Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits

4 Real jazz artists don’t do sitcoms. Real jazz artists don’t star in romantic comedies or revivals of frothy Broadway musicals. Real jazz artists don’t cover Elton John or Elvis or the Carpenters. So would argue some hardcore purists. But they’d be stymied by Harry Connick Jr., who has done all these things plus a whole lot more and, true to his New Orleans jazz roots, still manages to keep it real. When, precisely two decades ago, Connick’s participation in the mega-selling When Harry Met Sally... soundtrack ignited an initial shockwave of popularity, his similarity to the young Frank Sinatra was widely noted. Connick was 22 at the time, about the same age as Sinatra when he zoomed to stardom after joining the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. Connick’s dashing good looks and inveterate cockiness helped fuel the Sinatra comparisons, as did his overtly stated desire to use music as the foundation for building a multi-faceted showbiz career. Over the next 20 years, Connick more than achieved that goal, finding time between the steady release of 23 albums to star in more than a dozen films (extending the full range from artsy flicks like Little Man Tate to the blockbuster Independence Day and, in true Sinatra style, his fair share of dogs), earn a recurring role on the hit TV comedy Will & Grace, and headline a Tony-winning Broadway revival of The Pajama Game. Musically he has surpassed Sinatra, not in popularity or sales, but in creative dexterity. Connick was, like Nat King Cole, a masterful pianist well before he emerged as an august vocalist. He’s as comfortable with big bands as he is at New Orleans funk and jazz sessions with lifelong confreres Wynton and Branford Marsalis. He’s sharpened his songwriting skills and has established himself as a top-drawer arranger, orchestrator and conductor. Now, with the release of Your Songs (Columbia), an intentionally low-key collection of mostly pop covers, Connick seems to be returning to his Sinatra-wannabe roots. “I had two specific goals in mind,” says Connick, “to [record] very, very familiar songs and to feature my vocals as opposed to jazz solos or crazy arrangements. I just wanted to do a CD that was very accessible.” Connick celebrated his 42nd birthday just a couple of weeks prior to the album’s release. Sinatra turned 42 in 1957, a landmark year that saw the release of five top-selling albums, the launch of his second TV series and standout performances in diametrically opposed film roles, as ne’er-do-well saloon singer Joey Evans in Pal Joey and as deeply troubled vocalist-turned-comedian Joe E. Lewis in The Joker Is Wild. The Connick of ’09 seems remarkably akin to the Sinatra of ’57: a multitalented, multi-discipline performer entering mid-career at the top of his game, assured yet neither complacent nor rutted, and professionally fearless. “There’s no reason to be scared,” shrugs Connick, “as long as you’re properly prepared. We’re talking about a subjective deal. If you threw me into an operating room with a scalpel and said, ‘Save this guy’s life,’ I’d be real scared because I would have no idea what I was doing. But I do know what I’m doing in music, and I like what I’m doing, so what’s there to be scared of? You go onstage and you sing. The only thing I take really seriously is the art itself; the performance stuff is easy. That’s just my personality. I’m very fearless in creative situations. That doesn’t mean what I’m doing is good, but I certainly am not afraid to try.” Interestingly, Connick opens Your Songs with “All the Way.” The Academy Award winner, written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn for The Joker Is Wild, was Sinatra’s single biggest success of ’57 and ranks high among his most indelible hits. From the beginning of his solo career, Sinatra had the wisdom to surround himself with the best arrangers in the business. In the case of “All the Way” and much of his ’57 output, it was the brilliantly intuitive Nelson Riddle, but Axel Stordahl, Billy May, Neal Hefti and Johnny Mandel all made significant contributions to the Sinatra sound. Though Connick never relies on outside assistance with arranging, the smooth lushness and relaxed sophistication of Your Songs does suggest inspiration from the classic work of Riddle, May and their brethren. “I’m sure I’ve been influenced by Nelson and Billy May and Claus Ogerman,” says Connick, “but it’s a different kind of influence than on, say, my piano playing. When I was 20 years old I was trying to sound like Duke Ellington, I was trying to sound like Monk, I was trying to sound like Earl Hines. But with arranging, I’m just trying to write stuff that works for each particular song. I know there has to be inherent influence there, but I’m not thinking, ‘Hey, let me go and get my Nelson bag.’” Though Connick did single-handedly oversee all arranging, orchestrating and conducting for Your Songs, he agreed, for the first time ever, to cede a degree of artistic control. Enter Clive Davis, the larger-than-life, septuagenarian impresario whose hit-making legerdemain has helped shape the careers of everyone from Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen to Whitney Houston and Alicia Keys. “I’ve never collaborated with anyone,” says Connick, “so it took a little getting used to. Clive came in and said, ‘We know you can do this, and we know you can do that, but let’s just feature you as a singer. Don’t take any left turns with the arrangements. Make ’em straightforward.’ He said it was important to preserve my musical identity, which is why he thought it was a good idea that I still wrote the arrangements and did the orchestrations. But he said it shouldn’t come at the cost of distracting from the vocals. He said, ‘You really need to be front and center on these vocals,’ and I said, ‘Cool.’ He picked some songs, I came up with some and that’s kinda how we got started.” The complete profile is available in the December issue of JazzTimes. true

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2009-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes

Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits

2009-11-07T20:52:25-05:00

4 Crate diggers—music geeks with a particular affinity for obscure vinyl albums—fawn over vintage LP cover art. A hardcore crate digger will drop some serious coin for a rare groove and a hot sleeve. Serious coin. The appeal of eye-catching photography, typography and graphics goes hand-in-hand with the history of jazz. You have only to look at coffee table books such as Geoff Gans’ Prestige Records: The Album Cover Collection (Concord Music Group/Rare Cool Stuff), Julius Wiedemann’s Jazz Covers (Taschen Books) and Graham Marsh’s Blue Note: The Album Cover Art (Chronicle Books) for evidence of LP artwork’s eminence. And that extends to the worlds of high-fashion T-shirts, posters, screen prints and DJ culture, wherein many contemporary graphic artists tweak the iconic designs of Reid Miles (of Blue Note Records), Paul Bacon and Ken Deardoff (of Riverside), and Tom Hannan, Don Martin and Esmond Edwards (of Prestige) for flyers and posters. When the CD came into prominence as the most popular music format, record companies strained themselves in trying to reproduce the allure of LP artwork. Sometimes they failed miserably, especially when it came to certain reissues. Note how the magnificence of Miles Davis Kind of Blue or John Coltrane’s Giant Steps is reduced when the artwork shrinks from 12 square inches to 12 square centimeters. “I’m still irritated that all of the companies, with just a few exceptions, used the same CD packaging,” says Stefan Winter, founder of the German-based label Winter & Winter. Between 1985 and 1995, Winter ran JMT Records, the precursor to Winter & Winter, with distribution through PolyGram. He recalls his frustrations in trying to adapt the colorful modern designs of Stephen Byram, Yoshitomo Nara and Günter Mattei to the disc format. “Everything looked absolutely terrific,” Winter remembers. “Then, when we finally printed these artworks and put them into these plastic CD cases, a certain part of the attraction was lost. That was a big irritation for me.” Luxurious CD box sets allowed for more extravagant packaging, with glossy books filled with informative essays and rare photography. As for the single discs, some labels—such as Winter & Winter, with its beautiful, svelte cardboard sleeves—threw the jewel case away and started from scratch, creating singular packaging that is instantly recognizable. Legendary jazz photographer Jimmy Katz shares some of Winter’s sentiments, noting an overall decline in aesthetic value. “One of the things that’s really changed is [that] there used to be labels with very strong visions regarding their visual identities, like ECM and Blue Note,” Katz argues. “Now, there are almost no labels with very strong visual identities.” Indeed, one would be hard pressed to name a contemporary label that’s producing music packaging to make collectors go gaga, to the point of spending top dollar simply for the artwork. Still, there are a handful of labels, including Winter & Winter, ObliqSound and Thirsty Ear, that place high premiums on artwork. “Oftentimes art is just thrown in there because you need a picture,” says Peter Gordon, founder of Thirsty Ear Recordings. “You know, the artist just holding a horn or playing a piano. That can be a nice image but it doesn’t really give you anything extra to the music itself. We don’t do that. “We strongly believe that music is often interpreted through colors,” Gordon says, referring to Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series. “We thought that would speak volumes about the music and complement it. As an industry we have to work to create collectables for people. You have to think about music asking, ‘Is this something that you want to own?’” And while Blue Note Records no longer adheres to the more unified look it did during its hard-bop heyday, the company still values engaging artwork. “I think the element of art with music is still an important partnership when it comes to selling music,” says Gordon Jee, vice president of creative services at EMI Music, Blue Note’s parent company. Jee acknowledges the greatness, design-wise, Blue Note has already established through Francis Wolff’s photography and Reid Miles’ art direction, noting that the label has moved away from that boilerplate but hopes to continue the label’s strong artistic legacy. “With the newer covers we’re putting out, we’re hoping to have some of the same success that Reid Miles had with his covers,” Jee says. “The CD concept, with 5 inches square, still allows a designer to present a lot of information and have a lot of fun in creating visuals for a recording.” With the enormous impact of the iPod and digital downloads, music is becoming increasingly dematerialized. According to a December 2008 Nielsen SoundScan yearend report, digital album sales reached an all-time high with more than 65 million sales last year, up from 50 million in 2007. Some industry experts predict that digital sales will eclipse physical CD sales in the U.S. by 2010. And judging from major outlets such as Tower Records and the Virgin MegaStores vanishing, it certainly seems like that’s the case. In the same report, Nielsen SoundScan noted that album sales at non-traditional music outlets (e.g. digital, Internet, mail order, concert venue, non-traditional retailers) hit an all-time high with sales breaking the 100 million mark for the first time. Indeed, the shifting behavior patterns of music consumers are seriously impacting the popularity of physical music distribution. Perhaps it’s a generational thing or a matter of decreasing living space, but music fans are not only buying their music via downloads, but also transferring their existing catalogs from LPs and discs to MP3 files. So what does that mean for the music artwork? As we move forward in a digital age, will music packaging return to the days before Alex Steinweiss introduced cover art in 1939 with Columbia Records? Prior to Steinweiss convincing Columbia that it could attract a greater buying public if it invested more in quality graphics—he did this right after the Great Depression, mind you—music companies were more interested in selling players than actual records. 78 rpm shellac records came wrapped in generic brown paper or cardboard covers. In regards to reissues of, say, Miles Davis’ On the Corner or those legendary gatefold Impulse! LPs, record companies eventually learned how to extend the richness of Corky McCoy’s ghetto-fabulous cartoons and Joe Lebow’s magnificent juxtaposition of photography and typography for Impulse! Just reference elaborate, if costly, packages such as Columbia/Legacy’s The Complete On the Corner Sessions and Universal Music’s The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records. How will labels continue this tradition if music becomes completely cover-less? Twenty years from now, will young jazz fans know who Wolff and Miles were? Will they even care? The rest of this article can be found in the December 2009 issue of JazzTImes. What are your 5 favorite album covers from the LP era? What are your 5 favorite CD covers from the digital era? Comment below. true

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Can jazz’s rich tradition of eye-catching cover art survive in the MP3 era?

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Uncovered: Album Art in the Digital Age

2009-11-10T17:08:03-05:00

4 If you’ve ever seen Matt Wilson in action, then you’ve probably seen him smile. It happens often in the course of his playing, and it has a way of spreading: across the bandstand, throughout a club, along the expanse of a festival hall. His posture and bearing at the drums communicates an upright whimsy, perhaps especially when he’s wearing a coat and tie—which, combined with his dark-frame glasses and gray-streaked hair, can call to mind a younger version of Minnesota Senator Al Franken. And yes, it’s true: He’s good enough, and smart enough, to make you like him. In fact, he’s probably the most blithely sociable jazz drummer since the late Billy Higgins, who earned the fond sobriquet Smiling Billy, and who also happens to be Wilson’s clearest musical precursor. “Matt exudes joy and a sense of well-being on the bandstand,” says pianist-composer Myra Melford, who works alongside Wilson in the avant-garde collective Trio M, and occasionally in her ensemble Be Bread. “I’m constantly smiling when I’m playing with him, and I know this is transmitted to the audience as well as the ensemble members.” Terell Stafford, the trumpeter in Wilson’s band Arts & Crafts, uses similar terms to describe his first time ever playing with the drummer: “I would turn around and we were smiling at each other the whole performance.” That was at a conference of the International Association for Jazz Education, about a decade ago—not long after Wilson released an album called Smile, its cover emblazoned with a photo of his grinning mug. Of course, you don’t get to be one of the steadiest-working drummers in jazz on the merits of goofy charm alone. Consult Wilson’s discography of the last year or two, which includes sterling albums by pianist Denny Zeitlin (In Concert, Sunnyside); bassist Mario Pavone with pianist Paul Bley (Trio Arc, Playscape); soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom (Mental Weather, Outline); and multi-reedist Ted Nash (The Mancini Project, Palmetto). On each of those titles—as on That’s Gonna Leave a Mark (Palmetto), the excellent new release by the Matt Wilson Quartet—you’ll hear the mix of perceptive flow and responsive flexibility that has long been his unassuming trademark. There are a few more emphatically dazzling drummers working today, but almost nobody in Wilson’s peer group with a broader grasp of jazz history, or a more natural sense of time, or a stronger signature as a bandleader, or more goodwill among his fellow players. “In addition to being a great drummer, Matt is a bandleader and composer,” says bassist Ben Allison. “So he’s always thinking about the tune we’re playing—about making clear statements that, although often surprising, never feel out of place. He’s in the moment when he plays and has a keen sense of group interplay. In a way, he’s always playing ‘free.’” Alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, one of a handful of certified jazz legends to have employed Wilson, is no less enthusiastic: “I don’t think I’ve ever heard him play an unmusical hit on the drums and cymbals. That to me is very admirable. And, of course, he’s got a great sense of humor, and he has no compunction to release it at any point.” He adds: “When we’re playing together, it’s fun. Every time I look at him, I smile.” So here’s Matt Wilson, amiably swashbuckling his left-side cymbal in a low-ceilinged Greenwich Village club. It’s a late-summer weeknight at the Cornelia Street Café, and the gig is relaxed, though that’s no indication of its merits. Nir Felder, a guitarist of recent Berklee College of Music pedigree, is the bandleader, and he has brought along one of his mentors, alto saxophonist Greg Osby. The set opens with a Charlie Parker tune, a blues called “Big Foot,” and from Beat One there’s the pull of forward-tilt swing. Wilson, locking in with bassist Doug Weiss, initially keeps his ride pattern loose but driving; his snare-drum annotations, played with the left hand, are effectively sparse. Throughout the duration of Osby’s solo, a smart and angular thing, he never once uses his hi-hat, or breaks the pattern of his ride. But at the solo handoff to Felder, he switches to his right-side cymbal, for a brighter tonality, and strikes up a chattering conversation between his hi-hat and snare. It’s a change both pervasive and subtle, like flicking on a new light in the room. And it’s a decision motivated purely by intuition, though Wilson has no problem explaining it later. “Behind Greg it was more of a horizontal time feel,” he says. “When I got to Nir’s solo, I thought I could divide the bar up a bit more.” The second tune in the set is a rhythmically complex invention of Felder’s called “Memorial,” and somehow Wilson, sight-reading on the bandstand, makes it open up and breathe. After heeding a halting pulse during the song’s opening stretch, he delves into tumbling abstraction, inviting Osby along with him. Together they bob and weave, pulling further and further away from tempo, but with a toehold in tonality. Osby, at 49, and Wilson, at 45, are a full generation removed from Felder, and their treatment of his music suggests casual mastery crossed with a flicker of surprise. “Sometimes it’s more exciting not to know too much, and really react more,” Wilson says after the set. “I love that first time, when you’re trying stuff out. I always tell people that you only play a piece of music for the first time once. And if you approach every gig that way, it’s cool.” It’s just one of the lessons Wilson attributes to his apprenticeship with the late tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman—or to put it another way, one drop in the ocean of insight that the jazz life has afforded him. “Just to have had that experience of being with Dewey for that long, or being around Charlie,” he muses, referring to bassist Charlie Haden, in whose Liberation Music Orchestra he has memorably played. “There’s no substitute for the hang. I was never one of these people who play the gig and then go to bed. When you get in company with these people—Buster Williams is another one, for me—you just learn so much. No university will give you that. Not that any one of these guys have ever said that much to me about how to play, but one little thing here or there will do it. I played with Dewey for 12 years and I think he told me like five things.” true

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How drummer and funnyman Matt Wilson blended various eras of jazz drumming into a style worth its own historical weight.

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Matt Wilson: Living History

2009-10-23T08:48:57-04:00

4 For Dee Alexander, taking flight is both a vocal technique and the realization of a dream. “Rossignol,” from her acclaimed 2009 album, Wild Is the Wind (Blujazz), is named for a North African nightingale that she has adopted as her artistic alter-ego. Her improvisations artfully recreate the songbird’s flight patterns, interspersing forward-thrusting lines with playful flutters, zigzags and swoops. On “Butterfly,” dedicated to another of her winged role models, she unfurls complex filigrees and curlicues that move with disarming quickness, leaving shards of light in their wake. “I’m about uplifting,” the native Chicagoan explains, when asked about her fascination with airborne creatures. “Hope and joy, and love.” That’s not to say, however, that everything is sweetness and warmth in her musical world. One need only hear the predatory snarl in her voice when she takes on Abbey Lincoln’s caustic “And It’s Supposed to Be Love” (which she has yet to record) to know that she’s as fearless of the dark as she is exultant about the light. “The heart and soul comes from livin’,” she confirms. “You gotta get out there, you gotta play, you gotta experience some things, you gotta get hurt.” To hear her tell it, though, Alexander’s musical journey has followed an upward trajectory almost since the beginning. She cites artists such as Betty Carter as inspirations, but it was her personal encounters with the freedom-bound visions of vocalist Rita Warford and other Chicago-based musicians, some affiliated with the AACM, that motivated her to forge the unique fusion of rich musical storytelling and no-net risk-taking that has become her trademark. One of her most important early associations was with percussionist Baba Eli Hoenai’s Prana Ensemble, a group that linked contemporary Western jazz with its Africanist roots. While with Prana, she also met the man who would become her most important mentor, the late woodwind virtuoso “Light” Henry Huff. “At first I didn’t get it,” she admits about Huff’s challenging music. “It was new to me. He had a talk with me one day. He said, ‘You just gotta be totally uninhibited. You have to become one with the music, and you can’t be concerned about what people think.’ “I have an old recording of some of the stuff we did. I listen and, oh my God! If I’d sat and thought about it, I wouldn’t have done half this stuff! It’s just—out there.” In the mid-’80s, after about five years with Huff’s group Breath, Alexander struck out on her own. Since then she’s crafted a storehouse of styles that makes her among contemporary jazz’s most eclectic, yet artistically focused, vocalists. She’s as comfortable delivering a Gershwin medley as she is exploring the outer limits of free improvisation with the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble. On club dates she regularly spans the gamut from American songbook standards through refurbished pop hits to variations on themes by trailblazers such as John Coltrane, as well as her own variegated musical and lyric creations. “It’s been overwhelming,” she says about the praise Wild Is the Wind has garnered. “It’s been better than I ever dreamed or imagined it would be.” But she never forgets where the music comes from, and she always remembers to pay appropriate tribute. Rarely does she let an evening pass without singing Huff’s “You and I,” the disc’s centerpiece, which she offers up as a prayer/paean to her mentor (“Speak to God on my behalf”). Indeed, the entire CD could be construed as both a memorial to Huff and a culmination of her long-running (and still vital) relationship with him. “I knew that nothing was going to happen,” she says, “until I fulfilled the promise that I made to him, and that was to get all of his music charted, copywritten and published. He made his transition in the early ’90s. The last time I saw him he could barely talk, and he could barely breathe; he said, ‘I want you to get my music out there.’ And I said, ‘OK.’ And with the help of his family we did get that done, and when we got it completed we prayed over it, and I was like, ‘OK, Light, here it is.’ Seemed like as soon as I completed that process we went into the studio, and we did the recording in two five-hour sessions. “It’s a beautiful thing, I tell you,” she concludes, “this thing called music. Taking chances, not being afraid, being uninhibited, finding new things all the time—it’s an adventure, an odyssey, and I’m glad to be on this ride. My aim is to just keep producing great music that people love. As long as I feel good about whatever it is that I do, it’ll be good.” true

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Chicago-based vocalist Dee Alexander takes flight on Wild Is the Wind

Dee Alexander: Free As A Bird

2009-11-10T16:56:52-05:00

4 There’s a popular saying among aspiring wordsmiths that goes something like, “In order to become a good writer, you need to read good writers.” For her sparkling 2009 disc, Bare Bones (Rounder), Madeleine Peyroux heeded that call from a musical standpoint and wrote or co-wrote all 11 songs. Even though glimpses of her songwriting gifts have shimmered throughout her discography, dating back to her charming 1996 debut, Dreamland (Atlantic), much of Peyroux’s acclaim arose from her masterful interpretations of songs by Elliott Smith, Leonard Cohen, Hank Williams and others. “Writers have the focus of all of our attention, whether we realize it or not. Being a cover artist, I think I’m just doubly aware of that,” she says. “Having searched hard for songs that might fit me—and learning songs that I can’t do—became a part of who I am. Focusing on the song itself is what I’ve been doing all along.” Peyroux goes on to explain the process of learning songs that she can’t interpret by citing an absolute jazz classic. “Dinah Washington’s ‘This Bitter Earth’ is one of the greatest recordings ever. But it would be very difficult for me to do justice to that song. I think it takes a greater maturity than perhaps I have at this moment,” laughs Peyroux. “But that’s a song that I still look up to. There are also the happier songs that I don’t think I could cover at this particular point in my life.” After years of focusing on choosing the ideal song and slowly developing her own material, Peyroux says she began recognizing her strengths as a songwriter. “By the time I wrote one of the last songs for [Bare Bones], ‘I Must Be Saved,’ which I wrote by myself, I started to hear my voice in language. I began to recognize some of my strong points, which were being able to stay with one idea forever. I think I began to realize how much folk music influenced by songwriting—for instance, [using a] really repetitive formula and developing an idea over and over again.” Another great asset she discovered was her penchant for crafting compelling tunes out of conversations. She cites the wistful “Our Lady of Pigalle” as the perfect example. “My songs have lots of lyrics. From [that song] I discovered that I knew how to make [a] song out of a conversation, from covering songs that do that so well: singing in the second person, for example, or singing to someone in the first person but really having a conversation. I think a lot of these songs are built around conversations. “‘Our Lady of Pigalle’ is very interesting for me. It has a lot of musicality, a strong musical beauty. I enjoy what it’s trying to say,” she continues. “It’s a bit more cryptic, lyrically. It’s trying to propose the situation—emotional or philosophical—that exists from a secular standpoint of sexuality as salvation, and raises the issue regarding sexual repression and religion.” As on her previous two discs, Half the Perfect World (Rounder, 2006) and Careless Love (Rounder, 2004), Peyroux worked with Larry Klein, who’s produced other stellar albums by vocalists such as Luciana Souza, Melody Gardot and, of course, Joni Mitchell. When she collaborated with him on Careless Love, she first confided in him that she wanted to hone her songwriting skills. “But I hadn’t gotten the idea in my head that I would want to make an album of all originals. Larry suggested that we collaborate and do it,” she says. “A few months later, I think he was beginning to feel skeptical, based on some of the things I had been sending him, which were super, super rough,” she laughs. “By that point, I was already gung ho; I couldn’t be stopped. After about a year, I stopped touring, only doing little performances here and there, and concentrated on rewriting and rewriting and co-writing with a ton of other people. Many of the songs didn’t make it onto the album, but the process was extremely informative, so I threw myself into it. By the time Larry was becoming skeptical, I’d decided that there was no way we were going back.” true

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The chanteuse becomes a full-fledged songwriter on Bare Bones

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Online Exclusive: Madeleine Peyroux

2009-10-10T16:48:38-04:00

4 When fiddle virtuoso and composer Mark O’Connor recalls the history of his Hot Swing Trio—how it began as a tribute to Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt before evolving into something reflective of his own cross-genre musical journey—he is certain of one thing: Grappelli wouldn’t have had it any other way. “The biggest lesson I learned from Stephane is that he could take something and make it very individual to him,” says the 48-year-old Grammy winner, who was still a teenager when he began touring with the maestro in the late ’70s. The Seattle native was recruited for his guitar skills, but Grappelli also enjoyed playing violin duets with O’Connor, already an accomplished exponent of Western swing. “I was sort of like a mini-Stephane when I met him,” says O’Connor, calling from his Manhattan apartment. “It was not like I was starting from scratch. I already had my own style. He recognized that and he celebrated it.” The two musicians had a great deal in common, O’Connor recalls, yet the differences proved as important as the similarities, if not more so. “We both had classical training and enjoyed jazz, but the spices in his music, if you will, included Gypsy music, the tango and French cabaret, where he grew up in the ’20s. The secret ingredients of my style were a different set of cultural inflections: blues, bluegrass and Western swing. So we each had these five ingredients: two things we shared, and three that were different.” Live in New York, the trio’s latest recording, is a vibrant reminder of O’Connor’s swing, folk, blues and classical influences, and, as it turns out, a final hurrah. Released on the fiddler’s own OMAC label and again featuring the powerhouse pairing of guitarist Frank Vignola and bassist Jon Burr, it completes a trilogy of CDs that includes 2001’s Hot Swing! and 2003’s In Full Swing. O’Connor writes and arranges for the trio, yet he’s quick to note that the group’s fundamental appeal has to do with sheer swing chemistry. “The rhythmic power is something I could never write,” he says. “It’s something that’s in those guys. They bring it to the stage and to the recordings. It’s like fireworks—the most important part of the group.” Deciphering the Grappelli code was one of the great challenges O’Connor faced coming up. He had little difficulty emulating violinist Joe Venuti’s brand of unflagging swing, having closely studied his recordings, and he found himself in sync with fiddler Stuff Smith’s visceral blues attack. But Grappelli’s touch and technique remained elusive. “It wasn’t until I began playing with him that I began to figure it out,” says O’Connor, who was puzzled by Grappelli’s phrasing and his use of vibrato and the bow, no matter how often he listened to his recorded collaborations with Reinhardt. “I had played twin violins with a lot of players before that,” O’Connor recalls. “I thought I was good at copying people’s phrasing and acting as a subordinate harmony player, but it took me a while to figure out how to keep up with him just to play a tune. There were different mysteries, and it was the combination of them that was so hard to crack.” No question, he adds with a laugh, “there’s nothing like being up close.” O’Connor has spent much of his professional life returning the favor. Given his innumerable musical pursuits of late—collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer and the debut of his “Americana Symphony”—it’s amazing that he’s able to carve out so much time to mentor students at his popular string camps, at the Mark O’Connor String Institute at UCLA, and in other settings around the world. Several years ago, O’Connor invited Claude Williams, the late swing-era fiddler saluted on Live in New York, to participate in one of his string camps. “I didn’t know if he was into teaching, but I thought it doesn’t matter. He’s a legend and he should be there,” O’Connor says. “And it was a great call. So many kids were able to be around him. Whenever he’d pick up his violin, it was like a history lesson.” O’Connor is also working on an American violin method course, a unique and comprehensive program of lessons designed to take students from initial to advance levels of study. Don’t rush to Amazon just yet, however: He’s still trying to figure out whether to release the course in installments or “to finish the whole thing so that someone can see the entire arc.” And there are more swing collaborations on the horizon. While Live in New York marks the final recording for the Hot Swing Trio, O’Connor will soon be fielding a larger swing ensemble featuring guitarists Vignola and Julian Lage, among other musicians. Indeed, the fiddler is looking forward to bringing the group to the Kennedy Center in the nation’s capital early next year to celebrate the Django Reinhardt Centennial. Not a bad way to embark on yet another jazz adventure. true

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2009-10-05T13:23:02-04:00

true

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2009-10-05T00:00:00-04:00

The fiddle virtuoso on Gypsy jazz and the Grappelli legacy

50747

Online Exclusive: Mark O’Connor

2009-10-05T14:47:12-04:00

4 Nels Cline leans forward, fingers flickering across his Jerry Jones 12-string electric guitar. He’s onstage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, home of Late Show With David Letterman, where cameras are rolling for a performance by Wilco, this decade’s quintessential American alternative-rock band. Lanky but dapper in a high-buttoned black suit, he looks the part of a Grand Ole Opry flatpicker, or maybe an undertaker. To his left are Jeff Tweedy, the group’s lead vocalist, and Leslie Feist, a featured guest. “However close we get sometimes,” they’re singing amicably, “it’s like we never met.” The song is “You and I,” a three-minute soft-rock confection that earned Wilco its first No. 1 spot on the Triple-A radio chart. And Cline is aptly serving its needs, tracing chord arpeggios with a hint of twang. His contribution, subtle but substantial, has a lot to do with the mellow grace of the song. Over a closing tag, he fashions an obbligato behind the two singers, with a retro-trippy backmasking effect. “That’s my tribute to the Byrds’ Younger Than Yesterday album,” he chuckles the following afternoon in a Greenwich Village coffee shop, during a break in his whirlwind schedule with the band. Moments later he’s talking about Lester Young with Billie Holiday, and the improvising tradition in country music, and the uncontrived genius of Jim Hall. It’s a typically discursive conversation for Cline, studded with self-conscious musical allusions, and it reflects the broad base of knowledge he brings to his playing. As lead guitarist with Wilco since 2004, Cline has appeared prominently on two Top 5 albums and hundreds of concert stages. His value in the group probably can’t be overstated, both in terms of solo orchestration and the more cohesive elements of the music. Two years ago Rolling Stone included him in a roundup of 20 so-called New Guitar Gods, bestowing a fairly accurate epithet: “The Avant Romantic.” But whatever his godhead status, Cline is hardly a new arrival. His career as an improvising musician stretches back to the 1970s. He made his first album more than 20 years ago, and has since appeared on dozens of others. He has released three with his working trio, the Nels Cline Singers, which has another one on the way. At 53, he’s about the same age as Pat Metheny, John Scofield and Bill Frisell, and like them he has carved his path through the modern-jazz labyrinth with an open mind and a personal style. “When I first met him, jeez, his fingers would just be flying all over the place,” recalls Frisell, thinking back some 25 years. “Just as a guitar geek, man, how do you do that? But now it goes so far beyond that, too. It’s something in his imagination that, for me, is what music is all about. And he’s integrated the whole extra-guitar thing, all the electronic stuff, to the point where it’s totally organic. It’s just, like, amazing.” Cline, a lifelong resident of Los Angeles, has little capacity for the cocksure ego of a guitar hero. “I don’t go through life feeling particularly confident, in general,” he says. “The one area I feel the most confident in is spontaneous improvisation—and I’ve been able to do that with a lot of really great and likeminded people.” The rest of this article may be found in the October 2009 issue of JazzTImes, on sale at newsstands or as a back issue at jazztimes.com true

203

2009-10-02T12:03:02-04:00

false

25093

175

true

2009-10-01T09:00:00-04:00

Equally effective in free improvisation and one of rock’s most important bands, Nels Cline defines a new six-string ideal.

50852

Nels Cline: Guitar Anti-Hero

2009-10-08T17:50:26-04:00

4 Coming Soon! true

290

2009-10-02T12:05:28-04:00

false

25094

175

true

2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Coming Soon!

America Gypsy: Django Reinhardt’s legend looms enormous.

2009-10-08T17:18:26-04:00

4 "Hey, come back here and see what this band is really about,” said the guitarist John Scofield in April, chuckling from the rear of the plush touring coach he occupies with his Piety Street Band. The group, which on this leg of its extensive tour includes Scofield, the singer and keyboardist Jon Cleary, bassist Donald Ramsey and drummer Ricky Fataar, is shuttling from a D.C. suburb to Baltimore, playing two workaday gigs sandwiched between heavier dates at B.B. King’s in New York City and Jazz Fest in New Orleans. In the bus’ back lounge, the main attraction, courtesy of Cleary’s laptop, is a sketch from the short-lived British comedy show Big Train. It’s a hysterical clip, and pretty blue; maybe not the sort of programming you’d expect from two guys who contemplated salvation the night before with a set of terrifically soulful New Orleans-flavored gospel music. Or maybe it is—this isn’t the Five Blind Boys, after all. At both mid-Atlantic gigs, the quartet takes classic American music, much of it traditional gospel, and tastefully converts it into something that might best be termed Scofield-ian: At the coda of the spiritual “Motherless Child,” an extended reggae jam features a backwards-looped guitar solo; on the Reverend James Cleveland’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” Scofield wrings out wah-wah licks that assume the chillingly vocal quality of great slide guitar. During the climax of “It’s a Big Army,” Scofield’s own attempt at a Baptist pew-shaker, the guitarist sounds down-home and harmonically adroit in equal doses; B.B. King-isms alternate with bop phrasing that Sister Rosetta Tharpe probably never thought about. Other numbers showcase the guitarist’s deep melodic yearning: Hank Williams’ “The Angel of Death,” and “I’ll Fly Away,” the show-capping hymn that Scofield arranges uniquely and masterfully; an old-time country gallop, a simple snare-drum rhythm and a lengthy guitar solo out front, all tempered like a lullaby. Working around and behind the guitarist, the rhythm section of Fataar and Ramsey, who is filling in for George Porter Jr., burrows into the pocket. And then there’s Jon Cleary. It’s difficult to discern what’s more remarkable: His voice, with its beautifully worn timbre that fills the room, or his Professor Longhair-inspired piano playing, which reinforces the well-documented theory that British guys have an uncanny aptitude for American roots music. But then he dons a Stratocaster—guitar was his first instrument—and all bets are off. The tune is the bandleader’s funk-soaked arrangement of Ray Charles’ “I Don’t Need No Doctor,” originally recorded with John Mayer for That’s What I Say (Verve), Scofield’s Charles tribute disc from 2005. Cleary and Scofield exchange fiery blues runs and lock horns on harmonized bends, with joyously cathartic results. “He plays his ass off on guitar,” laughs Scofield. The Charles cover, mixed among songs by gospel stalwarts like Dorothy Love Coates and Thomas A. Dorsey, points up how few degrees of separation exist between sacred and secular styles of African-American music. As Cleary, who has minimal experience performing traditional gospel, puts it, “New Orleans music is all rooted in gospel music. If you listen to old New Orleans R&B tunes, the chord progressions and the arrangements are not that different. It’s just the lyrics that are different. And it’s always been that way, whether it was Sam Cooke—or Ray Charles. They’d move from the gospel world to the secular world by singing ‘baby’ instead of ‘God.’ “If you’re a musician in New Orleans, whether or not you go to church, gospel is a close cousin of what you do,” he continues. “And New Orleans piano is gospel piano, basically. There are other elements too, but that’s one of the fundamentals. I just play what I play and sit back and enjoy listening to what John puts on top, which is always a surprise.” As George Porter Jr. points out, the contemporary gospel genre is remarkably solvent: “The gospel churches sell far more records than any performing artist in the state [of Louisiana],” he says. Like modern country music, another genre able to remain reasonably healthy while the record industry crumbles, gospel has maintained ties to its core demographic while stylistically adapting to pop. Scofield is doing the opposite, using gospel as a means to a state-of-the-art composite of American roots music. And, as the guitarist says, “We’ve had some real gospel people come hear us that really like it.” The live performances are a bang-up advertisement for the product: An album, as Scofield quips onstage, called Piety Street, featuring the Piety Street Band, and recorded at Piety Street Studios in New Orleans’ Upper Ninth Ward for Emarcy Records. The project, co-produced by Scofield and Piety Street owner (and Scofield’s brother-in-law) Mark Bingham, has its share of Crescent City staples. There’s Cleary, the soul-slick jazz singer John Boutté, drummer Shannon Powell (primarily on tambourine here), and bassist Porter, a founding member of the Meters who can safely be called a New Orleans institution. (He recalls playing 22 gigs at this year’s Jazz Fest.) It was important to Scofield that the road band remain consistent with the touring band, so rather than choose one of his favorite New Orleans-based drummers, none of whom could commit to a tour, the bandleader chose Fataar, whom he became a fan of through Bonnie Raitt’s records. But there’s also a good deal of cultural exchange. Cleary is British, Fataar is South African, and Scofield hails from Connecticut, a state that could be considered Louisiana’s polar opposite in the American cultural landscape. Ramsey, who appears in the touring group but not on the recording, is the only regular player on the contemporary gospel scene. Regardless, deep roots and heavy respect abound—for New Orleans and, perhaps even more so, for the intertwining musics that bubble up from the wellspring of the American South. As Fataar says, “I don’t think it’s any secret that John is mad crazy about R&B.” The rest of this article may be found in the October 2009 issue of JazzTImes, on sale at newsstands or as back issue at jazztimes.com</> true

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2009-10-02T12:06:37-04:00

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25095

175

true

2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Postbop, fusion, jazz-funk, jam-bands and ... gospel? How the chameleonic guitarist John Scofield felt the spirit in New Orleans.

573

Reinventing the Feel: John Scofield Goes Gospel.

2009-10-08T20:34:20-04:00

4 Julian Lage drops a lot of names. There was the time, for example, when Carlos Santana invited his fellow guitarist onstage, and the recording session with David Grisman, and the run as a core member of Gary Burton’s band. Impressive credentials for any musician, but the hook is that Lage notched off these accomplishments at ages 8, 11 and 16, respectively. At 8—three years after he first picked up a guitar—Lage was the subject of a documentary film (appropriately titled Jules at Eight), in which the already gifted young axman nonchalantly cited Coltrane and Wes Montgomery as his preferred listening. At 12 he appeared both on the annual Grammy telecast and at the San Francisco Jazz Festival. So the word “prodigy” invariably comes up quickly in any conversation with Lage, and it’s a tag he neither shrugs off nor exploits—there’s no sense of bigheadedness as he unfurls his remarkable tale; it’s just an unavoidable chapter in his bio, and he’s cool with it. But right now all that backstory just serves as a lead-in to discussing Sounding Point (Emarcy), Lage’s stunning debut album. “It’s been a long time coming,” he says, fully aware of what that sounds like from a 21-year-old. “It’s cool being a sideman but you’re really judged on your own merits.” Lage uses the occasion of his first set as a leader to display not only his considerable acoustic guitar technique, but also his diversity and range. In 13 (mostly) original compositions, he slips comfortably from sweet and reflective to on-the-edge audacious. Two tracks are solo improvisations Lage recorded on the session’s final day. Three are trio pieces featuring the ubiquitous banjoist Béla Fleck and mandolin dynamo Chris Thile, a fellow prodigy best known as part of progressive bluegrassers Nickel Creek. Two tracks, including a cover of Miles’ “All Blues,” are duets with pianist Taylor Eigsti, who also began performing professionally in childhood. The rest utilize all or part of a quintet that also includes saxophonist Ben Roseth, celloist Aristides Rivas, bassist Jorge Roeder and percussionist Tupac Mantilla. “I had offers to make a record before, but I was waiting for a time when everything coalesced,” says Lage. “Musically I wanted to have the compositions. I was set on having a band that could tour. And I didn’t want to make a record when I was living at home, in California, in school. Because it’s not just the record, it’s the life that goes with it. Also, I wanted to be really clear. I know I could have done a straightahead jazz record, or several things, but I felt that I had something else brewing inside me. I couldn’t expect other people to jump onboard until I was clear. About two years ago I decided I was ready.” Lage began work on Sounding Point after moving from northern California, where he grew up, to Boston. He went there to attend the Berklee College of Music, only to quickly discover that there weren’t enough hours in the day to be a full-time student and a working musician. Fortunately, the school was able to offer Lage a special program that allowed him to take only the courses he wanted while leaving him enough space to craft his songwriting and his album. With Steven Epstein producing and Richard King engineering, Sounding Point came together while Lage worked toward his degree. The decision to showcase the various aspects of Lage’s musical personality was deliberate. Building the group tracks around a cello-saxophone mix, he says, “was tricky because I didn’t want to put in a cello for cello’s sake. I wanted saxophone and cello to create a hybrid harmonic. That adds a dynamic that I can’t do on the guitar at all. It was a process of discovery. As we began playing together we realized we were going for something different than what we had done before, more like a chamber group.” Similarly, the pairings with Fleck and Thile, and the duets with Eigsti, suggested more unusual textures than usually found on jazz-guitar recordings. “As soon as you see banjo, mandolin and guitar it offers you something that’s so vast and so different, and we worked well together,” says Lage. “Béla I’ve worked with since I was 12 or 13, and I wanted Thile because I admire him tremendously. He’s one of the greatest musical minds I’ve ever come across. We can bridge anything. The solo guitar pieces, meanwhile, connect everything. I wanted every song to be a different theme. By the end I don’t think you’re exhausted because you’ve been given pushes and pulls. I’d love for people to feel somewhat different than they did before they heard it. And this is only one hour, a day in the life kind of thing. There’s a lot more to come. I’m counting on it. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.” true

10422

2009-10-03T13:13:59-04:00

false

25114

175

true

2009-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

A prodigy becomes an artist on Sounding Point, guitarist Julian Lage’s stunning solo debut.

Julian Lage: Ahead of the Curve

2009-10-08T20:36:49-04:00

4 Francisco Mela was startled when Joe Lovano broached his idea for a new quintet. Mela had been the wiry, Cuban-born drummer in the saxophonist’s trio (with bassist Esperanza Spalding) for several years, a trio that sometimes became a quartet with the addition of pianist James Weidman. But now the rotund, goateed Lovano, the beatnik Buddha of Cleveland, wanted to form a quintet with a second drummer, and not a conga drummer or a timbales drummer but a second trap-set player, Otis Brown III. “The first day he called me about playing in a band with two drummers, I thought he wasn’t happy with me,” Mela recalls. “I said, ‘Joe, you don’t have to hire two drummers; just hire the drummer you want.’ He said, ‘No, Mela, this is a concept I’ve had for years, and now I want to try it.’ Later I heard that the same thing had happened with Otis; he said, ‘No, Joe, just hire the drummer you want.’ Both of us were so far behind what Joe was thinking.” “Of course they were nervous,” Lovano says with a chuckle. “How many drummers have played in situations with other drummers? On [2001’s] Flights of Fancy, my second trio recording for Blue Note, I used Idris Muhammad and Joey Baron on different tracks. Idris was in my regular trio, but I had a week at the Vanguard, and I decided to show various aspects of my record, so I brought Joey into it. Idris said, ‘Why do you want another drummer? You have me.’ I told him, ‘I don’t want another drummer; I want Joey Baron—he just happens to play drums.’ “It was one of the most magical weeks I ever had at the Vanguard, because Idris swings so hard and Joey sings on the drums. That planted the idea in my head of using two drummers in the same band. On [2002’s] Viva Caruso, I had three trap sets and a percussionist on some tracks; each person had a specific role. But that was the studio. I wanted to form a touring quintet that was piano, bass, two drummers and myself. I felt that format had not been explored before in a working band.” Lovano calls his new quintet with Mela, Spalding, Weidman and Brown “Us Five,” and in May they released their first album together, Folk Art (Blue Note). It is also the first album for which Lovano composed all the material, and his blossoming as a writer is evidenced by the dramatic encounters he sets up for various subsets of his band, along with the juicy themes he gives them to chew on. The nine Lovano originals are built around constant conversation, sometimes among all five players but just as often among selected duos and trios. “I’m trying to write tunes that will be vehicles for improvising,” he says. And because there are two drummers in the band, there is a percussive push in almost every encounter. “YOU GET ALL THESE incredible different colors,” Spalding says, “because we play all these different formations. Joe’s always working with different densities. For instance, ‘Us Five’ starts with all of us, but there’ll be different rhythm sections behind different solos. So Joe might solo with Mela and me or as a duo with James; I might play a bass solo with the two drummers or James might solo with Otis and Mela. So as a listener you hear different combinations. It’s as if there are 20 different bands.” “Having a group with that kind of form inspires a lot of new music,” Lovano confirms. “First of all, I not only have one quintet, but I also have four quartets, 10 trios, nine duets and five unaccompanied voices, so there are so many possibilities. And if you have two drummers, it’s easier to emphasize rhythm in nearly every combination.” You can hear this on the album’s title track. Lovano announces the jaunty, four-bar march figure, an original line but one with echoes of Sonny Rollins, Georges Bizet and carnival parades. After just one pass he leaves the theme to Weidman and introduces a second motif, one he describes as “a little folk song I created to play over that march, like a nursery rhyme.” From these two themes springs his solo on the straight alto, and he plays between the accents as if he were the Thelonious Monk of the saxophone. Because the themes borrow so blatantly from our shared, folk imagination, Lovano can mess with them without us ever forgetting what he’s changing. Just as Lovano and Weidman trade off the responsibilities for handling the theme and variation, so do Mela and Brown: One will groove while the other decorates, and then they’ll trade. Spalding is free to float, picking up one drummer’s feel one moment and the other’s the next. The rest of this article may be found in the August/September 2009 issue of JazzTImes, on sale at newsstands or as back issue at jazztimes.com true

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2009-10-08T16:49:36-04:00

false

25164

176

true

2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

After decades of acclaimed collaborations with peers and mentors, Joe Lovano introduces a powerhouse quintet featuring youthful talent—and two drummers.

Joe Lovano: Party of Five

2009-10-08T17:05:06-04:00

4 In the split second that he saw his left index and middle finger dangling, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner must’ve thought his very promising career had ended. “I work in my house with power saws and I was cutting wood for the fireplace,” he explains. “Sometimes the saw takes the wood into it … it’s just very powerful. And my hand went with the wood. The saw cut the tendons and nerves as well. It didn’t actually hit the bone but it was right there, so it severed them completely.” The first doctor he saw at the emergency room on Nov. 5 of last year was somewhat dubious about the prospect of Turner regaining the use of his fingers. An orthopedic surgeon had a more optimistic prognosis—six to eight months and he’d be back in the saddle again. “I didn’t touch the sax for two months after the surgery,” says Turner. “For the first month I did physical therapy twice a week, then once a week for the second month. I did some acupuncture, too. And I had to do certain exercises for the first three months, every two hours, all day. After two months I started fingering the sax five minutes every few days and three months after surgery I began practicing maybe two hours every few days.” By the end of February, less than four months after his surgery, Turner was back on the bandstand, performing at the Village Vanguard in pianist Edward Simon’s quartet. The following month he played a weeklong engagement at Birdland with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava, pianist Stefano Bollani, bassist Ben Street and drummer Paul Motian, in support of Rava’s new CD, New York Days (ECM). And in early April, Turner joined the members of his freewheeling collective Fly (bassist Larry Grenadier and drummer Jeff Ballard) for a weeklong engagement at Jazz Standard to celebrate the release of their extraordinary ECM debut, Sky & Country. During all these gigs, Turner could be seen alternately flexing his fingers and making a fist whenever he wasn’t playing. “I have to keep them going because they get stiff,” he explains. “I have to keep them limber so they work.” While he appeared to play with the same effortless fluidity, daring intervallic leaps and remarkable command of the altissimo register that have been Turner signatures since his 1998 self-titled debut for Warner Bros., he is not yet back in peak playing form. The same single-minded determination that allowed Turner to very thoughtfully and methodically forge his own unique vocabulary on the instrument—one that owes more to Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano than to earlier towering influences John Coltrane and Joe Henderson—has been a key to his comeback. “It’s never going to be all the way back,” he says of his injured left hand. “I’m not going to be able to make a full fist, but I’m definitely on the road to recovery and it gets better and my hand gets stronger every day. My technique is a lot more specific now. I don’t have the leeway that I used to. There are certain things I have to do; otherwise, I can’t play certain passages. So I have to learn how to play flat-fingered. But it’s OK. It makes it even more intense.” Both Sky & Country and Rava’s New York Days were recorded around the same time last year (February), at the same studio (Avatar in Manhattan), using the same engineer (James Farber). Both ECM projects were, of course, produced by Manfred Eicher, yet they have distinctly different sonic characteristics. The Rava recording utilizes a lot more reverb in the mix than the Fly recording, though Sky & Country is actually a “wetter” mix than Fly’s previous outing, 2004’s self-titled debut on Savoy Jazz. As drummer Ballard notes, “The presence of the drums is really in your face on the new one. If you compare it to our first record it doesn’t sound anything like it at all. There’s a very strong, very robust sound to the whole record. It’s close and you hear detail, but with the reverb it kind of spreads a little bit more than the first record.” On Ballard’s kinetic “Lady B” and his funk-laden title track, Turner’s evocative “Anandananda” and long-form composition “Super Sister,” or Grenadier’s spacious meditation “CJ” and his swinging “Transfigured,” the freewheeling collective demonstrates uncanny chemistry. Onstage together at Jazz Standard, whether they were running down the elegant and restrained “Fly Mr. Freakjar” or burning their way through John Coltrane’s “Satellite” (a blistering romp based on “How High the Moon”), their approach was intimate and conversational from bar to bar. And their roles shifted easily from tune to tune. “There’s some pieces where I play just melodies on the drums and then Larry plays more of a function of the rhythmic element,” says Ballard. “And Mark can assume that role of comping, as he did on the gig the other night behind my drum solo on ‘Satellite,’ just offering a bit of a push in there. The moment was calling for that and he answered.” “On certain tunes, the bass is supplying the more fundamental rhythmic thing and then Jeff is coloring against it,” adds Grenadier. “The focus is always shifting so that the person who is commandeering any particular aspect of the music is always moving around the band.” They’ve had quite a lot of time to develop their musical relationships. “Jeff and I probably first played together in 1982 at a Jamey Aebersold camp,” says Grenadier. “And then Mark and I first played together in 1984 at a California All-State Jazz Band concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival. So we definitely have a long history.” The first time all three played together was at a 1991 jam session at the West Side loft where Grenadier and Ballard were living. “Larry knew Mark from Berklee,” recalls Ballard, “and so he asked him to come by and play. And it clicked right away.” The first time the trio recorded together was a track for a 2000 compilation album called Originations, executive produced by Chick Corea to showcase the individual members of his Origin octet. Ballard had been the drummer of Origin since joining in 1997, and for this session (the track “Beat Street”) he recruited Turner and Grenadier and billed it as the Jeff Ballard Trio. Over the years there have been working situations where two of the three members of Fly might overlap in one band. Ballard and Turner, for instance, played together in Guillermo Klein’s Los Guachos in the late ’90s and later put in several years together in guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band. Says Ballard of Turner, “When I first heard Mark play long ago he was absorbing everything piece by piece, and really not sounding like himself at all. At first he sounded like Trane, then he sounded just like Joe Henderson. And then, suddenly—bam!—he started coming out. He and Kurt developed this great language together and it was really something different.” Says Turner, “At a certain point I just decided there were certain things I need to do. And it wasn’t so much, ‘I need to find myself.’ I just wanted to have more fun with music and learn how to improvise. I had acquired all this other vocabulary from other people—Trane and Joe Henderson—and it wasn’t fun anymore. So I just went on this search to figure out how can I really learn to truly improvise and I just devised all these different ways to practice. I started to figure out what are the nuts and bolts of music and I came up with some techniques of my own. And eventually it came out to be whatever it is I am now.” true

2009-10-08T16:58:04-04:00

false

25165

176

true

2009-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

After a potentially career-ending accident, saxophonist Mark Turner returns with Fly

Mark Turner: Road to Recovery

2009-10-21T10:03:04-04:00

4 Just when you thought the jazz-remix craze had disappeared, out comes RE: Generations (Capitol), a delightful new project on which such contemporary artists as Brazilian Girls, Nas and Just Blaze pay tribute to the incomparable Nat “King” Cole. After high-profile discs like the Verve/Remixed series and Blue Note Revisited that found top-notch electronica and hip-hop producers refurbishing vintage jazz for DJ culture, it’s easy to dismiss RE: Generations as merely jumping on a bandwagon. Nat “King” Cole’s oldest daughter, Carole Cole, who’s the main producer for the project, sees it differently. “This started from a very creative place,” she says. “I have a lot of feelings about the different [jazz] remixes that have been done. Some have been great and some weren’t as greatly realized.” Cole’s two sons, Sage and Harley, brought up the concept for a Nat “King” Cole remix project two years ago. After the idea “marinated” for a while, Cole brought in associate producer Mark Van Wye and executive producer Michelangelo L’Acqua, who helped her draw up a wish list of contemporary producers for the project. “The three of us have a pretty eclectic appreciation for music, so there were no boundaries really set in terms of genre,” she says. Cole says that they gave the interpreters a lot of creative autonomy. “The only direction we really gave them was to keep Nat’s vocals central to the track. But they had all the room to rearrange and reconstruct as they saw fit,” she explains. “I did have one concern initially and that was that some of the artists would be perhaps too respectful. I didn’t want them to feel hampered; I wanted them to feel as if Nat was in the studio with them. I discovered over the years that Dad was really an agent of change; he was so wide open to all genres of music and all kinds of experimentation.” Indeed, RE: Generations represents various idioms within the expansive DJ culture spectrum, ranging from the Roots’ velvet-gloved yet cunning hip-hop treatment of “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home” and Damian and Stephen Marley’s dubbed-out dancehall rendition of “Calypso Blues” to Amp Fiddler’s spacey Detroit funk retooling of “Any Time, Any Day, Anywhere” and L’Acqua and Bebel Gilberto’s idyllic take on “Brazilian Love Song.” Rock, Latin, R&B and pop also surface. Even Natalie Cole joins in with a feisty collaboration with hip-pop producer will.i.am on “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” The disc’s stylistic breadth plays into Cole’s legacy as one of the more versatile figures in 20th-century American music, who explored big band, the jazz trio, pop, bossa nova and Latin music. “Nat ‘King’ Cole was huge in Brazil,” Gilberto attests. “I used to watch him on television when I was supposed to be doing my homework. Just about everyone in Brazil knew who he was.” Cole points out that the contemporary stance on RE: Generations also reverberates strongly with her father’s legacy. “Dad really kept his ear on what was going on around him and didn’t cut them off because of genre or generation,” she recalls. She goes on to explain how lucky she was to have a father who didn’t dismiss the music he and her siblings enjoyed while growing up. “We never had to suffer what I think many other generations had, where their parents said, ‘Ugh! Turn that off! What are you listening to?’ That attitude sort of cuts the line of communication between generations. My idea for this project was that it might inspire a discussion between generations; I think this project can really inspire some exciting dialogue.” Cole says that no dissenting voice has surfaced within her family regarding RE: Generations, but she does recall one uncle, Eddie, struggling to listen to Cee-Lo’s boom-bap take on “Lush Life” with fresh ears. “He said that he couldn’t believe what he was hearing because the music was so familiar to him. He had to wrap his head around ‘Lush Life’ done that way,” she says. When asked if she had to give any of the producers a crash course in Nat’s oeuvre, Cole enthuses that she was astonished at just how much they really knew of her father’s legacy. “These young artists really did their homework; they really recognized that people like my father are the ones that paved the way in many ways for them.” Producer and turntablist Cut Chemist, however, is a bit more humble. He says that after he tweaked “Day In, Day Out,” the project really inspired him to delve deeper into Cole’s catalog. “I really didn’t know that song before they gave it to me,” he says. “But afterwards, I checked out a lot of other music by Nat once I heard all the other contributions on the project.” While the project proved to be a learning experience for some producers such as Cut Chemist, it was equally educational for Carole Cole. “I realized that this generation of young musicians listens to music in a very astute way in their appreciation for arrangements, individual instruments and voicing,” she says. “I think what’s going on in music in some cases now is bringing generations together. Dad always wanted to hear what we were listening to as kids and he always wanted to share his music with us and to get our opinion of it.” true

2009-04-20T10:03:17-04:00

false

24593

174

true

2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

An eclectic group of contemporary artists reinvents Nat “King” Cole classics

An eclectic group of contemporary artists reinvents Cole classics

Nat King Cole: Getting Their Kicks

2009-09-16T12:47:37-04:00

4 Think of John Zorn, the American composer, alto saxophonist and conceptualist, as a juggler. Zorn keeps aloft a plethora of radically different projects while also heading up his own label (Tzadik) and acting as artistic director at the Stone, his own cutting-edge performance venue in Manhattan’s East Village. A restlessly creative spirit with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy, Zorn is, at age 55, experiencing unprecedented productivity in a career that dates back to the mid-’70s, when he began experimenting with like-minded improvisers and musical renegades on Manhattan’s Lower East Side who, together, forged an alternative movement that would be identified by critics as the “downtown” scene. “I feel like things are really flowing now, like I’ve hit kind of a peak and I’m riding it,” confessed Zorn during an interview at the Ukrainian restaurant Veselka, a favorite East Village haunt for artists, thinkers and assorted bohemians. “I’m riding the wave and the wave is taking me further. People have told me that with Virgos, your life is like a crescendo. It begins and it slowly gets better and better and better. What better life to have?” On a Tuesday morning in early February I met Zorn at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Mark’s Church in the East Village for a dress rehearsal of “Astronome: A Night at the Opera,” his audacious and powerful new musical/theater collaboration with renowned playwright and avant-garde theater pioneer Richard Foreman. A mind-boggling visual explosion featuring a relentless flood of psychedelic, dreamlike imagery and sacred Jewish symbolism, it is fueled by the unbelievably intense soundtrack of Zorn’s Astronome, performed by his extreme hardcore noise trio Moonchild (Joey Baron on drums, Trevor Dunn on fuzz bass and Mike Patton on wordless banshee-scream vocals). The music is so loud and intense, in fact, that warnings are announced before each performance at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, along with offers of free earplugs for the faint of heart. (The production was filmed for future DVD release which will be available on Zorn’s label Web site, www.tzadik.com). That Friday night I attended the U.S. premiere of Zorn’s new Masada sextet, an expanded edition of his long-running Masada quartet (Zorn on alto sax, Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg Cohen on bass, Joey Baron on drums), augmented by outstanding pianist Uri Caine and Brazilian percussionist Cyro Baptista. This group, which combines elements of the classic Ornette Coleman quartet with the Eastern European flavor of traditional klezmer music and Jewish sacred music, is undeniably in the jazz camp, albeit traveling on its own unique tributary off the mainstream. Their invigorating sextet set at the Abrons Arts Center on the Lower East Side, marked by some stellar individual soloing and an uncanny group-think, represented a new level for this band that Zorn formed 15 years ago. Caine brought aspects of both Cecil Taylor and Bud Powell to the table while Baptista colored the proceedings in typically wacky and intuitive ways, resulting in a decided raising of the bar over all other previous Masada performances. The following night, Saturday, Zorn debuted new material with his surprisingly accessible group the Dreamers (Kenny Wollesen on vibes, Marc Ribot on guitar, Baron on drums, Dunn on bass, Jamie Saft on organ and piano). While Moonchild may be in the ultra-extreme zone and Masada may come across as challenging to the uninitiated, the music of the Dreamers is relaxed, engaging and downright delightful. A blend of pop, exotica, funk, surf rock, minimalism and world music crafted as little three-minute melodic gems, it is the yin to Masada’s yang. It’s hard to imagine that the music I witnessed on these three separate occasions over the span of a week was conceived by the same mind. And yet, it’s only the tip of the iceberg for the remarkably prolific Zorn. As the head of Tzadik (since 1995), he also shepherds new bands onto the label, providing them an outlet and nurturing them under the auspices of his Radical Jewish Culture series, Film Music series, New Japanese series, Oracle Series (promoting women in experimental music), Key series (promoting notable avant-garde musicians and projects) and Lunatic Fringe series (promoting music and musicians operating outside of the broad categories offered by other series). And then there is Zorn’s own incredibly rich, pre-Tzadik legacy: an extensive discography of well over 100 recordings as a composer of string trios and string quartets, film scores, game theory pieces, chamber pieces, classical works and meditations on Jewish mysticism, British occultist Aleister Crowley and pulp-fiction author Mickey Spillane (1987’s Spillane), as well as tributes to figures like Ennio Morricone (1986’s The Big Gundown) and projects as a leader with the bands Naked City, Painkiller and Spy vs. Spy (which performed hardcore renditions of Ornette Coleman compositions). Some of Zorn’s jazziest playing on record can be heard on such recordings as 1986’s Voodoo by the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet, 1988’s News for Lulu and 1992’s More News for Lulu (featuring interpretations of tunes by Kenny Dorham, Sonny Clark, Freddie Redd and Hank Mobley), as well as recordings with the great early ’60s Blue Note organist Big John Patton. He also makes a cameo appearance alongside his all-time alto sax hero Lee Konitz on the 1995 set The Colossal Saxophone Sessions, playing a version of Wayne Shorter’s “Devil’s Island.” In 2006, Zorn received a MacArthur Fellowship grant (a five-year grant of $500,000 to “individuals who show exceptional creativity in their work and the prospect for still more in the future”). And in 2007 he was the recipient of Columbia University’s William Schuman Award, an honor given “to recognize the lifetime achievement of an American composer whose works have been widely performed and generally acknowledged to be of lasting significance.” He was more than deserving on both counts. Zorn has also edited a series of books titled Arcana: Musicians on Music, which contain essays by various colleagues including Derek Bailey, George Lewis, Bill Laswell, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, Nels Cline, Fred Frith, Wayne Horvitz, Marty Ehrlich, Vijay Iyer, Elliott Sharp and dozens more. The fourth Arcana book is due out this spring, as is a new recording by the Dreamers, their third on Tzadik. Notoriously leery of interviews, Zorn nevertheless granted this sit-down and subsequent photo shoot for JazzTimes. He was unusually forthcoming and positively bubbling over in anticipation of the opening of “Astronome: A Night at the Opera,” which, as of our interview, was scheduled to run through April 5. I spoke with Zorn a few days after his gig with the Dreamers at the Abrons Art Center. JazzTimes: Your output over the past 30 years is staggering. Well, I’ve been busy. I guess it’s really hard to stay current with what I do because I put out like five, eight, 10 CDs a year. Most people who try to write about what I do just don’t have any sense of the scope and the range. And even if they were given a pile of 25 CDs or something, a lot of them just aren’t equipped to deal with something that’s as far-ranging as the Crowley String Quartet performing “Necronomicon” on the Magick CD and then to what you saw with Richard Foreman, the Astronome project, really heavy rock, to jazz-based music with people like Dave Douglas and Joey Baron, to the film scores to the Dreamers and on and on. There’s a lot of different music and unless you’re open to all that and acquainted with it in the first place, it’s just going to go in one ear and out the other. JazzTimes: I read somewhere that this is all the result of what you call “an incredibly short attention span.” Well, that’s just some 1980s hype where Nonesuch Records was attempting to sell me as some kind of postmodern phenomenon. It’s their job to sell product, and in order to sell product they need to market you in a certain way. But I don’t think that that is a very intelligent analysis of why someone likes a lot of different kinds of music. It’s not a matter of having a short attention span, it’s a matter of living in today’s world and being a curious, creative, open-minded, intelligent individual who appreciates greatness for its own sake without putting it into any kind of academic or cultural box. JazzTimes: And what you bring to it is this incredibly intense focus, which is a rare commodity these days. That’s who I am. For instance, I just got off the phone with the census bureau and they asked me how many hours do I work in a week. And my answer, basically, was I work 24 hours a day. Even when I’m sleeping I’m working. I’m talking with you, I’m working. I get up first thing in the morning, the computer goes on, I’m answering e-mails. I go out to lunch, I have a discussion with someone, it’s about music, it’s about art. I go to a museum. Even in the cab I’m on the phone doing business. I’m always working. My life is making work. That’s why I’m here. People are surprised that it’s possible to get as much work done as I do. It’s very simple. I choose to work. I don’t go on a vacation. I’m not interested in that. JazzTimes: I found it very revealing the other day when we were sharing a cab ride and I made some reference to Seinfeld. Right. I’ve never even seen it. JazzTimes: And I remember thinking when I said that, “He probably doesn’t even have a TV.” Right. Well, this is actually not so difficult to understand. The world is filled with distractions, and we understand why it’s good for the government, especially in an administration like Bush’s, to bamboozle people and keep them distracted from getting together and saying, “Wait a minute! What is going on here?!” I choose not to be distracted. I figured out, I guess sometime in the past 20 or 30 years, exactly what it was that was very distracting about our society and what was stopping me from making work. And I managed in a very simple way to cut that out. I’m not sticking my head in the sand; I’m just eliminating anything that gets in the way of making work. That means a lot of sacrificing, even to the extent of, you know, having a family. You have kids, you have to devote half your life to your children to be a correct parent. I can’t do that. I am devoted to my work. So my children are the compositions, the records, the performances. And my family? That’s the musical community. And that’s why it’s not an unusual thing for me to create the Stone or create Tzadik. That’s what a father would do to put clothes on the back of their children or make sure they get to a good school or protect them if they’re being bullied. I’m here to help the community that nurtured me. And that’s why no TV; that’s why I don’t read magazines or newspapers. I focus on the art that I’m doing. That’s my gift for the world; that’s why I’m on the planet. I’m not a hard-liner and I understand how difficult it is to survive in this world, but at the same time I think the reason I created Tzadik, the reason that the Stone had to happen, the reason that these Arcana books are coming out, the reason that I continue to create work to the extent that I do, is because I created my own avenue. JazzTimes: I got the impression from seeing the Dreamers the other night that you’re a guitar maven in a certain way because you seemed to take such great delight in some of Marc Ribot’s slashing guitar solos. Well, I’ve worked with some amazing guitar players in my time: Fred Frith, Arto Lindsay, Bob Quine, Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser, Bill Frisell, Marc Ribot. Right there is kind of like a history of experimental guitar in the 20th century. Those are great names; these are really amazing players. And I’ve always had a very close relationship with guitar players. JazzTimes: Did you ever have a personal connection to guitar? Did you ever play the instrument yourself? Yeah, I used to play it when I was a kid, sure. We all played guitar. I played bass in a surf band. I learned Beatles, Stones and Beach Boys tunes on guitar. I was really into surf rock when I was like 10 years old. So sure, I played guitar, bass and all like that. And in a way, the guitar is what the violin was in the 18th-19th century. It is the voice of the people; it’s a very important instrument. If you’re going to be a composer today you have to understand not just what the guitar can do but what the electric guitar can do, because that is one of the new instruments of the 20th century, along with the drum set and the electric organ and the saxophone, and now, the turntable. These are new instruments and you need to include them in your language. It’s here, it’s available. If Mozart were alive today, believe me, he’d be incorporating all those instruments and writing for them. And he would also be listening to all this different music that is around. It’s not an unusual thing for a creative person to be interested in creativity. People who grew up at the time that I did, in the ’60s, we loved all different musics. We loved rock, we loved jazz, we loved classical, we loved world music. We had a hunger for anything new. We’d make little mix tapes on cassette that had all these different styles of music. That was like a very special thing. We’d play them at parties. Now, that’s normal, that’s the iPod shuffle. Everybody listens that way now. So in that sense, we have really succeeded. It’s like our generation, our kind of impetus of loving all these different things, that is kind of the new way to listen to music. JazzTimes: It’s true. And one thing that I have to say, which is interesting on kind of a socio-cultural level of how this music has been misunderstood-understood, marginalized-glorified, this is a new music. There is a music that is kind of post-’60s and that music is a very pluralistic music, a music that incorporates and accepts all these different influences. These people that we’re talking about, whether it’s Fred Frith, Marc Ribot, Wayne Horvitz or Uri Caine, these are people that love all kinds of music and listen to all kinds of music. And they had access to all kinds of music and created something with that, with all their loves. And it’s a new music. Maybe Uri’s a little more in the jazz camp coming out of Philly with his background, maybe Fred Frith is a little more in the rock-folk camp. Everybody has different roots in different places. Ultimately, I thought of myself as more of a classical musician who then got involved with different kinds of players. But the music is not jazz music, it’s not classical music, it’s not rock music. It’s a new kind of music that was loved by people like yourself and other writers who were on that scene in the late ’70s-early ‘80s. You loved this music, you were stimulated by it, it said something to you because it came from your experience. But where can you write about this music that you love? What are the outlets? The only outlets were jazz magazines. Even though it didn’t belong in that tradition or in that format, it was the only format that there was. So I feel like that created a deep misunderstanding in what this music is. People started judging this new music with the standards of jazz, with the definitions of what jazz is and isn’t, because stories about it appeared in jazz magazines. And now I’ll do a gig at the Marciac Jazz Festival and I’ll get offstage and Wynton Marsalis will say, “That’s not jazz.” And I’ll say, “You’re right! But this is the only gig I’ve got, man. Give me another festival and I’ll play there.” JazzTimes: Well, he couldn’t possibly have said that about Masada. Actually, he said it about electric Masada, which, admittedly, is pretty out there. It has elements of [my game piece] “Cobra” in it, it has elements of my conduction kind of stuff. Plus, Ribot and Saft really take it to a little more of a rock area, and there are always some structural elements of classical in there. Some people want to try and define it and say it’s related to Third Stream. JazzTimes: What you’ve created with Tzadik is a label identity that is like ECM or Blue Note, Prestige, Windham Hill, where if there were any record stores left, Tzadik would have its own bin. Well, that’s a thought. And a lot of record stores do have a Tzadik bin, which is kind of one way to do it. We have almost 450 records on our label already and there has not been one dedicated article or feature in any United States magazine or newspaper on this label. Is that incredible? And of course the answer is simple: We don’t send review copies out, we don’t play the game, we don’t kiss ass, we don’t put ads in newspapers or magazines, and if we don’t scratch their back they’re not going to scratch ours. JazzTimes: And yet you have cultivated this pretty sizable audience around this label. Some of our records sell 40-50,000 copies. And it’s a worldwide audience. Of course, some sell 500 copies. But it’s structured in such a way that the ones that sell help the ones that don’t sell. So we manage to stay afloat in kind of a socialist paradigm. JazzTimes: Bruce Lundvall has the same scenario happening at Blue Note, where the successful million-sellers like Norah Jones help the more esoteric projects. He continues to do what he believes in and it works in the marketplace. I was never a believer in applying for grants. I don’t like to put my hand out to somebody and say, “Please help me.” I just went and did what I did and I managed to survive in the marketplace. I understand how some people can’t do that and need the grant process, but I find the grant process itself is so demeaning. Immediately, it’s like you’re asking daddy for a handout, you’re being judged by people who have no right to judge you, and if you do get the grant it’s usually half the money you asked for two years too late. By that time, you’re already onto something else. I’ve seen artists on Tzadik who tried to get grant proposals through to make a more ambitious record, and I’ve seen new records get completely derailed for five years. In one case, I said to an artist, “Look, I’ll give you a little extra money. Let’s find a way to do it just on our own.” And he said, “No, I want to do it right, I want this extra money. Let me wait.” And I said, “Well, what if you don’t get the grant?” Five years later we’re still waiting. And the fact is, he’s already on to another thing. JazzTimes: What is the average budget for the records you do on Tzadik? At first it was just always $5,000; now we’ve gotten a little more flexible with it. Now if someone breaks even on their first record we’ll give them $6,000. If they break even on their second record we’ll give them maybe $7,500. If they break even on their third record, we’ll up the ante a little bit. But if their first album doesn’t break even we either reduce the budget or say, “Let’s wait until this one sells more and then we’ll do a second record.” But we try to be very economical in the way we work because we can’t afford not to. The music we’re making is meant for the world; it’s meant for everybody to enjoy. But I’ve learned that some projects that I do, like the Dreamers, will do very well. We’ll sell 20-30 thousand copies of that because it’s popular music that people can really enjoy. But if I’m going to do an esoteric project about Aleister Crowley with the “Necronomicon” string quartet or something that’s really more challenging, which I’m compelled to do and these artists are compelled to do and the world needs, I’m not so naive as to think that that’s going to sell 30,000 copies. With a younger unknown artist, something esoteric like that will sell 500 or 1,000. With me, maybe it’ll sell 5,000, but it’s not going to sell 30,000. And that doesn’t break my heart anymore because ultimately this music is for the few. It’s meant for everybody, I want everybody to love it and enjoy it as much as I do, but I can see that that’s just not possible. JazzTimes: So business is good with Tzadik? As the music industry crumbles before our eyes and major companies are now going belly-up and people aren’t buying CDs, Tzadik is standing like a fucking oak! We have very modest sales, we break even every year ... maybe make a little, lose a little, but we basically break even every year. So we’re still standing here and sales are pretty consistent. We did really well this past year. People that believe in this music purchase this music. JazzTimes: Let’s talk about the Dreamers. I was delightfully surprised by this group. Where is this charming music coming from? Well, it comes from my love for music that does delight and charm. I am a big fan of Les Baxter, Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, the pioneers of exotica. I’ve been a fan of that music since I was young. It was part of my upbringing; it’s there. You can hear elements of it here and there in my music over time. You hear it in Bar Kokhba; even in things like Godard and Spillane there are moments that sound like that. This Dreamers project, I think, was bringing together all of these beautiful musics that I love, from world music to surf music to exotica music to different kinds of funk and blues. I put all of these things together and created something that, for me, was meant to charm and delight. JazzTimes: And you did it within these three-minute little gems of melody. Yeah, little instrumental gems. You and I grew up at a time when there were instrumental hits. Henry Mancini, Jack Nitzsche, Miklós Rózsa—they did film scores but they also had hits that were played on the radio. But the concept of the instrumental hit has almost completely disappeared because greedy record executives understand that vocal music is going to sell five times or 10 times more than instrumental music. That’s just the way it is. JazzTimes: I think the Beatles phenomenon made people in the industry go a bit crazy. They saw the money that could be made with vocal groups. It did indeed. And I don’t know whether the Beatles themselves are responsible for the disappearance of instrumental music. I wouldn’t put it that way. Because at that time, “The ‘In’ Crowd” was an enormous instrumental hit for Ramsey Lewis, Max Steiner’s “Theme From a Summer Place” was enormous. There were tons of great instrumental hits back then. Maurice Jarre’s “Lara’s Theme” from Dr. Zhivago was a hit, “Telstar” by the surf band the Tornados was an enormous hit in 1962. JazzTimes: Al Hirt, Duane Eddy and Herb Alpert all had instrumental hits in the early ’60s. Yeah! This was music that was backed by record companies, promoted by record companies, who were just trying to make some money. And they managed to make money with that music. And were fine with it. Now they’re just not gonna waste their time with it when they can make so much more money with a vocal performance. So instrumental music doesn’t have the same impact on our culture that it used to, and I’m sorry about that. It still has an impact on me, though. I devote my life to instrumental music and the Dreamers is just another form of instrumental music. JazzTimes: You mentioned Martin Denny and some others as having an impact on you growing up. What about Burt Bacharach? Of course! Most of what he did was vocal but harmonically he was way advanced, and also in terms of time signatures, he was always experimenting. And he had a few instrumental pieces that were absolutely wonderful that I love. Sure, Bacharach is absolutely an influence. There are so many influences in the Dreamers. And again, each piece is kind of a unique little thing, its own little world. JazzTimes: I thought I may have also heard some MJQ and Dave Brubeck influences in there too. Yeah, Ramsey Lewis and Booker T & the MGs, the Meters. These were all amazing instrumental bands. You can hear some of that influence in there as well. So you know, the Dreamers is a charming project of beautiful music. And it’s been very successful. It’s a kind of very beautiful world that I hadn’t dealt with before, but elements of “Cobra” or Electric Masada are still in there. JazzTimes: The sound of the Dreamers is engaging rather than challenging, like Masada. You don’t always have to challenge the audience. Sometimes you want to challenge the musicians to keep them engaged in what you’re doing. And that’s something that’s always been at the forefront of my modus operandi. I don’t just write music, I write music for musicians to play. I want them to be psyched about what they play. I want them to be engaged, because if they’re bored, the audience is going to be bored. I want them to be on the edge, to be surprised, to be delighted. I want to have fun up there. Ultimately, it’s all about love—if we love each other and we love what we’re doing, some of that love is going to go into the audience. JazzTimes: You have already released several volumes of Masada CDs since 1994, but you’ve really taken it to another level with this new sextet edition of the group. I think you’re right. I think that the concert you saw the other night was one of the best concerts we’ve ever done. It’s like the old joke with the Masada quartet: “What was our best gig? It’s the next one.” Because it was always getting better. But I felt like we kind of hit a plateau a little bit with it in 2007 and I said, “Well, maybe the quartet is really done. Maybe we’ve accomplished what we can accomplish. Maybe it’s time to put this to bed.” And then I was asked by the Marciac Jazz Festival to put together a slightly larger group. They asked me what if I added a couple of people to Masada and I said, “I can’t add anybody to the quartet. The quartet is the quartet, that’s what we do.” But then I thought, “Well, if I was going to add someone I would probably ask Uri and Cyro.” So we tried it at Marciac and it was unbelievable. We didn’t even have any rehearsal time. I just passed the charts out and said, “OK, just watch me because I’ll be conducting. Let’s just do it.” And it was one of those magical clicks on the bandstand that sometimes happens. So yeah, this band is taking off again. After 15 years of doing this music, we can still find new things. JazzTimes: And certainly Wynton can identify this new Masada sextet music as jazz. Absolutely. With Uri’s presence, that is clear. It’s the most jazz-sounding thing I’ve ever done. JazzTimes: And that connection to Ornette’s quartet, which comes in and out. It’s in and out. Maybe it’s not there as much as it used to be. I think there’s as much Miles in the approach with Dave and Uri and in the way the group kind of breaks down to a single solo piano once in a while, or trio sections within the context of the group before coming back together. There’s always a lot of surprise there. So, yeah, it is definitely stronger in the jazz tradition with Uri in the band. And I think Uri and Dave have a really strong hookup. They’ve worked on a lot of projects together and Uri has also played in Dave’s quintet, so there’s some magic formula going on there. And then you add Cyro Baptista to the mix, crazy Cyro with all his sounds. I’ve been working with Cyro for 27 years and he never fails to surprise me from night to night. JazzTimes: I remember you guys doing a duet at your former club the Saint back in 1981. There you go! Yeah, man. And this is another thing that I think is important to mention is the longevity of these relationships that I’ve had with musicians. When I find someone to work with, we continue to work together because we believe in the same things and we love doing what we do. If Bill Frisell were still living in New York, I’d be working with him still. But he moved out to the West Coast and it’s just too hard to get together. So it’s been Cyro since ’81, Joey Baron since ’84, Dave Douglas since ’94, Uri more recently, and then you’ve got Ribot, Greg Cohen, Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander, Trevor Dunn, Mike Patton … these are all people that I continue to work with. It’s a tight community; it’s a real community. It’s a community the way we see the bebop community was in the ’50s or the existentialist community was in Paris or the abstract expressionists in the ’40s in New York, which was a community of people that got together, that talked about art, that were inspired by each other and that created a very strong artistic statement that had impact on the society. We’re doing the same thing. We’re living in the same area, we’re meeting all the time outside of musical situations, we’re talking, we’re communicating. This is a real scene in the best definition of that word. It’s creative, it’s inspiring, there’s less competition and more encouragement. Marc Ribot is delighted when I do well. I’m delighted when he does well when he does a project. It’s good for everybody. When Ribot’s onstage, I want him to play his best. I’m not trying to throw banana peels under him to slip so that I can smoke him onstage. That’s not the point. We’re all focused on music and we all want each other to sound as good as we possibly can sound. And when I get people in my projects, I feel like they sound the best that they can sound. They’re killing! And that’s what I want, that’s what I encourage. And that’s what the compositions are meant to do. JazzTimes: You know who you sound like now? Joe Zawinul. He would say the same thing, man. He’d always say, “My band, I put this band together for these guys to be killers!” That’s right. And there’s a lot of other people that don’t think that way. The band is about them. They’re the leader, it’s all about them; they don’t want anyone to sound better than them. So they keep them under wraps, they push them down, they don’t give them solo space. They don’t let them express themselves. You need to have a certain rein on people so that the compositional integrity is kept intact. You know, there’s a frame around a composition and there are things that belong in the frame and things that don’t. And it’s the bandleader-composer’s job to make sure that everything fits. But the most important thing is to keep that balance, where everything belongs but the players are injecting themselves into the work and doing their best. Duke Ellington was a perfect example of that. JazzTimes: And Frank Zappa. Yes, though Zappa in the earlier years. Then it got a little different for him. He got more and more into control. For me, in his later years, his best record is Jazz From Hell, where it’s all done on a Synclavier. JazzTimes: Yeah, I think his comment at the time was, “At last, I’ve found my perfect band.” There you go! It’s him playing everything. Well, I don’t think that way. Because the lesson I learned from Zappa was that you treat your band members like royalty. You give them as much money as you can afford to give them on the road, the best situations in the hotels, treat them to meals, thank them for their work, appreciate their creativity and just thank your lucky stars that they’re in your band working with you. JazzTimes: I’ve read that Ellington loved his band and always treated his musicians well. I think that’s really one of the secrets of making great music that is not unique to the 20th century. I think Mozart understood that, I think Bach understood that. I think that great composers were performers and understood what it was like being in a band. And they wrote for players who could get onstage and feel excited about what they were doing because they just looked fucking great doing it. No one wants to look like a fool onstage; you want to look good. You want to play music that makes you look good, and I think composers understand that too. And the ones that have a sense of the performer side of it are the best composers, the ones that came up in a band. Ellington never stood in front of a band waving his arms; he was playing piano, he was part of the group. When Steve Reich came up, he was always playing percussion in his group and still does in a lot of cases. Phil Glass too. They understood what it was to be a performer, and that made their compositions so much more deep. That’s something I never wanted to lose. JazzTimes: And here you are about to turn around another Dreamers project in just a few months. It’s very easy to do. You just do it. I’ve been lucky but I’ve always thought pragmatically. When I was starting out 35 years ago, I worked with the few people that I knew—Polly Bradfield and Eugene Chadbourne. Then [trumpeter] Toshinori Kondo came along, Tom Cora came along, Fred Frith came along ... all these people slowly began entering the picture. And as we got to be friends, then I kind of expanded my ambitions or my vision. But I never dreamed of doing an opera on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, you know? I’m not someone who wants to write something and then have it sit around for 30 years. I want to write for the people I know, I want to make something that’s possible, that can be made. So I worked with whatever I had at hand. And I made it work. And at first it was the game theory pieces (1980’s Pool, 1982’s Archery), because I was surrounded by improvisers. Then I got to know people like Bill Frisell and Joey Baron, who could do anything. So then I created music like Spillane or Naked City for musicians who could do anything. Then I got to know Fred Sherry and a bunch of classical musicians and I started writing more classical stuff. I think the job of a composer is not just to write music but to write it for musicians who can get onstage and present it to an audience in the best possible situation. Following it through is part of a composer’s responsibility, to see that that child is nurtured in a proper way and is presented to the world in the best possible light. You know, you educate the child as well as you can so that they can go out prepared to deal with this cruel and pernicious world we have. Same thing when you create a piece of music. I don’t really believe in the idea that you just write it and then you put it on the shelf, the way Charles Ives did. I write it for people I know, I get the best people to do it, I find the best possible venue, we rehearse it the best possible way and then we present it to people in as pure a way as possible. And now I feel like what needs to be added to that equation is also a kind of education of the audience. I think it’s important to speak about the music, to make it understood or possible for it to be better understood. Which is why I started these Arcana books, this series of books that have musicians writing about music. There’s four volumes of those already. JazzTimes: In the tradition of Art Taylor’s Notes and Tones? And so many other people who collected writings and put them out there for people to help get an insight into how an artist or how a musician thinks about their work, their life, their relationship to the world. Because I think there’s way too large a gap between the world and the artist. I feel like we live in parallel universes and there’s really very few instances where a bridge is created to cross that divide. But I feel like that’s the writer’s job, in a sense, to create that bridge so that there can be understanding. But it’s a difficult world for writers now. Where can you place a piece? Who will give you enough space to do something really intelligent and insightful? You have to churn out these small little pieces on a deadline. You don’t have time to really do the research or speak to the artist or do the thinking through. And even if you do, what they want, what sells best, is a hatchet job. It’s rare that I’ll read an insightful introduction to someone’s work that steers the younger audience toward something that they may be curious about that really may change their life around. I would say it came about in a very natural and organic way. It just kind of happened. JazzTimes: Similar to your encounter on the street in the East Village with Richard Foreman, which led to Astronome: A Night at the Opera? Same thing. I’ve known Richard since 1974 when I first went to his theater and just flipped over what he was doing there. A friend of mine was in the play and they’d let me into rehearsals, so I’d watch his procedure. I stayed at his theater during the day so I could practice the sax, and I answered the phone for him and took reservations, I took tickets at the door. So I’ve paid my dues with Richard Foreman. He’s one of my heroes, one of my mentors. And I’ve known him for 35 years but I never thought about collaboration until way, way after I met him ... 30 years or more later. We met on the street one day and he said, “Why don’t you write me an opera?” And I said, “Well, maybe I will.” And whenever I’d see him for the next year or so he’d say, “Hey Zorn, where’s my opera?” And I finally was convinced, “He really wants it! I’m gonna write it for him. And it’s gonna be amazing, it’s got to be. I can’t go to him and give him something that’s weak. He’s my hero.” So with Lou Reed...my connection to him goes way back. I was at the Exploding Plastic Inevitable events at the Dom on 8th Street back in 1967 when I was like 13, 14 years old, and I saw Velvet Underground there. So Lou was one of my heroes for a long, long time. JazzTimes: So you had a chance encounter with him on the street? Yes, that’s exactly true. What happened was we got to know of each other a little bit, I think, because of (producer) Hal Wilner. Hal included me on his Kurt Weill record (1985’s Lost in the Stars) and Lou loved my piece on it (“Der Kleine Leutnant des Lieben Gottes“). And Hal came to me and said, “Lou heard it and he said, ‘Wow, that track was amazing. It’s like turning the pages of a book...each page is something new.’ And I thought, “That’s a really beautiful way of saying what’s going on in that arrangement.” Because I was doing my block style thing on that piece with the radical jump-cuts. So there was some kind of connection there. But then I’m not gonna call him out of nowhere ... "Wow, he likes my stuff. I’m gonna go send him a package.” You just don’t do that, you know? But then in 1992 I asked him to perform at the first Radical Jewish Cultural Festival in Munich. I called him out of nowhere because he kind of knew who I was at that point and I said, “Lou, I want you to do a set at this Jewish festival. Would you do it?” I think I might’ve even had Hal do it because I was shy. And Lou said, “Yes, I’ll be there.” So he performed at this Jewish festival I put together with Ribot and a bunch of other players. And it was amazing. Laurie Anderson was playing at the same festival, and I had known Laurie for years, going back to the old Kitchen days. And at the airport we were all there together and I said, “Lou, I want you to meet Laurie Anderson.” So I introduced them, actually. Then they became real tight. They’re married now, it’s the love affair of a lifetime. They’re so incredible together. So there’s another kind of little connection. Anyway, in the early part off 2007 I was coming out of the St. Mark’s bookshop, I saw Lou across the street and I said, “Lou! How are you, man? It’s great to see you in the East Village. You look great!” And he just got a big smile on his face and we just started talking. We talked about Michael Dorf’s upcoming 20th Anniversary Knitting Factory concert at Town Hall and I said, “Are you gonna do that?” And he said, “Yeah, actually.” Lou said he would donate profits to The Stone, so I thought maybe it would be cool. And I thought, “Well, if he’s donating profits to The Stone, that’s a great enterprise. So I’ll do it too. Then he said, “Maybe we should do something together?” And I said, “Yeah, you could even just read poetry or something and I’ll just play behind you.” And he said, “There’ a real tradition to that. That would be sweet.” What eventually happened on stage was I sat in with his band. And it was not even planned. It was, “Well, we didn’t rehearse anything, we really shouldn’t do it. If you want to play with me you’re welcome.” And right before he went on he sent someone over... "Hey John, come over to the dressing room with Lou.” And Lou said, “Why don’t you just play on one of the pieces. It’s in D minor.” So I played and ... boom. We clicked and he loved it. That’s where it started. I sat in with him again at the Highline Ballroom, which was great. I was supposed to play two songs, I went to the soundcheck, I ended up playing almost a whole set. Then we did a duo improvised concert (January 10, 2008) as a benefit at The Stone and he invited Laurie to sit in with us. And then bit by bit it happened very slowly and very organically. So you could say our relationship started back in 1966 when I saw the Velvet Underground play at the Dom. And it just took 40 years to get to the point where it is now. When the time was right, it happened. JazzTimes: Have you and Lou recorded together yet? We did a benefit CD for The Stone (Issue Three on Tzadik), which was a recording of a live gig. And I also asked him to put guitar on a piece of mine on the Music for Children record. It’s kind of a wind machine drone piece and he loved it. He’s the master of feedback and drones, so I had him do that. He was just going to play on the climax, the last five minutes of a 20-minute piece. But he said, “I want to play on the whole thing. I love it. I’m so inspired. Let’s do it.” We recorded at his house ... boom! It was done. And then the Song of Songs thing also happened. I was doing a project setting the Biblical “Song of Songs” from the Old Testament, the “Shir Ha-Shirim,” to music. I created a vocal backdrop with five female voices singing and I wanted two people reading the text from the “Song of Songs” (the allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel as husband and wife). And I wanted two lovers to recite this so I asked Lou and Laurie. I said, “You know what? You two are the perfect lovers to read the “Song of Songs” in this piece. And they said, “We would love it.” So we did it down at the Abrons Art Center, the place you saw us play a couple of nights ago. We did that last February, 2008. They loved it. We took it to Italy. You know stuff just kind of happens. It’s not any kind of weird machination, it’s just all very organic and it’s growing at a very slow way. And it feels right. I don’t want to take advantage of anybody and I certainly don’t want them to feel taken advantage of. So these are going to be things that happen, you know, when the time is right. And they’ll be little special events in themselves. JazzTimes: And you continue to nurture all these different relationships over time. Lou and I, you know...it seems like we text message back and forth or speak almost every week now. We go to lunch when we can. I’ve been to his house many times to experience what his world is, and he has an amazing world and great people working with him and for him. It’s a whole organization how he has it worked, and it’s very inspiring. Because you know, I basically do everything myself. But through him I’m learning that it is possible to find people that can really help. Like Kazunori (Sugiyama) is someone who really helps out with Tzadik. Without Kazunori there wouldn’t be a Tzadik. So yeah, the thing with Lou...it just happened very slowly and it feels good. Zorn Essentials The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone (Nonesuch/Icon, 1986) Zorn’s major label debut elevated him beyond East Village cult status. This intriguing concept album—radical interpretations of themes by Italian film composer Ennio Morricone—included a battery of guitarists in Derek Bailey, Bill Frisell, Fred Frith, Robert Quine, Jody Harris, Vernon Reid and Marc Ribot as well as special guests like Big John Patton and harmonica ace Toots Thielemans. Voodoo (Black Saint, 1986) This swinging tribute to the quintessential bebop pianist caught a lot of doubters and scoffers by surprise. A potent quartet project featuring Wayne Horvitz on piano, Bobby Previte on drums and Ray Drummond on bass, it offered a rare first glimpse at Zorn as a “legit” alto burner. Spillane (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1987) Using his “blocks of sound” method, Zorn concocts a gritty narrative tribute to pulp detective fiction writer Mickey Spillane that incorporates touches of jazz, blues, country and hardcore/thrash. Special guests include blues guitarist Albert Collins on “Two Lane Highway,” Bill Frisell, Robert Quine, Bobby Previte, Big John Patton, Ronald Shannon Jackson, John Lurie and the Kronos Quartet. Spy Vs. Spy: The Music of Ornette Coleman (Elektra/Musician, 1989) Explosive hardcore/thrash renditions of 17 familiar Ornette tunes performed (in some cases under two minutes) by Zorn with fellow alto saxophonist Tim Berne, bassist Mark Dresser and the two-drummer tandem of Joey Baron and Michael Vatcher. Naked City (Elektra/Nonesuch, 1990) Zorn’s radical jump-cut aesthetic was employed with perfection by an exacting yet remarkably flexible quintet featuring Bill Frisell on guitar, Wayne Horvitz on keyboards, Fred Frith on bass and Joey Baron on drums. Startling juxtapositions of surf punk, hardcore/thrash, speed metal, lounge jazz and abstractions on movie themes. Kristallnacht (Tzadik, 1995) Zorn’s profoundly moving, if somber and occasionally disturbing, meditation on “the Night of Broken Glass,” a coordinated attack on Jews throughout the German Reich that occurred on Nov. 9, 1938. Features trumpeter Frank London, violinist Mark Feldman, guitarist Marc Ribot, keyboardist Anthony Coleman and bassist Mark Dresser. Masada: Live in Sevilla 2000 (Tzadik, 2000) One of the most dazzling documents of Zorn’s longstanding klezmer-meets-Ornette quartet with trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Joey Baron. The Gift (Tzadik, 2001) Zorn surprised everyone with this delightful detour from Masada and some of his more extreme musical outings. A tribute to the popular instrumental music of his youth, including exotica pioneers Martin Denny and Lex Baxter, this highly accessible project pointed the way to even more eclectic instrumental pop offerings like 2008’s The Dreamers and this year’s O’o. Masada String Trio: 50th Birthday Celebration, Vol. 1 (Tzadik, 2004) Zorn conducts violinist Mark Feldman, cellist Erik Friedlander and bassist Greg Cohen through a program of his Jewish-flavored music at Tonic on the occasion of his 50th birthday celebration. Astronome (Tzadik, 2006) Ultra-intense power trio of electric bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Joey Baron and banshee-scream vocalist Rob Patton performs extreme hardcore/thrash tunes that go a step or two beyond Zorn’s Painkiller on the intensity meter. Violent, shocking and beautiful. true

2009-04-20T10:22:51-04:00

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24597

174

true

2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

A rare, exclusive interview with a prolific innovator

John Zorn: The Working Man

2009-08-26T18:58:53-04:00

4 “Oh, that’s so beautiful! I’m on the banks of the Seine right now. There’s a winter sky, grey and blue pastel, with a bright yellow setting sun. Ah, I love it here.” Melody Gardot is in Paris, laughing happily over the phone, waxing ecstatically as she rides through the City of Light during a tour in support of her new CD, My One and Only Thrill (Verve). And she’s not sounding at all like someone who is still suffering the aftereffects of a near-death, life-transforming accident. She is, in fact, a lot more focused on her pleasure at being back in France. “It’s the only place,” she says, “where I’ve ever gotten off the plane and felt I was at home. [I’m surprised] I was born where I was. Because I feel as though if my spirit were to have chosen where I was to be born, it would have been France.” Then, interrupting herself, Gardot adds, “Oh, look. There’s my favorite café!” Despite her enthusiasm, however, the consequences of the accident are still an intrinsic part of her life—directly, as she continues through her recovery, and indirectly, as an element in her art and her story. Five years after the then-19-year old student was struck by an SUV while riding a bicycle to a fashion class at Community College of Philadelphia, she has established herself as an important new talent. Comparisons to Norah Jones, Madeleine Peyroux, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell and Shania Twain have been bandied about. Herbie Hancock invited her to sing Joni Mitchell’s song, “Edith and the King-Pin,” for the Live From Abbey Road TV series. The New York Times’ Nate Chinen, in a review of a live performance, wrote, “Smoldering becomes Ms. Gardot, whose voice carries a soft allure even on brighter fare.” The BBC suggested, “You owe it to your ears to discover this gem for yourself.” And Business Week, in a rare musical observation, described her first CD, Worrisome Heart, as “a place where Billie Holiday meets Tom Waits.” A slender blonde with dark, arching eyebrows and a cool, Peggy Lee manner, Gardot must wear dark glasses to compensate for hyper-photosensitivity, earplugs for severe Hyperacusis/Tinnitus, and use a cane, which she calls “Citizen Cane,” for stability and balance. But none of these intrude on the dark seductive timbre of her voice, the quality of her music or the emotional electricity of her performances. If anything, the dark glasses and the cane, combined with her affection for, as she puts it, “nice shoes,” provide an intriguing air of timeless elegance. She also makes clear, on her MySpace page, her dislike for the word “disabled,” a word she considers to be “self-demoting.” “I see myself,” she writes, “in this way: ‘I am able to do some things and unable to do others.’ That’s all. The technicalities are just as important as you make them. All you need to know is why I need the things you see me with, as most people do not need them.” But Gardot has had, nonetheless, a difficult journey. The impact of the SUV, which was making an illegal left turn, caused multiple pelvic fractures as well as head, back and spinal injuries. Unable to walk, or even sit up comfortably, she spent a year mostly lying in bed. Her state of mind, combined with the pain she was experiencing, didn’t improve when a physician suggested music therapy as a possible aid in dealing with the cognitive impairment that had been caused by her head injuries. “The truth is I was devastated when I was encouraged to play,” recalls Gardot, “because I thought it meant I would have to sit at the piano. Which wasn’t possible, because I had fractures in the front and the back, in my pelvis, and sitting was incredibly painful. Even getting to a doctor was a fiasco. It took 20 minutes to get there, and two days to recover from it. It was a really difficult time. So when the doctor mentioned music, it was just kind of both inspiring and deflating in the same breath, because it was hopeful but impossible.” Impossible for her to play the piano, yes, but there are other ways to make music. Gardot’s mother suggested one, asking, “Why don’t you try the guitar? I have one, you know.” But even that was daunting. “Basically,” she says, “I learned to play the guitar, on my back, in bed. It was the only way, since I couldn’t sit up. And it did help my situation, if only because it took my mind off the pain for a few minutes.” But the awkward position, lying on her back while holding the guitar, was compounded by the fact that she was still a pianist. “I really had no idea how to use this instrument,” Gardot continues. “I mean, mechanically I’m a pianist. With the guitar, you use your left hand differently, with this gripping motion. And your right hand is sort of clawing, instead of moving fluidly. At first, I took on the approach of someone like Stanley Jordan, flipping the guitar down and finger-tapping. But it sounded wrong, it sounded boring, it sounded like I wasn’t going to be able to develop what I was hearing. So I worked at getting my hand around the instrument and I figured out a way, even though I don’t use my thumb and I don’t bar chord.” In addition to the sheer physical demands of learning a new instrument in such demanding circumstances, Gardot was plagued by memory lapses that are still, although to a lesser extent, a recurring problem. “The simple truth,” she says, “was that I couldn’t remember a thing, not even from the beginning of the day until the end. So I couldn’t make progress. Because you can’t make progress unless you can look back and reflect on what you’ve done. And with the guitar, I couldn’t remember what I had done. Every day was a new day, with a new instrument and a new challenge. And to learn it what I had to do was break it down. And, finally, a song popped out.” That song, along with five others, became the appropriately titled EP, Some Lessons: The Bedroom Sessions, Gardot’s first recording. The title piece, “Some Lessons,” is a stunning introduction to an extraordinary new talent: a blues-phrased paean to life from someone who has come dangerously close to the edge. In it, she sings: Well, I’m buckled up inside It’s a miracle that I’m alive To think that I could have fallen A centimeter to the left Would not be here to see the sunset Or have myself a time Aside from its telling content, what’s impressive about the song, as well as the others on the EP, is the striking sense of maturity in Gardot’s voice, her phrasing and her capacity to tell a story. Yet, remarkably, prior to the accident, singing and songwriting had not been present in her résumé. The daughter of a single-parent mother, she was “cooking and taking care of my own behind by the time I was 7, because my mom was a jack of all trades, working three jobs at once and doing photography on the side.” Raised in Philadelphia—central Philly, she specifies—she had no particular exposure to music other than piano lessons. But, although she was considering a career in fashion, it was in those obligatory piano lessons that the first indication of her considerable native talents first manifested itself. “Music was funny for me as a child,” she recalls. “Because the first time I experienced jazz was a mistake, a kind of intended mistake, actually. I was learning to play piano when I was 9, taking lessons from this beautiful teacher. One day he came over and I was playing a classical piece I had learned a week earlier. I think it was Tchaikovsky. I was playing it very fast, playing it very quickly so he couldn’t hear my mistakes. “When I finished, he said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Playing this section here.’ He asked me to play it again, and I did. He looked at me and said it again: ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m adding notes.’ And he said, ‘You can’t add notes to Tchaikovsky.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about, so I played it again. And then I said, ‘See? I can.’” Fortunately, Gardot’s piano teacher was not only open-minded, he was also sympathetic to improvisation and to jazz. The next time he came for a lesson, he arrived with a different music book, opened it to a page titled “C Jam Blues” and asked Gardot to play. “I remember sitting there playing it,” says Gardot, “and going, ‘Hey, are you kidding me? This is easy.’ I loved it. Somehow I knew that jazz was harder than that, but it was fun. And thank goodness he was smart enough to see what I was inclined for.” By the age of 16, her piano playing had developed to the point where she was handling a repertoire reaching from Radiohead and the Mamas and the Papas to Duke Ellington. Her professional career, like the discovery of her improvisational abilities, began almost randomly on a night when her car was nearly out of gas and she was in need of a job. “I guess my karma was right,” Gardot explains. “I walked into this place, liked it and asked if they had music. They said, ‘Yeah, but our piano player just quit. Why? Do you play?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah!’ I sat down and auditioned and I got the job. And I started playing there every weekend from the time I was 16 until I was 19.” She may not have suspected it at that time, but Gardot was apprenticing the techniques as a performer that would make it possible for her to make a remarkably quick transition to the confident onstage manner that almost immediately characterized her post-accident career. “My only parameter as a young pianist,” she says, “was that I played tunes I liked. And then, as the weeks went on, I gradually learned how to go from being a wallpaper act to doing something that was actually worthy of attention. I did that by tailoring what I did to the people that walked into the room, by learning how to read people, check out their composure and think, ‘OK, what do they really want to hear?’” Ironically, it wasn’t until after the accident, however, that Gardot began to receive some attention from the local Philadelphia media. The EP, Some Lessons: The Bedroom Sessions, released in 2005, received airplay on WSPN, and City Paper Philadelphia acknowledged her in the periodical’s 2005 People’s Choice Awards. At that point, her visibility expanded dramatically and her career took off. Her first full-length CD, Worrisome Heart, nearly sold out on Amazon.com on the first day of its release in February 2008. Her new album, My One and Only Thrill, to be released at the end of April, propels her into the majors, with Larry Klein producing and Vince Mendoza providing arrangements for a large orchestra. It arrives in a quarter that also sees new releases from Diana Krall, Madeleine Peyroux and Kelly Clarkson, among others. But Gardot’s attention clearly focuses on the quality of the music rather than the sales competitiveness of the product. Her working method is unique, embracing each song as a complete entity. “Everything comes to me at once,” she says. “And, without sounding definitive or creepy, it comes to me in about 20 minutes: music, lyrics, melody, how I imagine the arrangement, everything. It’s almost like a bodily function thing, where everything happens with great urgency. You must sit down and catch it. And if you don’t, it will dissolve. Only in one case on My One and Only Thrill did the lyrics fail to be captured in that initial sitting. And that was only because I got distracted, or they just got caught up in my head.” It takes a self-assured producer to work with an artist with that kind of complete conceptualization of a song. And, serendipitously, as Gardot puts it, a producer with those qualities found her. “Larry heard me on XM Radio,” she explains. “He heard the music, and wanted to get together. First and foremost it was most important to me that I liked him, and that concern was immediately put at ease when I met him in New York. He’d done a lot of work with singers, which helped put my mind at ease. And then there’s that little factor of me hearing everything complete in my head, which leaves little room for alteration. With the wrong person, that can be a battle; it can be a breaking point. But Larry is someone who supports a vision, or who can create it if he needs to. He’s not one-sided, and he doesn’t have to go a single way.” The specific way that Gardot had in mind for My One and Only Thrill encompassed, she says, romance in many hues. And not just about romantic love. “In fact,” she says with a giggle, “sometimes it’s not about love at all. It can be about having a moment with someone that can feel like an eternity. It can be like when you’re walking in the park, and you feel as though the world stops around you and you’re the only two people who exist. Or maybe you’re not even with someone.” She laughs again. “Romance happens when birds land on your window sill, and meals end with wine.” Capturing a set of songs—including “Les Etoiles,” her first song conceived and written in French, as well as her view of “Over the Rainbow”—coursing through the full range of romantic subtleties called for very specific kinds of settings. Gardot found the answer when she heard some recordings with Mendoza’s arrangements, even though she was completely unaware of his history. “I just knew that I liked his work,” she recalls. “And it wasn’t until Larry told me about him that I realized he had worked with Joni Mitchell, Björk and Elvis Costello.” Characteristically, Gardot was very clear about how she wanted the album to sound, that she wanted to have strings, for the sake of “expression.” “The cornerstones of what makes music good for me,” says Gardot, “are simplicity, melody and sentiment. Now, when you add strings to the equation, people automatically go, ‘Wait a minute, simplicity with 70 people? I don’t think so.’ It’s a far-reaching concept in that sense, I guess. But what it was really about was adding strings that would support thematic ideas, expand upon thematic ideas and add new ones, without losing touch with those cornerstones. And I think that’s what I got from Vince’s arrangements.” With the new album in the stores, a busy schedule of appearances, enthusiastic audiences and growing critical acclaim, Gardot’s career is obviously on a fast track. But although she speaks openly of her accident in conversation, she rarely mentions it in her performances, preferring to let the music speak for itself. Nor does she seem especially curious about the strangeness of the accident-driven transition that has taken her from life as a fashion student who played piano in a bistro on weekends to her present role as a rapidly rising young singer-songwriter. Asked about it, Gardot simply replies, “You know, there’s a saying I repeat often. It goes like this: Good writers write, great writers write what they know. At the time, before the accident, perhaps I knew nothing. And now, I guess I do.” true

2009-04-20T10:47:46-04:00

false

24598

174

true

2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

Melody Gardot overcomes life-threatening accident to make beautiful music.

“I guess my karma was right.”

Melody Gardot’s Melodic Therapy

2009-07-28T16:19:56-04:00

4 Leave it to old friends to dredge up stories from the past at a birthday party. Of course, not everyone gets to celebrate on the stage of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and even fewer have the opportunity to be embarrassed by a surprise visit from Bill Cosby. But Benny Golson began his storied eight decades in Philadelphia, as did the slightly younger Cosby, who happened to be performing on another of the Kennedy Center’s stages on the January night that Golson was being honored. The comedian began by surveying the saxophonists in the Clayton-Hamilton Jazz Orchestra regarding the size of their reeds. After hearing a few replies in the three to four range, Cosby countered with Golson’s youthful claim of using an eight. “That’s not a reed,” Cosby recalls telling the nascent tenorist, “that’s a floorboard.” After Cosby hammered out a burlesque of a piano solo, the curtain fell for intermission. Cosby was escorted offstage past a clutch of starstruck faces while the evening’s guest of honor quietly and unassumingly strolled over to a folding chair in the corner. Somehow the dichotomy seemed appropriate for a musician who seems to accept his legendary status with a shrug, always more eager to get back to work than to bask in the limelight. Looking forward to the birthday concert over room service in his Philadelphia hotel room last December, Golson insisted that the occasion hadn’t placed him in a particularly nostalgic frame of mind. “I don’t like to look back too much,” he said. “What’s done is done; I want to see what’s looming up before me. I want to realize things that don’t exist now. I want to be able to find things awaiting my discovery of them, perhaps give them a name or a direction that they didn’t have before.” The staggering breadth of Golson’s career was well encapsulated on the Kennedy Center’s stage that night, which he shared with old friends like Curtis Fuller, Cedar Walton and Ron Carter. The musical selections ranged from big band to solo piano. The saxophonist shared the stage with a band of legends from his past and another recently formed group that resurrects the Jazztet name. Canonical standards from the composer’s pen appeared in contexts familiar and unusual (a particularly physical arrangement of “Blues March” for the Uptown String Quartet). A video documentary offered stills of Golson with Hollywood heavyweights from his decade-plus tenure as a film and TV composer, culminating in a sweetly rambling tribute by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, who cast Golson as himself in their 2004 film The Terminal. As has become traditional, the concert followed by one year the presentation of the BNY Mellon Jazz Living Legacy Award (Kenny Barron was presented this year’s award following Golson’s performance). The honor stands alongside Golson’s 1995 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Award. Despite all of that, Benny Golson remains the same soft-spoken, erudite gentleman who speaks of penning “Whisper Not” or “Killer Joe” with the same workmanlike pride with which a carpenter would discuss a finely crafted cabinet. You’ll never find Golson referring to his playing or writing in the soul-searching, mystical manner of some of his more ephemerally minded counterparts, not even with the religious overtones of another old friend, John Coltrane. As evidenced by the program of midtempo swingers and lyrical ballads that evening in D.C., Golson adheres to a decidedly more cerebral, romantic approach. “As far as I’m concerned,” Golson offered, “my music should always, now and then, have meaningful melodic content, something you come away humming. Athleticism doesn’t really mean anything. It shows that you can do calisthenics, but nobody can hum any of that stuff. I’m from the old school, I guess.” When Golson says old school, he means old school, extending the club beyond early compatriots like Dizzy Gillespie and Art Blakey to Verdi and Chopin, both of whom are represented on Golson’s latest CD, New Time, New ’Tet (Concord Jazz). The album is the debut of the third incarnation of the Jazztet, the six-piece band Golson co-led with the late trumpeter Art Farmer in the early ’60s and again in the mid-’80s. Golson and Farmer had met several years earlier when both were playing with Lionel Hampton’s band, in a lineup that also included Clifford Brown, Quincy Jones, Monk Montgomery and Gigi Gryce. That tenure was short-lived, however, due to a dispute over money. “The guys were getting $19 a night, and I told the road manager I had to have $22,” Golson recalled, laughing now at the meager sums involved. The road manager agreed, but when word reached Hampton’s wife, Gladys, who handled the band’s business affairs, she refused. “So we drove from South Carolina to Washington, and I left, got onto the train and said goodbye. That’s when they went to Europe, and the band was sneaking out of the hotel windows and doing all of this recording outside of Lionel Hampton. Quincy wrote me a card saying, ‘Sorry you didn’t come, Benny, we’re making so much money.’ I said, ‘Damn me and my principles!’” Farmer crossed Golson’s path several times over the ensuing years, and when Golson devised the idea of forming a working sextet in 1959, he rang the trumpeter with the proposal. “Art started laughing,” Golson recounted, “and when he stopped he says, ‘You’re not going to believe this. I was thinking of putting a sextet together and I wanted you to be my saxophone player.’” The pair recruited Farmer’s twin brother, Addison, to play bass, trombonist Curtis Fuller, drummer Dave Bailey and a 19-year-old pianist Golson knew from Philly named McCoy Tyner. By the time they recorded their debut album, Bailey had left and been replaced by Lex Humphries; shortly thereafter, Tyner got the long-awaited call from Coltrane that formed the saxophone legend’s classic quartet. The line-up shifted repeatedly over the years, notably including Cedar Walton, Grachan Moncur III and Tootie Heath; Fuller returned to the fold for the Jazztet’s 1980s incarnation. Even in 1959, the Jazztet’s sound could be considered conservative; the band made its debut at the Five Spot in Greenwich Village, instantly becoming the answer to a jazz trivia question by sharing the bill with Ornette Coleman during his infamous first East Coast stint. To this day, Golson has never recognized the legitimacy of the avant-garde, in the person of Coleman or his free-jazz successors. “We intuitively think that change means for the better,” Golson said, “and let’s hope that’s the case. But sometimes things change and they’re not as good as the things that they evolve from. Sometimes people get so efficient that they’re deficient.” Maintaining the instrumentation but overhauling the lineup of the classic Jazztets for this third go-round, Golson enlisted a group with impressive pedigrees and a similarly tradition-minded outlook: trumpeter Eddie Henderson, trombonist Steve Davis, pianist Mike LeDonne, bassist Buster Williams and drummer Carl Allen. While much of the material adheres to the usual Golson template—originals by the leader and Davis, a revisiting of “Whisper Not” with Al Jarreau on vocals, familiar material from Monk and Sonny Rollins—there are surprises, in the form of the aforementioned arrangements of classical pieces and even a tune by ’80s soul group DeBarge, which Golson is the first to admit is “an aberration.” “It’s today and yesterday, really,” Golson says of the new Jazztet. “It conjures up memories of yesterday, but it’s an extrapolation of what yesterday was because we’ve moved ahead. We want to do newer things, things that we would not have considered before, like something by DeBarge or a classical piece by Chopin. Music is music and the way it comes out depends on how you treat it.” The constant reappearance of his most well-worn standards may seem to run counter to his forward-looking philosophy, but Golson insists that drawing on the past is not the same as dwelling on it. “New ways of doing old things sometimes are just as important as new things, because the old things have been refurbished and don’t look the same. They don’t feel the same. They don’t taste the same. So extrapolations—that is, new ways of doing old things—are consequential too, as in the case of Chopin and Verdi. I just hope they don’t come back to haunt me for what I’ve done.” Golson is once again attacking some of those familiar tunes, albeit with his pen rather than his horn, and for a somewhat unexpected audience: children. Although he’s long been averse to most efforts to put lyrics to his pieces, Golson is turning many of the titles into children’s books. In these stories, which he plans to accompany with CDs of the music, “Whisper Not” becomes a warning against disturbing a sleeping giant; “Stablemates” the tale of a donkey rooming with horses; “Along Came Betty” a whimsical yarn about a woman instigating a trend for two-toned shoes. While those titles are instantly recognizable, Golson cited a few that were considerably more obscure—and, he declared, deservedly so. “I Found My True Love in Mexico,” “I’m Finger-Poppin’ and Hip-Shakin’,” “The Maharajah and the Blues”—these were some of the embarrassing titles Golson dredged up from his earliest attempts at composing, tunes never recorded and deeply buried. “People think of me as a writer, but nobody knows the dogs that I’ve written,” Golson says with a laugh. “They were godawful, but I keep them to remind me not to get too big a head.” This was in the earliest part of Golson’s career, as he struggled on the fertile North Philadelphia scene alongside his friend John Coltrane. The childhood friends got together and emulated their idols—Coltrane, then playing alto, in the guise of Johnny Hodges; Golson attempting to replicate Arnett Cobb’s solo on “Flying Home.” Their paths, like so many other young musicians’, were irrevocably altered the first time they heard the new sounds of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. But while Golson saw his future clearly, his mother convinced him to head off to Howard University as a fallback to an uncertain music career. “My mother, in her wisdom, said in case you don’t make it—which is to say, in case you’re not as good as you think you are and hope to be—you should have something in your back pocket to lean on. If you don’t make it you could teach school. But I was a rebel all through college. They hated to see me come in. I always said, ‘Why?’” That inquisitive nature has guided Golson throughout his career. It led him to leave Howard and hit the road with R&B saxophonist and vocalist Bull Moose Jackson. In Jackson’s band at that point was pianist Tadd Dameron, who taught Golson more about composing than anything he’d gleaned during his college years. Much later, it led him to abandon his horn altogether and strike out for Hollywood, eager to experiment with new techniques and the confluence of sound and image that only film scoring can provide. It still leads him to seek out new challenges today. While some of his dream opportunities are now impossible—playing with Oscar Peterson or recording with Duke Ellington—there are others, like performing with a symphony orchestra, that don’t seem unrealistic. “I feel that there are things that are possible for me to do that I’m not aware of yet,” Golson speculated. “And since creativity never retires, there’s a possibility I may be able to do some of those things. Creativity is alive and well and affects everything we’re all about as a society: music, medicine, automobiles, architecture, everything. I’m an old man now, but I’m still not satisfied. That thing [pointing to his saxophone, which lay in its open case on the hotel room’s bed] is so demanding, and it’s capable of doing everything, but it’ll only do it if I tell it to. That’s a part of the adventure. It gives me something to look forward to when I wake up every morning besides breakfast. What can I do today better than I did yesterday? What can I discover today that I didn’t know existed yesterday? Of course, that’s being poetic.” Then there are the surprising turns that Golson’s tastes occasionally take, which may not manifest themselves through his music. “I like country and western music. I don’t want to delve into it, but some of the lyrics in those tunes will break your heart.” Of course, he never expected to return to the jazz life once he left it for Hollywood after the first Jazztet disbanded in 1962. Upon moving west he had cut all ties to his jazz past, insistent on being recognized as a legitimate film composer. “I didn’t want to be viewed as a jazz musician,” he said. “I wanted to do comedy and drama, not just hip jazz things. So I turned down every gig and eventually they stopped calling. My bridges were burned out of existence and the nest egg that I’d saved up felt like an elevator out of control. I could have gone home to sleep or taken my wagon to the pawn shop and slept where my stuff was.” He eventually did earn his name in show business, however, garnering extensive credits including M.A.S.H., Room 222 and The Partridge Family, none of which could ever be mistaken for “hip jazz things.” But after eight years of allowing his horn to gather dust, he felt compelled to return to it once again. “I thought I’d never play again,” Golson said. “I didn’t like how I was sounding, and to add to that problem, I didn’t know what I wanted to do conceptually. It was frustrating. So the easiest thing was to put it down. I gave my mouthpieces away, my flute, my soprano, and then I got the itch again. Trying to come back was like getting over a stroke. I had no embouchure, no corn on my thumb where you support the horn. When I picked it up it was like a piece of plumbing from underneath the kitchen sink rather than a saxophone. I wasn’t the same person, and my concept had intuitively changed, even though I wasn’t playing. It took me 10 years to feel comfortable again.” Asked if his composer and performer sides were in conflict, considering how at odds they seemed at that time, Golson said, “I call myself a musical bigamist because I love them both. When I play, I don’t think about the writing aspect, and when I write I don’t think about playing.” In either case, Golson determinedly follows his own muse; as accessible and audience-friendly as all of his work may be, from jazz tunes to classical chamber pieces, he forever composes and performs with an audience of one in mind: himself. “I’m not an entertainer,” he claims. “I don’t do it to please people. Yet I’m not obdurate, I don’t cast the people out. I have the people in mind to the extent that I hope they like what I do. I don’t discount them, but I must answer that thing inside of me first rather than trying to please them. I’ve been with groups where they wanted to walk the bar and step over drinks and sing with the crowd and sway. But I’d rather be in the group called artists, where my first obligation is to the music and myself.” Unerringly tasteful, Golson still keeps in mind that at the very heart of artistic success is something elusive and alchemical, something that can’t be taught or really even consciously realized. “I’ve heard bands where all the notes are right, they’re razor-sharp, but the spirit, the soul is lacking. It’s hard to put a name on it; we usually say ‘that thing’—‘that thing’ that touches the deepest grotto of the heart’s core.” It’s now been nearly 30 years since Golson returned to performing, a span longer than many entire careers—longer, in fact, than the entire lifespan of his friend Clifford Brown. He has recently been recounting his history in detail, trimming an autobiography that currently stretches over more than 1,000 pages to a more palatable (for publishers, anyway) 300. As for what will follow the final period in that book as it now reads, Golson declares himself happily uncertain. “How much time do I have on Earth? There’s no guarantee, because the future’s always going to have an indistinguishable face. We’re not prescient, but to some extent we can give it a face of our own making. Not always, but sometimes. And sometimes that’s called success and sometimes it’s not.” At 80, Golson shows no signs of slowing down, looking like a man 20 years younger. But the toll of those years was revealed as he reviewed old photographs while helping to prepare the video that screened at the Kennedy Center concert. “In so many of those pictures, I’m the only one left alive,” he recalls mournfully. “A lot of my friends are gone. That’s depressing, not that I want to join them. Time is corrosive, but time can be very rewarding sometimes. Life is full of surprises, disappointments and rewards. I choose life rather than the alternative.” true

10613

2009-04-20T10:52:42-04:00

false

24599

174

true

2009-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

At 80, a master declares, “I don't like to look back.”

Benny Golson: Old School

2009-05-04T10:04:10-04:00