A Fiery Gem From Pianist Chris McCarthy

No doubt pianist Chris McCarthy was hoping for better days when he put out his most recent album Still Time to Quit – streaming at Bandcamp – in the fall of 2020. Like so many other vinyl records from that horrible year, it didn’t get the attention it deserved and that’s too bad because this is a beast of an album. McCarthy is a hard-charging, intense, colorful player with a cynical sense of humor, a sophisticated and sometimes explosive tunesmith, and has assembled a brilliant band to interact with.

He opens with the brief, pummeling trio piece That’s All You Get, packed with crisply rapidfire McCoy Tyner-esque riffs over the scramble of bassist Sam Minaie and drummer Jongkuk Kim. The horns – trumpeter Takuya Kuroda and tenor saxophonist Michael Blake – punch in over uneasily circling, modally-charged piano in Ready Steady Here You Go, McCarthy’s phantasmagorical splashes triggering a rapidfire trumpet solo. From there, Blake leads the group through momentary, ominous lulls and victoriously bluesy trajectories.

They open Shockingly Effective with stairstepping, syncopated harmonies, McCarthy busting loose with careening quasi-ragtime around a sailing Blake solo, Kuroda playing good cop to the pianist’s fanged New Orleans spectre.

McCarthy blends lingering, gospel-flavored contentment and enigmatic, Debussyesque gleam over Kim’s judicious polyrhythms in Toasty, the horns adding hazy harmonies before diverging in a series of soulful, increasingly driving exchanges. Valedictorian Driver is an energetic, rhythmically shifting take on what would otherwise be a classic soul ballad from the 70s, McCarthy fueling an increasingly funky drive, Kuroda choosing his spots as Kim matches him flurry for flurry up to a lively horn duel out.

Wryly expectant horn riffs interchange with McCarthy’s persistently uneasy undercurrent in Happy Tired, Minaie’s spring-loaded solo triggering the album’s most warmly nocturnal piano interlude. The big epic here is The Nightmare, no surprise considering when the album came out. Dissociative flickers from the bass and Blake’s flute give way to spare, portentous resonance from McCarthy, sax and trumpet ratcheting in tandem in a Wadada Leo Smith vein. McCarthy’s regal cascades and Blake’s throaty lines evoke more muscular bustle than night terror.

The final cut is Bury Me in Times Square (Underneath the M&M Store), which sounds like a genuine nightmare. Is there such a place? Duckduckgo says it’s on Broadway. Over an implied clave, the group blend gospel, latin soul and a little New Orleans into cheery, glittery contentment but also agitation, heavier on the caffeine than the sugar.

McCarthy doesn’t have any gigs coming up, but Blake is playing a rare, auspicious chordless trio show tonight, March 16 at 7:30 PM at Smalls with Tony Scherr on bass and Allan Mednard on drums, and you know Scherr is going to dig in for this one. Smalls is back open with no restrictions; cover is $25 cash at the door. You might want to get there early.

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Towering, Funky, Innovative Big Band Jazz From Organist Matthias Bublath’s Eight Cylinder Bigband

From the first few spiraling seconds of the intro to the first track on the Eight Cylinder Bigband’s debut album – streaming at Spotify – it’s obvious that this is not your average large jazz ensemble. Other than Dr. Lonnie Smith’s octet, this may be the only big band in the world led by a jazz organist. Matthias Bublath orchestrates his song with innovatively intricate flair, matching that with his attack on the keys. There’s a deep New Orleans funk influence here, but that’s often cached beneath many layers.

The result sometimes requires a lot of rapidfire, meticulous playing from the eighteen-piece group, and they deliver. The first number, Midnight Intro is a starry Hollywood Hills boudoir funk groove beefed up with judicious orchestral swells and an energetically melisamtic solo from lead trumpeter Takuya Kuroda.

Nice Green Bo has some nice call-and-response over funky syncopation, part 70s Crusaders, part darkly blustery, cinematic theme, a lithely dancing alto sax solo at the center as the organ swirls and pulses in the background. Eventually, the bandleader adds a Riders on the Storm electric piano solo.

Bassist Patrick Scales opens Eight Cylinder with a tasty rumble underneath the brightly pouncing horns, the song shifting further into funk, dipping and rising again with tight solos from alto sax and trumpet, to a torrential coda from Bublath. The simply titled Gospel Song has one of the album’s most imaginative charts, a surreal blend of slow, summery bluesiness and orchestral heft, Kuroda contributing bubbly lyricism.

Home Cooking is a Meters-style soul strut with a defiantly allusive baritone sax solo and a wryly hazy, halfspeed psychedelic interlude where all the textures get woozy. Bublath switches to piano, then glittery, reverbtoned Rhodes in the brassy salsa-jazz number Return the Source

Guitarist Ferdinand Kirner’s spare chicken-scratch lines contrast with the orchestral grandeur in Dump the Goose as the horns tease out a New Orleans melody and the bandleader sails around. Sad Belt is moodier but no less funky and majestic as Bublath takes the music into sunnier terrain, with hints of gospel and a series of bracing tradeoffs between the organ and various parts of the ensemble.

The most straight-up funky number here is Mister Scales, spiced with an ebulliently bluesy guitar solo. The album’s biggest New Orleans funk homage is Outro Blow. They close with Bolero, which is a lot closer to Stan Getz’s adventures in Brazilian music than it is anything particularly Spanish.

Pushing beyond both the confines of the organ jazz and big band demimondes, this is a very entertaining project from a group that also includes trumpeters Nemanja Jovanovich, Florian Jechlinger, Reinhard Greiner and Andreas Unterrainer; saxophonists Ulrich Wangenheim, Florian Riedl, Alexander Kuhn, Moritz Stahl and Gregor Burger; trombonists Jürgen Neudert, Hans Heiner Bettinger, Erwin Gregg and Jakob Grimm, and drummer Christian Lettner.

A Wild Celebration of 25 Years of Jazz at the New School

The New School’s jazz program turned 25 this year: to celebrate, they threw an eclectic, often transcendent bash last night featuring a mix of jazz legends, alumni, faculty and students, a younger generation practically jumping out of their socks to be playing with icons, the veterans just as psyched to be up there with what could be the next generation of jazz greats. The premise of the night – other than to get more than three hours’ worth of enticing video for students who might be vaccillating between jazz programs – was a tribute to former faculty members Frank Foster and Benny Powell. For whatever reason, the program ended up having more to do with Dizzy Gillespie than the Basie connection those two shared for decades. But what’s unplanned is almost always why jazz is so much fun.

The Foster/Powell tribute kicked off with a blistering version of Foster’s Manhattan Madness. Reggie Workman, as shrewd an observer of talent as there is, introduced the band and told everyone to keep an eye out for pianist Martha Kato, a student. He was right on the money about her: fearless when it came to mining the lowest registers for magisterial power, she showed off a crystalline, bluesy purism that made a perfect match alongside a mix of alums and faculty: Kenyatta Beasley (who conducted the ensemble) ; Cecil Bridgewater on trumpet; Arun Luthra,  Keith Loftis and the Cookers’ Billy Harper on saxes; Christopher Stover on trombone; Rory Stuart and Mike Moreno on guitars; Josh Ginsburg on bass; and the Yellowjackets’ Marcus Baylor clattering up a storm on drums. Their take on a series of swing, Afro-Cuban and bossa nova themes reveled in the tunefulness that defined Foster’s repertoire.

The night’s single most transcendent moment was a rich, gospel-infused blues duet between pianist Junior Mance and violinist Michi Fuji. The two play together in Mance’s trio and share a finely attuned chemistry, Fuji adding an element of mystery with judiciously placed glissandos, Mance mimicking Fuji’s attack with some unexpected flutters of his own before returning to an otherworldly glimmer. The two were done all too soon. Mance plays with his trio most Sundays at Cafe Loup on 13th just west of 6th Ave. in case you might need more of him.

Close behind was an expansive, high-energy yet richly dynamic “trumpet battle” led by the great Jimmy Owens in tandem with Bridgewater, a tribute to Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Gillespie, Thad Jones and also Thelonious Monk. Owens’ straight-ahead, often slyly witty style paired off with Bridgewater’s artfully ornamented attack; Bridgewater’s decision to do Clifford Brown’s Dahoud as a subdued, plaintive ballad was shatteringly successful. Again, it was a student, bassist Tony Lannen, who held the crowd rapt with both his wit – it takes nerve to punctuate your first solo of the night with a joke and make it resound like he did – and then a bristlingly precise, rapidfire spot later on which he played entirely with his bow. Meanwhile, Winard Harper put on a clinic in joyous, counterintuitive, latin-tinged beats: when he finally got a solo, it was all avant garde sticks and hardware and rims, and yet purist in a way that drew a straight line back to Elvin Jones. At one point, Owens wanted to take it all the way down to just his horn, but pianist JoAnne Brackeen wasn’t looking up: she’d become one with the resonant sheets of Monk she was playing at that point. Another up-and-coming talent, Alejandro Berti, joined in a genially crescendoing round-robin of trumpets to wind up the set on a literally high note.

For the night’s second duet, faculty pianist Andy Milne joined forces with Swiss harmonicist Gregoire Maret for a radical, slowly unwinding, atonalist reinterpretation of Body and Soul. The night ended on with the more traditionally ecstatic sounds of the Eyal Vilner Big Band, first backing nonagenarian tenor player Frank Wess and then fellow tenor legend Jimmy Heath, who’s five years his junior. Wess embodied pure soul, matched nuance to energy and got two standing ovations out of it; Heath, eternally youthful, refused to take a seat, cheered on his new bandmates – Mike McGarill, Tom Abbott, Lucas Pino, Asaf Yuria and big baritone guy Jason Marshall on saxes; the explosive Cameron Johnson and Takuya Kuroda on trumpet; Ivan Malespin and John Mosca on trombones; Yonatan Riklis on piano and Mike Karn on bass, with drummer Joe Strasser showing off a nimble originality matched to a power that never quite exploded – clearly, he was feeling the room and played to it perfectly. Chanteuse Brianna Thomas – whom none other than Will Friedwald has anointed as arguably the new generation’s finest straight-ahead jazz singer – joined them and battled a nonresponsive PA to put her message of sass and style across vividly in a rousing take of Lover, Come Back to Me. Otherwise, Vilner’s arrangements of Bud Powell (a potently percussive Un Poco Loco) and Diz nimbly articulated voices throughout the ensemble, Vilner himself taking the occasionally understated bluesy solo spots on alto sax. When they closed with what sounded like a Gillespie reworking of a Louis Jordan jump blues, Heath grinned and looked on deviously before choosing his spot to join in the raucous riffage as it wound out. It was something of a shock to see a handful of empty seats: concerts with the sheer magnitude of this one don’t come along every day.

The New School may not have weekly concerts like they had back in the early days, but those they do have tend to be extraordinary: both Marc Ribot (with his noir soundtrack project) and Ethiopian jazz masters Either/Orchestra have delivered equally sensational concerts here in recent months, something to keep in mind if you’re looking for major live jazz events percolating just under the radar.