I had no idea that Clark Terry and Wayne Shorter had ever played together. I had even less of an idea that Clark sat in with Wayne's quartet at Newport. In 1986. Or that video of this encounter exists. And is on YouTube.

Internets, sometimes you bring me down, but how can I stay mad?

Remember, this is the kind of playing that led former (thank the FSM) New York Times jazz critic Peter Watrous to observe that "[Shorter's] work on soprano saxophone leads directly to Kenny G." Yeah. That's it. Totally.

(Thanks to Rick Perlstein for bringing this to my attention. Buy his book, fercrissakes.)

Matt Rubin, co-proprietor of the newish blog Twenty Dollars, breaks out the lead pipes and blowtorches with a post called Why I Hate Big Band Music. I am, ironically, too busy to respond at the moment because I'm writing liner notes¹ for an upcoming bigband record by a certain notoriously prolific trumpeter and composer. But Matt's piece is certainly worth reading. I have definite qualms about Matt's diagnosis -- if the problem with bigband music is the fetishization of "precision" above all else, then citing Maria Schneider's fearsomely precise group as the antithesis of that does not really ring true. (Gil's band in the 1980's -- okay. Maria's band in the 2000's -- fuggedaboudit.) And you will have to take my word for it that any rumors of rampant selflessness and/or ego-abnegation amongst bigband musicians are not true. Still, I encourage y'all to take a bit of time out from celebrating America's greatness by blowing shit up, and go read Matt's post.

Speaking of Maria Schneider's band, I don't think I've ever seen a more naked attempt to smack down a successful female artist and put her in her place (at least, not in living memory) than this review on the Montreal Gazette's blog. It's got everything, really -- including comparing her looks (unfavorably) to the Last Tango in Paris actress, a complaint that it was "creepy" seeing so many "steely, blond" middle-aged women in the audience, and the literally incredible allegation that Maria's body language was "stiff." Dude -- my body language is stiff. I am (and this is putting it extremely charitably) a utilitarian conductor. When I get in front of a band, my goal is to beat clear, unambiguous time that doesn't rush or drag, and to give cues that actually do more good than harm. I am sorry to say that even this level of basic adequacy is unusual enough that I get compliments about my conducting from players. Maria's skill and expressivity as a conductor is clearly so far beyond this -- so far beyond anyone else in jazz -- that it's not even worth having a conversation about it, except to note that if this is stiff, then the rest of us make Peter Boyle look like Fred Astaire.

1. For our younger readers: "liner notes" were written descriptions of, or essays about, the music contained on a particular album^a, which were included as part of the packaging for said album.

a. "Albums" were compilations of songs or other musical works that were collected on physical media (such as vinyl, cassettes, or compact discs), intended to be listened to without interruption in a specific predetermined sequence. At one point, people were willing to pay up to the equivalent of three (sometimes even four) Starbucks beverages in exchange for them.

Here's some Kenny Wheeler:

My RSS Reader readers¹ won't notice a difference, but I have finally cleaned up the sprawling, embarrassingly out-of-date right-hand column and updated the Secret Society blogroll. I am not sure anyone ever looks at (let alone clicks through to) blogroll links anymore, but people have been politely requesting that I update mine for literally years now, and I have finally been shamed into actually doing something about it. I removed inactive blogs and blogs I don't read anymore and all blogs that feature that damnable light text on a dark background.² Oh, and I also folded the "musician blogs" and "non-musician blogs" into a single category. We Are One, just like in the CK ad.

Most of the additions are new-ish blogs I've probably mentioned in this space before -- Nate Chinen's The Gig, NPR's A Blog Supreme, Fred Kaplan's Stereophile blog (which I include despite major reservations about its pitiful excuse for an RSS feed),  Molly Sheridan's Mind The Gap, Marc Myers's JazzWax, Peter Hum's Jazzblog.ca -- formerly known as Thriving on a Riff -- or embarrassing omissions I should have corrected a long time ago -- most egregiously, Doug Ramsey's Rifftides. 

However, a few of these recent additions could benefit from a more extensive introduction. Please welcome:

Createquity, one of the few blogs out there devoted to arts policy and economic issues. It's also written by an actual artist: singer, composer, and Capital M honcho Ian David Moss, who has recently graduated from the Yale School of Management. He's still keeping it real, though -- check out this recent post on "sustainability." No, don't go check your Twitter feed instead -- trust me, it can wait. This shit's important, and Ian makes it engaging, accessible, and provocative.

Jason Palmer's Blog -- Jason is a fantastic and in-demand trumpet player (and now indie film star). I know Jason from our mutual NEC years -- he played on the original versions of "Lizard Brain," "Chrysalis," and "Flux in a Box" -- so it is great to see him throw himself headlong into the blogosphere, despite his already full plate of teaching and musical commitments. Jason was among the winners of the Bad Plus Blog Competition, for this heartwarming post.

The Big City, composer George Grella's omnivorous music-in-NYC blog. Anyone who can write with insight and authority about Alas No Axis, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, my NewAm colleagues Missy Mazzoli and William Britelle, and the recent Boulez/Barenboim/Staatskapelle Berlin Mahler marathon is okay in my book. And, yes, I would totally be saying that even if Grella hadn't given us this far-too-generous writeup.

Music and More, Tim Niland's record-review-centric blog. He's been at it since 2003 but his blog is new to me, and maybe new to you? This species of blogging is time-consuming and mostly thankless, but when done well, it's invaluable.

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1. If you are new to RSS (and you use a Mac), I recommend NetNewsWire. It's free and it's way better than Google Reader.

2. Exceptions were made for Kris Tiner and Hank Shteamer, but c'mon, guys.... a disturbing number of entrants in the Bad Plus Blog Competition also inexplicably use that heinous, unreadable color scheme. Listen, kids: just say "no" to shitty blog templates. I can't process your brilliant blogospheric pronouncements if your light-on-dark text is burning holes in my corneas.

Two essential new interviews:

Ethan Iverson unleashes another epic conversation, this one with Tim Berne:

Intro
Part One
Part Two

A taste:

EI: You are a pretty rare example of someone who isn’t playing music already as a teenager but then has the willpower - because of a love of the music - to like really devote yourself to it, a bit on the late side, and then turn it around. In a few years you’ve made your first record and you’ve got your own voice coming.

TB: Yeah I was pretty strong-willed. I don’t know what possessed me. When I look back on it, it seems incredible, especially considering my overall lack of confidence. The more I learned, the less confident I felt. I would take these jazz lessons and stuff, but I didn’t really ever do sideman stuff. I think the first thing I ever did as a sideman could’ve been the Mark Helias record Split Image, where I played with Dewey Redman for a couple of tunes.

That was amazing. Mark might have given Dewey the music but I seriously doubt he looked at it. He came in from a gallery show, where he’d been drinking some wine. He’s kind of laughing and screwing around. And I’m paralyzed with fear. Not even just about him, but just recording a record in a studio. Somebody else’s music, some of the tunes have changes, you know I’m just mortified I’m gonna fuck up. And, uh, then Dewey just shows up and we play this thing and it’s like "boom." We’re playing this tango of Mark’s, and playing it “correctly” and all this, and Dewey comes in... his solo’s killing. And then we play the other tune he’s on, and it’s the same thing. He’s not nailing the music, but all of a sudden it has a vibe. It’s like this guy is a pro in the best sense of the word. This guy’s been around the block! He just knows how to cut to the music. Get to the music quickly. You put up all these blocks: “I can’t do this, I can’t do that.” I was just fighting myself on every issue. “I’m not as good as these guys,” or whatever. All that shit’s spinning out of control in my brain. And this guy’s coming in like “I’m Dewey Redman. I play the saxophone. It’s just music. I’m gonna play some music.” He wasn’t worried about somebody saying he fucked up letter B or whatever -- and if they had, he would’ve done it again, of course. But on the improvised stuff he just sort of killed it.

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Ethan is famous for his extended interviews, but Marc Myers of JazzWax is giving him a run for his money. This week he is publishing his 5-part(!) interview with my mentor, Bob Brookmeyer, and it is riveting. There is a lot of stuff in here I didn't know!

So far, only the first two parts are up... parts 3-5 coming later this the week. I will update the links as needed.

Part One
Part Two

A sample:

JW: How did you come to play the valve-trombone?
BB: The stories about me starting to play it cold with Claude Thornhill’s band are wrong [laughs]. Yeah, right, I just walked into Thornhill’s band, picked up the valve-trombone and started to play it. The truth is I started playing the instrument when I was 13. I didn’t want to play slide trombone, so I found some old baritone horn in the band room and learned to play the valves. Then friends gave me an old Czechoslovakian valve-trombone. I learned to play the instrument by watching trumpet players.

JW: Why didn’t you like the slide trombone?
BB: Who likes the slide trombone? Sax players got all the girls because they were seated in the front row. Trumpeters got all the money because they were driving the band from the back row. Trombones sit in the middle and develop an interior life [laughs]. Trombonists didn’t get the money or the girls.

Dave Douglas's Brass Ecstasy -- a postmodern take on the New Orleans street band, via Lester Bowie -- plays live at Fern Bar HQ in about 20 minutes (3 PM EST), and there is a video stream. They band includes Vincent Chancey (horn), Luis Bonilla (trombone), Marcus Rojas (tuba), and Nasheet Waits (drums) -- I caught them this Saturday at Jazz Standard and the group is killing (Marcus Rojas is literally unstoppable), so I definitely recommend tuning in. The band has a new record out, too, which like all Greenleaf releases, can be streamed in its entirety.

Infinite Summer has begun.

I will be reading Infinite Jest for the third time. Here's why.

And also: my consumption of pixels-on-a-screen has been vastly outstripping my consumption of ink-on-cellulose-pulp for many years now. I have mixed feelings about this, but it seems healthier to start getting a larger dose of the latter in my life.

But, my comrades-in-Jest, before you exit the Information Superhighway you might want to take a look at the 10th Anniversary Edition Foreward by Dave Eggers:

In recent years, there have been a few literary dustups — how insane is it that such a thing exists in a world at war? — about readability in contemporary fiction. In essence, there are some people who feel that fiction should be easy to read, that it’s a popular medium that should communicate on a somewhat conversational wavelength. On the other hand, there are those who feel that fiction can be challenging, generally and thematically, and even on a sentence-by-sentence basis — that it’s okay if a person needs to work a bit while reading, for the rewards can be that much greater when one’s mind has been exercised and thus (presumably) expanded.

Much in the way that would-be civilized debates are polarized by extreme thinkers on either side, this debate has been made to seem like an either/or proposition, that the world has room for only one kind of fiction, and that the other kind should be banned and its proponents hunted down and, why not, dismembered.

Like the FSM, the Complexity Wars are everywhere.

(Photo: Paul G. Deker)

"At this moment I'd like to pause for station identification. Station SOUL and LOVE. Charles Mariano, lead alto and alto solos."

This is Mingus, in his liner notes to The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. Mariano is the leadoff soloist, and sets up the entire record with his open, heartrending sound -- you all know the moment:

MP3: Track A - Solo Dancer (Stop! Look! And Listen, Sinner Jim Whitney!) (excerpt)

Mariano's playing is all over The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady and it is glorious. Especially his blazing extended solo on "Track C - Group Dancers - (Soul Fusion) Freewoman and Oh, This Freedom's Slave Cries." This record is justifiably beloved -- it's some of the most amazing music ever recorded, and it's unimaginable without Charlie Mariano.

Other places:

Ethan Iverson (Do The Math) highlights a lesser-known Mariano session.
Carl Abernathy (Cahl's Juke Joint) gives The Toshiko Mariano Quartet some love.
David Valdez (Casa Valdez Studios) posts a rare collection of Mariano compositions from the 1960's.
Michael Carlson (Irresistable Targets) has some invaluable info about Mariano's European years.
John Dilberto's reminiscence at Echoes is interesting (a ski mask? Really?) but his lede undersells Mariano considerably: "a second tier bop saxophonist"? You'd find an awful lot of alto players who'd take serious objection to that characterization!
Peter Hum (jazzblog.ca)
Boston Globe (Joan Anderman)

Charlie Mariano Tribute Page

Matana Roberts took a furlough from her long-running, ongoing blood narrative Coin Coin to present some new music at Roulette last night -- a suite called "New York Stories," performed by Roberts, Vijay Iyer (piano), Liberty Ellman (guitar), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Damion Reid (drums). (Tenor saxophonist JD Allen was also on the bill but could not appear due to a last-minute tour conflict.) The music sounds patient, varied, organically freeflowing with plenty of room to breathe... but achieving that effect in a musically satisfying way usually takes a bit of work.

What separates Matana from a lot of her peers -- beyond her balls-to-the-wall commitment, a virtue which is already far-too-scarse -- is her attention to shaping the details of her music in the service of a larger structure. Those details may be fairly loosely specified, but they are specified. I stole a few quick glances at the written parts for "New York Stories" after the gig -- there's a lot of graphic notation involved, with glyphs for "density w/space," "non-tonal texture," "lock in," etc., as well as passages of notated music that can be read in the clef of the player's choice. (Which in this context is realistically going to be either treble or bass -- jazz musicians don't really rock the C-clefs.) There's also an overall structural plan for the piece, with many repeated and cued sections mapped out in advance.

The music included a lot of satisfying timbral variety: the full ensemble was deployed sparingly, and there were many stripped-down moments -- solos, duos, and trios in various instrumental configurations. These were (subtly) cued on the fly by the composer. The upshot is that the judicious deployment of all of these techniques affords Matana the ability to exert ownership over this music. This isn't to denigrate the sensitive, spontaneous interplay amongst all of these great improvising musicians -- but Matana's "New York Stories" are clearly her own.

More photos below the fold...

Matana Roberts

Damion Reid

Liberty Ellman

Thomas Morgan

Let me be the latest to welcome NYT stringer and JazzTimes exile Nate Chinen to the Fraternal Order of Jazzbloggers. His new blog, The Gig, has been officially unveiled and already has some killer content -- the audio interview with Grizzly Bear bassist and former Branford Marsalis student Chris Taylor (no, really), in which Taylor talks about the influence of Ahmad Jamal on the band's latest, Veckatimest (no, really) is a must-read. Kudos to Nate for catching the Vernell Fournier-inspired off-beat ride cymbal beat on "Southern Point." He also reports on the ongoing mustache-growing competition between Andrew D'Angelo and Bill McHenry, and oh yeah, Brad Meldhau's special guest appearance with McHenry's quartet at the Vanguard last night, which marks what is, improbably, the first-ever musical encounter between Meldhau and Paul Motian.

It always seemed to me Nate's naturally casual, vivid, engaging style sometimes gets a bit dampened down by the Professional Voice requirements of Major Publications, so I am glad Nate has decided to hang up his own shingle and begin dispensing the unfiltered stuff. I am sure this newfound liberation totally makes up for the loss of a regular paycheck from JazzTimes.

In other news, Nate recently interviewed me for the BBC's Jazz on 3. Said interview is airing tonight at 11:15 PM GMT (i.e., 6:15 PM EST). The show will be streaming thereafter for a week.

UPDATE: Listen here -- my interview segment begins 1:27:00.

OMG you guys did you hear JazzTimes is going under? I can't believe no one in the blogosphere is talking about it!

Kidding, of course. In the event that rock you've been under has been feeling really, really comfy... rumors of financial troubles at "the other jazz magazine" began last week on Howard Mandel's blog and were confirmed on Monday when the magazine's management posted a brief note acknowledging that they had ceased (sorry, "temporarily" "suspended") publication and laid off all of their staff. Apparently they are also not planning on paying the money they owe freelancers for previous assignments (i.e., work that has already been published), which totally bites. Howard also wonders aloud if the unsurprising but depressing demise of New York's JVC Jazz Festival was the final nail in the JazzTimes coffin -- his inside baseball perspective about "advertorial supplements" gives a slightly surreal look behind the curtain of the jazz publication industry.

There is a tendency in jazz, as in all fringe endeavors, to make the perfect the enemy of the good. "The politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small," etc. And so while I certainly understand the schadenfreude felt by those who take a grim satisfaction in seeing the former pillars of the jazz establishment immolate in such spectacular fashion, it does seem to me that it's a whole lot easier to attempt to reform the jazz-industrial complex while some of it is still left standing. "Burn it to the ground and start over" is a fun notion to entertain, but as a viable growth strategy it leaves a little something to be desired. Also, as David Adler points out, the lazy jab at "NPR fern bar jazz" seems particularly out of step with the times, although it's nice they have a sense of humor about it. (I am not sure what species of mutant space-fern you'd need to domesticate a front line that includes Bill McHenry and Andrew D'Angelo.)

On the other hand, William Parker can be justifiably proud of what he and his wife Patricia have built with the Vision Festival, now in its 14th year and still going strong. This year's Vision Fest kicked off on Tuesday -- Magnet Magazine has a great writeup of opening night. It's also nice to see some love for the VF over at Brooklyn Vegan. (The BV commenters also inevitably bring the snark, but that is all part of the love. Really.) The festival runs through June 15 -- I'm going to try to make it down on Saturday night.

But on Sunday afternoon, I'll be heading up to the Northside Festival -- specifically, Public Assembly, where the Search and Restore crew have stealthily inserted a slice of fresh new jazz into an event otherwise dominated by indie rock. Starting at 2 PM, S&R will be presenting the awesome quad-bill of Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Andrew D'Angelo's Gay Disco Trio, Ken Thompson's Slow/Fast, and Kneebody. This is the way of the future, I think... if our own institutions are crumbling, we might as well infiltrate someone else's.

Also, a reminder that Infinite Summer is just 10 days away. Have you secured your copy yet? How about your t-shirt?

Please be advised that the fabulously stylish and highly desirable Secret Society T-Shirts are almost completely sold out. Our friends at Hemlock Ink will be silkcreening a new batch for us shortly, but meanwhile, we are blowing out our remaining inventory for a mere $10 each. These freshly discounted shirts are available in any size you want, provided it is S. I would like them out of my apartment and into your wardrobes, please.

"Act now," "while quantities last," "limited-time offer" -- I sense you have heard these words before. But hark, is that summer I spy, just around the corner? Do you really want to be caught without a fashionable and lightweight garment which proclaims your allegiance to the Society?

Back in Brooklyn. More photos and (post-)tourblogging to come.

Briefly, though: I've had a few inquires from our new European fans looking for our CD -- yes, New Amsterdam ships worldwide, and shipping costs are reasonable. Also, no matter where you are in the world, you get instant access to downloadable MP3s when you purchase the CD from NewAm.

However, if you prefer to purchase from a European distributor, Infernal Machines is also available from InstantJazz.

The Society has a new News-Letter. It is conveyed directly to your electro-courier's In-Box and looks like this. It will be distributed approximately once a month, or whenever there is Important News to Convey. If you are not yet subscribed, you can do so here.