![]() She was at Howard University but coming home to Detroit to play with Marcus Belgrave. Losing Wallace-that one shocked me, even though I knew he was having health issues. I wanted to write music that would reflect on that past, the sounds from our ancestors.ĭid the concept take on more weight with the pandemic? Wallace Roney and Ellis Marsalis were just two of many musicians who died of COVID in the first weeks. She would come on every day at 12 o’clock and play this James Cleveland song, which was kind of sad. There was a radio personality, Martha Jean “The Queen”. That’s how much I loved the music that was touching me like Aretha, B.B. And on Christmas Day, I would play this music, my favorite records, and it would fill me up and carry me into the next year. KENNY GARRETT: The concept came about because I was thinking of when I was a kid, how at Thanksgiving I would hide all of my 45s until Christmas Day. ![]() Usually, when you put a record out, you’re traveling, and it ends up being ‘You gotta move this out.’” With touring suspended, “I had a chance to look at the songs: ‘It would be interesting to add some Yoruban chants or some keyboards here.’ It gave me time to think about the music.” Ironically, Garrett admits, “the pandemic allowed me to look at some things on the album that I wouldn’t have noticed. ![]() And Garrett credits trumpeter Woody Shaw, pianist McCoy Tyner, and vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson-“that generation of musicians”-with “the way I’m hearing the chords, harmonically what I’m trying to get across” in the jubilant turbulence of “What Was That?” ![]() “When the Days Were Different” evokes the sensual crossroads of church and street corner in Garrett’s favorite boyhood singles by Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin. “It’s Time to Come Home” opens the record with an Afro-Cuban flourish steeped in Garrett’s stage encounters with the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés. Once we open it up in performance, it can be more than that.”Ĭombining a core band-pianist Vernell Brown, Jr., bassist Corcoran Holt, drummer Ronald Bruner, and percussionist Rudy Bird-with a cast of guests including trumpeter Maurice Brown and legendary fusion drummer Lenny White, Sounds from the Ancestors is a wide-ranging, richly textured account of Garrett’s life in roots and lessons, from his earliest memories of music in Detroit, his hometown, to key friendships and schooling with the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove (“Hargrove”) and drumming magus Art Blakey (“For Art’s Sake”). “But I want to keep focused on Sounds from the Ancestors because I feel it’s a snippet of what the music can do. “We have plans to keep moving,” he insists. where he was a special guest the night before at a concert celebrating Wayne Shorter. “Even now, things are moving but they’re not moving-not full force like it once was.”Īctually, Garrett is fresh off a plane from Los Angeles. “When the album was released, I felt like, ‘This thing has been around a long time,’” he says on a sunny late-winter afternoon, sitting outside a coffee shop near his home in a northern New Jersey suburb. Recorded in November 2019, before the pandemic, the alto saxophonist’s 17th album as a leader was finally issued last summer during a brief window between COVID variants, allowing Garrett to tour with his band and the new music for a few weeks before Omicron forced live music off the rails again. D epending on how he looks at it, Kenny Garrett’s latest album, Sounds from the Ancestors, has been out for an eternity or an instant.
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