Matthew Shipp Article

[BbM7]

I found this, like much The Atlantic publishes, to be worthwhile reading. (That's a plug because I took this from a subscriber-only site.)

X Jazz

The pianist Matthew Shipp is the star of the latter-day free-jazz scene—the only scene in jazz right now with younger faces in the audience

by Francis Davis

.....

I think of Donald Barthelme's short story "The King of Jazz" whenever I'm at a party and people at a loss for appropriate small talk after I've said I write about jazz ask me to name a good place in town to hear some. They want me to point them to a hangout like the one that Hokie Mokie, Barthelme's king of jazz, strolls into after inheriting the crown from the deceased Spicy MacLammermoor—"Hi Bucky! Hi Zoot! Hi Freddie! Hi Thad! Hi Roy! Hi Dexter! Hi Jo! Hi Willie! Hi Greens!" A hangout with all the giants on the bandstand or at the bar, being fawned over by an audience for whom the music is incidental to the satisfaction of not being square.

In reality, it's been two full generations since being a jazz insider was taken as proof of being hip, and almost as long since jazz fans or musicians agreed on such basic issues as what jazz is and who the legitimate heirs of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane are. The problem with wanting to dig the scene is that there isn't a scene anymore—not one that could live up to the fanciful expectations of the people I politely excuse myself from at parties, by that point not merely pretending to need another drink.

What jazz does offer today, along with a bewildering profusion of subgenres and hybrids, is vest-pocket scenes, the most vital of which is the most marginalized—banished to the furthest reaches of bohemia in its home base of New York City, and documented chiefly on musicians' vanity labels and small labels here and abroad. The music—which is descended from the avant-garde "free jazz" of the 1960s (the title of a 1961 album by Ornette Coleman, the movement's founder), and proud of it—may be too extreme for anyone desiring only a foot-tapping beat. Otherwise, if the party was in New York, before excusing myself I would advise people to keep an eye out for Steve Dalachinsky, a stream-of-consciousness poet and a loquacious advocate for his favorite players. His presence is a guarantee that on any given night you're where the action is.

You're sure to spot Dalachinsky handing out flyers or minding the CD table at the annual Vision Festival, where the odds of being drawn into a conversation with him, or with one of the other regulars, or even with a performer who's hanging out to listen after finishing his own set, are equally good. Presented over several nights leading up to Memorial Day, in a variety of homey Lower East Side locations that have included a former synagogue and a recreation center, the Vision Festival is the best time to hear everybody and meet everyone. The music may be uncompromising, but the vibe couldn't be friendlier.

ast May, a few weeks before the festival, Dalachinsky and a handful of other regulars were among the large crowd that showed up at the Blue Note for a one-nighter by the pianist Matthew Shipp, the closest thing this scene has to a star. The swankiest of New York's frontline jazz spots, the Blue Note was a move up for Shipp—a club with a menu and tables instead of folding chairs. He dressed for the gig as always, in slacker's T-shirt and jeans; the polished loafers he wore in place of his customary sneakers were the lone hint of occasion.

Bespectacled and tall and still wiry in his early forties, Shipp is the most dynamic and advanced of a growing number of pianists his age and younger whose starting point is the turning, elongated approach to melody and the inching, fragmented rhythms that Cecil Taylor introduced to jazz in the late 1950s, in the aftermath of bebop. These innovations still haven't been absorbed into the jazz mainstream, and Taylor long ago set off in a more open-ended direction. But often when Shipp or another pianist of similar inclinations seats himself at the bench, Taylor's fingerprints are already on the keys. In Shipp's case, the similarity is infrequent enough to be knowing. The long list of other pianists Shipp draws from—Bud Powell and his skewered runs, Thelonious Monk and his rhymes, McCoy Tyner and his harmonic magic carpet—is somehow proof of his individuality. The earlier pianist he most resembles, in impact more than approach or touch, is the relatively unsung Mal Waldron, who specialized in tension-and-release—though he frequently made do with just tension. Shipp, too, tends to worry a phrase as though something about it is eating away at him, and his solos don't "swing" in a way that a jazz listener with conservative tastes might recognize. Instead of giving the impression of ongoing forward motion, they go back and forth and around in circles, inexorably dragging you along.

Shipp was in top form at the Blue Note, where his trio featured the bassist William Parker and the drummer Guillermo E. Brown, his teammates in the tenor saxophonist David S. Ware's rhythm section. They demonstrated their usual rapport, not merely accompanying Shipp but improvising their parts on equal footing with him and frequently taking the lead. A highlight of the set was Shipp's own "Three in One," a waltz that suggested both Monk and a sinister twist on "Rockabye Baby." More surprising, since Shipp only occasionally plays standards, was a hammering interpretation of the Sinatra barroom anthem "Angel Eyes" that obsessed on the phrase corresponding to "try to think," calling up drizzle and blinking neon signs and other images from film noir.

I was surprised to learn, when I met Shipp for coffee the following morning near his apartment on the gentrified tip of Alphabet City, that he didn't know the lyrics or even the song's bridge. "I get that from Ran Blake," he told me, naming one of his teachers at the New England Conservatory, a maverick pianist whose own music is haunted by movies and images from his dreams. "Because he's a film buff, Ran structures his interpretations that way, with songs going through different 'scenes.' And I've always had plenty of film images and dream images of my own."

Something Shipp undoubtedly gets from Cecil Taylor is his athleticism; his attack starts in his shoulders, and biding his time during a dialogue between bass and drums, he makes fists over the keyboard and pumps them like a prizefighter waiting for the bell to begin the next round. "It's unconscious," he said when I remarked on it, "but I must be doing it, because you're the third person to tell me. The first high school I went to, before I got expelled, my friends and I used to talk on the phone at night and decide who we were going to beat up the next day. I'm a total pacifist now, but following boxing is my major hobby, and the way they used to talk about Cecil Taylor emulating the leaps of dancers—well, I'm not emulating a boxer, but I guess it does enter the fray."

he latter-day free-jazz scene of which Shipp is a part—along with Parker, Brown, Ware, the drummer Susie Ibarra, and the saxophonists Rob Brown, Daniel Carter, Charles Gayle, and Assif Tsahar, among others—is the only one in jazz right now with younger faces noticeably represented in the audience. I don't mean young, mind you; that would be hoping for too much. I mean people a decade or two younger than Baby Boomers like Steve Dalachinsky and me.

Free jazz was wrongly blamed for chasing people away in the late 1960s, around the time that the graying of the jazz audience first became a grave concern. The truth was more complicated. By then soul music and psychedelic rock not only had achieved greater popularity than jazz ever dared to hope for but also, in some odd way, had eliminated any need for it. No longer greasy kid stuff, pop suddenly offered simplified and easier-to-find versions of everything that had once drawn certain kinds of listeners to jazz: its own Charlie Parker and John Coltrane in Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, its own Stan Kenton in Frank Zappa, its own wigged-out Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra in Captain Beefheart and George Clinton. Plus you could dance to it. The most telling blow came when James Brown, and then Motown artists led by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, embraced black consciousness. Unlike that era's politicized jazz, which generally relied on titles to communicate pride and outrage, their music had the advantage of lyrics—not to mention the ear of black America.

Jazz survived despite all of this, but just barely. It joined classical music as one of those fine arts that people pay lip service to out of guilt but shy away from out of fear they might be too difficult. (This is increasingly what passes for high culture today: yesterday's no-longer-popular pop culture, coming soon to your public-television station. Rock-and-roll is already on its way.) The fanfare surrounding Wynton Marsalis when he burst onto the scene almost twenty-five years ago was widely taken as evidence of a return to traditional values in jazz, following two decades of self-indulgent experimentation by avant-gardists, and commercial compromise by Miles Davis and his former sidemen. But even Marsalis, who as the son of a journeyman jazz pianist was presumably exposed to the best in jazz more or less from the cradle, has admitted to having liked such jazz-rock fusion bands as Weather Report and Return to Forever as a teenager, before renouncing them for bebop and Ellington. And although Marsalis has remained steadfast, many of the slightly younger players once counted among his disciples, including the trumpeters Nicholas Payton and Roy Hargrove and the bassist Christian McBride, have lately been toying with techno and electronica.

Are these younger players selling out or heeding generational inclination? They grew up with pop—like Shipp, who at one point during our conversation interrupted himself when a song on the radio caught his ear. It was something from Uh Huh Her, the latest CD by P. J. Harvey. "I love her," Shipp said. In 1999 Shipp signed with Thirsty Ear, a label whose catalogue also includes CDs by such alternative-rock bands as Throbbing Gristle, Teenage Fanclub, and Gay Dad. In addition to serving as "curator" of the label's new jazz series, he has recorded numerous collaborations with what he refers to as "beat artists," meaning rappers and DJs from the hip-hop underground. (The very notion of unrecognized hip-hop experimentalists may be a shock to many jazz listeners, who, like adults in general, assume that hip-hop is all MTV awards, drive-by shootings, and bling bling.)

Shipp has in fact enjoyed a following outside jazz since the early 1990s. That was when the audiences for free jazz and post-punk bands such as Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo began to overlap, partly because word got out that the bands' members were devotees of free jazz, and partly because Shipp cultivated relationships with alternative-rock labels. Shipp's fans include Thurston Moore, of Sonic Youth (whose collection of free-jazz vinyl from the 1960s and 1970s is legendary); Henry Rollins, of the 1980s hardcore band Black Flag, whose label 2 13 61 released the CDs that brought Shipp airplay on college radio; and Lenny Kaye, the guitarist with Patti Smith's band, who offered Shipp a job with Smith.

Shipp is still as likely to be featured in such rock fanzines such as Yakuza, Puncture, and Forced Exposure as he is to be interviewed for Downbeat and JazzTimes. Marsalis, despite his wish to be our day's Duke Ellington, is more like our Leonard Bernstein—which I mean as no small compliment. Officiating, in his role as the director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, at what amount to Young People's Concerts for adults, he has greatly expanded the cultural establishment's appreciation of jazz and respect for its history. But tradition and the mature elegance that Marsalis sees jazz as epitomizing are a tough sell to the young—especially those who prize all-out aural assault.

Today's youth culture is a body culture, and both Shipp's music and free jazz as a whole are far too cerebral ever to become a significant part of it. Even so, I suspect that in listening to free jazz, many intellectually curious younger people vicariously experience a thrill similar to the one experienced by participants in skateboarding, motocross, BMX, and the sports featured at the annual X (for "extreme") Games. And also similar, perhaps, to the thrill Shipp himself experiences watching boxing and ultimate fighting.

At various times free jazz has also been called "avant-garde," "free form," "the new thing," "out jazz" (as in "far out"), and, for a brief spell about ten years ago, "ecstatic jazz," referring to both the party drug Ecstasy and a religious trance. "A lot of us meditate, including me," Shipp told me, "and there is a strong Pentecostal element to the music—speaking in tongues and the descent of the Holy Ghost—going back to Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders in the 1960s. So I guess the idea of an ecstatic religious experience isn't totally off base. But I'm just as glad that one never caught on."

Shipp prefers "free jazz." "The idea," he said, "is that what we're doing is a revival of that." Free jazz is an alternative music unlikely to be co-opted. But what its younger followers might find even more appealing is that something actually seems at risk in its heated improvisations. A good name for what Shipp and his fellow revivalists are up to might be "X Jazz"—even when it's acoustic, it's amped.

hipp freely admits to being ambitious. He says he "practices" being interviewed, and word has it that he drops into a shop in his neighborhood that specializes in avant-garde music almost daily to see if he's moved any CDs. The question I bet he gets at parties—although that didn't stop me from playing square's advocate and asking it anyway—is, Since free jazz dispenses with bebop's framework of chord changes, what guidelines do its improvisers follow? He gave a detailed and patient answer. "You might present a band with just eight bars of written music and encourage them to improvise on that using their own vocabularies, expanding on those eight bars of music rhythmically, harmonically, or melodically," he said. "There might be a set of melodies or just a gesture in the direction of one, but you keep extrapolating from that. And sometimes my pieces actually have chord changes, though not like in bop—more like a set of bass lines or a general harmonic movement of some kind."

On the new Harmony and Abyss (Thirsty Ear) the drama is in hearing Shipp's trio, featuring Parker and the swift drummer Gerald Cleaver, interact with the loops and sampled beats furnished by Chris Flam, the album's co-producer (billed here as just FLAM). Free-jazz fans can be as set in their ways as anyone; spontaneity is a fetish with some of them, and they fear its loss when studio technology is added to the equation. But FLAM's electronically generated sounds are dissonant and elliptically dreamlike, rarely lapsing into facile man-versus-machine allegory or mindless turntable wicky-wicky. And Shipp, for his part, proves more adaptable than most of the neo-beboppers and modal colorists who have attempted this sort of thing and failed.

Shipp's other recent release is The Trio Plays Ware, on the Italian label Splasc(H), a program of eight compositions previously recorded by Ware's quartet, this time without the leader. Ware's pieces may be little more than springboards, but here they convey a rapturous sorrow independent of his baleful solos. Shipp has become a more economical improviser than he used to be, possibly as a side effect of emulating pop recording techniques (and all to the good), and he wrings every last nuance out of these melodies. The Trio Plays Ware is as good a starting point as any for newcomers to Shipp. But for the especially wary, an even better introduction—to him and to the latest manifestation of free jazz he represents—might be Songs (2001), another Splasc(H) CD, featuring his interpretations of several standards; a hymn; an English carol; one tune each by Dizzy Gillespie, Milt Jackson, and Sonny Rollins; and an interpretation of "Angel Eyes" almost as startling as the one you missed unless someone told you the Blue Note was the happening place to be one rainy evening this past spring.

[Lazaro Vega]

The comment about younger audiences at Free Jazz events might apply to New York, but would be cut from the Chicago Reader. Young alt audiences have been keeping that scene in beer for some time now. Even in Kalamazoo when the Brotzmann Tentet played Kraftbrau Brewery and all the college kids showed up to their usual alt rock beer hang, they flipped for the heterodox jazz.

[JSngry]

Yeah, I too have noticed that young(er), non-musician audiences show a real affection for the freer stuff. The old stuff they respect (sometimes), but the freer (and the funkier) stuff they seem to feel (why shouldn't they?). And I don't mean the "smooth" stuff, either. That's a whole 'nother crowd there.

Now here's the funny/sad part - the types of creative jazz that appeals most to a younger audience aren't even considered "real" and/or "serious" jazz by a significant portion of the "jazz power structure", the people who book the clubs, festivals, etc. They're so busy looking for third-tier talent In The Tradition to replace the second-tier talent that's beginning to die off (after having a period in the spotlight replacing the top-shelf talent who died off several decades ago) that the notion that preserving something and keeping it alive ain't always the same thing. Ask any taxidermist.

[BbM7]

Yeah, I too have noticed that young(er), non-musician audiences show a real affection for the freer stuff. The old stuff they respect (sometimes), but the freer (and the funkier) stuff they seem to feel (why shouldn't they?). And I don't mean the "smooth" stuff, either. That's a whole 'nother crowd there.

Now here's the funny/sad part - the types of creative jazz that appeals most to a younger audience aren't even considered "real" and/or "serious" jazz by a significant portion of the "jazz power structure", the people who book the clubs, festivals, etc. They're so busy looking for third-tier talent In The Tradition to replace the second-tier talent that's beginning to die off (after having a period in the spotlight replacing the top-shelf talent who died off several decades ago) that the notion that preserving something and keeping it alive ain't always the same thing. Ask any taxidermist.

Amen. I call this the Yoshi's (Oakland, CA club) phenomenon. Their core patrons are of a uniform demographic (age, race, income, wealth) and they want what they want...nothing ear-opening.

Jazz cruise, anyone?

[Guest Chaney]

Yeah, I too have noticed that young(er), non-musician audiences show a real affection for the freer stuff. The old stuff they respect (sometimes), but the freer (and the funkier) stuff they seem to feel (why shouldn't they?). And I don't mean the "smooth" stuff, either. That's a whole 'nother crowd there.

Now here's the funny/sad part - the types of creative jazz that appeals most to a younger audience aren't even considered "real" and/or "serious" jazz by a significant portion of the "jazz power structure", the people who book the clubs, festivals, etc. They're so busy looking for third-tier talent In The Tradition to replace the second-tier talent that's beginning to die off (after having a period in the spotlight replacing the top-shelf talent who died off several decades ago) that the notion that preserving something and keeping it alive ain't always the same thing. Ask any taxidermist.

I'm in love with this post. Seriously.

[WD45]

Jazz cruise, anyone?

Word.

[Larry Kart]

Per the posts by Lazaro, Jim and others, here's a listing from last week's Chicago Reader:

TOBY SUMMERFIELD For this show, Toby Summerfield, bassist in the instrumental rock outfit Crush Kill Destroy, has assembled a large band to perform a piece about what he calls the "convergence of contemporary 'jazz' or 'new music' composition and rock and ethnic pop material." That phrase doesn't go very far toward explaining what the music will sound like, but the roster of 17 musicians is promising. The usual suspects from the local improv scene, like saxophonist Aram Shelton, percussionists Frank Rosaly, Tim Daisy, Jason Adasiewicz, and Dan Sylvester, and bassists Brian Dibblee and Jason Ajemian, will be joined by a handful of visiting artists, including Antibalas reedist and former Chicagoan Stuart Bogie. --Peter Margasak

I went, the place was packed with young people (as it was the following night for the same lineup at another venue, a bar called The Hungry Brain -- my wife and I were the only people there on the first night in our age group), and the music was fantastic. Here's an account I sent to a friend:

"Caught a remarkable concert last night at the Open End Gallery (I think it's a gallery -- big two-and-a-half storey loft at the corner of Fulton and Damen, about four blocks north of the United Center, where the Bulls were losing to the Celtics. Main event was a semi-written, semi-conduction, 50-minute or so piece for 16 players (title "Never Enough Hope") by bassist/guitarist man-mountain (6'-5'', 270 or so, bearded) Toby Summerfield. Lineup was three-and-a-half vibraphones (Tim Daisy doubling on half-sized vibes and a snare/cymbal kit); accordion doubling on electric guitar; another electric guitar; acoustic bass; electric bass; drums; alto sax, tenor sax, two baritone saxes; violin, viola, and cello (these three, plus the acoustic bass, fairly heavily amplified). Basic setup, as the vibes sets may suggest, bore some slight relation to Steve Reichian minimalism, but the patterns weren't frozen or handled in such as to imply systemization and potential trance; rather the effect was of gallumphing, giddy rhythmic energy, over which of the typically long-lined rubato sax and string ensemble work was somewhat reminiscent of mid-to-late-'50s Mingus (e.g. "Far Wells Mill Valley," "Eclipse"). Patches of conduction-impelled free blowing by the sax section, but the only extended solo work came from San Francisco-based violinist Dina Maccabee, who played her ass off. Rest of the band was Amy Cimini (viola), Kevin Davis (cello), Brian Dibblee (bass), Aram Shelton (alto), Stuart Bogie (tenor), Daniel Bennett, Colin Stetson (both bari. sax) Jason Adasiewicz, Dan Sylvester, Tom (aka Tackett) Brown (all three on vibes), Daisy, Frank Rosaly (dms.), Joshua Tillinghast (gtr.), Nathaniel Braddock (accordion and gtr.), Jason Ajemian (el. bass). From what I heard of him warming up and in a few exposed passages, Bogie (originally from Ann Arbor, as is Summerfield, now a member of the NY-based Afrobeat band Antibalas) sound like to someone to watch. Also impressive among the players new to me (though I've heard him before on drums) who had some exposed solo passages was Tim Brown, once at Ann Arbor, now in Seattle.

"Opening set was Shelton's trio Dragons 1976 (with Daisy and Ajemian). Liked them from the first but can hardly believe how much they've grown as a band (and Shelton individually) since I last heard them live (maybe three months ago). They play and rehearse together so much that everyone knows everyone else's moves (in the fruitful mind-reading sense), and Shelton, though he sounds like himself, is among the shrewdest, most genuine Ornette-affected players I've ever heard. For one thing, I think he hears each note as having a top, middle, and bottom (at the least), and he can move into (and around inside, if he wants to) each note from any of those directions -- and without anything but expressive, structural necessity/desire as a guide. Also, he's slowed down a bit at age 28 -- maybe 20 percent fewer notes, makes them all count.

"The Summerfield piece was recorded the next day. If they got it right and it gets out, I'll let you know."

Both groups received long ovations -- the Summerfield piece got five minutes worth on the second night, so I'm told (I wasn't there that night).

[AllenLowe]

Larry's post makes me want to travel to Chicago to hear these guys - because, and I've discussed this with him in emails, I've gotten a little jaded about the new music/free jazz scene - this, however, is based primarily on recordings I've listened to after reading articles in the Wire and Signals to Noise - I just have this feeling that there is a generation out there that has learned to talk the talk but not really play the music - lots of learned rhetoric on sound and sonority and theory, and lots of cliched playing. And I know I'm an old guy now and out of touch (and in the way) but I believe I understand all aspects of the spectrum, having played it all and having recorded with a few new music luminaries (Hemphill, Rudd, Byron, Murray) and having played or recorded with a few of the older generation (Walter Bishop, Doc Cheatham)- the fact that the young audience likes all of this does not mean it's good - those young 'uns also like Niels Cline (a leading bs'er in my opinion) and Brittany Spears -

Edited February 1, 2005 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

by the way, my post, above, was not to take issue with Larry but with the sense, indicated earlier, that a young audience insures that a music will remain vital -

[Lazaro Vega]

In Chicago you have guitarist Jeff Parker who, from what I've heard, isn't a b.s. - er.

The jazz media is missing the scene in Chicago. Man, WNUR -- where else?

[Larry Kart]

Guess I'm destined (or foredoomed) to write something about the current Chicago scene in some way or other fairly soon -- I go to a fair amount of stuff, enjoy a lot of what I hear, know a fair number of the players, think I have a pretty good fix on what makes it special (and I think it is). To possible roadblocks to writing about the scene with the requisite freedom and honesty are (a) the Ken Vandermark problem and (b) the AACM problem. The Vandermark problem is that while his presence played an undeniably important role in bringing this scene into being (for example, a fair number of now-important young guys who aren't natives of the area came to Chicago from the mid-1990s on because they heard through the grapevine that there was a scene here, and that scene revolved around Vandermark), his own music just isn't very good IMO. Moreover, and this is where it gets awkward, lots of the younger guys who have benefited directly or indirectly from Vandermark's presence also don't have a high opinion of him as a player or a composer. So while this probably needs to be talked about if you're going to talk about this scene at all, how do you do this without either making a whole lot of trouble for guys who are willing to speak openly for attribution (assuming any are) or, if none are, making a whole lot of trouble for yourself and/or coming across like an "I know better" jerk (even though, again, you know that lots of the good younger players agree with you). The AACM problem is really two problems. First, with a few exceptions (Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Mike Reed, and others) the younger really good players are mostly white (not that they group together along racial lines; rather the grouping is of like-minded players, and most of them are white). In what way is this a problem? Well, not perhaps in human terms -- the communal feeling, from what I can tell, is remarkably strong, and it certainly includes the non-white guys who hear things along similiar lines. And of course Jeff Parker was something of model/mentor figure for some of the guys who are younger than he is. Second, the AACM is not what it once was. Leaving aside Ernest Dawkins (don't have enough experience of his music to spout off about it), I think that the major younger figures are the no longer so young Edward Wilkerson Jr., flutist-composer Nicole Mitchell, and reedman David Boykin -- all of whom suffer to varying degrees IMO from the fact that the first great generation of AACM figures pretty much left town 30-odd years ago and return only for brief visits. Wilkerson solved this problem for himself in the 1980s by forming Eight Bold Souls -- solved it because he's a marvelous player and composer, and he assembled a damn good (if sometimes dangerously raw or shaggy) band, though it would be hard to separate the rawness/shagginess of the players from the virtues they brought to the music. Over time, though, the band is has gotten pretty frayed -- in part because of illness and death -- to the point where it seems to me that Eight Bold Souls is not only not the band it once was but also one that, for whatever reasons (tenderhearted communal sentiment perhaps) is not going to take steps to right itself (if indeed I've described the situation accurately, and there are steps that Wilkerson could take). "If ... there are steps that Wilkerson could take" implies that there might be a problem with the pool of young AACM-associated players, and from what I can tell, there is. Corey Wilkes, for example, works with Roscoe (which certainly counts for something), and some here have been knocked out by his playing, but to me he's mostly a showboat -- and even if there's more substance behind the flash than I think there is, seems to me like Wilkes temperamentally wants to be "star," not part of a communal music-making enterprise. Boykin, on the other hand, is really good at best, but whenever I hear him I get the feeling that 1) he needs to push himself (or be pushed by others) and 2) he isn't inclined to push himself that much and is hardly ever playing with guys who are going to push him. By contrast, the North Side (for want of a better term) scene is so communally competitive (but also, as far as I can tell, remarkably low on snarkiness) that the guys there who are good tend to become better by leaps and bounds, and so far I'm not aware of anyone on that scene who's good who shows signs of settling down into "I've got this thing that's good, and that's good enough" mode. But that's what it sounds like Boykin is doing. Finally, Nicole Mitchell, who does some really nice stuff as a player and a writer, and is not complacent. But as nice as her stuff can be, nice is all that it is or ever will be I think; her music is like a really good travelogue or the best painting you ever saw at an art fair -- nothing wrong with it but not, almost by definition, major in intent or achievement. The typical Mitchell performance probably would be more successful than the typical Boykin one (as I recall he often is part of her ensemble), but I think Boykin hasn't come close to reaching his limits, while Mitchell may be at hers. Actually, Boykin reminds me a bit of Roland Kirk without the showmanship -- seems like there is a vein of jive and/or complacency there, and while you'd hope that this would burned away (as it could be with Kirk when he made music with aggressive major players), so far that isn't happening. Again, on the North Side you see players growing, self-correcting, being pushed by their peer and superiors, all the time.

[Lazaro Vega]

Well, and for what it is worth, some of the young folks who are now on the scene Ken helped create haven't paid any real dues. The scene was there, and there are those who approach the bandstand as if it always will be. I mean, Ken's telling me about a violinist playing with a guitarist who uses a lap top for all his musical effects. Can't get the lap top to run, but doesn't leave the stage. A performance of frustration -- button pushing, failure, stomp on the ground, violinist brushes the bow over the strings half waiting, half playing, button pushing, stomping, and that's about as together as it ever got. Whatever you may think of Ken as a player, his organizational abilities, not just in terms of concerts and the scene but in terms of a vast array of bands and using the size of Chicago to reach across the ocean to the energy of creative music over there, is to be commended.

Edited February 2, 2005 by Lazaro Vega

[Chuck Nessa]

The father of the "white, northside scene" was Hal Russell, not Ken or his friend John Corbett.

[Larry Kart]

OK, some of the young folks on any scene probably haven't paid their dues by some standard, and I'd witnessed the performance Vandermark described, I'd be pissed too. But all the young folks I'm thinking of on this scene who seem to me to be very good have done their homework and then some, or else they couldn't make the music they do. Vandermark's organizational/promotional abilities are undeniable as far as I'm aware (though how do you separate them from those of John Corbett?), but if he is not himself a figure of significant value musically (and if he is, I've yet to hear it) isn't his centrality on the Chicago scene a bit odd? I'm not out to knock Vandermark BTW, just calling things here the way I see them and feeling uneasy about doing so in any more public forum, for the reasons I mentioned above.

[Larry Kart]

Yes, Chuck, in artistic-creative terms, it was Hal all the way, but my impression (and I could be wrong here) was that there was some break in continuity -- timewise and otherwise -- between Hal and his associates and what came after and what there is now. Seems to me that, for better or for worse (and leaving Vandermark out of the equation for the moment), the advent of the post-rock (is that the right term?) bands Tortoise and Isotope 217 was important, or at least symbolic of what the difference was. That is, you had, on the one hand, bands that were getting kind of jazzlike from a rock vantage point or starting place -- in part because they found rock's musical conventions boring and/or not musical enough -- while, on the other hand, you had young jazz guys for whom rock was neither the enemy, nor something to try to borrow from or "fuse" with (a la fusion music), in the name of financial gain or cultural/social/genrational rejiggering, but just part of the casual musical backdrop of their lives. In particular, I think, the Tortoise/Isotope 217 thing -- which was a natural development one, not a programmatic one -- was important, regardless of whether you think that music mattered much aesthetically, because it really cleared the decks. If the guys who were for a hot minute or two regarded as the hippest things around were almost becoming jazz bands, albeit in a reinvent the wheel way, there then was (for the younger guys I know or whose sensibilities back then I can reasonably guess at) a rapidly growing sense of permission in the air. They were free to feel new if they could make something new and good, and I think many of them have. I'm just making this up as I go along now, but I'm pretty sure that there was a genuine "free to feel new" moment for this scene, and that it was a turning point.

[Chuck Nessa]

No time to sort it all out now, but I think you missed some stuff in the early '80s. Maybe that will suffice after all. Time for bed.

[Larry Kart]

Then, right around Tortoise/Isotope 217 time and, I believe, folding right into or out of it, there was Rob Mazurek and the Chicago Underground Duo thing. Wasn't really into that or even paying enough attention to anything around town at the time, and listening to the records later on I was interested at times though not bowled over, but it certainly cleared more ground on the arbitrariness/spaciness front.

Also, Chuck, do you have in mind when Mars Williams was with Hal? Because Mars did go on to Liquid Soul, without which maybe.... Bed for me too.

[Lazaro Vega]

And, likewise, Larry I'm not knocking the North Side Chicago scene at all. There's some great energy there, some ambitiousness that seems to be stymied elsewhere, especially when it involves large ensembles such as the one you described.

I remember one of those early nights when Vandermark played with the NRG Ensemble at the old Hot House. That was before Ken went home for three or four years to study and shed after the reception he got. But Hal's band provided the nucleus (did I spell that right?) for subsequent developments in Vandermark's career. And Hal had that "crossover" thing going on before those other bands you mentioned, didn't he? I mean, crossing over into the alt community playing his music but attracting those listeners....

For what it is worth the Vandermark 5 was one of the most together, on-point bands at Lester Bowie's farewell concert in Chicago those many years ago. He had orchestrated "New York Is Full of Lonely People" for the occasion and amid a lot of malarkey and posturing, Ken's segment seemed more focused on the music of Bowie than everything outside of Roscoe's band (which was marred by the sound man who couldn't seem to find Sco's mic and turn it up).

In any case, though his solo style is more derivative than even Rempis, Ken's ensemble music has potential. That cut for Jack Montrose, "Full Deck," from "Simpatico" swayed me the first time I heard him play it live in Grand Rapids.

Sure, the Brotzmann Tentet was nearly a theme-solo-theme band at the onset, which was a huge disappointment given the forces at hand, but they seemed to evolve a compositional framework that enlivened the solo sections with more interplay, counterpoint and textural "response" than when they started out.

O.K. you guys go to bed. By the way, I brought Hal Russell's band with Mars to Grand Rapids around 86-87? It was after they played the Chicago Jazz Festival and did that Fred Astaire thing with the dancers. They couldn't afford to bring both dancers to Grand Rapids so the guy partnered up with a rubber blow up sex doll. That confused the hell out of many folks. Got them all into a woman's rights/treatment of women defensive posture, though had to let that down as it was really hilarious. Humor. Hal was The Lion Tamer (didn't Litweiler say that?).

G'night guys. I'm staying up with the new Henry Grimes Trio Cd on Ayler Records with David Murray, Grimes and that wonderful Hamid Drake on drums....Listening to this I'd really like to hear this band with Fred Anderson instead of Murray. Hell, with Harrison Bankhead AND Henry Grimes.

Edited February 2, 2005 by Lazaro Vega

[AllenLowe]

YAAAAAWWWWNNN - anybody up yet? You guys have got me interested - isn't there some record company out there that can issue an anthology of post-1980s Chicago bands? sounds like it's needed -

[Nate Dorward]

Actually there was one on 482 Music, wasn't there? It was called Document Chicago (482-1015). Haven't heard it tho'.

[Larry Kart]

"Document Chicago" (482 Music) is worth getting, but there still is a somewhat frustrating gap between the guys who are the best IMO being able to get their best stuff on record and decently recorded. Aram Shelton's trio Dragons 1976 has made a representative album, "On Cortez"; his band Arrive, with vibraharpist Jason Adasiewicz, is in fine form on an album of the same name, and they'll have a new one on 482 Music coming soon. (The first two Sheltons are self-produced I believe and can perhaps be obtained through the Jazz Record Mart. If that doesn't work, let me know -- Shelton himself probably has copies under his bed.) Dave Rempis' trio Triage is captured well on "Twenty Minute Cliff" (Okkadisc) and another disc I think whose title escapes me; haven't yet heard his quartet album "Out of Season" (482 Music), but I bet it's at least as good. Tenor saxophonist Matt Bauder has an album on 482 Music, but while I've been impressed by him in live performance, I found this music impenetrable/aimless/pretentiously arty/you name it. Cornetist Josh Berman, tenorman Keefe Jackson, drummer Frank Rosaly, and Swiss tuba player Marc Unternaeher have a good new one coming on Delmark in March (disclaimer: I wrote the notes). Excellent altoist Matana Roberts' trio Sticks and Stones (bassist Josh Abrams, drummer Chad Taylor) has frustratingly not been captured whole on record yet, but "Shed Grace" (Thrill Jockey) comes much closer than its predecessor. (Roberts hasn't been a Chicagoan for a while, but her music is in the spirit.) Haven't yet heard the new Jeff Parker on Thrill Jockey; his Delmark trio album, "Like-Coping," is dully recorded but can be made to sound decent with a big treble boost and bass cut. The Jeb Bishop Trio album on Okkadisc captures him at his shaggy-dog best, but I think it's OOP. All in all, though, there's a lot happening in performance that hasn't made its way to disc yet.

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro -- I just don't get Vandermark as a player at all, doubt that there's much there to get. And this raises big doubts in my mind about his compositional stuff, makes me pretty sure that to the degree that it works or seems to work it's because he's got some good players working with him.

[Chuck Nessa]

Larry, I too think KV is a modest player but think he's a good (and active) organizer. This shows up in his performances/recordings where many worthy musicians are "showcased" in a way they would not be without his work.

[Larry Kart]

"he's a good (and active) organizer. This shows up in his performances/recordings where many worthy musicians are "showcased" in a way they would not be without his work."

That fits what I've heard.

[AllenLowe]

didn't vandermark win one of those McArthur's?