Burning Ambulance Podcast

Cindy Blackman Santana is originally from Ohio, came to the East Coast to study at Berklee and at the Hartt School of Music, moved to New York in the late '80s and has played and recorded with a ton of people across the spectrum of jazz and rock ever since. She’s made a slew of albums under her own name, including some featuring saxophonist and longtime friend of Burning Ambulance JD Allen; she toured off and on with Pharoah Sanders; she was the drummer for Spectrum Road, a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime that featured guitarist Vernon Reid, who’s also been on this podcast, plus keyboardist John Medeski, and bassist Jack Bruce. And she’s probably best known to a lot of people for being Lenny Kravitz’s touring drummer for many, many years, but what some people may not know is that she did not play drums on his records — he plays drums on his records. So part of our interview gets into the question of how you make music your own when you’re playing someone else’s parts.

We also talk about her time working with Pharoah Sanders, and recording with Joe Henderson; we talk about her admiration for Tony Williams, and she gives her analysis of the changes in his style over the course of his career and how those manifested in the changes to his kit; we talk about how to lock in with a bassist, the difference in mindset between playing jazz and rock, and much more. This was a really interesting conversation. Unfortunately, it was cut short. 

Around 45 minutes in, my internet cut out and took our Zoom call with it. So you’ll hear a sudden fade right as we start talking about the 2019 Santana album Africa Speaks, on which Cindy Blackman Santana plays. So what I’ve done is gone back into my archives and pulled up an interview I did with Carlos Santana when that record came out, and we talk about it, and also about her contributions to the band’s music and his feelings about playing with her. I think it’s a valuable addendum to this conversation, and I hope you enjoy the whole episode. Thanks as always for listening.

Amina Claudine Myers was one of the earliest members of the AACM, and if you’re listening to this podcast, I’m pretty sure you know what the AACM is, but just in case you don’t, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians is an organization formed by Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell and a few other musicians in Chicago in the mid-1960s. A tremendous number of the most important avant-garde jazz musicians of the mid to late 20th century and the 21st century have come out of the AACM, including Anthony Braxton, Henry Threadgill, Fred Anderson, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wadada Leo Smith, Matana Roberts, Nicole Mitchell, Tomeka Reid, and Amina Claudine Myers. There’s a tremendous book by trombonist and composer George Lewis, called A Power Stronger Than Itself, that’s the best possible introduction to the group. You should absolutely read that if you’re a fan of any of the musicians I just named.

Now, all the founders and early members of the AACM worked together, supporting each other, and moving the music forward in large part by composing and performing original work. What’s interesting — and this is something we talk about in this conversation — is that Amina Claudine Myers’ early albums included some original music, but they also included interpretations of other people’s compositions, specifically Marion Brown and Bessie Smith. But she always paired that music up with pieces of her own that demonstrated a really fascinating compositional voice that was a combination of jazz, gospel, blues, and classical music. She took all her influences and early training and combined them into something that sounded like nobody else out there, and was incredibly powerful.

In addition to making her own records, she’s been a part of albums by Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, Bill Laswell, and many other people. Her latest release is a collection of duos with Wadada Leo Smith, the first time they’ve recorded together since 1969, and their first collaboration as leaders.

I’m really glad I had the chance to interview her. We talked about a lot of things — the AACM, the role of spirituality in music and the way the term spiritual jazz is used to gatekeep certain things, her work with all the artists I just mentioned, her upbringing in Arkansas and Texas and how it influenced her writing... this is a really wide-ranging conversation that I think will be really interesting for you to hear. I thank you as always for listening.

Carlos Niño is from Los Angeles, and has been a vital part of that city’s music scene for almost 30 years. He started out as a radio DJ when he was still a teenager, and expanded from that into putting on shows, releasing records, producing sessions for artists, performing and doing just about everything else that a life in music will eventually drop in someone’s lap. He’s developed really long creative relationships with two other people who’ve been on this podcast in the past, vocalist Dwight Trible and percussionist Adam Rudolph, both of whom work at least part of the time in the area that’s currently governed by the term spiritual jazz.

If you look around, you’ll see Carlos’s name on a lot of really fascinating projects. He makes records as Carlos Niño and Friends, which is a good way of summarizing his methods and his aesthetic — he gets together with people who he considers friends and kindred spirits, they make music together, and he assembles it all. But the people he calls friends are some of the most fascinating musicians around right now. He’s worked with Shabaka Hutchings, with Kamasi Washington, with Makaya McCraven, with Laraaji, and right now he’s very involved with André 3000’s New Blue Sun project. He was one of the leaders of the sessions that produced the album, and he’s also part of Andre’s live band.

Carlos has a new album coming out later this month called Placenta. It’s his third release for International Anthem, following a previous Carlos Niño and Friends album and a duo release with South African pianist Thandi Ntuli, and it features a ton of guests, including frequent collaborators like Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina, as well as saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Deantoni Parks, Adam Rudolph, André 3000, and many, many others. It’s a mix of live recordings and studio sessions, some of which go as far back as 2018, and they’ve all been reconstituted and overdubbed and collaged with vocals, field recordings, and all kinds of sound design into something really unique and kaleidoscopic. Although it’s got elements of jazz and elements of New Age music, it’s really hard to describe or categorize and it’s not the kind of thing you can just put on in the background and chill with. It demands your attention. When it comes out, I recommend you sit with it and see what you get out of it. I think you’ll find it very rewarding.

I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Carlos Niño. He’s a really interesting guy with a very open and optimistic creative philosophy that I think will be inspiring to those of you who make art yourselves, whether it’s music or something else, and even to those of you who are just interested in art and creativity generally. Thanks as always for listening.

Kenny Garrett has been playing for more than 40 years. Originally from Detroit, he joined the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late 70s, when it was being run by Ellington’s son Mercer. He also played with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and with Donald Byrd, Woody Shaw, and Freddie Hubbard. He was a member of a young lions group put together by Blue Note Records in the 80s called Out Of The Blue that also included the late drummer Ralph Peterson, and he was already recording as a leader when he was invited to join Miles Davis’s band in 1987. He played on the album Amandla, and was part of the Davis band all the way until the end of Miles’s life in 1991. Miles Davis even made a very rare guest appearance on one of Garrett’s albums, Prisoner Of Love, from 1989.

Kenny Garrett’s discography as a leader has taken him in a lot of really interesting directions. His 1995 album Triology, with Brian Blade on drums and either Charnett Moffett or Kiyoshi Kitagawa on bass, is a really intense, high-energy record that kind of marries bebop language to post-Ornette Coleman freedom, but the real key to the whole thing is the way he executes these really complex melodies on tunes like John Coltrane’s "Giant Steps," Wynton Marsalis’s "Delfeayo’s Dilemma," and Mulgrew Miller’s "Pressing The Issue." It’s a tremendous showcase for his technical command of the saxophone. But the album that first got me interested in his work was Beyond The Wall, a 2006 release that was a collaboration with Pharoah Sanders that also featured Mulgrew Miller on piano, Bobby Hutcherson on vibes, Robert Hurst on bass, Brian Blade on drums, and on some tracks there were strings and harp and Chinese instruments and a six-member vocal ensemble. It’s not spiritual jazz in the way that term is used now, and it’s not world music, it’s entirely its own thing, and it’s particularly fascinating because you might not think of Kenny Garrett and Pharoah Sanders having that much in common, artistically speaking, but they really did. They also recorded a live album together that came out in 2008. Garrett talks about Pharoah a lot in the interview you’re about to hear.

And Kenny Garrett’s latest album is going to surprise a lot of people. It’s called Who Killed AI, and it’s a collaboration with Svoy, an electronic music producer. Garrett plays alto and soprano sax on it, and all the rest of the music is made with synths and programmed drums. Even the horns are multi-tracked and fed through effects at times. It’s structured as kind of a suite — the first track is called “Ascendence,” and there are also pieces called “Transcendence,” “Divergence” and “Convergence.” But there’s also a really beautiful version of “My Funny Valentine,” which lays the ballad melody over these kind of shimmering keyboard sounds and a hard drum 'n' bass beat. It’s not at all what I was expecting when I was told that there was a new Kenny Garrett album on the way.

I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Kenny Garrett. We discussed his history with Miles Davis and with Woody Shaw, his early musical upbringing, his work with Pharoah Sanders, his approach to synthesizing genres and musics from around the world, and much more. I think you’re going to enjoy this conversation.

I first learned about Arushi Jain three years ago, when most people who are aware of her work did. Her 2021 album Under The Lilac Sky was extremely beautiful, six tracks of droning, pulsing synth music with her vocals kind of floating in the middle like she was singing from the middle of an isolation tank. It was entirely created with a modular synth rig that she constructed and programmed, but the compositions were based on ragas from the Indian classical tradition, including the fact that the album was meant to be heard at a specific time of day, while the sun was setting. 

Under The Lilac Sky was described as her first full-length album, but she had also put out a four-song EP, Just A Feeling, in 2018, documenting the earliest stages of developing her sound, and another four-track release, With & Without, in 2019, where each track was inspired by a specific raga, although with that one, she says on the album’s Bandcamp page, “I didn’t always follow the rules of the ragas, I’m sure those who know this art can hear that, and maybe purists won’t approve.”

There’s also a companion release, With & Without (Golem Version), which features two remixes of tracks from the original album for some kind of virtual reality dance piece, and then a 46-minute soundtrack to the piece.

Her music is still evolving. At the end of March, she’s putting out a new album, Delight, on which she’s not working just with the modular synth. She’s also gotten people to play flute, saxophone, classical guitar, cello and marimba and sampled those parts and incorporated them into the tracks, which are also much more conventionally song-like than her previous work. And the vocals and lyrics are much more up front as well. Delight isn’t a pop album, but it’s absolutely more directly communicative than her previous work.

We had a really interesting conversation. We talked about her background singing Indian classical music with her family, how she came to electronic music when she arrived in America to go to college, how modular synths actually work, which I’m still not 100 percent sure I understand, how her live performances have evolved, and even a little bit about her visual presentation and how the music she makes relates to her Indian identity – or doesn’t. So on that note, here’s my conversation with Arushi Jain.

Rufus Reid is an extremely important but under-recognized figure in modern jazz. He’s always been someone who’s had one foot in the mainstream and one in the avant-garde — he did a lot of work with soul jazz and jazz-funk saxophonist Eddie Harris in the early 1970s, before joining Dexter Gordon’s band when Gordon made his famous US comeback after years in Europe. He was also part of Andrew Hill’s band in the late ’80s, and has done a ton of straightahead records. But he was also a member of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition in the early ’80s, and he was one of the four bassists on Henry Threadgill’s X-75 album, and he played on Muhal Richard Abrams’ Things To Come From Those Now Gone, and he played with Anthony Braxton on the two Seven Standards 1985 albums with Hank Jones on piano and Victor Lewis on drums. He was also a member of the World Bass Violin Ensemble, which was a group of six bassists that made an album for Black Saint in 1984. 

Reid has also done a lot of work as a leader. He’s made a string of albums in collaboration with drummer Akira Tana and various other musicians; he’s done bass duo albums with Michael Moore; and he’s led the Out Front trio with pianist Steve Allee and drummer Duduka Da Fonseca. In 2014, he released Quiet Pride: the Elizabeth Catlett Project, an album that featured a total of 19 instrumentalists and a singer all paying tribute to a sculptor whose work focused on the Black female experience in America. Reid is also an educator and the author of The Evolving Bassist, a book originally published in 1974 that’s still a standard text for bassists. 

In this interview, we talk about Reid’s work with Eddie Harris, with Dexter Gordon, with Henry Threadgill, and with his own ensembles. We talk about a six-CD set he made with Frank Kimbrough a few years ago, recording all of Thelonious Monk’s compositions. We talk about his approach to the instrument, his influences, and about his new album, which is a duo collaboration with pianist Sullivan Fortner. This was a really enjoyable and informative conversation, and I think you’ll come away from it with a new or perhaps a renewed appreciation for someone who’s been a major figure in jazz for 50 years and isn’t stopping yet.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these. In fact, the last episode was released in December of 2022. I talked then to film critic Walter Chaw about his book on the work of director Walter Hill. Since then, a lot’s been going on. Most notably, I wrote a book of my own, In The Brewing Luminous: The Life And Music Of Cecil Taylor, which will be released this year. It’s the first full-length biography and critical analysis of Taylor, who is not only a hugely important jazz musician – along with Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler and others, he was one of the pioneers of free jazz and really pushed the music forward in undeniable ways – but is also, I believe and argue in the book, a brilliant and under-recognized American composer whose work spans a much broader range than many people realize.

Ethan Iverson is also a really interesting American composer. You could be reductive about it and call him a synthesist of old and new pop and jazz styles, but he has a strong and recognizable voice that becomes easy to hear the more of his music you listen to. There are chords and types of melodies that he favors that set him apart from his peers, and he’s got a real attraction to big hooks, which manifested in the Bad Plus’s work in a number of ways and shows up in his solo work too. The Bad Plus developed a reputation for piano trio covers of pop songs that people often seemed to think were ironic, but were in fact performed from a perspective of real love for compositional form. A great tune is a great tune. And it’s worth remembering that they also recorded Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, which is an avant-garde landmark but also has some really kick-ass and highly memorable melodies. After all, it was originally written for dancers.

Ethan’s new album, Technically Acceptable, is his second record for Blue Note and he’s doing some things on it that he’s never done before. First of all, he’s playing with two different rhythm sections that are made up of musicians more or less his own age, even younger than himself. Until now, he’s tended to record with older players, legends like Jack DeJohnette, Albert "Tootie" Heath, Billy Hart, Paul Motian, Ron Carter, etc. This is his first time post-Bad Plus making an album entirely with musicians of his own generation. Also, it includes a solo piano sonata – three movements, fifteen minutes, a through composed classical piece that still manages to fit under the umbrella of jazz in a George Gershwin meets Fats Waller kind of way. This album is a real showcase for him as a composer.

Ethan and I talk about Cecil Taylor in the interview you’re about to hear. We also talk about his work and how it’s evolved over the years, the economics of surviving as a jazz musician in the 21st century, and we talk about other piano players of his generation like Jason Moran, Aaron Diehl, Aaron Parks, Jeb Patton, and Sullivan Fortner. We talk about diving into the music’s history, and about how there’s as much to learn and draw from in the music of the 1920s and 1930s as in the music of the 1960s and afterward, and about the increasing movement toward composition in current jazz. This is his second time on the podcast – a couple of years ago, I interviewed him alongside Mark Turner, because they’d made a duo album together. But this time it’s a one on one conversation, and I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did.

This is not a typical episode of this podcast. Normally, as you probably know, I talk to musicians. And in 2022, we’ve specifically been talking about fusion, which means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And we’re going to get back to that subject in our next episode, when I have an interview with saxophonist Dave Liebman, who played with Miles Davis in the early '70s and also had his own band, Lookout Farm, which was a very interesting fusion act. But on this episode, we’re taking a sharp left turn and talking about movies, and specifically the movies of Walter Hill.

Walter Chaw is a critic I read fairly often at the site Film Freak Central. He writes for lots of other places, too, but that’s where I see his work the most. And a few months ago, I saw that he had a book coming out all about the work of director Walter Hill. It’s called A Walter Hill Film: Tragedy And Masculinity In The Films Of Walter Hill, and it’s out now. You can get it from mzs.press.

If you’re not familiar with his name, Walter Hill has directed two dozen movies, including Hard Times, The Driver, The Warriors, Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs., Extreme Prejudice, Streets of Fire, he directed the pilot episode of Deadwood, he wrote at least portions of the first three Alien movies, he’s done a ton of unbelievable work. He's got a new movie out this year called Dead For A Dollar. Most of his movies are very violent, in an action rather than a horror way, but they’re also a lot more thoughtful and progressive than you might expect them to be. There’s a tremendous amount going on in them in terms of interrogation of masculinity, interrogation of the violence of American culture, interrogation of race and sex and even capitalism, but it’s all couched in these really pulpy, violent, action-packed stories that sometimes start out feeling like morality plays but then go sharply sideways. I might compare him to directors like Sam Fuller or William Friedkin or Michael Mann, maybe even Paul Schrader, all of whose work I love, but his track record is better than any of them. I own more Walter Hill movies on DVD or Blu-Ray than movies by any of those other guys. So the minute I heard about this book, I knew I had to read it. And once I read it, I knew I wanted to talk to the author.

So I did. We had a really great conversation over this past weekend, and that’s what you’re going to hear on this episode. We talk about Walter Hill’s movies in all their aspects, from their politics to his use of music, which is relatively unique in Hollywood, as you’ll learn, and we also talk about the process of writing this book and about some other directors’ work, including Ridley and Tony Scott, Rob Zombie, Sam Fuller, Michael Mann and William Friedkin. It’s a long conversation, but I think you're really going to enjoy it. 

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:

The Blasters, "One Bad Stud" (from Streets of Fire)

The Bus Boys, “Boys Are Back In Town” (from 48 Hrs.)

I have said two things all season long. The first is that we’re going to be exploring a single topic for ten episodes, and that topic is fusion. But the second thing I’ve been saying is that what I’m talking about when I say the word fusion isn’t a style or a genre, but a state of mind. It’s not what you play, it’s how you approach music-making.

In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people typically think of as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that more or less starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and branches out to include Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report. But my version of that continuum also includes early Seventies Santana, it includes the Fania All Stars collaborating with Jan Hammer and Billy Cobham, it includes adventurous funk and R&B fusion, like P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players and Slave, and it includes jazz-funk acts like Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and George Duke.

Vernon Reid is a guitarist who was born in England but grew up in New York. He’s best known as the leader of Living Colour, and one of the co-founders of the Black Rock Coalition along with the late writer Greg Tate, but he’s got a long and varied discography that encompasses solo material, duo and trio work with other guitarists like Bill Frisell, David Torn and Elliot Sharp, and guest appearances with a ton of groups from Public Enemy to the Rollins Band, Mick Jagger, Janet Jackson, Mariah Carey, Santana, and many, many more. His solo album Mistaken Identity from 1996 is the only album to carry co-producer credits from Prince Paul and Teo Macero. Back in 2012, he made an album with a group called Spectrum Road which featured John Medeski on keyboards, Jack Bruce on bass, and Cindy Blackman Santana on drums — it was conceptually a tribute to Tony Williams Lifetime, but it’s very much its own thing as well, so definitely check that out.

Reid got his start, though, with drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson’s band the Decoding Society. He played guitar, banjo, and guitar synth with that group, which had two bassists: Melvin Gibbs, who was on this podcast a couple of years ago, and Reverend Bruce Johnson, and then some horn players, mostly Zane Massey on saxophones and Henry Scott on trumpet. It’s high-energy music that’s also really melodic in a kind of post-Prime Time way — jazz, funk, rock, Texas blues and West African music all swirled together and thrown straight at your face at a hundred miles an hour. Their albums Nasty, Street Priest, Mandance, Barbeque Dog, Montreux Jazz Festival and Earned Dreams are all incredible. They’re all out of print right now, too, but some of them are on streaming services, so dig up whatever you can. 

Reid has a new record out with the group Free Form Funky Freqs, a trio with bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma, who’s also been on this podcast before, and drummer Calvin Weston, and as he explains in this conversation, it’s full-on improv, starting from zero every time they play together, and because it’s so limited – no rehearsals, no soundchecks with all three members – they know exactly how many times they’ve played together. The album represents their 73rd encounter. It’s called Hymn Of The 3rd Galaxy, sort of a tribute to Return To Forever there, who had an album called Hymn Of The Seventh Galaxy, and you’ll hear a little bit of the music late in the podcast. 

I think you’ll really enjoy this episode. I’ve been a fan of Vernon Reid’s music for about 35 years. The first Living Colour album came out when I was in high school, and I saw them play on the first Lollapalooza festival in the summer of 1991. And I interviewed him once before, about 10 years ago, when he was doing a multimedia presentation called Artificial Africa. So in this conversation, we talk about his work with the Decoding Society, about the Free Form Funky Freqs, about the whole wave of guitarists who came up at the same time he did, including Michael Gregory Jackson and Kelvyn Bell and Jean-Paul Bourelly and Brandon Ross, as well as older players like James "Blood" Ulmer and Pete Cosey and Sonny Sharrock… we talk about a lot of things, and I’m just gonna end this introduction here, so you can dive in.

MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE:

Living Colour, “WTFF” (from Stain)

Ronald Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, “Iola” (from Mandance)

Vernon Reid & Bill Frisell, “Size 10 1/2 Sneaks” (from Smash & Scatteration)

Free Form Funky Freqs, “Outer Arm” (from Hymn of the 3rd Galaxy)

In previous episodes, we’ve talked about what people commonly understand as fusion, which drummer Lenny White, who appeared in episode two of this series, prefers to call jazz-rock. That’s the version that starts with Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and Tony Williams’ Lifetime and quickly branches out with Mahavishnu Orchestra and Return To Forever and Weather Report and on and on. But as we’ve continued the discussion, we’ve expanded the scope of inquiry to include adventurous funk and R&B fusion, which includes everything from P-Funk and Earth, Wind & Fire and the Ohio Players — and wow, do the Ohio Players deserve a place in the fusion conversation that they are very rarely granted — to Donald Byrd and Freddie Hubbard and especially George Duke.

Adam Rudolph is a fusion artist in about as broad a sense as you can imagine. He’s been a percussionist for close to 50 years, and should be much better known than he is. He’s been around since the early ’70s and has worked with everyone: Yusef Lateef, Fred Anderson, Don Cherry, Roscoe Mitchell, Pharoah Sanders, Sam Rivers, Wadada Leo Smith, Herbie Hancock, Maulawi, Foday Musa Suso, Hassan Hakmoun, Jon Hassell… he’s part of the Bill Laswell company of players, too, so he’s on a zillion records through that connection. Plus he leads two main groups of his own, Moving Pictures and the Go! Organic Orchestra, which have made many, many albums and even crossed over with each other a time or two.

Adam and I had a really fascinating conversation over the course of two phone calls. The impetus was Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef, a collaboration between him and reeds player Bennie Maupin that’s just been released. Bennie Maupin of course is a legend on his own — he played on Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew and On The Corner, he was a member of Marion Brown’s group in the 1960s, he was in Mwandishi and the Headhunters with Herbie Hancock, he played with Woody Shaw, and his own album from 1974, The Jewel In The Lotus, is an absolutely brilliant record that blends spiritual jazz with almost New Age ambient music. There’s really no other album like it; if you’ve never heard it, it’s a must-hear. So obviously Rudolph and I talk about Maupin, whom he’s worked with off and on for decades, but we also talk about Laswell and about Lateef and about the whole idea of world music and fusion-as-creative-mindset that I’ve been discussing with every artist I’ve interviewed for the podcast this year. We talk a lot about the philosophy that goes into bringing together musicians from all sorts of traditions, from all over the globe, and finding ways to make their ideas flow together. That’s what he does with Go! Organic Orchestra, the membership of which is completely open and the music of which is created through spontaneous conduction. So he was really the ideal person to talk about all this stuff with. 

I think you’ll come away from this episode with a lot to think about. I know I did. And I hope you enjoy listening to it. All the music you’ll hear, by the way, comes from Symphonic Tone Poem For Brother Yusef.