Through a
series of critically acclaimed releases over the past decade, saxophonist and
composer Rudresh Mahanthappa has
explored the music of his South Indian heritage and translated it through the
vocabulary of his own distinctive approach to modern jazz. On his latest
release, “Bird Calls,” Mahanthappa trains his anthropological imagination on an
equally important cultural influence: the music of Charlie Parker. With a
stellar quintet of forward-thinking musicians, which includes some long-time
collaborators as well as 20-year-old trumpet prodigy Adam O’Farrill,
Mahanthappa offers an inspired examination of Bird’s foundational influence and
how it manifests itself in a decidedly 21st-century context. The saxophonist
will be bringing this music to the Iowa City Jazz Festival on July 3rd.
“Triangles
and Circles” is the sixth album by Dafnis
Prieto as a leader and his sextet’s long-awaited second release. The new recording
brightly illuminates the drummer and McArthur Fellow as a composer of
considerable depth, with a penchant for complex but infectious melodies that
meld the folklore of his Afro-Cuban roots with modern harmonies rich with
counterpoint and virtuosic rhythmic concepts. His bandmates, including
saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum and pianist Manuel Valera, are all brilliant
soloists but also exemplary team players who, like Prieto, are experts at
crafting a musical narrative from Pan-American source material.
Also this
week, the Grammy Award-winning Brooklyn-based collective Snarky Puppy are joined by the famous Metropole Orkest for their
new project, “Sylva”; Johnson County
Landmark, the University of Iowa’s premiere jazz ensemble, plays the music of their director John Rapson
on “Crescendo”; and Canadian saxophonist Cory
Weeds takes on the Jackie McLean songbook on “Condition Blue.”
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