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.

Miscellany #5: French Men and Gorey Details

1. Le Redoutable (2017)

I’m a big fan of Michel Hazanavicius’s OSS 117 films. The titular secret agent, also known as Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath and played by the wonderful Jean Dujardin, is funny to us, the audience, because he is a creaking relic of a France long past (to us, the audience), a chauvinist and racist pig whose sophisticated clothes and flashy smile deceive no one but himself and other French (male) spies. The humor of the OSS 117 series comes not, as in the Pink Panther series, from the hero’s bumbling antics among competent colleagues (David Cairns: Clouseau is a "man whose idiocy is perfectly, agonizingly balanced between awareness of his own inadequacy and lack of awareness that it’s obvious to pretty well everyone around him"), but rather from the way that the hero’s antics only become bumbling when they are transplanted away from home, where everyone views him (incredibly) as normal to Cairo, Brazil, or (in the upcoming third film) Africa. When Hubert tips an Egyptian with a photograph of de Gaulle, it is not only funny because of the Egyptian’s bewilderment, but because of Hubert’s supreme confidence in the generosity of this gesture and his complete ignorance of why someone outside of France might not see it the same way. In Hubert, Hazanavicius gives us a savagely satirical picture of a certain kind of Frenchman - sexy and fashionable but reactionary and misogynist, a thoughtless and incurious supporter of empire and the status quo.

Jean-Luc Godard, of course, is unlike Hubert in many ways, especially during the years (1967-1969) examined in Le Redoutable, a fantastic film written and directed by Hazanavicius and starring Louis Garrel and Stacy Martin in virtuoso performances. Godard was an unapologetic radical and revolutionary whose efforts to disrupt and discard the status quo with his 1960 debut, À bout de souffle, were so effective in establishing a new French cinema that he had to do it all over again in the late 1960s. Godard is an artist, more specifically a director. “What is a film director?” Truffaut asks in La Nuit américaine. “Someone who’s asked questions about everything. Sometimes he knows the answers.” While Godard is Hubert de la Bath’s opposite in a thousand ways - assuredly, the Godard of Le Redoutable would be disgusted by OSS 117 - Hazanavicius presents him as simply the other side of the same coin of French masculinity, one which always knows the answers. Godard seems astonishingly incurious at every turn - about his girlfriend and then wife, Anne Wiazemsky, about his friends, about film, and ultimately about the ideologies and protests he turns to when he leaves the others behind. A scene in a cramped car, driving back from the cancelled 1968 Cannes festival, is hilarious, painful, and infuriating, as Godard systematically demolishes his friendships over the course of 800 kilometers. As in the OSS 117 films, our male hero (of sorts) exists in a narrow, male world; inside it, he is a genius, but as soon as he steps outside of this safe space, his pretensions and prejudices are thrown into high relief. For Godard, this occurs most obviously whenever he attempts to speak to protesters and students (one attempted analogy about Israel is especially hilarious and could have been lifted straight from an OSS 117 script), and more subtly in every interaction with his wife, Anne, whose novel Un an aprés was the source for the film. One masterful scene provides both the text and subtext of their relationship, with their spoken words accompanied by subtitled unspoken meaning.

Hazanavicius employs similar stylistics tours-de-force in Le Redoutable as in OSS 117 - slow motion, slick editing and effects. Here, too, he has Godard's work to play with, and his references are often both subtle and unmissable. The directing and production echoes of his work on OSS 117 only reinforces the theory that they are working with some similar ideas, that we are supposed to see them, on some level, as part of a unified oeuvre.

Hubert de la Bath is a square swinger, a playboy who, like so many playboys of the 1950s who pushed for sexual liberation in their own lives, is incredibly uncomfortable with the sexual and other liberations of everyone else in the 1960s. Godard, too, is a reactionary revolutionary, a man who believes passionately - blindly - in his cause, and yet is angry that others are better at it, and more naturally suited to it, than he is. His endless railing against his enemies and obstacles - friends, the government, actors, students, his shoes, his wife - is telling. When Anne finally tells him she doesn’t love him anymore, she chooses self-preservation over self-destruction in her struggle with Godard. Having lost his dearest foil, a woman he seemingly despises when she is anything but his shadow, a woman who helps him define himself through opposition, Godard attempts suicide. At the end of the film, Anne tells us, he has achieved his radical goal - making collective decisions with cast and crew each morning, representing important subject matter. And what is he doing? Arguing for tracking shots, for the importance of learning cinema's shared language, for form and style. Ultimately, he cannot throw out the status quo any more than can Hubert de la Bath. Without France's retrograde attitudes to shelter within, OSS 117 is exposed and vulnerable, in danger of losing his poise and sophistication; meanwhile, without an OSS 117 to despise, Godard loses his own revolutionary identity.

2. Born to be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey

I’ve been trundling my way through Mark Dery’s biography of artist and writer Edward Gorey for several weeks now, and my stock line about it has been that I’m still reading it in spite of Dery, not because of him. In other words, Gorey’s own life and work is so fascinating to me that I am compelled to keep working my way through a book that increasingly makes me want to bang my head against a wall. I’m not the first to point this out, but Dery’s obsessive treatment of Gorey’s sexuality is a serious blight on the book. I’m all for reading texts with an aim to understand how they might inform our understanding of an author, and vice versa. I’m also all for bringing LGBTQ+ stories to the forefront. But Dery’s sin isn’t his choice to focus on this aspect of Gorey’s life and work - it’s his incompetence in actually doing so.

He often spends pages making huge leaps of analysis about Gorey’s books that are supported less by evidence and more by Dery’s own obvious question-begging. My favorite example might be when he writes about The Bug Book, a rare colorful entry in the Gorey bibliography. Describing two bugs who live in a teacup and “were frivolous, and often danced on the roof,” Dery swings between forehead-slapping obviousness and mind-bending assumption: “Are they a couple? They seem to be” - yes, Mark, they live in a teacup together - “and their matching coloring... invites us to read them as a same-sex couple” - ????? There’s a difference between there being a real possibility of two baby-blue bugs living together in a teacup being a same-sex couple, and an invitation by the text for us to see them that way, and the bugs simply being the same color is not that difference. In my mind, that invitation is only present if one has decided that everything Gorey did was intrinsically tinted by his sexuality. Here, I feel that Dery falls into a damaging trope, the same kind of trope that causes the homophobic to fear being in men’s restrooms or the transphobic to fear for women’s restrooms or the misogynistic to blame women’s clothes or bodies for rape or sexual assault - that any sexual being who is not a straight man must necessarily be completely consumed at all times with expressing an outward-facing sexuality. Perhaps Gorey was pulling a Frog and Toad with his baby-blue bugs (although Nobel actually does invite us to read his characters as a same-sex couple by not making them both the same kind of animal, and also by not making them literally related, as Gorey does with his bugs). In my personal reading of the text, in the absence of more evidence of authorial intent, there simply isn’t enough ground on which to stand Dery’s interpretation. After hundreds of pages of this kind of thing, it starts to feel like Dery came to a conclusion about Gorey’s sexuality and its role in his work and will bend the books any way he needs to to get them to fit that narrative, rather than the other way around.

This insistence on twisting the facts to fit a pre-drawn conclusion also causes Dery to miss some meaty opportunities for the exact kind of analysis he clearly wants to make, and which actually would support the conclusions he wants to make. Near the end of the book, Dery is so focused on an overwrought explanation of the Freudian concept of collecting as a transference of affection from the human to the object (including obligatory “collected object = absent phallus” mumbo-jumbo) that he speeds right past a fascinating real connection between one of Gorey’s influences and his work, one that seems to raise interesting questions about, if not sexuality, than at least traditional masculinity in Gorey’s life and art.

(It’s worth noting here that while Dery discusses Gorey’s influences at some length, he often does so in a way that still privileges the “lightning strikes from above” narrative of genius - hence the book’s subtitle, I guess. Gorey worked hard at drawing all of his life, and clearly used a variety of sources - literature, art and photography, film - intentionally to help him in creating his own books. Dery somehow lays all of this work out, and still tries to hammer home the idea of Gorey as a static, Mozart-esque Genius from Day One, the source of whose abilities is anyone’s guess.)

The section on collecting is one of Dery’s most strained - he even hedges on it himself in places, which is irritating - and plays into a tendency he has (despite his stated mission to uncover the complexity of the Real Gorey) to pigeonhole Gorey as just a weird, spooky guy (see Dick Cavett’s interview of Gorey for the prototype of this approach), so we get descriptions of a skull he owned, Day of the Dead masks, photographs of dead children, etc. Then Dery writes that “[l]ess predictable” objects in Gorey’s collection include “sandpaper drawings... pictures done in charcoal on stiff-stock paper coated with a ground of marble dust and varnish. A pastime of young ladies in the mid-nineteenth century, the work tends towards picturesque landscapes and romantic fantasies, such as moonlight shimmering on black waters.” Dery quotes Gorey: “The ones that are imaginary landscapes are kitschy, because they’re sort of castles on the Rhine and blah-ty blah-ty blah-ty.... I think people just kind of made them up, you know; you did obelisks and ruins and columns and trees.” Dery then blithely moves on from sandpaper drawings, despite the fact that this seems to be an embarrassment of riches for analysis: Gorey describes the drawings as “kitschy,” which plausibly connects them to a gay aesthetic sensibility that Dery has described at other points in the book; Gorey describes them as made up, which aligns with Gorey’s own emphasis on his imagination rather than drawing from life (a point Dery makes when describing how small Gorey’s Cape Cod studio was); the landscapes are not only full of Gorey-esque touches like ruins and obelisks (obelisks! How could Dery lump anything including obelisks into a discussion of less predictable influences?), but the whole description of these particular drawings is incredibly reminiscent of Dery’s own discussion of the landscapes in Gorey’s 1958 book The Obect-Lesson; and finally, these drawings Gorey loved were done by young women, returning again to a non-traditional conception of masculinity in Gorey’s influences and work. Indeed, the entire idea of landscapes connects to Gorey’s affinity for the artist in his family, his great-grandmother Helen St. John Garvey, who, Dery tells us, “specialized in landscapes.”

Dery’s tunnel vision about the Freudian subtext of collecting (pages and pages of which result in this incredible non-payoff: “Whether some psychic trauma drove Gorey to displace his deepest affections to cats and collections ‘rather than to people, who have proven not to reliable,’ who can say?” Thanks, Mark) are not only based on thin evidence, they’re exhausting. I almost skimmed over the passage on sandpaper drawings as I tried to hack my way through Dery’s dense psychoanalytic underbrush. Confounding. I’m still reading this, but I don’t expect my thoughts on it to change (except for the worse). Looking forward to re-reading Ascending Peculiarity after this as a palate-cleanser. Recommended for the Gorey details (har har), but not for their packaging.

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.

Text Smash #2: Mirror, Mirror

RFK (2002) / Plein soleil (1960)

In the 2002 TV movie RFK, Robert Kennedy puts on his John F. Kennedy's Presidential G-1 jacket after his brother's assassination.

Looking in the mirror, he is visited by a (very silly) vision of his brother, echoing voice and all:

JFK: It's a little big in the shoulders. Suppose you could grow into it.

RFK: Or I could walk away from it. 

JFK: Why would you want to do that? 

RFK: Things don't make sense anymore, Jack.  

JFK: You think it ever did? 

RFK: I don't know what to believe in anymore. 

JFK: Jesus, Bobby, you always needed to think somebody had all the answers. What are you going to do, put God on the witness stand? [pause] It suits you. 

 In The Kennedy Imprisonment, Garry Wills writes that Robert "could only solve the successor problem by being more deeply charismatic than his brother - not in the superficial sense, not as a Prince Charming, but in the Weberian sense, as a rebel against the system. The more he tried to become a successor to the charisma of his brother, the less likely became his inheritance of power in the legal order." Wills quotes Lawrence O'Brien, who says that "Robert was senselessly killed because 'he didn't have a chance.'" What made Bobby so attractive to young and minority voters  - his commitment to Civil Rights, his serious opposition (late and somewhat compromised though it was) to Vietnam, was exactly what made him unpalatable to the same establishment that Nixon would ride to the White House with the Southern strategy.

Bobby really did wear his brother's jacket - tellingly, the above photo was used as the jacket photo for Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur Schlesinger, mythmaker-in-chief of the Kennedy years. In that context, the photo emphasizes both the idea of Bobby as finding a way to step into his brother's shoes - to find meaning in carrying on the Kennedy legacy after the tragedy of Dallas - and the fact that he will always be Kennedy's younger brother, doomed to wear his older brother's jacket. Even in a book about his times, he is unable to escape the times of John F. Kennedy.

Visited by a vision of his brother, who bequeaths a talisman of his successful Presidency to him ("It suits you"), Bobby is able to begin to move forward from the assassination and find his political footing as an individual. When, three months after the mirror encounter, Bobby says he feels "like I'm supposed to pick up the torch for his brother," his aide tells him he could never walk away from politics. Once Kennedy finally decides to run for the Senate in New York, the leather jacket isn't seen again - there's no symbolic moment of it being put aside, it just disappears. Instead of the closure of Kennedy consciously choosing to leave his brother's image behind, we get that move through clumsy dialogue during the Senate run. The specter of his brother is invisible, but not really resolved.

RFK wants the mirror moment to be deep and inspiring - it is thrusting the same torch into Bobby's hands that he himself says he doesn't want to carry. No matter how much he makes a name for himself in the Senate and on the campaign trail, we'll remember that mirror scene, and the ghost of JFK will be taking all the credit.

The image of a younger man, lost and unsure of himself in the emotional chaos surrounding a murder of a man so closely resembling himself who he then must either impersonate or reject to move forward in life, trying on the dead brother's jacket in the mirror reminded me of Alain Delon in Plein soleil, wearing Philippe (Dickie) Greenleaf's clothes:

The parallel is not exact. Bobby puts on Jack's jacket out of grief, while Tom is simply a child, unable to read the feelings and reactions of Philippe and Marge, who don't want him around. When he sees something he wants, he takes it, and in this scene he wants to be Philippe. Delon does a great job of communicating that childlike happiness as he puts on the blazer and ties the tie. But he is ultimately punished for his inability to read Philippe and Marge, to be an adult - punished on the boat, sure, but first here.

Ripley puts on the blazer not to see if it fits, like Bobby, but because he knows it will fit. Jack speaks to Bobby first from inside the mirror, and Bobby is reluctant to go along with him; Tom speaks to himself first, loving his own image, pretending he is both Philippe and Marge - he doesn't just want the clothes, he wants them, their adulthood, their emotional life which he cannot understand. We see Philippe's legs -  Tom's fall from innocence - in the mirror before Tom does. And because Tom is just a child, the fall is painful to watch.

In RFK, Jack passes on the mantle of his political maturity - the Presidency, the ultimate American political maturity - to Bobby. Bobby wears that mantle until he can discard it in order to find his own path to that maturity, but of course it is not his own path, and never will be - he can never take the mantle off once it has been bequeathed. Philippe, however, takes back the mantle of his adulthood from Tom ("Take off my clothes"). Tom, who feels he will never achieve Philippe's ease in the world, his poise, his relationships, on his own, soon realizes that he must reclaim the mantle somehow, and does so by murdering Philippe.

Once he has the mantle, however, it tightens into a prison. Marge reminds him of Philippe; Freddy Miles suspects him because of Philippe's stolen things; and, in the end, Philippe returns, tangled in the propeller of the boat (oh, what could have been if Clément had allowed Ripley to get away with it! A much better film). Bobby and Tom are both doomed from the moment they put on the jackets - not to die, necessarily, but to lose something of themselves. Bobby is wearing his brother's jacket even as he protests that he wants to go teach at Oxford instead of pursuing politics - his clothes belie his words, however sincere they may be, and by the time he takes the jacket off, it's too late - he's already running for Senate. Tom is doomed by acting on his urges - by opening the Pandora's box rather than simply imagining what is inside, he must ultimately kill, and (in the film, at least) be punished for that killing, to own what he sees inside.

Miscellany #5: Memorial Day

"America the Beautiful," David Hammons (1968)

1. From "An Address Delivered by General John Coburn on Memorial Day, May 30, 1905"

Almost half a million able-bodied men, fit to bear arms, perished in this way. Their hallowed dust, scattered upon distant battle-fields, or where ships foundered in the silent waters, or gathered in National cemeteries; the people would crown this day, with flowers, and praises and blessings. 

Their toils and sufferings have not been in vain. The cause they espoused was successful; the die has been cast; the great American Nation is one, and is foremost on earth. Did man ever die for a nobler purpose? What gratitude can ever repay the cost of such a sacrifice?  

[...] 

Sergeant Brow, of the 85th Indiana, with his life current streaming away, said, "Oh, Colonel, save me for my wife, but it is all right if I go." Colonel Gilbert of the 19th Michigan, mortally wounded at Resacca, said to me, "Farewell, I am going; write to my wife that I did my duty and died for my country." Sergeant Anderson Winterowd, of the 33d Indiana, on the field of Peachtree Creek, falling and dying, sad: "Boys, the rebels have got me, but it is all right." 

What is all right? Is such a death; such agony, all right? Oh, no. But the result will be all right. Victory will come and peace will come, and both will come to stay. And somebody will live to hail the mighty day, and ten thousand glad hearts, all over the land, will rejoice in the happy beams of that splendid dawn, and call down blessing on the memories of those who freely shed their blood that it might be.

2. From "Memorial Day 1936," by the Middlebury Peace Council

Eight million five hundred thousand men of all nations were killed in the last war. Tomorrow America will commemorate their sacrifice; not only to America but to all nations. At the same time the question will arise; Have they died in vain?

The answer lies in us: the students, workers, professionals and veterans united in a common front against the war-markers, prejudice, yellow journalism and political leaders who will not lead. Memorial Day is an opportunity to express that the unity of thought in action by showing the peoples of the world, who also morn [sic] their dead, that their dead and our own have not and will not be betrayed. 

Memorial Day 1936 has thus a deeper signifigance [sic] than heretofore. The issues are plain: a demonstration of solidarity on our part with the soldier dead who fought our fight. It is this solidarity alone which can ever check the war-mongers and reactionaries who vote ever larger war budgets in the midst of starvation; who instigate loyalty oaths and military training. 

3. From Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

Not even the chaplain could bring Doc Daneeka back to life under the circumstances. Alarm changed to resignation, and more and more Doc Daneeka acquired the look of an ailing rodent. The sacks under his eyes turned hollow and black, and he padded through the shadows fruitlessly like a ubiquitous spook. Even Captain Flume recoiled when Doc Daneeka sought him out in the woods for help. Heartlessly, Gus and Wes turned him away from their medical tent without even a thermometer for comfort, and then, only then, did he realize that, to all intents and purposes, he really was dead, and that he had better do something damned fast if he ever hoped to save himself. 

There was nowhere else to turn but to his wife, and he scribbled an impassioned letter begging her to bring his plight to the attention of the War Department and urging her to communicate at once with his group commander, Colonel Cathcart, for assurances that—no matter what else she might have heard—it was indeed he, her husband, Doc Daneeka, who was pleading with her, and not a corpse or some impostor. Mrs. Daneeka was stunned by the depth of emotion in the almost illegible appeal. She was torn with compunction and tempted to comply, but the very next letter she opened that day was from that same Colonel Cathcart, her husband’s group commander, and began: Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. and Mrs. Daneeka: Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action. 

Mrs. Daneeka moved with her children to Lansing, Michigan, and left no forwarding address.

4. "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.