Inverted Garden

Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak": Quartet Relaunch!

Jazz careers (like all American careers) can get broken down into two trajectories. There's the vertical orientation—the career of our company-man fathers—in which a musician gets into a band when he's young and stays there until he's old, working with more or less the same collaborators and gradually honing the subtleties of sound. This is what Bill Evans did and Johnny Hodges did and Brad Mehldau has done. Then there's the horizontal career—the modern freelancer—in which a musician plays in many bands at the same time. None of these bands will play together all that much; and none of them will ever rise to the heights of a great vertical band; but they'll never be short of energy and ideas. Almost every jazz musician today follows this horizontal path. Just as lifetime employment at a single, paternal company has become a relic, lifetime or even consistent multi-year employment in one band has all but gone extinct.

Saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa has recently been a sublime horizontalist. Last year, he put out two albums, Dual Identity and Apex. Both were collaborations with other saxophonists, both featured new bands, both were beautifully realized, neither has launched a band that plays together 100 nights a year. Rudresh's website lists nine "projects" that he leads or co-leads. That's pretty much the definition of a horizontal career.

Tonight at the Cornelia Street Café, Rudresh relaunches vertically, debuting the new Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet. This is a fresh manifestation of the band that put out Rudresh's earlier records Black Water, Mother Tongue, and Codebook; the band that dominated his musical identity before he fully embraced South Indian Carnatic music, put out Kinsmen and Apti, and got profiled in the New Yorker. The new Rudresh Mahanthappa Quartet features the guitarist David "Fuze" Fiuczynski, a departure from the Quartet's past reliance on pianists to hold down the harmony. "I’ve been blessed to have had such piano powerhouses as Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn perform with me before," Rudresh told me, "but having a guitarist with David’s unique abilities and perspectives will be a big change in thee overall group sound."

The suite the Quartet debuts tonight and tomorrow, "Gamak," continues Rudresh's modern jazz exploration of South Indian musical concepts (and, in the case of "Gamak," Indonesian musical concepts as well). With "Gamak," Rudresh says, "I’m working with quarter-tones and melodic ornamentation in ways that I have not before, especially with regard to composition." It's not a through-composed hour-long piece, but a template for improvisation, exploration. It should be both classic Rudresh and the newer Rudresh rolled into one.

Note: Today marks the beginning of my own collaboration. The drawing of Rudresh above was done by the Argentine cartoonist and humorist Sebastián Scherman. Seba will be contributing illustrations on a regular basis to Inverted Garden, which may finally force me to blog on a regular basis. Please take a sec to visit Seba's website.

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Tonight:
Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak"
The Cornelia Street Cafe
9 and 10:30

Tomorrow:
Rudresh Mahanthappa's "Gamak"
The Jazz Gallery
9 and 10:30

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Illustration credit: Sebastián Scherman (scherman.blogspot.com)

POW!: Search & Restore and Secret Society

Two very worthy outfits highlight this week's NYC jazz offerings. Tonight, jazz presenter Search and Restore, nearly $40,000 into its $75,000 Kickstarter campaign to document NYC's jazz scene, goes for a big score with the help of twenty musician friends. S&R's Adam Schatz makes his plea here:
 
"A Night of Round Robin Improvised Duets" @ (Le) Poisson Rogue
(Tonight, 11/29)

The jazz presenter Search and Restore has rounded up twenty musicians for a collaborative cutting contest that features wily veterans like trombonist Roswell Rudd and well-known stars like the Bad Plus’s Reid Anderson.

Tomorrow, Darcy James Argue (alias: the Gowanus dandy) and his co-conspirators present a new work at Joe's Pub. Darcy recently made an eloquent plea for donations, likening the economics of his group more to a classical orchestra (entities which have always had institutional support) than to a rock act (which almost always start as three or four guys).

Secret Society @ Joe's Pub
(Tomorrow, 11/30)

Conductor Darcy James Argue writes sprawling, intensely dramatic compositions that turn his eighteen-piece “steampunk” big band into a kind of runaway jazz locomotive. Here he leads the group in their usual repertoire and the debut of a new composition. With flautist Claire Chase and bass trombonist David Taylor.

POW!: Two on the devil horn

Lou Donaldson Quartet at the Village Vanguard
(Tonight - Sunday)

The 84-year-old alto saxophonist came of age when big bands barnstormed through the country’s dance halls and Bird ruled the roost in New York. He keeps the flame of that golden epoch burning with his sultry blues tone and a refreshingly old-school dedication to “getting audiences’ feet shuffling.”

Greg Ward's Fitted Shards at the Cornelia Street Café
(Sunday)

Chicago’s tight-knit jazz scene breeds fluency in many musical tongues: Young players learn at the feet of both straight-ahead legends like Von Freeman and upstart fusionistas like Jeff Parker. The 28-year-old saxophonist Greg Ward, a recent Windy City émigré, embodies that spirit on his new album, South Side Story, and celebrates its release here.

POW! (NYMag picks of the week)

This week's picks:

The inventive tenorman Bill McHenry plays tonight in a quartet with fellow Mainers Ben Street and R.J. Miller (at the Cornelia Street Cafe)

— and —

Lucian Ban and John Hébert celebrate the release of their excellent new album, Enesco Re-Imagined (Tuesday at LPR)—a sophisticated, jazzish makeover of the compositions of Romanian violinist George Enesco. (Come to think of it, this whole jazz-re-imagining-of-great-non-jazz-composer thing is becoming a Sunnyside trend.)

 

POW! (NYMag picks of the week)

In the early days of this blog, I had a haphazardly weekly feature called POW! (Pick of the Week). I devised POW! largely to force myself to post regularly, but as anyone who scrolls down the page will see, POW! never really accomplished that goal. As my blogging schedule became more erratic, I abandoned POW!. If I wasn't going to post every week, selecting a "pick of the week" felt disingenuous.

I abandoned POW! completely when I started to write the two weekly jazz listings for New York magazine. That was my new POW! and the pressure of real deadlines forced me to turn in copy in a way that blogging never did. For whatever reason, it's taken me until now to start posting my NYMag listings to this site. Here goes:

Chucho Valdés with the Afro-Cuban Messengers @ JALC on Friday (10/22) and Saturday (10/23)

— and —

The Steve Lehman Octet @ (Le) Poisson Rouge next Tuesday (10/26)

POW!: Jenny Scheinman - Mischief & Mayhem

Jenny Scheinman -
Mischief & Mayhem

The Village Vanguard
Through July 18, 9 p.m., 11 p.m.

The Village Vanguard is the only club in the world that can shift the meaning of "mainstream" in jazz. Befitting its history and reputation, the Vanguard books a lot of traditional acts; but every so often, a group of adventurous young musicians arrives unexpectedly, and the week of gigs makes seismic ripples. When the then little-known Bad Plus played the Vanguard for the first time in 2002, a Columbia Records rep scouted them and quickly signed them. No band of the last ten years has been as widely influential as the Bad Plus (jazz musician friends of mine in Buenos Aires know their records chapter and verse); and the Vanguard's endorsement played no small part in their early rise.

This week's appearance by Jenny Scheinman - Mischief & Mayhem has the whiff of that Bad Plus show—the Vanguard taking a risk and displaying its best instincts. The violinst/fiddler/composer Scheinman has played the club before, but this band—with Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, longtime Ani DiFranco bassist Todd Sickafoose, and mad-cap drummer Jim Black—sounds especially promising: four virtuosos equally comfortable in and out of the jazz idiom who can't help but drive the music in new directions. I gave the show at critic's pick in New York magazine and can't wait to check it out...

'Tis the season: My NYMag jazz fest picks

June is jazz season in New York. Last weekend's Undead Jazzfest made nearly literal the figurative term "jazz marathon." It was sweaty, exhausting, and often exhilarating. Rushing to five gigs at three venues in less than five hours gave me the improvised music spectator's equivalent of runner's high. (Ratliff had an excellent breakdown at the Times. I caught sight of him during the Steve Coleman gig wearing too many layers for the heat and shaking his head vigorously as in "no fucking way!" at the end of one number.)

This week, the festival season continues with the starts of the CareFusion and Vision fests. For a preview, I'll direct you to NYMag.com, which has just posted my write-ups of both festivals. The magazine asked me to highlight about a dozen shows, and I decided I'd list the concerts that intrigued me the most—the ones with the most potential for surprise. The eleven shows I highlighted might not prove to be the best of both festivals, but I highly doubt any of them will be boring.

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

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.

POW!: Alejandro Demogli at FB Lounge

I've written before about my love for Argentine jazz, an unexpected attraction that started on a Thursday night at Thelonious in Buenos Aires and continues to this day. Soon (fingers crossed), I'll be hosting a radio documentary on the composer Guillermo Klein and I've already spilled quite a bit of digital ink covering musicians such as Pipi Piazzolla and Dino Saluzzi. An untold story (at least in writing) of my relationship with Argentine jazz is my friendship with the guitarist Alejandro Demogli.

I met Ale through a serendipitous chain of events that began on an August 2007 night when, at the last minute, I decided to see T.K. Blue perform at Lenox Lounge instead of Bill Stewart at the Jazz Gallery. I'd known T.K. for a few years—he's Randy Weston's artistic director and saxophonist—and I wanted to catch up with him before I moved down to Buenos Aires. When I spoke with T.K. before the set, I mentioned my pending relocation. "You've got to talk to my man Hill Greene," he said, "he goes down there all the time."

When I finally spoke with Hill, it was over the phone in Buenos Aires and I was looking for an apartment to rent. He was heading back to New York in a few days, but he thought I should check in with a guy named Ale Demogli who had a place he rented in San Telmo. By the time Ale and I got in touch, I already had an apartment (his wasn't available anyway), but we agreed to meet for coffee anyway.

Over the next few months, Ale was my guide to the Buenos Aires jazz scene. He gave me the phone numbers of musicians I wanted to interview; he told me whom I should check out and whom I could pass up; he invited me to a jazz festival in Patagonia that proved one of my best weeks in the country. When I look back on that year, both lively and lonely, I see jazz filling a spot that could have been a big void.

I mention Ale now, because he's arrived in New York for a 10 day spell. He's playing tonight at FB Lounge on East 106th in a horn-less quartet that should be a great showcase for his considerable talents as a soloist. I've heard good things about the venue too—Josh Jackson called it a hidden gem. So while it's late breaking, Ale Demogli at FB Lounge is enthusiastically my pick of the week.