mim’s blog

A couple of weekends ago my parents and I went to the Newport Jazz Festival, also known as the JVC Jazz Festival Newport. Here are the schedules for saturday and sunday if you want to follow along. It was very cool, once I realized that three simultaneous stages meant that I could leave a show I didn’t like and go exploring. In general, the side-stage acts were younger and I was less likely to have heard of them, but more likely to enjoy their performances. Don’t get me wrong, there were some great acts on the main stage, including MyCoy Tyner, the Bad Plus, and Dave Brubeck, but the people I really liked were on the side stages. My favorites were Hiromi, Avishai Cohen’s Trio, James Carter, Cyrus Chestnut, Gold Sounds (including Carter and Chestnut), Christain Scott and the venerable Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

Some random thoughts in no particular order. I found it a bit weird that most people in the crowd knew the words and were singing along to George Benson’s songs, as I don’t think I’d ever heard them before. It was even weirder that my dad was one of them. For all of his pop-iness, he still plays a mean guitar. Al Jarreau seemed to be drunk or something. Arturo Sandoval was a lot of fun and as entertaining and impressive as ever. Dave Brubeck seems to be getting a little soft now that he’s entered middle age, although I liked his sax player Bobby Militello more this time than previous times I’ve seen him. Savion Glover was pretty amazing to watch, the communication between him and the rest of the band, although I think I needed to get into the shade at that point otherwise I might have passed out. Avishai Cohen’s pianist plays a mean melodica, espcially considering that he plays it through a giant bendy-straw while dancing. And Hiromi was playing some licks on her synth that sounded like she had the arpeggiator cranked up to 11, but it was all her.

In general, an interesting experience and a good introduction to some people I hadn’t heard or heard of before. Next time I’ll start exploring the side stages sooner.

Last night Matt and I went out the Flux Factory in Queens to check out Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society. The flux factory is apparently in the middle of nowhere in Queens, but luckily it wasn’t too long a ride on the 7 from Matt’s place in Long Island City. The concert itself was well worth the ride. The setup was your typical 20 piece big band, but playing some really awesome, dark music. Recordings of past shows are available on Darcy’s website and do a pretty good job of capturing them.

They reminded both Matt and me of Justin Mullens’ Delphian Jazz Orchestra, a show that we saw at the Bowery Poetry Club a few months ago. The Secret Society also happens to play at the BPC, so maybe I should look into other big bands playing there as well. The thing that I really like about this kind of music is the way that it just keeps building in intensity. Even when they were playing a ballad, the trumpets would sneak in at some point and all of the sudden they’d be screaming, but in a way that compeletely fit the mood of the piece and just built the intensity even further.

This show and the Newport Jazz Fest got me thinking about the arc of a performance’s energy and structure. Bear with me here, I’m imagining arcs within arcs. At the smallest scale, an improviser needs to build this sort of arc into his/her solo. As Arni Cheatham from the Aardvark Jazz Ensemble said once at a rehearsal, building a solo is like making love, you have to build up to things.

The next level of structure would be the song level. This is where I find that the typical head-solos-head jazz combo form falls flat. With each soloist building his own solo’s energy, there isn’t much continuity from one to the next or to or from the head. When you take the head out, it doesn’t really feel like you’ve arrived anywhere aside from where you started. Big band music like the Secret Society or the Delphia Orchestra, being through-composed, can go somewhere. The extra structure around the solos, and perhaps instead of some of the improvising, allows the energy to build and unifies the whole piece. It’s not a new idea, incorporating improvisation into a large-scale structure, Mingus did it with his through-composed pieces, but I feel like these new bands really take the idea and run with it.

I guess you can see where this is going. The next levels would be the set / album level, then maybe the career level. I suppose this is all stuff that they teach you in composition 101, but I feel like it’s been neglected in jazz’s emphasis on the individual improviser.

Adrian was in town this week and in addition to going to Hallo Berlin with him and jwerberg and perlick and liz and qwdigbo we also went to see Jens Lekman play in Williamsburg. The set was just Jens playing on his mini guitar (plus a trumpet and some whistling by the crowd) in a rather intimate back room of a record store. What with this heat wave, it was around 110 degrees in there at 100% humidity, even with a bunch of fans and air conditioners going. To me that just made it all the more fun, but the Swedes seemed to be slightly wilted by it. Don’t get me wrong, the set was still great, but perhaps a bit shorter than it might have been. Of course, anything is more music than you usually get for free.

Another fun part about it was that this was the second show of Jens’ that I’d seen this tour. A few weeks ago Joanne and I saw him and his band play the Bowery Ballroom. We missed Beirut’s opening set, which I regret even more after having listened to a few of their songs at the record shop yesterday. But it was interesting to hear the same songs played with and without a band and to hear what worked and what didn’t. Pardon my unfamiliarity with his repertoire, but there was one song about a trip to Berlin and being introduced as a friends fiancee that he played both nights and came off completely differently. Personally, I think it worked better with the whole band because without them the climactic stop time part fell a little flat. But it was easier to hear the words without the band getting in the
way.

The last fun part about last night was eating dinner in the same little pizza place as Jens and his small entourage. This funness also extended to recognizing various members of the band and the non-Beirut opening act from the previous show. In my time in New York, I haven’t recognized that many celebrities, maybe I’m not going to the right places.

I was thinking about taking some sax lessons in New York with Sean Nowell. If I’m going to go as far as to drag someone else into this endeavor, I figured I should make a list of what I want to get out of it. It’s not easy to tell whether I’ve met these goals, nor is it clear that they are any different from what anyone else in any stage of musical development would say, but here they are anyway.

The thing I most want to get out of playing the saxophone is to be able to get what I hear, internally or externally, into my intellect and into my fingers. My secondary goal, one that is more measurable, is to be able to survive a New York jam session. As a step towards that first goal, I need to learn how to approach fast changes. This means knowing which chords are most important and which could be ignored or substituted or glossed over and knowing where important harmonic events like key changes occur. In addition, I need to learn what to play over each type of chord: major, dominant, dorian, diminished, half-diminished, and augmented. This means which notes are very important, which notes sound good, and which ones sound bad. In order to survive a jam session, I’ll need to have a bunch of songs memorized, which means I’ll need to get better at memorization. Since that’s a difficult thing to do, a more concrete approach might be to get better at recognizing which features of songs are the most crucial to their identities. Features could include particular chord progressions, voicings, rhythms, melodic motives, etc.

In the even longer term, I have a few more things I’d like to accomplish. It would be nice to be able to bust out some fast bop licks when it would be appropriate. Maybe that will just come with more practice. I also want to make my ear more sensitive to different players’ sounds and to figure out what I’d like my horn to sound like. In addition to recognizing players’ tones, it would be nice to be able to recognize what they’re doing musically. And finally, I want to learn how to approach soloing in different styles and what makes a song or a solo more one than another.

Last night Matt and I went to see Justin Mullens’ Delphian Jazz Orchestra at the Bowery Poetry club. It was an awesome show, I wish I hadn’t missed the first two numbers. It’s a traditional big band setup, but they play music that does a lot of my favorite things. Individual songs change style frequently. There’s a great groove, but it’s always shifting, either when they play a waltz with no drums or when the drummer plays some sort of samba rhythm and keeps switching up what he’s playing it on. The harmonies are dense, rich, lush, and crunchy.

The highlight of the night was the last song called “S’latch” which was played in accompaniment to a video put together by the bari player, Matt Cowan. The video was made up of clips from “Land of the Lost”, a campy 70s TV show, featuring claymation dinosaurs, people in ape suits, and “aliens” with giant gem-like eyes. The best special effect had to be when the characters were supposed to be plummeting down some sort of bottomless pit, but it was clear that they were actually sitting on the floor wriggling their arms and legs. Cowan didn’t have to do much to make the show completely ridiculous, but he did a good job of splicing various scenes together with iMovie. The music was superbly synched with the video on a fine temporal level as well as an emotional level, which was doubly amazing since the band members seemed hardly to pay any attention to it.

Thusday night I caught the late set of Joe Lovano’s Extended ensemble or some such title. The sax section was hot: Steve Slagle on flute and soprano, Ralph Lalama on tenor, George Garzone on tenor, and Gary Smulyan on bari. They were all tearing it up and I was especially impressed by Slagle’s bebop lines that just kept going. Smulyan, although he must double-time anything too slow, was still a little fireball. He was playing so fast that I didn’t hear the individual notes, but the lines were miraculously discernible.

I missed the opening, but the whole show was some sort of suite, with a bunch of songs by Lovano plus some of the Birth of the Cool arranged by Gunther Schuller thrown in for good measure. The interactions between the musicians trading solos was great; all of the performers were clearly enjoying themselves. During all of the solos Lovano would make up a background, sing it to the band, and they would all play it the next time it came around. The best, though, was when he called Giant Steps as the background for a minor blues. And one of my favorite parts, aside from the incredible music and the surly waitress, was that Lovano’s sax strap matched his purple shirt, that’s class.

On Wednesday my dad took me to see Cream play the last of their three reunion shows at Madison Square Gardens. It was an awesome, if slightly unlikely experience. Why, 37 years after breaking up, are they playing reunion shows? Maybe they need the money. They were certainly getting lots of that, what between the packed area, exorbitant ticket price, and merciless moichendising. The crowd was almost exclusively business types who were hippies back in 1966-68.

The music itself was on the whole very good. At points it seemed a little like a Cream cover band made up of the original memebers (insert discussion of the philosophy of personal identity). But at other times it was just a kick-ass rock/blues band. Clapton played a version of Stormy Monday that drove my dad nuts. He was understated, but dead on the whole night. Ginger Baker played a long drum solo to close the show, followed by, after an extended wait, the encore of “Sunshine of your love”.

They also had an neat light show component. The whole back wall of the stage was made of LEDs that would show “psychadelic” patterns that looked like pulsating oil on water, high-contrast green and red blobs floating in space, smoke, etc. Each “scene” had its own particular way of throbbing with the music. The whole thing reminded me of fbyte’s tensor LED wall, but three or four times as wide, and showing movies instead of moving patterns.

On the whole, an incredible experience.