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Here are Maggio’s reflections on Barber and the process of writing “Summer: 2 AM” with librettist Mary Liz McNamara.

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Trying Not To Think About “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”

or: How Mary Liz and I wrote “Summer: 2 AM”

by Robert Maggio

Maggio with his mother and daughter. "Summer: 2 AM" is dedicated to them.

In 1982, I bought a recording of Eleanor Steber singing Barber’s “Knoxville” at the Yale Co-op on the recommendation of my first composition teacher, who sensed in my own “young” music a spirit kindred to Barber’s. Along with Copland’s, Bernstein’s and Ives’ music, Barber’s compositions became beacons of light for me amidst the overwhelming variety of 20th Century music I was immersed in as a student. Barber’s idyllic, moving and nostalgic picture of writer James Agee’s native Knoxville, Tennessee haunted me with its simple, dreamlike depiction of an evening in the American South, narrated by a child who seems, at times, to transform into an adult of profound wisdom. I wore out that recording of “Knoxville,” secretly wishing I had written it.

Thus it was something of a dream come true to have been commissioned to create a companion piece to “Knoxville” to celebrate the Barber Centennial and yet, the shadow of anxiety cast by Barber’s music was something I was eager to step out of.  I immediately decided that my new piece could be nothing like Barber’s.

To this end, my very first call was to enlist Mary Liz McNamara to write the words for this new “song cycle.” Mary Liz is a talented singer-songwriter, a mother of two self-assured young men, and a good friend. We met through the BMI musical theater workshop in New York and have collaborated on three concert music projects over the past four years. She’s both hilarious and soulful, and I knew that collaborating with her would lead me out of “Knoxville’s” shadow into funnier, less nostalgic musical and dramatic territory.

In approaching the writing of the piece, Mary Liz and I discussed all sorts of ways to complement Barber’s “Knoxville,” and some musical and lyrical ideas kept surfacing, such as the image of a rocking chair on a summer night, and the inevitability of change coupled with a yearning for constancy. In fact, the opening of “Summer” is a paraphrase of “Knoxville,” in which the soprano attempts to use Barber’s music as a lullaby for her restless child.

“Our” soprano, the wonderful Laurie Heimes, is a new mother herself, and when we met her at her home to discuss ideas for the piece on a hot, summer day, she hurried in and out of the room, gracefully and with great humor juggling the demands of a newborn with our free-wheeling discussion, all on very little sleep. There was the hot summer day and the rocking chair of the Barber piece, but the point of view was not of a child, as it is in “Knoxville,” but of this very new parent.

It seemed a natural, logical pursuit for us: write about this very personal, idiosyncratic and yet almost universal experience. How does a person realize, not just with the mind, but with every part of their exhausted being, that everything, the whole world, has changed? And so, in a series of eight short songs, “Summer: 2 AM” charts the dizzying, stupefying, awful and wonderful transformation of a person into a parent.

When Barber was writing “Knoxville,” his father, Roy Barber, was losing his health and rapidly approaching death. Barber dedicated the work with the inscription “In memory of my Father,” suggesting that his father’s deteriorating health had something to do with his identification with the piece. I dedicate “Summer: 2 AM” to my mother, whose own memory has been fading far too quickly over the years, and to my daughter, now age 9, who is blossoming more and more each day, much to my amazement and delight. In trying not to think about “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” I found a way to remember my own summers, past and future.

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Orchestra 2001: Samuel Barber Centennial. Saturday, May 22. 8 PM. Kimmel Center,  Perelman Theater. 300 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102.

Second performance (FREE): Sunday, May 23. 3 PM.  Swarthmore College, Lang Concert Hall, Swarthmore, PA 19081.

Tickets: Buy online (May 22 only) or call 215-893-1999

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Robert Maggio

Orchestra 2001

KYLE BARTLETT is a composer, performer, and teaching artist living in Philadelphia. She is also a founding member of the NY-based new music collective counter)induction. On Sunday, May 16, the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society presents counter)induction performing the world premiere of  Kyle’s sextet “Present” (alongside works by Xenakis, Dusapin, Crumb, and c)i member Douglas Boyce).

Listen to Kyle describe her  new composition here:

*Playing in the background: excerpts of Bartlett’s “Bas Relief: 1.” Hear more  here.

Sometimes the starting point of a piece is a particular sound-texture or a melody; sometimes it’s a story. Sometimes it’s a poem or a picture.  Sometimes it is a case of finding the right metaphor for something (a feeling? an idea?) that escapes direct analysis. This time I just felt a sense of movement, free movement, movement impeded by obstacles, movement that travels long distances, and movement that stands in place…

I had the idea that the music from the piano behaved like a liquid. At the beginning of the piece it is sloshing around in there, from one end of the keyboard to the other, very turbulent. So turbulent that sometimes some of this music would splash out of the piano onto the violinist, whose music would be colored or diluted by the piano. The strings become soaked with this music, and the piano’s leftover liquid becomes more and more viscous, clotting up into funky rhythms and chords. The strings have two identities, they can be “stringy”—those piano notes are expressed as long, drippy glissandos—or they can be brittle, with very short, sharp digs into the string making more noise than tone. (Only later did I realize that these properties are shared exactly by Laffy Taffy. Sorry.)  And the winds? The flute behaves like a flame, playful and agile, producing a lot of heat and light. The clarinet is earth. Most of the time it is just damply observing.  But under the right circumstances it turns dry, abrasive, gets into everywhere it shouldn’t. Maybe this is all a bit too surreal: what I have are different chords, textures, melodic fragments.  The instruments each have their own ways of expressing these materials, their own dialects, perhaps. Experimenting with different combinations of material, in different combinations of instruments, is my (and the piece’s) motivation.

Even with a clear starting point, the final product can be surprising. I don’t like to plan everything out beforehand. When my intentions become too ossified, I tend to lose interest, like knowing the end of a suspenseful movie. Instead I compose outward, and let myself be drawn toward what is necessary. Last fall when I was asked what would be the title of this work, for the press materials, I replied, “How to disappear is how to appear completely.” It was the fall, and I was completely submerged in the emotional and compositional challenges of “The Lost Child,” the most complex and deep-driving work of my career. Perhaps I was subconsciously thinking of making a quick getaway. But as the spring arrived, with the success of “The Lost Child,” getting back with old friends, making new ones, deepening emotional connections and feeling more power and more purpose, this music had to be renamed. The piece is lively and rhythmic, with bright, astringent harmonies and showy demonstrations of virtuosity. Cheerful, even! I chose the title “Present,” which refers first to “being present,” a wonderful sense of being alive in the world, being alert and immersed in activity; and second, “present” as a gift, a gratitude for that feeling and for the musicians who so beautifully render my work.

~ Kyle Bartlett

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counter)induction: Sunday, May 16, 2010. 3 PM (Pre-concert Lecture at 1:45 pm by Robert Capanna). American Philosophical Society, Benjamin Franklin Hall. 427 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106.

Tickets: buy online or call 215-569-8080.

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counter)induction

Kyle Bartlett

Philadelphia Chamber Music Society

Roberto Sierra's Missa Latina will be performed by the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia on April24th with guest soloists Heidi Grant Murphy and Nathaniel Webster.

By Tom Di Nardo

The Latin Mass began its evolution during the seventh century, with Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Notre Dame—from around 1360—the first known example in its eventually-accepted form.

Since that time, thousands of Masses have been composed which include the Kyrie-Gloria-Credo-Sanctus-Agnus Dei core elements, usually set to Latin texts. Perhaps the grandest of them all, Bach’s B Minor Mass, was unacceptable to his Lutheran church and not heard during his lifetime. The form evolved through Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, though many were conceived for concert rather than liturgical purposes. In recent times, Leonard Bernstein’s eclectic MASS and Osvaldo Golijov’s polysourced La Pasión Según San Marcos have expanded the use of popular forms, different languages and many ethnic flavors.

Roberto Sierra’s Missa Latina refers not only to the Latin texts, with prayers to peace added to its extremities, but to the rhythmic palette he brings from his native Puerto Rico. These rhythms on claves, bongos, congas, and timbales emerge organically with a sense of inevitability, never jarring and always with stunning dramatic effect.

The Mass, subtitled “Pro Pace,” was commissioned in 2003 to celebrate two anniversaries: the 75^th of the National Symphony of Washington, D. C., and the 40^th of the Washington Choral Arts Society. Leonard Slatkin conducted the premiere on February 2, 2006, with the 75-minute work featuring enormously challenging solos for soprano Heidi Grant Murphy and baritone Nathaniel Webster. An excellent recent Naxos recording of the work, with the Milwaukee Symphony led by Andreas Delfs, features the same two soloists.

Murphy and Webster will also join the Mendelssohn Club of Philadelphia, conducted by Alan Harler, in the Philadelphia premiere of Missa Latina on April 24. The venue will be the restored Baptist Temple at Broad and Berks Streets, a 36,000 square-foot space neglected for 35 years and given a $30 million restoration. Built in 1891 as the Grace Baptist Church, the edifice with 140 stain glass windows became the parish from which Russell Conwell founded Temple University.

The prolific Sierra, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Composer-In-Residence during the 2000-2001 season, studied in Europe with iconic composer Gyorgy Ligeti. He now teaches at Cornell University, and just supervised a new recording of his chamber works and Concerto for Saxophone with jazzman James Carter as soloist.

Sierra had always wanted to write a large choral piece, though not necessarily a Mass, so the commission was the perfect opportunity. “I believe in one church for myself, and I’m respectful of that,” said Sierra. “The Catholic Church was the only one around for a millennium and a half, the one frame of mind. But others worship with the same sincerity and goodness of heart. Therefore, one cannot say one church any longer.”

In his compositional palette, Sierra often uses a tresillo (3/3/2) rhythm, as well as the octatonic scale, constructed of alternating whole and half steps.

“You’ll find the tresillo a lot in my other pieces,” explained Sierra, “and it should be at the center of expression. I don’t consciously work to do it, or it would be just an artifact. It’s useful because you can create a huge variety of complexity around it, as in the Gloria, using any kind of meter and subdivision, almost like a friction between the inner structure and the main rhythms.

“The octatonic scale has elements of tonality, but gives you some sense that you are not doing triad tonality. And the body relates to the rhythm in a physical way, and the enormous variety or meters gives it a kind of dance aspect.”

The tresillo at the end of the opening Introitus comes as a kind of an amen to the Amen; its use in the Gloria and the cha-cha-cha in that movement’s Laudamus te seem natural accents to the work’s fervency; and the octatonic scale in the Kyrie gives a slight exoticism which accentuates that section’s rhythmic undulations.

Alan Harler will be leaving his Temple post next month after 30 years, though continuing his leadership of the Mendelssohn Club. Since he toured Puerto Rico many times with the Temple and the Mendelssohn Club choirs, his friendship with Sierra goes back almost three decades.

Alan Harler, Artistic Director of the Mendelssohn Club

“I discovered Roberto’s early and wonderful Cantos Populares in the ‘80’s and later commissioned two subsequent works, Guakia Baba and Lux Aeterna.  This Mass is a brilliant work, and like all great works, the deeper one gets into the score, the more that is found. It sometimes approaches a popular idiom with translucent harmonies and Latin dance rhythms, whose forms and structure are quite complex and sophisticated.

“All I had was the recording of the premiere performance until the recent CD came out, and I thought I would perform this in an instant, especially if I could get these soloists. We’re so lucky to have engaged them, because there is so much for them to do. Heidi [Murphy] can float her high notes with the best of them, and she uses that range throughout. And their voices match in duet singing, which predominates in the piece.”

Harler’s Mendelssohn Club has commissioned 45 works in the last 20 years. “It’s good for us to find pieces which speak to audiences directly and immediately, music that a general audience doesn’t have to struggle with. That’s especially true with this work, with so many intense dance rhythms. If it weren’t distracting, in my dream performance, the audience would be moved to get to their feet and dance!”

While in town, Sierra will engage the Latin Community in a number of residency programs, noted below. “It takes a lot of effort,” Sierra said, “but it’s worth it, even if there aren’t immediate results of people flocking to the concert hall. I think it’s important that both the smaller and larger institutions get involved in this, because outreach should be continuous. You cannot use public funding and then ignore your demographic base, because then you have a subsidized concert club. But these Latino citizens need to feel that the doors are open for them, that there are efforts to welcome them, and that the arts are not just for a certain segment of the community.”

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Tom Di Nardo writes about the arts for the Philadelphia Daily News.

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Missa Latina: Saturday, April 24, 2010. 8 PM (pre-concert talk by the composer at 7:15). The Baptist Temple, 1837-55 North Broad St, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122.

Tickets: Buy online or call 800.298.4200 (press 6, then 5)

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Roberto Sierra’s community itinerary prior to the April 24 concert:

Thursday, April 22, 4-5 PM:  Roberto Sierra will offer an introduction to his “Missa Latina” for the afterschool programs at Taller Puertorriqueňo, 2721 North 5th Street. Their two after-school groups, the Young Artists Program (a two-year professional art-training program for high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors) and the Cultural Awareness Program (an arts education program for younger students, ages 5 to 15) will participate in an interactive session, which will include listening to excerpts of the Missa Latina recording as well as demonstrations of the percussion sections by musicians from AMLA (Artistas y Músicos Latino Americanos) and excerpts performed by Mendelssohn Club soloists. Students will have an opportunity to experiment with Latin percussion instruments and to play rhythms used in the work.

Friday, April 23, at 2:30 PM: Sierra will present a workshop for the music students at Nueva Esperanza Academy Charter School, 301 West Hunting Park Avenue. This group of about 70 high school students comprise the school’s string orchestra, chorus, and elite band. The interactive session with the composer will incorporate the same elements as at the Taller workshop, but will be offered at a level appropriate for these experienced music students.

Friday, April 23: All workshop participants will be invited to attend the evening dress rehearsal for Missa Latina at Baptist Temple, giving students exposure to the rehearsal process with full orchestra, chorus and soloists.

Allison Sanders as Cleopatra in The Curtis Opera Theater's sold-out production of Antony and Cleopatra, March 2010. Photo by Lenore Doxsee

By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim

In the long and colorful history of opera fiascos, that of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra must surely take pride of place. For starters, the stakes could not have been higher. For Barber, the Met’s commission of an American opera for the opening of its spectacular new home at Lincoln Center in September of 1966 was an honor that would have marked the pinnacle of any composer’s career. To do it justice, he turned to one of the greatest love stories of the ages as told by Shakespeare, the tale of the Roman general Antony, torn between loyalty to Caesar and his love for the Egyptian empress Cleopatra. At the urging of the Metropolitan Opera, he paired up with the flamboyant Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was to adapt the libretto and stage a production that would, in Zeffirelli’s words, “rise to the occasion with mammoth sets, a vast cast, and sumptuous costumes.”

The opening night, however, proved such a resounding disaster that it succeeded in burying the opera for decades. The list of mishaps is almost comical: the lead soprano, Leontyne Price, found herself trapped in a pyramid that would not open; the mechanical controls for the scene changes broke down; live horses and goats provided unplanned aural distractions from the wings. Zeffirelli’s “mammoth sets and vast cast” dwarfed not only the star-crossed lovers on stage but also Barber’s music itself. The few critics who, amid all the glitter and pageantry, paid any attention to the music at all, dismissed it as “a prosaic and spiritless exercise,” as Roland Gelatt wrote in a November 1966 issue of Musical America. Barber was deeply wounded by the criticism of a work he felt contained some of his finest music. A streamlined version edited with his partner and “Vanessa” librettist Gian Carlo Menotti found a kinder reception at its Juilliard Opera premiere in 1975. Even so, Antony and Cleopatra was staged only twice in the following 35 years.

Leontyne Price as Cleopatra in the 1966 Metropolitan Opera production. Photo by Louis Melancon, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera archives.

In March 2010, as part of the celebrations marking Barber’s centennial, the Curtis Institute of Music, in collaboration with the Opera Company of Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, offered a new and radically down-sized production that sought to resuscitate Antony and Cleopatra and give the opera its deserved place in the American opera repertoire.

In stark contrast to Zeffirelli’s vision, the Philadelphia production was reduced to its essentials, with a pared-down, shimmering metallic set focusing the attention on the unfolding psychological drama.

“It is not in fact an overly grand piece,” says Chas Rader-Shieber, the production’s stage director. “It is quite intimate. In the 1975 revision a lot of the political action was taken out. That makes the intimate part cut to the fore.”

As he points out, even the opera’s one battle scene is reduced to the human drama of one man facing the consequences of his actions. “It is actually not the battle itself that is shown but the aftermath of the battle, which is much more intimate. He is left asking himself, what has he done, what has he caused?

“So even though you can say it’s played against a grand backdrop, what’s grand, actually, is the story of Antony and Cleopatra.”

At the opera’s center is the conflict between two diametrically opposed worlds. To Caesar and his senators, Cleopatra’s Egypt represents not only a political challenge, but a cultural one, which threatens to emasculate his most famous general. “In the opening scene, the Roman chorus warns that Cleopatra has made Antony effeminate,” says Rader-Shieber. “Hers is a female-oriented world. It’s an emotion-based world; it’s about chaos, debauchery. It’s delicious, that world, you can’t help but be seduced by it.”

The Roman world, by contrast, is devoid of women. Even Octavia, Caesar’s sister who is betrothed to Antony in an effort to break Cleopatra’s spell on him, is entirely mute in Barber’s 1975 reworking of the opera. But while Barber pits the two worlds against each other, he treats them with “non-judgmental evenness,” says Mr Rader-Shieber. “It’s not a battle between both worlds; Barber doesn’t prefer one over the other. But Antony doesn’t belong in either. He’s an old-fashioned warrior, whereas Rome is all about carefully calculated politics. He can never live in Egypt where he could never be in charge. When this man can live in neither world, he has to exit both, he has to commit suicide.”

Chas Rader-Shieber directed Curtis' fully staged production, with scenic design by David Zinn, costume design by Jacob A. Climer, and lighting design by Lenore Doxsee. Photo by Peter Checchia.

Musically, Barber draws on all his coloristic skills to distinguish the two worlds. Following the action’s quick changes of location and temperament, he produces a mercurial score in which delicate chamber-music-like moments give way to brash brassy outbursts at the drop of a hat. Without resorting to orientalist clichés, he uses exotic percussion instruments along with harp, flute and celeste in order to create what Shakespeare’s Cleopatra calls “Music, mood food for us that trade in love.”

“It’s gesture music, like silken cloth,” says conductor George Manahan. “You can almost feel the breeze on the Nile. The music for the Romans is almost Hollywood, all those big trumpets and angular intervals.” Mr Mahanan has been a fan of the opera ever since he acted as rehearsal pianist at the Juilliard revival in 1975, and continues to be a vocal advocate for its rehabilitation.

“It’s a masterpiece,” he says. “It’s so beautifully written in the ranges; each character has the personality written into the music.” Cleopatra’s part, written specifically for Ms. Price, has gorgeously lyrical lines that can vie with the big Italian arias of the nineteenth century. The lush duet “Oh, take those lips away” demands a commanding vocal presence from both Antony and Cleopatra. Their love is larger-than-life, their words declarations rather than confessions. These are two lovers who are very much aware of their own importance.

But Barber is also capable of pulling back the music to let Shakespeare’s rich language shine through. In the scene leading up to Antony’s suicide, his vocal line is accompanied by a single flute and timpani—to spine-chilling effect.

There are also substantial orchestral interludes written for the scene changes which Mr. Manahan plans to arrange into an orchestral suite. But he hopes that the opera itself will no longer be relegated to the occasional concert performance such as the one he gave last year with New York City Opera. The Philadelphia production, he hopes, will see to that: “Now that we’ve done it, people will see that it should be staged.”

“It is a bit of a mystery why it isn’t done more often,” says Mr Rader-Shieber. “It gives you everything opera is supposed to give you. And it can be done on this scale, with 24 people in the chorus, not 88. You don’t have to put sphinxes and pyramids on stage.”

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Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim is an arts journalist living in New York City. Her articles on music have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, the Jerusalem Post and Symphony Magazine.

John Coltrane

By Howard Mandel

“Anti-Jazz: The New Thing Revisited” is the provocative title of a four-program series at International House Philadelphia that began in October 2009 with a performance by the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, and continues through March 6, 2010 with a concert by the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Curated by the independent non-profit organization Ars Nova Workshop, the series features ensembles rooted in a musical movement that emerged in the late 1950s, cohered in the ‘60s, and has become recognized as an integral part of the historic jazz narrative.

The series’ name is taken from a Down Beat magazine review of 1961 that described a John Coltrane performance as “a horrifying demonstration of what appears to be a growing anti-jazz trend.” What the review’s author, associate editor John Tynan—and elsewhere, critics Ira Gitler and Leonard Feather—objected to was the length, density, intensity and harmonic content of solo statements by Coltrane and his front-line collaborator, fellow saxophonist Eric Dolphy. Those two men, performing with Coltrane’s rhythm section at the Village Vanguard, were introducing new language that upset the established melodic-harmonic basis of jazz improvisation, and required the modification of other elements of then-standard jazz performance.

Having recently worked closely with composer-pianist Thelonious Monk, Coltrane enfolded unusual, nominally “dissonant” intervals into his note stream, which had already been characterized as relentless arpeggios, without pause—this was what Gitler meant when he described Coltrane’s efforts as “sheets of sound.” Having recently discovered Indian classical music through the recordings of sitarist Ravi Shankar, Coltrane turned away from the ultra-complex chord progressions he had used in recordings such as Giant Steps (of 1959) to a severely stripped down harmonic basis that furthered the “modal jazz” movement his former employer Miles Davis had mined so successfully in his seminal recording Kind of Blue (also of ‘59, on which Coltrane also played).

Simultaneously, Dolphy, who investigated contemporary classical music and studied “Third Stream” classical-jazz hybrid compositions with Gunther Schuller, among others, was expanding the reeds’ vocabulary in other directions. He was interested in 12-tone ideas, practiced wide intervallic leaps (rather than sticking essentially to diatonic and chromatic runs), and explored timbral possibilities, with forays into multiphonics and exploitation of the extreme registers of his instruments, including alto sax, flute and the then little-known bass clarinet.

Eric Dolphy

Together Coltrane and Dolphy produced a saxophone gale, the likes of which had not been much heard in jazz (one precedent was the dueling tenor saxophones of Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray in “The Chase” of 1947, but that is a six-minute blues-based piece incorporating bebop extensions which became commonplace ten years later). The ferocity of the two horn players’ combined sound prompted louder, busier drumming from Elvin Jones, and more aggressive piano accompaniment from McCoy Tyner, than was then conventional. The overall volume, as well as single pieces that lasted ten or even twenty minutes with little or no harmonic movement (rather than standard five to eight minute runs through complicated chord changes), shocked and dismayed both Tynan and Gitler.

In ‘61 Gitler was a staunch bebop advocate, Feather a strident anti-avant-gardist (conceding the sincerity of Coltrane’s efforts, he wrote “Even Hitler was sincere”), and Tynan a more nuanced critic, appreciating the melodic/harmonic re-conceptions that Ornette Coleman had introduced to New York in 1959, albeit in shorter and more immediately “tuneful” settings than what he (Tynan) called “anti-jazz.” Though certainly some listeners at the time preferred the jazz they already knew to Coltrane’s break away from accepted parameters, open-minded fans followed his advances to the limits of their own patience and understanding. The Coltrane Quartet-Quintet recordings live from the Village Vanguard on Impulse! were the basis for the rise of his popularity in the ‘60s. In 1961 Coltrane had not yet entered his most abstract, dissonant, and ostensibly arrhythmic phase; looking back, his sound in the earliest ‘60s seems relatively tame compared to where he went in the six productive years that followed, ending with his death at age 40 from liver cancer in July 1967.

In a Down Beat interview of 1962 conducted by then-associate editor Don DeMichael, Coltrane explained that solos were long because “all the soloists try to explore all the avenues that the tune offers. . . It’s not planned . . . [i]t’s just sort of growing that way.” Dolphy spoke of being inspired by bird songs–”Birds have notes in between our notes . . . Indian music has something of the same quality—different scales and quarter tones. I don’t know how you label it but it’s pretty.” Both men were calm and reasoned in their explanations of what they were doing, and expressed puzzlement, but not anger, that it had been labeled “anti-jazz.”

Their music would soon become so influential that their immediate rivals—widely-acclaimed saxophone improviser-composers including Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Jimmy Heath, Joe Henderson, and Michael Brecker—adopted aspects of it as coin-of-the-realm. Furthermore, other instrumentalists, composers, bandleaders, and audiences reaching into pop and contemporary compositional spheres also embraced so-called “anti-jazz.”  Folk-rockers such as the Byrds and blues-rockers like Paul Butterfield, minimalists Terry Riley and LaMont Young, San Francisco psychedelic guitarist Carlos Santana, and trumpeter Miles Davis (heading into the next “anti-jazz” uproar over his electrically-charged albums Bitches Brew, Live/Evil and On The Corner) are among those who popularized and expanded upon this direction. By the 1990s, licks that Coltrane labored to produce were appropriated as blandishments by the likes of smooth jazzer Kenny G.

Of course Coltrane and Dolphy had not effected that revolution on their own. Efforts to break away from traditional swing and the bluesy, chordal basis of bebop were in the air already during the ‘50s, an era that was rife with musical re-conception–hear the recordings of Lennie Tristano, George Russell, Stan Kenton, and Cecil Taylor. In jazz as in rock ‘n’ roll, soul, blues, some Latin dance music (such as boogaloo, and later, salsa), protest songs, and other vernacular genres, music was identified with the social ferment of the times. Trane and others associated with the so-called “new thing,” including Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, Sun Ra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, and even Max Roach and Charles Mingus, indulged in long, impassioned performances that threw down a gauntlet to some listeners’ precepts.  They made overt political points with their compositions’ titles and contents, and magnified the notion that “free jazz” was about the civil rights struggle, opposition to the war in Vietnam, and indulgence in a sexually-liberated, drug infused “youth culture” that professed anti-capitalism, distrust of anyone over 30, and solidarity with “radicals” ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Ho Chi Minh.

Some commentators went along with this line, or pushed it. Critic-poet and playwright Leroi Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka and became more overtly polemical around these issues. Frank Kofsky, a history professor at California State University with Marxist views became editor of Jazz and Pop magazine, relentlessly encouraging such linkages. Some musicians did indeed speak up for what might be construed as extreme positions. Most, however, were more interested in exploring music than fomenting social change. There was a coterie who instigated guerilla protests on nationally televised programs, enraged by their lack of representation on the shows. More typically, musicians with social consciences performed for free in benefits for movements and organizations they supported, and otherwise put their energies toward the very challenging business of getting gigs.

Even as activism around the most divisive social issues of the ‘60s faded in the 1970s with the end of the Vietnam war, the resignation of President Richard Nixon, and some evidence of tangible progress in the struggles of minority populations in the U.S., the possibilities the musicians had opened up, and their determination to deconstruct jazz conventions in order to refresh and personalize their music, remained. New trends swayed the avant-garde. There was a phase of “free funk,” promoted by bands such as Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time, Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society, Oliver Lake’s Jump Up! and Joseph Bowie’s Defunkt in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s; a high-energy “avant-gutbucket” initiative that included instrumental vocalisms and bluesy melodic themes set in established song forms, embodied by saxophonist David Murray’s octets in the later ‘80s; and a noticeable acceleration in the globalization of jazz with the increasingly universal adoption of the internet in the ‘90s.

While the grassroots social movements of the ‘60s became more professionalized and institutionalized in subsequent decades, such developments did not occur within the core communities of jazz experimentalism. In the 1970s the American recording industry profited from acts performing stadium rock, middle-brow jazz-rock “fusion,” and the formulaic dance beats of disco. In the 1980s the introduction of the digital cd format, replacing analog vinyl long-playing records, promoted more segmented preferences among consumers, and a fervor for reissues over newly produced recordings, while a neo-conservative movement spearheaded by trumpeter Wynton Marsalis raised the profile of clean-cut, virtuosic, but largely conventional “young lions.” Latin jazz, propulsive but tightly arranged, gained ground, and swing dancing was revived. Smooth jazz prevailed on radio, and singers became the best-selling jazz artists. In the 1990s, every style of jazz became equally acceptable—and almost equally marginalized in the greater pop-dominated media landscape. This condition continues, essentially unchanged, to this day.

Still, the basic principles of what John Tynan had myopically called “anti-jazz” have remained in place. Most jazz musicians feel free to put jazz’s fundamental swing, blues, bebop, and ballads on a backburner, if they so desire, in order to update rhythmic material, concoct new musical structures, invent vocabulary and modes of composition, mix it up across geographic, ethnic, and aesthetic borders, and project expression that is indelibly their own. All jazz musicians—including Wynton Marsalis—do this, or claim to. Embracing an aesthetic freedom that is supported by knowledge of past practices, if not obvious employment of them, is characteristic of jazz musicians’ rhetoric now.

So back to Ars Nova’s series at International House. Its title “anti-jazz” is clearly meant to be provocative or ironic. If what Coltrane played had continued to be considered “anti-jazz,” it’s doubtful the National Endowment of the Arts would have honored such musicians as Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and this year Yusef Lateef and Muhal Richard Abrams (co-founder of the AACM/Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which gave rise to the Art Ensemble) as hallowed Jazz Masters. Thus, has the avant-garde been de-toothed? What contemporary relevance could “anti-jazz” have, such that International House presents it, Ars Nova produces it, and Philadelphia audiences come to listen? If what was avant-garde in the ‘60s is now heard in such bastions of cultural propriety as Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Kennedy Center—albeit infrequently—can it possibly still be cutting-edge enough to excite young audiences? Is it a throwback, a novelty, akin to the Dixieland aficionados scoffed at in the ‘60s? Has it become a novelty rather than an initiative, speaking only to its longtime fans?

First some background: International House Philadelphia is primarily a residence for foreign students at University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University and other local schools. Its arts programming goes back 30 years, initially focusing on film and traditional folkloric music. In 2002, a new president directed reconsideration of the presentations in its then- 450 seat theater. After two years of programming efforts Renae Dinerman, director of arts at International House, calls “hit or miss,” she found the stars aligned to work with Mark Christman, founder of Ars Nova Workshop and a devotee of what this year is being called “anti-jazz.”

Mark Christman says that when he started Ars Nova in 2000, it was for selfish reasons. “I had just graduated from college,” he says (he had studied music marketing at Drexel), “and this music was my personal passion. But I was sick of traveling to New York City two or three times a month to hear it. There was a need, I thought, for some organization to be presenting this material right here. Soon after I got the ball rolling, I realized there was only modest demand.

“But Philadelphia is unique. We’re conveniently near New York, not far from Chicago, and being on the eastern seaboard we’re an obvious stop for musicians who are visiting the east coast. So there was a circuit we could be a stop on. It’s a small town as well as a big city, a community in which Ars Nova could develop its own constituency around improvised music interests. That development has been natural, and very satisfying.

“Free jazz, post-free jazz, post-Coltrane continuums—people have responded to that. I’m interested in the history of the music, its role in changing values and perceptions, even changing the meaning of music and what it means to listen to music. I’m interested in the live event, experiencing something that may never happen again, hearing people in front of me experiment, take major risks. I mean musical risks, because they often result in the coolest payoffs.”

Raised in Allentown, now age 33, Christman says “I had no idea of improvisational music beyond Herb Alpert when I was in high school. I was more interested in fringe rock and hip-hop. But going to a lot of live performances and absorbing every piece of rock history I could find, I came to be constantly searching for the next thing that would move me. It wasn’t long before my path led to Miles and Coltrane, and then John Zorn.”

It was at International House in the 1990s that Christman first heard Zorn, a New York-based MacArthur fellow now in his mid 50s who emerged from downtown Manhattan’s genre-defying loft music scene to blow a squalling alto saxophone, and compose intricate musical games and a large portfolio of quirky pieces for an imposing variety of instrumental combinations. He brought Zorn’s rapacious Electric Masada ensemble back to International House in 2008. But he doesn’t only book old favorites. Christman is a true believer in jazz-derived improvisation from the past to the present to the future, by musicians from across the U.S. and also abroad. He’s not content with what he’s heard before, so serves as a powerful agent, introducing what’s new, good, and rare to Philadelphia.

He is not alone in scoffing at reactionary dismissals, or easy categorizations.  The musicians who have been most deeply involved with this music may disdain the term “avant-garde” and even shy away from calling what they do “jazz,” due to what they perceive as a market devaluation of that four-letter word. However, as is natural and also instructive, the people who’ve given their lives to the art believe in its relevance and validity. Their insights into its attractions involve more than faith in their own pursuits; they speak of what they’re doing as compelling investigations.

Roscoe Mitchell and the Art Ensemble of Chicago will perform at International House on March 6, 2010

“I always felt it would take a while to really explore this music, and I’m still feeling like that,” asserts Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist, composer and mainstay of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which made its first recordings in 1967. Mitchell currently holds the Darius Milhaud chair in composition at Mills College in Oakland, California.

“For me it’s ongoing, it doesn’t stop. You constantly have to learn, study hard, learn this—and then there’s more. That’s always what has excited me the most, the challenges of constantly working on it, discovering and revealing things. I’m here because there’s so much to learn, every day. That’s not dated. And good music doesn’t go away.”

Frode Gjerstad, a Norwegian saxophonist and clarinetist whose 12-piece Circulasione Totale Orchestra was presented at the Anti-Jazz series on January 30, 2010, first performed with his standing trio at International House in December 2007, and visited Philadelphia again in summer of 2008 to work with Marshall Allen. He wrote in an e-mail, “We are a free improvising ensemble and the sound of the individuals makes the total sound of the ensemble. With people like Bobby Bradford [cornet] and Lasse Marhaug [electronics] you could talk about two different worlds, galaxies apart. But they both improvise, using two different languages which melt together when their sounds mix. I have tried to bring together several generations, as well: almost 50 years between Bradford and guitarist Anders Hana, and also different schools of improvisation. I think at our best we create a very interesting place to be.

“We are very happy to be invited as part of a concert series with some of the names I always looked up to: the Art Ensemble, Sun Ra and Bill Dixon [the trumpeter and electronics musician, who in the ‘60s was a major force in collaboration with Cecil Taylor, among others]. I feel that our music would not have happened unless I have listened to the electric Miles Davis early/mid ‘70s bands, Gil Evans’ later bands with synths, and Sun Ra’s Arkestra. They brought a whole new sound into improvised music by using electronic devices. I loved it! The energy and the sound hooked me.”

Cornetist Bradford, a member of Ornette Coleman’s ‘60s touring group and later a partner with clarinetist John Carter in a series of critically acclaimed, suite-like recordings, expands on Gertstad’s remarks and echoes Roscoe Mitchell’s. “We’re offering people a chance to hear a large ensemble of musicians from all over the world—the drummer Louis Moholo is from South Africa, and there are three Americans plus Swedes, Norwegians, and an Englishman. We come together to share a common interest in music that can’t be categorized by country.

“Actually more than an interest is required to do what it takes. The monetary rewards are negligible, but we’re willing to go with what that implies. I know how much this music means to me, and how eager we all are to share it with others. It seems to me important, especially for a city the size of Philadelphia, to make creative music available to the general public, because this music is consciousness-raising. It asks something from the listener, as well as the musician. It’s music that’s beautiful, and a different experience every time.”

The argument can be made that the tensions which in the ‘50s and ‘60s inspired the new thing, anti-jazz, or call it what you will, have never been resolved. That the spontaneous interplay of skilled and well-informed musicians is timeless, yet always mirrors the moment in which they make it. That there is no other musical format so ambitious, flexible, fertile, and able to communicate full expressive array with immediacy to listeners as well as players. That “anti-jazz” is distinguished by imposing few if any conditions on its participants, and that it allows for enormous amounts of individualism to co-exist with spectacularly particular collectivity.

Among jazz musicians—especially those veterans of the early ‘60s who survived charges they were doing something “anti-jazz”—there seems to be a prevailing sentiment that social movements for justice and equality of all Americans have not come to a successful conclusion. They may not claim their music is in support of today’s hot-button issues, but they stand behind the notion that improvisation unfettered by inflexible conventions has enormous moral force as an expression of freely creative individualism.

The most avant-garde of these musicians, who are not necessarily the youngest of them, have created new music using computers as well as instrumental techniques that they have advanced far beyond what was accomplished in the ‘60s (such as complete mastery of circular breathing, greater control over multiphonics, freer approaches to polyrhythms, more tolerance of personal languages on the piano and guitar). They may depend even less upon pre-determined structure, employ in their ensembles even more unusual juxtapositions of instruments, come up with continually surprising, innovative and unique musical schema. Their musical directions and expressions seem new, even if they’re rooted in experiments half a century old, because those old experiments emphasized immediacy of expression, and inclusion of all reference points currently at hand, as requirements for authentic performances.

This avant-garde is self-motivated, knowing it will not be embraced by enormous general audiences, or well covered by mainstream media. It satisfies itself with devoted niche audiences, which exist world-wide. Certain members of this avant-garde still give voice to their political positions and dedication to social change, such as issues regarding AIDS, same-sex marriage legality, and gender equality; many more have performed in specific response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, out of concern for the people of New Orleans devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, in support of the election of President Barack Obama, and most recently to benefit the victims of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.

Marshall Allen

“This is creative music,” says Marshall Allen, who joined Sun Ra’s Arkestra in 1958, moved with Ra from Chicago to New York in the early ‘60s and to the Arkestra’s group house in Philadelphia’s Germantown in 1968. Allen has sustained Ra’s legacy since his visionary leader’s death (or ascension) in 1993. “It represents the vibrations of the day you have to play it. The foundations of what we do concert to concert are basically the same, but there are a lot of variations. You can’t get them all in one day, because one day is so different than the next. The Creator gives us a gift every day, and you’ve got to honor the Creator and the spirit of things by creating the vibrations of that day.

“Now we tell a story about the musicians before us, the older ones, the big bands that were so great from the 1920s to the 1940s. We’ve got a band-book full of charts dedicated to who we heard when we were coming up. They wrote masterpieces, and we honor them, but we have our own style, Sun Ra style. There are so many ways to play a note—boom! And so many ways to play boom!”

There doesn’t seem to be anything anti-jazz about that.

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Howard Mandel, author of Future Jazz and Miles Ornette Cecil—Jazz Beyond Jazz, blogs at www.ArtsJournal.com/JazzBeyondJazz and is president of the Jazz Journalists Association.

Tim Berne (photo by Peter Gannushkin)

By David R. Adler

For the last 30 years, alto saxophonist Tim Berne has developed a singularly challenging body of work for a host of different ensembles—from the pared-down trios Paraphrase and Big Satan to the sextet Caos Totale, from the famed quartet Bloodcount to the large ensemble heard on Open, Coma. It’s a world of scabrous dissonance, fast and elaborate lines, infectious rhythm and tightly conceived yet wildly unpredictable structure that pushes improvisers beyond their limits.

Until recently, the piano has played little to no role in Berne’s oeuvre. This began to change decisively with the appearance of pianist Craig Taborn in the Berne-led groups Science Friction and Hard Cell. Now Berne has struck up a promising creative relationship with Philadelphia-based Matt Mitchell, who brings formidable keyboard skills to two of Berne’s newest projects, Adobe Probe and Los Totopos (“chips”).

Adobe Probe, a septet, makes its Philadelphia debut on December 12, the second night of an Ars Nova Workshop-sponsored Composer Portrait honoring Berne. Mitchell will begin the evening with a set of Berne’s works for solo piano — a bold new departure for the composer, but one that calls for extensive improvisational input from the performer. On December 11 Berne appears with Big Satan; he’ll also unveil a new treatment of music from his ambitious 2002 release The Sevens.

I sat down with Berne and Mitchell in a Brooklyn coffeehouse to discuss the new music.

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David R. Adler: Matt, tell us about the solo piano music you’ll be performing.

Matt Mitchell: There’ll be about five pieces. “Traction,” “I-Hornet,” “The Opener” and two other things, the newest things…

Tim Berne: You can call them “Flirting With Success, Parts I & II.” Is that pretentious enough? I like to keep a balance.

DA: In January 2009, Matt, you played a solo piano show at the Stone in New York, and one of the pieces was Tim’s “Huevos Expanded.” So you’d already been delving into Tim’s music in a solo context?

MM: That was probably the first time. At that point I had spent the last few months learning the Adobe Probe parts. A lot of them sound good by themselves, but there’s extra stuff that’s not in the piano part. It wouldn’t be feasible to perform any of it solo. That’s when Tim mentioned the possibility of doing a solo piano project.

Matt Mitchell (photo by Dario Villa)

TB: I always wanted to hear somebody approach my stuff on solo piano and make decisions without me around to interfere. I talked to Craig [Taborn] about that for a long time. We did a lot of sound checks where Craig would play my shit. I’d hear him practicing a part and I’d go, “Wow, it really sounds cool without the other instruments.”

DA: Is the solo piano music fully notated?

TB: It’s like the tunes without the band [i.e., not fully notated]. I know this is a “Composer Portrait,” and yet I don’t want to act like the composer. I sort of outgrew my control-freak tendencies probably about 10 years ago. Part of my thing is to find people who are willing to take responsibility for what they improvise. … I’d still rather have an improvised transition than a written one. And the way jazz musicians interpret written music is pretty high-level. They just have this rhythmic flexibility that very few musicians have. They can play an eighth note 20 different ways. That’s where my stuff just comes to life.

DA: Tim, you were mentored by [alto saxophonist and composer] Julius Hemphill, and in turn you’ve nurtured the careers of younger players like [saxophonist-clarinetist] Chris Speed and [drummer] Jim Black. Do you see your collaborations with Matt in the same light?

TB: I’ve always been into that, finding these weirdoes that no one knows about…

[Mitchell grimaces...]

TB: … you know what I mean, people with personality, and catching them on the rise, before they get seduced by the scene and become professional musicians in the worst sense of the word.

DA: How did you two meet?

MM: I’ve been a fan of Tim’s music since I was in high school. Especially the longer pieces — the more nuts and the more sections it had, the more I liked it. When I heard the second Miniature album, I Can’t Put My Finger On It (JMT), I realized half the tunes were Tim’s and they were the ones that took me the longest to “get.”

So I wrote Tim a letter. I typed out a letter asking if I could buy scores from him. And I threw my number in there just in case. He actually called me, and we ended up talking sporadically for a couple of years. He sent me scores for “Eye Contact” and “Impacted Wisdom.” He charged $20.

TB: I did?

MM: Meanwhile I maintained a friendship with [trumpeter] Ralph Alessi, who taught at Eastman while I was there.

TB: Ralph used to tell me about Matt. I wasn’t playing with piano players much — I was just starting to make my move around 2000 with Craig. But Ralph kept telling me I should check Matt out. “Oh, he can play your stuff. He’ll read it.” He was kind of tantalizing me.

MM: So finally, in 2008 I was a core faculty member at Ralph’s School for Improvisational Music (SIM) at the same time as Tim.

TB: At one of the SIM faculty concerts I wanted to play “Whatever” [now part of the Adobe Probe repertoire]. I thought, “Ok, I’m going to find out how sick this guy really is.”

MM: Listening to Tim’s music when I was younger was one thing. Playing it is completely different. It requires a certain level of precision that you’re never really asked for, at least not usually in jazz. I feel like I’ve improved from the sheer act of having to learn it. I had the “Whatever” part for two days, and got it to a point where it’d be good enough for the rehearsal. It was literally half an hour and Tim asked me if I wanted to do a gig.

TB: I wanted to start a younger band, something that I was going to rehearse a lot, which became Los Totopos. Matt was the first piece in that puzzle, somebody who was doing things for purely musical reasons.

DA: Matt, you’re playing electric keyboards with Los Totopos?

MM: Yes, I’m playing a controller keyboard connected to a laptop, and I have Ableton Live open mostly just as a vessel for the Softsynth sounds in there, so I’m playing an electric piano sound and a couple of other synth sounds.

TB: Los Totopos was meant to be acoustic, but we couldn’t get a piano for the first gig and had to do it electric. Now I’m thinking it should be both. I love electric shit, and I don’t want this to be “chamber music” in the worst sense. I write some powerful stuff, physically, where it’s got to be slamming. And then other times it’s got to be super-delicate. I think in the end it’ll be both. [Los Totopos will appear at the Jazz Gallery in New York on January 7, 2010.]

DA: And Tim, you’re also playing in Matt’s new band, yes?

TB: Oh, it’s great. It’s really fun. The band’s really cool.

MM: It’s me, Tim, Oscar Noriega on bass clarinet, Mary Halvorson on guitar and Tomas Fujiwara on drums. We have an Ars Nova Workshop gig scheduled for April 13, 2010. I wanted to take my time and compose and not worry about the music being too hard or whatever. I’m learning what it feels like to inflict this on other people — people who are willing to have it inflicted on them.

DA: Finally, Tim, you’re bringing Adobe Probe to Philadelphia, but the personnel has changed a bit since the January 2009 premiere at the Stone.

TB: Yeah. I would say this group is more of a when-I-can-do-it type deal.

MM: Seven really busy people.

TB: I love doing these big things, but it’s impossible!

DA: Are there attributes of the new music that are markedly different from your past work?

TB: It got to the point, probably in the late ’80s, where I got really good at organizing and structuring things so they always worked. … Now what I do is more complicated — the written stuff is more complicated and the improvised parts are less complicated, if that makes sense. I started to realize that when you have people with a lot of personality, exploit that, give them kind of an equal partnership in what’s going to happen, so that I’m surprised by what I’m doing. I also think I got more confident in my playing, and the more you do as a leader, the less precious it gets, and the more you realize that failure is kind of an inherent attribute of being an improviser. It’s almost necessary. I would say it’s a positive thing. That’s how you transition into other things. You have to have those uncomfortable moments. It means everybody’s improvising.

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David R. Adler writes about music, politics and culture. He covers jazz for Time Out New York, Jazz Times, Philadelphia Weekly, All About Jazz-New York and other publications. His work has also appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Down Beat, Jazziz, The New York Times, The New Republic Online, Slate, Forward, Democratiya, New Music Box, All Music Guide, Global Rhythm, Signal to Noise, Coda, Jewish Currents and more. David is also the editor of Jazz Notes, the quarterly publication of the Jazz Journalists Association.

Ars Nova Workshop presents:

Tim Berne: Works for Saxophone Quartet and Trio: Friday, December 11, 2009. 8PM. (Pre-concert discussion with Nate Chinen and Steve Byram 6:30-7:30 PM.) Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th Street. $15. Click here for tickets.

Tim Berne: Works for Large Ensemble and Solo Piano: Saturday, December 12, 2009. 8 PM. Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th Street. $15. Click here for tickets.

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Links!

Ars Nova Workshop

Matt Mitchell:  Myspace | Website

Tim Berne: Myspace | Screwgun Records

School for Improvisational Music (SIM)

Click here for a Latin jazz bibliography and discography compiled by John Santos.

John Santos (photo by Tom Ehrlich)

Sabor Latino: A Caribbean Journey

The amazing artists featured in the “Sabor Latino: A Caribbean Journey” series represent a marvelous cross section of modern Latin jazz, but to refer to them simply as Latin jazz musicians would do them a disservice, as they all bring a broad range of experience and awareness to their art. They are all musically multi-lingual, equally at home playing myriad rhythms and styles from all over Latin America as they are with classical music, straight-ahead jazz, and funk.

David Sanchez is a veteran young lion at the forefront of a vibrant Latin jazz scene found in Puerto Rico today. His impeccably produced recordings have all become instant classics. His compositions are as beautiful and adventurous as his soaring tenor sax solos, informed as much by his early rhythmic experience as a percussionist as by his deconstruction of masters such as John Coltrane. I had the pleasure of hearing him and sitting in with a band in which he was playing in 1989 in Old San Juan. I don’t think he was twenty years old, yet he was burning the place up. The band featured some highly respected musicians, such as percussionist Mañengue Hidalgo (the great Giovanni Hidalgo’s father), drummer Jimmy Rivera, and the late saxophonist Hector Veneros. Each of them individually told me “Watch out for this kid—he’s going to make some noise in the States soon.” They were extremely proud of him and knew he was destined for international notoriety. How right they were!

The Spanish Harlem Orchestra specializes in “old school” New York salsa, mambo, and Latin jazz for hardcore salseros. Their classic sound harkens back to the golden era of highly danceable, jazzy orchestras like those of Machito, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodriguez during New York’s “Palladium Days” (1940s to 1960s), as well as to the golden decades of salsa (1970s & 1980s), when all of the members of this fabulous orchestra, including musical director Oscar Hernandez, made their debuts in New York City. They are the “little big band” of salsa, achieving a surprisingly large sound through the inventive voicings of Oscar’s arrangements. Three of New York’s best vocalists; tight, tasty, clave-imbued arrangements; a full house of exciting soloists; and a powerful rhythm section are the hallmarks of this Grammy-winning orchestra.

The Spanish Harlem Orchestra, above, will perform in the Philadelphia area on November 20th as part of Montgomery County Community College's Lively Arts Series. (Photo by Jerry Lacay)

Multi Grammy-winning saxophonist and composer Paquito D’Rivera is a living legend and musical genius.   He was a child prodigy in Havana, and since moving to the United States in 1981, has taken his place as one of the greatest and most versatile musicians in the world, shining particularly on the clarinet.  His masterful work throughout the 1970s with the seminal Afro-Cuban jazz/fusion group, Irakere, will always stand as a milestone in quality, versatility, and creativity within the genre of Latin jazz. Paquito’s superb musicianship, boundless imagination, stage presence, and sense of humor always come across in his playing. He is a true master.

Marlon Simon is part of a highly respected musical family, representative of the imaginative movement of Latin jazz found throughout Latin America. With the diverse and beautiful music of his native Venezuela as a foundation, Marlon has creatively integrated traditional and contemporary music from the entire hemisphere into a unique and very personal expression. He is a complete percussionist, recording artist, bandleader, and educator, part of a new wave of fearlessly innovative Latino musicians unbound by national musical styles.

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What is Latin Jazz?

The Latin roots of jazz belong in the discussion of the origins of jazz, along with the blues, work songs from the southern United States, and Western European classical music. Latin jazz is an American legacy of immense value, as it documents our history in the true, pan-American sense of the word.  With Afro-Euro roots, and marked by the ugly beauty of colonial history, Latin jazz is an important part of our cultural landscape that has been afforded token attention.

“What is Latin Jazz?” is a question that has always, and will always, provoke discussion and disagreement among practitioners, students and fans. The regular risk-taking and profound emotion embodied in Latin jazz make it attractive to many listeners and unappealing to many dancers.  Tito Puente and Ray Barretto, two pioneers in the field—may they rest in peace—were highly influential Puerto Rican percussionists and bandleaders. They each made statements that appear contradictory.  Maestro Puente felt that the dance element is an identifying trademark of Latin jazz, while Maestro Barretto thought that dancing identified music as salsa, or any number of earlier genres, and that Latin jazz is not necessarily danceable.

Like jazz, Latin jazz has origins in dance music, particularly when you consider its Afro-Cuban folkloric roots, where movement is at least as important as music. The most essential rhythms of Latin jazz—mambo, son, rumba, and many others—are all dances as well. So musical language extends to choreography, and that connection must be learned in any Latin jazz “apprenticeship.” Also, the idea of an audience is relatively new when you consider that for centuries, dancing has involved the “audience,” uniting them with the musicians, rhythms, celebrations, and ancestral rites. In African traditions, the music-dance connection is like DNA. The Western concept of sitting and appreciating the beauty and nuances of the music has brought another aesthetic to Latin jazz.

Improvisation, essential to jazz, is also essential to Latin jazz, as it is to all of its seminal genres such as the Cuban traditional forms rumba, son, conga de comparsa (carnaval music), and all of the spiritually-based musical expressions of the island such as Abakuá, Palo-Kongo, Lucumí, Arará, and Iyesá. The same is true of traditional African and Spanish-derived music of the entire Caribbean basin.

The inclusion of Afro-Cuban percussive instruments such as tumbadoras (conga drums), timbales, bongos, cowbells, maracas, güiro, claves, etc., has always been a large part of the music’s identity. That concept has expanded to include batá drums, chekere (beaded gourd) and other liturgical drums and instruments from the Afro-Cuban canon, as well as the Peruvian cajón (wooden box) and quijada (jawbone of a donkey or horse), the double-headed tambora drum from the Dominican Republic, the pandereta and barril from Puerto Rico, the fulía and redondo drums from Venezuela, and a host of percussive instruments from Brasil and other places. The role of the U.S.-born drum set has steadily increased. It is fairly common today to find Latin jazz that depends as much, if not more, on the drum set as on the traditional percussive instruments.

For many artists, social commentary, especially the subject of self-determination, informs their work to a great extent, while others avoid such commentary and seek to provide an escape from the harsh realities of the working class communities that gave birth to Latin jazz and its related forms. The words, actions, and compositions of many major artists speak volumes about the function of the music and the unbreakable ties between jazz, Latin jazz, American pop culture, and social justice movements. Paul Robeson said, “The artist must choose between slavery and freedom.”  Thelonious Monk stated that “Jazz is freedom.”  In Strange Fruit, Billie Holliday boldly commented on the practice of lynching. Duke Ellington’s Immigration Blues, Black Beauty, and Black Brown and Beige Suite, John Coltrane’s Alabama, Charles Mingus’ Haitian Fight Song, Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s We Insist, Eliseo Grenet’s Lamento Esclavo, Rafael Hernandez’ Lamento Borincano, Canario’s Están Tirando Bombas, and Arsenio Rodriguez’ Bruca Manigua are just a few examples of song-statements that reflected the political and social realities of their times.

Jazz Latino: America’s Music

While some argue the differences between jazz, Latin jazz, jazz latino, Afro-Cuban jazz, world music, son, salsa, salsa gorda, salsa monja, salsa romántica, salsa dura, cumbia, bachata, merengue, timba, tropical music, etc., the lines that might have delineated some of these forms from others continue to blur, perhaps leaving the gray areas larger than the categories themselves. Today, what we refer to as Latin jazz crosses over into the aforementioned styles and many others as well. While this may prove problematic for the marketers, vendors, and award-givers in the “industry,” I’m delighted at the gradually increasing opportunities to musically tell historical truths that have been neglected for far too long. The first on my list is the essence of the word “America.” Central and South America and the Caribbean are no less American than North America. We construct imaginary barriers between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere by continuing to equate “America” exclusively with our young country.  In fact, we have much more in common with the rest of the Americas than what separates us, and few things demonstrate this better than Latin jazz.

Our national art form, jazz, is arguably the greatest example of our shared histories. Although you wouldn’t know it from the curriculum of most jazz studies programs, popular culture in the U.S., through jazz, draws considerably from the Afro-Latin-Caribbean experience. Jazz was born in the major Caribbean port of New Orleans, which has been intimately connected to every other major Caribbean port since the advent of colonialism in the Americas. This old connection, from its beginning, has been political, economic, and highly cultural, with music playing a crucial role in documenting the region’s evolution.

The area’s common Creole nature, born of nasty political history, certainly had much to do with the creation of jazz, son, rumba, plena, calypso, merengue, beguine, and many other forms of Black urban expression. The “Negro Brass Bands” that eventually came to be known as jazz bands in the United States were identical in their instrumentation to the Caribbean “Orquestas Típicas” for the simple reason that all the Americas shared the colonial tradition of the military band. Seasonal work cycles and the need for survival spawned inter-Caribbean, post-slavery migrations of cane cutters, dock and field workers, and other manual laborers—New Orleans and other points along the entire U.S. Gulf Coast were significant stopovers in these movements. The common surnames of French, Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Dutch origin found throughout the extended Caribbean community are evidence of these migratory patterns. Musicians counted heavily in the ranks of these laborers, and their music, rhythms, and songs intermingled freely. This is the environment from which jazz and Latin jazz sprouted.

“It Don’t Mean a Thing if it Ain’t Got That Swing”

Duke Ellington’s famous quote is a direct reference to perhaps the strongest inter-connective element in jazz and other Afro-Latin-Caribbean music: rhythm. Clave (clah-veh) is a basic rhythm, feel, and concept that underlies a great deal of West and Central African music. It spread throughout the Americas with the numerous Africans and African descendants who were forced into slavery. It is prevalent in Caribbean folk and popular music, and is present in the jazz tradition and its related antecedents and offshoots. Clave is not generally recognized in music of United States origin because it is usually played or implied on European instruments rather than on African or African-derived percussion.

The Gullah traditions from the Georgia Sea Islands and typical New Orleans music such as Mardi Gras second line and rhythm and blues carry obvious connotations of clave. The same can be said for much early rock and roll, which was a direct descendant of rhythm and blues.  Most funk and hip-hop also depend upon clave-based rhythmic phrases.  The 20th century proliferation of recordings, radio broadcasts, and the touring they instigated, were strong pre- and post-jazz, cross-pollinating influences.

There are many levels on which the terms “Latin” and “jazz” intersect: Latin musicians who participated in the development of jazz, jazz musicians who toured in Latin American countries and incorporated what they experienced into their own music, and Latin American rhythmic, lyrical, and melodic elements used in jazz.

Alberto Socarrás’ first recorded flute solo on a jazz record with Clarence Williams in 1927, W.C. Handy’s jazz-tangos, Jelly Roll Morton’s “Spanish tinge,” Louis Armstrong’s Peanut Vendor (El Manicero), Chick Webb’s Cuban musical director Mario Bauzá, Duke Ellington’s Puerto Rican trombonist/composer Juan Tizol, the Machito Orchestra, the Dizzy Gillespie-Chano Pozo collaboration, the Cubop period, Puerto Rican bandleader Tito Puente, and the century-old history of Puerto Ricans in Harlem and throughout New York City are just a few examples of people and elements that lend weight to the position that jazz must honor its Caribbean roots.

Alberto Socarrás (courtesy of Max Salazar)

Afro-Latino Displacement & Identity

The undeniable contributions, as well as the socioeconomic problems, of Black and Latino communities in the United States are universally acknowledged. However, the concept and existence of the Afro-Latino, and his or her relationship to traditional Black and Latino communities, are still under-recognized and misunderstood, not only among the general populace, but within the Black and Latino communities themselves.

Latin jazz is living cultural expression, born of the Afro-Latino experience, and directly connected to its inception, history, and future. The tumbadora, and other African drums, are the symbols of centuries-old African wisdom, spirituality, and creative expression of music and dance. They were uprooted from the communities for which they were, and are, a centerpiece, and rose like a phoenix from the ashes to become the center of an international movement, despite centuries of concerted persecution intended to eliminate them and all that they represent. Today, the tumbadora is the backbone of much Latin jazz and other music, carrying forth its message of resistance, peace, ancestor recognition, respect for the environment, and dignity for all. The international community of practitioners and followers of this drum/dance movement, of which Latin jazz is a major component, represents a formidable part of American history that has been effectively swept under the rug.

Has jazz borrowed more from Latin music, or has Latin music borrowed more from jazz?  It really doesn’t matter. The importance lies in recognizing that they have enjoyed a mutually beneficial, parallel relationship since long before the word jazz became commonplace. Latin jazz has evolved into a true pan-American and worldwide phenomenon that continues to distill traditional and contemporary sociocultural elements in its endless movement toward creative expression, identification, and preservation. It is a Creole model of beauty, power, and cooperation with tremendous historical significance, whose example inspires the propagation of truth, freedom, and the continued dismantling of boundaries and barriers, be they real or imagined.

Criollo

Creole culture, emanating from the Caribbean heart of the Americas, was born of slavery and forced migration. Huge Spanish-speaking communities throughout the Caribbean and all the Americas have directly integrated cultural practices of African origin. Caribbean vitality has attracted the world’s attention and admiration through the powerful cultural representations of music, dance, Vodún, Santería, etc., but the pervading images of the region are those of occupation, exploitation, poverty, dictatorships, Indigenous tragedies, and the tourist industry. Yet Caribbean roots unite us. The Caribbean example of Creole society, with African, European, Indigenous, and Asian roots, is the epitome of American migration, adaptation, and survival. Of particular interest to me, as a person of Puerto Rican descent, is the fact that there are more Puerto Ricans living in the US than in Puerto Rico, and that most of the 4.1 million people calling themselves Puerto Ricans were born outside the island.  Yet we strongly identify with the culture of that tiny island—a culture which by its very nature is what the islanders call trigueña, composed of “three races,” European, Indigenous and African. Music plays a central role in that identification, and Latin jazz has always been among its most vibrant forms.

The Afro-Latino experience that emerged to various degrees from every corner of Latin America is a quiet powerhouse in the U.S. in terms of overlapping and paralleling Black history and experience. This story must be revealed as an important link in the fragmented history and identity of African-Americans, and as such, of all Americans. The separation in the United States between Black American communities and those of Hispanic origins is stark, and perceived to be representative of American culture. However, our common American histories of labor, displacement, struggle, and spirituality outweigh the gaps in communication, understanding, and empathy.  Though slavery and neo-colonialism discourage such notions, knowledge of our historical and current bonds unites us and empowers us all to move forward as a positive cultural and political force.

Spirituality

African spirituality permeates Caribbean life and greatly informs Caribbean-based music. Just as jazz has evolved from its Blues, Gospel, and Spiritual roots, the spiritual roots of Latin jazz are also immense. Many of the rhythms employed in Latin jazz on tumbadoras, bells, chekeres, and other percussive instruments are directly derived from the folkloric, ceremonial contexts where they are used to call the presence of our ancestors into the room. The music comes from amazing oral traditions of gorgeous poetry, melodies, and rhythms of spiritual and secular origin that unite all the African-based spiritual traditions of the Americas. Among these spiritual traditions we find Santería, Palo, Candomblé, Macumba, Umbanda, Quimbanda, Gagá, Vodun, Espiritismo, and Mesa Blanca, all stigmatized by negative, colonial stereotypes born of dangerously empowered ignorance. Latin jazz is an evolving manifestation of all these forms. The music is transformational. It is a gift, not intended to be a commodity.  From the perspective of the student, fan, dancer, and musician, it represents our efforts to strive for improvement, for elevation, for enlightenment.

New York, New York

It is not a coincidence that New York City, the Mecca of jazz, is also the Mecca of Latin jazz and salsa. Neither is it a coincidence that New York is also a major center of Caribbean culture, particularly Spanish-speaking Caribbean culture. The 1930s explosion of Cuban and Puerto Rican music in New York set the stage. During the 1940s, the terms “Afro-Cuban jazz” and “Cubop” emerged, clearly delineating the origin of the genre’s major musical elements, despite the fact that the Latino community where the music proliferated was mainly Puerto Rican.

During the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, the music that would come to be known as Latin jazz was akin to pop music. Musicians, dancers, and listeners from New York’s Latino, Italian, Jewish, and Black American enclaves found themselves playing, dancing, and listening together at huge dance halls, theaters, supper clubs, after-hours joints, and neighborhood bars. The music graced the silver screen, Broadway, and even the living rooms of every American home with a television, when the groundbreaking I Love Lucy Show debuted in 1951.

Although the term “Afro-Cuban jazz” is still used, it very gradually gave way to the term “Latin jazz,” which is much more popular today, and a reflection of the great contributions of artists and musical forms from all over Latin America. Latin jazz, and Cuban music in general, fell from pop status towards the end of the 1950s with the rise of rock and roll, even as they helped birth the new genre, and moved into a position of spawning another New York musical giant in the 1970s that claimed pop status in its own right—salsa.

Into the 21st Century

Since the 1960s, Latin jazz has been greatly overshadowed by the barrage of industry-fueled commercial musical forms that come and go with the wind. As these styles come in and out of popularity, Latin jazz remains essentially an underground art form, with a slowly but steadily increasing international fan base and a unique, if largely unknown, connection to American history.

The music continues to represent its evolving communities with all their issues around gender, race, and age and other aspects of identity. The lack of real support from the industry and government in the form of significant airplay, general media presence, and grant monies is considered by many to be directly related to the “double whammy” of Latin jazz’s Black and Brown roots. This is especially true in the post-9/11, anti-immigrant climate, despite the homegrown roots of Latin jazz.

Youth, of course, always seek new frontiers, and the modern tech age would appear to be a lunge in the opposite direction from the hands-on-instruments traditions that are still the foundation of Latin jazz. But the chameleon qualities of Latin jazz that made it multi-cultural from the outset, allow it to continue its path of evolution, through a revolving door of rhythms, styles, instrumentation, technology, and humanity.

Don’t be surprised if Latin jazz’s stock rises with the “greening” of the planet, as it holds many of the same truths around spiritual, physical, and mental development, while using organic, acoustic instruments, little or no electricity and fossil fuels, all the while uniting people around the globe in a fun, highly educational activity.

“The truth will set us free, but only if the truth is told.”

Perhaps history has not given Latin jazz its due because of the ill-informed perception that it is foreign, and the tendency in the United States to consider anything five minutes outside our borders as un-American and of lesser value. Perhaps the racism and classism of colonial and neo-colonial mentalities have kept the story of Latin jazz out of our history books. But Latin jazz is a highly expressive vehicle of identity, communication, and cooperation for millions of people of all colors and generations throughout the Americas and the world. It is, by nature, a barrier-breaking art form that touches all of us, whether or not we are aware of it, and has the potential to be even stronger if its truths are embraced by educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities.

The survival of Latin jazz depends on the activism of those who appreciate it. What can be done? Make noise. Let politicians, presenters, venues, promoters, radio, TV, print media, and children know that the music matters. There is a lot of work to be done in the field of education. Ask why the music is not represented in most university jazz departments, jazz camps, and jazz festivals, not to mention in the general curriculum of schools of every level. And perhaps most importantly, support live music!!

John Santos

Oakland, CA

November, 2009

www.johnsantos.com

Want to learn more? Click here to download a list of resources for further listening and reading (discography & bibliography).

♦♦♦

Spanish Harlem Orchestra: Friday, November 20, 2009. 8 PM. (Salsa party at 7 PM). Montgomery County Community College, Blue Bell Campus. 340 Dekalb Pike, Blue Bell, PA 19422

Marlon Simon and Nagual Spirits: Friday, January 22, 2010. 8 PM. Montgomery County Community College, Pottstowm Campus. 101 College Drive, Pottstown, PA 19464

Paquito D’Rivera: February 12, 2010. 8 PM. Montgomery County Community College, Blue Bell Campus

Montgomery County Community College
Lively Arts Series at Science Center Theater
Box Office: 215-641-6518