One of the World’s Mightiest Latin Jazz Orchestras Gets Back to Business at Birdland
When a bunch of oligarchs and their puppets in politics tried to take over the world in 2020, musicians were left out in the cold. In the liner notes to his new album Virtual Birdland, pianist Arturo O’Farrill, longtime leader of the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra takes care to mention how people who play music for a living are no less essential than any other workers. Empowered by that knowledge, he kept the band going through a long series of webcasts, possibly the most labor-intensive of all the innumerable online collaborations of the past sixteen months or so. The great news is that the big band’s home base, Birdland, is open again, and the group have resumed the Sunday night residency they were banished from in March of last year. Showtime these days is 7 PM.. If you feel like celebrating, it couldn’t hurt to reserve a spot now since these shows are very likely to sell out. Cover is $20; your best deal is a seat at the bar.
Considering that individual parts on the record – streaming at Spotify – were recorded remotely in innumerable different sonic environments, the fact that it sounds as contiguous as it does reflects the herculean work of the engineers involved.
Big trombone fanfares interweave with lushly swirling reeds over a bubbling Punjabi-inflected groove in the cuisine-inspired opening number, Gulab Jamon. O’Farrill takes a cascading, brightly neoromantic solo with Bam Bam Rodriguez’s bass growling minimalistically behind him while the rhythm straightens into an emphatic clave. Tenor saxophonist Jasper Dutz summons a return to a web of triumphant counterpoint and a devious false ending.
Guest Malika Zarra sings her composition Pouvoir, a slinky, brassy Moroccan-flavored tune with solos from trombonist Mariel Bildstein and conguero Keisel Jimenez. This band have always slayed with Arabic and Jewish themes, underscored by their version of trombonist Rafi Malkiel’s brooding Desert, its uneasily undulating chromatics giving way to a serpentine solo by the composer and then a muted, soulful one from lead trumpeter Seneca Black.
With its nocturnal, Dizzy Gillespie-style suspense and bluster, Larry Willis’ Nightfall makes a great segue, trumpeter Rachel Therrien and tenor saxophonist Ivan Renta cutting loose hauntingly between the orchestra’s chromatic gusts. The bandleader spirals elegantly; Jimenez goes deep down the well as the storm hovers.
Guest guitarist Ghazi Faisal Al-Mulaifi sings his methodical, bittersweet ballad Ana Mashoof, adding a starry solo in tandem with O’Farrill before Alejandro Aviles spins in on soprano sax. Alto saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera soars and weaves through a tightly turbulent take of his Samba For Carmen, echoed by O’Farrill’s trumpeter son Adam.
Alafia, by Letieres Leite – the Brazilian Arturo O’Farrill – gets a jubilant, percussion-fueled workout, part elegantly orchestral candomble theme, part feral frevo brass-band romp with a tantalizingly brief, smoky Larry Bustamante baritone sax solo.
O’Farrill first performed Rafael Solano’s En La Oscuridad with his big band legend father Chico O’Farrill alongside the great tenor saxophonist Mario Rivera, so playing this suave, balmy ballad again with Renta, a Rivera protege, brings the song full circle.
They close the album with a couple of salutes to transgression, something the world is rising to embrace like never before. The epic take of Papo Vazquez’s relentlessly anthemic Cimarron first features calm triumph from trombonist Abdulrahman Amer, Aviles turning up the heat on alto, then percussionist Carly Maldonado fueling a charge out. The final number is a towering, cinematic take of Tito Puente’s Para Los Rumberos: Renta, Malkiel, Maldonado, Jimenez and drummer Vince Cherico all get to cut loose. How beautiful it is that we can hear musicians of this caliber take material like this to the next level onstage again.
And if you’re around the East Village on the 29th, O’Farrill is leading a much smaller group at St. Marks Park at 2nd Ave. and 10th St. at half past noon.
An Electrifying, Entertaining, Amusing Magnum Opus From Multi-Reedwoman Anna Webber
Damn, this is a funny record. Multi-reedwoman Anna Webber‘s mammoth new double album Idiom – streaming at Bandcamp – is her most ambitious yet. She’s no stranger to large-ensemble work, most memorably with her Webber/Morris Big Band album from a couple of years ago. The loosely connecting thread here is extended technique, something Webber has plenty of and uses liberally but not gratuitously. The jokes are relentless and irresistible. Webber gets extra props for having the nerve – and the optimism – to put out another big band record at a time when big band performances in New York have been criminalized. Hopefully for no longer than it takes for a Cuomo impeachment!
There’s also an opening disc, Webber joined by her long-running Simple Trio. The first number is a creepy, circling flute and piano theme and variations, with sudden dynamic and rhythmic shifts. It’s closer to Terry Riley than jazz. Drummer John Hollenbeck adds flickering color to the steady sway, pianist Matt Mitchell setting off a lake of ripples from the lows upward. Furtiveness becomes spritely, then the hypnotic spiral returns.
The second of these Idiom pieces has even more of an air of mystery in the beginning, its spaciously wispy minimalism growing more herky-jerky, up to a clever piano-sax conversation over Hollenbeck’s funky drive. Forgotten Best is a great track, beginning as a very allusive, rhythmically resistant take on hauntingly majestic Civil Rights Coltrane, then hitting a triumphant, quasi-anthemic drive. The trio follow with a coyly comedic, hypnotically circular, flute-driven march.
Webber subtly employs her pitch pedal for sax duotones and microtones in the third of the Idiom series over Hollenbeck’s straight-ahead funk and Mitchell’s surgical staccato, then clusters wildly over the pianist’s various vortices. The drummer’s persistent gremlin at the door signals a shivery shift.
The twelve-piece large ensemble play an epic, largely improvisational seven-track suite on the second disc. Emphatic swats over a murmuring background, with a wryly funny low/high exchange, pervade the opening movement. One assume that’s the bandleader’s distant squall that sets off a racewalking pace. Sounds like somebody’s using a EWI for those Marshall Allen-style blips and squiggles.
An airy, increasingly suspenseful interlude introduces movement two, Webber back on flute, fluttering in tandem with Yuma Uesaka’s clarinet over the tiptoeing Frankenstein of the rhythm section – Nick Dunston on bass and Satoshi Takeishi on drums. A swinging fugue follows, the rest of the horns – Nathaniel Morgan on alto sax, Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, David Byrd-Marrow on horn and Jacob Garchik on trombone joined by the string trio of violinist Erica Dicker, violist Joanna Mattrey and cellist Mariel Roberts. Webber’s mealy-mouthed meandering, picked off by the trombone, is another deviously amusing moment.
O’Farrill punctures the mist of the second interlude and then wafts optimistically, a goofy faux-takadimi duel between horn and trumpet finally disappearing into a chuffing shuffle; ersatz qawwali has seldom been so amusing. Everybody gets to make a Casper the Friendly Ghost episode out of the fourth movement. Movement five slowly coalesces out of looming mystery, O’Farrill playfully nudging everybody up, Webber’s acidic multiphonics over a slinky quasi-tropical syncopation and an ending that’s predictably ridiculous.
The group rise out of the ether a final time to impersonate a gamelan for awhile the string section leading the ramshackle parade this time. It’s as if Webber is daring us to go out and have half as much fun as she did making this album.
A Mesmerizing Start to the Final Installment of This Year’s Charlie Parker Festival
The final night of this year’s Charlie Parker Festival this past weekend was front-loaded. Young lions and then a veteran lioness set the bar impossibly high for whatever followed. By five in the evening, the usual wall-to-wall mob that has come out for the festival’s original flagship space, Tompkins Square Park, hadn’t materialized. Maybe it was the stormclouds overhead. Maybe, more ominously, the shrinking turnout reflects how many of the longtime East Village residents who supported this festival year after year have been driven out by gentrifiers. As we all know, gentrifiers have no interest in the arts: there’s infinitely more perceived immortality in taking a selfie in front of a hundred dollar brunch spread than while watching some guy blowing weird notes on a horn at a show which costs nothing to attend.
So an aging bunch of East Village holdovers (that’s what they call us), kids and tourists got to revel quietly in the trio of trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, tenor saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins and vibraphonist Joel Ross, teamed up with drummer Craig Weinrib, conguero Roman Diaz and a slinky bassist throughout a set that shifted artfully from rapturous, misty atmospherics, to tantalizingly allusive Afro-Cuban grooves punctuated by darkly masterful solos. O’Farrill set the tone, leading a hazy, distantly disconcerted tone poem to open the show, then finally brought it back at the end of their roughly 45 minutes onstage. In between, they reinvented hauntingly elegaic Coltrane as AACM cloudscape, spiced with wickedly incisive Arabic-tinged modal horn work, Then they took a jaunting, biting clave theme and made a lattice of disorienting polyrhythms out of it. The bassist managed to hold the center, pedaling his riffs while Weinrib and Diaz made their meticulous rhythmic negotiation look effortless. This really is the future of jazz, and it’s in good hands with these relatively young, restlessly hungry cats.
Which is not to say that ageless septuagenarian Amina Claudine Myers isn’t still pushing the envelope. What a trip it was to watch open her se by swinging her way through gutbucket Jimmy Smith B3 organ grease, leading a trio with Jerome Harris on guitar and Reggie Nicholson on drums. Then she took the party into the tectonically shifting ambience she’s best known for, building a storm on the horizon with peaks in between for stark, magisterial 19th century gospel and practically the complete Chopin C Minor Prelude. Rather than twisting the harmonies to suit the rest of the material, she played it exactly as written, letting its anguished series of chords linger. “Have mercy,” she sang over and over again throughout the set’s last number, as much a command as an entreaty.
There were a couple of other acts on the bill afterward, but pianist Orrin Evans’ originals are a thousand times more interesting than the material he was scheduled to run through as a replacement at this money gig. O’Farrill is at the Jazz Gallery on Sept 29 at 7 PM on day two of Futurefest there, dueling it out with guitarist Gabe Schnider, followed by obscure Japanese jazz unit Secret Mall and then at 10 by vibraphonist Sasha Berliner leading a quartet. Cover is $25.
High-Voltage Suspense and State-of-the-Art Big Band Jazz From Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society Uptown Saturday Night
The suspense was relentless throughout Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society’s sold-out concert Saturday night at the Miller Theatre. Although a couple of numbers on the bill had genuinely visceral suspense narratives, there was no central mystery theme. That’s just the way Argue writes. What a thrill!
Throughout the show, four of the composer/conductor’s favorite tropes jumped out over and over again: artful variations on simple, acerbic hooks; circular phrases that widened and sometimes contracted; unexpected pairings between instruments, and high/low contrasts that often took on a sinister quality. Gil Evans did a lot of that, but drawing on vintage swing; Argue does that with just as much symphonic sweep, but more acidic harmonies.
Obviously, with a eighteen-piece big band, there was a whole lot more to the night than just that. They opened the first of their two marathon sets with Phobos, a mighty showstopper from the group’s debut album Infernal Machines, inspired by the moon of Mars which will someday either crash into the planet or shatter under the force of gravity. Drummer Jon Wikan’s first ominously shuffling notes of the night introduced bassist Matt Clohesy’s grim, gothic riffs that bookended the piece, guitarist Sebastian Noelle’s smoldering chords looming behind the steady interweave of brass and reeds. Tenor saxophonist John Ellis’ lyrical solo proved to be a red herring.
They’d revisit that catchy, cinematic ominousness with a pulsing take of Transit, seemingly slower and more portentous than the album version, to close the first set with a mighty, cold ending that nobody but the band could see coming.
Blow-Out Prevention, a shout-out to Argue’s late influence Bob Brookmeyer, juxtaposed bright but astringent brass harmonies against a shifting, lustrous backdrop. All In, a tribute to the late, longtime Secret Society mainstay and “trumpet guru” Laurie Frink, got a Nadje Noordhuis trumpet solo which offered somber homage to her old bandmate, then took a triumphantly spiraling turn and eventually wound down against pianist Adam Birnbaum’s stately, Satie-esque minimalism.
Codebreaker, a salute to Alan Turing, bristled with spy-movie twists and turns but never went over the edge into John Barry-style menace. The second set was a performance of Argue’s recent, mammoth, labyrinthine Tensile Curves, inspired by Ellington’s Crescendo and Diminuendo in Blue. The bandleader, who was in rare form as emcee, explained that he’d decided to assemble the piece – a commission requiring a full forty minutes of music – as a study in subtle rhythmic decelerations. And much as it was a clinic in the use of that effect, it also was packed with innumerable dynamic shifts, a wryly squirrelly Sam Sadigursky clarinet solo, a much longer and eventually wildly churning one from trombonist Ryan Keberle, and a characteristically translucent one from trumpeter Adam O’Farrill – among other things.
Animatedly loopy phrases filtered throughout the ensemble, from a snide, nagging introductory theme through a final comfortable touchdown on the runway. Let’s hope this mighty tour de force makes it to the web – and maybe even a vinyl record – sooner than later. A towering performance for the rest of the crew, including but not limited to saxophonists Dave Pietro and Rob Wilkerson, baritone saxophonist Carl Maraghi, trumpeters Seneca Black, Matt Holman and David Smith, trombonists Mike Fahie, Jacob Garchik and George Flynn.
The next show at the Miller Theatre is on Feb 13 at 6 PM with the Mivos Quartet playing new works by Marisol Jimenez, Jeffrey Mumford, their own Victor Lowrie and Mariel Roberts. It’s one of the wildly popular free concerts here. Get there close to when the doors open at 5:30 and there might be free beer or wine; show up later and there probably won’t be.
Considering the Prospects For Adam O’Farrill’s Daunting Technique and Compositional Chops
Even if trumpeter Adam O’Farrill hadn’t made such a big splash as a twenty-year-old phenom in Rudresh Mahanthappa’s band, or if he wasn’t heir to a brilliant jazz legacy that goes back three generations to his grandfather Chico O’Farrill, he’d still be one of his era’s most in-demand players. When pianist Chris Pattishall got a gig to livescore the debut of visual artist Kambui’s new video project, Where Does the Time Go this coming Weds, Nov 15 at 7:30 at the Lincoln Center atrium space on Broadway just north of 62nd Street, he immediately brought in O’Farrill as a sparring partner. Which testifies to his reputation as an improviser as well as a sideman. Pattishall is no slouch as an improviser, either: this performance could school a lot of players.
O’Farrill is also a composer, with several tracks to his credit on his debut album Stranger Days, streaming at Sunnyside Records. It’s a lot of fun, and the lineup is somewhat unorthodox for a debut – two horns, bass and drums. Not to be disrespectful to young composers, but there are plenty of guys twice O’Farrill’s age who can’t write tunes as purposeful as the numbers here. Being a bigtime movie fan probably has a lot to do with the vividness of his sonic narratives.
The album title is a pun, and it’s apt, referencing both the Camus novel as well as our surreal times. The album opens with the optimistically waltzing harmonies of A & R Italian Eatery, O’Farriull and tenor saxophonist Chad Lefkowitz-Brown bantering like a couple of garrulous oldtimers in the neighborhood pizza joint. O’Farrill’s similarly brliliant brother Zack adds sparkle and spatter against Walter Stinson’s sinuous bass.
A fluttery solo trumpet approximation of waves licking the beach opens the epic The Stranger, then the bandleader takes an allusively North African tangent as a shout to the novel’s enigmatic protagonist. From there the band shuffle, then march with a Mingus-inspired grit, the brothers in the band messing with the time and pushing their instruments’ outer edges: the fun these guys are having is contagious. Long, exploratory, unresolved solos from each horn player give way to moody minimalism from the bass and drums before the procession resumes. Does anybody get shot? No spoilers here.
Stinson’s terse solo base interchange with moody horn harmonies peppered by latin-tinged rimshots in Survival Instincts. Why She Loves, by Stinson, begins with low-key, amiable solo sax; slinky syncopation and tense close harmonies follow until the brothers in the band bust through the clouds, clearing a path for the bass to bop around.
Aligator Got the Blues rises from moody, blues-infused atmospherics to a latin slink and then a strut as the sax bobs and weaves; they take it out with argumentative New Orleans horns and wind it back somberly. Another Stinson tune, Forget Everything You’ve Learned At School follows a byzantine if ultimately triumphant path out of frustration with routine and repetition: no wonder everybody can’t wait til the school day is over!
The album’s most ambitious point is a triptych that begins with The Cows and Their Farmer Walt, inspired by the famous 1935 Mickey Mouse cartoon The Band Concert, with the satirical, buffoonish feel of a Mostly Other People Do the Killing parody piece: everybody chews the scenery, with irresistibly amusing results. The Courtroom keeps this silly, conversational narrative going “as a judge (bass), a politician (sax), and an environmental scientist (trumpet) try to come to terms with what happened after this natural disaster, not to mention what happened to the cows and their farmer.” It concludes with the funky math of Building the Metamorphosen Bridge
The album closes with Lower Brooklyn Botanical Union, a jaunty swing shuffle and joint shout-out to Strayhorn and the brothers’ pioneering latin jazz composer grandfather. It’s impressively eclectic stuff from a guy whose ceiling seems to be pretty unlimited – and a good indication of what he might pull out of thin air at the Lincoln Center gig on Wednesday.
Rudresh Mahanthappa Brings His Sizzling Indian-Flavored Take on Charlie Parker to the Jazz Standard
Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa is one of the world’s most individualistic and thrilling musicians, a wide-ranging scholar of jazz as well as Indian music. His latest album, Bird Calls – streaming at Spotify – is a characteristically unconventional effort, heavily influenced by Charlie Parker, although not a tribute album per se. His performance with the quintet on the album at this year’s Winter Jazzfest was a spine-tingling display of chops, ideas, and high-voltage banter between the musicians. He’s doing it again, playing the album release show at the Jazz Standard on March 24 with sets at 7:30 and 10 PM with a slightly different crew: trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, pianist Bobby Avey, bassist François Moutin and drummer Jordan Perlson. Cover is $25.
Musicians have been highfiving each other in song for eons. The shout-outs to Bird on this album are all over the place, some as simple as Mahanthappa playing his own tune over Parker’s changes, to switching up the rhythm of a Bird melody or solo, along with more artfully concealed passages. Whatever the case, it’s classic Mahanthappa, ancient-sounding, often majestic Indian motifs within a somewhat harder bop framework than usual.
The album juxtaposes brief interludes with larger-scale numbers. Bird Calls #1, which opens it, is a brief, murkily suspenseful modal platform for the first of many animated sax-trumpet conversation (at Winter Jazzfest, they really took their time and had a ball with this). On the DL (a reference to Bird’s Donna Lee) opens with the same interplay at triplespeed or more – how firebrand young trumpeter Adam O’Farrill (son of latin jazz maven Arturo) matches Mahanthappa’s silken, precise intonation is stunning. At Winter Jazzfest, Indian percussion master Vish, of dancefloor groove instrumentalists SuKhush commented that if this was a sine wave, it would be completely flat [thanks for the company and the erudite insights, guys!].
Sax and trumpet join in a tightly rhythmic duet with echoes of Indian bhangra brass music, followed by Chillin’, referencing Bird’s Relaxin’ at the Camarillo in bubbly, joyous trumpet/sax eschanges, graceful melismas from O’Farrill and long, elusive flights from Mahanthappa. They follow a playful, masterful solo sax passage replete with overtones and subtle rhythmic shifts with Talin Is Thinking, inspired equally by Parker’s Mood and Mahanthappa’s young son. A pensive march that rises to majestic, fiery heights, pianist Matt Mitchell’s resonant, hard-hitting but surgically precise pedalpoint enhances the shadowy Indian-tinged mystery underneath. Moutin’s dancing, kinetic lines blend with and then leap from drummer Rudy Royston’s steady, subtle rat-a-tat drive: who knew he could channel an intricate tabla rhythm yet bring it into the 21st century, thousands of miles away?
Both Hands (based on Dexterity) is another showcase for clarity and rapidfire precision from sax and trumpet, hard bop over a briskly rumbling, hypnotic backdrop, Mitchell nimbly choosing his spots. A rustling Moutin solo leads into the wryly tiltled Gopuram (referencing Steeplechase – in India, a gopur is a temple tower), a tersely simmering, modally-charged number that reminds of Marc Cary (has he played with Mahanthappa? What a collaboration that would be!).
Maybe Later (drawing on Now’s the Time) contrasts lively, upbeat postbop horn riffage with a sternly rhythmic underpinning, with an acidically rippling Mitchell solo over Royston’s tumbling aggression and jabs. An expansive Mitchell solo sets the stage for Sure Why Not? (a shout-out to Confirmation and Barbados), the album’s least Indian-flavored and most lightheartedly pulsing track. The album winds up much the way it started, but with a staccato pulse, referencing Bird’s Anthropology with all hands on deck, blistering spirals from Mitchell and a hard-charging sax/trumpet debate. In case you haven’t figured out, there’s no one on earth who sounds remotely like Rudresh Mahanthappa, and he’s a force of nature live. This show promises to be amazing, get there early.