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.

By its broadest definition, Nordic Jazz Week encompasses five nights, including a show tonight at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage. But Wednesday night at the House of Sweden, in which the big draw was Nils Petter Molvær and Arve Henriksen (pictured above), was treated as a closing night of sorts. The omnipresent threat of rain forced the concert indoors instead of its customary spot on the House of Sweden’s picturesque rooftop, but that didn’t stop a substantial crowd from gathering.

Photos and writeup after the jump. Full gallery here.

Iceland’s Sunna Gunnlaugs Quartet opened the evening with a set of straightforward, at times somewhat tentative jazz, pleasant but hardly revelatory. Henriksen took the stage next, joined by electronics wizard Jan Bang, and the two played as a duo with Bang manipulating the sounds coming from Henriksen’s trumpet and providing additional layers as well. There was a distinct Jon Hassell influence at work here, but Henriksen’s vocals provided a pleasant surprise: he sung wordlessly with amazing range and power, something I wasn’t expecting at all. After some time, Henriksen and Bang were replaced, without a break in the music, by Molvær and his two collaborators, Eivind Aarset on guitar and Audun Kleive on drums. The music changed, becoming somewhat more beat-driven and intense, but the overall feel remained consistent: the House of Sweden seemed to be hosting a psychedelic space-music fest as much as it was an evening of jazz.

The Jonas Kulhammar Quartet brought things back to a more conventional level. Before their set, A Love Supreme played over the PA, which was a fitting prelude to this quartet’s music, which reminded strongly of early 60s Coltrane. Like the Sunna Gunnlaugs Quartet, it was nothing particularly new and exciting, but very much enjoyable and spiced up by Kulhammar’s humorous banter. This quartet will also be playing tonight at the Kennedy Center.

Nordic Jazz Fest has become a reliable annual event at which one can expect to see a good mix of straightforward jazz and slightly more off the wall material. The most “out” the festival has ever gotten was probably the 2006 appearance of Kjetil Møster, but recent years have seen some performances (such as Henriksen/Molvær this year or Kristian Blak last year) gently pushing the boundaries of jazz in diverse directions. I’m already looking forward to what’s in store for 2010.

Nils Petter Molvær:

Jonas Kulhammar Quartet:

Sunna Gunnlaugs:

Full gallery here.

Nordic Jazz Fest, hosted annually by the embassies of Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark, has become Nordic Jazz Week for 2009, featuring an opening performance at the Embassy of Finland on Sunday, June 14, and then two nights of performances at the House of Sweden on June 16-17.

Of note in the lineup are Norwegians Nils Petter Molvær & Arve Henriksen, who are pioneers in the peculiar kind of jazz/electronic/ambient music crossover that labels like Rune Grammofon (to which Henriksen is signed) are currently exploring. These two play as a duo on June 17, probably my most highly anticipated set of the festival. A close second is the Søren Kjærgaard Trio on June 16; Kjærgaard is a Danish pianist whose tuneful, energetic style has made him an interesting collaborator with such avant-jazz luminaries as Peter Brötzmann, Derek Bailey, Tim Berne, Herb Robertson, and more.

Full lineup, location and ticket details after the jump.

Photo of Nils Petter Molvær above courtesy his Myspace page.

Sunday, June 14 at 6 pm
Concert at the Embassy of Finland
Karikko (Finland)
Bjørn Solli Quartet (Norway)

Tuesday, June 16 at 6.30 pm
Concert on House of Sweden rooftop
Jonas Kullhammar Quartet (Sweden)
Karikko (Finland)
Søren Kjærgaard Trio (Denmark)

Wednesday, June 17 at 6.30 pm
Concert on House of Sweden Rooftop
The Sunna Gunnlaugs Quartet (Iceland)
Nils Petter Molvær & Arve Henriksen (Norway)
Jonas Kullhammar Quartet (Sweden)

Where: Embassy of Finland, 3301 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20008 (June 14) and Embassy of Sweden, House of Sweden, 2900 K Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20007 (June 16 and 17)
When: June 14 at 6 pm, June 16 at 6.30 pm and June 17 at 6.30 pm
Tickets: Presale tickets only from ticketweb or 866 666 8932.
$25 per night; $50 for all three nights. (No ticket sales at the door.)

• Led Bib – Sensible Shoes
• Miriodor – Avant!
• The Ed Palermo Big Band – Eddy Loves Frank
• Positive Catastrophe – Garabatos Volume One
• Upsilon Acrux – Radian Futura

Let’s see. This is all potentially good stuff. Perhaps most exciting (for me) is the Upsilon Acrux – this is a young avant-rock band who were once upon a time on D.C.’s own Planaria Records, whose last record Galapagos Momentum was a feast of heavy odd-time riffing. Miriodor are a Quebecois band who have a humorous and peculiarly Francophone take on avant-rock (you know it when you hear it); Ed Palermo has carved out a niche for himself reinterpreting Frank Zappa tunes, and by the name of this new album it doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

Then there’s the jazz. I know nothing about Led Bib, but apparently the Times (UK) said of them, “Sun Ra didn’t die in vain,” so that bodes well. Positive Catastrophe is a new group fronted by the always excellent Taylor Ho Bynum (and includes a favorite saxophonist of mine, Michaël Attias) and sounds really, really, interesting, purporting to combine Latin jazz and free/avant-jazz in a way that, as far as I know, hasn’t really been done before. Cool!

I recently flew across the country to watch a New York musician play a series of concerts in San Francisco. If that doesn’t seem to make much sense, consider that downtown legend John Zorn, a recent recipient of the half-a-million-bucks Macarthur “Genius” grant, almost never plays live except in New York City and Europe. But last week, he did a six-night residency at Yoshi’s in San Francisco, showcasing a different band each night, all but one playing material from his Masada songbook of tunes based on traditional Jewish scales and melodies.

I caught the last three shows: Bar Kokhba, The Dreamers and Electric Masada. Last Friday was Bar Kokhba, a sextet with violin, cello and guitar doing most of the melodic work with bass, drums and percussion backing. Two sets: the early set contained material from Zorn’s Masada Book 1 – the first 200 songs he wrote in the series – while the late set contained Book 2 material, drawing from some 300 songs Zorn wrote in a more recent burst of insane creativity. On record, I find the Book 1 material incredibly compelling (particularly as represented on the 3-disc set 50th Birthday Celebration Volume 11), while the Book 2 material is much more middle-of-the-road, the kind of the stuff you could play at a dinner party without offending anyone whatsoever. Live, though, it all got flipped.

My (very lengthy) full thoughts after the jump.

The first set of Bar Kokhba’s Book 1 material was great, but hardly transcendent, as if the musicians had played these compositions so many times that it was all becoming a bit rote. The newer pieces played during the second set, on the other hand, came across passionately, with violinist Mark Feldman and cellist Erik Friedlander (who is playing next month at An Die Musik in Baltimore with his own combo) deserving of special mention. Bar Kokhba’s interpretations of Zorn’s songbook are flowingly melodic, thanks largely to the contributions of these two musicians, whose sensitive soloing made the new material – almost soporific on record – come to shimmering life. During one of Feldman’s especially delicate solos, the cavernous club was completely silent except for one awed concertgoer whose amazed, whispered “…fuck…” pretty much summed it all up.

After Bar Kokhba, the black sheep of the residency came to play on Saturday. The Dreamers are an odd ensemble – and the only one of the residency not playing Masada material – whose self-titled 2008 record struck me as a rather unexciting mix of surf, rock and roll, jam-band music and jazz. After Bar Kokhba surprised me so pleasantly with their second set on Friday, I went in hoping that The Dreamers would prove a similar revelation. Sadly, it was not to be – the live set sounded louder and more intense than the album versions (including on some pieces the group did from The Gift, a similar album released on Zorn’s Tzadik label in the late 1990s), but just making the songs louder and more intense didn’t make them any more compelling. My tablemates seemed similarly unimpressed, and from the folks I talked to who attended all six nights, there seemed to be a general consensus that this was the weakest of them.

But Zorn was not to leave on a down note. Sunday night’s closing show was Electric Masada, an eight-piece band whose interpretations of the Masada songbook sound like a cross between Miles Davis post-Bitches Brew, strident free jazz, twitchy avant-rock, and the spacy, psychedelic jams of bands like Circle. Electric Masada weave a dense tapestry of sound, with each instrumentalist usually sticking to a general role: Marc Ribot on guitar, Jamie Saft on keyboards and Zorn on sax provide the main melody lines, Trevor Dunn on bass gives the music its most steady pulse, and Kenny Wolleson and Joey Baron on drums, Cyro Baptista on percussion and Ikue Mori on laptop electronics provide an avalanche of rhythm and miscellaneous noisemaking that ensure that even during the quiet moments there are always several layers of sound for the listener to process.

For all but one of the bands that played during Zorn’s six-night residency, Zorn played the role of conductor, using a diverse array of hand signals to direct his handpicked musicians in their interpretations of his songs. If he seemed a bit control-freakish, especially for a musician most often cubbyholed into the jazz world, the results spoke for themselves. Electric Masada was the clearest example of the effectiveness of his methods: with Zorn gesticulating wildly at his band throughout the performance, the band was fluid when it was supposed to be fluid and tight when it was navigating tricky passages full of free-meter playing and spastic time changes. The most enjoyable pieces were Zorn’s more avant-garde ones, which showed off not only the band’s ability to plow through fiendishly knotty stop-and-go passages but also Zorn’s compositional humor. His juxtaposition of fiercely amelodic, almost show-offy “look how tricky this is” sections with passages of bewitching lyricism, smashed together haphazardly within the confines of a single song, brought appreciative laughter from the audience as well as amazed applause.

The individual highlights of the evening frequently came from Zorn’s own contributions on sax. Of the six nights at Yoshi’s, Zorn played only two of them, conducting three more (he was absent for the opening set, Secret Chiefs 3). His playing with Electric Masada made me deeply regret missing the acoustic Masada quartet, which played the Thursday before. Simply put, Zorn is one of the most powerful saxophonists I have ever heard, possessing a mastery of the instrument that made absurd feats of musicianship seem routine. In fact, even while in the midst of some of his most aggressive blowing of the night, he would take one hand off his instrument to urge other musicians onward, never missing a beat in his own playing.

The tough thing about writing about an ensemble like Electric Masada is that all the musicians deserve individual plaudits; however, I’ll just single out one more contributor: Marc Ribot, whose guitar solos ran the gamut from bluesy to all-out noise to beautifully straightforward interpretations of Zorn’s Jewish melodies. Electric Masada is in many ways built around Ribot’s contributions, and while the whole band was stunningly good, Ribot and Zorn together put Sunday night’s performance over the top.

Masada-related bands have only come to D.C. a few times in the past few years: Masada String Trio (Feldman, Friedlander and Greg Cohen on bass) played here four or five years ago; Rashanim, a young band that released an album of rocked-up Masada tunes, played the Washington Jewish Music Festival in 2006; and Feldman played some Book 2 songs in a duo with pianist Sylvie Courvoisier at Twins Jazz in 2007. Here’s hoping that the deliriously positive reception of Zorn’s residency in San Francisco means he might actually play some more shows in the States soon.

Transparent Productions is still basically defunct, but it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that the name is being resurrected to accommodate Kahil El’Zabar and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble, who for the past 8 years have played a Black History Month show in the D.C. area. Last year it was special: a 35th-anniversary extravaganza that included a drum circle, a workshop, and two nights of fantastic shows at Chief Ike’s (that’s the first night pictured above—trumpeter Corey Wilkes showcasing a technique that really shouldn’t work, but somehow did).

This year, El’Zabar and company are playing at Contradiction Dance in Takoma Park, which apparently is what replaced the venerable Sangha (which was a fair trade/neo-hippie store that played generous host to countless Transparent shows). EHE’s meshing of traditional African music with avant-garde jazz is interesting on record but really comes alive in a live setting; El’Zabar himself is one of the most expressive percussionists (and kalimba-ists) I’ve ever seen.

$15, 7014 Westmoreland Avenue, Takoma Park, MD (three blocks from the Takoma Park metro), 8pm sharp tonight.

Cosmologic are a four-piece jazz combo and a recent signing to Silver Spring’s Cuneiform Records. They fit in well with the rest of Cuneiform’s jazz output: stuff that is very recognizably coming from within the jazz tradition, but pushes boundaries in any number of subtle ways. Not really free jazz and certainly not unrestrained collective improv, but honest-to-goodness grooving tunes with noticeable tendencies towards experimentation. (The Vandermark 5 might be a good, if more aggressive, example of a band that straddle that line in a somewhat similar way.)

The sax-trombone-bass-drums group released Eyes In the Back of My Head on Cuneiform last May and are making an appearance at Pyramid Atlantic in Silver Spring (home to many a Sonic Circuits event) tomorrow evening at 8pm sharp.

photo courtesy Cosmologic’s Myspace page

As previously announced, the theme for this year is “The Musical Heritage of New Orleans,” and the headliner as such is trumpeter Terence Blanchard — who will be performing his 2007 piece A Tale of God’s Will: Requiem for Katrina in its entirety on June 12, in a free concert at the National Mall.

Another highlight is a closing concert tribute to New Orleans pianist Ellis Marsalis, which will feature his sons Branford, Jason, and Delfeayo, along with Harry Connick Jr., a 15-piece big band, and some surprises.

The list of featured artists after the jump.

Paquito D’Rivera (DEJF Artistic Director)
Terence Blanchard & Orchestra
Harry Connick, Jr
Davell Crawford
Duke Ellington Orchestra
Little Freddie King
Branford Marsalis
Delfeayo Marsalis
Ellis Marsalis
Jason Marsalis
Nicholas Payton
Rebirth Brass Band
Irma Thomas
Buckwheat Zydeco

Precise schedule TBD, and will be posted at the festival’s website when finalized.

Also note that this year the festival has been moved from fall to summer, scheduled for June 5-15. The city has arranged for DEJF to have a permanent spot on its events schedule in the second week of June. In addition, the “Jazz on the National Mall” event, previously the final day of the festival, will now expand to three days, June 12-14.

Where 2007 was my love-affair year with free jazz, 2008 saw my affections turn to extreme metal in all its varied forms. The sad departure of Transparent Productions meant a dearth of interesting avant-garde jazz in the District, and I replaced concertgoing expeditions to Sangha (RIP) and Twins Jazz with rather different expeditions to places like Jaxx and various smaller venues booking the more underground kinds of metal. My passion for music tracks closely with what I’m seeing in the live setting, so it makes sense that my 2008 list is dominated by the heavy, evil stuff. (My friends—and especially housemates—didn’t appreciate this so much.)

Be it metal, jazz, electronic music, free improvisation, or whatever, I’ve been convinced for a few years now that, industry woes aside, we’re living in a renaissance period with fascinating new music being made at an unprecedented clip. Granted, I have absolutely no empirical basis for this claim, but I present the following 10 recordings as examples of the freshness of today’s music-making scene…

1. One With Filth, Crowpath (Willowtip)
Pundits can quibble over whether or not “avant-garde metal” is really avant-garde in any meaningful sense, but the latest album from Swedish band Crowpath is an undeniably experimental and edgy slab of death metal. Compared to the band’s two earlier releases, it’s downright catchy and accessible, striking a perfect balance between challenging and immediately rewarding, but it’s still impossibly punishing. “Thinking man’s metal” is an overused phrase and too often refers to dry exercises in technicality, but it’s a perfect term for this recording.

Crowpath, “Cleansed In Chlorine”:

2. Doombringer, Nasum (Relapse)
A more than welcome posthumous live release from these grindcore greats. Although Doombringer clocks in at a mere 23 minutes, the 16 tracks here are meatier than most albums twice the length or more. Brutal and unrelenting from start to finish, like getting punched in the face repeatedly, by a guy wearing spiked brass knuckles. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Nasum, “Inhale/Exhale”:

3. (duck), Buffalo Collision (Screwgun)
A collaboration between two members of the Bad Plus (piano and drums) and older free-jazzers Tim Berne (sax) and Hank Roberts (cello), Buffalo Collision straddles the line between groovy jazz and boisterous free improv. Comprised of three long, almost incomprehensible twisting pieces, this project bears Berne’s distinctive stamp, but the Bad Plus members add a wonderfully melodic tilt to the proceedings.

Buffalo Collision, “2nd of 4″:

4. The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, Earth (Southern Lord)
Classic drone metal band meets renowned jazz/Americana guitarist Bill Frisell… and the results are gorgeous. There’s little vestige of Earth’s doomy past to be found here; the new version of the band is obsessed with painting desolate pictures of rural America using extremely sparse, twangy, still heavy guitar notes. Frisell contributes a few lonely, windblown solos that take the album from good solidly into the realm of great.

Earth, “Engine of Ruin”:

5. Salome, Salome (Vendetta)
The D.C. area’s best doom metal band, Salome is a simple guitar-drums-vocal band, but that lone guitarist sounds like three downtuned guitarists and a bassist all combined. The band has just about the biggest sound imaginable from a mere trio, and vocalist Kat’s memorable growls and shrieks just add to the stark, evil atmosphere.

Salome, “Black Tides”:

6. Keio Line, Richard Pinhas and Merzbow (Cuneiform)
Ambient music at its best, Keio Line is a meeting of two very different but equally brilliant minds: a French guitarist and a legend of Japanese noise. The result is more than the sum of the parts, music that blends well into the background but still manages to reveal layer upon fascinating layer under a close listen.

Richard Pinhas & Merzbow, “Shibuya AKS”:

7. Secular Works, Extra Life (Planaria)
What happens when you mash up rhythmically complex avant-rock with the stark, monochromatic vocal melodies of early Western music? Guitarist Charlie Looker, formerly of Zs, explores the possibilities with this new band. The album never quite lives up to the promise of its explosive opening track, but the sheer freshness of Looker’s ideas makes any of his work worth a close listen.

Extra Life, “Blackmail Blues”:

8. Oneiromantical War, Wrnlrd (FSS)
Listening to this D.C.-area one-man atmospheric metal band’s latest album is akin to falling endlessly through a dark, damp abyss in slow motion. Oneiromantical War is as ugly and lo-fi as any early-’90s DIY Norwegian black metal record; “wall of sound” might be a good descriptor, but only if one imagines walls covered in sandpaper and sharp edges. Yet the overtly evil stuff is often hidden away in long, ambient drones, giving the album a nuance that the vast majority of metal recordings lack.

Wrnlrd, “War”:

9. Belle Ville, Townhouse Orchestra (Clean Feed)
Second album by this all-star European quartet, led by Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and featuring legendary British saxophonist Evan Parker. Belle Ville consists of two 45-minute long collective improvisations. Listening to it is a bit like wandering through a corn maze: you’re never quite sure what comes next, you can’t quite remember all the twists and turns, and eventually you emerge out at the end, a bit unsure of what you just went through but feeling a certain sense of satisfaction nevertheless.

Townhouse Orchestra, “Belle Ville”:

10. Pitom, Yoshie Fruchter (Tzadik)
I found much of this year’s output from John Zorn’s Tzadik label a bit disappointing, but Pitom was a pleasant surprise. Imagine the loping, heavy prog of 70s-era King Crimson meets Zorn’s free-jazz group Masada, with a dash of Sonic Youth for good measure. Melody, chaos, noise, whimsy, fun.

Yoshie Fruchter, “The Dregs”:

11. Twenty honorable mentions:

Holon, Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (ECM)
Studio 1, Box (Rune Grammofon)
Carried to Dust, Calexico (Quarterstick)
Traced in Air, Cynic (Season of Mist)
Incendio, Los Dorados & Cuong Vu (Intolerancia)
Hello, Voyager, Evangelista (Constellation)
V1.1, Fessenden (Other Electricities)
To Sail, To Sail, Fred Frith (Tzadik)
Street Horrrsing, Fuck Buttons (ATP)
Disgorge Mexico, Fuck the Facts (Relapse)
The Way of All Flesh, Gojira (Prosthetic)
Stockholm & Göteborg, Henry Cow (ReR)
Krallice, Krallice (Profound Lore)
Teeth, Little Women (SocketsCDR)
ObZen, Meshuggah (Nuclear Blast)
River Mouth Echoes, Maja Ratkje (Tzadik)
This Is It…, Marnie Stern (Kill Rock Stars)
Now and Forever, The Thing (Smalltown Superjazzz)
Beat Reader, The Vandermark 5 (Atavistic)
Oud Bass Piano Trio, Yitzhak Yedid (Between the Lines)