THE GIG

The Oughts, Meet the Dustbin

Part Six of a year-end email conversation with Andrey Henkin, Peter Margasak, Ben Ratliff and Hank Shteamer. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 )

From: Nate Chinen

 

Hey guys,

I was supposed to come up with the next link to this chain over the weekend, but snowfall and football turn out to be wicked procrastination-boosters. I do have some thoughts, though, beginning with this quotation:

“When you look at the history of jazz, everybody who made significant contributions to that music never really saw it as a kind of music. Anybody who can shed that preconception of what jazz is or is not, or should be or shouldn’t be, and can just approach it as human endeavor, I think will find something to resonate with here.” -- Vijay Iyer  (via EPK )

The polls and picks are mostly in, and it looks like Iyer just might have had the consensus choice for best jazz album of 2009. Ben, you had his Historicity as your top dog, irrespective of genre (more on that in a sec). A casual perusal of the 50 JazzTimes critics’ ballots shows that only one voter, editor-in-chief Lee Mergner, had it quite so high -- but also that it appears on 12 total ballots, the same tally as Joe Lovano’s Folk Art, which came in just ahead at #1. 

I’m no numbers-cruncher, so I won’t pursue that gauntlet further. But I’ll gladly pick up another one, the one Iyer throws down in his statement above. Throughout this roundtable so far, we’ve heralded artists who make their way without most of the old hang-ups, ducking the heavy drag of genre obligation. 

Reflecting on that fact this weekend, I got to thinking about this first decade of the new century, and what it has meant for jazz, in some loose sense. Others have done this recently, including my man David Adler, who provides a kind of personal tour on his blog. Over at the Slate Music Club, my model for this email exchange, there was a subplot concerning the best handle for the 2000s, which has been known in some starchy circles as “the Aughts.” Carl Wilson kicked around a few ideas, settling on “the Singles” -- part nod to “Single Ladies,” part acknowledgment of the iTunes-abetted devaluation of the album. But since that trend doesn’t really apply to jazz, here’s another possible option: “the Oughts.” (Indulge me here for a minute, guys.)

 Remember how this decade began? So much agita over definitions! On the one hand we had imposing cultural arbiters (right) telling us what jazz ought to be: blues-based, swinging, firmly rooted in the African-American idiom. On the other hand, there was the countervailing response, which spoke to a Balkanization of jazz, literally and figuratively (cf., the Knitting Factory). At that end of the spectrum, the thinking was that jazz ought to be open-ended and exploratory, not so serious all the time. (Maybe their version was the Naughts, or the Nots.) Of course this is a wildly reductive take on the “jazz wars,” itself a wildly reductive term. 

The point is that we can now survey the Oughts in terms of a cycle of action and reaction. For much of the last decade, jazz was a pendular protectorate, swinging (or not) back and forth between entrenchments, toward some contested new center of truth. Look at Historicity -- or, for that matter, at Folk Art, which resides so comfortably in today’s modern mainstream only because that center has shifted. (Whether we can all admit it is another story.)

I’m not saying that Lovano is inventing a new syntax, or even that Folk Art is more “adventurous” somehow than, say, Congo Square. (We could play this game all day.) But I am indeed arguing that the “preconception of what jazz is or is not, or should be or shouldn’t be,” to borrow Iyer’s formulation, has buckled enough to allow for a wealth of new shoots coming up through the cracks. And there’s no zero-sum game anymore: you can dig Håkon Kornstad and Joe Lovano, the Bad Plus and James P. Johnson, Wynton and Dave. 

If I had to designate a jazz artist of the decade, it would probably be pianist Jason Moran, who has gone out of his way, again and again, to deal with jazz tradition in an honest and personal way. (No accident that Moran is the present-day artist who closes Jazz, the new Giddins-DeVeaux book. Marsalis held down that spot in Jazz, the Ken Burns film and ultimate Oughts artifact.)

There’s one more thing to be said about Moran and Iyer -- and Iverson, whom we’ve also invoked, and Darcy James Argue, whom I can’t believe we haven’t. Each of these musicians has taken it upon himself to articulate his own ideas: about his music, about his influences, and about much more besides. Hank, you shouted out Iverson’s interviews at Do The Math; I’m guessing you’ve already seen his latest bit of jazz criticism too? And has everybody read Iyer on Monk (and physics!), Steve Lehman on spectral music, and Argue, just today, on Bob Brookmeyer? Hard to keep up with it all, right? And just think, we haven’t even gotten to Wynton’s Facebook notes. Has there ever been more transparency, more dialogue, more open-source debate, in all of jazz history? 

I’ll end with a photo: the Vijay Iyer Trio backstage at Newport this summer, with drummer Billy Hart and WBGO producer-host Josh Jackson. What’s good about jazz in 2009? You’re looking at it. One facet of it, anyway.

 

That’s it for my hand in the roundtable, fellas. I’ll pass the aforementioned gauntlet your way, keeping in mind that the holidays loom. Farewell to the Oughts and all that; Hello to whatever’s rounding that corner!

Midwest Represent: Scrambling Purity, Fiercely Independent

Part Three of a year-end email conversation with Andrey Henkin, Peter Margasak, Ben Ratliff and Hank Shteamer. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 )

 

From: Peter Margasak

 

 

Dear Nate, Ben, Andrey and Hank,

I’ll echo Hank’s delight in engaging in this exchange. Turning back to Nate’s question about Esperanza and Babs... only the former strikes me as truly noteworthy, but I’m disappointed that Obama keeps inviting back the same musician. It’s exciting to see jazz get such a platform, but there are plenty of other worthy (dare I say, far more interesting) folks that should get the call from here on out.

I’m happy that the Lewis went into paperback this year, further extending its impact. As the sole participant here that doesn’t live in New York, I’m always happy to see Chicago get some props, even if Lewis and Threadgill haven’t lived here in decades; the city’s fiercely independent spirit lives on, certainly through the music of Lehman and Iyer (who, along with Threadgill, all landed in my top five albums). While big name organizations in Chicago, from the city-sponsored Jazz Festival to Symphony Center, draw the local media attention, what really matters in this city is increasingly the responsibility of musicians. All but one of the presenters behind Umbrella Music -- a loose constellation of three strong weekly series -- is a musician, and this year they curated their best festival yet, and probably the most exciting week in the city’s adventurous music calendar. These guys know that no one is going to give them anything for nothing, so they tend the garden themselves, and it’s been paying off.  

   It’s also nice to see some of the best groups from Chicago -- Josh Berman’s Old Idea, Jason Adasiewicz’s Rolldown, James Falzone’s Klang, Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things -- getting noticed by New Yorkers. I’m still thrilled and mildly shocked that Ken Vandermark (right) played some gigs in a quartet with Eric Revis, Jason Moran, and Nasheet Waits a few months back.

I suppose related to the early achievements of the AACM is the continued scrambling and/or disregard to any kind of purity, whether it’s a drummer like Tyshawn Sorey writing post-Feldman guitar music or the wonderfully bizarre amalgam of heavy metal, cracked bluegrass, and shambling funk by the Seabrook Power Plant. Maybe this is an irrelevant point as the present decade comes to its conclusion, but I’m consistently encouraged and excited as the flung open doors are torn off their hinges and the openings keep widening. Why the hell not? The problem with this reality in our profession (knock on wood that I can keep calling it that) is that more and more music falls off the “jazz” map, meaning that the radars of so many writers only go so far -- present company excluded, natch -- so that lots of the most interesting stuff, especially if it’s produced outside of New York, is largely invisible. Most jazz from outside of the US suffers the same problem -- if we don’t hear great music from Germany (Die Enttäuschung, pictured below; Christian Lillinger), Sweden (Jonas Kullhammar, Alberto Pinton) or Japan (Akira Sakata, Otomo Yoshihide) does that mean it doesn’t exist? And that’s always the rub about year-end considerations -- I mostly get frustrated about the music I still haven’t heard rather than rating the records I have.

 

 

So many records, so many shows, so many musicians. Although I don’t want to reopen the Terry Teachout jazz is dead can o’ worms, I’ve never seen such a crushing deluge of new music. Yes, much of it is boilerplate, but there are still countless musicians really pushing. I’m still lucky enough to able to buy records at real record stores (Jazz Record Mart, Dusty Groove), but I can’t deny that I’ve taken advantage of downloading to further add to the pile of music. I’ve spent more and more time thinking, “Where do I draw the line?” I take a certain pride in trying to be comprehensive, but it’s getting harder.

I’m not sure if Nate was referring to me when he mentioned Norwegian jazz, but I’ll take the bait. I too love the duo of Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, but they’ve yet to perform out here. But I also dig Kornstad’s recent solo sax album Dwell Time, and he seems to be getting better at developing an original language through simple looping effects. I had the chance to hear him do the same thing in a gorgeous duet with singer Sidsel Endresen -- a one-time ECM folk-jazz singer who’s experiencing a mid-life radicalism, unleashing incredible, all-improvised vocal performances, both solo and with this saxophonist -- that defied categorization, a quality that so much of the best Norwegian stuff exhibits. Atomic didn’t release a record, but its powerhouse drummer Paal Nilssen-Love blew my mind in a trio called OffOnOff with electric guitarist Terri Ex (of the Ex) and bassist Massimo Pupillo (of Zu) that turned churning free improv/noise and gut-punching grooves into the most physical, fantastically brutal concert I saw all year. They have two good records, but they’re impotent next to the live experience.

I feel like I’m rambling a little, which is an indirect way of writing that I didn’t observe any clear consensus or dominant thread over the last year. I also feel like so much of my favorite music is increasingly genre-averse. I mean, I like and appreciate Eric Alexander as much as the next person, but I get more excited by head scratchers like the Tyondai Braxton solo record, the electro-acoustic improv web that David Sylvian croons through on Manafon, or Vijay Iyer reshaping “Galang,” as shown here:

It may not all be strictly jazz, but it all evolves from a kindred spirit of experimentation, individual voices, and curiosity that’s always characterized much of the best jazz, and lots of musicians seem increasingly fluid in their collaborations and interactions.

Supergroup Outbreak, But No Generation Gap

Part Two of a year-end email conversation with Andrey Henkin, Peter Margasak, Ben Ratliff and Hank Shteamer. (Jump: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 )

From: Hank Shteamer

 

Dear Nate, Peter, Andrey and Ben,

Very nice to have the opportunity to e-dialogue with you all. If you’ll pardon me, I’ll begin by stepping away from jazz for a quick sec...

One of the big stories in rock this year was the supergroup outbreak. The oft-ridiculed trend yielded cheesy one-offs like Sammy Hagar’s Chickenfoot, but it also gave rise to at least one great album, the self-titled Interscope debut by Them Crooked Vultures, which brought together Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme and Nirvana’s former drum basher Dave Grohl with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. It was great to see these players decimating the generation gap so successfully, and it’s worth noting that similar collaborations have been brewing in the jazz world.

 Take 31-year-old saxist Darius Jones (left), who tapped two under-appreciated veterans -- pianist and diddley-bo expert Cooper-Moore (63), and drummer Rakalam Bob Moses (61) -- for his powerful debut, Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing), a gutsy, blues-infused free-jazz session that came in at No. 5 on my year-end list. Cooper-Moore and Moses each have lengthy résumés to draw on, but Jones isn’t interested in nostalgic references. Like Them Crooked Vultures, Man’ish Boy sounds vigorous and inventive, with the younger player lighting a fire under his elders and vice versa.

Ethan Iverson, pianist in the Bad Plus, was another player who pursued intergenerational collaboration in 2009. For a few years now, Iverson has made a habit of interviewing elder musicians on his blog and then engaging them on the bandstand. This two-pronged approach obviously has a self-promotional angle - “You’ve read the interview, now see the show” - but it works beautifully nevertheless. 

Iverson’s lengthy chat with Tim Berne, posted in late June, felt like the perfect preamble to their duet gig at the Stone later the same week, with each encounter providing a different window into these artists’ strange yet fruitful rapport. This year, Iverson also anchored a band led by drummer Billy Hart, another artist he’d previously interviewed. A September gig by this quartet was for me one of the year’s true highlights; it struck the perfect balance between classy and challenging. And the pianist isn’t done yet: This coming weekend he stops by Iridium with a quintet featuring two other veterans with whom he’s published Q&As, saxist Lee Konitz and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath.

A few other strong 2009 releases demonstrated the flip side of the coin, namely an older artist drawing on the vitality and enthusiasm of considerably younger players. Henry Threadgill’s This Brings Us To, Volume 1, cited as a year-end favorite by myself as well as Nate, found the composer riding the exquisitely open-ended grooves of drummer Eliot Humberto Kavee, while Borah Bergman’s gorgeously minimal Luminescence featured the airy lift of bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

Of course there were tons of great releases that didn’t fit this template. My three favorite jazz discs of the year -- Ran Blake’s Driftwoods, Chad Taylor’s Circle Down, and Jon Irabagon and Mike Pride’s I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues -- were the products of, respectively, a 74-year-old loner, a trio of midcareer inside-outside specialists and a pair of ultraversatile young mavericks. Elsewhere, I was happy to hear strong compositional visions shining through, in ensembles big (Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Warren Smith’s Composer’s Workshop Ensemble), small (Linda Oh Trio -- a band to which Ben tipped me off -- Loren Stillman, Seabrook Power Plant) and somewhere in between (Steve Lehman Octet, John Hébert’s Byzantine Monkey, Bill Dixon).

 

In the live arena, duos captured my imagination. The pairings of Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, (above, and heard at Monkey Town in April -- I know Andrey and Nate dug this gig as well), and Bill McHenry and Ben Monder (at Cornelia St. Café in September) each tapped into a special kind of meditative poetry. (To be fair, Connie Crothers’s quartet and a Joe McPhee solo set took me to a similar state of grace.)

The coming year promises more duo delights, namely the mindblowingly weird tandem of guitarist Steeve Hurdle (formerly of Candian prog-metal heavyweights Gorguts) and pianist Craig Taborn (Tim Berne, The Gang Font, James Carter, etc.), playing the Stone February 13. And for now, back to Robin D.G. Kelley’s fantastic Monk bio...

A Gate-Crashing Year

Part One of a year-end email conversation with Andrey Henkin, Peter Margasak, Ben Ratliff and Hank Shteamer. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7| 8 )

From: Nate Chinen

 

Dear Andrey, Ben, Hank and Peter, 

Thanks for taking time out of your perennial list-making to kick around a few ideas about the year in jazz. (I’m not going to capitalize that phrase.) I’ve always been a big fan of the Slate Music Club, as spearheaded by Jody Rosen, and after complaining for some time about the absence of a jazz equivalent, I thought it would be fun and fitting to cobble one together. Just one thing, guys: this is a No Lady GaGa Zone. Unless you also mention Sun Ra. 

Thus stipulated, I’ll open with a rhetorical question. Which did you expect to see first in this lifetime: Barbra Streisand at the Village Vanguard, or Esperanza Spalding at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony? Somehow we got both this year, and I’m not sure which event had the tougher guest list. At the Vanguard, Streisand made a nervous quip about the tight dimensions of the stage. In Oslo, our 44th President made a (nervous?) comment about being “at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.” Can’t help but wonder whether Spalding felt a twinge of recognition there. Also, can’t help but share this, courtesy of Jimmy Kimmel Live:

 

Tabloid angle aside, this was a gate-crashing year, whether we’re talking about the White House, where Spalding has appeared at least twice, or the House of Swing, where I witnessed several thunderous ovations for the eminent Ornette Coleman, a once-unthinkable season opener for Jazz at Lincoln Center. (It was his first-ever JALC concert, a so-what fact except that it seemed to mean something to all parties involved.) And up in Newport, George Wein effectively crashed his own festival, or at least that’s how it felt.

This was also the year that George Lewis, from his perch in the music department at Columbia University, finally published A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, a book about the challenges to convention made by a highly individualized collective. (Or maybe that should be “highly collectivized individuals” -- past a certain point, the distinction blurs.)

My two top jazz releases happened to be by Steve Lehman, an occasional teaching assistant to Lewis, and alto/flutist Henry Threadgill, a member of the AACM’s first wave. Coming in at a close third was Vijay Iyer, who could safely be pegged as part of the association’s extended family. (And I know that as regards admiration for Iyer’s record, I’m not the only one here.)

Maybe I’m just thinking about institutions and incursions because of another big piece of reading: Last week I popped into the Strand and bought Pops, Terry Teachout’s long-awaited Louis Armstrong biography. Really good so far, as expected, but I find it striking that Page 1 presents a survey of New York’s changing “cultural map” in 1956, vis-à-vis high-art complexes like the Guggenheim and Lincoln Center. It’s a strange way to begin a Satchmo book, except as a form of orientation: Teachout really knows that landscape, and he understands the tensions inherent in Armstrong’s presence there. 

 

 

Speaking of important jazz books and once-inscrutable jazz heroes, you could argue that the year began and ended with revisionist Monk. Back in February we all braced ourselves for Jason Moran’s In My Mind, a conceptual gamble that turned out to be soulful as well as smart. Moran gave us a Monk of lucid ambition and shrewd humor and tangible Southern roots -- a humane vision of the man that Robin Kelley has now articulated even more clearly.

What else? Ben, as you’ve noted, there was also something in the water this year that gave us one outstanding saxophone trio record after another. Marcus Strickland and J.D. Allen both found admirable focus in the format (though on further reflection, Allen’s entry was the sequel to an analogous 2008 release). I reviewed both Allen and Strickland live, and damned if I know which show wins. I do know that another tenor trio, FLY, which earned a spot in my Top 5 album berth, practically levitated at the Jazz Standard during an April stand. (That set made yet another list of mine: Top 10 gigs, for JazzTimes.)

I haven’t mentioned jazz’s incipient rhythm revolution, or the crumbling media infrastructure (and attendant blog awakening), or the postmillennial big band renaissance, or the great jazz audience debate. I haven’t mentioned any Norwegians. But take this in whatever direction you like, guys. No one will be calling the Jazz Police (not literally, in any case).