Javon Jackson / Nikki Giovanni - Javon & Nikki go to the movies

On Javon and Nikki Go to the Movies, Jackson is once again joined by the stellar group that he’s worked with for more than a decade: pianist Jeremy Manasia, bassist David Williams and drummer McClenty Hunter. That band first appeared on Jackson’s 2018 album For You and its 2020 follow-up, Déjà Vu, then after The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni reconvened for a portion of Jackson’s soundtrack to the documentary With Peter Bradley in 2023. Here they’re also joined by Grammy-winning vocalist Nicole Zuraitis and, on three captivating cuts, by the poet herself.

Both because of the nature of the original project and because it was recorded at the height of the pandemic, Giovanni’s contributions to The Gospel According to Nikki Giovanni were largely conceptual. She contributed vocals for the ballad “Night Song,” and political scientist and podcast host Christina Greer recited Giovanni’s poem “A Very Simple Wish” over the quartet’s rendition of “Wade in the Water.” But that was the extent of Giovanni’s aural and textual presence on the session.

That’s all changed with Javon and Nikki Go to the Movies. The album commences with the quartet alone, revisiting the title track from Jackson’s Betty Carter-produced Blue Note debut When the Time is Right for the first time since its release in 1994. Then the band eases into a bossa nova-flavored version of the Kurt Weill/Ogden Nash classic “Speak Low,” written for the 1943 Broadway musical One Touch of Venus and performed in its 1948 movie adaptation by Dick Haymes and Ava Gardner (with dubbed vocals by Eileen Wilson). Midway through, accompanied by Manasia’s tender piano solo, Giovanni makes her first appearance – not, as with “Night Song,” as a singer, but reciting her own provocative poem “That Day,” its words a bold refutation of the original lyrics’ urged discretion.

Giovanni couples two separate poems to pair with the quartet’s “Poinciana”-like take on “Love is a Many Splendored Thing.” The erotic nature of food and cooking becomes one of those splendors in “Still Life With Apron,” while “I Exist” ruminates on the poet’s omnipresence in her lover’s imagination. Finally, Jackson’s funky “Have You Heard,” originally recorded with Dr. Lonnie Smith on the 2004 album of the same name, graced now by Giovanni’s reading of “Vegetable Soup,” a meditation on the fear of aging that name-checks a number of jazz greats, including Miles, Trane and Monk. Jackson pays homage to one of their peers, the still living legend Sonny Rollins, with the Saxophone Colossus’ “Valse Hot.”

Nicole Zuraitis brings her compelling vocals to an exhilarated “How About You” (introduced by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes on Broadway); a smoldering “I Belong to You” (from the obscure 1955 Kirk Douglas car-racing drama The Racers) and a wistful “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” (sung by Irene Dunne in 1937’s High, Wide and Handsome but immortalized by Peggy Lee), an ideal pairing with the similarly mature reflection of “Have You Heard/Vegetable Soup.”

The album is rounded out by the quartet’s yearning interpretation of “The Nearness of You” (intended for a never-produced film called Romance in the Rough) and the scintillating “Theme For Nikki,” Jackson’s tribute to his collaborator, pointedly written as a minor blues. “Nikki is loving, soulful and unapologetically herself,” the saxophonist explains. “I don’t care if it’s being played by John Lee Hooker or John Coltrane or Bob Dylan, the blues is always unapologetic. And that captures what Nikki is all about.”