Scott Gutterman

Pianist and composer Cat Toren combines classical training with a commitment to the questing, open-ended nature of free jazz. Her playing is lyrical and spare, with a deep affinity for the qualities of space and silence. Likewise, her composing is attuned to the importance of simplicity.

Live music in New York City in the summertime: nothing could be more natural, or more welcome. But after the canceled summer of 2020, nobody knew what to expect this year.

From a single session in 1939 grew an inimitable label devoted to jazz “with a feeling,” as they described it. Blue Note moved from swing into bebop, then fell into its role, for about 10 years, as the defining label of hard bop.

The name of the band came about because it can be read to mean a gathering, particularly a religious one, or “con clavé.” “’Clavé’ means key, and as an instrument and as a rhythm, the clavé holds all this music together. Through these connections, the ancestors are speaking to you and through you.”

The year 2021 saw two outstanding polymath artists celebrated for their achievements in what turned out to be the final months of their lives: Lebanese poet-painter-novelist-journalist-playwright Etel Adnan, subject of an exhibition, Light’s New Measure, at the Guggenheim, and American percussionist-martial artist-herbalist-sculptor Milford Graves, whose solo show Fundamental Frequency at Artists Space grew out of another one at the ICA in Philadelphia last year.

When pianist Vadim Neselovskyi played at a benefit for Ukraine at Roulette in April, he brought something that the other participants, even major figures like Fred Hersch and John Zorn, could not: a life spent growing up in the country by the Black Sea, in particular the ancient port town of Odesa.

Composer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey has emerged as a major statesman on the scene. The New Yorker has called him “an extraordinary talent who can see across the entire musical landscape,” and the New York Times, raising the stakes, has described him as “an artist who is at the nexus of the music industry’s artistic and social concerns.”

The art of the music doc has seemed especially strong the last fifteen years or so. Filmmakers in the digital era have access to so many different kinds of source material, and they can sometimes create richer portraits with them.

Among music’s many other powers is the ability to cross boundaries and make intuitive connections between cultures. In the recognition of that is our own godlike feeling, the ability to travel over the earth, to fly free and to apprehend.

Musicians are always playing off one another, and their own sounds are altered by these different contexts. Guitarist Grant Green sounds very different on two separate recordings of “My Favorite Things,” one with the low-slung, stepped-back style of pianist Sonny Clark, another with the ethereal modal reach of pianist McCoy Tyner. And these particularities are not limited to the musicians, but to the spaces in which the music is played.