Culture Creep

Blame Rolling Stone.

One of the attractive selling points of the iconic publication back when it was still a bi-folded newspaper based in San Francisco was that it "spoke to us" by combining contemporary popular music and cultural issues related to many young people and others who were exploring "alternatives."

That made a lot of sense when the non-musical issues were things like the way the FBI was targeting the Black Panther Party through its COINTELPRO program or the way actors like Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson were helping to subvert the dominant, conservative culture of Hollywood.

Now-- at least judging by Flip Music, the iPad-friendly music magazine included in Flipboard -- what we've come to is news of the stars of so-called reality TV shows like Real Atlanta Housewives and the obituaries of secondary actors like Leslie Nielsen. It's not like there aren't dozens of gossip publications -- print and digital -- where that kind of "news" can be found. Why put them in a vehicle that is designed to be about music?

Curse you, Jann Wenner.

2010 Long List

My full Top 10 list for 2010 will be published in the Village Voice again this year—in either the December 29 or January 5 issue—but here's what's in the running (at this point in the order in which I heard them):

Allison Miller – Boom Tic Boom
Paul Motian Trio – Lost In A Dream
Ralph Towner/Paolo Fresu – Chiaroscuro
Tomasz Stanko Quintet – Dark Eyes
John Geggie Trio + Donny McCaslin – Across The Sky
Jason Moran & The Bandwagon – Ten
Steve Coleman & Five Elements – Harvesting Semblances And Affinities
Rova & Nels Cline Singers – The Celestial Septet
Vijay Iyer – Solo
Mary Halvorson Quintet – Saturn Sings
Charles Lloyd Quartet – Mirror
Henry Threadgill Zooid – This Brings Us To, Volume 2
Ray Anderson/Marty Ehrlich Quartet – Hear You Say: Live In Willisau
Kurt Rosenwinkel & OJM – Our Secret World

So, four have to go. It's a particularly tough choice this year. All of these are quite worthy.

Improvising Online

It has been at least 25 years since the first time I heard someone opine that virtual concerts would soon supplement—if not actually replace—live music. We all know what's happened since then. Despite promising efforts—Michael Dorf's occasional live webcasts from his Knitting Factory in Lower Manhattan was one notable experiment—live simulcasts have largely been confined to the audio portion of the performances.

Adam Schatz, a 23-year-old promoter who runs a non-profit organization called Search & Restore is helping to change that. Search & Restore has posted a number of concert videos, and on November 29 Schatz is staging a fundraising event that promises to give fans of improvised music around the world a chance to witness some of the genre's leading performers.

Beginning at 10 p.m. Eastern time, Search & Restore's global webcast will feature 20 artists in continuous improvisation—passing the baton through a series of round-robin duets set in random order.

Featured in the webcast will be:

Andy Milne
DJ Logic
Ben Allison
Steven Bernstein
Ralph Alessi
Jason Lindner
Tim Lefebvre
Reid Anderson
Dan Weiss
Mark Guiliana
Roswell Rudd
Matt Wilson
Avishai Cohen (trumpet)
Theo Bleckmann
Henry Grimes
Andrew D'Angelo
Dave Binney

And others to be announced.

The webcast can be found here.

Creating A Jazz Hub

Veteran jazz publicist Don Lucoff has just announced the official launch of the Jazz Forward Coalition, a "global and unified voice for jazz." Joining Lucoff in developing the organization have been Michael Ricci, founder/owner of AllAboutJazz.com, Peter Gordon of Thirsty Ear Recordings, Martin Ashby of MCG Jazz, and Jeff Myers of THIS IS RED Agency. Here's the group's news release.

Jazz is as vital as ever, with vibrant local scenes, active educators and thousands of jazz recordings released each year. However, the jazz community lacks a central organization to coordinate and maximize its vast resources, and must take a mainstream new media approach through social and professional networking. The Jazz Forward Coalition (JFC) was formed by a consortium of industry leaders who seek to raise jazz's profile by enhancing its vitality and cultural relevance. The organization's leadership group includes: Peter Gordon (Thirsty Ear Recordings), Michael Ricci (All About Jazz), Marty Ashby (MCG Jazz), Don Lucoff (DL Media) and Jeff Myers (THIS IS RED Agency).

JFC plans to utilize existing and emerging technologies in order to sustain growth and expose jazz to an under-served community. The goals of the organization include creating a central hub for the jazz industry, a global brand for jazz, and a leadership voice for the jazz community. They plan to reach these goals through grants, fundraising efforts, music industry partnerships and with an online presence.

The work of the JFC will be focused on four levels: connectivity via a business-to-business website; a global voice that speaks both within the community and outside; a knowledge base library of tools bringing marketplace solutions to its membership base; and strategic partnerships to help with mainstream market penetration and economic viability.

JFC will create an interactive website that will allow jazz professionals to network, publish and exchange information and access marketplace tools. An online newsletter, "Business of Jazz," has already been developed to keep jazz professionals up-to-date on industry news and trends.

Radio Days

Thirty-two-year-old nostalgia rules my brain this week, in anticipation of Saturday's reunion for alumni of CKCU-FM and the blast of publicity surrounding next week's release of Bruce Springsteen's re-packaging of one of my seminal albums, Darkness On The Edge Of Town.

The fall of 1978 was a turning point for me. Out of school for a year, I'd put in nine months of work at a small arts magazine, learning the magazine business from the ground up, and had landed my first serious job in journalism (as dedicated as I was to the arts magazine, it was hard to view those nine months as anything more than a paid apprenticeship). At the end of the summer I got a chance to attend the reunion of The Allman Brothers Band in Macon, Georgia, which inspired what I considered my first substantial piece of music writing, and led to me selling a small article to Rolling Stone. In the fall, I began volunteering at CKCU-FM—landing several on-air shows that dominated my life for the next several years. This was heady stuff; it seemed that it might actually be possible to make some kind of living in arts journalism.

But, enough about me. What really has my thoughts occupied is how radio seems to have failed to keep pace with developments in jazz.

A casual look at the state of jazz in the late '70s/early '80s makes it appear that it was a relatively fallow time. Fusion had burned out and simultaneously turned in on itself and outward toward smooth jazz. The young Marsalis brothers were about to move out of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers and launch the neo-conservative movement that would dominate the music for 20 years.

That much was true, but bubbling beneath the surface was a tremendous amount of great—albeit non-commercial—music by people like Henry Threadgill (as the leader of the trio Air), Arthur Blythe, David Murray, James Blood Ulmer and Ronald Shannon Jackson. What's more, exciting new bands like the Lounge Lizards and The Contortions were using elements of improvised music, and artists like Neneh Cherry were bursting out with dance hits that melded easily into playlists alongside Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis.

At CKCU and other radio stations these sounds were swept up and intermingled with smart pop bands like The Jam, Public Image Ltd., and DEVO.

Is that same thing happening today with artists like Vijay Iyer, Jason Moran, Steve Coleman and Mary Halvorson? If it is, I'm not hearing it.

I'm trying not to let my 30-plus years of distance affect my thinking, and simultaneously hoping there's some young broadcaster out there who is mixing from Iyer into MIA, or from Lil' Wayne into Moran.

Any thoughts?

Journalists On The Bandstand

In Ottawa, November will be a significant month for two of the city's best-known musicians—both of whom also happen to be well-known journalists.

On November 12 at the National Arts Centre Fourth Stage, the Tim Murray Quintet—featuring trumpeter Charley Gordon, longtime newspaper columnist and editor—will be holding its 50th anniversary concert.

Pianist Murray, Gordon, trombonist Jerry Heath, bassist Sol Gunner and drummer John Sullivan started playing together in Kingston in 1960, at a house four of them shared while attending Queen's University. They also shared an interest in the hard bop popularized by Art Blakey and Horace Silver, and in the West Coast sound of Gerry Mulligan and others.

The band dispersed in the early '60s, but reunited—minus Sullivan—for several gigs in the '80s and '90s. In 2000, veteran drummer Scott Warren joined the ensemble. The NAC anniversary show will be partly a band retrospective, but several new original compositions will also be included.

On November 27 at Cafe Paradiso, pianist, newspaper editor and blogger Peter Hum will officially launch his long-awaited debut CD, A Boy's Journey.

An astute jazz critic (he and I shared reviewing duties at The Ottawa Citizen for a decade) Hum has long had his performing career on a slow boil while he raised a family and developed his journalism career. Backed by a superb band—saxophonists Nathan Cepelinski and Kenji Omae, bassist Alec Walkington and drummer Ted Warren—he recorded an album of highly lyrical original compositions after playing them in public a couple of years ago. Those who witnessed that show have been anticipating the eventual CD.

Omae, who lives in South Korea, won't be at the launch, but he'll be replaced by another of Hum's longtime collaborators, guitarist Mike Rud.

Wow Factor

It's getting to be that time of year again, and I've been weighing the options for the annual top 10 CD list. Some of the usual suspects—Vijay Iyer, Mary Halvorson, Jason Moran—are back in serious contention again this year.

I'm not sure it will have the staying power to crack the top 10, but one recording that has impressed me lately is Alexander McCabe's Quiz, which I recently spent a lot of time with for an upcoming DownBeat review. What I do know at this point is that if I was nominating a single track of the year McCabe's version of "Good Morning Heartache" would be at the top of the list. Wow! A stunning performance, very much in the vein of mid-period Coltrane without being slavish to Trane's sound (for one thing, McCabe plays alto, not tenor).

McCabe might not be a name you know. He's a Boston native who's in his late 40s, but he's only done a couple of previous recordings under his own name. Quiz is definitely worth a listen, and "Good Morning Heartache" will knock you out if you're a fan of Crescent, "My Favorite Things" or "Afro-Blue."

Virtual Space

The Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation announced its latest Jazz.NEXT grants—amounting to $462,350—on October 13, and among grants to the Berklee College of Music, trumpeter Dave Douglas and the Jazz Journalists Association, one that caught my imagination was a $93,600 grant to New York City's Symphony Space.

Located on the Upper West Side, Symphony Space has always struck me as a forward-looking venue with a very broad artistic mandate. I have particularly fond memories of the 12 hours I spent there experiencing the free Wall-to-Wall Miles Davis performances about a decade ago.

Through its Jazz.NEXT support, Symphony Space will develop The Symph App, a smart phone application that will allow people who own an iPhone, iPad, Android or Google TV to stream jazz performances. An open-source app, The Symph App will also be made available to musicians, other venues and the jazz community at large for their use. The app is scheduled to launch next spring, when at least 34 jazz events and discussions will be made available.

Also mentioned in the grant announcement is the fact that Symphony Space will be releasing more than 100 live recordings, including jazz.

Pork Pie Delight

Despite the jazz tradition of 'sitting in', it's remarkable how seldom I've actually seen someone appear unannounced with a headline act and get the feeling that I'm witnessing something unrehearsed and fully in the moment.

I was having mixed feelings at last night's concert by The Mingus Dynasty at the Quebec City jazz festival—aside from a spirited take of "Ysabel's Table Dance," the band had seemed a bit listless, with a high number of onstage conferences and on-the-fly arrangement coaching. Then, in the second half of the show, leader Craig Handy introduced special guest Kurt Elling—who headlines the festival tonight.

Wearing jeans instead of his de rigueur slick suit, Elling blew the room apart with his version of Mingus' "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat," encouraging tenor saxophonist Seamus Blake to roll out the kind of multi-tiered, lyrical solo that made me fall for his playing when I first heard him in the early '90s. Elling was sweating, Blake was burning, the whole band playing like Mingus himself was kicking their behinds.

It was one of those moments when all you can do is tell your friends, You had to be there.

Jazz On The River

The Saint Lawrence, not the Mississippi.

In an era when many jazz festivals are struggling to survive, it's great to see one growing and extending the North America festival season into October—in the company of the San Francisco Jazz Festival.

Next week, I'll be attending the Quebec City Jazz Festival, which is headquartered at the city's Largo Resto-Club.

The lineup is an impressive one for a festival in just its fourth year, and includes: Charles Lloyd Quartet, Ron Carter Trio, Mingus Dynasty, Kurt Elling and the John Abercrombie Quartet (with Mark Feldman, Joey Baron and Thomas Morgan). In addition, the festival has a large assortment of some of Quebec's best musicians, including: Évidence—a trio I'll put up against any in New York City; Jean-Pierre Zanella; Hommes de Jazz; Jazzlab; Normand Guilbeault Ensemble; François Bourassa and Jeanne Rochette; Trio Janis Steprans; and Trio Michel Côté.

Guelph Wrap-Up

So, now it comes back to me. In the three years since I've attended the Guelph Jazz Festival—which seems to be the consensus choice among my fellow jazz critics as the best-kept-secret great festival in North America—I've forgotten how exhausting the pace is here. I began with good intentions to blog-if-not-Twitter regularly, but the combination of inconsistent Internet connections and constant musical and social stimuli derailed that plan. Now, comfortably installed in the hotel bar, where the WiFi is good and the Japanese beer very cold, I'm in a reflective mood.

First the good—and bear in mind that all will be reviewed in depth (and minus the slight Sapporo buzz) in a forthcoming issue of DownBeat: this morning's concert with Marc Ribot, Henry Grimes and Chad Taylor was the transcendent uplift I was looking for this weekend. Damn! Ribot is a terrific guitarist. No surprise, but it bears repeating. I love his ideas and his tonal choices. I'm looking forward to digging into his new solo recording for a Signal To Noise review when I get home. The same venue—a small, sharply raked, theatre at Guelph's beautiful River Run Centre—was also the site of excellent performances by Marilyns Crispell (solo) and Lerner (with her trio). I'd give the slight edge to Lerner, if only because her piano work with her trio is slightly more integrated than that of Crispell, who still seems to be wavering between the roiling waves of sound that many of us grew to love when we first encountered her and the more lyrical material she has favoured lately. This is to take nothing away from either of these approaches—I love both—but they do occasionally seem at odds.

Much less compelling was a disastrous afternoon outing by the Ratchet Orchestra, which despite boasting some of the best players in Quebec sounded like a train wreck that wouldn't stop.

In the coulda-been/shoulda-been column, a late-night performance by Jane Bunnett, Grimes and Andrew Cyrille leads. Despite Bunnett's best efforts, Grimes and—to a lesser extent—Cyrille weren't compelled to communicate broadly. Too bad, because one gets to hear Bunnett in this kind of setting too seldom. I just kept reflecting on how utterly fearless she is, and how great her early recordings with Don Pullen were. Go, Jane! More gigs like this.

Follow Me On Ping

Apple introduced its new social networking for music, Ping, yesterday. If you want to see what I'm listening to, you can follow me.

Jazz's Shoulder Season

As longtime readers know, I've always been a fan of the Guelph Jazz Festival—not just for its adventurous programming and combination of academic papers and concerts, but because it extends the festival season past Labour Day. This year, the festival is paying tribute to ECM Records, with concerts by Dino Saluzzi & Anja Lechner, Marilyn Crispell and Charles Lloyd, and co-ordinating a 'nuit blanche' event that promises to tie in events throughout the small college town.

This year, the season is extending even further for me, with an assignment from DownBeat to report on the fourth annual Quebec City Jazz Festival. I haven't seen the full lineup yet, but headliners include Charles Lloyd (this time fronting his marvellous quartet with Jason Moran), Ron Carter, Kurt Elling and the Mingus Dynasty.

I'll be blogging from both festivals.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

In case you're wondering what Jazz Chronicles has been up to this summer, the photo says it all. I became a grandfather for the first time on August 20, and I've been soaking in good family times in recent weeks.

Jazz Chronicles will return shortly. Right now, I've got my hands full.

Through The Spyglass

Treasure Island – the fifth album released by pianist Keith Jarrett's so-called American Quartet – begins in what sounds like the middle of a performance, the band already churning on Jarrett's "The Rich (And The Poor)." Driven by Charlie Haden's bass, it's a slow groove that sounds like some of the extended vamps improvised during his solo concerts of the time. Recorded on the final two days of February 1974, Treasure Island actually features an expanded band, with guitarist Sam Brown on two pieces and percussionists Danny Johnson and Guilherme Franco throughout. Those added percussionists are well used, too, as the band explores some funky movements – making Treasure Island one of the more exuberant recordings in the band's catalogue.

On "The Rich (And The Poor)" the percussionists balance the weighty theme and Jarrett's gospel-inflected piano trills with what sound like a bicycle bell and a child's metallic noise-maker. On "Fullsuvollivus (Fools Of All Of Us)" Johnson and Franco stir up a cacophonous backdrop to the quartet's cascading improvisations. Jarrett's piano pulses with energy, Redman reels out a declaratory statement. What struck many listeners at the time—and what remains so attractive about the performance now—is that this was clearly music with American roots, abstracted but not obscured. There is no mistaking the relationship to what the Art Ensemble of Chicago had been doing a decade earlier, and yet Jarrett's take sounds like it is coming at the source material from a classical perspective.

Another element that makes Treasure Island compelling is the accessibility of the material. On the title song, Brown and Jarrett trade the lead on the bright, upbeat melody—their tones and attacks almost indistinguishable from one another, while the theme of "Introduction/Yaqui Indian Folk Song" is almost pastural. "Le Mistral" has a strong pulse running through it, and Jarrett's playing on "Death And The Flower" is rhapsodic. Only "Angles," with its flatulent bass solo, brawling tenor and Ornette-informed head strides outside the comfort zone that buyers of The Köln Concert might be happy living in.

From the somewhat iconic photographs of Jarrett to the detailed map work in the ornate cover art, Treasure Island stands as the least thorny, dare-I-say-it, most commercial release by the American Quartet. Little wonder, then, that the album was reviewed in Rolling Stone and other mainstream music publications of the time, and remains an ideal entry point to the band for those who are familiar with the latter-day Jarrett.

Cryptography

Here in Ottawa, you would be challenged to find a bigger civic booster than Ken Gray, a columnist, editorial writer and blogger for The Ottawa Citizen, a daily newspaper that was also my home as a columnist for 10 years. To his credit, Gray is always looking for ways that Canada's capital city could expand its horizons—methods that include playing host to major international sporting events and paying attention to urban theorist Richard Florida.

Gray is also a jazz fan, and he has taken to using his summer vacation days to immerse himself in the music at the TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival. This week, he's back at work and reflecting on 11 days spent inside the "Gold Tent"—the white vinyl enclosure that sits to the left of the festival's main stage in Confederation Park (that's it over my left shoulder in the YouTube video posted below). He focuses on the non-jazz activities inside what he calls a "crypt," which include people BlackBerry surfing, gourmet sandwich eating and chatting—anything but responding to the exhortations of Kenny Garrett to get up and dance.

I've spent my own time inside the "crypt"—both as a paying customer before being employed by the festival as a media consultant and during brief moments on the job—and can attest to Gray's observations that the people in there sometimes seem less interested in what's happening on the stage than in the latest memo their boss has emailed to them. But, where Gray is off base in his efforts to make Ottawans seem like hicks who need to get with the program and act like they live in a world-class city is in believing that concert-goers in other cities act differently. I've seen the same types of behaviour at jazz festivals in San Francisco, Vancouver, Montreal and, yes, New York City. In Spain, I've seen audience members at jazz concerts more excited by the pintxos they buy between acts than headline performances.

One of the best things about festivals is that they welcome all comers. During my 24 years observing Ottawa's jazz festival I've seen the same people over and over. Some of them bring a book to every concert. Some of them treat the concerts like background music as they unpack picnic baskets and sip wine from plastic cups. Some of them seem to lack any grace whatsoever (to the woman who held a loud conversation on her cellphone during the percussion workshop last week, may your BlackBerry be stolen). At least they are there, and hopefully repeated exposure will improve their appreciation.

Jazz and Lifelong Learning

Outside my office at the Ottawa jazz festival, I answered a few questions for a reporter about the importance of music education.

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A Few High Notes To Finish

The 30th edition of the TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival wrapped up last night, ending with an exhilarating performance by Tomasz Stanko's quintet—which might well have garnered many people's nomination for best indoor performance, had it not been for the stunning show that trumpeter Christian Scott gave in the same venue two hours before.

Exposing listeners to relative newcomers like Scott at the same time as giving them a rare opportunity to experience masters like Stanko is what the festival does best. This year, it also did a good job at giving large outdoor audiences what they wanted: a chance to be uplifted by party music from the likes of Smokey Robinson, Kenny Garrett and John Scofield. So, it was appropriate that a large crowd was still shaking it in Confederation Park to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings in the moments after Stanko had finished indoors.

As usual, The Ottawa Citizen's Peter Hum has written a thorough overview of the festival as he saw it.

Metal Machine Improv

I played hooky from Ottawa's jazz festival last night to head down the road two hours to Montreal to catch the trio of Lou Reed, John Zorn and Laurie Anderson. It promised to be entertaining; it was that in more ways than one.

What began as a capacity audience was reduced by about 20 percent after the first, long piece—which was greeted by loud, sustained booing, catcalls and angry expletives all around me. Those who were clapping seemed to be momentarily overwhelmed.

"Play some music," yelled someone behind me and to my left.

"If you don't think this is music then get the fuck out of here," shouted Zorn, dismissing the booers with both arms.

What were these 500 or so disgruntled people expecting? Versions of "Sweet Jane" or "Walk On The Wild Side?" Perhaps an electronic rendering of Zorn's later, peaceful film music? Maybe for $100 and up they were expecting a show that met each and every one of their individual wishes.

What they received were huge slabs of sound, led mostly by Reed's heavily processed guitar with Zorn's manic, overblown alto roaring over top. Anderson acted mostly as the tiller person, steering this massive craft with slashes and filigrees. At its most noisy, it resembled Metal Machine Music meets Albert Ayler, which was stimulating, but there were long swatches of great beauty, as well.

After a main set of about 63 minutes, and a generous encore, the musicians stood and waved to prolonged cheers, acknowledging those who had remained open enough to see where the journey went.

Early This Morning

Everyone knew last night's jam session at the 2010 TD Ottawa International Jazz Festival had the potential to go nuclear, what with Joe Lovano, Roy Hargrove, Matt Wilson and Manu Katché in town with their respective bands.

The hang at the bar—with Wilson, Lovano, Cuong Vu and others—was terrific, but what was happening on the bandstand was something else again. I left before Lovano sat in, but my friend Peter Hum captured it all here.