Articles by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Jeff Dayton-Johnson's 2015 Mixtape
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
The narrator of Jean-Jacques Schuhl's 2002 novel Ingrid Caven muses, “I like the connection, the splice, not the things themselves; what's between them, their rapport. Two ideas, images, the bridge between two harmonies for the jazz musician..." It's an interesting esthetic statement regarding jazz: that part of the music's appeal lies not in its components, but in its power to make connections among those components. A heady and appropriate benediction for this list of 2015 records that I listened to ...
read moreJeff Dayton-Johnson's Best Releases of 2013
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Every year the list gets longer and more heterogeneous. There are blockbusters and obscure little gems, loud jazz and quiet jazz, hip hop and kora music, some of it downright unclassifiable. Which is fine. “Junku," a 1984 track anthologized on Herbie Hancock's spectacular box set below, is in fact both hip hop and kora music! In an interview with the New York Times earlier this year, Hancock said, “The thing that keeps jazz alive, even if it's under the radar, ...
read moreJohn Hollenbeck's September Songs
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
John Hollenbeck's productivity would be astonishing in its own right, but the uniformly high quality of this high output places the drummer among the top tier of jazz (and not only jazz) musicians. Hollenbeck's recordings, compositions and performances defy certain expectations. He can be as seriously intellectual as a stereotypically stuffy classical musician, but his music is interlaced with humor and fun. As befits a 21st century drummer, he is rhythmically complex but the music is underlain with a deep ...
read moreWayne Wallace: Latin Jazz Jazz Latin
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Trombonist Wayne Wallace and his Latin Jazz Ensemble have a well-oiled record-making machine that seems incapable of turning out a subpar album.Therein lies the mystery. The ingredients that Wallace and his bandmates pour into the machine are eminently predictable--a studiously well-sampled array of Latin rhythms, didactically specified in the liner notes; a mixture of strong original compositions and Latin settings of jazz standards; tight ensemble playing by the quintet with plenty of space to breathe; a smattering of ...
read moreGustavo Cortiñas: Snapshot
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
With Snapshot, drummer Gustavo Cortiñas emerges from that challenging rite of passage: the début album. Following years of training (with saxophonist Victor Goines, among others, who is on the record) and sideman duty (on a record with saxophonist Roy McGrath, who also shows up for this date), a young artist seeks to craft a meaningful and representative musical statement and calling card.The musician has in the short span of the début record's length to establish him or herself ...
read moreKanye West: Yeezus
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Ben Jonson said of his dead child, my sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy. We too easily take what the poets write as figures of speech, as pretty images, as strings of bons mots. Sometimes perhaps they speak the truth. --Margaret Drabble, The Millstone (1965).Every time I write these words they become a taboo Making sure my punctuation curve, every letter is true Living my life in the margin ...
read moreChris Kelsey & What I Say: The Electric Miles Project
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Trumpeter Miles Davis' post-Bitches Brew (Columbia, 1970), pre-hiatus (1975-1981) electric music--dense, loud, dark, funky, vast--has posed problems for musicians. The Yo Miles! collective, led by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and guitarist Henry Kaiser, gamely approached it as a repertoire: these are songs, they seemed to say; let's just play them (and so they did, on albums like Upriver, Cuneiform, 2005). Bassist/impresario Bill Laswell, meanwhile, approached the releases of the period as post-performance collage, woven together from miles of Ampex tape; ...
read moreMike Wofford: It's Personal
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Pianist Mike Wofford can boast decades of high-caliber sideman gigs: notably with vocalists Ella Fitzgerald (for whom he served as music director), Mel Tormé and Sarah Vaughan, as well as drummer Shelly Manne, saxophonist Phil Woods, guitarist Joe Pass and others. His studio work is amply represented on records by a dizzying variety of artists. And his frequent collaborations with his wife, flutist Holly Hofmann, have been warmly received. Solo sets are not unknown in Wofford's lengthy discography but, on ...
read moreMark Masters: Everything You Did
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Bandleader/arranger Mark Masters has recorded a set of Steely Dan tunes with a big band, which can be set on the shelf next to his celebrated albums dedicated to the music of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington and Dewey Redman. A Dan jazz album makes sense. It's clear from the rock band's '70s albums that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker warmly loved jazz: the intro to their hit “Rikki Don't Lose That Number" is lifted directly from pianist Horace Silver's “Song ...
read moreThe Caravan: The Caravan
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
The Caravan, the self-titled second album from a Halifax, Nova Scotia-based hybrid hip hop trio, has attracted attention for the track “What Up Steve?." It's a new kind of political protest record for Canada, a reaction to the new kind of conservative politics practiced by the Stephen Harper administration. But “What Up Steve?," whatever its effectiveness, only partially represents the musical breadth of the record. The album merges the easy-going collective sensibility of the Maritime Canadian kitchen party ...
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