Inverted Garden

Undead: The festival and this blog

The Undead Jazzfest opens tonight, and I'm taking the opportunity to relaunch this—let's face it—pretty much deceased blog of mine. For those who don't know the basics, here's my NYMag Undead blurb:

"What began last year as a cri de coeur against the jazz-is-dead grumblers has grown into the Walt Whitman of New York festivals: a celebration of the multitudes. Featuring 50-plus bands, including those of pianist Gerald Clayton, saxophonist Darius Jones, and guitarist Dave Fiuczynski, the Undead takes place over four nights in Greenwich Village, Gowanus, and Williamsburg, and should leave no doubt about the music’s vitality."

I've also provided NYMag readers with five picks for great shows. Three of them, it should be noted, are tonight.

Check out Undead's website for the full schedule. No one show (or five shows) is the point; The bounty of music and enthusiasm is the point. And to that end, Adam Schatz, the festival's young and talented presenter, has cut this trailer with a second of music for every one of the Undead's bands:

 

I'll see you there tonight.

All-Night Session: Abrams, Moran, City Winery Jam

Other cities may have more tightly knit jazz communities (Peter Margasak and Andrey Henkin have made pitches for the vitality of Chicago), but none come close to approaching the size and diversity of the New York scene. On any given night, there are around two dozen jazz shows in the city, and it's not uncommon that I see two or three or ten that I want to check out. From the time I started going to clubs, I've dreamed of pulling off a "jazz marathon"—catch the early set here, move on to the late set there, and swing by somewhere else for the early morning jam.

Now, conditioned by the ready-made marathon of the Undead Jazzfest (five shows in three venues in four-and-a-half hours), I'm finally undertaking the all-night jazz endurance challenge. I'll be starting at 7 at the Abrons Arts Center for Muhal Richard Abrams playing solo piano, move on to Jason Moran, Mary Halvorson, and Ron Miles's 9:30 Jazz Standard set, and finish off the evening at City Winery for the CareFusion Herbie Hancock–tribute jam. I'll plan on Tweeting selected observations throughout the evening (although my BlackBerry has been temperamental of late, so no guarantees). A 16-year-old's dream finally realized by a 25-year-old with a free night...

Postmortem: Undead Jazzfest

The Undead Jazzfest is safely back in its grave. The CareFusion and Vision festivals are in full-swing, and Undead co-organizer Adam Schatz is skipping town for a cross-country tour with his "zombie jazz" band Father Figures. (Catch their album release show on June 30th at 45 Bleecker.) So it's a little late for a full review, but nevertheless, I wanted to note a few observations for internet posterity.

Ben Ratliff wrote in his Undead recap that perhaps one of every six festival goers was a musician. That estimate strikes me as plausible. During the Tim Berne/Dave King/Craig Taborn set at Kenny's Castaways on Sunday, cheers and jeers kept cracking the band's quiet interplay. This kind of thing happens from time to time at New York City jazz clubs—a woman on a bender wanders in off the street, a few obnoxious tourists chatter loudly through a show—but at the Undead, the offenders were musicians gathered in the bar's front room to watch Game 5 of the Celtics-Lakers Final. The disruption was unfortunate—Berne/King/Taborn's sound was spacey and mellow and would have been better served by a silent atmosphere—but it was also strangely wonderful—the club transformed into a big jazz hangout, with some cats playing in the living room and others catching a game in the kitchen. (Had the game been played two hours earlier, it would have actually been a perfect complement to the loud and fast Endangered Blood.)

This is all to say that while the music at Undead was mostly excellent, it wasn't entirely the point. I heard Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Berne/King/Taborn, and the John Hollenbeck Large Ensemble. Of these, Ideal Bread, Endangered Blood, and Steve Coleman were spectacular (Ideal Bread's cover of Steve Lacy's "The Dumps" was a highlight); the Berne/King/Taborn gig never quite came together; and Hollenbeck's ensemble impressed me but didn't move me—they've probably had much better days.

What I'll remember more than the very good musical moments was the thrill of the crowd—no small thing for a fan accustomed to watching jazz alone as one of the youngest members of a respectful but uninspired audience. As I waited for the doors of (Le) Poisson Rouge to open for the Hollenbeck show, a guy next to me remarked that we were in the longest line he'd ever seen for a jazz show. "Who's playing, Herbie Hancock?" he joked. And he was right. The line snaked around the corner, and it was after 10 on a Sunday night with a well-known but hardly "primetime" band on the bill. It brought to mind a story my friend Greg Kress once relayed to me. Year back, Greg was catching a Jimmy Cobb show at Smalls, and as he entered the nearly vacant club a Frenchmen approached him. "Can you believe this? It's Jimmy Cobb!" The Frenchman had said. "In France, there would have been a riot to get in!"

True to form, I did hear plenty of foreign voices in the crowd, but even if a sixth of the audience were in-the-know Europeans, who were the two-thirds of the over 1600 audience members who weren't musicians or tourists? I haven't a clue, but I do know that Schatz and co-organizer Brice Rosenbloom staged a powerful protest—maybe the most powerful ever—against that chronic, noxious, and hopefully passing phrase "jazz is dead."

Bonus: Catch all of the (Le) Poisson Rouge sets on WNYC's website.

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