Lizz Wright: Shadow

Wright, vocals; many others

Blues & Greens 00810069450872 (CD, available as LP). 2024. Chris Bruce, prod.; Ryan Freeland, eng.

Performance ****½

Sonics ****

Lizz Wright’s new album recalls the good old days when successful jazz labels bankrolled ambitious projects for big-time singers. Shadow has classy packaging, a large cast of musicians, an established producer, a well-known photographer, fashion designers, and famous guests like Angelique Kidjo and Meshell Ndegeocello. But it is 2024, so Wright had to do all that herself. Shadow is the second release on her own label, Blues & Greens.

Wright has never quite achieved major status as a jazz singer. But, over 20 years, she has compiled a respected discography on the Verve and Concord labels. If, like your present correspondent, you have slept through Wright, when you hear the first track here—her original “Sparrow”—you will wonder how you missed her. Her vocal instrument instantly commands attention with its richness and clarity. Her voice conveys a sense of enormous power in reserve, yet it also contains an intimate, dignified revelation of vulnerability.

Wright says Shadow is the album she always wanted to make. Free of the influence of record companies and A&R people, who tend to prefer genre specificity, she incorporates Americana into her jazz. She sings pieces by Caitlin Canty, Gillian Welch, and Toshi Reagon, with spare arrangements (despite all the available players) centered on acoustic guitar. When performed by their composers, the plaintive, slightly nasal country voices of Canty and Welch make songs like “Lost in the Valley” and “I Made a Lover’s Prayer” into deep but narrow slices of life. When Wright sings them, her extraordinary voice enlarges them and renders them universal. Wright’s version of Sandy Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes” may be that song’s most profound interpretation. Her “I Concentrate on You” makes most Cole Porter covers sound inconsequential.—Thomas Conrad

Shabaka Hutchings: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace

Impulse! 00602465043112. 2024. Hutchings, Dilip Harris, prods.; Dilip Harris, Guy Davie, engs.

Performance *****

Sonics ****½

Sons of Kemet were a UK jazz band with a muscular vitality and freshness. They built a sizable, dedicated following. Many were disappointed when founding member Shabaka Hutchings announced that they would disband. That turned to surprise at the news that he would also give up his primary instrument, saxophone, to take up flute.

Nor would many have expected him to embark on a path as new as this, his first solo album. Sonically it floats along, elegant and delicate, its ambience traveling on the winds of influences from across continents: African rhythms and poetry, the complexity of Middle Eastern textures, Western electronica. Sometimes instrumental, sometimes with spoken word, sometimes with guest vocalists, this set of songs blends together to create a near-transcendental experience.

Rising higher in the mix, often, is one of his many, varied flutes, or Charles Overton’s harp, or Euclid’s or Lianne La Havas’s vocals, or any of 25 musicians. The musician list is big, the impact is big, but this is no big-band sound; it’s small-group jazz with many players. It never sounds cluttered. Indeed, there is space between the notes, between the tones and textures, reminiscent of the sense of freedom which South African pianist Abdullah Ibrahim achieves—and that is crucial to the album’s great success. This is music to meditate to, to submerge yourself in, as in a deep, warm crystal-pure pool, or to allow to massage your mind. Sons of Kemet were known for energetic, blistering sets; with this album, Shabaka slows the pace and takes time to draw breath. Yet there’s a new energy and strength. Miles Davis said to be creative you have to change. Shabaka did and has. The album’s title perfectly encapsulates this. Although an alternative one could have been Simply Sublime.—Phil Brett

Julien Knowles: As Many, as One

Knowles, trumpet; Devin Daniels, alto saxophone; Javier Santiago, piano; Dario Bizio, bass; Benjamin Ring, drums; string quartet (three tracks)

Biophilia BREP0030 (24/96 download). 2024. Knowles, Adam Benjamin, prods.; Stuart Schenk, eng.

Performance ****½

Sonics ****

There are several ways to think about this album. First, its exhilarating, fresh creativity is further proof of the vitality of today’s jazz art. Second, it is additional documentation of the recent explosion of the Los Angeles jazz scene. Third, it is an example of the growing importance of stringed instruments in jazz. Fourth, it represents a new jazz genre. Call it “contemporary avant-garde.”

As Many, as One, on the digital-only Biophilia label, is the debut recording of L.A.-based trumpeter/composer Julien Knowles. He leads a young quintet, which executes his edgy, complex, asymmetrical music as if they don’t know it’s hard. “Desire Path,” for example, is fervent with energy yet sounds focused and purposeful. Knowles, alto saxophonist Devin Daniels, and pianist Javier Santiago take remarkable solos in the moment that become inseparable from Knowles’s preconceived ensemble design. (Daniels, Santiago, and drummer Benjamin Ring were classmates of Knowles’s at the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz at UCLA. Daniels recently joined Hancock’s band.)

Knowles’s writing for strings is distinctive. He uses them three ways. “Opening” is a one-minute microcosm; Knowles’s trumpet makes a single dramatic sweep over a lush smear of violins. “End of the Night” is a ballad by L.A. artist Louis Cole; strings quietly cry beneath rapt contemplations by Knowles, Javier, and Knowles again. The centerpiece of the album is “Moon Theater,” a river of sound that for more than nine minutes flows into diverse branches and sometimes circles back on itself; the notated parts for the strings are so alive they could almost be real-time responses to the inspired improvisations of Knowles, Santiago, and bassist Dario Bizio.—Thomas Conrad

KJ Denhert: The Evening News

Denhert, vocals, guitar; Nicki Denner, piano; Mark McInyre, guitar; Adam Armstrong, bass; Eric Halvorson, drums

Mother Cyclone (no number) (CD). 2024. Denhert, Armstrong, prods.; Dave Stoller, Chris Sulit, engs.

Performance ****

Sonics ****

KJ Denhert is difficult to classify, which may partly explain why she is not more famous. She has been many places in her 40-year career but will always be associated with two: the 55 Bar in New York, where she was a fixture for 23 years (until the pandemic shut it down), and the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. For years, she played every day of the 10-day Umbria festival on one of its free stages, often outclassing acts that played the 5000-seat arena, where tickets cost many euros.

Denhert sings and accompanies herself (skillfully) on guitar. She acknowledges the influence of singer/songwriters like James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, but Denhert has more jazz feeling. What she does might be called “urban folk-jazz.”

The Evening News is the name of her new, lithe, tight band and also of her 11th album. It has four new songs. “Esmerelda” has the kind of hook that sets itself deep. Also deep-seated is Denhert’s heartfelt memory of a friend who came to her rescue long ago, when she was “just short of 19.” “Postcard from Paris” is another touching retrospective love song, this time for her late mother.

She has always sung standards. “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” may seem an improbable choice. But Denhert, with her smoky, streetwise voice, can make any good song freshly relevant. The same can be said of The Evening News as a band. They give Rodgers and Hammerstein a snaky, insinuating new groove.

But Denhert’s calling card is the expressive power of her voice. Its humanity and authenticity are so undeniable that you always believe her, whether she sings about surreys or long-lost friends or parents, or even when she sings a Beatles song you have heard 1000 times. “Eleanor Rigby” never sounded more lonely.—Thomas Conrad

Sun Ra: At the Showcase: Live in Chicago 1976–1977

Sun Ra, piano, electric keyboards; John Gilmore, tenor sax; Marshall Allen, alto sax, flute, kora; many others

Jazz Detective DDJD-013 (2CD). 1976, 1977/2024. Zev Feldman, Michael D. Anderson, prods.; Richard Wilkerson, Joe Lizzi, engs.

Performance ****½

Sonics ****½

Sun Ra boasts a huge discography, yet this posthumous addition is welcome. It captures a pair of rip-roaring club sessions from one of Ra’s peak periods, and its palpable audio presence is a far cry from many lo-fi live recordings, including one from the same period and venue, available online.

The first disc, recorded in 1977, presents Ra in a relatively conventional vein; consider his ragged, rowdy, yet respectful treatment of “Rose Room,” the only non-original composition on either disc. Other tunes have a soul-jazz feel, such as “Synthesis Approach,” where John Gilmore’s gritty tenor sax wails bluesily over Ra’s organ, or “Ankhnaton,” where the band riffs propulsively behind a squalling trumpet. Others are abstract, such as “View from Another Dimension,” where horns honk and screech their way into a state of inspired chaos.

The second disc, recorded the previous year, has a more cacophonous feel. On the opening track, “Calling Planet Earth & the Shadow World,” Ra’s spaced-out synthesizer seems to speak in an extraterrestrial language before the band erupts into structured pandemonium and Marshall Allen delivers a squawking, squealing alto sax solo over furious percussion. On “Ebah Speaks in Cosmic Tongue,” Akh Tal Ebah does just that in a striking display of spoken glossolalia. Another three numbers are sung by band members, including Ra’s signature anthem “Space Is the Place,” during which the volume lowers as the musicians leave the stage and march around the club.

What I best remember from my own Showcase attendance are Ra’s hypnotic keyboard solos. Here, these are given less emphasis than the ensemble work. Nonetheless, the collection makes a sterling impression.—Larry Birnbaum

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