THE GIG

Year-End Year-Ender

As promised, and/or threatened: a couple of weeks ago, Ben Ratliff and I sat down to talk about the year in jazz for the NY Times Popcast. Ben Sisario moderated our conversation; Jon Pareles chimed in a few times. Listen here, or subscribe via iTunes or whatever. Ciao!

The Year in Gigs

Daniel Barry for The New York Times

Results from the 2010 Village Voice Jazz Critics’ Poll are officially in, along with a brief contextual essay by its master undertaker, Francis Davis. No spoilers here: presumably you already knew that this was the Year of JAMO. I’m only sorry that my belated review of Charles Lloyd’s Mirror, slated to run in today’s paper, had to be bumped for space. It was a real pleasure to dive back into that album, after some months, and study Moran’s contribution anew.

While we’re still on the subject of year-end reflections -- and don’t worry, dear reader, this all ends with the arrival of a new year -- Jazztimes has posted my sixth annual Year in Gigs (hence A. Braxton, pictured above). The fun thing about this list is that it makes no claim for comprehensiveness. I saw a lot of jazz in 2010. Perhaps you did too. There’s a good chance that something you saw would have made this list, had I also managed to see it. So with that in mind, I’m welcoming any other Best Gig reminiscences in the comments below.

Please, though, nobody say “Herbie Hancock at Carnegie Hall.” I know a prank comment when I see one.

Year-End: The Set Closer

Final round of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: Nate Chinen

Hey gang,

Season’s greetings from the Houston suburbs! I’m hunkered down with family for a spell, but wanted to throw out one more post before tying the ribbon on this thing. Since the last round, the year-end churn has given us a lot more to chew on, including scads of Top 10s.

NPR’s A Blog Supreme had an early roundup of roundups. Chris, your picks are up now as a slide show at the L.A. Times. I imagine the Village Voice will soon be posting its jazz poll, spearheaded by Francis Davis. (I’ll be shocked if the consensus pick isn’t Jason Moran’s Ten.) And JazzTimes has a compendium of critics’ ballots -- several of us among them. David and Shaun, Ten is our single item of overlap; Shaun, you and I also had Mary Halvorson and Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth. Shaun and David, you guys both listed the Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet, which resides on my unseen extended list. (Jennifer, you may be glad to know that I share at least one fave with the Jazzfamoose, whose true identity is safe with me.) 

Critical consensus should always raise more questions than it answers, but the Moran-tastic thrust of this year feels about right. Ten was also the only album to appear on two critics’ lists in the NY Times on Sunday: my Top 10 and Ben Ratliff’s. (By the way, this week’s NY Times Popcast will feature Ben and me jawing about the year in jazz. I’ll post that when it’s up; meanwhile, last week’s edition has all four pop and jazz critics talking more generally about the year in music:)

NY Times Popcast 12/15/10  

Ben placed Steve Coleman and Five Elements at the top of his list, and rightly so.  Harvesting Semblances and Affinities is a stunningly realized statement, the sort of album that a Netflix algorithm would align precisely with my taste preferences. (Last year, I big-upped Steve Lehman, Henry Threadgill and Vijay Iyer. )

So why isn’t Coleman on my list? (For that matter, why not Threadgill again?) I’m not really sure. This year more than most, I made a conscious effort to form my list from the gut, thinking honestly about the albums that kept drawing me back. 

Ten fit that bill, and so did my No. 2: Jasmine, by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden. Is it completely nuts for me to suggest that this album has been slept on? Perusing the JazzTimes census, I see that eight other critics have listed it, mostly within the first five slots -- but there wasn’t a ton of discussion about the album, unless I just missed it.

 

On the surface, Jasmine might seem a conservative choice, but there are depths therein that I still haven’t exhausted. Like The Melody at Night, With You, Jarrett’s exquisitely brittle solo recital of roughly a decade ago, it’s a paean to melody and reflection. The impression it leaves is twofold: mastery and modesty. (Yes, I am aware of the oddness of deploying the word “modest” in any discussion of Keith Jarrett.) Perhaps “maturity” is the concept I’m grasping at here. For all the light and heat generated by our Halvorsons, our Tyshawn Soreys, our Irabagons and Abbasis, there’s something to be said for the direct, mature statement. Jazz does maturity well, now as ever.

It’s a brilliantly diverse ecosystem, though, and there’s room for all sorts. (I suspect your curiosity was as piqued as mine over the latest bit of Esperanza news.) So I end this roundtable more or less as I started: with deep gratitude for your participation, and benign indecision over the year’s unifying theory. I’m sorry you won’t all be at the Winter Jazzfest in a couple of weeks -- we’ll have to grab a drink some other time. How about a New Orleans hang next spring? Or Philly in the fall? Or some appointment drinking in Rehoboth Beach? To be continued... 

Nate

Seriously, Unseriously

Part Ten of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: Jennifer Odell

Hi folks,

I’m still mulling Nate’s Wall of Objectivity and thinking of the many journalistic standards that support his approach to social media networking. I’m also thinking about the misleading link I posted on my Facebook profile that appears to commend Time magazine for naming Herman Leonard their man of the year. Although the legendary jazz photographer’s death was simply mentioned in a long list of “fond farewells,” subsumed under Time’s annual “Person of the Year” package, I like how Facebook lets me distill the daily digital information onslaught down to the things that I find poignant -- and emphasize those things so that, hopefully my Facebook friends get exposed to a new idea or two.

I guess posts like that are tantamount to the general murmur you might overhear at a music festival or conference. And like those overheard one-liners, information we get from these sites can easily be taken out of context to create false impressions, as Nate learned the hard way. (But making Herman Leonard the Person of the Year on a site created by the actual Person of the Year has such a nice ring to it...)

To me, the mere fact that we’re having this discussion about the ethics of Facebook friending in jazz is a positive sign. Search and Restore’s movement to broaden jazz’s audience needs to reach a generation that expects everything about everything to be available on the web. Jazz isn’t quite there yet. Downbeat doesn’t publish the magazine’s stories online, iTunes does little to guide new listeners to the music, and there are about as many websites about jazz as there women critics (cough).

But jazz communities are at least thriving on Facebook and Twitter, so maybe our industry is finally climbing out of its much-maligned, proverbial ivory tower. 

Speaking of which, did anyone else follow the Jazzfamoose this year? Before 2010, there was no jazz version of Gawker, launching snarky missives about controversies like the decision to name every Marsalis a Jazz Master -- or Phil Woods’ pursuant boycott of the NEA. But at some point in July, a mysterious, take-no-prisoners digital personality calling itself JazzFamoose appeared on Twitter and started lobbing 140-character grenades at everyone in jazz, from musicians to critics to genre-specific phenomena.

It would be a stretch to argue that this guy’s comments are making jazz more accessible -- but I do like to think that his existence means we’re all taking ourselves a little less seriously.

On the other end of the seriousness spectrum, Nate and Shaun both touched on Herbie’s Imagine Project, an album that raised a number of questions for me. While the cloying impression of Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up,” revisited in jazz form will not be easily expunged from the recesses of my brain, reading Herbie’s explanation of the project in Downbeat this month made consider his effort from a new perspective. His goal was to make a statement about the need for and potential of global unity. So that statement was obscured by a confusing combination of Irish fiddlers, African guitar riffs and Lisa Hannigan, but hey, he tried. I appreciate the message.

While working on an obit for Abbey Lincoln this summer, I had music and politics on the brain and found myself coming back to one politically-inspired track that worked better than anything on Herbie’s disc: Preservation Hall Band director, Ben Jaffe, Trombone Shorty, Mos Def and Lenny Kravitz’s recording of the brass band staple, “It Ain’t My Fault,” which they made to raise money for GulfAid.org. It was recorded while BP’s heinously unmitigated environmental disaster was still spewing untold amounts of crude oil into the Gulf. Mos’ New York rap-styled lyrical lilt sounds a little foreign in a brass band setting, but his tone echoes the frustration we all felt about so much responsibility-shirking.

 

There was also “Sorry Ain’t Enough No More,” a hip-hop-R&B jam by Shamarr Allen and Hot 8 Brass Band’s Bennie Pete. It’s got almost nothing to do with jazz, but Shamarr’s first teachers were Kidd Jordan and Herlin Riley, and he came up playing with Tuba Fats, so I’ll grandfather him into the discussion. And I’d be curious to hear more from Shaun about which issues are inspiring artists in South America to compose music.

Maybe these intersections between jazz and politics fascinate me because of my terrible addiction to Freedom Now and Attica Blues, but I resolve that in 2011 I’ll try my damnedest to spill some ink around more politicized music projects.

Anyway, thanks for the excuse to synthesize (sort of) these random ideas, guys. I’ll be looking for news about JJA, David (I’ll be at JEN in New Orleans that week) and about Panama’s rising stars, Shaun.

 Chris, Elephant9’s “over-caffeinated Deep Purple sprinting through a jazz record” is officially on my To Listen To list. And Nate -- try not to Twitter-kill any more jazz fans. We need as many as we can get.

May the Moose be with you. 

-- Jennifer

What the Hell is Going On with Europe

Part Nine of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8  | 9 | 10 | 11 )

Hello again, all,

First let me also pass along my envy for Shaun on those festivals, those sounded amazing (my hope for that country-folding technology to happen in our lifetimes still stands).

As for the social media hoo-ha, I’m still muddling around with it. Being one of the last on Earth (it seems) with a resolutely “dumb” phone, my Twitterizing remains confined to this desk, a sort of free-fire zone for stray, possibly coherent thoughts and the partly self-promotional link-share. I wonder, with regard to what you ran into, Nate, where else those in-the-moment thoughts would land me at a show? Does the Twitter feed become a sort of notebook where you’re live-blogging a performance, like I’ve seen with a few writers here? I have a hard time imagining wanting to get pixels under my fingernails midway through something like that, but who can tell? There’s probably a lot things we can say that about just looking back to 2009.

And with regard to the artist-as-”friend” question, started to shrug that off too. Just as being someone’s “follower” isn’t the same as a disciple, the “friend” doesn’t mean the same thing to my mind, either. I think it’s more of a question of shortening people’s proximity to each other more than anything else, if that makes sense, and as Jennifer said even that gets diluted amid all the noise. Very curious where our Man of the Year’s little toy leads everyone in, say, five years, after Quetzalcoatl (or equivalent) has enslaved us all.

David, have you priced those ranches in Montana? I’ve been considering a goat farm, maybe on California’s central coast.

Back to the music: Nate, I couldn’t pick a better word than “head-spinning” for that Flying Lotus record, it’s been months and I’m still maybe only halfway toward figuring it out. Missing that release show from that video you posted probably is one of my bigger regrets for 2010, as well as his collaboration with Build an Ark’s Miguel-Atwood Ferguson that happened this summer. I think I’ll still be finding new things in Cosmogramma well into 2011, but given the company Ellison’s been keeping I think whatever he does next will be just as mysterious, in the best way.

On a different tack while my top 10 waits to come out of the oven, this was another “What the hell is going on with Europe” kind of year for me, there was some great ideas behind a lot of what I heard. Peepers, by Polar Bear (pictured at the top of this post), grabbed me with this growling rock-ish drive, along with the simmering world-jazz of Portico Quartet and Food’s moody collaboration with Fennesz. And this trio Elephant9 (above) kept Norway’s run going with Walk the Nile, something that sounded like an over-caffeinated Deep Purple sprinting through a jazz record. Tough stuff to define, certainly, but that thought doesn’t seem to come up as often over there.

Well, I’m missing like seven or eight great thoughts you all brought up, but the day beckons. Looking forward to reading more of these and all you guys have going in 2011 (and more thanks to Nate for shepherding this spiraling project). Happy holidays and happy listening, everyone.

- Chris

Friending, Tending, Trending

Part Eight of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: David Adler

Dear all,

Glad to get Shaun’s report on happenings South of the Border. Me, I’ve been living under a rock, remember? So, no travel. Not even any Maxwell or Flying Lotus concerts. And for certain sustained periods, no Twitter, no Facebook.

My take on the repeated “friending” question: I held to a policy of not friending musicians for a while, but it crumbled -- for me, maintaining the wall of separation was a pure hassle, an attempt to solve a problem that I concluded didn’t really exist.

That doesn’t mean I discount the idea of an Objectivity Wall, to use Nate’s semi-facetious term. In my view, objectivity means fairness, plain and simple. I was struck by something Jack Shafer said in a recent column on the Olbermann suspension. Citing the 2001 book The Elements of Journalism, Shafer noted: “[T]raditionally, it was the journalistic method that was supposed to be objective, not the journalist.” Works for me.

My view of Twitter is much like my view of Olbermann: I’m glad it’s there but I find it irritating. I know, new media is here to stay and will only grow, and the need to develop multimedia, multiplatform skills (or rather, skillz) is inescapable. But sometimes the hivemind, or “throbbing networked intelligence” as someone recently called it, makes me want to move to Montana and tend cattle. Also, I got into this to be a writer. To paraphrase Robert Plant, does anybody remember writing?

Enough gripes and on to the shameless plugs. One of my projects this year was the launch of JJA News, the new online publication of the Jazz Journalists Association (JJA), devoted to news and ideas relevant to the profession. So let me point everyone to the JJA’s upcoming “New Media for New Jazz” conference, Jan. 7-11 in New York, an effort connected to the annual APAP proceedings. I’ll be speaking on a panel, “Jazz Journalism Now and Future Prospects,” Jan. 8 at 2p.m.

A final trickle of thoughts about 2010:

- two solo bass albums (did I miss others?), by Jason Roebke, pictured at the top of this post (In the Interval) and Boris Kozlov (Double Standard).

- Florian Ross’s gorgeous solo piano disc Mechanism, lost in the shuffle amid entries by Geri Allen, Vijay Iyer and other higher-profile cats.

- Eric Hofbauer’s wild solo guitar disc American Fear! – also lost next to Marc Ribot’s far more talked-about Silent Movies. Hofbauer covers “Hot for Teacher” in a way that, to me, serves as the ultimate rebuke to ELEW.

- I agree with Nate about Herbie’s uninspired Imagine Project, but on a brighter note, anyone catch how many people are covering “I Have a Dream”? Check the track lists on David Weiss’s Snuck In, Wallace Roney’s If Only for One Night, Pablo Held’s Music and Dana Hall’s Into the Light.

I could go on, but time to stop. Thanks again everyone, and thanks to Nate for throwing open the doors and organizing this forum. Onward to 2011!

Seeds Being Planted

Part Seven of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: Shaun Brady

Hello again, all,

Jazz thriving outside the usual places, Nate? My year was bracketed by a pair of jazz fest excursions that brought that idea (in a more literal sense, perhaps, than you intended) to vivid life. The first, in January, was to the seventh Panama Jazz Festival; the second, just last month, was to the Festival Internacional JAZZUV in Xalapa, Mexico. Neither is a locale that one would normally associate with a thriving jazz scene, but (perhaps for that very reason) both were attended by packed houses of enthusiastic locals.

In both cases, the performances were not the beginning and end of the festivals, but the endcaps to week-long educational efforts. 

 

Master classes from the likes of John Patitucci and Ellis Marsalis (in Panama) and Jack DeJohnette and Ray Drummond (in Xalapa) were at least as important to the fests’ missions, and it was intriguing to watch young students in both places work with master musicians or virtuoso peers not much older -- Panama served as the inauguration of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, whose students led classes of their own. (Here's one BGJI vid of a class that I was in the room for.)

Both also, not coincidentally, have at their helms musicians who take education and advocacy as importantly as chops: in JAZZUV’s third year, making it the same age as its eponymous Universidad Vericruzano-affiliated jazz school, Francisco Mela (pictured at the top of this post) took over as artistic director, supplementing the efforts of pianist/founder/school director Edgar Dorantes.

And the former is the brainchild of hometown boy Danilo Perez, whose year was just capped by a well-deserved Grammy nom for his gorgeous Providencia.

 This on top of his duties at Berklee, forming an all-star band in tribute to Dizzy Gillespie (whose initial performances were a bit shaky-legged, though here’s hoping the Perez/Rudresh Mahanthappa collaboration continues), and curating his seventh season at the Kimmel Center here in Philly, a Monk tribute that brought Geri Allen’s Timeline Quartet and a reprisal of Danilo’s own Panamonk project to town.

So there you go: a master at the top of his own game, and seeds being planted for the future. Meet you back here in ten years or so to talk about the burgeoning crop of Panamanian and Xalapan rising stars?

- Shaun

Outside the Usual Places

Part Six of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: Nate Chinen

OK, you guys, the sponsor relations rep at Dogfish Head thought it would be a good idea for me to work in more product placement, preferably with some clicky visual cues. So: Happy Holidaises from mah kitteh, Toshi, who luvs his Bitchez Brewses as much as I does!

I kid (um, obviously?). But seriously, Dogfish Head, call me. (Kidding! Kidding!) I do like the fact that beer has been a through-line in our convo so far; it says something reassuring about the state of American jazz criticism. Also, thinking for a moment about ethics and gag humor reminds me of a question posed by Shaun earlier in our exchange. Paraphrasing a bit: should we critics still be wary Facebookers? And how has Twitter changed our game? 

Maybe this is a bit inside-baseball for some of our readers, but I’ll touch on it for a minute. Seems worth it. The Facebook quandary has changed in degrees but not in principle, for me. I don’t friend musicians as a rule, and that flat policy keeps me out of trouble. It also keeps me out of a few potentially vital conversations. It’s an imperfect solution, but I have to trust it. The alternative feels messy and treacherous. I’d feel differently about that, I think, if the nature of my job didn’t involve so much critical evaluation of the scene. (Despite appearances, I still consider even the weekly Jazz Listings to be a form of criticism.) Still, I’m open to reevaluating the policy. As this week’s news reinforces, the Facebook reign ain’t ending anytime soon.

Nor is the Age of Twitter. (Shaun, I’m talking to you.) But there’s a key distinction between the two social-media platforms: “friends” vs. “followers,” and “ambient awareness” (baby pictures, favorite movies, Farm-fucking-ville) vs. something more like viral graffiti (hashtags, retweets, “must-read”s). Yes, I am aware of the narcissism involved in the amassing of “followers.” I’m also aware that participating in the Twitterverse constitutes a crack in my Objectivity Wall. To wit:

I joined Twitter a day or two into the new year, which means 2010 really was distinct from 2009, as far as my media metabolism goes. I’d only been aboard about a week when the Winter Jazzfest rolled around, and I found myself experiencing the event on two separate but overlapping frequencies. At one point, overheated and sardine-packed in Le Poisson Rouge for a Vijay Iyer Trio set, I heard about someone passing out in the room. Unwisely, I fired off a tweet riffing on this info. (At that point, I’d seen the ambulance but heard that it wasn’t serious. I wasn’t on duty that night, and I’d also had a few pints of Dogfish Head *.) Guess what happened? Yep, a ripple of concern from multiple sources, including Iyer himself. Not a good look for a critic.

So yeah, there are perils to our new critical sub-function as real-time commentators. Don’t be stupid. Check yourself. There’s also, it should be said, a continuing reason why jazz still needs critics who put in the time and effort for reflection. (Preaching to the choir, right?) But hey, back to Twitter. Last night there was a steady flow of updates from Prince’s big show at the Izod Center in N.J. One dispatch in particular caught my eye: ?uestlove, drummer and musical director for the Roots, uploaded a pic of opening act Esperanza Spalding.

Which brings me to the issue of jazz and pop, which registered clearly for me this year. Spalding’s case is obvious, though no less remarkable for that. (She’s a star on the rise, and rising fast. How many of those has jazz produced recently?) Then there was her ex-boyfriend Christian Scott, whose considerable media savvy -- no less, perhaps, than his considerable chops -- landed him a DownBeat cover story by our own Jennifer Odell. (Over at JazzTimes, I weighed in too.) 

 

Say what you will of Scott’s whole vibe; here he is, above, exposing a network television audience to the genius of Jamire Williams. (For the record, I think Yesterday You Said Tomorrow was a flawed album but also a big leap forward, and a good sign of things to come.) 

Speaking of New Orleans exports: Jen, you brought up Treme, another huge part of my year in jazz, and another example of our music resonating in the popular sphere. Has there ever been a truer, more richly textured depiction of the jazz musician’s social reality? Has there ever been a better reason to raise a glass to the righteous existence of Tom McDermott, Rebirth and Kermit Ruffins? The show lost some narrative steam near season’s end, but not the music.  

While we’re talking about jazz thriving outside the usual places, can we get an amen for Ravi Coltrane onstage with his cousin, the cutting-edge producer/beatmeister Flying Lotus?

 

Lotus, a.k.a. Steven Ellison, made some of this year’s most head-spinning music, and jazz was fluttering in there somewhere. I’d like to think that Coltrane, who was smartly signed to Blue Note this year, might be working with Ellison even without the familial hookup. The other night, as I was reviewing a dance-pop band, my contact at Warp told me that a big New York date was in the works for next year. He also told me that they had their eye on the Village Vanguard. (!!!) I’m not holding my breath on that front, but the mere idea is something. 

David, I am 100% with you on the continuing need for a jazz canon, and the importance of planting a flag between polarized extremes. When my Top 10 lands, sometime within the next day or two, I’ll pick up that thread a bit. But I’ll close with two more examples of jazz-pop interaction this year. First up, Herbie Hancock’s Imagine, a top-heavy Rolodex album that strikes me as the limpest, least creative approach to jazz-pop exchange. (Nonetheless: three Grammy nominations! Ask me some other time about the Hancock Clause.)  

At the other end of the quality spectrum, for me at least, was the Maxwell tour, for which I’ve already aired my admiration here. This was one of my live shows of the year, hands-down, irrespective of genre -- and a big part of the reason had to do with Robert Glasper, Derrick Hodge and Chris Dave. Something tight is happening at the margins of jazz and R&B. Just ask the diehard Prince fans who heard Esperanza last night. Now, what does that mean for jazz, beyond the audience-bait factor? Dunno yet, but I’m paying close attention. 

Wow, have I filibustered? I relinquish my soapbox and open the floor. Have at it, gang!

* The names of some beers have been changed to protect the gag premise.

Notes From the Woodshed

Part Five of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: David Adler

Dear Nate, Chris, Shaun and Jen,

Greetings, and what a pleasure to join you!

I’m finishing up a very atypical year -- yesterday marked the end of my first semester teaching jazz history at Queens College. Rewarding but stressful -- I need to sit down with a six-pack of that Dogfish Head. (Figured I’d get it out of the way.)

To answer the old question -- “Have you been living under a rock?” -- I have to say yes, partly. Just counted up my live show intake, and seems in the midst of juggling coursework and my one-year-old daughter, I was out hearing music 52 nights in 2010 -- down from a peak some years ago of well over 200 (and I’m sure Bill Bragin puts even my peak completely to shame).

Highlights? Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion gig at Town Hall, Lee Konitz/Dan Tepfer at Kitano, Fred Hersch/Nancy King at Jazz Standard (at right), Anthony Wilson’s furiously smoking nonet at Smalls.

Mostly, though, I was woodshedding prewar jazz. Anyone want to talk about John Nesbitt’s radical 1928 arrangements for McKinney’s Cotton Pickers? Seriously, heed Gunther Schuller’s advice in The Swing Era and check that shit out (“Put It There,” “Crying and Sighing,” “Stop Kidding”). I’m on a wild tangent but there’s a point: Nesbitt (pictured below, seated far left) was arguably a half-century or more ahead of his time, and yet he is completely, utterly forgotten. It got me thinking anew about canon formation, about winners and losers in the critical sweepstakes.

I did still manage to keep up on current listening -- my picks of the year are here, though I regret not giving list-props to Dan Weiss’s Timshel, the Claudia Quintet’s Royal Toast, Frank Kimbrough’s Rumors, certainly Fred Hersch’s Whirl and plenty others. And since Chris heaped well-deserved praise on the Bad Plus, and we all seem to agree 2010 was the year of the piano, shall I mention Indelicate, Dave King’s one-man piano/drums project? An item I’m itching to revisit.

Esperanza’s Grammy nod, anyone? I think it’s huge, but I also think Chamber Music Society was a misfire. Kind of like, ahem, Highway Rider.

We’ve been batting around the idea of non-linearity and jazz, of the lack of clear narratives for the music in 2010. Jen pushed back against that, so I’ll continue pushing, in less specific terms.

I’m a big no-boundaries proponent, as much as anyone. But back to the teaching thing: I’ve always believed in some notion of canonicity in jazz, and after this year I believe in it more. The argument that jazz students are too wrapped up in the tradition -- maybe it was once true, but today I think it’s poppycock. More of them are palpably, howlingly disconnected from the tradition.

Shaun, you mentioned Jason Marsalis’s salvo in support of the canon, so I thought I’d quote Wynton on the “what is jazz” issue in 1994: “Because no single criterion applies doesn’t mean that no criterion applies.” That’s the kind of statement we wave away at our peril. (Oh, check out Wynton’s new and compelling Vitoria Suite, btw).

Which brings me to the Crouch/Mtume fight over electric Miles, cited by more than one of you. I don’t share Crouch’s view at all, and yet I found myself disagreeing just as much with the pompous Mtume. “Allow me the latitude of completion,” Mtume admonished Crouch, and yet the editor of this video allowed no such latitude to Crouch, whose responses were deliberately truncated while Mtume’s went on at length. And yet the video caption tells us that Mtume “destroys” Crouch. Uh-huh. In the age of new media, intellectual honesty still applies. We have to insist on it.

Mtume also erred when he stated that Miles, in turning to electric instruments, felt there was nothing left to be said on a saxophone. Miles continued employing saxophonists until the end.

 

As a teenager first coming into jazz I felt this, and I still feel it today: There’s no need to choose. You can find a place in between the stark partisanship of a James Mtume and a Stanley Crouch, and you can stand there firmly.

Who better to illustrate this than Ethan Iverson? In mid-October I had Ethan visit my class to talk about boogie-woogie, Count Basie and Lester Young (bouncing off his mammoth Lester centennial blog series). After demonstrating the finer points of boogie-woogie bass lines on piano, he dissected Basie’s “Jumpin’ at the Woodside” and “Swingin’ the Blues.” To close, Ethan sang Pres’s classic “Lady Be Good” solo, but he didn’t just sing it -- he acted it out, like a piece of dialogue in a play.

Allow me the latitude of gushing: It was awesome. And it showed my students -- I hope -- that there’s no conflict between being a cutting-edge pianist and composer and a passionate student of the 1930s. The one feeds the other.

Prompted by Nate, I’ll close with a shout-out to my home during 2007-2008: the fine and underrated city of Philadelphia. Here’s to 10 years of Mark Christman’s Ars Nova Workshop. And here’s to the memory of Sid Simmons, who shouldn’t have been reduced to playing that hideous piano at the now-defunct Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus. Shaun, I miss you all down there. Hopefully this spring I’ll have more time to hop down the Turnpike.

That’s Round One. Back to you, General Nate.

- David

A Locavore Aesthetic

Part Four of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )

From: Jennifer Odell

Hi guys,

Wow, it’s pretty cool when writers agree on something, whether it’s that this was the year of the pianist or that naming a beer after a Miles Davis record is the jazz version of Katy Perry selling music to tweens by wearing nothing but candy. But since we seem to have a consensus on Ten and Dirty Baby, I’d like to swing the conversation in a somewhat different direction.

I actually do see a narrative thread in the story of jazz in 2010. In the Mtume-Crouch video, Mtume says that fusion was Miles’ way of battling “technical exhaustion.” In some ways, 2010 was a year when the jazz industry acknowledged its own technical exhaustion and tried new things: from Orrin Evans’ jam sessions in Philly to broader booking habits by George Wein, to New Orleans music finding a platform for promotion on TV. In each case, the common denominator was a locavore aesthetic.

2010 began with Wein boasting online about how he was hanging out late at night in Williamsburg, trying to get a handle on Brooklyn’s music scene so that his reincarnated CareFusion festivals would be more accessible to a younger demographic.

Sure, Wein was “discovering” acts like Brooklyn’s Mostly Other People Do the Killing, which topped critics’ best new artists lists back in 2008. And yes, MOPDTK got an early New York CareFusion slot that coincided with the NBA playoffs, while Herbie and Wayne headlined at Carnegie. But I’d argue that Wein’s overall interest in representing local music, offering it for lower ticket prices and collaborating with Brice Rosenbloom, the Jazz Gallery and Revive Da Live still signaled a change from the norm. 

On the label side, this year’s buzz was focused more around Clean Feed than Blue Note and Verve. You even got the sense that Brad Mehldau’s output smacked too much of  the establishment for some critics. The author of a post exemplifying the Mehldau backlash Chris referenced felt that Bill McHenry and Trombone Shorty, both of whose followings used to be pretty localized to New York and New Orleans, respectively, delivered better albums than Highway Rider this year.  Just like what’s happening in restaurants (has anyone visited Portland, OR lately?) we’re seeing a shift to the more nationalized celebration of what’s happening on local levels. 

Shaun, I’m willing to bet this can be traced in part to the explosion of Facebook and Twitter, which has made geography less of an issue than ever before. (For the record, I haven’t logged into my Twitter account in a year or two, but probably will re-up the account now because this conversation’s made me curious.) If there was an ethical quandary two years ago about having artists you might review as Facebook friends, that issue was diluted in 2010 by sheer numbers. George Porter and I are online buddies but the “likes” I send his way gets lost in the massive fold of his ever-rising number of “friends.” (I’m skipping over a response to the Bad Plus dialogue because Ethan Iverson and Reid Anderson are, unlike Porter, real-life friends.)

Another artist whose local following grew a little more national this year was Mary Halvorson, whose graceful nods to pop and rock earned Saturn Sings top billing on Shaun’s Top 10. I’d also put some of the year’s most head-turning sax players in that category: John Ellis, JD Allen, Andrew D’Angelo and Tony Malaby. 

There was also Chris Lightcap’s addictively gorgeous Clean Feed release, Deluxe, which year-end critical praise hopefully brought another wave of attention to the New York scene staples in its lineup. Finally, it can’t be a coincidence that all of these artists gave top-notch performances at the new Undead Jazzfest, produced by boomBOOM Presents and Search and Restore. 

Robert Wright for The New York Times

Which brings us to December, when the big underdog story was Adam Schatz’s successful push to raise $75,000 for Search and Restore to expand the jazz audience and, specifically, to get younger listeners involved. The fact that Schatz on one end of the spectrum and Wein on the other, share the goal of bringing jazz to a younger, more localized crowd tells me this is a mobilized effort. 

2010 was also a huge year for the New Orleans music scene. John Ellis’ Puppet Mischief was a creepy, groove-infused yet cerebral experiment in sonic joy, which I’d rank high in my picks of the year. By the spring, a former child prodigy from the Crescent City named Troy Andrews debuted his Backatown release at the top of Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz charts, where it stayed for nine weeks (it’s been in the Top 10 for 27).

Troy probably had some help in the sales department from his recurring role as himself on HBO’s Treme, which also debuted in 2010 and turned out to be like “American Bandstand” for the New Orleans music scene.

 National audiences never sang the lyrics to John Boutte’s songs the way they did this year when Big Easy bands regularly broke into renditions of the HBO show’s theme song at shows across the country. Donald Harrison, Davis Rogan, Kermit Ruffins and his drummer Derek Freedman (also a bandleader in his own right), Terence Blanchard and John Cleary also made appearances on the show. Depending on when season two wrapped shooting, I’d be willing to bet there will be scenes involving jazz funerals for a great jazz photographer and a legendary member of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

As for where a modern day Miles cameo might turn up, let’s not rule out the silver or small screens -- the guy was in Scrooged, after all. I like to think that in a year when even the industry bigwigs were trying to get down with the underground, Miles would have rejected a major label offer from Kanye so he could sit in with Trombone Shorty’s band on Treme. And with that weird visual... I hand the baton to David.