Front and Center: Sara Serpa/André Matos Duo at the Institute For the Musical Arts

On Friday I met with jazz scholar, radio host and record producer Ben Young, who gifted me albums recorded in the 1960s and 70s by Archie Shepp, Ted Daniels, Sirone and others. They were “free” jazz records made entirely by men. The next night, March 30, Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares presented vocalist Sara Serpa at the Institute For the Musical Arts in Goshen, MA. The juxtaposition of these two events in my life underscored the sea change that has taken place in both the music and those who make it.

In the past 50 years, and especially in the last 20 or so, the number of women who have taken jazz’s center stage has exploded. Of course, even back in the day women like Mary Lou Williams, Alice Coltrane and Carla Bley had major impacts on jazz. But now, the number of female jazz artists working in the field has grown so great as to seem unremarkable (although more work remains). In the past five weeks alone, for instance, Jazz Shares has presented bands led by Tomeka Reid, Kris Davis, Ingrid Laubrock, Anna Webber and Sara Serpa. These artists were not hired to fulfil some random women’s history month quota, but because they have thriving careers making music on a high level. And they are far from alone.

Serpa, who performed with her husband, guitarist André Matos, and keyboardist Dov Manski, gave us a set of ethereal originals that filled the barn at IMA with love and creative energy. The material, all written by either Serpa and Matos, were drawn from a series of fine recordings they have produced, the majority from their most recent, Night Birds (2023). Utilizing the wordless vocal style that is her trademark, Serpa’s voice is precise and evocative, conjuring a tensile strength with an angelic disposition. Manski played both acoustic piano and synthesizer with understated authority, his bass-like lines on synth providing a nice bottom to the proceedings. Playing electric guitar, Matos gave the music its melodic backbone and compositional contour. Although all three musicians were highly proficient, none of them flaunted their technical skills. Instead, they let these simple pieces shine in beautifully direct ways.

For the last two numbers, the group invited tenor saxophonist Nathan Blehar to join the trio. Blehar, who owned Northampton’s The Dirty Truth from 2008 – 2017, now lives in Warwick, MA, and is a long-time friend and colleague of Matos. On “Carlos”, a beautiful piece that seemed to be constructed of a series of two-note commas, he soloed convincedly and gave the ensemble a velvety depth.

Serpa, who was born and raised in Portugal, has used her career success to advocate for women and social justice. She is a charter member of the We Have Voice Collective, a diverse group of musicians, performers, scholars, and thinkers who are shifting the cultural landscape by fostering awareness, inclusion, and the creation of safe(r) spaces for all. She conceived and composed Recognition (2020), a multi-disciplinary work that traces the historical legacy of Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Serpa (along with fellow musician Jen Shyu) is the co-founder of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians (M³), an important non-profit organization created to empower and elevate women and non-binary musicians. On “Degrowth”, one of two originals with lyrics, Serpa exhorted us to “fly less, drive less, walk more, slow down, buy less, waste less, look more, listen more.”

It was entirely appropriate to have Saturday’s concert at IMA, a women-centered recording studio and retreat space best known for their rock and roll camps for girls. Serpa and IMA co-founder Ann Hackler had a lot to talk about over dinner and our post-show reception.

Serpa and Matos’ lovely 10 year old son Lourenzo came along for the trip. We ate food cooked by Priscilla Page and yours truly, the musicians stayed in the home of Dorothy Nemetz and John Todd, who were at the dinner and concert, and we shared conversation in the home of Ann Hackler and June Millington. Along with the good vibe of the performance venue (dubbed “the musical queendom”), the evening was an exercise in relationship building.

The increase in the number of women in jazz has coincided with the proliferation of jazz studies programs on college campuses, the Me Too movement and the fight for equal rights more generally, and the presence of powerful role models like Geri Allen, Nicole Mitchell and Terri Lyne Carrington. It makes perfect sense that the higher profile of women in jazz manifests itself in how musicians relate to each other, how they are treated by the industry and perhaps even the very shape of jazz to come.

Breaking New Ground: Anna Webber's Shimmer Wince Plays The Shea Theater

What happens when you combine an inquisitive intellect with superior musicianship? You get projects like Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince. The prolific 39-year old tenor saxophonist and flutist is also a first rate composer and musical thinker who took a deep dive into “just intonation” during the depth of the pandemic. Her research led to a new book of compositions, and the formation of a new band of crack musicians who breathed life into the material. Seventy of us got to hear the results at the Shea Theater on March 17 at a concert produced by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares.

Shimmer Wince includes: Adam O’Farrill (trumpet), Mariel Roberts (cello), Elias Stemeseder (synthesizer), Lesley Mok (drums) and Webber. They are touring the northeast in support of their self-titled release on Intakt Records.

Just intonation is a tuning system that has its origin in ancient Greece, and differs from the more widely adopted equal temperament system. Just intonation is based on the natural vibrations of physical objects, such as strings or vocal chords, and pitches are expressed as fractions. Its complex notation system requires a good understanding of tuning theory, which is why most musicians are not fluent in it. As a non-musician, it’s certainly beyond me. 

Webber was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2021 during the worst period of the pandemic, a time of “enforced quiet”, she writes in her detailed liner notes that accompany the recording. Webber immersed herself in the inner working of just intonation, reading the scholarship, studying scores that utilize it, and listening. The music we heard on Sunday was the result of her intense focus on this ancient system of harmony. “If this music sounds different from some of my previous albums, that’s because it is,” Webber writes. She wanted the music to feel “almost like a collection of incredibly bizarre standards.”

The music had a coherence that felt off or slightly inebriated, full of odd harmonies as well as daring flights of rhythmic fancy. Despite the complexity of the music, Adam O’Farrill barely seemed to refer to the written score, and nailed all the parts. Not yet 30, O’Farrill tours the world with the pianist Hiromi, performs with Mary Halvorson’s Amaryllis, and has worked with Rudresh Mahanthappa, Vijay Iyer, and his father, pianist Arturo O’Farrill. O’Farrill played a Jazz Shares concert in Easthampton in 2017 with his quartet Stranger Days, part of his first tour as a leader outside New York.

Drummer Lesley Mok ushered the band through all the variegated tempo changes with ease. Although they only stepped to the forefront during “Periodicity 2”, you could tell they had a surfeit of chops. In their late 20s, Mok is now touring and recording with Myra Melford’s super group Fire & Water, the percussion collective The Forest, and David Leon’s Bird’s Eye. Their debut recording, The Living Collection, was nominated for a German Jazz Prize in the categories International Debut Album of the Year and Album of the Year. I first met her when she was a student at Berklee and participated in a retreat at the Institute For the Musical Arts.

This was my first opportunity to meet and hear the marvelous cellist Mariel Roberts whose work is firmly planted in the contemporary music world. She is a member and co-director of the Wet Ink Ensemble, and is also part of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), the Mivos Quartet and the Bang On a Can All-Stars, all premier new music organizations. As we heard on Sunday, she is also a first rate improviser. Her sonic interaction with sounds generated by Elias Stemeseder’s synthesizer added both woozy depth and sharp accents to Webber’s compositions. Neither soloed at length; instead they provided short riffs and fills that gave the music its warp and woof.

I first heard about Stemeseder in 2017, when drummer Jim Black hipped me to his name. With bassist Thomas Morgan, the pianist was part of Black’s phenomenal trio, which has four discs to its name. This was also my first opportunity to meet and hear him. He and Roberts set the stage for “Fizz”, laying down a sultry bed over which the horns soared, and he got to dazzle briefly with an arresting array of buzzes and bleaps on “Periodicity 1”. He is an exceptional pianist and I look forward to hearing him play acoustically.

Like her fellow saxophonist and composer Ingrid Laubrock, who performed in the Valley three days earlier, Anna Webber is a rising star who continues to turn heads and break new ground. She’s poised to do so for years to come. It’s a good time to be a fan of creative music.

Burgeoning Composer in Action: Ingrid Laubrock's Lilith

“During the last decade saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has been steadily expanding her reach as a composer, devising new ways to inspire, organize and situate improvised music”, writes Peter Margasak in the liner notes to Laubrock’s most recent recording, Monochromes. Margasak’s point was beautifully illustrated for 60 intent listeners who filled the Perch at Hawks & Reed on March 14. The 53 year old German tenor and soprano saxophonist brought Lilith, her sextet of promising younger musicians to Greenfield for a set of highly charged originals.

On stage behind Lilith was a dramatic set design for Gorgons, a play produced by Human Agenda Theater that was between weekend performances. Giant paper mache forms were attached to the walls, interspersed with sculpted human figures and enigmatic equations written in chalk. I think the set’s baffling effect improved the sound quality while reinforcing the additive quality that comes with combining different art forms. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if musicians could consistently play in theaters after closing night, before sets were struck?

The music flowed from piece to piece, all unnamed and played without pause, in a suite-like trance lasting about 75 minutes. The compositional frames Laubrock built were sturdy, with open floor plans, allowing the band: Yvonne Rogers (piano), Dave Adewumi (trumpet), Adam Matlock (accordion), Eva Lawitts (bass) and Henry Mermer (drums), plenty of room to stretch their improvising chops, which were considerable.

Some of her pieces featured tricky heads at quick tempos; others unfolded as slowly as dawn, with elegant melodies emerging through an expanse of open time. Laubrock’s burgeoning reputation as a composer has been confirmed in recent years. Her piece, Vogelfrei, was nominated 'one of the best 25 Classical tracks of 2018' by The New York Times. She won the Herb Alpert/Ragdale Prize in Composition 2019, and has received a slew of composing commissions from the BBC Glasgow Symphony Orchestra, Bang on The Can, American Composers Orchestra, Tricentric Foundation, SWR New Jazz Meeting, Wet Ink, and the EOS Orchestra, among other organizations.

Her writing gave form to the improvisations, which were played by individuals or by groups of two or three. The applause after most solos gave the proceedings a jazz feel despite the new music vibe that permeated the evening. Matlock, who studied with Margaux Simmons at Hampshire College, had a particularly mesmerizing unaccompanied solo full of stuttering bursts of air amid pastoral fragments of melody. His work throughout anchored the music, and the unique sonority of his instrument lent the music a folkish, old world feel. Roger’s delicate approach to the piano had a jewel-like quality that was interrupted by a welcome foray of force on her one extended solo. Like all her bandmates, she had a very sophisticated understanding of harmony and rhythm.

Lilith came together last year at the behest of jazzahead!, a large, annual festival and trade fair in Bremen. Germany, who asked Laubrock to put together a new ensemble. She knew trumpeter Dave Adewumi from Jason Moran’s Harlem Hellfighter’s project, and the two horns created a strong front line that sparred playfully and delivered punchy lines in unison. An up and comer, Adewumi was awarded 1st prize in the Carmine Caruso International Jazz Trumpet Competition in 2019, and can be found on recordings by Dave Douglas and Remy Le Boeuf.

The rhythm team of Lawitts and Mermer rooted the band, providing both textural depth and a flexible swing feel. Everyone in the ensemble were crack musicians who could read and interpret, adding their personal voice to Laubrock’s complex compositions. By the time they perform, and then record this work at Firehouse 12 in New Haven two days hence, we should have another fully formed statement of consequence from Ingrid Laubrock.