It's All Folk Music: I Never Heard a Horse Sing

RAVI COLTRANE with TERENCE BLANCHARD’s E COLLECTIVE (Charles Altura, Tom Oren, David Ginyard, and Jaylen Pettinaud), 23 JULY 2026

This tour came through St Louis for a gig at Powell Hall after we’d headed Up North. I don’t know that I would have gone, so I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to see their core show. I just saw RAVI COLTRANE with Ari Hoenig at JAZZCULTURAL for one of the stellar streams of the year; COLTRANE’s tone and invention emerging as distinctive and winning. I saw TERENCE BLANCHARD and an iteration of E COLLECTIVE a couple of years ago at the Sheldon Concert Hall for the tour with the Turtle Island String Quartet. He is a huge talent who realizes broad ambitions, but I’m just not that fond of his trumpet playing. Still he very successfully captures a side of Miles Davis.

Indeed, the opener Flow had the feel of Marcus Miller/Tutu era Miles—a very catchy melody which he played with effects on his horn while Charles Altura’s electric guitar and Tom Oren’s keyboard swirled. David Ginyard’s electric bass was funky with occasional slaps and Jaylen Pettinaud was rocksteady while coloring the beat. BLANCHARD explained that the tune, ultimately the title cut on a project Herbie Hancock produced, arose as they had run out of material without have an album yet. In his leadership role, Hancock rallied the troops with a stirring,”You’re fucking jazz musicians, make some shit up.” For all that, it’s a pretty cool tune.

As Altura comped the familiar figure, RAVI COLTRANE came out for Flamenco Sketches. His playing continues to impress me with a litheness and lyricism. He plays in the mid range, neither growling nor living with the overtones. His playing feels grounded. Insofar as he has some of his father’s sound, it feels like it’s pre-Implulse, that is the 1950s, which is well before he was born. Again, he was but a toddler when John died. In terms of learning the music, he’s just part of the common legacy. BLANCHARD was relatively light on the effects for this tune though they built up through the set and he was pretty full on MIDI by the end. COLTRANE was drawing more directly on the source material—On Green Dolphin Street and All of You. Altura’s playing was lyrical and clean; of course, there was rock in there because that’s part of the environmental DNA for the instrument just as John Coltrane is there for tenor players. Tom Oren was more fidgety on keyboard.and when he got to acoustic he didn’t quite swing.

The BLANCHARD/COLTRANE interactions were strong as the final choruses were usually the two of them conversing and maybe that pulled BLANCHARD back to jazz. I’m a little bit harsh as his notes were generally apt and would have sounded good on trumpet. But they took that interplay up several notches with the All Blues that COLTRANE played while everyone else went toward Someday My Prince Will Come. As with Lotus Blossom last night with Eric Scott Reed, Someday/Prince has implications. It worked surprisingly well. Two Bass Hit was the closer with a loping punchiness and Latin feel.

The theme was that these three musicians were contemporaries in the Vienna music seen. MOZART and WRANITZY were both born in 1756 and had complementary successes, even if Wolfie endured. That said, the WRANITZY SEXTET NO 2 IN E FLAT MAJOR, if anything, had more of the fizz I associate with MOZART. To be fair, his OBOE QUARTET IN F MAJOR K 370/368b is from 1781 or so, the year that HAYDN’s influential String Quartets Opus 33 appeared and his collaboration with Frederick Ramm in Munich. So the MOZART tends a bit more toward an oboe with string accompaniment than in the chamber music conventions HAYDN , he himself, and others were developing at that very moment. But it has an oboe and enough mischief (Lindsey Flowers pointed out there’s a section where she plays in 4/4 while the strings are in 6/8).

But the WRANITZY had oboe and flute to go with the violin with two violas and cello holding things down. He published his six sextets in 1790, so he and the genres had almost a decade to mature. There was lots of space among the instruments and they all used it. That said, there is some thought that this (all of them?) were arrangements of symphonic works/ideas and/or that they could have been taken into that format. In any case, it deserved to take us to intermission. It is this kind of curation of the musical literature that makes this series so valuable; I know have my eyes out for WRANITZY’s music.

Given the forthcoming flute plus string quartet of the Peter Salomon arrangement of HAYDN’s SYMPHONY NO 101 IN D MAJOR (“The Clock”) as well as the prospect that WRANITZY’s work was arranged up, my “what makes a symphony a symphony” question now had more case studies to go with the Hummel arrangements of the late Mozart symphonies for flute/oboe, piano, violin, and cello and the Liszt transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies for piano. I noticed Jim Birkenstock, MIDSUMMER MUSIC’s Executive Director and author of the wonderfully encyclopedic program notes I study every year, in the audience, so I asked him for his informed take on the question. He said that he had had a similar discussion recently. We each pondered the thematic question (does a composer conceive things differently for different ensembles?) but he pointed out the practicalities—that the modern symphony orchestra is indeed modern (the New York Philharmonic was founded in 1842; Berlin 1882) and that composers, outside of patronages/commissions, wrote for publication so that a musically literate public heard the music when they played it at home. Hence, the Hummel/MOZART and the Salomon/HAYDN.

I have listened to orchestra versions of HAYDN’s 101/Clock and found it charming. That I liked this version more is attributable some/a lot to it being live, but I think this chamber version was more conducive to some of HAYDN’s wit and the nuances of the composition. Papa Haydn, I need to remember, is no austere figure; there are dad jokes.

The prospect of hearing a fraction of the voluminous ELLINGTON/STRAYHORN book from the fluent and driving pianist ERIC SCOTT REED was compelling. I’ve seen REED several times on the Smoke Streams and, though he hadn’t struck me as a particular Ellingtonian—and, for that matter, I’m not sure I recall covers—well, we all are. In any case, he’s an appealingly crisp player. He made that point right out of the gate with Stevie>Take The Coltrane from the collaboration with John Coltrane. Though the album has always struck me more as a curiosity (but what a meeting to have on record), the latter tune gets covered some.

Then it was RENE MARIE’s turn to grace the bandstand. I don’t know singers, but she’s a new name to me. But she’s my age and has recorded some out of DC (Ellington’s hometown after all). For her first stint, she did Do Nothing Til You Hear From Me, exhibiting both a warm mezzo-soprano/alto instrument and proper jazz bona fides. She scatted/vocalized but with the spirit of a jazzer. Her next two tunes were off brand for the night but appealing. Her I Like You cleverly repeated the title line and adding “better than…” a clever list of some of HER favorite things and What A Difference A Day Makes both referenced Dinah Washington’s breakthrough from rhythm and blues (she might identify with her for that) and showed a bit of the tunes Latin roots. Here but throughout McLenty Hunter Jr was effective, far from shy but fully cognizant of the band he was playing. Rick Rosato was even more essential with several very nice moments—a duet with RENE MARIE in I Like You and some pedal points during Lotus Blossom. But always listening big and sympathetically. He was the hero of the gig.

She left for a Billy Strayhorn set. REED celebrated him as a hero, “Afro Queer,” “who crawled so that he could twirl.” The tunes were superb: Ishfahan was mournful, reverential, and stunning while Lotus Blossom had Rosato’s pedal points which continued through a full Someday My Prince Will Come chorus. There were several teases—Rosato playing a bebop line in the opener, REED with A Train in the properly frisky closing It Don’t Mean A Thing which RENE MARIE and all of them took home. But she also applied her rich voice to Mood Indigo.

FINDING SASHA BERLINER

Kim Kleinman, Contributing Writer

In that winter of Lockdown, the Smalls/Mezzrow livestreams were my way of accessing at least some kind of live music performance. I hit a jackpot (on a pretty safe bet) with a band called Palladium promising to play Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil on Christmas Eve 2020, 56 years to the day after its original recording. This was also the first time I heard Nicole Glover who met the responsibility of playing tenor saxophone by being a fresh voice, very much her own, respectful but not too deferential. Sasha Berliner was equally fearless in carving out a voice for the vibraphone on those iconic tunes.

By their next gigs on February 6 and April 25, 2021, they had established the lineup that their organizer Jesse Markowitz took into the studio on June 9th that year for the Bandcamp album, Don’t Look Back https://palladium825.bandcamp.com/album/dont-look-back . A June 21st Smalls gig celebrated that recording. Besides Glover and Berliner, pianist Sean Mason was the other breakout star. Since he and Glover had regular late-night gigs at Mezzrow and Smalls Jazz Club respectively, I tried not to miss either’s once they hit the archive.

Berliner, though, was harder to find on the streams. She led her quartet at Smoke Jazz Club in June 2023 which I caught and has scattered a few shows at Smalls which I’m afraid I mostly didn’t. So it’s her work with Palladium with Glover and Mason I know best.

In the first minute of ESP on the album, she splices in voices over her vibe pattern: “Too extreme?,” she asks. Rusell Hall, Palladium’s bassist, chuckles, “Oh, my god, that’s insane, man. You’re from another planet. I ain’t never heard no sounds like that before in my life. We’re in the future now.” Glover adds, “Sasha, if you feel that, do it.” Then Shorter himself on tape from an earlier interviews admonishes all of us to “don’t look back” while studying history so we can “knock the hell out of this music.” This version of Shorter’s first tune for Miles Davis develops out of her sound collage—electronics and vibraphone—that inspires her bandmates to explore their instruments, the tune, and themselves as they embark on the album. Markowitz released 2020 under the Palladium name as an all-star anthology of Shorter’s music with Berliner’s similar but solo sound collage, “Meridianne—A Wood Sylph,” as the opener. On each Palladium album, it is Berliner’s vision of Shorter’s music that we encounter first. Later in the album, she presents a solo version of “Face on the Barroom Floor.” Her other showcase is a duet with guest soprano saxophonist Emilio Modeste on the traditional song “She Moved Through the Fair” which serves as a lush, deliberate conversation, contributing her instrument’s sustain and its spare chord possibilities with incisive melodic statements.

At the Palladium gigs and Don’t Look Back, she is part of the frontline with Glover, soloing expansively while contributing to the rhythn section. The Shorter canon is a rich test for her and her equally talented young compatriots. They pass easily.

I some just can’t seem to see ARI HOENIG with his trio. Last time, Ben Tiberio was away and Joe Martin filled in on bass and the show skewed away from even one of HOENIG’s originals for standards. Then Miguel Zenon and Matt Penman were the trio. And the time before that, maybe two, I missed the gig in real time and never got back to it in the Archives.

And, this time, poor poor me, had to/got the treat of seeing Ravi Coltrane join the band. He was a remarkably good fit and helped continue last time’s trend of a remarkably subtle and controlled set with Gadi Lehavi continuing to blossom into a force to help his leader express his vision. At JAZZCULTURAL, bassists aren’t lost in the mix, so Tiberio’s many contributions were prominent. HOENIG remains irrepressible—complex and sophisticated, his rhythmic conception unique while being fully dedicated to the tunes. There were covers but his own often wistful and/or lyrical tunes were in the mix and Irish Golem was in both sets. They have plenty of improvisation but they have a definite structure which, as was clear from the covers which had guideposts and snippets of familiarity, to be deconstructed.

Stepping into all this Coltrane was the perfect foil. He sounded more like his father than I’ve ever heard him (it’s an unfair but hard to avoid comparison. He was two when John died and his mother Alice had to be a more formative influence. Still he went into the family business), not the Impulse John Coltrane but the ‘50s Trane . His tone was airy, his approach melodic. But he could be punchy delighting himself and HOENIG by dancing along with the rhythms. Not what his father was doing with Rashied Ali when he was a babe in arms, but joining HOENIG’s complexities. They beamed at one another.

So did Coltrane and Lehavi who play together in an occasional trio with drummer Ele Howell, with Lehavi adding keyboard sounds in lieu of a bass player as he sometimes does with HOENIG and Tivon Pinnicott. I’ve liked those gigs, but miss Tiberio. And not to knock Pinnicott, but Coltrane was pretty special.

They opened both sets with Monk tunes, Epistrophy and I Mean You, and closed the second one with one that wasn’t In Walked Bud even if I thought that was it even as it started with HOENIG using mallets, his elbows, and the drums to play the melody. He did the same thing at the end of the first set but that was Charles Mingus’ Dry Cleaner From Des Moines. The second set had Horace Silver’s necessary Peace while the first set had an original composition to honor mentor Ralph Peterson. So there was lots of history in the room, but also a focused energy. HOENIG is a gem with established telepathy with Tiberio and Lehavi, a balance that welcomes Lehavi’s continued growth. Coltrane fit right in and I choose to dream that he could become a regular and/or hire this band as his rhythm section.

GEOFFREY KEEZER’s good reputation has prompted my curiosity most times he has been in Smalls Live world; a duo date with Ron Carter stands out. He hasn’t been t/here often enough for me to fix him. This time around he had the endorsement from Spike Wilner et al of a weekend run at JAZZCULTURAL, that and old hero Noriko Ueda on bass and new one Ron Blake on the gig. And it was a curious gig at that.

The opener Refuge was pleasantly lowkey though Ueda, as always, was mischievously inventive. Blake and young guitarist Jocelyn Gould wove together the front line but forced nothing together or in their solos. I suppose that could have been a clue, but the vibe of the gig was set by Abstraido (absent minded in Spanish) which was a contrafact of Hotel California so he said. I didn’t recognize it beyond some of the shifts among the sections, instead it had a Steely Dan feel. KEEZER among them stretched out the most, but Ueda was always active. Next up was a cover of the 1970s funk band The Brothers Johnson’s Tomorrow. I went back to the prominent streaming service that will only give them a fraction of a penny for me listening to it. The original is actually pretty tame smooth jazz ish while Ueda laid it down and then soloed inventively, provoking big grins from her bandmates.

KEEZER served up Duke Ellington’s Second Sacred Concert miniature TGTT (Too Good To Title) as a solo exploration that opened up some proper jazz there and with The Wild Vine that followed. There was a section of that tune where they were all soloing (well, maybe Ueda was just playing) on top of other. Ryan Sand was tasteful but quiet even as he brought the funk. The closer was mostly Ogunde, the Brazilian folk song John Coltrane covered on Expressions, which Blake could dig into after Blake blocked the chords and Ueda bowed. Then Keezer segued into an allusive and gentle Give Peace A Chance with an Across The Universe tease in the last chorus.

JANE MONHEIT seems to have an annual residency at SMOKE JAZZ CLUB which was her real training ground when she was in school at the Manhattan School of Music in the late 1990s. Classmates included this rhythm section. I saw her last year as part of my burgeoning fandom for her long time music director Michael Kanan who plays regularly with Neal Miner. There was another drummer as husband Rick Montalbano had to stay in Los Angeles, possibly with their son. Max Haymer has also served as music director out in Los Angeles and came east this time.

A Cole Porter program suited me just fine and it was a treat to hear what she and they did with favorites/familiars like In The Still Of The Night, All Of You (creatively unfamiliar with Nicholas Payton’s arrangement), It’s De-Lovely, and Easy To Love. There were tunes befitting a deeper dive into the canon which were clearly Porter in their lyrical and musical wit but didn’t ring a bell for this notoriously poor Name That Tune player. Why Can’t You Behave and So In Love (the closer with the full band) were from Kiss Me Kate. The opener was I Am In Love and the encore was Do I Love You?, quiet and romantic only with Haymer, but clearly directed at Montalbano whose place off the bandstand she wanted to identify. The answer to the song’s question is an emphatic yes.

Since she made her personal life a part of her patter, I will add her evidence to my consideration of being a woman in jazz. While Miki Yamanaka and Nicole Glover are among my favorite players period full stop, I can’t help but notice how each (and they are friends and collaborators) protect themselves—Yamanaka with her kimonos, her charmingly goofy English isn’t my first language comments, and, yes, probably, drummer/husband Jimmy Macbride whereas Glover is ultra serious talking little even when she leads the band. These artists deserve to be taken seriously and the expansion of women in to these ranks increases the level of talent.

Monheit is about a musical generation older and a vocalist. Her expectations for stage patter for instance and selling the song is different. She is a fine JAZZ singer, improvising capably including scatting not too much. Her band accompanies well but she lets them play jazz. Still the publicity photo SMOKE JAZZ CLUB uses is from at least 25 years ago when she was “cute.” She remains so in an age appropriate way, but she points at the combination of perimenopause and ADHD means she forgets which stories she told in which set, that their son is with them on this trip but he now has his own things to do in the City besides watch Mom and Dad play at SMOKE, and, tellingly, that she knows she can do other things now with these songs than she did when the record companies promoted her in different ways which she would talk about in the next set. Undoubtedly that included, at its mildest, shooting that publicity photo the club still uses.

BILLY HART with Nicole Glover, Ethan Iverson, and Tyrone Allen

Already going into this gig, Nicole Glover was set to replace Mark Turner in this working band. Much as I value Turner, I was interested to see what Glover would do, happy that she continues to get the recognition that I’ve thought is her due since I became a fan early in Lockdown, and curious about her interactions with Ethan Iverson to whom Sasha Berliner issued her 2017 open letter concerning sexism in jazz. The music was absolutely top notch as Glover rose to the occasion. She was both gracious and a little embarrassed by her leader’s praise which was probably fed to him by Iverson, so they had a laugh over it. To dispense with the third point, Berliner took justified offense at a thoughtless and tasteless but telling aside that pianist Robert Glasper included, unchallenged, in an interview with Iverson to which Iverson cluelessly responded in the general aftermath that he himself was impressed with the intelligence of women jazzers. Berliner used this exchange to chronicle her experiences up to age 19 at the time learning her craft to be accepted as a jazzer who was female. Both Glasper’s crudity and Iverson’s paternalism were obstacles. Since Berliner and Glover have collaborated, including on the Palladium project honoring Wayne Shorter, I wondered how each had grown over the intervening nine years. Glover’s response to being a jazzer while female is to be non-demonstrative and strictly professional. She owes no one, especially me, a smile, but, for her sake, I’d like to know she is having fun creating art that I admire so much.

All that said, I think she just maybe had some fun last night. She (and Tyrone Allen, bassist in her trio and with Miki Yamanaka, who filled in for Ben Street) played from a complicated repertoire with scores and music stands. Hart describes his Song for Balkis as a tone poem and places Balkis as the daughter of Solomon and Bathsheba in the Old Testament and not as also his daughter. It is an appropriately beautiful tune but tricky with significant through composed moments beginning with the composer’s deliberate mallet work on all the drums. Similarly, Iverson’s Giant Steps contrafact, Onedaruth, is as complicated as the original and with enough hints around it that it takes concentration to play Iverson’s new melody and then to make the whole thing swing. Iverson’s other tune was The Showdown which was surprisingly lyrical after Hart introduced it as in contrast to negotiation. His announcements would likely have tended to being cryptic and/or discursive 15 years ago when he was my current age. Now at 85, there are pauses and non sequiturs that border on feeling embarrassed for him. He got lost in explaining Glover’s award, both times, and waited two or three ticks too long to add “Glover” after saying “Nicole.” But, not to worry, his playing was sublime with cymbal work both on the introduction to the first tune that sounded like the quick decay of rain or countless little steel drums. The clave is insistent but he doesn’t have to roar.

This show was on my radar, but got lost in the shuffle as I was at Jazz St Louis hearing Terrell Stafford and Tim Warfield when it streamed and then we went Up North. It stayed in the middle of my list too long and I forgot about it. But having seen Bill Stewart with George Colligan over the weekend rekindled my interest in the show, even though in late May I wondered why Jimmy Macbride wasn’t behind the kit. He contributes importantly to MIKI YAMANAKA’s appeal, but Stewart is indeed incredible and his presence as well as Ron Blake’s tenor saxophone and flute made this a different gig. Tyrone Allen was the only holdover from her regular band and he was strong and solid; she called him “a comfort, like a pillow” in one of her charmingly awkward English is not my native language asides.

As fine as her tunes are, she leaned into a very appealing array of jazz compositions that highlighted Blake’s lush tone (on what had to have been a white plastic tenor) and Stewart’s percussive subtleties. Hearing her on the heels of Colligan, I was attuned to her comping skills and how open and sparer her soloing was compared to her trio work.

She had luscious tunes to work with. Bronislaw Kaper’s Invitation was a promising opening but then Sam Rivers’ luxuriant Beatrice (quite the vehicle for Blake) and James Williams’ exquisite Alter-Ego were treasures. Both are prominent on a playlist I assemble of compositions to savor. Sonny Rollins’ Airegin was in the first set as his Doxy opened the second. The community was absorbing his loss then. John Coltrane’s Giant Steps (more tenor madness for Blake and all of them) followed Doxy. Joining Rivers, Rollins, and Coltrane, the other monster tenor saxophonist/composer was Benny Golson’s whose Stablemates was the first set closer. No Wayne Shorter, but monuments all of them that they all dug into. Blake’s robust tone was of course prominent and essential, but, again, YAMANAKA’s soloing was fluid and spacious in a way I hadn’t heard from her in her trio work. She was enjoying the JAZZCULTURAL Steinway which is a powerful instrument. She did do a trio tune in each set, maybe the same one. The second set one was announced—Duke Pearson’s You Know I Care.

She had given the band the option of Monk’s Trinkle Tinkle when they collectively chose Stablemates. But they made sure to include it in the second set as well as Bobby Hutcherson’s Little B’s Poem. What a stellar collection of tunes!!

The closer started with The Theme before giving way to a more generic Rhythm Changes jam which shifted gears and closed out with the head to Monk’s In Walked Bud.

GEORGE COLLIGAN with Steve Wilson (Saturday), Jaleel Shaw (Sunday), Alexander Claffy, and Bill Stewart!, JAZZCULTURAL, 11-12 JULY 2026, 9 pm sets

GEORGE COLLIGAN has an ear for saxophonists. He mentored Nicole Glover back in Portland and I’ve seen them at Smalls Jazz Club. Another favorite, Steve Wilson, has been fairly regular at his gigs. I wouldn’t want to miss either of them. I saw Jaleel Shaw first with Dave Holland when the Village Vanguard was streaming gigs during Lockdown and more recently with Joe Farnsworth. He’s someone I want to know better, particularly as I listen more attentively to altoists.

I caught both for the second sets two nights running. COLLIGAN played the exact same set in the same order, so I suppose I could theoretically hold forth on the differences between Wilson and Shaw. Sorry, not really. With Wilson, I was happy to have his introductions to the tunes and just generally appreciative of his talent. The tunes were strong vehicles for all of them, but my general impression was that COLLIGAN was stronger as a composer and bandleader than pianist. That is, I wasn’t avidly wondering how he would sound in a trio. But there are plenty of players like that, though Andrew Hill is who came first to mind. Still, he did play a properly lyrical and elegiac Song for Jack DeJohnette. He also paid tribute to Mulgrew Miller with the second tune which gave Bill Stewart, a wonder all night long, plenty of layers to create a slightly Latin theme. Bus #14 (in Portland) was jaunty and intricate; Wilson, having played on Friday night too, could take the first solo, but Shaw went second on his stab at it. Was Wilson simply more familiar with the tune, the better sight reader, or just more experienced overall? I don’t think it matters. I think the world of Wilson, but Shaw is a thoughtful, appealing player too. On the closer, the title an allusion to Oregon electoral politics, he had an appealing r&b feel and may even had incorporated bits of Stevie Wonder’s Overjoyed in his solo which I didn’t hear in Wilson (just wonder, not Wonder).

What I heard with more familiarity with the tunes is what COLLIGAN brings as a pianist. His accompanying skills are top drawer and the DeJohnette tribute was lyrical. His soloing the second night seemed more fluid and melodic.

A chance to see EMMET COHEN should not be missed and he has, in the avuncular Joe Farnsworth, a kindred spirit. Both swing insistently, put prodigious technique in the service of not just the music of the moment but its tradition, and are generous to a fault, each going on perhaps too long in their band introductions. They have collaborated for a couple of years by now, most often with Yasushi Nakamura, including last season at Jazz St Louis. So, of course, I’d snatch up this stream, but the presence of Peter Washington, the consummate piano trio bassist as COHEN put it, made this essential.

As strong as Nakamura is and how much telepathy a working band forms, Washington was a force throughout, walking his quarter notes relentlessly except when they were eighth notes. He was powerful and inventive, more than holding his own with strong bandmates. This is a different power than Jean-Michel Pilc/Francois Moutin/Ari Hoenig, more straight ahead, but COHEN knows tunes and respects the tradition.

I didn’t catch the name of the opener, but after setting up big block chords to match Washington’s line, COHEN danced gracefully but not delicately over it all. The second tune was Thad Jones’ Let’s from Washington’s tenure with Tommy Flanagan. They slowed things down for Young and Foolish but it too still simmered. For all my focus on this band’s power, it was in their more delicate moments, of which there were several, that they really shone. Tadd Dameron’s If You Could See Me Now had that sweet mix of grace and power as did Compassion, the middle part of the Universal Truth Suite that closed the show. Both throttled up, but they allowed all of them to show subtler sides. Compassion was sandwiched by Eternal Glimpse which had a bouncy groove and Universal Truth itself which cooked.

Time and travel have conspired against my jazz streaming, but I seized some introvert time and these vigorous, straight ahead sets to jumpstart the habit. I’d seen LARRY FULLER et al on 25 June 2025 at the Blue Strawberry in St Louis on the basis of recalling him playing in the studio for Jazz Spectrum in his hometown of Toledo. A year later, that same mix was just comfortable—infectious and familiar without being predictable.

FULLER was Ray Brown’s last pianist and so it makes sense that he has some Oscar Peterson in his power and grace and that Lorin Cohen would be a force on bass. Carmen Intorre Jr was always making the right choices, but really came into his own in the second set. In the first he had only one showcase, but he got a couple of proper solos and traded fours etc in most of the others. They have a comfortable band chemistry; for all their collective and individual chops, I don’t know that they play with other musicians. If they are the jazz equivalent of a dad rock band, it speaks to the high level of skill it takes to play this music.

They opened, as they did in St Louis, with Old Devil Moon which roared and purred as it was supposed to. The second set began with Wes Montgomery’s Fried Pies which didn’t have to be quite the same kind of warm up but played the same role. They nicely place a ballad in the second slot and those were highlights—Oscar Peterson’s iconic Wheatland from the Canadiana Suite (and, I’ll say it once again, featured at my first jazz concert when I was eight years old) and Jane’s Theme for FULLER’s wife. They honored Brown (Line With A Groove) and Dizzy Gillespie (Tin Tin Deo) but then stopped announcing titles. FULLER certainly took a sustained solo exploration of Ellington’s Come Sunday in the first set but the band then took up something else. Similarly, I heard the Salt Peanuts head but the jam was not necessarily directly related. The second had a luxurious Lil Darlin from the Basie book and a brisk Milestones. The homestretch of that set was a tune that felt like a 1960s movie theme (and I did tend to like the ballads and slow blues as a reminder of the subtlety that goes with the swagger) and then a distinctive roaring tune.

JOEL FRAHM and Gary Versace, 27 JUNE 2026, 7 pm set, and

Gadi Lehavi, 29 JUNE 2026, 9 pm set

I missed JOEL FRAHM in real time, despite proprietor Spike Wilner touting a member of his own Manhattan School of Music cohort that also included Peter Bernstein and Brad Mehldau and his pianist Gary Versace as a favorite cat on the scene. Club owners are proud of their talent in public, but JAZZ CULTURAL, Smalls, and Mezzrow have stellar reputations because of his taste and integrity. I did catch their show on You Tube (not the usual Smalls Live Archive) and without annoying ads to boot on the basis of ARI HOENIG in the band, particularly after seeing his own gig in real time with regular pianist Gadi Lehavi and Joe Martin, also on FRAHM’s gig, filling in for bassist Ben Tiberio.

The HOENIG gig was almost the Gadi Lehavi Trio as the tunes, mostly standards probably for Martin’s benefit, were taken very gently with brooding, subtle piano. Lehavi even more than usual seized the spotlight and HOENIG was his complex, multilayered self just quieter. He’s a consummate trio drummer anyway, though he more than holds his own with Jean-Michel Pilc and Francois Moutin, but he notched everything down. If anything, that called even more attention to what he was doing rhythmically and musically. They opened with Come Rain or Come Shine which came into focus only during Lehavi’s second chorus.and Martin’s solo. That was recognizable in a way that George Shearing’s Conception didn’t, remaining “familiar standard” in my notes until HOENIG announced it. But they often include it so if sure was familiar. Less so was Blame It On My Youth which I should know much better. The closer was some bebop, maybe even Monk and by the tail end of Youth and certainly by this one they were up to standard volume. A very nice set, but a little different.

Probably the FRAHM set, had I seen it in real time, might have been a heads up. He and Versace play lightly and patiently, digging into the melodic and harmonic possibilities without rushing things. His own Mendoza Line was a straight ahead medium tempo opener, very tasty with FRAHM’s tenor in the mid-range. He cites John Coltrane (surely early), Chris Potter, and Stan Getz as influences and indeed his tone got dryer as the set went on. He did an original bossa which he wrote when he had Getz’s late rhythm section of Kenny Barron, Rufus Reid, and Lewis Nash and he was on soprano for that one. Brubeck’s In You Own Sweet Way evoked the Miles Davis version which of course had Coltrane on it, a slow burn. HOENIG provoked FRAHM’s smile for the first time for combining rhythmic magic with melodic drumming. FRAHM and Versace took the first chorus of Monk’s We See without the rhythm section, but then FRAHM dug into two full choruses of the bebop closer (which one, who knows because, besides my own deficiencies as a listener FRAHM mischievouly quotes other tunes—Get Up Stand Up and maybe Stevie Wonder on his opener, Young At Heart here) with Versace laying out. Stardust was in there, luxurious as always and another chance for HOENIG to play the tune.

ERIC ALEXANDER with Nicholas Payton, David Kikoski, Alexander Claffy, and Carl Allen, SMOKE JAZZ CLUB, 26 JUNE 2026, 8:30 pm set

I would have signed up for this stream on the basis of ERIC ALEXANDER. Nicholas Payton, dour though he usually is (he almost smiled as his leader recited the lyrics to his high point ballad showcase though), was added incentive. Honoring Sonny Rollins was worthwhile but unexpected. I am quite fond of ALEXANDER’s playing and his lyricism and melodic invention owe something at least in general to Rollins. But his tone has struck me as lighter. He did player more fully and reveled in the repertoire—Valse Hot with explicit references to Somewhere Over The Rainbow as source material was a high point. They also took on the tricky The Most Beautiful Girl In The World as the closer as an example of Rollins’ love of the Great American Song Book. So it was effectively Sonny time.

The opener, Strode Rode, had the horns serially introducing the theme before each taking their assay. ALEXANDER was markedly more rounded in tone, so it was Payton who at least started sparer before leaning into it. Rollins wrote this for Clifford Brown to join him, so it was a dual tribute. Here and throughout David Kikoski’s piano work was energetic as always but was less clunky than he sometimes is. His right hand danced rather than plodded. There was a nice moment during Valse Hot where he and drummer Carl Allen grinned at one another—and there was much to smile at. Allen was seasoned and effective. His expertise and contribution was unquestionable, but he approached things with an ease that hid what he accomplished. Alex Claffy did the bassists’ thing of churning away finding rhythmic and harmonic prods for the others, at least one earned a mischievous grin from Allen. His solos were equally robust.

Payton’s Everything Happens To Me was powerfully poignant as he with Kikoski’s sensitive help dug into the line and its supporting chords. I heard it twice last week from Mark Morganelli who interrupted his Miles Davis tribute to offer a nod to Chet Baker. As good as Morganelli was, Payton’s was exquisite. Afterward, ALEXANDER almost provoked a smile by reciting the lyrics, altering them to be about Payton. As part of that patter, he explained that his American Lit PhD father said that if one could do the NYTimes crossword and extensively quote Great American Song Book lyrics, one could convince people that you might know something. There are times that something like that captures my version and rationale for a liberal education.

LITTLE FEAT, DOOR COUNTY AUDITORIUM, FISH CREEK WI, 26 JUNE 2026

LITTLE FEAT was the last rock band I fell in love with even as I was becoming a jazz snob in the mid 1970s. Like the more senior members of my core—The Allman Brothers Band, The Band, and, of course, the Grateful Dead—they were a swirling blend of influences. LITTLE FEAT had thick syncopation with more than a little Nawlins to go with the blues and country and rhythm and blues that all these bands had. Lowell George had pipes as a vocalist, was a wickedly clever songwriter, and brought slide guitar to yet another two guitar attack with Paul Barrere. His death in 1979 was another blow to my rock’n’roll fandom to go with the Dead’s overproduced phase of Blues for Allah and Terrapin Station after the disjointed and lackluster Steal Your Face live album; the break up of The Band; post Blood on the Tracks Dylan not grabbing me; and otherwise the ‘70s showing warning signs of the ‘80s.

I never saw LITTLE FEAT after they re-formed despite having a following in St Louis, but here they were Up North and it seemed worth seeing how the survivors and worthy new blood was upholding the legacy. No matter what I was going to hear signature tunes from a core repertoire. But was this LITTLE FEAT or more akin to the several extensions of the Grateful Dead that had key founding members at the core—The Other Ones, The Dead, Furthur, or Dead and Company?

Bill Payne is foundational even if he no longer sits behind a battery of keyboards. The technology is so good that he gets acoustic and electric piano out of a professional level keyboard distantly related to mine and swirling organ out of another shorter one. He is a commanding soloist to this day, fresh and innovative. He has Kenny Gradney’s bass lines thickly syncopating things and he may have always been the secret weapon, though Sam Clayton’s percussion and bass vocal growl is essential. Payne has said the he sets up so that he and drummer Tony Leone have a straight line of sight. He has jazz chops—studying with Art Taylor and leading bands at Smalls from time to time. Of course, I miss Richie Hayward for his role in creating the sound, but the band as a band is certainly not diminished and might well be “better.” Leone also tended to sing the Barrere songs, particularly Old Folks Boogie (much funnier 50 years ago than it sounds now) and Skin It Back. Fred Tackett was a friend and collaborator of Lowell George and so brings plenty of bona fides. His guitar playing has some of Barrere’s snarl. His soloes are perfectly acceptable but he is clearly the second guitarist to Scott Sharrard who also takes on most of the George vocals. That’s a daunting task and I suppose the new or cover band question comes down to his role. Like John Mayer in relation to Garcia in Dead and Company, I respect that Sharrard is his own player and not a clone while the band with Tackett, Payne, and that fantastic rhythm section gives him the right launching pad. He’s the right guitarist for the job. But I think only someone like Warren Haynes has the right power and his own voice, literally, to take on and deliver this repertoire.

But, what a repertoire! Of course, there were things I would have been delighted to hear (All That You Dream, Cold Cold Cold, Day At The Dog Races, Mercenary Territory), but Oh Atlanta, Rock’n’Roll Doctor (with a monster drum fill from Leone), Long Distance Love, Spanish Moon nicely into Skin It Back, and Time Loves A Hero (by way remembering Hayward, Barrere, and George) in the first set alone would have been enough. That set also included new/er tunes like the Let It Roll to open, Four Days Of Heaven Three Days of Work, and Willie Dixon’s You’ll Be Mine from Sam’s Place which feature Mr Clayton.

The guys next to me left at the break and the crowd continued to thin out, but a core of us stayed. The second set included a five tune acoustic set with Easy To Slip, Tackett’s Church Falling Down, Sailin’ Shoes (Tackett added a sweet trumpet part here and played mandolin as he did through out the set except on his own song), Don’t Bogart The Joint into the inevitable Willin’ sing along. Maybe it really doesn’t matter how well Sharrard and any of them sang because most of us were either singing along or hearing the original voices. As they cleared the stage, Payne had a solo turn on Rita Was Her Name, seemingly previously unreleased and cowritten by a novelist friend. Then it was the home stretch of On The Way Down, Two Trains, a shifting jammed out, multiphased Fat Man In The Bathtub, a little piano/trumpet interlude that clearly foreshadowed Dixie Chicken that showcased everyone before finding its way into Tripe Face Boogie. They didn’t leave the stage but Feats Don’t Fail Me Now was the appropriate semi-encore.

It was all great fun and maybe sloppier than Lowell George would have accepted. But it was a treat to commune with the songs.

MARK MORGANELLI with George Cables, Yasushi Nakamura, and Elio Coppollo, SMALLS JAZZ CLUB, 5-6 JUNE 2026, 6 and 7:30 pm sets

These sets took place 10 days after the Miles Davis Centennial, but I didn’t know that when I plugged into the early Friday night set. George Cables was on the gig and I wanted to see at least a set. Cables was wonderfully sympathetic and expressive as always and hence a treat to hear him. Hear him, not see him, as he and the piano were not illuminated and I could only see his hands silhouetted on one camera angle out of the three that cycle through.

That was enough and that it was a Miles tribute was enough to convince me to see the whole run. MARK MORGANELLI runs Jazz Forum Alliance in Tarrytown, but is a worthy player as Spike Wilner of Smalls Live is. His trumpet playing evoked Miles very well and perhaps playing Bye Bye Blackbird, All Of You (twice), Someday My Prince Will Come (also twice), and Freddie Freeloader (every set) meant that he played with a mute more than he might at a “regular” gig, he wasn’t tamping down some inner Dizzy Gillespie via Jon Faddis. As such, he fit the conventions for the trumpet I learned first. Equally, this examination of Miles’ 1950s book was so formative. Together they made for a wonderfully conventional set and I intend no faint praise. MORGANELLI set a fine example with crisp focused soloes, yet everyone got generous showcases. Cables was all I had hoped for and Elio Coppollo was light and swinging.

It was Yakasushi Nakamura who was flashy and captivating. I can tell myself a story that one learns to swagger and play with power after playing with Emmet Cohen and Joe Farnsworth as much as he has lately. He was very strong and even broke his deepest string on the next to last tune, So What, as he was working with Coppollo to take the tune out just as he vigorously explore the intro before leading the band into the outro. He did the same with All Blues both times they played it. He somehow got through the closer of the run, Milestones.

With more MOZART (the clarinet Quintet in A major, K 581 “Stadler”) on the program and nearby in downtown Sturgeon Bay, I put this one on our schedule. In so far as I knew of Alexander GLAZUNOV, it was in passing at best and certainly I didn’t know his cello (two of them!) Quintet in A major, Opus 39, G 84 specifically. The instrumentation appealed and reading that he was a friend of Tchaikovsky; a student of Rimsky-Korsakov; a teacher of Shostakovitch; and colleague of Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky certainly helped place him but didn’t provoke unqualified enthusiasm.

Still, as with the Raff last time, I appreciate the curation of MIDSUMMER MUSIC in keeping composers in the repertoire. GLAZUNOV (1865-1936) is a generation and a half or maybe two after Raff (1822-1882), so have appealing chamber music conventions well in hand. That is, whereas the MOZART certainly had a bit of a concerto feel with the clarinet soloing over a string ensemble (four pieces in this particular case) and with that the clarinet was more in the violin range whereas it being a viola or even cello is where its timbre and tone interest me most. GLAZUNOV’s voices intertwined significantly and many themes were led by the lower voices. Shirley Chisholm was back on viola and she introduced three movements, first and second by herself and the fourth with the cellos. The second had lots of pizzacati from all five of them and that aspect caught my ear. The two cellos of course gave an appealing depth. Mara McClain was the first cello and was prominent in the music. For the MOZART she sat dead center and seemed to cue the others, though it might simply been her intelligent and lively facial expressions. She seemed to be having more fun than anyone on both pieces. David Perry as first violinist was personally restrained, putting the emotion into the playing.

The MOZART was wonderfully as expected. JJ Koh took advantage of this early showcase for his instrument to contribute to the infectious fizz of these melodies.