MUSIC REVIEW | WINTER JAZZFEST
Jazz Showcase Fever Propels a Mini Marathon
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: January 14, 2008
The Winter Jazzfest, now in its fourth year at the Knitting Factory, is one of the necessary gigs to attend on the New York jazz scene. With nine hours of music and 24 bands from all over the place gathered into one building, it’s pure cosmopolitan overload.
It’s open to the public, yet half the concertgoers seem to be there on the job. Its reason for being is the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, the people who book concert halls around the country and give jazz musicians a living. Performing-arts presenters like to stay up late and hear music endlessly. They probably did this for fun before they did it for work.
Anything necessary contains at least a hint of a drag, and this bonanza can be brutal, especially during its most sardinelike stretches. On Saturday night that was around 11:30, and I remember it as an enveloping white noise of amiable chat. If you wanted to understand the music, you had to get within five feet of the stage; that was hard to do, with the completely weird sightlines in all three theaters. (If you weren’t blocking someone else’s view, a post or a loudspeaker was blocking yours.)
At 11 the tenor saxophonist David Murray was playing upstairs in the club’s biggest space with his Black Saint Quartet, a self-conscious throwback to 1987 or so, with a knockabout rhythm section, sweet and soulful melodies and Mr. Murray’s typically virtuosic, high-register free-improvising style, which involves as much pure grandstanding as Mariah Carey’s singing. In the Tap Bar downstairs, the bassist Ben Allison presented his new band, Man Size Safe, an instance of sturdy and well-conceived rock music played by jazz musicians. And in the basement club, the Old Office, a band called Aetherial Bace, with the drummers Eric McPherson and Nasheet Waits and the saxophonist Abraham Burton — New York neighborhood friends since childhood — played off-the-cuff themes and rhythms that sounded like the meeting place between John Coltrane’s port-wine ballads and his later, intense music. They were coordinated and methodical and proceeded in waves.
A little later, after a bit of crowd thinning, the pianist Wayne Horvitz started up an excellent set with his band Sweeter Than the Day. Mr. Horvitz should have a room named after him at the club. He booked acts at the original Knitting Factory on Houston Street in the late 1980s, performing there often himself, and his aesthetic and his music encoded the notion of “downtown jazz.”
Much about the club and the city around it have become almost unrecognizable since then, but Mr. Horvitz still sounds familiar. For this group he writes strong mixtures of jazz and pop that sound like film music with strong, sturdy harmonies, equal parts Thelonious Monk and John Williams and the Band, with the guitarist Tim Young soloing through it. It’s beautiful, but never naïvely so; the pastoral moments were offset by barrelhouse intrusions.
Elsewhere in the evening the young Iraqi-American trumpeter Amir ElSaffar, who has studied both jazz and traditional Arabic maqam patterns and combines them in modal pieces for improvisers, demonstrated with his sextet (including an oud and a santoor, the Persian hammered dulcimer) how hungry jazz still is for sources older than itself.
Meanwhile old American folk forms — gospel, New Orleans, country — stole into set after set. Doug Wamble played rhythm and blues on a metal guitar with Southern bounce in his rhythm section. A new trio of the clarinetist Don Byron, the classical pianist Lisa Moore and the Czech violinist and singer Iva Bittova played multilingual drawing-room music that could sound like old hymns and airs.
And the trumpeter Dave Douglas’s new trio, Magic Circle, with the violinist Mark Feldman and the bassist Scott Colley, played a poignant version of “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” an English drinking song from the 20s. That song, and a few others from the set as well, were all part of the songbook of Jimmy Giuffre’s late-1950s trios — drummerless groups with which Mr. Douglas’s new band has a lot in common. Even back then clever musicians were playing with the idea of modernism in jazz, creating a full-spectrum version of American music that could sound simultaneously old and new.
|
Bringing the Avant-Garde Back Home
Jazz
By WILL FRIEDWALD
January 14, 2008
Before the Knitting Factory opened in 1987, a lot of music lovers, myself included, were under the general impression that there were essentially two kinds of contemporary jazz: neo-bebop, of the Marsalis brothers variety, and free jazz, which extended out of the 1960s avant-garde. At their most complacent, the bop revivalists were safe and predictable, while the free players, at their most extreme, were screamingly unlistenable.
It was primarily in the '90s that another kind of jazz began to develop, one that was greatly informed by world music, classical, and pop, yet still was essentially jazz. The Knitting Factory was ground zero for this kind of postmodern jazz experimentation; in fact, the club's name referred to how various strains of music could be knitted together. But its glory faded quickly. Not long after the club moved to its expanded quarters on Leonard Street, it began phasing out jazz altogether (too bad — it might have predated Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall as the music's first multiplex).
In the 21st century, jazz has returned to the Knitting Factory at least once a year, as it did on Saturday night in an annual event mounted by the Association of Performing Arts Presenters entitled "The NYC Winter JazzFest." For the last four years, unconventional jazz groups have gathered back at their spiritual home on Leonard Street to perform a nine-hour marathon in the venue's three spaces. Saturday offered a total of 24 bands playing between 40 and 50 minutes of music each.
The first two bands in the middle space, the Tap Bar, laid out some of the broad parameters of this kind of jazz. The Pan Asian Chamber Jazz Ensemble includes a core group of four female players — cello, flute, piano, with leader-composer Meg Okura on violin — plus two guests on drums and soprano saxophone (the latter being Sam Newsome, who has been heard in many world-music settings). The group delivers exactly what its name promises: a combination of an Asian idea of what jazz is and a Western idea of what Japanese and Chinese music sound like. On Saturday, the group found a common ground in '60s-style modality, occasionally reminiscent of John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner's Eastern explorations.
Where the Pan Asians offered truth in advertising, Coin Coin, led by the singer-saxist Matana Roberts, gave us no forewarning. The act is essentially a quartet with trumpet (Jason Palmer, who sounded and even looked like the late Don Cherry), bass (the veteran Hilliard Greene), and drums. The group sounded like my idea of a Southern church band of 70 years ago — ragged, funky, and barely in tune, but with undeniable drive. The use of voices, however, gave Coin Coin a surreal, postmodern quality; a baritone sang random lines from familiar spirituals and Ms. Roberts interjected ranting speeches that juxtaposed lines of Scripture with country-western lyrics, as well as, it seemed, anything else that popped into her head.
In the upstairs Main Space, Travis Sullivan's Bjorkestra was a total surprise: A generation or two after Gil Evans, Buddy Rich, Maynard Ferguson, and others injected rock rhythms and electricity into a big band context, this collective of 18 20-somethings strikes a perfect balance between the two. I couldn't tell you whether I would like them as much if I had ever once listened to the music of the Icelandic pop singer-songwriter Björk (I feel like a bjerk for never having heard her), but even so, it was clear that these guys were doing something right. The native Bjorkers were followed in the Main Space by two trios. The first was led by the piano prodigy Eldar, and the second was Dave Douglas's Magic Circle. Eldar, despite the name, was the youngest performer on this bill, as well as the most mainstream. In this fringe-music setting, he seemed to be playing with more eclecticism than usual. Contrastingly, Magic Circle is one of Mr. Douglas's more "inside" groups. Though it comprises violin (Mark Feldman), bass (Scott Colley), and the trumpeter himself, Mr. Douglas opened with three standards: harmonic variations on "All of Me," a lovely, straight reading of the melody of "Travelin' Light" from the Billie Holiday songbook, and a highly ornamented treatment of the '20s drinking song "Show Me the Way to Go Home."
Meanwhile, two excellent tenor saxophonists, both working with the guitarist Ben Monder, prevailed at the lower-level space, called the Old Office: Donny McCaslin is an excellent technician who uses the whole length of his horn and a wide range of dynamics. In keeping with the international mood of the evening, at one point he played a long passage in which he made his tenor sound like a Celtic flute. Contrastingly, Jerome Sabbagh, a name new to me, was most comfortable in the middle range of his tenor and played in a softer, more lyrical style that seemed like a postmodern extension of Stan Getz (much as Getz himself extended the swing-era legacy of Lester Young). Even when playing in blues and funk grooves or going through elaborate tempo changes, Mr. Sabbagh sounded like a grandson of the original four brothers; along with the Bjorkettes, his is the act I'll most want to check out again.
The JazzFest's world-music mold was reinforced by Magos Herrera, a South American vocalist; I'm not sure what she was doing at a jazz event, other than working with the brilliant African guitarist Lionel Loueke and the Hadouk Trio, who play improvised music on a combination of Western and Middle Eastern instruments. I have no objection if you want to call it jazz.
The Tennessee-born singer-songwriter-guitarist Doug Wamble channels influences of a different sort. His playing and writing are firmly based in the blues, but he works with a boppish rhythm section (piano, bass, drums), and at times he seems like a descendent of both Blood Ulmer and Mose Allison. Mr. Wamble played a vintage steel guitar with a ringing tone almost like a horn, and his most intriguing new composition was a piece called "Home," written in the traditional Tin Pan Alley song form (AABA). I'd have liked to hear him do a few more songs that I knew rather than so many originals, but since his writing is so firmly based in the fundamentals, this point seemed moot.
By 7 p.m. Saturday (the event stretched from 6 p.m. to 3 a.m.), the whole facility was completely packed, and there was still a line stretching down the block (music presenters, take note). I had stood up for the whole time I was there, and by 10:30 p.m. there was barely even room to do that. So the final act of the night for me was the excellent, high-energy, free-style tenor saxophonist J.D. Allen and his trio. After exploring all varieties of postmodern jazz, it was fitting to finish the evening with a taste of the old-fashioned avant-garde.
|
February 2008
Published: February 2, 2008
Winter Jazzfest at Knitting Factory
It’s hard to say which was the bigger surprise: spending an evening at the Knitting Factory hearing some of the best jazz players around or being just one of hundreds doing the same thing, with at least 50 more waiting to get into the sold-out night. True, the Winter Jazzfest takes over the one-time hotspot once a year, using all three stages to present artists that might be lured onto the festival circuit the following summer, but Jan. 12th was an unusually strong showing, with a triple-header of David Murray, Dave Douglas and Iva Bittova with Don Byron serving as the centerpiece for a bill of two dozen groups. Murray was reliably solid with his Black Saint Quartet, benefiting from heavy roadwork. Douglas presented a new trio with Mark Feldman and Scott Colley, playing standards with a nicely off-kilter feeling as if half the band was missing. Czech violinist Bittova was the wild card; with her upstate residency still fairly fresh, her trio with Byron and Lisa Moore was her first new project here; the common ground the three composers found was, pure and simple, in melody. The Winter Jazzfest also offers the chance to traipse about and stumble on pleasant surprises, as in sets by Jerome Sabbagh and Eldar. The smaller rooms housed a Wayne Horvitz quartet, Amir ElSaffar’s excellent Two Rivers band and a strong performance by Matana Roberts’ sextet. It was, by design, impossible to catch everything, but as Douglas said onstage, “Maybe next year they’ll do two nights.”
|
|
|
