Once, it might have been hard to imagine bassist and composer William Parker headlining two nights at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club in Manhattan.
It will happen July 26 & 27. And really, it makes perfect sense.
As a bassist, composer and bandleader, Parker is one of modern jazz’s defining presences; as much as any musician, he fulfills a vision Dizzy Gillespie, the club’s namesake, had decades ago of jazz as an expansive and cross-cultural music, one never stuck in place and always connected to a larger social and political awareness. And by now anyone’s wrongheaded view of Parker as simply a “downtown” musician (though that’s where he’s lived for a long time, and where he has anchored a community) have been erased by two forces: the sheer breadth and depth of Parker’s work; and the collapse in general of limiting categories when it comes to real jazz. Also, more than a decade past the organization’s founding, Jazz at Lincoln Center has notably broadened its bookings and ethos.
At Dizzy’s, Parker, who composes music at a dizzying pace, will present new compositions. These will be performed on July 26 by a quintet, and on the 27th by an 8-piece edition of his In Order to Survive Ensemble (the second set, billed as “Extended Breath,” may involve yet more musicians). Both nights will feature the wondrous tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan and drummer Hamid Drake (and any chance to hear Parker and Drake together is a reason to show up and get a good seat.)
Once, it might have been hard to imagine Parker absent from New York City’s annual Vision Festival—this country’s essential gathering of avant-garde improvising musicians, and a broader celebration of artistic purpose that also highlights dance, poetry and visual arts.
Yet that, too, will happen.
Parker was a founding force behind the festival, now in its 21st year, and a ubiquitous onstage presence. This year, he’ll be in Calgary, Alberta, as composer & musical director of the Decidedly Jazz Danceworks brand New Universe piece & performance space during Vision Fest.
Oddly perhaps, that circumstance makes a certain sense, too: The Vision fest’s offerings (June 7-12) are so broad and strong, its cast of characters so deserving of their spotlights, that this year’s edition is no less satisfying with Parker on the road. (Full schedule here.)
As happens annually, one artist is honored for a lifetime of achievement with a full evening as headliner. This year’s focus (June 7) is on bassist and violinist Henry Grimes, whose elemental work in the late 1950s is worth seeking out on recordings, and whose unlikely career resurgence in in 2003, involved a helping hand from Parker.
Grimes’ story is itself wondrous. He was among jazz’s most sought-after bassists in the late ’50s, and he played on free-jazz recordings in the ’60s with the likes of Ayler, Cecil Taylor and Don Cherry. Then he just dropped out, disappeared from the scene for more than three decades.
I’ll never forget hearing Grimes, playing a green-stained bass given to him by Parker, during a triumphant appearance at the 2003 Vision Festival. “Something happened,” Grimes told me following that performance. “It was like a thick air came into the club and came right down on everybody in it. Everything that I’ve strived for came true, with bigger implications for the future.” Those implications have turned into realities in the years since.
On June 7, Grimes will lead two powerhouse groups—one a quartet that includes one of Grimes’ contemporaries, drummer Andrew Cyrille, the other a septet including guitarist Marc Ribot, who has worked closely with Grimes since his return to the scene. In between, Grimes will be joined by several vocalists, performing songs by Lisa Sokolov, drawn from the original poems Grimes sometimes recites in performance.
There are many highlights to this year’s fest. Among them:
—Jen Shyu‘s genre-and-border-defying songs (June 8)
—Sun Ra Arkestra 60th anniversary celebration (June 8)
—Saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc leading a quintet including pianist Matthew Shipp (June 9)
—Garland of Blessing (Hamid Drake – drums, Kidd Jordan – sax, Cooper-Moore – piano, Michael Bisio – bass—June 9)
—trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s with a viola Quartet and Electronics (June 11)
—saxophonist Kidd Jordan leading a quintet to close the fest (June 12)
And I’ll especially highlight the June 10 performance by Michele Rosewoman’s New Yor-Uba, a group that showcases no just a rare union of religious and folkloric Afro-Cuban forms with modern large-ensemble jazz but also the place of Afro-Latin lineage within the Vision Festival’s legacy.
I’ve been following New Yor-Uba closely. In an email, Rosewoman described the extended new work she will present at Vision as her attempt to “jump the octave” with this group, through a rhythmic suite and tribute to 23 orishas. The group includes batá and conga master Román Díaz, surrounded by others suitably skilled in rhythmic magic, such as bassist Yunior Terry, drummer Robby Ameen and percussionist Mauricio Herrera.
What John Coltrane (& Others) Told Ralph Gleason
I’m slowly working my way again through “Conversations in Jazz: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews,” which will be published May 24 by Yale University Press. As the Yale press web page explains: “The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Ralph J. Gleason was among the most respected journalists, interviewers, and critics writing about popular music in the latter half of the twentieth century.”
To which I’d add that Gleason did those things when a journalist, interviewer and critic could, by virtue of his or her work, earn a broad and deep measure of respect. And when a co-founder of Rolling Stone could delve deeply into jazz as more than just hobby or affectation. Yale’s site also mentions that Gleason was “the only music journalist included on President Richard Nixon’s infamous ‘Enemies List,’ which Gleason himself considered ‘the highest honor a man’s country can bestow upon him.’ I haven’t gotten to the explanation of that tidbit yet, but I’m hoping it’s contained in the Jann Wenner’s foreword to a companion volume, “Music in the Air: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason.” Both editions were edited by Gleason’s son Toby, himself a forty-year veteran of the music business.
“Conversations in Jazz,” has a foreword and introductory notes by Ted Gioia, which frame these encounters nicely and wisely. I’m bound in there, too, in the front matter, with an advance word of praise I’d happily provided Yale editor-at-large Steve Wasserman (whose list also includes Scott Timberg’s “Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class,” the best book I’ve read on the contemporary context, or lack thereof, for culture in this country).
Here’s what I wrote:
As music, jazz takes shape through what exceptional musicians play. As social history and philosophy, it is often best revealed through what these musicians say—provided there’s a conversation partner with a firm grasp of how jazz gets played and laid-back attitude toward how life gets lived. Ralph Gleason, an influential music critic, brought jazz into countless American living rooms during the 1960s through his TV series “Jazz Casual.” Yet the one-on-one discussions in Gleason’s own Berkeley, California living room—tape recorder rolling, Gleason and one or another of jazz’s greats sitting in overstuffed leather chairs—tell deeper stories. Here, framed with a wise and light touch by writer Ted Gioia, we get windows into personal worlds: John Coltrane on the cusp of a breakthrough; Sonny Rollins entering a period of reclusion; “Philly” Jo Jones sharing drumming tradecraft and history; Duke Ellington explaining why, in music as in life, problems are opportunities.
Last night, I found myself focused on Gleason’s May 1961 interview with John Coltrane. As Gioia points out, Coltrane was “at a turning point in his career,” having left Miles Davis’ group, and was soon to begin his important relationship with a newly launched Impulse! record label. I love this excerpt below for several reasons, including: the humility with which Gleason asks his question and Coltrane answers; the relevance of this exchange now, a half-century later, in terms of a “globalized” notion of jazz; the power, as expressed by Coltrane, of jazz culture “in the air”; and the hints here—“something that’s coming”—of the introspection that contributed to Coltrane’s masterpiece, still four years off, “A Love Supreme.” Continue reading “What John Coltrane (& Others) Told Ralph Gleason”
Carla Bley at 80
As a pianist, Carla Bley plays exactly the right amount of notes.
Needless to say they’re also the right note choices, except when they are gorgeously and intentionally wrong. Her hands seem to fall upon these keys as if discovering them or like they were quite obviously the only ones worth considering.
I remember Bley’s comments last year, upon accepting an NEA Jazz Masters award:
“I asked my father, ‘Where does the music come from?’ He told me, ‘A composer wrote it.’ And I said, ‘I would like to do that.’ So I wrote hundreds of notes and he told me, ‘No, no, this is much to hard for me to play. Get rid of most of these notes.’ And so that was my first lesson.”
As a composer, Bley inspires from her fellow musicians a similarly correct sense of proportion—something beyond restraint or economy, and implying a grand sense of overall design, of form one can live satisfyingly within.
It’s not as if her music sounds perfect or that it seeks or achieves equilibrium. No, Bley’s music has always involved subtle subterfuge a gently off-kilter sensibility. It’s dramatic as well, but sneakily so, in ways that lure, not lurch, you into deep feeling.
Celebrating her 80th birthday with a brief and intimate concert at Manhattan’s Steinway Hall, Bley exuded a child’s wonder and an elder’s wisdom, both qualities coexisting in elegant balance, just as, say, dissonance and consonance do in her music.
Two of the pieces Bley peformed on Wednesday with saxophonist Andy Sheppard and bassist Steve Swallow (the latter, her partner in life as well as music for the past 25 years) were drawn from her finely crafted and yet casually charming new CD “Andando el Tiempo” (ECM). Continue reading “Carla Bley at 80”
(Something Right in the Universe Dep't): Henry Threadgill Awarded Pulitzer Prize
We humans are happy because yesterday Henry Threadgill was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Music.
At the Pulitzer site, Threadgill’s “In for a Penny, In for a Pound” (released in May, 20015, on Pi Recordings) is referred to as “a highly original work in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life.”
That’s savvy analysis, and it’s a relief to hear the “American-ness” of music from an African American composer with strong roots in jazz invoked as something beyond “the democracy of improvisation” or the “cry of freedom.”
Still, I hear in Threadgill’s music, and especially in light of the range of his influences, the very expression of life here on earth, period.
Threadgill is never at a loss for words. (Cornetist Graham Haynes posted on Facebook that Threadgill could have won a Pulitzer simply for his song titles.) In Nate Chinen’s news piece in today’s New York Times, here’s Threadgill’s pull-quote: Continue reading “(Something Right in the Universe Dep't): Henry Threadgill Awarded Pulitzer Prize”
Cecil Taylor at the Whitney: Storming Places, Like He’s Always Done
If you arrived on Thursday night at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s fifth floor, Cecil Taylor was there to greet you.
Elevator doors opened and there was Taylor—his image, anyway—in towering proportions as projected on a massive screen, moving fleetly about a piano’s keyboard while wearing a white knit cap, as captured in Ronn Mann’s 1981 documentary, “Imagine the Sound.”
The night’s real attraction was an increasingly rare invitation—the chance to see and hear Taylor, who recently turned 87, perform in person.
And in glorious context, no less: At the far west end of an imposing venue—the largest column-free museum exhibition space in New York City (more than 18,000 feet of open space), at a Bösendorfer grand piano set against floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River.
A yet deeper context was on display. Taylor’s concert was the prelude to a lovingly curated and wisely broad-minded exhibition and residency at the Whitney through April 24, dedicated to the full range of Taylor’s artistry. “Open Plan: Cecil Taylor,” the first of five such Whitney programs, places Taylor in the company of a wide range of creative souls: installation and performance artist Andrea Fraser; painter Lucy Dodd; sculptor/earth artist Michael Heizer; and video/filmmaker Steve McQueen.
Continue reading “Cecil Taylor at the Whitney: Storming Places, Like He’s Always Done”
Now Playing (New and Forthcoming CDs)
Carla Bley/Andy Sheppard/Steve Swallow Andando el Tiempo (ECM, May 6): As pianist, composer and arranger, Bley, who turns 80 in May, has always exuded a stern authority tempered with obvious tenderness and grace. And offstage, she’s usually disarmingly humble, even childlike in the best sense. Such was the case last year when she accepted her NEA Jazz Masters Award. As I noted here, Bley told this anecdote from the podium:
“I asked my father, ‘Where does the music come from?’ He told me, ‘A composer wrote it.’ And I said, ‘I would like to do that.’ So I wrote hundreds of notes and he told me, ‘No, no, this is much too hard for me to play. Get rid of most of these notes.’ And so that was my first lesson.”
Her new CD has, in spots, riveting emotional impact. It’s in one sense a beautiful musical study in contrary motion of instrumental voices. But what strikes me most is how well Bley has incorporated that early lesson about economy into her music through the decades, and especially here.
Melissa Aldana Back Home (Word of Mouth Music): It was no surprise to me when tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana won the 2013 Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition. Aldana first captured my attention a decade ago, when she was a precocious 17-year-old whose tone, confidence and knowledge belied her age during late-night jam sessions at the Panama Jazz Festival. Pianist Danilo Pérez, the festival’s founder, predicted big things from her, and she has delivered.
Aldana, who is from Santiago, Chile and now lives in New York City, released two hard-swinging and supple-sounding quartet albums for saxophonist Greg Osby’s Inner Circle label. The title of her new CD, “Back Home,” refers not to her native country, but to the piano-less trio format she fell in love with while listening to Sonny Rollins albums, and which she employs here.
David Murray, Geri Allen & Terri Lynne Carrington Perfection (Motéma, April 15): Call it a “supergroup.” Or a “power trio.” The sound is bold, ignited principally by Murray’s bristling and active tenor saxophone (it’s easy to take Murray for granted; but name another living saxophonist other than Sonny Rollins whose sound erupts and ripples with such visceral power). Part of the fascination here is how complete this trio (sax-piano-drums) sounds without the presence of a bassist. Yet this CD is about cohesion in difficult musical terrain more than sheer force. That cohesion stems from the fact that here are three established leaders (stars, really) and owes most of all to deep connections. These include the bond between Allen (who, for my money, is among he generation’s most important musicians) and Carrington (as confident and versatile as any drummer in jazz; and who maintains an inventive trio with Allen and bassist Esperanza Spalding.
The emotional core of the album is the title track, a previously unrecorded Ornette Coleman composition (here the group expands to sextet, including longtime Coleman associate Charnett Moffett on bass and Wallace Roney, Jr (son of Allen and trumpeter Wallace Roney) on trumpet. This group shook things up at January’s Winter Jazzfest in New York City. On first listen, they seem to have settled into something no less provocative and yet more refined.
Vijay Iyer's New Day Gig at the Met Breuer
Seated at a Steinway grand piano in a dark, intimate room in early March, Vijay Iyerwasn’t simply playing another gig.
Aficionados in attendance could recognize a loose medley of familiar jazz themes, including Wayne Shorter’s “ Nefertiti” and Billy Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge.” Mostly, Mr. Iyer and his duet partner, tenor saxophonist Mark Turner, issued an unbroken and largely abstract flow, moving easily from dense dissonances to languid melodies.
Musically, the scene wasn’t unlike Mr. Iyer’s performances at any number of Manhattan jazz clubs and concert halls. Except here, the listeners were gathered in a small gallery behind the lobby of the Met Breuer, the celebrated five-story hulk of a building that serves as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new outpost for modern and contemporary art.
The audience was witnessing the first installment of “Relation,” a performance residency showcasing Mr. Iyer, who is equally distinguished as a pianist, composer and educator. His ongoing performances open to the general public Friday and run through the end of the month.
“It’ll be my day gig,” said Mr. Iyer, in an interview at his Harlem home. “It’s almost like having an office.” Continue reading “Vijay Iyer's New Day Gig at the Met Breuer”
Can We Keep Up With Anthony Braxton?
Two years ago, when Anthony Braxton was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, he was was showcased in the awards concert as a composer. He didn’t pick up any of the reed instruments he plays with mastery, or sit down at the piano.
The short scene presented from his opera, “Trillium J,” was atonal, emblematic of his distinctive voice and, in spots, deeply funny. Braxton talked for more than 30 minutes, reflecting on both well-known sources of inspiration, such as Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), with which he had early and formative connection, and less obvious ones, like the University of Michigan marching band. He seemed to relish being called a “master,” but not the word “jazz.”
“My interests were never idiomatic,” he said. “My interests were trans-idiomatic.”
It’s been fasinating to watch lately as the profound influence of the unclassifiable masters connected with the AACM continues to deepen and widen, even as these elder musicians produce original work at an impressive clip. (Witness, for instance, Henry Threadill’s recent work, or Wadada Leo Smith’s.) At 70, Braxton’s projects continue to spill forth, to grow and morph, in ways that trace his inspirations and ideas backward and forward, always expanding the grand and grandly organic systems within which his work exists. Those who have been influenced by these musicians—an expanding sphere with expansive reach, I’d argue—live in trans-idiomatic world that minds like Braxton’s continue to sketch.
In Braxton’s case, it’s not just the sheer volume of work (how can one find time to digest it all?) or the quality (just listen); it’s also the scope and innovation of what Braxton is doing: Are we ready for this yet? Can we handle it?
I’ve just received word that Braxton is set for the release of three major boxed sets of his works on April 1 via the Tri-Centric Foundation and Firehouse 12 Records. It includes the best representation yet of Braxton’s four-part opera, “Trillium J”; a quintet tribute to the legacy of Lennie Tristano, with Braxton at the piano; and Braxton’s “Echo Echo Mirror House Music”—the press release describes the latter as “the latest conceptual innovation in Braxton’s five-decade career…. In this ensemble of longtime collaborators, all the musicians wield iPods in addition to their instruments, while navigating scores that combine cartography and evocative graphic notation, creating a musical tapestry combining live performance and sampled sound from Braxton’s extensive recorded discography.”
Braxton will celebrate the three releases with rare U.S. concert appearances at the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN on April 1 & 2.
I can’t make that scene, but I hope to find time and headspace to dig into these three sets. In that interest, more to come. For now:
Now Playing (new & forthcoming CDs)
Snow flurries fight it out with waves of warm breeze. My in-box is brimming with new music. The latest:
Allison Miller and Boom Tic Boom Otis Was a Polar Bear (Royal Potato Family, April 8): Drummer and bandleader Allison Miller speaks her mind clearly and with no apologies. Such was the case in a Huffington Post essay a few years ago in which she wrote: “I am a woman. I am a dyke. I am a tomboy. I play jazz.” She’s just as confident and forthright behind her drum kit at the helm of her Boom Tic Boom ensemble, which boasts an impressive personnel of wide-ranging and distinguished players: Myra Melford (piano), Jenny Scheinman (violin), Kirk Knuffke (cornet), Ben Goldberg (clarinet), Todd Sickafoose (bass).
Miller began writing Otis Was a Polar Bear during the summer of 2014 while touring with singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant. The birth of Miller’s (and her partner, Rachel’s) first child Josie inspired the music on this latest CD. Miller began writing the music while on tour with singer Natalie Merchant and completed the project through a Chamber Music American grant. The 10 original compositions featured on Otis Was a Polar Bear chart an inspirited soundtrack to the beginnings of a new life chapter for Miller and her family.
We’ve reached a moment when it’s far from remarkable that a jazz band is led by a female drummer and is half-populated by stirring women instrumentalists (Melford should be on anyone’s list of essential pianist). When motherhood inspires good jazz. When drummers who compose stirring jazz, about far more than groove, abound. Miller’s Boom-Tic-Boom is proof of all that, and yet it sounds singular, smart, cool and with just the right amount of weirdness. Sort of like how you’d wish your child to turn out. Continue reading “Now Playing (new & forthcoming CDs)”
Entering Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith at The New Quorum in New Orleans
In January, I got the chance to return to New Orleans for a focused period of writing and reflection, courtesy of The New Quorum, where I was writer-in-residence within an inaugural residency class. Having unpacked my clothes, I’m now unpacking my notes, interviews and conversations. Here’s the first of a series of posts drawn from that experience.
The New Quorum is an artist residency organization founded and directed by Gianna Chachere, and dedicated to bringing professional musicians and writers from across the globe to New Orleans for meaningful cultural exchange with local and regional artists.
If you’re a musician or writer interested in such an opportunity, now’s the time to go here: Applications for Spring residencies (May 16-June 13) are accepted through March 4.
If you’d lend financial or volunteer support go here now: This innovative program deserves such nurturing.
The night after I settled into my temporary and lovely home on Esplanade Avenue, the living room Christmas tree, which was still up, was dotted with sheet music. This was the first of four workshops for musicians led by composer and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, followed by an informal house concerts as part of his January residency.
Smith’s music, which is both singular and part of an influential movement connected to Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), demands improvisatory spirit. And, well, those Christmas tree branches worked just fine as music stands.
The music itself was anything but ornamental. Smith’s work employs “rhythm units” and is expressed on paper through “Ankhrasmation.” Smith uses this neologism—formed of “Ankh,” the Egyptian symbol for life, “Ras,” the Ethiopian word for leader, and “Ma”, a universal term for mother—to denote the systemic musical language he has developed over nearly 50 years for, he says, “scoring sound, rhythm and silence, or for scoring improvisation.” Continue reading “Entering Ankhrasmation: Wadada Leo Smith at The New Quorum in New Orleans”