Koan
Tyshawn Sorey
482 Music

Young avant-garde jazz drummer Tyshawn Sorey’s stunning new disc contains little drumming and even less jazz, but plenty of avant-garde. Koan is a minimalist project primarily for guitar and bass that moves slowly and plainly, like a sonic desert landscape;  it makes its points with stark texture and in-the-moment harmonies that linger far beyond the moment of creation. Like the Zen mystical element for which the record is named, Koan is a meditative musing that taps into both the brain and the spirit, perplexes both, and mesmerizes them anyway.

You once knew it as the Duke Ellington Jazz Festival. For all of its five years, in fact. No more.

Festival boss Charlie Fishman reports that there’s been a dispute with the Ellington family over the rights to use the name of District jazz’s favorite son. Henceforth, then, it shall be known as the DC Jazz Festival, and shall be accorded all rights and privileges commensurate with that name.

It is notable, however, that festivals with the names of famous musicians attached have tended to be second-tier festivals, held in fifth-tier cities. Who, after all, could forget the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival in Moscow, Idaho; the Clifford Brown Jazz Festival in Wilmington, Delaware; or the headline-grabbing Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival in bustling Davenport, Iowa?

By contrast, the big-time fests — Newport Jazz Festival, Chicago Jazz Festival, Monterey Jazz Festival, Portland Jazz Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival — are all named after the cities that host them.

So let’s call this name change a promotion, shall we?

With all of the talk of jazz needing young listeners, and in particular young African American listeners, it is unconscionable that Jose James—who sang a marvelous set at Bohemian Caverns Thursday night, is not the talk of the jazz world.

James, 29, doesn’t sound like a jazz singer. Oh, his throaty baritone and rapid “vocalese” (lyrical improvisation) is in the same lineage Eddie Jefferson, but his delivery full of is dark and earthy and philosophical inflections that place it more squarely in the realm of neo-soul. That was even the case in James’ cover (with self-written lyrics) of John Coltrane’s probing blues “Equinox”; James’ band (drummer Adam Jackson, electric bassist Chris Smith, and keyboardist Gideon van Gelder) captured the majesty of ‘Trane’s modal modern jazz, but James’ heady but understated declaration “I go to claim what’s rightfully mine” was impossible to limit to jazz. Doubly so, his gentle gospel waltz “The Dreamer”—the title track of his album, dedicated to Martin Luther King—on which he adopted a lighter, higher voice that might have made him the envy of the Quiet Storm movement in the 1980s. He sounded old enough to have done so, too, never once betraying his youth.
Read More “Jose James @ Bohemian Caverns: Travesty” »

Seen live jazz lately? got a twitter account? Put the two together: Tweet about your most recent jazz concert experiences, and include the who, the where, and the hashtag #jazzlives.

Some background:

Two and a half weeks ago, Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout set the jazz world a-buzzin’ with an op-ed entitled “Can Jazz Be Saved?” The article referred to a recently published NEA survey of Public Participation in the Arts, which says that the number of Americans who have seen a live jazz performance is in freefall, while at the same time the median age of those live jazz attendees is skyrocketing. Jazz, Teachout concluded, is in dire straits unless it can get more listeners, and younger ones, fast.

In the time since, jazz musicians, journalists, and otherwise devotees have questioned the accuracy of the NEA’s numbers based on context (e.g., aren’t the recession and the Internet revolution being taken into account here?), semantics (how exactly are we defining “jazz” anyway?), geography (doesn’t it count for something that people’s access to jazz is severely limited outside a few big cities?), and anecdotal evidence (how come I see jazz clubs filled with young people?).

Teachout’s response, stubborn but not unreasonable, has essentially been “Anecdotes are well and good, but they don’t square off against numbers. If you have think the statistics are problematic, come up with better ones.”

Howard Mandel, jazz critic extraordinaire and president of the Jazz Journalists Association, has thus proposed exactly that. His campaign is as described above: If you’ve seen live jazz recently, or will do so soon, say so on Twitter. In your 140-character allotment, say who you’ve seen, where and when you saw them, and include the hashtag “#jazzlives.” The goal is to see how many people we can find that actually are seeing live jazz.

Game on, folks. Rack ‘em up and hash ‘em out.

August, 2009, has been a horrible month for the jazz world. First it was Rashied Ali, then Les Paul. Now, AllAboutJazz.com and Time Out New York report that saxophonist and innovator Joe Maneri died last night at the age of 82.

Maneri labored mostly in obscurity, introducing the twelve-tone compositional technique into jazz and pioneering the use of microtones in composition and improvising. Though widely unknown, he was a great influence and mentor through his long stint as a teacher at the New England Conservatory, the first fully accredited jazz education program in the United States. In the ’90s, however, his son Mat Maneri – a jazz violinist who also engages with microtones – lured Maneri out into live performance and recording, where he found steady work in the Downtown scene until his death.

August sucks.

Al Stewart is best known for his 1976 hit “Year of the Cat,” but in my obsessive family merely owning the single or even the album wasn’t enough. My mother, 20 when “Year of the Cat” hit, promptly went out and purchased every album Stewart had ever made, from 1967 onward; she’s purchased every album since. Hence his (history-) bookish folk rock is the music I grew up on – before I was two I was toddling up to my parents with his 1980 record 24 Carrots in hand and humming songs.

So that’s why I simply can’t miss seeing Al Stewart tonight at The Birchmere in Alexandria. And I’d humbly suggest that you can’t either – that is, if you like British folk, ’70s singer-songwriters, or the obscure but fascinating historical tidbits he frequently writes about. (Know who Charlotte Corday is? Heard of the mystery of the Mary Celeste? Ever compared the worlds of an early 1920s migrant worker and then-President Warren G. Harding? Al Stewart might be the guy for you.) Besides, he’s got American country-folk singer Jesse Winchester opening for him, which is always a good thing. Tickets are $29.50.

The news just goes from bad to worse for jazz fans today: Les Paul, a virtual God of the guitar, passed away this morning from complications of pneumonia at 94, reports the Associated Press.

Paul’s legacy is hard to overstate. He was a pioneer of the solid-body electric guitar, giving his name to a Gibson model guitar that to this day remains one of the best-selling instruments in the world. He is also credited with inventing the multitrack recording, innovating with half-speed and double-speed playback, and creating a device known as the “Les Paulverizer” which was among the first tape-looping technologies.

Over a four-year period in the early 1950s, Paul and his then wife, Mary Ford, had 16 top ten hits. Ford died in 1977.

Paul had not shied away from music in his old age. Until his recent illness, the nonagenarian had been playing every Monday night at the Iridium in Times Square.

The loss is tremendous.

UPDATE 2:40 PM: The Village Voice reports that Ali succumbed after suffering a heart attack. More specifically, the New York Times cites a blocked artery, and adds that he died at New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

Rashied Ali, the great free jazz drummer who was a member of John Coltrane’s last band, has died, according to his website.

In addition to Coltrane, Ali had worked with Paul Bley, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, and John Zorn. Just this weekend, Ali had performed with his By Any Means trio at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Details of Ali’s death are still unclear, but will be published here as they become available.

Some people insist that the newspapers’ current crisis is ultimately good for journalism, including arts journalism. But decreased budgets mean giving ink to the lowest bidders, rather than the best journalists.

Which is how highly regarded papers end up with concert reviews like this one, published last Thursday in the Montreal Gazette. The ignorance and complete disregard for the actual music is exceeded only by the blatant misogyny.

Still wonder why journos are worried?

Wynton Marsalis just gives till it hurts. Last week he was in our own back yard, giving music lessons at the White House and offering up a Kennedy Center tribute to his father Ellis. Today it was a Q&A session on his Facebook page with fans. And, at the end of the session, a surprise from the maestro (which also showed up on his Twitter:

Thanks for joining me for the Q&A. I’d like to give you all a free download of my album, “Here…Now”, which is only available online. Download it here and let me know what you think!

Here…Now is a ballet about the late Olympian Florence “FloJo” Griffith Joyner, choreographed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2001 to music specially commissioned from Marsalis. The download page carries a 2007 release date, but in fact it’s never been released on CD or anywhere except online. And it is excellent — some of the best and most original, ambitious, and tuneful work of Marsalis’ career [insert endless arguments about Marsalis' career here].

But even if you hate everything Marsalis stands for, what have you got to lose with a free download?