Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  She had long dabbled in writing poetry and lyrics, drawing her earliest inspiration from the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen. Her more recent influences in that vein included Robert Wyatt and Elliott Smith. But the results on Code Girl strayed far from any of these reference points, and even farther from anything like a confessional urge.

  The title was a nod to Anthony Braxton, whom Halvorson had once heard uttering the phrase while on tour. She’d jotted it in her notebook for possible later use. When Halvorson began mobilizing behind her new project, she latched on to this scrap of free association. “It just seemed to fit,” she recalled. “Because at that point I’d written a lot of the lyrics, and they seemed a little bit coded and strange.” The multivalence of the term only sharpened its appeal: “It could be like coding a computer, or breaking a code, some kind of a password.”

  The songs on Code Girl, eventually released on an album by that title, do have a coiled and cryptic beauty; they’re full of haunting resonances and restive tensions, with a style that borrows from psychedelic folk and art rock as well as new music and avant-garde jazz. Akinmusire moves through the songs with a decisive pliability, equally at home with a crisp melodic line or its tonal opposite, an abstract, smudged-charcoal shading. This plays out not only on several instrumental pieces—like “Thunderhead” and “Off the Record,” which employ springy variations on swing rhythm—but also in the elaborative sprawl of the songs with lyrics.

  And Kidambi, a powerful singer trained in classical Carnatic methodologies but drawn to uncharted frontiers, proved the ideal messenger for those lyrics. She projects in a voice both clarion and tender, bringing bounce and grace to a melodic framework spiked with chromatic obstacles. She also manages to convey the emotional undercurrent of the lyrics, despite their abstruse designs—the impulse that had led Halvorson to scramble her own signals, applying oblique and nonlinear techniques that belong more to language poetry than conventional song craft. A ballad called “Accurate Hit” features just voice and guitar, evoking an approachable mode of indie-rock intimacy—but the lyrics consist of ominous, disjointed couplets: “original error / terminal insides / searing body.” Kidambi imbues them with fearsome presence.

  Here and throughout Code Girl, Halvorson insists on an expression of complex feeling not only in content but also in form. “It is not predictable my mind,” declares Kidambi on the album’s calmly unsettled opening track, “My Mind I Find in Time.” (Later comes a refrain: “Reconstruction is required in time.”) “The Unexpected Natural Phenomenon,” an account of a near drowning, begins in dirgelike rubato, builds to a passage of literal screaming, and concludes with a long, thrashing spiral of free improvisation. And on a sci-fi ballad called “Drop the Needle,” Kidambi brings deep, declarative intensity to Halvorson’s lyrics, which in this case are about the shifting dimensions of the music itself:

  One might drop the needle

  An entire song transcends

  Repeat a twirling hypnotic

  Melody in descending order

  Genre, it almost goes without saying, is the least interesting prism through which to assess the songs on Code Girl. And yet Halvorson’s own expectation for the project was that it might nudge her into an unfamiliar space—something more rigid or repetitive than her usual mode. The results did feel like a stretch, but they were congruent with the rest of her output. What made it personal, in the end, wasn’t the incorporation of lyrics so much as the musical signature.

  After recording the album, near the close of 2016, Halvorson gave herself a break from composing. “For the first time in my life I felt like I needed to stop for a second,” she said. “I feel like the last decade of my life, it’s been: ‘Okay, next project, write a bunch of music, record an album.’ You don’t have the time to take a breath and actually take stock in anything. Because I didn’t have the next idea, which normally I did, I thought, ‘Well great, I’m just going to practice guitar and do the projects that are already happening.’ ”

  One indication of the vitality in Halvorson’s peer group, then, is how productive she was over the ensuing year. She performed in duo settings, on separate occasions, with Akinmusire, Crump, Fujiwara, and the harpist Zeena Parkins—and released an album in that format, Crop Circles, with the sharply inquisitive pianist Sylvie Courvoisier. She also recorded and toured in a trio led by the drummer Tom Rainey. This was just a small sampling of her collaborative reach, which also extended to the an album titled Paimon: Book of Angels Volume 32, a new installment of John Zorn’s inexhaustible Masada project. On it, Halvorson leads an ace quartet featuring Fujiwara, her fellow guitarist Miles Okazaki, and the bassist Drew Gress.

  Among the other albums she released in 2017 were two standout trio efforts, each released in small-batch form to critical acclaim. The first was BANGS, by Jason Moran, with the cornetist Ron Miles—two artists with a profile ostensibly more mainstream than Halvorson’s, though that distinction was growing less meaningful all the time. An experiment in form and flow, the album featured compositions from all three musicians, whose stern yet beautiful rapport suggested a sparking of flint and steel.

  The second album, released digitally and on limited-edition vinyl, was New American Songbooks, Volume 1, an outgrowth of Nate Wooley’s online journal Sound American, with a mission made plain by its title. It also featured Halvorson with Miles, though the third member came from a different place entirely. He was Greg Saunier, the drummer in Deerhoof, though his energy here skewed more jazz-compatible, in a Paul Motian vein.

  Each musician had been asked to bring in a few tunes worth regarding as “standards,” whatever they might take that to mean. Halvorson chose some bittersweet songs by Fiona Apple and Elliott Smith. She also arranged “Vignette,” a haunting Gary Peacock ballad from Tales of Another, an album he’d made in 1977 with Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette, the nascent Standards Trio. She was the picture of fluency on these tunes, but she also delivered a clomp of chords, redolent of Harlem stride piano, on James P. Johnson’s “Snowy Morning Blues.”

  And on “Day Dream,” a Duke Ellington–Billy Strayhorn ballad from 1941, Halvorson voiced the melody as an exquisite reverie, slow and serious. She was unerringly, even touchingly faithful to the melody, but her chords flickered like the surface of a faraway mirage.

  Mary Halvorson, Code Girl (Firehouse 12)

  Mary Halvorson Octet, Away with You (Firehouse 12)

  Mary Halvorson Trio, Dragon’s Head (Firehouse 12)

  Jason Moran, BANGS (Yes)

  Thumbscrew, Thumbscrew (Cuneiform)

  Afterword

  As long as people have been talking about jazz, they’ve been talking about where it’s going. The conversation rests on presumptions of forward progress and collective striving. But while some musicians have embraced the premise, others refused to play along. A well-meaning interviewer once asked Thelonious Monk where he thought jazz was going, and the pianist replied: “I don’t know where it’s going. Maybe it’s going to hell. You can’t make anything go anywhere. It just happens.”

  Monk’s retort, an instant classic, contains the wisdom of intuition. There is no way of prognosticating jazz’s future, or even its precise trajectory, because the art form doesn’t adhere to a linear axis. The evolutionary thrust in the music is real, but it shouldn’t be misconstrued as a motive. Jazz has no inherent locomotive agenda, as some factions would have you believe, nor is it the monolith that some other factions take pains to preserve. The music’s ongoing story might best be understood in terms of a climate: volatile, variable, subject to unseen forces outside anyone’s direct control.

  Here’s what we can say, at this stage: the music we call jazz continues to find traction in a range of conditions. Its advances are manifold, proceeding on multiple fronts. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum; most improvising musicians maintain a relationship to
popular culture, however tenuous or circumscribed. The level of baseline proficiency keeps climbing, and vital new artists keep emerging, often to seize the moment on their own terms. The decentralization of what we used to call “the scene” can be disconcerting, but it’s also a boon.

  Not to imply that the verities of jazz’s past have receded into darkness. Every year brings more attrition among the generation that defined jazz in the postwar era, but their lessons survive—preserved in ever more accessible forms, and carried on by admirers and inheritors. Spend some time in the presence of a swashbuckling artist like Jazzmeia Horn, whose jazz-vocal totems include Betty Carter and Sarah Vaughan, or Aaron Diehl, whose fastidious pianism can evoke John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet—or Riley Mulherkar, whose passions range beyond the Westerlies to the glories of King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and Dizzy Gillespie—and you leave both inspired and reassured. Young musicians don’t come up the way they used to, but the brightest among them will always find a way to access the root traditions of the music.

  For another constituency, the vibrant synergies between jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, and R&B amount to a raison d’être—a lifeline to young audiences, and in particular young black audiences, that had seemed almost lost for good. The runaway success of a Robert Glasper or a Kamasi Washington amounts to proof of concept for this crowd, as well as the basis for an inevitable spate of stories about jazz’s “new golden age.” Among the musicians to watch in this zone are the pianists Kris Bowers and James Francies; the vibraphonists Joel Ross and Warren Wolf; the saxophonists Lakecia Benjamin, Shabaka Hutchings, Logan Richardson, and Nubya Garcia; and the trumpeters Takuya Kuroda and Keyon Harrold. (The list goes on and on.)

  Elsewhere, heady potential resides in an ever more advanced articulation of harmony and rhythm, the stuff of complex metrics and intricate maneuvers. The members of Fieldwork—Steve Lehman, Vijay Iyer, Tyshawn Sorey—all helped set the bar for this ascendant strain of experimentation in the music. So too have the pianists Craig Taborn, Matt Mitchell, Kris Davis, and Eve Risser; the vocalists Jen Shyu, Sara Serpa, and Amirtha Kidambi; and the guitarists Miles Okazaki and Liberty Ellman, among many others. The embrace of this cohort by the new-music classical establishment is a form of mutual outreach, and a hopeful turn.

  Across every iteration of style, the ascendant currency is an ever greater investment in ideas. To be a successful jazz artist today is to be, on some level, a conceptualist. This isn’t just about courting institutional approval, or pursuing grants and commissions—though it’s true that many musicians rely on that funding apparatus. As generations of artists have come of age without the promise of a tried-and-true path through the industry, they were forced to start out with the most fundamental questions: Why do this? What’s my contribution? What do I want to say, and how best to convey it? These artists, looking to ambitious role models, have set their talent against the odds. For the most disciplined among them, it’s a recipe for pure creative possibility, opening up new ways of seeing the music, and not just in the forward view.

  The treatment of Thelonious Monk’s centenary, in 2017, suggests a case in point. Early in the year there came a glowing artifact direct from the source: the first-ever release of a soundtrack Monk recorded for Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the 1959 Roger Vadim film. Musicians took note, savoring rich new documentation of a working band at a moment of great momentum in Monk’s career. There also came deluxe reissues of Monk’s known output, and an anniversary edition of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, the definitive biography by Robin D. G. Kelley. There was never a better time to draw a clear bead on the dimensions of Monk’s genius, and consider its implications.

  Jazz culture has grown adept at mobilizing behind a good centennial tribute, and that happened in all the expected ways. Jazz at Lincoln Center held a two-day Monk symposium, and presented a club date by the T. S. Monk Sextet, led by the pianist’s son and leading spokesman. A handful of more figurative Monk inheritors released tribute albums, from the teenaged piano phenom Joey Alexander leading his trio, to the composer-arranger John Beasley with the band he calls the MONK’estra. Wadada Leo Smith, the leonine avant-garde hero, recorded a solo trumpet recital of Monk’s music, in an air of ascetic solemnity.

  But also in the mix were some Monk celebrations that accessed his music and genius in a thrumming present tense. Jason Moran went on tour with his multimedia concert program In My Mind: Monk at Town Hall, 1959, an impressionistic homage incorporating found audio, field research, and an affectionate spirit of freedom. And the pianist Ethan Iverson, another diehard Monkophile, spearheaded the programming of a ten-day festival presented by Duke Performances at the Durham Fruit & Produce Company, a fifteen-thousand-square-foot warehouse in downtown Durham, North Carolina.

  This event, Monk@100, offered myriad angles on its subject. Iverson led a swinging, old-school rhythm section behind a series of guest saxophonists—Houston Person, Joshua Redman, Melissa Aldana, Ravi Coltrane, Chris Potter—in what amounted to a disquisition on Monk’s most steadfast instrumental format. Moran abstracted Monk compositions in a duo with Tyshawn Sorey. A solo piano concert offered those compositions for interpretation by Iverson and four colleagues, including Orrin Evans, his replacement in the Bad Plus. Other creative alignments involved musicians like the pianist Gerald Clayton and the guitarist Bill Frisell.

  The profusion of perspectives in the event was not only intentional but instructive, because it honored the spirit of multiplicity that now prevails. There can be no way of knowing whether Monk would have approved of Monk@100, but he probably would have appreciated the notion that no single view of his work reigns supreme.

  And as is often true of jazz, the historical thrust of the programming only sharpened a focus on the present moment and its endless possibilities. Progress is almost beside the point. The music will flow and fluctuate, keep going. And where to? Anywhere. It just happens.

  The 129 Essential Albums of the Twenty-First Century (So Far)

  A spectacular range of music has been released under the rubric of jazz since the turn of the century. These are among the best, arranged by year: work your way through the list, and you’ll have a good impression of the contemporary state of the art. (No artist appears more than once as a leader, though there’s ample overlap in personnel.)

  2000

  1. Jim Black’s AlasNoAxis, AlasNoAxis (Winter & Winter)

  2. Brian Blade Fellowship, Perceptual (Blue Note)

  3. Kurt Elling, Live in Chicago (Blue Note)

  4. Nils Petter Molvær, Solid Ether (ECM)

  5. Danilo Pérez, Motherland (Verve)

  6. David Sánchez, Melaza (Columbia)

  7. David S. Ware, Surrendered (Columbia)

  2001

  8. Chicago Underground Quartet, Chicago Underground Quartet (Thrill Jockey)

  9. The Claudia Quintet, The Claudia Quintet (Blueshift CRI)

  10. Marilyn Crispell / Paul Motian / Gary Peacock, Amaryllis (ECM)

  11. Kurt Rosenwinkel, The Next Step (Verve)

  12. John Scofield, Works for Me (Verve)

  13. Matthew Shipp, New Orbit (Thirsty Ear)

  2002

  14. Ben Allison, Peace Pipe (Palmetto)

  15. Tim Berne, Science Friction (Screwgun)

  16. Keith Jarrett Trio, Always Let Me Go (ECM)

  17. Wayne Shorter Quartet, Footprints Live! (Blue Note)

  18. Luciana Souza, Brazilian Duos (Sunnyside)

  19. Tomasz Stańko Quartet, Soul of Things (ECM)

  20. Cecil Taylor, The Willisau Concert (Intakt)

  21. Cassandra Wilson, Belly of the Sun (Blue Note)

  2003

  22. The Bad Plus, These Are the Vistas (Columbia)

  23. David Binney, South (ACT)

  24. Terence Bl
anchard, Bounce (Blue Note)

  25. Jane Ira Bloom, Chasing Paint (Arabesque)

  26. Fred Hersch Trio, Live at the Village Vanguard (Palmetto)

  27. Dave Holland Quintet, Extended Play: Live at Birdland (ECM)

  28. Ahmad Jamal, In Search of Momentum (Dreyfus)

  2004

  29. Geri Allen, The Life of a Song (Telarc)

  30. Don Byron, Ivey-Divey (Blue Note)

  31. Frank Kimbrough, Lullabluebye (Palmetto)

  32. Tony Malaby Trio, Adobe (Sunnyside)

  33. Medeski Martin & Wood, End of the World Party (Just in Case) (Blue Note)

  34. Brad Mehldau Trio, Anything Goes (Warner Bros.)

  35. Mulgrew Miller Trio, Live at Yoshi’s: Volume One (Maxjazz)

  2005

  36. Amina Figarova, September Suite (Munich)

  37. Guillermo Klein, Una Nave (Sunnyside)

  38. Pat Metheny Group, The Way Up (Nonesuch)

  39. Paul Motian / Bill Frisell / Joe Lovano, I Have the Room Above Her (ECM)

  40. Sonny Rollins, Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert (Milestone)

  41. Jenny Scheinman, 12 Songs (Cryptogramophone)

  42. Cuong Vu, It’s Mostly Residual (Intoxicate)

  43. Miguel Zenón, Jíbaro (Marsalis Music)

  2006

  44. Ornette Coleman, Sound Grammar (Sound Grammar)