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I play a community music. I go home, and my family is pretty naive about what I do. They're like, "Can you take out your horn and play that record you just did?" I try to explain to them that it's really not that kind of music, that if I play just a single line on my horn, you'll have no idea what it sounds like. They'll be saying, "Why not? Can't you play it? Don't you know your own music?" But it's a communal thing. You have to be there. In the community.
During Jeremy Lin's dizzying rise from obscurity to fame, before the New York Knick's promotion department had even printed the fan posters, the point guard had been held up as poster boy for a variety of things. Christian faithful pointed to his unabashed faith, fashioning him the successor to quarterback Tim Tebow on a touched-by-god run. Author Gish Jen reflected on his success with a New York Times Op-Ed. piece titled "Asian Men Can Jump." And Lin has become, for many, the newest little guy who can topple giants (in the NBA, that works even if you're 6'3").
But for me the message in the story of this undrafted benchwarmer who was about to be waived from his third team, a guy who two weeks ago was hoping to simply play in the NBA and now, suddenly, can harbor legitimate dreams of lasting stardom, is simply the fact that his ability to do what he's done--to score 20-plus points in six straight games, distribute 13 assists in a seventh, beat the Lakers in crunch time and then go one better by burying Toronto with a three-pointer in the waning second of regulation--eluded the many coaches, scouts and experts charged with evaluating talent and achievement potential.
]]> Jen's Times piece, which is actually a nuanced expression of changing and complex Chinese values, points out that in Taiwan, "there is an alternate track for college applications. Students can apply via the standard track, emphasizing grades and scores, but they can also apply via a track emphasizing their special gifts or contributions." It's worth appreciating the effects of Lin's week aside from his impressive stats line and his newly secure place on the Knicks roster. He's simply made the players around him work harder, commit more deeply to the team, and perform better. He realized the logic and promise of a scheme devised by a beleaguered coach, who was quite likely on the chopping block; he single-handedly made it work. He's jumpstarted the energy surrounding an underachieving team, benefiting the moods of many New Yorkers and the bottom lines of everyone from team and network executives down to ticket scalpers. All that from a guy who was passed over by scouts and coaches for what I'm sure looked like legitimate reasons based on a tightly construed, by-the-numbers system of evaluation geared solely toward narrow short-term outcomes. Best to think twice about such systems, which can never recognize true talent and desire and dedication. Once his team was struggling and beset by injuries, once he got the call from the bench, Lin highlighted precisely what education reformers need to keep in mind. That numbers tell only part of the story. That the only true predictor is opportunity.]]>Chico Freeman called me one day and said, "C'mon, let me take you to this place."
So we went down to Studio RivBea on Bond Street. There were all these crazy-looking cats. They just looked like madmen wearing all kinds of crazy hats. Sam looked like Fu Man Chu. I'm like, "What scene is this, and who are these people." The music didn't sound like anything I had ever heard in my life. Sam's big-band music was some of the most original shit that I had ever heard. And when it was played right, it was just stunning. It was all written out. Sam was very organized. He had trunks of music. Trunks full of it. It was never properly documented. Even those records we did ["Inspiration" (1999) and "Culimnation" (2000), both produced by Coleman] were nothing compared to what all that music represented.
Click on Winter Issue to Preview
Aside from his prowess as a drummer, his restless need to invent on the bandstand and his compassionate embrace of musical partners young and old, famous and not, Paul Motian, who died very early this morning at 80, was a real person. The kind you need to meet and sit with a while to understand. And then you get up and leave, feeling better and wiser in ways you can't yet process. Motian didn't want to meet with me for the July Cultural Conversation piece I wrote about him for The Wall Street Journal back in July. His stalwart and wonderful publicist, Tina Pelikan, finessed my way in. Motian told me up front how unhappy he was with his decision to do another interview. ("What haven't I said yet?") Then, two hours later, I could scarcely get him to stop his soft-spoken, stop-start, painterly flow of words, which were not entirely unlike his drumming.
I don't know if I'll write anything new in commemoration of Motian's life and career. I do know that I'm reflecting on it today, and that I welcome any news of memorial concerts or gatherings. Here's that Journal piece again:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461104576459980345305492.html
]]>THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JULY 26, 2011
CULTURAL CONVERSATION with Paul Motian
Master of Time, Defier of Age
By LARRY BLUMENFELD
New York
'Everything fell in my lap, sort of," said Paul Motian, sitting in an office of ECM, a music label he's been associated with for nearly half his 80 years. "I never tried to push things." Mr. Motian referred to the arc of his career. But he might as well have meant his manner of playing drums, so relaxed and unforced are his iterations of swinging time.
Whether within a trio or a larger ensemble, such as the septet he will bring to the Village Vanguard here beginning Tuesday, Mr. Motian is both a peaceful presence and a locus of swirling power. A few cymbal strikes are all he needs to indicate velocity and flow. He employs moments of silence with equal emphasis as bass-drum kicks. He distills jazz's pulses into pithy implication through rhythmic phrases that sound personal. By now, he is both eminence and enigma: Everyone wants to play with him; no one can play like him.
"What turns me on isn't technique," he said. "It's the sound of the drums, the way they're tuned. I can play one beat on a tom-tom, and that might set me off. One sound leads to another. It just grows."
Mr. Motian grew in up in Providence, R.I., listening to the odd-metered music of his parents' native Turkey on the family's Victrola, and hearing visiting swing bands. By the end of high school, he was playing stock arrangements of Glenn Miller tunes in a touring band.
After his discharge from the Navy in 1954, Mr. Motian moved to Manhattan's East Village. He studied some piano and composition at Manhattan School of Music, but quit to begin performing. Mr. Motian has kept work diaries--bandleaders, dates, fees--for most of his life. Their pages filled up early, dotted with heroic names: saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, trumpeter Roy Eldridge, pianist Lennie Tristano.
Some things did fall into his lap. When drummer Arthur Taylor was a no-show for pianist Thelonious Monk's date one night in the mid-1950s at a club called The Open Door, promoter Bob Reisner asked Mr. Motian if he wanted to sit in. "I ran back home, got my drums," he said, "and there I was with Monk. He paid me $10, and when he got up and danced during the set, I was never more proud." (He'd play another week with Mr. Monk, in Boston, in 1960.)
When he wasn't playing, Mr. Motian studied bebop's master drummers. "Kenny Clarke was my top choice," he said. "His feel was so swinging, yet with such little effort." He focused also on the quintet co-led by drummer Max Roach and trumpeter Clifford Brown. "I'd hear that band and then go home and try to do what Max did. That's what happens until you develop your own thing."
Mr. Motian's own thing began forming in a trio led by pianist Bill Evans, with, at its peak, bassist Scott LaFaro. "It wasn't a piano and rhythm section," he said. "It was three playing as one. We talked about making music that would stand the test of time." Indeed, 1961's "Sunday at the Village Vanguard" is an enduring classic. (Mr. Motian is partial to that trio's 1959 "Portrait in Jazz.") Mr. LaFaro died in a car accident in 1961. By 1964, Mr. Motian had grown disenchanted. "It seemed like I was playing softer and softer until I was barely there at all," he said. He left in the middle of a West Coast engagement.
Important as it was, Mr. Motian's work with Evans gave little indication of where his playing was headed. His style transformed quickly into something far more abstract--free, for the most part, of jazz's technical conventions and often punctuated with silences--urged on especially through work with pianists Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett. (Mr. Motian joined Mr. Jarrett's group in 1967, and stayed with him nearly a decade.)
An invitation from ECM founder Manfred Eicher to record his own project motivated Mr. Motian to buy an old piano from Mr. Jarrett, and to resume keyboard study. "Conception Vessel" (1973) announced the melodic charms and peculiar forms of Mr. Motian's own compositions, which form a good deal of his current repertoire.
"The first time I had my own band, I was 45 years old," he said. By 1984, he'd distilled a trio, with tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano and guitarist Bill Frisell, from his working quintet. For nearly 30 years, this piano-free group upended notions about the trio format as breathtakingly as did Evans's group, yet in an entirely different way. "It taught me what it means to play ideas," Mr. Lovano said.
"That trio evolved beyond what I could have envisioned," Mr. Motian said. "But it has run its course." Which means an even greater focus on Mr. Motian's ever-evolving palette of ensembles--"each with its own function," he said--that fuel his relationship with two labels, ECM and Winter + Winter. His Vanguard septet this week is an offshoot of his Paul Motian Band, which features two saxophones and three guitars, formerly his Electric Bebop Band. "I originally put that band together to take bebop tunes and destroy them," he said. It has grown into a vehicle for expansive takes on his own compositions. Mr. Motian's Trio 2000, usually with bassist Larry Grenadier and tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, is frequently augmented, most notably by pianist Masabumi Kikuchi, with whom Mr. Motian has found intimate rapport. (Last year's "Live at the Village Vanguard, Volume 3" offers stirring testimony.) The trio documented on last year's "Lost in a Dream," with tenor saxophonist Chris Potter and pianist Jason Moran, has since given way to one with Mr. Kikuchi and alto saxophonist Greg Osby. Two new CDs extend longstanding relationships: "The Windmills of Your Mind" features Mr. Frisell; the collective quartet on "Live at Birdland" includes alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, who first shared a stage with Mr. Motian in 1957.
Mr. Motian regularly works with musicians half his age; for them, the experience is transformative. "He decided to abandon everything except his aesthetic instinct," said Mr. Potter, 40, who has played with Mr. Motian for 20 years. "That's something to aspire to." Tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry, 38, who is in Mr. Motian's septet, recalled first playing with him a decade ago. "As soon as he responded musically, all my planning went out the window. What he played was so profound it demanded something different, something greater."
Several years ago, Mr. Motian swore off touring. "I simply got burned out," he said. "I haven't stepped on a plane in eight years. The truth is, I rarely leave Manhattan." He appears to have all the work he needs at home. Especially at the Village Vanguard. Mr. Motian's appearance there a half-century ago with Evans forever enshrined him at the club. Yet he's a singular Vanguard fixture in the here-and-now, on his own terms. This week's engagement will be his 12th Vanguard appearance in just the past year. He'll return in August, September and November, leading three different groups.
"It never seems like too much," Vanguard owner Lorraine Gordon said, "because each time he brings in something totally different from the time before."
If there's a guiding philosophy behind Mr. Motian's playing, he cites only restraint. "After many years, I realized that less is more," he said. "And as I get older, I think even more less adds up to even more."
Mr. Blumenfeld writes about jazz for the Journal.
]]>
Just a bit of reflection on hurtling balls of precipitation and anniversaries.
A email on Thursday from Long Island's Stephen Talkhouse informed me that, with Irene (then still a bona fide hurricane) on its way, last weekend's shows by Trombone Shorty and his Orleans Avenue band would be cancelled.
"Having lived through Katrina," the promoter explained,
"they have opted to head home."
A New Orleans musician heading back home from New York to avoid a hurricane--to feel safe. Irony is only a few letters removed from Irene. It turned out that, for New Yorkers, Irene wasn't the monster it appeared to be--and could well have been. Not to dismiss the floods, blackouts, damages, costs, and even, up and down the East Coast, several losses of lives. But we were braced for something far more devastating and it looked real.
In my Brooklyn neighborhood, save for a few fallen trees, Irene was mostly just heavy rains and howling winds while holed up inside. But don't head to a hardware store the day before a forecast hurricane. There is the smell of panic. Flashlights? Gone. D Batteries? Sold out. Duct tape? Shoulda come yesterday.
Only days earlier, I'd been rethinking my plans, considering heading down to NOLA for what I hesitate to call an "anniversary" of the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the precipitating event of the levee failures that caused the flood of 2005, leading to a manmade disaster of unprecedented and long-running proportion. It felt odd not to be covering the day for a newspaper or magazine, as I have each of the past six years, save for the one, three years ago, when my boy Sam was newborn. For me, the 29th is more than an anniversary or commemoration; rather, it has been a peg to draw national (and editors') attention to both the ongoing needs and glories of a city I've come to hold as dear as the family with which I was holed up.
]]> Yet the wise parent in me stayed in Brooklyn, preparing despite the impending storm for Sam's third birthday (and a fine Saturday bash it was). The smart husband in me was alongside Erica (another time-marker: 20 years together, Wednesday), getting ready to hunker down in case the lights went off and all hell broke lose. And even as the reporter in me kept focusing on what happened in New Orleans in 2005, what has and hasn't happened since, and how much I don't want all eyes to avert now that more than 5 years have passed, I found myself transfixed in the present tense on a swirling ball moving up the East Coast toward my home. This brought back odd, slightly faded memories of 2005, when we all tracked Katrina with a sense of impending doom, and of 2008, when I'd steal time in the hospital lounge after Sam's troubled delivery, as he was just gaining his strength, to catch CNN glimpses of Hurricane Gustav bearing down on New Orleans, like some ball of cruelty hurtling toward a city just getting back on its feet.There is no comparison, wasn't even one when we thought this might be a Category Three direct hit. I mean to imply none regarding Irene. New York City is not routinely threatened by hurricanes. It is not surrounded by faulty levees waiting for provocation to fail. Say what you will about Obama: We no longer have a president who turns blind eyes to suffering and appoints willfully incompetent agency directors. Plus, we all know that NYC would ever be left to suffer as NOLA was. Just wouldn't happen that way, such is the nature of inequity.
The mostly swift and smart responses to Irene's havoc can be credited to many sources, among them lessons learned from New Orleans. I know that's true for me. As I have so many times in so many ways since my immersion in New Orleans life and culture, in both good times and bad, I found myself wiser and better for what I've learned in NOLA. The friends I've made and the folks I've interviewed were the ones who stood by whispering in my ear as I backed up my computer, gassed up my car, loaded up on bottled water and dry food, and thought about my family's and friends' needs. And when, having done what I could, I relaxed and let Nature take its course.
We're fine, as you must by now know. It's the 29th, and I'm here in Brooklyn, no loss of light or power, and no loss of passion for the things I care about.
It's been six years since the floods that resulted from the levee failures following Katrina. If you're in New Orleans, here are two among the many events going on today:
--6TH ANNUAL NEW ORLEANS KATRINA COMMEMORATION MARCH SECONDLINE
MONDAY, AUGUST 29, 2011 10:00 AM
We are commemorating the first Monday since Monday, August 29, 2005.
Our theme this year: IN LOVING MEMORY OF LOST LOVED ONES. We will always miss our loved ones and we miss our family that is dispersed across America.
The purposes and outcomes of this annual event include:
1. To remember and honor friends, family, and neighbors who died in Hurricane Katrina.
2. To support Katrina Survivors in the healing process by providing a community outlet for expression and collective remembrance.
3. To re-issue our calls for a just recovery for those who are still struggling with access to affordable housing, quality schools, good jobs, safe streets, and proper health care
4. To educate and inform the community about the ongoing issues affecting us, including environmental concerns such as wetland restoration and environmental justice and the resulting health problems.
5. To appeal to the State of Louisiana to make August 29th a state holiday.
Rain or Shine, on Monday, August 29, 2011, the New Orleans Katrina Commemoration Foundation is hosting the sixth annual Katrina Commemoration March Second line. We are marching for our future as American citizens rebuilding our lives. We as a community we must always remember our lost loved ones and those life altering events. The Commemoration events begin 10:00am at the Lower 9th Ward Levee Breach located at Jourdan and North Galvez Avenue across the Industrial Canal. Following the Levee Breach healing ceremony; the March Secondline begins at 10:45am.
The March Secondline will move down St. Claude Avenue to Hunter's Field on the corner of North Claiborne Avenue and St. Bernard Avenue. 1:00 pm at Hunter's Field, we will have the Commemoration Program. There is a HipHop fundraiser at the Who Dat Daiquiri Shop in Metairie on Friday 26 August 2011 9:00pm. That's Tonight!!
The Commemoration Programming will be hosted by Q93's Wild Wayne and Sister Sunni Patterson. The community speakers include Brother Jerome Smith of Tamborine and Fan, National Wildlife Federation and many others. The following artist will perform Rantz Davis, Truth Universal, Sunni Patterson, B Streezy, Detroit, Iris P, Pervella, Monteco, Blaze, Caren Green, Shakespeare the Poet, Sess 4-5, Young Sino, Nuthin' But Fire Boys, Q93, FM98, 102.9FM, 106.7FM, WBOK. Scholastic Read and Rise will be giving away books to kids in grade K through 8th. St. Anna's Mission Bus will be there! We look forward to seeing you there!
########
Contact: Ms. U. Glover or Mr. D. Warren
New Orleans Katrina Commemoration Foundation
1840 North Claiborne Avenue New Orleans Louisiana 70116
504.328.3158
504.342.6977 katrinacommemoration.org
--
Contacts:
Adam Norris, Director of Public Relations
The University of New Orleans
(504) 280-6939, amnorris@uno.edu
Allison Plyer, Chief Demographer and Deputy Director
Greater New Orleans Community Data Center
allisonp@gnocdc.org
Media Advisory
What: Mayor Landrieu will speak at Brookings Institution Press Book Launch and Forum
When: Monday, August 29, 2011, 1:00-4:30 p.m., reception from 4:30-5:30 p.m.
Where: Lindy Boggs International Conference Center, 2045 Lakeshore Dr., Room 152
Details: The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) and the University of New Orleans (UNO) will host a forum to introduce the new book Resilience and Opportunity: Lessons from the U.S. Gulf Coast after Katrina and Rita from the Brookings Institution Press and discuss its implications.
Multiple disasters since 2005, including Hurricane Irene's fury on the Eastern seaboard, place new urgency on understanding the lessons learned from Katrina and Rita. Resilience and Opportunity presents the complex lessons of the 2005 storms and their aftermath. It offers the first comprehensive look at how the Gulf Coast communities are reemerging from the disasters with resilience and determination. Resilience and Opportunity, featuring many New Orleans researchers, documents the unprecedented civic revival that has breathed energy and accountability into reforms and has the potential to make the region more resilient to future catastrophes.
Welcome: Joe King, Acting Chancellor, and Susan Krantz, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, UNO
Introduction: Amy Liu, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
New Orleans Index at Six: Allison Plyer, Deputy Director, GNOCDC
Panel Discussion: State and Future of Policy Reforms
Moderator: Andre Perry, Loyola University
John Renne, The University of New Orleans
Karen DeSalvo, City of New Orleans
Luceia LeDoux, Baptist Community Ministries
David Marcello, Tulane University
Panel Discussion: State and Future of Civil Society and Community Engagement
Moderator: Flozell Daniels, Foundation for Louisiana
Richard Mizelle, Florida State University
Linetta Gilbert, Ford Foundation and The Declaration Initiative
Silas Lee, Xavier University
Reilly Morse, Mississippi Center for Justice
Rich McCline, Southern University at Baton Rouge
Moderated conversation with the Honorable Mitchell J. Landrieu
Amy Liu, Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution
]]>
A quarterly magazine takes some time till publication. So here's my piece in the Winter issue of JAZZIZ, inspired by Sonny Rollins and, sort of, by my brother Leslie.
Blu Notes
Winter 2010
Sonny Skies
by Larry Blumenfeld
Pull quote: "It was a metaphysical
experience, not a musical experience. You had to be there."
It was the best thing I'd ever done for my older brother Leslie -- a seventh-row
seat to Sonny Rollins 80th birthday concert at New York's Beacon Theater in
September. Back in the '70s, when I was listening to Billy Joel, Leslie was into
modern jazz. I couldn't wrap my head around the music he listened to then -- Dexter
Gordon, Thelonious Monk, Rollins. A few years later, while he was off studying
music at college, I grew to appreciate those LPs enough to steal them before
heading off for my sophomore year at Boston University.
Though he
earns his living in computers in Jacksonville, Florida, Leslie remains a
dedicated reedman, playing on weekends in wine bars and restaurants. (I like
him best on tenor sax, Rollins' instrument of choice.) But he had never heard
Rollins in person. So with Leslie turning 50 and Rollins turning 80, I figured
it was time to get the former in front of the latter. Who knew how many more
chances there'd be? I sprung for concert and plane tickets.
Rollins no longer performs in clubs. The Beacon show was his first in New York in three years, making it the sort of hot ticket rare these days in jazz. Rollins was billed with his working quintet, plus trumpeter Roy Hargrove, guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Christian McBride and "surprise special guests." Since Rollins' last New York concert, at Carnegie Hall, featured him in trio with McBride and drummer Roy Haynes, I suspected Haynes would be among the surprises. At least I hoped so. At Carnegie, Haynes and Rollins had maintained a musical dialogue loose as a barbershop conversation. For all his harmonic genius, Rollins' rhythmic prowess (and an adventurousness grounded in that ability) has been just as elemental to the brilliance of his epic solos. Haynes' driving and utterly organic brand of swing time -- which has anchored music by Louis Armstrong through Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and today's best -- is the perfect complement. I couldn't wait for another taste of that hookup. I happened to interview Haynes for an article about jazz families the day before the Rollins show. He confirmed that he'd be on the date. "And there's someone else, too," he said, eyes agleam. "Not gonna say who, though."
]]> In the days leading up to the show, I listened to some of Rollins' recordings: "Saxophone Colossus," the Prestige classic he recorded at 25; "The Bridge," which marked his return after a three-year hiatus, in 1962; and "Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert," recorded at a Boston venue just four days after Rollins evacuated his apartment near the World Trade Center in 2001. On that last one, his bold, blistering sound, always potent with feeling, sounded just a bit more emotional. "Maybe music can help," he told the audience then. "I don't know. We have to try something."The Beacon Theater show was scheduled for September 10, one day shy of the ninth anniversary of 9/11. The site of the former World Trade Center was still largely a hole in the ground, around which swirled vague and angry controversies. Protests were mounting against the proposed Park51 Islamic Cultural Center, the so-called "Ground Zero mosque." Some preacher in Florida was organizing a Koran-burning event. We needed still to "try something."
Despite the duck-like hobble with which Rollins took the Beacon stage, I don't know why I worried about his vitality. He played for more than two hours, fierce from the outset, strongest at show's end. If he couldn't walk that well, he managed, once he began blowing, to pretty much dance. Rollins' working band, including longtime bassist Bob Cranshaw, guitarist Russell Malone, drummer Kobie Watkins and percussionist Sammy Figueroa, performed with precision and well-calibrated drive, especially on the opener, a new Rollins tune titled "Patanjali." When Rollins soloed, it was all there, intact: the bold and bristling tone, the ceaseless, unfurling ingenuity, and the focus and force of breath to carry it all through. And he was just getting started.
Maybe his selection of the ballad, "I Can't Get Started" was intended as an ironic comment. More likely, Rollins chose it as an accommodating vehicle for Roy Hargrove's lovely flugelhorn tone. "Rain Check," a Billy Strayhorn tune Rollins recorded in 1955, made for fast-grooving traded 8's between he and Hargrove. The trumpeter, who is precisely half Rollins' age, was up to the task, projecting just the right balance of fiery pride and sincere humility as Rollins tossed him one challenge after another.
Jim Hall was unfortunately still tuning his instrument a third of the way into "In a Sentimental Mood," yet he managed a lovely solo toward the end. Better -- beautiful, actually -- was a bossa-based "If Ever I Would Leave You," which he and Rollins recorded in 1962.
When Christian McBride came onstage, sure enough, there was Roy Haynes along with him. Their trio section began with Duke Ellington's "In My Solitude," which Rollins essayed with all sorts of harmonic license at a stately pace until Haynes jumped in for a solo, the brilliant bombast of which erased any thought that, at 85, he had lost any degree of vigor or daring.
The three began Rollins' "Sonnymoon for Two." Rollins stepped up to the mic and said, "There's someone backstage who's got his horn, and he wants to wish me a happy birthday." I guessed it was tenor saxophonist Jimmy Heath, who I'd seen in the audience earlier. The band vamped, facing stage left. No one. Pregnant pause. Finally, out strode Ornette Coleman. He bowed gently to Rollins, then listened intently as Rollins messed masterfully with both the key and meter of the 12-bar blues.
Coleman eased in with almost otherworldly gentleness and little formal relationship to what had come before. Yet it all fit and flowed. Haynes didn't miss a beat, literally. McBride seemed momentarily flustered, then found his footing. After Coleman had walked out, a little voice in my head had begun fairly screaming: "Rollins and Coleman have never performed in public before! This is historic!" That voice wisely shut up. This was happening now, before me. And it got even better.
Rollins began to play. The best I can do to describe what he did is this: Once Coleman had played his version of Rollins, Rollins offered up Sonny playing Ornette playing Sonny. Something like that, anyway. Rollins had entered the key-less space of Coleman's music, fully free of the blues form of his tune. He played in something close to Coleman's ineluctable dialect, yet through his own familiar voice.
Days later cornetist Graham Haynes, Roy's son, gave me his analysis. "Sonny and Roy and Christian were pushing the 12-bar blues to its furthest abstraction," he said. "My dad and Sonny both have ways of opening up rhythmic possibilities that seem to defy time and space. They do this on a regular basis. That's where they live. But Ornette is going to play Ornette. Melodically, harmonically, he opened things up to the point where what they had been doing was neutralized. It became something else. The rhythms were not covered up, but they become illusory. The most fascinating thing about that episode is that someone could have recorded it, and it would sound great, but it would never approach what actually happened. It was a metaphysical experience, not a musical experience. You had to be there."
I was. So was Leslie.
If Rollins' encore, his beloved calypso "St. Thomas," performed with all the musicians except Coleman, was an anticlimax, it nevertheless served as closing ritual for an experience with meaningful overtones. The next morning, September 11th, I watched a plane, maybe Leslie's, slide across a sky as cloudlessly blue as the one pierced by terrorism nine years ago. Yet I wasn't thinking about destruction. My head was filled with something beautiful and inscrutable heard the night before, born of creativity.
]]>I've been back from Barcelona for more than a week, but it seems like yesterday.
If Barcelona is one of the world's most alluring cities--and it is--its Voll-Damm International Jazz Festival must be counted as one of the world's most distinctive and complete jazz events.
The audacious architectural achievements of Gaudí, the searching experimentalism of early works at the Picasso Museum, and the unexpected culinary inventions (what, for instance, Catalan chef Isma Prados can do with tomatoes, strawberries, and sardines) all figure into a novel context for great and adventurous music, and for concert-going in general. The "tenderness sutras," as he calls them, offered by saxophonist Charles Lloyd and his terrific quartet seemed especially radiant there, and both the intimacy and the ostentation of Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés's music were perfectly matched by his setting, the Palau de Música. Not to mention the graciousness of artistic director Joan Anton Cararach, a former music critic himself, his exceedingly lovely wife, Doan Manfugas, whose deeply felt ideas about music owe to her early training in Havana's finest conservatories, and the suave General Director Tito Ramoneda, whose dream of a cultural event linking his city with both New York and Rio de Janeiro seems just crazy enough to work.
]]> In Barcelona, you can sense a true intellectual bent and a finely honed political awareness: When Duke Ellington performed his Second Sacred Concert there in 1969, at the height of Franco's regime, a Catalan choir sang the word "freedom" and meant it, felt it, the way Ellington intended.So that was the perfect backdrop too, for me to speak for an hour in a lecture titled: "Saving the Second Line: The Fight for New Orleans Jazz Culture Since the Flood" at the invitation of by the U.S. Embassy in Spain, in connection with the festival. The audience felt that too, shared my passion. They just got it, and their savvy questions proved it.
So I was able to bring New Orleans along with me--not to mention Erica and little Sam.
So I'm finally stepping up as a sibling, doing something deep and grand: Flying my older brother Leslie, who happens to play tenor saxophone, to New York so that he can sit tomorrow night in the seventh row of the Beacon Theater, at the feet of Sonny Rollins. The occasion? Leslie's 50th and Sonny' 80th birthdays.
No saxophonist should walk through life without at least once listening in Rollins's presence. Hell, no human should. There is so much spiritual presence embedded in Rollins's sound, so much intellectual wonder invested in how he treats a melody, so much musical history referenced in his solos, and yet more--philosophy, politics, and a sense of social purpose--reflected in simply how he conducts himself on and off the stage.
Here's an interview I did with Rollins for The Village Voice, during which we dealt mostly with extra-musical affairs, including for instance why music is an appropriate response to terror. I'd also suggest this lovely piece, full of reminiscences of the Harlem in which Rollins grew up, by my colleague Marc Myers in The Wall Street Journal.
]]>Tonight's "Tavis
Smiley Reports" primetime special, "New Orleans: Been in the Storm Too
Long," is produced in collaboration with Academy-Award-winning director
Jonathan Demme. It premieres at 8pm EST/7pm Central on PBS.
Both Demme and Smiley focused on New Orleans with depth and sensitivity in 2005, after the flood, and they've both stayed on the storyline. (With so much attention rightly paid to the oil spill just now, it's my hope that the still-relevant story of the flood's aftermath is not forgotten--rather, that the two narratives are folded together to highlight many core issues in common.)
This collaboration owes in part to Demme's ongoing documentary project "Right to Return." Back in 2008, Smiley gave over a week of his airtime to Demme's material and to the post-Katrina narrative in New Orleans. This New York Times piece by Felicia R. Lee offers more background.) On tonight's special, Smiley interviews, among others: musicians Ellis and Branford Marsalis, and Lenny Kravitz; and actors Wendell Pierce and John Goodman (both of whom have central roles in HBO's "Treme"). Pierce, in particular, has seeded important redevelopment work in his native Pontchartrain Park.
]]> I ran into Demme on Mardi Gras Day, when he was tracking Big Chief Donald Harrison of Congo Nation (among the families his documentary focuses on is the Harrisons): I hope some of that glorious footage is in the program.You can find more information on tonight's show here.
]]>Harvey Pekar was pissed at me. He told me so himself but I'd seen it coming because, as a parting gift, the outgoing editor of the jazz magazine I'd just taken the reins of had repeated to Harvey my criticisms--all legitimate--of his article about Jazz at Lincoln Center, knowing it would raise his substantial ire. I was "one of those Wynton sycophants," he raged, another "spineless suckup" looking for power and missing the real music. Harvey was wrong. I mean, he was right about the real music--Harvey was more often than not right about music; he had great taste and the knowledge to place it in context. But he was wrong about me: I agreed with his point of view, I just had some issues with the way he'd expressed it in print, with his research or lack thereof.
There was no such thing as a short conversation with Harvey. And boy do I miss that today. Not just because there will be no more conversations with Harvey -- in truth, there haven't been for me in a decade, since I left that gig (yet now there's not even the possibility of another one with him)--but also because the world I've now entered, one filled with emails and texts but little in the way of actual human discourse, is a place Harvey predicted, along with a dozen other dour but spot-on prophecies. Harvey's shit could bring you down if you let it, sure, but it was usually accurate.
Harvey was again incorrect a few calls after that first one, when he called me a "garden variety Jew" in a combative tone when I queried his commentary about Sephardic musical themes. (I think he was reviewing something by Joe Maneri, but it could have been John Zorn. Or maybe neither.) When I explained that my grandfather on my mother's side came from Greece, that I'd been Bar Mitzvahed in a Sephardic temple, landing on t's, not s's at the ends of words, he seemed convinced of my legitimacy as a Jew (if not an editor) of some distinction.
Things went more smoothly after that.
]]> The intern in the Florida office still had to transcribe into computer files the stuff Harvey would fax from the Cleveland Veterans Administration hospital where he worked as a file clerk. And he'd call, excitedly, always late on a Friday night or early on a Sunday morning, upset that a certain Albert Ayler reissue had not arrived in the mail or troubled by the inadequate wordcount for his pending review. (Years later, when the "American Splendor" film came out, I wondered if I was part of the composite asshole editor implied in a scene wherein Harvey can't find his Ornette Coleman recording, and needed to file; I'd have been honored to be another asshole provoking Harvey's anxiety, so rich and productive was his worry.)I was working on a shoestring budget then and working too much, smoking too much weed, and trying to see what I could get away with in a jazz magazine till they took the thing away. Once Harvey sensed my mission--to avoid at all costs the same stuff every other jazz magazine was and had been doing--and once I upped his paltry pay, he was a willing accomplice. When I put together an issue devoted to Duke Ellington, I asked Harvey to do a comic strip. He came up with one, illustrated by his longtime collaborator Gary Dumm, about trumpeter Arthur Whetsol titled "Duke's Forgotten Voice." Harvey was like that: He'd hone in on forgotten or neglected voices and give them treatments that were memorable and attentive. Aside from Don Byron's essay on Duke's subversive musical tendencies, was the best thing in that issue.
You know, rethinking, maybe Harvey was right. About me being a garden variety Jew, that is. I think he might have been too. Harvey was never really one for pretense, you know. And whatever is good enough for Harvey--who made artful suffering out of everyday life and faced genuine suffering with artful heroism and rolled the stuff of everyday conversation into bona fide art--is more than enough for me.
]]>The first, for the website Truthdig, talks about brass bands and street musicians in New Orleans--especially some city ordinances that make my blood boil and some signs of reform by city council and Mayor Landrieu that would warm my heart.
The second, for The Wall Street Journal, celebrates the near-half-century legacy of Jazzmobile, a nonprofit that, if you live in New York City, has likely rolled into your 'hood.
]]>The first, for the website Truthdig, talks about brass bands and street musicians in New Orleans--especially some city ordinances that make my blood boil and some signs of reform by city council and Mayor Landrieu that would warm my heart.
The second, for The Wall Street Journal, celebrates the near-half-century legacy of Jazzmobile, a nonprofit that, if you live in New York City, has likely rolled into your 'hood.
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