Two reviews of Cecil Taylor/John Zorn concerts

[brownie]

Ben Ratliff's review of last weekend's Cecil Taylor/John Zorn concerts at Jazz at Lincoln Center in The New York Times today:

BARRICADES TO STORM, WHETHER OR NOT ANY GUARDS WERE ON THEM

By BEN RATLIFF

Published: March 13, 2007

There was a superficial electricity ahead of last weekend’s double bill at the Rose Theater at Jazz at Lincoln Center: Cecil Taylor’s new trio and John Zorn’s Masada. It was conducted further by some critics and through the nervous conversations of the audience before the show. It had to do with the notion that a pugnacious jazz avant-garde was being invited inside the gates of a dull and powerful establishment.

The jazz avant-garde is a problematic notion: everybody knows roughly what it means, but nobody knows where it begins and ends. And if you accept Mr. Taylor and Mr. Zorn as avant-gardists, you’re too easily forced to consider Wynton Marsalis — Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director — as a mainstreamer. He’s not. His bands don’t sound like anyone else’s.

But above all, the experimental composers and bandleaders whose work refers to, argues against and engages with different parts of jazz — the putative jazz avant-garde — just don’t need Jazz at Lincoln Center anymore. Their interests and audiences don’t extend there. They’ve built their own festivals, their own record companies. (Mr. Zorn has created his own Lower East Side club, the Stone, with music six nights a week.) The MacArthur Foundation has honored almost all the major figures of the jazz avant-garde with fellowships. Academic presses are pumping out books about their achievements. What’s the big deal, for them, about a gig at the Rose Theater?

Since it began presenting concerts in 1988, Jazz at Lincoln Center has never before contracted Mr. Taylor or Mr. Zorn for a concert. (Oops.) Now, toward the end of a season called “Innovations in Jazz,” they were packaged together as a twofer. But whatever ponderous metathoughts about jazz the weekend’s shows promised, they happily delivered something much more specific: the end of one great band and the beginning of another.

Mr. Zorn distrusts institutional authority and has mastered the language of the outsider-scourge. Onstage with Masada on Friday, he righteously cudgeled the institution.

“Let’s hope this is the beginning of a trend of enlightened programming here,” he yelped. “There are more young faces in the audience here than there have been since the inception of this place!” The remark ennobled the scattering of mostly white and schlumpy student hipsters among the old subscription audience, but that didn’t make it true.

Speeches delivered, the quartet started up, and of course it didn’t sound out of place; it sounded great. Nobody got up and left. The older subscriber types around me weren’t put off by the aggression in the music. They liked it.

Masada’s music is logical, comic, athletic; it rides on a strong groove from Greg Cohen’s bass and Joey Baron’s speeding drums. It never sounds comfortable or settled, which fits with the rest of Mr. Zorn’s artistic temperament. It uses Jewish scales, early Ornette Coleman melodic shapes and hardcore-punk energy, and both Mr. Zorn and the trumpeter Dave Douglas feed off the rhythm section’s rush: Mr. Douglas’s solos are harmonically engaged; Mr. Zorn’s are gestural.

Like all of Mr. Zorn’s best projects, Masada is an airtight system. It has also barely changed since its first records in 1994, and Tzadik.com, the Web site of Mr. Zorn’s label, Tzadik, announced that the Lincoln Center shows would be two of Masada’s last concerts.

What is it, at this point, that’s so important in Cecil Taylor’s music? Rhythm. He plays some interesting chords, but it isn’t so much how he gets from one to the next, or the melodic shapes he traces; it’s all in the movement. As with any innately charismatic actor or dancer, witnessing it is infinitely better than trying to explain it. It’s in the millions of choices that make a flowing gesture.

There’s plenty of alluring stuff in Mr. Taylor’s phrasing: funk, 6/8 grooves and very familiar bits and pieces of blues. It’s just that a lot of it happens almost simultaneously, one strand merging into the next before the completion of a single measure. His new trio, AHA 3, had Henry Grimes on bass, who confirmed the music’s shifting key centers with his low-end rumble. But it was the drummer Pheeroan AkLaff, playing with technical detail and plenty of funk, who made it all clear for you.

In a handful of pieces, some becoming impossibly dense and clotted, too much for a sizable chunk of the audience — was this why the Rose Theater technical crew made the idiotic decision to bring up the house lights before the show was over? — the three musicians careered through agitated pantonal improvisations, bass and drums tightly aligned to Mr. Taylor’s phrasing.

Mr. Taylor’s music doesn’t draw on a body of consensual, practical knowledge; he is the single source of his art, and his sidemen got as close to it as any Taylor group I’ve seen in 20 years.

Will Friedwald's review of the same concert in The New York Sun:

REVOLUTIONARIES IN THE FOLD

By WILL FRIEDWALD

March 12, 2007

When Jazz at Lincoln Center got going 15 years ago, it was initially perceived as the leading bastion of jazz conservativism, preserving everything that was good about the music's past. As for the future, the thinking seemed to go, it would take care of itself. In the three years since the opening of Rose Hall, however, there has been more of an effort by JALC to position itself as the organization for all of jazz — classic and contemporary.

Saturday night's program featured two groups: Masada, the avant-garde jazz ensemble led by alto saxophonist John Zorn and pianist Cecil Taylor's new Aha 3 trio. The evening represented a major step forward for the idea that JALC can truly be all things to all jazz lovers. Mr. Taylor, a venerated statesman of jazz who has been a controversial headliner for over 50 years, is the archetypical revolutionary. Mr. Zorn has positioned himself as something of an anti-Wynton Marsalis: He runs a performance space (the Stone, on Avenue C, in addition to the record label Tzadik), but whereas Mr. Marsalis champions everything traditional — New Orleans, swing, bebop — Mr. Zorn is the guru of everything downtown, experimental, and just plain flaky.

Masada, which first recorded for a Japanese label in 1994, is both a specific body of compositions and the ensemble, with Dave Douglas, trumpet; Greg Cohen, bass, and Joey Baron, drums. The concept behind this group was to present what Mr. Zorn calls "radical Jewish culture": '60s-style free jazz with a decidedly Hebraic outlook — sort of Ornette Coleman meets Mickey Katz in hi-fi. Mr. Zorn's main tactic here is to start with melodies that sound like they could be played at a Jewish wedding, but the music is rendered with collective melodic improvisation. Mr. Zorn's saxophone statements — such as shrieks and shouts or disturbances and distortions — are just as much a part of the music as the regular tempered notes. The most conventionally melodic moments are Mr. Cohen's bass solos, and the quietest passages are Mr. Baron's drum solos. The group is constantly playing beautiful, minor key melodies, often involving exotic polyrhythms, and then immediately destroying any chance of the audience relaxing into the music with eruptive, explosive dissonances — as if it were a production of "Fiddler on the Roof" staged by the inmates of "Marat/Sade."

Mr. Zorn, who was recently awarded the MacArthur Foundation's "genius" grant, also seems to be competing with Keith Jarrett for the role of jazz bad boy. After the first number, Mr. Zorn harangued the Rose Hall technical staff to lower the house lights and refused to proceed until they did, and delivered nearly all of his spoken announcements off-mike, as if he couldn't be bothered to walk three feet and talk into a microphone. He was dressed like a rapper, in camoflauge pants and hooded sweatshirt, and treated like a rock star, in that the crowd went wild every time he overblew a note. But because his skill as a composer, and his mastery of the horn, as well as the interplay of the quartet, are all remarkable, I was going wild as well.

Cecil Taylor's major bit of stagecraft was to have his drummer, Pheeroan akLaff, begin the show by tapping on his conga drum, while Mr. Taylor, still backstage, responded by tapping back. (Mr. akLaff sports the largest, most intimidating percussion setup I have ever seen — even more impressive than that of drum star Jack DeJohnette.)

Next Henry Grimes made his entrance, but rather than picking up his familiar olive oil-colored bass, he began scratching random notes on a violin. Mr. Taylor then alighted the stage, but did an odd dance holding what looked like Balinese finger cymbals, gargling what sounded like a death rattle. When he made it to the piano, he plucked a few strings inside the instrument, and read several lines of decidedly nonlinear poetry (seemingly random words) before starting to play.

After a lot of buildup, we were suddenly in the middle of it. Whereas Mr. Zorn's music employs theme and variations, loud and soft dynamics, fast and slow, Mr. Taylor's playing is nothing but pure momentum and energy: a morass of rhythmically driven music with nothing that suggests conventional melody or harmony. Never before has JALC emcee Todd Barkan's standard opening line about jazz being "a journey into the unforeheard" been so accurate. Mr. Taylor's playing seems at first like pure pounding, an assault on both the piano and the audience, but gradually patterns emerge and a kind of inner logic reveals itself. Mr. Grimes switched between violin and bass, and Mr. akLaff was all over his encyclopedic trap set, but the main force was Mr. Taylor, pushing ever forward. His stamina and technique were remarkable in his 30s, and now, for a 78-year-old man, they are even more impressive. About two thirds of the way through his set, he slowed down, letting our ears relax a bit. The softer and almost tranquil passage that followed seemed beautiful.

Both groups, who played to a near capacity crowd of people younger than the standard JALC audiences, received two of the only standing ovations I've seen at the Rose Theater, and both played encores. After tonight, nothing could surprise me, even if Wynton Marsalis were to give a solo, unaccompanied trumpet concert at the Stone.

Edited March 13, 2007 by brownie

[Alexander Hawkins]

Thanks for posting those!

[Niko]

“There are more young faces in the audience here than there have been since the inception of this place!”

who'd have thought that Zorn was a Lincoln Center Regular

thank you for posting

[AllenLowe]

I think you meant Friedwald not Litweiler -

[brownie]

I think you meant Friedwald not Litweiler -

Thanks for catching up on this!

I have fixed the proper credit.

I should have waited to have my first morning taste of red wine before posting the two reviews

[J Larsen]

I went Saturday night - Masada was pretty good, while Cecil Taylor was awesome (but not as awesome as the first time I saw AHA 3 at the Iridium a few months ago). I thought Zorn played up the chip-on-the-shoulder thing a bit much, as when he screamed "Do you have to play music that is 100 years old to get any respect in this place" after it took the house technician more than three seconds to dim the house lights after Zorn had requested he do so.

Cecil Taylor really cleared out the room. He started his set by screaming, as if in unbearable pain, from off stage for about two minutes. When he finally came on, he continued screaming, then started chanting, and then started banging a cymbal against the piano. An elderly couple behind me contemplated calling the police. When he finally started playing, he was really on fire, but apparently most didn't share that opninion. I'd say about 80% of the house walked out on him.

[J Larsen]

J-- did you pay $$$ or get the discount? been too busy/busted to go but i saw ad somewhere, call up get 1/2 price tix.

I'll answer your question by asking you another question: What discount?

I bought tix as soon as they went on sale and got front center seats. It was easily worth it (half the price of equivalent seats at the Met, for instance).

[Hoppy T. Frog]

J-- did you pay $$$ or get the discount? been too busy/busted to go but i saw ad somewhere, call up get 1/2 price tix.

I'll answer your question by asking you another question: What discount?

If you went to the box office and asked for the Zorn50 discount. It only worked for box office walk-up sales.

Oh, and Masada didn't impress me at all. Sounded like an Ornette Coleman tribute band. All the season ticket blue hairs seemed to like it, tho.

Edited March 15, 2007 by Hoppy T. Frog

[7/4]

Oh, and Masada didn't impress me at all. Sounded like an Ornette Coleman tribute band. All the season ticket blue hairs seemed to like it, tho.

I always thought they sounded like an Easter European wedding band meets Ornette Coleman

Edited March 15, 2007 by 7/4

[J Larsen]

I'm pretty lukewarm on Masada, myself. I didn't think they sucked, but I think they rely on gimmicks too much. It's kind of hard for me to give an objective opinion because I was sitting in the middle of a bunch of high school and college kids who were cuckoo for cocoa puffs, and therefore I feel like I'm biased towards being unduly harsh on them as a knee jerk reaction. Objectively, I think they were probably pretty good but not great. If I had walked into a random club and heard the exact same music, I probably would have been pleasantly surprised. And they passed the hour leading up to Cecil Taylor taking the stage suitably quickly, which was their primary job that night, as far as I was concerned.

Edited March 15, 2007 by J Larsen