Mingus Big Band has been playing Mondays at Pocket Jazz, and Mingus Dynasty has been playing 3d Fridays at Zinc. Which do you prefer? To me, the Big Band was not well integrated. It was just a procession of solos. The smaller Mingus Dynasty was much tighter and better able to play together, even though personnel is a little different each time I’ve seen them. Your views?
I’m all for the developing jazz scene in Brooklyn, and I know that a bunch of great musicians call Brooklyn home, including some of our best avant-garde musicians, but is it worth a trip from Manhattan when there’s so much to choose from and new clubs keep opening? Maybe some Brooklyn fans could provide guidance on which Brooklyn venues are worth the trip from Manhattan.
Heard all four sets in this 2-night gig and came away persuaded that Courvoisier is our leading avant-garde composer and this trio is at the top of avant-garde performers. Courvoisier’s music has a narrative character that I haven’t heard any other avant-grade musician achieve, and punctuating her free jazz by folding an occasional groove into most of the numbers in this gig made her music more enjoyable without dulling it’s cutting edge.
All of us who live here know about The Village Vanguard, The Blue Note, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and I’m certainly invested in your views on all of those, but I’m especially interested in any venues you like that are less well-known, including bars and dives that may only have music a couple of days a week. Personally, I prefer the clubs that don’t serve dinner, because I find dinner service during a set distracting.
Do you use Bandsintown? Songkick? NYC Jazz Record? Venue websites? What are the most useful sources for making sure you don’t miss something you will wish you had heard?
I approach all jazz critics with skepticism, and the few jazz musicians I know (all “blue collar” class working pros who play in NYC and occasionally tour, mostly as side musicians, sometimes as leaders, and have released numerous albums) just have contempt for critics in general. The comment I hear most often goes something like this: “I listen to the album, I read the review, and I have no idea what the critic was listening to, but it couldn’t have been the album I heard.” Now, there might well be some sour grapes in that, but these musicians have all received some 4/5 star reviews in respected publications. So, what’s your experience? I don’t need a list of bad critics, but I don’t put much trust in any of them, but if there are critics you like, I’d love to hear about it.
EDIT: Let’s stipulate that we don’t need critics to tell us what we like or should like, but that a critic’s job is to direct our attention to the good and away from the bad because we don’t have time for every new release, and that a helpful critic would, most of all, accurately describe the music in terms a reader can use to predict whether he/she might like the album. Think about it this way: If you read newspaper restaurant reviews, it’s not because you want to be told whether you like the places you know; it’s because you want to know what’s new and whether you should go spend your time and money.