Is Joni Mitchell a jazz artist? Short answer: No. Long answer: No, but…

Almost 30 years ago, a new sound began bubbling up in small venues around Chicago — jazz clubs sometimes, but punk clubs and arts centers and other less defined spaces too. Cornet player Rob Mazurek was one of a small coterie of players, some of whom were members of the dubby “post-rock” (remember when that was a thing to aspire to be?) group Tortoise, and others who were experimenting in other ways, but all of whose music was blurring and erasing the boundaries between jazz, rock, electronic music, modern composition and improvisation.

Nicole Glover is always thinking. The 36-year-old saxophonist, who grew up in Portland, OR, speaks the way she plays: with confidence and without hesitation. Every question I asked when we spoke by phone earlier this month generated a thoughtful, multi-paragraph response, and her approach to her music is as considered as her solos.

Saxophonist Joshua Redman has been on the jazz scene for over three decades. He made his debut on his father Dewey Redman’s 1992 album Choices and released his own self-titled album on Warner Bros. the next year.

I started listening to jazz when I was around 15. My entry point was a common one: Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, which I bought on cassette for $5.99. I also heard John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme early on, after which I started gradually, haphazardly picking up albums here and there with no real method or guide; I would just hear about something somewhere — and this was pre-internet, and I wasn’t reading jazz magazines, so I was mostly limited to what I found out about from Rolling Stone or Spin — and try to find it in my local record store or grab something from my local library.

David Murray turned 70 in February. That feels wrong somehow, not because I’m unaware that time only moves in one direction but because Murray doesn’t fit the mold of an elder statesman. Since his arrival in New York in the mid-’70s, he’s been on a unique creative path, releasing a torrent of material — his Discogs page lists close to 300 credits — in contexts ranging from solo recitals to big bands to collaborations with musicians from all corners of the globe. He never seems to stop moving, and he’s never stayed on a single path for any length of time. Typically, when a jazz musician gets this far into their career, they settle down. Even fire-breathing radicals get predictable. But Murray is still taking chances, as his new album Birdly Serenade proves.

I first heard Nels Cline in 1999, when he and drummer Gregg Bendian released Interstellar Space Revisited. The original Interstellar Space album was a set of four saxophone-drums duos played by John Coltrane and Rashied Ali, recorded in February 1967 but not released until September 1974. It’s volcanic and meditative at once; Coltrane takes his music about as far out as it can go, and Ali is with him all the way, delivering explosive rattling runs but also settling into a mellow, even gentle pulse at times, like wind blowing through a field.

Jason Palmer is a trumpeter you should know but probably don’t. Based in New England, he’s been releasing albums as a leader since 2007. He also played with saxophonist Noah Preminger’s group for a while and was featured prominently on Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin Chapter Two: Mississippi Moonchile in 2013. But despite making consistently high-quality records and demonstrating some intriguing personality quirks — he’s apparently a big fan of female R&B singers, having recorded albums paying tribute to Minnie Riperton, Janelle Monaé and Anita Baker — the Jazz IndustryTM has never gotten behind him and given him the big push.

If you think about it a certain way, one of the defining qualities of jazz is earnestness. This is one of the reasons why jazz and metal have so much in common, and so often appeal to the same listeners. Both forms can be totally absurd. Think of the most lurid, squiggly fusion, or the blare of a thoroughly unsubtle big band record; aren’t they the equivalent of, say, DragonForce? But metal’s awareness of its own absurdity does not translate into ironic distance from what they’re doing. And the same is true of jazz. People will play the most ridiculous, over-the-top shit with a totally straight face. Even when a jazz group exhibits a certain amount of wit — think of the Bad Plus in their original incarnation, the version that covered “Smells Like Teen Spirit”; or Mostly Other People Do The Killing, and the way their sleeve designs imitated famous jazz album covers — it’s done out of love, not mockery.

Being the saxophonist in a Miles Davis band was never the easiest job in the world. Even if he liked you, he often led by challenging his musicians, giving them enigmatic or even contradictory instructions. Once, when saxophonist Gary Bartz complained that he didn’t like what Keith Jarrett was playing behind him, and asked Davis to rein the keyboardist in, the trumpeter instead told Jarrett that Bartz loved was he was playing and wanted to hear more of it. When John Coltrane earnestly explained to Davis that he was having trouble figuring out how to end his solos, Davis replied, “Try taking the horn out of your mouth.” Dave Liebman, Davis’ saxophonist for a period in the early ’70s, felt lost within the band’s stormy sound (two electric guitars, deep funk bass, multiple percussionists, Davis’s own piercing one-finger synth stabs) and asked what his role was; the trumpeter replied that audiences liked to watch a saxophonist’s fingers move while he played.

In 2018, I met up with Tyshawn Sorey at the Guggenheim Museum in New York for an interview that involved me playing a series of records for him and soliciting his thoughts. We listened to everything from Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, and Eric Dolphy to Metallica, Redman, and Autechre. And at one point, after listening to a recording of Eric Dolphy’s “Jim Crow,” a piece that was more 20th century classical than “jazz,” we discussed something that has plagued jazz musicians for almost a century: the respective roles of composition and improvisation.

Nubya Garcia’s moment seems to have come at last. And it’s weird to say “at last” about someone who’s only in her early thirties, but I’ve been listening to her music for the better part of a decade.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin has been blasting through the jazz world like a comet the last couple of years. She’s been around for a while — her debut, Retox, was released in 2012, and her next album, Rise Up, in 2018 — but her third, Pursuance: The Coltranes, was her first truly great record. Its 13 tracks were all written by John and Alice Coltrane, including pieces from throughout both artists’ careers like “Syeeda’s Song Flute,” “Liberia,” “Central Park West,” “Going Home,” and “Turiya And Ramakrishna.” The music was performed by a stunning array of guests, from bassists Ron Carter and Reggie Workman (both of whom played with the Coltranes) to harpist Brandee Younger, vocalists Dee Dee Bridgewater and Georgia Anne Muldrow, violinist Regina Carter, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, and more. But Benjamin was always the focus, her sharp and fluid lines cutting through in a way that bridges multiple genres and generations.

Bill Laswell, the legendary bassist and producer, is in rough shape these days. He’s had a lot of health issues since before the COVID-19 pandemic started, and since he’s been effectively unable to work, he’s been in danger of losing both his home and his New Jersey studio, Orange Music, which he’s been running for over 20 years since leaving his former longtime spot in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There’s a GoFundMe to help him stay afloat, but another way people can support Laswell is by subscribing to his Bandcamp page, which I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. For $22 a month, you get access to a tremendous amount of music from his vast archives, much of it previously unreleased.

Alto and soprano saxophonist Kenny Garrett is an explorer. He’s constantly seeking new situations, new sources of inspiration, and new ways to expand the boundaries of his own musical conception.

The Black Art Jazz Collective came together in 2013, with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt, trombonist James Burton III, pianist Xavier Davis, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Johnathan Blake. Burno died suddenly in December of that year, though, and the other members recruited Vicente Archer to replace him.

I’ve been listening to Vijay Iyer’s music for almost 20 years. We first met in 2006, when I was the editor of the world music magazine Global Rhythm and he had just released Raw Materials, an album of duos with saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa. They came up to the magazine’s offices and I interviewed them together. It was a very interesting conversation; what struck me the most was something Iyer said about cultural identity, that Asian-Americans “become the boundary by which American identity is defined… we are always the people who are on the either-or side of the American fence.”

Pianist Ethan Iverson released his first album, School Work, in 1993, when he was 20. In about 1997, he started playing with bassist Reid Anderson, and at the turn of the millennium, they connected with drummer Dave King and formed the Bad Plus. That trio was one of the breakout jazz groups of the early 21st century, releasing 13 albums in 16 years and selling a surprising number of records along the way. They were a lot of listeners’ gateway into jazz, particularly because of their habit of arranging pop and rock songs like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” for piano trio. But once the covers got people in the door, they heard tightly arranged, high-energy original compositions by all three members.

2023 has been a transitional year for jazz. We lost one of the genre’s most brilliant composers and performers, Wayne Shorter; free jazz flamethrowers Peter Brötzmann and Charles Gayle; genteel pianist Ahmad Jamal; bassist, composer and Spike Lee’s father Bill Lee; singer Tony Bennett; trombonist Curtis Fowlkes; bassist Richard Davis; pianist and composer Carla Bley; saxophonist Mars Williams, known to some as a modern free jazz hero and others as the dude from the Psychedelic Furs; and some people I consider jazz-adjacent, like Brazilian singer Astrud Gilberto and guitarist Jeff Beck, who made a series of excellent fusion albums in the mid ’70s. And while Shabaka Hutchings is still alive, he announced his intention to quit playing the saxophone, and disbanded all of his current groups: Sons Of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka And The Ancestors.

Did you listen to André 3000’s 90-minute collection of semi-ambient flute jams, New Blue Sun? I did, and I… didn’t hate it! I mean, he stacked the deck by featuring some of the most interesting players in LA on it, including percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Carlos Niño, keyboardist Surya Botofasina, and others. (Niño has just released an album with South African keyboardist/singer Thandi Ntuli that’s discussed below, and he put out his own album, (I’m Just) Chillin’, On Fire, back in September — André 3000 is one of many guests on that record.) But the music on New Blue Sun is surprisingly blissful, if somewhat meandering, and I think the album could have a real half-life beyond the initial social media explosion if Sony mails a copy to every acupuncturist in the US for in-office play.

John Zorn turned 70 in September. And, as if he’s decided to celebrate by giving everyone else a gift, his label, Tzadik, has made its catalog available on streaming services. There was no PR announcement, because Tzadik has almost never done PR for any of its activities, but word spread quickly among the devoted, and now there are hundreds of albums’ worth of adventurous, boundary-breaking music to listen to that had previously been available only to CD buyers. (They sold MP3s via iTunes and Amazon, too, but you get my point.)

Chief Adjuah, formerly known as Christian Scott, has been one of the most exciting musicians around for close to two decades. Since releasing his debut as a leader, 2006’s Rewind That, and particularly the following year’s Anthem, he’s been traveling a path that incorporates jazz, electronic music, trap, and all the percussive and rhythmic traditions of his native New Orleans. Since signing with Ropeadope a little over a decade ago, he’s put out a string of records that exist within a new genre he calls “stretch music,” best exemplified on his 2017 trilogy of Diaspora, Ruler Rebel, and The Emancipation Procrastination.

Charles Mingus might be the ultimate example of someone who’s “jazz famous.” Within jazz circles, he’s revered, but he should be as well-known as Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, or John Coltrane. His name should be as familiar as theirs to people who know almost nothing about jazz, but it’s not, for a variety of reasons. He had a volcanic temper that was at one time or another turned on almost everyone in his personal and professional life — bandmates, record labels, managers, wives (he had four), even audiences. He famously destroyed a bass onstage at the Five Spot in response to heckling from the crowd, and punched trombonist Jimmy Knepper in the mouth during a rehearsal, knocking out one of his teeth and ruining his embouchure.

Are GoGo Penguin jazz? Their first album, Fanfares, came out just over a decade ago, in November 2012; it was released on Gondwana, a label run by trumpeter Matthew Halsall, whose own music is quite beautiful spiritual jazz. They stayed with Gondwana for their 2014 breakthrough release, v2.0, but then signed with Blue Note for 2016’s Man Made Object, 2018’s A Humdrum Star, and 2020’s self-titled release, which was followed the next year by the remix album GGP/RMX.

Wayne Shorter died this month at 89. Although he stopped playing live a few years ago due to health issues, he’d been doing some really fascinating work up until the end, including composing the opera (Iphigenia) in collaboration with Esperanza Spalding — with sets designed by Frank Gehry! He’d also been leading a quartet with pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Patitucci, and drummer Brian Blade since the turn of the millennium, one of the longest-running bands in jazz.

One of the last live jazz performances I attended, on February 1, 2020, was by a one-off group called Ghidorah that appeared at the Jazz Gallery for two nights and has to my knowledge never reconvened since. They were structured like the three-headed monster that was their namesake, with bassist Eric Wheeler and drummer Rodney Green in back and a trio of tenor saxophonists (with one or another occasionally doubling on soprano or bass clarinet) up front: JD Allen, Stacy Dillard, and the man who put the project together, Marcus Strickland. They played two sets each night, and at the show I caught, Strickland began things with a short discussion of the history of the tenor saxophone and a roll call of legends, including Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Don Byas, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins, and paying special tribute to Jimmy Heath, who had died less than two weeks earlier, on January 19.

Pianist Jason Moran does things on his own terms. Since leaving Blue Note Records almost a decade ago (his final album for them was 2014’s All Rise: A Joyful Elegy For Fats Waller), he’s become the Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and started Yes Records, releasing his own music on Bandcamp since 2016. He charges $20 for his albums, which is about twice what most people charge, and when I asked him about that in 2017, he said, “I think about music as, ‘What do you value it at?’…I could charge $50 for this, and if a person wants it, they want it. If they don’t, they don’t. It’s totally fine…The way music has been sold, this thing where I should be able to stream the entire thing before I buy it is unfair, and I think it’s unfair that musicians should fall into the mode where they would do that automatically. I don’t believe in that.”

2022 started off really well. A bunch of great albums came out in January, including alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins’ The 7th Hand; bassist Luke Stewart’s The Bottom; the Matthew Shipp/Michael Bisio duo Flow Of Everything; 2 Blues For Cecil by the trio of trumpeter Enrico Rava, bassist William Parker, and drummer Andrew Cyrille; John Zorn and Bill Laswell’s first collection of duos, The Cleansing; and Historic Music Past Tense Future, an archival recording by Peter Brötzmann, Parker, and Milford Graves. I hosted a streaming event on New Year’s Day, the Burning Ambulance Festival, that included performances from bassist William Parker, saxophonists Muriel Grossmann, Rodrigo Amado, and Patrick Shiroishi, pianist Lisa Ullén, drummer Gard Nilssen’s trio Acoustic Unity (see the list below), and many other musicians from the worlds of jazz, avant-garde improv, noise, and electronic music. In February, my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, which I’d spent most of 2021 writing, came out. The year held incredible promise.

I’ve known trumpeter Jeremy Pelt for a little over a decade at this point. I started listening to his music in 2009 or 2010 and interviewed him for the first time in 2011. We’ve spoken on several occasions since — he’s one of the more than three dozen artists profiled in my book Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, which came out in February (available everywhere now! makes a great gift!). He puts out an album every year; this year’s offering was Soundtrack, his third release with pianist Victor Gould, vibraphonist Chien Chien Lu, bassist Vicente Archer, and drummer Allan Mednard. Back in April, I called it “high-level (mostly) acoustic jazz in the tradition of Seventies power trumpeters like Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, non-disco Donald Byrd, and Marcus Belgrave,” and I’ve come back to it over and over in the months since its release.

Bassist Eric Revis is a very busy man. When I reached him by phone, he had just returned home to Los Angeles after a solid month — “a very solid month,” he said with a laugh — of tour dates with guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, drummer Greg Hutchinson, and two different pianists: Aaron Parks on most dates, and Taylor Eigsti for a West Coast leg. “We did Maine, New Hampshire, Montreal, a few cities in Ohio, Philadelphia, and then somewhere else I can’t think of, and then we went to the [Village] Vanguard for a week, and then after that we did kind of a West Coast thing — Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, LA, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Portland, Seattle,” he says with a kind of mild shock.

There’s been a concerted effort the last few years to address the gender imbalance in jazz, on the bandstand and in the studio but particularly in education. A lot of the heavy lifting in this ongoing process has been done by drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, and a major step forward is coming this month. Born in Massachusetts, Carrington studied at Berklee College of Music, after which she moved to New York, where she was affiliated with the M-BASE collective alongside saxophonists Steve Coleman and Greg Osby, among others, and then to Los Angeles, where she was the drummer for the Arsenio Hall Show band. She’s released about 10 albums as a leader and appeared on dozens of others with artists including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Diana Krall, Esperanza Spalding, Cassandra Wilson, George Duke, and more.

First, an announcement: I’m writing another book! My latest book, Ugly Beauty: Jazz In The 21st Century, came out in February and is available everywhere (Esquire called it one of the Best Music Books of 2022, which is nice), and I’ve just signed the contract to write In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor for the German publisher Wolke Verlag. Don’t worry, the book will be in English. It’ll be a cross between a biography and a critical analysis of various phases and aspects of his work, analyzing key albums from his sizable discography and discussing how his music evolved from his professional debut in the mid ’50s to the April 2016 performances at the Whitney Museum which marked the end of his public career. The plan is for it to be out in spring/summer 2024.

The list of truly great jazz movies — dramas, I mean, not documentaries — is surprisingly short. Most movies about jazz kinda suck, in fact, and in recent years, there have been some really bad ones, like La La Land, Whiplash, Miles Ahead, and Bolden. (At least the soundtracks to the latter two were worth listening to … once.) Things weren’t much better in the past, either; the only two older jazz-related movies I really like are Paris Blues, with Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier, and The Man With The Golden Arm, which is a noir movie that’s about illegal gambling as much as jazz. (Frank Sinatra plays a junkie ex-con card dealer who wants to be a big band drummer.) One of the supporting characters in Sweet Smell Of Success, which is an incredible movie that you should absolutely see if you never have, is a jazz guitarist, seen performing with Chico Hamilton’s band (the quintet’s real guitarist, John Pisano, recorded the music for the soundtrack), but the movie’s not really about that. Similarly, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Cotton Club is better than you may have heard, but it’s half about music and half about gangsterism, and its horrible musical-fantasy ending blows any goodwill earned.