Pat Metheny's Hair

Orchestra Hall, 10/14/07: Pat Metheny, Christian McBride, and Antonio Sanchez gave us more than two hours of terrific music at the 2007-08 Northrop Jazz Season opener. Metheny played several different guitars, including a baritone and a four-neck monster with 42 strings called a Pikasso. (Until then, the most awesome guitar I'd ever seen was Fareed Haque's hybrid guitar-sitar.) Bassist Christian McBride and drummer Antonio Sanchez were Metheny's rhythm section; in an interview with the StarTribune's Britt Robson, Metheny said, "They are like an elephant and a bull, two very different but very strong kinds of power." I've seen McBride several times (including as a leader) and always enjoy his virtuosic, imaginative playing and his sheer physical presence. Sanchez I've seen just twice before: at IAJE in 2004 with David Sanchez and Miguel Zenon and at Monterey in 2005 with Metheny, McBride, and David Sanchez. This time I was really able to focus on Antonio Sanchez: how he plays with a compact efficiency that's both expressive and fierce, and how he seems to have multiple limbs, all moving at the same time and all pounding out different rhythms.

I don't know Metheny's music, so while the crowd greeted the opening notes of several tunes with claps and whistles, I was glad when Metheny took a break and told us what they were playing: an opening improvisation, "Make Peace," "Unrequited" (from Metheny's CD with Brad Mehldau), "Sound of Water," "So May It Secretly Begin," "Day Trip" (the title track on the CD the trio will release in January 2008), "Bright Size Life" (the title track from Metheny's first studio release on ECM in 1975), "Question and Answer." Toward the end, Metheny and McBride played a lovely duet of "My Romance," after which Metheny and Sanchez played a duet of their own (beginning with big drums BAM BAM BAM from Sanchez).

Orchestra Hall doesn't seem able to figure out the proper sound treatment for anyone but its own resident orchestra. Most of the show was overamped, and there was too much guitar at the expense of the bass and drums. Often the sound was distorted and almost painfully loud. I hope they do a better job with the Global Drum Project later this month.

So, what's with Pat Metheny's hair? Metheny is one of the world's most acclaimed, accomplished, and talented musicians, and his hair looks like...never mind. I won't say anything mean about a musician I respect and admire. Besides, that might open the door to a rant about Joey Calderazzo's ratty t-shirts. But must Metheny, an otherwise good-looking, rangy dude, be the Don King of jazz?

Photo: Metheny, Sanchez, and McBride on stage at Orchestra Hall. A we-were-there shot snapped with an Elph from the 10th row.

More Pots

The 2007 Western Wisconsin Pottery Tour is now in its fourth year. We crossed the St. Croix toward Wisconsin's rolling and still green fields. Cows grazed, horses galloped, and creamy clouds dotted the sky. It was a perfect day for a drive in the country, where potters like to live, often at the end of bumpy dirt roads.

We began at the studio of University of Minnesota ceramics professor Mark Pharis and architect/potter Wayne Branum in Roberts, then went to see work by Jay Jensen, Wendy Olson, and guest Mike Helke from Minneapolis. From there we drove to Doug Johnson's place, a beautiful setting where the air smelled so sweet I briefly entertained the thought of moving to the country. (Pristine vistas, quiet, birds...bugs, isolation, no jazz clubs.) Next stop: Randy Johnston and Jan McKeachie Johnston, then the Victorian home and studio of S.C. Rolf in River Falls.

Rolf is one of the tour's organizers (with Willem Gebben, whose studio we didn't get to). We first met Rolf at the Uptown Art Fair five years ago, where we talked about tea bowls (yunomi) and he said something that informed how I've looked at pots ever since: For him, a tea bowl is a sketch. In conversation at his home, he said he takes tea bowls very seriously because they're so intimate; people cradle them in their hands and touch them to their lips. Rolf's guest was Winona potter Chuck Aydlett, who makes fantastic teapots.

We ended the day with dinner at Stone's, a modern restaurant in a historic building in Stillwater. If you go, try the creamed corn.

Photos by John Whiting. Top to bottom: Fire bricks and tea bowls at the studio of Mark Pharis and Wayne Branum. Ceramic yard art by Wendy Olson. Inside the anagama kiln at the Johnstons'.

• To get on the mailing list for next year's Western Wisconsin Pottery Tour, send an email to scrolf.potter1@sbcglobal.net.
• To get on the mailing list for next year's Minnesota Potters' Tour (the big one, held on Mother's Day Weekend), send an email to potters@minnesotapotters.com.

Cafe Ena

Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl, a food critic I enjoy reading, gave Cafe Ena a bad review, and it's one time I honestly didn't understand what she was talking about. I've been to Ena several times, and each time it gets more interesting. The South American-French fusion food (French because, we were told, the chef is French-trained, and a lot of dishes come with colorful sauce squiggles) is prepared imaginatively and well, and the service is usually excellent. The menu keeps changing and the specials (scallops with mascarpone mashed potatoes, pork loin with a chorizo tamale and black beans) are definitely worth trying. Ena has become the restaurant we often suggest when friends ask, "Where should we go to eat?" Our friend Andrea should have her own booth there by now, or at least a small brass plaque. Tip: If you want a booth (and you do), ask for one when you make your reservation.

Cafe Ena, 4601 Grand Ave. S., Minneapolis, MN 55419; 612-824-4441

Davis

Visit the Artists' Quarter in St. Paul and you'll be greeted at the door by Davis, who will take your money, share a poem, tell you about books he's reading and plays he's seen, and generally make you feel welcome. Later he'll introduce the performers ("Lords and ladies! Cats and kittens! We're pleased and flipped!"), do a bit of Lord Buckley if you're lucky, and return to his post by the door. He's as much as part of the AQ as the musicians who grace its stage, and he helps keep it classy and smart.

Here's Davis reading a poem about Monk during Laura Caviani's annual Monk's Birthday concert. Photo by John Whiting.

Monk's Birthday, with Cake

Artists' Quarter, 10/10/07: Each year, pianist and composer Laura Caviani celebrates Thelonious Monk's birthday (and the day before her own birthday) with an evening of Monk's music at the AQ. This year, she was joined by Adam Linz on bass and Phil Hey on drums. (Adam leaves soon for three weeks of sold-out performances in France and Germany with Fat Kid Wednesdays.) Laura teaches when she performs, which I appreciate, letting us know what she is playing and telling us a little about each selection. ("San Francisco Holiday" was originally called "Worry Later" because whenever Monk was asked its name, he'd say, "I'll worry about that later.") The trio gave us inventive arrangements of already inventive tunes. How can you make "Bemsha Swing" even more intricate? By playing the melody with the right hand, and also with the left hand...a half-beat or so behind, as Laura does, making me wonder if somewhere along the way she had the halves of her brain surgically separated.

If listening to Monk is "difficult," as some have said, you couldn't tell from the crowd of smiling people nodding their heads and tapping their feet. Some were musicians and teachers (in the house: Eric Kamau Gravatt, who will perform at the AQ with his band Source Code on Friday and Saturday; Matthew McCright, an instructor in piano at Carleton College, where Laura also teaches; vocalist Lucia Newell). The two generous sets included "I Mean You," "In Walked Bud," "Epistrophy," "Monk's Dream," "Ask Me Now," "Bright Mississippi," "Rhythm-a-ning," "Coming on the Hudson," "Bemsha Swing," "Let's Call This," "Sweet and Lovely" (during Adam's bass solo, you could hear him sing "Sweet...and...lovely...."), and the finale, "Blue Monk." Between sets, cake was served; talking got louder around the bar during the second set, probably due to the sugar rush.

I've always thought that Monk's music had a lot of math in it, but beautiful math--less about calculations and memorizing multiplication tables, more about planetary orbits and the geometry of snowflakes. I could never play it in a million years, but I can enjoy it when it's played as well as it was last night. As the couple sitting behind me said, "What a great way to spend a Wednesday evening!" "And for just six bucks!"

Photo by John Whiting.

Jazz 101: Origins of Jazz

In tonight's class with Kelly Rossum, we explored the origins of jazz, the gumbo/cassoulet/ragout of African slaves, Creoles of Color, blues, ragtime, European classical music, musicians who learned their instruments in Storyville, those who were trained in Paris conservatories, military bands, workers in the fields, travelers, and God knows who else. Kelly played the last track from Wynton Marsalis's Live at the House of Tribes as an example of New Orleans second-line music. He told us that John Philip Sousa's cornet player hated jazz and thought it the work of the devil. And he played us selections from a 1919 recording by Lieutenant James Reese Europe's "Hell Fighters" Band, part of the African American 369th Infantry of World War I.

Picture Europe's band standing around a giant recording horn, playing for exactly three minutes as a needle etched a wax cylinder. Standing nearest the horn is the band's drum major, a man named Noble Sissle, who starts to sing:

I'm a jazz baby,
I wanna be jazzin' all the time.
There's something in the tone of a saxophone
That makes me do a little wiggle all my own,
'Cause I'm a jazz baby,
Full of jazzbo harmony.

Love to sit by the cradle and to-and-fro,
To-and-fro to the tune of a Tickle Toe.
Ever since I started in to grow
I love to hear the music playing,
See my dear old mammy swaying.
Jazz, jazz, jazz, that's all I ever knew.
All day long, I never would get through.
Jazz, jazz, jazz, that's all I want to do.
Play me a little jazz.

Read more about James Reese Europe and hear some of his recordings

Christian Scott at the Dakota: Jazz concert review

Photo by John Whiting. L2R: Louis Fouche,
Andrew Marsh (partial), Christian Scott, Matt Stevens

Originally published on Jazz Police.

There’s been a lot of buzz about Christian Scott. Just 24 years old, New Orleans born and bred, Berklee educated, the personable young trumpeter played a one-night stand at the Dakota on Sunday, October 7. Just two weeks earlier, we’d seen him at the prestigious Monterey Jazz Festival. He arrived at the Dakota with three members of the band he’d played with in Monterey, Louis Fouché on alto sax, Luques Curtis on bass, and Matt Stevens on guitar. Andrew Marsh on drums rounded out the quintet. Lacking a piano player, Scott occasionally laid his horn down and did some comping of his own.

The late show at the Dakota began with a beautiful interpretation of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” a showcase for Scott’s unique tone: breathy, eloquent, older than his years. Some critics have compared Scott to Miles Davis, an inevitability when anyone new picks up a trumpet; others describe his tone as more like Ben Webster’s. Scott counts Davis among his many influences, which also include Louis Armstrong, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Freddie Hubbard. His tone whispers, cajoles, elucidates, caresses (he’s young enough to be my son, so I’ll be careful here), but can also breathe fire when he wants it to.

“Katrina’s Eyes,” the original tune that followed “Footprints” in the Dakota set, is a track on Scott’s second CD, Anthem, recently released on the Concord label. (His debut CD, Rewind That, came out on Concord in 2006 and earned a Grammy nomination.) Like Terence Blanchard, another New Orleans musician whose life was changed by Hurricane Katrina, Scott felt compelled to say something about the storm’s devastation and aftermath. Anthem is for Scott what A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina) is for Blanchard, a personal expression of the inexpressible. It’s interesting that “Katrina’s Eyes” is not, as Scott explains, about the hurricane. Instead, it’s based on a dream Scott had about fathering a baby girl—something you don’t know unless you hear him perform it live and introduce it himself. He heard the theme in a dream, awoke to find the baby not there, and felt a deep sadness and loss, which permeates the melody.

Scott told us the story about “Katrina’s Eyes,” and about the next tune he played, which was based on an encounter with a racist in Boston. “I’ll show you what my trumpet sounds like when it gets angry,” he said, and did, breathing fire. As we heard earlier in Monterey, Scott likes to preface his songs with stories. He’s a bit of a ham but not a show-off; his stories are interesting and add flavor to his music. The living got easy again with “Summertime,” a version that showcased Stevens’s guitar.

They followed with what Scott termed “Mardi Gras 101,” a call-and-response based on the music of the Black Indian tribes of New Orleans. This went over so well that Scott decided to give us “Indian Blues” next instead of another track from Anthem. A now-classic blend of jazz and Mardi Gras music, “Indian Blues” was originally recorded in 1991 by Donald Harrison Jr., Scott’s uncle (and himself a Mardi Gras Indian chief since 1988). This was announced as the final tune of the set, and we were told that Scott doesn’t do encores, but he surprised us and did, ending with “Litany Against Fear” from Anthem. As he had done in Monterey, Scott prefaced his performance with a story about the song’s origins: meeting a little boy in New Orleans’ 9th ward whose big brother had just been arrested and who was afraid of the “bad police.” The more I hear this song (live and on CD), the more I like it. The hypnotic, repetitive opening phrase (played by pianist Aaron Parks on the CD) is a security blanket for Scott’s trumpet and Stevens’ guitar as they lead us through a series of emotions: grief, mourning, and ultimately hope. Scott may be in his early 20s, but he’s thinking grown-up thoughts, which can happen when your life gets blown out from under you.

After the show, we headed for the green room to say hello. Scott had already positioned himself at the club’s front door so he could greet people as they left. We had a brief conversation, during which someone mentioned dogs. Scott had two beloved Labradors, both lost during Katrina when he was forced to leave them behind.

Later this month, Scott plays the Blue Note and Sculler’s, then heads back to New Orleans for the Voodoo Music Experience. In November, he goes to the US Virgin Islands for the St. Croix-New Orleans Jazz Festival. Catch him if you can, wherever he lands.

The Wild Trees

I once spent an awestruck afternoon in Muir Woods, but that was on the ground looking up and up and up. Richard Preston's book The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring tells of people who hunt for giant trees, then climb them, study them, sleep in them (in specially made hammocks), get married in them, and hang from ropes looped over branches hundreds of feet from the ground. You want them not to fall (some do) so you can learn more about what it's like to go where they go--where no humans have gone before. There are a few too many names in the book, and the narrative moves around in time a bit much, but it's a fascinating tale of exploration and discovery; these men (and one woman) are vertical Marco Polos. Preston himself is an expert tree climber who has passed on that gene of desire to his own children; they take exotic climbing trips as a family. He tells us more than I wanted to know about the personal lives of the people in the book, but the science is deeply interesting, and when he describes the trees themselves--their height and mass and majesty, the gardens that grow in them, how impossibly old they are--he approaches poetry.

Richard Preston's Web site includes interviews, a photo gallery, and excerpts from the book read by the author