Officials' biggest fear by far was a direct hit to New Orleans, where post-Katrina rebuilding remains a work in progress. Roughly two-thirds of the population has returned and countless homeowners have used their savings to fix up their properties. But many homes still lie in disrepair, and the byzantine system of canals, pumps and levees that is supposed to protect the city from flooding remains incomplete."Although we have made strong strides in rebuilding our infrastructure, the levees have not been fully repaired and we have an $800-million budget gap to complete our sewage and water systems," Nagin said earlier in a statement.
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August 2008
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23 August 2008
Charlie Parker Jazz Festival - 23 Aug 2008, Marcus Garvey Park
Robert Glasper with Vicente Archer, Chris Dave
Rasheid Ali with Lawrence Clark, Lakecia Benjamin, Greg Murphy, Joris Teepe
Vanessa Rubin with Danny Grissett, Lonnie Plaxico, Alvin Atkinson
Barry Harris and Charles McPherson with Ray Drummond, Leroy Williams, plus the Barry Harris Jazz Choir
More pics below the fold...
Continue reading "Charlie Parker Jazz Festival - 23 Aug 2008, Marcus Garvey Park" »
J&R MusicFest - 22 Aug 2008 @ City Hall Park
MP3: Aaron Parks, "Nemesis" (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download)
From Invisible Cinema. Aaron Parks, piano; Mike Moreno, guitar; Matt Penman, bass; Eric Harland, drums. Posted with permission of the artist.
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So clearly the J&R MusicFest people do not fuck around when it comes to punctuality. Last night's mini jazz showcase was scheduled to start at 5 PM. I walked up at 5:02 and Aaron Parks & co. were already a couple of minutes into the anthemic 7/4 rocker "Nemesis" (see above). You know, even Carnegie Hall starts at five after.
Anyway, Aaron's Blue Note debut (and his first record as a leader in six years) dropped on Tuesday and he's been a busy boy this week, co-headlining (with Kurt Rosenwinkel) four sets over two nights at Smalls earlier in the week, and then this. I was at the first Small's set Tuesday night, sitting directly behind Aaron's piano bench (onstage, in fact, on the Rhodes bench), and the experience was kind of mind-blowing. Tuesday night was also the first time Kurt and Kendrick played together -- I do not believe it will be the last. The drummer on the record is Eric Harland, who is also great, but as I overheard one young jazz student at last night's hit tell his compatriot: "I love Kendrick's style, it's so fucking marching band."
The thing is, though, Kendrick is boundlessly inventive -- I've heard him play Aaron's music several times and he's always surprising me. One of his newly acquired toys are these special drum mallets with shakers inside the mallets -- he used them in dramatically different ways on Tuesday and Friday. And nobody plays the surging multimetric straight-eighth grooves that have become the lingua franca of modern mainstream jazz better than Kendrick.
As for the leader, Aaron has a real gift for spinning memorable, attractively folksy themes (like the pentatonic-based "Peaceful Warrior," which I have heard in a few different incarnations over the years) into mutlisection long-form workouts. He's always been kind of a scary technical wunderkind (like many jazz pianists, his piano guru is Sofia Rosoff) but what makes his recent music a thrill to listen to is the combination of effusive joy and an ambitious, architectural sense of structure and large-scale design.
At this point the music industry's operatically extended death throes, EMI releasing a creative jazz record by an up-and-coming artist kind of feels like staging a jam session on the Hindenburg, but hey, I am not complaining. Good on them for putting Invisible Cinemas out there, and also putting some of that major-label mojo behind an eminently worthy young musician.
WBGO's Josh Jackson has a nice interview with Aaron (including some live-in-the-studio versions of songs from Invisible Cineams). BGO aslo recorded the J&R Fest and all of these performances should be available for streaming soonish now. When that happens, I will update this post. (Post has been updated.)
[As always, I don't pretend to be remotely objective about anything I write here, but especially not about Aaron -- he is a friend, he's subbed in Society rehearsals a few times, and he's the person responsible for introducing me to Lizz Wright. But, you know, if objectivity is your thing, what are you even doing reading blogs in the first place?]
Singer and bassist Esperanza Spalding has had the kind of storybook success I honestly did not think was still even possible for a jazz artist -- she grew up home-schooled in a single-parent family in Portland, Oregon, landed a full ride at Berklee, was hired to teach bass at her alma mater as soon as she graduated, started gigging with Joe Lovano, put out a couple of records as a leader, and recently ended up playing on Letterman(!) and -- like Nico Muhly -- featured in the Times' Fashion & Style section.
This was my first time hearing her. Live, she's an engaging and charismatic performer with a wispy, attractive voice. She easily enthralled the big, diverse crowd, especially on the neo-soulish "Precious," and a cover of Nina Simone's "Wild Is The Wind." I'd like to hear her inhabit the songs a bit more -- Esperanza somtimes comes off as self-consciously putting on a performance instead of sublimating herself into the song. She's hardly alone in this -- jazz singers in general tend to be more concerned with sound than story -- but I have trouble connecting to that.
My other gripe was that for most of the set it, was well-nigh impossible to hear her bass playing. You could feel her notes, sure, but there was practically no pitch definition, and the bass drum was amplified so excessively it masked most of the low-end frequencies anyway. Now I love the communal experience of the outdoor summer gigs, and I'm glad that this year there are a few more jazz shows in the mix, but sweet jeebus is the live sound at these things ever atrocious. I'd like to catch her band again under more favorable sonic circumstances.
Mallet percussionist Dave Samuels -- of Spyro Gyra fame -- led his Caribbean Jazz Project in an energetic set that included the Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo classic "Wachi Wara" and a Afro-Carribeanized versions of Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments" and Monk's "Bemsha Swing." The band is made up of very talented players, but the set suffered from a lack of contrast -- I wanted to hear more dynamic variation, more ebb and flow, more drama.
It's been a long time since I've heard Roy Hargrove and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. He's spent recent years concentrating on groove-oriented fusion projects and hiphop collaborations, but his most recent album, Earfood, is a back-to-bop testament. Roy brought the Earfood band to City Hall Park -- Justin Robinson, alto sax; Gerald Clayton, piano; Danton Boller, bass; Montez Coleman, drums -- and any worries I might had about dry, lifeless museum jazz were quickly dispelled by Coleman's swirling, billowing energy and Hargrove's swaggering intensity. (Dig the sneakers with the shiny black suit.) Clayton was another highlight, especially his impressive stopped-string work during his solo on a funky romp through Cedar Walton's "I'm Not So Sure." Hargrove showed us a few different facets of himself over the set, reaching for the fluegelhorn on an uncannily intimate ballad, but he seemed happiest when he was soaring out above the furiously churning rhythm section. Seriously, Montez Coleman is a total badass and he makes the perfect foil for Roy's unbound exuberance. A really fun closing set.
More pictures below the fold...
Continue reading "J&R MusicFest - 22 Aug 2008 @ City Hall Park" »
21 August 2008
19 August 2008
17 August 2008
15 August 2008
12 August 2008
Just grab the rope and I'll pull you in
This archival (1994) Fresh Air interview with Isaac Hayes is definitely worth listening to in full. It is really astounding that a kid who grew up literally picking cotton in Covington, Tennessee became one of the most polished, sophisticated, ambitious orchestrators in popular music. I mean, it's no surprise that Randy Newman is a killing orchestrator, he grew up in a family of film composers. But Isaac Hayes, whose skills are unquestionably right up there with Newman's, learned it all on the gig, arranging and producing for Stax.
Here are a couple of choice bits from the interview:
GROSS: Now how did you learn to play piano? Growing up as poor as you did, I know there were times in your life where you didn't have shoes, let alone a piano.HAYES: That's true. How did I do that? Well... let's see. A friend of mine I grew up with, Sidney Kirk -- used to be my accompanist, we went places and he'd play for me. He joined the Air Force, he wasn't there. There was a call in to him about a gig New Year's Eve. His sister knew that I was destitute and I needed money, so she asked me if I wanted to play. Well I could play maybe "Chopsticks" and stuff like that, and I say "Yeah, I'll take it." I took the gig out of desperation. And when I got to the club I was petrified, I said "Oh my God they're gonna shoot me, I can't play." And musicians started coming in, you know, setting up, tuning up, and I'm sitting there, you know, trying to be cool. I said "God, you know, they're gonna find me out." And the featured artist came in and said "Hey man, do y'all know such-and-such" -- this is the first time this band had been put together, we didn't rehearse or anything -- and everybody say "Yeah, we know it, blah blah blah." And he kicked off the tune, and it sounded horrible -- everybody did. I said, "Wow, these guys can't play either, so I'm comfortable."
And, you know, being New Year's Eve, the clientele was drunk, and they thought we were cooking, you know. And somewhere along the line, the club owner, he was sauced, he came up and was like: "You know, you boys sound real good, y'all want a regular job?" "Yeah, we'll take it." And that was in Memphis. And, um, it was a regular gig, and each night I'd learn something more and more on keyboards. And that's how I got started.
[…]
HAYES: I had been doing arranging all the time. I did a lot of arranging with the horns and stuff at Stax, and the first string arrangements I tried was a thing that Dave [Porter] and I did on Sam and Dave. And that album was like a big flop. But we tried it anyway, but I had a taste for it, and once I tasted the strings I couldn't let it go.
See also LowerManhattanite's extended tributes to Hayes and Bernie Mac.
Hayes was of a generation of great musicians that came through the Memphis public school system's music program (a veritable “Who's Who” of Jazz and R&B legends too numerous to cite here), who stayed in the city and re-vitalized it with his groundbreaking work at Stax. He fused the hard Blues with the roaring fire of Southern Gospel, while adding into the mix more than a little bit of the punchy Jazz style (particularly the horn charts—Basie-esque “smears” and “stabs” on the brass) endemic to the region.And God, could he write melodies! Melodies that mated perfectly with the scary rhythmic sense he seemed to simply sweat. He had a “golden ear” for arrangements and balance, while having a special knack for building a jam “in-song” from a whisper to a roar, until the song was a big ol' almost living, amoebic thing—pulsing, flying here and there...whispering and shouting...all at once.
11 August 2008
RIP Isaac Hayes
Okay, I know everybody loves "Chocolate Salty Balls" and the soundtrack to Shaft, but damn. Isaac Hayes was a great songwriter. Not as prolific as Smokey Robinson, but Hayes and his songwriting partner David Porter were just as integral to the Stax sound as Smokey was to Motown. American popular music is unimaginable without the songs they penned, especially the Sam and Dave cuts -- "Soul Man," "Hold On I'm Coming," "You Don't Know Like I Know"... these are perfect bits of pop craftsmanship, down to the tiniest details (the twangy guitar intro on "Soul Man" that comes back to trigger the key change, the cup-muted trumpet behind the vocals on "Hold On," the oblique vocal harmonies on "You Don't Know"... ).
So basically, I am in total agreement with Andrew Durkin:
I'd be lying if I said I didn't suspect, with some chagrin, that Hayes will be remembered primarily for the latter phase of his career, and particularly as the epic soul artist who brought us the music from Shaft.Not that I don't love that music -- even if it did set the template for a lot of cheesy porn soundtracks, and even if it did lay the groundwork for later generations of white comedians who could then counter-exploit the aesthetics of blaxploitation by using its definitive music to make fun of their own lack of cool (everyone from Will Ferrell to Conan O'Brien has toyed with this tiresome trope in some form or other). Obviously that stuff wasn't Hayes' fault.
[…]
Unlike a lot of the other music that ends up in constant rotation / Clear Channel / oldies purgatory, much of this stuff defies exhaustion. These recordings are like little perfectly-constructed perpetual motion machines: they don't wear out. They also demonstrate that just because a piece of music appears simple, logical, and apposite in retrospect -- the sort of thing that makes you exclaim "of course!" upon hearing it -- it does not follow that anybody could have written it. (In some ways, I've been trying to pen something as elegant, true, and basic as "Soul Man" for my entire career, and I haven't even come close.)
See also:
Ta-Nehisi Coates (you already read Ta-Nehisi's blog every day, right?)
I came to Isaac Hayes from at least three angles. Hip-hop took me to his 70s joints which I kept on repeat during my early college years. Then hip-hop sent me to Stax (Marle Marl's "Symphony" to Otis Redding's "Hard to Handle"; Salt and Pepa's "Tramp" to Otis Redding and Carla Thomas's original.) I was down with that for awhile (Sam and Dave covering "Soothe Me", The Barkays "Holy Ghost" etc.) and then I found out that Isaac Hayes had basically built Stax as a composer, years before he became a solo act. I count that as Hayes basically living three times. Once as a composer and producer, once as a solo act in his own right, and then again through hip-hop.[…]
Still the saddest thing, to me artistically, about Isaac Hayes' death is that it's a reminder that a certain class of black artists--I'm talking James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, George Clinton and maybe ending with Prince--is starting to depart the scene. It's not that these guys are somehow superior to the folks I came up on. They just had so much more leeway. My one hope about music business having to cope with online, is that maybe that sort of broad individualism and experimentalism can make a return.
Only thing I could do was wear my vintage “Black Moses” T-shirt and head out to a local bar in remembrance and reflect. There, I had to confront frustrations of many bar patrons not knowing what the “Black Moses” T-shirt was in reference to – many thought it was some hot T-shirt from H&M or Abercrombie & Fitch – then deal with annoyance of others reducing him to being the crazed black Scientologist who was the voice of Chef on South Park. If I got lucky, I ran into someone who could reference “The Theme from ‘Shaft’” but that was about it. Soon, I realized that it’ll be too exhausting to really talk about the breadth of Isaac Hayes’ legacy in a room full of debauchery. So I had to just go inward and grapple with my melancholy.Growing up in Mississippi, which is very close to Memphis, Isaac Hayes represented many things to me. But the one that always stood out is his transformation — that a poor Black person from the segregated South could reinvent himself through art, become an international icon and not lose sight of where he came from. He beat the odds.
Matthew Guerrieri (Soho the Dog)
The big news yesterday, of course, was the death of Isaac Hayes over the weekend. I came to Hayes, like every other white kid I knew, through his soundtrack th Shaft, but I think my favorite song of his ended up being "Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymystic,", the nine-and-a-half-minute laid-back epic that's only the third-longest track on his 1969 solo breakthrough album, Hot Buttered Soul. It's the sort of song that, when it comes up on shuffle play, all activity ceases, and I just sit around being an Isaac Hayes fan for ten minutes. I once read an appreciation of the song by some well-known DJ (DJ Spooky? One-half of The Chemical Brothers? The internet isn't helping me out here) who said that he would always spin the song at the end of a long evening, when it didn't seem like anyone else was listening anymore. That gets at what I always found to be one of Hayes' most distinguishing features, the way that, even in the most blazing song, he kept that quality of cool intimacy, like he was leaning in to tell you a particularly juicy secret.
10 August 2008
Never can say goodbye
RIP Isaac Hayes. Damn.
Hayes played Prospect Park on June 13. Unfortunately, I was otherwise engaged, but everyone I know who saw it attested to its killingness.
UPDATE: Here's video:
So ya wanna dump out yo' trick bag
Kass writes in the comments:
After a Christian McBride concert:Geoff Keezer - "Is that a Darcy Argue shirt?"
Me - "Yeah"
GK - "That is so hip! I want one of those so I can be that hip!"
You know who else is hip? John Guari, who kindly sent me this pic:
(Photo: Michael Garcia)
Perhaps you, too, harbor a desire to be hipper than Geoff Keezer. (This is understandable, as Geoff Keezer is exceptionally hip.) If so, you can acquire your very own Secret Society T-Shirt from our Swag Page. These are quality silkscreened tees from Hemlock Ink -- not like those cheap-ass CaféPress transfers. And you'll be helping to fund Secret Society-related program activities, like recordings and tours.
07 August 2008
A lifetime of devotion
Some days, New York really grinds you down and destroys your will to live.
Today was not one of those days:
Congratulations! You have been selected to receive tickets for a special taping of "Spectacle: Elvis Costello with... Smokey Robinson."
Not even blog-related... as far as I know, this was just because I'm on Elvis Costello's email list and happened to get lucky.
"Spectacle" is a talk show with music (it starts airing on Sundance Channel in a few months). So this was over two hours of geeked-out shop-talk between two genius songwriters, bookended by live performances. Smokey had an inexhaustible supply of great stories, the best of which was about showing up at the Apollo with the Miracles for a show in the group's earliest days. They were too green to know that when you played the Apollo, you had to bring arrangements for the house big band -- which happened to be, that week, Ray Charles's band. But all the Miracles had was onionskin lead sheets for "Bad Girl." The house manager threw a massive fit and wanted "those ignorant Detroit boys" flayed alive, but Ray calmly intervened, asking the (terrified and starstruck) Smokey to play through a chorus of his song at the piano. Then he took over at the piano, started playing the tune like he'd written it, and began dictating an arrangement on the spot -- "Here, saxophones, you play this" (and Smokey proceeds to sing Ray's lines like this all happened yesterday), "trumpets, you play this; trombones, you play this; guitar, you play this. Write that down, okay?"
Costello and the Imposters opened with "Going To A Go-Go," and a few lesser-known Smokey tunes (including "The Hunter Gets Captured by The Game"). After some conversating, Smokey sang Norah Jones's superhit "Don't Know Why" (penned by Jesse Harris) and a cruelly abridged version of "The Tracks of My Tears" with just Steve Nieve on piano. More confab ensued -- including an embarrassed admission by Costello that the dancing in this video was the Attractions' best effort at some Miracles-style choreography -- and then he and Smokey closed with a close-harmony duet on (of course) "You've Really Got A Hold On Me," which is clearly the definitive obsessive/destructive love song.
After L. and I signed our first lease in the city (just about five years ago now), we wandered down the street to find a bar where we could get ourselves a celebratory drink. As we were anxiously toasting to our new life in NYC, someone put "I Second That Emotion" on the jukebox. I took that as a good omen.
06 August 2008
Thank you
Well, the fundraising for our IAJE-killing winter 2008 tour (N.B. we did not actually kill IAJE) has officially concluded, and I'd like to give one final shout-out to all of the individuals who helped make it happen. Last year around this time was when I first decided, "Fuck it, let's take the band on the road and see what happens." What happened was that we played for tremendously supportive crowds, garnered some very positive writeups, laid the groundwork for future excursions, and somehow enticed Tim Hagans into becoming an official co-conspirator. But at the time I had no idea how I was going to pay for any of it -- even the most bare-bones, couch-surfing, car-stuffing, favor-expoiting, goodwill-straining bigband tour in history still costs a whole lot more than it could ever hope to bring in. And so it was, well, terrifying. Especially when the cruel hand of fate denied us basically all of the grants we had been counting on. There was a point (several points, actually) when I was ready to scuttle the whole tour. But thanks to individual donations from you guys -- supporters of the band, readers of the blog -- we were actually able to pull it off.
I am incredibly grateful to the following people:
Lori Kirchen
Jack Brown
David Rothschild
Mwanji Ezana
John Murphy
Gerard Hogan
Michael Bradley
Paul James Birchenough
Christopher Ekman
Richard Kamins
Amy Cervini
Patrick Boyle
Steve Bellamy
Ayn Inserto
Leigh Daniels
Anthony Cammarata
Suzi Beyerstein
Janet Allen
Gord & Nancy Argue
Jack Brown
David Rothschild
Mwanji Ezana
John Murphy
Gerard Hogan
Michael Bradley
Paul James Birchenough
Christopher Ekman
Richard Kamins
Amy Cervini
Patrick Boyle
Steve Bellamy
Ayn Inserto
Leigh Daniels
Anthony Cammarata
Suzi Beyerstein
Janet Allen
Gord & Nancy Argue
And also to:
There is absolutely no way we could ever have done it without you.
* * * * *
So now that tour and post-tour fundraising has officially wrapped, we have shifted our Fractured Atlas fiscal sponsorship project to long-term support for Secret Society, which allows individual donors to make tax-deductible online contributions, which help ensure that we can keep making this music.
I do have a very exciting, long-awaited major endeavor to announce soon, but in the meanwhile, consider this a friendly reminder that your support is always, always deeply appreciated.
MANDATORY DISCLAIMER GOES HERE: Darcy James Argue's Secret Society is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions in behalf of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society may be made payable to Fractured Atlas and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
04 August 2008
03 August 2008
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