Rehearsing The Blues

In The Vanguard No Longer

An oddly culturally-isolated piece from Patrick Jarenwattananon at A Blog Supreme on Wynton's Vanguard recordings. That PJ can make the assertion that Marsalis is only controversial because he's been so "effective," end of story, is a gross oversimplification. Effective at making jazz business? That's not meant to be a pejorative question - like any art form, jazz needs to have good and effective PR and good and effective business deals. But Marslis proved remarkable effective at helping the business and PR of musicians who sound exactly like him, often prematurely. Was he effective at helping, even by association, the avant-arde musicians who had been struggling for years before the Marsalises hit the scene in the 1980s? Most of them would say not. I say not. For Patrick say that:

the thrust of what he's created business-wise, and the narrative around it, has deeply impacted the way jazz is presented and generally thought of in this country

with no discussion about whether he's talking about positive or negative impact is puzzling. I know, NPR and so on, but come on. This is basic stuff.

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I happen to love the Marsalis Vanguard recordings, and even wrote an article about them at my old blog. But the truth is that Marsalis isn't much of a musician, meaning that while he possesses amazing talents, he isn't, and was never, involved in the jazz scene.

The New Real Book

UPDATE: Rob Grundel, in the comments, has told me he's set up a Spotify playlist for about 2/3rds of these tunes. "Hommage A Mitch," for one, hasn't been recorded by Kurt Rosenwinkel, but there are some videos of him playing it in France, as well as a bootleg or two kicking around. I saw him play it several nights in succession at the Vanguard last winter and it blew my mind. Anyhow, thanks to Rob.

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At his blog, Do The Math, Ethan Iverson says: 

All major jazz composers avoid stock harmony and rhythm.  Likewise,  I hope recent jazz worthy to be included in Colligan's proposed "new" Real Bookwould also be too detailed to be reduced comfortably. 

I'd go for a list of tunes, though.  Maybe George or someone else could offer a list of modern compositions that should become common language.

The Real Book is indeed a bit of a problem, not only because it's oversimplified. Dave Prentice only transcribes his tunes, to get the right changes, but then has to hit the brick wall of gigging with guys playing the wrong chords from the Real Book charts.

Anyway, here's my list of contemporary (and some not) tunes that I would like to see in a new Real Book. If they aren't contemporary, they've been done very well by cats playing right now, and in a way that means they could be considered "new" compositions (in a way that, say, "Yardbird Suite" can't - just a random example). 

If these were to appear in a new Real Book (something I've been mulling my mind for many months), the ideal situation would be to contact the tunes' authors, have them submit the chart, and then (instead of having "recommended listening," which I see the 6th edition Real Book has done away with anyway) have that composer say what part of the jazz tradition or jazz vanguard they would like that tune to represent for beginning and intermediate jazz players. An advanced player will have this knowledge already, but a beginner coming to a Rosenwinkel tune for the first time will, instead of just running to the recommended record and copying it, get a pointer for how they should interpret it on their own. 

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Hommage A Mitch (Rosenwinkel)

Shed (Goldberg)

Peaceful Warrior (Parks)

Nemesis (Parks)

Little One (Christensen)

("Jazz")

UPDATE: This is interesting, but a bit of an oversimplification. Glasper is right-on about the thin line between alchemy and calculation, but I think a lot of jazz musicians out there would disagree with his "hip-hop and jazz is jazz right now" pronouncement - and at least one critic (me) raises his eyebrows at that statement being so closely followed with another: "To label jazz as one thing, like 'This is jazz,' I think when people do that they don't even understand the true meaning of jazz." Anyway, take a look:

 

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The brilliant Nate Chinen in The New York Times, in re: CMJ at Le Poisson Rouge:

The keyboardist Robert Glasper name-checked and covered J Dilla during his set, as he often does, even when leading his acoustic trio. Here he was joined by a longtime vocal collaborator, Bilal, and by Derrick Hodge on electric bass, Jahi Sundance on turntables and Mark Colenburg on drums. As usual their groove was deep but diffuse, an immersive haze. And the crowd seemed hooked, though the most enthusiastic cheers came when Mr. Glasper announced the roll call of intended guests on his next album. Expected from Blue Note next year, it is to include Erykah Badu, Lupe Fiasco, Meshell Ndegeocello, Ledisi and Lalah Hathaway, among others.

Good to see someone with a clear head about Mr. Glasper.

Untitled Sermon (New York, 1968)

My first article for Nextbop.com, on song titles, is up. Check it out here. 

Song titles are a big thing for me. Too many musicians cop out on both aspects of a tune - the name and the music - by choosing a bad title. Just like a poem's, a song's title adds another dimension to what follows. To use an irrelevant or vague title misses an opportunity to have, essentially, another melody or another stanza (...the title), as well as misses the opportunity to add some complexity to what's there anyway. To have a nice, happy hard-bop tune called "Worldwide Hunger" isn't just confusing, it's like negative creativity. It could have been called something nice and happy and had just as strong an effect, and the "Hunger" title could have enhanced a haunting ballad or a chaotic free tune (although, let's be honest, it's a little obvious). 

Anyway, I'm very happy that Nextbop is allowing me to rant on their clean and tidy website.

Interrupted Conversations

Bassist Christian McBride is undoubtedly one of the best bassists of the last twenty years. His early work, particularly with Joshua Redman, is astoundingly good – he even made an intentionally square two-feel sound hip on Joshua Redman’s “On The Sunny Side Of The Street” in 1993. But where Mr. Redman’s style has perhaps evolved too far (I thought his latest effort, with James Farm, was well-intentioned but vague), McBride could be said to be too firmly where he started. He still plays in a trio with pianist Benny Green (who is no modernist). Ethan Iverson, who thinks very highly of Mr. McBride (see comments section below), nevertheless noted:

When McBride pedals for a moment during Ornette’s first solo it is quite a relief.  But McBride is still in the tonality and resolves the 12-bars accurately.  In my opinion, too accurately! 

Iverson's post should be read in full for the context of that quote, but I picked it out because it points to a quality in McBride's playing that I consider flawed, a quality present in force on the bassist's newest record, an album of duets, out November 8th on Mack Avenue.

There are two kinds of duet albums. There is the Joe Lovano/Hank Jones or Joel Frahm/Brad Mehldau variety (an album by an actual duo), and then there is the Sinatra or Tony Bennett Duets variety – one static performer pairing off with a variety of companions. McBride has chosen the latter format for Conversations With Christian, and while it has its moments, it falls prey to the usual failings of this kind of record.

Is Jazz Dead? No, But Something Is

Will Layman at PopMatters has written a clever and witty article entitled "A 'Dear John' Letter To Jazz: To Hell With Loving You." His introductory points ("My friends all say they like you, but it turns out they’re just using you") are on-point, except for one thing: Layman fails to draw a distinction between the pop-culture image of "jazz" and the real sound of jazz that is, contrary to Layman's conclusion, still flourishing around the world. A quote:

Jazz, I know there was a time when you were the cutest cat in school, the bee’s knees, the zippiddy-doo-dah coolest sound around. Folks danced to you. They mobbed ballrooms to Lindy their very asses off while you throbbed and swung, saxophones roaring.

And even after that was the case, you still had a devoted popular following. College kids in Allen Ginsberg glasses might pop their fingers to Brubeck or Miles Davis.  Jukeboxes in cities got worn out from playing funky stuff like Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” or Cannonball Adderley’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy”.

And as recently as the ‘70s there were pop radio hits like Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good”—and as recently as the ‘80s Bobby McFerrin took some overdubbed scat singing up the charts with “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. When Wynton Marsalis was 21 years old, wearing a killer suit and holding two Grammys in his hands—one for jazz and one for classical music—there was still some kind of hope.

But then two decades of “smooth jazz” dreck rolled over the landscape and real jazz seemed both more obscure and more rare. You became a taste from the past. Once only the hip kids were likely to know about you. But in recent years the hip kids are too busy digging really obscure or noisy/unpopular rock to bother with obscure/noisy/unpopular jazz.

The problem with this is that Layman isn't really talking about what he thinks he's talking about. The Vanguard shows he mentions later in his piece don't really have much to do with the Lindy Hop, "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" or Chuck Mangione. They also don't have much to do with Wynton Marsalis or anyone else who doesn't dare mess with history. "The rock aesthetic of simplicity, directness and sincerity doesn’t much cotton to your complexities and abstractions," Layman writes. "A society that prizes spectacle and memoir doesn’t know what to make of a trumpet solo that resembles architecture more than it does a sit-com or a confession." 

Ah. So that's how it is.

Two Years/Big Changes

Hello. My name is Jonathan Wertheim, and I'm a jazz critic.

There's a lot of out there in the webiverse about jazz critics and jazz criticism (Nate Chinen has just added the most recent drop of water to this ocean over at The Gig). There might be a little too much written about being a jazz critic.

This blog has been around since September 2009, two years. In that time, I've had comments from musicians I listen to and admire, I've been read by other bloggers, many of whom originally inspired RTB, and I have learned a lot about the music I love.

I've been involved in the start of an exciting new year, and that has had an impact on RTB. There hasn't been much here in recent weeks. That's about to change.