The New BlacK
Darrell Grant Live At Birdland
2022 (Lair Hill Records)
Buy from Bandcamp
Album Tracks
Introduction
The New Black
Tilmon Tones
Foresight
For Heaven’s Sake
The New Bop
Einbahnstrasse
Blue in Green
Freedom Dance
Coda
There are those rare times in live music when absolutely everything is right. Portland-based pianist and composer Darrell Grant remembers such a time, when he had the almost accidental great fortune to capture two magic nights in New York, on one of the city’s preeminent bandstands. The year was 2019, 25 years since the release of Grant’s 1994 debut album Black Art, one of the canonical documents of ’90s New York jazz featuring Wallace Roney, Christian McBride, and Brian Blade. On the stunning new release The New Black: Darrell Grant Live at Birdland, the pianist offers a bracing revisitation of the Black Art repertoire with the jaw-dropping lineup of trumpeter Marquis Hill, bassist Clark Sommers, and drummer Kendrick Scott. The group also unveils a new Grant piece for the occasion, “The New Black,” and an incendiary reading of “The New Bop,” the title track of Grant’s 1997 follow-up to Black Art.
The New Black music film by Kalimah Abioto
“a definitive statement to the jazz world of what is common knowledge in the Pacific Northwest—that Darrell Grant is a jazz artist residing in the top tier of modern jazz protagonists.”
The only tape rolling at those Birdland sets was Sommers’ personal digital recorder, for his own reference, a fact he mentioned to Grant only in passing. There was no thought in anyone’s mind that a live recording was being made, much less one for official release. But thank goodness. Grant sets the scene vividly: “I’m in New York, playing with one of the best bands I can imagine, the crowd is psyched, the sound is fantastic, the piano feels good, the club owner wants me to be there, we have a real connection. When that happens, when you have that spirit and practice of adventure, you get to these transcendent things.”
After a sustained listen to Sommers’ files shared via Dropbox, Grant realized that “the music, the feeling, was leaping off the recording. Of course, it’s not like a typical album, nothing is close-miked or mixed, but it felt like how the music felt when we were playing in New York in the ’90s. In that period of time jazz was just burning up the street, it was incredible. I felt that the importance of that moment at Birdland overshadowed whatever the sonic challenges might be, and that it deserved to be heard.”
The titles Black Art and The New Black, Grant adds, “are statements of identity. Making Black Art was an affirmation of the impact that Black musical voices had in shaping my own identity. Both Black Art and The New Black celebrate the joy and unfettered possibility of Black artistic expression.”
Yet The New Black, as the title suggests, is far more than simply a reprise of Black Art. “Every song is rearranged,” Grant says. “I knew if I was going to revisit this music it would have to have the benefit of 25 years of music-making. I’ve written an opera in between when I recorded Black Art and now. I wanted to open up these tunes, like the interludes and time-shifting vamps on ‘Tilmon Tones.’ ‘Blue In Green,’ which I recorded before Black Art with my group Current Events, is such a short form, and I thought wouldn’t it be interesting to break it open. ‘Foresight’ I recorded solo piano for my album Spirit in 2003, so I thought, what if I combined that with [the Black Art version]? I knew on this gig that we could really dig deep into these tunes.” To that end, the standard “For Heaven’s Sake,” a sublime trumpet-piano duo on Black Art, leaps another dimension here with the full band, a colorful outro vamp giving Hill space to take Roney-esque flight.
“I’ve really held to this admonishment that Betty Carter used to tell us,” Grant recalls, “that you can’t do the same thing, you have to create in the moment, you have to do it differently than last night.” The New Black, with its untouched, unfiltered sound and hint of barroom chatter, lives up to that ethos, empowering the band to hit home run after home run on every tune. “The ideal of us as performers being willing to leap ‘without a net,’ as Wayne Shorter says, is something I feel deeply,” Grant concludes. “My own view on that metaphor is that when we take those risks, it’s the community we have surrounded ourselves with that ‘catches us.’”