Jen Shyu at UMass: Nine Doors

It felt a little daunting to come face-to-face with Jen Shyu, whose talent, ambition, curiosity and energy has resulted in so many accomplishments in a short amount of time. But her friendliness and her laugh are genuine and disarming; putting people at ease is yet another of her super powers.

She made a lot of friends during her three-day UMass residency, which culminated in an evening-length performance of her solo piece, Nine Doors, at Bowker Auditorium on November 7. Shyu’s concert, co-produced by the Fine Arts Center’s Magic Triangle Jazz Series and the Asian Arts & Culture Program, showcased her mastery of biwa, moon lute, gayageum, piano, percussion, movement, and most spectacularly, voice.

Nine Doors is a meditation on loss, dedicated to her friend, the 30-year old Indonesian shadow-puppet master Sri Joko Raharjo. In her opening remarks, she asked the audience to reflect on the loss of a loved one. After getting us to pair up for a “shoot shake” (stand up, hold hands, move them back and forth, yell ‘shoot’ repeatedly,) and some deep breathing, we settled in for a moving, virtuosic 75-minute tour de force.

After getting the phone call detailing the car crash that killed Joko, his wife and 11-month old son, she picked up the biwa, a four-string Japanese lute, and wailed. Her anguished singing and playing set the tone for the ritual drama that followed. The piece showcased the deep dive Shyu has taken into the stories, poetry, dress, dance and music of Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia and Taiwan.

Born in Peoria, Illinois to Taiwanese and East Timorese parents, she learned ballet and won awards as a classical pianist and violinist before studying opera at Stanford. While in the Bay Area, she befriended a group of Asian American improvisers, including Francis Wong, Jon Jang and Anthony Brown, who encouraged her to explore her cultural roots. A push from Steve Coleman first sent Shyu to Taiwan, beginning a life-long, in-person pursuit of indigenous traditions. Foundation support from Guggenheim, Fulbright, Doris Duke and USA Fellow has enabled her to spend years abroad, learning languages and songs, making friends, finding collaborators and gaining first-hand knowledge of traditional practices.

I first encountered Shyu’s music about eight years ago, listening hard to her exquisite duo record with bassist Mark Dresser, Synastry (Pi Recordings, 2011), her contemporaneous contributions to Steve Coleman’s Pi Recordings, and her own band, Jade Tongue, which over the years has included Thomas Morgan, Dan Weiss, Mat Maneri, Ambrose Akinmusire, Miles Okazaki and David Binney. She is a chance-taker, the embodiment of the Pi tag line: “Dedicated to the innovative.”

Song of Silver Geese (2017), her latest Pi recording, contains ensemble versions of some of the material we heard on Thursday. “I wanted to write for as big a group as I could,” Shyu told National Sawdust, which premiered Nine Doors in 2018, “and then distill it down to a solo.”

“It operates in some unpatrolled border zone,” said NPR, “blurring lines between folk song and art song, the traditional and the avant-garde, Western and Eastern, between waking consciousness and dream logic.” That’s exactly what we heard.

The piano, featured on “Song of Baridegi,” stood out from the three stringed instruments, providing brightness, and an edge of jazz energy; a western instrument in an East Asian music world. Shyu sung with abandon while generating sheets of sound through all registers of the 9-foot Steinway. It stirred the audience.

There were many other sublime moments: a short Javanese dance with a red silken scarf, the Korean female centered myth of Ati Batik, recited in English with soribuk drum accompaniment, the disembodied recorded sounds of drums and Joko and his family laughing together, Shyu holding her gayageum on her shoulder like a coffin, slowly turning in half light. The evening unfolded like a dream: a fleeting image, a brief encounter, a feeling of ritual, a transformation.

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.