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.

The drummer, given some: Albert "Tootie" Heath with Ethan Iverson at the Vanguard

What do we mean when we say "Give the drummer some"? The trio of Ethan Iverson, Ben Street and Albert "Tootie" Heath—which I heard at the Village Vanguard last night—is one answer. The band grows out of Iverson's "Seek out your heroes and play with them" initiative, also the engine behind the pianist's ongoing Billy Hart collaboration. The idea isn't simply that you give the drummer a lot of solo space; it's more that you simply play really great jazz in the company of the musician in question, while drawing the listeners' attention, both verbally and through sympathetic arrangements, to their brilliance.

I knew Tootie's name before attending last night's show, but I didn't know his work and his sound the way I know, say, Roy Haynes's. I may have even seen him play one other time—as part of the Heath Brothers, I believe, at a Jazz Foundation of America event—but he wasn't really on my radar in the way he ought to have been. And this is sort of the point re: the aforementioned "Seek out your heroes" initiative: The gig—in this case, a run at the Vanguard‚is no longer just a gig; it's a work of advocacy. What it says, is, "This masterful musician walks among us; he's playing better than ever; come pay your respects."(One of Iverson's many Heath intros last night went like this: "As we live and breathe, 'Tootie' Heath on drums!")

I heard such wonders coming from the drum kit last night that I felt embarrassed by my prior ignorance of Mr. Heath's work, by the fact that I'd never deliberately set aside a night, or ten, to go hear him play. There was the wicked bouncing march he laid down on "The Charleston," a quasi-backbeat—I think I remember a 16th-note feel, played with the left hand on the hi-hat—that reminded me of the Purdie Shuffle (see around 3:30 here) on Sonny Rollins's "No Moe" and some of the most exquisitely swinging brushwork I've ever heard on the head of "Shiny Stockings." (The way Heath's wire brushes grabbed the snare and lifted out the sound on the latter piece made me feel like I understood for the first time what was really meant by the term "trap set.")

But it was the mallet playing that really floored me. In his recap of Tuesday night's sets, Iverson mentioned Heath's "African mallet patterns" on Paul Motian's "It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago." I wouldn't have been knowledgeable enough to identify the beat in question—played with one mallet on the untightened snare, the other on the rack tom—as African, but that description makes perfect sense; relistening to the pattern in my head now, I'm pretty sure there was some three-against-four going on. Technicalities aside, though, the important thing about the beat was how it fit into the arrangement. Much of the rest of the set had to do with swinging in the conventional sense, pieces in which Iverson and Street reveled in Heath's spacious, gracious pocket, in which the trio grooved as one entity. But "It Should've Happened…" was something different. The performance was about coexistence rather than straightforward agreement. Iverson's melody floated over Heath's mallet pattern, the two seeming totally independent of one another but totally attuned. It's the kind of arrangement that, it seems to me, has to just sort of happen. It's like, "I'll play this, you play that, and I'll see you at the end of the tune." The parts jelled beautifully, even though their actual relationship was a mystery. And thus, as a Motian tribute, it made perfect sense. If that mallet episode played to me like a little mind puzzle, the one on "How Insensitive" was an exercise in simplicity. I'm not sure I've ever seen a drummer make more poetic use of minimal materials than Heath did on this piece. He held the mallet in his right hand, using it to lightly strike the floor tom while he rustled the fingers of his left hand over the head of the same drum. There were variations in the pattern, but mostly it was just pure pulse, with ever-so-slight embellishment. You heard the piano and the bass, but what you felt was the drum, a plush murmur in time. If I had to guess, I'd say that the piece lasted two minutes, maybe two and a half (all the pieces were brief, which made for excellent variety), but it felt so generous in its lulling hush. As with the brushwork, what I really felt here was a new understanding of the materials of jazz drumming: why you use brushes here, sticks there, mallets in this other context. The kit can speak in so many different tongues, and Albert Heath is fluent in them all.

Heath's witty banter was a show unto itself. The bowtied drummer was obviously in high spirits last night—though I'd venture to say that he probably is every night he's onstage—cracking constant jokes in between and even during the pieces. He'd turn constantly to the young man seated immediately to his left and offer commentary on the music as it was happening. One of my favorite of these moments was when Iverson was playing an eerie uncaccompanied intro to the ballad "Memories of You"; Heath leaned toward the audience member in question and stage-whispered "Frankenstein!" Then he pantomimed a scary monster, curling his hands into claws and baring his teeth. He was obviously poking fun at Iverson's love of the esoteric flourish, but in a loving, old-school way, the way one seasoned comedian might roast another. And after Iverson announced "Shiny Stockings," Heath turned to the young man and asked, "You know 'Thong Song'?" He explained that "Shiny Stockings" was pretty much analogous to that Sisqo favorite, before singing a little snippet of the immortal chorus ("Thong-th-thong-thong-thong") for the benefit of the entire crowd. Then, after Iverson spoke about Heath's association with Mal Waldron—the trio had either just played or was about to play Waldron's "Fire Waltz," the killer opener to the classic Dolphy/Little/Waldron/Davis/Blackwell Five Spot recordings, with Heath unleashing a merciless series of triplets on the snare—and recommended the Waldron record Impressions as a good example of that partnership, Heath said, "I think that record went rust instead of gold… or maybe it went mold."

As if it wasn't clear whose show it really was, Iverson and Street both sported "Tootie" buttons, with Street even wearing a Heath-style bowtie. This dynamic, i.e., generations mixing onstage, with the younger element (namely Iverson) making it very plain how thrilled they are to be onstage with the elder, has the potential to be corny or cloying. But the reason it's not in this case is that however worshipful Iverson's intros of Heath are, once the music begins, he's performing as an equal. Often, you'll see younger sidemen to distinguished older musicians playing a sort of "Yes man" role. Here, it's almost the opposite; Iverson's job in this trio seems to be to keep Heath surprised and energized. You can tell it's working because Heath plays in a constant state of delight, smiling and letting out appreciative whoops. Sure the style and the repertoire—familiar standards like "Now's the Time" and "All the Things You Are" alongside eccentric choices like the aforementioned "Fire Waltz" and the Motian—are designed to flatter, but in the end, the point is not simply to cater to the drummer but to stimulate him and thus to give the listener a sense of his breadth, to cultivate in the audience the kind of appreciation for this great man that Iverson himself harbors. And in all those senses, this project is entirely successful.

When you see this ingenerational link done right—i.e., when there's mutual respect, but also a real head-on engagement between equals—it's one of most inspiring, satisfying phenomena in jazz. I think about Jon Irabagon and Barry Altschul, or Darius Jones and Cooper-Moore, or Anthony Braxton and any one of his current much-younger collaborators. The Iverson/Heath hook-up (and I mean no disrespect to Ben Street; his role is vital—not to mention clearly impressive to Heath, who listened to the bassist's solos with rapt attention last night—and my discussion here is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the complex dynamic of this particular trio) is one of the most successful examples of this that I've seen, a partnership that makes "old" jazz feel entirely new. I'm not sure I can remember enjoying a set of so-called straight-ahead jazz more than this one, and it's because the setting encouraged me to focus on the nuts and bolts, to not take for granted the decades' worth of class and experience and good humor and skill seated behind the drums. In short, the set made me a Tootie fan for life. Mission accomplished.

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*If anyone can think of other great intergenerational collaborations, either current (like the ones mentioned above) or past (Miles Davis and Tony Williams, say), I'd love to hear about ’em in the comments.

*It's interesting to think about how the Iverson/Heath partnership differs from the Iverson/Hart one. Hart is just five years older than Heath (the men were born in 1940 and 1935, respectively), but that gap is important. The current Billy Hart Quartet is playing a much more, for lack of a better word, modern strain of jazz than this Iverson/Street/Heath group, focused on long, exploratory performances and mostly original repertoire. The bands sound nothing alike, and they complement each other beautifully.

*Here is Steve Smith's sharp appreciation of the Iverson/Street/Heath trio, which he caught this past Thursday. I'd like to thank Steve for the tip, which spurred me to attend last night.

 *As is customary with the Iverson collaborations, there's an extended interview on file.

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UPDATE: Thanks, Mark Stryker, for his informative intergenerational-collabo overview, which you'll find in the comments. I know a few of those examples well (Shorter, Haynes, etc., and the Cookers absolutely rule!), but some are new to me. Psyched to look into the Louis Hayes group in particular.

Bands, working: Hart and Crothers

A rare organism, glimpsed twice over the weekend. Two working bands, each a sax-piano-bass-drums quartet led by an underrated veteran, i.e., drummer Billy Hart (at the Vanguard on Friday - check out the ) and pianist Connie Crothers (at the Stone on Saturday). Strangely, these two were born less than a year apart, Hart on 11/29/40 and Crothers on 5/2/41. Is the parallel significant?

I think so, mainly because there was a refreshing beauty and openness at work in both sets. You could tell that these were full-spectrum bandleaders with a firm grounding in bop basics but with a yearning for something more. No self-conscious avant-gardism reared its head in either set. In both cases, this was accessible music, basically suited for a "jazz club." But the special strangeness was there if you were looking.














I said "organism" above because both groups moved and functioned that way. This outfit led by Hart (pictured above) has been around at least since 2005. The lineup at the Vanguard on Friday was the same as the one on Hart's amazing 2006 album Quartet (which I've praised before on DFSBP): Mark Turner on sax, Ethan Iverson on piano and Ben Street on bass. And the set I caught was an extension of that release, reprising several of its pieces and generally continuing along that line of inquiry.

The band's original pieces, mostly by Hart and Iverson, are stunners. Iverson's album opener, "Mellow B," also opened the set, and it was just right for introducing this band's special kind of moody mystery. It's sort of a ballad, but a murky almost mischievous one, with a sly, creeping-around-on-tiptoes melody and this extremely peculiar B section in which Iverson and Turner scamper in unison through a sort of scatterbrained aside. This latter segment gives the whole piece a kind of Monkish wit. On Friday, the band seemed to really be emphasizing the cavernous spaces between the different sections of the head - there were these huge expanses where Hart was filling in the blanks with his strange diffuse timekeeping. A very tense effect.

The rest of the set was all over the place, in a good way. There were vintage chestnuts (I'm pretty sure a piece from Birth of the Cool was played), an absolutely gorgeous Hart ballad from Quartet ("Charvez," a piece that should stand as the shining example of how jazz can sound exceedingly smooth and yet not the least bit cheesy) and a hard-grooving funk tune.

The band played with utter authority, and the arrangements were just effortless. Players laid out here and there, solos oozed into one another; everyone got a lot of space to say what they needed to say. And sometimes, the band would lock into these intensely complex unison patterns, just "presto," out of nowhere. The contrast with the heavily aspirated looseness at work during much of the set was startling.

That looseness was largely Hart's doing. I felt like I was hearing the closest thing to vintage Tony Williams that I may ever hear live. He's a fearless drummer, but at the same time wispy. Like Paul Motian, he can seem like he's not even there one minute and then come crashing through the music the next. He rides on cymbal and snare when he feels like it, but other times he plays only cymbals, summoning this great washy cloud of sound. The other players all executed beautifully - Iverson brought an ultrasubtle reflectiveness, Turner a sturdy, introspective boldness - but it was definitely Hart's night. He even took some fun and cryptic mike breaks, sometimes almost seeming to poke fun at his sidemen (introducing Iverson he made a strange reference to Vogue and Better Homes and Gardens), but mostly expressing awe at their abilities.

One gets the sense that Hart is as happy as he's ever been behind the kit. He has a working band with a strong book of tunes and three hungry sidemen who know the entirety of jazz as well he does. Every veteran should be so lucky.












Connie Crothers (pictured above), whom I previewed in Time Out New York a little while back and who curated the second half of September at The Stone, is fortunate enough to be in a similar situation. As far as I can tell, the band she led on Saturday - with Richard Tabnik, Ken Filiano on bass and Roger Mancuso on drums - has been around for at least a decade. (Filiano is one of everal different bassists have worked with the quartet.)

A week ago, I wrote about Bill McHenry and Ben Monder and their aesthetic of floating music. This Crothers set wasn't quite the same thing but the vibe was very similar - a remarkable feeling of pillowy drift, with the music oozing in and out of time and the instruments swirling together softly.

The band performed a few of Crothers's tunes, a few of Tabnik's tunes and an older piece by a singer whose name I didn't catch (I think Crothers announced it as "Laughing to Keep from Crying" but don't quote me on that). It might seem cheesy or reductive but one of the things that really impressed me about this band was the fact that no one was reading music, and furthermore that everyone seemed to have internalized the pieces entirely. Now this is usually the case with a band that's been together for a while, but too many jazz gigs seem like extensions of rehearsal, with the sidemen sort of tentatively following along. There was none of that here: The three supporting players had the music down just as well as Crothers, and these were some seriously complicated pieces.

It's well known that Crothers was a longtime associate of Lennie Tristano, and if I hear any of his influence on her, it's in the impossibly complex yet beautifully sinuous lines she writes. Tabnik's compositions had the same feel. The lines just kept building and building, and the players executed them with an uncanny kind of drifting ease.

Each musician in the band was extraordinary, just world class. And it struck me how odd it was that at least two (if not all) of these musicians are largely unknown. I guess I'd have to start with Tabnik, who simply has one of the oddest and most compelling approaches to the saxophone that I've ever heard in my life. To describe his tone as liquid would be a severe understatement. The notes flow out of his horn with a weird languor that kept making me think of honey or some other gel-like substance, midway between liquid and solid. The notes burble along in a way that at times suggested the squawkier, more pinched registers of a clarinet or a soprano sax. But to be honest, Tabnik's sax sounds more like a cat's meow or the cry of a small bird or monkey than any other horn player I can think of. Just extraordinary, and he fit into the mix so effortlessly. (Anyone have a clue where Tabnik has been hiding out? I've never heard of him except w/ this band.)

Mancuso, too, played with an otherworldly lightness. As with Hart, I thought of Paul Motian, but Mancuso's playing was even more daring and diffuse than Motian's. Stewarding the beat with the slightest hint of timekeeping, suggesting cushions of air, billowing this way and that.

Crothers was remarkable as well. Tempestuous - swooping up and down the keyboard - but with a light, caressing touch. Like the rest of the band, she seemed to be spinning clouds. The music as a whole was much more dreamy and abstract than the Hart band. While Hart & Co. mixed quite a bit of sass and badass heat into their jazz, the set by Crothers & Co. seemed like one big long reverie, touching on a familiar style but mainly just floating away into some swirled kind of bliss. The knotty tunes brought it back to earth just enough.

These bands both exhibited an openness I want to hear more often. Again, I keep coming to the idea of jazz that's weird but unself-consciously so. We're talking about the highest ideal, i.e., experimental music that doesn't try too hard to be experimental, that doesn't foreground it's difficultness. It's really just a matter of letting jazz breathe, respecting its basic principles, retaining some and jettisoning others, but never pointlessly assailing them. I recall many interviews with Steve Lacy (in the amazing Conversations book) where he's yearning to know what comes after the anarchy of free jazz. How do you organize things just enough, so that you don't choke or stifle the musicians. Folks like Eric Dolphy, Jackie McLean, Grachan Moncur III, Andrew Hill and others were hard at work at this in the '60s, and you can hear their legacy in the groups I saw this weekend. May Hart and Crothers continue to walk this wondrous line for many years to come.

[Update: I forgot to mention that you can hear the entirety of the Hart Quartet's set from last Wednesday night - and check out a great interview w/ Hart - over at NPR Music. Thanks to the anonymous commenter for the reminder.]