Paul Motian

I haven't tried to tally it up, but I may have written more about Paul Motian's music on this blog than any other subject. Before I moved to New York City, I'd heard him on records but it wasn't until I saw him live a couple times that I really got hooked on his music. Writing about it was a way of trying to understand what made me keep coming back (I tried to see at least one set whenever Motian played a week at the Vanguard). While I'm very sad I won't be able to see him play anymore, I plan to continue picking up his records and others that he played on (his latest, Windmills of My Mind, and Bill McHenry's Ghosts of the Sun will probably be the next ones I get), and I'll keep trying to get to the bottom of why his music has such a hold on me.

Here are links to my Motian-related posts. Looking back, a lot of the writing is not so hot (and my thoughts on Motian are sometimes followed by reviews of bakeries?!), and I don't think I really got to the bottom of what appeals to me so much about the sound world Motian was able to create each time he stepped onstage (or into a recording studio), but these pieces are interesting to me at least as a scrapbook of the man whose music enriched my life over the past few years:

Trio 3 in 1 (w/ Jason Moran and Chris Potter) from the week they recorded Lost in a Dream
A quote I really love from an interview with Motian
Motian-Lovano-Frisell in 2009
Octet+1
Motian plays in the Fred Hersch Trio - a meeting of two of my absolute favorites
An Amazon.com anomaly for one of Motian's records
A Motian-related dream
Motian-Moran-Osby
On Motian's many great collaborations w/ Charlie Haden on piano trio records
Jakob Bro and Tim Berne records w/ Motian on drums
the fabulous Motian Soul Note box set
my Best Live Music of 2010 features a couple of Motian gigs
Quintet w/ Bill McHenry
a spectacular three-week run at the Vanguard w/ three different groups
Motian's New Trio w/ Jerome Sabbagh and Ben Monder

I didn't get around to writing about the last time I saw Motian play, with Greg Osby and Masabumi Kikuchi, during what turned out to be the last of his many, many weeklong engagements at the Village Vanguard. The combo of Motian and Kikuchi was strong stuff, and Osby could mix it up with them on the same high plane. At the end of the set, which must've been profoundly disorienting for anyone in the audience who only knew Motian from his early work with Bill Evans, I remember Motian smiling, looking really pleased, as the last note was struck and he took the mic to introduce his fellow musicians. I don't know if he knew his time as a performer was coming to an end, but there was no doubt that he was having fun.

Check out some far better writing on Motian from Ethan Iverson, Jerome Sabbagh and a beautiful remembrance from photographer John Rogers. I'm sure many more tributes will continue rolling in.

Thoughts on Some Recent Shows (+ Amazon Knucklehead Dilution Project)

In the last couple weeks, I've had the opportunity to see three of the most exciting contemporary drummers on the New York scene: Tom Rainey (with guitarist Nir Felder), Ches Smith (with his These Arches group), and the man who has fit that description for over 50 years, Paul Motian (with a quintet).  Rainey was the only one of the three that I hadn't seen before and he was extremely impressive, employing a full range of techniques (including playing with his bare hands) with a concentrated focus - you can see Rainey listening and the results, whether subtle accents or controlled explosions, consistently elevate the music being played (Rainey is truly onto some "next level sh*t"). I would think Felder's music must sound very different when he plays with any other drummer.

I'd seen Ches Smith before (with Mary Halvorson and in Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog), but I don't think I'm ever quite prepared for him. One of the most fascinating drummers to watch, there is something very visual about his style, simultaneously free/out/avant and rock-oriented. He seems to have a special mind meld with Mary Halvorson, finding just the right weird thing to perfectly accompany whatever weird thing she's playing at a given time (and to be clear, weird is to be taken as an endorsement of this music). This was my first time hearing a set of Smith's compositions, and though I probably can't describe them adequately (they were pretty diverse), I definitely want to hear more. 

I've written plenty about Paul Motian, but there was one moment toward the end of the recent set I saw at the Village Vanguard when the sound coming from his corner of the stage was just amazing. He really had the whole kit simmering with an utterly distinctive combination of (among other sounds) "pish"ing cymbal, clattering sticks, and a sound that reminded me of kicking the side of a file cabinet. As I said about Fred Hersch's piano sound at the Vanguard, I don't think any recording I've heard of Motian has quite captured what he sounds like in that room.

After seeing Motian's quintet last weekend (he's at the Vanguard for two more weeks with two different groups), I think I can feel a major Bill McHenry phase coming on. McHenry's use of space with Motian was one of the more striking features of the group's sound.  He built up solos gradually, deliberately, from short phrases separated by pauses that seemed almost uncomfortable (like pauses in a conversation that last just a little too long) to longer, more sustained runs, whether languid or fleet - it was edge-of-the-seat dramatic and wholly successful.

The entire quintet impressed me with how fluent they were in Motian's language, with McHenry and pianist Russ Lossing perhaps most outstanding in this regard. Distinctively Motian-esque phrases kept cropping up in the midst of improvisation (certainly on Motian's own tunes - the set I saw seemed to follow a strict pattern of alternating Motian compositions with standards). Some of this was just a matter of improvising on the melodies, but at other times, it really felt like these players were really thinking like Motian, they'd absorbed his compositional language and now sounded like natural, native speakers.

And while I'm on the subject of great contemporary New York-based improvising musicians, I should point out an injustice of sorts that's recently come to my attention. I noticed yesterday that Jason Moran's pretty much universally praised Ten, consensus best jazz album of 2010, currently has a three-star (out of five) rating on Amazon. This matters because it could potentially keep people away from discovering this album. People who may not be familiar with Moran's work or only know his earlier stuff might actually give credence to the two (in my opinion) wildly misguided two-star reviews and miss out on some great music. Surely Ten had more than four total reviews at one time, but now it seems that it's being sold through an Amazon affiliate and Amazon has wiped all the previous reviews and started from scratch, so that these two bad reviews really stand out and have undue weight.  So, what I'm proposing is that any fans of Ten reading this follow this link and review it. Let's right an aesthetic wrong here. (And maybe somebody with a blog readership exceeding mine can pick this up and make it a mini-campaign.)

Bonus Links
I found a great Bill McHenry audio interview (along with two streaming live sets) here.

And a sweet YouTube find: McHenry Sings Carmichael! (in Spain, while looking a lot like Mad Men's Paul Kinsey)

Two Drummer-Led Albums (And A Piano Footnote)

Nasheet Waits' Equality: Alive at MPI is a fine album from last year that seems to have flown pretty far under the radar, especially considering who's on it.  I couldn't find much online about it other than a positive mini-review in one of Tom Hull's valuable, Christgau-style Jazz Consumer Guides and a combined review (like this one, I guess) on All About Jazz.  It may say something about the continued importance of record labels and their promotional capabilities that Jason Moran's recent Blue Note release, Ten, got a lot of well-deserved attention (for a jazz record) from NPR and other major outlets, but Equality (with the same personnel as Ten, plus saxophonist Logan Richardson), released on the tasteful but tiny Barcelona-based Fresh Sound, was mostly ignored.  If you're a fan of Ten, as I am, I would be surprised if you didn't dig Equality (it's definitely more of a RIYL thing than an Armond White-style "better than" thing).  After Waits pretty much blew my mind at a couple of recent performances, I wanted to find out what other recent albums he appeared on, and eventually came across Equality.  It's a great example of the discoveries to be made by digging into the discographies of players you admire. 

As I've mentioned before, there's something I really like about Moran when he's playing with saxophonists (his recent work with Apex comes to mind, as well as the ultimate Bandwagon+sax album, Black Stars), and he has plenty of great moments here.  Equality also showcases the talents of bassist Tarus Mateen particularly well - his "King Hassan", one of the album's highlights, features a funky, propulsive Moran-Mateen-Waits groove set against the longer tones and mysterious/exotic mode of Richardson's melody statement and solos.  Both Ten and Equality feature Jaki Byard tunes, and it's also interesting to compare the different approaches to Byard's "Mrs. Parker of K.C." on Equality and Fred Hersch's Whirl (Moran and Hersch* were both Byard students, although the influence is probably more evident in Moran's case).  The head is played just about the same on both records, but the approaches diverge pretty starkly from there.

Another drummer-led album I've been listening to lately is Billy Hart's Enhance from 1977 (I was tipped off by reading Ethan Iverson's revised 1973-1990 list, a great starting point if you're looking to expand your knowledge and record collection).  It's a tough one for me to pin down or briefly summarize.  There's a lot going on and several styles and sounds packed into seven tracks (perhaps because six different members of the ensemble contribute compositions - Oliver Lake has two).  Lake's presence may explain why I'm hearing a bit of the "St. Louis sound" (I'm thinking here of BAG, WSQ, and the later Julius Hemphill circle of associates and proteges) in the freewheeling group dynamic and the way bluesy harmonized passages comfortably share album space with "out"/free sections, particularly on "Hymn for the Old Year" (which also appeared a few years later on the WSQ masterpiece Revue).

I think I hear a bit of late Mingus, too, perhaps mostly in the playing of Don Pullen (who I really like on Mingus' Changes records) - Pullen fans should definitely check out this album.  Enhance documents a group of world-class musicians choosing intelligently from the all the sounds available to them, not preemptively rejecting any possibilities or following any stylistic dictates or dogma, which is to say that there's a lot of music here, enough to last for many, many listens.  The next Billy Hart I really want to get is Oshumare - it's Hart in the '80s, with Branford Marsalis and Steve Coleman instead of Enhance's Dewey Redman and Oliver Lake, Kenny Kirkland instead of Don Pullen, plus Bill Frisell!

*I've probably written about Fred Hersch enough on this blog, but I have to briefly mention that I saw the first set of his solo run at the Vanguard on Tuesday night.  Highlights of a set in which everything was up to his usual high standard included a new composition dedicated to Billy Strayhorn, "Hot House Flower", which seemed to evoke the longing and beautiful melancholy that are important components of both Hersch and Strayhorn's music, and a version of Monk's "I Mean You" with Hersch conducting a deep exploration of the tune that made the long-delayed direct statement of the head at the end sound like a triumph.  The set was being recorded (hopefully for a future release), but, unfortunately, somebody close to the mics knocked over a bottle in the middle of "I Mean You".  Knowing Hersch, though, he'll probably play an even better one by the end of the run.

Drummers, Trios

I'm probably way behind on this, but I recently found out that there's a trio featuring drummers Eric McPherson and Nasheet Waits (the other member is Abraham Burton on tenor).   As it happens, these are also the drummers on two new piano trio albums that I've been listening to a lot lately, Fred Hersch's Whirl (McPherson) and Jason Moran's Ten (Waits).  Whirl and Ten really showcase Hersch and Moran's strengths, with major, distinctive, and highly collaborative contributions from McPherson and Waits.  Both of these albums would be excellent "start here" recommendations for new listeners, which is saying something considering that both Hersch and Moran have extensive catalogs (especially Hersch, who, as far as I can tell, has put out close to 30 discs as a leader).  If you hadn't heard a note of their music, these new albums would give you a pretty clear idea of what these guys are about.

Bonus Links
Waits gives an insightful tour through the Max Roach discography, along with some personal reminiscences, here.  Unless you are some kind of world-class percussion master or scholar, you will learn some things about drums reading this.  After I read it, I was inspired to pick up a couple of Max Roach albums from a vendor at the Brooklyn Flea on Saturday, The Max Roach 4 Plays Charlie Parker and The Many Sides of Max Roach.  They were from a cheap, not attractively packaged, reissue series, but they sound OK and the music is definitely more than OK.  Many Sides is perhaps the more interesting recording.  There's no way for Max Roach Plays Charlie Parker to improve on Max Roach playing with Charlie Parker (even with Kenny Dorham on the session); Many Sides has Booker Little on trumpet and a nicely eclectic group of compositions, including tunes by Bill (father of Spike, bassist on Bringing It All Back Home) Lee, a young Muhal Richard Abrams (so young that he's referred to as just Richard Abrams on the sleeve), and Consuela (aunt of Spike) Lee Morehead.