Late last month, New York’s Jazz Composers’ Collective celebrated its 10th anniversary with a week at the Jazz Standard. Each of its principal composers — bassist Ben Allison, pianist Frank Kimbrough, saxophonists Ted Nash and Michael Blake, and trumpeter Ron Horton — led bands, and on two nights, they came together to form the Herbie Nichols Project, a septet devoted to the music of the late, neglected pianist and composer. Each night, they packed the newly renovated Manhattan jazz club’s large basement music room — an indication that people are finally catching on to the collective’s innovative yet audience-friendly music.
It’s hard to exaggerate what a milestone 10 years is for a jazz musicians’ collective, whose lifespan is usually as fleeting as a Mayfly’s. What the Jazz Composers’ Collective’s members have achieved in that time is nothing less than a jazz revolution. They have transformed jazz conventions without destroying them. They have fused incongruous musical elements in meaningful, organic ways. They have elevated musically complex but melodically gifted composers like Herbie Nichols and Andrew Hill to a place of central importance; they have co-opted textures and sonorities from free jazz and world music into a mainstream-jazz context. The result is a new vision of uncompromising but widely accessible jazz that can attract an audience without pandering. Not bad for a group that started out as four guys rehearsing together in a basement practice room because they felt alienated from both the late-’80s neo-boppers and the Lower East Side avant-garde.
Ten years ago, the then 24-year-old Allison, fresh out of the NYU jazz program, was growing increasingly sick of endless nights backing stale tenor solos and $30 gigs in clubs where the espresso machine drowned out his solos. Then he had a "light-bulb moment" as he was reading a biography of twelve-tone composer Alban Berg. "Berg was frustrated because his music was being presented out of context, and he felt disconnected from the Viennese scene. That really struck a chord — I felt the same way about New York. So Berg and Schoenberg gathered some like-minded composers together, found a patron, and put on concerts in the patron’s apartment. Berg also wrote a newsletter to bridge the gap between the composers and the audience.
"That was a kind of epiphany for me. I knew that was what I had to do. Later on, as we started to put the collective together, I learned about all the organizations that had come before us. But I wasn’t hip to the AACM, the Jazz Composers’ Guild, or Dave Liebman’s Free Light Communications when we started. It was then that I realized that each generation of musicians seems to stumble on some basic truths — doing for themselves."
In the fall of 1992, Allison, Kimbrough, Nash, and saxophonist John Schraeder put $75 each into a shoebox and rented a hall at the Greenwich House Music School. They kept the scale of operations modest and eventually incorporated as a non-profit. And as luck would have it, they turned out to be compatible personally and musically. By now, they have produced more than 90 concerts and presented more than 300 new works. They also put out a bi-monthly newsletter with statements from the artists and a concert schedule.
About three years ago, small jazz labels took notice and started issuing albums from JCC members. Today, there’s a substantial body of recordings documenting the organization’s breadth and creativity. Third Eye (Palmetto), the debut recording of Ben Allison and his Medicine Wheel septet, features tuneful writing that draws on folk music and other non-jazz sources plus warm orchestrations that mask underlying complexities — it’s like a sunnier Charles Mingus. Ted Nash’s Sidewalk Meeting (Arabesque) fuses New Orleans funk and Argentine tango into an elusive rhythmic base for exceptional soloing. Michael Blake’s new Elevated (Knitting Factory) showcases seemingly limitless melodic invention in a sympathetic quartet that makes the saxophonist’s world-music influences swing. Trumpeter Ron Horton’s Genius Envy (Omnitone) displays his meticulous sextet arrangements and subtly imaginative soloing. Pianist Frank Kimbrough’s conversational duets with vibraphonist Joe Locke are thoughtful and serene; his Omnitone trio release Saturn’s Child, recorded at a JCC concert, offers a fuller portrait of his unconventional lyricism.
Although they share common concerns, there isn’t a JCC sound. That’s "a sign of maturity," says Allison. "I think through the years, we’ve allowed ourselves to play more of the music we really like. For myself, I knew that I could play and write, but in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, ‘God, I still love Neil Young, I like incidental music from ’70s sit-coms, why can’t I allow some of that into my writing?’ It just took time to admit these things to myself. The way I did it was to find the people I like to play with and who like to play my tunes and then find an audience that will clap at the end of one of my tunes. And each time I play, I take a little more of a chance."
