This is the golden age of the saxophone trio. I say that not only because the form is now incredibly popular, replacing both the quartet and quintet as the default sax-led unit, but because bands like Fly and the JD Allen Trio have pushed it to new heights. It used to be that all you needed for a sax trio was a big-toned tenorman and a pick-up rhythm section. Now you need to have three distinct voices that together sing with fearful synergy.
Juxtapositions are the joy of Honey Ear. On the title track, "Steampunk Serenade," drummer Allison Miller kicks things off with a sharp, metronomic beat that Rene Hart augments with a repeating bass riff and electronic distortion. The music is precise and mechanical. Then Erik Lawrence enters on tenor sax, bellowing long and deep. An operatic voice cries out over the clanking of gears and sprockets. If that's not steampunk, I don't know what is.
Many of the new sax trios make a virtue out of restraint, as if correcting years of saxophone excess. The Honey Ear Trio does not. There are quiet tracks, like "Over the Rainbow" and "Eyjafjallajokull (Icelandic Volcano Hymn)," but even these are upfront in their emotional immediacy. Lawrence, Hart, and Miller have all toured with rock musicians and they've learned well the lessons of that genre. Non-jazz fans often complain that the music is too abstract and too esoteric. No one will say that about the Honey Ear Trio. Their sound is bold, brash, and fierce.
Tonight, the Honey Ear Trio celebrates the release of Steampunk Serenade with a concert at Littlefield in Gowanus. Opening will be Ben Perowsky's Moodswing Orchestra and the Portland-based Blue Cranes, an indie rock-jazz hybrid that shares with Honey Ear a predilection for complex rhythms and rock snarls. (Check out their pulsing anthem "Ritchie Bros.") For $15, you're not going to get a much better night of music.
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.
"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:
Nothing in Ken Burns's much-maligned, decade-old Official History of Jazz caused as much umbrage as Branford Marsalis's remark that in the 70s "jazz just kind of died; it just kind of went away for a while." As Nate Chinen chronicled several years ago in the Times, the 70s have been lovingly, exhaustively chronicled in the jazz blogosphere, with the indispensable Destination: OUT leading the way. This historical revisionism has been sorely needed—jazz didn't die during the 70s, but a whole lot of it was ignored and forgotten.
Many jazz musicians who came of age during the 70s did enter the annals, but usually outside of the mainstream. Chick Corea earned a lasting following not from extraordinary acoustic albums like Now He Sings, Now He Sobs, but from his fusion band, Return to Forever (which appealed to Deadheads and future Phish "phans"). Avant-garde innovators like Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor played to a sophisticated niche in the 70s, which more or less followed them, impervious to trends. But mainstream players found a more hostile climate in the decade and were largely swept from the history books when Wynton and the Young Lions stormed the gates in the 80s.
The 69-year-old saxophonist and flautist Lew Tabackin, who played two riveting sets last Friday at Smalls, is an emblematic player of this lost generation—he came of age in the 70s and has waged his very successful career largely outside the jazz spotlight. I've known of Tabackin for a while—he was the longtime star soloist in his wife Toshiko Akiyoshi's big band—but I don't recall ever reading a review of one of his albums, seeing an article about him, or hearing another musician utter his name. In my ten years as a club-going jazz fan, last Friday was the first time I remember even entertaining the idea of seeing him.
And, boy, could he play! Out in front of a pick-up trio of Phil Palombi and Bill Goodwin, Tabackin absolutely killed, channeling Sonny Rollins on tenor and an angry Japanese forest sprite on flute. Lately the sax trio has been re-imagined as a collective of equals, which can be thrilling (as in the work of Fly) or frustratingly diffuse. Playing that kind of jazz, though, demands a close working relationship with one's fellow musicians, and Tabackin only hired Palombi and Goodwin for a two-night gig. He needed to dominate; and he displayed the chops and dexterity of thought to make it a success. Ethan Iverson recently cited Smalls as the New York establishment most nourishing of the "serious tradition of jazz as casual club music" and Tabackin's gig exemplified it: a bold improviser conquering standards and a few originals as capable accompanists backed him up. It's not the kind of music that starts revolutions; but it's what pumps the blood of jazz's everyday brilliance.
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).
The sax trio, that bare-frame vehicle of pure acoustic music, proved the small-group counterweight to the big bands. The form may have been gaining popularity in recent years (see Joshua Redman's Back East), but 2009 is when it solidified into that most precarious of journalistic inventions: the trend.
Marcus Strickland's Idiosyncrasies, Fly's Sky & Country, Darius Jones's Man'ish Boy, and JD Allen's Shine! placed high on many critics' lists, but it was Allen's mid-August residency at the Village Vanguard that was the sax trio's moment of elevation. When compared to the innovative Fly, Allen's band seemed conservative—rooted deeply in the Sonny Rollins tradition of muscular solos and tight, swinging rhythms—yet somehow it sounded fresh, rag-tag, unscripted—excellence with an after-hours immediacy and intimacy. That Allen's music resonated with forward-thinking jazz fans spoke not only to his skills as a player and a leader but also to the continued possibilities of the form. Unlike the trumpet-and-sax quintet, which often lends itself to harmonically intricate JALC revivalism (think Wynton's Black Codes from the Underground), the bare-bones sax trio resists pretension—an ideal attribute at a moment when young jazz musicians are trying to court indie rockers far more than supper clubbers.
From Tuesday through Sunday this coming week, JD Allen, bassist Gregg August, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey return to the Village Vanguard; six nights that, like the great room itself, should use the frame of history to find new ways to point forward.
