THE GIG

Spare Parts

New Music, Feb. 7

Tim Berne, "Snakeoil"

Veiled Shade

Playlist, June 10

Aaron Goldberg and Guillermo Klein, BB&C,

Woods, Diskjokke, Youssou N’Dour

Inside the Box

Michael Formanek Group

Jazz Standard, Oct. 27

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...

Berne Notice

 

Programming Note: I’m in Philadelphia this weekend, taking part in an Ars Nova Workshop Composer Portrait series on alto saxophonist-composer Tim Berne. Originally I was scheduled for a pre-concert talk on Friday, but my jury service has shuffled the deck a bit. So now it’s 6:30 p.m. Saturday. I’ll be speaking with Steve Byram, the influential graphic designer who has worked closely with Berne for years.

One reason I was booked for Friday: that’s when Berne and the Collide Saxophone Quartet (with guitarist Marc Ducret) will perform music from The Sevens, a 2002 release on New World Records. I wrote liner notes for that release -- note: the link goes to a PDF -- and somehow, reading now, they don’t make me cringe. (Not much, at least.) I now heed a general house-policy prohibition against liner notes, but I’m glad I had the chance to tackle these.

Back to this weekend. Saturday looks to be every bit as engaging, with one set apiece by Berne’s new band, Adobe Probe, and Philadelphia-based pianist Matt Mitchell. I haven’t heard the music for either of these settings, but I did enjoy a recent interview conducted by David Adler for the online magazine of the Philadelphia Music Project.

Where, you might ask, is Steve Byram in all this? Pretty much everywhere. And I expect our conversation to range from visual aesthetics to musical details, encompassing the considerable overlap therein. Here, warm up with an image gallery at Screwgun Records. 

(Unrelated Byram-Berne image.)

Berne Notice

Tim Berne (second from left) and Ethan Iverson (far right), with Buffalo Collision

Ethan Iverson has an expansive and insightful Tim Berne interview at the mighty Bad Plus blog, Do the Math. The conversation covers a lot of ground, touching on Berne’s mentor Julius Hemphill, the pride and perils of the self-run record business, and of course Berne’s compositions (in detail, with audio clips). You want to go to there.

Since he began posting these long-form interviews -- past conversations have included not only bassist Charlie Haden (a Bad Plus lodestar) but also Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch (both eminently worth reading) -- Iverson has added greatly to the churn of contemporary jazz criticism. His humility and obsessive attention to detail make him a disarmingly effective interrogator, even more than his common affiliation as a player. And coming at a time of constricting opportunity in the mainstream jazz media, he deserves credit for thinking to elevate the underappreciated Q&A format.

Years ago I conducted a series of interviews (pro bono) for Berne’s label, Screwgun Records. Most of these took place at the label’s HQ, a brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. I’m recalling this now because it was an indication of Berne’s sincere interest in discourse: like Iverson, he values conversation. A lot of jazz musicians share this trait, but it’s by no means universal, as I’m sure many of my colleagues can attest. Anyway, if you’re interested in those old Screwgun Q&As, check out the last four links listed here.

Iverson and Berne are playing as a duo on Friday at the Stone. Buffalo Collision, their collective band with cellist Hank Roberts and drummer David King, released its Screwgun debut in December.