Inverted Garden

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.

Video of Sonny + Ornette at the Beacon

This is where I say that I disapprove of the unauthorized taping and recording of shows, but that I'm going to post this video anyway. Damn, it's history! Footage of the moment at the Beacon when, for the first time ever, Sonny and Ornette shared the stage!

Sonny Rollins + Ornette Coleman at the Beacon

Toward the end of his concert at the Beacon Theatre, the great Sonny Rollins announced that there was someone in the house “with a horn” who wanted to wish him a happy 80th birthday. The announcement suggested the imminent appearance of the mystery guest, but Rollins plunged into his next number, “Sonnymoon for Two,” without any front-line support. As Sonny soloed, I racked my brain: who could this extra-special interloper turn out to be? Roy Hargrove, Jim Hall, Christian McBride, and Roy Haynes had all been billed as special guests, but they hadn't received such protracted introductions. Who would justify this kind of drama? Wayne Shorter? No real history with Sonny. Wynton Marsalis? Too polarizing. James Carter or Joshua Redman? Too green and not enough oomph. And then, about five minutes into “Sonnymoon”, the obvious answer sauntered on stage—rail-thin and slinky, with a hat and demeanor that define the word “rakish,” it was Ornette Coleman.

I’ve never thought of Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins as brothers-in-arms. I figured that as the two last surviving jazz Olympians, they must share a certain measure of mutual respect, but I never thought their music sounded terribly related. After all, Ornette made his mark pushing jazz away from the rigid harmonic framework of Tin Pan Alley standards and bebop charts; Sonny made his mark as one of the greatest explorers of that framework—the Platonic ideal of jazz soloist. Yet as the two men played—Ornette excising the melody from the changes with a surgeon’s unflappable precision; Sonny probing each note with a new gusto for experimentation—I realized their music came from a similar place: a deep devotion to melody, to song, to voice above all else.

A few years ago, I heard the Chicago saxophonist Ken Vandermark give a talk after a screening of Musician, a documentary chronicling the avant-gardist at work. At one point, an audience member asked Vandermark to reflect on his influences, and he obliged saying he came out of Sonny Rollins and his explorations of melody and rhythm far more than he did John Coltrane and his experiments in harmony. In an oversimplified history of jazz, it’s common to view Coltrane as the great innovator and Rollins as the more traditional virtuoso who couldn’t get hip to the times. (Rollins's 1959 - 1962 hiatus from performing is usually chalked up to his feelings of inadequacy in the face of Coltrane and, to a lesser extent, Coleman). Vandermark, though, was arguing against the idea of Coltrane as revolutionary and Sonny as establishment hold-out. Sonny’s music wasn’t less innovative; it just came from a different place.

Ornette Coleman, like Vandermark and Rollins, is first and foremost a melodist. Ornette’s “harmolodic” approach uses melody as the music’s foundation—harmony and rhythm are built on top of it. It’s very different from a typical bebop improvisation, in which the musician develops his solo over already determined chord changes and rhythms. Much of Sonny Rollins's music follows the more traditional approach, but he's always been pushing against its boundaries. From early in his career, Rollins has favored bands without a piano, an arrangement that builds a more malleable harmonic framework. In these bands—his famous sax trios, especially—Rollins shapes solos that are full of subversions, jokes, and quotes. He never sounds concerned with wrapping up his ideas before the next chorus.

It's this preference for space that reveals the deep affinity between Rollins and Coleman. Both players helped move jazz from the rigidity of the AABA song structure to the wide-open free jazz of the 60s and 70s. That Coleman pushed this development more radically and brashly seems increasingly unimportant. On Friday night, side by side, jazz's sax kings were clearly on the same quest.

A few more thoughts on Sonny:

In the 50s, Sonny’s nickname was “Newk” because he bore an uncanny resemblance to Brooklyn Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. I’d never known the story of how he got the name until I happened upon an excerpt from Miles Davis’s autobiography on Sonny's official website:

"One day, me and Sonny were in a cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and said, `Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."

Is there any jazz musician today who looks a lot like a famous professional athlete? And if, say, a great young bassist was a dead ringer for Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, how many of today’s jazz fans would get it when the bassist billed himself as “Big Papi”?

Plus: The first video to surface from the concert. (It's Sonny playing "Global Warming," which is called "Global Morning" on the set list.)

A bizarre TMZ-stalks-LiLo-style video of Ornette Coleman leaving the Beacon:

And a set list of Friday night’s concert from Bret "Jazz Video Guy" Primack, via the Ottawa Citizen!