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.