Fresh Sound New Talent Organic Grooves 7 Items

Mr. K goes Gospel on the latest seven from Most Excellent Unlimited’s series of collaborations with the master editor. As is often the case, both of these edits are appearing on vinyl, and on 45, for the first time, with all the hallmarks of MEU’s commitment to quality.

A massive favorite with audiences who’ve attended Danny Krivit’s sets around the world, his “Churchapella” edit of Madonna's “Like A Prayer" is finally on wax. One of the singer’s greatest tracks, it has always fascinated with its combination of the sacred and the profane, leaving it up to the listener whether she is referring to a secular or holy love. In Krivit’s hands, focused largely on the undeniably massive sound of the Andre Crouch Choir, the divine nature of the lyrics shine through. Uplifting, moving, even transcendent when presented at the right moments, it’s both an inspiring piece of music and a seriously powerful DJ tool.

“Like A Prayer” is paired on the flip side with a fantastic edit of the Clark Sisters funky, slinky rare groove classic “Ha-Ya (Eternal Life).” Never officially released on 7-inch before, Krivit has taken the loose original recording and given it a steady pulse not by adding post-production elements, but via his experienced hand at building a musical movement that audiences will respond to. A slight tempo change, a bit of careful repetition, and at last connoisseurs of the smaller format vinyl have a definitive version of this powerful song.

"Before he rose to jazz renown as one-third of The Bad Plus, bassist Reid Anderson put out two albums on Fresh Sound New Talent, 'Dirty Showtunes' and 'Abolish Bad Architecture,' that stand up as classics of turn-of-the-millennium New York jazz. Anderson remembers these quartet dates as his first forays into original composition, full of dark and intriguing harmony and quirks of form that were forward-thinking in an acoustic jazz mold.

After the two initial albums, Anderson underwent what he describes as “a very conscious and discernible shift” in 2000 with his third Fsnt release, 'The Vastness of Space.' The writing was starker and simpler in a sense, more triadic and rock-edged in its language, moving decisively toward the sound he would pursue full-time with The Bad Plus. Two tracks from Vastness, “Prehensile Dream” and “Silence Is the Question,” became Bad Plus numbers. “Whatever you can say my style is,” Anderson remarks, “I think it really began with The Vastness of Space.”

Vastness features a quintet with the beating heart of a rock band. Andrew D’Angelo and Bill McHenry, saxophonists with impressive track records as leaders ever since, brought two distinct energies and horn approaches to Anderson’s early tunes yet functioned with seamless compatibility as a frontline. (“The Owl” is McHenry’s nickname.) Ben Monder, soft-spoken guitar giant of our time, provided just the right touch whether doubling melodies, laying down chords or venturing poignant solo flights, giving every song his own stamp (not to mention a harmonic underpinning quite unlike Ethan Iverson’s piano on the two previous Anderson discs). Drummer Marlon Browden, now in Berlin and focusing on songwriting and electronics as a multi-instrumentalist, has a loose and funky flow that suits Anderson as a bassist and gives the session lots of its grit.

“The Enthusiast,” “The Owl” and “The Captain” are rock-inflected anthems with a direct and inescapable lyricism, but also an element of raw free jazz. There are slow tempos and yearning romantic moods (“Foxy,” “Talons,” “Melismatic Clouds of Joy”) as well, or atmospheric and asymetrically grooving episodes such as “Reclusive.” There is complexity, counterpoint, polyrhythm, orchestration, dynamic contrast and a certain wildness to the album, a stylistically searching aesthetic that paved the way not only for The Bad Plus, but also Anderson’s Golden Valley Is Now collaboration with Craig Taborn and Dave King, or his electronics work with the adventurous Jeff Ballard led group Fairgrounds.

Years ago Anderson told me that once he has a concept for a song in his brain, to commit it to paper is already somehow to dilute or corrupt it. A necessary stage in the process, perhaps, akin to getting a bicycle tire fully inflated but then having to let just a bit of air escape when disengaging the pump. The point being: if 'The Vastness of Space' is but an approximation of the fully realized music Anderson was hearing in his head, then just imagine..."

—David R. Adler

Having spent close to 30 years recording some of the most promising musicians in jazz—from the prolific scene of the 90s until today—Fresh Sound New Talent is revisiting its origins by popular demand, this time on vinyl. For this new series, we bring you a timeless album by one of the most influential and widely acclaimed jazz leaders of his generation who made his recording debut for Fsnt.

“In Passing” began as an elegy for Glasper’s Houston friend, Scooby, who died in 1999. “I never could finish the tune, but I started working on it again when Aliyah died,” Glasper says. “Not too long after that, 9/11 happened. That made me finish the song. It’s about how your time on earth is passing.” Glasper ends the program with the incendiary “L N K Blues,” setting up a John Ellis-Marcus Strickland tenor battle that implicitly affirms his connection to and extensions of the idiom that defined the sound of jazz in Houston from the ‘40s through the ‘60s. —Ted Panken, Downbeat, Jazziz, WKCR, 2003 The trio embarks on their own voyage with Glasper’s “Lil’ Tipsy,” using compression-expansion techniques to explore in painstaking detail a disjunctive dance of inebriation. Glasper uses the concluding vamp as a spur-of-the-moment opportunity to segue directly into “Alone Together.” There ensues an avid triologue, Hurst holding down the bottom as Glasper and Reid, with nonchalant confidence, weave through of an obstacle course of rhythmic signatures. On “Mood,” a quintet track, Moreno and Ellis offer beautiful contrapuntal section playing and pungent solos, capturing the composer’s intent to resolve from a melancholy opening to an impassioned feelgood vamp. Bilal ratchets the intensity on “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” a bluesy jazz ballad to which Glasper wrote the melody and the lyric. Glasper says: “I have a certain feel, a certain way of thinking and imagining of and hearing harmony, and it all descends from coming up in and playing music in the church.” Glasper returns to ebullience on a creative and virtuosic treatment of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” There was a detergent commercial that used it during my first year in school,” he relates, “and I was singing all the time. Then someone told me it was a jazz tune. I arranged it for a concert at school. A year later, I came up with this arrangement. “‘Interlude’ happened because we kept playing after I faded out from the drum solo, and when I listened to the tape I thought the hip-hop part was hot. Hip-hop is a part of me, too, and I wanted to have that influence on the album.”

The best jazz musicians, guitarists or otherwise, do what they need to do, and not necessarily what is most expedient. But to an observer of the jazz scene in 1996, when Kurt Rosenwinkel made his first record, a jazz guitarist could have gone down any of several different routes, or ongoing traditions. Some were old and some were new, but they all had their votaries. Because “jazz” was no longer a monolithic entity to anyone, the jazz-education movement had gotten in full swing, and the information age was just starting, all of these traditions were fairly well-mapped. More than a little of East Coast Love Affair is historicist-classicist material. It’s a trio with the bassist Avishai Cohen and the drummer Jorge Rossy that was not a working band, though the paths of all threemusicians intersected within the general orbit of Smalls; the album was recorded at Smalls, but mostly during the day, so that you can’t hear an audience, though you can hear the club’s intimate dimensions, dry room-tone. It is studious and calm and quiet and full of standards. But is also rich and modern and just slightly volatile. There is a lot going on here. “Pannonica” and “Round About Midnight” come from Thelonious Monk, whose harmo-nies have fascinated New York guitarists over the last few decades—Bobby Broom, Peter Bern-stein, and especially Bill Frisell among them. Walter Donaldson’s “Little White Lies” was a pop semi-standard of the ‘30s and ‘40s, the most unusual choice among the older songs on this record. But Rosenwinkel’s own tunes on the record, “B Blues,” and “East Coast Love Affair”—the two tracks recorded before an audience, that same evening—are its slow, strange, smash-hits. The former is suspenseful and structurally weird, broken up into 21-bar sections. The latter, a 12/8, 32-bar composition, remains one of the best things he’s written. It uses a wider range of his instrument than most of the rest of the record. It is shadowy and full of hesitations, clipped or modest or slightly rough statements; when Rosenwinkel heads into a limited series of virtuosic runs and sprays in the second half of his solo, it amounts to a deviation from the track’s norm of open space and understatement. It is an advanced lesson in moderation. —Ben Ratliff, 2018