Freddie Hubbard 1938-2008

Sad news from the west coast this morning, where the great trumpeter Freddie Hubbard died in hospital. He suffered a heart attack and multiple organ failure a month ago.

Bright Moments 2008

Looking back over my list of CDs received in 2008, it's clear that it was a better-than-average year. As regular readers may recall, I set out to celebrate Anthony Braxton this year, and it turned out to be a great year for that – capped by the release of the box set of Arista recordings and Braxton's 2008 quartet set from Moscow. That worked out so well that I've decided to do the same thing with Cecil Taylor in 2009. I mined some of his catalogue this year to fill some holes in my collection, picked up some things that were recommended by colleagues, and I'm looking forward to exploring them all next year.

Personal musical highlights in 2008 include the list of great concerts already noted, of course, and my top 10 list of CDs – the definitive version of which will appear in this week's Village Voice – but also a few others. Topping the list would have to be the privilege of spending some time in the company of some masters. I'm a firm believer that you should take any chance you have to catch people like Taylor, Ornette Coleman and Wayne Shorter while they're still with us, and I was lucky enough to see all three play this year, and to spend a couple of moments expressing my thanks to Coleman and Shorter in person for all the great inspiration they've shared through their music.

So, here's to 2009. I hope you have a great musical year, and as always I look forward to hearing your reactions to the music or whatever you read here.

Best Live 2008

Miles Davis once famously referred to a great gig as the most fun he'd had with his clothes on. I'm not sure if any of my live musical experiences reached that level this year, with the possible exception of the second half of a show I saw Sonny Rollins give, but there were more than a few moments of delight at various venues and in various genres.

Myra Melford's Be Bread Quintet – Portland Jazz Festival: I dropped into this show after it had started and was immediately transported. I love Myra Melford's compositions and have heard them in several settings – including a smaller version of this group – but this show was definitely on another level. I've long been a fan of trumpeter Cuong Vu, but seldom have I heard him this focused and creative. It's a cliche that critics often gather in a bar after a show and try to top each other with their observations, but this show slayed everyone. Given that another band of Myra's – Trio M – also topped my 'best of' list of 2007 tells you all you need to know about how good her songbook is and what kind of level she's playing on. If you are not a convert, do yourself a favour and check her out in 2009.

Maria Schneider Orchestra – Vitoria-Gasteiz Jazz Festival: I ran into members of the band at lunch and outside the venue before the show began and heard about the grueling tour schedule they were following as they criss-crossed the European festival circuit. Add that kind of background to a venue that is normally a small-town basketball arena and you could be excused if you lowered your expectations a notch or two. But this is Maria Schneider, one of the most-determined musicians on the contemporary scene, and a set of material that I gave top marks to in a DownBeat review. Given those factors, it's probably no surprise that this was a captivating performance, gorgeously nuanced, with numerous highlights, including stunning work by Ingrid Jensen on one of my favourite Schneider compositions, "The 'Pretty' Road."

Kathleen Edwards – Ottawa Bluesfest: It must be so hard to be a star from here – from anyplace, probably. You can never be as big, as exciting, as 'foreign', as you seem anywhere else but in your hometown. I'd seen Ottawa native Kathleen Edwards once before on a large stage – on a cold, rainy night when she was just starting to get noticed by David Letterman and Saturday Night Live – and was decidedly underwhelmed. I blame myself, because I think I had bought into the hype surrounding Edwards as someone who had been influenced by Lucinda Williams. So here she was back in her hometown, on an even bigger stage, just a couple of nights after a performance by Williams herself. Edwards killed. Playing a superb set of songs from her album Asking For Flowers, she was disarmingly self-deprecating yet so obviously at home on the big stage that it was immediately clear what people around the world see when she comes to their town.

Charles Lloyd Quartet – Vitoria-Gasteiz Jazz Festival: Although his new live album with his current quartet ended up on my 'top 10' list for 2008, there were parts of it that left me a bit cold. Not so with this late-afternoon set in Vitoria's beautiful Art Deco theatre. Maybe it was because Lloyd avoided a lot of the 'Coltrane-lite' playing that tends to undercut his more creative playing, or just because his stellar band – pianist Jason Moran, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Eric Harland – sounded so much better live. Whatever the reason, this was one of those shows you wish was twice as long as it was. Harland did some stuff on his hi-hat that I'm still trying to figure out, and Moran's splay-fingered playing was so funky that Lloyd started dancing in place. Yes, sure, everything sounds better on a sunny afternoon in the Basque Region; but this set would rank if you'd heard it anywhere.

Daniel Lanois – Centrepointe Theatre, Ottawa: I'm such a sucker for rootsy music played by a four-piece band with two electric guitars. Unlike Edwards, local boy Lanois has little to prove when he comes home; after all, he made his name first in Hamilton and then in Dublin, New Orleans and Silver Lake, California with artists including Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan and U2. He doesn't need to play the homeboy card, and yet there is an added poignancy to shows played in the area where he grew up and continues to have numerous relatives. This was a low-intensity show, yet it seemed to glow like a hot coal with tremendous songwriting, stage presence and band communication on display. In addition, I hate to sound like a 50-something suck, but damn I love to hear a great show in a small, soft-seat venue.

The Bad Plus – Portland Jazz Festival: Like Myra Melford, The Bad Plus makes the list for the second consecutive year. Almost the same set, but a completely different venue. Where the 2007 show I caught was a sonically perfect one in a large, soft-seat venue, this one was an all-ages gig in a funky, old ballroom with a spring-loaded dancefloor. I'm completely compromised on this show since I was on some panel discussions with the band members and hung out with them in Portland – so be it, but my critical faculties were still in place, and this show rocked the joint.

Other notable shows from 2008...

Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band in Montreal

Andy Milne playing solo in Ottawa

Cecil Taylor in Portland

Wayne Shorter in Vitoria-Gasteiz

Ornette Coleman in Portland

Michael Occhipinti's Sicilian Jazz Project in Ottawa

Jazz Funding Woes Continue

Wow! This is a big one, but not a surprise given the climate in the auto industry.

The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal has lost General Motors as its title sponsor. Under contract, GM will still be onboard for 2009, but the festival is searching for a new corporate investor for 2010 and beyond.

FIJM is such a strong brand that it will be very interesting – and telling – to see how quickly it can replace GM. I have no doubt that they will, but it's a terrible environment in which to launch this kind of search.

UPDATE: I had a chance to speak with FIJM founder and president Alain Simard for a DownBeat piece on the funding issue, and not surprisingly he was upbeat about having a new presenting sponsor in place to announce at the 2009 edition of the festival. As the central player in a city that bills itself – with justification – as "city of festivals," FIJM is in an enviable position among cultural events that count on funding at every political level as well as from major corporations.

Seminal Listening

It's hard to describe the impact that Jimi Hendrix's third album, Electric Ladyland, had on me when I first heard it in 1969. Suffice to say that it barely left my turntable for several months. I certainly remember the first time I listened to it through headphones, lying in the dark on the floor of my bedroom. Along with the first time I heard Muddy Waters, Kind Of Blue, A Love Supreme and Keith Jarrett's Facing You, the memory still brings a chill. The phasing at the end of "And The Gods Made Love" and the quick cut into "Have You Ever Been (To Electric Ladyland)" struck me as anthemic. It was interesting to learn years later that Hendrix created that particular sonic blend in the aftermath of the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in the spring of 1968. The working title for Electric Ladyland had been The End Of The Beginning, and that soundscape definitely sounded like change was in the air.

This month marks the 40th anniversary of Hendrix's masterpiece – a milestone that will be marked by the release of a deluxe edition of the original recording that pairs the most recent remastering of the CD with an extended version of a "making of" TV documentary. Originally released in mid-October 1968 in the U.S., and on October 25 in Britain (with the infamous naked women cover, which Hendrix hated) Electric Ladyland marked a huge break with Are You Experienced? and Axis: Bold As Love as Hendrix took control from Chas Chandler in the studio and brought in engineer Eddie Kramer to try to realize the sounds he heard in his mind.

What moved me most at the time was hearing Hendrix's blues and R&B roots come to the foreground. His main solo on Earl King's "Come On" remains one of my favourite guitar breaks and the primal backbeat of "Gypsy Eyes" introduced a side of Hendrix few of us had been exposed to in 1968. As Hendrix himself described the album: "...electric funk...blues and hard rock, it goes into complete opposite, complete fantasy.... It has a rough, hard feel on some of the tracks, those funky tunes, some of the things on it are hungry."

Hungry? That's going to have to remain one of those mysteries, I guess, although it strikes me as equally tellingly oblique as Miles Davis referring to his work on Sketches Of Spain as "expensive," by which he meant that it had wrung everything out of him and couldn't be repeated.

Alas, Hendrix was not to repeat the peaks of Electric Ladyland, either. It was, of course, to remain his final fully realized studio recording, and the story of its making has all the signposts of his demise less than two years later: the infighting with bassist Noel Redding and manager Michael Jeffery; the lack of a firm hand in the studio; the hangers-on – whose presence Hendrix alluded to at the end of the epochal "Voodoo Chile."

Like Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run, Electric Ladyland documents a musical genius willing something to happen in the studio despite enormous obstacles. And, like Born To Run, Electric Ladyland is all the more remarkable because it was made during the course of a sporadic touring schedule.

When I listen to it today it is with less naive ears, but I still thrill to its majesty and grit; it can still take me by surprise, regardless of how many dozen (hundreds?) times I've heard it. These days, like A Love Supreme, I tend to save it for special times – hoping that each time I hear it a little bit of my own innocence and youth will come back to me. Can you – should you – ask more of a piece of music?

Thoughts For Freddie

Howard Mandel passes on news that trumpeter Freddie Hubbard is in critical condition, suffering from multiple organ failure.

Those of us who have followed Hubbard's courageous struggles to regain some measure of his once-mighty chops can only wish him peace in this latest battle.

Witness For The Defence

I've been stewing for awhile about a blog posting that attracted no little attention for its strident stance on the state of jazz journalism. Time to respond.

Need I even take the bandwidth to state my bias in this dispute? Obviously, as a leading contributor to DownBeat – one of the two main targets of the original blog post – and vice-president of the Jazz Journalists Association, which represents +400 writers, broadcasters and photographers around the world, I have a point of view about the current state of jazz writing.

My intention is not to debate the anonymous (funny, that) poster – though I'd love to if any festival producer or radio station wants to set it up – on a point-by-point basis, though I will state that the fact that he/she "(has) no idea who (Jason Koransky) is, or how he came to be editor of DownBeat" says more about the poster than it does about Jason. Rather, I want to point out something interesting about the "Golden Age" theory that the poster subscribes to.

Like so many things from the past that are based largely on our memories, it's a myth.

Last year, when Rolling Stone released its collected back issues on CD-ROM, I was excited because it meant having ready access to the works of some of my favourite music writers: the magazine's co-founder Ralph J. Gleason, Robert Palmer, Greil Marcus, et.al. I was anxious to re-read some of the work that had influenced me as a wannabe writer in my teens. Imagine my surprise when I found that – with the notable exception of the mighty triumvirate just listed – much of the writing was fatuous and sloppy. The use of adjectives was a major issue (why didn't I remember how often "heavy" was used to describe guitar playing?) and so was the obvious lack of knowledge about how music is created and recorded.

I don't have to wait for DownBeat to issue a set of CD-ROMs – though, hey, Frank Alkyer, it's a great idea – to go through the same exercise. I have a stack of old back issues, as I'm sure many of you do, and I've gone back to check things, and been just as surprised at how the memory plays tricks. Guess what? Some of our jazz journalism heroes had feet of clay, too. And I don't even have to go to the old DownBeats; I can turn to my own clipping files and find things I'm embarrassed to see my name attached to from decades past. As humans – as professionals – we strive to improve, or hopefully, we don't progress far in our chosen fields of endeavour.

Obviously, just like the music we criticize, the quality of jazz journalism is highly subjective, but I simply do not buy the idea that today's jazz writers are somehow genetically inferior to our poster's heroes (Morgenstern, Gitler, Hentoff, et.al.). Based on dozens and dozens of articles read, I would put Gary Giddins, Francis Davis, Mark Miller, Stuart Broomer or Bob Blumenthal up against any mid-career journalist of a previous generation you care to name. And just so I'm not accused of naming only those writers who I tend to agree with critically, let me add Stanley Crouch to that list (if you think Crouch can't write because you disagree with his generally neo-con stance, go read his profile of Sonny Rollins in The New Yorker or dig up some of his pro-avant gut bucket pieces from The Village Voice). I'm also encouraged by the commitment, passion, style and breadth of knowledge that a number of my younger peers – Nate Chinen, David Adler, Larry Blumenfeld spring to mind – are bringing to our trade. The future looks bright.

All of this is not to say that our business is without fault. Far from it. To be sure, there are lazy, style-deprived and narrow-minded jazz journalists, and they deserve to be called out whenever possible. But they've been called out with far more force and effectiveness than this anonymous blog post has done. If you want to read some insightful criticism of jazz criticism – words that have helped me shape how I've approached the craft over the years – I heartily recommend Orrin Keepnews' blunt 1987 essay, 'A Bad Idea, Poorly Executed...', available in his collected works, The View From Within: Jazz Writings 1948-1987 (Oxford University Press). The fact that Orrin was writing critically of jazz journalism more than 20 years ago – and shooting with deadly aim at some of the same icons that the current blogger lauds as leading lights of the Golden Age – speaks volumes.

Another One Bites...

Okay, this is threatening to turn into a recurring feature called Jazz Death Watch.

Thanks to my old buddy Calvin Wilson, news comes of the death of the St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival. The festival's presenter, Cultural Festivals, has announced that it's withdrawing its support. In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch blog Culture Club, Calvin reports that there's a possibility that Sheldon Concert Hall and Jazz St. Louis will join forces to resurrect the festival, but it's dead for now.

Here in Ottawa, all of our festivals – including the well-established TD Canada Trust Ottawa International Jazz Festival and the world's largest chamber music festival – are threatened by the city government's pending motion to withdraw all funding. The funding itself doesn't amount to that much of the individual festivals' budgets, but as the festival organizers point out, municipal funding is a gateway – maybe cornerstone is a better metaphor – to other funding. If your own government isn't behind you, goes the thinking, why should other funders get onboard?

This death watch is getting depressing. Yes, times are tough, but why is jazz – and culture in general – such an easy target?

RIP Mitch Mitchell

For skinny white guys like myself, Mitch Mitchell – who was found dead today in his Portland, Oregon, hotel room – provided hope that we could one day too sound like something approaching Elvin Jones.

Even next to the perpetually emaciated-looking Jimi Hendrix Mitchell looked slight, but what a sound he produced. He was to Hendrix what Keith Moon was to Pete Townshend, but unlike Moon Mitchell seemed to be in complete control at all times. In fact, he may have been the most in-control rocker of the time – perhaps just as well given Hendrix's manic nature and bassist Noel Redding's chip-on-his-shoulder edge. Without Mitchell's calming influence the Experience may not have lasted to see 1968.

The fact remains that Mitchell was the only musician who recorded – officially – with Hendrix who could hold a candle to him musically, but unfortunately he seemed completely without direction or ambition after the guitarist's death.

A sadder death than some, then. At 62, he should have still been in his prime instead of a somewhat-forgotten figure deep within Hendrix's lengthy shadow.

Sing on, brother. Play on, drummer.

2008 Top 10 Mk. 1

I'm always a bit hesitant to draw a line on new releases midway through November, but since I've just submitted my first list to a publication – AllAboutJazz Los Angeles – I can't delay posting here any longer.

Even as I post I've just listened to Ben Ratliff's intriguing audio review of the new Rudresh Mahanthappa CD, which I don't have yet, and I have a new Alex Cline sitting on my desk that looks very promising.

So, with the proviso that this may still change...

1. Mary Halvorson Trio – Dragon’s Head (Firehouse 12)
2. Anthony Braxton – Quartet (Moscow) 2008 (Leo)
3. Donny McCaslin Trio – Recommended Tools (Greenleaf)
4. Vijay Iyer – Tragicomic (Sunnyside)
5. Bennie Maupin Quartet – Early Reflections (Cryptogramophone)
6. Anthony Braxton – Trio (Victoriaville) 2007 (Victo)
7. Manuel Mengis Gruppe 6 – The Pond (hatOLOGY)
8. Jane Ira Bloom – Mental Weather (Outline)
9. Charles Lloyd Quartet – Rabo De Nube (ECM)
10. Wadada Leo Smith’s Golden Quartet – Tabligh (Cuneiform)

Two Braxtons? I easily could've stretched it to three by including the big band set that Victo released this year, and of course there's the entire Arista reissue set to consider if one includes historical recordings in the top 10, but that's it for now.

All in all, a very good year. Lots of other things that could've/should've made the list, but I tried to stick to my approach of "nominating" things as I heard them and not re-thinking the decisions.

[UPDATE 20.11.08: Well, my instincts about the Alex Cline recording were right; it's killing, and jumps onto the list around the #7 spot.]

Thoughts For Mark Turner

Send some love and good thoughts to musician Mark Turner. The brilliant young saxophonist was badly injured in a power saw accident and is undergoing surgery to repair damage sustained by several fingers.

If you're in the New York City area, stay tuned to your regular sources for news of upcoming benefits to help offset his medical expenses.

And if you want to hear Mark at his best, pick up the new Francisco Mela CD Cirio, a live recording by the Cuban drummer with Turner, Jason Moran, Larry Grenadier and Lionel Loueke.

[UPDATE]: Reports are that Mark Turner's hand surgery went as well as could be expected and there's a chance that he could regain the full use of his fingers. Here's hoping.

Zawinul: Win Some, Lose Some

Austria's Green and Liberal parties may have turned down the bid to erect a monument to Vienna homeboy Josef Zawinul (a simple plaque will have to suffice) but the late keyboardist's son Tony has announced plans to reopen Joe Zawinul's Birdland – which went bankrupt last summer – and incorporate a museum to highlight his father's career.

The Shrinkage Continues

Coming on the heels of the announcement regarding the suspension of the 2009 Victo festival, the City of Chicago has announced that the Chicago Jazz Festival will be reduced both in length and scope. In 2009, the festival will be reduced to three days from four, and the number of stages will also be cut.

"To be frank, we simply cannot continue moving forward with programs, events and festivals that cost the City of Chicago more to operate than we bring in in revenue," said Megan McDonald, executive director of the mayor’s Office of Special Events. McDonald warned that further "operational" cuts might be forthcoming as the administration struggles to adjust its budget. A number of other city-funded cultural events and programs – including the popular annual blues festival – are also being affected by budgetary restrictions.

More On Mary Halvorson

Yesterday marked the official release of guitarist Mary Halvorson's terrific new recording, Dragon's Head, on the Firehouse 12 label. She can also be heard on a new Anthony Braxton Quartet recording, recorded this summer in Moscow and now out on Leo.

Accompanied by bassist John Hebert and drummer Ches Smith, Halvorson immediately reveals herself as an enticing new voice on Dragon's Head. As she writes in brief liner notes, she's interested in exploring both the harmonic and rhythmic possibilities of the guitar, and in composing music that provides both structure and improvisational freedom to specific bandmates. In an interesting turn, she has numbered the 10 compositions on her CD to reflect the order in which they were written. "Old Nine Two Six Four Two Dies" – the final piece composed but the first on the recording – has a stealthy bassline as its centrepiece, an ideal accompaniment for Halvorson's lead, which also follows a deliberate course, with occasional stutters or shifts in direction. Her relatively unadorned tone is contrasted with phrase-ending tonal bends – a device she employs at several junctures on Dragon's Head. Overall, her writing often hands the lead role to the bass, leaving the guitar to ornament and expand on the theme, and she has an obvious love for interacting with her drummer.

Performing Braxton's music, Halvorson's textural characteristics and off-kilter phrasing really come to the fore. Quartet (Moscow) 2008 could hardly be more textured, in fact, combining Braxton's multiple horns with Taylor Ho Bynum's rich array of brass instruments and bassoonist Katherine Young in addition to Halvorson. Consisting of one 70-minute piece (Braxton's "Composition 367B") and a brief encore, the recording provides Halvorson with a wide range of sonic possibilities – from a dull, almost-toneless chunk rhythm that sounds like an axe hitting punky wood to an ear-catching spectral burst at about the 28-minute point that provides an effective bridge from a sax/trumpet duet to a brief bassoon interlude, which in turn gives way to a superb blending of elements. This may be my favourite Braxton disc from recent years.

I want to keep hearing Halvorson in more settings because her phrasing and harmonic conception are so distinctive that I'm not sure I've heard her entire range yet. If you haven't had the pleasure of catching her, here's a taste from a recent performance.

Just 28, Halvorson seems totally unbound from traditional approaches to guitar at times – although she admits that her first song was the ubiquitous "Stairway To Heaven" – yet not in a deliberately genre-smashing way. Rather, she seems more like someone who has found her own way to self-expression without consciously breaking barriers. There's a guitar-geek video interview on her web site where she talks casually about loving the sound a shorted-out volume knob on her Epiphone hollow-body made until some well-intentioned guitar tech fixed it for her. The same interview also includes a few examples of the fractured-sounding chords she sometimes employs.

I also love Halvorson's playing because she is not afraid to confound your conceptions of her work. Just when you think you have her pegged for her flat, dry amplifier tone – reminiscent of her former teacher Joe Morris – she throws something at you like the amplifier histrionics on "Momentary Lapse".

"I think of myself as a guitar player," she told jazz journalist Steve Dollar in an interview that's posted on her site. "I'm not really concerned whether something is rock or jazz. I just want to play something that's interesting to me."

Judging by even the relatively narrow range of projects I've heard so far, her interests are exceptionally broad.

Beyond the excitement her fresh-sounding playing brings, it's heartening to see that she's getting her share of high-profile gigs with musicians who will force her to stretch even further. In addition to the exposure she's getting with Braxton, she recently joined pianist Myra Melford in New York City for a double bill with Henry Threadgill. Reports from both my critical colleague Howard Mandel and Ms. Melford herself make me wish I had heard that outing. Melford's music is some of the most demanding stuff around these days, and Mandel said Halvorson nailed it.

All of which makes Mary Halvorson my early choice for artist of the year and an absolute pick for someone to listen for in the future.

Victo On Hold

First it was the Portland Jazz Festival going under (briefly) and now word reaches me that the annual Festival International Musique Actuelle Victoriaville – known to one and all as simply 'Victo' – has suspended operations for 2009.

Anyone who has booked an airline ticket lately knows how high prices have climbed, and with the global economic crash who knows what lies ahead regarding credit, international exchange rates, etc. Likely the Canadian government's decision to cut funding for many cultural events has had an impact, too.

It seems like a prudent thing for organizer Michel Levasseur to do in the face of uncertain finances, but combined with the situation with IAJE and Portland it doesn't seem to bode well for jazz events.

I hope to see Victo back on the calendar in 2010.

Like Bird... Portland Lives

Great news for jazz fans in the Pacific Northwest, and anyone looking for a bracing couple of weeks of great music in the wintertime: the Portland Jazz Festival is back.

Artistic director and co-founder Bill Royston and his original partner Sarah Bailen Smith announced today in Portland that a new sponsor – Alaska Airlines – has come onboard with a multi-year deal. At the local level, a number of strong supporters and other sponsors kept the faith and refused to let the five-year-old festival die.

As a result, the festival will be back for its sixth year – from February 13 to 22, 2009 – with its originally scheduled 70th anniversary tribute to Blue Note Records.

Bill and Sarah are two of the most creative and dedicated festival organizers I’ve met, and it’s great to have them back.

Now Spinning: Sicilian Jazz Project

I've been spending unusually long periods of time in my car recently and my most frequent musical companion has been the new recording by Toronto guitarist/bandleader Michael Occhipinti.

Occhipinti has had a series of intriguing projects – some shared with keyboardist Paul Neufeld, his co-leader in NOJO – which has found him working alongside musicians like Sam Rivers and Don Byron, and interpreting the music of Bruce Cockburn. This new project takes him – and his brother, the multi-faceted bassist Roberto Occhipinti – back to his Sicilian roots. Featuring players like trumpeter Kevin Turcotte, drummer Barry Romberg and saxophonist Ernie Tollar, the Sicilian Jazz project makes great driving music because it's filled with propulsive, joyous rhythms and passionate solos. It's also filled with terrific vocal performances by Maryem Tollar and Dominic Mancuso – who has a great, raw voice.

I caught a version of this band this summer and they were a hell of a lot of fun, but blasting out of my car speakers on these cool, early-fall nights... hard to keep your foot off the floor.

Chasing Ghosts

A recent liner note assignment from Italian pianist Roberto Magris (requisite plug: his new recording, Kansas City Outbound – the final recording by the great bassist Art Davis – will be out on Soul Note this fall) brought me in contact with the ghost of Hassan Ibn Ali. It's fascinating – and somehow reassuring – that in this age of Wikipedia, Google, etc., to learn that there are still some mysterious figures out there. It takes me back to my teenaged obsession with bluesman Robert Johnson, sparked by the ghost-story liner notes on the original Columbia Records reissue of Johnson's music in the '60s.

Born William Langford, Hassan became a ubiquitous figure on the Philadelphia jazz scene in the '50s and '60s. He gets passing mention in Lewis Porter's biography of John Coltrane and Francis Davis' Outcats. Francis kindly helped me find out a bit more about Hassan, as did another Jazz Journalists Association buddy, David Adler. The search also brought me back in touch with one of the first musical connections I made on the web: pianist Marc Sabatella. Even with their insights, though, Hassan remains more a specter than flesh and blood.

We know, of course, that the pianist was picked by Max Roach to fill out a trio with himself and Art Davis for a recording in 1964, but much else is speculation. Apparently, Hassan was an early influence on Coltrane – pushing him toward further exploration of certain types of chord voicings.

Unfortunately, it also seems that the pianist had some mental issues that may have limited his own career – or did he? Much remains to be discovered. Fascinating.

Portland Jazz Fest RIP

This morning's email brought surprising news about the demise of the Portland Jazz Festival. The festival topped a great five-year run last February with tributes to Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor, and was scheduled to mark Blue Note Records' anniversary in 2009.

Coming on the heels of the bankruptcy of IAJE – and the cancellation of the planned convention in Seattle – it's quite a double blow to jazz in the U.S. northwest.

Now Spinning: Mary Halvorson

I'm a firm believer that any signature you develop as a writer – and, I think, particularly as a critical writer – should be implicit. Otherwise, it's sort of akin to giving yourself a nickname a la George Costanza. That stated, one thing I've tried to establish as a critic is to avoid comparing one artist to another. I think this came naturally to me, but I've grown to learn how much most musicians hate it when critics link them stylistically to others. It's often just a sign of lazy thinking, or a sign that the critic feels their reader needs a reference point (writing down to readers is a whole other topic). The practice is especially bad when the critic makes incorrect assumptions – like linking Brad Mehldau to Bill Evans, a pianist Mehldau doesn't particularly admire, let alone take influence from.

Still, it's cool to hear an upcoming musician flash their influences as they find their own voice, or extend the voice they've already developed by the time they first record. I've been enjoying what I've heard from 28-year-old guitarist Mary Halvorson – primarily in the context of Anthony Braxton's bands – and I'm excited to be digging into her new CD, Dragon's Head, on Firehouse 12 Records. A native of Brookline, Massachusetts, she admits to being a Hendrix fanatic in eighth grade (I knew there was a reason I liked her, although our eighth grade obsessions were a few decades apart) and she studied with fellow Bostonian Joe Morris, with whom she shares a love for a flat, dry amplified tone. But, in addition to Hendrix and Morris, Dragon's Head subtly references Dolphy and Monk, as well as more obvious nods to Blood Ulmer, Derek Bailey and Sonny Sharrock.

There is no shortage of utterly original phrasing and attack, as well, and Halvorson's trio (bassist John Hebert and drummer Ches Smith) complements her extremely well. Hearing her tear through some Hendrix-inspired noise on "Momentary Lapse (No. 1)" put me in mind of saxophonist's James Carter's mind-warping debut on JC On The Set, where he obliquely referenced Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and immediately laid his bona fides at your feet.

In short, a great recording – one that's sure to upset the neighbours if you play it loud. In the best way possible.