Review: Introducing Triveni

Avishai Cohen
Introducing Triveni

It seems like every other album I've been listening to lately has been either a sax-bass-drums or piano-bass-drums trio. Finally I get some variety, in the form of a trumpet-bass-drum trio, no less. All kidding aside, I cannot find many examples of the trumpet-led pianoless trio (though Miles Davis' second quintet comes close, since Herbie Hancock sometimes sat out during Miles' solos). But the new album from Israeli-born Smalls-bred trumpeter Avishai Cohen is a refreshing statement of neobop which avoids cliche and stays interesting on multiple listens.

It seems the model for his band is not another trumpet player's group, but the early-1960s ensembles of Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane (Cohen covers Trane's Wise One and many of the scaler lines in his solos remind me of Sonny Rollins). The title of the album is a Sanskrit word meaning the confluence of the three holy rivers in the hindu tradition, the physical rivers Ganges and Yamuna, and the mythic Saraswati River. In Cohen's ethos, the Triveni are hard bop, funk, and the avant-garde, the three dominant strains of postwar American jazz.

Cohen's trio, which includes bassist Omer Avital and drummer Nasheet Waits, is well versed in the three styles alluded to in the album's title, and in most cases weave them together relatively seamlessly. On their version of Don Cherry's Art Deco, the group opens with a freeish take on Cherry's melody before moving into a more straightahead feel. Though playing a tune written two decades ago and referencing subgenres who saw their heydays years before that, the three sound totally of the moment. In doing so, they manage to avoid becoming a nostalgia act, which you should know by now is my biggest pet peeve.

   Avishai Cohen - Art Deco

Cohen's got chops. He can make the kind of dexterous runs across partials reminiscent of Freddie Hubbard's 1960s output. Though his lines seem very familiar at times (I swear I've heard Sonny Rollins play them before), he manages to sound fresh despite the familiarity. This is a very enjoyable album. I might not remember it well in two or three years, but in the month or so I've had this album in my iPod, I've enjoyed it more with every listen.

Track Listing: One Man's Idea; Ferrara Napoly; Art Deco; Mood Indigo; Wise One; Amenu; You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To; October 25th

Personnel: Avishai Cohen, trumpet; Omer Avital, bass; Nasheet Waits, drums

Christian Scott and a New Jazz Orthodoxy

It has been a long time since Wynton Marsalis made the cover of Time Magazine. Twenty years ago, actually. Though he had risen to the top of the jazz world by that time, the October 20, 1990 issue of Time served as Wynton's unofficial coronation as the most well-known jazz musician in mainstream America. With that, of course, came his role as the major tastemaker in the jazz world (and the accompanying backlash which still lingers). But in the intervening two decades, we have yet to see another jazz musician rise to the top of the heap, as it were, and become the new face of jazz for the mainstream.

Enter Christian Scott. His latest album, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow, was released last month, and Scott has made a media blitz which is rare for a jazz musician. Scott has appeared on late-night talk shows and NPR, sat in with Thom Yorke of Radiohead, and been featured in Vibe, New York Magazine, and the Village Voice, just to name a few. None of this matches Wynton's Time cover, but Scott could very well add a few more high profile notches to his belt before the year is up (it should be noted that Maralis had been leading his own groups for almost a decade before the Time cover). On top of that, Yesterday You Said Tomorrow could very well make everyone's year-end lists of the best albums of 2010. I will not predict that Scott will become the Marsalis; such predictions rarely end up being true. But whether or not he gets noticed by the rest of America, he could very well play an important role in the ongoing evolution of jazz.

The question "What is jazz?" is beyond cliche, but Christian Scott is fast becoming the embodiment of an answer to this question (though not necessarily the answer), whether he likes it or not. Though I suspect he may like it. Having read and watched a number of different interviews of his lately, it is plainly evident to me that Scott is not afraid to share his feelings on jazz. Case in point, in his recent All About Jazz interview, Scott recounts his own disagreements with Marsalis, and criticizes his narrow conception of jazz, "He got to this place where he's at the top of the pile, and then he decided he was going to tell everyone else in the country what to listen to and how to play jazz." Scott goes on to dismiss the idea of recording a standards album, as well. None of this is, of course, anything new for a jazz musician to say. However, Scott and a number of his contemporaries, to me, embody a conception of jazz that moves beyond the Jazz Wars of the 1990s (Marsalis complaints notwithstanding).

Musicians like Christian Scott, Vijay Iyer, Robert Glasper, and Jason Moran (just to name a few) seem to experience jazz as an oral tradition, one that is adaptable to various external forces and one which can incorporate new strands without losing its identity as jazz.¹ You can find ample evidence of this relationship with jazz in the music of these artists. For one, they seem to fill out their repertoire with both nonjazz tunes (from genres as diverse as classical, rap, alternative rock, and gospel) and standards written by some of jazz's universally-recognized masters, like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, or Andrew Hill. They are reverent of the past, but they value individual expression over belonging to a certain school (as Davis, Monk, and Hill did).

As for the nonjazz tunes, they run the gamut from M.I.A. to Radiohead to Ligeti and beyond. What's important is not the specific music but the fact is that far from jazz, yet these musicians love it enough to bring into the fold. This is obviously not the first generation to listen to other kinds of music besides jazz, nor is it the first to incorporate it into its own music. Rather, Christian Scott and company draw heavily from one strain of jazz tradition that is ecumenical in its source material. Some forebears in this strain would include Lennie Tristano, Anthony Braxton, Wayne Shorter, and Herbie Hancock.

So Scott has made a powerful argument for bridging the gap between Marsalis' neoclassicists and his detractors, who maybe were a bit too preoccupied with denying boundaries (or maybe not, and their resistance to Marsalis was less about boundaries in general than Marsalis' specific boundaries). Regardless, though Christian Scott may become just another jazz musician who occasionally pops into the popular consciousness, he has made his position on what is jazz quite clear, and he is not alone in his artistic choices.

Note: Moran and Glasper appeared on my Jazz Now list last year, and two of the three other groups on my list, The Bad Plus and Happy Apple, I would say share this relationship to jazz I am describing.

FURTHER READING
Jason Parker on jazz and cultural relevance (I'd say Jason and I are on a similar wavelengths)
Time's 1990 cover story on Marsalis
Christian Scott's AAJ interview
A Blog Supreme's Jazz Now project



¹ Of course, calling jazz an oral tradition is somewhat anachronistic, as the music can be preserved in a number of physical forms (recordings and sheet music most prominently) which are vastly more efficient means of propagation than oral transmission. But even so, because of the existence of recordings, we can experience music in its historical moment well after it was created, allowing up-and-coming musicians to become familiar with a vast musical history in a relatively short amount of time. We can arrange our introduction to the past in such a way as to learn the tradition chronologically, as if witnessing a century of history in order. In other words, we can comprehend jazz as an oral tradition through artificial recreations of the past (i.e. recordings).

Dave Holland: A Latter Day Art Blakey

Of the generation of musicians who came of age during the development of bebop, Art Blakey is remembered as the great teacher of subsequent generations of jazz musicians. His band, The Jazz Messengers, are frequently referred to as a university of jazz in the historical literature. And his place in this slightly mythologized narrative is secure. His former sidemen, which includes Lee Morgan, Wayne Shorter, Donald Harrison, and Terence Blanchard, all credit Blakey to their developments as musicians. Blakey is the classic evangelist, as the tall tale goes:

Art was driving to an out-of-town job and passed through a village where traffic was completely tied up because of a funeral procession. Since he couldn't get past the cemetery until the service was over, he got out and listened to the eulogy. The minister spoke at length about the virtues of the deceased, and then asked if anyone had anything else to add. After a silence during which nobody spoke up, Art said, "If nobody has anything to say about the deceased, I'd like to say a few words about jazz!"¹

Such was Blakey, always educating. And he is not the only musician who should be championed for his role as a bandstand professor. Dave Holland has served as a kind of Dean of Postbop for the past 30 years. His working bands, while they lack the brand name of Blakey's Messengers, have nonetheless served as a revolving door of talent which Holland nurtures. Like Blakey, Holland has an impressive record of graduates: Chris Potter, Steve Coleman, Eric Harland, and Kenny Wheeler, to name but a few.

But the analogy runs deeper than that. It is one thing to hire a bunch of up-and-coming sidemen, but quite another to let them develop as individuals while keeping your own stamp on the band at the same time. Holland and Blakey were both members of their respective rhythm sections; they could not be as overtly dominant as a front line player. Indeed, both men also recorded many original compositions written by their sidemen, and are remembered by their sidemen for their encouragement in contributing tunes to the book. But at the same time, the recorded outputs of Blakey and Holland each bear a distinctive sound. You know whose band is on the stand anytime either plays. It takes a special kind of musical leader to develop such a recognizable style with a continually changing cast of musicians passing through their bands.

Holland's recordings always seem to be well-received, but he has not quite reached the historical status of Blakey. Of course Blakey had the benefit of one of his sidemen acquiring an incredibly powerful position for mythmaking (ahem), but that's not territory I wish to cover here. Blakey also played during a time when stylistic categories within jazz were less complicated (it's much easier to approach a definition of hard bop than it is for postbop). However, if we can call the Jazz Messengers Hard Bop Academy, I think it's about time we start calling Holland's quintet the School for Postbop Studies.

Bonus material after the jump.

Review: That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Matt Wilson Quartet

That's Gonna Leave a Mark

Jazz and historical scholarship share a similar pathological obsession with the new. Historians are rewarded more for writing something new than writing something well. I read more than a few books in grad school in which noted scholars and sharp minds stretched an idea far past the point of usefulness in order to make a book-length argument that had never been made before (not naming names...). Meanwhile, there seems to be a scarcity of syntheses which may not be earth-shattering but nonetheless incorporate miscellaneous ideas from other works into a coherent, convincing final product.

Such is the case in jazz. Consider this critique of Wynton Marsalis from Destination: Out!

There was something intractably stodgy about much of this neo-traditional work, lacking both the spark found in the original forms and the thrilling innovations of the so-called avant garde. To our ears, it was minor music with a major publicist.

I'm not begrudging the argument, because I kind of feel the same way. Whenever I listen to Black Codes (From the Underground), I usually end up switching to Miles Smiles before I finish the album. But is my haste to go directly to the source, as it were, indicative of a bias towards music that was "newer" at the moment of creation?

This is where Matt Wilson comes in. His latest album, That's Gonna Leave a Mark, might not be striving to break new ground, but it presents a coherent take on postbop, drawing from the influence of Ornette Coleman's first quartet. Wilson's drumming has been compared to that of Billy Higgins, which I find to be an apt comparison. The tunes on this album are loose and a bit freewheeling, but he anchors the group in a subtle way reminiscent of Higgins' work with Coleman.

Altoist Andrew D'Angelo provides two originals on the album, Shooshabuster and Rear Control, which are among the most intriguing moments of the disc. D'Angelo's compositions are quirky and energetic, with the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that I love when applied to jazz composition. Listen to Rear Control (below); the fusion of the melody and bass line in the A section is a perfect marriage of melody, harmony, and rhythm (you may even call it harmolodic if you knew what you were talking about).

This album likely will not make any top ten lists at the end of the year, and there's a good chance that it will recede into the dark recesses of my music library after awhile, but it is nonetheless a fun listen that shouldn't be put down because it doesn't say anything new.


Bonus Material:

Track Listing: Shooshabuster; Arts & Crafts; Rear Control; Getting Friendly; Two Bass Hit; Area Man; Lucky; That's Gonna Leave a Mark; Celibate Oriole; Come and Find The Quiet Center; Why Can't We Be Friends
Personnel: Andrew D'Angelo, alto saxophone, bass clarinet; Jeff Lederer, tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone, clarinet; Chris Lightcap, bass; Matt Wilson, drums

Review: Pass It On

Dave Holland Sextet

Pass It On

The other day, I realized that (the inefficacy of historical analogies aside) Dave Holland is kind of like the Art Blakey of postbop. Like Blakey, Holland has become an Old Lion who continues to surround himself with younger musicians. Not necessarily a talent scout, Holland does not discover new stars so much as create an environment to which they are attracted and in which they thrive. Holland's alumni association is quite impressive: it includes Steve Coleman, Kenny Wheeler, Robin Eubanks, Chris Potter, and Marvin "Smitty" Smith, among others. Maybe not as impressive as the volume of sidemen who passed through Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, but about as good a roster as you will find in contemporary jazz.

Despite a constantly evolving working ensemble, Holland manages to craft albums that are both representative of his own style and refreshingly different from anything he has recorded before. That Mr. Holland has not been afforded the stature among casual jazz fans that Blakey is given is unfortunate, but I doubt he would care much for my mythologizing. I was first exposed to Holland's music in high school when I bought a copy of Prime Directive. I bought it having never heard Holland - I liked the album cover and remember the album getting a five-star review in DownBeat, so I figured it was worth the money. I was immediately taken by the record, and have since gotten my hands on much more of Holland's work.

Pass It On features Holland in a different setting than most of his albums. Instead of his normal quintet, he is joined by longtime sideman Robin Eubanks with Eric Harland on drums, Antonio Hart on saxophone, Alex Sipiagin on trumpet, and Mulgrew Miller on piano. The presence of Mulgrew is interesting, considering that Holland rarely uses a pianist, even on his big band albums, usually opting for a vibraphone instead. The album leads off with "The Sum of All Parts," a Eubanks tune that flows from an extended drums-and-trombone duet by Eubanks and Harland into a group improvisation featuring the entire front line. From here the tune commences, with snaking syncopated lines adhering into a beautiful fugue. After a minute-long melodic sequence, Holland begins a solo that is reminiscent of the highly logical melodies which grace so many of his albums. The tune is representative of the Holland's milieu: tightly-orchestrated melodies over a distinctive harmonic structure.

The remaining tunes on the album are all Holland compositions, most of which have appeared in different forms on previous Holland efforts. Nearly every one is a winner. "Modern Times" is the best of the bunch, though, featuring a very tight arrangement with wonderful timbres. Against a backdrop of Eubanks' trombone and Sipiagin's trumpet (which sounds about as mellow as a trumpet can sound), Hart and Miller unfurl a sinuous melody which on paper may look like an exercise from a method book, but on record sounds sublime.

As is so often the case, Holland's sidemen are top notch. Frequent collaborator Robin Eubanks is in his usual virtuosic form, and his command over the trombone pays vast dividends on the album. Hart and Sipiagin are two who I have not listened to much in the past, but both won me over on this album. Eric Harland is Eric Harland, and frankly, if he is good enough for Holland, Charles Lloyd, Jason Moran, and Terence Blanchard, then he is surely good enough for me. Pass It On slipped a bit under the radar last year, and did not appear on many year-end best-of lists, which is a shame. The album makes a great primer on the Dave Holland Graduate School of Jazz Performance.


Track Listing: The Sum of All Parts; Fast Track; Lazy Snake; Double Vision; Equality; Modern Times; Rivers Run; Processional; Pass It On
Personnel: Alex Sipiagin, trumpet; Robin Eubanks, trombone; Antonio Hart, saxophone; Mulgrew Miller, piano; Dave Holland, bass; Eric Harland, drums

On Booker Little and Jazz Mythology

Booker Little and Clifford Brown had much in common. Both were trumpet players from middling cities (Little from Memphis, Brown from Wilmington, Delaware) who played important roles in the development of jazz trumpet, but died before their thirtieth birthdays. Brown's and Little's solos are both studied and transcribed intently by young trumpet players. Both made impressive albums, both as a leader and a sideman, which are among the greatest jazz on record. Both were sidemen in Max Roach's quintet, and both built on the bebop trumpet style of Dizzy Gillespie and Fats Navarro.

Yet while Clifford Brown has been mythologized in The Jazz Tradition, Little remains a surprisingly obscure figure in the history of jazz, known mostly by musicians and aficionados. Why is this? It can't be because Little did not record enough masterpieces. Take a look at his discography, he appeared on Africa/Brass, Percussion Bitter Sweet, and Eric Dolphy's live recordings at The Five Spot. They may not be the most legendary recordings, but they are just as memorable and important to the development of jazz as any of the best Clifford Brown recordings. I would argue the same of Little's solo work, especially the well-regarded Out Front.

I wish I could come up with a better reason, but it seems to me that the answer largely has to do with timing and circumstance. Brown's heyday fits within a neat break in The Jazz Tradition. His first recording with Max Roach, Brown and Roach, Inc., was recorded in August 1954, just a few months before the death of Charlie Parker. Brown's ascent comes just as a the historical arc of jazz is in need of a protagonist. The same cannot be said for Little. Among his contemporaries were Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, two figures who seemingly crowd out all other jazz musicians in some writers' retellings of the history of jazz between 1960 and 1963. Little seems to get lost in the background of jazz history.

But Clifford Brown is not just a lead player during one period of The Jazz Tradition, his personal story is also more easily mythologized. Because Charlie Parker's death stemmed from years of drug abuse, the clean cut image of Brown, who shunned drugs, smoking, and drinking, served as important story in jazz. Brown was kind of a corrective to the surprisingly-prevalent notion among jazz musiciansat the time that herion use contributed to creativity and performance (at least, according to some). This factor is also key in transforming Brown's life into myth; he is the opposite kind of fast-burning flame than Parker, and his story serves as a captivating next chapter following Bird's life and death. Ken Burns uses this dichotomy to much effect in his documentary Jazz.

So for having reasons little to do with their own music in some regard, perhaps, Brown can be mythologized into this jazz martyr, while Little is neglected by history. This fact in itself is an interesting critique of the mythologization of jazz inherent in The Jazz Tradition, and should inspire us to think beyond this master narrative when considering the history and development of jazz.

Wynton Marsalis is the Ronald Reagan of Jazz - Not That There's Anything Wrong With That

On Monday morning I awoke to find a wonderful surprise on my RSS reader: a panoply of new posts on Do The Math examining the Young Lions of the 1980s and the jazz wars of that decade, as well as an extensive interview (and blindfold test!) with Wynton Marsalis. What a great early holiday gift from Ethan Iverson. Do yourself a favor and skim through some of the goods. Some of the material delves into historical and musical minutiae that only a specialist can really understand, but there are plenty of tidbits that will entertain even casual jazz fans.

The material as a whole brought to my mind a thought I had explored somewhat deeply during my time in graduate school. During that time, when I was mentally plotting out possible dissertation topics, I explored the idea of writing a cultural history of jazz that effectively contextualized the music in American thought and culture. Basically, I thought I would rewrite Jazz in American Culture my way. One chapter idea for the dissertation which received much contemplation was a study of Wynton Marsalis' rise to prominence during the 1980s. The idea in my mind was to connect the forces surrounding the rise of Marsalis to those surrounding the rise of Ronald Reagan.

Calling Wynton Marsalis the Ronald Reagan of jazz is not a new idea. Indeed, invoking Reagan in the pejorative sense had become somewhat of a favored mode of attack in the jazz wars. Shortly after the Ken Burns Jazz documentary aired in 2001, this screed made the rounds on the internet, in which saxophonist Mike Zilber issued a number of pronouncements against Marsalis (who was a major consultant to and presence in the documentary), Burns, and the documentary itself. The charges themselves are mostly not worth repeating, since you can read the entire piece on this page and anyone familiar with the controversy around the document is well aware of the points made in Zilber's critique.

But my idea was to examine the connection between Reagan and Marsalis in a non-pejorative, inquisitive manner. Indeed, Reagan's name carries with it an almost inconceivable amount of baggage, as this year's election cycle showed us time and again. However, if you look past the mythology built around Reagan and examine the personal feelings behind his ideology and how he resonated with a large coalition of voters in 1980, I think you will find more than a few interesting similarities between he and Marsalis that help explain Marsalis' own rise to prominence as well as the "renaissance" of jazz he helped lead in the 1980s.

The lazy critique of Marsalis posits that he does not like a lot of jazz made during the 1960s and 1970s. His detractors point out that Marsalis has never paid tribute to Marion Brown or Keith Jarrett at Jazz at Lincoln Center the way he has to Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker. This, they argue, shows his hand. As Mike Zilber put it,

Marsalis is now the Ronald Reagan of jazz and, like Reagan, has no memory of those nasty 60s and 70s, preferring to bask in the halcyon days of Roseland, Satchmo and wax recordings.

Though Zilber and others have overstated this fact, it is still important to note that Marsalis feels and is not afraid to argue that much of the music produced and marketed as "jazz" during the 1960s and 1970s is not jazz. More specifically, Marsalis has argued many times that two strains of American jazz - the experimental avant-garde and jazz-rock fusion - should not be considered jazz (he would call both styles "improvised music" instead). This, not surprisingly, rubs many musicians, critics, and fans the wrong way.*

Marsalis has made two arguments for these exclusions. The first, which Wynton expresses in his DTM interview, and which his intellectual godfather Stanley Crouch has repeated elsewhere, is that by succumbing to inclusion ad infinitum, the word jazz loses its meaning. Instead, Marsalis argues, one must draw the line somewhere. For Marsalis, swing is one of the essential traits of jazz (the blues aesthetic is another), so any evaluation of what is or is not jazz begins by determining whether the music in question swings (though it should be noted that Marsalis' tastes seem to have broadened over the past 15 years).** As Iverson argues in his DTM posts, Marsalis and his contemporaries fetishize swing to an astonishing degree. Avant-garde jazz and fusion do many things, but they do not swing the way Marsalis and his peers swing. So it is not surprising why Marsalis would argue for the exclusion of those styles from The Jazz Tradition.

The second reason speaks both to cultural politics and musical analysis. In Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making (Roth Family Foundation Music in America Imprint), Gabriel Solis explains Marsalis' has description of the 1960s and 1970s as a time when some jazz musicians lost their way. The historical trajectory of jazz was altered when a number of musicians followed the trails of either the avant-garde or fusion. Both styles were not jazz. Fusion was no better than rock music. As Wynton put it "If you were there it was a great way to meet women and have a good time... but it's a death toll for jazz musicians." And the avant garde was also decidedly non-jazz. It was merely "a reaction to the European avant-garde," which sacrificed The Jazz Tradition for the sake of innovation. Because so many musicians fell under the spell of fusion or the avant-garde, jazz ceased to exist as an artistic musical expression that also captured the ears of a substantial audience, according to Marsalis.

Marsalis sought to return jazz to this cultural moment at which jazz could be both accessible and elevated to high art status. He and the Young Lions brought a renewal to jazz following these musical upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. The excesses of the avant-garde and the crass comercialism of fusion were to be cast aside for jazz that built upon a tradition that was artistic but did not innovate for the sake of innovation. It can easily be described Morning in Jazz if you wanted to make reference to Reagan.

Marsalis was successful. He became enough of a cultural zeitgeist to appear on the cover of Time and secure his appointment as Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he institutionalized his program of jazz renewal. But not only that, he created great jazz that itself should be included in The Jazz Tradition. On DTM, Iverson restates the case for Marsalis Standard Time ~ Vol.1, J Mood, The Wynton Marsalis Quartet Live At Blues Alley, and Black Codes (From the Underground), and I heartily second. He may have touched off the Jazz Wars in the process, but he would argue that he also helped blaze the path for creating The Jazz Tradition.

This story of renewal following two decades in the wilderness is oddly reminiscent of the narrative employed by Ronald Reagan in 1980, just around the same time Marsalis began his apprenticeship with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Reagan saw the politics of the 1960s and 1970s much in the same way Marsalis saw the jazz of those eras. The major thenes of Reagan's 1980 Presidential campaign included critiques of the boated welfare state of the 1960s, the loss of momentum in the Cold War at the hand of detente during the 1970s, and the permissive youth culture of both decades. As Marsalis perceived his music as a renewal of jazz, Reagan presented his platform as a vehicle of American renewal (whether he achieved it or not is a whole other story).

Like Reagan, Marsalis consolidated his ideas into a movement, creating a template for his own school to follow and for his detractors to criticize. Both men placed themselves in important historic moments, at which point they were to lead the public on a historical trajectory. Both are at the center of debate in their respective fields almost thirty years afterward, in the 2008 Republican Presidential primaries in Reagan's case, and in the postmortem of the Jazz Wars in the case of Marsalis. So aside from being a superficially biting critique of Marsalis, the comparison to Reagan also reveals much about the way Marsalis may perceive of himself in jazz history.

--

Big h/t and a heartfelt thanks for being who they are to: The Bad Plus (DTM)

For more on Marsalis, see Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz?: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, pp. 287-334 and Gabriel Solis, Monk's Music: Thelonious Monk and Jazz History in the Making, pp. 150-151.

*There is an undeniable amount of resentment inherent in these critiques of Marsalis. As Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he is in a particularly powerful position as the preeminent tastemaker of American jazz. Certainly, most of his critics would enjoy that kind of critical power.
**Marsalis postulates this theory, which he calls the "purist ethic in jazz," in a 1988 op-ed piece for the New York Times, "What is Jazz - And Isn't." Iverson summed up a major critique of this position brilliantly in his DTM post, writing that to his detractors, Marsalis appeared to have "a unified disdain for jazz music that wasn’t swinging, virtuosic, and informed only by the great black jazz musicians comfortable with chord changes."

Review: Migration

Antonio Sanchez

Migration

Fans of Pat Metheny should be familiar with Antonio Sanchez. The drummer has been a mainstay of Metheny's groups for the past five years, and has also recorded with Michael Brecker and Danilo Perez. His bona fides go on, having attended the Berklee School of Music and sitting in the drummer's chair of the Dizzy Gillespie United Nations Orchestra. Last year, he recorded his debut album as a leader, Migration. The album is an exciting debut from a seasoned veteran (at age 36, Sanchez's career had seen some incredible highs up to that point).

Aside from the opening and closing tracks (which feature special guests Chick Corea and Pat Metheny, respectively), Sanchez presents a quartet with the interesting front line of tenor saxophonists David Sanchez (no relation) and Chris Potter. Bassist Scott Colley rounds out the group. Following Corea's "One for Antonio," the quartet portion of the album kicks off with "Did You Get It?," an intriguing melody with densely harmonized lines by Potter and Sanchez on tenors. It is the first of four originals by Antonio Sanchez, and I was immediately impressed by the quality of his compositions. Like Tony Williams, an obvious influence, Sanchez takes writing very seriously, and reveals a harmonic sophistication not often associated with drummers (you can read more about his compositional techniques in this All About Jazz interview).

Following a pair of solos by David Sanchez and Potter (whom I, unfortunately, cannot tell apart - note to Amazon.com: please include liner notes with your mp3 downloads!) as well as a solo by Colley, Sanchez gives a (too) brief solo which combines a sense of polyrhythm reminiscent of Tony Williams with the melodic instincts of Max Roach. I was left wanting more, unfortunately (a drummer can and should give himself more than eight bars on his own record).

"Challenge Within" is the highlight of the disc, another Sanchez composition which evokes the powerful frontline of the 1960s Blue Note Sound with a driving Latin-tinged beat. It is stunning to hear a drummer present such a provocative melody on his debut (even accounting for the fact that he was an old-by-jazz-standards 36 when the album was released). Potter (I think) opens up the solo section with a melodic masterpiece as one familiar with his work would expect. After a statement from David Sanchez and a restatement of the melody, Antonio Sanchez gives an extended solo over Colley's bass acompaniement. What is nice about Sanchez's playing here and elsewhere on the album is that he eschews the pyrotechnics one might expect on a drummer's debut for a sublty melodic statement that would have made Max Roach proud.

Other points of interest on the album include Sanchez's haunting original, "Ballade," his reworking of the Joe Henderson classic "Inner Urge," and (I think) David Sanchez's solo on "Greedy Silence," in which he and Antonio channel Elvin and Trane in a frenetic exchange of ideas. Indeed, the quartet selections are so good that the duet with Metheny and trio with Colley and Corea could have been left off the album entirely, and I would still be satisfied. As it is, the bookending tracks are icing on the cake. Sanchez has given a resoundingly strong opening statement, and I excitedly await the next chapter.

Track Listing: One for Antonio; Did You Get It; Arena (Sand); Challenge Within; Ballade; Greedy Silence; Inner Urge; Solar

Personnel: Sanchez, drums; Chris Potter, David Sanchez, saxophone; Scott Colley, bass; Chick Corea, piano (on One for Antonio); Pat Metheny, guitar (on Arena (Sand) and Solar)

Review

Miles Davis, Miles Smiles, and the Invention of Post Bop
Jeremy Yudkin

Miles Davis' "Second Quintet" of the 1960s (featuring Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock, and Tony Williams) does not quite get the attention it deserves at times. It is overshadowed in memory by John Coltrane's and Ornette Coleman's groundbreaking quartets, and is sometimes seen as merely a bridge between Miles' straightforward hard bop of the 1950s and early 1960s and his wild fusion experiments later in the decade. Jeremy Yudkin, a musicologist at Boston University, thinks this band, and especially the album Miles Smiles, deserves a place in the pantheon of Miles alongside his other celebrated works like Kind of Blue and Birth of the Cool. Moreover, Yudkin thinks Miles Smiles is best understood as the album in which Miles solidifies the style of postbop, making it an unrecognized pillar of The Jazz Tradition. In this book, Yudkin both attempts to understand Miles Smiles within the development of Miles Davis' artistic development and to employ Miles Smiles as a codification of postbop, a heretofore "slippery title" which other scholars of jazz have used in a temporal, but not necessarily stylistic sense.

Yudkin is at his best when placing Miles Smiles in the context of the Miles Davis canon. He deftly compares Miles' use of space in Miles Smiles to earlier examples in his career like "Boplicity" from the Birth of the Cool sessions in 1950 and "Bag's Groove" in 1954. He also identifies Miles' use of pyramidic structures and modes as points of continuity between Miles Smiles and Miles' earlier canon. Miles Smiles emerges from this study as a logical continuance from Birth of the Cool, Milestones, and Kind of Blue. Miles Smiles emerges as a work with deep roots in Miles' past, which reveal themselves as the foundation of his style evident throughout his evolution as an artist.

Yudkin falls short, however, in demonstrating how Miles Smiles translates into a specimen of postbop, and not just another link in the Miles Davis chain. Defining postbop as "freedom anchored in form," he concludes that Miles developed "a new approach to music, an approach that was abstract and intense in the extreme, with space created for the rhythmic and coloristic independence of the drummer--an approach that incorporated modal and chordal harmonies, flexible form, structured choruses, melodic variation, and free improvisation." Under this definition; flexible, abstract-yet-melodic, modal and chordal; postbop continues to seem like a catch-all definition, the kind which Yudkin dismisses as "slippery" at the outset of his work. The definition offered by Yudkin seems better utilized as a classification of Miles rather than a definition of postbop.

Indeed, the difficulty with defining postbop as a style underscores the impossibility of classifying jazz at this point in the music's history. After the rise of free jazz and the avant-garde, jazz loses its linear narrative form. Countless styles abound, finding strange connections. Roswell Rudd goes from playing traditional dixieland to free jazz; Stanley Crouch transforms from free jazz drummer into the intellectual godfather of jazz neoclacissism. Yudkin illustrates the complicated nature of classifying a mature and diverse art form like jazz: in which it is easier to position an artist within a web of influences than it is to unite a group of artists under a stylistic banner.

Nevertheless, many will find this book useful. Yudkin includes some very helpful transcriptions from Miles Smiles, and, as anyone who has tried to figure out the chord changes to Nefertiti can attest, deciphering the music of this group is no easy matter. More than that, though, Yudkin has shined a spotlight on a body of work which can never get the amount of attention it really deserves. We owe him thanks for reminding us what pure genius Miles Smiles is, and remains.