Lover man: Lee Konitz, singing (to) the song

Last week, on the final night of the Village Vanguard's 80th birthday week, overseen by Jason Moran, I saw Charles Lloyd's quartet play an unreal set at the Village Vanguard. I had a feeling the show was going to be a good one, but I was unprepared for the slashing intensity of the band—Lloyd, Moran, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums—for what Nate Chinen referred to in his spot-on review as its "radical empathy."

The group operated like a team of elite fighter pilots, swooping instantaneously into tight battle formations and then dispersing into looser unities. They played free; they played pretty; they played funky—all with grace and intensity. However extreme, however state-of-the-art the band got, the 77-year-old Lloyd was right there—a veteran whose improvisational reflexes have only grown even sharper, whose sound on the tenor sax has only grown more commanding, fluid and expressive, and whose radiant onstage charisma has only grown more potent as he's aged. (Amen to Nate's observation that "[The band's] slanted rhythmic strategies, indebted to progressive hip-hop production, didn’t throw off Mr. Lloyd any more than the rolling, continuous energies of the set.")

Beyond some limited, yet awed exposure to Lloyd's classic ’60s quartet with Keith Jarrett, Cecil McBee and Jack DeJohnette, I don't know his discography well, but this show made me an instant super-fan. It exemplified the fruitful intergenerational friction that is the engine of so much great jazz, from Davis/Shorter/Hancock/Carter/Williams to Heath/Iverson/Street (the latter of which sounded extraordinary at the Vanguard the week prior to Moran's run).

Last night, I saw another fantastic intergenerational band, led by a veteran saxophonist exactly ten years Lloyd's senior: Lee Konitz, who's in the midst of a Jazz Standard run—concluding tonight, Sunday, March 22—with a quintet co-led by trumpeter Dave Douglas, and including pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Linda Oh and drummer Ches Smith. The energy of this set couldn't have felt more different from that of the Lloyd set, but there was one key similarity: the performance fully reflected the personality and agenda of its central figure, as though the other players were channeling their voices through Konitz's horn, or inviting Konitz to channel his through their own instruments.

Voices were a key theme during this set. As he did during the Charlie Haden memorial back in January Konitz spent a good portion of the performance singing, scatting wordless melodies, during a set that consisted mostly of his treasured standards—"Lover Man," "Solar" and one or two others—along with a Lennie Tristano theme, "317 E. 32nd St," written on the chord changes of "Out of Nowhere." (Here's a lovely 1952 version of the piece, featuring Tristano, Konitz and Warne Marsh.) Douglas and Oh also joined in the fun, the latter, prompted by Konitz, offering a mellow extended vocal meditation on "How Deep Is the Ocean?"

At first, I regarded these vocal passages as charming interludes, but as the set progressed, I realized that they were in some ways the meat of the set. At the club, I sat with a friend, the accomplished bassist Devin Hoff. Afterward, we talked about how the presence of an elder like Lee Konitz on a bandstand instantly confers legitimacy onto a set of jazz. Hoff, commenting on his own experiences playing standards with older players in the Bay Area, pointed out that these figures have a way of reminding you that standards like the ones we heard last night are actual songs—tunes with lyrics and shapes and sentiments, not simply launch pads for improvisers looking to show off the snazzy tricks they've developed in the practice room.

When Konitz scat-sings, it seems to me that he's not exactly singing the song in question, but singing to the song, serenading it. Part of the Konitz legend is how fixated he is on a core group of standards. Watching him sing, wordlessly, with a weathered but tuneful voice, eyes closed, is to watch a man in love, not so much with the music coming out of him, but with the music in his head, with the song that's fueling his reverie. "How Deep Is the Ocean?" was written in 1932, which makes Konitz's relationship to that song roughly analogous to my own relationship to, say, "Billie Jean." This abstract idea we have of standards, a tome of musical texts brought down from the mount (by Steve Swallow?), must seem rather foreign to the 87-year-old Konitz, a man who experienced many of these songs in their heyday, absorbed them through the air just as we do the pop songs of our age.

That's not to say that Konitz's playing is an afterthought. His sound on the alto is—still, as it seems to have always been—gloriously pillowy, fluid, sweet. (When you hear Lee Konitz live, you realize what the essence of "sweet" really is, and why that doesn't have to be a dismissive term.) Konitz puffs up his cheeks grandly when he plays, and, almost paradoxically, this act yields extreme softness, a sound with a certain kind of tartness of tone (at some moments, I thought of Eric Dolphy, an altoist who seems 180 degrees removed from Konitz but might actually be a good deal closer in spirit) but with a halo of breath around it. His melodies, the songs he sings to the songs he's singing, are precious cargo, and he pads them well for a safe journey.

Last night, his lines intertwined beautifully with Douglas's. The set featured a good amount of conventional solos, but my favorite moments by far were when Konitz and Douglas were improvising together, swooping in and out of one another's flight patterns like birds dancing a duet in the air. At these moments, the star was truly the song in question, and the imaginative feats it inspired in the players, not the players themselves.

The rest of the band played with tenderness and sensitivity. If the Lloyd set was about radical empathy, this set was about radical comfort, about the point at which casualness becomes so absolute, so soul-deep, that it achieves profundity. No obvious—to me, at least—"out" signifiers from any of Konitz's bandmates, all of whom are known for working in such realms to varying degrees. Everyone was on-message, which is not to say obedient or subservient—Ches Smith, for example, still sounded exactly like the drummer who plays in Tim Berne's Snakeoil—but simply conscious of the Lee Konitz Concept and fully committed to seeing it through. (Matt Mitchell shone on the ballads, at times playing duo with Konitz and laying out a handsome harmonic red carpet for him to blow over.) Everyone was there to celebrate these songs, and to celebrate the man who has devoted his entire career to reanimating them at every performance, to making them new not through radical reinvention, but through simple care and attention. Love, really.

/////

*Lee Konitz on singing and playing.

*Ted Panken's invaluable Charles Loyd interviews.

Inside-outside: Billy Mintz and jazz infinity

Last night, near the beginning of a set by his working quartet—part of the exemplary Sound It Out series at the Greenwich House Music School—drummer Billy Mintz played a long solo using only mallets. He spent a lot of time teasing a shimmer out of a riveted cymbal, sitting there with his eyes closed and just drawing the waves forth, proceeding as patiently as any percussionist I've seen doing anything in quite a while. He was clearly just letting the moment be. It was beautiful, and I felt the urge to classify Billy Mintz as a texturalist, the kind of drummer who had the good sense to let pure sound guide him.

And I think he is that kind of a drummer. But he's also many other kinds. There were moments during the set when he really bore down on the groove, swinging dangerously hard in a rumbly, tom-heavy, post–Elvin Jones style. There were others when he played wispy, barely there brushes, or a sloshy, slinky soul-jazz groove. He was deep in the pocket, or he was out in space. He was featured prominently, or he was acting as a distant backdrop, a kind of weather behind the other musicians—John Gross on tenor sax, Putter Smith on bass and Robert Piket on piano, keyboard and, on one beautifully subdued track ("Destiny"), vocals, all of whom appear on the sixtysomething drummer's 2013 debut as a leader, Mintz Quartet, and who complement Mintz's beguiling aesthetic remarkably well. 

The breadth of the repertoire was equally wide: the most romantic, elegant ballads imaginable—all, I believe, Mintz originals, including the "Naima"-esque "Beautiful" and the consummately songful, unhurried "Beautiful You" (yes, two distinct tunes); the scampering freebop piece "Shmear," which sounds a bit like one of the more manic, minimal compositions in the Paul Motian book; the aforementioned soul-jazz groover, "Cannonball," with Piket featured on funky B3-esque keyboard. As with Mintz's own playing, whatever space the band was inhabiting, it was fully in that space—Gross's ballad playing was as full, songful and lush as you'd hope from any student of the great ’30s tenor men; likewise, during the moments when Mintz let his inner Elvin loose, Gross responded with fierce, flinty, wailing post-Trane expressionism, fully convincing and not just a special effect.

Before last night, it had been more than a decade since I'd seen Billy Mintz play. I remember catching his Two Bass Band—a nine-piece little big band—at the avant-jazz series (was it Dee Pop who ran it?) that ran weekly for a long while in the basement of CB's 313 Gallery in the East Village. I'm guessing the show I saw went down in 2002. Anyway, I remember little about that night except taking note of Mintz and his highly unusual, though extremely unassuming, playing style. During certain moments, Mintz holds his right-hand stick so that only his thumb and forefinger are touching the wood, right at the fulcrum point, and he raises the stick ever so slightly up and down, and sort of drapes it over the ride cymbal. When he does this, it honestly looks and sounds as though the stick were made of some elastic material. I've never seen this kind of fluidity in a grip before; I'd almost be tempted to call it a magic trick, if the effect Mintz produces weren't so characteristically subtle. That, for lack of a better term, fluid grip made a strong impression on me that night, and I'd been wanting to go back and witness it again ever since. Mintz has been playing around town a lot more over the past couple years, and I had a lot of recent opportunities, but last night was the first time since that Two Bass Band gig that I was able to make it out. Sure enough, there was the fluid grip again, as mesmerizing and logic-defying as ever.

Yesterday, I mentioned to a friend that I was going to see Mintz's band, and I described the group as "inside-outside." It's an inadequate, noncommittal term, but as I watched the show and reflected on it afterward, I realized that it's probably the best descriptor I know of to get at the brand of jazz that moves me most, the brand that Mintz's quartet specializes in. In other words: jazz played by musicians skilled, versatile and mature enough to truly inhabit whatever realm they're operating in. In jazz of the past 20 years or so, the aesthetic of undermining, of literally or metaphorically winking as one plays, has become such a major part of the collective vocabulary. I like to see a band engaging styles head on—whether that's a so-called inside ballad or a so-called outside free-improv episode. At this point, neither or these forms is any more or less traditional, any more or less familiar; each can be transcendent or numbingly rote, depending on the execution. Mintz's band is one of the few that I've seen that's both open-minded enough to address such a broad spectrum of jazz practice and shrewd enough not to treat any point along that spectrum flippantly. To me, that is the true meaning of inside-outside.

The effect of inside-outside, when it's done really well, is that both "poles" start creeping toward some sublime aesthetic center—the traditional starts to seem weirder, the weird starts to seem especially sturdy, dignified. That is absolutely the case with this Mintz band. By the end of the set, as a listener, I felt like I'd been thoroughly transported into their self-styled aesthetic zone.  There were familiar signposts, sure, but little by little, as they traversed all these seemingly disparate styles, they demonstrated that these forms were all really just part of one "mother" style, facets of what jazz can be when its makers really devote time and care and attention to each element of its making—the warmth and the harshness, the swing and the abstraction, the groove and the texture. This is when jazz feels infinite to me, and when I love it most.

/////

P.S. I caught Mintz's quartet during the second night of a five-date "Walking Tour," during which they're playing various spaces throughout the city. This Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, they're at Barbès, IBeam and Smalls, respectively; and tonight and Thursday, Mintz and Piket turn up at Korzo and ShapeShifter Lab, respectively, with first saxist Louie Belogenis and then bassist Max Johnson. See Roberta Piket's website for details. If I weren't so busy this week, I would make it a point to see several more of these shows.

P.P.S. Mintz's history—detailed here, here and, presumably, in this interview, which I haven't yet had a chance to view in full—is indicative of a certain kind of veteran jazz musician who's worked in the "trenches" for decades and played with big names such as Lee Konitz and Charles Lloyd, but who, perhaps due to a fair amount of East Coast–West Coast relocation or to a far-flung discography (I'd like to hear all of these, but I'm guessing many of them aren't too easy to come by), isn't well known outside his niche. I'm glad to see that he's been playing out more (I'd love to catch Vortex, his trio with saxist Tony Malaby and pianist Russ Lossing); he, and especially this particular band, need to be heard.

P.P.S. Billy Mintz might be the only drummer I've ever seen pull out a can of WD-40 between songs to spray a squeaky hi-hat stand. I'd heard the squeaking earlier in the set, and just assumed that the listeners and musicians were agreeing to ignore it. But when I saw Mintz address it, I understood just how exacting his sonic standards are. To him, whether he's playing quiet or loud, no sound is incidental.

2013 jazz top 10

My 2013 jazz top 10 is live now at the Jazz Journalists Association site. My 2012 year-end jazz list was pretty extensive; this one is more concise, simply because I didn't spend as much time with new jazz, either on disc or out and about, as I did last year. That wasn't by design, or any indication of a large-scale shift in my tastes; jazz just wasn't as much where my listening brain was at during these past 12 months. That said: plenty of great records heard, and a handful of great shows witnessed, so let's talk about ’em.

(The Lloyd/Moran, Parks and Lonnie Smith albums aren't on Spotify; you can stream the other seven selections here.)

1. Black Host Life in the Sugar Candle Mines [Northern Spy]

I had high expectations for this record. I'd heard this band live two years back and was mightily intrigued. Life absolutely measures up. The Cleaver-as-a-leader discography is one of my favorite in contemporary jazz, and this is at least as strong a statement as Be It as I See It (discussed here). Probably stronger, because the personnel—Darius Jones, Brandon Seabrook, Cooper-Moore, Pascal Niggenkemper—is just so damn impressive. Serious kudos to Cleaver for figuring out a way to re-present the perennially underrated Cooper-Moore to the world. C-M's understated star turn on Life's concluding track, "May Be Home," is one of my favorite musical moments of the year. There's plenty of electrifying skronk on this record—some of which drags on a bit long for my tastes, that being the main reason this didn't crack my all-genres-in-play top 10—but the almost gospel-ish, soul-stirring element is what really draws me in. The quieter moments, such as the dreamy breakdown around 4:00 in "Hover," the heartbreakingly fragile "Citizen Rose" or the aforementioned "May Be Home" are pure bliss. For more on Life, see my Pitchfork review.

2. Charles Lloyd / Jason Moran Hagar's Song [ECM]

What a warm and sumptuous album this is. These two are just hanging out and playing great songs together. I'm a big fan of the Bandwagon, but I prefer Moran in a more unadorned setting, like this. There's no hook, no concept, just full engagement with the material. I'm currently revisiting one of my favorite tracks, "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," and Moran takes the most loving, unflashy solo, laying out the red carpet for Lloyd, whose presence throughout is, at the risk of sounding cliché, totally Zen-ed out. The epitome of a nothing-to-prove session. There's a little bit of modernist scrambling, but mostly this album is just songs (pop standards such as "God Only Knows" are treated as reverently as the jazz ones), with a bias toward luminous ballads. Absolutely fine by me. This is jazz you can really live with.

3. Aaron Parks Arborescence [ECM]

I would say the same of this album. I say, without shame, that both have served as cooking-dinner soundtracks for me. Is it doing a disservice to the deep beauty of Arborescence to say that it's ideal mood-setting music? I shy away from the idea of background music, but I wonder if the pianist himself would even take offense to that? He seems to really want to reach his audience here. These are mostly improvised pieces; to my ear, they're unrepentantly pretty and more classical-ish than jazzy. It's strange, but in a way, my experience of Arborescence is what I imagine the experience of The Köln Concert to be. I've never spent good time with that legendary record—no bias; I just haven't gotten around to the Jarrett solo repertoire in general—but judging by everything I've heard about Köln, Arborescence is, at least niche-wise if not style-wise, the same kind of piano record. One that, in theory, anyone could enjoy, and one that a purist might see fit to frown upon. Sometimes Arborescence is so wispy and drawn out that it almost seems to disappear, but there's real power in that ephemerality. You sit with this and you marvel at Parks's ability to simply make music, and to do so selflessly enough to make it so universal. It's hard to imagine an ear that doesn't crane toward this music as to soft morning sunlight, as mine is doing right now as I revisit it.

4. David Ake Bridges [Posi-Tone]

For me, the jazz writer of the year was Phil Freeman. He covered more of the music, in a more genuinely useful way—i.e., a way that made you want to seek out the sounds—than anyone else I read in 2013. Phil's year-end jazz round-up is essential; among the records he cited there, I got particularly into David Ake's Bridges, which I checked out a while back after reading this Burning Ambulance post. Bridges is one of those somewhat rare sessions where, going in, I'd never heard of the leader but I knew most of the other players well. The lineup is stellar—trumpeter Ralph Alessi, saxists Peter Epstein and Ravi Coltrane, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Mark Ferber—but it's what Ake, a pianist, does with the personnel that makes this album work. The compositions are maybe the tightest, most intricate and most memorable that I've heard on a jazz album this year. Ake leaves space for his sidemen to speak up—I'm listening to a great Colley solo, with commentary from Alessi, on the track "Sonomads"—but what you'll remember are these beautifully arranged, little-big-band themes, executed in a modern postbop style. Phil cited a minimalism influence, and I can definitely hear that, combined with the lusher, more meticulous end of the mid-’60s Blue Note sound—maybe a little bit of Dimensions and Extensions or The All-Seeing Eye, though Bridges is lighter in tone, funkier and more approachable, in a way that sometimes reminds me of Ravi Coltrane's own 2012 date Spirit Fiction (discussed here), which also features Alessi. Sometimes the mood gets greasier, slurrier, such as on the raucous and bluesy "Year in Review," where—as often happens on the album—the horns solo in unison. Even there, though, there's such a wonderful sense of order to this record, of a leader taking the time not only to assemble a great band but also to put together a compelling context for them to work within. I'd recommend this to any fan of well-made, composer-centric but also player-friendly small-group jazz.

5. Aaron Diehl The Bespoke Man's Narrative [Mack Avenue]

Same deal here, but in a more consciously retro idiom. As with the Aaron Parks above, I can think back to a time when I might have found a session like this—one that, God forbid, dares to hark back to that age-old connection between jazz and snappy dressing—distasteful. Now I find it to be the opposite. Anyone who writes this off due to the cover art is going to be missing on a gorgeous record. Steve Smith likened the concept here to the Modern Jazz Quartet, and he's right: That similarity is inescapable, given the piano-vibes-bass-drums instrumentation and almost obsessive polish and elegance on display in the playing and composition. But if there's retro-ness at play here, it's the most lived-in, un-gimmicky kind. There is such a nothing-to-prove quality about a piece like "Blue Nude" here; as with the Lloyd/Moran above—note that Bespoke also includes a marvelous version of "Bess, You Is My Woman Now"—Diehl just wants to play songs, to swing crisply, muse tastefully, give you a good feeling while at the same time presenting a striking portrait of who he is as a bandleader. You could hear, say, this group's reading of "Moonlight in Vermont" in passing and think it was merely "right," in the not-a-hair-out-of-place sense, but as with the MJQ, you listen closely and you're blown away by the unassuming skill, shrewdness, loving care of it all. Diehl's solo version of Ellington's "Single Petal of a Rose," burrows a little deeper; the ballads on Hagar's Song are astonishing in their unhurried composure, but this might even be more so. This record radiates love and care, for the material, yes, but also for the listener. Diehl wants to make you comfortable, not as an end in itself, but so that he can move you. The Bespoke Man's Narrative is radical in its sheer composure.

6. Matthew Shipp Piano Sutras [Thirsty Ear]

We think of Matthew Shipp as an avant-garde guy, someone on the opposite end of the spectrum from an immaculately groomed, Juilliard-trained, J@LC–anointed (complete with Wynton co-sign and Crouch liner notes) prodigy such as Diehl. And, to judge by Shipp's pugilistic stance toward the jazz maintream, he thinks of himself that way. But strip away the rhetoric and you're left with an aesthetic that's plenty approachable, plenty jazzy and, as heard on Piano Sutras, really, really satisfying. For one thing, Shipp takes the trouble to make records, as such. He's no Cecil Taylor, who for roughly the past 35 years has released almost exclusively live records, or rather others have released them. Taylor seems to have very little regard for how his music is consumed after it's made; Shipp, on the other hand, seems to only be getting better at plotting out programs that his listeners can genuinely engage with. Piano Sutras is a collection of 13 short-ish pieces. Aside from the standards, I'm not sure which are based on preconceived ideas and which were improvised on the spot, but each one seems to have a strong center and purpose—we're not just listening to Shipp jam. There are some tracks on this record that set a killer mood, that make essentially abstract, solo, sort-of-jazz piano seem like the same thing as songwriting: "Space Bubble" captures that crystalline sense of mystery that I associate with my favorite Shipp recordings (New Orbit, e.g.); "Blue Orbit" does sound like a blues, but refracted beautifully through the Shipp prism; "Cosmic Dust" comes off like a tug-of-war between Taylor and Andrew Hill. And then there are the standards, which strike me as deeply generous. I know that's a weird word to use, but the 71-second "Giant Steps" is just pure nourishing gorgeousness. "Nefertiti" is little more diffuse, but again, this is no deconstruction of, no attack on a chestnut; like the "Giant Steps," and like all great interpretations of standards, it's a celebration of the raw material. Overall, Piano Sutras is as warmly swinging as it is mad-scientist demented (see esp. "Cosmic Shuffle," which perfectly illustrates the tension between those two currents in Shipp's playing); it can be difficult, but generally, it meets you halfway. In that sense, I think Shipp has more in common with Hill than with Taylor. Thinking of Shipp as merely an iconoclast, whose output is as forbidding as his verbal critiques, does him a disservice. I like Piano Sutras because it's a record of weird solo piano that nevertheless invites you in.

7. Dr. Lonnie Smith Octet In the Beginning, Vols. 1 and 2 [Pilgrimage]

The second release from this veteran organist's own label, Pilgrimage, and the follow-up to a highly enjoyable trio set that made my jazz honorable-mentions list for 2012. Frequently, this record is the epitome of what you might estimate it to be: an exemplary soul-jazz set in the mode that Smith helped to perfect. Then, suddenly, when the leader goes off on one of his skipping-record excursions, wiggling his fingers relentlessly between two notes, or holding down a chord so long that it starts to feel like a laser beam of joy aimed at your skull, you start to realize that you're glimpsing the infinite. The band is pure fire and focus, whether the mode on display is crackling hardbop ("Turning Point"), strutting funk ("Move Your Hand," which features a beautiful Smith lead vocal) or pensive balladry ("In the Beginning"). The other soloists are generally strong; the arrangements, by saxist-flutist Ian Hendrickson-Smith; and the rhythm section—with guitarist Ed Cherry and drummer Jonathan Blake—kicks a great deal of ass. But the glory of this set is the leader himself, how hard he pushes, how, with each solo, he erases the line between music for your body and music for your spirit. You rarely hear a man so clearly convinced that his chosen instrument is a vehicle for transcendence, even salvation. Let's let Smith have the last word, via a quote from Ted Panken's informative liner notes: "I always say that the Hammond has all the elements in the world to me—the thunder and the lightning and the rainbow, the feel of the earth, the sun, the moon, the water."

8. Kirk Knuffke Chorale [SteepleChase]

I've dug cornetist's Kirk Knuffke's playing whenever I've heard him live, with bands like Ideal Bread or Merger (discussed here), as well as on recent records like Federico Ughi's self-titled quartet album, Max Johnson's Elevated Vegetation and the collaborative trio Sifter. I think Chorale is the first record I'd heard under Knuffke's own name. He's been making a bunch of cool CDs for the venerable SteepleChase label—including various collaborations with pianist Jesse Stacken—that I really need to take a closer look at, but Chorale grabbed me instantly, largely because I'm a complete sucker for anything with Billy Hart on it. Because of the unmistakable presence of Hart's drumming, its authority and weight—even when he's barely playing—he's going to be more or less a co-leader in any band in which he appears. That's definitely the case here, but Hart isn't dominating. The great thing is, no one is. Knuffke is a wonderfully patient, lyrical player, who's seemingly obsessed with the simple beauty of the line. You'll sometimes hear him going for slight timbral distortions, but mostly he's just singing, softly yet forcefully. He's not coming to the table on Chorale with a huge amount of compositional baggage. He seems to want to simply mix it up with the wonderful band he's assembled, which also includes pianist Russ Lossing and bassist Michael Formanek. What they're playing is a kind of cool-toned free jazz. In pieces like "Made," the musicians are jumping from one lily pad to the next, unbound by meter, but the interplay is so right-on—each player seeming so willing to help the others, as well as the overall sound, along. Sometimes the sound is more traditional, like on the gentle postbop dance "Standing," but the band maintains its wonderfully plush feel. Listening back now, I'm starting to hear the whole group concept of this record as an extension of Knuffke's songful cornet style, a style so self-assured that he doesn't have to raise his voice. There's not a lot of overt heat on Chorale, but the mojo bubbling beneath the surface is formidable. Like Hart, the rest of the players here know how to make their mark on a session simply by speaking clearly as themselves.

9. Harris Eisenstadt September Trio The Destructive Element [Clean Feed]

The Destructive Element is slightly heavier on the compositional emphasis than Chorale, i.e., the specific pieces here stand out as much as the overall feel, where on the Knuffke I tend to come away savoring the latter. As I indicated on last year's jazz recap, which featured a pair of new Harris Eisenstadt records (I think these were the third and fourth Eisenstadt albums that have turned up in my year-end coverage in recent years), I'm consistently impressed by this drummer-composer's ability to build bands that matter, that have something to say. A lot of jazz musicians are really fond of hatching projects, period. It's not always clear why a given composer/conceptualist feels the constant need to found their various ventures. But with Eisenstadt, I always feel like I understand why this group needs to be playing this music. That's really the case in the repertoire of the September Trio, which features two extraordinary players: pianist Angelica Sanchez and saxophonist Ellery Eskelin. I remember liking this band's self-titled 2011 debut, but I think this is better. The compositions on The Destructive Element seem to me to be Eisenstadt's love letters to his collaborators. He really seems to be working hard to give them what they need compositionally to be themselves as players. There are few things I've heard on record this year as beautiful as the ballad "Back and Forth"—Sanchez and Eisenstadt marching steadily forward as Eskelin emotes in that passion-packed yet anti-histrionic style of his. "Swimming, Then Rained Out"—an almost gospel-ish slow-burner—is another piece with the same kind of unassuming authority. All three of these players are known for venturing into various sorts of free-jazz territory, and there is a bit of hectic scramble on this record (e.g., the brief improv episodes that fall between the signpost theme statements in "Additives"). But gorgeousness is, I'd say, the chief imperative. There is so much pleasure and care and warmth and soul in these pieces—Eisenstadt working hard for Sanchez and Eskelin, and them working hard for him in turn. This isn't an all-ballads program, like they used to make back in the day, but it's definitely oriented that way, and it has the same spirit, i.e., "This is the vibe we're going to be working with, so get on board with it." I really admire that commitment, and I find myself wishing that this band would go even further in that direction on their next effort. Few working jazz groups I can think of have a more affecting, unpretentious way of singing a song together.

10. Kris Davis Massive Threads [Thirsty Ear]

This was a serious year for solo piano. In addition to Massive Threads, you've got the Parks and Shipp albums above, and a few other acclaimed discs—by Myra Melford, Bobby Avey, Geri Allen (hers was mostly solo, some duo)—that sounded intriguing to me on a first spin but that I didn't get a chance to put in good time with. This might be the most challenging of the whole crop. What I like about Massive Threads is that it sounds genuinely experimental, i.e., like a document of fresh ideas being road-tested, without coming off as ponderous. The first piece, "Ten Exorcists," is a study in what sounds like prepared-piano minimalism; I'm not sure if Davis is actually placing objects inside the piano, or simply muting the hammers with her fingers, but the net effect is something like a mini tuned-percussion orchestra. It's technically impressive, but why it works is that it sounds genuinely curious—like Davis is excited to share what she's found, rather than austerely demonstrating some rarefied technique. I feel the same of "Dancing Marlins," where she seems to really be getting down to basics with the piano, reveling in it as a sound generator, rather than an instrument with all this heavy tradition behind it. On a piece like this, she sounds almost playful, but there's clearly a heavy thought going into these exursions, as though she'd spent days and weeks homing in on a specific area of inquiry before tossing away the blueprints and hitting record. Like Craig Taborn—and I think of Massive Threads as a cousin to his Avenging Angel (discussed here), in a way—Davis is clearly a player of frighteningly advanced technique who often seems utterly ambivalent about showing it off. The idea is primary, the sense of chasing down some weird sound zone—cornering it, dissecting it, finally inhabiting it. These players are poker-faced; they can verge on Cecil Taylor's density and destabilization, but the torrential outbursts he's famous for aren't their style. With Taborn and Davis, there's more the sense that, yes, they could slay you at any moment, but they'd rather keep you, and themselves, in infinite suspense. You get on their wavelength or you turn the record off; it's that simple. As intimidating as that sounds, there's a deep, human pleasure in listening to Davis live with these ideas. "Desolation and Despair" (what a title!)—just crawling, limping along, but not maudlin or emotionally showy. She's seeking stillness on Massive Threads, just as much as she's seeking herky-jerky mobility on some of the other pieces. As with Taborn, whatever the area of inquiry, Davis is going to get to the very bottom of it, at her own pace. And that's a thrilling thing to witness.

/////

There are a bunch of other 2013 jazz records that I dug and hope to be able to spend more time with. These include the two Ethan Iverson–plus-contemporaries-and-veteran sessions (Tootie's Tempo, Costumes Are Mandatory), Tarbaby's Ballad of Sam Langford, Hush Point's self-titled debut, Dan Tepfer and Ben Wendel's Small Constructions and Dave Holland's Prism.

But the one formal honorable mention I feel like I need to make is of Ben Allison's The Stars Look Very Different Today, an album that came out recently and only made its greatest impact on me once I'd already filed my 2013 jazz ballot. I'm not sure that this one would've ended up displacing anything listed above, but I still probably would've given the matter serious thought if I'd had another couple weeks. Like Eisenstadt, Ben Allison has shown up on my end-of-year jazz list before; I loved Action-Refraction from 2011. I think Stars might be better. Allison is the kind of composer-bandleader that always seems to be heading further from jazz, per se, and nearer to his own personal soundworld. On The Stars, he's firmly in his own space. The instrumentation—Brandon Seabrook (it's great to compare his work here with that on the Black Host record, btw) and Steve Cardenas on wonderfully complementary guitars, and Allison Miller on drums—helps to give the record its individualized feel, but it's also the writing and the thrust of the performances. I've placed so much emphasis above on the idea of song. I have no problem repeating myself, because it so pleases me to hear a band zeroing in on that notion and getting it right. The songs here are magical—"Neutron Star," a sort of psychedelic roots-rock theme, is one of my favorite pieces of music of the year. There's great soloing on The Stars, but when I reflect on it, I think of a band laboring intensely in the pursuit of Allison's beautiful writing. Such that when they improvise, it's more like embellishment rather than departure. The thing is the singing of these wordless reveries, and the little mini idiom Allison has created here, this sort of folksy, funky, emotive, spacey-textured wordless pop that he's focusing on. He seems to want the instrumentation and the material to exist in perfect balance, so that you don't hear jazz, you hear these themes, and underlying them, the personal signatures of himself and his collaborators. I wish all "jazz" felt this personal, this generous, this simultaneously unfamiliar and inviting.

/////

My favorite historical releases (reissues/unearthings) of 2013 were:

Miles Davis The Bootleg Series, Volume 2: Live in Europe 1969 [Columbia/Legacy] 
Pitchfork review here.

New York Art Quartet call it art [Triple Point]
Thoughts here.


Woody Shaw The Complete Muse Sessions [Mosaic]
I'm slowly making my way through this set, and it's sounding excellent—an important document of a period (mostly ’74–’87) that's a blank spot on many jazz maps, and was on mine until not that long ago. One session that blows my mind is the December ’65 date Shaw originally recorded for Blue Note—Wikipedia says it was a demo tape; the Mosaic liners say that Alfred Lion intended to release it but backed out after he sold the company. Anyway, those five tracks are as good as you'd hope/expect given the vintage and the personnel: Joe Henderson and Joe Chambers, along with either Larry Young (on piano rather than organ, a month after the great Unity, which features Shaw and Henderson) and Ron Carter, or Herbie Hancock and Paul Chambers. I'm curious to know how Woody Shaw's general stature in jazz would look if this album had come out on Blue Note at the time it was made. Anyway, point is, it's great, and I can't wait to spend more time with this set as a whole. (Speaking of Mosaic, I really want to get my hands on that Clifford Jordan box, as well.)


/////

On the live front, my favorite jazz performances of the year were:

1.11.13
Eric Revis, Kris Davis and Andrew Cyrille at Winter Jazzfest
Thoughts here.

3.22.13
A Tribute to Paul Motian at Symphony Space
Thoughts here.

10.5.13
McCoy Tyner, Gary Bartz and Co. at the Blue Note
Thoughts here.

9.21.13
9.28.13
12.6.13
Milford Graves with, respectively, Evan Parker, John Zorn and Joe Lovano, at, respectively, the Stone, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Stone.
Thoughts here.

I also loved seeing Black Host at Seeds (May 29) and Roy Haynes at the Blue Note (June 27).

/////

P.S. Aside from Phil Freeman's excellent jazz round-up, linked above, I've really enjoyed perusing the latest installment of Francis Davis's annual Jazz Critics Poll (plus the always-fascinating data breakdown by Tom Hull), as well as Seth Colter Walls's Rhapsody list, and Ben Ratliff and Nate Chinen's jazz-heavy NYT top 10s.

Chico Hamilton, 2006

In 2006, I spent an afternoon at Chico Hamilton's apartment, interviewing him for Time Out New York. I was underprepared; he was ailing and rightfully impatient. The conversation limped along until I mentioned, in quick succession, that I was 1) from Kansas City and 2) a drummer. The Q&A is no longer on the TONY site, but after I heard about his passing, I dug it out of the archives and transcribed it.

I still don't know Hamilton's music as well as I'd like to. I do love what I've heard of the early quintet material, and about a year ago, I caught a few pieces off Man from Two Worlds (a ’63 Impulse set with Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabó) on WKCR and sat spellbound. The only time I saw Hamilton live was at the 2011 Winter Jazzfest; here's my mini review:

"I'm happy to be here.... At my age, I'm happy to be anywhere," joked 89-year-old drummer Chico Hamilton from the stage, before offering a textbook demonstration of how swinging propulsion can coexist with whisper-level dynamics.

I look forward to further listening. Hamilton seems to be someone who fits into no jazz school; from what I remember, those early records are exceedingly polished, while the Impulse dates are loose and raw. Anyone know of any detailed primers re: his body of work? I'd love a guided tour.

In the meantime, here's the TONY interview, in both photo and text form:

"Backstage with… Chico Hamilton"
By Hank Shteamer; Time Out New York – September 21, 2006

You're commemorating your 85th birthday this year by releasing four diverse CDs. They include your own tunes, pieces by Duke Ellington and the Who, plus DJ remixes—why cover so much ground?
Well, that's what music is all about, isn't it? Versatility in regards to sound, rhythms and melodic structures.

One CD has a vocal cameo by Arthur Lee.
Yeah, I was really shocked when I heard that he died [in August]. I think this was his last recording. My band performed with his group Love [in the late ’60s] out in L.A., where I'm from. It was unusual for a jazz organization to share the stage with a rock group.

Speaking of your past, you worked for years in commercial and movie music, scoring films such as Roman Polanski's Repulsion. Why'd you move away from that?
There's really no such thing as a film score anymore. Everybody lifts prerecorded tracks. As for my commercial period, that was the only time jazz was played on TV. Most of the commercials were recorded by jazz musicians, who had no choice in the matter—but that work drains you, you know?

I can imagine. You teach drums and lead ensembles at the New School—what led you to that?
I realized that this could be my way of giving something back, because music has been very good to me. Schools are the only place to learn jazz today, but sadly, a lot of people teaching this music know nothing about swinging.

Okay, how do you teach someone to swing?
It takes two things: patience and fortitude. [Taps rhythmically on table] You hear that? Okay, do that for me.

[Taps along]
Good. Now can you talk at the same time?

Okay… [Still tapping] My name is Hank; I was born in Kansas City…
You're from Kansas City? Oh shit, okay! All right, keep tapping; now I want you to do this at the same time: [Sings] daaah-dah dah.

[Taps, sings] Daaah-dah dah…
See what kind of a groove you got in all of a sudden? Your whole body started to feel it, didn't it? It's just that simple, man.

Well, I actually play drums too.
That's cool. What kind of group do you have?

It's kind of a loud, heavy rock band.
Why loud? If you start loud, where you gonna go?

Down, I guess!
I think you should have some sensitivity to your sound, because the ear can only take so much.

Do you ever play loud?
I don't have no need for it. I play in the danger zone.

What's that?
It's a way of playing that's very tensified, but at a volume where you can hear everything. And I stay in that zone, with that energy happening, you dig?

The spirit of radio: WKCR's blessing

Last evening I drove to Westchester with my wife to celebrate a happy family event. On the way, we listened to WKCR, catching the tail end of Afternoon New Music (featuring side A of Distinction Without Difference, an intense 1979 Billy Bang solo set I'd never heard before) and the first chunk of Jazz Alternatives.

The show began with Chico Hamilton's Man from Two Worlds, a 1963 record that was also new to me. The title track started with a shifting bed of uptempo rhythm from Hamilton (sounding more Elvin Jones–like than I've ever heard him) and bassist Albert Stinson—a carpet of almost Indian-esque drone. Charles Lloyd and Gábor Szabo drifted in with tranced-out tenor and guitar, engaging in a brief improv tangle before launching into the sing-songy, unmistakably Ornette-ish head (written by Lloyd, I'm now finding out). It was classic inside-outside jazz: steady and propulsive underneath and ear-bending up top. Unlike the Bang, it made sense as drive-time music, but the calories weren't empty. The same went for the next selection: side B of Jimmy Smith's Got My Mojo Workin'. I wasn't in love with the title track (a showcase for Smith's gruff vocals), but the Ellington (Strayhorn?) pieces that followed, "Johnny Come Lately" and "C Jam Blues," killed me with their combination of sass and class; the rhythm section alone—Kenny Burrell, George Duvivier and Grady Tate—had me doing internal cartwheels.

I didn't get to listen beyond that, but what a pleasure: to tune in at random and hear this wonderful—and in the case of the Hamilton, fairly obscure—vintage jazz, not being played to celebrate an anniversary or a new reissue, or to commemorate a passing, but spun just because. A set of music that challenged but didn't alienate, that, in the end, served the function you'd hope radio would serve around 6 p.m. on a weeknight.

For maybe a year and a half in college, I hosted a show on WKCR, the 5–8:20 a.m. Daybreak Express program, which segued right into Phil Schaap's Bird Flight (thus giving me ample opportunity to learn firsthand from the sensei). These days, I'm more a WKCR appreciator than a participant; I still host the occasional show, but whenever I tune in to the station and hear something great, I can't help but wish I still spun there regularly. I spent so many hours in that incredible library, scanning the LPs from A to Z, writing down the names of hundreds of titles that interested me (I did the same at Jazz Record Mart in Chicago around the same time), and checking out five or so at a time for dorm-room research.

Some of my happiest times at WKCR were when listeners would call in to say, "I dig what you're playing," or some variation thereof. (Plenty of times, you'd get the opposite: "This isn't jazz!" etc.) One instance in particular stands out: It must have been about 7 a.m., and I was playing "Who Does She Hope to Be?"—that gorgeous and perfectly accessible ballad from Sonny Sharrock's Ask the Ages. A man called the studio and said, with genuine rapture in his voice, "I love this song." It was a brief exchange—I'm pretty sure I thanked him sincerely for listening and that was pretty much it—but it planted a vivid picture in my mind. I heard background noise that suggested a car, and I imagined him cruising across one of the NYC bridges, convertible top down, just drinking in the Sonny and the sunlight and smiling contentedly. Sure, I spun plenty of "out" records during my time at WKCR, but it was at moments like this when I felt most deeply connected to the DJ's trade and to the glory of jazz radio. I felt like I was both meeting my own needs, i.e., those of a discerning curator, and the customer's, as it were, i.e., giving this kind man something beautiful to listen to on his a.m. drive. It's like Neil Peart said in "The Spirit of Radio":

Begin the day with a friendly voice,
A companion unobtrusive
Plays that song that's so elusive
And the magic music makes your morning mood

We are all our own DJs, scouring the internet, cramming our hard drives full of obscurities. But sometimes you want to surrender to a trusted source, tap into something communal, let the current carry you. Do not take WKCR for granted. To be able to turn on the radio at random on a weeknight and hear Billy Bang, Chico Hamilton and Jimmy Smith consecutively, from original LP sources and without commercial interruption? That is what is called a blessing.