The Advancing Agenda: Devin Gray’s Socialytics

Just because grant support has dwindled and audience size has shrunk doesn’t mean that jazz is dead or dying. Quite the contrary. People often confuse the lack of attention and the abysmal metrics of the jazz business with the health of the music itself.

Take for instance the vibrant music delivered on Saturday, October 26 by Devin Gray’s Socialytics at Hampshire College’s Music & Dance Recital Hall. It pulsed with beauty, risk, and a sense of experimentation. While the remuneration was modest, the trio: Devin Gray, drums, Dave Ballou, trumpet, and Ryan Ferreira, guitar, delivered a plate full of engaged music-making, as Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares continued its 8th season of concerts.

Gray and Ferreira are among a large throng of fantastic improvisers under 40, who, against all odds, are reinvigorating jazz in its second century. The rewards for performers are found mostly on the bandstand and in forged friendships; artists committed to creative music mostly have to find other ways to make rent.

But the music is alive and moving in many fruitful directions, absorbing, as it always has, influences from everywhere. Makaya McCraven and his band of 20 and 30-somethings, who were at UMass two weeks ago, are invoking funk and spiritual jazz legacies. Others draw from hip hop, free jazz, contemporary classical, R&B, and multiple world music traditions. The Socialytics explore open jazz territory, unpacking, dissecting and transforming small memorable compositions by Gray in recurring acts of no-net improvising.

The veteran at 52, Dave Ballou is a Professor of Music at Towson University, and comfortable in most settings. He has recorded as a leader since the mid-1990s, and has performed with Andrew Hill, Rabih Aboul-Kahlil, Michael Formanek and John Hollenbeck. Over dinner hosted by Jazz Shares Board member Marta Ostapuik, Ballou told us how he turned down a lucrative tour with Steely Dan because he had already committed to, and would have a lot more fun in, Satoko Fujii’s adventurous New York Big Band. A good, steady day job makes it easier to prioritize the creative impulse. In Saturday’s pared down setting, Ballou’s broad and evocative vocabulary, ranging from long clarion tones to glitchy sputters, had plenty of room to shine.

Ryan Ferreira plays without attention grabbing histrionics or ear-splitting volume. He is an atmospherean, creating sonic beds of various colors, inserting pointed phrases, using pedals and loops to spread pastels and uncertainty. He did double duty with the Socialytics, playing through a guitar amp and a bass amp, providing bottom and melody for each of the four pieces. His preference for ambient soundscapes made the trio sound like a larger ensemble. Like his music, and true to his northern California roots, Ferreira is chill. He has history with Tim Berne, Chris Dingman and Colin Hinton (coming to the 121 Club with a fabulous quintet on November 15).

Devin Gray is a resourceful drummer. He spent the evening exploring his kit, striking and scraping rims, drum sides, hardware, skins and cymbals with brushes, hands, mallets, and sticks. The result was a cornucopia of textures that kept things fresh and dynamic. His rhythmic framing of each theme served as signpost for both bandmates and audience. Gray splits his time between New York, Berlin and Brussels, and his bandleading duties between Dirigo Rataplan (Ellery Eskelin, Dave Ballou and Michael Formanek,) Relative Resonance (Chris Speed, Kris Davis and Chris Tordini,) and Fashionable Pop Music (Jonathan Goldberger, Ferreira and Tordini.) Like all his peers, Gray has learned the multi-task dance, balancing writing, performing, practicing, traveling, booking, teaching, promoting, and eating.

Gray has long history with Ballou, whom he met as a 14-year old at the Maine Jazz Camp, and Ferreira, but this was their first go as a trio. They performed at the Red Room in Baltimore on Friday and were recording in Brooklyn on Sunday. Then Gray is off to Europe to inject more energy into the incredible morphing machine we call jazz.

Stars Rising: Makaya McCraven Quintet at UMass

They say you can’t go home again, but Makaya McCraven returned to western Massachusetts on Wednesday, October 10 mesmerizing 325 willing souls, as the UMass Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series began its 31st season. The globe-trotting drummer and composer, who has lived in Chicago for more than a decade, grew up in the Pioneer Valley, where he learned the ins-and-outs of the musical arts.

The concert at Bowker Auditorium featured four close collaborators: Jeff Parker, guitar, Joel Ross, vibraphone and Fender Rhodes, Brandee Younger, harp, and Dezron Douglas, bass, all of whom are featured on McCraven’s latest gem, Universal Beings, (International Anthem, 2018). Eschewing horns, the band dispensed with notions of a “front line,” opting instead for a shimmering group sound that was both ethereal and rooted in back beats.

Often the band would play beautiful, slow elongated lines, while the drummer skittered at double the pace. The effect was dream and stream-like: calm on the surface, but roiling beneath. It resulted in an evening of deep connection to sound. Ross, Younger, and Parker produced rich ringing tones that hung in the air, while Douglas and McCraven gave each tune heft and bottom.

All but “Song of the Forest Boogaraboo,” (Steve McCraven) and the encore – a brief, gorgeous rendition of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain” – were Makaya McCraven originals. They were full of simple, memorable rifts and infectious beats that lingered in the mind. Many had depth of feeling and pop simplicity. The level of technical skill on stage elevated the music from pleasing to profound.

Makaya McCraven and his bandmates are connected to the jazz tradition, and are also re-vamping it. I’ve seen photos of Makaya in Marion Brown’s lap and playing drums with Archie Shepp as a five-year old. The band has learned the rudiments at the Hartt School (Brandee Younger and Dezron Douglas) and Berklee (Jeff Parker.) Joel Ross, 23, is fresh off two years of intense study with Stefon Harris at his Brubeck Institute Jazz Quintet at the University of the Pacific. The musicians have been personally touched by Jackie McLean, Yusef Lateef and other past masters.

But following the imperative to add to the tradition, McCraven and a large cohort of peers are incorporating new kinds of influences to reinvigorate the music. As he told Chicago Magazine, “I grew up studying jazz as a way to be masterful at my craft as a drummer. But as a young person, I was listening to A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, Nas, and Biggie just like everybody else. That was just our generation.” Those sounds, like everything else circulating throughout the culture, is legit grist for the jazz mill.

At 52, Jeff Parker is the elder-statesman of the group. The guitarist was one of the first musicians to reach out to McCraven when he arrived in Chicago in 2007; they have been close collaborators since. Parker’s long-standing policy of genre-busting is well documented through projects like Tortoise and his involvement in multiple Chicago creative music scenes. His fabulous International Anthem record, The New Breed, came out just after McCraven’s heralded In This Moment (International Anthem, 2015.) They are clearly simpatico and pushing in the same direction. Parker has a clean yet quirky approach, never too busy or loud. His playing is full of afterthoughts, phrases mentioned in passing.

The shadow of Alice Coltrane looms over the harp in a unique way; no other instrument is so closely tied to a single individual. (Other than Dorothy Ashby, name another jazz harpist.) Younger has embraced Coltrane’s influence, and has worked alongside Ravi Coltrane in paying tribute to his mother in concert. To hear a harp in person is a special thing. Early in the evening, Younger had an unaccompanied solo that took my breath away. Although harp occupies similar sonic territory as vibes and guitar, we could hear it clearly. Younger’s sound, and the stage lights glistening off her large, majestic instrument, were celestial. Her recent recording, Soul Awakening (Self-released, 2019), was produced by Dezron Douglas.

Born in Hartford, Douglas is rock-solid, physically and musically, and was a more than able replacement for Junius Paul, McCraven’s most constant musical compatriot. (Paul was in Europe, touring with Roscoe Mitchell and the reconstituted Art Ensemble of Chicago.) McCraven’s tribute to Douglas, “Black Lion,” featured a firmly grounded bass line and a muscular solo. Maurice Robertson and the CT crew have been singing this man’s praises forever. The rest of the world now knows.

Joel Ross has burst on the scene like few others, going from recent college grad to bandleader, Blue Note recording artist, and in demand sideman seemingly overnight. Playing two mallets, (not the four popularized by Gary Burton,) Ross brought the house down with a virtuosic, note-filled solo early in the proceedings. He also created welcome tension when he used fewer, well-placed notes and let them decay while the band sped on. He will bring his ensemble to the Vermont Jazz Center on March 14.

McCraven is a melodicist versed in funk. His drumming is strong, full of interesting detail, beat-driven, for sure. His compositions provide his band with interesting moods and melodies to explore, including many in a spiritual realm. This is more than just a party. His father, the drummer Steve McCraven, and his mother, musician and artist Agnes Zsigmondi, gave him full access to a life of creativity. Makaya McCraven has seized it.

The Legend Continues: Andrew Cyrille at UMass

There are lots of fabulous jazz drummers working today, some of them legendary. I can name 50 greats before coming up for air. But the number of percussionists who can hold an audience for an entire solo concert is much smaller.

Andrew Cyrille, who turns 80 years old next month, is both legendary and a riveting soloist. On Friday, September 27, the applause of 90 patrons went on and on and on, as he filled the New Africa House Theater at UMass with melody, anecdotes and of course, rhythm.

The concert was co-produced by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares and the UMass Fine Arts Center’s Augusta Savage Gallery. Cyrille’s concert was the culminating event in the Gallery’s fabulous week of live performances curated by Terry Jenoure.

The Brooklyn-born icon has a long history of drum-only endeavors. His 1969 debut recording, What About? (BYG), is a solo effort. His second album, Dialogue of the Drums (IPS, 1974), is a duet with fellow percussionist Milford Graves. The very first Solos & Duos Series concert I produced at UMass in 2002 was Cyrille alone.

Cyrille made opening remarks in front of his kit, then began to play the instrument from that side, hitting bass drum, hardware and then the rest of it, as he slowly made his way around to his throne.

Over the course of his 70-minute recital, he paid tribute to past masters Kenny Clarke and Max Roach. Clarke, who was the house drummer at Minton’s in the 1940s, is one of the unsung architects of bebop. On “Laurent,” written by Klook as he was known, Cyrille played squarely in the jazz tradition, sizzling on his ride cymbals. His original, “Drum Song for Leadbelly,” played mostly on snare and rims, was an extroverted composition that marched and danced with an early 20th century nod. Both songs are found on Pieces of Time (Soul Note, 1994), a project Cyrille put together with Famadou Don Moye, Milford Graves and Kenny Clarke.

The evening consisted of discreet compositions, each with distinct rhythmic and melodic intent. The riffs and phrases that defined each piece were full of groove and melody, and allowed us to marvel at all the tangents and variations he spun. He played a brand-new Ludwig kit, with two rack toms, donated by the company; Bob Weiner lent us extra cymbals, putting five at his disposal. Cyrille took advantage of it all.

The drummer is at a very good point in his career. His lifetime of achievement was marked at the Vision Festival in June, where he joined with Wadada Leo Smith, Peter Brötzmann, Kidd Jordan, Tomeka Reid, Brandon Ross, Milford Graves, Lisa Sokolov, along with poets, dancers and visual artists, in eight different ensembles over one evening. He is now recording for ECM, one of the last major jazz labels still standing. His two recent well-received releases, The Declaration of Musical Independence (2016) and Lebroba (2018), both featuring Bill Frisell, has introduced him to new audiences. He is getting good gigs and still enjoys teaching at the New School (Benny Woodard from South Hadley was one of his more serious students.)

Cyrille, who had extensive dealings with Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, ended the evening with “For Girls Dancing,” an original inspired by his study of African music. True to its name, it was buoyant, infectious and life affirming, ending the concert on the highest of notes.