And yes, they can finish each other’s sentences. As I experienced when I spoke with them last week. Charlap was in New York finishing the second of two consecutive weeks at the Village Vanguard. Bridgewater was at her home. They will be performing together in Los Angeles on Friday night to open the 2023-2024 CAP UCLA season at Royce Hall. If you love jazz piano and jazz vocals, you owe it to yourself to check out this concert.

Rather than follow a traditional format of questions and answers, for this interview I will allow Bridgewater & Charlap to do their own performance of themes and variations on the concept of musical partnerships. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview with Bridgewater & Charlap, please go to our YouTube channel.

The key to a good musical partnership is…

Bridgewater: …being open and listening to each other; keeping that line of communication going. It’s no different, I don’t think, than in a relationship without the music, but I think that’s the most important thing. Keeping your ears open and your mind open to receive. And in my case, all of this beautiful musical information from Bill Charlap. 

Charlap: Well, the same is happening to me. There’s all kinds of beautiful information coming to me from Dee Dee. It’s essentially listening first and foremost and chemistry and that we had right away. The chemistry continues to grow, but chemistry, just like any relationship, sometimes you just catch on fire right away and that’s how it is with us.

Bridgewater: It was the first step when we came together. When I approached Bill with this idea I just started calling out tunes and Bill started playing them and then we were putting keys on them. And before we knew it, we had amassed something like 50 songs easily.

Charlap: And there’s plenty more that I’m certain that could just happen. We may choose songs beforehand and say, let’s do these ones, but it could change at any moment. 

Bridgewater: We’ve kind of narrowed the song selections down to some songs that we really feel comfortable with. We’ve kind of worked out, without even saying it, kinds of arrangements in that there’s a beginning and ending and Bill puts some some special little tags on phrases and then I’ll pick those up. We have unspoken arrangements, don’t we, Bill? 

Charlap: I think so. But they can also change on a dime. Both could change on a dime. It’s not necessarily me setting a tempo or you setting a tempo. It could be both of us. Either one of us could take the reins at any point. In fact, that’s the beauty of it. It’s a true collaboration. It’s a true partnership. She accompanies me, too. Were accompanying each other in a sense.

Bridgewater: I don’t know of any vocal piano duo that can do what we do. 

Charlap: It’s great trust. That’s an important word. But beyond that, Dee Dee is such a great storyteller. That’s what [lyricist] Alan Bergman said the first time he heard her. He said she is the storyteller. So there is that. Then there’s Dee Dee Bridgewater the musician. Perfect time, perfect instincts. The ability to hear harmonically exactly what’s going on. The instincts. But it’s beyond telling the story. And it’s beyond the music. It’s all of those things.

Bridgewater: I just saw that that extraordinary documentary, Zero Gravity. So wonderful. Oh, my goodness. I’ve seen it twice. It’s so inspirational. 

Charlap: It’s a knockout. 

Bridgewater: Listening to Herbie [Hancock] talk about the duo that that he had with Wayne [Shorter] I was really struck. I said, Oh, okay, this is where we’re coming from. Except I remember Herbie saying that he felt like Wayne was the master and he was the student and that he just paid attention. I just I feel in a lot of ways that Bill is is such a master with his music and what he does that it would behoove me to pay attention and to listen because we feed off of each other. This is where the inspiration comes from.

Charlap: One can’t hold the other at bay. We jump into the deep end of the pool together at the same time. It’s not sometimes one washes and one dries, one leads and one follows. It changes all the time. It’s in balance. And it’s a dance. it’s also a palette. It’s like a canvas. It’s an emotional canvas, a story canvas. It has humor. It has depth, of course, with the lyrics and the storytelling. There are layers to all of the lyrics, so it’s not always exactly what every word is, too. It might be something else. All of that.

Bridgewater: Bill knows the lyrics. Bill knows all the lyrics. There have been moments where I go up on a word and he just quietly inserts the word that I’m searching for in that moment. I have never worked with a musician who knows every lyric and the stories behind how they came about. This is extraordinary.

Charlap: I’m playing 50% lyrics and 50% music there. They’re wedded to each other. They’re equal partners.

Bridgewater: Yes, but you are unique in that. What can be said about this duo and the beauty of it is because you just have these two sounds coming at you. We are able to dig deeper into the song, into its meaning; exploring the melody more than would be possible, even if it’s Bill’s magnificent trio. We broke that puppy down to just the two of us. That was really the moment. So I think we have this beautiful relationship now. It just tells its own story and it just amplified the uniqueness of it.

Charlap: I must tell when she first called me and said it would be great to do some stuff together. Of course I would love to do that, but I said, “Well, that would be wonderful if you want to do that with the trio.” And she said, “No, I want to do it as a duo.” And I thought, Wow, now that’s special. And that’s great risk. That was great courage. I’ll never forget that first gig.

Bridgewater: I felt naked and I said that to the audience. I said, I feel completely exposed. Nowhere to hide. I remember running around the piano. 

Charlap: It was that feeling of what’s this? This is working. I don’t feel naked. In fact, if I do, I feel very comfortable in it. It has made something that’s really uniquely of itself and a place that is a center that so many things can grow out of. It’s all about exactly being yourself in this music or in any art. So that’s where we’re going to shine the most. 

Bridgewater: Of course, we’re different and our backgrounds are different and all of that. I know that people were really surprised and still are surprised to hear that the two of us are working together and then to experience it and go come back and go, what is that? That was amazing. I think it is the fact that we are different and we are bringing our individual experiences into this duo is the thing that makes it so magical. And there has to be some sort of similarity between the two of us or it just wouldn’t work. I feel like Bill and I are both very adventurous musical spirits and we’re ready to go anywhere.

Charlap: That’s really nice. 

Bridgewater: Something else that that has happened with Bill and I as we’ve gotten more and more comfortable with each other is the the clowning and the having fun. The moments where it’s silly. I think for people to see that with the two of us they’re kind of like, wow, this is different. Like break out in our whistle, do our little whistle things and when I’ll come around behind the piano bench and have my hands on his shoulders and be doing stuff.

Charlap: Well, it’s supposed to be fun and we’re having lots of fun. Kids in the sandbox.

Bridgewater: Exactly. 

Charlap: Would you ever want to lose that finger paint?

Bridgewater: Go play. Yes. 

Charlap: Don’t be afraid to get messy.

Bridgewater: Exactly. Exactly.

And play they do. Beautifully.

To see the full interview with Bridgewater & Charlap (including a very passionate discussion of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” please go here.

Main Photo: Bill Charlap and Dee Dee Bridgewater (Photo by Todd Rosenberg/Courtesy CAP UCLA)

The post Bo23: Bridgewater & Charlap Are Musical Partners appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

If you ask most people under the age of 50 who Billy Strayhorn was they will probably look at you with a blank face. Composer and musician Marlon Martinez, well under that age, would be able to tell you more about Strayhorn that you could possibly imagine. Unlike many of his peers, Martinez took an early interest in jazz.

“I was in middle school and I gravitated towards big band jazz,” he told me. “My parents knew that I was interested in it, so they bought me a lot of compilation CDs.” Remember compact discs?

Any good compilation of big band jazz was certain to include the music and recordings of Duke Ellington. But as Martinez kept listening he discovered something he couldn’t quite figure out at first.

“As the years went by and as I listened more and more to Duke Ellington, I started picking up on compositions that really resonated with me,” he revealed. “You know, I didn’t know at the time that those particular compositions were Billy Strayhorn’s compositions: Isfahan, Chelsea Bridge, Clementine, all these other compositions. I was assuming it was just Duke Ellington’s compositions and his music.”

It took a few documentaries hearing Strayhorn’s name regularly mentioned with Ellington’s and for Martinez to start digging deeper. His studies in music provided some clarity about the music he’d been listening to and the help of a teacher pointed Martinez in a direction that would change his life.

“I went back to Duke Ellington and I listened to The Nutcracker Suite, Such Sweet Thunder and other orchestral suites. I heard these compositions again. My ears had developed so much through school that I started to pick up on harmonies and chords and melodies that I really liked and these particular pieces sound a little different from Duke’s pieces. One of my orchestration teachers, Joey Sellers, let me borrow his copy of David Hajdu’s Lush Life book. I read that and fell in love with Billy Strayhorn right then and there.”

Where it went is impressive. Through Colburn Conservatory of Music, where he went to school, Martinez created an eight-part video series called Ever Up And Onward: A Tribute to Billy Strayhorn. It’s an impressive series of videos that cover multiple aspects of Strayhorn’s life and music.

On January 16th, Martinez will release an album with his Marlonious Jazz Orchestra entitled Marlonious/Strayhorn – a combination of Strayhorn’s songs (using the composer’s original charts) and originals written by Martinez. They will be performing selections from that record on December 7th at the Clive Davis Theatre at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.

When asked how he differentiated between what was written by Ellington and what Strayhorn had composed, he didn’t hesitate.

“Billy Strayhorn has a legato melodic sensibility that I feel is not in Duke Ellington’s music as much,” he offered. “Strayhorn has that element. He also has harmonic elements that aren’t really characteristic of Duke Ellington, like his frequent use of melodic minor or minor 11 chords instead of your minor seven or the half diminished chord. There’s also a tinge of sadness in Strayhorn’s music that separates him from Duke Ellington. That does not mean that Duke Ellington is not deep, but they’re just both so deep in their own way. Billy Strayhorn has that emotional content in there.”

Strayhorn was an anomaly for his time. He was an openly gay Black American. He came out before the expression existed. That emotional content that Martinez spoke about is nowhere more pronounced than in the song Lush Life, a song Strayhorn wrote as a teenager.

“It’s more like a poem. The music is set to a poem. It has more of a classical sense to it. I think it’s rhapsodic. It has a different kind of flow from the regular song styles at the time. Lush Life has those twists and turns that’s usually going to be hard to interpret. Lyrically I think it’s very sophisticated; very mature lyrics.”

It’s a classic song that has been recorded by a who’s who of popular and jazz music: Nat King Cole, John Coltrane, Ella Fitzgerald, Lady Gaga, Johnny Hartman, Bettye LaVette, Frank Sinatra, Donna Summer, Sarah Vaughan and more. Perhaps the most surprising rendition of the song is the one recording Strayhorn made of this notoriously challenging and profoundly emotional song.

“It’s faster. He has a theatrical take to Lush Life. I think that makes a lot of sense because Strayhorn was so inspired by musical theater. It seems like something that is like a staged song. Something where you would have choreography, you’d have acting, you’d have a bit of singing. I feel like that’s kind of the narrative in which Strayhorn wrote Lush Life.”

As passionate as Martinez is about Strayhorn, he also knew he has to create a link between the music he writes and the music he loves – while still maintaining his own sound and vision.

“I find my music is very much centered in the rich tradition of big band writing and the styles from the forties, fifties and sixties. But played in a contemporary way, in a contemporary context. What I seek to do, even to this day with all my projects, is to show how Billy Strayhorn has inspired my writing. I wanted to pick Strayhorn repertoire that covers many areas of his style or many of the styles that he has. Then sprinkle in some of my compositions to be more of a commentary on Billy Strayhorn’s writing.

“This album will be the first big band album that I’ve produced. I think it’s wise to showcase some of my work as well. This is his world of writing and then here’s my writing. It moved me to do these compositions this particular way. So I think that is definitely carrying the torch and then passing it on to the listener.”

Martinez is under no illusion that the music he loves and the music he writes is not the type of music you find topping the charts today.

“I think the main challenge is showing people that these chords and this type of instrumentation isn’t old. It’s not a thing of the past or a memory. I’m not trying to be a cover band and I’m not trying to be a cover band in the way I write music either. I feel that there’s a stigma around jazz and big band music that needs to be broken. The challenge is how do you make something that’s genuinely what you want to write and not deter people from thinking, ‘Oh, it’s sounds like In the Mood or Take the A-Train.’ I haven’t found the big answer here yet, but I think the fact that I’m writing this music makes it appealing to people because I’m a young musician, a young musician of color. I’m writing this music dedicated to the people in the past and presenting it today. I think the younger generation coming after me they’re going to appreciate it, too.”

Of course Martinez could just follow Strayhorn’s own philosophy: “If you want something hard enough, it just gets done.”

“I was thinking about that quote literally yesterday. That’s always driven me,whether it’s through finding venues and convincing people that this is a band that needs to be heard and contracting musicians and convincing them that this music will be fun and it will be something that you’ll want to play with your your friends in the section. I don’t have to do this kind of music. I don’t have to be a big band composer at this time and be successful at it. There are so many other avenues that I could take, but I love it so much that I’m going to see to it that I do this for the rest of my life.”

Which, of course, sounds like Martinez does have to do this kind of music.

“I do because I have the passion for it. Hypothetically I can say I’ll do the other things that I like to do, like play in symphony orchestras. I can do that and then retire off that and whatever. I find joy in doing that. I find joy in being a sideman on bass for someone else. I can write all kinds of music, but I have the urge and the itch to just write big band music and direct big bands. So that’s what I’m going to do.”

To see the full interview with Marlon Martinez, please go here.

Main photo: Marlon Martinez (Photo by Imran Stephen/Courtesy MarlonMartinezMusic.com)

The post Marlon Martinez Loves Big Band Music appeared first on Cultural Attaché.

Legendary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane only ever recorded with one vocalist: baritone Johnny Hartman. Their 1963 album, simply titled John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, is considered an essential jazz album. Only six songs are on the album which runs just over 30 minutes. Nonetheless, it is a classic. On June 15th, saxophonist Ted Nash is going to celebrate that album in a show at Chelsea Table + Stage in New York.

Nash is an innovative musician who composes much of the work he plays. He’s a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. That ensemble has recorded and performed Nash’s work. He’s a two-time Grammy Award winner and his most recent album was last year’s Transformation: Personal Stories of Change, Acceptance and Evolution.

Joining Nash for this show is baritone Tyreek McDole with bassist Ben Allison, Isaiah J. Thompson on piano and drummer Matt Wilson. Last December I spoke with Nash about the significance of this album and his approach to performing it live. The show was scheduled for early in 2022, but was postponed. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity.

John Coltrane is quoted as having said, “I’ve found you’ve got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.” What will be your approach to looking back on this classic collaboration between John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman?

Well, that’s a good question. I love the recording and I’ve listened to parts of it so many times over the years; as a jazz musician and someone who is it improviser, because that’s largely what makes jazz so special. We’re always looking for a way to put our stamp on something. We tend not to want to do it like the original because what’s the point? These artists were masters and geniuses. For us to say, “Well, I can do what they did” it kind of misses the point. We love the music so much so we tend to want to play them at some point during our life.

I think this record, which it’s all standards, what makes it so incredibly unique are the two artists, of course, Johnny Hartman and Coltrane, and their incredible commitment to melody and the way they phrased the melodies and with such expression. My goal to do this is not try to figure out a complete different way to do it. My feeling is to try to embrace it for what it is – almost a recreation of it. People now are more modern and play differently. But to find ways to respect this original project by presenting it close to what it is, that’s what I want to do. I want to embrace it.

What do you think was so special about this collaboration that these two men had at this given moment in time? 

I think both the artists featured here were really at the height of their of their expression. Coltrane, of course, went on to continue to develop as a composer and as an improviser in different directions from this. But I think that it was magical. You can’t really explain things that are magical. They just happen. I read somewhere that there was talk of Mel Torme being the collaborator with Coltrane and Coltrane, said, “No, there’s this guy, Johnny Hartman, who is really singing great for me.” It’s like two great artists that come together and it just created its own thing. I don’t think even if they had gotten together later that they could have recreated the feeling and the spirituality behind the sound of this of this recording.

Do you think Hartman is overlooked as an artist? 

I think he is. I can’t tell you why it is that we know other artists more like, let’s say, Tony Bennett or or Frank Sinatra. Why do you know Clifford Brown more than Booker Little? It could be something personal, it could be something about choices that they made. I have no idea. I do know that he’s got an incredibly deep and rich beautiful voice that makes you feel good.

The album contains what my favorite song of all time, which is Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life. I had the privilege of talking to Betty LaVette. She told me that she could spend her whole life performing that song and never feel like she got it right. Now you’re working with someone who is closer in age to Billy Strayhorn, who was 16 when he wrote the song. What are your hopes are for what your collaboration with Tyreek McDole will be and what you as somebody who’s further down the line in your career and he, who’s more a newbie in his career, are going to bring to this challenging, beautiful song? 

It’s probably one of the greatest songs ever written. I just have to say that. It’s humbling that it was written by somebody so young and so attuned to social and human characteristics and qualities to be able to talk like that in a song. It’s always a reminder that there’s depth in people at any age.

Getting off your question a little bit, but it’s interesting that the words tend to fall second place to the melody and harmony for a lot of horn players, myself included. I always tell people they should learn the song and the lyrics because it’ll give you some insight into what the song is about and maybe you’ll play it differently as a result. I’ve heard, of course, the lyrics to Lush Life. I’ve read and heard and listened to and thought about it a lot, but a lot of these songs I haven’t. This is a learning experience for me at my age. I’m hoping that with Tyreek will find that place inside of himself, even as a youngster, to bring something of humanity to these songs.

You’ve gotten so much attention for your own compositions, why this project now?

Coltrane continues to be an incredible inspiration and an influence on people. When you’re younger you’re trying to figure out ways to copy his style and copy his notes, copy his sort of expression. And then at a certain point you’re like, I can’t do this anymore. I have to try to find my voice. So you run away from Coltrane. You spend your life running away from Coltrane, right? Then here comes a project where I have license now to play something similar to Coltrane. That’s part of what I’m looking forward to on this gig is to kind of try to find Coltrane, but not to the notes that we do when we’re younger. In this case I want to try to find the spirituality behind Coltrane’s playing and bring it to this gig. In other words, even if I’m not kind of mocking or copying him, I want to copy the feeling that he had back at this time because that’s what’s truly sticks out.

All images of Ted Nash Courtesy Chelsea Table + Stage

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Not many singers who have a hit song at the age of sixteen are still performing at the age of 68. Even fewer still could suffer the incredible highs and lows that Bettye LaVette has experienced and still be, as her new album is titled, Thankful N’ Thoughtful. On Saturday at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, the resilient, big-voiced soul singer will perform a selection of songs from her five-decade career.

“My Man – He’s a Lovin’ Man” was a hit for LaVette in 1962 when she was a teenager from Detroit. Her personal and professional lives careened wildly for the next forty years. She followed that with popular singles like “Let Me Down Easy” in 1965 and “He Made a Woman Out Of Me” in 1969, but she never broke big the way Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross did. Battles with alcohol and drugs followed; rollercoaster relationships with other artists, producers, pimps, and drug dealers didn’t help. Instead of living in the limelight, LaVette found herself struggling to make ends meet.

Things started to turn in 2005 when punk-centric label ANTI- Records “rediscovered” LaVette and began releasing new recordings starting with I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise. Her fan base expanded and she found herself with two Grammy Award nominations. In 2008, LaVette was invited to perform “Love Reign O’er Me” for Roger Daltrey and Pete Townsend at The Kennedy Center Honors. Despite all these ups and downs, or maybe because of them, LaVette remains brutally honest. “It’s a business always designed for the youth but respectful for the elderly or people with seniority,” she says while sipping a glass of champagne the day before her 68th birthday. “All they are doing in the business is acknowledging me, but it isn’t opening up to me so I can get to anyone else. I know more musicians than I’ve ever known in my entire life. It’s happening with me not happening to me.”

On Thankful N’ Thoughtful LaVette sings songs by Sly & The Family Stone, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Neil Young, and others. She explains her selection process: “It depends, baby, on what reason you are choosing them. I haven’t been able to figure out what sells. When I like a song, I sing it. My career wasn’t working so at some point I had to decide: Can I not sing because I’m not in favor with these people? Or have they not found me? I realized I couldn’t depend on the public to tell me.”

Her favorite song is Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life.” “I’ve spent a lot of time on it,” La Vette says. “My manager used it as a tool to terrorize me, especially when one of my records sold 25,000 copies. He’d say ‘There are 25,000 more people who know you can’t sing.’ He held it out to me as a bar to reach for a woman with a voice and a big booty. He said, ‘You may never be a star, but you can sing for the rest of your life and make money at it. But you have to be good and you have to know a lot of songs and you may not have one hit record.’ I took great pride in learning to sing ‘Lush Life.’”

When asked what she plans to perform at The Broad she replies, “I don’t know. I have so much to do before that. I’ll get there and see. We have a basic structure. Ten years ago it was a trying proposition. Now I have enough songs I can do whatever the venue calls for. I’m doing something from all five decades of my 50 plus year career.”

In her autobiography, A Woman Like Me, LaVette tells her story with little regard for vanity or ego. When off-stage, she lives with her husband in New Jersey. “I come up here to be very quiet right now. I started so young. I’m so many different things. My grandchildren are used to me being high. They weren’t used to me being on the stage until just ten years ago. They just knew their grandmother sang. When my entire ‘yesterday’ was revealed, they became my staunchest fans. They don’t think I’m Betty LaVette. They think it’s their grandmother who owns Bettye LaVette.”

Having survived over 50 years in the business, is she thinking about her 60th anniversary? “I can’t imagine. I hope by my 60th anniversary in this business I will make a third step. The first was in 1962 signing to Atlantic. The second was with my new label. I need to make another step. I want to be playing venues like the Carlyle and appearing in performing arts theatres. That’s all I’d wish for for the 60th year.”

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