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      An Elastic and Impressive Year in Jazz

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThere was much to celebrate in jazz this past year — great new albums from Meshell Ndegeocello, Ambrose Akinmusire and Immanuel Wilkins; outstanding live performances by Cecile McLorin Salvant and Brandon Woody. It was also a year of reflection, following the passing of Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal, Jaimie Branch, Les McCann and others.Conversations about jazz often extended beyond the bounds of the genre, thanks both to work by open-minded jazz musicians (Kassa Overall, Chief Adjuah) uninterested in that label or the expectations that come with it, and also because of music released outside of the genre (Laufey, André 3000) that prompted conversations about who is included in jazz, and who should be left out.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about some of the year’s most impressive jazz releases, the ways in which its borders are softening, and who benefits, and suffers, when people working outside of formal jazz idioms are lumped into conversations about jazz.Guests:Marcus J. Moore, who writes about music for The New York TimesGiovanni Russonello, who writes about jazz for The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Winter Jazzfest Has Company: Unity Jazz Festival

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      The decision to place another festival right on top of Jazzfest highlighted how much has been flipped upside-down in jazz over the past 20 years.Back in 2005 — when the first NYC Winter Jazzfest was held at the Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan, and Jazz at Lincoln Center’s multimillion-dollar facilities had recently opened on the Upper West Side — it was clear which represented the establishment, and which was proposing an alternative. Today, it’s not such an easy distinction.Steered by its artistic director, the Pulitzer Prize-winning trumpeter and retro jazz philosopher Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center was cultivating an older and affluent audience, adjacent to the opera-going crowd. Marsalis’s bookings proudly held the line for what he considered jazz’s defining virtues. Two decades later, those things are still true.Winter Jazzfest was geared toward disruption. The mid-2000s were lean years for the music: Online file sharing hit jazz musicians especially hard, and the fallout from the Sept. 11 attacks left many live-music venues closed throughout New York City.Brice Rosenbloom, Winter Jazzfest’s founder, positioned it as both an infusion of crucial life support and a challenge to some of jazz’s passively dominant trends. The festival’s biggest target, perhaps, was the idea that you could draw any stark dividing lines through music: Pop-friendly, fusion-driven, acoustic and tradition-revering improvisers coexisted on the festival’s bill, which in that first year unfolded across three stages on a single night at the Knit.New York jazz lost its flagship summertime festival in 2009, leaving Winter Jazzfest as the biggest game in town; since then it has grown into more than a week of concerts and satellite events. Every year, it offers a full buffet of the current flavors in jazz at a mix of theaters, rock halls and small rooms.The 20th annual Winter Jazzfest marathons took place over the weekend, in Lower Manhattan on Friday night and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Saturday. From the sound of things, no matter how dark things may look in the wider world, the state of improvised music appears strong.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jay Clayton, Vocal Innovator in Jazz and Beyond, Dies at 82

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      She sparred with avant-garde instrumentalists and used electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette. She was also at home in more conventional settings.Jay Clayton, a singer whose six-decade career encompassed freewheeling improvisation, lyrical songs and poetry, and the prescient use of electronics, died on Dec. 31 at her home in New Paltz, N.Y. She was 82.Her daughter, Dejha Colantuono, said the cause was small-cell lung cancer.Ms. Clayton established herself as an innovator in the 1970s and ’80s, sparring with instrumentalists in avant-garde settings and using electronics to alter and extend her vocal palette well before the practice became common. She worked frequently with other singers — she formed an especially close bond with Sheila Jordan, an early mentor — and she sang in playfully aerobatic vocal groups with peers like Jeanne Lee, Ursula Dudziak, Norma Winstone and Bobby McFerrin.“She works in the familiar avant-garde terrain of wordless, spontaneous improvisations in duo and group settings,” the critic Jon Garelick wrote of her work in The Boston Phoenix in 1990. “But Clayton is also a warm, gracious interpreter of lyric standards, and this lyricism pervades all her work.”Ms. Clayton in 1969. She fell in with the downtown jazz scene after moving to New York in 1963.via Clayton familyShe performed for a decade with the composer Steve Reich, participating in the development and recording of breakthrough pieces like “Drumming,” “Music for 18 Musicians” and “Tehillim.” She also worked closely with dancers and choreographers early in her career, and she maintained an enduring collaboration with the tap dancer Brenda Bufalino.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton held positions at the City College of New York, the Peabody Institute and Princeton University. She developed a vocal program for the Banff Center in Alberta, Canada, where she taught with Ms. Jordan. The two further collaborated in training programs in Massachusetts and Vermont and ran a celebrated retreat for singers at Willow Lane Farm in Berne, N.Y., near Albany.Prominent among Ms. Clayton’s students are the composer Karen Goldfeder and the protean vocal improviser Theo Bleckmann. But through her widespread pedagogy — including a book, “Sing Your Story: A Practical Guide for Learning and Teaching the Art of Jazz Singing,” published in 2001 — her progeny are legion.She was born Judith Theresa Colantone on Oct. 28, 1941, in Youngstown, Ohio. Her father, William Colantone, was a carpenter and construction worker; her mother, Josephine (Armeni) Colantone, had sung professionally during the big-band era.Ms. Clayton took up the accordion and later had several years of piano lessons. After high school, she attended a summer program at the St. Louis Institute of Music and then enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, where she received a bachelor’s degree in music education in 1963. Since jazz courses were not available, she studied classical repertoire while quietly polishing her improvisational skills on weekend dates with a local trombonist.A prominent and influential teacher, Ms. Clayton was the author of what she called “a practical guide” to the study of jazz singing/No creditAfter moving to New York City in 1963, Ms. Clayton fell in with the downtown jazz scene and formed an early association with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. Through him, she met the drummer Frank Clayton, with whom she began a relationship in 1965. In 1967, the couple started a concert series, “Jazz at the Loft,” in their home on Lispenard Street, in the neighborhood later called TriBeCa, presenting performances by the saxophonist Sam Rivers, the pianist Joanne Brackeen and others. They married in 1968.Not long afterward, Ms. Clayton was introduced to Mr. Reich by the singer Joan La Barbara, who was her student. What he sought, he said in a phone interview, was a “modern-day equivalent” of Ella Fitzgerald: someone who could perform his music with spontaneity as well as precision.Ms. Clayton fit the bill. “Her pitch was dead-on, and her rhythm was a lift to the spirit,” Mr. Reich said. “She grasped what had to be done, and she did it to perfection.”Flourishing among her fellow innovators and iconoclasts, Ms. Clayton led educational workshops with Jeanne Lee and performed with the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams at the Public Theater in 1979. That same year, she consulted on the first Women in Jazz festival, produced by Cobi Narita (who died in November).In 1981, Ms. Clayton released her first album, “All-Out,” a wide-ranging statement with an ensemble that included Mr. Clayton, the pianist Larry Karush, the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, the vocalist Shelley Hirsch and others. On several tracks Ms. Clayton sang swooping, soaring lines in tandem with Ms. Bloom, a recent arrival from New Haven, Conn., whom Ms. Clayton had taken under her wing.“From the minute she and I met, we had this linear synchronicity,” Ms. Bloom said in an interview. “There’s something about the combination of her sound and my sound: We played lines together, and it was like this other instrument.” They collaborated for decades.In 1982, Ms. Clayton, her husband and their two children moved to Seattle, where she taught at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts. When she and Mr. Clayton divorced in 1984, she remained in Seattle, developing a new circle of collaborators that included the drummer Jerry Granelli, the trombonist Julian Priester, the bassist and the saxophonist Briggan Krauss.Ms. Clayton, center, in the 1980s with, from left, the pianist Larry Karush, the bassist Harvie Swartz, the drummer Frank Clayton and the saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom.via Clayton familyShe recorded works by the experimental composer John Cage in the late 1980s and returned to Mr. Reich’s music on occasion. Her jazz recordings from those years include “Beautiful Love,” a 1995 album devoted to vintage popular standards with the pianist Fred Hersch.“I always think that doing standard material lets you know where somebody’s coming from,” Mr. Hersch said in an interview, likening the practice to a painter rendering a still life or a nude. “In Jay’s case, a lot of it is very hauntingly beautiful, and pretty fierce in terms of improvising.”Ms. Clayton moved back to New York in 2002, re-establishing a local presence both alone and in collaboration with Ms. Jordan. She made a stream of recordings for the Sunnyside label, ranging from a lyrical tribute to the songwriter Harry Warren to an adventurous electronic fantasia involving poetry by Emily Dickinson, made with the composer and pianist Kirk Nurock.She was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer in December 2022. Her final recording, “Voices in Flight,” a collaboration with the singer Judy Niemack, was released in June.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Clayton is survived by her brother, William Colantone Jr.; her son, Dov Clayton; and two grandchildren.To the end, Ms. Clayton remained devoted to her students. “She was always just exactly herself, personally and musically,” Ms. Goldfeder wrote in a Facebook post; “it’s one of the many ways she was a great teacher.” More

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      The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings Is on a New Journey: Flutes

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      The British musician is an artist in residence at Winter Jazzfest in New York this week, playing an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.As Shabaka Hutchings led a concert tribute to Pharoah Sanders in early December, he returned to a familiar equation: funneling gallons of air through his tenor saxophone, transforming it into a corrosive stream of sound.Hutchings has been an essential figure on a British jazz scene that has experienced an uptick in popularity over the past decade because of its erasure of genre boundaries and its embrace of the art form’s foundational dance music sensibilities. His distinctive tenor has long been the through line of his diverse, widely acclaimed projects, connecting the electronic skronk of the Comet Is Coming to the fire of Sons of Kemet, and lately to the legacy of fellow hard-blowing saxophonists like Sanders.But by the time we met earlier this month, Hutchings, 39, had put down the saxophone, if not for good then certainly for the foreseeable. A handful of gigs across London last month — the Sanders tribute, an extended take on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” and a final flourish as a guest with the pianist Alexander Hawkins’s trio — were the final chances to hear Hutchings performing on an instrument that has dominated his musical life for the first part of his professional career. When he appears at New York’s Winter Jazzfest as an artist in residence this week, for the most part he will be playing flutes, an instrument group that he first picked up in 2019.“The bands that I was doing those gigs with became successful enough for them to dominate all the space of my work,” Hutchings said, speaking quietly and methodically, in a way that suggested recounting recent life events to others may be another extension of his artistic practice. “People say, because you’re doing lots of work on the saxophone, you are a saxophone player. I’m not really a saxophone player.” He felt that the only chance to be proficient elsewhere was to make a bold change.“I think of him as a sort of a multi-instrumentalist,” said the pianist Alexander Hawkins, a longtime collaborator. “Rather than being a switch, I think this is just a move towards other modes of expression.” The decision, which Hutchings said “ultimately boils down to intuition,” still surprised even him, though. “I literally would never have imagined putting down the saxophone back in 2020,” he said.In 2020, Hutchings also likely didn’t anticipate a rising profile for the flute in jazz. But “New Blue Sun,” a surprise release from the onetime Outkast rapper André 3000 last November that featured him playing different types of flute, gave the instrument a boost. (A new album from Hutchings is due this spring.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Linda Sharrock Has Lost Her Speech, but She’s Still Performing

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      Linda Sharrock, an avant-garde jazz musician who became aphasic after a 2009 stroke, has returned to the stage and inspired new generations.Last April, the Vienna-based avant-garde jazz vocalist Linda Sharrock gave her first New York performance in over 40 years: a sold-out concert at BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House, as part of a series curated by Solange. Appearing between the poet Claudia Rankine and the saxophonist Archie Shepp, Sharrock guided eight musicians through a fully improvised set while she howled powerfully over the cacophonous squall of free jazz in a declamatory style that evoked the evening’s program title, “The Cry of My People.”It wasn’t until after she’d received multiple standing ovations that most of the audience realized the 76-year-old singer wasn’t able to speak: Sharrock became aphasic after a 2009 stroke that paralyzed her right side; she now uses a wheelchair. A few weeks later at the Cambridge, Mass., home of the pianist Eric Zinman, who plays in her group the Linda Sharrock Network, Sharrock was unable to verbalize much more than “yeah,” “no,” “OK” and “I don’t know.”Despite her limited dialogical abilities, Sharrock was cheerful, charming and quick to laughter. Much of the talking was done by her caregiver — Mario Rechtern, an 81-year-old Austrian free jazz saxophonist who has, by his account, overseen her personal affairs and daily activities for the last 20 years. He not only plays in her band, he helps her dress, feeds her if necessary and carries her down the stairs.“This work with Linda is consuming,” Rechtern said, tugging at his woolly gray beard, “and at the same time, I cannot give in to the consuming, because when I give in, she’s lost. So it’s challenging.”Sharrock’s return to the stage — a manifestation of her stubborn refusal to be silenced — is one of the most stirring comeback stories in recent memory. Over a career stretching six decades, Sharrock has been a resolutely singular figure; almost no peers share her uniquely unorthodox vocal delivery. Too “out” for jazz’s in-crowd, she was relegated to relative obscurity. Yet her commitment to challenging her audience has ultimately made her a role model for experimental vocalists and Black female performers, providing a beacon of tantalizing possibilities.The poet and vocalist Camae Ayewa, who performs as Moor Mother, recalled hearing Sharrock’s music for the first time and “losing my mind,” she said in an interview. “I wrote a little poem about this because it was such urgency on my part to be like, ‘What is going on here? This is where I want to go! This is what I want to sound like!’ I hadn’t heard anyone before that had inspired me this way besides Betty Carter. I just started to be obsessed about it.”Sharrock’s vocal exclamations have become deeper and more guttural moans than the high-pitched shrieks of her early work with her then-husband, the musician Sonny Sharrock. In the late 1960s, Sonny revolutionized jazz guitar through volume, distortion and feedback while playing with Pharoah Sanders, Don Cherry, Wayne Shorter and Miles Davis. Linda’s approach was no less radical: On three albums of collaborations with Sonny, beginning with their remarkable 1969 debut “Black Woman,” her wordless exhortations included psychedelic sighs, orgasmic yodels and blood-chilling screams, all delivered with an intensity that made “Plastic Ono Band”-era Yoko Ono sound like Anne Murray in comparison.“I’ve never listened to any kind of a female jazz singer for any kind of inspiration or anything like that,” Sharrock said in a 1973 WKCR radio interview. “I was influenced by horn players,” she explained, citing incendiary saxophonists like Sanders and Albert Ayler.“The thing that killed me about her singing was that she was, if not the first, one of the few jazz singers who improvise,” Sonny said in the same WKCR conversation. “That’s one of the reasons she doesn’t use words: because it hinders your improvisation.”Sharrock was born Linda Chambers in Philadelphia, and lived with her grandmother and her younger brother, Pablo, in the working class Germantown neighborhood, according to Jacquelyn Bullock, a longtime friend and former neighbor. In an interview, she said that despite Sharrock’s confrontational vocal approach, offstage “she was quiet and demure,” with an interest in fashion and a distinctive sense of style. “She’s a gracious woman. Like most women, she likes nice things, and she has a great sense of humor.”Sharrock moved to New York after graduating from high school in 1965 with the intention to study painting, but soon became immersed in the Lower East Side’s jazz scene, where her inaugural professional gig was singing with Sanders. When she first began performing, she shaved off her eyebrows and kept her hair close-cropped, she told The New York Times Magazine in 1975. “It was the strangest look I could conceive of,” she said. “My life had taken such a drastic change, I wanted to present it physically.”She met Sonny through Sanders, and they married in 1967. Earnings for most free jazz musicians were lean, but that year, Sonny got the opportunity to work with the commercially successful jazz-funk flutist Herbie Mann, and spent most of the next seven years playing in his group. Linda went on tour with them and eventually joined the band, usually performing two of the couple’s compositions each night, “Black Woman” and “Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black.”The Sharrocks lived in an apartment at 77 East 3rd Street in the East Village; the pianist Dave Burrell was a neighbor and hosted rehearsals for the 1969 “Black Woman” album in his tiny living room. Burrell recalled in an interview that hearing Sharrock sing for the first time, “I felt a bolt of excitement,” he said. “I thought of her as a vocalist who could throw herself into the ‘Black is beautiful’ moment and movement, and that made her one of the boys, so having her around was cool.”Another “Black Woman” musician, the trumpeter Ted Daniel, was a childhood friend of Sonny’s from Ossining, N.Y. “She was one of a kind,” Daniel said in an interview. “I haven’t heard anybody sing with the raw passion and just that kind of freedom that she approached in her singing with Sonny in that band.”Released on the Vortex subsidiary of Atlantic Records, the trailblazing “Black Woman” failed to find a larger audience. A few years later, the couple put together the Savages, a working band that could play out regularly. The group included steel drums and Latin percussion and gigged at downtown venues like the Tin Palace and lofts like Studio Rivbea, said Abe Speller, the band’s drummer. The Savages recorded a soundtrack to Sedat Pakay’s 1973 short documentary “James Baldwin: From Another Place” and performed a live set in 1974 on WKCR, which are the only surviving souvenirs of their existence. Speller recalled the band holing up to rehearse before entering a studio in December 1977 to record a four-song demo tape, but the group failed to score a label deal and eventually fizzled out.After Linda and Sonny divorced, she moved to Turkey and then Vienna, where she met her second husband, the Austrian saxophonist Wolfgang Puschnig, a few years later. (Sonny died in 1994 at 53.) Initially they were just musical collaborators, Puschnig said in a video call from his home in southern Austria, but a relationship blossomed and they were married in 1987 while in Mozambique for a gig.Under their own names and in groups like the Pat Brothers, AM4 and Red Sun, Puschnig and Sharrock recorded more than 20 albums together on European and South Korean labels from 1986 to 2007, but her vocal approach had changed markedly. Puschnig said that she moved away from singing in her free style after consulting a former Ziegfeld girl turned palm reader, who told her, “I see you’re a singer, but you don’t use words, but you should because you have a talent to use words.”“So that’s how she started to do lyrics,” he said.The jazz fusion bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma performed with them for years, and produced “On Holiday,” Sharrock’s 1990 album of Billie Holiday covers, complete with new jack swing beats and a rapper. “She was pushing the ball,” Tacuma said in an interview, “thinking outside of the box, in terms of music, creativity, and improvisation, and trying to bring something about musically with her voice that had not been done before.”Puschnig said Sharrock’s health started to deteriorate in the mid-1990s, and though their romantic relationship ended around 1996, they continued working together as late as 2007. Around 2004, Rechtern — who had first met Sharrock in 1979 — began caring for her, and was granted power of attorney in 2007. “She was really falling into the nothingness,” Rechtern said. “If I wouldn’t have taken her she would be in a home.”During surgery for an intestinal blockage in 2009, Sharrock suffered her stroke, and spent the following two years in and out of the hospital. In 2012 she was visited in Austria by the jazz bassist Henry Grimes. “She was sitting on the couch while he played,” Rechtern recalled, “and I heard her very softly singing into the music.”Intrigued, Rechtern began gradually coaxing Sharrock to perform again. “She started to develop first this growl sound, this cry, because she couldn’t articulate,” he said. “Out of the blues and this typical sound, she found this explosion.”Beginning with “No Is No” in 2014, Sharrock has released five recordings in Europe since her stroke. Her recent music is more in the spirit of the free jazz she made with Sonny than her somewhat more conventional work with Puschnig, though her vocal range is understandably not the same.Sharrock responded affirmatively when asked if she had needed to sing and perform again, and when asked if she felt better while onstage, she cracked up laughing.“This music is healing for her,” Rechtern replied. “There’s no doubt.”Sharrock’s work and perseverance has inspired a new generation of artists. “So much of it doesn’t have lyrics,” Taja Cheek, who performs as L’Rain, said in an interview, “and isn’t easy to understand in a certain kind of way, but I understood it, and I felt it so viscerally when I first heard her that it got very emotional for me.”On a recent re-listen of “Black Woman,” Cheek said, “it sort of hit me like a ton of bricks that ‘Oh, Linda Sharrock is the lineage I might be a part of.’ I am able to do what I’m doing, and it can be met with a little bit of understanding, because Linda has already done something like this.”Sharrock’s resiliency has resonated with her old colleagues, as well. “It is very telling about the heart of a performing artist wanting to be able to do that until it’s completely impossible,” Burrell said, “another further dimension of the determination that she still has, no matter what the circumstances. I’m very proud of her.” More

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      ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ Review: A Lens on a Jazz Luminary

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      Brigitte Berman’s dazzling 1985 look at the self-taught virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader is showing after a restoration.The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time, early in what would be a lengthy but nevertheless self-truncated jazz career, he tried to write a novel about Bix. He couldn’t complete it, he says here, because the story had “depth and connotation that I wasn’t philosophically or mentally prepared to cope with.”Shaw was not only a self-taught virtuoso but also often the smartest guy in any room he was in. When he came back to the bandstand, his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” was a smash hit of the swing era. An unselfconscious civil rights pioneer, he hired the Black singer Billie Holiday to sing with him at a time when that just wasn’t done.Charming as well as erudite, he married eight times, to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner among others. The marriages didn’t last because of his cantankerousness. The fame he avidly sought in his early years — “like any other American kid, I wanted more of everything,” he notes — eventually struck him as inane and repellent. An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga. The movie on its first release did so well — it won an Oscar — that it prompted the ever-unsatisfied Shaw to sue for a bigger share of the picture’s profits.Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve GotNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Strata-East Records

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      This label founded in 1971 gave Afrocentric and psychedelic jazz a home, and found a breakout hit with Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson. Take a guided tour through its deep catalog.We’ve been asking writers, musicians and scholars to tell us what songs they’d play to get people into jazz. This month, we decided to highlight a record label: Strata-East Records, founded in 1971 by the trumpeter Charles Tolliver and the pianist Stanley Cowell.An artist-driven label, Strata-East became a hub for the type of Afrocentric and psychedelic jazz that wasn’t accepted by the wider mainstream. With projects like Tolliver’s own Music Inc., alongside experimental acts like Brother Ah, the Descendants of Mike and Phoebe, and Jayne Cortez, the albums released on Strata-East spoke to the Civil Rights struggles of Black Americans at the time. In 1974, the label enjoyed a breakout hit with “Winter in America,” a collaborative album from Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson powered by the lead single “The Bottle.” But while that’s the most notable album in the catalog, Strata-East is full of excellent records that are widely celebrated, if not always easy to hear; original copies of some trade hands for hundreds of dollars, and none of the selections below are available on Spotify. The lack of a streaming playlist just makes this guided tour of the label from 10 writers and musicians more essential.As you’ll see (and hear) below, Strata-East released some of the best jazz heard on any label, and shouldn’t be discounted because it wasn’t one of the majors. More than 50 years on, the work of Strata-East prevails. Be sure to leave your own favorites in the comments.◆ ◆ ◆Nabil Ayers, author and record executive“Alkebu-Lan” by Mtume Umoja EnsembleThe second LP of the 1972 Mtume Umoja Ensemble album, “Alkebu-Lan,” opens with an epic 16-minute journey into its title, which translates to “Land of the Blacks.” Over a patient backdrop of horns, voices and Stanley Cowell’s piano, James Mtume emphatically states the ensemble’s goals: Organizing and unifying! Unifying and organizing! Going back, back, back … to Africa!As “Alkebu-Lan” builds, horns blast, cymbals crash, voices shout, and at times, everything hits the tape just a bit too hard. But the resulting distortion is where the energy lives on this album recorded live at The East, gaining momentum, until 12 minutes in, when a restless chorus of saxophones devolves into Ndugu Chancler’s drum solo. The excitement in the room is palpable, and the collision of celebration and conviction causes the band and the audience — it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between the two — to sound like they might mutually erupt.Some might consider this music challenging or niche, but it’s actually a distant and seminal precursor to some of the most popular music of a generation: Ten years later, its drummer played the first sounds we hear on Michael Jackson’s megahit “Billie Jean.” I like to think that Chancler brought some of the energy with him from that night at The East.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆MidnightRoba, vocalist and producer“On the Nile” by Music Inc.The Strata-East label’s debut recording, Music Inc., features the co-founders Charles Tolliver and Stanley Cowell with Cecil McBee, Jimmy Hopps and a supporting orchestra of brass, reeds and flutes. Although initially recorded by Tolliver’s quartet on Polydor’s “The Ringer,” the Strata-East version of “On the Nile” is the ultimate contemporary sonic celebration of the grandeur of ancient Nubia. Brass opens, drawing us in, in sequence, to bear witness; the flutes are the heka, or magic and mysticism of ancient Egypt; Cowell’s piano is at times a firm salute to the power of the ancient civilization and at others reflective of the deity-worshiping arched harp. Tolliver’s own solo is the falcon, Horus, the spirit of the Nile itself; McBee’s bass solo, the milk and honey of the land. This recording is a truly visual sonic experience. A sensorial and transportive joy.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Alisa L. Brock, writer“First Impressions” by Shamek FarrahSteady bass in the intro, then the keys take the lead, sticks make their way swiftly behind, and the horn drags in like a somber cry. What is a first impression, if not rhythms meeting with a willingness to be heard and felt? It’s almost impossible not to feel Shamek Farrah’s “First Impressions.” It’s the kind of sound that pulls you in, and invites you on a beautiful and exciting ride with the unfamiliar.It’s effortless to soak in the comfort of the bass strings that play the bottom. The consistency grounds me as the introduction of each instrument pulls us deeper into this encounter with sacred noise. Feel it. Let it make its way through you. Get well acquainted with the shifts in mood that offer up a demonstration of the impermanence of everything and the joy of difference. Surrender to the sounds of a first impression. It’s a vibe.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Jeff Parker, guitarist, composer and producer“Hopscotch” by Charles RouseBack in 2001, Tortoise was performing at one of the early iterations of the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. The festival was packed with folks — supposedly about a million people were in attendance throughout the course of the weekend. We were hanging after our show and I heard this insane music come over the gigantic P.A.: a hypnotic groove with an angular melody atop, and unconventional instrumentation of tenor saxophone, electric guitar, acoustic bass and drums. Someone made their way to the D.J. booth and found out that the track was “Hopscotch” by Charles (a.k.a. Charlie) Rouse from his album “Two Is One” on Strata-East Records. Serendipity found me in Peoples Records the following day, and lo and behold, there the album was in the jazz bins (the only time I’ve ever seen it in the wild). I discovered that the composition was written by one of my favorites — the drummer and composer Joe Chambers — and features Rouse on tenor, Paul Metzke on guitar, Stanley Clarke on bass, Airto Moreira on percussion, and the great New Orleans drummer David Lee. This album introduced me to Strata-East Records, and I’ve been performing this tune, following the label and collecting the records ever since.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Greg Bryant, musician and broadcaster“Wilpan’s” by Music Inc.Inspired by the saunter of a former love interest, the bassist Cecil McBee’s composition “Wilpan’s” spotlights the post-bop quartet Music Inc. live at the legendary New York City nightclub Slugs’ Saloon. As few recordings of the music made in Slugs’ survive, “Wilpan’s” provides essential documentation of an ethos and an era that has inspired subsequent generations of forward-thinking improvisers grounded in swing.From the beginning, McBee’s catchy ostinato bass figure ignites the ensemble immediately. The trumpeter Charles Tolliver takes the first solo and navigates McBee’s tune with the confidence and cunning of a prizefighter. Listen for that same zeal in the pianist Stanley Cowell’s improvisation that emphasizes the tune’s harmony alongside powerful right-hand declarations. Next, McBee takes a solo that is one of his most explosive on record. He taps into the vocabulary of a shredding guitarist at times, and somehow, he never overplays. After the band states the final melody, they ride the lock-step groove set by the drummer Jimmy Hopps and McBee. As the tune’s pinnacle, it is an infectious, bouncy swing that will make you want to get involved.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Cosmo Baker, D.J.“Prince of Peace” by Pharoah SandersWhen I was 16 years old, while going through a crate of used records in the back of an old pet-supply store in Philly, I pulled out a well-worn (well loved) copy of Pharoah Sanders’s “Izipho Zam (My Gifts)” — a copy I still own to this day, and my world was never the same.This record was my introduction to Pharoah, setting off a personal journey that is still going. It was an intro to many of his collaborators — Sonny Sharrock! Cecil McBee! Leon Thomas! Mostly it was an intro to both the Strata-East label and the philosophy, ethos and sound that it exemplifies: the intersection of spiritual jazz, Black consciousness and identity, avant-garde pioneering, among so many more intangibles, and that’s for both this album and Strata-East in general. As for Pharoah, the album is a glimpse into his soul-baring relinquishment to something larger than all of us. Written words don’t do this masterpiece any justice, but “Prince of Peace” is a universal mantra the world could use right now, and always.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆V.C.R, recording artist, violinist and composer“Winter in America” by Gil Scott-Heron and Brian JacksonGrowing up, gospel, classical, jazz and folk music was the soundtrack to my life. This soundtrack has shaped how I dissect, digest and compose music. But no seed that was sown grew stronger roots than when my mother introduced me to Gil Scott-Heron. She would always tell me stories about her time at Harvard during her undergraduate years where she would follow his work, hoping to catch one of his live shows. For a lover of poetry and jazz, you didn’t get any more authentic than Boston in the late ’70s.“Winter in America,” like all of Scott-Heron’s repertoire, was timely and prophetic. The lyrics describe the ice-cold state of the nation in 1974, eerily echoing the cold front we are experiencing presently. Over a haunting, repetitive piano riff in C minor, Gil preached, “We have been taken over by the season of ice. Very few people recognize it for what it is. Although they feel uncomfortable very few people recognize the fact that somehow the seasons don’t change.” (A live performance of the song was released on the CD version of the “Winter in America” album in 1998.)Right now people are still so overwhelmed by the reality of how dark the state of the world is. My favorite line of the song is when he sang, “The truth is there ain’t nobody fighting because, well, nobody knows what to save. Brother, save your soul.” That statement alone hits home for me as I look around wondering how can I truly make a difference. I wish I could share this song with everyone in this country, especially now. Thank God my mother shared Gil with me.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Richard Scheinin, music writer“Cry of Hunger!” by Billy HarperNo one composes like Billy Harper. His tunes are noble, soulful, and questing. This epic track — from his debut album, “Capra Black” — begins with a call to attention. Wake up! We are instantly spun into some mysterious dimension by the sextet, which seems to move in slow motion as Harper makes one of his patented, monolithic entrances on tenor saxophone. He moans. He ascends. You hear the blues. You hear the ecstatic power of the Black church. We are held in suspense; there are moments of literal silence that take your breath away. Then the chorus enters, singing one of Harper’s most memorable themes: “There’ll be e-nough some day!” Over and over. A soprano sings an ethereal line in counterpoint to Harper’s next solo. With each beseeching note, he imparts a message: of joy, sorrow, yearning, beauty. He is singing; he is praying. The band (featuring the likes of George Cables, Reggie Workman and Jimmy Owens) moves at a majestic lope, cycling back to the wake-up call before the chorus (which includes the great Gene McDaniels) returns for the finale. Taken in another direction, this song of hope might have been a hit for someone like Curtis Mayfield. I’ve been listening to it for 50 years and it still brings me to my knees.Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Angel Bat Dawid, musician“Baba Hengates” by Mtume Umoja EnsembleMtume’s “Alkebu-Lan” is my favorite Strata-East album. It’s hard to say which one song hits me with “Alkebu-Lan,” because it is in my opinion not an album to be compartmentalized in that way; it is a living, breathing creature, and one must commit to the sonic instructions of invocation to the end of this powerful incantation. But for reference purposes, the “Invocation” going into “Baba Hengates” resonates to my core. “Alkebu-Lan” is one of those holy grail albums I’m still searching for, waiting for my bank account to have the funds to afford an original, as most Strata-East O.G.s are pretty pricey. So if anyone out there wanna give a creative musician a present, holla at ya girl!Listen on YouTube◆ ◆ ◆Marcus J. Moore, jazz writer“Malika” by the Ensemble Al-SalaamOne day about 10 years ago, I was listening to the producer Madlib’s “Medicine Show #8: Advanced Jazz” when this piercing soprano came barreling through the speakers. I had just finished laughing at the album’s fake 1970s Blaxploitation film promo when the singer Beatrice Parker snapped me back into place. The song was “Malika” from the Ensemble Al-Salaam, a New York-based spiritual jazz septet who counted Bill Lee (a fellow Strata-East artist and the film director Spike Lee’s father) as inspiration. Between Parker’s rolling vocals and the band’s frenetic arrangement, “Malika” sounded like a car-chase scene in a crime saga. I liked free and spiritual jazz anyway, so I already had a palate for avant-garde music. But I’d never heard that. The song was something else, something I didn’t know I needed. To that end, I also give credit to Madlib for shaping my taste in jazz. I knew the classics, but albums like “Advanced Jazz” and “Shades of Blue” introduced me to psychedelic underground jazz, and labels like Strata-East Records.Listen on YouTube More

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      Les McCann, a Jazz Pianist and Singer, Dies at 88

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      He released more than 50 albums but had his greatest commercial success with “Compared to What,” a recording that came together at the last minute in 1969.Les McCann, a jazz pianist and vocalist who was an early progenitor of the bluesy, crowd-pleasing style that came to be known as soul jazz, and who, although he released more than 50 albums, was best known for a happenstance hit from 1969, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His death, at a hospital where he had been admitted with pneumonia, was confirmed on Monday by Alan Abrahams, his longtime manager and a producer of several of his albums. Mr. McCann had lived for the past four years at a skilled nursing facility in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles.Mr. McCann’s earthy, uplifting approach to music was a product of his upbringing in a churchgoing family. As he came to emphasize his singing more and play electric keyboards, his albums, released from 1960 to 2018, influenced funk and R&B artists and became a rich vein for hip-hop artists to mine.His greatest commercial success, though, came purely by chance, in June 1969 at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.Already a recording veteran by then, with albums on Pacific Jazz, Limelight and, most recently, Atlantic, Mr. McCann was appearing at the festival for the first time. After he and the tenor saxophonist Eddie Harris, also an Atlantic artist, played separate sets, they gave an unscheduled performance together, with Mr. Harris as well as the expatriate trumpeter Benny Bailey joining Mr. McCann’s trio.Neither had played with Mr. McCann before, and there was no time for rehearsal. But the performance was to be recorded and filmed for broadcast.Despite the pressure, or perhaps because of it, as Mr. McCann recalled in the liner notes for the 1996 CD reissue of the concert album, which was released in 1969 as “Swiss Movement,” “Just before we went onstage, and for the first time in my life, I smoked some hash.”When he got to the bandstand, he wrote, “I didn’t know where the hell I was. I was totally disoriented. The other guys said, ‘OK, play, man!’ Somehow I got myself together, and after that, everything just took off.”The highlight of the concert was Eugene McDaniels’s protest song “Compared to What.” Stretching past eight minutes and featuring Mr. McCann’s churchy vocals, “Compared to What” would be released as a single and peak at No. 35 on the Billboard R&B chart. “Swiss Movement” was nominated for a Grammy Award and went on to sell a half-million copies.Mr. McCann and Mr. Harris reconvened in 1971 for the Atlantic studio album “Second Movement.” They also returned to Montreux for the 1988 festival, where they performed an obligatory reprise of “Compared to What.”Leslie Coleman McCann was born on Sept. 23, 1935, in Lexington, Ky., to James and Anna McCann. His father was a water maintenance engineer.His family was a musical one; he, his four younger brothers and his sister all sang in the Shiloh Baptist Church choir. Mr. McCann began playing piano at age 3 and a few years later had a music teacher, who charged 35 cents a lesson. (Those lessons did not last long: She died only six weeks after he began studying with her.) While attending Dunbar High School in Lexington, he played drums and sousaphone in the marching band.He left Kentucky at 17 when he enlisted in the Navy and was posted to the San Francisco area.Les McCann performing at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1974. He had been performing in clubs in Los Angeles when he was first offered a record contract.Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archive, via Getty ImagesDuring his time in the Navy, he sang on “The Ed Sullivan Show” after winning a talent contest. On his nights off, he would spend time at the Black Hawk, a San Francisco jazz nightclub.After leaving the Navy, Mr. McCann moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music and journalism at Los Angeles City College and hosted a Monday night jam session at the Hillcrest Club. It was during that time that he first connected with Mr. McDaniels.In a 2017 interview for the magazine Oxford American, Mr. McCann was asked about Mr. McDaniels’s composition “Compared to What.” “When I heard him,” he said, “I hired him in my band — one of the best singers I’ve ever heard. And I found out he was also a writer. We stayed in touch for years after that, and he would always send me songs. I can’t tell you how many songs he sent me, but that one stuck with me.”Mr. McCann was performing in Los Angeles clubs when a representative of Pacific Jazz Records heard him and asked if he had a record contract. When told no, the representative pulled one from his pocket and offered it to him.Mr. McCann recorded more than a dozen albums for the label from 1960 to 1964, usually leading a trio under the businesslike moniker Les McCann Ltd., but sometimes adding guest horns or orchestral accompaniment and sometimes collaborating with the guitarist Joe Pass. He also took part in Pacific Jazz sessions led by the saxophonist Teddy Edwards, the Jazz Crusaders and others. Les McCann Ltd. backed the singer Lou Rawls on his debut album, “Stormy Monday,” released by Capitol in 1962.Mr. McCann then moved to Limelight, a subsidiary of Mercury Records run by Quincy Jones, for which he made six albums from 1964 to 1966. He signed with Atlantic in 1968; on his first album for the label, “Much Les,” he was accompanied by a string section.He would make 11 albums for Atlantic. On two of them, “Invitation to Openness” (1971) and “Layers” (1972), he played a host of keyboards and synthesizers, an avenue he had been inspired to explore after hearing the keyboardist Joe Zawinul’s work with Miles Davis. Those albums have been cited as seminal in popularizing electric keyboards.Later in his Atlantic years, Mr. McCann was featured more as a singer in a slicker, more pop-oriented context. This continued through the 1970s and ’80s on albums for the Impulse!, A&M and Jam labels. But he also remained committed to the piano. In 1989, when he was a guest on the NPR show “Piano Jazz,“ hosted by his fellow pianist Marian McPartland, it was as both a singer and a player. The two closed the broadcast with a duet on “Compared to What.”Mr. McCann had returned to emphasizing his piano playing by 1994, when he released “On the Soul Side,” the first of three albums for the MusicMasters label, which reunited him with Eddie Harris and Lou Rawls. But a stroke later that year forced him to once again focus on singing, which he did through the end of the decade.He later recovered fully and resumed recording. He released albums on a German label in 2002 and on a Japanese label two years later. His last recording was the holiday-themed “A Time Les Christmas,” which he released himself in 2018.In December, Resonance Records released the archival album “Les McCann — Never a Dull Moment! Live From Coast to Coast (1966-1967),” comprising concert recordings from Seattle and New York.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. McCann’s music has been sampled by nearly 300 hip-hop artists, including Eric B. & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, Nas, De La Soul, Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs.Mr. McCann performing at the 40th Montreux Jazz Festival in 2006. He also painted and was a photographer.Martial Trezzini/European Pressphoto AgencyIn 1975, Mr. McCann became the first artist in residence at Harvard University’s Learning From Performers program. He was also a devoted painter and photographer of jazz culture and Black history, and his images have been included with some of his albums. His work was collected in 2015 in the book “Invitation to Openness: The Jazz & Soul Photography of Les McCann 1960-1980.”In an interview for the preface to that book, Mr. McCann was asked how he had achieved intimacy with his photographic subjects. He responded: “I trust my intuition, you see,” adding, “I’m better off when I just do what I do on the piano: play.”Rebecca Carballo More