This Week on Jazz Spectrum - 10/14

By Fritz Byers

A couple of days ago, I posted a few thoughts about the drummer Ed Blackwell. You can find that post immediately below. This week, Jazz Spectrum begins with “Nebula,” the track that opens What It Be Like?, the posthumous release of the Ed Blackwell Project, recorded in performance in August 1992, two months before his passing. In addition to Ed’s typically nuanced yet propulsive drumming, check out the twined horns of the saxophonist Carlos Ward and the cornetist Graham Haynes.  Other reflections of Ed’s work will be sprinkled through the sets on this weekend’s Jazz Spectrum Overnight.

Also this week, a mélange of trumpets. The second hour of Jazz Spectrum opens with a piece from one of Wadada Leo Smith’s magnificent Chicago Symphonies, a set of extended compositions released two years ago. We’ll hear the second movement from the Sapphire Symphony, titled The Presidents and Their Vision for America. The movement is titled “Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg: Two Seven Two, 1863.”  All this labeling may seem grandiose, but once you hear Wadada’s composition and his improvisations on it, paired with the saxophone of Jonathon Haffner, all abetted by the master drummer Jack DeJohnette, you’ll get the point. Wadada’s late-career accomplishments are mind-bendingly diverse. I hope you find this tune an inviting point of entry.
Later in the set, Wynton Marsalis works out on one of Louis Armstrong’s signature tunes, “When It’s Sleepy Time Down South.” Wynton’s tone and verve are an homage to Louis, and also a winning reflection of his own exuberant style.

And the set concludes with the trumpeter Ingrid Jensen, working with keyboardist Jason Miles, on the Miles Davis tune, “Jean Pierre.” The track comes from Kind of New, an elliptical although apt allusion to Miles’s quintessential record, Kind of Blue. As the composer would have wanted, Jason and Ingrid take the tune’s structure mainly as a departure point. Jason’s keyboard sounds are so distorted that I hear them almost as the kind of fuzzy guitar support Miles first introduced in his early fusion days with John McLaughlin. As you’ve heard over the years on Jazz Spectrum, Ingrid can do nearly anything on her horn, and her flights on this tune are magnificent.

Miles Davis in performance in Tokyo in 1964 opens the following set. This iteration of his group had Sam Rivers occupying the tenor-saxophone slot, succeeding George Coleman and preparing things for Wayne Shorter. Sam is all too often lost in the shuffle, and in the deluge of great tenor players that flowed through the music in the 1960s, so it’s nice to hear his fluid style and the harmonic innovations he contrives on the Cole Porter evergreen, “All of You.” And of course, Miles does his impeccable narrow-range muted magic on the tune.