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A jazzy year
Dancing in the aisles
BY JON GARELICK

Here’s some of the jazz I liked this year — including concerts and CDs — listed in no particular order.

1) Unnamable

Bill Frisell delivered Unspeakable (Nonesuch), his best album since 1996’s Bill Frisell Quartet (also Nonesuch), and a show back in May at the Somerville Theatre with organist Sam Yahel and drummer Brian Blade at which the trio covered Dylan’s "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," the Delfonics’ "La La Means I Love You," and Hank Williams’s "Lost Highway," wringing maximum harmonic variety from the pieces’ structures while extolling the singable perfection of their melodies. As for Unspeakable, it restores the good name of postmodernism. There’s funk, country, folk, rock, even a haunting string trio, and yet none of these 14 originals is any one of those things. Each is simply itself, much like all of Frisell’s music. Give producer Hal Willner props as well. I had to miss a show later in the year at the Regattabar, where Frisell was joined by bassist Viktor Krauss and drummer Kenny Wollesen, but Phoenix contributor Ed Hazell gave it high marks in his review.

2) Oddballs

Slide-trumpeter Brian Carpenter and his three-ring-theater-jazz troupe the Beat Circus emerged as a formidable virtuoso ensemble with their first CD, The Ringleader’s Revolt (Innova). Working with Jim Hobbs (saxophone), Brandon Seabrook (banjo), Ron Caswell (tuba), Alec K. Redfearn (accordion), and Matt McLaren (drums), Carpenter created a band with a decidedly Fellini-esque bent who allude to Nino Rota, Kurt Weill, and the American circus music of Karl King. They even deconstruct Rodgers & Hammerstein’s "The Lonely Goatherd." A show at the Middle East with One Ring Zero, Rev. Glasseye and His Wooden Leg, Curtis Eller, the Sob Sisters, and comedian DJ Hazard turned out a true left-of-Dresden-Dolls menagerie.

3) Dreaming of the masters

Trumpeter Lester Bowie died several years before the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Sirius Calling (Pi) was made, and bassist Malachi Favors passed away shortly after, in January. But with saxophone-and-flute man Joseph Jarman rejoining, the band have never sounded better. They avoid some of the stamina- and form-defying lengthy jams of the past in favor of short pieces of free bop, serial-style kabuki collective improvs, and African percussion workouts and a spacious, orchestral deployment of bells and other percussion that will conjure West Africa or Bali, depending on your point of view. The trio the Revolutionary Ensemble reconvened for And now . . . (Pi), their first recording since 1977, and it finds their sound and their sensibility intact, violinist Leroy Jenkins’s sweet tone and skittering melodies enmeshed with the delicate rumble of Jerome Cooper’s drums and the free throb of Sirone’s bass abetted by other instruments as the situation demands and even a bit of electronics. Both albums demonstrated how deliberate and poised so-called "free" jazz can be.

4) Dreaming of Gil

Bassist Bruno Råberg with Chrysalis (Orbis Music), flutist Jamie Baum with Moving Forward, Standing Still (OmniTone), and bandleader Maria Schneider with Concert in the Garden (Artist Share) paid indirect tribute, intentionally or not, to Schneider’s former employer, Gil Evans, with work that emphasized orchestral color and ensemble balance across a broad palette as much as swing and improvisatory derring-do. And swing they did — Råberg with his nonet (also in a sterling show at Ryles), Baum with a septet (and at the Regattabar), and Schneider with her fantastic large orchestra (will someone bring them here soon?).

5) Vocal sampling

Vocalist/pianist/songwriter Patricia Barber returned with Live: A Fortnight in France (Blue Note) and a show at the Real Deal Jazz Club and was, as always, urbane, smart, and literate, with a taste for noirish irony. And she’s one hell of a pianist. Madeleine Peyroux, meanwhile, who hadn’t had an album since 1996’s Dreamland (Atlantic), returned with Careless Love (Rounder), on which her eerie vocal resemblance to Billie Holiday and her own, fetching approach to songs were again in evidence as she worked with producer Larry Klein and spare, retro arrangements of the William C. Handy title tune, Hank Williams’s "Weary Blues," and Leonard Cohen’s "Dance Me to the End of Love," among others.

6) Meditations

Simplicity of means doesn’t mean simple-minded. Married pianists/composers Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz shared a solo-piano album, Solos (Songlines), alternating tracks, mixing covers and originals, spontaneous improvisations and through-composed pieces, Holcomb favoring ambiguous tonalities and chord-cluster rumblings and Horvitz leaning toward blues and Wayne Shorter. The complementary styles make for overall unity and perfect sequencing. Minnesota-based guitarist Steve Tibbetts and Tibetan Buddhist nun and vocalist Chöying Drolma first collaborated on 1997’s Chö (Hannibal), where they were joined by percussionist Marc Anderson. Reconvening for 2004’s Selway (Six Degrees), they still use percussion and drone figures or slow-moving harmonies as the grounding for pieces in which Drolma’s extraordinary control of pitch, her subtle ululations over exotic scales, and the deep-grain warmth of her instrument at once convey tension and deep serenity.

7) Liberating

Working at the Regattabar back in February following the release of Strange Liberation (RCA), Dave Douglas and a great band — Uri Caine on Fender Rhodes, tenor-saxophonist Chris Potter, bassist James Genus, and drummer Clarence Penn — opened up the forms on that CD and proved themselves the true successors to the Miles Davis band of the mid ’60s — the same loose forms and crackling spontaneity, but enhanced by more compositional detail. Douglas also released the collaborative Bow River Falls (Premonition), a chamber ensemble with cellist Peggy Lee, clarinettist Louis Sclavis, and Dylan van der Schyff on drums and lap-top that’s another of the year’s best CDs.

8) Six strings and more

The trio of guitarist John Scofield, electric-bassist Steve Swallow, and drummer Bill Stewart is one of the great jazz ensembles — Stewart combining Tony Williams’s on-the-beat intensity and Elvin Jones’s looseness, Swallow playing guitar-like upper-register figures as well as providing almost subsonic waves on his six-string bass guitar, and Scofield fashioning funny, cubist, breathtaking solos. They played the Regattabar twice this year following the release of their live CD EnRoute (Verve).

9) Clarinet man

Don Byron followed a three-year recording break with Ivey-Divey (Blue Note), his tribute to — among other people and things — the Lester Young trios, with pianist Jason Moran and drummer Jack DeJohnette (trumpeter Ralph Alessi and bassist Lonnie Plaxico guest on a few tracks). Typical of Byron, it was reverent, irreverent, delicate, raucous, swinging. In November, he took the material out for a high-spirited spin at the Regattabar with Plaxico, guitarist Dave Fiuczynski, and drummer Ralph Peterson; it was one of the best club shows of the year.

10) Micro man

Bassist Mike Rivard’s Club d’Elf has been a regular fixture on alternating Thursday nights at the Lizard Lounge since 1998, a floating crap game of rotating personnel mixing jazz, dub, electronics, Middle Eastern folk, microtonal noodling, what have you. This year, Club d’Elf followed up As Above: Live at the Lizard Lounge (2000 Live Archive) with three double CDs on the live-CD specialty label Kufala documenting performances at Vassar College and in New York City and Athens (Georgia) with a cast of characters including Mat and Joe Maneri, John Medeski, Brahmin Fribgane, Randy Roos, Reeves Gabrels, and Eric Kerr. All three are good, sometimes conjuring Miles Davis–like electric shitstorms of the early ’70s, other times drifting in an uncategorizable but danceable haze. In July, Rivard brought his crew to the Museum of Fine Arts and did indeed get folks dancing in the aisles of Remis Auditorium.


Issue Date: December 24 - 30, 2004
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