Ellery Eskelin - New CD Release Announcement Trio New York II

Just received this in my email from Ellery Eskelin and thought I would take the opportunity to promote a really fine saxophonist.

TRIO NEW YORK II is NOW Available... Listen to samples on the website... See the promotional video on YouTube… Order on-line using Pay Pal for Immediate Delivery Worldwide...

Please visit the website and click the TRIO NEW YORK link for complete information and track samples. 

Have a look at the TRIO NEW YORK II video on Youtube. 

To ORDER NOW simply visit the Mail Order page. You’ll have the CD in no time!

ELLERY ESKELIN - TRIO NEW YORK II

prime source CD 7010

Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone

Gary Versace - Hammond B3 organ

Gerald Cleaver - drums

The New Yorker magazine recently referred to me as a saxophonist “with a romantic streak that runs parallel to his experimental leanings”. I like that. Romance is a descriptor that is rarely associated with the improv scene in New York City. And for the past couple of decades that is what I’ve been doing mostly. I’ve always thought of “Trio New York” as a free improvisation unit, in some ways a continuation of the type of work I’ve been doing all along, in other ways a distinct break from many of the concepts I’d been working with previously. For those of you familiar with our first recording, you'll know that we use the Great American Songbook as our source material.

“Trio New York II” is the second recording by this group and represents an evolution, the band having fine tuned it’s musical processes from gig to gig though our touring in Europe as well as performances in Canada and the US, most recently being the Detroit Jazz Festival. I’m very proud to be working with two of the great musicians of our time, organist Gary Versace (who knows his way around a Hammond organ and knows how to be creative with it) and Gerald Cleaver (who is both swinging and free, always with impressive dynamic sensitivity). This new release also coincides with the fact that as of this month I’ve been living in New York City for thirty years. A lot has happened during that time and I feel as though I’m finally in a place where I can truly integrate all my experiences into the music, from the early days up until today.

As for this recording, please know that it’s very important to me to take the extra time and expense to document this work and present it to you as a physical entity with the highest standards of artistic and technical quality possible. This documentation is not only central to my progress as an artist but I feel it is doubly important that as we are asking for your time and attention you should understand that you are getting a state of the art recording for your collection that you can value for many years to come. Trio New York II is released on my own “prime source” label.

Thank You,

Ellery Eskelin

Two Original Tracks from Saxophonist Dotun Bankole

Tenor Saxophonist Dotun “Dotsax” Bankole dropped by my house the other night for a jam. He plays a 156k silver plate Mark VI which is about a year younger than the horn I've been playing lately, a 148k Mark VI that is basically bare brass, having been stripped of its silver plate a long time ago. The horns are brothers from the late 60's, although his has a high F# key and mine doesn't  Dotun really liked the resonance of my horn and we traded instruments for the evening. He is playing on a Jody Jazz metal mouthpiece which was given to him by the manufacturer while on tour in the States a couple of months ago with Femi Kuti.

Dotun was bemoaning the scarcity of jazz in present-day Lagos. There is not a single venue in this city of 17 million that features live jazz every day. I thought maybe it was just me because I have played out less this past year than in any year in recent memory, although I have been working in a city which is lauded in some media circles as one of the really happening places in the third world. Not really happening for jazz since there is practically no place to jam, even for excellent local players, and not much happening even for home-grown styles like afrobeat although the music press refers to afrobeat as being really popular worldwide – I've previously written about that paradox.

In any event, Dotun continues to improvise and create on his saxophone. Recently he has been working on two original tracks in the studio: Irawo Owuro and Aja Nti Ele, where he plays soprano sax rather than his more usual tenor. You can listen to these two works-in-progress here and look for and buy the CD when it is released. Click on the track names to download and listen. Meanwhile, you can catch Dotsax playing tenor behind Femi Kuti at the New Africa Shrine in Ikeja, Lagos, on Thursday and Sunday evenings.

Lee Konitz, Conversations on the Improviser’s Art

Just finished reading Andy Hamilton’s excellent book of interviews with and about 85-year-old alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, one of the few remaining survivors of Bird’s generation, who continues to create masterfully until this day. It is a good read all the way through and I heartily recommend it. Rather than review the book, since I am sure you can find reviews elsewhere on the net, I decided to post some of my favorite quotes from Lee. His prologue is a strong start: 

“I'm writing this after a trip to Vienna, and while I was there I had the opportunity to hear an Austrian tenor player, fifteen years old, who really played the instrument very well, and wowed the audience with his expertise. And a few days ago I heard an Italian alto player of the same age who was really unbelievably accomplished, instrumentally and musically – and he really got the audience shouting approval. When I was fifteen years old I was playing, but no one had really inspired me like these two guys have obviously been inspired. These two people were not aware, as of yet, of a true musical statement, without the sensationalism – something they will learn, we hope. 

…I never wowed an audience in my whole life like these young players did, so I can’t help but feel I've missed something. But in a more modest way I've been able to continue playing, in private and in public, with occasional comments from people after a concert telling me they like the way I played through the years.” 

On Charlie Parker: (Hamilton) At his peak, for a few years in the late 1940’s, Parker was probably the most phenomenal improviser jazz has ever seen. (Konitz) “Red Rodney was quoted as saying that he didn't think Bird knew the changes all that well! So I wonder. He certainly knew elementary harmony…” 

On Anthony Braxton: “Well, it’s the worst solo I've ever heard in my life, I think. I don’t know what his real intention is in doing this…I can’t stand his sound. I think it’s awful.” 

On practicing: “I haven’t read music for years. I don’t enjoy doing that too much.” 

On the sound of the saxophone: “Our sound has to do with our whole anatomy…We are the sound. When Charlie Parker borrowed my horn for a set at Birdland, to my complete astonishment, it no longer sounded familiar to me. It’s a most flexible instrument.” 

On perfect pitch: “No, I have imperfect pitch! Sometimes when things are right I can hear pretty accurately. But waking up in the morning and hitting a concert A or whatever, I have to think about that for a minute…Absolutely unsure – after all these years. That’s amazing!” 

Great stuff – go get the book and read more (yes, I know it is old school but some people still read books these days). Better yet, get out some Lee Konitz records and listen for a while.

The Genius of Fela’s Horn Lines

Now that I have about a dozen of Fela Kuti’s tunes under my belt courtesy of weekly lessons with his former baritone sax player Showboy, currently music director of Egypt 80, I have begun to understand Fela’s music much better. Although I have long been a big fan and have listened to Fela’s records for decades, placing him in my 1970's musical triumvirate alongside Miles Davis and James Brown, I am just now really appreciating the sheer genius of the lines he wrote for his horn section. Genius is an overused term and I do not choose it frivolously. 

Fela’s music is not written down anywhere - but Showboy knows all the tunes, the arrangements, the solos, the horn parts, the harmonies, the rhythms, the voicings, the vocals, and the cues by heart, since he spent so many years playing and touring with Egypt 80. He is teaching me by ear, scatting the parts while I do my best to pick them out on my horn and note them down. It is obvious to me that Fela was a tenor sax player since virtually every horn part I have learned so far falls comfortably under my fingers on tenor. Felas’s music is primarily in minor keys and the keys are, again, almost all comfortable ones for the tenor sax, not bizarre keys that test if you got As in music theory class. Although Fela started out on trumpet, played alto sax before taking up tenor, and finished his career mostly on keyboards (I understand the reason is that the cumulative effects of multiple beatings by the authorities made it difficult for him to play much sax in the later years of his life), his music is that of a tenor saxophonist. Composed on the instrument, not on paper away from the horn. 

Over the last few weeks something broke loose and I discovered the inner logic to Fela’s music, an epiphany of sorts. Lately I’ve been able to pick up tunes in minutes as opposed to hours. Last session I was on top of Power Show after only about 10 minutes. 

It dawned on me that most of the famous tunes by the undeniable greats Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are in tenor-friendly keys as well (duh!). The great players don’t torture themselves over theory and unnecessary gymnastics. Very few of their compositions fall outside of key signatures that are basic for the way the tenor operates mechanically. I have written before about Occam’s Razor, the logic that says that given multiple possible solutions, the simplest one is always the best. Fela’s horn lines fit this rule. With all the talk of the so-called Afrobeat Revival, I've yet to find one composer who has equalled Fela’s writing for horn sections.

Seun Kuti Premieres A New Song at the Shrine

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 performed last night at the New Africa Shrine in Lagos, their first Shrine appearance in 2013. The performance was sparsely attended; probably only 100 or so in the audience, baffling for a band that toured all over the globe last year including sell-out performances in the US, UK, Australia, and Japan. It wasn't because the tickets were outpriced either. I hardly spent ten bucks including my gate fees, drinks, and taxi money in a city known for high prices. 

Egypt 80 led off a bit after 11:00 pm with Fela’s Dog Eat Dog and then proceeded through a warm-up set of an hour and a quarter, with Showboy vocalizing and directing the horns. Seun came on at about 12:30 am dressed in red pants. The crowd was..shall we say…interesting? First a big rat ran across the dance floor, then an older woman in full-length local garb and high headdress got out front and danced wildly, at one point flinging her headdress, bag, and shoes onto the middle of the floor, collapsing, then getting back up and continuing to dance for the rest of the night. A whole lot of people were taking poor quality hand phone videos of the show, which never cases to baffle me since the quality is worse than a 1980s VHS camcorder, but nobody seems to care. 

Highlights of the set included the frenetic and always-crowd-pleasing Zombie, then Seun’s rap preceding Slave Masters, where he compared locals working for multinationals down in Lekki with slaves living in master’s house in exchange for an easier life than their brethren. 3% of Nigerians thinking everything is fine. About 2:00 am Seun rapped about Kalakuta; this week was the anniversary of the 1977 police attack on Fela’s compound that left Fela with broken bones and his mother beaten so badly that she would ultimately die from her injuries. That led into the première of a new composition dedicated to Kalakuta. Here is a somewhat fuzzy Zoom recording of the world première piece, which hopefully will spur you on both to see Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 live on tour and to buy their next recording.

Searching for Sugar Man (Jazz Version)

Just finished watching the 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man, about early 70’s folk-rocker Sixto Rodriguez who found obscurity at home but was more popular than Elvis in apartheid South Africa, unbeknownst to him. I liked the film and recommend it. Cheesy parts like overly dramatic interviews of people who couldn't have cared less about him at the time but are now teary-eyed, and the omnipresent violins in the background, do not cover up what is a remarkable story. It is a story line that Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriters could not have fabricated. Rodriguez made a couple of major label records back in the vinyl days but for some reason they didn't sell in the US – like one interviewee said, maybe because the record was orange and should have been green. Sheds light on the capriciousness of stardom. In South Africa he was considered the equivalent of the Beatles (and bigger than the Rolling Stones, who are rolling in dough) but back in Detroit he was discovered working construction and living in the same house he has occupied for the past 40 years. After a brief revival and recognition by his South African fans in the late 90s, which he calmly took in stride, he went back to his modest life in inner city Detroit. 

This film reminded me of the 2010 Guardian video about tenor saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, “That’s not a horn, it’s a starvation box”. That excellent video is still up on the Guardian site and I strongly recommend watching it. Kalaparusha was one of the original members of Chicago’s AACM in the 60s, in the historic first wave of AACM recordings on Delmark, and made ripples in the 1970s New York loft scene in the pre-Marsalis days of creative improvised music. I remember seeing him blow some excellent tenor at the Tin Palace in the Bowery in the mid-70s. Unlike Sugar Man, though, Kalaparusha never received uplifting late-in-life recognition and as far as I can tell, still lingers in obscurity and penury. I found traces of him in a June 2012 Sax On The Web thread which was inconclusive as to an anticipated new recording. Any word on that would be appreciated, since fewer and fewer of the creative saxophone masters still walk the earth. Is it possible that Kalaparusha can still find the appreciation and recognition that escaped him earlier in life? The Sugar Man of jazz? 

The artist who has stayed true to his muse and reaped the dual rewards of poverty and lack of recognition is a caricature in our society - and I am not talking facetiously about Squidward. But these guys are real and very often produce the best music.

Femi Kuti on CNN’s Inside Africa

There is a half-hour segment currently running on CNN’s Inside Africa series that focuses on contemporary music scene in West Africa (primarily Nigeria), a scene that I find vapid - an opinion that causes the younger locals to label me “old school”. I simply find nothing in today’s big sunglasses, machine-driven beats, and insipid lyrics to inspire me when compared to what existed a few decades ago. I mean then the musicians actually played instruments. Just my opinion, I may be wrong.

The Inside Africa segment features a seven minute interview with Femi Kuti and some footage of the New Africa Shrine in Lagos. Click here to watch. Kudos to Femi's international publicity machine for getting him on CNN. In searching for the web link, I came across an interview with Femi where he described Afrobeat as “incredibly popular” – if that is so, he means outside of Nigeria because it is on life support here in its homeland. Fela Kuti so dominated the Afrobeat scene that his death nearly killed the entire genre; today you will be hard pressed to find live Afrobeat music in Nigeria outside of sons Femi and Seun playing with their respective bands at the Shrine. I understand that some of that crappy hip-hop so popular with the younger crowd has labeled itself Afrobeats just to confuse the issue. Afrobeats has nothing to do with Afrobeat beyond appropriating the name.

The CNN video opens with a shot of my friend, tenor saxophonist Dotun “Dotsax” Bankole, at 00:06; he shows up again a couple more times. Hope that does something good for his career as he is a solid player deserving wider exposure. I think I might have been present at the Shrine during one of the nights they were filming, as I previously noted Femi playing trumpet up on the riser with the horn section as shown in the final few seconds of the video. His yellow t-shirt looks mighty familiar too. I don’t remember seeing the cheesy CNN reporter at the Shrine, however. Throughout the segment, he wears what we used to call a sh*t eating grin back when I was growing up in the Midwest. He would have stood out like a sore thumb. You just don’t see smiles like that in Lagos.