JAZZ/ ROCK/CLASSICAL/ALT

jazz / classical / alt / rock

MARK KERESMAN

Ella 100: Live at the Apollo! HHHHH Concord Jazz

Ella Jane Fitzgerald (1917-1996) was and remains one of the great American ladies of Song. Fitzgerald was one of the few jazz artists whose popularity and influence went beyond the jazz sphere and impacted mainstream pop music. Frank Sinatra counted her among his favorite singers, and the two performed together periodically over the years. (As to why they did not record together, check out the book The Song is You, the great Will Friedwald bio of Sinatra’s recording career.)

Fitzgerald sang with crisp, clean articulation and could improvise like the master musicians with whom she shared stages and studios. Swing was/is the thing, and Ella symbolized that as few others could. Like Elvis would do later, Fitzgerald slimmed and shattered the barriers between musical zones—The NY Times’ Frank Rich said of her, “Here was a black woman popularizing urban songs often written by immigrant Jews to a national audience of predominantly white Christians.” This might not seem crucial today, pilgrims, but when one stops and considers the stratification of American society and culture—there was a time when folks with non

warhorse “How High the Moon.” (Worth the price of admission—take that to the bank.) Take a breather from all that singing with a driving, droll instrumental “Back to the Apollo” that shows the Basie legacy is indeed in good hands (and showing why the Basie band was favored by Sinatra, dancers, and swing aficionados then and now). Cassandra Wilson applies her trademarked dusky, smoky tones to the classic torch/cry-in-your-beer ballad “Cry Me a River,” and Monica Mancini—daughter of cool-cat soundtrack wizard Henry—channels the Ella influence via a crystalline barebones take on “Once in a While.” The show closes with the slightly irreverent/joyously jivey “You’ll Have to Swing It Mr. Paganini” duetted by Austin and Grier. Unlike some “tribute” discs, this celebrates more than pays homage to the legacy of Ella Fitzgerald…as well as showing her legacy is in good hands/throats.

Ohad Talmor Newsreel Sextet HHHHH Long Forms Intakt

Every once in a while, you read about someone who makes you realize how little you’ve accomplished: saxophonist Ohad Talmor grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, mixed it up in the European jazz scene with Joachim Kuhn, Steve Swallow, and Lee Konitz (the latter a mentor to him), had his music performed by European orchestras (such as Germany’s legendary WDR Big Band and Portugal’s OJM Big Band), composed the score for the depressing-but-worth-seeing biopic Lowdown (starring John Hawkes, Elle Fanning, Glenn Close, and Peter Dinklage), a Professorship at Queens College CUNY, and finds time to lead swell studio sessions such as this. Among his combo is trumpeter Shane Endsley, guitarist Miles Okazaki, and rock-solid drummer Dan Weiss. “Casado” is a rich panorama of spare, ringing piano chords and haunting, intertwining horn phrases over a majestically pensive rhythmic base. “Kayeda” features overlapping phrases from the horns and guitar, rippling yet reflective piano from Jacob

Cassandra Wilson.

pale skin tones were forbidden to drink Cokes at the same counters and Jews could not rent hotel rooms where their Christian brethren could— it’s significant. Fitzgerald performed and recorded with some of the greatest big bands ever, those of Count Basie, Chick Webb (mentioned in the film Taxi Driver), Duke Ellington, and Benny Goodman. Ms. Ella appeared in movies too, including Let No Man Write My Epitaph (starring Burl Ives, Shelley Winters, and tragic heroine Jean Seberg) and Pete Kelly’s Blues (starring Jack Webb, Peggy Lee, and Lee Marvin). In 2007 there was the release of We All Love Ella, a tribute album recorded for the 90th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s birth featuring Michael Bublé, Natalie Cole, Gladys Knight, Diana Krall, k.d. lang, Queen Latifah, and Linda Ronstadt. Her legacy continues.

Ella 100: Live at the Apollo is a recorded celebration of Ella’s life and enduring inspiration. Co-hosted by singer Patti Austin and actor/singer David Alan Grier, this concert program features Lizz Wright, Cassandra Wilson, the Count Basie Orchestra, Ayo, Afro Blue, Monica Mancini, and Brian Nova. Grier essays a surprisingly suave “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me” with spunky accompaniment from the Basie outfit. Lizz Wright navigates “Love You Madly” with swaggering grace and irresistible uptown sass. The vocal ensemble Afro Blue dazzles with “Lady Be Good,” the voices wordlessly glisten separately/together as light through a prism, then join Austin for a grooving, kaleidoscopic, and STUNNING take on the

Sacks, driving cyclic phrases that drill into your skull, and soloing from Talmor that, like that bowl of Cream of Wheat TV commercial, will follow and warm you all day. “Scent” is a spacious hunk of balladry in which notes are parsed out with an aching, yet not tentative, clarity and a bereaved sob-into-the-wilderness (a little different than cry-in-your-beer) quality. Talmor has a vibrant, hearty, low-on-vibrato, and a not too sentimental tenor sound, but his compositions are the stars here—no frameworks/excuses for drawn-out soloing, full of intriguing shades/arrangements and loaded with gutsy delivery. A winner. (6 tracks, 52 min.) intaktrec.ch

J.C. Hopkins Biggish Band HHHH New York Moment Twee-Jazz

Here’s a (probable) rarity: A retro-ish band that transcends (seeming) nostalgia with plenty of class. J.C. Hopkins’ deep background is in the world of indie rock as a member of the Bay Area indie-rock combo Flophouse, but he’s forsaken the zone of alternative pop music in favor of big band jazz (leaning heavily toward the Great American Songbook axis) with his Biggish Band. Hopkins functions here as bandleader, pianist, and songwriter, leaving the vocals to such as Joy Hanson, Nico Sarbanes (also on trumpet), Vanisha-Arlene Gould, and others. “Sublime Beauty” features Gould in a delicious languid ballad in the manner of greats of jazz song Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae, her husky and romantic tones caressing the lyrics for all they’re worth—and it might be worth the price of admission just to hear the way she coos the word “objectivity” with killer confidence. The slyly lifting swing of “What Would You Say?” evokes the classy Capitol era of Ol’ Blue Eyes (Mr. Sinatra to you, Mac) and the Verve era of Ella, the voices intertwining elegantly like candle smoke.

Hopkins does a dandy job of distilling the nature of the Great American Songbook with a small, sleek orchestra, stylistically emulating Count Basie bounce and the classy arrangements of Nelson Riddle without ever veering to parody (intentional or not) or cheesiness. But get you not the notion this is some look backward—note the drolly urgent bluesy swagger of “The Children Will Lead Us” with its brittle, sleek electric guitar solo, sixstringer Alicyn Yaffe literally coaxing notes (with vivid, slightly wrenching ease) from her axe. The resulting number can be heard as the great lost Ray Charles 1950s take that never was. This album could unite the generations—referring naturally to the ones valuing the crooners and thrushes of yore and the young-ish sharkskin-wearing hepcats getting wise to the ways of the elder ones. Zoot! (11 tracks, 43 min.) jchopkins.com

John DiMartino HHHHH Passion Flower: The Music of Billy Strayhorn Sunnyside

Pianist/composer Billy Strayhorn was to a degree Duke Ellington’s right hand—“Take the ‘A’ Train,” while forever linked to The Duke, was Strayhorn’s tune. This was not lost on pianist John DiMartino: Passion Flower is an all-Strayhorn set, 14 gems from his pen that became identified with the Ellington songbook, rendered by DiMartino’s quartet of Eric Alexander, tenor sax; Boris Kozlov, bass, and drummer to/for the stars Lewis Nash. As the setting is for four, we get an intimate viewing into Strayhorn’s vividly tasty, many-are-standards tunes. “Isfahan” is a bit of Ellingtonian exotica given a stripped-down treatment as a bebop ballad—DiMartino chasing the ghost of Thelonious Monk, Alexander showing how to take the essence of ‘Trane as a point of departure, all the while playing heartily and semisweetly. “Chelsea Bridge” is one of jazz’s loveliest songs ever, and these fellows get inside it with rare grace and an achingly beautiful sense of economy. Alexander gets a brief, completely unaccompanied solo spot that’s sure to make the other sax-guys in town (any town, really) nervous with its tender assurance. “U.M.M.G” finds DiMartino saying a lot by playing precious few notes and Alexander judiciously using a bit of echo on his horn, building into some brief, bracing dissonance before fading out. “Blood Count” finds Alexander getting poetic against DiMartino’s classically spare chords. What makes this set so special is that many of these tunes are so familiar and the DiMartino posse take them to different places by under-playing and re-harmonizing without muddling (or taking for granted) the inventive, passionate melodies at the core of Strayhorn’s songs. This lot plays it pretty but not excessively so, taking us to the dark corners but not letting the light shine all the way’ round. I like to think Strayhorn would be pleased. (14 tracks, 62 min.) sunnysiderecords.com n

FINDINGS Jimi Hendrix was cleared of responsibility for the proliferation of London’s non- native parakeet population, whereas humans were found solely responsible for the extinction of the United States’ only native parrot. The collapse of Norse colonies in Greenland was blamed on walrus depletion that in turn arose from falling wholesale prices for walrus ivory. Eighty- five- hundred- year- old human tooth pendants were found at Catalhöyük. The earliest known use of lead- tin- yellow pigment predating 1300 ad was found in sixth- century bc limestone reliefs, which also contain Egyptian blue, from the Palace of Apries. In a gold- lined tomb next to that of the Griffin Warrior, archaeologists found a gold pendant of the Egyptian goddess Hathor. Runologists determined that the nine riddles of the Rök stone bespeak Vikings’ fear of another Fimbulwinter, and a star- shaped magnetic anomaly resulting from an ancient lightning strike was discovered at the Calanais Standing Stones’ Airigh na Beinne Bige. Megadroughts encouraged farmers to clear and cultivate Andean cloud forests. The last remaining Pacific glaciers between the Himalayas and the Andes were expected to melt in the coming decade. In the past two hundred years, American men have cooled by a temperature of 1º F. \ Established brands are resilient against fake news, which was also found to implant false memories. Fish farmers freed a bald eagle from an octopus. In Australia, hypersaline effluent at the Sydney Desalination Plant was found to have increased the local population of one- spot puller. The sounds of underwater pile driving elicit signs of both alarm and habituation in longfin squid, and the medium- term stress level of fish can be determined by plucking their scales and testing for cortisol. Illuminating bat caves disturbs bats. European zoologists urged the preservation of tree cavities to accommodate honeybees, and a reward remained on offer for information leading to the poisoner of seven million Florida bees. Military interrogators at the end of Word War II were found to have improperly disregarded Nazis’ claims of having invented a form of DDTmuch safer for mammals. \ Italic fonts were rated more liberal than boldface ones, and a feel- ing of vulnerability to disease was found to predict political conservatism. Liberals are likelier than conservatives to experience caring emotions in their chests, whereas conservatives are likelier to experience them in their faces. Patients from the McLean Hospital Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Institute who each had one of their real hands and a rubber hand stroked synchronously by Harvard doctors who then dabbed fake feces on the rubber hand before returning to stroking both hands displayed nearly twice as much facial disgust as patients whose real and rubber hands were stroked asynchronously. A study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes reported the stress- relieving effects of “enjoyed flirtation” in the workplace. Sexually exploitable men are less attractive to straight women than sexually exploitable women are to straight men. Women, but not men, experience better orgasms with worse socioeconomic circumstances. Female Chinese university students who shift their vocal pitch up are perceived as more attractive, whereas male counterparts who shift their pitch down become less attractive. Baboons’ clear articulation of proto- vowels led scientists to conclude that speech could have begun developing twenty million years earlier than was previously thought. Mantled howler monkeys howl for longer in the resource- rich interiors of forests than in areas impacted by human activity. Japanese macaques were recolonizing the abandoned zone around Fukushima. Percentage of sexually active Americans who say that their “skills in the bedroom” have improved over the past year: 57 Who say that 2019 was their “best year of sex”: 44 Number of years by which the average age of a North or South American nation’s leader has increased since 1950: 10.5 By which the average age of a European nation’s leader has decreased since then: 2.5

Number of European nations whose leader is 45 years old or younger: 15 Percentage of U.S. Protestants who have “a lot” of confidence in their clergy’s ability to provide useful parenting advice: 49 Of U.S. Catholics who do: 23 Percentage by which the median length of U.S. black Protestant sermons exceeds that of U.S. Catholic homilies: 286 Factor by which evangelical Christian sermons are likelier than those of other Christian traditions to include the phrase “eternal hell”: 3 Average % of their fortunes that the 20 richest Americans gave to charity in 2018: 0.8 Median amount owed by U.S. renters evicted 2014–2016 for failing to pay rent: $1,253 Percentage of those evicted who owed less than $500: 12 Percentage of U.S. manufacturing jobs that required a bachelor’s degree in 1983: 14 That required one in 2018: 31 Projected percentage growth over the next year in the office-chair market: 10 In the gaming-chair market: 30 Chance that an American aged 19 to 34 is prediabetic: 1 in 4 Average percentage by which an obese person contributes more carbon emissions than someone in the “normal-weight” range: 20 Rank of SUVs among contributors to the increase in carbon emissions over the past decade: 2 Rank of the power industry: 1 Percentage of total retail sales made in 2018 that were returned: 10.6 Amount, in tons, of annual carbon emissions that can be attributed to retail returns: 16,500,000 Percentage of American travelers who say they cut back on flying in 2019 for environmental reasons: 38 Percentage of the world’s cities with populations over 500,000 that experience periodic water shortages: 47 Number of people injured in a volcanic eruption in New Zealand in December: 13 Amount of human skin, in square footage, subsequently ordered by New Zealand from the United States: 516 Factor by which the portion of Americans dying at home has increased since 1972: 2

Percentage of U.S. school districts in which the portion of Latino teachers equals or exceeds that of Latino students: 0.1 Year in which the NFL first required teams to interview candidates of color for every available head coaching job: 2003 Number of head coaches of color employed by the NFL at the time: 3 Number who are today: 4 Percentage by which men are more likely than women to frame research findings in top scientific journals with positive adjectives: 21 By which the use of a positive adjective in a paper title or abstract increases subsequent citations in those journals: 13 Percentage of Americans who think that the Chinese government is sometimes or very often a source of disinformation: 36 Who think that CNN is: 36 Number of fact-checking organizations that were active in 2014: 103 That are active today: 225 Rank of Donald Trump among the most admired men in America: 1 Of Barack Obama: 1 INDEX

SOURCES: 1,2 72Point Inc (NYC); 3–5 One Earth Future (Broomfield, Colo.); 6–9 Pew Research Center (Washington); 10 Gabriel Zucman, University of California, Berkeley; 11,12 The Eviction Lab (Princeton, N.J.); 13,14 Nicole Smith, Georgetown University (Washington); 15,16 Raynor Group (West Hempstead, N.Y.); 17 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta); 18 Faidon Magkos, University of Copenhagen (Denmark); 19,20 International Energy Agency (Paris); 21 National Retail Federation (Washington); 22 Optoro (Washington); 23 UBS (London); 24 The Nature Conservancy (Arlington, Va.); 25,26 Middlemore Hospital (Auckland, New Zealand); 27 Haider J. Warraich, VA Boston Healthcare System; 28 Washington Post; 29–31 Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (Orlando, Fla.); 32,33 Marc Lerchenmueller, University of Mannheim (Germany); 34,35 Ipsos (Chicago); 36,37 Bill Adair, Duke University (Durham, N.C.); 38,39 Gallup (Atlanta).

So many have tried to copy you, but can’t. How do you attribute this popularity?

It’s flattering, it is. Our music has been used in third-party works—lots of lifting of the voices—and 80 percent of it isn’t my cup of tea. They use Lisa’s voice a lot because it injects human emotion into their songs. That’s Lisa’s forte, her voice is very emotive.

What arrangements do you most want to perform on this tour?

We have no favorites. What was interesting was choosing songs that have never been performed live outside of their studio settings. That was probably the most eagerly anticipated part of the whole process—how can we make this work live? All we ever imagined was its studio recording.

Do you make those moments work onstage by doing original arrangements or improvising?

I’d say the original. Let me put it this way: all of our recordings and productions do not exist in multi-track form. No one can do remixes of our work. That was done on purpose. Like an artist who makes a painting or a sculpture, they don’t do versions of the work—they create one final piece, and that’s it. That’s been our approach to music since our start—an approach like fine art. There’s only one, so we try to be faithful to our original. To us, that is our unique template. Voices change. You’ll never emulate the sound of your voice at age 20 but you get close. And improvisation? That’s where our love of progressive rock stops in its tracks. n

(Dead Can Dance’s appearance at The Met Philadelphia on April 17 has been postponed. Check themetphilly.com for updates.)

<7 | FAREED ZAKARIA

have proved a huge problem in this case—is just one example among hundreds. The scholar who has long studied this topic, Paul Light, notes that under John F. Kennedy, the Cabinet departments had 17 “layers” of hierarchy. By the time Trump took office, there were a staggering 71 layers. Both parties have contributed to the problem, making the federal government a caricature of bureaucratic inefficiency.

Most of these dysfunctions are replicated at the state and local level with their own smaller agencies. The challenge of creating a national strategy is complicated by the reality that the true power in public health lies with 2,684 state, local and tribal systems, each jealously guarding its independence. We like to celebrate American federalism as the flourishing of local democracy. But this crazy quilt patchwork of authority is proving a nightmare when tackling an epidemic that knows no borders, and where any locality with a weak response will allow the infection to keep spreading elsewhere. What happens on Florida’s beaches doesn’t stay on Florida’s beaches.

It’s an easy cop-out to say that America can’t mirror China’s dictatorship. The governments that are handling this pandemic effectively include democracies like South Korea, Taiwan and Germany. Many of the best practices employed in places like Singapore and Hong Kong are not tyrannical but smart—testing, contact tracing, and isolation. But all these places have governments that are well-funded, efficient and responsive. In today’s world, with problems that spill across borders at lightning speed, “well executed government” is what makes a country truly exceptional. n

own reelection prospects, and who would work with other nations to stem the tide of COVID-19 cases around the world.

What we have instead is a president epically outmatched by a global pandemic. A president who in late January, when the first confirmed coronavirus case was announced in the United States, downplayed the risk and insisted all was under control. A president who, rather than aggressively test all those exposed to the virus, said he’d prefer not to bring ashore passengers on a contaminated cruise ship so as to keep national case numbers (artificially) low. A president who, consistent with his mistrust and undermining of scientific fact, has misled the public about unproven cures for COVID-19, and who baited-and-switched last week about whether the country ought to end social distancing to open up by Easter, and then about whether he’d impose a quarantine on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A president who has pledged to oversee the doling out of the $500 billion in corporate bailout money in the latest stimulus package, some of which will go to the travel industry in which his family is invested. A president who spent a good chunk of a recent press conference complaining about how hard it is for a rich man to serve in the White House even as Americans had already begun to lose their jobs, their health care, and their lives. A president who has reinforced racial stigma by calling the contagion a “Chinese virus” and failed to collaborate adequately with other countries to contain their outbreaks and study the disease. A president who evades responsibility and refuses to acknowledge, let alone own, the bitter truth of National Institutes of Health scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony: that the country’s testing rollout was “a failing.”

Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s test—a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual states (including Massachusetts) trying to purchase medical supplies. It has dragged its heels on invoking the Defense Production Act to get scarce, sorely needed ventilators and masks into production so that they can be distributed to hospitals nationwide as they hit their peaks in the cycle of the epidemic. It has left governors and mayors in the lurch, begging for help. The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary.

In other words, the president has blood on his hands.

It’s not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders that they be competent and informed when responding to a crisis of historic proportions. Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption and incompetence, whose mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of compassion and clarity, the president, in his addresses to the nation, embodies callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass. Dangling unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality TV cliffhangers, he unsettles rather than reassures. The pandemic reveals that the worst features of this presidency are not merely late-night comedy fodder; they come at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and our collective psyche.

Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous turnaround—and that the too-little, too-late strategy of the White House task force will henceforth at least prevent contagion and economic ruin of the grandest scale. But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch. n