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| The guitarist Marc Ribot played with Spiritual Unity, a quartet that is dedicated to the music of Albert Ayler. |
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| Meshell Ndegeocello's band balances pop structure and jamming. |
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January 24, 2006
Jazz Review | NYC Winter Jazzfest
Finding Diamonds in a One-Night Jazz Cornucopia
By BEN RATLIFF
The second annual NYC Winter Jazzfest, Sunday's all-night party on three different stages at the Knitting Factory, is the right thing at the right time of year. At its best it puts before you, non-bumptiously, New York's casual musical internationalism; it puts together different jazz cultures without imposing any theories. It can have the promise, too, of containing next-big-things: if you follow jazz, there were bands you might have seen before and others that you might have only heard about. It's low-key and packed-in. It goes late. It's in the middle of January, when concertgoers need cheering up. And there are three working bars.
Keeping all that in mind during the festival helped. The 20 overlapping sets often left an aftertaste of "better in theory," "glad I could tick that off my list" or simply "whatever." There was a lot of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural surface chic, and not quite enough raw pleasure.
The Winter Jazzfest is not entirely for the lay concertgoer. It was conceived last year to take place during the annual convention for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, so visiting concert producers could see what they might want to book in the coming year. On Sunday, out of a possible 700 tickets, 400 were sold to walk-in customers, who paid $25 for the whole night. Much of the rest of the full house were association conventioneers.
Financially, the festival floated on a combination of full-evening-pass ticket sales and a grant from the French Bureau Export Office - a nonprofit organization financed by French record companies and French government agencies - which was given in return for putting some French acts on the bill. This is mild interference, but even though the Jazzfest basically was a trade show, there were no visible banners for the French agency. It is indescribably better, though now fairly rare, to go to a jazz festival without bumping into overt corporate interests.
Chiara Civello, an Italian singer, demonstrated oversweetened jazz-pop; Pyeng Threadgill, an American singer, played a shined-up, cooled-out version of New Orleans blues that owed a certain amount to Cassandra Wilson and Olu Dara, but with more fiery soloists. The French accordionist and singer Arnaud Méthivier, who goes by the stage name Nano, played a dream-drone version of French musette music. The pianist Vijay Iyer, with the poet Mike Ladd and the saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, played some new collaborative material with underfed hip-hop rhythms and big-thought texts about America, politics and cultural memory; none of it was commanding in the way it was intended to be.
Some of the best-wrought, lived-in grooves were spaced about seven hours apart, with J. D. Allen's acoustic jazz trio on one end and Meshell Ndegeocello's Spirit Music Jamia band on the other. Mr. Allen's group, with Eric Revis on bass, Gerald Cleaver on drums and Mr. Allen on tenor saxophone, took no time to warm up: it put aloft one short, driving motif after another, with an Ornette Coleman-like simplicity. Mr. Allen, with a strong sense of time and improvisational play, was riding securely on top of mature, new-style rhythm-section playing, with dense, bunched-up patterns inside the swing; in long, unbroken swaths of music, he changed the rhythm by cueing the band with new riffs.
Much later, Mr. Allen joined Ms. Ndegeocello's band, which feels like a continuing, changeable experiment, balancing between pop-song structure and jamming. But it isn't a time-waster; her presence is mercurial, and everything she sang or played on electric bass was rapturous, implying groove and melody without making it explicit. After making the audience wait until 1 a.m., more than an hour later than scheduled, she made her performance a real show, not just a canned showcase, and won the crowd with a slow, chanted funk number winding through various soloists, followed by a hard, motoring, metallic piece, with Terreon Gully on drums, Brandon Ross on guitar, and solos by the saxophonist Oliver Lake.
The guitarist Marc Ribot played with Spiritual Unity, a repertory quartet devoted entirely to the work of the saxophonist and composer Albert Ayler; the group invoked that music's "Marseillaise"-like themes and free, cathartic, oceanic improvisation, with the help of the bassist Henry Grimes, who played with Mr. Ayler 40 years ago. There's no saxophone in the band. Instead, Mr. Ribot filled in the Ayler role, with violent, sliding tremolos, and by turning up the volume of his hollow-bodied electric guitar on his jagged solos.
In another set, Dafnis Prieto, the Cuban drummer, with his Absolute Quintet, went the other way, toward technical astonishment instead of lofty primitivism. He did what he does better than most other trap-set drummers; that is, he played supercharged, orchestral patterns involving his entire kit, making it all cohere with strong clave rhythms. For his Absolute Quintet, with drums, keyboards, violin, cello, tenor saxophone and no bass, he has written highly disciplined arrangements to lie over fast, physical music. Hearing the musicians navigate them without missteps, and improvising fluidly over the complicated broken rhythms, was the thrill; appreciating it involved both clinical and the human concerns, like watching the Olympics.
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