Kind Regards
Recordings by Gustavo Cortiñas, Emily Kuhn, and Jeremy Cunningham
Three visions to discuss today: two records with highly distinctive structures—concepts, if you will—and a third that is a bit less conceptual and satisfied with strong compositions and warm, joyous musical interaction. It might be mad of me to cover so much rich work in a short space, but, as has been established, I don’t know what I’m doing, so—Olivia Rodrigo need not be re-referenced.
Gustavo Cortiñas Fouilloux, drummer and composer, was born in Mexico City, and went to college at Loyola University New Orleans, earning a degree in jazz performance and minoring in philosophy. After earning an additional graduate degree from Northwestern in Evanston, IL, he decided to stay in Chicago, where in the last ten years he has become a regular fixture on the scene, and has released four recordings, the most recent of which is Kind Regards / Saludos Afectuosos. This recording radiates particularly strongly Cortiñas’s interests in bridge-building and creative collaboration, even as it is also a semi-autobiographical collection of songs, half sung in English and half in Spanish. That bilingual commitment is just the start of the way this music positions itself to make maximum use of affordances of jazz and improvised music to further its project, positioning that begins with the membership of the band.
In this quintet, women outnumber men three to two; that is unusual. Furthering gender diversity in jazz remains a lively project, and partly that means widening the role of women beyond the one place where women have been well-represented historically, as singers.1 However, in other ways the ensemble partakes of the tradition of women singing lyrics written by men: that is indeed the case here, with Meghan Stagl doing all the singing on the record including her own backing vocals. But that tradition is also scrambled by the nature and bilinguality of the songs, where Cortiñas is interested in representing the immigrant experience, both his own and in general, which very much includes sexuality as a critical element of belonging and cultural stability, as well a frequent target of some of the most pernicious bigotry. Stagl’s voice can cover a lot of territory, but one thing it can certainly do effortlessly is allude to the breathy sensuality of, to use an extreme example, Serge Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot, or, more recently, the daughter of the former two, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who has also released bilingual records in English and French. Thus we have a white woman singing a song like the opening track, “I Hope You Had a Good Phone Call Today,” which narrates a conversation between Cortiñas and a Palestinian immigrant Uber driver taking him to the airport, and highlights the vast difference in their immigrant precarity next to their common humanity. Later on in the record, on “Wednesday Can’t Come Soon Enough,” we find a song describing the anticipation for an exciting second date, and the qualities of a deepening and flourishing romantic relationship. So, on the one hand we have Stagl taking a commonplace, chance encounter of two immigrants and treating it with a style of singing associated with frank expressions of feminine sexuality, and then later simply shifting gender in a love song, singing masculine sexuality in a feminine key—ordinary enough, but here given more weight from the progression that the recording generates from the sexualized male immigrant invader (e.g., Trump’s “rapists” and “bad hombres”) toward someone able to participate in an anglophone heterosexual dating scene.2
But perhaps the convergence of gender, sexuality, and voicing is nowhere more intense than in “Emigraste,” the second track on the record, also the song that most directly speaks to the immigrant experience. It speaks in the second person, in Spanish, with these opening lines: “Abrasaste a mamá, la maleta pakaste, / Partiste de casa, y no regresaste” (“You hugged mom, you packed your bags / You left home and you never came back”).3 From this initial compression and dispatch, the lyric opens to embrace a multitude of modes of making the journey, and a multitude of reasons why, always emphasizing the size of the loss incurred, all that has been left behind. Here Stagl’s voice makes such a discussion beautiful and sensuous, and also allows Cortiñas’s voice as a writer that affordance, and also perhaps generates a sense of cross-border, cross-cultural compassionate embrace.
I can’t let this record go without also noting that it mostly eschews one of the most solidly established features of jazz and improvised music, namely the “solo,” where one instrumentalist proverbially or literally steps forward, and becomes the focus of attention during an improvisation usually over the form of the song in question, usually generating a narrative or trajectory of energy and musical language that often ends by a live audience applauding the performer. There’s almost none of that here. Instead, the quintet engages in “collective improvisation,” as in, they solo together, with Stagl’s piano, Emily Kuhn’s trumpet, Eric Skov’s guitar, Katie Ernst’s bass, and Cortiñas’s drum set all by turns offering musical ideas that are picked up, turned around, sent on, as the group rides waves of energy and intensity up and down, before finally returning to the lyrics. This is hardly unprecedented in jazz, but it is another move that seems to reflect and deepen the music’s concerns and amplify its message of inclusiveness and collective strength coming from the diversity of its individual members.
The trumpeter on the Kind Regards session is Emily Kuhn, and she has recently released a recording of her own, Ghosts of Us, which reassembles almost all of the ensemble from Kind Regards, with the exception of Katie Ernst—Kitt Lyles is the bassist here. Kuhn’s compositions are harmonically and rhythmically adventurous, and are balanced with more traditional kinds of solos and variations in timbre and character that one looks forward to on a modern jazz record. We get to hear the musicians solo and “stretch” somewhat more than on Kind Regards, which is lovely, but for me a familiar warm, joyous energy suffuses the recording which attaches it appealingly to the other record. “In Lieu of Certainty, Movement” is a good exemplar of this.
Emily Kuhn is just finishing a tour with this band promoting her recording—they will perform on November 17 at the North Street Cabaret in Madison, WI and on November 18 at the Jazz Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, WI.
I met Jeremy Cunningham and played music with him informally before I learned of the existence of The Weather Up There (2020). While he is as friendly and personable as anyone on the scene, I had noted a quality of seriousness or gravity, or density in his playing that seemed unusual and distinctive and compelling. Musicians have to invest themselves in what will nourish and energize them, and when I did learn of the recording I felt like I had been prepared for it in some way by encountering his playing and the quality of energy and emotion it radiated.
The concept of this record is simple and profound: the album narrates and responds to the murder of his brother Andrew, shot dead in a robbery/home invasion in 2008. It narrates using the voices of family members and relations, recordings that sound like they were made off of a telephone or an old answering machine. All this seems daring on a number of levels, not the least of which is that it is difficult to let this become background music—so not an obvious fit with a jazz playlist or what have you. As with Cortiñas’s Kind Regards, the album makes use of various techniques to heighten and intensify and sublimate its volatile materials. In The Weather some of the most memorable moments seem to show trauma being processed into something else as we listen. This is especially true of “Elegy,” which features a drum choir, where Cunningham is joined by three other splendid Chicago drummers, and where we listen to several relatives and relations of his brother attempting to make sense of his death. For me, the effect is to hear these voices—which for us, are never named, are only roles like “father, aunt, girlfriend”—both distinctly and indistinctly. You can hear the words describing grief and rage resonating and also failing to resonate, merging with each other, and with innumerable other voices, and finally with the language of percussion and bells and cymbals, the most abstract of musical instruments and the visceral language of rhythm.
The opening of the recording is equally remarkable, as a woman narrates a dream where she believes she was visited by Andrew’s departing spirit—at this point we may know nothing about what is happening, but the production and orchestration of sounds and instruments effectively creates a dream-world, or the world of longing where the dead live on and come and greet us in our dreams.
And for the intensity and ambition of the record, it also finds its way to a zone perhaps not quite as warm and comforting as the geography of Kind Regards and Ghosts of Us, but close. “Hike,” for example, evokes with that one word a range of childhood memories, connected perhaps to the family photograph that adorns the album’s cover. The track breathes with summer air and lingers like a long summer’s day, like the memory of love and life, a track to put on repeat and let keep riding on.
While I’m fascinated by the way both Kind Regards and The Weather Up There take materials that are wracked with pain and anxiety, and make from them beautiful music, they both also retain the desire for plain speech and for persuasion and advocacy: for Cortiñas there is a clear project of broadening perspectives, of humanizing and educating (this follows from the predecessor to Kind Regards, the sweeping, double-album tour of Latin American history in Desafío Candente). And for Cunningham, and the voices that remain after Andrew, there is one obvious thing to do, and that is to break our senseless love affair with weapons of war like those used to kill him—finally and simply the record advocates for gun control and safety.
To give a sense of the liveliness, I’ll note the publication of and acclaim last year around New Standards: 101 Lead Sheets by Women Composers (Boston, MA: Berklee Press, 2022). Drummer and NEA Jazz Master Terri Lyne Carrington edited this collection of sheet music, and the biographical note also points out that Carrington is the founder and artistic director of the Berklee (Boston) Institute of Jazz and Gender Justice, “which supports and advocates for the creations and careers of women and non-binary musicians.” A recording based on this book and concept just won the Grammy for best jazz instrumental album of 2022.
The quotations are from Trump’s campaign announcement speech in June 2015, and the third presidential debate in 2016, respectively.
The translation is by Cortiñas, in lyrics published on Bandcamp.com, including the slight difference of the apparent absence of “never” in the Spanish lyrics.