Chick Corea is going to be an easy man to find this month. He’s in residence at the Blue Note through Nov. 27, with a cavalcade of collaborators. (On Mondays he’ll rest, ceding the stage to some good jazz singers.) The booking seemed like a good excuse to reflect on Corea’s many-sided musical personality, which I did over here.
My personal history with Chick Corea’s music goes back almost as far as my active engagement with live jazz: as I’ve noted in JazzTimes and elsewhere, I had my head turned around by an Akoustic Band concert in 1990, in Honolulu. (An aside: pianist Robert Glasper once told me that the first jazz album he really paid attention to was Alive, the document taped during this tour. He had it on cassette.)
I’ve had occasion to see Corea many times since: in several different trios, and with Origin, Béla Fleck, Remembering Bud Powell and the Five Peace Band. (There are others I must be forgetting.) A few years ago I went to Austin to cover the Return to Forever reunion, observing rehearsals for a couple of days, taking in the big debut and then airing my thoughts, including some mild reservations.
Others have their own reservations about Corea -- I know of at least one prominent musician-blogger who decidely isn’t a fan -- and others still are hyper-specific about which iteration of the artist’s music they prefer.
Everybody digs Now He Sings. But there are those who get especially fired up by Crystal Silence or No Mystery or Three Quartets, and those who prefer the laser-etched contours of the Elektric Band.
I’m interested in this partisanship, which certainly exists with other jazz artists, but usually not in an accessible present tense. So lemme ask you, dear reader: which version of Chick works best for you, and why? What’s the album to beat? If you’re hitting the Blue Note this month, which night, or nights, will you be going? And if Chick is just not your guy, I want to hear from you, too. Have at it, below.
The new JazzTimes column is up, with a personal riff on the value of jazz clubs, even in a pop-up age. I won’t parrot myself here, except to note that the Ortlieb’s Jazzhaus I knew had passed into lore well before the club itself expired. I haven’t come across a really good account of what went down over the last five years or so, but the comment thread beneath this item in the Philly City Paper will give you some idea.
Also, a word about Sid Simmons, who partly defined the Ortlieb’s I remember. A gentleman in every respect, Simmons handled his post with a kind of superhuman patience and dignity. A battered piano, a noisy crowd, a parade of would-be hard-boppers clamoring to sit in. I learned a lot by watching Simmons deal with guys who couldn’t cut it. (I also learned a lot by sitting in with him and Mike Boone every week, but that’s a tale for another time.)
The Sid Simmons-Mike Boone-Byron Landham album Keep the Faith is worth hearing if you’re interested in this corner of the often-underrated mid-Atlantic jazz mainstream; look here for audio samples and download options. And the EPK below features some good interview and performance footage, shot at Ortlieb’s. (Simmons’ thoughts about Boone are very touching.)
Whither Ted Brown? The answer to that question can be found in my feature in Arts & Leisure this weekend, which uses Brown’s return -- at the Kitano Hotel this Wednesday, in case you didn’t know -- as an excuse to reflect on the growing influence of the Tristano School.
I suspect hardcore Tristano fans will find plenty of fault with the piece, which takes a rudimentary approach to a fairly complex set of issues. This was the necessary tradeoff for a general-interest readership, though I do worry about one thing: I hope my characterization of Tristano’s music doesn’t make it seem like rhythm itself was M.I.A.
Anyone who has attempted to transcribe these tunes can attest to the subdivisions and superimpositions that Tristano could inflict on a 4/4 bar; that’s one reason for Larry Kart’s assertion, in The Complete Atlantic Recordings of Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Wayne Marsh, that “Rhythm is the paramount issue in Tristano-related music.”
Still it’s demonstrably true that Tristano subordinated the bassist and drummer in most of his available music, at a time when the rhythm section was king. (Here is where I steer you to Ethan Iverson’s post on Tristano; scroll down, if you must, to the sections on drummers and bassists.) What interested me here was the thought that improvisers now in their 20s and 30s are willing to look past the non-dynamic rhythm sections and embrace Tristano’s music for its considerable strengths. If anyone is responsible for this, it’s Mark Turner.
Part One of a year-end email conversation with David Adler, Chris Barton, Shaun Brady and Jennifer Odell (Jump to: 1 |2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10| 11)
From: Nate Chinen
Joe Kohen for The New York Times
Dear Chris, Shaun, Jen and David,
Well, here we are, closing the lid on another year in jazz, and I can’t decide what narrative to impose. Was this a time of mortal reflection, with the departures of Hank Jones, Abbey Lincoln and James Moody, among so many others? Or a season of triumph, as we observed the endless vitality of Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman and Roy Haynes? Was this the year that proved, with a horde of hard-charging younger talent, that jazz is -- in the words of a certain upstart summer festival -- not dead, but Undead? Or was it just another 12 months of hustling, out in the clubs and concert halls, and in the cloistered spaces where we do our solitary listening? Maybe Option E, for all of the above?
Whatever it was, we tracked and chronicled this year in real time (or, as our social-media metabolism might have it, hyper-real time), and I’m wondering how it looks to you now, with a wisp of hindsight. So to keep up a tradition of sorts at The Gig, I’ve asked you all to engage in a bit of year-end banter. Thanks for joining me -- this should be fun.
At this point you’ve probably sent in your ballots and compiled your lists, and it’ll be fascinating (to some of us, at least) to see where consensus forms. My Top 10 will be posted later this week, so for now I’m going to change the subject slightly. I recently appeared on BBC radio to air my conviction that pianists came out in full force this year. It would have been startlingly easy for me to construct a Top 10 of just pianistic efforts. Others might do the same for guitarists, or drummers.
But consider: Geri Allen, Vijay Iyer, Benôit Delbecq and Matthew Shipp each released a provocative solo disc. Keith Jarrett took the duo route. For trios, try Fred Hersch, Dan Tepfer, Frank Kimbrough, Delbecq again, Kris Davis, Russ Lossing, etc. Larger concepts? Try Myra Melford, Randy Weston, Danilo Pérez, Brad Mehldau. And then there were Jason Moran and Ethan Iverson, each with a band commemorating a decade of strong, unmistakable work.
About that commemoration: we like anniversaries and round numbers. It’s a way of organizing time, reselling material and sifting winners out of the historical mess. (We jazzbos are notalonein this.)
There was nothing perfunctory or contrived, though, about Ten, the album released this year by Moran’s Bandwagon, or Never Stop, the one put out by Iverson with the Bad Plus (above). In both cases you heard the cumulative weight and wisdom of the last 10 years, and a clear sense of intelligent artists taking the measure of their art.
A similar sense of purpose lit up several other commemorative moments this year. (I refer you to the aforementioned Rollins and Haynes.) Shaun and David, I’m sure you both paid close attention to the 10th anniversary of Ars Nova Workshop, the nonprofit Philadelphia presenting organization run by my friend Mark Christman. (More on that in a future post, perhaps.) We commemorate because we care.
And, in some rare cases, because we can make a lot of money. (I’m using the Royal We, in case there was any doubt.) Remember Bitches Brew? Perhaps you know that it turned 40 this year. Perhaps you noticed the all-out promotional push, the shiny new product, the unreleased live footage, the licensed Dogfish Head brew. I never said I was opposed to all of this, by the way.
Why bring up Bitches Brew? I’ll blame Kanye West. (Stay with me here, people.) In the musical world beyond jazz, which most of us also cover in one form or another, this is shaping up to be Annus Kanyebilis, with his new-school media strategy a proven success and his recorded opus landing rave upon rave. No one in pop was more compelling to watch this year, whether you believed you were witnessing aesthetic genius or riveted by a car crash. At times West himself seems unsure about which is which; you all saw the Runaway movie, I presume.
Thinking about how West conquered every room he entered this year, I drew the only parallel that seemed really apt: to post-Bitches Miles Davis, another frequently bedeviled African-American sound-sculptor drawn to aggressive reinvention, unbridled ego and rococo indulgence. This parallel doesn’t entirely flatter either artist.
But jazzfolk often complain about how their music gets left out of the mainstream conversation. Miles would have none of that, for better or for worse. If the timing had worked differently, I suspect he might have put in a cameo on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even if that title is more Mingus-esque in syntax and scope. Look at how much steam can still be generated by Bitches Brew, all these years later. That level of cultural cachet seems to be precisely what West is reaching for.
Speaking of reaching, I believe this exhausts the air in the room, for now. I gladly pass the baton to Chris, out in Los Angeles. Take it in any direction you like, good sir, but just answer me this: was the Nels Cline Dirty Baby premiere as unmissable as it seemed? (Sub-question: how hard should I be kicking myself, still?) cheers to all, Nate
You read that headline correctly: saxophonist Branford Marsalis was born half a century ago today. Some of us will want a minute to absorb that information. Take one if you need it.
Branford has a new album out this week with the Marsalis Family, which is naturally part of his claim to fame. That’s not what I want to talk about here, though. I’d like to talk about the specific achievements of Ellis’ eldest son: as a saxophonist, as a bandleader, and as a public figure besides. (Forgive me, folks, this may get a little personal.)
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