I never wanted a blog. I resisted having a blog. The only thing I hated more than that invented word, blog, was its bastard form as a verb.
And then I found myself doing that, blogging.
When Artinfo.com asked me to create a jazz blog in 2012 I said yes. I knew my stuff—about jazz and culture, about New York and New Orleans, about ideas beyond those categories and places—would get read by folks outside my usual music-world echo chamber, owing to Blouin Media’s broad international reach and visual-arts focus. Plus, the site looks terrific. The things that I couldn’t fit into The Wall Street Journal, of which there were many, spilled into “Blu Notes.”
Still, I really never wanted to blog.
And until the blog disappeared in late October—a problem since resolved by Artinfo’s tech gurus—I didn’t think I’d miss it.
For month or so, I felt like I’d evaporated from the digital sphere. The distressing “page not found” message made it seem as if I’d been ripped out of a binding or blown away by a stiff wind.
Buy a ticket here.
Read on, and find out why you just did.
A New York Times Magazine piece by Rachel L. Swarns in April of this year bore the headline: “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?”
That university is hardly exceptional in its discovery or the issues it faces.
In the context of a consciouness that gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement, Ned and Constance Sublette’s long, rich and meticulously researched book, “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry” (Chicago Review Press) tells the harrowing and necessary story of how black lives mattered to a still-formative United States of America—as not just forced labor, but also product and currency.
At a moment when presidential candidates argue about jobs, the economy, race relations, international affairs and our country’s moral direction, the Sublettes show how all those issues were rolled into the single ugly truth on which much of what some seek to “make great again” was, well, made great.
As the publisher’s description states, the book offers “a provocative vision of US history from earliest colonial times through emancipation,” centered around “the brutal story of how the slavery industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as ‘breeding women’ essential to the young country’s expansion. Captive African Americans in the slave nation were not only laborers but merchandise and collateral all at once. In a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, their children and their children’s children into perpetuity were used as human savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit in a market premised on the continual expansion of slavery.”
I’ve written widely about Ned Sublette’s previous books. (You can find my reviews of his excellent books on New Orleans here and here.) In those volumes, and in “Cuba and Its Music,” ideas about cultural history are expressed via music against a common backdrop of the slave trade throughout the Western hemisphere.
Somewhere around the 400th of the 673 pages of narrative in “The American Slave Coast,” the Sublettes delve into the white supremacist leanings of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics for what would become our national anthem, including the rarely heard and objectionable third verse.
Music in this book, too, as is, in a larger sense, the long song of racism that still hums through life in the United States. I’ve also written about Sublette’s own propensity toward writing songs (one of which was covered by Willie Nelson). It seems only natural to recite the elements of “The American Slave Coast” as spoken-word poetry. Why not set it to music? That’s what the Sublettes are doing—for one night only, at Manhattan’s Symphony Space on Friday, October 28:
“The American Slave Coast: Live” is a spoken word-and-music performance piece drawn from the pages of the book. Alto saxophonist and composer Donald Harrison will lead the band. Speakers will include Jonathan Demme, Nona Hendryx and Carl Hancock Rux.
Harrison, who is among the most important jazz musicians of my generation, is also uniquely qualified for this gig. Aside from leading jazz ensembles (he’ll lead a fine one at Symphony Space), he is, in his hometown of New Orleans, Big Chief of Congo Nation, which claims as its spiritual home Congo Square; enslaved Africans once drummed and danced there on Sundays, but until 2011, the city officially called the site “Beauregard Square,” in honor of a Confederate general.
Come join me on Oct. 28.
Meantime, here’s a brief interview with Ned and Constance Sublette. Ned and Constance Sublette When you two began working on this book, did you envision it in other forms?
Ned: We formally began work on it as a project in 2010. It took five years, plus now that it’s been out for a year we’ve been taking it around and doing events, so six years now. I hope this performance can be the beginning of a new cycle of events for it. Maybe we can even make it into a movie. Did you ever imagine the book would be so timely and resonant with daily news?
Ned: I think we did, though we didn’t know how it would play out. At the time we were more worried about getting lost in the Civil War sesquicentennial deluge of books, which is now over. I think the sesquicentennial was an interesting moment that — for the people who have been reading, paying attention, trying to understand — marked a new sophistication in our collective understanding of American history with slavery at its core.
It’s been astounding watching our book come to life in the news, in one way or another, in the last couple of years, right down to the third verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which is in there. Every generation has different questions that they look to history to answer, and this is the history we need to know right now.
Also, between the greater availability of research material in the post-Google era and the investigations of a new generation of scholars, we’re seeing all kinds of historians do really interesting work. So I see this book as part of a movement of greater awareness of this issue.
Constance: During the course of researching this book I became more and more aware of our present situation as a war on people of color. I became aware of white privilege in a way I never had before. Why did you need to bring this from the page to the stage?
Ned: It seemed like a natural step to me. There are lots of people who are never going to read a 673-page book but who might sit down and watch a performance version.
I love the idea of discourse with music. I’ve been producing episodes of the public radio program Afropop Worldwide since 1990, and that’s what we do, juxtaposing narration and musical beds, so after 25 years of cross-fades, it seemed very natural for me to imagine our text flowing back and forth with music, kind of like a living audiobook or a radio version.
This is my fourth book, and I’ve learned that you have to go out and perform your book, one way or another, after it’s published, so from the very beginning of working on The American Slave Coast, I was thinking of how to perform it.
Constance: We had to comb out all the bits that would make no sense to an audience hearing it without the context of the whole book. Fortunately, we’ve been reading parts of the script ourselves on tour, which helped a lot and gave us a chance to workshop it a little. On our book tours, at every stop, always, the Q & A at the end of a reading was transformational of the content, with all the varieties of communities that were present at our events — brilliant, passionate, people with their own insights. Does this presentation change the meaning of The American Slave Coast?
Constance: No. But it adds the dimension of actually hearing the voices that are in our text. It’s a tapestry of voices, so we hear from slave narratives — Charles Ball, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Louis Hughes — as well as a unique letter from 1853, written by a woman named Virginia Boyd who was being held for sale in a slave trader’s yard in Houston in 1853. And there are voices from the Fisk University and WPA oral histories. Plus everybody from Andrew Jackson to Karl Marx to contemporary scholars.
Ned: Second that. This is a really exciting group of speakers to work with. There exists an audiobook (from Tantor) of The American Slave Coast — no music, just straight narration by Robin Ray Eller — and it takes up, like, 25 CDs. So obviously we can’t cover but a small part of what’s in the book. In my mind the full musical version exists and I would happily go on staging scene after scene. Any idea what Donald Harrison will play?
Ned: I have no idea, other than that he’ll be working with a quintet that will have [guitarist/banjoist] Detroit Brooks and [pianist] Zaccai Curtis in it. I’ll hear the music the night before the show, and we’ll hear it together with the seven voices on the day of, and then we do it, and then it’s over. Blink and you miss it. We’ve talked in general terms about what he would do, but I don’t know how he will respond to those conversations or to the script. Whatever he does will by definition be right.
I remember Donald from when he used to live in Brooklyn. I’d seen him play with Eddie Palmieri a bunch of times. But I didn’t get to know him until Constance and I moved to New Orleans for a very significant year in 2004. When I saw him in action as a Big Chief on Mardi Gras day 2005, I was knocked out, and his post-Katrina 2006 procession was the setting for the finale of my book The World That Made New Orleans. I asked him if he would do this like, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, and he said yes. He was my first choice for composer, and I didn’t have a second choice. The way I see it, he brings the music, but he also brings moral authority. As do all the vocalists.
Pick Hit: Kris DavisDuopoly (Pyroclastic Records): Davis has for quite some time been one of the most distinctive of pianists on the New York scene to make a big noise without, well, making that much noise. There’s a grace and even quietude to her best work, which is not to say that her playing lacks energy, swing, or any other quality. Yet there’s something about her touch and her thinking (free, yet never wandering) that makes her an ideal collaborator (I loved her work in the trio Paradoxical Frog, with saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock and drummer Tyshawn Sorey). The concept on this CD is a series of duets, pairing Davis with an interestingly curated cast: guitarists Bill Frisell and Julian Lage; pianists Craig Taborn and Angelica Sanchez; drummers Billy Drummond and Marcus Gilmore; and reed players Tim Berne and Don Byron. These are A-list improvisers, not to mention mostly rugged individualists who collaborate with compassion but bend to no one’s will. The first half of the CD cycles through each partner in composed pieces; the second reverses that order for free improvisations. If that seems contrived in theory, it doesn’t sound so in the results. There is instead a lovely balance and a coherent flow. Frisell heightens Davis’s innate sense of weirdness, and highlights the good use she makes of prepared piano (I’m pretty sure it was prepared, anyway; sometimes Frisell’s arsenal of sounds can make even a standard piano sound so…) and repetitive figures. Berne lures her into dark corners of harmony and a playful sense of form. A version of “Prelude to a Kiss” with Byron is the most creative and tonally logical combination of clarinet and piano I’ve heard recorded in this young century. And with Taborn, Davis shares something truly special—based on restraint, conscious of space, and something like floating. (There’s a DVD included in this package. Maybe it’s cool. The music was all I needed to understand what went on here.)
Essential library additions: Miles Davis QuintetFreedom Jazz Dance: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 (Columbia/Legacy, Oct. 21): There was a time when I thought that maybe record labels shouldn’t be releasing all this bootleg session stuff. Maybe we didn’t need it. Maybe it was too much. Maybe there are even ethical problems (“The Complete Bud Powell on Verve,” which was among the earliest of the boxed-set reissue collections during the CD’s glory days, raised such questions in its expansive notes.) The answer—at least when it comes to anything from this Miles quintet is: Yes, please bring it on! These three CDs, from 1966-68, would be worth listening to simply for the studio chatter, which is as illuminating as it is cool. Included here is, as the press release states, “every second of music and dialogue that were taped for the ‘Miles Smiles album…” And, as they say on TV—that’s not all.. Personally, I can’t possible get enough of the making of “Nefertiti” or “Footprints.” If there were 10 more reels, I’d want those too. David S. Ware & Matthew ShippDuoLive in Sant’Anna Arressi, 2004 (Aum, Oct. 21): This second volume in AUM’s Davis S. Ware Archive Series, is essential listening for anyone who valued the magisterial possibilities of Ware’s playing and anyone who tracked, as I did, the work of his wondrous quaret, which included pianist Shipp. There are few musicians who could sustain what is essentially one album-length improvisation: Ware was one. There are also few musicians who would know how to channel that abundant energy and process its purpose: Shipp remains one.
Next up to hear: Donny McCaslinBeyond Now (Motéma): This is basically David Bowie’s last band, the one he used for “Blackstar,” including saxophonist McCaslin, bassist Tim Lefebvre, drummer Mark Guiliana and keyboardist Jason Lindner, along with some additional guests. It’s not as if Bowie set McCaslin on this path; really, the plugged-in sound, rhythmic intensity and sense of ambient possibility heard on Blackstar was evident in McCaslin’s music since his 2011 release, “Perpetual Motion.” Yet there are few forces as animating and galvanizing as Bowie was to lend purpose and poise to an idea. I haven’t yet dug in, but I’m eager to hear what McCaslin took from that experience. Aziza (Dare2): This quartet—bassist Dave Holland, guitarist Lionel Loueke, saxophonist Chris Potter and drummer Eric Harland—assembled for Holland’s Dare2 label is in one respect a fascinating elder master-plus-midcareer standouts ensemble. It also promises to be a fascinating left-of-center springboard for collective creations from four limber and free-thinking players. The name—Aziza—is drawn from the mythology of Dahomey, the African kingdom that encompassed Loueke’s homeland, Benin: in that tradition, Aziza is a small, elusive woodland creature that lends magic to artists and hunters in the woods. Holland isn’t a small guy, but otherwise he fits that bill. Photo by Larry Blumenfeld
David Virelles, in conversation with Román Díaz and Larry Blumenfeld at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem Oct. 18
During my first of four sessions of “NYC: The Afro-Cuban Beat” at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, saxophonist and chekere player Yosvany Terry shared, among other things: secrets from his birthplace, Cuba’s Camagüey province; lessons from his father, Eladio “Don Pancho” Terry, a violinist and master of the chekeré; and new unreleased music from his innovative collective, Bohemian Trio.
If you missed all that, you’ll want to make it to the museum on Tuesday, October 18.
It will be an especially powerful session, thanks to the presence of pianist David Virelles and percussonist Román Díaz, two musicians who have invigorated the New York scene in several ways, including while playing together. The premise of my series is that Afro-Cuban traditions (not just rhythms, despite my title) have always coursed through New York City jazz; my “beat” covering that scene has revealed a recent flowering of that connection and its possibilities.
We’ll have discussion, recorded excerpts and live duo performance. Suggested $10 donation.
Here’s more on the program: History, Mystery and Modernism: Pianist and composer David Virelles mines traditions of his native Santiago, Cuba, while using his current home in Brooklyn as a base for some of New York’s most striking and progressive music. Since coming to the U.S. in 1999, master percussionist, scholar and composer Román Díaz has been mentor to many musicians, key player in several ensembles, a spiritual guide to wide-ranging scene. Virelles and Díaz will discuss and demonstrate and discuss how musicology, mysticism and Cuban culture combine in their music.
I’ve written widely about both musicians. Here’s a blog piece on Díaz (which includes an embedded video from his Thursday night midnight rumba at Zinc Bar; and a Wall Street Journal profile of Virelles. Both articles out-of-date by now (these guys never stand still); we’ll be discussing what gave rise to thier music and how it continues to grow.
Here’s what’s coming up in the series in November: November 7: The Conversation Continued: Grammy-winning pianist and bandleader Arturo O’Farrill reflects on: the journey of his father, composer Chico O’Farrill, from Cuba to Manhattan; his own journeys in reverse; the founding and development of his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra; the present diplomatic embrace between the U.S. and Cuba; and his dream of an expansive, borderless musical tradition. November 15: New Yor-Uba, Then and Now: More than 30 years ago, pianist and composer Michele Rosewoman’s parallel paths—jazz and Afro-Cuban folklore—merged into a compelling whole in New York through her New Yor-Uba ensemble. Rosewoman will describe the awakening that led to that group, remember her studies with the late Orlando “Puntilla” Ríos, and explain the cross-generational way in which she has rekindled that group’s flame. About that special offer:
The National Jazz Museum in Harlem invites you to its 2nd Annual Harlem Shout Fall Benefit Concert featuring Grammy nominated Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martinez his quartet at the historic Alhambra Ballroom in Harlem on Nov. 1.
Proceeds go towards supporting ongoing free Jazz for Curious Listeners programming and Born in Harlem education programs for Upper Manhattan schools.
I’ve written about Pedrito often. Of course, he’d be a great addition to my conversation series. Then again, he says it all with his drums, his chants and his band. Also, good as his band has been, I’m told that the wondeful Yunior Terry (brother of Yosvany) is now the group’s bassist; that news gives me chills.
While supplies last (as they say on TV), the Museum is offering 50% to Blu Notes readers at this link. See you there.
In honor of Columbus Day—a holiday I can neither grasp nor endorse save for the joy of suspended alternate-side parking in my neighborhood—here’s a celebration from Nicholas Payton—”The Egyptian Second Line” (two versions, in fact).
I first met Payton, a trumpeter, keyboardist and singer, while he was still in his teens (he’s 43 now). He was supporting pianist Ellis Marsalis in a band assembled for a morning TV show. It was the sort of publicity event that, 20-some-odd-years ago, supported the idea of a nascent neo-traditionalist jazz renaissance (with Payton as the latest young lion to follow in Louis Armstrong’s—and perhaps Ellis’s son Wynton’s—wake).
Payton had soaked in his history and his tradition, for sure, not least from his father, bassist and sousaphonist Walter Payton.
In the decades since, Payton has distinguished himself as a musician who questions categories and even the dogma of accepted history as much as, well, Armstrong did (do some research at the Armstrong House museum, and you’ll get a sense of what I’m talking about).
Payton is an intense and restless soul, and his thoughts and feelings spill forth with self-assuredness and defiant pride through both his music and his online posts. His music should probably raise more eyebrows than it does because, aside from its integrity and range, it generally doesn’t respect the party line heeded by many so-called jazz musicians. Payton’s blog posts—in which, among other stances, he refuses to wear the term “jazz,” and instead favors the acronym BAM (for Black American Music)—perhaps shouldn’t raise as many eyebrows as they have. At least, these missives can’t be dismissed as rants, which they’re not, or even radical, which they’re also not. The musicians involved in Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) said pretty much the same things 50 years ago.
I’ll not get into a long catalog of what Payton has written online and what was then written about him and what he then wrote in response (though it’s easy enough, and illuminating, to follow that chronology). Yes, it’s about race as much as music, as it should be: Yet whereas, say, the comments appended to articles in the Times Picayune of Payton’s hometown discusses race in a lowest-common-denominator who-can-hate-more style, Payton channels his own feelings (sometimes, yes, rage) into the sort of truth-telling that black trumpeters born and raised in the United States have long done. Amstrong and Miles Davis weren’t enamored with the term “jazz” either. In a March post titled “#WorldSoWhite,” Payton wrote:
“Louis bowed and scraped so Miles could turn his back.”
He’s right about that.
And still, let’s not let all that distract our attention from Payton’s music, which keeps coming and never stays put.
Through an arrangement with his own music label, Paytone, Ropeadope Records will reissue five of Payton’s recordings and plans to release his “Afro-Carribean Mixtape.” (You can find his catalog at pantone.bandcamp.com.)
The label describes the forthcoming release as “an exploration into the history of the African diaspora as it follows the original trade routes to this hemisphere”—which must naturally involve the slave trade. Ropeadope released a download of Payton’s single, “The Egyptian Second Line,”on Friday, October 7th as “a poignant statement in advance of Columbus Day, as much of the nation questions the version of history handed down by the colonists.”
The stuff is deeply funky, simple on the surface in both groove and structure, yet embedded with a complex and shifting set of cues, clues and hues, most through a dense layering of samples.
I’ll not say more about it until I listen more. And perhaps not until I get the whole album and can pen a proper review.
But here’s what Payton wrote about what’s in the mix:
In the spirit of reclaiming that which colonization sought to destroy, I’m releasing the first single from my upcoming album Afro-Caribbean Mixtape at the top of Columbus Day weekend. Like a piece of African patchwork, this track is comprised of a lot of different elements — some old, some new. The main body of this record was constructed from the end vamp of a tune I wrote for Dr. Greg Carr (chair of African-American studies at Howard University) called, “Kimathi.” In fact, throughout the piece, you can hear my turntablist, DJ Lady Fingaz, scratching a sample I chopped from one of his interviews. I constructed a new work by cutting and pasting the best moments of Kevin Hays and I playing keyboards on top of the extended jam, and superimposed that over the groove laid down by bassist Vicente Archer, drummer Joe Dyson, and percussionist Daniel Sadownick. I did this with the help of my mix engineer, Blake Leyh (The Wire, Treme).
Towards the beginning of the piece, you’ll hear a chant from vocalists Yolanda Robinson, Jolynda Phillips, and Christina Machado. It’s from a thing my father made up while walking through his childhood neighborhood of 13th Ward New Orleans back in the 1940s, “Na-na ni-ta ho-ho. Left, right. Left, right.” Thirty years later, as an elementary school band teacher at McDonogh #15, he had us chant this whenever we marched in second line parades. It recalls the syllabic prayers of ancient languages used in modern dance songs like Mani Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” of which Michael Jackson borrowed for “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”
The centerpiece of the single is a poem I wrote back in 2006 in the aftermath of the flood commonly referred to as “Katrina.” It’s called “The Egyptian Second Line,” recited by Nicole Sweeney, a deejay at WBGO. The gist of it toys with the theory that somehow Africans submitted to slavery in an attempt to become better versions of themselves. After the ladies chirp the hook, I step away from the keyboards and embrace the instrument I’m most known for — the trumpet — and blow a few before we take it out. With this song, I am channeling the energy of the ancestors to help give Africa back to herself in the best way I know how, through the power of music.
In New Orleans, a “second line” is the procession where we dance in the streets to music played by a brass band to celebrate either life or death. When I think about what an Egyptian second line looks like, I think of the imagery of that photo of Louis Armstrong serenading his wife, Lucille in front of the Sphinx — again Africans giving Africa back to herself.
Steve Coleman (left) and Henry Threadgill top my list and loom large on today’s jazz landscape. (photos: left-courtesy Pi Recordings; right—Nhumi Threadgill)
The best gigs I’ve attended lately seemed more like workshops in the development of new music than packaged entertainment or standard clubs sets.
To me, that’s a good thing.
In order to frame Henry Threadgill’s current stand at the Village Vanguard, leading his Zooid ensemble (his work with that group was recently honored with the Pulitzer Prize for Music), and Steve Coleman’s month-long residency at The Stone leading his Five Elements group and a newer ensemble, Natal Eclipse, along with other configurations—let me return to the beginning of a Wall Street Journal piece I wrote about these two musicians last year:
Those who pine for a new “big idea” in jazz—one that lends the music’s next chapter a catchy name—miss what’s going on.
Radical thinkers—seeming outliers—are today’s prime movers. If this has been the case throughout much of jazz’s history, what is different today is that such innovators no longer beget clear schools that gain popularity, such as bebop or even free jazz. Jazz’s forward flow is not well measured by stylistic monikers and pop-culture breakthroughs, but rather through profound ripples of impact. The most influential musicians now suggest less about how jazz should sound or be sold and more about how meaningful musical possibilities may be awakened within the context of jazz tradition.
On those terms, two musicians— Henry Threadgill, 71 years old, and Steve Coleman, 58—loom especially large. Messrs. Threadgill and Coleman have achieved masterly and original voices as instrumentalists (both play alto saxophone; Mr. Threadgill is also a flutist). Leading unconventional ensembles, both are starkly authoritative yet also warmly nurturing presences. Most significantly, each has successfully met one of jazz’s central challenges: to synthesize the acts of composition and improvisation through personalized yet rigorous approaches to structure and form. Each has crafted and stuck to a unique process that can’t really be imitated but can be shared.
That piece has outdated references: Coleman just turned 60, which is hard to believe because he plays with a young man’s wonder and swagger, and he still looks good in a backward baseball cap. Yet his music has advanced largely through what must be considered accumulated wisdom.
Perhaps as a birthday present, his friend and fellow saxophonist-composer John Zorn ceded the club he owns, The Stone, for a month-long celebration. Such a residency is the sort of thing that happened generations ago in jazz clubs but not really in my listening lifetime. And for Coleman, a month (a lunar cycle) holds particular physical and spiritual promise. (The music of his 2010 Five Elements release, “Harvesting Semblances and Affinities” related quite literally to the phases of the moon.)
I made it down to The Stone a few times this month. I got to hear Five Elements in all its consistent glory, and with the relatively new addition, tenor saxophonist Maria Grand, who holds her own alongside Coleman’s longstanding partners: trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, guitarist Miles Okazaki, bassist Anthony Tidd and drummer Sean Rickman. (On a final night Marcus Gilmore took over at drums; I missed that, but I’d bet it presented fascinating wrinkles).
Early on in the month, I heard a sextet (with Finlayson, Okazaki, bassist Linda Oh, percussionist Neeraj Mehta and tenor saxophonist Mark Turner). It turns out that Coleman and Turner had not performed together before, which surprised me. Their connection sounded intuitive, and the contrasts between their tones—Coleman’s slightly tart and ever-alert phrases; Turner’s softer-edged and seemingly relaxed ones—was a distinct treat. I’ve long admired Turner’s music; it has its own clear logic and manner, which folded nicely and without compromise into Coleman’s demanding and distinct music. I was entirely unfamiliar with Mehta, a percussionist who plays an interestingly idiosyncratic setup (within it are a set of PVC pipes with affixed drumheads). Apparently, Coleman heard Mehta playing in a series concerts featuring the compositions of Per Nørgård, a Danish composer Coleman admires, and decided to see how Mehta might fit in with his music. I’d say the experiment is working, providing customary drive to Coleman’s “rhythm chants” while also lending new colors and tones.
On his actual birthday, September 20, Coleman led an ensemble called Natal Eclipse. The nonet includes: Coleman, Mehta, Finlayson, Shyu, clarinetist Rane Moore, tenor saxophonist Maria Grand, violinist Kristin Lee, bassist Greg Chudzik, pianist Matt Mitchell and singer Jen Shyu. I’d heard this group the first time Coleman presented it some months ago at the Village Vanguard. It creates a startlingly lovely sound, more dense and (dare I say) pretty than that issued from Coleman’s Five Elements, and in some ways a distillation of the remarkable harmonic advancements Coleman made with the 21-piece assemblage on his brilliant 2015 CD, “Synovial Joints.” At the Stone, Coleman ended the Sept. 20 late set with a long balladic piece (the sheet music went on for some 15 pages). Shyu told me they were about to go into the studio to record. I can’t wait to hear it.
In this group and throughout Coleman’s residency, special notice must be made of Finlayson. Now 34, he’s been playing in Coleman’s ensembles for roughly half his life; he knows this stuff as well as he likely knows anything. But he’s also an emerging composer and bandleader in his own right with a sturdy and wily concept all his own; this too comes clear during his solos. And then there’s his technical prowess: The Stone is a fairly unforgiving space, yet Finalyson’s playing there sounded big, rounded, sweet or sour as needed and often bright as if bouncing around a more welcoming concert hall.
Coleman calls what he creates “community music,” in the sense that it involves deep and prolonged relationships that feed and shape what’s played. He has always prized the environment of a musical workshop. That’s what he walked into when he entered Sam Rivers’s Studio RivBea upon arriving in New York City decades ago, and it’s what he’s sought to create from his earliest performing days here (first, at an art gallery, I recall, and then at places like the now-defunct Tonic and the original Jazz Gallery). None of which is meant to imply that his music is not carefully considered and worked-out, or that its presentation, including at The Stone this month, is messy or disjoint. And when recorded, it’s always decidedly a finished piece.
But Coleman sees music more as process as product. For those of us who share that attitude (at least when it comes to ensembles of superior musicians) a month of Coleman at The Stone is not unlike the joys and fascinations of the latest bootleg release of sessions by Miles Davis’s quintet (out Oct. 21, by the way)—and, no, I’m not comparing Coleman to Davis; you know what I mean. We can hear how the sounds and spaces or a dynamic system get negotiated in real time.
One delightful and insightful aspect of these gigs is the chance to see how Coleman reacts to his own music being worked out—when he seems to think it has become a knotty problem, and when it sparks spontaneous joy.
Same was true of Henry Threadgill’s late set Wednesday night at the Village Vanguard. (He leads Zooid there through Sunday night, so get moving…)
There were moments where Threadgill would, all of a sudden, get seized with pleasure. I wasn’t even sure why at times, but I could sense that energy getting folded back into the music.
Threadgill’s performances offer entry not simply into a process but into a strange and lovely sonic environment that seems in some senses unchanged across even decades yet in others wildly mutable even over the course of a few minutes. His Zooid group —including guitarist Liberty Ellman, cellist Christopher Hoffman, drummer Elliot Kavee’s Jose Davila on tuba, trombone and bass—is one in his long line of unconventional assemblages that suit his desires.
The newest wrinkle here was the tres—a Cuban instrument most closely associated with son and its derivatives. Ellman played it in an entirely untraditional style (one that I’m not sure my Cuban friends would have ears for). But to my ears, it was pretty cool. And it lent both sonic overtones and a newfound edge to the patterns that undergird Threadgill’s compositions. When the set was over, Ellman told me that after Threadgill recently returned from a trip to Cuba, he called the guitarist up and told him he’d brought something back for him.
“I thought he was giving me cigars or rum,” Ellman said. “But he handed me this tres and said, ‘I want you to play this, OK?’”
As much as anyone’s music, Threadgill’s is a process in real-time display. Sometimes it builds steam slowly, as on Wednesday night, when only at the end of the set did Threadgill move from flute to alto saxophone to play spare but searing lines, sometimes shadowed by Davila’s trombone playing, sometimes at odds with it, always feeding a fiery churn of funkiness that existed in a space beyond meter.
As the season changed this month, as I was forced with each report of sudden violence to consider what kind of world I’m living in or what world I’ll awaken to should the presidential election sway a certain way, as I grow disenchanted with the electoral process or the current processes of news dissemination, it’s nice to get lost for a couple hours in processes I can relate to, that I can trust, and to drift into worlds defined by structures, forms and intents I may not fully grasp but I can believe in.
Thanks, Henry. Thanks, Steve.
PHOTO: JESSE CHUN/ECM RECORDS
I could have picked nearly any moment in the past decade or so to celebrate the power and beauty of drummer Andrew Cyrille’s music and his presence on the New York scene. Cyrille is simply that important and prolific, even now at 76. (I certainly should have in 2011, when he released the wonderful album “Route de Freres” with his Haitian Fascination band.
In my Wall Street Journal piece today, I review two new CDs bearing Cyrille’s name: “The Declaration of Musical Independence” (ECM), with Cyrille leading a quartet including guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer and piano; and “Proximity” (Sunnyside), which extends his catalog of duets, alongside tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.
As I say in the review: Continue reading “Andrew Cyrille Declares His Independence (Once Again, and Twice…)”
Pianist Danilo Pérez created a jazz festival in his native Panama in 2004. Photo by Jean-Marc Aspe via Flickr
In 1989, the U.S. Congress passed Resolution 57, declaring: “Jazz is hereby designated as a rare and valuable national American treasure, to which we should devote our attention, support, and resources to make certain it is preserved, understood, and promulgated.”
It was a way to pay governmental lip service to jazz as an art form; more important, it sent federal funding jazz’s way.
On September 5th, 2016, the Panama Jazz Festival became Law 312 of the Republic of Panama.
The law guarantees funds of at least $250,000 in each year, beginning in 2018, for the festival, which is held annually in January. It stipulates that “the government of Panama recognizes the Panama Jazz Festival is an event that creates a space for cultural exchange, that provides education and social awareness, where people of all ages, cultural and social backgrounds meet to share interdisciplinary ideas about music of the highest academic quality.”
Word of this development came my way via email, from Patricia Zarate, a saxophonist and the wife of pianist Danilo Pérez, who founded the festival in his hometown of Panama City in 2004. According to Zarate, the support will go to the activities that benefit Panamanian citizens the most: the educational component and the outdoor free concert.
I covered the festival for The Wall Street Journal in 2006. (My complete article is pasted below.)
Back then, Pérez told me, “The spirit of jazz has always been here, but it’s been sleeping for years.” And I noticed that his festival was clearly a labor of love, with good will and sheer dedication substituting for budget at times. Continue reading “Panama Jazz Festival Gets Written Into National Law”
photo by Stepanie Berger/ courtesy WNYC
I was saddened to read Daniel E. Slotnick’s New York Times obituary about singer Nora York, and to learn that she’d died at 60 of pancreatic cancer.
York’s was a voice worth hearing for both its musical qualities and its focus on the intersections of beauty and justice. She was a force to be reckoned with, popping up in varying contexts through the years. She was also a friend. We’d encouraged each other at critical moments, though we’d recently fallen out of touch.
I don’t agree that, as Slotnick wrote, she “intrigued audiences with bold mashups of jazz, rock and other genres”—her creations were too fully formed and fluid, and never sounded mashed-up.
Yet he otherwise characterized and quoted her well: Continue reading “Remembering Nora York, Lightning Rod for Beauty and Truth”
Photo/ Flikr Andrew CyrilleThe Declaration of Musical Independence (ECM, Sept 23) Andrew Cyrille & Bill McHenryProximity (Sunnyside, Sept. 30)
Soon to be a Wall Street Journal review, considered in tandem. At 76 years old, Mr. Cyrille remains a vital force on the N.Y. scene in several contexts: As leader of wide-ranging ensembles; playing alongside fellow septuagenarians bassist Reggie Workman and alto saxophonist Oliver Lake—in the wondrous collective Trio 3; and within groups led by much younger players, such as pianist David Virelles and tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry.
Two new recordings display Cyrille’s subtle power and remarkable breadth of expression. On “The Declaration of Musical Independence” he leads a quartet including guitarist Bill Frisell, bassist Ben Street and Richard Teitelbaum on synthesizer and piano. “Proximity” extends his catalog of duets, alongside Mr. McHenry. Ted Nash Big BandPresidential Suite: Eight Variations on Freedom (Motéma)
Reeds player and composer Ted Nash has an ambitious big-band concept album, just out, with a timely nonmusical hook: “Presidential Suite: 8 Variations on Freedom” (Motema Music). For the album, Nash has recruited notable speakers (actress Glenn Close, historian Douglas Brinkley, Senator Joe Lieberman) to recite passages from iconic speeches by world leaders (JFK, FDR, Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi): He weaves these into an original suite meant to evoke these themes.
Typically, I’d think such a project, especially in an election year, would be exploitative or just too cute. But Nash is a serious musician and savvy composer whose work I have written about many times. His compositions as a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra have marked some of that ensemble’s most creative moments. His own big-band CD, “Portrait in Seven Shades” is one exhibit in the mounting evidence that we’re living in a resurgence moment of large-ensemble jazz.
On that election-year theme… Charlie Haden Liberation Music OrchestraTime/Life: Song for the Whales and Other Beings (Impulse!/Verve, Oct. 14)
Through its more than 40-year tenure, Haden tended to convene his Liberation Music Orchestra whenever a Republican was in office and usually when there were repugnant policies worth protesting. (His was the last great example of instrumental music as protest.)
Thus, I’m not sure if the timing of this new release signals a coming Trump presidency. But I do know that Haden, were he alive now, would be distinctly worried about that prospect. (“He’d probably say, as he told me about Republicans one the eve of Obama’s electoral victory, “You know, they can do anything.”)
This new release includes two tracks recorded at a 2011 festival, with Haden present (likely the last material he recorded with this ensemble), and 3 others recorded last year, with Carla Bley (the group’s longtime pianist and arranger) leading.
I never wanted a blog. I resisted having a blog. The only thing I hated more than that invented word, blog, was its bastard form as a verb.
