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Dan Smith Will Make You His Bitch Teach You Guitar - Davie Kaufmann takes a lesson with NYC's hardest-working flyer-poster.
(Yes it's old, but I only just stumbled on it now.)
UPDATE: Of course there is a Dan Smith Will Teach You blog.
UPDATE 2: The Boston Dan Smith is James Berry, although he has been known to kick it up a notch. I think someone needs to set these guys up in a guitar duel. Or possibly a flyering duel.
I am fairly confident that this is going to be all kinds of awesome:
At the Tea Lounge (837 Union St. in Park Slope) tomorrow (Friday) night. Admission by donation. Sets at 9 PM and 10:30 PM.
Listen -- I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Not all jazz musicians are as interested in indie rock as I am. I'm sorry. I know this must come as a terrible shock to you. I'll understand if you need a moment.
Feist's music isn't explicitly "jazzy" (except for the odd splash of fluegelhorn or Nina Simone reference) but she does make it easy for jazz musicians to love her. She's a ridiculously skilled singer with a sweet clear voice, colored with a tiny, heartbreaking rasp. Her delivery is almost unnervingly direct and personal, and her songwriting is tender, wistful, transparent, and unapologetically melodic. In fact, listening to the mellower tracks on The Reminder, it's sometimes a bit hard to hear the principled difference between Feist, whose hipster cred has remained intact despite the fact that you can buy her latest record in every Starbucks, and Norah Jones, who gets no love from the likes of Pitchfork or Stereogum.
Or at least, that's what I thought before I saw Feist live.
Having never seen Ms. Feist perform, I was honestly a bit skeptical that her songs would be able to carry a sold-out, thousands-strong outdoor throng. After all, as she told us from the stage, her first NYC hits were singer-songwriter gigs for a handful of people at The Living Room, and her solo records sound like they are geared towards the hushed intimacy of that kind of small venue. As it turns out, my lack of faith was wholly unwarranted -- Feist knows exactly how to command the attention of a huge crowd but still make you feel like she's singing for you and you alone.
Her punky roots showed in her fierce vocals on tunes like "My Moon My Man" and "Past In Present," both of which rocked way harder than the album versions. But she brought just as much emotional intensity to moody, spacious ballads like "The Water" -- which was so good it gave me goosebumps -- and countrified weepers like "In My Hands" (a cover of a tune by Sex Mob bassist and, ah, Norah Jones associate Tony Scherr).
For me, the best thing about Feist's songwriting is the seamless way she integrates her influences. I mean, you could pick it apart -- "Oh, here's a bit of folksy Canadiana via Joni Mitchell, mixed with a touch of electroclash on loan from Peaches, laced with some unabashedly retro Dusty Springfield/Burt Bacharach stylings" -- but you don't, because everything is so well integrated and so personal.
My only complaint, and it's a minor one, is that apart from drummer Jesse Baird (who was outstanding), the rest of her band didn't even seem to try to match her energy. Ultimately, it didn't matter much, since she was more than capable of carrying the show on their own, but I'd have liked to have seen the other guys step it up a bit.
Incidentally, one of those Feist-loving jazz musicians is Amy Cervini, who covers "Mushaboom" on her new release Famous Blue. Amy has graciously allowed me to share that track with readers of this blog, so here you go:
MP3: Amy Cervini Quartet - "Mushaboom" (click to listen/download)
This hit was the NYC debut (and, as far as I can tell, second-ever gig) for Feist's boyfriend Kevin Drew's post-Broken Social Scene solo project, "Spirit If." (Warning: audio launches instantly, and might be mildly NSFW if your W is really uptight.) The lineup is great and features Brendan Canning (bass) and Justin Peroff (drums) from BSS. They don't really sound very much like Broken Social Scene, though, even when they broke from Kevin's solo stuff and, uh, "covered" BSS tunes.
I worry Kevin is falling into the trap Calexico did with Garden Ruin -- he's trying very hard to do something different than what he's done before, which is commendable. Except that what he did before, with BBS, was distinctive and unusual and cool, and what he's doing now just sounds listless and generic. And also a bit sloppy... but like I said, I think it's only their second gig playing this stuff, so that's at least somewhat forgivable -- even if Kevin did need his bandmate to hold up the lyrics sheet for him at one point.
I wish I'd known that Grizzly Bear were starting so early -- I might have hustled to get there sooner. Doors were supposed to be at 6 PM, and G.B. must have started fairly close upon, because by the time I got to McCarren, they were almost finished. Their stage presence is unapologetically, endearingly dorky, and what little I heard of their set sounded fantastic.
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No thanks to our efforts at trying to locate each other in the crowd via a series of increasingly farcical text messages, my comrade-in-blog ACB and I finally met face-to-face at the very end of the show. It's somehow fitting that a jazz composer and an opera singer would find common ground at a Feist hit.
More pictures below the fold...
Continue reading "Feist, Kevin Drew, Grizzly Bear @ McCarren Park Pool" »
NYT (Ben Sisario)
Village Voice (Camille Dodaro)
Jen Carlson (Gothamist)
Brooklyn Vegan (w/MP3s from some of the classic CB's scene bands)
FreeIndie.com
I never met the dude, but Secret Society got our start at CB's, which I always felt was fitting.
Here's an excerpt from Hilly's online history of CBGB:
The beginning of what we now think of as CBGB came early on. I was on a ladder in front of the club fixing the awning in place, when I looked down to notice three scruffy dudes in torn jeans and T shirts looking up at me inquisitively.
"WHAT'S GOIN' ON?" or something of that nature, was the question they asked.
They were Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, and Richard Lloyd, three of the four members of the rock group "Television." A few days later, Terry Ork, Television's manager came around to try and get the band a gig at CBGB.
He was a pudgy little dynamo with a penchant for non-stop talking; energy and enthusiasm up to here. He believed Television was going to be the hottest new sound since John Cage first played his "clothes line."
Since at that time we weren't open on Sunday, I decided to give Television a try out, about three and a half weeks hence, on a Sunday.The admission was one dollar. ----It was not an impressive debut (at least not in my opinion). There were only a few paid customers and not too many more friends. They not only didn't pay admission but didn't have any money for drinks.
I thought the band was terrible; screechy, ear-splitting guitars and a jumble of sounds that "I just didn't get." I said, " NEVER AGAIN!!!" After much cajoling and haranguing, however, Terry Ork persuaded me to let them play again with another "hot' new rock group from Forest Hills, Queens. They were called "The Ramones." Terry said that the Ramones had a big following and the combination of the two bands will make a great show. I thought, "What the hell, what do we have to lose!!?....Ha!"
Well the anticipated night came, and there were not many more people than before.
As for the Ramones, they were even worse than Television. At that first gig at CBGB, they were the most untogether group I'd ever heard.
They kept starting and stopping-equipment breaking down- and yelling at each other. They were a mess.
Little did I suspect that both Television and the Ramones would eventually get it together and become two of the most important punk bands of the 70's.It taught me to be more forgiving in judging new bands, and to listen a little more closely. I think both the Ramones and Television teach a valuable lesson for aspiring artists. They were wonderfully talented, they believed in themselves, they had integrity, they were persistent, and they worked hard. The Ramones to this day have millions of fans all over the world and to many kids they are still the quintessential punk band. Television was an inspiration and a great influence on bands that came after. Rock critics today, still rate Television's debut album as one of the ten best albums of the 70's.
Since their inauspicious beginnings, both groups have played over a hundred sets each at CBGB.
UPDATE: Brooklyn Vegan has pictures of the impromptu shrine fans set up yesterday outside the skeletal remains of CB's.
One area in which my prior ports of call -- Vancouver, Montreal -- cut NYC is in the quality and quantity of free summertime outdoor jazz shows. Neither of the big NYC jazz fests (JVC and Vision) have much to offer in this area -- Vision has nothing, JVC co-sponsors a single performance in Prospect Park. This year Celebrate Brooklyn included a second jazz hit in addition to the JVC show. There was also a token jazz hit at Central Park Summerstage (Cassandra Wilson), one at River to River (Marc Ribot), and a smattering of smaller shows here and there. But there's nothing remotely on the scale of Vancouver or Montreal during jazz fest time, with multiple outdoor stages jam-packed with gigs over the course of several weeks. They are far from perfect -- the live sound is often a problem (especially in Montreal), and the quality is highly variable. But the sheer quantity of shows means that programmers are free to take some chances with the scheduling, so there's always at least a few gigs that are both (A) free, and (B) worth seeing.
(Full disclosure -- my quintet played one of these free outdoor hits at the Montreal fest back in 2000, and we had a great time, so I am probably more positively disposed to that festival than some.)
What NYC has is the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, now in its 15th year. But the "festival" is just a couple of days in late August -- Saturday in Harlem's Marcus Garvey Park, and Sunday the East Village's Tompkins Square Park. The headliners play on both days, which cuts down on the variety of the programming even further. And the sound, at least at Sunday at Tompkins Square, was notably atrocious.
On the other hand, one of the headliners was Chico Hamilton, who is just a few weeks away from his 86th birthday. So there's that.
The classic Gerry Mulligan-Chet Baker-Bob Whitlock-Chico Hamilton quartet is one of my all-time favorite small groups. Obviously, Gerry's writing and arranging are top-notch, and the lack of any chordal instrument was a bold choice at the time, but what I really love is how the group manages to pull off this incredibly casual, laid-back, distinctively West Coast vibe while still swinging incredibly hard -- they come across like a irredeemable stoner who somehow never lets the pot blunt his conversational wits.
Chico deserves an immense amount of credit for this. His drumming is ultra-minimal -- never showy or bombastic, but everything is in its right place, and played with impeccable finesse. It's a very old-school, practically pre-bop approach to drumming, where the timekeeping is the focus, and whenever he breaks the pattern for a punctuation, a fill, or a bit of comping, it really means something. And his relationship to the time is deep and personal in a way that has all but vanished, while remaining apparently effortless. Hearing him live for the first time was a revelation -- it's not just that his playing seems undiminished by age, it's like he's actually taking you back in time to show you how it's really done.
Not that Chico's an arch-traditionalist -- the sextet he brought to the parks this weekend includes Paul Ramsey on fretless electric bass, and Cary DeNigris on electric guitar. Like Max Roach, Chico is an inventive composer -- in fact, he honored his late friend with an apparently brand new mallets-driven original called "Just Play The Melody." But Chico's always been interested in moving the music forward -- one of his first projects as a leader was a quintet with a then-unprecedented instrumentation of flute, cello, guitar, bass, and drums. This was in 1955, mind you. Oh, and that guitar player? Jim Hall. A later incarnation of this group appeared (as themselves) in The Sweet Smell of Success -- one of the hippest onscreen jazz moments.
Chico has a great ear for talent -- in addition to Jim Hall, he also discovered Eric Dolphy, Charles Lloyd, Larry Coryell, and Thomas Chapin. He's also written a few film scores, including one for Polanki's Repulsion. The current sextet has great musicians and lots of evocative, cinematic tunes, contributed by leader and sidemen both -- check out the recent selections on Chico's MySpace page, especially the languid "Christina," which sounds like it's just begging for Calexico to cover it. And he plays with such irrepressible joy and such timeless elegance -- during an infectious shuffle called "Thunderwalk," a few young-at-heart old-timers got up to strut their stuff (see pics below). And, as Ben Ratliff pointed out in his review, this seemed to delight him to no end -- as he told the crowd afterwards: "People dancing! That's the best compliment you can get."
Here is a YouTube clip from the Chico Hamilton Quintet's 1958 appearance at Newport, featuring Eric Dolphy:
Yeah, that's right -- 1958.
Cassandra Wilson followed, a last-minute sub for an ailing Abbey Lincoln, using most of Abbey's rhythm section -- Jonathan Batiste on piano and Michael Bowie on bass, with the young phenom Marcus Gilmore on drums and Evan Schwam on tenor (borrowed from Chico's band). We were told Lincoln's no-show was due to the heat, though it wasn't actually that hot on Sunday. This week must have been unbelievably difficult for her, so here's hoping it's nothing serious.
I have to admit I haven't really followed Cassandra's post-Blue Light Till Dawn career, although I really admire her early work with Steve Coleman. But here she played the straight-up jazz diva, with loose renditions of well-worn tunes like "Caravan," "Blue Monk," and "Up Jumped Spring." She had trouble negotiating the bop blues "Now's The Time" and only really seemed to cut loose on a scorching "St. James Infirmary." The band had their moments, especially Batiste, but the horrendous live sound was particularly harsh on Michael Bowie's bass, and he never seemed to quite lock in with Gilmore. It felt like a jam session, which it basically was -- enjoyable enough, under the circumstances, but all these musicians are clearly capable of better things.
I missed Maurice Brown's opening set, but got there just in time to catch former Wynton Marsalis associate Todd Williams's quartet. I really honestly hate to go negative on this blog, but in this case I'm left with little choice -- their set was almost uniformly leaden, plodding, and ponderous. Pianist Eric Lewis had a few crowd-pleasing solos that left me totally cold -- he just seemed to move randomly from one flashy gimmick to another without any attempt to tell a coherent or convincing story. The leader's playing was flat and uninspired, as were his tunes. I found myself wishing the festival organizers had given this high-profile opportunity to a genuinely creative up-and-comer. It's not like they lack for choices. Maybe if they had more than a single weekend to work with, there would be more opportunity for creative programming and audience-building.
More pics below the fold...
If you've been reading this blog even semi-regularly, you know one of my persisent obsessions is "rhythmic authority," a term I stole from Ethan Iverson and have been plowing into the ground ever since. But it's an incredibly useful concept to refer to when talking about the disconnect that too often exists between even very highly skilled conservatory-trained musicians and, well... basically every other skilled musician on the planet. It's a disconnect that a lot of classical players do not perceive, partly because they have spent many years intensely focused on the development of a very sophisticated and deep emotional connection to pitch. But not only have many of them not invested the long hours of work required to develop an equally sophisticated emotional connection to rhythm, often they are not even aware that they don't have one, or that they might need one. They -- rightly -- consider themselves among the most highly-trained musicians in the world, so it can be very humbling to realize that they still have a lot to learn about something as fundamental as rhythm.
This disconnect leads to a lot of frustration when musicians from a nonclassical background try to collaborate with classical musicians, since the latter are not generally used to (and worse, do not generally respect) putting such a premium on rhythm. This is slowly changing, as the minimalist and post-minimalist works of the past 30 years are not playable by musicians who lack rhythmic authority. But, unsurprisingly, the slowest organism to adapt is the symphony orchestra.
I have to say, as a listener, I find this intensely frustrating. It's not just recent works that would benefit from being played by orchestras where everyone has solid time and can lock in together. There are lots of passages in the standard rep that would be greatly invigorated if orchestras and conductors made an investment in rhythmic authority. How great would it be to hear a rhythmically authoritative Rite? Or imagine if every orchestra played Bartók's rhythms as convincingly as the players in the Hungarian State Symphony.
But I have more or less given up attending orchestral performances, even though I love much of the repertoire -- partly because decent seats for the NY Phil are prohibitively expensive, but also because I find their lack of rhythmic authority kills the experience for me.
Some people don't believe it's even possible for a large orchestra to achieve the kind of rhythmic authority I'm talking about. Steve Reich gave up writing for orchestra in 1987 because he was convinced they were just fundamentally incapable of playing with the requisite rhythmic clarity. But it can be done -- watch:
That's the Simón Bolívar National Youth Orchestra, who are basically ambassadors for Venezuela's El Sistema, a national music program that for 30 years has been providing free instruments and music education to kids we've taken to euphemistically calling "at risk."
At just 12, Legner Lacosta was on the streets. Leaving school, his mother and stepbrothers, he started hanging out in Pinto Salinas, a notorious Caracas barrio where bullet-ridden shacks pile on top of each other in a ravine nestled beside the motorway.
By 13, Legner had a crack habit and a .38 calibre gun and a regular role as a drug-dealer and thief. "I got trapped by money," he says, "when I was high, I felt as if I were somewhere else; you clear everything out of your mind and start to invent your own world." By 15, the police caught and beat him, and he was sent to a young offenders' institute in Los Chorros, east Caracas, among 150 glue-sniffers and abandoned or abused children.
Forced to go cold turkey, Legner withdrew into himself. "I was bored and didn't want to do anything," he says. But one day, the Youth Orchestras Project turned up and he had his first meeting with a clarinet. "When the instruments arrived, the director told me there was a clarinet left. I didn't know what it was. I was fascinated when I saw it. He taught me the first four notes. I played those four notes all day."
By 17, Legner was back at the detention centre, but this time in a smart polo shirt and trendy thick-rimmed glasses, there to teach clarinet. "Music saved my life," he says. "It helped me let out a lot of the anger inside. If music had not arrived, I wouldn't be here today." He has now moved to Germany to continue his studies.
The conductor is the 26 year-old Gustavo Dudamel, himself a product of El Sistema. He made a big splash earlier in the year when he was appointed the next music director of the LA Phil, beginning in 2009. He and the Simón Bolivar NYO are currently all over the classical music blogosphere, with the general consensus being that they pwned every other orchestra at this year's Proms.
American orchestras, feeling the crunch of reduced ticket sales and an aging audience, have been wracking their brains trying to figure out how to turn things around, but many of the proposed changes are of the "rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic" variety. It seems to me that when you are getting your asses handed to you by a bunch of Venezuelan street kids, it's time for everyone involved to take a long hard look in the mirror. And then maybe reach for that tambor mina and start shedding.
Tomorrow night (Sunday, Aug. 25), Society co-conspirator André Canniere returns to the scene with a hit at Park Slope's Bar 4. Ignore the seriously appalling cocktail menu (nothing that combines flavored vodka, schnapps, and sour mix should ever be billed as a "Martini") and go for the music, which promises to be much more refreshing — Canniere's band for this hit includes his fellow co-conspirator Sam Sadigursky (reeds), Ryan Ferreira (guitar), Ike Sturm (bass), and Tommy Crane (drums).
Last year, I posted an MP3 from Canniere's debut recording, As Of Yet, and it is still available for your listening pleasure.
7:00 PM hit. Suggested donation — $5.
I haven't blogged on the conviction Thursday in Jose Padilla show-trial, because the whole thing is just too depressing. Almost 60 years after Project MKULTRA was launched, the US government is still inflicting Manchurian Candidate-style psychological violence on US citizens. The "enhanced interrogation techniques" they used are not designed to extract useful information from you. Instead, they are absolutely guaranteed to destroy your mind, just as surely as if they had lobotomized you.
There's a word for this -- it's called "menticide."
Drummers aren't supposed to be intellectuals. The instrument is so direct and intense that it purportedly attracts only your more, ah... physical types. We all know the jokes — Q. How can you tell if the stage is level? A. The drummer is drooling out of both sides of his mouth. And so on.
Max Roach was an intellectual — the best kind of intellectual. He was constantly pushing against the boundaries of what was expected of him as a drummer, as a jazz musician, as an African-American artist. He started his career by creating the template for modern jazz drumming, taking Kenny Clarke's proto-bebop style and making it more conversational and interactive. His playing propelled Bird and Diz to new heights -- their best moments all came with Max behind the kit. He was just as concerned about color and timbre as he was about timekeeping, and his playing is shot through with intricate details and subtle shadings. He is legendary for coming up with truly oddball choices and making them work, somehow. (See Ethan's post for a few great examples of this.) His solos are models of rigorous, methodical development.
Like Blakey, in 1954 he co-founded a canonical hard bop band, and like Blakey, he eventually assumed sole leadership of the group. Unlike Blakey, though, Max contributed original compositions to the band. In fact, even while he was one of the busiest drummers in jazz, he had also been enrolled as a composition major at the Manhattan School of Music. (He graduated in 1952.)
At a time where virtually no one played tunes in 3/4, Max released an entire record of them. Then he went on to prove he could play just as effortlessly in 5/4 and 7/4, both in his own groups and alongside the young firebrand Booker Little.
In 1958, he played (beautifully) on Sonny Rollins's Freedom Suite. The record doesn't sound angry or solemn or even overtly political — it's classic Sonny, ebullient and witty. I mean, Side B opens with a Noel Coward tune, and the 19-minute title track is vibrant, tuneful, singsong-y. But because the sleeve included a brief authorial note from Sonny, which shockingly observed that "America is deeply rooted in Negro culture," the record was quickly pulled, stripped of its original liner notes, and reissued as Shadow Waltz.
Two years later, Max came out with a blisteringly explicit political statement of his own, consisting entirely of his original compositions. The title literally shouts in your face — WE INSIST! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite. It's possibly the only jazz record to open with a song that begins with a slave getting raped. The vocals are by Max's wife-to-be, Abbey Lincoln, who on the vocal-drum duet "Triptych (Prayer, Protest, Peace)," combines some of the most beautifully poignant singing you've ever heard with full-throttle screaming that makes Yamatsuka Eye sound like a piker. And it closes with the haunting "Tears for Johannesburg," decades before the horrors of South African apartheid were anywhere close to being on white America's radar -- after all, we had only just barely begun to acknowledge our homegrown apartheid. The Freedom Now Suite is among of the most powerful, innovative, and artistically coherent political works ever — in any genre, in any artform. (You can listen to the second cut, "Freedom Day," over at Destination Out.)
In 1962, he released another record of original compositions, It's Time, augmenting his sextet with a 16-piece choir. He also thought it might be fun to play on one of the most kickass piano trio records ever.
In 1970, he enlisted some of the best jazz drummers around to start his own all-percussion ensemble, M'Boom, presaging Steve Reich's Drumming by a year. Joe Chambers recalls:
[A]lthough I had been playing piano, I really didn’t ever think of playing the mallets until [Max] called me and the rest of the [M'Boom] members in 1970 — it was 1970, in the summer of ‘70 — with the idea to this and I remember I said that I was very excited to get the call and I said “Damn! What are we going to do? Have six guys on a drums set?” (laughs) Max said “No, no, no. We’re going to play percussion.” So we had to learn all of this. That’s when I really got into this.
He built on his M'Boom experience to create solo percussion concerts. And in 1979, up at Columbia, he played a legendary duo concert with Cecil Taylor, having absorbed enough of Cecil's language to meet him on his own terms. But by exerting his own gravitational force, Max was able to eventually draw Cecil into his orbit.
In the 1980s, he began writing music for the stage, and for dance companies -- Bill T. Jones, Alvin Ailey, and others. He augmented his working quartet with the Uptown String Quartet, led by his daughter Maxine -- this was the first string quartet with the rhythmic authority to play jazz convincingly. And in 1983, just in case anyone needed any further evidence that Max Roach didn't give a damn what the retrograde forces in jazz thought, he played a hit at The Kitchen with Fab Five Freddy.
Here is a video that includes footage of some of these late-career creative highlights, along with terrific commentary from Max:
Many of the obits so far have focused on Max Roach's well-deserved place in the pantheon of the greatest drummers of all time. There is no question that he deserves every last one of those accolades. Hell, he deserves them for the first five years of his career alone. But Max Roach was so much more than "just" a brilliant, innovative, prolific, sensitive, massively influential, swing-your-ass-off jazz drummer. He was an artist — a great one, and, paradoxically, an underrated one, despite all the accolades. His most personal and creative works aren't widely known, even amongst jazz musicians and aficionados.
It would have been easy for him to rest on his laurels, but Max lived a life of constant artistic renewal. He always kept his ears open to what was going on in the jazz scene, and in the culture at large. He found a way to let the fight for civil rights and social justice enrich his music and broaden, not limit, its scope. He idolized older players, especially Papa Jo Jones, but he never let his love for the past constrain his vision of the future. His career spanned almost 70 years, and every single one of them was spent setting new challenges for himself — as a player, as a composer, as an artist.
I can't think of anyone who exemplifies what I personally love about music better than Max Roach. I never met him, but I will miss him dearly.
Via Steve Smith and David Ryshpan.
What I was listening to when I found out.
More later.
UPDATE 1:
Who Walk In Brooklyn. (Max was a Brooklyn kid -- he grew up in Bed-Stuy.)
3 Quarks Daily — Robin Varghese.
There was a semester in the late 1980s at UMass, where both Roach and Shepp taught, during which they would have weekly afternoon sessions in the Hatch, one the university bars. There was never really more than 8 of us in the audience. The happy hour beers were $1.50 or so. A half a dozen private concerts by Roach and Shepp--my introduction to jazz. Enviable, no?
UPDATE 2:
SpiderMonkey Stories — Taylor Ho Bynum.
But as amazing as he was as a drummer, we must be sure to celebrate him as far more than simply a master instrumentalist. (Though for that alone, he earned immortality.) As I got to learn more about his career, and heard more from other musicians who were friends and collaborators of his, like Braxton or Cecil Bridgewater or Warren Smith, I saw what a profoundly innovative and truly revolutionary artist he was. He refused to accept the boundaries imposed upon him by others, be it race or genre or discipline; he exploded definitions while creating art that was relevant, vibrant, and always searching.
Soho the Dog — Matthew Guerrieri.
It's probably not an exaggeration to say that Roach changed drumming the way Liszt changed piano playing.
Via Phil Freeman (Running The Voodoo Down), this classic clip:
Howard Mandel (Jazz Beyond Jazz) has an interview with Max (drawn from his upcoming book), and some thoughts of his own.
Chicago Tribune — Larry McShane.
His place in the pantheon of jazz greats long since secured, Roach collaborated with drummers from around the world, with a string quartet that featured daughter Maxine, and with rapper Fab Five Freddy.
"I try to show my students the correlation between hip-hop and Louis Armstrong," he once said. "That's how well-rooted hip-hop is, coming out of an environment where people were denied any kind of cultural enrichment."
But maybe that appellation "old guard" didn't really suit Roach, a rebel who never stopped challenging the formal boundaries of jazz. Forget what I wrote a couple paragraphs ago; Max Roach never grew old.
This only scratches the surface — for more, try this Google Blog Search and Google News Search. There are many more great clips on YouTube.
I'll have my own remembrance up once I get the chance to collect my thoughts.
UPDATE 3:
The winner, Carl Payne, a gripman who over the years won the contest ten times, showed up one afternoon at Keystone Korner with a cable car bell mounted on a frame. Roach was waiting at his drum set. Mr. Payne could meter on that cumbersome brass bell. He invented patterns that stimulated Max and the two spent a half hour or so playing for, to and with one another. I have never heard anything quite like it -- Max Roach trading fours with a cable car gripman. It made a good story on that evening's six o'clock newscast, and a memory that has stayed with me for a quarter of a century.
Many obits will stick to those historic moments and they are indeed impressive. But Max Roach never rested on his laurels. Like few others, he spanned jazz history from bebop to the furthest reaches of the avant garde. And unlike many of his peers, Roach restlessly sought to play in different contexts and embrace new musical modes. He embodied the idea that music was one great continuum and shredded the received notion the avant and the tradition were somehow at odds.
UPDATE FOUR:
Ethan Iverson — Do The Math. (Be sure to check out the audio clips.)
The 1953 records of "Confirmation" and "Chi-Chi" with Al Haig and Percy Heath feature the highest-level ensemble playing recorded in a studio with Parker. If Percy and Max showed up anywhere in the world right now playing just how they played for Bird in 1953 they could take anybody's gig. (This is not true of the performances of the bass and drums on most classic bebop.)
UPDATE FIVE:
Me.
UPDATE SIX:
The tributes keep pouring in:
NPR's Morning Edition. (With links to his appearances on Jazz Profiles and Piano Jazz.)
Ben Ratliff (NYT) has a selected discography, with commentary. Unfortunately, he lists nothing from between 1962 and 1989. Many of these recordings are unfortunately out of print (including the double quartet dates), but you can get the first (self-titled) M'Boom record, Birth and Rebirth (duets with Braxton), and In The Light (with his 80's quartet) from iTunes.
Kris Tiner — Stop the Play and Watch the Audience.
If only so many of those who will be lauding Roach from the lofty edifice of jazz education would recognize that he didn't just help to create a style, but that he continued to push the music, and continued to recognize and support others who were pushing the music, far past the crystallization point of bebop in the 1950s.
Andrew Durkin — Jazz: The Music of Unemployment.
We all mourn in our own way, of course; what's "appropriate" is what feels right. As for me, I choose the celebratory mode, both in pondering Max's life and the "state of jazz." For one thing, Max's contribution to music (indeed, to art) was not limited to something finite, like the elements of a style (he swung in such and such a way, he pioneered the use of this piece of the kit, etc.). Those things are of course important, but like Ellington, Zappa, Mingus, Monk, and umpteen other heroes of mine, Max left behind what Joseph Conrad called a "how to be": in this case, a philosophy of artistic survival, vitality, and growth (one of the elements of which was a sense that art is socially important -- imagine that!).
Dave Rawkblog — The Rawking Refuses To Stop! gives it up for Money Jungle.
[T]his is not an Ellington album any more than it is a Roach album or a Mingus album. Everyone deserves top billing here, and they certainly earn it: take the title track, where Mingus goes nuts with desperate high-fret machine-gunning before slipping back to the lower register and letting Roach take center stage.
"Hip-Hop is complete theater," Roach told the Los Angeles Times in 1991. "These kids don't have rhetoric courses, so they've created their own script in rhyme--it's verbal improvisation. They don't have formal musical training, so they make music from the tones and rhythms of human speech--they'll sample Malcolm X saying, 'Too black, too strong.' They've even created their own instrument--the turntable. They have nothing but the inclination to be involved. And like Louis Armstrong, out of nothing they create something."
The jazz world today–like the world of constitutional interpretation–is lousy with neocons seeking to etch the old verities in stone, protecting them from heretical impurity. But for Roach jazz was a living art form and the spirit of jazz WAS the spirit of innovation, that’s why, in his teens he could play with Duke Ellington and in his 60s he could play with Fab Five Freddy. There’s no doubt that Roach’s legacy as a drummer is secure. But I suspect that for Roach, a man who was both musician and educator, his lessons of innovation and imagination would be just as important.
Kenneth Woods — A View From The Podium.
He was a virtuoso in the best sense of the word, but also a poet- no drummer ever had a sweeter touch or a more effortless sense of swing. Jazz fans like to talk about how hard a drummer swings, but with Max Roach it never sounded hard, but cool and electric.
On a personal level, he was a key figure in opening my eyes and ears to jazz in particular and a wider range of musical possibility in general. In high school, when I was still at the stage where Neal Peart seemed like the pinnacle of percussion prowess, Roach gave a clinic that I attended. I was completely awed by what he could accomplish with nothing more than a high-hat.
Max Roach was born in New Land, N.C., on Jan. 10, 1924. His family moved four years later to a Brooklyn apartment, where a player piano left by the previous tenants gave Roach his musical introduction. Using player piano rolls of Jelly Roll Morton and Albert Ammons, Roach played along by putting his fingers on the keys and pedals as they rose and fell.
UPDATE 7:
There are far too many wonderful tributes coming in from all corners of blogdonia for me to keep up with -- remember, Google Blog Search is your friend. (And if you have authored something good that I missed, don't be shy about letting people know about it in the comments.)
Here are just a few more:
I listened to Steve Lacy, Peter Brötzmann, and a couple others, but generally thought jazz was dead. Then there was a piece on the radio in that winter landscape that truly stunned me. It turned out to be a recent piece by Max Roach from 1991. Just a few years ago I came across a journal entry I had made later that day. It was one sentence written to myself in bold letters, as if an epiphanic answer to some torturous metaphysical conundrum, that read: "More Max Roach!"
Howie Klein — Crooks and Liars.
Doug Shulkind's Give the Drummer Some broadcast on WFMU.
And here is information about the memorial at Riverside Church:
A public viewing will be held at Riverside Church for jazz great Max Roach, who died of complications of dementia/Alzheimer's Disease at 12:45 a.m. Thursday in New York at the age of 83. His daughters Maxine and Dara were at his bedside, according to family spokesperson, Terrie M. Williams.
Roach's public viewing will be held on Friday, August 24 at Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive in Manhattan from 9:00 A.M. to 10:30 A.M. with a funeral service from 11:00 A.M. to 1 P.M. The legendary drummer will be buried in a private ceremony at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.
Born on January 10, 1924 in Newland, North Carolina -- which he always referred to as "the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina" -- Roach is survived by his five children Daryl Roach, Maxine Roach, Raoul Roach, Ayo Roach and Dara Roach.
The family issued a statement: "We are deeply saddened by his passing, yet heartened and thankful for the many blessings and condolences we have received during as we grieve. As a musician, educator and social activist, are fortunate to share his life and his legacy with the world."
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be sent to Alzheimer's Association, 225 N. Michigan Ave., Fl. 17, Chicago, Ill. 60601- 7633, http://www.alz.org/.
It's been far too long since the last blogroll refresh, but that's nothing new. But hey, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you, right?
Rather than my usual M.O. of laying one long linkdump on you, I'm going to serve these up one by one over the course of the next few days.
It was only a matter of time, right? One of jazz's most original thinkers has jumped into the blogoswamp. The format so far is mostly Q&A, and Steve's not afraid to go long and technical. The blog only launched a couple of weeks ago, and there are only four posts up so far, but there is already an almost overwhelming density of information. I actually kind of wish he'd make it more blog-like and digestible by divvying things up into shorter individual posts, but there's no doubt this blog is shaping up to be one hell of a resource.
Here are just a few things worth mulling over. (I definitely don't agree with all of this!)
I have spent most of my career concentrating more on the rhythm/pitch/form aspects of music versus timbral considerations. I have certainly not ignored timbre, but I have not really delved into a systematized study of it either. And the musicians that I favor tend to be those that have highly developed and specific rhythmic and tonality languages. With these musicians I feel that the timbral elements are aids for expressing the sophisticated rhythmelodies. Of course there would be those who completely disagree with me and that is why their music would tend to run in directions that stress timbral qualities. For myself I prefer a more subtle expression of timbre.
I feel strongly that the younger generation that is involved in creative music today are foregoing the detailed rhythmic and melodic developments demonstrated by the older masters (which take an incredible amount of concentration to develop) in favor of more ‘effects’. These trends tend to pendulum back and forth, as each generation reacts to the excesses of the previous generation by moving in the opposite direction.
In all of my teaching one of the main things I notice is that young people (who make up most of the class when you are teaching) tend to rush when playing music. Young people have less patience, and the tendency to want to push the beat is greater. So you have to make a conscious effort to relax and lay back. This tendency is counteracted in some cultures, especially in the African Diaspora. This may be because initially in these cultures it is frequent for much older people to play alongside younger people and the ‘way’ of playing may more easily be transferred to the younger musicians, but I’m just speculating here. My own experience is that I picked this up from playing with much older musicians. I remember when I first joined the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra that I was always ahead of Thad in terms of where I felt the time (this was true when I played alongside Von Freeman also), so I had to consciously slow down – and after some time this became a habit.
You know, what really clarified things for me was when I got some kind of handle on ‘what am I trying to say with my music’. In other words it is one thing to play music with emotional feeling and expressiveness. It is quite another to try to express very specific ideas through your music. All humans are born with emotion as a basic language, even babies have this, for the most part it is the only language we possess initially. But there is more to us than emotion, feeling and emotion are not the same thing. Feeling actually encompasses emotion but other forms of sensation as well, physical and mental sensation and impressions and even spiritual sensations and impressions.
Julie has been cutting my hair since I moved to Brooklyn four years ago. I walked into the Beehive Salon because it was across the street from Gimme Coffee, and Julie happened to have a break in her schedule. She's not just an awesome stylist, she is an incredibly smart and interesting person and we totally hit it off. My hair in its natural state is a primeval tangle of weeds, so anytime I find someone who can carve it into shape and carry on a decent conversation, I hold fast.
A few months ago, Julie left the Beehive. My initial efforts to determine where she'd gone went nowhere. It was obvious the receptionist had been instructed to lie to me: "We don't know where she's gone." They have apparently also been telling the more persistent callers that "She's moved away" or "She's not cutting hair anymore. " I looked around on Craig's List for news but couldn't find anything. It didn't help that I never learned her last name.
Finally, with my hair now intolerably out of control, I stumbled on this comment on CitySearch, and the mystery was revealed -- Julie (formerly of the Beehive Salon) is now cutting hair at Deluxe on North 4th Street in Williamsburg. (Also, it turns out her last name is "Heggelke.") I went in today and and confirmed this info myself, and now my chia head has been tamed.
Why am I telling you all this? Well, it's like I said -- Julie's a friend and I don't think her former employers have done right by her. She shouldn't have to start over again from zero. And since this blog's Google page rank is not too shabby, I'm hoping that if I post the info about her current whereabouts here, more of her former regulars will be able to find out where she's gone. And, you know, it's not clear to me what the point of having your own blog is if you can't occasionally usurp it to give your friends a hand.
I don't really buy the hook of this Martin Johnson piece in New York magazine -- is there really anything distinctively "non-Trane" about these four guys? And conservatories are responsible for making players less slavishly reliant on Coltrane-isms? Really?
That said, it's nice to see great players like Bill McHenry and Joel Frahm get some props in a magazine that doesn't normally have a lot of time for jazz. I'm not as familiar with the other players profiled -- Ned Goold and Chris Byars, although evidently Ned has a blog.
Here's a taste:
The best and most distinctive among them is McHenry, whose new record is called Roses. A native of Maine, he arrived in New York in 1992 to find a fairly enervated and unwelcoming scene. He did a tour of duty playing for lousy tips in East Village bars but couldn’t gain traction in the more serious local clubs. “I was just weirding out in people’s basements,” McHenry says of his playing then. So he decamped to Barcelona for a year, where he found a more nurturing environment. By the late nineties he had hooked up with guitarist Ben Monder and bassist Reid Anderson (of the Bad Plus), who, along with drummer Paul Motian, now make up his quartet. Their years of playing together have given them that kind of telepathy that turns solos into duos and trios, and then takes entirely unexpected turns. Since his return to New York, McHenry has been ubiquitous, playing in numerous other top bands, including a regular Sunday-night turn in Brooklyn with trumpeter John McNeil in a quartet devoted to obscure numbers by dead composers.
The article also answers the question "Hey, whatever happened to Gigi Gryce?":
(Gryce, a leading saxophonist and arranger in the fifties, is himself an interesting story—fed up with the music biz, he abandoned it to develop a top-notch public-school music program in the Bronx.)
Well, it seems I inadvertently opened a can of worms with this post...
All of these accounts of Jarrett going SACPOP on some dude with a camera or a cough remind me of one of my favorite David Foster Wallace short stories, "Girl With Curious Hair," in which a sociopathic Young Republican and his punk friends behave very badly indeed during a Keith Jarrett concert in Irvine, CA in the early 1980's.
I've posted one excerpt before -- here's more:
Last night we arrived at our row of six seats in the Irvine Concert Hall and sat in our seats. My new friend Grope sat down far away from me next to Big, and Mr. Wonderful sat beside Big also. I sat between Cheese and Gimlet who sat at the end of our row of six seats. Far down on stage in the Irvine Concert Hall was a piano with a bench. The woman seated behind Gimlet tapped me on the padded shoulder of my new sportcoat and complained that Gimlet's hair was creating problems for her vision of the piano and bench on the stage. Gimlet told the woman to Fuck You, but good old Cheese was concerned at the situation and politely traded to Gimlet's outside seat so as to solve the vision problems of the woman, who was coughing at what Gimlet said. Cheese was a shrimp and he had very little hair to ascend from his head into the air so he was a good fellow to sit behind. Gimlet only has hair at the center of her round head, and it is very skillfully sculpted into the shape of a giant and erect male penis, otherwise she is bald like Cheese. The penis of her hair is very large and tumescent, however, and can introduce problems in low spaces or for those people behind her who wish to see what she can see.
[…]
Cheese leaned toward my body and made the assertion that the Negro Keith Jarrett was such a skillful and pleasurable musician because his jazz music performance was in reality improvisational, that Keith Jarrett was in reality composing his performance as he performed it. Gimlet began to cry because of this and because of the small girl's curious hair and I lent her one of my silk handkerchiefs which complements the color and design of several of my wardrobe ensembles.
[…]
At the Irvine Concert Hall last night Grope nursed his mid section and began to opine that Keith Jarrett was firing forms of electricity at him from the outer regions of his Negro afro, and he became a nervous Nellie. Gimlet no longer cried but did become even more fascinated with the blond and curled hair of the young child sitting with an older man in a very attractive sportcoat two rows of concert seats below our six seats. Gimlet stated that the girl's curious hair represented radioactive chemical waste product anti-immolation mojo and that if Gimlet could cut it off and place it in her vagina beneath the porch of her stepfather's house in Deming, New Mexico, she could be burned and burned and never feel pain or discomfort. She was crying and beating at fictitious flames, and subsequently tried to rise and run pell mell over concert seats down to the hair of the girl, but Mr. Wonderful held Gimlet back and offered her his assurances that he would attempt to get her some of the curious hair at an intermission, and placed something in Gimlet's mouth courtesy of Big.
Next to me at the end of our row of concert seats Cheese became very interested in me as a person and began to talk as we listened to Keith Jarrett improvise his performance right on the spot on his bench. Cheese stated that while it was evident that I was a swell individual he wondered how I had come to become friends with my punkrocker friends in Los Angeles, Big and Gimlet and Mr. Wonderful, since I did not look like them or have a distinctive punkrocker hairstyle, nor was I poor or disaffected or nihilistic. Cheese and I began to have a deep conversation that was very fascinating and compelling. We talked in depth while Mr. Wonderful restrained Gimlet and Big restrained the nervous Grope, quietly so as to be able to hear the very good melodies our outstanding Negro performer was putting forth at all times.
The blogosphere's favorite newlywed has not one but two writeups of co-conspirator Sam Sadigursky's new disc, The Words Project -- one for the blog, one for the day job. Not-entirely-unjustified fears of the jazz+poetry genre are dispelled, and Sam earns comparisons to the poetic projects of Fred Hersch Frank Carlberg, and even Steve Lacy, and on the blog, is juxtaposed with a review of David Garland's latest.
Sam wrote about the challenges of working with poetry in a piece for All About Jazz back in June. (I can attest from personal experience that Sam is not kidding when he admits that prior to embarking on this project, he did not tend to listen to song lyrics attentively.) I just got my copy of this disc the other day, so if I ever start talking about CDs on this blog again, I may have a few words of my own to add.
On Sunday afternoon, Society co-conspirator Josh Sinton brings his Steve Lacy project, Ideal Bread, to Café Grumpy in Greenpoint (193 Meserole Ave). Ideal Bread is Josh, Kirk Knuffke, Reuben Radding, and Tomas Fujiwara. No cover.
The band is named after a characteristically charming and epigrammatic Lacy quote:
"... I have to remake it, I have to do better. Today's bread isn't good for tomorrow. I'm always looking for the bread that I had the idea about . . . the ideal bread."
Josh studied with Lacy from the time he returned to the US in 2002 until just before his untimely death in 2004. Back in January, Josh contributed a wonderful guest post on what it means for him to perform Lacy's music with Ideal Bread. If you missed it the first time, go read it now.
The Hold Steady are, on a good night, like the burger at Bonnie's Grill, on a good night -- an immensely satisfying rendition of an American classic that has been so thoroughly debased by bland institutional indistinguishability on the one side, and absurdly pretentious ritzing up on the other, that it's easy to forget what made it so appealing in the first place.
Last night in Prospect Park was a good night. The the huge crowd needed only the first whiff of the opening lick of "Stuck Between Stations" before crashing the gates and flooding the front section (which is ostensibly reserved for VIPs and "Friends of Celebrate B
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