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.

POW!: Tigran Hamasyan, wunderkind or just good?

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Tigran Hamasyan - Solo + Quintet
Tuesday, February 8th at 7
Le Poisson Rouge

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When I started receiving emails from Search & Restore about the upcoming appearance of the Armenian piano whizkid Tigran, I thought it best to approach with extreme caution. Our society is obsessed with prodigies, but especially in jazz, words like "whizkid" often equate to "flame-out." Jazz wunderkinds don't suffer the typical case of too-much, too-soon—even star jazz musicians don't make enough to snort fortunes up their noses—but like overgrown toddlers, they never learn to play well with others. They're all about "me;" but jazz is just too collaborative for a musician to cop that kind of pose. The trajectory is thus: The virtuoso 20-year-old jazz pianist arrives on the scene; a big record company signs him; he tours around Europe with his own band instead of serving an apprenticeship with the masters. His music stagnates into an act.

A few years back, I heard a double bill at Blue Note featuring the precocious pianist Eldar and a far-more-seasoned group with Don Byron and Jason Moran. Eldar played fluently. Byron's Ivey-Divey group dug deep. Their music was as textured and complex as Eldar's was polished and superficial.

I've thought back often on that juxtaposition. Was Eldar merely green? A talent in development? Or was it possible that bland, competent music was all we'd ever get from this greatly hyped pianist? He'd been signed to Sony Classical when he was 17 and, befitting a star, he played (and seems to still play) mostly with his own band. The pianist on the second part of the bill, Jason Moran, also became a star when he was young; but even as a MacArthur "genius" well into his thirties, he spends an awful lot of time working as a sideman. Eldar's career felt like it was probably managed by Sony Classical; Moran's career feels like it's managed by a very quirky man who goes by the name Jason Moran.

Which brings us to Tigran, he of the Eldar-like former-Soviet-republic roots and the preference for one name. (Understandable. Say "Hamasyan" three times fast.) He also shares with Eldar a technique-heavy approach to jazz piano that draws a lot of attention to his dazzling instrumental skill. It's great that Tigran plays so well; but in jazz, a surfeit of virtuosity often masks a paucity of soul. Thankfully, that's not the case with Tigran Hamasyan. On his new record, A Fable, he glides up and down the keyboard like an insufferable show-off, but then he'll hit a chord at an odd angle, cracking the perfection with Monkish jigs and jags. He pulls off two songs based on traditional Armenian melodies; and his propulsive, brooding "A memory that became a dream" reminds me of Guillermo Klein, which, as this blog's archives suggest, I consider very high praise indeed.

Tomorrow night, Tigran will play at LPR, first solo and then in an adventurous quintet featuring Kneebody's Ben Wendel and Nate Wood, musicians well-versed in both a classical approach and the seduction of deep groove. They seem like perfect foils for Tigran, forcing him to move his music beyond pure beauty. Tigran's already a damn fine pianist; I hope he'll keep exploring and become a seriously creative musician.

Tigran with Hoenig, Wendel, and Francois Moutin:

 

All-Night Session: Abrams, Moran, City Winery Jam

Other cities may have more tightly knit jazz communities (Peter Margasak and Andrey Henkin have made pitches for the vitality of Chicago), but none come close to approaching the size and diversity of the New York scene. On any given night, there are around two dozen jazz shows in the city, and it's not uncommon that I see two or three or ten that I want to check out. From the time I started going to clubs, I've dreamed of pulling off a "jazz marathon"—catch the early set here, move on to the late set there, and swing by somewhere else for the early morning jam.

Now, conditioned by the ready-made marathon of the Undead Jazzfest (five shows in three venues in four-and-a-half hours), I'm finally undertaking the all-night jazz endurance challenge. I'll be starting at 7 at the Abrons Arts Center for Muhal Richard Abrams playing solo piano, move on to Jason Moran, Mary Halvorson, and Ron Miles's 9:30 Jazz Standard set, and finish off the evening at City Winery for the CareFusion Herbie Hancock–tribute jam. I'll plan on Tweeting selected observations throughout the evening (although my BlackBerry has been temperamental of late, so no guarantees). A 16-year-old's dream finally realized by a 25-year-old with a free night...