As the passing of time undoes established norms, the contemporary music world keeps updating the meaning of that collection of styles often bundled up as “classic jazz”. In the 1940s, the modernist bebop movement was jazz’s uncompromising cutting edge, and the music’s early 20th-century roots in street music, plantations, saloons and red-light districts became its classic trad forms.
Thirty years later, bebop’s breakneck melodies and jarring chords became “classic jazz” themselves, overtaken by the free-improv avant garde of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, the jazz/rock fusions of Miles Davis, Weather Report and Frank Zappa, and new jazz-influenced folk and contemporary classical forms from all over the world. In those creatively dizzying years, jazzers still wanting to play song-tunes and old-school swing sometimes found themselves mocked by progressives as sad nostalgics. But now, in a 21st-century music world accepting of abundantly competing choices, all that has changed.
Walter Smith III, the formidably resourceful 45-year-old Houston-born saxophonist, is a sublime example of the jazz tradition’s enduring contemporaneity. Like its 2018 predecessor, Twio Vol 2 explores standard song-shapes with Smith accompanied only by bass and drums. His sound and incisively rugged phrasing bring many sax icons to mind – Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, even the soft-hued cool schoolers Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh – but his storytelling focus makes new music of it all.
On My Ideal, made famous by Chet Baker, Smith’s tenor builds laconically deliberate Rollins-like phrasing into double-time swirls and dives. Thelonious Monk’s Light Blue unfolds like a private meditation, a delightfully acrobatic Casual-Lee (a Konitz-dedicated duet shared with guest Branford Marsalis) is a highlight, and the poignant I Should Care and the Billy Strayhorn classic Isfahan feature bassist Ron Carter at his sublimely creative best. This is a set that could hardly better represent classic and contemporary jazz creativity, seamlessly fused.
Also out this month
Bill Frisell reconvenes one of his most gracefully idiosyncratic lineups for In My Dreams (Blue Note), bringing together longtime partners Jenny Scheinman (violin), Eyvind Kang (viola) and Hank Roberts (cello) with bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Rudy Royston. From the lilting, beautiful title track to a chiming, harmonised Home on the Range, it’s a heartfelt personal celebration for this unique artist’s 75th year. A comparably original legend, German jazz pianist Joachim Kühn, wrote Joachim Kühn & Young Lions (ACT) in his 80th year for young musicians he had never played with before. Tight funk and late-Miles trumpet edginess (from excellent 23-year-old newcomer Jakob Bänsch) joins lyrical warmth and a free-collective ensemble fluency in which Kühn sounds positively exhilarated. And US saxophonist/composer Caroline Davis mixes the lyrical to free-atonal sax sounds, painterly synth collages, field recordings and tributes to the late jazz originals Steve Lacy and Geri Allen on the imaginative Fallows (Ropeadope).
