Inverted Garden

(Updated) Search & Restore's Spontaneous Construction

(Update: Tuba master Bob Stewart will be the fourth member of the Moran, Malaby, Baron quartet for this Friday's Spontaneous Construction.)

A commonly heard lament among the younger jazz crowd is that New York clubs are too expensive, too impersonal, too conservative. They’re designed for an older audience, not the kind of people who are used to paying $10 for SRO indie-rock shows. One of the reasons I loved the jazz scene in Buenos Aires is that it had a distinctly DIY vibe. Fogies in Buenos Aires listen to tango or classical (plenty of non-fogies do too); jazz there is a cutting-edge music and its entrepreneurs tend to be like the wild and crazy Cutaia brothers. One of my favorite venues, Corrientes 2014, was a music studio that occasionally hosted jazz concerts. It felt like listening to music in a friend’s living room.

Since moving back to New York in 2008, I’ve seen the city's DIY jazz scene bloom. The Douglass Street Music Collective in Gowanus is basically Corrientes 2014-New York, a studio rented by several musicians (including the powerhouse baritone saxman Josh Sinton) that doubles as a cheap, informal performance space. The Jazz Gallery has always given off the vibe of a slightly hidden, informal workshop. But the most resolutely “New York jazz” exponent of this kind of music presentation is Search & Restore’s new concert series: Spontaneous Construction. Here, S&R’s Adam Schatz has pulled off the ultimate coup: staging a cheap, midnight free-jazz series at the most commercial and least intimate of New York clubs, Blue Note.

The series is based around a proto-jazz concept: gather together four simpatico musicians who have never played together as a group and let them discover music on the bandstand. Many of the musicians who play have never met each other. It’s a hello, and a handshake, and then an hour of trying to make it work. It’s not a jam session—at jam sessions musicians play standards and try to cut one another—this is a dry run at creating a real group sound. Schatz curates these evenings around one musician and then expands the band from there. Sometimes the chosen musician will recruit the other three players on his or her own. Sometimes it’ll be left up to Schatz.

The night I went, the featured player, Sex Mob drummer Kenny Wollesen, had deferred band-creation duties to Search & Restore, and the resulting group was excellent: accompanying Wollesen were saxophonists Samir Zarif and Jon Irabagon and banjo player Brandon Seabrook. The virgin quartet played for an hour uninterrupted. Some of it didn’t mesh, and some moments—Zarif and Irabagon pulsing on their horns, Seabrook strumming static tension, and Wollesen defining the contours with his sticks—were sublime. After the set, Wollesen looked giddy and winded—like a guy who’d just finished a ten-mile run—and applauded us for sticking around through the madness. On our way out, Zarif—at the bar for a nightcap—thanked us for hanging out. That’s exactly what it was: hanging out with music. I was back in the living room of Corrientes 2014.

This Friday’s Spontaneous Construction is your chance to hang out with the stars. If it’s not the most promising lineup yet, it’s certainly the most famous—a meet-up of the percussive piano genius Jason Moran, the whirlwind tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby, the lyrical drummer Joey Baron, and a TBA bassist. (A great bassist will want to play with these three, guaranteed.) tuba master Bob Stewart!!! (If you weren't already excited about this gig, the inclusion of a tuba dynamo has to have you stoked.) I had other plans on Friday, but after writing these few grafs, I think I know where I need to be. See you there.

Note: A number of readers have asked me why my blogging has slowed to a trickle. One reason is my day job and other writing I've been doing. The other is a new blog project I've launched with two friends: Back At This Table, a semi-anonymous celebration and critique of Charlie Rose and his nonpareil nightly interview show. If I have any readers left, I hope some of you will check it out.

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

Seca and Lucas Cutaia: The Thelonious mystique

There are no jazz club owners in New York like Seca and Lucas Cutaia, the brother-proprietors of Thelonious. They're good businessmen; they're chummy with nearly every player on the scene; and they moonlight as rock musicians. One could be forgiven for initially mistaking them for too-hip-by-half DJ-impresarios, but the truth is that they're far more interested in the music than the scene, and they're fiercely committed to their club, not the search for the next hot spot.

The brothers hail from royal blood. Their father is Carlos Cutaia, a keyboardist who played in some of the seminal bands of Luis Alberto Spinetta and Charly Garcia—the Zeus and Poseidon of Argentine rock. Seca signs off emails by writing "money jungle." Lucas has hair that would make Sideshow Bob blush. Without further ado, the Brothers Cutaia.

Eric Benson: What was the original idea behind the club?

Seca Cutaia: We saw jazz as something more modern, more at the vanguard, more connected with young people. We wanted to take jazz out of that formal café-concert setting and make it something a little more nocturnal. For us, jazz wasn’t something historical.

Lucas Cutaia: It was never the idea to fill Thelonious with old people drinking expensive wine, listening to jazz.

Escuchando jaaazzzzz

EB: Did you find your audience immediately?

SC: No. It took a while. At the beginning, the situation was pretty hostile.

EB: What was so hostile?

SC: Having a place, keeping the place open. This isn’t something a lot of people like. It’s complicated to keep the place open all week with these kinds of shows.

LC: Maybe hostile isn’t the right word. The audiences weren’t hostile. The number of people in the audiences was hostile. We’d have a lot of Tuesdays with four or five people in the crowd.

SC: And we put up with it. We kept programming what we liked. To do that, there had to be a lot of love on our part. We’re musicians. If we were businessmen, we would have closed the place in two months.

LC: There’ve been some heavy moments. We had a problem with the buildings department and we had to survive without live music for eight months in 2004. We were just trying to invent anything so that we wouldn’t have to close the place.

EB: How did you do it?

SC: The club was open as a bar. The place has it’s attraction as a bar, but the heart and soul of the place is the music.

EB: Was that the most difficult time for the club?

LC: We had two eras that were truly difficult. We had that era, and there was the crisis in 2001. I remember during one show, we had two changes of president. That whole year after the crisis was a tough year to have anything open. And imagine, you’re starting with something that’s not that popular to begin with…

SC: It was a sacrifice on our part. Of course, we’re not talking about Jesus Christ here, but we needed to claw for everything.

EB: Guillermo and Pipi told me a lot of things in jazz changed during the time of the crisis...

LC: After a crisis, the only ones who remain are the ones who really want it. Playing jazz isn’t trendy. The guys who play jazz, really like jazz. The musicians who continued with their personal projects after the crisis, those were the guys who had a terrible desire to make music.

SC: I think the crisis forced us to be stronger. The only level that remained was the strongest, deepest foundation.

EB: The only ones who stayed were the madmen.

LC: The only ones who stayed were the madmen.

SC: And they’re the most attractive.

LC: This whole thing was madness for us too. So there’s a kind of affinity between us and the musicians. That’s something that distinguishes us from other places.

SC: Thelonious generated a kind of mystique in those years. There's still something magical about it.

EB: How would you define the mystique of Thelonious?

SC: The mystique is what’s generated between the place and the musicians.

LC: And the audience as well. There are three factors. But mystique also has to do with something irrational. It’s something uncommon, something that you’ll never see happen again.

EB: Guillermo told me that before Thelonious, Buenos Aires didn’t have a place where you could play consistently...

SC: There were other jazz clubs, like Jazz & Pop, but there weren’t a lot of places. There wasn’t really a space to generate this movement.

LC: When we started out, we had no experience at all with any of this. We couldn’t do anything with food, we didn’t know how to work a bar, and we didn’t have any model for what we wanted the place to be like.

SC: It was an experience from absolute zero.

LC: We didn’t know anything. Now you can talk about these twenty, thirty, forty groups, but back when we opened the bar, we didn’t even know who Guillermo Klein was. We didn’t know that Pipi was going to come here. We just had no idea.

EB: So why did you open Thelonious?

LC: Because we had a fantasy of what could exist. We knew that there were musicians, but it wasn’t like we were tight with them.

SC: I had played with Pipi, so there was some background, but we didn’t have a long-term vision for the place.

LC: It was madness.

EB: Was there a moment when you said, this is what we want Thelonious to sound like!

SC: For me, it was Hernan Merlo’s quintet with Ernesto Jodos.

LC: Yeah, Hernan Merlo’s quintet is when we said, that’s it!

SC: It was seeing that, hearing that, and then saying, this is spectacular! This is so modern.

LC: I think the first group that played here was a slide guitarist. He played on Wednesday. I don’t remember who played Thursday. And Friday, Merlo played.

EB: And what about the nights that generated the Thelonious mystique?

LC: There was one night when Guillermo Klein played with two bands, one over there on the staircase, and the other here [on the stage]. Guillermo Klein was at the bar conducting the two bands in a canon. He’d start one band and the other would respond. It was totally full. We had to take out all the tables. That was a mystical night.

This interview has been translated from the original Spanish. It was conducted on July 10, 2008 at Thelonious in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires.