[Dixielandjazz] Jazz, Show Business & Politics

[Steve Barbone]

Perhaps not OKOM, but the story is interesting.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone

Where Jazz, Show Business and Politics Converge

NY TIMES - By BEN RATLIFF - September 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 ‹ The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, now 20 years
old, has a private face and a public one, and there is a dissonance between
them. 

The private one involves a small postgraduate program in jazz performance,
operating out of the University of Southern California, presided over by the
trumpeter and educator Terence Blanchard. The public one is an annual jazz
contest and a sparkly, self-celebrating concert, usually recorded for
television, buttressed with top-ranking federal government officials and
famous nonjazz performers.

There is a point at which pop¹s intersection with jazz is a good idea: their
histories are intertwined, and each can renew the other¹s aesthetic
resources. And there is a point at which the federal government¹s
intersection with jazz makes sense, like the State Department¹s 50-year
history of sponsoring jazz tours in foreign countries. Past those points ‹
and some of the events around the Monk Institute¹s Thelonious Monk
International Jazz Piano Competition, last weekend, kept going past them ‹ a
spectator starts to wonder what the institute¹s real purpose is.

Nevertheless, the semifinals of the Monk Institute¹s annual competition,
which happened Saturday afternoon in the auditorium at the Smithsonian¹s
Museum of Natural History, remain a fascinating index of what young jazz
musicians in the mainstream are sounding like, and of what judges choose to
reward year by year. The contest is open to musicians under 30, and this
year the instrument was piano; the heavy-duty contest judges were Herbie
Hancock, Andrew Hill, Danilo Perez, Renee Rosnes, Billy Taylor and Randy
Weston. 

The winner was Tigran Hamasyan, a 19-year old Armenian pianist currently
studying at the University of Southern California, though as an
undergraduate, not within the Monk Institute program. His performances, in
both the semifinals and the finals, were intensely searching, and stubborn
in their intuitive force: jazz, for him, is about constantly moving around
the rhythmic accents in a piece of music so that nearly every bar seems to
be in a different time signature from the last.

His concept of style, as he revealed in the standards ³Cherokee² and
³Solar,² had something to do with Keith Jarrett (as did the sound of so many
other pianists in the contest), with his long-phrased, almost intemperate
melodic improvising; it had to do with Mr. Hancock, too, and his sense of
order and harmonic vocabulary. But Mr. Hamasyan¹s particular kind of nonstop
rhythmic reshuffling seemed his own.

Those who lost were piles of promise. Victor Gould, an 18-year-old with a
lovely, mysterious sense of time, drifted around ³You and the Night and the
Music,² leaving phrases half-turned and drawing out the house rhythm
section, the bassist Rodney Whitaker and the drummer Carl Allen, to help him
finish phrases. Aaron Parks, 22, who has been heard for four years in Mr.
Blanchard¹s band, used strong arrangement ideas and leaned hard on
solo-piano performance to show the judges what he could do.

And Gerald Clayton from California, also 22 and the son of the bassist John
Clayton, came to destroy: his playing had huge, authoritative presence, an
Oscar Peterson-like style, highly controlled touch and dynamics and
rhapsodic, episodic soloing. (The audience broke into applause during his
solo.) 

Had he won, it would have cast a different light on the whole enterprise.
Any musician can use the $20,000 prize money (half of it earmarked for some
kind of academic study), but Mr. Clayton seemed fully formed. Mr. Hamasyan
was, excitingly, not.

At what point will jazz just crumble under the weight of the glib encomiums
paid to it? During Sunday night¹s gala concert at the Kennedy Center, former
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright talked about how ³the power of jazz
enhances our cultural diplomacy,² and another former secretary of state,
Colin L. Powell, theorized that the qualities that made effective
international relations were ³the same as those that create a good jazz
band.² 

On Thursday night, at a half-hour White House performance presented by the
institute, with the president and the first lady as hosts ‹ which will be
seen in February on PBS ‹ Laura Bush gave a speech about jazz as ³an
American cultural treasure.² No art should have to live up to such clichés.

Sunday¹s concert included a short, tenebrous duet between Mr. Hancock and
Wayne Shorter, as well as a number by Mr. Blanchard¹s students from the Monk
Institute graduate program, playing adventurously in up-to-the-minute
mainstream jazz idioms.

But the institute saves prime spots for showboaters who aren¹t necessarily
jazz performers. Anita Baker, at Thursday night¹s event, sang ³My Funny
Valentine² before the president, and on Sunday Stevie Wonder was awarded the
institute¹s Maria Fisher Founder¹s Award for public service. Flanked by Ms.
Albright and Mr. Powell ‹ in the kind of surreal tableau this event provides
annually ‹ Mr. Wonder dedicated the award to his mother. ³I don¹t think she
was a Republican,² he added, impulsively. ³I¹m just trying to keep it real.²

Then he performed a drawn-out version of the standard ³Midnight Sun,²
playing harmonica and singing. The rest of the band was Mr. Hancock on
piano, Ron Carter on bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums and Mr. Blanchard
on trumpet. (Not bad.) But it became overly eccentric, and Mr. Wonder tried
some awkward scat singing; despite the booming power of his voice, the
performance fell apart.

The program for the finals competition and gala concert recycled old news
clips implying that record-company bidding wars follow the announcement of
the winner. This is not true: the bigger labels are barely signing new jazz
artists these days, and the excellent last two winners, the singer Gretchen
Parlato and the guitarist Lage Lund, have yet to cut much of a profile.

But whatever happens to Mr. Hamasyan, the contest brought him around people
like the judges and the contest¹s rhythm section, and brought them around
him. That¹s good enough.