At some point, certain jazz folk may have stopped paying
close attention to Medeski Martin & Wood. They’re doing fine, in case you
were wondering. After coming to the end of their Blue Note Records affiliation
five years ago, they went indie full-time, establishing Indirecto Records and
doubling down on their bet that there will never be a bear market for
instrumental grooves.
In today’s paper: the album review above plus my take on Ornette Coleman at the Rose Theater. (Some readers of The Gig will probably skip right to the latter, but let me say right now that Miranda Lambert is serious business. Ignore her at your peril.) For the concert review and set list, skip to the post below. Meanwhile, a few additional thoughts.
Continuing my commemoration of the 50th anniversary of
Statehood, here’s a new YouTube find (new to me, anyway) featuring
pianist-bandleader Martin Denny on the long-running local program Hawaii
Calls. This apparently dates to 1956, a few
years before entry to the Union, which partly accounts for the perfumed air.
Note how host Webley Edwards hails Denny as “a man who’s both modern and
native in his approach to music,” before the band sidles into “Quiet Village,” the definitive anthem of exotica. The camera
trains first on the musicians, with their tropical birdcalls, before a languid (and staged) montage that’s part National Geographic, part South Pacific.
Exotica was by definition a mongrel genre, hovering not only
between “modern” and “native” but also between the West and the Orient, between
honor and exploitation, between shrewdness and kitsch. (I might add art and
commerce, but the scales were pretty far tipped, in that case, all along.)
Because it was an instrumental pop music during the era when jazz was pop, there’s quite a bit of overlap in terms of
style and repertoire. Musicians like Denny came from a similar school of
thought as George Shearing, though their arranging strategies actually fell
more in line, at the end of the day, with Sun Ra.