The East Village Scene
by Mark Schiebe
The First Annual Nublu Jazz Festival
Al Foster Quartet at Nublu
Andrew D’Angelo’s Gay Disco Trio at Drom
Once home to some of the great venues for “downtown” music, the closing of spots like Tonic and The Internet Café have crippled the east village jazz and experimental scene. Avant-garde icon John Zorn moved Tonic further east into Alphabet city and called the new spot The Stone. The club (just a single room with folding chairs and an art space vibe) has been open for about three years. It’s strictly for diehards, however, and does not have a liquor license, meaning it will likely perish even before Avenue C starts sprouting the luxury condominiums that priced Tonic out a few blocks west. Instead, downtown music has begun to attach itself to lounge 
spaces that are able to attract a hybrid crowd: fans of electronica, weekend warriors looking for a house party with artistic edge, and finally, fans of jazz and some of its more experimental offshoots. Two such clubs are Drom (Ave. A / 5th St.) and Nublu (Ave. C / 4th St.). The latter has just finished hosting its first annual jazz festival, which ran from Nov. 5 – 22.
Nublu is owned by Turkish saxophonist, record producer, and promoter Ilhan Ersahin. By my count at least three of his own groups work regularly at the club. Wax Poetic is a heady fusion of electronica, world music, and dub funk, with Middle Eastern melodies. Norah Jones sang for the band for two years before becoming a pop star. The Wonderland Quartet features the Danish guitarist/loops/samples man Thor Madsen and two of the great “straight-ahead” players on the New Yo
rk scene: Matt Penman (bass) and Jochen Rueckert (drums). Wonderland, whom I had an op
portunity to see at the festival, seems to be evolving more in the direction of the American postbop idiom (surely because of the presence of Penman and Rueckert) while still retaining much of the Turkish rhythmic and melodic flavors from earlier European incarnations of the group, and the digital loops and samples background provided by Madsen.
My problem was not with the music but rather with the fact that most of the crowd that particular night (and it was very crowded) were there to see DJ Logic, who was performing next. Without sounding like an old curmudgeon (okay…maybe I am) or some kind of jazz purist (I’m not), the uncomfortable feeling I had (a close listener who had come for the jazz) amongst hordes of folks who wanted a house party is symptomatic of my problem with Nublu’s pretensions toward hosting a jazz festival in the first place. The club is really an ambient lounge specializing in electronica and an eclectic variety of live performance, basically the range of its owner’s interests. The house party crowds probably weren’t happy standing through an hour and half of jazz, and I wasn’t happy feeling like a rave was going to break out every time someone stepped near a turntable.
The venue itself was not going to stop me from seeing Al Foster, one of my all-time favorite drummers and musicians in general. Foster was the headline act on that particular night and I arrived late, figuring to miss “DJ Hardedge,” who was performing just before. I should have remembered that these festivals usually run about an hour behind schedule, so after forty-five minutes of deafness-inducing beats (that did not inspire dancing but more of a head-drooping stupor from the crowd), Foster appeared with his quartet. Al Foster is most commonly known for his lengthy stint as Miles Davis’s drummer beginning in the early seventies, and then continuing with Miles after his comeback in the eighties. According to some, he is one of the only people the “Dark Prince” would talk to during his six years of reclusion.
My personal connection with Foster’s music began when I heard his work with the Joe Henderson Trio in the eighties and nineties, a collaboration that produced albums such as State of the Tenor (Blue Note, 1985) with Ron Carter on bass, and the stunning but underappreciated An Evening with Joe Henderson (Red Records, 1987). Foster’s versatility (moving from the heavy funk of Miles’s seventies period to a more straight-ahead context with Henderson and Herbie Hancock) is impr
essive, but as a drummer in the postbop jazz idiom he far surpasses the thundering fusion drummers of the seventies, such as Billy Cobham and Lenny White. Perhaps only Jack DeJohnette is Foster’s rival in having created absolutely original conceptions in both genres.
All of the characteristics that make Foster instantly identifiable were on display at Nublu, where he offered a relaxed set of jazz standards and originals, joined by his current quartet featuring Kevin Hays (Fender Rhodes), Doug Weiss (bass), and Rich Perry on saxophone. The band opened with “Take the Coltrane,” a blues in F by Duke Ellington. I was thrilled to be standing five feet from Foster. There were the waves of rolling tom runs behind the soloist, the distinctive patterns on the ride cymbal bell, and the unmistakable click hiss, click hiss of the “sock” drum (high-hat). Foster brings an intensity, focus and charisma to his approach that is characteristic of the greats. And the telepathic dialogues he engages in with the soloist were evident throughout the show. Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines. Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.
Andrew D’Angelo’s Gay Disco Trio
Similar to Nublu, Drom has a dark, lounge vibe with a mix of bar area, scattered couches and seating. Unlike Nublu, the club was underground and it was huge. After walking through a narrow, intimate room, the space opens up into warehouse-like proportions, which certainly affect the acoustics. Sound tended to echo off of the walls a bit more than I would have wanted. I was there to see Andrew D’Angelo, one of my favorite alto saxophonists, playing with his Gay Disco Trio, featuring Trevor Dunn on bass and Jim Black on drums.
Before the performance D’Angelo, a brain cancer survivor, gave a rambling talk about his experience over the past year and a half: seizure, diagnosis, two surgeries, miraculous recovery, and a trip to “The East” to find out if the monks had “the answer.” It turns out they didn’t. Instead of opting for more traditional radiation treatment, he worked with Peter Roth, founder of the Heart River Center for Intuitive Healing, and has made a full recovery that has astonished doctors. While on the one hand, I am sympathetic to D’Angelo’s critique of hospitals, the answer, as he has it: that we are all solely responsible for everything that happens in our lives (including cancer, which he argues is the result of built up resentment) is a little ridiculous. In a way, however, I was glad I heard D’Angelo speak, because it helped shore up one of my critical axioms when evaluating art and artists, probably best summed up by D.H. Lawrence’s “Trust the tale, not the teller.” The way I look at it, anything helpful I get from the artist is just gravy. If the artist starts saying some weird stuff about his own life, or his work, or about life in general, I don’t hold it against him. If the artist is an asshole, I don’t hold it against him. It’s not what matters.
Well, there is nothing especially gay or disco about The Gay Disco Trio. The music is a volatile, exuberant fusion of free jazz, funk, and rock that perfectly suits the unique talents of Dunn (formerly the bass player of the experimental rock group Mr. Bungle) and Black (one of the most ubiquitous drummers on the downtown scene). But even in a band comprised of three “stars,” D’Angelo’s playing is so intense as to exert a gravitational pull. The trio’s songs are mere sketches: maybe a mood set up by a bass riff, or one of the saxophonist’s repeated hammering, spiraling lines. At this point, I’m willing to risk the paradoxical statement that D’Angelo is both entirely original but at the same time sounds more like the early Ornette Coleman than anyone I’ve ever heard. “Ornette doesn’t think I sound like him,” he once joked in an interview. “So that’s all that matters.” But there is that plastic blues cry deep in the sound that comes in part from blowing “through” the horn, exerting more air pressure than normal, which renders more audible the rich overtone set that accompanies each note played. To the casual listener, his playing might seem random or imprecise, but the opposite is true: D’Angelo has incredible control of his horn and produces some amazing multi-phonics, creating effects evoking a range of sounds from the thick richness of an overdriven guitar to the airiness of a flute. On sustained notes, his pitch will often waver, hanging beautifully between pitches, creating a natural “chorus” effect, before being bent sharp or flat as they disappear. Like Ornette, and like Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman, this musician really thinks less in terms of notes and more in terms of sound. To appreciate D’Angelo, understanding this is essential. Listening to avant-garde improvisers is no different than listening to those who are more anchored in tradition. The difference is simply that the initial effort is greater. The listener must learn the private language of the artist — judgment must be reserved until one feels sufficiently familiar with the language. We must grant each artist his own terms.
The appearance of Al Foster and Andrew D’Angelo at Nublu and Drom is a sad reminder that jazz music is still suffering from its inability to support itself. It’s unfortunate that those of us who want to see this great music (and are willing to pay a reasonable price to see it) are forced to be part of a scene that really has little to do with acoustic jazz, and in some ways is damaging to it. On the other hand, I suppose it is reason to cherish those places like The Village Vanguard that are bravely uncompromising.
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