May 9th
Cornelia St Cafe
8:30PM

With PETE RENDE – Keyboards, PATRICE BLANCHARD – Electric Bass & RUDY ROYSTON – Drums

The simple act of “plugging in” is easy to take for granted, but it provides power, illumination, charge; the same could be said for connecting a power cord or for the meeting of creative minds. On Plugged In (Bee Jazz), his fifth album as a leader, French-born, Brooklyn-based saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh discovers the spark of inspiration provided by both, assembling an exhilarating electric quartet and collaborating with the jaw-dropping Belgian keyboardist Jozef Dumoulin.

The result is an album that is all about electrifying connections – that between Sabbagh and Dumoulin, the intense grooves forged by Martinique-born bassist Patrice Blanchardand American drummer Rudy Royston, the conjunction of the electric and the lyrical, the raw edge of rock girding the sophisticated communication of jazz.

Sabbagh first encountered the keyboardist on record, knowing as soon as he heard Dumoulin’s unique approach that he wanted to work with him. “I heard something really pure in Jozef’s playing that I connected with,” Sabbagh recalls. “He was using a lot of effects, but at the same time he had a really distinct, original voice, and a degree of lyricism that is quite rare in an electric context.”

Dumoulin’s solo on the album’s perpetual-motion opener, “Drive,” highlights exactly why Sabbagh became so enamored of the Paris-based keyboardist. His ferocious howl approaches the overdriven force of an electric guitar, a sound that has inspired the saxophonist in the past: a member of the saxophonist’s long-running quartet, along with bassist Joe Martinand drummer Ted Poor, is the never-predictable guitarist Ben Monder, whose ability to coax a surprising array of colors from his chosen instrument is echoed by Dumoulin’s similarly virtuosic skillset.

As a composer, Sabbagh achieves that singing quality via a propensity for rock-tinged pieces that embrace the accessibility of pop music without eschewing intellectual rigor. The anthemic “Special K”, with its infectious, memorable melody is a prime example, the type of tune that will send listeners scrambling into the recesses of their memory for a forgotten scrap of lyric. “I like writing quasi-pop tunes,” Sabbagh says. “The human voice is an inspiration to me.”

The two came together via a grant from the French-American Jazz Exchange program administered jointly by Chamber Music Americaand the French American Cultural Exchange, bringing Dumoulin to New York for an intensive ten days of rehearsal, gigging and recording. Sabbagh and Dumoulin each composed half of the repertoire, agreeing not to check in on one another during the writing process. “I had no idea what he was writing and he had no idea what I was writing until he flew to New York,” Sabbagh says. “We trusted that we would make it work once we actually got together.”

Not only did they make it work, but Plugged In is a powerfully cohesive album comprising fourteen diverse pieces. “One emphasis of this project was showcasing Jozef’s writing and my writing and the similarities and differences between them,” Sabbagh explains, “so I wanted to have a variety of material.” The pieces they chose reconcile Sabbagh’s pop-centric, song-like approach with Dumoulin’s headier, more conceptual style without the record ever feeling schizophrenic. The keyboardist’s ethereal “Ronny” seems to flow naturally from the saxophonist’s African-influenced “Jeli,” Sabbagh’s languorous “Minor” from Dumoulin’s simmering “UR”, which takes a free hand with the chords of “All the Things You Are,” leaving little trace of the well-worn standard.

Both composers get their fair share of the spotlight due over the course of the album’s fourteen concise tracks. Rather than indulging in lengthy, rambling improvisations, Sabbagh and company focused on playing brief, taut, impactful statements. “I like the idea of trying to get to the essence of the songs, saying what you have to say and then moving on,” Sabbagh says. “I think having one song that’s really different from the one before and the one after, like rock albums often do, keeps you alert and listening. And I like making albums as opposed to a random collection of songs.”

The session is possessed of the excitement its creators were feeling during its recordings. The date marked Dumoulin’s first visit not only to New York but to the States; Sabbagh was fresh off playing a week at the Village Vanguard in Paul Motian’s New Trio, alongside frequent collaborator Ben Monder (the legendary drummer, sadly, passed away two months later). That experience stood out, even among the other greats with whom Sabbagh has performed or recorded, including Victor Lewis, Bill Stewart, Billy Drummond, Andrew Cyrille, Daniel Humair, Guillermo Klein, Ben Street and many others.

Praise for Seasons: Live At the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Board of Directors of the Jazz Bakery today announced the appointment of Jeff Gauthieras the Bakery’s first executive director. With experience as a nonprofit manager, concert promoter, music producer and musician in Los Angeles, Gauthier brings many relevant skills to the 20-year-old nonprofit organization.  Gauthier will work closely with Ruth Price, Bakery founder, President and Artistic Director.

Culver City recently agreed to transfer a parcel of land adjacent to the Kirk Douglas Theater to the Jazz Bakery for a new jazz performance and cultural center to be designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. The hiring of an executive director marks an important step toward strengthening the Bakery’s organizational resources and capacity, and establishing a new home for this cherished Westside institution. Ruth Price said, “I’ve been impressed by Jeff for years as a musician, record company producer, and forward-thinking entrepreneur.  This is serendipity at its best!”

The Board of Directors of the Jazz Bakery today announced the appointment of Jeff Gauthieras the Bakery’s first executive director. With experience as a nonprofit manager, concert promoter, music producer and musician in Los Angeles, Gauthier brings many relevant skills to the 20-year-old nonprofit organization.  Gauthier will work closely with Ruth Price, Bakery founder, President and Artistic Director.

Culver City recently agreed to transfer a parcel of land adjacent to the Kirk Douglas Theater to the Jazz Bakery for a new jazz performance and cultural center to be designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. The hiring of an executive director marks an important step toward strengthening the Bakery’s organizational resources and capacity, and establishing a new home for this cherished Westside institution. Ruth Price said, “I’ve been impressed by Jeff for years as a musician, record company producer, and forward-thinking entrepreneur.  This is serendipity at its best!”

Jeff Gauthier. Photo by Peak.

Gauthier’s duties will include development and fundraising, and support of the Board’s planning and capital campaign for construction of the new center. “This new cultural center, which will include two performance spaces, a gallery, a community space and a café, presents an incredible opportunity for the Jazz Bakery to become a center for jazz and creative music on the West Coast,” said Gauthier. “I’m honored and thrilled at the chance to help realize this vision.”

Ruth says, “While we develop our new home, our Movable Feast concert series will continue to bring music to our audiences, presenting in venues around Los Angeles.” The Movable Feasts have brought artists John Abercrombie, Mose Allison, Brian Blade, Eliane Elias, Jim Hall, Charles Lloyd, and many others, to diverse crowds at a variety of venues including the Musicians Institute, Zipper Hall, and REDCAT. For more information about the Movable Feast series, please go to www.jazzbakery.com.

Gauthier’s hiring also brings new opportunities for the Jazz Bakery and Angel City Arts to collaborate, beginning with the co-production of the 2012 Angel City Jazz Festival. As former executive director of Angel City Arts, Gauthier and festival founder/artistic director Rocco Somazzi established the four-year-old festival as one of the West Coast’s premier showcases for contemporary music. This year’s festival will take place October 5-14, with the theme “Artists and Legends: Innovative artists pay tribute to their legendary mentors.” Concerts will take place at UCLA’s Royce Hall, REDCAT, The John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and LACMA. Performers for the festival will be announced in early May. For more information about the Angel City Jazz Festival, please go to www.angelcityjazz.com.

Jeff Gauthier has been named a Downbeat Magazine “Rising Star” as both violinist and producer for several years running. He is the founder of Cryptogramophone Records which was named #4 Best Jazz Label in the 2007 Downbeat Critics Poll. Gauthier has produced more than 60 jazz and classical recordings, working with Alan Broadbent, Alex Cline, Nels Cline, Mark Dresser, Peter Erskine, Bennie Maupin, Alan Pasqua, Jimmy and Stacy Rowles, and many others. He also produced the long-running Cryptonight concert series in Culver City.  As a classical violinist he has performed with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, L.A. Opera, Long Beach Symphony, Carmel Bach Festival and Oregon Bach Festival. As an improviser he has performed and recorded with the Jeff Gauthier Goatette which includes Nels Cline, Alex Cline, David Witham and John Fumo. He has also performed and recorded with Adam Rudolph and Yusef Lateef, with Vinny Golia’s Large Ensemble, and with many other creative musicians on both coasts. Gauthier is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts.

The Jazz Bakery is a California non-profit organization dedicated to presenting America’s music in all its non-commercial diversity, and to keeping jazz alive by cultivating new audiences and fostering new talent. Founded in 1992 by jazz vocalist Ruth Price, the Jazz Bakery has achieved international acclaim through her uncompromising artistic vision, and has earned a reputation as one of the best places anywhere to experience live jazz. Price’s vision includes a performance space with theater seating that creates focused interaction between the artist and audience, a space where the sound is the highest fidelity, the lighting is appropriate, the quality piano is well-maintained, and every seat is the best in the house.  Look for the Jazz Bakery on Facebook at www.facebook.com/thejazzbakery

Ruth Price. Photo by Gregory Dahl

Album Features Covers of Michael Jackson,
Flying Lotus, Heatwave, Henry Threadgill, 
Duke Ellington & Herbie Nichols

Album to be Featured as NPR First Listen (March 6 to 13), NPR Song of The Day, NPR’s All Things Considered, January Cover of JazzTimes Magazine & Much More

Iyer Tours US in March & April with Trio, As Solo Pianist & With Collaborative South Asian Trio, Tirtha

“…a stunning album…” – Paste

“In musical terms, accelerando signifies a quickening of tempo, a gradual acceleration of pace…it’s a dead-on descriptor of the velocity at which Iyer’s career has traveled of late” – JazzTimes

“Vijay Iyer does the nearly impossible with his captivating makeover of Threadgill’s “Little Pocket Size Demons,” from Iyer’s forthcoming album Accelerando.”
– NPR Song of the Day

“The material on Accelerando steers an epic course from Ellington, through 1970s funk and disco, to the avant garde, and on to contemporary psychedelic-electronica navigated by Iyer’s distinctive post-MBASE filter that also draws in five of the pianist’s original compositions.” – Jazzwise

“Iyer has emerged as one of the most respected, influential and popular artists in jazz, amid a creative surge that includes perhaps his best record yet, ‘Accelerando’”
– Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Vijay Iyer has been one of jazz’s most exciting pianists over the past several years. He flourishes in all sorts of settings, from solo to quartets, and he gets more interesting with each new record. His forthcoming trio record, “Accelerando,’’ ups the ante.”
- The Boston Globe

“Unquestionably one of the most imaginative composers and improvisers in contemporary jazz” – East Bay Express

Watch the Accelerando video EPK on YouTube

Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer’s career has moved on an ever-accelerating arc over the past decade and a half, with the Indian-American artist earning a slew of international honors for his intrepid, multi-hued vision of 21st-century music. The latest chapter of this compelling story in contemporary jazz comes with the Vijay Iyer Trio’s Accelerando, an album driven by the visceral, universal, intoxicating experience of rhythm. To be released in March 2012 by the German independent label ACT Music + Vision, Accelerando sees Iyer and his telepathic trio mates – bassist Stephan Crump and drummerMarcus Gilmore – go both deep and wide. They light up material that ranges from a brace of bold Iyer originals and pieces by great jazz composers (Duke Ellington, Herbie Nichols, Henry Threadgill) to surprising interpretations of vintage and recent pop and funk tunes (Michael Jackson, Heatwave, Flying Lotus). Absorbing and infectious, this is jazz about not only the mind but the body.

With an advanced education in the hard sciences and his facility for complex music, Iyer could have been pegged as a “cerebral musician.” But, he insists, “I actually experience music on a visceral level, the way most people do. Dance is just a bodily way of listening to music – it’s a universal response. Jazz has always had some sort of dance impulse at its core. Bebop grew out of swing, which was a dance rhythm that became art music. I never want to lose that foundation of rhythmic communication in my work. That’s what Accelerando is concerned with, that physical reality of music. For me, music is action.”

Iyer has played with Memphis-bred bassist Stephan Crump since 1997 (when the pianist had first moved to New York City) and with Marcus Gilmore since 2003 (when the drummer, grandson of legendary jazz stickman Roy Haynes, was still attending New York’s LaGuardia High School). The overwhelming response to the trio’s 2009 album, Historicity, gave these musicians the opportunity to hone their group interaction in front of audiences around the world for two years. Iyer says: “We found more possibilities for spontaneous arrangement, textural and timbral extremes, and ensemble interplay. Our approach is less and less soloistic lately; it’s more about developing a collective energy and momentum. When you hear us now, you can tell that it’s us.”

As very contemporary musicians, Iyer and his trio mates have a wide purview when it comes to a group approach to rhythm. “The way we come to rhythm is inspired by Bud Powell and Max Roach, Ahmad Jamal, Ellington and Monk, but it is not limited to that,” he says. “There is the way James Brown approached it, and the way Jimi Hendrix, the Meters or Earth, Wind & Fire did it; there is the influence of Indian music, African music, Javanese gamelan. There is a whole world history of groove and pulse to draw on, and we do. When it comes to co-articulating a groove and thinking about the subtle dimensions of the beat, we aim to push and pull, to incorporate as many different ideas of orchestration, touch and dynamics as we can so that the rhythm breathes just like a body does.”

The range of material on Accelerando – from Ellington to Henry Threadgill to Michael Jackson to Iyer’s compositions – is dizzying, wonderfully so. Among Iyer’s original compositions, “Optimism” starts with a buoyant feel, but its crescendo “means that it builds way beyond anything hinted at by the opening material,” Iyer explains. “It erupts from the light to the visceral, and we have to push ourselves physically to achieve that.” The album’s title track was initially the final movement of a suite Iyer wrote for choreographer Karole Armitage that was performed in Central Park. “I’m interested in tempo as a structural element,” he says, “and this was an experiment to see if a constantly accelerating pulse could be the basis for dance. Luckily it worked.  It was an amazing experience to write something for dancers and see it realized.”

One of the highlights of Accelerando is Iyer’s ingenious version of Threadgill’s “Little Pocket-Sized Demons.” The kaleidoscopic original version included two tubas, two guitars and a French horn. “It took a leap of imagination,” Iyer says. “The original has this carnival vibe – polyphonic and surreal. It was hard to express all that counterpoint with just six hands.  We used arco bass to thicken up the sound and spread the beat to evoke the tubas. Thread came to a rehearsal and gave us pointers, which was so inspiring. Like Monk, Henry has this composer’s approach, but he is also someone, like Monk, who played in the church. You can hear that communicative power when he plays.  His relationship to the beat is profound.”

The soulful Ellington piece “The Village of the Virgins” comes from his 1970 ballet The River. Reducing his orchestral sound to the trio format “involved sleight of hand,” Iyer explains. “It both is and isn’t the original.” Herbie Nichols’ “Wildflower” is “a tune I really love,” Iyer says. “He was influenced by Duke and the stride pianists and by Stravinsky and Prokofiev. There is a lightness and elegance in spite of this harmonic darkness. It’s dissonant, but it makes you smile. It’s inspiring when someone reconciles the seemingly irreconcilable.” The album’s version of the Michael Jackson ballad “Human Nature” is a trio extension of Iyer’s solo piano arrangement heard on his 2009 album, Solo. “Interpreting a song like `Human Nature’ is about telling your own story, like Miles did not long after the original,” Iyer says. “That one or the Heatwave song or the Flying Lotus track were not obvious choices for a piano trio. But it’s good for us to reach beyond ourselves to different musical approaches and even beyond our instruments. It leads to discovery – and that’s the sound I really like.”

New Artists, New Technologies, New Dave Douglas Quintet Album With All-New Lineup

While 2012 could be the year of the global apocalypse as predicted by the Mayans, trumpeter, composer and label head Dave Douglas and his label Greenleaf Music (GLM) continue to roll full-steam ahead by releasing jazz, post-jazz, and other creative music.  The label’s credo is simply about creativity in musical expression. As a result, GLM’s sound is defined by the artists Douglas chooses to sign, allowing them room to define their own world—new sounds that connect, music that has something personal to say that is unique to that individual, as well as having something universal to offer. GLM believes that what interests listeners is not just the recorded product, but the artists themselves. As such we are interested in making available sheet music, artist commentary, discussion and more.

This Spring will bring new albums from two remarkable young musicians: the Malaysia-born, Perth, Australia-raised and now New York-based powerhouse bassist and composer Linda Oh (May 22nd) and the Chicago-based chamber-jazz composer and bassist Matt Ulery (June 12).

Linda Oh

Bassist and compoaser Linda Oh, whose 2009 self-released debut album Entry, featuring the unconventional lineup of bass, trumpet & drums, shook the jazz world up and put the Aussie bassist on the map almost overnight, beginning with a rave live New York Times review by critic Ben Ratliff who wrote, “self-generated energy fuels [Oh's] go-for-broke improvisation.” The acclaimed pianist Vijay Iyer later wrote in the pages of artFORUM, “a young bass powerhouse from down-under… I love how she just blew into town and took over.”

Entry was voted the #3 debut album in that year’s 3rd Annual Village Voice Jazz Critics Poll. Since that time Oh has worked in the bands of Dave Douglas, Kenny Barron, Steve Wilson, Fabian Almazan, The Le Boeuf Brothers and many more. GLM will be releasing Oh’s 2nd album entitled Initial Here, featuring saxophonistDayna Stephens, pianist Fabian Almazan, drummerRudy Royston and guest vocalist Jen Shyu. Look for Linda on the road and for the new album May 22nd, 2012. “What can I say,” says Douglas, “Linda is among the best! What I hear on this record  is a very personal statement of auspicious beginnings, of growth and change, and an inspired use of some of this country’s finest musicians. There’s great playing from everyone involved. Her vision on this album puts her on the forefront of creative musicians working today. I am so thrilled to be able to release this music on Greenleaf.”

Matt Ulery

Bassist Matt Ulery represents an extension of GLM’s roots in Chicago and Douglas’ interest in providing a platform for independent voices who may not be well-known in the greater jazz world, but whose raw talent lends great promise to the future of the music. Ulery, who has worked as a bassist with a number of Chicago-based bandleaders including Patricia Barber, Fareed Haque, Howard Levy, Grazyna Auguscik, Goran Ivanovic’s Eastern Blok and Jeff Parker, is also an accomplished arranger and composer. His work for chamber and large ensembles use unique timbres to achieve new sounds that owe as much to “new music” and film music as they do to his jazz forebears. Along these lines, hi