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FEATURING Kandace Springs James Carter Organ Trio James Francies

BLUE NOTE RECORDS 80TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATIONTHE STATE OF JAZZ 2019

Cullen Theater, Wortham Theater Center

SAT 8 PM NOV 2

Kandace Springs, voice, keysConnor Parks, drumsChris Gaskell, bass

James Carter, saxophoneGerard Gibbs, organAlex White, drums

Selections to be announced from the stage Tonight’s concert will include one 20-minute intermission.

7:15 pm Pre-concert conversation with James Carter, James Francies and jazz educator Robert Morgan

James Francies, pianoMax Gerl, bassJeremy Dutton, drums

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Ask anyone with a minimal familiarity of history what the year 1939 is most often remembered for and they will probably tell you that it is the year World War II broke out in Europe, which qualifies it as one of the worst years in human history. But as saxophonist and multi-reeds player James Carter points out, 1939 was an auspicious year for jazz. It was the year that Coleman Hawkins recorded Body and Soul, which as Carter explains laid the blueprint for the modern jazz approach to the tenor saxophone. Carter also notes that 1939 was the year Charlie Parker first moved to New York and discovered a new alto saxophone sound and musical vocabulary that became known as bebop. And, most importantly for our purposes here, 1939 was the year that a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany named Alfred Lion, with financial backing from an American communist writer named Max Margulis, founded Blue Note Records in New York City. “That was thirty years before I was born,” Carter says “There are so many Blue Note recordings—Horace Silver… Dr. Lonnie Smith, The Turning Point, he recorded that the day before I was born… the later Leo Parker stuff… anything with Jimmy Smith and Stanley Turrentine… This is cook-out music. It’s the soundtrack of my life. Anything that came out of Rudy Van Gelder’s studio was magic, from Blue Trane on down.”Carter also refers to the iconic photos of the artists, many taken at Van Gelder’s New Jersey studio by Lion’s childhood friend Francis Wolff and incorporated into the cover art by graphic designer Reid Miles, as contributing to “that Blue Note vibe.” Now Carter is making his own contribution to the Blue Note vibe by headlining Blue Note Records’ 80th Birthday Celebration

tour. Carter is performing with his organ trio featuring Gerard Gibbs on Hammond B-3 and Alexander White on drums. The trio’s debut album on the label, Live from Newport Jazz, was released in August. Joining Carter on the tour are two younger artists signed to Blue Note, vocalist-keyboardist Kandace Springs and pianist-keyboardist James Francies. In the early years, Alfred Lion recorded the sort of traditional jazz and boogie-woogie piano he had heard as a young man in Berlin. The label’s first hit was Sidney Bechet’s recording of Summertime, still considered one of the definitive jazz performances of any era. With the encouragement of saxophonist Ike Quebec, Blue Note began recording modern jazz artists in the years after WWII. Thelonious Monk made his debut on the label in 1947, as did Art Blakey. Horace Silver, who remained with Blue Note for a quarter of a century, showed up in the early 1950s. Rudy Van Gelder became Blue Note’s chief engineer in 1953, and he opened his own studio in 1959. In 1956, Jimmy Smith became the label’s first artist to record a full-length 12-inch LP. By the 1960s, the label was cranking out jazz masterpieces—mostly centered on hard bop but also veering into the avant-garde—almost on a weekly basis, utilizing a stable of the best young black jazz artists of their generation playing on each other’s sessions. On June 14, 1965, Van Gelder engineered two classic albums on the same day—Wayne Shorter’s Et Cetera and Bobby Hutcherson’s Components, both featuring Herbie Hancock on piano and Joe Chambers on drums. Lion sold Blue Note to Liberty Records in 1965 and retired a couple years later. Liberty was in turn acquired by United Artists in 1969. Under the direction of George Butler, Blue Note made

the transition into the fusion era, releasing commercially successful albums by Donald Byrd and Ronnie Laws, among others. But when EMI bought United Artists in 1979, the label went dark until 1985, when it was reborn under the auspices of EMI Manhattan Records. In the ensuing decades, CEO Bruce Lundvall oversaw both an ambitious CD reissue series and signed notable new artists such as Dianne Reeves, Joe Lovano, John Scofield, Jason Moran and Norah Jones, whose 2002 debut album, Come Away With Me, sold more than 10 million copies to become by far the label’s biggest commercial success. After EMI was acquired by the Universal Music Group in 2012, noted producer and bassist Don Was took over as president of Blue Note. Under Was’ stewardship, Blue Note has maintained a balance between discovering and promoting a new generation of cutting-edge jazz artists such as Francies and vibraphonist Joel Ross, and putting out crossover-oriented projects such as Kandace Springs’ Indigo and Robert Glasper’s album Black Radio, which in 2012 won a Grammy for best R&B recording. The label has also brought back a few legendary survivors from its Sixties Golden Age including Wayne Shorter and Dr. Lonnie Smith, while keeping its vast archive available both in print and available digitally. Don Was is responsible for signing James Carter to Blue Note. Both Was and Carter are from Detroit, and in 2015 Was invited Carter to take part in Detroit Jazz City, a Blue Note benefit compilation album of new and old tracks. Needless to mention, Carter tore it up, as he usually does. “He does seem like a natural for the label,” says Was, “and this trio is a timeless Blue Note sound.” Both Gerard Gibbs, who has played with Carter since 2001, and Alexander White, who joined in 2015, still live in Detroit. Carter

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says he goes back and forth between his hometown and New York. Live From Newport Jazz consists of compositions by the Belgian-born gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt, who with violinist Stephane Grappelli co-led the Hot Club of France Quintet in Paris in the 1930s. Carter, who previously paid homage to Reinhardt on the 2000 album Chasin’ the Gypsy, traces his interest to a public radio program he used to listen to as a teenager called Jazz Yesterday. The program consisted mostly of big band music, but one night he heard something different; no horns, no drums, just guitars and violin, playing Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’. “It was charming yet hot at the same time,” he says. Carter turned on his cassette recorder but, as was common back in the day, the tape ran out before the announcer came on to tell him who he was listening to. Fifteen years later, Carter was on tour in The Netherlands. “We stopped at a gas station,” he recalls. “There was a carousel of tapes and CDs you could buy. One CD kept yelling out to me; Swinging with Django. I took it home and played it and I immediately went, ‘That’s it! That’s the same band!” A year or two later, Carter was on tour with opera singer Kathleen Battle, who was doing a jazz crossover tour. When Battle was late for a rehearsal, the musicians—Carter, pianist Cyrus Chestnut, bassist Christian McBride, guitarist Romero Lubambo, percussionist Cyro Baptista – had an opportunity to jam. “I started playing Nuages [one of Reinhardt’s best-loved compositions] out of nowhere. Romero said ‘I know that!’ And then it got real tasty. And that’s when Kathleen walked in. We looked at each other and said, ‘Damn. We’re going to do this.’” The result was Chasin’ the Gypsy, a remarkable album that featured Lubambo and Jay Berliner on guitars, Baptista on percussion, Carter’s cousin Regina Carter on violin and Carter playing tenor saxophone, bass

saxophone, soprano saxophone and f mezzo saxophone. Carter calls the approach he takes to Reinhardt’s music with his organ trio “Django Unchained,” meaning, he says, “unchained from the acoustic mellowness.” In addition to the obvious soul-jazz organ trio vibe, he throws in funk grooves, quotes from R&B tunes and squawking, free-jazz sax solos. He describes Live from Newport Jazz as his attempt “to give Gypsy jazz a ‘hood pass’.” Carter credits his musical eclecticism to his teacher, Donald Washington, who led a youth jazz ensemble called Bird-Trane-Sco-Now. Washington both taught him about the history of jazz and took him to see avant-garde artists such as the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the World Saxophone Quartet. “He said, ‘Always keep your ears and your eyes open for different things to interpret to bring out your individuality,” Carter told an interviewer for Bomb magazine in 1995. Seeing the World Saxophone Quartet—which at the time consisted of David Murray on tenor, Julius Hemphill and Oliver Lake on altos and Hamiett Bluett on baritone – was particularly life-changing because “it solidified the legitimacy of the saxophone. I could see myself in a situation such as that one.”In the early Nineties, as his career was just taking off, Carter was playing with both Lester Bowie and Wynton Marsalis, trumpet players at the opposite ends of the spectrum in the debate in jazz at the time about the primacy of upholding tradition vs. constant innovation. At the same time that he was channeling his Swing Era saxophone hero Don Byas in the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s movie Kansas City, he was performing and recording in real time with free-jazz stalwarts such as Bluiett and Hemphill. And in 2010, Carter realized his youthful fantasy by recording with the World Saxophone Quartet. “As my

teacher said, it’s just one continuum,” he told me. In addition to being conversant in virtually any era of jazz, ancient to the future, Carter also plays almost every wind instrument, from soprano sax to baritone sax, and from flute to bass clarinet. What’s more he plays each of them differently and yet sounds exactly like himself on all of them. Asked which instrument he started on, he gives a surprising answer: “The baroque recorder. It was an elementary school music rental program. They gave kids a recorder, which cost $2.50 at the time. That way they could see who lost interest and who was musically inclined. I went straight from baroque recorder to the saxophone.”At one point early in his education, Carter was about to quit playing music because he was so bored with the school curriculum. “All they wanted to teach us was ‘Hot Cross Buns’ and ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’,” he mutters. That’s when his older brother came to the rescue. Carter recalls the first time he heard Charlie Parker. “I was coming from Johnny Hodges with Duke Ellington, and also Grover Washington, people playing very sweetly. To listen to this album, to watch it rotate and know that this is possible, to go back and be the individual playing with that hard, bluesy, swinging approach, I was just floored. I looked at my instrument and said, ‘Dang, you can do that?’” Carter now collects vintage saxophones—‘horn shop beauties’ he calls them—including a 1920s model he is repairing that was owned by Chu Berry, who played with Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway. “If you’re in your right mind, your horns are going to talk to you,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘You haven’t played me in a while.’” He’s most likely bringing three with him to Houston; a tenor, alto and soprano. Carter has released 18 albums as a leader or co-leader going back to 1991, on labels ranging from the Japanese DIW label to Atlantic (which released Chasin’ the Gypsy), Columbia, Half Note

and EmArcy. But prior to Live from Newport Jazz, he had not released an album under his own name since At the Crossroads in 2011. He makes a point of noting that Impulse Records passed on his Django Unchained organ trio. In fact, he said it twice. But perhaps Blue Note is where he belonged all along. “Oh man,” he says. “As the label puts it, ‘The Finest in Jazz Since 1939.’ There’s history, legacy and longevity that goes with this label, and to be part of that in some fashion or form is a privilege and an honor.”Vocalist and pianist Kandace Springs grew up in Nashville, where her father, Scat Springs, was a respected session singer who instilled in her a love for great voices, from Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone to Luther Vandross and Eva Cassidy. She was signed to Blue Note after Don Was heard her sing Bonnie Raitt’s hit I Can’t Make You Love Me (produced by Was, coincidentally) at an audition at the Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood. Her debut album, Soul Eyes, was released in 2016, followed by the crossover-oriented Indigo in 2018. She says her next album, due out in early 2020, will be a tribute to her favorite female singers. Titled The Women Who Raised Me, and produced by Larry Klein ( Joni Mitchell’s ex-husband and the producer of several of her albums), it includes a duet with Norah Jones on Angel Eyes and guest appearances by saxophonists David Sanborn and Chris Potter, among others. James Francies is the latest pianist from Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts to make his mark on the international jazz scene. After graduating from HSPVA in 2013, he moved to New York to attend the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music. Since then, his profile has continued to rise, from tours and recordings with Jeff “Tain” Watts, Stefon Harris, Chris Potter, Pat Metheny and Marcus Miller to playing on Chance the Rapper’s huge hit No Problem and sitting in with the Roots on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. His debut album, Flight, was released on Blue Note in 2018 and garnered strong reviews. The New York Times called him “a pianist with liquid dynamism in his touch.” Francies observes that Blue Note has also been home to fellow pianists and HSPVA grads Jason Moran and Robert Glasper. “Just to follow in their footsteps, let alone in the footsteps of Herbie Hancock, Bud Powell and all these other artists who recorded for the label, it’s an honor,” he says. “And there’s a responsibility that comes with it, too.” Rick Mitchell

European Pastriessince 1990

Wedding Cakes • Birthday Cakes Party Trays

Mika Hasler Competition Foundation

11th Mika Hasler Competition

Sunday, January 12, 2020Duncan Hall, Rice University

First Prize: $10,000Second Prize: $5,000

Deadline for application: December 15, 2019

All instruments may applyAge: Under 23 by December 15, 2019Winners recital: Feb. 7, 2020 Duncan Hall, Rice UniversityApply online at: www.mikahaslercompetition.org