Night After Night

Illuminating Downtown's Dark Years.

Charles Gayle in 'Rising Tones Cross'

Jazziz
July 1999

The early 1980s were a period of transition for the avant-garde fringe in New York. The loft scene – the days in which Ornette Coleman's hom on Prince Street and Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea provided workshops for experimenters to develop their art –was drawing to a close, and the arrival of the Knitting Factory and its explosive impact on the Downtown scene was still a few years away, it fell to the artists themselves to create new opportunities.

As chronicled in Ebba Jahn's 1984 [sic – 1985, actually] documentary, Rising Tones Cross (just released on video), two such motivated visionaries were bassist William Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson. The film centers around the Sound Unity Festival, a precursor to the couple's current Lower East Side bash, the now four-year-old Vision Festival.

It was German bassist Peter Kowald, on an extended sojourn in New York that included a hefty formative role in Sound Unity, who convinced Jahn to make a film about the upstart festival. "It was clear to me that I wanted to have a German protagonist and an American protagonist," Jahn says. Her friend Kowald was the German of choice, naturally, but America's representative had yet to be confirmed. "Originally, I had thought of Ornette Coleman. But on the day I arrived, first thing in the morning I met Charles Gayle, the most un-famous saxophonist at the time in New York City." That meeting, combined with a choice encounter with a cameraman who was working on Shirley Clark's Coleman documentary, Made in America, led Jahn to shift her focus "from the most famous avant-garde saxophonist to the most un-famous."

Instead of simply a compilation of festival footage – though performances by musicians like Jemeel Moondoc, Don Cherry, and Peter Brötzmann abound in the film – Rising Tones Cross was intended to be a tool for music education. "For many people who saw the film in Germany, it was the first time they ever heard this type of music," she says. "They said in the beginning they had difficulty. But after a while, they could, all of a sudden, hear it 'click' in their ears, and something opened up."

To help facilitate this reaction, Jahn put the most difficult music at the end of the film, easing the audience into it gradually. She also included a number of scenes intended to dispel common myths about free jazz. For example, when Brötzmann's strapping 11-piece ensemble – boasting a tenor phalanx comprised of the leader, Gayle, David S. Ware, and Frank Wright – seems to be blowing chaotically onstage, Jahn's camera pans across Brötzmann's diagrammatic score to reveal an extraordinary amount of careful detail, planning, and scripting – the architecture girding the maelstrom.

And having overcome an initial distrust and some reluctance to take part in the film, the enigmatic Gayle is revealed to be affable, erudite, and quite well-versed in jazz history, a far cry from his dark public persona and stage presence. "He was perceived as a philosopher in Germany," says Jahn.

Now that the film is available on video – through Jahn's Website (http://members.aol.com/FilmPals/store.htm) and through NorthCountry Distribution – Jahn looks forward to her film reaching new viewers. "I would like it to be in colleges," she says, "where people learn about jazz. I think it's a good tool for people wanting to learn a little bit about this music. Nobody else has made a film about this music. And at the end of the century, the time is probably right for it."

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The Vision Festival, now in its 18th season, will be held June 12-16 at Roulette. Rising Tones Cross was issued on DVD by the FMP label in 2005; I have no idea whether it's still available, but you can watch the first 26 minutes of it here. Below, the Peter Brötzmann scene I described in the article, mistakenly labeled as the Vision Festival (which was launched in 1996).

Order Up… Burnt CDs for Five.

John Shiurba

Jazziz
May 1999

Bay Area guitarist and free-improvisor John Shiurba hit upon the idea of his new Limited Sedition record label soon after buying a CD burner last year: "I just wanted to put out CDs of my music, and music that I think is worthy," he explains. "But the idea of shopping tapes of this kind of music to labels seemed like a dead end. When the CD writer opened the door to small editions, it just occurred to me that here was the perfect medium for improvised music. If you have an audience of five people, then you can make five CDs and not have a closet full of aluminum coasters."

Free improvisation and the recording industry have endured a troubled union from the beginning. Improvisation is a fleeting mode of musical communication, felt by many to exist purely in the moment of creation, and to be resistant to documentation. And the audience for the music is so comparatively small that it renders recording improv too costly for most record companies, anyway.

But the falling cost of home-recording technologies has enabled less marketable musicians to document their work and to sell it to enthusiasts in a creative and cost-effective way. Shiurba's Limited Sedition (www.sfo.com/~shiurba/sedition.html), for instance, documents his own music and that of his fellow Bay Area improvisors with extremely limited-edition runs on recordable CD (or CD-R).

Such a D.I.Y. approach is not without precedent. In 1973, British guitarist Derek Bailey released a series of four solo-guitar recordings on reel-to-reel tape, making individual custom copies to order. (These rare recordings were issued on CD as Incus Taps on the Organ of Corti label in 1996.) But Shiurba is among the first to devote an entire record label of strictly limited, numbered editions of well under 100 copies that will never be re-pressed. He has released eight hand-designed recordings since founding Limited Sedition last July. His production costs average around four dollars per disc. This, coupled with grassroots promotion via the Internet, helps him turn modest profits into new recordings quickly in order to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the music and its creators.

Already, Shiurba is not alone. Saxophonist David Gross has begun to release limited-edition CD-Rs of music recorded live at the Zeitgeist Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts on his Tautology label (members.aol.com/Tautology3). And Splatter Trio percussionist Gino Robair, who runs the more conventional Rastascan label (www.rastascan.com), has taken the notion a step further, creating individual "private concert" releases on CD-R. "They're more than just a live improv," Robair explains. "I do a bit of digital hacking on the material before burning a CD-R. They're one of a kind, and I've made them to order. I think this is the way that many improvisors will be working very soon."

Beyond the obvious benefit of low overhead, this approach to recording allows an artist to explore even the most unlikely creative impulse. Saxophonist Dan Plonsey gave Shiurba a whimsical solo-oboe recording made on the day he purchased the instrument. And Robair, who has played on two Limited Sedition releases and compiled a disc of Splatter Trio rarities for the label as well, has plans for an album of music performed entirely on…Styrofoam? "A handful of Styrofoam and a bow and that's it," says Robair. "You can see why we need a label like Limited Sedition."

Kenny Kirkland's Unanswered Promise.

Kenny Kirkland

 

Jazziz
February 1999

Word leaked over the Internet before any official sources were heard. But in the end, the stories were the same: Pianist Kenny Kirkland was found dead in his Queens home on Friday, November 13. He was 43. At press time, no apparent cause of death was revealed.*

Kirkland came of age in the 1980s in Wynton Marsalis' band. He played on Marsalis's first four albums, up through the electrifying Black Codes from the Underground, an album that powerfully evokes the storm with which Marsalis and his bandmates took the jazz world. Black Codes set the popular standard for mainstream jazz in the mid-’80s, and Kirkland's contributions as pianist and composer were sizable and eloquent.

"When I first got to Juilliard," Marsalis remembers, "vibraphonist Mark Sherman played these really difficult chords for me, these complex bi-tonal chords. I was about 17 at the time. He said, 'You dig these chords? These are Kirkland's chords. You've got to hear Kirkland.' So when I met Kenny later, I already knew I wanted to play with him. We would rehearse at his house. He had great ears, he could really hear. And he had a truly deep grasp of theoretical knowledge, a great sense of harmony, a sophisticated sense of rhythm. You only had to play something for him one time and he got it right away. And he was the best soloist in the band; each note had a vector, its own direction, all leading somewhere, and everything swinging. We learned a lot from him, my brother and I."

Kirkland recorded and toured with Branford Marsalis throughout the ’80s. When the saxophonist joined Sting for his Dream of the Blue Turtles album in 1985, Kirkland accompanied him and went on to continue working with Sting for some eight years and four further albums.

Kirkland made only one album as a leader, an eponymously titled release for GRP in 1991. It was as a versatile and dependable sideman that he left his mark on music. When Branford became musical director of the Tonight Show in 1992, Kirkland joined the band. In 1997, he returned to Branford's quartet (with drummer Jeff Watts and bassist Eric Revis) for well-received live performances and for the recording of Branford's next album, due for release in March.**

Tonight Show bandmate and current musical director Kevin Eubanks summed up the esteem in which Kirkland was held by his peers: "In my heart, I've always felt that Kenny Kirkland really embodied the essence of a generation of musicians, bridging the past and the future while taking no bows. He always left us wanting more."

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My first article for Jazziz, from 1999. Not the most pleasant subject with which to start a new career path, but a serious assignment – and the only time to date that I've interviewed Wynton Marsalis. The official cause of Kenny Kirkland's death was congestive heart failure, though some obituaries reported that drug paraphernalia was found when his body was discovered. Requiem, the final Branford Marsalis album to feature Kirkland, came out in March 1999.

Swing shift.

Sometimes the road ahead is simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time…and knowing the right people. Back in the spring of 2000, with my illustrious public-relations career at an impasse after BMG Classics eliminated almost everyone in the department, I got an interesting offer from Larry Blumenfeld, then the editor in chief of Jazziz magazine.

Jazziz was and is based in Palm Beach County, Florida, but Larry worked from New York City, coordinating his labor with another editor, R. Dante Sawyer, down at the home office. The magazine, which started out as a smooth-jazz-friendly vehicle and always retained a place for commercial sounds, flourished under Blumenfeld and Sawyer. Major articles on artists like John Zorn, David S. Ware and Dave Douglas became newly prominent under their watch.

The reason Larry approached me in 2000 was that Dante was leaving Jazziz, en route to India and a spiritual trek. Would I be interested in taking on his position as associate editor of Jazziz, with the understanding that Larry himself would be leaving the company in four months' time?

The answer, of course, was yes. Not just any magazine editor would have taken a former publicist on board as an editor. But Larry, who'd done P.R. work himself in the past, had been assigning me freelance pieces for some years by the time he hired me outright, and trusted my objectivity. Having been laid off by BMG, I was unemployed only for a single weekend.

This, then, was my bridge back to journalism, from which I'd stepped away in 1993 for the sole reason of finding my way to and in New York City. Larry was a terrific colleague and guide, and I got to work with some extraordinary writers: among them Neil Tesser, Steve Dollar, Harvey Pekar, Ed Hazell, Steve Futterman, Lee Jeske and a new face on the scene, Lara Pellegrinelli.

Larry reasoned that when his time to depart arrived, Jazziz might invite me to stay on and perhaps even replace him. An invitation like that did actually come, with the stipulation that I'd have to relocate to Florida to take it. The notion was tempting, but I'd worked far too long and hard to get to New York in the first place; leaving after seven years didn't feel like a viable option. Happily, Billboard magazine came calling, and with it, a return to classical music after a five-year hiatus.

I bring all of this up not only as a wallow in pleasant nostalgia, but also because Lara and I are digging through piles of Jazziz back issues retrieved from an emptied-out storage unit, and I'm about to start posting some of my old odds and ends here for safe keeping and convenient retrieval.

Thanks for everything, Larry. And hey, does anyone know what became of Dante?

Ken Thomson goes bang.

Ken Thomson, by James Hirschfeld

Ken Thomson and I first crossed paths back in 1997, when I was the publicist for the Knitting Factory and its first-annual [sic] Texaco Jazz Festival (formerly What Is Jazz?), and he was part of an intrepid team broadcasting multiple events for Columbia University's invaluable radio station, WKCR-FM.

Since then, I've eagerly and admiringly followed Ken's exploits as the force-of-nature reedist who fronts avant-skronk jazz quartet Gutbucket; in the new-music all-star aggregate Signal; with the composerly chamber-jazz combo slow/fast; and in the riotous Bang on a Can street band Asphalt Orchestra – the last of which you'll see tearing up the pavement anew at Lincoln Center Out of Doors this summer.

All of which makes it a distinct pleasure, if hardly a surprise, to congratulate Ken on his new status as clarinetist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, announced mere moments ago. No question, Evan Ziporyn is a tough act to follow…but if anyone can do it, Ken can.

Watch Ken in sax-dervish mode, fronting Gutbucket in his "dOg Help Us" at Le Poisson Rouge:

Voices of Latin America at Carnegie Hall

Gilberto Gil, by Marco Hermes; Osvaldo Golijov, by Tanit Sakakini; Gustavo Dudamel, by Chris Christodoulou

"Calling Out the Neighboring Virtuosos: Voices of Latin America at Carnegie Hall"
The New York Times, Nov. 5, 2012

Pretty happy with the way this one turned out…I feel like I'm getting better at creating an equilibrium in covering events that present a ton of ground to cover, if that makes any sense. Where once I would have struggled to make sure every single name, concert and tie-in was cited, in the process destroying any semblance of engaging prose, I think I'm finally getting a feel for providing just enough and not too much. (Comments to the contrary are welcome.)

One more thing I have to mention: Every journalist I know has at least one equipment-failure story. I've got two good ones and one great one from the analog-tape era, but this article represents my first-ever digital-era malfunction—Gilberto Gil granted an interview for this article, not a moment of which ended up on my high-end Edirol. (Since there were no problems with the other interviews, I'm inclined to think the failure was actually in the ubiquitous cheap, plastic Radio Shack phone adapter.)

Even if I don't think the article suffered much from the loss, ultimately, I was thrilled and honored to speak with Mr. Gil, and thus crestfallen to discover the snafu. Unquestionably there's something to be said about old-school pen-and-pad, if you're up to it.

TILT Brass with Nate Wooley at University Settlement, September 21, 2012

TILT Brass with Nate Wooley at University Settlement, September 21, 2012
The New York Times, Sept. 26, 2012

Scroll down past reviews of Kimiko Ishizaka and the Talea Ensemble for a succinct snapshot of a rich collaboration between New York agit-prop new-music ensemble TILT Brass and trumpeter Nate Wooley, who presented the fourth and latest installment of his substantial Seven Storey Mountain project on Friday night as part of the Festival of New Trumpet Music (FONT).

If I'd had a bit more space, I'd have devoted it to the New York premiere of Louis Andriessen's de Volharding, a brilliant 45-minute magnum opus from 1972 that caused the founding of the long-running Dutch new-music group Orkest de Volharding—whose instrumentation, I was fascinated to learn, was similar to that of another brilliant Dutch institution, the Willem Breuker Kollektief, whose leader, the late saxophonist and composer Willem Breuker, had founded Orkest de Volharding with Andriessen.

The performance, trance-inducing and paint-peeling by turns, was superb. The piece is not one of flashy display, mostly, but it seemed slightly paradoxical that the showiest playing of a brass-oriented night came from pianist Stephen Gosling in the work's lengthy, cyclonic minimalist dance-frenzy opening.

Incidentally, speaking of the Willem Breuker Kollektief, that wonderful band is paying homage to its late founder and leader with a farewell tour currently underway. The Kollektief will perform at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn next Thursday, Oct. 4; sorry to say that I won't be able to attend, but you should consider it. And the Festival of New Trumpet Music runs through Oct. 6.

Ethan Iverson, Ben Street and Tootie Heath at the Village Vanguard, August 22, 2012

Ethan Iverson and Ben Street, from the best seat in the house

School is in session at the venerable Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village this week, as pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Ben Street and drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath merrily romp and ruminate their collective way through a master class in unhackneyed jazz repertoire. By now, Iverson needs no introduction; his work in brainy, brawny collective trio The Bad Plus has revealed his melodic, harmonic and rhythmic wiles, and he's proved eager to absorb the lessons that older generations of players can impart on the bandstand. Iverson's also one of music's keenest bloggers; his interviews with forebears and peers are not to be missed.

Ben Street is the kind of bassist everyone wants to work with: a player capable of complementing any setting, and Iverson's bandmate in the exceptional Billy Hart Quartet (about which my Time Out New York colleague Hank Shteamer wrote memorably, here.) Albert "Tootie" Heath, as Iverson mentioned from the bandstand on Wednesday night, played on John Coltrane's first session in 1957; went on to work with the likes of Wes Montgomery, Dexter Gordon, Mal Waldron and the Art Farmer/Benny Golson Jazztet, among others; and since 1975 has provided the supple backbeat for famed family act the Heath Brothers.

Wednesday, the second night of the trio's current Vanguard run, was the scene for a live broadcast on WBGO-FM series The Checkout, guest-hosted by Matt Wilson while regular host Josh Jackson wanders abroad. (A related NPR Music live webchat was hosted as ever by Dr. LP.) What struck me initially and quickly during the first set was an unusual concision: The trio got through five tunes in the first 24 minutes, a period many bands will devote to just the first two charts of their sets. Nothing wrong with expressive longeur, but there was something downright refreshing about the way Iverson, Street and Heath compressed richness and variety into album-track-sized parcels.

From a moody original opener, "South Hampton," inspired by the late, great pianist Hampton Hawes, Iverson proceeded to call a set of standards that veered pleasantly, if not wildly, from the beaten path. "It was all the most obvious tunes by those guys," Iverson would say later during a quick hang in the Vanguard's kitchen. It was clear, too, that he was favoring some charts by leaders with whom Heath had a historical association, like Waldron and Golson.

But seriously, who else calls tunes by James P. Johnson (a tambourine-jingling "Charleston"), Eubie Blake (a rhapsodic, harmonically dense "Memories of You"), Sonny Rollins ("No Moe") and Waldron ("Fire Waltz"), let alone back to back? Further highlights included a sensuous airing of Tom Jobim's "Insensatez," with gorgeously hushed work from Heath, and "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago," a haunting Paul Motian chart subtly reshaped by Heath's rhythmic conception.

True, I don't get around much anymore – or at least not as much as I used to and still want to on nights like this. But I feel confident in proclaiming that, start to finish, this was among the most satisfying jazz sets I've heard in many moons. Happily, it's archived on the NPR Music site, where anyone can drop in and listen again and again. But for anyone in New York City between now and Sunday night, get yourself down to the Vanguard and hear this trio do its thing for real.

Setlist

South Hampton (Iverson)
Nice Work If You Can Get It (Gershwin)
Insensatez (Jobim)
Shiny Stockings (Foster)
The Charleston (Johnson)
Memories of You (Blake)
No Moe (Rollins)
Fire Waltz (Waldron)
Along Came Betty (Golson)
It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago (Motian)
Now's the Time (Parker)

Ethan Iverson, Ben Street and Tootie Heath play the Village Vanguard through Sunday, August 26.

Iverson's lapel pin, which also adorned bandmates and crew members

Captain Jack.

To mark the 70th birthday of the brilliant drummer, bandleader and composer Jack DeJohnette, a quick post featuring two somewhat offbeat videos, since you've probably seen a lot of Miles Davis and Keith Jarrett footage elsewhere.

First, my favorite of DeJohnette's original compositions, "Silver Hollow" (not "Hallow," as the clip is labeled), recorded in 1978 by his New Directions quartet with Lester Bowie, John Abercrombie and Eddie Gomez. It's slightly perverse to highlight a clip in which DeJohnette doesn't play drums, but his piano here is just gorgeous.

There's plenty of DeJohnette's drumming, though mostly kept to a simmer, in this video of a 1997 performance with Bill Laswell's Transmutations, which also features free-improv guitar titan Derek Bailey and DJ Disk. Beautifully recorded and filmed at the Frankfurt Jazz Festival, this readily demonstrates DeJohnette's breadth and sensitivity. (There's more on YouTube; the second of the four posts includes a tight DeJohnette solo at the 8:40 mark.)

Happy birthday, Mr. DeJohnette. Thanks again for being so gracious when I came up to speak with you, all tongue-tied and starstruck, after your Special Edition gig at the Caravan of Dreams back in 1987.

Endless shout.

Steven Schick playing "North Star Boogaloo." Photograph: Erin Baiano/The New York Times

International Contemporary Ensemble: George Lewis Composer Portrait at Miller Theatre
The New York Times, November 14, 2011

Happy as I am with most of this review, I'm still kind of amazed that I managed to write an entire piece on George Lewis without once mentioning Chicago, where he came from and where his aesthetic was shaped early on by his activities in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, or A.A.C.M. Lewis's history of the organization, A Power Stronger Than Itself, is sprawling, detailed and authoritative.

Still, I'm pleased to have smuggled a link to an audio track from the great Anthony Braxton live album Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 into the first paragraph (thanks, YouTube!). It was also fortuitous that a Zora Neale Hurston essay cited in the final graf was available in its entirety online. And, finally, with absolute respect to all the great photographers who share my beat for The New York Times, I'm unfailingly deighted with the images that Erin Baiano provides.