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Jazz Beyond Jazz

Howard Mandel's Urban Improvisation

Jazz beats the virus online

Chicago presenters of jazz and new music, and journalists from Madrid to the Bay Area, vocalist Kurt Elling, trumpeter Orbert Davis and pianist Lafayette Gilchrist discussed how they’ve transcended coronavirus-restrictions on live performances with innovative methods to sustain their communities of musicians and listeners, as well as their own enterprises were in two Zoom panels I moderated last week .

The Show Goes On – Online on February 18 convened Chris Anderson of the Fulton Street Collective, trumpeter Davis of Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, vocalist extraordinaire Elling and his business partner Bryan Farina, Marguerite Horberg of HotHouse, Olivia Junell of Experimental Sound Studio and Steve Rashid of Studio 5 under the auspices of the Jazz Institute of Chicago. They’ve all produced live-streams, pitched to international as well as local audiences, achieving unprecedented results.

ESS started quickly last March with its Quarantine Concerts, and Fulton Street Collective’s Jazz Art Record Collective quickly followed suit; HotHouseGlobal has mounted five nights of music connecting Havana and Chicago musicians, among other far-reaching programs; Chicago Jazz Philharmonic engaged eager music students from the Cuban province Matanzas and launched and International Masters of Improvisation Workshop; Studio 5 conceptualized and has realized the very entertaining Into the Mist, an unique combination of website design and real-time, interactive Zoom play as a 90-minute immersive and interactive event, offered once a week (next on March 5);

Elling sang from his porch and the otherwise locked-down Green Mill, one of his performances from isolation reaching 180,000 listeners!

The Jazz Journalists Association (of which I’m president) followed up on Feb. 21 with Reviewing “Live” in the Age of Covid. Are these live-streams being reviewed? Do special techniques apply? Is there a market for such analysis? Is live-streaming changing jazz journalism, and here to stay?

This panel comprised freelance writers Jordannah Elizabeth (Baltimore-based), Paul de Barros (Seattle) and Andy Gilbert (Berkeley — both those latter two JJA board members); Seattle Times news editor/former features editor Melissa Davis; publicist Ann Braithwaite (of Boston-area Braithwaite & Katz Communications); Henry Wong, director of the Baltimore listening room An die Musik, which in past months has produced some 200 live-stream performances, and Gilchrist, who has live-streamed from An die Musik (video remains available for $5) as well as the Village Vanguard. Also speaking up were Spanish jazz journalist Mirian Arbalejo, MinnPost Artscape columnist Pamela Espeland, KNKX Jazz Northwest program host Jim Wilke and Amsterdam News writer Ron Scott, who said he felt it imperative to report more than ever on issues regarding social justice for Black Americans.

We learned that coverage of live-stream performances from mainstream media almost entirely consists of advance listings rather than reviews; that traditional print publications continue to grapple with declining revenues and content wells (there’s more news than can fit) besides digital platform challenges; that live-streams, unlike in-person performances, give reviewers the opportunity to re-watch but may also be judged on video production values; that individuals, professional or not, use social media to comment on live-streams in real time — and that news of the pandemic, social and political turmoil throughout 2020 have led many writers as well as musicians and indeed people in all professions to refocus, as best they can.

Panelists in these Zooms discussions were unfailingly candid and thoughtful (there may be something about staring at yourself in a grid with your peers that encourages best self-projection). No one indulged in whining about how life’s so different now that we’ve been victimized by Covid-19. Everyone was intent on people over profits, creating, producing, promoting and commenting seriously on musicians’ and venues’ online efforts in order to serve the art form in its many dimensions, most specifically addressing its local/global communities and constituents.

Almost a dozen presenters, more than half a dozen music journalists and media-purveyors, three musical artists (and special thanks to Lafayette for representing the concerns of many on the Show Zoom — view the JJA 2020 Awards Winners Live-Streaming party to hear others’ takes on the issues). They represent the grit, imagination, energetic devotion to their labors and the spirit fundamental to keeping not just jazz but all our arts alive today. Without exception they predict that hybrid models of presentation melding some sorts of live-streaming with some sorts of live, in-person shows (when those can resume), are the future. Hear them out! Or in the more urgent onscreen-version of radio/tv’s “Stay tuned” — Keep close watch!

Future Jazz past: Hal Willner, circa 1992

The death of funny, smart, idiosyncratic, unique music producer Hal Willner at age 64 saddens me.

Hal Willner, photo by  David Andrako

We were East Village neighbors in the go-go ’90s, flush with ideas to try in the future. Here’s my entry about him from Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999).

CONCEPT PRODUCER AS VISIONARY

“My projects happen mostly by accident,” claims Hal Willner, soundtrack producer of Robert Altman’s films including Short Cuts, based on short stories by the late American “dirty realist” writer Raymond Carver and Kansas City, a paean to jazz during that town’s Depression era apotheosis. Incidents in Carver’s fiction, Altman’s films and Willner’s total-concept soundtrack design might seem to share only temporal connection, yet nothing in any of them occurs out of nowhere.

Considering Willner’s unusual accomplishments — he’s longtime music director of the television staple Saturday Night Live, the man behind the musical guests romantic sax star David Sanborn introduced on the short-lived but fondly remembered tv program Night Music, and producer of albums in which rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and new music notables have emerged from obscurity, made career comebacks, or stretched their talents in unpredictable directions — “mostly by accident” is no explanation.

 Willner had prepared, perhaps unconsciously, to realize music in narrative terms — and vice versa — since his youthful fascination with old-time radio shows in which stories were told through sound. As a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s, he appreciated “concept albums with beginnings, middles and ends that somehow transcended the music and became almost visual.””And you know the producer Joel Dorn, right?” he asked me on afternoon, sitting in his apartment on Avenue B in New York City’s East Village. “I had an internship with him in Philadelphia, and he used to make records like this with jazz artists. Remember the spin-through-the-radio-dial on Yusef Lateef’s Part Of The Search, and the story behind Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Case Of The 3-Sided Dream in Audio Color? I think it’s a real loss nobody makes albums like that anymore.”

These albums foreshadowed Willner’s creation of a genre-defying genre in which re-interpretations of a noted composer’s work by widely diverse musicians reveal unexpected implications.

His ouevre as a concept album producer includes tributes to Federico Fellini’s film composer (Amacord Nino Rota),  iconic iconoclast Thelonious Monk (That’s The Way I Feel Now),  Kurt Weill (Lost In The Stars), songs from vintage Disney films (Stay Awake) and the brooding bassist Charles Mingus (Weird Nightmare).

Willner also produced career peaks for rock chanteuse Marianne Faithful (Broken English Strange Weather and Easy Come, Easy Go) and song-speaker Leonard Cohen (the live concert for the documentary I’m Your Man), albums of readings by poet Allen Ginsberg and satirist William Burroughs set to hip downtownesque music; works by admired if lesser-known jazz musicians (the Beaver Harris-Don Pullen 360 Degree Music Society’s A Well-Kept Secret) and a restoration of long lost tapes by comic social critic Lenny Bruce. The list is the wish fulfillment of a man with broad tastes, an encyclopedic memory for jazz and pop, a sense of larger structures (naturally, he’s listened to classical European chamber and symphonic music), and very good connections.

Willner’s unplanned way began in high school.

“I was into radio programs like Inner Sanctum and the Orson Welles productions, then I got interested in records like the Beatles’ white album, the first Blood Sweat and Tears, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Miles Davis’s Sketches Of Spain. They took me somewhere, they were like journeys through dreams. In fact, I was going to call the Monk album Monk’s Nightmare until Steve Lacy suggested the title we used.”

Anyway, “Weird Nightmare” was the title of a Charles Mingus composition, and perfectly fit Willner’s 1992 Mingus production.

  “Mingus is a logical choice for me to make — his music works with this kind of approach. I try not to think of too many possible subjects, and I’ve never done anyone who’s not dead, because then you have a complete career to work with. I’d like to do an Ellington; it would be a great excuse to immerse myself in his music, study it and become more expert.” That’s why he did Kurt Weill.

“I originally intended just to examine the music of Nino Rota with one artist,” Wilner says of his first cast-of-hundreds album production. “But I got a vision in the night to do it with Carla Bley, Jaki [Byard] and Muhal Richard Abrams. Then Chris Stein and Deborah Harry [of the band Blondie] wanted to be involved, and when the record came out it got all this attention. I thought ‘This is going to be my record production high water mark. It won’t get better than this.’

One of Harry Partch’s instruments

“Then after Monk died I was sitting in Carnegie Hall at some jazz fest memorial to Monk, getting freaked that Terry Adams from NRBQ and Donald Fagen from Steely Dan and all these other people who really had a love of Monk weren’t performing, and that the jazz people who were playing Monk’s music were making it boring. Monk’s music was never boring. When Oscar Peterson came on, that was it — he had even put Monk down. So there was my Monk idea. And after that, the question was ‘Who else?'”

Willner has by now called on stylists as disparate as New Orleans’ voice of r&b Aaron Neville and East Village punk saxophonist/composer John Zorn to participate on his albums, which come off as less eclectic than visionary. He’s mixed music scene such outsiders as the self-styled “Peruvian songbird” Yma Sumac with such insiders as Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. He’s effected arguably obvious but never before attempted pairings such as soprano saxist Steve Lacy with drummer Elvin Jones, and surprisingly powerful meetings such singer Betty Carter and saxophonist Branford Marsalis with blues bassist Willie Dixon. He’s provided invaluable a&r suggestions to bands with their own distinctive sounds — from Los Angeles barrio homeboys Los Lobos to NYC downtown new jazz vaudevillians the Jazz Passengers.

Many of Willner’s mixes and matches immediately announce themselves as inspired. Sting sings Weill’s “Mac The Knife.” The Marsalis brothers play a medley of melodies from early Fellini. Sun Ra’s Arkestra swings “Pink Elephants On Parade” from Dumbo.

On the Mingus tribute, arrangements by black rock guitar star Vernon Reid, reedist Henry Threadgill and pianist Geri Allen, among others, use the justly intoned musical instruments of the late composer Harry Partch, some under portions of Mingus’s exaggerated autobiography read by Robbie (the Band) Robertson, novelist Hubert {Last Exit To Brooklyn) Selby Jr. and gangsta rapper Chuck D.

Willner says his ideas are always at the service of undervalued or misapprehended 20th century classics.

“I look for music that has influenced or can influence different types of musicians, and music that can break down so it flows from Todd Rundgren to solo Randy Weston to Zorn with Arto Lindsay and Wayne Horvitz to Terry Adams to Eugene Chadbourne’s Shockabilly to [New Orleans’ guitarist] Mark Bingham with John Scofield and Steve Swallow, without seeming like a novelty,” he says. “That’s one of my favorite sequences on the Monk album. Check it out.”

Sheer pleasure in making the never-before happen seems to motivate Willner, who for most of the ’80s and ’90s lived modestly next door to Charlie Parker’s final home in Manhattan’s East Village. His personal style is self-depreciating, and he brings a fan’s respect to his productions’ subjects. That’s generally won him kudos from critical purists, though some pop musicians feel a need to defend their versions of beloved jazz against possible complaint.

Cover of Weird Nightmare

“I like Hal’s records; whether or not serious-minded people approve of them is irrelevant,” said Elvis Costello, who sang the challenging title track of Willner’s Mingus tribute Weird Nightmare. “There’s a place for different interpretations of great music; having different musicians keep the music alive by playing it cannot diminish any version which to some ears is truer or closer to the original. Whatever comes out of my work on the Mingus record will be because of my love of his music — not to promote myself.”

Same with the producer, really, though he doesn’t completely abjure the spotlight. On Monk’s “Misterioso,” after tenor saxist Johnny Griffin blows a fervent solo over Carla Bley’s swirling orchestral chart, Hal Willner himself chimes in, credited as The Voice of Death.

Luminous PoKempner pix of Sun Ra’s celestial music

Marshall Allen, ageless 94, leads the Sun Ra Arkestra

If you liked Black Panther, listen to the music that introduced and embodies Afro-Futurism. Photojournalist Marc PoKempner captured a bit of the celestial magic of the Sun Ra Arkestra (est. circa 1954) during its November touchdown in New Orleans’s Music Box Village. This picturesque venue is an assembly of little houses which MPoK says “each has some sound producing capability – bells, chimes, horns, drums.” (Above: Marshall Allen, Arkestra leader since 1995. All photos here Marc PoKempner copyright 2018).

Arkestra at the Music House Village. (This wide angle shot looks best in larger display. Either “un-pinch” or use “Command” and the + sign to open image, view HD details.)

Marc continues, “It’s next to the bridge on the upper side of the Industrial Canal, surrounded by a fence made of recycled corrugated metal.  Since last time I was there, they’ve added loads of interesting lighting, and smoke generators that add to the magical atmosphere – perfect for the Arkestra.”

Vincent Chance, who plays French horn in the Arkestra (and elsewhere), commented, “The concerts there were pretty amazing. The audience was knocked out by both shows, we played two days there and had two days before to familiarize ourselves with the instruments from their installations.” Preparation is good for liftoff!

Tara Middleton, Arkestra vocalist (successor to the great June Tyson)

Sun Ra was a visionary who gifted the Earth with his sensibility, forevermore. During winter holidays and times of social crisis — or really, whenever — traveling the spaceways with his sounds and messages in mind is recommended as an enhancement, inspiration, provocation and/or escape.

Tyler Mitchell bass; DM Hotep, guitar

John Szwed’s biography Space Is The Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra is recommended for further reading about the singular bandleader/composer/arranger/poet/entrepreneur/satirist/philosopher, named by his Earthling parents at birth Herman Poole Blount. I’ve written about him, including liner notes for the Complete Performance resulting from his meeting with John Cage, and a 1991 concert at Inter-Media-Arts. Still, my favorite of Sun Ra’s many albums is Secrets of the Sun. The Omniverse being one, start anywhere.

Hear it now.

Howard Mandel

I'm a Chicago-born (and after 32 years in NYC, recently repatriated) writer, editor, author, arts reporter for National Public Radio, consultant and nascent videographer -- a veteran freelance journalist working on newspapers, magazines and websites, appearing on tv and radio, teaching at New York University and elsewhere, consulting on media, publishing and jazz-related issues. I'm president of the Jazz Journalists Association, a non-profit membership organization devoted to using all media to disseminate news and views about all kinds of jazz.
My books are Future Jazz (Oxford U Press, 1999) and Miles Ornette Cecil - Jazz Beyond Jazz (Routledge, 2008). I was general editor of the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz and Blues (Flame Tree 2005/Billboard Books 2006). Of course I'm working on something new. . . Read More…

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