JON GARELICK

Close readings

JON GARELICK — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:48:20 GMT

Darrell Katz and the JCA, Ben Ratliff, Jeff Turton
The JCA has been at it since 1985, a collective of musicians who are primarily composers rather than players, in need of an outlet to hear their pieces.

METAL HEAD: No reason someone who loves Mastodon shouldn’t love Monk, Ratliff reasons.

WFNX Jazz Brunch Top Five
1. Paul Shapiro, Essen [Tzadik]
2. Lake Street Dive | Promises, Promises [FYO Records]
3. Will Bernard | Blue Plate Special [Palmetto]
4. Christian Scott | Live at Newport [Concord]
5. Buena Vista Social Club | At Carnegie Hall [Nonesuch]

I've already reviewed Darrell Katz's exciting new album with the Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra, The Same Thing (Cadence), but I still have some questions for him. And besides, it's been a few years. When we get together at the Starbucks across from Berklee, I ask about "December 30, 1994," which is about that day's murders at a Brookline women's health clinic, with a text by Paula Tatarunis. In the midst of general mayhem, Rebecca Shrimpton begins to sing a lovely tune: "Who will keep the homefires burning/While out you go/To your deathcamps gunshops/Wars and penitentiaries." It's a fleeting moment, but jarring, memorable.

"Something about those lines reminded me of a standard," Katz says. (It turned out to be Cole Porter's "You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To.") "So okay, here's this thing about death camps and gun shops and somehow I come up with this pretty little melody. So I said, 'Okay, fine, I'm going to trust my instincts — this is the totally wrong music for this, but therefore it will be good.' I'm hardly the only person who's thought of that."

The JCA has been at it since 1985, a collective of musicians who are primarily composers rather than players, in need of an outlet to hear their pieces. Over the years, they've also played with or commissioned new work from the likes of Marty Ehrlich, Julius Hemphill, Dave Holland, Sam Rivers, and Maria Schneider. Meanwhile, the 18-piece JCA Orchestra has always drawn from the ranks of the best players in town. All of the pieces on The Same Thing are by Katz (that includes his arrangement of Willie Dixon's title tune), but most of the JCA concerts and discs are multi-composer affairs. This Saturday night at Emmanuel Church, the JCAO will play pieces by Katz, Jim Hobbs, Bob Pilkington, Warren Senders, and Norm Zocher.

Katz has been working with text more and more over the years. "It gives me a place to start. A poem gives shape and direction to the process." The starting point for "December 30, 1994" was the last lines: "Words do kill/And kill and kill again." "It was a really angry poem, and when I got to that last line, I just instantly thought I could make this poem a piece of music."

Darrell Katz/Jazz Composers Alliance Orchestra | The Same Thing

JON GARELICK — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:14:34 GMT

Cadence (2008)
Boston's Jazz Composers Alliance is fearless about subject matter — this, after all, is the organization that gave us The Death of Simone Weil as an "improvisational cantata."

Nights out

JON GARELICK — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 15:45:44 GMT

Björkestra, Jarrett, Kelly, and the Cohens
Five shows in eight days (not counting an early-music side trip with Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI at Sanders Theatre), so let’s get cracking.

“POSITIVE AND BUBBLY” Anat Cohen is as ebullient and charming as Keith Jarrett is prickly.

WFNX Jazz Brunch Top Five
1. New York Electric Piano, King Mystery [Buffalo Puppy]
2. Jimmy Herring, Lifeboat [Abstract Logix]
3. Buena Vista Social Club, At Carnegie Hall [World Circuit]
4. Sol y Canto, Cada Día un Regalo [Musicamador]
5. Lake Street Dive, Promises, Promises [FYO]

Five shows in eight days (not counting an early-music side trip with Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI at Sanders Theatre), so let’s get cracking.

Regular readers of these pages know my apprehensions about Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra. To wit, would the most idiosyncratic pop vocalist of our time be turned into conventional big-band music? In times of yore, jazz made corny tunes hip (“Bye Bye Blackbird,” “My Favorite Things”). Is jazz now in the business of turning the hip corny?

Fears allayed. At the Regattabar on October 23, following this year’s release of Enjoy! (Koch), Sullivan and a reduced “advance stealth unit” of the Björkestra (12 pieces instead of 18), roiled and rolled. Sullivan didn’t use Björk as a means of reinventing jazz, or vice versa. What he did do was create some progressive, “hip” jazz for 12 pieces (including laptop) that was satisfying as jazz at the same time that it reminded you what a wonderful songwriter Björk is. “Hyperballad” built on the original’s pattering drum ’n’ bass groove, “Hunter” shifted in and out of a bolero, “Army of Me” was as relentless as the original, and everyone took turns building succinct, dramatic solos. And there were pointed arranging touches: dynamic shifts, chorales for brass. Sullivan switched pianist Art Hirahara and bassist Yoshi Waki in and out of acoustic and electric roles as the songs demanded, and in Becca Stevens, he has a vocalist with the technique and the smarts to play Björk straight. No, you’re not going to hear any of those growls, pinched-off notes, and other colorings of Ms. Gudmundsdóttir, but this was an emotionally committed performance — and, again, Stevens makes you realize how good a songwriter Björk is because she lets you hear every word, even over a full complement of brass and rhythm.

No jazz fan will begrudge Keith Jarrett and his “Standards Trio” nearly filling Symphony Hall a week ago Sunday. What other serious instrumental jazz artist can do that these days? Herbie Hancock? Pat Metheny? Sonny Rollins? Anyone else? Still, is Jarrett all that?

Monika H. Band | Disguised As Umbrellas, We Slept

JON GARELICK — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:53:37 GMT

Self-released (2008)
Monika’s taste for leaping vocal lines likewise pushes the art-rock envelope.

Good fellows

JON GARELICK — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:42:27 GMT

Brian Blade and company help blaze jazz’s newest path
The jazz tide is shifting once again.

FREESTYLING: Blade’s Fellowship Band has no trouble mixing Joni Mitchell with their Coltrane.

Jazz Brunch Top 5
1. Jimmy Herring, Lifeboat [Abstract Logix]
2. New York Electric Piano, King Mystery [Buffalo Puppy]
3. Danilo Pérez/Claus Ogerman, Across the Crystal Sea [Emarcy]
4. E.S.T., Leucocyte [Emarcy]
5. Richard Bona, Bona Makes You Sweat [Blue Note]

The jazz tide is shifting once again. Over the past 40 years, wave after wave of the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion, and funk has broken and been absorbed. But in the last decade or so, yet another concept of jazz has begun to take in the pop music of our time.

It’s easier to define this music by what it isn’t than by what it is. It has no special allegiance to 4/4 swing — the walking-bass and dotted-rhythm ride-cymbal patterns that, along with ballads and brushes, irritate so many rock fans. Neither is there the core of Great American Songbook 32-bar standards that serve as the food for typical jazz ideas about form and harmony. There’s little of the cross-currents of Africa and Stockhausen and Cage that have influenced the avant-garde. There’s not even a lot of blues.

Instead, there’s Joni Mitchell and Radiohead and Björk. (Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra even specialize in the Icelandic chanteuse as big-band jazz.) The Bad Plus appropriate everything from Queen and Black Sabbath to Neil Young and Nirvana. Even when jazz musicians aren’t actually covering these artists, they’re listening hard. Brad Mehldau’s 2002 Largo (Warner Bros.) and Kurt Rosenwinkel’s 2003 Heartcore (Verve) were benchmarks, both in musical content and in the use of pop studio production techniques. On his recent Invisible Cinema (Blue Note), pianist Aaron Parks (a Rosenwinkel bandmember) offered a couple of originals that could have come right out of the Radiohead playbook. In this context, “real” jazz can sound strange. At a Bad Plus show a couple of years ago, I remember hearing — a good 40 minutes into the set —something strangely familiar from pianist Ethan Iverson. The friend who was sitting with me — a jazz pianist — leaned over and whispered, “That’s the first jazz chord they’ve played tonight.”

The Wee Trio | Capitol Diner Vol. 1

JON GARELICK — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 14:31:37 GMT

Bionic Records (2008)
The up-front news is that this vibes-bass-drums trio include the now-obligatory post–Bad Plus contemporary pop covers, in this case Nirvana and Sufjan Stevens.

The doctor is in

JON GARELICK — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:07:54 GMT

Stanley Sagov’s jazz remedies, plus Saxophone Summit
That Stanley Sagov plays jazz at all is impressive. That he plays it at such a high level is stunning.

That Stanley Sagov plays jazz at all is impressive. That he plays it at such a high level is stunning.

Sagov — a Boston family physician whose band visit Scullers this Tuesday for a CD-release show — is from South Africa. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he was born with Gordon’s Syndrome, a genetic disorder that left him with two club feet. By the time he was 13, he’d endured 16 different surgeries in London, New York, and Boston. He spent much of his early years walking in iron leg braces. Yet through all the extensive medical care, he found himself bonding with the doctors who treated him. Inspired as well by family members in the medical profession, he decided that he too would become a doctor.

But he was also drawn to music, and a variety of instruments. “I played guitar a lot and played in a band that did covers, R&B — Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis,” he tells me when we get together at his Chestnut Hill home. When the piano player left the band for a time, Sagov was tapped for the job. “I must have driven my parents insane, trying to teach myself to play these boogie-woogie and R&B things over and over and over. Then the piano player came back, but I was hooked.”

Hanging with older musicians, getting into jazz, he acquired mentors. “Bob Tizard, a bassist and trombonist, decided he was going to teach me how to play ‘Perdido’ — a 32-bar song form — and he was going to make this rock-and-roll musician understand about playing more than three chords and how to remember the form. We played the song from midnight until six in the morning.” By morning — “after around the 30th time” — Tizard had Sagov improvising.

This was Cape Town, during the depth of apartheid, about which Sagov had his own epiphany. At about the age of nine, he recounts in his press biography, he was walking uphill, wearing his leg irons, from a violin lesson when he “suddenly understood the parallel between my being stigmatized for looking unusual and the terrible way that black people in South Africa were being treated by whites.”

Later, he tells me, he was among a group of “iconoclastic young South Africans” who experienced the music as a bridge across races. “We had this fantasy about America that the jazz community was an integrated community, white and black people demonstrating across the color bar that you could make great art together.” In the meantime, as a medical doctor, he worked in the segregated townships.

Blink. | The Epidemic Of Ideas

JON GARELICK — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:36:38 GMT

Thirsty Ear (2008)
Aside from the general aggressive, post-rock, post-jazz underground feel, there’s pretty tunes here.

Robot love

JON GARELICK — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 23:32:44 GMT

Terminator ’s wonder years
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. It may be the best teen drama for adults on TV.

MILF FROM HELL: What’s a mother to do when her boy really is the savior of mankind?

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox, Mondays at 8 pm) is ostensibly sci-fi action adventure. In fact, it plays as maybe the best teen drama for adults on TV.

As you’ll recall from the end of the second Terminator movie, Sarah (in a role created by Linda Hamilton) was on the run with her son John, the future leader of the resistance movement fighting the totalitarian Skynet computer and its army of cyborgs. She worked in the present to save the future through the agency of her son, with the help of a reformed Arnold Schwarzenegger, who sacrificed himself at the end of that chapter of the story — the “last” Terminator.

On The Sarah Connor Chronicles (the first season has come out on a Warner DVD), a new generation of Terminators is again in pursuit of the now-teenage John Connor, and there’s conflict over a new computer known as the Turk that contains the digital DNA that will make possible the eventual creation of Skynet. Sarah is in the middle of two struggles: to preserve the life of her son, and to prevent Skynet from being born.

All well and good — and who cares. Skynet, the Turk — a premise is a premise. What matters here is the story of a single mother trying to protect her son while the son tries to be a normal teenager. The beauty of The Sarah Connor Chronicles is that it gives this primal set-up a cosmic significance — and a cosmic irony. Every mother thinks her son is the savior of the world (God’s gift to mankind) — but for Sarah Connor, this fiction happens to be true.

Lena Headey as Sarah is dark, beautiful, drawn, tough, and scary, in a low-maintenance shag of black hair, eyes wary, unsmiling, as good with a 12-gauge as Hamilton was. Thomas Dekker as John could be an emo-boy-in-waiting — if mom and he didn’t have to keep fleeing every time their house explodes. The complication comes with the entrance of Cameron (Summer Glau), a “good” Terminator in the guise of a teenage girl sent from the future to protect John.

Headey and Glau are perfect foils — hot-blooded real woman versus . . . a robot. As for Glau and Dekker, well, what sexually inexperienced teenage boy doesn’t want his own beautiful robot-doll woman? If John Connor were 14 rather than 16, his character would be impossible — as all 14-year-old boys are.

Getting it live

JON GARELICK — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:44:47 GMT

Noah Preminger, Fernando Huergo, the John Coltrane Memorial Concert, and the BeanTown Jazz Festival
Noah Preminger — bearded, shaggy-haired, 23 years old — plays tenor saxophone like a man at least twice his age while remaining completely of the moment.

FRESH: Preminger floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.

WFNX Jazz Brunch Top Five
1. ROY HARGROVE, Earfood [Emarcy]
2. PATRICIA BARBER, The Cole Porter Mix [Blue Note]
3. MCCOY TYNER, Guitarists [Half Note/McCoy Records]
4. CLAUS OGERMAN/DANILO PÉREZ, Across the Crystal Sea [Emarcy]
5. AARON PARKS, Invisible Cinema [Blue Note]

Noah Preminger — bearded, shaggy-haired, 23 years old — plays tenor saxophone like a man at least twice his age while remaining completely of the moment. At Scullers on September 9, appearing behind his new Dry Bridge Road (Nowt Records), he led a line-up that included veteran pianist Frank Kimbrough and guitar wizard Ben Monder, plus trumpeter Russ Johnson, bassist John Hebert, and drummer Jochen Rueckert. Plenty of younger players extol funk, hip-hop, or rock backbeats. Preminger is pure jazz without being a fuddy-duddy. Instead of the brawn and bray of Coltrane, he likes silky floating beboppish lines in the manner of Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh. (The band played Konitz & Marsh’s “Sax of a Kind,” and its trim unison theme fit like a glove.) There was plenty of rhythmic variety — Preminger’s “Luke” mixed call-and-response sections of 4/4 and 6/8. Kimbrough, Hebert, and Rueckert found all manner of ways to vary standard 4/4 pulse, Hebert stepping out of his walks for syncopated counterpoint to Rueckert’s swinging ride and snare, Kimbrough stepping in with odd-beat chords. Monder varied a blurry classic jazz tone with some fuzzy distorted (but still quiet) rock guitar, especially on the last — and most freewheeling — tune of the night, Joe Lovano’s “Uprising.”

Preminger’s lines are always fresh. He likes to start a solo with a long burry low note and then accelerate up through the registers, from his pearly mid range to a top-of-the-horn rasp. And he varies his phrasing — one of the things that make a ballad like “Where Seagulls Fly,” from the album, sound older than Preminger’s years. He’ll use space and tone not to mimic some older balladeer like Ben Webster or Lester Young but to find his own emotions and thoughts, inventing new riffs, new harmonies, in the midst of his melodic embellishments. He starts and stops his eighth-note runs, mixing in plenty of rests or longer tones, and he’s especially good at the blues procedure of “additive” phrasing, which gives his solos a motivic logic. Think of his rhythmic embellishment as a lyric and you get the idea:

Patricia Barber | The Cole Porter Mix

JON GARELICK — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 21:08:16 GMT

Blue Note
On this Porter “mix,” pianist/singer/songwriter Barber pulls back just a bit from the audacious ambition of 2006’s Mythologies (based on Ovid, no less).

Autumn leaves

JON GARELICK — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:08:52 GMT

A cornucopia of jazz
One of the great harbingers of fall jazz for the past seven years has been the Beantown Jazz Festival.

GOLD SOUNDS: They’ll be playing the Beantown Jazz Festival September 26-27.

One of the great harbingers of fall jazz for the past seven years has been the BEANTOWN JAZZ FESTIVAL (September 26-27). Created by Bob’s Southern Bistro proprietor Darryl Settles (now an owner of the Beehive), the event is produced by Berklee College of Music and has grown in scope. This year, a Friday-night concert at the Berklee Performance Center will feature the great drummers Cindy Blackman and Terri Lyne Carrington with their bands, as well as pianists Geri Allen and Patrice Rushen, guitarist David Gilmore, and young Dutch saxophonist Tineke Postma. But the jewel of the weekend is the free Saturday street fair, from noon to 6 pm, on Columbus Ave starting at Mass Ave and going west. This year’s line-up includes Javon Jackson with Les McCann, Kurt Elling, Walter Beasley, Randy Weston’s African Rhythms Trio, the Russell Malone Quartet, Rebecca Cline, Andrew Ward, Fernando Brandão, and Gold Sounds. That last is a Pavement tribute band (we kid you not) with James Carter, Cyrus Chestnut, Reginal Veal, and Ali Jackson. (Friday tickets: 617.931.2000 or www.ticketmaster.com; info at www.beantownjazz.org.)

The organizers behind the JOHN COLTRANE MEMORIAL CONCERT have taken every conceivable approach to their subject since the annual event began 31 years ago, so it figures that they’d get around to a hip-hop take on Trane. Of course, it helps that one of the progenitors of hip-hop/jazz fusion is the Roxbury-born Guru, the former Gang Starr MC who began his Jazzmatazz series back in 1993. Guru — joined by producer Solar, DJ Doo Wop, trumpeter Brownman, and multi-instrumentalist David Scott — will take on the likes of Coltrane’s “Acknowledgement” (from A Love Supreme) and his version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things” on September 27 (Blackman Theatre, Northeastern University, 360 Huntington Ave, Boston; 617.373.4700 or www.gonu.com/tickets).

Few jazz acts these days can fill US concerts halls on their own, but the trio of pianist KEITH JARRETT, bassist GARY PEACOCK, and drummer JACK DEJOHNETTE — now in their 26th year together — are one of them. With umpteem albums behind them on the ECM label, and their concert film of two shows from 1985 and ’86, Standards I/II: Tokyo, released in August as a double-DVD set, the trio take their sublime (or inert, depending on your point of view) book of American popular song to Symphony Hall on October 26 (300 Mass Ave, Boston; 888.266.1200 or www.bso.org).

Life lessons

JON GARELICK — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:55:54 GMT

Danilo Pérez gets into the moment
At 42, the pianist and composer Danilo Pérez is everywhere.

OPEN VISA: “I don’t want my music to have an immigration officer.”

At 42, the pianist and composer Danilo Pérez is everywhere. For starters, he’s key to two of the best working bands in jazz right now, and two of the busiest: the Wayne Shorter Quartet and his own trio with bassist Ben Street and drummer Adam Cruz. (The latter perform this weekend at the Regattabar.) Besides that, he’s teaching at both Berklee College of Music and New England Conservatory. Since 2003, he’s run the Panama Jazz Festival, which is the keystone for his educational foundation and outreach programs in his home country. And this year he’s added two major works to his discography. In January came Panama Suite (ArtistShare), a recording of his own composition, and then on August 26 Across the Crystal Sea (Emarcy/Decca), a collaboration with the venerable composer/arranger Claus Ogerman.

Together these projects show the breadth of Pérez’s talent. Classically trained at the National Conservatory in Panama, he came to Berklee in 1985 to study jazz composition. His skill at combining the bebop vocabulary with his pan-American heritage was honed as a member of Dizzy Gillespie’s United Nation Orchestra, and a series of solo albums — especially 1996’s PanaMonk and 2000’s Motherland — showed him developing his own voice. But it wasn’t until he began playing with Shorter (on the 2003 Verve album Alegría) that his work leapt into a whole new dimension. When Shorter formed his new quartet, he pushed Pérez farther and farther out of his comfort zone. Pérez has always maintained that he wanted to play music “without an immigration officer”; Shorter, basing his new band’s music on a combination of his own compositions and free improvisation, stamped Pérez’s permanent visa. The Shorter Quartet’s live performances have become some of the most exciting on the scene right now because of their unpredictability and because the group (with bassist John Patitucci and drummer Brian Blade) have taken the jazz ethos of combining form and intuition to remarkable heights. It’s a practice that Pérez has continued in his own trio.

Of the new discs, Pérez told me when we got together at New England Conservatory during a break in his touring schedule with Shorter this past July, Panama Suite is his attempt “to translate the folkloric sound of Panama to the big-band setting but with the harmonies and adventure of jazz improvisation.” The three-movement, 25-minute work roils with catchy, riff-like tunes and propulsive Afro-Latin rhythms. Across the Crystal Sea, on the other hand, was conceived as an Ogerman project with producer Tommy LiPuma, and it wasn’t till the recording was completed that Ogerman decided Pérez should get top billing. “It’s all about him!” says Pérez affectionately of Ogerman. “I was just an actor in his movie.”

State of the art

JON GARELICK — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:38:55 GMT

Newport's Jazz ID check
You could find just about any kind of jazz you wanted on the three stages at the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport last weekend.

GROUP IDENTITY Blade’s Fellowship band are a resolutely ego-less bunch.

You could find just about any kind of jazz you wanted on the three stages at the JVC Jazz Festival in Newport last weekend: jazz as heavy metal (Marco Benevento Trio), jazz as twee prog (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey), jazz as history lesson (George Wein’s Newport All-Stars), jazz as avant-trad import (Empirical), jazz as pop funk (Herbie Hancock), jazz as magazine-cover glamor (Christian Scott, Esperanza Spalding), jazz as Latin diaspora (Guillermo Klein y Los Guachos), jazz as African bebop (Lionel Loueke), jazz as R&B (Aretha Fanklin), jazz as lingerie-buying background (Chris Botti), and jazz as jazz (Warren Vaché, Wayne Shorter, Sonny Rollins).

Slideshow: Newport Jazz Festival. By Jean Hangarter.

There were plenty of other spinoffs, but perhaps the most telling of any current trend was the post-rock contingent, which included Benevento, the Jacob Freds, Christian Scott’s quintet, and, most provocatively, the Brian Blade Fellowship. Blade is a first-call drummer among the jazz elite — he was also appearing at the festival as a regular member of the Wayne Shorter Quartet. But the Fellowship have been his pet project since their first disc in 1998. At the Pavilion Stage on Saturday, they played a chunk of their latest, Season of Changes (Verve). Led by Blade and composer/pianist John Cowherd, the line-up includes star guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, but this is a resolutely ego-less bunch. The songs suggest beautifully arranged and detailed folk rock, with carefully cued entrances and exits and layered, brooding themes.

The group ethic so predominates over the individual that the first song, “Stoner Hill,” was played straight through without a single solo. The Fellowship line-up also includes two crack reedmen — alto/bass-clarinet man Myron Walden and tenor-sax Melvin Butler — as well as one of the best drummers in jazz and a jazz-guitar visionary, so they can’t help sounding like jazz. But when you pretty much declare your indifference to the improvised solo, you’re discarding an idea that’s been central to the music since Louis Armstrong.

It hardly mattered — the Fellowship were compelling at just about every turn. Certainly the audience was unconcerned: the 500-plus who filled the chairs and overflowed the open sides of the Pavilion tent were rapt for the Fellowship’s 75 minutes on the stage. When Butler solo’d, it didn’t matter that his passage served more as a structural bridge than as improvised personal statement — the audience hooted and hollered anyway. By my watch, the first full-blown solo came from Rosenwinkel, nearly a half-hour into the set. (Although, as Ben Ratliff pointed out in his recent New York Times live review of the Fellowship, Blade improvises almost constantly.) Jazz is usually about how individual expression works within a band — but this project seems to be about the ensemble itself as a expressive statement.

Aaron Parks

JON GARELICK — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:33:04 GMT

Invisible Cinema | Blue Note
He likes the shape of pop tunes, their dynamics, their unfolding dramas. He names Radiohead as an influence.

Cinematic

JON GARELICK — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:15:55 GMT

Empirical go to the movies, plus the Hot 8
Talking with Nathaniel Facey, the alto-saxophonist in the London band Empirical, you find it difficult at first to pin down where and how the quintet developed their unusual compositional style.

PICTORIAL: Movies and visual imagery inspire Empirical as much as does music.

Talking with Nathaniel Facey, the 25-year-old alto-saxophonist in the London band Empirical, you find it difficult at first to pin down where and how the quintet (who play the Newport Jazz Festival August 10) developed their unusual compositional style. Some tunes have a straight-ahead post-bop feel, like Facey’s “Blessing”; with its standard song form mixed up with contrary keys and rhythms, it’s bright and hooky, like a cross between Ornette Coleman’s “Blues Connotation” and Miles Davis’s take on “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Other numbers, like Facey’s “Palantir” and pianist Kit Downes’s “Dark Lady,” are episodic marvels, one theme supplanted by another, each solo with its own background setting in the shifting textures of the piece. Although all five players in Empirical impress, it’s the writing that impresses most on their homonymous debut — the piquant ensemble voicings, the unfolding narrative structures.

Over the phone from London, Facey names an array of influences: Wayne Shorter (“particularly his current quartet”), Steve Coleman, Tim Berne. All of these offer keys to the band’s individual playing, even particular rhythmic or harmonic devices. But they don’t explain “Palantir,” whose 16-minute length is more the result of detailed writing than any extended solo passages.

“I think it’s a lot of things,” says Facey. “But we’re all fans of films and visual arts. For myself, I really love films and animation, as well as the dramatic nature of film music. That’s something that’s an inspiration: the more creative scores and really nice films. The music of The Lord of the Rings [Howard Shore] is really great, Pan’s Labyrinth [Javier Navarrete] as well. So there’s definitely the pictorial thing, as well as trying to conjure imagery or play in a really dramatic way.”

“Palantir” was inspired in part by “the mystical seeing stone” of that name from The Lord of the Rings. (Facey says he was watching the DVDs of the movie during the piece’s gestation.) Drummer Shaney Forbes’s “Kite” conjures the flight of a hawk over the Tuscan town of Vinci; it’s dedicated to Leonardo. Phelps’s lovely ballad “Clapton Willow” is about a district in Northeast London (not the guitar god) and a willow tree that lends a sense of calm to the troubled neighborhood.

Islander

JON GARELICK — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 18:01:07 GMT

Julie Hecht’s self-help
There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht.

LIFE’S STORIES: Hecht’s narratives unfold like elaborate improvisations.

Happy Trails to You | By Julie Hecht | Simon & Schuster | 224 pages | $24

There’s still time to spend some of your summer with Julie Hecht. She’s been winning awards for her short stories almost since she began publishing them, first in Harper’s in the ’70s and then in the New Yorker starting in the early ’90s. Her two collections and one novel are told in the same first-person voice: that of an unnamed photographer who splits her time between East Hampton in the winter and Nantucket in the summer. Prickly, anxiety-ridden, deadpan-funny, vegan, this narrator doesn’t sound much different from her creator in the rare interview Hecht gave to the Believer in May. The jacket flaps of all Hecht’s books (which also include a collection of “talks” with Andy Kaufman, Was This Man a Genius?) provide the same bio: “She lives on the east end of Long Island in the winter and in Massachusetts in summer and fall.” The same author photo has been published with all four books.

Hecht’s stories read like elaborate improvisations. Almost plotless, they recount a loosely related series of events, all embellished with the narrator’s singular social observations, free associations, phobias, and obsessions. The title story of her first collection, Do the Windows Open?, is ostensibly about trying to overcome her fear of taking the South Fork bus from East Hampton to Manhattan. (The title gives you an idea of the base level of anxiety.) The recurring themes and characters include an unnamed husband who floats through the background offering commentary like a one-man Greek chorus. One character is referred to by a phrase that’s repeated verbatim and functions like a call-back in a comedy routine: “the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto.”

Hecht told the Believer that when people ask her what her stories are about she says, “They’re about the way things are now.” The domestic is always yoked to the global or the infinite, in the space of a paragraph, or even a sentence. And everywhere Hecht is marking civilization’s decline: from personal etiquette and the degradation of the English language to fashion to international catastrophes, the “Alfred E. Neuman president” and “the globally warmed-up days.”

Life of Don

JON GARELICK — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 21:01:19 GMT

Mad Men ’s dark nostalgia
Mad Men continues to take us back to a time we think we know.

THE MAN: Don Draper is his own his mise-en-scène.

Mad Men continues to take us back to a time we think we know. The AMC hit series (Sundays at 10 pm) established itself last year with its freakishly restrained portrait of Madison Avenue advertising executives. Here was the life of 1960: unchecked office racism and sexism, copious cocktails at lunch and around the conference table. A fist fight breaks out between a couple of junior executives, and their bosses blithely ignore it as they wait for the elevator. A senior executive barfs his lunch in front of a major client and is let off with a perfectly reasonable explanation: “Oysters.” Here’s over-the-top behavior presented amid the understated mise-en-scène of subdued lighting, starched Hathaway shirts, ubiquitous cigarette smoking, and brilliantined $5 haircuts.

As Season 2 dawns, it’s 1962, and Valentine’s Day — a holiday invented by advertising. JFK is president, and Jackie’s tour of the White House is on black-and-white TVs everywhere. A callow ad man brings his wife a heart-shaped box of chocolates, urging her, “Come on, open them, I want one,” before proceeding to eat them all as Jackie talks about the “architectural unity” of the Roosevelt Room.

At the offices of the Sterling Cooper agency, the minions of creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) sit obediently waiting for the boss in a conference room with a platter of untouched half-sandwiches. Is Don playing hooky? Having one of his afternoon extramarital trysts? No, he’s at the doctor’s office for a long-overdue physical. His blood pressure is 160/100, and the doctor prescribes what any good doctor in 1962 would prescribe: more relaxation — and Phenobarbital. Don is 36 years old. Then, a leisurely lunch of meat and whiskey at a neighborhood bar.

Don finally shows up at the meeting, aloof, unrepentant. He brushes off the first glib pitches for the new Mohawk Airlines campaign: “It has to be advertising for people without a sense of humor.” More tag lines are suggested and brushed off until Don rears back and, with only a hint of impatience, explains: “It’s not about the majestic beauty of the Mohawk nation — it’s about adventure.” Ah-ha! Don Draper is still the man.

Draper is all repression and mystery, but his big secret was exposed last season: he’s an orphan, his mother was a prostitute, and he’s living under an assumed identity. A psychological MacGuffin, perhaps, but good enough. Don may be an actual bastard, but he’s also conflicted. “What an interesting character,” my wife marveled after an early episode. “A tortured hypocrite.”

Cambodian dance party!

JON GARELICK — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:39:30 GMT

Dengue Fever + Pistolera at the Museum of Fine Arts, July 9, 2008
Dengue Fever’s charms are so extreme that at first they might strike you as incongruous — like a chocolate-covered lobster.

Hybrid rhythmic engine

JON GARELICK — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 16:57:04 GMT

Nation Beat is a gas
Fusions are the lifeblood of music, but too often they come with a whiff of high-concept gimmickry.

ROOTED On Legends of the Preacher, Nation Beat create their own folklore.

Fusions are the lifeblood of music, but too often they come with a whiff of high-concept gimmickry. Country rock, folk rock, cowpunk, Latin jazz — all well and good. But when does an integral style break down? At what point do the signifying regionalisms and musical accents get whirled and blended at such a high velocity that you end up with music that sounds as if it were from — nowhere? In his more purist jazz moments, Wynton Marsalis has drawn an analogy with gumbo: at what point does it become just soup with shrimp?

Not that music has to be of an identifiable genre to be good. (Most of the time the opposite is true — or else genre becomes generic.) But it does have to be identifiable as something, its own integral self and not just a collection of musical signifiers. Or, as the resolutely free-improv saxophonist David Gross once said to me mockingly: “I’m going to have my Latin-country-funk band. . . . This is my orchestral dub ensemble.’ ”

And yet, in town over the past couple of weeks we’ve had Dengue Fever, a Los Angeles Cambodian-American psych-surf band, and Forro in the Dark, Brazilian Brooklyners who meld South American rhythms with reggae, among other things. Now we have Nation Beat, yet another Brooklyn band, coming to the Regattabar on June 31. On their new Legends of the Preacher (Modiba), you can hear their core sound — the maracatu rhythms of the Northeast Brazilian city of Recife (home also to forró) — wed to zydeco, New Orleans funk, bluegrass, country (Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is here, and so is “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”) and, gulp, klezmer. All three of these bands make integral music that reaches wide with obvious references yet still holds together as its own thing. And they do it in different ways.

You can get away with a lot in folkloric music if your folklore is sound, and Nation Beat (terrible band name aside) have done their homework. Scott Kettner, a young jazz percussionist in New York, was encouraged to study maracatu by his teacher, the great jazz drummer Billy Hart: “I don’t know how to play it, but it’s a bad-ass rhythm and you gotta learn it so you can teach it to me!”