Music Notes

Last weekend was Newport Jazz Festival. I go to all three days of Newport Folk, but one day of Newport Jazz is usually enough for me, both in terms of cost and the physical exertion that I am still feeling after 3 days standing in the sun the previous weekend. In some ways, I prefer Newport Jazz–the crowd is older and more diverse. It’s also less a scene, fewer white kids in the festival clothes pretending like they are at Woodstock. But the programming usually frustrates me, as it trends pretty conservative. Now, I grant you there’s a reason for that, which is that it is a commercial enterprise in a world where lots of people like to say they like jazz, but few people really like jazz that much. Jazz is like forests. People say they want to go to the forest and spend time in nature, but in reality, they get bored in 5 minutes so you have ziplines and putt putt outside the park to do instead. Any jazz festival at this size has to include a very broad definition of jazz because this isn’t Big Ears and people aren’t going to listen to 8 hours of challenging music.

Nate Smith took over for Christian McBride this year as the lead artist in charge of the festival’s programming and I think he did a pretty good job. Nate Chinen was on the board who chose him and he has an interesting piece on it here. Overall, there was something I wanted to see all the time when I was there on the Sunday and had I gone the other days, it would have been similar. That’s about all you can ask for. I do however have to make a protest statement against Flea’s jazz project getting a prime slot. Look, I’m glad Flea is finding joy playing the trumpet. But why would I want to see a dilettante when there are lifelong jazz musicians who would have died for that slot? Just because he was in Red Hot Chili Peppers, a shitty band if there ever was one. But it’s not about RHCP sucking here. For example, the same thing happened a couple of years with Andre3000 and his horrible flute project that people said was great because they love Outkast. But it sucks. Also, if anyone ever comes to you and says, “Would you like to hear about my flute project?” you should run for the hills. I did see some of that and it was atrocious. So I could have gone to see Flea. But other than saying, “Hey, I saw Flea play once,” why would I do that? It’s insulting to the real jazz musicians of the world.

I got to see all or good parts of eight sets in one day, which is really good and which wasn’t exactly intentional, but the schedule was done in a way that really opened up some possibilities for me. I should say I saw a tiny bit of the Thundercat set, but not enough and not close enough to the stage to have much to say about it.

1. Marquis Hill’s Blacktet–I happened to review a Joel Ross album last week and I didn’t realize Hill was on that album when I was planning this, largely because I didn’t think I’d get to the festival in time for this set. But I did and Ross was playing the vibes for this set. I wasn’t real familiar with Hill’s music, but I found it to be a very solid set of a kind of post-bop jazz with R&B and hip hop elements to it. Need to hear the albums and this made me want to.
2. Michael Mayo–I had a few minutes so I wandered over to this singer. Not my thing. Might be the only black singer in history with all white backup singers. Though whatever. It’s crowd-pleasing, unchallenging jazz neo-soul kinda easy listening, like an easier version of Bobby McFerrin. Whatever. He’s worked with Nate Smith so that’s why he was there. I’ve seen worse things, if I’ve seen much better things.
3. Sullivan Fortner Trio–a pretty fair piano trio. Jason Moran has talked this guy up a lot and I’m not sure I quite see that he’s that great, but it was a fun enough set for a Sunday afternoon.
4. SML–this was the first band I had really wanted to see. This electrojazz group comes very highly recommended to me. They played a ton of sets at Big Ears but I never got around to seeing them. That they were playing here made me prioritze Sunday, as well as the closer, who I will get to in a minute. The only person I really know in this band is Anna Butterss, who is Jason Isbell’s bassist now and whose inclusion in that band really upped the entire musical side of an Isbell show (sorry Jimbo Hart, but this is a different universe of bassist). The rest of the band is Jeremiah Chiu on synths, Josh Johnson on sax, Booker Stardrum on percussion (is that a real name?). and Gregory Uhlmann on guitar. It’s basically a groove band. They find a spot and they just run with it for an hour. It’s not often you get jazz you actually want to dance to. This qualifies. Now, it does get a bit too repetitive, thus its influence from the techno world. But it’s quite a thing to see live.
5. Arlo Parks–I’m a big fan of Parks’ recent album of queer British R&B and while this is the kind of non-jazz that gets a slot here, she’s totally deserving of it. She’s really an electronic musician and like a lot of that music, it’s just her, the prerecorded sounds, and in this case, a bassist. In the live experience, it can be less rewarding than the studio album. But she got it over to a friendly crowd and was clearly pretty excited to be there. Me, I was happy to see an artist like this who I would be unlikely to pay and travel to Boston for just for her, but whose songs I like and thus can definitely be glad to check that box in a festival setting.
6. Charlie Hunter & Ella Feingold. This one was kind of special to me. Charlie Hunter was the first jazz musician I ever saw live a whole bunch of time. That’s because he was just starting out when I was in college and as a west coast guy, he was touring up and down the rest of the coast, both in his own band and his TJ Kirk covers project. I probably saw him 4 times in a year and then I hadn’t seen him since 1996. I had largely lost touch with his work in the last 30 years. Turns out it hadn’t changed much. He’s still the kind of groove jazz with his weird guitar/bass/organ sort of instrument. But he is still playing that groove. Ella Feingold does a pretty similar thing, having worked as a guitarist on R&B and hip hop albums forever, so they switch off and work well together. It’s also good drum music and they had a super drummer and that was fun, though I didn’t catch his name. I was glad to see him again. Show was fun. Not sure I need to do that much work to go back to all those albums I’ve missed, but it’s fun live.
7. The Bad Plus. Why are Bad Plus breaking up? I mean, sure they’ve played together for 25 years and maybe Dave King and Reid Anderson don’t have that much more to say to each other musically. On the other hand, they actually make money somehow and people come out to see some pretty challenging jazz when it’s them. How much not teaching have Ben Monder and Chris Speed not had to do since joining the band a few years ago? But hey, that’s their call, whatever they want to do. I can say that they still sound pretty great to me and I am quite glad I got another chance to see them, especially since the audience was in thrall and very much did not want them to break up.
8. Herbie Hancock. I had never seen Herbie. He’s very old. It was time. He still sounds good and he still moves around pretty well too. Even plays a little keytar and that’s not so light for a man in his mid 80s. The only way he really acts old is when he starts talking and he kinda goes on in his stories like Grandpa Simpson. The band had Terence Blanchard in it and I had never seen Blanchard either, so that was very cool. I mean, you can be a legend in your own right and still just want to be in Herbie’s band. Now, the reality is that Herbie was mostly playing stuff from the Headhunters era, whether his own music or Wayne Shorter’s. And that’s always been my reservation in calling him a true great–his own writing and arranging basically stalled out in 1975 and never really revived. In the jazz world, this seems strange to me. But he knows what people want to hear and it’s what he wants to play anyway. Still, I got to see Herbie Hancock play when he very much could still do it. I am very happy to be able to say that after a few opportunities I did not take. It was almost too late. Sometimes, you just have to see a legend.

Other News:

We lost L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. That bummed me out. L7 didn’t last long as a great band but boy were they a great fucking band in the early 90s, one of the best of that entire era. Finch’s bass was key to the band too, unlike a lot of other punk bands in that era. Bricks Are Heavy remains probably my favorite album out of that whole early grunge/punk scene, at least until Sleater-Kinney came along.

I don’t really get the whole Jesse Welles thing, as he seems to be not much more than an imitator of Dylan and Springsteen to me, both in terms of sound and look. But good for him here–he refused to play a show due to striking workers. Graham Nash soon joined him in canceling. Good, pay your workers you cheap bastards!

There’s been a lot of stories about Glen Hansard after his death. On the other hand, one person who is fucking sick of it is Neko Case, who wrote a long essay about how Hansard was a hypocrite and a sexual predator and used her own experience with him as an example. In short, Hansard publicly asked Neko to fuck his bass player. That’s….kinda gross!

The mysterious art of conducting.

Tracy Lawrence is your typical piece of shit mainstream Nashville fuck and he is now claiming he won’t play California anymore because of gas prices and libs. Might want to look at your beloved Trump for the former there asshole. Gee, what will California do without you?

Lotta people worried about Ariana Grande. Hope she’s OK.

No playlist this week as my way of listening to music got all fucked up. I use an external drive and it got fried thanks to a bunch of short power outages at my house last week. The music itself is all backed up, so that in itself is not an issue, but to have to move all that stuff to a different drive and then integrate it back into my Itunes and then get it the way I want to–that’s a lot for me right now. But it’s how I listen to music, especially on shuffle days and as someone with no shortage of OCD, for my routines on how to listen to music to get messed up like this, well it upsets me a lot more than it probably would you. If you have any advice on getting that external drive to show up on my computer again, I’d certainly appreciate it, but I assume it’s fried. Aarrrghhh…….Plus there’s a lot of stuff that is not on any streaming service that I own, including the entire catalog of Butch Hancock, just as one example. The idea that streaming has everything is just flat out untrue. As someone who cares a lot about music, it requires a lot of workarounds. Ugh.

Album Reviews:

Vaguess, Another Man’s Treasure

Short song slacker rock of the millennial set. Lots of songs that sound like Pavement and Guided by Voices, but all the songs are about anxiety. Which is OK I guess, but pretty limited in concept, which means they are all pretty samey. The guy’s fans are BIG FANS though, so maybe that can be you.

B-

St. Lenox, Ten Songs of Worship and Praise for Our Tumultuous Times

This 2021 album is a queer spiritual album by a guy who really doesn’t believe in religion. It’s good hearted and well-meaning. It’s sung with spirit. Unfortunately, it’s sung by a guy who can’t sing his way out of box. Which isn’t to say that you have to be a great singer to sing. The entire history of folk music is very much not that. But you do have to have a style and this guy’s style is to just sing like he doesn’t need to make some adjustments for his voice. There’s a song with the chorus “That’s how we roll at Bethesda Lutheran.” He sings like that’s the church he grew up in.

C+

Bill Frisell, In My Dreams

Bill Frisell was once my favorite musician in the world, but in the 21st century, the quality of his music declined because he got obsessed with making pretty music instead of interesting music. That he was a master of playing between the notes (in a similar way to Miles Davis, who made a lot of music without a lot of notes) could lead to the worst possible result–boring. It depended on the project and still does. The In My Dreams project brought a bunch of his friends together to focus on strings. Jenny Scheinman is on violin, Eyvind Kang on viola, and Hank Roberts is on cello, along with Thomas Morgan on bass and Rudy Royston on drums. A fantastic group of musicians and when I saw this live, I had a real good time. He recorded the album for the group live as well, pulling from a few different performances, and that adds something to it, because the engagement with the audience seems to be good for Frisell at this point in his career. It does have its slow moments like so much of his modern work, but the interplay of his guitar with the strings is fantastic and everyone is having a good time. It’s nice.

B+

Julian Lage, Scenes from Above

Kind of interesting to transition from Frisell to Lage, who is clearly Frisell influenced. I’ve thought this before, as have many others, but it feels even stronger with this particular back to back listen. Lage is of course a very fine musician and he has great people around him here–John Medeski (even if I’m not really a big fan of his work), Jorge Roeder, Patrick Warren, and Kenny Wollesen, who has also worked extensively with Frisell. There are moments of interest here and it’s nice. But it also trends toward easy listening jams sometimes and that I find frustrating. Restrained and tasteful is fine, those are hallmarks of the great Frisell albums. But this kind of restrained and tasteful lends itself a little too easy to the background for my liking.

B-

James Brandon Lewis Quartet, OMNI

The latest from the prodigious and profuse saxophonist and his great quartet of Aruan Ortiz, Brad Jones, and Chad Taylor continues his glorious spiritualism through his Coltrane-esque sound. Everyone loves him now because of his work with The Messthetics and that’s cool, but his work with his quartet is just better. This is a spiritual and even religious album, with titles that reflect that. It’s a church service and he’s the preacher and that’s the kind of church I need. These four sound amazing together. It’s their sixth album together. Twelve sound good to me.

A

Aja Monet, The Color of Rain

I happened upon Aja Monet’s set at the 2024 Newport Jazz Festival and was quite impressed with her mixing of poetry and music (and stop with the “songwriting is poetry” line, it’s not the same thing at all). I guess when it comes to the album, how often do you want to listen to someone talking over jazzy arrangements. Quite often for me, the answer would be not very, but I really liked this. She has a lot to say and she presents it in a very appealing way, a path toward promoting a black based political radicalism that focuses on the beauty of her voice.

A-

As always, this is an open thread for all things music and art and none things politics.