Dave Douglas and Uri Caine at An die Musik – Present Joys

 This article first appeared in the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Newsletter

It was capacity seating in the listening room with the high-back chairs on Charles Street in Baltimore, but that did not deter the trumpeter, composer, band leader, and record label founder Dave Douglas from squeezing in a couple of extra audience members.  He simply toted from the back of the room a few folding chairs and placed them onstage with him. After all, this was to be a concert of piano and trumpet duets, so there was some extra room up there.  Amused and in good spirits,  Douglas mounted the stage, called up his musical partner, pianist Uri Caine, and recalled for the audience what the late pianist Horace Silver had told him when Douglas worked with the composer early in his career. Horace Silver said that if one wants to be a jazz musician and one wants to hit a homerun, one must be prepared to play the role of: pitcher, batter, outfielder fielding the ball, catcher receiving the throw home, vendor selling popcorn in the stands, and finally the umpire calling the play at the plate.

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“Chaos was first,

but next appeared broad-bosomed Earth,

sure standing place for all the gods.”

--  Hesiod’s Theogeny (c. 1000 B.C.E., contemporary of Homer)

Silver’s advice was not just a dose of reality administered to a young jazz musician, his words also touch upon the the essence of the music played that Saturday night in July in Mount Vernon.  The duo played pieces adapted from and inspired by the songbooks of the shape-note singing tradition --  a collection of songs based on a simplified form of musical notation which has its roots in Europe, but which flourished first among the New England colonists and later, in the 19th and 20th centuries, throughout the rural South.  The tradition encompasses songs both religious and secular and is practiced in both African-American and European American communities and in the places where these communities meet.  In their lyrics and in their melodies alternatively stark and bright, the songs etch a portrait of the meeting of the spiritual and the material realms of life.  As is suggested by Horace Silver’s words of counsel to a young trumpeter: to reach great heights, one must work hard on the ground. And as Hesiod’s verse above suggests: it is here on Earth that we encounter spirit. 

Shape-note singing has very different roots from those of the many jazz “standards” -- with their catchy, bittersweet melodies perched over sophisticated chord changes -- that were originally written for Broadway or MGM musicals.  However, Dave Doulas and Uri Caine demonstrated at An die Musik that the shape-note tradition may prove to be a very deep well for jazz musicians to draw from.  The songs in the show typically began with simple, almost march-like piano chord phrases, over which Dave Douglas would play a stately melody from the shape-note tradition. (For those readers unfamiliar with these songs, your closest melodic reference point may be the much more widely known Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts,” adapted by Aaron Copeland for his score for the ballet Appalachian Spring).  From there, Douglas and Caine employed the jazz aesthetics of improvisation, rhythmic syncopation and harmonic extension to the hymns and laments.

 Uri Caine, a pianist who has released several albums of his fiercely individualistic interpretations of classical composers such as Gustav Mahler and Ricard Wagner  and albums which fuse jazz with drum n’ bass and hip-hop rhythms,  is an excellent choice by Douglas for the shape-note singing concept.  His style can be both precise and free.  His attack on the piano can go from clipped-sounding Glen Gould-style classical rigor to highly percussive blues and boogie woogie.  True to his heritage as a longtime member of the downtown New York jazz scene headed by maverick and genre-hybridizing composers like John Zorn and Marc Ribot,  Caine often played against the melody, deconstructing it and seeming to oppose it --  before returning to a well-defined articulation of it.  The effect was thrilling.

 Dave Douglas has a long history of drawing inspiration from folk music forms.  Notable in his oevure in this respect is the 2000 recording Charms of the Night Sky -- featuring a quartet of trumpet, violin, accordion, and bass -- which explores Eastern European and Jewish folk melodies. More recent is his 2012, Be Still -- featuring his current jazz quintet,  plus the Appalachian vocalist Aofie O’Donovan –-  a recording which contains six American folk hymns that Douglas’ mother requested he play at her funeral in 2011.  His performance at An die Musik made it clear why he is attracted to these old, land-based musical forms.  They come from a time of oral traditions and community singing events. As such, they are imbued with the struggles of everyday people; with their hopes, their longings and their moments of spiritual transcendence.  They serve as an excellent template for Douglas to seek spirit through the plaintive voice of his trumpet.

Baltimore

August, 2014

The Gary Bartz Quartet at An die Musik

This piece first appeared in the Baltimore Jazz Alliance Newsletter.

Midway through an eclectic and exuberant set of music on June 28 at An die Musik in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood, Charm City native and jazz luminary Gary Bartz paused to tell a story. “People play this song and sing it with the original lyrics. We’re going to play it and change the lyrics to tell you of some memories.” The quartet began to play the standard “Is That All There Is?” with all of the playfulness, daring and humming chemistry they had displayed in the previous  numbers of the set. Australian native Barney MacCall’s piano traveled seamlessly from bittersweet Elington-inspired melodies to speedy and soaring bop runs. Bassist James King anchored the quartet, articulating solid and expertly chosen three and four note phrases that served as a sort of root system for the group, connecting the drums, saxophone and piano into a living organism. Greg Bandy’s drums propelled the group by manifesting the dictum “less is more.” His distilling of a drum fill to its simplified essence or leaving out of a tom-tom hit where one expected to hear it granted the compositions space, breath and uplift. And finally there was Gary Bartz’s alto saxophone, which,  in keeping with our metaphor, was like the blossoming flowers upon the branches – melodic phrases bursting forth like the congruence of petals that form a flower.

            Gary Bartz sang “Is That All There Is,” his voice possessing the weathered presence that one would expect to hear in a 73-year-old musician who has played with Charles Mingus and Miles Davis. As the chorus approached, the music reduced and the bandleader told the story of his earliest memory.  He was two years old and playing in the living room of his family’s house in Baltimore, as his great-grandmother stood in the kitchen cooking a pot of beans. “I heard her fall down and saw her laying on the floor of the kitchen. My parents returned home and asked me where great-grandma was. I said that she was in the kitchen, sleeping. My parents entered the kitchen and saw her. And I said (and here Bartz began to sing and the music returned full on), ‘Is that all there is?’ “

It is odd that this story of viewing death for the first time served as the preamble to the chorus refrain, “Is That All There Is?” Death is so immense and incomprehensible to the small child that the response, “Is that all there is?” seems weirdly apt. And this - the union of seemingly incompatible parts - gets to the essence of great jazz, like that performed by the Gary Bartz Quartet in the high ceilinged room with the tall, arched windows that warm Saturday night in Baltimore in late June.

Chicago reed player Douglas Ewart has stated of jazz, “This is music of collective thought.” Throughout the evening, we heard this collective thought in full force. Several of the night’s pieces came from Gary Bartz’s most recent release, “Coltrane Rules - Tao of a Music Warrior.” These pieces (some of which are Coltrane compositions) feature the spiritual seeking characterized by a stark saxophone ascending in dizzying spirals over the moving ship formed by the piano, bass and drums – a form forged by the John Coltrane Quartet and carried on since by many disciples. It was within this structure that we heard the simultaneous and collective improvisation alluded to above. While the bass maintained a blues-based ostinato and peppered variations upon it, the piano endlessly unspooled chord voicings – tinged now with the Impressionist colors of Debussy, now with the sly impasto of Fats Waller. Bandy’s drumming, meanwhile, was in constant conversation with these moving parts: a cymbal splash to acknowledge a piano accent, a quick snare roll as a tip of the hat to a saxophone flourish.

Gary Bartz - looking stately in a gunmetal blue suit with a light green shirt, his curly gray locks combed straight back and cascading onto his shoulders – led the band on alto sax, soprano sax or vocals and mesmerized the audience. Writing of the late Chicago tenorman Fred Anderson, the poet Sterling Plumpp has said, “He believes art is the process of knowing one’s axe (instrument), as exemplified by one’s ability to invent a personal language that articulates its infinite layers of prophecy.” This, exactly, has been the pursuit of Gary Bartz for more than 60 years. A “personal language (articulating) infinite layers of prophecy” describes precisely what the enthralled audience heard that night at An die Musik. In his liner notes to Coltrane Rules, Gary Bartz defines himself as a warrior involved in a lifelong struggle to bring people healing through music. At the show, Gary Bartz healed and provoked with the power of his tone imbued with many decades of artistic and spiritual seeking, dating all the way back to his earliest memory involving his great-grandmother in the kitchen in Baltimore.

  Baltimore, Maryland. June, 2014

Mary Halvorson Solo Guitar at Otto Bar – Baltimore

This is the guitar as it is rightly played. I speak not of the genre of music presented – which is a neuron-firing blend of jazz, free jazz, noise and punk aesthetics in the service of European folk melodies, among other things. I speak, rather, of the attack of Mary Halvorson on the guitar. The instrument appears as something she uses to express her feelings and ideas and stories; but the large and heavy hollow body guitar, made of polished wood and metal and electronics, also influences, in return, all she has to say. We hear in real time the mysterious interface between an artist and her tools. The instrument is influencing Halverson's expression of the song as much as Halvorson is influencing its articulation on the guitar – and these two processes occur simultaneously. We hear song that is the fruit of at least three converging forces: the melody of the original composition, Halvorson's understanding of that melody and, finally, its articulation via the big six-stringed and resonating instrument. Spirit in matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXvs5_rLU9g