Pulitzer Committee: Award Duke Ellington the 1965 Pulitzer Prize he was denied. 🔗🎶

Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚

When was the last time I link to a Slate article? Maybe never.

In any case, their “Best Jazz Albums of 2021” is excellent—introduced me to a number of albums I hadn’t yet heard; all the ones I have heard I also loved, especially the Mingus and the Shepp/Moran. 🎵 🔗

The title track from Johnathan Blake’s upcoming album Homeward Bound is a beautiful tear-jerker.

“Homeward Bound (for Ana Grace)” was written in memory of Ana Grace Marquez-Greene, the daughter of saxophonist Jimmy Greene & flutist Nelba Marquez-Greene, who died at Sandy Hook, just six years old. 🎵🔗

Current listening: the Danish String Quartet’s Prism III 🎶

Current listening: Squint, jazz guitarist Julian Lage’s new album, which features the trio Lage has been playing with lately: Minnesotan Dave King on drums and bassist Jorge Roeder. 🎶

Current listening: Another Land by Dave Holland, featuring Robin Eubanks on guitar and Obed Calvaire on drums. 🎵

Dropped yesterday: Uneasy by Vijay Iyer with Linda May Han Oh & Tyshawn Sorey. Three jazz musicians at the absolute pinnacle of their instruments. It’s a beautiful album. 🎶

Happy new year & happy public-domain day! The works coming out of US copyright protection this year are pretty impressive: Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby, The Trial; music by Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton, & Fats Waller.

Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a detailed overview.

Your annual reminder that Geri Allen’s A Child is Born is the pinnacle of Christmas jazz, and the title track is sublime. 🎶

My favorite year-end list is always Ted Gioia’s 100 favorite albums of the year. I guarantee you’ll find something excellent you didn’t previously know about.

(If you think 100 albums isn’t quite enough, well, he includes 100 honorable mentions as well.) 🎶

Out this week: Songs from Home, beautiful solo piano from Fred Hersch. 🎶

Coffee + grading while listening to Mahler’s Sympony No. 5, prompted by this touching anecdote from Alex Ross. 🎶 ☕️ 🔗

Here’s 58.5 hours of Glenn Gould playing Bach for y’all. See ya next week. 🎶

I just caught the Billy Hart quartet live at the Village Vanguard, thanks to the club’s streaming series. (Vijay Iyer’s trio is up next weekend.)

Hart and his conspirators were excellent. All original pieces, I believe. I particularly love Turner’s piece, “Nigeria,” with which they closed their set.

Personnel:

• Billy Hart, drums
• Ethan Iverson, piano
• Ben Street, bass
• Mark Turner, tenor

Partial set list:

• ? (I missed the intro & half of the first tune)
• Aviation (Iverson)
• Teule’s Redemption (Hart)
• Showdown (Iverson)
• Ira (Hart?)
• Amethyst (Hart)
• Nigeria (Turner)

I’ve been listening to Pat Metheny’s outstanding new album From This Place.

From the compositions, through the arrangements (Metheny called in Alan Broadbent to help), to the musicianship of drummer Antonio Sanchez, bassist Linda May Han Oh, & pianist Gwilym Simcock.

Highly recommended—& also available on Bandcamp.

Singers, among many others, have had their livelihoods cancelled or postponed indefinitely due to COVID-19.

But it turns out you can still make beautiful music together virtually. Here’s my sister-in-law singing Mauricio Duruflé’s Ubi Cartas, as part of a virtual octet. 🎶

Learning to play the piano without a piano 🔗🎶

This is a remarkable story, though disappointingly brief.

I was in Fargo for a couple days for my mom’s birthday. While there, I enjoyed an all-too-rare gift: an hour of free time to play jazz with my dad.

Our set list:

• Midnight Mood
• Little Waltz
• Stolen Moments
• Lucky Southern
• Autumn in New York

🎶

I’ve been exploring the ECM Artist’s Choice playlist curated by pianist Ethan Iverson (available on Apple Music & Tidal).

It was cool enough to have these ECM tracks hand-picked by him. But then I discovered that he has also annotated each selection. Iverson’s notes illuminate the music—but they also provide a window into the listening biography and musical development of a great jazz pianists.

Silence & Music: two of my favorite things. Also the name of a beautiful album by the Gabrieli Consort. 🎶

If you use Apple Music and you like top jazz, give my ¡¡¡ Top Jazz !!! playlist a listen. (Shuffle mode recommended.)

With 690 tracks of great jazz music, there are few better ways to spend the next 72 hours. 🎶

I made an Apple Music playlist of Hans Castorp’s favorite music in the “Fullness of Harmony” chapter of The Magic Mountain. (Full disclosure: there’s lots of opera.)

Amazing that it’s so easy to enjoy the same music that a fictional character listened to 110 years ago! 📚 🎶

Today’s listening: on a recommendation from my father, Pat Methany’s Still Life (Talking), a Latin-jazz-fusion album. Like a lot of Methany’s music, it’s strange, beautiful, a bit surreal, heavily produced. 🎶

Brad Mehldau’s new album, Finding Gabriel, is apparently the fruit of an intense reading of the Bible. Its compositions are inspired by passages from the wisdom literature and the minor prophets. Unsurprisingly, then, it’s wild, wide-ranging, and beautiful. 🎹 🎶