Kenny Barron's Book of Intuition (on the revived Impulse! label) is an infectiously joyous album, bursting with riffs and vamps and sparkling chords over head-swaying melodies, some infused with a Latin tinge, others crooning with lyrical balladry, all of them propelled by a forceful forward motion, whatever the tempo.
Henry Threadgill won the Pulitzer Prize this year for his 2015 album, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, but his latest album, Old Locks and Irregular Verbs (just out this month on the Pi Recordings label), is better still. It's his true career milestone, one of the great jazz compositions of the past several years, a musical masterpiece beyond category.
First things first. Yes, Dave Douglas named his new album, Dark Territory, after my new book of the same title. This may seem odd: my book is about the history of cyber war; Douglas' album is a deep-dive exploration of improvisation, composition, and technology in the risky corners of jazz and electronica. But in an email sent out by his self-owned label, Greenleaf Music, he explains that both works are about "similarly mysterious murky waters of underground activity" and that he found my title fitting because, like the characters in my book, he and his band are "playing through a similar territory without rules where the dangers and challenges of technology are much greater than normal."
If this doesn't wind up as the year's archival jazz find, I can't wait for the treasure that beats it. In Paris: The ORTF Recordings (on the Resonance Records label) is dazzling, riveting stuffpreviously unissued sessions by Larry Young, made during a brief stay in Paris, from December 1964 to February 1965, just before his string of Blue Note albums established him as the modern innovator on the Hammond B-3 organ.
Until Zenith, the first release on his own label, Inner Voice Jazz, pianist Marc Copland had never played with trumpeter Ralph Alessi, but they prove an ideal match. Joined by bassist Drew Gress (who has long played with both musicians) and drummer Joey Baron (who can play anything with anybody), this might turn out to be a "classic quartet."
Hey, why have a blog if you can't plug your own wares now and then? Today, March 1, is pub date for my new book, Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War (Simon & Schuster). John le Carré calls it "a book that grips, informs, and alarms, finely researched and lucidly related." The New York Times hails it as "an eye-opening history . . . a page-turner . . . consistently surprising." Kirkus Reviews describes it as "important, gripping, disturbing."
Blackstar has been called David Bowie's "death album" (several of its songs allude to death, he died of cancer two days after its release), but that makes it seem like a grisly novelty number when, in fact, it's a masterpieceand, for purposes of this blog, a work of jazz-rock fusion that, unlike many stabs at the genre, truly fuses the two idioms, staying true to both, creating something new in the process, rather than watering them down in a muddy swamp.
Paul Bley is featured on The Montreal Tapes, with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian.
I missed the chance to send off an R.I.P. to the jazz pianist Paul Bley, who died on January 3, at the age of 83, so I'm catching up with this advance notice of a free memorial concert to be held this Thursday night, February 11, featuring piano solos by seven of his acolytesmost notably Ethan Iverson and Frank Kimbrough, whom I've lauded on this page many times.
I wrote about the new audiophile label Analog Spark a few months ago, on its vinyl reissue of Dave Brubeck's oft-overlooked 1954 Jazz Goes to College. Now its proprietor, Mark Piro, has come out with a few Broadway musical soundtracks, the best of which is West Side Story, with its score by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by a young Stephen Sondheim.