Inverted Garden

Tuesday Morning Listen: Manu Katche, Third Round

In Coltrane: The Story of a Sound, Times critic Ben Ratliff writes, "the sound of so many jazz gigs I've heard in the past fifteen years...is usually the sound of albums like Coltrane's Sound or Coltrane Plays the Blues, the quartet just before or in the first stages of a modal-jazz style, just tightening, still before A Love Supreme and that later music that is so personal that to borrow from it would be obvious." I hadn't heard either album when I first read Ratliff's words, but I quickly corrected that and found he was absolutely right. Walk into Smalls or the 55 Bar, the Vanguard or Blue Note, and you'll likely hear a cooking quartet that's playing very much in a mid-career-Coltrane style. Bop like modernism has proved nearly immortal in its "post" phase.

What then to make of ECM Records? The European label is a critical darling in the States, often lauded for its distinctive sound (notes are pristine, you can hear silences) and the creative vision of its chief Manfred Eicher, but to my knowledge, it's never produced an album that's anything like Coltrane's Sound. In fact, it's the rare ECM album that's anything like any music that's being played in New York's jazz clubs. The ECM sound is soft, hyper-lyrical, and subtly textured—Bill Evans without swing. New York's many sounds tend towards propulsion, no matter if it's the Bad Plus, Darius Jones, or Wynton Marsalis.

I thought about ECM's paradoxical position in America (beloved by critics but unlike anything else they praise) while listening to Manu Katché's Third Round, a pleasing wisp of an album that was released last Tuesday by the venerable label. The French drummer Katché is playing the Ottawa and Montreal jazz festivals over the next two days before arriving at the Highline Ballroom on Thursday for a one-nighter in the city. Katché has worked extensively with Peter Gabriel and Sting, so it's not surprising that Third Round has plenty of moments that sound like a mash-up of soft-rock and smooth jazz—death by light grooving—but it doesn't really make sense to analyze the album simply by pointing out that it is not a serious jazz record in the American tradition nor even an accomplished "Euro Jazz" record like the works of Enrico Rava or Tomasz Stanko.

Katché, to his credit, seems to know just what he's doing, telling Ian Patterson at All About Jazz:

I've been playing with pop artists for more than 20 years, so I'm used to their structure. The way I listen to the music and the way I approach it is very much pop—I'm just talking about the structures of my compositions. Even if it's instrumental music like jazz, I'm not a big fan on record of—which is different than on stage—having 150 bars of improvisation. I think that when you listen to a record you just go for a trip, and if the trip is too long you get bored.

Only one of the 11 tracks on Third Round runs more than five minutes and many of them have surprisingly catchy melodies. After a quick browse through the music, I got the impression that Third Round was a compilation of elevator music for a yoga company's headquarters, but it's much deeper than muzak. Textures emulsify into one another on "Springtime Dancing," Katché's drumming smolders on "Out Take Number 9," and "Being Ben" has such a fine hook that I swear I've heard it before. I'm not sure I'll ever want to check out Third Round again, but I can hear the appeal: it's Easy Listening with contours. The drum and bass have shape and snap; Tore Brunborg's sax sounds breathy and immediate, not processed; and there's a consistent craftsmanship to the album that makes it, despite some soporific moments, a lush treat.

The "Keep On Trippin'" video from Third Round:

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.

Darcy James Argue sells out!

That's right, the indie jazz world's favorite composer/conductor is taking his Reign-of-Terror–loving, Extraordinary Renditions–hating act from the halls of Williamsburg and the Bowery to Wynton's Jazz Palace in the Sky. To quote the man himself, "Zounds!"

In all seriousness, this is great news—a marker of Secret Society's recent successes and JALC's expanding horizons. Argue's Dizzy's Club gig will come as part of the new CareFusion Jazz Fesitval, a rebooted and vastly improved version of the bloated JVC Jazz Festival that was canceled last spring. The octogenarian jazz impresario George Wein is, according to the Times's Ben Ratliff, taking a far more active role in programming than in the past; and it looks like the opening bars of a hell of a swan song. The majority of the gigs are cheap, some are free, and the musicians trend young, local, and innovative. (The giants of the festival circuit still play a role, but a decidedly smaller one.)

The jazz world (especially its fringe blogosphere incarnation) has been immersed in a period of soul-searching for the last couple years, giving cultural irrelevance a sobering stare and scheming about ways to hook those crazy kids once more. It's nice to see the top echelons of the jazz establishment responding with such an affirmative, "we hear you."

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.