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Ella Fitzgerald

Photo by Harry Croner/ullstein bild via Getty Images

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Unearthing A Lost Ella Fitzgerald Recording, 60 Years Later

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Recorded in 1962 at Sportpalast Arena in Berlin, the never-before-heard set features the First Lady of Song in her prime—and now, it will be available for all to hear on Oct. 2 via Verve Records
Rob LeDonne
GRAMMYs
Oct 1, 2020 - 11:05 am

It was like a scene out of an Indiana Jones film: Ken Druker, the Vice President of Catalogue at Verve Records, and Gregg Field, the veteran drummer and producer, were about to play a dusty recording of the indelible First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald, that hadn’t been heard, seen or even opened in almost 60 years. "The information written on it certainly wasn’t complete, so it was kind of a crapshoot of what was on it," says Druker of the tedious process. "But the tape was in very good shape and when we listened to it we recognized immediately it was an incredible performance. It was very exciting."

Exactly what Druker and Field stumbled upon was a complete live set of Fitzgerald in her prime performing in 1962 at Sportpalast Arena in Berlin, Germany with the same band as her GRAMMY-winning classic album Ella in Berlin: Mack the Knife, which snagged the prize for Best Female Vocal Performance (Single) and the Best Vocal Performance, Female (Album) at the third-ever GRAMMY Awards in 1961. Explains Druker of the monumental find: "The mono recording sounded good, but when we came across the stereo version of the same show we knew for sure it was something that needed to be released."

The result, out Oct. 2 on Verve Records, is appropriately dubbed The Lost Berlin Tapes and is a rare, never-before-heard release courtesy one of America’s greatest voices traversing through bouncy renditions of both her hallmark tracks ("Mack the Knife" and "Check to Cheek") and otherwise rare covers (including a version of Ray Charles’ hit "Hallelujah I Love Her So," swapping "him" for "her").

"There are those nights when you can count on one hand that everything is working on such a high level and this was one of those nights," explains Field who played drums for Fitzgerald in the mid-'80s and serves as a co-producer of the Lost Berlin Tapes endeavour. "She was coming off this big success and you couldn't pick a better year in terms of her age and developed abilities. Here she is with maximum knowledge and ability to execute what she wanted to do. Not only that, but everyone is in a great mood too. All of those things contributed to a much more interesting, compelling performance than the 1960 record that she won the GRAMMY for, which is iconic in itself."

How exactly this particular concert never saw the light of day until the 21st century is a mystery lost to the ages, but Field has some ideas. Formerly in the collection of Ella’s famed manager Norman Granz who founded Verve with the specific mission to release Fitzgerald, the tapes entered a limbo state when Granz later founded Pablo Records in 1973 and sold Verve to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "We're guessing that when Verve was sold, he took a lot of these tapes with him. Since Verve could have claimed ownership, it could have contributed to why they never came out."

The tapes then sat quietly in Granz's collection for decades, Fitzgerald died in 1996 and Granz passed in 2001, and they were essentially forgotten. That is until a nudge last year from Richard D. Rosman, a caretaker of the Fitzgerald estate, pointed Druker and Field in the direction of the treasure. "We’ll never know what we don’t find," says Druker of the tricky business of lost recordings, some which have the very real ability of disappearing forever. (See: The 2008 fire at Universal Studios during which countless master recordings went ablaze.) "There are some recordings that we know happened but we never found them, so we’re lucky when we do come across these things. When we dig them up, we’re very fortunate."

The quality of The Lost Berlin Tapes is also bolstered by a state-of-the-art technology created by the software company iZotope called RX 8 Music Rebalance. "This technology did not exist a year ago and they called me by chance (just as I was looking into the tapes)," says Field, who used the technology to separate the original stereo mix into a four-track drum, bass, piano and vocal recording. "On the original tape, Ella’s voice was a little thin in the mid-range and the piano and drums were panned hard left and hard right, which is very old school. I was able to bring her more forward and brought up the bottom so you can even hear fingers on the strings. The result is that Ella's much more in the room with you. When I sent it to Ken, he said, 'This is the best live recording of Ella I've ever heard.'"

For Field, who became so close to Ella that she even serenaded him with "Happy Birthday" when he turned 30, it’s both her talent and humanity that’s on full display on the unearthed recording. "Ella was two people. She was very humble, very shy and generous. But when she walked on stage she was hardcore and didn’t know how to sing unless it was coming from her heart," Field explains. "She had a great sense of her audience and made you feel like you were in on all the fun that we were having. She was able to get rid of the walls between her and the audience. That showed in her music, and this set."

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Paul Winter

Paul Winter

Photo: Bill Ellzey

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Paul Winter On How His New Album, 'Light Of The Sun,' Starts A New Path In His 60-year Recording Career

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Over the decades, the 81-year-old, GRAMMY-winning soprano saxophonist swerved around rock 'n' roll, embraced whale songs and so much more. 'Light Of The Sun' encapsulates his contemplative, meditative vibe
Pamela Chelin
GRAMMYs
Dec 30, 2020 - 8:45 am

When the soprano saxophonist, composer, and bandleader Paul Winter gazes at the night sky, he's not just looking for the Man on the Moon. Not only did Apollo 15 astronauts name two craters after his songs ("Icarus" and "Ghost Beads"), but they left a cassette copy of Road, a 1970 live album by Winter's longtime band The Paul Winter Consort, on the moon. "When I look up at the moon at night, and I remember that story, sometimes I don't quite get it," Winter tells GRAMMY.com over the phone from his farm in Connecticut. "'I think, 'No, that's not possible.' But they said they left the cassette up there, so I've told friends, 'When you go to the moon, take a cassette player and see if you can find my cassette.'"

Winter, who's won six GRAMMYs as an artist, may have turned 81 this year, but he shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, the 81-year-old's latest release, Light Of The Sun, released last month (Nov. 13) via Living Music, starts a new path in his 60-year recording career. It's the first time Winter is the featured soloist after decades of assuming the role of bandleader and involving numerous collaborators in his recordings. "It's something I'd dreamed about doing for a long, long time," he says. "When I turned 80, I thought, 'This is as good a time as any to do it.' It was great fun to focus on my playing. It's been a great labor of love, and I consider this my testament as a sax player, but I don't mean to imply it's my last one. I'd like it to be my first one."

Light Of The Sun embraces Winter's lifelong fascination with the sun. (Some of his previous album titles include Sun Singer, Journey With the Sun, Morning Sun, and Everybody Under the Sun.). "The idea was to try to see if the feeling of the sun, the sunlight, could be transmuted into music the way sunlight transmutes chlorophyll giving life to all the plants," he says. "I've long been fascinated with the sun and the ways that we experience it. It's the source of our life. All life on Earth comes from the sun, and it's just a tremendous factor in our lives that we don't think about too much."  

To Winter, the sun also symbolizes hope, kindness, love, serenity, and optimism. As Winter's soprano sax takes front and center, winding prominently through the record, the 15 compositions are as celebratory as they are soothing. At times, the music sounds uplifting, like a morning prayer. At others, the soothing music sounds like the perfect companion to a relaxing glass of wine at the end of the day. A welcome antidote to a dark and stressful year, Light Of The Sun offers a delightful musical reprieve from 2020's turmoil.

To best capture his sound, Winter utilized wide open spaces to allow for the most robust musical resonance and reverberation, recording in three unique locations: the Miho Museum in Japan; the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the Grand Canyon. He first discovered the powerful acoustics inside the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1968 during Duke Ellington's funeral service, where Ella Fitzgerald sang, and musicians from Ellington's orchestra played in honor of the jazz composer and bandleader. Since 1980, Winter's been the artist-in-residence at the historic cathedral, where he's held winter solstice celebrations for forty years. 

Growing up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Winter switched from clarinet to saxophone after falling in love with big band music when he was seven years old. "It was in the 1940s and the big band era," he says. "I loved that music more than anything, and to have a whole genre of music very much in the air and alive in our culture to inspire me then was exciting." Luckily for Winter, his grandfather owned a music store, making it easy to get a saxophone.

By the time he was 12, Winter had a group in the vein of German drinking bands. He played churches, the local YMCA, and the rotary club. His mom was his roadie. "It was great fun, and people loved seeing these kids play this happy, wacky music and telling jokes that were very corny, of course, but all the funnier because we were only twelve," Winter says. He received his first payday when, one night, he made 50 cents after a performance. "When you were twelve in 1951, that was big money," he says. 

A couple of years later, his band morphed into a 9-piece dance band, playing Great American Songbook standards. "That music is so timeless," he says. "That shaped my aesthetic a lot." While enrolled as a Northwestern University student, Winter formed the Paul Winter Sextet, incorporating bebop music. In 1961, they won an intercollegiate competition judged by jazz virtuoso Dizzy Gillespie and record producer and talent scout John Hammond, who had discovered Aretha Franklin and signed Bob Dylan. Hammond promptly signed Winter to Columbia Records. "It was astounding; I'd never dreamed of anything like that," Winter says.

Unfortunately, Winter says that because jazz was an underground phenomenon, there was nowhere to play publicly. Sitting around his apartment with nothing to do, he decided to write to the U.S. Department of State, asking to be sent on a goodwill tour of Latin America. 

"We were perfectly integrated with three Blacks and three whites at a time early in the Kennedy years when civil rights were the burning issue, and I was extremely interested in cultural exchange," he says. Winter didn't expect a response to his letter, but a few months later, his request was granted. For six months, the Paul Winter Sextet toured Latin America, played concerts in 23 countries, and received steady pay. He recalls the joy he derived when he performed for 5,000 barefoot villagers in Bolivia: "They had no experience with what we were doing, but they loved it because it was rhythmic, and in the warm countries, people like to move."

When they returned from their tour, the band decided to move to New York to try their luck. But though their tour of Latin America was a success, there was still no work to be had and nowhere to play live. Winter considered going to the University of Virginia law school, whose acceptance he had deferred for a year. By then, the Paul Winter Sextet had put out two records, 1961's The Paul Winter Sextet—which only came out in Latin America—and 1962's Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova, which became a minor hit, selling 30,000 copies.

Fortuitously, the band got to play an unusual and unlikely venue. As part of Jackie Kennedy's Concerts for Young People By Young People initiative, the Paul Winter Sextet was the first-ever jazz group invited to perform at the White House in 1962. When they arrived, the First Lady told Winter that she'd been listening to Jazz Meets the Bossa Nova nonstop for three weeks. As President John F. Kennedy worked down the hall nearby, Mrs. Kennedy watched the performance, along with a room filled with children and reporters. The following day, according to Winter, the news headlines read, "Jackie Loves Jazz." With his moment in the spotlight, Winter got work touring clubs around the country. But he didn't like it. "In nightclubs, you were almost a liquor salesman, there to entertain people so they would drink more, and the acoustics were bad."

Soon after, Winter broke up the jazz ensemble and lived in Brazil for a year. Playing with Brazilian musicians planted the seeds for his next musical pursuit. In 1967, Winter formed the Paul Winter Consort, combining jazz, world and classical music, and nature sounds. A few years later, he signed with Albert Grossman, who managed Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Band, and other luminaries. But the Paul Winter Consort didn't fit into an apparent musical genre, making it hard to break through to an audience despite having released three records. "Record stores didn't know whether to put it in classical, jazz, or folk, so they put it nowhere," Winter says. 

To attract a large audience to the band, manager Bennett Glotzer introduced Winter to the Beatles' famed producer George Martin. Martin played oboe and had a deep grounding in classical and instrumental music. "George agreed to have lunch with me, and we hit it off so well," Winter says. With Martin at the producing helm, the Paul Winter Consort spent three weeks recording in the coastal town of Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1971. They released the resulting Icarus to critical acclaim in 1972. 

That's when Winter became renowned as a pioneer of new-age music, which makes him laugh. "It's a joke," he says. He explains that the new age classification was given to him by the record industry when electric music dominated the music scene. Many perceived acoustic music to aid meditative purposes and alternative therapeutics. The simple tag of "new age" positioned the Paul Winter Consort's genre-evading records in record store aisles and awards categories.

While the Paul Winter Consort never fit neatly into one musical category, there is a specific music genre of which Winter's never really been a fan; rock music. So it was ironic when Winter found himself on bills in the seventies with rockers like Procol Harum, Spirit, and Bruce Springsteen. The latter opened for Winter at a gig in 1973. The Boss's friendliness and his extreme confidence struck Winter, but he watched just a small portion of Springsteen's set. "When he started talking about New Jersey, David Darling and I said, 'OK, let's go out for dinner,'" he deadpans.

Nature's music was more Winter's speed, and he had first fallen in love with it when he heard humpback whales in 1968. The yearning quality in whales' songs enamored him, which led to his fascination with other wild animals' sounds. For instance, wolves' howls express what Winter calls "the universal blues." Since the 1970s, Winter has been incorporating what he calls "the symphony of the earth" into his music. He's currently working on a new recording project, recording Indigenous peoples' music in fifteen countries situated along the African-Eurasian flyway, to raise support and awareness for migratory birds, including storks and cranes, who need protection.

As humble as he is hard-working, Winter doesn't display any of his six GRAMMYs on his mantle, preferring to keep some of them in boxes in his barn. He gave several of them away. "I don't think it's healthy to keep awards around. It gives you an illusion that you've accomplished something," he says. "For me, it's always what I'm doing next." He's even reluctant to take credit for his success, continually attributing it to good fortune. "I think if one realizes any dreams in their lifetime, they're lucky, and I've had a huge abundance of luck," he says.

Though he hasn't had the same level of success as some of his contemporaries, Winter says he wouldn't want it because it often comes at a cost. "I think something happens when you have huge success," he says. "Once you become used to the fame and the adulation and the entourage, it seems like often people lose their muse, that the thing that originally propelled them toward resting whatever they did that reached a wide audience and their output ends. They can still perform, but their music is no longer full of magic. There's a certain amount of humility and creative aspiration that is needed." 

"Of course, I can't be critical of people who had great success," he adds. "They earned it. It's remarkable how the adventures that it afforded them, but it's very hard to find people who reach that level who still have their original values intact."

He points to acclaimed folk singer Pete Seeger as a rarity who never lost his integrity. Winter first heard Seeger's music when Hammond took him to a Carnegie Hall concert in 1963. "It was like a revelation hearing a voice that seemed very real to me," he says. "It didn't sound like a pop music voice where you feel somebody's trying to sell you something. And he spoke about [authentic] things in the world. I had never been allured to listen to folk music. That was the big turning point for me." Three years later, the pair met at the Newport Folk Festival, where they bonded and became close friends. (Winter later produced Seeger's album Pete, which won a GRAMMY for Best Traditional Folk Album in 1996.)

Though Winter has endured his fair share of ups and downs in the music industry, he says he wouldn't have it any other way. To him, it's been more critical to stay true to his musical vision. He says that music, for which his appreciation grows more profound with each passing year, has been a "magic carpet," allowing him to travel to places he'd otherwise not have gone and to meet people, including his wife, he'd otherwise not have met. The couple has two daughters.

"I can't say our path has been easy," Winter says. "But it's been profoundly gratifying because I've always been able to keep somehow making the music I love, and I didn't have to try to fabricate something that would be more commercial. I've come to appreciate the challenges. You don't grow without challenge, so there's been no shortage of that for me."

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Ella Fitzgerald at 1977 GRAMMYs

Ella Fitzgerald at the 1977 GRAMMYs

 
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GRAMMY Rewind: Ella Fitzgerald Wins Best Jazz Vocal Performance In 1977

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Fitzgerald won 13 total GRAMMYs during her illustrious musical career, taking home her first two golden gramophones at the inaugural GRAMMY Awards in 1959
Ana Monroy Yglesias
GRAMMYs
Jan 1, 2021 - 10:00 am

For the first episode of GRAMMY Rewind of 2021, GRAMMY.com travels back to 1977, when the First Lady of Song, Ella Fitzgerald, took home her eighth GRAMMY win. Below, watch the jazz legend accept her GRAMMY for Best Jazz Vocal Performance for Fitzgerald & Pass…Again, her second album with guitarist Joe Pass.

GRAMMY Rewind: Ella Fitzgerald Wins GRAMMY In 1977

Fitzgerald won 13 total GRAMMYs during her illustrious musical career, taking home her first two golden gramophones at the inaugural GRAMMY Awards in 1959. The first woman to be honored with the Recording Academy's Special Merit Award in 1967, she also has nine recordings in the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame.

Unearthing A Lost Ella Fitzgerald Recording, 60 Years Later

Alice Coltrane circa 1970

Alice Coltrane circa 1970

 

Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

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'Ptah, The El Daoud' At 50: How Alice Coltrane Straddled Heaven And Earth

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The pianist-harpist's home-recorded album, featuring Joe Henderson, Pharoah Sanders, Ron Carter and Ben Riley, is otherworldly yet drenched in the blues
Morgan Enos
GRAMMYs
Dec 30, 2020 - 8:39 pm

Every morning, the alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin rises before the sun, settles behind her 88-key electric piano and offers wordless thanks to the Creator. "My goal is to get to it before sunrise," she tells GRAMMY.com from her New York apartment. "That's when the universe is most receptive, right before the day is about to break and everyone gets in their prayers. I'm there before everyone." 

Right then, Benjamin plays a composition that means more to her than any denominational hymn: "Turiya And Ramakrishna," the worshipful blues from pianist, harpist, and composer Alice Coltrane, off her 1970 album Ptah, The El Daoud.

Benjamin last performed "Turiya And Ramakrishna" for a paying audience back in March. That was at Dizzy's Club at Jazz At Lincoln Center during the release show for her tribute album, Pursuance: The Coltranes, on the cusp of the national COVID-19 lockdown. 

"'Turiya And Ramakrishna' puts me in a place of worship," Benjamin says of her setlist, which invariably features the tune. "I usually take that moment to get deeper into how the audience and I are feeling. I try to bring them into a place of worship to realize this song is not the same as the rest. It's not a church song, but for her style of music, it is. Whether they take it as a church song or not, I'm going to the next step." 

These days, critics are reappraising Coltrane as an artistic equal to her husband, John. But of all her albums, from her early days as a Detroit bebopper to her recordings as the spiritual director of an ashram, Journey In Satchidananda (1971)—Ptah's follow-up—gets the most ink. (It was her only album to make Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time list, at No. 446.) 

But Ptah, The El Daoud, which turns 50 this year, deserves a seat at the table, too.

Ptah, which Coltrane titled in tribute to the Egyptian creator god of Memphis and patron of craftspeople and architects ("El Daoud" means "the beloved" in Arabic), contains abundant hypnotic power and emotional import. These qualities relate to the inner journey Coltrane underwent at the time, the fact she recorded Ptah at home, her quintet's performances, and the album's matrix of ancient Vedic and Egyptian references.

By all accounts, Coltrane conceived Ptah, The El Daoud, and its predecessors, A Monastic Trio (1968) and Huntington Ashram Monastery (1969), during a period of grief and spiritual evolution. In the years after her husband, John, died of liver cancer in 1967, she experienced physical, mental and metaphysical phenomena, as documented in her 1977 spiritual memoir, "Monument Eternal." 

"Sometimes, my heartbeat shifted to the right side of my body. All of the hair on my head would stand on end as if it were electrically charged," Coltrane wrote, citing the "extensive mental and physical austerities" she underwent during this time.

As evidenced by the track titles from this period, like "Lord Help Me To Be" and "IHS" (or, "I Have Suffered"), she interfaced with her traumas and pushed past them into a transcendent space. "My meaning here was to express and bring out a feeling of purification," Coltrane stated in Leonard Feather's liner notes to Ptah, The El Daoud. "Sometimes on Earth, we don't have to wait for death to go through a sort of purging, a purification."

"A lot of those tracks [on A Monastic Trio], like 'I Want to See You' and 'Gospel Trane,' I think of them as mourning because she'd suffered that loss," harpist Brandee Younger tells GRAMMY.com. "And by the time we get to Huntington Ashram Monastery, you know, that title speaks volumes. So then we have Ptah, The El Daoud: 'This is my next phase, and it's more than what you got before.'"

"You know what I think is cool about this album, but also [about] just her in general?" pianist Cat Toren asks GRAMMY.com. "She had four young kids, and she had lost the love of her life. I think that's huge. It speaks to her power as a woman, to go forth no matter the adversity of what else is going on in her life. I would be interested to know her support network and how she was able to produce this incredible work under such challenging conditions."

Vijay Iyer, a pianist, composer and Harvard professor, is careful to note that Coltrane's spiritual quest was more far-reaching than her husband's loss. "She was in public life from 1960 until [her death in] 2007, and for four of those years, she was married to John Coltrane," he says. "Yes, she was grieving, but there was something else she went through in those years that was the beginning of a much larger transformation. Not to reduce her role in the family or her relationship to [John] or anything like that, but she was on her own journey, too."

"When [John] passed, it's not just his passing; it's the combination of his passing, plus mothering, plus careering, plus the world is in unrest," Younger says. "I feel it would be impossible not to be affected by that combination of factors. In the big picture, she went through a serious transition, and there's no question about that because it's written in the book."

"I mean, think about it," she adds. "That happened in that house, where she recorded that record. How could one not affect the other?"

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York

John and Alice Coltrane's home in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York | Photo: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM via Getty Images

As with A Monastic Trio and Huntington Ashram Monastery, Alice Coltrane recorded Ptah, The El Daoud in the basement of her ranch-style house at 247 Candlewood Path in Dix Hills on Long Island, New York, which she and John shared from 1964 until his death; she remained there until 1973. Tenor saxophonists and flutists Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders, bassist Ron Carter and drummer Ben Riley accompanied her on the recording.

Read: Hank Mobley's 'Soul Station' At 60: How The Tenor Saxophonist's Mellow Masterpiece Inspires Jazz Musicians In 2020

"When I hear that record, the first thing I hear is the room," saxophonist-clarinetist Jeff Lederer tells GRAMMY.com, describing the rich, boomy atmosphere of Ptah, The El Daoud as "comforting." "It's not a [Rudy] Van Gelder sound or anything, but you can feel [like], 'Wow! She was making this record in her house.' It's not the kind of sound you'd expect."

In that regard, Steve Holtje, a keyboardist, writer and the manager and producer of the long-running, Bernard Stollman-founded label, ESP-Disk', views Ptah as something of a landmark. 

"It's not the first time anybody ever did this—it's not even the first time she did it—but I have a certain fondness of placing this album in the lineage of DIY recording," he says. "It happens that Ed Michel at [jazz label] Impulse! got the producer credit on this, but I'm not sure how much a producer he was in terms of influencing the music." 

"Was she a Billie Eilish in the making?" Ashley Kahn, the author of "A Love Supreme: The Story Of John Coltrane's Signature Album" and "The House That Trane Built: The Story Of Impulse Records," asks GRAMMY.com. "The self-produced, self-sufficient musician idea has been around for many, many years and expressed in many different ways." 

"It's a Black female artist taking control of her music," Holtje states. "That's really important."

"It may be that that sensibility was in the air at that time," Iyer adds. "A sense of self-determination to make this work for you on your terms, rather than a transaction with a corporation, which doesn't necessarily have your best interests at heart. Particularly for Black artists in the 1960s and '70s, that was a movement."

"It's homey. It has that Sunday-afternoon-after-church vibe," bassist Melvin Gibbs tells GRAMMY.com of the feeling "Turiya And Ramakrishna" exudes. "Even the Van Gelder records were recorded in a living room, so it's not that far out of context in the sound of jazz, but it feels like your relatives were playing for you. That's evocative for me." 

"The room is the invisible instrument. The other member of the band is the room in which you record the live date," vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow tells GRAMMY.com. 

But when it comes to record-making, a lush-sounding room doesn't mean much without stellar musicians within its walls.

"Ptah, The El Daoud has darkness and richness of tone that speaks to me, and some of that comes from the incredible sound of every musician [on the album]," keyboardist Jamie Saft tells GRAMMY.com. "The musicians on this record, their tone is as rich and developed and important as it gets. Joe Henderson and Pharoah [Sanders] have some of the greatest saxophone tones of all time. Alice Coltrane's piano tone and Ron Carter's bass tone are so important to jazz music." 

Aside from "Lord Help Me To Be" on A Monastic Trio, where Sanders tears a hole in the firmament, Ptah, The El Daoud is Coltrane's first album with horns. 

"I think what makes this album so great is that you get to hear her comp with great horn players," pianist Matthew Shipp tells GRAMMY.com. "The beautiful plant and flower that her chordal language and her touch had [relates to] the interplay of those two horn players."

Joe Henderson circa 1970

Joe Henderson circa 1970 | Photo: Tom Copi/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

The musicians featured on Ptah hail from both the avant-garde and straight-ahead jazz scenes. 

"This rapprochement between those two styles was very deliberate on [Coltrane's] part," Holtje says. "Ben Riley is best-known from Thelonious Monk's quartet. And before that, Riley had been playing with the Johnny Griffin/'Lockjaw' Davis quintet, which was very much a popular style."

Holtje goes on to note that while Carter played with Miles Davis and Henderson had come off a string of exploratory-yet-tonal albums on Blue Note, Sanders was "Albert Ayler-influenced—a real firebreather in Alice's husband's band." 

"Aside from Pharoah, Alice's band on this record looks, to me, like a deliberate move away from associations with John," he observes. "And to do that, she put together a set of musicians who were not especially associated with each other."

Read: 'Bitches Brew' At 50: Why Miles Davis' Masterpiece Remains Impactful

As for the rest of the rhythm section? 

"Ron Carter's walking on air. You can't get away from the fact that this is a blues-based, cosmic cat," Shipp enthuses. 

"Ron is maybe one of the two or three most important bass players in the history of jazz from a harmonic standpoint," drummer Gerry Gibbs adds. "Alice's music only has a few chords; usually, it doesn't have a lot of chord progression. So that gives Ron a lot of space to use a lot of his harmonic brilliance.

"Ben [Riley] was a very soft drummer," he continues. "He never really played much with a crash cymbal; he usually played with a ride and a flat cymbal. He was never a basher." 

"He's the kind of drummer I'd like to be," Muldrow adds. "The kind that supports what's going on and makes statements through the ways he supports the music. There are things he does with the brushes on that record that I'll never forget."

"There's this real attention to groove and the meaning, the importance of that," Iyer says of Riley's performance. "Even when the [music] seems to kind of wash along, there's precise attention and care for how the pulse is expressed. You hear her dealing with that in a way you don't as much as when she plays with Rashied Ali. It gives this album a certain backbone that's important."

Despite its harmonic and rhythmic dust devils, Ptah has an undeniable core and pulse.

"'Ptah, The El Daoud,' to me, sounds like a battle cry of sorts," Younger says. "The interplay between Sanders and Henderson, and the way Coltrane favors the low end of the piano for nearly the entirety of the head and horn solos, gives it this riveting edge."

"After it's all done," she continues, "'Turiya And Ramakrishna' is the perfect release. Spiritually, and she references this in so many of her composition titles and writings, she sought to express a state of nirvana. This track achieves just that. That blues, the way it just keeps going, this cyclical driving-home, and then how the bass moves underneath it to give all types of new qualities to this one scale—it's just beautiful how she did that."

"There's stasis in here, but it keeps moving. It's like a spiral," guitarist Brandon Ross says of Coltrane's pianism on "Turiya And Ramakrishna." "It's moving laterally, but not in a broad sense. It's elevating each time to the cycles in another dimensional field of its orbit."

"She's going back to the roots," Kahn says about "Blue Nile," for which Coltrane switched from piano to harp, with Sanders and Henderson picking up alto flutes. "But never mind bebop; it's a blues. It has that comfortable feel, yet the sound, textures and mysterioso, in-the-air feel is like waking up in the morning and looking out the window, the same window you're familiar with, and you see the lunar surface or the rings of Saturn. It's both comfortable and otherworldly at the same time."

"Whereas the harp can be more glissando-focused, the way she plays piano, she gives you everything. But the use of the blues is always present," vibraphonist Joel Ross tells GRAMMY.com.

"The only track where Pharoah asserts himself in the whole avant-garde sense is 'Mantra,'" Holtje adds. "That is the longest track, so that is the track where they have the most time to explore, if I can use that word. So that's kind of a natural thing to be happening there, but Pharoah also had a good grounding before he went out. I'm sure he respected Joe Henderson, and I'm sure Joe Henderson respected him."

While Muldrow characterizes Ptah as "a nice little cutaway, a rest stop," Iyer and Kahn see it more as an on-ramp. 

"There are many effective doorways to Alice Coltrane's world," Kahn says. "It's an unbelievably kaleidoscopic mixture of music that'll leave stretch marks on your ears and brain as far as what is possible. It combines so many different musical traditions on this planet in a way that feels very organic and satisfying on a bunch of different levels: culturally, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Ptah, The El Daoud is as effective as any other doorway that I would recommend for any listener trying to get into Alice Coltrane and grasp what she's about. But it shouldn't be the last stop, either. It should be a welcome mat, and it's a very effective one."

Ptah, The El Daoud is a tribute to God through ancient Vedic and Egyptian lenses, and the parallels between the two cosmologies run deep. 

"You're talking about ancient evidence of contemplating the universe. That's the point of relation," Muldrow says. "Ptah, that's coming from Africa, up from Ethiopia into the Nubian civilization, all the way into what we call Egypt today." 

"Bringing the Black experience to the Sanskrit thing, I feel like there's a circle that gets completed," she continues. "What dovetails everything is the history, the landscape and the people. That's what brings it all together, and she was completely aware of it. She's quite a scholar."

The album's heavily stylized, Jim Evans-painted cover features a wealth of emblematic information. 

"If you look at this album cover, it's got many different images in it," cultural scholar and essayist Menzi Maseko tells GRAMMY.com over Zoom from Zimbabwe. "What you see in the hieroglyphs are the names of God and of becoming. It says, 'The father of beginnings, the creator of the egg, the sun and the moon.' It's got the cobra at the bottom, which symbolizes cunning, superior intellectual capability and danger."

"The fact she even mentioned the word Ptah, to me, is like a whole history lesson," bassist Lonnie Plaxico tells GRAMMY.com, connecting Ptah to the ancient Egyptian vizier named after the deity. "I would tell people to go look at 'The Teachings Of Ptahhotep,' and you'll understand why she [evoked him]. I encourage people to go check out who Ptahhotep was. I think that was her intent. It's like a seed. I think she was putting the seed out there, like, 'You should know about this person.'"

Regarding the importance of Egyptian and Vedic systems to Coltrane, "I wouldn't put one over the other; it all becomes this percolating stew," Iyer notes. "There are all these different influences, from Islam to ancient, pre-Hindu Indian spiritual practices to Kemetic systems of knowledge. All of that intersected and had that transformative impact on Alice Coltrane to the point that she then took on the name Turiyasangitananda."

To Maseko, to make an album bearing Ptah's name is a sacred action. 

"It is all in devotional service to the Supreme Being," Maseko says, with a hint of awe. "She's immortalizing the name of Ptah, but every musician is involved in the creation of that work. Pharoah Sanders carried on the tradition. Joe Henderson carries on the tradition. Last year, you probably didn't know you would be doing this, but you're doing it because it's the will of Ptah. We didn't plan it. It's something inside your DNA, inside you and inside me, that has brought us to this moment. It's a miracle, bra'. It's an unfolding of the divine will."

In early November, Benjamin, clad in white and gold, emerged from the lockdown for a livestreamed gig at Jazzfest Berlin, her first since the album release show at Dizzy's. Midway through the set, she, Plaxico, pianist Zaccai Curtis and drummer Darrell Green changed gears and took the socially distanced crowd to church.

"That last song we played was an Alice Coltrane song entitled 'Turiya And Ramakrishna,'" she said on the mic. "Most people tell me it sounds like a love song. It's a constant seeking out the Creator, your purpose, and why you are here and getting closer to the source of the one that gave you life. It is a love song, but it's a love song to the universe."

While that "love song to the universe" may be under-discussed among casual jazz fans, its inspiration ripples forth via these musicians' hearts, minds and hands. To the question of why a jazz layperson should hear Ptah, The El Daoud, Muldrow takes what feels like half a minute for silent contemplation. 

"Because it will make you feel better," she finally allows. "You're going to hear something special in this record. You're going to feel love in this record. If I were to give this to a layperson, I'd say, 'Man, you're going to feel better after you listen to this.'"

"If you're not versed in Alice Coltrane, why do you need to hear it?" Younger asks. "Because 'Turiya And Ramakrishna' will save your life. If it doesn't save your life, it'll change your life." 

Brandon Ross sounds captivated, serene, even a little solemn while reflecting on the same track. "What else can I say about this, man?" he asks as it burbles in the background. "It's self-explanatory. They need to play this when I die, as a lift."

'Giant Steps' At 60: Why John Coltrane's Classic Hard Bop Album Is More Than A Jazz-School Worksheet

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Bonnie McKee, Leroy Sanchez, Gallant and Whethan

Screenshot from New Year x New Music x New Normal summit

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New Year x New Music x New Normal: How Artists, Creatives And The Music Industry Learned To Pivot And Adapt During The Pandemic

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Presented by the Recording Academy's Los Angeles Chapter, this timely and introspective peer-to-peer discussion saw creatives and music industry professionals discussing the future of the music industry
Lily Moayeri
Membership
Dec 17, 2020 - 5:26 pm

To say 2020 has been the most unprecedented year for the music industry is redundant as well as an understatement. With all the upheavals that have come with the pandemic, not the least of which are the cessation of in-person live shows and lockdowns that have impeded studio sessions, have come many adjustments and changes in approaches to the creation of music. This has brought about a prolific time for the creators who have successfully pivoted, gaining knowledge and additional skills in the process, which they are taking with them into 2021. 

The Recording Academy's Los Angeles Chapter summit, New Year x New Music x New Normal, which took place virtually Wednesday (Dec. 16), explored this topic through four panels that offered a range of perspectives from the various sides of the industry. Each of the 45-minute panels focused on a specific cross section of creatives, including artists, songwriters/producers/A&R, arranger/conductor/composer and music for visual media. Conducted in conversational style, the panel discussions saw professionals sharing experiences, trading ideas and finding common ground.

Hosted by the Executive Director of the Los Angeles Chapter, Qiana Conley, the panels featured guests and speakers like: the Recording Academy's Interim President/CEO, Harvey Mason jr.; GRAMMY-winning producer/music director and L.A. Chapter governor Gregg Field; GRAMMY-winning songwriter/producer Philip Lawrence; GRAMMY-nominated producer and L.A. Chapter advisor Jeff Gitelman; GRAMMY-nominated songwriter and L.A. Chapter governor Marcus Lomax; GRAMMY-nominated composer/conductor/music director and L.A. Chapter governor Ryan Shore; GRAMMY-nominated artists Bonnie McKee and Gallant; A&R executives and L.A. Chapter governors Amanda Samii and Nicole Plantin; music supervisor and L.A. Chapter trustee Julia Michels; and artists Leroy Sanchez and Whethan. Also speaking were the Los Angeles Chapter's senior operations manager, Nicole Brown, and membership manager, Brittany Presley, plus musician/producer, founder and CEO of Jammcard, Elmo Lovano.

Watch the New Year x New Music x New Normal summit in full on Facebook.

Clockwise from top-left: Qiana Conley, Brittany Presley and Nicole Brown

Clockwise from top-left: Qiana Conley, Brittany Presley and Nicole Brown | Screenshot from New Year x New Music x New Normal summit

"We've all been impacted by the events of 2020 from the pandemic to social injustice to the continued advocacy efforts that we've been putting forward, fighting for music creator rights," Conley said in her opening remarks at the summit. "We take on these things together and music continues to unite us, both in our purpose and in the soundtrack of our passions. Our summit will allow creators to talk amongst themselves, to share and have conversations with each other about how they've been creating in this bubble, and to also sow what they expect from the New Year from the lessons that they've learned or the changes that they've made and how that will ultimately shape their creative process moving forward."

The A Conversation With Artists panel, moderated by McKee, began the summit with Gallant, Whethan and Sanchez. Some of the topics discussed included the creation of music remotely, schedule management, livestreamed shows, challenging parts of the pandemic, the effects the state of the world made on their sound and more. 

Read More: Behind The Record Returns To #GiveCredit To The Behind-The-Scenes Music Creators

"I need to keep making music," Sanchez said of staying connected to fans. "People are still listening to music. A lot of artists have realized that and we've already seen a lot of great music coming out. There's going to be a lot more creation that way. Since people can't do shows, there's a lot of audiovisual stuff. It's not a visual album, but it's some sort of movie or some sort of creative twist around the album that puts a spin on it and people can still consume it from their home and still get an experience that's not a show."

On keeping a schedule, Gallant commented, "I'm such a disorganized dude, the only way to get that clerical work done is if I really planned it out. I would think I wouldn't thrive without that structure, but when you have disorganization on top of world disorganization on top of mental disorganization, it's just a little too chaotic."

Clockwise from top-left: Jeff Gitelman, Amanda Samii, Nicole Plantin and Marcus Lomax

Clockwise from top-left: Jeff Gitelman, Amanda Samii, Nicole Plantin and Marcus Lomax | Screenshot from New Year x New Music x New Normal summit

The next panel, A Conversation With Songwriters/Producers/A&Rs, centered around the topics of creation during quarantine, breakthroughs with challenges and new practices and techniques. All panelists said they have been the busiest they have ever been during this time, with Zoom sessions and meetings allowing them to accomplish more, and more efficiently. 

"Our artists are writing from the comfort of their own home," Samii said. "Educating them on new writers, new producers that I think could be really interesting with them so that once we're out of this pandemic, we're not starting from zero. Zoom sessions are not the sexiest thing to do, but they work. I can get an artist in Australia or London in with people in L.A. today, and I can grab somebody from Nashville. There's an advantage to this time where I can grab people and put them in a room where I would have to wait until like the stars aligned, which might take a long time."

Gitelman juxtaposed not being able to be in the same room with an artist and not having a creative and intimate setting to connect with them against the convenience of being able to call someone, like Lomax, and have them quickly help in a session. 

"It's been revolutionary where certain writers have been able to give me two hours and then they'll do two hours somewhere in another Zoom session. A challenge, but something I believe we have to push ourselves to adjust to," Gitelman said.

Lomax said what helped him break through this challenge is continuing to work with the same people he has for the last few years. "The core same people that pretty much I've been doing music with, I've been very familiar with for the last few years so that was an easy way to get into it for me," he said. "Once I got into it, these sessions aren't going as long. I can be available to more people more frequently and maybe be more effective and more efficient in a different way."

"It's allowed us to use our time differently than we would have used it in the past and that's not a bad thing," Plantin added. "We've been able to pour a little bit more into ourselves, dig into ourselves a little more and do things that we may not have had the time to do before."

On the topic of inspiration, Gitelman said, "It's an important time in history right now. Are you going to be on this side of it? Or are you going to be on this side? All of us need to evolve and push ourselves a little more. If you need to learn a DAW, Pro Tools or Logic, if your career depended on it, wouldn't you be able to do that? I'm a fighter. We're going to get through it. We're going to make it happen. I encourage other people to embrace the evolution."

"It's been a testing year, but it's been a great year for music, and I think we're going to see some great music come from this. A lot of people have a lot to say and I'm looking forward to hearing that," Samii concluded.

Ryan Shore (L) and Gregg Field (R)

Ryan Shore (L) and Gregg Field (R) | Screenshot from New Year x New Music x New Normal summit

The A Conversation With Arrangers/Conductors/Composers panel was a one-on-one between Shore and Field who have a unique perspective from the composing side. Shifting relatively easily into the post-pandemic way of studio recording, Field spoke on one of the major changes he experienced. "If I've got a vocalist, I want to be in the live room with them, one-on-one. The worst thing for me is to leave an artist alone in a room when they've got no energy to come back and forth, so the emotional opportunities for the singer to feel something are missed."

The Los Angeles Chapter leaders came in with some remarks, noting the many ways creatives could engage around advocacy as a member. Conley, who frequently hears members asking about how they could get involved, suggested to "contact Congress."

Read More: VP Of Member & Industry Relations Kelley Purcell On How Recording Academy Members Can Make A Difference

"We are still in the fight, on your behalf, for getting the correct relief that we need for music creators that have been impacted by COVID by encouraging your Congress people to support the HITS Act or the SOS Bill or the Restart Act," Conley said.

Clockwise from top-left: Julia Michels, Philip Lawrence and Harvey Mason jr.

Clockwise from top-left: Julia Michels, Philip Lawrence and Harvey Mason jr. | Screenshot from New Year x New Music x New Normal summit

The final panel of the summit was A Conversation With One Project, Three Voices: Music For Visual Media. This panel revolved around the Netflix smash holiday musical, Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. The three voices of Mason, Lawrence and Michels, who moderated the panel, are responsible for creating the unforgettable music of David E. Talbert's Jingle Jangle, mainly during the pandemic. 

Michels asked Lawrence about the speed in which he wrote the songs to which he replied, "I fell in love with the story. I was moved by the script. And I fell in love with David and his energy. He's this infectious personality that you just want to be around. Understanding the story and narrative and wanting to do justice to these characters was the catalyst for me to be as spontaneous and in the moment as possible. I've built a career on freestyling. I try not to overthink."

In contrast to the spontaneous and in-person interaction of Lawrence with Talbert, Mason's experience recording for Jingle Jangle was wholly dictated by the pandemic's fluctuating restrictions.

"At certain points we could gather 10 people, so we would rush and get as many people in the room as we could," Mason said. "Then they said now you can only have two people, so we would put people in different booths. At one point we tried to record a choir. Fortunately, in my studio we have five isolation booths, which gave us 10. We stacked it so we ended up with 40 or 50 voices by the time it was done. It was laborious for sure, to say the least. It was not convenient. But it was a challenge, and like the rest of this movie, it was big fun."

Much like the Songwriters/Producers/A&R panelists, Michaels also found that, "I have more access to musicians because, unfortunately, people aren't touring. People are willing to write, and I'm getting a lot of 'yeses' where I think I would have gotten 'nos' on some other projects."

Recording Academy Invites & Celebrates Its 2020 New Member Class

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