Voyages: Tim Berne's Snakeoil and the art of the musical journey

Photo: Caterina Di Perri

I keep coming back to Tim Berne. One of the first jazz shows I saw upon arriving in New York 20 years ago was Berne's band Paraphrase with Drew Gress and Tom Rainey at Tonic — I think Tony Malaby was sitting in that night. I was particularly mesmerized by what Rainey was doing — I'd never heard anyone play drums that abstractly yet with that much conviction — but I became an instant fan of all the musicians onstage.

Once I was on board with Tim Berne's music, I kept up with his many projects as much as I could. I particularly loved, and still do, the various Berne/Rainey bands: Hard Cell with Craig Taborn (their 2001 album The Shell Game is simply one of my favorite jazz records ever, with epic compositions and a huge sound courtesy of frequent Berne collaborator David Torn); Big Satan with Marc Ducret (check out the marvelous Souls Saved Hear, from 2003); and Science Friction, a hybrid of the two aforementioned bands (their 2003 live double album The Sublime And, now available digitally in two separate parts, is an absolute feast of gritty yet exacting contemporary jazz).

There are so many other great projects and records — I highly recommend browsing Berne's extensive Bandcamp site, where he's offering not just many albums originally released on his own Screwgun label, but otherwise out-of-print gems that span his nearly 40-year discography. (The mid-to-late '80s small-group records, such as the mighty Fulton Street Maul, are another crucial subset.) I haven't heard 'em all, but I've heard a hell of a lot, and I consider every single one I own to be an essential item in my collection.

I'm in the midst of a heavy Berne listening phase, and after revisiting those magical Rainey-era records, I've moved on to the more recent stuff, specifically the four studio albums by Berne's current working band, Snakeoil. Like pretty much every Berne project, Snakeoil both has its own distinct identity and embodies key traits common to his various bands. After you've listened to enough of this stuff, it's fascinating to hear how the basic Berne principles carry over to the different groups.

One of the things that I love the most about Tim Berne's music is the way it moves, or maybe I should say, the way it unfolds. Tim Berne's music has a narrative quality that I don't hear in a lot of jazz. As much as I can get down with the head-solos-head format, or full-on free improv, a lot of the jazz that moves me most takes a more compositional approach. Though some Tim Berne pieces do follow a conventional head-improv-head type of structure, a lot of his music unfolds in more complex ways. For one thing, his pieces very rarely end up where they start: a theme or texture is established and, often very gradually, a new one takes its place and we're on to a different chapter in the piece. There's a very subtle and complex stitching together of composition and improvisation, a play between those two core jazz elements, that occurs in his work, that to me, makes his music especially gripping. Since he never seems to take the shape of a given piece for granted, I find that I'm always alert when listening to Tim Berne: A dizzyingly complex theme might emerge from what a few minutes ago sounded like total abstraction, or vice versa. There's always a progression, often a linear, almost novelistic one — it's not about endlessly cycling through one form; it's about setting up one form, exploring it, abstracting it and moving on to a new one; or, in a favorite Berne tactic, starting from a seemingly free place and then gradually moving toward a breathtakingly tight, often very funky theme statement, as though the structure of the piece were like a vise closing in imperceptible increments.

I touched on this idea in a 2008 DFSBP post re: a killer Bloodcount show at the Stone:

"... I came up with a phrase that I think describes Bloodcount's concept adequately: (ahem) gradual coalescence. basically what I'm trying to capture here is this phenomenon in the group's music wherein one of Berne's patented prog-funk themes sort of appears on the horizon of an improvisation and moves closer and closer and closer until, bam, it's right in front of your face and the band is absolutely slamming away at it in perfect unison."

So that play of abstraction and rigor is all over these Snakeoil records, which contain some of the most elaborate and ambitious Berne works I've heard. As is often the case with Berne, the longest pieces are among the most captivating. Two that are really grabbing me right now are "Small World in a Small Town," from 2015's You've Been Watching Me and "Sideshow," from 2017's Incidentals. (Quick note: The two preceding discs, 2013's Shadow Man and 2012's Snakeoil, are also excellent, but I think the addition of guitarist Ryan Ferreira to the core group — of Berne, clarinetist Oscar Noriega, pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer/vibraphonist Ches Smith — on Incidentals and You've Been Watching Me only strengthens an already outstanding band.)

Often in Snakeoil, you will hear a crisp group theme statement right off the bat, but the 18-minute "Small World" starts out in more spare fashion, with a lyrical, initially ballad-like Mitchell/Berne duet that really lets you savor the tart, singing quality of Berne's gorgeous alto playing. As evidenced by last year's FØRAGE disc (a Mitchell solo album featuring various Berne themes), these two have a profound musical connection, and it's a treat to hear them soaring together in a passage of unguarded lushness and beauty. Around 3:50 Mitchell sets up a steady quarter-note cadence as Berne continues to improvise; and around 5:17, Smith (on vibes) and Ferreira join in, mirroring Mitchell's pulse. The piece's first theme statement occurs around 5:32, but crucially, Berne keeps soloing for a bit after Smith and Ferreira enter, creating this lovely sort of segue effect. In other words, the improv doesn't suddenly cut to a theme statement, it sort of cross-fades, so you get that moment of contrast and fruitful clash just before full-on order takes over. The theme gradually grows denser and more involved, with Snakeoil sounding like a miniature chamber orchestra, and Smith begins switching between vibes and brushes on his snare.

Then at 7:50, there's a stark textural change, as the ensemble strips down to piano, with Mitchell still implying the upbeat cadence from the prior theme; drums, with Smith switching to sticks and playing delicately on cymbals; and guitar, with Ferreira picking out fragile-sounding notes. Almost imperceptibly, around 8:15, Oscar Noriega enters on clarinet, playing with remarkable subtlety and fluidity. The band falls away entirely and Noriega plays alone, his supple sound suspended in mid-air like some floating gossamer thread. Mitchell and Smith return to add faint accents, and again, the ensemble texture is as much "chamber music" as jazz. Around 12:40, almost slyly, Mitchell breaks into a new cadence, a waltz-like rhythm that Smith picks up on brushes; meanwhile, Noriega continues to solo, much as Berne had in that beginning duet. The rhythm becomes bluesier, with Smith digging into the groove, and at 14:15, Berne reenters with a fresh theme statement, soon joined by Ferreira. Again, we get this ear-catching cross-fade, with Noriega continuing to flutter over top as the theme coalesces. Now Ferreira moves into the role of texturalist, adding this sort of abstract sparkle effect in the right channel. The full band sort of struts its way to a crescendo, until everyone cuts out but Mitchell and Smith, who trail off dreamily.

There's just so much event packed into this piece, so much of a sense of musical ground being covered, such an artful weave of composition and improvisation, and of a sense of musical chapters beginning and concluding almost imperceptibly. It's all blurred together in the Berne playbook, with solos sort of floating over those demarcation points so that you always have this fruitful static between what's mapped out and what's spontaneous.

"Sideshow," the 26-minute centerpiece of Incidentals, is similarly event-packed, but the piece takes a different tack. Here, we get a dense theme statement right at the top, set up first by Mitchell in complex two-hand formation, with Berne and Ferreira joining in soon after and Smith following. The band makes its way to a classic Tim Berne math-groove around the 2:00 mark, a theme that swoops and darts and mutates in head-spinning fashion without losing its sense of badass momentum. (Noriega has entered by this point, holding down the low-end with chugging bass-clarinet.) Berne drops out, leaving the rest of the band to sort of boogie down on the prog-funk cadence they've set up — Mitchell gets seriously rumbling and bluesy here. Around 4:50, though, the groove starts to splinter and decelerate, and abstraction takes over: Mitchell and Smith (I think playing bongos here) darting around one another, Noriega adding soft, swelling, fluttering phrases. The pianist and bass-clarinetist are soon dueting, playing a sort of dark, oozing ballad — the overall feel couldn't be more different from where the piece started — to which Smith adds soft cymbal scrapes. As in "Small World in Small Town," around 7:50 Mitchell almost unassumingly begins to lay down a rolling cadence as the others continue to explore a sort of free ballad space. Then Berne enters around 8:19, joining up with Mitchell for a new theme statement as Noriega flutters freely, with faint accents from Smith on vibes. Again, we're in that sort of suspended space between composition and improvisation. By 9:30, though, Noriega has joined in on the theme, with Smith and Ferreira now playing the role of tasteful chaos agents.

And then another shift around 10:50, as the ensemble thins out and Berne blows faintly against a humming background of electronics, presumably textural effects from Ferreira. There's a feeling of almost total ambient stillness here, of a whole new musical zone briefly opening. Around 13:00, Mitchell and Smith enter and engage Ferreira in some free trio play, but soon, Mitchell is laying down a new cadence to which Smith gradually adds a softly strutting backbeat. Ferreira continues to sculpt weird sound shapes as the groove grows more and more funky. Berne enters at 15:48 and locks in with Mitchell; Ferreira keeps soloing but seems to be gradually drawn in to the band's orbit, until around the 17:00 mark, the full band is navigating a lush, elaborate, almost celebratory new theme. Smith switches from drums to vibes as the band makes one last go-round through the passage, and then another sudden change, as everyone drops out but Mitchell and Smith (playing both cymbals and vibes), dueting in spare, abstract fashion. Mitchell then goes quiet, leaving Smith to play a sparse quasi–drum solo, alternating tight bongo flurries with what sound like mallet-struck, tympani-like booms on a low tom-tom (or maybe even the bass drum). There's a sort of textural halo here that I think is coming from Ferreira; overall his ability to add extremely subtle shading is a huge asset to the band. (Mitchell also contributes electronics on this record, so some of what I'm attributing to guitar could also be him.)

At around 21:30, Smith hints at a new cadence, and Mitchell, Berne and Ferreira enter about 20 seconds later with the piece's final theme, a slowly unfolding dirge. Ferreira plays along but adds a sort of running psychedelic commentary. His contributions and Smith's become denser and more aggressive, sort of battering and washing over the calm theme statement, and the band sounds like it's at war with itself. [Note: Matt Mitchell helpfully informs me that David Torn also plays guitar on the outro here too!] Until the last minute or so, when Smith drops out, and Berne, Mitchell, Noriega and Ferreira make one last evanescent pass through the theme.

I obviously encourage you to take these journeys yourself. These Snakeoil records are long and information-packed, and I've sometimes found that I get more mileage out of close listening to individual pieces, which are often themselves long and information-packed, rather than trying to tackle the full LPs in one go. Whatever your listening approach, I think these records demonstrate incredibly well what an artful and accomplished writer, bandleader and just overall sound sculptor Tim Berne is — and how he's still pushing into new territory in this phase of his career. When I listen, I can hear him constantly fighting against predictable, conventional ways of organizing a piece of so-called jazz. He seems intent on utilizing every possible approach, from the most meticulously arranged, virtuosically executed full-ensemble passage to the sparest, most abstract wisp of an improvisation from one or two band members, and intent on combining and contrasting these approaches within the compositions so that you never know quite where you're headed, but you know that you're headed somewhere. To fill up, say, 18 or 26 minutes of a listener's time and to sustain a compelling narrative arc, to provide enough textural contrast that the journey never seems tedious, is a serious accomplishment. I would never argue for some kind of hierarchy, that a long-form, linear, narrative approach is somehow superior to a more conventional head-solos-head one, for example; I'm just saying that in the right hands, the former can make for a thrilling alternative.

In any idiom, I love concision and directness, as in another recent listening obsession, the early works of AC/DC; but I also love ambition and scope and a more searching, intuitive way of getting from point A to point B (and in Berne's case, points C, D, E and so forth), as in the work of Tool, who I gushed about on DFSBP in February, or King Crimson, whose '80s album I've been savoring. I hope Tim Berne wouldn't mind my aligning him with the latter camp, or, more broadly, a genre-transcendent "prog" philosophy. In my mind, that doesn't rule out, say, gnarly aggression or extreme funkiness or any of the other key Berne traits. It's only to say that, as a musical thinker, he seems to like to consider all the possibilities, and to take each mood or strategy or configuration or texture or structure as far as his imagination — and the abilities of his collaborators, which in the case of Snakeoil, are pretty much limitless — will allow within the scope of a different piece, and to use the art of skillful arrangement (the cross-fade, the gradual coalescence, etc.) to always keep you just destabilized enough, immersed, yes, but never too settled because there always the possibility of a shift on the horizon. His music has been taking me on voyages like the afore-described for close to 20 years, and may it always be so.

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*There's some great nitty-gritty discussion of the way Tim Berne's bands function in part two of Ethan Iverson's essential, career-spanning 2009 Berne interview. This part is a fascinating look at that fundamental tension between composition and improvisation in his work, and how he likes to ride that line as much as possible:

EI:  How do you tell your bands how to find the vamp?

TB:  I don’t. I just say that at some point, “This has to happen.” And, “Don’t telegraph it.  It’s best when it just kind of happens.” When it’s a cue it’s less interesting.

Mike is a genius at this shit. He’ll build the tension as long as possible, so that you can barely stand it. That’s really great. Jim is also great at getting there in a natural way, not like an obvious cut.

That’s the structure of this music: getting from section to section somehow—the rest of it is open.

 I also think this part above is very revealing, in terms of Berne's very specialized rhythmic language:

And then the stuff like Julius [Hemphill] and [Keith] Jarrett, there was just that rhythmic thing that I was really into. It was like soul music and stuff, it really kind of brought all those elements. And it wasn’t swing, really, to me. Even though I loved Joe Henderson, Sonny Rollins, and those guys, that wasn’t my language, it isn’t now, it may never be. But grooves are something that I like. 

The Vijay Iyer / Steve Lehman / Tyshawn Sorey saga: 'Far From Over,' indeed

Photo: Lynne Harty

The new Vijay Iyer Sextet album feels both like an arrival point (i.e., a summit-like convergence of the now fully risen progressive-jazz stars of the past decade-plus, namely Iyer, Steve Lehman and Tyshawn Sorey) and a blueprint for the future. It's also a hell of a fun, engaging listen, a record I'd recommend to pretty much any fan of any kind of "modern" jazz — it has just the right blend of old-school format and cutting-edge execution. I was happy to be able to share some thoughts on Far From Over via Rolling Stone.

I still have fond memories of witnessing Iyer, Lehman and Sorey's "robojazz fury" up close at a Fieldwork gig almost exactly eight years ago, as well as watching and listening as each of these three have branched out and bloomed (here's a best-of-2016 DFSBP roundup featuring some props for Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith's excellent A Cosmic Rhythm With Each Stroke; here's a 2012 TONY piece on Lehman's striking trio record Dialect Fluorescent; and here's TONY's best-of-2007 roundup, where both I and Steve Smith shouted out Sorey's spellbinding debut as a leader, that/not) into true leaders of the jazz vanguard

And I intend no slight to Graham Haynes, Mark Shim and Stephan Crump, the other musicians on Far From Over. Lehman's octet, Iyer's trio, Sorey's various bands, Fieldwork itself — all superb, but this Iyer group seems like something special and distinct; even, in the context of this music in my lifetime, historic. (I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we're in a kind of neo–Blue Note moment here; not in terms of a retro sound but in terms of a stunningly deep pool of players who are cross-pollinating in all kinds of fascinating ways, much as, say, Tony Williams, Jackie McLean, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Wayne Shorter et al. did back in the day.) Can't wait to hear where these musicians go, individually and as a collective.

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*See also Seth Colter Walls' typically sharp, detailed Pitchfork take.

American treasure: Jack DeJohnette's Made in Chicago and the AACM in the present tense

Photograph: Paul Natkin / ECM Records

Made in Chicago, a Jack DeJohnette album that came out on ECM earlier this year, is an important statement, easily one of the most striking jazz releases of 2015, almost by default. The mere facts of the album—a master drummer of the progressive mainstream reengages with his roots in the unparalleled experiments-in-sound collective the AACM, which turns 50 this year—make it special. And it's a damn good record, one I'm still digesting and savoring months after I first heard it.

But seeing the Made in Chicago group live, as I did Sunday at Cornell University, was a whole other experience. It's clear to me that since their 2013 debut gig, the Chicago Jazz Festival performance documented on the ECM album, this group has evolved from a project, an unusually well-plotted experiment, into an actual band, a collective of composers and improvisers committed to developing a shared language over time.

When an artist or group of artists gains a reputation for experimentalism, there's always a risk, from the perspective of audience or creator, that what once seemed radical can devolve into shtick. Somehow, that hasn't happened with the AACM representatives in Made in Chicago: saxophonists and multi-instrumentalists Roscoe Mitchell and Henry Threadgill, and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. (Incidentally, Mitchell turned 75 in August, Abrams 85 in September; Threadgill is 71.) Seeing these three together onstage was a profoundly intense experience, and not just because their respective sonic palettes can, at times, tend toward the extreme or confrontational. More what I mean is that all three seemed absolutely sharp, fully attuned to each passing moment.

Watching the show, I got the sense of being in some sort of temple or dojo—an extension of the project founded by Abrams and others back in 1965 as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, and documented and broadcast to the world on Mitchell's debut album, titled, simply and tellingly, Sound—where the practices of listening and responding in real time are sacred. I noticed the listening, the reception of sound—Threadgill, seated when not playing, zeroing in on Mitchell's solos, nodding in approval; Abrams, head bowed as if in prayer while bassist Larry Gray played an unaccompanied intro on arco cello—as much as its creation.

You felt, hearing this band play, the certainty and conviction of the original AACM mission, the self-belief that allowed these musicians to band together 50 years ago in the spirit of pursuing their individual and collective aesthetics, and then live their lives according to that belief. But the miracle is how good it all sounds today—how uncompromising, yes, but also how engaging, how human.

I felt, throughout the set, this strong feeling of pushing, of extremity, like the band was taking an idea into its collective vise and slowly, steadily squeezing and refining. This quality came through especially on a piece during which DeJohnette performed exclusively on an electronic drum pad that I'm pretty sure was a Wavedrum. During a solo intro, he struck the pad, producing echoing, marimba-like tones, and scraped his stick across the side as one would play a güiro. I remember the rest of the band slowly wading in with small, piquant textures—I believe Mitchell was on sopranino and Threadgill flute, with Abrams strumming the piano's strings by hand—so that the sound gradually fattened and amplified, eventually achieving an alarming density, with DeJohnette pounding mercilessly on the Wavedrum. The piece didn't develop so much as expand. It was one sound, one idea, that became a mini universe.

There was something especially driven and focused about that piece, but the whole set had this sort of staring-contest intensity, not hostile or off-putting, but simply extreme. The opening piece, which built off Gray's cello intro into a series of beautifully calm, refined statements, some solo and some overlapping, was extreme in its sparseness. The one that followed brought more of a familiar sort of free-jazz heat, with DeJohnette bashing out rubato time—his drum-hero bravado serving as a fascinating counterpoint to his bandmates' deep-seated strangeness—as Mitchell unleashed for the first time his trademark alien-speech circular breathing on alto. Here and elsewhere in the set, it was fascinating to compare Threadgill's approach—focused more on brief, choppy, gut-wrenchingly soulful phrases than a steady stream of sound—to Mitchell's. The two are just so fully themselves, as is Abrams, who executes the oddest, most ear-bending ideas, either skipping and stabbing his way across the piano or softly caressing the keys, with a palpable sense of loving care. The set ended with Mitchell's "Chant," the seesawing minimalist epic that leads off Made in Chicago—this was the only piece in the set that I'm sure appears on the album, but there may have been others—and came off as a lovably demented roof-raiser live.

The band played a quick encore, a loose, swinging freebop improv that was by far the closest thing to conventional jazz in the set. It was a powerful reminder of the deliberate nature of the whole Made in Chicago endeavor. These are master musicians who can play whatever they want. And time after time during this set, they chose to take it there, pushing, ratcheting up the intensity and the focus and the abstraction to borderline uncomfortable levels, avoiding the easy out. Working up at times to recognizable points of climax or cohesion, but sometimes just letting the sounds exist and hang in the air. There was no hand-holding of the audience, no explanation or disclaimer—DeJohnette didn't say a word to the crowd until he introduced the musicians at the end of the set—just sound and commitment.

Made in Chicago is a band very much still in progress, still finding out what it has to say. If they keep giving concerts as special, as fully realized, as the one I saw, they could become one of the key endeavors of the AACM as a whole, a living emblem of what this collective (not just Abrams, Mitchell and Threadgill, but also Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith, George Lewis and so many others), this American treasure, has meant and still means.

*****

Postscript (10/9/15): I realized after I wrote this post that it doesn't address the Made in Chicago endeavor in the larger context of Jack DeJohnette bandleading endeavors, which is an oversight. I don't know all of DeJohnette's work as a leader, but I love what I've heard of the bands known as Special Edition—particularly the late-’70s and early-’80s albums reissued in the 2013 ECM box and this excellent 1983 concert—and New Directions. Both of those groups are totally different from Made in Chicago, and from each other. Special Edition is, to me, the most compositionally driven of the three, featuring precise little-big-band-style arrangements that foreground Jack DeJohnette, the writer. New Directions, at least judging by the self-titled album linked above, is more of a "vibe" band—an atmospheric post-fusion trance-out project à la DeJohnette and John Abercrombie's earlier collaboration in Gateway. (Incidentally, that first New Directions album is magical and, like pretty much all of DeJohnette's work as a leader, bafflingly underrated.)

What Made in Chicago does share with New Directions is that focus on texture and interaction over composition. Both are players' bands. When you hear New Directions, you come away thinking more about Abercrombie and trumpeter Lester Bowie—interestingly, another AACM member—than DeJohnette, and the same is true as regards Abrams, Threadgill and Mitchell's roles in Made in Chicago. (MIC almost seems designed to spotlight these men's talents in the way that the Iverson/Heath/Street trio is built to showcase the drumming of Al "Tootie" Heath.") MIC is about Jack DeJohnette immersing (or perhaps re-immersing) in the AACM concept rather than employing AACM musicians in service of his own concept, and as I hope the above post indicates, both aesthetics are strengthened in the process. MIC is an exemplary, all-in collaboration among masters.

Just song: The Paul Motian Trio's "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago"

The past six months or so have been a time of change in my personal life. Positive change, in the long run, but not without its difficulties. The other day, a friend asked me whether I'd ever considered writing in detail about what I've been going through. My reply was, in so many words, "Maybe sometime, but not now." None of this is a secret—my amazingly supportive family and friends of course know what's up. But at this stage, there's no need for the details to be anything but private.

Still, to pretend that my life and my writing don't intersect, that one doesn't inform the other, whether I like it or not, is silly. And the same goes for my listening. During the past couple weeks, as a sort of sequel to my chronological Keith Jarrett ’67–’76 project, I've listened to little other than Paul Motian albums, specifically the first chunk of records he made as a leader, from his debut, Conception Vessel—recorded in ’72, while Motian was still a member of Jarrett's band—through 1987's One Time Out, the second LP by his famed trio with Joe Lovano and Bill Frisell, and the last Motian album on Soul Note before a long run on JMT / Winter and Winter. I've heard these records before, but I felt them more acutely this time around, and that probably has something to do with my emotional state.

In the second of the two Jarrett posts linked above, I wrote of Conception Vessel that it "…feels beautifully empty of compositional, directional content in the same way that [Jarrett's] Survivors' Suite feels so beautifully full." I've been thinking a lot about this idea of emptiness, or probably more accurately, simplicity, with respect to the Paul Motian bandleading concept. To listen to these early Motian records in sequence is fascinating. You can hear Motian trying out different approaches, from the moody, textural improv of Conception Vessel to the openhearted, melody-forward, almost psychedelic ’70s jazz of Tribute, and on to the sometimes placid, sometimes violent post-Ayler/Ornette saxophone-trio-isms (starring the great Charles Brackeen) of Dance and Le Voyage.

Then Bill Frisell comes along and alters the DNA of the Paul Motian sound. The intermittent turbulence and outright nastiness of the Brackeen years are still in evidence on the early quintet albums Motian made with Frisell (Psalm, The Story of Maryam and Jack of Clubs, recorded in ’81, ’83 and ’84, respectively), especially given that the guitarist was working with a seriously outré sonic palette back then, opting for sounds that sometimes come off as appealingly gnarly, sometimes as merely quirky and even a bit dated. But the romantic, atmospheric side of the Frisell sound was also blooming during these years, and bleeding together with Motian's own like-minded tendencies. The result was that when Motian scaled down the band to just himself, Frisell and Lovano for 1984's It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago, he hit upon a startlingly fresh concept. It's as though the quintet albums, good-to-great as they are, were a kind of training-wheels version of the trio to come, introducing the overall soundworld of the later band, but in a more conventional, less stark format.

To me, the Motian/Frisell/Lovano trio is one of the most, if not the most, emotionally resonant bands in all of jazz. At its best, this band strips away all the "head" elements of jazz, the detached, rote quality that the music can embody at its worst, and leaves only heart, feeling—sometimes warm and comforting; other times cold and forbidding—the nerve endings underneath the style, without the protective skin of genre.

In my current emotional state—hopeful, yet also vulnerable and reflective—this music feels like a balm. No other music, jazz or otherwise, will do, because no other music that I know has such a nakedness to it. It's pure affect, setting aside, or seeming to, technique and method and style and convention, and leaving only flow. "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago" is, to me, a kind of theme song for this trio. It's the first piece and the title track from their debut album, and in many ways, it's the purest distillation of what made them great.

The track feels holy to me, like a kind of communion with melody. There is nothing but the song, the chant, the murmur. Each player is dancing only with the music, never with "chops" or with technique. It's just a group mission, with the objective of "How can we get closer to the root?" The whole song is the root. There are solos, I guess, but there's really only one sound, and it's the sound of this swaying, haunting waltz, a tune that, once you've heard it, sounds like it's always been there.

Motian wrote many different types of pieces, and this trio with Frisell and Lovano performed them in many different ways. But the "ballads," if we can call them ballads, such as "It Should've…," are the ones that really hit home with me. "It Should've…" feels both minimal and infinite. I hear it and I start grasping for similes that imply both simplicity and great depth: like a smooth stone that you keep in your pocket and turn over and over in your palm, learning every contour; like a game that, as the saying goes, takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master.

These concepts speak to me right now, during a time when, partly by necessity and partly by choice, I'm paring down my life, devoting as much time and attention as possible to the people and pursuits I love—family, friends, drumming, listening, writing, reading. I guess I'm looking for mantras, and I'm finding them in the work of Paul Motian. I'm wary of projecting my experiences onto music, of regarding art in a utilitarian way—i.e., "What can this piece of music do for me, right now?" But sometimes your listening ventures beyond enjoyment and into a kind of sonic therapy. "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago" has become a kind of chant for me, a North Star, a way of centering.

I can't recommend It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago, the song and the album, highly enough. This trio made a ton of great music together, but there's something about the purity and perfection of this initial statement that really speaks to me. (Read Thom Jurek's take at AllMusic: "This set is made of the kind of music that made Manfred Eicher's ECM such a force to be reckoned with. It placed three musicians in a context that was comfortable enough to make them want to sing to one another.") As I've suggested above, Frisell's guitar language—see the ray-gun tone he employs on "Fiasco," for example—sometimes has a way of grounding an otherwise timeless-feeling album in its early-'80s era, but that's a minor quibble. "Conception Vessel," reprised from the album of the same name, is like a sculpture built from straw, focused and purposeful but also light and porous enough to blow away in the wind. The contrast with the wilder pieces is startling. On "Two Women from Padua," the trio plays a brief theme and then moves resolutely into the anti-gravity zone, speaking an alien language of texture and noise. All of a sudden, the music is the opposite of soothing—it's edgy and almost random-feeling. But Motian drops out and the surface of the sound smooths out; Lovano murmuring and praying through the horn, Frisell buffeting him with clouds of sound.

The band's intuitive motion into and around one another's sounds, the way each player always seemed to take into account not only the other two musicians, but also the immovable fact of the song they were playing, the bubble-thin delicacy of the vibe they were crafting together, only deepened over time. I'd love to embed the first "It Should've Happened…" here, but it's not streaming anywhere. Instead, I draw your attention to this 2005 Village Vanguard performance of the piece, 15 short minutes of bliss:



Watch Lovano lean back around the :30 mark. I relate to the feeling of communion his gesture expresses, the idea that a "jazz club" has become a kind of space station, a place where musicians and listeners alike take no sound for granted, where you don't move on to the next idea till you've fully processed the gravity of the one that came before. Minimalism seems like too pat a word for what Motian himself contributes here, the one-impossibly-profound-idea-at-a-time patience of his drumming. Again, the idea of paring down a performance till all that's left is the essence of the song, filling the room like a mist. Lovano begins to toy with the familiar theme around 3:30, emphasizing its dancing, almost klezmerish quality. Frisell chiming forth—accompanying but also enveloping. The performance is a slow group levitation, determined yet effortless. It's a sonic essay on the pleasures of concentration, of uncluttering. Lovano drops out around 6:30. Motian continuing unperturbed. Frisell intent on doing justice to the priceless vibe the three have built up. Not soloing; just flowing. I'm invoking concepts that seem cliché, but in practice, they don't come along all that often. This band, in its own muted way, exhibited a fierce dedication to this idea—you let the song guide you. Not "jazz," not "theory," not "convention." Just song.

When Lovano reenters to a scattering of applause, I'm reminded—as I am nearly every time I attend a jazz performance—of Keith Jarrett's admonition of the audience on the CD reissue of Fort Yawuh: "There's absolutely no need to clap." He's right, because in a great jazz performance, who's soloing doesn't matter. Yes, solos can be chapter markings, but this performance is all about three musicians who share a common goal simply passing the baton back and forth. Everyone's a steward of the song, so it doesn't matter who's in "front" at any given moment. Motian ratcheting up the groove and tension ever so slightly around 10:40, bringing the song to a low boil, this trio's version of a climax. The theme returning in fragmented form, then in full bloom. Motian's two-handed accents around 12:30 signifying a kind of destination: "We're here at the meat of song." And then the final statement around 13:00, followed by a long trail of, for lack of a better term, song dust—a dispersing of essence.

Attention and care and focus and oneness. Performances like this are like life rafts for me at this moment. Again, I'm not trying to dramatize recent events in my life, nor am I trying to co-opt sound for my own good. I'm just trying to point out how music can inspire and guide, offer a framework for living as much as a sound for hearing. To sing one's song so plainly, with such serenity and determination, seems like the right idea, right now.

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P.S. One more gorgeous version of this piece, a 1993 performance from the Motian album Trioism:

"…that revolution period": Keith Jarrett's anti-purism, 1967–’72

"We were in the midst of that revolution period, and I felt that we were defying the norms of the time. That means in all ways… If we wanted to swing, we could. If we didn’t, we didn’t. If the overall context demanded both, we could do that."—Keith Jarrett on his late-’60s/early-’70s trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, from a 2008 interview with Ted Panken

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 "It seemed to me with Keith it was more fun in a way. It was so open and so free that you could almost do whatever you wanted. It was almost like you didn't even care whether the audience was there or not, or whether they liked it or whether they didn't. It was quite different with Bill [Evans]… I think that was the influence of the times too, you know? I mean, playing with Bill there wasn't much rock and roll around, really. But playing with Keith, that was a whole different thing."—Paul Motian, from a 1996 interview with Chuck Braman

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I briefly mentioned the recent ECM archival release Hamburg ’72, a live recording of Keith Jarrett's trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian, in my 2014 jazz round-up. Since compiling that list, I've fallen down the rabbit hole with this album, and with the Jarrett/Haden/Motian records that led up to it: a series of LPs under Jarrett's name starting with 1967's Life Between the Exit Signs and including 1968's Somewhere Before, a trio of albums culled from various 1971 sessions—El Juicio (The Judgement), Birth and The Mourning of a Star, the first two of which feature Dewey Redman—and 1972's Expectations, a double album recorded before Hamburg ’72, but released after. The pre- and early history of Jarrett's great American Quartet, in other words.

This body of work fascinates me for a couple reasons.

1) You don't hear about it a lot. During the past few years, the American Quartet itself seems to have really gotten its due from Ethan Iverson and others—Iverson's interview with Jarrett, where the latter calls the Redman/Haden/Motian quartet "this absolutely raw commodity," is required reading for anyone interested in this band—but most of that praise tends to center on the group's later recordings, from 1973's Fort Yawuh on. For one thing, until recently, I didn't realize that the Jarrett/Haden/Motian trio had laid such extensive groundwork for the better-known quartet. (Just to make it clear, the Redman-less Hamburg ’72 dates from after Redman was already working with the band, at least on record; I'm not sure whether Dewey had played live with Jarrett by the summer of ’72 and just couldn't make that particular gig, or whether he had yet to make his onstage debut with the group.)

2) And here's where the above quotes come in, specifically Jarrett's "If we wanted to swing, we could / If we didn’t, we didn’t" credo, and Motian's "fun," "open" and "free" characterizations: There's something about the broadness of this band's aesthetic that, at this exact point in my listening life, appeals to me immensely.

More on that second point:

When I was first really getting my head around jazz, my primary reference point was Blue Note. I still consider the label's early-to-mid-’60s output to be my personal gold standard for what jazz can achieve. To me, the Blue Note aesthetic is inseparable from a certain kind of purity. Rudy Van Gelder's impeccably clean, vibrant recordings; the stark personnel listings on the back of each record, with each musician typically listed as playing a single instrument, the one he had mastered. Yes, you had your brilliant multi-instrumentalists such as Eric Dolphy and Sam Rivers in the mix, but mostly you had your one-ax champs, your Joe Hendersons and Lee Morgans and Jackie McLeans and Elvin Joneses and Larry Youngs and Bobby Hutchersons and Tony Williamses. No fucking around; no dabbling; these guys just played what they played. And even when the context is freer and more exploratory, such as on Williams's Life Time album, there's a certain kind of focus to these sessions that I found and still find immensely attractive.

It's hard to overstate just how greatly Jarrett's American Quartet, and the trio that preceded it, diverges from the purist Blue Note aesthetic. This is a band that throws that kind of focus out the window in favor of something more mongrel, more open-ended, more porous. You could invoke Motian's descriptor, "fun," here, but that seems to indicate some sort of value judgment. Better to just point out the American Quartet's wild stylistic swings, Jarrett's staunch commitment to multi-instrumentalism during these years, the random percussionists thrown into the mix, the hippie-ish insanity of it all, the overall, yes, raw-commodity-dom of the enterprise. It's such a blender of an aesthetic, and if you're going into the work of the American Quartet or the Jarrett/Haden/Motian trio expecting simple Blue Note–ism—three or four dudes playing one role apiece and just getting down to business—you're going to be extremely frustrated by this band.

To get into this music, you have to throw all those expectations out the window. No two pieces on Hamburg ’72, for instance, really sound anything like one another; as with the Quartet, there is no definitive performance by this trio—or rather the most un–"jazz combo"–ish performances could be considered just as definitive as the more straightforward ones where everyone plays their "proper" role. There's the polite, Bill Evans Trio–y "Rainbow"; "Everything That Lives Laments," a two-minute interlude from The Mourning of a Star that's expanded here into a near-ten-minute patchouli texture-quest with Jarrett spending a good deal of the running time on flute; the frantic, scampering, and, yes, suitably Ornette-ish "Piece for Ornette," a chance for all three musicians to really unleash, with Jarrett playing exclusively soprano sax; the super bluesy "Take Me Back," a gloriously infectious piece with a poppy turnaround that, like many of the great early-’70s Jarrett themes, reminds me a whole lot of the contemporary Steely Dan output (I highly recommend watching the video of this performance); and so forth.

That kind of variety was in evidence from the get-go. Life Between the Exit Signs, the recorded debut of the Jarrett/Haden/Motian team-up, is a fascinatingly eclectic piano-trio album that convincingly reconciles Bill Evans with Cecil Taylor and Paul Bley, and also advances its own unique concepts. (For example, I've never heard any other piano-trio piece that sounds anything like "Church Dreams.") It's also obvious, here and on the later Somewhere Before and The Mourning of a Star—both of which run the gamut from thorny free jazz to covers of songs by the likes of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell—that Jarrett was soaking up bandleading influences from his successive employers Charles Lloyd (note Keith's already-rampant multi-instrumentalism in this great extended performance—he's reaching inside the piano one minute, picking up the soprano sax the next; in this sense the American Quartet and the Jarrett/Haden/Motian trio are direct extensions of this Lloyd quartet) and Miles Davis, both of whom built their careers on the idea that populist and experimental impulses shouldn't have to be mutually exclusive, that a set of jazz can veer wildly between crowd-pleasing and self-indulgent modes. (For context, consider that Jarrett was a member of Lloyd's band when he recorded Life Between the Exit Signs and Somewhere Before, and a member of Davis's when he made Mourning, Birth—home of the outrageously funky "Mortgage on My Soul"—and El Juicio.) So you put all these influences together, the Lloyd and the Miles and the Evans and the Bley and the Dylan and the aforementioned Ornette, and it's only natural that you'd end up with an aesthetic as fun and free and borderless and anti-purist as the one documented on these releases.



If Hamburg ’72—and if you enjoy that release, you really want to hunt down the uncut bootleg version (see here, for example) of the same show, which contains about twice as much material—represents the live peak of the 1972 Keith Jarrett Experience, so to speak, Expectations, recorded two months before, represents the studio peak. In some ways, Expectations might be my single favorite Keith Jarrett album, at least of the ones I've explored so far. What this album does is take the eclecticism described above and turbocharges it, studio-izes it, adding extra strings, brass and guitar (on this album, the American Quartet is really a quintet, since guitarist Sam Brown is a full-on featured member of the core band). Expectations is the ultimate anti–Blue Note jazz album, a sprawling beast of a thing that explodes with poppy melody, gritty expressionism and just a general overflow of ideas. Nearly every track presents a different approach to the Jarrett aesthetic. You have your Steely Dan–meets-opening-credits-theme soul-pop groovers, such as "The Magician in You" and the aforementioned "Take Me Back." You have your shaggy, celebratory Ornette homages like "The Circular Letter (For J.K.)" and "Roussilion," the latter of which shows off just how deadly the American Quartet could sound when it stripped down to its "central" elements and simply burned. You have your 17-minute odyssey, "Nomads," which elongates and expands the "Take Me Back" aesthetic into a borderline psych-prog zone. And you have your orchestral, melody-drunk bliss-outs such as "Expectations" and closing track "There Is a Road (God's River)," the latter of which breaks out into a drummerless, down-home Jarrett/Haden/Brown jam that's one of the most outrageously joyful musical episodes I've ever heard, on a jazz record or otherwise.

Again, in setting Expectations and these other Jarrett records against the ’60s Blue Notes I learned to love as a younger listener, I'm not indicating some sort of hierarchy or value judgment. What I'm mainly trying to convey is how expansive jazz is, that it can contain all these different flavors of greatness. During my hard-core Blue Note years, I'm pretty sure I would've dismissed Hamburg ’72, Expectations and other Jarrett releases from this period as unfocused ("Put down that soprano sax, dammit!" "Why are you all playing steel drums?" "Give me some jazz, not vampy pop!"), maybe even pandering. Now, though, I'm in more of a tear-down-the-walls phase. I still want my music undiluted, but that's not the same as wanting it segregated, with the "straight-ahead" over here, the "free" over here, the soul off in one corner, the rock and pop in another. If it's all flooding over you in a single experience, if an artist wants to serve you sushi and rice and beans on the same plate, there's profundity in that, too.

Obviously, and especially in light of Jarrett's career trajectory, leading up to the seemingly more conservative Standards Trio (I say "seemingly" because I haven't yet delved deeply enough into this body of work to feel comfortable categorizing it, and I know that this group has ventured into plenty of experimental areas over the years), the eclecticism displayed on these ’67–’72 recordings was about capturing a moment in time, about, as Jarrett suggests in his invocation of "that revolution period" or Motian in his mention of "the influence of the times," taking the temperature both of the jazz scene and the music scene as a whole. Just like Miles, Jarrett was at this point both an insular and confident bandleader and one obsessed with currency. The result was a true Woodstockian jazz, born of and tied to its age. It wasn't better or worse than the classic Blue Note stuff; it was simply other. And right now I'm loving it both for what it is (wide-eyed, unfettered) and isn't (severe, walled-off from pop). Can't wait to really put the later American Quartet recordings under the magnifying glass and see how they fit into this whole, neverending discussion.

The Billy Hart Quartet: A portrait

Here's my new TONY profile of the Billy Hart Quartet, based on an interview with Hart and Ethan Iverson, conducted back in February at Birdland. The occasion is All Our Reasons, the long-awaited (by me, anyway) follow-up to 2006's Quartet.

Hopefully it's not too evident in the writing, but I struggled a bit with this piece, mainly because I had so much I wanted to do justice to in such a confined space, not to mention a ton of exposition, aimed at the jazz novice. I also had an insightful, wide-ranging joint interview to draw on. I hope the subjects will pardon me if, in the end, I used less of their verbatim thoughts than I'd expected to. As I was working, I realized I was after a portrait more than a photograph, a way to convey the special camaraderie shared by Billy Hart and Ethan Iverson (and by extension, Ben Street and Mark Turner).

I hope to see the band live next week at Birdland (they're there from Tuesday, 4/3 through Saturday, 4/7). I've got my fingers crossed for the more meditative material from All Our Reasons, e.g., the sprawling mood piece "Song for Balkis" and the superbly unflashy drum feature "Wasteland." Nothing against the upbeat stuff; it's just that, to my ears, the band's sweet spot is a dusky sound space, like the distant rumble of an oncoming storm.

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*Here's Ethan Iverson's interview with Billy Hart, which I mention in the piece.

*Here's a nice promo video dealing with the new record.

*Here's Nate Chinen's take on All Our Reasons. I'll heartily second "the dark shimmer of [Hart's] cymbals and the raspy catch of his snare."

*And here's a new Jazz Session interview with Mr. Hart. Haven't gotten a chance to take this one in yet, but I can't wait.

Feeling Fly

If you stripped the term "smooth jazz" of every single negative connotation, and then sought out the epitome of what those words actually mean, you might find yourself obsessing over Fly, as I currently am. If I'd have spent due time with this trio's 2009 release, Sky and Country, it probably would've placed a lot higher on my year-end jazz list. The album has mystified me over the past days: so wispy that it recedes into the background with even a moment's lapse of attention, but so sturdy and engaging if you can manage to focus.

Saxophonist Mark Turner's sublimated heat and drummer Jeff Ballard's exceedingly delicate yet hard-driving momentum. Bassist Larry Grenadier ruminating or holding it down. Compositions with thorough, convincing architecture. A lot of variety from piece to piece: backbeat, post–second-great-Miles-quintet freebop, hushed prayers, even a crazy drum 'n' bass styled thing. (All rendered on Sky and Country with inimitable ECM classiness: perfectly elegant.) It almost goes without saying, but this is a working band (and one that bills no player's name out front, which I love). This weekend they'll be working at Jazz Standard. Jim Macnie has some brief words of praise and a great video. David Adler wrote a nice profile for TONY last year. [After writing this, I discovered some strong recent live recordings on the Fly MySpace.]

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Also: Tonight, Hexa and The Octagon share a bill at Bruar Falls. Both bands feature good friends of mine and musical collaborators past and present. I'm biased but both also create outstanding modern guitar-pop music. The Octagon has a great new record out on Serious Business--you should definitely pick it up.

Also: Jean-Ralphio. I cannot stop watching this.

Also: Neglected to mention here that Roaratorio has an awesome new limited-edition Joe McPhee LP out with liner notes by me, sourced from this blog post. (The gig you hear on the record is the very same one I wrote about.)