4 On the afternoon and evening of June 25, 1961, the Bill Evans Trio performed a pair of shows at New York’s Village Vanguard that, when subsequently released by Riverside Records, became essential components of any serious jazz library: <I>Sunday at the Village Vanguard</I> and <I>Waltz for Debby</I>. The albums, though not Evans’ first, firmly established the pianist as one of the certified geniuses of the genre and altered the notion of what a jazz piano trio was all about. But for many who’ve heard them, there is an element of melancholy permanently affixed to these sessions—one that extends beyond the music itself—as they represent the final official recorded statements of Scott LaFaro. Only 25 years old, LaFaro, one of the most innovative and promising double bassists on the scene during this fertile period in jazz, died in an automobile accident just 10 days after these landmark gigs. Although the Evans Vanguard performances, which also included the brilliant Paul Motian on drums, remain Scott LaFaro’s highest-profile contribution to the music, he had, by the time of his death, become one of the most in-demand bassists in jazz. His professional career lasted a mere seven years, but during that brief but prolific tenure he collaborated with a dizzyingly diverse array of leaders, among them Evans, Benny Goodman, Ornette Coleman, Stan Kenton, Steve Kuhn, Stan Getz, Victor Feldman, Booker Little, Herb Geller and Chet Baker. The great tragedy of LaFaro’s untimely passing invariably leads to questions of what might have been. But for countless musicians, the relatively little he was able to accomplish left, and continues to leave, a sizable impression. LaFaro, simply put, changed jazz bass playing. “Everyone uses the word ‘interactive,’ and Scott was this,” says bassist Marc Johnson, who played with Evans years after LaFaro. “But he was also very melodic. He understood harmony and he had a linear concept for moving through harmony. So, as a bassist, he’s not only providing a root function, but he was also interjecting melodic asides and ideas or even just filling the space rhythmically. And that became an interactive concept, especially in that group with Evans.” Johnson has penned liner notes to a new collection of previously unreleased LaFaro recordings, <I>Pieces of Jade</I>, recently issued on Resonance Records as part of the label’s Heirloom Series. The disc features five tracks recorded in 1961 with pianist Don Friedman and drummer Pete LaRoca; a near-23-minute 1960 rehearsal of “My Foolish Heart” (a polished five-minute version of which ended up on <I>Waltz for Debby</I>) featuring only LaFaro and Evans; an extensive 1966 interview with Evans, who discusses LaFaro with then-radio host, now-Resonance founder George Klabin; and a solo piano piece by Friedman of more recent vintage, “Memories for Scotty.” Some of the Friedman-LaFaro-LaRoca tracks were previously issued on a Japanese collection, but all of it is new to the American market. “I don’t remember why exactly we were there,” says Friedman today, “because we weren’t recording with anybody. But for some reason or other we were in this studio and the engineer said, ‘Why don’t you guys play something and I’ll let the tape go?’” LaFaro has always been praised for his adventurous solos, and his forays on <I>Pieces of Jade</I> are no exception. But within the trio as well he was constantly probing. “He developed this way of playing the bass that I don’t think anybody was doing,” says Friedman. “He progressed so amazingly [fast]. I first heard him with the Buddy Morrow band [circa 1955]. It could be because of the music he was playing, but he wasn’t necessarily an outstanding player [yet]. But it wasn’t much after that that he became this amazing bass player.” Klabin agrees. “I became more impressed with him as time went on. I call him the Charlie Parker of the bass. He used the bass in a way that it had never been used before, from a technical standpoint. The sliding notes—I don’t know if anybody else was doing that. He was a seeker. He was not fearful. His whole idea was to leap in and sometimes go overboard and then come back from that, rather than holding back and being cautious. That’s how great music is made—taking chances.” Simultaneous with the release of the new CD is the publication of <I>Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro</I> (University of North Texas Press), a comprehensive biography—the first on LaFaro—written by his sister, Helene LaFaro-Fernández. The book takes its name from one of only two compositions LaFaro completed and recorded, the one that closes the original <I>Sunday at the Village Vanguard</I> LP (the other, “Gloria’s Step,” opens it). Younger than Scott by two years, Fernández wrote the book—which also includes a complete discography, a technical dissection of LaFaro’s music and more—in order to clear up some of the mysteries and misinformation that persist about her brother. Says the author, “The longer he’s been gone, the more interest there seems to be.” Despite his continuing impact, even most jazz aficionados know little about LaFaro. The bio provides not only a detailed account of LaFaro’s too-short life, but also insight into his personality. “Scotty liked to be an enigma,” she says. “And he was terribly intense about his practice habits. When everybody else was out at the pool, Scotty was inside practicing. Have a meal, back to practice. So some people thought he was aloof but most of them changed their minds when they got to know him.” LaFaro did not begin his musical endeavors as a bassist. Prior to taking up the upright bass, he had already tried his hand at piano, clarinet and saxophone. But upon entering Ithaca College in upstate New York in 1954, not far from the family’s home in Geneva, N.Y., LaFaro latched onto the bass and never looked back. Within a year he was playing professionally. Surprisingly, says Fernández, LaFaro “didn’t like very much what he recorded—he thought it was like watching a home movie. He liked what he did with Pat Moran. After that he was never too keen on much. “But he did remark to the family that he liked the work he’d just finished on the Vanguard sessions that Sunday.” true 10422 2009-11-04T21:07:40-05:00 false 25270 178 true 2 2009-12-01T00:00:00-05:00 Remembering Scotty

Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro

2009-11-06T12:14:32-05:00

4 Let’s come right out and say it: Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time. Mercurial but ever-lyrical, a serenader as well as a searcher, he represents the higher instincts and aspirations of a field crowded with every sort of throwback. At 42, he’s a perennial poll winner and consummate insider, occupying a role that would have seemed far-fetched when he made his first album 15 years ago. But the state of jazz singing will be different in the coming decade than it was when he arrived, and I dare say it will be better. In no small part, that’s because of the ambitious standard he has set. “Among my jazz students, he’s the contemporary singer that I hear cited the most as an influence,” says David Thorne Scott, an associate professor in the voice department at the Berklee College of Music. “I always expect it from my guys, but it’s the women too.” Similar testimony comes from Dominique Eade, an accomplished jazz singerand revered faculty member at the New England Conservatory. “Technically he’s so impressive,” she says, “and I think students can feel the weight of musicianship behind what he does, in his transcription and his writing of lyrics to other people’s solos.” With a chuckle, she adds, “It’s sometimes hard for me to remember this, but I’m teaching kids who don’t know Mark Murphy and don’t know Eddie Jefferson, and may not know Annie Ross. There’s a direction that those people pointed toward that nobody really followed through on. It almost skipped a generation. Kurt took that idea and carried it forward.” Elling, a product of Chicago, had his basic agenda in place from the start. <I>Close Your Eyes</I>, his Blue Note debut, opens with the title track, one of two durable standards by Bernice Petkere. A study in smoldering crescendo, it begins as a dreamy reverie, shifts to assertive swing and crests with an expressionistic scat chorus. The following tune, “Dolores Dream,” presents Elling’s vocalese take on a Wayne Shorter composition, with clever use of onomatopoeia (“‘Bronk!’ went a taxicab outside”) and shrewd manipulation of timbre. Next comes “The Ballad of the Sad Young Men,” another standard, and “(Hide the) Salomé,” an original with implications both literary and faintly lascivious. And so it goes, on an album that invokes poet Rainer Maria Rilke alongside jazzmen like Herbie Hancock. Elling, supported throughout by his steadfast musical partner, pianist Laurence Hobgood, exudes spectacular confidence and élan. The ensuing years would find him both expanding and refining his portfolio, with two superb follow-up albums, <I>The Messenger</I> (1997) and <I>This Time It’s Love</I> (1998), and a worthwhile succession of others, both on Blue Note and Concord, his current label home. Along the way his core assets as a singer—intelligent phrasing, clear but pliable intonation, impeccable breath and pitch control—commingled freely with his literary and conceptual inclinations. His most recent release, <I>Dedicated to You: Kurt Elling Sings the Music of Coltrane and Hartman</I>, showcases his skills as a balladeer, even if it also confirms that his temperament skews more Coltrane than Hartman. He’ll be recording his next studio album in December; the veteran pop producer Don Was will be involved. I should note that Elling, who has lately been residing with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn, does have his share of detractors. My own reservations have revolved around various kinds of cerebral or sentimental excess. Sometimes it feels like each of Elling’s brilliant literary turns—like the role he fills so memorably in <I>Leaves of Grass</I>, a multimedia work by pianist Fred Hersch—has a corresponding moment of bathos or pretension. Nightmoves, his 2007 Concord debut, still strikes me as an unctuous flop, despite his vocalese response to a Dexter Gordon recording of “Body and Soul.” Still, it’s fascinating to learn that the Elling track most aspiring vocalists at Berklee want to transcribe is “In the Winelight,” a slow jam from the 2003 album Man in the Air. “The fact that he goes outside of your spang-a-lang swing rhythm is something they can tap into,” says Scott, suggesting that R&B inflection also plays a role in that equation. Given that Elling has prominently toured with Jon Hendricks and Mark Murphy, the two jazz-vocal masters who form the backbone of his style, it would seem that he still considers himself more of a pupil than a mentor. But I would venture to say he recognizes his own impact as a standard-bearer, which has been inexorably on the rise. Consider José James, a dashing young jazz singer with a pronounced footing in R&B, who has cited Elling and Cassandra Wilson as early influences. Among the signature moves in James’ fledgling repertoire is a spin on “Resolution,” from John Coltrane’s hallowed suite A Love Supreme. (Elling got there first, brilliantly. Find the studio result on Man in the Air, or a superior live track at kurtelling.com.) Even more telling is the example of Sachal Vasandani, a prepossessing recent arrival whose sophomore album, <I>We Move</I> (Mack Avenue), is among this year’s best vocal releases. On it he contributes several of his own tunes, pays homage to Hendricks and Murphy, and interacts sure-footedly with a dynamic working band. His take on the standard “Don’t Worry About Me” involves a lilting “Poinciana” groove, over which he phrases in long arcs; the whole package suggests Elling on “My Foolish Heart” a decade ago. And one of the originals, a near-bossa called “Royal Eyes,” incorporates a distinctly Elling-esque reading, complete with subtly multitracked background harmonies. Which is not to say that Vasandani sounds just like Elling—that would be beside the point, as both singers would surely agree. Eade sheds the best light on this facet of the elder’s influence. “One thing I have not encountered in my teaching,” she says, “is students who are slavishly imitative of Kurt. And I think in a way that’s his best gift. There’s so much to admire, but people use it as an inroad to something musical, rather than just a pose.” true 203 2009-11-04T21:14:19-05:00 true 25272 178 true 90 2009-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Nate Chinen makes the argument that Kurt Elling is the most influential jazz vocalist of our time

2009-11-06T12:08:35-05:00

4 For the JT staff, theme issues can either be a lot of fun or a real chore. When it doesn’t work, it feels like we’re simply connecting a bunch of dots, albeit well-written and sharply designed ones, to form some preset picture. Plus, if we’re doing a theme devoted to a specific instrument, we feel a certain pressure to somehow make it comprehensive, as if it must include all the giants of the past as well as the innovators of the present. If, as with this month, we’re doing a drum issue, then it must include something on the likes of Papa Jo Jones, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Buddy Rich, Tony Williams, Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Kenny Clarke, Roy Haynes and Jack DeJohnette. But obviously that would take more pages than a single magazine can muster. Or so it seems. It was only when I read the magazine cover to cover that I realized we didn’t need to connect the dots, because the dots connected themselves. We didn’t need to cover all of those legends and innovators—our featured artists simply did the name-checking for us. Beginning with a cover story on the chronically affable Matt Wilson, we hear not only about his own projects, but also about his affinity for Roach, DeJohnette and other iconic drummers, thanks to a series of toss-up questions posed by our Nate Chinen. Of course Wilson’s list of favorites includes Rich, whose lengthy rivalry with Gene Krupa is the subject of a fascinating piece by Dr. Bruce H. Klauber. Rich also had a rivalry of sorts with Roach, whom Andrew Cyrille recalls fondly in an Overdue Ovation by Bill Milkowski. Cyrille points to bop legend Clarke as his inspiration for taking his music to new places. In the Before & After feature with Jimmy Cobb, we hear his informed take on the pantheon of great drummers, including Jo Jones, Blakey, Elvin Jones, Ed Thigpen, Haynes and Williams. When it comes to the innovators of the future, look no further than our Opening Chorus section, in which we profile Justin Faulkner, perhaps the most impressive young drumming prodigy since Tony Williams; Tyshawn Sorey, who talks about going back to college to study composition; and Dan Weiss, who connects his music to the masters of Indian percussion. Or, for more on drumming’s bright horizon, read Nate Chinen’s column about new explorations in rhythm. And you can’t talk about drumming without talking about Latin jazz, in all its permutations. Miguel Zenón isn’t a drummer, but his latest project draws on the drum rhythms of his native Puerto Rico, explained by his drummer Henry Cole in a fascinating sidebar story about the plena tradition. Be sure and read that and the Zenón feature, the first JT contributions by Fernando González. There is something awfully communal about drummers who so intensely keep track of one another. This month it has served us and our special-issue gods quite well, so much so that I wish we could have run some sort of index in the back, the way books do. Apparently, when it comes to great drummers, it takes one to know one. true 129 2009-10-12T21:06:31-04:00 false 25182 177 true 96 2009-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

For the JT staff, theme issues can either be a lot of fun or a real chore. When it doesn’t work, it feels like we’re simply connecting a bunch of dots, albeit well-written and sharply designed ones, to form some preset picture. Plus, if we’re doing a theme devoted to a specific instrument, we feel a certain pressure to somehow make it comprehensive, as if it must include all the giants of the past as well as the innovators of the present. If, as with this month, we’re doing a drum issue, then it must include something on the likes of Papa Jo Jones, Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, Buddy Rich, Tony Williams, Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Kenny Clarke, Roy Haynes and Jack DeJohnette. But obviously that would take more pages than a single magazine can muster. Or so it seems. It was only when I read the magazine cover to cover that I realized we didn’t need to connect the dots, because the dots connected themselves. We didn’t need to cover all of those legends and innovators—our featured artists simply did the name-checking for us. Beginning with a cover story on the chronically affable Matt Wilson, we hear not only about his own projects, but also about his affinity for Roach, DeJohnette and other iconic drummers, thanks to a series of toss-up questions posed by our Nate Chinen. Of course Wilson’s list of favorites includes Rich, whose lengthy rivalry with Gene Krupa is the subject of a fascinating piece by Dr. Bruce H. Klauber. Rich...

51139 2009-10-24T09:06:04-04:00

4 I listen to all the jazz-for-kids recordings that come in, with hope they’ll generate future audiences, and for my own kicks. Now, the most groovingly joyous of all the recordings I’ve heard has arrived: Randy Sandke’s <I>Jazz for Juniors</I> on Mat Domber’s Arbors Records, where Domber has often reminded us how much fun jazz can be. Trumpeter-composer-leader Sandke, a global performer, tells me he’d been thinking about “exposing this current generation of young people to jazz since they’ll be the ones to keep this [music] alive,” when a critical development impelled him to gather Wycliffe Gordon, Wayne Escoffery, Ted Rosenthal, John Riley, Jay Leonhart, Ken Peplowski, Howard Alden and Chuck Wilson to play music (with lyrics and drawings) that would answer the question, “What is jazz?” The critical motivation, he says, was “when my wife Karen and I adopted a newborn infant two years ago whom we named Bix. Bix showed that a love of music develops very early in life—even before any comprehension of spoken language.” This music for juniors so lifted this 84-year-old columnist out of the gloom of my day job—documenting how President Obama is continuing the Bush-Cheney anti-Constitution legacy—that I decided to get a more age-appropriate second opinion from my 4-year-old granddaughter, Ruby. I sent the CD to my daughter Mandy (Miranda), who is a pianist, singer,composer and music teacher. Mandy soon called with a glowing review: “Ruby loves it, and keeps playing it! And when one of the instruments is featured, she runs to her toy box, and if there’s an instrument like it there, she grabs it and joins in.” Mandy added her own review: “Brilliantly done! And what a band! The musicianship is so high.” When I relayed the response to Sandke, adding my own wish that I still had my clarinet so I too could join in, he said, “It doesn’t surprise me at all that you’re still a kid at heart.” And, without a doubt, so are the musicians on this gig—including vocalists Allan Harris and Carolyn Leonhart. But then, so are jazz people of all ages. A recent Sandke discography, published by Dutch jazz scholar Gerard Bielderman, runs 52 pages, and I doubt any of those discs will be spinning as much in nurseries and children’s playrooms as Jazz for Juniors (and then again later as the kids grow up). As Sandke says, “There’s really no age limit for Jazz for Juniors.” So even if you don’t have children or grandchildren, you may well be following the travels of Sandke’s jazz-playing animals as they search through the world for other animals to join their band. There’s Tiger Tiger who volunteers—in song and in the lively booklet—to define “jazz” for new listeners. “It’s a kind of music where you make up your own song as you go along,” he says. “Or you add onto someone else’s song in your own way. You’re free to put all your own feelings into the notes you play and tell your own story. It’s just like talking to your best friends and telling them how you feel.” That’s why Tiger Tiger “boarded a steamship bound for Africa, where he’d heard there were many wonderful animals who loved to make music.” So he found, among other swingers, “An Elegant Elephant,” “The Hip Hippo,” “The Drummin’ Dromedary,” “A Penguin Who Plays It Cool,” “A Cockatoo on the Clarinet” and “The Blue Bison.” By the way, when this CD is played on a PC computer (not a MAC), you—and the kids—can see a slide show with illustrations and music. But I remember, as a kid, how unleashed a youngster’s imagination can be—like when I listened faithfully every Saturday morning to the fairy tales on CBS Radio’s Let’s Pretend. I was inside those stories before there was television, let alone computers. This CD, Jazz for Juniors, is a microcosm of this music all by itself. And I believe that as my grandchild Ruby and the other juniors grow up, they’ll be drawn for the rest of their lives to this music that was so resoundingly put into words by David Baker in the October 2009 DownBeat: “Most important of all, jazz is synonymous with freedom. Jazz embraces all that freedom stands for. There is the freedom to create on the spot that is given to the individual soloist. There is the freedom created within a group of talented individuals coming together, each approaching his or her respective role with a creativity that results in a whole greater than the sum of its parts. … [And] jazz musicians not only bring their great art to the population of the globe, they bring the concept of freedom that is the very foundation on which this music was created. That is what endures.” Randy Sandke, his fellow kids at heart, and Mat Domber have opened the souls of who knows how many youngsters to lifelong delights in what Baker calls the “wonderful sense of anticipation on the part of both players and listeners alike, knowing that each performance—whether live or recorded—will present spontaneously created music combining elements of the familiar and the unexpected in new and exciting ways.” With regard to Jazz for Juniors, Sandke says (and I, with applause, agree): “Fortunately Mat Domber went along with the idea and decided to record the project for Arbors Records.” If there is a Hall of Fame for jazz record producers, Domber should join Norman Granz among a few other nurturers of the jazz life. Nat Hentoff can be contacted at 212-366-9181. true 95 2009-10-12T21:19:58-04:00 false 25185 177 true 2 2009-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

Randy Sandke's <I>Jazz for Juniors</I> CD makes Nat Hentoff feel like a kid again.

2009-11-03T14:36:27-05:00

4 Christian McBride settled into a chair onstage and flashed a knowing smile. It was Sunday afternoon at Fort Adams in Newport, R.I., and for the moment he was working not as a bass player but rather an interviewer, as he does on his Sirius/XM satellite radio show. There had been a problem, said McBride, waving an unlit cigar: His scheduled guest backed out, leaving him to scramble for a replacement. The solution, simple in retrospect, was to enlist Newport Jazz Festival founder George Wein. Of course: George Wein to the rescue. It was the weekend’s overarching theme. After a saga involving the sale of his production company, the subsequent flameout of the buyer and the last-minute emergence of a title sponsor, this was the festival of false endings and fresh beginnings. Still, it only happened because Wein, at 83, committed to it regardless of subsidy, balking at the prospect of a summer with no major jazz fête in Newport. “I just couldn’t let that happen,” he told McBride. “My whole life is involved here.” I can vouch for that sentiment, having co-authored Wein’s autobiography a handful of years ago. But then so can any number of musicians and fans, beneficiaries of a tradition that stretches much farther back, through 10 previous presidential administrations and countless other changes of the guard. Landing this year with the earnest if cumbersome title George Wein’s CareFusion Jazz Festival 55—“It wasn’t an ego trip, it really wasn’t,” its namesake hero chuckled, citing copyright concerns—the big event carried its burden of history lightly, with an ageless exuberance and maybe a new lease on life. The music, on a vast open-air stage and in two comfortable tents, proposed a study in vitality. This was true of elegant formalists like pianist Cedar Walton, who presided over a crisply swinging hard-bop quintet. It was true of adventurous pragmatists like Joe Lovano and Joshua Redman, who both played soprano as well as tenor saxophone, leading dynamic five-piece bands with two drummers apiece. It was certainly true of inveterate seekers like alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose Indo-Pak Coalition projected an incantatory power, and multi-reedist Ken Vandermark, who made his performance a blustery depth charge, putting weight and pressure into his attack. At one point, introducing a tune called “Spiel,” he said this marked the first time an American festival had asked the Vandermark 5, his rugged longtime band, to perform original material. It was hardly a first time for any of the final headliners on Sunday: crooner Tony Bennett, pianist Dave Brubeck and drummer Roy Haynes. All three are octogenarians, but age proved neither a barrier nor barometer at this festival. Those veterans delivered with as much vibrancy as their inheritors, and it wasn’t just Haynes, with his Fountain of Youth Band (featuring veteran bassist Ron Carter), who skewered the idea of a generational schism. Esperanza Spalding, 24, appeared both as a featured artist and as the bassist in Lovano’s band, Us Five. Haynes’ grandson Marcus Gilmore, now in his early 20s, brought a sleek percussive flow to the music of pianist Vijay Iyer. Another prodigious young drummer, Justin Faulkner, generated the requisite polyrhythmic churn in the Branford Marsalis Quartet. (Marsalis, by the way, put in a serious mentorship effort at Newport this year, coming to his own set directly from a guest turn with the North Carolina Central University Big Band. His label, Marsalis Music, was also a sponsor of one of the smaller stages.) There were many other moments of felicitous grace, some involving little more than the glint of midday sun across a sailboat-speckled Narragansett Bay. Consulting my memory rather than my notes, I come across trumpeter Steven Bernstein, urging his Millennial Territory Orchestra through an amiably brawling “St. Louis Blues.” And saxophonist James Carter, barking through his tenor as his organ trio barreled through a juke-joint shuffle. And McBride, on bass, tapping into a deeply swinging current with pianist George Colligan and drummer Billy Hart. I was less enthralled by Mos Def, the weekend’s only glaring youth-market concession, but not because he was too hip-hop. His Watermelon Syndicate, featuring a horn section (highly capable) and a string section (nearly expendable), with musical direction from the pianist Robert Glasper, was, if anything, too well intentioned a compromise. On a festival full of blurred boundaries, it stood out more for its awkward vagueness than for any clash of style. Across the festival, on all three stages, Wein’s name kept surfacing in tributes and testimonials. (Some artists made a point of also mentioning Jason Olaine, who worked closely with Wein on booking talent and made for a genial stage announcer.) One note of gratitude came from drummer Brian Blade, during the preface to a luminous performance by his gospel-leaning Fellowship band. “When I think about what he’s heard in his lifetime, and been a witness to, it’s incredible,” he marveled. Another came from Hiromi, who interrupted her own hyperkinetic set to dedicate a solo piano number—her deliriously maximal take on “I Got Rhythm”—to the man of the hour. “Man, I never hugged so many musicians in my life!” Wein chirped during his rap session with McBride, claiming wonderment at the endless tide of good feeling. Then, at his interviewer’s request, he sat at the piano for some dialogue of a more musical strain. Striking up a 12-bar blues, he set a tempo suggestive of sleepy-eyed Kansas City swing. After a moment McBride joined him, with the full mahogany roundness of his tone. The feeling was relaxed but buoyant, and somewhere around the eighth chorus, Wein contentedly shook his head. “I could keep going like this all night,” he quipped, and the applause in the tent was an amen. true 203 2009-10-03T13:09:16-04:00 false 25113 175 true 90 2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Columnist Nate Chinen on the revival of Jazz at Newport by its original founder George Wein.

16173 2009-10-05T14:20:11-04:00

4 Yes, it’s true. We put (another) rock star on the cover of JazzTimes. But this month’s cover subject, guitarist Nels Cline, had heavy jazz and experimental music cred way before he joined the acclaimed rock band Wilco. We featured the Los Angeles-based guitarist in 1997, and a few years back, Cline wrote an interesting piece for us about the legacy and influence of Andrew Hill. In short, he is no Johnny-come-lately to the jazz scene, nothing like those aging rockers who turn to jazz for some sort of cloak of credibility late in their fading careers. If anything, Cline went the opposite way, going from the jazz avant-garde to rock. And he never stopped recording and performing as a jazz artist. What’s been most interesting is just how warmly he’s been accepted and embraced within the rock world for essentially playing the same audacious way he plays in front of small audiences. True, he’s now merely bringing his own sound and approach to a fully formed band with an established identity and a clear-cut leader in Jeff Tweedy. But it is interesting that Wilco fans of all ages genuinely appreciate Cline’s creative explorations. Yet, at least for now, Cline’s own solo performances don’t play to the same arena-sized audiences. I thought it appropriate to ask our own Nate Chinen, who interviewed Cline for the cover story, to speak about this duality, because as a frequent New York Times music critic, Chinen works the rock beat almost as much as the jazz one. I asked him what it’s like going from jazz to rock, sometimes in the same night. “Being a jazz critic really lays the groundwork for me to be perhaps a different sort of rock critic,” says Chinen. “It’s interesting that, of the four people writing about pop music for the New York Times, three of us have covered jazz. I think it really helps. You’re used to listening closely and deeply to what happens beneath the surface of a band’s interaction.” And how about going the other way, from rock to jazz? “In a way, if I were only writing about jazz, day in and day out, I think burnout is a real risk. It really helps to have some kind of variety.” Sometimes the variety is in the music itself. “One thing that’s been interesting to me here in New York is how much young energy there is on both the rock and jazz spectrums, and how much cross-pollination is happening at the moment,” Chinen adds. Watching Cline onstage with Wilco, I almost forget that he’s much closer in age to my 50-something self than to the average audience member (or even the rest of the band). It seems reasonable to presume that, for a young Wilco fan, seeing the middle-aged Cline improvise may change the way he or she views the work of instrumental jazz artists—Cline included. true 129 2009-10-05T14:18:38-04:00 false 25139 175 true 96 2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

JT's Editor in Chief explains how a rock star can end up on the cover of a jazz magazine.

43376 2009-10-05T14:18:44-04:00

4 When I was a kid, doctors made house calls and learned more about a patient’s living and emotional conditions than they did taking a medical history in an office. These days, many increasingly overburdened doctors can usually give a patient little more than a short listening period. Recently I got all of 12 minutes from a physician I went to. As a result, and as I previously wrote in the April issue, there’s growing concern among medical educators to teach doctors how to let the patient set the tempo for revealing his or her symptoms and worries. In showing how Dr. Paul Haidet has become an expert in using jazz to instruct doctors in the advanced art of creative listening, I promised a second column on how he presents—in lectures and at medical conferences around the country—illustrations of “guided jazz listening” through specific recordings. Although most <I>JazzTimes</I> readers are not doctors, I thought you might be interested in expanding and deepening what you hear in the music through his commentary. And maybe some of the teachers of jazz courses in schools around the country can choose other recordings to show how much there actually is to hear. For instance, last December at New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Haidet—during a seminar entitled “Where Medicine Meets Jazz: The Improvisational Aspects of Talking With Patients”—played the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby” (Take 2), from the Riverside CD of the same name. In introducing the audience to the concept of ensemble playing, he said, “The early ’60s Bill Evans Trio was one of the most empathic units in the history of jazz. Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro, in particular, had a kind of mental telepathy going on. It was said that Bill could start a phrase and Scott would finish it, and vice versa. When you listen to ‘Waltz for Debby,’ listen to how the piano and bass weave in and around each other. Both players are improvising simultaneously in a way that they are making up a collective new melody to the song. This takes advanced listening to each other.” How does this happen in a doctor’s office? In an article, “Building a History Rather Than Taking One” (Archives of Internal Medicine, May 24, 2003), Haidet tells doctors how to improvise collectively, to develop “the ability of the physician not only to observe the patient during the medical interview, but himself/herself as well. This ability to observe one’s words and actions applies directly to questions asked during the development of the patient’s narrative,” a contrast to doctors’ “narrowly constructed yes/no questions.” I’d call that spontaneous empathy a way of describing the advanced listening of musicians in a jazz ensemble. Referring to “Waltz for Debby,” Dr. Haidet told the doctors and medical students at Mt. Sinai, “Listen to the first 30 seconds of this track. … [E]ven on something as straightforward as the statement of the melody, Evans and LaFaro compress and stretch time—in perfect unison! How did they do that?” By being able to hear inside one another. “Also,” Haidet continued during his seminar, “listen to what Paul Motian is doing on drums. LaFaro is not playing the usual thunk, thunk, thunk that you might expect from the bass player. Instead, he is running up into the high registers of the bass to ‘play’ with Evans. Then, when Motian goes off to rejoice with Evans, the drummer ever so subtly picks up the timekeeping function and accents his playing with the brushes in such a way that the song never loses its pulse, its ‘spark.’” Dr. Haidet concluded: “These three define what it means to listen and play, simultaneously, harmoniously.” And, as I can testify, being very much a lay listener, you don’t have to be able to identify the passing chords and what Basie guitarist Freddie Green called “the rhythm waves” in order to appreciate and learn from the music. At the core of the spontaneous interaction among jazz players, and listeners, is feeling. Art Blakey said it for all times: “You don’t have to be a musician to understand jazz. All you have to do is be able to feel.” So, too, in the doctor-patient relationship, the doctor has to give the patient the space and impetus to express not only his symptoms but also his range of feelings. And the doctor’s openness to his own feelings, as he takes real time to listen, will add to the spontaneity of his questions as he gets to know more of the whole patient. If you feel regularly rushed by your doctor, and he or she doesn’t intimidate you, you might want to show them these two columns on how medical educator Paul Haidet is trying to enable doctors and patients to improvise. This skill is all the more vital in our world of instantaneous communication and new media, where there is less and less true understanding of one another. (Take, for example, the Internet, where most people go only to sites they already agree with.) Another dividend of Dr. Haidet’s pioneering, I expect, will be more doctors starting collections of jazz recordings and being drawn into jazz clubs. true 95 2009-10-08T16:20:38-04:00 false 25161 176 true 94 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

When I was a kid, doctors made house calls and learned more about a patient’s living and emotional conditions than they did taking a medical history in an office. These days, many increasingly overburdened doctors can usually give a patient little more than a short listening period. Recently I got all of 12 minutes from a physician I went to. As a result, and as I previously wrote in the April issue, there’s growing concern among medical educators to teach doctors how to let the patient set the tempo for revealing his or her symptoms and worries. In showing how Dr. Paul Haidet has become an expert in using jazz to instruct doctors in the advanced art of creative listening, I promised a second column on how he presents—in lectures and at medical conferences around the country—illustrations of “guided jazz listening” through specific recordings. Although most JazzTimes readers are not doctors, I thought you might be interested in expanding and deepening what you hear in the music through his commentary. And maybe some of the teachers of jazz courses in schools around the country can choose other recordings to show how much there actually is to hear. For instance, last December at New York’s Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, Dr. Haidet—during a seminar entitled “Where Medicine Meets Jazz: The Improvisational Aspects of Talking With Patients”—played the Bill Evans Trio’s “Waltz for Debby” (Take 2), from the Riverside CD of the same name. In introducing the audience to the concept of ensemble playing, he said, “The early...

2009-10-08T16:21:46-04:00

4 The <I>JazzTimes</I> issue you hold in your hands may not look any different from recent editions, but in fact it’s the result of a very special transformation. For the last 39 years, the magazine was owned and run by the Sabin family—first Ira Sabin, who founded the publication in 1970, and then his sons, Glenn and Jeff Sabin, who took over the business in 1990 and transformed it into the award-winning glossy magazine that All Music Guide called “arguably the number-one jazz magazine in the world.” However, recent financial pressures made the economics of a one-title business untenable for the owners. After a brief hiatus, the <I>JazzTimes</I> brand was purchased in early July by Madavor Media, a publishing group based in Boston. We appreciate the support and understanding we received from subscribers during this period. Whether it was calls and e-mails to the <I>JazzTimes</I> office or messages posted to jazztimes.com, the communication from our readers was almost unanimously positive. Just as readers could more readily value a publication they suddenly didn’t receive, we can now better appreciate the loyalty of our vocal and passionate audience. A more significant result of the hiatus was the opportunity for us to objectively evaluate ourselves, determining what should be changed with the magazine and how the publication might be transformed yet again to make it more competitive. What we found was that <I>JazzTimes</I> is an excellent magazine. Thanks to a stellar list of contributors, from Nate Chinen to Nat Hentoff, the writing is intelligent and crisp. With photographers such as John Abbott, Jimmy Katz and Nick Ruechel, and with top-notch graphic design, the look of the book is contemporary and sophisticated yet still very readable. The magazine is able to cover the diversity in artists and music that fit, albeit sometimes uncomfortably, under the wide umbrella of jazz. We have no plans to tear up the playbook and work against the strengths of this publication. However, we do realize that we need to adjust to the changes in the way that music is made and information is shared. Our Web site was recently redesigned and now features a depth and breadth of content. The site also allows our readers to voice their own opinions and share news, commentary and photos from all over the world. That international aspect is no small consideration. Jazz is no longer solely an American phenomenon. Alert readers may have already noticed more and more coverage of artists, releases and events from all over the globe—from Italian jazz pianists to young Israeli players. That trend will only increase in the coming years. The music industry itself has changed a great deal since Ira ran his newspaper from his record store in Washington, D.C. Large labels have come and gone in the jazz field, and the DIY approach now reigns supreme. As a result we need to cover more artists and releases than ever, and we are already doing that by using jazztimes.com for extended coverage of the hundreds of recordings and performances we’ve traditionally ignored due to lack of space. There will be other tweaks in the approach of the magazine, but our focus will remain on reader engagement. We are confident that <I>JazzTimes</I> will remain not just a viable outlet, but also an essential one for jazz fans and practitioners who share a passion for this vibrant music. One major reason for our confidence in this lies with the formidable resources and expertise of the Madavor organization. Founded by Jeffrey Wolk, Madavor has done its own transformation act and in the process become a leading publisher of niche fan and enthusiast magazines, from International Figure Skating to New York Golf. Madavor’s credo is to tap into the shared passion of people within a specific community. We are very excited to be working together to strengthen the relationship between this magazine and the uniquely diverse jazz community. For many years <I>JazzTimes</I> used the slogan “About the Music” in all of its promotional materials. We dropped it not just because it ran its course the way slogans do, but also because it had become internalized like a mantra. Of course <I>JazzTimes</I> is about the music. Some things will never change. true 129 2009-10-08T16:42:50-04:00 false 25163 176 true 96 2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

The JazzTimes issue you hold in your hands may not look any different from recent editions, but in fact it’s the result of a very special transformation. For the last 39 years, the magazine was owned and run by the Sabin family—first Ira Sabin, who founded the publication in 1970, and then his sons, Glenn and Jeff Sabin, who took over the business in 1990 and transformed it into the award-winning glossy magazine that All Music Guide called “arguably the number-one jazz magazine in the world.” However, recent financial pressures made the economics of a one-title business untenable for the owners. After a brief hiatus, the JazzTimes brand was purchased in early July by Madavor Media, a publishing group based in Boston. We appreciate the support and understanding we received from subscribers during this period. Whether it was calls and e-mails to the JazzTimes office or messages posted to jazztimes.com, the communication from our readers was almost unanimously positive. Just as readers could more readily value a publication they suddenly didn’t receive, we can now better appreciate the loyalty of our vocal and passionate audience. A more significant result of the hiatus was the opportunity for us to objectively evaluate ourselves, determining what should be changed with the magazine and how the publication might be transformed yet again to make it more competitive. What we found was that JazzTimes is an excellent magazine. Thanks to a stellar list of contributors, from Nate Chinen to Nat Hentoff, the writing is intelligent and crisp. With photographers such as...

2009-10-08T16:43:21-04:00

4 Come on, admit it: When you saw this month’s JazzTimes in your mailbox or on the newsstand, you were surprised—maybe even shocked. In this issue, we’re proud to offer extensive coverage of iconoclast John Zorn. Not only did Bill Milkowski secure a candid, no-holds-barred interview—is there any other kind with Zorn?—but Nick Ruechel shot brand new portraits, one of which made the cover. Zorn is undoubtedly one of the most prolific, original and important figures in American music today. Like his forebears in the loft era, he understands the avant-garde is defined not by a specific stylistic paradigm, but by an ability to avoid such boundaries. One of the most “out” things about him is how bewitchingly “in” he can get. Listen to the apocalyptic, metallic ooze of Naked City’s Leng Tch’e, then the sun-kissed surf melody “Mow Mow” by his Dreamers outfit, then his righteously grooving Masada quartet—a Zorn collection is a survey of musics new and old, with smack-in-the-face surprises at every turn. As eventful as this piece is, however, it’s not entirely unprecedented. Longtime JT readers might remember Zorn’s lengthy interview in the March 2000 issue, a polemical cover story he (unknowingly) shared with Wynton Marsalis. Then, as now, contradictions abound: Zorn generally distrusts interviewers, but he’s often a remarkable conversationalist; he resents commerce but is himself an entrepreneur with enough business savvy to sustain a record label specializing in underground music. In the older interview, also conducted by Milkowski, Zorn seems especially dour, perhaps even paranoid, regarding the influence of corporations and the manner in which major labels trivialize experimental music. Milkowski offers the possibility that getting one’s music produced and sold could be a more proletarian affair through the Internet and a not-yet ubiquitous audio format known as “MP3,” but Zorn isn’t convinced. Says Zorn: “[D]o you think these large corporations are going to let that happen? … I mean, I would love to think that in 500 years everybody’s gonna have their own Web site.” Although his timeline is a few years off, Zorn’s concerns are perceptive, even if they aren’t all that prescient. He’s speaking a decade ago, in an odd epoch for the Internet and technology-dependent culture in general. Much of the public only knew the ’net as a series of buzzwords and Wall Street blunders. The truth is that the Internet has forced businesses of all sizes, especially media- and entertainment-oriented ones, to reinvent themselves in order to survive. JazzTimes recently made strides toward that survival with its re-launch of JazzTimes.com. In the spirit of the online age, we’re giving it all away: You can search through archival materials—columns, reviews, features, photos—stretching back to the early 1990s. There are also myriad opportunities for readers to contribute their own jazz writing, event listings and more. It’s a beautifully designed site and we’ll be frequently adding exclusive features, the first of which is this month’s John Zorn interview, unedited and unfettered by magazine space constraints. true 292 2009-04-17T14:43:51-04:00 false 24583 174 true 96 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Come on, admit it: When you saw this month’s JazzTimes in your mailbox or on the newsstand, you were surprised—maybe even shocked. In this issue, we’re proud to offer extensive coverage of iconoclast John Zorn. Not only did Bill Milkowski secure a candid, no-holds-barred interview—is there any other kind with Zorn?—but Nick Ruechel shot brand new portraits, one of which made the cover. Zorn is undoubtedly one of the most prolific, original and important figures in American music today. Like his forebears in the loft era, he understands the avant-garde is defined not by a specific stylistic paradigm, but by an ability to avoid such boundaries. One of the most “out” things about him is how bewitchingly “in” he can get. Listen to the apocalyptic, metallic ooze of Naked City’s Leng Tch’e, then the sun-kissed surf melody “Mow Mow” by his Dreamers outfit, then his righteously grooving Masada quartet—a Zorn collection is a survey of musics new and old, with smack-in-the-face surprises at every turn. As eventful as this piece is, however, it’s not entirely unprecedented. Longtime JT readers might remember Zorn’s lengthy interview in the March 2000 issue, a polemical cover story he (unknowingly) shared with Wynton Marsalis. Then, as now, contradictions abound: Zorn generally distrusts interviewers, but he’s often a remarkable conversationalist; he resents commerce but is himself an entrepreneur with enough business savvy to sustain a record label specializing in underground music. In the older interview, also conducted by Milkowski, Zorn seems especially dour, perhaps even paranoid, regarding the influence of corporations and...

2009-04-23T14:00:06-04:00

4 Conan O’Brien looked determined. “Get out of the way!” he barked, barreling toward the bandstand with a sledgehammer. Richie Rosenberg—a.k.a. LaBamba, the fedora-topped trombonist in the Max Weinberg 7—hopped to one side, startled, as his upholstered music stand absorbed several hard whacks. Then, the coup de grâce: O’Brien grabbed an ax, severed the microphone cord and carried the bulky stand into the audience, as a kind of offering. Rosenberg stood by, clutching his sheet music and ruefully shaking his head. This anarchic scene played out during one of the final episodes of NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The show’s prankish host, on track to take over the network’s august Tonight Show, had been mining his set for souvenirs all week. So his music-stand rampage was part of the gag, though it certainly seemed to catch everyone off guard. Less surprising was the declaration he made near the top of the show: Weinberg and the band would be joining him in Los Angeles when the new Tonight Show begins in June. The late-night television landscape has seen tectonic changes recently, with plenty of musical implications. O’Brien’s signoff opened the door for a new Late Night host, Jimmy Fallon, who tapped hip-hop powerhouse the Roots as his band. Jay Leno announced his move to an earlier time slot, confirming that his house orchestra, led by guitarist Kevin Eubanks, would join him. Meanwhile things hummed reassuringly along for the Saturday Night Live Band, and for Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra, an ever-boisterous fixture of Late Show with David Letterman. There are jazz musicians in each of these unionized ensembles, and jazz plays a subtle but significant role in their activities. O’Brien’s catchy Late Night theme was a jump-swing ditty by saxophonist John Lurie (with Howard Shore), for starters. The cutaways on Saturday Night Live often involve bright flashes of solo extroversion, from tenor saxophonist Lenny Pickett or one of his trusted band members. Eubanks and his crew have been known to push a hard-bop angle, between doses of funk and rock. It’s not the Doc Severinsen era anymore, but it’s about as close as anyone might reasonably expect. And in an odd way, the late-night musical mishmash echoes the polyglot feel of present-day jazz culture. It’s no longer the Doc Severinsen era in our realm, either; just flip through the pages of this magazine for confirmation. The jazz mainstream now regularly accommodates funk, rock, country and many strains of world music, sometimes with the same quick-flash sensibility one might notice on the air. And consider these jazzmen in Pickett’s posse, hailed precisely for their versatility: trombonist Steve Turre, who often touts his affinities for Latin jazz and R&B; bassist James Genus, who has toured with Herbie Hancock and Dave Douglas, hybridizers both; and saxophonist Ron Blake, whose most recent release, Shayari (Mack Avenue), reflects his faith in groove-based truths. Of course there’s a fundamental tension between the creative freedoms of a jazz life and the rigid routine of a television gig. “The schedule of the show is relentless,” Shaffer told me recently, and he seemed to mean it almost in existential terms. (The title of his forthcoming memoir, written with David Ritz and due out in October, is We’ll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives.) The rigors of such a schedule have exacted a toll on network-employed jazz musicians for years. Trumpeter Joe Wilder spent a sizeable chunk of his career under contract to ABC, when he wasn’t working with big bands; his headlining debut in a New York club came only a few years ago, when he was 83. For a less extreme case, try to recall the last time you heard new music from Eubanks, formerly one of the more prominent postbop guitarists around. (Chances are better if you live in Los Angeles; he apparently played a couple of nights at the Baked Potato in February.) And, it could safely be argued, there’s a certain amount of debasement built into the job of a TV band. Here’s a brutal sentence from Wikipedia: “Aside from his music, Eubanks is known for his lingering, amused laughter following many of Leno’s sharper jokes, and for Leno routinely implying marijuana, pornography and masturbation addictions.” (Why doesn’t it feel as bullying when O’Brien teases his bandleader this way? Because Weinberg keeps a straight face? Or because his other gig is with Bruce Springsteen?) Small wonder that Eubanks’ predecessor, saxophonist Branford Marsalis, lasted such a short time in his post. “The job of musical director, I found out later, was just to kiss the ass of the host,” he told a newspaper after his departure, “and I ain’t no ass-kisser.” What came next, after the dust had settled, was a new period of creative fecundity for Marsalis and his band. Which is why a part of me was excited for Eubanks and his sidemen, back when I thought that Leno would be going off the air. “You’ll be neutered!” Marsalis reportedly told Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the drummer and bandleader of the Roots, warning him against the Late Night gig. But as Thompson admitted to the Associated Press, the numbers were just too convincing. “This would basically match or surpass what we would make touring 200-plus days out of the year,” he said, adding that the group would be commuting from Philadelphia, its home. It’s easy enough to imagine the same rationalization from, say, drummer Marvin “Smitty” Smith, who plays with Eubanks in the soon-to-be-renamed Tonight Show band. The Roots have taken precautionary measures, though, that the likes of Eubanks might yet consider. After closing their first week on the job at Rockefeller Center, the hip-hop group also started a residency at the Highline Ballroom, some 30 blocks downtown. And along with rappers like Talib Kweli and Pharoahe Monch, they welcomed keyboardist Robert Glasper and, during one hypnotic stretch, alto saxophonist Gary Bartz. It was a jam session in every sense, and it felt like a necessary outpouring. As long as they have this pressure valve, they’ll probably be fine, right up until it’s sledgehammer time. true 203 2009-04-17T14:53:00-04:00 false 24584 174 true 90 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Conan O’Brien looked determined. “Get out of the way!” he barked, barreling toward the bandstand with a sledgehammer. Richie Rosenberg—a.k.a. LaBamba, the fedora-topped trombonist in the Max Weinberg 7—hopped to one side, startled, as his upholstered music stand absorbed several hard whacks. Then, the coup de grâce: O’Brien grabbed an ax, severed the microphone cord and carried the bulky stand into the audience, as a kind of offering. Rosenberg stood by, clutching his sheet music and ruefully shaking his head. This anarchic scene played out during one of the final episodes of NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien. The show’s prankish host, on track to take over the network’s august Tonight Show, had been mining his set for souvenirs all week. So his music-stand rampage was part of the gag, though it certainly seemed to catch everyone off guard. Less surprising was the declaration he made near the top of the show: Weinberg and the band would be joining him in Los Angeles when the new Tonight Show begins in June. The late-night television landscape has seen tectonic changes recently, with plenty of musical implications. O’Brien’s signoff opened the door for a new Late Night host, Jimmy Fallon, who tapped hip-hop powerhouse the Roots as his band. Jay Leno announced his move to an earlier time slot, confirming that his house orchestra, led by guitarist Kevin Eubanks, would join him. Meanwhile things hummed reassuringly along for the Saturday Night Live Band, and for Paul Shaffer’s CBS Orchestra, an ever-boisterous fixture of Late Show with David Letterman....

2009-04-23T12:25:21-04:00

4 The middle 1960s were strong years for jazz. The writing was not yet engraved on the wall: rock ’n’ roll had morphed into rock and soul, redefining the entire popular music landscape, but jazz musicians continued to operate with the confidence of artisans who have a fixed and essential place. They were more intrigued with the unholy terrors of the avant-garde than the comings and goings of Brit bands with funny haircuts, and more concerned with lining up gigs than accommodating themselves to the latest fashions. That attitude began to change by 1968, and underwent shock therapy during the next two years as the fusion hydra reared its head: jazz clubs closed; jazz labels declined, folded or modified their bill of fare; jazz musicians decamped for the academy, the studios and Europe, or invested in electronic accessories. Funny haircuts became de rigueur: Is there a musician who doesn’t cringe at photographs taken of him or her in, say, 1974? Yet in that brief window—the LBJ years—looking out on jazz as we knew it and not as it would soon be, a kind of workaholic innocence prevailed and the sheer number of prized recordings was huge. Blue Note was at an absolute peak, adding Cecil, Ornette, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill to the mix before falling into the maw of Liberty Records. Prestige was reclaiming the postbop mantle for a last hurrah with Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, Sonny Criss and Teddy Edwards. Impulse!, Verve and Limelight looked as slick as they sounded, running the gamut from Ben Webster, Benny Carter and Dizzy Gillespie to Wes Montgomery, Bill Evans and Archie Shepp. Meanwhile, at the so-called majors, RCA dawdled in perennial confusion, while Decca turned to reissues, Capitol remade itself as “the home of the Beatles,” and Columbia, with John Hammond back in harness after more than a decade at Mercury and Vanguard, attempted, with mixed results, to expand on the steady output of Miles and Monk. Hammond facilitated pleasing instrumental sessions by George Benson, Illinois Jacquet, Herb Ellis, Stuff Smith, Clare Fischer, Don Ellis and two major signings that are too often overlooked. Mosaic Select has now rescued them with indispensible collections of the albums Hammond produced by pianist Denny Zeitlin (1964-67) and saxophonist John Handy (1965-68), both longtime residents of San Francisco with full-time alternate careers, Handy as an educator, Zeitlin as a psychotherapist. The best of the original albums—Handy’s Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival and Zeitlin’s Carnival—are at once timeless and time-defining, capturing a pivot-point when the most advanced thinking at the jazz center involved an understanding of free jazz and an almost subliminal recognition that rock wasn’t just for kids anymore. This music is radiant with ambition: the exhilaration of owning your music and your instrument with if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it virtuosity, not for its own sake but to express the immortal joy of homo ludens. A younger colleague recently named Handy’s Monterey as one of the first fusion albums, which seemed preposterous to me, perhaps because I had grown up with it before anyone spoke of jazz-rock. But you can’t miss the westward winds blowing here, in the extended length of the selections, the quintet instrumentation with violin and guitar, the flamenco and backbeat rhythms, and the fastidiousness of Handy’s lucid improvisations: “If Only We Knew” is almost half an hour, but the solos are concise, the changeups frequent, and the dynamics measured. This album introduced the Canadian rhythm team of Don Thompson and Terry Clarke, later known for their association with Jim Hall, guitarist Jerry Hahn and violinist Michael White. All returned for Handy’s follow-up album, after which Hahn and White went into fusion with Hahn’s Brotherhood (a Hammond project) and the Fourth Way. Mosaic includes singles versions of the Monterey tracks, unissued pieces and a concert performance with guitarist Sonny Greenwich plus violin and cello, but not Handy’s third album, New View, with Bobby Hutcherson and Pat Martino. Much of the Handy material was released by Koch in the 1990s, but the Zeitlin albums have languished, absurdly, for four decades. Hammond initially recorded him with flutist Jeremy Steig, and then released three studio albums (collected here with an hour of previously unreleased pieces, all worthy, some exceptional, including an uncharacteristically straight-ahead “I Got Rhythm”), and a concert album, not included. In a felicitous coincidence, the Mosaic set was issued at the same time as Zeitlin’s In Concert (Sunnyside), an ideal complement because it shows he never stopped growing while underscoring the fact that he had his stylistic ducks in a row as early as 1964. Hammond did him no favor by adorning the cover of Carnival with magazine hype: “The most inventive jazz pianist in at least two decades.” I love “at least”; so much for Bud and Monk. Also working against him was his second career, which limited his touring time and encouraged those who weren’t listening to dismiss him as a dilettante with chops. Big mistake: Zeitlin, born in 1938, sounds like no one else in his generation. He seems constitutionally incapable of playing an expected harmony; the pleasure in listening to him, especially when he dissects (le mot juste) standards, is bound up with his lightning aversions of the commonplace. The Columbias combine alluring borderline funk ditties—“Repeat,” “Cathexis,” “Carole’s Garden,” “Skippy-ing”—that go down like aged bourbon but with just enough harmonic surprises to keep you from taking them for granted, with expansive meditations on classic jazz (he digs Gigi Gryce), pop tunes and originals that manage the hat trick of not sounding as intricate as they obviously are. Confident enough to re-harmonize “Maiden Voyage” when its slash chords were still new, he is more impressive turning the extremely familiar changes of “All the Things You Are” into an adventurous fantasia. Then as now, he circumvents the sentimental. His two-part “Mirage” is a waltz that isn’t a waltz—it never stays still long enough to fall into line, but the tune and his extrapolations are so strong that your best option, as with Ornette, is to follow the melody. Zeitlin’s signature technique is a two-handed, chromatically omnivorous attack that washes across the keyboard, alternated with dancing single-note figures that have, no matter the speed, the articulation of discrete bells. He works with the best bassists and drummers, including Cecil McBee and Freddie Waits, Charlie Haden and Jerry Granelli, and on the new album, Buster Williams and Matt Wilson—they shoot the moon on a supersonic “Mr. P.C.” true 224 2009-04-20T16:01:41-04:00 false 24686 174 true 81 2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

The middle 1960s were strong years for jazz. The writing was not yet engraved on the wall: rock ’n’ roll had morphed into rock and soul, redefining the entire popular music landscape, but jazz musicians continued to operate with the confidence of artisans who have a fixed and essential place. They were more intrigued with the unholy terrors of the avant-garde than the comings and goings of Brit bands with funny haircuts, and more concerned with lining up gigs than accommodating themselves to the latest fashions. That attitude began to change by 1968, and underwent shock therapy during the next two years as the fusion hydra reared its head: jazz clubs closed; jazz labels declined, folded or modified their bill of fare; jazz musicians decamped for the academy, the studios and Europe, or invested in electronic accessories. Funny haircuts became de rigueur: Is there a musician who doesn’t cringe at photographs taken of him or her in, say, 1974? Yet in that brief window—the LBJ years—looking out on jazz as we knew it and not as it would soon be, a kind of workaholic innocence prevailed and the sheer number of prized recordings was huge. Blue Note was at an absolute peak, adding Cecil, Ornette, Eric Dolphy and Andrew Hill to the mix before falling into the maw of Liberty Records. Prestige was reclaiming the postbop mantle for a last hurrah with Jaki Byard, Booker Ervin, Sonny Criss and Teddy Edwards. Impulse!, Verve and Limelight looked as slick as they sounded, running the gamut from Ben...

2009-04-29T16:49:55-04:00

4 Let me tell you about some of the music I’ve been digging lately. First, there’s that burning set featuring Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones from Berlin, 1987. Joshua Redman’s recent double-trio engagement at New York’s Highline Ballroom and Ravi Coltrane’s Vanguard show from last December have received repeated plays, as have a killer Wynton Kelly-Wes Montgomery 1965 jam at NYC’s Half Note, a ’57 Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers gig in Philly and a steamy 1981 Tokyo meeting of Herbie Hancock and Carlos Santana. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen these for sale, it’s because they aren’t. These unreleased live recordings are among thousands that make the rounds on the Internet, available for free download to those who know where to find them. I mention this not to make anyone jealous or to rile music-industry types, but because to me the gray-area practice of making stealth recordings is validated by what’s discussed in Thomas Conrad’s Opening Chorus piece in this issue. Conrad ponders the importance of “private” recordings, a category that includes Sonny Rollins’ compilation Road Shows, Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy), the album that earned the top spot in JazzTimes’ 2008 critics’ poll in the category of Historical/Reissues. Much of the album consists of soundboard recordings never originally intended for release. We’re all glad that, in this case, wiser minds prevailed and the music is now available; it’s only due to the diligence of those who keep the recorders rolling at concerts, sometimes surreptitiously, that those of us who weren’t in the room that night can hear the music. The success of that album made me think about just how much goes on in general in the world of jazz that most fans are either unaware of or spend little time thinking about. And if there is a current running through this month’s issue, it’s one of well-kept secrets and elusive information that lies beneath the surface of the music. Andrew W. Lehren’s fascinating investigative report, “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” reveals an uncomfortable truth that record buyers in the Cold War era never knew: Some of our greatest artists—Max Roach, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington among them—were hounded by overzealous FBI agents eager to prove these geniuses were political subversives. Don Heckman’s profile of bassist Jennifer Leitham, meanwhile, unveils the pain and difficulties experienced by a respected musician who spent more than 40 years living in the body of a male until she made the bold decision to be who she really is. In a way, even the arrangers featured in Josef Woodard’s cover story—Michael Abene, John Clayton, Gil Goldstein and Vince Mendoza—operate in the shadows. How many listeners, even those who do read the small print in the CD booklets, have really given much consideration to the essential contribution of these talented behind-the-scenes people? There’s also an underground aspect to Nate Chinen’s Gig appreciation of avant-gardist William Parker. Now, if you don’t mind, there’s a 1992 Jimmy Giuffre/Paul Bley/Steve Swallow concert from Sweet Basil cued up in the CD drive. true 10422 2009-03-24T11:08:13-04:00 false 24379 138 true 96 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

Let me tell you about some of the music I’ve been digging lately. First, there’s that burning set featuring Freddie Hubbard, McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones from Berlin, 1987. Joshua Redman’s recent double-trio engagement at New York’s Highline Ballroom and Ravi Coltrane’s Vanguard show from last December have received repeated plays, as have a killer Wynton Kelly-Wes Montgomery 1965 jam at NYC’s Half Note, a ’57 Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers gig in Philly and a steamy 1981 Tokyo meeting of Herbie Hancock and Carlos Santana. If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen these for sale, it’s because they aren’t. These unreleased live recordings are among thousands that make the rounds on the Internet, available for free download to those who know where to find them. I mention this not to make anyone jealous or to rile music-industry types, but because to me the gray-area practice of making stealth recordings is validated by what’s discussed in Thomas Conrad’s Opening Chorus piece in this issue. Conrad ponders the importance of “private” recordings, a category that includes Sonny Rollins’ compilation Road Shows, Vol. 1 (Doxy/Emarcy), the album that earned the top spot in JazzTimes’ 2008 critics’ poll in the category of Historical/Reissues. Much of the album consists of soundboard recordings never originally intended for release. We’re all glad that, in this case, wiser minds prevailed and the music is now available; it’s only due to the diligence of those who keep the recorders rolling at concerts, sometimes surreptitiously, that those of us who weren’t in the room that night...

2009-04-03T12:07:53-04:00

4 Jazz bassists are often described as anchors: steadfast in purpose, with the final word on tonality and time. But what about the function of a bass player in freeform settings, where foundations themselves are changeable? Here the better analogy might be the eye of a cyclone as it moves across the landscape. Encircled by monumental forces, it’s the imperturbable center, a locus of mysterious calm and unequivocal power. There have been dozens of important bassists in free jazz and the related streams of avant-gardism; many are hard at work now. But when it comes to that radiant energy, you’d be hard-pressed to find one more tireless, or more significant, than William Parker. And as he approaches the lower threshold of elder-statesman stature, at 57, Parker warrants a fresh look even from those jazz listeners who tend to shy away from squalls. Ever prolific, Parker appears on a cache of recent releases, including Shakti (AUM Fidelity), an inward-searching missive from his longtime boss, tenor saxophonist David S. Ware; Beyond Quantum (Tzadik), a brilliantly expansive outing with Anthony Braxton on reeds and Milford Graves on drums; and, just out, Farmers by Nature (AUM Fidelity), a collective rumination with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver. The common thread on these albums isn’t open form, necessarily; it’s an extraordinary level of interaction. Taborn, in a recent e-mail from Paris, described Parker’s bass work in terms almost suggestive of relativity theory: “His approach has the effect of throwing musical ideas introduced by other musicians into much deeper relief, by contextualizing or de-contextualizing them.” In a way, that’s a jazz bassist’s mandate to the nth degree, minus the certainty of style. Parker grew up in the New York area, drawn to R&B as well as jazz. Dave Burrell, the august avant-garde pianist, recalls teaching a teenaged, Curtis Mayfield-crazy Parker at a community center in the South Bronx. “Next thing I knew,” Burrell said recently, with a chuckle, “he was downtown playing with Cecil [Taylor], and it didn’t seem like such a long time between those two points.” (Burrell, who used to feature Parker in his Full Blown Trio, is now on tour with the bassist’s Curtis Mayfield Project.) Even as an upstart, Parker was distinguished by the bigness of his sound. “It was just really, really strong, and rhythmically motivating,” Burrell said. “He had a lot of power.” That assessment jibes with a 1973 Frank Lowe recording called Black Beings, reissued last year by ESP-Disk. Parker, all of 21 at the time, already sounds like several bassists at once: plucking clusters of notes, straining fast, conveying himself as a sort of gridiron mass. His style would deepen but not harden, judging by the available evidence. Consider, for instance, that as a member of Ware’s quartet, alongside pianist Matthew Shipp and a few different drummers—check out the three-CD set Live in the World (Thirsty Ear), with Susie Ibarra, Guillermo Brown and Hamid Drake on one disc apiece—Parker was, metaphorically, both an anchor and an eye. He pulled off the same feat in a few of his own groups, notably the Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra. It’s no wonder that Gary Giddins, mentioning him over the years in the Village Voice, used one adjective repeatedly: teeming. That’s “to become filled to overflowing,” as Merriam-Webster has it. A more archaic usage involves conception and procreation, which probably applies more readily to Parker now than it would have 35 or even 15 years ago. It was in 1996 that he established the Vision Festival with his wife, the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker. And to call that event his baby would be misleading, but not untrue. Though run by Nicholson Parker with a board of directors (on which her husband sits), the Vision Festival feeds on an ideal of multiplicity most powerfully embodied by the bassist himself. “It’s about breaking barriers,” he told me recently, “uniting musicians, and starting this slow process where people who don’t normally acknowledge each other can begin to think about that.” One of the two albums Parker released on AUM Fidelity in 2008 was a byproduct of the Vision Festival, which proves that some investments still pay dividends. (Or did, once.) Double Sunrise Over Neptune came out of a large-group premiere reflecting Parker’s worldlier, more utopian inclinations: On it he plays the doson ngoni, a Malian hunter’s guitar. Meanwhile an Indian singer quavers over shifting textures, and horns and strings commingle. Still, it seems a waste that “Morning Mantra,” the first of three sections, employs the same lulling bass ostinato as “Neptune’s Mirror,” the last. Momentum may not be the point, but surely a little more couldn’t have hurt. The other, better album to appear last year was Petit Oiseau, featuring a quartet with Lewis Barnes on trumpet, Rob Brown on alto and Hamid Drake, Parker’s strongest rhythm partner, on drums. Here the compositional forms are sturdy and often concise, though they open up to individual and collective abstractions. Ethnic sounds resurface, explicitly or obliquely, and there are stretches of postbop swing, along with loose-limbed funk. Parker holds the whole thing together, inspiring excellent work from his colleagues and hitching the band to a common aim. Petit Oiseau is the William Parker record I’d recommend to neophytes and skeptics. Among its many lessons is a better understanding of Parker’s bandleading as a corollary to his bass playing. But then Taborn, testifying, probably put that lesson best: “William leads with the same strong but subtle approach [with which] he plays. You can feel him guiding things but are not really aware of him dictating anything. The context seems to harmonize around him.” The storm, as it were, rolls on. true 203 2009-03-24T11:25:43-04:00 false 24381 138 true 90 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

Bassist William Parker is deserving of greater recognition

2009-04-30T15:41:44-04:00

4 There is a growing momentum in medical education to make doctors aware that they not only take the patient’s history, but, much more meaningfully, must listen to his or her stories about why they came to a doctor. Too often a physician makes a diagnosis quickly, based on past experiences with that condition and certain stereotypes of the illness. A leading medical educator and practicing physician, Dr. Paul Haidet, is pioneering the use of jazz to teach medical students and doctors how jazz musicians, as they improvise, listen deeply to one another’s stories. Haidet, a longtime jazz listener—he was a jazz disc jockey in college—quotes in his essay “Jazz and the ‘Art’ of Medicine: Improvisation in the Medical Encounter,” what McCoy Tyner said of Roy Haynes: “The thing that sets Roy apart from other musicians is that he listens so well. He teaches you to listen carefully and to respond accordingly—to put things in perspective, not simply go out for yourself.” Haidet tells me that Miles Davis is another of his teachers in how to use space in communicating with a patient. As he has written in the Annals of Family Medicine (March 2007), “Rather than take up all the space in the conversation with strings of ‘yes/no’ questions or long psychological explanations, I find that I am at my best when I can give patients space to say what they want to say, gently leading patients through the telling of their illness narrative from their perspective, rather than forcing their narrative to follow my biomedical perspective.” As of this writing, Dr. Haidet is a staff physician at the DeBakey VA Medical Center as well as an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine, both in Houston. I was introduced to him and his work by my son-in-law, Dr. David Nierman, who directs a hospital in Queens, N.Y., and who is a swinging jazz saxophonist when he can find time for jazz gigs. Dr. Nierman is also involved with using music to teach medical students how to listen. I wish Duke Ellington were here so that I could tell him about this advance in medical education. The Ellington Orchestra was like the Supreme Court in that vacancies were few. I once asked Duke what his criteria were in deciding to bring a new player into the band. “He has to show me,” Duke said, “that he knows how to listen.” Dr. Haidet, who is designing a course for medical students and young doctors to teach them, through jazz, improvisation in medical settings, educated me with a quote from Dr. Stephen Nachmanovitch, a violinist and educator, on the vital importance of improvisation in doctor-patient settings. What he says is something that jazz educators should also tell their students about how to listen creatively during a gig: “In real medicine, you view the person [the patient] as unique. You use your training, but you don’t allow your training to blind you to the actual person sitting in front of you [or alongside you in a band]. In this way, you pass beyond competence to presence. To do anything artistically, you have to acquire technique, but you create through your technique, not with it.” As Ralph Ellison puts it in Living With Music (Modern Library), “After the jazzman has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazz … he must then ‘find himself,’ must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul. He must achieve his self-determined identity.” And simultaneously, must be able to listen to the “actual persons” playing with him. How does this apply to the doctor-patient relationship? Says Dr. Haidet, “It takes recognition that all voices in the medical encounter have things to say that are as important as one’s own statements. … And it takes raising one’s awareness to clues: nonverbal signals, fleeting glimpses of emotion, and key words [such as ‘worried,’ ‘concerned’ and ‘afraid’] and following up on these clues when they present themselves. “The essence of ensemble, whether in jazz or in medicine, lies in looking beyond one’s own perspective to see, understand and respond to the perspective of others.” In July, Haidet will become Director of Medical Education Research at the Penn State University College of Medicine in Hershey, Pa. He will carry with him a lesson from a teacher he much admires, Bill Evans, on the challenge of group improvisation: “Aside from the weighty technical problem of collective coherent thinking, there is the very human, even social, need for sympathy from all members to bend for the common result.” And, in medicine, Haidet adds, “Physicians and patients can achieve ensemble in their improvisation by accommodating, where possible, to each other’s statements and styles of communication.” As a patient, there are varied and uneven skills of communication, when you’re conscious of your mortality. Dr. Haidet has already conducted several sessions with medical students and physicians in which they learn through “guided jazz listening” (specific jazz recordings) about how hearing this music can enhance their interrelationships with patients telling them their stories. In my next column, I will give you a list of those recordings he chooses, through which you can test yourself—even if you’re not a doctor or medical student—in what jazz teaches you about the nature of improvisation; the creation of a singular personal sound; the importance of space in the act of communication; and the art of listening to one another in ensembles. Haidet told me that one of his references in teaching is a story in my book, Listen to the Stories, about how Charlie Parker shocked fellow musicians at a bar by choosing country music records on a jukebox. Bird explained his pleasure in that music: “Listen to the stories!” true 95 2009-04-01T14:36:01-04:00 false 24523 138 true 94 2009-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

There is a growing momentum in medical education to make doctors aware that they not only take the patient’s history, but, much more meaningfully, must listen to his or her stories about why they came to a doctor. Too often a physician makes a diagnosis quickly, based on past experiences with that condition and certain stereotypes of the illness. A leading medical educator and practicing physician, Dr. Paul Haidet, is pioneering the use of jazz to teach medical students and doctors how jazz musicians, as they improvise, listen deeply to one another’s stories. Haidet, a longtime jazz listener—he was a jazz disc jockey in college—quotes in his essay “Jazz and the ‘Art’ of Medicine: Improvisation in the Medical Encounter,” what McCoy Tyner said of Roy Haynes: “The thing that sets Roy apart from other musicians is that he listens so well. He teaches you to listen carefully and to respond accordingly—to put things in perspective, not simply go out for yourself.” Haidet tells me that Miles Davis is another of his teachers in how to use space in communicating with a patient. As he has written in the Annals of Family Medicine (March 2007), “Rather than take up all the space in the conversation with strings of ‘yes/no’ questions or long psychological explanations, I find that I am at my best when I can give patients space to say what they want to say, gently leading patients through the telling of their illness narrative from their perspective, rather than forcing their narrative to follow my biomedical...

2009-04-16T16:09:13-04:00

4 What does it say about me that I enjoy putting together this issue with its tributes to those important figures who died during the past year? Call me morbid or, better yet, respectful, but this annual issue with its Farewells has been a great source of pride for me. Over the years, we’ve struggled to deal appropriately with deaths in the jazz world. Who gets a mention or obituary? Who gets a longer tribute? And what should that tribute consist of? Honestly, we’ve never known if we’ve answered those questions correctly. And running lengthy obit tributes in issue after issue seemed like a concession to the old “jazz is dead” slur. I’d like to say that the idea of putting all of the tributes into one issue was an original one all my own, but it wasn’t. Publications like Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times Magazine have been doing it for years. My contribution has solely been to play matchmaker and find interesting eulogists who can speak from the heart with distinction. In fact, one of the surprising benefits of this section has been the discovery of rich new voices outside the general realm of jazz journalism. Artists like Branford Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Christian McBride, Dianne Reeves and Joe Lovano have shown themselves to be as articulate on paper as they are on their respective instruments. Since we started this annual section back in 2006, many of the pieces have left indelible memories. Last year, Randy Brecker wrote beautifully about his brother Michael in a Farewell that not only cracks me up, but also makes me teary every time I read it. I suppose that comes from having two brothers of my own. And Sonny Rollins’ memories of his childhood friend Jackie McLean never fail to magically transport me to that special place and time of Harlem in the ’40s. In a few cases over the years, the Farewells have formed a tragic chain. We had Oscar Peterson pay tribute to his longtime bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen, and now Benny Green does the honors for his mentor, who died at the end of 2007. We asked record producer Joel Dorn to salute Ed Bradley in 2007, only to have Joel pass away later that year and become the subject of one of the most touching tributes in this issue. Les McCann’s funny piece about lifelong pal Dorn offers a window into their very special friendship. There is a longstanding tradition of eloquent eulogies in jazz. One of our former contributors, Stanley Dance, delivered the eulogy at Duke Ellington’s funeral in 1974. I remember talking about that occasion with Stanley and he counted that speech as one of the best things he ever wrote. He knew that his words in this case mattered a great deal and, if done properly, would live beyond his own years. Indeed they have: “It is Memorial Day, when those who died for the free world are properly remembered. Duke Ellington never lost faith in this country, and he served it well. His music will go on serving it for years to come.” We in turn dedicate this issue to all of those who served the jazz community so well before they passed away in 2008. true 129 2009-02-24T14:39:16-05:00 false 21258 137 true 96 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

What does it say about me that I enjoy putting together this issue with its tributes to those important figures who died during the past year? Call me morbid or, better yet, respectful, but this annual issue with its Farewells has been a great source of pride for me. Over the years, we’ve struggled to deal appropriately with deaths in the jazz world. Who gets a mention or obituary? Who gets a longer tribute? And what should that tribute consist of? Honestly, we’ve never known if we’ve answered those questions correctly. And running lengthy obit tributes in issue after issue seemed like a concession to the old “jazz is dead” slur. I’d like to say that the idea of putting all of the tributes into one issue was an original one all my own, but it wasn’t. Publications like Entertainment Weekly and The New York Times Magazine have been doing it for years. My contribution has solely been to play matchmaker and find interesting eulogists who can speak from the heart with distinction. In fact, one of the surprising benefits of this section has been the discovery of rich new voices outside the general realm of jazz journalism. Artists like Branford Marsalis, Charlie Haden, Christian McBride, Dianne Reeves and Joe Lovano have shown themselves to be as articulate on paper as they are on their respective instruments. Since we started this annual section back in 2006, many of the pieces have left indelible memories. Last year, Randy Brecker wrote beautifully about his brother Michael in a...

2009-03-02T00:28:20-05:00

4 One evening last summer, the precociously gifted bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding made her network television debut on Late Night With David Letterman. Front and center with her upright bass, she seemed a straightforward vision of self-assurance. But there was a note of sly reproach to her lyrics in “Precious,” one of the R&B-infused originals from her self-titled first Heads Up release. “You love the way I fit some ideal,” she sang, breezily but evenly. “Not the real woman you’ve yet to understand.” Watching the clip now as then, I can’t help but fixate on that complaint, lodged within Spalding’s first 20 seconds on camera. And I can’t help but notice the fawning reaction of her host when the song cruises to a close. “Oh, my gosh; that was wonderful!” Letterman cries, more effusive than usual, while clasping Spalding’s hand. Without relaxing his grip, he turns to his bandleader, Paul Shaffer. “You were absolutely right, Paul: the coolest person we’ve ever had on the show. Beautiful!” Then comes a creaky parody of chivalry, as Dave lifts Esperanza’s wrist to bestow a kiss. The scene makes me shudder slightly, despite the glad tidings for Spalding’s career. And it isn’t just the whiff of patriarchy that provokes my queasiness: It’s the mix of material and setting. “You always wanted something more from my body,” Spalding purrs in the song’s chorus, addressing her (implicitly male) observer from a position of moral clarity. But what does it mean for this artist to level that charge? Could Spalding have landed her Letterman spot—usually a stark impossibility for even the savviest of jazz musicians—had she not been an attractive young woman, coolly singing about desire? Should it matter that she admits to her strategic advantages? Does it cast a shadow on her legitimate talent? By what standards should she be judged? As you may recall, 2008 was an often-vexing year for feminists, post-feminists and anyone remotely interested in women’s issues. Politically, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin roused separate passions, both in righteousness’ name. “Was this the Year of the Woman or the year of incremental progress, or neither?” mused Nancy Gibbs in a recent Time. “You had to ask yourself if it was an accident that the two most powerful women in our national life just happened to be among the most polarizing.” It was actually 2007 that Village Voice jazz critic Francis Davis anointed “The Year of the Woman,” due to strong product from Maria Schneider, Abbey Lincoln and others. I’d argue that 2008 holds at least as strong a claim to that headline, in ways that question as well as proclaim. For starters, there were standout albums by Cassandra Wilson, guitarist Mary Halvorson and pianist Carla Bley, along with equally serious work from violinist Jenny Scheinman, flutist Nicole Mitchell, saxophonist Matana Roberts and multireedist Anat Cohen. But any honor roll of female jazz artists feels inherently exceptional, a bit like what Jazz at Lincoln Center attempts with its Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival. While surely well intentioned, that annual celebration has its shortcomings, starting of course with the name. (Try to envision a Vanilla Coke White People in Jazz Festival, and you get the point.) Beyond that, the self-marginalization implied by such an event—two other examples would be the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival (at the Kennedy Center) and the Women in Jazz Festival (at Saint Peter’s Church)—raises its own set of worries. Solidarity is good. False compensation? Not so much. To put it another way, I have nothing but respect for DIVA, the all-female big band led by drummer Sherrie Marricle. But its existence shouldn’t obviate the lingering question of why Jazz at Lincoln Center has never hired a full-time female member for its orchestra. Jazz never really operates outside the larger culture, and it stands to reason that recent hand wringing in feminist circles would produce a parallel movement in ours. By my subjective measure, it hasn’t yet, but more jazz citizens do seem to be awakening to issues of gender. That process may be best observed in academia, thanks to scholars like Sherrie Tucker, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Lara Pellegrinelli, whose perceptive work can be sampled in Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke University Press), a worthwhile new anthology edited by Tucker and Nichole T. Rustin. Change can also be detected in the substance of critics’ polls, and in the gradually evolving demographics of the bandstand, where women are no longer expected to stick to the piano (though many who do, like Marilyn Crispell and Geri Allen, are rightly hailed). One of the most accessible essays in Big Ears is by Ingrid Monson, a former jazz trumpeter now serving as the Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music at Harvard. “There was something about being a woman that was disqualifying,” she writes of her years as a gifted trumpet student, in a personal history that honestly grapples with gender as well as race and sexual orientation. And her experience is still far from unusual. When I spoke with Mary Halvorson recently, she told a similar story of prejudgment. “Going to jazz school,” she said, “it would be, ‘Oh, you play guitar, how cute; do you sing?’ I had such a chip on my shoulder about that. That’s why I didn’t start singing until four, five years ago.” Prejudice is no longer an issue, she hastened to add—but Halvorson travels in open-minded circles. (And I can sadly attest that her vocal-and-instrumental duo with violist Jessica Pavone has elicited the occasional leer.) If you read this column regularly, you may recall that I listed pianist-composer Myra Melford twice in my roundup of last year’s Top 10 gigs. One of those was by a chamberlike quartet with Halvorson, Matana Roberts and drummer Harris Eisenstadt: very nearly an all-female band, though that was by no means the point. What mattered was the music, which required no qualifiers and requested no brownie points. On a related note, I choose to take heart from the very end of that Letterman clip, which has Spalding taking Dave’s hand and giving it a peck of her own. Flirtatious or forceful? She seems secure in the conviction that she can be both at once. true 203 2009-02-24T14:51:07-05:00 false 21259 137 true 90 2009-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Players like Esperanza Spalding and Mary Halvorson are making a big splash

2009-04-02T08:56:49-04:00