Universal
Music Group is reactivating the legendary jazz label impulse! with the release
of Viper’s Drag, a retro-modern opus from Henry Butler-Steven Bernstein and the
Hot 9 that is due out July 15 in the U.S. The new impulse!, which was reported
yesterday in The New York Times, is a division of Universal Music France
headquartered in Paris that will be distributed by Blue Note Records in the
U.S. The label will focus on new releases from artists including Randy Weston,
Kenny Barron, Jacky Terrasson, Ran Blake, Rodney Kendrick, Sullivan Fortner,
Jean-Luc Ponty/Stanley Clarke/Biréli Lagrène, Madeleine Peyroux, and a
previously-unreleased live duo album from Charlie Haden and Jim Hall recorded
at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 1990.
Founded
in 1960 by Creed Taylor who was succeeded by Bob Thiele, impulse! quickly
became the home of “The New Wave In Jazz” with landmark recordings from John
Coltrane, Charles Mingus, Gil Evans, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Duke Ellington,
Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Charlie Haden’s
Liberation Music Orchestra, and many more. After falling inactive in the late
1970s the label was revived in the late 1980s for releases from McCoy Tyner and
Michael Brecker, as well as Henry Butler’s first two albums—Fivin’ Around and
The Village—and later on Diana Krall and Alice Coltrane.
Viper’s
Drag is the happy collision of two perfectly matched musical sensibilities—that
of the New Orleans singer/pianist Henry Butler and trumpeter/arranger Steven
Bernstein--two students of early jazz with decidedly modern voices. “Their
collaboration is both historically aware and fully prepared to cut loose,” remarked
The New York Times in an enthusiastic review of their recent New Year’s Eve
performance at the Jazz Standard.
Blind
since birth, Butler tells stories through the rise, swing, and rumble of his
fingers as they channel sounds as diverse as his Louisiana birthplace: jazz,
Caribbean, classical, pop, blues and R&B, among others. A giant among
giants, he is a member of a special brotherhood that also includes Professor
Longhair, James Booker and Allen Toussaint. His technical ability and expansive
repertoire are legendary.
A
veteran of New York City's downtown scene and a GRAMMY-winning arranger,
Bernstein juggles a forward-looking perspective with a rooted sense of what’s
come before. Known for his work with The Lounge Lizards and Sexmob, he’s also
the leader of the Millennial Territory Orchestra, a nine-piece ensemble that
draws tunes and inspiration from the dance orchestras that toured the U.S.
before World War II.
Though
historical explorers they may be; neither Butler nor Bernstein can avoid
incorporating the most modern and freer edge of today’s jazz expression into
their music. Each has found ways of balancing past and future in their
respective musical signatures. “Steve’s got this modern touch in his playing
and his arrangements, avant-garde and beyond,” says Butler. Bernstein laughs
and shakes his head: “I call Henry a space-traveler/historian.”
The two
first worked together in 1998 in the Kansas City All Stars, a touring big band
led by Bernstein that came out of the Robert Altman film Kansas City. They
reunited in 2011 to perform a special, one-off concert at a blues festival in
New York City and the material they chose to do that day—the classic blues of
Bessie Smith, the first-generation jazz of Jelly Roll Morton, and other similar
tunes—resonated in a way neither had expected. “We’ll do something like this
again,” Bernstein remembers them promising each other.
Butler
and Bernstein reassembled in 2012 for an engagement at the Jazz Standard. “We
had to get tunes together since we’d be doing two sets a night,” explains
Butler. “Steven came over to my place and he’d propose a tune, we’d play it and
I’d feed ideas to him—he calls them ‘Henryisms.’ Then he’d work them out for
the whole band, play them back to me and I’d have to come up with some new
ideas all over again. That’s how most of the arrangements came about.”
“We knew
we had something special on the first set of the run,” recalls Bernstein.
Veteran producer Joshua Feigenbaum was in the audience that night. He returned
for most of their shows that week, convinced the group had to record. Both
Butler and Bernstein refer to him as the third partner that made this album a
reality. “This music is really the result of three perspectives,” says
Bernstein. “The song choices came from Henry and myself and I did the
arrangements, plus we used most of MTO’s frontline players. But the push to get
this music recorded—and the idea for using an expert rhythm section like
Reginald Veal and Herlin Riley—that’s Josh. He heard the value in this music
and made this album happen.”
The
music that Butler, Bernstein, and the Hot 9 have created together is filled
with modern flavors, agile arrangements and a vitality that never allows the
historical focus to limit itself to mere recreation. “We’re not trying to
replicate New Orleans music or old-time blues,” says Bernstein. “We’re all
musicians who have come out of other experiences, many of us in New York like
working with Don Cherry and Wynton Marsalis and Lou Reed and Levon Helm. We’re
taking that and then using the framework of Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Waller.”
“They
were an ideal pairing,” concluded The New York Times in their review. “Mr.
Bernstein and the Hot 9’s New York City erudition and gusto worked to compound
Mr. Butler’s encyclopedic New Orleans flair. They are partway through recording
an album together: a promising project, indeed.”
The
tracklisting for Viper’s Drag is as follows:
1.
Viper’s Drag (Fats Waller)
2. Dixie
Walker (Henry Butler)
3. Buddy
Bolden’s Blues (Jelly Roll Morton)
4.
Henry’s Boogie (Butler)
5. Gimmie
A Pigfoot (Wesley Wilson)
6.
Wolverine Blues (Morton)
7. King
Porter Stomp (Morton)
8. I
Left My Baby (Andy Gibson)
9. Some
Iko (Butler)
Henry
Butler-Steven Bernstein and the Hot 9 – Summer 2014 Tour Dates:
June
11-12 – Yoshi's – San Francisco, CA
June 14
– Playboy Jazz Festival – Los Angeles, CA
June 26
– BAM R&B Festival at MetroTech – Brooklyn, NY
July 10
– Nice Jazz Festival – Nice, France
July 13
– North Sea Jazz Festival – Rotterdam, Netherlands
July 18
– New Mexico Jazz Festival – Santa Fe, NM
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