billbeuttler.com

January 1, 1970

A busier-looking week than usual this week, because of the concert reviews that ran on Monday and Tuesday — in reverse order from when the two shows actually took place. Dave Douglas performed his music for Fatty Arbuckle silent films, two of which were projected onscreen alongside the music. Esperanza Spalding led her group at Scullers for the first time, and seems like a rising star in the making.

Friday's Jazz Notes profile of a female vocalist going by the single name Rhiannon. Her new CD features a couple of duets with Bobby McFerrin, with whose Voicestra she's enjoyed a long affiliation. The Calendar pick for the week was Wynton Marsalis, whose show Sunday I'll be reviewing for publication sometime next week.

Cheers.

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Rhiannon improvises in life and music

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 28, 2005

Rhiannon took an unusual path to becoming the improvisational jazz singer and storyteller she is today.

It began in New York in the late 1960s, where Rhiannon (her legally adopted single name) lived for a few years after graduating Cornell with a degree in theater. She arrived to teach drama at a predominantly black Long Island high school, and her students and their parents encouraged her to check out the jazz clubs in Manhattan. Not that she needed much prodding.

"I heard Ella Fitzgerald two nights after I got to New York," she recalls by phone from Madison, Wis., where she recently spent several days teaching and performing. Rhiannon comes to the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center tonight to celebrate the release of her new CD, "In My Prime," backed by Tim Ray on piano, John Lockwood on bass, and Pedro Ito on drums and percussion.

"It was in a small club in midtown. I could have reached out and touched her. With those little bitty tables, you know, big enough for two drinks. And I remember what impressed me about her was how calm her body was while she was singing so fast. Her body was very still and relaxed."

Soon she was driving into the city several nights a week to hear music, where her other early influences quickly accumulated.

"I just got to thinking about voices and horns and texture and bel canto and lyrics and original music and jazz," she said. "I was really a sponge."

She wasn't singing at the time, though. After studying classical voice and piano for 10 years growing up, she'd caught the theater bug. "I stopped singing completely," Rhiannon says. "I don't even know if I sang in the shower."

Her singing resumed a few years later, in the mid-1970s, after she moved to San Francisco, became disenchanted with acting, and put together a cover band by tacking a notice to a bulletin board.

"Then along came the women's movement," she says, which led her to hitch rides to a pair of all-women's music festivals. There she made an important discovery: "There was nobody doing jazz at these festivals," she says. "I thought, 'Well, I could say that I don't belong here, or I could say that there's a big open space for me.'"

She returned from those festivals and joined a jazz workshop for women taught by pianist Michele Rosewoman. The first night she met the musicians with whom she formed the group Alive! That all-women jazz quintet stayed together for a decade, recording three albums before disbanding in 1986. Rhiannon's subsequent, ongoing association with Bobby McFerrin's Voicestra has lasted nearly twice that long and counting.

McFerrin sings improvised duets with Rhiannon on two tracks of "In My Prime," the two weaving their voices together like a pair of instrumentalists. But improvisation is paramount even in such covers as Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You" and the Beatles' "Blackbird," the latter featuring a rapid-fire stretch of improvised storytelling that Rhiannon says changes every time she performs it.

Her musicians tonight will be encouraged to improvise heavily, too.

"There will be some free stuff that will happen in between songs," she explains. "I always do have that layer that anything can happen. I always say to the guys, 'OK, if at any moment we finish a song and you're not done yet, please take off and go.'"

Rhiannon performs at 8 tonight at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. $18 ($16 for CMAC members, students, and seniors). Call 617-577-1400 or visit www.cmacusa.org.

Boston's bebop past: Sam Rivers, Herb Pomeroy, Ray Santisi, and Lennie Sogoloff (of the famed bygone club Lennie's on the Turnpike) will reminisce about Boston's 1950s jazz scene at 6 p.m. Monday at Berklee's David Friend Recital Hall, 921 Boylston St. Berklee writing professor and Down Beat contributor Fred Bouchard will moderate the panel discussion. Pomeroy and Santisi are well-known musicians and educators on the local scene. Rivers, 82, came to town to study at Boston Conservatory and went on to become one of jazz's most inventive saxophonists, serving a brief stint in the Miles Davis Quintet, among other notable achievements. Admission is free. For more information, call 617-266-7455. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 
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Calendar Jazz Picks

Sun 10-30

Wynton Marsalis
Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy St., Harvard Square, Cambridge. 617-496-2222. 5 p.m. $38-$58. $20 for students, cash only, 90 minutes prior to show time.

Wynton Marsalis (right) isn't such a young man with a horn anymore. He turned 44 last week, apparently in the mood to look back and review his career to date. Next month Jazz at Lincoln Center, where Marsalis has long served as artistic director, is celebrating the trumpeter's 25 years on the music scene with three nights of concerts billed as "Wynton with Strings," shows devoted to orchestral arrangements of music from his past. Meanwhile, Marsalis also appears mindful of where he wants to take his career next, judging by his recent Blue Note releases. His latest, "Live at the House of Tribes," has him letting his hair down and swinging hard with a small ensemble featuring the marvelous alto saxophonist Wessell "Warmdaddy" Anderson (whose playing contains echoes of Cannonball Adderley) and pianist Eric Lewis. Detractors have sometimes derided Marsalis's undeniable trumpet wizardry as mechanical and stilted, but even they'd likely admit that that doesn't apply to his playing here. Marsalis seems intent these days on stripping out complication and getting back to jazz's essence. Hear for yourself when Marsalis brings his quintet to Sanders Theatre on Sunday.

Thu 10-27 Kevin Eubanks Guitarist Eubanks succeeded Wynton's brother Branford 10 years ago at the helm of the "Tonight Show" band. Tonight he's at Berklee, his alma mater, leading a band featuring woodwind department chair Bill Pierce on sax and fellow Berklee alumnus Marvin "Smitty" Smith on drums. Berklee Performance Center, 136 Massachusetts Ave., Boston. 617-747-2261. 8:15 p.m. $25 ($18.75 seniors).

BILL BEUTTLER

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Bassist Spalding knows how to sing and swing

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent | October 25, 2005

Recent Berklee graduate (and current Berklee instructor) Esperanza Spalding headlined Scullers for the first time Thursday, leading a talented quartet through a mix of covers and originals that served notice: This is a uniquely gifted star on the rise.

Spalding's instrument is the upright bass, unusual for a woman in itself. More unheard of still is that she sings while she plays, and sings well. Her work on bass, meanwhile, is even better while soloing and laying down support. Spalding doesn't merely hold down the bottom and help keep time; her fingers dance continuously as she inventively guides her musicians through their paces.

She opened with a freewheeling piece called "The Sorcerer," then moved on to two originals: one an energetic aural portrait of her drummer, Francisco Mela, featuring Spalding's sweet-sounding wordless vocals; the other a love song with English lyrics, which Spalding explained to the audience was really about procrastinating while writing a song.

At that point she put down her bass, Mela and pianist Leo Genovese exited the stage, and Spalding sang a hornlike, intricate duet with guitarist Rick Peckham on the Brazilian choro tune "Um a Zero." The others then trooped back onstage, and Spalding grabbed her bass for a splendid reading of Chick Corea's "You're Everything."

On acoustic piano through most of the evening, Genovese showed maturity beyond his years. He emphasized careful plotting in his solos instead of playing lots of notes though he proved he could do that, too, in the group's lickety-split race through "Autumn Leaves." Peckham was impeccable on guitar. Mela, like Peckham, a Berklee faculty-mate of Spalding's, seemed happy to eschew soloing in favor of keeping time, to judge by his near-constant smile.

Other highlights included a slow, sad interpretation of Jobim's "Retrato em Branco e Preto," sung by Spalding in Portuguese, and the instrumental, "I Adore You."

"I just wrote it," said Spalding of the latter, "and it's so killing." She then laughed at her apparent immodesty and explained that she meant that she loves the way her band plays it.

That charmingly girlish enthusiasm, equal parts bubbly and hip, is something you don't see much of in jazz. One more reason that Spalding is a performer to watch.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

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Douglas's music pays tribute to a silent star

By Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent  |  October 24, 2005

At the Regattabar Friday, Dave Douglas and his Keystone band put on a multimedia presentation demonstrating how well cutting-edge jazz composition from the first years of the 21st century can be matched up with cutting-edge filmmaking from the first years of the 20th.

The occasion was the first of the group's two nights in town touting its new CD/DVD tribute to silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle; the CD, like the band, is named "Keystone" in honor of Arbuckle's studio.

The opening set kicked off with Douglas cueing up Arbuckle's half-hour-long 1916 film "Fatty & Mabel Adrift" with a DVD remote, which the band — Douglas on trumpet, Marcus Strickland on soprano and tenor saxophones, Adam Benjamin on keyboards, Brad Jones on bass, Gene Lake on drums, and DJ Olive on turntables and samples — proceeded to accompany live. The soloing was minimal, the score instead emphasizing carefully layered ensemble work, much of it in counterpoint to what was happening onscreen.

The video was turned off for the next three pieces, so the band could have the audience's undivided attention. "The Real Roscoe" began with turntable, bass, and drums setting up a groove, with Douglas and Strickland then leaping in with the piece's theme. "Mabel Normand," up next, began with Douglas employing his mute, followed by a moody electric piano solo by Benjamin and another tenor solo from Strickland.

"Pool Sharks" was next, and like the others was inspired by Arbuckle's films but unlike them was left off the new CD. Douglas launched it with a pyrotechnic display of his trumpet prowess, shot through with mouthed effects.

The DVD was clicked back on for the short film "Fatty's Plucky Pup." Hard to say which had Douglas smiling more: what was going on on-screen or Lake's accompanying drumming. 

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company