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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bassist William Parker is deserving of greater recognition

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

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

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

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

4 Tradition and innovation have never really been at odds in jazz, despite whatever the history books say. More often, the two forces have been deeply entwined, redefining each other in a vital and perpetual exchange. Trombonist and composer George Lewis reminded us of that balance this year with the landmark publication of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Univ. of Chicago). It seems likely that we’ll see another challenge to the old vs. new idea when Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux introduce their textbook Jazz (W.W. Norton), next spring. (DeVeaux’s penetrating work on bebop crucially stresses continuity over disruption; Giddins once titled an essay collection “Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation.”) So it’s probably no surprise that my annual roundup of shows would reflect a similar resistance to crude binaries. Much of the strongest jazz I heard was made by well-seasoned artists exploring fresh ideas. Many of the younger players who caught my ear were working both with and against received traditions. Even the marketplace worked to subvert conventional wisdom: Our people balked at some facetious comments made by a representative of Live Nation, the concert-promotion behemoth. (He lamely said they were “doing everything we can to eliminate jazz from American culture,” in case you didn’t get the memo.) But it’s worth noting that two of the standout concerts below, featuring Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman, were Live Nation-sponsored. Maybe good and evil aren’t always easy to sort out, either. Lionel Loueke Trio, Joe’s Pub, Jan. 23: Loueke, the sharply imaginative guitarist from Benin, had a banner year, releasing Karibu, a superb Blue Note debut. I saw his working trio a handful of other times this year, and while its sound got sleeker in other settings, this gig gets the nod for its slippery but driving momentum (and for a euphoric guest appearance by Beninese singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo). Trio M, Kitano Hotel, Jan. 31: Pianist Myra Melford, bassist Mark Dresser and drummer Matt Wilson drew upon more than 40 years of avant-garde jazz custom here, in a way that felt personal and unrestrained. There were flashes of swing along with brisk atonal brambles, and it all fit together, drawn close by the pull of the trio’s rapport. Pat Metheny Trio, Town Hall, Mar. 18: There may not be a working jazz musician with a keener sense of the heroic than guitarist Pat Metheny. Not that his trio, with Christian McBride on bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums, specializes only in high drama. But Metheny’s laser-like focus and miraculous technique demand more than passive appreciation, as the crowd at this sold-out concert seemed instinctively to know. Ornette Coleman, Town Hall, Mar. 28: An astonishing night for Coleman, as an alto saxophonist, an eminence and an unrepentant bluesman. Leading his quartet with two bassists, including the arpeggio-crazed Al MacDowell, he ducked through a series of bebop-like heads, threading each with his chirpily soulful instrumental voice. On a nearly roadhouse-raucous “Turnaround,” the effect was thrilling in its discontinuity. Lee Konitz Quartet, Jazz Standard, April 1: Every moment of this set, featuring a more or less ad hoc quartet, carried a whiff of the unknown. Konitz, the incorrigibly curious alto saxophonist, was forging a new bond with pianist Danilo Pérez, who committed fully to the situation. What capped it off was a version of “Cherokee” that cycled through all 12 keys, not with bravado but rather a kind of infectious whimsy. Evan Christopher and Tom McDermott, Donna’s, May 1: Some of the most engaging music I heard during JazzFest in New Orleans was this modest gig on the funky edge of the French Quarter. Christopher, a clarinetist, and McDermott, a pianist, were leading a quartet, and playing their vibrant strain of traditional jazz. The clear highlight was a duet on Scott Joplin’s “Pine Apple Rag,” brimming with an ageless insouciance. Kidd Jordan and Fred Anderson, Vision Festival, June 13: Two tenor saxophonists, two old-timers, two (mostly) unsung heroes: Jordan and Anderson met on common ground, with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. Their interaction proposed a study in contrasts, with Anderson harrumphing low and Jordan skirling high. But there was also the simple, changeable chemistry of conversation. Guillermo Klein, Village Vanguard, June 15: The same week that he released Filtros (Sunnyside), a gem of an album, this Argentine pianist and composer headlined at the Vanguard with his 11-piece band Los Guachos. The sound conveyed both stark drama and tenderness, advancing what I’ve taken to calling a kind of folkloric futurism. Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley, Village Vanguard, July 15: I’ve always had a special appreciation for pianist Cecil Taylor in a duo context, working with a drummer. Oxley, a longtime compatriot, imbued this engagement with an extraordinary attunement to texture, and he nudged Taylor ever so subtly toward a genuine dialogue. Henry Threadgill/Myra Melford, Roulette, Oct. 2: Threadgill, the multi-reedist, and Melford, the pianist, represent two generations of experimental tradition, and here they presented new suites under the banner of the AACM. Each led an ensemble featuring exacting younger musicians, notably in the guitar chair: Liberty Ellman was a focal point in Threadgill’s Zooid, as was Mary Halvorson in Melford’s quartet. The result was a program illuminated by the play of erudition and discovery. true 203 2009-02-12T14:37:34-05:00 false 21145 136 true 90 2009-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

Tradition and innovation have never really been at odds in jazz, despite whatever the history books say. More often, the two forces have been deeply entwined, redefining each other in a vital and perpetual exchange. Trombonist and composer George Lewis reminded us of that balance this year with the landmark publication of A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Univ. of Chicago). It seems likely that we’ll see another challenge to the old vs. new idea when Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux introduce their textbook Jazz (W.W. Norton), next spring. (DeVeaux’s penetrating work on bebop crucially stresses continuity over disruption; Giddins once titled an essay collection “Rhythm-a-ning: Jazz Tradition and Innovation.”) So it’s probably no surprise that my annual roundup of shows would reflect a similar resistance to crude binaries. Much of the strongest jazz I heard was made by well-seasoned artists exploring fresh ideas. Many of the younger players who caught my ear were working both with and against received traditions. Even the marketplace worked to subvert conventional wisdom: Our people balked at some facetious comments made by a representative of Live Nation, the concert-promotion behemoth. (He lamely said they were “doing everything we can to eliminate jazz from American culture,” in case you didn’t get the memo.) But it’s worth noting that two of the standout concerts below, featuring Pat Metheny and Ornette Coleman, were Live Nation-sponsored. Maybe good and evil aren’t always easy to sort out, either. Lionel Loueke Trio, Joe’s Pub, Jan. 23: Loueke, the sharply imaginative guitarist...

2009-03-02T00:28:16-05:00

4 In the annals of recorded music, there may not be a more exuberant three-minute salvo than “Shoe Shine Boy,” one of a handful of sides made by the entity of Jones-Smith, Incorporated. Opening with a spring-loaded piano intro by Count Basie, it rides an irresistible current, both jaunty and relaxed. Lester Young takes his first-ever tenor saxophone solo on record, his tone as bright and radiant as early-morning sunshine. Carl Smith, one of the session’s putative leaders, says his piece on trumpet; Jo Jones does the same, and more, on drums. The effort comes awfully close to a pure expression of joy. “Shoe Shine Boy” was made in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression. And in that regard it’s hardly exceptional. This was also the period, after all, that gave us Benny Goodman’s small-group sessions, and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra recording “Happy as the Day Is Long.” Then there were Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, delivering equally sanguine work (including their own respective versions of “Shoe Shine Boy”). To put it simply, the hour of our greatest hardship coincided with a golden age for jazz, when the music was not only a creative force but also a popular entertainment, and a national source of comfort. I’ve been thinking a lot about that legacy lately, for reasons that should be evident: The events of recent months have revived the specter of financial calamity. Way back in April—before the Fed bailouts, before the Dow Industrial seesaw, even before much of the economic rhetoric of the presidential campaign—the International Monetary Fund was issuing warnings about “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” What sounded a bit like alarmism back then now seems like conventional wisdom. For many jazz citizens, the economic crisis may have registered as a sort of solar flare: dramatic and remote. In the short term, life goes on. But given that our musicians as a group tend to be underpaid and underinsured, as an NEA survey confirmed in 2003, it’s worth considering the implications. I haven’t yet noticed a pronounced downturn in club or concert attendance on the New York scene—but these things can take time. And besides, there are questions beyond the realm of cover charges and CD sales. What will become of the grants and commissions routinely awarded to jazz musicians? What about the constellation of festivals, here and abroad, made possible by corporate or government funds? This fall I had the surreal experience of hearing music at a festival tent sponsored by Washington Mutual—just one day after that banking giant was seized and sold by the FDIC. I found this grimly comical, but then I never had a stake in WaMu. “We’re going to see, in this city particularly, given our reliance on the financial sector, that public funding goes down for many institutions,” Adrian Ellis, executive director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, told me recently. We happened to be sitting in the main theater of Frederick P. Rose Hall, the organization’s multimillion-dollar facility, awaiting a celebration of the 2009 class of NEA Jazz Masters. (Cross your fingers for the future of that program, which will come under scrutiny by the new presidential administration.) The outgoing NEA Chairman Dana Gioia began the ceremony that evening by noting wryly that jazz was one commodity whose value had not plummeted in recent weeks. Another question has to do with the so-called Hemline Index, the notion that culture reflects the tenor of its time. Social historians have shown, for example, that Playboy’s Playmate of the Year tends to adhere to a more waiflike standard of beauty during flush economies; leaner times result in more “mature,” fuller-figured models. (Despite the temptation to confirm this, I decided to take their findings at, ahem, face value.) It would be too simple to suggest that the swing boom was a direct byproduct of despair—but surely there was a correlation, given that even the most destitute families had radios. The late Peter Levinson, in his 2005 biography of Tommy Dorsey, points out that musicians like the Dorsey Brothers (who, it should be noted, were white) fared uncommonly well during the Depression, owing to the nation’s hunger for “escapist entertainment.” But for argument’s sake, let’s look again at “Shoe Shine Boy,” a song created by Saul Chaplin and Sammy Cahn for the show Connie’s Hot Chocolates of 1936. The lyrics, which factor into the Armstrong and Ellington versions (but not the one by Jones-Smith, Inc.), confirm the cycle of struggle: You’re just a shoe shine boy/You work hard all day Shoe shine boy/Got no time to play Every nickel helps a lot/So shine, shine, shoe shine boy. Even though the child laborer in the song is idealized, wishfully, as “seldom ever blue,” I’d argue that this is a poor specimen of escapism. What transforms the song into something transcendently positive, in its jazz iterations, is that familiar combination of ebullient rhythm and canny improvisation. Prez and Basie and the rest, including bassist Walter Page, are showing us the best of humanity precisely when it’s needed most. Of course the topical leverage of jazz has waned since, with many more fans digging Young Jeezy’s The Recession than, say, the latest by Anat Cohen. (I’ll add that Jeezy was clearly prescient, and his album is actually pretty great.) The mass audience for jazz has both evaporated but factionalized, for a host of reasons. Loren Schoenberg, the executive director of the Jazz Museum of Harlem, was stating the obvious when he reminded me that the jazz of the 1930s had a social functionality that it now transparently lacks. But Schoenberg, an expert on the swing era, agreed that the answer doesn’t reside in the past. “They weren’t playing music from the Great Depression of 1893,” he said of Basie and crew. “Maybe in some odd way this might be the spur we’ve all been waiting for,” he added, “in that it forces us to confront the fact that we need people to be engaged.” There’s no magic formula for that outcome, but jazz musicians, as ever, will surely find ways to adapt. true 203 2008-12-10T13:45:37-05:00 false 20901 129 200812 true 90 2008-12-01T00:00:00-05:00

In the annals of recorded music, there may not be a more exuberant three-minute salvo than “Shoe Shine Boy,” one of a handful of sides made by the entity of Jones-Smith, Incorporated. Opening with a spring-loaded piano intro by Count Basie, it rides an irresistible current, both jaunty and relaxed. Lester Young takes his first-ever tenor saxophone solo on record, his tone as bright and radiant as early-morning sunshine. Carl Smith, one of the session’s putative leaders, says his piece on trumpet; Jo Jones does the same, and more, on drums. The effort comes awfully close to a pure expression of joy. “Shoe Shine Boy” was made in 1936, in the middle of the Great Depression. And in that regard it’s hardly exceptional. This was also the period, after all, that gave us Benny Goodman’s small-group sessions, and the Fletcher Henderson Orchestra recording “Happy as the Day Is Long.” Then there were Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, delivering equally sanguine work (including their own respective versions of “Shoe Shine Boy”). To put it simply, the hour of our greatest hardship coincided with a golden age for jazz, when the music was not only a creative force but also a popular entertainment, and a national source of comfort. I’ve been thinking a lot about that legacy lately, for reasons that should be evident: The events of recent months have revived the specter of financial calamity. Way back in April—before the Fed bailouts, before the Dow Industrial seesaw, even before much of the economic rhetoric of the presidential...

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

4 A few months ago, after much halfhearted resistance and some full-hearted reluctance, I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers and made the plunge. I joined Facebook, the increasingly ubiquitous online social networking Web site. Since then, I have bonded with friends, rekindled acquaintanceships and made some new connections, like any user on the site. Less typically, perhaps, I’ve felt the ethical compunctions of a critic within a living scene, grasping a freshly opened can of worms. My initial reservations about joining Facebook had reflected concerns that I was about to authorize a new source of time-suck in my life. But there soon came a greater danger, and a subtler one. “Nate is figuring out how to work this thing,” I wrote in the first of many status updates linked to my profile. This was the stone cold truth, in more than one sense. Facebook has over 100 million active users worldwide, including a fast-increasing swath of the jazz citizenry. Name a youngish musician featured in the pages of this magazine, and there’s a decent chance he or she has either a self-maintained profile or a fan-created tribute page. (One example of the latter would be a group called Ari Hoenig Rocks My Socks Off, with 64 members as of this writing.) In a trademark feature of the service, common interests serve nearly as great a purpose as common backgrounds, so that anyone who claims, say, Kid Ory as a favorite musician can instantly find others who did the same. The Miles Davis page boasts somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000 pledged fans; John Coltrane has more than 15,000. Through an outside source—Facebook allows amateur developers to run free with unofficial add-ons—there’s even an application called I Love Jazz, which allows members to “send” jazz musicians to one another. The app, created by a woman in Indonesia, has more than 12,000 monthly users. (Somehow, no one has yet thought to lob a digital David Sanborn in my direction.) But even more than MySpace, its arch competitor, Facebook harnesses the energy of relationships: whom you know, and who knows you, and how you know each other. In this sense the network suggests a loose parallel to the global jazz community, if on a larger scale. And the perils of real-world interaction are mirrored there, especially for someone whose public life involves a series of aesthetic judgments. Before signing on for the first time, I set a clear policy: no “friendships” with any musician I might be called upon to cover. This was tested immediately. No sooner had I created my profile than Facebook roguishly suggested a handful of People I Might Know, most of them jazz musicians. Because I hadn’t yet specified a profession or any interests, I’m guessing their names popped up because each had posted a press quote of mine. Whatever the case, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. To be a critic, of course, is to face a perpetual crisis of impartiality. And with no way to prove it, I’d suggest that this is especially true in jazz, where the scene is small, the cause is noble and the struggle is often great. There are some jazz critics who would flee a room to avoid social interaction with a musician, and there are many others (too many) who routinely allow that interaction to flourish past the point of prudence. Good relationships are an asset in this profession, but cozy ones are a liability, and it’s not always easy to discern the middle. Which is why strict guidelines are essential, and why Facebook presented such a quandary. Within days of joining the network, I received at least a dozen friend requests from jazz musicians, and was faced with two blunt options: accept or ignore. Stoically, I chose to ignore them all, though this made me feel uneasy and neglectful. (I’m not a flee-the-room type, though I take pains to avoid being chummy.) So after about a week of feeling like a bad boyfriend, I decided to try out another strategy. Facebook enables a message to be sent along with any confirmation or denial, so I began sending brief disclaimers. For the most part, these were received kindly: Jazz musicians aren’t dummies, and can certainly fathom conflict of interest. But a few people responded with the equivalent of a cocked eyebrow. “Sorry about your trepidation, with hopes that you are not as strange as this makes you appear,” wrote one drummer who has recorded for a major label. “Hopefully, your non-cyber relationships are not also distorted by this inflated sense of purpose.” (If only he knew how I behave in restaurants.) A trumpeter quipped: “Now you don’t have to wonder if you’re really my friend or I’m just kissing your ass!!!” (In fact, I had plans to review him the following week, and who’s to say whether “friendship” might have affected the tone of the review?) Again, this strikes me as a situation peculiar to jazz: I seriously doubt that David Fricke at Rolling Stone spends much time turning down friend requests from U2’s Bono. (I could be wrong on this point; Bono seems needy. But you get the picture.) And I have no intention of suggesting that I’ve found the answer, where critics and Facebook are concerned. By not befriending these musicians, I stand to miss out on a certain kind of passing exposure to their semipublic lives. Social scientists call this “ambient awareness,” and it has to do with the status updates and news feeds built into the Facebook experience. My “friends” on Facebook constantly update their profiles with photos, posted links and all manner of commentary. I imagine most Facebook-savvy jazz musicians do the same, and their output is surely fascinating. But I’m fine with the present situation: It’s surprisingly refreshing to be Facebook friends with people whose lives don’t necessarily revolve around jazz. A handful of people in my network—faraway, long-lost high school pals—have only the slightest idea about my (ahem) inflated sense of purpose. And I have to say, their kids are awfully cute. true 203 2008-12-03T14:28:45-05:00 false 20779 128 200811 true 90 2008-11-01T00:00:00-04:00

A few months ago, after much halfhearted resistance and some full-hearted reluctance, I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers and made the plunge. I joined Facebook, the increasingly ubiquitous online social networking Web site. Since then, I have bonded with friends, rekindled acquaintanceships and made some new connections, like any user on the site. Less typically, perhaps, I’ve felt the ethical compunctions of a critic within a living scene, grasping a freshly opened can of worms. My initial reservations about joining Facebook had reflected concerns that I was about to authorize a new source of time-suck in my life. But there soon came a greater danger, and a subtler one. “Nate is figuring out how to work this thing,” I wrote in the first of many status updates linked to my profile. This was the stone cold truth, in more than one sense. Facebook has over 100 million active users worldwide, including a fast-increasing swath of the jazz citizenry. Name a youngish musician featured in the pages of this magazine, and there’s a decent chance he or she has either a self-maintained profile or a fan-created tribute page. (One example of the latter would be a group called Ari Hoenig Rocks My Socks Off, with 64 members as of this writing.) In a trademark feature of the service, common interests serve nearly as great a purpose as common backgrounds, so that anyone who claims, say, Kid Ory as a favorite musician can instantly find others who did the same. The Miles Davis page boasts somewhere...

2009-03-02T00:28:01-05:00

4 Perhaps you’ve heard of the android trumpeter. Developed by Toyota, it was unveiled in 2004 as part of a suite of so-called Partner Robots designed to “embody kindness and intelligence and to assist with human activities,” in the parlance of a company press release. The scattered evidence found online is impressive, even scary. In one video clip, the robot plays a credible Dixieland version of “Bippity Boppity Boo,” complete with Wynton-esque trills. Another clip features a segue from “When You Wish Upon a Star” to the original Mickey Mouse Club theme, with what sounds like flawless intonation. The tone of the comments on these pages runs from dumbstruck awe to withering skepticism. One commenter summed up the ambivalence with a phrase both suggestive and succinct: “That robot blows.” Setting aside the obvious wow factor and any attendant paranoia—no, the android will not take your gigs, unless you’re in a brass band at Tokyo Disneyland—the phenomenon represents a new intersection between trumpets and technology. I’m sure the research here is fascinating, with regard to embouchure alone. But since my interest tends more toward aesthetics than animatronics, I’ll take the android in symbolic terms, as a curious inversion. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t encountered any robotic trumpeters on the scene. But I have seen quite a few human horn players engaging seriously with circuitry, and adopting electronics as an integral part of their music. Old news, you might argue, and in a certain sense you’d be right. If we’re going there, though, you could say the same about Toyota’s young machine with a horn: German inventor Friedrich Kaufmann unveiled his own “Mechanical Trumpeter” back in 1810, using an assemblage of coils, levers and tongs. But Kaufmann’s contraption looked much better than it sounded, according to staff members at the Deutsches Museum, where it’s part of the permanent collection. I’ll similarly submit that most electronic effects favored by jazz trumpeters have long suffered from similar deficiencies, functioning at best like window dressing and at worst like the stuff of kitsch. Now, to be clear: There’s a sizeable chunk of electric Miles Davis that I consider both deeply engrossing and vitally important, partly because of the Hendrix-inspired wah-wah action on the horn. And it’s hard not to be impressed by the perspicacity of Don Ellis, who ran his trumpet through an Echoplex at least as early as 1967. (See “Open Beauty,” the sumptuous tone poem at the heart of his Electric Bath album, on Columbia/Legacy.) What leaves me cold is any subsequent attempt to adopt electronics on a strictly superficial level, or in blatant Miles-ian imitation. This tough standard indicts some imposing trumpet talent, from Randy Brecker to Wallace Roney to Nicholas Payton. And it effectively excludes many others whose plugged-in bands have involved minimal electronic treatment of the horn itself: Roy Hargrove, Tim Hagans, Jeremy Pelt, Christian Scott, Corey Wilkes, etc. (all of whom I dig, by the way). The more conscientious trumpet electricians take pains to approach their art almost as an entirely separate pursuit, requiring a different methodology of playing. Two of the finest happen to hail from Norway, where improvisation and electronics have had a less contentious relationship over the years. Nils Petter Molvær integrates sampling and sound manipulation so thoroughly into his playing that he can often seem like an electronic artist whose interface just happens to be a horn. Arve Henriksen presents an even more radical figure: His work with the four-piece collective Supersilent isn’t likely to be rivaled by any other trumpeter-programmer for some time. (The distinction isn’t merely technological: Listen to one of Supersilent’s many releases on Rune Grammofon, and you’re likely to be as haunted by his pristine tone as you are by his electronic savvy.) Among the other trumpeters exploring this terrain, I’d place Cuong Vu and Rob Mazurek in comparable positions at the front of the pack. If you’ve heard any of Vu’s albums over the last decade, or seen him on tour with the Pat Metheny Group, you can probably attest to his firm grasp of electronics, both in concrete and abstract terms; his real-time sampling puts the equipment directly in the path of improvisation. As for Mazurek, I first took note of his efforts around the turn of the millennium—check out his cornet solo on “Tunnel Chrome,” from Chicago Underground Quartet (Thrill Jockey, 2001)—and his advances since then have been exponential. Last year his Exploding Star Orchestra released an album featuring the venerable trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon, who has worked extensively (and provocatively) with electronic effects himself. It would also behoove anyone with interest to seek out live recordings of Keystone, led by Dave Douglas; start with Moonshine, which Greenleaf Music released officially this spring. Lest it seem that trumpet electronics are strictly an avant-garde preoccupation, consider the emergence of players like Matt Schulman, whose sensibility runs toward the pop spectrum, and Jesse Neuman, who often traffics in a deep-lyrical mode. (Neuman, it should be disclosed, is a former roommate of mine.) Another proponent is Shane Endsley, best known for his role in the jazz-rock confab Kneebody. “I think a lot of guys my age and younger especially are thinking along the next stage of development,” he told me recently, “buying electronics and starting to really treat them as something that you practice and develop and manipulate, just like you do your regular instrument.” Endsley and I were perched at the bar in Barbès, the Park Slope joint where he had just finished a gig with a new trio called Stones Throw. The set was a vivid illustration of his statement, beginning with a sampled and harmonized background riff, triggered with foot pedals. At various other spots in the performance, Endsley employed an octave effect, generated a haze of static and distortion, and sparred with on-the-spot recordings of himself. “My concept for using that stuff is to try and have it not sound like a trumpet most of the time,” he explained. “I like to disguise and mask it, have it blend into the sounds that the pedals are making. So it really is more like laptop or keyboard.” That may sound like an odd goal for a trumpeter, but it’s viable, and a thoughtful use of the means at hand. Besides, there’s a beguiling symmetry at work here: While Toyota strives to have its robot play the horn in a serviceably human style, there are those who are taking the opposite route. In a cutting contest, I know which side I’m betting on. true 203 2008-09-24T19:27:38-04:00 false 20380 127 200810 true 90 2008-10-01T00:00:00-04:00

Perhaps you’ve heard of the android trumpeter. Developed by Toyota, it was unveiled in 2004 as part of a suite of so-called Partner Robots designed to “embody kindness and intelligence and to assist with human activities,” in the parlance of a company press release. The scattered evidence found online is impressive, even scary. In one video clip, the robot plays a credible Dixieland version of “Bippity Boppity Boo,” complete with Wynton-esque trills. Another clip features a segue from “When You Wish Upon a Star” to the original Mickey Mouse Club theme, with what sounds like flawless intonation. The tone of the comments on these pages runs from dumbstruck awe to withering skepticism. One commenter summed up the ambivalence with a phrase both suggestive and succinct: “That robot blows.” Setting aside the obvious wow factor and any attendant paranoia—no, the android will not take your gigs, unless you’re in a brass band at Tokyo Disneyland—the phenomenon represents a new intersection between trumpets and technology. I’m sure the research here is fascinating, with regard to embouchure alone. But since my interest tends more toward aesthetics than animatronics, I’ll take the android in symbolic terms, as a curious inversion. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t encountered any robotic trumpeters on the scene. But I have seen quite a few human horn players engaging seriously with circuitry, and adopting electronics as an integral part of their music. Old news, you might argue, and in a certain sense you’d be right. If we’re going there, though, you could say...

2009-03-02T00:27:48-05:00

4 For the ambitious jazz listener in New York City, a kind of haze descends around the second week of June. With the JVC Jazz Festival just stirring and the Vision Festival gathering steam, concertgoers can gravitate to the aesthetic extreme of their choice. But that’s only the half of it: In a season of overbooking, the clubs also grow delirious with promise. So what was striking about this past June, for me, had less to do with the abundance of options—though the upstart New Languages Festival, in its fourth season, did compound that issue—than with one common ideal among them. Uptown and downtown, on stages great and small, I kept considering the social legacy of jazz innovation. Wherever I turned, there was fodder for the argument that visionaries need company—they don’t come out of nowhere, whatever their press clippings say. Of course this isn’t a novel idea. Jazz has always been a communal art, despite the emphasis on solo feats and the timeless imperative to find one’s own voice. Ralph Ellison once famously described it as “an art of individual assertion within and against the group,” exposing both the balance and the tensions of such an arrangement. Consult some of the more conscientious histories of the music, like Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop (Univ. of Calif.) or George Lewis’ A Power Stronger Than Itself (Univ. of Chicago), and you’ll encounter a record of communal innovation, punctuated by the errant flash of genius. It’s much the same today, though collectivity may be an even bigger deal now, if bandstand evidence can be trusted to tell the tale. Consider the case of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, who appeared in two different settings this festival season. Now well into his 30s, he emerged just over a decade ago as one of the postbop progressives who congregated at Smalls, the Minton’s Playhouse of the Clinton era. Barring the specter of guitar-geek fetishism, there’s no way to isolate his talent from its context, or from a peer group that found footing together. So it was instructive to hear Rosenwinkel at the Village Vanguard with the Brian Blade Fellowship, which originally coalesced at Smalls, and then, one week later, on a JVC bill with the Bad Plus, whose members could be described as fellow travelers. On both gigs he was lucid and inspired, drawing tangible energy from the relationships onstage. If musical bonds forged a decade ago can yield such potent dividends, one has to wonder what the scene will produce a dozen years from now. Another recent JVC concert featured ensembles led by bassist Esperanza Spalding and multireedist Anat Cohen, two of the lauded under-30 visionaries profiled elsewhere in this issue. Spalding and Cohen are prodigiously gifted musicians who don’t just happen to move in creative social circles; their artistry has largely developed there. (Cohen’s band featured two of her brothers along with pianist Jason Lindner, another Smalls alumnus.) A similar dynamic was evident during portions of this year’s Vision Festival, as when cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum led a sextet that included guitarist Mary Halvorson and violist Jessica Pavone, two fearless young improvisers whose names turn up often on the avant-garde grid. It’s no coincidence that I spotted Halvorson and Pavone in the audience at the New Languages Festival one night, during a set by alto saxophonist Jackson Moore. Running concurrently with the Vision Festival and situated just a couple of blocks away, New Languages celebrated an in-between aesthetic, somewhere along the expanse between flat-out experimentalism and polished presentation. Moore, one of the event’s organizers, was weaving long, serpentine melodic strands over a rhythmic current stirred by bassist Eivind Opsvik and drummer Eric McPherson. Among the other artists gathered under the festival’s umbrella were tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby, leading a dynamic trio with Matt Brewer on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums, and guitarist Miles Okazaki, whose capable band included alto saxophonist David Binney and bassist Hans Glawischnig. If you’ve dug anywhere past the topsoil of the New York club landscape, you’ve probably seen some of these figures working hard in one of myriad possible combinations. What differentiates that situation from the club circuit immemorial? Logistics, for one thing. Over the last five years or so, an increasing proportion of the smaller clubs in New York have moved toward an artist-curator model, in which the musicians book the schedules. The Stone, following the blueprint originally laid for Tonic, entrusts a different overseer each month. Barbès, in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood, has enlisted a few different resident programmers for its Wednesday night series. Elsewhere in Brooklyn there are semi-regular events organized by keyboardist James Carney and guitarist Mike Gamble, and a few group efforts like the Douglass Street Music Collective and the Brooklyn Jazz Underground. It doesn’t take a degree in music business to grasp that artist involvement in programming will have some effect on the social dynamics of the art. That proved true during the lofty New York of the 1970s, as it had in Chicago a few years earlier. These days, for better or worse, community is once again a prevailing focus. That realization was close at hand one Wednesday during the height of festival madness, as I scrutinized the calendar. At Barbès, there would be a rare stand by Bloodcount, an influential avant-garde quartet; at the Stone, there would be a set by Fieldwork, an advanced cooperative trio. Over at Joe’s Pub, violinist Jenny Scheinman was exploring new vocal terrain with a trusted partner, Tony Scherr. And in Williamsburg a handful of kindred spirits—including bassist Ben Allison, formerly of the Jazz Composers Collective—were presiding over an evening pointedly titled “This Is Our Music.” This was just scratching the surface, but it all gestured toward the interconnectedness of the scene. So too did my actual plans that evening, which involved several hours of stalwart performance by the august New Orleans tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan. Appearing at the Vision Festival, he played with dozens of musicians, some of them a good deal younger. But he did his strongest work alongside his fellow tenor saxophonist and longtime veteran Fred Anderson. Pushing and provoking each other, they produced something fiercely vital: proof, as if any were needed, that visionaries can be receptive and productive at any stage, especially in the company of their peers. true 203 2008-08-12T19:18:45-04:00 false 19899 126 200809 true 90 2008-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

For the ambitious jazz listener in New York City, a kind of haze descends around the second week of June. With the JVC Jazz Festival just stirring and the Vision Festival gathering steam, concertgoers can gravitate to the aesthetic extreme of their choice. But that’s only the half of it: In a season of overbooking, the clubs also grow delirious with promise. So what was striking about this past June, for me, had less to do with the abundance of options—though the upstart New Languages Festival, in its fourth season, did compound that issue—than with one common ideal among them. Uptown and downtown, on stages great and small, I kept considering the social legacy of jazz innovation. Wherever I turned, there was fodder for the argument that visionaries need company—they don’t come out of nowhere, whatever their press clippings say. Of course this isn’t a novel idea. Jazz has always been a communal art, despite the emphasis on solo feats and the timeless imperative to find one’s own voice. Ralph Ellison once famously described it as “an art of individual assertion within and against the group,” exposing both the balance and the tensions of such an arrangement. Consult some of the more conscientious histories of the music, like Scott DeVeaux’s The Birth of Bebop (Univ. of Calif.) or George Lewis’ A Power Stronger Than Itself (Univ. of Chicago), and you’ll encounter a record of communal innovation, punctuated by the errant flash of genius. It’s much the same today, though collectivity may be an even bigger deal...

2009-03-02T00:27:24-05:00

4 On one level it wasn’t an unusual scene: Nicholas Payton and James Carter carving up rhythm changes on trumpet and tenor saxophone, respectively. Beside them: the indubitable bassist Christian McBride and the irrepressible drummer Roy Haynes. Boppish head, medium-bright clip. Snap, crackle. Crescendo. Applause. But this wasn’t a marquee booking at Birdland, or an all-star festival special. The musicians were at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden, appearing by invitation at the seventh annual Jammy Awards. Their liaison, Page McConnell, formerly of the jam-band Phish, was at the piano and technically at the helm. For many of the several thousand fans gathered in the name of the Jam, the tune was familiar as “Magilla,” a McConnell composition from A Picture of Nectar, Phish’s 1992 major-label debut. If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to this scene over the last decade or so, you probably aren’t surprised by the jazz-friendly overtures. While still clearly rooted in the loose-limbed guitar-rock paradigm of Jerry Garcia and Duane Allman, among others, the jam-band realm has proven a hospitable environment for improvisers of all sorts. And whereas the overlap was something of a novelty as recently as the early ’90s—A Picture of Nectar grabbed some notice for its inclusion of “Manteca,” the Dizzy Gillespie tune—recent developments have deepened the cross-genre rapport. What’s more, that dialogue has subtly altered the language itself, mongrelizing the syntax of jazz and jam alike. Consider the talent assembled for that Jammys interlude: Notwithstanding the venerable Haynes, each member of the band has at some point made the shift from hard-bop wunderkind to new-millennial fusioneer. The Christian McBride Band, with its wah-wah synthesizers, is a more intuitive fit for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival than the Village Vanguard. As for Carter, there was a recent spell when you were more likely to hear him playing Harmolodic funk than bop or swing. And Payton, once widely heralded as an inheritor to Louis Armstrong, swerved hard in another direction five years ago with his project Sonic Trance, and a Warner Bros. studio album of the same name. It doesn’t take much skepticism to suspect an ulterior motive for these putative digressions. Any reader of this magazine is already numbingly aware of the tenuous market foothold held by instrumental jazz today. It stands to reason that Jam Nation, though a far cry from the glossy pop mainstream, can propose a more attractive and viable option than the ever-feebler jazz constituency. As I recall, guitarist John Scofield was initially taken aback by the size of the crowds that greeted him on tour a decade ago, after he made his first collaborative album with Medeski, Martin & Wood. And Return to Forever, the landmark 1970s jazz-rock band that recently reunited with much ado, mounted its comeback with keen awareness of the jam-band circuit. “They were the beneficiaries of what we had done,” drummer Lenny White said of Jam Nation, during a break in rehearsals in Austin. I reconsidered the jazz-jam exchange—can we agree to call it “jamz,” just for the remainder of this column?—during this year’s New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, one of the prime settings for overlap. Operating at full capacity for the first time since Hurricane Katrina, JazzFest offered a dizzying preponderance of jazz-sans-groove, often at unexpected moments: During Santana’s often-explosive headlining performance, for instance, I counted at least two long extrapolations of themes by John Coltrane. More predictable, perhaps, were the late-night offerings all over the city, featuring the likes of trumpeter Christian Scott, guitarist Eric Krasno and organist Robert Walter. One of the highlights of my JazzFest weekend was a 3 a.m. show at Preservation Hall featuring a soul-jazz trio led by drummer Stanton Moore, with Trombone Shorty as a special guest. Another night at Snug Harbor, the brightest gem among New Orleans jazz clubs, I left a sparkling late set by pianist Ellis Marsalis only to bump into saxophonist John Ellis, who was booked to play an even later set with his new band Double-Wide. By my tally, Ellis (John Ellis, that is) had been playing several gigs a night during JazzFest weekend; par for the course, he said. One such gig was a showcase for Hyena Records, which has lately specialized in jamz like Marco Benevento’s audacious Invisible Baby and Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey’s electro-spective Lil Tae Rides Again. The recent Hyena release by Ellis and Double-Wide, Dance Like There’s No Tomorrow, strikes a solid middle ground between gutbucket funk, serpentine postbop and buoyant New Orleans parade music. One striking thing about jamz albums like these is the advanced evolution they handily suggest. An artist like Benevento, the keyboardist who rocketed onto Jam Nation radar screens with his madly propulsive Benevento-Russo Duo, doesn’t appear out of place in a more jazz-derived setting. On his sprawling 2007 release Live at Tonic (Ropeadope), he covers Benny Goodman and Thelonious Monk right along with Pink Floyd. He also plays a Brad Mehldau tune, though it should be noted that the tune is named “Sabbath,” after the heavy metal band Black Sabbath. Without empirical data, I’d hazard a guess that there are many citizens of Jam Nation—folks who track live shows on JamBase.com and skim the occasional issue of Relix—who are no less familiar with Mehldau than they are with, say, the String Cheese Incident. Their views on music are passionate and often well considered, even if they lack the historical perspective evinced by hardcore jazzbos. They were the ones giving Roy Haynes a hero’s welcome at the Jammy Awards. Incidentally, on the morning after those festivities, it was announced that the Jammys were no more, and not for lack of success, creative or otherwise. “In the spirit of the event, we’re going to figure it out as we go,” its executive producer, Peter Shapiro, told me. “A lot of people would say, ‘Why switch now?’ We think it’s the perfect time to make an improvisational move and go for the new thing.” Without getting into specifics, he vowed that this new thing would more broadly celebrate the spirit of live music, naturally including jazz. Considering the current state of jamz, a term I promise to henceforth relinquish, my thoughts return to Payton, who recently released his first album for Nonesuch. Into the Blue, featuring a working postbop quintet, feels immeasurably more relaxed than Sonic Trance, and truer to Payton’s personality. It grooves, at times explicitly, but without the sense of someone trying to get a point across. Maybe it’s no longer necessary for a brilliant, tradition-honed jazz musician to get defensive or obvious when it comes to enlisting a serious backbeat. And maybe that’s simply a good thing. true 203 2008-07-09T18:20:11-04:00 false 19419 125 200808 true 90 2008-08-01T00:00:00-04:00

On one level it wasn’t an unusual scene: Nicholas Payton and James Carter carving up rhythm changes on trumpet and tenor saxophone, respectively. Beside them: the indubitable bassist Christian McBride and the irrepressible drummer Roy Haynes. Boppish head, medium-bright clip. Snap, crackle. Crescendo. Applause. But this wasn’t a marquee booking at Birdland, or an all-star festival special. The musicians were at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden, appearing by invitation at the seventh annual Jammy Awards. Their liaison, Page McConnell, formerly of the jam-band Phish, was at the piano and technically at the helm. For many of the several thousand fans gathered in the name of the Jam, the tune was familiar as “Magilla,” a McConnell composition from A Picture of Nectar, Phish’s 1992 major-label debut. If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to this scene over the last decade or so, you probably aren’t surprised by the jazz-friendly overtures. While still clearly rooted in the loose-limbed guitar-rock paradigm of Jerry Garcia and Duane Allman, among others, the jam-band realm has proven a hospitable environment for improvisers of all sorts. And whereas the overlap was something of a novelty as recently as the early ’90s—A Picture of Nectar grabbed some notice for its inclusion of “Manteca,” the Dizzy Gillespie tune—recent developments have deepened the cross-genre rapport. What’s more, that dialogue has subtly altered the language itself, mongrelizing the syntax of jazz and jam alike. Consider the talent assembled for that Jammys interlude: Notwithstanding the venerable Haynes, each member of the band has at some point...

2009-03-02T00:27:05-05:00

4 On March 25, 1963, an alto saxophonist named Jimmy Woods entered a Los Angeles studio to record an album, his second, for the Contemporary label. He had assembled some musicians of note, including tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Andrew Hill and drummer Elvin Jones. Their sessions, which spilled over into the next day, yielded an obscure little gem called Conflict. For reasons no one has publicly aired, it would be the last release by Woods, who would surface as a sideman on just a few more recordings (Gerald Wilson, Chico Hamilton), before withdrawing completely from the scene. I thought of Jimmy Woods—not to be confused with the actor James Woods, or literary critic James Wood, or bassist Jimmy Woode—after spending four days in Seattle for the EMP Pop Conference, a summit and gabfest hosted annually by the Experience Music Project. Partly this was because the conference encourages its participating critics and scholars (and intrepid audience members, attending free of charge) to reconsider people much like Woods, whom the Los Angeles-based pianist-trombonist Horace Tapscott remembered in his autobiography as “an inspiration to all the modern players around.” Partly, too, my thought process hinged on that album title: Conflict. The theme of this year’s Pop Conference was “Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict and Change,” and it inspired some terrific papers on subjects both predictable (protest singer Phil Ochs) and less so (retro-soul siren Amy Winehouse). For at least one good reason—1963 was a pivotal year for the civil-rights movement—Woods’ album sprang to mind as perhaps another of the myriad instances in which music engages, incites or deflects social tensions. Jazz topics generally occupy only a narrow band of the EMP spectrum, a fact that probably has less to do with the organizers’ prejudices than with a lack of widespread involvement and effort among the jazz cognoscenti. Gary Giddins appeared on the inaugural conference in 2002, and a handful of less illustrious folk, myself included, have presented on or about jazz since. But only rarely has a knockout piece of jazz analysis or scholarship turned up there. This year I moderated a session that included three of the only jazz-focused presentations. Among them was “‘We Insist!’ Popular Music, the Civil Rights Movement, and King’s ‘Urgency of Now,’” a timely but rather rudimentary survey by Barry Long, an assistant professor of music at Mount St. Mary’s University. There’s still ample reason to revisit the conflict-minded jazz of yore, including We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Candid), the 1960 Roach and Oscar Brown opus invoked above. One reason is that much of this music still packs considerable power. (Professor Long could have bolstered his case by screening one of several awe-inspiring YouTube clips of the Max Roach Quartet with Abbey Lincoln.) Most JazzTimes readers could probably cite a litany of related works. And of course political commentary continues in our era, among artists as stylistically diverse as pianist Vijay Iyer, tenor saxophonist Andrew Rathbun and trumpeters Wynton Marsalis and Dave Douglas. What was missing at EMP among a profusion of exegeses, many quite compelling, was any sustained investigation of these ideas, beginning with the politics of improv. (That phrase surfaced in a paper about Mingus’ collaboration with filmmaker John Cassavetes, but the takeaway there was that both men were as hardheaded as rumored.) While I sat absorbing some especially thoughtful and illuminating work on, say, turn-of-the-century vaudeville sensation Eva Tanguay, I couldn’t help but wonder where the equivalent jazz ruminations might be lurking. During my session, Jazz Journalists Association president Howard Mandel put forth the interesting idea that Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor—the troika at the heart of his recent book, Miles Ornette Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge)—were all “coalition-builders.” But because that notion wasn’t framed in a structured paper, it felt more like a teaser for the book than a standalone argument. The friction between academic and journalistic efforts in jazz—between university-rooted “jazz studies” and workaday jazz criticism—still seems to curtail much meaningful discourse across the aisle. So jazz critics don’t turn out for EMP, and jazz scholars largely disregard it. I believe this can change, in Seattle or some other forum, though few hopes can be pinned on the International Association for Jazz Education, an organization that imploded this spring under financial duress. But then the IAJE Conference was never primarily about ideas anyway, as Giddins implied in some quote-worthy comments made shortly after his only visit to EMP; this took place on a panel organized by jazz journalist Larry Blumenfeld under the aegis of the National Arts Journalism Program. (Blumenfeld, by the way, presented another of the jazz papers at this year’s EMP, focusing on post-Katrina New Orleans funerals.) But back to those comments by Giddins, delivered during an afternoon at the Village Vanguard. “Every time I’ve ever been to a jazz conference,” he said, “it always turns into a kind of boosterism: ‘What can we do for jazz? How can we help jazz?’” Whereas at EMP, he continued, “everybody wrote papers that had to do with ideas and theories and concepts and historicism and criticism. It was absolutely fascinating. The critics were doing serious scholarly work, and the academics were doing their scholarly work in plain English, and everybody understood everybody else.” It sounds like the opposite of conflict, which isn’t to say absolute consensus. And if jazz is to have a summit as stimulating as the EMP Pop Conference—or even just a stronger presence there—all of us simply need to make an effort. Speaking for myself, I’d love to hear more erudite jazz talk in Seattle next April. Maybe someone might even find some context for Jimmy Woods, a figure I still don’t know nearly enough about. true 203 2008-06-12T21:12:54-04:00 false 17982 116 200806 true 90 2008-06-01T00:00:00-04:00

On March 25, 1963, an alto saxophonist named Jimmy Woods entered a Los Angeles studio to record an album, his second, for the Contemporary label. He had assembled some musicians of note, including tenor saxophonist Harold Land, pianist Andrew Hill and drummer Elvin Jones. Their sessions, which spilled over into the next day, yielded an obscure little gem called Conflict. For reasons no one has publicly aired, it would be the last release by Woods, who would surface as a sideman on just a few more recordings (Gerald Wilson, Chico Hamilton), before withdrawing completely from the scene. I thought of Jimmy Woods—not to be confused with the actor James Woods, or literary critic James Wood, or bassist Jimmy Woode—after spending four days in Seattle for the EMP Pop Conference, a summit and gabfest hosted annually by the Experience Music Project. Partly this was because the conference encourages its participating critics and scholars (and intrepid audience members, attending free of charge) to reconsider people much like Woods, whom the Los Angeles-based pianist-trombonist Horace Tapscott remembered in his autobiography as “an inspiration to all the modern players around.” Partly, too, my thought process hinged on that album title: Conflict. The theme of this year’s Pop Conference was “Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict and Change,” and it inspired some terrific papers on subjects both predictable (protest singer Phil Ochs) and less so (retro-soul siren Amy Winehouse). For at least one good reason—1963 was a pivotal year for the civil-rights movement—Woods’ album sprang to mind as perhaps another of the myriad...

2009-03-02T00:26:10-05:00

4 One night last summer in Lower Manhattan, the Chicago-based flutist Nicole Mitchell premiered a long-form composition inspired by the work of Octavia Butler, the pioneering science-fiction author. Created and conceived for Mitchell’s nine-piece Black Earth Ensemble, it was one of several new works presented during the 12th annual Vision Festival. And it pursued an ambitious agenda, exploring metaphysical concepts through the multifarious procedures of a still-evolving jazz avant-garde. Mitchell’s work is now available as a studio recording, Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler (Firehouse 12), and if you scan the inside cover, you’ll find the usual notes and acknowledgments. You’ll also see a line about the origins of the piece: “It was created with support from Chamber Music America’s New Works: Creation and Presentation Program through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.” If you’re the type of person who reads festival programs and concert playbills, those words will have a familiar ring. Jazz has increasingly become, like classical music, a principality of grants and commissions, from sources public and private. This is the natural state of affairs for a music that exists beyond popular support, but it also raises unsettling questions. Patronage is by no means a new phenomenon, even in jazz. During the early years of the Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals—a time when jazz was much more of a mainstream concern—commissions were given to Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, among others. (Monterey still does this, and now so does SFJAZZ and many other festivals worldwide.) That same midcentury span saw the heyday of the major labels, which effectively sponsored new work from their rosters. (Without the vested interest of a Columbia Records, could there really have been a Sketches of Spain?) The current boom in grants and commissions has more of an impassive philanthropic feel. On some level it can be attributed to the rise in cultural stature jazz has experienced over the last two decades, since the height of our neoclassicist era and the concurrent rise of a canny downtown scene. Wynton Marsalis, from the former camp, programs Jazz at Lincoln Center with funds largely provided by corporations; John Zorn, from the latter, is the recent recipient of separate $50,000 grants from the MacArthur Foundation and Columbia University. On both sides, the money has been attached to some abstract notion of cultural value, with expectations of tangible results. These days, financial support for jazz composers also comes from organizations like BMI and the ASCAP Foundation, along with the American Composers Forum, Meet the Composer and regional entities like the New York State Council on the Arts. Each year the International Association for Jazz Education presents a Gil Evans commission, with funds provided by the Herb Alpert Foundation. Incidentally, the first recipient of that particular honor, in 1992, was Maria Schneider, who would later democratize the process of patronage through ArtistShare. Chamber Music America, the sponsor of Xenogenesis Suite, is probably the most active commissioning body in the field. According to Margaret Lioi, the organization’s CEO, it has commissioned 104 new works since 2000, about a dozen per year. CMA’s working definition of chamber music is flexible and jazz-conducive: “music for small ensembles in which players perform one to a part, generally without a conductor.” Beneficiaries of the program have included jazz artists of varying degrees of prominence. Lioi reports that a total of $1.3 million has been awarded, in standard increments of $6,000 per composer and $1,000 per ensemble member. (By this calculus, Mitchell’s Black Earth Ensemble received $14,000.) The only postgrant requirement is a physical copy of the score and the realization of two performances. Occasionally, as in Mitchell’s case, results also yield an album; two more recent examples would be Codebook (Pi) and In Pursuit (Sunnyside), respectively by the saxophonists Rudresh Mahanthappa and Donny McCaslin. So what’s the problem? Strictly speaking, nothing: Jazz desperately needs this sort of institutional support. But sometimes I wonder about the greater influence of such an arrangement. Peruse the comprehensive list of Chamber Music America grants, and you’ll find a preponderance of self-consciously intellectual or pointedly interdisciplinary works. In the program’s inaugural year, grants were awarded not only for “Abstract Expression,” by pianist Phil Markowitz, but also “Chasing Paint: The Jackson Pollock Suites,” by soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom. “People have associated their commissions with artwork, with literature, with contemporary social themes,” says Lioi. That’s fine, except for the fact that concept-driven work is fast becoming the norm. Consider again Mitchell’s Xenogenesis Suite, this time as a textbook case. A cynic might suggest that “suite” has become a sort of magic word—in the first five years of CMA’s program, it appeared in the titles of 24 works, and probably in countless more proposals—and that the exploitation of extramusical ideas has become a recipe for grant-writing success. There have been success stories in this area, like the performance-art partnerships of Jason Moran, the multimedia social critiques of pianist Vijay Iyer, and the cultural investigations of Myra Melford. But there have also been duds, pieces weighed down by premise or expectation, with results that feel more dutiful than dynamic. For better or worse, jazz has steadily been adjusting to a system that rewards rationalization. Where does this leave a musician like guitarist Russell Malone, or tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, or even pianist Mulgrew Miller, who put into circulation the wry term “interview music” a few years ago? (Where, for that matter, would it have left someone like Dexter Gordon?) Lioi points to CMA’s residency program, which sponsors ensemble performances in a range of community settings. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t change the fact that jazz musicians are now expected to be heady conceptualists, ambitious composers and shrewd grant writers, in addition to mastering the quantum physics of improvisation, which isn’t any easier now than it was a generation ago. Thankfully most musicians seem to understand the balance. One month before the premiere of “Xenogenesis”, Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble recorded a separate album, Black Unstoppable (Delmark). Consisting of all original music but no larger concept, it might well be the less important work. But it’s also the more rewarding one. true 203 2008-06-16T19:17:21-04:00 false 18105 117 200805 true 90 2008-05-01T00:00:00-04:00

One night last summer in Lower Manhattan, the Chicago-based flutist Nicole Mitchell premiered a long-form composition inspired by the work of Octavia Butler, the pioneering science-fiction author. Created and conceived for Mitchell’s nine-piece Black Earth Ensemble, it was one of several new works presented during the 12th annual Vision Festival. And it pursued an ambitious agenda, exploring metaphysical concepts through the multifarious procedures of a still-evolving jazz avant-garde. Mitchell’s work is now available as a studio recording, Xenogenesis Suite: A Tribute to Octavia Butler (Firehouse 12), and if you scan the inside cover, you’ll find the usual notes and acknowledgments. You’ll also see a line about the origins of the piece: “It was created with support from Chamber Music America’s New Works: Creation and Presentation Program through the generosity of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.” If you’re the type of person who reads festival programs and concert playbills, those words will have a familiar ring. Jazz has increasingly become, like classical music, a principality of grants and commissions, from sources public and private. This is the natural state of affairs for a music that exists beyond popular support, but it also raises unsettling questions. Patronage is by no means a new phenomenon, even in jazz. During the early years of the Newport and Monterey Jazz Festivals—a time when jazz was much more of a mainstream concern—commissions were given to Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, among others. (Monterey still does this, and now so does SFJAZZ and many other festivals worldwide.) That same midcentury span saw the...

2009-03-02T00:26:14-05:00

4 Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Another bolt of conventional wisdom holds that wherever three or more jazz musicians are gathered, a bass player shall be among them. Put those credos together and you might come to this conclusion: Any jazz group bold enough to venture into the world without a bassist is bound to realize, all the more clearly, a bassist’s crucial role in the music. There have surely been countless jam sessions, and even a few dispiriting gigs, where such a truth hit home. Yet every rule has its exceptions. And it’s worth remembering that the string bass was adopted into the standard jazz rhythm section rather than born to it. There were no bass players on Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, or in most other contemporaneous recordings. Nor was there a bassist in the Benny Goodman Quartet a decade later. By that point, the mid-1930s, the bass had largely edged out the tuba in jazz, thanks to stylistic shifts as well as advances in recording technology. It would take the quantum leap of bebop, though, before bassists were de rigueur: When the pianist is dancing over bar lines and the drummer is dropping bombs, it helps to have a steady voice in play. What, then, would prompt a group to eschew a bassist after 1940 or so? Sometimes the decision might have been made to foster a sense of intimacy, or showcase a degree of virtuosity. Both of those ideas were probably involved when Lester Young recorded his famous Verve sides with Nat “King” Cole and Buddy Rich. Cole was a pianist schooled in the style of ex-Goodman wingman Teddy Wilson, and Rich was a drummer possessed not only of prodigious chops but also a sharp set of ears. And while the sessions took place in ’46, they show no signs of bebop’s encroachment. The pulse feels fluid but fixed. The advent and aftermath of free-jazz opened up more possibilities for bass-less ensembles, and at least one generation of musicians has developed some sophisticated accompanying strategies. When clarinetist Don Byron decided to pay homage to the Young-Cole-Rich confab with Ivey-Divey, a Blue Note release, he enlisted musicians with a handle on both the ebullient imperative of swing and the elastic properties of the avant-garde: pianist Jason Moran and drummer Jack DeJohnette. What was especially striking about their album, which grabbed a first-place finish in the 2004 JazzTimes Critics’ Poll, was its refusal to acknowledge any binary split between “inside” and “outside.” Tempos and tonalities were free to slacken or constrict, in ways that felt unexpected but never arbitrary. This effect would have been much harder to pull off with a bassist, though these musicians could probably have found a way. If the absence of a bassist compounds the responsibility of the other rhythm section players, what specific skills does it demand? For a pianist, one answer might be greater range and ambidexterity, except that doesn’t quite cover it. Fred Hersch doesn’t want for either of those qualities, and yet he made a telling decision when the regular bassist in his trio, Drew Gress, had to miss the opening set at a Village Vanguard engagement a few years ago: Hersch opted to play solo piano rather than in a duo with drummer Nasheet Waits. This was neither a poor reflection on Waits, who can handle any setting, nor a dodge by Hersch, who has recorded with a bass-less chamber trio, Thirteen Ways. It was simply an acknowledgment that chemistry can’t be counted on without some preliminary testing. Along similar lines, it’s no surprise that the high-water mark for bass-less bands has been set by a trio with more than 25 years of collaborative history. Consisting of Paul Motian on drums, Joe Lovano on tenor sax and the guitarist Bill Frisell, this group has recorded a number of stunningly good albums, all variations on a theme of exploratory euphony. (The latest example is Time and Time Again, released last year on ECM.) Still, the best way to savor the group is at the Vanguard, where the lack of a bass player comes across as pure, tangible opportunity. Frisell’s ghostly arpeggios and judicious electronic loops usually inhabit the open space without ever quite filling it. Motian, meanwhile, deserves equal credit for what amounts to a percussive treatise on the space-time continuum. (That analogy brings to mind the fantastic Verve album from 1999, Momentum Space, featuring pianist Cecil Taylor, tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Elvin Jones; no bassist need apply.) Sparseness has been a hallmark of some other bass-less bands in recent years. Barondown, a group led by drummer Joey Baron in the ’90s, entrusted its bottom end to its only other members, trombonist Steve Swell and tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin. Around the same time, Baron also had a band called Miniature, with cellist Hank Roberts and saxophonist Tim Berne, who were given to prowling the bass clef with incisors bared. It makes some sense that Baron would be influenced by Motian. It makes further sense that Eskelin and Berne would go on to lead serious bass-less groups of their own. But Eskelin’s trio with accordionist Andrea Parkins and drummer Jim Black is hardly a minimalist proposition, and neither are Berne’s various groups with keyboardist Craig Taborn. Here the traditional role of a bassist isn’t substituted for, but rather superseded; Parkins and Taborn don’t compensate for the absence so much as obliterate the idea of it. Small wonder that Taborn also largely defines the dynamic of Underground, tenor saxophonist Chris Potter’s bass-less jazz-rock band. For some groups, leaving out a bassist enables greater rhythmic intricacies, more complex structures, and a tighter network of interaction. This was once the case for the Tiny Bell Trio, the Balkan-flavored band that trumpeter Dave Douglas led in the ’90s, with Black and guitarist Brad Shepik. These days it’s even more clearly the case for Fieldwork, the brilliant collective that consists of Vijay Iyer on piano, Steve Lehman on alto saxophone and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. Early this year, Motian headlined the Vanguard with Moran and Potter, and the thrilling result confirmed that there were myriad ways to approach a bass-less bandstand. On a couple of balladic originals, the group interaction was limpid and pliable. On Thelonious Monk’s “Trinkle, Tinkle,” it was sly and jagged. Then came a Charlie Parker tune, “Au Privave,” which drove headlong toward some of the most strenuous free improvisation I’ve seen from either Motian or Moran. When it was over, the cheers in the room suggested that no one knew what they were missing. true 203 2008-06-17T18:50:46-04:00 false 18228 118 200804 true 90 2008-04-01T00:00:00-04:00

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder. Another bolt of conventional wisdom holds that wherever three or more jazz musicians are gathered, a bass player shall be among them. Put those credos together and you might come to this conclusion: Any jazz group bold enough to venture into the world without a bassist is bound to realize, all the more clearly, a bassist’s crucial role in the music. There have surely been countless jam sessions, and even a few dispiriting gigs, where such a truth hit home. Yet every rule has its exceptions. And it’s worth remembering that the string bass was adopted into the standard jazz rhythm section rather than born to it. There were no bass players on Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Sevens, or in most other contemporaneous recordings. Nor was there a bassist in the Benny Goodman Quartet a decade later. By that point, the mid-1930s, the bass had largely edged out the tuba in jazz, thanks to stylistic shifts as well as advances in recording technology. It would take the quantum leap of bebop, though, before bassists were de rigueur: When the pianist is dancing over bar lines and the drummer is dropping bombs, it helps to have a steady voice in play. What, then, would prompt a group to eschew a bassist after 1940 or so? Sometimes the decision might have been made to foster a sense of intimacy, or showcase a degree of virtuosity. Both of those ideas were probably involved when Lester Young recorded his famous Verve...

2009-03-02T00:26:18-05:00

4 Word came hard and fast: Michael Brecker was gone. And for a number of musicians and fans at the 2007 International Association for Jazz Education Conference, there was comfort in solidarity. My experience with the news was more private: I was working at the computer, and called up an online menu of Brecker performances, spanning more than a quarter century. There was the artist as a young man, carving up “Invitation” and “Oleo.” There he was onstage with Paul Simon in Central Park. And there he was in recent years, playing with groups I had seen and heard. Somehow this accumulation of clips, more like a dream montage than a highlight reel, encouraged a sense of connection. The footage captured the figure, in a way that recordings couldn’t match. (A similar search for the reclusive Alice Coltrane, whose passing was almost concurrent, didn’t yield much at the time.) What felt strange, in retrospect, was the nearly automatic nature of my query. Possibly for the first time, I had instinctively turned to video snippets rather than my usual repository of albums. It wasn’t an inherently meaningful gesture, but it said something about the recent ascendancy of jazz on the small screen. The trend has been developing for a while now—and jazz was a comparatively late arrival, to be frank—but 2007 was a boom year in this respect, marking what felt like an exponential leap. If you harbor any doubts, direct the nearest Internet browser to YouTube and plug in Brecker’s name today. Just don’t expect to get anything done for the next few hours. As many a jazz fan can attest, online video sources now offer an embarrassment of riches, and it’s easy to slip into that sort of wormhole. Ever seen the Sun Ra Arkestra on NBC’s Night Music in 1990? What about Stan Getz and John Coltrane in 1960, trading quips on a Jazz at the Philharmonic show? Oh, and here’s a taste of Sonny Rollins in 1963, knocking about with trumpeter Don Cherry. Of course this is hardly the tip of the iceberg. Don’t even get me started on the second great Miles Davis Quintet. And in addition to the online scrapheap—much of it unlicensed, in the outlaw spirit of the age—there have been concerted efforts to release and distribute jazz on DVD. If you haven’t sampled the material grouped under the Jazz Icons banner, now’s the time. Compiled by an entity called Reelin’ in the Years Productions and distributed by Naxos, the series features archival television and film footage long available in Europe but rarely seen in the States. Results range from the merely wonderful to the nearly revelatory, including long-lost footage of Coltrane with the first Davis Quintet in 1960, sans Miles. (The Getz-Coltrane exchange, incidentally, can be found on the same disc.) There are those who would argue that a certain mystery dissolves when so much material suddenly becomes this accessible. I tend to align with the opposite perspective, delighting in discovery and feasting on new information. At this point I couldn’t tell you exactly what I learned from observing multi-reedist Eric Dolphy on two separate Jazz Icons discs (with Coltrane in 1961 and Charles Mingus in ’64). But something clicked, and in time it will translate to understanding. As someone who never witnessed Dolphy in action, this is invaluable perspective: no amount of isolation with the albums could supplant it. One question that intrigues me about this moment, though: What will this new era of accessibility mean for jazz’s future generations? Material like this was once hard sought and closely guarded, a reward for those students curious or tenacious enough to dig it up. (I can recall scrutinizing a tape of Buddy Rich’s drum solos in high school, which probably tells you more than you need to know about my teenage years.) A skeptic could easily lump the jazz-video boom together with the jazz-instructional glut: one more information source to add to the cache, alongside Aebersold Play-A-Longs. In another of the Icons DVDs, there’s a recurring over-the-shoulder shot of guitarist Wes Montgomery that reveals both his trademark thumb technique and his fretboard voicings. Could we be making it too easy for aspiring players, who once had to puzzle over and decode these details? Are these resources responsible for the pervasive criticism that younger players are sounding more homogeneous with each passing year? It’s possible, though I suspect that these open floodgates will do more good than harm. The online realm and the DVD market propose an open landscape, not a fixed course. And if the archives represent a wellspring, there’s also the steady stream of new content, which appears to be growing stronger all the time. In 2005 the Delmark label began supplementing its CD releases with companion DVDs: Black Unstoppable, which chronicles a Velvet Lounge performance by flutist Nicole Mitchell and her Black Earth Ensemble, is a low-fi but estimable counterpart to the studio album of the same name. Other labels and artists are following suit, and not just via MySpace updates and YouTube clips, though that’s not a terrible place to start. At the memorial tribute to Michael Brecker held at Town Hall last February, and at a subsequent tribute to Alice Coltrane at the Church of St. John the Divine, there were as many heartfelt testimonials and hair-raising performances as anyone could desire. Each gathering, though, peaked with a thoughtfully edited projection on a video screen. true 203 2008-06-18T19:11:24-04:00 false 18372 120 200803 true 90 2008-03-01T00:00:00-05:00

Word came hard and fast: Michael Brecker was gone. And for a number of musicians and fans at the 2007 International Association for Jazz Education Conference, there was comfort in solidarity. My experience with the news was more private: I was working at the computer, and called up an online menu of Brecker performances, spanning more than a quarter century. There was the artist as a young man, carving up “Invitation” and “Oleo.” There he was onstage with Paul Simon in Central Park. And there he was in recent years, playing with groups I had seen and heard. Somehow this accumulation of clips, more like a dream montage than a highlight reel, encouraged a sense of connection. The footage captured the figure, in a way that recordings couldn’t match. (A similar search for the reclusive Alice Coltrane, whose passing was almost concurrent, didn’t yield much at the time.) What felt strange, in retrospect, was the nearly automatic nature of my query. Possibly for the first time, I had instinctively turned to video snippets rather than my usual repository of albums. It wasn’t an inherently meaningful gesture, but it said something about the recent ascendancy of jazz on the small screen. The trend has been developing for a while now—and jazz was a comparatively late arrival, to be frank—but 2007 was a boom year in this respect, marking what felt like an exponential leap. If you harbor any doubts, direct the nearest Internet browser to YouTube and plug in Brecker’s name today. Just don’t expect to get...

2009-03-02T00:26:23-05:00

4 I missed Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall. Likewise John McLaughlin with his new fusion band, and the Keith Jarrett Trio in their latest New York appearance, and Branford Marsalis in his Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Gil Evans. I couldn’t make it to the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Jazz Festival, or to Duke University for the premiere of Jason Moran’s In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959. A critic can’t be everywhere at once. But he can try, and try I did. Along the way I heard a wealth of stuff that bolstered my view of jazz as a robust and still-evolving art. Even with some difficult losses this year—ranging from Michael Brecker, the beloved tenor saxophonist, to Tonic, the Lower East Side club—our scene has held up, even managed to flourish. Consider the impressively self-assured debut recordings issued this year, including Kendrick Scott’s The Source (World Culture), Antonio Sanchez’s Migration (Cam Jazz), Tyshawn Sorey’s That/Not (Firehouse 12) and the self-released efforts Tintal Drumset Solo (by Dan Weiss) and Brooklyn Qawwali Party (via a band led by Brook Martinez). And those are just albums by drummers; don’t even get me started on guitarists. The year’s live highlights were exceedingly diverse. There were poignant and well-programmed memorial concerts for Brecker, Alice Coltrane and Max Roach. There was the engrossing depth of this year’s Vision Festival, which included a powerful new piece by Bill Dixon. There was a rare Village Vanguard engagement by Martial Solal, in wry solo piano mode. And perhaps most inspiring, there were the semifinals at the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in Los Angeles, where Ambrose Akinmusire prevailed over a strong crop of fellow trumpeters, each of whom played with conviction. What follows is my fourth annual roundup of standout gigs, and as always it should be received with the understanding that there were dozens more. I’m almost willing to bet that Sonny Rollins would be on it, had I not been out of the country during his landmark Carnegie stand. A couple of months later, Rollins happened to be on my plane to Barcelona, where he was booked to play a Barcelona Jazz Festival concert at the splendidly surreal Palau de la Música. That gig doesn’t appear below, but let’s give it an honorable mention: I’ll never forget the sight of Sonny nearly bounding onstage, as the audience filled the hall with their raucous applause. Jason Moran and the Bandwagon, Birdland, Jan. 11: This late set capped a long day at the International Association for Jazz Education Conference, and it could have faded into the blur. But Moran’s dynamic pianism, and the slashing propulsion of drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen, delivered a clear and memorable jolt. Marilyn Crispell Trio, Village Vanguard, Feb. 27: Drawing only in part from Storyteller (ECM, 2004), pianist Marilyn Crispell made an auspicious Vanguard debut with Mark Helias on bass and Paul Motian on drums. The week’s first set, especially, was a shape-shifting marvel of tensions and resolutions. Steve Kuhn Trio, Birdland, March 15: Briskness and ebullience were the chief characteristics of this rewarding run, which had Kuhn, on piano, regrouping with bassist Ron Carter and drummer Al Foster. As on the worthy document Live at Birdland (Blue Note), they struck a sparkling interplay. Pat Metheny and Brad Mehldau, McCallum Theatre, Palm Desert, Calif., March 22: Eclipsing a later stand at Carnegie Hall, this concert found Mehldau’s piano and Metheny’s guitar deeply in sync, and the rhythm section—Larry Grenadier on bass, Jeff Ballard on drums—in a state of perpetual arrival. Andrew Hill Trio, Trinity Church, NYC, March 29: The somber euphony of Andrew Hill’s chords here was breathtaking, and so was the sensitivity of bassist John Hebert and drummer Eric McPherson. Within little more than a month, Hill would be gone, but his final performance (archived at trinitywallstreet.org) would still be with us. Niño Josele, Village Vanguard, May 22: Bill Evans resurfaced at the Vanguard through the novel ministrations of this flamenco guitarist, who was supporting an album called Paz (Norte/Calle 54). Bassist Esperanza Spalding and drummer Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez compounded the magical air. Sam Rivers Trio, Miller Theater at Columbia University, NYC, May 25: Two words: Dave Holland. His open-form bass playing, in this rare reunion with multi-reedist Sam Rivers and drummer Barry Altschul, was an absolute thrill. Ditto the casual cohesion of the trio, and the inexhaustible creativity of Rivers, then 83. Repeat booking, please. Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos, Village Vanguard, June 14: Klein, the composer-bandleader whose career triangulates Buenos Aires, Barcelona and New York, led his signature ensemble with otherworldly poise. And when he sang at the piano, in a hushed and confidential tone, the room shifted on its axis. Gary Peacock, Paul Bley, Paul Motian, Birdland, Aug. 22: Another late set, another bout with exhaustion, another heady triumph. Bley often set the tone from the piano, but Peacock (on bass) and Motian (on drums) exerted no less pull. The results covered a broader range than on their stunning album Not Two, Not One (ECM, 1999), but with just as much atmospheric mystery. Maria Schneider Orchestra, Jazz Standard, Nov. 20: Drawing from this year’s exquisite Sky Blue (ArtistShare), Schneider and her ensemble played an arresting first set, with strong solos from tenor saxophonists Chris Cheek (making his first appearance as a sub) and Donny McCaslin (filling his usual role with gusto). Simply gorgeous. true 203 2008-06-19T18:48:57-04:00 false 18482 121 200802 true 90 2008-01-01T00:00:00-05:00

I missed Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall. Likewise John McLaughlin with his new fusion band, and the Keith Jarrett Trio in their latest New York appearance, and Branford Marsalis in his Jazz at Lincoln Center tribute to Gil Evans. I couldn’t make it to the 50th anniversary of the Monterey Jazz Festival, or to Duke University for the premiere of Jason Moran’s In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959. A critic can’t be everywhere at once. But he can try, and try I did. Along the way I heard a wealth of stuff that bolstered my view of jazz as a robust and still-evolving art. Even with some difficult losses this year—ranging from Michael Brecker, the beloved tenor saxophonist, to Tonic, the Lower East Side club—our scene has held up, even managed to flourish. Consider the impressively self-assured debut recordings issued this year, including Kendrick Scott’s The Source (World Culture), Antonio Sanchez’s Migration (Cam Jazz), Tyshawn Sorey’s That/Not (Firehouse 12) and the self-released efforts Tintal Drumset Solo (by Dan Weiss) and Brooklyn Qawwali Party (via a band led by Brook Martinez). And those are just albums by drummers; don’t even get me started on guitarists. The year’s live highlights were exceedingly diverse. There were poignant and well-programmed memorial concerts for Brecker, Alice Coltrane and Max Roach. There was the engrossing depth of this year’s Vision Festival, which included a powerful new piece by Bill Dixon. There was a rare Village Vanguard engagement by Martial Solal, in wry solo piano mode. And perhaps most inspiring, there...

2009-03-02T00:26:26-05:00