In this fifth of a series of monthly columns, John Fordham picks out his musical milestones from recent weeks. Tell us in the comments section below if there's anything we've missed, plus what you'd like to see John covering in next month's column
Wayne Krantz at Ronnie Scott's
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An August jazz highlight came in the form of two nights of blistering fusion-guitar improv at Ronnie Scott's from one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary jazz – the freewheelingly youthful 56-year-old New Yorker Wayne Krantz. Krantz has been his own personal underground force in jazzmaking for years, crossing into the mainstream from time to time to play legacy rock with Steely Dan, but for the most part making a powerfully personal music with players who share his anything-goes instincts (notably bass guitarist Tim Lefebvre, and new percussion phenomenon Nate Wood, both of whom partnered him on this trip) and using the web to control his own distribution, often of live material recorded and posted the same night.
Krantz has recently released a rare studio album called Howie 61 with an all-star cast of guests, but here he is in 2010 in more typical circumstances at Greenwich Village's 55 Bar, his favourite haunt of the 1990s and noughties. Nate Wood is on drums, Anthony Jackson on bass.
Jazz at the Proms
Jazz came to the country's biggest classical musical festival twice last month – the BBC's Proms series at the Royal Albert Hall hosted the now 47-year-old National Youth Jazz Orchestra on 10 August, and a concert dedicated to the memory of the late guitar star Django Reinhardt on 31 August.
There was a hidden connection between the two – Guy Barker, the British trumpet star who has developed a 21st century second career as an accomplished composer for mixed jazz and classical bands. Barker wrote, arranged and conducted guitarist Martin Taylor's music for the Spirit of Django Prom – but he'd found his feet as a teenage soloist back in 1970, in the then five-year-old National Youth Jazz Orchestra under its founder and director Bill Ashton.
Barker is one of NYJO's best-known alumni, though the late Amy Winehouse has to be the most famous of a long list of originals who performed with the outfit. NYJO has its critics, but it has been an invaluable workshop for the kind of jazz discipline and knowledge rarely available for British teenagers until the emergence of conservatoire jazz courses in the 1990s. Founder Bill Ashton retired recently, with a raft of citations and an OBE to his name, and trumpeter and Royal College of Music professor Mark Armstrong has taken the reins. But though the ensemble is adapting now to a very different jazz-education era, NYJO's August Prom showed it still had a lot to offer, not least through the composing talents of its own young members. Here's the title track of the band's new album, The Change – a distinctly non-mainstream NYJO venture by reeds player Chris Whiter. Check out guitarist Rob Luft in the later stages, a player the jazz scene will almost certainly be hearing plenty from.
Von Freeman RIP
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As The Guardian's Richard Williams pointed out, you probably needed to hear the late Chicago musician Earl Lavon "Von" Freeman on his home patch to get the truest sense of what this overlooked saxophone original was all about – he was poorly represented on record (though he contributed tellingly to other people's, including some by vocalist and fellow-Chicagoan Kurt Elling) and he rarely toured. But if Freeman, who died on 11 August at 88, liked being where he felt comfortable, that was where surrender to habit ended. Musically, he would travel anywhere his fertile imagination took him.
Freeman's tone sounded like nobody else's – a mix of the sound of long-gone blues singers and a pitch-warping free-sax eloquence that sometimes rivalled Ornette Coleman's. The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings memorably referred to his "curious down-home style that occasionally makes his saxophone sound as if it is held together with rubber bands and sealing wax". But if his playing was down-home, it was often free as a bird too. Here's the great unsung hero in April 2010, at 87 years old, at Chicago's New Apartment Lounge.
Dedication Orchestra
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A party at the Vortex Jazz Club in August celebrated the successful winding-up of the Dedication Orchestra project – first unveiled on New Year's Day 1992, when an all-star 25-piece band of the same name played a stirring memorial gig for the prematurely-departed members of South Africa's London-exiled Blue Notes – saxophonist Dudu Pukwana, trumpeter Mongezi Feza, bassist Johnny Dyani and pianist Chris McGregor, who had all died before their time between 1975 and 1990. Django Bates, Evan Parker, Kenny Wheeler and singers Julie Tippetts and Maggie Nichols were among many who donated their services for free, and the sole surviving Blue Note, Louis Moholo-Moholo, was at the drums. The immediate objective was to pay for proper burial arrangements for the four musicians in their homeland. The longer-term one was to raise money for music education in South Africa.
As Evan Parker writes: "When we started the project the apartheid system was still in place, South Africa was under the control of an exploitative white minority and Mandela was still in prison. We were the unwitting beneficiaries of that situation when the Blue Notes, escaping that regime via the Antibes Jazz Festival and Zurich came to live in London. Death – the unavoidable – took Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana. In each case the survivors had marked their loss with a musical offering. When only Louis Moholo-Moholo was left, we formed the Dedication Orchestra so that we London musicians could pay tribute."
After 20 years of Dedication Orchestra activity, the Blue Notes Bursary has now been established to fund a student to study jazz at the University of Cape Town's South African College of Music. And for a flavour of what that South African sound was like, here's the raucously sumptuous Davashe's Dream, from the debut 1971 album by Chris McGregor's inimitable Brotherhood of Breath big band. The late Dudu Pukwana is on alto sax, Mongezi Feza on pocket trumpet.
The Necks
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An upcoming highlight sharp-end fans won't want to miss will be the imminent arrival of Australian improv super-trio The Necks, playing a short tour of the UK and Ireland from 13-17 September. With last year's album Mindset, the band informed long-time listeners (this is their 25th year) and sympathetic newcomers that they're as devoted as they have ever been to totally spontaneous performance, and to single, slow-burn pieces that run for half an hour or more. But for the doubtful, who might think of free-improvised music as a spiky business driven by a profound mistrust of tunes or grooves, The Necks frequently offer a musical experience as tranquilly invigorating as a meditation, sustaining long passages of tone-centred coherence, and loop-like rhythm-layering symmetry. Here's part of Rum Jungle, from the current Mindset album.
Jazz
John Fordham
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