TT 537: Jim McNeely, James Newton, Teddy Abrams & Yuja Wang, The Hemphill Stringtet, Sophie Dunér & Steven Beck play Stockhausen, sinonó

The continuing collision of serious jazz and serious classical

Six recent albums in review; most are concerned with something from both the “jazz” side:

swing, blues, improvisation

and the “classical” side:

notation, pre-planned forms of significant duration.

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Jim McNeely has been in the forefront of advanced big band composition since the mid-1980s. As mentored directly by Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, and Bob Brookmeyer, he became a key contributor to the book for Monday nights at the Village Vanguard. McNeely then took that American tradition to the big bands of Europe, including WDR, UMO, The Stockholm Jazz Orchestra, The Metropole Orchestra, The Danish Radio Big Band, and the Frankfurt Radio Big Band.

Over the years McNeely has stretched his compositional chops by writing substantial suites. The most recent recording feels like a culmination, for Primal Colors features not just the Frankfurt Big Band but the Frankfurt Radio Symphony as well. At the top of the score there are 40 staves of music: conventional symphonic winds, brass, and strings, plus conventional big band, with the addition of soprano sax, harp, guitar, and percussion.

The suite is 50 minutes; there are five main movements for all forces (“Black,” “Yellow,” “Red,” “Blue” and “White”) interspersed with short interludes for selected participants (“Olives,” “Ochre,” “Fuchsia,” “Rigel”). While good jazz improvisations decorate each track—and the horn features in the interludes are mostly improvised—the general feel is through-composed.

McNeely’s own big-band language is an easy blindfold test. As one of the best jazz pianists of his generation, McNeely was well up on his McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, and Chick Corea. When it came time to write ensemble music, that complex pianistic harmonic information was placed in service of skittering, slightly ominous syncopated bass lines, thick soli that probe the chromatic quite a bit further than Thad Jones, and sustained lyrical lines written against the time.

Some of McNeely’s most modernist ideas are related to colorful atonal European composers like Witold Lutosławski. In my interview with McNeely, he talks about Bob Brookmeyer giving a tape of the Lutosławski Cello Concerto to Mel Lewis. The next time Mel saw Bob, Mel enthused, “That was great! Do you think he’d want to write something for the band?”

Mel’s comment is amusing partly because the effects created by someone like Lutosławski are often idiomatic to strings. Big bands can do a certain amount of smearing and abstract coloring, but that toolkit is much easier to access and refine when writing for an orchestra.

With Primal Colors, Jim McNeely finally has his orchestra. It’s just great.

Black. Begins from nothing with a prayer bowl and harp. The strings split the atom, and the orchestral winds and brass really get into it:

Three minutes in, we arrive at a classic McNeely jazz theme, unison for two tenors and two trumpets over a pedal point, a kind of surreal hard bop.

It is fun to hear timpani take the Mel Lewis role of setting up the hits as the full complement of forces interact and develop. The vital soprano sax soloist is Heinz-Dieter Sauerborn.

Olives. Part of McNeely’s heritage is that defining sound of 60’s jazz, a pentatonic scale over a drone. In this interlude, the harmony is impressionistic and the meter is in 5/4, a moment for Oliver Leicht to thread varied alto lines on top.

Yellow. The percussion section sets up a mysterious waltz in the Wayne Shorter lineage. Busy lines are doubled in both band and symphony. Peter Reite takes a thoughtful piano solo that winds its way through a mix of feels; flugelhornist Axel Schlosser also gets a star turn.

Ochre. This interlude includes written out parts for classical percussionists on brake drums, tam tams, slit drum and timpani, while the jazz drummer plays along (mostly mallets on cymbals), all in support of Tony Lakatos’s preach on tenor. The final effect is perhaps a bit like some of Ellington’s “jungle music.”

Red. McNeely undoubtedly had to think long and hard about how to combine all forces. At times he finds genuinely novel effects, like coolly swinging contrapuntal horns over dour pizzicato strings.

Guitarist Martin Scales gets to shred over a swinging band periodically interrupted by esoteric string textures. In terms of programmatic content, perhaps the strings “stop” things like a “Red” light.

Fuchsia. Trombonist Christian Jaksjø blows sweet improvised melodies over cinematic chamber music with harp, winds, and shaker.

Blue. Julian Argüelles gets a mellow feature. One of the most unique effects in all of Primal Colors takes place in Argüelles’s tenor sax improvisation about three minutes in. Argüelles is reacting to changes implied by the shifting orchestral background, but the drums are not playing time, but free like the tenor. A brilliant moment.

Rigel. Axel Schlosser returns to deliver more lonely flugelhorn. Unlike the other interludes, this one has a full complement of strings murmuring away like the soundtrack to a film noir.

White. A forest of percussion kicks things off for the album’s closer. Drummer Jean Paul Höchstädter does a fantastic job throughout the suite, and here he gets a chance to trade with a written part comprised of roto toms, temple blocks, cowbells, and brake drums. The orchestral entrance in fifths and pentatonics has an exotic cast, made considerably more American in affect when the big band enters. Throughout the finale the ensembles dialogue and combine to complementary effect, and Tony Lakatos takes another roaring tenor solo. (Kudos also to bassist Thomas Heidepriem, who pairs up with drummer Höchstädter to handle a tough assignment with ease.)

A notably terrific effort from Jim McNeely. Yeah, Jim!

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James Newton keeps getting better. His latest, Compassion and Mustard Seeds in Perilous Times, is luxuriant and intoxicating.

Newton is still probably best-known for a remarkable series of jazz albums recorded in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was a flutist aligned with creative musicians like Arthur Blythe, Henry Threadgill, David Murray, Amina Claudine Myers, Anthony Davis, and Abdul Wadud. Jazz critics rightly appreciated the work of Newton and his community: the high-end Gramavision release I’ve Known Rivers by Newton, Davis, and Wadud was a talking point of the era, while Newton’s debut on Blue Note, The African Flower: The Music of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, won DownBeat’s album of the year in 1986.

At some point, Newton put down his flute and dedicated himself to formal composition. Recognition for this new career was slow to develop, but by now many performers and conductors have become champions of this fearless individual.

The latest album documents three major works.

Compassion and Mustard Seeds in Perilous Times (2022–2023) and The Image of the Invisible (1995, rev. 2020) are played by The Lyris Quartet (Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan, violin, Luke Maurer, viola, Timothy Loo, cello) while Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane (2024) is for baritone and mixed chamber ensemble (Cedric Berry, baritone, Alyssa Park, violin, Timothy Loo, cello, Michael Matsuno, flute, Jon Stehney, bassoon, Sidney Hopson, vibraphone, Jacqueline Marshall, harp, Andreas Foivos Apostolou, piano, and Anthony Parnther, conductor).

Dwight Andrews offers a helpful comment in the substantial liner notes:

This music could perhaps be best described as pantonal, although there are clear references to modal constructions that can be heard on the musical surface. The pitch organization defies systematic categorization. The music does not fit easily within a single system or style and thus defies many of the analytic methods currently used by music theorists and musicologists. It is in the syntax, the aural experience, that one perceives the coherence and cohesion of each piece.

Newton’s proclivity for musical gesture is an organizing principle and a fundamental aspect of the grammar of his striking musical language. He deftly establishes networks of associations of gesture that are aurally intelligible, yet difficult to systematically deconstruct. There is something else going on here—a music that is wholly self-referential, that is, “you know it when you hear it.”

The title work opens the program. We are right in it. No holds barred.

There’s a lot of modernist and atonal string quartet out there, beginning with Schoenberg and Bartók over a century ago and continuing through just about every notable composer in that lineage since. It’s a wonderful sound, the four string voices in tense conversation, yet at this point there may be occasions when the style starts to feel like a cliché.

Newton is in the tradition, yet there is something undefinably jazzy or Ellingtonian about his string quartet writing. Just a touch of sincere blues deep within the esoteric surface. This soulful understanding permeates Compassion and Mustard Seeds in Perilous Times and keeps the genre fresh. After you listen to the first movement once, listen to it again.

Newton is also very concerned with spirituality, as the substantial offering Jesus’ Prayer at Gethsemane makes explicit. This is Christ the night before his crucifixion; Newton sets the King James text. While the density of the writing is striking, there is still ample room for the baritone to give his sermon. The written flute lines conjure up Newton’s own flute playing from his time as a jazz practitioner. A wholly unique listening experience.

[James Newton’s Compassion and Mustard Seeds in Perilous Times at New World Records]

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A certain amount of contemporary composition seems to be not much more than varied quotations from a grab bag of styles. A notably high-profile entry is the Piano Concerto by Teddy Abrams, which was played by superstar Yuja Wang, recorded for elite Deutsche Grammophon, and won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo in 2024.

Abrams is trying very hard to be jazzy. The overture is something Neal Hefti would write for a detective show in 1962, and Abrams even audibly counts it off, about as hip as Lawrence Welk: “Ah-one, ah-two, ah-one, two, three, four!” As the piece proceeds, the band and orchestra are terribly out-of-sync with each other, the beat is a mess, the tempo indication “swing” is not honored. (Oh! the poor drummer, unnamed in the liner note, de-clawed and otherwise impotent, nonetheless turned up hot in the mix.)

The second movement, a cadenza, starts as a boogie woogie.

Boogie woogie is one of the great American piano styles: fantastic on its own, and also one of the clear antecedents to Rhythm and Blues and Rock ‘n Roll. Boogie woogie is also a bit fraught aesthetically, for finding the line between true African-American genius and mainstream whitebread corniness can be a challenge for the uninitiated.

On one hand, Meade Lux Lewis played boogie woogie. On the other, so did Liberace.

The trope namer, Pinetop Smith, was shot and killed at a dance shortly after recording his hit in 1928. The Twin Peaks episode "May the Giant Be with You" from 1990 concludes with a child pianist playing a note-for-note rendition of “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” (Smith is not credited as the composer.)

There’s nothing new about using boogie woogie as source material for concert music. Morton Gould was a practitioner of this idiom in the 1940s. But Gould would never take boogie riffs and put them in a piece without intellectual concert music operations. Even Gould’s familiar encore Boogie Woogie Etude is surreal— although I much prefer the boogie-styled Toccata in Gould’s Prelude and Toccata, played so gorgeously by the young Shura Cherkassky.

An obvious forerunner of the Teddy Abrams Piano Concerto is Morton Gould’s Interplay (1943), which still has a tiny foothold in the culture thanks to a famous Jerome Robbins ballet. Gould’s Interplay is no masterpiece—of course, the “worst masterpiece” is another clear forebear to both Gould and Abrams—but the work is a multi-movement piano concerto that smoothly integrates jazz and popular music with Gould’s talented appropriations of Stravinsky and Copland. Time and again through a long career, Gould made swing and boogie woogie references his own, always through inserting some kind of formal modernism into the mix.

Morton Gould is admittedly a relatively unfamiliar name. Instead of Gould, what about Samuel Barber? Teddy Abrams and Yuja Wang met while students at the Curtis Institute of Music, and Barber is a patron saint of Curtis. Souvenirs and Excursions are Barber’s pianistic treatments of dance and vernacular music; Excursions even starts with a boogie woogie. No matter the idiom, each and every bar is stamped, “This music is by Samuel Barber.”

(There is also Conlon Nancarrow, who put boogie through the shredder when programming his player piano.)

Teddy Abrams does not make swing or boogie woogie his own. These appropriations are straight-up, and about the level of an arts magnet high school talent show.

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Julius Hemphill was part bluesman, part modernist, and part trickster. While his alto saxophone spoke of Cannonball Adderley, Eric Dolphy, and Ornette Coleman, he was also natural composer, leaving us hundreds of pieces for all sorts of configurations and contexts, none more durable than the extended odd-meter groove “Dogon A.D.,” from which a whole world of modern jazz flows, partly through the influential tributary of Tim Berne.

Sadly, Hemphill died in 1995 at 57, a few years before he could take on the status of revered elder. His name means a lot to a certain group of jazz insiders, but the dimensions of Hemphill’s contribution are far from being generally understood.

The new recording The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill is a major event. Hemphill himself saw no boundaries, and the members of the string quartet are drawn from those more associated with jazz and those more associated with classical. Curtis Stewart is the artistic director of the American Composers’ Orchestra; Sam Bardfeld is a member of the Jazz Passengers; Stephanie Griffin is a member of Momenta Quartet; Tomeka Reid comes out of the AACM and an obvious inheritor to the cello tradition of Hemphill’s key collaborator, Abdul Wadud.

Not everything from this corner of the galaxy is that inviting. Some experimental jazz and modern music is simply better live, when conceptual daring is easier to comprehend as part of certain time and place.

Leave your expectations at the door: The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill turns out to be charismatic, fun, and highly listenable even from a casual perspective.

In his lifetime, Hemphill’s most prominent working group was The World Saxophone Quartet. Without meaning to be too essentialist, Hemphill’s contributions to the WSQ book were often the standout pieces on the group’s records. One of those tracks is the thoughtful R ‘n B ballad, “Revue.”

The Hemphill Stringtet new release opens with “Revue,” which is dangerous in a way, for the WSQ album is a classic. But immediately the Stringtet establishes a good reason for being, as Hemphill’s colorful sonorities bloom in the string quartet setting.

Another important WSQ album is Plays Duke Ellington, and here the Stringtet offers the premiere recording of Hemphill’s arrangements of Charles Mingus for string quartet. They are awesome! What a wonderful discovery, and a real insight into how Hemphill treated harmony and counterpoint.

All the members of the Stringtet take compelling improvised solos; even more crucially, they sound like a chamber group well-versed in the formal lineage of the string quartet. Surely Hemphill would be surprised and delighted that his music still has reach and relevance thirty years after his passing.

[The Hemphill Stringtet Plays the Music of Julius Hemphill on Bandcamp.]

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I admit to not knowing much of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s vast catalog. My impression is that it mainly emphasizes conceptual music, and at times can get a bit silly, for example the Helicopter Quartet, where the four members of a string quartet get in four helicopters. (I’m not making this up.) At a Maurizio Pollini recital in London, the carefully notated Stockhausen segment was the highlight (and better played than the Beethoven), while the Aus den sieben Tagen LP is mediocre European free jazz created from banal text instructions (“play a sound, play it for so long, until you feel that you should stop”).

As a neophyte, I was unprepared for Tierkreis, which is Stockhausen’s “hit,” a collection of twelve charming avant-garde melodies inspired by the Zodiac. The original was for music boxes, but the composer has created many different settings, and encouraged further transcription and improvisation. The helpful Wikipedia article lists over two dozen recordings.

Vocalist Sophie Dunér is a jazz singer with an avant lean; Jay Clayton might be a reference, although the core of Dunér’s sound is richer, more like a professional lieder recitalist. Steven Beck is one of the great NYC new music pianists, and he plays the whole cycle on a Fender Rhodes. The pieces are generally treated like jazz, where they play the melody, improvise, and restate the melody. Dunér has written additional lyrics to the Stockhausen themes, bringing to mind Joni Mitchell singing Charles Mingus.

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Dunér worked with Stockhausen and he approved of her approach. The final effect is a bit sci-fi cabaret, like the entertainment on a cruise ship on a distant planet as two suns boil off in the distance.

[Sophie Dunér and Steven Beck: Stockhausen’s Tierkreis at Urlicht Records]

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Vocalist isabel crespo pardo leads sinonó with cellist Lester St. Louis and bassist Henry Fraser; the first release is la espalda y su punto radiante (in Spanish: “the backbody and its radiant point”).

The poems by pardo are surely set, but how much else is notated is not clear. However, this album surely fits the theme of this post as music informed by both jazz and classical, although in this case Latin American folk song is also a key element.

For a long time now, pure improvisation has replaced notation as the most dynamic vehicle for abstraction. (Move over Stockhausen, here comes Cecil Taylor.) However, noisy music eventually takes its toll no matter the mode. Many of the techniques used by St. Louis and Fraser are standard for free jazz, but the sheer songfulness of sinonó is impressive: even the audible ambient slide of the hands on the string instruments seems lyrical. Still, this is pardo’s showcase, their vocals are breathy, charismatic, and sexy.

Another puzzle piece is the group’s interest in the seminal text The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam.

[sinonó, la espalda y su punto radiante on Bandcamp]

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Footnotes:

Jim McNeely has released several groovy trio records over the years; In This Moment with Lennart Gilman and Adam Nussbaum opens with a seriously swinging “You and the Night and the Music.” (Nussbaum sounds awesome at this middle tempo.)

James Newton’s Axum on ECM is surely one of the finest solo flute albums ever made.

Yuja Wang is generally terrific; her recordings of Russian repertoire (Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev) rank with anyone’s, both technically and lyrically. People I trust assure me that Teddy Abrams has written better music than the Piano Concerto.

Everyone’s favorite Julius Hemphill record is Dogon A.D., with Baikida Carroll, Abdul Wadud, and Philip Wilson. Indeed, Dogon A.D. sounds fresher every year. In addition to Tim Berne, Marty Ehrlich deserves credit for sustaining and curating Hemphill’s legacy.