Inverted Garden

A Journey to the End of Taste: The Road to Damascus

This is the fourth entry in an ongoing conversation with my good friend, former roommate, and fellow blogger Will C. White, a classical composer and conductor. Prompted by Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, Will and I are unpacking issues relating to taste, culture, and society as they relate to classical music and jazz. Click on these links to read Will's initial entry, my response, and Will's follow-up.

Wow, Maestro, this is rich stuff. Like you, I'll start with the biographical and expand to the societal.

There's some truth to your dime-store psychiatrist's analysis that my place of birth predisposed me to falling hard for jazz. Growing up in Manhattan, I had easy access to "the music," and clubs like the Knitting Factory were the first places where my high school friends and I got to be quasi-grown-ups. I'm not sure I thought of jazz clubs as "louche dens of cool," but they certainly excited me. Pursuing jazz meant leaving the comforts of my native Upper West Side and venturing downtown, which at time seemed a pretty exotic place—the streets jagged and narrow, the buildings squat and ancient. The music was the draw, but the exploration it demanded amplified the allure.

I may have thought I was pretty cool for going downtown to check out clubs like the Knitting Factory and the Vanguard, but spending Friday and Saturday nights hanging out with a bunch of nerds at music venues predominantly populated by the middle-aged was not what the cool kids were doing in New York circa 2001. It also wasn't what drew me to jazz. Long before I heard the Dave Liebman Big Band play the Knitting Factory on November 4, 2000 (my first real jazz-club visit), I considered jazz to be my music. Like you, I got hooked on "the music" around the age of 13. Unlike you, I had a very specific Road to Damascus moment.

The story goes something like this: In early middle school, music didn't particularly matter to me. I played piano with waxing and waning enthusiasm, but listening to music wasn't an activity I pursued. I remember quite vividly feeling ashamed when an older first-cousin interrogated me about my musical tastes. "What are you into?" he asked. I said, "oh, lots of stuff, I mean, kind of everything. I dunno, really." Or something to that extent. It was like a virgin answering a question about sex. There was this exciting world out there, and I had no real connection to it. I needed to seek it out.

I consummated my relationship with jazz on an early evening when I was in, if I remember correctly, seventh grade. My mother, much like yours, was a casual fan of the music I'd end up marrying. (Oedipal alert?) She and my father had some jazz records, which I'd listen to from time to time, but I understood it basically as background noise. Then, one night, I put on Kind of Blue, and all of a sudden, looking out at the amber glow of lights dotting Riverside Park as Paul Chambers and Bill Evans played the introduction to "So What," I heard jazz. It's never been the same since.

When music takes hold it does it with a vise grip—it's brutally physical. I got goosebumps the night I heard "So What." When I listen to a good performance, I can't help but move in some way. I can easily sit still for even the most riveting scene in the most riveting movie.

That animalistic attachment to music also affects the way I think about taste. I like the writings of Borges and the films of Tarantino, but I fully understand that others may not, and they probably have good reasons. Music is a different story. It hits deeper. Right now I'm listening to Bill Evans improvise on "Nardis," and I can't imagine that there's a human being alive that wouldn't like it. It's a chemical, primal reaction. Trying to imagine someone not liking the best jazz is like trying to imagine someone not liking alcohol (or someone not liking sex).

Admittedly, I'm not quite comparing apples to apples. I find it nearly impossible to imagine someone who wouldn't be moved by music, but jazz is just one variety of music. Jazz isn't analogous to alcohol, it's more analogous to Scotch, and plenty of people don't like Scotch. Still, even people who recoil from the first taste of jazz should be able to connect with its visceral impact. Someone who hates Scotch after all could still enjoy getting drunk off the stuff. Most listeners, though, don't even allow themselves to get that far. They discard jazz before even taking a sip. The problem here isn't that people don't like Scotch; it's that they don't want to be the kind of people who like Scotch.

*****

Here, I'd like to address the final and wonderfully pithy point you make in your post: "a big problem with jazz is that it’s neither promoted as being 'good for you' nor is it commonly viewed as being 'bad for you'." You're right. Jazz continues to be an uneasy fit in high-art institutions (as the polarizing nature of Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center attests) and no parents are ever going to worry that their jazz-loving son is listening to the Devil's music.

But I think this analysis ignores a big fact of contemporary American art and commerce. In 2011, no music is bad for you. Who are today's edgy rock acts? The ones who suburban mothers are really afraid of? Who are today's truly edgy rap acts? The ones who arouse the ire of today's Tipper Gores? I'm not sure I could name any. Lil Wayne went to prison for wielding a handgun and Bill Clinton said he was a fan and was excited for his release. Tyler, the Creator seems like an edgy young dude, and he's already appeared on Jimmy Fallon and sold a TV show to the Cartoon Network. This isn't news, of course, but the aughts brought us an almost total synchronization of commodity and art to the point that no mainstream or even marginally mainstream group really challenges the social order. When you live in an era when a Slovenian Marxist-Lacanian professor can get called both "the most despicable philosopher in the West" and write an Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, you know that we're in a sad moment for radicalism. (N.B.: I wonder if the Occupy movements are responding not only to income inequality but the paucity of loud radical voices.)

Since no musical genre is currently "bad for you," I have a hard time believing that jazz's problem has much to do with it's admittedly conflicted status as both high and low, good and bad. Jazz's problem is that it's "too old for you;" it suffers from the perception that it's something that happened a while ago and continues as a kind of repertory music. The fact that by far the biggest jazz star of the past thirty years, Wynton Marsalis, is a self-consciously retro artist only underscores this point. To the general public, jazz is five black guys in suits playing more or less the music of Miles Davis's first quintet, and if you go to a lot of jazz clubs, that's in fact much of what you'll see. When that music is played well, it's still going to move me; but I can understand why people would recoil from it. No one, save Walter Sobchak, really wants to live in the past.

"Too old for you" is the big classical problem too, isn't it? A great symphony concert should blow anyone away. It's more powerful and visceral than stadium rock, but the optics are all wrong for recruiting young listeners. We both know that Valery Gergiev is far more of a gangster than any rapper in the US (how many of them are close with someone like this guy?), but this is about performance not life. Who was the last famous American classical musician who spoke fiercly to the moment? Yo-Yo Ma is pretty famous; fierce he is not. Lenny was certainly in the zeitgeist, but I doubt even he drew scores of young fans.

Because we're young and we feel passionately about jazz and classical music, we want more of our peers to like it. I'd be excited to live in a world where my knowledge of contemporary jazz carried over into more areas of my life; and I'd be excited to live in a world where I had more good company at shows. But I think it's worth asking what a world in which classical and jazz were less marginalized would really look like? Would it mean that there would be more people like us? Or would it mean that we'd have to let go of our attachment to genre? Would popular jazz and classical music end up meaning an end to jazz and classical music as we know them?

As a way of closing, I'll briefly consider the case of the very-often-referenced-on-this-blog Guillermo Klein. Guillermo doesn't consider himself a jazz musician, and while his music is probably more jazz than anything else, he sings with the unpolished voice of a rocker and he borrows from Ligeti and Reich as often as Ellington. It's not that hard for me to imagine Guillermo singing on a few more tunes and getting labeled a "jazz-ish indie-rocker." I could see this Guillermo getting popular in Williamsburg and earning very high marks on Pitchfork.

On one hand, this would be the ideal scenario for young jazz fans—one of our own making it in the indie mainstream. But I'm also a little freaked out by the idea. Having Guillermo as a jazz musician means that I can see him in small clubs and talk to him after the show and that I feel like I have a small degree of ownership over his music. If he'd never been a jazz musician, my relationship with him and his music would have been very different.

Maybe we really want our genres obscure and marginalized. We were the middle-school kids who were listening to Miles Davis and Verdi when everyone else was listening to Eminem. What would we have listened to if everyone else had been listening to Miles Davis and Verdi?

A Journey to the End of Taste: A Response

This is my first entry in a co-blogging project with my friend and fellow blogger Will C. White, who also happens to be the assistant conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. You can read Will's initial entry, which discussed Carl Wilson's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, on his eponymous blog. This is my response.

Maestro,

Fascinating that you should write that jazz is "more fetishized as a commodity" than classical music, and that you think that everyone from "elderly black people in the suburbs [to] the Williamsburg-Wicker Park-Silver Lake set can make their friends think they’re hip when they play Miles or Ella at their backyard picnic." I don't see it that way at all, but I've noticed before that the jazz and classical crowds, equally marginalized in the mainstream, tend to look hungrily at one another and think, "if only I had it like they did." Alex Ross got at this in a New Yorker essay when he talked about his envy for jazz people who referred to their chosen genre simply as "the music" while his chosen genre got saddled with the eternally unhip moniker "classical." He also noted that some in jazz were equally envious, craving the respectability of the term "classical" while wanting to ditch the almost-entirely-lost New Orleans–whorehouse connotations of "jazz."

In truth, I think our lots are just about equal. Jazz might appeal to a larger cultural base than classical music, but classical has been more successful at crossing over into indie culture over the past five to ten years. Nico Muhly has collaborated with Grizzly Bear, after all, while even the most forward-looking jazzmen get stuck as Mos Def's backing band. There might be more jazz musicians than classical musicians concerned with making defiantly modern music—people like Darcy James Argue and Guillermo Klein and Vijay Iyer and Jason Moran—but I don't think any of them have yet landed the kind of quasi-mainstream wallop that Nico and his crew or even, heck, Terry Riley have managed.

But when we speak of the classical and jazz audience, the big difference has to do with the kind of venues in which the two currently are performed. Outside of Wynton's Jazz at Lincoln Center, jazz doesn't operate on the institutional model. Let's put the difference this way: The most famous venue in American classical music is Carnegie Hall. The Chairman of Carnegie Hall is Sandy Weill, who was CEO of Citicorp when it merged with Traveler's Group in 1998. (That's the mega-merger that got Congress to overturn the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act—a decision that played a big role in the economic mess of the last three years. Oh, and Sandy Weill once bribed a nursery school.) Anyway, the most famous venue in American jazz is the Village Vanguard, which has no chairman and, over the course of its 76 year history, has been run by a hard-driving Lithuanian immigrant and, since his death in 1989, his equally hard-driving widow. Sandy Weill and his crowd have no doubt spent plenty of evenings at the classical music halls of America listening or, as you aptly put it, not listening to music. I doubt many of them have set foot in a jazz club, at least not since they rose far into the 1%.

So I don't see the so-called economic capitalistas playing much of a role in jazz, but I'm not naive enough to think that that amounts to a triumph of pure taste. A visit on any night to that very same Village Vanguard would reveal plenty of people who are there for reasons other than to hear the group onstage. There are couples on a third or fourth date who want to do something "different"; there are tourists who flock to jazz clubs in New York the way tourists go to, say, tango clubs in Buenos Aires ("it's a cultural experience!"); and there are old jazz fans who haven't heard an album since Stan Getz and Strings and think it might be kind of fun to drink wine and listen to live music. It's really easy to condescend to these people (as I just did), but the truth is that we desperately need all of them. Part of having a missionary's zeal—something we share—means welcoming all into the church and hoping they find God while they're there.

Outside of a potentially decent date, then, does listening to jazz have any social function at all? The clubs are small. They're far removed from the non-profit gala-benefit set. And most of the novices are extremely unlikely to run into anyone they know. If I wanted to establish myself as a high-status college white-boy, I'd probably do better to listen to either indie-rock, socially conscious rap, or some combination there of. If I wanted to establish myself as a complete eccentric, I might want to listen to, oh, I don't know, classical music or, better yet, Celine Dion. If I wanted to fit in with a more mainstream crowd, I'd listen to anything but jazz.

I don't doubt that my lifelong preference for jazz has deep social roots, but I'm having trouble seeing what they are. I've always been attracted to grand American projects, things that are both forward-looking and deeply obsessed with their histories—things like baseball and long-form magazine journalism and, yes, jazz. But those preferences reveal a pattern not a cause. There's something that draws me to all of them, and I have some theories, but I'm pretty sure they're all bunk.

So, Maestro, maybe you play the analyst on this next one. What drew you to classical music in the first place? How do you see your own attachment to it in a social context? And, you have my eager permission, can you solve the mystery of my attachment to jazz? (Maybe you see it far more clearly and un-mysteriously than I do.)

More thoughts on the jazz-critic question

The acoustic bass guitarist (and excellent jazz blogger) Ronan Guilfoyle was kind enough to comment at length on my jazz-critic-question post, and I wanted to respond in a forum that caught more eyeballs than the blog's comment thread.

In his comment, Ronan reiterated his argument that jazz critics should be able to play the music, not to a professional level, but to a point where they have a solid, instinctive understanding of jazz fundamentals.

In my opinion it’s very difficult to get into the depth necessary to write knowledegably about the music if you can’t recognise a 12 bar blues form when you hear it. Or simple song structure – AABA – etc. A jazz critic should be able to hear basic stuff like that in my opinion. They should be able to hear the difference between a modal piece and one that uses changes – they don’t have to know what those changes are, but they should know whether they’re being used as a basis for improvisation or not...The success or failure of the music, is of course subjective, but a good jazz writer should be able to express their opinion on that success or failure from a standpoint of an understanding of the basic structure of what it is they’re writing about.

I find it hard to quibble too much with Ronan's position—a jazz critic who doesn't know the difference between free playing, modal playing, and playing over the changes to "I've Got Rhythm" is probably not only a jazz critic who can't play, but also a jazz critic who hasn't listened to much jazz. The underlying issue here, it seems to me, is all about knowledge and not really about performance ability at all. No one cares whether or not a critic can actually pull off an ersatz Bud Powell piano solo; a reader should care whether or not a critic can accurately explain what an ersatz Bud Powell piano solo would sound like.

As I said in the previous post, any critic who oversteps his knowledge is going to very quickly be exposed as a hack. (Ronan notes, on his blog, a few particularly egregious examples of critical ignorance.) And I'd certainly advocate that any serious jazz critic acquire far more than rudimentary knowledge about jazz structure, theory, etc. You're only going to be able to approach the full spectrum of the music honestly and persuasively, if you actually understand it.

These strike me as self-evident points, which begs the question, when Roanna Forman first asked the jazz-critic question on the Boston Jazz Blog, what was she actually getting at? I can't think of a widely published jazz critic who lacks the basics of musical knowledge described by Ronan in his comment, and if such critics are out there, they should be called to task. At least on the Boston Jazz Blog and the follow-ups that I've read, no one has stepped up to do that. Was the jazz-critic question, then, merely a vehicle for denouncing a mostly theoretical bogeyman, the lazy hack who writes the occasional know-nothing review in little-read publications? Would the jazz-critic question have torn up the blogosphere if it were phrased "should jazz critics know anything about the subject they're writing about?"

The jazz-critic question isn't really about whether a jazz critic needs to possess rudimentary knowledge. Of course a jazz critic should have rudimentary knowledge! Who's going to seriously argue against that point? The jazz-critic question, it seems to me, is really about whether a critic needs to have expert-level knowledge—knowledge that's equal to the musician he's critiquing. I suspect a lot of people (many musicians included) would say, yes, a critic ought to have expert-level knowledge. A critic writing about Steve Lehman, this view would hold, should have a fairly nuanced understanding of microtonal harmony, how else could he understand deeply what was going on? If he didn't fully understand the process, what right would he have to critique Steve Lehman?

I'm sympathetic to this view, favoring a world in which writers are all wildly informed and competent, but its implications for the music make me very uncomfortable. Demanding that jazz critics be as knowledgeable technically as musicians would not only severely restrict the pool of potential jazz critics, it would also strongly bias that pool toward writers who were primarily fascinated by questions of theory and technique. We'd lose a lot of sharp writing that explored jazz in the light of history, culture, and society.

Jazz doesn't want for more album and show reviews—as great as they can be, they're mostly geared toward people who already know about the artist in question. What jazz criticism needs is more long-form writing that can reach an audience beyond the initiated, pieces that have something to say that's bigger than whether a bass solo sucked. Ben Ratliff's remarkable 2005 Times essay on two then-newly-unearthed Coltrane recordings is one sparkling example of this. It begins as an examination of the albums' popularity with consumers and ends with a string of brilliant paragraphs on society, technology, and the nature of art, theorizing that the end of long residencies and habitual club-going have deeply affected the way the music sounds. More writers should be trying to tackle jazz from that angle—to describe it, to make connections from it to other arts, and to ask of it big, bold questions.

More: As hoped for, Ethan Iverson weighed in on the jazz-critic question. His headline, "Could Liebling Box?," says it all.

The jazz-critic question, examined

I walked into the kitchen at the Village Vanguard and saw the big New Orleanian I call “Bayou Socrates” holding court on a swivel chair. “Bayou Socrates,” I yelped. “It’s So-crates,” he corrected with a grin, before adding, “I thought you’d quit jazz.” Bayou Socrates and I often spar with half-joke jabs, but this time he seemed serious. It was mid-August, and I hadn’t published a blog post about jazz in two months. I’d been to fewer shows. Publicists had stopped emailing me. The deluge of pre-release albums arriving at my office had slowed to a drip.

Why had I been backing away from jazz? Before the summer, traffic on Inverted Garden had been up significantly. I was now writing some of the pick-of-the-week blurbs on New York’s listings pages, getting Guillermo Klein, Peter Brötzmann, and Jenny Scheinman into the space usually reserved for our pop critic’s favorites. I wasn’t exactly expecting David Remnick to ask if I’d be interested in filling Whitney Balliett’s vacant chair (above), but things were moving—slowly—in the right direction.

Part of my silence had to do with the time demands of a new job at the magazine. A larger part of my silence had to do with a question that’s recently been popping up across the jazz blogosphere: “Do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?”

The question, first posed on the Boston Jazz Blog, elicited a more or less immediate consensus: “no, of course not.” There were nuances to the responses, handwringing over how much rudimentary theory one needed, but most critics made one key point, which Ted Gioia put most succinctly: “I’m less concerned with how well various critics can play music, and more interested in how well they can hear what is happening in a performance.”

That one's observational acumen rather than participatory skill is the key to being a good reporter is a truism in most areas of writing. Few people lament that crime writing isn’t done by criminals, or that sports writing isn’t done by athletes. All writers, even those who focus on a single area, are, at heart, generalists. Michael Lewis doesn’t know as much about credit-default swaps as the most seasoned Wall Street trader, but he knows enough about credit-default swaps to analyze intelligently their role in the financial crisis. Journalists needn’t be an expert in that field their writing about, but they need to be capable of asking experts in the field the right questions. They also need to be able to write engaging prose. As Patrick Jarenwattananon noted in his response to the jazz-critic question, “It seems to me that [the] skill set [for a critic] is all about storytelling, and it's not taught in music theory classes at conservatory.”

Unfortunately, storytelling skill has never seemed like quite enough when it comes to jazz. In an interview with Jazz Times in 2005, A.B Spellman, one of the great jazz critics, explained why he stopped writing in what should have been the middle of his career.

I wish jazz musicians wrote more. There have been some good individual critics—some great individual critics—but the overall state of jazz criticism has never been great. I just don't think there are enough jazz writers who can really approach jazz from the inside. Classical music has good writing by important composers. I would like to see more of that in jazz writing. There's not enough jazz musicology. That's one thing that stopped me from writing about jazz.

It's hard for me to imagine Lester Bangs or Robert Christgau quitting rock criticism out of a desire to see Mick and Ringo start writing their own analytical works. I can't really imagine any film critic or book critic or food critic doing this either. We've come to expect that criticism isn't written by artists, but rather by the smartest, best-informed member of the audience—someone who knows the art cold but also has some distance from it, the better to properly evaluate what's going on.

Yet the farther you get away from the popular arts, the larger looms the question of expertise. Everyone eats, has food preferences, and has cooked a rudimentary meal. Everyone who graduated middle school has read novels and written papers. Everyone has seen movies and decided whether or not he or she liked them. These things are our lingua franca, and that means that almost anyone has "the right" to be a food critic or movie critic or book critic. We'd all pass the minimum standard of expertise since we all engage with at least some manifestation of these arts every single day.

Jazz isn't like food and books and movies. It's abstract, generally unfamiliar, and sophisticated technically. It's distant from most people's everyday lives, and thus, jazz expertise doesn't come simply by interacting with the culture. The jazz critic isn't just an evaluator. He is, in some sense, an intermediary, a translator. He's claiming to be able to read something that most people can't.

I don't completely subscribe to this view. Good jazz writing doesn't need to be about translating the music's technical process. It can be about how the music works on a more basic level, and that requires only big ears, not years of training. But the anxiety of expertise is hard to shake in jazz, not only driving away many listeners (who perceive the music as "too hard") but prompting the kind of soul-searching among critics that could make the question “do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?” resonate throughout the blogosphere. If jazz is a foreign language in need of translation through critics, are non-jazz musicians who critique jazz akin to non-Spanish speakers trying to parse Don Quixote? I would imagine that some people would answer that question in the affirmative.

And that's the last thing jazz needs. If we allow jazz to be viewed as a foreign tongue that only experts can decipher for the public, then quite simply, the music has no future. Great jazz should be able to stand on its own, winning over first-time listeners and offering an even deeper reward for the more experienced. Jazz criticism should aspire to the same goal. When Frank Bruni was the Times' restaurant critic, he talked about how he wanted his reviews to be literary pieces rather than service journalism since the majority of his readers lived outside New York and likely wouldn't have a chance to follow his advice. Jazz criticism would do well to follow his lead. The chief critical question shouldn’t be “Who understands jazz music best?” or "Who can show off how much he knows about the structure of this song?" It should be “Who can present the music freshly? Who can make the sharpest observations?" and, above all, "Who can make people care?”

I've learned that writers who spend a lot of time asking themselves, “Do I have the authority to write this?” are writers who don't get very much done. Do the research. Talk to people. Keep track of what’s going on. But don’t use the need for more background knowledge as justification for a failure to write. In an ideal world, every jazz critic would listen to every new release, read every article and blog, catch live shows six night a week, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the music’s history and theory, interview musicians and producers and presenters and scholars, and compose missives on obscure harmonic ideas in their spare time. (All of these critics would be able to cut you on the piano, too.) But we don’t live in that world, and the search for these perfect critics will only mean a dearth of good writing.

*****

Authority in writing comes from the writing itself. Good readers have good bullshit detectors, and a critic who makes claims beyond what he really knows is going to be unmasked as a hack. All writers live in fear of this. Whenever I write about anything, be it a blog post on jazz or a long essay on Jorge Luis Borges or a short charticle in New York on Wal-Mart, I always think, “I need to make sure that people who really know about this aren’t going to call me a fraud.” When you're dealing with a subject as difficult to capture as jazz, this fear gets heightened. And when you have a handful of jazz musicians—Ethan Iverson and Vijay Iyer come to mind—who can write exceptionally themselves, it's tempting to follow A.B. Spellman toward the exit.

But such defeatism isn't necessary. A large part of the reason I write about jazz is because I can't understand why more people don't love it. This is my proselytizing impulse: I want to spread the gospel, and I want to convince people that the music didn't die with Coltrane. I still bristle, as I'm sure many of you do, when I tell people, "I'm into jazz," and they say, "oh, like Miles Davis." How can I get through to these people?

Simply saying "jazz is great" is no way to convince readers that jazz continues to thrive. (It's also dishonest. A lot of jazz is far from great.) Scrutinizing jazz, criticizing its faults, celebrating its triumphs, showing the ways in which it's essential to the larger culture, exposing the ways in which it's isolated from the larger culture, that's what writers do to living art forms, and it's what critics owe jazz. And that kind of conversation isn't going to take place if writers view jazz as a foreign language. It's going to take place only if writers view jazz as a subject through which they can tell stories and comment on issues more fundamental than a drummer's use of 16th notes. Sixteenth notes are part of it, but if jazz criticism restricts itself to the technical, then it's telling a very one-dimensional story. We need writers who know technique cold, and we need writers who can't read a note of music who can dazzlingly connect the music of Darcy James Argue, the build-up to the war in Iraq, and the late films of David Lynch. We should be broadening the ranks of jazz critics, not narrowing them to a club of musicians.

The anxiety of expertise, though, has haunted the music for decades and its going to be tough to overcome. I remember reading a Nat Hentoff column in Jazz Times during my sophomore year of college, wondering whether I should be reviewing jazz shows at all. Maybe if I were still playing piano I could do this, I thought, but writing about jazz without really knowing about it felt dishonest. Hentoff, I was relieved to discover, had experienced the same doubts himself.

I sometimes felt fraudulent because I couldn’t describe what chords or inversions someone was playing. This disquiet intensified one day when my younger daughter, beginning a professional career as a pianist and composer, said accusingly: "How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?" Brooding about this while walking on the street one day, I saw Gil Evans coming toward me. I’d known him since interviewing him when he was arranging for Claude Thornhill. I decided to make Gil my rabbi, and told him what my daughter had said.

“I’ve been reading you for years," Gil began, "so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying."

We'd all do well to follow his advice.

Notes: Also very much worth checking out on this subject are Hank Shteamer and Phil Freeman. Hoping Ethan Iverson lends this discussion a musician's perspective when he returns after his August blog break.

Bienestan and the joys of minor albums

It takes a major artist to make a minor album; a big career is the only yardstick capable of measuring the relative size of a work. And sometimes, it takes a minor album to confirm that an artist is indeed major. The smallness and the modesty of a lesser work gives needed perspective on what surrounds it, like a truck parked in a forest of sequoias.

Guillermo Klein's Bienestan, which Sunnyside released in June, is the first minor album of his career—a milestone that I view as a triumph. For the last decade and half, Klein has been releasing big albums. I don't mean that in the rock sense. He and Los Guachos aren't holing up in Scottish castles for 13 months to write and record. I mean they're big in their sound and their vision, accentuated by their rarity. When Klein gets around to releasing an album, it's greeted by a certain kind of jazz fan and critic (I'm obviously among them) as a major event. Indeed, the three albums Klein released prior to Bienestan made the New York Times jazz critics' end-of-year top-10 lists. (Una Nave in 2005; Filtros in 2008, and Domador de Huellas in 2010.)

Bienestan is the first Guillermo Klein release that doesn't feel like a major event, and I'm betting it won't find its way onto the year-end lists. I don't mean that as a slur. In fact, it's a gorgeous album. Aaron Goldberg, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland form a masterful piano trio, slinking through Klein's arrangements with tightly coiled intensity and rhythmic precision. The best tunes, like "Manha de Carnival (Orfeo Negro)," are restrained but nonetheless carry the latent wallop of undetonated TNT—every snick-snack from the drums suggesting potential explosions. When Miguel Zenón and Chris Cheek come in on saxes, they're both (no surprise here) big-toned, dazzling—a pleasure.

Yet, unlike Klein's previous albums, the dominant mood here is casualness. Whereas Klein's other albums have felt like the main attraction, this is all after-hours playing. Half the band has left; Guillermo is fooling around with his distortions of Bird's "Moose the Mooche;" Miguel walks in (he wasn't playing the gig) happens to have his horn and starts soloing. Instead of brooding through some 12-minute-long composition with a full complement of horns swooning around him, Bienestan is about Klein dashing off a music-nerd retake on "All The Things You Are" then tossing it over to Goldberg to have fun with. Klein and Goldberg met in the early 90s when they were both college students in Boston, and I'm betting Bienestan is as close as we'll ever get to hearing what was going on in those Berklee and Harvard practice rooms.

The album is also a clear glimpse into Klein's process. It's his only album so far that doesn't feel finished. "All The Things You Are," which kicks off the album, is a disfigured skeleton of the tune, the odd-time-signatured bones on which Klein could have hung his typical thick, harmonic flesh. "Implacable," the second track, is a Reichian jigsaw puzzle that appears in more confident form as the introduction to "Coplas del regreso" on Domador de Huellas, an album which—tellingly—was recorded seven months after Bienestan but released almost a year earlier. Some of Klein's originals on Bienestan, "Burrito" and "Human Feel," were given richer renditions when Klein's flagship group, Los Guachos, played them at the Village Vanguard in May. (Both may very well make it onto Klein's next Los Guachos album.)

Bienestan, then, is a sort of sketchbook, Klein working out ideas that we'll find more fully illustrated on future recordings. That's no reason to lament what Bienestan could have been; rather, it's a rare opportunity. Delayed in its release for two years, with an odd mix of tunes, and an unfamiliar lineup, this is the kind of album that in another era might only have found its way to us posthumously. It's a sign of the progress of Klein's career that it's with us in his prime, and that this dashed-off work of old friends feels not only revealing but profound.

Borges reads "Texas"

My Borges feature has gotten some nice responses—the New Yorker's Book Bench blog tweeted it, the principals were by and large happy with the final result—but my favorite follow-up came via Twitter, where a Montreal-based reader named Natalie Bouchard asked if I still had the recording of Borges reading "Texas." I told Natalie that I did and sent her the MP3 last night. Natalie replied by asking if she could post it around the web, a spread-the-gospel impulse which struck me as such a great (if lightly copyright-infringing) idea that I decided I needed to do it myself. Here is Borges reading "Texas." Even non-Spanish speakers should be able to get something out of his voice—clear, wispy and wise:

Borges reads "Texas"

Mark Strand's elegant, and quite liberal, English translation is below:

Here too. Here as at the other
Edge of the hemisphere, an endless plain
Where a man’s cry dies a lonely death.
Here too the Indian, the lasso, the wild horse.
Here too the bird that never shows itself,
That sings for the memory of one evening
Over the rumblings of history
Here too the mystic alphabet of stars
Leading my pen over the page to names
Not swept aside in the continual
Labyrinth of Days: San Jacinto
And that other Thermopylae, the Alamo.
Here too, the never understood
Anxious, and brief affair that is life.

Borges in Texas in Guernica Magazine

Loyal readers will notice that this blog's output has slowed to a trickle. I chalk up part of this my own fickleness, and part of it to a lot of time I've spent working on other projects. The most significant of those was published today in Guernica Magazine: a long reported essay on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and his unlikely love for Texas. My admiration for things porteño, you see, does not begin and end with the music of Guillermo Klein...

Undead: The festival and this blog

The Undead Jazzfest opens tonight, and I'm taking the opportunity to relaunch this—let's face it—pretty much deceased blog of mine. For those who don't know the basics, here's my NYMag Undead blurb:

"What began last year as a cri de coeur against the jazz-is-dead grumblers has grown into the Walt Whitman of New York festivals: a celebration of the multitudes. Featuring 50-plus bands, including those of pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist Darius Jones, and guitarist Dave Fiuczynski, the Undead takes place over four nights in Greenwich Village, Gowanus, and Williamsburg, and should leave no doubt about the music’s vitality."

I've also provided NYMag readers with five picks for great shows. Three of them, it should be noted, are tonight.

Check out Undead's website for the full schedule. No one show (or five shows) is the point; The bounty of music and enthusiasm is the point. And to that end, Adam Schatz, the festival's young and talented presenter, has cut this trailer with a second of music for every one of the Undead's bands:

 

I'll see you there tonight.

"I only want to make you dance": Jason Moran's Fats Waller Dance Party

A month ago, an email arrived in my inbox with the subject "Note from Jason Moran." My curiosity was piqued. I've met Jason a couple times, and I once fact-checked an NYMag story in which a technology expert advised him on how to streamline his gadgets, but suffice it to say, we're not in frequent correspondence. I clicked:

With the Fats Waller Dance Party i'm going for something new (to me).

I ONLY WANT TO MAKE YOU DANCE.

That's my only aim.

Meshell and I are reworking about 15 Fats Waller songs into new "club" versions (house, afrobeat, etc).

It's a 2 night party.

Tix are only $10, and are disappearing swiftly. I want to make sure most of the village is present.

Fats' Joint is Jumpin' becomes Our House is Housin'.

Spread WORD!!

Loyal readers will know that I'm fascinated by the idea of jazz not only as art music but as social music. Quiet listening rooms like the Village Vanguard are perfect for some jazz, but there's no reason they need to be the music's only home. There's a certain kind of jazz performance—loud, boisterous, groove-heavy—that doesn't come fully to life unless the audience is standing, moving, jigging. A "Fats Waller Dance Party" with Jason Moran seemed like just such an occasion; and last night's premiere proved that assumption correct. The music worked as well as it did precisely because of its context.

The performance started late and casually. The band shuffled onto the stage. Moran followed behind them and plopped down at the piano. Without announcement or warning, he hit a chord, and suddenly we were off. The audience, seated at club-style tables in back of a small dance floor, remained stationary. Wasn't this supposed to be a party?

Just as I was doubting that the evening would live up to Moran's cri de coeur, a troupe of professional dancers in neckties crept along the wings, slinking to Moran's jaunty strides. As the music picked up, the slinking broke into acrobatics, the dancers leapt onto the main floor, and—after a short choreographed piece—shot into the crowd to summon the audience to rise up. Almost everyone did. For the rest of the hour-long set, the vast majority of the crowd took to the dance floor—some bobbing up and down like melodic buoys, others flopping this way and that in slightly restrained breakdances.

The music itself was propulsive yet crude. The Harlem Stage's stereo system crackled on Moran's first chord and the band often sounded muddy—contours and dynamics flattened into a wall of sound. Meshell Ndegeocello's singing had attitude, but with the amped-up electric bass crashing behind her, it was nearly impossible to make out her words. Resonating through a cavernous stone hall on speakers that rattled the snares, the music careered through subtleties, but that mattered little. This wasn't the Vanguard, where a bad mix would have sent me home disappointed. This was a party, and movement—pure and expressive—was the thing.

Yet to my ears and feet, the night's most intoxicating moment came during one of its sharpest points of sonic clarity. In the middle of one of the set's last tunes, the band cut out leaving Moran playing alone. He was perched at the piano wearing a giant Fats Waller Mardi Gras mask, and his stride-stylings sent the audience into a tizzy. Here was that old-time music filtered through Moran's hands—knottier and funkier than anything that had broken out across the room so far. It wasn't the nostalgic aura that was so striking; it was the music's perfectly executed simplicity. Moran's solo didn't compel you to dance; it seduced you into dancing. Throughout the performance, the band had been bold and Ndegeocello brazen and brash, but it was this lonely piano—clever and cocky like Fats—that really got the joint jumpin'.

Guillermo Klein: Sunday Magic at the Village Vanguard

Ever since Bill Evans's classic 1961 recordings the phrase "Sunday at the Village Vanguard" has had a mythic ring. Tourists go to the Vanguard on Friday and Saturday. The real people, the die-hards, go to the Vanguard on Sunday. The music isn't something the die-hards do on a night out, it's part of their weekly routines—as essential to good living (if not as mundane) as a home-cooked dinner or laundry. You do routine things—even beautiful routine things—on Sunday.

Sunday is also the night at the Vanguard on which you're most likely to hear a great show. Jazz bands get tighter and bolder the more they play together, and a week-long stint at the Vanguard is often a process of gradual improvement. A promising piano trio with solid ideas on Tuesday becomes a potent and intuitive music machine by Sunday. To crib from poker, on Tuesday, the musicians play the tunes; on Sunday, they play each other.

I've rarely visited the Vanguard twice in one week, but every time I have, I've been rewarded. Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos' first show on Sunday was the latest confirmation that ten sets (and, in this case, a recording session) do a lot to hone a sound. I loved Los Guachos' performances on Tuesday, but the band sounded tentative on some of Guillermo's new material ("Artesano" felt even more off-kilter than intended). On Sunday night, Los Guachos strutted with an ecstatic shuffle. They owned the material, and their confidence allowed them greater freedom and creativity.

On "Juana," a song the band has been playing for 15 years, tenorman Bill McHenry showed that he knew the music well enough to play directly against its current. Instead of mimicking the song's jaunty clave-heavy groove, McHenry sang out a tectonic procession of long, heavy notes. Usually a soloist flys fast over the top of the music; McHenry allowed the rest of the band to rush under him—a great ship at anchor resting atop the waves. McHenry has been playing a version of that solo on "Juana" for years (you can hear it on Los Guachos II), but his version on Sunday was a more extreme rendition, and it was all the more expressive and moving for it.

Los Guachos' interpretation of the first movement of Alberto Ginastera's "Piano Sonata No.1" also showed the benefits of a week's hard work. What had been moving but inconsistent on Tuesday landed with a wallop on Sunday. Ginastera's daughter Georgina and her companion, the Argentine poet Albino Gómez, sat in the audience. After the set, Guillermo admitted that he'd been nervous in the presence of such porteño cultural royalty. If Guillermo really had the jitters, they didn't hamper his playing. It was the strongest version of Ginastera the band had played all week, Guillermo told me, even more assured than what they'd recorded the previous day for their album.

It's that remark, that the band's best came not during an exhaustive recording session but on a lonely Sunday night in a basement club, that reveals why these visits to the Vanguard can feel so magical: there's the possibility that you'll witness the music in its most perfect form. If you're so lucky—as I think we were on Sunday—it'll exist for just a moment in the ears of you and about 100 other people. Then it'll fade, and the band will start playing—imperfectly, beautifully—once again.