Loid have moicy, Cryptophiles. I suppose we don’t have to tell you that our festival week of Crypto artists at the Jazz Standard in New York City was an unabashed success! Seven straight nights of Left Coasties – capped off by two-night stands by Nels Cline and his many Friends and Mr. Bennie Maupin – seemed to leave their mark on the locals, who showed up en masse and gave the artists so much L-O-V-E that we were a little overwhelmed by it all. The entire staff of the Jazz Standard – in particular, Seth, Lauren, Clarissa, Corolla and Jasmine – was simply gracious and endlessly patient with us. They seemed, to our own Fearless Leader Jeff Gauthier, to “embrace an aesthetic of customer happiness” – I mean, this WAS New York, the kinda place where one might inquire to a passing waiter “Excuse me, I’m a little confused about this dish” and receive a “Glad I’m not you!” – or a phist in yer phreakin’ phace – in response.
But no. New York, at least the part of Manhattan we were gallivanting around, had changed quite profoundly since Your Humble Blogger was there a few whiffens past. I actually saw an old man trip and fall in Central Park and several people rushed over to help him up – not one, mind you, but SEVERAL people. Or the African-American shoeshine in Times Square yelling at the Middle Eastern cabdriver, calling him a “racist asshole,” before the Jewish guy stepped up out of nowhere and calmed them both by saying something (I couldn’t quite hear over the rush of traffic and other street theater) about “not doing this in the city that’s suffered so much from hate.” I mean, wow. This was a different place. It was still New Yawk, of course (we didn’t dare wear out L.A. Dodgers caps) with the usual cranked up parade of Life Going On, a grand symphony of towering man-made vistas and large public spaces that felt like cavernous living rooms, with none of that “postmodern alienation” L.A. is infamous for. But people were actually looking out for one another. At least it seemed that way. Perhaps it’s already a cliché to say so.
After all, when we made our sober (in body and soul) pilgrimage to see Ground Zero, which aside from all of the moving tributes, both professional and private, just made me angry and vengeful. What calmed me down was actually something across the street from where the Twin Towers had dropped though the earth: the tiny St. Paul’s Chapel. It was built in 1766 – before we were even a country, for chrissakes – and had survived not only 9/11 but various other calamities. We sat in the ancient cemetery under a light drizzle and that’s when we realized with certain finality, We will never perish from the earth—the civilized bedrock we are built on is just too strong.
My first night there I must have talked to about 50 New Yorkers from the time I landed at JFK at 8:30pm to when I finally stumbled home after bartime at 5am, striking up running conversations on street corners and in restaurants, pharmacies, taxis. . .After Nels’ second sweaty set on Thursday night, I carried the (in)famous accordion of avant-sound goddess Andrea Parkins, who was recovering from a foot injury, three blocks from the JS to a bar near Gramercy Park called The Mad Hatter at 3rd Ave. & E. 26th Street, which is run by a tough Irishman (any other kind?) named either Mike or Shaun and bartended by the fetching young Tara. There we joined Bobby Bradford, Scott Amendola, Devin Hoff and Sir Nels (who was sporting a cool floppy Greek Fisherman-style cap he had just bought that day on the street “for ten bucks!”) and a few others for a couple of late-night rounds.
The next morning, I woke up in my hotel room (at least I hope it was mine) with a vicious tequila hangover and a polished wooden dugout packed with skunk-shake in my jacket pocket (and no idea how it got there). There was a note on a napkin that read: Dude! Great meeting you! Have fun with The Señor and give it back to me tomorrow night!
Ah, New York. The Midwest of the Northeast.
But, of course, you didn’t tune in to hear my paltry ramblings about Manhattan. No, you came to hear about the shows, eh? Well, I can’t help you much for the first few nights, as I didn’t see a full show until Friday night. But we had loyal locals who showed up and can provide us with a night-by-night playbook. If you want to read about the first night with the Jeff Gauthier Goatette in detail, check out Steve Smith’s Night After Night, which we put up in our last post. Mr. Smith, whose an Assistant Editor at Time Out-New York, also came back for Nels’s first night:
I caught the second set in the company of TONY colleague (and Dark Forces Swing blogger) Hank Shteamer and our brave, bold editor in chief, Brian Farnham, who has charged himself with the duty of accompanying every writer and editor on his staff to a representative event. (Brian was Hank's guest tonight; I still haven't decided what I'll be taking him to hear. His interest and effort, I must say, are incredibly inspiring.)
Most of the music in Cline's late set tonight was drawn from his recent Cryptogramophone CD, New Monastery. (You can read Hank's brief review of the disc here.) As on the disc, the band included veteran cornetist Bobby Bradford, Bay Area clarinetist Ben Goldberg, New Yorker Andrea Parkins on accordion and electronic effects, bassist Devin Hoff and drummer Scott Amendola. The last two are the guitarist's regular partners in his excellent current trio, the Nels Cline Singers.
The set opened with "Dedication," its stealthy free-time splatter slightly marred by persistent microphone feedback, despite which Goldberg provided some gorgeously tawny work on what I assumed to be a contrabass clarinet. (Although much of his playing was in a range I associate with the bass clarinet, this was a paperclip-configuration metal instrument with an endpin.) A medley of "Yokada Yokada" and "The Rumproller" featured waggishly bluesy playing from Bradford and a barnburning solo from Goldberg, backed by Hoff's rumbling pulse and Amendola's light, lithe swing, then shifted gears into a surf-rock blowout punctuated by sputtering noise interludes and crushing groans from Parkins's squeezebox.
"Yomo," a track from Hill's Mosaic Select anthology of mostly unreleased tracks from his Blue Note tenure, opened with Amendola's electronically tweaked mbira and a high-pitched drone from Hoff, with occasional spoken interjections from Bradford. Early on, the piece rippled and surged like the surface of a lake; later, Cline and the rhythm section surged into something of a bebop apocalypse.
Cline, Hoff and Amendola opened a medley of "Reconciliation" and "New Monastery" with a relaxed, understated swing that proved the guitarist hasn't forgotten a lick or trick during his later alt-rock adventures with the Geraldine Fibbers and Wilco. Is he a jazzer with a ornery maverick streak? A rocker with unusually musicianly tendencies? Both, and more besides. I'd be hard pressed to name a musician more versatile than Cline, or one more capable of playing so naturally and convincingly in any conceivable setting.
The set's finale, "Compulsion," offered a full-blown punk-rock rave-up between its happily loping open and close. Parkins seemed to be exorcising demons -- or perhaps taking revenge on whatever relative consigned her to youthful accordion lessons -- with every furious pump of her bellows. One of New York's most consistently inventive and satisfying players, Parkins doesn't receive nearly as much recognition as she should, mainly because her artistry is so protean that it can be hard to draw a bead on how to define and describe it. Here, for once, I had no such problem: plain and simple -- and not for the first time -- Andrea Parkins was my favorite rock star.
Nate Chinen of The New York Times also weighed in on the coincidence of Nels’ first night and a rare Andrew Hill performance on the same day titled "The Composer as Performer and Inspiration":
The pianist Andrew Hill makes music of deep reflection and patient discovery. For most of his long career he has stayed faithful to a mode of abstraction steeped in his own preoccupations: enigmatic harmony, elasticized rhythm, a multilayered arrangement of texture and pulse. When he plays his own compositions – and he rarely plays anything else – he can create the impression of illusive and flickering beauty.
In a lunch-hour concert on Thursday at Trinity Church, Mr. Hill developed that feeling into an enveloping sensation. Together with is superb working trio, he played a four-piece suite identified in the program notes as “Before I,” an original liturgical work. The performance, which can be viewed as an archived video broadcast at trinitywallstreet.org, was a powerfully meditative experience.
For the last few years, Mr. Hill has been battling cancer, a widely known fact that probably has something to do with the impressive midday turnout. He had canceled a four-night engagement at Birdland planned for this week, making the Trinity Concert his only appearance for the foreseeable future. All his recent performances have been tinged with the poignant awareness that any chance to hear him is the gift.
The spiritual undercurrent of “Before I” was eminently clear. In the first movement, which lasted 20 minutes, Mr. Hill explored a range of gospel tonalities, drifting between major and minor keys. The bassist John Herbert and the drummer Eric McPherson shadowed him carefully, producing an undulant pull. There was tension and restraint in their shadowy rapport, and in the pentatonic rumbles gently played by Mr. Hill.
In the next two movements a rhythmic idea emerged, coming into sharpest focus when Mr. Hill set up a tumbling triplet figure with his left hand and Mr. Herbert carried it forward as an ostinato. With a shimmer of cymbals, Mr. McPherson implied a quicker tempo; Mr. Hill pulled back and grew increasingly abstract. They were working with rhythmic concepts Mr. Hill has been investigating for years – at least since “Refuge,” which he recorded in 1964 – but the results still felt startling and immediate.
Turbulence gave way to tonality near the end of the third movement, after which Mr. Hill played a hymnlike conclusion, with feathery chordal movement and a harmonious sustain. Then, with a few minutes left in his allotted hour, he made the surprising decision to play a standard, “If I Should Care.” Its melody coalesced gradually, at a sumptuous pace, and Mr. Hill effectively absorbed it into the body of the performance.
The haunting depth of that performance was a reminder of why other musicians have rarely tried to play Mr. Hill’s music. One notable exception is the guitarist Nels Cline, who released an excellent album last year called New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill (Cryptogramophone). Mr. Cline happened to be booked at the Jazz Standard on Thursday night, and his six-piece group sounded fierce.
Mr. Cline is a resourceful improviser with a strong connection to experimental rock, and he brings radiant, noisy extroversion to Mr. Hill’s music. His colleagues did some of the more strident work: Scott Amendola slashed away at his drums with punkish glee; and Andrea Parkins played one accordion solo as a single distorted wail.
But there were moments of beauty, too. Mr. Cline set up the sinuous vamp of “Dance with Death” by tapping on the neck of his guitar, and fashioned an intricate solo laced with deft electronic effects. He played “MacNeil Island” as an intricate duet with clarinetist Ben Goldberg before the band kicked in to play “Pumpkin,” which featured a cornet solo by Bobby Bradford.
Temperamentally, it was a far cry from what unfolded at Trinity Chruch. But it was intelligently organized and audaciously played, a testament to Mr. Cline’s sincere feeling for the music. Ending his set, he put it more directly. “The music of Andrew Hill,” he said over the applause. “I hope you heard him this afternoon.”
Whereas Will Friedwald of the New York Sun gave a good bird’s eye view of the whole week:
MIXING AND MATCHING WITH A MODERN PALETTE
Never again will I be so foolish as to overlook such obvious warning signs: When I arrived Monday night for the late set, the Jazz Standard was packed with people who had liked the music from the first set so much that they stuck around for the second. A good sign. What I failed to notice was that the first six or so rows were empty — apparently nobody wanted to get too close to the bandstand.
This was the opening night of a weeklong series called "Cryptonights at Jazz Standard," a minifestival of artists and bands from the Venice, Calif.-based Cryptogramophone label. Although none of the Cryptogramophone groups that I have heard sound much like one another, they all share certain qualities: Each concocts an original combination of sounds by juxtaposing electronic instruments with traditional acoustic ones, and incorporates musical elements from different parts of the world while maintaining some of the familiar jazz template of varying pre-written ensemble music with solo improvisation.
Monday night's group was the Jeff Gauthier Goatette, which might be considered Cryptogramophone's flagship band since it's led by the violinist and composer who also runs the label. Even having played and enjoyed the group's new album, "One and the Same," several times, I was unprepared for what I heard at Jazz Standard.
The band on the recording is considerably more nuanced and varied, but the music at the club was pure, relentless distortion and dissonance, only occasionally relieved by a fragment of conventional melody or tonality. It was also unbearably loud (the latter complaint may be the fault of the club on the series's opening night). The acoustic players— Erik Friedlander on cello, Joel Hamilton on bass, and Alex Cline on drums — and the electric ones — the leader on electric violin, David Witham on keys, and Nels Cline on guitar — ganged up to produce some of the most disturbing sounds I have ever heard. After a few minutes, I wanted to storm the stage with a pair of wire-cutters.
Moving to the back of the club helped considerably, and I was able to enjoy Mr. Gauthier's thoughtful last piece. Here, he depicted the sensation of listening to discordant church bells in Mexico while a record of Billie Holiday singing "I Didn't Know What Time It Was" played. The number had a properly Koyaanisqatsi feeling of time being out of balance, using snippets of the Richard Rodgers melody as a condiment.
Throughout the first night, Nels Clines' playing was particularly severe, as he continually banged and manhandled his guitar strings while manipulating an electronics kit that produced sounds capable of destroying a human nervous system. Yet on the next night, when Mr. Cline was featured with drummer Scott Amendola's band (co-starring John Shifflett on bass and the marvelous violinist Jenny Scheinman), the guitarist played much more melodically, kinder, and gentler. I can scarcely guess how he'll sound on Friday, when he brings his own sextet, featuring the free jazz pioneer cornetist Bobby Bradford, to play the music of Andrew Hill — which, though unconventional, is more a part of the jazz mainstream. (Obviously, there are substantial hints in Mr. Cline's current album, New Monastery: A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill.)
Mr. Amendola's quartet adds an element of Celtic music, which lends a New Age feel to the overall sound. Even on the opening tune, "Bantu," on which the leader put his hands on his traps and played them like a conga, the group sounded more Irish than African. Like the Goatette, Mr. Amendola's band also makes use of chaos and confusion, as in a free episode at the start of the third tune, "Shady" (heard on the band's recent album, Believe), in which the four instruments skitter and scatter and chase one another around. But with this group, even the dissonance seemed suitably organic — a large patch of distortion suggested a thunderstorm over Nantucket.
I enjoyed Wednesday night's band — the keyboardist Myra Melford's Be Bread — best of all, but I must confess to certain biases. Not only was this the most purely acoustic group of the first three (only bassist Stomu Takeishi plugged in), but I have long admired Ms. Melford's playing and compositions. Still, I never thought I'd see the day when she was the most traditional bandleader in a given lineup. Her recent music, played superbly on her current album, The Image of Your Body, is highly influenced by Indian musical techniques, which she studied in Calcutta on a Fulbright Scholarship several years ago. Ms. Melford's current quartet is a fusion of Eastern and Western ideas, co-starring the fine Vietnamese trumpeter Cuong Vu, the Japanese-born Mr. Takeishi, the clarinetist Ben Goldberg (who switched to the Dr. Seuss-like contrabass clarinet), and the drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee.
Ms. Melford, whose work is deeply inspired by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi (an increasingly frequent point of reference in contemporary jazz), switches between piano and harmonium. She spins melodies with her right hand and pumps with her left, while Mr. Takeishi fills in with the bass line. Her solo piano passages occasionally suggest the vintage free jazz of Cecil Taylor, but her harmonium solos have all the intensity of a whirling dervish — thereby introducing yet another element of Eastern culture to the mix. For the last number, the guitarist Brandon Ross made Be Bread into a septet, and the group played a funky number that seemed anticlimactic compared with the Eastern-style frenzy the group had just served up.
The Cryptonights series continues tonight with Nels Clines's Andrew Hill presentation and concludes Saturday and Sunday with a rare NYC appearance by one of the founding fathers of this brand of acoustic-electro-jazz-rock-world fusion, the versatile multireed player Bennie Maupin. Mr. Maupin's recently released Penumbra, in which he showcases his well-known bass clarinet technique over a comparatively straightforward rhythm section, is the most enjoyable Cryptogramophone album I've yet heard. May the label's catalog continue to grow and prosper.
Thanks, Will, I’ll take it from here. Mr. Bennie Maupin’s two nights rounded out Cryptoweek not with a bang – Nels took care of that end of it – but a supple drawing of breath followed by an intense sigh. I had never seen Bennie live before – moreover, seen Bennie rehearse his band and do a sound check, either – and the command the man has over his fellow musicians as well as a live audience is quite spellbinding. Thing is, the man knows exactly what he wants and he takes his time. One aspect of Bennie’s recent Crypto release Penumbra that comes out even more in a live setting is the way he draws out the spaces within a song, as we all saw in the incredibly intimate and subtle workings of songs like “Neophilia,” “Walter Bishop, Jr.”, “Vapors” and the title track. On the 2nd set of the first night, Bennie & Co. took the stage with an almost twenty minute prologue to “Tapping Things” by, well, tapping things. Bennie created a percussion rhythm by clicking the keys of his bass clarinet, followed by percussionist Munyungo Jackson tapping on his instruments, his body, his face. This led into a rap by drummer Michael Stephans that was left off of Penumbra and went something like this: “orange silk, dream weaver…boppin’ with Maupin all over the place…talkin’ and tickin,’ eatin’ that chicken…on the way to the moon, bang-zoom!” Some pretty heavy NYC kats showed up the listen as well: Oliver Lake, Matthew Shipp, Andy Milne, Charlie Hunter, Steve Bernstein and Ellery Eskelin were just a few!
Needless to say, we sold out of Penumbra CDs.
Here’s some more L-O-V-E from the New Yorkies:
New York Times – “Some jazz record labels are fortunate enough to catch the spirit of a moment…Cryptogramophone is one of those.” 4/23/07
The New Yorker – “If a sideman hall of fame is ever established, the saxophone and bass-clarinet virtuoso Bennie Maupin would find himself among those honorees.” 4/2/07
Time Out-NY – "L.A.'s Cryptogramophone label continues to show off its edgy roster...handily demonstrating that West Coast jazz is no longer a breezy affair." 4/29/07
Flavorpill NYC – “Cline's slippery guitar flips from waahhh to sweeshhh with quick wrist flicks before decaying through his armament of digital decoders…expect everything BUT standard jazz.” 3/27/07
And in related Music News, Wilco’s new album Sky Blue Sky will be due out on May 15, and Rolling Stone features a little blurbie about it in the current issue with the rather masturbatory cover image of Rosario D. and Rose MacG:
This is how Wilco made their sixth studio album, Sky Blue Sky, according to the band's leader, singer-guitarist-songwriter Jeff Tweedy: "Six people in a room, playing one song all day for six or seven hours, and everyone reaching a consensus on how it should sound." Tweedy laughs, marveling at that simplicity and how long it took him to get it. "After so many configurations of the band, I guess one of them's bound to get it right."
Tweedy is quick to point out he doesn't want to be negative about earlier lineups, but Sky Blue Sky -- released by Nonesuch on May 15th -- is the work that he claims he wanted all along. "I always liked the Band as a model -- a bunch of guys sitting around with a typewriter, drinking coffee, writing. That seemed the most fun -- a collective thing. And somehow we ended up being that."
Bassist John Stirratt, the only other survivor of the original Wilco from the band's 1995 debut, A.M., puts it another way: "This was definitely the most civilized record Wilco has ever made."
Its twelve songs are also a startling turnaround from the scarring distortion of Wilco's commercial breakthrough, 2002's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and 2004's follow-up, A Ghost Is Born. There is a vocal clarity and wide-open space to Sky Blue Sky -- in the tender lysergic whirl of "Either Way" and the mix of Dixie-soul balladry and Badfinger-style pop crunch in "Hate It Here" -- that echoes the Grateful Dead's honing of their early acid rock into the warm detail of 1970's Workingman's Dead.
Drummer Glenn Kotche credits guitarist Nels Cline, who joined in 2004 after the release of A Ghost Is Born, with bringing some of that psychedelic sparkle. "People think Nels is this avant-garde guitarist stuck on Jazz Island," Kotche says. "But he loves Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds."
Tweedy, in turn, says the mix of Pacific-sunset romance and freak-out funk in "You Are My Face" was partly inspired by the lone eponymous album by an early-Seventies California band, Relatively Clean Rivers. "It's pretty fucking obscure," Tweedy says. "It sounds like the Dead, but it also has these hip-hop beats, years before there was such a thing. I was digging that record a lot while we were messing with the groove in that song."
Tweedy, Stirratt, Kotche, Cline, guitar-keyboard player Pat Sansone and keyboardist Mikael Jorgensen rehearsed and recorded Sky Blue Sky at Wilco's studio in Chicago, the Loft, starting in August 2005. The band worked in two- and three-week spurts. "We would make these minirecords," Stirratt says, "working on things that tended to sound alike." Wilco also tested a few songs onstage, like the jaunty "Walken," while touring between sessions. But Tweedy's guiding principle for Sky Blue Sky was something he mentioned to Stirratt during recording -- "about being able to put a song in your pocket," the bassist recalls, "and take it with you."
"I got nervous about the technology on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot," Tweedy confesses. "If you need a certain amp or pedal to make a song what it is, it isn't a song."
But Tweedy is also a different songwriter now. "I went through some well-documented miserable times," he admits, referring to the personnel dramas and record-label tumult at the time of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and his 2004 spell in rehab to beat an addiction to prescription medicine. "When you're in a place with a lot of denial, it's hard to be direct about yourself. You need to encode things, because you're hiding a lot."
On Sky Blue Sky, he says, "I had no interest in being complex" -- which explains the optimism right up front in the final songs, "What Light" and "On and On and On." "I'm more hopeful than I used to be," Tweedy insists. "It's just easier to hear now -- there's less static." –David Fricke, 4/19/07
Mr. Fricke also adds in the print version that the “Highlight” of Sky Blue Sky is “new member Nels Cline’s ace guitar work”! And it’s true. As I said to the man himself recently after he played me a few prime cuts: “Nels after being the Gerald R. Ford of Wilco for three years, you’ve now been elected and documented on your own merits.” Nels laughed, but his eyes said, I’m not quite sure how to take that.
Upcoming in Crypto Musings Uno: Our Fearless leader JEFF GAUTHIER is profiled and his whole Cryptogramophone operation exposed for what it really is by writer Will Layman in an upcoming issue of the online cultural rag PopMatters.
Upcoming in Crypto Musings Dos: Our INDIEJAZZ.COM re-launch!
Upcoming in Crypto Musings Tres: Exclusive previews of new Crypto releases by DAVID WITHAM and THE NELS CLINE SINGERS!
Upcoming in Crypto Musings Quatro: Enough already
(P.S. "The Señor," a.k.a. "Señor Pinch" a.ka. "Lefty Guns" a.ka. "Lefty Two-Guns," was returned safely to its owner. THANK U NU YORK!)
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