| The Broad Tent of Jazzfest
By JIM FUSILLI
New York
[Online Edition]
Each January, groups and solo artists perform at a variety of Greenwich Village clubs under the banner of Winter Jazzfest; last Friday and Saturday nights, the eighth annual festival featured more than 60 acts in five venues, all for a single fee of only $45. A very satisfying weekend, except perhaps for those troubled by the increasing elasticity of the definition of jazz.
It's an old debate without resolution. Referring to the once-blasphemous style of free jazz, trumpeter Steven Bernstein said by telephone, "A lot of my friends and I had this conversation 30 years ago. I was into the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Oliver Lake and Don Cherry. That was the music when I was young. Dexter Gordon and Art Blakey were the old guys."
Saxophonist Ravi Coltrane, whose accomplishments have garnered him a mighty reputation beyond his legacy as John and Alice Coltrane's son, might be considered a traditionalist by fans of electric, rock-influenced jazz. But, he said, "If I went to Lincoln Center and said I'm a traditional player, they'd laugh me out of the room."
"I don't describe it as jazz," said pianist Marco Benevento of his own music, "but I do cover instrumental music, which is a jazz concept."
Winter Jazzfest encourages the broadest definition of jazz. No venue is designated for one or another stream: The postbop attack of trumpeter Wallace Roney and his quintet was presented at the same hall as guitarist Marc Ribot's rock- and free-jazz-influenced Ceramic Dog. Playing music from his big-band tribute to Nat King Cole's Spanish-language albums, saxophonist David Murray's Cuban Ensemble occupied the same space as Mr. Bernstein and his Millennial Territory Orchestra, which drew from its new album, a take on the music of Sly Stone. The free-wheeling Mostly Other People Do the Killing, a quartet that jumps from postbop to funk to free jazz—often within the span of a few bars—worked the same stage as Rudresh Mahanthappa, whose album "Samdhi" (ACT) incorporates straight-ahead jazz, electronica and Indian percussion and modes. And so it went, from late evening until close to dawn.
As you might expect, among musicians at the festival the definition of jazz depends on the kind of music they play. "You don't have to call me a jazz musician," Mr. Bernstein said. "I listen to more jazz than anybody you know. But I'm a dude from Berkeley. I'm going to come up with whatever I come up with. I don't need any name."
For some musicians, fans and critics, whether the music swings is the key to the definition of jazz. Mr. Coltrane doesn't agree. "Swing is a style. It's a genre. There's music that's presented as swing that's corny. There's modern music that's uplifting and inspiring, and it has nothing to do with genre and style. It has to do with what the music is trying to communicate."
Mr. Roney holds to high standards musicians who profit from an affiliation with jazz. "I'm willing to bet if they can't swing, they probably can't play what's put in front of them." They may admire John Coltrane's innovative compositions but, he added, "Trane gave them their freedom to do different things and I don't know that that was Trane's intention. He was searching for something higher. It allowed people who weren't as committed to do things that weren't as pure."
Terminology didn't matter much to the energized Winter Jazzfest crowds, which spanned multiple demographic groups; clubs were packed—dangerously so at times—and lines for admission streamed along the Village streets. Rock and electronica invaded—and not only in the form of electric music with an emphasis on the backbeat: Guitarist Julian Lage and his combo ended its set with a Pearl Jam tune, Mr. Coltrane quoted a Nirvana song, and pianist Vijay Iyer paid tribute to techno's Robert Hood.
But as if to confound all debate about what jazz means in 2012, funk was a dominating presence at the festival. Mr. Bernstein's group, which featured John Medeski on the Hammond B-3, turned (Le) Poisson Rouge into a dance club on Friday with his Sly interpretations, and the Bernie Worrell Orchestra did the same a night later.
Prior to his set, Mr. Coltrane said repertoire was irrelevant. "I'm looking to find how we can relate to each other. Funk, jazz—let's explore those places." With Matt Garrison on electric bass—he's the son of Jimmy Garrison, who was the elder Coltrane's bassist—and the powerhouse whirlwind Nikki Glaspie on drums, the trio fused hard-bop percussion and jazz-funk bass under Mr. Coltrane's serpentine tenor. It was an impressive performance for mind and soul, with Mr. Garrison laying down a supple bottom and filling the middle range too.
As for the all-but-doctrinaire Mr. Roney, he fronted an excellent septet that melded postbop and electric jazz: Along with his brother Antoine and Arnold Lee on saxophones—Mr. Lee is the son of bassist Bill Lee—Mr. Roney played warm unison lines over a burbling caldron of electric keyboards with a wah-wah pedal, congas, funk bass by Rashaan Carter on an upright, and Kush Abadey, who with his perpetual motion seemed to channel Mr. Roney's late friend Tony Williams, which is the ultimate in praise for a drummer. Was it jazz that Mr. Roney and his unit played? In 1970, when Davis cut "Bitches Brew," purists would have said no. In 2012, according to the musicians at Winter Jazzfest, if it's spontaneous and innovative, it qualifies.
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| Ravi Coltrane's style of jazz was but one of many examples on display at the festival. Photo by Hollis King |
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| MUSIC REVIEW
Ear-Openers: New Sounds, No Dogma
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: January 8, 2012
[Online Edition]
At best, Winter Jazzfest is an extraordinary thing. It’s a significant jazz festival, not tied to any cultural institution. And it doesn’t rely on the names that would fill Carnegie Hall or Rose Theater, but on those that make up the music’s daily life, chosen with discernment and advocacy. That’s inspired.
It took the form of about 60 performances (I passed through about a third of them) spread across Friday and Saturday in five rooms on or near Bleecker Street: Le Poisson Rouge, Sullivan Hall, Kenny’s Castaways, Zinc Bar, the Bitter End. Since 2005 Winter Jazzfest has leaned toward new groups, playing new music, and it helps push them into visibility: different audiences — twice as big or more as those groups would usually draw — enacting a different kind of listening, a sorting-out and contextualizing kind.
The festival’s organizers, Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz, made two positive innovations this year. They raised minimum pay scales for the bands, and lengthened the time between acts. What good does that do? You’d be surprised: it gives the crowd extra time to dissipate and change. The hope, not always realized, is for everyone to be walking around as much as possible, sampling and moving on.
But I would bet that a lot of listeners — the festival sold out, with around 2,000 each night — were rooted to the spot, as they were probably hearing for the first time the pianist Fabian Almazan’s intense and crystalline trio music, sometimes augmented by a string quartet (a version of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 10 was a total ear-opener); or the trio of the violinist Mat Maneri, the bassist Shahzad Ismaily and the drummer Ches Smith stamping out free improvisation in an idiom all their own, with abrupt short-order themes; or ERIMAJ, led by the drummer Jamire Williams, a band that dissolves lines between rhythmic traditions in jazz and hip-hop as well as I’ve ever heard; or Herculaneum, a totally unslick, all-for-one sextet from Chicago scrambling aspects of postbop jazz, minimalism, rock dissonance and West African rhythms.
Once you buy a ticket — $35 for a single night, $45 for two — you’re basically on your own. There’s no particular guiding philosophy about jazz on offer, not really even the dogma of no dogma. And this gives the power to the audience, in a way.
But having one really good experience as a listener at Winter Jazzfest reminds you that you want to see all that you came to see. You don’t want to get marooned in a line or have your view entirely blocked by bottlenecks of people who aren’t really there to listen, packed into a space that’s completely wrong for the occasion. On Friday night around 9, the bouncer at the Zinc Bar, as affably as he could, told those in a large group lined up to hear Miguel Zenón’s quartet that they might have to wait for two hours to enter the club, at which point they’d be waiting for a different band. That’s nonsense.
As for after-the-fact themes or through lines, you might want to think about sounds rather than styles. There were a lot of aggressive or proggy electric guitars: Nels Cline, both with the Nels Cline Singers and with Jenny Scheinman’s Mischief & Mayhem; the semi-metal Jerseyband; Marc Ribot, in his band Ceramic Dog. There were a lot of violins and violas, from the string sections convened by the bandleaders Mr. Almazan, Matt Wilson and Ben Allison to the individual paths cut through the festival by Mr. Maneri (two bands), Ms. Scheinman (four) and Charlie Burnham (two, both great: Michael Blake’s wild, aggressive Hellbent, and Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra, which played Sly and the Family Stone repertory as complex, organically interlocking vamps).
Sullivan Hall benefited on Saturday from one more filter of booking. The promotion outfit Revive da Live organized a bill that had style and swing and cultural history — jazz as informed by hip-hop, funk, soul and electric Miles Davis, jazz as 21st-century black music. The lineup included bands led by the drummer Justin Brown, the bassist Ben Williams and the trumpeter Wallace Roney (sounding strong, as did his brother, the tenor saxophonist Antoine Roney); the D.J.’s who played remixed and refracted jazz between acts included Ali Shaheed Muhammad from a Tribe Called Quest.
I can’t stand the corporate branding of cultural festivals, and Winter Jazz Fest seems to agree, at least for now. Sixpoint Craft Ale, one of the festival’s creative collaborators, brewed a special beer for it, Spontaneous Construction Ale, but that’s about as promo-y as things got. At searchandrestore.com, the Web site for Mr. Schatz’s promotional energies, you can see a band playing music in the brewery to “infuse their tanks with the spirit of improvisation.” That’s a crazy idea, and it’s in line with the festival’s thinking about how to connect jazz with audiences in New York: there needs to be more unreasonable optimism, maybe even more magic. They’re working on it.
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| The Chicago sextet Herculaneum at Kenny's Castaways. |
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| The bassist Ben Williams. |
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| Q&AS
Vijay Iyer on Abandoning the Word "Jazz"
By Dale W. Eisinger And Oresti Tsonopoulos | Friday, Jan 13, 2012 | Updated 1:48 PM EST
[Online Edition]
Nonstop Sound recently spoke with rising jazz pianist Vijay Iyer, after his Winter Jazz Festival gig at Le Poisson Rouge. Beyond his lucid description of New York City and its musical lifeforce, Iyer spoke on identity formation and creating community out of music.
Nonstop Sound: We're really interested in your album Tirtha, in regard to your heritage and your talking about racial justice a lot in public. Where does all this come from?
Vijay Iyer: "I work from what I know, from what I’ve experienced. But I also try and reach into what I don’t know. I guess my work as a musician as a composer and as a bandleader is kind of navigating that dialogue between what’s me and what’s not me. So, what’s me is a lot of different things.
I was groomed for the sciences growing up, so my college degree is in physics and that was what I thought I was going to do, before I finally realized at the age of 23 that the world was going to let me be an artist. So that was a big step for me to take, partly because at the time – I’m talking about the early, mid ‘90s now – there weren’t many people who looked like me or who had my background in this kind of music, or really, in American culture at all. Nowadays you see people like Aziz Ansari and all these guys on TV. ... As I was coming of age, this was really a new thing. So part of my process was just figuring out how to be a person in America and how to be an artist and how to negotiate that. It was new enough that parts of it had to be invented. It wasn’t like I had clear role models.
But my main role models were people from the African-American community who innovated under much more dire circumstances than I ever experienced and who created this music the world knows and loves now. So I was inspired by Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, and all these innovative, creative geniuses. And then I had the benefit of working with some really stellar, extremely courageous artists, like Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Butch Morris, and all these guys taught me so much about self-determination and being self-assured in what you do and really working from who you are. But also being rigorous with information and just being disciplined about what you do, working with whole systems of knowledge that might be new to you and reaching in and trying to learn about them and work with them."
NS: You say the world lets you be an artist. In that regard we always found it fascinating that you’re self-taught at jazz piano. Does being self-taught in this idiom sort of explode the last 50 years of jazz?
VI: "Lately it’s become more like that. But if you look at the history of the music, the way I learned is more like the way people used to learn. It’s the way Duke Ellington learned to play the piano. It’s the way Muhal Richard Abrams learned to play the piano. ... And they also learned from working with elders. And that’s exactly how I learned.
I had the benefit, when I was living in California in the ‘90s, I got to work with these amazing elder musicians from Oakland who schooled me in ways I can’t even describe. I mean, being on the bandstand with them, being in rehearsal with them, just carrying their equipment. I worked with this elder drummer, who’s not so well known outside of the West Coast but who used to tour with McCoy Tyner, Pharoah Sanders, all those guys. His name is E.W. Wainwright and he had a group that used to go play in prisons in California. So we’d go play in a maximum security ward at [San] Quentin, stuff like this. And that was an amazing education because you kind of saw what music, what this area of music especially, was always about.
It was always about community, connecting with heritage, and pushing the boundaries of what was possible. So that’s an attitude I really feel close to. Especially because I had to, like I said, innovate an identity for myself as an Indian-American, because that was when I was growing up, a very new thing. So I took my cues from people who were that inventive or more inventive with music and life as one thing."
NS: In terms of identity, moving beyond Tirtha or you as a pianist alone, your trio that we heard tonight is very varied in its influences. Where is jazz for you right now when you can draw from so many identities to create your own?
VI: "I think that this music was always hybrid. It was always coming from a lot of different places. It has its roots in the African-American community, but it also has a history of reaching outward. Even the idea of taking some dumb pop song from a Broadway show and turning it into something unbelievable, which is what everyone did in the ‘20s ‘30s and ‘40s, and that continues today. The new album [Accelerando, March 2012] I cover a Flying Lotus track, and we did one by Heatwave, this funk band from the ‘70s. In past albums I’ve covered stuff, both in the history of great composers both associated with this tradition -- Duke Ellington, Henry Threadgill, Julius Hemphill, Andrew Hill -- some of my heroes, but also music that’s been meaningful to me. So we do 'Human Nature,' which is a song from my childhood that came out when I was 10 or 11 years old and I listened to it thousands of times. I know that song backwards. It’s like the air I breathe. I think we’re all like this really.
It’s easy to imagine that genre is something that’s pre-ordained. But really genre is a kind of misreading of the way communities interact and make music together. I don’t really think of genres. I think of communities. I think of groups of people who work together and create something according to a shared set of assumptions or principles or aesthetics. And it’s given a name sort of after the fact. Because the name is not what matters. It’s really about the creative spirit which is universal, which everybody has inside of them. And that’s what we’re all doin."
NS: That makes us rethink of jazz as a continuum of the way you draw from the world rather than as a continuum of music.
VI: "I said the other day, if we’re going to use what’s now being called “the J word” -- there’s kind of a movement to jettison that word in fact -- but if we’re going to use it, we have to understand it not as a style of music but as basically a strategy of transformation. Because it’s about transforming yourself and your surroundings and people around you, working with materials you have at hand, what you have at your disposal. When we talk about improvised music, it’s improvised not just in the sense that I’m choosing what notes to play, but I’m also choosing everything about it and putting it together because it’s what we have. If you were stranded in the forest overnight, you might improvise a tent out of some branches and a blanket. And when you think about it that way, that’s kind of what this music is. It’s a strategy for survival, a strategy for transformation and connection, and a strategy for creative becoming, I think is the best way to put it.
See more Vijay Iyer in Nonstop Sound's video interview.
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| 2012 NYC Winter Jazzfest: Our favorite sets
Posted in Own This City by Hank Shteamer and Andrew Frisicano on Jan 9, 2012 at 2:00pm
[Online Edition]
For this year's Winter Jazzfest—that bustling Greenwich Village takeover—TONY Music took a divide-and-conquer approach, with Hank Shteamer handling Friday's portion and Andrew Frisicano taking over on Saturday. Below is each writer's respective pick for his night's top set.
Friday: Miguel Zenón Quartet
During the early part of my Friday WJF excursion, I caught several unconventionally outfitted bands, including Ben Allison's drummerless Trio with Strings and a double-drummer version of trombonist Curtis Hasselbring's New Mellow Edwards. Both groups made the most of their idiosyncrasies—with Allison, guitarist Steve Cardenas and violinist Jenny Scheinman summoning folksy intimacy, and Hasselbring and friends providing sprawling soundtracks for imaginary films—but it was a good, old sax-bass-piano-drums lineup, the Miguel Zenón Quartet at Zinc Bar, that revved me up the most that night.
The San Juan, Puerto Rico–born leader, pictured, a font of passionate virtuosity, seems to understand that, as in tennis, the fiercer your opposition, the better you play. Venezuelan pianist Luis Perdomo, Austrian bassist Hans Glawischnig and Puerto Rican drummer Henry Cole blazed through Zenón's charts—urgently emotive rhythmic obstacle courses that suggested a state-of-the-art Latin jazz counterpart to the classic Coltrane quartet—decimating any sense of leader-sidemen hierarchy. Zenón swayed and nodded vigorously during his turbo-speed solos, then danced stageside as Perdomo constructed his own increasingly complex two-handed sound lattices over Glawischnig and Cole's springy vamps. The performance (drawn from the saxist's 2011 full-length, Alma Adentro: The Puerto Rican Songbook) crescendoed with a riveting Cole drum solo, which handily summed up the set's blend of pyrotechnic flair and shrewd musicality. Game, set and match: Zenón & Co.—HS
Saturday: David Murray Cuban Ensemble
On Saturday, I mostly stayed put at Le Poisson Rouge, checking out the diverse bandleaders featured on the fest's biggest stage. It was interesting to note how saxist Ravi Coltrane and pianist Vijay Iyer took on such different roles within their respective trios. The former seemed happy to play off his virtuosic rhythm section, while Iyer took a much more dominant tack, layering dizzying arpeggios on top of the playful basslines of Stephan Crump and drumming of Marcus Gilmore. Both groups had fun with their sets: Coltrane's was skillful and jammy, while Iyer's arrangements transformed pop tunes including Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" and Heatwave's "The Star of a Story" into knotty deconstructions. Arguably though, no one had more fun than David Murray, whose Cuban Ensemble was my favorite act of the night.
The tenor player invited the audience to dance early on, and led by example, practically shimmying out of his shoes as he laid spirited melodies over the sound of his ten-piece band. The songs were derived from the Spanish-language catalog of Nat King Cole, but the outsize sound in front was all Murray. The large format only made the loose arrangements, shifting from solo to melody to conclusion at Murray's cue, all the more thrilling. The musicians wore their reactions on their faces, whether they were unsure about the latest jump in the song or in awe of their fellow improvisers. No one looked more enrapt than Murray, who sang out melodies for the band to mimic and sprang up to cue the set's last note with a leap.—AF
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| Miguel Zenon. Photograph: Keith Sirchio. |
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| Live: Winter Jazzfest Breaks Down Boundaries And Confounds Expectations
By Benjamin Lozovsky Mon., Jan. 9 2012 at 3:00 PM
[Online Edition]
Winter Jazzfest
Friday-Saturday, January 6-7
Better than: Summer Zydeco Fest (assuming such a terror exists).
After a discordant, twisted reimagining of Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" by his trio Ceramic Dog, guitarist Marc Ribot slyly reminded the audience at Sullivan Hall Friday what they should be encountering. He then followed with a gut-punching interpretation of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," leaving the springy melody intact enough to be ravaged by the chugging furor of a runaway train from hell. It was anything but expected.
The hardly discernable rendition of that classic jazz favorite was one of the few examples of looking back at a festival devoted to new ideas and the performers preoccupied with furthering them. At one point, the biggest names in jazz were obsessed with the future, trying to engender new sounds, techniques, and cascades of cross-cultural movement one session at a time. Festival organizers Brice Rosenbloom and Adam Schatz have, for years, put a curatorial emphasis on spotlighting the best musicians still enraptured by such a mind-set, and without the looming, prehistoric shadow of the genre's most discernable legends and venues, the programming had endless room to breathe. Much more than the concertgoers—4,000 of them gladly crammed into and shuffled between the festival's five venues (Le Poisson Rouge, The Bitter End, Kenny's Castaways, Zinc Bar, and Sullivan Hall), which were always bustling, often beyond capacity. Heads and feet dangled off balconies and stools became risers for audience members desperate for a glimpse.
Those who persisted through the crowds were treated to an endless array of authority, mastery, and most importantly, variety. Pillars of contemporary jazz like Vijay Iyer, Ravi Coltrane, and Rudresh Mahanthappa, rooted in tradition yet expansive and progressive with their tastes, commanded much attention. Coltrane, filling in for Bill Laswell at the last second, played a powerful, circuitous improvised set that nevertheless felt deeply rehearsed, even didactic. Ayer, always dynamic and revelatory, twisted his sonorous constructional ability on the piano into a sparse, electronic-like dance pulse for "Hood," a tribute to Detroit techno experimentalist Robert Hood. Mahanthappa blazed through tiny Kenny's Castaways with funky dissonance and free jazz absurdity in "Breakfastlunchanddinner," his own homage to crazed politico Jimmy McMillan.
Rock and funk seemed to pervade the programming as much as Bebop and big band. Groups like the aforementioned Ceramic Dog, The Nels Cline Singers, Jenny Scheinman's Mischief and Mayhem, Rosetta Trio, Steven Bernstein's MTO, Sifter, and Jerseyband explored prog, post-punk, grunge, surfy garage, and metal. Rosetta Trio, the chamber group of bassist Stephen Crumb with duel guitars by Liberty Ellman and Jamie Fox, augmented Crumb's meditative, emotionally driven works with passages that sounded like something out of a Nirvana song. A nihilistic, alternatively grating and swooping bass line was as present as the delicate guitar interplay between Ellman and Fox, seamlessly switching between holding the arching melody and rhythmic duties.
Cline expanded his band's sound with the textural keyboard of Cibo Matto's Yuka Honda, playing a more ethereal set than expected with psychedelic folk sections along side the usual sound-twisting guitar hysterics and looping extravaganza. Perhaps he was saving more gas for his next act as part of Scheinman's Mischief and Mayhem, which followed the Singers with possibly the definitive set of the festival. The lyrical interplay between Scheinman and Cline was a rousing conversation, definitely framed by Jim Black's childlike, wondrous drumbeats—inquisitive percussion that could ascend into breakneck, drum and bass rhythms in an instant. Songs like "Mite" and "A Ride with Polly Jean" challenged the audience with, of all things, the power of simplicity.
Scheinman was a familiar face at the festival, and she captured the essence of each different performance she aided. She appeared with bassist Ben Allison, pianist Fabian Almazan (as part of a string quintet), and Allison Miller. Miller, a standout drummer and composer, performed with her BOOM TIC BOOM project, and she shone alongside Scheinman's virtuosic ability and pianist Myra Milford's calm ivory ownership and smile-filled solos, channeling Max Roach with steady, swinging beats that were constantly propelled by smoothly integrated drum fills.
For jazz to continue to stay afloat, it needs to adapt and encourage a dialogue between it and other forms of music. Last weekend those dialogues thrived, with genres being broken down properly and startlingly. Funk from synth wizard Bernie Worrell and Steven Bernstein provided lighthearted party touches, although they too were sufficiently inquisitive. During Bernstein's MTO Ensemble's performance of Sly Stone numbers, the familiar melody of "Everyday People" only emerged after a pastoral opening, full of cacophonous wind polyphonics and anthemic bluster, gave way. It was one of the many times that expectations were met by relinquishing much of what might have been foreseen. In many ways, Winter Jazzfest has become the definitive jazz happening by letting go of genre definitions.
Critical bias: The pizza joints in that section of Bleecker Street are probably the worst in the city.
Overheard: Any number of variations of performers onstage begging presenters to book them in the future.
Random notebook dump: The funniest part of the whole festival? As I walked from one rousing, inspirational set to another, horrific solo acoustic covers of Bon Jovi and John Mayer wafted from the other bars along Bleecker.
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| Jenny Scheinman, Nels Cline, Trevor Dunn, and Jim Black of Mischief & Mayhem |
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| Winter Jazzfest 2012: Drums, Droves And Different Visions
by TIM WILKINS, SIMON RENTNER, ANASTASIA TSIOULCAS and PATRICK JARENWATTANANON
January 9, 2012 04:13 pm
For the last eight years, New York has played host to a glorious, highly-concentrated overload of improvised music called Winter Jazzfest. In recent years, the early-January festival has expanded to five nearby Greenwich Village venues, two long nights and over 4,000 attendees.
The audiences are remarkably younger and bigger than your average jazz crowds. The performers — with notable exceptions — aren't yet of the profile who can fill weeklong runs or performing arts centers, but many of them ought to be. The corporate sponsorship doesn't really exist (how does that work, exactly?), unless you count a certain limited-edition beer made for this event. As for the music: With about 60 bands scattered about the stylistic map, there's bound to be something any festival-goer would like, if not many things.
With me to recap the music and madness of this year's Winter Jazzfest are producers Simon Rentner and Tim Wilkins of WBGO, and my big-eared colleague Anastasia Tsioulcas, notably of NPR Music's Deceptive Cadence. We had this edited conversation via instant messenger early Sunday afternoon, after partial recovery from two nights of concertgoing.
The recap discussion is found at the below link...
[Full Online Edition]
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| Saxophonist Ridresh Mahnathappa assembled a unique lineup of friends for the Winter Jazzfest, a group with similar instrumentation to the band on his latest album Samdhi. Credit: John Rogers for NPR |
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| Hot Bars, Hotter Tunes: Jamming at New York’s Winter Jazzfest
by Ari Bergen and Emily Gerard 5:45 PM, JANUARY 9 2012
[Online Edition]
Our correspondents cover the highlights of this weekend’s jazz explosion in New York City.
Friday night:
In the 1920s when Louis Armstrong famously stepped out in front of “King” Oliver’s band and effectively invented the jazz solo, he probably wasn’t dreaming of the funky offshoots his music would eventually inspire. But at the Eighth Annual New York City Jazzfest—two days of diverse performances packed into five intimate venues—it was hard not to be struck by how far the genre has come, and how far it’s spread. Queues coiling down the block outside each venue made clear that more than nine decades later, the thirst for live, improvised music is alive and well.
John Medeski’s performance at Le Poisson Rouge set the tone for the festival, which leans toward the experimental. Medeski, who can usually be found playing with the Medeski, Martin and Wood trio, decided to forgo his electric keyboard, opting instead for an acoustic piano. He opened with highly composed music with sparse notes, then transitioned into more percussive, spastic improvisations. For his creative closing piece, he produced a long wooden flute that he played into the piano mics, at times altering its sound with the bottom of his shoe.
Later, local favorite Marco Benevento pleased the eager crowd at Sullivan Room with his bubbly blend of approachable jazz. Marco, clearly enjoying himself as much as his audience did, augmented his acoustic piano with electronic effects and analogue gadgetry. The result was joyous music you could dance to, and dance we did.
Ending the night, Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Dog played a frenetic, loud, and very visceral set of jazz rock—more Jimi Hendrix than Wes Montgomery. The band’s drummer, Ches Smith, positioned his crash cymbal over his head, the better to smash it. Ribot closed the set by playing Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” at warp speed, to the delight of the amped-up crowd. “Hey,” he shouted. “This is Jazzfest, right?”
Saturday night:
Guitarist Lionel Loueke may have been praised by his mentor Herbie Hancock for being “a musical painter,” but his velvety voice is what blew us away at Zinc Bar on Saturday night. Whether the West African singer is scatting or softly crooning in his native Swahili over a melancholy guitar solo, it’s bewitching. Loueke’s easy rapport with British/Nigerian bassist Michael Olatuja had them riffing off each other, while their understated drummer Mark Guiliana got a chance to shine with a solo in one of the last tunes, ending the set on an upbeat swing.
Next, the Will Calhoun ensemble (featuring New Orleans alto saxophonist Donald Harrison) started off with a bang. Harrison launched immediately into a long horn solo that harnessed the frenetic energy of the crowd. Pianist Marc Cary was a triple threat, fingers flying over both his Yamaha and his Fender Rhodes (sometimes simultaneously) and backing it up with effects from his computer synthesizer. Throughout the set Cary crouched over his keys, too wired to sit, as overcome by the music as his audience was. Toward the end of the set, band leader and Grammy winner Calhoun pulled out an African clay drum, turning up the heat in an already sweaty crowd with a magnificent solo. Calhoun has traveled throughout South America and Africa, influences which clearly permeate his style and unusual choice of instruments.
At the Bitter End, faux-hawked drummer Allison Miller, backed by her mostly female group BOOM TIC BOOM, put a rock-punk spin on things—and violinist Jenny Scheinman managed to make her instrument seem like the most badass instrument of all. In a largely male- and horn-dominated night, theirs was a different—and appreciated—offering.
Every year, choosing which sets to see at the Winter Jazzfest is torture—though with the lineup, you truly can’t go wrong. This year the lines of people waiting to see each set were a welcome reminder that the demand for jazz is still deep and fervent.
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| Marc Cary. Photo by Ari Bergen |
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| 2012 NYC Winter Jazzfest
Reinventing Modern Styles
By Geoffrey Himes
One of the highlights of this year’s Winter Jazzfest in Manhattan’s West Village was Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra playing the music of Sly and the Family Stone. The 11-member ensemble resembled a reduced version of a traditional jazz big band with three reeds, two brass and upright bass, and every tune began as a moody, abstracted instrumental. But each selection eventually morphed into one of Sly Stone’s classic funk numbers—“Stand,” “My Lady” or “Everyday People”—and as the band started stomping on the one, you saw something you rarely see at a jazz show outside New Orleans: young people dancing.
When jazz declared itself “America’s classical music,” it unwittingly took on classical music’s problem: a dwindling, graying audience. Go to your typical jazz nightclub these days, and you’ll see a lot of men with salt-and-pepper beards sipping expensive glasses of red wine and nodding knowingly when a saxophonist quotes an old standard in the middle of a solo. There’s nothing wrong with those guys; they represent a valid approach to the music, if not the only valid approach. But there aren’t enough of them to sustain the genre in the present, much less the future.
That’s why the sight of all those youngsters at the eighth annual Winter Jazzfest this past weekend was so encouraging. Over the course of Friday and Saturday nights, five different clubs within easy walking distance of each other presented six or seven acts per night, and a wristband to get into all the shows cost only $45 for both nights ($35 for a single night). Some of the young dancers I talked to cited price as a major reason they were attending. After all, it can cost $45 to see one act play one set in a normal nightclub with a typical $25 cover and two-drink minimum. Make it affordable and they will come.
But that wasn’t the only reason half the audience at some festival sets was under 35. Those were the sets where the often-younger musicians made a connection to the rock ’n’ roll, R&B and electronica that younger audiences were familiar with. It wasn’t that Bernstein’s MTO or similar outfits were playing straight-ahead R&B; it was that they were basing their improvisational transformations on music the young listeners already knew and they were toying with rhythms those same listeners could dance to. And dance they did. (It also helped that, unlike most jazz clubs, Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street offered a large, open dance floor.)
They could have also danced to the old-fashioned mambos and rumbas that rippled through David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble the next night as the 10-piece band interpreted the songbook of Nat King Cole, but they didn’t. Murray’s band played those rhythms with supple elegance, but younger audiences don’t have a personal connection to those dance styles—nor to Cole himself. Jazz advocates can talk themselves blue in the face that youngsters should appreciate those things—and maybe they should—but the fact remains that they don’t.
But even if they were born after Sly Stone stopped showing up for his own gigs, younger listeners know his endlessly sampled songs and his funk beat. And many of those young dancers were entranced by the way the familiar funk tropes could be reimagined by jazz musicians who spun riffs into strange shapes, substituted odd chords for simple changes and proved how far those rhythms could be stretched without breaking. This music was both familiar and unfamiliar at once.
That’s what jazz has always done at its best. It has taken the pop sounds of the day and reinvented them as a more sophisticated, virtuosic music. It’s like watching a slam-bang TV cop show turned into a moody Martin Scorsese film—you still get the gunfire but you also get the darker shadows of the soul. When Bernstein’s special guest John Medeski (leader of the crossover jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood) took a Sly Stone organ riff and twisted it into a dizzying helix of interlocking arpeggios in each hand, he took something we knew and made it new. When Charlie Burnham took the high harmony parts from Stone’s original singles and played them as wild wailing on his violin, he did the same. And when vocalist Dean Bowman of the Screaming Headless Torsos introduced “Everyday People” as a murmuring country blues number, he revealed a side of the song we’d never glimpsed.
Jazz ran into trouble when it decided it should reflect not the popular music of the day but the popular music of pre-1960—or when it decided it shouldn’t reflect popular music at all. But the basis of jazz’s strategy of theme-and-variation is having an audience that knows the theme before they’re surprised by the variation. And young audiences are not as likely to recognize a Nat King Cole tune as quickly as one by Michael Jackson.
The Vijay Iyer Trio reflects the most traditional of jazz formats: acoustic piano, acoustic bass and trap drums. But when the pianist Iyer, boyish-looking in his dark suit and tie, played the melody from Jackson’s “Human Nature,” everyone under the age of 40 was right there with him and was willing to follow him as he pushed and pulled at the phrasing till it was barely recognizable. But in his stretching, Iyer opened up rich veins of feeling and virtuosity, and his bandmates, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore were distending the song in similar ways with similar results.
Later in the same set, the trio played Iyer’s “Hood,” a tribute to electronica hero Robert “Noise” Hood. Iyer and his bandmates played the pulsing beeps of loops and triggered programs on their acoustic instruments and only when those patterns were established did they mess with them in mind-boggling ways. The Vijay Iyer Trio, which is about to release a stunning album called Accelerando, took these songs on a journey, but the audience would never have tagged along if they hadn’t known where the trip began.
If Iyer’s trio was the best band at the festival, Murray was the best soloist, erupting in tenor-sax solos that sounded like several articulate voices vying for attention at once. But a far easier entry point for young rock fans trying out jazz was Nels Cline, the guitarist who was a jazz star before he joined Wilco and who still keeps his jazz career going. As the leader of the Nels Cline Singers on Friday, Cline conjured up a roar of electrified squalls from his six and twelve-string guitars and from the table of effects next to his right hip. Cline always seemed to be searching for a sound he had never heard before, and he often found it.
Some people love that Research & Development Department approach to music, but I preferred very tall, shaggy-haired Cline when he backed up violinist Jenny Scheinman in the following set, as part of a band called Mischief & Mayhem. Here Cline was in his Wilco mode, toughening up the rhythms and fleshing out the harmonic possibilities of a songwriter’s lyrical melodies. The 32-year-old violinist, five months pregnant but still radiant in a halo of brown curls, is a fine vocalist but here she did her singing with her fiddle. She also shone in a terrific drummer-less trio led by bassist Ben Allison—who would later play Larry Graham’s slap-happy lines on an acoustic bass as part of Bernstein’s MTO.
Bernstein and Iyer weren’t the only ones stretching out on old R&B hits. Bernie Worrell, the keyboardist and co-writer on many of Parliament-Funkadelic’s biggest albums, led a 12-person jazz orchestra that featured Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas playing hot blues licks on Jimmy Smith-like B-3 organ tunes and P-Funk hits alike. In Thursday’s pre-festival kick-off party, Marc Ribot’s Young Philadelphians took a similar approach to Philly Soul material. But unlike Bernstein, Ribot neither rehearsed his arrangements sufficiently nor hired real singers and paid the price accordingly.
One might ask, Why go see a jazz version of P-Funk or similar pop music when the real version is so readily available on CD, YouTube and reunion tours? Because pop musicians just don’t play as well as jazz musicians—jazz fans can only chuckle when metalheads go on about their favorite guitarists—and those virtuosos can open up the music in enthralling ways. To hear alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (an alumnus of Iyer’s bands) tear off cascades of notes over Rich Brown’s throbbing, burbling electric bass at the Winter Jazzfest on Friday was to hear improvisation taken to places jam bands could never follow.
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| Steven Bernstein's MTO plays Sly. Photo by Hollis King. |
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