I’m in Seattle this week for the EMP Pop Conference, presenting under the banner of music and technology. My jam will be Pat Metheny’s Orchestrion project, which reached American shores last week. Tour dates can be found here; I last wrote about the project right here. After the jump, a mess of stuff I’ll be using in the presentation.
When I first met with Pat Metheny in preparation for this feature, it was the day before Thanksgiving, and he was ready for me. I entered the front parlor of his rehearsal space, we sat down, and within a minute or two he had opened a hardcover copy of The Golden Age of Automatic Musical Instruments, by Arthur A. Reblitz. I can’t remember the illustration he indicated -- this one, perhaps? -- but I do have his comments on file. “People were essentially doing this same kind of thing in that wacky period before people had recordings,” he said. “And I mean, this in particular [pointing] sort of parallels the specific kind of thing that I’m doing.” (Here he made eye contact.) “So it’s not like this is something I came up with out of the clear blue sky.”
Pat Metheny is not a crazy person. Far from it, in fact. Spend a couple of hours in his presence, as I did that afternoon and again in December, and this whole robot-orchestra idea begins to seem rational, if not exactly normal. At the time, word wasn’t really out about Orchestrion, though select folk -- like David Adler, now hard at work on his second Metheny cover for JazzTimes -- had seen a demo. The air of secrecy was thick, as Team Metheny counted down the days to its 16-week tour. I couldn’t help but think of a Bond villain in his lair, preparing to unleash his diabolical creation on the world.
Continue reading "Pat Metheny Is Not Insane (OK, Maybe a Little) " »
I took an unpressured, leisurely approach to the festival, which was a nice indulgence. Heard the Vijay Iyer Trio, which met high expectations, and the duo of Jenny Scheinman and Jason Moran, which exceeded them. Had my first, satisfying taste of Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things. And while I was sorry to miss a lot of stuff -- including a late set by Jamie Saft’s Whoopie Pie, pictured above (in a photo by Greg Aiello) -- there was plenty of music to go around.
And plenty of hang time, which was what really made the Winter JazzFest feel, y’know, festive. Maybe my recent introduction to the Twitterverse is playing some role here, but the weekend felt extremely connected to me. (This is one reason I’m sorry to have missed a pertinent APAP / Jazz Journalists Association panel on Sunday. It was squarely on my agenda, but other plans interfered.) In any case, I’m not just talking about virtual connections. It was the whole vibe, which bassist Ben Allison hits on in a blog recap:
The venues were cleared of tables and chairs. People stood, packed together. It was hot and sweaty inside (despite the sub-zero temperatures outside). People talked and laughed and yelled in appreciation of the music, hanging on every note. They applauded not just at the end of solos like they were taught in “jazz appreciation class,” but whenever they felt like it -- during interesting transitions, when a cool groove emerged, when the intensity of a performance changed. It all felt very organic, very musical.
I’d echo those sentiments exactly. So now, a question: how to
sustain this high? There’ll be no less jazz around the city next week, and the week
after that. (OK, maybe a little less.) I’d love to see the energy and passion of Winter JazzFest all year-round. Could happen.
Ars Nova Workshop, the leading jazz and new-music presenter in Philadelphia, launched a stylish new website today. It’s content-rich, as these things go: blog, archives, audio. And I’m struck by how effectively this design highlights the scope of the organization, an independent nonprofit now entering its 10th season.
I claim no objectivity here: Ars Nova founder Mark Christman was a groomsman in my wedding. (The brooding image above ran as part of a recent piece by David Adler, in the Philadelphia Weekly.) Mark’s obsessive seriousness about the music is what fuels the machine. In recent years I’ve heard about many more of his shows than I had the opportunity to attend. But I was there for the first one: Chris Speed’s yeahNO, at the Plays & Players Theater. When I heard last week’s sad news about Joe Maneri, my thoughts quickly turned to an Ars Nova show from a few years back, featuring Joe and his son Mat.
Ars Nova’s fall season kicks off next Friday with the Mary Halvorson Quintet, whom I’ve covered here. Scan the calendar and you’ll notice a good number of events worth traveling to see: a Don Cherry composer portrait, for starters, and a series called “Anti-Jazz: The New Thing Revisited” (with the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Bill Dixon with the Exploding Star Orchestra). In the interest of full disclosure and, yes, self-promotion: I’ll be taking part in a Q&A preceding this Tim Berne event in December.
Here are photos from this year’s Newport festival (that’s Jen Hope, Mark’s better half, in the middle) and last year’s NFL playoffs (we’re on my couch watching his Eagles steal victory from my Giants).
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...?
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