Miscellany #6: Living in the Movies, the Official Preppy Obituary, and the Athleticism of Art

1. Two great movie apartments: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and Alice (Woody Allen, 1990)

While preparing my upcoming Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post on Vertigo, I pulled these screenshots of one of my favorite movie apartments, Midge's San Francisco apartment. We see a lot of this apartment, but are never explicitly told if it's a studio (in the bedroom sense - it is an art studio) or a one-bedroom apartment. More to come on Vertigo in my next Gentlemen Prefer Brunettes post. For now, enjoy this incredible apartment in all its glory:

I'm probably not ever going to write a blog post about Woody Allen's 1990 film Alice, which Wikipedia somewhat passive-aggressively notes received "mildly positive reviews" (although it was Keye Luke's final film, and was originally called "The Magical Herbs of Dr. Yang," which makes me feel like there's a lot to unpack), but enjoy this fantastic apartment anyway.

2. Lisa Birnbach on Brooks Brothers's bankruptcy

The Brooks Man.

As Official Preppy Handbook author Lisa Birnbach recently wrote in the New York Times, Brooks Brothers provided "James Madison’s suits, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wardrobe and the Union Army’s uniforms during the Civil War," as well as uniforms for Roosevelt's Rough Riders and coats for presidents including Abraham Lincoln.

I like Brooks Brothers - I own many Brooks Brothers ties, tweeds, suits, and button-down shirts. I am saddened to see news of its bankruptcy because I love the clothes from the company that I own. But I also understand two things: first, Brooks Brothers hasn't made those clothes in a very long time, and second, Brooks Brothers is an increasingly hard sell in a more inclusive world. While I am disappointed that Birnbach's article ignores Brooks's trend towards sweatshop-made mediocrity - when she exhorts her readers to buy Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, suits, and polos, she neglects to mention that after the imminent closing of the company's factories in Haverhill, MA, Queens, and Garland, South Carolina, none of these products will be made in the United States (so much for the Union Army!) - I am more disappointed that her article fails to address what I suspect is a deeper problem with the resuscitation of Brooks than COVID-19.

The problem I'm referring to was summed up beautifully by Daniel Penny when he wrote about his "fear that you can’t uncouple conservative aesthetics from conservative politics, that the man in the Brooks Brothers suit is usually The Man." While it makes sense that Wynton would wear Brooks Brothers, it doesn't help his image among young jazz fans, or an inclusive one for women (Brooks Brothers makes women's clothing, of course, but it is most famous for its clothes for men). And while James Madison, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt are all great examples of Brooks's place in the annals of American history, those examples also perpetuate myths about that history - namely, that it is completely white and completely male.

Contrast Birnbach's article with this op-ed written by Robert Hill for USA Today, where Hill describes his time as one of the very few Black employees. While he wore the Ivy League look - the natural-shouldered, button-down-collared, repp-tied look of which Brooks was the primary creator and exemplar - he ended up embittered by Brooks's discriminatory policies. When Hill writes, "By the time of my sophomore year in high school, I was one of those African American kids who affected the Ivy Jivey persona. But, that wasn't enough — I wanted to sell it," you can hear the disdain for his past self seeping through the type. He wanted to get in the door at Brooks to sell something he loved; when he got there, he ended up selling something he wasn't allowed to fully be a part of. Why doesn't Birnbach mention prominent Black wearers of Brooks Brothers in her pantheon of American history? One reason might be that many of the most famous Black Ivy icons avoided it. Miles Davis, to take just one example, shopped at jazz-lover Charlie Davidson's Andover Shop in the mid-1950s before he, like Hill, moved on from Ivy for bigger and better things. (She doesn't even mention Wynton Marsalis, though Brooks Brothers is the official outfitter of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and Marsalis has championed their suits for years.)

"Save Brooks Brothers!" Lisa Birnbach cries. Me? I love my clothes from Brooks Brothers, but I also understand that the Brooks of the past is gone, and that it won't be coming back no matter how they move forward from their bankruptcy. Part of me is sad - I'd love to see repp ties, button-down oxford shirts, and sack suits (made in America!) on the shelves at 346 Madison, and see people flocking in to buy them. But part of me also wishes Brooks would just go down with their mothership and leave some space for new labels to thrive, labels that have a deeper commitment to domestic manufacturing and inclusivity, without the weight of an exclusionary history on their shoulders: labels like Drake's in England, or Rowing Blazers here in America, or even J. Press, the historic Ivy clothier who has weathered several storms by streamlining their operation to focus on their relationships to the history of Ivy League style in general and to American manufacturing, and to bridging the gap between past and present, with a balance of baggy traditional fits and hip newer styles that somehow doesn't make the stick-in-the-muds who wear these clothes too angry.

Even if we save Brooks, we won't be saving the Brooks Birnbach wrote about in her (very white) Preppy Handbook; we won't be saving James Madison's Brooks, or Teddy Roosevelt's, or her own father's or even her own. But if we let it die, we might just be saving something else - the chance for the clothes Brooks ushered into American history to survive; to prove that the man in the navy blazer and repp tie doesn't always have to be The Man.

3. Art as Sports: Wynton Marsalis on Sports Look

In 1986, jazz trumpeter and educator Wynton Marsalis appeared on Sports Look (later renamed Up Close) with Roy Firestone on ESPN to discuss the intersections between jazz and sports. Marsalis was a superstar at this time - he won Grammys for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in 1983, 1984, and 1985, and for Best jazz Instrumental Album in 1985, 1986, and 1987. 1985 also saw him engaging even more directly with the ways jazz amplifies an underrepresented Black voice with the release of Black Codes (From the Underground). Marsalis had a huge publicity machine, a huge audience, and critical acclaim. He was perfectly positioned to be an authority on jazz, and on its face it's very cool to see him featured on ESPN. Imagine seeing that today!

However, as I wrote about briefly here, Marsalis is a complicated figure. While he raised the profile of jazz hugely in the 1980s and 1990s, one could argue that he did so at the expense of established musicians working with fusion and avant-garde styles, some of whom had been making ends meet in the loft scene for years before Marsalis hit it big. Marsalis has always advanced a conservative view of jazz, prioritizing tradition and history and emphasizing the need for the blues and swing to be the foundation of any meaningful jazz expression. Sometimes, this conservative vision has had problematic real-world consequences beyond simple style disagreements - for example, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is almost completely male, and has been since its inception.

Sports, of course, has its own troubled history with inclusion and with managing a conservative image as times changed in America, and that history is perhaps no more important to consider than it is right now. So while it's cool to see Marsalis showing up on ESPN, it's also interesting to hear what he has to say because we have an intersection of two traditionally male-dominated modes of expression, and hearing what Marsalis (who, while he has unfairly become a meme of fuddy-duddiness in jazz, is also pretty clearly both a champion of the Jazz Tradition™️ and the most culturally visible jazz educator and standard-bearer in the last 40 years, whose influence, in one way or another, reshaped the jazz landscape in the 1980s and 1990s) has to say about them can perhaps help us understand the challenges jazz is wrestling with as it seeks to shed its overwhelming maleness.

Marsalis appeared on Sports Look in 1986 to discuss the question of "sports as art." Wynton does two noteworthy things early in the interview, as he and Firestone discuss basketball and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. First, he makes a strong argument for intelligence as the root of both jazz and basketball. This is hugely important because jazz and sports are two areas where the intelligence of Black creators has been discounted over and over again. Rhythm and athleticism are often used as racist tropes, with whites dismissing the work that Black artists and athletes put into their craft by claiming that these skills are inherent in Blacks, that they have a genetic predisposition to excel in these areas. This trope not only explains away the humiliation white supremacists feel when, for example, white athletes are bested by Black ones, but it also serves to damn Black artists and athletes with faint praise: if you’re inherently good at sports or music (rather than succeeding due to hard work and intelligence), this racist trope says, then you should stay playing music and sports, not trying to compete with whites intellectually. Wynton pushes back against this trope, emphasizing the intelligence of musicians and athletes. And he does it in a skillful way - while the style of, say, the Harlem Globetrotters might conceivably be open to accusations of minstrelsy, Wynton frames basketball style as specifically rooted in intelligence when he says that “style is an aesthetic proposition” - an intentional artistic statement, in other words - and that Kareem “uses his intelligence to develop the style of the game.”

However, Wynton then pivots to an interesting argument that's worth quoting more at length. Kareem, Wynton says,

reminds me of Monk. You know, you can’t get an angle on Kareem. And then when you think have the angle on him, he’ll do something - Like Monk will play a blues phrase, you know [Wynton sings the opening phrases of “Blues Five Spot”], that’s, like, the same phrase, people been playing that since the 1800s, but he’ll just play it a certain way, or he places it a certain way in the time, and you think, you know, ‘Oh, I know what this is,’ but you really don’t know what it is. That’s like Kareem will throw those, throw a shot on you, you know, it’ll look like the same thing but it won’t be the same thing. 

To me, the interesting part of this analogy is that, while Wynton is making an argument about the aesthetics and intelligence of jazz and basketball, which are directly comparable, there is one major difference between Abdul-Jabbar's playing and Monk's music, one that Wynton's description glosses over: Kareem is trying to win. When Kareem plays a shot that "look[s] like the same thing but it won't be the same thing," he is doing that to trick the opposing player into losing the game. When Monk plays a phrase that seems familiar but is made new and surprising by the way it sits in the time, no one loses, or is supposed to lose.

This brings us to the way that Wynton can frame jazz in an athletic, ultimately masculine and ultimately conservative way. Jazz hasn't been competitive in any meaningful way since the 1930s and 1940s, when "tenor battles" and "drum battles" were staged as publicity stunts. The sweaty histrionics of Buddy Rich were about winning, not about any "aesthetic proposition." Ethan Iverson speaks to this directly in his essay on Whiplash:

Back to the photos of Buddy, Tony, and Elvin at the top. These two photos don’t deserve the weight I’m going to give them now, but I just can’t resist. When I see those impeccably turned out devotional black masters posing with the sweating white athlete, my hackles begin to rise. It’s not just the drumming, it’s the whole relationship they were afforded to their work in the 20th century. Again, this is unfair. I’ve certainly seen Elvin Jones sweaty in a T-shirt with a towel around his neck after a gig! Still, my fear is that Whiplash slouches in as a sweaty white athlete and blocks our view from the devotional black masters.

Buddy Rich as the sweaty white athlete does block our view of the Black masters. However, the sweaty Black masters themselves can easily be twisted into a racist view of art as mere athleticism. A great example of this twisting can be found in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a novel full of problematic depictions of non-white culture:

The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around; his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more phrases, just cries, cries, "Baugh" and down to "Beep!" and up to "EEEEE!" and down to clinkers and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down, horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and everybody pushed around and yelled, "Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!"(1)

This description calls to mind saxophonists like Illinois Jacquet, honking and screaming players who brought down the house with showstopper solos. Kerouac doesn't describe the music as intelligible, just as nonsense sounds employed in a "duel." The real-life Jacquet was an erudite musician who doubled on the bassoon(1), not simply a sweaty tenor machine. Jacquet speaks eloquently about the education of jazz musicians in Dizzy Gillespie's To Be or Not to Bop:

Working in bands, that was your college. If you played music, the big bands were your college.... And most of the people in the bands, the musicians, were college graduates or started out to be doctors and started playing music. But they were all educated musicians, mostly, in their fields. You got in a band, the discipline was there. The band itself was a school.... So when a youngster like me would join a band like Lionel Hampton or Basie, everybody was like professors.

Contrast this view of the jazz musician with Kerouac's! Likewise, the "cutting contest" of the type encouraged by promoters like Norman Granz is undercut by Sonny Rollins, who participated in one of the most famous tenor battles in jazz, Tenor Madness with John Coltrane in 1956. Interviewed earlier this year in the New York Times, Rollins said,

When I played with Coltrane, I had the impression — and back then it was true — that I was much more popular than him. I remember what Kamasi Washington said about “Tenor Madness”: “Sonny, you weren’t even really playing.” I wasn’t really playing. Coltrane was playing. I was only playing halfway, because I thought that I was the guy and that Coltrane was this young whippersnapper. That was my mind-set. It was immature.... I don’t want people to think that I’m saying, “Oh, wow, I could have played much better,” but that’s the story of “Tenor Madness.” My attitude on it wasn’t right.

For Rollins, the "tenor battle" or "cutting contest" mentality is "immature"; for him, competition and jockeying to win between artists is damaging to the art itself. (Tenor Madness was released in 1956. Tenor battles really only came back into vogue with the arrival of saxophonists like Joshua Redman, James Carter, and so on in the wake of Marsalis's fame in the 1990s, when the mid-1950s were back in vogue in the jazz world.)

To return to Marsalis's analysis of Monk and Abdul-Jabbar, then, we can see him working with two ideas that, historically, have been in opposition: first, that jazz and basketball are art forms created by intelligent artists; and second, that the goal of the artists in both forms is to compete and win, either with another artist or with the audience. In both views, the artist is unquestionably male.

For a (often unintentionally) revealing look at Marsalis's male world at its peak, check out Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, Carl Vigeland's awestruck account of Wynton's septet on tour, largely covering the period between 1989 and 1994, interspersed with passages by Marsalis himself. One passage calls to mind the Robert Glasper interview with Ethan Iverson that caused some controversy a couple of years ago. Speaking about women in the audience, Iverson said, "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really." Glasper said, "I've seen what that does to the audience, playing that groove. I love making the audience feel that way. Getting back to women: women love that. They don't love a whole lot of soloing. When you hit that one groove and stay there, it's like musical clitoris. You're there, you stay on that groove, and the women's eyes close and they start to sway, going into a trance." Vigeland writes, "[E]verywhere you looked in that crowd there was another beautiful woman." Marsalis then writes:

And I'd be lying if I told you that beautiful women don't make you play better. Or try to play better.... Hell, we're from New Orleans. We understand picnics and parades. And sweet things. And the blues. And making love and the wangdang doodle dandy.... I like the tenderness of an uncertain kiss which innocently begins with a question mark but crescendos to an exclamation point.... Then. I am a man. I love the road. It's not an effort to play for people.... I want to go, every night, want to swing - hard - with the men in the band, with people. Willful participation with style and in the groove - that's swing. And once you feel it you got to get you some more.

I truly don't believe that when he said "I guess that's one of the reasons to play, really," Iverson was being intentionally misogynistic or sexist (Glasper is another matter). Rather, he was simply falling into a decades-old masculine, macho attitude about playing music. After all, the music is played to win - against an opponent, against an audience, against resistance from a woman. That's art as sport.

NOTES

(1) Kerouac describes the "sweaty white athlete," too, in the form of George Shearing:

And Shearing began to rock; a smile broke over his ecstatic face; he began to rock in the piano seat, back and forth, slowly at first, then the beat went up, and he began rocking fast, his left foot jumped up with every beat, his neck began to rock crookedly, he brought his face down to the keys, he pushed his hair back, his combed hair dissolved, he began to sweat. The music I picked up. The bass-player hunched over and socked it in, faster and faster, it seemed faster and faster, that’s all. Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you’d think the man wouldn’t have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That’s him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean’s gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn’t see. "That’s right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial.

Review Roundup: If It Ain't Got That Swing

Jazz, in a more or less consistently recognizable form, sprang into being in the 1920s, a joyous trumpet boil from the simmering pot of musical ingredients being stirred together in New Orleans, New York, and Chicago, via Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe. From that time to approximately 1965, jazz was dominated - for all its shifting complexities of rhythm and harmony over the decades - by swing, a feeling that no other music replicates in exactly the same way. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Stan Getz, Freddie Hubbard, Jaki Byard, and Tony Williams are all deeply individual players, yet their swing is the connective tissue that holds them all together. Duke Ellington's Cotton Club orchestra and Miles Davis's quintet with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock play music that is worlds apart, yet their sense of swing unites them. 

Since 1965, with the explorations of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and their respective schools of avant-garde music, with the forays into fusion of Miles Davis's alumni Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Tony Williams, and with the deaths and rebirths of jazz necessitated by the social injustices and economic realities of America, swing has become a debated topic in jazz. Some saw it as retrograde. Some saw it as reactionary. Some saw it as simply irrelevant. With the rise of Wynton Marsalis - a reactionary if ever there was one, though he has admittedly been reduced over time by conventional wisdom into a 2D cutout of a more complex figure - swing become politically charged. Wynton used Ken Burns's 2001 documentary Jazz to advance an argument he is still making today - that jazz is "a Metaphor for Democracy," where musicians put the American concepts of "individual freedom" and "the momentum of the group" in conversation with each other. When Marsalis says "jazz," he means jazz that swings. So swing, in Marsalis's conception, is America and its values. 

In my opinion, Marsalis is a deeply problematic figure, one who should be held to account much more than he is, not just about his role in sidelining an entire generation or more of avant-garde musicians from lucrative record contracts when the money was flowing in the 1980s and 1990s and from a prominent place in popular culture's definition of jazz when he had the opportunity in Burns's documentary, but about his masculine conception of the music, from the historical figures he chooses to champion to the makeup of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (overwhelmingly male for its entire existence). And, of course, many in jazz have decided that the kind of grooving, swinging jazz tradition that Wynton champions is not the way to get anything done - whether that be growing the music's audience in general, connecting specifically to black audiences instead of white ones, or addressing pressing political and social concerns. Many of the new albums I get from labels to review feature extended suites addressing topics such as immigration or policy; when they do feature standards, these tunes are usually de- and re-constructed to fit into jazz's new language of odd meters and straight eighths, a kind of ironic distance. All of this is positive and useful - I welcome any way that jazz can address the important issues of 2020, to connect in a real way with audiences, and to critically examine its own canon and tradition. 

However. In my review of Ethan Iverson's 2019 record Common Practice, I wrote that 

Iverson identifies a central piece of jazz playing: an "emotional connection" to a "real form of American music".... the African diasporic tradition. The new record features drummer Eric McPherson. When asked about the choice of McPherson in an email, Iverson quickly shifted the emphasis from himself to his bandmates, saying that Ben Street requested McPherson and that "Tom loved the rhythm section." But he also told me that McPherson has "something really 'old' and swinging" in his playing. McPherson (who is named after Eric Dolphy) grew up surrounded by musicians like Richard Davis (his godfather), Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Charles Moffett, and Freddie Waits.

Iverson is right to emphasize this African tradition at his blog, Do The Math, and in his music. Iverson places the drums at the center of this tradition, and while he is no Wynton Marsalis when it comes to gatekeeping jazz, he views swing as an essential element of the jazz language. When Iverson notes that Eric McPherson's playing has something "old" about it, he speaks to the way that that swing vocabulary connects the music to its roots - roots which are deeply buried in Black identity and heritage, the pain of slavery in America, and the space Black Americans have had to fight for in this country since before its founding.

While jazz has been wrestling with the role of swing for about half a century now, the great records of the prior five decades of jazz tradition are still usually the foundational texts for any person looking for a doorway into jazz. They were mine - my iTunes playlist that keeps track of my first jazz albums is full of names like Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Red Garland, Art Blakey, Ben Webster, Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Cannonball Adderley, and Charles Mingus. Few of the albums were recorded after 1966, and of those several are looks back (in various ways) at the jazz tradition - Keith Jarrett's Standards, Volume 2, standards by The Great Jazz Trio with Hank and Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes's Love Letters, Wynton Marsalis at the Village Vanguard.

I've written all of this to recommend to albums which were released yesterday. The first, drummer Jeff Hamilton's Catch Me If You Can, from Capri, features Tamir Hendelman on piano and Jon Hamar on bass. The album is a swinging romp, with standards ("Moon Ray" and "Bijou" are standouts) and deeper cuts (the opening "Make Me Rainbows" is fantastic) complimented by original compositions. Some records tail off as they reach the end of their running time, but Catch Me If You Can closes with a one-two punch - "Big Dipper," a meaty Thad Jones composition from the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones Orchestra days, and that "Moon Ray," made famous by Artie Shaw but inseparable in my mind from Roy Haynes and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. This is a group full of life and invention, but also a clear reverence for the foundational voices that lend weight and meaning to that exuberant, swinging sound. The second record I want to recommend is John Fedchock's Into the Shadows, from Summit, featuring trombonist Fedchock with trumpeter Scott Wendholt, tenor saxophonist Walt Weiskopf, pianist Allen Farnham, bassist David Finck, and drummer Eric Halvorson. There is more emphasis on originals here (the three standards are chestnuts, though: "I Should Care," "Nature Boy," and "Star Eyes") but the same feeling of exuberance and swing pervades this record as it does on Hamilton's. Listening to this album directly after Catch Me If You Can made me appreciate anew the complex textures of a larger group, especially the multilayered trombone/tenor/trumpet line Art Blakey used so effectively in the 1960s. These albums are not perfect: they each have slower moments, and each is an all-white group, which in my opinion adds a bar of responsibility to the traditions and innovations of jazz that (while it may be unfair of me to hold them to) I feel these records do not always quite rise to meet.

What I experience when I hear an album that swings, though, is not simple. On one hand, it is music I can "pat my foot" to, as Art Blakey would say, and learn and sing the tastiest licks from, and put on repeat. It carries me along on its current, reminding me of the excitement of my first discoveries in this music, and it fills me with joy. On the other hand, though, it reminds me of the meaning of swing, of its connection to the blues, of the Black voice and Black identity that is foundational to any jazz that contributes meaningfully to the conversation. While swing can be derided as old hat or conservative, it can also be celebrated as revolutionary and uncompromising, a forceful statement of identity in a society and culture dominated by whiteness. It is both comfort food and discomfort food. Both, in the America of 2020, are nourishing.

Review: Crossing the Bridge (Ethan Iverson's "Common Practice")

Note: I listened to this record again as I put the final touches on this piece. As the last track ended, my iTunes moved to a Hank Jones tune, and at first, I was completely disoriented - where was this bonus track the last time I heard Common Practice? I got my bearings, but the confusion - momentary though it was - speaks to the larger message of my review, which is that this record is, at heart, three things: accomplished; pleasurable; and is placing itself not outside a larger timeline looking in, but on that timeline.

1. In his essay on drummer Donald Bailey, Ethan Iverson admiringly describes Bailey's drumming as having "something intentionally square in the phrasing." Iverson writes, "I love the clunky drummers: Frankie Dunlop, Ed Blackwell, Paul Motian, Tootie Heath, the cats who play some sparse, corny stuff on the snare a bit too loud and look over, daring you to make something of it." Several years ago, Iverson laid out his thesis on jazz drumming in a magnum opus of a blog post; in it, he wrote that "[a] drum set is a version of an African drum choir reduced and streamlined so that a single musician can provide that devotional feel for a larger ensemble. All the greatest American drummers specialize in 'feel.' I am not an expert in this topic, but as a big jazz fan, I know that 'feel' is what makes the music go. Most great jazz needs a great drummer." And, indeed, some of Iverson's best work has been done in a recurring trio with Heath and Ben Street, or in Billy Hart's longtime quartet (1) - two groups where Iverson's spare, purposeful improvisations are complimented by those warmly clunky drum tones.

Iverson is a proponent of a jazz ethos which prioritizes swing. I mean "swing" not simply in the literal, Wynton Marsalis-esque sense, though Iverson can certainly swing with the best, but in a deeper, more figurative sense - perhaps the sense Marsalis (for all his infamous rejections of Ornette Coleman or fusion) meant all along. For Iverson, whatever else jazz might be, it is at its heart the African rhythmic tradition. Lose this, he argues, and an essential aspect of the music is lost as well.

In his writing about jazz, too, Iverson has made it clear that he is the student and black music is the teacher. A trailblazing modernist who is also a "devotional" historicist, and a white musician from Wisconsin who uses his platform to foreground black artists, Iverson seems to embody one way forward in a music which has wrestled with thorny questions of race, power, tradition and authenticity since its birth. (2)

In his epic blog post "The Drum Thing," Iverson writes that

[t]he devotional attitude of African rhythm is one reason it’s so compelling. African rhythm seeks ecstasy through communion, not just with God but with everyone in the immediate vicinity. You don’t practice it. You plug into the ancestors and your reason for living and it’s there.

When Iverson writes of African rhythm, "You don't practice it," he echoes Miles Davis's pronouncement on Oscar Peterson - "He even had to learn how to play the blues." Back in 2008, Iverson wrote an excellent essay about Davis and Peterson where he writes that

the first lesson taught in Jazz Education 101 is the so-called "blues scale,” giving a novice six notes that can be rolled around over any set of blues (or blues-related) changes. When Davis derides someone for “learning” the blues, the image that comes to my mind is a classroom full of student horn players, all honking out the six-note blues scale in any order and rhythm with no emotional connection to any real form of American music…and all now thinking they are playing the blues.

In this quote, Iverson identifies a central piece of jazz playing: an "emotional connection" to a "real form of American music"; Iverson rejects the idea that this emotional connection can be "practiced," or simply invoked through the deployment of a learned scale. In "Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis," as in "The Drum Thing," Iverson returns to the drums:

The drum set could symbolize the African diaspora as interpreted by Americans. Since the invention of bebop in the mid-Forties, small group jazz had been seeking a way to bring the drums (i.e.  the African diaspora) to further prominence in the ensemble.... [I]f Peterson only made records without drums, Davis probably wouldn’t have thought to comment about him in a rhythm section, since you really need the African diaspora to be present to call it a "rhythm section." (3)

2. Iverson has been letting African American jazz legends establish this communion with the African diasporic tradition on his records for decades - his 1993 record School Work features Dewey Redman on some tracks, and he's recorded and performed extensively with drummers Billy Hart, Al Foster, and Albert Heath, as well as with elder statesmen Ron Carter, Charles McPherson, and Houston Person, among others. Iverson's interviews, many of which are with older black jazz musicians, also place Iverson in the "devotional" student chair.

The new record features drummer Eric McPherson. When asked about the choice of McPherson in an email, Iverson quickly shifted the emphasis from himself to his bandmates, saying that Ben Street requested McPherson and that "Tom loved the rhythm section." But he also told me that McPherson has "something really 'old' and swinging" in his playing. McPherson (who is named after Eric Dolphy) grew up surrounded by musicians like Richard Davis (his godfather), Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Charles Moffett, and Freddie Waits.

McPherson has also held the drum chair in Fred Hersch's trio for ten years - like that group, Iverson's quartet is an all-white group with a black drummer. In an interview with Iverson, Hersch discusses drummers, drums, and rhythm at length:

EI:  Do you have any recollections of Ed Blackwell?

FH:  Oh I do, he was the most lovely guy, and he was always kind of working on something. Eric McPherson reminds me of him. I come in the dressing room  at the Vanguard, and with his hands or something, Blackwell’s working on some rhythm that he’d show me. And the guy was on dialysis for years, but he was really positive. He had such an incredible cymbal sound, and everything about his playing just danced, it was so beautiful.

[...] 

At 56, I’m part of the last batch that learned in the old way, figuring it out by fucking up, getting back up on your feet, fucking up again, getting back up on your feet, hanging out, learning from people around you, listening to tons of records, learning the history of your instrument, learning the repertoire, the standard repertoire, the jazz repertoire, composing your own music, starting all that, as one of the last of that batch. That’s why I have this affinity with Billy Hart, who’s 14 years older than me. I probably have more in common with him than someone 14 years younger, who may be playing everything in 7/4, or writing science project pieces, or tunes with too many chords in them. 

I consider myself a very rhythmic player; certainly I’ve earned my stripes in terms of playing rhythm and doing interesting things with time, but I’m also a melodist. Even in my post-bop (or whatever you want to call them) lines, they’re kind of my lines, they’re sort of my shapes, and they’re melodically driven. And hopefully, they follow consecutively from what happened the phrase before. It’s not like I ever practice patterns or altered scales, or any of that other Jazz information stuff.

Practice! "You don’t practice it," Iverson writes about the African rhythmic tradition. You don't practice the emotional connection to the music the way that you practice a time signature or a scale. When Hersch talks about bassist Buster Williams, he says, "We had a really deep connection, a rhythmic connection." The notes - "[a]nd he knew all the notes, too; he really did know all the notes" - are almost secondary.

Hersch, like Iverson, spent years apprenticing himself to older musicians. In the Iverson interview, he says that "When I first started getting trio gigs, if the gig paid 200 dollars, I would hire Buster Williams and Billy Hart, and give them each 100 dollars.... Because A) it was like taking a lesson, B) it meant that people would show up, and C) it would mean that people saw me as deserving to be in that company." Eventually, it became clear that he had earned the right to not only be in that company, but to continue the traditions  - the practices - he had learned from older black jazz musicians on his own.

3. Common Practice is arguably a major step forward for Iverson. Common Practice still features the hallmarks of an Ethan Iverson project: a set list of chestnuts ("All the Things You Are," "I Can't Get Started," "Out of Nowhere"); an elder statesman, in the person of Tom Harrell; bassist Ben Street; and a drummer deeply and emotionally connected to the rhythmic heritage of jazz.

Years ago, I played a friend Iverson's 2000 recording of "You've Changed," recorded with a quartet including Bill McHenry, Reid Anderson and Jeff Williams. My friend was turned off - "Why does everything have to be deconstructed?" At times in the past, I've imagined Iverson's approach to the piano as being like an exploded diagram - every piece present, but exposed, expanded, examined. Around 2013, when Iverson released Costumes Are Mandatory (with Lee Konitz, Larry Grenadier, and Jorge Rossy), I started having to reexamine my assumptions about Iverson's style. "My Old Flame" had the loosely lyrical quality of a Paul Motian Trio 2000 recording, and while a tune like "It's You" (in two treatments) had a quality of practice (the bad kind) that reminded me of old exploded-diagram Iverson, then what was he doing playing "Blueberry Hill" like that? I was fully converted by Iverson's recordings with Street and Albert Heath, released in 2013 and 2015, by Iverson's own Purity of the Turf, with Ron Carter and Nasheet Waits, and by his playing on Billy Hart's All Our Reasons and One Is the Other (also released on ECM). This output, seen in total, could be said to be a project of construction, of putting disparate influences, both historical and contemporary, in conversation with Iverson's own unique musical identity - of building a bridge from the tradition to oneself, and vice versa.

It is notable that, save for the customary five seconds of silence at its start, Common Practice doesn't sound much like the stereotypical reverb-heavy, spacey ECM record. It was recorded in 2017, not in a cathedral or a cavernous European studio but live at the Village Vanguard - and unlike the rapturous, minutes-long deluges of applause on Keith Jarrett records - the most famous live records from ECM - the clapping for Iverson and the quartet is enthusiastic and human, the recording accurately capturing the sound of a human space inhabited by real people ("African rhythm seeks ecstasy through communion, not just with God but with everyone in the immediate vicinity").

"Wee" is a tightly pulsing workout, with Iverson's piano, wearing a Tristano influence on its sleeve, providing a darker counterpoint to McPherson's sparkling swing. "Sentimental Journey" is the kind of standard Iverson does well, because you can't ever quite pin down all the intentions - is it ironic? postmodern? earnest? My guess is all of the above, but there's nothing detached about Harrell's masterful solo or Ben Street's rock solid support in the low register. On tunes like "I Remember You," the group sounds like a pick-up band, which, in essence, it is - a group convened to support Harrell at the Vanguard. That's not to imply anything slouchy about the sound, though. McPherson and Iverson, especially, are two musicians who are often heard in contexts they have been in long enough to know every musical nook and cranny. Here, they are not so much imbalanced as rebalanced, and the group carries a looseness and lightness with it throughout the whole album that is always welcome. Hearing the melodies of Iverson's solo on "I Remember You" unfold is a special pleasure.

Jazz is a meta-genre, always concerned with its own authenticity and how much it respects its traditions. Iverson is a contributor to those larger conversations as a writer, but this album demonstrates how much his music is able to live in the piano, and on the stage, rather than purely in the abstract. In the record's liner notes, Kevin Sun writes that "[a]fter their last set together, Harrell told Iverson that the collective sound emanating from the rhythm section sounded to him like a new form of music - this, despite the obvious age of the repertoire." I suspect that that final phrase is Sun's, not Harrell's, because I think Harrell would understand that newness isn't contained in charts, it's contained in the connection between the musicians, both with each other and with the rhythms of the music - a connection which creates something new from (in Iverson's phrase) "something really 'old' and swinging." As Iverson himself says in the album's press release, Eric McPherson's "time feel is both ancient and modern… None of us is approaching straight-ahead jazz like we want it to sound like 1955 or 1945 or 1965. We’re playing in the 21st-century. But what I hope gives it depth is a commitment to the tradition." That commitment, Iverson argues with this new music, is jazz's common practice - what Iverson has been finding through his interviews, writing, and playing.

In a 2011 essay, Iverson wrote, "The way to deal with a genius is always: go to the genius." On this newest album, Iverson - back in the company of well-worn standards, Tom Harrell, and the drums - demonstrates that, like Hersch, he has gone to the genius, learned his lessons, and deserves to be in his company. This "common practice" isn't the kind of practice Iverson mentions in "The Drum Thing," or the kind of practice that Hersch talks about in his interview with Iverson. Iverson's Common Practice is not a verb but a noun: "the actual application or use of an idea, belief, or method as opposed to theories about such application or use." This record shows him taking ownership of jazz's common practice in a new way. In the Common Practice press release, Iverson says that "for this record, I wanted to work in the middle, to help things gel." This is a humble quote, but it discounts the power of the center of gravity. He has built his bridge, and now he's crossing it.

NOTES

(1) "Billy Hart's longtime quartet": Hart's 2006 record Quartet with Mark Turner, Iverson, and Street was the first jazz album I bought on my own initiative, with my own money. I saw Hart and Turner (and maybe Street?) play at the Regattabar in Boston with Kurt Rosenwinkel, and loved the show so much I went to the local CD store to find some Billy Hart - I was a drummer, so he was the one I gravitated to. I think the CD was something like thirteen dollars, and a stranger who was also perusing the jazz section actually gave me a few extra dollars so I could afford the album. I had mainly been listening to Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington, Speak No Evil, Cookin' With the Miles Davis Quintet, and Saxophone Colossus, and while I loved the hypnotic rendition of "Confirmation" and the fragile "Lullaby for Imke," Turner's explosive entrance on "Moment's Notice" was completely unintelligible to me. I stuck with the more comfortable (that should be "comfortable") tracks for a few years, but eventually I ventured into the thornier tunes, and the whole record became a favorite. I really credit that whole group with opening up lots of doors for me as a jazz listener.

(2) "Iverson seems to embody one way forward in a music which has wrestled with thorny questions of race, power, tradition and authenticity since its birth": This is my own claim for Iverson, not one he has ever, to my knowledge, advanced about himself.

(3) "You really need the African diaspora to be present to call it a 'rhythm section'": A cross-Iversonian echo: In "Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis," Iverson isolates a sentence from the 1958 Davis interview - "He leaves no holes for the rhythm section" - and uses it as a refrain as he analyzes Peterson's playing: "A good example is the Peterson trio backing Lester Young with little-known but totally solid J.C. Heard on drums. Peterson cannot stop playing the piano for even a second. ('He leaves no holes for the rhythm section.')" In Iverson's interview with Fred Hersch, Hersch says that "Billy Hart once told me, 'if you want to know where to put your left hand, and you’re playing straight-ahead Jazz, listen to where Philly Joe Jones thumps the snare drums, or hits the tom fill.  Those are really good places to lay a chord down.'" That's a lesson not in leaving holes for the rhythm section, but in hearing how the rhythm section points you to holes that already exist in the group dynamic.