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Glenn Siegel’s Jazz Ruminations

There comes a time in an artist’s life when the pendulum swings, and the hard work and dogged pursuit of excellence forged over many years begins to bear fruit. With mid-career in the rear view mirror, the accumulation of credits and accomplishments becomes so impressive, the time left so precious, that respect, and maybe even a few accolades, begin to pour in. Such is the case with Joseph Daley, the 75-year old low brass player whose performance on October 6 at Hawks & Reed in Greenfield was a study in power and restraint.

 

Accompanied by bassist Ken Filiano and guitarist Shu Odamura, Daley debuted his Tonal Colors Trio on Sunday for a Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares audience of 50. Playing tuba, euphonium, piano and wood flute, Daley led the ensemble in an evening of bracing and elegiac music.

 

The first half of the concert featured an open floor plan, mostly non-metered and harmonically free with textures galore. Filiano and Daley, playing tuba, inhabited a similar nether world of bottom friendly sound, with Odamura’s shimmering guitar floating on top. The music, while untethered, nevertheless had a certain momentum, propelling us through uncharted soundscapes. This approach, never settled but not unsettling, was peppered with short sections of intricately written material that seemed to come out of nowhere, nailed with precision.

 

The second half of the program was highlighted by a gorgeous rendition of Don Pullen’s “Ode To Life”, that jumped off the stage with a beauty that made us gasp. Why this composition has not become a modern jazz standard is beyond me. Pullen’s piece was brilliantly juxtaposed with an equally beautiful Daley original dedicated to his late wife, Wanda. Daley has written a number of works in honor of his wife and he includes at least one during every live performance. Odamura told me later that he was not familiar with the composition, but once he figured out what key it was written in, was able to acquit himself quite convincingly.

 

Odamura was born in Kyoto, Japan and moved to the U.S. in 2006 to attend the Berklee School of Music on scholarship. He’s been living in New York since 2009, including five years in my old stomping grounds of Woodside, Queens. Affable, humble and a monster player, Odamura had a clean ringing sound and an approach that was devoid of grandstanding and excessive volume. Perhaps his extensive experience making music for theater, including over a decade as musical director for Watoku Ueno’s shadow puppetry group, explains the guitarist’s ability to fit in and serve the music.

 

Filiano was his usual commanding self. The great bass player has been a regular and welcome presence at recent Jazz Shares events, enhancing bands led by Anders Griffen, Taylor Ho Bynum and Jeff Cosgrove in the last couple of years. This time Filiano employed an array of pedals and electronic effects to enhance his sound. Watching him manipulate his devices was a bit distracting, but when I closed my eyes and focused only on auditory information, the bent, swooped world he created opened up vistas. Combined with his patented vocalizations and the knitting needles he wove between his bass strings, Filiano embodied the band’s name: tonal colors, indeed.

 

Regal yet relaxed in his stocking feet and beautiful print tunic, Joseph Daley seemed cut from African royalty. Obscured behind a music stand and his large coil of brass, Daley controlled the proceedings with a light but confident touch. Appearing almost two years to the day since his Jazz Shares debut with Reggie Nicholson’s Brass Concept, Daley celebrated his 75th circumnavigation of the sun by leading his trio in a masterful display of improvisatory spirit. After a good run on tuba, Daley moved to the smaller, nimbler euphonium, a cousin to the baritone horn, my instrument of choice through middle and high school. The baritone, Daley explained, has a cylindrical bore, meaning that the tubing is a uniform diameter throughout most of the instrument. The euphonium on the other hand, has conical tubing, it gets larger as it moves from mouthpiece to bell. Explained like the consummate public school teacher he was.

 

Daley has also been the consummate side man over his illustrious 50 year career. I know him from his ground breaking stint with Sam River’s Trio, as well as his work with Taj Mahal, Howard Johnson’s tuba-heavy outfit, Gravity, and the big bands of Gil Evans, Charlie Haden and Carla Bley. I first met him in 2015, when he (and Filiano) performed with Jason Kao Hwang’s genre-straddling project, Burning Bridge, as part of the UMass Magic Triangle Jazz Series. But Daley is also a first rate composer and arranger. Do yourself a favor and check out his brilliant 2011 opus, The Seven Deadly Sins, and his 2013 follow up, The Seven Heavenly Virtues, both featuring his orchestral Earth Tones Ensemble.

 

Late in the concert Daley played piano and a Native American wood flute, which moved things in a spiritual direction and lightened up the evening’s dark sonorities. It was the perfect coda to a night of adventure and exploration, and served as an invitation to delve deeper into the remarkable career of Joseph Daley.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Far from the hoopla surrounding the latest artist du jour, there are hundreds of high caliber jazz musicians making “serious” music that is not without humor, passion and virtuosity. We saw two such musicians on September 27 at Holyoke Media: Josh Sinton and Jeb Bishop.

 

These two old friends ran down complex original compositions, plus pieces by Herbie Nichols and Steve Lacy, while engaging in a series of basic sound science experiments. Sinton coaxed a variety of sounds from his baritone saxophone, bass clarinet and flute, while Bishop did the same with his trombone.

 

The concert began with solo statements by each musician. Bishop, who moved to Chicago two years ago for his second stint in the Windy City, began the evening walking the stage using a mute as both percussion instrument and note bender. Mixing melodious runs and unconventional bleats with a judicious use of multi-phonics, Bishop constructed a lucid 10-minute musical statement, a master class in crafting coherence from a trunk-full of unusual components.

 

I think of the baritone sax and bass clarinet as Sinton’s main axes, but he told us it wasn’t until he picked up the flute in his late teens that he felt “as one” with an instrument. He began his solo producing a beautiful array of tones, full of purity and depth. Before long he was fluttering and vocalizing through his flute, turning his instrument into a wind-swept vessel of breath. Having just heard Nicole Mitchell in Hartford alongside guitarist Joe Morris, I was reminded again of the great sound potential and emotional range of the flute.

 

The whole evening was a celebration of breath, blowing life into low end devices, saturating the atmosphere with honking, slap-tonguing and tone-splitting vibrations. Often thought of as galumphing ugly ducklings fit merely for bottom-end oompah, the baritone saxophone, bass clarinet and trombone were transformed on Friday into princes of versatile derring-do.

 

The duo’s jaunty treatment of Herbie Nichols’ "Karna Kanji", (never recorded during Nichols’ short career), had his characteristic lilt and tilt, and Sinton and Bishop hinted at its playful, 1920’s-like spirit. Sinton first heard the piece on Roswell Rudd’s The Unheard Herbie Nichols, Vol. 1, and he asked Bishop if he was familiar with it. The trombonist quickly texted back a picture of his copy of the disc.

 

These two kindred spirits also tackled Steve Lacy’s “The Dumps”, written, we were told by Sinton, after Lacy’s weeks-long failure to try to write a convincing blues tune. After a trilling opening, the duo launched into the crux of the tune: a brisk bop-like unison line that provided a fertile platform for the two impassioned solos that followed. Sinton got to study with the great soprano saxophonist at the New England Conservatory in his last years. The experience was so profound for Sinton he formed Ideal Bread (Kirk Knuffke, Tomas Fujiwara, Adam Hopkins), built solely to perform Lacy’s compositions. Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares hosted Ideal Bread during our first season, thirteen years ago.

 

Since then, Sinton has come back to the Valley often. His parents, long-time Jazz Shares supporters John and Wendy Sinton, live in Northampton. (They moved to the Valley after Josh had flown the coop.) There have also been memorable Sinton sightings with Nate Wooley’s Quintet (2016), Sinton’s Predicate Trio (2019) and Charlie Kohlhase’s Saxophone Support Group (2020).

 

Until he moved back to Chicago, Jeb Bishop had called Boston home, where he (re)connected with folks like Nate McBride, Joe Morris, Tony Malaby, Ellwood Epps and others. Bishop grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and in addition to playing trombone and guitar, studied philosophy extensively at the graduate level. He also translated the recently departed pianist Irène Schweizer’s biography, The Uncontainable Feeling of Freedom, from German to English. During Bishop’s first stint in Chicago in the 1990s, he closely collaborated with Ken Vandermark, Joshua Abrams, Frank Rosaly and Tim Daisy, among others. Lately, he has been playing a lot with Ed Wilkerson, Jr. and Avreeayl Ra. At a certain point during the concert, he used a plastic margarine container as a mute to produce a series of innovative buzzes, quacks and vocal distortions. Brilliant.

 

Sinton and Bishop were embarked on a modest tour that will take them to The Lilypad in Cambridge, Paul Lichter’s long-running Dimensions in Jazz series in Portland, ME, and back to Sinton’s current hometown, Brooklyn. Just two very accomplished musicians moving outside of the limelight, garnering all the right attention.

 

 

The butterflies that routinely congregate in the gut as the calendar turns to September result from a lifetime of school beginnings, a resumption of adult responsibilities at summer’s end, and the looming melancholy of another cold and dark New England winter. One antidote to that early fall apprehension is the start of another Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares season. The Jazz Shares tip-off produces a jolt of anticipation, built on the prospect of dozens of the world’s best creative musicians visiting our neck of the woods over the next 10 months.

 

Season 13 of Jazz Shares got off to an auspicious start on September 5, as trumpeter Eric Vloeimans and accordionist Will Holshouser filled the elegant marble music room at the Wistariahust Museum with mellifluous music full of heartfelt melody. Their 75-minute performance had the hallmarks of a proper European recital: sturdy compositions played with impeccable technique and executed with brio. There were short bursts of improvisation, but in the main every hair was in its proper place. With the exception of “I Wish You Love”, the program consisted of originals by Vloeimans and Holshouser, who collectively harnessed elements of European formalism, homey country music, and indeterminate folk traditions to create music that, while composed by the performers, sounded like classic tunes.

 

“I Wish You Love”, written by Charles Trenet in the early 1940s and made popular in the U.S. in 1957 by vocalist Keely Smith, featured the most jazz-inflected playing of the evening. Vloeimans swung in spurts with fleet, well-articulated runs straight out of the Clifford Brown playbook. The trumpeter became interested in jazz while at the Rotterdam Academy of Music before moving to New York to study with Donald Byrd. He later cut his teeth in the big bands of Mercer Ellington and Frank Foster. Vloeimans’ sound was round, burnished and as bright as his outfit (colorful floral shirt, loud yellow pants and pointed red boots).  His tone and approach was a perfect fit with the dazzling venue.

 

During the intermission that was the COVID pandemic, Vloeimans turned to composing and wrote a body of work he numbered and grouped under the heading “Innermissions”. We heard a few of them. “Innermission # 1” had a gorgeous plaintive melody with a delicate oom-pah waltz rhythm that I’ve been humming for days. “Innermission # 12”, an up tempo romp that highlighted the (seemingly) effortless facility of the instrumentalists, ended with a slow hymn-like exhale. As with many of the pieces we heard in Holyoke, both are found on their recent disc, the excellent Two For The Road. Everybody loves melody, and the entire program was full of strong, memorable lines. The crowd of 50 seemed pleased.

 

The Duo recorded Holshouser’s “The Light Quick Bones” on their first collaboration, Eric & Will (2018). The piece had a playful, spritely quality with short bursts of craziness. “Deep Gap”, also written by Holshouser, paid homage to the great guitarist Doc Watson, who was born in Deep Gap, North Carolina in 1923. It had the feel of a good mid-twentieth century country tune, and highlighted the deep, reedy resonance of Holshouser’s chosen instrument.


The accordionist is a graduate of Wesleyan University, where he studied with Bill Barron and Anthony Braxton. It’s no surprise, given the versatility and universality of the squeezebox, that Holshouser’s career spans musical worlds, and bands led by David Krakauer, Suzanne Vega, Han Bennink and Martha and Loudon Wainwright III. His fondness for the early 20th century Paris musette tradition (explored in depth with his band Musette Explosion), his experience working with the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the NYC Opera, and his affinity with jazz and country traditions, were all brought to bear on Thursday. The results were transportive, and removed all fear and worry from my end of summer.

 

Susana Von Canon, Vloeimans’ manager and a long-time champion of Dutch jazz on both sides of the Atlantic, accompanied the band to Holyoke along with subsequent gigs in Cambridge (The Lilypad) and New York (Drom). She was instrumental in helping me organize a  UMass Magic Triangle concert in 2006 featuring Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink’s legendary 10-piece Instant Composers Pool Orchestra. I met her then, and it was great to see her 18 years later. It was inspiring to see her continued perseverance on behalf of musicians and the music despite current punitive visa restrictions and diminished state support.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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