Quarantine Hall: Live Enough

A reminder: the COVID-19 virus is everywhere and will continue to be everywhere until there’s a vaccine. Sorry, just reporting, I don’t make the rules here, the universe does. Here in New York City we’re in Phase 2, which means you can eat out, as long as you’re outside, and even the Strand is letting in small groups of customers—browsing through used bookstores is the thing I miss the most. Concerts return in Phase 4, but what the statistics from Arizona, Texas, Florida, and California are showing is that Phase 3—indoor dining and half-full bars—is a problem no one has been able to yet navigate. This almost entirely relies on personal behavior, and this is America, where spoiling the commons is a national pastime. So no, I have no confidence that New York City is going to reach Phase 4 and maintain that without a vaccine.

That leaves the streaming landscape, which has been generally unsuccessful. The will is there, but I see very little thinking about this new environment—playing in front of a camera and a microphone just doesn’t cut it. I’m starting to see new thinking though, and can hearily recommend the new Streaming Live at the Village Vanguard series. Sets are Saturdays at 7 and Sundays at 2 (EST), sound is quite good (though there’s the classic Vanguard stuffiness in the drums) and the production is excellent, the lighting gives the stage a new look and there’s multi-camera direction, including hand-held work. I wish musicians would stop talking to the non-existent audience, it crashes into the Third Wall, but as far as live jazz goes, it’s a good experience. Access is a modest $7 and this weekend you can catch the Joe Martin Quartet, with Mark Turner, Kevin Hays, and Nasheet Waits.

The Festival International de Jazz de Montréal is going streaming this year, June 27-30. All shows will be free, live at the festival’s Facebook page, then those sets will be available on Facebook, IGTV and YouTube. With COVID-19, the lineup is heavy on Canadian musicians, including guitarist Jordan Officer and Jacques Kuba Séguin, and the festival is augmenting the live music with archival performances from Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan, and Miles Davis.

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― Darcy James Argue

Quarantine Hall: Marathon and More

The second Bang on a Can Marathon of the COVID-19 era hits the the ground this afternoon, 3pm-9pm EST. You can view it via this link or with the embedded stream below:

Viewing is free, but as always if you can, please help out the musicians and Bang on a Can by buying a ticket (it amounts to a donation for the cause). Bang on a Can is donating 10% of today’s ticket revenue to the Equal Justice Initiative. Hourly schedule (approximate) follows at the bottom of this post.

And in what I hope is good news, live jazz has returned to the Village Vanguard. This weekend the club has started a live-streaming schedule, Saturday nights at 7 and Sunday matinées at 2. Tickets to the streaming portal are $7. Most promising is that the Vanguard is presenting ensembles—Billy Hart’s Quartet this weekend, with Mark Turner, Ethan Iverson, and Ben Street—which at the very least indicates these musicians are healthy and hints at the possibilities of just how many musicians might be allowed on stage when phase four of New York State’s reopening arrives here in the city, which right now looks to be, maybe, sometime in September at the earliest (though if there are more scenes like this one from St. Mark’s Place in the East Village the evening of June 12 then we’re not getting to phase four until there’s a vaccine. Culture is not going to survive humanity.).

The one caveat to all this is that the live-streaming experience for the past few months has mostly been piss-poor—even without the often mediocre technical quality, snafus, and the fact that listeners are limited by the quality of their sound reproduction equipment, music played in isolation for isolated audiences is just that, isolating, alienating, cold. I’m hoping the Vanguard experience is different, and the Bang on a Can lineup has some performers who might be able to shine in the solo, isolated environment, Iva Bittová and Nik Bärtsch. Give it a try, and donate if you can.

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3:00

• Rhiannon Giddens
• Helena Tulve’s Without love atoms would stop spinning (world premiere) performed by Arlen Hlusko
• Aaron Garcia’s disconnect. (world premiere) performed by Ken Thomson
• Shara Nova – New Work (world premiere)

4:00

• Alvin Curran’s Shofar Rags XXL
• Ted Hearne’s Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job
• Žibuoklė Martinaitytė’s Abyssal Zone (world premiere) performed by Robert Black
• Nik Bӓrtsch

5:00

• Iva Bittová
• Roscoe Mitchell
• Paula Matthusen’s of an implacable subtraction performed by Dana Jessen
• Tomeka Reid’s Lamenting G.F., A.A., B.T., T.M. (world premiere) performed by Vicky Chow
• Nico Muhly

6:00

• Susanna Hancock’s EVERYTHING IN BLOOM (world premiere) performed by Nick Photinos
• Don Byron
• Ailie Robertson – New Work (world premiere) performed by Gregg August
• Tim Brady’s At Sergio’s Request (world premiere)

7:00

• Judd Greenstein’s In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves performed by Nadia Sirota
• Pamela Z
• Alex Weiser’s Music from ‘and all the days were purple’ performed by Eliza Bagg
• Kendall Williams – New Work (world premiere) performed by David Cossin

8:00

• Carla Kihlstedt – New Work (world premiere)
• Frederic Rzewski’s “Which side are you on?” performed by Conrad Tao
• Leila Adu – New Work (world premiere) performed by Mark Stewart
• Terry Riley

“I strongly disagree with much of…this essay…but it’s incredibly well-written and thought-provoking, and definitely worth a read. This is the kind of writing that I would hold up as a perfect example of why blogs are not merely fun and interesting, but also serious and important.”

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“Anyone who can write with insight and authority about Alas No Axis, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello…Missy Mazzoli and William Britelle, and…Mahler…is okay in my book.”

― Darcy James Argue

Miles To Go

Happy Birthday Miles

One of the reader reviews on the Amazon page for my book, Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew scoffs at me for comparing Miles Davis’ artistry to that of Picasso and Stravinsky. That’s not much reason to respond to that, it’s a personal complaint that doesn’t even approach any level of critical thinking, but still it bothers me. Not that someone is dissatisfied with my book, but that this kind of shallow snobbery is still around.

Putting Davis in the company of Picasso and Stravinsky is historically and critically accurate. Each man pioneered brand new styles and concepts in their art, before leaving an innovation behind and moving on to a new one, and then doing it again, and again. To paraphrase a passage from Miles’ autobiography, Miles was seated next to a well-tended woman at a White House dinner, and when the woman asked him, with no little condescension, what he (a black man) did to earn an invite, he responded “I changed music four or five times, what did you do other than being born white?”

Miles (after serving as Charlie Parker’s musical director and sitting in Bird’s trumpet chair longer than Red Rodney or Kenny Dorham) went on to create cool jazz, modal jazz, then jazz-rock fusion. In between, especially with the 1965-68 Quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams, he climbed a pinnacle of jazz conception that has yet to be surpassed, using wiry structure to contain playing that was almost entirely free within a clear jazz language. Jazz is a hybrid music in that it is the only music to begin as a popular style then move on to become an art music (and no, John Dowland becoming “classical” because he’s ancient doesn’t count). And no one, not even Parker or Duke Ellington or Coltrane (and think about Coltrane and all the other careers Miles launched as one of the great bandleaders), did more to blend the pop with the art. Miles’ music always had soul, blues, funk, sweat, sex, intellect, abstraction, and hipness. Just like Picasso, and Stravinsky. What more can we want from art?

Recommendations? Well, all of it. There are the individual classics, of course, but it’s the body of work as a whole that is an endless pleasure. With that, the record I reach for most often is Someday My Prince Will Come. I just love the elegance and muscularity of Miles’ playing and arranging, Hank Mobley sounds so fresh, and it’s a subtle feature for the great Jimmy Cobb, who just left us this past weekend. If in doubt, though, listen to the great, massive playlist I put together:

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“George Grella understood exactly.”

― Robert Ashley

“…Edgy models include Brooklyn Rail…”

― San Francisco Classical Voice

A Sunny Day

May 22, 1914, that’s when America and the world got ahold of one Herman Blount—at least that’s what his parents thought his name was.

Sun Ra and America are the essential combination: Ra’s mythos is an utterly logical response to the insanity of being an African-American, building much of the greatness of a nation that despises you. And the greatness he did build spanned every aspect of American popular music.

Seriously, listen for yourself. The collection of his 45rpm singles (Yeah baby!) is one of the most important documents of American music, if you don’t have it, get it. There’s no “old, weird” America with Ra, it’s all America, and it makes such sense that the music that other people make sounds weird in comparison. Listening to Ra explains to me why I’ve been deaccessioning all my Dylan recordings. Dylan seems like such arch artifice compared to this:

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― G. Schirmer & Associates

“…Edgy models include Brooklyn Rail…”

― San Francisco Classical Voice

Clean on the Scene

The great Jackie McLean was born on this day in 1931. And when I mean great I mean just a motherfucker, in the way Miles meant it.

I came relatively late to McLean. There was something about his playing that put me off for a time, he was saying something I didn’t understand and say it in a way that overpowered my thinking. But I stuck with it, and in particular I listened to Bluesnik and New Soil again and again and again and again. And I started to get it, the incredible toughness and soul and blues, the kind of swagger that comes from strength and clarity and a sense of oneself.

With those, One Step Beyond and Destination…Out! made complete sense to me, and they became profound—the sound of a musician trying to break out of himself, willing to take a chance on faltering and failing because he had more to say and need to find the means to say it. With that, New and Old Gospel, with Ornette Coleman, was a complete triumph.

For me, this is the most important and fulfilling kind of music making, musicians taking risks to get from where they are to where they want to be, and that destination itself is undiscovered territory. Jackie McLean is one of my titans.

I was glad to write a Lest We Forget piece on McLean for the May issue of the New York City Jazz Record. Didn’t get to fit in all the words I wanted, but I would just add that his run of Blue Note records in the 1960s is some of the greatest and most important discography in jazz, and nothing on Blue Note surpasses it. You should listen to all fo them. Again and again and again and again and

Download Lest We Forget: Jackie McLeanDownload

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Quarantine Hall: The New Gig

Everybody’s hurting. In music, jazz musicians are really hurting because for the most part they make their money with live gigs and teaching, so yeah no work (and that work is wage-based, you do the work then you get paid, we’re a long way from when Duke Ellington could keep a band on salary and have them available when he wanted).

Thursday, May 14, 8pm EST, the Jazz Foundation of America is putting up an online show for the COVID-19 Musicians Emergency Concert Fund. It’s a benefit show, so your donations go to the fund. And why donate? Because here’s some of the people who will be playing:

• John Batiste
• Elvis Costello
• Robert Cray
• Bootsy Collins
• Cheryl Crow
• Mark Ribot
• Angelique Kidjo

Keegan-Michael Key hosts. The show will stream at the link above of the Foundation’s YouTube page, and once it opens it will be rebroadcast at 10pm the same night then be available for 24 hours. Tune in.

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“A reputable music blog.”

― New Amsterdam Records

Paul Desmond: The Complete 1975 Toronto Recordings

EPSON MFP image

A new box set from Mosaic Records, looks primo, and ready to ship.

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― Darcy James Argue

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May Day Music

On May 1, Bandcamp is once again waiving their fees, so if you buy something 100% of the money goes to the artist (they’ll also be doing this at the beginning of June and July, if you want to gird your wallet).

Pi Recordings has started to issue a series called This is Now: Love in the Time of COVID, with quick and unusual new recordings from their group of artists. First is this solo album from saxophonist Steve Lehman, a very personal and idiosyncratic (and mind-blowing) set of studies he recorded in his car.

I flag this series in particular because Pi is distributing this for their artists, and the musicians get 100% of the money. Good guys all around.

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“I dig the jacket!”

― Kurt Elling

“George Grella understood exactly.”

― Robert Ashley