THE GIG

Boss Bass

Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times

Back in January, I wrote an obituary for pioneering talent manager and former bassist John Levy, who died a few weeks shy of his own centennial. Soon afterward, it came time for the "bass issue" of JazzTimes, and I found myself thinking of Levy again. 

So I wrote this column, which appeared in the April issue of the magazine — the one with Esperanza Spalding on the cover. I'm posting it here because it hadn't previously made its way online. All my pertinent thoughts are in the column, so I'll say no more. But here for good measure is a clip of Levy playing "Conception" with the George Shearing Quintet: 

 

John Levy, RIP

 

Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times

John Levy, Bassist and Talent Manager, Dies at 99

Come (Again) Sunday

Ruby Washington / The New York Times

Jazz Valedictorians, Cyberpunks and Country Troubadours

Charlie Haden and Hank Jones; Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; Trio M; Bobby Bradford, Mark Dresser and Glenn Ferris; the Little Willies; Albatrosh (Playlist, Jan. 8)

Fuchsia Swing Song

Sam Rivers, Jazz Artist at the Helm of the Loft Scene

More coverage from: 

• Ethan Iverson, Do the Math
• Jim Abbott, Orlando Sentinel
• Howard Mandel, Jazz Beyond Jazz
• Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
• Mark Richardson, Pitchfork
• Ted Panken, Today is the Question
• Jason Crane, The Jazz Session 
• Phil Freeman, Village Voice
• Jon Wertheim, Rehearsing the Blues 
• Hank Shteamer, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches

One More Once: Last Thoughts

Part Eight of a year-end email conversation with Angelika Beener, Aaron Cohen, Joe Tangari and K. Leander Williams. (Jump to: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 )

From: Nate Chinen

Hey gang,

 What a terrific way to wind down the year. I’m grateful to all of you for agreeing to take part in this roundtable — and for bringing so much of substance to the exchange! You really made this a pleasure. Here’s my grasping attempt to close shop. Hang tight, this may be a #longread.

 The issue of Arts & Leisure now sitting on your doorsteps (right, guys?) contains my Top 10, along with those of Ben Ratliff and the indefatigable Jons (Pareles, Caramanica). Aaron, you noted the inclusion of tUnE-yArDs’ whokill on my list. Merrill Garbus, the in-your-face dynamo at the center of that band, crammed so much into this record — Afropop rhythm, jangly harmony, vocals that bark or purr — that it can be easy to miss its jazz moorings.

Her bassist is Nate Brenner, who was raised by an old-fashioned boogie-woogie pianist and then trained at Oberlin; he’s the only other full-time member of tUnE-yArDs, and had a hand in writing some of the songs on whokill.

 This stealth jazz influence was a big feature in some other highly touted releases this year: Bon Iver’s Bon Iver, which is up for Album of the Year; St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy; The Roots’ undun (dig that Don Pullenesque freakout by D.D. Jackson, with attendant ?uestlove fire); even, as Angelika noted, the gilt-armored hip-hop opus Watch the Throne. My current JazzTimes column (analog edition) discusses this phenomenon at length. You can also hear me discuss it with Ben Ratliff on a year-end Popcast. (He begs to differ re: tUnE-yArDs.)

 Speaking of Ben and lists, did you notice what he did this year? High up on his Top 10 is an hourlong set recorded live at 713-->212: Houstonians in NYC, the 92YTriBeCa show that Angelika also mentioned as a highlight. “When it ended,” Ben writes of this high-kinesis jam, “I felt that it said so much about where jazz is now — inasmuch as it is black music, popular music, regional music, improvised music and a philosophy of play — that I didn’t need to hear any more for a while.” (Parenthetically, he adds: “If we can call it an album, it’s a better extended statement than most I heard this year.”)

 Which raises a good question: is the album, as a discrete delivery system, still the best way to adjudicate success in jazz? Do the top-albums lists that we all pore over (Kelvin, you’re the rare exception) really tell us what happened over the past year? Obviously I don’t entirely think so, which is why we’re all here. But I want to use Houstonians in NYC as a springboard for another assertion, about how jazz at its best is the direct product of a social context, a cultural milieu, a moment in time. A scene, in other words. This may sound obvious, but it’s something we (critics and musicians) often take for granted. The music doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. Our perceptions of the music don’t, either.

 This point was born out time and again in 2011. Consider the bonds of brotherhood on Captain Black Big Band, which some of you have mentioned; consider the spirit of inquiry on Miguel Zenón’s Alma Adentro. Consider the vitality of the Chicago scene, invoked by Aaron and ratified by Joe. Or look no further than the wise and pointed assertions made by Geri Allen, in that Alternate Takes interview.

 Well, maybe look a little further. Aaron has a great new book out as part of the 33⅓ series, in which he lays out the social climate and cultural environment surrounding Aretha Franklin’s landmark album Amazing Grace. (I really am preaching to the choir here, so to speak.)

Another new book that smartly unearths the context around the music is Love Goes to Buildings on Fire, by Will Hermes. Its subtitle is “Five Years in New York City That Changed Music Forever,” with a timeframe of 1973 to 1977. Most reviewers have naturally fixated on the Modern Lovers, Patti Smith and Grandmaster Flash (not to mention Springsteen, Dylan, Byrne) — but there’s a lot of good stuff in there about the loft scene, the post-Coltrane avant-garde, and the early stirrings of salsa. David Murray figures into the narrative. So does Lester Bowie, and Eddie Palmieri. Jazz folk should know about this.

 I think the issue of social context is one reason why we all feel a little weird about Jazz at Lincoln Center hanging a shingle in Qatar. What could be less organic than that? I’m not implying that good things won’t happen; as we know from many years of State Department subsidy, jazz has a way of winning people over across the globe. Still, this is the work of an institution expanding its footprint on luxury terms, which is why it feels less like Pops at the pyramids than like the opening of a new Bulgari flagship. Or, worse, like this:

 Sheesh, I’ve gone on too long. One more thing: if we weren’t all invested in the notion of a jazz community, why would the challenges posed by a Nicholas Payton register so strongly, and spark such heated response? Why would we all argue so intently about so much? I’m among those who feel that the Year of the Cannibal, as I tagged it at the beginning of this exchange, actually reflects a defiantly thriving culture, with all the crosstalk and controversy that comes with it.

 Last night I saw the Claudia Quintet +1 with Kurt Elling at Cornelia Street Café, unpacking material from their scintillating album What is the Beautiful? (Cuneiform). At the beginning of the set, drummer-bandleader John Hollenbeck dedicated the evening’s performance to Bob Brookmeyer, one of the dearly departed elders of our tribe. It was heartfelt and true.

 And on that bittersweet note, I’ll simply add that this roundtable has been edifying and inspiring — and totally free of name-calling! — and that I hope to resume the thread in person sometime, with each of y’all. See you out there on the grid, and here’s wishing everyone Happy Holidays, and all the best in 2012.

 yrs,

 Nate

Speak to Me

So Many Musicians Inspired by Paul Motian

Keith Jarrett, Bill McHenry,

Marc Copland and John Abercrombie, Dan Tepfer

Psalm

There have already been many fine and touching tributes to Paul Motian, the master drummer, composer and bandleader, since news of his death rippled through the world yesterday morning. This morning I drove up the Palisades Parkway through a cold mist, listening the whole way to WKCR's memorial broadcast. I think it still hasn't really hit me that I'll never hear the dark clang of his ride cymbal in the Village Vanguard again.

I reviewed Motian often over the last decade; in recent years there were times when I had to stop myself from covering a gig because he'd just been reviewed, in another context, only a week or two earlier. I'm not going to link to anything right now, though, and my present thoughts on Motian -- as an adamantine creative force, a professional enigma and a shaper of the musical dialect for generations of younger players -- hardly feel adequate to the task. I hope it won't seem like a failure of purpose, or insufficient respect, but I'm going to cede the floor to others who have managed, in personal or critical terms, to articulate this loss to the jazz community, especially in New York. 

• Ben Ratliff, responsible for the best writing on Motion over the last decade, wrote the NY Times obituary. See also the Times profile that later became a chapter in Ratliff's book The Jazz Ear.
• Ethan Iverson, who is quoted in the Times obituary (and from whom I heard the news), offers his reflections here. "It's Easy to Remember" will slay you, if you really listen, as you should.
• Hank Shteamer does right by Motian's magical, "phantomizing" time feel in a blog post. I agree that certain of his musical values will surely live on.
• John Rogers, a photographer who was very close to Motian, wrote a beautiful tribute at A Blog Supreme. 
• Finally -- this one had to go last -- Peter Hum has collected reminiscences from a number of musicians, including Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, Marilyn Crispell and Frank Kimbrough. They're all linked off a main post, which also has some choice YouTube footage. 

More on Frank Foster

Frank Foster died yesterday morning, in his sleep, at 82. I spent the afternoon working on the NY Times obituary, which hits major points of interest, starting with the obvious: his indispensable contribution to the Count Basie Orchestra, in its New Testament and legacy editions.

A handful of things had to be left out, including the kinship between Foster and his fellow arranger-bandleader and Basie alumnus Thad Jones. For space reasons, there also wasn’t anything about Foster’s time in Detroit, after college but before Basie. And I didn’t touch on a recent development regarding his publishing rights, which involves the filmmaker Brian Grady and a team of law students at Rutgers.

But after filing and editing the obituary, I saw that others had filled in some of those gaps, notably Felix Contreras and Patrick Jarenwattananon at NPR. Their coverage, on Morning Edition and A Blog Supreme, is heartfelt and thorough; Contreras in particular had written about Foster a number of times over the years.  

While we’re here: don’t sleep on Manhattan Fever, a fully realized album that holds up well, despite its Age of Aquarius undertones. Opening with a boogaloo called “Little Miss No Nose” — a song for his daughter, playing on a comment by Nancy Wilson — the album features a small-to-midsize group that often sounds bigger, thanks to Foster’s canny arranging. Hear it for that band sound, and for Mickey Roker’s drumming, and for the title track, which Foster proudly cited, decades later, as one of his most forward-thinking. 

Another plug: Foster’s work on ¡Viva! Vaughan, released in 1965. The album, which apparently languished in obscurity for years before its 2001 reissue on Verve, impeccably captures that era’s vision of urbane sophistication, with flute, trombones and percussion, and a bossa nova undertow. It features some primo Sarah, and some excellent pop-minded arrangements by Foster. (Its producer, Quincy Jones, may or may not have had some influence there.) It also features a slinky lite-mambo version of “Shiny Stockings,” with Ella Fitzgerald’s lyrics and Willie Bobo’s congas.

Finally, Foster’s 1998 interview (PDF) with William Brower, Jr., for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, is an engrossing read — not only for the road stories and reminiscences, but also for Foster’s thoughts on arranging, and on his own stylistic fluctuation. Here’s just one excerpt, obviously too inside-baseball for a mainstream readership, but probably, dear reader, just inside-baseball enough for you: 

As far as harmony and orchestration is concerned, I really wanted to go beyond Basie.  In the Basie format ninths, elevens and thirteenths, the extensions, are used quite a bit, especially in the modern era with Ernie Wilkins, Quincy Jones, Oliver Nelson, and Neil Hefti, but there were always for the most part conventional harmonic structural arrangements.  I wanted to get beyond that and deal with modes.  I became aware of modes about the time I was observing John Coltrane and his sheets of sound approach. I wanted to incorporate that sheets of sound format into my arranging and harmonizations.  Those sheets of sound that were referred to by critics or writers or whoever talked about that effect, consisted mostly of certain placements of notes that formed certain scales or modes from the bottom of the horn to the top of the horn and back down again.  I began incorporating these modal harmonizations into my writing, in that I wouldn’t just be 1-3-5-7-9 in my approach to harmony in building chords in thirds, in conventional thirds.  I started using more cluster writing, like 1-2-3-4-5. Instead of 1-3-5-7-9, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7.  I would have these very clashy kind of harmonies very often inserted into my arrangements.

P.S.-- on a wildly different note, a Foster-related observation that may remind you of Christmas in July: that Tony Bennett record is tops.

After Hours

Ray Bryant, Jazz Pianist, Dies at 79

Angel Faces

Chad Batka for The New York Times

2011 NEA Jazz Masters Awards

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jan. 11