THE GIG

Old Wood

Billy Hart Quartet

"All Our Reasons" (ECM)

Doing the Math

Mylan Cannon/The New York Times

Roy Hargrove Quintet / The Badwagon

Prospect Park Bandshell, June 24

Ted and the Tristano School

Whither Ted Brown? The answer to that question can be found in my feature in Arts & Leisure this weekend, which uses Brown’s return -- at the Kitano Hotel this Wednesday, in case you didn’t know -- as an excuse to reflect on the growing influence of the Tristano School. 

I suspect hardcore Tristano fans will find plenty of fault with the piece, which takes a rudimentary approach to a fairly complex set of issues. This was the necessary tradeoff for a general-interest readership, though I do worry about one thing: I hope my characterization of Tristano’s music doesn’t make it seem like rhythm itself was M.I.A.

Anyone who has attempted to transcribe these tunes can attest to the subdivisions and superimpositions that Tristano could inflict on a 4/4 bar; that’s one reason for Larry Kart’s assertion, in The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Wayne Marsh, that “Rhythm is the paramount issue in Tristano-related music.”

Still it’s demonstrably true that Tristano subordinated the bassist and drummer in most of his available music, at a time when the rhythm section was king. (Here is where I steer you to Ethan Iverson’s post on Tristano; scroll down, if you must, to the sections on drummers and bassists.) What interested me here was the thought that improvisers now in their 20s and 30s are willing to look past the non-dynamic rhythm sections and embrace Tristano’s music for its considerable strengths. If anyone is responsible for this, it’s Mark Turner.

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

Backlash to the Backlash

Part Two 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: Chris Barton

Dear Shaun, Jen, David and Nate:

 Greetings and happy year-end to you all -- and we’re off and running, I’ll do my best to keep the torch upright.

First off, thank you for putting that Mtume v. Stanley Crouch face-off in your kick-starter post, Nate. I saw that video make the rounds awhile back, but never made time to watch. For what it’s worth, I had to take a second to make sure this was a new flare-up and not something that had surfaced recently from some roundtable years ago when that argument seemed to peak, like some long-lost outtake from an old album. Needless to say, this argument about Bitches Brew and acoustic music and what makes jazz *jazz* and all that blah blah is still raging somewhere just makes my teeth ache.

But that aside -- and may such border-wars fall quiet in 2011, if that’s possible (is it?) -- I want to follow your lead about two of the pianists you mentioned in Mehldau and Iverson (and I completely agree about this being a great year for pianists -- Aaron Goldberg’s another that turned my head nicely). Being at a paper that adheres to the ‘star system’ with album-rating, I hung a four-out-of-four on Highway Rider, something I’ll stand by even after listening all year. It was the sort of record that once I heard it I wanted to pass around to so many people I knew, and that’s even before seeing what happens with it live next month.

Interestingly, however, in the fractious Internet/social-media/insta-react-o-tron space your mentioned, a backlash hit that album fast, with a vigor that reminded me of the one that fell all over Franzen’s Freedom, another one that earned so much early praise. On one hand that seems to be some branch of human (or at least critic-human) nature, to throw up a ‘hold on a second’ when rave reviews start piling up, but on the other I wonder if Highway Rider took some heat for not sounding like either Largo or how anyone supposed it should have -- as if it was a sort of classical-inclined Bitches Brew, if I may strangle the transition. Or maybe since Mehldau gets slapped with some kind of pretentiousness badge here and there people react against that too. Then again, maybe some people simply thought it stunk and whattayagonnado. Still, it was interesting how heated the response to that became.

As for Iverson, and maybe this is simply the difference in being on the West Coast, but along the lines of the ‘mainstream conversation’ you mentioned it strikes me how little (present company excepted) the Bad Plus gets talked about anymore. Maybe after 10 years they’re just “that trio that does wacky stuff with the ‘120 Minutes’ songbook,” which would be a shame because I’m right there with you, Never Stop was their strongest record yet. Maybe there’s something in the ever-fractured promotion machine of 2010 that’s not serving them right, or maybe it’s a byproduct of not fitting into one category or another (whatever he might think of their songs, surely ‘Brother Stanley’ above would approve of how many things they plug in every night). It’s probably the sort of ‘what if’ talk that might be better left in our few remaining record store stockrooms, but I wonder what would happen with those guys if they landed an opening slot with like the Black Keys or something, where would the public consciousness go from there? Could that kind of bill-mixing even happen at this point? I’m guessing If anyone could or would even want to do something like that it would be Kanye, which might cause the internet to collapse.

(One more thing: after seeing the Bad Plus again in a tiny club in West LA last week, I hope New York at least had some period in the last 10 years where ‘Dave King is God’ was tagged on subway platforms across the city. Too far-fetched?)

Speaking of virtuosi, that brings us to Nels, someone else who enjoyed a 10-year-anniversary with the Singers’ Initiate (maybe there’s some kind of ‘the year of the 10 year’ list that should come together). On top of that record’s madcap dip into ‘70s fusion in its own right, yes, Dirty Baby was really something. Though its message got a little heavy handed in spots, musically it was remarkable seeing all the moving parts all come together, something that didn’t happen so easily for me on paper.  So, I’d say about a level 8 out of 10 kicking yourself, if there was a possibility of catching it, though I’m betting we’ll hear echoes of Dirty Baby in where Cline goes from here.

One surprise late this year is how that show set the table nicely for Cline’s appearance at an Alice Coltrane tribute months later, one that surprised me by not being a showcase for a galaxy of effects and sonic splatter-art (which, to be clear, I completely love) and instead again going someplace further inward that was more composed and orchestrated. I don’t know where iPhone Nation was during Cline and his crew’s cover of Charlie Haden that night, but I’ll settle for the Singers’ (w/ Yuka Honda) doing a Tiny Desk concert for NPR by way of example:

   Having said that, most of you all may now tell me the 10-out-of-10 level kicking myself I should be embarking on for not seeing that Undead Fest, to say nothing for just about any given night at Ars Nova. I hope someone somewhere is working on an effective way to fold the country in half.

And did anyone try Dogfish’s ‘Bitches Brew’? Will they make more or will I have to wait 40 years until it’s remixed and reissued?

-chris

Year-Ender: All of the Above

Part One 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

Joe Kohen for The New York Times

Dear Chris, Shaun, Jen and David,

Well, here we are, closing the lid on another year in jazz, and I can’t decide what narrative to impose. Was this a time of mortal reflection, with the departures of Hank Jones, Abbey Lincoln and James Moody, among so many others? Or a season of triumph, as we observed the endless vitality of Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Roy Haynes? Was this the year that proved, with a horde of hard-charging younger talent, that jazz is -- in the words of a certain upstart summer festival -- not dead, but Undead? Or was it just another 12 months of hustling, out in the clubs and concert halls, and in the cloistered spaces where we do our solitary listening? Maybe Option E, for all of the above?

Whatever it was, we tracked and chronicled this year in real time (or, as our social-media metabolism might have it, hyper-real time), and I’m wondering how it looks to you now, with a wisp of hindsight. So to keep up a tradition of sorts at The Gig, I’ve asked you all to engage in a bit of year-end banter. Thanks for joining me -- this should be fun.

At this point you’ve probably sent in your ballots and compiled your lists, and it’ll be fascinating (to some of us, at least) to see where consensus forms. My Top 10 will be posted later this week, so for now I’m going to change the subject slightly. I recently appeared on BBC radio to air my conviction that pianists came out in full force this year. It would have been startlingly easy for me to construct a Top 10 of just pianistic efforts. Others might do the same for guitarists, or drummers. 

But consider: Geri Allen, Vijay Iyer, Benôit Delbecq and Matthew Shipp each released a provocative solo disc. Keith Jarrett took the duo route. For trios, try Fred Hersch, Dan Tepfer, Frank Kimbrough, Delbecq again, Kris Davis, Russ Lossing, etc. Larger concepts? Try Myra Melford, Randy Weston, Danilo Pérez, Brad Mehldau. And then there were Jason Moran and Ethan Iverson, each with a band commemorating a decade of strong, unmistakable work.  

About that commemoration: we like anniversaries and round numbers. It’s a way of organizing time, reselling material and sifting winners out of the historical mess. (We jazzbos are not alone in this.)

There was nothing perfunctory or contrived, though, about Ten, the album released this year by Moran’s Bandwagon, or Never Stop, the one put out by Iverson with the Bad Plus (above). In both cases you heard the cumulative weight and wisdom of the last 10 years, and a clear sense of intelligent artists taking the measure of their art. 

A similar sense of purpose lit up several other commemorative moments this year. (I refer you to the aforementioned Rollins and Haynes.) Shaun and David, I’m sure you both paid close attention to the 10th anniversary of Ars Nova Workshop, the nonprofit Philadelphia presenting organization run by my friend Mark Christman. (More on that in a future post, perhaps.) We commemorate because we care.

And, in some rare cases, because we can make a lot of money. (I’m using the Royal We, in case there was any doubt.) Remember Bitches Brew? Perhaps you know that it turned 40 this year. Perhaps you noticed the all-out promotional push, the shiny new product, the unreleased live footage, the licensed Dogfish Head brew. I never said I was opposed to all of this, by the way.  

 

Why bring up Bitches Brew? I’ll blame Kanye West. (Stay with me here, people.) In the musical world beyond jazz, which most of us also cover in one form or another, this is shaping up to be Annus Kanyebilis, with his new-school media strategy a proven success and his recorded opus landing rave upon rave. No one in pop was more compelling to watch this year, whether you believed you were witnessing aesthetic genius or riveted by a car crash. At times West himself seems unsure about which is which; you all saw the Runaway movie, I presume.

     Thinking about how West conquered every room he entered this year, I drew the only parallel that seemed really apt: to post-Bitches Miles Davis, another frequently bedeviled African-American sound-sculptor drawn to aggressive reinvention, unbridled ego and rococo indulgence. This parallel doesn’t entirely flatter either artist.

But jazzfolk often complain about how their music gets left out of the mainstream conversation. Miles would have none of that, for better or for worse. If the timing had worked differently, I suspect he might have put in a cameo on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even if that title is more Mingus-esque in syntax and scope. Look at how much steam can still be generated by Bitches Brew, all these years later. That level of cultural cachet seems to be precisely what West is reaching for. 

Speaking of reaching, I believe this exhausts the air in the room, for now. I gladly pass the baton to Chris, out in Los Angeles. Take it in any direction you like, good sir, but just answer me this: was the Nels Cline Dirty Baby premiere as unmissable as it seemed? (Sub-question: how hard should I be kicking myself, still?)   cheers to all, Nate

People Like You

The Bad Plus

Bowery Ballroom, Sept. 15

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!

Let's Hear It For New York

Part Five 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: Ben Ratliff

 

Did someone before Andrey really demote New York as jazz capital of the world?   Who: the head of the NEA? The editor of Forbes? David Longstreth?

I get really excited too when I go to other cities and see a more nurturing and affordable system for musicians. Haven’t given up on New York yet, though. As a farm, it’s hopeless. As a market, it’s still pretty damn good.

I took a musician friend from Dublin to the Stone the other night to see Peter Evans’ new group (above) and she was stunned by the level of musicianship, the tenacity of everything, the brain-power on display to about 40 very quiet people. She was having what you could call a profound reaction. 

I myself had one at James P. Johnson subculture a few months ago at Smalls, the fundraiser for the headstone. Imagine, all these people in one small place, coming from completely different backgrounds and aesthetic universes, giving it up for a guy who died in 1955, and completely engaged in doing so. Nothing fake about it.

I don’t wish for more cool clubs in New York where 25-year-olds with money can feel at home. There’s no end to them here. Art-school bands are great, and supper-club bands are great, but there’s more to life. I wish for more places where three different generations can get together around music, and I wish for more music that can be gotten around by three different generations. Hold it: I’m not talking about an idea of “heritage” music, or conservatory music, or something mediated by NPR. For obvious reasons I think jazz, in the largest sense of the word, and in flavors that are yet to be discovered, is right for this void. 

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...