My impulse was to write the last black play ever for myself. I really believed if I put it all into one play, people would leave me alone.
—
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins
Willie Jones III’s Straight Swingin’ by Zoë Anglesey
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- James Casebere by Roberto Juarez
- Raimund Abraham by Carlos Brillembourg
- Julia Wolfe by David Krasnow
- Mary Robison by Maureen Murray
- Barry Hannah by Fiona Maazel
- Jonathan Franzen by Donald Antrim
- Barbet Schroeder by Ken Foster
Interviews
- Bill Owens by Larry Sultan
- Louise Fishman by Archie Rand
- Walter Pichler by Diane Lewis
- Rona Pondick by George Fifield
Artists on Artists
- Billy Goats by Jill McCorkle
- Two Poems by Albert Mobilio
- The Dead Man’s Dream by Mia Couto
- Two Poems by Daniel Shapiro
- Two Poems by Jeffrey Skinner
- Two Poems by Carolyn Stoloff
- Taking a Stitch in a Dead Man’s Arm by Katherine Vaz
- A Lepidopterist’s Tale by Daniel Waterman
First Proof
- Elisabeth Subrin’s The Fancy by Rachel Greene
- Allan Gurganus’s A Practical Heart by Mona Simpson
- Alex Brown by Rachel Kushner
- Michel Negroponte’s WISOR by Charlie Ahearn
- Mitch Epstein’s The City by Marvin Heiferman
- Andrew Roy by Dona Nelson
- Willie Jones III’s Straight Swingin’ by Zoë Anglesey
- Michael Rips’s Pasquale’s Nose by Frederic Tuten
- Ivy Compton-Burnett by Maria Aitken
- Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy by Matthea Harvey
- Paula Fox’s Borrowed Finery by Fiona Maazel
Editor's Choice
Courtesy of WJIII Records.
Bands led by stellar drummers—Max Roach, Elvin Jones, and Roy Haynes, for example—play to international jazz audiences keen to hear hard-edged jazz. Not a subcategory, bop or hard bop is jazz. For his debut recording, Straight Swingin’ (WJ3 Records), drummer Willie Jones Ill steers clear of soft pop influences. As a member of Roy Hargrove’s Quintet since 1997, he has developed a repertoire of distinct rhythms admired by worldwide fans loyal to this high art.
For his “Volume I” date, Jones enlists major-leaguer Eric Reed, a mainstay pianist who plays with Wynton Marsalis. Reed unreels engaging runs a la early McCoy Tyner, and offers articulate vectors of melody on ballads and fluency in displays of speed. “Ornate,” Reed’s tip of the hat to Ornette Coleman, goes for studied cogency if not a Monkish moment. Anyone into the piano will find him worthy of the spotlight.
Jones includes two accomplished colleagues from the Hargrove band, bassist Gerald Cannon and Sherman Irby on alto. Making more of a duet than a duel, the altoists’ sizzling repartee closes “Blues for Dat Taz” and signals their different takes on “Little G’s Walk,” a complex, musical portrait. “Wide Open,” a tune penned by Sherman Irby, illustrates just how important free thought is to musical structures no matter how ephemeral. The composition brings out the best in the rhythm section. If that feeling akin to soaring becomes apparent, it is because Gerald Cannon understands that the fullest exigencies of pulse, hum, tone, and accents propel music to its apogee.
Jones must place importance on striving as a “unit,” since his few solos are not of a heavyweight crash-and-boom sort, but balance strength with lyricism. In the role of composer, he provides the trio ballads “Jessica’s Theme” and “Ballad,” sumptuous melodies that defy time and space like a couple’s midnight interlude. Straight Swingin’ passes the test: it’s to be listened to over and over.
—Zoë Anglesey
Straight Swingin’, by Willie Jones III, was released by WJ3 Records last spring.
Related
The improvisor and composer contemplates polyphonic pathways and reaching past the self.
Cauleen Smith tangles the past with figures from African American histories, Afrofuturism, Radical Jazz, and alternative futures.
Alvin Ailey’s Jamar Roberts on pain, joy, and choreographing to John Coltrane.
Originally published in
BOMB 77,
Fall 2001
Featuring interviews with James Casebere, Raimund Abraham, Julia Wolfe, Mary Robinson, Barry Hannah, Jonathan Franzen, and Barbet Schroeder.
