Fred Kaplan

Those who follow this space know of my enthusiasm for the music of trumpeter Dave Douglas: his plangent tone, his spine-tingling way with minor-chord intervals, his knack for evoking joy, melancholy, romance, and a host of other emotions—sometimes all at once—without dipping so much as a toe into sentimentalism.

Henry Threadgill should be better known than he is. A topnotch musician on alto sax and flute, one of the more innovative composers in jazz, a veteran of the Chicago avant-garde and a revivalist of ragtime improvisational styles (the two are not so contradictory, as he was the first to demonstrate), Threadgill started out on small labels, briefly landed contracts at RCA Novus and Columbia during their brief flirtations with experimentalists (in the late ‘80s and mid ‘90s, respectively), then went back to the indies—all the while retaining, even advancing, his spirit of adventure and his restless but disciplined innovation.

Never Stop (on the E1 label) is the album from The Bad Plus that many of us have been waiting for—the first of their albums to consist entirely of original material.

The Israeli pianist Anat Fort’s second CD, And If (on the ECM label), is an album that I like a lot, though it’s hard to explain why or even to describe. Her music is rhapsodic but spare, tender but propulsive, flush with melodic hooks that loop in sinuous, unpredictable shapes.

For some time now, I’ve been urging (begging) the audiophile vinyl-reissue houses to focus on Duke Ellington’s great 1950s albums on the Columbia label, and finally Pure Pleasure Records has done it.

Sony/Legacy’s 40th anniversary, deluxe reissue of Bitches Brew, Miles Davis’ landmark fusion double-album, is everything that the company’s 50th anniversary reissue of Kind of Blue tried to be but wasn’t: a fitting commemoration, handsomely packaged, with liner notes by a scribe (Greg Tate) who fully grasps the music and its cultural significance, and—a remarkable achievement—a boxed set that warrants tossing the original out.

A few thousand jazz fans are feeling lightheaded this morning. They saw Sonny Rollins’ 80th-birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York City last night, and they’re still marveling (especially those too young to have witnessed giants walking the earth in great number) that, finally, they’ve seen a concert that made them tremble and that people will be talking about years from now.