Tag Archives: memoir

On Bands, Very Large and Very Small

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In the Joshua Redman chapter of his lovely recent book The Jazz Ear, Ben Ratliff—apparently paraphrasing Redman—writes, “Great bands, more than great individuals, make jazz matter in the larger culture” (135). Redman argues that Coltrane’s quartet functioned as a unit and a whole, rather than as a platform for the leader (Sonny Rollins is the foil here). “I think the most interesting jazz these days doesn’t take the form of a soloist backed by accompanists,” he says; “it takes the form of a group interacting, improvising together” (136). Ratliff believes this attitude extends beyond Redman, to “many musicians of Redman’s generation … [whose] Rosetta stones are bands, not individuals.” Interestingly, the bands Ratliff goes on to list are Miles Davis’s, Bill Evans’s, and Ornette Coleman’s from the ‘60s, and Keith Jarrett’s from the ‘70s—this though Redman’s original list included Tortoise and Led Zeppelin. (That’s the gambit of The Jazz Ear, by the way: Ratliff asked a bunch of musicians to pick pieces of music they wanted to talk about, and then interviewed them while and after listening.)

Born in 1968, Redman is just a year older than me; I am “the broader culture” for which the Coltrane quartet “matters.” So Redman’s comment, and Ratliff’s gloss, got me thinking about the special resonance bands have, not just for musicians, but for listeners of my generation.

There are a couple of contemporary jazz bands (Masada and The Vandermark 5) that I love unreasonably. I think this is so because they act as surrogates for those rock bands I once loved unreasonably, their logos etched across my cortex. If you were to take one of those porcelain phrenology heads and substitute ANGER and CREATIVITY with IRON MAIDEN and PINK FLOYD, you’d have a pretty good representation of my one-time mental life. There is an element of nostalgia at work here, of course: my taste may have matured in fits and starts, but I still carry along the residue of a desire; and, since it seems harder and harder to cathect rock bands with anything like the same intensity I used to (though with a few I’ve come close), the old energy, which I imagine must be conserved, is transferred to other genres.

I don’t say this to disparage the music or musicianship of either Masada or the V5. Both bands beautifully embody Redman’s concept of “a group interacting, improvising together.” I’m trying to identify something in excess of the music—a supplement, an aura; an ethos that coheres as a sound. In this respect, it’s not just the gestalt idea that the sum of the playing is more than its parts. That is true of any successful ensemble. Rather, the charisma of the band radiates at once from a persona or identity created by its distinctive, collective voice, and from the contributions of each of its members, in whose individual identities the persona remains intact and present. This persona is eminently marketable, and circulates as much in images, concepts, narratives, etc. as in sounds. It is most marketable, for reasons suggested above, to listeners of my generation; and above all, to male listeners. I’m not sure why; all that shared sweat and camaraderie, I guess. Life as one long Howard Hawks war picture.

It’s not just jazz bands. I came to string quartets on my own, in my twenties, my parents’ taste being focused around piano, orchestra, and combinations thereof. Can I discount the impact of my generation’s popular music on my gravitating toward the chamber ensemble? Do I really need the Kronos Quartet to play Metallica and Meshuggah for me to figure this out? Why else would I be able to name every member of the Emerson Quartet? Do you think they’d hire me to do their logo?

As the cult of the soloist gives way to the dynamic of the group—at least at this point on the helix of cultural history—I can’t help but wonder if the big band, with its greater focus on composition and arrangement, and its often tightly-controlled and thoughtfully-ornamented circumstances for improvisation (I am thinking of Maria Schneider’s comments here, in another chapter of The Jazz Ear), is also experiencing a resurgence.

And then can the orchestra, that nineteenth-century musical equivalent of the jumbo jet, be far behind?

For my part, I can’t imagine it. Excepting the orchestral works with which I bonded in my teens—the symphonies of Beethoven and Brahms, the tone poems of Richard Strauss, a number of piano concertos, a handful of other pieces—I find it harder and harder to suspend my disbelief before the orchestra. I said something in a previous post about a culture of distrust, and I can’t claim to be immune from it. Why belabor with a string section what can be said by a single violin? The orchestra’s size and grandeur seem unsuited to audiences today. Spectacle has moved to the arena and the cinema—and the orchestra with it, to the limbo of film scores and playing backup for heavy-rock ballads. If I ever get around to exploring the symphonies of Mahler, Bruckner, and Shostakovitch, it will be for my own edification … which is another way of saying that I don’t expect to fall in love. (But I’m happy to be surprised.)

Undiscovered string quartets, on the other hand, retain the potential to move me greatly, both intellectually and emotionally. Again, there is an element of emotional memory at work here that can’t be discounted. To my ear, though, quartets and similar-sized groups (octets are pushing it) work with a manageable number of voices, timbres and rhythms for my ear to parse. As with the band, I can simultaneously appreciate both the discrete threads and the fabric. And to the whole can be assigned an identity that is neither individual (soloist, conductor, or bandleader) nor a faceless mass (the collective of the orchestra).

Maybe it’s an issue of the performance ethic, too. Interaction among members of an orchestra is always filtered through the conductor, many of whom have reputations for being disciplinarians. (The same is true of big band leaders.) My impression is that the history of the orchestra is as rife with mutinies and desertions as naval history. According to a trombonist friend, orchestra positions have a job satisfaction rating on a par with working at a toll booth. Last year when I was in Houston visiting family, the orchestra was out on strike. True, both an orchestra and a quartet have their first violin, but their jobs aren’t really comparable. An orchestra’s first violin seems like a bureaucratic post. Meanwhile, if you’re the Emerson quartet, you can always trade first fiddle down the middle: three Bartok quartets for Drucker, three for Selzer.

Then again, maybe it’s just that my ear has been ruined by digital recording. The warm distortions of vinyl always helped the orchestra’s sound cohere into a mass; and it was the mass, not the individual voices, that made the orchestra compelling.

Sometimes I imagine the string quartet like the first mammals in those Charles Knight paintings of prehistoric life, when the paradigm that dinosaurs died of their own lumbering ineptitude still held sway. Small, supple, adaptable little critters, emerging from behind the stumps and grasses, ready to lay claim to their evolutionary title. Maybe Disney got it right, in Fantasia, when they made of The Rite of Spring the dinosaurs’ death-march. It was an image of the age of the orchestra coming to a close.

Paying the Rent, Now and Then

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The first time I went to the 55 Bar (on Christopher Street just off Seventh Avenue) was probably late 1992 or early 1993. A friend of mine living in Weehawken and working in the City took me to see Mike Stern, whose trio played at the 55 every Monday and Wednesday. It was eight dollars a set, and although it seems ludicrous today, I’m pretty sure that included two drinks.

Stern was my initiation into the New York jazz scene, and I could hardly have asked for a better one. A one-time Miles Davis sideman, Stern plays a sophisticated fusion, a cross between the Al DiMeola “more notes!” school, which my guitar teacher, trying to get me to sublimate my heavy-metal urges, had guided me toward as a teen, and the bebop and post-bebop jazz that I had only begun listening to the previous year, while living in Madrid. I had bought my first jazz discs only months before, to supplement the Art Blakey and Thelonious Monk I had taped off an Australian friend in Spain. It was a fittingly cosmopolitan introduction to the music. Now I was back in the States, and for the moment in the New York area, and I was eager to start digging into jazz at its source and mecca.

Stern generally opened his sets at the 55 with a long, driving standard that built slowly from shuffling, chorus-infused lines to a blues-rock-funk climax. At some point along the way the drummer would trade his brushes for sticks, the bass would stop walking and start stomping, and Stern’s pick, which he’d been using like the drummer had his brushes, would begin to bite. During this rising action you could pick out the guitar-heads on their 55 pilgrimmage from the drool on their chins. They were all sitting on their hands, waiting for Stern to hit the overdrive and start wailing.

The slow movement of the set Stern would begin and end solo, fingerpicking, accenting the rounder tones he could get from his Telecaster, a guitar more often associated with country music. The “Tele” probably helped him to split the difference between the overdriven twang of his rock soloing (a Telecaster, after all, is just a one-horned Stratocaster) and his quicksilver bop … as well as to avoid the bulbous sound that players using similar effects often get from their big hollowbody Gibsons.

As for the last movement, it would return to something like the original allegro, though a bit louder, a bit funkier, and featuring an extended cadenza for the drums.

Of all the many tricks Stern smuggled in his deep pockets and up his ample sleeves, my favorite was when he would pick a single note on the high “E” string in swung triplets and interpolate chords on the upbeats. It’s an effective technique for crescendo: the chords zigzag up the neck; after a few bars, the repeated note will move up a third, say—higher ground on which to build another set of relentlessly-climbing triads. The effect is almost pianistic, with the contrast between the insistent high note and the shifting chords generating tension. When the passage was over, Stern would be someplace other than where he began—further up the neck, certainly, but on a new emotional plateau as well, although maybe not quite ready to hit that overdrive pedal. It’s a technique that fellow New York guitarist Ron Affif would take to its logical conclusion, quadrupling the speed of the high note to a mandolin-like tremolo, while reducing the accompaniment from a chord progression to a melodic line. In both cases, technique acts as a signature: it announces the musician’s identity as surely as a composer’s name coded into a score.

I remember how Stern used to look when he came in: hair unkempt, face unshaven, wearing a nondescript grey shirt and jeans and holding a diner coffee. He looked like he’d just gotten out of bed, which he might have; and truth be told on some nights he played like he was still asleep, or had woken up on the far wrong side. The waitress would rip our tickets in half (I say “our” because I’ve tried to repay the favor done me and take as many friends as possible to see Stern), and while we drank our first drink we would watch the musicians filter in, greet the people they knew, and chat while they set up their gear. I appreciated the lack of pretension, and the lack of distance between the audience and musicians. In itself this was nothing new: I’d been catching rock acts at small to mid-size clubs for a good five years, and more than once I’d stuck around to chat with bandmembers, whom I generally found to be down-to-earth and eager to discuss their music. But this was something more: a fantasy of being in the musician’s workshop, like one of those all-night jam sessions at the old Minton’s, although for what I knew at the time the comparison is anachronistic.

I always figured the 55 barflies hated those Monday and Wednesday nights, when the tourists and so-called bridge-and-tunnel crowd would pack that little bar to the gills, the acolytes crowding a foot away from the head of Stern’s Tele and jamming up the doorway to the bathroom behind him. The waitresses had to do pirouettes to get drinks to the tables. In this respect Stern’s appearance was apropos: the 55 was a dive, and proud of it. I’m sure they welcomed Stern for the same reason The Tower art theater in Salt Lake City held over the hit sports documentary Hoop Dreams for months on end: even at eight dollars a head, he paid the rent.

It’s the early-nineties décor I remember best of all. One painting in pastels showed a woman doubled over the back of an armchair. At the top was the injunction to “practice safe sex”; at the bottom, much larger: “FUCK A CHAIR.” Next to it was a mural-sized painting of a group of American presidents at a sort of Last Supper, with Reagan in the place of Jesus, a miniature mushroom cloud rising from his plate.

*

Besides the price, the pictures are about the only thing that’s changed at the 55. I miss them. Today, the walls are covered with the clichéd jazz-and-blues memorabilia you can find in any club: smoky, heavy-chiaroscuro portraits, iconic photos of Miles and Robert Johnson, “A Great Day in Harlem,” Blue Note album cover reproductions. It’s a small but significant difference: the 55 has gone from being a bar where jazz was played to a jazz bar. Maybe noplace can withstand a regular gig by an internationally-known musician for long without changing in some fundamental ways. But in a broader sense, what’s happened to the 55 is indicative of what’s happened to New York City as a whole, which for the last couple of decades has been busy draining itself of all its wonderfully garish “local” color, and repackaging itself as one more franchise in a global urban chain store, drawing liberally on its own myths to manufacture a brand identity.

I still go to the 55 a few times a year, though it’s been a while since I saw Stern, who still plays there Mondays and Wednesdays, just less regularly than he used to. Wayne Krantz was my surrogate Stern for a time, but his invigorating Thursday-night sets have (sadly) come to an end. Of all the other great music I’ve caught there recently, I wanted to single out the last time I saw Chris Potter, in part (but only in part) because it makes for an interesting counterpoint with the 55 of yore (at least my yore).

Like Stern, Potter is a rent-payer, and the crowd was the typical mix of music students, locals and tourists. By the time I arrived, there wasn’t a seat in the house, although several people were being instructed to sit in places where there seemed to be no available chairs. The waitresses were engaged in their usual calisthenics, and drinks were being passed like buckets in a fire brigade. The bar itself—I mean the wooden thing you lean against and set drinks on—was packed two deep all the way down, with the biggest crowd, as always, next to the band, making it well-nigh impossible to get to the bathroom before the set’s end.

I took a spot against the back wall, right by the door, standing with my feet slightly parted and my backpack clamped between my shins—there wasn’t even room for it on the floor next to me. It was actually the first of several elements that conspired to make the night’s set one of those quasi-religious experiences that recorded music simply can’t reproduce. There’s nothing like a little pain to get you in the mood for spiritual uplift: ten minutes of standing with my backpack between my knees, and I was ready to sink down on them and beg the God of Music for a speedy deliverance.

Add to this that it was one of those school nights when I shouldn’t have been out at all, had snuck down to the Village in spite of my conscience and better judgment, reading papers on the train in both directions. In this sense, Music was not only my god, but my mistress as well, and I was at once martyr and sinner. Who knew what my partner would find on my collar when I got home?

As for Potter, he stood facing me at the other end of the pub, as if he were my mirror image, or I his. He seemed to stare at a spot directly over my head while he played. And I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that he was playing for me, and only for me—this despite the acolyte who stood almost directly behind him, also facing me, whose face I watched from time to time, and whose changing expressions I began to mirror, as if I could make his emotions (surprise, wonder, pleasure) my own.

And as for the music Potter played … well, this was almost a year ago; I couldn’t name you a single tune. I couldn’t even tell you who his band was. But that tone … that tone! For Potter was channeling Rollins that night, his big sound poured, and poured, and poured, until the bar ran over with it. It pinned me to the wall more than any crowd could. And it swallowed me, as sure as Jonah was by the whale. Except that unlike Jonah, I wasn’t fleeing the Lord; I’d boarded that boat hunting Leviathan as much as any Ahab, had stayed on deck through the gale, waiting for Him to find me. And when He did, and opened His mouth, I held my nose and jumped in.

*

A closing observation on the Potter set: Depending on the tune, the bartender would turn the AC on or off. A ballad, and the AC would go off; a burner, and the AC would come back on. I just can’t imagine this being the case twenty years ago, before the music was put on an altar. In fact, I can’t imagine the 55 had AC at all, though I’m sure it did.

Then again, clicking the AC off for a ballad is really only a stone’s throw from FUCK A CHAIR, isn’t it? This little pub-that-could has worked hard to brand itself as a cross between Dizzy’s and dive bar, a place to slum with the anointed. The altar is made of plastic.

And then again, who cares? Altar or no altar, plastic or solid gold, old New York or new, the music has stuck it out, even thrived. The wood paneling may smell like cigarettes, but there’s music there, too. Put your ear to the wall and you’ll hear it, like the sea in a shell.

Spring, Washington Square

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I love spring in Washington Square, when the musicians come out with the crocuses and daffodils. You’ll be walking through the Square on one of the first warm days of the year and hear the strains of a trumpet or a saxophone you hadn’t heard since the previous fall, and you’ll recognize it immediately, though the notes, and by and large the musicians, are as anonymous as cathedrals.

The other day I took a train to Park Slope hungover and got my taxes done and had lunch and sat down in Ozzie’s café and finished Sweet Hearts by Melanie Rae Thon (what a writer) and then sat drooling and half-dozing watching the shops across the street re-open while the sun emerged from behind clouds and beat through the window. Then I took a train back to the City. I listened to “Perugia,” maybe the most mournful piece on Brad Meldhau’s album Places, while the B train crossed over the East River, listening to the clatter of the train over the music and watching the water and the city behind and before me for the duration of the crossing. The sun wasn’t going anywhere now, and between the satiety of the receding hangover and the slight caffeine buzz and the nostalgia of the music and the view of the city from the bridge high above, all of these things colluded to bring about one of those lingering moments when you think about old lovers and other possible lives, and you feel a secret sad joyful resignation. I felt pleasantly scummy, too, as if I’d never made it home the night before, as if I were still in my itinerant twenties, all full of wanderlust and the spirit of vagrancy.

So I wasn’t ready to go home yet. I got out at Canal and footed it up to Washington Square, on this first real spring day after half a week of torrential rain. How could the Square not look radiant? And who should be playing on this day but Lawrence Clark. Lawrence is a young tenor player I’ve spoken to a couple of times. He seems to have had a champion in the late, great Rashied Ali, whom he played with at the uptown Charlie Parker Festival in 2008. Another time I tried to go see him at The Kitano, but he didn’t show. (An image from that set sticks in my mind: a drop of spit clinging to the edge of the bell of the trumpet, falling, forming again there.) He played brilliantly at the Festival—better, I thought, than the young altoist whom the crowd obviously preferred, and who won the day’s perhaps unintended (but always implicit?) cutting contest. Her sound was more firmly grounded in R&B; Clark, following Ali, has a tendency to play farther out. The crowd that comes out for the Charlie Parker Festival is not the same crowd that goes to, say, The Stone, or Roulette—not even the crowd for the downtown sets on Sunday, so far as I can tell.

Clark’s blowing has a buttery tone reminiscent of Rollins’s. At least, that was what struck me when I sat down to listen to him play, closed my eyes in the sun like I had in Ozzie’s. Jazz sounds almost preternaturally good after a hangover. You surrender yourself to the music, you let it wash over you. And then all the pores in your body open, and the music saturates you. Of course, there’s a time and a place for intellect and processing, for standing back and comparing musical phrases, for thinking the music even as you listen. But this was not such a time or place. Not in Washington Square, at the beginning of the spring, after drinking too much. These are moments for surrender.

It was a trio, sax and bass and drums. The bass player had thick dirty fingers—Brahms had fingers like that—and a red star on his baseball cap. There was a plastic wheelbarrow set in front of them, for donations. A wheelbarrow. It seemed a bit ambitious.

Look at them: they have no right to play music like this, this well. They might have wandered here off the street. They might have just met. History has not anointed them geniuses. They have no right to play music like this, this well. Which, I guess, is one reason they do.

It was like running into an old friend—even though these musicians wouldn’t know me from Adam—because the sound, the sound was back, very much the sound of the Square. (And this remains true, mind you, even as much of the old vibe seems to have migrated north, to Union Square.) I’ve always loved this quote from Eric Dolphy: “Once the music’s over, it’s gone, in the air, you can’t get it back.” But in the Square you can get it back; the circle is inscribed in the square, the music is as cyclical as the seasons, and as transient as the passers-by. That’s the beauty of it: you leave one day in the middle of a song, which fades slowly out of hearing as you walk away; but you’ll pick it up again the next day, or the next week, or the following year. Each band may be staked in a different corner of the park, but the listener lives on the frontiers, the melodies mesh one with another. And in the meantime the other business of the Square goes on around, a Whitmanesque time immemorial of walking-meeting-parting-listening-playing. And so you’re never sad to just be passing through, because you’re never just passing through, because you know you’ll return to this very spot, and the sound will be here, an old friend, waiting, in that one long jam without beginning or end.