A Day's Work: Kenny Warren's Sweet World

The discrepancy between expertise and reward is nowhere larger than in the jazz world. The point was driven home by a comment made by trumpeter Kenny Warren, who remarked how strange and wonderful it was that he could perform a prestigious concert one day and be back moving furniture for a living the next. Most people with even a modicum of talent who devote their life to a worthwhile pursuit find adequate compensation. But throughout the arts, and especially in creative music, the gap between mastery and opportunity is gaping.

I mused about that while entranced by the music of Kenny Warren’s Sweet World on February 5. His trio, featuring Christopher Hoffman, cello, and Nathan Ellman-Bell, drums, treated 50 of us to a very satisfying evening of Warren’s original compositions at CitySpace in Easthampton, MA. Nary a microphone on stage, the all-acoustic, 70-minute set consisted of material from their 2023 self-titled release, and an equal number of newer pieces they hope to record this summer.

In the main, the music had clear rhythmic structure, filled with exciting “bass” lines that grooved. The compositions had distinct personalities with strong hook-filled melodies. There were periods of open playing, sparking animated conversations between the musicians. The band was tight, nailing tricky endings and complex unison passages. And most of all, they played with the joy that results from creativity unleashed.

There was a slinky-ness to a lot of the music, played within a limited band of relaxed energy and sonic territory. With the exception of a short section of circular breathing, Warren steered clear of extended techniques, choosing instead to highlight his beautiful tone and a lithe, expressive approach to his instrument.

I first met Warren when I presented Slavic Soul Party! at UMass in 2017. He has been a part of Matt Moran’s new-jazz exploration of Roma music since 2008. The scales and phrasing that characterize Balkan music, and related forms like Arab maqam, have seeped into Sweet World, with “Angels Migration”, and "Q To Canal Light Show" providing thrilling reference to non-Western traditions. Dressed in black, Warren’s understated on-stage persona reinforced his relaxed attitude, but one with clear musical intention. Like fellow trumpeters Kirk Knuffke, Nate Wooley and Shane Endsley, Warren was profoundly influenced by Ron Miles while growing up in Denver. Warren shares Miles’ humble life-stance.

Christopher Hoffman is among a small throng of jazz musicians shining a spotlight on the cello. (See Tomeka Reid, Lester St. Louis, Daniel Levin, Marika Hughes, Erik Friedlander, Akua Dixon, Hank Roberts…) He walked with a swagger on “Respectfulee”, a bebop-inflected tribute to Lee Konitz, and provided a highly syncopated backbone for a slithering “Pigeon Rich”. Hoffman’s hand-in-glove work with Warren mirrors his essential role in the bands of Henry Threadgill, Anat Cohen, Tony Malaby and James Brandon Lewis. I hope his new job at the Kent School in Connecticut won’t impede his performing schedule too much.

A transplanted Brooklynite like Warren, Nathan Ellman-Bell is a tasty drummer who has been working with the trumpeter since the late teens. Currently subbing in the Bobby Darin-inspired Broadway jukebox musical, Just in Time, Ellman-Bell is a charter member of Brass Against, a New York-based, horn-heavy energy machine that cover songs by Tool, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden and Black Sabbath, and write their own anti-establishment themes. A graduate of the Idyllwild Arts Academy (CA) and the Peabody Institute (Baltimore), Ellman-Bell drilled into tunes he knew well, making them feel inevitable. It is always great to be able to widen my circle of good drummers.

Even as paying gigs for artists like Warren, Hoffman and Ellman-Bell trickle in, the intrinsic rewards of unleashing creativity pile up.

“I play music because I love to play music, and because no one tells me I can’t,” Kenny Warren writes in the notes accompanying Sweet World. “No one is asking me to make another record. I will almost certainly lose money on it, like I have with every other record I’ve ever made. And it’s not going to change the world. It’s simply for the joy of making live art with and for the people I love. It’s silly and absurd, and sweet. It makes me feel good, and hopefully it will make some other people feel good too when they listen to it. Maybe it will make somebody wonder, or make them want to try something weird and beautiful, if, inshallah, they have the space to do so. I’m taking the good with the bad. I’m trying to live a life guided by love and honesty, even when the world fills me with existential dread. I have to believe that in dark times, simple acts of humanity are akin to acts of resistance. Sweet World.”

Anna Webber Nonet at the Iron Horse

It’s exciting to watch the emergence of a major talent, and over the few last years we’ve had a front row seat for Anna Webber’s full flowering as an instrumentalist, composer and bandleader. For this listener, confirmation of her inclusion among the top echelon came on January 22, when she led a nonet in the world premiere of a new book of compositions at Northampton’s venerable Iron Horse.

“it’s easier to imagine the end of the world…”, is the working title for material to be recorded next week, after two performances at The Jazz Gallery in New York. Taken from a quote by philosopher Fredric Jameson (“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism”), the half dozen pieces encompassed a variety of styles, expertly played by an all-star band that included: Yuma Uesaka (clarinets), Ingrid Laubrock (tenor and soprano sax), Ryan Easter (trumpet), DoYeon Kim (gayageum), Mary Halvorson (guitar), David Virelles (piano), Chris Tordini (bass), Ches Smith (drums) and Webber (tenor and soprano sax, flute). The nine musicians hail from five countries.

Webber’s first Jazz Shares concert was with her Simple Trio (Matt Mitchell, John Hollenbeck) in 2018. She has since performed with pianist Eric Wubbels (2020), the David Sanford Big Band (2022), the Max Johnson Trio (2023), and her quintet Shimmer Wince (2024). So we’ve had ample opportunity to bear witness to her growth as an artist. Her Nonet represents another leap forward.

Webber co-leads a big band with Angela Morris, so we know she can write for large ensembles. But the music we heard on Thursday was downright compelling: complex without being ponderous, rhythmically rich, with lots of angles and rock n' roll energy. She used chimes, gayageum (Korean zither) and contrabass clarinet to produce unique textures, and each composition had a clarity of purpose and a point of view. The music moved from high octane density to delicate two person exchanges. One driving section, played loud and pan-tonally by all nine members, was directly followed by a whispered trumpet/piano interlude. We exhaled, cleared our minds and marveled at the intensity that just flew by. The pace of the concert, and an ever changing combination of instrumental colors, kept our ears glued to the (very crowded) stage.

A couple of audience members referred to Mary Halvorson, Ingrid Laubrock and Anna Webber as “the trinity”; other bandmembers: Ches Smith, David Virelles, Chris Tordini, also have well-established careers and have played in the area multiple times. But DoYeon Kim, Yuma Uesaka and Ryan Easter were all wowing us for the first time.

DoYeon Kim, is a traditionally trained Korean artist with advanced degrees from both the New England Conservatory of Music and Berklee’s Global Jazz Institute. Mentored by Joe Morris and Mark Dresser, she has brought the gayageum into the world of creative music, demonstrating yet again, jazz’s appetite for innovation and inclusion. Hitting strings with the vigor of Eddie Van Halen, Kim played with abandon as she flicked between blues and Asian scales.

Yuma Uesaka brought three clarinets, including his massive contrabass, situated an octave lower than the bass clarinet. His solo on the contrabass was nimble and vibratious as he filled the 47-year old Iron Horse with deep resonant sounds. He was the glue guy, contributing a reedy complexity to the sound stew. A classmate of UMass professor Jonathan Hulting-Cohen at the University of Michigan, the 35-year old reedist will be back in June with Max Johnson’s Sextet, while talk is under way to bring his cooperative quartet, Tropos, next season.

Ryan Easter was a revelation. He has a gorgeous tone and possesses all the tools we associate with Wooley, Evans, Knuffke and Ho Bynum. He is not only an adventurous trumpeter, but a fleet tongued MC with the band Wrens (Elias Stemeseder, Lester St. Louis, Jason Nazary). He founded the Trap Music Orchestra in 2014, described as “synchronizing the aural lineage of Black diasporic music around the modern library of the trap music branch of hip-hop, in the orchestral style made legendary by greats such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Charles Mingus.” It was nice that Amherst College music professor Darryl Harper and Easter, who met years ago at VCU, had a chance to catch up after the show. 

I can only imagine the logistical and financial challenges Webber faced putting this project together. From writing a Chamber Music America New Works grant, to developing a budget and schedule, the non-musical part of being a bandleader is thankless and its own skill set. Webber seems to excel at that, too, and along with her burgeoning skills as a composer, instrumentalist and leader, we have every confidence the 41-year old Canadian wunderkind will be shining a light deep into the future.

For those who want more, Webber will be back with John Hollenbeck’s GEORGE, March 17 and Max Johnson’s Sextet, June 4.

Vinny Golia Trio in Northampton

In our age of university-educated jazz artists, the number of self-trained musicians is small and dwindling. Vinny Golia, who brought his trio to the Parlor Room in Northampton, MA on January 10, is one of them. Trained as a visual artist, Golia started his musical journey at age 25 when he bought a soprano saxophone with money earned creating album art for Chick Correa. The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist, who turns 80 in a couple of months, can be found on over 500 recordings, and has mentored generations of southern Californian improvisers. Pretty good for an autodidact.

The trio was to include bassist Ken Filiano, whose relationship with Golia began in 1978. But Filiano recently had hand surgery and was unavailable. Drummer Michael TA Thompson, whose shared history with Golia also dates to the late-70s, suggested Cooper-Moore, the iconoclastic pianist. The only problem: there is no piano in the Parlor Room, so Cooper-Moore, who also turns 80 this year, brought his array of handcrafted string instruments. It changed everything.

Instead of a band of long-time collaborators, we saw the first interaction between two highly regarded elders. That Golia and Cooper-Moore had never played together and only met the day of the gig, gave the evening a miraculous quality. Where else but in the jazz world can artists create beautiful music together with no pre-conception?

By centering the blues throughout the performance, Cooper-Moore rooted the improvisation and gave us footholds. I don’t know that Cooper-Moore considers himself a shaman, but on Saturday he was definitely connecting us to the spirit world. The sounds he produced on his home-made instruments: diddley-bow, harp, fretless banjo and mouth harp, felt both ancient and contemporary, conjuring African kora, early Delta blues guitar, the funky bass of Fred Thomas, and the electronics of Morton Subotnick, all of it filtered through an expansive (avant-garde) sense of time and harmony. The results were transcendent.

Cooper-Moore has lived the bifurcated life of a contemporary creative musician: making ends meet busking on the streets of New York and receiving a Lifetime Achievement award from the Vision Festival in 2017. Born and raised in Virginia, he spent time in Hartford, where his brother-in-law, pianist Emory Smith, was a mentor. He also lived in Boston and knows Easthampton through a long-ago girlfriend. He’s a trusted colleague of William Parker, David S Ware, Bill Cole, Chad Taylor and Gerald Cleaver, and has created music for theater and dance with Rita Dove, Laurie Carlos, Marlies Yearby, Emily Mann and Carl Hancock Rux. Cooper-Moore is a fierce, one-of-a-kind musician who has lived an extremely rich life in the arts, a thoughtful, kind and soft-spoken renaissance man with a wise demeanor. 

Michael TA Thompson sat on stage between his band mates, providing pulse and connective tissue. His responsive rat-a-tat, played at just the right volume, propelled the music and gave it shape. Repeatedly, he locked in with Cooper-Moore, the evening’s de facto bass player, to groove, although invariably the groove would change and move on. His use of wooden xylophone and thumb piano gave the evening a hint of Codona. As loose, sinewy lines emerged from the stage, I kept coming back to the words of Elliott Sharp: “Rightness, not accuracy, is necessarily the goal.” Thompson, who grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, is Golia’s east coast drummer of choice, and at 70 he remains a talent deserving wider recognition. Roy Campbell, Jr. was his entrée into the New York scene, where he has collaborated with William Parker, Joe McPhee, Charles Gayle, Oliver Lake, Matthew Shipp, Henry Grimes and Jason Kao Hwang. He also has a foot in the Caribbean music world, having toured and recorded with Clypsonians, The Mighty Sparrow and Owen Gray.

With the exception of Scott Robinson, Vinny Golia plays more horns than anyone I know. He has mastered dozens of saxophones, clarinets, flutes and other reed instruments; he brought six of them to the Parlor Room, including tenor, soprano and sopranino sax. His brief turn on piccolo, with Cooper-Moore on harp, produced beautiful overtones of Japanese shakuhachi and koto music. Nine Winds, the label Golia established in 1977, has done major work documenting the creative music scene in southern California. Its catalogue of 170 recordings includes work by Bobby Bradford, John Carter, Mark Dresser, Bert Turetsky, Nels and Alex Cline. As a self-trained outsider who only came to music in his 20s, it’s interesting that Golia ended up in the academy. He has mentored (and hired) generations of students at CalArts, where he has taught since 1999. Golia told me that having access to talented students who could bring his large scale compositions to life, was a blessing for both him and his students. He played with an open heart and open ears, happily enmeshed in the spontaneous, wide-ranging, three-way conversation.

Golia and Cooper-Moore were both part of William Parker’s Little Huey Orchestra in 1995 when over two nights at the Knitting Factory, they recorded Sunrise in the Tone World. But Golia and Cooper-Moore performed on different days, so we have Michael TA Thompson to  thank for providing the impetus to bring these two titans together for the first time.