THE GIG

Award Tour: Jazz Edition

 The 14th annual JJA Jazz Awards threw down yesterday at City Winery, with the standard dosage of pomp and circumstance (a light dosage, really, as these things go). I’m going to break with custom and go straight to the journalist winners: Don Heckman for Lifetime Achievement in Jazz Journalism; prior Lifetime Achievement winner Dan Morgenstern, for Best Liner Notes; Josh Jackson of WBGO for the Willis Conover-Marian McPartland Award for Broadcasting; Mitchell Seidel for the Lona Foote-Bob Parent Award for Photography. For the 10th straight year, JazzTimes won Periodical of the Year. And All About Jazz -- which has complete results, including the musician awards you probably want to see -- was again recognized as Website of the Year.

Doug Ramsey, who took home the Lifetime Achievement nod in 2008, won Blog of the Year, most deservedly, for his ArtsJournal perch, Rifftides. And forgive me for burying the lede, but I was fortunate enough to grab the Helen Dance-Robert Palmer Award for Review and Feature Writing, out of an inspiring clutch of nominees.

Beyond their ceremonial function, these Jazz Awards have become an annual hang for the extended family, a place where musicians and managers and publicists (and critics) take a moment to acknowledge their common ground. That in itself is a worthy thing. And this year the event was broadcast through an online video stream, to satellite parties in Albuquerque, Scottsdale, Seattle, Berkeley and Chicago, among other places (Canada, I’m told, and various points in Europe).

 I should note here that a hush fell over the crowd at the announcement that Chicago saxophone legend Fred Anderson had suffered a heart attack and a stroke the night before. (As it turns out, those details may have been inaccurate, though Anderson is indeed in serious condition. Peter Margasak is tracking the story.)

Letters to a Young Critic

 Frank Alkyer, Down Beat

Like most folk who do what I do, I’ve been approached by aspiring young music journos with some variation on the question: So how do I get into this racket? This happens a lot when I visit college campuses, and lately my response has involved some combination of research (i.e., listening, reading) and enterprise (pitching, bloggery).

But mostly what I say is: write. If you want to be a writer, you should be writing. Obsessively, thanklessly. When this advice meets with a distant, glassy stare -- rather than a glint of recognition, which is far rarer -- I feel like I’ve identified a hobbyist rather than someone bound for the profession, if such a word can still be said to apply. 

I bring this up by way of introduction to a terrific series compiled by Jason Gross, at PopMatters.com. The premise: more than 100 qualified people have been asked to provide a response to the question above. For anyone with even a passing interest in music criticism, the results make for compelling reading.

Respondents have been sorted alphabetically; so far we’re into Di. My hope is that a few jazz journalists have made the cut. We’re already past Davis (as in Francis) and Crouch (Stanley), which is too bad. Perhaps Giddins is up in the next round? Maybe Ratliff turns up later? No offense to Frank Alkyer -- the publisher of Down Beat, pictured above -- but it would be a disappointment not to have the voice of a prominent jazz critic in the mix. Still worth checking out, though.

Update: The series hits Gary Giddins, Howard Mandel

Band of the Lost

Recommended Reading Dept: the New Yorker’s Alex Ross spends some time with Michael Giacchino, who’s responsible for the music on Lost. The link goes to an abstract, but trust me, you’ll want to read the full article, which combines close access with serious insight -- about the show, about Giacchino, and about the vicissitudes of film and television scoring.

I’ll admit to following Lost, in the same way that a certain kind of smoker cops to his habit: guiltily, helplessly, with a lot of self-conscious grumbling. (I originally started watching for vaguely homesick reasons: most of the location shooting takes place around my old stomping grounds.) But Ross is right to single out the music for appreciation. It’s one of the few aspects of the show that has never failed to deliver, season after season. 

And the Nominees Are...

 

 Attention jazzbos! The Jazz Journalists Association has announced nominees for its 2010 Jazz Awards, with winners to be unveiled at a gala event on June 14 at City Winery. As usual, the lifetime achievement category presents an awesomely tough decision for voters. (The above photo, by Enid Farber, finds pianist Hank Jones accepting that honor last year.) The rest of the field is also impressive: consider first-time nominee Darcy James Argue, up in five different categories. 

 I am honored to be included among the journalist nominees, alongside esteemed friends and colleagues; I’m also proud to note that a debut nomination was awarded to this here blog (see previous phrase, re: friends, colleagues). A full list of nominees is after the jump.

Herbie Fully Loaded

  

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.)

Final Round: Can You Dig It?

Part Eight 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: Andrey Henkin

In my final thoughts, I am reminded of an exchange I had with John Surman (above) some years ago during an interview. We were talking about what jazz was and wasn’t and I commented that I didn’t really know, I just knew it wasn’t popular. And I could have sworn someone mentioned that Simpsons episode that mentioned jazz radio (138 people can’t be wrong) but I can’t find it. I sometimes wonder how many of those “138 people” are left. 

But being in Chicago and seeing sold-out evenings at the Umbrella Music Festival in November, seeing good crowds for complex music this summer in Vancouver and intense audience reaction in the Perspectives Festival in Sweden in March, I am generally encouraged by the health of progressive music (which really absorbs everything that we’ve mentioned in these posts, including jazz artists not having issues getting exposure). Ken Vandermark and I once spoke about the subject of audience and I made the comment that all it would take was LeBron James plugging Paul Bley and record sales would explode. Ken disagreed about that... who knows who is right (since I don’t see it happening). But probably what jazz needs is a continued stream of conscientious listeners, even if that stream is more like a trickle. 

Jazz is certainly not ever going to reclaim its mantle as popular music (when was that again? ‘50s? ‘40s? ‘30s?) so a little bit of realism is necessary. AllAboutJazz-New York received over 2,000 CDs in 2009, which is a staggering number, even when considering that comes from all over the globe. So the musicians are still there and, to some extent, a support structure (labels, clubs, festivals, promoters) is as well. The audience is also there and while it might not be large in number, it is huge when it comes to enthusiasm and grass-roots energy. 

I teach a class about writing on live music; one of my students was exposed to Han Bennink at 15 and has gone on to interview him for the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, invited William Hooker to her college and plays Sun Ra on her university radio program. I’m not patting myself on the back for this but it shows that jazz can gain new audiences as long as musicians keep being sincere in their efforts. I close with a quote from one of my favorite movies, The Warriors, which is germane to this conversation. Or maybe it isn’t...I just love this flick.

Happy New Decade!

Someone's Tradition, Anyway

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

From: Peter Margasak

I think that Vijay Iyer quote sorta summed up many of the things I far less articulately attempted to express in my earlier bit. I’d like to think that everyone shares his opinion, but I’m afraid there is a generational schism; I’m sure plenty of folks would agree with his statement in theory, but reality is a different can of worms. Anyway, I think Nate’s point rings true. As the decade comes to a close this openness isn’t such a big deal, and I’m glad that’s the case. Jason Moran does indeed represent this kind of thinking as much as anyone during the previous ten years. 

Looking back on the previous exchanges it seems that a few of us really focused on music that was smashing those boundaries at the expense of more traditional practitioners of jazz. I’d say great new records by everyone from Von Freeman (above) to John Hollenbeck to Matt Wilson are all in the tradition -- someone’s tradition, anyway -- and they brought me as much pleasure as any other record this year. Hell, I loved Anthony Coleman’s rather conservative spin through the music of Jelly Roll Morton on Freakish.

And while I big upped Chicago, I think there are fascinating things happening all over the country, and, of course, the globe. My beloved Chicago Reader ran a pretty good piece this week about a Thai pop singer that discusses the futility of year-end lists because there’s always more that we don’t hear. Writer Noah Berlatsky ends the piece with, “Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.” Amen.

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. 

Hitting the Road

Part Four 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: Andrey Henkin

 

 

Dear Nate, Ben, Hank and Peter,

I’m glad I got a later slot in this Algonquin round email. I could simply react to what everyone else has said thus far. I agree wholeheartedly with Peter in his assessment of Chicago. Having made my first trip out there for the Umbrella Music Festival in early November, I was impressed by the sort of community-building that scene of musicians engages in, something I find woefully lacking in New York.

Sure, there are circles of musicians here but I find far too few porous borders (let me book The Stone for a month and I’d bring together some interesting first-time collaborations: Peter Evans/Jeremy Pelt duo, anyone?). That said, since Obama has already displayed a penchant for plugging his adopted home state -- be it through the Olympics debacle or the just-announced plan to move Guantanamo inmates to a Northern Illinois prison -- he should listen to Peter and invite somebody new to play at the White House. My vote? The Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet (above). With Chicagoans, Germans and Scandinavians, it seems a perfect band to reinforce the notion of global engagement. What would Steven Colbert have to say about that, I wonder? (One other note on Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams/Fred Anderson duo as part of the AACM concert series...one of my gigs of the year.)

 And using Umbrella as a jumping-off point, let me also echo praise lavished on Akira Sakata (left). I knew his work through Yosuke Yamashita mainly but had the chance to see him twice this year, once in Sweden in March and then at Umbrella. Both times he played with his trio of bassist Darin Gray and drummer Chris Corsano. Nate mentioned sax trios... this is the best one out there for my money. Playing free jazz well is tapping into something internal and Sakata-san has an unending wellspring.

And Chris Corsano is a drummer exemplifying musicians not limiting themselves to jazz or noise or whatever. Any of us who saw his trio with Evan Parker and Nate Wooley at The Stone in October should agree.

Segueing from Japan to debuts, check out Nobuyasu Furuya’s sax trio on Clean Feed, Bendowa. The Portuguese label releases so much and from so many high-profile artists, a disc like this can get overlooked. Darius Jones’ album was a remarkably mature debut. I forget who described him as coming out “fully formed” but I think that is an accurate assessment. And as Hank mentioned, tapping Cooper-Moore and Rakalam Bob Moses was inspired. So much so that when the band played at the AUM Fidelity showcase at Abrons Arts Center in October, Moses’ absence (replaced by the younger and more frenetic Jason Nazary) was too much for the band to overcome. And lastly on the debut thread, after years of being so impressed by John Hebert’s deliciously open concept of bass playing (learned at the proverbial knee of Andrew Hill), his debut Byzantine Monkey was a dynamic first statement.

Håkon Kornstad is probably the most interesting saxist out there these days in terms of the breadth of his projects. The duo with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten was remarkable and Dwell Time just as much. He recently played that music live at Monkeytown (which is really growing on me as a venue for this kind of music), and I am most captivated by an “avant-garde” saxist who appreciates and strives for beauty above all else:

Not to bring things down, but one instance of the supergroup that disappointed me greatly this year was the Five Peace Band, with Chick Corea and John McLaughlin. I heard the record and wasn’t very impressed and live at Jazz at Lincoln Center in April (a booking nearly as surprising as Ornette Coleman), the band seemed flat in the way only fusion bands can, which is to say, hyperactive yet hypoglycemic. Maybe Corea was tired from non-stop touring for the last couple of years but what’s McLaughlin’s excuse? Why can’t such an amazing player finally find a project that will make everyone forget about the Mahavishnu Orchestra? 

As we enter a new decade, I am encouraged by all the labels supporting jazz and “related configurations”, to borrow an WBAI term, like the aforementioned Clean Feed, Intakt, Kadima Collective, No Business and even a resurgent ECM (great albums by Miroslav Vitous, John Surman, Evan Parker) as I am saddened by New York’s demotion in terms of “Jazz Capital of the World.” In January, I am making a trip to Philadelphia to see the Circulasione Totale Orchestra, who are skipping New York on a small tour, as do most traveling musicians. Club bookers either draw from the same pool of musicians or we have the curator model, which is nice but hardly inclusive. 

Tonic remains empty and festivals held in small Austrian villages outclass anything we have here. I never have a problem choosing my Shows of the Year but find myself looking forward more and more to trips out of town.