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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.

LIST: THE BEST JAZZ OF 2018

(New York Times)

“Some of the most trusted names in jazz and a host of innovative young disrupters brought cross-media collaborations and fresh approaches to the genre.”

1. Wayne Shorter, ‘Emanon’

Here’s a grand reckoning with the most revered compositional voice in contemporary jazz. The first of three discs here is defined by the kinetic synergy between the saxophonist’s quartet and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. The album isn’t complete without its accompanying graphic novel, written by Mr. Shorter and Monica Sly, and illustrated by Randy DuBurke.

2. Ambrose Akinmusire, ‘Origami Harvest’

For the past decade, Ambrose Akinmusire has played trumpet with a fresh style: elusive and rarely resolving, but also ruby-red and urgent. His newest album reminds us that his compositions can achieve the same balance of intimacy and vision.

3. Logan Richardson, ‘Blues People’

Thrashing and full of impact but endlessly slippery, Logan Richardson’s two-electric-guitar quintet remains guided at every turn by his alto saxophone. No one plays the instrument with the same sweltering, swooning grace.

4. Esperanza Spalding, ‘12 Little Spells’

Esperanza Spalding took her time on this one, crafting a video album of millennial-size ambition, ranging from orchestral jazz with loquacious lyrics to therapeutic funk. Altogether, it’s a little like experiencing the ecstatic philosophy of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (her writings on, say, the interrelation of language, desire and physical texture) as sounds and moving images.

See the full list over at NY Times.

YEAR IN REVIEW: 2018 PROVED JAZZ IS STILL RELEVANT—HERE’S WHY

(KQED)

“In one sense, jazz is far from the mainstream dance music it once was in the 1930s and ’40s at the height of its big band era. Popular tastes have moved on to hip-hop and electronic music, and to some, jazz carries connotations of high-brow, out-of-touch intellectualism.

But 101 years since the first jazz recording, the genre is very much alive. In fact, it’s experiencing a transformation before our eyes. Pay no mind to the “jazz is dead” crowd, or get caught up in the fanfare when unheard material from Miles Davis or John Coltrane finds the light of day. Those vintage releases preserve notions of what the music should still sound like, when in 2018, jazz’s youthful innovators mold the art form in their image, integrating contemporary influences while continuing the music’s storied history of activism and experimentation.

As leading jazz critic Nate Chinen writes in his new book, Playing Changes: Jazz for the New Century: ‘Instead of a push for definition and one prevailing style, we have boundless permutations without fixed parameters. That multiplicity lies precisely at the heart of the new aesthetic—and is the engine of its greatest promise.’”

Read the full article here.

HOW TO RESPOND TO THE CHALLENGES OF OUR TIME?: JAZZ LEGENDS HERBIE HANCOCK & WAYNE SHORTER GIVE 10 PIECES OF ADVICE TO YOUNG ARTISTS, AND EVERYONE ELSE

(Open Culture)

“Some moments in history strike us as dramatic ruptures. Certainties are superseded, thrown into chaos by a seismic event, and we find ourselves adrift and anxious. What are artists to do? Gripped by the same fears as everyone else, the same sense of urgency, writers, musicians, filmmakers, painters, etc. may find themselves unable to ‘breathe with unconditional breath / the unconditioned air,’ as Wendell Berry once described the creative process.

We might remember the radical break with tradition when the shocking carnage of World War I sent poets and painters into frightening places they had previously left unexplored. Virginia Woolf summed up the situation in her essay The Leaning Tower: ‘suddenly like a chasm in a smooth road, the [Great] war came.’ Shattered as they were, her generation overcame their paralysis. Modernists of the early 20th century were able to speak to their broken age in ways that continue to speak to ours.

But we should temper our belief that bad times make good art by noting that the most visionary creative minds are not simply reactive, responding to tragedy like reporters on a crime scene. As Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock— two of the 20th century’s most consistently innovative musicians—suggest, artists at all times need a set of guiding principles. (See the two play ‘Memory of Enchantment’ above in 2002.) There is always a lot of personal work to do. And in ‘turbulent and unpredictable times,’ the two jazz greats advise, ‘the answer to peace is simple; it begins with you.’”

A CENTURY LATER, AN ILLUMINATED EULOGY FOR A JAZZ PIONEER

(NPR Music)

“For his multimedia tribute to jazz pioneer and war hero James Reese Europe, Jason Moran doesn’t wear his usual performance attire. His wife, the musician Alicia Hall Moran, had some ideas for a more meaningful costume.

‘She told me I needed to experience the same weight and pressure Europe and his soldier musicians did when they performed in uniform overseas,’ says Moran.

So as a kind of method acting tool, Moran sits down at the piano in a heavy army green trench coat and tightly laced boots. ‘Those boots are constricting,’ Moran says. ‘It’s a small gesture, but it helps me remember what black bodies had to take for freedom.’

Costuming is just one of the many ways that Moran seeks to inhabit the life and music of Europe, New York’s most prominent black musician in the 1910s. Eubie Blake called Europe the ‘Martin Luther King of music’ for his innovation as a composer and innovator, as well as his charisma and skill as an organizer. In 1912, for example, Europe gathered 125 musicians on Carnegie Hall’s stage for what’s been called the first concert where jazz was ever heard at the venue. He then risked it all, and changed the course of jazz history, by enlisting in WWI, organizing the first black infantry regiment, the 369^th, a group of soldiers and musicians which both fought on the front lines and introduced jazz to France, earning the nickname the Harlem Hellfighters.”

Read more here.

MIX: GILLES PETERSON: A ROY HARGROVE TRIBUTE // 06-12-2018

(Worldwide FM)