Chick Corea is going to be an easy man to find this month. He’s in residence at the Blue Note through Nov. 27, with a cavalcade of collaborators. (On Mondays he’ll rest, ceding the stage to some good jazz singers.) The booking seemed like a good excuse to reflect on Corea’s many-sided musical personality, which I did over here.
My personal history with Chick Corea’s music goes back almost as far as my active engagement with live jazz: as I’ve noted in JazzTimes and elsewhere, I had my head turned around by an Akoustic Band concert in 1990, in Honolulu. (An aside: pianist Robert Glasper once told me that the first jazz album he really paid attention to was Alive, the document taped during this tour. He had it on cassette.)
I’ve had occasion to see Corea many times since: in several different trios, and with Origin, Béla Fleck, Remembering Bud Powell and the Five Peace Band. (There are others I must be forgetting.) A few years ago I went to Austin to cover the Return to Forever reunion, observing rehearsals for a couple of days, taking in the big debut and then airing my thoughts, including some mild reservations.
Others have their own reservations about Corea -- I know of at least one prominent musician-blogger who decidely isn’t a fan -- and others still are hyper-specific about which iteration of the artist’s music they prefer.
Everybody digs Now He Sings. But there are those who get especially fired up by Crystal Silence or No Mystery or Three Quartets, and those who prefer the laser-etched contours of the Elektric Band.
I’m interested in this partisanship, which certainly exists with other jazz artists, but usually not in an accessible present tense. So lemme ask you, dear reader: which version of Chick works best for you, and why? What’s the album to beat? If you’re hitting the Blue Note this month, which night, or nights, will you be going? And if Chick is just not your guy, I want to hear from you, too. Have at it, below.
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.
I’m coming a bit late to this expansive
post on Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, sacred cows and polemical
critics at the Bad Plus blog, Do the Math. (Did I leave anything out? You bet I
did. Read the damn thing for yourself.) I feel as though I’ve done this a lot
already, but congratulations to Ethan Iverson for a piece that feels both
passionate (in its feeling) and dispassionate (in its fairness). It’s good criticism, made all the better by the open-forum
commentariat.
One undercurrent in the post -- about the deference shown to
Hancock and Shorter by critics, perhaps partly for fear of mass indignation -- rang
familiar, amusingly and scarily so. There isn’t a jazz critic working who hasn’t marveled
at the vitriol generated by Peter Watrous’s notorious
takedown of Shorter’s High Life. To adapt a
phrase from Iverson’s assessment, it was a drowning-kittens moment. (I agree,
by the way, that we need this kind of criticism even, or especially, when it
runs contrary to our own baseline judgments.)
