Inverted Garden

"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'.

Jason Moran no-shows; Malaby trio triumphs

Two weeks ago, Search & Restore’s “Spontaneous Construction” was a sparsely attended after-hours gig—a night-cap elixir of free jazz after a busy night. The musicians riffed and experimented. It felt more like a closed-door workshop than a formal performance. We were all, as Samir Zarif said, “hanging out.”

The stakes felt much higher last Friday night. A long line snaked down West Third Street thirty minutes before the show was set to begin. Inside, the Blue Note was packed with the “jazz famous”—musicians, critics, and devotees whose collective presence signifies a concert-of-note. This wasn’t going to be a hang-out. It was going to be an event.

The crowds had gathered for one big reason. And that reason wasn’t really to hear the explosive tenorman Tony Malaby, or the brilliant drummer Joey Baron, or the tuba dynamo Bob Stewart. That reason was to hear one of the jazz world’s bona-fide stars: a MacArthur “genius,” Blue Note recording artist, and badass pianist by the name of Jason Moran.

To be fair, I wasn’t there just because of Moran. I was there because the prospect of Moran, Malaby, and Baron playing a late-night free-jazz set for $10 sounded too good to pass up. I’m a sucker for a certain strain of high-brow culture that celebrates the casual work of serious artists. Sure, I’d love to have a dinner at celebrated chef Eric Ripert’s haute-seafood palace, Le Bernardin; but I’d probably be even more excited to have him fix me some fish-and-chips. Likewise, I’ve always enjoyed seeing Jason Moran play with his flagship group, The Bandwagon—the product of ten years of top-flight trio cooking; but when he leads one-off side-projects, there’s a freewheeling creativity that can be even more thrilling. With Malaby and Baron (and the late addition of Stewart), it felt like Moran had the perfect collaborators to create something really special.

He did. And he didn’t even have to show up. The gig was scheduled to start at 12:30. Joey Baron sat down at the drums shortly thereafter looking ready to go. Bob Stewart milled about the audience talking with friends. Tony Malaby ducked in and out of my view. I didn’t see Jason Moran. A little before 1 a.m., Malaby and Stewart stepped onto the stage and started to play. It was beyond casual. Malaby leaned against the piano with the rakish pose of a street-corner loiterer and blew softly through his horn. The audience continued to talk, unsure if this was the beginning of the show or just some live background-music. The club didn’t even dim the house lights.

After about three minutes, it became clear the Malaby-Stewart-Baron trio was performing. The lights went down. Malaby stepped forward. The music took off. The band: instant synergy. Malaby and Stewart engaged in a quick-fire call-and-response—like birds at sunset—and Joey Baron dictated the pace, slowing Malaby down to half-time with a couple hits on the snare, then speeding things up with a few strikes on the toms that soon echoed in Stewart’s tuba. The trio blasted through up-tempo improvisations and slowed gracefully to some wide-open abstractions. They never seemed lost. A middle-aged woman sitting in front of me turned and asked, “you said, they’ve never played together before?”

During all of this, Jason Moran haunted the proceedings—an open question. It quickly became apparent that the trio wasn’t going to leave anyone disappointed. Still, a thought lingered: if Moran walks in here halfway through, hops onto the bandstand mid-song, and lifts this music even higher, the audience is going to go absolutely nuts. It’s going to be as explosive as the moment when Ornette Coleman sauntered onto the Beacon stage at Sonny Rollins’s 80th-birthday concert. No, it’s going to be even more explosive. It’s going to be more like Sonny Rollins not showing up for his own 80th-birthday concert; his bandmates, Christian McBride and Roy Haynes, playing an incredible 45-minute duet alone on stage; and then—just as everyone in the audience is thinking, “well, Sonny didn’t come, but it was still a fucking incredible concert”—Sonny himself bounding into the theater, running through the audience, catching a tenor saxophone thrown to him from off-stage, and digging into the best solo of his career. It was going to be like that.

That didn’t happen. Jason Moran never showed up. He missed what could have been the greatest hero’s welcome of his career. It didn’t matter.

I’d be lying if I said, I wasn’t disappointed; but I’d be foolish to think Moran would have guaranteed a better concert. A sax trio is one of the music’s most flexible forms, a vessel with little harmonic mooring that can convert sheer energy into beauty. Tony Malaby plays the saxophone in torrents; Joey Baron hits the drums like a conductor directs an orchestra; Bob Stewart deploys the tuba’s oomph with warm charisma. Each of them has a big presence. Each of them knows how to listen and how to amplify the simple interplay of three instruments into rich drama. Moran knows this too, but I wonder if his long, percussive keyboard runs wouldn’t have been too much of a good thing. On this night, perhaps Moran’s absence was his best possible accompaniment.

Sonny Rollins + Ornette Coleman at the Beacon

Toward the end of his concert at the Beacon Theatre, the great Sonny Rollins announced that there was someone in the house “with a horn” who wanted to wish him a happy 80th birthday. The announcement suggested the imminent appearance of the mystery guest, but Rollins plunged into his next number, “Sonnymoon for Two,” without any front-line support. As Sonny soloed, I racked my brain: who could this extra-special interloper turn out to be? Roy Hargrove, Jim Hall, Christian McBride, and Roy Haynes had all been billed as special guests, but they hadn't received such protracted introductions. Who would justify this kind of drama? Wayne Shorter? No real history with Sonny. Wynton Marsalis? Too polarizing. James Carter or Joshua Redman? Too green and not enough oomph. And then, about five minutes into “Sonnymoon”, the obvious answer sauntered on stage—rail-thin and slinky, with a hat and demeanor that define the word “rakish,” it was Ornette Coleman.

I’ve never thought of Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins as brothers-in-arms. I figured that as the two last surviving jazz Olympians, they must share a certain measure of mutual respect, but I never thought their music sounded terribly related. After all, Ornette made his mark pushing jazz away from the rigid harmonic framework of Tin Pan Alley standards and bebop charts; Sonny made his mark as one of the greatest explorers of that framework—the Platonic ideal of jazz soloist. Yet as the two men played—Ornette excising the melody from the changes with a surgeon’s unflappable precision; Sonny probing each note with a new gusto for experimentation—I realized their music came from a similar place: a deep devotion to melody, to song, to voice above all else.

A few years ago, I heard the Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark give a talk after a screening of Musician, a documentary chronicling the avant-gardist at work. At one point, an audience member asked Vandermark to reflect on his influences, and he obliged saying he came out of Sonny Rollins and his explorations of melody and rhythm far more than he did John Coltrane and his experiments in harmony. In an oversimplified history of jazz, it’s common to view Coltrane as the great innovator and Rollins as the more traditional virtuoso who couldn’t get hip to the times. (Rollins's 1959 - 1962 hiatus from performing is usually chalked up to his feelings of inadequacy in the face of Coltrane and, to a lesser extent, Coleman). Vandermark, though, was arguing against the idea of Coltrane as revolutionary and Sonny as establishment hold-out. Sonny’s music wasn’t less innovative; it just came from a different place.

Ornette Coleman, like Vandermark and Rollins, is first and foremost a melodist. Ornette’s “harmolodic” approach uses melody as the music’s foundation—harmony and rhythm are built on top of it. It’s very different from a typical bebop improvisation, in which the musician develops his solo over already determined chord changes and rhythms. Much of Sonny Rollins's music follows the more traditional approach, but he's always been pushing against its boundaries. From early in his career, Rollins has favored bands without a piano, an arrangement that builds a more malleable harmonic framework. In these bands—his famous sax trios, especially—Rollins shapes solos that are full of subversions, jokes, and quotes. He never sounds concerned with wrapping up his ideas before the next chorus.

It's this preference for space that reveals the deep affinity between Rollins and Coleman. Both players helped move jazz from the rigidity of the AABA song structure to the wide-open free jazz of the 60s and 70s. That Coleman pushed this development more radically and brashly seems increasingly unimportant. On Friday night, side by side, jazz's sax kings were clearly on the same quest.

A few more thoughts on Sonny:

In the 50s, Sonny’s nickname was “Newk” because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Brooklyn Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. I’d never known the story of how he got the name until I happened upon an excerpt from Miles Davis’s autobiography on Sonny's official website:

"One day, me and Sonny were in a cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, `Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."

Is there any jazz musician today who looks a lot like a famous professional athlete? And if, say, a great young bassist was a dead ringer for Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, how many of today’s jazz fans would get it when the bassist billed himself as “Big Papi”?

Plus: The first video to surface from the concert. (It's Sonny playing "Global Warming," which is called "Global Morning" on the set list.)

A bizarre TMZ-stalks-LiLo-style video of Ornette Coleman leaving the Beacon:

And a set list of Friday night’s concert from Bret "Jazz Video Guy" Primack, via the Ottawa Citizen!

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.

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.

Gigging: Lew Tabackin at Smalls

Nothing in Ken Burns's much-maligned, decade-old Official History of Jazz caused as much umbrage as Branford Marsalis's remark that in the 70s "jazz just kind of died; it just kind of went away for a while." As Nate Chinen chronicled several years ago in the Times, the 70s have been lovingly, exhaustively chronicled in the jazz blogosphere, with the indispensable Destination: OUT leading the way. This historical revisionism has been sorely needed—jazz didn't die during the 70s, but a whole lot of it was ignored and forgotten.

Many jazz musicians who came of age during the 70s did enter the annals, but usually outside of the mainstream. Chick Corea earned a lasting following not from extraordinary acoustic albums like Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, but from his fusion band, Return to Forever (which appealed to Deadheads and future Phish "phans"). Avant-garde innovators like Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor played to a sophisticated niche in the 70s, which more or less followed them, impervious to trends. But mainstream players found a more hostile climate in the decade and were largely swept from the history books when Wynton and the Young Lions stormed the gates in the 80s.

The 69-year-old saxophonist and flautist Lew Tabackin, who played two riveting sets last Friday at Smalls, is an emblematic player of this lost generation—he came of age in the 70s and has waged his very successful career largely outside the jazz spotlight. I've known of Tabackin for a while—he was the longtime star soloist in his wife Toshiko Akiyoshi's big band—but I don't recall ever reading a review of one of his albums, seeing an article about him, or hearing another musician utter his name. In my ten years as a club-going jazz fan, last Friday was the first time I remember even entertaining the idea of seeing him.

And, boy, could he play! Out in front of a pick-up trio of Phil Palombi and Bill Goodwin, Tabackin absolutely killed, channeling Sonny Rollins on tenor and an angry Japanese forest sprite on flute. Lately the sax trio has been re-imagined as a collective of equals, which can be thrilling (as in the work of Fly) or frustratingly diffuse. Playing that kind of jazz, though, demands a close working relationship with one's fellow musicians, and Tabackin only hired Palombi and Goodwin for a two-night gig. He needed to dominate; and he displayed the chops and dexterity of thought to make it a success. Ethan Iverson recently cited Smalls as the New York establishment most nourishing of the "serious tradition of jazz as casual club music" and Tabackin's gig exemplified it: a bold improviser conquering standards and a few originals as capable accompanists backed him up. It's not the kind of music that starts revolutions; but it's what pumps the blood of jazz's everyday brilliance.