(l-r) Liam O’Dell, DeAnte Payne, Martin Carodine, Charles Pender II, and Kurtis Gray (Photo: Steve Roberts)
Sometimes the best way to champion the music of today is by looking to some milestone from the past. Take the experience of David Less: Having worked in and around Memphis music for half a century, writing dozens of articles and the bookMemphis Mayhem, promoting shows, producing records, he’d known about an especially rare Memphis jazz LP for some time. “Fred Ford had told me about it in 1975 or ’76,” he says, “and told me what a great record it was. I always wanted to hear it, but it was very hard to find.”
So potent was the album’s music that when Less finally got a copy, he was motivated to produce one of his own.
The legendary album in question? Young Men from Memphis: Down Home Reunion, released in 1959 on United Artists Records, for which the groundbreaking producer Tom Wilson assembled a band that reads like a Memphis jazz who’s who: on alto saxophone, Frank Strozier; on tenor, George Coleman; on piano, Phineas Newborn Jr.; on guitar, his brother Calvin; on bass, Jamil Nasser; on drums, Charles Crosby; and on trumpet, Louis Smith and Booker Little.
“It featured the great Memphis jazz players when they were young and just getting to New York,” says Less. “That group of people later became very well-known, but at the time they were not, so the record went into obscurity.”
Other Memphians also knew of the album. “Johnny Phillips, whose father owned [record distributor] Select-O-Hits and later bought my record company, Memphis International Records, had heard it,” recounts Less. “In fact, Johnny kind of grew up listening to it. So when I found a copy, Johnny and I and his son Jeff, who owns the label, started talking about doing an updated version of this.”
This April 2nd, at a Memphis Listening Lab event from 6-8 p.m., the world will first hear the full realization of that thought, Playing in the Yard by the Jazz Ensemble of Memphis (J.E.M.). (It will be officially released on CD and vinyl three days later.)
Just as Wilson had done, Less set out to recruit a band. “First of all, we approached the teachers, where it all comes from,” he says. “We called Sam Shoup, Gary Topper, Steve Lee, Michael Scott … you know, the guys! And we found these five players. Some of them knew each other. Most of them didn’t.”
As the sessions for the album unfolded, the players developed a powerful group chemistry. Tenor saxophonist and flautist Charles Pender II, a University of Memphis alum, was the senior member of the group, 26 at the time. His grandfather, E.L Pender, taught such greats as Maurice White, David Porter, and Booker T. Jones. Keyboardist and vibraphonist DeAnte Payne, 25, a standout member of James Sexton’s band, plays the vibes with a breathtaking, playful dexterity. Bassist Liam O’Dell, 21, is an Arkansas native and University of Memphis graduate who made a splash locally before pursuing a master’s of jazz performance degree at the University of Texas at Austin. Trumpeter Martin Carodine,19, came to the sessions from the University of Miami. And drummer Kurtis Gray, 17, is, in Less’ opinion, “an absolute savant.”
On the title track, there’s a notable cameo from the old guard. “Jim Spake is on the first song, playing soprano,” says Less. “I brought Jim in because I was afraid that they would not know where we set the bar for this record. I wanted them to understand that this is the best saxophone player in town. I wanted to put them with him, playing at that caliber, from the very first song. And so we cut ‘Playing in the Yard,’ which is by Sonny Rollins.”
The bar clearly set, the ad hoc quintet shines through the rest of the album. The Ellington staple “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” also featured on Down Home Reunion, is the clearest echo of that 20th-century predecessor, while other tunes, like Willie Mitchell’s “The Crawl” and Dan Penn’s “The Dark End of the Street,” situate the album squarely in Memphis. Payne’s vibraphone casts a spell on “When You Wish Upon a Star,” a tune that’s reprised at the end as a pensive arco solo by O’Dell. The album feels like an instant classic.
While clearly delighted, Less is not surprised by the results. “Memphis is a jazz city,” he says. “Jazz is just as good as it ever was in Memphis.”
Befitting a veritable capital of Vinylandia, Memphis is all over Record Store Day (RSD), and not just because Memphis Record Pressing produces such a large percentage of the nation’s LPs these days. The city also boasts a large roster of bands currently releasing product on vinyl, from the Turnstyles‘ new album to Ibex Clone. But look no further than the RSD homepage to see more: their partnership with Sun Records has now led to a 10th anniversary edition of the Sun Records Curated by Record Store Day releases; and two clicks below that one sees a celebration of the debut full-length album from boygenius, which includes Memphis’ own Julien Baker.
Yet there’s another side to Record Store Day, having arisen gradually over the years, in which it’s a chance for previously shelved recordings to see the light of day in special editions. And that’s the real gem of this year’s RSD, scheduled for this Saturday, April 22, in the form of a new release on Jazz Detective, the label of Downbeat Producer Of The Year Zev Feldman, and Reel to Real Records, the partnership between Feldman and Vancouver-based impresario and musician Cory Weeds. Included in the labels’ new trio of previously unissued LP releases of archival performances (by groups led by Walter Bishop, Jr. and Sonny Stitt) is an organ lover’s dream album: Shirley Scott’s Queen Talk: Live at the Left Bank (Reel to Real).
Taking its name from Scott’s moniker, “the Queen of the Hammond B-3,” this gig showcases the organist’s soulful side in a trio setting featuring Memphis native George Coleman on tenor sax and Bobby Durham on drums. Captured at the Famous Ballroom in Baltimore, Maryland on Aug. 20, 1972, the band is a study in chemistry, especially when jazz vocalist Ernie Andrews sits in on three of the album’s ten numbers.
If Scott isn’t quite the household name that Jimmy Smith or Jimmy McGriff are, she’s no less of a player for it. The late jazz organ star Joey DeFrancesco once said of Scott: “Her legacy is her tremendous contribution to jazz organ that will live on forever. … She has some great records, but live is a whole other thing because the people are so free to go in whatever direction they like.”
And that’s exactly what this trio does, as Scott leads them through her grab bag of covers, many with a decidedly pop provenance. The title tune is of course a 1944 pop-tune-turned-standard, but she gets quite contemporary as well with “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim,” and, perhaps of most interest to Isaac Hayes (and Michael Jackson) fans, “Never Can Say Goodbye.”
And yet, such is the gravitas and groove of Scott, who pedals some very hip bass lines as her choppy chords and melodic flurries percolate on top, that these tunes — and even sentimental favorites like Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile” — come out swinging. It’s a testament to the organist’s sympatico with drummer Durham that the forward momentum never lapses.
And the pop nature of this workout is especially interesting in light of George Coleman’s career. With what may be considered his edgiest work with Miles Davis eight or nine years behind him, it’s interesting to see Coleman in league with Scott’s embrace of radio hits of the day. Ultimately, it’s a testament to not only his versatility, but his tone. With Coleman, the edge is always there in the voice emanating from his horn.
And if “edge” isn’t quite the right word for the undeniable warmth that’s also there, let’s just agree that he contains multitudes. With “Witchcraft,” Coleman even get’s to wail over a neo-bop uptempo workout, complete with humorous interpolations. Then Scott, with her thrilling, trilling, glossy sound, takes it up a notch, as her seeming telepathy with the drummer produces time-defying hits and accents whenever she scrambles over the keyboard.
As Coleman himself says (in the LP’s excellent liner notes) after recently hearing this album’s version of a John Coltrane tune: “I was amazed, especially, by ‘Impressions.’ I don’t think I really played it that well with Miles, but on this, with Shirley, the tempo was right. And Bobby Durham was real good on it. He kept everything really in focus and so did she.”
As it turns out, Record Store Day itself contains multitudes, across a spectrum that runs from gimmicky colored discs to true vinyl gems. For fans of jazz organ and/or George Coleman, this live set by three masters of their craft is a multifaceted example of the latter, a jewel in any collection.
Charles Lloyd (Photo courtesy Forest Farm Music + Art)
It’s not every day one gets to swap emails with a living, breathing creative dynamo like Memphis native Charles Lloyd. But it’s not every day that finds him poised for what looks to be a euphoric homecoming, where Lloyd will rejoin an erstwhile collaborator who was living in Memphis recently, the phenomenal guitarist Anthony Wilson. Local music fans are already abuzz with news of their appearance at the Germantown Performing Arts Center (GPAC) on November 4th.
Wilson, a Crosstown Arts Resident Composer in 2021, made a resounding impression on the Memphis jazz scene while visiting here, sitting in with many artists even as he appeared in shows of his own. And, as he explains in a recent Facebook post, an extended stay here resonated deeply with his family history:
Since 2018 I’ve been working on a project of music & photography inspired by my family history in the Mississippi Delta, as well as other histories and vibrations centered in that most essential American space. I’ve been missing being there since my last visit in May. I’ll be so happy to return to the Delta at the end of this month for a few days, just before a tour w/ Charles Lloyd, who was born and raised in Memphis—the northern entry point to the Delta—and also shares deep history in Mississippi. It feels symbolic that we’ll play our first show of our tour in Memphis, and that we can begin by communing with the energies and voices of the lands and the waters and the endless skies and the ancestors who speak to and through us.
To learn more about their collaboration, and Lloyd’s own roots here, I reached out to the saxophone and flute master via email, where we conducted an interview-by-correspondence. What follows is a glimpse into the creative process of one of jazz’s greatest living innovators.
Memphis Flyer:Blue Note has recently released your Trio of Trios album set. What are your feelings about the trio as an intentional approach to music? Many fellow jazz players feel that there’s something charmed about a trio in particular. And that form has a charmed history in jazz, from Jimmy Giufre’s albums, to Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, and beyond. What are some great examples of trios that have inspired you?
Charles Lloyd: Maestro Rollins’ Way Out West is great, as is Giufre. When I was a young man in NYC I used to play opposite Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard. I have always loved his trios, but especially the one with my friend Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. The trio format gives a lot of space to the music.
How did the Ocean album specifically come about? Anthony Wilson was a resident artist here at Crosstown Arts not long ago, and the Memphis music world was quite inspired by him.
TheOcean Trio, which is the second trio in the Trio of Trios trilogy, was recorded in the one hundred and fifty-year-old Lobero Theater in Santa Barbara, California. I have performed there more than any other venue in the world — so it was very relaxed, kind of like my extended living room. The concert was live-streamed in September 2020, during the pandemic, so there is no audience. I asked Gerald Clayton to join me on piano — he has been touring and recording with me since 2013. And I invited Anthony Wilson on guitar, they both live in L.A. and were easily able to make the drive up. They both happen to be sons of famous musician fathers — Gerald is the son of bass legend John Clayton, while Anthony is the son of celebrated band leader, trumpeter, composer and arranger with strong Memphis roots, Gerald Wilson. When I moved from Memphis to Los Angeles to go to the University of Southern California (USC), I played lead alto in Gerald Wilson’s Big Band. So having Anthony playing with me now is like coming full circle. He is also a great composer and arranger.
Who will be playing in your trio at GPAC on November 4th?
At GPAC, Anthony and I will be joined by an amazing bass player, Harish Raghavan. Harish has a big rich sound and he has an ability to propel the music forward.
When I was recording The Water Is Wide, one of the engineers told me how much Anthony Wilson loved my playing. “You should hear him sometime,” he said. I didn’t know Anthony at that time; we had never met. But the fact that he was Gerald’s son meant a lot to me. Eventually we met, and then later, I heard him play (he also has a great singing voice!). He has been touring with Diana Krall for the last 15 years or so and has an extremely busy schedule. Covid slowed things down and gave us the perfect opportunity to get together. We are continuing to forge a path together in the music. Anthony has been exploring his Memphis roots in recent years, so it feels appropriate that we will launch the start of this tour here in Memphis at GPAC.
You’re known for your innovation, and collaborations outside of the jazz world. As someone who evolves so relentlessly, how does it feel to be bringing your newest music to Memphis? You’ve explored so many styles since you left your hometown. Are there still echoes of your earliest playing in what you play today?
I’m in service. Music was always my inspiration and consolation — I hope I can bring that to someone and lift them up. Nancy Wilson called me a bluesman on a spiritual journey. The blues are in my DNA but I’m also an explorer looking for that perfect sound. The sound that will allow me to put my horn down and go back into the woods. But the Lord has this carrot he dangles in front of me… “Not yet Charles, not yet. Just a little bit further.”
The Charles Lloyd Trio will play GPAC on Friday, November 4, 8 p.m. Click here for tickets.
There’s a lot of laughter when Stephan Crump and I catch up on the phone, partly because long ago we played together in Big Ass Truck. Even then, both of us set our sights beyond Memphis. “For me, at that point, I knew that I had to be a musician, and I knew that I was going to finish school and move to New York,” he says of those days. His reason for making a hometown stop now has less to do with our old combo than what he found when he moved on to Gotham. For New York is where he’s truly carved out his own niche in the free jazz/improvisational music scene, and where he’s lived, composed, taught, and performed for nearly thirty years.
On Saturday, he’ll leave a little of what he’s learned along the way in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, as he confesses, the possibility of old friends and family distracting him is daunting. “It’s quite rare that I play Memphis. And it’s pretty intense, because there are just so many more dynamics at play for me personally. I could talk about going straight into and through the fear! I’m just recognizing that there’s all this stuff, that’s all wonderful and a blessing, but is a lot to deal with. It’s more distracting.”
Lest anyone get the wrong idea, diving straight into and through the fear is part of the do-or-die attitude that Crump and many other players embrace while improvising in the most unstructured settings. But while he’s often pegged with the free jazz/improv tag, Crump actually plays in a variety of ways across many projects, as he explains below.
Saturday’s show will focus mainly on his latest album, a selection of works for solo bass dubbed Rocket Love, and, as revealed below, Crump is relishing the chance to bring all the sonic possibilities of the instrument to the fore on his current six-city tour.
Memphis Flyer: In your description of making the new record on Bandcamp, you say making it sustained you through the first year of the pandemic, “materially and spiritually.” It sounds like that was a real life-saver.
Stephan Crump: It was, man. There were so many blessings in that period. We have two boys who are now 17 and 13. My wife’s a high school history teacher, so she was teaching all day on Zoom, and I was helping the boys manage online school. I started teaching music online, but having the album project was absolutely a lifeline as far as creativity. Having my Bandcamp fans support an aspect of it made it feel like a community was behind it. A modest community, but it still felt good. So that was great. Also, I had a home studio, and I could have just planned a record and made it and been done with it, but, as I usually do with albums, whether it’s at home or another studio, I wanted to do a different process with this and really take my time and build that community, and not feel like it needed to be a certain number of pieces. It could just be open-ended. I could experiment. It was a really good mode.
How exactly were you interacting with your supporters?
It was through Bandcamp. They have a subscription-based thing that you can do. I wrote my subscribers updates and they would get two pieces a month: one cover or a standard, and an original piece. Then I also did a series of Facebook live concerts from my studio. Not only would I broadcast those to supporters and fans, from all parts of the world, I had all my microphones set up and I was recording it properly in my studio. So some pieces on Rocket Love were just me doing them in my studio in various moments, but some were recorded during those concerts. And that brought a different energy. Facebook Live is not like being in the same space with people, of course, but it’s still a performance and still creates a good kind of tension and energy to engage with. You do have to step up to a certain mode of performance that galvanizes your focus and energy. People would write comments, and I’d stop between tunes to respond. It felt good to me. I needed that.
Musically, it’s just you playing solo, right?
All of the pieces are just me on bass, except for one cool thing which was an experiment that worked out. The record is book-ended by this two-part piece called “Lament.” Those two pieces happened on the last two days of 2020. I wanted to try something different, so I said, “Let me do a piece channeling all my feelings about this year, all the complexities of it. And do a short piece where, instead of just one bass I’ll do three, with overdubs.” But on the first track, which I did on December 30th, I said, “Let me play one of the voices and then immediately play the second one and immediately play the third one, but without listening to any of it, with no headphones.” So I wasn’t listening to what I had played previously.
The next day, I did the same thing, but I listened as I overdubbed. And that’s “Lament, Part II.” I could hear what I played before. But on “Lament, Part I,’ I wasn’t. I love both pieces, but there’s something that is transcendent about the first one. It was such a learning experience because I realized I was playing along with what I had played before, because I was in the same zone, and I had just done it. Emotionally and spiritually, I was playing along with it. But the part of my brain that gets engaged when I’m listening and playing along, and interacting with something, was not a factor. So it remained on a less cerebral plane. It remained on a more spiritual plane.
I feel like it’s just a reminder to me that that’s where the real shit is anyway. That’s what we’re trying to get to when we are listening and interacting. That experimental way of doing it was just a more direct thing. Technically, if you were to analyze it harmonically and melodically, obviously there are things that never would have happened had I been listening and playing. But there’s something that gets communicated that’s so right, that whatever details on the surface that would be deemed to be dissonant or wrong or whatever, are totally irrelevant. That’s just surface information.
The stuff that we think music is about — notes and tones and chords and melodies and harmonic relationships — all of that is just the surface, the crust, of what it is. The real stuff that you need to make any of that worthwhile is living underneath.
Borderlands Trio, featuring Crump, Kris Davis, and Eric McPherson (Photo courtesy Stephan Crump)
Free jazz or improv is your stock in trade, isn’t it?
Yeah, like my project called the Borderlands Trio. We have two albums, and the latest one is a double CD called Wandersphere. It’s a piano trio, all spontaneously composed. It’s always evolving and always grooving. Playing that way is also a big thing that I teach. I love bringing people into that zone and clarifying for them how to be in that mode.
I also compose. I write pieces for my band, and for improvising ensembles. And that’s a whole other thing. How do you create an environment with a distinctive, powerful DNA that maintains its identity while also inviting people in to express themselves, and be as expansive as possible within that?
You write that you had planned the album even before the pandemic hit.
I had been thinking about it the year before, then in January I put the plan together, and February was when I did the initial outreach. I announced the process and planned to start in March. And then…[laughs].
I completed the year. I did it from March to March, which was my original plan. I completed it and had two albums worth of material, but this plan was never about being constrained by good album length. It was about using another forum to see what that brings, and not think about an album until afterwards. So I finished in March, but only later that spring or summer did I decide to curate an album from that whole body of work. And that’s what Rocket Love is.
The bass has so many sonic possibilities, yet it’s rare to be able to focus on that instrument alone.
When you’re talking about the acoustic bass, there’s so much to the sound of it that doesn’t speak through a traditional ensemble. There’s a lot of it you can’t explore and get to as a player, when you’re exclusively playing in those contexts. So it’s something I’ve been exploring in some of my other, less traditional ensembles, to try to make space for some of the expressiveness of the bass. Playing solo is an extreme version of that. You get to decide what your sculpture is, what you present to the audience. You can decide, this piece is going to be about texture, about sound. The next piece might be about melody, or groove. You can make those decisions, and by limiting yourself to the one instrument, you’re also expanding the palette of what’s viable as a piece of art.
Stephan Crump plays The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday, October 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 advance/$10 student | $25 day of the show.
Frog Squad plays Satie at The Green Room (Credit: Alex Greene)
Frog Squad has been turning heads for a few years now, especially among free jazz aficionados. But unlike, say, Dopolarians or other strictly “free” combos based solely on improvisation, Frog Squad has a secret weapon: composition. Memphis Flyer readers know of Frog Squad founder David Collins’ compositions from our feature from this March, focused on his album Memphis, painstakingly scored for quintet. But fewer know that his gift for jazz ensemble scoring overlaps with his Frog Squad work.
Yet that was abundantly clear last night, when Frog Squad took to the stage in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, ironically, Collins’ talent for arranging was brought to light not through his own compositions, but through his interpretations of the work of Erik Satie.
It was intriguing from the start: the work of one of classical music’s most minimalist composers re-imagined by an eight-piece free jazz ensemble. But this wasn’t just any ensemble. The group featured Hope Clayburn on alto saxophone and flute, Franko Coleman on tenor sax and flute, Aaron Phillips on baritone sax and bass flute, Cedric Taylor on keyboards, Khari Wynn on bass, Jon Harrison on drums, and Collins on guitar, with occasional group member Chad Fowler joining on saxello, C Melody sax, alto sax, and flute. This is a heavy band under any circumstances, but especially so when guided by Collins’ arrangements and one of the greatest composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The final sound achieved by the group revealed just how versatile and open to improvisation Satie’s music is. Collins’ approach was to transpose pieces most often known as piano works to full band voicings, using the four horn players sometimes as an integrated unit, sometimes as individual soloists. And solo they did, with great passion and abandon. Fowler and Clayburn especially made use of the full range of their reed instruments’ possibilities for honks, shrieks, and wails, then reined themselves in on a dime to return to the horn section’s arrangements. Meanwhile, the guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums held down funk/jazz grooves the likes of which have never been applied to Satie, one can be sure.
In all, eight pieces were featured: “Gnossiennes” 1-4, “Je Te Veux,” and “Gymnopédies” 1-3. Surely the highlight was Satie’s ethereal “First Gymnopédie,” with the delicate, waltzing chords played by the horn section, as Collins outlined the melody with echoing guitar.
The end result was beyond category. One might compare it to the finer instrumental work of Frank Zappa, or perhaps the wilder, latter day efforts by Gil Evans, but ultimately it was its own sound. There were even lighthearted moments, as when the horn section’s oom-pah-pah dynamics were amplified by all the players doing knee bends in time to their parts. And an intriguing bit of futurism was added by effects pedals that Clayburn and Phillips played through, not to mention some fine synth renderings by Taylor.
The nearly-full Green Room audience was fully engaged, cheering loudly for each fresh take on Satie, then demanding an encore and rounding off the night with uproarious applause.
As the band packed their instruments, I asked Collins how long it had taken him to craft this approach to Satie. “For about a month and a half, that was all I thought about,” he said, as he described driving, walking, or eating with Satie’s music looping through his head. Then there was one full band rehearsal, a smattering of play-throughs with the rhythm section, and a recent ‘incognito’ gig at B-Side Memphis, also known as “a rehearsal,” to quote saxophonist Chad Fowler.
“We recorded the B-Side show, and for tonight we have both the audio and video,” said Collins. “Soon I’ll be taking the best tracks from both shows and making an album out of it.”
“Jazz” is a big word, and can cover so many approaches to music that it may have lost all its descriptive power. That is especially true if one follows the music’s history into the 1970s and beyond. After traditional forms were blown wide open in the 1960s (with the ascendance of free jazz), the music’s influences and reference points became so far-flung that any noise, texture, or groove was fair game.
Anything being fair game is a good motto for the latest album by New Memphis Colorways, It is What it Isn’t, set to be self-released on May 21st. As the catch-all name for the various musical projects of virtuoso Paul Taylor, New Memphis Colorways has always considered the world fair game, of course, ranging from tightly woven power pop of The Music Stands to the stomping, almost surfing groove rock of Old Forest Loop.
Most of those earlier projects showed off Taylor’s inventiveness with a dollop of genre-appropriate restraint, his self-accompaniment on multiple instruments always in service of the song. But what restraints are in play when the song is jazz-funk fusion? Those are mostly the restraints demanded by each song’s groove, even as solo instruments take unfettered flight. Yea verily, this is the album where Taylor lets his freak flag fly high.
Imagining some of Herbie Hancock’s finest work from the late 70s or 80s, from Man-Child to Future Shock, will put you in the ballpark. It’s not that none of the players (all Taylor, in this case) show restraint; an effective groove requires that sense of space. It’s rather that the direction of the melodies, instrumentation, and breakdowns could surprise you with any new development at any time.
And that’s exactly what awaits listeners of It is What it Isn’t. Just take the lead single and video, “Hangover Funk.”
Video game skronks give way to the solidest of grooves, backing up some smooth/tweaked keyboard chords. Is this Herbie Hancock or George Clinton? Or Pac Man, perhaps? None of the above: this is New Memphis Colorways.
It’s first-rate funk (and excellent party music, by the way), all the better to undergird a full-on rock guitar solo that screams “good times,” which anything evoking the 1970s surely must. As the opening track of the album, it’s perfect, and sets the tone for much of what is to follow. But, having set the inventiveness bar so high from the top, what follows is essentially more funky unpredictability and more expressive synth and guitar playing.
One surprise, even in this cornucopia of surprises, is Taylor’s treatment of the jazz standard, “All the Things You Are.” It’s played with a jazzer’s sensitivity to the delicate harmonies, but what really sets it apart is the singing voice run through a vocoder. It’s as if Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” suddenly fell in love. And in combining the sci-fi iciness of a synthetic vocoder with such a chestnut of the 1930s, an eerie, Blade Runner-esque world is conjured up, perfect for our current moment in history. It’s that restless inventiveness that keeps this from being a retro fashion accessory, and propels it into a fusion work of the highest order.
After shutting down during the quarantine era, Memphis Public Libraries are bringing back the popular Five Fridays of Jazz series, and it kicks off tonight at 7 p.m., and will continue every Friday thereafter until May 7th. However, in a nod to the ongoing need for public health precautions, the series will not be held at the main library location, as in the past, but will be live-streamed for free on the Memphis Public Libraries Facebook page. It will also be free to watch on demand on Facebook for a limited time.
Lisa Webb (Photo courtesy Memphis Public Libraries)
This year’s opening concert is “From the Twenties to the Twenties,” featuring Lisa Webb on piano, voice, and ukulele. Tune in for a journey through a century of music, as Webb takes listeners from Bessie Smith through Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, and beyond, including her own jazz originals.
One new element being added to the series is a curated list of fiction and nonfiction book suggestions to tie in with the theme and era of each night. Readings salient to tonight’s online concert are listed here.
Five Fridays of Jazz is sponsored by the Memphis Library Foundation and presented in conjunction with Levitt Shell.
Thanksgiving Day had a bittersweet quality this year, and not only because of the vagaries of 2020 and the coronavirus: It was the day that Dr. Herman Green, the stellar saxophonist and flutist, passed away. According to his friend and protege Richard Cushing, with whom he co-founded the band FreeWorld, Green passed away “at home, surrounded by family, listening to Coltrane.”
Dave Gonsalves , Herman Green, John Coltrane, and Arthur Hoyle
This was especially fitting, given that Green rubbed shoulders with John Coltrane and many other jazz greats in his long, eclectic career. Born in 1930, he first played Beale Street as a teenager and toured regionally with a then-obscure B.B. King, before hitting the highway that would lead him to the New York and San Francisco jazz scenes, and a long stint with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra. Returning to Memphis in the 60s, he then became a local mainstay, bringing his bold tone and authentic voice to many jazz, soul and funk projects.
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King
Herman Green
In 2017, the Memphis Flyer ran a cover story on his storied life in music. And that story came to a happy finale with Green’s long tenure in FreeWorld, with whom he played nearly every Sunday night at the Blues City Cafe on Beale, right back where he got his start. Though he’d been in poor health recently, he played with the band nearly up to his 90th year.
As Cushing wrote on social media yesterday:
Herman passed peacefully in his home this afternoon, surrounded by his family, and will join his dear wife Rose Jackson-Green in the hereafter. There will be a visitation at Memorial Park Funeral Home sometime in the next week or so, followed by the ceremonial walking of his ashes down Beale Street with a funeral parade sometime soon. In addition, a Memorial Jam will be planned for sometime in the Spring.
As a truly amazing musician, caring patriarch to his family, mentor and teacher to many, and friend to everyone he met, Herman lived an astounding 90 years on this Earth (1930-2020), and was a true treasure to all he touched with his deep musical knowledge & skill, his infectious laugh, and his zest for life and love. The City of Memphis will never be the same without his energy in the mix, and his music & mentorship will be missed forever by all the musicians on Beale Street – Memphis and beyond. I had the honor of knowing and working closely with Herman since 1986, and he taught me practically everything I know about making music… Justin Fox Burks
Green touched the lives of many players and music aficionados over the years, and the grieving has been widespread. Keyboardist Ross Rice wrote:
My sensei is gone. Dr. Herman Green has moved on to the next adventure. Wow, was I lucky to be in his world for awhile. He shared so much and he didn’t hold back. There is nobody more generous. He taught us all on every gig, and made me believe I was a pretty good musician, and that I was good enough to play with him, which meant good enough to play with anyone. I loved him and I know he loved me back, because he made sure to tell me every time we hung. This man is a giant, a Memphis and Terran treasure, and a generation of musicians owe him a great debt. Til we meet again…
In memory of Dr. Green, here is a track he recorded with FreeWorld, from the album Inspirations: Family & Friends.
Dr. Herman Green: Remembering a Giant of Memphis Jazz & Blues
Khari Wynn is a bit of a globetrotter, or at least he was before the coronavirus brought us all back home. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s not a regular presence on the live scene here. By his reckoning, he’s been to at least 20 countries in as many years, and has played around 2,000 shows in that time. That’s because he’s been working as the guitarist, and more recently the musical director, for the group Public Enemy. But that’s another story.
Here in Memphis, Wynn, son of erstwhile Commercial Appeal jazz and pop music critic Ron Wynn, creates music that is very different from Public Enemy’s. In these solo projects, often featuring some of the city’s finest players in supporting roles, Wynn takes a jazzier turn, sometimes with cosmic musings woven into the dense musical compositions. All of them feature Wynn’s own virtuoso guitar playing, as well as being his original compositions, which display the keen musical instincts that won him recognition as one of Crosstown Arts’ resident musicians earlier this year. I spoke with Wynn recently about this solo work and the diverse influences that have informed his music.
Khari Wynn, aka Misterioso Africano
Memphis Flyer:You have a lot of musical tracks on YouTube under the name Energy Disciples. Tell me a bit about that.
Khari Wynn: Where I got Energy Disciples, the basic concept, was I was very interested in electronic music. I’m still interested in it; I think it’s the new frontier of music. But I wanted to combine electronic music with some of the acoustic instrumentation, and conceptual, more ‘out’ concepts of what somebody like Sun Ra was doing. Sun Ra is so original, because he would have some tunes that were straight big band charts, he would have other tunes that were almost like pop/show tunes, and then he had other stuff that was just absolutely, completely, all the way out. Cacophony/chaos kinda stuff, man. So if you could take that concept and somehow integrate it with electronic music, combined with live instrumentation, I thought that would be an original concept. So that’s what I attempted with that group.
I heard it right from the get go. Like Sun Ra without the Fletcher Henderson.
Exactly. Re-imagined with the influences of the 1980s and ’90s vs. the 1930s and ’40s.
Is it an actual band you assembled?
That was more of a studio project. I have another project that I did after that. Energy Disciples was purely a studio thing that never did anything live. I have another group now called the New Saturn Collective. And we did some live gigs. That’s the live interpretation of the Energy Disciples. Before Energy Disciples, I had a group called Solstice, and and we played around Midtown in the early 2000s. That was way more of a live, jazz/rock sound. Kinda like that late ’60s, early ’70s mix. Rock, but with extended solos but not all the way jazz either. Kinda like Colosseum. The first John McLaughlin record, Devotion, that type of vibe.
Misterioso Africano: Khari Wynn Discusses Sun Ra’s Influence on His Music (2)
There’s even a little Frank Zappa in there.
Definitely. Exactly. The pioneering late ’60s, early ’70s, before fusion got a little corny. It started to get corny in the mid-70s. But it was still real dangerous in the late ’60s early ’70s. Solstice was that kinda thing. But at that time I started going out on the road more with Public Enemy, so I couldn’t really play out. It’s hard in Memphis, to get gigs with stuff like that. It still is. It’s really hard to get gigs like that anywhere, but especially in Memphis. Even on the Midtown scene, it was hard.
So I disbanded that and did Energy Disciples purely as a studio thing. And I would bring in other musicians. And I did about four CDs of that. So then I thought, it may be cool to attempt stuff live again, so that’s when I did the New Saturn Collective. Almost as a combination of Solstice and Energy Disciples. Where it had some of the live aspect of Solstice and then some of the spacier concepts of Energy Disciples.
Is New Saturn Collective a set group of people, or a rotating cast?
It’s a rotating cast. Now I’m working on this other concept, so I’m starting to rotate the players. On each New Saturn Collective album it was a new cast. I like to bring in different players. I composed all the music. But different players give it a different interpretation, so it always takes you a different place. Each player puts their individual personality onto the thing so it’s good to keep it fresh.
I’ve also got this improv project that’s called Misterioso Africano, and it’s pure improvisation, nothing worked out. Sometimes we get into the avant-garde noise thing, sometimes we just groove.
Paul Taylor, the local multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire who manages the recording studio at Crosstown Arts, recently approached me about a project he was particularly excited about: a live jazz recording session, open to the public, that would be held in the Green Room listening space this weekend. The band would include Taylor on drums, Carl Caspersen on bass, and Jim Spake on saxophone.The band leader? Pianist and singer Katharine Hedlund, who lived and played in Memphis for a few years before relocating to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Intrigued, I spoke to both Hedlund and Taylor about jazz, soul, show tunes, and the unique experience of playing and recording with a Steinway in the Green Room.
Paul Taylor
Memphis Flyer: How did you start working with Katharine?
Paul Taylor: Year before last, right before Katharine moved, we started playing jazz together and we just locked really well. It was super fun, and I immediately regretted that we hadn’t been playing together for the entire time she’d been in Memphis. So when she came back to visit last year, I invited her to come record in my residency space, before I was hired at Crosstown Arts. We made some recordings that I thought were really fantastic, but the only limitation was that it was a digital piano. So I asked her, when are you coming to Memphis? I thought we could book a show at the Green Room and record it live, because they often have a real piano up there. Right now they’ve got a Steinway baby grand which sounds fantastic.
So it really worked out. All the elements came together perfectly for us to make a more authentic-sounding record. And she’s one of the best pianists and vocalists I’ve ever worked with. So I’m thrilled that it could work out. She was making waves on the scene and we really hit if off. Sometimes when you’re playing music with people, especially jazz, it can get really cerebral and really academic really fast. And she is extraordinarily well-educated, but it’s always a blast to play with her. The rhythmic things we wind up doing together are always super fun. That just doesn’t happen with everybody. That’s an important part of it.
Katharine Hedlund
So Katharine, you’re not from Memphis?
Katharine Hedlund: No, my family’s from Connecticut, the New York metropolitan area, essentially. My brother went to Rhodes College. He loved it here and stayed after Rhodes. I started working at the same company he was at and ended up here for three and half years or so. Now I’m in the Bay Area, playing music and back in school studying computer science. It’s kind of a transitional career shift. Basically, I put all of my free time into music, but I’m not trying to do it for money. That way I get to put my time into music that I really care about, which is awesome. You can really be fully present for the music then, and it doesn’t feel like as much of a burden.
So you recorded with Paul Taylor and this Memphis band last year?
Yeah, it was just kind of a casual recording session he put together, all first takes.
I heard some of the tracks. There were some cool choices of soul tunes and a nice arrangement of “Skylark.”
Thank you! Yeah, I feel like every Hoagy Carmichael song is this little musical gem. Tomorrow night, that’s definitely the energy we’re going for: soul tunes and standards and a few that will just be us jamming out. But quite a few are arranged with a Katharine perspective, you could say. It’s gonna be really fun.
What’s your musical background?
I started off playing classical music, but I always really liked singing, and I was really into musical theater. So when I discovered jazz — and standards are basically songs from musical theater that jazz musicians decided to start playing around with — I got really into it. I started listening to Ella Fitzgerald and joined the jazz band, and my musical affinity shifted towards jazz. And I also loved playing with other people. I loved the social aspect of it. The collaborative aspect of it.
After high school, I went to Northwestern University and studied jazz piano and economics there. It was a great experience. I was able to play in small jazz ensembles all around Chicago. And I did fun original bands with friends from Chicago. So it was really a great experience.
When I moved to Memphis, I was a total jazz nerd. I hate to admit it, but I totally was. And I started playing at the Zebra Lounge at Overton Square. I thought, ‘This’ll be fun.’ I had never played in a piano bar. Though I had played and sung before, I never played all the pop and soul and everything under the sun. That turned out to be the most amazing gig ever. I actually got really into it. My singing got better, and I started learning all these soul and pop songs and doing fun arrangements, and talking to the audience. It just ended up being this amazing community and an amazing musical experience. That was awesome. So a lot of what I’m playing on Saturday are these songs that I’d been playing for years at the Zebra Lounge. I had these arrangements in my mind and just had to write them out for the rest of the band.
So, coming from playing jazz in college, I saw it as coming back to my original love, which was singing these songs. I love the performance of it. So I’m taking all that musical knowledge and all that nerdy stuff you learn in college, but making it more accessible and fun and a real performance — combining all that together. That’s really my home: playing jazz and standards, making them musically interesting for everyone to play, but the audience doesn’t feel alienated, ‘cos it’s fun, and I’m talking to people. That’s the energy I’m going for.
Learning jazz academically can get kind of cerebral, as Paul said…
Definitely, when you study it in school. So what I’m doing with these soul songs is kind of like what jazz musicians were doing with musical theater songs back in the day. Just putting your own energy into it.
Tomorrow’s show will be music in three categories: one is arrangements of soul-oriented stuff, and the second will be standards I’ve arranged, and the third category will be me playing with really great musicians, just playing some instrumentals and having a really fun time. I mostly wanted to reconnect with people I’ve played with here. I’m sure we’ll do another one next year sometime. That size of room, like the Green Room, is my favorite kind of space to perform in and even to see music in. It’s big enough that you can feel the energy of the audience, but you’re close enough to the musicians that you feel you’re a part of it. I’m so happy that Memphis has that space, it’s so awesome.
Did you play out much with a band like this when you were living in Memphis?
Not at first, but I came to that point where I realized, ‘Everyone’s making it up and I’m gonna make it up too. Let’s just see where this goes.’ Then I started playing with Daniel McKee and Paul right before I left. And Jim Spake and Carl. That was three or four months before I left. And just as we started getting going, I was like, ‘Sorry guys, I’m leaving.’
Are you forging ahead with music in the Bay Area?
It’s been good so far! But during this visit, it’s gonna be great playing with good friends and good musicians in a really wonderful place. And I feel like, now that I’ve been away from Memphis I have even more love for Memphis and what Memphis is. It’s gonna be great. This is going to be a long-overdue concert.
Justin Fox Burks 
Photo Courtesy of Jadene King 
Justin Fox Burks 
