Somewhere we've never been: Farmers by Nature at ShapeShifter Lab

The debate over the now-infamous "Sonny Rollins" New Yorker piece continues. I'm not going to get into what I think of the original article, or the points made by its various supporters and detractors, or even Sonny's own response, mainly because I think both the incident and its aftershocks are beside the point. That point being: music ("jazz," or what have you) as an actual human practice, happening now, in real time—rather than an idea to be lobbed about abstractly.

I bring up the Sonny business mainly because I read Justin Moyer's jazz-bashing response in The Washington Post yesterday, and then went out to see a very satisfying night of what you might call jazz—the Aum Fidelity–backed double-record-release bill of Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp and the Farmers by Nature trio (Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver, pictured above, left to right) at ShapeShifter Lab; and a trio set by Travis Laplante, Mick Barr and Nick Podgurski in a Clinton Hill living room, part of the Home Audio series. One of Moyer's points ("There’s not much difference between a screechy performance by avant-garde saxophonist Peter Brötzmann from 1974 and one from 2014") stuck with me—the idea being that "free jazz" always sounds the same. I've seen enough supposedly free performances to know that, when it comes to the post-Coltrane/Ayler tradition, at least, "free" can indeed refer to a well-rehearsed script. I happen to love Peter Brötzmann—’74, ’14, whenever—and I think he's a much better listener/collaborator and more diverse performer than he's given credit for. But yes, you go to see him, and you know that a certain flavor of ornery, macho catharsis is going to be part of the deal.

But I take issue with the idea that actual freedom, actual improvisation, is a myth, and that, to cite another one of Moyer's points, improvisation is overrated as a rule. Again, I agree with him in the macro sense. Moyer writes, "…the fact that music is improvised doesn’t make it great." Amen to that—I think the idea of improvisation (or any other philosophical construct that informs music's creation or performance, be that serialism, or graphic scores or Conduction, or what have you) being presented as an inherent virtue of that given piece of music is b.s. I'm really only interested in the result, and very often songs, or more generally, compositions, are what I'm after. As a metalhead, I love riffs; as a jazz guy, I love melodies—Ellington, Mingus, Andrew Hill, etc.; as a lifelong pop fan, I love hooks.

But, in some cases, improvised music appears before you as a kind of miracle. Watching Farmers by Nature last night, I felt like I was witnessing the honest-to-God creation of something out of nothing. It wasn't free jazz, or any other kind of calcified thing. It wasn't self-important about its method. It was just an honest shot at doing what improvisers ought, ideally, to do every time, which is not simply to empty your closet of every idea you might have stuffed in there, but to deal with the moment, with its possibility, and to listen, really listen, to what your collaborators have to say, and concern yourself with supporting those ideas, as well as the overall continuity, as fragile as a bubble, of the collective statement.


The set had a real elegance of design to it. Parker started out solo, and the other two slowly built up a kind of murky groove, rising out of nothingness. From there, over roughly an hour, the music visited roughly six or seven different zones, like track demarcations on an album. Each proceeded logically from the one before, and never arrived till the group had fully explored the prior area of inquiry. I remember an episode of fractured funk, with Taborn and Cleaver clanking out jagged accents, completing each other's sentences; an exquisitely chill section that felt almost like placid bossa nova; a couple of frenzied Taborn flights, where he came off like a short-circuiting cyborg, juxtaposing single, percussive notes from different registers of the keyboard; a long unaccompanied Cleaver solo that took full advantage of some expert tom-tom tuning—the drum kit was really singing, in the melodic sense—and ramped up to torrential density; and maybe most profound of all, a section featuring Parker on arco. I don't think I've ever heard a double bass cry out with such grain and elegy and deep feeling as it did last night in Parker's hands. Taborn accompanied with superhuman restraint, serving up quiet yet extremely resonant chords.

So, yes, sensitivity and restraint are a big part of why this music succeeded. But as I attempted to describe above, the group raged plenty as well. I think what impressed me so much was, again, this sense of continuity, of each player's—and the trio's, as a collective unit—awareness of the overall arc. Too often, long sets of improvised music follow a predictable quiet-loud-quiet shape. This felt more like a suite, with each movement taking on its own special mini contour. The band went for the climax when it was there, but they never milked it. Intensity was only one color on the palette. And the same goes for the hierarchy of the music, as it were. For long stretches, the band played in a way that seemed totally collective, i.e., sans soloist, almost in the way that groups like the Necks improvise. But, as with the varied dynamics, collectivity was just one strategy. During plenty of other moments, the more traditional soloist-plus-accompanists concept was very much at play. Each of the three players starred in turn.

Most amazing to me, though, was how the moment, the actual spontaneous unfolding circumstance, seemed to drive the set, as much as the will of any one player, or even of the trio as a whole. I'm thinking, for example, about how Gerald Cleaver's smallest cymbal—the size of a splash, but with a more ping-y, less tinny sound than I've often heard out of splashes—turned out to be something like a central character during the last 10 or 15 minutes of the set. Throughout the performance, Cleaver moved this cymbal around the kit—sometimes it was perched on its own stand to his right, sometimes it was resting on the hi-hat stand above those cymbals or on the floor tom or snare. So, in the middle of one such transfer, Cleaver happened to drop this little cymbal. He reached down beside the bass drum and picked it up, and then he went to put it back on its original stand to his right. But this act became, in and of itself, a sort of tic or weird fixation. He didn't just replace the cymbal and go on playing the full kit. He began obsessively, continuously spinning the cymbal around on the stand, eliciting a faint little creak. The other players didn't seem to directly respond, but as Cleaver turned the cymbal around and around, it was almost like he was drawing the accumulated momentum of the set down into a final moment—draining the water from the tub, funneling the creative material out of the air. Taborn and Parker gradually quieted, and Cleaver was striking the still-spinning cymbal with a wire brush, almost inaudibly. He stopped spinning it and continued whacking the brush into the air, engaging in movement but producing essentially no sound. And that was the end of the set.

I trust that none of the above episodes, the high-intensity Taborn solos, the Parker arco feature, the concluding Cleaver small-cymbal mini drama, were planned. Befitting their group name, the three musicians actually were harvesting moments, turning them over, wringing out all their potential. The overall result didn't sound anything like any stereotypical idea of "free jazz," or any other style of improvised music I can think of. But at the same time, it wasn't alien; it felt fully logical, narrative, directed, harmonious, complete. The set lasted for exactly the right amount of time, and for the band to have played a single note after the ending would've felt (to me, at least) superfluous. This Farmers by Nature set wasn't great because it was improvised; it was great because of, as I've attempted to describe, the brilliance of the various individual moments and the coherence of the overall form. At the same time, I think the set's uniqueness, the fact that what happened last night hasn't happened before and won't happen again, was part of its immense appeal. We shouldn't fetishize the means of production—how something was made, or according to what principle—but when something truly special arises from a certain method, or lack of method, it's good to remember that, yes, that method has potential. It is absolutely no guarantee—not whatsoever—but improvisation can, under certain circumstances, take both players and audience somewhere they've never been. Last night's Farmers by Nature set reaffirmed that fact for me. As always, I'll be staying tuned.

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P.S. My focus on the Taborn/Parker/Cleaver performance isn't intended to slight the other sets I saw last night. Both were fierce and beautiful. Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp burrowed ever further into the special kind of poignant, stormy melancholy—doled out in three- or four-minute chunks, the so-called Cosmic Lieder of their album titles—they've been creating as a duo for the past few years. And Travis Laplante and Mick Barr, both scarily extreme, virtuosic and idiosyncratic musicians, unleashed their respective aesthetic selves, but with no sense of autopilot whatsoever, building something collective and response-based, with help from Nick Podgurski's expertly tension-ratcheting percussion, moving imperceptibly from sparseness to brutal density. A hell of a night all around.

Best of 2012: Jazz, part I

I've posted a list of my favorite 2012 jazz recordings at the Jazz Journalists Association site. As you'll see, it's a little unwieldy: 15 numbered choices, plus 11 extras. I'd almost rather not order these at all, but so far, I've submitted rankings to two year-end polls (one jazz-only and one where all genres are in play), and I wanted to maintain some consistency between my various lists. Really, though, I view this as a non-hierarchical set. I consider all these picks honorable mentions, in a non-consolation-prize sense; this is the jazz that captured my attention this year, and each of these albums comes highly recommended. Below are some thoughts on eight of the selections, presented in an intuitive order not related to the rankings of the aforelinked list; I'll post comments on the rest soon, probably in two more installments. I've included Spotify and Bandcamp embeds, as well as video links, when available.

Ravi Coltrane
Spirit Fiction [Blue Note]

I'll begin with this album, and devote extended space to it, because (A) it slipped my mind as I was hastily compiling my year-end lists—one or two worthy records always do—and (B) I've been re-enchanted with it over the past couple days. Before hearing Spirit Fiction, I was only vaguely familiar with Ravi Coltrane's work; I think I may have skimmed through his 2009 full-length, Blending Times. I can't tell you how this compares, but as an entry point, it's stellar.

Normally I like my albums of a piece, i.e., recorded in one session—or at a few close together—with stable personnel, but Spirit Fiction makes a strong case for a different model. The record flip-flops between tracks by two different bands: Coltrane's working quartet with pianist Luis Perdomo, bassist Drew Gress and drummer E.J. Strickland, and a quintet with trumpeter Ralph Alessi, pianist Geri Allen, bassist James Genus and drummer Eric Harland. Joe Lovano, the album's co-producer, sits in on two tracks by the latter, and though this all sounds like a bit of a jumble, the pieces flow together beautifully.

Interestingly, the quartet focuses on free jazz, in the literal sense (i.e., jazz that's free, rather than Free Jazz; compare progressive rock and Progressive Rock)—a strategy that's also employed, as I'm now reading, on Blending Times. There's only the faintest connection here to the ecstatic jazz launched by Coltrane senior; these improvisations are nimble, lyrical, responsive—almost like a more overtly jazzy version of what you hear on the Spontaneous Music Ensemble's Karyobin—with the players sort of skipping over and around each other as they gradually cohere into grooves. In contrast, the quintet tracks (three of which are by Alessi) are tight, swinging and refreshingly nonformulaic; "Who Wants Ice Cream," e.g., starts with a magical little Coltrane/Alessi duet before the full group kicks in. A few other pieces also atomize the personnel: "Spring and Hudson"—a Coltrane/Strickland duet—and "Fantasm," a remarkable Coltrane/Lovano/Allen reading of a Paul Motian composition that does right by the title. Rather than distracting you, the variety helps you focus. Listening straight through, you don't know what's coming next, and the changes in personnel, ensemble texture and performance strategy re-engage the ear.

Basically, Spirit Fiction is the kind of record that proves to me that there really is no contemporary jazz mainstream, per se, at least not a uniform one; any artist who matters, and I'm now fully convinced that Ravi Coltrane does, comes off like a movement of one. Coltrane isn't a soul-baring searcher like his dad; he's far humbler and more emotionally cool than that. But at the same time, there's nothing staid or rote about what he does; it's accessible without being particularly conventional. Spirit Fiction doesn't reach out and grab you; instead, it subtly draws you in, gradually waking you up to an aesthetic that's far richer than it seems on the surface, one that wants to present the leader against various backdrops, to showcase him as a consummate interactor. (Again, it's a small miracle that the album hangs together, and doesn't feel at all haphazard.) I have no idea what to compare this record to, and I find that exhilarating. Hear this.

(In case you're keeping track, tracks 1, 3, 4, 7 and 11 are by the quartet; 2, 5, 8 and 9 are by the quintet, with the latter also featuring Lovano; 6 is the Strickland duet; and 10 is the Lovano/Allen trio.)




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George Schuller's Circle Wide
Listen Both Ways [Playscape]

Schuller is another artist I woke up to this year; I knew that he was Gunther's son, and that I'd enjoyed his brother Ed's bass playing in the ’80s Paul Motian quintet, but I'm not sure I'd ever heard him before this record showed up in the mail. And like Spirit Fiction, Listen Both Ways is the kind of record that doesn't fit into any convenient jazz subcategory; it's nonformulaic without feeling eccentric in any obvious or gimmicky ways, and it's unabashedly beautiful without seeming saccharine. Unlike Spirit Fiction, Listen Both Ways is very much the sound of a single ensemble, made up of really strong, distinctive, seasoned players who—the leader included—are probably less well known than they should be: saxist Peter Apfelbaum (for me, he might be the star of the record; he's got this gruff yet songful tone that reminds of me of Dewey Redman at his best), guitarist Brad Shepik (I first heard him with Dave Douglas's Tiny Bell Trio, probably the first "downtown" jazz group I saw live), vibist Tom Beckham and bassist David Ambrosio. Most of the music is by Schuller, and it's got this airy, folkish yet still propulsive and engaging quality—much like the leader's drumming. Sometimes, as on "Store Without a Name," the aesthetic reminds me of Paul Motian—sort of this ghostly, free-floating mass of melody; other times, as on Margo Guryan's "Edwin," it's more playful and boppish. But what's present overall is a very strong engagement with the material; the forms aren't terribly unconventional, but this isn't just a band playing heads and soloing. Both together and as a unit, these players are putting forth something personal and intimate. As with Spirit Fiction, it's easy to call Listen Both Ways worthwhile jazz, but it's hard to peg it with any easy signifier beyond that.

Schuller and Circle Wide play a CD-release gig December 19 at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn.

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Tim Berne
Snakeoil [ECM]

In contrast to the two names above, I knew Tim Berne's work really well coming into Snakeoil; so this one wasn't so much about surprise as it was about appreciating a subtle reframing. (More on that in my Time Out NY preview.) Over the past few years, Berne has been working hard with his current quartet (Oscar Noriega on clarinets, Matt Mitchell on piano and Ches Smith on percussion, an ensemble formerly known as Los Totopos), and though his writing for this group doesn't differ hugely from the multivalent prog-jazz he put forth in projects like Hardcell, the band has found its own way into the material. As you hear on Snakeoil, the upshot is kind of a "chamber" version of the Benre aesthetic—not defanged, by any means, but especially engaged with moody, lyrical improvisation. You'll find some of the prettiest Berne to date on pieces like "Spare Parts"; these performances still have his trademark robot-ballet momentum, but the band seems to always be pushing toward a pensive, abstract place, which they do without losing a sense of purpose. Not exactly something new from Berne, in other words, but fresh enough to be entirely worthwhile.

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Darius Jones Quartet
Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise) [Aum Fidelity]

Book of Mæ'bul parallels Snakeoil in two ways: (A) It presents an often gritty alto saxophonist-composer in a relatively refined light, and (B) it also features Matt Mitchell and Ches Smith, contributing the same sort of elegant adventurousness that they do on the Berne recording. But this album serves a very different function in the Jones discography than Snakeoil does in the Berne one. Tim Berne has issued many, many full-lengths, whereas Jones is still a relatively young recording artist; Book of Mæ'bul is, by my count, only his third LP as a leader (in addition to a duo with Matthew Shipp, a couple records with Little Women and a new one as part of the Grass Roots collective). I enjoyed Jones's last two records, 2011's Big Gurl (Smell My Dream) and 2009's Man'ish Boy (A Raw and Beautiful Thing)—especially the latter, which featured the monster tandem of Cooper-Moore and Bob Moses—but I think he's reached a new level with Book of Mæ'bul. No one who's heard Jones over the past few years would dispute that he's one of the more searingly soulful young saxophonists playing today, a worthy heir to the original Free Jazz giants, but with this record, he shows that he's after much more than straight catharsis. Here, you really hear Darius Jones the writer, sculpting poetic melodies—opener "The Enjoli Moon" breaks my heart, and deserves to become a new standard—living with them, and then, when he gets the urge, blowing them to bits. Music like this makes me think of the classic Sonny Sharrock manifesto: "I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song." To me, Book of Mæ'bul represents Jones's own quest for that same aesthetic grail. Fortunately, the musicians in his quartet grasp this entirely. To me, this group sounds like a potential heir to the late David S. Ware's fabled quartet; there's a similar kind of caress-then-crush duality going on in. I can't wait to hear the next chapter.

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Federico Ughi
Songs for Four Cities [Skycap]

Eri Yamamoto Trio
The Next Page [Aum Fidelity]

More personnel overlap here: The band on drummer Federico Ughi's Songs for Four Cities features both Darius Jones and pianist Eri Yamamoto—whose own 2012 full-length also made my list—not to mention the aforementioned Ed Schuller. The Ughi was a real sleeper for me; unlike the records above, and many other records I chose, this one didn't benefit from any sort of PR push whatsoever. I doubt I'd have heard of it at all if it weren't for my weekly TONY duties; I checked out Songs for Four Cities after I noticed a listing for a record-release show at Firehouse Space (a show I unfortunately didn't get to see). Before this, I had a sense of Ughi as a staunch free-jazzer, mainly affiliated with William Parker, Daniel Carter and other Vision Festival mainstays, as well as with guitarist Adam Caine, an old friend and former bandmate of mine who currently works with Ughi in a rousing freeform duo known as The Moon.

But while there are moments of old-school ecstatic-jazz catharsis on Songs, that's not the prevailing vibe here at all. No, on the contrary, this is one of the warmest, most straightforwardly approachable records I've heard in 2012, jazz or otherwise. The Songs in the title is no accident; the pieces here—inspired, as the title would suggest, by four cities around the world where Ughi has lived—feel as elemental as deep, old hymns, and as catchy as great ’70s soul. Once you've heard tracks like "Tolmin" and "Claygate," I can pretty much guarantee they'll be looping in your head. And the band plays the material with such loving respect; the themes aren't just improvisational fodder, stated and then jettisoned; Jones and Yamamoto, both proud guardians of melody in their own work, really dig into these compositions, nurturing them, seeing to it that they bloom. I'm thinking of moments like Yamamoto's solo on "Claygate"—it's just so lush and bluesy and fun and heartfelt, so extremely not about hip jazz sophistication, geared entirely to bringing out the essence of Ughi's writing and sharing it with the audience. Again, there are hints of free-jazz fire in this music, as on "When We Cry," during which the band reaches a hectic, increasingly abstract crescendo, but even here, it's not at the expense of the tune. The straighter pieces are what really put this one over the top for me, though; every time I put this record on, I marvel at its unpretentiousness—how it's not some knowing gloss on a sort of pop-jazz aesthetic (and I use pop-jazz in a totally non-pejorative sense), but a fully realized embrace of that idea, the notion that jazz, whatever its "school," should be about the song first and foremost, and about how improvisation grows from that like a flower from soil. Whatever your particular tastes, you need to hear what Ughi and his band are doing here.



Here's some video from a 2011 gig by the Songs for Four Cities band.

Much of what I've written above also applies to Yamamoto's own 2012 release, The Next Page. I've enjoyed her last couple discs on Aum Fidelity, but this latest one seems to me like a definitive statement. As with Songs for Four Cities, there's something wonderfully out-of-step about Yamamoto's aesthetic as a bandleader. A good illustration of what I mean: I had The Next Page on in the kitchen the other day, and my wife asked if I was listening to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I laughed and told her that that was exactly what I thought of when I first heard this record. (Maybe my recent appreciation of Yamamoto's work is no coincidence, given that I woke up to Vince Guaraldi's trio in a big way earlier this year when I wrote about drummer Jerry Granelli.) I think the Guaraldi comparison is fully apt here, and fully complimentary. Again, as with the Ughi, this is an unfashionable record: unfashionable in its plainspoken devotion to song. I mean Yamamoto and her bandmates (bassist David Ambrosio, who's also on the George Schuller record above, and drummer Ikuo Takeuchi) no disrespect when I say that pieces like "Whiskey River," a particularly warm and bluesy piece here, sound almost like themes for vintage sitcoms, the kind of music that might play as a camera pans down a row of inviting Brooklyn brownstones in autumn.

This is the kind of jazz that's extremely easy to take for granted, even to condescend to. (Indeed, I guess you could accuse me of the same in light of that sitcom description, but I'm just honestly reporting the images this record conjures for me.) Reviewing this album on PopMatters, Will Layman wrote, "But in a field of new jazz piano trios operating at the heights of Glasper and Moran, Iyer and Taborn, Shipp and Parks, Yamamoto’s group on The Next Page seems too sweet and too pleasant to grab a listener’s ear and demand that it listen." In a way, I think that's exactly what I enjoy about the Yamamoto aesthetic, i.e., its alleged too-pleasantness, which doesn't seem excessive at all to me. On the whole, I respect and enjoy the work of the pianists above—as readers of this blog might know, I'm particularly partial to Taborn, Shipp and Moran—but to me, it seems narrow-minded to portray jazz piano as some kind of arms race, a contest to see who can sound the most contemporary, whether it be via hip repertory choices, engagement with cutting-edge pop forms or staunch avant-gardism.

I'm not sure exactly when this gig ended, but for a long while—I'm talking years—Yamamoto and her band played weekly (maybe even more frequently?) at Arthur's Tavern in the Village. I've never been there, so I can't tell you exactly what it's like, but I do know that Arthur's isn't a jazz haunt, per se, like, say, Smalls is. My sense is that it's a neighborhood bar, where the music plays more of a background role. Or at least, that's how I imagine it, hearing The Next Page. This is music that fits into and shores up life, rather than music that demands intellectual engagement. It doesn't flatter the listener's urbane sophistication, so it's only logical that it wouldn't be a critics' favorite. (Hey, I like brainy jazz as much as the next person, enough so that I've been accused of "recondite hipsterism" in the past; the inclusion of, say, Steve Lehman's record on my year-end list shows you that I'm still very enticed by progressiveness, when done well, that is. Also, I should say that part of the uphill battle for Yamamoto in particular might be that she records for Aum Fidelity, which many consider synonymous with classically styled free jazz. She's also appeared on albums by William Parker and Whit Dickey. Maybe there's an unfair expectation that her own work will follow up on that thread.) On the other hand, The Next Page sounds really good and gives you a genuinely warm feeling—much the way "Linus and Lucy" does. In these areas, it succeeds mightily, and I think that's all one can ask of a record: that it choose a direction and head that way wholeheartedly. The Next Page is a simple pleasure, but it isn't a shallow one. Much like on the Ughi record, Yamamoto, Ambrosio and Takeuchi are really singing songs here, together, and I think jazz could use a bit more of that.

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Steve Lehman Trio
Dialect Fluorescent [Pi Recordings]

Since I mentioned the Lehman above, I'll head here next. I wrote at length on Lehman and this record in a June profile for TONY, so I'll keep this relatively brief. Part of what attracts me to Dialect Fluorescent is how smartly it contrasts with Lehman's previous LP as a bandleader (not counting sessions co-led by Rudresh Mahanthappa and Stephan Crump), 2009's octet release Travail, Transformation and Flow. As I wrote in the TONY piece, Travail is a contemporary masterpiece, an example of "what you point to when someone asks you what NYC jazz sounds like right now." Dialect Fluorescent is also a very right-now kind of jazz record, but one achieved with a totally different set of tools, namely the incorporation several standards (not to mention the theme from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) and the use of a slimmed-down ensemble. Simply put, this trio, with bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid, cooks in a way that a record like Travail couldn't. In 2009, I wrote about a live performance by Fieldwork (the collective trio of Lehman, Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey), dubbing their aesthetic robojazz. There's a similarly prog-minded virtuosity at work on Dialect, but the pure funk is closer to the surface here. To me, this record is as much about the super-dry, unforgiving sound of Reid's kit as it is about Lehman's tart-toned lines; it's about daredevil busy-ness, but with tons of space left, as on pieces like "Foster Brothers." Travail was about Lehman the composer; this one's more about the athleticism, the breakdance. And simply by virtue of it being a trio release, the sidemen aren't really sidemen anymore; they're right there with Lehman, pushing, prodding, stutter-stepping. You have to be in a certain mood to dig this one: caffeinated, almost—primed for hyper-awareness, as you would be when stepping up to an addictive yet fiendishly challenging arcade game. But when that feeling strikes, Dialect Fluorescent is the perfect musical counterpart.

Here's an EPK on Vimeo.

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Dr. Lonnie Smith
The Healer [Pilgrimage]

The Healer is, again, a totally different kind of jazz record than any of the others I've listed: not complex and acutely engaged like the Lehman, or homey and inviting like the Yamamoto. I think of this album as an exercise in vibe cultivation. Going into this record, my impression of Lonnie Smith was more or less a caricature: classic soul-jazz organ dude, wears a turban, etc. He's the kind of artist that almost invites you to underestimate him, pigeonhole him, align him with a sound or an era or a motivation, to file him away with a "Yeah, I get it." As with the Yamamoto, though, it's a mistake to consider approachability and shallowness to be synonymous. This record blindsided me and swallowed me up. I'm not familiar enough with Smith's recent career to know how long he's been gigging in a trio format with guitarist Jonathan Kreisberg and drummer Jamire Williams—the band featured here, as well as on 2010's Spiral—but this group has achieved a rare kind of mojo: somewhere between laid-back funk, chopsy fusion and spacey psychedelia. On pieces like "Backtrack," the three musicians enter a kind of slow-burning group trance: humid, slinky, almost impossibly patient. These are the kind of grooves you wish would go on forever, vamps where in the macro sense, nothing much of consequence is happening, but where the tiny details have mind-altering potential if you let them work on you. Yes, the aesthetic here is very retro, as though a crate-digger's samples had come to life, but obviously Smith comes by it honestly, having been at it since the ’60s; Kreisberg and Williams, meanwhile, groove like a dream. Every time I put this record on, I want to drift away with it (see esp. the molasses-slow version of "Chelsea Bridge"); if you're a sucker for the intersection of funkiness and trippiness, I think you'll feel the same. I should mention too, that the disc is far from uniformly placid: "Beehive" burns like the rare-groove equivalent of Mahavishnu Orchestra. It's all just badass, super-authentic and, to me, pretty much irresistible.

Check out the EPK here, and a Spotify stream below.

Vision Festival: NYC North Star

Last night, I caught an extraordinary set by the Darius Jones Quartet at Vision Festival 17, which runs through Sunday at Roulette. (I very much enjoyed what I saw of the Farmers by Nature trio—with Craig Taborn, William Parker and Gerald Cleaver—and Parker's own In Order to Survive quintet, but the Jones band hit me the hardest.) The performance centered on a series of heart-rending ballads. Jones sounded as precise and openhearted as I've ever heard him. Every time I go see him, I'm struck by the care and gravity he puts into each phrase; even if the passage is a delicate one, he gears up, bears down, applies enormous psychic pressure. The notes have a vocal cry—smooth, yet with rasp always threatening to creep in around the edges, like peppered honey—but they're sculpted and purposeful.

The same goes for Jones's suitelike compositions. By "free jazz" standards, they're compact and accessible; they have movement and narrative drive. (The episodic, busy-to-sparse "You Have Me Seeing Red" and the tender "The Enjoli Moon" are two that stuck in my head.) When they work up to a screaming peak, that peak is earned, contextualized. The rest of the band—pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Ches Smith—sounded really alert and attuned, but each time Jones entered, I felt a different kind of grip on my brain and heart. He's entered a new phase of maturity with this project. Its emotional spectrum is total. (Hear for yourself on Book of Mæ'bul (Another Kind of Sunrise), out now on Aum Fidelity, which celebrated its 15th anniversary at last night's Vision gig.)

As I listened I thought about my history with the Vision Festival, and how I might not have appreciate a set this nuanced and straightforwardly beautiful had I seen it back in 2000, when I first attended the event. (I volunteered at the fest that year, via my DJ-ing gig at WKCR, and I remember a fun afternoon spent folding programs in the company of heavy players like Alan Silva and Mat Maneri.) At that time, I had a real stake in the idea of avant-garde-ness in music. I was looking for a kind of assault, the freer, longer, more difficult and abstract—and often, louder—the better. I remember countless variations on this idea from various Vision Fests: a set by Peter Kowald's trio with drummer Gunter Sommer and a monster of a David S. Ware solo performance at a space above St. Marks Place; the 2 Days in April band with Fred Anderson, Kidd Jordan, William Parker and Hamid Drake at a cavernous venue in Soho (and a variant of that band minus Anderson, plus Henry Grimes many years later); mammoth Bill Dixon and Sam Rivers ensembles at Angel Orensanz; Peter Brötzmann in various settings at Abrons Arts Center last year.

Though my tastes—i.e., exactly what it is I'm looking for when I attend a jazz performance—might have changed somewhat, I treasure all those memories, not to mention the longevity/consistency of the Vision Festival, which has been something like a personal North Star in my NYC concertgoing life. I may have been guilty of taking the fest for granted the past few years. (Talking between sets last night, a friend and I were struck anew by the fact that many people travel from out of town for the event, which has come to seem to us like an everyday neighborhood hang.) Last night, I did my best to appreciate the awesome bounty of this event—for one thing, Roulette might be the ideal Vision venue; the sight lines and sound were about as good as I've ever found them to be at any previous edition—especially the fact that after so many years, it still had new joys to offer. Sure, there was an element of old-guard free-jazz stampede to be found in the In Order to Survive set, but the Jones performance (and in a very different way, the Farmers by Nature set) gave me hope that younger practitioners of what is often called "this music" are looking for ways to shatter the wall of impenetrability that surrounds the subgenre, to retain the gut-busting passion while at the same time putting on a warm, relatable show, one that avoids improvisational bombast, that places a premium on sensitivity and experiment (not just a pat idea of what's "experimental"). On the latter tip, I think of the drowsy impressionist blues that ended the Farmers set—a major surprise to me and, I think, the musicians themselves, and a definite highlight of the evening.

There's little more to say other than this: Check out the Vision Festival over the next few days if you can. (Joe McPhee and Sonny Simmons play tonight, Wednesday.) Go back next year and the year after, even if you think you've got this territory fully mapped. Like any great cultural institution, Vision can grow with you, and you with it.

Living, letting live: Gerald Cleaver's Black Host

Photo: Juan-Carlos Hernández

This past Saturday night I heard Black Host, a new project led by drummer Gerald Cleaver, at Cornelia Street Café. (The band was concluding a five-night mini tour of NYC, during which it had stopped by three other local venues.) What drew me in was partly my recent interest in Cleaver-led projects (his latest album, Be It As I See It, is a stunner) but the personnel—Darius Jones on alto, Brandon Seabrook on guitar, Pascal Niggenkemper on bass and the mighty Cooper-Moore on piano—was also a major factor.

Throughout the evening's two sets, I kept thinking about the make-up of the band, or more accurately, the fact that in jazz bands are often made, period, custom-built for each gig or recording session. Of course there are exceptions, groups like the Bad Plus that have impressed me precisely because they don't conform to this "leader plus the auxiliary players he or she happens to have convened for the night" model. I kept thinking about the fact that even once players have established themselves, not just as improvisers but as bandleaders and conceptualists, they can still appear in other people's projects, without any sense of it being beneath them. If you happen to be a jazz bandleader—it helps to live in New York and have a decent budget—you can actually assemble your dream group.

It's an obvious fact, one of the first principles of modern jazz, really, that personnel is fluid, but watching Black Host last night, I was re-struck by the special-ness, the vast potential of that idea. Say you're Gerald Cleaver, a great drummer and an experienced bandleader; you can think to yourself, I'd like to put together a project that includes four other established players, bandleaders in their own right: Cooper-Moore (one-time leader of Triptych Myth, multi-instrumental legend), Jones (increasingly prominent leader of a trio and quartet), Seabrook (leader of the punk-jazz force Seabrook Power Plant) and Niggenkemper (I'm not as familiar with his work, but his PNTrio has two CDs out). You can write some engaging music to fuel the enterprise; then, best of all, you can wind the whole thing up and watch it go.

(In rock, the band-building process typically happens once, right at the start. Personnel might shift, of course—guitarist Joe Petrucelli and I founded STATS roughly a decade ago, and we've worked with four different bassists during that time—but really what you're looking for is fixed membership.)

In the case of Black Host, you were hearing what happens when this process pays off, when you draft various players for a project and they get along outstandingly. What I love about this whole phenomenon is how, due to the x-factor of improvisation, a bandleader can't know in advance exactly how his recruits are going to interact. At Cornelia, I was struck specifically by the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook connection. There was one episode, I think it was during the second set, when C-M took a particularly wild solo (one of many that found his fingers, and forearms, scampering across the keyboard, summoning a riot of notes—chaotic and yet fully coherent, tasteful and related to the piece at hand) and lighted upon this violent, trilling figure. Seabrook looked up, clearly transfixed by the pattern, and then began to mimic it, employing the turbo-picking right hand that serves him so well when playing banjo in the Power Plant. The two men, a pianist in his mid-sixties and a guitarist in his mid-thirties were engaged in maniacal game of Hot Potato.

At other points I recall Cooper-Moore watching Seabrook or Niggenkemper solo with obvious glee, clearly fascinated by their ingenuity (throughout the evening, Seabrook was sampling various passages, particularly Jones's saxophone lines, with a small tape recorder and playing them back through his guitar pick-ups; other times he'd toss out razor-toothed ninja stars of notes, like the final flourish in John McLaughlin's epic riff at the end of Miles's "Right Off," from A Tribute to Jack Johnson—one iteration of McLaughlin moment I'm referring to comes right at 18:49 here; and during Niggenkemper's solo intro to one piece, the bassist held some kind of metal bowl, or maybe an aluminum pan?, against the strings to produce a fruitfully abrasive texture). It struck me in these moments that by convening various players, you're not just inviting them to play together, but also to listen to one another, to simply be together for that segment of time. (This fifth straight night of performance seemed like just the right juncture to savor the new relationships within Black Host: The players were comfortable together, but still a bit in awe of one another, still full of wonder.)

Darius Jones contributed his trademark combination of volcanic passion and laserlike focus. As impressive a bandleader as he is, I was struck last night by what a model collaborator he is as well. During the written portions—particularly during the second piece in the first set, a staggeringly gorgeous ballad that I immediately wanted to hear again as soon as it was over—he served Cleaver's vision, articulating the melodies with total clarity and a complex sensation of harsh sweetness—like honey with an underlying pungency—the tenderest notes paradoxically seeming the most effortful. And during the improvised portions, Jones served the hive mind, the collectively settled-upon direction of the music. Sometimes he led, delivering a full-on burry blare; other times, he sat back and reveled in the mayhem, grinning, cheering even, homing in on the Cooper-Moore/Seabrook firestorm, and doling out brief punctuation phrases. Like Cooper-Moore, Jones is a model onstage listener; you feel what others are playing more deeply while watching him respond to it. And that goes back to my point above: As a bandleader, in bringing players together, especially players like these, ones with huge personalities, you're creating this little society, a forum for new relationships to develop. I know Jones has a history with Cooper-Moore, but I'm not sure how much either player has worked with Seabrook, or whether any of the three had previously played with Niggenkemper but there was a very clear sense of camaraderie to Black Host, and one thing that fascinated me was how out of the spotlight Cleaver, the man with the plan, was. In light of what was going on up front, his drumming was a subtle glue.

You did feel his guiding hand in the written material, of course. There was a lot of variety to it. Unlike on Be It As I See It, which features short, chamber-music-like episodes, here the focus was on lengthy pieces that set up an atmosphere and explored it. The opening piece of the first set featured a subtle funk backbeat, with other instruments swirling on top; then came the remarkable ballad I mentioned above, a truly poetic song without words—not unlike "Charles Street Sunrise" from Be It—and a more hectic, uptempo piece. The second set was both harsher and more abstract. I remember some patient, drawn-out melodies and others that were more jagged—weird little sound shapes played in unison by Jones and Seabrook. I remember both hurtling uptempo swing and moments of pure, out-of-time weightlessness. Overall there was just enough shape and contour to hold the enterprise together, but Cleaver had left a lot of room for the spontaneity. I remember that the second set ended with all players partaking of a collective freak-out: Jones barking harshly, Seabrook wringing staticky squeals out of his tape-player/pick-up apparatus, Cooper-Moore leapfrogging his hands across the keyboard. Cleaver stood behind his kit, pressing a stick vertically into the head of his floor tom and threading it up through his fist (a technique I've seen before and experimented with myself but that I know of no proper name for), taking in the whole enterprise stoically yet attentively.

This was the kind of "It's alive!" moment that I've been trying to describe here. As a jazz bandleader in a forum like this, you're composing and preparing, yes; like the host of a dinner party, you're cooking, cleaning, stocking the fridge with beverages, making sure you've got enough place settings, etc. You're probably micromanaging a bit throughout the evening, especially during those first crucial, perhaps tense moments when the guests start to arrive. But at a certain point, you're letting go, allowing your friends to make of the evening what they will. There's a certain joy in seeing the preparations pay off as you expected; someone loves a particular dish that you labored over, say. But what makes you proudest is watching the guests socialize, seeing unexpected new friendships blossom in real time. You've ceded control; now the personalities themselves are in charge.

Again, this is not some shocking revelation; by and large, it's the way jazz works. But it doesn't always work as well as it did in Black Host, where you could see the players reveling in these new relationships. (Clearly, it didn't hurt that they'd been sharing stages for four nights already.) At this point, as an artist, you haven't just assembled a cast to execute your vision; you've founded a little village, a self-sufficient community with a vision of its own. Once it's humming along with its own momentum, you cease to be a leader, per se. At that point, you're just living, and letting live.

In the zones: Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp at Jazz Standard

In their new duo, Darius Jones and Matthew Shipp are limiting themselves, and it sounds really good. Tonight I saw the pair, on alto saxophone and piano respectively, at Jazz Standard, where they were celebrating a new Aum Fidelity album, Cosmic Lieder. The record is very good; the show was much more than that—an arresting demonstration of a shared philosophy of improvisation, a series of sharp answers to age-old questions like "Where do we start?," "Who leads?," "Who follows?" and maybe most importantly, "Where do we end?"

As far as I can tell, the Jones/Shipp duo is an all-improv project, but it is not a free-for-all. These are songs, in a way—brief (averaging four minutes or so) and highly directional. The titular cosmos delivered with pop-song economy.

At Jazz Standard, the duo was incredibly decisive, each piece a single sustained idea, kicked around and prodded at but fixed, secure in its center. I think of Ghostbusters, when each of the three 'busters zaps Slimer and they slowly, steadily lower him into the trap in unison. It was that kind of teamwork.

Darius Jones already has a formidable reputation for gutsy free-jazz soul. (See Steve Dollar's fine Wall Street Journal profile.) If you've heard him in Little Women, you know it's not just soul that interests him, but maniacal, stabbing noise as well. The key thing to understand about Jones's work with Shipp, though, is that he's playing here with an almost heroic restraint. That's not to say that his ideas are restrained; he unleashed plenty of throaty shrieks and yelps tonight. It's more that he doesn't let them fully off the leash. This is not a blow-till-you-drop free-jazz concept (a good thing, in my opinion—we've got quite enough of those)—it's a concept of harnessing moments of wildness, violence boiling up and receding, leaving behind its scent. Wind the tension till it snaps, work through the tantrum and then bring it back to a whisper. Tonight Jones played with such tension, bearing down even at barely audible volumes. Always deciding, to do or to not do, to attack or to grit teeth and let the moment pass, winding, winding. Letting go and reining in. Making a song out of raw materials, letting their edges show but obeying an imaginary hourglass—when it's time to stop, you stop. You don't mourn the passing. You pause and you get on with what's next. These songs had an imperative to get somewhere, and almost without fail, they did.

Matthew Shipp made damn sure they did, actually. The pianist has a reputation for cantankerousness off the bandstand, and that tendency is often projected onto his playing. I feel like I've read descriptions that likened his improvising to boxing—I could've sworn the word "pugilistic" was used somewhere [NOTE: After the fact, I turned up this boxing-and-jazz piece by Shipp himself!]as though he was this swaggering, merciless hard-ass. And of course there are the vague Cecil Taylor comparisons. But specifically on the latter front, there's an immense difference, namely that Matthew Shipp goes to Herculean lengths to ensure that his collaborators sound good. (For all his strengths, CT is not, on the whole, what one would call a deeply sensitive collaborator.) Or, maybe I should say, he did so tonight—I suppose his trio (where he is the nominal leader and principal soloist) is a somewhat different story. With Jones he was like a shadow, cushioning and supporting at all times, providing just the right backdrop, vamping when need be, hammering out the framework so that Jones could dance within it. The word I kept thinking of, and writing down, was GRACIOUS. This was a duo music, i.e., neither player really soloed per se, but the roles were clear—Shipp was ground and Jones was sky. So the tension, and there was so much and it was so very exciting, came from the ideas and not from some sort of hackneyed clash between the players. Shipp is no pugilist—he's a master scene-setter, like some sort of production designer, laying out sumptuous period furnishings that help the actors immerse in their roles, accessing new truths.

The moods and textures were many. There was the eerie impressionism that is something like Shipp's signature. (Jones shouts-out this special Shippian vibe in this great joint appearance on Jason Crane's The Jazz Session, zeroing in on New Orbit, a truly fantastic 2001 record—maybe my favorite of Shipp's that I've heard.) Faster, choppier excursions. Hushed sonic mobiles with Shipp plucking the piano strings by hand. Jones always sounding so incredibly vocal, crying out with something there's not even a word for. "Anguish" seems too broad. It's like a simmering combination of mad and sad, wounded and vengeful. Bearing down immensely on the notes till they pop out. It was like soul surgery, with Shipp laying out all the tools on the operating table.

The two railed, in a way, against the semi-swanky jazz-club setting. They paused after each piece, just long enough to let you know it was indeed over, and the applause would begin. But they were onto the next one immediately—no time for basking or even, really, acknowledgment. I think about Keith Jarrett and how when I saw him at Carnegie Hall earlier this year, he bowed ponderously after each piece, enervating the room each time. Jones and Shipp weren't about to break the fourth wall. They were in the zone, or should I say in the zones, each brief song its own cosmos that for those four minutes or so was their shared, sole objective. Anyone improvising "open-endedly," "seeing how it goes," "relaxing," "emoting," doing whatever you're doing other than deciding where a piece should go and going there, NOW, take heed. However "experimental" you fancy yourself, you are competing with composed music; there is an imperative to pick an idea, to state that idea, make it stick and call "Scene." If further clarification is needed, consult your copy of Cosmic Lieder or the next Jones/Shipp duo gig.

Winter Jazzfest 2011: My top 5

Pictured (left to right): Loren Stillman, Nate Radley, Gary Versace and Ted Poor of Bad Touch.

Via The Volume, a list of the five best sets I caught at Winter Jazzfest 2011.