The Brooklyn Rail

There is a piece by the British land artist Richard Long known by the straightforward title A Line Made By Walking (1967). The artist walked a straight line through a field of grass, repetitively, and photographed the result, a very subtle rut where the grass had been tamped down by his feet. No doubt this disappeared within a few hours.

Although now forty-five years old, Dark Music Days remains a strangely clandestine festival outside of Iceland. If we wake at ten, it is still not sunrise. Your scribe first visited Reykjavík in the summer of 2023, so is pleased to be experiencing the full snowfall winter during his three days at the colossally impressive Harpa concert hall (or halls, as it’s possible to discover a new, different sized space each day of the weekend).

Listening to “I’m alone on stage with / no exit” from “Maker Taker” off of Kaia Kater’s most recent release, Strange Medicine (Free Dirt Records, 2024), one wonders if French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre has returned. In his play No Exit, Sartre asks us to assume our individuality, and be mindful of our relationship with other people.

From March through May of this year, Ars Nova Workshop will present special twenty-fifth anniversary programming, with concerts that range across the musical spectrum. These will include John Zorn’s New Masada Quartet, Thurston Moore, The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis, and Roscoe Mitchell with Tyshawn Sorey. This is a capstone and show of strength for an organization that has presented such major figures as Cecil Taylor, Rhys Chatham, Henry Threadgill, and Vijay Iyer.

I know there’s beauty and chaos, but I try to find some kind of playful balance between all of this—where I find pleasure, and composition is where I find pleasure, improvisation as well. Sort of defining free improvisation as a genre away from, say, jamming.

Each track on Wendy Eisenberg’s Viewfinder is like a microcosm, an autonomous adventure with its own internal logic. After each is done, you feel like the next could go anywhere else in terms of structure and affect.

One of the recent Adelphi fortieth highlights was provided by the unlikely appearance of one of Belgium’s finest combos, Don Kapot, crashing together no-wave jazz, monomaniac funk, and punk skitter, a trio from Brussels that has been active for around a decade and now risking the hassles of a mini-tour across the fortified borders of Great Britain.

Co-founded in 2007 by musicians Rob Garcia, Michel Gentile, and Daniel Kelly, Connection Works’ mission is to operate as “an artist-run non-profit organization that engages the Brooklyn community with world-class jazz performances and educational events.”

On the corner of South 5th and Hewes Street lies P.I.T. (Property Is Theft), a former laundromat that has been converted into an all-purpose hub for a range of activities. As P.I.T. founder Jim McHugh relates, “There's no neighborhood more radical than a neighborhood full of working class people of color, because they've had to be radical to survive.”

Enjoy Jazz might have a mainstream, accessible title for a festival, but all levels are embraced, from an impressive spread of starry names to a strong contingent of adventurous artists, mainly arriving from the jazzed quarter but often representing rock, hip-hop, electronic, global-ethno, or modern classical.

There certainly was a valedictory edge to the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra concerts at Rose Hall the first weekend after the election. The band, with trombonist Vincent Gardner as music director with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, featuring guest vocalist Ashley Pezzotti and percussionists Bobby Allende and Isaiah Bravo, played a concert titled “Bebop Revolution,” a celebration of both the music and the bebop inspired art of the great Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Music for Broken Violins is a fascinating project by violinist Marija Kovačević. Born in Serbia and now based in New York, she was working as a violin teacher at the Brooklyn Music School when she happened upon a closet that was stuffed with broken violins. Kovačević decided to work with them as they were—to seek out whatever beauty might remain in their battered forms.

Tendrils of connection, links, strings; when the pandemic created distance between musical artists, new modes of performance sprang up along with great losses (in a great many ways).

The crowd at Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s concert wasn’t, perhaps, what you’d expect for an eighty-year-old. Throngs of young queer people (masked, as was required) packed in like sardines. Glenn, as the Canada-based musician likes to be called, was helped onstage onto a cushioned lounge chair. A throne from which to sing, arms outstretched: “Welcome to you, both young and old.”

The gigs of Cologne Jazzweek seem to be multiplying in the short history of this now-established multi-venue-festival.

For Black South African artists, the past that needs to be reckoned with includes the intense pain, the ghosts, of apartheid. Yet it was out of this oppressed culture that there arose arguably the first major star of the genre known as world music: Miriam Makeba.

Few pianists have made such a radical pivot in their repertoire as Awadagin Pratt. In 1992, he won the Naumburg International Piano Competition playing Bach-Busoni, Beethoven, and Liszt. He was the first Black pianist to take home the gold.

Syto Cavé was born in Haiti in 1944. He blossomed as a poet first in the radical Port au Prince of the 1960s, and later in New York City as part of the Kouidor theater group, becoming an actor and a playwright—with a fan in writer Aimé Césaire—often putting on plays in Martinique. His plays are masterpieces, including Brakoupe, about a man struggling with a severed arm, a play with butoh-like qualities. 

Freeman writes about music—this is his fourth nonfiction book after Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis and Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century—he previously published the Burning Ambulance magazine and now has a record label and newsletter under that imprint, and has recently started administering the back catalogue of the Leo Records label on Bandcamp. This biography came out of Freeman’s coverage of the Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor retrospective and performances in the spring of 2016, two years before Taylor’s death.

I thought of that when considering the astonishing life and career of the drummer Max Roach, whose centennial is being celebrated with concerts, lectures, and a terrific documentary named after one of his solo percussion pieces, The Drum Also Waltzes.

As the parable of the blind men and the elephant has noted, it’s best to go piece by piece, and even then there’s way too much Allen to fit into one article in one section of a journal. This one is ostensibly about Brendan Greaves’s invaluable biography of Terry Allen, which in five hundred-plus pages of text and extensive notes tells Allen’s story up to this point—he turned eighty-one in May—but demands a critical companion to the artist.

It’s the most expensive free jazz tour of all time. At least in my book, and likely in yours. At 160 dollars this May, André Benjamin hit about the middle of the price point he has been asking from ticket buyers in support of his recent flute album, New Blue Sun (Epic, 2023).

One of the most appealing parts of Anahata’s aesthetic is how the vocals move from raw and strangled—barely containing themselves within the speakers—to softer and cleaner, keening for something almost unobtainable. This is post-hardcore at work, the influence of all those aforementioned styles Christopher Leyba absorbed as a young man, but also a dichotomy present in all of us: inner monologue versus what we present to the world. 

Summoning that will to change, and bringing people together to do so, is an essential challenge. Initiatives like the Habibi Festival allow us not only to envision this transformation, but to accelerate into change.