![\"\"](\"https:\/\/geneseymour.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/geneseymour.com\/2011\/12\/Sonny_Rollins-Road_Shows_Volume_2_2.jpg\" "\\"Sonny_Rollins-Road_Shows_Volume_2_2\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n1.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sonny Rollins, \u201cRoad Shows Vol. 2\u201d (Doxy) \u2013 <\/strong>The Greatest Live Act in Jazz, headlined by the Greatest Living Improviser, keeps rolling along, its every flourish and delicacy captured for what promises to be an epochal series of recordings from past and (one hopes) future concerts. This second installment\u2019s tracks are just a year old, but you understand why they needed to be out there in a hurry. They celebrate the start of the Colossus\u2019 ninth decade as observed in Japan and, most notably, at last September\u2019s \u201cSonny Rollins @80\u201d concert @ New York\u2019s Beacon Theater. On that evening, the celebrant, leonine and fit, sounded frisky and responsive to the electricity of the moment, his furry tone combed to a bristly sheen. He brought out guitarist Jim Hall, his comparably indefatigable 1960s playmate (to dive into \u201cIn a Sentimental Mood,\u201d of course) as well as trumpeter Roy Hargrove who, as with the leader, always brings his A-game in front of onlookers. This disc is the next best thing to having been there. Yet it still makes you wish you\u2019d been able to share the audience\u2019s excitement at seeing Ornette Coleman wander on-stage for a characteristically insurgent solo on \u201cSonnymoon for Two\u201d wherein he lures the Colossus \u201coutside\u201d the regular changes for some buoyant give-and-take.\u00a0 If Rollins is now the de-facto king of whatever it is we mean when we talk about jazz, then this edition of \u201cRoad Shows\u201d shows him to be a wise, benevolent ruler whose domain, however small it may seem to outsiders, feels accessible enough to meet your most urgent needs and expansive enough to contain multitudes.<\/p>\n<\/a>2.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Ambrose Akinmusir, \u201cWhen the Heart Emerges Glistening\u201d (Blue Note) <\/strong>\u2013 Only four years removed from winning the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, this 29-year-old trumpeter has delivered on his grand promise with an album of startling depth and range. Once you get past the challenges of pronouncing his intimidating surname (ah-kin-MOO-sir-ee) and of getting past the album\u2019s knotty title, you\u2019re free to acclimate with his big, brilliant sound or unravel the intricacies of his soloing \u2013 <\/strong>which, while layered with the trills, glissandos and arpeggios emblematic of the jazz trumpet\u2019s heritage, share the probing detail and varied attack of sax icon Joe Henderson and of pianist (and album co-producer) Jason Moran. For all his agility and command, Akinmusire leans heavily on his band-mates (tenor saxophonist Walter Smith III, pianist Gerald Clayton, bassist Harish Raghavan and drummer Justin Brown); all of whom are worthy collaborators, collectively and individually. Word is out that these guys are all part of a big band that Akinmusire is leading. Can\u2019t wait to hear what that\u2019s like.<\/p>\n<\/a>3.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Noah Preminger, \u201cBefore the Rain\u201d (Palmetto) \u2013\u00a0 <\/strong>At age 24,\u00a0 Preminger, a front-rank tenor saxophonist on just his second album as a leader, plays ballads as if he were a seventy-something road-warrior. He already knows, on instinct, how to approach a melody from behind; where to hang the drapery on a chord change and when to gently pull it away. And he doesn\u2019t seem in a hurry to disclose everything he knows, not even on his original compositions (the title track, \u201cAbreaction,\u201d \u201cJamie\u201d) or on Ornette Coleman\u2019s \u201cToy Dance.\u201d As with Akinmusire, Preminger is blessed with a eerily compatible rhythm section of bassist John Herbert, drummer Matt Wilson and pianist Frank Kimbrough, who contributes a couple of his prodigious compositions (\u201cQuickening,\u201d \u201cNovember\u201d) to the cause. By the time this group gets to massage a sturdy war horse such as \u201cUntil the Real Thing Comes Along,\u201d you\u2019re utterly convinced that Preminger is the real thing \u2013 and that he\u2019s coming along quite nicely.<\/p>\n<\/a>4.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Allen Lowe, \u201cBlues and the Empirical Truth\u201d (Music & Arts)<\/strong> \u2013 Is it music or is it scholarship? Or musical scholarship? Is it criticism of the blues or just critical of them (or at least of what people say about them)? These and dozens of other questions aroused by \u201cBlues and the Empirical Truth\u201d are far more significant than any answers I or anyone else pretending to know more about music than Allen Lowe can cobble together. Lowe is a gnomic, compulsively idiosyncratic polymath who lives in Maine, plays a red-hot saxophone and has for years put together epic inquiries into the history and nature of American music and how it shapes \u2013 or doesn\u2019t \u2013 the national character. On this three-disc set, recorded over a two-year period, Lowe arranges, composes and plays \u201cinside\u201d and \u201coutside\u201d jazz as well as such makeshift forms as neo-gutbucket-progressive-punk (at least that\u2019s what I\u2019m calling it for the moment.) He is backed by a typically eclectic guest list that includes guitarist Marc Ribot, pianist Matthew Shipp, trombonist Roswell Rudd and Lowe\u2019s fellow musicologist Lewis Porter, contributing here and there on keyboards. Along the way, tribute is made to civil rights activists Pauli Murray and Ella Mae Wiggins, forgotten or obscure musicians such as saxophonist Dave Schildkraft and pianist Blind Tom Bethune and\u2026Doris Day, who should have been invited to Portland to jam with this crowd; except you have to wonder what she would have made of a song list with such titles as \u201cSpeckled Shaw Crippled Pete Boogie,\u201d \u201cBlues in Transfiguration,\u201d \u201cElvis Died With His Sins Intact,\u201d \u201cIn a Harlem Ashram\u201d and \u201c(Bull Connor Sees) Darkies on the Delta.\u201d Guess it doesn\u2019t matter as long as no animals were harmed in the process.<\/p>\n<\/a>5.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Muhal Richard Abrams, \u201cSoundDance\u201d (Pi)<\/strong> \u2013 Just so you know, Sonny Rollins isn\u2019t the only octogenarian legend who\u2019s still getting the job done. Abrams, the peerless pianist-composer who co-founded the legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) nearly 50 years ago, marked his own ninth decade by engaging in colloquies of such breadth and magnitude that they each needed their own disc. One of these is a dialogue with tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson that took place in October, 2009, a year before the latter\u2019s death, though it\u2019s a strain to detect signs of sagging energy in his playing. Both Abrams and Anderson seem energized by the task of extending or enhancing each other\u2019s thoughts and even listeners resistant to free-form improvisation\u00a0 won\u2019t miss a beat (so to speak). A year later, Abrams engaged in a sonic pas de deux with fellow innovator, author and AACM veteran George Lewis, who brought both his trombone and his laptop to the party. These two masters of orchestration create intricate, spiraling patterns that are at once imposing and puckish. <\/strong>You can wander in and out of their gallery of sound and find something strange, shiny and, in a peculiar way, companionable.<\/p>\n<\/a>6.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Craig Taborn, \u201cAvenging Angel\u201d (EMI) <\/strong>\u2013 A title of one track could easily apply to most of the others: \u201cA Difficult Thing Said Simply.\u201d Taborn, who owns one of the most eclectic curriculum vitae in contemporary music (Tim Berne AND James Carter?), approaches the art of solo jazz piano as if he were translating complex code from a distant star. Often, he binds the information in tightly-wound chords struck down as if on anvils to forge unusual shapes. At other times (the aptly-named \u201cGlossolalia\u201d), he lets things twirl in the air like dazed, tiny phantasms squeezed out of an overcrowded basement. As with the early work of Keith Jarrett, Taborn is prone to lean to too hard on a riff, but (again, as with Jarrett) the digging can occasionally lead to an illuminated strike. In what\u2019s been a vintage year for solo jazz piano discs (see the honorable-mention list below), this stood out for one simple reason: <\/strong>It sounded the most different from what its genre had yielded before.<\/p>\n<\/a>7.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>Youn Sun Nah, \u201cSame Girl\u201d (ACT) \u2013 <\/strong>Didn\u2019t know a thing about her when this disc slipped into in my mailbox earlier in the year. After one track, I found myself asking, \u201cWhere has she been all my life?\u201d (In Europe, apparently, where this album was first released last winter.) She is steeped in the French chanson tradition, but as with the most interesting singers beyond the boomer generation \u2013 Is she really 42? \u2013 she\u2019s willing to try anything from Broadway (\u201cMy Favorite Things\u201d) to Brazil (\u201cSong of No Regrets\u201d), from the folk music of her native Korea (\u201cKangwondo Aririang\u201d) to the mellow sounds of Metallica (\u201cEnter Sandman\u201d). And she can scat real good, too, as proven on the quiet-fire \u201cBreakfast in Baghdad.\u201d The minimalist backing she gets from guitarist Ulf Wakenius, bassist-cellist Lars Danielson and percussionist Xavier Desandre lets her rangy, limber voice roam, run and leap about at will, even when the material is dipped in deep blue. Nothing seems to scare or stop her. Good as this disc is, it makes you wish she\u2019<\/strong>d dare even more.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>8.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong>Bill Frisell, \u201cSign of Life\u201d (Savoy)<\/strong> \u2013 At its most inquisitive and unfettered, Bill Frisell\u2019s music can be as evocative of the \u201cthe old, weird America\u201d as Bob Dylan\u2019s 1967 basement tapes. (Come and get me, Greil Marcus!) \u00a0He has a boho-folk artist\u2019s affinity for both the pastoral and the abstract. Beneath even his most glowing, spacious-skies landscapes, there are flickering shadows and misshapen objects that don\u2019t distort the view, but are blended to make a slightly cockeyed, but still arresting picture, \u201cSign of Life,\u201d performed by his 858 Quartet of violinist Jenny Schienman, violist Eyvind Kang and cellist Hank Roberts, is his best-realized sound painting since 2001\u2019s \u201cBlues Dream,\u201d whose noir-ish cloaking devices I still appreciate, even if others didn\u2019t. This is a sunnier compound of motifs and riffs that give off an aura of mystery, even danger \u2013 especially when the irrepressible Scheinman starts throwing paraphrases and adornments like left jabs. It\u2019s clearer than ever that with both this disc and the John Lennon tribute released in the same year, Frisell can\u2019t be stopped \u2013 or even contained. Only sampled \u2013 and what would NPR do for filler between news stories if his music weren\u2019t around?<\/p>\n