Originally posted by Joseph K
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The first tune has very Tippet-esque harmonies to my ears, full of stacked fourths and fifths. Brad Mehldau is on piano...
It is fascinating to listen to this as I was actually at that gig which was recorded at Vienne sometime in the mid-2000s. The whole concert was about 90 mins long and I remember being distinctly under-whelmed at the time. The second piece is far more robust that I recall and the gig tended to wash by. It was part of a double bill and seem to recall that the second set was by a Roy Haynes group with possibly Kenny Garrett on alto. An hour and a half of this kind of stuff is a bit of a tough ask.
You could argue that these musicians really summed up the state of jazz in the 2000s Brad Mehldau is seemingly the piano stylist of this generation whereas musicians like Rosenwinkel, Grenadier and Redman offered an alternative away from the more aggressive style of the New Neos from the previous generation. I suppose the odd man out in this group is Wynton / LCJO drummer Ali Jackson who I had forgotten had made up this quintet. At the time I had become really fed up with listening to this kind of jazz which sounded increasingly comfortable and pleased with itself. Redman is a good case in point. I have seen him perform on numerous occasions and although he has impressed in a piano-less trio and unexpectedly with the old formation of The Bad Plus, his appeal has generally passed me by. (Been listening to his Dad play with Keith Jarrett this afternoon on a CD and that is much more to my liking.) The same applies with Mehldau who I have found to be either spell bounding or frustratingly elusive. Players like Mehldau, Redman and Rosenwinkel are incredibly gifted and have enormous techniques yet listening to the first composition, you can't help but thinking that they have traded a lot of jazz's edge to achieve this. Another player I would throw into this same category is tenor player Mark Turner whose appeal alludes me.
The 2000s were often quite disappointing insofar as the kind of jazz that was being churned out. Musicians at the time seen quite content to claim that they were not jazz musicians and then the modish fad for laptops and stuff like Nu-Jazz seemed to grab the media's attention. Set again this, the likes of Mehldau, Redman and Rosenwinkel offered a more "traditional" response yet I find it really difficult to warm to. For me, these players are like the culmination of years of formal jazz education insofar that they have bags of technique and no soul. Luckily, I think that the current situation has improved considerably, largely helped by the then contemporary generation of musicians from Chicago who just seem to have grasped that jazz should not sound as slick as Rosenwinkel's quintet. Looking back at this period, you can draw parallels with these musicians with those previously signed to labels like Verve and Pablo. Weird too that if you are looking for some kind of narrative regarding jazz evolution or "development" as SA is want, this kind of jazz totally avoids the question.
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