Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla Master Zakir Hussain, 73, Succumbs to Illness
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
Rickey Washington (left), Tony Austin, Kamasi Washington and Miles Mosley perform at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago on July 17.
(Photo: Brian Zimmerman)That admixture clearly made an impression on Pitchfork fans, who lined up by the dozens to get his Washington’s autograph after the set. Just how big that impression will grow, however, is still in the air.
What we can count on is the saxophonist’s eagerness to lead the changing of the guard, a notion borne out in the lyrics to “The Rhythm Changes,” which the band played with fierce urgency: “Our work, our triumph, our glory/ Won’t worry what happened before me/ I’m here.”
Thundercat, who played electric bass on The Epic, offered a Pitchfork set on July 17 that was indebted to the jazz-funk lineage but tugged attendees toward a looser and freer improvisational style. Joined by drummer Justin Brown and keyboardist Dennis Hamm, the fleet-fingered bassist held forth in a set that was both adventurous in spirit and pleasantly relaxed in execution.
Thundercat (aka Stephen Bruner) and crew luxuriated in a kind of open-ended adventurism during their performance, which mostly featured compositions that began with an emphasis on groove, then detoured into areas of intense exploration. Brown and Bruner fed off each other with a psychokinetic closeness, goading each other down paths unlighted only to resurface at the end in lock-step accord. Bruner, who played a six-string bass, proved a calm and determined vocalist, leading the band with a cool, crystalline altissimo.
Earlier in the day, the festival’s most trenchantly jazz-centric group, the Sun Ra Arkestra, performed to a thin but supportive crowd. Led by the inimitable saxophonist Marshall Allen, who has presided over the group since its namesake’s death in 1993, the Arkestra delivered a performance that was characteristically wonky and weird, but seemed toned down in terms of musical discordance, one of the group’s signature aesthetic qualities.
Instead, the band traded in more conventional fare, augmenting its typical skronks and squeaks with a chugging blues and vaguely calypso-sounding Latin tune. From there, the Arkestra engaged in its typical shenanigans: Allen, on EVI (electronic valve instrument), added computerized bleeps and bloops, and alto saxophonist Knoel Scott turned cartwheels at the front of the bandstand. Strange as Allen and his foil-caped band members might have appeared to the Pitchfork crowd, the set was undeniably subdued by Sun Ra standards.
Still, that Pitchfork decided to speckle its programming with artists of the jazz persuasion is a step toward greater crossover appeal for the genre. After all, the Pitchfork attendee is an educated listener; she is selective in her tastes and canny in her procurement of new music. It’s easy to conceive a scenario in which this neophyte jazz fan, impressed by Washington’s Pitchfork set, might rush home to trace the saxophonist’s lineage down a wormhole of digital music, beginning first with Washington’s immediate influence, pianist Horace Tapscott, and then on to Alice and John Coltrane, and back through Johnny Hodges and Lester Young.
Pitchfork, in other words, is as good a portal to jazz as any. Whether it remains as such depends on whether artists like Washington, Thundercat and the Sun Ra Arkestra are willing to continue their gradual merge into the popular music sphere, and whether the conventional jazz audience is willing to let them.
“Watching people like Max Roach or Elvin Jones and seeing how they utilize the whole drum kit in a very rhythmic and melodic way and how they stretched time — that was a huge inspiration to me,” Hussain said in DownBeat.
Dec 17, 2024 9:58 AM
Tabla master Ustad Zakir Hussain, one of India’s reigning cultural ambassadors and a revered figure worldwide…
“I love doing ballads,” Mike Stern says. “It’s just a part of me, some part of emotionally how I feel sometimes.”
Dec 3, 2024 12:52 PM
Stories of major shifts and rebirths among musicians during the past five years are common, from weathering the…
Queen Latifah extols Harlem and the Apollo Theater at this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.
Dec 12, 2024 1:58 AM
Cuban-American jazz trumpet legend Arturo Sandoval and Harlem’s Apollo Theater were among the honorees at the 2024…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
Robertson had a penetrating, pliant sound with a remarkable softness at its center.
Dec 11, 2024 10:34 AM
Herb Robertson, a trumpeter and flugelhornist known for his wide-lens explorations of the avant-garde, died Dec. 10. He…
