Having recently received his Master’s in Jazz Piano Performance from Manhattan School of Music, David…
David Zheng (Photo: Clubgroovenyc.com)[/caption]
“The concept for Loading … grew out of my extensive jazz background and heavy immersion in the beat music scene in New York,” Zheng says. “For all the jazz I had been hearing for the past 10 years, I felt like the one element that was missing was dance music. It had been largely ignored in the jazz community. Robert Glasper sparked the neo-soul/hip-hop jazz fusion movement, but for too long I felt that my love for jazz and the excitement I felt listening to dance music were totally separate worlds. Until I heard BIGYUKI and what some of these other great artists were doing, I wouldn’t have had the courage to do an album like this.
“I think what makes it unique is that I’m not just experimenting with a mix of dance music and jazz, but I really wanted this to be an album that incorporated all different strands of Black American Music, a term that Nicholas Payton has coined, from jazz and blues to R&B, neo-soul, disco, house and hip-hop," he adds. “I wanted this to be a dance-oriented album that incorporated different strands of Black American Music, from jazz and blues to R&B, neo-soul and hip-hop. It’s a very different experience when I’m producing compared to the live jazz context, thinking more about the structure and sound quality as opposed to just notes. As a producer, with the help of my incredible mixer Joel Gardella, I was focused primarily on sound design and sound quality.”
For Zheng, the artist moniker ZENG is not simply a culturally neutral appropriation of his Chinese surname. It’s a way to establish his brand as the leader of an evolving musical collective that spotlights his dynamic collaborators as much as himself. Created mostly remotely during COVID, the project allowed his collaborators to create and record their parts at their own unhurried pace.
Jazz ensembles usually thrive on live interaction in a studio setting, but Zheng found the lockdown-imposed file exchange/feedback process quite efficient. The result is an inspiring demonstration of the fact that, as he says, “when we’re apart, we’re still together. Music is the therapeutic anchor that comforted and uplifted us all during this difficult time. ‘CNS.als’ is a perfect example. “I had performed it with my live band and wanted to create a dance production version. So I made a skeleton demo and sent it to [vocalist] J. Hoard, who sent me back vocal tracks of the melody I had written, and took liberties with the incredible lyrics. Then I sent what we had to Braxton Cook for some sax parts, and finally to [vocalist] Joy Elysse, who sang and wrote lyrics to the bridge. Like all the tracks, a total collaborative effort.”
In whatever way listeners choose to experience the music on Loading … , they’re sure to notice the quirky way the titles are presented, from the opening track “STARGAZING.als” to the closer “RED LIGHT.als.” “The all caps and .als at the end of each song is the file format for Abelton, the program I created the beats in. I put them there because I want people to see the album as I saw it in my actual workflow when I was creating it. And the fact that they still have the file attachment at the end implies they are still works-in-progress, which is how I basically view all my music.”
Zheng is a work in progress himself, releasing his new album while completing his medical training at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His academic research at Princeton, MIT, Johns Hopkins, Yale and the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine explored the connections of music with cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry and neurology. Rather than choose music over medicine, he can envision a path for himself like that of Richard Kogan — a clinical professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical Center and the Artistic Director of the Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Program, Kogan’s also a concert pianist.
“I always remember what [vibraphonist] Stefon Harris, former Associate Dean and Director of the Jazz Arts program at MSM said: ‘The heart of jazz is empathy,’ ” says Zheng. “Underlying both the cerebral and spontaneous, uninhibited creative side of jazz is the interpersonal relationship between band members and those musical conversations. To me, psychiatry and jazz are two sides of the same coin. My goal is to have my own practice and stay involved in the local music scene, while producing more albums like Loading… that involve the great talents of that community.”
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Michael Lington, Alone Together (Peak)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddUpZKJ6TZs
Early in the COVID-19 lockdown, veteran contemporary-jazz saxophonist Michael Lington hooked up with the StageIt platform for a weekly state-of-the art livestream from his home studio. Performances included split-screen duets with fellow smooth jazz artists (Dave Koz, Nick Colionne, Brian Culbertson, Boney James) and and an array of genre-crossing vocalists (Sy Smith, Kenny Lattimore, Chris Walker, Javier Colon and Billy Dean). This perfectly and poignantly titled collection, which features the audio portion of some of Lington’s most compelling duets, offers longtime fans an opportunity to experience choice tracks from his two-decade-plus career in a fresh, inspiring and technologically of-the-moment setting. 