THE GIG

Year-Ender: All of the Above

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 not alone in 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

Music is the Magic

RIP Abbey Lincoln. Belatedly, here are some links -- and this video, which I had never seen before, from Night Music. (I didn’t want to post clips from the Freedom Now Suite, which are awesome but from a time before Lincoln herself had reached her fearsome maturity as an artist. No, I don’t think the presence of David Sanborn above is a sacrilege.)

• NY Times obituary
• NPR Weekend Edition remembrance
• NPR Jazz Profiles audio archive
• Do the Math on “the middle period”
• Rifftides with two more clips
• The Guardian obituary
  

In addition to the Times obituary above, I wrote a profile of Abbey Lincoln in 2007, before I started this blog. She was a tough but gracious interview, and already not in the best of health. There’s an audio accompaniment to that link, including some of our conversation.

Please feel free to share tributes and more links in the comments.

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.)

Tweet Revenge

So, this conversation still has a little life in it, eh? Others have linked to yesterday’s Soundcheck program, in which Vijay Iyer brought an admirable objectivity to his conversation with Terry Teachout. I appreciated some of what Teachout said, too, though I still take issue with his core conclusions -- among them, the notion that young people shoulder the bulk of responsibility for the declining numbers. Iyer made some good points about demographic trends, including this aphorism: “The problem has been not one of accessibility but one of access.” 

I’m holding fast to my conviction that the poll results are suspect, and should at least be considered as something other than absolute fact. (For more on that, see the comments in a recent post here, notably one by J.D. Considine.) But it’s really no surprise that Teachout, a former member of the National Council on the Arts, would give those results his full endorsement. “Those are real numbers, hard numbers,” he says on WNYC, with what strikes me as a note of defensive credulity. His particular critical perspective also explains his view that jazz’s “high-art” stature has driven an audience decline. As I have argued before, that doesn’t account for what’s really happening among present-day jazz fans, whose interactions with the music largely skirt institutions. 

Blah blah blah, right? OK, here’s what I’m getting at: Howard Mandel, Arts Journal blogger and president of the Jazz Journalists Association, has kicked off a campaign to amass evidence of live-jazz attendance. The medium is Twitter, and the hashmark of choice is #jazzlives. Find more instructions here, on Mandel’s blog, and here, courtesy of Darcy James Argue, who helpfully explains:

The point of all this, of course, is to leverage Twitter's social media juju to draw attention to the live jazz that's happening around us all the time. Even if we take the NEA survey numbers with a grain of salt, it's pretty clear that if you want the kids to come to your shows, you've got to start by reaching them the way they want to be reached.

I have heretofore been a Twitter agnostic, but hmmm...?

Dark Day

RIP Rashied Ali. (Stream WKCR here.)

RIP Les Paul.

RIP George Russell

Deadlines have prevented me from commenting on the commenting sparked by last week’s Chamber Music America post, which has been extremely instructive to me. Thanks to everyone who has waded into this discussion -- and please, keep it going, if you have more to say.

I hope to add a few more thoughts soon, but in the meantime it feels appropriate to pay my sincere respects to composer George Russell, who died on Monday night. His example puts this subject in perspective: it’s hard to imagine another jazz musician who sustained a longer or more productive relationship with the academy. We’ll see tributes across the jazz blogosphere; I’ll update this post accordingly. 

More at:

• Stereophile
• The Secret Society 
• NPR's A Blog Supreme
• The Echoes Blog
• Jazzblog.ca
• Lament for a Straight Line