Happy long weekend all. A heads-up that next Wednesday you will want to dance with us to Henry Cole's Afrobeat Collective, with the Gilad Hekselman Quartet. And now, these links:

• The Library of Congress has gradually been digitizing and archiving its talks and concerts on YouTube. It's often classical and non-Western music, but plenty of jazz bits too. There are interviews with Dave Brubeck, Henry Butler, Guillermo Klein, Dafnis Prieto, Jim Hall, etc. Plus, full concert performances from Uri Caine and Lionel Loueke.
• Whither the modern standard? More from Alternate Takes.
• Drummer Ralph Peterson, coming up on his 50th birthday, is profiled in the Daily News. The former Jazz Messenger was actually failed by his freshman percussion audition, he says. New album, The Duality Perspective, coming soon — I quite like it.
• Neneh Cherry, Swedish pop star and step-daughter of Don Cherry, talks about her upcoming collaboration with Scandinavian free-jazz trio The Thing, called The Cherry Thing. (I quite like this too.) Fun fact: The Thing was named after a piece by her stepfather.
• Pianist Steve Kuhn is profiled in the Ottawa Citizen. The 74-year-old hit the New York scene in 1959 and is still at it, releasing a new album earlier this year.
• An Ethiopian jazz piano prodigy, Samuel Yirga, is profiled in the Australian newspaper The Age prior to a gig in Melbourne. Haven't heard his music, but the article says he's invested in reimagining Ethiopian music of the '20s and '30s.
• Jack DeJohnette interview at the CBC online. The 70-year celebration of the great drummer continues.
• Saxophonist Chris Potter is profiled at The Australian. I like how the writer establishes the intense fandom some have for him (with good reason, mind you). "A story in The New York Times last year noted the crowd of music students at one of his live shows, the young men sitting rapt as he played. ('It's always men,' he points out.)"
• Wynton Marsalis and Kenny G may be more alike than different. The always insightful soprano saxophonist Sam Newsome weighs in.
• A Jaco Pastorius documentary is on the way from ... Metallica's bassist, Robert Trujillo. Like for many electric bassists, Jaco was an early hero. From USA Today.
• Nazi Germany outlawed jazz and other supposedly "degraded" rhythms. But the Nazis also kept a syncopated dance band around for propaganda purposes. Smithsonian.com tells the history.
• The jazz scare of the '20s, as detailed at a Libertarian website.
• The Scottish National Jazz Orchestra is losing annual public funding, it learned weeks before releasing a major-label album (Celebration, ECM Records) with bassist Arild Andersen. The change is part of a restructuring in the Scottish national arts agency.
• 25 Years of Linda Yohn, WEMU jazz radio host.
• John Zorn: The Guardian primer to his career. The sort of thing makes sense for an artist who is so incredibly eclectic.
• The first ever jazz review: Who wrote it, exactly?
• On The Road, the Jack Kerouac novel steeped in jazz scenes, is now actually a movie. It debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. "Most early reviews were negative."
• Gene Kelly and Chicago jazz culture.
• This is by far my favorite response so far to Kurt Ellenberger's guest post this week.
• Miles Davis is already getting a U.S. Postal Service stamp — and now, a statue in his birthplace, too.
• Charlie Parker's saxophone is expected to fetch $30-35 thousand at auction.
• The Jazz Session spoke with harmonica player Gregoire Maret and drummer Tomas Fujiwara.
• The Checkout broadcast Kendrick Scott's band live.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• JazzSet features Alexis Cuadrado's "A Lorca Soundscape" project.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features Daniela Schaechter.
• Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux plays guest DJ and betrays her passion for jazz.
• Sonnymoon, a band with jazz affinities, is featured on Song of the Day.

In addition to being a very good performance of a very likeable song, this YouTube clip is a very specific and increasingly rare type of cover.

The performers are the Joshua Redman Trio: Reuben Rogers on bass, Gregory Hutchinson on drums, Redman on alto saxophone. (He usually plays tenor or soprano, so this is unusual.) And the tune is "Riddle Me This," by Aaron Parks, who is roughly Redman's contemporary. As you see, Aaron Parks is not on this gig, nor could he, as a pianist, possibly play in the Joshua Redman Trio.

"Riddle Me This" was first recorded on Parks' 2008 album Invisible Cinema. It sounds fairly simple at first listen, but the score is actually quite intricate, with lots of highly specific rhythms, a constantly fluctuating tonal center and a long form that takes nearly two minutes to get through. Redman's version here, recorded Feb. 10, 2012 during a European tour, accomplishes the nifty trick of making the complex sound alive, soulful, foot-tapping, hummable.

You would think that "jazz bandleader calls a tune by his or her contemporary" is a fairly common occurrence. Jazz musicians' careers depend on playing in each others' bands — and, by extension, playing each others' tunes. It certainly happened in the past, in a way that's inscribed Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Wayne Shorter tunes into standard repertoire.

But oddly enough, it isn't today. That's the subject of a recent post by Angelika Beener on her blog Alternate Takes:

I then started focusing on today, and my experiences at jazz performances. Yes, the headliner is playing his or her original work, and yes the band, on some occasions, may feature a tune or two from a bandmate, but what were the odds that they would play a tune by a musical peer beyond their own band? Slim to none, as far as I could tell.

Beener interviews a few musicians for reasons why so few modern compositions have become jazz standard repertoire: lack of current tunes in fake books, the permanence of older standards, the ease of making and recording original music, the perceived need to "do your own thing," the relative difficulty of modern compositions, the lack of new standards within wider popular culture, the fracturing of the modern jazz scene into subcommunities, etc. All told, it's amazing that jazz performers cover their contemporaries at all.

And yet, Redman does it here.

 

Now, Redman and Parks aren't strangers. Parks is over a dozen years younger, but the two have collaborated fairly extensively in the collective band James Farm. We know that Redman didn't have to transcribe this tune from a record without any guidance — Parks made lead sheets for this tune, and even made them publicly available.

Still, it's the sort of thing which warms the heart a little: A great composition recognized by a great, well-known performer. It keeps alive the faint hope that some body of modern standard repertoire may eventually coalesce in a sort of organic consensus.

Perhaps Redman's trio will eventually record this for an album, disseminating it further into the public consciousness. But if you're trying to monitor the response to a catchy jazz tune in real time, YouTube can serve as an echo chamber in the form of student or relatively unknown bands covering a tune, then posting their recordings. For example, here is a student ensemble doing "Riddle Me This," with a vocal arrangement. A few other tunes from Invisible Cinema are actually more popular among the student set. In particular, "Nemesis," a fetching rocker in 7/4, is covered a bunch of times.

As much as young groups make for a nice gauge of popular reception, what could actually make modern jazz tunes catch on as standard repertoire is high-level performances. "Nemesis" may stick — the much-loved guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel has notably been known to play it with Parks in the piano chair. And I maintain that this video of "Riddle Me This" documents a very good performance too. Redman has a way of conjuring up greasy, gritty cries from his horn; sometimes I personally find it distracting, but here I think he metes it out just right. Reuben Rogers sounds supremely confident weaving around the many chord changes even though he appears to be reading sheet music. And Greg Hutchinson builds textures so well — note how he starts by drumming with bare hands, then works up to that funky and snappy beat with sticks.

Apparently, I'm not the only one who thought highly of this. At this performance in Oslo, Norway, two different people were moved to bootleg video of the same song and later post it to YouTube. (I'm assuming they were acting independently, judging by the "I got the same one that you did!" comment one left on the other's upload.) This second version has better video, but distorted audio. Two days later in Stockholm, Sweden, yet another audience member grabbed video of the same band doing the same tune.

So riddle me this: Are there any other good examples you can think of where a jazz musician covers a contemporary who isn't in his or her band?

Last week, we published a much-discussed blog post about the connection — or lack thereof — between jazz education and the development of new audiences. It examined a viewpoint by pianist, composer and music professor Kurt Ellenberger, and concluded by challenging Ellenberger to suggest some ways to win new audiences. Here is Ellenberger's response. —Ed.

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Since my Huffington Post article on jazz education and audience development, many (including this very blog) have asked "Well, if education isn't the answer, what's the solution? How do we develop and maintain a strong jazz audience?"

Audience development is a complicated issue, and it's not limited to jazz. Every artist and arts organization is trying to answer the same question. We've identified a problem and we're going to "build" something to solve it. Sounds so simple, doesn't it?

It's not simple. It's so complex, in fact, that I think that the question itself is actually a linguistic deception, a euphemism perhaps, that cleverly masks the enormity of the task. When we ask "How do we develop and maintain a strong jazz audience?" what we are really saying is "How can we convince millions of people to alter and expand their aesthetic sensibilities and their cultural proclivities so that they include jazz to such an extent that they will regularly attend concerts and purchase recordings?" And that statement itself is embedded within another Herculean task: "How can we convince people to embrace music that is no longer part of the popular culture?"

 

Assuming that many readers here are probably jazz or classical music people, I think it might also be helpful to consider the question from another angle. Imagine for a moment that country music is on the skids, suffering from poor sales and anemic concert attendance. Nashville commissions a consulting firm to work on building the audience for country music. Is there anything they could do to get you to become a country music fan? Or a heavy metal fan? Or trance?

I anticipate responses to these questions to the effect of "Well, those styles of music are harmonically and rhythmically quite simple, and the pieces are very short, so it doesn't appeal to me very much. I need more content in my music." This identifies yet another problem area in this discussion: namely, the fact that most of the music we are trying to build an audience for is cognitively demanding. So we're looking for some marketing, education, packaging or programming strategy that will influence and/or supersede both personal taste and the enormous pressures of the dominant popular culture; at the same time, we're asking people to commit to an art form that will tax (and probably frustrate) their capabilities before, hopefully, delivering a heightened aesthetic experience.

That's a tall order that seems insurmountable. Frankly speaking, it can't be done, at least not as part of a prefabricated "strategy" to build an audience. You'd no sooner be able to create a sustainable audience base for jazz as you could for medieval plainchant. If a solution existed, wouldn't one of the thousands and thousands of creative artists, agents, managers and the many jazz collectives, societies and alliances have found it? I realize that this is not what anyone in the jazz community wants to hear, but I also don't think it is helpful to continue pretending that there is a solution out there somewhere, just waiting for us to discover it.

Jazz simply needs to continue doing what made it great in the first place: engage with popular culture in an intelligent, nuanced and sophisticated manner, as some successful groups are doing today. If there is any hope of audience building, this is where it lies. It must be organic, visceral and culturally relevant, qualities which cannot be consciously conjured by an audience development committee.

What we're really talking about when we complain about the jazz scene (and the arts scene in general) is not that jazz is dying creatively, or that it's lost its vitality. It's that there isn't enough work and the work that's there doesn't pay enough. Those of us who were born between 1950 and 1970 came up in a very different environment than that which exists today in at least three ways:

1. Technological developments have made it very hard to earn money from recordings. If you can attach it to an email, stream it or download it, it's going to be very hard to make money from it. This is especially true for a niche genre in the fine arts.
2. The gig scene is severely truncated. When I was in my twenties, there was plenty of live music work — theatre, pop bands, some recording work, parties, weddings and, of course, some actual jazz. It was possible to eke out a reasonable living just playing music, but that work has largely dried up. (Let's face it: Most of that work is not artistically satisfying anyway. It's either party music or background music, not exactly the stuff of artistic dreams.) And, as I've written about previously, the pay hasn't kept up with inflation. Where it was possible to make $25,000 a year in 1984, you'd need to be making $52,000 in 2010.
3. Private and public sources of arts funding are drying up. We've experienced an "arts funding bubble" during the last 60 years, and that bubble is bursting. In Art Lessons: Learning from The Rise and Fall of Public Arts Funding, the late Alice Goldfarb-Marquis details how a surge in public funding for the arts occurred in the middle of the last century created an artificial demand for artists and arts organizations of various types (dance, music, theatre, etc.). She also identifies how those benefactors began to move away from arts funding in favor of other charitable donations (hospitals, education, etc.) that provided them with the visibility and cachet that the arts no longer provided. We'll be lucky, therefore, if those sources maintain the funding they are providing now, because they certainly aren't going to substantially increase funding during a time when the national debt is already a matter of grave concern. (I've written about this before.)

I think it's clear that obtaining a reasonable income in jazz and classical music is becoming exceedingly difficult. Those of us who grew up in the arts bubble were very fortunate to come up in an era that was, relatively speaking, flush with cash, which makes the new reality very difficult to accept. But historically speaking, this was an aberration. Beethoven had money problems, Mozart died broke, and I'm sure that we're all aware of the many incredibly talented and influential jazz musicians of the last 75 years who needed benefit concerts to pay for medical care and funeral expenses as they entered middle and old age.

I suggest that we consider doing what many classical and jazz musicians that I know have done during the last decade. It's not an earth-shattering proposition that we haven't heard before: a separation, as it were, of church and state. Make money doing something else, and keep your music pure.

Play only what you want to play, don't play casuals, weddings or anything else that isn't artistically satisfying. Let the young players do that work — they need the experience, we don't. Write and play music without concern for "selling it" or "marketing it"; do it because it's fun to do and do it with people you enjoy playing with. Rent a venue and put on concerts of your music, but don't expect to make a profit. A very small percentage of these projects just might garner enough attention to make them financially profitable, and an even smaller percentage might become "famous," but most won't.

What I've seen from people who have left the "business" behind is that they are generally much happier. Granted, it's not an easy decision to make. We have so much of our self-image invested in the romantic mythology that swirls around jazz, and that mythology includes the idea that a "day job" is a cop-out, the kiss of death, not something that a "true artist" would ever do. So while the pressures of the dominant culture may be very difficult to overcome, the pressures of jazz culture are equally as daunting. But it seems to me that if a creative and artistically independent life is the goal, then the solution, in an era of dwindling support and an apathetic public, is to finance it with other productive work.

As aggravating and depressing as all of this may be, I don't see it as a "doom and gloom" scenario; to the contrary, I think that jazz is actually thriving, not dying. In one of my first blog posts, I stated the following:

...we live in a time of remarkable creative growth for music in general, and for jazz in particular. With the ability to record and distribute music independently and inexpensively, and the resultant unlimited access that this provides, we've seen an explosion in musical activity in all genres, jazz included. Visit CDBaby (for example) and search for jazz, and you'll find a staggering number of accomplished jazz artists, mostly unknown, making music of all kinds under the "jazz" umbrella (including genre descriptions that defy description like "Industrial Fake Jazz"). And look at the tremendous quality and quantity of European jazz being produced, with its unabashed blending of styles which has led to many heated discussions on how jazz is defined at this juncture in the 21C. There are so many amazing musicians creating such a fantastic smorgasbord of new jazz, that one can hardly even keep up with a small percentage of it.

In short, this era exhibits unparalleled creative activity and creative potential for jazz and for the arts in general ... despite the issues I wrote about previously, there are reasons to be very hopeful about the future of jazz from a creative viewpoint.

Jazz as a creative force is not going away. In fact, I would go so far to stay that it will never go away because of the depth of its materials, its rich history and canon, and its openness to new influences.

Wasn't jazz a street music to begin with? A hybrid that drank from many wells and remade itself every decade (much to the chagrin of many artists then and now)? Why not write music that utilizes electronics and looping, hip-hop, rap, gamelan, minimalism, trance, rock, yodeling, country and anything else that you listen to and find interesting? These things will happen because people need to express themselves, not because they need to land a gig.

And that is why I think it is unwise to finance art through art. Separate church and state, and maybe, just maybe, an audience will coalesce around your music. You'll be as surprised as everyone else.

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Kurt Ellenberger is a pianist and composer, and writes at Also Sprach FraKathustra.

Usually, it's the musicians who go on tour, and the journalists who write about them for local publications. But one journalist is taking to the road to talk to musicians where they live.

As of today, Jason Crane has produced 374 episodes of The Jazz Session, a podcast of interviews with top jazz musicians. Last week, he announced he was going on a "World Tour."

Starting June 1, he'll be interviewing musicians in cities large and small throughout the eastern and southeastern United States, all the while reading and writing original poetry. (He hopes to eventually make the tour actually international, or at least to go west of the Mississippi River.) He has only a loose itinerary; he plans to buy a Greyhound bus pass and eventually end up in New Orleans, crashing on couches of friends, acquaintances and strangers. He's seeking crowdfunding and logistical support at The Jazz Session website.

Crane, 38, once supported himself as a working soprano saxophonist and later, as the station manager at Jazz90.1 in Rochester, N.Y. He recently moved to New York City in part to be closer to the jazz scene. So why is he taking to the road again? Over e-mail last week, I sent him a few questions to find out, and he was happy to respond:

 

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Patrick Jarenwattananon: These days, with phone and Skype and so forth it's possible to interview musicians from nearly anywhere for pretty cheap. So why, as a journalist, should one go everywhere?

Jason Crane: I spent nearly 10 years interviewing people by phone and had a lot of good conversations during that time. But I've always preferred to be in the same room, seeing people's facial expressions and body language and making a more personal connection. The Jazz Session's interviews are usually conducted in the artist's home, and that brings yet another level of human contact to the conversation. I'd like to have those same experiences outside of New York City. And I'd like to see first-hand what's happening in the jazz world in places I've never been.

PJ: Are there any big questions you want to get a consensus answer on? Like, "how is it possible to be a jazz musician in somewhere like Asheville, N.C.?" or "what are the major infrastructural challenges to touring as a jazz musician in 2012?"

JC: So much of the conversation in the mainstream jazz press and blogosphere these days is about the future of jazz, the death of jazz, the relevance of jazz. As someone who once made my living playing jazz and Latin music far removed from a major entertainment hub, I know that the conversation is often very different when the press isn't paying attention to you. It's about booking the next gig, keeping a band together, building an audience in your local area or figuring out what the existing audience wants to hear. Plus, I'd be willing to bet that there's a ton of exciting, creative music being made that I know nothing about because it just hasn't been found by the press yet. I'm hoping to find some of those folks.

PJ: You relocated within the last two years from upstate to Brooklyn, N.Y. I presume a lot of that has had to do with following the jazz community, yes? What has being in New York City taught you so far?

JC: I came to New York to try to expand what I was doing with The Jazz Session. I started doing jazz interviews in Rochester, N.Y., in 2001 and continued in Albany, N.Y., until I moved here last year. I did a fair number of in-person interviews with touring players, but nothing like what's been possible since I moved to New York. I feel much more a part of the scene now, and I've realized just how paradoxically large and small that scene is. There's an incredible range of music being made, yet it's possible to know most of the people making it personally. I find that very exciting. It really feels like a community.

PJ: Since reading your original poetry is also a part of this tour, it seems fair to ask: Do you see a connection between poetry and jazz? Are they linked by some aesthetic quality, or perhaps through an odd cultural standing in this modern age? Or are the two activities largely separate?

JC: I always joke that I became a poet because I wanted to see if there was any profession less lucrative than interviewing jazz musicians. (Answer: yes.) Jazz and poetry have been linked for decades, going back at least as far as the Beats — the most obvious connection — but also in the poetry of folks like Hayden Carruth, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, Amiri Baraka and many others. I think both art forms are very much about sound and about live performance. I love writing poetry, but reading it is a truly magical experience for me, providing a very visceral and emotionally available connection with my listeners, much in the way I found saxophone playing to be. My poetry is at jasoncrane.org, and I imagine I'll be writing a lot of poems during the tour.

PJ: Can you predict a few highlights — places you've never been, people you're most excited to talk to? Might one of the answers be: "talking to the people I didn't already know about"?

JC: For me, the biggest highlight of the first leg of the trip will be New Orleans, which to me is like traveling to Mecca. I've never been there, despite loving so much of the music that's made in New Orleans and having so many friends and colleagues there. So I'm beyond thrilled to be headed there. After that, the next most exciting part of the trip is to meet musicians in all the places I've never been. Music happens everywhere. It's such a core part of the human experience. I think it can be a little too easy to see it as a commodity or a trend and forget that it's also an integral part of being alive. I want to be reminded of that and to see improvised music in settings other than New York clubs. (Not that I don't love those, too.)

Among the notable musician deaths of this week was go-go pioneer Chuck Brown. As prelude to this week's links, I find it fascinating how jazz so directly led into something that could be called an original musical style. See: the Washington Post obituary, and YouTube footage of a "Go-Go Swing [It Don't Mean A Thing]/Midnight Sun/Moody's Mood For Love" medley. And now:

• This story is titled "Top Ten Jazz Albums for People Who Don't Know S— About Jazz." Let the debates begin. From Sean O'Connell/LA Weekly.
• DownBeat magazine has slowly been sprucing up its web presence. You'll see some current news and concert reports on the left-hand column, plus some editors' recommendations. The layout for archival material is a bit improved and it appears that some ad support is coming too.
• Gil Evans centennial celebrations are happening this week in New York. Nate Chinen writes about efforts to deliver the great composer/arranger's repertoire, including some new discoveries. Also from Chinen: Dafnis Prieto takes us through his day in uptown New York, when he isn't making next-level percussion things around the world.
• The Cabaret Card rules in New York had an awful lot of sway in who got to have careers in music prior to 1967. Nate Chinen gives the synopsis for JazzTimes.
• Taylor Eigsti, who came onto the scene as a piano prodigy a decade or so ago, also writes pieces for orchestra. (He's only 27.) He returns to his hometown for a performance with the Oakland-East Bay Symphony this week. From Richard Scheinin/San Jose Mercury News.
• Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran (his wife) just curated a week of performances at the Whitney Biennial. Ben Ratliff sums it up.
• Sidney Bechet, the first jazz review ever and the relationship between journalism and the "feeling" in black-origin music. From New England Public Radio.
• Don Cherry in the 1960s is the subject of this week's Night Lights, from WFIU.
• Latin jazz in the Bay Area is the subject of a documentary in progress. The Latin Jazz Corner has a short interview.
• Before Peggy Lee was great singer Peggy Lee — quite literally — she was a teenage train depot agent in North Dakota.
• Milton Babbitt's seminal "Who Cares if You Listen" article (opens PDF). Contributor Alex W. Rodriguez, himself a Ph.D. candidate, reminded me of this viewpoint with respect to the movement of jazz toward the academy.
• Two major musicologists argue to save the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College Chicago. Testaments to this place's importance continue to pour in.
• "Hyatt Hotel Heir Denies He's Spent $100 Mil on Unfinished Jazz Film," reads the Forbes headline. You'll note that NPR first covered this story in 2007, when the filmmaker's "side-project" movie about Louis Armstrong had a different working title.
• Ted Panken's archives this week: a Jackie McLean remembrance.
• JazzWax has a variety of features up.
• The Jazz Session spoke with vocalist Maria Neckam and the trio of Colin Stranahan, Glenn Zaleski and Rick Rosato. It also announced a tour which we'll have more information about next week.
• The Checkout sat down with the great Chico Hamilton, and arranger Ryan Truesdell, who has arranged some newly-discovered Gil Evans charts.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• Gil Evans at 100.
• Cecil Taylor is featured on All Things Considered.
• Arturo Sandoval on his mentor, Dizzy Gillespie.
• JazzSet features Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features pianist Chris Ziemba.
• Louis Armstrong's last recorded concert is featured on Song of the Day.
• S. Epatha Merkerson of Law & Order tells NPR's Tell Me More about what she's been listening to. Joe Henderson is first up.

People throughout Belgium are currently celebrating the harmonica player and guitarist Jean-Baptiste "Toots" Thielemans, born in Brussels on April 29, 1922. That puts the NEA Jazz Master, also made a Baron by the King of Belgium in 2001, just a few days past 90.

The night after his birthday, Thielemans set out on an eight-concert tour across his homeland. In Ghent, Belgian guitarist Philip Catherine joined him as a special guest. In Brussels, his long-time pianist Kenny Werner and guitarist Oscar Castro-Neves came from the U.S. and Brazil, respectively. In Hasselt, Thielemans — who had broken his foot — performed from a wheelchair. And last night and tonight, May 17 and 18, the two final concerts take place in Liège and then Dinant. It's all taking place in a country where everyone can pronounce the name "Thielemans." (Try "teel-mahnz.")

Invited by the Belgian Tourist Office, I attended his May 9 performance at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, a.k.a. BOZAR (get it?), in Brussels. The interviews and meet-and-greets were canceled, but the concert was sold out and a great success.

Thielemans entered to roaring applause. His band members helped him cross the stage to perch on a high chair so his feet could dangle and clap together. He looks frail, but his breath support and musicality seem little diminished. Just the sound of his Hohner harmonica brings joy and sadness together, and sweetly so.

 

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Prior to the show, we journalists were taken on a "Toots Walk" through central Brussels to see his birthplace. There's a whimsical mural that tells you when you're near his childhood home on Rue Haute (High Street).

The Baron calls himself un vrai Bruxellois (a true man of Brussels). His father was a carpenter; his parents ran a pub. They rented rooms to construction workers during the 1920s building boom.

Down the street, a larger but now-demolished building housed the workers' center. Historian Roland Jacob told us that Thielemans remembers being hoisted on his father's shoulders at socialist-leaning political meetings.

His first instrument was the accordion. Then, in an ornate movie palace (still standing, though no longer a cinema) on the same street, Thielemans first heard the harmonica on a film soundtrack. His early inspiration on the guitar, in the early 1940s, was Django Reinhardt. As for his singular technique of whistling an octave above his guitar, it's said that comes from Slam Stewart (1914-87), the humming virtuoso bassist.

Toots Thielemans did it all — the guitar, the whistling, the harmonica. (He struggled with asthma to do so.) Now, he sticks to the instrument he can carry in his pocket. As he said from the stage in English, "I try to sing almost bel canto with this toothbrush!"

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From the early 1950s, Thielemans lived and worked in the U.S., where he became a citizen in 1957. Two early thrills were jamming with Miles Davis in Paris in 1949 and — a few years later — working a week in Philadelphia in the Charlie Parker All Stars, again with Davis. (Toots recalled in a recent article in Le Vif that Parker protected him from Davis. But when Davis remarked that Toots was Caucasian, Toots himself responded, no, "I come from Belgium.")

At BOZAR, four of Toots' first five tunes were recorded by Miles Davis in a short span: "On Green Dolphin Street" (1958), "All Blues" (early 1959), "I Loves You, Porgy" and "Summertime" (both 1958, for Porgy and Bess). "Days of Wine and Roses" was the other number.

In these tunes, Toots' quartet of pianist Karel Boehlee, bassist Hein Van de Geyn and drummer Hans Van Oosterhout were elegant and swinging, much in the tradition of the 1982 Toots Thielemans album Live in the Netherlands with Joe Pass on guitar and Niels-Henning Orsted Pederson on bass. Toots was flying then. And, though he's streamlined his playing, 30 years later he still sounds tuneful, optimistic, willing to soar.

When Werner and Castro-Neves came to the stage — excitement! embraces! — they brought shades of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Hollywood as they played "How High the Moon" (a samba, thanks to Castro-Neves), "All the Way" (Werner on synthesizer, interpolating "My Way"), and the theme to Midnight Cowboy, an eight-note melody that circles and haunts. Indeed, Thielemans played it on the soundtrack.

Toots' commercial work paid well. He made a Chrysler ad with Louis Armstrong (who called Toots "Bop Chops"), whistled the iconic Old Spice jingle, and played harmonica on the theme song for Sesame Street. Our Toots Walk tour guide quoted him as having said, "When I'm on tour, I can pay for the gasoline for the car. When I make advertising, I can buy the car."

Back on stage, he celebrated his love of Brazilian music with an Ivan Lins piece. It segued into "Manha da Carnival," the theme from the 1959 film Black Orpheus. Applause met "Manha" at the beginning, and rose in a great crescendo at the end.

It was then that I began to feel the emotion of the occasion.

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Toots Thielemans' most famous song is "Bluesette." As he told my WBGO colleague Michael Bourne in a 1993 DownBeat story:

"I was playing a concert with [the Parisian violinist] Stephane Grappelli in Brussels in 1962. I was in the same dressing room as Stephane and I was tuning my guitar, and somehow this little song came out. I was humming it and Stephane said, 'That's nice. What is it?' I just said he inspired me, but he said, 'Ecrivez tout de suite! Write it down right away!' I called it 'Bluette' for this little blue flower in Belgium, but when I played it on a show in Sweden, the producer said, 'Isn't that a blues? Why don't you put the 's' in there?' I owe the 's' to him."

Bourne told me another story. Toots' first gig outside Belgium came in Sweden, and he learned Swedish to play in a cabaret. He said the woman introducing him presented him to the crowd as "Tits Tooliemans." I can imagine Toots giggling.

For his 90th birthday concert in Brussels, "Bluesette" — the waltz named for a flower — came near the end of the show, delivered with a deep, stirring, almost frightening samba beat.

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Toots Thielemans loves musicians. The more they challenge him, the better. He's said in response to Kenny Werner's more "out" harmonies, "Keep throwing me in the pool. But don't let me drown."

He had a close friendship with the wild and woolly electric bassist Jaco Pastorius (1951-87). In a story in his new Toots 90 coffee-table book, he writes:

I met Jaco [Pastorius] at the end of 1979 at the Berlin Jazz Festival. He was playing solo bass. He had just recently left Weather Report. I was playing at the festival, too. During a press conference, a journalist asked Pastorius, 'If you were to form a duo now, who would it be with?' And Jaco glanced at the festival programme and said: 'With Toots Thillman [sic]. Yes, bring me Toots!'

Pastorius said that ever since his childhood, when Thielemans was a member of the George Shearing Quartet, he'd been familiar with Toots' music. So here's a song for Toots Thielemans' 90th birthday, from NPR's Jazz Alive! archive. At the 1982 Kool Jazz Festival in New York, Toots joins Jaco and the Word of Mouth Band for Jaco's waltz, "Liberty City."

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Becca Pulliam of WBGO is the producer of JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater.

The late alto saxophone giant Jackie McLean would have been 81 this week. He died after a long illness in 2006, but continued performing and teaching until late in his life. One of the last songs he wrote and recorded was "Mr. E," which leads off his 1998 septet album Fire and Love.

I'm thinking of it because I recently heard another version of the song by the much younger alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and his trio. Their take on "Mr. E" comes from a recording called Dialect Fluorescent, which came out just a few months ago.

"I really love the composition," Lehman said. "I love the way the melody is structured; I love the way that the harmony is set up. And I think it's really ingenious, actually, the way that every aspect of the composition ... is really set up to create a kind of musical framework that at once is really grounded, and gives you a kind of sense of place and sound as a listener, but also has an incredible amount of flexibility and is kind of malleable as musical material."

Obviously, Lehman likes the tune — but I suspected that there was more to it than that. I had read that Lehman studied with McLean, and I knew that Lehman had even written an academic paper about McLean. And if you listen closely to the two saxophonists, you'll notice a certain strident overtone to both, an quality that Lehman's recent press material describes as a "bracing, McLean-tinged saxophone sound."

There's a deeper connection here. So I gave Lehman a call yesterday to find out about it. During our conversation, the words "state-of-the-art" kept coming up.

 

"['Mr. E'] really represents, as far as I'm concerned, state-of-the-art composing for small ensemble," Lehman said. Then he continued. "And also, I think it's important to document the recent work of all these amazing musicians which we look up to, whether it be Jackie McLean or Andrew Hill or Wayne Shorter, all of whom are people who wrote really amazing, seminal works in the '60s, but also continued to do so right up until the ends of their lives — or are continuing to do so, in Wayne Shorter's case. When it feels appropriate, it's really important to underline the fact that people like Jackie really stayed active and really kept pushing himself throughout his life."

Another, related example: "In the late '90s, before he got sick, I think young saxophonists were really looking for him for the state of the art of the instrument. Which I think is really amazing, considering the fact that he was 68."

Lehman was one of those young saxophonists who looked up to McLean. As an undergraduate student at Wesleyan University, he commuted twenty-five minutes north to the nearby University of Hartford to audit classes with McLean, who was on faculty.

By the time McLean started teaching at the University of Hartford in 1968, he had already made many of the recordings which now cement his legacy as jazz royalty. McLean started as a drug counselor — drawing upon his own, previous addiction to heroin — and eventually began teaching music history and performance. Around that time, he also founded the Artists Collective, a cultural center in a poor section of Hartford. By the mid-1970s, he had established a department of African-American Music, and today a program at the University of Hartford's Hartt School conservatory bears his name: The Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz.

Lehman encountered McLean nearly three decades into his teaching career. He recalled how in the classroom, McLean's social skills and sense of humor combined with his "unassailable musical pedigree."

"In the course of one class, you might get very specific instructions of how to play a Bud Powell composition, based on feedback that he himself received from Bud Powell," Lehman says. "And later on, in the same class, he might take a four-minute solo — either in an open setting, or on 'Giant Steps,' or on a composition of his own — that defined state-of-the-art alto saxophone improvisation in the late '90s. So just to be confronted with that historical continuum, and also be put in the position to engage with the fact that all of this information and learning was oriented toward doing something incredibly unique and contemporary in the present — it really leaves an indelible mark on everybody who was able to study with him."

Lehman studied with McLean in the late 1990s. At that time, McLean was working with a young drummer named Eric McPherson — another former student. In fact, "Mr. E." is a dedication to McPherson, complete with a section for a drum solo. (Among many others, McLean's former students include trombonist Steve Davis, saxophonists Wayne Escoffery and Antoine Roney, and his son René McLean, also a saxophone player.)

Later, Lehman himself worked extensively with McPherson, who is now on faculty at the Hartt School.

"Eric is one of my favorite drummers of all time, and somebody that I've really been lucky to perform with and record with quite a bit," Lehman says. "He's somebody that I've been listening to since I was about 14 years old."

Toward the end of our conversation, Lehman reemphasized how vital McLean was as an artist throughout his entire career — how many fellow young saxophone players admired McLean. But was also clear that Lehman had a personal history with his idol too.

"I often, when I'm talking to non-musicians, will describe it as being a basketball player who idolized Michael Jordan for most of his life, and then actually getting to study with him, work with him," Lehman said. "That's really what it felt like — every time we got to work together, every time I got to take a car ride with him, it was in the presence of that greatness."

As an acclaimed pianist and composer, Vijay Iyer is able to perform his music in concert halls and jazz clubs around the world. But few venues are quite like the one he played May 1-2 of this year.

Yesterday the BBC's Jazz on 3 posted a live recording of a new song by the Vijay Iyer Trio — too new, even, for the band's 2012 album Accelerando. The song is called "Hood":

"Hood" is a tribute to the Detroit techno pioneer Robert Hood, and I think you'll agree it's an incredible thing for an acoustic piano trio to do. (Iyer's trio has actually been performing the song for a little while, as it did when NPR Music recorded a full concert in January.) If you listen carefully, you'll notice the applause is that of an intimate room, not a cavernous performing arts center or theater. Indeed, the credits reveal: "Recorded at The Vortex, London on 1 May 2012."

Being a guy who helps to record jazz concerts, I wondered: What kind of club is The Vortex that the Vijay Iyer Trio would play there, and that the BBC would record it? It's certainly not the first Vortex recording for the BBC, I gather, so I searched for more about the venue.

I found that The Vortex is a lot like many small jazz clubs — except nobody is paid to work there. Check out this short documentary video:

 

The Vortex is a small non-profit venue in Dalston, London, with a capacity of around 100 people. (That's even smaller than the hallowed Village Vanguard in New York, capacity 123.) It specializes in "left-field" music, as you can tell from the soundtrack. It was founded in the northeast London neighborhood of Stoke Newington, where it helped to develop the area into a thriving commercial district. After it was forced out, community support helped the club move to nearby Dalston in 2005. From the outside (see around 3:00) it looks like a glass enclosure jutting out from the Dalston Culture House. Located literally around the corner is the Dalston Kingsland rail stop.

It's all the more remarkable, then, that it's primarily a volunteer operation. That fact is the first thing the documentary hits you with, and it's also prominent on the "about" section of the club's website. All staff, including sound guys and directors, are volunteers.

This scheme actually makes for a rather effective business plan. It allows for both quality and quantity: With reduced overhead, the club can pay a (presumably) reasonable amount to world-class bands like the Vijay Iyer Trio, but also host music seven nights a week, including local artists. Amazingly, this is done while receiving no "regular source of public funding" and keeping admission prices "reasonable, generally in the range of £8 to £15" ($13 to $24).

It seems as if the volunteer focus also helps to develop a good vibe — a sense of community and shared ownership. Musicians have a safe place to play without anyone trying to rip them off, and staffers feel invested in running the operation. Certainly, it wouldn't work out for every jazz setting, but it's certainly worth noting that it seems to work here.

As for Iyer, here's a quote from a review of the Vortex show (actually a two-night residency) on the LondonJazz blog: "Iyer said how much they enjoyed playing the Vortex — perhaps one of the few places left where undivided audience attention is guaranteed — and said that they'd love to return, 'if we are invited'."

In a recent Huffington Post submission, pianist and composer Kurt Ellenberger writes about what he calls "the education fallacy": the premise that an increase in music education will lead to increased audiences. He's writing here about classical music, but draws a parallel with jazz:

On the education spending issue, it's common to hear musicians say, "well, we're not spending enough, that's why we're not building classical music audiences — we need to spend more on education." I return to Jazz Education, where we went from spending very little, to spending hundreds of millions, with nothing to show for it in regards to audience development. Why did the jazz audience decline, not grow, as the spending rapidly increased? Is there any reason to think that more spending would succeed with classical music where it has failed with jazz?

As evidence that jazz education has "failed" to produce new audiences, Ellenberger cites data demonstrating the proliferation of jazz education in colleges, summer camps and high schools. At the same time, he also states that discussions like the Jazz Audiences Initiative are responses to declining jazz audiences.

Ellenberger, I gather, is also on faculty at Grand Valley State University, and from that perch once helped to produce jazz concerts himself. (He plays in the Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble once featured on NPR's Weekend Edition.) That is, he's seen the shifts in education spending and audience decline in person. As he is paid to be a jazz educator, it seems unlikely that he's attacking the entire system that supports him — just its efficacy at seeding jazz audiences.

I find this perspective compelling, but also a bit frustrating.

 

The logical next question is: Why? Why did this fail; why isn't there a correlation? It would seem that producing lots of jazz-literate former students would create the next generation of professional musicians and its dedicated fans. If students seem to engage with the music deeply when they're studying it, why aren't they going to shows when they grow up?

In a separate post on his own blog, Ellenberger submits an answer:

Music is a cultural artifact, and the culture has moved on. Jazz has moved on as well, further and further away from being "popular music," and yet jazz culture (particularly jazz education) stubbornly adheres to a stodgy conservatism which is hopelessly mired in romantic notions of the Golden Age (circa 1950-1960). (This decade has been reified by many performers, critics, and academics for a variety of legitimate reasons which I will not go into here.) Here we are, a half century later, and jazz musicians continue to foster the attitudes, behaviors, and sometimes even the hopelessly worn-out hipster lingo from that bygone era. While I'm sure this is emotionally comforting as subculture signifiers, to the outside world, this nostalgic indulgence must appear archaic, comical, and desperate. Jazz and its affectations certainly aren't "cool" anymore, and haven't been for decades; these signifiers no longer identify the user as a slick, modern, and rebellious hipster.

Read that carefully: He's not saying that the music is stuck in a notion of the "golden age," but that the culture around jazz is. It's actually remarkably similar to Nicholas Payton's declaration that "jazz," as a construct that supports the music, lost its appeal a long time ago.

But frustratingly, that's where Ellenberger stops. Nicholas Payton has suggested "Black American Music" as a better frame of reference than "jazz." That suggestion frustrated a lot of people, but at least it got those people thinking. Here's where I would have liked to see Ellenberger's recommendations as to attracting an audience in addition to his critique of what didn't work. How can so-called jazz music catch up to culture?

This question has been implicitly answered by a number of folks discussed on this blog lately. The band BADBADNOTGOOD seems to be rejecting a lot of jazz culture outright. In contrast, the pianist Christian Sands seems to be embracing the jazz tradition, but infusing his music with contemporary influences. And a bunch of musicians are taking cues from punk rock (and under-emphasized parts of jazz history) with intimate DIY shows.

Another person who I think has some useful recommendations is the pianist Jason Moran. Conveniently, he was on NPR's Talk of the Nation two weeks ago, on the excuse of International Jazz Day, and these very issues came up:

I mean, you know, there's a thing that happens when we start to take the form for granted. So, I mean, even stylistically, if I'm looking at photographs of Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington with his 18-piece orchestra, impeccably dressed, sitting behind, you know, equally formatted music stands, all with the title 'Duke Ellington' — you know, like an immaculate set for a stage, as well.

You know, we take that form for granted about how to present the music. And I think to a degree, we have to rethink just how do we present this music in 2012 and for the future. I mean, it can't be on the same model that happened in 1908 or 1958, you know. It has to continue to move because the way the world works is not the same.

"For me, it's the recontextualization," Moran said earlier in the conversation. The music may be top-notch, and emotionally powerful to those used to its conventions — but how will it fit into modern lives? Moran is now curating jazz shows for the Kennedy Center, so starting next season, he'll have many more chances to recontextualize for audiences.

Moran's is hardly the only vision for presenting music in new ways, and we need to hear others. The last time the jazz community collectively agreed to argue about its audience was around Terry Teachout's 2009 op-ed "Can Jazz Be Saved?" I pointed it out then, and I will continue to now: Lamenting the loss of concertgoers is a lot more useful when you also suggest ways to win new ones.

More links from this week:

• Interesting discussions at George Colligan's blog this week. An informed opinion on the charge that music schools produce "cookie cutter" musicians. Some thoughts on sight reading, that misunderstood skill among the jazz community. And a low brass forum erupts.
• At the WBGO blog, there are interviews with master drummer and educator Charlie Persip and saxophonist Kenny Garrett, who you may know has recently put out a new studio album. Also, memories of Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette from the JazzSet vaults.
• Capsulocity is a short video interview series with young (mostly jazz) musicians in New York. We mentioned it earlier this week but only in passing.
• This week in Esperanza Spalding: JazzTimes cover story. From one of A Blog Supreme's newest contributors.
• Guitarist Vernon Reid briefly talks Spectrum Road, the new jazz-rock supergroup with Jack Bruce (of Cream), John Medeski and Cindy Blackman Santana.
• Pianist Myra Melford is one of five winners of the 2012 Alpert Awards in the Arts. The award is worth $75,000.
• Lester Young, clarinetist. He was known as a tenor saxophonist, of course, but also kept a cheap metal clarinet on his arsenal. From Aesthetic, Not Anesthetic, who also recontextualizes, say, early cornetist Red Nichols.
• A new film about jazz in India is out. And the Times article manages to avoid all "Calcutta Cutie" references.
• The Jazz Gallery, a New York venue supporting emerging artists, needs to move and raise a whole bunch of money to do it. (NPR Music has recorded live from the Gallery in recent years.) Howard Mandel reports.
• More on Cecil Taylor, who is being feted this month in New York. Seth Colter Walls reviews an early tribute.
• At last, an obituary for iconic jazz matron Phoebe Jacobs.
• Bix Beiderbecke's prep school dorm room is being destroyed.
• Destination: Out posts a rare Cecil Taylor bit.
• The Jazz Session spoke with pianist George Colligan and saxophonist Steve Lehman.
• The Checkout features student jazz ensemble recordings, from WBGO's celebration of Jazz Appreciation Month.

Elsewhere at NPR Music:

 

• Endangered Blood: Tiny Desk Concert.
• JazzSet features a Miles Davis/Gil Evans tribute from the Monterey Jazz Festival.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz features Daryl Sherman's tribute to Johnny Mercer.
• Violinist Scott Tixier is featured on Song of the Day.

I was an 18-year-old saxophone student at Berklee College of Music when my new best friend, a trumpeter named Willy Olenick, told me about The Fringe. "You've got to hear this band," he said. "They're an amazing trio. You can hear them any Monday night at Michael's and you're nuts not to go."

Willy didn't mention anything about what style they played, and I didn't ask. I just took his advice and went.

Michael's was a small, narrow bar behind Symphony Hall in Boston. There was a WPA mural on the wall. They only served beer and wine, and let's just say a contingent of a few regulars might have been there just for the Rolling Rocks. (In fact, they may have been there all day for the Rolling Rocks.) A man named Bill was at the front door at night, collecting the $2 cover charge. Michael himself manned the bar.

Frankly, on first hearing The Fringe, I wasn't sure what was happening. The trio took the stage, and I don't think I was even sure when the set started. At some point, I realized that this music was not like the other jazz I had heard. Until that time, my jazz listening had been mostly big bands and straight-ahead, swinging jazz groups.

I'd never really heard so-called avant-garde music before, but I stayed for the set, trying to make sense of the sounds. I remember thinking, "I've got to check this out more. There's something here and I don't understand it." I didn't know why, but I found myself looking forward to the next Monday. And then the next Monday, and the next.

After about a year of Mondays, Michael spoke to me: "You're here every week — why don't you be the bartender?" I thought for two seconds and said, "Sure."

 

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The Fringe is the trio of virtuosos George Garzone (saxophone), Bob Gullotti (drums) and John Lockwood (bass). All three members teach at Berklee College of Music, but they also meet on Mondays to improvise freely together. The Fringe has met on Mondays for 40 years now; that's four decades, two score.

For three of those years, I heard the band play every week. As my musical sensibility was taking on a new dimension, the band became akin to an addiction. No matter what was going on in my life, from college-student drama to bigger issues like my father's death during freshman year, I found myself counting down the time to Monday night. Many times, I've likened it to therapy. No matter what's going on in my life, I leave a Fringe gig and know that everything is going to be all right.

I was delighted recently when drummer Bob Gullotti told me the same thing, in an interview with the band I conducted for DownBeat. A student of master percussionist Alan Dawson, Gullotti lays down intricate webs of rhythmic foundation under the band in a demonstration of true effortless mastery. His steady thunder is a driving force in the music, but it isn't overbearing. There was a period when he brought a huge gong every week and wrenched bowing sounds from it.

Tenor saxophonist George Garzone grew up in a family band and has the most remarkable sense of melody you'll ever hear in free jazz, coupled with a harmonic depth few have achieved. (Cosmically apropos, he shares a birthday with John Coltrane.) Bassist John Lockwood is at his best when his feet are to the fire and he has to invent a new path through the music.

The bass chair is the only one that has changed in 40 years. After 12 years, original Fringe bassist Rich Appleman left to balance his responsibilities of being the chairman of the bass department at Berklee, gigging in Boston and raising his growing family. He retires from Berklee this year.

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Eventually, Michael's closed, and The Fringe moved on to The Willow in Somerville for the next 17 years. By that time, I was on the road with a rock band six nights a week, but any Monday I was home, I was at The Willow.

Over the years, I've seen many wonderful players sit in with the band, notably saxophonist Joe Lovano, pianist Kenny Werner and bassist Scott Lee. I always thought that these three world-class musicians were the only ones who could keep up with The Fringe. Usually, if someone sat in with them, it just slowed the band down — or, worse yet, got in their way. I suppose this makes me a bit of a "Fringe purist," although I recently heard Lovano sit in (all these years later) and it was still delightful. Joe is tuned in to the band's wavelength.

Saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi's quintet shares Mondays with The Fringe at The Lily Pad in Cambridge now. He and Garzone have a great mutual admiration, and I'm told Jerry sits in with them sometimes. I can't wait to hear this.

I've lived in New York since 1985, but I still try to see The Fringe when I can — I've made the journey twice in the last two months. Really, I've gone to hear The Fringe every chance I've had since 1976, and I expect I'll continue doing so as long as I'm physically able. In fact, I expect that when my time on earth comes to a close, my personal soundtrack will be the music of The Fringe.

But I have no plans to leave this planet now. The Fringe's 40th-anniversary concert is this weekend, and I'm driving a contingent of New Yorkers up to see it.

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Claire Daly is a saxophonist and composer. She is touring the Pacific Northwest with her quartet in early June. You can follow her on Twitter at @cdbjazz.

The Undead Music Festival, which lifted off last night, has grown every year. On Friday, it will outgrow New York City.

Now in its third year, this jazz festival typically seizes small pockets of Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, as it did yesterday, building immersive urban playgrounds where largely young audiences flood venues with colored admissions bracelets. It is jazz as both heady experience and social happening. But on Friday's Night of the Living DIY, the venues scatter across five Brooklyn neighborhoods, as well as a half-dozen cities across the U.S.

Still, the festival's expansion — and its use of "do-it-yourself" spaces rather than traditional clubs — is really a way of asking audiences to think smaller, to look closer to home. To turn off (computers and stereos), tune out (from your MP3 collection) and drop in (on a snug, local gathering).

As the head of Capitalbop, an organization that seeks to engage local jazz audiences in Washington, D.C., and presents informal shows in service of that goal, I find this development exciting. Search & Restore, one of the groups responsible for Undead, has decided to feature living-room venues simply because they are already thriving: A quiet movement of artist-produced, anti-corporate jazz concerts is creeping across the country. Here are a few of the motivations that I've perceived for this idea, and for Undead's decision to embrace it.

 

1. Jazz thrives in unmediated spaces. The venues at the Night of the Living DIY range from artist studios to musicians' lofts. Some don't have event permits, let alone liquor licenses. One, in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is the living room of Search & Restore director Adam Schatz's friends. In these settings, "You're just in a room with the music, and that's what's important," Schatz told me earlier this week. "On the artistic side, that's usually where it starts — people playing this music in their homes — and it's kind of cool to perform it in a similar, raw setting. Not just physically raw, but emotionally raw: There's a kind of vulnerability to [these spaces] that I think really magnifies the humanity of the music, which is what makes it so special."

In my experience, Schatz is exactly right. With a crowd of curious listeners bunched up in a small room, nothing but a share of the floor or a spongy couch to sit on, the musical experience is remarkably direct. It's no coincidence that historically, jazz's most generous gardens of innovation have included low-lit New Orleans brothels, Harlem brownstones and Soho lofts.

2. A technology-drowned society demands raw experiences. The critic Whitney Balliett famously described jazz as "the sound of surprise." As I see it, this is the music's strongest claim to importance today.

Many of us now attach ourselves to machines, and they're increasingly engineered to deny us surprises. The Google ads that accompany our browsing form a closed circuit, tailored to the terms we've searched or the subject line we've sent. The IT age has brought us mammoth businesses with a firmer grip on our everyday actions than ever before, and a more insidious ability to invent their own necessity. Last month, in a New York Times op-ed, psychologist Sherry Turkle weighed in: "We've become accustomed to a new way of being 'alone together.'" (The jazz allusion seems incidental.) "[W]e are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens."

The focus at the Night of the Living DIY combats all that by building community, one makeshift room at a time. Close-knit gatherings, where women and men are urgently making music just feet away from their listeners, are an excellent way to encourage triumphant compassion. Schatz is conscientious about the importance of such lifelines to humanity. "For the large part, social media makes me sick to my stomach," Schatz said. "The question for me is, 'How can I connect people with things that are so explosively real and present that they can sort of combat the idea that everything you need in life is on the Internet?' [Jazz] is something that happens differently every single time."

Lucas Gillan is a drummer who co-runs a concert series called House Party Starting in Chicago. For the Night of the Living DIY, he's helping to present a show in a gallery. "I feel like it is very appropriate" to showcase jazz in homes, he said. "It's a conversational music. You go to a party to talk to people you've never met before and to have a conversation, and hopefully you can learn something new about somebody. And you go to a party to hear some music that's going to be in the moment and part of the atmosphere."

3. Doing it yourself is easier than ever before. For all that the Internet has done to lure us out of the crowd and into a cloud, it has also fostered an equal and opposite force: democratizing the tools of making and doing. Individuals now have remarkable means for entrepreneurship. No matter the realm — presenting live music, assembling a recreational sports league, community organizing — it's relatively simple to build something that guides people to each other. Inviting all your friends to a house concert, and encouraging them to invite all of their own friends, is as simple as creating a Facebook event.

Search & Restore, which started in 2007 as a small concert-presenting outfit, blossomed online. Schatz launched a website in 2009 as a hub for promoting the organization's shows, plus other mutinous elements of the New York City jazz scene. The following year, a crowd fundraising campaign on Kickstarter earned him more than $76,000 and a profile in The New York Times' Sunday edition. Schatz used the money to launch a video documentation initiative, and today Search & Restore's website features about 100 videos of live jazz performances around New York.

The means of growth might have been digital, but the ends remain planted in the real world. "I'm always conscious and concerned about the thousands of people who have never gotten the chance to experience this music," Schatz said, defaulting to talking about its live expression. "For now, doing it through the videos is an important first step."

Jamie Breiwick is a trumpeter and the co-founder of Milwaukee Jazz Vision, an advocacy organization that will present a Night of the Living DIY show at a multipurpose arts space. His group's website is robust, offering a calendar of Milwaukee jazz events, a guide to the scene's hotspots and a multimedia archive. However, "the ultimate goal in our case is to get people to come out and see shows live — get people out of the digital world and into the real world," Breiwick said. "Using Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff is just another method by which to let people know what's really happening."

4. The punk ideal of DIY resonates among alternative-minded youth. When Schatz named the festival Undead, the idea was to resist the idea that jazz is "dead" or "dying," while evoking some accepted tokens of outré youth culture: namely, zombies. The term DIY, as it applies to music, dates back to punk rock's origins in the late 1970s, when bands resisting or rejected by commercial venues and record labels struck out on their own. They held their own concerts, self-released records and published stapled-together fanzines. Undead appeals to a similar type of audience: young, educated, imbued with (perhaps more vague) anti-establishment notions of hipness, searching for genuine experiences.

This isn't without its perils. To me, Undead and its sister jazz festival Winter Jazzfest fail to attract enough young people who aren't middle-class, white males. Aligning with an underground method of presentation potentially brings us further from inclusivity: Who is being invited to the performances, and who feels welcome?

5. From musicians' perspective, DIY pays. Schatz thinks traditional jazz clubs, with drink minimums and hounding wait staffs, have done as much to harm jazz's popularity as have those clubs' own scarcity. (It's why Search & Restore typically favors standing rock clubs and other alternative venues.) But as a saxophonist, Schatz also sees clear advantages for musicians to playing at house parties and artist-run spaces. "Aside from the fact that it's hard to get a club to even check out your music, it's much more likely you'll have a crowd [at a DIY show]," Schatz said. "It's much more likely you'll have people there who actually care. And it's a good way to meet people."

Some of the shows at Friday's nationwide Night of the Living DIY are being organized by people whom Schatz met while crisscrossing the country with his band. "Adam actually played in my living room last May," Gillan said.

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Giovanni Russonello is a regular contributor to JazzTimes and the founder of Capitalbop.

As a follow-up to yesterday's thoughts around BADBADNOTGOOD, the improvising band that many folks are talking about, I'd like to submit this brief video interview with young pianist Christian Sands.

Sands is a product of the modern jazz education system — he graduated from the Manhattan School of Music, one of the most prestigious jazz programs out there, and studied with both Jason Moran and Dr. Billy Taylor. He got his first big break when he joined Christian McBride's Inside Straight, which brought him on tour around the world. He's currently studying composition with Vijay Iyer — he was literally in the middle of a lesson when All Things Considered interviewed Iyer in March.

As you can see, Sands carries himself with a soft-spoken humility. He also happens to be a very good and very in-demand musician. I met him briefly when he stopped by NPR with Ben Williams' band, and you can hear him on Piano Jazz and playing with the Olatuja Project.

All this would seem to make him the anti-BBNG musician: possesses a music school pedigree, is polite, demonstrates competence in straight-ahead jazz, plays a lot of seated shows in suits, actually looks up to older musicians. But he's but a 23-year-old with a voice that occasionally cracks — merely two years older than BBNG's oldest member. And check out the tune Sands is playing throughout in the background: Kanye West's "Runaway." (It becomes more obvious around 6:21, when you can hear Sands' riff on the signature "repeating single note on beat three" motif.)

Like BBNG's members, who cover Kanye's "Flashing Lights," Sands came of age musically as Kanye West rose to pop culture superstardom. Naturally, Kanye's beats are part of Sands' musical lexicon too. (So is the popular hip-hop duo OutKast, whose song "Prototype" Sands also briefly talks about arranging.) Just because he came up in jazz's mainstream doesn't mean that Sands doesn't think about how his art interfaces with pop culture today. I like to think it's given him more tools to deal with that, actually.

I'd like to point out one more bit of this interview I find revealing:

 

A strong thing that me and Dr. Taylor spoke about was how to keep [jazz] going. In this kind of society now, is everything is Internet driven, and television driven, and radio driven. And a lot of the stuff that we do as jazz musicians caters to just jazz musicians, you know? It doesn't really cater to TV, or doesn't really cater to mainstream radio. And it's not on purpose — it's just because we just like to have fun, and a lot of our stuff borders [on] 10, 12 minutes. And they don't have that kind of time sometimes. So the thing that Dr. Taylor really talked about was: Bring your audience with you.

The success that BBNG enjoys owes a lot to the fact that the band has brought its audience with it. The band has done more than meet its young fans halfway — it's given away plenty of free downloads and YouTube clips and cover tunes, and booked its shows in standing-room venues, and communicated often in photos and Tweets and strongly-worded interviews.

In comparison, the jazz community of recent decades — musicians, fans and even bloggers like this one — could generally do a much better job of communicating why live improvisation is still relevant, and why swing and the blues are forever relevant. But Sands is at least thinking hard about this issue, much as Billy Taylor still was not long before he died in late 2010, at age 89. If you were listening to Kanye West like most other 23-year-olds, and simultaneously wearing suits to time-out-of-mind jazz clubs and fancy performing arts centers — for gigs that your non-musician peers rarely attend — how could you not think about it?

Something like Capsulocity, the folks behind this series of video interview/performances with young New-York-based musicians — well, it's not the answer. But it certainly could be a part of the storytelling, the translation to the present tense, that more jazz artists deserve.

Hello, fans of the Toronto band BADBADNOTGOOD. Thanks for stopping by, truly. I'm delighted that somebody turned you on to the joys of improvised instrumental music; as you can see, it's an experience like none other.

The three young band members — "No one above the age of 21 was involved in the making of this album," their new mixtape claims — create music that could theoretically be called "jazz," but you probably heard about them from a friend or media outlet for whom jazz isn't a top priority. (In fact, the consensus among professional jazz musicians and journalists seems to be notably against them, and further remarks still trickle in.) Their repertoire merges jazz training with their musical milieu: covers of songs by au courant musicians, extrapolations upon hip-hop beats and a few original compositions too.

BBNG is currently on a short U.S. tour, including a New York City stop and a gig backing singer Frank Ocean at Coachella. That's led to another wave of press about the band's connection to the music of today. Being a jazz journalist, I'd like to point out that this connection essentially describes the entire history of jazz: Musicians have always adapted pop music of the age to their own ends. So if you're into what BBNG is doing, here are five other bands who think similarly, but aren't as well-known outside the jazz world. For the sake of simplicity, I've picked only trios of keyboards, bass and drums — just like BADBADNOTGOOD itself.

 

So if they're so great and attuned to the present moment, why aren't these bands I've discussed — with the exception of Robert Glasper's — attaining the buzz that BBNG is? Part of it has to do with the inflammatory nature of BBNG's public comments toward jazz education and jazz tradition in certain recent interviews. That makes it easy for journalists who don't know much about current jazz (one Vice magazine interviewer wrote that "jazz blows" in the first sentence of her lede) to contrast this band to an incompletely-portrayed establishment. Meanwhile, musicians whose careers have benefited from immersion within the jazz community — even those who eventually make art their mentors may not approve of — are much less likely to spurn their peers, elders and teachers.

Another part has to do with BBNG's savvy in online self-promotion. The band has released two free mixtapes, two free live recordings, a Tumblr, a Twitter feed and several YouTube videos of their covers, all with elegant graphic design and CPTL LTTR branding and aesthetic in-jokes. (Pig mask, anyone?) Jazz PR representation, on balance, has failed to execute this sort of 21st century grassroots promotional activity. A general lack of institutional wherewithal accounts for some of this. More importantly, making music videos and free studio recordings requires financial resources that professional musicians and record companies aren't willing to risk. (This is especially true for cover songs, which require copyright clearances to record legally.) Record companies don't expect to recoup their investments on most jazz artists, whose track record of commercial success is not stellar. And professional musicians aren't as apt to self-promote for free as BBNG is: They have careers and often families, and expect to be paid for their services, not unreasonably.

I do admire BADBADNOTGOOD for making original music that feels personal to its members, and articulating its connection with the zeitgeist. Frustrated by a flat-footed prevailing order that wasn't comprehending its ideas, the band took its message directly to fans. That's a lesson in hustle many in jazz might learn from.

But I also believe that plenty of astounding bands have a similar outlook when it comes to creativity. All of those mentioned here have more years of study and bandstand experience under their belts, which translates to greater depth of creative possibility. There are many more, too: Fellow piano trios The Bad Plus, the Brad Mehldau Trio, Medeski Martin and Wood or Jason Moran and the Bandwagon have been celebrated for their pop music connections for over a decade now.

The fact that you haven't heard much about these bands is a problem the jazz community ought to address. But in the correct light, their art ought to speak for itself.

From the first downbeat of the first Center City Jazz Festival in Philadelphia, you could hear history in the air — and maybe history being made.

The Wade Dean Enspiration, a gutsy young quintet, led off the festival with "Gingerbread Boy" by Jimmy Heath, one of Philly's many homegrown jazz legends. It was 1 p.m. last Saturday, and the dim carpeted room upstairs at Fergie's Pub was starting to fill up.

For the next six hours, Dean, a saxophonist, and his fellow bandleaders would strive not only to honor the legacy embodied by Heath and others, but also to bring forward their own art, a music of today. There was a larger goal as well: to revive a year-round jazz presence in Philadelphia, where the jazz club scene has all but collapsed.

The Center City Jazz Festival is the brainchild of trombonist Ernest Stuart, 28. Buoyed by a Kickstarter campaign, which exceeded its goal of $16,000, Stuart took a cue from New York's Undead and Winter Jazzfests. On Saturday afternoon, he booked 16 bands at four venues within short walking distance.

Of these, Chris's Jazz Café and Time Restaurant book jazz regularly. Fergie's, an old-school Irish bar, and Milkboy, a coffee shop and rock venue, do not. But for one day — possibly the most significant day for Philly jazz in years — these establishments came together for a grassroots showcase of one of the city's greatest cultural assets.

"I'm so proud of my good friend Ernest," said drummer Justin Faulkner as the day ended. "This festival was what we needed to lift our spirits."

Wade Dean concurred: "He did a damn good job. Ernest came through."

 

The four CCJF venues are mostly dotted along Sansom Street downtown, near the stretch of Broad Street known as the Avenue of the Arts. (One venue, Milkboy, is on neighboring Chestnut Street.) Val Brown, a patron at Fergie's and an area resident in the '70s and '80s, recalled how Sansom was once blighted, a shell of abandoned industry, "the street you hurried past to get to Market Street."

Today Sansom Street is hardly pretty — a narrow and often malodorous lane of dumpsters and parking garage exits — but also decently sprinkled with businesses. To walk here is to see immediately how events like CCJF can brighten urban spaces.

Unfortunately, City Hall didn't bite. Stuart sought government help early on, but a meeting with officials "wasn't very fruitful," he said. (In fairness, he added, "We had just launched the Kickstarter a week before, and we'd only raised about $1,500 at that point.") To his credit, Mayor Michael Nutter held a press conference on Jazz Day (April 13, as declared by the U.S. Conference of Mayors) and spoke of his own personal stake in Philly's jazz culture. But in spite of this, the CCJF had to fend for itself.

Stuart did line up advertising support from Yelp and Philadelphia Magazine; a donation from the coffee maker L'Aube Torrefaction; and free live sound and recording from Turtle Studios. Otherwise, he said, "We just went to the people, and the people showed up, just like they showed up today."

Bassist Mike Boone, a mentor to many younger players in town, looks at Philly as an undervalued music capital. "When people think of us they think of Rocky, the sports teams, they think of cheese steaks and hoagies," he says. "Music is kind of way down on that list."

But Philly music history is easily as rich as Nashville's, Boone noted, and its stylistic range is arguably broader. John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Lee Morgan, Benny Golson and countless others came from the city. The impact of organ greats Jimmy Smith, Don Patterson, Shirley Scott and Trudy Pitts is still widely felt. Gamble & Huff, the famed soul and R&B producers, pioneered a "Philly Sound" that rivaled Motown in influence, and many jazz musicians came on board as session players. All these elements converge to give Philly jazz a kind of gritty, groove-oriented populism, readily apparent at the CCJF.

The city boasts a rich avant-garde legacy as well. It remains the home base of Marshall Allen and the Sun Ra Arkestra, who have done DIY music promotion for decades. And some of Philly's more "outside" players were already engaged elsewhere on Saturday: A big band led by saxophonist Bobby Zankel was performing in collaboration with AACM leading light Muhal Richard Abrams. Ars Nova Workshop spearheaded the event as part of its ongoing concert series.

Philly's network of left-of-center improvisers, not unlike their brethren in Seattle, have had some success tapping alternative spaces and forging opportunities through sheer will. With the CCJF, might the straight-ahead jazz scene be poised to do the same?

At Time, a four-year-old restaurant and bar with no bandstand, soul-jazz and Hammond B-3 organ ruled the day. Leading off was Three Blind Mice, a cooking and subtly inventive trio with saxophonist Victor North, organist Lucas Brown and drummer Wayne Smith. In fact, Chris' Jazz Cafe was the only venue with an acoustic piano. The Roland digital keyboard at Milkboy wasn't ideal, but the Fender Rhodes at Fergie's Pub lent a warm and enveloping modernism to bands led by tenor saxophonist Dahi Divine, bassist Alex Claffy and drummer Joe Truglio. Years ago, when jazz could be heard in Philly's innumerable neighborhood bars, the Rhodes was a necessity. These days it can be a benefit.

At Milkboy, festival founder Stuart led a group with Boone, Faulkner and pianist Jason Shattil, courageously featuring his trombone as the only horn. Vocalist Venissa Santí followed with Afro-Cuban jazz of high spirit and technical accomplishment. Then Faulkner returned for a smashing trio set led by altoist and Roy Haynes bandmate Jaleel Shaw, with Luques Curtis on bass.

By the time the formidable young pianist George Burton played around 5 p.m., Chris' was turning people away (including me). "It's difficult with the four-venue thing," said Terrance Leach, manager of Time, earlier in the day. "So many tickets sold, and I'm a little worried that everyone's going to rush to one venue at once." Problems like these have bedeviled the New York festivals, but they're good problems to have.

You could barely squeeze into Chris' for the 8 p.m. headlining set by renowned trumpeter Sean Jones. (Lo and behold, there was Burton on piano, Luques Curtis on bass and the indefatigable Faulkner on drums, with Brian Hogans on alto.) Jones, an Ohio native now based in Pittsburgh, had a moment when he looked out and saw Dolores Fambrough, widow of recently-departed Philly bassist Charles Fambrough. "My first professional recording was with Charles Fambrough," he said, eyes welling up. "He was like a father to me, and you are like a mom."

The impact of losing elders like Fambrough can't be overstated. Nor can losing community-fostering venues like Ortlieb's Jazzhaus (though Ortlieb's Lounge is now presenting jazz once a week). Younger players, in Philly and everywhere, face tough odds as they build careers.

But Philly's resounding success stories are many. Faulkner, now playing with Branford Marsalis and Kurt Rosenwinkel, is just the latest. Rosenwinkel belongs on the list himself. So do Uri Caine, Christian McBride, Orrin Evans, Ari Hoenig, Joey DeFrancesco, Jaleel Shaw and Johnathan Blake.

There's no reason to think the list will stop growing. The question is whether Philadelphia can rebuild a bustling jazz-club culture of its own.

Standing in Chris' waiting for Sean Jones to start, Ernest Stuart seemed elated, no doubt exhausted. "There are so many unknowns with an event like this," he said. "I woke up this morning just full of nerves. But I was so pleasantly surprised.

"The people coming up to me are people I don't know. I'm so happy that they gave the music a chance, and they loved it. It's up to the venues to keep this momentum going."

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David R. Adler is a freelance writer formerly of Philadelphia.