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Blindfold Test: Buster Williams
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Becca Stevens applied her pellucid soprano to the piercingly intelligent, nakedly personal lyrics of “Now Feels Bigger Than The Past,” “Wild Eyes Open” and “Rainbow Connection” from her 2024 solo album Maple To Paper (GroundUp).
(Photo: Courtesy M³)On Oct. 4, M³, as the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians initiative is known, held its fifth annual festival at Roulette Intermedium in downtown Brooklyn. It was a compelling show. The four-hour “marathon,” curated by vocalists and M³ co-founders Sara Serpa and Jen Shyu, comprised nine varied, genre-spanning sets of 15 to 18 minutes. Six sets featured high-level, under-the-radar, primarily female practitioners from the worlds of speculative improv, jazz-adjacency and Afro-Brasilia, juxtaposed with solo sets by the eminent singer-songwriter-guitarist-composer Becca Stevens, octogenarian grandmaster jazz pianist Kenny Barron and poll-winning 28-year-old alto saxophone avatar Immanuel Wilkins. Two intermissions allowed the enthusiastic witnesses to digest not only the music, but also Brazilian canapes and Portuguese custard tarts, as well as the inaugural issue of M³ Magazine, an anthology of a similarly eclectic admixture of texts by the participants.
In their introductory remarks, Serpa and Shyu outlined the initiative’s mission to create a space for women and gender-expansive musicians to be heard on their own terms. They platform creative risk-taking by pairing musicians who had not previously played together to collaborate for six months on making a video and developing repertoire, and then for three months on writing their own textual narratives. The videos are archived on YouTube, and are accessible from the M³ website, as are the texts.
“The core of M³ is our mentorship program,” Shyu, joined by Serpa, said on a Zoom call the following afternoon. “When we started out of the pandemic in 2020, we handpicked our first cohort, but from the second cohort onward, there’s been an application process and a nomination process. The artists from the previous cohort each nominate someone to be in the next cohort, in addition to open call applications. We select half from each category. We’re interested in musicians who are compassionate, egoless and generous in their collaborative process. The idea is that everyone contributes. Everyone mentors each other.”
Serpa added: “We want to give opportunities to people who have been so resilient throughout their careers. Many musicians who didn’t attend college, for example, have much more limited access to other musicians or opportunities. So after the second cohort, we decided that someone who is enrolled in a college or a program is not eligible to apply. Geography, where you’re based, factors into it. Someone in a rural area has much less access, for example. Power outages happen constantly in South Africa, so there are times where musicians from there aren’t able to connect. It’s good for musicians to realize that many of us come from different places where there was not so much investment in musicians from a young age.”
Shyu reviewed M³’s criteria. “Our minimum age is 18, and there’s no upper age limit,” she said. “We give an annual Luminary award to age-60-plus artists who have gone through our program, because ageism is very real for women in our industry. We’re including a musician’s career experience as well as balance and diversity. We’ve decided to focus on people who perform their own music, across all genres. We’ve had Balinese traditional artists who compose their own music. We’ve had electronic music artists. We are looking for a variety of instrumentation, including some vocalists, if that’s how it lands.”
As it turned out, the festival featured many accomplished voices, beginning with generationally eminent singer-songwriter Stevens, who asked to perform first and soundcheck last to allow her minimum time away from her two small children. Stevens applied her pellucid soprano to the piercingly intelligent, nakedly personal lyrics of “Now Feels Bigger Than The Past,” “Wild Eyes Open” and “Rainbow Connection” from her 2024 solo album Maple To Paper (GroundUp), on which she eschewed the jazz-inflected harmonies and rhythms that mark her highly influential earlier discography for the lyric simplicity of her roots in Appalachian folk.
Virtuosic complexity marked an accomplished, breathe-as-one duo by Vortex, as pianist-synthesist Shoko Nagai and the eminent drummer Satoshi Takeishi, her spouse of 20 years, call their electro-acoustic project. (Takeishi filled the breach for Nagai’s Cohort 6 partner Naomi McCarroll-Butler, who was unable to attend.) Nagai introduced their duo — dedicated to musicians who had recently transitioned — with rubato atonal passages complemented by Takeishi’s fragmented xylophone rhythms, before transitioning to a stormy march-like motif that metrically modulated several times. They achieved Cecil Taylor-Aki Takase energy levels, then made their way home with delicate, informed sound-painting, finally reaching the gentle introduction. Nagai began the second duo — provoked by her first-ever poem, written for M³’s Anthology — with electronic tintinnabulations, maneuvered into a repetitive atonal line, and then stated brisk, urgent variations.
There followed a disjointed set by the Vertical Sounds Trio, with Milanese guitarist-vocalist Kess Southpaw (Francesca Naibo) and South African bassist-vocalist Mnisibass (Sibongile Buda) adapting to gifted violinist Melanie Dyer (whose Cohort 6 partner, pianist Marta Sanchez, was performing in Europe) as they addressed three of Naibo’s lyrics.
After the first break, Shyu asked the audience to “enjoy the sacred music” of Barron, who found fresh approaches for his ballad “Rain” (from The Art Of Conversation, a 2014 duo with Dave Holland) and his oft-recorded modern standard “Sunshower.” Then the maestro uncorked a memorable navigation of “Body And Soul,” taking it to the edge of abstraction while unfailingly returning to the melody.
Next was a ritualistic solo performance by septuagenarian M³ 2025 Luminary Awardee Maia (Sonjia Hubert Harper), reflecting her experiences as an AACM member since 1976, when she joined Phil Cohran’s Afrocentric unit. She chanted her way on stage with a call-and-response in English that, she told the audience a moment later, “was sung by enslaved Africans in spiritual ritual who brought it here — they call it ‘church’ now.” Then she intoned a Yoruban chant, translated as “What God has put together, let no man destroy it,” and signified with a brief birdsong episode on piccolo. She moved to vibraphone, playing a pithy 5/4 blues, dancing through the elemental melody with much pedal-generated vibrato. She concluded with an excerpt from “Key Vibrations Symphony #1,” eliciting oscillating, overtone-rich harmonics evocative of Chicago vibraphonist Gordon Emmanuel’s contribution to Muhal Richard Abrams’ 1967 debut album Levels And Degrees Of Light.
Siren Xypher, comprising Melanie Dyer, pianist Mara Rosenbloom and vocalist Kyoto Kitamura, embodied speculative improvising at its finest with a cohesive, inspired set of original works in which all three women sang their songs, animated their texts and improvised virtuosically with intelligently controlled abandon. I’ve heard Kitamura multiple times with Anthony Braxton, whom she’s worked extensively both as a performer and producer over the past two decades, but never on a self-generated project. I was deeply impressed with her conceptual and technical range and freedom of expression, as she transitioned on a dime from nuanced spoken-word passages to a broad vocabulary of well-articulated sounds while sustaining cogent dialogue with Dyer’s expressive violin.
The last third of the program began with a first-time-ever duo by fellow Brazilians Nath Rodrigues and Gil Lopes on contrabass. Multi-talented, charismatic Belo Horizonte native Rodrigues (“Nath R.”) performed three songs, opening with a traditional Afro-Brazilian piece on which she self-accompanied on berimbau. Rodrigues composed the second piece, a tour de force for her gorgeous violin playing; midway through, she briefly raised her chin, continuing to play while she sang a brief interlude. For the third number, she foregrounded her sensuous contralto, self-accompanying first a wordless vocalese and then the lyric on acoustic guitar.
The penultimate set featured singer-songwriter-bassist Devon Gates’ Ghost Stories. Accompanied by electric guitarist Matt Greenwood and dancer Victoria Awkward, who interpreted with graceful, efficient motion, Gates — a one-time student of Esperanza Spalding — carved out strong, full-toned bass lines as armature for four songs. She opened with “Words From David Drake,” named for a potter on a South Carolina plantation in the 1800s whose couplets on the pots that he made (for example, “a better thing I never saw than when I shot off the lion’s jaw”), which, she pointed out, “was not legal at the time,” she transformed into stirring lyrics. She followed with another three original, beautifully rendered songs.
The marathon concluded with an intense, thematically cogent alto saxophone improvisation by Wilkins, who sustained his resonant tone and embouchure as he gradually developed a motif from fragmentary rubato beginnings to overtone-rich ascendance.
“Immanuel, Becca and Kenny Barron have always been supportive of M³,” Shyu said the next day, explaining the decidedly non-sectarian, inclusive aesthetics that animate the initiative. “Even though they’re not part of the cohort themselves, we invite them because they are known in New York and we want to draw their fans so they can hear the other artists.”
Serpa added: “I think it’s huge for all the M³ musicians, especially the ones who aren’t based in New York, to be part of a lineup like that.”
They were already thinking about the next event. “We’ve downsized from two cohorts a year to one, and also the number of participants in each cohort,” Serpa said. “Each year we check with the artists about what worked and what could have been better, and we learn from mistakes and adjust. It’s a challenge to manage so many different musicians all the time, and make it a more meaningful experience for them, and it can be very personally demanding for us. How do we feel about all this work? It’s important for us to continue asking those questions.” DB
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