Search Results for: tamez

Deep Music of the South

Posted on August 12, 2011 by - Columns

Last Monday I went to hear yet another concert at University of the Streets. This time, though, I had no reason to be there other than to watch and listen to the group headed by guitarist/composer Omar Tamez of Monterrey, Mexico. He will be performing around the state of New York for the month of August and this was his second performance since arriving last week. His first was a duo with Dom Minasi at the ABC No Rio – C.O.M.A. performance space run by saxophonist Blaise Siwula.

The 37-year old Tamez is a moving force in the Mexican music scene. For the last fifteen years he has led the Non-Jazz Ensemble, a group with a varied personnel and repertoire. In 2002 he began organizing an annual event in Monterrey for his ensemble, bringing together musicians from different countries and disciplines to create series of concerts lasting a week or more. The Non-Jazz website contains links to a broad palette of samples of these concerts.

Tamez was joined by trombonist Steve Swell, trumpeter Herb Robertson, cellist Jonathan Golove, bassist Joe Fonda, and drummer Harvey Sorgen for his University of the Streets performance, but the program was composed by his father and teacher, Nicandro Tamez (1931-1985). Omar picked four works for the concert: Comunio Spoza et Mater—a love poem composed in 1976 for his wife on Mother’s Day structured in 4 movements to represent four seasons; Monomaquia #2—a kind of “duel” composed in 1978 for solo cello; Trimurti Ying—a set of 17 pieces composed in 1979 (“Señora,” “Niña,” “Diosa,” “Pleroma,” “Tántrica,” “Genetric,” “Virgin,” “Palmera,” Cyprés,” “Torre,” “Portal,” “Templete,” “Noria,” “Fuente,” “Trimonio,” “Espíritu,” and “Amor”) performed by Tamez on guitar alone; and Ubudo—Nicandro’s last work and composed in 1984.

Nicandro Tamez was an educator who worked through several universities as well as founding his own Escuela Formativa por las Artes. His approach to composition grew from one steeped in the traditional Western paradigm to serialism and then to inventing his own notation and embracing improvisation and intuitive interpretation by the performer. In some of the works performed by the ensemble, the notation might only relate to pitch and relative duration, with chromatic alterations indicated by note head shape. The tempo, dynamics, register and articulation of the phrases are improvised. Sometimes microtonal ornamentation for the notated pitches were also improvised, such as the last movement of Comunio Spoza et Mater. Some of the improvisation is built into Tamez’s use of what Omar calls “intuitive” graphics, where amoeba-like shapes are given to the performer to interpret. Tamez also used what I’ll call “legended” graphics, where a technique, or set of techniques, is assigned to a specific ideogram. In Monomaquia #2 Jonathan Golove added a level of interpretation with use of electronic signal processors. Some pieces (“Cyprés” and “Amor”) have the performers construct their own scales to use in their improvising. The last piece, Ubudo, has the ensemble reading from parts that contain three pages of graphics arranged in +/- Cartesian planes. The graphics themselves relate to legended sets of instructions while the quadrants of the planes are interpreted by the performer.

One of the most impressive things about the concert was the choice of musicians. While not as nationally diverse as Tamez’s Monterrey concerts, the diversity of musical background was profound. Robertson, best known for his work with saxophonist Tim Berne, and Swell are strongly associated with the New York free-jazz community. Golove is an associate professor of cello performance at the University of Buffalo and is probably better known for his work in orchestral situations and Sorgen, a mainstay of the Woodstock music scene, is best known for his work with the group, Hot Tuna. Fonda is a bassist of the highest order whose use of extended techniques is both encyclopedic and personal. The group’s performance was nothing short of top-flight, even though the band/audience ratio neared 1-to-1. While each performer is a virtuoso in their own right, the degree of sensitivity to the music at hand never faltered.

Tamez brings a sensibility to the ensemble that is tempered by a profound knowledge of music canon (he is a dedicated collector of recordings and has a weekly radio show where he shares his findings) and a deep connection to his indigenous roots. His immediate family is made up of artists. Besides his father, his sister Teresa is a classical pianist, his brother Emilio is a brilliant drummer/percussionist, and his mother is a poet/painter. Tamez’s music, while including modern European and American instruments never seems to originate in their commonly associated styles and, while the language of his poetry is Spanish, the spirit of his music is pre-Columbian. At first, he almost seems to be playing at the guitar; but as his performance continues, you see that the guitar is what he plays his music on. Instead of accessing the “tradition” of the instrument (something he is quite capable of doing, as his discography shows), he goes to a tradition of place, where instruments are assimilated. In a sense, the umbrella he uses for his projects, “Non-Jazz,” is a non-sequitur, since indigenousness is the root of jazz as well.

The performance was a musical event that was worthy of any major concert hall. I’m only sorry I couldn’t stay to hear Max Johnson’s band. Omar Tamez will be bringing groups to Middleton, Connecticut on Friday, August 12; Buffalo, New York on Saturday, August 13; Woodstock, New York on Sunday, August 21; Grand Rapids, Michigan on Friday and Saturday, September 2 & 3; and in Buffalo again on Thursday, September 8. He tells me that there are other dates in Woodstock and Cleveland, but the details aren’t yet available. I’ll add them as comments to this blog when I know more.

A brief explanation for the comments from last week: I wasn’t being dismissive of hip-hop or rap at all when I wrote that the genres “pretty much use the same drum sample.” I base the statement on the evidence presented here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac that claims that a 6-second drum pattern called the “Amen Break” is the root sample for all hip-hop music. But I see how my statement could be misconstrued. While the use of the sampled drum break is about authenticity (at least I think it is), Shel Silverstein’s use of three or four basic chord progressions was (I think) more about appropriation of the Country-and-Western style that he obviously loved. By including the name of a genre in the discussion of a person, I inadvertently seemed dismissive of one or the other or both, which was not the point of doing so. The point was that the songs of Shel Silverstein are distinctive more so because of their lyrics than because of their musical elements, which is something that can be said about quite a bit of popular music as well.

Monterrey to Woodstock

Posted on August 19, 2011 by - Columns

Last night I had the pleasure of playing with guitarist Omar Tamez and drummer Harvey Sorgen at the Rondout Music Lounge in Kingston, New York. Tamez, as I mentioned last week, is a superb guitarist/composer who plays mostly free jazz and jazz improvisation. His roots are indigenous Mexican (Mayan) and his musical education began with his father, composer/poet/painter/philosopher Nicandro Tamez. Although many of his father’s compositions employ graphical notation that has to be interpreted by the performer (who is also often instructed to construct melodies from loosely defined scales and modes), the elder Tamez didn’t refer to the performer’s activity as improvisation.

Although Harvey Sorgen plays the drums as if there’s no tomorrow, he always means to serve the situation at hand. He’s as “at home” playing the music of Nicandro and Omar Tamez as he is playing with the groups MaMaGe 3 or Hot Tuna. Musicians from as diverse aesthetic corners as vocalist Kate Bull, pianist/composer Jeffrey Michael Stevens, and bassist John Lindberg regularly perform with Sorgen, who wholeheartedly champions their music in the guise of fan and promoter/producer to the rock ‘n’ roll hoi polloi of Woodstock, where he makes his home. As part of his tireless pursuit of quality, he took Omar to several of the high-end luthiers living in Woodstock to secure samples of their best instruments for an upcoming concert and recording with trumpeter Herb Robertson, trombonist Steve Swell, and bassist Joe Fonda.

Besides being a pleasure and an honor to play with Tamez and Sorgen, it was a lesson in stylistic melding and genre hopping. They’re both tireless music researchers and technical masters of their instruments with huge palettes to choose from in their improvisations. We played two sets, the first was one long improvisation and the second lasted for three tunes (Pat Metheny’s “80/81,” an untitled blues probably written by Omar, and a short free piece initiated by Sorgen). When one of the more inebriated “drop ins” suggested that we play some dance music, we called the performance short and I packed up to drive home to New York. The venue has just recently established a creative music policy and, although they would have liked us to play longer, were fine with supporting our effort to educate the public (if you want to listen to dance music, go to a place where dance music is being played).

One of the great things about playing music like this is how the performers leave the concert with new eyes and ears. Although Sorgen and I have known about each other for a while, we had never played together before (that I can remember, anyway) and we both found ourselves playing things we normally wouldn’t in a “free-jazz” setting. Part of that was each of us just seeing what the other would do when presented with an impromptu “motive” and part was the discovery of what we can do well together. This was coupled with Omar’s playing, which is strongly informed by the music of contemporary Mayan culture near his native Monterrey, Mexico. Omar told me in an interview that I conducted with him on Wednesday that free improvisation is an essential part of their ancient traditions.

Music like this, while fleeting in its repeatability, is unforgettable in its immediacy. While this statement might seem paradoxical, it was driven home when we returned from a fairly long break after our first set to see that most of our audience of blues musicians and business people were still there, waiting to hear what we’d play next.

Things like that give me hope!

The Second Oldest Profession? (Part 1)

Posted on November 30, 2012 by - Columns

Often I’ve heard people metaphorically refer to working musicians as practitioners of the world’s oldest profession, usually by the most ubiquitous employers of freelance musicians, the parents of soon-to-be brides. But I’ve heard enough professional musicians discuss the vocation as such that I wonder just how old our profession is. According to the Jubalist philosophy of music history, animal husbandry is the oldest occupation, with music coming second (Genesis 4:20-21). However, there is enough evidence to suggest that music is a human activity that predates the concept of professionalism. However, our evolutionary trajectory for a long time points towards our becoming a commercial species, homo negotiorum, and music is now a commodity with its own subculture(s) of professional manufacturers, performers, composers, instructors, presenters, and mongers.

Those engaged in the music business today wear several of these hats at once and it has become commonplace to see self-produced CDs being sold at an artist’s public performances, something that was rare when I was starting out, forty years ago. Then the idea was that someone else took on the role of producer and distribution was handled by a “label.” I realized that I’m still adjusting to this jack-of-all-trades paradigm when I was in the recording studio last week, documenting the music of guitarist-composer-educator-impresario Omar Tamez at Brooklyn Recording, a fantastic recording facility in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. (While not nearly as spacious as my all-time favorite, Systems 2, Brooklyn Recording’s equipment is every bit as good—even to the availability of a Studer 24-track analog recorder—and their offering of esoteric vintage amplifiers and electronic keyboards is superior.) The session was co-produced by pianist-composer-educator Angelica Sanchez and included music composed by her as well as by Tamez and myself. Percussionist Satoshi Takeishi rounded out the group and I look forward to hearing the final product after Tamez mixes and masters it in late December. Omar will be performing with trombonist Steve Swell at Roulette on December 6 in a concert of the music of his father, Nicandro Tamez, produced as part of singer-composer-presenter Thomas Buckner’s Interpretations series. Sadly, I’ll be in San Francisco preparing for my December 9 concert at Chez Hanny and will have to miss it.

More sadly, drummer Pete “La Roca” Sims, a man who exemplified a philosophy of music that ran counter to the corporate culture that established and disseminated jazz as America’s music, lost his battle with lung cancer at the age of 74 on Monday, November 19. Born April 7, 1938, Sims was probably best known as the original drummer in the John Coltrane Quartet (with pianist Steve Kuhn and bassist Steve Davis), a role he performed while Elvin Jones was indisposed in Lexington, Kentucky in 1960. Sims was a musician of great depth who also wore the hat of bandleader and was responsible for giving many of today’s prominent jazz musicians their initial exposure to the public. Saxophonist-composer-educator David Liebman wrote of him:

Before the advent of so many jazz programs … the question used to be …: “Who did you play with?” The inference was what “master” did you serve under. (Now the question is: “What school did you attend?”) Those of you familiar with my background know that I … put in a few years with Elvin Jones and Miles Davis…. But my first true employer was drummer Pete LaRoca Sims…. I spent … six months with him mostly doing a gig at a club … called La Boheme paying five dollars a night…. We ended that cycle playing the Village Vanguard on Thanksgiving weekend in 1969 … my first time there. I was substitute teaching in NY schools at the time to make a living…. For those six months every bass player and pianist in New York worked with Pete and me. He was my first teacher in all ways…. a brilliant guy who after being so disenchanted with the music business became a lawyer…. Coltrane had him before Elvin; he worked with Newk [Sonny Rollins]; Miles wanted him to join as did Herbie Hancock when he branched out on his own. Pete was one of a kind … a stubborn, brilliant guy who insisted on perfection. I will never forget the lessons he taught me, which I recite almost daily in my teaching. For me, Pete’s passing is in a sense like the passing of a father or uncle, meaning of all my mentors he was the last to survive.

The ellipses in the above quote omits Liebman’s explanation of “La Roca” (“The Rock”) as a nickname (bestowed on him during his years as a timbalero), but Liebman doesn’t mention in his eulogy Sims’ achievements as a lawyer.

Possibly the most important of these was the role he played during the 1980s in assisting attorney Paul Chevigny in changing the oppressive cabaret laws in New York City. The laws were established in 1926 and targeted venues serving food and/or drink where jazz was performed, especially to the audiences comprised of a diverse array of skin pigmentation that congregated in Harlem, by requiring them to purchase a cabaret license or limit the number of performing musicians and/or “people moving in synchronized fashion” to three or less. Anyone working in a New York City nightclub had to have a valid cabaret card, which was controlled by the city’s police. If an entertainer didn’t have a card, he or she could not play any steady engagement in the Big Apple, which was defined as one lasting three or more consecutive days. The cabaret card requirement was dropped in 1967 (after Frank Sinatra wrote to the City Council that he would not apply for a card nor perform in NYC if he needed one), but the cabaret laws still stand today, although in a different form. By 1980, the laws stated that no wind or percussion instruments were to perform in nightclubs without the hard-to-get cabaret license. In 1987, these instruments were allowed (since an electric guitar, technically a “stringed instrument” could play louder than an entire big band), but the rule limiting the number of musicians to three was still enforced. Chevigny credits Sims with pointing out that the limit on the number of musicians placed the law in conflict with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, since musicians had to re-orchestrate music originally intended for more performers, thus compromising their artistic vision. On this argument Chevigny was able to get the limit repealed, although to this day a license is required for establishments that allow dancing by three or more patrons on their premises. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that American music might be very different today if it weren’t for drummer-presenter-educator-attorney Pete “La Roca” Sims.

I remember well how, upon arriving in New York in 1977, certain nightclubs only had piano duos. The best known was Bradley’s on University Place, and the Knickerbocker Bar and Grill still features that instrumentation as its nightly entertainment. While the quality of the music coming out of these New York City establishments was nothing less than superb, the effect on drummers was devastating. I know several world-class drummers who were faced with leaving town or taking up a second career. During the brief time I drove a taxicab in the Apple, I saw many drummers doing the same: Tom Rainey, Newman Taylor Baker, and John Betsch were just a few. And another was Pete “La Roca” Sims. In a 2004 interview given to José Francisco “Pachi” Tapiz, Sims describes his early exposure to music as part of his family life with the profound story of how his uncle, Kenneth Lloyd Bright, a field director for Circle Records, made it possible for him to be present at a broadcast of James P. Johnson and Baby Dodds—which would have occurred at radio station WOR in 1947, when Sims was nine-years old! He also explains his five-year stint as a New York “hackie” as the pivotal experience supplying the impetus to take up law. But he never once mentioned the word “cabaret” in the interview or alluded to the possibility that regulations on the entertainment venues in the city were designed to make a career as a free-lance drummer difficult to pursue. Instead he blamed the genre of jazz-rock fusion as the focus of his “disenchantment” with the music business and dispels the myth that he retired from music to take up law.

Without mentioning names, Sims described how, after recording two albums of music with Middle Eastern and Indian themes, Basra (Blue Note, 1965) and Turkish Women at the Bath (Douglas, 1967), he was employed for several recording sessions that required him to play in a fashion he felt was inappropriate to his artistic vision. One such session required that he play “extremely repetitive and boring” straight-eighth note back beat and shuffle rhythms, “the basis of Fusion.” Another required that he supply a swinging feel to the straight-eighth note music of the Byrds, “(that’s Fusion again, folks).” The one name he did mention is that of Columbia Records producer John Hammond, who wanted him to record with “a great Jazz saxophonist” and “an East Indian singer.” Hammond wanted to include another drummer, one who played rock ‘n’ roll to provide what he believed would ensure commercial viability. Sims refused to work with the “Rock drummer” and “they sent in a couple of guys who looked like they wanted to break both my legs.” Sims stuck to his guns and the date was cancelled. Sims was now a “Bad Boy. Blackballed! Not to be hired. [His] calls not to be answered.” (Of course, I would love to know who the unnamed parties were, especially since it wasn’t long before saxophonist Ornette Coleman recorded an album for Columbia, Science Fiction, featuring the Indian-born vocalist Asha Puthli.) Indeed, there is a huge gap in Sims’s discography between 1967 and 1997. Fully 90% of the sessions listed are from the first ten years of his recording career with the major portion of the remainder recorded in the last year. In fact, only two recordings are from the 30-year hiatus: two private recordings of one song each, the first of which, recorded in 1974 (the other is from 1995) was released on a label appropriately called “Ironic.”

Pete La Roca, a. k. a. Peter Sims, led a life peppered with irony. His first recording as a leader, Basra has an eclectic mix of songs. He didn’t shy away from playing a feel-good boogaloo groove on its opener, “Candu,” which, along with the title track and “Tears,” is one of three originals on the album. Ernesto Lecuona and Marian Banks’s “Malagueña” displays saxophonist Joe Henderson’s virtuosity as does the classic rendering of Jerome Moross and John Latouche’s “Lazy Afternoon,” with Henderson’s altissimo tenor over Steve Kuhn’s lush piano voicings. But it’s ironic that bassist Steve Swallow’s “Eiderdown” became a mainstay of jam sessions and a “jazz standard” in its own right. La Roca’s next album as a leader, Turkish Women at the Baths (named after a 19th-century painting by Jean August Dominique Ingres) features seven Sims originals, one of which, “Bliss,” incorporates a psychedelic “slap-back” reverb effect popular at the time. One could interpret a sense of irony in the entire recording being reissued under pianist Chick Corea’s name (he, as well as saxophonist John Gilmore and bassist Walter Booker were on the date) on an album called, Bliss (Muse, 1973), if it weren’t that another one of Sims’ legal coups was to successfully sue either Corea, Muse, or both. Pete Sims’ final session as a leader, Swingtime (Blue Note, 1997), features Liebman as well as Lance Bryant on soprano saxophones. Mingus alumnus Ricky Ford is on the tenor saxophone and National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master Jimmy Owens plays trumpet. Sims’s rhythm mates on the date are pianist George Cables and bassist Santi Debriano. I haven’t heard the entire CD yet, but I have heard excerpts that are promising and I plan to order a copy when I get to San Francisco on Saturday, even though the thought that one of jazz’s biggest labels, Blue Note, has outsourced its distribution as manufactured “on demand” is something I also find ironic.

La Roca Swingtime

Pete La Roca lived 15 years after the release of Swingtime, his final recording session as a leader

A strange twist of fate has added another element of irony to this post about Peter “La Roca” Sims during my research for it. Of course, I have to mention the irony I found in reading in his interview of how he abhorred the monotonous repetition of fusion drumming, but considered the motoric practice of playing bass lines comprised entirely of quarter-notes (“walking”) as “the greatest musical development of the 20th century (12-tone notwithstanding).” But when looking through website after website for something that didn’t keep repeating what I found unbelievable, that he would just stop playing music to pursue a career as a lawyer, I found one at Drummerworld that stopped me dead in my tracks. The myth isn’t dispelled, but reinforced by giving a date for his “return” to music (1979). There are three great excerpts from videos of La Roca playing with trumpeter Art Farmer (with guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Steve Swallow) as well as with tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins (with bassist Henry Grimes) that display his smooth time keeping and as yet unpolished imagination as a soloist. But there is also an audio clip just below the brief obituary that is label “Click Sound: Pete La Roca Sims.” When I clicked it, I heard a familiar quasi-second line pattern of Tom Rainey. Ironically, the sound clip was (and possibly still is) the theme and piano solo on Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s “Have You Met Miss Jones,” performed by the Kenny Werner Trio on the CD, Guru (TCB, 1994). And it ends just before my bass solo!

Probably the greatest irony in the life of Pete Sims is that someone so articulate, capable, talented, accomplished, and respected by his peers came to be ignored by the industry. The 30-year gap in his discography, followed by another 15-year span of inactivity from his last year of major label recording until his death, speaks volumes about just how uninterested in musicians the music industry can be. Sims’s musical vision, like his playing, was direct, clear, and obvious. He was a sensitive improviser and, as the Art Farmer videos linked to above show, forgiving of the faults of his band mates—notice how Jim Hall, I’m sure without ill intent, interrupts the flow the 21-year old drummer’s solos by forcibly injecting his sense of the form of the tune into them. A stubborn Pete Sims could have pressed on and let Hall’s interjections fall to the wayside, but his dedication to musical teamwork prevailed and he deferred to Hall. The only time that I had the pleasure of seeing him play in person was at Birdland when it was still on the corner of 105th and Broadway. I don’t remember the exact year or who was in the band he was leading. But I do remember that everything he played was meant to serve the musicians on the stand with him, whether they were acclaimed masters or not. In the final analysis, it can be said that Pete “La Roca” Sims spent a life of service to his master, music, and not to the service of Mammon; something that should not be taken lightly when engaging in the second oldest profession.

I Guess I’ll Call It Serendipity…

Posted on May 4, 2012 by - Columns

…and hope I’m using the word correctly.

It started off that I didn’t know what to write about here. I’m done with “cliquing” for the time being (although I know there’s more there) and, while the comments from last week are tempting to use as fodder, I know I must move on. So Monday rolls around and I catch something like the flu, strep throat, bronchitis, the bends, and malaria and can do nothing but sleep, wheeze, hack, and groan until Thursday, when, after I see the doctor, I have an opportunity to take care of everything that didn’t get done (including writing this post) earlier in the week, but that has to be taken care of before I leave town on Sunday. The good news is that I don’t have malaria, the bends, bronchitis, or even strep throat and I’ll probably be over the whole thing by Friday night. The bad news—I had to work Thursday night at a club that has achieved a new low in the treatment of musicians, and I hadn’t even thought about what to write about yet. While it is tempting to discuss the club, I know I have to think it through and probably discuss it with our editorial conscience first. When I told my finer partner in The Institution (you know, the great “I Did”—marriage) about my fears, she suggested that I write about the trip I’ll be embarking on. OK, says I.

Starting Monday, May 7, Yours Truly will be involved in a wonderful little consortium of musicians from different countries and disciplines meeting in Monterrey, México. This will be the 10th annual “Encuentro de Internacional de Músicos de Jazz y Música Viva Monterrey” presented at Conarte and the third that I’ve had the privilege to participate in. Conarte is part of Fundidora Park, a reconfigured steel mill that is now the city’s largest interdisciplinary cultural center. This year’s line up at Conarte includes (for those of you who might remember President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s salutation) My Fellow Americans Lou Grassi (drums, cymbals, and percussion), Herb Robertson (trumpets, trombone, French horn, and mutes), Conny Bauer (trombone), as well as Andreas Willers (guitar) from Germany, Sophia Domancich (piano) from France, Harri Söjström (soprano saxophone) from Finland, Marcos Miranda (soprano saxophone, alto clarinet, and exotic flutes) from Bolivia, and Rémi Álvarez (soprano and tenor saxophones and flute) and Omar Tamez (guitar, effects, and percussion) from México. Tamez, who I have mentioned before and at length in this column, is the person largely responsible for producing the event. He has been travelling a lot lately, since recovering from cancer in 2004, and gaining the respect of the artists he meets and works with in his travels, including percussionist Harvey Sorgen, guitarist Bruce Arnold (they’ve recorded together for Arnold’s MUSE EEK label), and vocalist/composer Katie Bull (who was going to attend this year, but had to bow out).

So I logged onto NewMusicBox to check up on things before I started to write this, and I see the face of Wadada Leo Smith, someone who I know little about other than that I want to know more about him. Tamez and Smith played together earlier this year in Buffalo, New York, and, from what I heard, the two will be involved in projects in the future. I decided to read the Oteri interview with Smith and was blown away by his clear and direct explanation of his musical philosophy and his method for composing long forms that allow for the greatest creative involvement by the performer vis-à-vis the performer’s simultaneous interpretation of Smith’s “musical language,” Ankhrasmation.

As an improvising bassist, I find myself hamstrung by stylistic considerations based on arcane traditions and historical lineage. One of the appealing aspects of jazz is that the music is possibly younger than the recording industry, and its historical lineage and traditions are, for the most part, available for study. One of the drawbacks is that the list of artists huddled under jazz’s awning, often without their consent, produce a music that is so diverse that it’s very difficult to pinpoint what the overarching traditions are. Smith accesses trumpeter Miles Davis as a standard without subcategorizing Davis’s creative output, something that, until very recently, few did. I also found Smith’s inclusion of tonguing, the heart and soul of trumpet playing, included in the interview. I’m usually disappointed to read interviews with musicians who pretend that their technique is secondary to their music. I can understand this approach when the audience hasn’t a clue as to what music is, but I think it shows an utter lack of respect to the music community when a musician won’t even suggest that there’s something about his or her relationship to their instrument that is vital to the music that comes out of it. Furthermore, Smith’s description of the blues as a place where musical personalities meet with no regard to musicological considerations such as scordatura, temperament, tempo, or form was eye-opening. Without resorting to the neo-conservative hyperbole that many jazz studies programs find appealing, Smith gives a no-nonsense explanation of the blues as doin’ the dozens in song.

The thing that struck me as most profound in Smith’s interview was the inclusion of Booker Little’s failed attempts to produce multiphonics on the trumpet as proof of an intention to do so, which makes Little an early proponent of multiphonics on the instrument. This is something that goes almost totally against the grain of musicology, the idea that the intent to do it means it was done. This is an attitude that only works in paradigms that include improvisation as a vital part of making music—even, paradoxically, when the music being performed is pre-composed. I found myself re-reading the comments from last week and essentially agreeing with “improvisation is the beginning and end of all music making.”[1] Miles Davis is attributed to saying, “When you make a mistake, play it again, and then once more just to be sure,” which I think also goes to this point. Finally, in Derek Bailey’s Improvisation Steve Lacy described this in his finest style by answering the question, “In 15 seconds, what’s the difference between composition and improvisation?” with: “In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds.”

Which took Lacy exactly 15 seconds to say.[2]


1. Thanks to Andrew Strauss.


2. Thanks to Herb Robertson.

Reporting From Mexico

Posted on May 11, 2012 by - Columns

Monterrey is the seat of the third largest metropolitan area in Mexico and is, arguably, the most “Americanized” city in the country, allowing me the idiosyncratic sensation of comfort I get from consciously eschewing establishments offering mass-hypnosis in the form of fast-food and warehouse shopping. The daily routine, though, of Encuentro Internacional de Jazz y Música Viva makes it somewhat difficult to sightsee or go shopping for souvenirs. Every day, our group of ten musicians is scheduled to rehearse from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with workshops being conducted from 3-6 p.m. and, since Wednesday, concerts from 8-10 p.m.

Tonight (May 11) the musicians from the United States (myself, trumpeter Herb Robertson, and drummer Lou Grassi) will be featured. Yesterday’s concert featured the music of the musicians from Europe: pianist Sophia Domancich, saxophonist Harri Söström, trombonist Conrad “Conny” Bauer, and guitarist Andreas Willers. Tomorrow is the last concert and features works presented by musicians from Mexico (guitarist and event organizer Omar Tamez and saxophonist Rémi Álvarez) and Bolivia (saxophonist Marcos Miranda). Our program, so far, consists of two compositions of mine (a cycling dirge, “The Carpenter,” and an up-tempo multiple-layer blues, “9-2”), one by Robertson (“Cosmic Child,” a 32-measure piece with chord changes that is parsed into three somewhat independent events using a varied palette of improvisational strategies), and two by Grassi (“Avanti Galoppi” and “Parallel Realities,” both comprised of single-line melodies that serve to mark the compositions’ structures and forms, which are interpretations of their titles). The promoter wanted tonight’s performance to be dedicated to the memory of Paul Motian and we were happy to oblige by adding “From Time to Time” (Motian in Tokyo, JMT, 1991) to the program.

This is the third (and I sincerely hope not the last) Encuentro in Monterrey I’ve been a part of. If my memory serves me well, the first was in 2004 and the second in 2008. The first was a two-week affair with concerts held on the weekends. The artists were housed at an elegant Howard Johnson’s in downtown Monterrey. Sadly, the hotel has not been well maintained and a hurricane that devastated much of that area of the city has turned it into a mold trap. Fortunately, a Hilton opened in Fundidora Park, where Encuentro is held, and our accommodations are better than ever. Yesterday was Mother’s Day in Mexico and the hotel’s dining facilities were decked out in grand style, complete with a strolling violinist, making lunch a gala affair. But even the added festivities couldn’t alter the bittersweet feeling that accompanies the knowledge that a unique and vital musical event is now only half what it once was. While those who are in-the-know when it comes to improvised music support the Encuentro de Jazz y Música Viva Monterrey series, even to the point of people traveling from nearby Texas and New Mexico to attend, the local tastes are more acclimated to indigenous folk, popular Latin, and dance music.

Monterrey is a major, and possibly the center of corporate culture in Mexico, which is reflected in the attitude towards music education here. So far, Tamez has been working with select local businesses and the home embassies of the musicians he brings to Monterrey for support. This year a new and surprising source of support in the person of Roberto Romero, the owner of Roberto’s Winds and Michiko Studios, has appeared at Encuentro Monterrey. Roberto is no stranger to saxophonists in New York, and a saxophonist who travels to that city inevitably winds up at his 46th Street shop. I go there often to rehearse at Michiko Studios, the most affordable high-quality rehearsal studios in Manhattan. It turns out that Romero has dealerships in Australia as well as in Mexico City. Tamez met Romero on one of his trips to New York and the two agreed that this year a nation-wide saxophone competition would be included in the list of Encuentro events with the first prize being a Roberto’s Winds signature soprano saxophone. So now, not only can you buy recordings by the various artists performing at Encuentro de Jazz y Música Viva Monterrey, but you can also try out and buy a brand new saxophone from Roberto’s Winds!

I think this could be the start of something really great for Encuentro de Jazz y Música Viva Monterrey and the world of improvised music. I’ll include pictures next week, but now I have to go rehearse…

Try To Remember

Posted on November 16, 2012 by - Columns

Music is not just something created by musicians; someone must perceive it in order for it to be. While this fact is obvious to most (… will someone say, “Well, DUH!”), an entire culture of music making is dedicated to rendering this into a shortcoming to be overcome by attempting to reify music as notation. While this practice is not limited to (and actually predates) Western civilization, the forms of notation most widely used to direct musicians about what to sing or play are modeled on its five-line stave and assortment of iconic shapes, esoteric terms, and abstruse abbreviations. That most improvising musicians can read standard Western music notation isn’t any great news, yet many music fans perceive a dichotomy between reading music and improvising it.

Of course, this is a fallacy. Playing music interpreted from even the most detail-oriented notation includes elements of improvisation (especially when sight reading). So improvisation is ubiquitous; it always comes down to a matter of degree. But we live in a world where things are most easily explained or taught in relation to binaries, such as: good/bad, high/low, left/right, or right/wrong. This either/or paradigm of acceptance and intellectual digestion profoundly shapes how the performers’ actual reification of music is perceived by their audience (which represents a binary). The comparison of pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Glenn Gould is one of the most classic examples of this. Richter’s stoic performance style is the near antithesis of Gould’s flamboyant mannerisms at the instrument. Gould retired from the stage for the last half of his career, performing almost exclusively in recording studios, while Richter recorded mostly in live performance. Richter championed the music of Schubert while Gould felt that its non-contrapuntal aspects weren’t part of serious music making. Gould played mostly from memory while Richter, who supposedly had a photographic memory, often read from the score in performance. Though both are among the most iconic musicians of the 20th century, there are those who insist that one was better than the other. While some of both camps’ detractors (and supporters) cite issues gleaned from the purely audible aspects of their performances as the sole criterion for these judgments, others point to what they perceived when watching them perform: Richter’s stoic style seems “uninvolved,” Gould’s mannerisms “detract” from the music.

This binary-based approach to music critiquing (which is part of what we do when we listen) influences how artists approach and present their music. One of the persistent myths about early jazz is that it was mostly group improvisation. This was reinforced by the fact that many, if not most, early jazz artists memorized their programs and didn’t need to read onstage. This allowed for another myth: that jazz musicians were unschooled and had a “genius” for music that could only be explained by a cultural heritage based on racial identity. The image of musicians playing from memory is powerful to a Eurocentric audience’s infatuation with literacy and the pre-jazz concertgoer was used to seeing musicians reading “serious” music. Musicians who didn’t read at these concerts were the soloists, “geniuses” who were playing concertos of the masters while the orchestra read the accompaniment. Closer to the truth might be that jazz musicians were trained differently than non-jazz musicians—whatever that means for musicians who were playing this music that wasn’t yet called “jazz.” For example, the difference between the enharmonic intervals of a dominant seventh and an augmented sixth didn’t get drummed into the jazz caste, so the traditional rules of their voice leading were effectively combined. This approach is now a part of American music. While this seems subtle on its face, the effect on melodic and harmonic development is clear even to the untrained ear.

Of course, almost anybody can memorize things, especially music. It’s like the ABCs and, for most, fun to do. I’ve taught music in middle school programs and have been surprised at the hefty repertoires of popular music that 12- to 16- year olds commit to memory. To boot, they knew when I made a mistake in my part and could, with very little prompting, sing the harmonies and/or antiphonal back-ups of their material. (We are definitely hard-wired for music and should take better advantage of it in our educational institutions.) But it’s still considered a sign of extra-special talent when jazz musicians play from memory. Maybe this is because the craft of reading music forces one to engage memory to different purposes when performing. When I read music, I concentrate on remembering fingerings, clef assignments, default key signatures and the like and, because I don’t have to remember the melody that I’m playing, I’m flexible; I’m guided by whatever notes and indications are on the paper in front of me. When I play from memory, I’m more rigid and tend to play the same things that I believe belong in an idealized performance.

This is something that I didn’t realize by myself. I first heard it described by guitarist-composer-philosopher Omar Tamez when I was playing at the festival he curates in Monterrey, Mexico. I had been researching jam-session culture at the time and we were talking about our experiences playing at them. He brought up an experience he had where he went to sit in at one (in New York, I think) and wanted to have the sheet music for a blues that was going to be played. He said that the person calling the tune thought it was ridiculous that Omar should need the sheet music for a blues, but Omar insisted on having it. When I asked him why (I usually don’t bother with sheet music at jam sessions, unless I’ve never heard the tune and don’t think I can learn its chord progression in one or two passes), he explained that when he reads from the page, he’s constantly seeing new ways to approach the tune, rather than relying on what he’s already taught himself about it. I imagine Richter, playing a Schubert sonata for the hundredth time, letting the page show his eye a fresh or deeper understanding of the music that he memorized long before the third time he performed it. I wonder, is that insight something that a member of the audience who was familiar with the 99th performance might have been able to perceive?

Omar’s music is designed to send its players into a very open improvising space. Even when he writes music over a repeating formal template (like the 32-measure AABA song structure), he prefers that everyone is willing to abandon it if the performance is better served. When the structure is abandoned, which happens often, the challenge becomes how to craft a group improvisation that “remembers” the tune. It’s very different from the standard approach where the form reigns supreme and the challenge is for the composer to write something distinctive that transcends the improvisations. I’ll be performing with Sarah Jane Cion’s trio tomorrow at the PAC House Theater in New Rochelle. Sarah is a pianist whose formidable technique has led her to write music that does just that. In this case, the challenge is to make one’s voice compatible with the vision that the composer (who is also the performer) has been able to transmit to paper.

I’ll be playing with Omar tonight in pianist Angelica Sanchez’s quartet at IBeam in Brooklyn with Satoshi Takeishi on drums. Omar’s performance style is much like Gould’s; highly animated with nearly every musical gesture articulated by an obvious physical one. Sanchez offers the antithesis: a performance that uses little motion other than what is needed to play the piano, no matter how virtuosic she gets, and her compositions are similar to Tamez’s in terms of open-endedness. Satoshi’s performance style is somewhere in between Tamez and Sanchez’s, but I’m absolutely unqualified to discuss my approach. We all played together at Konceptions at Korzo on Tuesday and we’ll be playing a lot of the same music that we did then. Although nearly everything that we’ll play in tonight’s performance will be improvised, I’m still going to try to see if I notice how the printed page influences it.

Cultured?

Posted on November 15, 2013 by - Columns

I generally feel a sense of self-righteous satisfaction when scientific research (the kind with reproducible results) once again reveals evidence supporting my personal non-peer-reviewed theories and beliefs about music functioning as a fabric to weave and tailor the wardrobes of our lives with. So, I was happy to read about the research from Finland that proves that we are able to respond to music before we are born. Although the idea has been tossed around for quite a while, the study echoes one conducted in France nearly three years earlier that, while using different methods, came to the same conclusion: human beings are capable of apprehending and remembering music while in the womb. The concept that memories of our watery symbiotic prenatal sonic environment are transported into the world of air-breathing individuation lends support to a theory I have about the practice of regulating the temporal experience by dividing it into a series of motoric units. These units, be they global (hours, minutes, seconds) or local (whole note, half note, quarter note), are as arbitrary a way to measure time as equal temperament is to measure an octave.

Given that our gestational sonic environment is unarguably rich, the predominant sound heard is the uneven rhythm of our mother’s heartbeat with a ratio that approximates the Golden Mean. (The ratio varies, though, depending on one’s general health, state of mind, and level of physical activity.) The tempo of a heartbeat for an adult at rest ranges between 60 and 100 beats per minute and, moreover, the volume levels of the two beats making up the rhythmic pattern are different. The heartbeat that an unborn human hears when its mother is healthy, relaxed, and in a good frame of mind sounds very similar to the drumming patterns that accompany Native American round or “friendship” dances. In Native American music, evenly spaced drum pulses are mostly used in competitive or “fancy” dances. They sound similar to the heartbeat of someone engaged in intense physical activity.

My theory goes that we unconsciously equate irregular rhythms with security, safety, and community, especially rhythms that resemble the human heartbeat, such as the Charleston rhythm of jazz or the bombo – ponche bass line heard in the tresillo-style tumbao of Latin music. These rhythms, I believe, were in common use in America before the arrival of European colonists. Modern American music, though, is primarily the result of Eurocentric philosophy, technology, and pedagogy, and its largely tacit hegemonic foundation of super-cultural fathers currently supports the idea that these rhythmic elements were imported to the New World as part of the African Diaspora. This would suggest that jazz, which is officially America’s indigenous art form and born out of a push for inclusion of African Americans in mainstream American culture, is non-inclusive of the indigenous New World cultures that predate by millennia the trans-Atlantic colonization of the Western Hemisphere. But the push has been an obvious success, despite the inability of so many melanin-challenged brothers and sisters to accept that white supremacy is very near the root of our nation’s woes, and there are many who believe that African-American inclusion will lead to an egalitarian culture recognizing a broader base of diversity. So hope stays alive while artists like Vijay Iyer, Fred Ho, Jennifer Leitham, Fred Hersch, Cynthia Hilts, Joris Teepe, Cecil Taylor, Bobby Sanabria, Joanne Brackeen, Arturo O’Farrill, and Wayne Wallace exemplify how, no matter how one negotiates the Great American Culture Machine, diversity is key.

As a side note, I would like to think that the Kaheri Quartet, who celebrated the release of their first CD last month, is part of this trend, especially since—along with guitarist Omar Tamez, pianist Angelica Sanchez, and drummer Satoshi Takeishi—I’m a member of it and we plan to record our second CD in a few weeks. Kaheri’s music is about improvisation, both structured and not. While it’s not a new concept, what is unique to the group is the addition of non-African elements to the mix. While it is truthfully said that all human experience can be traced to Africa, its musicological influence in Kaheri is filtered through several layers of diasporic timelines that include the pre-European indigenous elements that inform Tamez’s playing. Sanchez is well-known on the new music scene, especially for her collaborations with saxophonist Tony Malaby and drummer Tom Rainey. Takeishi is from Mito, Japan, but spent years working in Columbia, South America, on projects that combined elements of folk, jazz, and classical music.

The international aspect of Kaheri is one that mirrors how jazz studies has become international as well, and the publicly funded Jazzinstitut Darmstadt offers a service that scans through the headlines of leading newspapers for jazz-related news items. One story that caught my eye was an interview with saxophonist Dave Rempis. A native of Boston, Massachusetts, Rempis has made Chicago, Illinois, his home for the last 15 years. Like Tamez, Rempis is an organizer as well as a performer and improviser. He performs as part of a group, The Vandermark 5, that takes a unique approach to alternative groove-based jazz. Rempis’s playing is high energy and steeped in the aesthetic of post-Albert Ayler avant-garde and free-jazz movements. In his interview, he is asked the question that I feel is at the heart of this post: “Do you ever think of social progress and playing music in the same breath?” His answer, although coming from the right place, reflects a problem with how jazz as an American art form is perceived and/or taught in America:

The history of jazz and social progress are deeply intertwined on every level, from the first racially mixed groups that Benny Goodman led and made no compromises with, to Max Roach’s groundbreaking Freedom Now Suite, and up through current times, whether it be in regards to the various wars this country has undertaken in recent years, or to social movements such as gay rights. On a less explicit level, jazz is inherently a music that allows for meaningful personal expression without necessarily sacrificing group integrity, and the balance of those things between the musicians offers a model for possibilities within the society at large.

As was mentioned in a previous post, the racially diverse groups led by Benny Goodman were formed at the behest of his agent, John Hammond; Goodman’s participation was a compromise. Besides, the push to include subaltern musicians in “mainstream” society went back at least to James Reese Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra playing at Carnegie Hall in 1912, twenty-six years before Goodman. (Notice that his first name is abbreviated to “Jas.” on the poster.) If one wants to suggest a “great white hope” for integration in the jazz age, probably credit should be given to Vernon and Irene Castle, the ballroom dancing stars who popularized the fox trot and employed Europe’s “Society Orchestra” to accompany them in the same year. Another problem is to use the We Insist! (subtitled Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite) (Candid Records, 1960) as an endpoint for jazz as a force for social change. John Coltrane recorded “Alabama,” dedicated to the victims of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, in 1963 and New Thing At Newport (Impulse!, 1965) mostly featured the politically outspoken music of Archie Shepp. Saxophonist Joe Henderson’s Milestone release, If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem, was recorded at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach in 1970. Jim Pepper’s first recording as a leader, Pepper’s Pow Wow (Embryo, 1971), includes two Peter La Farge tunes, “Senecas (As Long as the Grass Shall Grow)” and “Drums,” both about the mistreatment of Native Americans, as well as the traditional, “Nommie Nommie (When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder),” a tongue-in-cheek version of the Methodist spiritual. Mingus alumni and trumpet virtuoso Jack Walrath recorded his A Plea For Sanity in 1983 for Stash Records, and the work of Fred Ho (Deadly She-Wolf Assassin At Armageddon!, Innova Records, 2010) has never been disassociated with his political activism. In short, jazz is still very much part of the push for social change.

The music/social commentary connection isn’t limited to contemporary African-American musical forms either. Part of the Mozart effect could be the inclusion of the political views suggested in The Magic Flute or Zaide. Of course Dimitri Shostakovich is another figure from European art music who managed to include social commentary in his music. In America, Charles Ives, George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, and John Corigliano have all used music to promote social commentary, but these are and were individuals whose vision was tp use their talents to create great music and see it performed. To the Great American Culture Machine, music is still mainly seen as a pastime marketed primarily to sexually frustrated adolescents with enough money to buy new releases. My concern is that the new research mentioned earlier won’t lead to the creation of a consumer class via pre-natal indoctrination. While this suggestion might be nothing more than the result of a fatalistic imagination working overtime, there are social issues that need to be addressed with louder voices more now than ever.

To be continued…

JAM Session

Posted on May 3, 2013 by - Columns

JAM Logo
Tuesday was International Jazz Day (IJD) and marked the end of Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM), a title that April has held since JAM was launched by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in 2002. The news of JAM had been heralded in July of the previous year with the help of the cross-musical boundaries composer-producer Quincy Jones, a man who epitomizes last year’s JAM theme, “Jazz Crossing Borders and Cultures.” As if to underscore this, Jones, who began his career as a big-band arranger, has composed music for film (In Cold Blood, The Pawnbroker, The Heat of the Night), television (The Bill Cosby Show, Ironside, Sanford and Son), and produced albums for Aretha Franklin (Hey Now Hey) and Michael Jackson (Thriller), was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this month. But IJD hasn’t been around as long as JAM, nor is it under the auspices of the Smithsonian. April 30 was designated as IJD by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in November of 2011, making last Tuesday the first anniversary of IJD.

The logo of JAM includes the motto: “Spontaneous. Never Ordinary. Completely Genuine.” Of course, I immediately found something fairy tale-ish about this, but the motto continues, “Made in America. Enjoyed Worldwide.” which struck me as integral to the genre, as well as the day (discounting that Tuesday was also the second day of Colorado’s Air Quality Awareness Week 2013).

After all, jazz did start somewhere in America and rather quickly became popular in Europe and, by the end of World War II, was played by local musicians on every continent. The early dissemination of the music in Europe was through records exported from America. In 1919, the year after James Reese Europe brought his Harlem Hellfighters, a military marching band that played syncopated music, the Original Dixieland Jass Band arrived in London. The group opened their tour at the Hippodrome in April, performing and recording in the foggy town until they returned to America in July of 1920. By the end of World War I, jazz had taken root in virtually every major city in Europe, eventually becoming a symbol of the decadence of Germany’s Weimar nightlife and banned in Hitler’s Third Reich. During this period of Nazi oppression jazz musicians like Django Reinhardt would compose and perform original music that might be considered “unjazzlike” until 1946, when jazz musicians were no longer under the threat of persecution. It was at this same time that a teenage pianist in Japan named Toshiko Akiyoshi began playing piano professionally in venues that catered to American servicemen, sending her ground-breaking career into motion. So, by the time jazz became known to high-brow America at the end of WWI, it had also become known abroad, and by the time it was accepted in America as a musical art form after WWII, it was being played all over the world. In a sense, jazz was a vital component of the 20th-century thrust towards globalization that currently defines humanity in the second decade of its 21st. Jazz, which originated somewhere, and somehow, in America, is now a globally relevant cultural commodity, so it is only fitting that the last day of JAM is celebrated with IJD.

The IJD website tells the history of the event and offers videos of this year’s opening concert in Istanbul (which served as the official host of this year’s IJD UNESCO sponsored events) and two opening concerts from the first IJD hosted in Paris and New Orleans, the city credited as jazz’s birthplace. The hosted events are conducted in the style of a music convention with workshops, symposia, and lectures about various aspects of jazz theory, scholarship, and performance as well as supporting concerts in local venues. Their website also has a page dedicated to ideas for teaching children about jazz in public schools on IJD that I found very interesting, being that I learned to play jazz in the traditional way (which wasn’t in a public school). But nowhere in the lesson plans and other materials listed to explain the origins and history of jazz were Native Americans or other indigenous New World cultures mentioned. The music is only described as being “rooted in the African-American experience,” so the lack of any discussion of Native Americans as part of a jazz timeline makes the idea that “jazz has contributed to and been a reflection of American culture … widely considered to be the only truly original American art form” somewhat disingenuous, if not oppressive; especially when so many of jazz’s proponents have been of Native American descent (Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Dave Brubeck, Don Cherry, Jack Teagarden, and so forth). This is echoed, albeit with a twist, on the JAM website, which describes this year’s theme as “The Spirit and Rhythms of Jazz.” It has long been my contention that the Charleston rhythm, named after the James P. Johnson composition, “The Charleston,” as well as the clave of so-called Latin music, are actually Native American influences.
In a similar vein, the JAM website’s FAQ page includes the question, “Why is [JAM] needed?” The answer includes the idea that “JAM will encourage people to take jazz more seriously as a vital part of America’s cultural patrimony.” It is well known to anyone who has interviewed Ornette Coleman, one of the most influential jazz artists of all time, that he makes it a point, often in the face of laughter from his audience, to discuss the importance of one’s mother as a messenger of culture, knowledge, and life. He takes this on from many vernacular angles, sometimes using language that would offend “polite” company, but the deep question he repeatedly asks is, “Where would we be without [our mothers]?” It’s not a question that many like to pursue for long, but it’s one worth pondering, especially when considering the absence of discussing Native American matriarchal social institutions and philosophy. If Herbie Hancock tells us to “Speak Like A Child,” then who would we be speaking to? But this is part of the current paradox and dilemma that jazz represents. How does a music designed to overcome the white male-dominated socio-economic marginalization of subaltern communities continue being relevant when that design is viewed as artifact and no longer essential as a musicological consideration?

I was very happy and honored to play with Cynthia Hilts’s group, Lyric Fury, for IJD. Her group this time included Lily White on alto and tenor saxophones, Lisa Parrott on baritone and soprano saxophones, Jack Walrath on trumpet, Matt Haviland on trombone, Nioka Workman on cello, and Scott Neumann on drums. Cynthia, who plays piano and sings in her group, writes music that displays an appreciation for the work of Frank Zappa, Stephen Sondheim, and James Brown, but requires the trans-stylistic temperament of jazz musicians to execute. Her songs include a piece she calls “Previously a Thing” that juxtaposes her band’s improvisational skills against a reggae groove, a shuffling excursion into breathlessness called “Blues for the Bronchs,” and other humorously titled works. More somber works, like “Please, Mercy,” a lament for those impacted by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the lovely homage to the idea of “Teacher,” feature ostinatos that often pivot around two tonal centers or long anthem-like progressions. Some of her pieces are joyous, like the buoyant Afro-Cuban “Peace Now” and the self-referential “Celebration.” The two dirges in her program include the aptly titled “Persistance,” that plows through a never-quite-repeating 5/4 ostinato, and her recently penned prayer for the victims of Hurricane Sandy (many of whom ran out of time on their temporary hotel accommodations on April 30), “Floodtide’s Gone.”


Now that IJD is over and JAM is done for the year, I’ll be going back to Monterrey, Mexico, to perform in the XI Encuentro Internationale de Jazz y Musica Viva organized by guitarist Omar Tamez. The lineup this year is Karl Berger on vibraphone and piano, and his wife, Ingrid Sertso, on vocals. Together with Ornette Coleman, they founded the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York. Flute virtuoso Wilfrido Terrazas, electric bassist Pablo González, and drummer Emilo Tamez (Omar’s older brother) will round out this year’s contingency from Mexico, which is the largest I’ve encountered at Encuentro. Guitarist Marc Ducret will be representing France and drummer Harvey Sorgen will be representing the United States along with me. Sadly, because this was a last-minute call, I’ll have to bow out of a very special event, Calling All Forces, organized by vocalist Katie Bull, a mother of two who takes Air Quality Awareness Week very seriously, that will occur Saturday, May 11. The event, to foster awareness of the environmental impacts of hydrolic fracturing and raise money for 350°.org, is presented under the banner of “Climate Force” and will include vocalist Fay Victor, guitarist Anders Nilsson, percussionists Andrew Drury and Deric Dickens, bassist Joe Fonda, pianist Landon Knoblock, and saxophonists Jeff Lederer and Ras Moshe, as well as dancers Amanda Hunt and Alex Romania, and visual artists Fran Bull, Robert Black, and Aileen Gural. Even if it weren’t for a great cause, the idea of helping to realize Bull’s multi-disciplinary vision is something I’ll miss sorely. I hope that those readers who might be in the New York area that day don’t miss it.

Report From Monterrey

Posted on May 10, 2013 by - Columns

In last week’s post I discussed how the end of the Smithsonian Institution’s Jazz Appreciation Month was marked by the celebration of UNESCO’s International Jazz Day, which was hosted in Istanbul this year, but that the day was also celebrated in cities around the world. I mentioned my own performance with Cynthia Hilts’s Lyric Fury at Somethin’ Jazz Club in New York, a city where just about every day is International Jazz Day. A quick look down the maw of YouTube reveals celebrations in Culj-Napoca, Romania, Yerevan, Armenia, Gwang Shu, Korea, and Faro, Portugal. A more complete list of events is available at the IJD website.

One listed event caught my eye because it took place in Monterrey, Mexico, which is where I’m writing this and will be playing at the XI Encuentro Internacional de Jazz y Música Viva hosted by Conarte. What surprises me isn’t that the event I’m playing in (I’m filling in for bassist John Lindberg, who had to tend to a family emergency) isn’t mentioned in the IJD list, but that what’s listed is a guitar master class, held at the Facultad de Música at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, followed by a panel discussion, “Is there original jazz in Monterrey or original rehash?,” and a jam session.

As the name suggests, this is the eleventh year that Encuentro Internacional de Jazz y Música Viva has been held in Monterrey. It is the brainchild of Omar Tamez, the youngest child of Nicandro Tamez, a composer-educator-philosopher who developed his own musical language and notation before he succumbed to cancer in the 1980s and also instilled a passion for music in his other children, Teresa and Emilio, who play piano and percussion, respectively. (Emilio is playing in this year’s Encuentro along with Omar.) It is a testament to how pernicious the power of politics is in music that an annually held jazz international festival goes ignored by the founders of International Jazz Day.

And, as I mentioned last week, this year’s lineup includes artists from Germany (via the U.S.), France, Mexico, Costa Rica, and the United States. Two of this year’s featured artists are Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso. Vibraphonist-pianist-composer Berger moved to America from Germany in 1966 and, with Sertso and Ornette Coleman, founded a school for jazz, the Creative Music Studio, in Woodstock, New York, in 1972. He is tireless as an organizer, composer, and arranger. His work has been featured at the Kool Jazz Festival and by the West German Radio Orchestra (where he was a guest conductor). He has recorded with John McLaughlin, Carla Bley, and Lee Konitz. He has partnered with Bill Laswell as an arranger for the likes of Jeff Buckley, Natalie Merchant, and Angélique Kidjo. Sertso is a singer who improvises words as well as melodies. Her approach is unique in its conception as well as its execution and weaves through the fabric of instruments she works with. She is as comfortable performing straight-ahead jazz as she is with free improvisation and has worked with the likes of Eric Dolphy, Nana Vasconcelos, Don Cherry (MultiKulti), and Steve Lacy.

I first heard guitarist Marc Ducret in Paris in 1994 playing at the Rising Sun. His masterful approach to the instrument is inclusive of the jazz traditions that shape the work of guitarists like Ed Cherry and John Scoffield, as well as the electronic effects that inform the work of Bill Frisell and Bruce Arnold. Since leaving Copenhagen, he considers himself a resident of the world with no permanent address, although he conducts his business as a French citizen. It is a thrill to finally play with Marc, as well as the phenomenal flutist Wilfreido Terrazas, who hails from Mexico City. He is a cross-discipline musician who is as comfortable improvising as he is playing the works of Boulez. Baritone saxophonist Sofia Zumbado has just recently begun crossing the line from “legitimate” music to improvisation. She was at last year’s Encuentro as part of saxophone manufacturer and repairman Roberto Romero’s display booth. The participation of Romero (who owns Roberto’s Winds in Mexico City and New York) in Encuentro now includes a competition for young saxophonists with one of his company’s tenor saxophones as first prize. Sofia, who was demonstrating Romero’s instruments, has a ten-year plan to learn the language of jazz improvisation as well as she has learned the language of free-improvisation. No doubt she will be a voice to reckon with. Drummer-percussionist-composer Harvey Sorgen rounds out this year’s line-up. He is best known for his work with guitar legend Jorma Kaukonen and Hot Tuna. However, his range of expression goes far beyond any one style of music. His musical partnerships include trumpeter extraordinaire Herb Robertson, pianist David Lopato, and bassist Joe Fonda (who is this year’s Encuentro poster child).
Although all of the participants are asked to bring their own music to perform, improvisation is the key to Omar’s Encuentro series. So far, the music rehearsed includes a piece from Sorgen’s graphically notated Density-Dynamics compositions, a few of my tunes—“I Saw A Bear,” “The Carpenter,” and “Duh, Kidz” —and an extended composition of Berger’s No Man Is An Island, which he first recorded in 1999; but our first night was dedicated to free improvisation.

I couldn’t find anything about the previously mentioned panel discussion in the university’s archives, so I plan to talk to Omar about this and see if there’s a chance to include his Encuentro Internacional series into the International Jazz Day listings next year, although he’s doing pretty well so far on his own!

Monterrey Afterword

Posted on May 17, 2013 by - Columns

The XI Encuentro Internacional de Jazz y Música Viva ended Saturday, but I stayed in Mexico until Tuesday before flying to San Francisco, where I am writing this post. Thankfully, this year’s event wasn’t marked by the social unease that framed Encuentro X. (Monterrey was the focal point of several drug cartel-associated mass murders that occurred on the opening night of last year’s festival and again on the morning after the last performance.) However, it was framed by its own internal controversy that emerged from its saxophone competition sponsored by Roberto Romero’s company, Roberto’s Winds.

Musicians who use their own instruments often take care of problems arising from the wear-and-tear of practice, rehearsals, and performance themselves. (Competent violinists are expected to change a string or adjust a bridge and trumpeters constantly open valve casings to lubricate moving parts.) But when major problems arise, such as when my bass took a fall in October and lost its fingerboard, a specialist is required to bring the instrument back to playability. So it behooves every working musician to cultivate a long-term relationship with at least one well-established instrument repairperson.

These highly skilled craftspeople can be found just about everywhere. Some work out of their living rooms and garages, others out of multi-leveled facilities that double as instrument showrooms and/or music studios. To enhance their bottom lines, most will sell accessories for the instruments they repair (cases, sheet music, etc.) at a reasonable markup. Others go as far as to offer their own line of “custom” instruments and accessories. (I deploy quotation marks because these items are usually mass produced to a set of manufacturing specifications that are the repairperson’s retail “customization,” instead of tailoring the product for any specific customer’s requirement.) Barrie Kolstein, the proprietor of Kolstein Music, provides a case in point. His shop, located in Baldwin, New York, offers its own line of strings, rosin, repair kits, polishes, and other accessories, as well as a large assortment of high-quality instruments. A more instrument-specific facility is Lemur Music, a double bass shop located in San Capistrano, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego.

Good repair people are usually pretty good players, too. Steve Berger is an excellent guitarist who often plays with vocalist Melissa Hamilton and is a long-time accompanist for pianist-vocalist-songwriter Bob Dorough. He is also a gifted guitar technician who, unfortunately, lost his repair shop, which was located in the basement of the Westbeth artist residency complex during the flooding of Lower Manhattan caused by Hurricane Sandy. But instrument repair is an art in-and-of itself that requires training, practice, and talent. More often than not, a good repair person will let performance fall to the wayside as more and more artists bring them their broken tools of the trade. Another facet of repairpersonship is how “schools” of repair and instrument design become established through apprenticeship. Iconic names like Stradivarius and Selmer belong to such schools in which a family member takes over the business. Such is the case of Barrie Kolstein, who took over Kolstein Music from his father, Samuel.
Often apprentices break away from their masters’ tutelage to strike out on their own. Such was the case for my first long-term repairperson, Chuck Traeger. He started out working alongside Samuel Kolstein and then broke away to start his own company, The Bass Shop. I used to carry my factory-assembled, possibly pre-war Juzeck up the three flights to his Christopher Street shop. He showed me everything that needed to be changed to maximize its sound (new tailpiece, fingerboard, and bridge), explaining why it all had to be done while demonstrating his points on the instruments that filled his intimate “showroom,” a 35′ x 15′ waiting area that he crammed almost 100 basses in, some being sold on consignment and some waiting to be repaired or picked up. His logic was impeccable and the list of bassists who trusted their instruments to him backed up everything he said. Over the two years it took to get my bass up to snuff, I learned more about the instrument than any private teacher could show me. When I finally had the money to buy a high-quality pedigree instrument from the early 19th century, I wound up buying one of Chuck’s personal basses—the one that lost its fingerboard.

Traeger’s apprentices, David Gage and Bill Merchant, alternated repairing my instruments. Gage took care of the first major mishap, when a taxi ran into my bass and caved in one of the bouts (the rounded panels that make up the sides of the instrument). It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture to follow. But the repair has lasted for over thirty years without needing to be revisited. Merchant took care of the next one, when I slapped the side of the bass too hard while producing percussion sounds and poked a hole in it. He used a long metal rod inserted through one of the instrument’s F-holes to push the piece of wood that was hanging towards the inside back into its original position and then applied a patch behind it. It was supposed to be a temporary fix, but it also lasted until another accident tore open the entire side of the bass in 2011. When Traeger retired, Merchant took over his shop and Gage established his own in Lower Manhattan. I’ve stuck with Bill over the years because of brand loyalty, and I recommend both Merchant and Gage (and Kolstein as well) to anyone needing work done on their bass.

Merchant’s facility is a bare-bones repair shop. You walk in and there are basses for sale and basses being fixed. There are one or two of his “Traveler” basses and one or two of his “Vertical” basses on display (if leaning in a corner counts as “on display”). There are two photos on a bulletin board (one of me and one of David Finck) and the “office” section is filled with bass cases. He does great work. By contrast, David Gage occupies three floors of Tribeca loft space. The ground floor is the repair shop and the two upper floors are display/event rooms where bassists have given master classes and workshops. My first exposure to The Marks Brothers (Mark Dresser and Mark Helias) was in this room. There haven’t been any workshops or master classes this year because of the upcoming International Society of Bassists Convention. Instead, Gage Instrument Repair has been developing a new line of products that they intend to unveil there that includes a new piezoelectric transducer pickup that I hope to review in the future.

Like Gage, Roberto Romero runs a multiple-story complex that includes a repair shop and show room. He also has several floors worth of practice rooms he calls Michiko Studios that are very reasonably priced. The rooms are clean, with in-tune pianos, good sounding drum sets, and well-maintained amplification systems and are very popular with New York jazz musicians. Romero came to New York from Italy in 1981. He was on his way to Brazil, but ran out of money. He took a job at the now defunct Sound of Joy School. He was asked to help the school’s owner build extra rehearsal studios on West 46th Street—on the same block where the street dance scene in the movie Fame was staged—and met his mentor, a well-respected saxophone technician named Saul Fromkin, there. Romero’s skill as a repairperson was tempered by a genius for understanding what Fromkin’s clients needed. Word got around about Roberto’s talent for saxophone repair and he became Fromkin’s lead repairperson. When Fromkin’s health began to wane in the late 1980s, he retired and Romero took over the business.

If Nashville is the center of country and western guitar, New York would have to be called ground zero for jazz saxophone. Thirty-two years of maintaining and repairing the instruments of the best saxophonists in the world have given Roberto Romero a profound understanding of what makes American music tick. His clients have included Joe Henderson, Michael Brecker, Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, Lee Konitz, Dexter Gordon, Clifford Jordan, David Murray, Paul Winter, Jay Rodriguez, Pharoah Sanders, Benny Golson, Joshua Redman, Bobby Watson, Dave Schnitter, Joe Temperly, and Sonny Rollins. Some of these names are synonymous with the music known as jazz, and these greatest of jazz musicians rely on their saxophones retaining the idiosyncrasies that help them express their musical sound and ideas, their voice. So, being a repairperson isn’t about resetting someone’s horn to factory presets. Romero has to know what the players want their horns to sound like and what they need to have their horns be able to do. So when Ornette Coleman called Roberto’s Winds because his alto saxophone fell off the roof of his car on his way to the airport, Romero cancelled his vacation long enough to repair the instrument before Coleman’s flight left. (It reminds me of when a taxicab knocked the neck off of my bass while I was on my way to catch a train for a New York State Council of the Arts tour. Bill Merchant got out of bed, opened the shop, and glued the neck on in time for me to catch the next train to Buffalo.) Repairpersons like Romero have to know how these iconoclasts think and how they’ve lived. He’s heard them talk about how they learned to play music and why they play it the way they do. So it’s a very special thing when someone like Roberto Romero sponsors a saxophone competition with the first prize being one of his signature instruments. Last year he did this and the winner sold the instrument within a short period of time so he could have the money and then came back to compete again this year!

To be fair, the person in question has every right to do whatever he wants with his property, even a hand-crafted saxophone he won in a student competition. But it struck Romero as a real waste of that instrument. You see, Romero opened a store in Mexico City last year, so if anyone nearby needs to have their instrument repaired, all they need to do is set up an appointment to have one of the best saxophone repair people in the world attend to it. If the young man wasn’t satisfied with how his soprano saxophone played, all he had to do was to call Roberto’s Winds and discuss the matter. Roberto Romero’s calling in life is to make saxophones work for the artists who play them. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the young man got rid of the horn. As a result, Romero directed the judges to hold all the applicants to a standard more in keeping with the artists who make it possible for him to sponsor the competition, rather than merely deciding the winner to be whomever was the best from this year’s applicant pool. It’s the difference between grading on a curve and giving an absolute grade. The result was that no prize was awarded at the competition, which was held on the first night of the festival. It was announced that the competition would be held again on the festival’s last night. This was agreed to by all of the judges involved, as well as by the accompanists (myself included). The competitors would just have to practice for the next five days and do better.

It was a sublime statement to these young men, who believed that they were competing with each other when they came into the performance hall and left realizing that they were competing for a standard of musicianship. Needless to say, on the last night no first prize was given out. Instead, two second prizes–a collection of DVDs featuring workshops by some of Roberto’s clients (Joe Lovano, Chris Potter, Dave Liebman, and others)–and one third prize–a set of reeds and accessories for maintaining a saxophone–were awarded. Some of the contestants’ parents were upset and wrote letters, but Omar Tamez has stood by Romero’s and the judges’ decision. Tamez and I spoke about it while I stayed at his home in Monterrey, recuperating from the mold that permeates the air conditioning of so many of the hotels there. We realized that by not giving away a horn to someone who hasn’t really paid enough dues to play it, Roberto Romero did more to transmit the epitome of the jazz tradition to Mexico than all of the radios, CDs, and streaming videos could ever do. Those mediums, which are outlets of the Great American Culture Machine, can only present what their manufacturers believe will sell the most units. The message that they’ve conveyed about jazz is that it’s easy, natural, and best done by the unstudied. But Romero told the truth: that life doesn’t imitate art, it fashions it.