Juno award winner Gordon Grdina is a Oud/Guitarist whose sound is a combination of his interests in mainstream jazz, free- form improvisation and Arabic classical music. Out of Vancouver GG Trio, Qalandar, Haram and Peregrine Falls. Out of NYC The Gordon Grdina Quartet with Oscar Noriega, Russ Lossing, and Satoshi Takeishi, The Oud Trio with Hank Roberts and Mark Helias, and Ismaily/Grdina/Maneri.
On Vanheusenism, the Sicilian-born pianist, vocalist and songwriter gorgeously interprets the celebrated songwriter, best known for his work with Frank Sinatra
“The Italian-born Schächter never seemed to run out of ideas. Often unfurling long, cascading runs, she balanced fluid improvisations with a soulful touch, adding subtle harmonic accents here and there…” —Mike Joyce, The Washington Post
“Daniela Schächter cements traditional idioms with modern ideas, and boasts a melodic voicing that is easy on the ears and comfortable on the senses.” – Susan Frances, JazzTimes.com
Performances:
October 18 Sahara Club, Methuen, MA
October 20 at Thelonious Monkfish, Cambridge, MA
October 22 at Chris’ Jazz Café, Philadelphia, PA
October 27 at Kitano in NYC
A gifted composer in addition to being an expressive vocalist and pianist, Daniela Schächter focuses her attention on a single songwriter for the first time in her career on her fourth album, Vanheusenism: A Tribute to Jimmy Van Heusen (due out September 9). The album features 11 tunes from the pen of Van Heusen, one of the most prolific and celebrated songwriters of the 20th century, along with the title track, written as a tribute by Schächter.
Born in 1913, Jimmy Van Heusen wrote dozens of songs that have become timeless standards, several of which are included herein – including “All the Way,” “Darn That Dream,” “Here’s That Rainy Day,” and “Come Fly With Me.” He was best known for his long association with Frank Sinatra (he rushed Ol’ Blue Eyes to the hospital after Sinatra’s failed suicide attempt in the aftermath of his split with Ava Gardner), his collaborations with lyricist Sammy Cahn providing the titles for several of Sinatra’s classic albums from the late 1950s. But he composed hundreds of songs over the course of his long career, writing for film, television and theater and garnering an Emmy and four Academy Awards.
On Vanheusenism, these songs are reinvigorated by a skilled and deftly communicative band, all longtime associates of Schächter’s. Both tenor saxophonist Mike Tucker and drummer Mark Walker are frequent collaborators in the singer/pianist’s adopted hometown of Boston, where she teaches at Berklee College of Music. Bassist Michael O’Brien, who engages Schächter in a playful, spirited duo version of “Call Me Irresponsible,” enjoyed a lengthy trio stint with her during a residency at the New York City club The Garage.
Born in Sicily, Schächter studied at Berklee College of Music and the Henry Mancini Institute at UCLA. She went on to win Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead Competition in 2002 and the Mary Lou Williams Jazz Piano Competition in 2005, and has performed with influential artists including the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra, Terri Lyne Carrington, Patti Austin, Marian McPartland, Regina Carter, Kevin Mahogany, Christian McBride, Tiger Okoshi and Shirley Horn, among others. She has also performed under the baton of such notable jazz and classical conductors as Quincy Jones, Patrick Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, John Clayton Jr., Elmer Bernstein, Bob Brookmeyer, Justin DiCioccio and Phil Wilson.
While she’d performed many of Van Heusen’s songs during her career, Schächter hadn’t looked closely into his repertoire until she was interviewed for Jim Burns’ documentary on the songwriter, Jimmy Van Heusen: Swingin; with Frank & Bing. “Since then I’ve been exploring his music more in-depth,” Schächter says. “His songs have both clever lyrics and intriguing harmonic progressions: appealing to the new generation and the old generation as well.”
Throughout Vanheusenism, Schächter puts her own unique and elegant spin on Van Heusen’s classic songs, often reimagining the songs’ harmonic texture or rhythmic sensibility to make them her own. “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” for instance, typically rendered as a winsome ballad, takes on a bright mid-tempo pace in Schächter’s version, her harmonic changes capturing the sense of wonder and discovery in the lyrics. Similarly, “Darn That Dream” captures the mystified consternation of the lyrics, Schächter vividly rendering the groggy frustration as dream dissipates into lovelorn wakefulness.
There’s a hint of bossa bounce to “The Second Time Around,” a danger-courting freneticism in “It Could Happen To You,” a simmering pop cool on “But Beautiful,” and a bluesy swing to the album-closing, unaccompanied “I Thought About You.” Knowing when not to mess with perfection, Schächter maintains the breezy, jet-setting spirit of “Come Fly With Me” and the yearning wistfulness of “All the Way.”
Schächter combines “Like Someone in Love” and “Imagination” into a medley, a recognition of the kinds of harmonic patterns that recurred frequently in Van Heusen’s work, making such pairings natural. “Once I started researching, I could see how similar some of his tunes were to one another,” Schächter says. “But at the same time, every tune was completely different. Melodically he could really develop the ideas in different ways, with very interesting musical details, despite the similarities between some of the tunes.”
She added a new intro and outro to “Here’s That Rainy Day,” which opens the album, and contributed a brand new song in the composer’s recognizable style. “Vanheusenism” combines several elements gleaned from Van Heusen’s oeuvre (check the motif that the bass and sax play in unison, for instance) into a new love song featuring a romantic solo by Tucker.
While Vanheusenism marks Schächter’s first foray into Songbook territory, it follows her previous releases in building an album around a unifying central concept. Her last release, Purple Butterfly, focused on the feeling of loneliness and yearning through changing seasons, moving thematically through nearly a full calendar year; its predecessor, I Colori Del Mare, was centered on her Sicilian motherland.
“I like to make an album sound connected, with a definite direction, so a listener understands immediately what I’m trying to deliver,” Schächter explains. “In this case, Vanheusenism is my way of representing an expression that comes from listening to and playing his tunes all the time.”
It’s also a way of looking back at a bygone era, when singers and songwriters were two different creatures, each an expert in their own unique form. “Now we have songwriters who do everything: they sing, they compose, they write lyrics,” says Schächter, who can certainly count herself in that category. “Back then how music was made was so different. The result is that the songs are amazingly written and are still played after so many years. The ideas are still so strong and the melodies are still so interesting. I’d like to keep that tradition alive and perform those tunes in a way that might interest a new generation.”
Heralded voice/bass partnership delivers program with a focus on musical purity and universal fellowship in their first recording without other accompanists in 20 years
"Where jazz meets Latin with elegance and soulŠ" - The Boston Globe.
CD release concerts October 23 and December 13 at the Lilypad, Cambridge, MA
October 29 at The Dance Hall, Kittery, ME
Mili Bermejo Sextet performing September 23 at Beantown Jazz Festival
Since first joining forces over a quarter-century ago, vocalist Mili Bermejo and bassist Dan Greenspan have created a recorded library of timeless music with a number of cherished partners. For those fortunate enough to experience them in live performance, however, the lingering memory of this brilliantly skilled and totally compatible couple is likely to be the moments when they stand alone. "We have always wanted to make pure music," Greenspan explains, "and have always included duo tunes in our sets." On October 7, 2016 the pair releases their first all-duo program in two decades, Arte de Duo, on Ediciones Pentagrama. Bermejo, born in Buenos Aires, raised in Mexico City and a professor at Berklee College of Music since 1984, and Greenspan, a New Haven native and classically trained cellist who became one of the Boston area's leading freelance bassists, have created a unique body of music that applies jazz improvisation to original songs and music from throughout the Americas. Themes of political liberation, environmental responsibility and interpersonal commitment have defined both their music and their career and led them to a major life decison. "The business changed so much post-9/11 that we had to decide whether we should reinvent ourselves," Bermejo notes. This led to what Greenspan describes as "an entire creative undertaking of another kind" - a move to New Hampshire, where the couple built their own house. "We decided to live the right way," Bermejo says of their relocation to a nature reserve. "It has brought us closer and closer to `do it yourself,' including growing as much of our own food and making as many of our own clothes as possible. It has purified us, and removed many of our frustrations." But, Greenspan adds, "For a while, the move replaced music. Finding opportunities to rehearse in Boston when everyone we worked with had so many other gigs became hell." The bassist also turned his attention to baking and has built a growing reputation with his Dan's Brick Oven Bread, while a construction accident also left him unable to play for several months. The future of their performing partnership became unclear.
"But Mili insisted that we couldn't let the music go," Greenspan stresses, and the result is a new focus on the intimate artistry that had previously only been showcased on their 1997 album Duo which was released on Gunther Schuller's GM Records. "It got us back to the essence of art," he says, "and provides the best opportunity to use all of the classical information that we have." Yet the new music, developed over a series of monthly gigs at the Lilypad in Cambridge, Massachusetts, takes the pair beyond their previous achievements. "We didn't want to repeat ourselves," Bermejo adds. "Now we reduce. I think of the music like my garden, as being all about beauty after years of work. And nobody told me how to do it."
The influence of life in New Hampshire is clear in the Bermejo originals "La Casa del Arbol" ("The Tree House"), about "a secret refugeŠamong trees and stars" and "Cosecha" ("Harvest"); but she also contributes two new titles in her string of beautiful love songs, "Los que se Aman" ("Those Who Love") and "No Dejo de Quererte" ("I Don't Stop Loving You"). The duo also links Bermejo's "Décima Muerte I" from their first duo disc and "Décima Muerte II" by the Mexican poet and playwright Xavier Villarrutiga in a medley linked by a powerful Greenspan solo.
Greenspan's bass also launches "Las Orillas del Mar" ("At the Edge of the Sea"), a 13th Century feminist poem with music by Hafez Modirzadeh, the composer-saxophonist who featured Bermejo extensively on his acclaimed 2011 album In Convergence Liberation (Pi Recordings). "Working with Hafez is the most challenging thing I've done," she notes, "and it has opened both of our minds. Now I'm improvising more, though not `taking a chorus' in the traditional sense."
This new improvisational freedom is joyously displayed on "Tres Veces Heroica" ("Three Times Heroic"), written by Mexican composer Charlie Dríguez and previously heard on the 2006 live recording De Tierra (Of Earth) (Ediciones Pentagrama), and "End of the Beginning," written for the duo by the Armenian-born pianist and composer Vardan Ovsepian. "Windmills of Your Mind," by French composer Michel Legrand with Spanish lyrics by Manuel Gurria, was also arranged by Ovsepian. "Vardan's arrangement got Dan back in shape after his injury," Bermejo notes, adding with a laugh, "it also made me get back in shape."
Two works from Argentina are included, "Equipaje" ("Luggage") by Juan Quintero and "Cambalache" ("Pawn Shop") by E. Santos Discépolo. The latter, a classic tango, gives Greenspan the opportunity to display his skill with the bow. "Candombe para Gardel" ("Candombe for Gardel"), a tribute to Argentinian tango master Carlos Gardel from the Afro-Uruguayan perspective of Rubén Rada, completes the program.
Arte del Duo is Bermejo's fifth release on Mexico's Ediciones Pentagrama label, which recently received the Independence Award from the Fundación Mediterránea Mar y Tierra in Tarragona, Spain. "We've stayed faithful to the vision of [label founder] Modesto López: Independence and 35 years of support to Latin American artists dedicated to progressive social change," she notes.
The album will be released at the Lilypad on Sunday afternoon, October 23, where a new audio system created especially for the duo by sound engineer Art Steele will enhance the performance. "I asked Art for a minimal system, with just two small speakers, Greenspan explains. "Now my hands are free, just like my mother's were when she sang," Bermejo adds.
Creativity, and the magic that ensues, remain at the heart of Mili Bermejo's and Dan Greenspan's music; and Arte del Duo is their most creative and magical statement to date.
French saxophone player Faïz Lamouri began the study of saxophone and music at a very early age. After eight years of classical studies, he became interested in jazz through musicians like Paul Desmond, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.
Faïz received a scholarship in 2008 to attend the prestigious New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. There he refined his craft with internationally renowned jazz musicians including Mark Tuner, Reggie Workman, Abraham Burton, Joel Frahm, Vincent Herring, Wayne Escoffery and Andy Milne. Faïz graduated with honors in May 2011 from the New School.
In New York, Faïz also performed regularly with his own band in famous Jazz venues. He was notably featured at the Iridium Jazz Club as part of their Rising Stars Series. Faïz moved back to Paris in 2013 and continues to perform in Jazz clubs and Festivals around the world.
Comprised mostly of his original compositions, his debut album transports the listener into a highly captivating and creative musical universe. It also brings together world class musicians such as bassist Vicente Archer and drummer Damion Reid as well as talented Italian pianist Sam Mortellaro.
Vicente and Damion play together since the early 2000's and are an essential part of today's jazz scene. Just like them, Faïz and Sam shared the stage around the world for many years. The recording of this album was thus a true dialogue between musicians who share a deep connection.
Jazz is created in the moment and with great complicity. It is an essential condition for it to convey sincere and intense emotions to the listener. And that’s exactly what Wonders do.
Internationally Acclaimed Saxophonist/Composer Miguel Zenón
releases intimate new recording Típico
February 10, 2017 on Miel Music
Zenón's 10th recording as a leader celebrates his longstanding quartet
with Luis Perdomo, Hans Glawischnig, Henry Cole
Miguel Zenón's new album, Típico, is above all a celebration of his longstanding quartet. His past several releases have generally fleshed out that core unit with additional instrumentalists as Zenón has looked outward to explore various aspects of his Puerto Rican heritage. This new album feels more intimate. Its focus stays closer to home, with nods to Zenón's own personal and professional life as it zeroes in on what makes his band unique.
"I was thinking about what this band and the guys in the band mean to me as I was writing the music," he explains. "I kept going back to this idea of us developing this common language that identifies us as a band."
That language has been developing for more than a decade. Pianist Luis Perdomo and bassist Hans Glawischnig have been with Zenón since the turn of the millennium; Henry Cole joined the band in 2005. Their language is thoroughly fluent modern jazz, with all the instrumental prowess and rhythmic and harmonic complexity that that implies. But the dialect they've created together through the years is distinctive.
"'Típico' refers to something that's customary to a region or a group of people," Zenón says. "Or something that can be related to a specific group of people. And when I was writing the music, I was thinking about music that identified us and this band."
Each of the album's final three tracks, Zenón notes, was composed around a solo or signature rhythmic line that one of the band members had played before. "My approach was more systematic on those three compositions specifically. But the whole record essentially is about representing the sound of the band. The sound of our band."
The album opens with "Academia," a tune inspired by Zenón's teaching at New England Conservatory, where he serves as part of the jazz faculty. "One of the great things about teaching at NEC is that I get the opportunity to create a personalized curriculum for each of my private students, depending on their needs and on what I feel they should be working on. So I find myself having to come up with new exercises constantly, in order to keep our interactions interesting and challenging. This composition is built around various harmonic and rhythmic exercises that I developed with some of my more recent students at the school."
The second track, "Cantor," honors Zenón's friend and frequent collaborator Guillermo Klein. "Gullermo's music has a very personal voice, something very unique. With this piece I was trying to convey some of what I feel are his most interesting qualities as a composer, like the lyrical character of his melodies and the very nuanced harmonic movement of his pieces. He also has very particular way of organizing the 3/4 bar, which he breaks down into three bars of 7/8 and one bar of 3/8. The piece touches on this a bit towards the end, sort of as a way of tipping my hat to a great friend and musician."
The third and fourth tracks both stem from Zenón pondering what gives a particular song a folkloric feel. "Ciclo" emphasizes melody and rhythm, Zenón taking "a melody that is meant to sound very folkloric - a bit simpler harmonically and delineating a very specific beat" and building a complex extended cycle around it using smaller, interlocking rhythmic cells.
"Típico" approaches its folkloric aims harmonically. "There's a harmonic cadence that is very common in Latin American music, especially music in the Caribbean. Something that revolves around a minor key and then slides down, going 'Subdominant Minor - Tonic Minor - Dominant - Tonic Minor.' A very simple cadence, but one that is very unique and effective. It's always caught my ear because I'm always on the lookout for things that serve as sort of musical connecting threads, things that makes me feel that the music from all these different countries and cultural expressions is somehow connected and coming out of the same combination of elements. I built this specific composition around this cadence, and called it "Típico" in reference to this Pan-American idea."
"Sangre Di Me Sangre" is a tune the quartet has been playing for a while now, a balladic tribute to Zenón's 4-year-old daughter, Elena, written before her first birthday. "I was sitting in this park with her," he recalls. "She was playing around and I sat down and sketched out the song on my notepad." Zenón wrote the piece first with lyrics, then orchestrated it for the quartet, featuring Glawischnig's bass both on a sprightly introductory melody played in unison with Perdomo and on a solo meant to convey a singing quality.
Glawischnig is also featured on "Corteza," its melody derived from Zenón's transcription of his bass solo opening the track "Calle Calma" on the 2009 Zenón album Esta Plena. It, too, has a balladic feel, with lyrical solos from Zenón and Perdomo leading to a closing uptempo restatement of the theme.
The Perdomo feature "Entre Las Raíces" ("Amongst the Roots") is more fiery, emphasizing two key facets of the pianist's musical personality. The intricate melody he and Zenón whip through together was transcribed from a Perdomo solo on "Street View: Biker," the opening track on Perdomo's album Awareness. But this arrangement opens with Perdomo playing wild and free, and Zenón's alto solo when it comes reveals a free side of his own, veering more toward Ornette Coleman or Albert Ayler.
"The piece is very free in terms of the way we deal with the improvised segments," says Zenón. "Luis always talks about listening to Bud Powell and Cecil Taylor at the same time when he was growing up in Caracas, and always having a foot in this freer, avant-gardish world of jazz. And when you hear him play on that track, it sounds that way. For that piece specifically, he really sounds like he's 100 percent in his element."
Cole's playing is suitably free on "Entre Las Raíces" as well, but his featured track, "Las Ramas" ("The Branches," Cole's own debut album having been titled "Roots Before Branches"), required more discipline. "I wrote the piece around this figure that he has been developing over the last few years and plays all the time," says Zenón. "The piece is very difficult to play - sort of like an etude for the drums, pretty much. And I know he worked very hard on it. Even though the original idea came from him, he worked very hard on making it precise and making it clean, and really sounded amazing on this track."
It's no accident that the final three songs are named for parts of a tree. "I was thinking of the band as a tree," Zenón acknowledges. "And thinking of myself as the watcher. I mean, I'm part of it also. But mostly I'm observing these amazing musicians night after night, and how together they kind of make up this living organism."
Zenón is onto something with that metaphor. The spotlight cast by Típico illuminates how alive his quartet's music has always been, while never ceasing to evolve and grow.
About Miguel Zenón
A multiple Grammy® nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, Zenón is one of a select group of musicians who have masterfully balanced and blended the often-contradictory poles of innovation and tradition. Widely considered one of the most groundbreaking and influential saxophonists of his generation, Zenón has also developed a unique voice as a composer and as a conceptualist, concentrating his efforts on perfecting a fine mix between Latin American folkloric music and jazz. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Zenón has recorded and toured with a wide variety of musicians including Charlie Haden, Fred Hersch, Kenny Werner, Bobby Hutcherson and Steve Coleman and is a founding member of the SFJAZZ Collective.
Just an early heads up that on February 10, 2017 saxophonist/composer Miguel Zenón will be releasing his 10th recording Típico on Miel Music. The album features his longstanding quartet with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Hans Glawischnig, and drummer Henry Cole.
He'll also be touring widely to support the release. 2017 Tour dates currently booked include:
* February 10 - Villa Victoria Center for the Arts - Boston, MA
* February 11 - Annenberg Center Live, Philadelphia, PA
* February 14 - 19 - Village Vanguard, New York, NY
* February 22 - The Loft at UCSD - San Diego, CA
* February 23 - Kuumbwa Jazz Center - Santa Cruz, CA
* February 24 - 26 - SFJazz Center, Joe Henderson Lab - San Francisco, CA
* March 1- Earshot Jazz - Seattle, WA
* March 2 & 3 - Dazzle Jazz, Denver, CO
* March 5: Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society, Half Moon Bay, CA
* March 7: Appalachian State University, Boone, NC
For the 13th edition of OUT.FEST that will take place as usual in the city of Barreiro, Portugal, across the river Tagus from Lisbon, from October 6 to 9, we announce the first names confirmed on the program, that reflect some of the focus that has been part of the curatorial fabrics of the festival. As always, the priority is given to whom has been developing a musical work of bravery, creativity, progression and artistic coherence - the provenance of one’s aesthetic field or vocabulary is not a primordial concern.
Thus, we find one of the most fundamental bands of the history of jazz - not only the free, but the whole of it - in the last decades, in the trio of Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton, for its first show in Portugal in 15 years; the spearheads of the tradition of Japanese psychedelic heavy rock Acid Mothers Temple, as always led by the Hendrixian virtuoso Makoto Kawabata.
Acid Mothers Temple
The return of Peter Kember, which is to say Sonic Boom, to present his project E.A.R. (Experimental Audio Research), a short time after settling residence in our country. Mr Kember will also offer a workshop project to announce further ahead; the legendary Lê Quan Ninh, french percussionist, composer and improviser, will also come to present a solo show as well as a workshop.
Peter Kember
Lê Quan Ninh
Foodman, from Yokohama/Tokyo, will premiere in Portugal as part of his first European tour, after crashing the scene as a revelation of an electronica that cross-pollinates and distills every possible style (in potency) that this neo-renaisssance and futurist producer can grab and mold in a concretist manner.
Foodman
Tropa Macaca, who have seen the release this Summer of their new LP “Vida” by Londoner label The Trilogy Tapes, constituted by 4 rites with its singular density and psychodynamic breath, the new episode of this music rich in harmonics textures and mediumship rhythms, an infinite techno ballad composed by gracious phrasings on guitar and an aural landscape played by an original electronic system.
Tropa Macaca
Ondness
Ondness is the most active heteronym in recent times of Bruno Silva, tireless musician with a route amply registered with releases published internationally in the last few years, on this project particularly focused on humid landscaping and vaguely toxic, which he processes and distills countless references of composition, improvisation, electronic and ambient music.
The festival, accordingly to his identity, will take place throughout different stages and venues in Barreiro, and the global passes will be on sale online starting tomorrow August 5, with a special price of 20€ until September 9th.
