Jazz Ragas For Restless Times
On a cold night last month, I walked into a show at the warm Lower East Side venue, Nublu, to a bass/drums/vibraphone trio ravenously bowing–the double bassist in arco arches; the vibes player, a bow in each hand, coaxing a tuned and resonant metallic hum out of the vibraphone’s keys; the drummer bowing a cymbal. It wasn’t noise per se, but a drone-y extramusical interlude, a sonically adventurous respite, before the trio edged back into a torrent of high-paced improvisation. So is this jazz in 2024?
New York is a jazz town, always has been. And NYC Winter Jazz Fest, especially the Manhattan and Brooklyn marathon nights, is a chance to see many of the city’s best players outside of their regular grinds and typical clubs. I look at it as sort of a winter reset, after the flurry of end-of-year lists, and a chance to see what’s coming next. The out-of-towners flow through the city and turn the dominant styles and forms on their heads while incorporating the depth of improvisation and quality of New York’s fine players, tilting the music into new shapes. Winter Jazzfest is where we get a high-level indication of the push-pull of various global scenes.
For five or six years, the dominant Jazzfest sound has been capital-S Spiritual Jazz, coinciding with the relative popularity of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, and a crew of modern musicians from London, Chicago, and Los Angeles representing some fresh takes on the spiritual jazz axis. Jazz has always been music for seekers, pioneers, and misfits, and the corporatization (and cynicism) of platforms like Spotify and LiveNation, and the ongoing ghettoization of jazz music to the fringes of the mainstream, have provoked a reaction akin to returning to nature from our technological hellholes. Nature is healing.
But that dominance seems to be shifting. I saw less evidence of the spiritual jazz milieu–meaning body music for the spirit, regular meter, ostinato phrasing, and long jam-like sections, prioritizing groove and ecstatic blowing. This year, despite Shabaka’s WJF Artist-in-Residence distinction, the dominant jazz forms veered into New Age and ambient territory: abstract, pretty, burbling along in loose conglomerations of synths and “organic” instrumentation, modern ragas for restless times. Carlos Nino (and his copious Friends) found rapt audiences wherever they popped up in various configurations across the festival’s fortnight. The Friends command rooms. Laaraji, too, has become an inescapable touchstone in the crossover, whether or not you’d ever call it jazz.
If jazz’s turn toward New Age can come off as faddish, it’s because trends are real. Jazz has certainly taken cues from chronic meditators before, from the Windham Hill crew and Vangelis and the more hippie-ish strands of both the smooth and free jazz canons. The fibrous connections to Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington are harder to parse. I’m sure they’re there.
Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince, on the other hand, felt like a continuous line from mid-60s Blue Note classics like Bobby Hutcherson’s Dialogue or Andrew Hill’s Point of Departure, and back to, say, Fletcher Henderson. Her killer band combined on-point playing with architectural compositions that prioritized the transition elements between sections–pre-choruses and bridges–building blocks of sound out of compositional parts. Modern and pleasing, not as far out as Anthony Braxton’s structural approach or Cecil Taylor’s units but you see where I’m going with this. Anna Webber could arrange a telephone book and make it sing.
Bark Culture, the trio referenced at the top, ripped through a seismic set of rhythmic improvisation and jazz voicings recalling the great improvisers of the NYC ‘90s when jazz improvisation slid untethered back and forth from song structure and abstract form. I can’t wait to hear what this trio does next.
I missed Natural Information Society when I arrived near showtime and the perfectly curated Dada Strain showcase was at capacity. Had I seen them, I would tell you I think NIS sits comfortably adjacent to the current New Age moment with their droning repetition, and may well be forerunners in a sense. NIS is the ying to 75 Dollar Bill’s yang, a band that also incorporates elements of rhythm, repetition, and drone in heavy doses.
Speaking of 75 Dollar Bill, I caught an experimental trio with Alex Zhang Hungtai, Che Chen, and Leo Chang with 75DB’s Che Chen on a makeshift drum kit built out of wood blocks, hand drums, small cymbals, and various detritus played with mallets. This was a pure improv set, introduced by the festival’s host as being on the outer edge of whatever jazz is. But the project was perfectly in line with Che Chen’s work outside of 75 Dollar Bill, where he’s more likely to play violin in an abstract cooperative setting. The set started with Pharoah-like split tones from some sort of indigenous flute, the kind you might see Andre-3000 blowing on, plus midi-triggered synth elements, elephant bells, and denden daikos, which crescendoed into a clatter and devolved into a humming drone. There was a group of gongs hanging tantalizingly on stands that were never touched.
The alto player Caroline Davis’s Alula was one band I’d been hoping to see. Alula is Davis’s “protest band” and her compositions incorporated recorded speeches from incarcerated persons. The band included Qasim Naqvi from Dawn of Midi on modular synth, Chris Tordini on electric bass, and Professor Tyshawn Sorey on drums, navigating a set of post-bop with free elements and at times even approaching a hip-hop sensibility with smears of restless synths and electric basslines.
The night prior, Tyshawn Sorey’s piano trio, in a totally packed room, played with such elegance, touch, and emotion that it kept the crowd in a heightened state of calm, a weird kind of tension in itself, recalling tender and patient cinema as much as anything called jazz. The slowness and unfurling, the soft clinks of upper register piano keys, were closer to Morton Feldman’s glacial compositions than Laraaji, though just as meditative and captivating.
From André 3000’s flute foray into Carlos Nino’s improvisational universe to Stuart Bogie’s unlikely ambient collaboration with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, it’s clear something’s happening. Jazz has always been reflective of the times, a response to whatever the world’s giving in a particular era. In our current state of political division, war, climate chaos, capitalistic pressures, and the frenetic blur of meme culture, maybe jazz comingling with ambient and New Age sensibilities is exactly the antidote we need, the still point of the turning world. The cry of jazz. | s mcdowell
For heads, by heads. Aquarium Drunkard is powered by its patrons. Keep the servers humming and help us continue doing it by pledging your support via our Patreon page.