The Berkeley Item - #273

JOEY DE FRANCESCO, whose new Organic Vibes CD was released by Concord Jazz last Tuesday (3/21), opens a week-long engagement at the Jazz Showcase in Chicago tomorrow (3/28) with his trio, guitarist Jake Langley and drummer Byron Landham. It was at the Jazz Showcase last summer, De Francesco told Billboard's Dan Ouellette (3/25), that he caught a particularly compelling Hutcherson set ("Bobby was playing his butt off with heavy emotion") and invited him on the spot to be part of his next record date.

In addition to his invaluable contributions to the new CD, Hutcherson will be guesting with DeFrancesco on several concert and club bookings later this year, including New York, Atlanta, St. Louis, and others now in the works.

Tenor saxophonist George Coleman, another esteemed guest on Organic Vibes, joins the DeFrancesco trio for their four-night stand at Yoshi's in Oakland (4/6-9) immediately following the Chicago gig. The organist's April-May European dates include stops in Oslo (4/29), Amsterdam (4/30), Munich (5/4), and Marabella, Spain (5/11).

Scheduled for release from The Jazz Alliance next week (4/4) is a new edition of “Piano Jazz," which finds host MARIAN McPARTLAND in conversation (and performance) with keyboard man John Medeski of Medeski Martin & Wood.

The 2003 broadcast marked Medeski's first time on the award-winning National Public Radio program, of which, he told McPartland, he'd been a steady listener--and taper--in the early '80s: “It was a very valuable resource to have as a piano player coming up."

Joined by bassist Gary Mazzaroppi, McPartland and Medeski essay “Bemsha Swing," “Caravan," and, as a vertiginous show-closer, MM&W's “Bubble House" (at the conclusion of which McPartland quips, “I think that was bubbly enough for everybody").

This month, on the Sonny Rollins web site's Reflections page, saxophonist Joe Lovano muses (in audio and video) on the man and his music:

“SONNY ROLLINS is one of the people and musicians that if you're hip to gives you the highest standard to reach for in your music and in your life," says Lovano. “Knowing about Sonny, studying his music and playing, his execution, his ideas, his free-flowing streams of consciousness and life, has just given me so much to reach for as a player, as a composer... For me, he gave me all the confidence to try to be myself and taught me so many lessons about getting as deep into the piece of music as you can."

Rollins is the first artist to be featured on jazzvideopodcasts.com, a new web site offering jazz artist interviews and performances. In his podcast ("The Bridge"), Sonny discusses his 1959-62 sabbatical and is seen in exclusive concert footage. The podcasts are available for download to iPods, computers, and other portable video devices.

Long accustomed to being interviewed by journalists from around the globe, Sonny Rollins recently sat for a local interview with writer Tom Staudter, published in the April issue of Hudson Valley (NY) magazine. (The saxophonist has been a resident of upstate Columbia County since the early 1970s, and has supported environmental causes in the Valley, such as opposing expansion by local cement companies.)

“On a large scale, I'm optimistic about the health of the planet," he told Staudter, “but in smaller ways I see that technology has made people more callous about caring. In fact, I'd almost say that we're involved in a lot of losing battles. You have to fight anyway, though."

Rollins is scheduled to play two California dates in early April (Davis 4/6, Cerritos 4/8) before preparing for an eight-concert European tour that commences 5/1 in Goteborg, Sweden and takes in Geneva (5/5), Amsterdam (5/8), Rome (5/10), London (5/13), Toulouse (5/15), Paris (5/18), and Duisburg, Germany (5/21), where he'll perform at the Traumzeit Festival.