Downbeast - music blog

Before we get to the latest in a flurry of current interviews with Jeff Gauthier, we'd like to finally acknowledge some shitty, sad news: one of the extended Cryptogramophone clan has passed on in a most untimely fashion: bassist Dave Carpenter.

Probably best known for his trio work with pianist Alan Pasqua and drummer Peter Erskine, Carpenter suffered a fatal heart attack at his home in Burbank on June 23. Read the all-too-short L.A. Times obit here, and check out some of Mr. Carpenter's stellar work here.

Continue reading "AAJ Grills a Weary Fearless Leader" »

Thursday night's CD release party for the Jeff Gauthier Goatette's House of Return at West L.A.'s Palmer Room was a bit of a surprise. Our fearless leader didn't just showcase tracks from the new record -- "Satellites and Sideburns" (the Nels Cline-penned tribute to Weather Report's Joe Zawinul) and Eric Von Essen's "Dissolution" were particular standouts -- but took the capacity crowd on a pocket journey through his entire five album repertoire, including "Seriously Twisted Blues" from 1994's Internal Memo and the opening song, a sparkling version of "Ephemera," from 2001's Mask, which included a muscular bass solo from Joel Hamilton and an insistent but light-on-its-feet tribal rumble from Alex Cline. Next was a supple take on Eric Von Essen's "Biko's Blues," easily the standout track on the new album as well as the first set. Keyboardist David Witham ruled on the following "Sofflicka"; his electric piano intentionally distorted to create an unsettlingly "dirty' sound, as if the keys were encrusted with sand grit. The biggest surprise was the cover of "From Gagarin's Point of View" by the recently deceased Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson. This in turn led into a short freefall improv (in which Mr. Cline and Mr. Gauthier really shined) that metamorphed into a rollicking "Friends of the Animals" from the new album. (During the show, Mr. Bennie Maupin strolled in, looking incognito in baseball cap and long beige jacket, ordering a cranberry and pineapple juice. Nice touch!)

Luckily, the concert was recorded live to video by our friend DiMarkco Chandler, so we'll get some footage up for you ASAP!

SET I
1. Ephemera (For Eric)
2. Biko's Blues
3. Solflicka
4. Gagarin's Point of View / Improv / Friends of the Animals

SET II
1. Heart Wisdom (for Thelma)
2. Seriously Twisted Blues (for Richard Grossman)
3. Improv / Dissolution
4. Satellites and Sideburns

(For an even more in-depth review of the show, including some terrific in-performance pics, check out Kellen Yamanaka's blog Song With Orange.)

Wow, here's a pair of odd bedfellows for your plans this weekend: Jeff Gauthier and Chip Fitzgerald.

Tonight at 8pm our Fearless Leader continues his subversive plot to destroy all musical boundaries by leading his Goatette -- keyboardist David Witham, bassist Joel Hamilton and percussionist Alex Cline (no, L.A. Times, Nels will NOT be playing) -- in the CD release party at West L.A.'s Palmer Room for the ensemble's new Crypto drop House of Return. Not to miss -- and I'm not just saying that because he's the boss...hahhhaahahhh (trailing off weakly)

Our friend Greg Burk has a cool metal/jazz blog called, you guessed, it, Metal Jazz. Read his interview with Mr. Gauthier here.

Beginning at noon on Saturday in Leimert Park, at the KAOS Network/Project Blowed space, there will what be a day-long series of events in support of Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, the longest incarcerated Black Panther in the United States. (38 years -- and Fitzgerald's parole hearing is set for July 2.) Documentary films will be shown, people will speak -- including former Black Panther Elaine Brown (whose Seize The Time, her 1969 collaboration with Horace Tapscott was just reissued). For more info on Fitzgerald and his case, go here. To read a compelling account of more fallout from that ugly, volatile time in American life, check out Matthew Fleischer's LA Weekly article Children of the Revolutionary.

"When the world is running down..."

Cinema du Musique PostScript: if you're not too tuckered on Sat. night, they're running a new documentary downtown on the glory days of the famed L.A. session musicians known as The Wrecking Crew (California Plaza Amphitheatre, 350 S. Grand Ave., dwntwn; Sat., June 28, 8 p.m. Admission free). Then, have a good sleep (after watching the rebroadcast of the very first Saturday Night Live with the recently vacated first host George Carlin), go check out an early music-film masterpiece in the comfort of an outdoor graveyard. Cinespia will be showing Steve Binder's 1964 concert doc The T.A.M.I. Show, featuring Chuck Berry, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys and, of course, the showstopping, career-making performances by Ike & Tina Turner and James Brown. Then, go home and collapse and have someone put a cape over you.

Continue reading "REVIEW ROUND-UP: Assemblage, 1998-2008" »

On our docket is a recent interview conducted by Bass Player magazine with Todd Sickafoose, whose sublime Tiny Resistors was just released this month, along with or Fearless Leader Jeff Gauthier's House of Return.

Continue reading "T-Sick Dishes To Bass Player" »

A SIX PAGE profile or Mr. Bennie Maupin!? What God did we please?

You know, I always like those lads at JazzTimes -- and apparently so does the Jazz Journalists' Association, which just last night awarded JT the honor of "Best Jazz Periodical."

Well, OK, it's not exactly a profile as it is an interview culled from the website of Resonance Records, founded by local jazz producer/engineer George Klabin, who recorded many future jazz legends (Gary Burton, Bill Evans, Bob James, Keith Jarrett, Roger Kellaway) when he headed the College Radio Jazz Department at Columbia University in the mid-1960s.

Klabin is the man behind the Rising Stars Jazz Foundation, which among many other activities mounts home jazz salons that take place in the Beverly Hills estate he purchased next door to his own. He converted the estate into a sumptuous high-tech performance space and recording studio. Klabin's salons feature out of town artists not just from the U.S. but from England, Brazil, Sweden and Italy. Guests have included Gerald Clayton, Elaine Elias, Peter Erskine, Mike Garson, Anglea Hagenbach, Tamir Hendelman, Christian Howes, Christian Jacob, Kathy Kosins, Romero Lubambo, Josh Nelson, Enrico Pieranunzi, Ron Satterfield, Annie Sellick and Ernie Watts. Klabin also just released the Great Moments in Performance Volume 1, a DVD culled from the salons.

[Per our previous post about the upcoming group photograph of L.A.'s jazz community in front of UCLA's Schoenberg Hall (the date has been changed to Sunday, Oct. 12 at 1:30pm), the following is an unpublished short piece I wrote a few years back about a group photograph of local L.A jazz and cultural luminaries from Leimert Park on Saturday, May 13, 2006. Once we track down the photo in question, we'll try to put it up. Enjoy!]

The fascinating headwear began to gather around noontime Saturday before the giant stone fountain in Leimert Park Village: tams, skull caps, straw fedoras, pork pies, Chinese coolies, top hats, fezzes. For passers-by curious enough to ask, the mélange was described as this: “Remember the ‘Great Day in Harlem’?” ?" The reactions were either that of recognition or feigned recognition. "Great Day in Harlem? What does that have to do with this?”

Jesse Sharps searches for The Oneness before the Leimert Village fountain

The reference was to Art Kane’s now-famous 1958 Esquire group photo that captured 58 jazz masters, from Lester Young and Thelonius Monk to Art Blakey and Mary Lou Williams, on a Harlem staircase and later became the subject of a book and a documentary film. What distinguished that image was that nobody—certainly not Kane or those who posed for it—really thought much of what it portended at the time; only later did filmmakers and writers seem to glean some sort of zeitgeist-defining moment.

Such group photos seem to have become cultural hallmarks in African-American life, particularly in the intersection of music and the visual arts. Thirty years after Kane's photo, Anthony Barboza’s photo of a 15-person collective helped to define the "New Black Aesthetic" in the 1980s, from George C. Wolfe and Russell Simmons to Spike Lee and Chris Rock, shot on a staircase at the Brooklyn headquarters of Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule production company and currently the subject of the documentary Smart Black People. "I use the photo here...because, for me, it captures the spirit of the time like a charm," wrote critic Nelson George. "Barboza’s photo is the future of our collective past."

But in many ways, what happened at the village fountain was quite different from those decidedly Gotham-centric scene. The Leimert Park group photo, assembled by photographer and Malcolm X festival co-organizer Torre’ Brannon-Reese, was the latest addition to a project called “cultural renaissance classic photo series.” It will be unveiled in all its sepia glory on May 18 at the Lucy Florence Cultural Center, exactly ten years to the day of the first photo of 60 local jazz legends standing, sitting and kneeling before the World Stage performance gallery.

In other words, this wasn’t just a single moment captured for posterity but an ongoing documentation of the comings and goings of generations in a city that was never a single city but a crazy quiltwork of them, each with their separate rhythms and identities, split by traffic and hamstrung by time—in many ways, a rebuke to the very idea of artistic interaction, musical or otherwise.

So, for exactly two hours, at least 84 musicians, artists, writers, dancers and poets who defined the African-American arts in South (Central) L.A. for the past half-century converged from all over the area: artist John Outterbridge and poet Kamau Daáood, graduates of the area’s first cultural flowering following the 1965 riots; trumpeter Clora Bryant, the only female to play with Charlie Parker, and Aman Kufahamu, host of the influential KUSC radio show Greg's Refresher Course; Dale Davis, co-owner of the first African-American owned business in Leimert Park, and Bob Watt, assistant principal french horn for the L.A. Philharmonic and the symphony’s first African-American; David Ornette Cherry and Harold Land Jr., pianist sons of great Los Angeles horn masters. (Louis Gossett Jr. was a no-show as was Buddy Collette, Arthur Blythe, Dr. Art Davis, Sonship Theus and Gerald Wilson.)

As usual, it was musicians who dominated the scene. Jackie Kelso arrived looking regal in a gray suit and sea-blue blouse, holding his soprano sax like a proud brass totem. Roberto Miguel Miranda showed up with his bass and jammed with the drum circle whose pulse created the backbeat for the reminiscing and joking, the raucous laughter and salty cajoling of people who haven’t seen each other in years, days or weeks. “We're dealin’ with jazz people here,” chuckled Reese. “When I said ‘arrive at twelve noon,’ they hear ‘one o clock.’” As the entire mass of people assembled itself on the lip of the fountain, or knelt before it with their instruments, homeless men crept up to the edge of this warm chaos and stare in wonderment, too taken aback to approach anybody. On the other hand, a dark-suited political hopeful materialized out of nowhere to shake hands and purr a teletype shpiel about supporting music in the schools. He was not run out on a rail.

It was a fun crowd but a prickly and self-assured one as well: They had somewhere else to be. Clora Bryant, sporting a halo of purple, pink and blue carnations in her hair, marched up and announced: “I want somebody to take my picture now!" Young bassist Nick Rosen glanced around distractedly, “This is such a great scene, but I gotta go help my mom put her dog to sleep.” Folding chairs were brought over from the World Stage and placed on two large rugs that had been laid at the south end of the fountain. ("Are we gonna have to bring these chairs back?" someone called out.) Reese pointed to a gray-bearded man who wandered by, looking both dazed and keyed up by all the familiar faces and voices. "Hey, I want you in the front of the photo ‘cause you missed it ten years ago!" A long three branch kept dipping into the corner of the shot until someone broke it off. After the photo was taken, some ventured over to a jam session at the Farmer’s Market down the street. Most, however, dispersed and melted back into the city as quickly as they came.

Reese seemed to recognize both the fleeting quality of the moment as much as the ghost trails left by those who had passed on since the original photo. (The next one, whenever it will be taken, many here will be noticeably absent.) Before he centered his subjects in the camera lens, Reese stepped up and addressed them with the exhorting musicality of a Baptist preacher: "We are standing on sacred ground, where Horace Tapscott and Billy Higgins once walked, where Richard Fulton started 5th Street Dick's and the Davis Brothers started the Brockman Gallery. We thank the Divine Creator for our lives. We thank you for the struggles of our ancestors. We thank you for being able to stand with our art in this spiritual village. We pledge to you oh God we will do all we can to make this world a better place for our children than it was for us.” He asked the crowd to repeat after him: “We are Focued! Powerful! Gifted! Tolerant! In Love!" Cheers and fists went up in the sun.

Flash.

NEW RELEASES BY TODD SICKAFOOSE & JEFF GAUTHIER OUT TODAY!

On Tiny Resistors, bassist and composer Todd Sickafoose matches violinist/looper Andrew Bird and iconic singer Ani DiFranco with his 8-piece New York band (with Skerik and Adam Levy) to create a jazz record with the muscle and scope of an indie-rock orchestra. The music evokes images: the mysterious flora of a future epoch, a secret message scribbled in invisible ink, an exodus of buzzing bees, and the silent sadness of an underwater piano, drowned in the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. It is these visions, and others, that inspire the 11 original compositions on Tiny Resistors, Sickafoose's third and most lushly-produced release to date.

House of Return, Jeff Gauthier's 5th recording as a leader, moves effortlessly from moody acoustic jazz to creative new music, to skronk fusion and electronic space jam. Voted a "Rising Star" as violinist and producer in the 2007 Downbeat Critics Poll, Gauthier continues his subversive plot to destroy all musical boundaries. House of Return features Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, drummer Alex Cline, pianist David Witham, and bassist Joel Hamilton.

Go to www.crypto.tv to find CDs by Bennie Maupin, Nels Cline, Alex Cline, Trio M, David Witham, Alan Pasqua, Myra Melford, Ben Goldberg, Scott Amendola, Mark Dresser and others. Also check out www.indiejazz.com where you can find creative jazz from over 200 different artists.