*An interview with Anthony Braxton, with a bit of input from Nels Cline, on his new improv album with Cline, Taylor Ho Bynum and Deerhoof's Greg Saunier. This was my second time interviewing Anthony, with more than a decade in between, and he remains a joy to speak with.
*Also a joy, witnessing Andrew Cyrille play eight inspired sets on opening night of this year's Vision Fest.
*A recap of the new Blue Note doc, which I really enjoyed.
*An interview with current King Crimson singer-guitarist Jakko Jakszyk, ahead of their ongoing 50th anniversary tour.
Showing posts with label Andrew Cyrille. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Cyrille. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Sunday, February 28, 2016
DFSBP archives: Beaver Harris
As WKCR—the world's greatest jazz broadcasting outlet and the place where I learned much of what I know about this art form that I love—continues to struggle with its online-streaming rights, I present a digital version of one of the most enjoyable shows I helped to organize there: a 2000 tribute to drummer-composer William "Beaver" Harris.
The role I played in this show was a background one. Glo Harris, the show's principal host and key architect, clearly had the whole thing covered. I can't recall exactly how the program came about, but I remember Phil Schaap mentioning to me—then an eager, inexperienced student broadcaster—that he had a project I might be interested in. I believe Glo, who had been married to Beaver, had approached Phil about putting together a radio show in her late husband's honor. At some point, Phil graciously handed me the reins. I engineered the show, talked on-air a bit and may have had some input into what musical selections were played—at that time, I was a huge fan of Beaver's work on the 1976 Steve Lacy–Roswell Rudd album Trickles—but this was Glo's brainchild, and the warmth and sincerity of the finished product is a testament to her enduring love for Beaver, both as a man and a musician.
Wade Barnes, the late drummer, educator and NYC jazz torchbearer, is a genial and insightful presence in parts I and II of the broadcast, and the supporting cast only snowballs from there. I still remember sitting in the main WKCR control room, then housed in Riverside Church, as master after master materialized, either on the phone or in person. Part III features an Andrew Cyrille call-in, and Rashied Ali and Grachan Moncur III drop by in Part IV, joined later by impromptu call-in guest Jack DeJohnette. Like Glo, they all clearly admired this man as a player and loved him as a human being. Their stories flesh out a career that's sadly underrepresented in the official discography.
Beaver Harris is a fascinating figure, and this program makes a compelling case for just how underrated and little understood his genius was, and still is. You'll hear Barnes discuss the "from ragtime to no time" ethos that guided Harris's work, and the concept wasn't just a clever phrase: whatever the idiom, Harris played with command and coherence. As a sideman, on Trickles, on various Albert Ayler and Archie Shepp recordings, on lesser-known sessions with Chet Baker and Lee Konitz, Ken McIntyre, and Rudolph Grey's Blue Humans, he was explosive (always wielding that slashing China cymbal) or supportive, as the moment demanded. He danced and pummeled with equal skill and flair.
As a leader or co-leader, on marvelous and almost completely overlooked albums such as 1976's In: Sanity (featuring Dave Burrell), 1984's A Well Kept Secret (featuring Don Pullen) and Thank You For Your Ears (recorded '84, released '98), he was even better. He wasn't just a drummer; he had a sonic and conceptual vision, which he aptly labeled "360 Degree." It was eclectic (those steel drums!), inclusive and fantastical. One of his pieces, "African Drums," even became a sort of out-jazz standard, recorded by Shepp and David S. Ware.
Beaver Harris made his mark. Start here and go forth:
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. I
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. II
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. III
Beaver Harris tribute - WKCR - April 19, 2000, pt. IV
Download the broadcast at the links above, or stream via the blue bar at the bottom of the page.
Thank you again to Glo Harris for putting together this incredible program, and to Phil Schaap for making the introduction.
/////
Other Beaver Harris resources:
*Clifford Allen's valuable career overview
*1987 WKCR interview re: Ayler (go here and scroll down)
*1983 live recording with Sam Rivers and steel-drummer Francis Haynes, who also appears on In: Sanity and A Well Kept Secret
*1975 live footage with Archie Shepp and Chet Baker
Incidentally, the broadcast above led, either directly or indirectly, to my later interviews with Moncur, Ali and Cyrille.
Sunday, December 07, 2014
2014 jazz top 10, plus
Did I hear enough jazz records in 2014 to comment authoritatively on what the "best" were? Did I listen hard/long enough to those I did hear, even the ones that yielded great pleasure? I'm thinking more about that word, listen, these days, after having read my friend Nick Podgurski's recent critique/manifesto on the topic, as it pertains to processing, appreciating and writing about music. His thoughts are well worth your time.
No, I don't feel that my jazz listening this year was really adequate, whatever that means. And I think that's as it should be. Those of us who follow and respond to the arts can always do more. But in the present tense, all you can do is make note of what moved you and why. That's why I like the year-end list bonanza, simply because it's a time of celebration. And celebration is the ultimate goal, always, maybe the only goal. "Criticism"—haha. I'm a fan.
So here are some 2014 jazz records I loved. The first ten are the ones I submitted as my ballot to Francis Davis's annual survey. The order feels more and more arbitrary to me as I look over the list, but I'll count down backward to build in just a little suspense. All of these should be easily accessible via Amazon and/or iTunes; most of them—the ECMs and the Palmetto excepted—are streaming on Spotify. Now, on to the music:
10. Louis Hayes Return of the Jazz Communicators (Smoke Sessions)
Smoke, on the Upper West Side, is a cool club. I admit I haven't been there in ages. The recent flurry of albums from the venue's in-house label, Smoke Sessions, makes me want to remedy that asap. As Nate Chinen recently reported, Smoke Sessions has been on a tear lately, much like its downtown counterpart Smalls Records. Every Smoke disc I've spent good time with has been strong, but I admit I'm biased toward the ones that pair elder bop masters with killer younger players. (Along these lines, I also highly recommend Jimmy Cobb's The Original Mob, with Peter Bernstein, Brad Mehldau and John Webber.) As I've written here before, the intergenerational concept often makes for great jazz: conventional jazz that feels profound, not perfunctory. And that's exactly what this Louis Hayes session is. On paper, it's completely straightforward—a nice, varied set of jazz-club jazz, played live at Smoke by an all-star band. But the sound is excellent, and it allows me to focus on what I want to focus on, namely the gorgeous thump and crash of Hayes's kit, the strange, somewhat loose, rattly snare sound, the relaxed insistence of his ride-cymbal patterns. Three outstanding soloists—saxist Abraham Burton, vibist Steve Nelson and pianist David Bryant—all of whom sound so comfortable in Hayes's luxurious pocket, and in the general idiom of this music: soulful hardbop, ’50s-style, from burners to ballads, like the sort that the now 77-year-old Hayes was playing with Horace Silver nearly 60 (!) years ago. I hope I get the chance to see Louis Hayes live soon, and I thank Smoke Sessions for reminding me to catch players like him while I still can.
9. Bill McHenry, Henry Grimes and Andrew Cyrille Us Free—Fish Stories (Fresh Sound New Talent)
I didn't know this album existed until a couple weeks ago. I think I was searching, as I often am, for new Andrew Cyrille delights and stumbled across Us Free on Spotify. As I mentioned on Twitter recently, it's been a great year for AC on disc; for example, Syvmileskridt, a trio album led by Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard and featuring the drummer, narrowly missed making this top 10 list and is well worth your time, as is Wiring, by the illustrious Trio 3 (Lake/Workman/Cyrille) with simpatico guest pianist Vijay Iyer. When I saw that Us Free was actually recorded in 2006, I wondered if it might have some sort of core drawback that kept it from release until now, but once you hear it, I think you'll agree that it's every bit as excellent as you'd expect given the musicians involved. As I've often written, I'm a big Bill McHenry fan; put him together with a drummer as classy, adaptable and distinctive as Cyrille (see: the current McHenry quartet with AC, Orrin Evans and Eric Revis) and an intense, unpredictable bass presence like Henry Grimes, and you've got serious potential. When I first came across Us Free, I was wondering if it would be more or less an open-improv session. I'd happily listen to a record like that made by these three, but I find Us Free's actual content—a diverse program of concise tracks, most of them originals—way more interesting.
I'm not sure whose idea this session was; it seems like a sort of collective affair, but I'm just now realizing that in many ways it's a sequel to Grimes's underrated 1965 debut as a leader, The Call. Us Free reprises three of the Grimes tracks from that session, "For Django" (just called "Django" here; not to be confused with the John Lewis standard), "Son of Alfafa" and "Fish Story," clearly the new album's quasi-namesake. Like The Call, Us Three is a trio session that runs on a sort of jittery, dancing, almost whimsical energy, and juggles gritty, deep-pocket, hard-swinging freebop with more abstract styles. In the former vein, the trio's reading of Keith Jarrett's "Shades of Jazz" (an interesting choice; I'm guessing it might have been McHenry's call, since he's the only one who doesn't contribute original pieces to this date) almost reminds me of an Old and New Dreams performance, or maybe a particularly hard-swinging Paul Motian–led track; it has that same rough, rambling, freewheeling, celebratory vibe. McHenry, Grimes and Cyrille share a deep earthiness of aesthetic, and so, a conventionally swinging performance like "Shades" or "Django" feels completely of a piece with the freer, more intuitive style of improvising heard on "Son of Alfafa." Smartly, there are plenty of moments of deep repose here: a stupendously chill version of Cyrille's "Aubade" (which I remember from another excellent, not-well-enough-known AC reed/bass/drums session, the C/D/E album from 2000), which features the sparsest and most prayerful instrumental interplay I've heard on record this year. "Vibration"—one of several tracks on which Grimes plays violin (another is a moving solo rendition of "Come Sunday")—"Fish Story" and "With You in Mind" (featuring a narration by AC) exemplify a similar sort of texture-oriented balladry that's heavenly to get lost in if you're a fan of the softer side of these three players' sounds. Any trio album featuring these three players was going to catch my attention, but the fact that this turned out to be such a thoughtful, substantial, approachable, and, I'd be remiss not to mention, beautifully recorded album was a pleasant shock. Can't wait to spend more time with this one (and, for that matter, with The Call, an album I loved years ago but haven't revisited in quite a while).
8. David Virelles Mbókò (ECM)
Like many of my jazz-writin' peers, I was a big fan of Virelles's immersive 2012 set Continuum (see here and here). Mbókò is on a different label and features a different band—percussionist-vocalist Román Díaz is the sole holdover from Continuum—but to me it feels like a sequel to that session. David Virelles's work as a leader obviously has a very strong sense of mission. In the first write-up of Continuum linked above, I discussed how that record had an air of willful mystery. "I have also been asked about the meaning of Román Díaz’ words on this recording," wrote Virelles of Continuum, referring to the untranslated chant/narration that Díaz contributes to that album. "His poetry was created in Spanish, as well as ritual languages from the three main cultural lineages of African origin of Cuba: Karabalí, Kongo and Yorùbá-Lucumí. He uses their inherited phrases by morphing and reorganizing them, contributing to these oral traditions. His words address issues particular to each song in a code-like fashion that would be challenging to understand even to Spanish speakers." (Emphasis mine.) In this newer interview, he discusses the Abakuá secret society and its influence on Mbókò. "…some of the information is available only to intitiates," he says at one point. And in this Continuum interview, he states, "I wanted to have access to the kind of information that people like Andrew Cyrille [who appears on Continuum] have, for example. I wanted direct contact with that."
I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of Virelles's rich statements, either verbal or musical, but it's clear that his work is about communion, both with jazz tradition and with Afro-Cuban ritual tradition. And if you don't necessarily fully grasp all the references, you can still get lost in the music, feel its meditative composure and shadowy intrigue. Mbókò takes me to those same places, but to my ears, it's a less esoteric album than Continuum, more aligned with Jazz Piano proper. Part of that has to do with the fact that Díaz's verbal element is downplayed; his chant is featured, but in a less central role than it was on Continuum. I admit that this appeals to me; I enjoyed the vocals on the earlier record, and I understand their centrality to the project, but I found myself relishing the straightforward piano-bass-drums interplay the most. More than Continuum, Mbókò feels like a jazz album that has a strong Afro-Cuban ritual element, rather than an Afro-Cuban ritual album that has a strong jazz element. Some of the pieces, like the opening "Wind Rose (Antrogofoko Mokoirén)," feel like spirit-raising soundscapes, but other tracks here, like "Aberiñán y Aberisún," "Stories Waiting to Be Told" and "Seven, Through the Divination Horn" really let us hear Virelles the piano player and bandleader, as opposed to, for lack of a better term, Virelles the channeler-of-vibe. Díaz's percussion is beautifully integrated into the record's piano-bass-bass-drums fabric, and there's something really compelling about hearing his folkloric percussion set against kit drummer Marcus Gilmore's futuristic, electronica-inspired grooves on "Transmission," to name one example of how Díaz's contributions play out on Mbókò. If I had to venture a guess, I'd suspect that ECM's Manfred Eicher might have had something to do with the somewhat more conventional bent of this album with respect to its predecessor. (Interestingly, in the newest interview mentioned above, Virelles discusses how some listeners told him they felt Continuum wasn't traditionally "pianistic" enough; is Mbókò simply a response to that?) But whatever the reason for this slight shift in orientation, the important thing is that Mbókò delivers a lot of what I liked about Continuum, while telling us even more about the David Virelles aesthetic. This budding visionary clearly doesn't make records casually, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
7. Dave Douglas and Uri Caine Present Joys (Greenleaf Music)
I'm not all that familiar with Dave Douglas's enormous body of work. I've enjoyed the handful of his records I've checked out during the past few years, and there are a few back-catalog titles I remember digging many years back (including the Booker Little tribute In Our Lifetime and the Tiny Bell Trio's Songs for Wandering Souls), but I'm no expert. That's even more true re: my knowledge of Uri Caine. But Present Joys immediately felt familiar and inviting to me, and it's stuck with me since its release over the summer. I think this is because it falls into a certain category of record that I have an affinity for—not just a horn/piano duo album, but one with a powerful unifying mood, a reason for existing. There's a good amount of variety on Present Joys, but its prevailing mood is a sort of churchy somberness, stemming from the fact that several of the pieces are from the Sacred Harp songbook. And some of the tracks that aren't drawn from that source clearly take cues from this tradition. Much like Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo's similarly hued Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, Present Joys is a document of two badass jazz musicians getting together and deciding to do something other than simply play some tunes. Douglas and Caine are zeroing in on a wavelength, using their gifts to set, and burrow into, a mood, rather than just perform. As with Songs of Mirth, the album isn't all one thing; there's some nicely jaunty, bluesy, swinging, sometimes abstract material ("Ham Fist," "Seven Seas," "End to End") to season the mix. But the slower pieces seem to me to be the meat of the album. "Bethel" is one of the originals that's clearly indebted to the Sacred Harp material; it's intensely lovely and funereal. There's delicateness to the playing here and also great gravity. This performance, along with the other slow pieces, is the sound of two musicians playing a song, sitting with it and meditating on it, rather than perfunctorily stating a theme as a prelude to improvisation. I've always been a fan of, for lack of a better term, sad jazz: Booker Little's "Man of Words," Grachan Moncur's "Evolution," Andrew Hill's "Dedication" and much of the aforementioned Marsalis/Calderazzo set. If you, like me, love it when jazz slows, quiets, grows still, bears down emotionally, bares its heavy heart, then Present Joys will likely do for you what it does for me. I'm sitting here listening to the final track, "Zero Hour," and I'm feeling like I could live in this music. It's not some relaxing-background-music vibe; it's the power of jazz to embrace sparseness and patience and real reflection. A zone beyond ballads, approaching pure feeling. That's what Dave Douglas and Uri Caine achieve here.
(Incidentally, I'm curious to know what other duo albums in the vein of Present Joys folks might be able to recommend. Off the top of my head, I can think of three LPs I know of, but don't know so well, that might do the trick: Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan's Goin' Home, Hank Jones and Charlie Haden's Steal Away, and Haden and Metheny's Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now that I think about it, Haden's classic duets collections, Closeness and The Golden Number, fit the bill too.)
6. Johnathan Blake Gone, But Not Forgotten (Criss Cross)
Plenty of conventional jazz appeal on this record by drummer Johnathan Blake, another player I'm not super familiar with in general. I don't typically see promos from Criss Cross, but I sought this one out after reading Ethan Iverson's rave on Do the Math. I'll second his praise and state that I love the way this album both fulfills and subverts the paradigm of brawny, hard-swinging two-tenor jazz. There's no denying the thrill of hearing the clearly very Elvin-inspired, and sometimes (as on "Broski") beautifully bashy Blake light a fire underneath Chris Potter and Mark Turner. The former, who seems to really excel at soul-volcano catharsis, fits comfortably into this context, while Turner finds ways to match Potter's intensity while at the same time bringing his usual feeling of thoughtful composure into the mix. (Interestingly, I was just reading this Turner Ted Panken Blindfold Test, where Turner says of Potter, "I wish I could play that well. He’s totally incredible.") Blake clearly designed this as a playing date. In contrast to Present Joys, there is a feeling here of "Get the head out of the way so we can jam" on pieces such as "New Wheels" and monster opening track "Cryin' Blues." But the simple assuredness with which Blake and bassist Ben Street swing, and with which all the players solo (I'm listening to a killer Street bass feature on final track "Two for the Blues" right now) makes this record a moment-to-moment delight, whether the band is ambling or cooking.
The pianoless-quartet format yields a great feeling of openness; in that sense, this is free jazz, literally jazz that's free to do what its architect, Blake, clearly loves to do most, which is hang out in the pocket and just jam. (Not to play the pointless pigeonholing game, but I'm having a hard time placing this brand of jazz; there's a lot of hardbop in here, but the pianoless element takes it out of the realm of super-conventional jazz-club jazz; maybe you could liken the format heard on Gone, But Not Forgotten to some of the Elvin-led bands of the ’70s, including the Liebman/Grossman/Perla quartet from Live at the Lighthouse.) Blake picked the right players; as Iverson noted, he picked the right repertoire (a cool smattering including pieces by Eddie Harris, Cedar Walton, Paul Motian and Jim Hall) and he picked the right arrangements, just meticulous enough to create an appealing framework for the solos; and he clearly picked the right studio and engineer, because this album sounds excellent. I've got the Trudy Pitts ballad "Anysha" on now, and much like the Louis Hayes album, it just sounds good, in a simple, nourishing way. This is an uncomplicated jazz album—familiar though not, to my ears, particularly retro-feeling—but one with a really savvy design and a very clear, consistent appeal. I would love to see this music performed live.
5. David Weiss When Words Fail (Motéma Music)
Speaking of clear, consistent appeal, I'm really starting to recognize David Weiss's name as a mark of quality, a brand that implies a certain amount of seriousness and sophistication, and a determination to produce top-quality small-group jazz that summons an orchestral grandeur without skimping on the improvisational fire. I'm a big fan of his work with the Cookers, which released its latest robust, powerful disc this year, Time and Time Again, an album I wish I'd been able to spend more time with. Part of the reason I didn't, though, might have been that this disc under Weiss's own name really sated my appetite for that trademark Weiss sound that's so evident on the Cookers albums: big, lush, little-big-band arrangements bookending passionate solos. There's nothing particularly radical about the David Weiss aesthetic, but I do hear in his work a certain defiant spirit, an insistence that contemporary jazz ought not to shy away from being jazzy: big and bold and dramatic and flashy and hugely spirited, while taking on a range of emotions with a broadly shaded palette that clearly takes cues from the composerly likes of Wayne Shorter, an artist Weiss paid tribute to on last year's Endangered Species.
Simply put, many of these pieces (e.g., "The Intrepid Hub," "MJ") sound like they could be standards from somewhere between about ’65 and ’75—"White Magic" is actually a 1973 tune by pianist John Taylor—but the way Weiss's band performs them, they sound utterly urgent. I'm particularly impressed by altoist Myron Walden's voicelike wailing on "Aftermath." (You can sense Walden and the other sidemen's devotion to the Weiss enterprise in this promo video.) Does this jazz sound old? In a certain sense. When Words Fail makes me think of those proud, determinedly classy, brassy, swinging jazzmen of the ’70s, the Charles Tollivers and Woody Shaws, say; it's an album that asserts Weiss's unshakeable belief, expressed in Cookers liner notes I've read, that hardbop is an infinite and infinitely durable medium. So this record is not "cutting-edge" in any obvious way. What it is, though, is simply sturdy and superb and confident in its idiom and in control of its materials. Does hearing music this flawless sometimes make me want to grasp for something rawer, chancier, less pristine? Sure, but if you're in the mood for jazz with polish and grandeur and heart, and these sort of skyscraping, spirit-stirring themes—and I find that I often am—When Words Fail is an excellent bet.
4. Sarah Manning Harmonious Creature (Posi-Tone)
Like the Smalls and Smoke imprints mentioned above, L.A.'s Posi-Tone has a strong label identity, mostly orbiting around straight-ahead hardbop. While I've often enjoyed their output in the past, I've never felt as strongly about any of their records as I do about this one, and that might be because it stands so far apart from what they usually release. I have to thank Phil Freeman, a passionate Posi-Tone advocate, for turning me on to Harmonious Creature, via this interview with saxist-composer Sarah Manning. (The album ranked highly on Phil's very comprehensive and worthwhile year-end jazz list over at Burning Ambulance.) All of the albums on this list are, in one way or another, strong, individualistic statements, but to me, none of them feels as distinctive as this record. Harmonious Creature is an entire world; everything, from the makeup of the ensemble to the character of the writing, and Manning's alto-saxophone style and improvisational approach—and even the cover art/design—feels deeply personal. I can recall hearing jazz with strong overtones of chamber music, Americana or Eastern European folk, all currents I hear in this music, but there's a certain sense of fantasy, of elegant reverie, that pervades Manning's aesthetic and sets it wholly apart from any other soundworld I can think of. The themes are sturdy and instantly memorable; I'm particularly taken with the swaying, twisting, piquant "Radish Spirit" and the blazing, dervish-like "Floating Bridge." And the grouping of musicians, particularly the frontline of Manning, violist Eyvind Kang and guitarist Jonathan Goldberger, is an exemplary feat of bandbuilding. There's just such a synergy between material and format; you can tell that Manning crafted this music to be played by this band. The sax and viola solos, which often overlap, can feel like a single improvising brain expressing itself in two different voices: Manning's gorgeously liquid, almost stringlike sound—imagine Sonny Simmons's register-jumping daring combined with the calmly inspired flow of Lee Konitz—mingling with Kang's woody, super-emotive flights. Guitarist Johnathan Goldberger adds a luminous haze to the performances; he's particularly effective on the quasi-ambient ballad "I Dream a Highway" and the excellent cover of Neil Young's "On the Beach," which explodes into a blur of swimming colors.
Harmonious Creature stands apart from most jazz the way that Young song stands apart from most "roots rock." It expresses a very private vision, but also a very openhearted and inviting one, beautifully rendered by a profoundly sympathetic band. I have no idea who to compare Sarah Manning to soundwise, but spiritwise, I'm tempted to mention Booker Little, Kenny Wheeler, Bill Frisell and Paul Motian. The first two for specificity of vision, depth of affect and richness of texture, and the latter two for their championing of a deeply romantic, dreamlike vision of jazz—jazz that seems at once nostalgic and fantastical. I think Harmonious Creature embodies all of that. I love this record, and I'm fascinated to hear future dispatches from Sarah Manning's singular brain.
3. Kenny Barron and Dave Holland The Art of Conversation (Impulse!)
I came around to Dave Holland's 2013 release, Prism, pretty late. It was only a month or so ago that I really had a moment with that record, a fun, swaggery funk-fusion romp. This LP couldn't be more different from Prism. It's not anything like the other duo album on this list, Present Joys, either. In some ways, The Art of Conversation has a lot in common with the Johnathan Blake session above. Both are about providing elegant frameworks in which master improvisers can simply play—get down to business and be themselves. Kenny Barron's playing on this record is so assured, so swinging and bluesy and virtuosic, that it almost feels unassailable. I'm not sure how jazz piano could be played any better than this. Of course, there are a million more idiosyncratic ways it could be played, but Barron's playing seems free of quirk. The passion I hear in his playing is the passion of assurance; he's nailing this music and making it look easy. Holland solos too—and handles the melody statement on the exquisite Barron ballad "Rain"—but mostly, he's playing a straightforward pizzicato bassist's role on this program of originals by both men, plus a couple standards.
I truly don't mean to take anything away from this pair or minimize the album's appeal—even in a year of particularly strong jazz releases, this stood way out for me—when I say that The Art of Conversation seems like the platonic ideal of cocktail jazz. The performances are uniformly tight, pleasant and—again, I don't mean this as a value judgment—polite. The repertoire is well-balanced, from witty and urbane (Monk is clearly a touchstone; the duo plays "In Walked Bud," as well as Barron's very Monkish "The Only One") to stirring and romantic (Holland's "The Oracle," Ellingon/Strayhorn's "Daydream). And these pieces do work just fine in a background mood-setting capacity, but when you take the time to zero in, The Art of Conversation just sounds sublime. The album title is at once a) cliché and b) completely true. To listen closely to a piece like the gorgeous Holland ballad "In Your Arms" is to hear two players interlocking, exchanging, dancing together, reinforcing one another in turn.
The Art of Conversation contains a lot of music that will sound familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of jazz. It's tempting to gloss over an album like this, even if you find it appealing. It's great jazz musicians playing jazz, right? But beneath the almost casual, offhanded facade, its seeming effortlessness, is a deep conviction about how jazz ought to be done. There are obviously many more conventionally exciting and distinctive Dave Holland records than this chill and dynamically narrow release, and while I don't know the Kenny Barron catalog well, I'd guess that the same goes for him. But taken on its own merits, The Art of Conversation rewards every second you spend paying it close attention. Listen hard enough, and its straightforward excellence starts to sound almost radical. This album achieves urgency by simply being its own unassuming self.
2. Frank Kimbrough Quartet (Palmetto)
There's an illustrious jazz tradition of building on tradition, wearing one's influences proudly, whether that's Mingus channeling Duke, or Steve Lacy channeling Monk. You tell the listener where you're coming from, and you demonstrate how you're starting there and taking them somewhere new. I hear so much loving homage on this Frank Kimbrough album. The first three tracks he selects on this desert-island list are by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley and Andrew Hill, the latter two being former mentors of Kimbrough's. And his aesthetic, as expressed on Quartet, bears traces of all three. Like those three pianists, and I'm generalizing wildly here, Kimbrough operates at the intersection of modernism and the blues, creating radical music that's full of earth and hearty pulsation. He's a kind of eccentric/romantic—in some ways my favorite kind of jazz musician, Andrew Hill being my No. 1 example—who relishes freedom but also values rapturous emotion. The result is that you get a piece like "The Call," which opens Quartet. The performance operates in what I think of a post-Jarrett/Bley/Haden/Motian mode of free jazz, stumbling along in propulsive yet metrically free time while also embodying an intense sentimentality, so that the players enter into a kind of sweet delirium, pouring out a song as if it were so much sweat. I can't help but see Keith Jarrett's super-soulful, Afro-topped ’70s countenance when I hear much of this music, such as "The Call" or the clearly American Quartet–indebted blues-soul workout "Kudzu."
A lot of what helps Quartet transcend its influences is Kimbrough's shrewd choice of sidemen. Steve Wilson's alto work is in some ways the most appealing thing about this album. The dude absolutely soars on Quartet, drenching the pieces with sweet songfulness. And bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Lewis Nash do an excellent job of providing the molten rhythmic lava—not violent so much as restless, joyously multi-directional—that jazz like this so desperately needs. A performance like "Afternoon in Paris" here, essentially interpreted as free jazz (in the same sense as "The Call"), perfectly illustrates the album's blend of romance and abstraction. Like Present Joys and Harmonious Creature above, Quartet is a hugely openhearted album, a document of virtuosos getting down to meat of song. The ballad "November," with its dark, sensuous melody, might be my favorite track; it's such a delight to hear the way the band burrows into the material, scooping out all possible emotion and meaning. That goes for Quartet as a whole; the compositions are love letters to Kimbrough's forebears, and the solos are love letters to the compositions and the moods that inspired them. The effect is radiant and intoxicating.
1. Mark Turner Lathe of Heaven (ECM)
Whenever I see Mark Turner's name on an album or gig listing, I take notice. I suspect I'm not alone in this. He's been a musicians' and critics' favorite for some time. (See this great 2002 Ben Ratliff profile.) Every time I've seen him live—with several different bands, including Fly and quartets led by himself, Billy Hart and Gilad Hekselman—he's been, for me at least, the music's center of gravity. There's a composed, shaded purity to his solos, a patient, unshowy determination.
Those same qualities also apply to his bandleading, to the extent that Lathe of Heaven barely registered with me on the first couple listens. The same thing happened when I saw this particular band, a quartet with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Marcus Gilmore, at the Vanguard earlier in the year; the group honestly didn't make much of an impression. But duh, it's Mark Turner, so you have to look more closely. I doubt I could describe Lathe of Heaven in a more appropriate and evocative way than Turner himself does in this video profile: "…mystery and tension"; "In a lot of these songs, you're not going to hear the whole [story] from the beginning; it's going to develop over the course of the song."
I love all six tracks on this record, but there's something about the final one, "Brother Sister 2," that has me particularly enthralled. There's a version of this track on Fly's third album, 2012's Year of the Snake, yet another Mark Turner dispatch that I haven't quite gotten my head around yet. But the Lathe reading is one of the most enthralling puzzlements I've heard on any record this year. This notion Turner mentions of not revealing the whole story from the beginning comes through strongly here, though I'm not sure he and the band reveal the whole story even by the end. A simple, bluesily melancholy horn theme—played first by Turner, then by Cohen, then by both—set against an exaggeratedly slow Gilmore backbeat, which keeps petering out, losing steam. Martin meanwhile, plays what sounds like an entirely independent line, as though he's walking his fingers along to a whole other track that's piping through his headphones. The overall effect is extremely odd, almost as if the whole band is playing in a drowsy trance. Then, right as you're starting to orient yourself to the wavelength of the piece, its strange start/stop hypnosis, the piece shifts into another theme, played in a very slow, murky 6/8 that unravels into a pool of swirling sound. Turner and Cohen begin soloing at once, with the rhythm section barely implying the pulse, really letting the music swim. (I should make it clear here that Cohen is a dream foil for Turner throughout this record; Lathe really got me excited about the trumpeter, and sent me back to his own very good 2014 leader session, Dark Nights.) If you're one of those listeners who, like me, loves to relish jazz as pure sound, this section will be a deep delight for you. I could listen to this band sprawl out in collective, controlled freedom—as they do from around 4:00 through around 6:30 in "Brother Sister 2"—all day. There are hints of abandon, but this isn't "free jazz"; it's thoughtful, listening-oriented abstraction. Then around 7:20, the original drowsy-backbeat passage returns. Joe Martin really lets go here, stretching the tempo like taffy with his weird, oblique walking pattern. Then the rhythm section drops out, and Turner and Cohen lay the piece quietly to rest.
I don't know exactly what to make of "Brother Sister 2," but I do know that it exemplifies Turner's stated objectives of mystery and tension extraordinarily well. And not in obvious or obtuse ways. It draws you in, but it doesn't tip its hand. That doesn't mean there's not an order there. The rest of the pieces on the record are somewhat more conventional, but the whole album feels, to me, sort of infinitely worthy of regard, if that makes sense. (I think I know what Ben Ratliff meant when he wrote this of Lathe: "It does something that jazz records used to do more: you might hear it, feel there’s really nothing to add, and decide not to listen to records—including this one—for, say, a week.") It creates an atmosphere, a vibe, a hazy yet super-sturdy intensity, and sustains it, just like Mark Turner solos tend to do. I particularly love "Ethan's Line"—with its slyly shimmying rhythm, complex yet catchy theme and, similar to "Brother Sister 2," daringly but not chaotically abstracted midsection—and "Sonnet for Stevie" (another version appears, along with Turner himself, on Billy Hart's very good 2014 album, One Is the Other), an extremely laid-back, balladlike piece that slowly builds up swagger during the solos. The whole record is just pure content and composure and, thus, is a perfect summation of the Mark Turner aesthetic so far. I recommend that you spend serious time with Lathe of Heaven. And secondarily, I recommend the Ursula K. Le Guin novel that gives the album its name, which I picked up after falling for the disc.
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Honorable mentions:
At one point or another, I considered each of these ten albums for the above list.
Ginger Baker Why? (Motéma Music)
The fiercely individualized, incomparable-to-anything-else wonder that is Ginger Baker Playing Jazz.
Nels Cline and Julian Lage Room (Mack Avenue)
In other settings, Cline sometimes loses me with what I hear as fussy faux-weirdness, but there's a delicacy and thoughtfulness to the best material here that I find completely disarming.
Jeremiah Cymerman Pale Horse (5049)
Minimalist meditation and sinister mind control from an increasingly vital experimentalist and two expertly attuned collaborators. (Hear/buy on Bandcamp.)
Kris Davis Trio Waiting for You to Grow (Clean Feed)
One of the most formidable and formidably weird pianists on earth reaches new heights of exacting insanity—jarring and meditative in turn.
Donald Edwards Evolution of an Influenced Mind (Criss Cross)
State-of-the-art virtuoso postbop, deepened by excellent writing from the leader and an extraordinary lineup including ubiquitous geniuses Orrin Evans and Eric Revis.
Billy Hart One Is the Other (ECM)
The third album, and third straight essential statement, from one of the best working bands in contemporary jazz, featuring Turner, Street and Ethan Iverson.
Søren Kjærgaard, Andrew Cyrille and Ben Street Syvmileskridt (ILK)
A wonderful surprise, which finds a Danish pianist continuing his rich collaboration—and furthering a truly collaborative, subtly individualistic trio—with two American masters (incidentally also the rhythm team behind David Virelles's Continuum). (Hear/buy on Bandcamp.)
Kirk Knuffke and Jesse Stacken Five (Steeplechase)
A handsome trumpet-piano companion to the Douglas/Caine above: warmth, intimacy and inspired, unconventional repertoire, via a pair whose ongoing duo project really feels like a proper band.
Rudy Royston 303 (Greenleaf)
Lush, funky, confident postbop that isn't afraid to go for big emotion or pop-friendly slickness—this one's a delight when you're in the right mood.
Tyshawn Sorey Alloy (Pi Recordings)
Deepening mystery and stubborn patience from a drummer-composer who's making a habit of demanding and rewarding sustained attention.
P.S. I feel like I should mention one record I was dying to hear but haven't yet managed to get ahold of: Tarbaby's Fanon, on RogueArt. Hope to be able to check it out soon!
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Archival:
I haven't spent as much time with any of these as I'd like, but I adore what I have heard of them. The first two offer further proof of what we already knew about these giants' respective genius; the latter shows us yet another facet of an unpigeonhole-able original.
Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian Hamburg ’72 (ECM)
John Coltrane Offering: Live at Temple University (Resonance)
The Jimmy Giuffre 3 and 4 New York Concerts (Elemental Music)
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Live:
The 2014 jazz shows that stand out most strongly in my mind are the Ornette tribute at Celebrate Brooklyn! and Farmers by Nature at ShapeShifter Lab. James Blood Ulmer at Vision Fest was also a revelation.
No, I don't feel that my jazz listening this year was really adequate, whatever that means. And I think that's as it should be. Those of us who follow and respond to the arts can always do more. But in the present tense, all you can do is make note of what moved you and why. That's why I like the year-end list bonanza, simply because it's a time of celebration. And celebration is the ultimate goal, always, maybe the only goal. "Criticism"—haha. I'm a fan.
So here are some 2014 jazz records I loved. The first ten are the ones I submitted as my ballot to Francis Davis's annual survey. The order feels more and more arbitrary to me as I look over the list, but I'll count down backward to build in just a little suspense. All of these should be easily accessible via Amazon and/or iTunes; most of them—the ECMs and the Palmetto excepted—are streaming on Spotify. Now, on to the music:
10. Louis Hayes Return of the Jazz Communicators (Smoke Sessions)
Smoke, on the Upper West Side, is a cool club. I admit I haven't been there in ages. The recent flurry of albums from the venue's in-house label, Smoke Sessions, makes me want to remedy that asap. As Nate Chinen recently reported, Smoke Sessions has been on a tear lately, much like its downtown counterpart Smalls Records. Every Smoke disc I've spent good time with has been strong, but I admit I'm biased toward the ones that pair elder bop masters with killer younger players. (Along these lines, I also highly recommend Jimmy Cobb's The Original Mob, with Peter Bernstein, Brad Mehldau and John Webber.) As I've written here before, the intergenerational concept often makes for great jazz: conventional jazz that feels profound, not perfunctory. And that's exactly what this Louis Hayes session is. On paper, it's completely straightforward—a nice, varied set of jazz-club jazz, played live at Smoke by an all-star band. But the sound is excellent, and it allows me to focus on what I want to focus on, namely the gorgeous thump and crash of Hayes's kit, the strange, somewhat loose, rattly snare sound, the relaxed insistence of his ride-cymbal patterns. Three outstanding soloists—saxist Abraham Burton, vibist Steve Nelson and pianist David Bryant—all of whom sound so comfortable in Hayes's luxurious pocket, and in the general idiom of this music: soulful hardbop, ’50s-style, from burners to ballads, like the sort that the now 77-year-old Hayes was playing with Horace Silver nearly 60 (!) years ago. I hope I get the chance to see Louis Hayes live soon, and I thank Smoke Sessions for reminding me to catch players like him while I still can.
9. Bill McHenry, Henry Grimes and Andrew Cyrille Us Free—Fish Stories (Fresh Sound New Talent)
I didn't know this album existed until a couple weeks ago. I think I was searching, as I often am, for new Andrew Cyrille delights and stumbled across Us Free on Spotify. As I mentioned on Twitter recently, it's been a great year for AC on disc; for example, Syvmileskridt, a trio album led by Danish pianist Søren Kjærgaard and featuring the drummer, narrowly missed making this top 10 list and is well worth your time, as is Wiring, by the illustrious Trio 3 (Lake/Workman/Cyrille) with simpatico guest pianist Vijay Iyer. When I saw that Us Free was actually recorded in 2006, I wondered if it might have some sort of core drawback that kept it from release until now, but once you hear it, I think you'll agree that it's every bit as excellent as you'd expect given the musicians involved. As I've often written, I'm a big Bill McHenry fan; put him together with a drummer as classy, adaptable and distinctive as Cyrille (see: the current McHenry quartet with AC, Orrin Evans and Eric Revis) and an intense, unpredictable bass presence like Henry Grimes, and you've got serious potential. When I first came across Us Free, I was wondering if it would be more or less an open-improv session. I'd happily listen to a record like that made by these three, but I find Us Free's actual content—a diverse program of concise tracks, most of them originals—way more interesting.
I'm not sure whose idea this session was; it seems like a sort of collective affair, but I'm just now realizing that in many ways it's a sequel to Grimes's underrated 1965 debut as a leader, The Call. Us Free reprises three of the Grimes tracks from that session, "For Django" (just called "Django" here; not to be confused with the John Lewis standard), "Son of Alfafa" and "Fish Story," clearly the new album's quasi-namesake. Like The Call, Us Three is a trio session that runs on a sort of jittery, dancing, almost whimsical energy, and juggles gritty, deep-pocket, hard-swinging freebop with more abstract styles. In the former vein, the trio's reading of Keith Jarrett's "Shades of Jazz" (an interesting choice; I'm guessing it might have been McHenry's call, since he's the only one who doesn't contribute original pieces to this date) almost reminds me of an Old and New Dreams performance, or maybe a particularly hard-swinging Paul Motian–led track; it has that same rough, rambling, freewheeling, celebratory vibe. McHenry, Grimes and Cyrille share a deep earthiness of aesthetic, and so, a conventionally swinging performance like "Shades" or "Django" feels completely of a piece with the freer, more intuitive style of improvising heard on "Son of Alfafa." Smartly, there are plenty of moments of deep repose here: a stupendously chill version of Cyrille's "Aubade" (which I remember from another excellent, not-well-enough-known AC reed/bass/drums session, the C/D/E album from 2000), which features the sparsest and most prayerful instrumental interplay I've heard on record this year. "Vibration"—one of several tracks on which Grimes plays violin (another is a moving solo rendition of "Come Sunday")—"Fish Story" and "With You in Mind" (featuring a narration by AC) exemplify a similar sort of texture-oriented balladry that's heavenly to get lost in if you're a fan of the softer side of these three players' sounds. Any trio album featuring these three players was going to catch my attention, but the fact that this turned out to be such a thoughtful, substantial, approachable, and, I'd be remiss not to mention, beautifully recorded album was a pleasant shock. Can't wait to spend more time with this one (and, for that matter, with The Call, an album I loved years ago but haven't revisited in quite a while).
8. David Virelles Mbókò (ECM)
Like many of my jazz-writin' peers, I was a big fan of Virelles's immersive 2012 set Continuum (see here and here). Mbókò is on a different label and features a different band—percussionist-vocalist Román Díaz is the sole holdover from Continuum—but to me it feels like a sequel to that session. David Virelles's work as a leader obviously has a very strong sense of mission. In the first write-up of Continuum linked above, I discussed how that record had an air of willful mystery. "I have also been asked about the meaning of Román Díaz’ words on this recording," wrote Virelles of Continuum, referring to the untranslated chant/narration that Díaz contributes to that album. "His poetry was created in Spanish, as well as ritual languages from the three main cultural lineages of African origin of Cuba: Karabalí, Kongo and Yorùbá-Lucumí. He uses their inherited phrases by morphing and reorganizing them, contributing to these oral traditions. His words address issues particular to each song in a code-like fashion that would be challenging to understand even to Spanish speakers." (Emphasis mine.) In this newer interview, he discusses the Abakuá secret society and its influence on Mbókò. "…some of the information is available only to intitiates," he says at one point. And in this Continuum interview, he states, "I wanted to have access to the kind of information that people like Andrew Cyrille [who appears on Continuum] have, for example. I wanted direct contact with that."
I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of Virelles's rich statements, either verbal or musical, but it's clear that his work is about communion, both with jazz tradition and with Afro-Cuban ritual tradition. And if you don't necessarily fully grasp all the references, you can still get lost in the music, feel its meditative composure and shadowy intrigue. Mbókò takes me to those same places, but to my ears, it's a less esoteric album than Continuum, more aligned with Jazz Piano proper. Part of that has to do with the fact that Díaz's verbal element is downplayed; his chant is featured, but in a less central role than it was on Continuum. I admit that this appeals to me; I enjoyed the vocals on the earlier record, and I understand their centrality to the project, but I found myself relishing the straightforward piano-bass-drums interplay the most. More than Continuum, Mbókò feels like a jazz album that has a strong Afro-Cuban ritual element, rather than an Afro-Cuban ritual album that has a strong jazz element. Some of the pieces, like the opening "Wind Rose (Antrogofoko Mokoirén)," feel like spirit-raising soundscapes, but other tracks here, like "Aberiñán y Aberisún," "Stories Waiting to Be Told" and "Seven, Through the Divination Horn" really let us hear Virelles the piano player and bandleader, as opposed to, for lack of a better term, Virelles the channeler-of-vibe. Díaz's percussion is beautifully integrated into the record's piano-bass-bass-drums fabric, and there's something really compelling about hearing his folkloric percussion set against kit drummer Marcus Gilmore's futuristic, electronica-inspired grooves on "Transmission," to name one example of how Díaz's contributions play out on Mbókò. If I had to venture a guess, I'd suspect that ECM's Manfred Eicher might have had something to do with the somewhat more conventional bent of this album with respect to its predecessor. (Interestingly, in the newest interview mentioned above, Virelles discusses how some listeners told him they felt Continuum wasn't traditionally "pianistic" enough; is Mbókò simply a response to that?) But whatever the reason for this slight shift in orientation, the important thing is that Mbókò delivers a lot of what I liked about Continuum, while telling us even more about the David Virelles aesthetic. This budding visionary clearly doesn't make records casually, and I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.
7. Dave Douglas and Uri Caine Present Joys (Greenleaf Music)
I'm not all that familiar with Dave Douglas's enormous body of work. I've enjoyed the handful of his records I've checked out during the past few years, and there are a few back-catalog titles I remember digging many years back (including the Booker Little tribute In Our Lifetime and the Tiny Bell Trio's Songs for Wandering Souls), but I'm no expert. That's even more true re: my knowledge of Uri Caine. But Present Joys immediately felt familiar and inviting to me, and it's stuck with me since its release over the summer. I think this is because it falls into a certain category of record that I have an affinity for—not just a horn/piano duo album, but one with a powerful unifying mood, a reason for existing. There's a good amount of variety on Present Joys, but its prevailing mood is a sort of churchy somberness, stemming from the fact that several of the pieces are from the Sacred Harp songbook. And some of the tracks that aren't drawn from that source clearly take cues from this tradition. Much like Branford Marsalis and Joey Calderazzo's similarly hued Songs of Mirth and Melancholy, Present Joys is a document of two badass jazz musicians getting together and deciding to do something other than simply play some tunes. Douglas and Caine are zeroing in on a wavelength, using their gifts to set, and burrow into, a mood, rather than just perform. As with Songs of Mirth, the album isn't all one thing; there's some nicely jaunty, bluesy, swinging, sometimes abstract material ("Ham Fist," "Seven Seas," "End to End") to season the mix. But the slower pieces seem to me to be the meat of the album. "Bethel" is one of the originals that's clearly indebted to the Sacred Harp material; it's intensely lovely and funereal. There's delicateness to the playing here and also great gravity. This performance, along with the other slow pieces, is the sound of two musicians playing a song, sitting with it and meditating on it, rather than perfunctorily stating a theme as a prelude to improvisation. I've always been a fan of, for lack of a better term, sad jazz: Booker Little's "Man of Words," Grachan Moncur's "Evolution," Andrew Hill's "Dedication" and much of the aforementioned Marsalis/Calderazzo set. If you, like me, love it when jazz slows, quiets, grows still, bears down emotionally, bares its heavy heart, then Present Joys will likely do for you what it does for me. I'm sitting here listening to the final track, "Zero Hour," and I'm feeling like I could live in this music. It's not some relaxing-background-music vibe; it's the power of jazz to embrace sparseness and patience and real reflection. A zone beyond ballads, approaching pure feeling. That's what Dave Douglas and Uri Caine achieve here.
(Incidentally, I'm curious to know what other duo albums in the vein of Present Joys folks might be able to recommend. Off the top of my head, I can think of three LPs I know of, but don't know so well, that might do the trick: Archie Shepp and Horace Parlan's Goin' Home, Hank Jones and Charlie Haden's Steal Away, and Haden and Metheny's Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now that I think about it, Haden's classic duets collections, Closeness and The Golden Number, fit the bill too.)
6. Johnathan Blake Gone, But Not Forgotten (Criss Cross)
Plenty of conventional jazz appeal on this record by drummer Johnathan Blake, another player I'm not super familiar with in general. I don't typically see promos from Criss Cross, but I sought this one out after reading Ethan Iverson's rave on Do the Math. I'll second his praise and state that I love the way this album both fulfills and subverts the paradigm of brawny, hard-swinging two-tenor jazz. There's no denying the thrill of hearing the clearly very Elvin-inspired, and sometimes (as on "Broski") beautifully bashy Blake light a fire underneath Chris Potter and Mark Turner. The former, who seems to really excel at soul-volcano catharsis, fits comfortably into this context, while Turner finds ways to match Potter's intensity while at the same time bringing his usual feeling of thoughtful composure into the mix. (Interestingly, I was just reading this Turner Ted Panken Blindfold Test, where Turner says of Potter, "I wish I could play that well. He’s totally incredible.") Blake clearly designed this as a playing date. In contrast to Present Joys, there is a feeling here of "Get the head out of the way so we can jam" on pieces such as "New Wheels" and monster opening track "Cryin' Blues." But the simple assuredness with which Blake and bassist Ben Street swing, and with which all the players solo (I'm listening to a killer Street bass feature on final track "Two for the Blues" right now) makes this record a moment-to-moment delight, whether the band is ambling or cooking.
The pianoless-quartet format yields a great feeling of openness; in that sense, this is free jazz, literally jazz that's free to do what its architect, Blake, clearly loves to do most, which is hang out in the pocket and just jam. (Not to play the pointless pigeonholing game, but I'm having a hard time placing this brand of jazz; there's a lot of hardbop in here, but the pianoless element takes it out of the realm of super-conventional jazz-club jazz; maybe you could liken the format heard on Gone, But Not Forgotten to some of the Elvin-led bands of the ’70s, including the Liebman/Grossman/Perla quartet from Live at the Lighthouse.) Blake picked the right players; as Iverson noted, he picked the right repertoire (a cool smattering including pieces by Eddie Harris, Cedar Walton, Paul Motian and Jim Hall) and he picked the right arrangements, just meticulous enough to create an appealing framework for the solos; and he clearly picked the right studio and engineer, because this album sounds excellent. I've got the Trudy Pitts ballad "Anysha" on now, and much like the Louis Hayes album, it just sounds good, in a simple, nourishing way. This is an uncomplicated jazz album—familiar though not, to my ears, particularly retro-feeling—but one with a really savvy design and a very clear, consistent appeal. I would love to see this music performed live.
5. David Weiss When Words Fail (Motéma Music)
Speaking of clear, consistent appeal, I'm really starting to recognize David Weiss's name as a mark of quality, a brand that implies a certain amount of seriousness and sophistication, and a determination to produce top-quality small-group jazz that summons an orchestral grandeur without skimping on the improvisational fire. I'm a big fan of his work with the Cookers, which released its latest robust, powerful disc this year, Time and Time Again, an album I wish I'd been able to spend more time with. Part of the reason I didn't, though, might have been that this disc under Weiss's own name really sated my appetite for that trademark Weiss sound that's so evident on the Cookers albums: big, lush, little-big-band arrangements bookending passionate solos. There's nothing particularly radical about the David Weiss aesthetic, but I do hear in his work a certain defiant spirit, an insistence that contemporary jazz ought not to shy away from being jazzy: big and bold and dramatic and flashy and hugely spirited, while taking on a range of emotions with a broadly shaded palette that clearly takes cues from the composerly likes of Wayne Shorter, an artist Weiss paid tribute to on last year's Endangered Species.
Simply put, many of these pieces (e.g., "The Intrepid Hub," "MJ") sound like they could be standards from somewhere between about ’65 and ’75—"White Magic" is actually a 1973 tune by pianist John Taylor—but the way Weiss's band performs them, they sound utterly urgent. I'm particularly impressed by altoist Myron Walden's voicelike wailing on "Aftermath." (You can sense Walden and the other sidemen's devotion to the Weiss enterprise in this promo video.) Does this jazz sound old? In a certain sense. When Words Fail makes me think of those proud, determinedly classy, brassy, swinging jazzmen of the ’70s, the Charles Tollivers and Woody Shaws, say; it's an album that asserts Weiss's unshakeable belief, expressed in Cookers liner notes I've read, that hardbop is an infinite and infinitely durable medium. So this record is not "cutting-edge" in any obvious way. What it is, though, is simply sturdy and superb and confident in its idiom and in control of its materials. Does hearing music this flawless sometimes make me want to grasp for something rawer, chancier, less pristine? Sure, but if you're in the mood for jazz with polish and grandeur and heart, and these sort of skyscraping, spirit-stirring themes—and I find that I often am—When Words Fail is an excellent bet.
4. Sarah Manning Harmonious Creature (Posi-Tone)
Like the Smalls and Smoke imprints mentioned above, L.A.'s Posi-Tone has a strong label identity, mostly orbiting around straight-ahead hardbop. While I've often enjoyed their output in the past, I've never felt as strongly about any of their records as I do about this one, and that might be because it stands so far apart from what they usually release. I have to thank Phil Freeman, a passionate Posi-Tone advocate, for turning me on to Harmonious Creature, via this interview with saxist-composer Sarah Manning. (The album ranked highly on Phil's very comprehensive and worthwhile year-end jazz list over at Burning Ambulance.) All of the albums on this list are, in one way or another, strong, individualistic statements, but to me, none of them feels as distinctive as this record. Harmonious Creature is an entire world; everything, from the makeup of the ensemble to the character of the writing, and Manning's alto-saxophone style and improvisational approach—and even the cover art/design—feels deeply personal. I can recall hearing jazz with strong overtones of chamber music, Americana or Eastern European folk, all currents I hear in this music, but there's a certain sense of fantasy, of elegant reverie, that pervades Manning's aesthetic and sets it wholly apart from any other soundworld I can think of. The themes are sturdy and instantly memorable; I'm particularly taken with the swaying, twisting, piquant "Radish Spirit" and the blazing, dervish-like "Floating Bridge." And the grouping of musicians, particularly the frontline of Manning, violist Eyvind Kang and guitarist Jonathan Goldberger, is an exemplary feat of bandbuilding. There's just such a synergy between material and format; you can tell that Manning crafted this music to be played by this band. The sax and viola solos, which often overlap, can feel like a single improvising brain expressing itself in two different voices: Manning's gorgeously liquid, almost stringlike sound—imagine Sonny Simmons's register-jumping daring combined with the calmly inspired flow of Lee Konitz—mingling with Kang's woody, super-emotive flights. Guitarist Johnathan Goldberger adds a luminous haze to the performances; he's particularly effective on the quasi-ambient ballad "I Dream a Highway" and the excellent cover of Neil Young's "On the Beach," which explodes into a blur of swimming colors.
Harmonious Creature stands apart from most jazz the way that Young song stands apart from most "roots rock." It expresses a very private vision, but also a very openhearted and inviting one, beautifully rendered by a profoundly sympathetic band. I have no idea who to compare Sarah Manning to soundwise, but spiritwise, I'm tempted to mention Booker Little, Kenny Wheeler, Bill Frisell and Paul Motian. The first two for specificity of vision, depth of affect and richness of texture, and the latter two for their championing of a deeply romantic, dreamlike vision of jazz—jazz that seems at once nostalgic and fantastical. I think Harmonious Creature embodies all of that. I love this record, and I'm fascinated to hear future dispatches from Sarah Manning's singular brain.
3. Kenny Barron and Dave Holland The Art of Conversation (Impulse!)
I came around to Dave Holland's 2013 release, Prism, pretty late. It was only a month or so ago that I really had a moment with that record, a fun, swaggery funk-fusion romp. This LP couldn't be more different from Prism. It's not anything like the other duo album on this list, Present Joys, either. In some ways, The Art of Conversation has a lot in common with the Johnathan Blake session above. Both are about providing elegant frameworks in which master improvisers can simply play—get down to business and be themselves. Kenny Barron's playing on this record is so assured, so swinging and bluesy and virtuosic, that it almost feels unassailable. I'm not sure how jazz piano could be played any better than this. Of course, there are a million more idiosyncratic ways it could be played, but Barron's playing seems free of quirk. The passion I hear in his playing is the passion of assurance; he's nailing this music and making it look easy. Holland solos too—and handles the melody statement on the exquisite Barron ballad "Rain"—but mostly, he's playing a straightforward pizzicato bassist's role on this program of originals by both men, plus a couple standards.
I truly don't mean to take anything away from this pair or minimize the album's appeal—even in a year of particularly strong jazz releases, this stood way out for me—when I say that The Art of Conversation seems like the platonic ideal of cocktail jazz. The performances are uniformly tight, pleasant and—again, I don't mean this as a value judgment—polite. The repertoire is well-balanced, from witty and urbane (Monk is clearly a touchstone; the duo plays "In Walked Bud," as well as Barron's very Monkish "The Only One") to stirring and romantic (Holland's "The Oracle," Ellingon/Strayhorn's "Daydream). And these pieces do work just fine in a background mood-setting capacity, but when you take the time to zero in, The Art of Conversation just sounds sublime. The album title is at once a) cliché and b) completely true. To listen closely to a piece like the gorgeous Holland ballad "In Your Arms" is to hear two players interlocking, exchanging, dancing together, reinforcing one another in turn.
The Art of Conversation contains a lot of music that will sound familiar to anyone with even a passing knowledge of jazz. It's tempting to gloss over an album like this, even if you find it appealing. It's great jazz musicians playing jazz, right? But beneath the almost casual, offhanded facade, its seeming effortlessness, is a deep conviction about how jazz ought to be done. There are obviously many more conventionally exciting and distinctive Dave Holland records than this chill and dynamically narrow release, and while I don't know the Kenny Barron catalog well, I'd guess that the same goes for him. But taken on its own merits, The Art of Conversation rewards every second you spend paying it close attention. Listen hard enough, and its straightforward excellence starts to sound almost radical. This album achieves urgency by simply being its own unassuming self.
2. Frank Kimbrough Quartet (Palmetto)
There's an illustrious jazz tradition of building on tradition, wearing one's influences proudly, whether that's Mingus channeling Duke, or Steve Lacy channeling Monk. You tell the listener where you're coming from, and you demonstrate how you're starting there and taking them somewhere new. I hear so much loving homage on this Frank Kimbrough album. The first three tracks he selects on this desert-island list are by Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley and Andrew Hill, the latter two being former mentors of Kimbrough's. And his aesthetic, as expressed on Quartet, bears traces of all three. Like those three pianists, and I'm generalizing wildly here, Kimbrough operates at the intersection of modernism and the blues, creating radical music that's full of earth and hearty pulsation. He's a kind of eccentric/romantic—in some ways my favorite kind of jazz musician, Andrew Hill being my No. 1 example—who relishes freedom but also values rapturous emotion. The result is that you get a piece like "The Call," which opens Quartet. The performance operates in what I think of a post-Jarrett/Bley/Haden/Motian mode of free jazz, stumbling along in propulsive yet metrically free time while also embodying an intense sentimentality, so that the players enter into a kind of sweet delirium, pouring out a song as if it were so much sweat. I can't help but see Keith Jarrett's super-soulful, Afro-topped ’70s countenance when I hear much of this music, such as "The Call" or the clearly American Quartet–indebted blues-soul workout "Kudzu."
A lot of what helps Quartet transcend its influences is Kimbrough's shrewd choice of sidemen. Steve Wilson's alto work is in some ways the most appealing thing about this album. The dude absolutely soars on Quartet, drenching the pieces with sweet songfulness. And bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Lewis Nash do an excellent job of providing the molten rhythmic lava—not violent so much as restless, joyously multi-directional—that jazz like this so desperately needs. A performance like "Afternoon in Paris" here, essentially interpreted as free jazz (in the same sense as "The Call"), perfectly illustrates the album's blend of romance and abstraction. Like Present Joys and Harmonious Creature above, Quartet is a hugely openhearted album, a document of virtuosos getting down to meat of song. The ballad "November," with its dark, sensuous melody, might be my favorite track; it's such a delight to hear the way the band burrows into the material, scooping out all possible emotion and meaning. That goes for Quartet as a whole; the compositions are love letters to Kimbrough's forebears, and the solos are love letters to the compositions and the moods that inspired them. The effect is radiant and intoxicating.
1. Mark Turner Lathe of Heaven (ECM)
Whenever I see Mark Turner's name on an album or gig listing, I take notice. I suspect I'm not alone in this. He's been a musicians' and critics' favorite for some time. (See this great 2002 Ben Ratliff profile.) Every time I've seen him live—with several different bands, including Fly and quartets led by himself, Billy Hart and Gilad Hekselman—he's been, for me at least, the music's center of gravity. There's a composed, shaded purity to his solos, a patient, unshowy determination.
Those same qualities also apply to his bandleading, to the extent that Lathe of Heaven barely registered with me on the first couple listens. The same thing happened when I saw this particular band, a quartet with trumpeter Avishai Cohen, bassist Joe Martin and drummer Marcus Gilmore, at the Vanguard earlier in the year; the group honestly didn't make much of an impression. But duh, it's Mark Turner, so you have to look more closely. I doubt I could describe Lathe of Heaven in a more appropriate and evocative way than Turner himself does in this video profile: "…mystery and tension"; "In a lot of these songs, you're not going to hear the whole [story] from the beginning; it's going to develop over the course of the song."
I love all six tracks on this record, but there's something about the final one, "Brother Sister 2," that has me particularly enthralled. There's a version of this track on Fly's third album, 2012's Year of the Snake, yet another Mark Turner dispatch that I haven't quite gotten my head around yet. But the Lathe reading is one of the most enthralling puzzlements I've heard on any record this year. This notion Turner mentions of not revealing the whole story from the beginning comes through strongly here, though I'm not sure he and the band reveal the whole story even by the end. A simple, bluesily melancholy horn theme—played first by Turner, then by Cohen, then by both—set against an exaggeratedly slow Gilmore backbeat, which keeps petering out, losing steam. Martin meanwhile, plays what sounds like an entirely independent line, as though he's walking his fingers along to a whole other track that's piping through his headphones. The overall effect is extremely odd, almost as if the whole band is playing in a drowsy trance. Then, right as you're starting to orient yourself to the wavelength of the piece, its strange start/stop hypnosis, the piece shifts into another theme, played in a very slow, murky 6/8 that unravels into a pool of swirling sound. Turner and Cohen begin soloing at once, with the rhythm section barely implying the pulse, really letting the music swim. (I should make it clear here that Cohen is a dream foil for Turner throughout this record; Lathe really got me excited about the trumpeter, and sent me back to his own very good 2014 leader session, Dark Nights.) If you're one of those listeners who, like me, loves to relish jazz as pure sound, this section will be a deep delight for you. I could listen to this band sprawl out in collective, controlled freedom—as they do from around 4:00 through around 6:30 in "Brother Sister 2"—all day. There are hints of abandon, but this isn't "free jazz"; it's thoughtful, listening-oriented abstraction. Then around 7:20, the original drowsy-backbeat passage returns. Joe Martin really lets go here, stretching the tempo like taffy with his weird, oblique walking pattern. Then the rhythm section drops out, and Turner and Cohen lay the piece quietly to rest.
I don't know exactly what to make of "Brother Sister 2," but I do know that it exemplifies Turner's stated objectives of mystery and tension extraordinarily well. And not in obvious or obtuse ways. It draws you in, but it doesn't tip its hand. That doesn't mean there's not an order there. The rest of the pieces on the record are somewhat more conventional, but the whole album feels, to me, sort of infinitely worthy of regard, if that makes sense. (I think I know what Ben Ratliff meant when he wrote this of Lathe: "It does something that jazz records used to do more: you might hear it, feel there’s really nothing to add, and decide not to listen to records—including this one—for, say, a week.") It creates an atmosphere, a vibe, a hazy yet super-sturdy intensity, and sustains it, just like Mark Turner solos tend to do. I particularly love "Ethan's Line"—with its slyly shimmying rhythm, complex yet catchy theme and, similar to "Brother Sister 2," daringly but not chaotically abstracted midsection—and "Sonnet for Stevie" (another version appears, along with Turner himself, on Billy Hart's very good 2014 album, One Is the Other), an extremely laid-back, balladlike piece that slowly builds up swagger during the solos. The whole record is just pure content and composure and, thus, is a perfect summation of the Mark Turner aesthetic so far. I recommend that you spend serious time with Lathe of Heaven. And secondarily, I recommend the Ursula K. Le Guin novel that gives the album its name, which I picked up after falling for the disc.
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Honorable mentions:
At one point or another, I considered each of these ten albums for the above list.
Ginger Baker Why? (Motéma Music)
The fiercely individualized, incomparable-to-anything-else wonder that is Ginger Baker Playing Jazz.
Nels Cline and Julian Lage Room (Mack Avenue)
In other settings, Cline sometimes loses me with what I hear as fussy faux-weirdness, but there's a delicacy and thoughtfulness to the best material here that I find completely disarming.
Jeremiah Cymerman Pale Horse (5049)
Minimalist meditation and sinister mind control from an increasingly vital experimentalist and two expertly attuned collaborators. (Hear/buy on Bandcamp.)
Kris Davis Trio Waiting for You to Grow (Clean Feed)
One of the most formidable and formidably weird pianists on earth reaches new heights of exacting insanity—jarring and meditative in turn.
Donald Edwards Evolution of an Influenced Mind (Criss Cross)
State-of-the-art virtuoso postbop, deepened by excellent writing from the leader and an extraordinary lineup including ubiquitous geniuses Orrin Evans and Eric Revis.
Billy Hart One Is the Other (ECM)
The third album, and third straight essential statement, from one of the best working bands in contemporary jazz, featuring Turner, Street and Ethan Iverson.
Søren Kjærgaard, Andrew Cyrille and Ben Street Syvmileskridt (ILK)
A wonderful surprise, which finds a Danish pianist continuing his rich collaboration—and furthering a truly collaborative, subtly individualistic trio—with two American masters (incidentally also the rhythm team behind David Virelles's Continuum). (Hear/buy on Bandcamp.)
Kirk Knuffke and Jesse Stacken Five (Steeplechase)
A handsome trumpet-piano companion to the Douglas/Caine above: warmth, intimacy and inspired, unconventional repertoire, via a pair whose ongoing duo project really feels like a proper band.
Rudy Royston 303 (Greenleaf)
Lush, funky, confident postbop that isn't afraid to go for big emotion or pop-friendly slickness—this one's a delight when you're in the right mood.
Tyshawn Sorey Alloy (Pi Recordings)
Deepening mystery and stubborn patience from a drummer-composer who's making a habit of demanding and rewarding sustained attention.
P.S. I feel like I should mention one record I was dying to hear but haven't yet managed to get ahold of: Tarbaby's Fanon, on RogueArt. Hope to be able to check it out soon!
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Archival:
I haven't spent as much time with any of these as I'd like, but I adore what I have heard of them. The first two offer further proof of what we already knew about these giants' respective genius; the latter shows us yet another facet of an unpigeonhole-able original.
Keith Jarrett, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian Hamburg ’72 (ECM)
John Coltrane Offering: Live at Temple University (Resonance)
The Jimmy Giuffre 3 and 4 New York Concerts (Elemental Music)
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Live:
The 2014 jazz shows that stand out most strongly in my mind are the Ornette tribute at Celebrate Brooklyn! and Farmers by Nature at ShapeShifter Lab. James Blood Ulmer at Vision Fest was also a revelation.
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Songs of themselves: A Tribute to Paul Motian
Tribute concerts, or themed musical gatherings of any kind, come lugging a lot of baggage. What you hope is that they achieve some sort of lift-off, that at some point, you can set aside the "significance" of it all and just listen. That the musicians can get carried away, so that the same might happen to you, the listener.
I'm tempted to throw out a superlative (ahem, "Best tribute concert I've ever seen"), but that means less than to say that there are moments from last night's Paul Motian tribute concert at Symphony Space that I don't think I'll forget. Here are some of those:
Billy Hart and Andrew Cyrille's duet. As a drummer, I generally disdain mult-drum-set situations. A lot of the time, I just don't think they sound very good. This, though, was just poetic. On the surface, its appeal had very little to do with Paul Motian. I think that is completely okay. Hart and Cyrille are peers of Motian; they know that "tribute" doesn't always signify some sort of obvious allusion to. What the two drummers did, is they got up there and played together, for about eight minutes or so. It was tremendously exciting, not just because it was forceful, kinetic, sometimes loud, but because it was all those things and also an uncanny feat of listening. Cyrille sat down at his set first; Hart walked onstage and gave him a little shoulder squeeze from behind, speaking into his ear. They were both smiling. We don't know what was said, but since we heard what came next, we more or less did know. What I remember about the duet is how crisp it was, how clean and just deadly precise each drummer's ideas were. They overlapped, they traded; sometimes, for brief flashes, it was sort of a soloist and accompaniment thing, with Hart marking texture on the hi-hat while Cyrille went off. It was "free" but it wasn't jarring in the slightest. It just cohered, like a good short story. These two just sat down and did it, both players sounding exactly, unmistakably like themselves. Two master drummers, taking care of creative business. It was at once so graceful and completely ass-kicking. If there was anything Motian-y about it, I guess it was that—the willfulness of it, the authority, the license to just stand up and make something.
Masabumi Kikuchi's solo turn had something similar. Most of the pieces on the program were Motian favorites, identified in the program. Above the line announcing Kikuchi's unaccompanied appearance, though, it just said "TBA." Much like Hart/Cyrille, he just walked out there and did it, but in his own strange, quietly luminous way. My God, who is this man? My sense is that many were asking each other the same question during the sort of stunned applause that followed his performance. I wish I had a more exact recall of exactly how his improvisation sounded, but then again, that wouldn't be very Motian-y. It was a ripple, a stirring, a twinge. The thing that I loved about it was, while it was essentially a "ballad"—quiet, sparse, at certain moments heartbreaking—it was not merely pretty. It had a searching feeling that was real. There was other gorgeous "chamber"-style playing that went on last night. (The Matt Mitchell–Tim Berne duo was a killer in this vein) But none captured that innate Motian mystery more than this, that sense of ear-caressing beauty combined with the uncertainty that you're not on steady footing, that the going is rough, that the sensation of serenity is going to have to be somehow earned. Kikuchi's growly vocalizing was all a part of this. It was hard to imagine the performance without it. What was easy, was to understand why this man was, in many ways, Motian's pianist of choice. I've been listening a lot to Sunrise, but I can't wait to listen more, and to really dig into to the Tethered Moon material. (Ratliff's profile and Iverson's interview are essential, btw.)
Of the more orthodox performances—and I don't say that dismissively; I just mean to say "The performances where the musicians more or less played Motian's music in a Motian-influenced style"—my favorite might have been the Bad Plus with Bill Frisell, Joe Lovano and Ravi Coltrane. Frisell and Lovano were, please understand, the heart and soul of this evening. They were onstage a lot, together and separately, and they were always gracious—at the ends of pieces, you'd see Frisell beaming and bowing toward his collaborators, as if to say, "Thank you for doing this—with me but for Paul"—and always (especially in the case of Lovano) going for it. During this particular turn, the matter at hand was "Abacus," played in that sort of classic, drunkenly marching, smeary-parade-music style that some Motian work gets at, where everyone is stating the melody together while at the same time gleefully coloring outside of the lines. This was a tribute to the songfulness of Motian, to the aspect of his pieces that, to paraphrase something Joe Lovano told me, made you want to play them for hours, just trance out on them, cycling the melody over and over, decorating it a little, maybe, but mostly just living with it, letting it roll off your tongue. The Bad Plus were perfect for something like this, because, as I have written before, they are true stewards and connoisseurs of melody. Dave King approximated that sort of stumbling Motian free time without sounding slavish, and Reid Anderson and Ethan Iverson laid out this sumptuous carpet—the song, or a version of it, waving and billowing. I remember that Frisell was loud—not aggressive, but far from the delicate-ness he displayed during a lot of the other sets. I remember that Lovano was, as usual, completely inside the song, yet completely in control; authoritative, brawny, but listening, not just letting it fly. I remember that Coltrane was more reticent, but almost more stunning. His control over the horn was something very special, but beyond that, it was really the sense he projected of humbly serving the music that impressed me. He was there for the song, as were all the rest of the players.
I would say the same of so many of the others who were there. I loved watching Joey Baron and Matt Wilson play, sensing that they were simultaneously having a blast and were maybe just very slightly awed by the occasion, by the act of occupying the chair of someone who projected such authority, effortlessness and style. Both of them found their zone and lifted off, Baron in a version of "Dance" with Frisell, Lovano, Billy Drewes and Ed Schuller, and Wilson in spectacularly entertaining "Drum Music" finale, during which the 20 or so musicians onstage seemed at times bewildered but then rallied for a sublimely together group theme statement. Again, just celebrating the song, letting it blare out.
Or letting it diffuse into the room like a scent, as was the case during a Frisell-led guitar choir, with Jakob Bro, Steve Cardenas, Ben Monder and Jerome Harris. This was a little mini meditation or seance. "Paul loved guitar so…," Frisell said by way of introduction. It's a cliché to say of these tribute events that the subject in question "would've loved" such and such a bit, but I say that of this performance without hesitation. It was a tribute to the aspect of Motian's music that was a sort of license to be okay with just texture, just atmosphere, to not feel the compulsion to officially "begin playing"—that thing that happens in jazz right after the head is over and the solos begin, which can sometimes make you feel almost dejected that the "song" part of it all has, for the time being, evaporated—but to just commune. Frisell and Lovano's duet on "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago" was another one in this vein. What I admired about that was how brief it was. These were the stars of the evening; they could've rightly stretched out if they'd wanted to, but they just went in, paid their respects to the piece (one of Motian's real heartbreakers), living with that melody one more time, and exited gracefully.
Other sets kicked up a lot of dust, and this made sense too. Marilyn Crispell and Ben Monder were the unleashers of the evening, each making a pretty glorious racket during their respective performances with Cyrille. (The groups were, respectively, Crispell, Lovano, Gary Peacock and Cyrille, and Monder, Bill McHenry, Anderson and Cyrille.) I got the sense from Crispell that she got completely carried away, not necessarily by the whole "spirit of Motian" thing, but by the chance to be up there slaying alongside Andrew Cyrille; you could not mistake the inherent Cecil-ness of what was going on. It was wild and really fun to watch. Monder, on the other hand, snuck up behind McHenry—sounding, typically, eerily authoritative while maintaining that very Motian-y unknowability of his, that sense that he knows exactly what he's aiming for and that he isn't going to hold your hand while he goes there—conjuring this poison-cloud wash and then, when it was his turn to solo, dropping the incendiary shred as only he can. Both of these turns (the Crispell, the Monder) seemed just a little bullish to me, which again, was perfectly appropriate for the occasion. Motian's playing could often be that way too.
Petra Haden projected the opposite attitude. She was nervous, as she admitted. She read a beautiful note from her father, in which he identified Motian as his heartbeat. It was one of those sentiments that would've sounded cliché in almost any other case but this, i.e., there's an insane amount of wonderful recorded evidence to support Haden's claim. Petra Haden's performance of "The Windmills of Your Mind" was clear and yearning, not explicitly elegiac but definitely nostalgic. It was right to have only Frisell there to accompany her, so that the song could take on that sort of disembodied quality that Motian always seemed to be aiming for.
Like pretty much all of what went down last night, this performance eventually took flight, transcended the occasion, meant something more than mere reverence. Motian shone through in a lot of it, but what it was really about were all these great personalities—and I haven't mentioned Geri Allen, Greg Osby, Larry Grenadier, maybe a couple others, all of whom shone in their own ways—moving through the material and into a personal space, singing Motian, which in turn let them sing themselves.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Tribute
In advance of the Paul Motian memorial concert place taking place this Friday at Symphony Space, I've prepared this oral-history-style homage for TONY. I'd like to thank all the participants for taking the time to share their thoughts. The sometimes-lengthy phone conversations (Frisell, Lovano, Baron, Hart, Cyrille) were particularly enthralling. As you'll see, I stayed out of the way and printed a lot of quoted material. Motian's friends, collaborators and colleagues really loved him; they were also, it seems, a bit awed by him—and still are.
I've been re-immersing in the Motian discography over the past week or so, from the early ECM leader dates (being reissued soon) all the way up through Lost in a Dream and Masabumi Kikuchi's Sunrise, with a long, lingering stopover at Time and Time Again. The music is an ocean; you can't even come close to "knowing" it, let alone exhausting it. I'm thankful—credit here goes both to Motian himself and to the various labels that documented him so steadfastly—that he left so much music behind. As Greg Osby puts it in the aforelinked piece, "Paul lives."
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Radical convention: Winter Jazzfest 2013
Some quick thoughts about Winter Jazzfest 2013, which is wrapping up as I type this in the wee hours of Sunday, 1/13. This is by no means intended as any sort of comprehensive review of the fest—I'm sure we'll read many smart ones in the coming days—but merely as a distillation of my own (very enjoyable) experience of the event. Some from-the-field impressions can be found on my Twitter page.
I heard a lot of, for lack of a better term, high-tech music at WJF 2013: groups that used samples, groups that focused on proggish, daredevil precision, groups that nodded to funk, hip-hop and electronica, groups that foregrounded their now-ness, their distance from a conventional notion of what jazz is. I enjoyed several of these groups very much; I look forward to hearing more from, e.g., Marcus Strickland's Twi-Life (trombonist Frank Lacy was the MVP here) and Rafiq Bhatia's group.
But my favorite sets at the festival had nothing to do with any of that. They were unadorned, acoustic, lacking in any particular eye-catching hook. They were just about sensitive, in-the-moment interaction; they were about listening; they represented very different aesthetics, but they all, in one way or another, conformed to some relatively well-established, historically proven way of playing jazz.
1) The trio of pianist Kris Davis, bassist Eric Revis and drummer Andrew Cyrille (pictured above) at Zinc Bar on Friday. An extraordinarily sensitive set, that built from a hush to a subtle dance then back to a hush. It seems silly to say that the appeal here was the sound, but that's the only way I can think to put it. All three players were considering the sounds they were producing in relation to the sounds the others were producing. It's an obvious idea, but less commonly illustrated in practice than you'd think. Cyrille, master of timbre and touch dictated the pace (unhurried) and the focus level (extreme), but no one was really the star; or in another sense, everyone was. It was free jazz, but without any of the chest-thumping or catharsis. It was "out," but it was not self-consciously weird. It moved along as it pleased, but with real narrative intrigue. I would love to hear this band again soon. This is a moment for Andrew Cyrille: last year's Bill McHenry and David Virelles records, for example—the first of which Revis also appears on. I very much look forward to seeing Cyrille w/ Virelles at the Vanguard at the end of the month, and hopefully w/ Ethan Iverson, Tim Berne and Sam Newsome at Smalls the week before. (He's also playing a free big-band show at Lincoln Center next Thursday!)
2) The quartet of reedist Andrew D'Angelo, trumpeter Kirk Knuffke, bassist Ben Street and drummer Nasheet Waits, known collectively as Merger, at Culture Project on Saturday. On Twitter, I pegged what this band was playing as freebop. I'm not sure if that's the correct term, but I'm referring to a sort of inside/outside thing, part vanguard mid-’60s Blue Note, part late ’50s / early ’60s Ornette, part ’90s downtown. Jazzy, but also abstract, noise-embracing. Each player has an extremely distinctive voice on their respective instrument, and all those voices came through b/c each player made it his business to complement his bandmates' voices. Again, a "duh" idea, but to see it really happening, live, is special. Super-quiet moments, like a minutely detailed unaccompanied Knuffke solo, and aggressive ones, where D'Angelo was frothing in post-Zorn fashion. The rhythm section knew what to do with all of it, and that didn't necessarily mean rise up and meet the frontline; it just meant, "Find what's complementary, even if it's counterintuitive." Nasheet Waits is a poet of his instrument. He gets me closer to the bliss I get from primo Tony Williams than just about any other living drummer. The tempos are fluid, but the looseness does not signify slackness. There's such authority, whether the beat is explicit or left in the rearview. Nice thematic material in this set too. Merger needs to make a record, probably a live one.
3) The quartet of reedist Don Byron, pianist Aruán Ortiz, bassist Cameron Brown and drummer Rudy Royston at Le Poisson Rouge on Friday. I don't know Don Byron's work very well, but I do know that he has a penchant for the conceptual hook, the project devoted to a specific historical repertoire or genre, the kind of thing artists such as Dave Douglas and Ken Vandermark have often engaged in. Nothing against that approach, but this set was so, so not that. I didn't get to see the full performance, but what I did see was capital-J Jazz. Long solos, band swinging incredibly hard, each musician playing with serious flair and flash. No sense of "We need to get past this fossilized format." No. Merely a sense that what we need to do is play our asses off in a well-established mode, a mode that's well-established because it works. This was probably the most conventional set I saw all weekend, and interestingly, because of the context described at the top of this post, it also felt like one of the most radical. (Honorable mention in a similar vein: James Carter's Organ Trio at LPR on Saturday.)
P.S. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I interviewed Andrew Cyrille and wrote this profile.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012
Best of 2012: Jazz, part III
Here's the third and final installment of my 2012 jazz round-up. Complete, unannotated list is here, part I and an intro are here, and part II is here. And here's a thematically fitting bonus track: my Pitchfork review of the new Mingus box set on Mosaic. All-genres-in-play year-end lists coming soon!
Jim Black Trio
Somatic [Winter and Winter]
David Virelles
Continuum [Pi Recordings]
Grouping these two together might be a little bit of a stretch, but I think it makes sense. At heart, they're both unconventional piano-trio records that work hard to sustain a particular mood/feel over their respective running times.
I remember receiving a download of Somatic about a year ago, right in the middle of the 2011 year-end-list frenzy. Right from the first spin, I really enjoyed it, but I was worried that it would get lost in the shuffle as the year progressed; albums that come out early in January often do. (Though, interestingly, the album that ended up topping my 2012 all-genres-in-play list—to be revealed in due time—is also a record I've had my hands on since the very beginning of the year.) Fortunately, this did not occur. I saw a very good show by this band at Cornelia Street Café in February, and the record stuck with me pretty stubbornly throughout the year.
So what is Somatic, exactly? Jim Black is a musician I've come around to gradually. I first heard him at Tonic with Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio, probably around 1999 or 2000, and soon after that I ran into him on records by Tim Berne's Bloodcount. I wasn't in love with his drumming at that time. I respected the skill, but the aesthetic didn't click with me; something about the way he was channeling rock seemed sort of like a knowing paraphrase rather than the result of true, head-on engagement, and I found his signature idiosyncrasies, both timbral and rhythmic, a little distracting. But as I heard more of Black's work over the years—especially the gorgeous records he made with his AlasNoAxis band (e.g., Houseplant), on which he did an awesome job of getting out of the way of his own compositions and simply letting them speak—I really turned around on him. Jim Black, the composer-bandleader, appealed to me much more than Jim Black, the sideman.
With Somatic, I think he's reached a new peak. He's stripping the aesthetic down to the bone here, uncluttering it in an admirable way. AlasNoAxis retained that rockish feel via Hilmar Jensson's guitar and the backbeat feel of some of the grooves, but that kind of allusion is less apparent here. This set of pieces feels entirely secure within itself; listening, you're not preoccupied with what the influences might have been. So yes, as I mentioned above, this is a piano trio record: Black, plus bassist Thomas Morgan and pianist Elias Stemeseder (a young Austrian player whose name is new to me). The writing is just remarkable. You get these simple, folksy, memorable themes, such as "Uglysnug" and "Terrotow," which gets stuck in my head constantly, and a bunch of moodier, more troubled-, pensive-sounding ones—like opener "Tahre" and "Chibi Jones"—and then some, like "Somatic," that seem to combine those two sensations. A lot of slow, extremely chilled-out music here, but unpredictable and unboring. "Somatic" is a good illustration of what's so compelling about this record; the composition is sort of lilting and catchy, but the playing is teeming with strange detail. Black, Morgan and Stemeseder are having a real Bill Evans Trio kind of group conversation here, drifting in and out of in-time playing, just sort of flowing where the piece takes them. This record isn't just my favorite example to date of Jim Black's writing; it might be my favorite example of his drumming as well. On "Somatic," he seems to be going for an unbelievably subtle version of the Tony Williams–on-"Nefertiti" thing, i.e., a sort of constructive disruption. The trademark sounds of his kit, those dry cymbals, the splatty bass drum, and the strange, slurred time feel—here you hear all this in a quiet and composed setting. The improvisation does threaten to heat up at times, but it's all so dynamically controlled, so essentially balladic.
This trio doesn't sound anything like the Motian/Frisell/Lovano band, but there's a similar kind of murky, liquid lyricism at work here—an experimentalism that has no time for obvious signifiers. A few pieces on the record veer off in other directions—the postboppish "Sure Are You," one of the only tracks here with what I'd describe as a jazzy rhythmic feel, and the tumbling, prog-funky "Beariere"—but overall, Somatic is a pretty remarkable feat of sustained moodcraft. If you like your jazz reflective, with a little stimulating yet unobtrusive weirdness around the edges, you will eat this record up. Every time I put it on, I feel like I've previously underestimated how good it is.
Again, David Virelles's Continuum—a very different record. Jim Black is a veteran compared to Virelles, whose name I've only started seeing around over the past couple of years. When I noticed that this Cuban pianist's working band, also called Continuum, featured Andrew Cyrille on drums—as well as Ben Street, also a member of the Billy Hart Quartet discussed in part II of this round-up—I was instantly intrigued. Cyrille's been doing awesome work in Bill McHenry's band over the past couple years (check out the recent La Peur du Vide), and he sounds incredible on Continuum. (I've written before about intergenerational jazz bands designed to showcase the work of an older drummer; you can add Virelles trio to that list.)
As Ben Ratliff pointed out in his review, Continuum is a multimedia presentation, in which Román Díaz's chant and even Alberto Lescay's painting play a central role. While I've come to enjoy those elements—and I'll admit that Díaz's vocals took some getting used to—the sound of the piano trio at the core of this ensemble is what's kept me coming back to Continuum. I love the way Virelles, Street and Cyrille groove on the funky dervish dance "The Executioner"—Díaz's subtle Afro-Cuban percussion is key here too—working up to a tense climax and giving way to a masterfully textural Cyrille solo. Some of the other pieces go for pure texture; "Threefold" is a super-quiet masterpiece, an abstracted ballad, in which Virelles and Street leave tons of space for Cyrille's pinging cymbals and rustling brush-on-snare work.
The record can be a little disorienting, since the group's approach mutates constantly; almost every piece seems to have a different sonic objective. After a few spins, though, I started to embrace the variety. This is a record that ranges from "Manongo Pablo," essentially a nimble, uptempo Cyrille drum solo set against Virelles's spacey, almost psychedelic Wurlitzer, to "Our Birthright," where a Díaz recitation over hushed accompaniment from the trio gradually transitions into a passionate, spirit-raising free-jazz episode, featuring guest horn players Román Filiú, Mark Turner and Jonathan Finlayson. (During this latter section, you really hear how valuable Cyrille is to the session; when the other players dial up the intensity, he keeps his volume and density carefully controlled, assuring that the crescendo doesn't turn into a cacophonous blowout.)
While I look forward to spending more time with Continuum, I'm not sure I'll ever understand fully what Virelles is going for here. In the liner notes, he writes about the Afro-Cuban religious practices that inspired the record, discussing the "highly complex cosmologies" that guide them and the way Díaz's verse weaves together Spanish with the "ritual languages" of Karabali, Kongo and Yorùbá-Lucumí. No translations of any of the text are provided, so in a sense, any listener not steeped in these traditions is kept deliberately on the outside. It's an intriguing and, in a weird way, almost refreshing way to present a record, i.e., clue the listener in slightly to the concepts guiding the work but don't overexplain. The result is that Continuum scans like a mystery rather than some sort of context-laden cross-cultural artifact. It's fascinating stuff.
Note that this band plays Drom tonight. They're also at the Village Vanguard from January 29 through February 3, with Filiú guesting Friday to Sunday and none other than Henry Threadgill (!) sitting in on Thursday.
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Henry Threadgill Zooid
Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp [Pi Recordings]
As discussed on DFSBP a couple weeks back, I recently had a bit of a moment with Threadgill's three most recent Zooid releases, developing a new appreciation for the band's sound—and the ways in which it diverges from H.T.'s "classic" work. The postscript marked "Update" there features some in-the-moment impressions of this latest Zooid record, which welcomes cellist Christopher Hoffman to the fold, so I won't go into too much detail here. Tomorrow Sunny doesn't differ wildly from the bands prior two LPs—Vols. 1 and 2 of This Brings Us To—but you can hear a progression in terms of the band's deep-listening interaction. The group dynamic on tracks like "So Pleased, No Clue"—one of the sparser, shorter, less groove-oriented pieces—is stunningly sensitive. You really hear the players breathing together, completing each other's sentences, coexisting, collaboratively coaxing out the ensemble sound. In the post linked above, I wrote about how Zooid's music isn't the kind that comes to you; you have to meet it on its own terms. But once you're there—and for me, that meant shedding my desire for big, bold, super-memorable ensemble themes, so prevalent in older Threadgill—this is a very pleasurable, even sensuous record and probably my favorite Zooid statement yet.
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Joe Fiedler
Big Sackbut [Yellow Sound Label]
I don't know too much about the trombonist Joe Fiedler, but I have enjoyed the last couple of albums of his I've checked out: 2007's The Crab and last year's Sacred Chrome Orb, both lean trio discs geared toward showcasing the leader's charming compositions and impressive command of odd timbral effects. Big Sackbut debuts a very different project, a World Saxophone Quartet–style four-piece with three trombones (Fiedler, Ryan Keberle and Josh Roseman) and one tuba (Marcus Rojas. I like the more extroverted tracks on here, e.g. Fieder's "Mixed Bag" and a take on Willie Colon's "Calle Luna, Calle Sol," but the more measured, reflective pieces ("#11," "Don Pullen") impress me the most. For me, the real hurdle a project like this has to clear is "Does the music transcend the eccentricity of the ensemble make-up?," and I'd answer a definite yes with respect to this record. Enjoyable stuff, especially for the brass-inclined.
Here's a clip of the group doing "Calle Luna, Calle Sol" live in 2010.
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Yoni Kretzmer 2Bass Quartet
Weight [OutNow]
Another one that foregrounds an unusual ensemble make-up. Here, I'd heard everyone but the leader—Israeli tenor-saxist Yoni Kretzmer—going in; the rest of the band—bassist Sean Conly and Reuben Radding, and drummer Mike Pride—are all NYC stalwarts. There's definitely a gritty, post-Ayler quality to Weight, but that's only a fraction of what's going on here. Kretzmer has a very classic tenor sound, raspy yet melodic—I believe I cited Dewey Redman in one of the prior write-ups; I think of him here too—and a sometimes borderline-sentimental compositional sense; on pieces like "Giving Tree," and "A Bit of Peace," these qualities clash fruitfully with the grittiness of the improvising. This push-and-pull keeps me interested. I'm all for the backbeat-driven meltdown at the beginning of "Again and Again," but I'm even more intrigued by the way the dynamics dip down to ballad level instead of continuing to blare. "Smallone," a measured interlude that sets Kretzmer against the two plucked basses and Pride's tasteful brushwork, is another standout. As with the Threadgill record, Kretzmer really lets you hear every player in the band; it's a beautifully recorded disc, and its greatest pleasure is hearing the group members carrying on a lively yet expertly controlled conversation, e.g., on a track like the sing-songy "A Bit of Peace." Everyone's really listening, here and throughout the album.
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Ted Nash
The Creep [Plastic Sax]
I'd never really checked out Ted Nash's work before this year. One of the most welcome side benefits of researching my Jazz Composers Collective profile a couple months back was getting to know various Nash projects like the Double Quartet, Still Evolved and Odeon. As with the Fiedler and Kretzmer records above, some of this past Nash work—e.g., the tango-inspired Odeon and the string-quartet-augmented Double Quartet—thrives on unconventional ensemble make-up. The Creep is something different, though. It's simply a scrappy, hard-swinging quartet record, driven by Ulysses Owens's ass-kicking drumming and the stimulating warm-cool contrast between Nash's saxophone and Ron Horton's trumpet. Much like the Dolphy/Curson/Mingus/Richmond band, this group gets a ton of mileage out of its stripped-down instrumentation, emphasizing density or sparseness, abandon or control as the situation demands. Check out "Burnt Toast and Avocado" and "Plastic Sax Lullaby" in succession and you'll see what I mean. Nash has cited Ornette (particularly his use of a plastic saxophone) as an inspiration for this record, but to continue with our overriding theme, The Creep is another no-school jazz statement. It simply does its thing (many things, really) and leaves the classification up to the listener.
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Jeremy Pelt
Soul [HighNote]
Hat-tip to Phil Freeman for turning me on to this one. I knew Pelt's name, but little else about him, going in. I was intrigued by the idea of hearing JD Allen and Gerald Cleaver in a new context, and I wasn't disappointed at all. This is a low-key and unassuming session, ballad-heavy, clearly indebted to ’60s Blue Note fare—esp. moody Wayne Shorter records like Speak No Evil—and gorgeously recorded. (Pelt's site says that Rudy Van Gelder himself engineered this one, though, oddly, Joe Marciano's name is listed on the CD itself.) It's a throwback record, but it's not slavish in the slightest, and the playing is outstanding, whether on the more freewheeling, uptempo tracks like "What's Wrong Is Wright" or "The Tempest"—both of these have a pretty strong mid-to-late-’60s-Miles-quintet vibe going on, with Cleaver clearly mining a Tony Williams vibe on the latter, and sounding great—or whispery slow pieces like "The Ballad of Ichabod Crane." The latter piece exemplifies one of Soul's most appealing qualities, its ability to convey chill-ness without sleepiness; in the end, this is a fairly straightforward record, but there's enough intrigue and conviction in the playing that it doesn't feel rote. Playing this again now, though, I'm reminded by its subtle magnetism—I'll definitely be returning to this one, and keeping an eye out for future Pelt releases.
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Ralph Peterson
The Duality Perspective [Onyx]
As with Soul, I woke up to this one after reading another writer's take, in this case Ben Ratliff's review. And again, I'm very thankful for the heads-up, since I wasn't familiar with Peterson's prior work. Part of what intrigued me in the Times write-up was the description of the Fo'tet—one of two bands featured on this record—a quartet with clarinet, vibes and bass. (The sidemen are Felix Peikli, Joseph Doubleday and Alexander L.J. Tosh, respectively—all new names to me.) The combination of clarinet and vibes is one I've loved since I first heard the ’30s Benny Goodman Quartet back in college—got a nice opportunity to binge on these sides during WKCR's recent Teddy Wilson centennial marathon—and though the Fo'tet is no Swing Era throwback, the texture of the band does hint at the crisp, fresh, chamber-jazzy interplay of Goodman and Lionel Hampton. To me, this group sounds best playing more or less straightforward postbop, as on album opener "One False Move." What I like about this piece, and "Princess" as well, is the contrast between the cool sound of the clarinet-vibes frontline—and I mean that more texturally, since Peikli is a daring and passionate soloist—and Peterson's busy, churning accompaniment. He's got a rumbling, Elvin Jones quality to his swing, and he certainly smacks the kit from time to time, but his dynamics are impressively controlled; he's driving the band without overdoing it. I'd have to agree with Ratliff's assessment of the record's latter half, which features Peterson's sextet ("The sextet has its moments, but it deals in more weighed-down and conventional moods and doesn’t have as recognizable a group sound," he wrote). The title track—a lushly orchestrated ballad—is a definite winner, though: a strong showcase for Peterson's writing/arranging, that muscular yet sensitive drumming style I mentioned above and the appealing two-sax frontline of Walter Smith III and Tia Fuller. I look forward to hearing more from Peterson, especially the Fo'tet.
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Eric Revis's 11:11
Parallax [Clean Feed]
Was a little apprehensive about including this one on my year-end list, mainly because it only showed up in the mail a few days before I filed. But I knew that (A) the band featured here—the sidemen are Ken Vandermark, Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits—was too special to overlook and that (B) the record wasn't really going to be eligible for 2013 consideration. Definitely still digesting this one, so my impressions are a little sketchy. But I will tentatively say that Parallax lives up to my high expectations. (I remember seeing this band listed on the Jazz Gallery schedule a few years back, and after missing that gig, I eagerly awaited a recording.) Revis is, in his own way, one of the most eclectic players I know. I've been seriously impressed by his playing with Tarbaby, Bill McHenry's current working quartet, Peter Brötzmann (the 2011 Vision Festival featured a Revis / Brötzmann / William Parker trio), and Branford Marsalis—a pretty wide range of contexts—and I remember really digging his last leader record, Laughter's Necklace of Tears, when I checked it out a while back.
Like that LP, Parallax is an eclectic and challenging set. Revis doesn't just put together bands and let them rip; he assembles real programs' worth of music. This album features muscular, trancelike solo bass ("Percival," e.g.); dramatic, tightly orchestrated pieces like "Dark Net" and "MXR," which almost come off as proggy chamber jazz; entropic yet sensitive free-jazz pieces ("I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," "Celestial Hobo," "ENKJ") that really show off the potent group dynamic this quartet has achieved; and at least one piece ("Winin' Boy Blues") that sounds like a riff on the kind of stylized retro vibe that Moran and Waits often explore in the Bandwagon. Skimming back through the tracks now, I'm realizing that I can't wait to give this record a few more focused spins. Revis has put together a fascinating group here—one that can breathe free-form fire when called upon to do so, e.g., "Hyperthral," or groove hard and tough, e.g., "Split"—and he really seems to be wringing all the potential he can out of these players.
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Harris Eisenstadt
Canada Day III [Songlines]
Canada Day Octet [482 Music]
Harris Eisenstadt has been a mainstay of my year-end lists over the past few years—I particularly dug 2008's Guewel and 2010's Woodblock Prints. He's prolific, but he's always worth checking in with. I'd overlooked Eisenstadt's Canada Day band in the past, maybe because it's his most conventional-sounding ensemble, a quintet with saxophone, trumpet, vibes and bass. As with previous Canada Day releases, the writing on III is very clean, clear and lyrical, sometimes with a shade of playful quirk. The pieces seem designed to show off the sidemen, specifically the extraordinary frontline of saxist Matt Bauder and trumpeter Nate Wooley; both can veer into abstract/abrasive territory—fans of Wooley's work in freer contexts will recognize what he's up to on "Nosey Parker"—but what impresses me most here is when they're playing in this sort of soft, murmuring style—as on "Song for Sara"—and mingling their sounds with Chris Dingman's vibes. It's a very pleasant and accessible group texture, but far from conventional, which seems to be a hallmark of Eisenstadt's work overall. Don't meant to short-shrift the Canda Day Octet record record when I say that it's more or less a companion piece. Eisenstadt's writing for this expanded group is just as sharp as it is for the core band—the multipart "Ombudsman" suite, which really takes advantage of the larger ensemble, is magical—and again, Bauder, Wooley and Dingman are the stars here. Both these discs are highly recommended.
Here's some live footage of the octet.
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40Twenty
40Twenty [Yeah Yeah]
David Ambrosio has shown up a couple times on this list already, on the Schuller and Yamamoto records, and the other three here are familiar names, all of whom lead their own projects. (Garchik's The Heavens is definitely one to check out.) This is a subtle one that I might have overlooked if it wasn't for Nate Chinen's recent shout-out. I like how this record manages to sound both weird and composed at the same time, as when the band plays an expertly controlled form of free jazz on Ambrosio's "One Five," or a slurry Monkish march on Sacks's "Jan 20." With only trombone in the frontline, the group has a kind of drollness about it, a vibe that's also reinforced in the writing, but there's some really heated, energized playing on tracks like Garchik's "Gi." Like many of the other projects on this list, 40Twenty is taking what it needs from various jazz strains without aligning itself to any of them. "Jan 20" sounds almost throwbacky—appropriate since the band's name is a nod to the grueling nightclub gig schedules of yore—while "Plainchant" is as delicate and austere as the name would suggest. The feel of the latter piece captures what I enjoy about this record—the way both its beauty and its oddness feel muted, sort of far off. 40Twenty is more elusive than most of the records cited above, but it's worth taking the time to get close to it.
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P.S. The best jazz performances I saw this year, with links to coverage, where applicable:
Miguel Zenón Quartet
January 6; Zinc Bar (Winter Jazzfest)
Craig Taborn Trio
April 6, 8; Village Vanguard
Darius Jones Quartet
June 12; Roulette (Vision Festival)
Marc Ribot Trio
June 29; Village Vanguard
Ethan Iverson / Ben Street / Albert "Tootie" Heath
August 26; Village Vanguard
Bob Stewart Quintet
November 10; Central Park (Jazz and Colors)
Henry Threadgill Zooid
November 24; Roulette
Jim Black Trio
Somatic [Winter and Winter]
Continuum [Pi Recordings]
Grouping these two together might be a little bit of a stretch, but I think it makes sense. At heart, they're both unconventional piano-trio records that work hard to sustain a particular mood/feel over their respective running times.
I remember receiving a download of Somatic about a year ago, right in the middle of the 2011 year-end-list frenzy. Right from the first spin, I really enjoyed it, but I was worried that it would get lost in the shuffle as the year progressed; albums that come out early in January often do. (Though, interestingly, the album that ended up topping my 2012 all-genres-in-play list—to be revealed in due time—is also a record I've had my hands on since the very beginning of the year.) Fortunately, this did not occur. I saw a very good show by this band at Cornelia Street Café in February, and the record stuck with me pretty stubbornly throughout the year.
So what is Somatic, exactly? Jim Black is a musician I've come around to gradually. I first heard him at Tonic with Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio, probably around 1999 or 2000, and soon after that I ran into him on records by Tim Berne's Bloodcount. I wasn't in love with his drumming at that time. I respected the skill, but the aesthetic didn't click with me; something about the way he was channeling rock seemed sort of like a knowing paraphrase rather than the result of true, head-on engagement, and I found his signature idiosyncrasies, both timbral and rhythmic, a little distracting. But as I heard more of Black's work over the years—especially the gorgeous records he made with his AlasNoAxis band (e.g., Houseplant), on which he did an awesome job of getting out of the way of his own compositions and simply letting them speak—I really turned around on him. Jim Black, the composer-bandleader, appealed to me much more than Jim Black, the sideman.
With Somatic, I think he's reached a new peak. He's stripping the aesthetic down to the bone here, uncluttering it in an admirable way. AlasNoAxis retained that rockish feel via Hilmar Jensson's guitar and the backbeat feel of some of the grooves, but that kind of allusion is less apparent here. This set of pieces feels entirely secure within itself; listening, you're not preoccupied with what the influences might have been. So yes, as I mentioned above, this is a piano trio record: Black, plus bassist Thomas Morgan and pianist Elias Stemeseder (a young Austrian player whose name is new to me). The writing is just remarkable. You get these simple, folksy, memorable themes, such as "Uglysnug" and "Terrotow," which gets stuck in my head constantly, and a bunch of moodier, more troubled-, pensive-sounding ones—like opener "Tahre" and "Chibi Jones"—and then some, like "Somatic," that seem to combine those two sensations. A lot of slow, extremely chilled-out music here, but unpredictable and unboring. "Somatic" is a good illustration of what's so compelling about this record; the composition is sort of lilting and catchy, but the playing is teeming with strange detail. Black, Morgan and Stemeseder are having a real Bill Evans Trio kind of group conversation here, drifting in and out of in-time playing, just sort of flowing where the piece takes them. This record isn't just my favorite example to date of Jim Black's writing; it might be my favorite example of his drumming as well. On "Somatic," he seems to be going for an unbelievably subtle version of the Tony Williams–on-"Nefertiti" thing, i.e., a sort of constructive disruption. The trademark sounds of his kit, those dry cymbals, the splatty bass drum, and the strange, slurred time feel—here you hear all this in a quiet and composed setting. The improvisation does threaten to heat up at times, but it's all so dynamically controlled, so essentially balladic.
This trio doesn't sound anything like the Motian/Frisell/Lovano band, but there's a similar kind of murky, liquid lyricism at work here—an experimentalism that has no time for obvious signifiers. A few pieces on the record veer off in other directions—the postboppish "Sure Are You," one of the only tracks here with what I'd describe as a jazzy rhythmic feel, and the tumbling, prog-funky "Beariere"—but overall, Somatic is a pretty remarkable feat of sustained moodcraft. If you like your jazz reflective, with a little stimulating yet unobtrusive weirdness around the edges, you will eat this record up. Every time I put it on, I feel like I've previously underestimated how good it is.
Again, David Virelles's Continuum—a very different record. Jim Black is a veteran compared to Virelles, whose name I've only started seeing around over the past couple of years. When I noticed that this Cuban pianist's working band, also called Continuum, featured Andrew Cyrille on drums—as well as Ben Street, also a member of the Billy Hart Quartet discussed in part II of this round-up—I was instantly intrigued. Cyrille's been doing awesome work in Bill McHenry's band over the past couple years (check out the recent La Peur du Vide), and he sounds incredible on Continuum. (I've written before about intergenerational jazz bands designed to showcase the work of an older drummer; you can add Virelles trio to that list.)
As Ben Ratliff pointed out in his review, Continuum is a multimedia presentation, in which Román Díaz's chant and even Alberto Lescay's painting play a central role. While I've come to enjoy those elements—and I'll admit that Díaz's vocals took some getting used to—the sound of the piano trio at the core of this ensemble is what's kept me coming back to Continuum. I love the way Virelles, Street and Cyrille groove on the funky dervish dance "The Executioner"—Díaz's subtle Afro-Cuban percussion is key here too—working up to a tense climax and giving way to a masterfully textural Cyrille solo. Some of the other pieces go for pure texture; "Threefold" is a super-quiet masterpiece, an abstracted ballad, in which Virelles and Street leave tons of space for Cyrille's pinging cymbals and rustling brush-on-snare work.
The record can be a little disorienting, since the group's approach mutates constantly; almost every piece seems to have a different sonic objective. After a few spins, though, I started to embrace the variety. This is a record that ranges from "Manongo Pablo," essentially a nimble, uptempo Cyrille drum solo set against Virelles's spacey, almost psychedelic Wurlitzer, to "Our Birthright," where a Díaz recitation over hushed accompaniment from the trio gradually transitions into a passionate, spirit-raising free-jazz episode, featuring guest horn players Román Filiú, Mark Turner and Jonathan Finlayson. (During this latter section, you really hear how valuable Cyrille is to the session; when the other players dial up the intensity, he keeps his volume and density carefully controlled, assuring that the crescendo doesn't turn into a cacophonous blowout.)
While I look forward to spending more time with Continuum, I'm not sure I'll ever understand fully what Virelles is going for here. In the liner notes, he writes about the Afro-Cuban religious practices that inspired the record, discussing the "highly complex cosmologies" that guide them and the way Díaz's verse weaves together Spanish with the "ritual languages" of Karabali, Kongo and Yorùbá-Lucumí. No translations of any of the text are provided, so in a sense, any listener not steeped in these traditions is kept deliberately on the outside. It's an intriguing and, in a weird way, almost refreshing way to present a record, i.e., clue the listener in slightly to the concepts guiding the work but don't overexplain. The result is that Continuum scans like a mystery rather than some sort of context-laden cross-cultural artifact. It's fascinating stuff.
Note that this band plays Drom tonight. They're also at the Village Vanguard from January 29 through February 3, with Filiú guesting Friday to Sunday and none other than Henry Threadgill (!) sitting in on Thursday.
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Henry Threadgill Zooid
Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp [Pi Recordings]
As discussed on DFSBP a couple weeks back, I recently had a bit of a moment with Threadgill's three most recent Zooid releases, developing a new appreciation for the band's sound—and the ways in which it diverges from H.T.'s "classic" work. The postscript marked "Update" there features some in-the-moment impressions of this latest Zooid record, which welcomes cellist Christopher Hoffman to the fold, so I won't go into too much detail here. Tomorrow Sunny doesn't differ wildly from the bands prior two LPs—Vols. 1 and 2 of This Brings Us To—but you can hear a progression in terms of the band's deep-listening interaction. The group dynamic on tracks like "So Pleased, No Clue"—one of the sparser, shorter, less groove-oriented pieces—is stunningly sensitive. You really hear the players breathing together, completing each other's sentences, coexisting, collaboratively coaxing out the ensemble sound. In the post linked above, I wrote about how Zooid's music isn't the kind that comes to you; you have to meet it on its own terms. But once you're there—and for me, that meant shedding my desire for big, bold, super-memorable ensemble themes, so prevalent in older Threadgill—this is a very pleasurable, even sensuous record and probably my favorite Zooid statement yet.
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Joe Fiedler
Big Sackbut [Yellow Sound Label]
I don't know too much about the trombonist Joe Fiedler, but I have enjoyed the last couple of albums of his I've checked out: 2007's The Crab and last year's Sacred Chrome Orb, both lean trio discs geared toward showcasing the leader's charming compositions and impressive command of odd timbral effects. Big Sackbut debuts a very different project, a World Saxophone Quartet–style four-piece with three trombones (Fiedler, Ryan Keberle and Josh Roseman) and one tuba (Marcus Rojas. I like the more extroverted tracks on here, e.g. Fieder's "Mixed Bag" and a take on Willie Colon's "Calle Luna, Calle Sol," but the more measured, reflective pieces ("#11," "Don Pullen") impress me the most. For me, the real hurdle a project like this has to clear is "Does the music transcend the eccentricity of the ensemble make-up?," and I'd answer a definite yes with respect to this record. Enjoyable stuff, especially for the brass-inclined.
Here's a clip of the group doing "Calle Luna, Calle Sol" live in 2010.
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Yoni Kretzmer 2Bass Quartet
Weight [OutNow]
Another one that foregrounds an unusual ensemble make-up. Here, I'd heard everyone but the leader—Israeli tenor-saxist Yoni Kretzmer—going in; the rest of the band—bassist Sean Conly and Reuben Radding, and drummer Mike Pride—are all NYC stalwarts. There's definitely a gritty, post-Ayler quality to Weight, but that's only a fraction of what's going on here. Kretzmer has a very classic tenor sound, raspy yet melodic—I believe I cited Dewey Redman in one of the prior write-ups; I think of him here too—and a sometimes borderline-sentimental compositional sense; on pieces like "Giving Tree," and "A Bit of Peace," these qualities clash fruitfully with the grittiness of the improvising. This push-and-pull keeps me interested. I'm all for the backbeat-driven meltdown at the beginning of "Again and Again," but I'm even more intrigued by the way the dynamics dip down to ballad level instead of continuing to blare. "Smallone," a measured interlude that sets Kretzmer against the two plucked basses and Pride's tasteful brushwork, is another standout. As with the Threadgill record, Kretzmer really lets you hear every player in the band; it's a beautifully recorded disc, and its greatest pleasure is hearing the group members carrying on a lively yet expertly controlled conversation, e.g., on a track like the sing-songy "A Bit of Peace." Everyone's really listening, here and throughout the album.
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Ted Nash
The Creep [Plastic Sax]
I'd never really checked out Ted Nash's work before this year. One of the most welcome side benefits of researching my Jazz Composers Collective profile a couple months back was getting to know various Nash projects like the Double Quartet, Still Evolved and Odeon. As with the Fiedler and Kretzmer records above, some of this past Nash work—e.g., the tango-inspired Odeon and the string-quartet-augmented Double Quartet—thrives on unconventional ensemble make-up. The Creep is something different, though. It's simply a scrappy, hard-swinging quartet record, driven by Ulysses Owens's ass-kicking drumming and the stimulating warm-cool contrast between Nash's saxophone and Ron Horton's trumpet. Much like the Dolphy/Curson/Mingus/Richmond band, this group gets a ton of mileage out of its stripped-down instrumentation, emphasizing density or sparseness, abandon or control as the situation demands. Check out "Burnt Toast and Avocado" and "Plastic Sax Lullaby" in succession and you'll see what I mean. Nash has cited Ornette (particularly his use of a plastic saxophone) as an inspiration for this record, but to continue with our overriding theme, The Creep is another no-school jazz statement. It simply does its thing (many things, really) and leaves the classification up to the listener.
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Jeremy Pelt
Soul [HighNote]
Hat-tip to Phil Freeman for turning me on to this one. I knew Pelt's name, but little else about him, going in. I was intrigued by the idea of hearing JD Allen and Gerald Cleaver in a new context, and I wasn't disappointed at all. This is a low-key and unassuming session, ballad-heavy, clearly indebted to ’60s Blue Note fare—esp. moody Wayne Shorter records like Speak No Evil—and gorgeously recorded. (Pelt's site says that Rudy Van Gelder himself engineered this one, though, oddly, Joe Marciano's name is listed on the CD itself.) It's a throwback record, but it's not slavish in the slightest, and the playing is outstanding, whether on the more freewheeling, uptempo tracks like "What's Wrong Is Wright" or "The Tempest"—both of these have a pretty strong mid-to-late-’60s-Miles-quintet vibe going on, with Cleaver clearly mining a Tony Williams vibe on the latter, and sounding great—or whispery slow pieces like "The Ballad of Ichabod Crane." The latter piece exemplifies one of Soul's most appealing qualities, its ability to convey chill-ness without sleepiness; in the end, this is a fairly straightforward record, but there's enough intrigue and conviction in the playing that it doesn't feel rote. Playing this again now, though, I'm reminded by its subtle magnetism—I'll definitely be returning to this one, and keeping an eye out for future Pelt releases.
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Ralph Peterson
The Duality Perspective [Onyx]
As with Soul, I woke up to this one after reading another writer's take, in this case Ben Ratliff's review. And again, I'm very thankful for the heads-up, since I wasn't familiar with Peterson's prior work. Part of what intrigued me in the Times write-up was the description of the Fo'tet—one of two bands featured on this record—a quartet with clarinet, vibes and bass. (The sidemen are Felix Peikli, Joseph Doubleday and Alexander L.J. Tosh, respectively—all new names to me.) The combination of clarinet and vibes is one I've loved since I first heard the ’30s Benny Goodman Quartet back in college—got a nice opportunity to binge on these sides during WKCR's recent Teddy Wilson centennial marathon—and though the Fo'tet is no Swing Era throwback, the texture of the band does hint at the crisp, fresh, chamber-jazzy interplay of Goodman and Lionel Hampton. To me, this group sounds best playing more or less straightforward postbop, as on album opener "One False Move." What I like about this piece, and "Princess" as well, is the contrast between the cool sound of the clarinet-vibes frontline—and I mean that more texturally, since Peikli is a daring and passionate soloist—and Peterson's busy, churning accompaniment. He's got a rumbling, Elvin Jones quality to his swing, and he certainly smacks the kit from time to time, but his dynamics are impressively controlled; he's driving the band without overdoing it. I'd have to agree with Ratliff's assessment of the record's latter half, which features Peterson's sextet ("The sextet has its moments, but it deals in more weighed-down and conventional moods and doesn’t have as recognizable a group sound," he wrote). The title track—a lushly orchestrated ballad—is a definite winner, though: a strong showcase for Peterson's writing/arranging, that muscular yet sensitive drumming style I mentioned above and the appealing two-sax frontline of Walter Smith III and Tia Fuller. I look forward to hearing more from Peterson, especially the Fo'tet.
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Eric Revis's 11:11
Parallax [Clean Feed]
Was a little apprehensive about including this one on my year-end list, mainly because it only showed up in the mail a few days before I filed. But I knew that (A) the band featured here—the sidemen are Ken Vandermark, Jason Moran and Nasheet Waits—was too special to overlook and that (B) the record wasn't really going to be eligible for 2013 consideration. Definitely still digesting this one, so my impressions are a little sketchy. But I will tentatively say that Parallax lives up to my high expectations. (I remember seeing this band listed on the Jazz Gallery schedule a few years back, and after missing that gig, I eagerly awaited a recording.) Revis is, in his own way, one of the most eclectic players I know. I've been seriously impressed by his playing with Tarbaby, Bill McHenry's current working quartet, Peter Brötzmann (the 2011 Vision Festival featured a Revis / Brötzmann / William Parker trio), and Branford Marsalis—a pretty wide range of contexts—and I remember really digging his last leader record, Laughter's Necklace of Tears, when I checked it out a while back.
Like that LP, Parallax is an eclectic and challenging set. Revis doesn't just put together bands and let them rip; he assembles real programs' worth of music. This album features muscular, trancelike solo bass ("Percival," e.g.); dramatic, tightly orchestrated pieces like "Dark Net" and "MXR," which almost come off as proggy chamber jazz; entropic yet sensitive free-jazz pieces ("I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter," "Celestial Hobo," "ENKJ") that really show off the potent group dynamic this quartet has achieved; and at least one piece ("Winin' Boy Blues") that sounds like a riff on the kind of stylized retro vibe that Moran and Waits often explore in the Bandwagon. Skimming back through the tracks now, I'm realizing that I can't wait to give this record a few more focused spins. Revis has put together a fascinating group here—one that can breathe free-form fire when called upon to do so, e.g., "Hyperthral," or groove hard and tough, e.g., "Split"—and he really seems to be wringing all the potential he can out of these players.
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Harris Eisenstadt
Canada Day III [Songlines]
Canada Day Octet [482 Music]
Harris Eisenstadt has been a mainstay of my year-end lists over the past few years—I particularly dug 2008's Guewel and 2010's Woodblock Prints. He's prolific, but he's always worth checking in with. I'd overlooked Eisenstadt's Canada Day band in the past, maybe because it's his most conventional-sounding ensemble, a quintet with saxophone, trumpet, vibes and bass. As with previous Canada Day releases, the writing on III is very clean, clear and lyrical, sometimes with a shade of playful quirk. The pieces seem designed to show off the sidemen, specifically the extraordinary frontline of saxist Matt Bauder and trumpeter Nate Wooley; both can veer into abstract/abrasive territory—fans of Wooley's work in freer contexts will recognize what he's up to on "Nosey Parker"—but what impresses me most here is when they're playing in this sort of soft, murmuring style—as on "Song for Sara"—and mingling their sounds with Chris Dingman's vibes. It's a very pleasant and accessible group texture, but far from conventional, which seems to be a hallmark of Eisenstadt's work overall. Don't meant to short-shrift the Canda Day Octet record record when I say that it's more or less a companion piece. Eisenstadt's writing for this expanded group is just as sharp as it is for the core band—the multipart "Ombudsman" suite, which really takes advantage of the larger ensemble, is magical—and again, Bauder, Wooley and Dingman are the stars here. Both these discs are highly recommended.
Here's some live footage of the octet.
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40Twenty
40Twenty [Yeah Yeah]
David Ambrosio has shown up a couple times on this list already, on the Schuller and Yamamoto records, and the other three here are familiar names, all of whom lead their own projects. (Garchik's The Heavens is definitely one to check out.) This is a subtle one that I might have overlooked if it wasn't for Nate Chinen's recent shout-out. I like how this record manages to sound both weird and composed at the same time, as when the band plays an expertly controlled form of free jazz on Ambrosio's "One Five," or a slurry Monkish march on Sacks's "Jan 20." With only trombone in the frontline, the group has a kind of drollness about it, a vibe that's also reinforced in the writing, but there's some really heated, energized playing on tracks like Garchik's "Gi." Like many of the other projects on this list, 40Twenty is taking what it needs from various jazz strains without aligning itself to any of them. "Jan 20" sounds almost throwbacky—appropriate since the band's name is a nod to the grueling nightclub gig schedules of yore—while "Plainchant" is as delicate and austere as the name would suggest. The feel of the latter piece captures what I enjoy about this record—the way both its beauty and its oddness feel muted, sort of far off. 40Twenty is more elusive than most of the records cited above, but it's worth taking the time to get close to it.
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P.S. The best jazz performances I saw this year, with links to coverage, where applicable:
Miguel Zenón Quartet
January 6; Zinc Bar (Winter Jazzfest)
Craig Taborn Trio
April 6, 8; Village Vanguard
Darius Jones Quartet
June 12; Roulette (Vision Festival)
Marc Ribot Trio
June 29; Village Vanguard
Ethan Iverson / Ben Street / Albert "Tootie" Heath
August 26; Village Vanguard
Bob Stewart Quintet
November 10; Central Park (Jazz and Colors)
Henry Threadgill Zooid
November 24; Roulette
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