Blog: breath of life

A week highlighting vocalists—we start with ten interpretations of Duke Ellington's classic song, "Come Sunday" featuring Mahalia Jackson, Ray Nance, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ellis Marsalis, Gladys Knight, Dizzy Gillespie, Esquizito, World Saxophone Quartet, Joe Zawinul and Sabine Kabongo , and Les Nubians . We wrap it up with new music from Rene Marie and classic covers from Aaron Neville . The sweet sound of the human voice.

The good. The bad. The beautiful. The ugly. Mix it all up. Stir it in the pot. What you got? New Orleans—where everything is one thing. So hard it will make you go soft just thinking about it; try to leave and New Orleans will make you harden your heart to dealing with the soft of any place else, 'cause all you want is to be in New Orleans, even when the Big Easy is making it hard to be easy with what's going down. New Orleans. My home. Born, bred and [...]

Ladies & gentlemen, jazz heads and lovers of singers, I present to the future of serious jazz vocals. Long live Rene Marie! This is not marketing hype, nor an infatuation with a new recording. Rene Marie has six CDs and a handful of singles. Here is her background autobiography: I was born into a family of 9 in a very small town in Virginia. Music played a pivotal role in my life from the very beginning. It was at home that I learned the value of [...]

Sometimes, when the subject of religion is addressed by our students, I am asked for my personal affiliation. "I'm a born again pagan." A what? "A born again pagan." What's a pagan? "A pagan is a person who does not follow any organized religion." You don't believe in God? "I didn't say that but no, not in the way that I think you mean God, as a conscious being, usually a male, who sits on high." [...]

Ole. John Coltrane . Plus Gil Scott-Heron and Jose James —celebrating Trane's birthday. Shelley Nicole, Red Summer, Kandi Cole, Toshi Reagon and Hanifah Walidah gift us with a healthy helping of woman-centered music. Brazil's jazz diva Tania Maria wraps up an exciting week of innovative music.

Tania Maria Correa Reis is a Brazilian vocalist, pianist and composer. Born May 9, 1948 with a professional career of over 30 years, Tania Maria is one of only two or three true divas of Brazilian music alive today. Tania's work mixes Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), jazz, samba and funk. It's intoxicating the way she rocks. Heavy percussion even when (really I should say especially when) it's just she and her piano. Her piano attack is fierce, which is to say when she hits the key they respond as a drum would. What is not always immediately [...]

I met Olive Demetria and Hanifah Walidah during the desperate days immediately after Katrina. I was spending most of my time on the road doing video interviews with evacuees, performing poetry and giving talks about New Orleans. I was invited to visit the People's Republic of Brooklyn to be part of a benefit at a small club. I got there about twenty minutes early and sat at the bar peeping the proceedings. It didn't take five minutes for me to recognize the obvious: this was a lesbian affair. I was both humbled and impressed. Womyn-idenitifed sisters were [...]

Happy birthday Trane (September 23, 1926, Hamlet, North Carolina)! Trane exemplified Albert Ayler's maxim: music is the healing force of the universe. Beyond healing, Trane's music was also a spiritual force for good, an aural catalyst that encouraged and inspired all of us to reach deeper into ourselves, higher above the mundanities and mendacities of the world. This little mixtape attempts to get to that healing/spiritual uplift dyad. Gil Scott-Heron speaks on the healing and Jose James reaches for the spiritual. Trane's great song "Ole" is the centerpiece–the sonic fuel and the creative firelight. [...]

BoL is having serious techinical problems with our host server. It's been buggy all week and now it won't let me post music and photos. Hope to have everything solved within the next 24 to 36 hours. Unfortunately, there's not much I can do to speed up the repairs. Bear with us. Will email you once we're operational. Meanwhile, we'll keep last week's posting active. —Kalamu

The end of one is the beginning of another. BoL co-founder Mtume Salaam posts his last regular columns, featuring Nina Simone, Gil Scott-Heron, John Coltrane, Jose James and a 3 year retrospective of contemporary artists posted on BoL. A new regular feature on BoL will be weekly mixtape downloads rather than only individual tracks. Don't cry. Be Happy. We celebrate transitions—it's a New Orleans thing!

How do you write one post about three years' worth of covers? Well, as I mentioned just a few months ago, my favorite cover we've done here at Breath of Life has to be José James' brilliant re-recording of John Coltrane's "Equinox." Then I remembered that the Gil Scott-Heron tune "Spirits" had always reminded me of "Equinox." So there it was: my opportunity to due a post including one of my all-time favorite artists (Gil Scott) with my one of my all-time favorite covers (José's "Equinox" ) with Kalamu's all-time favorite musician (John [...]

Damn. I can hardly believe this is my last BoL post. I'll comfort myself with the thought that it's actually not: like I said over in the Classic post, I'll be around. For this one, I was initially going to write about a single artist, but I changed my mind. Instead, I'm going to go back through our last three years and drop a little something from a wiiiide variety of singers and players. A few weeks ago, Kalamu asked if I was ever going to do a mix. If I don't do it this week, I [...]

What's happening, beautiful people? This is Mtume, coming at you with my last three posts for Breath of Life. I know, I know: wipe your tears, take a deep breath, and climb back in from that ledge. None of you know/have any idea how you're going to continue without me, but I promise, it's gonna be okay. Seriously though. Kalamu and I started doing Breath of Life back in June of 2005. Since then, we've both written hundreds of posts and uploaded thousands of hours of music. Here's the thing [...]

A jazz week: John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders take us to Africa. Polish trumpeter Tomasz Stanko gives us heartfelt and engaging music. Adelaide Hall, Oliver Nelson, Ellis Marsalis, Esquizito and Rahsaan Roland Kirk interpret Duke's "Creole Love Call." Collectively these artists cover the gamut of jazz styles.

This music spans about eighty years and change. "Creole Love Call" is a composition from the twenties associated with Duke Ellington and copyrighted by Bubber Miley (Duke's tumpeter), Rudy Jackson, and Duke. It was the subject of litigation with Jackson charging that the song was originally his. Although he lost the suit, some critics point to an earlier King Oliver original as the provenance of "Creole Love Call." I do not know how it actually went, but given the time period of the twenties it's likely that the basic melody [...]

A couple weeks ago, before the hurricane (Gustav in 2008), I was talking to Kalamu about the Tomasz Stanko Quartet's 2004 ECM release, Suspended Night . I was saying: "These cats are using jazz techniques and they're playing instruments associated with jazz and they're playing them in the style of jazz and they've obviously studied the masters of jazz, but I'm not convinced they're actually playing jazz!" "Hmmm," Kalamu responded. "I dig it though. I dig it a [...]

I had just joined the army when this came out. A little over three years later, up in the Girt Town neighborhood of New Orleans I was introduced to Juno Lewis (born Julian Bertrand Lewis, 1932 in New Orleans) and we hung out. I copped one of his drum inventions: the daka-debello (sp?), patterned after a log drum but was like half a hollowed out cylinder and instead of a solid flat side, the top face had slits of different lengths cut into it. When the slits were struck with a small mallet with a rubber ball (sort of like [...]

International week: Joe Zawinul from Austria, Sexto Sentido from Cuba and 14 versions of the Juan Tizol (Puerto Rico) and Duke Ellington composition featuring: Duke Ellington Orchestra, Tessa Souter, Chucho Valdez, Andy Bey, Martial Solal, Duke with Charlie Mingus & Max Roach , Dee Dee Bridgewater, Ray Barretto, Rene Marie, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Dizzy Gillespie and Mark de Clive-Lowe . What a wonderful trip.

Caravan is one of the most popular of Duke's huge body of work. Valve trombonist Juan Tizol is the co-author of "Caravan" (and also of "Perdido," another Ellington perennial). Tizol's facility on the valve trombone is legendary. Also, there are literally hundreds of versions of this song. My goal here was to offer a range of interpretations that in style and/or chronology virtually span the history of jazz. We open with an air check recording of the Ellington Orchestra displaying one of his signature sounds: the jungle [...]

I look at the cover and I'm sure, somewhere in the background a man had a hand in putting this cover together. I've seen over six videos of Sexto Sentido. There's nothing to suggest they are selling themselves as sex objects except this cover, which is compelling evidence. I'm not saing they don't present what may accurately be portrayed as a sexy image, but straight up sex objects. No, I don't think so. Yet here it is. UPDATE: the cover I saw was from the initial Cuban release. Now there's a new release, dated 2008. Here's [...]