If only she had been at MGM instead of Warner Bros., they’d have given her challenging roles.”
When Ms. Day did get a chance to stretch as an actress, she could be memorable. In “Love Me or Leave Me” (1955), she gave a stirring performance as the singer Ruth Etting, whose life and career were dominated by a violent manager-husband who had ties to gangsters. She held her own against James Cagney’s powerful performance as the husband and flawlessly sang Etting classics like “Ten Cents a Dance” and “Chasing the Blues Away.”
Ms. Day married for a third time in 1951. Although that marriage, to Martin Melcher, her manager, seemed happy, she discovered after Mr. Melcher’s death in 1968 that he and his lawyer had embezzled or frittered away the $20 million she had earned and had left her $500,000 in debt. She agreed to star in a situation comedy to earn the money to pay off her debts.
That proved to be a wise move financially; “The Doris Day Show” had an extremely successful five-year run. (It underwent a number of changes in that time. Ms. Day’s character, a widow who lived on a ranch with her two children, got a job at a magazine in San Francisco in the show’s second season, and by the fourth season her children had been written out of the show.)
James Garner, who co-starred with Ms. Day in two 1963 films, “The Thrill of It All” and “Move Over, Darling,” told Mr. Hotchner, “Marty was a hustler, a shallow, insecure hustler who always ripped off $50,000 on every one of Doris’s films as the price for making the deal.”
Ms. Day sued the lawyer, Jerome Rosenthal, and eventually won a judgment for more than $22 million in 1974. In a 1986 interview Terry Melcher, her son by Al Jorden, said that she eventually got some of the money from an insurance company but “nothing like that amount.”
In 1976 Ms. Day married Barry Comden, a sometime restaurant manager 11 years her junior. They were divorced in 1981. During her marriage to Mr. Comden, she moved from Los Angeles to Carmel Valley, and she and her son became part owners of the pet-friendly Cypress Inn in the nearby beach town Carmel-by-the-Sea.
For the rest of her life she lived on a seven-acre estate with many more dogs than the zoning laws allowed. In the 1985-86 television season she was the host of “Doris Day’s Best Friends,” on the Christian Broadcasting Network, which focused on animal welfare.
Terry Melcher, her only child, who became a successful record producer, died in 2004. Her survivors include a grandson.
In 2011, three years after she received a lifetime achievement Grammy Award, Ms. Day surprised a lot of people by releasing her first album in almost 20 years, “My Heart,” which consisted mostly of songs she had recorded for “Doris Day’s Best Friends” but never released commercially.
Ms. Day, who summed up her fatalistic philosophy in the words of one of her biggest hits, “Que Sera, Sera” (“What will be, will be”), never liked unhappy endings. She told one interviewer: “It upsets me when the hero or heroine dies. I would like them to live happily ever after.”
But, except in movies, nobody lives happily ever after. Ms. Day told Mr. Hotchner: “During the painful and bleak periods I’ve suffered through these past years, my animal family has been a source of joy and strength to me. I have found that when you are deeply troubled, there are things you get from the silent, devoted companionship of your pets that you can get from no other source.”
“I have never found in a human being,” she added, “loyalty comparable to that of any pet.”
Slowboat Records in Cuba St. hosted 3 acts including Lawrence Arabia, Caroline Easter (The Chills, Let's Planet) and Kurt Vile. Rough Peel Records (RPM) hosted Motte and Hex. Here are a few snaps from the day. Enjoy.
"Some of my fondest childhood memories are of going to a small record store in Florence AL called The Turning Point every friday or saturday afternoon. I would skip lunch at school and save my lunch money for the week and it would put me within a dollar or two of having enough for a record a week (1974 prices). It doubled as a head shop and the smell of incense burning always made me think (even in 5th grade or so) that it was covering up the smell of some illicit drug being burned in the back. (It probably was, actually). I was very attracted to that thought and just loved the whole experience.
After they shut that store down I began going to a smaller, but really well stocked store across the river. The manager there was named Jay and he turned me onto The Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen and upteen other acts. We became life long friends, in fact he road-tripped into Athens GA this weekend to see my band play here. He runs Plan 9 in Richmond which is about as good a store as any in America and he still is turning me onto great bands. When I was 14 they built a mall on my side of the river with a Record Bar in it. They were a chain, but in those days it was a pretty cool one and when I turned 16 it became my first job. I was a terrible employee, but I'm convinced they never fired me because I spent all my paycheck on records and I knew our inventory inside out.
Actually they eventually did fire me, but by then I had grown into a pretty decent employee and the company had gone all corporate so I had to go. We have a turntable on our tourbus and we go scouring for little indie record stores in every town and I still blow my whole per-diem on records. Here I am 43 with a wife and child and I'm still misappropriating my lunch money like in 5th grade. The record labels throwing the indie stores to the wolves and casting their lot with the faceless megastores is indicative the mindset that has put them in such sorry shape of late. The indie record store was the closest link between music and the consumer and there was no replacing that interaction.
It is good tho see that some of the surviving indie stores are in some cases showing growth largely due to sales of vinyl records. It IS an interesting time to watch how all of this is going to pan out. Long Live Record Stores!"
CAPTURES LEGENDARY SAXOPHONIST’S GENIUS IN FIRST FLOWER DURING HIS BREAKTHROUGH “SHEETS OF SOUND” YEAR
2019 MARKS 70TH ANNIVERSARY OF PRESTIGE RECORDS
Though it’s been 52 years since his tragic passing, John Coltrane’s importance and influence have never been greater. Though active for a relatively short period—from 1957 to ’67—he was an intrepid spirit who developed at a feverish pace. Coltrane’s breakout year, when his mature sound first grabbed ears and his own recordings began to sell consistently, was 1958. Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings, out March 29th on Craft Recordings, is a box set (8-LP, 5-CD & digital formats) that chronicles the exciting story session by session, featuring all 37 tracks Coltrane recorded as a leader or co-leader for the independent Prestige label in those twelve months. This collection captures him in creative high gear—developing the signature improvisational style that journalist Ira Gitler famously dubbed “sheets of sound.”
The timely release of Coltrane ’58 marks the 70th year since the founding of Prestige Records and comes just after the 60th anniversary of these recordings. It also follows on last year’s successful release of Both Directions at Once, which debuted at No. 21 on the Billboard 200, the highest chart position of his career.
Coltrane ’58 brims with the shared jazz repertoire of the day—blues, bebop standards and familiar ballads—as well as original compositions and obscure tunes Coltrane rediscovered. Together they offer an array of emotional depth and instrumental prowess, showing how the rising saxophonist was actively stretching sound and increasing the intensity, and shifting the direction of what jazz performance was about. Included are definitive versions of “Lush Life,” “Lover Come Back to Me,” “Stardust,” “Good Bait” and “Little Melonae”; first recordings of originals like “Nakatini Serenade,” “The Believer,” “Black Pearls” and the heartfelt “Theme for Ernie”; and extended tenor saxophone tours-de-force such as “Russian Lullaby,” “Sweet Sapphire Blues” and “I Want to Talk About You” that anticipate the stratospheric heights Coltrane would reach in the 1960s.
In 1958 Coltrane was still two years away from emerging as a bandleader, but his membership in ensembles led by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk had propelled him into the spotlight as one of jazz’s most exciting and controversial figures. Coltrane ’58 serves as a window onto the shock and awe—and eventually deep appreciation—Coltrane generated during this period, when his sheets of sound approach pushed the bebop ideal of slaloming through a tune’s chordal pathways to its extreme.
To be sure, Coltrane ’58 is more than sheets of sound: It’s the sound of Coltrane working and smoothing out those sheets and exploring other ideas as well. For example, he frequently played in double-time—as if the chords were moving twice as fast as the rest of the band—and, if the music called for it, he’d decrease the intensity, caressing and embellishing a melody, an aspect that could calm the toughest critics.
Produced by Nick Phillips, the vinyl box includes eight 180-gram LPs, remastered from the original analog tapes by Paul Blakemore (all of which were recorded by renowned engineer Rudy Van Gelder) and cut by Clint Holley from 24-bit/192kHz transfers. The lavish, linen-wrapped, portfolio-style book features an eye-catching design and includes 40 pages containing extensive liner notes by Grammy®-winning American music historian Ashley Kahn, rare ephemera and historical photographs of the saxophonist and his collaborators, including several taken by renowned jazz photographers Francis Wolff and Esmond Edwards. The 5-CD edition, containing a 76-page book, is a faithful replica of the 8-LP vinyl box.
Coltrane ’58 reveals other significant aspects of Coltrane’s emergence, too, like his growing status in the hard bop brotherhood of the day. He recorded with contemporaries (many future legends in their own right), including pianist Red Garland; guitarist Kenny Burrell; trumpeters Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard and Wilbur Harden; bassist Paul Chambers and drummers Art Taylor, Jimmy Cobb and Louis Hayes. The sessions all took place in Rudy Van Gelder’s legendary home studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, where so much of the best jazz of that era was recorded. Coltrane’s music of 1958 benefits from a marked blue-collar, pressure-cooker aesthetic: Born in three-hour sessions with minimal rehearsal, head arrangements and mostly first takes, these tracks provide a true and transparent view of the talent Coltrane was able to draw upon and the timeless, improvised magic they created together.
It’s a challenge today to imagine how radical Coltrane must have sounded sixty years ago to jazz listeners accustomed to a gentler, lyrical flow. In his liner notes, Ashley Kahn sees an enduring relevancy in Coltrane’s bold chance-taking, as a creative artist and an African-American: “In the context of current headlines and an overriding sense of déjà vu, Coltrane’s music rings clearer than ever, with even greater meaning than it had in 1958. What he was playing then never felt less than urgent and relevant—subversive even. It still sounds that way.”
Remarkably, the majority of this music wasn’t released until the ’60s on various albums after Coltrane’s emergence as a bandleader, denying these 37 tracks the chance to tell their own collective story. By sequencing this music in the order of its original creation, Coltrane ’58 clearly delineates Coltrane’s first full year as a recording artist, finally allowing fans to experience—track by track—the emergence of a master improviser in his first great career crest.
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