Secret Society

What else should I be

On Friday, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Maher Arar, offered him compensation for his terrible ordeal, and pledged to ensure that what happened to him will never happen again.

Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy is quoted as saying:

The Canadian Government now has taken several steps to accept responsibility for its role in sending Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was tortured.

The question remains why, even if there were reasons to consider him suspicious, the U.S. government shipped him to Syria, where he was tortured, instead of to Canada for investigation or prosecution. I look forward to hearing the Justice Department's answer to that question next week.

It's refreshing to see that there is at least least one US elected official who takes Arar's case seriously.

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings (one of my all-time favorite bloggers) asks us to compare and contrast:

As I understand it, Canada's role in Arar's detention was twofold. First, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided information, some of it baseless and misleading, to US authorities. Among other things, it described him and another person as an "Islamic Extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement", a claim for which the Canadian investigation into this whole affair says they had "no basis" (p. 13 (pdf).) Second, they didn't do enough to try to free him once he was in detention.

We, by contrast, actually detained him and shipped him off to Syria, where he was kept in a three foot by six foot underground cell and tortured for ten months. Unlike the Canadian government, we have not initiated an investigation of how we ended up shipping an innocent engineer off to be tortured in Syria. To my knowledge, no one has resigned. We have not apologized, nor have we made any effort at all to help Mr. Arar put his life back together after we broke it apart. Here's what Alberto Gonzales had to say after the Canadian government's report appeared:

QUESTION: Canada, as you know, released a long-awaited report yesterday on the treatment of Maher Arar. Since the Department was the agency that allowed his removal to Syria in which he was then tortured, doesn't the Department owe him an apology?

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Well, we were not responsible for his removal to Syria, I'm not aware that he was tortured, and I haven't read the Commission report. Mr. Arar was deported under our immigration laws. He was initially detained because his name appeared on terrorist lists, and he was deported according to our laws.

Some people have characterized his removal as a rendition. That is not what happened here. It was a deportation. And even if it were a rendition, we understand as a government what our obligations are with respect to anyone who is rendered by this government to another country, and that is that we seek to satisfy ourselves that they will not be tortured. And we do that in every case. And if in fact he had been rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances, as we do in every case.

QUESTION: From the report, he had no connections with any terrorist groups, and he has sought an apology from the U.S. government.

ATTORNEY GENERAL GONZALES: Again, I haven't read the report.

Read the whole thing.

Kickin' like Kermit

You know Kermit Driscoll -- he's the one laying it down on all your favorite Bill Frisell records, and many more outstanding sessions besides, including two albums with New and Used, the group he co-led with Dave Douglas. Kermit has played on (and continues to play on) a staggering number of records that were vitally important to my development as a musician, and though I've never met him in person, I owe him a lot.

Back in the mid-1990's, Kermit was out on a hike in the New Jersey hinterlands when he got bitten by a deer tick. Thereafter, he started to develop some nasty chronic symptoms -- aching joints, throbbing headaches, fever -- that eventually began to really slow him down. But it wasn't until August 2005 that Driscoll's doctors finally connected the right dots and realized he'd been infected with Lyme Disease -- but by this time, the disease had become very advanced, very debilitating, and very expensive to treat.

The good news is that the treatment appears to be working -- while he's still very much up and down, Kermit has recently been able to return to (limited) performing. I saw him with the John Hollenbeck Big Band at IAJE and he sounded outstanding. But thanks to the absurdities of the US health care system, he's now faced with massive medical bills far beyond his ability to pay, or his insurance company's willingness to cover. (And this is despite having "good" health insurance via the Musician's Union.)

This Monday, January 29, at Tonic, there will be a benefit concert featuring groups led by Bill Frisell, John Zorn, John Patitucci, and John Hollenbeck -- 7:30 PM hit. Tickets are $23 in advance or $25 at the door, with all proceeds going to help Driscoll in his time of need. Please come out and lend your support.

For those unable to make it or not in NY -- consider mailing in a tax-decutable donation to:

Kermit Driscoll Emergency Relief Fund
ATTN: Bill Dennison
Musicians Union Local 802
322 West 48th Street
New York, N.Y. 10036

You can punk the skunks of freedom with your jeweled Etruscan knife

I'm a wee bit late on this, as I was in the middle of something when it was originally published, but this piece on Lee Hyla in the Boston Globe is outstanding:

"I think I was having such a hard time because I knew all these musics were equally important to me, and I couldn't find a way to reconcile them," Hyla said. Minimalism was one obvious solution in the air at the time, but for Hyla, this pop-inflected repetitive language lacked a basic harmonic tension that he saw as essential. He was seeking a blend of uptown and downtown influences at once more edgy and rigorous. He longed to capture the anarchic spirit of punk rock but his ear was too sophisticated to simply quote guitar riffs or crank up the volume of his string quartets.

Finally the dam broke in 1984, when he wrote a piece called "Pre-Pulse Suspended" for 12 instruments. "I was able to clarify how the energy of rock 'n' roll could come into notated classical music, how to get that energy unencumbered with extra intellectual baggage. The intellectual stuff is all still there, but it had shed its weight."

Lee was a tremendous teacher -- if I have any insight into Varèse, it's entirely due to Lee's influence -- and while I'm sorry (for their sake) to learn he's leaving NEC at the end of this semester, I wish him the best of luck in his new gig at Northwestern. I know he'll enjoy being close to the fertile Chicago improv scene, but I also hope the guys from that crowd manage to slip past the gates of the ivory tower and come check out Lee's stuff, which is always thoroughly killing.

Lee is the most down-to earth academic composer I've ever met. He's got this quiet, unassuming voice, but in class he'd just casually drop these incredibly penetrating observations about the music under discussion that would turn your head around for the rest of the day. He could talk just as authoritatively and passionately about John Lennon and Neil Young as he could about Elliott Carter and Stefan Wolpe. He is incredibly supportive of his students, one of the rare comp teachers who doesn't try to force the kids into a particular mold, but instead tries to help them acquire the tools to express whatever it is that they're trying to express... and maybe, along the way, open them up to some sounds and ideas they hadn't previously considered.

When I was at NEC, there was a bit of a weird vibe between us jazz composers and many of the "legit" comp majors -- I don't think it was outright animosity, just a little of this going on (on both sides, for sure) -- but Lee never distinguished between us, and in fact seemed genuinely happy to have a bunch of unruly, opinionated, and often flaky jazz composers crash his orchestration class. The Globe article mentions a few send-off concerts, including the official one next week, and if I can get free, I'm going to try to Fung Wah it out to Boston to catch the hit.

UPDATE: I think I will also take the opportunity to point you to this piece on Hyla, by listen.'s Steve Hicken. Steve is one of the guys who first hipped me to Hyla's music (long before I ever even considered going to NEC), back in the glory days of Salon Table Talk. Make sure you read all the way to the bottom, including this footnote:

15 In an April 14, 2004 e-mail Hyla writes:

I have a small footnote to add to that. I felt that at that time, some of us were starting to revolt against the idea of the composer as academic, which in the 70's was an overwhelmingly shared belief. When I left school after receiving a masters degree (and not following through with a doctorate) I was told by many composer friends that I was committing career suicide. I didn't pursue teaching positions and was academically unaffiliated with any institution from 1978-1992- something that I believe allowed me to re-claim my own compositional voice. During that time I drove a truck, worked in a bookstore, drove a cab, and managed to pay low rent. Starting in '84 I got lucky with a string of grants and commissions and worked exclusively as a composer until '92 (aided enormously by the low rent factor). At that point I felt it was safe to go back into the teaching world, since I felt more clear about who I was as a composer. Just thought I'd mention that aspect, since it was so important to me at the time.

Their activities are plenty in nighttime

Recently seen and heard -- sorry, no pics, because, well, you know...

Saturday, 20 January

Sound Art @ Chelsea Art Museum -- with Soundbook One (Jen Stock, laptop, composer; Mark Dancigers, guitar; Koven Smith, drums), Corey Dargel with Jim Altieri on violin, guitarist Evan Drummond performing Ingram Marshall's Soe-Pa, and Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Music.

A pre-Varèse afternoon hit, curated by Jen Stock, who presented some new music for her reconfigured SoundBook One ensemble. While the gallery's boomy acoustics made it difficult to hear the sampled voices she was triggering, I was very happy to hear the new direction Jen's taken in her music, which seems to be a more authentic reflection of her current musical interests.

At the end of Corey and Jim's set, I finally got to hear them do their hit tune from this fall's American Composers Orchestra show, "All The Notes And Rhythms I've Ever Loved." Jim's playing also brought out some very different facets of the songs from Less Famous Than You, and nicely complimented Corey's as-yet unreleased odes to the Virgin Mary (like the incisive "100% Abstinence").

To be perfectly honest, I hadn't heard any of Ingram Marshall's stuff before Sunday. Soe-Pa is a three-part piece for acoustic guitar plus delay and loop pedals. (All of the intricate delay/loop stuff is meticulously notated on a second staff in the score.) It's a captivating and hypnotic work, especially the beautiful second movement, which would not sound all that out of place on a Radiohead record. I'm definitely going to be checking out more of Marshall's stuff.

1-Bit Music is very cool object -- a simple electrical circuit built into a CD jewel case. You plug the headphones directly into the jewel case, and can listen to any of 11 different ultra lo-fi electro "glitch/dance" grooves. For concert performances, Tristan Perich hooks up the jewel case to the PA and plays live drumkit along with the programmed grooves. While I wasn't much impressed with Perich's drumming, the 1-bit grooves by themselves were pretty neat.

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Sunday, 21 January

Buffalo Collision @ Tonic -- Tim Berne, Mat Maneri, Ethan Iverson, Dave King.

While I'm somewhat disappointed this band -- making their first-ever performance together last Sunday -- didn't call themselves "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo," this was a very fun improv gig, which went through a great variety of textures and densities and featured lots of really sensitive listening from everyone involved. With drums but no bass, Ethan had free rein on the piano's low register, laying it down or taking it away at will -- though I especially liked the bits where Mat Maneri's viola ended up on the bottom, with everyone else splayed out above. The final piece had Tim, Mat, and Dave jumping off from an oblique reference to Petrouchka (supplied by Ethan, ntach), which was also pretty cool. (Oh, and thanks to Ethan for inviting me to this hit.)

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Tuesday, 23 January

Last night, Lindsay and I made it (by the skin of our teeth) to the final night of Dan Trujillo's play Talk of the Walk-Up, which was being workshopped at Manhattan Theatre Source. This was a night of weird connections -- we were invited by director (and Parabasis proprietor) Isaac Butler, who some time ago recognized Lindsay (from her blog photo) on the subway and introduced himself to the two of us. Before Talk of the Walk-Up began its three-night run, Isaac asked me if he could use some Secret Society tunes ("Tranist" and "Flux in a Box") as pre-show and intermission music. Of course, I was honored and grateful to be asked, and I'm even more honored and grateful now that I've seen the production, which was a total blast.

The dialogue is in what Trujillo calls "freestyle verse" -- meaning it mostly rhymes. Having seen some godawful Molière productions in my day, I think I have some small appreciation of just how difficult it is for actors to pull off rhyming dialog without driving the audience bugfuck insane within the first five minutes, but cast of Talk of the Walk-Up made the rhymes feel natural -- even the most outré couplets were funny but not distracting.

As it turns out, one of the cast members was Mac Rogers, who by day works for immigration lawyer Amanda Gillespie. Mac and Amanda handled my incredibly stressful and convoluted (but ultimately successful, praise be) O-1 Visa application this spring/summer/fall, with Mac bearing most of the brunt of my anxiety over the USCIS's inexplicable slowness in processing my case. "Have you heard anything today? No? Not yet? How about... now? Okay... NOW???"). I had no idea Mac would be in the cast (or that he was even an actor, since he never mentioned it) until Isaac emailed me a few days ago to say "You'll never believe this, but... "

Also in the audience was TACTUS pianist David Hanlon, who I mentioned in my review of the Reich Whitney blowout. I learned that David and Isaac have been buddies since, like, elementary school. Also that David is playing on Michael Gordon's Decasia, which I'm planning on hitting tomorrow.

After the play, I went down to Tonic again to hopefully catch the tail end of Kneebody's set. I only managed to hear the last 1.5 tunes, but the band is always a good time and the place was packed. BTW, the band has a new live CD out on Colortone.

Composer Portraits: Edgard Varèse @ Miller Theatre, 20 Jan 2007

Where, exactly, does Edgard Varèse fit into the narrative of 20th-century music? He loved spiky, biting dissonances as much as the serialists in the Second Viennese Mafia, and shared their commitment to the Darwinian inevitability of (a certain kind of) musical progress, but unlike them, he was an iconoclast who didn't hold to or advocate for a single, specific, unyielding compositional method. Which, for an early 20th-cen. composer, is a sure-fire way to ensure you're viewed as a bit of a marginal figure compared to the serialist crowd. Mainly because it's a lot harder to teach Varèse in theory class than it is to teach Schoenberg.

But listening to his music today, doesn't Varèse sound far more bracing, inventive, muscular, distinctive, and, well, contemporary than all that sober serialist stuff that (still!) gets most of the attention in music schools and conservatories? In the 1920's, Schoenberg et al. are plugging tone rows into Brahmisan phrases and gestures, using big-C Classical instrumental ensembles, still obsessed with artfully expressive angst and the elegance of formal unity. Meanwhile Varèse is getting in your face with rapid-fire brass stabs and a full-on percussive assault, advancing his argument with jump-cuts and sudden contrasts and a delight in purely sonic constructions. For a composer that has a reputation as the ultimate rationalist -- one of the quotes pulled for the program notes is "[t]here will be a laboratory where sounds will be scientifically studied and where the laws permitting the genesis of countless new means of expression will be corroborated" -- actually listening to Varèse done right is a thoroughly visceral experience.

This is most obvious in a piece like Ionisation, which has become the canonical piece for (mostly) unpitched percussion. It was originally intended as a dance piece (apparently Martha Graham passed on it -- gee, big surprise) and you can definitely tell. Despite all the rhythmic superimpositions, there is a constant underlying, unyielding pulse -- it's on a grid, meaning you can actually feel the rhythmic pull of the quintuplets etc. against the beat. I've seen several live versions of this piece, and listened to a few recordings, but Saturday's performance by the Manhattan School of Music Percussion Ensemble was definitely the tightest and most exciting I've heard. Having grown up surrounded by hiphop, industrial, and electronica, these kids find nothing unusual in the idea of a piece which is all about sirens, noise and thunderous percussion. In fact, I think they get a work like Ionisation in a way that most classically-trained musicians of previous generations have a lot of trouble wrapping their heads around. At the risk of repeating myself, for this music to work you need an emotional connection to rhythm, and the MSM percussionists locked right in and kept the momentum flowing straight through.

Other Manhattan School music students joined forces with the only slightly older players in Alarm Will Sound for what was billed as "the most Varèse ever performed at one concert in New York." Included were two versions of the 1958 tape piece, Poème électronique -- first, the original recording, and then, in the second half, a new arrangement of the work for acoustic instruments by Evan Hause. This live re-enactment of a purely electronic piece is very much in the spirit of Alarm Will Sound's Acoustica. The original opens with ominous cathedral bells before almost immediately giving way to vintage electro clicks, buzzes, zaps and sweeps. The audience actually laughed in a few spots -- and yeah, some of it seems awfully campy now, like the "special effects" in a B-movie from the same period -- but it's also a charming and spacious piece. The rate of change is very quick, but there's usually not more than a couple of sonic events happening at any one time. The original work was a technological tour-de-force, and Hause's adaptation for Alarm Will Sound is extremely impressive -- if I had been asked to do this, I honestly wouldn't know where the hell to begin. The work definitely loses something without all the old-school bloop-bleeps, but I really enjoyed the theatricality of the acoustic version, which calls for almost every member of AWS to move around the stage, juggling their regular instrumental duties with an array of kitchen-sink auxiliary percussion effects.

Another highlight was Octandre, an edgy but elegiac piece for four winds, three brass, and bass. Maybe it's just because of the vaguely similar instrumentation, or because I studied both pieces around the same time, but I always thought of this piece as something of a sequel to Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Both pieces unfold using techniques you'd normally associate more with movies than music -- they are full of montages, parallel editing, rapid repeated sequences,  jump cuts, and the like. Octandre was written just a few years after Symphonies of Winds, and I have no idea whether Varèse had even heard it, but it sure feels like he's taking the structural possibilities opened up by Stravinsky and pushing them to the limit. He's definitely pushing the players to their limit -- the piece is wicked hard, full of jumps in and out of extreme registers and tricky rhythms that you can't just fake your way through. The AWS octet didn't make it seem easy, exactly, but the music's technical demands never once got in the way of a soulful and emphatic performance. Special praise is due to flutist Jessica Johnson and oboist Jacqueline Leclair, who killed not just on Octandre, but on their respective solo features -- Jessica on Density 21.5 (for solo flute), and Jacqueline on Intégrales, which features a dramatic oboe solo.

This version of Intégrales reprised the staging used at last year's Zankel Hall hit, with most of the performers beginning offstage (in the wings and in the balconies) and constantly reconfiguring themselves as they play, gradually and inevitably being pulled towards the stage. There's also a great moment midway through where it looks like the oboe soloist is going to be eaten alive by the brass section. I still enjoyed this rendition immensely -- the evolving physical distance between the instruments does a lot to clarify the piece's dense sonorities -- but for some reason I found the staging not quite as satisfying the second time around. Perhaps because this time it lacked the element of surprise -- and not just for me. At Miller, conductor Alan Pierson announced in advance that Intégrales would be staged. I think the effect is much more powerful when it's unexpected.

That said, the actual playing was just as strong as last year's revelatory interpretation --  intensely focused and sure-footed. Alarm Will Sound's earthy, visceral interpretations make me long for an alternate version of early 20th-century "classical" music history, where composers like Varèse, Ives, Bartók, and (post-Rite) Stravinksy are the ones whose legacy is taken up by subsequent generations, and nobody cares about anything Schoenberg did after Pierrot Lunaire.

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See also:

Sandwich Cake
Maury D'Annato (My Favorite Intermissions)
Anne Midgette (New York Times)

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Tikets to this event were provided by Miller Theatre. Alarm Will Sound trombonist James Hirschfeld is also a Secret Society co-conspirator.

You can make history young again

Okay, I don't know how long this has been going on, but the "Search this blog" button in the sidebar -- which relies on Google's blog search engine to work -- is no longer showing results for anything not on the front page, making it rather useless. I'm afraid I have no idea what's going on, nor how to fix it. Anyone got any ideas?

(UPDATE: As an interim measure, I switched the box so it now uses regular Google, which seems to be working okay, at least for older posts. But Google Blog Search still doesn't see any of my archives.)

While I'm at it, I notice Typepad isn't showing the complete list of monthly archives in the sidebar anymore unless you actually click on the "Archive" button. That, too, is extremely annoying. If you know of some way to change it back, please share.

Don't leave me any memories

Incriminating evidence for last weekend's BPC gig is now up. Normally, our gigs are documented by Lindsay, who always does a great job under terrible conditions -- crappy lighting, cramped quarters, music stands getting in the way of everything, etc. But she wasn't sure if she would be able to make last Sunday's hit, given that she had another event to shoot earlier that day -- John Edwards at the Riverside Church. (If you're curious, the shots from that event are on Lindsay's Flickr page.)

However, as luck would have it, the incredibly talented Brazillian music photographer Dani Gurgel happened to be in town. She did a great job shooting Maria's gigs in Brazil, and so Maria put the two of us in touch and you can see the results here. I also recommend checking out the beautiful work on Dani's website. And if you do Flickr, Dani's page is here.

Sic Transit Gloria

"Transit" (featuring Ingrid Jensen) is today's featured download at AllAboutJazz.com.

To hear the rest of this show (from 18 April 2006), or any of our previous hits, visit the Secret Society Live Audio Archive.

And the Bowery is screaming while Delancey rests

Sunday, 14 January 2007 - Bowery Poetry Club

with the Industrial Jazz Group

SETLIST (click to listen/download)

1) Lizard Brain
Solo: Josh Sinton, baritone sax

2) Induction Effect
Solo: André Canniere, trumpet

3) Drift
Solo: Mark Small, tenor sax

4) Transit
Solo: Shane Endsley, trumpet

5) Chrysalis
Solo: Erica vonKleist, alto flute and soprano sax

6) Phobos
Solos: Jon Wikan, cajon; Mark Small, tenor sax

7) Habeas Corpus
Solo: James Hirschfeld, trombone

8) The Perils of Empire

 

Download all (ZIP archive)

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Incriminating evidence (by Brazilian music photographer Dani Gurgel).

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Goddamn but that was fun. And believe me, I never thought I'd say that about a gig where I found out just a few hours before the hit that one of the players was stuck in Florida airport hell (redundant, I know) and couldn't make it back to New York in time to play. Luckily, last-minute sub Marc Phaneuf -- who had never seen any of the music before -- is evidently some sort of sight-reading mutant, and so all was good.

The Industrial Jazz Group were, as predicted, more fun in a club setting at night than they were in a hotel ballroom during a Very Important Jazz Conference at noon a few days prior. And since they were still pretty goddamn fun at IAJE, that's quite the accomplishment. It no doubt helped that Andrew Durkin & co. were playing the final night of an east coast tour, in front of a hugely supportive crowd. Seriously, I have never seen the BPC that packed. Shameless gig-flogging at IAJE (from all involved) evidently really does work. Who knew?

Anyway, the IJG brought boundless reserves of energy to Andrew's infectious and witty charts, which are full of clever inside jokes but thankfully mostly snark-free -- they kid because they love. Their tunes are all great, but I'm especially partial to "Bongo Non Troppo." If you haven't heard their stuff yet, get thee to MySpace posthaste.

IJG trumpet player and blogger extraordinaire Kris Tiner has the inside scoop:

I'm interested to read what Durkin will blog about the whole thing, but I'll go ahead and venture to say that this was probably the strongest and most fun IJG gig I've ever played on. Playing this music night after night with more or less the same people is really something else. Tonight it just seemed to coalesce and flow together and fly by effortlessly.

It was truly amazing to have such a killing group hit just before we did -- their set was an inspiration for the Society to try to give it up as much as the Industrials did.

I will let you all decide whether or not we succeeded in that regard, but I'm very pleased with how things went. It was great to have Erica, Jon, and Darrell back with us, and the newly inducted co-conspirators -- Shane, Alex, Thomson, and of course Marc -- all played their asses off. Not a bad start to 2007, all things considered.

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REEDS
Erica vonKleist
Rob Wilkerson
Marc Phaneuf
Mark Small
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Shane Endsley
André Canniere
James De La Garza
Tom Goehring
Dave Rezek

TROMBONES
Alan Ferber
Alex Heitlinger
James Hirschfeld
Darrell Hendricks

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, guitar
Mike Holober, keyboards
Thomson Kneeland, bass
Jon Wikan, drums

COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, RINGLEADER
Darcy James Argue

MLK 2007

Last year on MLK day, I posted an excerpt from a speech King gave here in New York at the Riverside Church on 4 April 1967. The speech is called Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence and it contains some of the most powerful rhetoric ever delivered by the 20th century's greatest orator.

If anything, it is even more painfully apparent in 2007 that this administration remains intent on reenacting the Vietnam tragedy in full, including their recent intimation that extending the war to Laos and Cambodia Iran and Syria will somehow help end the war more quickly. ("We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.")

This year, Taylor Ho Bynum has also linked to King's Beyond Vietnam speech. I thought about choosing another passage to excerpt this time, but really, there is no substitute for listening to King's delivery -- reading his words without hearing to his voice is like looking at a Coltrane transcription without hearing the record. So just go listen.

When your dreamboat turns out to be a footnote

Many thanks to all who attended last night's Big Band Blowout on the Bowery. The Industrial Jazz Group put on a hell of a show and it was a real pleasure to share the stage with them, especially in front of such a large and appreciative crowd. I am in awe of IJG mastermind Andrew Durkin's ability to put together an east coast tour for his group. The logistics of trying to set up a Secret Society gig in, say, Philly, still seem incredibly daunting to me -- let alone pulling off a regional tour on the other side of the country.

As those who attended the show know, I found out shortly before the gig that one of my most valued co-conspirators, Sam Sadigursky, found himself stuck in a Florida airport with no way to get back to New York in time for the gig. Luckily, the incredible Marc Phaneuf was able to step in at the last minute and read the music cold. Marc has played some of my music before, but only in Pulse -- he's never seen the Secret Society book. But he sat down just before we hit and played like he had all the charts memorized. Marc is one of the most outstanding musicians in town -- not just a phenomenal reader but a first-rate improviser as well -- so if you get the opportunity to hear him play, fercrissakes go.

I'll have the full run-down, with audio and photos, up soon, but until then, here are the "show notes" -- followup on a couple of things I mentioned during the set:

MP3: Michael Brecker's solo on "Foxy Trot" (from Kenny Wheeler's Double, Double You)

As I mentioned, this track was my first exposure to Brecker's playing. At the time, I thought it was the most exciting jazz solo I'd ever heard, and after revisiting it the other night, I still think it kicks six kinds of ass.

Video: Maher Arar talks about his ordeal. A Canadian citizen, fellow McGill alumnus, telecommunications engineer, husband and father of two young children, in 2002 Arar was passing through JFK airport on his way home from a family vacation in Tunisia when he was taken aside and detained by the INS. A few days later, he was secretly deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned in a grave-like 3' by 6' underground prison cell. The only time he saw the outside of that cell was when he was taken to the torture room and beaten. Arar remained in Syrian custody for over 10 months until, thanks to the efforts of his family and the international human rights community, his release was finally secured. Arar was never charged with any crime and no evidence of any wrongdoing has ever been produced. A Canadian commission charged with looking into the matter found "there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada."

More info at maherarar.ca and Wikipedia.

"Habeas Corpus" is devoted to Maher Arar and those like him all over the world who have been illegally detained and tortured.

Open letter to the person who took my camera on Saturday night

The pictures on the camera's memory card -- of IAJE Day 4, including the closing Charlie Haden concert -- mean a great deal to me. I will give you $75 (which is what I paid for the card), no questions asked, for the safe return of that 2GB SD card, provided the photos have not yet been erased. Or if you want to help out an impoverished jazz musician, who really needs that camera to take pictures for this blog, by returning both camera and card, the reward is $100 -- again, no questions asked.

Meanwhile, I'm not much for blegging but if any Secret Society readers have enjoyed my photos and blogging from IAJE, or any of the music I've posted, your support is always greatly appreciated:

TONIGHT - Secret Society with Industrial Jazz Group @ Bowery Poetry Club

REEDS
Erica vonKleist
Rob Wilkerson
Sam Sadigursky
Mark Small
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Shane Endsley
André Canniere
James De La Garza
Tom Goehring
Dave Rezek

TROMBONES
Alan Ferber
Alex Heitlinger
James Hirschfeld
Darrell Hendricks

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, guitar
Mike Holober, keyboards
Thomson Kneeland, bass
Jon Wikan, drums

COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, RINGLEADER
Darcy James Argue

Sunday, 14 January 2006. Bowery Poetry Club.

8 PM - Industrial Jazz Group. 9:30 PM - Secret Society.

Two bands, one price -- $12.

IAJE Day 3 Photos -- Madness in great ones must not unwatch’d go

More pics from Day 3 below the fold...

RIP Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker

We all knew that Michael Brecker was living on borrowed time, but that doesn't lessen the blow of his passing one bit. I'm told he completed what will be his final recording just a few weeks ago.

But Alice Coltrane too? Her fate is especially cruel, coming as it does in the midst of a return to active playing and a critical reassessment of her recorded legacy.

Charlie Haden was incredibly close to both musicians. He played on what would be Alice's final concert, and the album he co-led with Brecker is one of the late sax god's most sincere, heartfelt representations on record.

Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra paid tribute to them both tonight in their performance at IAJE, and if you were there, you know how incredible it was -- easily the most emotionally powerful musical event I've ever seen at one of these things. When the horns starting playing a chorale harmonization of "We Shall Overcome" at the end of the show, I lost it -- I had tears streaming down my face, and they wouldn't stop until Charlie and Matt Wilson came in with the time, which sounded like the most beautiful time in the world. It was like they were putting an arm around everyone's shoulders and reassuring us that it really was going to be okay.

UPDATE: Do The Math brings you Mark Turner's elegy for Michael Brecker, which begins thusly:

Fuck those motherfuckers who don't give it up for Michael Brecker.

Indeed. Read the whole thing.

IAJE Day 2 Photos -- A Gallery of Madness

More pics from Day 2 below the fold...

A madness contagious

Other people blogging their IAJE experience:

LA Trumpet player Kris Tiner (Stop The Play And Watch The Audience).

Garland, TX-based saxophonist Kevin McNerney.

A capella vocal jazz ensemble Clockwork.

Critic Forrest Dylan Bryant (FoJazz).

Bassist and educator Matthew Wengerd (104 Weeks).

Critic/blogger J.B. of J.B. Spins.

Cedar Rapids-Iowa City public radio station Jazz 88.3 KCCK.

North Stars -- St. Charles North High School (St. Charles, Illinois).

And probably many more that Google doesn't know about yet. If you see one, let me know.

Missed opportunity

Now here's someone who knows how to make bebop sound fresh again. Why wasn't this dude booked to perform at IAJE?

Via Mwanji, who got it from Rifftides.

IAJE Day 3 - Live from the belly of the beast

First, thanks to all who enjoyed this afternoon's panel on MySpace, blogs, podcasts, and digital communities. I hope my contributions were helpful, especially for those who didn't know there was such a thing as "the jazz blogosphere." It was a pleasure to share the stage with mog.com's Michael Goldberg and artists like Brian Lynch, Lonnie Plaxico, Vinson Valega, Jaleel Shaw, and Deidre Rodman -- who I haven't seen since we were at Banff together back in 1999! Sorry for the lack of advance notice but there was some confusion about the number of panelists that could be included and I only knew I'd be part of this disucssion at the very last minute. If you're new to the Secret Society blog, I encourage you to poke around the archives (in the left sidebar -- scroll down) and, if you like, listen to or download some Secret Society MP3's (top right).

I'm currently liveblogging from one of the IAJE internet kiosks on the Hilton's third floor. I'd been hoping to do more updates from the site but my computer situation has been disasterous. See, I don't actually own a laptop -- I have to borrow Lindsay's every time I need to do a Finale workshop (or, um, go to Germany for a week), and while she has been incredibly understanding about this, needless to say she's never all that thrilled to be separated from her baby for very long. So I sprung for a MacBook Pro just before Christmas, only to have it fail catastrophically within 10 days. I had to ship the dead MacBook back to Amazon for a replacement, which was supposed to arrive on Wednesday. But it never turned up. When I put in the tracking number on the UPS site yesterday in the hopes of finding out what the hell happened, I get the following message:

MERCHANDISE IS MISSING. UPS WILL NOTIFY THE SENDER WITH ADDITIONAL DETAILS.;ALL MERCHANDISE MISSING, EMPTY CARTON WAS DISCARDED. UPS WILL NOTIFY THE SENDER WITH DETAILS OF THE DAMAGE

Draw your own conclusions.

Anyway, because of this and a few other issues that needed my attention on the home front, I didn't get to the conference until 4:30 PM today. But Ingrid Jensen let me sit in on the Sisters in Jazz rehearsal today -- since it's the tenth anniversary of this IAJE-sponsored mentorship program, I thought it might be cool to make a podcast (I bet you thought I wasn't ever going to do another podcast) featuring Ingrid and this year's SIJ participants -- Sharel Cassity, Chelsea Baratz, Mika Nishimura, Vanessa McGowan, and Tina Raymond. Today was just watching and recording the rehearsal and taking a few pictures. Tomorrow, after their hit, I'll try to get a little round table interview happening. This epsiode may take me a while to put together, but I figure you've already waited so long for Podcast #2, a few more days won't kill you.

After the panel, I managed to catch the final tune of singer Julia Dollison's hit. Julia was backed by Joe Locke on vibes and the unstoppable rhythm section of Geoff Keezer, Matt Clohesy, and Ted Poor. They did a version of "Night and Day" reharmonized with Coltrane changes, and I was surprised how much I liked it. Normally that sort of thing quickly turns into an empty exercise in harmonic hurdling, but this rendition had huge momentum behind it, thanks to Matt and Ted. I almost never get to hear those guys play straighahead swing, and it was a real treat to hear them bring the same relentless drive to that as they do in a more contemporary context. And Julia ate it up -- she's the real deal, no doubt.

Totally unexpectedly, I ran into a couple of old friends from NEC, tenor saxophonist John McClaggan and singer Lisa Berg (now Lisa McClaggan), who now both teach at Southwestern Community College in Creston, Iowa. Their school vocal group First Take is performing tomorrow, so they're in town representin'. I haven't seen these guys since we all graduated, so it was great to catch up.

I toyed with the idea of going to tongiht's Grand Ballroom hit (NEC Jazz Master Awards, plus the Clayton Brothers Quintet and the Dizzy Gillespie^TM All-Star Big Band), but by the time I was finished dinner, the lineup was absurd. (The lineup of people waiting to get into the hall, I mean -- not [necessarily] the lineup of musicians on the bill.) I figured now was a good time to feed the blog, and then head over to catch the last two hits of the night -- Jerry Bergonzi at 11 PM and Matt Wilson at 12:30 AM.

IAJE update

Last-minute heads-up -- I will be speaking on the "Jazz in My Space: Online Community-Building" panel at 6 PM today, Sheraton 3rd floor, New York West room.

IAJE Day 2 - Already madness lifts its wing

My itinerary (after being up until 7 AM last night morning blogging and getting ready for today's yesterday's Pulse hit):

11:30 AM -- subway into Manhattan. I was practicing my conducting on train, which reliably freaks out fellow passengers and, I'm fairly confident, makes me the biggest geek in the history of geekdom. Upon exit, I run into my friend elizabeth!, who is playing the late set with Matt Wilson's Arts and Crafts on Friday night. Matt's IAJE hits are always incredibly fun. A few years ago, Matt's bandmate, Andrew D'Angelo,  destroyed his alto saxophone (seriously, we're talking Pete Townshend-style smashing and  everything) at the end of the show. While this maneuver might have seemed a bit odd at, say, Fat Cat, at IAJE it was fucking brilliant.

12:20 PM -- slip into Industrial Jazz Group show, already underway. And a good time was had by all, especially during "The Job Song" (chorus: "Get a real job!"), which could be the IAJE theme song. Sunday's gonna be fun.

1:00 PM -- try to psych myself up to stand by the exit and force fliers for Sunday's IJG+Secret Society double-bill into the hands of all attendees. Fail miserably. Instead, end up shooting the shit with All About Jazz critic/editor/man-about-town Andrey Henkin, IJG mastermind Andrew Durkin and IJG trumpeter Kris Tiner. Am still mulling over the best way to describe what IJG do. Perhaps this way: Slavic Soul Party are to Balkan brass band music as Industrial Jazz Group are to big band.

2:00 PM -- obtain and consume much-needed coffee, then head up to the Hiton's Grand Ballroom to catch the premiere of Sherisse Rogers's Gil Evans commission, "Crossing Paths (3 Tales)." Beautiful performance of a killing piece, which contains occasional nods to Guillermo Klein and Pedro Giraudo (of Mr. Vivo), but is executed with Sherisse's incredibly sophisticated command of large-scale musical narrative. This is probably my favorite Sherisse chart yet. Her band also did Rufus Reid's IAJE/ASCAP commission, "Hues of a Different Blue," a McNeely-influenced post-Thad romp that featured a (literally) showstopping solo by altoist Jon Irabagon. I'd never heard Jon before but he's the kind of cat who can slay the room with a single note.

3:00 PM --  hang out, offer congrats to Sherisse & co,  shoot more shit, plug Pulse hit. We're playing at the other hotel (the conference consumes both the Hilton and the Sheraton), and I should head over there soon to get set up.

4:00 PM -- Pulse prep. Berate John McNeil for taking home the wrong part from Monday's rehearsal, insert Secret Society propaganda into Pulse programs, set up our totally unsanctioned recording device, attempt brief soundcheck. And we're off...

5:00 PM -- Pulse IAJE hit Things go really well -- this is honestly the best this music has ever sounded. Also, photo projections are actually visible this time. I'm told the sound in the room was decent, if maybe a bit on the loud side up front. John McNeil slays everyone with his playing on Josh Shneider's chart. Photos and audio from this should be up soon on the Pulse blog.

6:00 PM -- post-hit schmooze. I meet D.D. Jackson in person for the first time -- thanks for coming to check us out, D.D!  People seem generally positive about what we just did, which is nice. One of my stand lights goes AWOL, which is less nice. Oh well -- an inevitable casualty of war, I suppose.

6:40 PM -- post-hit food at the not-very-good-but-conveniently-located 53rd Street Deli. Other Pulsketeers lobby for real food, but I just want to get a quick bite and then catch Ingrid's 7 PM hit.

7:00 PM -- I'm biased, clearly, but I'm gonna go ahead and say it -- Ingrid Jensen, Geoff Keezer, Matt Clohesy and Jon Wikan owned this thing so far. Never mind the incredible playing, their pacing was a thing of beauty -- like Ingrid conceived of the set as a single cohesive piece. Her use of pedal-based electronic effects keeps getting deeper and deeper, I think party because of her uncanny ability to be in the moment without losing sight of the big picture, and partly because she's able to combine the electronics with complimentary acoustic-based extended techniques. The transition out of this skewed delay-drenched dream-world into Keezer's hard-driving "Captain John" was transfixing. Juilliard student Sharel Cassity joined in on flute, soprano, and alto for the title track from Ingrid's recent At Sea.

9:00 PM -- down to the Jazz Gallery for Sherisse's big band set. I'm sitting in the audience with Erica vonKleist. It must feel odd to her to hear this music from the other side of the stage -- Erica normally plays Reed 1 in Project Uprising (as well as Secret Society), but as more people start to realize what a bad motherfucker she is, it's become increasingly difficult for us to get our respective schedules in line. Tonight was a "I'm free for the gig but I can't make the rehearsals"-type situation, but it's a testament to just how devoted Erica is to Sherisse's music that despite her insane schedule this week, she came down to hear the band from out front.

In a (much less dramatic) parallel situation: I normally conduct Sherisse's "A Slippery Slope" while she holds down the bass chair -- this time, she entrusted the incredibly involved bass part to Ike Sturm's capable hands, and assumed traffic cop duties herself -- which left me free to actually enjoy the chart without stressing about all those frickin' meter changes and subtle tempo transitions.

11:00 PM -- up to the Ginger Man for Ingrid's birthday celebrations. Catchphrase of the evening: "Harden the fuck up" -- which has been embedded into black Lance Armstrong-style plastic wristbands that everyone's wearing.

12:30 AM -- we return to The Madness for John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble set. They played a relatively "jazzy" set (for them) that began with "Folkmoot" (Marian McPartland meets Jimmy Giuffre) and continued with Hollenbeck's minimalist/maximalist arrangement of Monk's "Four In One," the contemplative-but-invigorating "Guarana," the hypnotic "Long Swing Dream" (AKA "LSD" -- quoth John: "I myself have never tried LSD, but Cary Grant did"), and "A Blessing," Hollenbeck's 2001 IAJE commission. I confess I often can't hang with Hollenbeck's aggressively naive text settings -- "A Blessing" is based on the Irish Blessing ("May the road rise to meet you," etc) and is a conscious attempt to reclaim those words from cliché. When Theo Bleckmann sings them I almost buy it -- that's how good Theo is. It helps that the instrumental portions of the piece are phenomenal.

I took lots of photos of the course of the day -- in fact, I completely filled my 2 GB SD card -- but I see it's once again 6 AM and I'd really like to make Jim McNeely's talk about his Paul Klee-inspired works tomorrow today at noon. So the gallery will have to wait... watch this space.

IAJE Day 1 - Descent Into Madness, and a Quick Exit

A brief background for the uninitiated -- the annual International Association for Jazz Education conference is the jazz industry's biggest annual gathering of artists, students, educators, critics, radio hosts and programmers, label reps, publishers, etc etc etc. It's a four-day blowout of concerts, clinics, panels, and the like, beginning each morning at 9 AM and continuing until the wee small hours, There's more going on there than anyone could possibly see, even if you had the stamina. Plus, in addition to what's on the schedule, there is an incredible amount of Very Important Schmoozing going on at all times -- everyone's trying to persuade the right people to come to their hit (critics, label reps, big name artists, etc) or angling for teaching gigs, workshops, a record deal, etc. A lot of people believe, rightly or wrongly, that their entire career is riding on what happens at this conference. It's exhausting, even if you're  trying to stay largely above the fray.

There are also thousands upon thousands of high school and college students at this thing -- some of them are performing with their school ensemble, some of them have won auditions to play in various student all-star groups or have their works performed at the opening ceremonies, and some of them have come on their own dime -- student registration is $170-$180, plus travel and accommodation -- to hear the big names perform and check out the various workshops. Many of these kids come from small towns and this conference will be their first time hearing top-flight jazz artists perform live. It's easy to get cynical about the meat-market aspects of the conference -- and I'm as guilty of that as anyone -- but I think it's also good to remember how exciting the whole thing can be for young players, especially the first time they experience it. I still have many fond memories of my first IAJE -- the 1994 conference in Boston -- especially since that's where I first heard Bob Brookmeyer. (He was leading the Danish Radio Band in a concert of his own music.)

The conference kicked off at 12:30 this afternoon with what was billed as a "Special Focus Section: Envisioning the Future of Jazz," but I couldn't make it down there until around 6 PM -- just time enough to pick up my credentials and line up for one of the opening performances, by Quinsin Nachoff's Magic Numbers, a septet featuring Quinsin on tenor sax, Mark Helias on bass, Jim Black on drums, and a Montreal-based string quartet: Nathalie Bonin, Noémi Racine Gaudreault, Jean René and Christine Giguère. This is a good time slot to have -- only one other simultaneous performance to compete with, and at this point everyone is still fresh and full of anticipation. (Nobody survives IAJE without getting seriously burnt out. The only question is exactly when burnout sets in.)

Quinsin is a tenor player active on the Toronto scene. I know him from the Banff Jazz Workshop -- we met there in the summer of 1999, and then were reunited at the 2000 Montreal Jazz Fest, where he played in my quintet. But I haven't seen him since, so I was excited to see him again, and to hear what he's been up to.

Magic Numbers opened with a fractured funkish groove, with Quinsin laying down some spacious long tones and the string quartet contributing a running commentary. The tune, "There And Back," winds its way through various modal areas, and Quinsin's solo became surprisingly boppish in parts, followed by some intense, active lines in the violins, reinforced at the octave by the viola, and ending with a brief pizz cello groove. The string writing was varied and effective, if occasionally a little discontinuous -- some of the ideas could have used more elaboration, and more room to breathe.

The highlight for me was Quinsin's arrangement of his own "October," the kind of simple, earnest, unapologetically pretty ballad that jazz musicians write in their first year of college (i.e., before they start acutely feeling the need to shelter themselves behind layers of surface complexity). It began with a lovely viola solo by Jean René, and ended with subtone sax and bowed cymbals.

They closed with "How Postmodern of Me," a bit of Zornish musical channel-surfing done up Toronto-style. Naturally, Helias and Black ate it up, but I thought it was interesting that, unlike the usual wrenching start-stop figures we associate with Downtown eclecticism, many of the abrupt stylistic shifts here didn't actually feel all that abrupt. In fact, at times it seemed like the deliberate discontinuity between sections actually created a more cohesive overall effect. Go figure. Anyway, the playing was first-rate throughout, and the group seemed very comfortable with the considerable challenges of Quinsin's material. This was a great way to kick off the conference.

After this, I must confess that I decided to bail on the evening's remaining official IAJE performances in favor of one of the many unofficial off-site events -- the 2007 NYC Winter Jazzfest at the Knitting Factory. This is an annual mini-festival consisting of acts that, for one reason or another, won't be performing at this year's IAJE. This year's edition featured hits by (among others) Rudresh Mahanthappa, Lionel Loueke, So Percussion, Steve Lehman, and Slavic Soul Party. This is apparently the Knit's attempt to trick visitors into believing that they still feature jazz on a regular basis. Like IAJE, it features multiple simultaneous performances, so it's impossible to catch everything, or even part of everything. I'd also been told admission was free with my IAJE artist badge. This turned out not to be the case -- apparently if you wanted to take advantage of that offer, you had to RSVP. Oh well -- the lineup was impressive enough that I didn't mind springing for the $25 cover.

I'd love to be able to comment on the many excellent performances I saw at this thing, but damn, it's 6 AM and I should probably try to squeeze in at least a little sleep before the Pulse IAJE hit tomorrow... er, I mean, today. (Thursday Jan 11, 5 PM, Sheraton Empire Ballroom.) Instead, I will leave you with more pics of Magic Numbers, as well as shots of some of the Winter Jazzfest acts, all below the fold.

You're faking a smile with the coffee to go

Every bandleader dreads getting a phone call or email from a band member on the day of a rehearsal -- it's never good news. Very early this morning, amidst all the usual pre-gig drama, I heard from not one, but two key players who had got themselves a wee bit of the projectile vomiting, which obviously interfered with their ability to make today's Secret Society rehearsal. I definitely sympathize, since I very nearly had to bail on December's Pulse hit, for much the same reason. Get well soon, guys.

This is just one more reason why AM sessions suck -- if the rehearsal had been in the afternoon, I would have had at least a few hours to call around and try to find some subs. As it was, I had to leave for this morning's rehearsal with a both chairs as-yet unfilled, armed only with a printout of jazz musicians who I'd been told might [A] actually answer the phone if I called them before 9 AM, and [B] be willing and able to come in for an AM rehearsal on less than an hour's notice and read a bunch of really hard charts. As you might imagine, that's a short list, even in New York.

Things were not looking promising, but with a little help from the other players, I was able to get last-minute subs for both chairs (thank you, Mike and Karl) and we actually had a productive rehearsal.

Tomorrow, The Madness begins in earnest. I will try to cover as much as I can for the blog. Snark aside, IAJE is quite the experience and I will attempt to convey some of what it's like to take part. Again, if you're planning on hitting the conference, Pulse is performing on Thursday, January 11 at 5:00 PM at the Sheraton's Empire Ballroom.

Secret Society with Industrial Jazz Group @ Bowery Poetry Club, 14 Jan 2007

REEDS
Erica vonKleist
Rob Wilkerson
Sam Sadigursky
Mark Small
Josh Sinton

TRUMPETS
Shane Endsley
André Canniere
James De La Garza
Tom Goehring
Dave Rezek

TROMBONES
Alan Ferber
Alex Heitlinger
James Hirschfeld
Darrell Hendricks

RHYTHM
Sebastian Noelle, guitar
Mike Holober, keyboards
Thomson Kneeland, bass
Jon Wikan, drums

COMPOSER, CONDUCTOR, RINGLEADER
Darcy James Argue

Sunday, 14 January 2006. Bowery Poetry Club.

8 PM - Industrial Jazz Group. 9:30 PM - Secret Society.

Two bands, one price -- $12.

I can't believe it's five days before the hit and I've only just now let you know who's playing! But truth be told, the lineup was only finalized this weekend. The Madness is almost upon us (the sheer insanity of which is only partially captured in this piece by Nate Chinen) and everything is in flux as players perform voodoo on their schedules, trying to work out how they can be in two or three places at once in order to accommodate all the projects they are committed to.

At any rate, I'm very excited to announce the triumphant return of co-conspirators Erica vonKleist and Jon Wikan. Both players have been with the Society since the beginning, but their busy schedules have prevented them from appearing on the past few dates. I've been very lucky to have had absolutely amazing players step up in their place, but Erica and Jon are like family and it means a lot to have them return to the fold after all this time.

Of course, I'm excited about the new initiates as well. Trombonist Alex Heitlinger and bassist Thomson Kneeland  are not only great players and very active on the local scene, they are both extremely accomplished composers in their own right. The two of them subbed in during rehearsals for the previous Society hit, so they've already had the opportunity to wrap their heads around the music. On Sunday, Thompson will be making his New York debut on electric bass (on the charts what call for it). In fact, while he owns a very nice five-string fretless, Thompson hasn't played electric in public in twelve years. (Acoustic jazz purists, now's your chance to snub him.)

Also joining us for the first time is a guy I've wanted to recruit into the Society for a long time -- trumpeter Shane Endsley. You probably know him from Kneebody, the bicoastal electric jazz supergroup. His presence seems especially appropriate since this Sunday's show is a double-bill will the LA-based Industrial Jazz Group, led by Andrew Durkin (another one of those damn bloggers). I know Andrew's music only through MySpace, but those tracks are killing -- cunningly constructed but totally infectious, and irreverent. A few months ago, Andrew approached me about the possibility of setting up a double-bill while the band was out east for The Madness, and that seemed like a good idea, so I contacted our gracious hosts at the Bowery Poetry Club and they hooked us up. The IJG hits at 8 PM, and the Society strikes at 9:30 sharp.

I hope you can all make it down this Sunday for our big band blowout, especially if you're in town for IAJE. I promise you, after days of shuttling back and forth between hotels, squeezing into overstuffed ballrooms, trying to catch a glimpse of the stage from 500 feet back, surrounded by bored, petulant kids whose band directors require their attendance at the marquee concerts, only to be underwhelmed by empty, ego-driven performances^[1]... well, this gig is just what you need. Get the hell out of Midtown -- come down to the Bowery, have some drinks and have some fucking fun while you're in the city, goddammit.

-----
1. I jest, of course. That sort of thing never happens at IAJE. But listen, if you are going, you should check out the Industrial Jazz Group's IAJE hit, of course -- Jan 11 at noon in the Sherry's Empire Ballroom.) And Pulse is contributing to The Madness as well later that same day -- 5 PM, same space. 

You don't even make the list

The results from Idoloator's Jackin' Pop -- the massive "year's best" meta-poll of music critics (specifically, these ones), intended as an alternative to the Village Voice's venerable Pazz and Jop in the post-Christgau era -- are now up. David is right, the ability to sort the results by demographic is incredibly entertaining, as is the "Enthusiasm 40" -- like Pazz and Jop, Jackin' Pop is a weighted poll, and critics can give more weight to some choices than others.

Here's the top ten albums overall:

1. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain (1338 points in 125 votes)
2. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (1247 points in 118 votes)
3. The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America (1073 points in 95 votes)
4. Clipse - Hell Hath No Fury (1057 points in 102 votes)
5. Joanna Newsom - Ys (883 points in 84 votes)
6. Bob Dylan - Modern Times (749 points in 70 votes)
7. Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere (623 points in 61 votes)
8. The Knife - Silent Shout (607 points in 56 votes)
9. Neko Case - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood (588 points in 58 votes)
10. Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit (586 points in 54 votes)

I remain thoroughly transfixed by #1 (I forced Ethan I. to listen to "A Method" when he came over before Xmas) -- it might be the most compelling indie rock album I've heard since Funeral, and I really need to blog about it at length at some point.

I've heard some killing individual cuts from #2, #3, and #4, but haven't gotten around to obtaining the albums yet, though I'm most excited about #3, which from the sounds of it is a fun record. And they have the Anti-Social Music connection, which is very cool.

Much respect for #5, the unlikeliest indie rock darling ever. You would think this record would be right up my alley. I love harp -- in fact a few years ago, I joked with my friend Travis that harp was going to be the next big thing in indie rock. I love long-form through-composed songs. I love Steve Albini's engineering skills, and Van Dyke Park's orchestrations are to die for. Newsome's quirky, unpredictable, fully-committed vocals keep things from getting unbearably twee. (Sometimes.) But this record does absolutely nothing for me. While I'm very appreciative of the way Newsome has broadened the scope of the musical conversation, especially online, I don't want to hear any of her many supporters use the word "pretentious" to disparage anyone ever again. Not Tori Amos, not Meatloaf, not Yes, not even Sting. No, not even when he grabs for the damn lute. I mean it, now.

I'm not a Dylan-hater, but I have to confess I have very little interest in #6.

#7 is better than the anti-Gnarls backlash would have you believe, but contra Klosterman's "auteur" idiocy, many of the weaker tracks survive purely on the strength of Cee-Lo's vocals.

#8 -- I evidently slept on this band this year. I've barely heard of them, and have no idea what they're about.

I like Neko better as a New Pornographer, but #9 proves she does what she does better than just about anyone else. And if we're comparing occasionally over-precious Renaissance Faire-styl'd lyricis, I'll take Neko over Joanna anytime.

Belle & Sebastian is a band I have no particular objection to, but find it hard to get excited about, and nothing I've heard from #10 has done much to change my mind on that score.

On the jazz tip, Ornette's Sound Grammar comes in at #45, just behind Thom Yorke and just ahead of "Midlake," whatever the hell that is. I must confess that I still have not heard Ornette's new joint -- I'd been expecting Santa to help me rectify this, but evidently Sound Grammar Records don't have great distribution to the Arctic Circle. And, as previously noted, Vancouver's record shop situation has gotten dire. But now that I'm back in NY, I'll probably just order online.

Also, if you're not totally listed out by now, Francis Davis, who's still at the Voice -- they apparently haven't gotten around to firing their entire music staff yet -- has began an ambitious Jazz Critic's Poll. Davis weighs in on the results here.

When the promise of a brave new world unfurled beneath a clear blue sky

Liveblogging from Day 2 of Maria Schneider's Sky Blue sessions. It's now 8:40 PM -- the band has been going since 11:00 AM and they have just started another take. Donny McCaslin is playing his ass off, with the seductive, sinister rhythm section groove augmented by Gonzalo Grau and Pernell Saturnino on percussion. It kills me, but I'm going to have to split soon -- there's a Secret Society rehearsal tomorrow morning and I desperately need to prepare. But there are lots more of my session photos up on Maria's ArtistShare site and I think the interviews I recorded yesterday and today should be up soon.

Go cat go, high and down low

Stalwart co-conspirator Josh Sinton will be part of the following, totally killing, totally free show, tonight at The Lucky Cat in Billyburg:

7:30 PM
THPT -- Taylor Ho Bynum (you read his blog, right?), Pete Fitzpatrick, Thompson Kneeland, Harris Eisenstadt
swaying to the gentle strains of Jimi Hendrix

9:00 PM
Ideal Bread -- Josh Sinton, Kirk Knuffke, Reuben Radding, Tomas Fujiwara
rockin' the music of Steve Lacy

10:30 PM
TIN/BAG Quartet -- Mike Baggetta, Kris Tiner, Brian Walsh, Harris Eisenstadt
making their own special brand of sounds

Again, no cover (though hats will be passed and support will no doubt be gratefully and graciously accepted).

I saw Ideal Bread back in December at Jimmy's Restaurant. I didn't have time to blog about the hit at the time, but I was very impressed and asked Josh to submit his thoughts on the gig:

Why do I perform Steve Lacy’s music?

I have three reasons for doing this. The first reason is simply to honor and promote the artist Steve Lacy. I met Steve my last year in school and studied with him and he kind of changed my life. I had never met such a unified human being. By that, I mean he’s was all of a piece. The way he walked, played, wrote and talked were almost all interchangeable. When he walked down the hall, I could almost hear one of his songs in my head, and when he talked, it was eerily similar to when he played his saxophone. He came to mean an enormous amount to me as a teacher, composer and friend even though I only knew him for a little over two years. As for promoting him, Steve’s compositions are a unique and very American contribution to the world. While he might evoke other composers, no one else wrote what he wrote. Once you start listening to his music, you can instantly recognize one of his compositions as easily as one of Monk’s, Ellington’s or Webern’s. And there’s a lot of this material (anywhere from 300-500 compositions depending on who you aks) to choose from. No one else is regularly playing his music (yes, occasionally) so it struck me as fertile material for exploration and promotion. I looked at Lacy’s music and realized that maybe I could do a little for his music what he did for Thelonious Monk’s music.

Read the rest below the fold...

Skies were gray but they're not gray anymore

As you probably already know if you have enough interest in big band jazz to be reading this blog, Maria Schneider is in the process of recording her followup to 2004's much-acclaimed Concert in the Garden. The new record is called Sky Blue and today was the first day of recording. I was lucky enough to be there on the scene, taking pictures and recording interviews with the musicians involved. This behind-the-scenes content will be made available to those who preorder the record, which, like the last one, will be available exclusively via Maria's ArtistShare site. (In fact, I believe some of the photos I took might be already up.)

I may have gone a bit nuts with the photos today -- Lindsay got me a new digital camera for Christmas this year and I really wanted to put it through its paces, so much so that by about halfway through the session, I'd completely depleted the battery. When I go back tomorrow, I'll have to remember to bring the charger along.

In between taking pictures, I recorded "candid" discussions in the booth and one-on-one interviews with many of the players, including trombonists and Secret Society co-conspirators Ryan Keberle and Marshall Gilkes (our schedules have been frustratingly incompatible of late, but Marshall was on the first-ever Secret Society hit), and vocalist Sofia Koutsovitis, a friend since my NEC days. Ryan, Marshall, and Sofia are all making their first-ever appearance on a Maria record. I also got interviews with Donny McCaslin, Gary Versace, and even the notoriously reticent Rich Perry. Naturally, I captured Maria's own thoughts on the recording-in-progress at various points along the line.

Anyway, if you sign up for the ArtistShare thing, you'll be treated to my mad interview stylee, in which I at one point mistakenly refer to Ed Neumesiter as "Ed Partyka" (sorry, Eds), and also evidently failed to notice that there was, in fact, a small vocal part on "Sky Blue" (sorry, Sofia) -- I'm afraid when that piece was being cut I was busy editing photos and didn't get to hear very much of the chart. (Though I did manage to catch Steve Wilson's astounding soprano solo.) Anyway, I hope the interviews turn out decently despite these highly embarrassing gaffes. I'll try to talk to more players tomorrow.

The record is being cut at the Right Track A509 Annex, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, fucking enormous. They mostly do orchestral recordings and full B'way cast albums. In my day job as an NYC copyist, I've dropped off charts there before but I've never been up to the recording floor. You can get a sense of the scale of the 4500 square-foot room from the photo on this page. While having plenty of room to spread out is obviously preferable to being cramped into tiny quarters, as big bands usually are, it presents its own set of challenges, as you'll hear from Maria and the musicians once the audio clips go up. But the recorded sound so far is pretty stunning -- the sessions are being engineered by the legendary Joe Ferla, whose work you've no doubt heard on records by Dave Douglas, John Scofield, Bill Frisell, Paul Motian, Tim Berne, or perhaps this overlooked gem.

I can't even really begin to express how amazing it is to be able to be in the studio for this recording and watch Maria and her band work. What's particularly impressive is how insanely devoted everyone is to her and her music -- after almost eight hours of intense recording, there was a still a considerable contingent of players who stuck around for an informal post-session roundtable about what was working and what wasn't, what had happened at specific live gigs and whether that could be carried over in the studio, what could be tried tomorrow, etc. In just a few hours, I'll be heading back there for Day 2.

I blew it all at the penny arcade

Jen and I had plans to try to get tickets to one of the Arcade Fire's run of five shows at the Judson Memorial Church next month -- tickets theoretically went on sale at 9 AM this morning. It was supposed to be a tickets.com online exclusive -- so no calling out-of-state Ticketmaster numbers or any of the other tricks people used to get Radiohead tickets last summer. Just click when the clock rolls over, and first come, first serve.

Of course, well before 9 AM the site is swamped, and everyone gets put in a waiting queue. But eventually Jen and I both managed to get into the actual ticket purchase screen (albeit for different nights), so we thought we were golden... only to be told that the system was too overloaded to actually take our money. And after several minutes of frantic clicking, all of the tickets -- including the ones that we'd thought we'd scored -- were gone.

May the tongue of the tickets.com CEO wither and die in his mouth, and then be consumed by a thousand tiny maggots. And may a worse fate await this usurious eBay scalper.

Pretty good year

Best wishes to all for 2007. Thanks for your patience during the holiday hiatus -- regular(-ish) blogging will resume soon, but in the meanwhile I thought I'd open up comments for those who want to have the traditional "Best of 2006" discussion. I didn't hear nearly enough records this year to make any grand pronouncements, but over the next month I will try to squeeze in a few words about some notable 2006 recordings that I either didn't have time to review at the time of release, or didn't get around to snapping up until just now.

I usually take advantage of Vancouver's post-Boxing Day sales to stock up on CDs. The prices are still the best in North America, even with the weak US dollar, but it's getting harder and harder to find the records I'm interested in in brick-and-mortar CD stores. The once-mighty A&B Sound, whose densely-packed aisles I haunted practically every weekend when I was growing up, is now open and spacious, unencumbered by either CDs or customers. I'd been planning on picking up Ornette's Sound Grammar, Vijay Iyer's Raw Materials, the Reich Phases box, and The Hold Steady's Boys and Girls in America, among others -- but the Seymour Street flagship store didn't stock any of them.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd throw this open to the commenters -- what did you think of this year's crop of recordings? Did blogdonia's darlings, like TV On The Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain and Joanna Newsome's Ys, live up to the hype? What about Beck's (apparently) Scientology-inspired (seriously, now, WTF???) The Information or Yo La Tengo's anthemic I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass?

On the big band front, Jim McNeely put out three notable records this year, one each with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, the Swiss Jazz Orchestra, and the Danish Radio Big Band. And in addition to Ornette's widely praised Sound Grammar, there were notable '06 jazz releases from Bob Brookmeyer, Andrew Hill, Keith Jarrett, Randy Weston, Joe Lovano with Gunther Schuller, Jason Moran, Branford Marsalis, John Hollenbeck, Dave Douglas, Don Byron with Bang on a Can, and many others. I'll be sharing my thoughts on some of this stuff in the days ahead, but feel free to get the ball rolling in comments.