I thought it might be of interest to post this. Mark Miller's the jazz reviewer for
The Globe & Mail, one of Canada's two national newspapers, so it gives you a different perspective on the music than the American p.o.v.
----
taken from
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/...tainment/Music
Breaking the Old-Fig mould
Creative curiosity fuels the year's best efforts, with musicians playing mix and match, and singers broadening their repertoire, MARK MILLER writes
By MARK MILLER
Monday, December 22, 2003 - Page R3
Very slowly, yes, but just as surely, jazz is changing. This is not news in 2003 any more than it was in 2002 or will be in 2004. Jazz is always changing, which is not the same as saying that jazz
has changed -- that whatever jazz is now has replaced whatever jazz was before. The process is infinite and it's inclusive.
A jazz fan's tastes, however, are neither. At some point, virtually everyone, no matter how open-minded, will reach a rueful state of Mouldy-Old-Figism. (The Mouldy Old Figs were traditional jazz fans who decried the advent of bebop in the 1940s. Bebop, you'll note, has been the lingua franca of jazz ever since.)
These days, the onset of Mouldy-Old-Figism might be triggered by the sound in a jazz setting of Balkan rhythms or Italian operatic arias, bandoneons or bouzoukis, rappers and/or turntables. The New Mouldy Old Fig, even one who survived the extremism of the avant-garde in the 1960s and indulged the excess of fusion in the 1970s, will eventually harrumph, "
That's not jazz!"
But it is. (Well, maybe not the rappers. Harrumph. But those turntables? Sure. Think of them as conga drums for the 21st century.) Jazz follows its own course, rather like a river that overflows its banks and cuts a few new channels, one or two of which continue to be navigable in their own right even after the waters recede. In time, the map is redrawn. And then it's official, whether we're talking about rivers or about jazz.
Of course, someone is always going to come along and try to dam(n) the creative flow. But let's for once leave trumpeter Wynton Marsalis out of this; he had a relatively quiet year anyway. And a few musicians will usually try to sail against the current. More trumpeters: Dave Douglas, Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton, each of whom updated Miles Davis's funk-fusion from the 1970s on their most recent releases --
Freak In, Hard Groove and
Sonic Trance, respectively.
If three CDs can constitute a trend, then this is one trend from 2003.
Here's another: Singers seem to be making an effort to broaden their repertoire. Cassandra Wilson's newest,
Glamorized, features Sting, Bob Dylan and Willie Nelson songs. Norah Jones has been singing country classics lately. (Okay, did Norah Jones ever really have anything to do with jazz?).
Diana Krall's next CD, now recorded, will include covers of Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell and Mose Allison titles, as well as a few new items that she has written with husband Elvis Costello. Another Canadian singer, Bonnie Brett, has released
The Elvis Costello Songbook, a whole CD's worth of Costello material. (Does Diana know?) Now this may just look like a marketing ploy, nothing more than an effort to break through to a mass, pop audience. But it might also be that river spilling over its banks again. Something
had to give. As the Toronto trombonist Rob McConnell asks so waggishly in his notes to his 2003 CD,
Music from the Twenties, "How many girl singers does it take to sing
Summertime?" His answer: "All of them, apparently."
Instrumentalists are taking a similar tack, whether it's pianist Brad Mehldau playing Radiohead, the Bad Plus offering a piano-trio take on Nirvana or guitarist Pat Metheny reviving an old Gerry and the Pacemakers Top 40 hit. And then there's pianist Jason Moran dallying with a Brahms étude, saxophonist Wayne Shorter looking to Villa-Lobos and Canada's Great Uncles of the Revolution adapting Prokofiev's
Peter and the Wolf to three stringed instruments and a trumpet. It's all part of the same process as those Balkan rhythms, those bandoneons and even those rappers, a search for something other than the same old, same old.
There's nothing wrong with the same old, same old, if you like that sort of thing, but without the search for something else, jazz would sound in 2003 just like it did in 1917 when the Original Dixieland Jazz Band made its first recordings. We wouldn't have had Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman or Cecil Taylor. We wouldn't have had Mouldy Old Figs either.
At this point, "something else" might be new tunes, new rhythms, new instruments or even new combinations of old traditions. This last may sound like an exercise in postmodernism, and in some hands it is, but it can also be simply the product of creative curiosity. Much of the most interesting music heard this year was made by musicians who mixed and matched with little or no concern for idiomatic uniformity or stylistic purity.
Among them, in live performance: Amsterdam's Available Jelly and Ab Baars Trio, two of several Dutch bands touring Canada in 2003. And on CD: the Swedish quintet Atomic (
Boom, Boom), the Ottawa-born pianist D. D. Jackson (
Suite for New York) and the Toronto bassist Roberto Occhipinti (
The Cusp). In the same spirit, though, Jason Moran's
The Bandwagon and Wayne Shorter's
Alegria may have been a little too eclectic for their own good.
Both were nevertheless well received, although neither matched the raves given to bassist Dave Holland's double CD,
Extended Play, which is certain to stand as the critical establishment's choice for album of the year. While many musicians have been reaching outside the jazz tradition, the Holland quintet continues to stretch it further from within. The result, however, is still change -- very slowly, yes, and just as surely.
THE TOP 10
Ten memorable moments in jazz from 2003: chronologically:
Hugh Fraser's Vancouver Ensemble of Jazz Improvisation, startling an audience mostly of unsuspecting Americans at the International Association for Jazz Education conference in Toronto.
Wayne Shorter, stirring - when he put down his tenor saxophone in favour of his soprano - at the Downtown Jazz Festival in Toronto.
The Dave Holland Big Band, bracing at Downtown Jazz.
The Zawinul Syndicate, unstoppable at Downtown Jazz.
Violinist Florin Niculescu, serene in the spirit of Stéphane Grappelli as part of a tribute to Django Reinhardt at the Festival International de Jazz de Montreal.
Clarinetist Gabriele Mirabassi and accordionist Luciano Blondini, sublime at the Montreal festival
Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bittersweet at the Guelph Jazz Fetival.
Saxophonist Phil Dwyer, bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Alan Jones, swinging hard at the Top o' the Senator in Toronto.
Pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Dave Young and drummer Terry Clark, swinging smoothly the same September night at the Montreal Bistro in Toronto.
Available Jelly, kaleidoscopic at the Rex Jazz Bar in Toronto.
Linear Mode
