Hamid Drake and William Parker Pay a Visit to Springfield

The season schedule of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares was completely full before we received a phone call from Patricia Parker, Executive Director of Arts For Art, who reported that percussionist Hamid Drake would be in New York for the annual Vision Festival and was available to play. Would we be interested in a duo with bassist William Parker? Despite 23 events already on the docket, including a recently arranged house concert with drummer Gerry Hemingway and pianist Izumi Kimura, we said “yes” without hesitation. You don’t refuse an offer like that, and so on June 12, Drake and Parker performed in Springfield for 85 rapturous listeners at New England Public Media.

Drake, who turns 70 in August, is, like his former collaborator Don Cherry, a world traveler. He spends much of his time in Milan these days, and his visits to North America have decreased in recent years, making his appearance even more special. Drake was born in Monroe, Louisiana, raised in Chicago, and since the late 1990s has regularly graced western Massachusetts stages, first under the auspices of Michael Ehlers and later through the efforts of yours truly. His last visit was a Magic Triangle Jazz Series concert with Adam Rudolph and Ralph Jones in 2017.

Now 73, Parker was born and raised in New York, and has been an even more frequent visitor to these parts over the years. His first forays were at Ehlers’ “Fire in the Valley” gatherings in the mid-1990s, and he has subsequently participated in multiple UMass Solos & Duos and Magic Triangle concerts, along with numerous Jazz Shares events. This was the 15th time we’ve worked together.

Drake and Parker first collaborated in Peter Brötzmann’s band in the early 1990s. Also featuring trumpeter Toshinori Kondo, the group was called Die Like a Dog, after the title of their first recording. Drake and Parker performed in the Valley as a duo at Bezanson Recital Hall in 2004, a few years after the release of their celebrated recording, Piercing the Veil. In the interceding two decades they have lost none of their communicative power.

Over 20 years ago Phil Freeman called them “the best rhythm section in jazz”, and their rapport remains intact. Without discussion or written music, Drake and Parker launched into a driving groove on drum kit and bass, respectively. The lines they weaved were supple and organic, and despite shifts in mood and texture, the music retained the force of life. Over the past couple of years, health issues have sapped Parker’s energy and curtailed his bass playing. Having just heard him multiple times at the Vision Festival as well as in Springfield on Thursday, I’m here to report that Parker is back, playing with power and his usual indomitable spirit. More than once, after some crunchy smears and a flurry of high intensity notes, Parker would bring some funk to the fore with a few fat tones, illuminating what Graham Collier called the music’s “deep dark blue centre.”

About half-way through the set, Drake, with painted fingernails, took an extended turn on frame drum. He has been playing tabla and other non-western percussion since he was part of the Mandingo Griot Society in the late 1970s. So the variety of tones and articulate rhythmic patterns he produced on this simple instrument came as no surprise. Still, it’s always amazing. Parker moved between n’goni and sintir (African strings), and a wind instrument shaped like a bassoon but clearly not from Europe. The music moved closer to the multivalent world of Codona or Oregon, and NEPM’s Studio A was transformed from a black box theater to a spiritual hermitage.  Drake sung prayers in multiple languages, beginning in Hebrew, then what sounded like Arabic and Sanskrit. The effect was transformative and at least for a moment, we were unburdened from the weight of a world out of balance.

Parker is a modern-day griot. He is not only the most creative bassist of the past 45 years and a linchpin of the NY jazz scene, he is an easy-going story teller, who speaks in aphorism and metaphor. “I approach the bass as a drum set,” he told us. “The G string is my ride cymbal, the D string is my snare, the A string is my tom-toms, and the E string is my low gong. That’s how I approach it.” Later he made an analogy in which sound is water. “When it vibrates, it turns into steam and changes properties and appearance,” he said. “When it changes, you can step into another place, the tone world.” It seemed significant that the only “merch” he brought were his books: “Who Owns Music?”, “Voices in the First Person”, a few volumes of his “Conversations” series, along with Cisco Bradley’s 2021 biography, “Universal Tonality: The Life and Music of William Parker”.

“There was no greater joy for me than to get in the car and drive up to the University of Massachusetts, where I knew I would be treated like a king,” Parker wrote in “Close to the Music: 25 Years of Magic Triangle Jazz Series”.

We treated him like royalty because for a long time now, we have recognized him as our philosopher king. As much as possible, I surround myself with people who are wise and kind, so William Parker and Hamid Drake, the mayor of the East Village and the cosmic master of rhythm, are welcome anytime.

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:  inserting infectious, unexpected licks into serpentine funk lines while creating sounds of curious origin. 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 constantly 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.