THE GIG

Marclay, Screen Play

Today I traded emails with Roberta Smith, an esteemed art critic for the Times, on the subject of Christian Marclay: Festival, currently at the Whitney. This is an exhibit I’d encourage a lot of people to see, even without the involvement of improvisers like guitarist Mary Halvorson (who will perform in a version of “Screen Play” on July 21 and 24, and attempt to coax music out of “Wind Up Guitar” on July 22, 24 and 28. Look here for a full schedule; there’s so much more.)

In one of these ArtsBeat posts I mention “Band,” Marclay’s contribution to the 2002 Whitney Biennial -- the very same Biennial that prompted this righteous takedown by Smith. I wasn’t impressed by the Biennial that year, either, and penned a review of my own for the Philadelphia City Paper. (If you’re interested in that bit of invective, skip to the end of this post; I don’t want to put the link anywhere near Smith’s, for fear of suggesting some kind of critical equivalency.) 

 Anyway, “Band” consisted of musical instruments modified so as to be unplayable. In my review, I called it a “half-wit one-liner,” which strikes me now as unhelpful and wrongheaded, given that I still vividly remember the piece. Among its component parts were “Virtuoso,” an accordion whose bellows stretched out in a coil, and “Drumkit,” featuring drum and cymbal stands telescoped almost to the ceiling. (I wonder whether John Stanier of Battles ever saw “Drumkit,” by the way. Seems he might have.)

Here’s a mini-doc about Marclay’s musical innovation -- the physical aspect of his work that Festival sort of shunts to the background: 

Here he is working the decks on the short-lived, fondly remembered NBC show Night Music (the intro is by its host, David Sanborn):

 

And here, for your amusement only, is my review of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. As promised and/or threatened.

Herbie Fully Loaded

  

I’m coming a bit late to this expansive post on Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, sacred cows and polemical critics at the Bad Plus blog, Do the Math. (Did I leave anything out? You bet I did. Read the damn thing for yourself.) I feel as though I’ve done this a lot already, but congratulations to Ethan Iverson for a piece that feels both passionate (in its feeling) and dispassionate (in its fairness). It’s good criticism, made all the better by the open-forum commentariat.

One undercurrent in the post -- about the deference shown to Hancock and Shorter by critics, perhaps partly for fear of mass indignation -- rang familiar, amusingly and scarily so. There isn’t a jazz critic working who hasn’t marveled at the vitriol generated by Peter Watrous’s notorious takedown of Shorter’s High Life. To adapt a phrase from Iverson’s assessment, it was a drowning-kittens moment. (I agree, by the way, that we need this kind of criticism even, or especially, when it runs contrary to our own baseline judgments.)

Real Life (Talking)

 

Lindstrom & Christabelle

“Real Life Is No Cool”

My apologies for posting this so belatedly, and for the general silence at this frequency. I’ve been holed up in Deadlineville, and out of town for personal reasons, and juggling this and that. There’s stuff on the way, including a Playlist this weekend and a feature on Orchestrion, the mind-trippy new project (album, tour, quixotic obsession) from guitarist Pat Metheny. Some context, in case you have yet to see it: 

And while you’re here, allow me to steer you in the direction of a back-and-forth involving a vested party, an impartial observer and a worthy riposte. The subject is big band innovation and critical consensus, more or less. I’d be curious to hear the perspective of a certain blogger at the heart of this debate, though I wouldn’t begrudge him some pragmatic silence. I should note that my next JazzTimes column addresses the issue of big-band progressivism, falling prey, as it were, to some of the ostensible biases that Graham Collier decries. 

Final Round: Can You Dig It?

Part Eight 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: Andrey Henkin

In my final thoughts, I am reminded of an exchange I had with John Surman (above) some years ago during an interview. We were talking about what jazz was and wasn’t and I commented that I didn’t really know, I just knew it wasn’t popular. And I could have sworn someone mentioned that Simpsons episode that mentioned jazz radio (138 people can’t be wrong) but I can’t find it. I sometimes wonder how many of those “138 people” are left. 

But being in Chicago and seeing sold-out evenings at the Umbrella Music Festival in November, seeing good crowds for complex music this summer in Vancouver and intense audience reaction in the Perspectives Festival in Sweden in March, I am generally encouraged by the health of progressive music (which really absorbs everything that we’ve mentioned in these posts, including jazz artists not having issues getting exposure). Ken Vandermark and I once spoke about the subject of audience and I made the comment that all it would take was LeBron James plugging Paul Bley and record sales would explode. Ken disagreed about that... who knows who is right (since I don’t see it happening). But probably what jazz needs is a continued stream of conscientious listeners, even if that stream is more like a trickle. 

Jazz is certainly not ever going to reclaim its mantle as popular music (when was that again? ‘50s? ‘40s? ‘30s?) so a little bit of realism is necessary. AllAboutJazz-New York received over 2,000 CDs in 2009, which is a staggering number, even when considering that comes from all over the globe. So the musicians are still there and, to some extent, a support structure (labels, clubs, festivals, promoters) is as well. The audience is also there and while it might not be large in number, it is huge when it comes to enthusiasm and grass-roots energy. 

I teach a class about writing on live music; one of my students was exposed to Han Bennink at 15 and has gone on to interview him for the Stuyvesant High School newspaper, invited William Hooker to her college and plays Sun Ra on her university radio program. I’m not patting myself on the back for this but it shows that jazz can gain new audiences as long as musicians keep being sincere in their efforts. I close with a quote from one of my favorite movies, The Warriors, which is germane to this conversation. Or maybe it isn’t...I just love this flick.

Happy New Decade!

Someone's Tradition, Anyway

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

From: Peter Margasak

I think that Vijay Iyer quote sorta summed up many of the things I far less articulately attempted to express in my earlier bit. I’d like to think that everyone shares his opinion, but I’m afraid there is a generational schism; I’m sure plenty of folks would agree with his statement in theory, but reality is a different can of worms. Anyway, I think Nate’s point rings true. As the decade comes to a close this openness isn’t such a big deal, and I’m glad that’s the case. Jason Moran does indeed represent this kind of thinking as much as anyone during the previous ten years. 

Looking back on the previous exchanges it seems that a few of us really focused on music that was smashing those boundaries at the expense of more traditional practitioners of jazz. I’d say great new records by everyone from Von Freeman (above) to John Hollenbeck to Matt Wilson are all in the tradition -- someone’s tradition, anyway -- and they brought me as much pleasure as any other record this year. Hell, I loved Anthony Coleman’s rather conservative spin through the music of Jelly Roll Morton on Freakish.

And while I big upped Chicago, I think there are fascinating things happening all over the country, and, of course, the globe. My beloved Chicago Reader ran a pretty good piece this week about a Thai pop singer that discusses the futility of year-end lists because there’s always more that we don’t hear. Writer Noah Berlatsky ends the piece with, “Whether or not I download that Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, the world is still going to be bigger than my list. Which is a reassuring thought.” Amen.

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!

Let's Hear It For New York

Part Five 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: Ben Ratliff

 

Did someone before Andrey really demote New York as jazz capital of the world?   Who: the head of the NEA? The editor of Forbes? David Longstreth?

I get really excited too when I go to other cities and see a more nurturing and affordable system for musicians. Haven’t given up on New York yet, though. As a farm, it’s hopeless. As a market, it’s still pretty damn good.

I took a musician friend from Dublin to the Stone the other night to see Peter Evans’ new group (above) and she was stunned by the level of musicianship, the tenacity of everything, the brain-power on display to about 40 very quiet people. She was having what you could call a profound reaction. 

I myself had one at James P. Johnson subculture a few months ago at Smalls, the fundraiser for the headstone. Imagine, all these people in one small place, coming from completely different backgrounds and aesthetic universes, giving it up for a guy who died in 1955, and completely engaged in doing so. Nothing fake about it.

I don’t wish for more cool clubs in New York where 25-year-olds with money can feel at home. There’s no end to them here. Art-school bands are great, and supper-club bands are great, but there’s more to life. I wish for more places where three different generations can get together around music, and I wish for more music that can be gotten around by three different generations. Hold it: I’m not talking about an idea of “heritage” music, or conservatory music, or something mediated by NPR. For obvious reasons I think jazz, in the largest sense of the word, and in flavors that are yet to be discovered, is right for this void. 

Hitting the Road

Part Four 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: Andrey Henkin

 

 

Dear Nate, Ben, Hank and Peter,

I’m glad I got a later slot in this Algonquin round email. I could simply react to what everyone else has said thus far. I agree wholeheartedly with Peter in his assessment of Chicago. Having made my first trip out there for the Umbrella Music Festival in early November, I was impressed by the sort of community-building that scene of musicians engages in, something I find woefully lacking in New York.

Sure, there are circles of musicians here but I find far too few porous borders (let me book The Stone for a month and I’d bring together some interesting first-time collaborations: Peter Evans/Jeremy Pelt duo, anyone?). That said, since Obama has already displayed a penchant for plugging his adopted home state -- be it through the Olympics debacle or the just-announced plan to move Guantanamo inmates to a Northern Illinois prison -- he should listen to Peter and invite somebody new to play at the White House. My vote? The Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet (above). With Chicagoans, Germans and Scandinavians, it seems a perfect band to reinforce the notion of global engagement. What would Steven Colbert have to say about that, I wonder? (One other note on Chicago: Muhal Richard Abrams/Fred Anderson duo as part of the AACM concert series...one of my gigs of the year.)

 And using Umbrella as a jumping-off point, let me also echo praise lavished on Akira Sakata (left). I knew his work through Yosuke Yamashita mainly but had the chance to see him twice this year, once in Sweden in March and then at Umbrella. Both times he played with his trio of bassist Darin Gray and drummer Chris Corsano. Nate mentioned sax trios... this is the best one out there for my money. Playing free jazz well is tapping into something internal and Sakata-san has an unending wellspring.

And Chris Corsano is a drummer exemplifying musicians not limiting themselves to jazz or noise or whatever. Any of us who saw his trio with Evan Parker and Nate Wooley at The Stone in October should agree.

Segueing from Japan to debuts, check out Nobuyasu Furuya’s sax trio on Clean Feed, Bendowa. The Portuguese label releases so much and from so many high-profile artists, a disc like this can get overlooked. Darius Jones’ album was a remarkably mature debut. I forget who described him as coming out “fully formed” but I think that is an accurate assessment. And as Hank mentioned, tapping Cooper-Moore and Rakalam Bob Moses was inspired. So much so that when the band played at the AUM Fidelity showcase at Abrons Arts Center in October, Moses’ absence (replaced by the younger and more frenetic Jason Nazary) was too much for the band to overcome. And lastly on the debut thread, after years of being so impressed by John Hebert’s deliciously open concept of bass playing (learned at the proverbial knee of Andrew Hill), his debut Byzantine Monkey was a dynamic first statement.

Håkon Kornstad is probably the most interesting saxist out there these days in terms of the breadth of his projects. The duo with Ingebrigt Håker Flaten was remarkable and Dwell Time just as much. He recently played that music live at Monkeytown (which is really growing on me as a venue for this kind of music), and I am most captivated by an “avant-garde” saxist who appreciates and strives for beauty above all else:

Not to bring things down, but one instance of the supergroup that disappointed me greatly this year was the Five Peace Band, with Chick Corea and John McLaughlin. I heard the record and wasn’t very impressed and live at Jazz at Lincoln Center in April (a booking nearly as surprising as Ornette Coleman), the band seemed flat in the way only fusion bands can, which is to say, hyperactive yet hypoglycemic. Maybe Corea was tired from non-stop touring for the last couple of years but what’s McLaughlin’s excuse? Why can’t such an amazing player finally find a project that will make everyone forget about the Mahavishnu Orchestra? 

As we enter a new decade, I am encouraged by all the labels supporting jazz and “related configurations”, to borrow an WBAI term, like the aforementioned Clean Feed, Intakt, Kadima Collective, No Business and even a resurgent ECM (great albums by Miroslav Vitous, John Surman, Evan Parker) as I am saddened by New York’s demotion in terms of “Jazz Capital of the World.” In January, I am making a trip to Philadelphia to see the Circulasione Totale Orchestra, who are skipping New York on a small tour, as do most traveling musicians. Club bookers either draw from the same pool of musicians or we have the curator model, which is nice but hardly inclusive. 

Tonic remains empty and festivals held in small Austrian villages outclass anything we have here. I never have a problem choosing my Shows of the Year but find myself looking forward more and more to trips out of town.

Midwest Represent: Scrambling Purity, Fiercely Independent

Part Three 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: Peter Margasak

 

 

Dear Nate, Ben, Andrey and Hank,

I’ll echo Hank’s delight in engaging in this exchange. Turning back to Nate’s question about Esperanza and Babs... only the former strikes me as truly noteworthy, but I’m disappointed that Obama keeps inviting back the same musician. It’s exciting to see jazz get such a platform, but there are plenty of other worthy (dare I say, far more interesting) folks that should get the call from here on out.

I’m happy that the Lewis went into paperback this year, further extending its impact. As the sole participant here that doesn’t live in New York, I’m always happy to see Chicago get some props, even if Lewis and Threadgill haven’t lived here in decades; the city’s fiercely independent spirit lives on, certainly through the music of Lehman and Iyer (who, along with Threadgill, all landed in my top five albums). While big name organizations in Chicago, from the city-sponsored Jazz Festival to Symphony Center, draw the local media attention, what really matters in this city is increasingly the responsibility of musicians. All but one of the presenters behind Umbrella Music -- a loose constellation of three strong weekly series -- is a musician, and this year they curated their best festival yet, and probably the most exciting week in the city’s adventurous music calendar. These guys know that no one is going to give them anything for nothing, so they tend the garden themselves, and it’s been paying off.  

   It’s also nice to see some of the best groups from Chicago -- Josh Berman’s Old Idea, Jason Adasiewicz’s Rolldown, James Falzone’s Klang, Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things -- getting noticed by New Yorkers. I’m still thrilled and mildly shocked that Ken Vandermark (right) played some gigs in a quartet with Eric Revis, Jason Moran, and Nasheet Waits a few months back.

I suppose related to the early achievements of the AACM is the continued scrambling and/or disregard to any kind of purity, whether it’s a drummer like Tyshawn Sorey writing post-Feldman guitar music or the wonderfully bizarre amalgam of heavy metal, cracked bluegrass, and shambling funk by the Seabrook Power Plant. Maybe this is an irrelevant point as the present decade comes to its conclusion, but I’m consistently encouraged and excited as the flung open doors are torn off their hinges and the openings keep widening. Why the hell not? The problem with this reality in our profession (knock on wood that I can keep calling it that) is that more and more music falls off the “jazz” map, meaning that the radars of so many writers only go so far -- present company excluded, natch -- so that lots of the most interesting stuff, especially if it’s produced outside of New York, is largely invisible. Most jazz from outside of the US suffers the same problem -- if we don’t hear great music from Germany (Die Enttäuschung, pictured below; Christian Lillinger), Sweden (Jonas Kullhammar, Alberto Pinton) or Japan (Akira Sakata, Otomo Yoshihide) does that mean it doesn’t exist? And that’s always the rub about year-end considerations -- I mostly get frustrated about the music I still haven’t heard rather than rating the records I have.

 

 

So many records, so many shows, so many musicians. Although I don’t want to reopen the Terry Teachout jazz is dead can o’ worms, I’ve never seen such a crushing deluge of new music. Yes, much of it is boilerplate, but there are still countless musicians really pushing. I’m still lucky enough to able to buy records at real record stores (Jazz Record Mart, Dusty Groove), but I can’t deny that I’ve taken advantage of downloading to further add to the pile of music. I’ve spent more and more time thinking, “Where do I draw the line?” I take a certain pride in trying to be comprehensive, but it’s getting harder.

I’m not sure if Nate was referring to me when he mentioned Norwegian jazz, but I’ll take the bait. I too love the duo of Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, but they’ve yet to perform out here. But I also dig Kornstad’s recent solo sax album Dwell Time, and he seems to be getting better at developing an original language through simple looping effects. I had the chance to hear him do the same thing in a gorgeous duet with singer Sidsel Endresen -- a one-time ECM folk-jazz singer who’s experiencing a mid-life radicalism, unleashing incredible, all-improvised vocal performances, both solo and with this saxophonist -- that defied categorization, a quality that so much of the best Norwegian stuff exhibits. Atomic didn’t release a record, but its powerhouse drummer Paal Nilssen-Love blew my mind in a trio called OffOnOff with electric guitarist Terri Ex (of the Ex) and bassist Massimo Pupillo (of Zu) that turned churning free improv/noise and gut-punching grooves into the most physical, fantastically brutal concert I saw all year. They have two good records, but they’re impotent next to the live experience.

I feel like I’m rambling a little, which is an indirect way of writing that I didn’t observe any clear consensus or dominant thread over the last year. I also feel like so much of my favorite music is increasingly genre-averse. I mean, I like and appreciate Eric Alexander as much as the next person, but I get more excited by head scratchers like the Tyondai Braxton solo record, the electro-acoustic improv web that David Sylvian croons through on Manafon, or Vijay Iyer reshaping “Galang,” as shown here:

It may not all be strictly jazz, but it all evolves from a kindred spirit of experimentation, individual voices, and curiosity that’s always characterized much of the best jazz, and lots of musicians seem increasingly fluid in their collaborations and interactions.

Supergroup Outbreak, But No Generation Gap

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

From: Hank Shteamer

 

Dear Nate, Peter, Andrey and Ben,

Very nice to have the opportunity to e-dialogue with you all. If you’ll pardon me, I’ll begin by stepping away from jazz for a quick sec...

One of the big stories in rock this year was the supergroup outbreak. The oft-ridiculed trend yielded cheesy one-offs like Sammy Hagar’s Chickenfoot, but it also gave rise to at least one great album, the self-titled Interscope debut by Them Crooked Vultures, which brought together Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme and Nirvana’s former drum basher Dave Grohl with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones. It was great to see these players decimating the generation gap so successfully, and it’s worth noting that similar collaborations have been brewing in the jazz world.

 Take 31-year-old saxist Darius Jones (left), who tapped two under-appreciated veterans -- pianist and diddley-bo expert Cooper-Moore (63), and drummer Rakalam Bob Moses (61) -- for his powerful debut, Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing), a gutsy, blues-infused free-jazz session that came in at No. 5 on my year-end list. Cooper-Moore and Moses each have lengthy résumés to draw on, but Jones isn’t interested in nostalgic references. Like Them Crooked Vultures, Man’ish Boy sounds vigorous and inventive, with the younger player lighting a fire under his elders and vice versa.

Ethan Iverson, pianist in the Bad Plus, was another player who pursued intergenerational collaboration in 2009. For a few years now, Iverson has made a habit of interviewing elder musicians on his blog and then engaging them on the bandstand. This two-pronged approach obviously has a self-promotional angle - “You’ve read the interview, now see the show” - but it works beautifully nevertheless. 

Iverson’s lengthy chat with Tim Berne, posted in late June, felt like the perfect preamble to their duet gig at the Stone later the same week, with each encounter providing a different window into these artists’ strange yet fruitful rapport. This year, Iverson also anchored a band led by drummer Billy Hart, another artist he’d previously interviewed. A September gig by this quartet was for me one of the year’s true highlights; it struck the perfect balance between classy and challenging. And the pianist isn’t done yet: This coming weekend he stops by Iridium with a quintet featuring two other veterans with whom he’s published Q&As, saxist Lee Konitz and drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath.

A few other strong 2009 releases demonstrated the flip side of the coin, namely an older artist drawing on the vitality and enthusiasm of considerably younger players. Henry Threadgill’s This Brings Us To, Volume 1, cited as a year-end favorite by myself as well as Nate, found the composer riding the exquisitely open-ended grooves of drummer Eliot Humberto Kavee, while Borah Bergman’s gorgeously minimal Luminescence featured the airy lift of bassist Greg Cohen and drummer Kenny Wollesen.

Of course there were tons of great releases that didn’t fit this template. My three favorite jazz discs of the year -- Ran Blake’s Driftwoods, Chad Taylor’s Circle Down, and Jon Irabagon and Mike Pride’s I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues -- were the products of, respectively, a 74-year-old loner, a trio of midcareer inside-outside specialists and a pair of ultraversatile young mavericks. Elsewhere, I was happy to hear strong compositional visions shining through, in ensembles big (Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble, Warren Smith’s Composer’s Workshop Ensemble), small (Linda Oh Trio -- a band to which Ben tipped me off -- Loren Stillman, Seabrook Power Plant) and somewhere in between (Steve Lehman Octet, John Hébert’s Byzantine Monkey, Bill Dixon).

 

In the live arena, duos captured my imagination. The pairings of Håkon Kornstad and Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, (above, and heard at Monkey Town in April -- I know Andrey and Nate dug this gig as well), and Bill McHenry and Ben Monder (at Cornelia St. Café in September) each tapped into a special kind of meditative poetry. (To be fair, Connie Crothers’s quartet and a Joe McPhee solo set took me to a similar state of grace.)

The coming year promises more duo delights, namely the mindblowingly weird tandem of guitarist Steeve Hurdle (formerly of Candian prog-metal heavyweights Gorguts) and pianist Craig Taborn (Tim Berne, The Gang Font, James Carter, etc.), playing the Stone February 13. And for now, back to Robin D.G. Kelley’s fantastic Monk bio...