Dedicated to Diane on her birthday.
I don’t like that word “Jazz”. Don’t call it jazz, man. That’s some made-up word. It’s social music.
- Miles Davis
Last month, my wife Diane and I visited Venice and Madrid during their annual Jazz festivals. It was a good chance for me to listen to some contemporary European jazz, something admittedly I’m clueless about. I have not stayed current in the contemporary jazz scene, not even here in America. Not surprisingly, the trip made me realize the obvious: I have been looking backward at jazz. It also helped me discover two interesting and new reference points, from which I can begin to look forward.
The first reference point was that the younger jazz musicians were incorporating the sounds of their youth into their jazz, filtered through disparate styles and cultural backgrounds. The jazz I was mostly hearing reminded me of Yussef Kamaal, the London-based duo consisting of Kamaal Williams aka Henry Wu and Yussef Dayes:
Their 2016 Black Focus album is incredible and established what they called, “black music, inspired by jazz.” About their music, Williams said, “It’s all about the drums and the keys. Not to take anything from anyone else, but that’s where it all originates from: the chords, the rhythm of the chords, and the drums.” You can clearly hear that on display in their song Remembrance:
What I was hearing was a continuation of this kind of groove jazz I liked almost twenty years ago; however, it was opening up.
The second and perhaps more interesting reference point was that the music I liked best was by women. I did not see that coming.
Interestingly, a few months ago, my wife, who has been reading my journey since the beginning, made a comment that hit home. She told me, “Why don’t you write more about women in Jazz?” After thinking for a moment, it occurred to me that she was right. I have shared my journey weekly since October 2020, and I have only featured two women: Mary Lou Williams and Nina Simone.
You can read about Mary Lou Williams here:
…and Nina Simone here:
For the past few months, I had been thinking about female jazz artists I could feature. I thought about Carmen McRae, who I saw many times at the Blue Note in New York City in the early 1980s. I also thought about Barbara Donald, the Minneapolis-born trumpeter, who married Sonny Simmons. But then, before I knew it, we were on our way to Europe….
Once we got there, I Shazamed a few songs I particularly liked a lot, intent on learning about them later on. Surprisingly, when I recalled them on Spotify a few days later, I realized they were by women. Although it shouldn’t have, that surprised me. It exposed the bias Diane had identified.
I’d like to feature two of these women now.
The bulk of our time was spent in Madrid. Before we left, I searched for some vinyl bars where I could sample some of the local jazz on superior sound systems. One we visited was the Tempo Club located in the Malasaña district.
The club had two of these awesome old-school Tannoy FSM II speakers on the bar.
While we were there, Nubya Garcia’s When We Are came on:
Nubya Garcia was born in Camden in North London to a Guyanese mother, a former civil servant, and a British Trinidadian filmmaker father. At the age of 10, she started playing the saxophone. While growing up in Camden, she was exposed to multiple genres of music. Later, she would mix dance music or house, footwork, reggae, Dub, and electronic music with jazz.
In a recent DownBeat interview, Garcia explains, “I want to encapsulate dance-floor music’s energy, the stuff that I’ve been writing recently is focused on working more with electronics and imagining us playing in places that aren’t jazz clubs. I love jazz clubs. But I don’t want to only play in jazz clubs for the rest of my life.”
Her 2018 debut EP, When We Are, was created with the support of the Steve Reid InNOVAtion Award (a development project between the PRS Foundation and the Steve Reid Foundation). It was a big hit. Her second album, Source, released on the Concord Jazz label in 2020 found even wider recognition.
You can find out more about Nubya Garcia here.
Another place we went to was Faraday, a coffee shop/vinyl bar located in Madrid’s Justicia neighborhood.
While we were there Sarah Tandy’s Snake in the Grass came on:
Sarah Tandy grew up in West London in a strong musical family and took a longer road to finally find jazz as a profession. In a 2019 interview she explains, “I left school when I was 18, and went to a conservatoire to study classical piano, then a couple years later, halfway through the course, I left/got thrown out.” She then took some time off to study for an English literature degree at Cambridge University. While at Cambridge she got into jazz and, as she says, “…started to teach myself how to do it properly.”
Her debut album Infection in the Sentence takes its name from an Emily Dickinson poem. She explains how the album came about: “It basically came out of a residency I had at Servant’s Quarters. Most of the time I played there with Femi (Koleoso on drums) and Mutale (Chashi on bass), and quite often Binker (Golding on saxophone) would come down and play some tunes with us.”
She also explains the culturally diverse development of her music: “Femi and Mutale had a very different musical past to mine. I’d come from classical music and ended up at jazz that way, and they’d come from the opposite direction, from afrobeat and hip hop. We met in the middle somewhere.”
As I had heard in Nubya Garcia’s music, I was hearing influences from distinctly British sources that these musicians grew up on - jungle, UK garage, and later grime, hip-hop, reggae, Ska, and the sound of underground radio.
Here is one more for the road. Nérija is a nearly all-female Jazz group I learned about after reading more about Nubay Garcia. The septet consists of Garcia on tenor saxophone, Sheila Maurice-Grey on trumpet, Cassie Kinoshi on alto saxophone, Rosie Turton on trombone, Shirley Tetteh on guitar, Lizy Exell on drums, and Rio Kai (the lone male) on bass.
Here is Blume, the title track from their first record, released in 2019:
During my trip to Europe, it became clear to me that I have not kept up with Jazz. My feet have been firmly planted in the past. While that may be a liability, it is important to understand the past and acknowledge the masters who paved the way for today’s contemporary jazz musicians. But many of the younger jazz musicians have grown up in a completely different environment and incorporated into their jazz the unique sounds of new masters. I missed that trend.
While I still intend to keep my two feet in the past, at the same time, I need to keep my eyes and ears more focused on the future….
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in to explore the waters of Clifford Thornton.
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Until then, keep on walking….