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...

Gigging: Tony Malaby's Tamarindo at Jazz Gallery

It's an oft-repeated trope that you can tell the best ethnic restaurants by the make-up of their clientele. Walk into a Chinese restaurant on Canal St. and see tables full of the coach-bus-to-Broadway crowd, and you can safely turn around and walk out. Hop to the place next-door and do a double-take to make sure you're not in Fujian, and you've probably hit the jackpot.

I've always thought of the Jazz Gallery as the music's New York hole-in-the-wall for people in the know. It's the club in which I consistently see the most musicians in the audience, and the club that's most single-mindedly dedicated to the music. They're non-profit; they don't have a liquor license (and discontinued long ago their offering of a suggested-donation jug of wine); and they won't charge you for a second set "just because" (like the often onerous Jazz Standard). So when none other than the great Henry Threadgill walked into the club last night (with his latest album coincidentally playing over the speakers), I took it as both the norm and yet another confirmation of the Gallery's understated cool.

The set was the first of Tony Malaby's two-night run recording a live album that he told me is tentatively titled Hibiscus. For the gig, he'd enlisted the avant-garde greats William Parker (bass) and Wadada Leo Smith (trumpet) and the man I called "jazz's most dexterous drummer" in my NYMag listings, Nasheet Waits. (That's not to take anything away from drummers like Brian Blade, Billy Hart, and Jeff Ballard, who could certainly forward their own competing claims to the dexterity mantle.)

The set began with Malaby's "Hibiscus," a diffuse tune that left me adrift. Malaby (on sax) and Smith had the kind of one-beat-apart split voices interplay that recalled Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry, but it sounded loose, almost sloppily, calling for a good screw-tightening.

"Hibiscus" turned out to be an aberration—a tentative warm-up. On that number, the rhythm section had stayed in the background, but as the set continued, Waits and Parker took on more prominent roles.Part of my love for Waits stems from his impeccable taste. Most drummers are hams, quick to whip up the crowd with self-serving displays of volume and speed. Waits is understated but still ferocious.

On the third number of the night, called simply "No. 2," I started to hear the music picking up steam, rushing forward, a locomotive on a straight-away. The first thing to hit me was the sensation of surging energy; it wasn't until I listened more closely that I realized Waits was the motorman. Parker, too, became more prominent, quickening his fingers to make the music both busier and fuller. Malaby and Smith are excellent hornmen, but in music so heavily improvised, it fell to beat-keepers to give the music the shape of composition and the drive of reckless, beautiful freedom.

NYMag's Jazz Nightlife Agenda

Astute and obsessive readers of New York magazine might have noticed that, from this year's issue 8 (mid-March) onward, the magazine's jazz listings have undergone a slight, but nonetheless perceptible, change. Prior to issue 8, the magazine's two weekly jazz listings (there are more online) were almost always restricted to the goings on at Blue Note and Birdland. From issue 8 onward, the listings' scope has broadened significantly, championing events at the Jazz Gallery, Smalls, the Kitchen, and Galapagos, to name a few. What changed? You, the one person in New York who actually reads the magazine that carefully, might ask.

Allow me to announce a development that only two people at the magazine in question know about: Since mid-March, yours truly has been writing the jazz listings.

I have no illusions about the impact of such a position—New York hides its listings at the back of the magazine; the listings have little editorial oversight; and few readers even glance at them. Yet, I've been able to transfer the spirit of POW! (my earlier Pick Of the Week feature) onto the pages of a major magazine, promoting an idea that jazz can be more than paying $75 to hear the oldest living bebop survivor or, much worse, the slickest pseudo-jazz fusionista. I don't guarantee that every show that gets in will have my stamp (my editor has been gracious but still might throw in the odd JALC promotion), but I'm happy to say that I've shifted the faintest of breezes—and from this breeze may come a gale.

Act Local: Josh Roseman at Coco 66

I can probably count the times on one hand when I've walked from my apartment to a jazz club. Outside of Greenwich Village, I can think of few neighborhoods in the world that host multiple jazz spots, and consequently, the music is something you seek out rather than stumble upon. This isn't unique to jazz, of course: the economy hasn't supported a culture of live, local events since the debut of the television set. The grand old theater in my neighborhood is now a Rite Aid pharmacy (pictured is the disco ball on the ceiling). But in jazz especially, the decline of the local venue has also meant, in many ways, a decline in the quality of the art itself.

In a 2005 essay on Coltrane's live recordings, Ben Ratliff made a particularly persuasive case for this local club-robust music relationship:

There are a lot of great jazz musicians in New York, and in the world. But the number of great and economically sustainable bands has declined, along with an international audience and a circuit of clubs that encourages those bands to feel a sense of competition, and opportunities for those bands to play repeatedly for regular audiences in the same small places. A. J. Liebling once wrote that French food declined after World War I with the rise of highway driving, since small restaurants weren't committed to satisfying the same clientele night after night. Instead, they could serve the same dishes and not worry about improvement; regular waves of new diners would chew away, unaware of the stasis.

In a way, the same goes for jazz. Both bands, the Monk-Coltrane Quartet of 1957 and the Coltrane Quartet of 1965, had places in New York to take root. Monk and Coltrane played as many as 75 nights within a five-month stretch at the Five Spot Cafe in the East Village. The Coltrane Quartet played 14 weeks at the Half Note in the span of a year, from spring 1964 to spring 1965. Fourteen. It was a different time in many ways: it seems that anytime I meet someone who saw either of those bands at those clubs, they won't say that they went once, as if to cross it off a list; they went twice or three times a week, as part of their lives. (No Internet. No TiVo. Cheap rent. No risk of being thought a loser if you liked to go to jazz clubs at night.

Ratliff's piece has had a big impact on the way I think about the music and its efforts to win over a wider group of listeners. I love the idea of checking out the same band "twice or three times a week," of being in a position to (in the words of Josh Jackson) "live with music" rather than engage with it as an infrequent, expensive event.

Tonight, I'm going to give it a try. A few blocks away from my apartment, Coco 66 will be hosting the first of Search & Restore and Josh Roseman's The Loove series. The cover is cheap ($10), the musicians have top pedigrees (Roseman played trombone for Daves Douglas and Holland), and it's so close that I can stumble there. I hope I'll make it a habit.

NYMag: Village Vanguard Tales

My annotated slide-show, "A Brief and Colorful History of the Village Vanguard", is now up on nymag.com. It chronicles 13 events from the club's 75 years, from its beginnings as a hangout for lefty booze-hound poets to its present as jazz's most prestigious venue (with some Charles Mingus history/folklore and an account of Bill Evans's famous Sunday thrown in for good measure).

Irwin Corey stars at the Vanguard's Birthday Bash

Last night, New York's jazz elite gathered to toast 75 years of that quirky basement space at 178 Seventh Avenue South known as the Village Vanguard. The assembled included impresarios (Anzic's Colin Negrych, festival kingpin George Wein), writers (Gary Giddins, Ashley Kahn, Ben Ratliff), radio hosts (Phil Schapp, Josh Jackson), and, of course, musicians (Paul Motian, Jimmy Heath, Ravi Coltrane, Bill Charlap, Anat Cohen). The event was decidedly low-key—trays of ribs and wings for dinner, Lester Young records instead of live entertainment—which was fitting: even as the Vanguard has become the "Carnegie Hall of jazz" its retained the traces of its Village speakeasy roots. (That's "speakeasy" as in "illegal joint that serves swill to drunkard poets" rather than "trendy bar that serves cocktails to bankers, PR bunnies, and hipsters.")

The highlight of the night may have been an impromptu (and brief) stand-up routine by "Professor" Irwin Corey (pictured), an irreverent 95-year-old comedian who was a frequent Carson guest and a one-time presidential nominee (the 1960 Playboy ticket). While the Vanguard crew tried to fix the sound on a short documentary assembled by Deborah Gordon (the club's crown princess), Corey shuffled to the front and began to rant. I couldn't make out a word he said, but he clearly relished hamming it up like it was, oh, say, 1942.

Happy 75th Birthday, Village Vanguard!

The Village Vanguard, easily the most hallowed spot in the jazz world, celebrates its 75th birthday this evening with a party for friends of the club. (I was, unexpectedly and delightfully, invited last week.) The club has chosen to celebrate the big day on February 22nd, but befitting a basement venue that came of age in Greenwich Village's most bohemian days, its age and DOB are the subject of some dispute.

The Contenders:

February 26, 1934: In his memoir, Live at the Village Vanguard, Max Gordon, the club's founding eminence, gives February 26, 1934 as the date on which he started the venue. That date corresponds to the opening of the short-lived first Village Vanguard, a basement room on Charles Street that had only one exit and thus failed New York's requirements for a cabaret license. Gordon writes that he moved the club a year later to the Vanguard's current address, 178 Seventh Avenue South, in five truckloads over the course of a single night, but he doesn't specify an exact date.

February 21, 1935: The Wall Street Journal's 2005 article on the Vanguard's 70th birthday gives the club's DOB as February 21st, although I haven't seen that date anywhere and doubt that it was the result of thorough investigation.

February 23, 1935: The Vanguard's website is currently trumpeting February 23rd as the club's founding date, but the club's owner, Lorraine Gordon, told me she thinks February 22nd is more likely.

February 26, 1935: This date appears in Lorraine Gordon's memoir, Alive at the Village Vanguard, but appears to be an error: confusing Max Gordon's Charles Street founding date with the beginning of the current location in 1935.

February 22, 1935: Who knows if this date is actually correct, but it has a number of important things going for it: 1) Lorraine Gordon gives this as the founding date and says Max told her that the phone bills at the club started then, 2) the anniversary celebration is tonight so future generation's will probably date the founding thus (although one should note the big day also happens to fall on a Monday, the club's least popular night and the one on which it's least damaging to close to the public), 3) Wikipedia gives February 22nd as the date, and, well, that counts for something. (Although it should also be noted that the Wikipedia article say erroneously that the club went to an all-jazz format in 1957. Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce both performed at the club afterward.)

For a less speculative, insider-y take, I've written up an annotated timeline of the Vanguard's 75 years that should appear on nymag.com sometime this week. I'll also post some observations from tonight's event in the coming days...