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.
Final round of a year-end email conversation with Peter Hum, Jim Macnie, Giovanni Russonello and Greg Thomas(Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 )
From: Nate Chinen
Greetings, gents!
I write to you from the suburbs of Houston, where wintry
climes are but a faraway rumor, at least for now. Seems like we’re nearing the
end of this here roundtable, and I wanted to reiterate my thanks to you for taking
part. The other night I ran into our own Jim Macnie at the Jazz Standard
— he was on his way out, and I was on my way in — and we agreed that
this has been fun. I hereby resolve to keep the conversation going, on some
level, in the new year. Preferably in person, and with less cause for solemn
reflection. I believe I owe each of you a beer, at the least. (A couple of
years ago, Bitches Brew, a commemorative release from Dogfish Head, played a supporting
role in this exercise; you may be interested to know that the brewery
recently reissued said elixir, so to speak.)
Thought I’d just lob a few closing thoughts here, mainly as
an Amen chorus. For starters, I’m grateful that Greg brought
up the issue of female instrumentalists, since the evidence of their
critical mass shouldn’t be taken for granted. Frankly, this was a vexing year,
in the culture at large, for conversations about women — see “war on...”
and “binders full of...” and “...can’t
have it all” for starters — but a heartening year for women making
advances in jazz. It bothered me a little that my Top 10 didn’t reflect that,
despite strong work by the aforementioned Fuller and Spalding, along with violinist Jenny
Scheinman, guitarist Mary Halvorson, clarinetist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Nadje Noordhuis, saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and pianist
Kris Davis. And Luciana Souza! Greg, I spent so many hours in thrall to
the first Brazilian Duos album that I
probably haven’t given the sequels their proper due.
Speaking of proper dues: Initial Here, the self-possessed sophomore release by bassist
Linda Oh, was in the best-of running for me — as was Be Still, the Dave Douglas album on which she appears. (More
on that in a sec.) My mind flickers back to this year’s Monk
Competition, and the Kennedy Center concert in which Oh fearlessly grounded
a confab featuring Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock. No big deal. And it’s not
that I was impressed by how easily she handled herself in that context as
a young woman; I was just impressed,
straight up, no stipulations for age or gender required. (I’m now recalling
that the concert had a “Women in Jazz” subtext, and featured some others
fitting that description, including Monk adjudicator Terri Lyne Carrington. No
female competitors, tho.)
Gio, you brought
up Branford Marsalis as an exemplar of against-the-grain traditionalism
this year. His was another album that just missed the cutoff for me, and who
knows — were I compiling my Top 10 today, it might come in under the wire. I
got an early vinyl copy of Four MFs Playing Tunes in the spring, and was so taken with it that I had to sound
the alarm right away.
But as for Branford’s whole spiel about this music
not coming with a concept — well, I’m calling BS, to borrow his own
lexicographical shorthand. If you’ve heard much of the Branford Marsalis
Quartet over the years, in its original incarnation as well as this one, you’ll
recognize Four MFs as gloriously
true to form. He’s working within a post-bop tradition (call it post-Coltrane,
if you prefer) but the tradition he really upholds here is that of his own
proprietary small-group syntax: his concept, basically. Which is not so
different from what Vijay Iyer does in his trio. As with a few touted albums
in the non-jazz realm this year — your Dylans, your Springsteens, even Nas
— Marsalis built on a structure he’d already established. But calling Four MFs an album without a concept is like calling Seinfeld a show about nothing. And we all know how cleverly that one can be debunked.
Greg, I appreciate the “gut-heart-head” check that you
mentioned as an implicit litmus for listening. I’d wager that each of us
(and the better of our colleagues) has a similarly intuitive process for
evaluating music. But what stirs my soul or stimulates my cerebral cortex could
leave somebody else entirely unmoved. (Obvious, but it bears repeating every
now and again.) I don’t really know where I stand, anymore, on the subject of a
left-leaning critical bias in jazz — I still see a lot of love for the standard-bearers, and often not enough for those expanding the frame
— but I agree that we run up against a baby-with-the-bathwater quandary if
we’re no longer interested in the fundamentals. I think about that often, in fact.
Karsten Moran/New York Times
Last week I had a
terrific experience with the Christian McBride Trio, which reminded me at
times of the forthright splendor of Peterson, Brown and Thigpen in 1964. And one of the albums that did make it on my list, at a pretty high berth, was the latest from guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, which happens to feature Branford’s rhythm team. I loved Reflections, Kurt’s standards album, too — but I was glad to hear him bring that ease and mastery to bear on his own smart compositions.
By the way, I
have it on good authority that when I pick up the Houston Chronicle tomorrow
morning, I’ll see a feature on drummer Reggie Quinerly, whose recent debut is
as straight-ahead as they come, but also a meditation on the history of his
native H-town, and specifically the African-American enclave that once thrived
in its Fourth Ward, where he grew up. I saw Quinerly play this music at Smoke a few weeks ago, and it was tight.
I’d like to close now on an
album that uncannily weaves together so many of the strands of our
conversation: traditionalism and innovation, mourning and succor, that “renewed sense
of wonder,” Linda Oh. I’m speaking of course about Be Still, the exquisite album that Dave Douglas made out of
some old songs and a new band, along with a deeply
personal motivation.
I love this album — for its outright beauty, for its
reverence in the face of the divine, and for the way in which Aoife O’Donovan
inhabits a modern jazz setting so easefully, without losing sight of her own
aesthetic coordinates. And in light of recent events, I thought its message
incredibly pertinent. A moment ago I glanced at the Greenleaf Music website and
saw that Douglas had posted some
thoughts along these lines. “We are all united as we begin to take those
difficult next steps,” he writes.
After what happened in Newtown, a handful of people I know dusted off a famous quote by Leonard Bernstein; unless I’m
misremembering, Douglas did so too, on Twitter. The statement: “This will be
our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more
devotedly than ever before.”
There are countless different ways to make music intensely;
likewise, beautifully and devotedly. I’m sure I am not the only one among us who takes some
comfort in that. And I know I’m not the only one who looks forward, with every
kind of hope, to whatever lies ahead.
Part Two of a year-end email conversation with Peter Hum, Jim Macnie, Giovanni Russonello and Greg Thomas(Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3| 4 | 5| 6| 7| 8| 9| 10| 11 )
From: Peter Hum
Photo: Binary-Rhyme
Hi Nate, Greg, Gio and Jim,
First, thanks to Nate for asking me to chip in from the
Canadian jazz hinterland. Is there freezing rain pelting down where you are
too, turning cars into giant ice cubes?
Let me give a jazz-related shout out to my Ottawa Citizen
colleagues. Good on them — good on us, the major daily newspaper in Canada’s
capital — for putting the obit for Dave Brubeck on the front page of last
Thursday’s arts section. I didn’t even have a hand in that bit of stellar news
judgment, I swear. Granted, Brubeck had playedtwice
in the last five years at the Ottawa Jazz Festival, packing Confederation Park
in the process. But judging from the chitchat in the newsroom, and from what I
saw on Twitter and Facebook (where news, alas, happens first), I think that
Brubeck’s passing really resonated at large, and not just with people like me
who heard “Strange Meadowlark” decades ago and were forever hooked on jazz by
that Ab7#11. What I saw spoke to the power of great jazz — especially when it’s
a gateway into the music for an impressionable mind — to lodge itself,
inextricably so, in someone’s memory as a treasured, sentimental favourite.
I’d love to extrapolate from the outpouring of attention to
Brubeck’s passing — and, for that matter, in response to Austin Peralta’s
sad, sad death — that jazz, whatever that means to everyone else, still matters
beyond the jazz bubble, despite all the nay-saying. It’s not that the music’s
dying yet again (Seriously,
The Atlantic?), or riven by feuding clans, as if the Hatfields and McCoys
were in some kind of tradition-vs.-innovation cage match. Brubeck’s death might
remind civilians and us alike that jazz, while admittedly large, loose and even
monstrous (as Henry James famously said of 19th-Century novels), can indeed
inspire a sense of renewed wonder (as Nate almost as famously wrote in his kick-off
letter).
In case you’re thinking that glasses in Canada are overly
rose-coloured (sorry – colored), I’ll add that yes, it’s a drag that Taylor
Swift is worth two Ottawa jazz festivals. It sucks that as much as
everybody we know loves Vijay Iyer, someone else might write him up as a poster
boy for jazz-that-can’t-be-popular. It’s a kick in the jewels that Café
Paradiso, the leading (some would say only) jazz club in my city of a million
or so — the way station for folks like Dave Liebman, Ben Monder/Theo Bleckmann,
Sheila Jordan, Marc Copland, John Abercrombie and Steve Kuhn, not to mention
innumerable Canadian players I’d love to hip you to — shut
its doors in June after a dozen years or so of fighting the good fight. It
pains me that when they name a street after Monk in New York, they can’t spell
Thelonious right. It can be rough out there for jazz, but how significant are
these setbacks and slights? I’ll side with Lee Konitz, who affirms that “as
long as there are people trying to play music in a sincere way, there will be
some jazz.”
Chris Mikula, The Ottawa Citizen
My highlight reel from 2012 won’t be the same as
yours. To get to the Vanguard or the Jazz Gallery, Korzo or Carnegie Hall, it’s
a seven-hour drive from my house. But as admittedly very anecdotal evidence
that great music is taking place beyond the coverage of the New York Times and
the jazz periodicals, I’ll mention that, for example, I saw Dave Douglas play
his ass off twice this summer. He was ass-less and practically leaping off the
bandstand with the Sound Prints group he runs with Joe Lovano at the Ottawa
Jazz Festival, and then igniting things in a decommissioned church’s basement
with a quartet that includes Steve Swallow and two Canadian youngbloods, Chet
and Jim Doxas, at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival.
This summer, I twice saw
the Fellowship Band turn a big park audience into a Vanguard-like congregation
(although in the second instance I had to travel to France). I almost saw Dave
Holland three nights in a row, playing pristine duets with Kenny Barron, with
the sublime Thimar trio, and the inaugural gig for his visceral, molten Prism
group with Craig Taborn, Kevin Eubanks and Eric Harland. Take that, bifurcating
traditionalists and innovators.
Oh — I twice passed on Chris Botti.
I was able to catch Jack DeJohnette’s hard-thrashing group
without having to go to Newport, hear two burning sets of Liebman’s group
without going to the Deer Head Inn. (Aside: does Lieb, even with his NEA Jazz
Masters award, get all the love he deserves?) At jam sessions in Ottawa, I saw
Eric Harland, Taylor Eigsti and Dan Tepfer (on
melodica) put “Solar” through the wringer, and I saw Kneebody play
“Epistrophy” and “Bye Bye Blackbird.” If someone were to come up to me after
hearing any one of these concerts, and say, “Ah yes, but I pined for more
tradition or innovation in that music,” I would have smacked them for
completely missing the point, which
is the wonderment.
I want to ask you about two recordings that dropped this
year and that I thought were wonderful. No points for guessing that I have in
mind Keith Jarrett’s Sleeper and the Gil
Evans Centennial Project release from Ryan
Truesdell. How did you gauge those discs with the best of 2012, given that
Jarrett’s European group made its incandescent music in 1979, or that some of
the Evans material was older than Birth of the Cool?
What I’m inclined to take away from these delayed
gratifications is that arguments about jazz styles evolving or decaying
themselves shrivel up when time-defying music is pulsing through the Sennheisers.
The power of those discs makes me hopeful that in 2042 or 2062, some freshly
unearthed music by Iyer or Rudresh Mahanthappa, or Brad Mehldau or Kurt
Rosenwinkel, or Ambrose Akinmusire or Robert Glasper, or someone none of us
have heard yet, will be making heads spin.
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