Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

Earful

Sweet Jeebus, Ethan, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. Especially when that something is a five-part, feature-screenplay-length essay on the original nerdcore pianist, Lennie Tristano, and his musical progeny.

I just read the the whole thing in one sitting, at my computer. I do not recommend this approach. Fercrissakes, print the damn thing out (and reduce the font size or you risk exhausting your paper supply). Only go back to the machine when you need to listen to one of the musical examples. Reading that much text on a computer screen bites, so you'll want to take the dead-tree option instead -- but you do actually need to read the whole thing. Yeah, all five parts. It is absolutely worth it -- the piece is provocative, insightful, well-argued, and very entertaining to read, although many of you will find much to disagree with in there, I am sure.

Iverson doesn't flinch from the issues of race and identity that are inexorably entwined in any discussion of Tristano, Konitz, and Marsh & co. -- even when you're not talking about that, you're conspicuously not talking about it, right? So I'm throwing the comments here open for discussion of Mr. Iverson's treatise and related issues. All I ask is that you kindly read the whole thing -- yes, dammit, all 18,000 words -- before commenting.

I may or may not have more to say at a later date, time permitting. Thing is, I was never much of a Tristano-head, despite the sincere efforts of some of my piano teachers. And Warne Marsh's playing, however impressive, has always felt very "inside baseball" to me -- not sure I've ever encountered a bona fide Marsh fan who wasn't a saxophonist. Lee Konitz I like a great deal, as does most everyone, but I am especially partial to his musical activities since 1990 or so. So I'm going to turn over the floor to the people who have a stronger emotional connection to (and more detailed knowledge of) these players than I do.

I will say, though, that in light of this discussion, I think it might be interesting to compare 1955's Lee Konitz with Warne Marsh side-by-side with the criminally underappreciated Clark Terry-Bob Brookmeyer recordings of the mid-sixties -- two extremely contrasting approaches to twisting, sinewy eighth-note lines and double-barreled counterpoint.

I got questions the kind that got no clues

Mike McGinnis has questions. Do you have answers?

1) What things do you think are important to teach in regards to improvisation and more specifically jazz improvisation?

2) What is jazz vocabulary?

3) Is jazz vocabulary important?

4) Why is jazz vocabulary important or not important?

5) Should it be taught?

6) If yes, how do you teach it?

7) If yes, how do you learn it?

8) If no, why not?

9) Is teaching something different than learning something?

10) Or if you have learned something yourself can you save a student time or increase progress by showing them methods to learn something that you had to figure out yourself?

11) If vocabulary is important... whose vocabulary? Everyone's? Just certain people's? (Louis Armstrong, Hawk, Bird, Miles, Trane, etc.) What about when a student encounters harmonic or rhythmic patterns in newer music that a particular vocabulary doesn't fit with?

12) If vocabulary is not important, what is important?

13) Why is it important to teach this other thing (something other than "vocabulary")?

14) How is it learned?

15) How do you teach it?

Mike originally circulated this questionnaire to a handful of musicians (including myself) via email. I asked if he wouldn't mind my sharing it with the blog and he said "sure." If you have any thoughts on any of this, please weigh in in comments.

Don't get any big ideas

Letting your fans download your record for free if they want, but charging them $5.94 to buy the individual components to a single song, just so they can remix it? (Hmm... didn't Dave Douglas let you remix his stuff... for free?)

"It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever" and I honestly can't decide which side of the line this falls on. David St. Hubbins is looking increasingly prophetic.

(And goddammit, yes, I'd probably be first in line for those tracks if I wasn't flat-broke at the moment -- I have no interest in crating my own remix but I very much love to take songs apart to see how they work.)

Meanwhile, Matana Roberts reacts to the idea (news to me) that an audible Radiohead influence amongst jazz musicians has gone from being trendy to being mandatory.

Where's the love, McNulty?

DearRockers.org enables repentant illegal downloaders to soothe their guilty, guilty consciences.

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Fatty off the meter

Greenleaf Music is offering freebie downloads of the the first two tracks from the new Dave Douglas & Keystone album, Moonshine.

Their recording process actually sounds really interesting -- it's a single in-studio performance, recorded mid-tour in Bray, Ireland, in front of a live audience, but somehow the resulting multitrack recording was still isolated enough for Dave and co. to edit, mix, and master it with it the same flexibility and fidelity they would have with a "regular" studio record. Check out the treatment on Gene Lake's drums on the title track, and the slice of delay+echo at the top of Dave's solo.

UPDATE: Now you can remix the title track yourself. Or just listen to the instruments in isolation, if you want. (This is actually more fun than you'd think. And you find out all kinds of stuff -- for instance, it turns out the effects-treated drum beat at the beginning emanates from DJ Olive's turntables -- Gene Lake doesn't play until the rest of the rhythm section kicks in at around 0:16.)

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Prepare a list for what you need

Isn't it a bit early yet for this sort of thing? You'll have your fill of these lists soon enough, I'm sure, but check out #89. No really, check her out.

Sure, it's the single token jazz appearance on an otherwise pretty myopic list, but hey, that's one more than last year. Can this be the beginning of jazz's long-awaited popular resurgence? Will the team that once upon a time had a lock on the title of America's Favorite Music rise again to challenge the current champions?

[Be sure to click through to the actual study, which is extremely entertaining: "conservatives were more likely to watch only two channels out of the 24 highest-rated networks: Fox and Fox News." And: "conservatives dislike most music genres." You don't say.]

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Somebody turned around and shouted

Let me preface this by saying I am a fan of Sasha Frere-Jones -- he's an incredibly gifted, knowledgeable, and compelling writer. Also, I respect his willingness to get in there and mix it up on issues of racial identity and music. This shit is worth talking about, and avoiding the tough questions don't make them any less pertinent.

But what I don't get -- and I am certain I am not alone here -- is how, exactly, you write a 3,500-word New Yorker piece, plus a follow-up blog post and podcast interview, on the general topic of "Why does indie rock sound so goddamned white?" without once mentioning, even in passing, TV on the Radio.

Are they, like Eminem, an anomalous outlier -- the exception that proves the rule? Well okay, but... isn't it worth at least tangentially addressing the fact that the most critically acclaimed band in indie rock is 4/5ths black? I'm not trying to claim that this one group undermines SF-J's entire argument or anything lame like that, but... well, don't you think people might think this was kind of a curious omission?

Sasha's piece is well worth reading, and he makes a lot of solid points (especially w/r/t the scene's inexplicable love of insular mopiness and flat-out inept singing), but I honestly cannot fathom his reasons for dancing around this particular elephant.

UPDATE: Tim at Short Schrift has an excellent riposte. And there's a back-and-forth at the Voice.

Up in the morning and out to school

Occasionally -- okay, very occasionally, but it happens -- people will ask me if there are any resources out there for nonmusicians who want to learn a bit more about the mechanics of music, without getting bogged down in jargon or theory or having to learn notation. Ideally, it would draw examples from familiar pop and rock tunes to explain the basics of how music is constructed.

The best resource I've found for this -- by far -- is the Pandora podcast. If you've been reading this blog for a very long time, you may remember that I blogged about Pandora -- internet radio individually tailored to your specific taste(s) -- a few years back. I don't actually log into Pandora that much anymore, but the podcast is flippin' brilliant. So far, they have devoted episodes to demystifying vocal harmony, guitar effects, meters/time signatures, the various club music subgenres, and hiphop rhyme schemes -- all clearly explained and demonstrated in language anyone who actively listens to music can easily understand, even if you've never picked up an instrument in your life. This is what music education should look like.

New episodes appear about once every two weeks. The best way to get current and past episodes is to subscribe in iTunes.

When were you wont to be so full of songs, sirrah?

Steve Smith reviews the impossible-to-get-tickets-to RSC Lear with Ian McKellen, and, in the same post, Society co-conspirator Sam Sadigursky's record release hit at Cornelia Street -- both of which I very much wish I could have seen.

Thanks to a friend in the cast, I saw a different high-profile Lear back in the spring -- the Public Theater's staging, with Kevin Kline in the lead. It would have been fascinating to compare the performances of these two brilliant interpreters, especially with Kline's Lear still (somewhat) fresh in my mind.

A footnote: I've often wondered what the canonical classical and operatic rep would sound like if we approached it with the freedom and vigor of the best contemporary Shakespeare stagings. And I shudder to think how unenjoyable Shakespeare would be if the historically informed performance crowd ran the theater world -- we'd be stuck with boys in female roles and performers bound by some academic historian's notion of what acting might have been like in Shakespeare's day.

To trade the fiddle for the drum

Apparently, there can be only one hiphop violinist.

At least, that's according to Miri Ben-Ari, who arranged and played the string parts on Kanye West's debut, and co-wrote "Jesus Walks" with Kanye and Rhymefest. She has also (A) trademarked the phrase "The Hip-Hop Violinist," (B) sicced her legal team on other violinists who play hiphop, and according to one of those violinists, Paul Dateh, (C) has gotten YouTube to remove something on the order of twenty videos (including his), because they included the trademark-infringing tag "hip hop violin."

Did I mention that many of the scrubbed videos were substantially more popular on YouTube than Ms. Ben-Ari's?

Via Jay Smooth, The Hip-Hop Videoblogger™.

Remember, kids, Secret Society is your only approved source for authentic Steampunk Big Band™ -- accept no substitutes.

UPDATE: Paul's video is up again, albeit with one slight alteration. If they yank it again, there's always "hip hop violino," and "hip hop Geige."

Traneing Out

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.)

Truer words were never spoke

No One Sets Out To Be A Smooth Jazz Musician

Look, I'm not going to lie to you. Nobody ever just woke up one morning and thought, "Of all the things possible in the vastness that is life, what I'd really like to do is play smooth jazz 250 nights a year." It just doesn't work that way.

It's not something you can plan for—it's all circumstance, I swear: You want to play music for a living. You bust your ass paying your dues in tiny clubs with six people in the audience. You think about all the talented jazz musicians out there who can't make ends meet and you start to worry. The next thing you know, your agent has you filling out forms to legally change your name from Mel Jablonsky to Michael Langello, and it's seeming like a good idea. Then suddenly you're 40 years old and you open up your dresser drawer to find nothing but linen pants.

There are a few stumbles -- for instance, never in the entire history of school band programs has the alto sax ever been "the only instrument left." (More typically, school bands have, like, at least a dozen alto sax players and no one willing to even try the bassoon.) And like any other musical endeavor, smooth jazz isn't actually all that lucrative, except for a tiny handful of inexplicable superstars. "$6,000 to $14,000 a night"? Dude, where do I sign?

On the other hand -- "'I'd like you to meet my very good friend, Chuck Mangione'"? Priceless.

Read the whole thing.

I get your point, you're so sharp

There's nothing your Insufferable Music Snob (© Amanda) loves better than playing The Academy of the Overrated, so this Guardian piece is good fun. However, at the risk of turning this blog into Television Central, I can't resist quoting this bit:

Television, Marquee Moon Nominated by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand

People expect us to love Television the way they think we love Gang of Four and were influenced by them - but we don't and we weren't! Marquee Moon is one of those records that I thought I loved, but it was only after a few years I realised I didn't love the album, just the first 10 bars of the title track, which are pretty astonishing. Those guitars that play off each other and the way the instruments go into wonderful places and the guitars are totally insane and that big cascade of drums - it's incredible. Then your attention wanders. You know when a boring guy is explaining to you the technical spec of a car, the fuel injection system and the leather seats, and his voice becomes so much background noise? Once I took the needle off this record, I realised I hadn't heard it at all. But what annoys me is the way people pontificate over the album; it's one of those staples of student halls of residence. People wax lyrical about it, but the reason it's so popular is because it's a prog rock album its okay to like. Because the words "punk" and "New York" and "1977" are associated with it, it's deemed cool. Really, though, they're a band who give guys who like 20-minute guitar solos an excuse. They were the Grateful Dead of punk, and I always hated all that jam-band stuff. They have the ethos of a jam-band but the aesthetic of a New York outfit. If anything, the Strokes took the look of Television, the aesthetic - and the Converse sneakers - and ignored the jam-band aspect. They took those first 10 bars of Marquee Moon and did something great with it! Tom Verlaine's lyrics didn't have much impact on me. I'm always uneasy when singers in bands profess to be poets - they can veer into pomposity and pretentiousness. But I've got to be careful: I once said something about Jim Morrison and the Doors, about their pseudo-poetry, and immediately all these articles on the internet appeared saying, "Kapranos slams Morrison!" I'm not slamming Television - I respect them. But Marquee Moon is an album I admire more than enjoy.

The thing is, he's not wrong -- Television do have "the ethos of a jam-band but the aesthetic of a New York outfit." That is precisely what makes them interesting, as opposed to a drearily derivative and predictable band like... oh, I don't know, let's say Franz Ferdinand.

Get well, Ornette

Ornette Coleman Hospitalized After Bonnaroo Collapse

June 17, 2007, 9:30 PM CT

Jazz legend Ornette Coleman collapsed from heat stroke on stage during a performance today (June 17) at the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tenn., and is now in a local hospital under doctor's supervision.

After collapsing, the 77-year-old saxophonist was rushed to a nearby medical tent and given intravenous fluids, according to a Bonnaroo spokesperson. Coleman was said to be lucid and insistent that he had no prior symptoms before the incident.

The artist is now resting at the local Coffey County Hospital. His next scheduled concert is July 6 in Kongsberg, Norway.

[Billboard]

More here:

The jazz composer, saxophonist, trumpeter and violinist Ornette Coleman, 77, collapsed during his Bonnaroo set. He was playing one of his tenderly quizzical ballad lines on alto saxophone when he toppled suddenly to the stage. A few minutes later, he was helped to his feet, sipped some water and was walked off the stage. Suffering from heat exhaustion and dehydration, he was given fluids, taken to a local hospital and released a few hours later.

"Turn left," she says

Christine Jensen in All About Jazz:

So I actually arrived in Paris quite exhausted from the previous few months of work. I got there and this woman said, “The Place de la Seine is going on,” which is where they dump all this sand on the main thoroughfare running along the Seine. No traffic goes on it, it's all pedestrians. They put beach towels and chairs and sand and they have volleyball and all these sports going on. It was literally outside my door.

I hadn't experienced Paris in the summer before, so I just landed in this building right on the edge of this. I was like, “What is going on down there?” It was this huge extravagant party for the public along the Seine. So that was my “Promenade.” Also, for a couple of weeks I was walking miles and miles every day because there was so much to take in that way.

Read the whole thing.

Dancing about urban planning

Sufjan Stevens to apostrophize the BQE in song at BAM this fall:

The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway is a stretch of road that any vehicle-owning New Yorker (or anybody who's ever taken the bus to/from La Guardia) probably knows well...from being stuck in traffic on it for hours and hours. But, apparently, it's also a source of inspiration for one Mr. Sufjan Stevens, who has been commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music to write a "music and film work" titled "The BQE", which will make its world premiere at BAM's Next Wave festival November 1-3.

Read the rest. (I love how the headline drips condescension for Sufjan "going high art" -- as opposed to what, the lowbrow guilty pleasures of his albums?)

Up on getting up, I'm down on what I got up for

All About Jazz has a nice profile of drummer, bandleader, Secret Society co-conspirator, and upstart label owner Kendrick Scott:

When Scott made the decision it was time to record, he went for it. “It seems like everyone is sitting around waiting for a record. I felt that vibe from a lot of people. I didn’t want to do that. So I said that when I do this record, I’m just going to do it on my own. I’m not going to worry about producers or worry about trying to get signed with a record company. I just wanted to put the CD out and put the music out. It also led me to start my label, World Culture Music, which is a collective label. We’re all making our CDs the way we want to make them. We’re all bringing them together under World Culture Music. It’s not a traditional record label.”

Unlike most artist-created labels these days, World Culture Music is more than just a vehicle for Kendrick's own record. The initial roster also includes Mike Moreno, Julie Hardy, and Nick Vargenas.

The article also contains a remarkable list of People I Did Not Know Were From Houston:

“The record is amazing because the guys on the record have come from all parts of my life, new periods and early periods,” he says. “Robert Glasper [piano], Walter Smith [sax], Mike Moreno [guitar], we went to high school together at a school called the Houston School for Performing and Visual Arts. The school is very significant in that Jason Moran went there. Brian Michael Cox went there, he’s a famous producer now, with Mary J. Blige and Usher, and writing songs for them. Also Beyonce Knowles went there. Texas is very fertile with talent.”

A couple of other choice excerpts:

The high school was also an introduction to the real music world. “Our teacher actually went out and got gigs for us. We were playing gigs maybe three times a week. If we kept our grades straight, we actually played some gigs and make a little bit of money too,” he chuckles. “That was more incentive to be on it with the grades, and also be on it musically. Our best combo would be the one to be doing all the gigs. We would do parties and functions. If you think about just the experience of going to a gig, being on time, being dressed, being ready to go. Also speaking with people, and everything, when you get there. We had those experiences in high school, and some people don’t even have that when they get out of college. Those were great experiences.”

[...]

“I’m not even talking about jazz. I’m talking about having arts in schools. Kids being exposed to classical music. I don’t want to take hip-hop away from anybody. I don’t want to take rock away from anybody. I actually want to give everybody everything. Kids should be hearing what klezmer music sounds like. They should know classical music. They should hear a little Miles in elementary school. They should hear whatever. It’s the lack of them hearing everything that makes them closed-minded when they get older.”

Read the whole thing.

My right hand hasn't seen my left hand in thirty years

I missed this the first time around, but Hank Shteamer's interview with Chico Hamilton on the occasion of Chico's 85th birthday may be the greatest thing that has ever appeared in Time Out New York:

You teach drums and lead ensembles at the New School—what led you to that?

I realized that this could be my way of giving something back, because music has been very good to me. Schools are the only place to learn jazz today, but sadly, a lot of people teaching this music know nothing about swinging.

Okay, how do you teach someone to swing?

It takes just two things: patience and fortitude. [Taps rhythmically on table] You hear that? Okay, do that for me.

[Taps along]

Good. Now can you talk at the same time?

Okay… [Still tapping] My name is Hank, I was born in Kansas City.…

You’re from Kansas City? Oh shit, okay!

Read the rest.

(Via Mwanji.)

Let me tell y'all what it's like being male, middle class and white

Mwanji Ezana -- back from Cuba and tanned, rested and ready -- jumps into the always perilous race ring and leads with a one-two punch.

Actually, these are a pair of sincere and searching essays on a topic that never gets any easier to talk about. But it doesn't do any of us any good to pretend that our society -- or for that matter, our scene -- has somehow progressed "beyond" race. Only someone who has had the privilege of not having their racial identity inform their every interaction, every day, could possibly make that kind of absurd claim.

Anyway, just go read... listen... think...

Part 1

Reading about jazz, collecting albums and seeing who I and others think of as avant-garde/cutting-edge/innovative, I sometimes find myself wondering if young black musicians haven't disappeared almost totally from that category. Maybe they have - or maybe avant-garde jazz has become an oxymoron (for some reason, recent Ben Ratliff articles have been implying this) - but there are two elements that contribute to this feeling: media selectivity and the strong conciousness of tradition/history/lineage that's both felt within black America and also imposed upon it.

[...]

This - a white avant-garde apart from a black mainstream - is something that is often stated, explicitly or implicitly. Apart from Don Byron, everyone mentioned in the article quoted above and Will Layman's on fusion is white. Nate Chinen's "Brooklyn Jazz Renaissance" is slightly more balanced, but still prompted heated replies from trumpeter Ahmed Abdullah that, as far as I am aware, went largely unnoticed (perhaps because Abdullah was rather long-winded). Also, the only young black jazz musician prominently cited by Chinen is Robert Glasper, which kind of reinforces the "black jazz is stuck in the mainstream and/or past" sentiment.

Read the whole thing.

Part 2

On Matana Roberts's blog, a post titled "Hello black folks? can you hear me?" delves quite deeply into the web of feelings invested in this community/isolation tension. She starts from an overjoyed observation of the "wall to wall blackness in the audience" at an Alice Coltrane concert, but then gets depressed because "we are struggling cause not only are there not a lot of black folks in the experimental jazz realm that I am a passenger in, but there are rarely any black folks in the damn audience." The comments to the post are interesting too, as other young black American jazz musicians like Corey Wilkes and Jaleel Shaw chip in. Shaw's and Roberts's early educational experiences are really depressing and strange to me, and make this initiative seem particularly relevant.

Read the whole thing.

I'm not angry, I'm not angry anymore

Last weekend, John Zorn and Cecil Taylor made their debut at Jazz at Lincoln Center, a concert self-consciously promoted as a daring double-bill for the notoriously conservative cultural institution. If I'd had the cash, this is the rare JALC hit I'd actually have liked to have caught, especially since it marks one of Masada's last performances as a band, and I still haven't heard Cecil's new group with Henry Grimes and Pheeroan AkLaff, which everyone says is his strongest trio in decades.

But since I couldn't make it, I read Ben Ratliff's writeup with interest. I think he did a good job of concisely encapsulating the essence of the two groups -- Masada as "logical, comic, athletic" and an "airtight system"; Cecil's music is "all in the movement," the "millions of choices that make a flowing gesture" -- sounds about right to me. It was also no surprise that the Jazz at Lincoln Center audience warmed immediately to Masada's hard-grooving, high-energy post-Ornette klez-jazz (everybody loves the beat), but remained somewhat mystified by Cecil's more abstracted pulse -- to the uninitiated, his music often sounds discontinuous and disconnected, and it can take some time immersed in his sound-world for the shape of things to reveal themselves.

[It's also, sadly, no surprise to learn that the house management at JALC's Rose Theater apparently tried to cut the concert short by bringing up the house lights before Cecil's set was done, presumably to try to save on overtime fees.]

But shortly after the article went live on the Times' site, I got an email from Secret Society co-conspirator James Hirschfeld, reacting angrily to the third paragraph in Ratliff's review, which reads:

But above all, the experimental composers and bandleaders whose work refers to, argues against and engages with different parts of jazz — the putative jazz avant-garde — just don’t need Jazz at Lincoln Center anymore. Their interests and audiences don’t extend there. They’ve built their own festivals, their own record companies. (Mr. Zorn has created his own Lower East Side club, the Stone, with music six nights a week.) The MacArthur Foundation has honored almost all the major figures of the jazz avant-garde with fellowships. Academic presses are pumping out books about their achievements. What’s the big deal, for them, about a gig at the Rose Theater?

On a casual reading, this didn't seem particularly objectionable to me -- I took it as a somewhat veiled way of saying that the financially struggling Jazz at Lincoln Center needs Zorn and Taylor more than they need JALC's seal of approval. Who needs the blessing of The House That Wynton Built when you've got Guggenheims and MacArthurs?

But James begged to differ:

In this paragraph, (in my reading) Ratliff is speaking generally about "the putative jazz avant-garde," not specifically Zorn and Taylor. I think that a comparison between the institution of J@LC to whatever institution exists for jazz avant-garde artists is a bit silly. The operating budget of J@LC is $31 million. And while the MacArthur Foundation has given 8 or 9 avant-garde jazz guys grants over the years (which is hardly "almost all the major figures"), there still just isn't a huge audience or much institutional support for this music, though there are some exceptions (like this concert).

Ratliff seems to say that the avant-garde doesn't need Lincoln Center since we have our clubs and festivals and our record companies and our grants. But there is NOTHING on the scale of Lincoln Center. Can you really compare the Stone to Allen Hall? There is a chance that greater inclusion of this music into the J@LC programming would have an enormous impact on the marketability of this music across the country.

And, over at SpiderMonkey Stories, Taylor Ho Bynum voiced similar objections:

The point isn’t whether the avant-garde needs Jazz at Lincoln Center, the point is what truly creative artists could do with the truckloads of money they pour into that place! In a culture of very limited arts funding, Jazz at Lincoln Center is the elephant in the middle of the room, eating everything in sight, while everyone else fights over the crumbs. Marsalis, Crouch, and crew were very focused in marketing themselves as the only arbiters and purveyors of “real jazz” during their jazz purges of the 80s. I really think this was as much a well-organized business plan as it was an aesthetic crusade. Arts funding in general and in jazz in specific has become a very top-down, institutionally dominated field, and Lincoln Center is the most dominant institution. There is little support for independent artists and grass-roots movements. The festivals and record labels Ratliff mentions were all started out of necessity and run on shoe-string budgets. The Stone is a great place, but comparing a tiny sixty-person capacity room on the lower East Side to a multi-million dollar complex in a corporate mall on Columbus Circle is simply silly. A few MacArthur grants does not make up for the difference. (And hardly “almost all the major figures of the jazz avant-garde” have gotten one, that’s a pretty snarky comment. And I’m sure Marsalis’ annual salary over five years dwarfs even the generosity of a MacArthur Fellowship.)

These are all good points. I honestly do not begrudge Lincoln Center its conservatism. They are supposed to be conservative -- that's their cultural function. And while I'm glad to see Zorn and Taylor finally get their turn onstage at JALC, I also don't see this as embracing the avant-garde so much as embracing reality. Cecil Taylor and John Zorn may have started out as shit-disturbing radicals, but they have been established, respected figures for decades now. Their music may still be vital, provocative, and controversial, but it's been a long time since either of them has been a hardscrabbling up-and-comer.

James and Taylor are right that JALC would generate a lot less antipathy if they hadn't appointed themselves the exclusive arbiters of jazz legitimacy. But the problem is far bigger than who gets a JALC gig and who doesn't. The real issue here is that there's no structural support for up-and-coming artists. For starters: jazz has nothing remotely like South by Southwest -- although David Ryshpan asks an excellent question: why can't IAJE be more like SXSW? Taking over the local clubs, showcasing new talent, reaching out to the public and generating buzz outside of the hermetically-sealed walls of the hotel convention halls -- why doesn't this happen?

The record labels are fading away and there's nothing emerging to take their place -- no way to pay for that crucial first studio record other than going massively in debt to predatory lenders, with scant hope of ever breaking even. The only recording grant for US artists (that I'm aware of) is the Aaron Copland Fund for Music Recording, which is supposed to "provide wider exposure for the music of contemporary American composers," but look at who gets their support -- that's not exactly a who's who of hot young artists (notwithstanding a handful of notable exceptions). And no disrespect intended, but -- Roger Sessions? John Cage? Conlon Nancarrow? Lou Harrison? Harry Partch? Charles Ives??? The Copland Fund people are obviously operating under a definition of "contemporary" somewhat at odds with the one I'm aware of. They also tend to disproportionately reward large organizations whose staff includes full-time professional grant-writers -- like, say, Jazz at Lincoln Center.

While I'm obviously all for the proliferation of independent, artist-owned, do-it-yourself labels and young musicians trying to pull off ambitious projects even in the absence of institutional support, the problem is (as I have said elsewhere) if everyone's just doing their own thing, how does a collective scene emerge from that? How do we get people excited about the vanguard of independent, creative, contemporary jazz as a movement, instead of just gravitating towards the handful of stars who somehow emerge to wider acclaim?

There's more in the vault

Trombonist Jeff Albert on Ingrid Jensen's workshop at Loyola.

Ted Reichman on the NEC big band's Hollenbeck blowout.

Kris Tiner on his daughter-to-be.

DJ Durutti on Donald Byrd's Blackbyrds.

Mike Bagetta has a blog, which you should read.

Vijay Iyer on the word "jazz" and why many young jazz-trained artists are running from it. Reaction by Daniel Melnick and commentors at Soundslope. I don't think I'm unusual in having a love/hate relationship with the term, but I always feel most possessive of it when somebody tries to snatch it back -- like Ethan said: "I don't think you can have the word 'jazz,' Stanley -- you would make too many people upset if you took it away from them. "

A bunch of Downtown composers are blogging for the NYT, and I can't read them because it's behind the Times Select wall. I'm generally in favor of the Times Select wall as it prevents me from reflexively gaping at their perpetual car wreck of an Op-Ed page -- seriously, Maureen Dowd? Tom Friedman? John Tierney? David Brooks? Guest columns by Ann Althouse? And you want me to pay for that shit sandwich? But The Score blog actually sounds pretty cool. Just not $50/year cool. Plus, you know, it only encourages the aforementioned.

Until tomorrow but that's just some other time

With apologies to the indefatigable Steve Smith and the fabulous Molly Sheridan, the best interview with Nico Muhly (a young composer who's been receiving considerable attention in advance of his Zankel hit on Friday) remains the one conducted by Prof. Heebie McJeebie in July of '06. While the well-respected TANDY Professor of Electronic Music at the Hotel Cadillac in Rochester NY is currently on sabbatical, we feel certain that on his return to the blogosphere, he will insist on credit for being skeptical and/or dismissive of Mr. Muhly long before it became fashionable.

Hands up, hands up for Stanley

Back when I first started this blog, I kept tossing around the idea of writing a post entitled "Why are The Bad Plus so controversial?" I was going to start by riffing on the very deeply polarized reaction to the band, using it as a jumping-off point to talk about some big picture stuff -- you know: Irony. Authenticity. Historical Continuity. The State of Jazz Today, and Just Who The Hell is Listening to It, Anyway?

For various reasons I never actually got around to writing this post. But I was reminded of it last month when I saw Stanley Crouch at The Bad Plus's Vanguard hit, walking past the long bench along the right side of the club so he could sit right next to Dave King -- he was practically onstage. This was during "Anthem for the Earnest," I think, and Stanley's eyes were fixed on Dave's hihat. Ironically, the next tune on the setlist happened to be a 12-bar blues (Ethan's "Guilty"). Stanley was clearly digging it. I later learned that Crouch had come to the club three times that week, lavishing Stanley-like praise on the band -- upon meeting Dave King his first words were: "Man, you can play! I thought you'd suck!" -- and hung out shooting the shit with the guys until the wee small hours.

So that's it. It's over. If even Stanley Crouch is willing to give the Bad Plus his seal of approval, they are officially Not Controversial anymore. In fact, I hear Wynton has tapped Ethan, Reid and Dave as the rhythm section for his upcoming Blue Note record, Is This Love? A Jazz Tribute to Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.

Meanwhile, over at Do The Math, Ethan has a loooooong interview with Crouch -- but it's definitely worth your time. Some salient excerpts:

SC: The next point is that Betty Carter always complained to me that she always was searching for a pop tune to put in her band. (She believed in the classical jazz tradition of using pop tunes to connect with the audience.) But there wasn't anything in the music of those three guys--or anyone else in big money pop music--that she could use on a gig. There wasn't enough harmony or melody.

EI: Um, there's a certain irony that you are talking to a member of The Bad Plus right now.

SC: Of course. But it's not really that ironic, because you and Reid and Dave go so far from the original tune that you aren't playing on the form of the song.

EI: Well, you're right: we don't play jazz harmony or jazz solos on the tunes the way Betty Carter would have needed.

SC: But you also don't play anything after the head that that anybody would call pop music. Your first phrase, after the melody, is always totally "out." I find it really interesting how your audience is shocked and exhilarated by the conclusions you come to with a melody they already know.

To me, the conception of The Bad Plus is actually derived from the way Coltrane and his band played "My Favorite Things," which is really far from hearing Julie Andrews sing it. What Coltrane--what everybody in his band--was playing on it is like…[shrugs] "What are they playing?" -- "'My Favorite Things.'" --"Where is 'My Favorite Things' here? I don't get it." That's The Bad Plus, too.

EI: You are on the money with this comparison, Stanley. I have actually brought up Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" to interviewers myself.

SC: Well, there you go. Right.

This is interesting, because to me, the striking thing about Trane's first recording of "My Favorite Things" is how literal it is -- listen to how much of the track is taken up by Trane and McCoy just playing the the melody. They even keeps the minor-major contrast from the original, where later it would become a straight minor vamp. It has the reputation of being some kind of radical reimagining of the tune, but it's actually more faithful to the original than, say, the reharmonized and remelodized version of "But Not For Me" from the same recording. In other words, I agree that "My Favorite Things" is a good analogue to how The Bad Plus approach covers like, say, "Everybody Wants To Rule The World," but for exactly the opposite reasons that Stanley does.

SC: I don't write things to shock people, necessarily, but sometimes, when making an argument…

Let me put it this way: Some people go out into a field of wheat and they'll pick something--just one thing that they like. However, other people will drive a thresher through there.

Sometimes, if I have a choice, I'll just drive the thresher through.

[extensive laughter]

SC: Sometimes I think that's what's called for. Style and form are what I'm thinking about, you know. Sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph there is an attempt to personalize everything I learned from Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, Martin Williams, and Whitney Balliett. Then, in something like “Body and Soul,” I get to a symphonic version of essay form that I am very proud of. Form is always my concern and is what I am always experimenting with, even when I am driving the wheat thresher.

EI: Well…there are friends of mine that you have driven the thresher through, and I know that it doesn't feel good.

But I understand that there is an argument for being over the top, just putting it out there, and seeing the dust settle. I'm sure we will be still looking at this book long after history has forgotten those who never came down on one side or another.

[...]

EI: Should we talk in more detail about the most controversial piece in Considering Genius, which is "Putting the White Man in Charge?"

SC: Ok.

EI: I don't know too much about Tom Piazza or Francis Davis, which are your topics in the first two pages, but I do know something about Dave Douglas, who you get to at the end. Here's the paragraph:

There is nothing wrong with Douglas, who can play what he can play and should continue to do whatever he wants to do, but there is something pernicious about [Francis} Davis and all of those other white guys who want so badly to put white men--American and European--in charge and put Negroes in the background. Douglas…is far from being a bad musician, but he also knows that he should keep as much distance as possible between himself and trumpet players like Wallace Roney, Terence Blanchard, and Nicholas Payton, to name but three, any one of whom on any kind of material--chordal, nonchordal, modal, free, whatever--would turn him into a puddle on the bandstand. Unlike the great white players of the past, such as Jack Teagarden, Bobby Hackett, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz--or now, Joe Lovano--Douglas will never be seen standing up next to the black masters of the idiom. The white critical establishment couldn't help him then.

Well, all I can say is, if Roney, Payton, or Blanchard tried to play Dave's harder music, they would not find it easy--and they could never play it as well as he can. They would have trouble playing even a few bars of it unless they studied it in detail. There are authentic systems in Douglas' music that contribute to his unique voice.

SC: Whether or not there are authentic systems in Douglas’s music is not even close to the point. To me, the question is: What is jazz music? What I really don't like is how the avant-garde, which is more like contemporary European music, is treated as the solution to jazz to the exclusion of real jazz. I realized the problem years ago when Roland Kirk complained to Cecil Taylor in Downbeat that Cecil wouldn't let him sit in with his band. Cecil said they had arrangements, and that's why he didn't let Kirk sit it, but that's not a good reason. That's what holds the music back. It is a real problem that there is no agreed-upon place for avant-garde musicians and the musicians who play real jazz to play together. Because if the avant-garde musicians stay away from the jazz musicians, their music gets to the point where it has less and less to do with jazz. I don't like that. Some people do; I really don't!

I do know this: if Douglas got up on to the bandstand with Wallace, Payton, or Blanchard to play some blues, he would be in trouble.

EI: I'm not so sure, Stanley..but here, let me put this on me, not Dave. We are going downstairs to hear Eric Reed play in a little bit, and I wouldn't dare get up and play a straight-ahead blues solo after he did. He (or Cyrus Chestnut or Marcus Roberts) could cut me into little pieces. But I don't think any of them could play in The Bad Plus. You have got to make music based out of your life experience.

SC: Yeah, well, I think if you are playing jazz, you really need to be able to play some blues. Ornette is the perfect example: he always sounds like a blues musician, no matter how far out he gets. And this is why Duke Ellington could make a record--a supremely great record--with John Coltrane, with both men just playing their individual personalities but making music together. In fact, Elvin Jones told me how nervous he, Jimmy Garrison, and Coltrane were until Ellington got to the studio and cooled everyone out. Listen to the solo Ellington plays on Coltrane’s tune called "Big Nick." It's two perfect uncliched choruses that could be transcribed and made into a song.

It's a bit weird to hear Terrence Blanchard trotted out as some kind of blues-drenched hyper-authentic arch-traditionalist in this context, since his latest record (Flow) makes me think he's been listening to a lot of Dave Douglas lately. This is Stanley at his most infuriating.

Finally, Stanley and Ethan talk about Stanley's early days as a player:

EI: Julius Hemphill is someone I would have loved to gotten to know.

SC: Did he ever die too young! He's another cat who really had the blues in his playing, no matter how far out he got.

EI: You must have known Phillip Wilson.

SC: He was rough, man, a great drummer. But of those cats, it was Don Moye who impressed me the most. I heard the Art Ensemble almost every night at the Five Spot in 1976. They were playing! Wow!

EI: Back then you were playing the drums yourself.

SC: Not well, but not that bad, either, in that free-form style. Check it out:

[Stanley plays a tune recorded live in Amsterdam with David Murray, Butch Morris, Don Pullen, and Fred Hopkins. It's a long waltz with extended solos by each member--Pullen sounds the best on it. The drumming for the swinging waltz is a sloppy slow groove, quite behind the beat, and broken up by free fusillades.]

EI: I dig it! Why did you quit?

SC: Well, when I was in California, I thought I was really good. But then I moved to New York and kept hearing Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, Billy Higgins, and all the other truly great drummers. That was a level I had no hope of achieving. In my own style, Don Moye was the guy who closed the door.

EI: I guess you had a different destiny anyway.

SC: Yeah…that's certainly true.

Read the whoooooole thing...

Everybody's tryin' to make the news

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus last week. I wish I had a good excuse, but the truth is, I just needed a break. I will also confess to immersing myself in this story instead of making my usual rounds in the music blogosphere -- Amanda's a friend so this was personal, not business. [UPDATE: Amanda resigns. Dammit.]

Sooooo... ehm... how 'bout those Grammys, eh? I don't think I've ever actually watched a Grammy telecast, but this year Pat liveblogged it, as did Stereogum and Idolator. I am shocked -- shocked -- to learn that Stu Copeland is a big fucking liar. (Ach, nevermind -- apparently, I don't see date stamps.) The Bad Plus riffed on the Police reunion a while back. The fabulous Molly Sheridan goes behind the scenes at the über-exclusive jazz+classical Grammy party. Except, of course, there isn't one. Thankfully, that doesn't stop her from channeling her inner Dorothy Parker ("If you want to hear Terfel sing 'Send in the Clowns,' this is apparently the recording to get."). Oh, and congrats to Bryan and Eddie -- a well-deserved get. Likewise to ACB.

This is cool -- eMusic is now offering exclusive alternate takes and bonus tracks from Ran Blake's All That Is Tied, a record that didn't seem to make many Best Of 2006 of lists, but certainly deserves at least as much attention as Keith Jarrett's Carnegie Hall Concert. Ethan has urged me to devote a post to Ran, and I will do my best to oblige soonish. Ran ranks as one of the most brilliantly original and emotionally gripping improvising pianists in jazz (though of course he would bristle at that description -- he doesn't consider himself a jazz musician). Sadly, Ran's music is largely unknown outside of Boston/NEC circles. But if you're in the area, keep an eye on his upcoming performances -- live Ran is a serious trip, especially if the conditions in the hall are right (i.e., so dark you can barely see him, and he can't see you) and he's in his comfort zone.

Via Ran's newsletter, I learned of this new book on the Lenox School of Jazz, an ahead-of-its-time summer program which operated from 1957 to 1960. Ran studied there. So did Ornette. In fact, they played on the same Faculty-Student concert back in 1959. (Separately, I'm assuming -- can you imagine Ornette and Ran playing together? In 1959? The mind reels... ) More info here.

More linkage:

Stereogum mocks my childhood faves, part XXXIV. ("Quick, name five songs that are explicitly linked to a particular dance. 'Macarena'? 'The Electric Slide'? 'The Hokie-Pokie'? That’s some rarefied air.")

Destination Out offers some great Zorn/Previtte bebop, from The Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet. (They had a blindfold test and I missed it? Damn.)

Idolator on the alt-Grammy fiasco. ("Thankfully, host David Cross was just as frustrated as we were, and he served as our own Herbert Morrison, narrating the increasingly horrific turn of events with some first-rate zingers.")

Galen H. Brown reviews Lee Hyla's latest. ("The disc starts with the Lydian String Quartet tearing into the opening notes of Hyla’s “String Quartet #4” (1999) as if it had insulted their mother.")

Will Layman on Charles Tolliver's bigband outing ("It i