Jazz + Blues

Like this playlist? Love vinyl and jazz? Buy all the songs mentioned here and much much more on vinyl at Wayout Jazz.A musician’s-musician all the way through his brief but influential career, Eric Dolphy amassed a long list of guest appearances to help supplement his supburb solo albums. While most jazz fans know of his stints with both Charles Mingus and the John Coltrane Quartet, there remains a treasure trove of other collaborations that showed his true intellectual style and willingness to experiment based on nothing more than mutual respect of those artists whose visions he believed in. Don’t be put off if that sounds pretentious. He was not one to choose art over beauty, and time will reward repeated listens by exposing deeply emotional playing and thoughtful arrangements. -- Wayout Jazz

Keyboardist Erik Deutschs sound has been described as "a gumbo of American music that touches in jazz, blues, pop, funk and dub," and with his swirling new album Falling Flowers, that statement is definitely true. Touching on psychedelic and atmospheric, Deutsch traverses the realm of what a keyboard can do. An artist in his own right, Deutsch has also been backing up artists like Citizen Cope, Norah Jones, Alice Smith, Rosanne Cash and Shooter Jennings as well as touring regularly with Charlie Hunter throughout his career. Obviously a master of his craft, its no surprise he made a playlist championing his fellow keyboardists. Check it out here or hit play above.Says Deutsch of his playlist, "Hammers, Strings, Stops, & Knobs is my tribute to some of history’s best ticklers, plunkers, pounders, and tweakers of all things related to the undisputed heavyweight champ of western music: the keyboard. Every one of these essential artists holds a special place in my heart as the uniqueness of each of their musical voices exist on a level reserved for the very best (not to mention that these are seriously dope tracks!) So kick back, relax, and allow a hefty dose of keyboard wizardry to brighten up your day."

Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusses classic composition was originally recorded by Cy Grant in 1964, and, a year later, was covered by Nina Simone, whose version became one of the iconic tracks of that decade. Since then, its been covered, sampled and remixed dozens of times, including recently by Lauryn Hill.

Anyone familiar with the writings of Haruki Murakami knows that he’s a massive music geek with a particular interest in jazz. From the beginning of his career, his books have been filled with musical references. He longed to be a musician way before becoming a writer but lacked the necessary chops. Instead, he ran his own jazz bar, immersing himself in music 24/7, and even after becoming a writer, he continued that immersion—music is a constant part of his environment when he’s working. His official website offers a tantalizing photo of his vinyl collection, which he estimates at more than 10,000 records, and he even published a pair of books containing his own essays on his favorite jazz artists.An enterprising soul named Masamaro Fujiki has taken it upon himself to tally up the tunes in Murakami’s collection into a massive Spotify playlist. In its current state, the playlist contains only a small portion of the music on the author’s shelves—but even that ends up in excess of 3,000 tracks. According to Fujiki, he based his playlist on a Q&A website Murakami put up a couple of years back and on his music essays. Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the albums represented are jazz: Murakami’s tastes cycle between bop (Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young), cool (Stan Getz, Bud Shank), and vocalists (Beverly Kenney, copious amounts of Billie Holiday), which are interspersed with classical offerings (Prokofiev, Mozart, Tchaikovsky) and occasionally punctuated by a handful of rock records (The Beach Boys, CCR).If we take this to be an accurate sampling of Murakami’s collection, he definitely isn’t much of a modernist. He is, however, clearly capable of going deep when it comes to his chosen niches, as exemplified by the presence of obscure artists like Swedish sax man Lars Gullin and contemporary jazz vocalist Stacey Kent among all the icons. Fujiki has declared his intent to add more music to the list when he can, but in the meantime, what he’s already created is an impressive achievement—one that allows you to tune in to the celebrated author’s wavelength for a while and muse on the way his listening habits inform his singular literary style.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

John Coltrane went insane sometime around 1960. Once he hit that perfect balance of drugs, free jazz, and ingenious sidemen, it was game over for vintage hard bop. The Village Vanguard concerts of November 1961 saw the beginnings of the classic quartet—Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones—and their search for visionary new sounds and modes. In many ways, Coltrane revolutionized the concert experience through his visceral and spiritual engagement with his music of that period. Through these live performances, ranging from Coltrane Live in Paris to his essential contributions to Miles Davis’ 1960 tour, Coltrane delivered, through both his saxophone and his leadership, some of the most potent expressions of the post-war existential crisis that would ever be heard.

John Coltrane went insane sometime around 1960. Once he hit that perfect balance of drugs, free jazz, and ingenious sidemen, it was game over for vintage hard bop. The Village Vanguard concerts of November 1961 saw the beginnings of the classic quartet—Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones—and their search for visionary new sounds and modes. In many ways, Coltrane revolutionized the concert experience through his visceral and spiritual engagement with his music of that period. Through these live performances, ranging from Coltrane Live in Paris to his essential contributions to Miles Davis’ 1960 tour, Coltrane delivered, through both his saxophone and his leadership, some of the most potent expressions of the post-war existential crisis that would ever be heard.

Subscribe to the accompanying Spotify playlist that culls the influences of Kamasi Washingtons album, Heaven and EarthMusic discovery used to be much more difficult. Growing up in rural Louisiana, many quantum leaps from any recognizable cultural hub, and a good decade before the ubiquity of the internet, the process was much more iterative and laborious. I would find certain gateway artists, who would then lead towards other artists, aesthetics, or even entire cultures, and, with time, my understanding of both the broader musical landscape and of the world at large increased exponentially. My gateway to the gateways was discovering Bob Dylan when I was 13. To give you some context, the album I bought before Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. 1 was Young MC’s Stone Cold Rhymin’, and the only reason that I even bothered with Dylan was the betrayal and anxiety that my devoutly Christian parents expressed at Dylan drifting away from his religious fundamentalism of the early ‘80s. It was an act of blatant (if soft-toned) rebellion, but I was also experiencing my own doubts about religion, and I was curious about how someone could arrive at losing their faith. This was how I came to Dylan, but I quickly discovered the other pleasure of Dylan, and the potency of his music stirred an omnivorous curiosity in me to learn more about both Dylan and the world he existed within. I quickly scarfed down Dylan biographies and essays, and then can reams of microfiche (note: a pre-internet archive of journals and magazines maintained by libraries) for articles about him. During this process, I’d keep a journal, meticulously jotting down the names of musicians, authors, painters, and politicians, and then taking that list and doing further research. This was how I discovered Lenny Bruce, Leonard Cohen, Miles Davis, Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, and so on, who then subsequently led me to Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, John Coltrane, and so on and so forth. It was a slow education, and I went through a lot of notebooks.Music discovery is easier now, to state the obvious, but there are still gateway artists that nod towards larger, unknown universes for their fans. For a newer generation, Kamasi Washington is that point of entry for jazz. He’s recorded extensively with Kendrick Lamar, released his debut The Epic on Flying Lotus’ label Brainfeeder, and has been extensively praised by the Pitchfork and Faders of the world. He’s done this by playing a pretty straight-up variant of a specific type of jazz -- it’s not something you have to squint and call jazz -- and this is leading his legions of fans back to discover McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Alice Coltrane, or David Axelrod. Even for someone with an intermediate knowledge of jazz, such as myself, Kamasi still opens up certain windows. After the release of his latest, Heaven and Earth, I began diving into both West Coast Jazz and the genre’s more political threads. This lead me to the relatively unknown (at least to me) LA pianist Horace Tapscott. Horace began as a trumpet player, gigging with everyone from Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman to Fletcher Henderson and Gerald Wilson, but took up piano during a stint in the Air Force in the late ‘50s, and more of less stuck with that instrument for the remainder of his career. After a particularly harrowing tour of the South as part of Lionel Hampton’s big band, he became a devoted social activist, understanding and teaching the importance of music in both community building and societal transformation. He set up Union of Gods Musicians and Ascension (Ugmaa) in Watts, which was dedicated to supporting the artist community in the Watts neighborhood, and began recruiting young musicians into his group, The Pan-Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. When the infamous Watts Riots happened in 1965, the group drove a flat-bed truck through the chaos while playing their blend of afro-futurist, post-bop spiritual jazz. Soon, the group began to receive arts funding, and Horace would go on to mentor and teach hundreds of students throughout his life. When he passed in 1999, he was primarily known as an educator.Horace was incredibly influential in building out the Leimert Park jazz scene where Kamasi got his start, and where he recently returned for the launch party of Heaven and Earth. Kamasi has even stated in interviews that his father was a big fan of Horace’s music, and that he grew up listening to him and John Coltrane. Speaking to Jazzwise Magazine, Kamasi said, “Horace is one of the most important figures in the foundation of music in LA, from both a purely musically and socially conscious perspective. My dad took me to hear [Tapscott’s] Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra many times and I played with them after Horace passed away.”But more than anything, Kamasi is repaying that debt by keeping Horace’s legacy alive, and we all benefit from that.

In the two plus years since Kamasi Washington dropped The Epic, his appropriately titled three-CD bonanza of Afrocentric post-bop sound, there has been a revolution in the world of jazz—and some of it was televised. Its no longer uncommon for a jazz musician to play sold-out rock arenas and headline major festivals. And its no longer odd to see jazz on hip-hop playlists, be it tracks by Washingtons West Coast Get Down associates like Josef Leimberg, Miles Mosley, or Terrace Martin, or by hip, think-outside-the-box jazz players like Robert Glasper, Makaya McCraven, or Jeff Parker. Washingtons first release since The Epic—the new six-part EP, Harmony of Difference—arrives to a different scene.Harmony of Difference is the soundtrack to a film by A.G. Rojas that premiered during the Biennial at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in March 2017, and it shows the growth and diversification of Washingtons sound. He already draws heavily from the often overlooked glory days of the early 70s when musicians extended the jazz tradition into rock, funk, and African music. Deeper grooves power some of the tracks on Harmony, and the solos are more concise—where The Epics definitive tracks clocked in at longer than 10 minutes, the best music here often comes in under six. All of Washington’s stylistic advances are represented on “Truth,” which also provides a nifty recapitulation of what made The Epic so special, with its robust rhythms, a choir carrying a soaring melody, and a solo that would do John Coltrane proud. Its jazz eclecticism at its best—music that is both inclusive and deeply artful.But while his music can seem otherworldly, Washingtons bold new sound didnt land from outer space. The tracks on this playlist take you through his roots and influences, the current jazz movement he helped create, and the genre’s future.

Check out Kamasi’s new tracks in the playlist above, which captures his best alongside the artists and songs that influenced his career. We’ll keep it updated as new joints drop. Subscribe to the playlist here. In 2018, it’s difficult to figure out how we want pop culture -- and music in particular -- to deal with our larger, societal malaise. Really, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s going on with society at the moment. From data harvesting and the upward mobility of neo-Fascism, to environmental collapse, the #metoo movement and transhumanism, a larger narrative seems elusive. But one thing does seem clear: things are changing, and they’re changing very quickly. It could go one way or another, but, regardless, we will be radically different once we get out the other side.In this atmosphere of deep uncertainty, it feels silly to expect musicians (of all people) to have answers, and, as with previous generations, the art that best captures these times has been ambiguous and slippery. Think of Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. We all know the nature of our condition -- we’re living under a President that lies, steals, conjules, bullies and demeans every single fucking day -- and Lamar acknowledges that, but offers up few solution. Instead, the album feels powerful because it relays something more primal and honest: anger, confusion, distrust, and uncertainty. The two new tracks from modern jazz great Kamasi Washington engage with this dark, blurry zeitgeist. Appropriately, it’s difficult to think of any modern musician who contains as many multitudes as Kamasi Washington. He’s collaborated extensively with Kendrick Lamar, releases music through Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint, and plays in front of tens of thousands at Coachella, but his music doesn’t owe that much to hip-hop, electronic or modern pop traditions. Instead, it mines a broad spectrum of classic jazz, from the big band compositions of Charles Mingus to the free jazz spiritual quests of mid-’60s Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and on to the smoother, R&B-inflected of Roy Ayers. Washington recently released two tracks in support of his upcoming album, Heaven and Earth, and, of the two new tracks, “Fists of Fury” is the most immediate and the most explicitly political. It’s ostensibly a cover of the theme song from the classic Bruce Lee movie, but it’s a fairly dramatic departure (the lyrics have changed, for one thing). It’s a beautiful, startling track -- spacious and intricately composed, full of nuanced movements that swerve in and out of its in its nearly 10-minute runtime. Tinkling piano solos flow out of rumbling bongos, while the track’s string arrangement give a stately color to Washington’s warm tenor saxophone tones. Patrice Quinn and Dwight Trible provide aggrieved and aggravated vocals that telegraph the songs’s #woke themes of racial retribution and justice, “Our time as victims is over/ We will no longer ask for justice/ Instead we will take our retribution.” It’s great, but it feels like an outlier in Washington’s catalog. It’s not only a cover, but it’s Washington’s first explicitly political track, which is something that Washington has shied away from in the past. “Someone like Donald Trump cant control the way I show love to my brother,” Washington recently told Rolling Stone. “He cant control the way I feel about my neighbors. Im trying to make the music bigger than the politics. If you get caught up in the day-to-day, youll get lost in that." Of course, this doesn’t mean that Washington’s previous music hasn’t been engaged with the larger socio-political conversation; they have, just not in obvious ways. His 2017 EP Harmony of Difference -- and, in particular, its centerpiece, “Truth” -- was a slow, simmering burn, full of melancholic phrasing and delicate passages that gripped at the hems of the sublime. It was the perfect salve -- a perfect refuge -- to the reigning socio-culture shitshow. Washington’s other new track, “The Space Travelers Lullaby,” lives in a similar space. It’s wiry and ethereal, building off a wistful string arrangement and a spritely piano figure. It feels like a Sunday morning jog through the cosmos, or a brief sojourn to a beatific foreign world. It’s easy to put it in the lineage of afrofutustist forefather Sun Ra, but, with its cooing vocals and tickling cymbals, the song is more stately, measured, and baroque. It’s a soundtrack of itself, a cosmic journey through an endlessly dense, placid innerspace. In this ways, “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels more appropriate for these times than the more explicitly political “Fists of Fury.” Maybe it’s because of the track’s sonic maximalism, but, “First of Fury” feels disjointed from our pop culture timeline, despite all the BLM sloganeering. It could easily exist in 1972, 2005, or 2018. “The Space Travelers Lullaby” feels both sad and celebratory in a way that is very 2018. It draws its light from the dense darkness outside, and it feels as if it’s offering an answer of sorts, or at least a pretty good suggestion, about how to proceed in a world where we, as individuals, have no control.

With diplomatic relationships with Cuba thawing, theres been renewed interest in the music of the Caribbean Island. For this playlist Judy focuses her attention on the direct collaborations between Cuban and American musicians, with the subtext being that though formal diplomatic or financial ties may have been severed during the Castro years, but the cultural exchange between that two nations has continued. Books have been written on the influence of Cuban on American music, particularly on jazz and the music of New Orleans, and this cant be understated. Through much of the antebellum period, New Orleans served as the port of call for slaves ships coming from the Caribbean, and much of what we think of as foundational American music found it antecedent in places like Cuba. This playlist doesnt go back that far, of course, but theres some great stuff on here, from the pre-Castro days of Chico O’Farrill and Nat King Cole, to the modern music of Wynton Marsalis and Arturo O’Farrill.