The Future of Jazz is Now: Mali Obamsawin Sextet at IMA

The perennial question “is jazz dead” has always puzzled me, and the related imperative, taken up by many a jazz society, to “keep jazz alive”, is also a head scratcher. Certainly from an economic standpoint, the jazz world is on life support, largely dependent on wealthy patrons, institutions and public funds for its survival. Jazz musicians struggling to make ends meet is not a new problem, even if the reasons have shifted from racism and unscrupulous club and record owners, to public and media neglect. But despite real hardships borne by artists, the health of the music has never been better. If you know where to look, you can find more talented musicians, exploring more facets of music than ever in history.

That point was driven home by the Mali Obamsawin Sextet, who delivered a great concert in crappy weather at the Institute for the Musical Arts on March 25. These six young musicians, most in their mid-twenties, are living proof that jazz, as a set of musical ideals, is alive and well. Their stop in Goshen, MA was part of a tour in support of Obamsawin’s recent album, Sweet Tooth. The band included Mali Obomsawin (bass, voice), Zack O'Farrill (drums), Allison Burik (alto sax, bass clarinet), Noah Campbell (tenor sax), Miriam Elhajli (voice, guitar) and Allison Philips (trumpet).

Like most emerging musicians today, their learning place has shifted from the bandstand to the classroom, but the members of the Sextet have already logged a ton of real world experience. They seemed relaxed and seasoned, and delivered a polished performance filled with compelling music. The compositions, all found on the new record, were written and/or arranged by Obamsawin, and highlight her connection to her Abenaki heritage.

The evening began with a solo by Elhajli, a Venezuelan-Moroccan-American guitarist and vocalist, educated at Berklee. She’s a researcher at The Association for Cultural Equity, founded by Alan Lomax, where she discovered Doc Watson’s, “Winter’s Night”. Her finger-picking performance was a tour de force and showcased an angelic and muscular voice that transfixed all 50 audience members.

Obamsawin, a member of Abenaki First Nation at Odanak (Quebec), was mentored by Taylor Ho Bynum at Dartmouth College. Ho Bynum plays cornet on Sweet Tooth and helped produce the recording. Five years removed from Dartmouth, Obamsawin is an activist and a holder of stories and culture, and she set up many of the pieces with concise and cogent remarks.

“Wawasint8da”, a beautiful Catholic hymn with lyrics translated from Latin to Abenaki by an early Jesuit priest, devolved as the melody fractured, reflecting the complicated history between First Nation peoples and their colonizers. “Pedegwajois” featured the recorded voice of Theophile Panadis, recounting an ancient tale of a young man receiving a teaching, which brings him to the middle of Betobagw (“Lake Champlain”) during a thunderstorm.

One reason jazz remains a living, breathing art form is the integration of disparate musical traditions with African-American constructs. Many jazz artists, including Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Mildred Bailey and Don Pullen, had Native American ancestry, and the weaving of traditional chants, melodies and stories into jazz lexicon has precedent. Saxophonist Jim Pepper, whose parents were Creek and Kaw, had a hit in the late-1960s/early 1970s with “Witchi-Tai-To,” which was built around a peyote song Pepper learned from his grandfather. Recent efforts by Obamsawin, Diné trumpeter Delbert Anderson and Nez Percé singer Julia Keefe have organically incorporated Indigenous aesthetics into jazz. For information on the impact Native Americans have had on American music more generally, watch RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World.

The horn section added piquancy and punch. Noah Campbell, a classmate of Obamsawin’s at Dartmouth, delivered strong solos on tenor and soprano saxophone. He’s getting his PhD in political science at Brown in his spare time. Alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Allison Burik was mentored by Joe Morris at New England Conservatory. When I saw Morris at last week’s Jazz Shares concert, he told me how much he liked and respected Burik. Trumpeter Allison Phillips was educated at the New School, before earning a masters in Jazz Performance from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Together they provided bite, carried melody and raised the level of musicianship in the ensemble.

Drummer Zack O’Farrill was the only musician I had worked with before. He was part of a family band with his father, Arturo, and brother, Adam, in Holyoke in 2013, and he performed in Easthampton, with Adam’s Stranger Days quartet in 2017. As third generation royalty (his grandfather is big band legend Chico O’Farrill), Zack is well positioned to carry on the family legacy.

Mali Obamsawin’s Sextet provided a powerful first-person assertion of cultural pride, along with a healthy dose of musical prowess and youthful exuberance. It gave us pleasure in the moment and hope for the future of jazz.

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.