Lerterland

Questions

2008-07-24T21:41:00.003-04:00

"Will we extend our hand to the people in the forgotten corners of this world who yearn for lives marked by dignity and opportunity; by security and justice? Will we lift the child in Bangladesh from poverty, shelter the refugee in Chad, and banish the scourge of AIDS in our time?

"Will we stand for the human rights of the dissident in Burma, the blogger in Iran, or the voter in Zimbabwe? Will we give meaning to the words 'never again' in Darfur?

"Will we acknowledge that there is no more powerful example than the one each of our nations projects to the world? Will we reject torture and stand for the rule of law? Will we welcome immigrants from different lands, and shun discrimination against those who don’t look like us or worship like we do, and keep the promise of equality and opportunity for all of our people?" — Barack Obama

Matt Davis and Aerial Photograph

2008-07-22T23:33:00.005-04:00

My cover story on guitarist Matt Davis and his incredible Aerial Photograph project, in the current edition of Philadelphia Weekly.

Know your enemy

2008-07-22T12:47:00.004-04:00

And über-fashionable leftist author Naomi Klein does not, according to Jonathan Chait's dismantling of The Shock Doctrine:

Klein's relentless materialism is not the only thing driving her to see conservatives merely as corporate puppets. She pays shockingly (but, given her premises, unsurprisingly) little attention to right-wing ideas. She recognizes that neoconservatism sits at the heart of the Iraq war project, but she does not seem to know what neoconservatism is; and she makes no effort to find out. Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display in one breathtaking sentence:

'Only since the mid-nineties has the intellectual movement, led by the right-wing think-tanks with which [Milton] Friedman had long associations--Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute--called itself "neoconservative," a worldview that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda.'

Where to begin? First, neoconservative ideology dates not from the 1990s but from the 1960s, and the label came into widespread use in the 1970s. Second, while neoconservatism is highly congenial to corporate interests, it is distinctly less so than other forms of conservatism. The original neocons, unlike traditional conservatives, did not reject the New Deal. They favor what they now call "national greatness" over small government. And their foreign policy often collides head-on with corporate interests: neoconservatives favor saber-rattling in places such as China or the Middle East, where American corporations frown on political risk, and favor open relations and increased trade. Moreover, the Heritage Foundation has always had an uneasy relationship with neoconservatism. (Russell Kirk delivered a famous speech at the Heritage Foundation in which he declared that "not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.") And the Cato Institute is not neoconservative at all. It was virulently opposed to the Iraq war in particular, and it opposes interventionism in foreign policy in general.

Finally, there is the central role that Klein imputes to her villain Friedman, both in this one glorious passage and throughout her book. In her telling, he is the intellectual guru of the shock doctrine, whose minions have carried out his corporatist agenda from Santiago to Baghdad. Klein calls the neocon movement "Friedmanite to the core," and identifies the Iraq war as a "careful and faithful application of unrestrained Chicago School ideology" over which Friedman presided. What she does not mention--not once, not anywhere, in her book--is that Friedman argued against the Iraq war from the beginning, calling it an act of "aggression." [My emphasis.]

It ought to be morbidly embarrassing for a writer to discover that the central character of her narrative turns out to oppose what she identifies as the apotheosis of his own movement.

On Ronnie Mathews

2008-07-21T22:33:00.006-04:00

In the better-late-than-never department, I have to double back and say a brief word about the recent death of pianist Ronnie Mathews. Because when I entered the New School jazz program in 1987, Mathews was the first teacher I had. It was a jazz harmony course, and my memory of it is hazy (I turned 40 this year, folks). But I recall running out after the first class and buying Mathews's 1978 album Roots, Branches and Dances (on the Bee Hive label — out of print and never reissued on CD, and not to be confused with John Ellis's Roots, Branches & Leaves of 2002). I'll never forget the driving modal sound of the first cut, the Mathews original "Salima's Dance," with Frank Foster on tenor, Ray Drummond on bass and Al Foster on drums.

I was so taken with Ethan's succinct appreciation of Mathews a few weeks ago. "Mathews (like John Hicks, Kenny Barron, Harold Mabern, and others) took the 'energy style' comping of McCoy Tyner in the 1960's and made it work in more straight-ahead contexts from the 1970’s on," Ethan wrote, and that's exactly what you hear in "Salima's Dance." At some point during that school year, I went to see an Off-Broadway play based on the life of altoist Frank Morgan, and while Morgan didn't star in it, he did lead a house quartet. Mathews was the pianist. I remember they used "Salima's Dance" as an interlude between scenes, almost like a leitmotif.

I also remember seeing Mathews on TV, playing with Johnny Griffin in Europe, in a long concert clip that I taped and watched over and over. When I told Mathews about it, he shot back, "Everyone's seen that but me!"

Ethan also nailed it in this comment: "The music that [John] Hicks and Mathews represents is too dependent on a communal feeling for it to be documented. It has less to do with Art than Culture. You need to be there, close to the bandstand, preferably in a small club, hopefully surrounded by other patrons who really love and understand the language." Bradley's was like that — a place that Mathews played in often if memory serves, right around the corner from the New School.

"So, the moral is, go see the older straight-ahead masters now," Ethan concluded. "When they are gone, it is done." I would add that when places like Bradley's are gone, it's like losing an entire village of Ronnie Mathewses.

The week on disc (22)

2008-07-21T21:41:00.003-04:00

Mandela at 90

2008-07-18T09:55:00.007-04:00

One of the high points of my adult life was watching Nelson Mandela, Mario Cuomo and David Dinkins ride past in a motorcade in New York on June 20, 1990.

The legacy of Mandela, or "Madiba" as South Africans affectionately call him, is a complex one. His reaching out to Castro, Gadhafi and other autocrats during those days is still discomforting, though it had to be seen in geopolitical context — these were the forces unambiguously aligned against South African apartheid. Would that the U.S. and Israel could say the same.

Pockets of right-wing Jews in New York picketed Mandela — a source of great pain and embarrassment in progressive Jewish circles — over his embrace of Yasser Arafat. Three years later, Yitzhak Rabin would shake Arafat's hand on the White House lawn. In stark contrast to Mandela, Arafat would die a failure, a mediocrity, a thug.

Omali Yeshitela, leader of the African Peoples Socialist Party, a fringe leftist cult that enjoys support from dead prez and others in the hip-hop activist world, rails against Mandela as an unpardonable sellout. Imprisoned and horribly mistreated by the apartheid government for decades, Mandela emerged and sought peace and democratic transformation. How dare he! Yeshitela, who regularly pronounces on the necessity of cleansing revolutionary violence, would have preferred a bloodbath, which he would have watched in relative comfort in the U.S. Mandela faced the awesome task of running a country at a grave historical crossroads. "Chairman Omali" lectures in churches and basements to the self-brainwashed, who tell him he's a great man.

Happy birthday, Mandela! How far South African leadership has fallen since Thabo Mbeki took your place.

Verse for the day

2008-07-17T18:57:00.003-04:00

The passage
of a life should show;
it should abrade.
And when life stops,
a certain space —
however small —
should be left scarred
by the grand and
damaging parade.

— Kay Ryan, U.S. poet laureate

From "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard"

Jazz wars

2008-07-17T10:58:00.001-04:00

A must-read from Darcy James Argue on the aftermath of the jazz culture wars.

New Yorker cover

2008-07-15T10:38:00.003-04:00

Jack Shafer rejects the argument that the cartoon will merely reinforce anti-Obama prejudice:

Calling on the press to protect the common man from the potential corruptions of satire is a strange, paternalistic assignment for any journalist to give his peers, but that appears to be what The New Yorker's detractors desire.

Forcefully put, but I still think the cover image was a bad idea.

I also think Leonce Gaiter's take at the Huffington Post is incredibly silly:

The other possibility is that somewhere, deep in the recesses of [the editors'] upper east and west side white minds, lurks a restive "fear of black." To provide such an image without context is to accept its message to some degree. No similar cartoon would have ever appeared about a white candidate.

That must be it: Even though The New Yorker supports Obama's candidacy to the hilt, and has run numerous sympathetic profiles and editorials about him over a period of years, deep down they're all racists who agree with Fox News and want to sink his chances. I mean, upper east and west side? Say no more, they can't help themselves.

And this in a piece about the harm of stereotyping.

Where is the drawing of the left's vision of John McCain as an adulterous gold digger, with McCain hiding his current wife behind his first wife's hospital bed curtain? That analogous image would never appear on a New Yorker cover.

Of course it wouldn't, because the magazine doesn't support McCain, and therefore such an image would be correctly perceived as an attack, not a send-up. The irony factor would be zero.

There's a case to be made that the Obama cover showed a lack of judgment. But the racist double standard argument falls flat.

CD reviews

2008-07-14T22:42:00.003-04:00

I have a few in the current Jazz Times:

Jason Ajemian, The Art of Dying (Delmark)

James Carter, Present Tense (EmArcy)

Anthony Braxton, Quartet (GTM) 2006 (Important)

Steuart Liebig's Tee-Tot Quartet, Always Outnumbered (pfMentum)

Greens part two

2008-07-14T21:35:00.009-04:00

Rosa Clemente, the hip-hop activist who is now Cynthia McKinney's vice presidential running mate on the Green Party ticket, made an acceptance speech this weekend during which she offered unequivocal praise for the Weather Underground, Mutulu Shakur (currently serving a 60-year term for his involvement in the BLA's notorious 1981 Brinks heist) and other supposed paragons of progressivism in America. Clemente also waxed sentimental over the "prophetic" lyrics of dead prez, the rap duo:

tell me who's got control of your mind and your worldview/is it the news or the movie you're taking yourself to?

Well, it's only fair to note who has control of dead prez's mind and worldview: the extremist cult leader Omali Yeshitela of the African Peoples Socialist Party, who thunders not just against Barack Obama but also Jesse Jackson and Nelson Mandela, and has declared: "Neo-colonialism not only must be destroyed as a system — the neo-colonialists themselves are going to have to be physically destroyed before Africa can be liberated."

Clemente says, "I stand on the 10 key values and principles of the Green Party" — and note on the C-Span clip that she can barely say it with a straight face. Because one of those principles, clear in black and white, as I observed in yesterday's post, is non-violence.

I agree with Marc Cooper that not too many years ago,

there were a few patches of Green that seemed semi-rational, even promising. There were candidates, activists and even some low-level elected officials that seemed to reflect a forward-looking, accessible reform politics that based itself on a rejection of the big money corruption of the two major parties. At least at the local level, the Greens seemed a possible option that could cut across partisan lines and embrace a rainbow stretching from lefty liberals to cranky libertarians.

But now, as Marc rightly says, "the Greens have ossified into a tiny, shrill, 'revolutionary' cult," with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist heading the ticket and a hypocrite sloganeer in the number-two slot. This is the radical left's answer to Obama, who has mobilized millions upon millions with his message of enlightened democratic pluralism. You could dismiss it as pathetic if it weren't for the fact that Clemente may actually manage to dent Obama's support among hip-hop youth.

Make my day

2008-07-12T15:42:00.009-04:00

The specifics of Obama's alleged "move to the center" are complex, but I have to say I'm amused that lefties like Oregon artist Martha Shade, quoted in this NY Times piece, are abandoning Obama for the Green Party. (I say this as someone who voted for Nader in '96 and '00.) A person who hangs an "Occupation Is Terrorism" banner out her window needs to wake up, at some point, to the fact that Obama isn't, wasn't and never will be her candidate — and thank god he isn't. It's my view that "Occupation Is Terrorism" is another way of saying that terrorism isn't terrorism, but leaving that aside, I'd like to know: If these folks are so "disgusted" by Barack Obama, how can they justify pulling the lever for the Greens' presidential nominee, Cynthia McKinney?

In her statement condemning the Sean Bell verdict (and I too was troubled by that verdict), McKinney favorably cites the extremist December 12 Movement not once but four times. As I've noted in a column [pdf] in the current Jazz Times, the December 12 Movement has long served as a propaganda outlet for the government of Robert Mugabe, which has just brazenly tortured and murdered its way to "victory" in the recent run-off election in Zimbabwe. Let's also note that the December 12 Movement has now officially endorsed Mugabe's sham. The moral bankruptcy of this organization speaks very much for itself, but supporters of the Green Party ought to be wondering exactly what Cynthia McKinney's ties are.

In 2002 McKinney went to bat for the Mugabe regime on the House floor. So the position of the Green Party nominee for president would seem to be very much at odds with the party's platform plank on non-violence:

It is essential that we develop effective alternatives to society’s current patterns of violence. We will work to demilitarize, and eliminate weapons of mass destruction, without being naive about the intentions of other governments [my emphasis]. We recognize the need for self-defense and the defense of others who are in helpless situations [my emphasis]. We promote non-violent methods to oppose practices and policies with which we disagree, and will guide our actions toward lasting personal, community and global peace.

Read Craig Timberg's Washington Post reporting on the outright, unashamed corruption and bloodlust of Mugabe's illegitimate government and tell me, Green Party voters, why you're directing all your ire at the Democratic candidate, and not at your own.

The week on disc (21) - big band edition

2008-07-09T10:31:00.002-04:00

In case you missed the last one...

Evan Parker & the Transatlantic Art Ensemble, Boustrophedon (ECM)

Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, Song for Chico (Zoho)

The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard (Planet Arts)

Barry Romberg’s Random Access Large Ensemble, Existential Detective (Romhog)

Keefe Jackson’s Project Project, Just Like This (Delmark, 2007)

Bob Mintzer Big Band, Swing Out (MCG Jazz)

To the five m-f boroughs

2008-07-07T12:13:00.002-04:00

Feeling homesick for NY so thought I'd post this. [Hat tip Schrager.]

On Herbie

2008-07-04T09:45:00.001-04:00

My review of Herbie Hancock's recent Carnegie Hall show, online at Jazz Times.

Greenwald misreads Obama

2008-07-02T10:36:00.006-04:00

Some very smart liberal bloggers are up in arms about Obama's perceived move to the center — perhaps with some justification, although Glenn Greenwald's beef with the Obama patriotism speech borders on dishonest:

[Obama] defended his own patriotism by impugning the patriotism of others, specifically those in what he described as the "the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties" for "attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself" and -- echoing Jeanne Kirkpatrick's 1984 RNC speech -- "blaming America for all that was wrong with the world";

I'd expect far better from Greenwald. Here is what Obama said:

Still, what is striking about today's patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s - in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself....
[...]
Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views - these caricatures of left and right. Most Americans understood that dissent does not make one unpatriotic, and that there is nothing smart or sophisticated about a cynical disregard for America's traditions and institutions.

Greenwald ignores Obama's clear rejection of right-wing attacks on dissent and has a cow over what, in context, is a perfectly reasonable description of some would-be insurrectionists on the '60s left. The same exact take on the '60s can be found in The Audacity of Hope, published long before Obama was calibrating his way to the presidency. His patriotism speech was an admirably honest presentation of his thinking on the subject. Greenwald's refusal to accept one word of criticism of any segment of the left, even in the context of a nuanced historical argument, says more about the state of liberal and left-wing culture than it does about Obama.

Greenwald knows full well how indebted Obama is to the social justice struggles of the '60s and earlier, and how he's taken every opportunity during the campaign to affirm and align with that legacy. That doesn't mean Obama is being devious when he portrays the people involved in those struggles as complex, or in some cases not worthy of admiration.

Morocco reflections

2008-07-01T19:52:00.013-04:00

Almost two years ago, a close friend enthusiastically recommended Paul Bowles's 1955 novel The Spider's House — set in Morocco during the struggle for independence from France — as a prescient commentary on Muslim attitudes toward the west (and vice versa), the quagmire in Iraq and so forth. Eager to read it on my recent return from Fes, I was amazed to find that Bowles's story takes place in that very city, and includes descriptions of places I'd just been.

"[Fes] is no longer the intellectual and cultural center of North Africa; it is merely one more city beset by the insoluble problems of the Third World," Bowles wrote in a 1981 preface to the book. This accorded well with my first impression of Morocco, although the Festival of World Sacred Music certainly has done something to restore Fes's historic position.

To reach Fes, I took the train from Casablanca's Mohammed V Airport, a journey of well over five hours that involved a change of trains early on. Processing my reserved ticket at the airport train depot was a farce I can laugh about only now. Suffice to say it involved my nonexistent foreign language skills, a pink booklet of blank receipts and a crumpled slip of carbon paper, an impatient line of customers forming behind me, and two clerks who acted as though they were being asked to split the atom.

With the tickets finally in hand, I scrambled to the first train, a rusted iron hulk with windows you could barely see through. We began to pass shantytowns on the airport's periphery, a picture of appalling squalor: temporary cinderblock dwellings with tin roofs covered by tarps, held in place with rocks or tires. Some had no roof at all; forget plumbing and electricity. These depressing, dust-choked settlements popped up in many spots during the trip, often on just the other side of the tracks from relatively developed urban areas. At one point I watched a man graze his herd of goats on an expanse of garbage.

Getting off to change trains at Casa Voyageurs, I began noticing men in business suits and a level of general prosperity. The station was modern, with polished brick flooring and digital signs announcing departures and arrivals — nicer, in fact, than a typical Metro North station in suburban New York. I bought a mango soda and a bag of paprika potato chips and waited for my connecting train, which was in far better shape than the first but had no air-conditioning. Despite the scorching midday sun, people were ordering coffee from the drink carts that occasionally passed through. A teenage girl across from me was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, a collared shirt over that, and finally a v-neck sweater — three layers in the choking, miserable heat.

A man in his mid 40s to early 50s sat near me at one point and said something lighthearted in Arabic. Seeing my confusion, he began to suss out where I was from. We were soon speaking English, and though I was still carefully gauging folks' feelings toward Americans, this man shook my hand warmly when he heard I was covering the Fes Festival (he was born in Fes). He talked to me about Morocco's Arab and Berber communities and told me I really must visit the Mellah (he called it "Jewish town"). Without any prompting from me, he seemed to take a certain pride in Morocco's Jewish heritage, and I realized he reminded me very much of my wife's Israeli stepfather.

Arriving in Fes at last, I was greeted by a driver and taken to a new black Mercedes with black leather interior — embarrassing luxury in this setting. The parking lot was tiny, sheer chaos, cars backing up and turning around in every possible direction. Somehow the driver extricated us, but then took me to the wrong hotel. We sorted the problem out, and before long I was showered and sitting at the evening concert at Bab El Makina: flamenco music and dancing from the Compagnie Belen Maya of Spain. After 26 hours on the road, there was a real chance of me nodding off and falling from my chair. I had to get up and circulate. But somehow I made it to 11pm to hear the Tijania Sufi Brotherhood, the first of the brotherhoods I'd hear perform at the open-air venue Dar Tazi, tucked away inside the Fes Medina (the medieval walled city).

In The Spider's House, Paul Bowles portrays a teenage boy named Amar, who clings to a doctrinaire Islam in the midst of the colonialist-nationalist clashes going on around him. Late in the book, Amar finds himself at a Sufi gathering in a place called Sidi Bou Chta. Recalling the experience, he says:

And then we watched the Aïssaoua and the Haddaoua and the Jilala and the Hamacha and the Derqaoua and the Guennaoua and all that filth, because the Nazarene [protagonist John Stenham] liked to see the dancing ... It makes you sick to your stomach to look at it, all those people jumping up and down like monkeys.

Thus does Bowles capture fundamentalist loathing of the mystical, ecumenical Sufis, who were a major attraction at the Fes Festival. While there I was able to hear three of the brotherhoods — Aïssawa, Darkaouiya and Hamadcha — specifically condemned by Amar. The fourth, the Tijania, was purely vocal, no drums, no dancing. The following clip is a bit indistinct, but gives you a sense of the hypnotic power of the chanting and the strange, almost random quality of the harmonization:

Days later, on a guided tour of the Medina, I was told that Sidi Ahmed Tijani, the namesake of this brotherhood, was responsible for bringing Islam to Senegal some thousand years ago. As we neared his shrine in the Medina, I began to notice groups of black Africans milling about, talking. These were Senegalese pilgrims who make regular trips to Fes to honor their forebear Tijani.

Senegal is of course another former French colony, one I learned a bit about during my February trip to Dakar, where I and many other colleagues were briefed on Youssou N'Dour's microfinance project Birima. N'Dour, an extraordinary singer and songwriter, came to the Fes Festival several years ago to premiere his Egypt project, one of the most subtle political salvos of the post-9/11 era, an album that highlighted a tolerant face of Islam, something "that in recent times has come to be both misunderstood and misinterpreted by many commentators and adherents alike." To recall N'Dour's work and my Senegal trip, and to be in the midst of these Senegalese as they journeyed to the birthplace of their Sufi heritage in Fes, was something visceral, something I may never be able to describe.

As for the experience of walking through the Medina, I'll leave that to Paul Bowles:

Eleven hundred years ago the city had been begun at the bottom of a concavity in the hills, a formation which had the contours of a slightly tilted bowl; through the centuries as it grew, a vast, eternally spreading construction of cedar wood, marble, earth and tiles, it had climbed up the sides and over the rim of the bowl. Since the center was also the lowest part, all the passageways led to it; one had to go down first, and then choose the direction in which one wanted to climb. Except the paths which followed the river's course out into the orchards, all ways led upward from the heart of the city. The long climb through the noonday heat was tiring.

Heck yes. It's a dizzying place, but just incredible. Mules, not cars, are the mode of transport. I have many pictures up, but here's a commanding rooftop view (click to enlarge):

My travel companion Derek Beres has pics up as well. I've already directed you to my take on the festival itself, as published in the Forward; also see these interesting reports from the BBC and the Guardian.

More than most musical events, the Fes Festival is virtually impossible to separate from politics. By spearheading this call for global and interfaith dialogue through the arts, Morocco positions itself as a progressive force in the Arab and Muslim world. And still it has to contend with the fact that Moroccans are very heavily present in the ranks of jihadist movements, including Algerian-based Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, about which the NY Times has just reported in vivid detail. These tensions were very much in mind as I sat with friends on the top floor of the Kasbah restaurant. Looking over the balcony at a house painter hard at work, I tried to make out the English words on the back of his t-shirt. Away from the sun's glare, they came into focus:

"Uncle Sam Wants You."

Video links

2008-07-01T19:34:00.002-04:00

Finally got around to posting short YouTube vids from Istanbul, Suleimaniya and Dakar. Enjoy.

Six Picks: July 2008

2008-07-01T19:19:00.002-04:00

My monthly list of recommended CDs, as published in All About Jazz-New York, July 2008:

Kris Davis, Rye Eclipse (Fresh Sound New Talent)

Guillermo Klein, Filtros (Sunnyside)

Bennett Paster & Gregory Ryan, Grupo Yanqui Rides Again (Miles High)

Mario Pavone, Trio Arc (Playscape)

Wadada Leo Smith, Tabligh (Cuneiform)

Miguel Zenon, Awake (Marsalis Music)

Letter from Morocco

2008-06-26T19:42:00.002-04:00

My take on the Fes Festival in Morocco, in the current edition of the Forward.

Fire at will

2008-06-26T17:07:00.003-04:00

So sayeth the Supreme Court. Dahlia Lithwick makes a great point at Slate. Justice Scalia wrote in his Boumediene dissent, concerning the habeas corpus rights of Guantanamo detainees, that "today's decision will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." No such concern in the case of handguns, which kill more Americans in a year than terrorism has in the life the republic. It's exactly as Timothy Noah argued at the time of the Virginia Tech massacre. We care about those murdered kids, sure. But we care more about their murderer's gun rights. Noah weighs in again.

"Playing Changes for Change"

2008-06-25T21:16:00.001-04:00

Read my column on jazz and politics, in the July/August issue of Jazz Times, here [pdf].

On Venissa Santí

2008-06-23T09:00:00.002-04:00

My review of Philly-based Cuban-American vocalist Venissa Santí, in today's Inquirer.

The week on disc (20)

2008-06-20T15:08:00.008-04:00

Live highlights

2008-06-20T14:24:00.005-04:00

After Wednesday's JJA Jazz Awards event I club-hopped with award winner Nate Chinen, first to the new Poisson Rouge — kind of a fussy, disorganized space on first impression — for Charlie Haden's Quartet West. I'm not a keen follower of the band, but Ernie Watts on tenor really grabbed me by the lapels. Haden's lines on rhythm changes ("Passport") were unbelievably loose and roundabout, yet solid as steel.

Having crisscrossed the ocean last week and spent time in a foreign land, I couldn't have been happier to return to the Village Vanguard and let the Brian Blade Fellowship conquer my senses. I'm feeling the need to amplify my praise for this group following my Jazz Times review of Season of Changes, the new Verve disc.

Until now I failed to grasp the genius of the final three minutes of "Return of the Prodigal Son," by Fellowship pianist Jon Cowherd. Something happened when the group reached this section at the gig. A perfect melody, a paradisiacal set of chords in flowing waltz time, an accumulation of sound and texture as the theme grew out of Cowherd's piano intro — it was everything music should be, and the beauty of it was almost hard to stand. Besides, everyone in the group improvised like monsters and gave two hundred percent, including Blade, who dissected the beat continuously, playing wholly within the moment.

A band of the year nomination for BBF, please. And a long overdue nod to Jon Cowherd as a top composer.