New York, instrument: John Zorn at the Village Vanguard

John Zorn is at the Village Vanguard through Sunday. Last night I caught a pair of sets I've been looking forward to since the series was announced: the duo of Zorn and Milford Graves, augmented by special guest Steve Coleman, and the trio of Marc Ribot, Trevor Dunn and Tyshawn Sorey, playing material from the Asmodeus and Valentine's Day albums, with Zorn on live conduction.

Check out the samples from Asmodeus above, and you'll have an excellent idea of what the latter set sounded like. (G. Calvin Weston plays on that album, while Sorey is on Valentine's Day, but interestingly, the most compelling pieces from last night's set—such as the Sharrock-via-Hendrix stomper "Mufgar"—were from the former.) I have relatively little to say about this set, honestly, mainly because it was so much goddamn fun. The entire club—me and two of my best friends, those at all the tables visible around us and, crucially, the musicians onstage and especially Zorn—were beaming en masse, reveling in the vaguely transgressive thrill we were sharing. Ribot, Dunn and Sorey, who are, when they want to be, three of the straight-up nastiest musicians on the planet, simply, gloriously just kicking out the jams in a sort of acid-rock-meets-prog-punk-meets-screaming-cathartic-blues mode, and on the stage of the Village freakin' Vanguard, no less. Zorn offered plenty of on-the-fly instruction, orchestrating impromptu drop-outs and unison accents, stoking the flames of each musician in turn, but mainly what he offered was a platform for something this awesome to go down.

Zorn's core principle, as I understand it, can be reduced to some variant on "Music is community" or "Music is people." His greatest gift, in my eyes, is the way he locates the best musicians on the planet (which usually means in New York)—not just the chopsiest virtuosos, but the ones who shred with passion, fire and abandon, slams them together in dream-team assemblages, provides them with just enough compositional fuel that they can attain lift-off and simply gets out of the way. Yes, he was stageside last night, calling pieces and conducting, but mostly, he was sitting there grinning his ass off and rocking the fuck out, just like everyone else in the club. The thrills of primal, bashing jazz-rock, occasionally coming off the rails and zooming along in freeform tumult. It was such a basic concept, but the depth of heart and musical resources of the three musicians involved made it profound. Yes, Ribot, Dunn and Sorey were, in a certain sense, just jamming on some skeletal themes, but they poured so much love and aggression into the endeavor, returning the gift Zorn had given them by assembling them in the first place and giving them this material to work with. This was a high-order act of brain-frying. Someone should book this trio at a big rock club—would love to hear them that much louder.

There was noise and riot in the first set, as well, but that performance vibrated on a whole different wavelength, and I think that had a lot to do with the presence of Steve Coleman. Zorn and Graves have been working together as a duo for a long time, and they have a pretty well-established sound as a band of two. (Compare their first documented meeting, from 2003, with their 2013 Metropolitan Museum performance -- a trio with Jackson Pollock, in a sense.) Meditation, yes, but mixed in with plenty of catharsis in the classic free-jazz sense, with Graves providing the weather-event rumble and Zorn the jagged stabs of aural lightning. To my ears, the meditative element won out during last night's set. Zorn played his share of his patented aggro sandpaper, but he doled it out thoughtfully. For me, this set was about a special kind of unity, the two horns meshing in a snaking, interlocking dervish display, as Graves conjured rhythm, his patented primal shimmy, out of the earth.

The set had a nice arc to it. As I remember, the pieces went like this: full trio, Zorn/Graves duo, Coleman/Graves duo, brief Zorn/Coleman duo, full trio. Hearing the Coleman/Graves duo really drove home the contrast between the two horn players. Whereas Zorn's home base in these sorts of settings is an eruptive mode, Coleman seemed to hear in Graves's pulsations an invitation to control rather than release, an encouragement to find ecstasy in discipline, to craft and sustain a coherent soloistic line. When the three played together, the latter impulse often won out. Zorn and Coleman were two horns looking for one voice, darting, overlapping and at certain moments fusing, so that it was hard to tell their alto sounds apart. Both working admirably hard to, in some profound way, agree on the current they were following—striving for utmost harmony in every sense. To my ears, Graves was, this time around, homing in on the dance. It's always an element of his performance, but here, it seemed like the root of the whole endeavor. (Maybe it had something to do with the fact that before the show, he got stuck in traffic driving his drums from Jamaica, Queens to the Village—"You want to talk about avant-garde?" he said to the audience, playfully. "That was avant-garde"—and needed to counteract vehicular frustration with pure body-moving joy.)

At times, as during the Coleman duo, Graves would assume a more upright posture, with his back against the metal folding chair that he always uses as a drum throne, and fixate on simple right-hand motions that aimed for what my friend Will (an extraordinary drummer whose playing effortlessly connects the dots between Ed Blackwell and Clyde Stubblefield) referred to as the sweet spot of the floor tom, that zone that every drummer knows, where you strike and draw sound out of the three core elements of the instrument all at once: skin (the head), metal (the rim) and, through the percussive act, wood (the body). Milford Graves is the absolute unparalleled master of locating these sweet spots on his kit and using them to make the rhythm sing like a three-dimensional choir, pouring forth impossibly funky pulsations, not quite "in time" but always related to a certain groove imperative.

It made you want to dance and sing, and so the altos did. You heard the core strains of what these three players do—the Jewish music in Zorn's blood, the bebop in Coleman's, the Afro-Cuban root of the Graves endeavor—all swirled together in a kind of blurry oneness, a single stream, not barreling forth, but sort of riding a current. And while Graves was clearly the one directing that current—not just with the single-hand free funk described above, but with his full-kit massage/barrage, including moments where he held two sticks in the right hand so as to grab both the floor tom and a bongo nearby—no one was in charge here. At its best moments, this was a set that felt like a group submission, a burying of ego in the service of flow. You can talk it about it other ways, but to me, it sounded nakedly spiritual—a beautiful contrast to the heat and bombast of set two.

So music is community, music is people. And I'd add that music is event, the simple act of willing things to happen. I've had my reservations about John Zorn's work in the past, some published on this blog, but I've felt them melting away in recent years, from the 2013 Met takeover on. The bottom line is that, as the Met event demonstrated, and as the two sets I saw last night reaffirmed, this guy is an expert at making impossibly cool stuff happen. Free jazz and contemporary classical music at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Dirty punk fusion at the Village Vanguard? Yes, please. In a very real sense, John Zorn's instrument at this point in his career is New York City itself—its musical geniuses, its hallowed institutions. He's assembling world-class artists in any number of styles and presenting them in the way they ought to be presented: as cultural treasures, via events where you celebrate the artists, the spaces, the inimitable New York–iness of it all. These Zorn gatherings are, increasingly, real events, not just shows. He's changing the fabric of how we engage with art in NYC, and he has been for a long time, and that's a serious feat. (And not just through events he's directly involved in; his LES venue, The Stone, presents live music six nights a week.) And on a more immediate level, he's facilitating a very specific kind of fun—quintessentially abrasive perhaps, but also so inclusive. Anyone, not just a "free-jazz fan" or a "Zorn fan" could've checked out those sets last night and understood that something joyous and special was going on. Community, communication, communion—basic acts of bringing artists together and inviting audiences to join in. It's a profound cultural project, and based on last night's magic, boy, is it ever working.

The misery/mastery of Asphyx and other recent raves

A busy spell has kept me away from DFSBP for more than two weeks. Here's a top-heavy summary of what's been on my mind, musicwise.

Asphyx
In my Maryland Deathfest round-up, I mentioned some new friends my wife and I made that weekend, a metal-obsessed couple from Wisconsin. During the whirlwind "Dude, you need to check this out" discussions I had with H.S. (the male half of the pair) at MDF, he was more fired up about the Dutch outfit Asphyx than any other band he recommended. I'd heard samplings of their stuff in recent months—material from the new album, Deathhammer—but hadn't yet spent good time with any of their records. A few weeks after the fest, I received a package in the mail from H.S. containing a few old-fashioned mix CDs, one of which featured a whole bunch of Asphyx songs, including a few from their 1991 debut LP, The Rack. These tracks sent me into a delirious Asphyx obsession. I respectfully took temporary leave from the mixtapes and went burrowing into their discography, not coming up for air for something like two weeks.

While the early stuff hit me hard, it was the more recent material—Deathhammer, which came out this past February, and 2009's Death…the Brutal Way—that really ensnared me. As DFSBP readers may have noticed, old-school death metal—or more specifically, recent work by old-school death-metal bands such as Obituary, Cannibal Corpse and Immolation— has formed a major pillar of my listening over the past few years. A lot of what I've been craving this sort of gruesome primitiveness, expressed most purely in Obituary's work. It's an anti-evolutionary stance, a commitment to improving as a band without "progressing" in obvious, easily quantifiable ways. (I also touched on this in my recent Unsane review.) It has something to do with becoming more and more one's self as a band without messing with the core formula. Having stacked the old Asphyx records up against the new—and I'm specifically talking about the work they've done with their signature frontman Martin Van Drunen, i.e., two early-’90s LPs, and then these two latest ones, made after he rejoined the band in 2007—I can say that they are a perfect example of this. The latest Asphyx records sound a thousand times crisper and more hi-fi than the band's ’90s output, but they also have this unquantifiable x-factor that I also hear in recent Obituary. I can only describe it as the weight of years. Like Obituary, Asphyx thrives on the concept of anguish. The simulation of pain and suffering and ponderous psychic weight is their bread and butter. These new Asphyx records are among the most sheerly pained I've ever come across in the realm of death metal. Even at fast tempos, the band—and especially Van Drunen, who has one of the most genuinely dire, soul-vomiting deliveries I've heard coming from a death-metal frontman—sounds like its being driven against its will through frozen wastes, the music serving as a "Why have you forsaken me?" outcry.

The Asphyx songs that hit me the hardest were the slow ones, grim death marches like "Minefield" from Deathhammer. Like much of Asphyx's recent material, this song deals with a horrors-of-war theme. Martin Van Drunen (along with current Asphyx guitarist Paul Baayens) also plays in a World War II–themed metal band called Hail of Bullets, and he's funneled that same obsession into Asphyx. Here's a stream of "Minefield"—play it deafeningly loud, I implore you—and a sampling of lyrics:

Crawling through barbed wire
Into no-man's land
Soil soaked in blood
The crying of men
Terror unveiling
In between the lines
They scream mutilated
Detonating mines

You wouldn't think twice about lyrics like this if you read them out of context. I guess that's kind of a "Duh" observation, but I think it's worth pointing out. More than many bands I could name, in any genre, Asphyx is about raw sensation. Formally, i.e., when it comes to the on-paper aspects of what they do, they could not be more straightforward or potentially dismissable. They play some of the most easily pigeonhole-able death metal I know; basically they pick a tempo, either crawling or galloping (in the hardcore-derived sense—no blast beats here), and just let Van Drunen loose over it. But the sensation they give off, this feeling that you get from "Minefield," of trudging depression, of men being ground mercilessly into dust by their own savage impulses, of the cold unforgiving-ness of the universe, is the furthest thing from commonplace. In terms of pure feeling, I can think of very few metal bands that sock me in the gut the way Asphyx do. I love the minimal structures of their songs, the way they only shift gears when they really mean it. The first 2:20 of "Minefield" is straight crawling-on-hands-and-knees molasses doom, and then at that point, they switch into this woozy, lumbering shuffle groove. I can't get enough of this relentless drive, the way the band gradually flattens you with one texture till you absolutely can't take it anymore, and then switches to another and does the exact same thing. Death metal should feel like this: endless, vast, utterly miserable. You should want to tap out because it's so unrelenting. It should make you wince, as if against a biting wind, and Asphyx at their best have that effect on me. Crucially, they can also bring me to the verge of tears. Listen to the downshift back to trudging misery that happens at around 4:25 in "Minefield." Here Baayens blindsides you with an incredibly majestic lead, an Iommi-worthy elegy that lays aside brutality in favor of epic sadness. This is some funereal, bell-tolling, hand-of-doom shit here, people. It sounds to me like an epilogue to the gruesome war depicted in the main body of the song; you imagine a surviving soldier standing beside a mass grave as the rain drives down on him, realizing he's no better off than the ones who perished. (I should note here that Asphyx named their second LP Last One on Earth.)

If these sorts of sensations appeal to you—maybe "appeal" isn't the right word; it might be better to say, "If you feel the pull of this cold, dark, gritty art the way I do…"—I encourage you to check out Deathhammer in its entirety. The great thing about Asphyx is that they're not a one-note band; maybe a three-note band, but definitely not a one-note band. Aside from the molasses-paced, war-is-hell-and-so-is-life vibe they're working with on "Minefield," latter-day Asphyx has also been digging into this meta-metallic theme, i.e., the idea of actually pairing death metal with lyrics about death metal. It's an idea that's no so uncommon in, say, hip-hop, where part of the point is to rap about how good one is at, well, rapping. Asphyx does something very similar on their two latest albums. It's important to understand that the titles Death…the Brutal Way and Deathhammer refer not simply to dying, but rather to the craft of death metal itself.

Here's how drummer Bob Bagchus (the only remaining original member of the band) put it in a Decibel interview:

Decibel: What is the Deathhammer?
Bob Bagchus: Deathhammer represents the book of death metal. Our view on real death metal. It’s like the rules of what real death metal was supposed to be. Death metal was supposed to be hard, raw, dirty, creepy, dark and brutal to the bone. Music to be scared of. Just listen to bands like old Venom, Messiah, Slaughter, Hellhammer, Possessed, old Death, Autopsy, Necrophagia, early Mayhem, Necrovore, Incubus (Florida) etc., and you’ll know what we mean. During the last decade, it seems that death metal has turned into this hyper-blast technical nonsense bullshit that they dare to call “death metal.” In fact, it’s a contest of who can play the fastest bpm or riffs (sometimes 10 in 1 single song) and they seem to forget about the song itself. I mean, where’s the song? Where’s the catchiness and where is the atmosphere? Nowhere! And this is supposed to be death metal? It’s a joke! We say, “Go listen to Hellhammer’s Triumph of Death and discover what real death metal is!” So we thought that there should be a sort of guide book to remind those people of the essence of real death metal. We, of course, don’t want to be arrogant—hell no—but since death metal is in our hearts and souls, we hate to see it destroyed by those technical-bullshit-musically-graduated-soulless bands, pretending they know it all. Death metal comes from the heart, not from the mind.

As if the album's title track weren't already a perfect summation of these principles, dig how van Drunen growls, "This is some death metal, you bastards!" during the guitar break around :37:



The point that Bagchus makes above might seem like sort of an obvious one, but the truth is, it's an important gauntlet to lay down. Over the past 15 years or so, death metal really has bifurcated to an almost absurd degree. You've got this staunchly primitive, slither-through-the-muck-and-bang-your-fuckin'-head aesthetic that reemerged old-schoolers like Autopsy (and, I'd argue, Obituary, though I'm not sure whether or not they'd have a place in Bagchus's death-metal "guide book") and a bunch of neo-old-schoolers (I'm not knowledgeable enough about that movement to name names) champion, and then on the other hand, you've got this noodly, absurdly intricate technicality, as perfected by bands like Necrophagist. Now I absolutely love Necrophagist, and I also love Atheist and a ton of other bands that I'd place in that latter category, but listening to a super-techy but, to me, hard-to-really-love band like, say Origin, or a million faceless typewriter-blast-beat outfits, it's hard not to agree with Bagchus's polemic. Fortunately, this is music not war, and no one has to take sides. I'm sure that whenever the new Necrophagist album drops, I'll be happily indulging the side of my death-metal brain that can't get enough speed, precision and virtuosity, but lately, my compass has been pointing straight toward Aspyhx's shaggy, mud-smeared version of the truth.

P.S. I leave you with a a further illustration of Asphyx's lovably nerdy death-metal orthodoxy, a lyric excerpt from the title track to Death…the Brutal Way, which actually narrates the band's 2007 comeback gig at Germany's Party San festival. (Note that "Vermin" and "The Rack" are Asphyx song titles.)

Krushing at the Party San, hear the hordes rejoice
Filth to feed the Vermin, 'n beer to oil the voice
We'll beat your eardrums useless, and tie you on the Rack
Bones and nerves are grind to pulp, we are fucken back
Again we set the standards, get the message clear
Leave the fucken stage bitch, no room for you here
Mercy won't be given, as we enter our domain
Endlessly you'll suffer, on the altar of pain

Merchants of brutality, death our only rule
The doctrine of true metal, gods of the old school
Die by fucken Asphyx, ultra loud we slay
Skinned alive you humbly beg for death the brutal way!

/////

Other recent raves:

Marc Ribot Trio
I adored the Marc Ribot Trio set I saw at the Village Vanguard last Friday. Thank you to Nate Chinen (and to G.G., who dropped me a breathless 2am e-mail the next night) for encouraging me to attend.


Rush's Clockwork Angels
The new Rush album is outstanding. I will always be a Rush completist, but I've been mixed on their most recent studio output; I love 2002's Vapor Trails but I find 2007's Snakes & Arrows a little ponderous. This new one, though, is a straight killer: brisk, muscular, extremely varied and catchy across the board. It might be my favorite since 1993's Counterparts, which I consider to be the gold standard for their late-period sound. The title track is a standout, combining the Police-style pop-reggae lilt of their '80s work with the ass-kicking power-trio-ism they've excelled at since the late '70s:


Nick Sakes
This man needs no introduction 'round this parts. (If I'm wrong about that, go here.) Just this week, I discovered a guest-DJ segment that Nick did for WFMU back in March, via the Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine program. Go here to check out an extended on-air interview and various musical picks from one of my favorite living musicians. (The Sakes portion of the program begins a little over an hour into the stream; WFMU's pop-up player allows you to navigate there easily.)

News: Ween and Frank Ocean
Ween breaks up! Frank Ocean is gay! I've been a little dismayed lately by the sensational treatment of stories like these, especially since said instances concern artists that mean a lot to me.

In the case of Ween, I think it's best to exercise a little patience before we nail the coffin lid shut. The facts are simple: 1) Gene and Dean have been pursuing separate lives/careers for a while now—you know of Mickey's Guide Service, yes?—and Ween has really been more of a sporadic touring project over the last few years. 2) Gene has recently sobered up, not for the first time. He's got a cool new solo record out, and he probably just wants to put a little space between "Aaron Freeman" and the drug-fueled caricature that the Gene Ween persona has become in the minds of a lot of fans. 3) Both men have families, and Ween live shows are presumably their main respective sources of income. It makes a lot of sense to me that the project would be taking a little breather right this second (and even that the hiatus might hold for a few years), but the idea that Ween will never perform/record again seems a bit far-fetched to me. It sort of bugs me how people fall all over themselves to write these grandiose epitaphs in such circumstances. Aaron Freeman is a troubled guy who's obviously developed a bit of a love/hate relationship with the band that made him famous, but that has also been his personal undoing in many ways. So he has no plans to record or tour with Ween for the time being—so what? Let's give the man some space to come to terms with his demons. If in, say, five years, Freeman's solo career is thriving, Mickey is still out on his fishing boat full-time and there's been no further word about Ween qua Ween, then yeah, maybe we'll have a clear answer. Right now, at least as far as I—a serious Ween enthusiast and devoted fan—am concerned, this "break-up" is still a temporary hiatus.

In the case of Frank Ocean—who made my favorite album of 2011 and whose new one, Channel Orange, I can't wait to hear—why reduce such a beautiful and elliptical personal statement as this to a mere black & white revelation of sexual preference? The more important revelation is the continued intensity of this dude's self-inventory, and the fascinating methods through which he's seen fit to share that process with his ever-growing audience. I'm proud to be a Frank fan.

Mandance: Tarbaby at Undead Jazzfest

I spent the first couple hours of Undead Jazzfest 2011 channel-flipping. I took advantage of the staggered set times and jumped between venues to catch about 15 minutes of several different acts. I enjoyed watching Tyshawn Sorey deploy the gravity blast in his sparse, cryptic trio with Kris Davis and Ingrid Laubrock; hearing the often mercilessly abstract Nate Wooley play a straightforwardly beautiful solo with Harris Eisenstadt's Canada Day quintet; eavesdropping on Marc Ribot's ragged and poignant unaccompanied set. But then Tarbaby started playing and there was no need to think about OPTIONS, the blessing and the curse of the Jazzfest experience (whether Winter or Undead). I put the remote down.

I had heard this collective—pianist Orrin Evans, bassist Eric Revis (who sounded incredible alongside Peter Brötzmann at Vision Festival XVI) and drummer Nasheet Waits (for my money, one of the greatest living jazz drummers), augmented with various guests such as alto hero Oliver Lake, who fronted the group last night—on its 2010 sophomore album, The End of Fear. I'll admit to having initially been baffled by Tarbaby's conceptual/satirical slant (the record features a lot of overdubbed voices, speaking on the topic of jazz convention—and by extension, race— and creating a strange push-and-pull with the music); in short, it's the kind of record with a good deal of fuss and context, which tends to turn me off. As so often happens, I set the album aside intending to give it a second chance, but that chance never came about.

I can see now that no matter how good the record was, it wasn't going to prepare me for the shock (I think that's a fair word) of seeing Tarbaby live. The combined power of these musicians was damn near scary: I felt like I was watching Led Zeppelin, where every player can detonate on their own, but together they were simply volcanic.

The first piece built slowly, with Evans worrying an impish high-register phrase while the rhythm section got its bearings. Lake strode to the mic and began zipping off his trademark turbo-avant-bebop lines, and the music swelled. The band was like a tiny creature drawing air into its lungs and doubling in size with each breath, until—by the middle of this initial number—it was a writhing, hulking beast.

I wish I could put before you the loudness and the weight these four gave off during the course of the set. It's that creeping feeling of "Wow, these players are obviously playing at about 1/10 their full strength right now—if they let it entirely off the leash, we're going to be in some serious trouble." And soon, we were, and it was glorious. This was classic inside-outside jazz, sliding in and out of swing time, always inviting the turbulence while courting the form. And all four players projecting such mightiness, just at the border of macho and yet imbued with so much soul and wit and graciousness. Postbop, I guess I'd call it, though a particularly boisterous and totally un-arty strain of it.

I remember Evans's whirlwind piano flourishes, delivered with classic showman's flair, thundering-herd-of-elephants solos from Waits, Revis's cathartic shout in the middle of what I think was the piece "Brews" (the band quickly fell in line, punctuating the end of every phrase with a collective vocal outburst). Energy-wise, the performance reminded me of any number of free-jazz blowouts I've witnessed, but the crucial difference was that there was a SHAPE and an architecture at play. The quartet worked with relatively brief pieces, a repertoire it knew cold—mostly originals, I believe, in addition to an awesome version of "Awake Nu" from Don Cherry's Where Is Brooklyn?—and as it pushed and pulled and pummeled and caressed these compositions, you felt a guiding logic underneath. A point to it all.

As recently as last week, Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus reiterated that "The future of jazz lies in bands." Tarbaby is definitely, definitely what he meant, and I really hope they get their due soon (someone please book them for a week at a club!) because they are every bit as impressive as TBP, the Bandwagon (of which Waits is also a member) or any of the other more high-profile collectives. That irreverent energy that left me cold on my initial brush with The End of Fear, as though the band were sharing a joke I didn't get, made perfect sense live; it translated as a rare camaraderie. Not the annoying in-jokeyness ("See what I did there?") that sometimes haunts outside-the-box jazz, but a very genuine sense of play—playing with fire really.

It's quite possible that Tarbaby is the most virile jazz band on earth. Again, that flirting with machoness, that cutting-contest mentality, but instead of just stringing solos together, these men were building something, sharing in their own gloves-off kind of way. What a joy to see Oliver Lake, a man who will turn 70 next year, romping around alongside three considerably younger players (their median age is about 40), and there being no sense of tedious reverence for the old guy. Everyone was scrapping together, trading blows. It's enough to make you sad that some older players don't test their mettle against younger generations, and the same goes with younger players who don't get in the ring with older ones. I've definitely written this before (I remember singling out the example of Darius Jones, who was brave enough to tap Cooper-Moore and Bob Moses for his Aum Fidelity debut), but it's such a crucial thing in jazz. It's risky, sure—for the old as much as the young—and not everyone is ready for it. But Oliver Lake is currently playing at an astonishingly high level. Make no mistake, he is a living master, and since he gigs in New York all the time—he'll be back at Undead on Sunday with his Organ Quartet—you are remiss if you don't go check him out. If at all possible, check him out with Tarbaby.

I hope someone makes a live record of this band, or better yet a live DVD. I'm frantically wanting to demonstrate to my friends who weren't at last night's show how great they are. I know I'm going to go back to The End of Fear with fresh ears, but when you get down to it, Tarbaby exists in an undocumentable realm. Regarding it on record is like playing with an action figure of a T-Rex. This is the kind of sweet, jovial thunder that you have to hear in nature.

P.S. Hypocritical as it may seem, here's a Tarbaby + Lake live clip that gives you a little taste of the wildness.

P.P.S. Here's Tarbaby's self-titled 2009 debut (which I haven't heard yet) on CD Baby.

Figureheads, up close and consecutive: John Zorn and Wynton Marsalis

Two nights in a row, two evening-length performances by figureheads, not just of jazz but of The Culture. On Wednesday, I caught John Zorn's Masada Marathon at NYC Opera, a bonus track to his participation in the ongoing Monodramas presentation there; last night, just a few blocks south, I heard Wynton Marsalis present both a quintet and a septet at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Faced with such a seemingly stark duality, one is tempted to make grand pronouncements, to write a sweeping, op-ed type of thing, to choose a side. Better to talk specifics and let the conclusions flow as they may. Bottom line: I saw two very ambitious shows by two very hard-working musicians. There were pros and cons to both. There were clear points of parallel and divergence. Following are some observations, perhaps sprinkled with the occasional conclusion.

Zorn had his huge coterie with him, diversely skilled virtuosos from the community known as downtown, players who live at the intersection between Chops and Grit—in other words, pretty much exactly where you want to reside. Drummer Ches Smith, guitarist Marc Ribot (dear God—he was so loud and so mercilessly badass, wielding twang like a weapon), cellist Erik Friedlander (whose solo set was one of the night's triumphs), pianists Uri Caine, Jamie Saft (keyboard too) and Sylvie Courvoisier. These are the kind of players you would trust in pretty much any context.

It was a little frustrating, then, to hear them deployed for roughly four hours in the service of Zorn's Book of Angels oeuvre (a subset of his ongoing Masada endeavor), which seems to me like a willfully monotonous body of work. The story goes that Zorn wrote 316 pieces "in a flash of creativity during three months in late 2004." Hearing the music, it seems like "flash of productivity" would be more accurate. By Zorn's own admission, made during a mike break late in the Marathon, these compositions are skimpy by design, meant as improvisational fodder for his super-talented friends. So in practice, it's not that surprising that they can start to seem oppressive: dancing, klezmer-meets-exotica melodies, most laid over a sly bass vamp, with the occasional unison riff in five or seven. Zorn's decision to hammer on this aesthetic for a long period (both in real time—by my count, he's issued 17 Book of Angels records, spotlighting various ensembles, many of which played Wednesday's Marathon—and over the course of the concert) baffles me somewhat. During the event, I kept wondering: Why convene so many edgy masters, many of whom are great composers in their own right, and then straitjacket them within a fairly narrow soundworld? (Maybe a better approach would've been to let each band present a bit of its own music alongside their Zorn interpretations.) It's possible that the thought is to draw attention to the players precisely because of the samey-ness/mundane-ness of the material: "Watch these improvisational superheroes turn my humble lead into marvelous gold," or something like that.

Again, there was some fantastic playing. I loved the sultry, gently surreal spy-movie vibe of the Dreamers, as well as solo turns by Caine and Friedlander that were shocking in their command of dynamics and emotional contour. And the Electric Masada finale (with guest Mike Patton) was great, pyrotechnic fun. I left, though, really feeling the Marathon aspect of the whole thing—so saturated with that patented Masada vibe that I couldn't imagine wanting to see any of these bands again anytime soon. (To be fair, though, I did spend a good portion of yesterday spinning Book of Angels discs—the Marc Ribot/Trevor Dunn/G. Calvin Weston trio record Asmodeus is a monster and highly recommended for even the Masada-averse—so maybe this stuff is more infectious than I thought.) I remember feeling the exact same way when I heard various Masada projects at Symphony Space in June of 2000.

A Wynton Marsalis show at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Frederick P. Rose Hall is oppressive in its own, totally obvious ways of course. The "Jazz, America's classical music" trappings are thick and somewhat cloying—"Welcome to the House of Swing," said Marsalis as he stepped onstage in a natty suit—and there's an aggressive upscaleness to the whole experience that's illustrated concisely in the high ticket prices. But you know all of this already. You've probably already bitched about it without ever actually experiencing it, as—I'm somewhat ashamed to admit—I have. As with John Zorn, it's easy to think you "get" Wynton Marsalis. There's so much baggage, so much zeal both for and against these men, that you forget that they're simply musicians and composers. They're also showmen, of course, and community builders, and one-man scenes. But you can, in fact, go see them play music and just let that be the thing and not worry too much about the meaning of it all.

That is the experience I had at the Wynton show. Last night, he presented first his quintet, then his septet, separated by an intermission. This wasn't just a couple sets of jazz; this was a luxurious concert experience, and I mean luxurious there not in the cheesy, "America's classical music" sense, but in the sense that the music itself was rich and deeply satisfying. The quintet, built around the beyond-sturdy bass of Carlos Henriquez, was great, a showcase for the many faces of Marsalis's writing, from daredevil Latin jazz (I wish I could remember the name of this one tune they played that featured a frantically snaking line played by Marsalis and saxist Walter Blanding) to straightforward ballad poetry. In the latter vein, one piece was a sax-less quartet, and I swear, everyone should have the experience of hearing Wynton Marsalis play an unadorned ballad in Rose Hall. For a few minutes, the whole "luxury" angle made perfect sense; plush opulence was all you could think of, and it wasn't a base opulence but an entirely wholesome one. You felt spoiled.

If the quintet set was merely very good, the septet set was dazzling. I'm not sure that I've seen a more straightforwardly enjoyable presentation of music in the past few years—in the sense that I wished everyone I knew was there with me, from my discerning-jazz-connoisseur friends (one was with me, fortunately) to my largely jazz-oblivious family and jazz-appreciating-but-on-a-case-by-case-basis fiancée. Marsalis's septet clearly works on an Ellington model—you hear that right away in the plunger-muted brass and the shrewdly deployed soloists and rich themes. But from all the knocks against Marsalis, which you may have swallowed and even parroted without really knowing the deal, you think his work is going to be MERELY traditional, MERELY retro. This was an entire set of original music, and while it did feel "classic" in some sense, it was far more stimulating than the average set of straight-ahead, head-solos-head jazz you'd hear nightly in many local clubs. Each solo felt like an event, not a chore or a mere inevitability, because it had been properly set up by the compositional material around it. Trombonist Vincent Gardner, subbing for an on-tour Wycliffe Gordon, was a particular marvel, wielding the plunger in a way that can seem old-fashioned when you hear it on your scratchy vintage recordings but that feels totally vital up close. And the two saxophonists—Wessell Anderson and Victor Goines—sounded devastating dueting on the lovers' suite "'D' in the Key of 'F.'" All of these pieces radiated with the classic jazz push-and-pull: soloist vs. ensemble. The context kept changing, not in a rapid-fire way, but in a way that kept you engaged. At all times, there was a reason to keep paying attention, and not just to hear what hotshot lick would flow out next. I left feeling energized rather than exhausted, as I had after the Zorn affair.

I really don't want to make any grand pronouncements about the experience of seeing these two figures in their respective elements over consecutive nights, though it's hard, since they both seem to stand for so much jazz-world baggage. Googling their names, I found this piece: "There are currently two dominant schools in New York City’s jazz scene. Wynton Marsalis leads the Lincoln Center’s traditionalist school while John Zorn is the cover-boy for Downtown’s avant-garde movement." Conclusion: "Who would you rather follow? I lean towards Zorn since I partially agree with what one of my high profile teachers told me: 'Marsalis has set jazz back 100 years.'" Well, I guess that settles it!

In terms of the actual experience of checking out these shows, though, micro-observations abound. You can't help but be struck by the similarities between Zorn and Marsalis onstage: For one, both soak up as much attention when they're not playing as when they are, through their hyperbolic goading of their colleagues' improvisations. You can't help but feel that Zorn could learn something from Marsalis in terms of composition: focusing on writing a select amount of patient, deep, wholesome pieces rather than dashing off hundreds of stylistically constrained sketches. On the other hand, you can't help but feel that Marsalis could learn something from Zorn re: how to exist in the world of art: opening one's self to as many connections as possible (I think of Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, favored collaborators of late) and wielding one's influence as benevolently and expansively as possible. What I mean there is that while Zorn did admittedly confine his collaborators to the Masada oeuvre during this particular Marathon, for much of the year, he's practically a benefactor to not just these players, but a ton of other avant-garde-minded geniuses trying to find their way in the NYC scene. If he didn't play music at all, but simply ran the Tzadik label and the Stone club, he'd be a local and international hero. "Play my music on certain nights," he seems to say. "But every other night, do your own thing, and I'll support the hell out of you." Marsalis, on the other hand, seems to cloister his players up at Jazz at Lincoln Center. You don't see them really standing on their own two feet, outside of that context; when you hear their names, you think of Wynton. The same is not true of Zorn buddies like Marc Ribot. They may return to the hive when called, but they spend much of their working lives outside of it.

So maybe what I'm saying overall if you're speaking strictly on the "Who would I rather spend a lengthy evening listening to?" topic, Marsalis had the clear edge. But if you look outward re: "Whose musical empire is the saner, fairer, more benevolent and culturally nourishing one?" you have to hand it to Zorn. These figures are not in competition, of course, and as outspoken as each one is, I honestly don't think either one wants to stand for anything in particular aside from his own unique endeavors. They stand for things (uptown/downtown, tradition/iconoclasm) only because they've been extremely successful at those things, and thus they're convenient shorthand symbols. It's nice, though, to cut through the hype and the preconception and the rhetoric and just sit there in the theater and say, "What have you got for me?" I'm glad I live in a city where that's easily done.

P.S. My friend Joe, who also attended both concerts, makes a smart observation re: the Zorn show, i.e., that no one there was enjoying the music as much as he was. However hammy or hucksterish he can seem at times (to me, that is), his kid-in-a-candy-store glee is indeed endearing. You get a similar feeling from Wynton.