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 / 5^th St.) and Nublu (Ave. C / 4^th 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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My personal and admittedly partial lineage of the jazz saxophone trio starts with Sonny Rollins’s pair of 1957 recordings Way out West and A Night at the Vanguard. Way out West was a studio album, with bass icon Ray Brown anchoring and Shelley Manne on drums. The cover pictures Rollins in full cowboy get-up, Stetson, gunbelt and holster, the lone hornman in the desert. The explosive live set entitled A Night at the Vanguard paired the saxophonist with Wilbur Ware (bass) and the young and still developing Elvin Jones (drums), who three years later would storm the citadel with the John Coltrane Quartet. Rollins was instinctively attracted to the trio configuration for a couple of reasons. The absence of another horn provided extra space for his tenor explorations, allowing him to develop at length thematic seeds he planted in the early choruses of a solo and which often bore brilliant fruit on the tenth or even fifteenth chorus of the song. Charlie Parker, the inventor of bebop saxophone playing, who had died three years earlier, once said that anything more than two choruses was “just practicing.” Rollins might have responded that anything less than two choruses was “just warming up.”

The idea of a horn playing “on” chords without a piano “comping” the harmony behind the soloist had been pioneered at least five years earlier when Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker formed their “pianoless quartet,” which allowed Mulligan to compose melodies for two horns in counterpoint, rather than the standard (then and now) horn melody in unison with the piano supplying the harmony. Rollins seemed to like the pianoless format because he was an intensely lyrical player who emphasized the priority of melody over harmony, and without a piano filling in a preexisting harmony he could, in the process of improvising, discover new harmonies under the standard melody of the song. So beginning with Mulligan/Baker and Rollins, the pianoless format had really been a kind of jazz frontier; it was about what could be done with more space, both in terms of melodic development and harmonic freedom.

The pianoless format became far more common in the 1960’s after Ornette Coleman’s pioneering free jazz albums from 1959. On The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century the leader’s elastic blues lines and trumpeter Don Cherry’s spastic explosions were heard in a kind of improvised counterpoint with bassist Charlie Haden, a running dialogue between horn and bass. This music was less about melody against harmony, and more about melody against melody. In Stockholm in 1965, Ornette recorded in the saxophone trio format with bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffett on Live at the Golden Circle, this time ditching his trademark plastic horn for a metal one. (His playing was never the same…) By 1961, Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner was “laying out” large sections of the leader’s solos, allowing Coltrane to conduct his explorations simultaneously vertically and horizontally. In 1964, the tenor player Albert Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity in New York City with the like-minded Gary Peacock (bass) and Sonny Murray (drums). Peacock and Murray think more texturally than rhythmically, creating washes of sound, while Ayler communes with Dionysius through blues-drenched howls and screams. No words could do justice to the sustained and joyous energy of Spiritual Unity, a record that has achieved cult status but has made less headway among wider groups of jazz listeners.

By the 1980’s then, a substantial if slender body of saxophone trio work had been recorded. It took the master tenor player Joe Henderson twenty-five years before he tried the format, recording State of the Tenor live in 1985 at the Village Vanguard with Miles Davis alums Ron Carter on bass and the underrated Al Foster on drums. Two years later, with the crucial substitution of Charlie Haden for Carter on bass, Henderson’s trio recorded a sublime live set in France (An Evening with Joe Henderson). The archetype for this trio’s style is most certainly the early Rollins recordings, as Haden “walks” quarter-note bass lines throughout the set, but his superior sensitivity to the harmonic nuances of Henderson’s playing sets up breathtaking moments of improvised counterpoint as they explore such Henderson favorites as the Latin-colored “Invitation” and Thelonius Monk’s knotty ballad “Ask Me Now.”

In 1988, bassist Dave Holland pared down his usual quintet and sextet linups to give extra space to the innovative young alto saxophonist Steve Coleman on Triplicate. Joined by his frequent cohort Jack DeJohnette (drums), the result was one of Holland’s freshest records to date–far more spontaneous than much of his last five or six efforts, which have fallen into comfort and predictability. Coleman has gone on to become an important bandleader in his own right. The 80’s and early 90’s brought the “young lions,” a new generation led by Wynton Marsalis (and his institutional backers) dedicated to a resurgence of “respectable,” tradition-based approaches. Wynton’s brother Branford is joined Reginald Veal (bass) and powerhouse drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts for the post-Coltrane exercises Bloomington and The Dark Keys, where no new ground is broken. And a more recent, self-conscious trio effort was recorded by another young lion, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, who is arguably the current jazz improviser with the widest audience. (Sincerest apologies to Kenny G fans who think he is a jazz musician). On Back East, Redman tips his (cowboy) hat to Rollins by covering two of the latter’s selections on Way Out West, and employing a variety of trio configurations featuring a handful the best postbop players on the New York scene (bassist Larry Grenadier of Fly appears on six of the tracks). On Back East, Redman does what he does well, taking elements of the tradition (in this case the trio tradition), and distilling them into a style that is uniquely his, always tasteful and soulful, though never quite goose bump inducing.

*  *  *

All of which brings us to Sky & Country, the second release from the New York-based jazz trio Fly, comprised of Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Jeff Ballard on the drums. Fly’s roots are west coast as Grenadier and Ballard met playing in high school and college together in the late 70’s in northern California and Turner grew up in Long Beach. Predictably, after their paths diverged, all three ended up in the thriving New York postbop scene in the 90’s and Grenadier and Ballard currently form the rhythm section of the pianist Brad Mehldau’s important trio. Two of the most in-demand players on their respective instruments, Grenadier has toured extensively with such high-profile acts as the Joshua Redman quartet and the Pat Metheny trio, while Ballard is a member of Chick Corea’s working band. Turner, who has recorded four albums under his own name (check out Dharma Days), had also worked with Ballard for several years as a member of the guitarist (and kindred spirit) Kurt Rosenwinkel’s group. So when the three decided to form Fly in 2002 and to record their eponymous debut two years later, there was already a deep familiarity and a lot of shared territory.

The band does not identify as a saxophone trio, as they strive toward a more collective approach to trio playing, with no one instrumental voice as the leader. This in itself is not novel, the idea having been pioneered fifty years ago by the pianist Bill Evans, who allowed equal creative freedom to the traditionally subordinated bass player and drummer. This approach in a saxophone trio, at least on such self-conscious terms, is somewhat new, however. “What we do in this band,” Ballard says, “is work collectively. I always use gears and mechanics as an analogy. The way we’ve written the tunes, there are these functional elements. A bass arpeggio may be outlining the chords, but it’s also laying down the rhythmic foundation, which any of us might respond to. It’s wide, it’s not constricted. But what I love about it is the interdependency.” Turner adds: “We’re trying to distill that element of interdependency within the repertoire. We’ve been writing music where the tunes themselves will make that apparent. And the solo sections are engineered, in a sense, with that in mind.”

Turner, Grenadier and Ballard eschew such currently fashionable gimmickry as covering British pop and indie rock tunes (done sublimely by Mehldau and less successfully [though with some commercial success] by the Ethan Iverson-led piano trio The Bad Plus). Instead, their compositions are all originals, with each band member contributing material. For Fly, composition and improvisation are seamlessly integrated, and on Sky & Country it often sounds as if the compositions are mere sketches setting up melodic or rhythmic motifs, and leaving an optimal amount of room for each player to explore. Turner commented on the trio format in an interview for Jazz Weekly, “I like the simplicity of it. It is just three people… There is no…How can I put it… Harmonic middleman.” It is on the one hand an album that takes on a kind of rarefied mood, full of hints and guesses. Says Ballard, it’s about “filling the spaces, and not filling the spaces. It’s about what’s inferred, what’s in the air.”

This, of course, is the introspective side of the group. What makes Fly work is a heady blend of introspection with groove, plenty of which is provided by Grenadier’s supple, funky bass and Ballard’s irrepressible polyrhythmic undertow. On “Lady B,” the opening track, Turner displays his vaunted command of the tenor’s altissimo register, soaring and landing in unexpected places, pursued and sometimes overtaken by Ballard’s ecstatic thirty-two-note answers. Those of us who have seen Turner live know the collective breath-holding that takes place during these flights. His sound and vocabulary are utterly his, a wicked fusion of Coltrane and (the largely forgotten west coast tenor great) Wayne Marsh. On the title tune Turner plays soprano saxophone, the first time I have heard him do so. The song begins with Turner and Grenadier reticent, almost testing tones, picking the sound palette, before a meandering rock feel is established by the bass and drums. Turner’s soprano floats above the groove as he gets an almost flute-like tone from the horn, prodded lightly by Ballard’s bass drum suggestions. On this track, as on others, these musicians make the stripped-down sound of the trio format work to their advantage, achieving a lazy, pensive flow–a modest, even a minimalist sound.

Sky & Country is a record whose beauty lies in its nuances, Turner’s grace notes as he slips into or out of a melodic run (the “wow: he did that on purpose” moment comes on the third or fourth listen…); the way Ballard tunes each drum in his set, conceiving of each as a separate instrument; the contrapuntal consonances and dissonances established by Turner and Grenadier. Frankly, this is a difficult, demanding record because of the uncompromising musicianship of those involved. Yet the payoff is well worth the effort. Sky & Country is a noteworthy step forward for these three players, all of whom stand at the pinnacle of the art form, and who have collectively produced the best saxophone trio record since Joe Henderson’s collaboration with Charlie Haden and Al Foster twenty-two years earlier. 

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The idea to do an opera about the atomic bomb was the brainchild of Pamela Rosenberg, who in 2002 was the politically-minded director of the San Francisco Opera. The genesis of the bomb’s music, however, came much earlier, in a childhood experience of John Adams: “I do remember as a kid—I don’t know how old I was, maybe seven or eight years old—living in the most secure, Stephen Spielbergesque, idyllic village in New Hampshire… getting into bed one night, and my mother gave me a kiss and turned out the light. I heard a jet plane way, way high up in the sky, and I went into a panic, because I wondered if that was the Russians coming to bomb us.” Adams’s experience, the vague but numbing fear of nuclear annihilation, was the experience of the entire baby-boomer generation, who grew up during a cold war and an era of widespread paranoia, symbolized most poignantly by ‘the bomb’ itself, whose invisible waves of radiation threatened skin and sanity alike. As Norman Mailer has put it in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” the bomb ushered in a new phase in the history of human consciousness; a kind of psychic fracturing occurred where normal Americans would go about their everyday lives of getting and spending, all the while aware, on another level, of the possibility of the instant, impersonal, absolute extinction of the race. Such bone-chilling thoughts provide the psychic materials for Adams’s bracing score in Doctor Atomic, which

opened at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 12, and runs though November 13.

The opera is Adams’s third, and continues the composer’s commitment to giving operatic treatment to controversial social and political issues that have deep significance in the collective American psyche. 1987’s Nixon in China (the title pretty much sums up the plot) was the beginning of a collaboration between Adams and the adventurous director Peter Sellers. 1991’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which stages the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation front, brought heavy criticism including charges of “romanticizing terrorists,” which drove Adams away from the medium for over a decade. Doctor Atomic, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic weapon, is perhaps a less politically charged topic, though certainly no less psychologically unnerving. While it was first staged by Sellers in San Fransisco in 2005, the Met’s version features an entirely new stage design by Penny Woolcock, a British television director whose film version of Klinghoffer helped mitigate some of the earlier criticism of the opera. Woolcock’s vision of the stage is stripped down, as she eliminated Sellers’s chaotic, electron-like dancers. In fact, there is relatively little movement on stage, the visual dynamism coming more from electronic gimmicks like the digital projections of mathematical equations and Japanese bombing targets grafted onto the oversize windows of the Oppenheimers’ bedroom. The over-worked, strung-out physicists even nap at one point.

The story spans the tension-filled two weeks in the summer of 1945 before the first testing of the weapon, scheduled for July 16 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site Oppenheimer would name “Trinity” in a deeply personal nod to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Here Donne’s famous poem serves as the text of Oppenheimer’s aria, which ends the opening Act. The line “bend / your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new” is addressed not to God, but to the bomb, which hovers menacingly over the stage, suspended by wires. Not surprisingly, the focal point of the entire opera is the soul of the enigmatic director of the Manhattan Project, who was a brilliant physicist with the heart of a poet, and whose struggle is here projected in Faust-like magnitude.

Act I opens near the testing sight in New Mexico with Oppenheimer (played by Gerald Finley) and fellow physicists Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink)and Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn) arguing the merits of deploying the weapon in Japan at a time when the war in Europe was winding down. Sellers’s libretto, perhaps the most experimental element in the opera, is a collage of pre-existing texts, a heady mixture of the prosaic and the sublime: declassified military documents, transcripts of meetings, interviews with participants in the project, standard histories, and poetry. The effect rendered is an odd mixture of gritty realism and surreality. When the idealistic Teller laments that Americans will lose their souls if they release the deadly weapon, the mercurial Oppenheimer responds by quoting Baudelaire: “The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.” The three principals go back and forth in heated debate until the matter is decided.

Scene two takes place in the bedroom of Oppenheimer’s house in Los Alamos, late in the night, where Oppenheimer tries to calm his wife Kitty (played by Sasha Cooke), who tries and fails to sustain her husband’s attention. The two briefly connect through poetry: Kitty sings Muriel Rukeyser’s “Three sides of a coin” and Oppenheimer again responds with Baudelaire. In these tense times, the emotional heights of poetry are the plane on which husband and wife can briefly meet. After an argument, Oppenheimer leaves and Kitty is left alone to contemplate the uncertain future. In the first act’s final scene, the eve of the testing date, the weather turns ugly at Trinity, and the barrel-chested military supervisor of the project, General Leslie Groves (Eric Owens), stampedes around the stage, frustrated by a meteorologist’s predictions of continued storming. Oppenheimer warns of the possible dangers of testing in storm conditions, and then, in an attempt at comic relief that he can’t quite carry off, teases the General about his weight. Groves leaves, and in what is certainly the emotional climax of the opera, we find Oppenheimer alone with his creation, singing Donne’s sonnet. The Act ends with what is perhaps the opera’s most effective tableaux: the bomb is lowered into view and hangs suspended in air, a pool of yellow light on its upper left corner, and as we gaze at the illuminated sphere we perceive the linkages between the spherical weapon, the physicist’s brain, and the earth itself. A moment of reflection ensues: is this the end of the road for technological man? The curtain falls.

Act Two opens with a rumbling electronic white noise created by blending numerous radio frequencies, a static froth and aural analogue of the nuclear radiation shortly to be released into the desert air. Adams’s score deftly interweaves “found” radio sounds and various types of musique concrete with traditional orchestral sounds. His palatte in Doctor Atomic is particularly rich, emphasizing how far he has come from his minimalist work in the 1970 and early 1980’s, and even from Nixon in China, which featured live stage voices imitating the sound of tape loops. Minimalist repetition still plays an important role, but Adams draws from a far larger array of symphonic styles, incorporating molten Wagnerian brass, lush French impressionistic harmonies, and (what Peter Sellers dubs) “Stravinsky emergency music,” which Adams employs as a leitmotif.

Two hundred miles from the test site, the Oppenheimer’s Indian maid Pasqualita (played by Meredith Arwady) croons a lullaby to their child: “In the north the cloud-flower blossoms/ And now the lightning flashes, / And now the thunder clashes, / And now the rain comes down!” The baby sleeps but the storm rages deep into the night and Adams’s music rides along in its electricity. The radio rumblings gain in prominence and compete throughout with the “Stravinsky emergency music,” the French horns and trumpets, the oboes buzzing pedal tones below, strings swirling wind spirals above. The General Leslie Groves has disregarded all warnings about the storm, and the test shot is scheduled for 5:30 am.

From this point on, time itself seems to warp. Narrative fizzles and we the audience wait with the scientists and the generals, the Indians and the children. There is nothing, really, left to do. In a brilliant move, Adams emphasizes the deathly slow pace of the final day with a choice bit of minimalism, introducing an array of clocks which tick away underneath the orchestra, looping in an out of sync—not one countdown but many… an infinity of countdowns. The physicists, in a touch of black humor, make predictions about the size of the explosion: how far will the heat travel? Will the radiation reach their families? Will the earth’s atmosphere catch fire and the planet burn? Suddenly the night sky is filled with a vision of Vishnu, as described in the Bhagvad Gita. The chorus chants in slow crescendo: “At the site of this / Your shape stupendous / full of mouths and eyes / terrible with fangs / when I see you Vishnu / with your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring / all my peace is gone / and my heart is troubled.” The physicists and military personnel lie in rows of ditches as the warning shots are fired… It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. 

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Aaron Parks at Jazz Alley in Seattle

Aaron Parks’ Invisible Cinema (Blue Note, August 2008)

The rise, fall, and resurrection of a little jazz room on West 10th Street and 7th Avenue in Greenwich Village is one of the more remarkable stories in our corner of the contemporary jazz world. In 1994, a nightshift nurse named Mitch Borden mortgaged his New Jersey house, rented out rooms, and moved his family in with his parents in order to open Smalls, which he named after the legendary Harlem club Smalls Paradise. A contingent of veteran masters from the New York jazz scene such as Frank Hewitt, Lou Donaldson, and Jimmy Lovelace became regulars. Younger performers cut their teeth at the all-night jam sessions (lasting until 9am!) and the club quickly became a breeding ground for new talent, with some of the most significant new voices — players like Jason Linder, Omer Avital, and Kurt Rosenwinkel — getting their first regular headlining gigs because they were heard and booked by Borden. From its inception, Smalls was a place that provided the kind of “loose hang” atmosphere that has always fostered creative development in young aspiring musicians.

The famous Village Gate had closed its doors earlier that year and Borden envisioned his club as continuing the legacy of that club with the “feels like you’re in your living room” vibe. “There needs to be a Smalls,” he has said. “There was a Smalls. It was called the Village Gate.” In its original version (10 youthful years) Smalls featured a ten dollar cover and a bar that wasn’t a bar. There was no bartender and instead patrons would sit on barstools on the “employee” side. (Mitch was the only employee: owner and talent seeker, doorman and janitor; he was never behind the bar.) It was BYOB and audience members would show up with six packs from the bodega down the street or a bottle of wine from the local liquor store (hoping someone had a corkscrew); there was free tea and juice set up on a table in the back; there was a smattering of round tables, a random assortment of chairs, a bunch of candles, some on tables, some lined against the longer right wall of the room, where a cushioned bench snaked from stairs to stage. A Steinway grand piano, rented by Borden for $1300 a month, occupied the far left hand corner of the room. The low stage barely separated performer from audience, a distinction that disappeared entirely at “around midnight” when the all-night jam session would commence. A large framed photograph of Louis Armstrong in his youth, sitting Buddha-like, derby cap slightly askew, hung behind the musicians.

Having (in my bright-eyed, pimply-skinned youth) heroically stayed until close for a handful of these sessions, I can personally attest to the “jazz spell” cast by the room, and will never forget the eerie visions when emerging from the club into the morning light to look with wonder and incomprehension at the throngs of rush hour commuters (moving at what seemed incredible speeds) toward the Christopher Street subway station, taxis hurtling down 7th Ave., and bums asleep against sidewalk curbs, The New York Post shielding their eyes from the light.

The visions fled and yielded to reality in May of 2004 when Smalls closed its doors. In the ensuing months, I heard a variety of stories: the neighbors complained, and then a deluge of calls and letters from government agencies and lawyers; failed health inspection (faulty smoke detectors in the bathroom or something of the sort); citations for underage drinking; Borden’s failure to pay $7,000 in workers’ comp. (To whom? Himself? The musicians whose careers he helped bring to life by providing a space to play and a young and enthusiastic audience?) There were the mounting bills and no way to meet them with only the measly ten dollar door cover charge (about fifteen dollars less than what you would have to pay to see comparable talent anywhere else in the city). No liquor was sold. The bottom line is that Smalls was not profitable enough for the famous Greenwich Village, which now largely trades on the immense cultural capital produced during its bohemian glory days while scoffing at any attempt to keep that cultural vibrancy alive in any type of non-profit-driven manifestation.

Later that year a Brazilian bar owner took over the lease and renovated, turning the space into a sleek, tourist trap with some lame-ass name (I think it was “Ipanema Bar” or something). The interior was completely done over, and a bigger stage was added. (Probably top-of-the-line smoke detectors in the bathrooms also). After about a year of lackluster business, Borden (who had started booking bands at the nearby pool hall Fat Cat) finally persuaded the owner that the Latin-themed club wasn’t working. Borden was hired to book jazz talent again, only this time at a twenty dollar cover charge and with drink minimums. While many of the younger generations of musicians came back to play at the club, the clientele had shifted, and the unique atmosphere was long gone, as were the all-night jam sessions.

Encouraged by popular demand, the following year Borden partnered with musicians Spike Wilner and Leo Kostrinsky, re-purchased the club and opened Smalls again, attempting to restore the original pre-“Ipanema” vibe, but needing to make the place financially viable. The result: a retained twenty dollar cover and one drink minimum, one bartender, one waitress; a renovated look with the modern bar, hallway, and bathrooms intact; and a restoration of the older type small stage facing rows of used-furniture-store chairs.

In other words, patrons wishing to spend the night at Smalls will need about three times the cash they used to in order to soak in that bohemian living room vibe. But ironies aside, the saddest thing is that it prevents the music from getting heard by enough young people. Smalls used to be a place hip college students would come and just check the music out and hang out all night without worrying about having to spend too much; the club has retained its reputation among jazz enthusiasts and young students of the music, but it seems like now they are the only ones willing to pay the cover to see their favorites. The cover and drink minimum effectively prevent just “dropping by” on random nights.

Incredibly, despite all of this, Smalls (the new old version) is still one of the most affordable places to see the best players in the city, as the twenty dollar cover (good for the whole night) remains five to fifteen dollars cheaper than its more famous “competitors,” The Blue Note, Birdland, The Village Vanguard, and The Iridium, three of the four of which have succeeded in turning the art form into a status symbol and tourist “destination.” At Smalls there is no announcement over the PA about flash photography, no polite reminder about cell phone usage and “quiet time,” and no tired looking waitress handing you your bill in the middle of the set. It’s all about the music. And yes, the Buddha-like Armstrong photograph was restored to its proper place.

In contrast to the self-consciously experimental character of the jazz that used to happen at clubs like The Knitting Factory and Tonic, the original group of musicians drawn by Borden to Smalls played in a more “straight-ahead” vein, a phrase in jazz lingo that means a rough adherence to the shared, swing-based musical vocabulary as it has developed over the last fifty years from bebop to postbop. These days, for a post-Marsalis generation of younger players, the purview has widened again and the communal vocabulary is developing by incorporating elements from new generation x and y genres like alternative rock and indie pop. Brad Mehldau, who exemplifies the new turn, and Joshua Redman, a kind of bridge figure, have both used the club as a launching pad and gone on to become two of the most celebrated jazz musicians in the world.

Like other greats, Mehldau has created his own unmistakable idiom on his instrument (in this case the piano), and currently casts the largest shadow on newer players. The 24 year-old pianist Aaron Parks, who I had the pleasure of hearing last week at Smalls, seems to embrace the influence, working through it rather than around it. On this particular night, he was a sideman in the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel’s band, and he was consistently up to the daunting challenge of having to play a solo either before or after jazz’s latest guitar hero. Parks mesmerized the Smalls crowd with an incredible blend of chops and melodic ideas, but it is his sense of musical narrative, of improvisational architecture, that already sets him above even many of his musical peers, and makes him an ideal partner for Rosenwinkel.

Parks, who grew up in Seattle, is the classic case of the musical prodigy, entering Washington University at age 14 to triple major in math, computer science, and music. Shortly thereafter he realized that he was “addicted” to improvisational music and moved to New York. He joined trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s band and began a five year tenure which yielded numerous film soundtracks and three spacious, wide-ranging albums including 2005’s Flow. Parks made his debut as a major label leader earlier this month with Blue Note’s release of Invisible Cinema, which features ten of the pianists’ compositions played in a mostly quartet format with Mike Moreno on guitar, Matt Penman on bass, and Eric Harland (a member of Blanchard’s band) on drums. Parks says that the title of the album has many meanings, and one of them is that music for him (and for many of us) is kind of like an invisible cinema: “You can’t see it, but there’s all this drama between the musicians, all these stories that can be told.” This might sound like cliché, except that the music on the album is anything but.

The opening “Travelers” is reminiscent of Chick Corea’s seminal Blue Note debut, Now He Sings, Now He Sobs (1968), but garbed in a 21st century aesthetic. On the opening track, “Travelers,” Parks’ buttery, Corea-like piano lines sing, taking off in flight directly above the simmering techno-influenced rhythmic propulsion of Penman’s bass and Harland’s electronic snare drum. After a deceptively simple melody, Parks darts through sections of song which shift between meters of 15 and 4, creating a giddy, off-kilter feel. “Karma” uses another techno inspired groove, and a spacious landscape is set up, over which Parks and Moreno execute in unison a series of heavily chromatic melody lines which begin and end in surprising places; like twin sports cars, they speed around hairpin melodic turns, careening in and out of view at dangerous speeds. The open, “cinematic” sound of many of these tracks calls to mind recent albums by Parks’ immediate predecessors Mehldau, Rosenwinkel, and Blanchard, but also the sense of space present in music of the artists grouped on the German ECM label during the 1970’s, especially the work of Keith Jarrett’s great “European” quartet.

Parks, Moreno and Harland can also sound like fusion players from the 70’s, as on “Harvesting Dance,” a Balkan-inspired groove with a snake-like melody, Moreno’s tone calling to mind Larry Carlton’s nasty lead guitar on the late Steely Dan albums, and Harland sounding like The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s thunderous and machine-like Billy Cobham. On the meditative “Praise,” Moreno and Parks and blend beautifully, with Moreno deftly using volume pedal swells to create amplified shadows behind the piano melody.

Parks is a young jazz musician with a gift for musical narrative and an ability to speak to the musical “here and now,” absorbing a variety of influences past and present, and transmuting them with a prodigious talent and vision. Invisible Cinema is an exciting debut, an auspicious start for a promising composer and improviser who might just start casting some shadows of his own.

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Chick Corea and Gary Burton performing live at the 2007 Portland Jazz Festival.

Contemporary jazz icons Pat Metheny, Chick Corea, and Gary Burton have all released new albums in 2008. Metheny’s Day Trip marks the first recorded statement from the guitarist’s newest version of his trio, which includes Christian McBride on bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums. Pianist Corea and vibraphonist Burton, longtime jazz partners, pair up once again to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their classic ECM album, Crystal Silence.

Both of these outstanding records demonstrate once again that all three of these contemporary musical giants are “in on” the same jazz secret their predecessors knew: that staying inspired is often about finding fresh ways of saying something very old, and doing so at such a highly creative level is reserved for the few. In the expansive and daunting universe of postbop jazz, Metheny, Corea, and Burton possess three of the most highly distinctive voices, each forged from a variety of styles. Whereas so many talented players have pigeonholed themselves into one style and become mere technicians after the initial creative burst, and equally as many seem to move from style to style as musical fashion dictates, these three musicians are rare examples of the integrity of voice, which transcends time while continuing to adapt to and incorporate changes in the musical climate.

An interesting connecting point between these artists is the city of Boston, since the jazz scene that centered around Berklee College of Music was central to the development of all three musicians. Corea grew up in Chelsea, Mass., listening to Boston-based players, while Burton and Metheny, both from the Midwest, moved to Boston as young musicians. Burton attended Berkeley in the early 1960s and quickly joined Stan Getz’s band, where he was later replaced by Corea. Metheny moved to Boston in 1974 and joined Burton’s quartet the following year. By that time, the vibraphonist was a staff member at Berklee. While certainly not rivaling New York in scope and diversity of talent, this scene, featuring talented and forward-looking Latin, jazz, and rock musicians, proved a fertile soil for all three musicians. Thus while each has developed an idiom all his own, all three draw from the same larger vocabulary of melodic and harmonic ideas at least in part derived from their experiences in the city.

Listening to Chick Corea and Gary Burton play together today, we hear the empathy of each for the other’s idiosyncrasies, the virtuosity worn lightly, the easy confidence and joy of togetherness, the marks of two uncommon talents who have continued to co-evolve even as a younger generation of jazz musicians have reached maturity. But then again with these two the deeper elements were there from the beginning. Says Burton about first playing with Chick in 1967: “We discovered an immediate connection, like two people who speak the same obscure language.” And that language probably has something to do with Boston; and it definitely has something to do with deep study of the best and most demanding in the bebop and postbop traditions. For Burton and Corea (along with Metheny) belong to the smaller group of players associated with 1970’s fusion who were masterfully fluent in a “straight ahead” jazz context, and this separates them from the larger group who merely appropriated elements of jazz in order to create a (then fashionable) fusion sound. The result is that when the duo went into the studio to record Crystal Silence (ECM, 1973), they achieved something strange and beautiful. They improvised with the intricate logic and melodic/harmonic density of jazz virtuosos over unorthodox new song structures, ranging from the title track, a stark and spacious tone poem, to the achingly beautiful “Falling Grace” (penned by bassist and fellow Bostonian Steve Swallow), which has become a contemporary jazz standard thanks in part to the version they recorded. “Falling Grace” relies on a newer harmonic conception (both new types of chords and new ways of chordal movement) and poses challenges for the improviser not unlike the harmonic “problems” John Coltrane posed and solved so brilliantly on Giant Steps (Atlantic, 1959). The difference is that instead of the lone virtuoso treading new ground, Corea and Burton improvise simultaneously, in many cases literally finishing each other’s phrases, a feat all the more remarkable given that it was their first joint effort.

While both, and especially Corea, went on to greater fame leading their own bands in the 1970s and 1980s, there is something special in this pairing, as each seems to bring out submerged elements in the musical personality of the other. Perhaps most significantly, Burton’s understated playing teases out the introspective side in Corea, who is noted among jazz players for his outspoken (and Scientology-driven) attitudes about playing in an extroverted way that easily communicates his ideas to the audience. Since 1973, the pair have made several more albums, including Duet (ECM, 1978), the live album follow up In Concert, Zurich (ECM, 1980), and Native Sense (ECM, 1997).

The New Crystal Silence is a double album featuring a live concert performance in Australia with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and a live performance at the Molde Jazz Festival in Norway, both part of an international tour in 2007. Five compositions, three old and two new, set the two improvisers within lush orchestral backdrops arranged by reed player Tim Garland, a longtime collaborator with Corea and former member of his band Origin. The effect is bracing, recalling the “third stream” experiments of the 1950s and 1960s (Gil Evans and Miles Davis’ Sketches in Spain is most relevant, given Corea’s Spanish-tinged sensibility) yet spread on an even larger canvas.

“Love Castle” begins in a glowing pool of sound with the pianist and vibraphonist alone together carefully creating a rich texture as if mixing paints in a pre-composition ritual, before being gently enveloped in a soft atmosphere of flutes and eventually strings. Clear, bell-like trumpets herald the end of the beginning, and Corea’s jubilant melody winds its snaky way between him and Burton in that complex dynamic unison that characterizes their sound (they never play at the same volume at the same time). Both performers are clearly inspired by the new environment and play daring solos, couched around an ensemble interlude. The orchestral passages that follow the solos have a Stravinskian sweep that deliver in full bloom the majesty only implied in earlier versions of the song. After a restatement of the melody the duo “trade eights” in an inspired coda.

In the new version of the title track, the orchestra explores in greater depth some of the tonal possibilities outlined in the somber and haunting 1973 original. Garland again admirably uses the spectrum of the orchestra to imagine in detail what was really just a sketch 35 years earlier. (And having just gone back to the original, I can attest it asserts a retroactive influence). Overall, the performance, to my mind, represents a highly successful blending of orchestral and jazz traditions, perhaps even a definitive advance over anything that has been done, at least in terms of the range of ways in which the orchestra is used to support the improvisers.

Album two, the Norway concert, features the duo again alone together and delivering inspired renditions of tunes from their previous albums mixed with a selection of standards from the traditional and contemporary jazz songbook. They always manage to get something different out of Corea’s cheeky Spanish-sounding “Senor Mouse,” and the performance here is no exception. They try Gus Arnheims’ Bing Crosby vehicle “Sweet and Lovely” and nod to Monk (who warped the poor tune forever); and they display their unbelievable bebop chops on “Bud Powell.” The version of Bill Evans’ “Waltz for Debby” simultaneously demonstrates the debt owed the master and the distance both have traveled since the apprenticeship. And something about the triple meter and the intricate harmonies of the tune bring out the wonderfully percussive sounds that both players get out of their instruments. (It is noteworthy that Corea started his musical life as a drummer). The album closes with the swift, bright Corea favorite “Fiesta,” which emphasizes his signature pungent “Spanish key” harmonies and percussive staccato rhythms, over which Burton glides with virtuosic ease.

* * *

Starting with his debut Bright Size Life (ECM) in 1975, Pat Metheny has produced a slender body of guitar trio recordings that constitute the most significant work in this lineup configuration since his hero Wes Montgomery was making records in the 1960s. Metheny has changed the accompanying bassist and drummer on each album, and Day Trip continues that tradition, featuring Christian McBride, a “young lion” who matured during the 1980s neo-bop era, and one of the most sought-after bassists on the scene over the past fifteen years; and Antonio Sanchez, the extraordinary drummer from Mexico who is now a regular member in Metheny’s larger group.

For this record, Metheny chose what he dubs the “old school” method of recording after rather than before a tour. Day Trip, though released this year, was in fact recorded in one October day (thus the album title) in 2005, after a year on the road with the trio. (The group has subsequently toured extensively as well, as is standard for Metheny who averages over 200 performances a year!) This is a variation on the method for 1989’s Question and Answer (Geffen), where, after a year on the road with his larger Pat Metheny Group, the guitarist simply called up two guys he had always wanted to record with (bassist Dave Holland and the legendary drummer Roy Haynes) and laid down an album’s worth of tracks one day in New York City. And if the current trio reminds us of the 1989 trio it is probably also because bassist McBride possesses technique on the level of Holland, something few in the jazz world can say. Every note he plays, even during, especially during, the lightning speed solo lines is executed with bell-like clarity, almost to a level of distraction (sometimes I have to remind myself to listen to the content and stop being mystified by the technique!) But McBride plays more squarely in the center of the beat, whereas Holland was always pushing. This opens extra space for Metheny and Sanchez to dance around the center, alternately pushing forward and pulling back the groove.

On the title track, a medium-up tempo swing, the opening track, “Son of Thirteen,” an up tempo Latin reminiscent of the classic “Lone Jack,” and the folkish triple metered “At Last You’re Here,” Metheny favors the intensely chromatic style that characterizes his playing on Question & Answer, darting in and around the chords, spilling breathtakingly “over the bar” and somehow always landing on his feet. But with Metheny, the acrobatics have always been in the service of the deep lyrical vision that is his music, and the case is no different here. As with prior efforts, the evolutionary wrinkles in the guitarists’ lines from album to album may escape the casual listener, but the power of the overall vision surely won’t.

“Is this America? (Katrina 2005),” is a musical meditation on the aftermath of the hurricane (the title echoes the Metheny/David Bowie collaboration “This is not America” from the soundtrack to 1983’s The Falcon and the Snowman). The guitarist plays his signature electrified nylon string acoustic guitar in a vein recalling his work with bassist Charlie Haden. The melancholy folk melody, which Metheny begins unaccompanied, later picks up momentum as McBride and Sanchez join in. The emotional weight of the song climaxes in the bassist’s arco solo, McBride bowing surprisingly “countrified” lines and leaving plenty of space between them, before eventually giving way to the guitar again.

It is an idiosyncracy of Metheny’s genius that he has invented completely original idioms for himself not just within the tradition of “straight ahead” playing, where he uses a conventional electric hollowbody jazz guitar, but also in a Brazilian inflected folk-Americana mode on acoustic and a fusion-oriented style where he plays a custom designed guitar synthesizer, getting a sound that is somewhere in between a violin and a trumpet. “The Red One” (Metheny previously recorded it with guitarist John Scofield on I Can See Your House From Here, Blue Note, 1994) is a vehicle for the guitar synth. McBride and Sanchez make explicit the reggae feel only implied in the earlier version and Metheny responds on Mcbride’s solo with the only reggae comping you will ever hear from him on record. (It is more accurately somewhere between reggae and Steve Reich.) The energy of the trio on this track is thrilling and Metheny’s reharmonized “power chords” on the melody restatement send shivers.

While Day Trip doesn’t break ground the way Metheny’s first three trio albums (Bright Size Life , Rejoicing (ECM, 1984), Question and Answer) did, it does deepen and expand, in interesting and emotionally fulfilling ways, upon territory the guitarist already discovered, which is perhaps all we have a right to ask for.

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Works discussed in this essay:

• In Rainbows by Radiohead (self-released)

I was perplexed by the early response from some Radiohead fans that the group’s seventh album, In Rainbows, released on CD in the U.S. on January 1st, represented a return to an earlier style, a relief from the relentless experimentalism and introspection of the trio of albums that began with Kid A. But then I got to thinking about it and remembered that when anything really new sounding comes along it is comforting to fall back on old assumptions. There is a story that goes something like this:

Once upon a time there was a great rock band and after they produced a rock masterpiece that everyone could agree was great (OK Computer), they quit playing rock music and their fans divided between those who thought they were on the cutting edge of something new (where they belonged) and those who thought they just stopped writing good songs. For those in the second camp, In Rainbows is a welcome return to “hummable stuff.” The band had to deal with a lot of fame and accolades and went through a phase that we were supposed to dig and find “compelling” but it was really just boring. Now they’ve returned to what made them great.

Radiohead circa Hail to the Theif (2003). From left: Ed, Jonny, Thom, Phil and Colin

There are two problems with this story (parodic oversimplification aside). One is that the new album continues the band’s experimentation with the world of electronica: with new fusions of electronic and acoustic sounds, with loops, synthetic beats, ambient effects produced by different tape speeds, new combinations of noise and song. Basically, they pick up where they left off with 2003’s Hail to the Thief. The second problem is that the “prettier” and more pop-sounding stuff on this album doesn’t really sound like the “pretty” stuff they did in the 90’s, when they were forging the unique, guitar-driven rock of The Bends and OK Computer. Instead, In Rainbows follows in the wake of its electronica-inspired predecessors and at the same time it is a step to the side, moving into pop territory the band had previously shied away from.

“15 Steps,” the title of the album’s first track, refers both to its uneven meter (the rhythmic units at the song’s opening are divided into three “fives”) and vocalist Thom Yorke’s ominous line “15 steps then a sheer drop,” a warning which doesn’t seem to refer to anything specific. The guitar sound most prominently featured on the album, lightly overdriven and very present in the mix, enters after an opening minute of the drums’n’bassish “15” and Yorke’s vocals. The arpeggiated guitar riff and electronic snare sound give way to organ and a new darting bass line about halfway through. Soft crackle morphs into warm glow as the organ hangs ghost-like over the music. The track, like much of the album, is deceptively layered, yet somehow gives off a minimalist vibe despite the array of synthetic sounds buzzing around and through the vocal melody, from primitive video game “blasters” to light-speed dashes through channels of dead air.

“Bodysnatchers” is typical of how the band uses the studio to create new fusions of conventional rock formulas and electronic soundscapes. The song’s opening riff features a propulsive, off-kilter rhythm, but the instrument it is initially played on is distorted beyond the point of recognition. If it is a guitar, the “attack” of the notes (the initial sound made by the pick hitting the strings) has been mixed out and something like a blob comes at us. Beginning with Kid A, the band has really experimented with the “edges” of their sound, infinitely varying their levels of attack. The sound of “Bodysnatchers” is uncompromisingly synthetic: something like being hit with a pillow of metal. Perhaps this is reflected in Yorke’s lines “You killed the sound/ Removed backbone/ A pale imitation/ With the edges sawn off.” “Bodysnatchers,” like many other of the bands’ songs, is vertigo-inducing: sounds seem to come at us backwards as well as forwards. This is nothing new as Radiohead has practiced mixing in reverse tracks at least since “Everything in its Right Place” (Kid A) and Amnesiac’s “Like Spinning Plates” is a version of the earlier “I Will” played backwards.

The third cut on the album, the haunted ballad “Nude,” features Yorke’s characteristic aching and tender vocals, as he revisits the anti-utopian strain of earlier works like “2+2=5” (Hail to the Thief) in the lines “Don’t get any big ideas/ They’re not going to happen” and comments on the “white noise” of our media-driven cultural excesses: “You paint yourself white/ And fill up with noise/ But there’ll be something missing.” One thinks of the pleading cry “Hey man slow down/ Idiot slow down” from “The Tourist” (OK Computer) and the ecstatic chant “Here I’m allowed/ Everything all the time” from the “Idioteque” (Kid A). In the songs’ final verse, Yorke adds “You’ll go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking” setting up a pattern of sexual imagery to be followed up later in “House of Cards” and “All I Need.”

“All I Need” is a striking departure from anything the band has done, as the music and words combine to evoke a menacing mood reminiscent of Trent Reznor. After airily opening with what sounds like a mixture of strings and an electronic chorus, the slow groove is established by a synthetic bass over acoustic drums. Yorke half whispers, half growls “I am all the days that you choose to ignore/ You are all I need/ You are all I need/ I’m in the middle of your picture/ Lying in the reeds.” The song eventually fades into oblivion when a piano sustain pedal and a cymbal sound combine to wash over everything and drown out Yorke’s receding plea “It’s all wrong/ It’s all right.” Despite this, the stripped-down sound of the band (comprising the majority of the song) and pent-up energy of the vocals may well represent the beginnings of a new direction for them. For this listener, “All I Need” is a special track on the album, and represents an avenue Yorke and his mates would do well to continue to explore.

If In Rainbows is indeed more “hummable” than its immediate predecessors, it isn’t because Radiohead is “returning to their roots.” It is because the vocals of the front man, the band’s greatest strength, are nudged closer to the center of the mix again. It is probably also a sign that the band’s listeners, even those who favor the early work, have had their ears trained and stretched by the later work. One thing is for sure, the melodic and sonic experiments, continue to evolve unabated, which is a good thing.

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• Fleurine at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola
• Andy Biskin at The Stone
• Kristin Norderval at The Stone

“With the help of Coca-Cola, our club will embody [Dizzy Gillespie’s] sense of community and joie de vivre,” gushed Wynton Marsalis upon the opening Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola in the Fall of 2003, Lincoln Center’s latest move in its effort to empty jazz of its working class roots and complete its transformation into a form of cultural capital. The “community” Marsalis speaks of, whether he would have it or not, is not that democratic plurality sometimes (but increasingly rarely) associated with jazz, but rather, those residents and tourists able to afford the thirty dollar cover (not including the ten dollar food and $10 dollar drink minimum per set) in order eat molasses glazed salmon and sip a glass of sauvignon blanc while they gaze out at a breathtaking panorama of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline. And, oh yeah, listen to “world class” jazz.

Fleurine performing at Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola.

While Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola certainly isn’t the first venue to take advantage of the desire of the wealthy to consume some high culture along with their dinner (Birdland, The Iridium, and The Blue Note are all restaurants masquerading as jazz clubs), Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola represents a disturbing new honesty about the relationship of jazz and corporate sponsorship. Yes, Coca Cola put up the ten million “leadership grant” to build it, but (at the risk of sounding totally naïve) did they have to demand inclusion in the name of the club itself? Wouldn’t a few plaques spaced out within the club been more tasteful? While there are certainly precedents for this in many other areas of entertainment (think sports stadiums), to my knowledge this is the first jazz venue to be named after a corporation, and it is more than likely that others will follow suit, or otherwise risk losing the dollars of the wealthy residents and tourists who want the best “jazz experience” money can buy, and one that comes complete with a slogan they can take home with them. (This was provided by the “I want to Get Jazzed” postcard handed to each customer). After all, there is only one way to build a venue that could rival this one, and that is to woo another corporate sponsor. As one Village Voice commentator put it, “Somewhere up in heaven, John Birks Gillespie just hocked a loog in his coke.”

The effect that high-end jazz clubs are having on venerable jazz rooms like The Village Vanguard is worth noting. The Vanguard, which opened in 1935, does not serve salmon (or any food) and does not feature an observation-booth-like panorama of Manhattan. It has, however, been forced to increase its admission price (now $30) in order to stay in business. Besides rising rents, this is so that the club can afford to pay the musicians something comparable to what they might get at Birdland or Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, and also, I suspect, to draw enough higher income clientele to keep the room full. When jazz becomes synonymous with top dollar, it is difficult to get someone who can afford a $60 experience to understand that there is quality for $10.

Perhaps I would be less bothered by Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola, and by extension the entire Lincoln Center jazz project, if Marsalis and his corporate sponsors weren’t so sanctimonious about their mission to reach out to the public at large and nourish them with whitewashed versions of jazz history in the form of educational lectures and “kids concerts.” Marsalis and his cronies Stanley Crouch and Ken Burns seem to actually believe the G rated story of jazz as told, packaged, and sold to the privileged at Lincoln Center. Are these advertising campaigns really aimed at luring inner city blacks away from rap? Does Stanley Crouch, co-founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center, really believe that a Wednesday afternoon field trip to Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola will precipitate a revolution in the consciousness of a Jay-Z-spouting 12-year-old? If so, he is delusional; if not, I call his bluff. Because despite the Lincoln Center line about how jazz is (and always was) a music that brings people together, black and white, rich and poor, young and old — it has unmistakably become the music of the privileged few, studied and learned by white kids in the academy, ignored by the vast majority. Marsalis himself says it best: “Jazz is America’s classical music.”

The “experience” of Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola begins not with a descent (down your proverbial narrow crowded staircase) but rather with a trip through the mall in the Time Warner building at Columbus Circle. If you can successfully navigate the path between Gucci and The Gap, you are then entitled the privilege of waiting in line for the special elevator reserved for the club, and attended by security guards who stare at you as if they knew you only had one credit card to your name. Needless to say, by the time I arrived inside the club and took my seat, it was all I could do to keep my mind on what I had come for, (the music).

The innovative Dutch vocalist Fleurine performed three sets at the club on Sept. 10 as part of the Diet Coke Women in Jazz Festival, which runs through Oct. 1. A relative newcomer on the jazz scene, Fleurine has become known for writing original lyrics (Portuguese, Dutch, and English) to a variety of songs from the jazz and bossa nova songbooks as well as compositions by contemporary musicians who have inspired her. She was joined at the club by her current “Brazilian trio,” consisting of guitarist Freddy Bryant, percussionist Gilad, and bassist Doug Weiss. Pianist Brad Mehldau and saxophonist Chris Potter, two of the most exciting young players on the New York jazz scene, were special guests. Fleurine’s soft edged and dry tone, and her understated swing, traits inherited from bossa pioneers like Astrud Gilberto, were evident from the first song of the set, a mid tempo samba that floated atop the clave stated by Weiss and the delicate percussive work of Gilad.

Between songs, Fleurine would stop to tell a story and explain where her inspiration came from for this or that set of lyrics, mentioning the names of at least a dozen Brazilian composers during the course of the night. The third song featured her English translation of lyrics by Chico Buarque, the great Brazilian poet, guitarist, and singer, and Fluerine showed the utmost respect for the integrity of Buarque’s work by going so far as to apologize to those Brazilians in the audience for her necessarily flawed English translation, hoping they would excuse her on grounds that she wanted to expose a new audience to the poetry of one of their cultural heroes. Fluerine also performed a beautiful composition of Antonio Carlos Jobim’s, which she also translated, rendering the title “Memories in Black and White.”

The contributions of Mehldau and Potter added a richness and depth to the performance, each steering clear of the clichés of the idiom, instead wryly commenting on the bossa tradition while playing behind the vocals, then exploring it while soloing. Mehldau’s minimalist accompaniment echoed Jobim’s piano playing at times, yet he always seemed to come up with that one absolutely distinctive phrase reminding us of who was sitting at the piano, a master’s assurance that his voice will come through no matter how muted or subtle. Likewise with Potter, who occasionally treaded in and around Stan Getz territory, blowing soft, buttery lines under Fleurine, yet never ceasing to assert his own original conception.

The emotional highpoint of the performance was Fluerine’s version of Mehldau’s “Unrequited,” a dark, Liszt-like melody to which she set lyrics and performed in duet with the composer. Mehldau, never one to sit back and coast, opened the piece by setting up a rhythmic undercurrent slightly different from any of his previously recorded versions, a sinewy, undulating bit of counterpoint that morphs into the melody in the final bars of the piece, letting Fleurine state the “top” voice, and exploring his own composition as if from the perspective of a distant observer, the pain implied in the title now but the shadow of a memory.

But the quality of detachment, of ironic commentary, has always been central in Mehldau’s music. His is a music of seduction — teased into listening closely by the impeccable elegance of his musical sensibility and the power of his technical prowess, the close listener enters a world of musical pastiche that leaves one, to quote one of Mehldau’s own wryly parodic titles, “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.” Equally fluent in Brahms, Monk, and Radiohead (to cite three predecessors almost randomly), Mehldau is in a unique position to express the sense of ennui that accompanies the cultural cannibalization endemic in contemporary America, where art is reduced to a form of cultural capital, to be traded on the free market and consumed like any other commodity. He can be as deeply introspective and lyrical as Bill Evans or Keith Jarrett, and then by turns sound like a music box or a player piano, with moments of intense lyricism always threatening to morph into meaningless pattern, leaving us in perpetual unease about whether or not we are allowed to identify with the music or whether we should feel “in on the joke.” It is as if his music says to us, “mastery of idiom alone isn’t enough to guarantee transcendent experience anymore, but neither can irony save us.” Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the pianist whose work most embodies our supposed postmodern skepticism toward originality, performs in the club most symptomatic of the commodification of art that cultural theorist Frederic Jameson stressed in his famous essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society.”

The Stone

Kristin Norderval at The Stone.

After nine years of providing a venue for some of the most highly regarded experimental music in (and out of) the city, the club Tonic closed its doors last April. Located on Norfolk Street, the club was a casualty of the extraordinary “growth” in the Lower East Side during the last few years, resulting in a spate of “luxury condominiums,” boutique hotels, and glass towers. As reported on the club’s still running website, they were repeatedly harassed by the city’s Quality Of Life Task Force into closing the sub-tonic lounge, which had brought in much-needed revenue in order to keep the experimental music space open: “Coincidentally, this campaign began as our immediate neighbor The Blue Condominium Building — a symbol of the new Lower East Side — prepared to open its doors.”

Consequently, the club, originally the brainchild of avant-garde guru John Zorn, is without a permanent home. It’s current, though probably short-lived, location is a space called The Stone, a single, no-frills room which can be found on the corner of First Street and Avenue C. Just like its predecessor, The Stone features a unique booking policy: each month Zorn chooses a musician to serve as curator, booking two shows a night (8pm and 10pm) and generally being in and around the scene. Vocalist Theo Blackman served as curator during September, and his choices for Thursday, Sept.. 27 proved inspired.

The early show featured the clarinetist and composer Andy Biskin, who brought along three friends, Ron Horton on trumpet, Todd Sickafoose on acoustic bass, and Mark Ferber on drums. Amidst a relaxed, informal environment (Biskin chatted with audience members before the performance), the quartet explored seven of his compositions, ranging in feel from swing to polka and in tonality from postbop and “free” to neoclassical. The overall group sound, which featured no electricity (amps, mics, etc), and superb dynamics, combined with the intimacy of the room, gave the performance a “chamber jazz” quality. Biskin’s sound on the small reed instrument at times echoed the greats of the swing era but more often reflected a deep study of later reed masters Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy, whose bass clarinet work on Blue Note and Prestige albums of the early sixties is legendary. But also, and perhaps because of his classical training, there were things Biskin played during that set that I didn’t know could be executed on the clarinet, including a startling command of dynamics in the extreme high end of the instrument’s register.

The clarinetist’s bandmates shared the spotlight. Horton’s trumpet playing was a potent blend of avant-garde innovator and Coleman sideman Don Cherry, and contemporary star Dave Douglas, as he too drew from a range of jazz idioms, demonstrating restraint and abandon as the mood dictated. Bassist Sickafoose, playing in the liberating setting of a piano-less quartet, seemed inspired by the harmonic and rhythmic nooks and crannies of the compositions, occasionally suspending the rapidly shifting harmonic structures with lightly propulsive ostinados, which served as springboards for the others, including Ferber, who drew beautiful colors from his five piece kit, which featured a distinctive-sounding Chinese symbol (a ride cymbal with an inverted bell). The group’s effort as a whole represented an example of improvised music worth listening to — with one foot in the past and the other in the future.

If Biskin’s group looked both ways, the second performer of the night, Kristin Norderval, a classically trained soprano from Oslo, was engaged in a distinctly forward-looking project, both in look and sound. Juxtaposed against the conventional setup of Biskin’s group, Norderval’s trio had the look of children of the future in a techno-crazed toy room. The leader herself stood in front of her Macintosh Laptop, which in turn sat atop of a Gallian-Kruger preamplifier and various sound processors, wires tangling and sprouting from every electronic orifice. She was flanked by the percussionist Gustavo Aguilar, who spread a blanket on the floor and sat amongst dozens of miscellaneous rhythmic devices. (He is definitely from the any-random-object-can-make-beautiful-sound school.) On Norderval’s right stood Monique Buzzarte, trombone in hand and half a dozen types of mute on a table next to her.

The show began with Norderval, alone with laptop, less concerned with melody than with pure sound, creating and then sampling by using the computer to manipulate the sounds she had just made. Five minutes into the opening piece, the room was echoing as Norderval multiplied, spliced, and re-spliced. As it turned out, all of this was a backdrop for the poem she wanted to get to, which served as a quiet culmination, focusing on “kindness and sorrow,” and read with soft candor amid the buzzing voices around her. The second piece featured her interaction with her partners, Buzzarte starting with a giant mute inside the trombone, creating muffled deep groans, and Aguilar rubbing the inside of a bowl with some type of stick. Norderval, again, was more interested in creating sounds than in being lyrical, and the performance featured her approximating a bird whistle and a high-pitched dog bark, sounds I had never heard a human make. (I told her this after the performance and she seemed to be pleased). For sheer, jaw-dropping strangeness, though, Norderval was matched every step of the way by Aguilar, who actually may have used every toy on his blanket, creating percussive effects with a battery-powered transformer with dancing plastic balls in it, a squeaky grinder, little metal cars, stacks of blocks (of varying material), and mini plastic clapping-hands. The final sounds of the show were, fittingly, “performed” by a small audiocassette recorder held in Aguilar’s hand. He had recorded various sections of the performance, including the sounds coming from Norderval’s laptop, and so the night ended with a recording of a recording, perhaps a nod to John Cage.

As I left The Stone I mused about music and value judgments and came to the following temporary conclusions. Is Kristin Nordervall’s neo-classical experimentalism more significant than Brad Mehldau’s jazz innovations? No. At the same time, though, could a player like Mehldau, or any of the other contemporary jazz geniuses have developed with no place to experiment in front of a sympathetic (and not necessarily loaded) audience? Probably not. Perhaps “uptown” is more dependant on “downtown” than it would, or cares to, admit. n

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In an age where aesthetic experience continues to be packaged and repackaged into digitized bits by the dominant forms of media, the live performance of art stubbornly persists, and, for some of us, represents a kind of experience for which there can be no substitute. Any jazz musician worthy of the name will tell you that the best stuff he plays is live in front of an audience, where the possibility of airbrushing imperfections is not an option. The irreverent aesthetic of such an attitude is exemplified by pianist Paul Bley, who is known to have said “Practice makes perfect. Imperfect is better.” Bley, the Montreal-born godfather of avant-garde jazz piano, recently spent five days at Birdland, performing with his friends, bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian from Aug. 22–25. As with any time these three masters collaborate on the same stage, it was an event to be suffered through more than passively contemplated, equal parts trauma and bliss.

Too often, the binary of intellectual/emotional is used as a crutch to categorize the work of “serious” musicians and composers who work within classical and jazz traditions. Just as fans of modernist masters like Schoenberg must continually defend the composer against charges of “difficulty,” so must fans of Bley’s music defend the pianist against charges of intellectualism. Schoenberg was purging western classical music of traditional harmony, not of emotion, right? Intellectual boldness and innovation in music needn’t come at the expense of deep feeling. This is not a zero-sum game. But the jazz avant-garde, by pushing on the edges of the idiom, has always been subject to conservative attacks from opposing quarters: on the one hand, those who feel the music is too intellectual, and on the other, those who feel it has abandoned “sense” altogether, in the name of primal, pre-idiomatic emotion. While such charges are not always off the mark, as a general rule they serve only to impede understanding and enjoyment.

Bley, perhaps best known for introducing saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his band to the wider world in 1958, represents the best aspects of the avante-garde. He is deeply fluent in the bebop tradition (his recording debut in 1952 featured bop icons Charles Mingus and Art Blakey) and his way of playing the piano, like Coleman’s way of playing the saxophone, is best understood as an appropriation of the advances of bebop’s complex approach to melody and harmony, and a widening of its application, not a retreat. Bley first began playing with Peacock and Motian in 1963, presumably taking them on loan from the pianist Bill Evans, with whom the two were already forging new ground on their respective instruments, and collectively, in the piano trio genre. The group added tenor saxophonist John Gilmore for a recording session under Bley’s name in 1964, titled Turning Point. All three musicians were members of the Jazz Composers Guild, which Bley helped to found in 1964. The Jazz Composers Guild was an artist-controlled organization that presented its members in a series of avante-garde jazz concerts in New York, and was at the heart of the explosion of improvisational creativity associated with what became known as “The New Thing,” an assertion of freedom from the restrictions of bop and postbop melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic structures. Bley and Peacock have gone on to make several duo recordings since the sixties, and their musical lives and private lives are also intertwined, Bley marrying the bassist’s ex-wife, vocalist and composer Annette Peacock in 1966. (In a karmic twist, Bley’s ex-wife, the composer Carla Bley, would go on to “partner” with Peacock’s doppelganger Steve Swallow, the great bassist who was a regular member of Bley’s trio in the sixties.) In 1987, Bley and Motian recorded a rare piano/drums duo session entitled Notes for the Soul Note label. More recently, in 1999, the three got together as a group in the recording studio for the first time in over thirty five years and produced Not Two, Not One (ECM, 1999), a stunning session demonstrating that advancing age has not curbed their creativity, nor their commitment, at all costs, to “make it new” every time.

It was with the vibe of old friends getting back together to have a conversation that the three improvisers took the bandstand at Birdland on the 22nd. While the outward trappings of more conventional jazz performance (introduction of the performers, songs of three to 10 minutes, applause) assured tourists (from the looks of it, about half of the audience) that everything was going to be okay, the musical conversation between these three masters was, as always, a relentless and unforgiving exploration of topics opened long ago. The second set opened en medias res, with Peacock unaccompanied, unanchored by song form, setting himself, the band, and the audience adrift in a sea of melodic fragments, set against unexpected pedal points. Peacock trusted his instincts, knowing that his two bandmates were as likely inclined to push him farther from familiar shores as they were to provide liferafts. The bassist’s deeply searching style, his way of making a note tremble between half-step intervals, his lightning runs into stratospheric registers of the bass, demands an unusually high degree of empathy from audience and bandmates alike, as it is more of an invitation to inhabit a newly opened sense of time and space, than to “sing along.” And when Bley finally (it seemed like forever) began to play, he was less inclined to take the reins than to playfully toss ideas at the bassist, as was Motian, whose refusal to “keep time” has distinguished him from other drummers from the very beginning of his career in his work with the Bill Evans Trio.

While the intimate dialogue between piano, bass, and drums in Evans’ early trios (the freeing of bass and drums from mere supplementary roles) set the definitive blueprint for modern trio jazz, Bley’s sense of space pushes far beyond Evans’, as he often “lays out” for minutes at a time, allowing silence, as it were, to sing. His penchant for juxtaposing a desolate, minimalist approach with overcrowded, frenetic passages of nutty counterpoint and dark, Lennie Tristano-ish low register runs, give his playing a breathless cinematic sweep.

In the trio’s second song of the night, “Isn’t It Romantic?,” Bley’s version of the melody was more compressed suggestion than overt statement, as he repeated the first six notes of the familiar Richard Rodgers standard before tripping down the rabbit hole with a flurry of notes, making use of both the extreme high and low registers of the piano. The trio then floated along in a kind of jazz underworld where bebop lines mingled freely with the happened-upon blues motif, now and then sailing into more turbulent waters, while the original six notes of Rodgers’ tune occasionally resurfaced to be (re)examined within the rapidly shifting musical context.

The violent tempo and mood shifts remained present throughout the set, which included a “free” ballad and an Ornette Coleman-inspired blues, the band continuing its collective war against musical complacency, and exhausting the audience in the process. Part of what makes the Bley/Peacock partnership so potent is the large share Peacock has in the thematic and melodic direction of the music, a role that is considerably diminished in his more well-known trio with pianist Keith Jarrett and drummer Jack DeJohnette. In that band, Jarrett dominates and Peacock excels in the more conventional role of bass support, packing his ideas into one solo chorus after Jarrett’s ten (or so), and allowing listeners long and deserved breaks from the jaw-dropping density of his melodic and harmonic conception.

Needless to say, Bley’s version of the piano trio offers no such shield from Peacock, and I left Birdland physically and emotionally strung-out, ready to sip a beer in a bar and let a “classic rock” juke box bring me back somewhere more comfortable, less terrible. 

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