Paul Motian

Paul Motian was a fixture in my neighborhood. I've probably seen him live more than I've seen any other jazz musician and I liked him more each time. He was so active and so vibrant that I was surprised to learn that he was 80 years old when he died. He seemed younger. His death is a huge loss to jazz and I will miss him.

As always, Ethan Iverson says it best.

Beyond The Canon (Relativity Suite)

Jazz has a pretty well-established canon. There's some tinkering around the edges, but generally a few artists and albums come up time and again, with good reason.

But it's fun and worthwhile, on occasion, to revisit some of the forgotten classics -- or simply the forgotten.

Over the next few posts, I want to throw out the names of a few albums I really like that I don't hear mentioned too often. Coincidentally, the first few I have in mind are all from the 70's, a sort of lost decade perhaps, but which produced plenty of good jazz.

For starters:

Don Cherry, Relativity Suite (1973)

Don Cherry is certainly in my personal canon -- as I mentioned in an earlier post, Complete Communion is one of my all-time favorite albums and is itself overlooked. This one gets even less attention.

First off, Relativity Suite is worth hearing for the personnel alone: Cherry, Haden, Redman, Carla Bley, Paul Motian, the scarcely recorded Charles Brackeen, Leroy Jenkins and others...sort of a beefed up Liberation Music Orchestra, but the music here is Cherry through and through (I don't actually know that he wrote everything, but it has his feel for sure).

Don Cherry was a brilliant assimilator of sounds. Here, he melds India, China, some straight New York City and Midwestern free jazz and New Orleans. And it always sounds organic, never contrived, not just ok, I'm gonna hire a sitar player for this date. In other words, it's not that one Indian sounding song on a Beatles album. No, Cherry's experiments are always thoroughly thought-out and really well-executed. The pieces fit together.

I think that's probably because he was a guy who actually went out into the world, devoured its music and understood that the diversity of music on the planet truly is relative.

I love that Don Cherry wasn't content with his place on the cutting edge of a massively important innovation in American music, but insisted on getting the rest of the world in on it as well.

He's also got a way with melody. Like his cohort Ornette Coleman, he has a seemingly endless store of them.

Check out the soaring strings, searing horns, chants, pretty melodies (Trans-Love Airways in particular) and the inimitable Ed Blackwell bringing it home.

Edit: that video was removed..here's another track from the album.

Syncopated and Sanctified

It's hard to describe exactly, he contributed so many different elements. A lotta guys played fast. Rapid! I mean in one, these cats. But they didn't play the notes Charlie Parker played. His modus operandi was different, the way he attacked and how he swung...Charlie Parker played very syncopated and sanctified. There was nobody playing like that in our style...but Charlie Parker, when he came onto the scene, had it down to a T personified. Charlie Parker's contribution to our music was mostly melody, accents and bluesy interpretation. And the notes! "Bird" has some notes in his melodies, the lines that he wrote, that are deep, deep notes, as deep as anything Beethoven ever wrote.

-Dizzy Gillespie on his co-revolutionary, Charlie Parker

Happy birthday Bird!

The Golden Age of Post Bop

Back in 2009, there was a lot of commotion over Kind of Blue's 50th anniversary, from a self-satisfied Congressional resolution to yet another book (ok, it was actually released last year), to this. More generally, there was a lot of meditation on the year 1959 in jazz and, more broadly, in American society.

Doubtless, much of the hype was just a corporate plot to sell more shit.

Still, 1959 was a watershed and it got me thinking about where jazz was, where it was headed, and about the 50th anniversary of a moment in jazz I consider equally significant.

In 1959, Trane stretched bop harmonies to their logical limit, while Ornette and Miles explored melodic alternatives. Meanwhile, Mingus' survey of styles offered an early post-modern touchstone for its mix and match approach to the jazz tradition.

Those albums share something: they represent jazz gone utterly personal. There was a shift underway in 1959, from an emphasis on virtuosity or mastery of a particular idiom toward a more individual artistry.

The masterpieces released that year reveal artists taking a holistic approach to their music--conceptually, compositionally, tonally. Each album mentioned above consists entirely of original compositions—still unusual for the time. Moreover, a thematic thread ties each album together. By time the 60s rolled around, jazz musicians were deep into exploration of the 'concept album', years before rockers popularized it.

Not that there's anything essential about 1959 that definitively demarcates this approach in jazz. Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, for example, are two artists who come immediately to mind who took the holistic approach to their music much earlier.

Duke Ellington wrote “my men and my race are the inspiration of my work…I try to catch the character and mood and feeling of my people.” Though that statement was written more or less retrospectively (1973), there's really no doubt that Duke thought metaphysically, not just musically, when he composed.

Monk's music had a feel, just a uniqueness that I don't think has ever been matched.

Mingus's music, too, already exhibited a strong coherence by this time (Tijuana Moods, for example).

But, broadly speaking, before 1959, the main currency in jazz was ability to master and, I'd say, to incrementally build upon a common style. Any given style was like a language—learnable and teachable.

Here's what I mean:

Revolutionaries like Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and Coleman Hawkins innovated in ways previously unimagined. Yet, each of their breakthroughs contained something that was, in a sense, formulaic.

Charlie Parker's language was bebop. His execution was unmatched, but his genius contained discrete elements—the technical parts, at least—that could be deciphered and digitized for widespread use. We don't tend to think of everyone who plays bebop as merely a Charlie Parker (or Dizzy Gillespie, or Kenny Clarke, etc.) imitator. They're indebted to those guys, to be sure, but bebop accommodates new contributors and interpreters.

By the early 1960s, however, jazz was experiencing an more pronounced auteurism, which produced music that that was inseparable from its creator.

Miles, Trane and Ornette innovated in ways that defied adoption. Yes, there are imitators, but they are just that—imitators, not adopters, because those guys' powers were purely personal.

Compare charlie parker, who more or less gave us bebop, to mid-60’s, Miles Davis, who gave us…well…the ever-evolving genius of Miles Davis. There's nothing in it that can be parsed out and put to use without producing an homage at best and a knockoff at worst (See, e.g., the early Marsalis band).

Another example:

Over three inspired minutes in October 1939, Coleman Hawkins set out the blueprint for tenor sax's role in jazz. Hawk's genius, everyone's gain.

In his opening salvo on Atlantic, on the other hand, Ornette Coleman set out the blueprint for harmolodics, which, for all of its theoretical pretense, is mostly just a shorthand for the singular brilliance of Ornette Coleman.

Even when one of these guys deliberately slaps a name on his style, inviting adopters, we're still unable to properly describe it, let alone play it, 50 years later.

1959 ushered in jazz’s 'post-' period, during which artists reworked a half-century of tradition into a more personal approach to the music. Indeed, that was the shape of jazz to come.

After what I intended as a brief introduction, I want to skip ahead to the year in which post-bop truly came of age: 1964.

Much like it is today, America in 1964 was changing. The Vietnam War was formally green-lighted; Malcolm X's talked ballots and bullets amidst racial violence; the Beatles' arrival stateside starkly, if tunefully pointed up an increasingly bitter generation gap. The social changes that began at the end of the 50’s were slowly, painfully gearing up.

America was breaking down. At the same time, jazz was breaking through.

Amazingly, in just five years, the musical stirrings from the turn of the decade coalesced into a number of jazz’s masterworks. Some traditionalists surely view this as the petering out of jazz's golden age (Ken Burns, for instance, jams this entire period and everything after it into a single episode of his 10 part series). For me, it's the pinnacle. What follows are my favorite albums from that year:

Albert Ayler, Spiritual Unity/Witches and Devils/Vibrations (ESP/Transatlantic/Debut)

Take your pick. Any way you go, this trinity—to borrow from the man’s own spiritually-tinged lexicon—finds Albert Ayler at an early peak. Though Spiritual Unity seems to have emerged as a rallying point for Ayler enthusiasts, I think I prefer him with a trumpeter, as it heightens that brass band feeling his melodies and (intermittent) rhythms evoke.

In fact, none of these are my favorite Ayler album—that distinction belongs to the downright otherworldly In Greenwich Village (1967). Still, 1964 is the year in which Ayler first deployed, on record, the full force of his expressive apparatus.

Aching sonorities, haunting melodies, the joyous cacophony of turn of the century New Orleans retooled for the powder keg of mid-century New York. It's all there.

Albert Ayler was a visionary. Here, he lays out the vision he would restate and refine for the rest of his sadly short life.

John Coltrane, A Love Supreme (Impulse)

Has anyone ever written or played a more personal piece of music?

Enough ink has been spilled about this album and what it meant to Coltrane. Trane himself wrote, in the album’s liner notes, that it was his humble offering to God.

I remember reading that at one time in the 1960's, in Haight Ashbury, you could hear Trane's masterpiece pouring out of every window. That is to say that this is one of the few jazz albums that transcends the genre and appeals to anyone who can appreciate the sound of a brilliant and beautiful person bearing his soul.

Wayne Shorter, Speak No Evil (Blue Note)

I have a serious soft spot for this one. No other album so completely engulfs me in its world. Speak No Evil is a devious fantasy, concocted by Shorter and laid down by a truly world class quintet. Maybe it's the song titles—Witch Hunt, Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, Dance Cadaverous--or maybe the mysterious woman depicted on the album cover, but there's an enchantment that underlies this whole album and pours out in the music. But that's part of it; song titles, liner notes, album art—it's the entire package's theme, the attention to detail, that makes all of these albums special. That, and in this case, Shorter's brooding compositions and Elvin Jones' hypnotic, ride-based swing. Shorter's accompanied perfectly by Jones, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Freddie Hubbard.

Eric Dolphy, Out to Lunch (Blue Note)

I wrote a bit about this one in an earlier post. It's so utterly weird, but so perfectly crafted. It is, in my opinion, Dolphy's only masterpiece, but one of the greatest of all time. It just feels like everything he'd been tireless building toward, woodshedding and side-manning and in that way, it's a total triumph. The band is absolutely perfect (though I can only imagine what it might have sounded like had Booker Little survived to take on trumpet duties), especially Tony Williams, who turns in one of the most exciting and inventive drum performances I've ever heard, hands down.

And some honorable mentions:

Don Cherry, Complete Communion (Blue Note)

I'm throwing this one in because it's one of my personal favorite albums. I can't say, though, that's it's all Cherry, as that Ornette sound still dominates. But check out the dashing interplay between Cherry and Gato Barbieri, driven by a fleet and upbeat Ed Blackwell. Cherry packs a surprising number of memorable melodies into these two long tracks. He continued to develop his style, moving toward the more eclectic, worldly sound for which he's perhaps better known. This one, though, remains one of my favorites.

Charles Mingus, Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (Impulse)

This qualifies in almost every way: a magnificently ambitious suite, a massive, tumultuous performance (down to Mingus' audible "Goddamnit!" in the background of one of the tracks) and liner notes that stand alone as a work of art. It amounts to a glimpse into into the true, turbulent psyche of a genius.

Only problem—it was recorded in 1963. Obviously, since Mingus was always ahead of his time.

Herbie Hancock, Empyrean Island (Blue Note)

Close, but it feels like Herbie Hancock was still working things out, as evidenced by the uncharacteristically avant The Egg. His post-bop masterpiece, recorded a year later, was Maiden Voyage, which rivals Speak No Evil for its atmospherics.

Lee Morgan, Search for a New Land (Blue Note)

This one's interesting as a sort of missing link. It's a testament to the power of post-bop that even a hard-core hard bopper like Lee Morgan was looking for something new. As evidenced by the title and the extended title track, this is a sort of spiritual undertaking for Morgan, and it works. On the rest of the album, Lee returns to his hard-bopping, boogaloo-ing comfort zone (though Mr. Kenyatta is another interesting interesting piece that gets a pretty extensive treatment). Still, all tracks are Morgan originals, which he tried for the first time on 1963's The Sidewinder.

Check out 1970's Live at the Lighthouse for what I think is Lee Morgan's post-bop best (and an overlooked album generally).

Ultimately, of course, post-bop's golden age was short-lived. The triumph of 1964 soon devolved into the blah of 1970's fusion and the ever-more isolated cries of the avant-garde—all giving rise to the neo-blah of the 1980' Young Lions. Other contributing factors include Charles Mingus's personal problems, Max Roach's (whose Percussion Bittersweet is another, unjustly overlooked post-bop pleasure) political problems, and the tragic, tragic deaths of Eric Dolphy and Booker Little at creative peaks.

It was a brief moment in time, but the jazz of the mid-1960's was as important and enjoyable a creative outburst as any in this country's artistic history.

Speaking of Eric Dolphy...

That earlier list is only a partial discography from 1961. He recorded other albums and classic shows with Trane, with Ron Carter, Mal Waldron, etc. I wonder if anyone else has ever had a hand in so many classic albums in such a short period.

What was it about Dolphy that made him so desirable as a sideman? After all, he isn't the kind of musician you'd necessarily choose if you're trying to assert your own voice. Dolphy's sound, on all of his instruments, is so distinct that his deep musical imprint is left indelibly on anything with which he's involved. Yet, some of the most powerful and personal, and yes assertive voices in the history of the music--Charles Mingus, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman--chose Dolphy as their foil. Why?

Some musicians can immerse themselves in piece of music--really get inside it, become it. Seems to me Dolphy did the opposite. It was the music that was swallowed up by Dolphy. He was like a black box, a trip through which was apparently a rite of passage for those 60's searchers. Feed him any idea you've got and, i don't know what goes on in there, but Dolphy's fearless fire music invariably emerges. Congrats, your tunes now are tempered and ready for modern times.

I guess the greats preferred a sideman who would confront and maybe confound their musical sensibility, rather than disappear into it.

I remember reading a Stanley Crouch piece in which he calls Dolphy repetitive. Though I see it, I also think I understand why. I chalk it up to two factors: (1) that Dolphy was in fact so prolific. Recording as often as he did, more often than not someone else's music, it's not surprising that he fell back on a number of devices, phrases, quotes, etc. Tellingly, the better the raw material, the more original the result (see, e.g., any collaboration with Mingus).

More importantly, (2) Dolphy spoke his very own musical language, one that he constructed himself, which he honed ceaselessly. Innovators on that scale often spend a lifetime revisiting and fine-tuning their initial breakthrough. Dolphy did that. So I don't hold his repetition against him. His message bears repeating.

But for all the Dolphy we have on record, it wasn't until a few months before his death that we got his first masterpiece and one of my favorite albums of all time. Out to Lunch is a triumph of all the ideas Dolphy developed. It's just so perfectly off. For me, it stirs up a sort of paranoia, like wandering down some strange alley in the dead of a rainy night. It puts all of Dolphy's tendency to angularity, jagged rhythms, vocalizations to perfect thematic use. I love it.

It's the album by which I think Dolphy needs to be judged and far from repetition, it's unlike anything that came before it.

I had planned on writing something longer on Eric Dolphy, but just as I started drafting it, Matt Lavelle posted this. And he said everything I could have hoped to say, better than I could have hoped to say it. So I'll leave it at that.

R.I.P. Abbey Lincoln

Been listening to her absolute masterpiece, Straight Ahead, on repeat. For $6 on itunes and amazon, it's well worth picking up if you don't already own it.



On a related note, Max Roach's bands from this period deserve more attention. Consider that in 1961, Max Roach and some variation of his working band recorded Straight Ahead, Booker Little's Out Front Roach's own Percussion Bitter Sweet and Eric Dolphy's immortal Five Spot performances.

Eric Dolphy, by the way, played on all four records and, in the same year, played on Oliver Nelson's Blues and the Abstract Truth and played on and arranged Trane's Africa/Brass. Oh, and stopped in for a few sets at the Vanguard..

WAKE UP!!! (MK Groove Orchestra @ Blue Note)

Ravi Coltrane went late on this Saturday night at the Blue Note--Brooklyn based MK Groove Orchestra, already slotted for the late night set, didn't go on until at least 1am. With Marco Benevento sitting in, they killed, especially that raucous second set.

What transpired below was funny as hell and pretty sick musically. Some more of the show is up on youtube. Marco, you are the man..

(watch the whole thing)

Liner Notes

I'd love to see a jazz liner notes archive. Somewhere on the internet. I've always enjoyed reading them. Good liner notes put an album in context. They're a little piece of history like the music itself. Pretty frequently it happens that a piece of music was approached or received differently when it was made than it is now. The notes preserve that. Yeah, sometimes they're formulaic or otherwise uninteresting -- this song has a 5/4 time signature, that one's a slow blues (aka stuff we can figure out ourselves) -- but sometimes you get a cohesive, thoughtful essay on the artist (or by the artist) and his work.

It's one things that's been lost with the shift to digital music. I always wished apple would include original liner notes with their downloads, but I guess there was never much demand for it and certainly no money in it.

I understand they're including liner notes with they're new 'lp' format, but i can't see too many old jazz records finding the light of day that way. Maybe they should though, decked out in that classic Francis Wolff photography or slick Impulse design..

I don't know what the deal is with copyrights on that stuff, but I'd certainly love to see it go up somewhere. I'd even buy it in a nice coffee table book.

Someone please get on this or tell me it's already been done. Anyway, I'll leave you with an excerpt from a classic (grammy nominated, in case anyone gives a shit), courtesy of Charles Mingus:

I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn't only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts. And those people are: Art Tatum, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Parker, who is the greatest genius of all to me because he changed the whole era around. But there is no need to compare composers. If you like Beethoven, Bach or Brahms, that's okay. They were all pencil composers. I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one's mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I'm getting at is that I know I'm a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived. For instance, a man says he played with feeling. Now he can play with feeling and have no melodic concept at all. That's often what happens in jazz: I have found very little value left after the average guy takes his first eight bars-not to mention two or three choruses, because then it just becomes repetition, riffs and patterns, instead of spontaneous creativity, I could never get Bird to play over two choruses. Now, kids play fifty thousand if you let them. Who is that good?

Trane

Love this Trane post at Brilliant Corners. This is one of so many earth shattering Coltrane moments it can get lost in the shuffle. Don't let it.

Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original by Robin D.G. Kelley

Jazz history is mired in myth. Storyville to Minton's; Buddy Bolden as pied piper to Bird as tragic hero; kings, dukes and dark princes. Thankfully, a number of diligent scholars have disentangled some truth from the myriad tall tales (Garry Giddins and Scott Deveaux are the latest to offer up a substantial work, titled simply Jazz.)

Still, there's that Monk, the enigmatic high priest of bop. Monk's endured as more of a hazy archetype than flesh and blood. Impenetrably hip, indecipherably eccentric, with a born, black musicality, Monk is both the ultimate hipster and an unadulterated artist. Of course, that Monk is largely just an amalgam of everything from played out racial stereotypes to misunderstandings about mental illness. Here, Robin D.G. Kelley tries his hand at retrieving Monk the man from the heap of reductive and often demeaning stories that give us Monk the legend. He succeeds.

First thing's first, we're lucky to get a Monk biography from a practiced historian, rather than a critic or hobbyist. That Kelley's painstaking research and sourcing is the work of a pro is reinforced on every page. He proves that it takes more than passion or a way with words to do justice to a subject like Monk. Kelley shows the judgment of a person who's made a career, not just an occasional go, of poring over documents. At least this reader believes we're getting close to the best construction possible from the available material. And Monk certainly deserves the treatment Kelly gives him. Starting with the book's title, the straightforward and definitive Thelonious Monk, rather than some cliched song title, Round Midnight maybe, or Monk's Dream, we get a work that treats its subject as a matter of serious scholarship. Kelly distances himself sufficiently to give us that scholarship, but not so much that we can't enjoy it. There's a healthy reverence, to be sure, but happily, it falls short of that tired worship that gave us a lot of the bullshit to begin with.

We're all familiar with Monk's place in the pantheon of jazz composers, as well as his singular style at the keys. What struck me over and over again in this book is his legacy as both a teacher and ally to so many of his contemporaries, especially the younger, rawer talent around him. Monk tutored to varying degrees the likes of Bud Powell, Elmo Hope, David Amram, Gigi Gryce, Jaki Byard, Trane and Miles of course, and on and on endlessly. The story is always the same: he didn't say much, just let you know when you were playing it wrong. He was especially keen on the great, sometimes under-appreciated pianists of his day; besides Powell and Hope, Monk was close with Mary Lou Williams, Herbie Nichols and others. When a bunch of journalists hounded Monk for word on injuries he sustained when a stoop on which he was sitting collapsed, he offered only, after a long silence, that Elmo Hope is the greatest pianist in the world. He confounded not only the questioners, but Hope's mother, who was in the room at the time. That was Monk's sense of humor, but also his fierce loyalty.

Monk may not have invented bebop, but he certainly disseminated it, at the retail level that is, like none other. When the trumped up tales fall away, the most common recollection of Monk by people who knew him best is as a great fountainhead from which the language and posture of modern jazz flowed.

The importance of Monk's own teachers weren't lost on him either. One of the more touching episodes in the book is Monk's reaction to Coleman Hawkins's death. Of his many fallen comrades, Monk seemed to take Bean's death particularly hard, no doubt in part because he looked to Bean as one of his few teachers in a life full of students.

Rather than unpack the whole book, I'll just recommend it highly. If there's one trouble I had, it's that for all of Kelley's efforts to humanize Monk, it remains hard to get into his head. Kelley succeeds more in giving us Monk through the eyes of those around him. I guess the fact is that Monk did suffer from a debilitating, often untreated or mistreated mental illness, so his head is simply hard to get into. Some events like, for instance, Monk's mental breaks, his sudden separation from his wife Nellie snuck up on me, because we're not fully along for the psychic rides that led to the events. Kelley most succeeds in relating deeply personal and revealing moments in his descriptions of the home recordings of Monk at his piano with Nellie, or arranging his music for a big band with Hall Overton. Kelley puts those moments to paper beautifully and it's just a pleasure to live with Monk at those times. I'd love to hear the tapes myself.

So many artists deserve a proper bio like this (anyone want to tackle Mingus, I'd be grateful). The portrait of Monk here is full, fair, and warm but honest. I recommend the book.

Chicago Jazz Festival

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last weekend in Chicago soaking in some outdoor jazz. The festival was pleasant, well-attended and the music was enjoyable. I won't give any extensive reviews here--I'll leave that to someone else--but I do want to mention my favorite set of the weekend. That was Archie Shepp's.

Archie Shepp plays with an incredible pathos that is most definitely the product of years of total immersion as a musician, educator and activist. He is one of these former radicals who has seemingly turned inward in his old age. Specifically, he played a version of Steam completely lacking the despair and seething anger that pervaded the original version on Attica Blues. Attica Blues itself is actually a remarkably reflective and subdued album, given that it's inspiration was the Attica Prison riot. Still, it feels to me like a sort of collective reflection, still a purposeful and forceful record. The Chicago Steam, on the other hand, was very much personal, introspective, and despite the subject matter (Shepp's murdered cousin), somehow nostalgic.



In a way, it makes me think that those troubled times in the 60s and early 70s were somehow the good old days for guys like Shepp, because at least there was a genuine feeling that things could change. Jazz at that time, whether it was Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Trane, Max Roach, Mingus, Miles, exuded a certain rage, and an implied, if not direct, call to arms. Some of those guys who are still around, Shepp among them, now play a wistful, almost dreamlike music whose power is not of this moment, but derived from another time. It's a beautiful and sometimes sad music, powerful in its implicit lament of what could have been.

Archie oozed that feeling with Duke's Don't Get Around Much Anymore, which he sang ("Oh, Darling I guess my mind's more at ease, but nevertheless, why stir up memories"). It was fitting that he worked in a more explicitly reminiscent tune, whose themes ran through his entire set. It reminded me, although it was far more earnest, of Lou Donaldson's Things Ain't What They Used To Be, which I described a few weeks back. The same Archie Shepp who, in a more radical time, notoriously berated white audiences with his friend Amiri Baraka (Baraka famously told a white woman who asked what white people can do to help the black civil rights struggle, "You can die"), ended this set by demanding that his overwhelmingly white audience stand up, turn around, clap your hands...It's true that things ain't what they used to be.

I hope to have to pictures I took from this set up soon.

P.S.: For contrast, compare this set to Cecil Taylor's that I caught at the Highline Ballroom recently. Cecil has not backed down one inch musically. The guy is something like 82 years old, but if my eyes had been closed, I wouldn't have been able to tell if I was listening to Cecil Taylor 2009 or Cecil Taylor 1969. I have no words for his set except to say that seeing him in full force was something very special.

(Best I could do--no cameras allowed)

#Jazzlives (barely)

The results are in from this week's #jazzlives twitter campaign. They are...well...troubling:

the number of tweets...hasn't touched the number that who attended Woodstock 40 years ago but isn't bad as far as getting folks to independently raise their hands (or rather, use their thumbs) to shout 'Yes, I love live jazz' in 140 characters or less.

What is the number? 812.

Eight hundred twelve? I'm pretty sure I know single people who tweet more in a week. Somehow, Howard Mandel interprets that as

pretty encouraging, representing a hard-core eager to identify themselves with the idea, and a sign that it might grow legs.

First, he defines the hardcore as those willing to dash off 140 characters on their phone--basically anyone willing to send a text message. Then he celebrates when that group clocks in at 812 people, or rather some indeterminate number of people no higher than 812. I'll tell you right now, 2 of those tweets were by a friend of mine, who I dragged to the Chicago Jazz Festival, who couldn't care less whether jazz lives or dies, so knock one off that total. For comparison, consider that double that number have reviewed the Ashlee Simpson album Autobiography--actually thought out and wrote, in some cases, hundreds of words--on Amazon.

To put it another way, here is a list of terms that were tweeted more often than Jazzlives in the past week:

Iphone
Beatles
Jay-Z
Larry King
Bob Barker
Chick-fil-a
Oregon
Giant Octopus
Mega Shark
#sex101
#chrisbrownbowtie
#uknowufromqueens
#happybirthdaypink

and my favorite:

#adamfarted

OK?

Stolen Moments

Some shots I snapped at a jam session at Spotted Cat in New Orleans in February:

Paul Motian Trio @ Village Vanguard

Paul Motian, Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano played a spectacular set at the Vanguard last night. I loved the Bird references on the man's birthday -- thanks Joe.

Paul Motian's distinct style isn't my favorite, but he's someone I'll always go see, especially at the Vanguard, because he leads such great groups. This one, of course, has played as a unit for about thirty years. The last time I saw Motian was a few months ago with the similarly base-less trio of Motian, Jason Moran and Chris Potter. Paul Motian can be fairly heavy handed on his kit, and uses a setup that emphasizes crashing, metallic sounds over much else (the rivets in his ride cymbal, for instance, ensure that ever-present clang). To me, that kind of playing, combined with his loose conception of the drummer-as-timekeeper, seems to call for a bass, first for a rhythmic frame of reference, and second, for a fuller, more grounded sound to inject a bit of dynamism into the band's overall tone.

No matter, these guys don't need it. Motian didn't need it with Potter and Moran either. This trio's strength, to me, is not in their forward drive, but in their vertical construction of thick sound on top of thick sound, or jagged rhythm on top of jagged rhythm. They create wonderfully elaborate musical landscapes and can build a lot of tension for a long time that way. It has you fiending for a resolution, but not a simple harmonic resolution; more like a deliberate, brick by brick deconstruction of whatever musical house they've just as painstakingly built. Bill Frisell is especially adept at that sort of construction and deconstruction, as he does it solo with his myriad loops and effects. He didn't use too much of that last night, but those pedals were just a kick away the entire set.

A great set.

Happy Birthday Mr. President

Ethan Iverson offers this anecdote from Lester Young's brother, Lee:

[Lester] loved to play jam sessions and loved to not to know the tune....If you were playing a tune the instrumentalist--the soloist--didn’t know, well, it was fashionable for the pianist to turn around and say, E-flat-seventh, you know, D-flat, C major--he wouldn’t want that. If he didn’t know the tune, he’d say, “Don’t call the chords to me. Just play the chords, and I’ll play.” And I’d seen him do it many a time, you know; they just starteHd playing, and he didn’t know it, but he would play it.

But he would say that it confines you too much if you know it’s a Db7, you know, you start thinking of the only notes that will go in that chord, and he would say that’s not what he would hear. He wanted to play other things and make it fit. And he did. And I think most of the great musicians could do that, you know?

Check out Ethan's entire piece, which is a thorough examination of Lester and what his music means to jazz. Ted Gioia at Jazz.com has also paid Pres some much deserved respect over the last few days.

Since I began listening to jazz, its become increasingly clear to me that Lester Young is the towering soloist of his age. Coleman Hawkins ushered in the era of the tenor sax, but Lester Young ushered in the era of modern jazz -- not just musically, but philosophically and aesthetically as well.

Happy 100th Pres.

Chris Potter to the Rescue

Add Chris Potter to the list below of musicians with a clear head about what jazz is:

Its important to remember that this is how jazz started out: the rhythmic feeling of it, the connection with other music that was going on in society. It wasn't such a separate thing. It actually was the pop music for a while... There's been a widening of the gap, where it's become more and more art music. And it is art music: There's a huge range of complexity, of things you can do within the music. But it's important to not lose those roots that connect it to the rest of the music world that we're all living in

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That's a nice synergy, since my first post on this blog was about dancing to Chris Potter's Underground. Love that guy..

Lou Donaldson's Sufferin' Music

I took a long, long ride out to Co-op City in the Bronx a couple weeks ago to check out a free Lou Donaldson show -- part of Jazzmobile's summer festival. Here's a late post about it. It took me about 2 hours to get out there, largely because I had no real clue where I was going. It was well worth it. It was a very different type of jazz experience for me, at once extremely enjoyable and a bit disheartening. I'll get back to that, but first the music.

I arrived about 20 minutes after the scheduled start time, so I may have missed some of the set. I got there in time to catch the Erroll Garner tune Gravy Train, which is the kind soulful, Blue Note sound I associate with Lou Donaldson. It was pretty much what I expected -- an 82 year old man having a good time with his old tunes.

Then he did some talking. I have to say, Lou Donaldson's rap on the bandstand was about as entertaining as any I've heard, and the crowd really connected. He talked about a music they have back in North Carolina, called suffering music...the blues. He then proceeded to perform an untitled piece that I'll call the talking viagra blues. I'll spare you the details, but it was funny and had the audience (judging by the average age, I might have been the only person who didn't understand exactly what he was talking about) laughing. He sang a blues he called Whiskey Drinking Woman, another very funny song ("she puts whiskey in her coffee, she puts whiskey in her tea, she puts whiskey in her whiskey, then she pours the rest into me"). Lou's voice is great, and was the musical highlight of the night for me. He has that weathered, yet casual tone of an old man who sings the blues as a matter of course.

He also sang his own lyrics to Things Ain't What They Used To Be, which, from what I remember, were about a quest to recoup a $2.50 Woolworth wig from an unfaithful lover. Another highlight was the crowd pleasing Bye-Bye Blackbird. And, just as I was planning to write about how Lou has lost his wind and speed, he unloaded with some of the Bird-like maneuvers of his youth on a tune called Fast and Freaky, at a tempo he claimed young musicians can't handle.

His band included Randy Johnson on Guitar, Fukushi Tainaka on drums and Akiko Tsuruga on Organ. They supported Lou well and got the job done. They were all a lot of fun to watch.

What was somewhat bittersweet about the set is that, despite the fact that I live in New York City, I had to travel a couple of hours to the world's largest naturally occurring old age home to see jazz with an audience who knew how to have a little fun. I was quite literally the only person there who wasn't either over 70, or there with their grandparents. Are those the only people left who appreciate jazz for what it fundamentally is -- a dance music?

Yes, jazz is high art. It's both the greatest artistic form and the most important cultural creation ever conceived in this country. Period. But it is also, in its heart and its origins a celebratory music, played for and born of weekend dances. I hate more than anything going to a downtown jazz club and watching people stare at musicians like they're paintings on a wall. You're experiencing art, yes, but you're not at the goddamn Moma. Tap a foot, please.

Jazz's greatest artists, even the ones who most demanded to be taken seriously as artists, understood what it was about. Can you count the number of people who danced to the Duke Ellington Orchestra, from the Harlem rent parties of the 1920s to the legendary Blond at Newport '56? Could anyone play the blues, I mean play in a way that you can feel in your soul and in your gut, and not just appreciate coldly, like Charlie Parker? Thelonious Monk, every bit as important a modernist as the abstract expressionist painters of his time, danced to his own music. Those guys understood the balance between jazz as serious art and jazz as basic emotion. Most of the jazz patrons I see around treat the music as if it's solely an intellectual exercise.

That's why it was so fun and really just touching to hear the audience at Co-op City, for instance, sing along to Bye Bye Blackbird. I have never heard an entire audience sing the words to a standard like that. And I could just see that these were people who probably came home from their nine to five 50 years ago and actually spun a Lou Donaldson record to unwind -- a little soul after a hard day's work. Jazz isn't just a trip to the museum to fans of that generation, it's part of the rhythm of daily life.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that jazz, if already fading, was still a relatively popular music in this country when Lou Donaldson was making records and the residents of Co-op City were buying them. That's no longer the case. It goes to the question of whether jazz is on its deathbed -- a hot topic these days. But even those who say it is won't deny that there are some of us who still partake in, consume, travel to see, pay for jazz. I'm just asking if we can crack a smile once in a while we're doing it. How can we possibly convince the potential audience out there that jazz is still alive when so many of us act like we're already at the funeral?

Pat Metheny's Orchestrion Project

Pat Metheny introcduced his upcoming Orchestrion Project on his website recently. He described it as a "leap into new territory" and something "particularly connected to the reality of this unique period in time." But reading the description, it sounds like something connected to the reality of another time. From what I gather, he's playing acoustic instruments mechanically using technology developed for his purposes. To be fair, he adds a postscript to the effect of you have to hear it to believe it, but to me, a mechanical band sounds like some relic of the industrial revolution. Like it should debut at the next world's fair. Even if it's updated technologically, it still seems decidedly low tech. It seems to me this "moment in time" is about digital, more than mechanical innovation. I'd like to have Pat elaborate on what he means when he says "this moment in time". I do respect Pat Metheny, musically as well as intellectually, so I'll wait and see.

Update: Someone in an All About Jazz discussion forum on the Orchestrion thing posted a link to this video. This has (I hope) nothing to do with what Pat's up to, but I had to reproduce the link because this video had me mesmerized. Between the megaphone, the giant Karaoke screen and the freaky-ass dancing all around, the giant drum machine/medieval torture device is keeping a pretty low profile.

1959

1959 in jazz has already been obsessed over to an almost troubling degree this year. We've seen JALC shows, high priced special edition record releases, BBC programming, all seemingly paying tribute to the year itself, all further cementing contemporary jazzdom's already pretty firm orientation toward the past.

Anyway, here's my contribution: I just love that in the same year, John Coltrane gave us what was essentially the pinnacle of what could be achieved within the bop paradigm, while Ornette Coleman gave a first mind bending taste of what could be achieved beyond it. No lull between the climax of one mode of jazz improv and the recorded birth of the next torchbearer. Such a perfect synergy and an indication of what astounding creativity was bouncing around at the time..

Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life

I just read this 2001 book by Wynton Marsalis and Carl Vigeland. All in all, a forgettable little travelogue by Wynton and his just-about star struck companion, journalist Carl Vigeland. In the first 10 pages, Vigeland gushes about how he earned his nickname with Wyton's crew, explaining each incarnation and its meaning like a little sibling that won't shut up: "Then he began good-naturedly taunting me about the number the number of women I must have slept with...to the number three was added the word piece. Three piece, as in a suit...in a cab, three became tre, and piece became swig, because it sounded a little like the beginning of my last name..." Seriously Carl, if you're that proud of the fact that you're down, you're probably not. Admittedly, a taste of the jazz life might leave me similarly wild-eyed, but jazz writing has enough hero worshipers.

At one point, Vigeland lapses into a sort of faux poetic romp complete with unnecessary capitalization, fun with pronouns and Wynton spelled Wintone (acutally WINTONE) that almost ended my read entirely. I guess that's his attempt at jazz, but again, you're trying too hard Carl.

I understand that this is supposed to be a combination insider/outsider perspective on Marsalis' Septet, its music and travels. Problem is, in this case, the outsider doesn't contribute much. His portion of the book reads like a long newspaper article (in fact, some of it is just a bunch of newspaper articles). He gives us some helpful background, but no real analysis of the music, the people, the life, the stage. Needless to say, there's no criticism of anything ever. A more thoughtful outsider, or one less enamoured with his eighth wheel status, could have given us all of that. Instead, what we have here is stories. Bland ones. This guy writes for The Atlantic. That's where this book belongs, minus about 200 pages.

Wynton's passages--interspersed throughout--are significantly more interesting, both stylistically and substantively. His debt to the Albert Murray/Stanley Crouch (he mentions both in the both) school of jazz aesthetics are on full display in these lyrical, homey vignettes. It's as if the blues sensibility shapes his literary phrasing as much as it does his musical phrasing. The same is true of both Murray and Crouch--see the first section of Stomping the Blues, in which Murray uses those literary blues in an effort to define what exactly the blues are. It's that down home--Crouch likes to say gut bucket--approach. Even if it sometimes seems like pure showmanship (what in jazz isn't?), more often it's just great craftsmanship.

Since the blues in all their majesty are so hard to define and are more of an I know it when I hear it type of phenomenon, I find these sorts of informal musings on life, love and the music itself sometime captures the blues best. The blues need to be felt deeply. That, I think, is why Wynton writes for all the senses, to try in words to evoke that feeling. It's about the familiar taste of homemade Louisiana dinners, the expression of unrepentant sexuality, the vague melancholy of a solo Monk performance playing on endless loop on a long drive. It's the natural beauty the rises and falls with the road across the entire country. It's inseparable from and so valuable as a companion to the music. I listened to this Septet's Village Vanguard box set as I was reading. That's not a set that's gotten much play time from me, but with a little context it worked just fine.

Wynton's contributions are where we get some heart and a little thought as to what it all means, where it comes from and where it's going. Unfortunately, they're largely buried in pages and pages of pedestrian journalism.

I have my problems with both Crouch and Murray by the way, and Wynton Marsalis for that matter, whose music I generally find, put simply, boring. But their passion for jazz, blues and the richness of black life in America are undeniable and admirable.

I hope to write a post about the serious problems I have with Albert Murray later on, but that's a much bigger project.

As far as this book goes, I would have rather read a short travel memoir by Marsalis alone. He's a soulful, engaging writer who certainly has more to say about life on the road than some uninitiated wannabe. We get some nice peeks into what it means to be a modern day jazz musician in this book, but I guess I should've known by the $6 price tag that I wasn't getting much.