Richard Bona, promotion photo

Richard Bona introduces his Mandekan Cubano project at the Jazz Standard, Dec. 27 through New Year’s Eve — as I detail in my new CityArts-New York column. But from now through December 24 there’s other strong, new music to check out in, especially at Roulette in Brooklyn.

Tonight (Dec. 15) and tomorrow (Dec. 16), trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith celebrates his 70th birthday. First night with his Golden Quartet, his trio Mbira (which has put out the spare, penetrating album Dark Lady of the Sonnets) and String Quartet Plus with vocalist Thomas Buckner. Second night with that Golden Quartet (Angelika Sanchez, piano; John Lindberg, bass; Pheeroan akLaff, drums) and his Silver Orchestra. Smith — out of the deep blues and the AACM, currently teaching at California Institute of the Arts — has a compellingly rich trumpet tone and the rare range to go from near-complete abstraction to credible expansions on the electric music of Miles Davis (though he’s not doing that here).

Taylor Ho Bynum – photo credit sought. No copyright infringement intended.

(Also tonight, at the Jazz Gallery, drummer Tomas Fujiwara‘s The Hookup features guitarist Mary Halvorson and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson — mature young innovators who prove “jazz” is only “dead” if you believe it’s frozen in 1959. Saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum’s NY Hieroglyphics large ensemble is there on Dec. 16; cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum‘s Sextet celebrates the release of Apparent Distance, its new album on Dec. 17; Tony Malaby, perhaps NYC’s busiest under-valued tenor saxophonist, leads his nonet Novela with drummer John Hollenbeck on Dec. 18).

(And, Dec. 15 – 17: World premiere of “Vidas Perfectas” the Spanish-language version of Robert Ashley‘s opera “Perfect Lives,” the dryly and wryly hilarious story of a bank heist, now set on the Tex-Mex border, enacted by my friend and colleague Ned Sublette, Cuban pianist Elio Villafranca, music produced by Peter Gordon — at Irondale in Brooklyn).

At Roulette on Saturday, Dec. 17 — Eric Dolphy’s masterpiece Out To Lunch and other rare compositions by the revered inside/outside saxophonist-bass clarinetist-flutist are brought to life by all-star individualists comprising trumpeter Russ Johnson’s Quintet: alto saxist Roy Nathanson, pianist Myra Melford, bassist Brad Jones and drummer George Schuller. I heard this program two years ago at Merkin Concert Hall, and blogged about it being “in the zone.” This ensemble performed this program last week in New Haven. It is not slavish in reprising Dolphy, but it is appropriate, accurate and so continues to push the boundaries defined by expectation.

On Dec. 21, experimental intermediast Phill Niblock holds his annual Solstice Concert at Roulette — and if anyone can bring light to the darkest days of the year, Niblock can. The last time I heard him, at a Bang on a Can festival, his unique construction of digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones seemed to fill the auditorium with sonic luminosity. Niblock explains, “What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly.” Usually I find minimalism very, very boring, but Phill’s is not that.

Dec. 22: Pianist Bob Gluck, who has been doing deep research on Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band and the dawn of electric jazz in general, makes a rare trio appearance at the Gershwin Hotel with his trio, celebrating the release of their new album Returning.

John Zorn, by Andy Newcombe

And on Christmas eve, Dec. 24, tzadik John Zorn hosts and his Aleph Trio performs a nittlenach benefit for the Sixth Street Synagogue’s Center For Jewish Arts and Literacy, with
upbeat percussionist Cyro Baptista’s Banquet of the Spirits playing Zorn’s compositions from Masada Book II, Rashanim meets Hasidic New Wave’s Rabbi Greg and Frank London, and The Ayn Sof Arkestra and Bigger Band with Jake Marmer of Jazz Talmud.

There’s much more happening — thanks to everyone who’s invited me to their gigs. I’m getting to some, not all . . .

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Lists of top projects of the year are expected from arts journalism – my apologies for being so late this year, but I needed to re-visit many of the the 1200 cds and dvds I received as promotional samples from Thanksgiving 2010 – TG 2011.  Here are some favorites — top 10 I’ve liked best, and more (even at 30 more, far from exhaustive) —

Favorite New Releases, # 1 – 10

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Elliot Sharp – photo credit sought – no copyright infringement intended

No label exists for the music of composer-guitarist-saxophonist Elliott Sharp, who performed with two of his Carbon concept ensembles at Roulette in Brooklyn last week. In both quartet (Sharp on 8-string guitarbass with electronic processing, curved soprano and tenor saxes, and musicians playing electric bass, prepared harp and drums) and septet (the quartet plus second electric bassist, pianist and percussionist) formations, vernacular rock rhythms anchored advanced explorations of texture and gesture. Repetition of brief motives slid upon and beneath shifting sonic fields. Narrative arc encompassed extended and advanced instrumental techniques.

Sharp is a veteran in high standing of the late ’70s and thereafter downtown New York community of originalists, a status he substantiates by pursuing his own investigations of how sounds synchronize, collide and collude. His pieces, presented in fairly short versions (10 minutes? I wasn’t clocking) he alluded to wryly as “songs”, are derived from patterns found in nature, science and math, but his interests are in raw roars and tribalism. He’s not afraid of dissonance, indeed, it is for him what B’rer Rabbit called “the briar patch.” As sophisticated as is Sharp’s mastery of the mysteries that can be unfolded by so-called minimalism, the enveloping storm he stirs up dashes all bounds.

There are many ways to approach and perceive Sharp’s work. His music has volume levels (often, not always) and surface grooves that will please headbangers, but also complex layers of more subtly intriguing sounds and ideas. And Sharp is conscious of it all. He’s quite a good blues guitarist, for one thing (having drawn the late Hubert Sumlin, Howlin’ Wolf‘s right-hand man, into collaborations in his Terraplane band), and you see that from the way he strums and picks his broad-necked guitarbass, no matter what chords or clusters he’s getting from it. But he also is doing unusual work with overtones that he produces via a tapping technique, all the fingers of both hands on the guitar’s neck. If that’s coming from the blues, it’s rather a distance from the genre’s roots.

At Roulette, he offered only a couple of “melodies” in any conventional sense, though melody could be thought of as arising from his efforts (and in the quartet set bassist Marc Sloan put forth melodic figures, intermittently. That was interesting, too: Sloan did not keep a constant bass line going, instead playing a phrase, waiting, playing another phrase, etc., and at one point using a metal bar as a bow across his ax’s body, while drummer Joseph Trump provided the solid beat a la a loose, less frenetic Keith Moon). On his curved soprano, Sharp used continuous (circular) breathing, requiring serious concentration, and repeated a hyper-fast fingering pattern to produce the kind of full-out, throaty wail I associate with the Master Musicians of Jajouka all blowing double-reed rhaitas. Sharp also moves a lot of wind with his tenor — it has the squawk of an r&b honker, but he’s going less for tuneful, however-overblown riffs than a blur of unremitting sound. The other musicians improvise, but not jazzily. The emphasis is on collective.

So, within or from all this the effect is orchestral. There is much more going on than four people usually generate — especially considering that three of his four play “strings,” reconstructed. During the second septet (Orchestra Carbon) half of his Roulette “CARBONic Evening”, Sharp conducted some big blocky section changes, though again the instruments were layered like tectonic plates, creating new interrelationships and densities as they slipped under and over each other. At times this evoked an earthquake, breaking a crusty topside into shards yet sustaining characteristics of a given plot. In one movement, pianist Jenny Lin swept her keyboard and harpist Shelley Burgon did the same for glisses that seemed to fling open simultaneously all the doors and windows of a house in a cyclone. In a finale, which Sharp introduced as “dreaded” by his musicians, the action was all low register, earth rumbling under ocean currents. One thick stew of an ocean . . .

Sharp’s music can certainly seem foreboding, maybe anarchic or confrontational, and I bet my descriptions don’t do anything to belie that impression. But he is not nihilistic or even morbidly dark. The music he makes is ultra-deliberate, however wild it seems on first exposure, and he has labored to develop virtuosity in spheres lesser musicians only pretend to acknowledge actually exist.

I find the music he makes risky. His concerts aren’t inevitably successful; his stuff is not easy to play (I didn’t already mention that in Orchestra Carbon percussionist Danny Tunick did wonders on vibes, with a basic 4/4 groove that once in a while added added a 5/4 measure; second bassist Russ Flynn looked startled when called on to “solo” but held his own). It’s not generically easy listening, either. But it’s very rewarding, bracing and inspiring, primal and technological, monstrous yet humane.

Elliott Sharp has released some 85 albums. If I were to suggest one for starters, it might be Sharp? Monk? Sharp! Monk! because it’s a solo album that generously displays his guitarism and interpretive insights while dealing with the legacy of a canonical figure he reveres and who exemplifies the notion of “ugly beauty” from which E# does not shy.

But then you’d not be hearing Sharp’s self-designed and -realized launching points, which ain’t like Monk’s (or only like Monk’s). So I don’t know what I’d recommend. Oh, yeah: I recommend you hear him live.

Alternatively, here’s a trailer for a documentary film on Elliott Sharp. Maybe it shows better than I tell what the man and his music are about.

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My new CityArts column is about the wave of conducted orchestral improvisation currently sweeping New York City  — with Karl Berger’s Stone Workshop Orchestra and Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris’s Lucky Cheng Orchestra wrapping up their lengthy Monday night runs, Elliott Sharp reconvening Carbon at Roulette, Greg Tate’s Burnt Sugar: The Arkestra Chamber at Tammany Hall in a benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America, Adam Rudolph’s Organic Orchestra also in the mix and “soundpainter” Walter Thompson in discussion with aforementioned Dr. Morris at Columbia U’s Center for Jazz Studies (that’s tonight, November 30), leading students from Columbia U Jazz Ensembles at Miller Theater Dec. 4.

Conducting improvisation of individuals constituting large ensembles might be likened to herding cats or directing crowd scenes or arriving at consensus in the General Assembly or processing activities through chaos theory or refereeing games or . . . I don’t know, but it looks like fun and can sound spellbinding. Better witnessed live than heard on recording, usually — you want to see what’s happening. At least I do. Lots of opportunities to do that, immediately.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Christopher Buckley’s New York Times Book Review frontpage piece on And So It Goes, Charles J. Shields’ biography of Kurt Vonnegut, is as lazy a bit of evaluation as it’s possible to pick up a paycheck for. I can’t tell from it anything about Shields’ book, and nothing about Vonnegut’s many novels, either. (See “jazz” content at post’s end).

How does Buckley — whose comic novels I’ve enjoyed (esp. his first, The White House Mess) – – spend his 1500 words about a 500-page life of one of America’s best-selling fabulists of the late 20th century? He entertains us with what interests him. So we  learn in the lede  that the bio is “often hearthbreaking,” evidently because of Vonnegut’s human flaws, his “vexed” relations with women (such as the “hell on earth” — Buckley’s phrase — he shared in marriage with photographer Jill Krementz) and his attempt at suicide, perhaps in imitation of his mother (whose did indeed kill herself). We learn, too, that Vonnegut was sad, angry about the ways of the world (what satirist isn’t?) and resented being underrated by the literary elite but got rich off of actual book sales (sounds like a fair enough trade-off). We don’t find out what author Shields himself says about any of this in his long volume.

Berkeley neither tells nor shows us how Shields writes, explains why Vonnegut was read (and feted and influential) or describes the social context of the period of his greatest productivity. I hope Shields writes about that; as a reader, I’m  interested in an era that resulted in mainstream publication and public embrace of American satires and other serious, experimental, speculative, entertaining fictions by V., his pal Joseph Heller and also Pyncheon, Roth, Nabokov, Mailer, Coover, Burroughs, Brautigan, Algren, Phillip Dick, Hunter Thompson, Thomas Berger, Jerzy Kozinsky, Jerome Charyn, Ursula LeGuin, Grace Paley, Stanley Elkin, John Barth, Gore Vidal, Terry Southern, Donald Barthelme, Ishmael Reed, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Bruce Jay Friedman, Richard Condon, Tom Wolfe, arguably even such learned pundits as William F. Buckley, Jr.

It is this latter’s son, the reviewer Chris, who gets stuck on whether Kurt Vonnegut will matter forevermore (but doesn’t tell us if he thinks he should, only ties him to J.D. Salinger, relatively speaking a realist). One can only surmise Shields wrote a 500+page book because he thought his subject mattered.

I dig Vonnegut, having read most of his 14 novels from the dystopian Player Piano (1952, much indebted to Orwell and Huxley) through Timequake (1997), and I recommend the half dozen best of them highly.Vonnegut wrote clearly and directly, with a Midwestern-born sense of economy and understatement. He was comic and imaginative in a plainspoken style with an undercurrent of feeling — which might seem simple, but isn’t. Try to imitate his voice, his scruples about showing the worst sides of some protagonists and yet his compassion for ordinariness, his dry flights of fancy. In Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat’s Cradle (1963) he is hilariously ironic and unblinkingly pessimistic, deeply fatalistic and soaringly fantastical. I get continued pleasure from both those novels.

Mother Night I haven’t read for quite a while but recall for its daringly dark yet sympathetic character creation. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater also sticks in my mind as an unpredictable story about mixed-up morality.

Personally I find Slaughterhouse Five more sentimental and obvious than any of these early works, but I guess to many readers it seems most heart-felt, and it is no doubt earnest — the fire-bombing of Dresden is a searing episode. Of V’s later works, I thought Breakfast of Champions troubling, skipped Slapstick, remember little of Jailbird and avoided Deadeye Dick. Galapagos was diverting, Bluebeard mystifying and Hocus Pocus not very memorable, but I am firmly in favor of Timequake. To me Vonnegut’s summing up joins Heller’s Portrait of an Artist, As an Old Man and Charles Bukowski’s Pulp as the finest, funniest recapitulations of careers writing fiction I’ve read.

Image © Edie Vonnegut

I’ve met Vonnegut’s daughter Edie, and like her paintings of Domestic Goddesses,  and once met the man himself. I was standing behind him in a line for food after a preview showing of Robert Altman’s Kansas City. I introduced myself as a fan, and answered his question about what I do as “write about jazz.” Vonnegut, whom I remember looking sort of hang-dog, said he had played clarinet, and loved jazz. He added that he had tried to introduce the music to high school students while he was teaching at a high school in Cape Cod, but couldn’t get them interested.

I said I knew of only one bit of writing about music in his novels, one of my favorite scenes: When space traveller Malachi Constant finds himself stuck for an indeterminable amount of time in the caves of Mercury, he takes solace from the beautiful songs, light patterns and messages (“I am here, I am here, I am here” and “So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are”) of the harmoniums. Vonnegut seemed pleased I could quote that.

I haven’t read Shields’ bio, and might not, but it and Kurt Vonnegut, too, deserve better from the Times than being tossed off as topics rather beneath the reviewer’s engagement.

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Paul Motian – JazzProfiles

Drummer Paul Motian died November 22 at age 80. He was a unique sound organizer and constant actor on the jazz scene in New York City for nearly 60 years. He spoke to me for Down Beat in 1986 — an interview I offer in slightly different form below. Of course it doesn’t account for 15 more years of music, much of which has been stellar. But Motian’s voice — onrushing, exacting, broken occasionally by his barking laugh, may come through:

Drummer Paul Motian, like many a jazz player, lives in the eternal present. “When there were bohemians, I was a bohemian; when there were beatniks, I was a beatnik; when you were a hippie, I was a hippie, when you were a yippie, I was a yippie! I’ve been through the whole thing and even before there were bohemians, there was something else – I don’t know what it was – and I was that.”

He laughs dryly but enthusiastically, comfortable in his upper West Side of Manhattan apartment, hoping perhaps that his yuppie days are coming so he can decide whether or not to buy his soon-to-be-condo rooms with a view. The piano Keith Jarrett grew up on fills Motian’s living space, along with a partially setup drum kit, some stereo equipment he’s unhappy with, severeal healthy plants, records, shee music and well worn, friendly furniture. One acquires things, even living in the moment. Maybe what’s surprising to Motian, now that he thinks about it, is the extent of his past.

It’s been an amazingly brief but music-filled three decades since Motian made his first record – “with a band made up of Bob Dorough, the piano player, a bass player named Al Cotton, trumpeter Warren Fitzgerald, Hal Stein, a sax player, and Bob, uh, Newman, I think tenor player, in the summer of ’55, for Progressive Records, in New York and New Jersey” – not long after his Navy discharge. Could it have been so long ago he met the pianist Bill Evans, worked behind clarinetists Tony Scott and Jerry Wald, traveled with Oscar Pettiford’s big band, drummed with everybody at Birdland, at Small’s Paradise and the Café Bohemia, formed the trio with Evans and Scott Lafaro, joined the Jazz Composers Guild’s October Revolution, played in groups led by Arlo Guthrie, Charles Lloyd, Paul Bley and Keith Jarrett, sparked Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra and Carla Bley’s Escalator Over The Hill, began composing and recording, first for ECM and for Soul Note, too, under his own name, fronting his own combos, all the while maintaining his own highly poetic sound? Can’t be: check how open, alert and at the breaking point his most recent albums are. (It Should’ve Happened A Long Time Ago with guitarist Bill Frisell and tenorist Joe Lovano, Jack of Clubs with saxist Jim Pepper and bassist Ed Schuller added to make five. Taste and momentum have long been Motian’s long suits: his love of music and the beat – “I was talking to Dewey Redman,” he mentions, “and he said it’s like a blessing and a curse at the same time” – goes back to his childhood.

“I was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island; my parents moved there when I was one or two years old.” Both his folks were Armenians born in Turkey. His father was much older than his mother, and had been hired by her father to travel to Havana – where she’d gone from the Middle East – to marry, bring her to the States, then have the union annulled. Instead, the marriage took.

Besides his swarthiness, Motian retains his ancestry by calling his publishing company Yazgol Music, after his grandmother. “They spoke Armenian and Turkish at home, but the language I know is a mixture of both. I can only spak it with people from the same province as my parents.

“I heard Armenian music, Arabic music, Egyptian, Turkish, all on 78s on a wind-up phonograph when I was a kid. I like the Turkish stuff; it seems to be more earthy, have more bottom. But what got me started playing . . .?

“Actually,” he shrugs, “I started on guitar, but it didn’t go. I signed up on the street with a cat recruiting kids to take lessons. I was attracted because I like cowboy movies – the guy puts his guitar around his neck, strums, sings – that looks like fun, I thought. I want to do that. But when I went to the class, here were 10 or 15 kids with guitars across their laps – Hawaiian guitars, right? I was real disappointed. I split, took the guitar home, put a rope around it, put it around my neck, took the metal bridge off it, and just started strumming. That was the end of that.

“The drum thing started because there was a drummer in the neighborhood and I used to hand out with his brother, who was my age. This drummer was a little older, like 20, and when he played people used to gather in the street on his stoop to listen. I got into that. I used to go over there a lot, and I liked what I heard. I really liked it, and before you knew it I was taking lessons with this guy. I was about 12. Then I found a more legitimate teacher, then another one, and just grew from that.

“I played in the school band, starting around seventh grade, and in high school  played in the marching band. Also, they had a dance band and I got into that – two or three trumpets, a couple of trombones. I got out of high school in ’49, started gigging around Providence in parts, playin’ tunes. I got involved with a band that toured New England, playing stock arrangements, Glenn Miller stuff, and Dorseyes, yeah; and they used to have big bands come to theaters in those days. I caught Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, Gene Krupa – I used to go backstage for autographs.

These were the days of critical disputes over the merits of bebop vs. Dixieland. Paul recalls hearing a Charlie Parker record in ’48 or ’49. “I didn’t really know what was happening, but it sounded good to me. It sounded different – interesting and exciting. And I heard Symphony Sid’s radio program from Birdland, sent away for 78 rpm records with Max Roach, Bud Powell. I still didn’t know about the construction of music, but it had me, it grabbed me. I remember driving down to New York one time: the smoke-filled rooms – I was 16 or so – Birdland was packed, went across the street and saw Dizzy Gillespie with his big band opposite George Shearing’s quintet with Denzil Best. It was great.

“I went into the Navy because the Korean War was happening, and I found out if you joined the Navy you could go to music school in Washington, D.C. I missed out on the school because I got sick, and when I got out of the hospital they shipped me out, so I spent a couple of years going back and forth from the Mediterranean – but playin’ in the band. And coming out, I stayed in New York. I was in Brooklyn. That’s the start of my professional playing. I was already 24 or 25.

“There used to be a lot of sessions in New York,” Motian continues. “There were chances to play. At the Open Door, near where NYU is now, they had sessions during the week and on the weekend Monk or Bird. One night Arthur Taylor didn’t show up and Bob Reisner, who was running the sessions, said, ‘Go get your drums, you can play with Thelonious. I ran home, got the drums, ran back, played with Thelonious, and he gave me $10 at the end of the night. I was the happiest guy in the world. Fantastic.

“In those days I was out every night looking for places to play, and I found them. I met Bill Evans right around that time, out on an audition for Jerry Wald – he had a big band for a while, and then a sextet – I found about at the musicians union. Bill was also auditioning. We hit it off right away, both got the gig and went on the road. Then Bill and I hooked up with Tony Scott and hooked up with Don Elliott. We did some records with him – and with Jimmy Knepper, Milt Hinton, Henry Grimes, Sahib Shihab. There’s one of me and Bill and Scott LaFaro playing with Tony Scott that’s never been released. And Lennie Tristano’s record company just put out a second that Henry and I did with Lennie back then.

“I learned so much from all of that, man. I worked a lot with Lennie, actually. One time we played the Half Note for 10 weeks. Think about that today: 10 weeks in the same club? He kept me, but he used a different bass player every week: Paul Chambers, Teddy Kotick, Peter Ind, Jimmy Garrison, Henry Grimes, Whitey Mitchell, Red Mitchell. They all played differently, of course, but I loved all those people, and I never thought about making any adjustments for any of them. I just played what was happening.

“So Bill and I stayed close. We used to play every day in his place, which was tiny. This is before his first record, before he played with Miles. We’d play tunes, or he’d write a tune. I told you about my first record; I think the second one was either Bill’s trio, New Conception, or a George Russell record where we played “All About Rosie.” Yeah, that: I think Bill’s trio with Kotick was the third record I did. I listen to some of those records now, and I’m really proud to have been part of them.

“I saw someone the other day who I recognized from years ago, I don’t know his name, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember you – you were the house drummer at Birdland.’ I didn’t remember it like that. I worked some gigs there. But when he said that, I realized I played there a lot. With Bill Evans opposite Basie – what a night that was – oh, man! I played there with Mose Allison, with Oscar Pettiford, with Chris Connor, with Zoot Sims, with Sonny Rollins once. I got to play with Coltrane in there, because Elvin was late. In those days Pee Wee Marquette, the doorman, used to say, ‘We don’t want no lulls between the bands – no lulls, no lulls.’ Elvin’s late, Pee Wee says ‘Paul, will you play with John?’ ‘Oh no, I can’t, I don’t want to play with John.’  They talked me into it. That was a real challenge. I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to sound like Elvin.’ And he was so strong, his presence was so strong, it was hard not to sound like that.”

Did Motian sit down and try to determine what he did want to play to make himself distinctive and original? Or did he just sit and play it?

“Yeah, just played,” he recalls. “At times it seemed hard. I had a hard time getting with Scott LaFaro at the very beginning,

’cause I wasn’t used to the way he played – they said in those days, ‘This guy sounds like a guitar player.’ We didn’t click right away, it wasn’t like, ‘Ah, magic!’ Personally we were good friends; remember, he hadn’t been playing that long either, just a couple years at that point. It took a little time, but we hooked up, hooked up good. We each made adjustments, maybe, but we didn’t talk about it. We didn’t even rehearse much. Playin’, okay, but rehearsals, no.”

Hearing the Evans trio’s records today, one may become aware of their narrative detail – what subtly nuanced stories those three told – and the reorganization of the piano trio into a more equal unit.

“We knew we were doing something that was different, new, good and valid,” Motian testifies. “It was like three people being one voice instead of a piano with bass and drums accompaniment. We talked about that. And at the end of our Vanguard gig, when we recorded, we were talking about how we really reached a peak, we’ve got to be sure we work more, play more. But Scott died that Fourth of July weekend, the same year. Bill stopped playing for a while. I took some other gigs. Around the same time things started changing in New York. Albert Ayler was here, Paul Bley, the Jazz Composers Guild started – I wanted to be part of that. And stuff with Bill seemed at a standstill. We were doing the same stuff over and over. I quit Bill in California, when we were on the road.

“I’ll never forgive myself for that, but at the same time I couldn’t make it anymore. We were at Shelly Manne’s club, with Chuck Israels. The first night was great. The second night was a little not so great, and the third night. . . Everyone was telling me I was too loud, so I played softer and softer until I felt like I wasn’t even playing. I got pissed off and I quit. Bill said, ‘Please, don’t do this. ‘ But I paid my own way back to New York. What a horrible thing to do. If anyone ever did that to me now. . . Anyway, in New Ork I got back into the scene. I was in a band in the Village with Paul Bley, John Gilmore, Albert Ayler and Gary Peacock. We make two, five dollars a night.”

Didn’t time explode in the mid ’60s? Sure, but Motian simply kept his fingers on the intangible pulse. As he explains his method now, “I’m discovering the music as I do it. Playing a couple of nights ago, in Frankfort, with Dewey, Charlie Haden and Baikida Carroll, I did some technical things on the drum set I’d never done before, and I realized it at the moment or just after. The discovery as you do it, that’s what turns me on. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I go out there, nothing is pre-planned. I’m hoping I’m going to turn myself on, and that’s going to turn the drum solo or playing on, and it’s going to turn itself on and make me do something even better, make me grow.

“You ask about my characteristics. Well, I would say I have a sound. I do have sound that’s me, that’s my sound, and 90 percent of the time I can get that sound on any drum set. It’s the tuning, and I don’t have any preset about it, I’m just using my ears. Each drum has a different tonality, and I use my ears to get that which is pleasing to me and my ears. That’s my sound – plus the cymbal I’ve been playing on for 30 years or so.”

Keith Jarrett was the next leader to benefit from Motian’s sound, from his first LP as a trio leader (Life Between the Exit Signs, with Haden, too) to his last with a quintet (Mysteries, with Redman, Haden and Guilhermo Franco),

including such highlights as The Survivor’s Suite (quartet as above, without Franco). Though Paul did night club work for bread during the lean rock-impact years (“A waiter at the Vanguard asked me one night, ‘Paul, would you work with the Beatles?’ and I said, ‘Hell no, are you kidding me, man?'”), he didn’t exactly suffer. Due to a connection with Alan Arkin’s bass-playing brother Bob, Motian backed Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock and on the road, alternating weekends between the folky and Jarrett’s associate Charles Lloyd. These were literally riotous times, which were captured by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. There, under a red and black banner held by Haden and arranger Carla Bley, stands Paul between clarinetist Perry Robinson and trombonist Roswell Rudd, among Gato Barbieri, Don Cherry, Mike Mantler, Bob Northern, Howard Johnson, Andrew Cyrille and guitarist Sam Brown.

Motian knows just where he waws on the nights Bobby Kennedy was murdered and Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot dead, during the Chicago Democratic convention of ’68 and other calamitous events. (Besides having sharp recall, he’s kept a detailed gig log from an early point in

“But as far as the political thing goes, I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough. I’m into the music. The politics were Charlie’s stuff; I don’t say I don’t agree with it, ’cause I’m more on his side than any other.” Maybe Motian just happened to be around to cut “For a Free Portugal” for Haden’s Closeness album of duets, but titles such as “American Indian: Song of Sitting Bull,” “Inspiration from a Vietnamese Lullaby” and versons of Ornette Coleman’s “War Orphans” and Haden’s “Song for Che” on Motian’s own early ECM recordings suggests his political consciousness was no source of shame.

Working with Jarrett – “That sort of disintegrated; it was inevitable we would break up” – Motian had met Manfred Eicher and Thomas Stowsand (who became his European agent) of ECM. “On our first Europe tour, they were like roadies,” he says. His sound must have appealed to Eicher; certainly Motian’s brush work, his crisp stick patterns and his emphasis on the higher surfaces (rather than the bass drum) of the traps has been well served by ECM’s studio and engineers. “ECM offered me a record. I was still with Keith, but I was writing, My first record, Conception Vessel, had different people playing different things: Keith for one track, a trio with Sam Brown and Charlie, another track with [violinist] Leroy Jenkins, Charlie and [flutist] Becky Friend.

“Then Sam Brown told me about another guitarist, Paul Metzke, whom he liked; why didn’t we try something with two guitars? I thought it was a good idea, I wanted to do that, that was Tribute. By then Keith’s thing was over; the Tin Palace on the Bowery was happening, there were a lot of new people I hadn’t heard around and I didn’t know who I wanted, so I started going out, listening. I heard people I liked and talked to them; some were willing, some weren’t. I liked (saxophonist] Charles Brackeen, his playing, so we got together, and [bassist] David Izenzon – I’d known him for years. I got into putting together my own stuff; our album’s called Dance. Le Voyage was my next trio record, with Brackeen and [bassist] J.F. Jenny-Clark. I had Arild Anderson play bass on one tour. Then in 1980, summer, somehow it wasn’t working anymore. I want to changre, get out of that bass/saxophone/drum format. I wanted guitars. I played a gig with Pat Metheny and he recommended Bill Frisell. We’ve been together almost five years now, and the rest of the band came by people suggersting other people.

“I think Tim Berne brought up Ed Schuller’s name – if we play a tune with changes, Eddie’s cool, and if we play free, he’s cool: he can cover. Marc Johnson [bassist], I think, recommended Joe Lovano, and after I got with him, I wanted another one (tenor saxophonist]. Mack Goldsbury did one French tour with me – he’s from Texas and had that sound, but it didn’t quite work out. Then I found Jim Pepper, and we’ve been doing that.

“I also had in the back of my mind this thing about the saxophone and guitar and drums, without a bass. I never had the nerve to pull it off or try it. Then I did try it, and I liked it, it worked out. Now I’m working mostly with the trio, but the quintet’s still together when there’s money and interest in it. But it’s so simple with the trio, the transportation aspect, the money. I don’t even carry drums. The three of us can fit in one cab.”

This may sound like Motian’s typical flexibility and practicality, but he’s got a new attitude about his career, now accepting the drums – and his urge to compose – and laughing about at least some of the dues paying that attends most jazz endeavors. “I found out it’s possible to do your own and other stuff. You don’t have to be exclusive. Like, I’m playing with [pianist] Marilyn Crispell at Carnegie Recital Hall – she was up here rehearsing yesterday; that’s going to be nice. Or this thing with Charlie, Dewey and Baikida, and I’m going to Canada for a couple of weeks with David Friesen. In the past, when people called, I wouldn’t take their gigs, because everything I did took me away from my stuff, and it took me too long to get back into it, writing tunes, playing and rehearsing. But I’ve changed. I just made a record for ECM with Paul Bley, John Surman and Bill Frisetll. First time I’ve played with Bley in 20 years.

“I like melody, lyrics, tunes and songs more and more,” Motian admits. “Writing is not easy for me. I’ll have an idea, or sit at a piano – I’m a terrible pianist – and play until I do something I like, then write that down and keep it in mind. It’s not easy for me because I’m not knowledgeable, but I trust my ears and my intuition, and that’s the right way.

“That’s something I learned on piano, that taught me something about drums. I was taking piano lessons, playing a piece of music, looking down at my hands and I was really playing the piece. I remember thinking, ‘Whose hands are those? They can’t be mine.’ That’s great when that happens; you trust yourself. You know, you’re playing with someone and you’re thinking, ‘I should change the tempo now, I should anticipate. . . ‘ Or you’re playing a tune and it’s ending and you think, ‘Okay, I should end this now . . .’ No, it’s cool, just sit back and trust yourself. When the right time for that to happen is happening you’ll know it and you’ll just do it. Wait, trust yourself, it will end when the time comes. Now I do that, I trust myself.”

Of course he does. His past prove that many others have, and his present attests to his success.

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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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Bennie Maupin, artist provided photo. Credit south. No copyright infringement intended.

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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