Inverted Garden

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.

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.

Parallels: Guillermo Klein at the Village Vanguard

One of the new compositions that Los Guachos played last night was a tight, off-centered round called "Parallel." It was a highlight of the second set and spoke to a deeper truth in Los Guachos' construction: in many ways, this band of eleven speaks in a series of concurrent dialogues. Some of the clearest, most arresting moments of last night's performance came when these two-way conversations rose above the rest of the music—Jeff Ballard and Richard Nant exchanging rhtyhms on drums and bombo; Guillermo Klein and Ben Monder weaving piano and guitar lines between one another's strings; dueling strikes in the horn section cutting through the air like clashing épées.

Many arrangers with eleven instruments at their disposal would deploy them more or less in unison, making loud, bold music. Great arrangers like Guillermo carve lots of small ensembles out of a larger ensemble. The trick is creating a tremendous density of ideas while not piling on too much sonic weight. At this, Guillermo is a master musical manipulator.

Ethan Iverson was there last night as well, and he has a nice review of the show over at Do The Math. (Jeff Ballard, indeed!) And via Ethan's blog, I discovered the meaning of a cryptic remark Guillermo made to me last night. "You're an eminence in Argentine jazz now, people are quoting you," Guillermo told me as we stood by the Vanguard's backdoor on Waverly Place. I laughed it off as flattery, but I should have realized Guillermo doesn't flatter.

In his review of Klein's show at Duke over the weekend, The Thread's Brian Howe cites my Argentine-jazz radio documentary pretty extensively. A nascent discussion is even breaking out in the comment thread with the Argentine bassist Pablo Aslan. (My reply is awaiting moderation.) NPR jazz blogger-in-chief Patrick Jarenwattananon has a must-read guest post there as well.

Photo credit: Ruth Fremson/The New York Times (from Guillermo's last appearance at the Vanguard, August 2010)

Fer Isella: Talking Guillermo Klein and Argentine jazz

Guillermo Klein and Los Guachos open their week-long run at the Village Vanguard tonight, and loyal readers will know that I'm very excited about it. I've been writing about Argentine jazz for the last three years, and this blog offers plenty of resources for those who are new to Klein and his jazz argentino brethren. First, there's my radio documentary "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz," which played last August on The Checkout. Then, there are the interviews and commentary that a source no less than National Public Radio dubbed "a treasure trove of Argentine jazz." (How's that for horn-tooting!)

Last year, as I rushed to translate and edit said treasure trove, one essential interview fell through the cracks: a discussion about Guillermo Klein with his friend and collaborator Fer Isella. Fer is an award-winning record impresario, a top-notch producer, and a wonderful pianist and singer. His first album, Doña Furia Gaucha was an elegant and lyrical document of his years in New York with the band Makanudos. His upcoming album, Cosecha, features a lot of the key players on the Buenos Aires scene—among them Guillermo Klein's closest collaborator, Richard Nant. Fer is one of these people—specific to certain sectors of the music business—who's so talented he ends up performing pretty much every role, from negotiating major distribution deals to laying down backing vocals. This is not the last you'll hear from Fer Isella on this blog, but in honor of Klein's visit, I thought it high time to post this short discussion.

Eric Benson: Limbo Music, your record label, distributes Guillermo's albums in Argentina. How did that start?

Fer Isella: I had this dream of Guillermo being a person of recognition in his own country. He’s a composer who doesn’t only have a beautiful soul, he also has a very brilliant mathematical mind. He combines rhythms in this very smart way; but it’s not cold. He doesn’t start making some multiplications or something like that. He finds a very organic way to twist rhythms, like Ligeti used to do.

Anyway, when I moved back to Buenos Aires from New York in 2005, I discovered that none of Guillermo’s albums were out here. The musical community knew Guillermo very well, but the larger audience hadn’t started to follow him. So we started talking about getting his albums released in Buenos Aires, and that happened on my label, Limbo.

EB: And then you actually co-produced his last album, Domador de Huellas [ed note: click on the link to listen to the full album], his record of Cuchi Leguizamón songs. How did that come into being?

FI: Well, first, I want to say something about El Cuchi. He was this amazing folklore composer from Salta, in the north of Argentina. During the 70s, Argentine folklore was very popular throughout the world, and the voice of that era was Mercedes Sosa. A lot of the songs she was singing then were composed by Cuchi Leguizamón, but most people didn’t know that—even here in Argentina.

I actually saw El Cuchi a lot growing up. My family is from Salta and my father, César Isella, is a famous songwriter. He composed the Latin American anthem, and he was also very popular in the 70s. So my family was very close with El Cuchi. We used to have these beautiful music sessions and barbecues—all the things we do in Argentina. I captured him on video once, which I think is the only video that exists of him playing in a concert.

EB: What about El Cuchi as a musician?

FI: As a composer, I’d compare El Cuchi to Thelonious Monk. Both had this very strong base in the roots of the music—in Monk’s case jazz, in El Cuchi’s case folklore—but took it to some other level of complexity. And El Cuchi was a great performer, again like Monk. He didn’t have a perfect technique but a very personal technique.

So when Guillermo came to Buenos Aires to stay, in 2009, we started talking with Sunnyside records about doing a Cuchi album. It's been very intense and very emotional having this amazing, but not very well-known composer reframed in the brilliance of Guillermo and this band.

EB: Do you see this project as being part of some larger trend in Argentine jazz.

FI: Well, there are a lot of crossovers. The thing about Buenos Aires is that it's not so limited in styles. A musician who does rock might be great jazz piano player, and I think that affects the scene. Look at Guillermo. He’s doing this really folkloric music but framing it in contemporary jazz. That’s happening a lot. There’s Escalandrúm. There’s Ramiro Flores. Then there’s this school I have of being open to people like Bjork or Radiohead. Even if we’re doing jazz stuff, we’re trying to get closer to the feel of that music than to, say, standards.

EB: And where do you think that comes from?

FI: Well, part of it comes from following some steps that guys from the US have taken. I could mention the Bad Plus. They’re huge here. People are fascinated by the way they're presenting jazz. They see them, and they start recording jazz with a rock attitude. That's also happening in the compositions. People are composing music they know, but with some other twist. You have a lot of people doing things in electronic folklore like tremolo. Then there’s this style that’s booming here called cumbia digital—it's a mixture of folkloric cumbia and the electronic scene. My friends from Zizek Records are touring all over Europe with digital cumbia right now.

EB: In the US, there’s been this tortured discussion about how jazz is dead, how jazz is losing the young audience...

FI: Here it's for people in their twenties! You were in Pedraza, [a club in a private house], the other day and it was people in their 20s and 30s, but mostly their 20s. The scene is cool, it's a nice play to hang.

EB: When did that kind of scene develop?

FI: We had a really horrible tragedy that happened in a rock club here, [a fire at the Cromañón in 2004 that killed nearly 200 people], and since then all the clubs have been suffering to stay open. So now a lot of the really interesting things are happening in people's houses. They're not legal, but a lot of the scene is happening there, and they're even more packed with people than the regular places.

EB: Who’s in the audience mostly?

FI: I see a lot of students. Now there are five of six good music schools here. There are a lot of people studying here who aren’t thinking only about Berklee. I don't see a lot of people leaving like they did before. And then you have a lot of people in the audience that are coming for the hang, who are coming because it's not pretentious. It's good vibes.

This interview was conducted on December 16, 2009 at Isella's office in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.

Guillermo Klein & Aaron Goldberg's Bienestan

Loyal readers probably don't need to be told again that one of this blog's heroes is the Argentine composer and pianist Guillermo Klein. In early May, Klein arrives back in New York for a week at the Village Vanguard with his 11-piece ensemble, Los Guachos. (They'll be recording a follow-up to 2008's Filtros during that time, as well.) I was planning to hold off on any Argentine jazz blogging until the week before the Vanguard shows, but last week I received word that a new Klein album is set to drop on June 14th.

The record, Bienestan, is a collaboration between Klein and pianist Aaron Goldberg, with crack players Miguel Zenón, Chris Cheek, Matt Penman, and Eric Harland filling out the band. Klein composed and/or arranged all the songs on Bienestan and Goldberg takes on the role of featured soloist. "We were conceiving of it almost in a Gil Evans-Miles kind of way," Goldberg writes in the press release announcing the album.

Needless to say, I'm hugely excited. Klein's contrapuntal duet with keyboardist Esteban Sehinkman—which introduced "Coplas de Regreso" on Klein's last album, Domador de Huellas—executed mind-bending rhythms with maximum tension and propulsive force. Goldberg filled in ably for Sehinkman when Klein came to the Vanguard last year. Those brief moments of piano-Fender Rhodes conversation are enough promise for me. But you might need more. Sunnyside has pre-released two tracks from Bienestan. Here they are:

Burrito:
 

Anita:

Guillermo Klein + Dirty Projectors

After a post-Klein-radio-show break, I'm going to get back to this old blog thing. Before I start adding any original content, check out the latest post from NPR jazz blogger Patrick Jarenwattananon, which breaks down the similarities between Klein and indie-superstars Dirty Projectors. Darcy James Argue was the first to suggest that Klein and the Dirty Projectors should share a double bill (it may have even been first suggested by him to me in one our lengthy unreleased interviews), but NPR's Jarenwattananon provides the evidence to prove DJA's hypothesis. A taste:

I contend the two bodies of work converge at more than a superficial level...Perhaps the most salient of the connections between Klein and Longstreth is their penchant for hockets, the old device where two or more voices alternate to form a single melody line. You see it especially in Dirty Projectors songs like "Gimme Gimme Gimme" (deep within the song), or as an important part of Guillermo Klein charts like "La Última" or "Miula" (the end section).

The Guillermo Klein WBGO Show

My radio piece on Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz is now streaming on WBGO's website.

NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon gave a generous shout-out to the show and this blog's "treasure trove of Argentine jazz."

And you can find that treasure trove below...

Guillermo Klein and the New Argentine Jazz: Radio Documentary and Interviews

My radio documentary, "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz" debuts tonight on The Checkout. Listeners in the New York area can catch it on WBGO 88.3 FM. (Or streaming live everywhere!) The Checkout airs at 6:30 p.m. My segment will likely start around 6:39. (I'll post a link as soon as it's online.)

I didn't move to Buenos Aires expecting to find jazz. I'd grown up in New York, the jazz capital of the world, and going to hear "the music" in Argentina seemed roughly equivalent to catching a baseball game in Paris—a waste of time that would only make me long for home.

About a month after arriving in Buenos Aires, I went to hear Ramiro Flores's quintet at Thelonious. My expectations were low. The venue was cool. The music was astounding. When Ramiro and his band played "L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi," his riff on the legend of a well-endowed Paraguayan faun, it sounded as savvy and of the moment as anything Jason Moran was doing at the time.

L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi

The more Argentine jazz I heard, the more I became convinced it was special. Not only was this accomplished music on aesthetic grounds, but it also seemed to have a deep connection with its time and place. This music was the soundtrack to Buenos Aires in 2008. The link between American jazz and post-millennial New York had felt more strained.

I wanted to know why Argentine jazz was so vital. The quest led me to seek out many of Buenos Aires' jazz musicians, to pick their brains, to befriend them, and to begin to assemble an answer.

The New Argentine Jazz

Pipi Piazzolla talks about how the Argentine economic crisis changed jazz...

...and sticks around for a rhythm class

Juan Cruz de Urquiza examines the legacy of his group Quinteto Urbano

Richard Nant discusses his years at Berklee

Esteban Sehinkman delves into the theory behind his Real Book Argentina

The Cutaia brothers talk about the history and mystique of their club, Thelonious

Fer Isella gets into the nitty gritty of mic placement (coming soon...)

Plus, previously published interviews and profiles:

Guillermo Klein on his Argentine roots
Dino and Jose Saluzzi on family music
Ramiro Flores on self-analysis
Pipi Piazzolla on sharks and drums
The Ale Demogli Quintet kills at Thelonious

The Real Book Argentina (free download)

In 2008, Argentine pianist Esteban Sehinkman undertook a grand project: he would create a "real book" of compositions by Argentine jazz musicians. Anyone who has ever played in a high school jazz combo is familiar with the American real book (or "fake book"), a collection of lead sheets for pretty much every standard you can think of. The first time you play "All The Things You Are" or "Body and Soul," you're probably looking at the real book.

Sehinkman's idea was that Argentine jazz students needed to learn the music of their own country—that an Argentine student who played only American tunes would forever look north and think, "if only I'd been born in the USA!", but an Argentine student who looked at his own countrymen as fundamental referents could declare proudly, "I'm an Argentine jazz musician!"

Sehinkman's real book project has gathered compositions by 194 Argentine composers, and this week, he released a CD (you can download it for free!) of performances related to the book. You'll hear Richard Nant and his Argentos band play Guillermo Klein's "Va Román," saxophonist Ramiro Flores and his quartet take on Martin Iannacone's "Andrea en la boca," and the keyboardist/sound conjurer Mono Fontana caress Román Cea's "Vals." Most readers of this blog won't be familiar with these artists, but I highly recommend checking out the downloads (it's also streaming on the website). You can read an English version of the book's introduction, translated by yours truly, off a link on the "project" page.

On Tuesday, I'm going to be publishing an interview I did with Esteban a couple years back. For now, a few of his words:

"I think this book demystifies the idea that we don’t have roots. It’s all here! There are 150 composers. It’s all categorizable; it’s all logical. This country was formed by immigrants, by creoles, by indigenous peoples, and here, in this book, you see all of that. Tango is here! Folklore is here! Rock is here! And beneath all of the diversity of styles there’s something. It's going to help us define our roots. We’re not Horacio Salgán or traditional tango or folkloric musicians. We’re playing outside of all that..."

Guillermo Klein's 2008 Cuchi Concert (Live!)

Before Guillermo Klein's Domador de Huellas: Music of Cuchi Leguizamón was a studio album (out today!), it was a commission for the Buenos Aires International Jazz Festival in October 2008. That year was the first for pianist Adrian Iaies as the festival's artistic director, and he immediately proved his worth by asking Guillermo to tackle the legacy of el Cuchi. Guillermo didn't so much recreate el Cuchi's music as inhabit it, tossing aside doting reverence for what the old master deserved: serious analysis, engagement, and reinvention.

I wasn't at the 2008 concert and neither were you; but thanks to Fer Isella—the producer/composer/pianist/electronics-jockey behind Limbo Music (which co-released Domador)—videos, sheet music, and the full audio from the concert are up online. You can check it out at homenajealcuchi.com. The site is in Spanish, but even the most Anglo-exclusive readers shouldn't have a problem navigating. Just click "Extras" on the title bar, and then enter "elcuchi" in the "contraseña" (password) box. Bam! You've hit the motherlode.

The new album is certainly more refined and richly detailed than the concert—you won't find that Reichian introduction to "Coplas del Regreso," for instance—but the live recordings give off the sense of extraordinary celebration. This was Cuchi's long-delayed jazz funeral, and the applause feel cathartic even as they're joyful. I don't think it's a coincidence that Guillermo moved back to Buenos Aires eight months after this show.