Cold Jazz

Jazz Photography

2012-02-18T19:08:00.003-05:00

Louis Armstrong, Carnegie Hall, New York, N.Y., ca. Apr. 1947

Over at Business Insider, you'll find a little slide show I put together which showcases the jazz photographs of the great William P. Gottlieb. All 1,600 of his photos are now being featured on Flickr, courtesy of The Library of Congress.

If you haven't done so already, you should check them out. Most of the images that you have in your head of jazz in the late '30s through to the late '40s were probably taken by Gottlieb. As I say in the introduction to the slide show, jazz, and jazz photography, would not be the same without him.

The night before I wrote that introduction, I happened to have started Geoff Dyer's great book, "But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz." In an introductory section to the book, called "A Note on Photographs," Dyer writes, toward the end: "The best jazz photographs are those saturated in the sound of their subject." I loved that quote, even if it's not true.

So much so that I put it into my introduction.

Hendrik Meurkens

2012-01-27T20:00:00.001-05:00

Hendrik Meurkens

The New York City Jazz Record just published my review of Hendrik Meurkens's new CD, "Live at Bird's Eye." Go to nycjazzrecord.com and download the paper to read it. If you live in New York, you can pick up the paper at basically any jazz club in the city.

Here's the opening paragraph:

Hendrik Meurkens, the German-born harmonica and vibraphone player, has an affinity for Brazilian music, samba and bossa nova particularly. He spent some years in Rio de Janeiro in the early ‘80s playing gigs around the city and honing his craft. His latest album is an assemblage of tracks played by his Samba Jazz Quartet - Misha Tsiganov (piano), Gustavo Amarante (bass) and Adriano Santos (drums) - and recorded, from two different nights (oddly about two years apart), at the Bird’s Eye Jazz Club in Basel, Switzerland.

The next CD I'm reviewing is "Danny Boy," by the Venezuelan pianist Edward Simon. It just came in the mail today. I listened to the opening track before I wrote this post and found it quite lovely.

Chucho Valdés

2012-01-20T21:56:00.015-05:00

Now that I live in New York, seeing live music is much less of an ordeal than it used to be. I went to Winter Jazzfest a couple of weeks ago, staying out until three a.m. one night. I took the subway straight home from the West Village. No NJ Transit, no car ride. It felt too easy. Tomorrow night, I'm going to Carnegie Hall to see Chucho Valdés perform with his septet, the Afro-Cuban Messengers.

Before I moved here from New Jersey, I was writing arts and entertainment previews for a local monthly paper called the Princeton Echo. For one preview, I was lucky enough to interview Mr. Valdés in anticipation of a concert he is giving tonight, at McCarter Theatre, in Princeton. I figured I'd rehash it here as it also pertains, in some ways, to tomorrow night's show. It was my first interview with a translator involved.

Piano Legend Offers a Little Taste of Cuba

The Cuban jazz musician Chucho Valdés is, by many accounts, one of the world’s greatest pianists.

Born in Havana in 1941, Valdés grew up amid the pulsating vibrancy of the Cuban popular music scene. His father, Bebo Valdés, a formidable pianist in his own right who helped develop the mambo, was the musical advisor to the Tropicana, Havana’s storied nightclub, throughout most of the 1950s.

Valdés, who turned 70 last October, cites the influence of many American jazz musicians and their styles: Duke Ellington attracted him first. After that came Art Tatum. Then Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, Lennie Tristano, McCoy Tyner, Cecil Taylor. The list goes on—including the staples of many developing jazz musicians.

For the first ten years after the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Valdés explains, it was hard to get information about the music scene in the United States.

“We used to hear jazz on shortwave radio, the Voice of America ‘Jazz Hour,’ hosted by Willis Conover,” Valdés said in Spanish, through a translator, from Málaga, Spain, where he has lived for about a year. He moved from Havana to be closer to his father, now 93, who spends most of his time in Sweden but winters in the warm, Mediterranean city.

Listening to jazz on the radio, Valdés heard for the first time the music of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner.

“I would write out transcriptions of the music on paper for myself, so I could figure out what they were doing,” he said. He did this, by ear, for more than 10 years, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.

Valdés first came to the United States in 1978 for a performance at Carnegie Hall with the jazz-pop band Irakere. And in 2010, he toured the United States, for the first time since 2003, in the wake of looser travel restrictions and an important visit by the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra to Havana.

“I felt like I was floating in the air because of the first concert in New York after the years that I couldn’t come,” Valdés said of his most recent trip, adding: “The United States is the most important place to play jazz.”

This year, Valdés is returning to the American stage for another tour, which he will inaugurate with a performance by his septet, the Afro-Cuban Messengers, at McCarter Theatre on Jan. 20 at 8 p.m.

Valdés said he will be playing selections from his latest record, “Chucho’s Steps,” which won the 2011 Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album, along with new songs from a repertoire he is putting together for his next album.

The Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez will open the show, playing with his trio. Valdés knows the young musician from when he was a boy in Cuba, calling him “a great talent with a huge future.”

With the Afro-Cuban Messengers, Valdés combines elements of the music of his homeland—including intricate webs of percussion and rhythmic chanting—with some of the most accessible aspects of American jazz: the easy-swinging lilt of New Orleans polyphony, the funky trumpet-saxophone voicings of hard-bop.

And through his music, the Cuban pianist expresses himself with the seemingly indefatigable force and precision of a true virtuoso.

The article originally appeared here.

A New Jazz Club in New York

2012-01-14T12:34:00.005-05:00

A William P. Gottlieb photo of Nat King Cole

So I'm working as a lifestyle writer for a website called Business Insider right now. And jazz has to do with life, right? So I wrote this short article about a new jazz club that the owner of the Blue Note, Steve Bensusan, is proposing for the Meatpacking District. It sounds like a good cause.

Check it out here.

Joel Frahm Quartet: Live at Smalls

2011-12-28T22:22:00.011-05:00

My review of a new album by tenor saxophonist Joel Frahm was just published in The New York City Jazz Record. Check out the PDF version of the paper at nycjazzrecord.com if you're interested. The last time I saw Mr. Frahm, two summers ago at the Bar Next Door in the West Village, I was studying jazz criticism with Ben Ratliff. Quite a lot has happened since then. I am now living in New York--Long Island City, to be exact--and will start a job in digital journalism in the new year.

Mr. Frahm's new album was recorded live at Smalls, one of my favorite jazz clubs in New York City. I've only been there once--two summers ago, to see the stride pianist Mike Lipskin--but I remember it fondly. I hope to visit the club many more times in my new tenure as a New Yorker.

Here's the first paragraph of my review:

The black and white snapshots arrayed on the inside flap of "Live at Smalls," tenor saxist Joel Frahm’s latest recording, show the members of his quartet in the middle of a thought, with their eyes closed: guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel is reaching high up for a note on the neck of his hollow body; bassist Joe Martin hugs his instrument in closely, wearing a look of seeming elation; drummer Otis Brown III (unfortunately listed as a pianist) swings coolly on his ride cymbal. Then there’s Frahm, hunching his shoulders in tightly, brow furrowed, drawing the audience in with his focus. You wish you could have seen the show in color, especially at Smalls, that unpretentious basement hangout in the West Village. But this live recording is intimate enough.

My Judeo-Christmas Roots

2011-12-20T23:30:00.005-05:00

I promise, this is the last post (at least for the year) about the relationship between Judaism and Christmas. A blog post I wrote about my relationship with Christmas was just published on the website of Moment Magazine, and I figured I'd share it with you.

Here's the first two paragraphs:

Christmas doesn’t mean much to me anymore, though for the first ten years of my life, it was my favorite holiday. Pretty standard, even for a Jewish child, to be drawn in with eager spirit by that yuletide festivity. But you might wonder: why only ten years?

In my fourth year of elementary school, my parents decided that our family would stop celebrating Christmas, and that abrupt halt, to me, signaled the end of an era. Why were we, a secular Jewish family, celebrating this holiday in the first place? Well, as a child, my mom adored Christmas; she celebrated the holiday every year with her paternal grandmother. (My grandfather, her dad, converted to Judaism for my grandmother, a child of Depression-era Brownsville.)

Read the rest here.

A John Zorn Christmas

2011-12-19T17:08:00.015-05:00

A young Zorn, now 58

I reviewed John Zorn's first Christmas album, "A Dreamers Christmas," for the Arty Semite, a blog over at the Jewish Daily Forward. What wonderful music it is. John Zorn is as prolific as he is omnivorous, and this album is a testament to that.

Here's the first two paragraphs:

The CD case to John Zorn’s first Christmas record, "A Dreamers Christmas," comes as a sort of stocking. Reaching into the sleeve you’ll find, along with the CD, a sheet of stickers that could represent a new line of holiday-themed Giga Pets.

You might be tempted to over-think this album, with its cute and somewhat disturbing iconography, especially if you’ve come to expect music from Zorn more agitating than these lovely tracks. You shouldn’t. Zorn released this album through his own label, Tzadik, which puts out a steady stream of avant-garde recordings. And although he only served as producer and arranger here, this jazz album is as much Zorn’s brainchild as it is the Dreamers’, the band he assembled.

Read the rest here.

And listen to a rendition of "The Christmas Song," featuring Mike Patton, from the album:

Ralston Heights

2011-12-09T19:56:00.005-05:00

The Castle at Ralston Heights

This has nothing to do with jazz, but I'm proud of it, so I figured I'd share it with you. I recently wrote a story for the Hopewell Express about an old mansion in my hometown, Hopewell, NJ, that was once the capital of a strange health cult. Its figurehead was Webster Edgerly, a weird, paranoid man who formed his own obsessive-compulsive philosophy of racial purity in the late 1800s. He planned to put his beliefs into action on Ralston Heights, where the mansion sits. There have been stories about this guy circulating in my town for a long time. That's why I was happy to do the research and reporting necessary to put it all in perspective. Here are the first four paragraphs:

Small-town stories are often apocryphal, the stuff of popular myth. However, in the case of Webster Edgerly, a bigoted health reformer who moved to Hopewell in the late 1800s to establish a utopian community based on his own principles of hygiene and eugenics, the odd and disturbing stories surrounding him are mostly true.

Next to the Lindbergh House, probably the most well-known artifact of Hopewell’s parochial history is the Castle, across the street from the Highland Cemetery on Greenwood Avenue, up a long, gravel road, and tucked snugly away in a wooded clearing dappled with tall Japanese maples and ginkgo trees.

Most Hopewell residents are told that an eccentric white supremacist once lived there; that he wanted to create an exclusive, utopian community; that he failed, and his mansion—the Castle—is all that really remains. Those details are, indeed, accurate.

And today, the current residents of the mansion—a married couple seeking to foster community involvement—serve as an intriguing foil to the legacy of the bizarre man who once haunted the estate formerly known as Ralston Heights.

Read the rest here.

Dead Cat Bounce, Again

2011-12-04T20:39:00.005-05:00

Chance Episodes

I reviewed the Dead Cat Bounce album "Chance Episodes" for Exclaim! back in October, and I liked it a lot. So much so that I chose it as one of the best jazz albums of the year for Exclaim!'s "Improv & Avant-Garde 2011: 10 Favourites" list. (Note the Canadian English, which I find so charming!) I usually feel that I lack the knowledge to make an informed decision for these lists. But the jazz editor at the magazine told me to just go for it. So I did.

Steve Martin Interview

2011-11-30T09:07:00.002-05:00

Steve Martin

Well, he's not a jazz musician, but he does play the banjo. Steve Martin is coming to Princeton in December for his first public lecture at the university, and I interviewed him for the Princeton Echo.

Ed Thigpen

2011-11-26T16:54:00.018-05:00

Ed Thigpen (1930-2010)

You can find my latest review, of drummer Ed Thigpen's record, "You And The Night And The Music," over at nycjazzrecord.com. There's also a documentary DVD that accompanies the set called "Ed Thigpen: Master of Time, Rhythm and Taste." Thigpen, who died almost two years ago at 79, recorded this album with his trio in 2002, in Copenhagen, where he had lived since 1972.

Ed Thigpen played drums in the Oscar Peterson Trio from 1959 to 1965. That group was one of the first combos I came across when I started seriously listening to jazz in high school. I found Peterson's soloing immaculate, so much so that I began to expect that kind of virtuosic playing from the other pianists I was listening to. Peterson's trio was so clean, so concise, I suggest in the review, that eventually, the consistency of those qualities can become a final weakness.

I also suggest in the review that on this album, in this trio--with pianist Carsten Dahl and bassist Jesper Bodilsen--a looser, older Thigpen seems to be featuring his drums as another melodic instrument. In the video below, of a segment from the 1950s television show "The Subject is Jazz," Thigpen talks about getting new sounds out of his instrument:

"I was looking for a way in which to express myself, not only rhythmically, but musically," he says. "So I had to find tones, the sound of a tone quality, so I found that I knew I could do this on the drums."

Observing Christmas

2011-11-25T16:13:00.017-05:00

Now that Thanksgiving is over, we can all expect to hear a lot of Christmas songs for the next month or so. Even though I'm basically a secular Jew, I don't mind hearing music about the holiday I don't celebrate every year. The songs are mainly non-religious, anyway--the American ones, at least: they're all about snow and Santa and sleighs and whiteness. And that makes sense: most of them were written by Jews.

Here's a funny line from "Operation Shylock," by Philip Roth, which bears this out: “The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ--the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity--and what does Irving Berlin do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Those two songs are "Easter Parade" and "White Christmas," by Irving Berlin. And they're great.

I'm often surprised by the number of Jews who wrote the songs that Americans take for granted. But the Jewish sensibility (along with the homosexual, as Susan Sontag points out in "Notes on Camp") underpins a huge swath of American culture. And though I can't really imagine Irving Berlin writing a great song about Hanukkah, or Passover, or Yom Kippur, I can understand why he might have wanted to profit from that yuletide cheer.

Of course, the Jews have got some great songs from "Fiddler on the Roof," but they're mainly lugubrious and parodic--not on the same level as the Aleinu, or Kol Nidre, which was actually featured in "The Jazz Singer," though I'm not sure if many viewers at the time knew what song Al Jolson was singing.

In a 2005 op-ed piece for the New York Times titled "A Beginner's Guide to Hanukkah," the Jewish writer Jonathan Safran Foer wrote, in reference to Christmas Spirit: "Window displays are always more attractive than the gifts you receive--even if you receive what was in the window. Jews engage Christmas in its ideal form: from the outside. Unspoiled by family friction, or commerce, or anxiety about the wrong gift, we can experience the purest spirit. Someone else's spirit that we compose music for. And look at from the other side of the window. Christians should envy us envying them."

He's joking, but he does have a point. I've seen it from both sides, though. Because my mom celebrated Christmas with her Christian grandmother as a child, she wanted me and my brother to experience the holiday as we grew up, too. (We also celebrated Hanukkah, which must have been quite expensive for my parents.) But when I was in fourth grade, we stopped celebrating, I think mainly because we had to choose one holiday in the end. And because my dad had once had a fit when we put decorative candles in the windows, it made more sense to stick with the menorah.

I remember waking up that first morning without Christmas and feeling this sort of emptiness. There was no anticipation; you end up just lying in bed--no presents under the tree, no tree--and then that sort of tension becomes the thing. All of your friends are celebrating Christmas, so you can't do anything. America basically folds in on itself for a day of cozy warmth. In an inverse way, though, it brings a non-Christian family together, and creates another sort of yuletide tradition, one that most Jews practice every year: going out for a movie and Chinese food.

Anyway, there really aren't any good American Hanukkah songs that I can think of. Tom Lehrer's farce, "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica," is the only tune I've been able to find--aside from the well-known children's songs, and Adam Sandler's famous number--about the holiday. And all those popular songs by Jews are good, but one of my favorite Christmas songs happens to be a jazz rendition of the German carol "O Tannenbaum."

Vince Guaraldi (not a Jew) switches the song's time measure from three to four, which makes for some sturdy swing. His solo is lush and lyrical and sweeping. You don't have to like Christmas or winter or Charlie Brown to enjoy it. You just have to like this form of jazz.

Canaille

2011-11-22T17:45:00.007-05:00

My review of a new album by the Toronto-based sextet Canaille was just put up on the website of Exclaim. This band's influences include Ethiopian jazz, Sun Ra, and the jazz-rock of Miles Davis. I liked the music, but sometimes felt that the group failed to mix all the ingredients together into a cogent whole. Nevertheless, Canaille has a good sense of humor, which is important to me, and I imagine, many others.

Still Improvising

2011-11-14T14:18:00.001-05:00


The Paul Robeson Center in Princeton, where Cafe Improv takes place every month.

If you go here, you'll find an article I wrote about a 20-year-old open mic, called Cafe Improv, in Princeton. It's nice to know that these things exist.

Patrick Cornelius

2011-11-10T09:12:00.004-05:00

Patrick Cornelius

Another alto saxophonist. Quite different from Mr. Shanker, though. Mr. Cornelius provides artist notes to the tracks on his new album, "Maybe Steps," and some of them are interesting to read. Like this one, for example, for the song "Bella's Dreaming," which he wrote about his daughter:

"When Isabella was about three months old, my wife went back to work, and I started to care for her during the day. She would nap three times a day and I would stay in the same room with her while she was sleeping. The song is a literal musical depiction of the transitions from peaceful slumber to ﬁtful REM to waking up crying and screaming."

An enchanting song from an enchanting source. I reviewed the album here.

Kenny Shanker

2011-11-09T08:27:00.007-05:00

Alto saxophonist Kenny Shanker

My review of Kenny Shanker's new release, "Steppin' Up," is now on Exclaim!'s website. Shanker has a sweet and gritty sound which reminded me of David Sanborn. That can be his strength or weakness, depending on the song. I preferred the two ballads he plays the most. Very pretty.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones

2011-11-08T19:22:00.003-05:00

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones are playing in Princeton tomorrow. Howard Levy, a harmonica and piano player who was in the original Flecktones, has replaced saxophonist Jeff Coffin. I wrote a preview about it for the Princeton Echo. Find it here. And, if you're interested, find an interview I did with Jeff Coffin about a year ago. Lots of good insights.

The Pirkei Avot Project

2011-10-31T18:51:00.010-04:00

Abraham Cahan introduced A Bintel Brief in 1906.

I was happy to write a music review for the Arty Semite, a fun blog over at the website of the Jewish Daily Forward. The review covers a new release, called "The Pirkei Avot Project, Vol. 1," by jazz guitarist Amanda Monaco. She's interpreted some passages from a Jewish text, Pirkei Avot, and I enjoyed the result.

Two years ago, I read the book "A Bintel Brief: Sixty Years of Letters from the Lower East Side to the Jewish Daily Forward." A Bintel Brief was an advice column published in the Forward, a Yiddish-language newspaper founded in 1897. The paper is now published in both Yiddish and English, and its content has changed. If you read the book, you're peeking into a Jewish-American experience that doesn't exist anymore: the experience of the Jewish immigrant.

The paper was run from 1903 to 1946 by Abraham Cahan, one of the best writers to read if you want a good look into that experience at the turn of the nineteenth century. His first novel, "Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto," was made into a great film, "Hester Street."

If you didn't know, I'm Jewish. I'm still not positive what that means, even though I minored in Jewish studies at McGill. So in that vein, it felt a little weird writing a CD review for a blog at a newspaper which has its roots in the Jewish social dissidence of the early 1900s. But what can you do? A bi gezunt.

Gilad Hekselman

2011-10-29T13:08:00.013-04:00

Gilad Hekselman

If you can find it, check out my latest review of Gilad Hekselman's new record, "Hearts Wide Open." It's my first review for the New York City Jazz Record. To read it, You have to download a PDF copy of the paper on the website. (For December's issue of the Record, I'll be reviewing an Ed Thigpen album.)

"Hearts Wide Open" is really good. I recommend you listen to it. Mr. Hekselman, 28, is a wonderful guitarist, and he's only getting better.

Last November, I had the chance to interview Mr. Hekselman between sets at the Upstairs Jazz Club in Montreal. He was playing with bassist Rick Rosato and drummer Ari Hoenig--who both also sat in on the interview. If you're interested, find my review of the show here and the interview here on Nextbop. Mr. Hekselman stands out as one of the more quiet, humble, and thoughtful musicians I've interviewed in the past.

Here's a quote from the interview, about jazz in Israel, Mr. Hekselman's homeland.

"So there’s definitely a lot of great education, and I think the emphasis in Israel is on really good things: like a lot of tradition, a lot of 'check out where the music comes from' and stuff, so you know, in that sense, I think it’s great. And also, in the last few years, I feel like things have also started to open up. When I came to New York, I was like a total hard bop-head. You know, I was pretty much…I was still trying to be original, but I was almost only checking out like Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and stuff…"

Dead Cat Bounce

2011-10-13T00:17:00.005-04:00

Dead Cat Bounce

I hadn't heard of Dead Cat Bounce, the Boston-based jazz sextet, until I wrote a short review last week of their latest album, Chance Episodes, for the Canadian music magazine Exclaim!. The review was just put up on their website, and if you'd like to read it, you can find it here. I liked this music a lot, even more than the band name.

SFJazz Collective

2011-10-04T18:49:00.008-04:00

SFJazz Collective

For those of you living in or near the Princeton area, I highly recommend you check out the SFJazz Collective at McCarter Theatre tomorrow, October 5, at 8 p.m. It should be good. Follow this link to read a short preview I wrote of the show.

An Interview with Eric Harland

2011-09-24T17:42:00.019-04:00

I'm now working as a part-time freelance writer for Mercer County's Community News Service. The managing editor knows I like jazz, so he asked me last week to write up a little pre-show feature for the SFJazz Collective concert on October 5, at McCarter Theatre in Princeton. I gladly agreed, all the more happy to do it because I would get to interview a member of the group.

So yesterday, I talked over the phone with drummer Eric Harland for about 45 minutes. He was a very gracious interviewee. The writeup for the show is due Monday, and I'll post that when it's up. But most of what Mr. Harland said won't go into that. So, with his consent, I've posted an edited version of the interview, in a sort of narrative form, below.

Eric Harland

"It’s totally leaderless, it’s a collective, hence the name. It was purposed that way so that it could be something that is continuously evolving," Eric Harland told me about the eight-piece SFJazz Collective, which is supported by SFJazz, the Bay Area organization.

"Usually an all-star band happens for a season or two and it dissipates," Mr. Harland said. "This is the first time that something like this has been introduced in the music, and it's just so great to be able to compose, to rehearse, to play, to tour. Pretty much, you're an artist in residence every year."

Every year since 2004, the members of the SFJazz Collective--different members go in and out--have each been commissioned to write one original composition and to arrange a piece of music from the songbook of a jazz icon. Past arrangements have included those of the compositions of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman.

For Mr. Harland, being a member of the collective (he joined in 2006, when he was 30) has given him the chance to write music.

"For me, it was an opportunity to write, and see how I felt about being a composer," he said. "The band catered to my musical growth, and the direction I needed to go." "Plus, it’s great to be commissioned," he added.

This year, the members of the band--including alto saxophonist Miguel Zenon, tenorist Mark Turner, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, trombonist Robin Eubanks, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, pianist Edward Simon, bassist Matt Penman, and Mr. Harland--have interpreted the songs of Stevie Wonder. They already toured in the spring, with their 16 new songs, but are starting a fall tour in October. And of course, Mr. Wonder is not a jazz musician through and through, but that is no impediment.

I asked Mr. Harland if he thought this year's collective might get more attention, because of the Stevie Wonder connection.

"We came to Stevie because he himself is such a great composer and a great musician. Some people who don’t pay attention to jazz, there’s just something about hearing Stevie wonder’s name that causes them to look in that direction," he said. "But I think over all we just wanted to see—it was just pretty much an experiment—a new direction to see how it would sound.

"It’s music and the beauty about jazz is that you’re open to trying other things, not necessarily trying to always come up with the perfect solution—it’s about the journey, the experience.

"And because it’s all music, why wouldn’t you have Stevie in the same line as Coltrane, or Tyner or Ornette? It’s only we who come up with genres—it’s really music, it’s just expression. Music has different languages, but at the same time, if something is groovy, it's groovy, and it doesn’t matter what the type is. It’s just music."

"The beauty about the band is that everyone is bringing in a different dynamic of the music, and they seem to balance each other out: uptempo, medium tempo, ballads, groove, orchestral," Mr. Harland said, when I asked him how the band planned its arrangements. "It just happened, we didn’t discuss what kinds of tunes we would make."

And how much did they tweak the arrangements in rehearsal?

"When you’re writing, it’s more like you're sketching ideas, and sometimes in rehearsal some ideas work and some don’t, so you take them with a grain of salt," he said.

Is Stevie Wonder aware of the music they are making?

"Hopefully he’s listening to it and enjoying it," Mr. Harland said, admitting that he had not yet heard anything from Mr. Wonder. "I’m hoping that he feels honored and that he feels the love that we put into the music. I hope he feels the appreciation we have for him," he added.

Did he listen to Stevie Wonder growing up?

"I mean, who didn't listen to Stevie growing up?" he said. "Everywhere I went, it was always Stevie. His songs just relate to everybody. I think his music reaches everybody in the world. It’s so moving and so fulfilling. I couldn’t imagine not listening to Stevie wonder. Probably in the generations to come, there might be a lot of people who will be like, 'Stevie who?' But there’s so much honesty in his music and lyrics that has become a part of the American vernacular."

Why did he choose to arrange Mr. Wonder's song "Do I Do"?

"I chose 'Do I Do' because it has that fantastic Dizzy Gillespie solo in it," he said. "And what jazz trumpeter is not influenced by Dizzy Gillespie?"

At this point in our conversation, I had pretty much gotten what I needed for the short article I'd be writing, but Mr. Harland seemed more than willing to keep talking, so I continued with a few more questions. I asked him about how it is playing in the Charles Lloyd Quartet, with Jason Moran on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and that elder statesman of jazz, Charles Lloyd, on saxophone.

"I love an honest gentleman," he said of Mr. Lloyd. "He's a great friend, and the band is really great. You can’t beat that chemistry in the band."

If you didn't know, there are jazz musicians pouring out of Houston into New York every year--great jazz musicians. Mr. Harland is one of them, so is Jason Moran, and others include the pianist Robert Glasper, the drummer Kendrick Scott, and the guitarist Mike Moreno.

So I asked Mr. Harland how he feels about that, if it's at all surreal, if he's shocked that he grew up with so many of his colleagues.

He told me that Jason Moran's grandparents' house was ten houses down from where he grew up, though he officially met him in high school, at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

"On a certain level, we all just wanted to play music, and we didn’t think about any other option," Mr. Harland said, comparing the environment of the school to "Fame," a musical film from 1980 about a group of students in the New York High School of Performing Arts.

"It was a school filled with artists and you just worked on your craft all day," Mr. Harland continued. "And we had fantastic teachers to keep us in that realm of music and we had each other and were motivated to play all the time and to check out all kinds of music—the archive at the school is just great.

"And we were just digging in and checking it out and having opinions about the music and having discussions—and that’s something your don’t normally see in high school. But by having that in high school, it allowed us to be more present with the music.

"Then there's the competition factor—you know, friendly competitiveness. If your friend is doing well, you feel like you have to rise to the challenge, and we all kind of motivated each other. We also knew that it was important to be an individual, to force yourself to be an individual.

"And the product of that is what you see today, all these fantastic musicians, everybody doing their own thing, nobody borrowing from somebody else's success. It's like a Houston magic, something you cultivate down there. And outside, people pay attention to it for some reason. I think it really is something special; it's real. And everything is real, you know, but I don’t know, there's something about it. It's definitely love.

"When I hear my colleagues play, I'm always moved, and I can't say I'm always moved by everything I hear. I like something that moves me, whether it's intellectual, in the heart, chills in the spine, I want to feel the experience of music. Houston is just pumping 'em out every year. I think every city should have that dynamic, just that appreciation for each other. I know Philly has a really strong brotherhood, and a lot of great musicians come out of Philadelphia."

Mr. Harland now lives in Pennsylvania. He has a family, and enjoys the bucolic side of life. "I like living in Pennsylvania because there’s a lot of countryside, and a lot of time to relax, and just be," he said. "It’s beautiful."

By this time in our conversation, I had to go, and was surprised that Mr. Harland was still talking to me. He seemed completely willing to go on for another hour.

Before I hung up, he said he hoped I'd do my best in whatever I do.

I told him I'd try.

"We’re all trying," he said. "Its not about achieving perfection--it’s about the experience, which is a little different."

Enjoying Jazz

2011-09-10T19:13:00.008-04:00

This week I interviewed for a freelance reporting job at a local newspaper in New Jersey. There's a preponderance of jazz-related writing experience on my resume, and the man I was interviewing with pointed this out. Most potential employers do. I expect them to, but I'm never completely ready to explain why, or how, it's all there.

I'm also never really sure what posture to take. Just because I've done a bit of writing on jazz doesn't mean I know anything substantive. Should I drop a name? Go into a little history? Say which critics I like? What I do is wait to see what they say. If they ask me a question, I'll try to answer it.

This man asked me who my favorite jazz musician is. This is a particularly tough question for me to answer. I love and respect so many jazz musicians--dead and living--including Lester Young, Oscar Peterson, Paul Motian, Ethan Iverson, Benny Goodman, Al Grey, Jason Moran, Joshua Redman, Johnny Griffin, Red Garland. I could go on, for a while. In this situation, I said that, lately, I really enjoy the music of the clarinetist Anat Cohen. He hadn't heard of her. I then went on to explain that, although I don't consider myself a jazz critic, I mainly listen to jazz with critical ears now. I don't really enjoy it in the way that I used to, I said.

What was that way I used to? Well, in high school, listening to jazz, for me, was an exciting process in which aspects of the music were revealed by degrees as I continued to purchase CDs and listen and read the liner notes and memorize the personnel. I wasn't only learning about the music itself; it was teaching me something, about the importance of paying attention, of subtlety and grace and precision.

I started this blog after a summer spent writing and studying jazz criticism with Ben Ratliff, the New York Times music critic. Also that summer I took a course at the Rutgers Jazz Master's Program in Newark with the jazz historian and musician Lewis Porter. I was breathing jazz after I'd finished my work with Ben and Lewis. I wanted to continue thinking and writing about it. Yet at the same time, I didn't want to lose my innocence, if you understand. I didn't want to become too conscious of my consciousness of jazz, to make too much of a good thing. I thought that might make the music less enjoyable.

Ultimately, it didn't, because writing is important to me, and I want to become a better writer; and jazz is important to me, so I write about it, among other things. I also play the drums, and I'm usually the most refreshed after I listen to a good jazz drummer.

When I started this blog, I wanted to leave some of the mystery of jazz intact. It lured me in in the first place--I owe a lot to mystery. That's why I write so much about my life and how it relates to jazz. That relationship is hard to figure out.

So it's a different kind of enjoyment that I get from this new partnership I have with jazz, and music in general, and for that matter, almost everything. Yet it's fruitful.

Sometimes I can't tell what a piece of music has told me, or how it's made me feel, until I sit down to write about it.

The Business of Jazz

2011-09-09T16:31:00.007-04:00

Is this news?

In June, I went to the Jazz Journalists Association Jazz Awards. I had a great time, and although I was slightly intoxicated (who serves 9.4% beer, for free?) for a chunk of it, I made some good connections. I met Howard Mandel, the president of the Association, and David Alder, past editor of JJANews.org.

It was agreed that I would become the new editor of that website's news stream, and I was, for a couple of weeks. I wrote some news stories on jazz, but the editorship turned out to be too much work for one person working remotely from a computer. So I stepped down.

About a week ago, I got in touch with Howard, to offer my services again. We concluded that I could not handle the editorship on my own, and wouldn't. But I could still contribute to the website in some way. He decided that we should add a section to the website that aggregates stories of interest to those in the business of jazz and music--to musicians, academics, journalists. I'll be managing that section.

This doesn't mean human interest stories (though I do love them). Patrick Jarenwattananon does a great job of that with his weekly "Around The Jazz Internet" roundup at A Blog Supreme. So does Tim Wilkins with his "Morning Cup of Jazz" over at WBGO's website. And, when he was doing it, Eli Aleinikoff's "This Week in Jazz Blogs," on the JazzTimes website, was pretty good.

I'm going to start an RSS feed, to try to keep track of all the jazz-related esoterica that will pop up around the Internet. But I might need some help. We're looking for news as it relates to the business of jazz music. A new television series on jazz is being created? Someone bought Jazz.com? Ethan Iverson got a book deal to edit that jazz and race reader he keeps on talking about? We'd like to know about it.

So if you think you know of something in this vein, post it in the comments section, or email me at matthew.kassel@mail.mcgill.ca (excuse all the dots). I look forward to hearing from you.

Pourquoi, Montréal?

2011-08-18T16:45:00.010-04:00

You may have noticed, if you follow this thing, that I've been pretty inactive with the posts this summer. I suspect it's because I've been so preoccupied with finding a job. It's consumed me, and made it difficult to focus on other pursuits I find worthwhile--notably reading and writing. But I'm sick of scouring Craigslist ads for unpaid internships and writing cover letters to irresponsive employers. The Internet has made a fool of time and opportunity. It also allows me to blog. So here I am.

This summer, I was working as a (paid!) intern at a New Jersey news and information website called NJ Spotlight. It was my first legitimate foray into reporting. I was going down to the New Jersey Statehouse on a semi-regular basis, attending Governor Chris Christie's press conferences, driving out to school board meetings in Newark, writing news articles, interviewing regular New Jerseyans and higher-up politicians about their views on the state's fiscal and political future. I enjoyed it because, finally, the state of New Jersey is intriguing on a national level, what with Christie's controversial stature. (As my boss said, even though Christie may be messing things up, "It's good for business." As in, journalism.)

So the posts I've written on this blog since June I wrote in New Jersey, my home state. Now I'm back in Montreal, my surrogate home, for a few weeks. When I started this blog a little over a year ago, I chose to call it Cold Jazz for two reasons. One, it was a play on "cool" and "hot" jazz. Two--and this is the primary reason--Montreal gets very cold--and so snowy--and I would be writing in Montreal, about jazz. It was that simple.

It doesn't look like I'll be staying in Montreal permanently, though. For an aspiring, Anglophone (as they say here) writer, it's extremely hard to find a steady job in writing unless you are very well established. The province of Québec teeters on a linguistic seesaw, and although Montreal is a bastion of both English and French speakers, the English language, to me, always feels like an imposition here. (Read Mordecai Richler's "Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country" if you want to know more about this complex tension.)

You never know, I could come back. I do love this city. I had a good four years here. But I think I've got to move on for now. I'm keeping the title Cold Jazz the same as a vestigial reminder of why I started this blog. I'll have to change the About Me section, or parts of it, though I'll keep it the way it is for the time being. And I hope you'll continue to follow me as I slowly figure out my life.

In the meantime, I'll be in Montreal probably until the end of August or early September, and I hope to write a few more entries before I go.