The topic of race, in jazz as elsewhere, has often been framed as a binary: literally a matter of black and white. We saw this in many of our intraweb debates last year, though of course the issue goes farther back than any of us can recall. The implicit dualism is understandable, and there's obviously still much work to be done along that divide. I stand with both Nicholas Payton and Ethan Iverson, among others, in the conviction that we can gain something vital by talking about it.
In that spirit, I've been thinking a lot this week about what doesn't fit into the binary, and how we might enrich our jazz-and-race conversation by acknowledging it. Before we proceed, two quick homework assignments. First, watch the clip above -- one of the smarter, subtler pieces of sketch writing we've seen from Saturday Night Live in ages. And while I'm assuming that you need no briefing on the subject of Jeremy Lin, "Linsanity," or sports-media Foot in Mouth Syndrome, I'm also going to insist that you spent a few moments with this excellent essay by Jay Caspian Kang.
OK, done? Now bear with me; this will get a little personal.
Part Four of a year-end email conversation with Angelika Beener, Aaron Cohen, Joe Tangari and K. Leander Williams. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5| 6 |7 | 8 )
From: Joe Tangari
Hello everyone.
I’m enjoying the conversation a lot so far. The spirit in here is infectious. Thanks for inviting me, Nate, and I’m honored to be in on the exchange with such a fine group of writers and thinkers.
I want to start by picking up the thread of jazz and genre, and I think Esperanza Spalding is a great lens through which to do it.
The first time I ever heard Esperanza Spalding, it was on an album called Happy You Near, by a band called Noise for Pretend, of which she was the bassist and primary vocalist. It was released on the Hush label, which for years paired its logo with a quick tag line that simply said “anti-rock.” This was 2002 (The Grammy Awards often stretch the definition of “New Artist” to the breaking point), and I wrote about the record for Pitchfork.
There are plenty of hyphenates you could throw at that album (I certainly did), but at its heart, it’s an indie pop album. When Spalding talks about where she comes from as a musician, she’s filtering her response through a career that started with her playing in Portland’s indie rock scene.
I don’t think it’s possible to have a “pure” lineage no matter what kind of music you’re playing — even Nicholas Payton admits he’s playing “post-modern New Orleans.” If there’s a more ambiguous term than post-modern, let me know. Human beings are synthesizers — we blur together our DNA and the experiences of our lives into a personality, or a soul, if you prefer. It’s tough not to get a little Hollywood in your New Orleans growing up in such a media-saturated world.
I tend to side with Aaron in thinking that, on the creative side, jazz is just fine, and perhaps in better shape now than it has been in a long time. He reeled off a long list of albums he loved this year, and I don’t disagree with any of it.
Aaron also mentioned that jazz’s siege mentality doesn’t seep into Chicago as much as it does New York. Part of the reason for this may simply be that Chicago, of all cities, is probably the one where the walled garden of genre has been most thoroughly obliterated. Since the 1990s, it’s been routine for guys like Fred Lonberg-Holm and Rob Mazurek to show up on records by bands that are putatively rock artists (or post-rock, if you like). Jason Adasiewicz is a fantastic jazz vibist. He was also a member of the indie rock/loop folk group Pinetop Seven for years.
There’s a to-and-fro in that city’s music scene that really does create the “open field” effect that Nate mentioned in his introductory post. And I think the field is only going to open more and more, and that will happen everywhere as time goes on.
As an example, some of what is, to me, the most exciting jazz going today is being made by Indian and Pakistani-American musicians, and in particular by Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa. They are making music with dual (at the very least) ancestries, and it’s opened up a whole new avenue for innovation. Indian music and jazz have been meeting on record for a long time — Joe Harriott & John Mayer’s 1966 Indo-Jazz Fusions LP comes to mind — but this new music is less an on-the-surface meeting and more a true combination of distinct traditions.
Tirtha, Iyer’s album with Indian-born guitarist Prasanna and tabla player Nitin Mitta, is one of the most harmonically interesting records I heard this year for the way it combines Western and Carnatic harmony. And I’m not sure what you’d call Mahanthappa’s “Parakram #2,” from his recent album Samdhi. I would never say it’s not jazz, but Mahanthappa is credited with alto sax and laptop on the album, and that song in particular does some crazy things with manipulating the group performance.
We’ve come a long way since people got angry at Lennie Tristano for overdubbing, but I can see how some people who are holding on tight to a narrow definition of what they feel jazz should be could be thrown for a loop by that. Seems like a sad world to live in, though. The expansion of that definition is what gave us the thrilling Live at the South Bank, the record Steve Reid and Mats Gustafsson made with British electronic artist Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet) just before Reid’s death. I turned in a few top tens this year, and that album was in all of them.
Angelika makes a good point about how multi-faceted the conversation has become — these debates are never settled. They don’t lead us to some end point in the conversation where things are wrapped up. They fan the flames of ideas for the next phase of conversation. I think the diversification of the music reflects the diversification of the conversation — there are more voices in both rooms, and there’s still room for more.
So does jazz need a savior? I don’t think so. Besides, people waiting for saviors often end up waiting a very long time.
There was plenty of good information, and at least one terrific cosmic gag, that couldn’t make it into today’s feature about Pi Recordings. Some of that material was too granularly, and would have been a drag on the flow of the piece. Some of it was of dubious interest to a civilian readership. But you’re here now, so let’s get into it, after the jump.
A while back, I interviewed George Wein for a 14-minute segment on the BBC radio show Jazz on 3. It aired and was archived online for a week, though I forgot to check for it. My producers kindly dropped a disc in the mail, and the conversation struck me as worth sharing.
One thing that may strike you about the interview -- as it struck Jez Nelson, the host of Jazz on 3 -- is just how much credit Wein gives to the emergent generation, musicians like Darcy James Argue, Rudresh Mahanthappa and Miguel Zenón. Some of this, for an audience-seeking promoter, is merely a matter of adaptive survival.
But some of it reflects a recent change in Wein’s outlook, which Ben Ratliff hit upon earlier this year. “It’s the way you listen to music,” explains Wein in the clip above. “I’d go out and hear musicians and I didn’t think they were playing the real jazz. I was looking for something I wanted to hear. I stopped doing that. I stopped looking for something I wanted to hear; I started looking for something the musician wanted to play, which I should have been doing years ago.”
If that last part sounds familiar, perhaps you heard Wein say it at some other point over the last 60 years. He said something awfully similar at Newport in 1956, as Sam Stephenson recently reminded us in his Jazz Loft Project Blog. (By the way, Sam: I am fairly certain George would chuckle at those other comments today, especially the one about Armstrong playing at less than one-tenth of his potential, a common, misguided view among connoisseurs at the time.)
I’ll leave it at that, except for the usual disclosure about my relationship with Wein. That of course is one reason why I haven’t weighed in on the value of his festivals, though it hasn’t prevented me from passing judgment on individualconcerts.
P.S. -- Thus stipulated, the CareFusion Jazz Festival Newport, which Wein addresses toward the end of our conversation, will run from Aug. 6 to 8. More here.
P.P.S. -- And if you’re seeking more recent commentary from Wein, he also spoke with Scott Simon of NPR’s Weekend Edition. This clip aired in June.
Chamber Music America announced its latest rollout of commissions today: a dozen separate grants, awarded under the aegis of its New Jazz Works: Commissioning and Ensemble Development program. Among the recipients are John Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet, a quartet led by Rudresh Mahanthappa (pictured above), and Mario Pavone’s Double Tenor band. (For a full list, scroll to the bottom of this post.)
Commissions like these have become a fundamental part of the jazz economy. And, I’d add, now a significant factor in jazz’s creative life. Last year I confessed some guarded ambivalence about this fact in a related Gig column, musing about the specific qualities of these “new jazz works” that tend to look good in grant-proposal form.
I know, I know: Gift horse, mouth. It seems churlish, maybe even foolish, to question any institutionalized program that sees fit to distribute funding in the name of creative music.
