Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber Makes Their Western Massachusetts Debut

These days, it’s a challenge to put a nine-piece band on the road and get paid. When the band’s guiding light is gone, the odds grow longer still. But Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber has persevered, and they traveled from New York to perform on June 7 at The Iron Horse as part of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares’ 13th season. With a grant to presenters from the New England Foundation For the Arts, Burnt Sugar embarked on their first tour of New England, with stops in Hartford (Real Art Ways), Northampton (Iron Horse), Putney (Next Stage Arts) and Cambridge (The Lilypad), along with a concluding gig in Harlem (The Shrine). The band has performed many times at Real Art Ways over the years; director Will Wilkins, who was in the house, is a staunch supporter. We were all happy to be there on Saturday as they made their western Massachusetts debut.

Burnt Sugar was founded by Greg Tate (1957-2021) in 1999 and co-led by one of its original members, Jared Michael Nickerson. At the end of the concert, Bruce Mack (another original member) offered praise to Tate, and had us say his name again and again. Artist/professor Daniel Shrade, who was at the concert, told me he hosted Tate at Hampshire College many years ago to give a talk.

A longtime contributor to The Village Voice, and one of the most trenchant writers about Black music and culture, Tate led Burnt Sugar by incorporating Butch Morris’ conduction system of hand and baton signals. He has described his role as conductor as: “akin to Mickey Mouse in the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" section of Fantasia. Diddling with forces he doesn't quite understand, snapping his fingers, opening the floodgates, occasioning a deluge. Drowning the room in the music of African ascent.”

Although use of those conduction techniques have diminished over the years, Burnt Sugar provided plenty of dense surprises for the 125 of us gathered at the storied Pioneer Valley venue. Over the years, dozens of musicians, including Vijay Iyer, Matana Roberts, Pete Cosey, Vernon Reid and Carl Hancock Rux, have been part of the Burnt Sugar tribe. The current, nine-piece iteration included Shelley Nicole (vocals), Miss Olithea (vocals, electronics), Bruce Mack (vocals), Lewis “Flip” Barnes (trumpet), “Moist” Paula Henderson (baritone sax), Leon Gruenbaum (keyboards, electronics), Ben Tyree (electric guitar), Marque Gilmore tha Inna Most (drums, electronics) and Jared Michael Nickerson (electric bubble bass).

The band pleased the crowd with a set of original compositions, along with a range of standards that included Steely Dan’s “Black Cow”, Gershwin’s “Summertime” and David Bowie’s “Fame”. They balanced a feel-good party vibe with a sense of improvisational mischievous: creating sounds of curious origin and inserting infectious, unexpected licks into serpentine funk lines. Late in the evening, the band summoned Nickerson, who was stationed behind the vocalists, to come forward to take a bow. “I’m just trying to play more bass,” he told us humbly. He not only invigorated the band with his steadily inventive bass playing, he handled leadership duties with grace and efficiency.

Nickerson and drummer Marque Gilmore were key to the band’s success. They held it down with deep, constantly shifting grooves that both grounded us and kept our attention. Even though some of Gilmore’s electronic gear broke during soundcheck, he had enough materiel to make his drums pop. It also helped that this foundering member of the Black Rock Coalition and veteran of the bands Brian Jackson and Cheick Tidiane Seck, is one of the premier funk drummers of his generation.

The rest of the rhythm section: guitarist Ben Tyree and keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum, drenched the stage with the blues and sounds from other worlds. In addition to a conventional keyboard, Gruenbaum played the Samchillian, a keyboard MIDI controller of his own invention that added a driving, Afro-futurist swirl.

Miss Olithea treated her sultry vocals with a saturated wash of electronics, which billowed through the venue. It added an element of mystery, bringing a spiritual dimension to what was essentially dance music. The other vocalists, Shelly Nicole and Bruce Mack, were dynamic entertainers who took turns leading us with soul and infectious energy.

The band has given us 26 years of impressive service, centering Black music in all its manifestations, continuing to thrive after the passing of Greg Tate four years ago. It’s cause for celebration. Long live Burnt Sugar the Arkestra Chamber.

Why We Sing: Lisa Sokolov/Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez in Goshen

The web of connections we discover as we interact with our fellow human beings, what we sometimes call “small-world” phenomenon, creates both surprise and comfort. Vocalist and pianist Lisa Sokolov, who performed on May 24 at the Institute For the Musical Arts with Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez, has relatives named Siegel. We were born 12 miles and 30 days apart into New York Jewish families. One of her closest musical allies, William Parker, is a hero of mine whom I will present in concert on June 12th for the 15th time. Jake’s friend JaMario Stills, whom he met at Brown University, teaches at Amherst College and is a theater colleague of Priscilla Page, my wife. And on it goes.

We were 40 in the big barn at IMA in Goshen, MA. It felt like a prayer session. The music flowed from melody to melody, sometimes with brief pauses between pieces; the sound was pure. The poems, written by Muriel Rukeyser, Yip Harburg, William Parker and Sokolov, among others, celebrated love, explored life’s mysteries, cried out for peace and justice, and ridiculed greedy despots. Unsure if we were at a concert or a religious ceremony, we didn’t know whether to applaud or not. We did so weakly, in spots. At the end, of course, we erupted with full-throated approval.

Were we in a secular or sacred space? It stands to reason we were confused by the ambiguity of the moment. Sokolov knows a thing or two about the power of the human voice. She has been using it as a healing modality for over 40 years. Since the early 1980s she has taught music therapy and her Embodied Voicework method at NYU, where she is a full professor in the University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s also a cantor. On Saturday she sang “Hashiveinu”, a beautiful melody that is part of the Yom Kippur service.

Sokolov studied with avant-garde jazz masters Bill Dixon, Milford Graves and Jimmy Lyons at Bennington College, where in March, she participated in a 50 year celebration of the school’s Black Music Department. After college and a short stay in Paris, she moved to New York in 1977 where she quickly fell in with bassist William Parker and fellow vocalists Ellen Christi and Jeanne Lee. Soon she was part of the scene at Studio Henry, a cooperative performance space in lower Manhattan that she built with John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, Wayne Horvitz, Robin Holcomb and others.

After her own Jazz Shares performance at IMA in 2023, Holcomb encouraged Sokolov to contact me for a gig. The introverted Sokolov equivocated at first, but with a second push from Holcomb she relented; we thank the spirits she did.

But it was an easy ask. Nestled between Soft Machine and Martial Solal in my record collection were Lazy Afternoon, Presence and A Quiet Thing, three cherished Lisa Sokolov recordings. Also in the stacks were Gerry Hemingway’s Songs and William Parker’s Stan’s Hat Flapping in the Wind, both of which prominently feature the vocalist. I understood the upside of saying “yes”, and the addition of her son, Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez was the cherry on top.

A cellist blessed with a clarion tone and a fertile imagination, Sokolov-Gonzalez also experiments with electronics, film and performance art. He’s a year away from earning his PhD in Music and Multimedia Composition from Brown. He also cooperatively runs Pyxis, a performance/gathering space in Providence. Joining his mother in rich harmony and in plucked response to her darting flights, he grounded the proceedings with earthly resonance. It was the first inter-generational family band I’ve presented since Joe and Mat Maneri in 2004. In both instances, there was a special rapport.

“Like a pebble dropping into water,” she sang at the beginning of the evening, “tone is the rippling of waves through this ocean of air. Our ears translate these undulations into our experience of tone, activating trees of overtones, activating trees of overtones…” We were off and running.

“Take it to your heart,” she sang towards night’s end, “know and understand, that this world is merely a thin and narrow bridge. You need never be afraid, you need never be afraid.” And then in a remarkable coda, she revisited phrases she intoned throughout the concert. “Bring peace down” were her last whispered words.

When we got home after the post-concert reception, I played Tala, Terry Jenoure’s brand new release for Sokolov. I have long heard similarities in their sound and approach. She was pleased and impressed and unaware of Jenoure’s work. I was glad to create another strand in the web.

Just Friends: Advancing On a Wild Pitch in Greenfield

Bands produce better music when it’s made by friends. That’s not always the case, of course. There was no love lost between Stan Getz and Chet Baker, for instance, and tensions within various Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis ensembles have been well documented. Despite conflict, those ensembles made some beautiful (and important) music, but because jazz is highly interactive and requires such intense listening, it stands to reason that musicians who get along off the bandstand will have a better chance of making good music on it. Moppa Elliott’s quintet, Advancing on a Wild Pitch, is a case in point.

Bassist and composer Moppa Elliott, joined by friends Sam Kulik (trombone), Charles Evans (baritone saxophone), Danny Fox (piano) and Christian Coleman (drums), made some outstanding music for the 60 of us gathered at Hawks & Reed in Greenfield, MA on May 3. Playing material from their 2024 release, Disasters, Vol. II, on Elliott’s Hot Cup imprint, the quintet tore through the music with a surplus of spirit and technique.

The music, all written by Elliott, largely consisted of what we used to call light swingers: mid-tempo, toe tapping pieces with straightforward form. Recalling the luxurious, bottom-heavy sound of Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet with Bob Brookmeyer, Advancing On a Wild Pitch treated us to a satisfying and mellifluous evening. It was a standard deviation away from Elliott’s iconoclastic, polyglot band Mostly Other People Do the Killing (originally featuring Jon Iragabon, Peter Evans and Kevin Shea.)

The compositions we heard on Saturday, like many of Elliott’s pieces, were named after cities and towns in his native Pennsylvania. His current obsession highlights places in PA that have endured man-made disasters of one kind or another. There is no shortage of misfortune; Disasters, Vol. III is coming soon.

“Powelton Village” and “Cobb’s Creek” began the concert. They were places where John Africa’s anti-capitalist, Afro-centrist MOVE organization had confrontations with the Philadelphia Police Department. In 1985, the mayor and the police dropped two bombs on their Cobb’s Creek home, killing 11 people and destroying an entire city block. These pieces, and the others, were not programmatic, they didn’t reflect the title’s subject matter. They had, in fact, a relaxed demeanor and were full of low register cheer.

“Marcus Hook”, a small borough along the Delaware River, was the unfortunate location of a 1975 collision between two tankers carrying oil and chemicals that created a 50-mile oil spill and a fire that raged for three days. The piece was a slow blues featuring succinct solo statements from Fox and Evans. “The Donora Smog” commemorates an industrial town south of Pittsburgh that was the site of a rare weather event in 1948 when pollution from a steel mill and a zinc works plant combined with fog to create a toxic smog that killed upwards of 70 residents over several days. It provided easy listening, sending us back to the pre-revolutionary jazz of the early 1950s.

There were other disasters on the bill: a coal mine explosion, a train collision, a poisoned water supply among them, all delivered with élan and the polish of conservatory trained musicians.

The provocative premise of Elliott’s Disaster series is in keeping with his puckish nature. He named his celebrated band, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, by lifting a phrase of Leon Theremin's discussing Josef Stalin. A series of remarkable MOPDtK album covers faithfully mimic the design of classic records like Ornette Coleman’s This is Our Music (This is Our Moosic) and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert (The Coimbra Concert). And in 2014, they produced Blue, an uncanny note for note recreation of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, that stumped experts in blindfold tests and resulted in many heated discussions. Elliott’s inclusion of Jorge Luis Borge’s short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, as the only album note, sent a sly message about hero worship and the role of re-creation in art.

There was little irreverence displayed as the band relaxed before and after the show. Just the usual banter, jokes and needles between friends. Elliott and Charles Evans grew up together in Pennsylvania, and the baritone saxophonist took over for Elliott as band director at Tuckahoe (NY) High School. Elliott and Kulik met at Oberlin and live near each other in Queens, NY. (Kulik lives in Astoria, where I went to high school. Elliott lives in Sunnyside, where I spent the first 10 years of my life.) The Danny Fox Trio has released two recordings on Hot Cup Records. Bonding over the jazz canon and a love of baseball, this group of same-aged dudes all get along. You can hear it in the music.