If you’ve been watching this space in recent weeks, I’m really sorry. Life has been happening fast. Blog posts have not. Look for a separate item soon that will gather some highlights from the past two months or so.
What I want to talk about now, in case the photo here hasn’t tipped you off, is Laurie Frink, whose death on Saturday came a shock, if not exactly a surprise, to a lot of people.
I spent a good portion of Monday speaking with musicians who were close to Frink, as background for this Times obituary. But I didn’t need their testimonials to know how much she meant to those who knew her, perhaps especially her students. A little over a decade ago, I shared an apartment with one of those students, Jesse Neuman, and heard a ton of stories. I also heard Jesse’s daily practice regimen, as prescribed by Frink. For a while, it was like the soundtrack of my life during daylight hours.
I thought of that immediately when John McNeil, laughing ruefully, told me about the time a plumber (or was it an electrician?) came over to his apartment while he was practicing a Frink routine. McNeil’s wife answered the door, and the guy said, “Oh, is your son learning to play the trumpet?” She chuckled and said yes, to which he replied: “Whew, that’s brutal!”
I’m going to devote the rest of this post to some transcribed comments from my conversations, since the obituary was too brief to allow for more than a choice quote or two. But before you read on, please see the beautifully touching tribute that Jesse posted on Sunday. He was the person who let me know that Frink had passed, and he was the first person I called.
In this Sunday's Arts & Leisure section, you'll find a chirpy little interview with multi-reedist Ben Wendel and pianist Dan Tepfer, in advance of their excellent new album, Small Constructions (Sunnyside), and next Wednesday's gig at the Rubin Museum of Art. We spoke in the basement lair of New York Times photographer Tony Cenicola, on the same day that Wendel and Tepfer taped the above footage at WBGO.
The interview was held for Snapshot, a fairly recent A&L fixture intended to shine a light on breakout young talent. (In recent weeks it has featured comic actor Mather Zickel, non-comic actress Julia Garner, and Brit-soul singer Jessie Ware.) I was glad to have snuck the first improvising musicians into rotation.
But of course, space limitations meant that our conversation had to be truncated, and that some cool things hit the figurative cutting-room floor. One tangent in particular struck me as worth salvaging and posting here. Wendel's comment about the absence of a normalizing incentive provided by major labels was of special interest to me; I tossed off a similar comment recently in conversation with Ben Ratliff (something about "the upside of the collapsed infrastructure"), and it was good to hear validation from an informed source.
The two of you belong to a loose coalition of players roughly the same age, who have this total fluidity with style. Do you feel like you’re part of a movement? And do you feel on the same page with each other in this regard?
Wendel: Yeah, definitely. Especially in New York there’s really tight-knit communities of friends, and I think it’s very common to gravitate towards people who have shared common interests or likes in music. I definitely feel that way. Even though within that range of people that you’re describing there’s a really wide aesthetic range, there’s definitely this common aesthetic thread. I remember someone recently defined jazz as the music that jazz musicians play at the time that they’re living. That’s us: we love Radiohead and Bon Iver, and we love Mussogorsky and we love Duke Ellington. Hopefully that’s all going to be expressed through what we create.
Tepfer: I feel so much that way that I almost have to make a mental effort to think of what it would be if it weren’t that. It just seems so obvious. All the people I hang out with, we’re talking about what we find to be good music. Like the Duke Ellington quote, it just seems so obvious. This is good music, this is bad music. I don’t really know anybody who’s thinking in terms of a limitation of style. Everything is very clearly available to us at this point. I have a classical composer friend who’s in his 50s, and he was just saying that we’re so lucky these days. When he was coming up, you had to write serial music. Likewise in jazz, there was definitely a certain time where we were feeling these limitations. We live in a really exciting time in that respect.
Wendel: I feel like there’s a socioeconomic element to it too. Which is, like, we never even experienced even the idea of the bigger record deal, and having to conform to those industries. We missed that boat. I have friends that are 10 years older than me that were part of that experience, and know what’s gone. It’s like, well, I don’t even mourn the loss of anything. I never had it.
Tepfer: We’re literally in this position of just trying to make music that we like to listen to. Because there’s not going to be that many people buying the record, even if it’s a big success. Of six or seven billion people on earth, there’s going to be a number of people who feel probably pretty much the same way as I do, aesthetically speaking. We have access to all those people now.
Wendel: My sister, she does work in p.r. Her whole thing is, you’re not trying to please everyone anymore, you’re just trying to find your tribe. And if your tribe is .00001% of seven billion people, you’re fine.
Tepfer: It’s incredibly liberating. I really had that epiphany with the Goldberg Variations. Because I was doing this really strange project that hadn’t really been done that way before. And I’m sitting there and realizing that at certain points, I would do a take that I felt OK about. Like, “Oh. This is cool, I can put this out into the world.” And I realized that there’s literally a switch when that happens. And that was a total epiphany for me. Everything I make now is that. Nobody knows anything about what else is important. It used to be marketing and styles and all that stuff, but that’s literally not even relevant now to the marketplace.
I caught up with him in
Austin recently, at what felt like a pivotal moment, and came away with an even
higher opinion of him. The back story is in the piece, but I thought I’d fill
in a few blanks here.
Clark is a real product of
Austin, born and raised: he came up through that city’s intensely vibrant music
culture, forming his voice on the bandstand in a way that most musicians don’t
anymore. (New Orleans seems like only the other place in America where this
still happens regularly, as a matter of course.) We talked about what that has
meant for him, and some of his descriptions reminded me of testimonials from
the jazz life, as it used to be lived:
Let’s get this out of the way first: I don't think T.S.
Monk could have won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Drums Competition,
which I covered here. But I think he’d be the first to make that
disclaimer. (Well, one of the first.)
Monk fils, who served
as an emergency feed of personal history and family lore during the
logistically complex semifinals on Saturday — you’ll be grateful to learn
that his father gulped Pepsi, smoked Camels and pinched pennies — gave the first
performance at the finals on Sunday. His unaccompanied solo, played on an
electronic drum kit, was OK, and, under the circumstances, the essence of
chutzpah. But then this is a guy who had no qualms about starting an
invocation, on both days, with “Let’s get ready to Drumble!”
The drumble, as it were, came late in the game, well after
the competition had been settled. As I observed in the paper, it involved a
round robin of every member of the judges’ panel, along with Tipper Gore
— and most importantly, Jamison Ross, whose strong, untroubled swing feel
helped put him in the winner’s circle.
This week brings the Tri-Centric Festival, an omnibus showcase for composer-multireedist Anthony Braxton, at the new Roulette in Brooklyn. I wrote a piece previewing the event, after spending some time with Braxton recently, and much more time with his music.
One thing I’d been wondering about was whether Braxton sensed a greater acceptance of his music in recent years, after the warm glow of Wesleyan’s season-long tribute in 2005; the subsequent release of major multi-disc sets like The Complete Arista Recordings and 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006; and the ardent testimonials of his disciples. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Braxton ordered a glass of white wine as we sat down to our interview, and proceeded not to touch it for the next hour. He’s an energetic conversationalist, quick to oblige any request for clarification. Here’s what he had to say about misperceptions surrounding his work:
This month’s column tackles the subject of female jazz criticism, and especially the lack thereof — not a new issue by any stretch, but one worth considering anew. I’m not going to rehash my argument here, but I’d like to expand on one aspect of it. What initially motivated the column was the recent publication of Out of the Vinyl Deeps: Ellen Willis on Rock Music, which I urge any reader to purchase, like, now.
Some bands, with their interpersonal dynamic, give the impression of cold efficiency. Others seem to be just barely holding it all together. My Morning Jacket embodies a preferable third option: nothing but warmth, and a conviction that music-making still largely comes out of a hang. Last month I visited the band’s hometown of Louisville, Ky., on business, and plugged into their vibe firsthand. We talked a lot about Circuital, their intensely cohesive new album, and how it came to be.
I first heard Ambrose Akinmusire sometime during his Steve Coleman Apprentice Phase -- every young musician of his ilk seems to have one -- sometime in the last decade. (Could it have been around this time? I dunno. Maybe.) Whatever specific impression he made has faded, but I do recall filing his name away for future ref.
As for the first time I really heard Ambrose Akinmusire, that’s clearer. It was during the 2007 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, which I covered in Los Angeles. During the semifinals there were 10 competitors, each playing a few pieces with an expert house rhythm section. Almost everyone sounded good, but Akinmusire took his game further, pushing with poise through Wayne Shorter’s “Fee Fi Fo Fum” and then making the unusual decision to play “Stablemates” as a trumpet-piano duet. (The house pianist, so to speak, was Geoffrey Keezer.) He was moving out on the proverbial limb, and backing up every risk with results. It’s fair to say that I was floored.
That moment always returns fresh when I get to contemplating Akinmusire, as I do in this weekend’s piece. It’s not just about the trumpet playing, inventive and surefooted as it may be. It’s about the urge to connect with his band mates -- even when they’re not really his band mates but rather an all-star combo (Keezer, bassist Reginald Veal, drummer Carl Allen) working toward a functional end.
Obviously I think you hear that commitment clearly on When the Heart Emerges Glistening, Akinmusire’s new Blue Note debut. What I wanted to stress in the piece was the idea that he could lean heavily on a collective ideal without easing up on his prodigious gifts. The magnanimity doesn’t trump the prowess, or vice-versa.
This month’s cover story for JazzTimes, re: singer Kurt Elling, has been excerpted online. There’s way more insight behind the paywall, so if you like what you see, please go buy a copy, or swipe one from your neighbor. Meanwhile, I thought I’d expand on just one (major) aspect of the piece here, having to do with his thoughts on artistic maturity and its antipode, callow youth.
Elling is nothing if not a self-reflective artist, and soon after we sat down he was musing on his stature vis-à-vis jazz’s critical establishment. The tide had been turning for him in that regard, especially since the generally acknowledged triumph of his Coltrane-Hartman album, Dedicated to You, in 2009. But what Elling seemed eager to talk about were his detractors, some of whom he felt had formed their opinions early on.* Here is some of what he said:
The cover story in the new issue of JazzTimes is about pianist, composer and educator Danilo Pérez, whose Grammy-nominated album Providencia captures much of the sweeping energy of his recent creative life. I went to Boston in the fall for Pérez’s album-release gig at Scullers, and then spent a few engaging hours at his well-appointed home in Quincy, Mass. (That link leads you to a preview; the full piece, which I obviously endorse, is only available in print.)
I saw this piece as something more than the story of Providencia; by my reckoning, 2010 marked the end of a momentous decade for Pérez. If you were paying attention in 2000, you may recall that it was the year of Motherland, and also the year Pérez joined Wayne Shorter’s new quartet. In the years since, he had served as the cultural ambassador for his native Panama, and started a festival there.
Pérez is a great interview: responsive and generous, unguarded, quick to seize on a suggested premise. What struck me about our conversation was how frequently it kept returning to Shorter, without very much encouragement on my part. Pérez’s affiliation with Shorter has been transformative, opening new spaces in his playing and realigning the public’s perceptions of his art. Rudresh Mahanthappa, the saxophonist featured on Providencia, told me that when he first heard Pérez, in the late 1990s, he initially chalked it up to high-level Latin jazz. “But when I saw him with Wayne,” Mahanthappa said, “that’s when I realized that his palette was so wide.”
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