Spirit Without Frills: Joe Morris/Sam Newsome/Francisco Mela at the Shea Theater

A thirst for challenge and new experience fuels many jazz artists, who find exhilaration in the uncertainty that comes from improvising. Joe Morris, Sam Newsome and Francisco Mela, who played together for the first time as a trio at the Shea Theater on March 23, embraced their novel situation with gusto and confidence.

Morris, best known as a top-tier guitarist, played bass. Newsome, who came up playing tenor saxophone, was featured on soprano sax. And Francisco Mela, who grew up playing Latin rhythms, played drums with only passing reference to his Cuban heritage.

The result was a bracing, hour-long free improvisation that busted conventional niceties. Preferring to be closer to the 50 active listeners in the house, the musicians decided to forego the proscenium stage for the pit in front, and proceeded to worm their way into 100 ears.

For someone who has been impacting students for over two decades at the New England Conservatory, Morris has a fraught relationship with formal education. He didn’t go to college or a conventional high school, and he holds strong opinions about why “jazz education”, and the academy more broadly, has largely failed to foster creativity and deal with race. Over the course of his career, Morris has followed his own advice to students: make a scene with like-minded musicians and create your own opportunities. He has done that where ever he’s lived.

Morris is a music community organizer who has created scenes in Boston and throughout the Hartford/New Haven area. He co-founded the Boston Improvisers Group in the 1980s, and has a long history of producing and curating in Connecticut, especially with Real Art Ways in Hartford. In the last few years he has revived his fabulous monthly Sunday afternoon series at RAW called Improvisations Now. Ingrid Laubrock, Tom Rainey and Brandon Lopez will join Morris on April 2. It was instructive for us to compare notes on producing creative music.

After establishing himself as one of the most creative guitarists in jazz, Morris picked up the bass about 23 years ago. He is self-taught on both, and is in the process of adding drums and piano to his repertoire. His bass playing on Thursday was insistent, driving and inventive. He used a drum stick in addition to a bow to provide a throbbing bottom for the group sound.

Since 1995 Newsome has devoted himself exclusively to the soprano saxophone, and in 2005 started to develop a serious solo saxophone practice, using tubes, mutes, bells and balloons to provide an expanded sound palette. His Jazz Shares concert at the Wistariahurst Museum in December, 2019, was memorable. At the Shea, Newsome limited his bag of add-ons to chimes and a mute made of crumpled tin foil. Walking around his stationary bandmates, Newsome weaved lines of fractured melody, at times playing highly rhythmic staccato phrases or endless passages using circular breathing techniques. While in action, he waved his instrument from side to side, much like another paragon of the soprano sax, Jane Ira Bloom. Newsome is also a dedicated educator (at Long Island University in Brooklyn), and a writer. His recent book, Be Inspired, Stay Focused: Creativity, Learning and the Business of Music, is a deep, yet easy to read primer for musicians and lay people alike. He also writes fiction, and is close to going public with a novel and a set of short stories. Newsome will be back at the Shea Theater on April 15th, performing with Stephen Haynes’ seven-piece ensemble, Knuckleball.

Newsome and Mela, who hadn’t met before the gig, are both in their mid-fifties, and veterans of real repute. Born in Bayamo, Cuba and educated at the National School of Arts for Teachers, el CENCEA, Mela came to Boston in 2000 to enroll at the Berklee School of Music. Upon arrival, he realized he was offered only a half scholarship. Unable to afford the other half, Mela stayed in Boston, becoming a ubiquitous presence in the city and the house drummer at Wally’s Cafe. He now teaches at Berklee and has been a fixture in the ensembles of Joe Lovano, Esperanza Spalding and the late McCoy Tyner. His recent recordings as a leader on 577 Records includes William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Matthew Shipp and Zoh Amba. His drumming and his persona are infectious and ebullient. His kit was augmented by bongos and a frame drum, and he used it to propel the trio to ecstatic heights. His constant smile and yelps of joy lent momentum and good energy to the proceedings. It was great to finally meet him.

No fancy band name, no records together, just three creative souls open to making music with each other. I’m attracted to musicians who have vision, talent and drive, and are serious and humble about developing their genius. Joe Morris, Sam Newsome and Francisco Mela are like that.

Now's the Time: Wadada Leo Smith and Angelica Sanchez in Amherst

If one needed further proof of the miracle and majesty of the act of improvisation, the concert by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and pianist Angelica Sanchez at Amherst College on March 10, made the case. The two master musicians spent an hour searching the moment to create powerful, spontaneous music.

The event at Buckley Recital Hall, part of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares’ 11th season of concerts, was presented in partnership with the Amherst College Department of Music, and was made possible by professors Darryl Harper and Jason Robinson.

The great soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy was once asked about the difference between composition and improvisation. The difference, he said “is that in composition you have all the time you want to think about what to say in 15 seconds, while in improvisation you have only 15 seconds."

For Smith and Sanchez there was no preconceived roadmap and no time to deliberate, only, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “the fierce urgency of now”. Relying on their musical wits and a lifetime of experience, Smith and Sanchez gave 100 rapt listeners a window into their performance practice and their souls.

The two have a bit of shared history. Sanchez was a member of Smith’s Golden Quartet, and they collaborated on Twine Forest, a series of duets released on Clean Feed Records in 2013, but they arrived in Amherst from two very different paths.

Smith was born 81 years ago in Leland, Mississippi and came of age playing in blues, r&b and marching bands. Here is Smith playing in Glendora, Mississippi in 2017. In 1970, he developed a compositional system of graphic notation he calls Ankhrasmation, and he has subsequently composed for string quartet and orchestra. After retiring from CalArts in 2014, he moved back to New Haven, Connecticut, where he has a daughter and grandchildren. In the 1970s, Smith was part of a very vibrant Hartford/Wesleyan/New Haven music scene that included Anthony Davis, Pheeroan AkLaff, Gerry Hemingway, Ed Blackwell, Jay Hoggard and Mark Helias, among others. He is one of the jazz world’s most decorated and celebrated artists.

Sanchez was born in Arizona and moved to New York in 1994. Now 50, she is working more than ever, with trips to Chicago, Knoxville and Europe in the next few months. Her duo recording with fellow pianist Marilyn Crispell, How To Turn the Moon (2020), and her trio with Michael Formanek and Billy Hart, Sparkle Being (2022), both garnered significant critical praise. Her second Nonet recording will be released on Pyroclastic in October. This past fall, she started teaching full time at Bard College, (where Smith taught from 1987-1993), and she is parenting Jack, who is finishing high school in New Jersey.

Friday’s concert featured discreet improvisations that often ended on beautiful notes. How do they know when an unscripted piece is over? There were short periods when one of them would play alone, but there never seemed to be a leader or a follower; they were equals accompanying each other. “How wide is your now?”, the Bay area improviser Tim Perkis used to ask. In other words, how much knowledge and experience can you summon in the moment to make a coherent musical statement? In the case of Smith and Sanchez, the answer is a lot.

From the stage after the performance, Smith thanked us for our attention, drawing a distinction between hearing and listening. Although it was difficult to catch all his words, his gist was that while hearing is a mechanical process, listening requires intent and a level of engagement that musicians feed on to enhance the creative process. Indeed, the audience was one of the quietest I’ve heard, lending focus to an evening without amplification. The microphones on stage were for recording purposes, laying the groundwork, perhaps, for a sequel to their first duo release.

The intensity of the evening was enhanced by the warm acoustics of Buckley Recital Hall, which riveted our attention on the beautiful abstractions of two geniuses with a very wide now.

Keeping At It: Jorge Sylvester's Group Perseveres

Some shows are easier to produce than others. The concert at Hawks & Reed on March 4, featuring Jorge Sylvester Spontaneous Expressions, landed on one end of the spectrum. First there was the looming winter storm warning that threatened to dump a foot of snow on Greenfield (it ended early and amounted to much less than 12 inches.) Days before the gig, the band’s pianist, Kuba Cichocki, got COVID. On Wednesday, Amtrak canceled their scheduled train. A half-hour out of New York, their new train lost power and didn’t move for two hours. Instead of a leisurely meal and some downtime, we zipped straight from the Springfield train station to the venue, arriving at 6:50pm for a 7:30pm show. If that wasn’t enough, the bass drum pedal was faulty.

I’m not sure if the stress made the music sweeter, but there was certainly a sense of relief when the first note sounded, only 15 minutes later than usual. The ensemble, led by alto saxophonist Jorge Sylvester, featured vocalist Nora McCarthy, drummer Tony Moreno, and last minute replacement Bruce Arnold on guitar.

The set began with a solo by Sylvester, using Monk’s “Epistrophy” as his point of departure. It served as a wonderful introduction to his sly improvising and full bodied tone. As the evening unfolded, Sylvester proceeded to break the quartet into various duos and trios, giving us a chance to really hone in on each player; maybe half the concert featured the full group. He employed a similar strategy on his latest release, Mayhem At Large, a live concert recording featuring eight players, but only two octet pieces; the rest were duos and solos.

The evening’s 80-minute set was plenty experimental, featuring lots of open improvisation that only hinted at predictable harmony and rhythm. That was true even when the band invoked tunes such as “Peace”. McCarthy sung Horace Silver’s beautiful lyrics and melody while the rest of the ensemble alluded to the form with accents and embellishments.

The Panamanian-born Sylvester, now 70, has been plugging away at his craft since boyhood, mentored by fellow countrymen, Euclides Hall, Efrain Castro and Victor Boa. After earning a music degree from SUNY New Paltz in 1981, he had impactful experiences at Karl Berger’s legendary Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY, where he first made contact with Dave Holland, Oliver Lake and violinist Ramsey Ameen, who became an important collaborator. Career stops have included tours with the World Saxophone Quartet, work with Andrew Cyrille, Craig Harris and the poet Sekou Sundiata (check out The Blue Oneness of Dreams), and numerous recordings as a leader. His first Jazz Shares appearance in 2015 with his ACE Collective, took place at Northampton’s Parlor Room.

Nora McCarthy’s role in the group brought to mind vocalists like Phil Minton, Maggie Nichols and Lauren Newton, who don’t just croon on a bed of sound, but are instrumentalists actually embedded in the ensemble, comping, improvising, interacting like all the other musicians. Her alto voice was sometimes out front singing lyrics, but could also be heard wordlessly blending with a background guitar figure or trading rhythms with drums. The morning after the concert she regaled us with stories about singing background vocals in Wilson Pickett’s’ band as a young person. McCarthy is not only a long-time collaborator of Sylvester’s, they’re life partners.

Sylvester also has a long relationship with Tony Moreno, the veteran drummer who has worked with Frank Kimbrough, Ole Mathisen and Marc Mommas. There was a sureness of touch, a confidence in his playing that comes from a lifetime behind the kit. Born in Manhattan, Moreno was mentored by Elvin Jones, who sold him his first drum set. Moreno studied with him for six years at Frank Ippolito’s Professional Percussion Center, where he also became friends with Mel Lewis, Tony Williams, Gene Krupa and Billy Cobham. Moreno told us the heartbreaking story of losing equipment, all his instruments (including a Yamaha C6 grand piano and a drum kit owned by Papa Jo Jones), and his mother’s music library, including manuscripts dating back to the 15th century, in Hurricane Sandy. Despite the hardship, Moreno exuded a zest for music and the people who make it.

Moreno also suggested adding Bruce Arnold to the band. The two have been collaborating for over 15 years. They shared a basement studio at Westbeth, the legendary complex of artist housing, gallery, studio and performance space in the West Village, that was devastated by the hurricane in 2012. I didn’t know Arnold before last week, another example of the depth of musical talent that escapes even attentive listeners like me. Arnold is a prolific author and educator (Berklee, NYU, Princeton), who has 300 books, videos and apps on music theory, time studies, ear training, guitar technique and more. He can also play the guitar at the highest level in many styles.

Overcoming obstacles and enduring neglect seems to define the jazz journey of many. Like Jorge Sylvester and the members of his band, those that make it develop a resilience and resourcefulness that results in hard earned brilliance.