THE GIG

Oblique Strategies

 

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. 

Ghost Worlds

Part Six 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 

Hey guys,

First, a word of gratitude: thanks to all for such a lively first round. I’m honored that you guys accepted my invitation, and have already brought so much to the table — and so much to respond to! OK, let’s do this.

Jim, you ended your excellent post by suggesting we all take a moment to tip our beanies to the Tim Berne-Matt Mitchell hookup on Snakeoil. Since I pegged that as the best album of 2012, I’m perfectly happy to pick up the thread. The first time I heard Mitchell in person was at a Berne mini-festival of sorts in Philadelphia, three years ago: he was executing a complex script of Berne’s invention, brutish and gnarled at some points and cathedral-still at others. And while it was a solo piano piece — i.e., no interaction between the two players on an instrumental level — the depth of engagement was already there in nascent form. (For a simulacrum of the more reflective moments of that performance, here’s a clip filmed earlier that year, in what appear to be meat-lockeresque conditions at the Stone):

Mitchell spoke with me about the process of unpacking Berne’s compositions, back when I was gathering materials for a piece in JazzTimes. “Compared to a lot of contemporary classical music, it doesn’t necessarily look like it’s ultra-complicated on the page,” he said. “Then you sit down and try to play it, and it’s got all these little potential snags. So you have to play these charts accurately, and it has to groove.”

When I got my advance of Snakeoil, I was struck anew by the level of mind meld between the two musicians, whose dynamic might skew a little too mentor-pupil if not for the expansive liberties taken by Mitchell (who, it should be noted, commits all of the written material to memory). Sometimes, too, their altopiano — shades of Bru and Des in that portmanteau? — forms a fulcrum for the rest of the group. (Clarinetist Oscar Noriega distinguishes himself on the album too, and Ches Smith does some exceptionally strong and subtle things on percussion.) Then there’s that last word in the Mitchell quote above: this music really does groove, even when the pulse gets atomized, as is often the case.

Speaking of liberties, I absolutely loved your account of the deconstructive Tyshawn Sorey and Ben Gerstein performance, Jim. One thing it called to mind for me was some of the A.A.C.M.-inspired experimental fiction of Nathaniel Mackey, especially in his mind-bending epistolary trilogy. (There’s this one riff involving an onstage telephone, from the first volume, Bedouin Hornbook. I won’t spoil it for you.)

But it also reminds me of the DIY efforts Gio brought up in his first post. Did you all know about Music Factory, a sort of performance-art endurance marathon presented last weekend at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in the Chelsea gallery district? It was scheduled to last 96 hours, continuously, with some 70 improvisers drifting in and out of the mix, and earning an “extrapolated wage” based on pay-what-you-wish admission. (There was a point being made, I think, about the intrinsic “value” of the artistic process vs. its explicit “worth” as determined by market forces. Yay?) 

Marcus Yam for The New York Times

On a similarly enterprising but (much) less esoteric note, I spent a recent afternoon dashing about Central Park for Jazz & Colors, which featured 30 ensembles and the same two sets of standards. Just as was presumably the case in Music Factory, the artist and audience were encouraged to interact meaningfully with a physical environment; in both instances the organizers played around with notions of scale. There are pitfalls to making this the hinge of your endeavor — Jazz & Colors was more of an enjoyable blur than a deep musical experience, which also tends to be my chief critique of Winter and Undead fests ­— but I’m all for tweaking the interface. Greg, as I registered your understandable concern about the incredible shrinking jazz-club engagement, I thought of 40Twenty, a post-bop collective so enamored of the two-week run, as a chimerical ideal, that it went out and created one for itself.

Not to suggest that everything’s peachy, since the shrewder jazz musicians have learned to write grant proposals by day and pass the tip jar at night. (Doesn’t that sound like a description of the world’s least empowered superhero?) I think we should continue to care about the fate of the aboveground jazz economy, under extraordinary circumstances as well as those that pass for ordinary. What I’m saying here — what I think everyone else has implied, in one way or another — is that the preponderance of options is an essential boon, and a good way to expand the base beyond those who think a $40 cover and a $10 minimum represent an acceptable transactional cost. Jason Moran has obviously been kicking around this liberated notion, and I see hints of it in the programming of a place like Shapeshifter Lab.

Let’s get back to Top 10s for a moment, shall we? And in so doing, we’ll sidle into some of the points that y’all have already raised. Like everyone here, it seems, I felt this was an extremely strong year for jazz. My best-album list, open to all genres, reflects that conviction: in past years it has included more pop or hip-hop or indie-rock or whatever, and while there were certainly good options out there this year, I couldn’t justify losing the real estate when there was so much jazz to be touted. (Among the albums I loved that missed the cutoff: Billy Hart Quartet, Dave Douglas, Fly, the Brad Mehldau twofer. Probably a dozen others that escape my mind at the moment.) Peter, I’m with you on the Gil Evans Project: it squeezed in at No. 10, because even though I have a natural critical bias towards newness (not to be confused with novelty), that album struck me as a triumph of concept and execution, and probably would in any era.

I’ve said this before, but I’m not the sort of critic who lives for quantifying: the act of ranking interests me far less than the art of explanation. That said, I am always fascinated by the differences in opinion that lay themselves out for inspection. In a few weeks, Ratliff and I will be discussing the year in jazz on the NY Times Popcast; for now, I’ll note that we had more overlap this year than ever before. And there are albums on Ben’s 10 that I didn’t consider for inclusion but can happily endorse. (Every recent album by Jeremy Pelt has made a strong case, but Soul may be the derby winner.)

Gio: I agree about the visionary qualities that bind ERIMAJ, Karriem Riggins and Rafiq Bhatia, bursting out beyond the jazz frame. (I also agree that Bhatia’s album is a head-turner; haven’t seen him live yet, but I’m looking forward to it. “Summit-seeking and fastidious” strikes me as a great thumbnail description.)

But I’m not entirely convinced that 2012 was some kind of tipping point, or even “the year when we got a full picture of how well jazz’s foundations can undergird eclectic ventures.” The album that received the most jazzcritical consensus, Accelerando, was a refinement rather than a breakthrough; likewise Christian aTunde Adjuah. The eclecticism of scope and taste represented by someone like Justin Brown is marvelous, but not an especially new wrinkle, either.

As for the crossover traction of Robert Glasper and Esperanza Spalding, I’m totally on board, but we’ll see. Radio Music Society seems to me an ennobled but weirdly hermetic exercise, even with all the guests; Spalding’s influence in the world, which I hailed in this space last year, won’t have much to do with the album. And Black Radio has resonated with a stylish constituency that maybe embraces jazz more as a signifier than as a process. I don’t think Glasper moved the needle so much as he rightly spotted which house the party was at. (As I write this, I’m waiting to see what Ratliff had to say about his Stevie Wonder tribute at Harlem Stage.)

Late the other night, after a long evening that included one crowd-pleasing set at the Vanguard — and I use that modifying phrase without a touch of the pejorative ­— I checked in on the live stream of 121212: The Concert for Sandy Relief. The cause was eminently worthy, as Jim can attest, and the assemblage of talent was impressive. (I tuned in just in time to witness Sir Paul McCartney beckoning Lady Diana Krall to the stage. I didn’t pay any attention to what she was wearing.) But as I caught up with the show on my DVR the following evening, it seemed to me like a dispatch from a distant and rapidly fading ghost world.

The old monoculture that a benefit like this is designed to mobilize — you’ll know what I mean if you slogged through the concert, or read the bullet-pointed recap by Sasha Frere-Jones — really no longer has a sustainable future. Forty years from now, what will we all hold up as the epochal pop of this here moment? Bruno? Mumford? RiRi? Taylor? I doubt that you could poll 10 random people and get a quorum. So Gio, you talked about jazz finally accepting its position on the fringe, and there may be something to that. But I’d counter that it’s almost all fringe now. Jazz just got there first.

Enough for now; I’m looking forward to the next few choruses. Greg, we’ll expect a full report from that Chris Botti gig. Wonder if he’ll call up another famous guest to do his “Nessun Dorma” shtick?

On to the next one,

Nate

Flourishing on the Fringes

 Part Four 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: Giovanni Russonello

Astrid Riecken/FTWP 

Hi Nate, Peter, Greg and Jim,

It’s been a joy reading everyone’s posts so far. First off, I have to thank all of you, my “elders” in this jazz writing game, for all the inspiration that your work has provided me over the years. It’s a thrill to be hashing this stuff out with you folks.

I’ve been thinking lately about how jazz has a way of conveniently marking itself off by decades. How considerate it was of Coleman Hawkins, say, to record his bebop-auguring “Body and Soul” right as the 1930s were giving way to the ’40s. Or of all those luminaries who happened to wait until 1959 to give jazz a full-body makeover. Or of Miles Davis to release Bitches Brew in 1970, guaranteeing that the next decade would be given over to jazz-rock fusion. Then there was Wynton Marsalis, in early 1982, issuing his debut album and ushering in a decade of phoenix-like bop playing. You get the point.

To me, 2012 was that kind of year. A lot of forces converged to renegotiate jazz’s place in American culture. I think the 2010s will go down as the time when open-armed symbiosis with all sorts of art — mostly other music, but not exclusively — became the governing paradigm. Musicians are crossing boundaries at a fast clip, yet almost always avoiding the mainstream. That can be both a good and bad thing.

Nate, in your wrap-up last year, you noted the “stealth jazz influence” in a lot of the creative pop music that’s been coming out recently. I think you were right on in saying that this has the markings of jazz education’s influence all over it. There’s something else at play now, too: Spotify memberships became a commonplace this year. So we have to reckon with the impact of an unprecedented global aqueduct of musical dispersion; it can seem like everyone is listening to everything.

Most young jazz performers are reaffirming the postmodern definition of jazz that’s now more or less indisputable, as far as I’m concerned: Jazz is whatever jazz musicians play. But that hasn’t totally changed what it means to be a jazz musician; you have to know the tradition. The music’s finest fruit will always come from those who understand West African-born rhythm from the inside out, and who understand jazz as expressing some sort of insurgent ideal. (That’s part of why the #BAM discussion, which spilled over into 2012, was very much worth having, even if tempers on both sides — and a blackout from major media — prevented it from blooming.)

Photo: Mike Schreiber

This was the year when we got a full picture of how well jazz’s foundations can undergird eclectic ventures. To some degree, that’s what was happening on this year’s two most talked-about records made by jazz musicians: the Robert Glasper Experiment’s Black Radio and Esperanza Spalding’s Radio Music Society. The common word in those titles is a tip-off; I’d argue that the records will end up having a more important effect on the future of commercial music — principally hip-hop and R&B — than on that of jazz. But it was still good to see some prominent jazz musicians draw attention for their interest in other “great American art forms.” Plus, it points to another upside to all this cross-pollination. A friend of mine said she came across Black Radio online, when clicking through Erykah Badu’s catalog. From there, Spotify’s “related artists” feature guided her to a Christian Scott (aTunde Adjuah?) record. Who knows where that will lead her.

But when I look back on this year’s harvest, I’m convinced that albums like Rafiq Bhatia’s Yes It Will (which snuck onto my top 10 list),or ERIMAJ’s Conflict of a Man, or even Karriem Riggins’ Alone Together actually tell us more about the direction jazz is going. These discs, all debuts by musicians under 40, don’t force any dualistic conceit about fusing two genres; listening to them can feel like drinking up an ocean of influences.

The goal of Bhatia, Riggins and Jamire Williams of ERIMAJ is fundamentally the same as any classic jazz player’s: to throw light on the ironies of struggle, the productive partnership of pain and joy. Sometimes it can just be easier to evoke those contradictions when your music encompasses John Coltrane, Soft Machine, Sunn O))), Flying Lotus. (I’m thinking especially of Bhatia here. Both in concert and on record, I am thrilled by how his music can be so simultaneously summit-seeking and fastidious.)

If this is where we’re headed, it makes sense that Jason Moran seems to be the hottest name on the lips of jazz fans these days. After Dr. Billy Taylor died, Moran took over as artistic advisor for jazz at the Kennedy Center here in D.C. This past October marked the beginning of his first season as a jazz curator, and its scope has been something to celebrate. So far, he’s held an election night jam session with bluegrass musicians and opera singers sharing the stage with his own sextet; converted an area of the stately center into a dark-lit dance hall for a Medeski, Martin & Wood show; and presented a “KC Jazz Club” concert by Christie Dashiell, a young, adventurous singer from D.C. who’s relatively unknown on the national stage.

It takes a while for fundamental changes in the music to seep up into major performing arts institutions, so when you see the Kennedy Center already opening its arms to Moran’s experimental approach, you can almost watch the Young Lions vanishing from the rearview. (I wrote a piece for CapitalBop comparing his vision to that of Jazz at Lincoln Center; it might have felt like a potshot, if the differences weren’t so stark.)

In a JazzTimes profile of Moran earlier this year, I thought about why he seems ready to bear the music’s standard in an age of artistic crossbreeding. A big part of it is his embrace not just of varied musical influences, but of multimedia; at the recent Whitney installation that you mentioned, Nate, Moran and his wife — the opera singer Alicia Hall Moran — incorporated music, video, performance art and much else. That’s status quo for them, and for a growing number of jazz players.

The price of such wide-ranging artistic exploration is, of course, that you separate yourself from the mainstream. But a place on the fringe doesn’t connote stagnation. I think it works the other way — freeing you from certain commercial considerations and making room for straight-up expression. For once, I feel like jazz is learning to accept those advantages. The “jazz is dead” conversation now feels like a crude joke that’s been told too many times: The punch line doesn’t have any bite left. Even the awkwardness of the suggestion is gone. Jazz isn't dead, it's just spreading its wings. Nate, to respond to your question, people now seem at peace with the idea that the jazz tradition is itself a constant innovation.

I don’t mean to suggest that jazz lives in some distant, utopian world where all mercantile worries vanish. I don’t want to paint the internet as an absolute plus, either. A struggle for donations and the technology-triggered decline of radio have quietly eviscerated jazz on the airwaves in Boston, Los Angeles and D.C. Radio is a force that brings us together, gives people a touchstone, invites listeners to hear things they wouldn’t otherwise. For those reasons, the medium is a boon to any marginalized music (or strain of thought), and it's jarring to watch it disappear.

Still, the web has also empowered folks to think and work outside the box in helping the music thrive. You guys are right that the attrition of venues is a serious problem, including in D.C., where U Street (Black Broadway, as it’s long been known) is down to just two bona fide jazz clubs. To help make up for that, and build an audience for future clubs, CapitalBop puts on DIY shows at non-traditional venues, and we get the word out through our web presence. We’re far from the only ones. House Party Starting in Chicago, Search & Restore in New York, and a handful of similar organizations across the country are filling a need vacated by disappearing clubs, while showing how the web can help corral young listeners who are oblivious — but open — to contemporary jazz. (Just before the Undead Music Festival’s nationwide Night of the Living DIY in June, I wrote something for A Blog Supreme about the importance of DIY jazz organizations.)

And as long as we’re talking venues: Greg and Nate, I’m definitely concerned about the downfall of St. Nick’s Pub in Harlem, and the future of Lenox Lounge. But as you observed, Greg, there are still a handful of spots there. And what matters most to me is that the neighborhood is again a hotbed where a bumper crop of young stars lives, works and practices together.

I was in the pianist Gerald Clayton’s kitchen a while back, talking to him for a JazzTimes story on the Harlem scene, when he got to raving about his roommate, the drummer Justin Brown. He was talking about the endless wealth of music that’s liable to gust out of Brown’s computer speakers on a given day: singer-songwriter stuff, Indian classical, gospel — the gamut. The best part is that when the urge strikes them, Clayton and Brown get to call any of the dozens of young, professional musicians living in their neighborhood and convene a living-room jam session. I’m eager to see how the partnerships between these Harlem players — Clayton, Brown, Moran, Jamire Williams, Ben Williams, Fabian Almazan, Taylor Eigsti, Kendrick Scott and plenty more — help them churn something new and intimate out of their vast collective ken.

All this talk of the future reminds me that I need to pause for a moment, as you guys have, to recognize the great ones we lost this year: Dave Brubeck, David S. Ware, Pete La Roca Sims, Pete Cosey, Ted Curson, Shimrit Shoshan, Austin Peralta and so many others. I only had the chance to experience the first two of those names live (Brubeck with his quartet, and Ware in a heart-stirring solo soprano saxophone show), but every artist on that list calls up a distinct and enthralling sound in my brain. Which reminds me why we fight for this music: It shows us how to communicate, cooperate, construct, without ever compromising the essence of what gives us freedom.

Until the next Time Out,

Gio

Not Out of the Woods Yet

Brian Harkin for The New York Times

Red Hook Jazz Festival

Urban Meadow, June 10

Angel Faces

Chad Batka for The New York Times

2011 NEA Jazz Masters Awards

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jan. 11

What Was This Thing?

[10/21/10: Updated with Audio]

George Wein is at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola this week, with the renewable resource known as the Newport All-Stars. The occasion doubles, belatedly, as a birthday celebration. (“This is my 85th October, and I’m glad to be here,” Wein quipped at the start of Wednesday’s early set. “But the truth is, I’m glad to be anywhere.”) It also serves as an intergenerational experiment, by purposeful design. 

Before I go any further: full disclosure, etc. Now, you may know that Wein has recently taken a keen interest in younger musicians, stopping by the Jazz Gallery or the Stone or various points in Brooklyn to hear what’s what. This week he decided to welcome a slew of guests he’d encountered on the scene. During the set that I caught, it was Rudresh Mahanthappa, who is 39. (The late set featured Miguel Zenón, another alto saxophonist, a handful of years younger than that.)

Sleepless in Seattle

The Seattle jazz scene, insofar as such a thing can be responsibly encapsulated, is the subject of this feature in Arts & Leisure, due out in print this weekend. A few days ago I also sat down for a conversation with Ben Sisario, for the NY Times Popcast (via the ArtsBeat blog).

My focus was on the high school, collegiate and post-collegiate level, where I see real changes taking place. (The photo above is from a scene depicted in the piece: Riley Mulherkar earning some comically expressive respect from a certain fellow trumpeter. Shaky video here.) I won’t expand much further on my basic thesis, since it’s all up in the piece. But some additional context might be nice. Shall we?

Direction Nowhere

Forty years ago this month, Miles Davis opened for Neil Young at the Fillmore East. I wrote about their intersection a while back for an EMP Pop Conference, and now the piece has finally been released into the wild, thanks to the intrepid online magazine At Length. 

One animating idea in the piece is the power of unknowing. At one point in Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography, by Jimmy McDonough, Young offers probably the single best analysis of Crazy Horse:

Riders, Passengers

 

I’ve blobbed before in this space about Highway Rider, the new Brad Mehldau album, produced by Jon Brion. Chances are, you already know that it’s their first collaboration since Largo, which was released in 2002. I wanted to take the opportunity to not only tackle the new release but also revisit the implications of the older one, which has come to mean a lot more than it did on first arrival. So that was the explicit angle of this piece, in the current Arts & Leisure section. 

One thing that struck me, as I dug around, was how deeply Largo resonated with younger musicians. I had expected it, but not quite to this extent. Marco Benevento (above), has a track on his next album -- Between Needles and Nightfall, due out in May -- that explicitly invokes the Mehldau-Brion hookup. (It’s a waltz, sun-warped and bittersweet.) Benevento told me he heard the rough mixes for Largo during a lesson with Mehldau, describing that moment in the language of a convert. “It’s really just been a total inspiring thing, very much like a calling: ‘Yes, this is the direction where your heart is wanting to go.’” (You can hear the results of that conviction right here.)

Another pianist, Frank LoCrasto, caught my ear a few years ago with his debut, When You’re There. If you can track it down, listen to “Overture/The Rathskeller/Interlude,” which clearly evokes Brion. Or check the piano solo that follows Becca Stevens’ vocal on “Gathered Impressions” -- trés Mehldau. This isn’t a matter of abashment for LoCrasto, who affirmed that Largo provoked a sustained investigation into Brion’s history as both a producer and a singer-songwriter. (To hear LoCrasto’s version of the gospel, look here.) 

 I also heard form Erik Deutsch, whose Hush Money patently reflects a Largo influence. (That’s my assessment; judge for yourself.) “I had always been excited by Brad Mehldau’s playing, compositions, and treatment of contemporary covers, which spoke to my equal love for jazz, pop, and rock music,” Deutsch said in an email message. 

“Largo was ambitious texturally and compositionally, and definitely true to the history of sonic rock n roll production. The impressionistic jazz drumming of the trio records was replaced with straight-up rock pocket playing. There were lush horn and synth pads, crusty loops, and bubbly drum programs. There were adventurous piano treatments, including heavy distortion. Also, there were very few solos, especially from anyone in the band besides the leader. It’s not that these techniques stemmed from totally new ideas, but they did represent a new direction in jazz music, one that made sense to a younger generation of musicians (including myself).”

 Tomorrow I’ll post more on Highway Rider, with an emphasis on the Mehldau-Brion hookup, and audio clips from the recording studio.

Rank and File

The new column, about big bands and innovation, is now up at JazzTimes. You may recall that this subject had the jazz blogosphere abuzz not long ago. (If you don’t recall, just trust me, or start here and work your way back.) Alas, the online serve-and-volley transpired after the magazine had gone to print, or I would have incorporated it.

I also had to file just a few days before the NEA Jazz Masters concert, which began with the awesome head trip of Muhal Richard Abrams conducting the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. (Thankfully I had heard that piece, “2000 Plus the Twelfth Step,” in its premiere.)

So perhaps, from the standpoint of an RSS metabolism, the column feels outdated. I’d wager that most of the people who find their way here are well aware of the ground it covers. What interests me more in this case is the potential to reach another segment of the JazzTimes readership, people like Irwin Kimke of Buffalo Grove, Illinois. He has a letter in the current issue that reads as follows:

I have been a JazzTimes reader for a long time, since back when it was a newspaper. I am disgusted. Why? I just went over the last five issues of JT and didn’t find one single, solitary article about a big band. the only references to big bands are in your CD reviews. I have just renewed my yearly subscription, but unless things change that renewal will be my last.

 Now, I’m not sanctioning the practice of subscriber ultimatum. But it’s worth considering Mr. Kimke’s point of view, however far it may fall from my own. This was one objective of the current column, and a big reason for using Stan Kenton as the framing device. The music of Darcy James Argue and John Hollenbeck may be formally conventional to some observers, comparatively speaking (I refer you again to that blog dustup, above) -- but that’s hardly true among the listening majority. Or in the case of Mr. Kimke, a vocal and selectively well-informed minority. (I’m extrapolating here.)

 The big band-related results of this year’s Grammy Awards -- which Hollenbeck covered, in a manner of speaking -- would seem to confirm my thesis. (For the record, I have seen the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, in their hometown, and they were great. Formally inventive, no. But that’s not the only yardstick for success.) Anyway, there are a lot of people out there who love big band music. Some of them may be only dimly aware of what’s happening along the forward flank of that tradition. Perhaps they have no interest, which is fine. But with apologies to another oldfangled big band touchstone, Ya Gotta Try.