THE GIG

Some People...

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Sia, Oh Land

Webster Hall, July 28

Brandon Seabrook, Considered

The new column is all about banjo and guitar player Brandon Seabrook, who appears on one of this year’s most slyly inviting jazz albums, If the Past Seems So Bright, by Jeremy Udden’s Plainville. 

My piece doesn’t deal much with Plainville, focusing instead on Seabrook himself, and his approach to the banjo, and his demonic presence in Seabrook Power Plant, the band he formed with his brother, drummer Jared. Two years ago, sometime between their first album and their second, I reviewed the band in Brooklyn.

There’s a pull quote from my review at the band’s website, though it’s not the one that goes “...a manic clusterfuck of merciless banjo torture...” (That phrase comes from Christopher Weingarten’s blog post for the Village Voice. He’s not wrong, btw.) 

More on Frank Foster

Frank Foster died yesterday morning, in his sleep, at 82. I spent the afternoon working on the NY Times obituary, which hits major points of interest, starting with the obvious: his indispensable contribution to the Count Basie Orchestra, in its New Testament and legacy editions.

A handful of things had to be left out, including the kinship between Foster and his fellow arranger-bandleader and Basie alumnus Thad Jones. For space reasons, there also wasn’t anything about Foster’s time in Detroit, after college but before Basie. And I didn’t touch on a recent development regarding his publishing rights, which involves the filmmaker Brian Grady and a team of law students at Rutgers.

But after filing and editing the obituary, I saw that others had filled in some of those gaps, notably Felix Contreras and Patrick Jarenwattananon at NPR. Their coverage, on Morning Edition and A Blog Supreme, is heartfelt and thorough; Contreras in particular had written about Foster a number of times over the years.  

While we’re here: don’t sleep on Manhattan Fever, a fully realized album that holds up well, despite its Age of Aquarius undertones. Opening with a boogaloo called “Little Miss No Nose” — a song for his daughter, playing on a comment by Nancy Wilson — the album features a small-to-midsize group that often sounds bigger, thanks to Foster’s canny arranging. Hear it for that band sound, and for Mickey Roker’s drumming, and for the title track, which Foster proudly cited, decades later, as one of his most forward-thinking. 

Another plug: Foster’s work on ¡Viva! Vaughan, released in 1965. The album, which apparently languished in obscurity for years before its 2001 reissue on Verve, impeccably captures that era’s vision of urbane sophistication, with flute, trombones and percussion, and a bossa nova undertow. It features some primo Sarah, and some excellent pop-minded arrangements by Foster. (Its producer, Quincy Jones, may or may not have had some influence there.) It also features a slinky lite-mambo version of “Shiny Stockings,” with Ella Fitzgerald’s lyrics and Willie Bobo’s congas.

Finally, Foster’s 1998 interview (PDF) with William Brower, Jr., for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, is an engrossing read — not only for the road stories and reminiscences, but also for Foster’s thoughts on arranging, and on his own stylistic fluctuation. Here’s just one excerpt, obviously too inside-baseball for a mainstream readership, but probably, dear reader, just inside-baseball enough for you: 

As far as harmony and orchestration is concerned, I really wanted to go beyond Basie.  In the Basie format ninths, elevens and thirteenths, the extensions, are used quite a bit, especially in the modern era with Ernie Wilkins, Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, and Neil Hefti, but there were always for the most part conventional harmonic structural arrangements.  I wanted to get beyond that and deal with modes.  I became aware of modes about the time I was observing John Coltrane and his sheets of sound approach. I wanted to incorporate that sheets of sound format into my arranging and harmonizations.  Those sheets of sound that were referred to by critics or writers or whoever talked about that effect, consisted mostly of certain placements of notes that formed certain scales or modes from the bottom of the horn to the top of the horn and back down again.  I began incorporating these modal harmonizations into my writing, in that I wouldn’t just be 1-3-5-7-9 in my approach to harmony in building chords in thirds, in conventional thirds.  I started using more cluster writing, like 1-2-3-4-5. Instead of 1-3-5-7-9, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7.  I would have these very clashy kind of harmonies very often inserted into my arrangements.

P.S.-- on a wildly different note, a Foster-related observation that may remind you of Christmas in July: that Tony Bennett record is tops.

We Could Make Such Beautiful Music Together

Kenny Barron, Bruce Barth, Bill Charlap, Bill Mays

Jazz in July, 92nd Street Y, July 20

Knock Yourself Out

Happy Fry-Day, New York! And the same to all of you in other, equally overheated parts of this country. Let’s be safe out there. 

I should come right out and apologize for the in-absentia stature of this here blog. I’ve kept it updated with links to articles, but not as much original content as I’d like. Partly this is because the ground is pretty well covered these days, what with our town criers and our from-the-vaulters and of course, our insomniac scribes. Partly, too, it’s because I just don’t have the time, what with deadlines and an 8-month-old. (That’s an 8-month-old baby, not an 8-month-old deadline.)

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I do have some fodder for a post tangentially related to hotness and Fridays both. Shall we? 

Don't Lose Yourself

Playlist, July 17

Thomas Dybdahl, Eric Harland,

Terri Lyne Carrington, Erimaj, Ursa Minor

Canto / Griot

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Lionel Loueke Trio, Edmar Castaneda Trio

Madison Square Park, July 6

Gravity Point

Critics' Choice: New CDs

David Weiss & Point of Departure, "Snuck Out"

The Piano, at Night, with You

 

Lonely Voyage of Player, Piano and Audience

Arts & Leisure, July 3

(More on this topic here next week)