Hot damn: two seriously cool jazz shows on the same night. This Friday, October 16, the Cookers play a Place for Jazz in Schenectady while John Pizzarelli and Catherine Russell team up at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.
There are all-star groups; then there’s the Cookers, seven players whose 250 years of combined experience blur stars and styles together like Ken Burns’s “Jazz” on fast forward.
The Cookers. Photo provided.
Aged from 50 (saxophonist Craig Handy) to 91 (bassist Cecil McBee), they honor the tradition with bebop as unifying fulcrum between past and future, their common language.
Handy portrayed the lyrical tenor saxophone great Coleman Hawkins in the jazz-centric film “Kansas City,” set in the swing era; and led the Mingus Dynasty tribute crew honoring the innovative bassist. Maybe most visibly, he co-starred in Herbie Hancock’s fusion jazz-rocking Headhunters.
McBee accompanied jazz/R&B diva Dinah Washington and played folk-jazz fusion with Paul Winter before turning to jazz in his 30s on arriving in New York. He then joined forces with modernists Miles Davis, Charles Lloyd, Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane and others, and shared the Best Instrumental Performance Grammy for “Blues for Coltrane.”
No contemporary jazz giant combines jazz past and present so perfectly as saxophonist Donald Harrison. As Big Chief of The Congo Square Nation Afro-New Orleans Cultural Group, a Mardi Gras Indians masking troupe, he honors the New Orleans tradition. Then, playing hard bop with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and in a sparking duo with Terence Blanchard established him as an innovator. He combined both approaches in Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” alongside Blanchard, and starred as himself in HBO’s “Treme.”
Pianist George Cables’s star-studded resume lists gigs with Blakey, like Harrison; also working with saxophone giants Sonny Rollins and Dexter Gordon as swing became bop, then with Freddie Hubbard on the gentler side of fusion and in his own longtime trio.
Like McBee who came up with Dinah Washington, drummer Billy Hart (second oldest Cooker at 86) started in R&B with Memphis soul-men Otis Redding and Sam and Dave. Powerful, prolific – four or five albums a year for decades – Hart was declared NEA Jazz Master in 2022 alongside Cassandra Stanley and future fellow Cooker Donald Harrison. Hart also starred with Pharaoh Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Smith, Stan Getz, Charles Lloyd and in Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band, also in Miles Davis’s rocking, post-Bitches Brew bands.
Trumpeter David Weiss played with Handy in the fearless New Jazz Composers Octet, hailed by Ben Ratliff in the New York Times as “the sound of the new jazz mainstream.”
The Cookers other trumpeter, Jeremy Pelt also played with Handy, in the Mingus Big Band, and with the recently deceased Cassandra Wilson.
Saxophonist Azar Lawrence may be best known for his work with McCoy Tyner on the eminent pianists most exuberant and rhythmically propulsive 1970s albums including “Enlightenment” and “Sama Layuca.” Lawrence shares with McBee a varied background, including R&B credits in Tina Turner’s band, War, and the 103rd Street Rhythm Band. An early gig with Elvin Jones marked a turning point for Lawrence into the rocking neighborhood where trumpeters Freddy Hubbard and Woody Shaw played; both employed Lawrence.
Together, the Cookers have released half a dozen albums and played every significant jazz festival, club and theater, even while maintaining busy schedules as bandleaders and valued sidemen.
Friday they play A Place for Jazz in the Carl B. Taylor Auditorium of the SUNY Schenectady County Community College music department. 7 p.m. $25 general admission. www.aplaceforjazz.org.
Meanwhile, 24 miles away at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, guitarist-singer John Pizzarelli plays with singer Catherine Russell.
Both have long been highly visible here, Pizzarelli playing almost every area venue, first co-starring in guitar tag-teams with his late dad Bucky at WAMC’s The Linda, while Russell has starred on her own and accompanied others.
John Pizzarelli, above. Photo provided. Catherine Russell, below. Photo from Broadway World
Every week when Pizzarelli hosts “Radio Deluxe” on WAMC with singer-wife Jessica Molaskey, he proves himself an avid and knowledgeable fan first, before he ever picked up a guitar – spinning records by inspirations on air. He also produces tribute albums in all directions, from swing and early pop idols Frank Sinatra and Nat Cole to guitar innovator Pat Metheny. Pizzarelli also produced James Taylor’s Grammy-winning “American Standard” album and released “Dear Mr. Bennett” (tribute to Tony) this spring with bassist Mike Karn and pianist Isaiah J. Thompson.
Like the Cookers McBee, Hart and Lawrence, Catherine Russell first made her mark as accompanist, with pop-rockers David Bowie and Steely Dan and singers from Madonna to Cyndi Lauper and Rosanne Cash, including one of Cash’s strongest shows here, at The Egg in 2014.
Turning to jazz in 2006 with “Cat,” Russell began exploring the family business: Her father was musical director for years with New Orleans jazz trumpet pioneer Louis Armstrong. Russell played an early jazz vocalist in “Bolden!” – bio-pic honoring Armstrong’s contemporary. Russell often includes jazz classics in her live shows, including “At the Swing Cats Ball,” “Errand Girl for Rhythm,” Exactly Like You,” “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” and “Don’t Advertise Your Man” at Caffe Lena – two sold out shows – last March.
Live-streaming at home (car trouble), I found: “Russell may be the most superbly deserving Nepo kid this side of Rosanne Cash, whose band Russell sang in years ago at the Egg. Russell did cite her father Luis, composer of tunes in each show. On her own terms, backed by a cozy ensemble as skilled as she is, Russell is one spectacularly effective singer and a tasteful curator of a vintage repertoire. She said she doesn’t sing anything newer than 70 years old (her age at her next birthday), and she doesn’t need to.”
8 p.m. $63, $51. 518-273-0038 www.troymusichall.org
Also at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, Trombone Shorty returns next Tuesday to explode jazzy New Orleans funk at its most joyful.
Trombone Shorty. My photo
When he and his strong band Orleans Avenue played The Egg in 2023, I wrote: “To give joy, you need to bring it yourself, and Trombone Shorty – born Troy Andrews, a son of Treme in new Orleans – always packs plenty.
“For uplift and get-down, Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue amazed, again…A tremendous, thrilling show.
“In their formidable, forceful flow everything fit and nobody needed cues to hit their riffs, solos or section playing. Whenever anybody soloed, Shorty sidled up and encouraged them…Shorty formed trios and duets, switched off between trumpet and trombone and did that astounding thing where he repeated a riff, tight, over and over for several minutes by breathing in through his nose while blowing hard through the horn. He and tenor man DJ Raymond roamed the crowd, honking up one aisle and down another. Back onstage, he brought his saxophonists into a three-horn cluster, combining Sidney Bechet and J.S. Bach.”
Trombone Shorty and Orleans Avenue have taken over the festival-closing slot at both Jazz Fest in New Orleans (from the Neville Brothers) and the Saratoga Jazz Festival when they play up here in the summer, thrilling many thousands at each. Indoors, they should sound great in The Hall. Abraham Alexander opens, a young star vocalist born in Greece to Nigerian parents, and raised in Texas, he earned an Oscar nomination for his song “Like a Bird” in the film “Sing Sing,” 8 p.m. Tickets are selling very fast.
