Soundcheck

Trumpeter, composer, and educator Wynton Marsalis is arguably the most famous jazz musician of our time – though few would actually argue the point. He’s won multiple Grammys and in 1997 became the first jazz composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for his piece Blood On The Fields, a work about two slaves and their difficult journey to freedom. Born into one of the great families of New Orleans jazz, Marsalis has been closely tied to New York, and particularly to Lincoln Center, since the late 80s. He is the longtime visionary force behind Jazz At Lincoln Center; and his work has included both diverse live performance projects and a deep, ongoing concern with education, especially with bringing jazz and classical music to children. 

In partnership with Gothamist and their Future NYC series, host John Schaefer consults with Wynton Marsalis as he considers arts possibilities in the after-times, touching on full participation and the ways to question institutional curation. Marsalis would like to see increased engagement with the arts - inviting folks to participate, creating the will to participate, and building community. Practically speaking, that might mean lowering ticket prices, offering classes and encouraging curiosity. Wynton Marsalis shares his ideas for this Soundcheck Podcast. 

Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) is hosting its first virtual free Summer Jazz Academy now through August 1. Students of any level (ages 12 and up) can go to jazz.org for more information. 

Cecile McLorin Salvant, Wynton, Nduduzo Makhatini and more heavy hitters are providing free classes throughout.

zYoung Fathers defies labels in its songs. A tapestry of electronic music, rock, pop, and R&B, the alternative hip-hop group crafts songs as unique as its multi-ethnic background, which spans Scottish and West African lineages. Producer 'G' Hastings and vocalists Alloysious Massaquoi and Kayus Bankole all met in Edinburgh, Scotland as teenagers, and later formed the band in 2008, named after the fact that each member has the namesake of their fathers, hence, Young Fathers.

But Young Fathers true breakout came six years later, in 2014, with its Mercury Prize-winning second record, Dead. On their 2015 record, White Men Are Black Men Too, the group pushed ahead with a status quo-challenging aesthetic and message. Young Fathers subverts conventional views on race with their unique, vocally layered sound of organized chaos. It's a winning sound and original point of view that has won over fans and critics alike. Young Fathers performed in-studio for the Soundcheck Podcast. (From the archives.)

Yasmin Williams reinvents the guitar with a dazzling array of two-handed techniques, hammering, bowing, and percussion effects – but all in the service of the music. Music that dances, and, in its own way, sings. Her next full-length album, Urban Driftwood, both a beautifully melodic and, of course, percussive affair, is due out in the fall of 2020. Yasmin Williams shares her latest songs without words – featuring all her multi-tasking limbs - remotely, from her home in Virginia. 

Robert Glasper draws together his parallel passions for hip hop and jazz on his 2012 release, Black Radio. In addition to his formal jazz training, the pianist has long navigated the nebulous territory between the two genres – working with artists like Q-Tip, Kanye West, and Erykah Badu. In 2012, The Robert Glasper Experiment (featuring Casey Benjamin, Derrick Hodge, and Chris Dave) joined us for a live set in the Greene Space with a special guest – “Black Radio” collaborator and Grammy-nominated R&B artist Bilal. (From the archives.)

The Weather Station's 2015 record Loyalty features eleven songs with that most laudable quality of sounding like they are being sung directly to the listener, and recorded in a small quiet room. Which is all the more remarkable for the fact that the album was actually made in a large tumbledown French chateau outside of Paris. But the intimacy captured on the record is no accident. It's the sound of The Weather Station principal Tamara Lindeman and just two multi-instrumentalist accomplices, who make every guitar flourish and drum rattle sound purposeful and in-its-place. The huge, hushed emotional terrain of the record is as sweeping and rolling as Lindeman's Canadian homeland, with songs like "Way It Is, Way It Could Be" inviting the listener like an open road. 

Setlist: "Shy Women", "Floodplain", "Way It Is, Way It Could Be"

Nostalgia permeates the blood running through Leon Bridges' debut album, Coming Home. It's unusual for a 25-year-old to be so plugged into the Golden Age of soul and R&B, but with an expansive online music education and an influential mother from the era, it's hard not to be. The Fort Worth native's music is haunted by Sam Cooke's swaying rhythms and Nat King Cole's smooth romance, yet Bridges doesn't get lost in wistfulness. 

The album outlines a world in vintage bass lines and delicate percussion. It's colored in by velvet vocals and vibrant horns ("Brown Skin Girl," "Smooth Sailin'"). Heartfelt songwriting carries a touching tribute to his mother in "Lisa Sawyer." Throughout, Bridges dusts off Golden Era motifs and brings them into the 21st century with radiance and fresh musicality. (First aired in 2015.)

Setlist: "Coming Home," "River"

Guitarist Kaki King is perhaps best-known for her virtuosic instrumental guitar compositions and extended technique, but she’s also written songs, chamber music, and film scores. She’s come up with innovations that change the nature of the guitar itself; she taps, she bends, she projects onto the guitar body, and now she has added a bridge called a Passerelle to her guitar. A Passerelle is a bridge that turns any regular six string guitar into a twelve note zither-like creation that can produce sounds reminiscent of the Japanese koto or Chinese guzheng, and sounds really cool when she bends the note.  

She uses the Passerelle on her new album Modern Yesterdays, made at the beginning of March in the year 2020, as the entire world changed. The album was perhaps not what she set out to make, but it is a guitar record with lots of sound design, influenced by the pandemic. Some of the pieces might also be related to her latest multimedia work, “Data Not Found” which involves projections onto a special guitar which, when certain notes are played, triggers certain images or visuals. (Coming soon, in the after-times.)

For this Soundcheck Podcast, Kaki King joins us to discuss Big Issues like getting COVID19, the mysterious creative process, and fingernail care. She also nerds out about her family of fretted instruments (guitars, modified guitars, high-strung guitar, harp guitar), and plays some new songs.  

Set list:

“Teek,” ”Puzzle Me You” “Doing the Wrong Thing”

"Teek"

"Puzzle Me You":

"Doing the Wrong Thing"

Trent Reznor is a thoughtful composer and meticulous sonic manipulator. With Nine Inch Nails, he has constructed ominous, seething and often abrasive songs and dense albums built upon infinite layers of sounds, invoking feelings of pain, rage and doom. And together with British composer, audio engineer, and longtime collaborator Atticus Ross, he has scored David Fincher's The Social Network (2010), The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) -- which won a Grammy, and in 2014, Gone Girl. For that film, their icy ambient music perfectly fits the story's unsettling mood, adding dissonance, and noise amid the gorgeous electronic synths and lush orchestrations. 

For this Soundcheck Podcast, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross reflect on how their musical chemistry translates onto the screen. Plus, they talk about the processes behind their ongoing collaborations with director David Fincher, and how their work with bands Nine Inch Nails and How To Destroy Angels informs and is informed by their film compositions. (Originally aired in 2014.)

Jake Blount is a singer, fiddler, banjo player, and scholar of old time American music –he’s especially interested in the deep roots of the African-American music of the southeast, where his own family is from. And given that this is Pride month, it’s probably worth mentioning he’s a board member of the group Bluegrass Pride as well. Jake has just released his first full-length album, called Spider Tales – a reference to Anansi, the West African trickster figure who takes the shape of a spider. The album is full of unusual old tunes as well as new takes on songs you might think you knew well. Jake joins us -remotely, of course-  to play a few of them for this edition of the Soundcheck Podcast. 

Set list: 

"Where Did You Sleep Last Night":"We’re Going to Hunt the Buffalo":  "Roustabout": 

Spider Tales by Jake Blount

In the early 1970's, veteran Dallas gospel singer Rev. Gean West and his brother Tommie formed The Relatives, a band that pulled together traditional gospel and soul with psychedelia and funk and earned a reputation for their fiery live shows. While the band toured nationally, they recorded only three singles, apparently pressing small batches of 45's that never seemed to get any traction outside of North Texas. And unfortunately after recording their final session with legendary engineer Phil York in 1975, the band disbanded in 1980.

Still, miraculously, The Relatives' music lived on, and those singles, along with that previously unreleased session, were compiled on the 2009 anthology, Don’t Let Me Fall. That release helped bring The Relatives back together and led to their 2013 album, The Electric Word (Yep Roc), which was The Relatives' first recording in over 30 years. They lost two of their original members in 2016, and their 2016 release, Goodbye World, was the last recording to feature Rev. Gean West. Revisit this extraordinary live set, recorded in 2013, in The Greene Space.