Inverted Garden

NYMag: Village Vanguard Tales

My annotated slide-show, "A Brief and Colorful History of the Village Vanguard", is now up on nymag.com. It chronicles 13 events from the club's 75 years, from its beginnings as a hangout for lefty booze-hound poets to its present as jazz's most prestigious venue (with some Charles Mingus history/folklore and an account of Bill Evans's famous Sunday thrown in for good measure).

Fred Hersch = LeBron James?

Fred at the piano is like LeBron James on the basketball court. He’s perfection.
– Jason Moran

David Hajdu's recent New York Times Magazine profile of pianist Fred Hersch is an odd amalgam of hyperbolic praise (above), made-up trends ("A new movement in jazz has surfaced over the past few years—a wave of highly expressive music more concerned with emotion than with craft or virtuosity"), and out-of-the-blue pot-shots ("Fred's ego is enormous.") That said, there's a pretty moving story here about a really excellent musician making a name for himself, facing death, and returning triumphantly to the scene.

I've been a fan of Hersch's music for a long time—a duo gig he did several years ago with Joe Lovano at the Jazz Standard was one of the more magical shows I've been to—and I've heard first-hand stories of his kindness—he recorded a tape of solo piano for a close friend of my mother's while she was awaiting a bone-marrow transplant (they had mutual friends but had never met). I just wish Hajdu didn't feel the need to dress Hersch's journey with the trappings of story: the exaggeration of Hersch's musical importance, the thinly backed-up claims of his arrogant "artistic temperament", and the pop-psychoanalytical discussion of how Hersch's sexuality relates to his lyricism.

Brad Mehldau rides again

When Brad Mehldau released Largo in 2002, I remember thinking it was high-time the era's greatest jazz pianist ventured beyond his comfy acoustic trio. Since signing a deal with the now-defunct Warner Jazz at the tender age of 24, Mehldau had released six piano trio records with the same personnel (Larry Grenadier on bass, Jorge Rossy on drums) and one rambling and occasionally brilliant solo date, Elegaic Cycles. Largo didn't sound like anything Mehldau had done before—it was poppy, heavily produced, and played up Jon Brion's arranging chops at the expense of Mehldau's instrumental virtuosity—and it sounds like nothing Mehldau has done since.

I have friends, like the Argentine producer Fer Isella, who consider Largo Mehldau's best album. I do not. Viewed nearly eight years after its release, it seems like a necessary experiment that helped Mehldau grow as a composer and improviser, but it's a frustratingly hodge-podge album. That's why I'm anticipating Mehldau's upcoming release, Highway Rider (March 16), with guarded enthusiasm. Highway Rider reunites Mehldau and Brion in a heavily-produced orchestral affair, although this time around there are more promising signs: most notably, the presence of saxophonist Joshua Redman. Nonesuch has released an EPK to promote Highway Rider, and while it doesn't give away much of the music, the little it does, leaves me optimistic:

(via Nate Chinen, Nextbop, and Nonesuch)