Inverted Garden

More thoughts on the jazz-critic question

The acoustic bass guitarist (and excellent jazz blogger) Ronan Guilfoyle was kind enough to comment at length on my jazz-critic-question post, and I wanted to respond in a forum that caught more eyeballs than the blog's comment thread.

In his comment, Ronan reiterated his argument that jazz critics should be able to play the music, not to a professional level, but to a point where they have a solid, instinctive understanding of jazz fundamentals.

In my opinion it’s very difficult to get into the depth necessary to write knowledegably about the music if you can’t recognise a 12 bar blues form when you hear it. Or simple song structure – AABA – etc. A jazz critic should be able to hear basic stuff like that in my opinion. They should be able to hear the difference between a modal piece and one that uses changes – they don’t have to know what those changes are, but they should know whether they’re being used as a basis for improvisation or not...The success or failure of the music, is of course subjective, but a good jazz writer should be able to express their opinion on that success or failure from a standpoint of an understanding of the basic structure of what it is they’re writing about.

I find it hard to quibble too much with Ronan's position—a jazz critic who doesn't know the difference between free playing, modal playing, and playing over the changes to "I've Got Rhythm" is probably not only a jazz critic who can't play, but also a jazz critic who hasn't listened to much jazz. The underlying issue here, it seems to me, is all about knowledge and not really about performance ability at all. No one cares whether or not a critic can actually pull off an ersatz Bud Powell piano solo; a reader should care whether or not a critic can accurately explain what an ersatz Bud Powell piano solo would sound like.

As I said in the previous post, any critic who oversteps his knowledge is going to very quickly be exposed as a hack. (Ronan notes, on his blog, a few particularly egregious examples of critical ignorance.) And I'd certainly advocate that any serious jazz critic acquire far more than rudimentary knowledge about jazz structure, theory, etc. You're only going to be able to approach the full spectrum of the music honestly and persuasively, if you actually understand it.

These strike me as self-evident points, which begs the question, when Roanna Forman first asked the jazz-critic question on the Boston Jazz Blog, what was she actually getting at? I can't think of a widely published jazz critic who lacks the basics of musical knowledge described by Ronan in his comment, and if such critics are out there, they should be called to task. At least on the Boston Jazz Blog and the follow-ups that I've read, no one has stepped up to do that. Was the jazz-critic question, then, merely a vehicle for denouncing a mostly theoretical bogeyman, the lazy hack who writes the occasional know-nothing review in little-read publications? Would the jazz-critic question have torn up the blogosphere if it were phrased "should jazz critics know anything about the subject they're writing about?"

The jazz-critic question isn't really about whether a jazz critic needs to possess rudimentary knowledge. Of course a jazz critic should have rudimentary knowledge! Who's going to seriously argue against that point? The jazz-critic question, it seems to me, is really about whether a critic needs to have expert-level knowledge—knowledge that's equal to the musician he's critiquing. I suspect a lot of people (many musicians included) would say, yes, a critic ought to have expert-level knowledge. A critic writing about Steve Lehman, this view would hold, should have a fairly nuanced understanding of microtonal harmony, how else could he understand deeply what was going on? If he didn't fully understand the process, what right would he have to critique Steve Lehman?

I'm sympathetic to this view, favoring a world in which writers are all wildly informed and competent, but its implications for the music make me very uncomfortable. Demanding that jazz critics be as knowledgeable technically as musicians would not only severely restrict the pool of potential jazz critics, it would also strongly bias that pool toward writers who were primarily fascinated by questions of theory and technique. We'd lose a lot of sharp writing that explored jazz in the light of history, culture, and society.

Jazz doesn't want for more album and show reviews—as great as they can be, they're mostly geared toward people who already know about the artist in question. What jazz criticism needs is more long-form writing that can reach an audience beyond the initiated, pieces that have something to say that's bigger than whether a bass solo sucked. Ben Ratliff's remarkable 2005 Times essay on two then-newly-unearthed Coltrane recordings is one sparkling example of this. It begins as an examination of the albums' popularity with consumers and ends with a string of brilliant paragraphs on society, technology, and the nature of art, theorizing that the end of long residencies and habitual club-going have deeply affected the way the music sounds. More writers should be trying to tackle jazz from that angle—to describe it, to make connections from it to other arts, and to ask of it big, bold questions.

More: As hoped for, Ethan Iverson weighed in on the jazz-critic question. His headline, "Could Liebling Box?," says it all.

The jazz-critic question, examined

I walked into the kitchen at the Village Vanguard and saw the big New Orleanian I call “Bayou Socrates” holding court on a swivel chair. “Bayou Socrates,” I yelped. “It’s So-crates,” he corrected with a grin, before adding, “I thought you’d quit jazz.” Bayou Socrates and I often spar with half-joke jabs, but this time he seemed serious. It was mid-August, and I hadn’t published a blog post about jazz in two months. I’d been to fewer shows. Publicists had stopped emailing me. The deluge of pre-release albums arriving at my office had slowed to a drip.

Why had I been backing away from jazz? Before the summer, traffic on Inverted Garden had been up significantly. I was now writing some of the pick-of-the-week blurbs on New York’s listings pages, getting Guillermo Klein, Peter Brötzmann, and Jenny Scheinman into the space usually reserved for our pop critic’s favorites. I wasn’t exactly expecting David Remnick to ask if I’d be interested in filling Whitney Balliett’s vacant chair (above), but things were moving—slowly—in the right direction.

Part of my silence had to do with the time demands of a new job at the magazine. A larger part of my silence had to do with a question that’s recently been popping up across the jazz blogosphere: “Do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?”

The question, first posed on the Boston Jazz Blog, elicited a more or less immediate consensus: “no, of course not.” There were nuances to the responses, handwringing over how much rudimentary theory one needed, but most critics made one key point, which Ted Gioia put most succinctly: “I’m less concerned with how well various critics can play music, and more interested in how well they can hear what is happening in a performance.”

That one's observational acumen rather than participatory skill is the key to being a good reporter is a truism in most areas of writing. Few people lament that crime writing isn’t done by criminals, or that sports writing isn’t done by athletes. All writers, even those who focus on a single area, are, at heart, generalists. Michael Lewis doesn’t know as much about credit-default swaps as the most seasoned Wall Street trader, but he knows enough about credit-default swaps to analyze intelligently their role in the financial crisis. Journalists needn’t be an expert in that field their writing about, but they need to be capable of asking experts in the field the right questions. They also need to be able to write engaging prose. As Patrick Jarenwattananon noted in his response to the jazz-critic question, “It seems to me that [the] skill set [for a critic] is all about storytelling, and it's not taught in music theory classes at conservatory.”

Unfortunately, storytelling skill has never seemed like quite enough when it comes to jazz. In an interview with Jazz Times in 2005, A.B Spellman, one of the great jazz critics, explained why he stopped writing in what should have been the middle of his career.

I wish jazz musicians wrote more. There have been some good individual critics—some great individual critics—but the overall state of jazz criticism has never been great. I just don't think there are enough jazz writers who can really approach jazz from the inside. Classical music has good writing by important composers. I would like to see more of that in jazz writing. There's not enough jazz musicology. That's one thing that stopped me from writing about jazz.

It's hard for me to imagine Lester Bangs or Robert Christgau quitting rock criticism out of a desire to see Mick and Ringo start writing their own analytical works. I can't really imagine any film critic or book critic or food critic doing this either. We've come to expect that criticism isn't written by artists, but rather by the smartest, best-informed member of the audience—someone who knows the art cold but also has some distance from it, the better to properly evaluate what's going on.

Yet the farther you get away from the popular arts, the larger looms the question of expertise. Everyone eats, has food preferences, and has cooked a rudimentary meal. Everyone who graduated middle school has read novels and written papers. Everyone has seen movies and decided whether or not he or she liked them. These things are our lingua franca, and that means that almost anyone has "the right" to be a food critic or movie critic or book critic. We'd all pass the minimum standard of expertise since we all engage with at least some manifestation of these arts every single day.

Jazz isn't like food and books and movies. It's abstract, generally unfamiliar, and sophisticated technically. It's distant from most people's everyday lives, and thus, jazz expertise doesn't come simply by interacting with the culture. The jazz critic isn't just an evaluator. He is, in some sense, an intermediary, a translator. He's claiming to be able to read something that most people can't.

I don't completely subscribe to this view. Good jazz writing doesn't need to be about translating the music's technical process. It can be about how the music works on a more basic level, and that requires only big ears, not years of training. But the anxiety of expertise is hard to shake in jazz, not only driving away many listeners (who perceive the music as "too hard") but prompting the kind of soul-searching among critics that could make the question “do jazz critics need to know how to play jazz?” resonate throughout the blogosphere. If jazz is a foreign language in need of translation through critics, are non-jazz musicians who critique jazz akin to non-Spanish speakers trying to parse Don Quixote? I would imagine that some people would answer that question in the affirmative.

And that's the last thing jazz needs. If we allow jazz to be viewed as a foreign tongue that only experts can decipher for the public, then quite simply, the music has no future. Great jazz should be able to stand on its own, winning over first-time listeners and offering an even deeper reward for the more experienced. Jazz criticism should aspire to the same goal. When Frank Bruni was the Times' restaurant critic, he talked about how he wanted his reviews to be literary pieces rather than service journalism since the majority of his readers lived outside New York and likely wouldn't have a chance to follow his advice. Jazz criticism would do well to follow his lead. The chief critical question shouldn’t be “Who understands jazz music best?” or "Who can show off how much he knows about the structure of this song?" It should be “Who can present the music freshly? Who can make the sharpest observations?" and, above all, "Who can make people care?”

I've learned that writers who spend a lot of time asking themselves, “Do I have the authority to write this?” are writers who don't get very much done. Do the research. Talk to people. Keep track of what’s going on. But don’t use the need for more background knowledge as justification for a failure to write. In an ideal world, every jazz critic would listen to every new release, read every article and blog, catch live shows six night a week, possess an encyclopedic knowledge of the music’s history and theory, interview musicians and producers and presenters and scholars, and compose missives on obscure harmonic ideas in their spare time. (All of these critics would be able to cut you on the piano, too.) But we don’t live in that world, and the search for these perfect critics will only mean a dearth of good writing.

*****

Authority in writing comes from the writing itself. Good readers have good bullshit detectors, and a critic who makes claims beyond what he really knows is going to be unmasked as a hack. All writers live in fear of this. Whenever I write about anything, be it a blog post on jazz or a long essay on Jorge Luis Borges or a short charticle in New York on Wal-Mart, I always think, “I need to make sure that people who really know about this aren’t going to call me a fraud.” When you're dealing with a subject as difficult to capture as jazz, this fear gets heightened. And when you have a handful of jazz musicians—Ethan Iverson and Vijay Iyer come to mind—who can write exceptionally themselves, it's tempting to follow A.B. Spellman toward the exit.

But such defeatism isn't necessary. A large part of the reason I write about jazz is because I can't understand why more people don't love it. This is my proselytizing impulse: I want to spread the gospel, and I want to convince people that the music didn't die with Coltrane. I still bristle, as I'm sure many of you do, when I tell people, "I'm into jazz," and they say, "oh, like Miles Davis." How can I get through to these people?

Simply saying "jazz is great" is no way to convince readers that jazz continues to thrive. (It's also dishonest. A lot of jazz is far from great.) Scrutinizing jazz, criticizing its faults, celebrating its triumphs, showing the ways in which it's essential to the larger culture, exposing the ways in which it's isolated from the larger culture, that's what writers do to living art forms, and it's what critics owe jazz. And that kind of conversation isn't going to take place if writers view jazz as a foreign language. It's going to take place only if writers view jazz as a subject through which they can tell stories and comment on issues more fundamental than a drummer's use of 16th notes. Sixteenth notes are part of it, but if jazz criticism restricts itself to the technical, then it's telling a very one-dimensional story. We need writers who know technique cold, and we need writers who can't read a note of music who can dazzlingly connect the music of Darcy James Argue, the build-up to the war in Iraq, and the late films of David Lynch. We should be broadening the ranks of jazz critics, not narrowing them to a club of musicians.

The anxiety of expertise, though, has haunted the music for decades and its going to be tough to overcome. I remember reading a Nat Hentoff column in Jazz Times during my sophomore year of college, wondering whether I should be reviewing jazz shows at all. Maybe if I were still playing piano I could do this, I thought, but writing about jazz without really knowing about it felt dishonest. Hentoff, I was relieved to discover, had experienced the same doubts himself.

I sometimes felt fraudulent because I couldn’t describe what chords or inversions someone was playing. This disquiet intensified one day when my younger daughter, beginning a professional career as a pianist and composer, said accusingly: "How can you dare affect the income of a musician when you give him bad reviews since you can’t say technically what you think he’s doing wrong?" Brooding about this while walking on the street one day, I saw Gil Evans coming toward me. I’d known him since interviewing him when he was arranging for Claude Thornhill. I decided to make Gil my rabbi, and told him what my daughter had said.

“I’ve been reading you for years," Gil began, "so I know what you listen to and how you listen. I also know musicians who can tell technically everything that’s going on in a performance, but they don’t get into where this music is coming from inside the musician—the story he wants to tell. You can do that some of the time. Stop worrying."

We'd all do well to follow his advice.

Notes: Also very much worth checking out on this subject are Hank Shteamer and Phil Freeman. Hoping Ethan Iverson lends this discussion a musician's perspective when he returns after his August blog break.

Postmortem: Undead Jazzfest

The Undead Jazzfest is safely back in its grave. The CareFusion and Vision festivals are in full-swing, and Undead co-organizer Adam Schatz is skipping town for a cross-country tour with his "zombie jazz" band Father Figures. (Catch their album release show on June 30th at 45 Bleecker.) So it's a little late for a full review, but nevertheless, I wanted to note a few observations for internet posterity.

Ben Ratliff wrote in his Undead recap that perhaps one of every six festival goers was a musician. That estimate strikes me as plausible. During the Tim Berne/Dave King/Craig Taborn set at Kenny's Castaways on Sunday, cheers and jeers kept cracking the band's quiet interplay. This kind of thing happens from time to time at New York City jazz clubs—a woman on a bender wanders in off the street, a few obnoxious tourists chatter loudly through a show—but at the Undead, the offenders were musicians gathered in the bar's front room to watch Game 5 of the Celtics-Lakers Final. The disruption was unfortunate—Berne/King/Taborn's sound was spacey and mellow and would have been better served by a silent atmosphere—but it was also strangely wonderful—the club transformed into a big jazz hangout, with some cats playing in the living room and others catching a game in the kitchen. (Had the game been played two hours earlier, it would have actually been a perfect complement to the loud and fast Endangered Blood.)

This is all to say that while the music at Undead was mostly excellent, it wasn't entirely the point. I heard Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Berne/King/Taborn, and the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. Of these, Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, and Steve Coleman were spectacular (Ideal Bread's cover of Steve Lacy's "The Dumps" was a highlight); the Berne/King/Taborn gig never quite came together; and Hollenbeck's ensemble impressed me but didn't move me—they've probably had much better days.

What I'll remember more than the very good musical moments was the thrill of the crowd—no small thing for a fan accustomed to watching jazz alone as one of the youngest members of a respectful but uninspired audience. As I waited for the doors of (Le) Poisson Rouge to open for the Hollenbeck show, a guy next to me remarked that we were in the longest line he'd ever seen for a jazz show. "Who's playing, Herbie Hancock?" he joked. And he was right. The line snaked around the corner, and it was after 10 on a Sunday night with a well-known but hardly "primetime" band on the bill. It brought to mind a story my friend Greg Kress once relayed to me. Year back, Greg was catching a Jimmy Cobb show at Smalls, and as he entered the nearly vacant club a Frenchmen approached him. "Can you believe this? It's Jimmy Cobb!" The Frenchman had said. "In France, there would have been a riot to get in!"

True to form, I did hear plenty of foreign voices in the crowd, but even if a sixth of the audience were in-the-know Europeans, who were the two-thirds of the over 1600 audience members who weren't musicians or tourists? I haven't a clue, but I do know that Schatz and co-organizer Brice Rosenbloom staged a powerful protest—maybe the most powerful ever—against that chronic, noxious, and hopefully passing phrase "jazz is dead."

Bonus: Catch all of the (Le) Poisson Rouge sets on WNYC's website.

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.

NYMag's Jazz Nightlife Agenda

Astute and obsessive readers of New York magazine might have noticed that, from this year's issue 8 (mid-March) onward, the magazine's jazz listings have undergone a slight, but nonetheless perceptible, change. Prior to issue 8, the magazine's two weekly jazz listings (there are more online) were almost always restricted to the goings on at Blue Note and Birdland. From issue 8 onward, the listings' scope has broadened significantly, championing events at the Jazz Gallery, Smalls, the Kitchen, and Galapagos, to name a few. What changed? You, the one person in New York who actually reads the magazine that carefully, might ask.

Allow me to announce a development that only two people at the magazine in question know about: Since mid-March, yours truly has been writing the jazz listings.

I have no illusions about the impact of such a position—New York hides its listings at the back of the magazine; the listings have little editorial oversight; and few readers even glance at them. Yet, I've been able to transfer the spirit of POW! (my earlier Pick Of the Week feature) onto the pages of a major magazine, promoting an idea that jazz can be more than paying $75 to hear the oldest living bebop survivor or, much worse, the slickest pseudo-jazz fusionista. I don't guarantee that every show that gets in will have my stamp (my editor has been gracious but still might throw in the odd JALC promotion), but I'm happy to say that I've shifted the faintest of breezes—and from this breeze may come a gale.

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."

Where are all the black jazz writers?

Yesterday, NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon published his interview with the writer and arts administrator Willard Jenkins, focusing on Jenkins's ongoing series of talks with black jazz writers, Ain't But A Few Of Us. As the title suggests, there are (and always have been) very few black jazz writers—a state of affairs that's typical of the low numbers of African-Americans in journalism, but striking since, historically, jazz musicians have been predominantly black. The relationship between black culture and today's jazz is complicated, little discussed, and vitally important; I'm planning a much more substantial inquiry into the issue in a longer post this weekend.

For now, let me set up what I view as the big questions. If, for most of its history, jazz was "about" black expression and liberation, then what does jazz "mean" if black culture no longer cares about it? Is its existence now purely aesthetic? Is today's jazz just a more rarefied form of indie rock or new classical music, with an audience that's almost exclusively highly-educated white urbanites? What's the future like for jazz if the following excerpt from Jenkins's interview with the writer Greg Tate is true?

Jazz might as well be dead as far as the majority of Black Americans at every class level are concerned. If Culture is defined as what people do, then we can say that in significant numbers Black people don’t do jazz anymore.

POW! (Pick Of the Week): Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza

As it’s probably become clear by now, I have conflicted feelings toward tradition, especially as it relates to jazz. Part of the music’s appeal for me has always been its history: the way its ideas and their expression have evolved over the course of a century, the stories of its great personalities, and the way in which it has interacted with the larger culture and society. As I said in my first post, I love the fact that you can hear today’s jazz musicians play standards like “All The Things You Are” and “Body and Soul” because it allows me such a clear way to witness the music's continuing growth. When jazz musicians play those tunes, they aren't just expressing themselves, they’re adding a new chapter to an ongoing American project. Few other art forms promote such a clear view of generations of like-minded artists carving, like Italian stonemasons, new details onto the walls of a never to-be-completed cathedral.

Tradition is beautiful, but it can also paralyze. One of the most common criticisms of jazz over the last, say, 30 years is that it’s been so intimidated by its ghosts that it’s been too scared to say anything new. Going onstage conscious of the legacies of Armstrong, Ellington, and Coltrane coloring every note is going to spook a lot of musicians into copying them; It’s a lot more manageable to play your own stuff and to ignore your place in one of American art’s great epics.

The best jazz musicians realize that the real tradition of jazz is experimentation, innovation, and daring—the greats have always taken risks—but that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to escape the music’s long shadows. As jazz wrestles with a way to end its marginalization, there’s no more crucial issue than finding the right balance between tradition and change. Err too far on the side of tradition, and you have an inert niche product geared toward the kind of nostalgic hobbyists who collect model trains. Err too far on the side of change, and jazz risks losing the very qualities that make it special.

Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, an 18-piece Brooklyn-based big band, has discovered a way to honor jazz’s history while remaining proudly, defiantly current. Argue defuses the often-explosive question of tradition v. change with a wink, calling Secret Society a “steampunk bigband,” after the literary genre that imagines Victorian-era machines in a science fiction future. (Think of the striking visuals—and not the plots—of recent movies like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and you’ll get the idea.) In Argue’s formulation, the big band itself is the out-dated contraption, and his music the future that it should have never reached.

Argue uses the tremendous possibilities that one gets with 18 instruments to incorporate many of the electronic effects that have been a large part of studio-produced pop and rock for the last twenty years. Jazz, which is still primarily small group acoustic music, has pretty much ignored this sonic vocabulary because it’s often not possible to replicate with four or five musicians. By aligning his small army into a host of different formations, Argue has been able to mimic digital delays, static distortions, and the electric guitar pass filter. Most jazz covers of rock have been merely jazzy versions of rock melodies. Throw a couple minor 7s into "Stairway to Heaven" and you're there! Argue, however, has mined deep into the vernacular of pop and rock, taken the parts that interest him, and put them to work at the core rather than the surface of his music. Secret Society plays music that is unmistakably jazz but that makes sense to people who listen to a lot more Grizzly Bear than Joe Lovano. (At least, I think it does. I, admittedly, listen to more Joe Lovano than Grizzly Bear.)

On Monday night, Argue hosts the Brooklyn Big Band Bonanza at the Bell House in Gowanus, a night that will feature the likeminded Bjorkestra and Industrial Jazz Group. I tried to get a piece into New York to preview the event, but, alas, it was delayed. If you want to hear three very promising takes on the present and future of jazz, the BBBB is your $15 ticket.

More on DJA and Secret Society:
My piece on the making of Secret Society’s debut album Infernal Machines

Patrick Jarenwattananon’s interview with Argue, which was conducted in March but didn’t air until this week. (Seems like I wasn’t the only one who had a DJA album preview in the spring killed or delayed.)

Excerpts from Patrick’s interview that didn’t make the radio cut are here.

And, if you haven't clicked on it already, here's DJA's excellent blog, which features all of Secret Society’s concerts in streaming audio and excellent commentary on music, art, and politics.

Update:
The New Yorker gives props to DJA and the BBBB in its "Goings on About Town," highlighting it as the magazine's nightlife pick of the week.