London saxophonist/composer and BBC Young Jazz Musician of the year semi-finalist Asha Parkinson has come to be known for her creative output which regularly crosses boundaries between traditions, from jazz, to Classical, to world musics and beyond. Forming her ensemble Kalpadruma in 2017 to bring together her voice as both a composer and performer, her new record ‘Possession’ is set to release on September 20th on Ubuntu Music.
The powerfully melodic, rhythmically sophisticated, sometimes groove-based material is accentuated by the compelling timbral variety of her full Kalpadruma ensemble, a 14-piece mini studio orchestra bringing together jazz quintet, string quartet, woodwind, voice and the distinctive sound of the qanun alongside her own inspired sax playing.
‘Kalpadruma’ itself meaning "tree of life" in Indian-origin religions which Parkinson considers to be a perfect metaphor for her creative process, the album is a cinematic global jazz exploration of contrasting expressions of possession, featuring tracks that combine the intensity of a symphony with the concision of a pop single.
Stylistically blurring the boundaries between Jazz, Contemporary Classical, Flamenco, Mediterranean and Arab musics to find its own unique, deeply resonant voice, ‘Possession’ delves into themes of obsessive love to urban trance to mystical inspiration to devotion and beyond, drawing on lyrical motifs from traditional fairy tales to Tolstoy, Huxley, Jalāl al-Dīn Rumi and the Lord’s Prayer in the original Aramaic.
Following the ensemble’s 2022 debut release ‘Onwards’, Kalpadruma has gone on to perform regularly at a number of high profile venues such as the London Jazz Festival, Ronnie Scott’s, the Vortex, 7 Arts Jazz Leeds and more, and collaborate with the likes of the South Asian Youth Orchestra and the Orchestra of Syrian Musicians. Parkinson can also be heard performing and arranging for the National Youth Jazz Orchestra, Issie Barratt’s INTERCHANGE and the Sam Eastmond Big Band, composing for the likes of Table Music and the Ligeti Quartet, and working as the founder and driving force behind Voices Beyond Divisions, a charity dedicated to peace education through music and bringing young people from different cultures together.
Visionary vibraphonist, marimbist and composer Patricia Brennan returns with an adventurous new septet exploring the extremes of rhythmic expression
Breaking Stretch, released Sept. 6, 2024 via Pyroclastic Records, features Jon Irabagon,
Mark Shim, Adam O’Farrill, Kim Cass, Marcus Gilmore and Mauricio Herrera
“The jazz world can get stuck in a battle between the head and the heart, but rarely do you find an improviser like Patricia Brennan [whose] music seems to exist in a realm outside the body, but stays loaded with feeling." Giovanni Russonello, The New York Times
"Brennan supplements her dazzling technique with two-handed independence and unexpected tonal shifts courtesy of judicious use of electronics.” John Sharpe, The New York City Jazz Record
With each new release in her still-burgeoning career, the vision of vibraphonist/marimbist/composer Patricia Brennan has grown exponentially in both scale and scope. From the nucleus of her acclaimed solo debut Maquishti she formed a singular quartet for her venturesome follow-up, More Touch, hailed as “scarily good” by All About Jazz.
On her fiercely original third album, Breaking Stretch, Brennan’s creative imagination expands yet again, supplementing its predecessor’s core band (Brennan, bassist Kim Cass, drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Mauricio Herrera) with an adventurous trio of horns – Jon Irabagon on alto and sopranino saxes, Mark Shim on tenor, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet and electronics. Due out September 6, 2024 via Pyroclastic Records, Breaking Stretch is an enrichment of the themes and influences that made More Touch such a memorable experience: contemporary classical and forward-searching jazz, folkloric traditions from Brennan’s native Mexico, and a wealth of rhythmic inspirations from her youth, ranging from Afro-Caribbean sounds to funk, salsa and brass-driven rock bands.
Breaking Stretch sounds like none of those precursors, exactly, but draws together Brennan’s wide- ranging interests into a dramatic, mesmerizing balance, shifting fluidly between the grooving and the strident, the ethereal and the intricate. Brennan deftly melds the distinctive voices of her collaborators into a densely layered amalgam, the palette of her own mallet instruments transfigureed through the use of electronics.
The title of Breaking Stretch is a concise representation of Brennan’s envelope-pushing ambitions. Breaking references her desire to push herself and her bandmates to their limits, to mine the transcendent results of virtuosic imaginations confronted by unexpected challenges. Stretch captures her music’s intense elasticity, its ability to stretch from the taut and minutely focused to the wide-angled and reaching. Those extremes are depicted in the album’s striking artwork, a mix of astronomical and volcanic images, placing the cosmic and the subterranean side by side – the differences between the opposing poles, as in Brennan’s work, at times nearly indistinguishable.
“I wanted to push the music and the musicians almost to the breaking point,” Brennan explains. “I wrote music that creates the illusion of width and narrowness, either with orchestration techniques or with a play on rhythmic structures.”
Rhythm remains the vital core around which Brennan’s music orbits. The inextricable combination of the percussive and the melodic is uniquely inherent in her own instruments, the vibraphone and marimba; as a composer, she has applied that blend to her ensemble as a whole. Brennan has described the band on More Touch as a percussion quartet, drawing on her classical studies at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Despite the addition of three instrumentalists that would normally be described as melodic voices, she continued to approach the expanded ensemble as a percussion group. In her liner notes, she cites influences ranging from the Fania All-Stars to Earth Wind & Fire to the son jarocho of her hometown in Veracruz.
Beyond the purely musical, Brennan draws profound inspiration from a variety of sources. The new album’s opener, “Los Otros Yo (The Other Selves),” seeks inward for the multifarious identities that make up a single personality; closer “Earendel” looks to the far reaches of the universe as we know it, to the oldest and most distant star yet discovered by humanity. (Brennan is a self-avowed amateur astronomist, who often travels with her own telescope.) Between these bookends are pieces derived from mathematical concepts, Aztec mythology and astrological signs, the poetry of Salvador Díaz Mirón and the visual art of Harry Bertoia.
Brennan’s past also emerges in her blurring of the lines between the mathematical and the emotional in her writing. Both of her parents were engineers, providing her with nurturing role models whose minds tended toward the cerebral and analytical. Applying such concepts to music comes naturally to Brennan, whose music is undeniably complex and heady yet brimming with fervent passion and emotion. “There's mathematics in everything,” she asserts.
“Within mathematics there's tension and release, which are very emotional qualities. For me those push and pull energies coexist, and I feel that every good rhythm strikes a balance between consonance and dissonance. If there's too much dissonance in the rhythm, then it feels tense and hard to listen to; if there's too much consonance it can become boring or stagnant. That perfect balance between tension and release translates back to those numerical combinations.”
Reflecting on her roots in Mexico has become an increasingly complex notion for Brennan. The release of Breaking Stretch marks 20 years since she moved to the States, meaning that she’s fast approaching point at which she will have spent half of her life in her adopted homeland. The nostalgia and soul- searching that the anniversary evokes lend a poignant undercurrent to her music, another instigation to search within and beyond herself.
“Where am I really from now?” she muses. “Am I not Mexican anymore? I've been asking myself those questions a lot recently. There are days when I feel super disconnected from my time in Mexico, almost like it was a distant memory or a dream that never existed. As time passes I’ll probably have to deal with those questions of identity more and more.”
Vibraphonist, marimbist, improviser and composer Patricia Brennan “has been widely feted as one of the instrument’s newer leaders,” observed The New York City Jazz Record. She was voted the top “Rising Star Vibraphonist” in DownBeat magazine’s 70th Critics Poll, and her extensive sidewoman work includes the Grammy-nominated John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Michael Formanek’s Ensemble Kolossus, Matt Mitchell’s Phalanx Ambassadors, the Webber/Morris Big Band, Tomas Fujiwara’s 7 Poets Trio, Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis and Grammy-winner Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro Latin Jazz Big Band, amongst other groups and collectives. She has also collaborated with pianist Vijay Iyer as a member of Blind Spot with writer Teju Cole, Iyer’s large ensemble project Open City and several small ensemble performances along with renowned musicians including bassist Reggie Workman and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith.
Patricia’s own projects include the solo project Maquishti, MOCH - a collaborative duo with percussionist, drummer and turntablist Noel Brennan (DJ Arktureye) - and More Touch, featuring an unusual quartet of mallet percussion, percussion, drums, and bass.
Paris-based, Estonian soul artist Katrin-Merili is proud to share her debut EP ‘Beautiful Things’. Releasing on Friday 30th August, the project sees her channel the soulful energy of Yebba, Moonchild and Donny Hathaway, weaving her vocal around future-facing, blues-laced instrumentals to create a distinctive brand of Nordic neo-soul.
A rising name in the Parisian soul-jazz crossover scene, Katrin has spent the last eight years in the French capital collaborating and building a name for herself, supporting the likes of Roy Ayres at the revered New Morning jazz club. Her path in Paris led to her meeting co-producer Sacha Arnaud, who was able to help Katrin bring her musical vision to life alongside the vibrant presence of talented French musicians including Noé Berne (Nine Sparks Riot) and Remi Klein (Voyou).
‘Beautiful Things’ is a project consisting of five intimate stories centred around femininity, identity, and mental health, touching upon Katrin’s experience of being split between two countries, and supporting her mother through her battle with breast cancer. Due to the deeply personal subject material, Katrin wanted to be as involved as possible across the project, creating her own visual world to accompany the music, she shares:
“I decided to self-produce the EP independently to be able to follow through with my original vision and to make something really personal. I am fully present in all the aspects of the creation, from writing the lyrics to styling, MUA, self-portraits, artworks and collages. Every song is a personal piece of my life and an invite to join me on my journey of self-discovery.”
Lead single ‘Hold My Body’ reflected on a long distance relationship, and the power of love to surpass geographical boundaries, finding widespread support from the likes of Wonderland and WordPlay magazine. Follow up ‘Overjoyed’ explored a moment of joy experienced by Katrin after helping someone else, and serves as a reminder of how rewarding helping those around us can be. Creating a joyous, old-school soul feel akin to Donny Hathaway or Marvin Gaye, complete with wurlitzer organs, grooving bass and carefully arranged choral sections, Katrin shares:
“I wanted for it to sound as warm and human as it felt when I wrote it. In the production process we worked on mixing the old school feel with more of a modern sound, and this song took us the longest production-wise to get the right feeling, as it’s all live instrumentation.”
New York City... August 20th, 2024 While in New York City for the 2023 Jazz Congress, Sylvia Brooks felt compelled to make a pilgrimage to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. Descending into the hallowed ground where nearly 3,000 people lost their lives, she experienced a musical epiphany as “Amazing Grace” swept over her.
Turning to Grammy Award-winning arranger John Beasley to transform that aural vision into reality, Brooks has created a wrenching, arrestingly beautiful rendition of the 18th century English hymn. Available on August 26th 2024 via download and streaming services, the extraordinary arrangement recasts the song’s personal anguish into a communal lament “that at some moments verges almost on discordant,” Brooks says. “It’s a very different version that evokes the melted steel and the souls that were lost there.”
Brooks provides all of the wordless vocals, and the sumptuous four-part harmonies evoke the awe and unspeakable sadness of the space. Beasley’s expressive piano transforms the familiar theme before Daniel Rotem’s almost spectral bass clarinet introduces the melody. Joined by Cameron Stone’s cello the piece gains mass and momentum as Beasley’s arrangement expands the hymn with Edwin Livingston’s supple acoustic bass and Jonathan Pinson’s understated drum work. Lost or found, this work seems to say, we are all wretches unequal to comprehending such loss.
Possessing a sumptuous, velvet-rich tone, Brooks gained widespread attention with her first five critically acclaimed albums, which introduced her sensuous jazz-noir sound. In recent years she’s increasingly turned her attention to writing her own material with projects like 2022’s Signature, which draws on the cream of the Southland jazz scene with ace accompanists Tom Ranier and Christian Jacob.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, Brooks came to jazz as a birthright. Her father, pianist/arranger Don Ippolito, wrote his own music for his Octet and Big Band which were performed in a series on PBS. As a first-call player, he worked with legendary artists such as Stan Getz, Buddy Rich, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan and Dizzy Gillespie. Her mother, Johanna Dordick, was a conservatory-trained opera singer who also dazzled audiences singing pop tunes and standards at East Coast showrooms and resorts (she went on to found the Los Angeles Opera Theater in 1978). Initially drawn to acting, Brooks studied classical theatre at ACT in San Francisco under the tutelage of the great directors Allen Fletcher and Bill Ball. But it was the passing of her father that called her back to her jazz roots.
With “Amazing Grace,” the inimitable Brooks makes another creative leap. Instead of unraveling the mysteries of the human heart, she plunges into the ineffable, offering the succor of an aural embrace where words are insufficient.
Meshell Ndegeocello has released the inspiriting new single “Love,” the second song to be revealed from her forthcoming Blue Note album No More Water: The Gospel Of James Baldwin, a striking homage to the eminent writer and activist James Baldwin to be released Aug. 2 on his Centennial. Ndegeocello will be marking the album release with a headline performance at the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn Festival on Aug. 2. Ndegeocello performs songs from the new album on an upcoming Tiny Desk Concert coming soon as part of NPR Music’s Black Music Month celebration of Black women artists. Last month saw the release of the album’s opening track “Travel” paired with the searing spoken word piece “Raise The Roof” by poet Staceyann Chin.
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”
—James Baldwin
No More Water is a visionary work that is at once a musical experience, a church service, a celebration, a testimonial, and a call to action. Ndegeocello has created a prophetic musical odyssey that transcends boundaries and genres, delving headfirst into race, sexuality, religion, and other recurring themes explored in Baldwin’s canon. Following 2023’s The Omnichord Real Book, her acclaimed Blue Note debut which won the inaugural GRAMMY Award for Best Alternative Jazz Album, the multi-instrumentalist, singer, songwriter, and producer renders an immersive and palpable document that is as sagacious, unabashed, and introspective as Baldwin was in life.
Co-produced by Ndegeocello and guitarist Chris Bruce,No More Water features some of the bassist’s frequent collaborators including Bruce, vocalist Justin Hicks, saxophonist (and Omnichord producer) Josh Johnson, keyboardist Jebin Bruni, and drummer Abe Rounds. Also appearing on various songs are vocalist Kenita-Miller Hicks, keyboardists Jake Sherman and Julius Rodriguez, and Executive Director of the NYCPS Arts Office and trumpeter Paul Thompson. The album also showcases powerful spoken word byvenerated poet Staceyann Chin and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and critic Hilton Als.
Nearly a decade in the making, the album’s origins began in 2016 during a performance at The Harlem Stage Gatehouse as part of their annual showcase honoring Baldwin. Ndegeocello had delved into Baldwin’s work the year before, including the seminal nonfiction work The Fire Next Time, which she considers “life-changing” and carries with her as a “spiritual text.” Ndegeocello says, “It was just a revelation to me, and it softened my heart in so many ways.”
“Inspired by Baldwin’s most well-known essay, Ndegeocello’s piece—often staged as a church service—employs music, sermon, text, images, and movement, all of which enter into conversation with Baldwin’s monumental and delicate essay about how black bodies were perceived not only by white Americans but by blacks themselves,” writes Als in the album’s liner notes. “The music you hear in No More Water, is Jimmy talking to Meshell and his words meeting the language of her sounds and then coming out again through a multitude of voices, a multitude of sounds and thoughts that bring Jimmy back and give him—finally—his whole and true self, that which he offered up, time and again, if only we knew then how to listen.”
No More Water marks a significant moment of self-discovery for Ndegeocello. She adds that Baldwin entered her life at precisely the right time. “It came when I was ready to look in the mirror. I’ve had to play Plantation Lullabies at a few shows. Looking back, I had an interesting perspective, but the dialogue was limited. It was more like a cathartic experience for a young person of color, whereas now I’m going, ‘How can I get us all to love each other? How can I get us all to see this for what it is?’”
Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and trumpeter-composer Natsuki Tamura delight in each other’s music on their ninth duo album
“It seems—in the studio or on the stage—that Fujii and Tamura think as one.”
– Dan McClenaghan, All About Jazz
“a thrilling ride for the listener” – Steve Feeney, Portland Press Herald
Aloft to be released July 12, 2024 via Libra Records
Pianist-composer Satoko Fujii and trumpeter Natsuki Tamura have amassed quite a track record as duet partners. On their ninth duo album, Aloft, they once again find new things to say. The creativity level is as high as any of their previous eight albums, along with the assurance and maturity that comes from nearly 30 years of working together. As Fujii says, “I am amazed that we still have so many things to create together!” Tamura is equally enthusiastic about their partnership. “We both continue to explore deeper expressions and new sounds,” he said. “After years of performing together, I feel absolutely secure in a duo with her.”
Renowned for duo performances that border on the telepathic, Fujii and Tamura went into the studio with no plan except to rely on their trust and experience while improvising. They didn’t talk about the music before they played. “We just decided to play something,” says Fujii. “Natsuki listens to me very carefully and respects my playing so much but he has a very different sensibility and means of expression.” Tamura adds, “We listen carefully to each other, but at the same time we both understand that contrast and surprise are also important.”
Their differing but complementary approaches to music strike a fine-tuned balance. Tamura doesn’t improvise with a deliberate structure, while Fujii tends to bring structure when she improvises. “I like compositions played like improvised music, and improvised music that sounds like composed music,” notes Fujii. “I would like to erase the border between them.”
Consequently, the music on Aloft displays empathy and surprise in equal measure, governed by an intuitive balance between freedom and structure that comes from decades of music making. It’s hard to believe tracks such as “Migration” and “Wintering” are entirely improvised. Even though they sound so casual, they have distinctive beginnings, middles, and conclusions. “Waiting for Dawn” and “Traveling Birds” also evolve in a very unforced way, the music seems to grow on its own. Yet there are times when the unexpected happens and is absorbed into the flow of the events. “On the Flyway” begins with an easy South African groove but grows darker and even absurd when Tamura begins talking through his trumpet. Fujii’s lyric piano inventions contrast with Tamura’s extended technique, but despite wildly different approaches the music is closely coordinated, and they collaborate without compromising their respective personal visions.
Pianist and composer Satoko Fujii, “an improviser of rumbling intensity and generous restraint” (Giovanni Russonello, New York Times), is one of the most original voices in jazz today. For more than 25 years, she has created a unique, personal music that spans many genres, blending jazz, contemporary classical, rock, and traditional Japanese music into an innovative synthesis instantly recognizable as hers alone. A prolific composer for ensembles of all sizes and a performer who has appeared around the world, she was the recipient of a 2020 Instant Award in Improvised Music, in recognition of her “artistic intelligence, independence, and integrity.”
Since she burst onto the scene in 1996, Fujii has performed and recorded prolifically. In 2022, she released her 100th album as a leader. On the way to this impressive milestone, she has led some of the most consistently creative ensembles in modern improvised music. Highlights include a piano trio with Mark Dresser and Jim Black (1997-2009), and an electrifying avant-rock quartet featuring drummer Tatsuya Yoshida of The Ruins (2001-2008). In addition to a wide variety of small groups of different instrumentation, Fujii also performs in a duo with trumpeter Natsuki Tamura, with whom she’s recorded nine albums since 1997. She and Tamura are also one half of the international free- jazz quartet Kaze, which has released seven albums since their debut in 2011. Fujii has established herself as one of the world’s leading composers for large jazz ensembles. Fully a quarter of her albums have been with jazz orchestras, prompting Cadence magazine to call her “the Ellington of free jazz.”
Trumpeter and composer Natsuki Tamura is internationally recognized for a unique musical vocabulary that blends jazz lyricism with extended techniques. In addition to appearing with many of Fujii’s projects and recordings, he is a leader in his own right. 2003 was a breakout year for Tamura as a bandleader, with the release of Hada Hada (Libra), featuring his free jazz-avant rock quartet with Fujii on synthesizer. In 2005, he made a 180-degree turn with the debut of his all-acoustic Gato Libre quartet, focusing on the intersection of European folk music and sound abstraction. Now a trio, their most recent CD is Koneko (Libra), was released in 2020. Writing in the New York City Jazz Record, Tyran Grillo said, “By turns mysterious and whimsical.”
In 1998, Tamura released the first of his unaccompanied trumpet albums, A Song for Jyaki (Leo Lab). He followed it up in 2003 with KoKoKoKe (Polystar/NatSat) and in 2021, he celebrated his 70th birthday with Koki Solo (Libra), which Karl Ackermann in All About Jazz described as “quirky fun in an age of uncertainty.”
Tamura’s category-defying abilities make him “unquestionably one of the most adventurous trumpet players on the scene today,” said Marc Chenard in Coda.
Satoko Fujii-Natsuki Tamura – Aloft
Libra Records – Catalog Number: 102-075 Recorded December 13, 2023 Release date – July 12, 2024
