As I packed my bags to head to the 47th annual New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, I felt a pang of sadness.
Allen Toussaint would not be there.
I would not see Toussaint, who died unexpectedly at 77 on November 10, looking resplendent like he always did. Nor would I hear him cycling through songs he wrote or arranged or produced, that were hits for stars of several genres, from Lee Dorsey to the Rolling Stones, Al Hirt to Bonnie Raitt, and that traced a half-century of distinctive and unparalleled music making. In New Orleans, a city known for musical innovation, imponderable dualities, and inscrutable personal style, Toussaint epitomized it all: He was a mild-mannered, soft-spoken creator of classics who drove a cream-colored 1974 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow, who could look elegantly complete in a suit jacket, silk tie, and a pair of white athletic socks and sandals, who could say a lot with just few notes or turn a pop song into a symphony.
Since I couldn’t stick around for jazzfest’s second weekend—which begins today and runs through Sunday—I also knew I’d miss the jazzfest tribute to Toussaint (Sunday, May 1, on the fest’s Gentilly Stage). The announced guests that will join Toussaint’s working band include Aaron Neville, Cyril Neville, Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Jimmy Buffett and Jon Batiste, yet Toussaint’s reach was so broad and deep it’s hard to predict who else might show up.
It was some small comfort that right before I left New York, I received “American Tunes,” which will be released June 10 on Nonesuch, and which represents Toussaint’s final studio recordings—solo tracks at his home studio in New Orleans and small ensemble takes from Los Angeles. Here, Toussaint worked with producer Joe Henry, as he did on his 2009 release, “The Bright Mississippi.” Some Toussaint fans I know don’t love that recording, due to its slowed-down tempos and its lack of, well, a certain brand of funk. But I do. It stands alongside Toussaint’s singularly funky achievements across genres and generations as something else, showcasing an aspect of his legacy often overlooked: His prowess as a pianist, which deserves its place within both a particular New Orleans lineage and the wider jazz-piano roll call.
Toussaint was a regular performer at jazzfest. Yet it wasn’t until after the 2005 flood caused by the levee failures that followed Hurricane Katrina, after Toussaint was temporarily displaced to New York City, that Toussaint began to “reclaim my own music,” as he once told me, and to focus more on taking the spotlight as a performer. (I’ll never forget Toussaint’s Sunday shows at Joe’s Pub, the intimate East Village venue, which grew out of a one-off fundraiser, or his 2009 stand at Manhattan’s Village Vanguard.) “American Tunes” lacks the coherent focus of “The Bright Mississippi.” As with the former CD, the new one bears the imprint of Henry, who is an auteur producer; yet Toussaint makes it his own, as he did all that he touched, especially when, on the new CD, he digs into the repertoire of one of his forebears, Professor Longhair. As long as there is a New Orleans, as long as American music gets played, Toussaint will be with us. On that Delta flight to Louis Armstrong airport, it was nice to hear from him again and anew.
This year’s jazzfest took shape under a cloud of loss. Continue reading “Tributes and Tributaries: In and Around the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival”
(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.
Obama In Cuba
It’s hard to believe that President Obama touched down in Havana yesterday—the first sitting president to set foot in Cuba since 1928, when Calvin Coolidge sailed into Havana aboard the U.S.S. Texas, parking the World War I-era battleship at the exact spot where the U.S.S. Maine was sunk during the Spanish-American war 30 years before.
Based on Stephen Crowley’s photo on the front page of the New York Times, it was raining.
And the context for Obama’s historic three-day trip, which extends an effort, begun in late 2014, to write a new chapter in U.S.-Cuban relations, is far from perfectly sunny: The Times headline next to that photo reads “As Obama Arrives, Cuba Tightens Its Grip on Dissent,” and describes how, hours before Air Force One landed at José Martí International Airport, dozens of arrests were made at the weekly march of Ladies in White, a prominent dissident group. (Elizardo Sanchez, who runs the Cuban Commission of Human Rights and National Reconciliation, is quoted as stating that the arrests took place “in the moment that Obama was flying in the air to Cuba.”
The process of normalizing relations won’t be easy and is full of contradictions. Yet it’s not disingenuous, may in fact be ingenious, and is simply necessary. Only recalcitrant Republicans can derail it at this point.
That photo above, with Obama holding his umbrella high in his right hand, waving his left, and stepping lightly, others falling in behind, reminded me (and I’m sure anyone who spends time in New Orleans) of a second-line parade.
And it should. Let’s cut the body politic, in the form of a cruel and now pointless embargo, loose. Let’s celebrate the soul that has always connected people to other people across the mere 90 miles that separate Cuba from the U.S.
A truly normalized relationship between the U.S. and Cuba holds promise to relieve great suffering in Cuba and lift many lives. It also holds the potential for great profit for U.S. companies. It can help reshape the political landscape of our hemisphere.
Yet for me, the most tantalizing aspects of the whole thing are cultural: Connecting again an essential link, musically and otherwise, that could never be fully broken but was unnaturally estranged. Continue reading “Obama In Cuba”
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)”
Now Playing (New & Forthcoming Releases)
Charles Lloyd & The Marvels I Long To See You (Blue Note, Jan. 15):
Charles Lloyd’s late-in-life burst of exploratory energy continues with this new band. Bassist Reuben Rogers (here, playing mostly electric bass) and drummer Eric Harland are drawn from Lloyd’s “new quartet,” which is no longer so new but still stunning (and features pianist Jason Moran). The Marvels was born of a 2013 musical encounter at UCLA’s Royce Hall between the saxophonist and flutist Lloyd and guitarist Bill Foristell. Frisell recruited pedal-steel master Greg Leisz. The material ranges from some favorites from Lloyd’s catalog— “Of Course, Of Course,” the title track of his 1965 Columbia album and “La Llorona,” from 2009’s Mirror, among others—and a wide range of other material—Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War,” for instance, and the hymn “Abide With Me.” There are vocals on two tracks, by Willie Nelson and Norah Jones.
Aruán Ortiz Trio Featuring Eric Revis & Gerald Cleaver Hidden Voice (Intakt Records, Feb. 2): Pianist Ortiz leads trio that includes one of New York’s most fascinating drummers, Gerald Cleaver. Ortiz is among a generation of Cuban-born musicians making influential waves on the New York scene. His new CD ends with a classic Cuban tune. Yet otherwise, Ortiz plays experimental jazz that owes to no nation in particular; his clearest lodestar is revealed on the CD’s two Ornette Coleman compositions. Though Ortiz’s work to date has been excellent, this recording represents a major leap in context and substance, and I suspect it will end up on best-of lists at the end of this year.
Two new CDs focus on the drum in very different ways:
Herlin Riley New Direction (Mack Avenue, Feb. 12): Drummer Riley is best known for his work with Wynton Marsalis and, more recently, Ahmad Jamal. Yet he’s much more than an ace sideman. Here’s my strategy whenever I’m in New Orleans: Find out where and when Riley is playing; be there. He is quite simply the best drummer in New Orleans, a city known for its lineage of great trapsmen and rhythm masters. Riley can play the whole drum kit in polyrhythmic splendor or he can establish his authority with just, say, a single detail on cowbell or snare drum. On this, his first album as a leader in a decade, he flashes several takes on the distinct New Orleans “pocket” through various jazz styles.
Dan Weiss Sixteen: Drummers Suite (Pi, Feb. 26): Drummer/composer Dan Weiss used a fascinating concept as the basis for this CD: He built a suite of pieces, each based on a specific set of beats within classic recordings of his favorite jazz drummers (Elvin Jones, Max Roach, and others): His liner notes include footnotes to brief rhythmic passages, some just seconds long (timings noted). Weiss, who plays drums, tabla and contributes “vocal percussion” on some tracks, calls the music an “amalgam of jazz, Indian Music, prog rock, contemporary classical music and other completely idiosyncratic influences” which is a longwinded way of saying that you’ll hear unexpected blends of timbres and textures in music that adheres to nobody’s formula. It helps that Weiss here gathers more than a dozen notable and notably creative players, including singer Jen Shyu, pianist Matt Mitchell and guitarist Miles Okazaki.
At Home With The Morans
I got a chance to sit around the kitchen table at the Harlem home of pianist Jason Moran and singer Alicia Hall Moran, for this interview piece in The Wall Street Journal. The piece was ostensubly pegged to the release of Hall Moran’s debut CD, released on a new imprint the couple established together—a worthy release that celebrates the pure essence of Hall Moran’s voice as it blurs lines between genres and toys with aural textures
But the Journal piece really was a chance to check in on a remarkable couple who absorb and radiate cultural details with remarkable energy and insight, and whose presence in New York recalls a moment when Harlem was full of families that made art out of community and community out of art. I’ve known them both for more than a decade and it’s been inspiring and educational—about music and marriage–to see how husband and wife affect each other’s experience and expression.
When I asked Did you open musical doors for each other? Alicia said this:
Jason took me to hear Cecil Taylor and Henry Threadgill. Those doors needed opening for me. But on a deeper level, he helped me grasp how important each individual instrument and personality is in music.
And Jason told me:
Dating a girl who knew Western classical music inside and out—who felt it—was a new kind of education. She taught me that Alban Berg was as soulful as Duke Ellington. She helped me focus on narrative. As a jazz musician, living life with someone who always demands a story makes you check everything you’re going to play.
And Jason pointed out that Alicia helped him think more deeply about the idea of narrative in his own music. He said:
Jazz instrumentalists once played with a sense of narrative but now that’s mostly not true. And in school they weren’t teaching you how to play a story. Singers always have to tell a story—in English or German or whatever. We instrumentalists don’t, and though there was a generation that said you really have to learn the lyrics, it ain’t really a rule out here for success. So living life with someone who’s always trying to tell a story or who regularly asks ‘What do you mean by that,’ makes you rethink certain things.
That last part didn’t make it into the article, but here’s the complete text: Continue reading “At Home With The Morans”