Concertgoing – part VIII, IX | Listenings by Jason Weiss

How to account for twenty-eight years of listening to music in New York, almost a blur. So many, many performances; in clubs, spaces, theaters, museums, bars, homes, parks, churches—and I can hardly recall the concerts from last month. I will have to consult my agendas for those early years, to see what I forgot. But I do notice a progression of sorts in the places where I have lived. From the Jersey shore to Berkeley to LA to Paris and then to New York, the opportunities for listening expanded for me exponentially. And in the past decade now, Brooklyn itself has provided most of my musical sustenance.

Concertgoing 8: New York

What is it about the lure of live music, live performance, being in the moment, with its risk of collapse and its promises, that we always have to have more? Why do we need this thing, this almost nothing, such that we go again and again in search of it? And take nothing away but the experience. Where music is offered, we go there to listen, that’s all, not to read the paper or climb on a ladder, and to watch the people making that music. Whatever the space, and with the singularity of each particular space, the experience is different than listening to a recording. It’s a way of adding to what we’ve heard, even surprising us; we want to be surprised somehow, that is also why we attend. Because we don’t know how that specific group will sound that night.

So, it should not seem unexpected that a kind of amnesia settles over us soon after we leave the hall where the music took place, after it has rinsed loose from the stones and the trees and the air. Nothing more to listen to. Just a memory full of holes, and the vague certainty of where we were but a moment ago. Yet somewhere the embers remain of that music, still dimly aglow, added to all the others. There may be some residue that persists, likely beneficial, because after all it was music that passed through us, human spirit, and something beyond the human.

Some of what I recall, glimpses, is because I had to work a little more for the experience, in that I was writing about it. Two pieces for the Village Voice, my first year in New York, 1989, were instances of writing I had never done before and so my listening, how I took it all in, was like an experiment as well. I can’t even say if my listening was different except that I had an immediate purpose which demanded some form of increased attention. I had to write my article right after the concert—which I had done in the past, but in a more casual way. I was never a full-time journalist, the pieces I wrote didn’t require an immediate turnaround between the experience and the published text. But if I wanted to consider pursuing such a line of work, I better get used to it. My first piece for the Voice, I went over to the Knitting Factory on East Houston to catch Khan Jamal, the vibes player from Philadelphia. I really liked what I’d heard of his Steeplechase records. Ali and I both started listening to him after his first record with Johnny Dyani in the mid-1980s. And I was sitting at a table right in front of the stage with my not yet wife, jotting notes as I was listening. I enjoyed it plenty, but what did I hear? I’ll have to go back and read my own article.

A month or two later, first day of summer, I had to get down to the tip of Battery Park before dawn. There, with a keyboard slung around his neck, was Sun Ra, plus Don Cherry with his pocket trumpet, and five members of the Arkestra, all about to lead a procession in celebration of the solstice. Produced by sound artist Charlie Morrow, with his bowler hat and blowing on a conch shell, the procession followed a short ways along the park overlooking the harbor until we settled into seats for the rest of the concert. I had gotten up around four in the morning, so I was wide awake by then, and I recognized this was really quite a special event, with such important figures in music. But how, I surely wondered even at the time, did Sun Ra, in his mid-70s, agree to perform at that hour? Did Charlie Morrow have a large grant to finance the event? As usual, Sun Ra had us going with his catchy space ditties and all the rest. It was remarkable that two hundred people could show up like that at the break of day, and I was always delighted to hear Don Cherry in any group, he enhanced whatever was going on, gave it extra spirit.

Which is why I recall the last time I went to a Don Cherry concert, in the mid-1990s up at Symphony Space, less than a year before he died. Because he didn’t play much at all, and as a result the band, disciples mostly, wasn’t up to a whole lot. Whether he was drugged out or what, he tended to float on the music more than engage with it. Something was not right, that much seemed clear.

Concertgoing 9: Big bands

The blast of the horns lifts me up every time, more than I might imagine. Even heard on record, a big band will have that effect on me; but to feel the full force of a live performance, the air thunderous with all that blowing, limbs and sinews, blood and breath stirred to attention, how can we not be changed by the experience? The exquisite machinery of a big band when it’s blazing away, the players unafraid, each their part in the edifice of glory, transports me before I know it. We go marching forth in step, fortified by the joy in the music.

Is there such a thing as joy in music? For listeners like me, at least, and players too, what else to call it? That insubstantial something that seeps right to our core. And the music can be any size, any tone, when it seizes us. But a big band nearly overwhelms—there too is its power—so many Gabriels with their horns proclaiming fealty to a sound, a promise.

In the early 1980s, when I first saw Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath in Paris, probably at the New Morning, only then did I really appreciate the special excitement of a big band. Amplified in his music were the lovely lilting South African melodies, the multileveled voicings. Eight or nine horns (brass and reeds), piano (McGregor), bass, and drums, the Brotherhood was a revelation to me. Rhythmically driven, very swinging, far reaching—and not American. After a dozen years, just a nucleus of the band was South African, but the music’s origins were unmistakable, even with Europeans, and Caribbeans, and also Americans in the group; and even with echoes of Ellington and Basie, Mingus, Sun Ra, sounding through. The Brotherhood was always thrilling, and I played their records over and over, especially the more unbridled editions of the band from the ’70s. Surely I saw them more than twice, with Ali, but I know the last time was outside at La Villette, on 3 July 1988, part of a festival there. In the open air that afternoon, their big band sound was like a great affirmation, a shout and dance for life, and that worked for me too since I had gone to hear them with my best friends. So, we were not disappointed: they delivered what we went there for.

It was in the ’80s that I also got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra, at least a couple times. Again, probably at the New Morning, but a more unusual venue was later at the Warsaw Jazz Jamboree in October 1987, at the spacious Sala Kongresowa behind the massive Palace of Culture and Science, a gift from Khrushchev. What a treat to behold the full complement of Sun Ra’s crew in their glowing and colorful robes as they danced and chanted onto the wide stage—the rapt audience may not have known what to make of his Arkestra even at that late date. Someone I spoke with thought it was all an elaborate goof, that he was putting one over on the Polish public, but Sun Ra had been developing his sense of spectacle since the ’40s. Far from a joke, his marvelous vision offered the audience a hopeful perspective on the future by using the popular language of the space age while also having fun. And when the Arkestra came together on one of their rousing themes steeped in Fletcher Henderson and the Swing Era, it was clear the musicians could play their asses off. They had such a big bold sound; they could do anything. One left a Sun Ra concert exhilarated.

What I learned from seeing Gil Evans and his orchestra, whom I caught a couple times as well in that same decade, was different. We won’t worry about whatever perceived distinctions there may be between a big band and an orchestra, in jazz terms; doesn’t matter. Like Sun Ra, by the ’80s Gil Evans had had a long career. He had worked with many fine musicians over the years, and one of his chief talents—as was often said—was as a colorist, using his fellow bandmembers for their own special tone and personality, so that the varying and overlapping rosters each had their unique sound. I’m pretty sure I saw his band play at the New Morning and also at the grand Théàtre de la Ville; at least once George Lewis was in the lineup and Steve Lacy too. So, it was nice to be able to witness the organic particularity of his current orchestra, according to the people involved. Was Phil Woods also in the band one of those times? I think so. Always you could find musicians you knew from other contexts there to make up part of the Gil Evans palette.

There were others, of course, other big bands and large ensembles and orchestras, especially with lots of horns, that I had the privilege to enjoy in live performance. There was Luc Le Masne and his bright popping jazz orchestra Bekummernis, and earlier in the ’80s the Vienna Art Orchestra, dazzling in their own way. Later that decade, there was Dizzy Gillespie with his all-star United Nation Orchestra that included Sam Rivers, pretty stupendous. And maybe the same year, an ensemble that was big on spectacle, effectively so, more prominent than the music itself, with masses of horns, and masks and costumes too: Urban Sax. I saw them as part of the Fête de la Musique, the evening of the summer solstice, on the sloping lawns of the Square Willette, the park leading up to Sacre Coeur. Clusters of horn players at various spots in close proximity, so that we all stood among them, as they kept honking out their quasi-minimalist patterns.

It strikes me that I probably saw more large ensembles during my decade in Paris than I have through all the years since in New York, but still there were some. The Mingus Big Band, down in the Time Café on Lafayette Street, with Ray Anderson on trombone and Ronnie Cuber on baritone. Would that be around the year 2000 or so? Mingus is always stimulating music, and many of his pieces are old favorites for me. As a legacy band, even with changing personnel, they do his music proud. And in more recent years—twice now, once down at SubCulture on Bleecker and last year at BAM—I’ve been impressed by Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, a big band of remarkable cohesiveness and depth, and clearly epic ambitions thematically. In that respect, the performance at BAM was almost too much for me, seeing how the work, Real Enemies, incorporated numerous video screens over the mise-en-scène of the big band all in pursuing a theme of conspiracy theories. And why not, I suppose, if you’re gonna go big. Be that as it may, the majestic fullness of sound that one absorbs, physically and in spirit, attending a big band concert, really there’s nothing like it.

Headline photo: Cub Scout parade, Deal, NJ, 1963.