THE GIG

Miss Otis Regrets

Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times

Keith Jarrett

Carnegie Hall, Jan. 25

Speak to Me

So Many Musicians Inspired by Paul Motian

Keith Jarrett, Bill McHenry,

Marc Copland and John Abercrombie, Dan Tepfer

The Piano, at Night, with You

 

Lonely Voyage of Player, Piano and Audience

Arts & Leisure, July 3

(More on this topic here next week)

Year-End: The Set Closer

Final round 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

Hey gang,

Season’s greetings from the Houston suburbs! I’m hunkered down with family for a spell, but wanted to throw out one more post before tying the ribbon on this thing. Since the last round, the year-end churn has given us a lot more to chew on, including scads of Top 10s.

NPR’s A Blog Supreme had an early roundup of roundups. Chris, your picks are up now as a slide show at the L.A. Times. I imagine the Village Voice will soon be posting its jazz poll, spearheaded by Francis Davis. (I’ll be shocked if the consensus pick isn’t Jason Moran’s Ten.) And JazzTimes has a compendium of critics’ ballots -- several of us among them. David and Shaun, Ten is our single item of overlap; Shaun, you and I also had Mary Halvorson and Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth. Shaun and David, you guys both listed the Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet, which resides on my unseen extended list. (Jennifer, you may be glad to know that I share at least one fave with the Jazzfamoose, whose true identity is safe with me.) 

Critical consensus should always raise more questions than it answers, but the Moran-tastic thrust of this year feels about right. Ten was also the only album to appear on two critics’ lists in the NY Times on Sunday: my Top 10 and Ben Ratliff’s. (By the way, this week’s NY Times Popcast will feature Ben and me jawing about the year in jazz. I’ll post that when it’s up; meanwhile, last week’s edition has all four pop and jazz critics talking more generally about the year in music:)

NY Times Popcast 12/15/10  

Ben placed Steve Coleman and Five Elements at the top of his list, and rightly so.  Harvesting Semblances and Affinities is a stunningly realized statement, the sort of album that a Netflix algorithm would align precisely with my taste preferences. (Last year, I big-upped Steve Lehman, Henry Threadgill and Vijay Iyer. )

So why isn’t Coleman on my list? (For that matter, why not Threadgill again?) I’m not really sure. This year more than most, I made a conscious effort to form my list from the gut, thinking honestly about the albums that kept drawing me back. 

Ten fit that bill, and so did my No. 2: Jasmine, by Keith Jarrett and Charlie Haden. Is it completely nuts for me to suggest that this album has been slept on? Perusing the JazzTimes census, I see that eight other critics have listed it, mostly within the first five slots -- but there wasn’t a ton of discussion about the album, unless I just missed it.

 

On the surface, Jasmine might seem a conservative choice, but there are depths therein that I still haven’t exhausted. Like The Melody at Night, With You, Jarrett’s exquisitely brittle solo recital of roughly a decade ago, it’s a paean to melody and reflection. The impression it leaves is twofold: mastery and modesty. (Yes, I am aware of the oddness of deploying the word “modest” in any discussion of Keith Jarrett.) Perhaps “maturity” is the concept I’m grasping at here. For all the light and heat generated by our Halvorsons, our Tyshawn Soreys, our Irabagons and Abbasis, there’s something to be said for the direct, mature statement. Jazz does maturity well, now as ever.

It’s a brilliantly diverse ecosystem, though, and there’s room for all sorts. (I suspect your curiosity was as piqued as mine over the latest bit of Esperanza news.) So I end this roundtable more or less as I started: with deep gratitude for your participation, and benign indecision over the year’s unifying theory. I’m sorry you won’t all be at the Winter Jazzfest in a couple of weeks -- we’ll have to grab a drink some other time. How about a New Orleans hang next spring? Or Philly in the fall? Or some appointment drinking in Rehoboth Beach? To be continued... 

Nate

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

Consensus Bureau

Yesterday’s Jazz Matters panel on the Best of 2010 was a blast -- it could only have been improved by a stronger turnout and pitchers of draft beer. (Jazz Journalists Association president Howard Mandel, our moderator, voiced his awareness that those two things are probably related.) I could hardly put together a more astute or collegial crew than the one David Adler assembled, with WBGO’s Josh Jackson and Down Beat’s Jim Macnie (and of course, Adler himself). There was plentiful agreement; I’m amused to report that the only real dissent formed around one of my picks. Read on for more about that.

But first, a side note on the comments below my last related post. Mahalo to everyone who contributed picks (and keep it coming)! I’m intrigued by the apparent consensus around Mary Halvorson’s new album, and can’t help but muse about selection bias: beyond this here blog-ville, and the teeming urban centers, how are people feeling about it? Or perhaps the salient question is: who hasn’t heard it that should? On the panel I wondered aloud whether it would even show up in the jazz-mag reader’s polls. It’s certainly in the running for my Top 10, as is the other comment-field-consensus pick, Jason Moran’s Ten. (Speaking of Halvorson and Moran, you saw this, right? Amen.) 

Answer Me My Love

Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette

Carnegie Hall, June 17