Inverted Garden

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.

Cool Talk

Ever since Terry Teachout’s “Can Jazz Be Saved?” there’s been a serious debate raging through the jazz blogosphere over, well, how to make jazz relevant again. I didn’t start Inverted Garden because of the Teachout article and its aftermath, but it definitely gave the last little push I needed to actually register a TypePad account and a Go Daddy domain name.

I can’t claim to have followed the debate over The Future of Jazz everywhere for the last few months, but I think these recent posts illustrate a few different ways people are taking it.

Vikram and Matt at Twenty Dollars have compiled a YouTube-supported argument that Hollywood and pop culture portray jazz as profoundly uncool and its fans as a bunch of dorks. I don’t find the post all that persuasive, but it’s worth checking out for the comment section where Vijay Iyer works himself into a frenzy and then brings in the 800-pound themes, asking if the “uncoolness” of jazz has to do with the music’s economic prospects (bleak) and race (black). (In my first post, I mentioned Madavor (“Teddy Bear and Friends”) Media’s acquisition of Jazz Times as a sign of a potential “uncool” (or, really, an insular and distant from the world) apocalypse, but even if Jazz Times starts catering to an increasingly stuffy audience, I don’t think the entire music will follow suit—it’s just going to take new media outlets to spread the word.

Patrick Jarenwattananon, NPR’s jazz blogger, finishes up his excellent Jazz Now series with a selection of some of the best reader comments. Particularly relevant to this thread:

Commenter Dave Rohner noted via e-mail that he thought "the key to attracting a young audience is intensity." To flesh out what I think he's saying, if you present any sort of passionately-felt music -- in the correct environment -- the young audience will follow. I like this; I think people are drawn toward any sort of strong musical conviction, whether uptempo, languid, or somewhere in between.

I really like what Patrick is saying here and I think it ties in nicely with my last post on booing. The way to build an audience that looks to jazz as a serious contributor to the larger culture isn’t to convince them that it’s “cool”—suave, relaxing, above-it-all—but to show them that it’s engaged in a mad quest to understand, in the words of David Foster Wallace, “what it is to be a fucking human being.” Anyone who has seriously listened to Monk, Mingus, and Coltrane knows that obsession and passion drive their music, not coolness. (My friend Andrew Kambour once shut up a group of jazz dissenters who asked him to turn off a Coltrane record by snapping, “this is a man communicating directly with God!”)

For more on the Jazz Pitchfork idea, DJA (Darcy James Argue, who will likely be mentioned often in this blog so will henceforth go by initials) mentioned this post from non-jazzer FISTFULAYEN that addresses the “how to get the word out” question from the other side of things.

And last, but certainly not least, my good friend, former roommate, and fellow music blogger Will C. White gives me a big shout-out in the wrap-up of his “orchestra” pronunciation poll. (If you’ve ever wanted to hear the varied ways in which Americans from Aaron Copland to Charlie Rose to Larry David say “orchestra,” then this is not to be missed.) Will is an extraordinary composer and conductor and anyone interested in music, whatever genre, should poke around his media offerings. As a start, I’d recommend his tango-tinged “Desiderata,” written for “Two Girls, One Keyboard.”

More booing, please!

Last week, the Met opened its new production of Tosca and as the director took his curtain call, a vocal minority of the audience booed. I have to say, I’m envious of the opera crowd.

This isn’t the first time opera audiences have booed, as Charles and Mirella Jona Affron noted in today’s Times, it’s a vestige from opera’s days as bawdy public entertainment when debates over the score of La Traviata might result in fisticuffs. Terry Teachout riffed on this phenomenon the last time a met production opened to boos, and arrived at a conclusion I agree with: booing might not be polite, but it’s a hell of a lot better than robotic ovations and thoughtless praise.

Ever since I started reading jazz reviews, I’ve marveled at how often they’re positive. With a few notable exceptions like Ben Ratliff’s pointed takedown of an Eric Lewis pop covers performance at (Le) Poisson Rouge, jazz reviews tend toward praise and neutral description. Compare this to book, movie, and restaurant criticism, where the likes of Anthony Lane, Michiko Kakutani, and Adam Platt often turn their words into assassin's bullets. Other than the occasional pot shot at Wynton Marsalis or John Zorn, anyone scanning through mainstream jazz coverage would get the impression that almost all contemporary performances are, well, pretty good.

In wasn’t always like this. A quick glance through the collected work of longtime New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett shows just how how much deep and sometimes negative analysis one used to find in jazz writing. When John Coltrane died, poet and critic Philip Larkin famously quipped that while he mourned Coltrane’s death like the death of any man, “it [left] in jazz a vast, blessed silence.” If a famous jazz musician died tomorrow, would anyone dare type such words?

I suspect jazz’s current status at the farthest reaches of the commercial boondocks has a lot to do with the timidity of its criticism. A writer who cares about jazz and has been lucky enough to score an assignment with a mainstream publication will want to do his part to champion the music, not tear it down. After all, jazz is already taking a financial beating and jazz musicians are hard working artists scrounging to get by, unleashing on them Pauline Kael-like scorn seems not only counter to jazz’s best interests, but also just plain mean.

Yet the idea that positive vibes will save jazz strikes me as dangerously illusory. What’s needed are more fearless, honest, and engaged voices who won’t care about convincing the world that jazz is good but will convince the world that it matters. For the last twenty plus years, the debates over the definition of jazz could have yielded a wealth of this kind of incisive criticism, but instead writers and musicians dismissed the music of the other side without serious engagement. Where are the Stanley Crouch reviews that analyze the albums of Medeski, Martin, and Wood instead of just dismissing them as “not jazz”? Where are the reviews of more progressive minded critics questioning Wynton Marsalis’s approach to improvisation rather than just savaging his rhetoric? You might be able to unearth some examples (and I’d love to read them), but I think you’ll find them to be few and far between.

Part of this critical absence stems from the marginalization of jazz in the mainstream media, meaning that only a handful of writers in the country have jobs that force them to listen to and write about a wide swath of the music. Nate Chinen and Ben Ratliff at the Times have to cover Jamie Cullum as well as Ken Vandermark, and that means they’re going to have to analyze critically some music that they don’t really like. If you’re a freelance jazz writer pitching magazines and alt weeklies, however, your best shot at landing a piece is to prop up the next big thing, not break down the technical faults of some mildly successful tenor saxophonist.

This state of affairs isn't going to improve any time soon. As the jazz audience and the print media decline in tandem, outlets with less and less space are going to give fewer and fewer words to jazz. The Internet, journalism’s savior and executioner, should be riding to the rescue, but most jazz websites leave much to be desired. How many jazz sites are really engaged in serious criticism? All About Jazz, a site for which I frequently write and the winner of the Jazz Journalists Association best website award, depends on volunteer contributors who are, by and large, riffing on their favorite musicians. As an AAJ contributor, you don’t get assignments, you figure out which shows and albums you want to review. No one gets paid at AAJ, so unless you have a masochistic streak or really like writing hatchet jobs, you’re going to seek out music that you already enjoy or that you’re pretty sure you will enjoy. Because of that, a lot of AAJ reviews have a have a gushing, fanboy slant.

The blogosphere, of course, does opinionated and in-depth better than any other current media, and the jazz blogosphere has some true gems (noted on the right-hand column on the steadily growing “Conversation” list). Yet most of the best jazz blogs are written by musicians, which means that while they provide excellent analysis, they are also, very understandably, hesitant to call out their peers. Even bloggers who don’t pull their punches don’t seem ideal as the first wave of jazz popularizers. The blogosphere is built for niches, and while a great jazz blogger might find a loyal audience of jazz readers, it’ll be difficult for him to ever reach, say, that smart 17-year-old who digs Charles Mingus but has never heard of Ethan Iverson or Miguel Zenón and doesn’t think of jazz as something that’s played today outside of the high school jazz combo.

When I spoke with the composer/conductor/blogger Darcy James Argue a few weeks ago, he lamented that the jazz scene didn’t have its own Pitchfork, the indie rock hub that has been crucial to building a following for bands like Arcade Fire and TV on the Radio. Pitchfork, of course, doesn’t only give raves, it pans plenty, a sign that it asks writers to engage regularly and critically with a lot of different bands. More than anything else, jazz criticism needs more of this kind of regularity, and if reviewers step up who are fearless, offensive, and occasionally irresponsible, so much the better.

A lot of musicians talk about lack of accessibility being jazz’s biggest problem in failing to reach new audiences. Why should demanding indie rock acts like the Dirty Projectors get devoted followings and demanding indie jazz acts like Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society work at the fringes? The music itself doesn’t seem to be the biggest hurdle; it’s the stuffy jazz system, catering to an aging audience, that a lot of musicians and fans fault. If you can accept that hypothesis, then you might also buy that idea that a jazz Pitchfork could reach a large, latent jazz audience. All people need is the right kind of encouragement to give jazz a serious listen, this theory goes, then the music will sell itself. I admit this requires a leap of faith, but I think great presentation and good writing could help "save" jazz, helping to foster an audience that would, like those pesky opera fans, care enough about what its hearing to jeer as well as cheer.

Forward, Tradition

I’ve held off on starting this blog for nearly a year now, using the excuse of finding the right title as perpetual procrastination. Whether or not “inverted garden” fits the bill, I’ve decided it’s time to wade into the blogosphere, and specifically the jazz blogosphere, both because I find myself wanting more opportunities to write about “the music” and because I’d like to be part of the ongoing debate over jazz’s past, present, and future.

Terry Teachout’s recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Can Jazz Be Saved?”, ignited an unusually public (for jazz) debate over the music’s supposedly declining fortunes and what can be done to rescue it. Jazz has been the center of my musical life for as long as I’ve been listening to music, and while I certainly revere the old masters, jazz’s present has always excited me most. That puts me, I think, in the minority of self-described jazz listeners. It’s not unusual for me to meet a jazz fan who knows little of the music after A Love Supreme, a consequence of both the music’s commercial marginalization and its deep evocation of nostalgia.

Jazz is America’s music, we’re told, and like America’s pastime, it lives in a constant state of self-celebration and tribute. The predominant practices of jazz reinforce this habit. In the 1950s, jazz “standards” meant the Broadway show tunes and Tin Pan Alley jingles popular at the time. Jazz musicians broke apart those universally familiar melodies and recreated, if not elevated, them. In the 2000s, “standards” means the Broadway show tunes and Tin Pan Alley jingles popular in the 1940s and 50s. The reinterpretation of these songs is a conversation with history, not, as it once was, with contemporary pop culture.

Like many jazz fans, I love 1950s standards both as songs and as the parchment on which much of the music’s history is written. When a musician like Brad Mehldau plays “All The Things You Are,” it doesn’t sound quaint; it sounds like he’s adding a bold new chapter to one of our great narratives—he’s conversing with all the other great musicians of the last 70 years who have riffed on that richest of Jerome Kern tunes.

I’m an unabashed lover of tradition: my favorite sport is baseball; my favorite music jazz; one of my favorite places a boys summer camp in Maine that’s obsessed with its history and its founding year (1919); and one of my favorite magazines a storied institution whose literary editor once called it a 150 year-old “American project.” That might make me sound like a fusty old man, but the more I reflect on it, I think it’s a way to feel less alone. Tradition gives us a measure of immortality by placing us in the context of others—we’re part of an ongoing musical conversation, the “proud Yankee history,” an “American project”—rather than just howling, unheard, into the void. This is ultimately illusory—traditions have a duration not all that much longer than human lives—but tradition gives us comfort, and more importantly, a nobler raison d’etre than self-promotion.

Yet toasting tradition alone leads nowhere but backward. As many jazz musicians have pointed out, the music’s greatest tradition is innovation and change. Dwelling too long on celebrating Armstrong and Ellington ultimately betrays their legacy. Most jazz musicians get this, but a lot of jazz fans don’t. The question facing jazz, I think, is how to close this gap, how to get audiences back out to the clubs and back into the conversation. How to make them care as passionately about Brad Mehldau as they do about Bill Evans.

When the nation’s best jazz magazine, Jazz Times, was purchased by Madavor Media, we saw one bleak possibility for the music’s future. Madavor makes its money off titles like Doll Reader and Teddy Bear and Friends. This isn’t a company that specializes in cutting edge, it’s a company that specializes in niche. Its titles cater to hobbyists and collectors who left the auditorium long ago to go play with their toys in vacant classrooms. I want jazz to continue to matter. I want jazz to continue to speak to larger issues of society and spirituality. I don’t want jazz, for all its historical awareness, to ever become a conversation with itself.