Charles Lloyd’s jazz journey arrives home

Bob Mehr writes about the forest flower’s return to Memphis.

Charles Lloyd is coming home. It’s a much-belated return for the world-renowned jazz saxophonist, who was born and bred in the Bluff City. The last gig he played in Memphis was in 1964.

“I’ve been around the planet — played everywhere: Japan, Brazil, all of Europe,” says Lloyd, 74. “But it’s a simple song that informed me from when I was a kid in Memphis. That’s still there in me.”

At 11 a.m. Wednesday, Lloyd will be recognized with a brass note on Beale Street at Alfred’s. And on Thursday, Lloyd will perform a concert at Rhodes College. For Memphis music fans, it will be a rare opportunity to see one of the great living masters of music, one whose remarkable career has seen him work with the likes of B.B. King, Cannonball Adderly and the Beach Boys.

A child prodigy raised in South Memphis and Orange Mound, Lloyd’s career began at age 9, when he came under the tutelage of the great jazz-playing Newborn family.

“I had played on one of those amateur shows down there on Beale Street at the Old Daisy, and Phineas Newborn, Jr. heard me. I won first prize, and I came to the wings, and he said, ‘You need lessons, bad.’ That nipped any illusions of grandeur in the bud,” Lloyd says.

“I thought I was at the top of the ladder and realized I wasn’t ready. It was a beautiful thing, and it stayed with me all my life because it made me realize that one must always strive for excellence.”

Read the full article here:
http://www.gomemphis.com/news/2012/apr/05/native-son-charles-lloyds-jazz-journey-arrives/

The shakuhachi jazz Of Minoru Muraoka

Egon writes about Japan’s bamboo flute master. Check the link below for an audio hors d’oeuvre.

NPR - It took some time to count the stamps on my passports, but it turns out I’ve averaged one trip to Japan per year for the past decade. While crack-of-dawn sushi at Daiwa’s in Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market and journeys to Hakone in search of the best onsens (rustic, mineral spring-fed inns) were on my early “must do” lists, as a record collector one of my main desires was to dig deeper into Japanese jazz.

Prior to my first trip to Japan, I’d searched for years for Headhunter Paul Jackson‘s Japan-only Black Octopus album and, upon sourcing a copy, was disappointed in its plainness. While in college, I’d heard the superb, now-reissued (but always out of reach in its original form) Black Renaissance album by the late pianist and arranger Harry Whitaker. I’d run through the Japanese jazz label Three Blind Mice’s well-distributed catalog.

But most of my early ventures through the used bins in Tokyo and Osaka’s then-plentiful boutiques led to more American jazz scores than Japanese ones. Besides the wonderful novelty of the Yamaha-sponsored Electro Keyboard Orchestra’s solitary album and the official Japanese issue of Norwegian jazz vocalist Karin Krog’s We Could Be Flying, I didn’t hear any Japanese jazz worth shelling out the yen.

That was until a fateful visit to Shinjuku’s Universounds, where the shop’s proprietor, Yusuke Ogawa — a funk 45 collector with whom I’d been swapping since the 1990s — acknowledged that he loved “deep jazz” from the ’60s and ’70s. Wishing to illustrate the Japanese brand of this stuff, he pulled out a stack of wax from behind the counter.

One of the records was Minoru Muraoka‘s Bamboo. I’d not come across Muraoka’s name in any of my searches, so I listened patiently to the koto (a stringed instrument similar to a zither) introduction to “The Positive and the Negative.” A rolling bass line set the stage for funky-enough drums that soon gave way to Muraoka’s shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. A cascading koto sat in for chicken-scratched guitar. “What in the hell do you call this?” I asked. “Shakuhachi Jazz,” Ogawa replied, with an “Isn’t it obvious?” air. He then sheepishly admitted that the album wasn’t for sale, as Muraoka’s discography was extensive and his records were rare.

So, over the past seven years, I’ve made it a point to buy any Muraoka album I come across. Some are goofy attempts at crossover: His cover of the ’30s jazz standard “Harlem Nocturne,” for example, is far from essential. But when Muraoka stretched out in the psychedelic era of the late ’60s through the mid-’70s, usually with his groups The Life Theaters and The New Dimensions, he created haunting, difficult-to-compare music that you file as “jazz” only by default. The dozen or so Muraoka albums that I’ve kept at home are by far my favorite examples of Japanese jazz.

Listen here: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/149389758/the-shakuhachi-jazz-of-minoru-muraoka

New BadBadNotGood LP available for free download today

OKAYPLAYER – BadBadNotGood is a jazz trio from Toronto, discovered through their online covers of Odd Future – an experiment which pretty quickly led to an in-studio collaboration with Tyler, the Creator. Before you know it, Gilles Peterson had invited them to play his Worldwide Awards show last December, where they covered James Blake‘s “CMYK” & “Limit To Your Love”. The band has since been to Los Angeles, where they’ve recorded some new material with Earl Sweatshirt and Frank Ocean – possibly to debut at Coachella, where they will be performing.

In a matter of hours, their new album titled BBNG2 will be available for free on their web site badbadnotgood.com, so be on the lookout for that! Here’s a first taste…

http://www.okayplayer.com/news/audio-premiere-badbadnotgood-vices.html

Previously unreleased performances by Benny Goodman, Cannonball Adderley and Gerry Mulligan see the light of day

Bill Kopp writes about a new series of previously unreleased archives from a German broadcast station

Gerry Mulligan, photographed by Joerg Becker

Very recently, I spoke with Ulli Pfau, curator of a new series of archival jazz recordings on the German SWR Music label. These releases – under the Jazzhaus imprint – bring previously-unreleased live-in-the-studio (or concert hall) performances from a long list of jazz legends. The initial release schedule in March 2012 included three titles: a Benny Goodman Orchestra set from 1959 featuring Anita O’Day; the Cannonball Adderley Quintet from 1969 with Joe Zawinul; and the Gerry Mulligan Sextet recorded in 1977.

We quickly established some commonality: both of us had come up as rock fans first – specifically as Beatles fans — and both credited our introduction into jazz via the music of Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. Moreover, for both of us, a few Adderley tracks were for many years our only real jazz interests; it would only be many years later that each of us would delve deeper into the genre.

Pfau recounts how he got involved in this historically monumental project: “I’m a film and television producer. I started out my career in the late 70s at the broadcast station SWR; it used to be two stations: SDR and SWF, and they merged. I was a documentary filmmaker and producer. And all of a sudden I was heading a music department at the station, so I produced jazz concerts for television between 1985 and 1998 or so.” Near the end of the decade, Pfau left to pursue other opportunities.

“But,” he continues, “two years ago they called me from the station. The marketing department wanted to release the early jazz stuff that they had in their audio archive. Because they know I was working in the music field when I was at the station – and because I know my way around – they wanted to know if I would like to be a kind of creative director or artistic director to research the music and make all the compilations for new releases.” His charge would be, in part, to “listen for what sounds fresh and would be fit for release.” He readily accepted the challenge.

Read the full article here: http://blog.billkopp.com/?p=754

Joe Jackson covers Duke Ellington

By Greg Prato, Rolling Stone magazine (Photo courtesy of Ueli Frey – www.drjazz.ch)

He may be best known for such pop hits as “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” and “Steppin’ Out,” but Joe Jackson holds a deep admiration for legendary big band leader/songwriter/pianist Duke Ellington. And on his upcoming release, The Duke (due out June 26th via Razor & Tie), Jackson reworks an album’s worth of Ellington classics.

And one radical way that Jackson reworked the tunes was by eliminating an instrument that was a major element in many Ellington compositions. “No horns. That was a rule I made fairly early on, because the last thing I wanted to do was do something that just sounded like watered down Ellington. There’s just no point. Quite a few jazz people have done Ellington tribute records, and some of them are very good, but they tend to sound like second-hand Ellington.” Filling in for the horn parts are a wide variety of instruments, Jackson says, “everything from accordion to harmonica to Stylophone to a string quartet.”

Read more here: http://www.rollingstone.com/