Benny Maupin - Dec. 8 in L.A. - Jewel in the Lotus

[GA Russell]

“A true jazz classic… As timeless and adventurous in the present as the day it was released." —All Music Guide Jazz legend Bennie Maupin appears at REDCAT for the first live performance of The Jewel in the Lotus, an iconic ECM release from 1974. Maupin’s provocatively honest bass clarinet helped define the classic recordings of Miles Davis (Bitches Brew, Big Fun, On the Corner) and Herbie Hancock’s influential Headhunters band and Mwandishi sextet. The Bennie Maupin Ensemble fuses memories of Maupin’s early mentors with seminal saxophone-bass-drum trios led by Sonny Rollins with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. Bennie Maupin reeds; Munyungo Jackson percussion;  David Johnson vibraphone/marimba; Jeff Parker guitar;  Darek Oles bass; Gene Coye drums;  Steve Lehman alto saxophone; Eyvind Kang viola;  Lindsey Hundley piano/keyboards;  Shana Tucker cello/vocal impressions Friday December 8th, 8:30pm  REDCAT  631 WEST 2ND STREET  LOS ANGELES, CA 90012  213 237-2800  Call for tickets 213-237-2800  or BUY ONLINE CLICK TO BUY © 2017 ECM | ECM Records USA | 1755 Broadway, 3rd floor | New York NY 10011

[mjazzg]

One of my favourites. Interesting band. Now to get to LA

[chewy-chew-chew-bean-benitez]

[Adam]

Planning on going...

[GA Russell]

Available Today, ECM's Vinyl Reissue of Bennie Maupin's 1974 Landmark Album The Jewel in the Lotus Today as Part of its Audiophile Luminessence Series

ECM’s audiophile vinyl-reissue series Luminessence continues with the release of Bennie Maupin's 1974 album The Jewel in the Lotus.  The Luminessence series is a kaleidoscope, shedding light on the jewels of the label’s deep catalogue in elegant, high-quality editions. The hallmarks of the series: original and evocative music, imaginatively played and sensitively produced. The recordings underline the scope and variety of ECM’s world of sound and the LPs are presented in different formats.

Bennie Maupin The Jewel in the Lotus   Bennie Maupin | Reeds, Voice, Glockenspiel Herbie Hancock | Piano, Electric Piano Buster Williams | Bass Billy Hart | Drums Frederick Waits | Drums, Marimba Bill Summers | Percussion Charles Sullivan | Trumpet   ECM 1043   Release LP: May 16, 2025

"An unsung modernist classic from 1974." – Pitchfork   "Bennie Maupin, the reeds master whose contributions to the landmark Miles Davis Bitches Brew session and to Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band were so sparingly telling, reemerged last year with an unusual new album… This is the companion-piece… The rich soundscapes of Bitches Brew and early Weather Report are strong references, with Maupin far more of an enabler and a colourist than a flat-out soloist. But his rich tapestries are more acoustic than most early 1970s fusion, and this is an absorbing collage of long flute sounds over marimba vamps and loosely impressionistic percussion, water-churning noises and electric keys washing around brooding bass clarinet lines, airy soprano melodies over Buster Williams’ bowed bass." — John Fordham, The Guardian   Bennie Maupin has been an inventive contributor to iconic records including Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi and Headhunters and Marion Brown’s Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun. His recordings under his own name have been infrequent but his leader debut, is indeed a jewel. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine”, said DownBeat in 1975. “On The Jewel In The Lotus, the sound is supreme, and all the players strive to achieve a thorough blending”. Recorded in New York in 1974, the disc’s personnel is drawn from the circle around Herbie Hancock in the period, but the music has a character all its own.   Maupin was one of the first musicians to record for ECM, playing on Marion Brown’s Afternoon Of A Georgia Faun in August 1970, when the label was just a few months old. The Jewel In The Lotus, made four years later, was Maupin’s first date as a leader, but he had already left his imprint on some very significant recordings. Born in Detroit in 1940, Maupin was encouraged in his early musical development by Yusef Lateef, John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. Jack DeJohnette introduced him to Miles Davis, and Maupin’s bass clarinet was to become one of the signature sounds of the epochal Bitches Brew; he also appeared on Davis's On The Corner and Big Fun. The early '70s, however, were spent mostly working with Hancock’s ensembles – the Mwandishi group and the Headhunters – and the line-up on The Jewel In The Lotus is essential a pooling of players from the Hancock circle, including Hancock himself in his only ECM appearance.   If Hancock’s groups were beginning to lean toward funk in this era, the groove – even with three percussionists interacting – is often dispatched altogether on The Jewel In The Lotus, which is essentially a sequence of pulsing tone-poems, full of glowing, compound sound-colors and subtle interactions, a jazz-and-Buddhism-inspired floating chamber music that was way ahead of its time. The recording shows Maupin very much concerned with the totality of the musical conception, with the form as a whole. He is an exceptional improviser, thinking compositionally and directing group music in the moment.

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