Inverted Garden

Fred Hersch = LeBron James?

Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. He’s perfection.
– Jason Moran

David Hajdu's recent New York Times Magazine profile of pianist Fred Hersch is an odd amalgam of hyperbolic praise (above), made-up trends ("A new movement in jazz has surfaced over the past few years—a wave of highly expressive music more concerned with emotion than with craft or virtuosity"), and out-of-the-blue pot-shots ("Fred's ego is enormous.") That said, there's a pretty moving story here about a really excellent musician making a name for himself, facing death, and returning triumphantly to the scene.

I've been a fan of Hersch's music for a long time—a duo gig he did several years ago with Joe Lovano at the Jazz Standard was one of the more magical shows I've been to—and I've heard first-hand stories of his kindness—he recorded a tape of solo piano for a close friend of my mother's while she was awaiting a bone-marrow transplant (they had mutual friends but had never met). I just wish Hajdu didn't feel the need to dress Hersch's journey with the trappings of story: the exaggeration of Hersch's musical importance, the thinly backed-up claims of his arrogant "artistic temperament", and the pop-psychoanalytical discussion of how Hersch's sexuality relates to his lyricism.

POW! (Pick of the Week): JD Allen Trio

Looking back over jazz critics' top 10 lists of 2009, two of the most notable themes were the big band bloom and rise of the sax trio. The debut recording of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society and the sophomore effort of John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble found their way onto many year-end lists (Secret Society's Infernal Machines placed #2 on AccuJazz's compilation of critical consensus) and both bands generated buzz that traveled well beyond the jazz cognoscenti. (Infernal Machines was reviewed in Newsweek for crying out loud.)

The sax trio, that bare-frame vehicle of pure acoustic music, proved the small-group counterweight to the big bands. The form may have been gaining popularity in recent years (see Joshua Redman's Back East), but 2009 is when it solidified into that most precarious of journalistic inventions: the trend.

Marcus Strickland's Idiosyncrasies, Fly's Sky & Country, Darius Jones's Man'ish Boy, and JD Allen's Shine! placed high on many critics' lists, but it was Allen's mid-August residency at the Village Vanguard that was the sax trio's moment of elevation. When compared to the innovative Fly, Allen's band seemed conservative—rooted deeply in the Sonny Rollins tradition of muscular solos and tight, swinging rhythms—yet somehow it sounded fresh, rag-tag, unscripted—excellence with an after-hours immediacy and intimacy. That Allen's music resonated with forward-thinking jazz fans spoke not only to his skills as a player and a leader but also to the continued possibilities of the form. Unlike the trumpet-and-sax quintet, which often lends itself to harmonically intricate JALC revivalism (think Wynton's Black Codes from the Underground), the bare-bones sax trio resists pretension—an ideal attribute at a moment when young jazz musicians are trying to court indie rockers far more than supper clubbers.

From Tuesday through Sunday this coming week, JD Allen, bassist Gregg August, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey return to the Village Vanguard; six nights that, like the great room itself, should use the frame of history to find new ways to point forward.

Brad Mehldau rides again

When Brad Mehldau released Largo in 2002, I remember thinking it was high-time the era's greatest jazz pianist ventured beyond his comfy acoustic trio. Since signing a deal with the now-defunct Warner Jazz at the tender age of 24, Mehldau had released six piano trio records with the same personnel (Larry Grenadier on bass, Jorge Rossy on drums) and one rambling and occasionally brilliant solo date, Elegaic Cycles. Largo didn't sound like anything Mehldau had done before—it was poppy, heavily produced, and played up Jon Brion's arranging chops at the expense of Mehldau's instrumental virtuosity—and it sounds like nothing Mehldau has done since.

I have friends, like the Argentine producer Fer Isella, who consider Largo Mehldau's best album. I do not. Viewed nearly eight years after its release, it seems like a necessary experiment that helped Mehldau grow as a composer and improviser, but it's a frustratingly hodge-podge album. That's why I'm anticipating Mehldau's upcoming release, Highway Rider (March 16), with guarded enthusiasm. Highway Rider reunites Mehldau and Brion in a heavily-produced orchestral affair, although this time around there are more promising signs: most notably, the presence of saxophonist Joshua Redman. Nonesuch has released an EPK to promote Highway Rider, and while it doesn't give away much of the music, the little it does, leaves me optimistic:

(via Nate Chinen, Nextbop, and Nonesuch)

POW! Darius Jones

The Brooklyn jazz scene has been a boon to New York, fostering a defiantly local culture that the city's biggest clubs (Blue Note, Vanguard, etc) sometimes lack. In Greenwich Village, you see top jazz stars deliver polished performances; at Brooklyn events like the New Languages Festival, you see scruffy young musicians experimenting, developing, emerging.

Yet there's a strain running through some of the new Brooklyn music that feels counterproductive: an attraction toward gimmicks rather than expressions. The Respect Sextet, a unit that has seriously good musicians and has recorded some seriously good music, turned me off a couple weeks ago with a surfeit of glibness. I can take titles like "Furry with the Syringe On Top," but when the music also feels like punny pastiche, I'm left wanting something harder and more honest. Jazz has a proud tradition of pranksters, but great clowns always give you a glimpse behind the mask that compromises easy chuckles.

Alto saxophonist Darius Jones has the kind of brash sound and furious purpose that don't lend themselves to clowning around. His debut album, Man'ish Boy, was a tightly realized cry. For the next three nights, he'll be setting up shop at Roulette in Soho, playing with his working trio tonight, with his new quartet on Tuesday, and with a quirky larger ensemble called the Elizabeth-Caroline Unit on Wednesday. It should be intense music with a pow punch.

Mars or Bust

In early August 2009, I attended the 12th International Mars Society Convention with my close friend and frequent collaborator Justin Nobel. We went on a whim, knowing almost nothing about the Society and hoping that somewhere at the gathering we'd find a worthwhile story. From the first moment we saw him barking at an old rival about the idiocy of exploring the moon, it became very clear to us that Dr. Robert Zubrin, the Mars Society's president, was the story.

The weekend we spent at the Convention was a hoot. We tried to infiltrate every area of the Convention, covering the rousing keynote speeches and the often bizarre plenary sessions, chatting up Mars Society members and administrators, and dining at the Society's annual benefit gala (an absurdist affair MC'ed by former CNN host Miles O'Brien that featured Robert Zubrin bobble-head dolls and a live infomercial for a massage device). The following week, we wrote the article, passing drafts furiously back-and-forth, convinced that our story was timely and our window for selling it very small. Five months, many rejected pitches, and dozens of subsequent drafts later, Guernica Magazine has published the piece. You can check it out here.

POW! Respect Sextet + Ethan Iverson

After an Argentine sojourn, about which you should be hearing more soon, I'm back in New York and ready to return to the underground haunts that give Inverted Garden its name. Despite living in New York for the last year and a half, I've somehow never managed to set foot in (Le) Poisson Rouge, the trendy new-music venue big among the savvy indie rock set. (Think of the Nico Muhly-Grizzly Bear collaboration as the archetypal emblem of that scene.)

Tonight, the Bad Plus pianist/raconteur Ethan Iverson opens for the Respect Sextet, a raucous unit that's very much in keeping with LPR's post-genre spirit—their most recent release is Sirius Respect: The Respect Sextet play the music of Sun Ra & Stockhausen. Iverson should bring to bare his killer mix of formidable technique, fanboy nerdiness, and Midwestern deadpan for a set of "cocktail piano," and Respect will follow with a show that I'm expecting to be a blast. (I've never heard Respect play live, but they've earned great press and high praise from the likes of Darcy James Argue.)

A short review of the show will follow tomorrow.

Return to Buenos Aires

(Or, June 9th is...Guillermo Klein day)

From October 2007 to August 2008, I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, working first as a reporter for the biweekly ex-pat newspaper The Argentimes and then as a jazz chronicler and scene hanger-on for All About Jazz. During most of my stay in the South, I kept an irregularly updated blog called Type and Tonic (the title was supposed to conjure a boozy Graham Greene ex-pat life) that covered my adventures in Patagonia, my thoughts on the difficulty of learning Spanish, and, increasingly, my time spent listening to Argentine jazz.

I never officially closed Type and Tonic, but after a blog post entiteld "June 9th is...Guillermo Klein day" I got a commission to write a piece for Down Beat on the post-crisis history of Buenos Aires jazz—a story of economic recovery, peripatetic musicians, and a perfect storm of art and commerce that gave birth to a new jazz idiom. Energized by the assignment—and delusional about its scope—I conducted 15 hours of interviews with the key Buenos Aires players, producers, and club owners in an attempt to capture the movement from all sides. By the time the piece was due, its word count had been slashed to 800, and what I'd envisioned as a lyrical feature ended up reading like the abstract to an encyclopedia entry.

For the last year and half, I've been stewing over the piece that could have been. I've written a 5,000 word draft of what I'd hoped to have published, then realized (after some helpful comments from Digital Dying's Justin Nobel) that the concept needed a make-over. I also realized I needed to go back to Argentina, both to make the story current again and to ask the questions that have peaked my curiosity over the last year.

I'm sitting in an apartment in San Telmo right now, having arrived in Buenos Aires this morning. Thanks to WBGO's Josh Jackson and freelance reporter Anil Mundra (formerly of the Global Post and NPR) I've grown the stubs of radio sea-legs and, for the next week, I'll be setting out to tell the story of Argentine jazz in a medium that's new to me.

I'm not sure how much blogging I'm going to be doing down here, but I'll try to file a few updates in this Type and Tonic revival/Inverted Garden double bill. I've already eaten a choripan and am headed off to a "puerta cerrada" jazz club tonight. It's suddenly feeling very June 2008...

Wynton in Vogue: Race and Luxury

The latest issue of Vogue features the above picture, an Annie Leibovitz-composed portrait of the ever-dapper King Wynton rehearsing with the JALC orchestra. A quick glance at the photo might leave one with the impression that it’s a standard glamour shot, but another look brings into focus a curiously sprawled blonde, almost camouflage against the teak floor. As Patrick Jarenwattananon asked when he posted a link to the photo on his NPR blog, “what's with the sitting woman?”

After reading Patrick’s question and looking at the photo, I began to grasp at the strands of a few possible answers—none of them positive for the music. After the initial surprise at seeing a pretty, well-dressed woman gazing at our unsuspecting hero, I found it hard to ignore the issue of race. Here is a powerful black man being ogled by a seemingly helpless white woman, a pairing rife with historical precedent from Kong to LeBron. While this photo doesn’t scream jungle rape like that infamous Vogue cover (note: same magazine), there’s a faint, unnerving echo played out in the way that Leibovitz arranges her principals. The woman looks both available and immobile (standing up from that pose would take some doing) and Marsalis towers above her. There’s a tragic history of objectifying black masculinity in the eyes of white femininity, and the photo's resonance with that history makes troubling Leibovitz’s decision to use a white model as smitten damsel before her black captor.

It’s also hard not to notice the privileging of white over black beauty: the photo might still smack of gender inequality with a black model, but it wouldn’t recall Jim Crow. In 1957, when Columbia Records showed Miles Davis the first LP cover to Miles Ahead, he famously quipped to producer George Avakian, “Why'd you put that white bitch on there?” Subsequent additions of the album showed a picture of Davis playing his horn and when Davis’s later album covers showed women, they were always black*. Annie Leibovitz is a powerful artist who gets her way, but if she had set-up a similar shoot for Miles, I imagine he’d have given her a cold stare and repeated what he said to Avakian. Marsalis might have considered a similar rebuke.

It’s easy to blame Leibovitz for these racial overtones, but there’s another possibility: perhaps Leibovitz, completely aware of what she’s doing, has merely given us an honest artistic interpretation of Marsalis. I think there’s plenty to admire about Wynton and Jazz at Lincoln Center: he’s an extraordinary musician (a fact that really sunk in after reading Ethan Iverson’s discussion of the Young Lions) and he’s built a home in which jazz is taken seriously and musicians are well paid, which, given the music’s history, is an epochal achievement. (I’d much rather listen to jazz at a small club than at Jazz at Lincoln Center, but if you were to have asked Thelonious Monk in 1952 if he’d rather keep playing that out-of-tune upright for less than a hundred bucks a night or play a Bösendorfer grand in a concert hall for a $10,000 fee, I’m inclined to think he would have bolted for JALC at the earliest chance.)

This advancement has come with a steep price, however, namely the commodification of jazz as a luxury good. Wynton poses in ads for Movado watches (he wears one in the photo as well) and leads an institution that rents space in a gilded corporate palace alongside New York’s two most expensive restaurants. Tickets to JALC are expensive and its patrons affluent, which makes for great business but a questionable breeding ground for great art. In this context, maybe the white woman isn’t a helpless Ann Darrow, but just another perfect accessory for jazz’s greatest salesman.

* Update: Commenter Il Maestro points out that the cover of Miles's Porgy and Bess (released after Miles Ahead) depicts the trumpeter and a white woman. Il Maestro says that the Marsalis photo reminded him first of the Porgy cover and I can see why. I responded at length to Il Maestro in the comments section and while I realize this post is walking some rather precarious interpretative ground, I think the Marsalis Vogue photo encapsulates a lot of ideas about Wynton, the JALC, and jazz history that make it worth exploring.

With respect to a comparison between Davis's Porgy cover and the Marsalis photo, I wrote this: "I did find the staging of the [Marsalis] photo indicative of the power imbalance of those old racist pairings—the helpless white woman gazing up at the big, mighty black man—and if I were to draw a separation between Miles's Porgy cover and the Wynton Vogue photo it would be on those grounds: Miles and his companion are clearly a couple, on the same level, and each occupying half of the frame."

Gary Giddins talks shop

One the rare occasions when critics get interviewed, they’re usually asked to weigh in on their subject of expertise, but hardly ever asked to discuss their craft. Charlie Rose will call on David Denby to talk about the top movies of the year, for instance, but Rose won’t ask Denby the kinds of probing questions about “process” that he would of a novelist or filmmaker. Modern critics, by and large, have been lumped into the opinion category alongside “talking heads," far beneath their august cousins in the arts. Many critics deserve this treatment—they’re shouting hacks or preening pundits—but a subset has always ranked among out best writers and deserve a more open forum to discuss their work.

That’s why I was so happy to see this lengthy interview with jazz critic Gary Giddins on the very worthwhile (and somewhat mysterious) website, Big Think (shorter clips from the interview are here). Giddins is the most prominent active jazz critic, having covered the music for 30 years at the Village Voice before transitioning to a life of occasional New Yorker essays and books on jazz history. Given Giddins’s forty-year jazz immersion, I figured he’d spend the interview talking about, well, jazz; but, much to my delight, he spends it talking about his bigger passion: writing.

Throughout the interview, especially in its first half, Giddins sets out to correct the notion that a critic is primarily an expert on his subject. A critic is a writer first, Giddins says, and an expert decidedly second. “I think all of us begin as writers,” he says, “you pick a subject that allows you to express yourself as a writer.” Listening to the music is important of course, Giddins adds, but the key to being a good critic is to “read voraciously” and to read “classic criticism.” It’s all common sense stuff, but it’s reassuring to hear a big-time critic state that he’s no musicologist and that his authority comes not from his grasp of music theory but from his capacity to describe music with precision and clarity.

Dispatch from the vocation of unhappiness: One of the most popular videos on Big Think is a clip from an interview with novelist John Irving entitled “Advice to Aspiring Novelists: Don’t Shoot Yourself.” That would be mildly depressing, but more depressing (and more deliciously ironic) is that Irving offers no such advice. He tells aspiring novelists that, if he were in their shoes, he might very well shoot himself.

New Conversations

One of the main reasons I started Inverted Garden was to be part of a conversation. I'd written quite a few articles for other jazz websites, and while I had readers, I never got any feedback. I was tired of howling into the void.

Last week, the conversation came to Inverted Garden in a very real way. WBGO’s Josh Jackson linked to my Pandora post via his twitter feed. Andrew Durkin, the leader of the ribald West Coast big band Industrial Jazz Group, posted an excellent follow-up to my Pandora riff, extolling the virtues of hard-work-musical-discovery and concluding with a perceptive observation on why services like Pandora exist:

Pandora…would not be springing up if there was not exponentially more music in the world these days. It's a response to what Alvin Toffler called "overchoice" -- the dizzying array of new releases in any given week, month, year. So I get it, but I still avoid it.

Durkin also plugged my post on his blog, Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, which I’ve added to “the conversation.” (The Belgian writer Georges Simenon once said, “writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness.” If both Simenon and Durkin are right, then writing about jazz seems a deeply depressing endeavor.)

Jazz scribe Cicily Janus also found Inverted Garden, commenting on an old post, “Cool Talk,” and writing some kind words about my work on her blog, Writing About You (now part of "the conversation"). Janus has a book on the current jazz scene coming out next year—a very welcome addition to a marketplace dominated by histories and biographies.