Rehearsing The Blues

Shifting Designs

Live performances are all about the interplay, both aural and visual, between musicians. If a quartet is four isolated sounds, completely separated from each other, the performance becomes uninteresting. If, however, each musician is fully aware of his musical surroundings, and takes obvious joy in responding to a certain idea or exchanging a smile with a colleague, that inclusive happiness in collective music-making spreads outwards from the bandstand and into the audience.

The Kurt Rosenwinkel quartet, four nights on Friday into its weeklong run at the Village Vanguard, is a mix of both.

Life On Mars (The Bad Plus)

Yay, it's another installment of "Why Do Critics Hate Jazz?" 

The Bad Plus has released a new album, Never Stop. I haven't heard it yet. I hope to soon. For a long time, I hated The Bad Plus. What was the point? They covered songs I knew, but I couldn't find anything recognizable in their re-imaginings, and their original songbook was a closed book to me. Today, I have a very different view, and list the trio as one of my favorite units in music. I wonder if Bill Milkowski feels the same? In 2004, Milkowski wrote what could only be described as a wishful-thinking death warrant for The Bad Plus.

The Piano (Ahmad Hassan Muhammad)

The measure of a jazz musician is his influences. I don't mean who he is influenced by, but how he is influenced. In the evolution of every jazz musician's style, there comes a point when he must arrange his influences, dig into them, learn them, and then combine and consolidate them, add them together to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That point has arrived for twenty-two year old pianist Ahmad Hassan Muhammad, and it was a privilege to hear him doing those stylistic calculations on the night of Friday, April 23rd, at Bowdoin College's Studzinski Recital Hall.

Jazz Goes To College

Writing about a live show is much different than writing about a record or a musician. For records, the performance is documented, repeatable; for any musician, there are hard facts, clear avenues of exploration. Gigs, on the other hand, are highly emotional, easily misremembered, and instantly lost to history. The Marcus Roberts Trio played a good show yesterday in the Studzinski Recital Hall at Bowdoin College, but what is there to say about it other than that? I have no recording to point to, and the scope of such an article rules out wider analysis.