This week the drummer, pianist, and vibraphonist Joe Chambers returns to Blue Note to unravel some of the rhythmic affinities shared by jazz, Latin, Brazilian, Argentinian, and African music, between interpretations of pieces by Kurt Weill, Joe Henderson, Karl Ratzer, and his co-producer Andrés Vial offering an ode to the spirit of Congolese dance which features Vial on the piano, Caoilainn Power on alto saxophone, Michael Davidson on vibraphone, Ira Coleman on bass, and Elli Miller Maboungou on ngoma drums. Kate NV finds the playful in the mundane on a track whose trills about roadside fruit and vegetables were written by the Japanese footwork producer Foodman, and Rebecca Nash draws inspiration from the platinum group metals on an album which highlights the saxophonist John O’Gallagher and was commissioned by Bristol Jazz Festival, with the silvery-white ‘Iridium’ serving as the record’s quietly radiating centrepiece.
Raised between Ukraine and Germany, the composer Ganna Gryniva returns to her roots on a trek through the Carpathian Mountains which included spontaneous invitations into private homes and stops with members of the Drevo choir in Poltava and Barvinok Choir in the village of Fasova near Kyiv. The resulting album, titled simply Home, features songs of farewell and impromptu departure, lullabies, odes to motherhood, and paeans to the female spirit, patriotic marches alongside traditional Hutsul folk songs, some of which came to prominence in the streets of Ukraine and on social media during the Euromaidan protests or following the Russian invasion of the country earlier this year. Contributing vocals alongside the music and arrangements, Gryniva heads up an ensemble of old friends and fresh faces which includes Tom Berkmann on upright bass, Mathias Ruppnig on drums, Povel Widestrand on piano, and Musina Ebobissé who rounds out the quintet on tenor saxophone.
Now regarded as one of the first female singer-songwriters, composing from the heart of Greenwich Village in the fifties to the accompaniment of her guitar, Connie Converse’s only known public performance was a brief television appearance in 1954 on The Morning Show with Walter Cronkite, arranged at the behest of her friend and sometime audio engineer, the illustrator and film directer Gene Deitch. By the time Bob Dylan arrived in New York and the folk music revival consumed Greenwich Village at the turn of the sixties, Converse had quit the scene and moved to the quintessential college town of Ann Arbor. She edited and wrote for the Journal of Conflict Resolution, but become increasingly despondent after the journal moved from Michigan to Yale, and in August of 1974 she disappeared with her fate remaining unknown.
The same outcome befell her music until Gene Deitch appeared on a WNYC radio show in 2004. He brought along some of the reel-to-reel tape recordings he had made of Converse back in the fifties, including her song ‘One by One’ with its haunting melody and spare lyrics about walking in the dark. The spark of interest led to the discovery of more recordings in Deitch’s collection in Prague, and in a filing cabinet in Ann Arbor which belonged to Converse’s brother Philip. Then in 2009, the release of the compilation How Sad, How Lovely containing 17 songs by Converse salvaged her for posterity, and she has been the subject of articles, documentaries, and critical reappraisals, covers and full-length tributes in the years since.
For her debut solo effort the classical singer Julia Bullock performs ‘One by One’ alongside other folk songs and spirituals, including ‘City Called Heaven’ which was performed by Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson, ‘Brown Baby’ which Oscar Brown Jr. wrote for his first son, ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes?’ by the future Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny, and Billy Taylor’s civil rights anthem ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free’. Knoxville: Summer of 1915 by Samuel Barber and an aria from the John Adams nativity oratorio El Niño also feature, as Bullock is joined by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the conductor and pianist Christian Reif.
The baritone saxophonist Dave Sewelson, indomitable bassist William Parker, and drummer Steve Hirsh go long on an album of bristling intimacy and reedy indeterminacy for Mahakala Music, with Sewelson sometimes coopting Parker’s bass when the free jazz maverick blows through the Slovakian fujara or Catalan gralla. A change of scenery at the start of the pandemic led the percussionist Mauricio Takara and sound artist Carla Boregas to construct a giddy and cascading panorama of water, as the vaunted São Paulo experimental musicians lap the limits of jazz to explore the dank outer-reaches of dub, drone, and kosmische. Slikback sends more incendiary club missives from Nairobi, on the saz the dauntless Keiji Haino sings of careful plotting, Deleuzian becoming, and tremulous resonating for Sub Pop, the Senegalese fusion pioneer Baaba Maal returns to the shores of northernmost Podor for a raucous yet tender celebration of local fishermen, and Lana Del Rey samples Harry Nilsson while summoning the spirit of a defunct Californian tunnel on the titular track from her ninth studio release.
* * *
* * *
Dave Sewelson, William Parker, and Steve Hirsh – ‘Another Time’
* * *
M. Takara & Carla Boregas – ‘Desenho #5’
* * *
* * *
Baaba Maal – ‘Yerimayo Celebration’
* * *
* * *
Julia Bullock & Christian Reif – ‘One By One’
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
Lana Del Rey – ‘Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd’
