Latest news with #InaSentimentalMood
Boston Globe
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
The BSO takes ‘Giant Steps' with John Coltrane tribute by Terence Blanchard and Carlos Simon
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In the past, Blanchard has performed his original music a handful of times alongside both the Boston Pops and his own ensembles, at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. But this time around, he's playing with the BSO at the invitation of composer chair Advertisement 'He's a legend in his own right,' Simon said of Blanchard in a phone interview. 'I thought it would be amazing for him to join and be a part of this presentation, because he's incredible in terms of jazz, and he's very much a part of the legacy of what Coltrane represents, too.' Simon, the son of a pastor from Atlanta, also sees Coltrane as a personal inspiration. 'I love the way he experimented, and how his music really affected others, and how his life really influenced the music that he was writing,' Simon said. Portrait of musician Terence Blanchard at his home in New Orleans. Cedric Angeles The program includes several of the saxophonist's signature pieces arranged for orchestra, including the tremendously influential 'Giant Steps' and his hypnotic spin on Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'My Favorite Things.' The work of several arrangers, including Simon himself, is represented on the bill. The Washington, D.C.-based composer created orchestral versions of both 'In a Sentimental Mood,' which Coltrane performed on his collaborative album with the tune's composer, Duke Ellington; and the mournful 'Alabama,' composed in response to the 1963 Advertisement When listeners first hear Coltrane, Blanchard said, 'You get involved with the theoretical side of his playing, when you think about tunes like 'Countdown' and 'Giant Steps' and 'Moment's Notice.'' Other pieces, like 'Alabama' and 'A Love Supreme,' he continued, 'made me realize how conscious he was as a human being.' For a significant period, Coltrane struggled with both alcohol and intravenous drug use; his 'He allowed that to be the motivating factor in the rest of his life. You know, I'm always amazed when you see people who make those types of transformations, because it's not easy,' Blanchard said. 'Alabama' especially 'shows how in tune Coltrane was to the world,' Simon said. 'When you listen to that record, it has all the life and the struggles built into the music.' In addition to holding the composer chair position at the BSO, Simon is currently Advertisement Composer Carlos Simon speaks to an audience at Symphony Hall in 2023. Aram Boghosian Asked about the Kennedy Center over the phone, Simon said that he intends his music, such as his Grammy-nominated piece 'Requiem for the Enslaved,' to be 'a reflection of what's happening in the world, and not [be] apologetic about that, just completely unashamed and unafraid of what the outcome may be.' In short: 'I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.' Blanchard separately revealed that he'd been in preliminary talks to write something for the National Symphony Orchestra, and 'that's not happening now.' He counted several current and former connections at the center, including the As an artist, Blanchard said, 'you're always trying to have people reflect and think about current issues,' and in the present moment, doing that is 'paramount to the cause of being an artist.' That mission is a major reason why Blanchard thinks concerts like the Coltrane tribute are important. For older listeners, Coltrane's music 'helps them reflect and remember a time when civil rights were the things we were fighting for,' he said. At the same time, the trumpeter hopes younger audiences will 'do some homework about not only the music but the time that the music was created and what the country was like' — and in the end, that the next generation will 'want to raise the consciousness of the people who'll listen to their music." Advertisement BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Symphony Hall. March 21 and 22, 8 p.m. 617-266-1200, A.Z. Madonna can be reached at
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Michael Wollny Trio: Living Ghosts review
More than a century ago, jazz's early improvisers rarely strayed far from the secure consensus of a tune. That is, until the bebop revolutionaries of the 1940s started blowing impromptu ideas that often sounded better than the pop songs whose chords they borrowed. Post-1960s, free improvisation took themes and variations on epic, extemporised journeys that sometimes never returned to their starting point. Michael Wollny, the 46-year-old German pianist/composer, has long been familiar with the implications of that rapid evolution, and his powerful decade-old trio with David Bowie's Blackstar bassist Tim Lefebvre and punk-to-postbop drummer Eric Schaefer has become one of the world's most skilfully free-thinking contemporary jazz groups. Now comes the exceptional Living Ghosts, a live recording of one night on tour in Germany in 2024 that shows just why Wollny refers to the group's recent concerts as 'seances where the ghosts of the trio's songbook visit us at their will'. There's no setlist, no agreed arrangements or forethought about which tunes might be made to segue into each other or for how long. Two night-themed miniatures by Alban Berg and Paul Hindemith are recast in racing solo piano streams, bowed-bass sweeps, a tramping rock-drums pulse, and then flat-out postbop over Lefebvre's fast bass-walk. The harmonic implications (though only barely the tune) of Duke Ellington's In a Sentimental Mood give way to the lovely pop-song melody of Jon Brion's ballad Little Person. A warp-speed treatment of Nick Cave's Hand of God ascends to a tumult of mercurial piano runs over a marching drum pulse before hymnal harmonies turn it into Guillaume de Machaut's Lasse! A one-off rammed with surprises, but of the kind that bear plenty of repeated listening on what already sounds like a 2025 standout. Listen on Apple Music or on Spotify This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Tunisian oud star and composer Anouar Brahem is rejoined by old associates Dave Holland (bass) and Django Bates (piano) with eclectic cello luminary Anja Lechner on the all-original After the Last Sky (ECM). Lechner's rapturous long tones and Holland's darting counterpoint against Brahem's nimble urgency and Bates's attentive piano figures create a restlessly beautiful soundscape – deeply affected, as Brahem stresses, by the disaster of Gaza. The unique German/Afghan singer Simin Tander's The Wind (Jazzland Recordings), a mix of originals and Pashto and European traditionals, draws on her tender ballad delivery, wild, wordless improv and percussive exhalations, while Norwegian-Indian violinist Harpreet Bansal and electric bass and drums often kick up hard-grooving storms. And that idiosyncratically inventive UK pianist/composer Elliot Galvin is joined by bassist Ruth Goller, drummer Seb Rochford, Shabaka Hutchings and strings on The Ruin (Gearbox Records), a cyclical electro-acoustic work inspired by his early recordings on an old family piano, and morphed into a trip of typically quirky revelations.
