Fred Kaplan

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Fred Kaplan
Sonny, No
Fred Kaplan  |  Mar 11, 2008  |  First Published: Mar 12, 2008  |  1 comments
Bad news. Last June 15, in my first entry of the “Jazz Messengers” blog, I broke the news that three months hence, Sonny Rollins, the world’s greatest living tenor saxophone player, would be playing a rare trio concert at Carnegie Hall—with Roy Haynes (one of the two greatest living drummers) and Christian McBride (an outstanding young bassist)—and that his own record label, Doxy, would release the results on CD along with a similar, recently unearthed, never-before-heard trio session that Rollins played at Carnegie 50 years earlier.
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Fred Kaplan
Steven Bernstein's Diaspora Suite
Fred Kaplan  |  Feb 25, 2008  |  1 comments
Disaspora Suite is the 4th in a series of albums recorded by trumpeter-composer Steven Bernstein for John Zorn’s Tzadik label (the others were Diaspora Soul, Diaspora Blues, and Diaspora Hollywood). It’s also the most ambitious, far-flung, and satisfying. The band is a nonet that includes the versatile Nels Cline on electric guitar (strumming, plucking, and occasionally wailing), Peter Apfelbaum on saxes, and Ben Goldberg on clarinet. This is by no means simply “Jewish music.” The sounds and influences drift in from everywhere. The first track starts with an electric guitar riff and bongos back-up that’s straight out of Marvin Gaye. Horns enter, blowing slightly dissonant intervals. Two minutes in, the clarinet rolls in with those punchy klezmer chords, but it doesn’t overwhelm the other spices; they all mix and meld, play in and out and around one another. It’s dark, bluesy, danceable (in your head and on the floor). It careens off in unexpected directions, all of them worth following.
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Fred Kaplan
Kolker's cork
Fred Kaplan  |  Feb 17, 2008  |  2 comments
Adam Kolker’s Flag Day (on the Sunnyside label) is a knotty pleasure. It may leave your head in a coil (take two tracks of hard bop to unwind), but ride with the twists while they’re winding; it’s a soft-toned heady trip. Adam Kolker, who plays tenor sax, soprano sax, and clarinet, is known mainly as a sideman, and he doesn’t try to get out in front of his bandmates on this session—John Abercrombie on guitar, John Hebert on drums, and the irrepressible Paul Motian on drums. I promised when I started writing this blog that I wouldn’t dwell excessively on any individual musician, but Motian is such a giant, I could write about him every day and not be rightly charged with excess.
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Fred Kaplan
Jaki Byard
Fred Kaplan  |  Feb 02, 2008  |  4 comments
Jaki Byard’s Sunshine of My Soul (High Note) has come to my attention a bit late, otherwise it would have made my Top 10 list at the end of last year. Yet another long-lost concert-tape dug out of the vaults, it takes us to San Francisco’s Keystone Korner in June 1978, where Byard is flying barrel-rolls solo. Byard—who died in 1999 at 77, gunned down on his doorstep for still-unknown reasons—was a pianist both virtuosic and rowdy. His left hand is rock-solid, his right hand fleet with fury. Imagine Willie “The Lion” Smith pressure-cooked by Mingus (Byard played in Mingus’ band through most of the ‘60s), and you get some idea. He was a teacher to Jason Moran and Fred Hersch, two of today’s most versatile jazz pianists, and you can hear much of his influence in their work as well, especially Moran when he cruises through stride licks.
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Fred Kaplan
Advertisement for Myself
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 30, 2008  |  0 comments
What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be self-indulgent now and then? So allow me to plug my new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Wiley & Sons). As the subtitle may suggest, it is not a biography of the Monkees but rather a journalistic dissection of why the United States’ global adventures and image have gone to hell in recent years. Some of you may know that I write a twice-weekly column in Slate about such matters. My book is not a compilation of my columns; it’s all new stuff. The official pub date is February 4, but it’s already in stock in many bookstores and on amazon.
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Fred Kaplan
Jazz and Radiohead
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 21, 2008  |  First Published: Jan 22, 2008  |  10 comments
I was listening to Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. It’s really as great as all the rock critics say. More than that (from this blog’s angle), it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz. (I’m not saying it’s like jazz; rather, that on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it.) The album sent me to my music closet to take another listen to Brad Mehldau’s cover of Radiohead’s “Knives Out,” from his trio’s 2005 CD on the Nonesuch label, Day Is Done. I listened through all 10 tracks—which include, besides two Mehldau compositions, Lennon & McCartney’s “Martha My Dear” and “She’s Leaving Home,” Burt Bacharach’s “Alfie,” Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” and the title tune by Nick Drake.
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Fred Kaplan
Frank Kimbrough's Air
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 15, 2008  |  4 comments
In my last blog, I referred to “my friend, the pianist Frank Kimbrough,” so some of you may be leery when I tell you in this entry that Kimbrough’s new CD, and his first solo work, Air (on Palmetto Records), is a terrific piece of work, one of the half-dozen or so great solo piano albums of the past few years. If your suspicions keep you from checking it out, well, your loss.
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Fred Kaplan
Motian the Magician
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 10, 2008  |  First Published: Jan 11, 2008  |  2 comments
I don’t know what Paul Motian’s doing, I don’t understand how he’s doing it, all I know is that it’s wonderful. I’ve just returned from seeing the Motian 3 at the Village Vanguard, a high-powered trio that consists of Motian, Jason Moran, and Chris Potter (and no bassist to hold the anchor). Moran, just shy of 33, is, as I’ve written many times, the most extraordinary jazz pianist around. Potter, 37, as I’ve noted a couple times, is a tenor saxophonist with a galvanic tone and fleet agility. But Motian, at 76 (older than both of his trio mates combined, playing topnotch jazz since his days with the Bill Evans trio a half-century ago, and more combustive now than ever), is the heart-racer.
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Fred Kaplan
Blue Note 45s
Fred Kaplan  |  Jan 08, 2008  |  4 comments
The first two pressings from Music Matters Jazz arrived the other day. This is the new audiophile company that reissues classic stereo albums from the Blue Note catalogue on two slabs of 180-gram vinyl mastered at 45 rpm, packaged in a gatefold cover with not only a facsimile of the original cover but, inside, five finely reproduced photos from the session, taken by Blue Note’s masterly inhouse photographer, Francis Wolff. This is exciting stuff for jazz-loving audiophiles.
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Fred Kaplan
One more list!
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 22, 2007  |  14 comments
It occurs to me that, in my list-o-mania feature, I forgot one that I’d promised—Best Living Jazz Musician of Various Categories. So here they are: the best and the runner-up. These picks will no doubt raise hackles, catcalls, and fisticuffs. So raise them! Send in your choices!
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Fred Kaplan
The best of 2007 (and more!)
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 18, 2007  |  8 comments
Today in Slate (which, as some of you know, is where I do most of my writing, mainly on national-security politics), I lay out—as I have in each of the last five Decembers—my picks for the 10 best jazz albums of the year. Here are the best of 2007:
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Fred Kaplan
Coming soon - List-o-mania!
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 15, 2007  |  0 comments
Coming this week: What everyone loves this time of the year—lists! Best jazz albums of the year! And not just that: Best jazz albums of the decade (so far)! Best newly discovered jazz treasures! Best living jazz musicians in various categories! Etc.!
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Fred Kaplan
The Blue Note and the Euro Menace
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 09, 2007  |  6 comments
As further evidence that the American empire is on the decline, I submit the 8:00 set Friday night at the Blue Note on West 3rd Street in New York City, where three front-and-center tables of Europeans—twenty young to middle-aged, professional-looking men and women, who all seemed to be part of the same tour group—made more noise at a jazz club than I think I’ve ever witnessed. Shushing and shaming, from me and others in the audience, had but short-term impact; they’d quiet down for a few minutes and listen to the trio on the bandstand (more about them, in a moment), but then got back to the main business of yakking, chuckling, and generally treating the whole proceedings as the soundtrack to their merry Manhattan vacation and us poor jazz fans as mere props in the spectacle.
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Fred Kaplan
Dexter on DVD
Fred Kaplan  |  Dec 06, 2007  |  First Published: Dec 07, 2007  |  1 comments
I’m making my way, too slowly, through the latest set of Naxos’ “Jazz Icons” DVDs, taken from TV broadcasts of great American jazz musicians on European tours in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Some time ago, I wrote about Charles Mingus: Live in ’64 (a terrific companion piece to his CD, Cornell 1964, recorded just before and released just last year). Tonight I watched Dexter Gordon: Live in ’63 & ’64, and recommend it highly, too.
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Fred Kaplan
Maria Schneider at the Jazz Standard
Fred Kaplan  |  Nov 24, 2007  |  First Published: Nov 25, 2007  |  1 comments
I saw Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra at the Jazz Standard last night, for at least the 12th time in as many years, and they—both she and the band—get more and more dazzling with each visit. As I noted a couple months back, with the release of her latest CD, Sky Blue (available only from ArtistShare.com or MariaSchneider.com), Schneider’s compositions have grown both denser and airier—rich harmonies stacked on brisk, flowing melodies, swaying to rhythms at once buoyant, complex, and danceable. Her ballads are sweet and lovely without oozing into sentimentality. Her upbeat numbers are snappy without drifting into banality. In recent years, she’s been exploring Latin rhythms and styles—in Saturday night’s early set, she played compositions inspired by Brazil, Spain, and Peru, and it seemed absolutely authentic. Her band—17 members, many of whom have played with her for over 15 years—is drum-tight, and, perhaps because of this, the soloists soar more lyrically to more adventurous heights.
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