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A collection of newsworthy jazz headlines.

“This Week in Jazz” brings you a collection of jazz-related headlines, focusing on news, video, and articles in the new generation of jazz / hip-hop / soul. See below for the headlines you don’t want to miss this week.

ESPERANZA SPALDING IS THE 21st CENTURY’S JAZZ GENIUS

(NPR: Turning the Tables)

“It’s tempting to think of Spalding as a prodigy. Drummer, composer and producer Terri Lyne Carrington, who first met Spalding during those early Berklee years, prefers a different term: ‘I call her a genius every chance I get.’

If Spalding assembled her musician’s toolkit by mastering classical music, jazz and its Afro-Latin counterparts, she came into her own by threading those influences through the R&B she heard on the radio when she was a kid: Sam Cooke; Smokey Robinson; Earth, Wind & Fire. That fusion was already audible in Esperanza‘s funky bass lines, but has taken off in her later projects as she has come into the orbit of black popular musicians.”

Read the full article here.

REMEMBERING MAC MILLER

This week marked the unexpected passing of 26-year-old Mac Miller. A beloved rapper with a cult following, Miller was deeply involved in the new-generation jazz scene, and incorporated the sounds of jazz, soul, and R&B into his music with the help of Thundercat, Keyon Harrold, Robert Glasper, and many more. The days following his death saw an outpouring of love and remembrance by the many musicians who’d known him. Last month, he performed alongside Thundercat at NPR’s Tiny Desk in a soulful 17-minute segment that gains new relevance and light as we mourn the loss of the young, brilliant, and troubled artist.

8/6/18 || MAC MILLER TINY DESK CONCERT (FEAT. THUNDERCAT)

(NPR Music)

“There was a shift in Mac Miller’s boisterous demeanor as he started the third of his three-song Tiny Desk set. It’s the first time he’s performed tracks from his new album, Swimming, in front of an audience. On “2009,” he rubbed his chin with clinched eyes, looking like a young man who’s beginning to crack the code. Backed by a piano loop and a string quartet, he reflected on his journey’s peaks and valleys thus far.”

9/6/18 || PROFILE: ‘THE PERFECTIONIST’
Mac Miller is finally making the music he’s always wanted to make

(Vulture)

“This is partly because Mac hears sounds even a keen ear might miss, and while this causes a potentially unhealthy level of self-reflection it also keeps him in a close orbit of jazz fusion guys like Thundercat, the funk apostle Dam Funk, and rap technicians Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar. Listening to the playback of “Ladders” on site in the mixing room at Colbert, Miller caught an almost imperceptible rhyming misquote in a backing vocal and asked staff to adjust the levels subtly so it blended in better. It’s not preciousness so much as a studio rat’s high bar for professionalism.”

Read the full profile here.

9/10/18 || TOM MISCH PAYS TRIBUTE TO MAC: COVER OF “WHAT’S THE USE”

(Billboard)

One for Mac ?❤️ pic.twitter.com/VoO8mbzo13

— Tom Misch (@TomMisch) September 10, 2018

“A gifted guitarist, Misch posted a clip of himself laying sweet licks over Miller’s ‘What’s the Use,’ a cut from his recently released LP Swimming. The original beat fits well into Misch’s own catalog. If you’ve heard his tracks, like ‘Lost in Paris’ or ‘South of the River,’ you’ll catch a similar vibe.”

Read more at Billboard.

REVIEW: ‘EMANON’ BY WAYNE SHORTER — GRAND AMBITIONS ON FULL DISPLAY

(Wall Street Journal)

Jazz legend Wayne Shorter is back with an ethereal, four-part album that comes with an accompanying graphic novel and a peek into Shorter’s mind as a composer, performer, and storyteller.

“Once the orchestra joins in, the effect is something like an overture, with hints of Aaron Copland’s grandeur in the strings. Yet Mr. Shorter’s presence as a composer and orchestrator has little precedent. Tendrils of melody flower into larger movements. Foregrounds and backgrounds shift position with provocative beauty. The music sounds lush yet free of concert-music convention. When Mr. Shorter’s saxophone grabs the spotlight again near the end, he sounds gloriously unrestrained while highlighting the blues at the music’s core. In “Prometheus Unbound,” Mr. Shorter engages in some playful playful call-and-response with the orchestra’s strings. The harmonies of “Lotus” flicker with subtle yet forceful shifts of color. “The Three Marias,” arranged by Messrs. Perez and Patitucci, retains the original’s dancing quality, yet here, freed of its electric-bass anchor and fleshed out through orchestral textures, swirls with newfound possibilities.”

Read more here.

REVIEW: SWAMP DOGG ‘LOVE, LOSS, AND AUTO-TUNE’

(Pitchfork)

Beloved R&B vocalist Swamp Dogg, who made a name for himself as one of the seminal voices of 20th-century R&B (quite literally: born Jerry Williams Jr., “Swamp Dogg” is a pseudonym that he adopted in the ’70s). Now, the 76-year-old artist is back with a gleaming technological sound that comes courtesy of producers Ryan Olsen and Justin Vernon and their favorite synthesizers.

“R&B’s weirdest—and most radical—weirdo modernizes his sound on an album that uses Auto-Tune to convey the ecstasies of love, the misery of loss, and the economic desperation of life in Trumpland… Rather than adopt the austerity of the soul revival, Swamp Dogg embraces this technology as something fresh and new, another tool he can use to get his point across and sound fabulous doing it.”

Read the full review here.