Here’s the TLDR version: My quintet, featuring vocalist Lena Seikaly, guitarist John Lee, bassist Eliot Seppa and drummer Ele Rubenstein (as well as Yours Truly on piano), will perform at Mr. Henry’s (601 Pennsylvania Ave SE) on November 20, and we’ll be exclusively covering songs from the 1990s. Please get tickets, especially if you were born before, during or after the 1990s!
You may be wondering, what songs from the nineties are we covering, and why? (If not, you can stop reading. But still buy tickets please!) Primarily, we’re covering indie rock songs, and primarily in a jazz style. And, given that the terms “indie rock” and “jazz” are both so difficult (not to mention ridiculous and/or tedious) to define as to be borderline nebulous, what does that mean exactly? Well, a wise person once said that “talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” and I would personally extend that concept to say that, considering music in any way other than playing or listening to it kind of makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
But! Since you asked! At the risk of sounding like a pretentious nitwit (I know, I know, too late), I’ll say that there is long history of pretentious nitwits jazz musicians using radio- and audience-friendly popular songs as springboards for extended, improvisatory, musical explorations (that are naturally bound to be less radio and audience friendly, an unsolvable paradox for jazz musicians all the time everywhere). Charitably, you could say that in their quest to achieve “freedom of expression” (Duke Ellington’s definition of jazz, who am I to argue), they are using the popular song framework as an inviting entry point for folks disinclined to be interested in hearing people make the s**t up as they go along, so to speak (AKA 99% of the human population). Uncharitably, you could say that they’re trying to get some of that commercially viable juju to rub off on their commercially unviable product. Now please excuse me while I go bang my head against a wall.
OK! I’m back. Occasionally, this ploy yields magical results, such as when John Coltrane melted everybody’s faces by playing “My Favorite Things” and then doing musical backflips all over it for 10 minutes. Or when Gil Evans and Miles Davis turned “Porgy and Bess” into a spectacular jazz big band odyssey. Or when Cannonball Adderley transformed “People Will Say We’re in Love” from a corny whitebread love song about Oklahomans into a showcase for his mighty improvisational pyrotechnics. Or a hundred other examples. However, what all of the above have in common is that they are using songs from Broadway and/or Tin Pan Alley, i.e., “The Great American Songbook.” When it comes to rock music, it gets a little trickier.
The aesthetics of artistic creation involved in Broadway (one to three suave, debonair geniuses cranking out an elegant masterpiece over the course of fourteen months holed up in a hotel room on a diet of coffee and cigarettes) and jazz (achieving proficiency by driving yourself borderline insane transcribing Wynton Kelly solos and/or taking on a hideous mountain of debt attending a prestigious jazz studies program and/or playing hundreds of laughably low-paying gigs in dives with shady owners where the band outnumbers the audience, which is saying something when it’s a trio) have a lot more in common with each other than either does with the aesthetics of rock (I learned three chords on the guitar and then wrote a song about truth, beauty, and how The Man can go **** himself). The first two involve a lot of flop sweat, and quote unquote Mastery (attempted anyway). The third is largely about Attitude, and it pretty much pantses the others.
So. How do you take something that mostly shrugs at musical sophistication and use it as a vehicle to show how musically sophisticated you are? The answer is, pretty much, you don’t, or you shouldn’t anyway. Hank Mobley, bless him, one of my all time favorites, tried it in 1968 with his album “Reach Out!” and, let’s just say, that’s not the album he’s remembered for. Oscar Peterson and Milt Jackson covered the Rolling Stones (Satisfaction) on their 1972 album Reunion Blues and… it’s kinda whatever.
Then, along came The Bad Plus in 2003, melting faces again with their cover of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” In working so undeniably, it suddenly made covering rock songs seem like a good idea again. Brad Mehldau covered Radiohead and the Beatles, Joshua Redman covered Joni Mitchell and the Beatles, Kenny Werner covered Eric Clapton and the Beatles (lots of Beatles covers!) Those all mostly worked, but a lot of other people covered a lot of other rock songs that really didn’t work (looks in the mirror).
Which brings us to the present. Given the definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result, or something like that), maybe the reason I’m doing this is that I am a little bit insane. A much shorter explanation is that Lena Seikaly and I have a musical bond going back years and years that involves a shared love of, among other things, indie rock and music from the nineties, particularly the songs of Aimee Mann and Elliott Smith. Expanding the repertoire for this gig out from those two artists has proved much more challenging and invigorating than expected.
For example, are we trying to present a musical snapshot of a momentous decade, one that saw the end of the Cold War, the rise of globalism and grunge, and, most importantly, Bill Clinton playing saxophone on the Arsenio Hall Show? The last decade before the internet and smart phones and tech bros ruined everything for everybody? Well, no, that would be impossible. But also, maybe, kind of, a little bit? Mostly, I just wracked my brain looking for any songs written and/or released between the cosmically arbitrary dates of 1/1/90 and 12/31/99 that could be potentially cool to reframe in a straight-ahead jazz context.
In some cases, it was easy, e.g., “Give Me One Reason” by Tracy Chapman, or “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” by Bonnie Raitt: masterpieces that transcend genre, no adjustments required. In some cases, it led to fortuitous discoveries, e.g., when you extract the lyrics from “Friday I’m In Love” by The Cure, subtracting the jangly guitars and layered synths, what you’re left with bears a lot of the sophisticated hallmarks of the Great American Songbook (easy to get from there to the jazz version).
If you have any interest in seeing how we’ve reframed (or, depending on one’s perspective, needlessly messed with) songs by artists such as The Pixies, Blur, Jeff Buckley, The Magnetic Fields, among many others, please get tickets to the show! If you don’t have any interest in any of the above, please also get tickets. I hope to see you there and melt your face.