In the early 1960s, the Impulse! label tried to steer its star saxophonist John Coltrane away from increasingly uncompromising and experimental music that it feared might be scaring its customers. Label boss Bob Thiele suggested a more palatable all-ballads album with a little-known African American supper-club singer called Johnny Hartman, whose warm, Bing Crosby-like baritone but bracing absence of schmaltz had already impressed Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Coltrane and Hartman hit it off perfectly, and the 1963 album, John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, was an unexpected mini masterpiece of restraint, flawless timbral expressiveness, and mutual understanding.
Invited by Blue Note Records in Coltrane’s centenary year to curate his own tribute, post-bop sax luminary Branford Marsalis made that album the template for Dedicated to You – done as contemporary reinventions, not mere cover versions. Marsalis invited Dianne Reeves, a vastly experienced jazz singer with a Sarah Vaughan-like mix of flawless intonation and agile spontaneity, to take the vocal role. They saw themselves as co-creators of the sound.” Marsalis’s tenor murmurs and twists behind Reeves’ juggling of nostalgia and hope on Autumn Serenade, and the title track makes time stand still in its cherishing of every word and sound.
Lush Life’s famous small-hours ruminating on life’s mistakes is reinvented in Reeves’ almost defiant resignation and the sleepy languor of the tenor sax and piano, while her slyly taunting stretch of the syllables of “won-der-ful” unerringly nails the love-is-fab irony of They Say It’s Wonderful. Marsalis adds Trane instrumentals from the same period here, including the exhilaratingly beboppish soprano feature Big Nick, a hurtling Charlie Parkeresque genuflection on the uptempo 26-2, plus three bonus tracks engagingly balancing the vocal and jazz-instrumental eloquence of this fine album. The prodigiously eclectic German pianist Michael Wollny releases the solo-piano set Eine Winterreise (ACT), a rumination on the Schubert song cycle that the pianist typically recasts as “a meditation on walking – on moving forward without having any reliable guidance, without a fixed destination”.
Wollny relishes abstract sound, improv, and jazz phrasing, but his idiomatic range is profound. Alongside Schubert’s themes, Kate Bush’s Snowflake gets a glisteningly awestruck treatment here, as does Björk’s Aurora, as Wollny continues – unintentionally – to reinforce his stature as a piano visionary in the league of Jarrett, Hancock or Mehldau. London harpist/vocalist Tara Minton unveils a sensitive interweaving of Latin American rhythmic ideas and Spanish and English lyrics on her distinctive autobiographical set The Devil Invites You to Dance (Adhyâropa Records), while pianist/composer Myra Melford’s Fire and Water Quintet, including guitarist Mary Halvorson and cellist Tomeka Reid, delivers Sure Grand Out (RogueArt), her compelling third exploration of sonic parallels for the physicality, animation and grace of painter Cy Twombly’s work.
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