Inverted Garden

POW!: Undead Jazzfest

I started Inverted Garden to join a conversation that I heard increasing in volume and seriousness: namely, how to "revive" jazz. For the last 40 years, the imminent death of jazz has been oft foretold, and while much of the doomsaying has been nothing more than Chicken Little-ism, it does seem true that the jazz audience is nowhere near as robust as it was in the 1950s and 60s.

Back then, jazz was far from being the most popular music in America, but (at least witnessed through the misty lens of nostalgia) there was a palpable sense that it was a music of "the now." Mingus's "Fables of Faubus" skewered Arkansas's segregationist governor, Miles's classic quintets spoke to an anxious, seductive city life, and Coltrane scored his most popular album by covering a tune from a recent Broadway hit, The Sound of Music. When critics and musicians talk about wanting jazz to "matter" again, they're largely talking about this mystical fusion of music, culture, society, and politics—a state in which jazz can move listeners in ways beyond the purely aesthetic.

It's not that jazz musicians have stopped trying to comment on The Way We Live Now, it's that those attempts have felt somehow out-of-touch, forced, or, most often, have fallen on deaf ears. In jazz's "brink of death" phase (Coltrane's death to present), the way the general public perceives jazz has been, increasingly, as an historical artifact of mid-20th-Century America. Segments of the music have never stopped innovating, but mainstream jazz has, by and large, been way too content to keep trotting out "All The Things You Are" (71 years old), "Body and Soul" (a cool 80), and all those other wonderful Tin Pan Alley tunes. When the public thinks of jazz as a music with an already codified language, it's easy to cast attempts at growth as either not jazz (as in the case of the avant-garde) or a kind of pandering to the kids (as with the Bad Plus).

The case of the Bad Plus has been especially vexing. Every time the band releases an album, a few critics accuse it of being "too clever by half" for covering rock and pop songs. To this way of thinking, covering David Bowie is smug because it deploys jazz as a silly novelty (the musical equivalent of the Shakespearean rewrite of The Big Lebowski's script) but covering Jerome Kern is serious because it deploys jazz on the familiar territory of the masters. (Ethan Iverson, the Bad Plus's pianist, addressed the issue a few years back on his blog.)

The idea that jazz is fundamentally a music of the past has a widespread following, fueled, in part, by the way in which jazz is covered in the media. When a general-interest periodical writes about jazz, it's almost always to name-drop its greats: Satchmo, Duke, Bird, etc. A magazine I know well has run two pieces on jazz in the last year: one was about Jason Moran's Monk tribute show at Town Hall (illustrated with a big picture of Monk) and one about a Miles Davis boxed set. Slate's military correspondent Fred Kaplan also serves as its jazz critic; and his pick for the best jazz CD of 2009 was Ella Fitzgerald's Twelve Nights in Hollywood, writing, "the best jazz album of 2009 was recorded in 1961 and '62." Last year was generally considered excellent for jazz recordings with the best albums coming from young, innovative musicians (Darcy James Argue, Vijay Iyer, Steve Lehman), but Slate readers could be forgiven for thinking the music to be about 50 years past its prime.

Into this rather depressing state of affairs steps this weekend's Undead Jazzfest. The name is a direct bow shot at those who have long predicted the music's demise. The Undead is everything a jazz festival usually isn't: it features young guns not aging greats, it's cheap ($30 gets you an all-access pass for both nights), and it's in jazz's native habitat (three clubs within a block of each other on Bleecker St., not a sprawling fairground in Newport or Monterey). Among the more than 35 acts are bands like Happy Apple and Fight the Big Bull that could just as easily fall under the "indie" umbrella as the jazz umbrella—a key part of the Undead's audience-outreach plan. Selling jazz to young audiences as a cutting-edge music is audacious and may prove naively optimistic, but it's starkly, glorious opposed to what will only lead to greater decline: the vice-grip of history obsession.

Bonus: Check out the Undead Mixtape: streaming audio from many of the festival's bands

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.

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).

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...