 Site Links
Recent Additions
Budget Components Audacious Audio
Loudspeakers
Amplification
Digital Sources
Analog Sources
Accessories Listening / Art Dudley The Fifth Element / John Marks Music in the Round / Kal Rubinson Fine Tunes / Jonathan Scull Special Features Reference Interviews Think Pieces Historical Recording of the Month Records 2 Die 4 Music/Recordings Stephen Mejias Robert Baird Fred Kaplan Wes Phillips Audio News Past eNewsletters SSI 2009 CES 2009 RMAF 2008 FSI 2008 CES 2008 RMAF 2007 CEDIA 2007 HE 2007 FSI 2007 CES 2007 China 2006 RMAF 2006 HFN 2006 CEDIA 2006 HE 2006 FSI 2006 CES 2006 Forums Galleries Vote Previous Votes AV Links Audiophile Societies Contact Us Customer Service New Subscription Digital Subscription Renew Give a Gift Sub Services Recordings Backissues More . . . Phono Preamp Hi-Fi Phono Cartridge Amplifiers Stereo Speakers |
 |
|
|
Gil Evans' Out of the Cool in 45rpm
Acoustic Sounds, Chad Kassem’s Oz of analog wonders, has expanded its line of 45rpm jazz reissues to the Impulse! catalogue. Like the Blue Notes, which Kassem and Mike Hobson’s Classic Records have already covered (at 45, 33-1/3, 180g, 200g, black vinyl, clear vinyl, just about any format you might imagine), the great Impulse! albums were engineered by Rudy Van Gelder and featured the masters of their day—Coltrane, Mingus, Rollins, and, one of the most innovative big-band arrangers in modern jazz, Gil Evans. Out of the Cool, recorded in 1962, stands as Evans’ grandest achievement, apart from his finest works with Miles Davis fronting the orchestra (Sketches of Spain, Miles Ahead), and it’s one of the first of Kassem’s Impulse! 45 releases. Evans had been one of New York’s leading, though low-key, experimental jazz composers for over a decade at this point. He had a hand in Miles’ Birth of the Cool sessions. Like John Lewis, Gerry Mulligan, and especially George Russell, he was looking for a way out of bebop’s harmonic maze. A few years before the date, Russell had led Miles to a new “modal” approach, based on ancient church scales, perfected in 1959’s Kind of Blue (Evans, who sat in the control room, may have written the anthemic opening bars of “So What”), and, with Out of the Cool, leading just his big band with no upfront soloist, Evans extended the road to new outposts. The opening song, “Nevada,” is an audacious thing: there’s practically no chord changes, little melody to speak of; the piece advances entirely through orchestral texture, backed by a bassline and a subtle rhythm of the drums. It becomes almost a trick to see how long Evans can sustain the stasis, yet still make it hum and swing. He does it for 15-1/2 minutes, and the string stays taut, the attention never wavers. Even without Miles, the band is quite something: Johnny Coles, trumpet; Jimmy Knepper, trombone; Ron Carter, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; to name a few. To appreciate what they’re doing, you need a stereo system that can reproduce all those tonal colors. Van Gelder did his part with the mikes; and Kassem’s remasterers do theirs with the cutting lathe. Their 45rpm stereo pressing sounds at least as good—in the highs and lows, better—than the original, and that’s saying a lot. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
Advertisement for Myself
What’s the point of having a blog if I can’t occasionally indulge in self-promotion? So if you’ll forgive my blatancy for a moment, today marks the official pub date of my new book, 1959: The Year Everything Changed. Unlike my last book, which was entirely about foreign policy, this one actually might be of some interest to the readers of this space, because it covers not just politics but also culture, society, science, sex—as the title suggests, everything. More to the point, there are three chapters (out of 25) that deal explicitly with jazz. (Key jazz albums of 1959 included Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, Ornette Coleman’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.) There’s also a chapter about the creation of Motown (another 1959 phenomenon), and a jazz-blues vibe infuses the whole book. For reviews, blurbs, excerpts, a schedule of my upcoming appearances, and more, go to my website. To buy the book, click here. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (4)
Dave Douglas' Brass Ecstasy
Trumpeter Dave Douglas’ new album, Spirit Moves, featuring his Brass Ecstasy quintet, is a rouser: hot, cool, raucous, pensive, sometimes all at once, and always a lot of fun. The band’s name is a play on the late Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, and they share a similar hard-blowing vibe—as well as two of the players (Luis Bonilla on trombone and Vincent Chancey on French horn)—but where Bowie used the band to riff on the pop tunes of the day (long before The Bad Plus), Douglas’ sources are mainly original tunes with a zesty swing and a dash of his trademark Mediterranean melancholy. Douglas has been a celebrator of his colleagues in brass (each year, he curates a Trumpet Festival in New York), and Brass Ecstasy lives up to its name; there are no strings or chord instruments (Marcus Rojas on tuba trots the bassline); Nasheet Waits slides around them all on the trapset. All the players are masters of their domain, and they play together with amazing tightness, though you might not know it at first listen because they smear and sputter just enough to make things grind without tumbling into sloppiness (a tightrope line to walk, much less prance along). I saw the band at the Jazz Standard Thursday night (they play through Sunday), and everyone was having a merry time. They blow their brains out, and I wonder how their lips will survive through the summer tour they’ve laid out. Go see them if they’re in your town. Sit up front, and let the sound wash over you. Meanwhile, the album—on Douglas’ self-owned Greenleaf Music label—is a fine sample of what they do, and the sonics are superb: clear, dynamic and, well, brassy. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
Jazz Journalists' Association Prizes, 2009
The Jazz Journalists’ Association held its annual awards bash this week, honoring musicians and their work for the period from March 2008 to March 2009. Here’s who won in each of the major categories, followed by who got my vote and why.
NEW RECORD OF THE YEAR:
BASSIST OF THE YEAR:
SMALL ENSEMBLE OF THE YEAR: External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (7)
Joe Lovano & Us Five
Joe Lovano’s Folk Art, his 22nd album on the Blue Note label, is an odd, sometimes jarring record—it took a few hearings before I found my bearings—but once the fragments snap into place, it’s a rousing pleaser, bursting with indigo moods, heart-skipped romance, and free-flow funk riffs. Lovano plays all kinds of reeds—tenor sax, straight alto sax, clarinet, and, on one song, the aulochrome, a Hungarian-built horn that’s a double soprano sax (attached to one reed), each side tuned to a different key, so that you blow melody and harmony simultaneously. He plays with a somewhat hardened tone, reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, but with a more soulful sensibility, stemming from his Midwestern roots (his father was a tenor blues saxophonist in Cleveland), though over the past couple decades, he’s played with, and gleaned ideas from, a wide variety of masters, including Hank Jones, Gunther Schuller, and Mel Lewis, to name a few. His new band—called Us Five—consists of James Weidman, a spry young pianist who seems equally at home with lump-throat ballads and knotty mazes; Esperanza Spalding, a defter, grittier bassist here than on her own (more pop-ish) album; and Otis Brown and Francisco Mela on drums and percussion. The music, all of it composed by Lovano, has a deceptively casual feel—loose and tight, meandering and structured. Lots of small jazz bands aim for this brass-ring sensation; Us Five achieves it, and it’s head-swimming, if you give it your attention and dive in. The album was recorded, after a week of Village Vanguard gigs, at Sear Sound, the purist Manhattan studio, by James Farber, one of the top three or four jazz engineers, and, except for a bit of compression on the percussion, it sounds predictably terrific—vibrant, present, well-balanced, true to tone. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (3)
Jazz at the Chocolate Factory
I’ve just found out about a new, and unlikely, place to go hear jazz in New York City: the Cacao Bar at the Chocolate Factory, a.k.a. MarieBelle. Most of the time, it’s a chi-chi café—on the 2nd floor of 762 Madison Avenue, between E. 65th and 66th Streets—that serves hyper-rich chocolates, exotic drinks, and (so I’m told) killer short ribs. But on Wednesday nights, from 7:30 to 10, jazz musicians—a pianist and usually just one or two others (there’s no room for more)—come in and play. Last night, the players were Frank Kimbrough on piano and Ted Nash alternating between flute and tenor sax. Kimbrough (about whom I’ve written several times in this space) plays in Maria Schneider’s jazz orchestra. Nash is a member of the Jazz At Lincoln Center big band. Both of them also lead, or gamely serve as sideman in, several other bands. More to the point, they’ve been playing together, in one forum or another, for nearly 20 years—first in a Nash-led quartet, then in ensembles led by Kimbrough and bassist Ben Allison—and so last night’s pairing, in so informal a setting, felt like (because it was) two longtime pals getting together and just playing, casually (“What should we play now?” Nash asked after every tune) but also experimentally, each trying out new ideas and novel intervals or rhythms, knowing the other would catch a stumble. Piano-sax duets can be tricky affairs: there’s no bassist or drummer to anchor the rhythm, no other horns to step in once the ideas have run dry. When the juices are flowing, though, it’s a satisfying combo. There are many terrific piano-sax duet albums, and most of them are terrific, at least in part, because the players know each other well: Mal Waldron & Steve Lacy’s Sempre Amore, Abdullah Ibrahim & Carlos Ward’s Live at Sweet Basil, Vol. 1, David Murray & John Hicks’ Sketches of Tokyo, Art Pepper & George Cables’ Goin’ Home, Dave Brubeck & Paul Desmond’s The Duets, Ran Blake & Houston Person’s Suffield Gothic (as well as the duet tracks on Blake & Clifford Jordan’s Masters from Different Worlds, a disc that, I should confess, I co-produced), to name a few. Kimbrough and Nash dwell in this same territory. Nash has a ripe, rich tone and a knack for extended harmonies and staggered rhythms. Kimbrough is protégé of both Paul Bley and Shirley Horn, and thus knows his way around ballads, avant-garde, and connections in between. As a musician who went with me last night said afterwards, they seem to take a bit from the interplay of Warne Marsh and Lennie Tristano (another piano-sax duo, overtly outward bound), though not quite as intricate, a bit more mellow (in a good way). For a sample of Nash, pick up his albums Still Evolved and Sidewalk Meeting. For Kimbrough at his best, listen to his latest solo CD, Air. And next Wednesday, check out who’s playing at the Chocolate Factory. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
McCoy Tyner & Ravi Coltrane
It’s one of those lineups that almost promises too much: McCoy Tyner, the pianist from Coltrane’s “classic” early-‘60s quartet, leading his own quartet with Ravi Coltrane, John’s son, sitting in on tenor sax. And yet, at tonight’s first set, they pulled it off, which is to say, they seemed natural, the music was simply very good--better than that--and not some cockeyed freak show like, say, Paul McCartney teaming up with Sean Lennon. The band was playing in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room—a wonder of concert-hall architecture, at once spacious and intimate, with a grand view overlooking Central Park—and Tyner, now 70 and recently ailing, was in ultra-fine form. He banged out the set’s first notes, and there they were—those clanging block chords, forceful, percussive, the sustain-pedal meshing their overtones into a shimmering sonic bouquet. It sent shivers. Then entered Coltrane the younger, now 43 (he wasn’t quite two when John died of liver complications at the age of 40), sounding increasingly like his father—that plangent tone, the sinuous, fluent lines of sixteenth-notes, broken up by abrupt hesitations and jagged rhythms—but not as insistent, adopting more the tone of a balladeer. (Check out his new album, Blending Times, on Savoy Jazz, for a tasty sampling of what might be called intense lyricism.) Midway through the set, he and Tyner took a big risk—it literally took my breath—when they dashed into “Moment’s Notice,” John Coltrane’s uptempo anthem from his 1957 LP Blue Train, but Ravi navigated the brisk rapids with aplomb. (It may have helped that Tyner never played that song with Coltrane pere—the album was recorded a few years before he joined the group—so they were both, in a sense, interlopers. If they’d started wailing the first movement of A Love Supreme, well, that might have been too eerie.) Ravi has been on the scene for 20 years now, having recorded his first album as a leader in 1997 after serving as a sideman for the entire decade up to then. There were times when he was clearly searching for a sound. (Imagine the challenge, and derring-do, of being John Coltrane’s son and deciding to take up the tenor saxophone!) But those meanderings allowed him to return to his roots through a path that he plowed on his own; he sounds like a musician in “the Coltrane school,” but not at all an imitator, much less some kid cashing in on the name. The quartet—which also includes Gerald Cannon on bass and Eric Kamau Gravatt on drums—plays two more sets tomorrow night, May 16, at 7:30 and 9:30.
Rhythm-a-ning with Branford
It’s been several years since I saw Branford Marsalis play live, but if tonight’s late set at the Jazz Standard is anything to go by, let’s just say that his last few albums don’t begin to capture the peaks he’s scaling. He started the set with a slow pure-tone simmer of “Violets for Your Furs,” switched to a raucous original, and, at one point, lit into long, zigzag takes on Monk’s “Rhythm-a-ning,” treating it alternately as a funk fizz, a samba, a syncopated frenzy, and a straightforward Monk tune, each switch ripe with wit, adventure, and wry references reminiscent of Dexter Gordon’s (the deftest were two lines from “Jitterbug Waltz”). He blows hot and cool, intense and insouciant. At 48, the onetime wunderkind (and Wynton bro’) has grown fully into his promise and beyond. Another star of the evening was his drummer, an 18-year-old high-school senior from Philadelphia named Justin Faulkner, who’s replaced the longtime Jeff “Tain” Watts. Faulkner is incredible, klook-a-mopping the trapset with ferocious energy and gigantic ears, picking up on every twist from pianist Joey Calderazzo, expanding the spaces left open, then filling them with endless variations. He has a tendency to play louder as the music grows more intense, but hey, he’s 18. There’s a hint of a budding Elvin Jones here. Go watch and listen. The quartet plays through Sunday. The house was jam-packed.
Just another week in New York City
There’s been much hand-wringing among the aficionadi over reports that George Wein may call off his JVC Jazz Festival this year, leaving New York City bereft of such an event for the first time in decades. I’m not so bothered. Take this week. Last night, I went to see the Fred Hersch trio at Small’s, the convivial and, yes, quite small, jazz club in the West Village. Hersch, one of the most lyrical pianists around, was deathly ill for much of last year, and he still looks a bit tired, but he sounded strong: fresh, inventive, and buoyant, whether playing a knotty blues like Jaki Byard’s “Mrs. Parker of K.C. (Bird’s Mother)" or one of his own stirring ballads, like “Gravity’s Pull.” For the rest of this week, through Sunday, the Village Vanguard features Brad Mehldau and his riveting trio, which always broods and swings and covers Radiohead and the Beatles as fluently as Kern and Gershwin, and with astonishing originality. At Birdland, there’s David Murray, the tenor-sax titan who mixes Sonny Rollins’ chops for high-fly improv with Ben Webster’s romantic tone, spiced with a dash of Albert Ayler frenzy. When Murray lived here, he could be seen every week; since moving to Paris, each appearance is an Event. At the Blue Note, James Carter, Murray’s heir in many ways, is fronting John Medeski (of Medeski, Martin & Wood) on keyboards, Christian McBride on bass, and Joey Baron on drums; they’re recording a live album. And at the Jazz Standard, there’s Branford Marsalis, whose saxophone sojourns have grown more intense over time. New York City is a non-stop jazz festival.
Fly-ing
Sky & Country (on the ECM label), the new CD by Fly—the trio that consists of saxophonist Mark Turner, bassist Larry Grenadier, and drummer Jeff Ballard—is a deeply pleasurable album. It’s a tricky thing to improvise sinuous, crisscrossing lines over the span of an hour-long record, with neither a piano to lay down harmonic signposts nor a second horn to pick things up when the pace slacks off, yet still manage to keep a listener’s attention. Some have done it, and brilliantly: Sonny Rollins (A Night at the Vanguard and Way out West), Lee Konitz (Motion), Ornette Coleman (At the Golden Circle and Sound Grammar), and David Murray (The Hill), among others. But this list only amplifies the scope of the challenge. Sky & Country is nothing like any of those albums, but it’s harder to describe what it isn’t than what it is. It doesn’t have much in the way of distinct melody, but neither is it the slightest bit atonal. It’s low key but not mellow, cool but not insouciant. Turner plays the sax in a style reminiscent of Warne Marsh: without vibrato, even-keeled, endlessly inventive but not at all showy about it. (Josh Redman and Branford Marsalis also have pianoless-trio albums out now, but among the three Turner is the only one who doesn’t resort to riding scales or extending arpeggios when he gets stuck in a spot; he always finds ways in and out without lapsing into cliché.) Grenadier and Ballard are the bassist and drummer in Brad Mehldau’s piano trio—which is to say they can take anything and shoot it right back while supplying support. Fly is as pure a jazz trio as I’ve heard in a long time; no player dominates, all contribute equally but in very different ways; the strands stream off in several directions at once, yet they seamlessly cohere, like some musical equivalent of superstring theory. I can’t figure out quite how they do it, but they do. The sound quality, by engineer James Farber, is superb: tonally true with plenty of airy ambience. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (2)
Warhol Album Covers
I have an article in the Arts & Leisure section of today’s New York Times about Andy Warhol’s album covers. Everyone’s seen the covers he designed for The Velvet Underground & Nico, with the banana that peels, and the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, with the zipper that unzips. But who knew that the pioneer of Pop art designed over 50 covers over the entire span of his career, and not just for pop albums but also for jazz, classical, and opera? His work, often signed, appeared on Blue Note, RCA, Columbia—all the giants—and echoed, or often anticipated, the style that he would cultivate not just as a commercial designer but as a gallery-and-museum artist (though he rarely distinguished between the two). A new, lavishly illustrated, fastidiously documented book, Andy Warhol: The Record Covers, 1949-1987, lays them all out. Read about it here. Buy the book here.
Carla Bruni
Not the least astonishing moment of President Barack Obama’s recent trip to Europe (and for my more serious thoughts on that diplomatic voyage, click here) was when Michelle Obama met Carla Bruni and appeared her peer in every way, not at all outclassed. Ms. Bruni, of course, is the Italian-born French model and chanteuse who last year married French President Nicolas Sarkozy and, soon after, dazzled, nay seduced, every world leader she met at diplomatic soirées. Mrs. Obama’s one-upmanship in London in no way shoves Ms. Bruni aside—the pairing marked, more, the reemergence of a French-American cultural entente, and we are all the headier for it. I first saw Ms. Bruni sing on David Letterman’s show a month or so ago, when she was in the States promoting her new CD, Comme Si de Rien N’Était (As If It Never Happened). She was so charming and elegant, yet so frisky—OK, she was such a knock-out—that she had Dave stumbling and sent me to order her disc from amazon. (I must not have been the only one, since, I noticed that it was ranked #25 on the U.S. pop charts, even though, except for one song, the album is sung entirely in French). I’ve listened to this album several times since then, and even without visual accompaniment (the photos on the CD jacket are fuzzy and obscure), it’s a delight. Her voice is breathy without being too breathy; she keeps the melody, takes it on the occasional unexpected excursion, without making a big deal of it; she exudes a furtive passion, an insouciant sensuality. Her band is lively in a cabaret sort of way, the arrangements have lots of neat hooks, and the sound quality is very good. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (3)
"Jazz Ambassadors" photo show
I’m appallingly late with this, but the photo show “Jam Session: America’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World” is up for a few more days (through April 12) in the arcade of Jazz at Lincoln Center (on Broadway and 60th Street, 5th floor, New York City)—and, if you’re in the area, go see it. In the mid-1950s, the State Department hit upon the idea that the United States could polish its image around the world, and culturally compete with the Russians, by sending famous jazz musicians on global tours. And so, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie—all, and many more, made multiple journeys, to the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America, to the delight of the natives and of the American diplomatic corps, who were convinced that the tours were having an impact. The boisterousness of jazz—its energy, swing, and, above all, its mix of individual improvisation and ensemble interplay—was the ideal incarnation of American freedom. (The fact that most of the jazz bands had black and white musicians, playing together, was also a striking, if misleading, counter to the images of lynchings and racist police attacks that the world was viewing at the time.) Last summer, the Meridian House in Washington, D.C., sponsored an exhibition of photos from these jazz-ambassadors tours—photos that, in many cases, had only recently been discovered. (I wrote about the show in the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure section.) Now it’s at Lincoln Center, and it will be traveling next to San Francisco, New Orleans, Kansas City, and Missoula, Montana (!). (For the full schedule, click here.) The exhibition in New York doesn’t include as many photos as the one in Washington, but there is one extra feature that belongs exclusively to Lincoln Center—a set of video clips, including marvelous footage of Armstrong playing outdoors in Ghana, inspiring a whole village to get up and dance. Those were the days. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (2)
Ethan Iverson & "Tootie" Heath!
It’s rare that a live concert captures the mind-bending joy of mainstream post-War jazz. (Recitals of the bebop repertory tend toward the worshipfully literal, like museum pieces.) But just such a rare experience was had last night at Smalls, the convivial (and, yes, small) jazz club in the West Village, where pianist Ethan Iverson played standards with a trio that featured Albert “Tootie” Heath on drums. Heath’s presence was remarkable in itself. The youngest of the Heath Brothers (Percy, the late bassist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Jimmy, the much-alive tenor saxophonist once known as “Little Bird”), Tootie slaps and caresses the drumkit with a panache that’s passed a bit out of style but hasn't turned remotely old hat. The brisk tom-tom rolls, the snare accents, the splashy ride cymbal—he takes you back to a golden age but makes it glow as burnished and vital as tomorrow. Iverson is best known as the pianist for The Bad Plus, but, as I’ve noted here before, he’s an encyclopedic virtuoso, expert in all styles, reverent of tradition without falling prey to the furrowed brow of excess seriousness. There was none of TBP’s playful irony in last night’s first set, which included “Confirmation,” “Like Someone in Love,” and “The Shadow of Your Smile;” but neither was this your granddad’s bebop. Iverson laid down dark harmonies and shimmering clusters that brought new freshness to these chestnuts—while leaving plenty of space for Heath to thwack and sway. The trio (which also includes the very able Ben Street on bass) plays again tonight, at 9 and 10:30. If you’re anywhere near, go see them. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
TV on the Radio and Jazz
I’ve just glommed on to TV on the Radio, and let me tell all those who are as out-of-it as I am, when it comes to contemporary rock, the band is really very good. I first heard them play on Steven Colbert’s show, then bought their latest CD Dear Science (which the Village Voice and others touted as the best album of 2008), and I’ve listened to it since at least a dozen times. As I wrote a little over a year ago about Radiohead, after I first heard In Rainbows, it’s as harmonically and rhythmically sophisticated as just about any work of modern jazz—which is not to say that it’s like jazz but rather that, on any musical level, the purest jazz purist has no grounds for looking down on it. So here’s my question (and my topic for the day): Why aren’t jazz musicians more involved in this sort of music? The stream sometimes flows in one direction—Brad Mehldau has covered Radiohead tunes, Jason Moran and Matthew Shipp have made excursions into hip-hop—but not so much in the other; that is to say, today’s pop bands tend not to hire established jazz musicians to play with them. (A few go both ways—for instance, Nels Cline plays with Wilco, Marc Ribot came out of the Lounge Lizards—but those are exceptions.) Crossover was once far more commonplace. Joni Mitchell recruited Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock; Steely Dan hired Shorter, Phil Woods, and (fairly recently) Chris Potter; Stevie Wonder once featured Dizzy Gillespie on an inspired solo; the Grateful Dead briefly brought David Murray on tour, to wild acclaim from Deadheads, who hailed him as “the Hendrix of the tenor sax” (if anyone has a bootleg of those concerts, please let me know). One could argue that pop has moved on since those heady days; even the Dead had closer ties to Tin Pan Alley than to TV on the Radio’s multiculti polyphonies. But many of today’s best young jazz musicians grew up on rock and rap as well as Kern and Gershwin, and incorporate everything they’ve heard into what they play. As John Zorn, who’s not so young (a year older than I am), once said, in an age when you can buy records from all over the world with a single click, there’s no reason why music shouldn’t absorb and reflect that diversity. That attitude is shared by a lot of today’s jazz musicians and pop musicians. You can hear it in their music. But they’re not making music together. There’s plenty of fertile ground for crossbreeding, but there’s little mating going on. David Murray once said in an interview (I think with Cadence magazine) that he’d love to play on a Stevie Wonder record, that he could bring a lot to it. When are the likes of Murray, Moran, or Dave Douglas, or John Zorn going to be asked to play with TV on the Radio? The polygot world awaits. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (8)
A Final word on Tolliver, Moran & Monk
I have a column in today’s Slate, delving more deeply into the Monk at Town Hall concert that I’ve covered in this blog—and the whole concept, and risk, of jazz tributes. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
Ran Blake's Driftwoods
Among the many compelling jazz pianists still around, Ran Blake may be the oddest (and the most unjustly, though understandably, obscure). He can’t swing for more than a few bars; he tends to change keys at random intervals; for this reason, he usually plays solo, figuring that few musicians have the patience for his quirks (though some of his best albums—The Short Life of Barbara Monk, Suffield Gothic, That Certain Feeling, and Masters from Different Worlds—were collaborative efforts, involving such established artists as Steve Lacy, Clifford Jordan, and Houston Person). Yet there’s magic in Blake’s music; his chords, dissonant but heartfelt, seem to waft out of a dream. Now in his 70s, a longtime teacher at the New England Conservatory, Blake has called himself a filmmaker who doesn’t know how to hold a camera, and his albums all have a cinematic flavor. (Many years ago, he recorded the soundtrack of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and told me afterward that he could see scenes of the film in his head while he was playing.) Even when not playing movie themes, his songs possess a narrative impulse; he’s a very instinctive pianist (by his own admission, he’s not a strong sight-reader), and he seems to have some weird synaptic nerve that translates images in his brain to chords and intervals in his fingers. Driftwoods (on the Tompkins Square label) is dedicated to some of his favorite singers, most of them haunted and haunting. The title tune was sung by Chris Connor, a heroine of sorts; others are associated with Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Hank Williams, and Jackie Paris (who sang Charles Mingus’ “Portrait,” a tune that few others besides Blake has covered). The album requires, and deserves, close listening. His two back-to-back variations on “Dancing in the Dark” are especially gripping; “I Loves You, Porgy,” which he’s recorded a few times before, raises the hair on the back of the neck. You can get lost in Ran Blake’s music, and it’s a detour worth taking. Blake pushes down on the sustain pedal a lot, and the decay weaves eerily with the hammer notes that follow. The engineer captures this effect very clearly, though the mikes seem to be too close, probably inside the piano lid; the echo is a bit too reverberant. But this is only a minor shortcoming. (Full-disclosure P.S.: I co-produced Masters from Different Worlds, which Blake recorded with Clifford Jordan and several other guests in the early ‘90s on the Mapleshade label. I neither have nor ever had a financial stake in the album; if you dismiss my praise as a conflict of interest, the loss is yours.) External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
Tolliver & Moran Do Monk at Town Hall, Part 2 (The Aftermath)
The “Monk at Town Hall” tribute-concerts on Thursday and Friday night (which I previewed in my last blog) were as riveting as I’d expected—in the case of Charles Tolliver’s re-creation of Monk’s 1959 concert, much more so. Tolliver transcribed the original concert off the Monk LP, assembled a top-notch 10-piece band to play the parts, and conducted the score with precision except to let the hornmen improvise their solos. It’s a risky enterprise to invite comparison to a classic (cf. Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake of Psycho), but Tolliver roared into the ring and more than held his own. It wasn’t quite the marvel of the original—nobody can do all the things Monk did on the piano, and Tolliver’s drummer held back too much (Monk’s drummer, Art Taylor, splashed around the trap set, heightening the tension and release)—but it came very close. Stanley Cowell shadowed Monk’s piano runs with startling fidelity. Rufus Reid plucked the bassline with authority and soul. Several of the soloists rocked the full house—especially Howard Johnson on bari sax, Aaron Johnson on tuba, and the young Marcus Strickland on tenor sax, who outdid Charlie Rouse for sheer verve. The whole band plowed through these absurdly difficult tunes with crackling aplomb, swinging like crazy, as Monk might have said. Jason Moran’s Big Bandwagon (an eight-piece extension of his Bandwagon Trio) aimed for something else entirely—a po-mo excursion into the genesis of Monk’s music, drawing on audio tapes of the ’59 discussions between Monk and his arranger Hall Overton, video footage from the era, and Moran’s musings of Monk’s influence on his own music. The concert could have been very twee, but Moran made good on his ambitions; it did what such pastiches are supposed to do—make you hear, and think about, the music in a new and thrilling way. The band wasn’t as polished as Tolliver’s, and Cowell had a more commanding grasp of the material; but Moran captured Monk’s jagged rhythms and spiky dynamics more naturally—maybe more so than any living pianist can. Tolliver’s concert was broadcast live on WNYC (93.9 on the FM dial in New York, wnyc.org on the net). Moran’s was recorded and will be aired sometime later—but it really calls for a DVD produced by a video artist. Moran says he’s disinclined to go that route—he wants to keep it exclusively in the concert hall—but I hope he changes his mind; it’s worth preserving for posterity, too. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (1)
Tolliver & Moran Do Monk at Town Hall
It’s a bad idea to gin up expectations, but two concerts this week at Town Hall in New York City are worth the risk. Each commemorates Thelonious Monk’s big-band concert at the same Town Hall on Feb. 28, 1959—exactly 50 years ago—but in very different ways. This Thursday, Feb. 26, Charles Tolliver leads a 10-piece band on a straightforward (if that word can describe anything related to Monk) re-creation of the concert. The next night, Feb. 27, Jason Moran leads an octet on a bold re-conceptualization of the event, a sort of post-modern audio-video collage that aims to capture the spirit of Monk’s music while also tapping into its hidden roots and their links to Moran himself. The Town Hall concert was an oddity for Monk, one of only a few times that he stretched some of his quirky masterpieces—“Thelonious,” “Friday the 13th,” “Crepiscule with Nellie,” “Little Rootie Tootie,” “Off Minor,” and “Monk’s Mood”—onto a big-band canvas. It drew mixed reviews at the time, but the resulting album—recorded on Riverside--has long been regarded an irresistible classic. The arrangements were penned by Hall Overton (I use the word “penned” advisedly; the ideas were clearly Monk’s; Overton was more a facilitator), but the parts were lost decades ago in a household flood. As a teenager, Tolliver attended the ’59 concert, and now he has transcribed the performance off the original LP. The CD reissues, he told me in a phone conversation last week, weren’t clear enough to let him hear the French horn and tuba parts. (A new digital remaster, released last year under the “Keepnews Collection” rubric, sounds a bit better than an earlier CD, but still not as transparent as the half-century-old vinyl.) Tolliver may be the ideal candidate for this role in another sense. He’s an accomplished, adventurous trumpeter, composer, and arranger who mixes avant-tinged harmonies with jaunty melodies and propulsive rhythms—a description that, from a different angle, suits Monk as well. His contribution to the 50th-anniversary party will be a strict rendering of Monk’s concert—even beginning with the four quartet songs (which were left off the original LP, though tacked on, as welcome bonus tracks, on the Keepnews CD) before the whole band struts onstage. One difference: The horn players will improvise their own solos (this is still jazz, after all), though Stanley Cowell, on piano, will recite Monk’s solos. The trick in playing Monk is to capture both his precision and his playfulness; Cowell, who has been playing with Tolliver for over 30 years (they co-founded the Strata-East record label in the ‘70s), seems suited to the part as well. Jason Moran is delving deeper into the source and parsing it out with a zig-zaggier blade. Moran is the most versatile and virtuosic jazz pianist our time; just 34, he can play every era, every genre, true to the source, while still stamping it with his own distinctive signature. (His 2002 CD, Modernistic, may be the best solo piano jazz album of the last couple decades.) A few years ago, he learned of the tape recordings that the photographer W. Eugene Smith made in his loft on 6th Avenue, from 1957-65. Hundreds of jazz musicians dropped by that loft, to chat and play, and Smith put it all on tape. Among them were Monk and Overton (the latter lived in the same building), who spent hours discussing the arrangements for the Town Hall concert. (The band also rehearsed in the loft, and those sessions are on the tapes, too.) A gleefully obsessive historian named Sam Stephenson guided Moran through the archive—which is located at Duke University, which also commissioned Moran’s re-composition—and scattered through Moran’s concert are snippets from those tapes. In one moment, while pacing the floor, Monk breaks into a dance of the rhythm from “Little Rootie Tootie” (these songs were in the man’s bones); Moran turned this tapdance into a tape loop and runs it in the background, as a one-man drumkit, while he plays the song. Stephenson also took Moran and a video crew down to Newton Grove, the area around Duke where Monk’s ancestors were slaves 150 years ago. On a screen we watch footage of this land while onstage Moran and the band play a slow, melancholy version of “Thelonious.” “We think of Monk as a contemporary musician,” Moran said in a phone conversation, “but this is part of who he is, and what he plays, too.” Moran and his band have played their Monk tribute in 10 previous concerts, though this Friday will be the first time that I'll have seen it. Future performances are scheduled in Minneapolis, New Haven, France, and Poland. The concert will be videotaped by engineers from Duke, though Moran has no plans to issue it on DVD. So go see it, and seeing it where Monk played it may tingle with a special resonance. Order tickets at the “external link” below. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (3)
The Best Album from The Bad Plus
I’ve sometimes wondered how long The Bad Plus can keep up their high-concept mix of pop and punk covers, avant-classical harmonies, jazz cadences, kick-ass polyrhythms, and sly but un-ironic wit. Don’t get me wrong: I like their music a lot; each of the players (Ethan Iverson, piano; Reid Anderson, bass; David King, drums) crackles with brio and virtuosity; their interplay is a delight. Still, in the six years since they improbably crashed onto the scene, there have been times when their conceit has seemed to reach its limit. But the band’s new album, For All I Care (on Telarc’s Heads Up label), resolves the question: The Bad Plus, it’s now clear, can go on for as long as they want; their resourcefulness seems to be limitless. This is their most ambitious, and most accomplished, album, the one that should persuade the final doubters that there’s serious—not brow-furrowed, in fact still quite playful, but in the best sense of the word serious—music going on here. The range of material is even more gasp-inducing than before—from Nirvana’s “Lithium,” Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and Yes’ “Long Distance Runaround” to Stravinsky,’s “Variation d’Apollon,” Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Etude No. 8,” and Milton Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations.” Iverson is, in fact, an expert and passionate interpreter of 20th-century classical piano music, and it’s exciting to hear him cut loose on these latter pieces. There’s always been a classical lilt to his playing. (After hearing the take on Stravinsky, put on “1972 Bronze Medalist” from their 2003 debut album, These Are the Vistas; the chords are very similar, and not by coincidence.) What’s astonishing, though, is how seamlessly Reid and King integrate their own styles into this sort of work. It doesn't sound remotely like the academicism of Third Stream or the condescension of “jazzing up the classics;” it sounds natural, as if, for instance, Babbitt wrote in a late-Coltrane sort of style. In this sense, and more intensely than their earlier albums, For All I Care renews and broadens the discussion of just what is a “jazz standard.” In the 1930s and ‘40s, Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker transformed Broadway show tunes, the pop music of their day. Why should today's musicians restrict their alchemy to Gershwin and Kern? Why not expand the repertoire to Cobain, Jon Anderson, and the Brothers Gibb—if they prove the point in the process? (And speaking of the Bee-Gees, TBP’s rendition of “How Deep Is Your Love?” exudes a fine ghostly melancholy that spins the lyrics in more intriguing ways than you might have imagined possible.) Ah yes, lyrics. This is also the first Bad Plus album to feature a singer—Wendy Lewis, who hails from the indie-rock scene in Minneapolis (where Reid and King grew up and where the latter still lives). I’d never heard of her, but I look forward to hearing much more. Her voice has an insouciant cool while managing to tap a song’s emotional depths. She reminds me a bit of Nico but with range and without the junkie chic. This is also one of the few Bad Plus albums that aims for a more straight ahead sound, as opposed to the fanciful compression of many rock albums, and the effect is all to the good. External Link :: Blog Entry :: Comments (14)
|
|
|
|
 Sponsored Technology Center
|
