As writers the craft of journalism & criticism demands objectivity, no matter what the genre. But we’re human, we all have certain favored areas of our particular pursuit. Writer Bill Shoemaker, publisher of the penetrating online journal Point of Departure (http://www.pointofdeparture.org) certainly respects the tradition and has a broad-based sense of the music, but in particular he has long expressed a never-ending curiosity for the edgy, the experimental, and the free.

Last Labor Day Weekend as we sat in the unusually balmy clime of Chicago’s lakefront in Millenium Park awaiting another splendid night of the Chicago Jazz Festival, Bill laid a fresh copy of an intriguing new book on me of short critical essays, titled Arrivals/Departures – New Horizons in Jazz (pub. Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), for which he served as one of three contributors. From the jump the list of names on the book’s cover revealed it as a chronicle of sorts of some of the true restless seekers in contemporary music. Clearly some questions were in order for Bill Shoemaker.

It often happens that books like Arrivals/Departures – New Horizons in Jazz are published to fill at least a perceived void in the literature. Where do you see this book fitting as far as fulfilling a need for information on these artists? Would it be safe to say that this book is somewhat of an encyclopedia of some of the freer forms of modern jazz? Where/how is this book available to the public?
The book came about through unusual circumstances. Stuart Broomer and I were approached at the 2012 edition of Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, who produces the festival, to write a book coinciding with the 30th edition of the festival in ’13. At first, we thought they wanted an essay from each of us for a booklet, so were quite stunned when they proposed 100 essays on artists who had performed at the festival. This should have tipped us off that they were not really in touch with what it takes to write such a book.

We got them down to 50 – 25 at approximately 1,250 words; 25 at 750 – and then Stuart and I drew up a list of artists and divided them between us; it was like kids with baseball cards in a way. We then submitted a list, but we were overruled on some names. Randy Weston, for example, was nixed in favor of someone I refused to write about – another hint that trouble was ahead.

When we left the festival in mid-August, we basically had an agreement. Its finalization was held up for almost two months, which was potentially lethal given the short time we had to write. The administrator – Jose Pinto – took a lengthy holiday (he deserves them, he said in an email) and then, for weeks, he inexplicably could not confirm that Stuart and I were not subject to Portuguese income tax. Given that we had to deliver all the copy by the end of February, and that an unusual amount of other work came my way in the interim, I decided to sub out half of my work to Brian Morton. By this time, my relationship with Pinto was deteriorating – I think it was my suggestion that he just walk down the hall to the comptroller’s office on the tax issue.

We then had other issues: They dragged their feet on whether American or British English would be used (I’m used to Americanizing Brian’s writing, but at the 11th hour?); they insisted that Otomo Yoshihide be alphabetized as a Y name, even though Otomo is his family; we had to do all the line editing and page proofing; it went on and on. It was a stressful four or five months. The joke is that by spring I had a light case of The Shining. Then there is the cover, which looks like a middle school absence list on which a teacher placed his/her coffee cup. They managed to cram 50 names on the cover, but intentionally omitted ours – some nonsense about the current European protocol of academic volumes with multiple authors, they said – all of which brings me to their lack of marketing chops. True: jazz consumers are interested in the subjects of a book, but they are also interested in who wrote it. Many jazz fans use critics as barometers for better or worse, be it us, Stanley Crouch or Howard Mandel. Nobody seems to know the book’s list price. The ace kicker was that the Portuguese edition of the book was not ready at the start of the festival. BTW: The title is theirs, not ours.

I bring all this up not only to make it clear that writing a book is neat in theory, but something else altogether in practice, but to explain the somewhat inchoate state of the book. It’s not really an encyclopedia or a critical history. The book is 50 short essays about musicians who played at this particular festival over 30 years. It was an assignment; left to our devices and an appropriate production schedule, we would have come up with a more interesting template. Don’t get me wrong: for what it is, it is very solid. I’ve been contacted by a couple of the musicians included in the book, and their response has been very enthusiastic – that’s really my measure that we got it right.

I do think there remains a void in the literature about the avant-garde. It shrinks with each book that appears on the subject, including this one. I think we shed light on some newer artists – and some familiar, even iconic artists, as well. But, I do think the idea of a definitive text on the jazz avant-garde is increasingly elusive – the music is just evolving too rapidly. The idea that a definitive assessment can be made about an artist in their 30s or even 40s – say, Mary Halvorson – is wrong-headed. It is equivalent to saying Four Lives in the Bebop Business (a book I cherish) is the last word on Cecil Taylor. So, I think it’s a matter of having more books written by a more diverse population of writers – if that happens, then at least we have a detailed composite picture.

As to where or how to get the book: I have no idea.

Many of the artists featured in the book are identified with the so-called jazz avant garde. That’s always been a loaded term, but you know how it is with our collective need to categorize music and musicians. What’s your sense of that term avant garde and does it really fit these musicians featured in this book?
Almost any term in the discussion of jazz – including “jazz” itself – has been loaded at one time or another. In a way, it’s good that “avant-garde” still has some polarizing sting to it. I respond to the term “avant-garde” in two ways: as shorthand for envelope-pushing, non-commercial, too-original-for-words music; and as a historical marker when discussing the late ‘50s and ‘60s. I would say the term is fitting for the artists in the book, but not necessarily for the entirety of their output. I think Jimmy Giuffre is a good example of this. Perhaps it is partially our fault that, generally, we have not sufficiently educated our readers, but it remains a fact that most people have a much easier time with avant-garde visual art than with music – they can process Jackson Pollack better than they can Ornette Coleman. Mind you, we’re talking about art that’s 50 years old, so it shouldn’t be a stretch for an educated, upscale demo – but it is.

Arrivals/Departires – New Horizons in Jazz features a balance of U.S. and European improvisers. In terms of their training, experience, where they come from and their overall music perspective, what differences do you detect in the creative outlook of artists from the U.S. and those from Europe in terms of how they convey their music?
I was in the crossfire of the US v. Europe jazz controversy for years – Americans thought I was Eurocentric, while Europeans thought I was an American chauvinist. I think that speaks to the liability of being inclusive in your views. I always fall back on something my dad said about Europeans he met during WWII: They’re just like us, except they’re different. Certainly, the European social/cultural/political context is distinct from ours, but that doesn’t mean you can’t love something from a different context. There are few Americans who have taken Coltrane to heart as have Brits like Paul Dunmall, Evan Parker and the criminally neglected Art Themen. You would be hard-pressed to find someone with brighter insights into John Carter than Ab Baars. I really can’t think of an American currently who has that Big Sid Catlett swing [down] like Han Bennink – but that’s just part of what he does. Certainly, their individual aesthetic filters yield music that does not always bear much resemblance to American jazz; but if they did, there would be those who would say that they’re pale imitations. Conversely, there are American drummers who try to play like Paul Lovens, guitarists who try to approximate Derek Bailey; the list is long. So, I think the eggs are thoroughly scrambled.

Talk about your online journal Point of Departure and the perspective it chooses to deliver.
To paraphrase the old ESP slogan: It’s the writers who determine what you read in Point of Departure. I think saying PoD has an avant-garde-centric orientation is basically accurate, although the current issue has long pieces on Woody Shaw, Pee Wee Russell, Major Surgery (a British electric band from the ‘70s) and The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. BTW: Anyone who bemoans the death of long-form jazz journalism obviously hasn’t read PoD. We regularly run pieces of 3,000 words or more. I wish I had the time to continue the roundtables – they were always lively – but, otherwise, I’m OK with where we’re at in terms of content. I’m encouraged by the contributions of newer voices like Clifford Allen, Jason Bivins, Troy Collins (who is also an invaluable part of the production team), and Michael Rosenstein. Veterans like Brian, Stuart, Art Lange, Ed Hazell and Kevin Whitehead continue to motivate and educate me. Going from six issues a year to four was a necessary change – I’m amazed I haven’t completely burned out – and it now seems like a sustainable pace: writers have more time to write, readers have more time to read, and I actually have time to write fiction, shoot pool and hang out. The one thing I haven’t accomplished with PoD is completely squelching the idea that it is a blog, a term like “avant-garde” that is going to be there, regardless.

What’s forthcoming in P.O.D.?
The thing about PoD is that I only really don’t know what will be in the next issue until a couple weeks out from publication. Art rarely knows what he’ll be writing about until then; same with Brian, sometimes. I am continually amazed by their ability to produce incisive essays in a matter of a day or two. And, Art delivers absolutely immaculate copy to boot – I had to tease Art that Troy found two extra spaces when he formatted Art’s Pee Wee Russell piece. Obviously, record reviews have to be sorted out earlier in the cycle, but even then there are last minute additions – and crises that prevent delivery of a review or two. I think I’m writing about Jimmy Carter’s jazz picnic for the December issue, but that could change at any moment – really.

Just to give you a taste of what’s in store when you visit Bill Shoemaker’s online journal Point of Departure (http://www.pointofdeparture.org) here are the contents of the most recent issue:

Issue 44 – September 2013

Publisher: Bill Shoemaker
Production: Robert Winkle, Troy Collins

Here’s our playlist for the Wednesday, October 9 edition of Ancient/Future radio, heard Wednesday nights 10-midnight on WPFW 89.3FM in the DC metro area, and streaming live at http://www.wpfw.org.

ARTIST/TUNE/ALBUM/LABEL
Charles Brown, In the Evening, compilation
(Remembering Butch Warren)
Butch Warren, A Little Chippie (courtesy of Larry Appelbaum)
Thelonious Monk, Stuffy Turkey, Monk’s Miracles, Columbia
Thelonious Monk, Evidence, Monk in Tokyo, Columbia
Herbie Hancock, Three Bags Full, The Complete Blue Note Sessions, Blue Note
Jackie McLean, The Way I Feel (comp. Butch Warren), Vertigo, Blue Note
McCoy Tyner, Contemporary Focus, Today and Tomorrow, Impulse!
Hank Mobley, No Room for Squares, ditto, Blue Note
(What’s New/the New Release Hour)
Louis Armstrong/Oscar Peterson, What’s New
Rene Marie, Peel Me a Grape, I Wanna Be Evil, Motema
Jeri Brown, Echoes, ditto, Jongleur
Geri Allen (w/Marcus Belgrave), Space Odyssey, Grand River Crossings, Motema
Randy Weston & Billy Harper, Blues to Senegal, The Roots of the Blues, Universal/Sunnyside
Charnett Moffett, Lonely Woman, Spirit of Sound, Motema
Billy Bang, Law Years, Da Bang, Tum
Steve Khan, Blues Connotation, Parting Shot, Tone Center
Jamie Baum Septet, Nusrat, In This Life, Sunnyside

contact: willard@openskyjazz.com

This year marks my 4th decade doing weekly jazz radio shows for community and public radio stations. Currently my Ancient/Future show airs Wednesday nights 10:00pm-midnight over WPFW 89.3 FM in the DC Metro area, and streaming live at http://www.wpfw.org; from 11:00pm-midnight is our weekly feature What’s New/The New Release Hour. Here’s the playlist for October 2, 2013:

ARTIST / TUNE / ALBUM TITLE / LABEL
Wynton Marsalis & Eric Clapton, Joe Turner’s Blues, Play The Blues, Warner Bros.
Duke Ellington, Daybreak Express, Duke Ellington Centennial, RCA
Duke Ellington, Across the Track Blues, Duke Ellington Centennial, RCA
Clifford Brown, Take the ‘A’ Train, Complete Emarcy Recordings, Emarcy
Jon Hendricks, Little Train of Iron, Salud Joao Gilberto, Reprise
John Coltrane, Blue Train, Blue Train, Blue Note
Christian McBride, Dream Train, People Music, Mack Avenue
Bobby McFerrin, He Ran for the Train, Vocabularies, Emarcy
What’s New/The New Release Hour
Roberto Fonseca, 7 Rayos, Yo, Concord
Ahmad Jamal, Silver, Saturday Morning, Jazz Village
Gregory Porter, Free, Liquid Spirit, Blue Note
Trilok Gurtu, Jack Johnson Black Saint, Spellbound, Sunnyside
Michele Rosewoman’s New Yor-Uba, Perdon, 30 Years, Advance
Wayne Wallace Latin Jazz Quintet, Melambo, Latin Jazz/Jazz Latin, Patois
Monsur Scott Harlem Quartet, Song for My Father, Come Over,

Host: Willard Jenkins

Ain’t But a Few of Us
Black music writers tell their story…
Anthony Dean-Harris

I first encountered the young writer Anthony Dean-Harris via his very active jazz-based blog at http://www.NEXTBOP.com. Just to give you a sense of where he’s been coming from with NEXTBOP, here’s how he characterizes the site: “The philosophy of Nextbop isn’t just about promoting jazz to jazz lovers. Nextbop is about appealing to everyone. It’s about promoting jazz to the world. It’s about showing the indie rock crowd, the punk rock crowd, the hip hop crowd, the R&B crowd, the bluegrass crowd, and so many other scenes that this kind of music is great and it’s not so far off from what you’re used to hearing.” Being all about jazz audience development here with the Independent Ear, and with my work in general, that philosophy certainly struck a chord with this editor!

As with any upwardly mobile, energetic young striver, change is afoot for Anthony Dean-Harris, news he conveyed recently. “I, in consultation with my partner Sebastien, have decided to end Nextbop at the end of this year in order to oversee the blog at The Art of Cool Project (http://www.theartofcoolproject.com), a non-profit organization that puts on jazz and jazz-related shows in Durham, NC,” with their first festival in the works for April 2014. “Starting [in October] posts for Nextbop will post simultaneously at Art of Cool so as to get folks comfortable, eventually heading there by next year and to grow its audience.”

Clearly Anthony Dean-Harris was a fresh new candidate for this latest installment in the “Ain’t But a Few of Us” series of dialogues with African American jazz writers…

WHAT MOTIVATED YOU TO WRITE ABOUT SERIOUS MUSIC IN THE FIRST PLACE?
I’ve always loved jazz and grew up around it and I knew I’ve wanted to be a writer since high school when I knew I wanted to go to Trinity University for college because of its jazz station, KRTU San Antonio. However, I didn’t get a scholarship to Trinity, though I did get one for Morehouse College. So I ended up going there and my family soon followed me up to support me, experience the American black mecca [Atlanta] themselves, and keep costs low (or at least as low as one can in an area with a significantly higher cost of living than San Antonio). When I graduated from Morehouse in 2008, the recession had just hit and my family decided that since I was done with school, we’d all head back from Atlanta to our hometown of San Antonio.

Once home, I got involved as a volunteer with a city council race and met the late Kathy Clay-Little, a columnist for the San Antonio Express-News and publisher of the community newspaper African-American Expressions. We were talking at the campaign office one day about her plans to put on a small jazz festival on Fathers’ Day and who she should try to book. When she learned of my love of jazz, she asked if I’d like to cover concerts for her paper. I gladly said yes and one of my first assignments was to attend the annual KRTU spring concert with her, including the opening VIP reception. It was there, before the evening’s performer Ramsey Lewis, that I met many of the folks who ran KRTU. Those folks said I should have a show there, especially since one of their hosts was leaving soon. Over the next few months, I eventually ended up taking over The Line-Up, posting the playlists to my personal blog.

It was around this time that I ran across sites like Nextbop and NPR’s jazz blog, A Blog Supreme. ABS’s editor, Patrick Jarenwattananon, posed a question to a few folks in the jazz scene, asking if they were to share ten albums of jazz music with a newcomer to the genre, which albums would they choose, however all the albums could only be from the last twenty years. Nextbop’s founders, Sebastien Helary and Justin Wee, had a great list and that’s when I was impressed by the site and its potential. I also put together a list unsolicited and sent it to Jarenwattananon, who graciously posted it to the site. That’s how Sebastien ran across my blog with its playlists from my radio show and my writing from college back when I was on the newspaper staff as opinions editor. Seb contacted me about writing for Nextbop and as time went by and we grew a rapport, and as he learned that my college journalism background was perfect training for managing and growing the site, I eventually ended up as Nextbop’s editor and my role as writing about jazz music pretty much cemented.

I can see God’s hand in a lot of this, leading me from one role to another and making me incredibly happy (though still pretty poor, but I get plenty of new music and see a lot of shows in support of this community, so it all works out).

WHEN YOU FIRST STARTED WRITING ABOUT MUSIC WERE YOU AWARE OF THE DEARTH OF AFRICAN AMERICANS WRITING ABOUT SERIOUS MUSIC?
I can’t say I was aware of the dearth of black writers on jazz music, but I can’t say I was too surprised by it. The genre has been growing and changing a lot over the century of its existence, and as it goes with pretty much anything, it’s all too common for blacks to be shut out or limited from telling our own stories, framing our own narratives, or just giving our own perspective built from our backgrounds. Fortunately, it’s a bit easier for us to change this as the internet has democratised access and ability to do so but the work continues.

WHY DO YOU SUPPOSE THAT’S STILL SUCH A GLARING DISPARITY – WHERE YOU HAVE A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF BLACK MUSICIANS MAKING SERIOUS MUSIC BUT SO FEW BLACK MEDIA COMMENTATORS ON THE MUSIC?
I don’t like to think there are so many countervailing forces oppressing black journalists in this regard (there might be some who are indeed doing so maliciously, but I don’t want to cut wide swaths like that), but I do think that it could mostly be the public’s lack of familiarity with black voices. Much of my work focuses on contextualization– we are what we see everyday. We cannot know what we have not been exposed to and we’re experts on those things that surround us. There may very well be newspaper, magazine, and web editors who simply aren’t around voices of color who may be aware of black jazz (and R&B/hip hop/soul/etc) music and don’t even know that they don’t know this. In an increasingly nicheified musical landscape where people can read only the coverage they want to read, it may be getting easier to get our voices out there but difficult in entirely different ways to get work into disparate eyes.

DO YOU THINK THAT DISPARITY OR DEARTH OF AFRICAN AMERICAN JAZZ WRITERS CONTRIBUTES TO HOW THE MUSIC IS COVERED?
I definitely think this, largely because of contextualization. Take for example Kanye West‘s recent appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. The following day, there were many posts on music blogs linking to the performance– the standard web aggregation coverage of the day without much substance added to it other than “Watch this video!” It may have been noted that Charlie Wilson was present and singing, but a black voice well versed in Wilson’s body of work could have noted how many of Wilson’s trademark “shabba-dabba-tweet-tweet-tweet”s (and one or two “ooh’-weeEE’s) he ad-libbed. Of course, white writers who aren’t exposed to the back catalog of The Gap Band may not have even noticed this merited mentioning because they don’t know what they don’t know. This is how that added black perspective affects the discourse.

For black music to be, as it always has been, a crucial part of culture, informed people must also be part of the discourse about the music’s impact.

SINCE YOU’VE BEEN WRITING ABOUT SERIOUS MUSIC, HAVE YOU EVER FOUND YOURSELF QUESTIONING WHY SOME MUSICIANS MAY BE ELEVATED OVER OTHERS, AND IS IT YOUR SENSE THAT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE LACK OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY AMONG WRITERS COVERING THE MUSIC?
Since I’ve been writing about jazz, especially as I’ve run my own publication, I’ve come to realize essentially how this job and the attention given to some artists over others natually occurs. I’ve realized some of the seemingly trivial things like appealing album art determines whether or not I’ll devote attention to an album, or when an email hits my inbox at just the right time for me to care, or how important having a good press release and readily accessible songs to stream make spreading the word more appealing to me. Seeing the inner workings of music journalism like this helped me realize the whole industry functions like this to some degree, and this doesn’t even take into consideration how it all works in other genres or larger publications who may pay more attention to SEO optimization than merely discussing quality music and informing the masses of talent that needs a voice. The inner workings of the machine and its simple extension of how we as people pay attention to things explains so much about why music journalism is how it is.

So taking added diversity into account in this regard adjusts things a bit because it’s easy to assume people of different cultural backgrounds would have their respective attention drawn to different works. It’s the nature of the beast.

WHAT’S YOUR SENSE OF THE INDIFFERENCE OF SO MANY AFRICAN AMERICAN-ORIENTED PUBLICATIONS TOWARDS SERIOUS MUSIC, DESPITE THE FACT THAT SO MANY AFRICAN AMERICAN ARTISTS CONTINUE TO CREATE SERIOUS MUSIC?
When it comes to how black publications cover music of this sort, I don’t like to think of it too differently from how mainstream white publications cover mainstream pop music in comparison to other more sophisticated kinds of music. I’ve been so immersed in the world of jazz since I’ve been listening as a child, but especially since I’ve been involved in Nextbop and radio hosting at KRTU, that I have forgotten that this music does indeed have a tendency to be rather inaccessible. My listening to music for musicality, dynamism, quick decisions made on the spot, communalism between musicians, and other aspects that don’t bore me like simplicity does is distinctly different from how many others listen to music, searching for quick, visceral connection and catchiness. Every culture has this sort of dichotomy in its art and I’m loath to say black art may have this problem more than other cultures, though black culture’s influence on culture at large does shine a different sort of spotlight on the matter that is at times distressing.

HOW WOULD YOU REACT TO THE CONTENTION THAT THE WAY AND TONE OF HOW SERIOUS MUSIC IS COVERED HAS SOMETHING TO DO WITH WHO IS WRITING ABOUT IT?
I’d agree with this in much the same way writing about essentially anything is affected by who is doing the writing.

I’m a writer who loves not only music but also television and film. I’m one of those guys who uses the word “showrunner” a lot and cares about Aaron Sorkin’s oeuvre and things of that sort. When people ask me why I care about these sorts of things and how I remember details about television like I do, I tell them it’s all part of being a storyteller. In one’s family or circle of friends, there’s always some person at dinner — a guy back in college, that crazy uncle, a fellow bar patron — who tells stories in a way that makes people listen. Maybe the person describes things ornately, maybe s/he uses wild hand gestures, maybe s/he has a great voice. Whatever it is, the storyteller has attributes that makes his or her stories unique and appealing. A person tells a story in his or her own way that people remember, that causes them to come back for more. If a storyteller has a tendency to talk about interoffice relationships, or uses a camera to show the story, or uses the internet to talk about what happened at a jazz club in New York, these are all different ways to tell a story. I always try to understand that each medium lends itself to different strategies and means of performing the same function– there are people out there who want to hear what the storyteller has to say.

IN YOUR EXPERIENCE WRITING ABOUT SERIOUS MUSIC WHAT HAVE BEEN SOME OF YOUR MOST REWARDING ENCOUNTERS?
The most rewarding experience I’ve had since running Nextbop was putting together our first unofficial day party during the South By SouthWest festival in Austin, Texas, this last March. It was the first event I had ever organized and we had bands of renown local to Texas and throughout the world agree to play a little burger place built from a reformed car garage. It was humbling that such talented people like Australia’s Hiatus Kaiyote and Canada’s BADBADNOTGOOD would agree to play such an event for a clear novice like me at something like this, and moreso that it was attended as well as it was. I’m looking to put on another party this coming March without me being nearly as exasperated as I was the first time around, but after the dust cleared and everyone who was there had a great time, I could step back and marvel at just what happened. Writing is such a solitary act (and writers, like many artists, are often very critical of themselves to the point of self-loathing). So to throw an event where people actually show up and enjoy what it is that you do and are happy to say so is extremely satisfying.

Though lately, I’ve really enjoyed editing the work of others for Nextbop. There are essays like Jon Wertheim’s critique of trumpeter Nicholas Payton‘s contentious nature, or Ben Gray’s series looking at original versions of jazz songs and comparing them to cover versions, or just being blessed to post anything Angelika Beener writes that makes me immensely proud of Nextbop and what it has grown to be over these few years.

WHAT OBSTACLES HAVE YOU ENCOUNTERED – BESIDES DIFFICULT EDITORS AND INDIFFERENT PUBLICATIONS – IN YOUR EFFORTS AT COVERING SERIOUS MUSIC?
Since I’ve mostly been working as my own editor and manager since taking up music journalism, the most difficult part of all this is learning the ropes about all this on my own. Arranging interviews, obtaining press credentials for events, keeping in contact with publicists, and things of that sort is still a fish out of water thing for me. Another part of that, though, is figuring out how to make all this a viable business. Nextbop has been a labor of love for four years now and has yet to make money. I’ve been working on selling ad space to change that, but this, too, is one of those roles in the business that’s new to me. Running the whole business and learning the trade has been a lot to tackle, and though it’s been slow going, it’s sometimes a comfort to realize what I’ve picked up along the way in doing so.

10. WHAT HAVE BEEN THE MOST INTRIGUING RECORDS RELEASED SO FAR THIS YEAR?
Laura Mvula‘s Sing to the Moon
Thundercat‘s Apocalypse
Gerald Clayton‘s A Life Forum
The Stepkids‘ Troubadour
Butcher Brown‘s a & b-sides
Terence Blanchard‘s Magnetic
There’s definitely a lot more but I’ll get to that in the next few months around the time for year-end lists with the rest of the Nextbop staff.

DC-area based songstress/conceptualist Alison Crockett is a decidedly 21st century artist. I say that because here’s a woman who combines the political sensibility of a Nina Simone with a craft based on equal parts Sarah Vaughan and Jill Scott, blended with an approach informed by extensive work with artists ranging from DJ/producer/mixologist King Britt and the tightrope walking saxophonist-composer Greg Osby. Added to her many and varied experiences she brings exceptional music education from Temple University and an MA from Manhattan School of Music.

Alison’s latest recording is Mommy, What’s a Depression? – certainly a title that bears further exploring by inquisitive minds. There’s a strong sense of studio craft on this record, from the various news broadcast and speech samples and attention to such critical issues as immigration, to the use of technology more generally associated with hip hop and pop than with someone with her improvising skills. And dig the musicians she’s working with here; they include keyboardists like Marc Cary and Orrin Evans, the too often overlooked versatile/powerhouse drummer Terreon Gully, and his brother bassist Carlos Henderson, who alternates those chores with the ubiquitous Burniss Travis, alto saxophonist-keytar exponent Casey Benjamin (from the Robert Glasper Experiment)… and those are just a few of her fellow travelers. So what’s up with Alison Crockett? Read on…

Give us a little background on yourself and your singing efforts and activities.
I have been singing for a long time. I started off as a pianist but frankly didn’t want to practice as much as it took to get good so I moved to voice. That’s a little tongue and cheek, but still true. I started off singing straight ahead jazz in college and fully expected to do that for my life. Then I started working with DJs in Philly and it all changed. I worked with King Britt and Sylk 130 and was dubbed with the moniker, Ms. DivaBlue, an alter ego I have to this day. I then went over to Britain and recorded with Us3 and became their first vocalist. I was also recording with Jay Denes at Naked Music doing electronic lounge music. Meanwhile, I was putting out my first solo project, “On Becoming A Woman…” which started out as the EP “Azure”. The track “Like Rain” became very successful garnering a lot of praise from especially style makers like Gilles Peterson. I toured a lot, sometimes with my first daughter as a baby. All during that time I was working with kids and adults teaching, writing, arranging and conducting music. I decided early on, if I was going to be a musician, I was going to be a musician and that’s what I have done.

With the release of “Mommy, What’s a Depression,” what number is that in your discography? (For Alison’s complete discography visit www.alisoncrockett.net)
It is number 5. I did a Jazz EP titled, “That’s Where You Go“, “On Becoming a Woman…“, The Return of Diva Blue, (a remix record of On Becoming a Woman), “Bare“, and the present record out now.

There’s an obvious sense of narrative to this record, a sense of political inner-connectedness between the selections, starting with the title. Give us a sense of what you were after in putting this release together.
I have to get to the title later, because it won’t make sense if I say it first. My brother and I had a lot of political conversations and we were both news junkies. He suggested that I put my political thoughts to music. Originally it was to be a semi-tribute to Nina Simone; more of the spirit of her rebeliousness and originality. We were trying to capture all my interests in Jazz, Blues, Funk, and soul. I started off singing straight ahead jazz and then moved into Acid Jazz, Drum n bass, soulful house, and soul music. Each song I chose makes a statement about what I was thinking about an issue of the day. While we were planning and recording the record, the Great Recession hit, so there was even more material to deal with. “Gentrification” was my experience in Brooklyn being both the gentrifier and the gentrify-ee so to speak and the frustration that the people from the neighborhood feel at the changes occurring at their expense. I used the “Political Medley” to highlight what I saw George Bush do during his presidency. I just thought he did whatever he wanted, and screw what everyone else thought. He could take the country to war by saying whatever he wanted, which I thought the song “I’ve Got the World On a String” illustrated perfectly. When I heard Dinah Washington doing “Backwater blues”, the only thing I could think of was hurricane Katrina and the fecklessness of the response in spite of all the suffering. Then Obama dropped the ball totally in the same region during the oil spill a few years later. And all of that was tied into the world needing fossil fuels which has increased climate change which plays a part in the difficulties with the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana.

“H-U-M-A-N” came from the war in Iraq. We Americans can’t take it if one of us gets a hangnail, let alone death. However, if someone in another country dies, it’s doesn’t seem all that important. Though that is not completely true, when news reports were coming out about the American Soldier death tally at about 4000 it was really saddening. But then, the next number came out about Iraqi deaths and that was over 100,000! I started thinking about who we care about and what makes us care. We can see so much suffering, but as long as it doesn’t touch us personally, they are other and not truly human to us.

Each song is something in my life: being a hard working mom, having dreams for the future, being frustrated about political punditry and how self serving it is, being depressed about the present. Which brings me to the title of the record. My brother and I battled about it for months. But the news came on one day and my daughter heard about a depression, because they were talking about what was happening with the recession and how this was the worst economic downturn since the great depression. She asked me what a depression was. I tried to explain it to her. I was telling my brother about it in an off hand way and he said, that’s what we should call it. “Mommy, What’s a Depression?” I said, no, no, no, no…there’s got to be something better. But it stuck because it fit. This is a retrospective of what we as a nation have been going through for the past 10 years. It’s been really tough and who are the people that are going to be changed by it? Our children. I was going through all of this as a wife, mother and musician. My music has always been about sound pictures; snapshots of the moment. These songs are snapshots of this time, like you would see on CNN or Frontline, just done musically.

I have been performing the record as a one woman show recently and have been having the conversation with people through music about what it has been like. It makes an impact, because no one is discussing our recent past experiences with real talk. Events that have happened have changed peoples lives radically and the show has been like a release valve for me and hopefully others as we slowly climb our way out of the morass called the great recession. I’m continuing to expand and refine the show as I go until it gets to the point where literally it talks about the American dream that is not broken, but certainly has a flat tire or some problem with its engine for the majority of us.

You’ve got some first class partners working with you on this record, talk about your fellow collaborators on this disc.
I have been blessed to have grown up with some really wonderful players. I have to say that Terreon Gully made “H-U-M-A-N” what it was. I had the chart written and told him the feel and he destroyed it; pounded it into the ground. The greasiness he laid on tracks like Gentrification and the smoothness of I am a Million made everything feel so good. Then I had my Philly contingent on most of the jazz recordings. I have played with Orrin Evans, Mike Boone, and Byron Landham my entire adult life. We played gigs together when I was a young adult and so I know them and their sound well. They gave Trouble in the Lowlands the stank groove that only Philly cats can give. Marc Carey and I actually went to high school together and didn’t re-connect until I moved to Brooklyn. He has such a touch and deep understanding of how to make the piano sing. Casey Benjamin was my pianist for years and we did a tour together when my first record came out. His chord choices are epic! He puts a touch on music that makes it really unique. He made my song, “UR” on my first record into an epic journey literally with one chord change. He is brilliant. Trombonist Greg Boyer and I met while doing a workshop in Maryland, where I now reside. I asked him to listen to what I was working on, and would he be interested in doing the horns for “Talkin’ Like You Know”. He agreed and a classic was born. [poet] Ursula Rucker and I go way back to the King Britt and Sylk 130 days when we were on the record “When the Funk Hit’s the Fan”. She is my favorite performance poet. She has a way of putting words together sonically that sounds so real and uncontrived; unlike some other performance poets. I just like to listen to her talk. Then my brother, Teddy Crockett and I have been working together since we were born….

Clearly you’ve also decided to explore different means of sonic enhancement on this record, like the studio effect you get with “The Old Country”. Talk about that element of the release.
This record was to be a melding of all of my influences and that included the electronic influence. My brother, who produced the record, decided to go crazy in the best way possible. He decided to use auto-tune on my voice in a way that a lot of pop stars were using at that time. So we decided to put it into the song. We also wanted to create the picture of a a kitchen or a restaurant and a person listening to a radio about the immigration debate that was and is still raging at the time. Computers and processors allow you to make almost any sound you want, so the song morphs into a modern electronic lounge jam which I loved which represents to me the past and future melding as the issue continues to morph and change as we get deeper into the issue. Teddy also did this dope thing with the bass in “Nature Boy” where he ran the acoustic upright bass track that Mike Boone did through a processor to get the sound that you hear now. He used the same skills a producer would use in electronic music and Hip Hop by sampling aspects of the live recording and looping it so it could sound old and new at the same time. With “H-U-M-A-N”, we struggled with changing it at all. The live version was so ridiculously good, we didn’t know whether to leave it alone or not. Then Teddy went into mad genius phase and came up with the very same usage of auto-tune on my voice that he did on “Old Country” and it turned the song into a version of machine and man waring with each other about what is human. Originally it had no background vocals, but I loved the idea of the 2nds and suspended chords which added to the machine/robotic feeling even more. We are both sci-fi, star trek and star wars fans so it The effects makes a collage of sound that sonically can be overwhelming but gets the point across as much as the words do.

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