Among the abundance on offer in this year's Earshot Jazz Festival lineup, two representations of the newest variations in form and genre can be heard in the work of these distinctly dissimilar luminaries. With a date in his current North American tour, Shabaka Hutchings' mining of jazz's cultural memory will be on full display next month at Town Hall. Richly explored in his previous projects and quartets over the course of the last decade, Hutchings' ensembles include Sons of Kemet, its splinter trio The Comet Is Coming, Melt Yourself Down, Afro-futurist outfit The Ancestors, and as a guest player with the legendary Sun Ra Arkestra. So there is possibly no better player in contemporary jazz more equipped to lead a quartet exploring the fringes of the territory once mapped out by postbop, Afrofuturist and spiritual jazz luminaries, Charles Mingus, Pharoah Sanders, and the aforementioned Sun Ra. His albums have found a home on Impulse!, the legendary and influential American jazz label that was home to Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Freddie Hubbard, and Bill Evans at the peak of their 1960's output. This adds another weighty dimension to Hutchings’ relationship with American jazz, placing him among the players whose legacy he’s endeavoring to subvert, deconstruct, and expound upon. All of which, Hutchings enthusiastically details in his interview for The Guardian, "History Needs to Be Set Alight: Shabaka Hutchings on the Radical Power of Jazz". Following these interviews, he performed a series of concerts "soaring to unfettered heights" on international stages, and in the years since has "shifted towards the meditative", after stepping away from the saxophone in 2023. This maven of "The New British Jazz Explosion" has been reassessing his art, exploring the gentler timbres of the Japanese shakuhachi on his most recent solo endeavor, "Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace", an elegant rebirth in which, "The Saxophone Master Shabaka Hutchings is on a Fresh Journey: Flutes.".
Embodied by the Mats Eilertsen Trio, Thomas Strønen, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble, Tord Gustavsen Trio, Keith Jarrett's work with Jan Garbarek, and the quartet led by the late Tomasz Stanko, such players and ensembles comprise a corpus of the European-centric jazz which characterizes "The ECM Sound". The significance of the ECM label to the extended international jazz community, and its five decades of encompassing broad tangents both inside and outside of jazz, classical, avant-garde improvisation, and chamber music experimentation can't be overstated. Co-founded by producer Manfred Eicher, Manfred Scheffner and Karl Egger in Munich in 1969, the label's prestige has been meticulously constructed over five decades of "The Pristine Empire of ECM" bearing their distinctly refined auditory qualities and visual aesthetic. Dana Jennings "ECM: CDs Know that Ears Have Eyes" for the New York Times mines ECM's ensuing decades, focusing specifically on the imprint's meeting of sound, material, image and its half-century of "Manfred Eicher's Search for the Sublime". The ECM sound has also come to be epitomized by a new generation of players, outside of the Scandinavian scenes that initially defined it. Such is the case of the prolific pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer, who was rewarded Downbeat's 2015 Artist of the Year, and profiled by the New York Times in their "DNA of a Polymath, Restlessly Mutating". His newest trio alongside bassist Linda May Han Oh, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, developed its intuitive real-time exchanges in performances like those on the current tour, wherein "Vijay Iyer Wants to be Heard Loud and Clear" in Earshot Jazz Festival's night at Nordstrom Recital Hall. The reviews in the pages of The Guardian describe their synergy as a "an object lesson in music for the heart, head, and feet", which often sounds like displaced blues in its reflection of Miles Davis' postbop bands from the 1960s, or even their contemporaries in The Bad Plus, as they "push jazz into the future", through exercises as "a trio of rare intuition", in improvisations that sound simultaneously inside and outside the harmonies. Its in these two recent recordings for ECM, "Uneasy", and this year's "Compassion", they have established that, "Vijay Iyer’s New Trio Is a Natural Fit". Photo credit: Fadi Kheir
