Artemis: The State of the Art

by Fritz Byers

Virtuosity runs so deep in the music that I instinctively rebel against the idea of a jazz “super group.” Pick a seemingly run-of-the-mill horn-and-rhythm-section recording date for which the group was composed with a flurry of last-minute calls, and you might bump into a real masterwork. Of course there’s something to be said for stable groups that meld and deepen over long stretches of playing together in performance, in the studio, and at practice. We all can name our favorites. But the methods, techniques, and artistic ambitions of jazz are singularly suited to improvised groups, which makes sense, given the central roles in jazz played by improvisation, innovation, and spontaneity.

At the same time, across jazz history you bump into the occasional supergroup – The Quintet that played at Massey Hall in 1953 comprised Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. Labeled, inevitably, as The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever. Well, maybe.

Or V.S.O.P., a group that came together in the 70s to carry forward Miles Davis’s Second Great Quintet, with Freddie Hubbard taking over for Miles in the company of Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. One studio album and four live records. They were a big deal at the time, but I haven’t heard anyone mention the records for years.

So I suppose jazz has never lacked for supergroups, and it has likewise never lacked for supergroups that dissolved the moment the novelty of the billing wore off – too many stars, not enough band.

On the other hand, the reverse is rare: an assemblage of already-formed voices that, album by album, coheres into a band with its own identity, distinct from the sum of its members’ résumés. That’s the case with Artemis, the band led by the pianist Renee Rosnes. Renee founded the group in 2016, initially for a one-off European tour celebrating International Women’s Day. After the tour, the group formally bonded and took the name Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the hunt, also widely viewed as a symbol of female independence and autonomy.

The most notable thing about this origin story is that, although interesting, it has long since receded into footnote, while the band itself has endured as a working unit, with three albums, three DownBeat Readers Poll wins as Jazz Group of the Year, and a slightly shifting personnel roster that reads like a syllabus for a class in current jazz pathbreaking. That the group is composed entirely of women is a fact worth stating once and celebrating, and then setting aside, because Artemis’s claim on our attention has nothing to do with sex and gender arithmetic and everything to do with what happens when these great musicians get down to making great music from tunes that they have composed or have taken from the repertoire and arranged to make their own

This week on Jazz Spectrum Friday, you’ll hear an hour’s worth of Artemis.

The self-titled 2020 debut introduced the group as an instrumental sextet: Renee, the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, the clarinetist Anat Cohen, the tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana, the bassist Noriko Ueda and the drummer Allison Miller; the vocalist Cécile McLorin Salvant is featured on two tracks. You'll hear the record's opening salvo, Allison’s “Goddess of the Hunt,” a piece that channels the band’s mythological namesake with a surging, unhurried power; Renee’s own “Big Top," which lives up to its title’s suggestion of controlled spectacle; and her reharmonized run at Lee Morgan’s “The Sidewinder,” which trades Morgan’s original bravura strut for something cooler and more graceful without losing the tune’s essential swagger.

Three years later, In Real Time arrived with the tenor role passed to Nicole Glover, and the multi-reedist Alexa Tarantino added in place of Anat – a lineup shift that, rather than disrupting the group's chemistry, seemed to deepen it and expand the sonic range. This weekend’s show includes Renee’s arrangement of the late Lyle Mays's “Slink” – the result is slippery and quietly virtuosic; her own “Balance of Time,” whose title doubles as a fair description of what this band does best; and Alexa’s “Whirlwind,” a tune whose drive and tuneful fervor earn its name.

By this year’s Arboresque, the group had settled into the quintet configuration –  Renee, Ingrid, Nicole, Noriko and Allison – that now constitutes, as the album’s materials avow, its most-traveled and most-empathetic incarnation. Renee’s arrangement of Donald Brown’s “The Smile of the Snake” opens the record with a sinuous unease that gives way to bracing solos; Nicole’s own "Petrichor" is a dreamy, unhurried feature for her tenor, named for the scent of rain on dry earth; and at the record’s center sits Renee’s arrangement of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” taken at a tempo a bit brisker than the tune’s familiar loping gait – a quietly audacious choice for a piece this canonical, and one that pays off in the instrumental exchanges and tight interplay it opens up.

Running through all three records, despite the personnel shifts, is Renee’s talent as an arranger for leaving space, for creating charts loose enough that a soloist can follow her own imaginings where they lead without losing the essential shape underneath. That’s a harder trick than it sounds, and it’s the thread that connects “Goddess of the Hunt” to “Whirlwind” to “Footprints.”

This band is the state of the art. Period.