Inverted Garden

'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.

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.

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).

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.

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...

New Jazz Bridges

After a summer-long hiatus, I returned to the pages of All About Jazz with a review of the Eric Revis Quartet's late August Jazz Gallery gig. Revis has become one of the most interesting musicians in jazz, working alongside the legendary German avant-garde reedman Peter Brötzmann in addition to his gig playing bass in the far more mainstream Branford Marsalis Quartet. Nasheet Waits, the quartet's drummer, is widely revered in New York and, like Revis, has been playing with Brötzmann a fair amount recently. Revis and Waits together form a kind of jazz bridge, linking camps of the music that haven't been on speaking terms since Coltrane's death (at least).

Jason Moran, the quartet's pianist, plays with whomever he damn well pleases, employing an angular, idiosyncratic pianistic attack that sounds equally at home (and equally alien) at the Blue Note and the Stone. Ken Vandermark, a musician I grew to love when I lived in Chicago, has an equally uncompromising and personal take on the music. He plays avant-garde jazz that, unlike a lot of "out" exploration, has a tremendous sense of groove. Vandermark is the de-facto leader of the Chicago scene, but I wasn't sure if serious New York players followed him. His inclusion in the Revis Quartet shows that my fears were unfounded.

I'm planning to continue my reviewing for All About Jazz, while I use this space for opinion, essay, and miscellany. There may be some crossover now and again, but that's the current plan for the two sites.