Sullivan Fortner Embraces Music’s Past And Its Future
Dasha Dare
Pianist Sullivan Fortner is originally from New Orleans, but is one of the most respected and creative players in New York at the moment. He’s recorded with trumpeter Theo Croker, vocalist Jazzmeia Horn, guitarists Peter Bernstein and Lage Lund, drummer/producer Kassa Overall, and others, most notably singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. He’s been part of her band for about a decade, first appearing on her 2017 album Dreams & Daggers and subsequently on 2018’s The Window, 2022’s Ghost Song, and 2023’s Mélusine.
Fortner has four albums to his own name, starting with 2015’s Aria and 2018’s Moments Preserved, both released on Impulse!. In addition to five original compositions, his debut included versions of standards like “All The Things You Are” and Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You,” and a genuine surprise — “You Are Special,” from the children’s TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
After leaving Impulse!, he didn’t record as a leader for several years, choosing instead to work extensively as a sideman with Salvant, Horn, saxophonist Melissa Aldana, and others. But in 2023, he released a genuinely startling double disc, Solo Game, on the Paris-based Artwork label. The first disc offered nine solo versions of standards and pop tunes like Stevie Wonder’s “Don’t You Worry ’Bout A Thing,” while the second was a collection of pieces that incorporated electronic instruments, overdubbed percussion, guest vocals from Salvant, and unexpected production touches to create a head-spinning sonic journey. The juxtaposition was brilliant, but it took a while for it to achieve its final form.
“I had already recorded the electronic side and shopped it around, and basically every jazz label turned it down,” Fortner told me when we spoke by phone earlier this month. “They were all like, this is a musical joke, this is the stupidest thing that anyone’s ever done. One label said that ‘We love this album but we don’t like you as a pianist. If it was done by somebody who wasn’t you, we would put it out. Good luck.’” He was resigned to washing his hands of it, but then the idea to record a second disc of solo work occurred to him — and to get Fred Hersch to produce it.
Hersch, a pianist beloved of his peers and many jazz critics, is one of Fortner’s teachers and mentors, and according to Fortner, he’s played that role for many others. “His approach to playing the piano has really influenced a lot of the modern piano players that are on the scene. You know, from people like Ethan Iverson and Brad Mehldau to younger piano players like Micah Thomas and even younger than that, people like Brandon Goldberg, Esteban Castro. I mean, he’s had his hands on a lot of the piano players that are out playing today.”
He continued, “Studying with him, though, was very interesting because he would never sit at the piano and play a note for you. He would just sit and observe. At least in my lessons, we would basically talk for like 30 minutes about music and about the industry and certain things that I’m dealing with… I had questions about, you know, general things and then I would play and he would sit and watch. I’d play like two or three songs and he’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t like the way your feet look.’ Or, ‘I don’t like the way your hands look at the instrument. I don’t like how high you’re sitting or how low you’re sitting. You’re not moving enough.’”
When he approached Hersch about recording the acoustic half of what became Solo Game, the older man was on board in an instant. “I called him and I asked him and he was completely down to do it. He said, ‘Yeah, let’s go in on this date. I’ll call [engineer] James Farber, we’ll make this happen. And we’ll get you in and out in four or five hours.’ I’m like, okay. And so that was exactly what we did. Everything was done in one take. We recorded 30 songs… and we picked the nine that we thought were like the most cohesive from that session. And that was it.”
Fortner has returned this month with a superficially more conventional album — Southern Nights, a trio disc featuring bassist Peter Washington (with whom he’d previously played on guitarist Peter Bernstein’s What Comes Next in 2020) and drummer Marcus Gilmore. But this, too, offers surprises. It arose out of a week-long stand at the Village Vanguard in summer 2023; Fortner explained, “When I got the call, the powers that be at the Vanguard said, we’ll give you a week but we want you to bring in a special group.” So he recruited Washington, followed by Gilmore, without knowing that the two men had never played together before — in fact, they’d never even met.
“So here I am, the first day of the gig, maybe a couple days before, and Marcus calls me. He’s like, ‘Man, I’m really excited about this Vanguard hit. I’m really excited also to meet Peter Washington.’ I was like, y’all have never met? And then Peter was like, ‘Yeah, I’ve never even met this guy before. What does he sound like?’ I was like oh, this is going to be interesting. This could either be a disaster or it could be great… The first note of rehearsals, I was like, okay, alright, this is going to be good, this is going to be nice. And I think maybe around day two, day three, Peter comes up to me and says, ‘Man, that motherfucker is weird, but he can swing. And he’s got good timing.’”
The weirdness is indeed palpable on Southern Nights. The session, recorded while the Vanguard stint was still happening, was done with no isolation, edits, or second takes, capturing the band’s newly developed rapport. Fortner only brought in one new composition, simply called “9 Bar Tune”; other pieces include the title track, by New Orleans legend Allen Toussaint; Cole Porter’s “I Love You”; Clifford Brown’s “Daahoud”; Woody Shaw’s “Organ Grinder”; and “Again, Never” by bassist/composer Bill Lee (father of Spike). They’re all nice tunes with strong melodies and all three musicians make the most of them.
The way the album was recorded gives the sound unity and bulk. Washington is a powerful central presence, no mere supporting player. And the collision — that’s the only appropriate word — between his style and Gilmore’s is fascinating to hear.
The drummer has a light, off-kilter touch on the kit, sometimes seeming to skip more than swing. This is instantly noticeable on the opening title track. Fortner starts it solo, alternating short, lyrical blues figures with zips of his fingers across the piano’s strings. Then Washington and Gilmore come in, and the drummer sounds like he’s slapping out a hambone beat against his body, while the bassist bounces from side to side like a heavyweight listening for the bell. Fortner’s playing becomes jagged, the notes sounding carved out of glass, and each player’s energy ricochets off the other two.
The whole album reminds me more than anything else of Money Jungle, the 1962 trio date that teamed Duke Ellington up with bassist Charles Mingus and drummer Max Roach. The tension that marked that session — Mingus famously walked out midway through — is completely absent here; all three men are audibly enjoying each other’s company. But the music has a twitching energy that far too few groups seem capable of generating these days.
The range of compositions Fortner chooses to interpret on his albums — and is called upon to interpret in his work with Salvant — is something that truly sets him apart from his peers. “It’s a lot of fun,” he said of her penchant for reviving obscure old jazz tunes and pulling other songs from all over the world in order to strengthen a particular album’s theme. “Sometimes it can be very challenging. Like right now, maybe about a few days ago… she sent me music to an aria from Strauss’ Elektra opera, and she was like, We should do this. And I’m like, Oh, I can’t do this, I don’t know how to play this, so she goes, ‘You practice it and we can figure out some kind of arrangement for it.’ She’s always digging up things that are kind of out of the ordinary, and it’s always fun to learn music and it’s always a challenge to figure out how to… have a band, a jazz ensemble, breathe into like classical arias or some very rare, strange Spanish pop tune or French pop tune.”
He told me that he’d like to see the canon of jazz standards expanded to include more modern music: “If we think about the reason why songs became standards, it’s because they were popular and everybody played them. So if that’s the case, especially in the American lexicon of standards, then Stevie Wonder should be included in the American Songbook. Motown should be included in the American Songbook. Anything that was in the top 20 or the top 30 in the ’90s should be in the American Songbook.”
But he added that there’s a good and valid reason that songs from the 1920s and 1930s continue to be called on gigs and even on record dates. “The vocabulary and the language of our music exists and lives in those forms. In those A-A-B-A forms or those double-A forms. In those blues forms. In those eight-bar, 32-bar, 12-bar blues forms. It’s still there. And for us to completely abandon it is also abandoning a part of our history and our legacy.”
Furthermore, he said that if new music is to replace old music, or even sit alongside it, the quality of that music needs to improve. “Jazz musicians, I feel like it’s too much pressure to reinvent the wheel every time on some sad music that’s being played. And let’s just put it out there. Everybody’s writing songs now that are like 20, 30 pages long and there’s nothing about it that’s compact. There’s nothing about it that brings everyone in unless you’re in on the joke.” He added that one of his teachers, Detroit trumpeter Marcus Belgrave, had always emphasized the necessity of writing one’s own material, with a caveat. “He always used to tell me you should really explore different alternatives in your own writing. That’s something he would always say. But you also need to learn what makes form work. And why forms work. And you can only do that through the masters of forms.”
Somewhat surprisingly, Fortner attributes his wide-open ears at least in part to being from New Orleans, a city identified with just one highly traditional form of jazz. But when you think about it, he’s just one of a wave of artists from that city including Jon Batiste, Chief Adjuah (fka Christian Scott) and others who are making it into a creative hot spot. He credits musicians and teachers like Clyde Kerr, Jr., Kidd Jordan, Ellis Marsalis, Nicholas Payton, Donald Harrison and others for inspiring younger players to always go one step farther. He describes them as “people who held us accountable in the sense that like, yes, you got to understand the conditions of this stuff, but not at the expense of your own creativity…the things that we did differently and the things that we’ve chosen to embrace, things that we’ve chosen to almost in some instances let go of, were fostered by our fathers in the music. They also taught us not to be so closed-minded into genre. Play classical music, play jazz, play funk, play in church, Sullivan. Don’t stop playing in church. Don’t stop collaborating with R&B artists. There’s nothing beneath you because music is music. Collaborate with as many people as you possibly can. Be a sponge. Grow. Always grow. The minute you stop learning is the minute that you die.”
Sullivan Fortner is still learning. But he already has much to teach peers and those coming up behind him — and listeners as well. His game is tight.
TAKE 10
Tim Berne - "Oddly Enough"
Alto saxophonist and composer Tim Berne has a new trio with electric guitarist Gregg Belisle-Chi and drummer Tom Rainey. Rainey is a longtime collaborator, but Belisle-Chi is relatively new; he recorded a set of Berne’s compositions on acoustic guitar in 2021, and they made a duo album the following year. Several of the pieces from that disc reappear on Yikes Too, but the album opener, “Oddly Enough,” is entirely new. It kicks things off in high gear, with Berne and Belisle-Chi scrawling one of the saxophonist’s long, winding melodies in unison, before the guitarist takes a biting, distortion-soaked solo as Rainey lays down a heavy backbeat that’s closer to ’90s alt-rock than jazz. And when Berne comes back, he’s playing at the top of the alto’s range, squealing like feedback. This is gnarled, gritty music, but it’s got plenty of heartfelt beauty, too. (From Yikes Too, out now via Screwgun/Out Of Your Head.)
Jeong Lim Yang - "Synchronicity"
In 2022, bassist Jeong Lim Yang released Zodiac Suite: Reassured, a fascinating reworking of Mary Lou Williams’ epic composition. Synchronicity is her new album, almost all her own material (except for one piece by pianist Jacob Sacks), and features a new band with Mat Maneri on viola, Sacks on piano, and Randy Peterson on drums. Maneri and Peterson have been playing together since the ’90s, and have an easy rapport that’s made even easier by the inevitable mellowing of age. Once upon a time, the violist had a reputation for stark and eerie microtonal experimentation, but for many years now he’s been playing jazz based on Balkan music, and the melancholy melodies found in the Carpathian mountains are all over his performances here. Yang’s writing is clear and evocative, and her playing is the Gorilla Glue that holds everything in place, whether on uptempo pieces like “Synchronicity” or a ballad. (From Synchronicity, out now via Sunnyside.)
Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin - "Modul_66"
Keyboardist and composer Nik Bärtsch has been leading Ronin since 2001. Over the course of six studio albums and two live releases, they’ve explored a sound based on cellular patterns, gradually developing groove cycles, and ultra-tight rhythms. If you can imagine Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters interpreting the music of Steve Reich, you’re getting close to what Bärtsch and his group are about. This is the first Ronin release in six years, and it’s the first one on Bärtsch’s own label after five on ECM. As always, the compositions are called “Moduls” and simply numbered. The album opens with “Modul_66,” one of Ronin’s hardest-driving pieces and an excellent showcase for new bassist Jeremias Keller, who’s relentless while remaining 100% in the pocket, locked in with drummer Kaspar Rast. Bärtsch leads the group through an ever-escalating cycle of melodic figures, with saxophonist Sha pushing the intensity level high without ever truly cutting loose. (From SPIN, out now via Ronin Rhythm.)
Wolf Eyes x Anthony Braxton - "Side 1"
The intermittent artistic partnership between Detroit noise act Wolf Eyes and Chicago-born saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton is now entering its second decade. He saw them perform at a festival in Sweden in 2004, and bought every CD on their merch table afterward. The following year, they joined forces onstage in Canada, recording the legendary album Black Vomit. They’ve played together a few more times since, releasing live recordings from Los Angeles and now from Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works. On this disc, Braxton plays alto, sopranino, and bass saxophones, while Nate Young and John Olson contribute electronics, “pipes,” vocals and harmonica. This isn’t noise in the Merzbow-ish boil-your-eyeballs-in-their-sockets sense; the music burbles and grumbles and booms, sounding like a particularly abstract Autechre set at times. This allows Braxton to free-associate in an almost beboppish style, as though he’s wandering through a burned-out city after dark, singing to himself. It’s surprisingly beautiful. (From Live At Pioneer Works, 26 October 2023, out now via ESP-Disk.)
John Patitucci - "Think Fast"
Bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade anchored the Wayne Shorter Quartet, with help from pianist Danilo Pérez, for more than two decades. Now, in the wake of Shorter’s passing, they’ve reunited for the bassist’s new album, joined by saxophonist Chris Potter. Potter is a completely different kind of player, punchier and more riff-based, though he’s certainly capable of the kind of introspective, questing explorations Shorter specialized in. As a result, this is an album with focused energy, operating in two different zones which are determined by Patitucci. When he’s playing upright bass, the music has the thoughtful swing of Joe Henderson’s classic live albums, The State Of The Tenor Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, recorded with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Al Foster. That’s what you get on the opener, “Think Fast.” When he switches to electric, the music gets harder and funkier, more reminiscent of ’70s loft jazz. (From Spirit Fall, out now via Edition.)
James Brandon Lewis - "Remember Brooklyn & Moki"
Tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis’s latest album is a simultaneous tribute to Amiri Baraka and Don Cherry; it takes its title from a column Baraka wrote for DownBeat in the 1960s, and many of its tracks are references to Cherry’s life and work. Almost all the pieces are fully improvised by Lewis, electric guitarist/bassist Josh Werner, and drummer Chad Taylor, except for a version of Ornette Coleman’s “Broken Shadows.” On four pieces, the trio is joined by guitarist Guilherme Monteiro and percussionist Stephane San Juan. One of those quintet tracks is “Remember Brooklyn & Moki,” which is almost Bill Laswell-esque in its reckless blending of grooves. Werner and Taylor lay down a taut reggae groove as San Juan adds hand-held percussion and subtle congas, and Monteiro drifts across the landscape, emitting glowing atmospheres. Lewis takes a thoughtful solo that sounds like a man walking slowly home, regarding the scenery with affection. (From Apple Cores, out now via Anti-.)
Billy Hart Quartet - "Billy’s Waltz"
I almost saw the Billy Hart Quartet once, at the Village Vanguard. The group was Hart on drums, Ethan Iverson on piano, and Ben Street on bass, just as on this record and its three predecessors, 2006’s Quartet, 2012’s All Our Reasons and 2014’s One Is The Other. But Mark Turner wasn’t playing saxophone; instead, they were backing Houston Person, a veteran soul jazz player from South Carolina, and they delivered a beautiful set of ballads and blues, with Person taking time out between tunes to joke around and flirt with ladies at the tables up front. Obviously a studio album, especially one on ECM, with Turner on sax isn’t gonna have that same vibe, but the music these four make is brilliant, high-level, melodic jazz with a capital J. “Billy’s Waltz” is exactly what it sounds like, kicking off with a short but emphatic drum figure and then just floating by for seven blissful minutes. (From Just, out now via ECM.)
Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner - "34A"
Buy this album. Not just because it’s brilliant music — a high-energy performance of five Braxton pieces, two Lehman originals, and Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle Tinkle,” recorded last year — but because alto saxophonist Steve Lehman lost his house in the recent L.A. fires and can use all the help he can get. Lehman’s joined here by tenor saxophonist Mark Turner (yeah, him again), bassist Matt Brewer, and drummer Damion Reid, and they use the knotty, post-bebop melodies of classic Braxton compositions like “34A,” “23B,” and “40B” as trampolines, flying high into the air and turning and twirling before returning to earth and doing it all over again. Brewer and Reid are an extremely high-energy rhythm team, and you can hear a small but enthusiastic audience — the music was recorded at Enfield Tennis Academy, like Jeff Parker’s recent double live set The Way Out Of Easy — responding joyously to it all. Seriously, buy it. It’s a must-hear. (From The Music Of Anthony Braxton, out now via Pi Recordings.)
Marshall Allen - "New Dawn" (Feat. Neneh Cherry)
Marshall Allen is 100 years old. He has been a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1958, and its leader since 1995. Like most Arkestra members, he almost never records outside the context of the group — Ra kept his players close. On this album, which is being called his solo debut, he’s joined by some other Arkestra players, most notably baritone saxophonist Knoel Scott, but this is a very different type of record. It’s got an almost rock’n’roll swing on the jump blues track “Are You Ready,” and the ballads have a classic kind of romanticism, particularly the title track, which features a swooning nine-piece string section and vocals from Neneh Cherry. It sounds like something off the soundtrack to a David Lynch movie, and Cherry croons the words in a gentle, almost maternal voice, far from the streetwise persona she manifested in the ’80s. (From New Dawn, out now via Week-End Records.)
Jeremy Pelt - "Rhapsody"
Trumpeter Jeremy Pelt’s new album is arriving at the same time as his new book. For several years now, Pelt has been interviewing other jazz musicians for the Griot series. He talks to veteran players decades older than himself, as well as younger musicians, and strives to get their perspectives on how they came up, how they see the world of jazz as it currently exists, its importance as specifically Black culture, and much more. The series was inspired by legendary drummer Art Taylor’s book Notes And Tones, but in its scope and depth it’s already gone far beyond that equally essential book. The fifth volume is on its way to me as I type this, and I can’t wait to read it. It includes interviews with some folks I’ve spoken to myself, including alto saxophonist Charles McPherson, bassist Rufus Reid (who wrote a book himself that’s a standard text for students of the bass), Art Ensemble of Chicago percussionist Famoudou Don Moye, Sullivan Fortner, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and more. You can get all five volumes from his webstore, and I really recommend any serious student of jazz history do so. Hearing musicians tell their own stories in their own words is invaluable.
His new album Woven is a fascinating artistic statement. Pelt has a reputation as a traditionalist, a player who operates in the lineage of skilled forebears like Freddie Hubbard or Terence Blanchard. In the late 2000s, he led a fantastic quintet with tenor saxophonist JD Allen, pianist Danny Grissett, bassist Dwayne Burno, and drummer Gerald Cleaver. They made four killer albums that were my introduction to his work, and still seem to be what most people know him for. But he’s always been much more than that. He’s made several albums that embraced electronics; one featuring a two-drummer band; a record with a string quartet; and other experiments besides. Basically, you never know what you’re going to get when Jeremy Pelt makes a record, except that he’s going to play the hell out of the trumpet.
Woven features a fairly straightforward band — Jalen Baker on vibraphone, Misha Mendelenko on guitar, Leighton Harrell on bass, and Jared Spears on drums — all of whom are in their twenties. (Pelt is 48.) The tunes are all Pelt originals, with co-writing credit going to Baker on two pieces. They’re written in a high-level acoustic jazz style that will appeal to fans of Hubbard, Blanchard, Woody Shaw, Terell Stafford and others. The biggest surprise element this time out, though, is the presence of Marie Ann Hedonia, an electronic musician from Baltimore. She contributes modular synth atmospheres to four tracks, including “Rhapsody,” which also features electronically modified vocals from Mar Vilaseca. Pelt’s own playing, amid the subtle electronics and hard-swinging acoustic backdrop, has the richness and melodic sense of disco-era Donald Byrd. This is a beautiful and exciting record, one that puts the “modern” in modern jazz. Pelt is carving his own path forward, cognizant of history but unwilling to let it weigh him down, and using his own position in the scene to honor his elders and spotlight younger players. I love it, and I can’t wait to hear what he has to say next year. (From Woven, out now via HighNote.)
OUTWARD BOUND
@billy.the.talking.puppy Billy listens to live jazz for the first time!! 🎶❤️ It was such a treat having Jenny Scheinman’s All Species Parade over to play for Billy today! They’re an incredible ensemble on tour from New York and in this clip, are playing “Every Bear That Ever there Was” from their new album “All Species Parade.” A huge thank you to @Jenny Scheinman , Carmen Staaf, Adam Ratner and Tony Scherr for coming to play for Billy, and spoiling us with such fantastic playing. We’re so honoured that they were willing to come and share their art with our dear Billy. Stay tuned for many more clips of Billy experiencing Jazz for the first time!!! 😍 #dogreactstojazz #livemusic #allspeciesparade #musicaldog #violin #piano #guitar #bass #jazzband #spoileddog #rescuedog ♬ original sound – Billy
