Fred Kaplan

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Recording of January 2021: Rainbow Sign

Fred Kaplan | Dec 15, 2020 | 3 comments

Ron Miles: Rainbow Sign
Ron Miles, cornet; Jason Moran, piano; Bill Frisell, electric guitar; Thomas Morgan, bass; Brian Blade, drums.
Blue Note (CD, 2LPs). Ron Miles, prod.; Colin Bricker, eng.
Performance *****
Sonics *****

If Ron Miles lived in New York instead of Denver, he would have become a jazz star long ago. With Rainbow Sign, his 12th album as a leader but his debut on a major label (at age 57), now's his time—or should be anyway.

Recording of October 2021: Kimbrough

Recording of the Month

Fred Kaplan | Sep 23, 2021 | 3 comments

Various Artists: Kimbrough
Fred Hersch, Helen Sung, Craig Taborn, Dan Tepfer, Gary Versace, piano; Ben Allison, Jay Anderson, Rufus Reid, bass; Steve Cardenas, Ben Monder, guitar; Ted Nash, Joe Lovano, Danny McCaslin, Scott Robinson, Alexa Tarantino, Immanuel Wilkins, reeds; Dave Douglas, Kirk Knuffke, trumpets; Ryan Keberle, trombone; Olivia Chindamo, vocals; Billy Drummond, Clarence Penn, Matt Wilson, drums; 44 others.
Newvelle/Bandcamp. Elan Mehler, prod.; Marc Urselli, eng.
Performance ****½
Sonics ****

Frank Kimbrough was one of the most beloved figures in jazz and the most puzzlingly unsung among the great jazz musicians of our time. When he died on December 30, 2020, at the age of 64, there was much mourning among his colleagues—which explains why, over a three-day period this past May, it was possible to corral 67 of them to cover 58 of his compositions, without pay, for this download-only album. The proceeds will fund a scholarship in his name at Juilliard, where he taught. The good cause aside, the $20 download charge is crazy cheap for five and a half hours of music from some of New York's finest jazz musicians.

Rediscoveries #1: Archie Shepp's Ballads

ReDiscoveries

Fred Kaplan | Jun 03, 2021 | 2 comments

A review of the Archie Shepp/Jason Moran duet album Let My People Go, in the April issue, may have startled some readers. Shepp is a tenor saxophonist known for tearing across the fiercest climes of the avant-garde (his seminal album is called Fire Music); yet at 83, he's playing standards, spirituals, and slow blues. In fact, Shepp has been exploring such traditional terrain for several decades. So—for the debut of an occasional column on underappreciated albums, artists, genres, and labels—let's shine some light on Archie Shepp's ballads.

Revinylization #10: Bill Evans's Live at Montreux

Music and Recording Features Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Sep 22, 2020 | 11 comments

The late pianist Bill Evans may be the most reissued jazz musician in the catalogs of audiophile record labels. There are reasons for that: He played standards, mainly ballads (many audiophiles shun the avantgarde), almost never in groups larger than trios (stereo systems often do best with small-scale ensembles). Whether by design or chance, his best recordings were miked by superb engineers. Perhaps because of that, proprietors of high-end labels have cherished Evans's music with heightened passion.

Revinylization #16: George Russell's New York, N.Y.

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Apr 01, 2021 | 1 comments

George Russell was a major innovator in modern jazz: a pianist-composer-theoretician who profoundly influenced Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Gil Evans, and the "modal revolution" that propelled so much music of the 1960s and beyond. But he's largely been forgotten. He was also the leader of ensembles, big and small, on more than two dozen albums. A few of those albums are acknowledged masterpieces, but they too have been overshadowed by some of his acolytes' classics.

Revinylization #20: Kind of Great: Kind of Blue

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Aug 04, 2021 | 17 comments

Does the world need another audiophile reissue of Kind of Blue? This was the obvious question to ask upon news that Chad Kassem's Analogue Productions was joining the party. The album's arrival in the mail (yes, of course, I bought one) signaled that something special might be happening: the classy hard-box slip case with the wooden dowel spine, the Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket graced with well-reproduced session photos, a handsome booklet, and, finally, the LP: a 200gm UHQR pressing on off-white Clarity vinyl.

Revinylization #21: Charles Mingus at Carnegie Hall

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Sep 03, 2021 | 2 comments

Mingus at Carnegie Hall documents one of the most extraordinary live jazz concerts. Atlantic Records released a one-disc LP of the same title in 1975,a few months after the heady event, but it included only the second half of the show—late-career Charles Mingus's young quintet jamming for 45 minutes with three older guest stars on Ellington standards "C Jam Blues" and "Perdido" (the latter written by Juan Tizol).

Revinylization #23: Grant Green, Kenny Burrell, Oliver Nelson

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Nov 11, 2021 | 2 comments

Two new reissues in Blue Note's Classic Vinyl series—Grant Green's Idle Moments and Kenny Burrell's Midnight Blue—capture peaks of jazz guitar's possibilities at a juncture when modernism was primed for a shift to something else. Both albums were recorded in 1963; both sport "the Blue Note sound," which engineer Rudy Van Gelder had refined to its high point. But the two albums lay out very different musical paths.

Revinylization #24: Blue Note Classic Vinyl: Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage & Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch!

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Dec 09, 2021 | 1 comments

In the mid-'60s, modern jazz pivoted. Charlie Parker, the previous era's key revolutionary, had been dead for a decade. "Hard bop," the soul-and-back-beat variant of Parker's bebop, was running out of steam. The Beatles were rocking the world, and jazz would never recover as a branch of "popular music." In response or indifference to these tough transitions, jazz musicians set sail on several experimental paths. In those first few years, the most adventurous voyages were mapped and carved out at Blue Note Records.

Revinylization #26: Two Charles Mingus LPs

Revinylization

Fred Kaplan | Feb 03, 2022 | 2 comments

In the annals of jazz, Charles Mingus—bassist, pianist, composer, bandleader, unique, headstrong, and deeply influential in every category—occupies the transit point between Duke Ellington and the post-'60s avant-garde, a station he carved out deliberately.

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