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A collection of newsworthy jazz-related 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.

JAZZ ICON WAYNE SHORTER CAN PLAY ANYTHING. HE’S STILL TRYING TO SAY EVERYTHING.

(Washington Post)

“Wayne Shorter says he doesn’t really believe in beginnings or endings, so let’s just parachute into 1985, when the garrulous jazz sage felt the need to explain himself to an interviewer who couldn’t keep up with his oratorical playtime: “I’m the kind of person who jumps around when he talks because everything is connected.”

That ability to connect the most disparate of dots has helped Shorter become one of the finest composers in the history of American jazz — and when he receives the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday night, he’ll be recognized for all of that, and then some. Because when you listen to the sweep of his music — whether he made it with Miles Davis, or in Weather Report, or on his own — you can practically hear Shorter’s concept of “everything” growing wide enough to include what lies beyond our perception.

‘There are colors we can’t see, but they’re connected to the ones we can,’ he says, gesturing toward an open window on a breezy October afternoon in his California living room. ‘There’s a connection between everything.’”

Read the full article here.

MAKAYA MCCRAVEN SEES THE FUTURE OF JAZZ THROUGH LAYERS OF HISTORY

(New York Times: New Vanguard)

“Since his second record, ‘In the Moment,’ in 2015, Mr. McCraven has put out a string of albums and mixtapes that amount to a proof of concept. Each one features crudely recorded live improvisations that he has sliced up, pared down and spritzed with effects and extra instrumentals. Part concert bootleg, part hip-hop mixtape, his music — borne of a process rather than a compositional method — has the potential to open up the way musicians think about improvisation.

‘Something that I feel is severely missing in jazz is a connection to the aural tradition — it not just being on the page,’ Mr. McCraven said in a phone interview this week.

His ability to wrap his albums in the dark allure of a club show, the timeless texture of an old Folkways record and the sonic layering of a hip-hop producer has turned Mr. McCraven, 35, into the most discussed young musician on a Chicago jazz scene teeming with fresh energy.”

Read the full interview here.

JAZZ IS DANCE MUSIC AGAIN: Drummer Makaya McCraven and like-minded collaborators such as Shabaka Hutchings are combining advanced improv with rhythms designed to make audiences move

(Rolling Stone)

“Makaya McCraven’s set at New York’s (Le) Poisson Rouge on Sunday touched on a universe of musical styles. Driving funk, hypnotic reggae, loping odd-time vamps, hectic Afrobeat-esque workouts and more all found their way into the mix as the Chicago drummer and his 11-piece all-star band — featuring a roll call of rising jazz stars, including reedists Nubya Garcia and Shabaka Hutchings, harpist Brandee Younger, vibraphonist Joel Ross and violinist Miguel Atwood-Ferguson — presented music from McCraven’s enthralling new LP Universal Beings and earlier efforts like 2017’s Highly Rare. Throughout, one factor remained constant: Every piece featured a groove you could get lost in and, as demonstrated by many in the sold-out crowd, move to.

“I’ve never seen so many people cheering for a vibraphone solo,” my friend said during one gripping Ross improv, and he was right. The reaction McCraven & Co. got at Sunday’s Red Bull Music–backed show feels like part of a groundswell in the genre: a new wave of enthusiasm for jazz, driven by a desire on the part of the musicians to move audiences in a very literal sense. “

LISTEN TO ERYKAH BADU DEBUT NEW MUSIC WHILE HONORING JAZZ GREAT ROY HARGROVE

(Okayplayer)

“On Tuesday (November 6th) Erykah Badu was a guest host on the online radio station NTS Radio. She was on the show for the network’s The Sound of Colour series. It’s a series in which artists do mixes centered around a color.

Naturally, Badu chose green.

During Erykah Badu’s two hour set — which was dedicated to Jazz great Roy Hargrove, who passed away last weekend — she played songs from The Wu-Tang Clan, Earl Sweatshirt, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and more. However, at around the 1:05:04 mark, something special happened. She premiered a new track from herself.”

Listen to the full set here.

SAMPHA’S ‘TREASURE’ PERFORMANCE IS A COLLABORATIVE MOMENT OF BLACK EXCELLENCE

(OkayAfrica)

NPR MUSIC’S 50 BEST ALBUMS OF 2018

(NPR Music)

“Art is identity, scream these best albums of 2018. Even when it’s pure invention. The most striking things we heard this year mined personal experiences that could feel intimate as whispers or bold and overstuffed as superhero science fiction. Even in an era where listeners have been primed for the unexpected, genuine surprises arrived steadily across the last 12 months – a cascade of introductions, breakthroughs, revelations and rebirths to reward whatever precious attention you could give.”

Ambrose Akinmusire, Origami Harvest

Akinmusire, the incorrigibly inventive jazz trumpeter and composer, made this album a deep meld of experimental hip-hop, electronic texture and contemporary chamber music, in a way that feels not just seamless but fully metabolized. The spoken-word element, courtesy of Kool A.D., is slippery and intoxicating; Akinmusire’s string arrangements, for Mivos Quartet, are stirring and sophisticated. And Marcus Gilmore’s beats strike a balance of slash and shudder, groove and dislocation. Suffusing the whole affair is a mournful reflection on the perils of black masculinity in the American system, as well as the larger culture that enables such injustice: “The savage histories / Brutal legacies / Illusory democracies / Feudal tendencies.” But by and large, this isn’t a heavy-hearted album; it rings with horizonless creative possibility, and with a sort of slanted grace. As Kool A.D. offhandedly asserts at one point, against a post-minimalist piano repetition: “Love is the main thing.” —Nate Chinen

Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings

In 2015, drummer Makaya McCraven released In the Moment, an album lauded by critics as a new direction in modern jazz. The record featured reworkings of live recordings from a band he led over the course of a year at a small club in Chicago. Acclaim has followed McCraven through his career ever since, and he’s continued to refine this style of live recording, then remixing his performances.

Universal Beings builds on his strengths by taking the show on the road. Here, McCraven explores not just his own unique drumming style, with added soloists, but some of the most vital jazz scenes of the world: London, Los Angeles, New York and, of course, Chicago. Beyond McCraven’s formidable drumming and editing style, this album sounds like the scenes it was created in. The London side is danceable and upbeat. Los Angeles funky and cool. Chicago is hard-hitting and bombastic. New York is esoteric, boppish and heavy on improvisation. In this way, the record functions like a sort of core sample of the current jazz star-date we’re living in.

As jazz gains more popularity among younger audiences, McCraven is perfectly poised to help steer the ship. So many fusions of jazz and hip-hop have fallen short in terms of their honoring both genres. It’s a beautiful thing to see these energies combine in a way that’s so vital. —Matt Fleeger

Kamasi Washington, Heaven And Earth

If anyone was not clear about the tenor saxophonist, composer and bandleader’s mission after the phenomenon that was 2015’s The Epic, here is another lengthy chapter in his 21st-century gospel: a similarly sprawling, massively scaled, monumentally ambitious and metaphysically minded double album that lasts nearly two and a half hours. (That’s not all: for those who encounter this album in its CD release and who groove to Washington’s sense of the symbolic, there is a “hidden” EP, The Choice, waiting to be liberated from the package by means of a sharp knife — though, bending to the world of 2018, the EP was released digitally a week after the rest of Heaven and Earth.)

Here again, Washington wields giant brushes on the enormous canvases that he prefers — suffused with lush orchestra, celestial choir and currents of sound that envelop the listener — and he’s clearly far more interested in those big gestures than in the fine-detail work of small-group and solo improvisation. Everything is writ on, well, an epic scale, starting from a version of the Bruce Lee film theme “Fists of Fury” transformed into an exhortation to social action, to the church cadences of the closing “Will You Sing.” —Anastasia Tsioulcas

Noname, Room 25

A week after releasing one of the best albums of the year, Noname tweeted out a missive that perfectly encapsulated the frustration of being a wildly creative, independent artist without major-label backing in 2018. “This f*** around and be my last tape,” she wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “The way n***** consume music is so weird. I hope Room 25 means something to someone. If not, I tried.” Her timing coincided with the weekly release of the Billboard 200, where Room 25 failed to debut among the week’s 200 best-selling and -streaming albums. It’s a vivid reminder that, despite rap being the most-consumed genre, the industry has yet to devise a metric capable of accurately measuring the value of black genius.

Raised in the same Bronzeville neighborhood that birthed Gwendolyn Brooks’ Pulitzer-winning work, Noname is hip-hop’s unabashed poet laureate. On Room 25, she continues the coming of age narrative she began with her 2016 Telefone debut by letting us ride shotgun as she journeys and journals from the South Side of Chicago to uncharted territory. But it’s really a trip to her soul, as she counts the wages of American national sin, bartered success, oppressive politics, unrequited love and sexual liberation. “The secret is I’m actually broken / I tried to raise a healing, kneeling at the edge of the ocean,” she raps on “Don’t Forget About Me.” These are redemption songs, forged by Noname’s attempt to reconcile newfound independence with the knowledge that her people will never truly be free.

Her voice is intimate, revealing, satirical, cerebral, always clever and forever questing. All this bone-deep work she’s doing out in public to construct a world out of equal parts diligence and sacred indulgence isn’t really for us: “Nah, actually this is for me,” she raps on “Self.” We’re just fortunate enough to reap the benefit. Meanwhile, the algorithm to chart her soul’s progression has yet to be created. —Rodney Carmichael

Read the full list here.