Inverted Garden

HBO's Treme returns (and so do NPR's recaps)

When jazz is depicted in mainstream culture, it's usually done with a kind of tone-deafness that makes fans of "the music" grimace. Jazz is "smooth" and "cool" and often represented by a maudlin saxophone performance that sounds more like the intro to George Michael's "Never Gonna Dance Again" than, say, the opening of Coltrane's "Impressions."

That's part of what makes David Simon's New Orleans-set Treme so rare—it's a mainstream show that's deeply sensitive to the lives of working musicians and the subtleties of their art. Treme began its second season on Sunday night, and, like they did last year, NPR jazz blogger-in-chief Patrick Jarenwattananon and WBGO host (and native New Orleanian) Josh Jackson are providing what is likely the most informative TV recap on the interwebs. Their first post of Season 2 opens like this:

PJ: Okay. First, the live music. Why is Batiste visiting his teacher's grave and playing for him? Does that have to do with the fact that it's All Saints Day?

JJ: November 1 is a Holy Day of Obligation still celebrated widely in South Louisiana. That means good Catholics don't bother with the affairs of anyone but God. They attend Mass and visit the tombs of their departed loved ones. It's a nice way to keep life on your mind — laying flowers, lighting votive candles, painting graves ... or, in this case, playing "Buddy Bolden's Blues" for your trombone teacher.

The rest of their conversation follows a similar structure, with Patrick playing a savvier Glaucon and Josh as Bayou Socrates. I'm, admittedly, well behind in my Treme viewing (meaning I have seen Episode 1 and have good intentions to catch up at some point), but I still find Patrick and Josh's Treme analyses to be essential—if somewhat intimidating—reading. (Do you have to be able to pick Lawrence Fields out of a lineup to write about jazz?)

If you're hungry for more NOLA esoterica, check out the full recap archives.

Joe Lovano is the laughing Buddha of mainstream jazz

I write today in praise of Joe Lovano, a man whom I called in NYMag's jazz listings "the laughing Buddha of mainstream jazz." Ten years ago—on June 2nd, 2001 to be exact—I went to the Vanguard for the very first time, a 16-year-old discovering the music, taken with Lovano's 1992 release From the Soul. (The copy I had of Richard Cook and Brian Morton's Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD had called the disc something like "the definitive jazz album of the nineties," hyperbole that they edited out of subsequent editions.) Lovano was playing that night with two trios, a rhythmic assault that echoes in the dual-drummer format of his latest band, Us Five. After the set, I approached Joe, asked if he could sign my copy of Trio Fascination: Vol. 2, and he ushered me back to "the kitchen," as the Vanguard's greenroom is called. Joe didn't just sign my CD, he asked me about myself—what I played, where I lived—and he told me about his straight-alto horn and where he was heading on his tour (Dallas was the next stop).

That event feels fresh because last night, I went back to the Vanguard to hear Lovano. The club was jammed, seemingly fuller than a usual sell-out; and the band was big league, especially the drummers Matt Wilson and Otis Brown III. Lovano took a while to warm up—his breathy tone can be wispy and strangely insubstantial; but as the night wore on, it grew sharp and mighty. The pianist James Wiedman was stellar, awakening dark harmonies that played beautifully off the heavy grooves.

Of course, the band's bassist was the biggest star of all: Ms. Esperanza Spalding, she of the Obama Nobel Prize gig and the Grammy Best New Artist nod. In a band like this, Spalding was pretty clearly the least assured musician. That's not surprising. She's the youngest and least experienced by leaps and bounds. When I saw Lovano in 2001, he'd been a big jazz star for a dozen years and he was, famously, a late bloomer. Esperanza Spalding was a junior in high school.

What impressed me about Spalding in the gig wasn't her playing—which certainly wasn't bad, but lacked the confidence and dexterity of the musicians around her—but that she, despite her rapidly growing celebrity, chooses to keep learning. If Esperanza Spalding wanted to, she could spend all of her time doing jazz-crossover gigs with a crack backing band while earning a lot of money. That's what Chris Botti does. That's what Harry Connick Jr. once did. (It's kind of mind-boggling now to think that Harry Connick Jr. once played the Vanguard.) But to her immense credit, Esperanza seems to want to be a really good musician more than she wants to be a star; and she realizes that the way to do that is to play with better musicians. It's an attribute that's going to serve her very well. (What's Harry up to these days, anyway?)

Notes:

WBGO's Josh Jackson was on-site last night to record the first set for NPR's broadcast "Live at the Village Vanguard." Available here.

And Us Five just put out an excellent album, Bird Songs, Lovano's tribute to Charlie Parker. To help plug it, he wrote a few words about his favorite Charlie Parker performances for NYMag. Check it out here (scroll down).

Guillermo Klein and the New Argentine Jazz: Radio Documentary and Interviews

My radio documentary, "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz" debuts tonight on The Checkout. Listeners in the New York area can catch it on WBGO 88.3 FM. (Or streaming live everywhere!) The Checkout airs at 6:30 p.m. My segment will likely start around 6:39. (I'll post a link as soon as it's online.)

I didn't move to Buenos Aires expecting to find jazz. I'd grown up in New York, the jazz capital of the world, and going to hear "the music" in Argentina seemed roughly equivalent to catching a baseball game in Paris—a waste of time that would only make me long for home.

About a month after arriving in Buenos Aires, I went to hear Ramiro Flores's quintet at Thelonious. My expectations were low. The venue was cool. The music was astounding. When Ramiro and his band played "L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi," his riff on the legend of a well-endowed Paraguayan faun, it sounded as savvy and of the moment as anything Jason Moran was doing at the time.

L'aprés-midi d'un Curupi

The more Argentine jazz I heard, the more I became convinced it was special. Not only was this accomplished music on aesthetic grounds, but it also seemed to have a deep connection with its time and place. This music was the soundtrack to Buenos Aires in 2008. The link between American jazz and post-millennial New York had felt more strained.

I wanted to know why Argentine jazz was so vital. The quest led me to seek out many of Buenos Aires' jazz musicians, to pick their brains, to befriend them, and to begin to assemble an answer.

The New Argentine Jazz

Pipi Piazzolla talks about how the Argentine economic crisis changed jazz...

...and sticks around for a rhythm class

Juan Cruz de Urquiza examines the legacy of his group Quinteto Urbano

Richard Nant discusses his years at Berklee

Esteban Sehinkman delves into the theory behind his Real Book Argentina

The Cutaia brothers talk about the history and mystique of their club, Thelonious

Fer Isella gets into the nitty gritty of mic placement (coming soon...)

Plus, previously published interviews and profiles:

Guillermo Klein on his Argentine roots
Dino and Jose Saluzzi on family music
Ramiro Flores on self-analysis
Pipi Piazzolla on sharks and drums
The Ale Demogli Quintet kills at Thelonious

Guillermo Klein's new album (plus an exclusive clip!)

Tomorrow, Sunnyside will release Guillermo Klein's latest album, Domador de Huellas, an inventive and powerful take on the music of the Argentine folklore legend Cuchi Leguizamón. The early reviews are stellar. The Times' Ben Ratliff lauds the way Klein transforms Cuchi's music while retaining its essence. NPR's Patrick Jarenwattananon analyzes Klein's entrancing introduction to "Coplas del Regreso" and admits that, like me, he's been listening to the album on repeat for the last week.

For the next day, you can hear the entire album streaming on NPR's website. Then you can buy your very own copy. I can't recommend it highly enough.

But, wait, there's more—much more. Last December, I traveled to Buenos Aires and conducted lengthy interviews with Guillermo, Richard Nant, Pipi Piazzolla, Fer Isella, and Esteban Sehinkman, all part of the Domador de Huellas team. (Richard plays trumpet and bombo, Pipi is the drummer, Esteban plays keyboards, and Fer is one of the producers.) This material will be part of my forthcoming radio documentary, "Sounds of Upheaval: Guillermo Klein and the new Argentine jazz." The doc will be released on next week's installment of Josh Jackson's The Checkout (Tuesday, 8/17 at 6:30 p.m., 88.3 on the FM dial), which just so happens to be the night that Guillermo, Richard, and Pipi open their run at the Village Vanguard.

On the same day that my Checkout show premieres, I'm going to be releasing a veritable encyclopedia of Argentine jazz on this very blog. Interviews with Pipi Piazzolla, Richard Nant, Juan Cruz de Urquiza, Esteban Sehinkman, Fer Isella, Lucas and Seca Cutaia, and Guillermo Klein (and possibly more) will form the backbone of the project. I'm busy putting all of this together. It's going to be a multimedia extravaganza (words and sounds and sights, oh my!) and should feel like the Criterion Collection Disc 2 (the making-of docs, interviews, outtakes, etc) to my Checkout show's Disc 1.

For now, I leave you with a recording from my afternoon with Guillermo Klein at his house in the Buenos Aires neighorhood of Nuñez. He was playing a mash-up of Cuchi Leguizamón and Duke Ellington on his upright piano, and a very unskilled radio engineer managed to capture a few minutes of it in mono:

Klein Plays Cuchi

Who is @jazzfamoose?

A week ago, a bold new voice entered the jazz Twittersphere: @jazzfamoose. Jazzfamoose identifies himself (or herself) as a "roastmaster general," resides in the "Deciduous Vanguard," and claims "Joseph Jarman once tried to make a flute out of my antlers." So far Jazzfamoose has exploited for laughs his double identity as a boreal-forest dweller and a jazz aficionado: "My instincts tell me to avoid men in bright orange and dig countries that remind me of Miles Davis," the Moose wrote before the World Cup final. "Difference between a moose and a Michael Buble show? Moose has the horns in front and the asshole in the back," tweeted the Moose in high Borscht Belt–style.

So who is @jazzfamoose? He's become the jazz blogosphere's Batman, a human who takes animal form to dispense his own brand of savage justice. WBGO's Josh Jackson has admitted he knows the identity of @jazzfamoose, writing last Wednesday, "I cannot reveal identity of @jazzfamoose. A recluse: John Nash meets Bobby Fischer w/o the anti-semitism. But w/ horns." I suppose this makes Josh the jazz world's Alfred.

I can't confirm the identity of this antlered Twitter creature, but I have a few guesses:

Rafi Zabor: Zabor wrote the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novel The Bear Comes Home, which stars a saxophone-playing Bear who befriends the aforementioned Joseph Jarman's AACM collaborator Lester Bowie in one of the opening chapters (a clue!). Zabor is famously a bit of a recluse, a mad genius in the best sense, and definitely not an anti-Semite. If @jazzfamoose is not Rafi Zabor, then @jazzfamoose is certainly inspired by Rafi Zabor.

Josh Jackson: Jackson insists that he's not @jazzfamoose, but would Bruce Wayne have fessed up to being Batman? Jazzfamoose often mentions tweets and posts from the A Blog Supreme/Nextbop world with which Jackson is very familiar. I'd still opt for Zabor over Jackson, but, just asking, when was the last time you saw Josh and a jazz-loving moose in the same place?

I am the Jazzfamoose: On my high school baseball team, I was known as "Moose" and I celebrated big hits by bumping "antlers" with my teammate Ali "Babwah" Winston. A number of my friends who keep up with this blog will insist that the existence of a jazz-loving moose is just too much of a coincidence for it not to be me. I don't think I'm @jazzfamoose, but I agree that a jazz blogger nicknamed "Moose" is a very likely candidate. Maybe I tweet as @jazzfamoose in my sleep. I'm not ruling out the possibility.