Inverted Garden

All-Night Session: Abrams, Moran, City Winery Jam

Other cities may have more tightly knit jazz communities (Peter Margasak and Andrey Henkin have made pitches for the vitality of Chicago), but none come close to approaching the size and diversity of the New York scene. On any given night, there are around two dozen jazz shows in the city, and it's not uncommon that I see two or three or ten that I want to check out. From the time I started going to clubs, I've dreamed of pulling off a "jazz marathon"—catch the early set here, move on to the late set there, and swing by somewhere else for the early morning jam.

Now, conditioned by the ready-made marathon of the Undead Jazzfest (five shows in three venues in four-and-a-half hours), I'm finally undertaking the all-night jazz endurance challenge. I'll be starting at 7 at the Abrons Arts Center for Muhal Richard Abrams playing solo piano, move on to Jason Moran, Mary Halvorson, and Ron Miles's 9:30 Jazz Standard set, and finish off the evening at City Winery for the CareFusion Herbie Hancock–tribute jam. I'll plan on Tweeting selected observations throughout the evening (although my BlackBerry has been temperamental of late, so no guarantees). A 16-year-old's dream finally realized by a 25-year-old with a free night...

Postmortem: Undead Jazzfest

The Undead Jazzfest is safely back in its grave. The CareFusion and Vision festivals are in full-swing, and Undead co-organizer Adam Schatz is skipping town for a cross-country tour with his "zombie jazz" band Father Figures. (Catch their album release show on June 30th at 45 Bleecker.) So it's a little late for a full review, but nevertheless, I wanted to note a few observations for internet posterity.

Ben Ratliff wrote in his Undead recap that perhaps one of every six festival goers was a musician. That estimate strikes me as plausible. During the Tim Berne/Dave King/Craig Taborn set at Kenny's Castaways on Sunday, cheers and jeers kept cracking the band's quiet interplay. This kind of thing happens from time to time at New York City jazz clubs—a woman on a bender wanders in off the street, a few obnoxious tourists chatter loudly through a show—but at the Undead, the offenders were musicians gathered in the bar's front room to watch Game 5 of the Celtics-Lakers Final. The disruption was unfortunate—Berne/King/Taborn's sound was spacey and mellow and would have been better served by a silent atmosphere—but it was also strangely wonderful—the club transformed into a big jazz hangout, with some cats playing in the living room and others catching a game in the kitchen. (Had the game been played two hours earlier, it would have actually been a perfect complement to the loud and fast Endangered Blood.)

This is all to say that while the music at Undead was mostly excellent, it wasn't entirely the point. I heard Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Berne/King/Taborn, and the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. Of these, Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, and Steve Coleman were spectacular (Ideal Bread's cover of Steve Lacy's "The Dumps" was a highlight); the Berne/King/Taborn gig never quite came together; and Hollenbeck's ensemble impressed me but didn't move me—they've probably had much better days.

What I'll remember more than the very good musical moments was the thrill of the crowd—no small thing for a fan accustomed to watching jazz alone as one of the youngest members of a respectful but uninspired audience. As I waited for the doors of (Le) Poisson Rouge to open for the Hollenbeck show, a guy next to me remarked that we were in the longest line he'd ever seen for a jazz show. "Who's playing, Herbie Hancock?" he joked. And he was right. The line snaked around the corner, and it was after 10 on a Sunday night with a well-known but hardly "primetime" band on the bill. It brought to mind a story my friend Greg Kress once relayed to me. Year back, Greg was catching a Jimmy Cobb show at Smalls, and as he entered the nearly vacant club a Frenchmen approached him. "Can you believe this? It's Jimmy Cobb!" The Frenchman had said. "In France, there would have been a riot to get in!"

True to form, I did hear plenty of foreign voices in the crowd, but even if a sixth of the audience were in-the-know Europeans, who were the two-thirds of the over 1600 audience members who weren't musicians or tourists? I haven't a clue, but I do know that Schatz and co-organizer Brice Rosenbloom staged a powerful protest—maybe the most powerful ever—against that chronic, noxious, and hopefully passing phrase "jazz is dead."

Bonus: Catch all of the (Le) Poisson Rouge sets on WNYC's website.

Gigging: John Ellis's "The Ice Siren"

Melding jazz with other idioms is a risky endeavor, one that often ends in a depletion of the music's greatest virtues. Much of the jazz-fusion of the 1970s synthesized the worst of jazz and the worst of rock into a watered-down sound. This can be pleasant enough, but how many of the genre's albums have the full-bodied kick and boozy head-rush of the early Stones or Miles's '60s quintet?

This isn't to say that great jazz can't converse with other genres—bands like Secret Society, the Bad Plus, and Jason Moran's Bandwagon look beyond Tin Pan Alley and bebop with strikingly good results—but the self-conscious packaging of jazz and other genres typically results in the expression of the lowest common denominator.

Mixing jazz with a non-musical partner is even more fraught, birthing sub-genres of jazz-dances, jazz-operas, and jazz-oratorios that usually leave me with nothing so much as the desire to head to Smalls or 55 Bar to hear the thing in its unalloyed, blowing-session form.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached last Friday's Jazz Gallery-CareFusion production of John Ellis's The Ice Siren, a "jazz opera" that the saxophonist had premiered in 2009. From the get-go, Ellis sidestepped a few of the "jazz plus" genre's most common pitfalls: he avoided the pretentious subject (choosing a macabre dead-alive romance instead of, oh, the Civil War and slavery) and he enlisted a killer rhythm section (bland jazz usually lacks a driving pulse). What he didn't quite manage to conquer was the genre's static formality, in which a music that relies on improvisation as propulsion sputters when it's given too cautious a script. Ellis engineered a few stylistic departures into a klezmer feel, but for most of its hour running time, The Ice Siren didn't stray far from its opening motif of mournful strings and singer Gretchen Parlato's high-pitched call. The sound itself had verve—the precision of Parlato and the strings balanced against singer Miles Griffith's wailing, scatting, and croaking—but as the story progressed and Griffith's character descended into a frozen purgatory, the music demanded an evolution that never came. Griffith fought the sameness with his pull-out-the-stops performance (he had a bit of James Carter's madcap intensity), but he couldn't shift the music's direction, only enliven its journey

What the music lacked, ironically, was John Ellis. For too much of The Ice Siren Ellis, the composer, relegated Ellis, the player, to a supporting role. When, halfway through the piece, Ellis fired off a characteristically strong-toned tenor sax solo, The Ice Siren took on a new dimension—the strings were placed in sharper relief, the rhythmic section sounded more buoyant, and groove crushed monotony. The down-home hornman (North Carolina-bred, New Orleans-schooled) had emerged from the depths of his composer-self, making an unfulfilled-yet-tantalizing promise that this fusion could yet bring out the best of both sides.

'Tis the season: My NYMag jazz fest picks

June is jazz season in New York. Last weekend's Undead Jazzfest made nearly literal the figurative term "jazz marathon." It was sweaty, exhausting, and often exhilarating. Rushing to five gigs at three venues in less than five hours gave me the improvised music spectator's equivalent of runner's high. (Ratliff had an excellent breakdown at the Times. I caught sight of him during the Steve Coleman gig wearing too many layers for the heat and shaking his head vigorously as in "no fucking way!" at the end of one number.)

This week, the festival season continues with the starts of the CareFusion and Vision fests. For a preview, I'll direct you to NYMag.com, which has just posted my write-ups of both festivals. The magazine asked me to highlight about a dozen shows, and I decided I'd list the concerts that intrigued me the most—the ones with the most potential for surprise. The eleven shows I highlighted might not prove to be the best of both festivals, but I highly doubt any of them will be boring.

Darcy James Argue sells out!

That's right, the indie jazz world's favorite composer/conductor is taking his Reign-of-Terror–loving, Extraordinary Renditions–hating act from the halls of Williamsburg and the Bowery to Wynton's Jazz Palace in the Sky. To quote the man himself, "Zounds!"

In all seriousness, this is great news—a marker of Secret Society's recent successes and JALC's expanding horizons. Argue's Dizzy's Club gig will come as part of the new CareFusion Jazz Fesitval, a rebooted and vastly improved version of the bloated JVC Jazz Festival that was canceled last spring. The octogenarian jazz impresario George Wein is, according to the Times's Ben Ratliff, taking a far more active role in programming than in the past; and it looks like the opening bars of a hell of a swan song. The majority of the gigs are cheap, some are free, and the musicians trend young, local, and innovative. (The giants of the festival circuit still play a role, but a decidedly smaller one.)

The jazz world (especially its fringe blogosphere incarnation) has been immersed in a period of soul-searching for the last couple years, giving cultural irrelevance a sobering stare and scheming about ways to hook those crazy kids once more. It's nice to see the top echelons of the jazz establishment responding with such an affirmative, "we hear you."