Moments of Truth
A feast of reading and listening for the weekend ahead.
Happy Friday — I hope you’ve been holding up and hanging in. I’m here with a brief dispatch today, mainly to share some recommendations. So this will be a more bulleted post than usual, I hope you don’t mind. Sometimes I feel like I need to grant myself permission to do that sort of thing.
Ella at The Coliseum
This morning, Verve announced the forthcoming release of a newly unearthed album by Ella Fitzgerald: The Moment of Truth: Ella at the Coliseum. It was recorded on June 30, 1967, and if you know anything about Ella’s timeline, that should perk you up. This point in time falls right in between the end of her Verve contract and the start of her Capitol era. Her relationship with Norman Granz was changing: he was no longer her record producer, though he still arranged her concerts and tours. This concert, in Oakland, featured her on a bill with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, the Oscar Peterson Trio, and an all-star combo with the likes of Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter.
I wrote about the new album for WRTI, which had a brief window of exclusivity on news of the release. So that’s where I’d steer you for a bit more context. Here is the concert opener and title track, “The Moment of Truth.” (More on that in the article.)
A valid point, of course, but there’s no dearth of Ella and Duke on record together — notably Ella & Duke At The Cote d’Azur, which was recorded in 1966, released as a double LP in ‘67, and assembled as a magnificent 8-CD set in 1998. This concert at the Oakland Coliseum actually fell between two similar Granz-produced extravaganzas in 1967 — at Carnegie Hall (March 26) and the Hollywood Bowl (July 1) — that yielded an album released after Ellington’s death as The Greatest Jazz Concert in the World.1
PRISM and Zenón
Also for WRTI, here is my interview with Miguel Zenón and Matthew Levy, in advance of two concerts in New York and Philadelphia. Levy is a tenor saxophonist and founding member of PRISM Quartet, a chamber ensemble of exceptional repute. Their relationship with Zenón goes back about a decade, and they’ve been regular collaborators since. These concerts will feature the world premiere of a piece titled “El Eco del Tambor (The Echo of the Drum),” which PRISM commissioned from Zenón.
In the interview, I was keen to talk about the congruence and dissonance between saxophonic approaches, when Zenón and PRISM work together. He and Levy are both wonderfully articulate on that point and much more. And Zenón, who of course has made a deep study of the Afro-Caribbean diasporic music, reflects on the specific inspiration behind this new piece. Here’s part of what he says about the title:
I had this image. Like when you get really close, you’re kind of envisioning everything; you get all the specific visuals of the drums, and the singers, and the dancers, and all those things. As you go farther and farther away, certain things disappear. But the drum is still there. If you go really far away, the last thing you’re going to hear is that drum in the distance — that echo of the drum, kind of still saying, “I’m here. I’m here. I’m here.”
Again, here’s the interview. I’m looking forward to the concert next week. If you’re in Philly and planning to come out, I hope you’ll say hello.
Ethan in The Nation
There’s a good chance that, as a reader of The Gig, you have already spent time with the Feb. 2025 cover story of The Nation, titled Jazz Off the Record. It’s about the wildly adventurous yet firmly rooted acoustic jazz made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, which has often been underexplored. The author is pianist and prolific Substacker
, who did a remarkable job both making an argument and setting a context for the general-interest reader.What sparked Ethan’s piece was the release of Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’, the incredible recent McCoy Tyner / Joe Henderson release, for which I wrote the lead liner essay. In case you’re new to The Gig, or were just busy when I originally posted it, here is what I had to say about that album last fall.
There’s so much to unpack in Ethan’s piece, and he’s doing even more unpacking himself, over at
, his corner of the ‘stack-iverse. It’s fun to read some of the backstory, including a deeply thoughtful series of exchanges with his editor, Shuja Haider. (Ethan is right, what a rare thing that is!) And it’s amusing to consider how this differently this piece might have been received had it come waving a flag for “Interstellar Hard Bop” or “Late Jazz” or any other term. I’m guilty of occasionally trotting out a new term myself,2 but they made the right call here.Where I diverge from Iverson is in his ultimate assessment of Forces of Nature. Noting that it’s “not a perfect record,” he advises: “Newcomers should bypass it, for now, and head straight to The Real McCoy instead.”
I am as big an admirer of The Real McCoy as anyone, and there’s no question that it’s the more legible and coherent statement. But I’ve learned, over many years, not to make pronouncements like this. There’s a kind of listener (probably many kinds) who would flip out over the take-no-prisoners intensity of Forces of Nature but have a more measured response to The Real McCoy (or Inner Urge, etc.). Maybe Ethan is making a calculated assumption about the sort of person who reads The Nation.
Which brings me back to the main point: Bravo to Ethan for bringing this music and this story to such a prominent mainstream outlet. That almost never happens anymore. And on a writerly note, it’s delightful to see musical explication that neither talks down to the reader nor assumes too much understanding. How often do we see writers toss around the term “modal jazz,” to the puzzlement of a lay reader? Here is how Ethan writes about Tyner’s use of fourth chords:
Lacking the note that would make a chord either major or minor, fourth chords have a mysterious stasis, refusing to commit to the system of tonality that defined European art music. The effect was both ancient and contemporary: a circle of stones, lit by fire, right next to a jet plane.
As a reminder, Ethan and I talked about his music, his writing, and the state of jazz criticism around this time last year. Here is Part 1 of our discussion:
Bruckner and Ben
One day last summer, Ethan Iverson and I exchanged text messages about the bicentennial of the Austrian symphonic composer Anton Bruckner. I had published an interview at WRTI with a leading Bruckner scholar named Benjamin Korstvedt, which took Ethan slightly aback. He didn’t know me as the type to weigh in on Bruckner — and to be fair, it’s not something I would have done before this gig.
As it happens, I had more to say, and so did Korstvedt. After reading his superb scholarly book Bruckner’s Fourth: The Biography of a Symphony, I wrote this article for the January issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine at Penn. Some of the things I just praised about Ethan’s article — clarity, accessibility, a balance of pointed analysis and explanatory context — were the very qualities I sought to evoke with this piece. It was a balancing act and a kind of puzzle. If you harbor any interest in symphonic music and/or cultural theory, I hope you’ll check it out.
The March 26, 1967 Carnegie concert is notable as the debut performance of “Blood Count,” the Billy Strayhorn song, which composed in the hospital. Strayhorn died two months later. “Blood Count” made its proper debut on record the following year, on Side A of Ellington’s tender tribute ...And His Mother Called Him Bill.
Ahem. “Viral jazz” was not my coinage, but I bear responsibility for mainstreaming the term. “Soft Radicals” is all me. “Mossy Stones” is one that didn’t take. But my primary contribution to the lexicon was, and probably always will be, the jazzbro.
That last trumpet flourish has the Ellington stamp... but otherwise the horns are hitting like the Basie band! (Another vote for Jimmy Jones as, honorary Basie-ite, as the likely arranger.)