{"id":6318,"date":"2017-03-09T17:02:31","date_gmt":"2017-03-09T17:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=6318"},"modified":"2017-03-09T17:02:31","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T17:02:31","slug":"happy-30th-birthday-jazz-passengers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2017\/03\/09\/happy-30th-birthday-jazz-passengers\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy 30th Birthday, Jazz Passengers!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"525\" height=\"295\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PBTmiuTVg8w?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nHere&#8217;s a video of <strong>&#8220;Can&#8217;t Afford to Live,&#8221;<\/strong> the fifth track of <strong>&#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Still-Life-Trouble-Jazz-Passengers\/dp\/B01NCY7L28\">Still Life With Trouble<\/a>&#8221; <\/strong>(Thirsty Ear\/Yellowbird\/Enja, out March 24), an album that marks 30 years since the formation of the Jazz Passengers, a band that grew out of a partnership between saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Fowlkes, after the two had played with John Lurie&#8217;s band and in the Lounge Lizards.<br \/>\n\u201cI wanted something rougher around the edges, more oddball and genuinely funny,\u201d Nathanson told me for a 2011 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB10001424052748703730804576321202327107920\">Wall Street Journal piece<\/a>. \u201cAnd closer to real jazz.\u201d Duets with Fowlkes grew into the Jazz Passengers, whose fine recordings and noteworthy shows quickly earned the group a reputation for high musicianship and a freewheeling sensibility.<br \/>\nThe new album reflects the group&#8217;s manifold influences and qualities\u2014funk, fun, hard truths, early jazz, later jazz, even later jazz, stuff that isn&#8217;t quite jazz, stuff that ought to be jazz, a mastery of improvisatory instrumental language, a love of the English language and the history of spoken-word performance, good singing, passable yet savvy singing, collective improvisation, what rock used to be, what blues has always been, and wisps of Charles Mingus, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and other heroes (this is a partial list).<br \/>\nAll that comes through, plus some fascinating new wrinkles; for instance, these are some of the strongest arrangements in the group&#8217;s long catalog.<br \/>\nThe Passengers will celebrate the release and mark 30 years at <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/roulette.org\/event\/the-jazz-passengers-still-life-with-trouble-album-release-celebration\/\">Brooklyn&#8217;s Roulette on March 28<\/a><\/strong>.<br \/>\nThe current personnel is Nathanson, Fowlkes, violinist\u00a0Sam Bardfeld, vibraphonist Bill Ware, bassist\u00a0Brad Jones, drummer\u00a0Ben Perowsky and percussionist\u00a0EJ Rodriguez. The group&#8217;s got a fascinating history that spans much of what&#8217;s been best about downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn since the late 1980s.<br \/>\nThis video summarizes all that lovingly and with style (around 2 minutes in, when Nathanson and Fowlkes improvise together, you can sense the friendhip that is the group&#8217;s spiritual center):<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"525\" height=\"295\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uji5cdun3RY?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; encrypted-media\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><br \/>\nIf you see Nathanson on the Q train, head down and pen out, he&#8217;s working on a poem. \u201cI can only write poetry while riding the subway,\u201d he said recently from the living room of his house in Brooklyn&#8217;s Ditmas Park. \u201cIt&#8217;s the strangest thing.\u201d<br \/>\nEven his version of a press release, penned for the new CD, takes on literary dimension. It&#8217;s a nice history to a band you need to know:<!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In 1986, when my friend Ray Dobbins suggested we call our new band \u201cThe Jazz Passengers,\u201d I thought, &#8220;that&#8217;s kinda funny!&#8221; The name felt like a clever take on the alpha nature of the great iconic names: The Jazz Messengers and The Jazz Crusaders. The self-deprecating irony of the term \u201cThe Jazz Passengers\u201d seemed about right for our eclectic crew.<br \/>\nMost of us had been playing in the Lounge Lizards and several of us blended our appreciation for jazz with a deep affection and involvement in the east village culture of those late 80s early 90s days: punk music and poetry, gender bending theatre, and avant musics of different types in the context of venues that allowed for real experimentation with the support of cheap rents. Somewhere in this \u00a0\u201cdowntown\u201d universe we found a political\/cultural\/psychological world that valued stupid jokes and serious commitment to various types of exploration equally, and it was from this world that the Passengers emerged.<br \/>\nThen like the rest of our money infused global city and the world, the guys and guise in the band got shoved along in a variety of separate directions. But we liked each other enough, and valued these influences enough that somehow we hung in there. Somehow we stayed deeply connected and continued to evolve.\u00a0 No longer centered in a geographical location we managed to nurture and grow a collective sound and sensibility that has imbued quite a list of projects, which I recently digitized and got a chance to watch and listen to.<br \/>\nThe Fire at Keaton\u2019s Bar and Grille, 2000 (the song cycle about a mythical bar with loads of mythical guests), The Rock Concert, 2005 (commissioned by the University of Wisconsin Science Museum to contextualize their discovery of the world\u2019s oldest piece of geological material), You\u2019re the Fool, 2003, (my semi-autobiographical Radio play for NPR), Jazz Passengers in Egypt (our own 1990 Marxist \u2013 as in the brothers &#8211; musical comedy featuring members of the downtown Ridiculous Theatre community), and tons of our live performances from 1987 to today.<br \/>\nSeeing all this work \u2013 all these crazy solos and stories, jokes and nuts arrangements was something of an epiphany. What struck me most was how the work sung of community and \u00a0shared language, the weight of a collective life\u2019s work. It is in that spirit we carved out time in these last 2 years to work on this 30th Anniversary CD, \u201cStill Life With Trouble\u201d.\u00a0 Thankfully, deep into our late 50\u2019s and mid 60\u2019s we\u2019ve managed to record a CD that is a pure representation of this very particular Passengers language. It contains nine musical stories about trouble and the passage of time that describe a Still Life of odd birds native to these parts whose calls employ a variety of pitches, words, harmonies and rhythms that collectively translate into the following sentence: If there\u2019s still life, there\u2019s certainly still trouble!<br \/>\nWith the help of our longtime producer\/engineer\/friend Hugo Dwyer these nine tracks represent a new path in the Passengers journey.\u00a0 The original members of the band, Curtis Fowlkes (who started the JPs with me while playing for dancing elephants in the Big Apple Circus), Bill Ware, Brad Jones, EJ Rodriguez and myself are supplemented here with newish (last 10 years) violinist Sam Bardfeld and a second drummer, the wonderful Ben Perowsky.\u00a0 Original member Marc Ribot plays on one track. After years of trying other guitarists in Marc\u2019s absence, we finally found a different way to broaden the band\u2019s palette in this recording by adding Ben as a second drummer.<br \/>\nThis new CD finds inspiration in the intuitive abandon that characterized our first two CDs recorded in the late 1980s. \u201cParis,\u201d which opens this recording, is a blues dedication to the great city whose beleaguered banlieus has been a home to our band through the wonderful Banlieus Bleus Jazz Festival. \u201cEverybody Plays the Fool\u201d is a rearrangement of the great R and B classic.\u00a0 I was always so touched by the first verse when Cuba Gooding of the Main Ingredient asks, &#8220;I hear you&#8217;re even thinkin&#8217; about dyin\u2019 \/ but before you do anything rash \/ dig this!&#8221;. Such a thing to say in a pop tune! I thought we should try to make our sense of that.<br \/>\n\u201cTrouble\u201d is a multi-meter piece of mine with a blues head that moves between solo set-ups to give several of us a well-organized opportunity to complain with some eloquence.\u00a0 Brad\u2019s tune \u201cGleis, Spoor, Binario\u201d is dedicated to all these years of European touring that have enabled so many of us to continue to play this eccentric heartfelt music. Next is my Passengers style pop tune, \u201cWake Up, Again,\u201d an off kilter groove in 5\/4 featuring Curtis\u2019 mellifluous voice.\u00a0 Curtis wrote the next tune, \u201cWhere\u2019s Lonely Junior\u201d and it features his distinctive loping trombone, one of the great delicacies of this peculiar world we all live in.<br \/>\nThe seventh song \u201cWe\u2019re All Jews\u201d references Lenny Bruce\u2019s perfect description of New Yorkers. True, no? The last two tunes are by Bill Ware whose vibes and arrangements have provided a whole lot of sheen on all of our work.\u00a0 Bill claims that the first of the two, \u201cFriends\u201d, was given to him in a dream by Louis Armstrong, and who am I to quibble?\u00a0 The last tune, \u201cSpring Flowers\u201d celebrates the miracle of chemical enhancement.<br \/>\nSimply put, I\u2019d like to share the joy and enthusiasm I feel about this CD &#8211; and about being a passenger on this 30 year ride with these very special odd musicians &#8211; and to offer you a seat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s a video of &#8220;Can&#8217;t Afford to Live,&#8221; the fifth track of &#8220;Still Life With Trouble&#8221; (Thirsty Ear\/Yellowbird\/Enja, out March 24), an album that marks 30 years since the formation of the Jazz Passengers, a band that grew out of a partnership between saxophonist Roy Nathanson and trombonist Fowlkes, after the two had played with &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2017\/03\/09\/happy-30th-birthday-jazz-passengers\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Happy 30th Birthday, Jazz Passengers!&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}