Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  For all intents and purposes Berne was in the trenches with Zorn: they favored many of the same collaborators and were equally serious about carving out space as composers. In 1989 Elektra Musician released their Coleman tribute as a Zorn album, Spy vs. Spy—a battle royal in which the musicians wrestled Ornette’s tunes to the mat with a brawny intensity inspired by hardcore punk.

  Zorn brought similar panache to Naked City, a maniacally twitchy band with a fondness for pairing soundtrack atmospherics with a rude graffiti scrawl. (When Coleman’s plaintive “Lonely Woman” cropped up in the Naked City book, it was played with feral commitment to the melody but a bass riff copped from Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman.”) Zorn’s confreres in the band included Frisell, Horvitz, the bassist Fred Frith, and the drummer Joey Baron. There was usually a vocalist of volcanic heat and terror: either Yamatsuka Eye, of the Japanese noise band Boredoms, or Mike Patton, of the American alternative-metal bands Mr. Bungle and Faith No More.

  At a moment when jazz was beginning to seem buttoned-up and dutifully self-conscious, the rash audacity of this music and its makers struck many observers, especially in the rock and jazz press, as a destabilizing retort. It hardly mattered that the artists themselves showed little interest in the debates around the jazz tradition. Nor did it matter that their work belonged to a far-reaching downtown landscape that also housed so much else: performance artists like Laurie Anderson, postpunk minimalists like Rhys Chatham, drone auteurs like Tony Conrad and La Monte Young, rock experimentalists like Sonic Youth. Many in the jazz commentariat latched onto Zorn’s example, recognizing a prankish gravity congruent with beloved AACM flagships like the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This sort of chatter was only amplified after Zorn began making strides with Masada, in the mid-1990s.

  An acoustic quartet with Dave Douglas on trumpet, Greg Cohen on bass, and Joey Baron on drums, Masada represented the convergence of two of Zorn’s personal interests: the early small-group signature of Coleman and a more recent obsession, his own heritage. “When the Masada project started, I was forty,” Zorn reflected. “You begin to think about your roots, where you came from, who you are. You begin to turn inward. Being Jewish became important to me.”15

  The music for Masada involved lyrically terse, coiled-spring melodies—derived from modal Jewish scales (often the Phrygian dominant, also commonly found in thrash metal)—and a rhythmic motor that could seize up and overheat but also swing straight down the center or simmer into a groove. Behind Masada’s exotic veneer there was an agile, sympathetic, and cohesive jazz quartet. In a slanted way, the band was even an act of nostalgia: Coleman’s main outlet by this time was the delirious funk unit Prime Time, and he hadn’t worked regularly with this instrumentation for years. (The all-too-rare exceptions, like a quartet reunion on the 1987 album In All Languages, were regarded as events.) So along with a novel formulation of “klezmer free jazz,” as it was inevitably described, Masada offered a rambunctious thrill that somehow felt connected to the historic jazz lineage. Alex Ross, reviewing an early concert in 1994, accurately noted in The New York Times that Masada amounted to “Zorn’s most ingratiating work to date.”16

  The familiarity was partly cultural: those Jewish scales carried a specific resonance. And Zorn was hardly the first downtown artist to explore what he came to call “Radical Jewish Culture.” The Klezmatics, formed in the East Village in the late eighties, had become a Knitting Factory favorite, releasing a well-received album called Rhythm + Jews. A number of other improvisers who had studied at the New England Conservatory in Boston, with the multi-instrumentalist and ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky, were just as conversant in these traditions.

  Netsky had founded and led the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which brought a live spark to Yiddish musical traditions that had been all but lost. One of the band’s founding members was Don Byron, a commanding, stylistically voracious clarinetist originally from the Bronx, and an unusual fit for klezmer in that he was neither Jewish nor white. (The dreadlocks he wore had nothing to do with Hebrew payot.) Byron fell in love with klezmer’s wild, gulping exuberance, and with the fact that it was the rare strain of music that unabashedly gave the clarinet a starring role.

  He grew fixated on Mickey Katz, a virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader who had worked in a comic Yiddish-novelty vein from the 1930s into the ’60s. So after working for seven years with the Klezmer Conservatory Band, and then beginning to make his reputation in New York, Byron formed a repertory tribute to Katz, sparing not an ounce of shtick; it debuted at the Knit in 1987, causing an immediate stir. And while Byron tacked in a less idiomatic direction for his debut album—Tuskegee Experiments, on the Elektra/Nonesuch label in 1991, was an adventurous postbop outing whose intergenerational lineup included the former Coltrane bassist Reggie Workman, the Young Lion drummer Ralph Peterson Jr., and Frisell—he followed it two years later with Don Byron Plays the Music of Mickey Katz.

  Taking a cue from Katz, whose bands had featured first-call musicians, Byron stocked the album not with klezmer specialists but rather with a cadre of multi-literate peers like the pianist Uri Caine, the violinist Mark Feldman, and the guitarist Brandon Ross. On trumpet, frequently playing lead with a matador’s bravura, was Douglas, who would later do the same in Masada.

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  —

  Douglas was no more Jewish than Byron. The son of an IBM executive, he went to Sunday school at a Presbyterian church as a small child, and later attended Phillips Exeter Academy, the New Hampshire boarding school. He studied jazz at the conservatory level, first in Boston and then in New York, and landed his first major gig in 1987, with the venerable hard-bop pianist and composer Horace Silver. From a certain angle Douglas might have seemed like a Young Lion in waiting: proficient, apprenticed, literate in the jazz tradition.

  But he had a restless intellect, and was naturally drawn to a wider scope of music than what “the jazz tradition” was then understood to mean. His heroes on the trumpet included not only postbop paragons like Woody Shaw but also trailblazing oddballs like Don Cherry and Lester Bowie. When he returned to New York from a tour of Europe with Silver’s band, Douglas found himself caught between two scenes that had become polarized not only in the press but also at ground level, socially as well as musically.

  In that sense, Parallel Worlds was a good title for his debut album, released on the Italian label Soul Note in 1993. Featuring an unusual contingent of instruments—Douglas’s trumpet alongside Feldman’s violin, Erik Friedlander’s cello, Mark Dresser’s bass, and Michael Sarin’s drums—the album interspersed playfully prickly originals with themes by Ellington, Stravinsky, Webern, and Weill. (Ironically, given that composer lineup, no one thought to call it a neoclassical album.) The chamber thrust and experimental twitch of Parallel Worlds, along with its high-minded selection of covers, proved a challenge for the record industry at the time.

  “It took six years to convince somebody to let me do that album,” Douglas said. “I had offers to make straight-ahead jazz-type records, playing standards, and I felt like it was worth waiting to define things my own way. I was sort of shocked by the way those divisions existed.”17

  But the divisions were endorsed by musicians and promoters as well as the media, which was constitutionally drawn to paradigms of crude opposition. This proved vividly true in the discourse around the Knitting Factory’s first festival in New York. Dorf, emboldened and inspired by the club’s scrappy success, decided to start his own summer fête in 1988.

  It was understood as an alternative not to Lincoln Center’s fledgling jazz program but rather to the JVC Jazz Festival–New York, produced by George Wein. JVC was a smoothly run commercial affair whose headliners were expected to fill major concert halls; that year’s lineup featured Ella Fitzgerald at Carnegie Hall on the same night that Miles Davis was at Avery Fisher Hall. Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae each had her own headlining concert at Carnegie. One double bill a
t Avery Fisher put Marsalis’s band opposite the great swing-era vibraphonist Lionel Hampton; another featured the guitarist Stanley Jordan alongside Kenny G.

  These marquee names represented a level of popular success beyond the known experience of most jazz musicians in New York—major figures as well as up-and-comers. So while Dorf hadn’t set out to create a jazz stronghold with the Knit, he recognized a niche to be filled. The first Knitting Factory Jazz Festival procured a small-time sponsor (Vinylmania, a West Village record shop) but received glowing press. The lineup included living embodiments of the historic avant-garde, including Cecil Taylor, the Sun Ra Arkestra, the trumpeter Bill Dixon, and the pianist Andrew Hill. There were emissaries from the loft scene, including David Murray. And there were stalwarts of the Knit’s own emergent community, like Zorn, Horvitz, and the guitarist Elliott Sharp. Some concerts proposed a dialogue between experimental waves, like a double bill featuring the tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, of Colemanesque free-jazz pedigree, and the alto saxophonist Steve Coleman, who was working with his more contemporary synthesis of bebop phraseology and pointillist funk.

  The festival put the Knit on the cultural map, and not just in New York. Dutch promoters reached out to express interest in a collaboration, which led to a Knitting Factory Festival in Groningen, Holland, and subsequent European tours. The news coverage reached as far as Japan, where jazz magazines and the national television network ran stories. (One evening as Dorf was taking tickets at the door of the club, a busload of Japanese tourists rolled up, eager to hear the latest in jazz. He struggled in vain to warn them that the lineup for the night consisted of a hardcore punk band.)18

  Had there not been such demand for an upstart challenge to jazz’s status quo, the Knitting Factory might have been understood in less idiomatic terms: as a downtown catchall, a laboratory and rugged outpost perched beyond the borders of genre. That’s really what it was, in practical terms. But by 1994, when the club outgrew its original space and moved into a three-story building in Tribeca, the Knit was largely understood as a jazz room, albeit one whose idea of jazz allowed for all manner of downtown liberties. Much to the annoyance of Wein—and, for different reasons, Marsalis—the jazz press welcomed the Knitting Factory as an important new anchor of the scene. Dorf continued presenting a range of acts, always with growth in mind: he was an early advocate of live-streaming shows on the Internet (too early, as it turned out), and he started a label, Knitting Factory Works, to document the myriad voices on the scene.

  In 1996, the What Is Jazz? Festival, as Dorf had slyly renamed the Knit’s summer shebang, secured its first full corporate sponsor, a major beer company. That year’s festival ran almost two weeks in the club’s three spaces, with a total of more than 150 shows. (There were also bookings in Town Hall.) And for all the talk of contested traditions, the festival staked out a lot of middle ground. The jazz imprints of several major labels, including Columbia and Verve, helped underwrite showcases during the festival, which featured artists as prominent as the singer Abbey Lincoln and the bassist Charlie Haden. The press began to run stories that placed the What Is Jazz? and JVC festivals side by side as competing equals.

  The momentum in the jazz underground, meanwhile, yielded further alternatives—notably the Vision Festival, which from its first edition in 1996 upheld an ideal more earnest and utopian than Dorf’s. Founded by the dancer Patricia Nicholson Parker, whose husband, the bassist William Parker, had been a stalwart of the loft scene, the Vision Festival circled the wagons around a self-reliant but perpetually endangered avant-garde, a nonconformist and noncommercial music. Among the primary heroes in its ranks were free-jazz warriors like the tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, in whose band Parker played.

  Ware was also a Knitting Factory regular, but he more precisely embodied Vision Festival ideals: he was a total improviser in the post-Coltrane, post–Albert Ayler mold, a heroically powerful force on his instrument and a persuasive conduit for spiritual inquisition. Along with Parker, the David S. Ware Quartet, formed in 1989, featured the dynamically fluid pianist Matthew Shipp and a succession of excellent drummers: first Marc Edwards, then Whit Dickey, then Susie Ibarra, and finally Guillermo E. Brown.

  The accumulated energies in jazz and other improvisational musics in Lower Manhattan—encompassing Zorn as well as Ware, and so much else besides—proved an irresistible counterweight to what was happening in the vicinity of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Musicians as well as critics felt compelled to take sides in what became a rift colloquially known as the Jazz Wars. As a shorthand, many coded the difference in terms of the urban grid: uptown (conservatism) vs. downtown (anarchic freedom, stylistic range, rugged independence). There had already been official buy-in to this self-consciously divisive terminology. When the JVC Jazz Festival carved out a provisional space for its young rival in 1989, the concert series was advertised as “Knitting Factory Goes Uptown.” And every jazz critic seemed to have a specific cohort in mind when he or she wrote, with admiration or judgment, about “the downtown scene.”

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  Not many jazz musicians working in the mid-nineties moved credibly between downtown and uptown. (Frisell would have been a prime candidate, but he’d moved to Seattle in 1988, opting out of the whole fraught equation.) Douglas, who’d been puzzled by the rift in the first place, made a serious go of it. After finally releasing Parallel Worlds, he opened a spigot: from ’95 on, he put out no less than an album a year, often with a new angle and personnel.

  His second was the 1994 self-titled debut by a band he called the Tiny Bell Trio, with the guitarist Brad Shepik (then spelled “Schoeppach”) and the drummer Jim Black. They played tunes drawn from (or inspired by) the Balkan klezmer repertory, reveling in keening folk melodies and irregular dance rhythms. But they also took advantage of the trio’s permissively sparse format, gleefully chasing solo digressions over hill and dale.

  Black, who like Shepik originally hailed from Seattle, was a sound and sight to behold: he piloted his drum kit like a sputtering jalopy, with a rack tom cranked taut as a timbale and a kick drum loosened so much that it produced a splat. His wafer-thin cymbals had a fast decay, but he often didn’t wait even that long, clenching them quiet with a darting hand. Black knew the accepted schools of modern jazz drumming, but seemed to forage farther back and off to the side, conjuring a clattering ancestor like Baby Dodds, and projecting that ghost image through the distorted lens of a rock drummer like Keith Moon.

  One of the few drummers on the scene that Black vaguely called to mind was Baron, who worked in Masada and on the third album by Douglas, the one most in line with standard jazz conventions. That album—In Our Lifetime, released in 1995—featured an assertive postbop unit otherwise made up of Caine, Chris Speed on tenor saxophone and clarinet, James Genus on bass, and Josh Roseman on trombone. It was a tribute to Booker Little, a trumpeter of startlingly progressive harmonic ideas who had died of kidney failure at twenty-three.

  Among the album’s highlights were two tracks from Little’s underrated 1961 masterwork, Out Front, and a fanfare called “Forward Flight,” recorded for his final album that same year. But that was it for historic repertory: the rest of In Our Lifetime involved Douglas originals composed with Little’s instrumental palette and chordal language in mind. The title track opens abruptly in bright polytonal swing, with the horns moving in at an unrelated tempo, like a storm front. Douglas’s voicings for the ensemble evoke Little’s, but more as a springboard than as a blueprint. And there are state-of-the-art intricacies built into the tune, like a tumbling 11/8 bass vamp in one middle section, stealthily presaged in solos by both Douglas and Speed.

  So the album, for all of its repertory precision, came pre-inoculated against any notions of conservatism. But just to be sure, the CD booklet included an inscription from the liner notes to Out Front, words spoken more than thirty years earlier by Little:

  My own feelings ab
out the direction in which jazz should go are that there should be much less stress on technical exhibitionism and much more on emotional content, on what might be termed humanity in music and the freedom to say all that you want.

  Douglas spent the next several years putting this mandate to the test, with another handful of albums by the Tiny Bell Trio; a few more with a chamber string ensemble; and another jazz-repertory tribute—Stargazer, for Wayne Shorter, in 1997. That same year he released Sanctuary, a brazenly experimental improv summit recorded live at the Knitting Factory, with a cadre including Yuka Honda and Anthony Coleman on live samplers. He also convened a band that knowingly scrambled downtown and uptown signals—a limber acoustic postbop quartet featuring Genus, the drummer Ben Perowsky, and the prominent Young Lion–ish tenor saxophonist Chris Potter.

  Reviewing this new band at the Knit, Peter Watrous seized on the smartly jabbering frontline of Douglas and Potter, “two esteemed members of ostensibly different jazz scenes.” The quartet, Watrous wrote in The New York Times, showed promise: “Its success suggested that the raiding of two supposedly opposing teams should continue.”19

  By this point, most jazz listeners of a left-leaning disposition were already paying close attention to Douglas, compelled both by his proliferation of ideas and by the formal rigor with which he explored them. But it was something else to hear him in the context of a swinging acoustic quartet, going toe-to-toe with one of the most technically sound saxophonists in a centrist modern-jazz vein. Douglas’s prominence spiked right around the time that he began releasing albums by the quartet: Magic Triangle, in 1998, and then Leap of Faith in 2000.