Pass it Down: Ken Vandermark's Edition Redux

The passing of knowledge from one generation to the next is terribly important to the evolution and continuity of jazz. The history is full of stories of future standard bearers being shaped by formative interaction with their elders. Before the explosion of college-based jazz programs and the simultaneous shrinking of performance opportunities, most of that mentoring took place on bandstands and in the hours getting to those bandstands.

So it was heartening to watch 58-year old saxophonist and clarinetist Ken Vandermark lead a band of musicians half his age in concert at Hawks & Reed on April 20. The Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares event was part of an eight-city U.S. tour. The band has a European tour scheduled for the fall.

It’s hard to overestimate how valuable this kind of practical schooling is for emerging artists. The young musicians, Erez Dessel (keyboards), Beth McDonald (tuba) and Lily Finnegan (drums), are a few years out of college (undergraduate and graduate), and they absorbed Vandermark’s musical lessons a like dry paper towel. Vandermark remarked what fast learners they were, and how quickly they were able to inhabit his complicated compositions. At the same time, they were also soaking up soft skills: how to carry themselves, how to talk to sound engineers and interact with audience members, how to pack for the road.

Vandermark, who booked and managed the tour, also had to stay flexible and nimble. His original vision, called Edition 55, was a quintet with cello, bass, tuba and drums. Two months before liftoff, health and other unforeseen circumstances necessitated a reconfiguration into Edition Redux. Beth McDonald and Lily Finnegan were holdovers, while pianist Erez Dessel was a late addition. Vandermark had to rewrite parts and teach the newcomer his system for utilizing his compositions.

The music, which will be recorded and released on Vandermark’s Audiographic Records, had sections of dense, driving, unison playing juxtaposed with portions of open, meditative music. It had a suite-like sweep, and like all of Vandermark’s work, it was compelling and coherent and inspired by heroes of the composer. We heard pieces dedicated to the American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow and the French filmmaker Robert Bresson.

We were glad to provide Dessel with an acoustic piano, his first of the tour. Although he sounded very good on his Korg keyboard, the piano sounded grand, expansive. A recent New England Conservatory graduate, he was music director of the Savanah (GA) Music Festival Jazz Academy, where he learned about the work of Georgia-born saxophonist Marion Brown. During show-and-tell at the post-concert dinner, we showed him Brown’s hard to find book, “Recollections”, and an original painting he did while living in western Massachusetts. Dessel is currently the community engagement coordinator for the Chicago Philharmonic.

McDonald had a big fat satisfying tone on tuba that was augmented by a bunch of pedals and effects. She gave the music its bottom while also providing drones, rumblings and a bit of mystery. Like the rest of the band, she studied in Boston (NEC) and lives in Chicago. Like the rest of her bandmates, she was curious and gracious in equal measure.

Finnegan got her masters degree from Berklee School of Music, where she was part of the Global Jazz Institute and the Institute for Jazz and Gender Justice. Her career has been greatly advanced by Terri Lynn Carrington and Kris Davis, who put her to work and put her in touch with folks who can advance a career. She is now back in her hometown of Chicago, where she is the record store manager of Catalytic Sound, an experimental music cooperative that Vandermark is involved in.

Ken Vandermark, an important figure on Chicago’s jazz scene since 1990, learned from elders too, of course. These include Hal Russell, the idiosyncratic, multi-instrumentalist, tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson, the owner/operator of Chicago’s jazz finishing school, the Velvet Lounge, and German reed man Peter Brötzmann, a leading figure in the European avant-garde. His father, jazz writer Stu Vandermark, also had an early impact. He and Ken’s mom, Sue, were at the Greenfield show, as well as the concert the night before at Rob Vandermark’s Seven Cycles bicycle factory in Watertown, MA.

So it goes, from generation to generation. Ken Vandermark is a humble guy with high standards and an expansive understanding of music; he’s providing a perfect conduit of jazz knowledge. Lending expertise and encouraging youth is the ultimate expression of hope, and insures a future steeped in past accomplishments.

The Ties That Bind: Stephen Haynes’ Knuckleball at the Shea Theater

In the creative music world, relationships matter. Because the music is heavily improvised, musicians must listen deeply to each other in order for meaningful dialogue to occur. Because the material payouts are often meager, the relationships between players becomes its own reward.

I was reminded of this fact on April 15, when Stephen Haynes’ septet, Knuckleball, convened at the Shea Theater for a concert produced by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares. The concert was supported by a generous grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts, so at least for this evening, the musicians were paid well.

“Perhaps my favorite thing about the work yesterday in Turners Falls,” Haynes wrote on Facebook, “was the conversations: in cars, filled with sets of musicians driving to the gig, before and after our set, during dinner before we performed. Some of this was old friends in the ensemble reconnecting and reminiscing, some of it was new connections - the sort of listening and exchanges that knit and gather ensemble naturally. All of this flowed into and informed the improvisation throughout our hour plus set.”

And what a set it was.

In order to be closer to the audience, the ensemble set up in the pit in front of the stage. Sam Newsome (soprano sax), Josh Roseman (trombone) and Ben Stapp (tuba), were in one row, facing the three cornetists: Taylor Ho Bynum, Herb Robertson and Haynes, with Eric Rosenthal (drums) between them.

The unscripted performance had the drama and the ebb and flow of a great film score. There were no solos, per se. Rather, instrumental voices would emerge from the sound pool to command attention before retreating back into the mix. Periods of stasis morphed into cacophony before settling into quiet reflection. Brief solos and moments of dialogue between members of the ensemble gave the music space to breath.

Robertson’s use of miscellaneous sound making devices, what the Art Ensemble of Chicago called “little instruments”, greatly expanded the band’s sonic universe. Newsome, fresh off his brilliant work with Joe Morris and Francisco Mela in the same space three weeks earlier, attached tubes and tin foil to his soprano sax to produce myriad textures and colors. All the horn players employed mutes of various kinds, sometimes more than one at a time, to bend notes and invoke voice-like inflection.

The music was open and abstract, and produced a range of emotions. The nature of the proceedings reinforced the notion that we were exploring basic sound science, but the mastery of the musicians meant that the experiments were all in the service of making a collective sound. There was nothing dry or academic about it. Indeed, the dynamism of the players gave the septet a cohesion and shared purpose; they meshed perfectly.

After the show, most of the band reconvened at our house, where we listened to and marveled at Herb Robertson’s monumental 1988 JMT recording, Shades of Bud Powell. Ben Stapp, who teaches music to public school youngsters in Long Island City, was very interested in The Saga of Padani, a very hip recording by Oakland middle schoolers who have been taught to compose and improvise by their teacher Randy Porter. So it went past midnight, sharing stories and information, kibitzing, joking, eating and drinking.

Which brings us back to the notion of relationship. There were no egos, no stars in the band. Just seven highly accomplished veterans deciding in the moment what the music needed. The bonds deepened and expectations soared that the bands’ upcoming gigs at Firehouse 12 and Real Art Ways would yield even more satisfying results, and that the subsequent recording would be worthy of widespread public attention.

The Future of Jazz is Now: Mali Obamsawin Sextet at IMA

The perennial question “is jazz dead” has always puzzled me, and the related imperative, taken up by many a jazz society, to “keep jazz alive”, is also a head scratcher. Certainly from an economic standpoint, the jazz world is on life support, largely dependent on wealthy patrons, institutions and public funds for its survival. Jazz musicians struggling to make ends meet is not a new problem, even if the reasons have shifted from racism and unscrupulous club and record owners, to public and media neglect. But despite real hardships borne by artists, the health of the music has never been better. If you know where to look, you can find more talented musicians, exploring more facets of music than ever in history.

That point was driven home by the Mali Obamsawin Sextet, who delivered a great concert in crappy weather at the Institute for the Musical Arts on March 25. These six young musicians, most in their mid-twenties, are living proof that jazz, as a set of musical ideals, is alive and well. Their stop in Goshen, MA was part of a tour in support of Obamsawin’s recent album, Sweet Tooth. The band included Mali Obomsawin (bass, voice), Zack O'Farrill (drums), Allison Burik (alto sax, bass clarinet), Noah Campbell (tenor sax), Miriam Elhajli (voice, guitar) and Allison Philips (trumpet).

Like most emerging musicians today, their learning place has shifted from the bandstand to the classroom, but the members of the Sextet have already logged a ton of real world experience. They seemed relaxed and seasoned, and delivered a polished performance filled with compelling music. The compositions, all found on the new record, were written and/or arranged by Obamsawin, and highlight her connection to her Abenaki heritage.

The evening began with a solo by Elhajli, a Venezuelan-Moroccan-American guitarist and vocalist, educated at Berklee. She’s a researcher at The Association for Cultural Equity, founded by Alan Lomax, where she discovered Doc Watson’s, “Winter’s Night”. Her finger-picking performance was a tour de force and showcased an angelic and muscular voice that transfixed all 50 audience members.

Obamsawin, a member of Abenaki First Nation at Odanak (Quebec), was mentored by Taylor Ho Bynum at Dartmouth College. Ho Bynum plays cornet on Sweet Tooth and helped produce the recording. Five years removed from Dartmouth, Obamsawin is an activist and a holder of stories and culture, and she set up many of the pieces with concise and cogent remarks.

“Wawasint8da”, a beautiful Catholic hymn with lyrics translated from Latin to Abenaki by an early Jesuit priest, devolved as the melody fractured, reflecting the complicated history between First Nation peoples and their colonizers. “Pedegwajois” featured the recorded voice of Theophile Panadis, recounting an ancient tale of a young man receiving a teaching, which brings him to the middle of Betobagw (“Lake Champlain”) during a thunderstorm.

One reason jazz remains a living, breathing art form is the integration of disparate musical traditions with African-American constructs. Many jazz artists, including Charlie Parker, Oscar Pettiford, Mildred Bailey and Don Pullen, had Native American ancestry, and the weaving of traditional chants, melodies and stories into jazz lexicon has precedent. Saxophonist Jim Pepper, whose parents were Creek and Kaw, had a hit in the late-1960s/early 1970s with “Witchi-Tai-To,” which was built around a peyote song Pepper learned from his grandfather. Recent efforts by Obamsawin, Diné trumpeter Delbert Anderson and Nez Percé singer Julia Keefe have organically incorporated Indigenous aesthetics into jazz. For information on the impact Native Americans have had on American music more generally, watch RUMBLE: The Indians Who Rocked the World.

The horn section added piquancy and punch. Noah Campbell, a classmate of Obamsawin’s at Dartmouth, delivered strong solos on tenor and soprano saxophone. He’s getting his PhD in political science at Brown in his spare time. Alto saxophonist and bass clarinetist Allison Burik was mentored by Joe Morris at New England Conservatory. When I saw Morris at last week’s Jazz Shares concert, he told me how much he liked and respected Burik. Trumpeter Allison Phillips was educated at the New School, before earning a masters in Jazz Performance from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in The Netherlands. Together they provided bite, carried melody and raised the level of musicianship in the ensemble.

Drummer Zack O’Farrill was the only musician I had worked with before. He was part of a family band with his father, Arturo, and brother, Adam, in Holyoke in 2013, and he performed in Easthampton, with Adam’s Stranger Days quartet in 2017. As third generation royalty (his grandfather is big band legend Chico O’Farrill), Zack is well positioned to carry on the family legacy.

Mali Obamsawin’s Sextet provided a powerful first-person assertion of cultural pride, along with a healthy dose of musical prowess and youthful exuberance. It gave us pleasure in the moment and hope for the future of jazz.