Well, I'm not going to make any grand announcements like "the parrot squawks again", because who knows, this could be a dead parrot bounce. But one reason I quit posting a year ago or more (I guess more) - aside from the big one of starting other blogs and not being able to keep them all up at once - is that I was getting away from the social issues I was really interested in and often ended up writing performance reviews - which was not the original point. And I really want to get back to the heavy stuff. But what always seems to drag me back to the flogosbeer is a good concert or cultural event.
Thus I find myself more tempted to talk about the Jazz Festival I went to last night, and some of the great performances I saw there - or should I say great performers - than about, say, the question of who Coldplay plagiarized, if anyone, or the death of the music industry, or whether Herman Rosenblatt is a horrible person for writing a "memoir" in which the main character (him) turns out to be partly fictional. So that's what I'll do, for openers, only I'll adopt an entirely new practice for this sort of post: keeping it down to what an ordinary person can read in 15 minutes. I know, I know, what an unreasonable demand to impose on myself, I should be more realistic... nevertheless, here goes.
So I said great performers, not always great performances, by which I do not mean that the performers were having an off night. But something was off - usually a microphone. Start with Will Calhoun and his Native Land Experience (which was actually the last act I saw): due to technical problems - which turned out to be a misbehaving mike cable - they ended up having time for only one full number, and then basically (as far as I could tell) improvised for 5 minutes until they were all but literally given the stage hook treatment. That one number (a fairly long one) pretty much brought the house down. And if the last 5 minutes was indeed an improv, it still blew away a shitload of performances by lesser groups. To their credit they attempted to make up for the fact that jazz fans stood around for half hour to hear one tune by tossing free CD's to the audience (sort of the like blasting teeshirts into the stands at a baseball game - of course, I was no more successful at being in the right spot this time than I was at the last teeshirt blast). Their one song, I have to say, left the impression that this is best damn fusion group I've heard since I saw Weather Report at Northwestern 35 years ago. This I say despite the fact that I was ever so slightly disappointed that Pharoah Sanders didn't make an impromptu appearance at the gig. Who'm I kidding? Myself, I guess, but not without cause. Will Calhoun, the incredible drummer (think Buddy Miles, Billy Cobham, Michael Walden, Alfonse Mouzon - that sort of incredible) for Living Color, as well as leader of his own band, recorded five tracks of his Native Land Experience album with Sanders. I saw the Pharoah, too, back in the good old Chicago days . It seemed like a reasonable miracle that he might grace me with his presence again. Alas, no Pharoah, and barely any Calhoun. Nevertheless, an amazing short concert.
Next, take the guy I happen to be listening to right now on Lala.com, Lafayette Gilchrist - incredible piano player, who reminded me of yet another decades-old Chicago-area music experience, Sunnyland Slim at (long-defunked) Alice's Revisited. (If you are getting the impression that the Chicago music scene left more of an impression on me than the illustrious faculty at Northwestern, you are paying attention.) Not that their styles are so similar, Gilchrist is quite modern, and not blind either, but both riveting keyboardists with a few similar moves. Anyway, Kenny's Castaways, the unlikely host of a third of this jazz festival (the others were Le Poisson Rouge, a big space in a charming basement direclty across the street from Kenny's, and Sullivan Hall, another oblong cave around the corner) obviously has little or no experience with acoustic jazz pianists, perhaps having had nothing softer than some alt-country grundge in 30 years, since the piano (such as it is) was miked about two feet above the keyboard, with the lid closed - the predictable result being that you could barely hear Gilchrist at all. Thus, as I was saying - incredible performers, not always great performances, when you take technical and other factors into account. Though, ignoring those factors, the performances that nobody heard were no doubt exceptional. Especially the ones that were merely underamplified.
We also saw (and for the most part heard) Theo Bleckmann (vocalist, in various popular and show tunes backed by expressionistic string arrangements), Jason Moran's Bandwagon (whose style I lack a ready vocabulary to describe, but much of it was impressive), Toshi Reagon and Big Lovely (not jazz, and a bit long on attitude for this sort of environment, but energetic, unapologetic and well-played soul-pop), a bit of Don Byron Ivey-Divey Trio (very creative and refreshingly non-technical contemporary stuff with tenor sax or clarinet), and a dose of Tar Baby (very decent if not exactly earth-shaking post-bob jazz). All this for $25 and a tip for the Sullivan Hall men's room attendant. (I think they're practicing for the 4-star restaurant they'll be opening as soon as the economy improves, at which they'll serve cheeseburgers, onion rings and a goat cheese-mesclun salad with truffle oil).
The festival was sponsored by APAP - no, not Tylenol (I know some of you wiseacres who are not modern jazz fans are just waiting for an opening ) but the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. I'm assuming, from the crowds that packed nearly every concert, especially the later shows (it's the Village, after all) that the presenters made out like bandits, especially if everyone consumed as much alcohol as my small collective of five friends.
As I said, that's what I'm tempted to write about, but I'm not going to indulge myself. Except this time. Because there are issues of Great Social and Political Import that need to be addressed. Though another idea I had when I started PL was to talk about the arts in a context that related to NYC, which I guess I was a bit more successful at. So on that score the APAP Winter JazzFest is more relevant than, say, the question of whether Coldplay stole a riff from Joe Satriani. Nevertheless, see my next post...
Showing posts with label jazz. Show all posts
Showing posts with label jazz. Show all posts
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Friday, May 4, 2007
Get Jazzed at Bar Next Door
It's actually downstairs from the restaurant La Lanterna di Vittorio, though perhaps it is technically next door. You can practically fall into it if you happen to hit a slick spot on the sidewalk at just the right place. An almost literal hole in the wall at 129 Macdougal Street in the West Village, the "Bar Next Door" is one of the coolest jazz spots I've found in a city that does not exactly lack for cool jazz spots. They say that the house was built by Aaron Burr, I guess while he was taking time off from target practice. It definitely has that old, authentic look, with all sorts of funny little doors and closets. Owl and I were wondering what the long horizontal closet near the door might contain. Whatever it contains now, my bet for the original use is firearms. Why do bad things happen to decent folks like Alexander Hamilton and other rich brats get to fulfill their Presidential ambitions? History is so cruel...
Anyhow, this hobbit space below the restaurant was big enough for one rather tall and stout fellow who blew a mean tenor sax. Joel Frahm has apparently been around the NY jazz scene for a long time, and has just recorded a CD with members of Stan Getz's old band. But Tuesday nights he performs here with his own trio, which included Joel Martin on bass and Pete Zimmer on drums this week. These guys cooked up a concert that handed us, over the course of two sets, a wide variety of classics and originals - there was some Monk, some Bird (the Parrot is loving it so far!), some standards, some originals, probably some Getz though I didn't recognize it. (Frahm offered an original which I thought he called "Jobimiana", or something like that, but I can't say it set of the bossa nova bells in my head. Nice tune though.) This was relatively conservative material, but Frahm's treatment of it was exquisite. He is equally at home hanging on a slow bluesey tune with lots of breathy bends or doing lightning runs that make you wonder where he found all those notes. No technique for its own sake here. Free jazz is not his bag and you won't hear him pushing a reed hard enough to make it screech. But he has an original style that is hard to characterize and easy to admire; his lines are unpredictable even if the basic material is pretty well known.
Zimmer and Martin are no mere rhythm section but a couple of extremely talented musicians in their own right. It takes a lot to get me to really listen to a stand-up bass solo, but I was digging every note that Martin played when he took his breaks. ("Digging" here means "liking", for any overly web-savvy cranks out there. One "digs" in a hole in the ground, and "diggs" in a Web 2.0 media site. I was in a hole.) Zimmer is one of those jazz drummers who insists on being as much a part of the music as anyone else, and his contribution to the overall sound was immense. This is a group of musicians who it is almost insulting to call "professional", as that sounds a little like "competent". The fairly conservative tonality of the music at times makes you think of these words, but I would rather say that whatever can still be milked out of post-bop mainstream jazz, these guys are doing. Those who can't take anything less challenging than an Ornette Coleman concert should stay away. I'll be back though; this is serious music done with consummate taste and style.
Did I say the space was intimate? It is small enough that you might find yourself trying to get a seat where you are not staring down the horn of a sax or clinking your glass against a snare drum. Small but not uncomfortable, even at my table right next to the door. The cover is only $8; a 10" thin crust pizza is a bit more than that, but worth it. You can order from the full La Lanterna menu, but Owl and I stuck with pizza, salad, beer and desert, which came out to about $70 with the cover, tax and tip. Not too bad for dinner and a concert for two. My only complaint was that there was no beer on tap; but the waiter brought my Sam Adams in a tall glass so I never saw the bottle. I guess that is the next best thing to being on tap!
There may be some sort of folk music renaissance going on in New York, but there is no jazz renaissance. To my knowledge, the jazz scene never died in order to be reborn. It was great to find it so richly alive in a cave below Macdougal Street, a place I have passed many times without realizing there was life, music, beer and (perhaps most importantly) blueberry pie within. You want the "real New York"? So go to the Empire State Building! Or get hijacked into some underground hole at the Parrot's Lampost. Squawck!
Anyhow, this hobbit space below the restaurant was big enough for one rather tall and stout fellow who blew a mean tenor sax. Joel Frahm has apparently been around the NY jazz scene for a long time, and has just recorded a CD with members of Stan Getz's old band. But Tuesday nights he performs here with his own trio, which included Joel Martin on bass and Pete Zimmer on drums this week. These guys cooked up a concert that handed us, over the course of two sets, a wide variety of classics and originals - there was some Monk, some Bird (the Parrot is loving it so far!), some standards, some originals, probably some Getz though I didn't recognize it. (Frahm offered an original which I thought he called "Jobimiana", or something like that, but I can't say it set of the bossa nova bells in my head. Nice tune though.) This was relatively conservative material, but Frahm's treatment of it was exquisite. He is equally at home hanging on a slow bluesey tune with lots of breathy bends or doing lightning runs that make you wonder where he found all those notes. No technique for its own sake here. Free jazz is not his bag and you won't hear him pushing a reed hard enough to make it screech. But he has an original style that is hard to characterize and easy to admire; his lines are unpredictable even if the basic material is pretty well known.
Zimmer and Martin are no mere rhythm section but a couple of extremely talented musicians in their own right. It takes a lot to get me to really listen to a stand-up bass solo, but I was digging every note that Martin played when he took his breaks. ("Digging" here means "liking", for any overly web-savvy cranks out there. One "digs" in a hole in the ground, and "diggs" in a Web 2.0 media site. I was in a hole.) Zimmer is one of those jazz drummers who insists on being as much a part of the music as anyone else, and his contribution to the overall sound was immense. This is a group of musicians who it is almost insulting to call "professional", as that sounds a little like "competent". The fairly conservative tonality of the music at times makes you think of these words, but I would rather say that whatever can still be milked out of post-bop mainstream jazz, these guys are doing. Those who can't take anything less challenging than an Ornette Coleman concert should stay away. I'll be back though; this is serious music done with consummate taste and style.
Did I say the space was intimate? It is small enough that you might find yourself trying to get a seat where you are not staring down the horn of a sax or clinking your glass against a snare drum. Small but not uncomfortable, even at my table right next to the door. The cover is only $8; a 10" thin crust pizza is a bit more than that, but worth it. You can order from the full La Lanterna menu, but Owl and I stuck with pizza, salad, beer and desert, which came out to about $70 with the cover, tax and tip. Not too bad for dinner and a concert for two. My only complaint was that there was no beer on tap; but the waiter brought my Sam Adams in a tall glass so I never saw the bottle. I guess that is the next best thing to being on tap!
There may be some sort of folk music renaissance going on in New York, but there is no jazz renaissance. To my knowledge, the jazz scene never died in order to be reborn. It was great to find it so richly alive in a cave below Macdougal Street, a place I have passed many times without realizing there was life, music, beer and (perhaps most importantly) blueberry pie within. You want the "real New York"? So go to the Empire State Building! Or get hijacked into some underground hole at the Parrot's Lampost. Squawck!
Thursday, December 7, 2006
Jazzosphere: The Dave Douglas Quintet at the Jazz Standard
It all started, I guess, with Ken Burns and his famous (but unseen by me) jazz history documentary. In that show, Branford Marsalis apparently made the comment, quoted on Wednesday by Nate Chinen in the New York Times, that "jazz just kind of died" in the seventies. Next in the chain of events, as Chinen relates it, would be a book by Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America. (The title is enough to tell me this goes high on my reading list for the short term. Which means it is only behind 25 other books.) More pertinent, jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas read the book and commented on his blog that it might help explain the view Marsalis put forth. Then there was apparently a lot of listmaking and other unsavory activities in the jazzosphere, culminating in a comprehensive list of favorite or influential jazz albums from the 70's and 80's, or thereabout. ("Thereabout" means some of the albums actually date from the early 1990's.) So the Times, which has quite the ear to the Net these days (recall that they tracked down guitar whiz JerryC of Youtube/Pachelbel Canon fame, among other things) puts the story of this blog brouhaha in print, whereupon yours truly reads it, and finds that the very same Dave Douglas who started this thread was performing at the Jazz Standard last week and decided to go see them (partly for the benefit of my own audience - which I guess will remain pretty small if I keep taking a week to post a story.) From there it is but a short step to the present blog, with the additional link that the entire Douglas show, starting last Tuesday, was recorded and put on the band's blog by yesterday morning. ($7 for the full set; but the sound samples are free...). It wasn't there when I started writing this, and if could learn to write posts shorter than James Michener novels it might not have been when I finished... but it's there now.
I think I have some claim to expertise in classical, rock and folk music, having performed and written in all those styles. I make no such claim about jazz, where I figure as a mere listener. Nevertheless, when you say "seventies" and "jazz" things start to click for me as much as with any other musical connection in my life. For in 1971 I began my (rather extended) undergraduate career, at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. It was in my freshman year, I believe, that I saw what I think was my first jazz concert, with a group of my fellow students. And my first direct experience of this music was no trifle: I was sitting within spitting distance of Pharoah Sanders, whose cut "The Creator Has a Master Plan" was already legendary even in a young, white, middle class, Midwestern college crowd. This was like the definition of "alive and kicking", if you know what I mean; the concept that jazz "died" here would have been incoherent to me at that time. Later on, at Northwestern, I saw Weather Report, who blew me away (I know some of you must appreciate puns), and even more of a mind trip, an outdoor concert featuring a guy who I was told was the greatest guitar player in the world, which I frankly did not believe since I knew that that was Eric Clapton and he wasn't coming to Northwestern. So I've been wrong once or twice in my life: Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House played a gig I'll never forget, totally changing my conception of what could be done with a guitar - and possibly a trap set too, courtesy of Alfonse Mouzon and the largest array of skins I had ever seen. I believe it was that concert where one or both of the Brecker brothers joined Coryell as well. "Just kind of died"? Not for me.
I was also in the school orchestra, and though we did not play jazz (or even Gershwin), there was even a connection there. While I was sawing away at the violin parts in orchestral scores from Dvorak to Lutoslawski, the bass lines were partly being held down by Steve Rodby - later to join the Pat Metheny group and record Offramp and other fine albums. The music school at Northwestern was also one of the few in the country that offered a major in classical saxophone, thanks primarily to the presence of Fred Hemke. (You can Wikipedia him for more info.) To my frequent chagrin, I would barricade myself in one of the practice rooms in the little building we called the Beehive, rosin up my bow, start tickling the strings with some passage from Bach or Mozart, when suddenly a baritone sax would explode through the wall like a foghorn, rattling my music stand and everything else. Okay, so they were playing Glazounov not Gillespie. But you don't get a school full of classical horn players, right outside Chicago, in1973, without being bombarded with recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, not to mention the Modern Jazz Quartet and plenty of classic stuff. Northwestern had its own saxophone ensemble too; in fact, I heard them perform John Cage's 4'33" (imagine a smiley face here; but it's true, and Cage was there for the performance). One of my theory teachers was a jazz trombone player. These connections are only meant to say that I was not just learning to love Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington and Django Rheinhardt records then, I was pretty much surrounded by jazz culture.
So to put it mildly, I just ain't open to the idea that jazz "kind of died" in the seventies. Yes, AEC could be strong medicine at times. So there was John McLaughlin, or Chick Corea, or McCoy Tyner. Or Keith Jarrett, whose Bremen-Lausanne disks were not a heck of a lot less well known among my college friends than the latest Pink Floyd or Moody Blues album. (I saw Jarrett at the Village Vanguard a few years later, and was disappointed that he played for only about 25 minutes of a short 45-minute set. Nothing like the continuous improvisations of the Koln or Bremen-Lausanne concerts.) If you wanted something really accessible there was Ramsey Lewis. Accessible, I say, not "dead". Joni Mitchell was touring and recording with Tom Scott and the L.A. Express; college-oriented groups like Soft Machine were making jazz a central component; and Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and even Chicago were increasingly incorporating jazz influences. Jazz was starting to inhabit rock as much as the other way around, and my generation was sucking up this music. For me, it was the Jazz Age.
I won't say too much about the above-mentioned superlist, especially after I just did a superlong piece on a rock superlist. This one is very curious in certain ways: neither Coryell nor Lewis are mentioned even once, but Joni is, along with Frank Zappa and Alan Holdsworth. However, Joni's best jazz-infused album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is mysteriously left out. Ditto McLaughlin: several good albums listed, but no mention of Inner Mounting Flame, hello? Somehow Santana got on the list, but not, say, Michael Urbaniak, or - yikes - Gil Scott-Heron! And if we are going to fast forward as far as people like John Zorn and Bill Frisell, who have just about as little to do with the 1970's as Nirvana or the World Wide Web, I think there's a lot more that could get included. Ditto on the rewind: some older artists who were still working in the 1970's are mentioned here, but not Stephane Grapelli, who was joining contemporaries like Gary Burton (Paris Encounter, 1972), or Dave Brubeck, who according to one discography I saw had 15 major label releases in the 70's. Speaking of Burton, how did all these jazz buffs miss Crystal Silence, his collaboration with Chick Corea? Another direction that gets a Page Not Found on this list is basically anything with a "world" influence. There isn't a jalapeno's worth of Latin jazz on the list, even Gato Barbieri doesn't exist, not to mention Milton Nascimento or Willie Colon or anything that spicy. All that said, for people like me whose knowledge of jazz is far from comprehensive (I've never even heard of some of the artists on the list, and there are plenty of others whose music I am not familiar with), this is at least an opportunity to explore.
In fact, it makes me wish I still knew Jake. I wonder if some of the people in the jazzosphere knew Jake. From the time I was ten years old until I moved back to Brooklyn in my late 20's, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There was a gaunt, middle-aged Black man around the neighborhood, and one could have been forgiven for mistaking him for a tramp. He walked the local streets in tattered clothes and shabby boots, with a bucket of sudsy water, a sponge, a brush, some towels and a lot of car keys. These implements were employed as you might guess, in washing cars, which was Jake's main source of income. He would wash, wax, sometimes park and do other car-related chores for a modest amount of cash. Not much of a life, you would think, but it's better than starving, and at times better than sitting behind a desk pushing papers. Jake lived in the basement apartment of a building across the street. So what? Apparently, Jake the carwasher had one of the largest private jazz record collections in the U.S. I heard people say second or third largest, but I don't think anyone knew. It was large enough, I suspect, that I could have found most if not all of the jazz albums on this list in Jake's basement apartment. Or maybe not; maybe he just had an exceptionally large collection of earlier jazz. So who knows more about Jake and his collection? Send me a comment please.
I did start to write about Dave Douglas, didn't I? I hear only a few jazz concerts a year, so I like to be rewarded when I go. I was not particularly rewarded recently when I decided to do my birthday dinner at Cleopatra's Needle, a restaurant and jazz joint on the Upper West Side. There I heard the Jun Miyake Quartet. Miyake's recordings, to the extent I could find samples on the web, sounded intriguing enough. But in this venue practically everything I heard was so traditional I kept waiting for them to stop messing around and start playing. The Dave Douglas Quintet, on the other hand, came out swinging (not quite literally) and didn't quit until they had explored some post-Trane, Miles-inspired territory that for me rings as true now as it did in the late 60's and 70's. There's been plenty of recidivism in jazz since then, plenty of "light" and "smooth" and "retro" and "pop", so I'm still thinking of what Douglas does as progressive, even if it is shy of what Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman or the AEC were doing a while ago. There was the requisite bit of atonal improv occasionally, and some of what Village Voice jazz critic Francis Davis referred to last week as "free meter" in a review of David S. Ware's new album. (I make reference to this review partly because it is one of those rarities in Village Voice culture, a piece that prefers to be informative rather than relying on wry, self-indulgent references to artists and recordings that only a handful of people in the world besides the reviewer will ever recognize. And partly because I caught a Ware concert at the Knitting Factory before it moved downtown and became a rock club, and much of what Davis says brings to mind something I had been thinking about that concert. And yeah, he should also be on the list, since it goes clean through the 1980's.)
If Ware does the unthinkable with standards, Douglas did the thought-provoking with originals (club name notwithstanding). Without overtaxing his cornet he led his band through harmonic and rhythmic ideas that provided a wide range of choices for development. And they responded accordingly, from fairly straight modal riffing and crosstalk between instruments to sequences that could have come out of a piece by Luciano Berio or Pierre Boulez. For one example that doesn't require a financial commitment, check out the sound samples of "Twombly Infinites" from the studio recording and then the live set, where keyboardist Uri Caine creates a canvas that is much closer to postwar expressionism than than the melody from which it emerges, without radically altering from the spirit of the piece. But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the musical development in these performances is the staccato soloing of Donny McCaslin. While I'm not sure this style is the Next Big Thing in jazz improvisation, McCaslin is very effective in raising the these numbers to a climax, in addition to contributing plenty of appealing melodic variations.
Okay, that's it for the review; check out the concerts yourself if you want, the MP3's are all online by now. I said I was going to focus on art and public life in this blog, and
someone might be asking what this has to do with that. Whereas I'm thinking, how can I even get into the social and cultural issues that get raised by all this. And the truth is, I can't since I'm already five days later publishing this than I was hoping to be. So let me just allude to them, with a promissory note to keep them on as leitmotifs in future posts.
First, what is the impact of the fact that the input of so many isolated but knowledgeable people can coalesce in a space open to everyone, in a matter of hours or over the course of months, on a chime-in-when-you're-available basis, on an issue like the quality of jazz recordings in the 1970's? I mean, the fact that they can is apparently a very positive thing, but on the other hand, does it create a kind of de facto canon of respectable sounds in a genre that would have been happier waddling in an uncharted bog of opinion? Or does it provide a useful reality check on the lingering impression that jazz "kind of died" in the 70's?
Funny thing is, the list doesn't really answer what is probably the main component of that perception. For it is surely not that nothing new was happening in jazz in the 1970's. Fusion, atonality, world influence, electronic manipulation were all more or less new, but the list embraces all this (except Latin and other third world music, which just seems like an oversight). The objection really is that jazz got all mixed up with rock, and that this sapped the energy from it. But of course the list hardly rejects fusion, even if it leaves out some of its major exponents. So in fact, these blogs do not answer the critics, but kind of absorb the criticism. Besides, most people know that while people like Chick Corea were doing the fusion thing with Return to Forever they were doing other things on the side, possibly deeper and certainly more personal and experimental, stuff that is available on minor labels and bootlegs.
The other side of the criticism is that no one of quite the stature of a Coltrane or a Miles Davis emerged in that decade. But this is not addressed by a list of favorites; I don't think that the entries for Charlie Haden or Dewey Redman or Joe Henderson mean that these folds were comparable to Bird or Miles or Coltrane in creativity or influence. (One blogger did make that claim for the "American Quartet" of Keith Jarrett et al; I'm not going to judge that, though I'll say that the Koln Concert disk doesn't quite do that for me.) I'm not sure this has any significance anyway. Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollings both turned 40 in 1970; Cecil Taylor was 41. Sanders had just released Karma the previous year. Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan were 43. Etc. Okay, granted the start date of the list was supposed to be 1975, got pushed back to 1973, and I'm talking about 1970. But the point is, none of these artists turned to fusion, and I find it hard to believe that every one of them was over the hill as an artist. Only rock stars and hippies thought that anything "died" at the age of 40, and at least the rock stars quickly learned the error of that as they quickly rounded that corner and continued to develop. What I'm getting at is that nothing about these blog lists of favorites really threatens to establish a canon in the negative and unhelpful way that some conservative academics try to foist on us whitewashed lists of Great Books and the like. So, maybe for all the power of communication, there is neither artificial canon construction nor emergent consensus here.
Second, what about this: if someone can post a professional quality recording of his concerts for sale in less than 24 hours, using relatively widely available technology for both recording and distribution (a process that would once have taken months and all the financial and technical resources of Atlantic Records or EMI), why do we still live in a world where 90 minutes after a tsunami hits some islands north of Sumatra, people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere don't know that they are in danger? This is a rhetorical question, obviously, but I think it leads to a lot of more serious questions about the uses of technology, the distribution of wealth, and our priorities in this age of constant technological revolution. If a mere blog could conceivably have saved a few hundred thousand children from drowning, then even our genuine concerns about the effects of war, AIDS and other social disasters may not be the best ordering of priorities. The utilitarian moral philosophy counts quantities of happiness and misfortune in making moral evaluation; and though I think this is not always the best measure, there is something about tens of thousands of bodies washing ashore that says to me that the same technology that put Dave Douglas's concerts on the Internet the next day could make this a heck of a lot better world than it is. What do you think?
Plenty more directions this could go in, but I do want to publish it some day. Like today. And I promise, for those who find my lengthy spiels the least bit interesting, to try to do more frequent posts with less material.
I think I have some claim to expertise in classical, rock and folk music, having performed and written in all those styles. I make no such claim about jazz, where I figure as a mere listener. Nevertheless, when you say "seventies" and "jazz" things start to click for me as much as with any other musical connection in my life. For in 1971 I began my (rather extended) undergraduate career, at Northwestern University, just north of Chicago. It was in my freshman year, I believe, that I saw what I think was my first jazz concert, with a group of my fellow students. And my first direct experience of this music was no trifle: I was sitting within spitting distance of Pharoah Sanders, whose cut "The Creator Has a Master Plan" was already legendary even in a young, white, middle class, Midwestern college crowd. This was like the definition of "alive and kicking", if you know what I mean; the concept that jazz "died" here would have been incoherent to me at that time. Later on, at Northwestern, I saw Weather Report, who blew me away (I know some of you must appreciate puns), and even more of a mind trip, an outdoor concert featuring a guy who I was told was the greatest guitar player in the world, which I frankly did not believe since I knew that that was Eric Clapton and he wasn't coming to Northwestern. So I've been wrong once or twice in my life: Larry Coryell and the Eleventh House played a gig I'll never forget, totally changing my conception of what could be done with a guitar - and possibly a trap set too, courtesy of Alfonse Mouzon and the largest array of skins I had ever seen. I believe it was that concert where one or both of the Brecker brothers joined Coryell as well. "Just kind of died"? Not for me.
I was also in the school orchestra, and though we did not play jazz (or even Gershwin), there was even a connection there. While I was sawing away at the violin parts in orchestral scores from Dvorak to Lutoslawski, the bass lines were partly being held down by Steve Rodby - later to join the Pat Metheny group and record Offramp and other fine albums. The music school at Northwestern was also one of the few in the country that offered a major in classical saxophone, thanks primarily to the presence of Fred Hemke. (You can Wikipedia him for more info.) To my frequent chagrin, I would barricade myself in one of the practice rooms in the little building we called the Beehive, rosin up my bow, start tickling the strings with some passage from Bach or Mozart, when suddenly a baritone sax would explode through the wall like a foghorn, rattling my music stand and everything else. Okay, so they were playing Glazounov not Gillespie. But you don't get a school full of classical horn players, right outside Chicago, in1973, without being bombarded with recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, not to mention the Modern Jazz Quartet and plenty of classic stuff. Northwestern had its own saxophone ensemble too; in fact, I heard them perform John Cage's 4'33" (imagine a smiley face here; but it's true, and Cage was there for the performance). One of my theory teachers was a jazz trombone player. These connections are only meant to say that I was not just learning to love Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington and Django Rheinhardt records then, I was pretty much surrounded by jazz culture.
So to put it mildly, I just ain't open to the idea that jazz "kind of died" in the seventies. Yes, AEC could be strong medicine at times. So there was John McLaughlin, or Chick Corea, or McCoy Tyner. Or Keith Jarrett, whose Bremen-Lausanne disks were not a heck of a lot less well known among my college friends than the latest Pink Floyd or Moody Blues album. (I saw Jarrett at the Village Vanguard a few years later, and was disappointed that he played for only about 25 minutes of a short 45-minute set. Nothing like the continuous improvisations of the Koln or Bremen-Lausanne concerts.) If you wanted something really accessible there was Ramsey Lewis. Accessible, I say, not "dead". Joni Mitchell was touring and recording with Tom Scott and the L.A. Express; college-oriented groups like Soft Machine were making jazz a central component; and Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and even Chicago were increasingly incorporating jazz influences. Jazz was starting to inhabit rock as much as the other way around, and my generation was sucking up this music. For me, it was the Jazz Age.
I won't say too much about the above-mentioned superlist, especially after I just did a superlong piece on a rock superlist. This one is very curious in certain ways: neither Coryell nor Lewis are mentioned even once, but Joni is, along with Frank Zappa and Alan Holdsworth. However, Joni's best jazz-infused album, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, is mysteriously left out. Ditto McLaughlin: several good albums listed, but no mention of Inner Mounting Flame, hello? Somehow Santana got on the list, but not, say, Michael Urbaniak, or - yikes - Gil Scott-Heron! And if we are going to fast forward as far as people like John Zorn and Bill Frisell, who have just about as little to do with the 1970's as Nirvana or the World Wide Web, I think there's a lot more that could get included. Ditto on the rewind: some older artists who were still working in the 1970's are mentioned here, but not Stephane Grapelli, who was joining contemporaries like Gary Burton (Paris Encounter, 1972), or Dave Brubeck, who according to one discography I saw had 15 major label releases in the 70's. Speaking of Burton, how did all these jazz buffs miss Crystal Silence, his collaboration with Chick Corea? Another direction that gets a Page Not Found on this list is basically anything with a "world" influence. There isn't a jalapeno's worth of Latin jazz on the list, even Gato Barbieri doesn't exist, not to mention Milton Nascimento or Willie Colon or anything that spicy. All that said, for people like me whose knowledge of jazz is far from comprehensive (I've never even heard of some of the artists on the list, and there are plenty of others whose music I am not familiar with), this is at least an opportunity to explore.
In fact, it makes me wish I still knew Jake. I wonder if some of the people in the jazzosphere knew Jake. From the time I was ten years old until I moved back to Brooklyn in my late 20's, I lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There was a gaunt, middle-aged Black man around the neighborhood, and one could have been forgiven for mistaking him for a tramp. He walked the local streets in tattered clothes and shabby boots, with a bucket of sudsy water, a sponge, a brush, some towels and a lot of car keys. These implements were employed as you might guess, in washing cars, which was Jake's main source of income. He would wash, wax, sometimes park and do other car-related chores for a modest amount of cash. Not much of a life, you would think, but it's better than starving, and at times better than sitting behind a desk pushing papers. Jake lived in the basement apartment of a building across the street. So what? Apparently, Jake the carwasher had one of the largest private jazz record collections in the U.S. I heard people say second or third largest, but I don't think anyone knew. It was large enough, I suspect, that I could have found most if not all of the jazz albums on this list in Jake's basement apartment. Or maybe not; maybe he just had an exceptionally large collection of earlier jazz. So who knows more about Jake and his collection? Send me a comment please.
I did start to write about Dave Douglas, didn't I? I hear only a few jazz concerts a year, so I like to be rewarded when I go. I was not particularly rewarded recently when I decided to do my birthday dinner at Cleopatra's Needle, a restaurant and jazz joint on the Upper West Side. There I heard the Jun Miyake Quartet. Miyake's recordings, to the extent I could find samples on the web, sounded intriguing enough. But in this venue practically everything I heard was so traditional I kept waiting for them to stop messing around and start playing. The Dave Douglas Quintet, on the other hand, came out swinging (not quite literally) and didn't quit until they had explored some post-Trane, Miles-inspired territory that for me rings as true now as it did in the late 60's and 70's. There's been plenty of recidivism in jazz since then, plenty of "light" and "smooth" and "retro" and "pop", so I'm still thinking of what Douglas does as progressive, even if it is shy of what Cecil Taylor or Ornette Coleman or the AEC were doing a while ago. There was the requisite bit of atonal improv occasionally, and some of what Village Voice jazz critic Francis Davis referred to last week as "free meter" in a review of David S. Ware's new album. (I make reference to this review partly because it is one of those rarities in Village Voice culture, a piece that prefers to be informative rather than relying on wry, self-indulgent references to artists and recordings that only a handful of people in the world besides the reviewer will ever recognize. And partly because I caught a Ware concert at the Knitting Factory before it moved downtown and became a rock club, and much of what Davis says brings to mind something I had been thinking about that concert. And yeah, he should also be on the list, since it goes clean through the 1980's.)
If Ware does the unthinkable with standards, Douglas did the thought-provoking with originals (club name notwithstanding). Without overtaxing his cornet he led his band through harmonic and rhythmic ideas that provided a wide range of choices for development. And they responded accordingly, from fairly straight modal riffing and crosstalk between instruments to sequences that could have come out of a piece by Luciano Berio or Pierre Boulez. For one example that doesn't require a financial commitment, check out the sound samples of "Twombly Infinites" from the studio recording and then the live set, where keyboardist Uri Caine creates a canvas that is much closer to postwar expressionism than than the melody from which it emerges, without radically altering from the spirit of the piece. But perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the musical development in these performances is the staccato soloing of Donny McCaslin. While I'm not sure this style is the Next Big Thing in jazz improvisation, McCaslin is very effective in raising the these numbers to a climax, in addition to contributing plenty of appealing melodic variations.
Okay, that's it for the review; check out the concerts yourself if you want, the MP3's are all online by now. I said I was going to focus on art and public life in this blog, and
someone might be asking what this has to do with that. Whereas I'm thinking, how can I even get into the social and cultural issues that get raised by all this. And the truth is, I can't since I'm already five days later publishing this than I was hoping to be. So let me just allude to them, with a promissory note to keep them on as leitmotifs in future posts.
First, what is the impact of the fact that the input of so many isolated but knowledgeable people can coalesce in a space open to everyone, in a matter of hours or over the course of months, on a chime-in-when-you're-available basis, on an issue like the quality of jazz recordings in the 1970's? I mean, the fact that they can is apparently a very positive thing, but on the other hand, does it create a kind of de facto canon of respectable sounds in a genre that would have been happier waddling in an uncharted bog of opinion? Or does it provide a useful reality check on the lingering impression that jazz "kind of died" in the 70's?
Funny thing is, the list doesn't really answer what is probably the main component of that perception. For it is surely not that nothing new was happening in jazz in the 1970's. Fusion, atonality, world influence, electronic manipulation were all more or less new, but the list embraces all this (except Latin and other third world music, which just seems like an oversight). The objection really is that jazz got all mixed up with rock, and that this sapped the energy from it. But of course the list hardly rejects fusion, even if it leaves out some of its major exponents. So in fact, these blogs do not answer the critics, but kind of absorb the criticism. Besides, most people know that while people like Chick Corea were doing the fusion thing with Return to Forever they were doing other things on the side, possibly deeper and certainly more personal and experimental, stuff that is available on minor labels and bootlegs.
The other side of the criticism is that no one of quite the stature of a Coltrane or a Miles Davis emerged in that decade. But this is not addressed by a list of favorites; I don't think that the entries for Charlie Haden or Dewey Redman or Joe Henderson mean that these folds were comparable to Bird or Miles or Coltrane in creativity or influence. (One blogger did make that claim for the "American Quartet" of Keith Jarrett et al; I'm not going to judge that, though I'll say that the Koln Concert disk doesn't quite do that for me.) I'm not sure this has any significance anyway. Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollings both turned 40 in 1970; Cecil Taylor was 41. Sanders had just released Karma the previous year. Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan were 43. Etc. Okay, granted the start date of the list was supposed to be 1975, got pushed back to 1973, and I'm talking about 1970. But the point is, none of these artists turned to fusion, and I find it hard to believe that every one of them was over the hill as an artist. Only rock stars and hippies thought that anything "died" at the age of 40, and at least the rock stars quickly learned the error of that as they quickly rounded that corner and continued to develop. What I'm getting at is that nothing about these blog lists of favorites really threatens to establish a canon in the negative and unhelpful way that some conservative academics try to foist on us whitewashed lists of Great Books and the like. So, maybe for all the power of communication, there is neither artificial canon construction nor emergent consensus here.
Second, what about this: if someone can post a professional quality recording of his concerts for sale in less than 24 hours, using relatively widely available technology for both recording and distribution (a process that would once have taken months and all the financial and technical resources of Atlantic Records or EMI), why do we still live in a world where 90 minutes after a tsunami hits some islands north of Sumatra, people in Sri Lanka and elsewhere don't know that they are in danger? This is a rhetorical question, obviously, but I think it leads to a lot of more serious questions about the uses of technology, the distribution of wealth, and our priorities in this age of constant technological revolution. If a mere blog could conceivably have saved a few hundred thousand children from drowning, then even our genuine concerns about the effects of war, AIDS and other social disasters may not be the best ordering of priorities. The utilitarian moral philosophy counts quantities of happiness and misfortune in making moral evaluation; and though I think this is not always the best measure, there is something about tens of thousands of bodies washing ashore that says to me that the same technology that put Dave Douglas's concerts on the Internet the next day could make this a heck of a lot better world than it is. What do you think?
Plenty more directions this could go in, but I do want to publish it some day. Like today. And I promise, for those who find my lengthy spiels the least bit interesting, to try to do more frequent posts with less material.
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