THE GIG

RIP Hank Jones

The passing of pianist Hank Jones lit up the jazz Twitterverse this morning, and for good reason: at 91, Jones was one of the last surviving masters of his momentous peer group, and still playing with extraordinary grace. I last heard him just a year or two ago with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, his partner on an excellent series of Blue Note albums (find them here, here and here). Here’s the NYT obit.

My first encounters with Jones were naturally on record: albums by Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker. When I finally had the chance to see him about a dozen years ago, I was struck most by his correctness, a quality that suffused everything from his chord voicings to his posture and attire. But as Gary Giddins noted in 2007: “Jones’s playing isn’t all that genteel: mannerly, yes, but at the core resolute and spare.”

Giddins’s take is one of several that I posted earlier this morning. Also see: Ben Ratliff, Howard Mandel, Peter Hum, David Adler.  

And by all means, see the clip below, which features Jones in good company, backing Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Sweets Edison, Flip Phillips and Ella Fitzgerald, in a rhythm section with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Buddy Rich. (Ah, YouTube.)

The Oughts, Meet the Dustbin

Part Six of a year-end email conversation with Andrey Henkin, Peter Margasak, Ben Ratliff and Hank Shteamer. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 )

From: Nate Chinen

 

Hey guys,

I was supposed to come up with the next link to this chain over the weekend, but snowfall and football turn out to be wicked procrastination-boosters. I do have some thoughts, though, beginning with this quotation:

“When you look at the history of jazz, everybody who made significant contributions to that music never really saw it as a kind of music. Anybody who can shed that preconception of what jazz is or is not, or should be or shouldn’t be, and can just approach it as human endeavor, I think will find something to resonate with here.” -- Vijay Iyer  (via EPK )

The polls and picks are mostly in, and it looks like Iyer just might have had the consensus choice for best jazz album of 2009. Ben, you had his Historicity as your top dog, irrespective of genre (more on that in a sec). A casual perusal of the 50 JazzTimes critics’ ballots shows that only one voter, editor-in-chief Lee Mergner, had it quite so high -- but also that it appears on 12 total ballots, the same tally as Joe Lovano’s Folk Art, which came in just ahead at #1. 

I’m no numbers-cruncher, so I won’t pursue that gauntlet further. But I’ll gladly pick up another one, the one Iyer throws down in his statement above. Throughout this roundtable so far, we’ve heralded artists who make their way without most of the old hang-ups, ducking the heavy drag of genre obligation. 

Reflecting on that fact this weekend, I got to thinking about this first decade of the new century, and what it has meant for jazz, in some loose sense. Others have done this recently, including my man David Adler, who provides a kind of personal tour on his blog. Over at the Slate Music Club, my model for this email exchange, there was a subplot concerning the best handle for the 2000s, which has been known in some starchy circles as “the Aughts.” Carl Wilson kicked around a few ideas, settling on “the Singles” -- part nod to “Single Ladies,” part acknowledgment of the iTunes-abetted devaluation of the album. But since that trend doesn’t really apply to jazz, here’s another possible option: “the Oughts.” (Indulge me here for a minute, guys.)

 Remember how this decade began? So much agita over definitions! On the one hand we had imposing cultural arbiters (right) telling us what jazz ought to be: blues-based, swinging, firmly rooted in the African-American idiom. On the other hand, there was the countervailing response, which spoke to a Balkanization of jazz, literally and figuratively (cf., the Knitting Factory). At that end of the spectrum, the thinking was that jazz ought to be open-ended and exploratory, not so serious all the time. (Maybe their version was the Naughts, or the Nots.) Of course this is a wildly reductive take on the “jazz wars,” itself a wildly reductive term. 

The point is that we can now survey the Oughts in terms of a cycle of action and reaction. For much of the last decade, jazz was a pendular protectorate, swinging (or not) back and forth between entrenchments, toward some contested new center of truth. Look at Historicity -- or, for that matter, at Folk Art, which resides so comfortably in today’s modern mainstream only because that center has shifted. (Whether we can all admit it is another story.)

I’m not saying that Lovano is inventing a new syntax, or even that Folk Art is more “adventurous” somehow than, say, Congo Square. (We could play this game all day.) But I am indeed arguing that the “preconception of what jazz is or is not, or should be or shouldn’t be,” to borrow Iyer’s formulation, has buckled enough to allow for a wealth of new shoots coming up through the cracks. And there’s no zero-sum game anymore: you can dig Håkon Kornstad and Joe Lovano, the Bad Plus and James P. Johnson, Wynton and Dave. 

If I had to designate a jazz artist of the decade, it would probably be pianist Jason Moran, who has gone out of his way, again and again, to deal with jazz tradition in an honest and personal way. (No accident that Moran is the present-day artist who closes Jazz, the new Giddins-DeVeaux book. Marsalis held down that spot in Jazz, the Ken Burns film and ultimate Oughts artifact.)

There’s one more thing to be said about Moran and Iyer -- and Iverson, whom we’ve also invoked, and Darcy James Argue, whom I can’t believe we haven’t. Each of these musicians has taken it upon himself to articulate his own ideas: about his music, about his influences, and about much more besides. Hank, you shouted out Iverson’s interviews at Do The Math; I’m guessing you’ve already seen his latest bit of jazz criticism too? And has everybody read Iyer on Monk (and physics!), Steve Lehman on spectral music, and Argue, just today, on Bob Brookmeyer? Hard to keep up with it all, right? And just think, we haven’t even gotten to Wynton’s Facebook notes. Has there ever been more transparency, more dialogue, more open-source debate, in all of jazz history? 

I’ll end with a photo: the Vijay Iyer Trio backstage at Newport this summer, with drummer Billy Hart and WBGO producer-host Josh Jackson. What’s good about jazz in 2009? You’re looking at it. One facet of it, anyway.

 

That’s it for my hand in the roundtable, fellas. I’ll pass the aforementioned gauntlet your way, keeping in mind that the holidays loom. Farewell to the Oughts and all that; Hello to whatever’s rounding that corner!

Giddins on Giddins

 Big Think has posted a video interview 

with Gary Giddins. The clip is actually mostly Giddins on criticism, which is always worth hearing. I remember seeing a panel years ago, on which Giddins professed bafflement at the idea that jazz critics would not also be students of criticism -- and yet, he said, that often turns out to be the case. This interview hits on a similar idea (around 11:30 and, more pointedly, at 25:00), along with much else.

Giddins has a big new book out, coauthored with Scott DeVeaux.

Questions, Answers

In the unlikely event that you’re reading this blog and don’t also keep tabs on Do the Math, a.k.a. the Bad Plus web journal, maintained by pianist Ethan Iverson: do not miss the Tootie Heath interview now posted there. (Go right ahead, we’ll still be here when you’re finished.)

Iverson, whose interviewing mojo I have hailed here before, does his usual fine job of coaxing insights from an under-sung jazz legend. I won’t step on the results except to pick up where they leave off, with Tootie on Sonny: “This is what I felt about Sonny Rollins: that he could play anything I played back at me, twice as fast and twice as good.” Iverson then posts video of an “On Green Dolphin Street” recorded in Denmark in 1968. What’s above is from the same session, which can be legally obtained as part of the Jazz Icons DVD series. (Heath begins an easygoing, melodic drum solo at 6:45, though you’d be crazy not to sit through the preceding stuff first.)

And while we’re on the subject of interviews, I’d like to take a moment to plug tomorrow evening’s conversation between critic Gary Giddins and ECM Records majordomo Manfred Eicher, both giants in their respective fields (and, I’m happy to attest, both excellent practitioners of dialogue). The event is free and open to the public; details here.

Finally, a quick programming note: I will be on Soundcheck tomorrow to talk about the Vision Festival’s 28-hour marathon this weekend. The show airs from 2-3 p.m. EST, on WNYC 93.9 FM. You should be able to listen live on the website; an archive will probably appear on Friday. My host will be John Schaefer, another expert interviewer, and an open-minded fellow besides.