Archives for 2011

The holidays are the best of times and the worst of times for hearing music in New York City. Hosting friends and family, or being a guest on a visit, is great, until it pales. That’s when we look for entertainment options, and going out for jazz seems like the most sociable, something-for-everybody activity.

The main stages typically book artists who will please casual as well as hard-core audiences. This year these big draws are two. Maria Schneider, whose orchestra has its annual residency at the Jazz Standard, and multifarious pianist Chick Corea, who’s been celebrating his 70th birthday at the Blue Note since mid November. Of course, as I write this both shows for Wednesday, Nov. 23 are sold out.

Schneider conducts and writes for the most orchestrally-oriented of large jazz ensembles. Without having released a new record since Sky Blue in 2007, she’s overdue. Yet she has not stopped composing, on November 14 premiered her classically contextualized “Winter Morning Walks” with soprano Dawn Upshaw and the Australian Chamber Orchestra at the Ojai Festival in California, and before that was on tour of Europe. Her music does offer nearly something-for-everyone: structure and depth, vivid solos, powerful drumming supporting a huge sound. She doesn’t go for funk, and her themes can seem elusive, but the Jazz Standard is a place adults of all ages can go, assured they’ll hear something extraordinary, Tuesday the 22 through Sunday the 27. It’s closed on Thursday so no barbequed turkey that night or Schneider Orchestra, either.

Corea settled into the Blue Note on November 14 and has been rotating some of his favorite groupings through the venue every few days. His night-before-Thanksgiving gig in duo with pianist Herbie Hancock has a potential for greatness: both of these men are masters of the keyboard, after all, with a significant shared past.

Both played with Miles Davis, sequentially and simultaneously on his warmest experimental record, In A Silent Way. In 1978 they recorded expansive duets for an album called An Evening With . . .  Each of them, on their own, has exemplified solo lyricism, explored the tensions of trios (hear especially Chick’s Now He Sings, Now He Sobs), run larger bands and amped up their efforts. Together they tend to rhapsodic balladry, rich harmonies and nuanced dynamics. Any competitive impulses are muted to be playful rather than edgy.

The downside of this pairing is it’s one-night-only, and on Friday Corea ends his stand by featuring his Original Elektric Band, a very pro fusion-oriented outfit that’s never been my cup of tea, for three nights. Upsides are on Thanksgiving itself seductive Russian-born, Israeli-raised, Toronto-based singer Sophie Millman performs, on the next Monday soul singer-songwriter Leon Ware makes a rare NYC appearance, and then guitarist John Scofield, currently in a sensitive standards mode, brings his quartet.

Alternatives to Schneider and Corea abound, of course, which is why we love New York! This city loves piano players, and over the course of the holiday week encyclopedically capable Ethan Iverson plays in trio with drummer Albert “Tootie” Heath, pianist-of-ineffable-prettiness Frank Kimbrough is in tenor saxophonist Noah Preminger‘s quartet, back to back at Smalls, the Village basement joint. Cuban-born pianist Manuel Valera has several nights at the upscale Bar on 5th (between 36th and 37th streets). Gerald Clayton, 26 years old, dread-locked and lauded for “making standards new again,” has his trio at the Village Vanguard.

On Friday the bebop professor Barry Harris‘s trio is at The Kitano hotel’s jazz club, while boppish and bluesy Junior Mance holds forth in duet at the Knickerbocker (full menu and well-stocked bar) and Greg Lewis has his organ trio, which transforms Thelonious Monk’s repertoire, at Night of the Cookers (on Fulton Street in central Brooklyn).

Saturday night Sonelious Smith‘s trio is at Cleopatra’s Needle, the Upper West Side neighborhood hangout; David Hazeltine leads his quartet at Smoke, further uptown, and on Sunday I recommend Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, at Birdland in midtown.

That’s much of the best – not all, but some – for the Days of Overstuffing. Afterwards, if your company has left or you’ve gotten home yourself, there’s cause to sigh with relief and reason to say (as we so rarely do), “Thank God it’s Monday.”

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Onstage at the Japan Society before concertizing with Otomo Yoshihide, Christian Marclay
told a crowd, “You’re going to see us do some things you’ll think are interesting, but you have to understand how shocking it was to do this in the ’80s, when people treated records as something precious.” And thereby Marclay, famous recently for his Venice Bienalle-winning film/video/time mosaic “The Clock,” posed the question looming over his performance in duet with Yoshihide, hailed for 20 years as among Tokyo’s “most adventurous sound creators.” Is turntablism a relic of a fading past or an experimental form of music-making, still in development? That anybody’s asking should bring joy to the hearts of those celebrating Black Friday as the annual Record Store Day.

In three improvised stretches of some 15 to 18 minutes each and a three or four minute encore, Marclay and Yoshihide, who are longtime if only occasional collaborators, explored the clicks and pops of vinyl lps and 45s, the scratches of tone-arms with or without needles skimming the surface of records or paper/felt/plastic sheets on turntables or the turntables themselves. At some junctures the two men even found scraps of tunefulness within the records’ grooves.

Turntablism as practiced by Marclay and Yoshihide, who’ve been tilling the field since the mid and late ’80s, respectively, is a far cry from dj-ing as known in dance clubs, house parties and the dub/hip-hop worlds just about as long. There are no beats in their music, no ostensible cross fades or clever matches, some sampling and looping (I think) but very rarely a snatch of a recognizable theme. In their first improv, one of the duo invoked a distant, woodsy flute for a few moments, but it was like vapor in an air near-random sounds. In the second there were two quotes, separated by several minutes, of identifiably Asian folk motifs. Most of the time the pair worked with timbre (the textures of sound) rather than tonality (pitches on a scale).

 The pieces were rhythmically untethered but flowed swiftly, the musicians listening closely and responding to each other in non-specific ways. Their balance was not showy, but admirable. Considering they weren’t playing notes or themes and there was no obvious structure or attempts at synchronization much less harmony, their music had shape, suspense and rich variety. They expressed themselves — or perhaps the listener projected expressivity onto their efforts — and gave what they did narrative shape. It could seem comical as when Marclay flapped a thin platter off to the side for its wacka-wacka-wacka, and scrunched up a sheet of paper to put on the turntable for a ride. Yoshihide mirrored the move by using the flimy slipcover from an old single. There were also moments of dramatic hush. Indeed, Marclay and Yoshihide ended each jaunt by finding their ways to a resolved silence.

I remember hearing Marclay back when he’d improvise with East Village/downtown mavens including John Zorn, Elliott Sharp and/or Butch Morris (Marclay’s on Morris’s Conduction #1: Current Trends in Racism in Modern America: A Work in Progress). Then as now he was a calm and cool presence, selecting vinyl from a pile in a box, slipping unidentified albums onto and off of the spinning turntable in a moment or two, applying a stylus that he was more likely to worry across the grain than to rest gently, cue up carefully or rub the disc back-and-forth for for the telltale turntable rhythm lick.

His contributions lent that music — improvised by iconoclasts nonetheless using “real,” present instruments — a dimension of memory and subverted production. But during the Japan Society’s panel Marclay mentioned he’d always thought there wasn’t enough turntable, he wasn’t getting the respect afforded the other instruments, he felt like his turntable was being used as a spice rather than accepted as a main ingredient.

Yoshihide worked as a rock guitarist while getting an ethnomusicology degree during the ’70s (he studied post-WWII Japanese pop and Chinese instruments developed during the Cultural Revolution). He told the assembled audience during the pre-concert talk (moderated by UC/Santa Barbara prof David Novak; also featuring writer/musician Alan Licht) that he’d played with tape recorders even as a teenager and considered them his main ax. Not that he used them conventionally; he explored offbeat aspects of the machines’ capacities, as if splicing tape for music concréte.

Having taken up free improv around 1990 and founding the band Ground Zero (described on Wikipedia as “noise rock. . . with a heavy emphasis on sampling”) while maintaining his New Jazz Quintet and Orchestra, Yoshihide characterizes himself as often swinging between extremes of dynamics. Now he’s also begun to make installations, like the display in the Japan Society’s lobby garden of a dozen or so turntables set amid the plants, going on and off in sequence, automatically. Marclay observed that his partner’s latest obsession is concentrating on what can be done with the stylus itself, the needle — which is essentially a contact mike, able to convey to an amplifier or processing unit or mixing board any kind of vibration.

A translator sat behind Yoshihide whispering in his ear but he was able to speak understandable English and exhibit a casual, robust sense of humor. He wasn’t at all doctrinaire or defensive (nor was Marclay, though he seemed either exhausted or withdrawn). Asked if the music they said they were about to make owed anything to the late ’50s/early ’60s works of David Tudor and John Cage, Marclay allowed that he came out of ye olde avant-garde lineage, and Yoshihide said he was looking forward to playing Cage pieces for the first time next year.

Yet for all the hipster insouciance of Marclay and Yoshihide, the graceful absorption in the tactile operations of their setups and the cunning sound collages they made from bits of ambiance or (as Marclay says) sounds nobody wants, there was something old fashioned about what they were doing. Oh, I know: The turntables themselves. I’ve been told that vinyl is coming back (anybody want to bid on my 12,000 lp collection?) but this gear looked about as renewable as an old black barbell telephone. For a generation born after the victory of the cd, which occurred about the time these guys were revving up their careers, records and the turntables that play them are oddities, like buggy whips or shawms. Oh, you can take those clunky devices and make ’em hum, spit, throb? Gee daddie-o, what next? Tweet from a typewriter?

From that point of view, what Marclay and Yoshihide do makes perfect sense: They’re trying to wring the last vestiges of life out of ancient technology. Maybe Marclay didn’t realize that was his project when he started using turntables, he was just following the distinctive path of his thought towards insights about new uses for found objects and exploration of that sliver of reality where music, gesture, concept intersect and overlap, confusing everything and sparking wonder.

A New Yorker writer sitting next to me said he thought the physical element of what the performers were doing was at least equal in import to the music they made. I didn’t declare but I do believe that Marclay and Yoshihide think of themselves first and foremost as musicians, when they’re turntablisting — they don’t confuse the medium with sculpting and they’re not really doing it just for themselves. They want to share what they’ve learned less about manipulating equipment than about sound.

They’re doing it for everyone who has sat transfixed by their vinyl records, listening to Miles, the blues, the Beatles, Carole King, whoever through a veil of nicks and scars that we learned to love as if they were drummers’ bombs, suitably placed for greatest impact. My records gained their scars honestly — by my playing them over and over, sometimes while in careless states. Hear that gouge there? That’s the time I tripped over the . . . And that repeat? I remember when it circled on and on and I couldn’t get up to bump the needle ahead because I was busy with . . .

Now I love the tokens of those time. Turntablism of this sort awakens the nostalgic instinct and weds it to the wacky impulse. Mix everything up. Just what the doctors order. Why would I want to sell my lps when I can go to a record store and buy more, more more?

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A blues-belter with a beautiful big voice and cred in the rockin’, bawdy, electric tradition, Shemekia Copelandbrought a funky good time to the elegant Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center last Thursday night (and probably Friday, too), backed by a a tight four-man band, carrying a slew of fresh and catchy songs.

It’s unusual to hear a woman in her early 30s be so powerfully plain-spoken, whether with a wide smile (“I’m a wild, wild woman, and you’re a lucky man”)

 
or haunting shiver (“Never Going Back to Memphis” from her latest cd, Never Going Back).

It’s even more unusual for a blues performer to warm up an NYC crowd in the comfortable but oh-so-polished 200+ seat venue against a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on Columbus Circle, Central Park West and 59th St. to the point where people are shouting “2 a.m.!” or clapping intuitively on the two and four beats. But Shemekia, daughter of the late Texas-out-of-Africa blues guitarist Johnny Copeland who claims she’d been singing blues privately since she was 8 years old, did it. She was spontaneous — she doesn’t keep a set list, decides what to sing in the moment — and candidly funny. Not a tall woman and having curves, she struggled in a tight skirt to find a comfortable seat on a bar stool, adding that the taller stool she’d had for the first set wasn’t any better. “I guess I don’t know how to sit,” she shrugged, before singing a rather sentimental number about a beat up old guitar, acoustically and affectingly.

Shemekia Copeland tours out of Chicago, though she was born in Harlem. She signed to Telarc Records 9n 2009 after debuting on Alligator in 1997. She’s on tour constantly, has won a lot of awards and praise, and says she’s in New York City often, so I look forward to seeing her live again soon.

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Composer and improvising keyboardist William “WATIV” Thompson — Mississippi-born, New Orleans-based and an Iraq war veteran who I profiled for NPR in 2005 (podcast below) when he was posting laptop computer music he created in Bagdad during free time from his counterintelligence duties – made his first visit to New York City last week. I met him for coffee near New York University, saw him the next night at le Poisson Rouge hearing
electronics innovator Morton Subotnick and the night after that took him and his companion along with my NYU blues class to hear blues singer Shemekia Copeland perform in the Allen Room of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Thompson now likes New York.

So much so that he was heading down to the Occupy Wall Street encampment at Zuccotti Park on Veterans Day to start on his next recording project: interviews of returned soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, which he’ll process to generate melodic motifs and be sonic aspects of works like those on Syntaxis, his just released quartet CD (with guitarist Christ Alfrod, drummer Simon Lott and bassist James Singleton). This is clearly jazz beyond jazz, another next step, improvised but structured and drawing on a wide, unpredictable sound palette. Thompson has an MA in jazz piano and was studying bebop with Ellis Marsalis before going to the Middle East, but what he’s doing now is expanding on the sounds he found and fiddled around with when he was there, having never been interested in electronic music or very far out abstraction before. He told me all that, and Viet Nam vet violinist Billy Bang commented on what he heard in WATIV’s Bagdad Music Journal, in my aforementioned All Things Considered piece.

Thompson is a third-generation musician,  raised on Fats Domino, Huey “Piano” Smith and Professor Longhair. He turned to decisively towards jazz modernism upon hearing Bill Evans. His work week back home currently includes teaching kids (which he enjoys), playing on Sundays for a church and occasional party gigs. But he says since being in Iraq (he was called up as part of a reserve unit he’d joined for the educational benefits and spent a year there, a tour extended by the military’s “stop-gap” policy) he doesn’t much like making music for people to drink to, which is the New Orleans commonplace. He says likes the idea of playing softly, so that the audience must lean in to listen. On the other hand, here he is with in foursome wearing Sun Ra headgear and tearing up at the Always Lounge.

It was great to meet Thompson face-to-face — we did the NPR interview by phone — because he’s open-minded, perceptive, engaged and original. He told me he’d always veered away from “free jazz” because of its cliche image as being all high energy (Chicago’s AACM branch excluded, he was quick to say, and WATIV credits drummer Alvin Fielder as a mentor — Fielder, a Mississippian, was nonetheless in Chicago and instrumental in the AACM’s founding). WATIV doesn’t exclude anything anymore and was taking full advantage of Manhattan’s cultural offerings. He’s excited about hearing Chick Corea in duet with Herbie Hancock at the Blue Note, night before Thanksgiving.

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Reedist Bennie Maupin, whom I interviewed in the Jazz Talk Tent at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2006, says “One thing about Detroit, you learn how to make money.” Another thing he recalls from his youth: “There’s a lot of noise here because of the factories, and early on I listened to things that were basically noise. Now I incorporate those elements into my music in certain ways.”

Maupin has made beautiful recordings under his own name recently, but is probably still best known for playing bass clarinet throughout Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew as if trawling the bottom of a murky sea. He opened up to me about his youth, including a job as a lab specimen handler, newspaper boy and ash-seller — and much else, over 45 minutes you can now hear online, thanks to Jim Gallert of JazzStage Productions.

Gallert and his historian partner Lars Bjorn run a fine website on the continuum of Detroit music with Charles L. Latimer and H. Fred Reif. I hope whoever takes over the Detroit Jazz Fest from highly acclaimed but recently disassociated artistic and executive director Terri Pontremoli will keep the onstage interviews going. Like so much else Ms. Pontremoli did for the Detroit fest in the past decade, the Jazz Talk Tent was an innovation that worked to bring musicians and audiences together.

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Marilyn Crispell is an improvising pianist of deep concentration and beautiful touch, who at 7:30 pm EDT tonight (Thursday, Oct 27) offers at modest cost a “private” solo concert, the webcast of a three-camera shoot, from a soundstage near her residence in Woodstock NY. This is the first I’ve heard of a jazz-related performer performing essentially via pay-per-view, but given the advances in capture and playback quality (plus having Burrill Crohn, a filmmaker who knows Crispell well, directing the video) the project makes perfect sense.

Why wouldn’t listeners around the world tune in, all together but in the privacy of our homes, an intimate visual and audio experience meant for us, as if for us alone? Crispell — a longtime member of reedist Anthony Braxton’s quartet, a denizen of Karl Berger’s Creative Music Studio and an ECM recording artist usually with her trio featuring bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Paul Motian — tours all too rarely, but always provides the kind of immersive and expressive experience associated with nuanced chamber music. Thanks to the web, she can be nearly with you.

No doubt we’ll miss the interactive element that in-the-room live performances allow, however subtly, yet Crispell is a musician who leans inward while playing, and draws folks’ ears closer to her, so good sight and sound will convey much of the feeling of being there in person. The visual element will give us one dimension more than a sound recording alone would, and the real-time aspect of the webcast adds another — anything might happen, anything. Tickets cost $9.95, and include access to on-demand video of her show for 30 days. But the thrill will be to watch her play live, knowing there’s a potentially global audience out there beyond her senses, peering over her shoulder, watching her fingers, aware as she breathes, rapt.

Have a friend over, get comfy, wine may be appropriate — at 7:30 EDT log in for an example of how you might attend more music in the 21st century. How nice to have as brilliant a pianist as Marilyn Crispell virtually in your home.

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Double-barrelled rare upbeat jazz news: The husband-wife team behind publicists Improvised Communications (plus a couple helpers) launch JazzDIY.com, an online “trade journal for jazz”

And a composer-improviser from Oregon saves

Cadence magazine, founded in 1976, from demise.

Scott Menhinick and his wife Jennifer Peabody are doin’ it themselves and hoping to share information on jazz business with others, while pianist-composer-publisher David Haney is turning his talents to taking longtime low-tech Cadence online, with multi-media content. Best news yet to jazz journalists: the editors say they’ll pay.

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Don’t laugh at Harry Belafonte, the incomparable American/world roots folk musician and popularizer, for being caught on tv asleep or meditating last week. Laugh with him

during his appearance with Steven Colbert  which he amazingly turns into a genuinely musical  and touching duet on “Jamaican Sunrise.”

Even Colbert gives it up to Belafonte, whose wit is quick. Indeed, at age 84 the man is a bundle of energy and sharp observation. He’s been busy promoting his autobiography My Song, basking in a profile burnished by the laudatory HBO documentary Sing Your Song and its accompanying album, and voicing support for Occupy Wall Street. Given all that, so what if he chills? What could be more mundane than waiting in your own home for an early morning interview with a West Coast network-affiliate tv station?

I interviewed Belafonte 14 years ago for a cover story in RhythmMusic magazine (I was then editor). I’d known his music since I was little, and had recently experienced mixed reactions to his acting in Robert Altman’s Kansas City,” But I gained a lot of admiration for the man after looking into his life and speaking to him by phone. Here’s my story from 1997 —

 The Authentic Harry Belafonte at 70

When Harry Belafonte strides out onstage— probably every time he performs anywhere — he puts a skip in his step. A glint in his eye zooms the audience, laser-like, seeking a link directly to each of us. Or so one imagines, struck by the lightening charisma of this 70-year-smart man. Right now, as in his salad days during the first quake of late 20th century pop culture, Belafonte’s name, face, voice and talent looms huge among international crossover stars.

He’s at the Kennedy Center, introducing Salif Keita, Youssu N’Dour and other artists of Africa to the Beltway bunch who depend on a man of Belafonte’s reputation to bring them up-to-date. He’s on television, via PBS broadcasts and the video release of An Evening With Harry Belafonte And Friends by Island Records. It’s his first such U.S. tv special in 20 years, and the show’s soundtrack is his first live record in a decade. Island also has Belafonte in its distribution sights as he plans the debut albums of his own Niger label for 1998.

Belafonte’s in the movies, last year cast notably against type as an ultra-violent gangster-boss in Robert Altman’s Kansas City; he’s frequently photographed with his wife in newspaper and magazine society columns, and was profiled by Henry Louis Gates in The New Yorker. At the Marian Anderson Theater in Aaron Davis Hall of the City College of New York, up in Harlem, Belafonte recently reigned as a favorite native son and paterfamilias, mixing casually with a cast of friends and fellows including Tony Bennett, Diahann Carroll, ex-Mayor David Dinkins, Roy Hargrove, Letta Mbulu, Miriam Makeba, Joshua Redman, Max Roach, and his latest band, led by protégé-guitarist-bassist-vocalist Richard Bona of Cameroon.

They’d gathered to go wild about Harry and give him the first Harlem Renaissance Award, during a concert gala sponsored by the Lincoln-Mercury division of the Ford Motor Company and AT&T. He addressed them from the stage, as natural under the bright lights as if sitting in his living room.

“My mother, a domestic worker who was originally from Jamaica, used to walk past this great school with me almost every day,” remembered Belafonte, “and she’d say, ‘Harry, one day you gotta go there.’ I never got the chance — I left school when I was 15—but then years later, the great Ron Carter, jazz bassist and music professor, put me in line for an honorary degree.”

To protect her family from a wave of Depression-era crime, in 1935 Harry’s mom resettled them in Jamaica (the Blue Mountains, St. Anne’s and Kingston). Belafonte found little opportunity returning to Harlem in ’40, eventually joined the Navy, got married, and discovered the theater. Proceeds of this Renaissance award he’s initiating by accepting are dedicated to helping the children of Harlem recognize theater as a right — or, as Belafonte says, “We hope to bring some smiles to America’s face.”

For millions of American baby boomers, Belafonte has cast just such a magic spell since our childhood. He’s the folk singer as superstar, a cultural icon on par with Sinatra or Presley, whose recording Calypso  (RCA) of 1956 was The Harder They Come of the Eisenhower Administration — if not its Thriller.

The first long playing album ever to sell a million copies, Calypso  includes “Day-O,” “Jamaica Farewell,” “Brown Skin Girl” and “Man Smart (Woman Smarter),” songs that established Belafonte as the first American artist (black or otherwise) to widely (widely) disseminate non-Cuban Caribbean island forms. He’d started singing intermission jazz on 52nd St., then moved to the Village’s cabaret-folk revues. Initially Belafonte attracted urbane and liberal listeners, as Josh White and Lead Belly before him had, introducing and popularizing the blues, then very quickly Belafonte went beyond that crowd, reaching people deep in the heart of the heartland.

He was something other than a singer or even an entertainer by then, and far more personable in image than most symbols — he was somehow awaited. Catch Carmen Jones, Otto Preminger’s all-black 1954 update of Bizet’s opera with libretto by Oscar Hammerstein, on late night-TV (it’s in recent rotation) and watch Belafonte as the airman-protagonist, singing voice dubbed yet himself indelible: heroically handsome, abrim with passion and dubious honor, suffering the anguish of betrayal with the pique of a teenager, the most likable if tragic of illusion-doomed guys.

This is the Belafonte who longed to be discovered; he’d trained in theater and wanted desperately to be an actor. “I studied and studied,” he recalls with a wry twist, roll-calling some classmates: Brando, Matthau, Steiger and his career-long friend Sydney Portier. “Then I discovered there was no place for an African-American in the American theater as it existed. So I turned to singing as a substitute. And now in no portion of my mind do I entertain the slightest doubts about my ability as an actor, since for almost 50 years I’ve convinced the world I’m a singer!”

In fact, Belafonte is a gifted singer, who’s strong suits are his gifts for interpretation and delivery, his conviction and ultimate sunniness. He believes himself a teacher, and seems to have been a prophet, too. His intents and integrity have been scrutinized and assailed, but his efforts — especially as they superseded commercial activity to serve as vocal, moral and financial support of Dr. Martin Luther King’s civil rights initiatives, the USA for Africa’s “We Are the World,” UNICEF and his friend Nelson Mandela’s negotiated revolution in South Africa — bear all tests, including time.

If a male chorus sometimes renders Calypso as credible as “The Legend of Davey Crockett” or a campfire scene with the Sons of the Pioneers, Belafonte’s realizations of collaborations with Juilliard-schooled Irving Burgee (aka Lord Burgess) and lyricist Bill Attaway brought beguiling authentic qualities of African diaspora musics to the public ear — including hand-drum fundamentals, montuno piano passages, kwela-style penny-whistle solos, guitar obligattos (by Millard Thomas), and the universal joy of expressing, thus eluding, outwitting and transcending pain. If Belafonte’s music in the ’50s had arrangements and production touches that in hindsight sound designed to soften, “beautify” or simply sell, it had also undeniable melodic hooks, sly humor in its verses, and a point of view that spent no energy on disguise.

“Paul Robeson, my mentor, once said to me, ‘Harry, get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.’ That’s how Belafonte to this day introduces “The Banana Boat Song,” aka “Day-O.” “It’s a work song that tells of the ways of my people,” Belafonte says, and he leans into it with the aged and mellow hoarseness of a man who’s been laboring “all night long” for half a century, and is heartily glad “daylight comes, ’cause I want to go home.”

After four decades, “Day-O” has won the warmth and dignity Belafonte finds in it, and whether you’re sitting in a banana boat, in a theater seat, or on your bed starting at the tv, you almost have to (that’s okay, you’re urged to) sing along.

“The PBS special represents the end of a cycle,” says Belafonte from his hotel room in Honolulu, at the start of a week-long spring Pacific tour. “I wanted to introduce Richard Bona and two or three of our current songs.” He gives Bona, music director of his hip world-beat band, a solo spot in the middle of his show: under purple lights, wearing a derby, Bona thumbs deep, soft bass paths, then lets loose with fantastically precise rhythm, diction and drive, a keening stream of non-English phonetics. Bona’s also been gigging with Joe Zawinul’s Syndicate; and recorded Spaces II (Shanachie) with Billy Cobham, Larry Coryell and Birelli Lagrene.

“There’s a new direction in which I’m headed,” Belafonte insists. “I’m going into workshop for a few months to prepare new material, in new ways, and come up with some new configurations. Richard and Jake Holmes and I have been working on some things already, and I’m always looking for new artists to flesh out my concepts. I’ll probably be stepping away from the mainstream routine, not concern myself with the commercial aspects of the music business or the critics in the principal cities, but play universities and smaller cities. Though one thing I hope to do is go into the Public Theater in New York, take over one of the small theaters on a cyclical, regular basis, bring in African drama, movies, music, dance—performing arts. I’ve been talking to George Wolfe [the Public’s producer] about it.

“I’ve run into so many great artists from Africa and Brazil during my travels,” he says. “You know, we’re a cultural monolith, the U.S., dominating the world market—which wouldn’t necessarily be so bad, if we weren’t so mediocre.” By which Belafonte seems to mean unfocused, unanchored, small minded, complacent and pointless.

These are the qualities Belafonte rails against and seeks to root out of himself even during interviews, charging himself with a musical mission. “I have to make a change,” he says, “change up the rhythms of my performing troupe, go after a more internationally rhythmic sound. I love the music of South Africa—and a song like ‘The Wave,’ which has music that’s filled with metaphor. ‘Paradise in Gazankulu’ is another song I’ve been doing that depicts the South African experience—about the price and pain of getting so-called paradise. Right now is the most crucial time in the history of South Africa, be the nation’s youth must understand it’s a long and painful journey, an agonizing process to grow out of the morass created by the past. In ‘The Wave,'” he quotes, “‘We are the flow, we are the wind/and soon the rock must go.’ As the sea washes against the rock—so we should not surrender or capitulate about our ideals, but rather be tenacious and consistent about our goals.”

“I reject the concept of ‘purity,'” Belafonte continues. “Early in my career what annoyed me was not that I was considered inauthentic, but that I was being called so by others who didn’t know anything of the authenticity of which they spoke. First of all, I was singing original songs that took off from calypso, but certainly weren’t meant to be calypso. I didn’t want to be, or claim to be, a calypso singer—there were others who did that, and I didn’t want to take anything away from them. I took heart from what Brownie McGhee said: that all songs are original, if they’re your own expression. I think a lot of that criticism came from people who were disgruntled that they didn’t get over.

“I wanted to do something original, of my own. After all, the beboppers weren’t pure jazz players, in the eyes of the dixieland players. I was back then and hope I remain wide open to other music and other musicians, but I won’t be governed by other musicians’ limitations—no, I’m too busy trying to purge myself of my own. I look for musicians with skills of craft, people who are able to play, who exercise command over their instruments, who can accent the music with different moods and sounds.

“We take time with the music. When we first met, I worked with Richard Bona on one song for two weeks. We were having a little trouble working together, agreeing on where was the one.

We’d be rehearsing, and we’d pick it up for a while, then we’d lose it. After a while, Richard started to adjust to accommodate my idea, but I told him, ‘No—I want to get to learn how to do it your way.’ This is how I grow. It’s incumbent upon me to continue to grow and to learn.

“I’m going on with a percussionist and bass player and drummer, guitarist, an African thumb piano and a kora player. That’s a remarkable instrument, the kora. It’s a harp, guitar and piano all rolled up into exotic string sound—and just the basic playing technique dictates certain accents to the music. Bona plays both bass and guitar, and he helps shape up the rhythms. The rhythms—that’s what’s key to bringing, or perhaps retaining, the African interpretation of the music, and making the English language accommodate it.

“That’s a big problem,” says Belafonte, who’s arguably conquered it, though some make think he’s compromised with it, “translating the ingredient of language. The answer, I believe, lies in the physical way we sing. We’re constantly looking for ways to re-define address and speech, through our music.”

Then it’s about the delivery of material?

“I look for repertoire that takes me to my limits, which I try to go beyond, and gives me something to communicate to my audience, which is the real test. I don’t coddle or condescend to my audiences, nor do I permit the audience to intimidate me. I remain always alert the difference between musical and vocal syntax—and because of that, I’m convinced music must accommodate the text.

“In a performance, it’s incumbent that the audience understands you. If it doesn’t—who cares? Is it that you don’t want to work? No, the worst part of that kind of lapse of communication is that the art doesn’t fulfill itself.

“So we arrange the music for communication and metaphor, then I ask myself, have we cheapened the integrity of intent, or enhanced it? The most important thing to me about ‘The Banana Boat Song’ is that before America heard it, Americans had no notion of the rich culture of the Caribbean. Very few of them did, anyway, which made no sense to me. It made no sense to me back then that people in America would not respond to the Caribbean culture I knew in joyous, positive ways. But there were these cultural assumptions then about people from the Caribbean—that they were all rum drinking, sex-crazed and lazy—not they were tillers of the land, harvesters of bananas for landlords of the plantations

“I thought, let me sing about a new definition of these people. Let me sing a classic work song, about a man who works all night for a sum equal to the cost of a dram of beer, a man who works all night because it’s cooler then than during the day. Robeson said ‘When you get them to sing your song, you’re making the first step towards inviting thoughts that might be uplifting and instructive.’ I’ve kept that advice in mind when I’ve walked in front of black American audiences who might be suffering from anti-semitic myths and sung ‘Havah Nagilah.’ You’d be surprised, most of them tend to assume this is an Arabic song and they love it. I’ve enjoyed singing it, also, in Germany, where the echoes of 50 years ago ring on.

“The history of U.S. popular song? Well, I don’t have much resonance with Stephen Foster, say, as much as I understand where his came from, and respect that for his times he was a poet who grasped that pop sense of the period. Now, the spirituals, the work songs from which Foster drew his inspiration, to me those are the much richer lode to be mined. And I believe America was the worse off for the fact that that wealth of African-America culture was ignored, or denigrated, until blues and jazz finally commanded the attention of the other [white] America. To me, it’s a marvel we should have emerged with such rich cultural contributions despite all that pain inflicted on the people who created them.

“And what’s equally amazing,” Belafonte picks up enthusiasm, “is the extent to which white youth in America, especially today, is influenced by black kids from the inner city, by their body language, their black English, their taste in clothes. You know my production Beat Street [a movie about hip-hop]? I saw hip hop culture then as a dynamic, important expression of people who couldn’t find cadence with the other America. These people created their own inner dynamic and treated the mainstream society as wholly irrelevant—and that society reached out, pulled it in, consumed it, corrupted it.

“Well, nothing in America remains incorruptible,” Belafonte grumbles, “not since the moral center of this country has become so lost. Today we’re caught in a struggle against our immoral appetites, whereas it used to be that you could judge the American moral sense by how it played into some noble causes—as recently as when Dr. King put the example of true morality before the nation, saying we need our civil rights, it’s unfair to withhold them from us, we can’t live with that.

“Now, as long as we are committed to profit as the central dynamic of our existence, we’re in crisis. It’s the bottom line theory, in terms of commerce. Look at tv: nothing comes across that invention that’s worthy of listening to, pertaining to the power, purity and dynamics of the arts, due to the system in which it exists. Or take another example: One sees in Japan the support of enthusiastic audiences for jazz unlike anything here. I well remember the clubs of the ’50s”—as well he should: Belafonte was backed up on his first opening night at the Royal Roost by Al Haig and volunteer sitters-in Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Tommy Potter and Max Roach. At the Renaissance awards he hailed Roach as “my link to the past and the future.”

“Back then America was enjoying the height of its jazz expression. And it’s not that jazz doesn’t make money—it’s that it doesn’t make enough money.

“Oh, I’m sanguine,” Belafonte’s tone shifts. “I look at each individual, and at the beauty and power of art, and I don’t think great art will die.” He’s even more than sanguine, leaping back into the pop music fray.

“I was ready to go deep into the motion picture world, to write a book, to find a play to do, when [Island Records’] Chris Blackwell wrote to obtain video rights to the PBS show. He also asked me, ‘Why aren’t you recording?’ Was that nothing interested me. I replied, ‘Because I can’t overcome the industry’s obstacles to making the music happen.’ And Blackwell wrote back, ‘What if that changes?’ Well, I could be resurrected myself, but I’m not half so interested in doing that as in introducing new musics to the new generation of listeners who’ve grown up around us. And that’s how my label has come about. I’m going to put out music unencumbered by bottom line attitudes, music that’s not to be judged by accountants, and that might put a smile on America’s face. I’m looking for concepts and pollination, and I expect to get something out on Niger by mid ’98.

“My label will be independent, distributed by Island. Niger is named after the river, of course, but a lot of people will want to know where the other ‘g’ is. I’m glad to get that word out so it will be on the tongue—that in itself will provoke debate. The river Niger runs through the countries from which most of the peoples of the African diaspora come—a label name helps identify a label’s mission, and that’s part of mine, to explore music from those cultures. I’d like to go to the Georgia Sea Islands, too, which blend that culture with life in the new world, and find some of the plentiful black American music that still addresses aspects of that age-old tradition. It persists generation after generation, because there are young people in our culture who want to do things the way the masters did.

“Am I proud I’ve contributed to or been linked to crossover?” Belafonte considers a direct question. “I’m ambivalent. I like it that I’m welcomed in the place I go because of the popularity of some of my work, but then I also want to get past that image of what I do, get it out of the way. I’ve survived throughout my career, and to me it’s been magical.

“I’ve gone against the grain and I’ve come up roses. I’ve been involved with the greatest struggles of our time, the fight for our civil rights in the U.S, and the fight to free South Africa, which I was able to bring attention to in the U.S. by bringing out great South African artists, Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba and the others. Over my life, I’m pleased to find the moral point of view in all these cases prevailed. My anxiety about them was, at first, quite intense, but now look: Nelson Mandela is the icon of the 20th century, and Dr. King has a national holiday in his honor. Everyone, today, is into world beat music. I had a privileged place in the process. The rewards have been substantial, make no mistake.

“Some people say,” he considers, “ask me ‘What about the sacrifice?’ The sacrifice! The ones who say this are the guys sitting around their Beverly Hills swinging pools, studio people at their parties. I say, ‘Sacrifice!’ Wait a minute—did you ever meet Dr. King, have him at your home for dinner, walk and talk with him? Did you ever know Fannie Lou Hammer or Paul Robeson or Bobby Kennedy? Did you go to Africa?

“I’ve sacrificed nothing,” Harry Belafonte concludes, calm yet steely with conviction. “I say to such people, ‘I simply wonder what it is you’ve lost.”

*     *     *

Belafonte’s label Niger Records does not seem to have gotten off the ground. I haven’t read My Song, but have seen Sing Your Song, and learned more from it, especially about the Civil Rights era. On the Colbert show, Belafonte says he still sings “occasionally,” before the host lures him into lifting a now gravelly voice with still impeccable phrasing.

I watch for Belafonte’s movies to be programmed, especially Odds Against Tomorrow, The Angel Levine (with Zero Mostel), Island in the Sun and the post-apocalyptic The World, The Flesh and the Devil.

“I just had a great lust for life and lust for what was going on in America,” Belafonte tells Colbert, in answer to why he’s at the center of so much significant  activity over the past 60 years. “I felt I had a responsibility to reach into that misfortune and make a difference.” Good thing he did.

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The Jazz Audience Initiative, a 21-month research project of Columbus, Ohio’s Jazz Arts Group, has posted its final reports and scheduled a webinar for October 21 (free registration available) to discuss them. Among the main points:

Byron Stripling leads the Columbus Jazz Arts Group Orchestra; what can draw new audiences to listen?

• Musical tastes are socially transmitted.
• Jazz has relatively diverse audiences.
• People pay to hear specific artists.
• Local programming shapes local preferences.
• Young listeners are eclectic.
• Many paths lead to jazz.
• Jazz listeners like informal settings.

The JAI study, funded largely by a $200,000 grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, intended to “learn new ways for engaging audiences, and infusing the art form with new energy.” It was run by the consulting firm WolfBrown, and tapped data collected from “research partners” Jazz at Lincoln, SFJazz, the Monterey Jazz Festival, Jazz St. Louis, Scullers Jazz Club (Boston) and a consortium of university presenters.

I attended a roll-out of these findings in Columbus last August, and blogged about it. Jaded as I am about studies of jazz that are born of institution’s ways of doing things when jazz is a rather unruly and anti-institutional art form, I respond to most of the study’s determinations with, “Yeah, we knew that.” No conclusion will be striking to anyone who has presented jazz with any success (which means being able to sustain such activities) over the past 40 years or so. It’s nice to have the collected data, which can be parsed in many different ways, but hard to imagine that as boiled down into an overview the major conclusions will indeed “infuse the art form with new energy.”

What would infuse jazz with new energy? For that matter, is energy what’s needed? Jazz (however defined) has energy aplenty now — as demonstrated by such evidence as the 175 jazz degree programs featured in the November education issue of Down Beat. This is not bad, compared to some 470 degree-bearing music programs in the U.S. overall. Kids (or their parents) are spending thousands of dollars annually to learn jazz (assuming that jazz can be learned in school). My recent visits to the buzzing Berklee College of Music campus in Boston and Wesleyan University’s music program, as well as frequent peeps at the New School Jazz and Contemporary Music Program are proof positive.

What troubles jazz is not low energy, but that its income streams are mere trickles and the costs of producing jazz, while modest relative to costs of other performing arts productions, are higher than what it brings in. A presentation at the JAI’s August convening by Chamber Music America president Margaret Lioi noted that jazz clubs — those informal settings jazz lovers prefer — are beset by increasingly high rents. A study on how jazz musicians make their money is currently under way, thanks to the Future of Music Coalition, and a couple samples of the detailed questionaires that I’ve seen demonstrate that musicians scuffle for a living by addressing many different sources of funds simultaneously. None of this points to a lack of energy in jazz, unless “energy” = $.

Jazz musicians and related industries could use more money, no doubt about that, and some more respect from the broader culture, too. The bucks aren’t going to come from a consumer market that’s dominated by more popular forms, or the world of grants and philanthropy that subsidizes Western European classical music heavily, primarily through privileged institutions (there’s that word again).

Consider the JAI’s findings for what might help to raise jazz boats. The three that stand out to me are “local programming influences local preferences,” “many roads lead to jazz” and “young audiences are eclectic.” Together, they suggest that if young people are exposed on a local level to jazz — or jazz-like musics — they’ll arrive at jazz without negative prejudice. But where are young people exposed? In high school bands? Is that why jazz education has flourished?

The decline over a couple of decades of jazz on the radio has been a wound, but there is fine jazz radio still, with stations and programs on the web available to anyone with an uplink, and Sirius-XM for cars. Anyone — including eclectic youth — can find jazz for themselves for free by logging into Pandora and inputting a couple names (Miles Davis is a good one to start with, since so many stylists contemporary and historic are linked through his several artistic phases; add a good singer to get vocals). Jazz festivals, especially those with low entry fees held in municipalities where diverse audiences can easily attend, expose people of every sort to jazz in marvelously informal settings.

Some of the problems faced by jazz presenting institutions are self-inflicted. Among those are a disregard for how media to promote information of upcoming concerts and ongoing programs has changed. That issue is not taken up in the Jazz Audience Initiative study, but ought to be a focus of another project sometime, because media, as always and by definition, carries messages, and to get energy (aka buzz?) up, a presenter better figure out what media the desired audience is involved with and how that audience expects to be addressed.

Until that happens, jazz will be heard by people who find out about it from friends, neighbors, kinfolk and schoolteachers; they’ll pay most attention to what’s immediately around them; they’ll go places where they are socially comfortable to listen, hang out and interact. That’s been the pattern since jazz was born, which the basic findings of the Jazz Audience Initiative haven’t unearthed but rather reaffirm.

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Jim O’Neal, founder in 1970 of Living Blues magazine and a serious independent researcher into American roots music, is among the 59 million Americans without health insurance, and has lymph cancer. A series of benefit concerts are scheduled to raise funds for his treatments and a fund has been set up at Commerce Bank in Kansas City to accept direct donations: checks to: Jim O’Neal Blues Fund, P.O. Box 10334, Kansas City, MO 64171 or donations via Paypal to the account onealbluesfund@aol.com.

I met O’Neal and LB’s co-founder, his now ex-wife Amy Van Singel, while “interning” at Chicago’s Jazz Record Mart in the late ’60s. They established Living Blues as a decidedly non-commercial venture — not that they were trying to go broke or live poor, but it was ok 40 years ago to follow your passion, especially if it was of cultural significance, with the belief that eventually some small amount of security might follow. However, it hasn’t necessarily panned out that way.

University of Mississippi acquired the magazine in 1983, and today it remains an important chronicle of the bedrock music that has helped get people through their troubles for more than 100 years, feeding much of the rock and pop that’s accrued millions of fans and billions of dollars. Yet blues people and the music remain marginalized, and many of them act like that’s to be expected. Which is ridiculous — what great nation treats its artists, researchers and curators so callously?

O’Neal contributed to the Billboard Illustrated History of Jazz and Blues, published in 2005; I was general editor (it has since been republished with different credits, but the book’s the same). Jim’s writing is lucid, understated and exacting. He’s participated in various blues symposiums, and can be seen in Robert Mugge’s excellent documentary Hellhounds On My Trail – The Afterlife of Robert Johnson, filmed at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame when Delta blues legend Johnson was inducted as an “Early Influence” in 1986.

Here’s the schedule of benefit concerts. The music is sure to be good and heartfelt. Further info from Stackhouse-Bluesoterica, Jim O’Neal’s blog. I have no idea what Jim’s prognosis is, but I hope he gets well.

OCT. 20 SURF CLUB, HYATTSVILLE, MD With Memphis Gold and others
OCT. 28 KNUCKLEHEADS, KANSAS CITY, KANSAS Kenny Neal, Memphis Gold and
others
NOV 19 (date is tentative) BUDDY GUY’S LEGENDS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Kenny
Neal, Memphis Gold, Eddie Clearwater, Eddie Shaw, Billy Branch, Elmore James Jr., Nora Jean Bruso and others.

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