Jazz and Cultural Society storefront; photos by Barédu Ahmad/Capital Bop

In Washington DC for events surrounding the investiture of vibist Gary Burton, saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp and Jazz Foundation of America‘s executive director Wendy Oxenhorn as National Endowment of the Arts’  Jazz Masters, I visited a new grassroots venue that shows where the deep heart of jazz support lies.

The Jazz and Cultural Society is an 11-month old community center in a largely African-American neighborhood now presenting music twice a week (Wednesdays and Sundays, 6-9 pm). It’s the love-child of Dr. Alice Jamison, who owns the building, and trumpeter, artistic director and building contractor DeAndrey Howard, who spent five years renovating the formerly dilapidated storefront into a friendly, intimate, nonprofit, alcohol-free,

DeAndrey Howard announcing at JACS – CapitolBop

soul-food-available space that hosts local bands and all-age (under 12, free) audiences. Admission is $5, sodas and waters cost $1, there’s a grand piano and Hammond B-3 organ onstage, perfect sight- lines and good sound, comfortable seating at tables.

About 50 people gathered last night to hear singer Tiya Ade, with pianist Vince Smith, bassist Tim Jones and a tenor saxophonist whose name I missed but who tore through Sonny Rollins’ “Sonnymoon for Two” and was appropriately gentle on “Old Folks.” Few listeners left during the set-break, when Howard, who had been playing drums, sat down to explain to me that he has strict ideas about programming: No smooth jazz, only true jazz played by musicians who are ready, and if anyone starts blowing something like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” he walks up in front of them and casts a hard look.

DeAndrey has a long-term, go-slow vision for developing JACS’s presentations — a recent “Spoken Word” night drew a large crowd, on average younger than those usually in attendance. But whatever the age of listeners, JACS is clearly a hangout promoting socializing, relaxation and enjoyment of the original American art form.

2016 Jazz Heroes — Bios at JJAJazzAwards.org

After I posted notes to Facebook a couple days ago about President Barack Obama hosting International Jazz Day (April 30) at the White House — and also the Jazz Journalists Association’s celebrations for 27 “Jazz Heroes” in 23 U.S. cities — several commenters complained that IJD and other comparable events are top-down and not inclusive enough for the music as it really is (one “friend” even proposed that IJD is an act of jazz suppression, although the intent is to beam its big concert to 2 billion people, world-wide). My response was that initiatives like IJD and the Jazz Masters intend to reach beyond the hard-core jazz world to people who may have little knowledge, interest or access, and that if there’s not enough jazz in one’s locale, determined activism can change that.

Places like the Jazz and Culture Society — also Sistas’ Place in Brooklyn, Room 43 in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood and Elastic Arts in fashionable Logan Square, the Lilypad in Cambridge MA — prove that despite all challenges and impediments, where there’s a will there’s a way. Putting forth and preserving creative music has not been easy in the U.S. maybe ever, and increasingly less so over the past 50 years. But those of us who love to play and listen to it shouldn’t stop now. Our Jazz Masters haven’t — follow their lead.

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“I’m not as frisky as I used to be but I feel like I am,” Mavis Staples speaks the truth with a grin and a twinkle in Mavis!, an endearingly upbeat bio doc premiering on HBO tonight (Monday, February 29). Appearing early in the month for a sneak preview at Chicago’s Du Sable Museum, the 76-year-old

Mavis Staples performs with guitarist Rick Holmstrom at the preview of Mavis!, an HBO documentary, at Chicago’s DuSable Museum (FAB PHOTO).

Chicago fireball with a deep gritty voice had the vitality to fool anyone — it also overflows from her new album Livin’ On A High Note. She mixed merrily with the crowd, watched the show from a seat in the theater, then sang two songs backed by her tour band guitarist Rick Holmstrom. She still gets shouts from the house, seemingly as irrepressibly spunky as 50 years ago, when the Staple Singers stirred positive messages, gospel certainty and bluesy guitar (courtesy of her father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples) into a soundtrack for the Civil Rights movement and crossover hits of  (as Mavis says) “joy, inspiration, and good vibrations!”

Pops, Yvonne, Pervis and Mavis Staples – Jazz da Gama

Performance clips from back in the days when the Staples decided they could sing what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King preached, when Mavis flirted with Bob Dylan at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and when “Respect Yourself” was heard on AM radio across the nation, are among the joys of Mavis!, edited cogently by director Jessica Edwards with more recent footage of Mavis with Levon Helm and Jeff Tweedy, commentary by admirers Bonnie Raitt, Chuck D, Sharon Jones, writers Anthony (The Gospel Sound) Heilbut and Greg Kot, the Staples’ biographer. Mavis’ memories of growing up on Chicago’s south side with neighbors including Sam Cooke, Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler, of driving with Pops, her sisters and brother across the south when Jim Crow was still enforced, and of giving rocker anthems like “Blowing in the Wind,” “For What It’s Worth” and “The Weight” the Staples’ trademark “freedom songs” treatment are at the base, as well, of Living’ On A High Note, which dropped February 19, with Mavis working through new songs written by contemporary traditionalists including Benjamin Booker, Ben Harper, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Jon Batiste, Neko Case, Nick Cave and producer M. Ward.

Mavis, left, with her sister Yvonne ©Joe Alper Photo Collection LLC

Any independent black career in entertainment spanning the last 60 years is guaranteed to have suffered downs as well as ups — Mavis’s path has not been unimpeded, especially when she’s tried to go solo. Despite the certainty of Al Bell, her producer in the ’70s at Stax that “Aretha Franklin was no Mavis Staples,” her first albums under her own name were spotty and undercut by business shenanigans. Something similar happened when Prince produced her 1993 release The Voice. But she’s never stopped singing, with albums in the past 20 years tailored for her by Lucky Peterson and Ry Cooder, besides her own production issued by Alligator Records.

Sales success arrived when Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, a Staples’ devotee, produced You Are Not Alone, which earned Mavis a 2011 Grammy, and the 2013 followup One True Vine. Today Mavis Staples has been adopted by musicians of the new Americana. Her message ought to resound as well with activists urging Black Lives Matter.

“Action, action — who’s going to do it if I don’t do it?” she sings on Livin’ On A High Note, backed by casually exacting arrangements propelled by solid if not overpowering rhythms. From childhood Mavis Staples has projected the guileless optimism of a young idealist with the gravitas of a seasoned adult, and today she retains both qualities.  The years have inevitably touched Mavis’ vocal chords, but seldom have any except the greatest blues and soul singers used a rasp or groan so well to express the genuine, urgent conviction we must each ourselves be responsible for what happens around us. Listen to her music and watch Mavis! for a shot of the spirit that can nourish activism and lead to change.

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Paul Kantner in 2008, photo by Mike Krepka for The Chronicle

Jefferson Airplane founding member Paul Kantner’s death at age 74 on Jan. 28 has been met by a mainstream culture shrug compared to the celebratory attention paid rock stars dead in the past month including David Bowie, the Eagles’ Glenn Frey and Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots. Why?

In one hour since posting this, I’ve been besieged with Facebook comments that mourning is indeed being done and cultural note taken, like this New York Times obituary. A credible editor tells me there’s been more coverage of Kantner “by a pretty far margin” than of Frey. So, I’m pleased to stand corrected, and apologies for my glib headline.

Kantner was a visionary, a prince of the Summer of Love who in the late ’60s stirred the ears and fed the heads of an obstreperous generation. Initially a banjoist and 12-string guitar player, he was the man behind After Bathing At Baxter’s, one of the era’s most enduringly satisfying breakthrough albums.

By most testimony, Kantner was a hard guy to deal with. “A sometimes prickly, often sarcastic musician who keeps his own counsel and routinely enrages his old bandmates” is how pop music critic Joel Selvin described him in a 2008 interview in the Chronicle. In eulogies, Kantner’s former collaborators have nuanced their appreciation. As Marty Balin, the Airplane’s original impetus and most lyrical songwriter told Billboard‘s Gary Graff: “He was a hard-headed guy to get along with and wouldn’t do anybody else’s music. We had to do what he could do, so that’s what we all did eventually. We pretty much just did Paul’s music. That’s all he wanted to do.”

Jorma Kaukonen, the Airplane’s fearless guitarist, issued a statement saying, “In my opinion Paul was the catalyst that made the alchemy happen. He held our feet to the flame. He could be argumentative and contentious … he could be loving and kind … his dedication to the Airplane’s destiny as he saw it was undeniable. Over the years he and I occasionally butted heads over things that seem trivial today.”

Grace Slick, whose searing singing was the Airplane’s most obvious trademark and who had a daughter named China (b. 1971) with Kantner, simple Tweeted, “Rest in Peace my friend. Love, Grace.”

I never spoke to or met Kantner, but as a listener I think he deserves more applause. Although I caught the Airplane live during its rise in ’67 and its fall in ’71, those shows didn’t thrill me — it’s the recordings that still fuel my enthusiasm. I consider Baxter’s, the Airplane’s third album, beyond category. Upon release in ’67 it was unprecedented, attaining heights of incisiveness, conceptual sophistication and successfully experimental pop music comparable only to the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, released five months earlier. And today it still sounds hard, fresh, at moments profound.

Baxter’s is a studio creation flush of melodic drama and drive over 11 songs in five related suites, comprising soaring vocals, a sound collage, a wicked jam and exotic woodwinds arrangements. The tunes including “The Ballad of You & Me & Pooneil,” “Martha,” “Young Girl Sunday Blues,” “Wild Tyme,” “The Last Wall of the Castle,” “rejoyce,” “Watch Her Ride,” “Won’t You Try/Saturday Afternoon” are far from typical rockers or love songs, transformed by hot-wired guitar, Jack Casady’s bumptious electric bass, Spencer Dryden’s lowdown beat and the  keening singing into the highly charged, open-ended realm labeled psychedelia.

Fact is, no other American band of that musically explosive era — not the Byrds, the Mothers of Invention, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, the Doors, the Turtles, the Mamas and the Papas, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band, the Jimi Hendrix Experience or Dylan with Robbie Robertson and Nashville session players – had created a work of

After Bathing At Baxter’s. Cover art by Ron Cobb

such esthetic reach and multi-faceted unity. According to Jeff Tamarkin, author of Got A Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane and other chroniclers, Kantner was the one who worked through considerable distractions to pull it together. He was also central to the Airplane’s just as mordant if not so flowing followup Crown of Creation and the more agit-prop Volunteers before flying off to sci-fi land with his own Blows Agains the Empire, and eventually Jefferson Starship.

I stopped following Kantner’s career four decades ago, but a lot of the Airplane’s music, and most especially After Bathing at Baxter’s, is indelible in my memory. However irksome Kantner may have been, I thank him for that.

Of the Airplane/Starship crowd, perhaps no one suffered more from Kantner’s ego than Marty Balin, but he, too, attests in the value of his one-time partner’s ouevre.

“It was unique,” Balin said to Billboard. “It was part of that era, part of that time. A lot of those songs still exist, still live on, still are good.” Amen and RIP — if that’s what you want — Paul Kantner.

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Rhythm to help the sun rise — percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang. Photo collage: MARC PoKEMPNER

Saxophonist Mars Williams and band ecstatically wed holiday songs and Albert Ayler anthems at the Hungry Brain in Chicago past 12 pm December 20  — the deepest, darkest, longest night of the year — then at 6 am December 21 percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang performed a flowing, meditative duet to get the sun up, for a crowd that felt like a congregation at Constellation.

(Better than Chicago’s 606 hiking/biking trail did, cancelling its first time “Solstice Viewing” from an astronomically aligned endpoint due to “inclement weather” — in Chicago in December, really? Just a little cold rain. . .)

Drake and Zerang, extending their 25-year tradition by offering this program on three mornings and evening concerts with other collaborators, began together with hesitant, delicate, then increasingly detailed fingertip work on frame drums. Their tapping grew faster, more numerous, like raindrops, longer in phrasing and richer of timbre as Zerang took a goblet-shaped drum in hand and Drake synced lyrically, intuitively with him on his well-tuned traps set. Eventually Zerang went to his traps, too. They kept steady pace, volume controlled, dimensions of the beat shifting like kaleidoscopic patterns that didn’t repeat but grew out one into the next.

They didn’t rush to a peak, but kept constant in progress. The concert was in a dance studio with folding chairs and people sitting on the floor around the drummers, who faced windows high in a western wall behind where most of us sat. So maybe Zerang and Drake saw a patch of Chicago’s sky turn from Hopperesque street-lit to rain-streaked grey. The drummers swung looser, more physically, as if having reached a high plateau they were stretching their muscles. And then assured that the sun had indeed returned, they let the energy they’d stirred up subside. The crowd remained silent. Zerang struck his gong, once. The crowd held its hush, as those vibrations rang and died. Someone breathed. We all applauded.

Jim Baker at the Arp, Fred Lonberg-Holm, cello; photo by Robert Peterson

Just hours earlier – at the Brain around the corner and also presented by Constellation stalwart Mike Reed, to whom much credit for the verve of current cutting edge offerings is due — maverick reeds virtuoso Williams had led a no-holds-barred ensemble in a mind-boggling demonstration of the malleability of “The First Noel,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Partridge in a Pear Tree” and the like. The quaint caroling tunes proved perfectly well suited to mesh and meld with “The Truth Goes Marching In,” “Spirits” and other gloriously mad, insistent, utterly open airs from the Ayler songbook, jazz’s equivalents to the visions of William Blake.

Brassman Josh Berman brought the spirit of early jazz collective improv to his phrases, circling around and bouncing off Williams’ squeals and roars; cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and pianist/Arp synthesist Jim Baker on one side of the stage supplied a wealth of contrasts and drama; bassists Kent Kessler and Brian Sandstrom (they use other instruments, too), standing on either side of inspired drummer Steve Hunt, plucked and bowed a springy underscore to it. Their unholy fun was perhaps ironic, perhaps celebratory, most likely both, definitely orchestral and wild party appropriate.

At the break, Mars mentioned he’d tried this imaginative program a week ago in New Orleans, with New Orleans musicians — “And it was different, but good, too.” His Chicago troupe was a slightly enlarged version of the band Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and he said he’d been trying to book it in Europe, thought he’d had an engagement in Amsterdam, but then the venue said no, though they could do it in June. “This is a Christmas show!” Mars told them. For those of us who hate the season’s kitschy commercial bombast, seasonal favorites in the key of Ayler were the perfect antidote. Happy Hollydaze!

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Harris Eisenstadt; photo by Ziga Koritnik

Harris Eisenstadt, the subtle and substantive drummer/percussionist/composer, celebrates two decades of investigations and his recent projects at The Stone in NYC Sept. 1 through 6 with a circle of collaborators whose excellence seems to preclude their commerciality. That ain’t right, as Eisenstadt and the distinctly creative musicians in his ensembles (including Canada Day and Golden State, both on the Stone residency schedule) make music that’s intriguing and melodious. Why originality, a broad and deep musical vocabulary plus ease with form doesn’t grab listeners immediately is a question that’s never been satisfactorily answered.

Eisenstadt’s got rhythm, a natural sense of how time flows, how to express and enhance pulses swinging, rocking, grooving or in clavé. But rather than relying on inherent talent, he’s studied in West Africa and Cuba, and for the first set Wed. 9/2 he’ll perform Lucumi repertoire associated with the syncretic Santería religion on batá drums with John Amira, one of his teachers, and Lorne Watson.

Harris is, however, much more than a beat man. He loves to construct multi-layered, richly harmonized pieces for groups made up of such inspired improvisers as saxophonists Tony Malaby and Matt Bauder, trumpeter Nate Wooley, trombonist Jeb Bishop and vibraphonist Chris Dingman. He explains some of his thought and processes in a video about Canada Day, perhaps his signature band:

(Bassist Jason Roebke joins Bishop, Malaby and Eisenstadt in Old Growth Forest, playing two sets 9/1; bassist Adam Hopkins joins Bauder, Wooley, Dingman and Eisenstadt 9/3 celebrating the release of Canada Day IV at 8 pm, and Bishop, flutist Anna Webber, tubaist Dan Peck fill out the Canada Day Octet for a rare convening that night at 10).

He also enjoys experimenting with instrumentation, writing for the new music band Tilt Brass which features slide trumpet with alto, tenor and bass trombones (for the 10 pm set on 9/2). Mivos String Quartet gives the world premiere of his composition “Whatever Will Happen That Will Also Be” at 10 pm on 9/5.

Eisenstadt is daring enough to switch personnel mid-gig: Golden States plays two sets on 9/4, the first with clarinetist Ben Goldberg and cellist Marika Hughes joining Harris and improvising bassonist Sara Schoenbeck (his wife), the second with violinist Sam Bardfeld replacing Goldberg and cellist Chris Hoffman taking over for Hughes. He readily engages with open improv, performing with the fervent West Coast-resident (ex-New Yorker) reeds virtuoso Vinny Golia on 9/5, and with Adam Rudolph on percussion, Sylie Courvoisier on piano at 8 pm, James Hurt at 10 on 9/6.

Turning 40 on Sept. 4, Eisenstadt may be considered at the top of his game, but he’s continuously reaching for more. Now’s the time to see and hear him — so you’ll be ready for what else this steadily productive musician will arrive at and offer.

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Marc PoKempner may be best known for his photos of pre-presidential Barack Obama, Chicago’s reform mayor Harold Washington and the blues — but his jazz photography illuminates what we hear by refreshing how we see it.

Steve Coleman, center onscreen with tenor saxophonist Maria Grande, trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, and behind them Chicago guest soloists. Photo by Marc PoKempner, all rights reserved to photos in this post.

Here are some of his complex compositions in bracing color from the Pritzker Pavilion stage in Millennium Park, incorporating “The Screen” that blows up live video of the events, such as performances in the city’s current free-admission Made In Chicago: World Class Jazz series (programmed for the past 11 years by the Jazz Institute of Chicago, as it has the free Chicago Jazz Festival (coming right up, September 3 through 6).

Alto saxophonist Steve Coleman‘s sterling performance Aug. 6 was the culmination of his three-week Chicago residency (yet another Jazz Institute project)  during which he and colleagues from his octet set down to show what they do and invite others to join in at South Side school rooms, community facilities and the co-presenting University of Chicago’s Logan Center for the Arts. Coleman, b. 1956, grew up here and became a professional under the street-wise guidance of saxophonist Von Freeman; since 1979 he’s been an East Coast resident and world-traveller, prolific, exploratory, well-connected as well as independent and highly influential. In 2014 he was financially rewarded with prestigious and generous fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim and Doris Duke foundations, but money needn’t change everything. Coleman is proceeding artistically as he has for some 35 years.

Steve Coleman on screen center,  surrounded by guest soloists. At lower left, Coleman blows w/Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet, Mike Allamana, guitar. Photo by Marc PoKempner; all rights reserved.

For Made in Chicago, with bandmates trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, tenor saxophonist Maria Grande, guitarist Miles Ozaki, bassist Antony Tidd (sometimes spelled by Chicagoan Mark Harmon), drummer Sean Rickman and frequent associate Chicago guitarist and project co-coordinator Mike Allemana, Coleman wove layers of melodic lines over synchronized, syncopated, shifting, cyclical rhythms. It was quite possible to get lost in the depths. The saxophonist-composer is not, however, purposefully obscure, and launched the summer’s weekly park concerts playing bebop standards his own way, as well as chant-like riffs that tugged and tumbled with irresistible back-beats and one piece I think was a semi-classical air from an early 20th century operetta. Mesmerizing.

Dancer Mekka onstage, alto saxist Greg Ward onscreen, photo by Marc Pokempner

On Aug. 13 Greg Ward, a Chicago-bred rising star alto saxophonist a generation younger than Coleman, assembled a crack ensemble to play his swirling version of Charles Mingus’ Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, an album from 1963 originally imagined for dance. Onye Ozuzu‘s choreography for a troupe of physically diverse but all highly energized and dramatic movers seemed inspired and perfectly attuned to/interactive with the music. This performance was well-documented — but it should be repeated, and will travel well. Ward lives in NYC now; Ozuzu teaches at Chicago’s Columbia College.

Ward & band and dancer Mekka, onscreen and onstage; photo by Marc PoKempner

Onye Ozuzu troupe dancers; photos by Marc PoKempner

Larry Gray, bass; Ernie Adams, drums; Gary Bartz, alto sax; photo by Marc PoKempner

PoKempner’s vision is also vivid and informative in the most straightahead settings. Fireburning veteran alto saxophonist Gary Bartz helped celebrate Charlie Parker Month at the Jazz Showcase, delighting in the Chicago all-stars who he’d had one rehearsal with: Pianist Willie Pickens, bassist Larry Gray and drummer Ernie Adams. See the interplay, hear the moment?

Willie Pickens, piano; Gary Bartz, alto sax; Larry Gray, bass; Ernie Adams, drums; Charlie Parker smiling upon them at the Jazz Showcase; photo by Marc PoKempner

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