One of the highlights of this year’s Winter Jazzfest in Manhattan’s West Village was Steven Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra playing the music of Sly and the Family Stone. The 11-member ensemble resembled a reduced version of a traditional jazz big band with three reeds, two brass and upright bass, and every tune began as a moody, abstracted instrumental. But each selection eventually morphed into one of Sly Stone’s classic funk numbers—“Stand,” “My Lady” or “Everyday People”—and as the band started stomping on the one, you saw something you rarely see at a jazz show outside New Orleans: young people dancing.
When jazz declared itself “America’s classical music,” it unwittingly took on classical music’s problem: a dwindling, graying audience. Go to your typical jazz nightclub these days, and you’ll see a lot of men with salt-and-pepper beards sipping expensive glasses of red wine and nodding knowingly when a saxophonist quotes an old standard in the middle of a solo. There’s nothing wrong with those guys; they represent a valid approach to the music, if not the only valid approach. But there aren’t enough of them to sustain the genre in the present, much less the future.
That’s why the sight of all those youngsters at the eighth annual Winter Jazzfest this past weekend was so encouraging. Over the course of Friday and Saturday nights, five different clubs within easy walking distance of each other presented six or seven acts per night, and a wristband to get into all the shows cost only $45 for both nights ($35 for a single night). Some of the young dancers I talked to cited price as a major reason they were attending. After all, it can cost $45 to see one act play one set in a normal nightclub with a typical $25 cover and two-drink minimum. Make it affordable and they will come.
But that wasn’t the only reason half the audience at some festival sets was under 35. Those were the sets where the often-younger musicians made a connection to the rock ’n’ roll, R&B and electronica that younger audiences were familiar with. It wasn’t that Bernstein’s MTO or similar outfits were playing straight-ahead R&B; it was that they were basing their improvisational transformations on music the young listeners already knew and they were toying with rhythms those same listeners could dance to. And dance they did. (It also helped that, unlike most jazz clubs, Le Poisson Rouge on Bleecker Street offered a large, open dance floor.)
They could have also danced to the old-fashioned mambos and rumbas that rippled through David Murray’s Cuban Ensemble the next night as the 10-piece band interpreted the songbook of Nat King Cole, but they didn’t. Murray’s band played those rhythms with supple elegance, but younger audiences don’t have a personal connection to those dance styles—nor to Cole himself. Jazz advocates can talk themselves blue in the face that youngsters should appreciate those things—and maybe they should—but the fact remains that they don’t.
But even if they were born after Sly Stone stopped showing up for his own gigs, younger listeners know his endlessly sampled songs and his funk beat. And many of those young dancers were entranced by the way the familiar funk tropes could be reimagined by jazz musicians who spun riffs into strange shapes, substituted odd chords for simple changes and proved how far those rhythms could be stretched without breaking. This music was both familiar and unfamiliar at once.
That’s what jazz has always done at its best. It has taken the pop sounds of the day and reinvented them as a more sophisticated, virtuosic music. It’s like watching a slam-bang TV cop show turned into a moody Martin Scorsese film—you still get the gunfire but you also get the darker shadows of the soul. When Bernstein’s special guest John Medeski (leader of the crossover jazz trio Medeski, Martin & Wood) took a Sly Stone organ riff and twisted it into a dizzying helix of interlocking arpeggios in each hand, he took something we knew and made it new. When Charlie Burnham took the high harmony parts from Stone’s original singles and played them as wild wailing on his violin, he did the same. And when vocalist Dean Bowman of the Screaming Headless Torsos introduced “Everyday People” as a murmuring country blues number, he revealed a side of the song we’d never glimpsed.
Jazz ran into trouble when it decided it should reflect not the popular music of the day but the popular music of pre-1960—or when it decided it shouldn’t reflect popular music at all. But the basis of jazz’s strategy of theme-and-variation is having an audience that knows the theme before they’re surprised by the variation. And young audiences are not as likely to recognize a Nat King Cole tune as quickly as one by Michael Jackson.
The Vijay Iyer Trio reflects the most traditional of jazz formats: acoustic piano, acoustic bass and trap drums. But when the pianist Iyer, boyish-looking in his dark suit and tie, played the melody from Jackson’s “Human Nature,” everyone under the age of 40 was right there with him and was willing to follow him as he pushed and pulled at the phrasing till it was barely recognizable. But in his stretching, Iyer opened up rich veins of feeling and virtuosity, and his bandmates, bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore were distending the song in similar ways with similar results.
Later in the same set, the trio played Iyer’s “Hood,” a tribute to electronica hero Robert “Noise” Hood. Iyer and his bandmates played the pulsing beeps of loops and triggered programs on their acoustic instruments and only when those patterns were established did they mess with them in mind-boggling ways. The Vijay Iyer Trio, which is about to release a stunning album called Accelerando, took these songs on a journey, but the audience would never have tagged along if they hadn’t known where the trip began.
If Iyer’s trio was the best band at the festival, Murray was the best soloist, erupting in tenor-sax solos that sounded like several articulate voices vying for attention at once. But a far easier entry point for young rock fans trying out jazz was Nels Cline, the guitarist who was a jazz star before he joined Wilco and who still keeps his jazz career going. As the leader of the Nels Cline Singers on Friday, Cline conjured up a roar of electrified squalls from his six and twelve-string guitars and from the table of effects next to his right hip. Cline always seemed to be searching for a sound he had never heard before, and he often found it.
Some people love that Research & Development Department approach to music, but I preferred very tall, shaggy-haired Cline when he backed up violinist Jenny Scheinman in the following set, as part of a band called Mischief & Mayhem. Here Cline was in his Wilco mode, toughening up the rhythms and fleshing out the harmonic possibilities of a songwriter’s lyrical melodies. The 32-year-old violinist, five months pregnant but still radiant in a halo of brown curls, is a fine vocalist but here she did her singing with her fiddle. She also shone in a terrific drummer-less trio led by bassist Ben Allison—who would later play Larry Graham’s slap-happy lines on an acoustic bass as part of Bernstein’s MTO.
Bernstein and Iyer weren’t the only ones stretching out on old R&B hits. Bernie Worrell, the keyboardist and co-writer on many of Parliament-Funkadelic’s biggest albums, led a 12-person jazz orchestra that featured Captain Beefheart guitarist Gary Lucas playing hot blues licks on Jimmy Smith-like B-3 organ tunes and P-Funk hits alike. In Thursday’s pre-festival kick-off party, Marc Ribot’s Young Philadelphians took a similar approach to Philly Soul material. But unlike Bernstein, Ribot neither rehearsed his arrangements sufficiently nor hired real singers and paid the price accordingly.
One might ask, Why go see a jazz version of P-Funk or similar pop music when the real version is so readily available on CD, YouTube and reunion tours? Because pop musicians just don’t play as well as jazz musicians—jazz fans can only chuckle when metalheads go on about their favorite guitarists—and those virtuosos can open up the music in enthralling ways. To hear alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa (an alumnus of Iyer’s bands) tear off cascades of notes over Rich Brown’s throbbing, burbling electric bass at the Winter Jazzfest on Friday was to hear improvisation taken to places jam bands could never follow.