Archives for June 15, 2005

Today is the first day of this new web log about jazz and, as its subtitle proclaims, other matters. At the top of the right-hand column you will find a sort of manifesto, below that information about the proprietor. Farther down the right-hand column under “Doug’s Picks” are things I like that I hope you will like. I want this to be not merely a blog, but a diablog, so please respond with reactions. Your participation will be at least half the fun. There is an e-mail address under “Contact” in the right-hand column. My intention is to post every weekday, and weekends when the spirit or events move me.
Launching this venture, I would like to thank Terry Teachout, who suggested blogging as an alternative or supplement to the print straitjacket, and ArtsJournal commander Doug McLennan, who agreed to give Rifftides a home and helped me build it. Doug’s a wizard.

In yesterday’s New York Times, Ben Ratliff performed the amazing critical leap of predicting that a musical event will be uneventful. Ratliff wrote of a JVC Jazz Festival-New York tribute: “Tomorrow (that’s this evening, 6/15–DR) there is a concert blurrily called ‘Piano Masters Salute Piano Legends,’ with four different pianists playing Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Thelonious Monk. How boring.” The pianists, for those of you who missed them in Ratliff’s piece because he didn’t bother to name them, are Randy Weston, Uri Caine, Kenny Barron and Geri Allen. I can’t recall being bored by any of them, but Ratliff and I may have different thresholds of boredom.
This raises an interesting critical conundrum for Mr. Ratliff. Does he skip the concert, having decided that it’s not worth hearing? Does he cover it to give it a fair chance? If he covers it and likes it, does he say so in print, thereby letting the air out of his reputation as a seer? In any case, does he continue his new policy of deciding the merits of music yet unheard? Rifftides readers who attend, please let us know by the end of the week about the accuracy of Ratliff’s clairvoyance. Journalism ethicists, I wouldn’t mind hearing from you, too.

One of the pleasures of New York as recently as the 1980s was to schlep around Greenwich Village and drop into small clubs for casual listening. An evening of music, even in major clubs, did not require a reservation secured by a credit card, and a second mortgage to fund the occasion. Today, there is a minor renaissance of listening spots that at least hint at the fifties, sixties and seventies when there were places like the Five Spot, Slug’s,The Guitar, Bradley’s and–somewhat farther afield, down in the meat packing district–the blessed Half Note. My publisher, Malcolm Harris, his wife Karen and I took an evening out of our recent whirlwind book promotion visit to New York to dine in the midst of the youth explosion at Pastis (recommended for the food and the nonstop floor show provided by the crowd of early-twenties hangers-out at the bar) and then prowl in search of music.

The Village Vanguard was sold out, full of advance planners and second mortgagers eager to hear Lou Donaldson. We wandered three blocks down the street and found a 1920s garage converted into a jazz club. Even adjusting for inflation, the Garage Restaurant at 7th Avenue South near Grove is no throwback to the last golden age of jazz in New York–not in the fiscal sense. A couple of drinks can make twenty dollars disappear. But there is no cover and no minimum, and it is possible even on a populous Saturday night to commandeer a stool at the bar, focus your hearing through the hilarity and be treated to a superior jazz performance.
We listened to the Nick Moran trio with bassist Marco Panascia and pianist Eduardo Withrington. Moran is a good young guitarist with a lyrical bebop bent and an alert harmonic faculty. He would benefit from self-editing, but it’s a rare young improviser who would not. Unless you don’t want to hear the piano, try for a spot at the bar that is not under the enormous copper air vent, a relic of a cooking area long dismantled. The metal seems to block or absorb the piano’s sonority.

Next up was the bright young tenor saxophonist Virginia Mayhew, a Garage regular. She was at the helm of a pianoless quartet, a good idea under the acoustic circumstances. Mayhew’s playing was so far advanced from the last time I heard her that I was riveted by her expansive tenor sound, flow of ideas, humor, use of space, and swing that is by turns loping and hard-driving. This pleasant brunette, lean as a model, is one of the most interesting mainstream players of her generation. She has rhythm in her bones, and her exchanges with drummer Victor Jones are amiable conversations. When Jones solos, he makes melodies. Occasionally in her improvising, Mayhew reorients the listener by returning to or referring to the melody, an act of generosity she performed this night during an adventurous turn on Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation.” During a slow dalliance with “Deep in a Dream,” I wondered if she was thinking of Sinatra.

The Garage floor show is provided not by the customers but by a pair of young veteran bartenders, David Coss and Mary Ann Stevenson, who deftly dodge each other, occasionally dance together, hug now and then, josh with the counter dwellers and seem to have the time of their lives while slinging the sauce at top speed. Coss moved from Seattle to the Village thirteen years ago. In his spare time, he books the club. Sunday nights, he gets out from behind the bar and onto the bandstand. Next trip, I hope to find that he sings with the band as well as he performs with Ms. Stevenson under the copper overhang. Overhang is what I did at Garage. The loss of sleep was worth it.

Next time: The Take Five book party at Elaine’s.

If you live in Dallas, Fort Worth, northeast Texas or southern Oklahoma, you may want to tune into KETR-FM 88.9 tonight at 8:00. I’ll be on with Bruce Tater and Mark Chapman to discuss Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond. Sorry, the station doesn’t stream its programs on the web. I’ll talk about Desmond with Claudia Russell on KSDS, San Diego, at 6:oo pm PDT on Sunday, June 26. KSDS does stream. You’ll find it here. Several radio appearances are coming up when I’m in New York at the end of next week. I’ll let you know details soon.