A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, we are periodically leaving you with some photographs from The NPR Jazz Photography Pool, like the one below.

Photographer Bruce C. Moore writes:

While I have photographed scores of improvising musicians, I can think of none who are more deserving of exposure than Hadley Caliman. Over several years he has become one of my favorite subjects. I'm on the board of the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra and, among other things, I photograph most of their performances. This shot was taken at Seattle Center's Mural Amphitheater on Aug. 8, 2009 — a free outdoor concert by SRJO.

Hadley is a fine player, and a wonderful person. He has a fascinating backstory, and has earned the admiration and respect of all the musicians and jazz lovers in our region,. He, and his music, are honored by the broad acceptance of his recent recording projects, and we are fortunate to have him, and his music, within our reach.

Here's the original, and links to Bruce C. Moore's website and Flickr photostream. Feel free to contribute your jazz shots to the NPR Jazz Flickr group.

A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, we are periodically leaving you with some photographs from The NPR Jazz Photography Pool, like the one below.

Photographer Scott Bump writes:

The Newport Festivals — both folk and jazz — shrugged off their stuffy, old attitude this year with some fantastic performances from some great young players. From the absolutely jammed performance of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros at the folk fest to Julian Lage, Jenny Scheinman and Jason Moran at the jazz festival, the shows were relevant and extremely well attended. This is Lucia Micarelli, notable for the range of music she plays from Led Zeppelin covers to her work with Yael Biz's The Love Project. Here she is closing the jazz festival on the main stage with Chris Botti.

Here's the original, and a link to Scott Bump's website and Flickr photostream. You may recall NPR Music recorded much of the CareFusion Newport Jazz Festival (and Folk Festival) this year. And feel free to contribute your jazz shots to the NPR Jazz Flickr group.

A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, we are periodically leaving you with some photographs from The NPR Jazz Photography Pool, like the one below.

Photographer Tom Wiebe writes:

As part of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad at the Roundhouse in Vancouver, Anthony Braxton was in town for the premiere public performance of his Sonic Genome project. For 8 hours, 60+ musicians moved organically through 3 rooms at the Roundhouse, "breaking apart and reforming into new organisms performing Braxton's compositions and using his improvisational languages to create a living sound world where the audience is free to listen and wander at will" (to paraphrase from the event description).

Sounds like a recipe for utter musical wankerism and self-indulgence of the worst variety but, as is so often the case with Mr. Braxton, it instead turned into an utterly engaging, immersive and moving experience. His enthusiasm with the local high school musicians who formed part of the "ensemble" (to use the term very loosely) was absolutely amazing to watch. The 2010 Winter Olympics brought a lot of great moments and memorable experiences to Vancouver this winter, but, for me, this was a very close second to Sidney Crosby's overtime goal for the Gold Medal in men's hockey.

Here's the original, and links to Tom Wiebe's website and Flickr photostream. Feel free to contribute your jazz shots to the NPR Jazz Flickr group.

A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, we are periodically leaving you with some photographs from The NPR Jazz Photography Pool, like the one below.

Photographer Reuben Radding writes:

Here, the brass band Asphalt Orchestra was playing their last performance of the week at Lincoln Center Out of Doors. They emerged from taxicabs on 65th Street and played in front of Alice Tully Hall, and then led us all over the grounds of the complex, eventually taking us to Damrosch Park, where this shot was taken. They were playing the Frank Zappa song "Zomby Woof," which Peter Hess arranged for the band. I had been shooting them from the start with a good Canon DSLR but I had only a small memory card and by the time they got to Damrosch I'd filled it. Fortunately I had another camera with me, a tiny Panasonic LX3, and its wide angle lens turned out to be exactly what I needed anyway, so I used that.

Alan Ferber started his solo blowing hard, bending his knees and leaning back. In my mind I saw this exact shot. I just needed him to bend a little more ... and more ... and then ... he did it! I snapped, and felt like I had directed him with my mind. Alan is an amazing player and musician but he's a quiet personality and I think there are a lot of people who don't see this side of him. You can see Jessica Schmitz, the piccolo player, in the background smiling at other people in the band in reaction. There were a lot of better photographers than me around that day, and with much better gear, but I was in the best place for this shot, and it felt at the time almost fated.

Here's the original, and a link to Reuben Radding's Flickr photostream. You may also know Reuben Radding as a bass player. And feel free to contribute your jazz shots to the NPR Jazz Flickr group.

A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, we are periodically leaving you with some photographs from The NPR Jazz Photography Pool, like the one below.

Photographer Tom Marcello writes:

That was taken on July 6, 1976 in New York, N.Y. As a part of the Newport Jazz Festival New York, George Wein set up stages for free concerts called "The 52nd Street Jazz Fair" along 52nd Street, and Hannibal Marvin Peterson's Sunrise Orchestra was one of them. I had known of Hannibal's playing before with Gil Evans and Roy Haynes and I picked up his masterpiece Children of the Fire, but this performance was really exciting and inspiring. I especially remember a series of stop-time choruses that he played with the wonderful [drummer] Freddie Waits.

I've never been able to identify the saxophonist in the band. Maybe you know who it is?

Here's the original, and a link to Tom Marcello's Flickr photostream. And feel free to contribute your jazz shots to the NPR Jazz Flickr group.

A Blog Supreme will be on vacation until after Labor Day. Until then, here are some midweek links. Also, NPR Music's other jazz coverage.

• Louis, the silent film about a juvenile Louis Armstrong, and featuring a live band led by Wynton Marsalis, is now touring. Felix and I saw it this weekend. It is not particularly historically accurate. It is an impressive synchrony, though. The band is good. And it is also, in the way of good farces, fun.
• Phil Woods is not happy about the NEA making the entire Marsalis family Jazz Masters.
• RIP Bob Bowen. Man, this isn't supposed to happen any more.
• The matriarch of New York jazz.
• Burning Ambulance, the newish quarterly dedicated to music (including plenty of out jazz) is now available.
• Nextbop has been putting up new music from U.K. piano trios (and the Portico Quartet) this week.
• Chicago and Detroit jazz festivals this weekend. Nicole Mitchell! Mulgrew Miller!

This looks labor-intensive:

As a student at the Berklee College of Music, Meghan Stabile's peers were jazz musicians who grew up with hip-hop as popular music. So during her last semester of study, she first put together a show that brought together musicians from both jazz and hip-hop communities, exploring the connections within.

Stabile's operation, now based in New York, has become Revive Da Live, a concert production group presenting street-savvy jazz artists like Robert Glasper, Jaleel Shaw and Esperanza Spalding, often on stage with hip-hop performers like Talib Kweli, Pete Rock and Large Professor. Revive Da Live produces frequent performances around New York and the world; the Revive Music Group now also manages and books a roster of artists.

Revive's underlying goal has always been about education through live experience: Of jazz to the hip-hop crowd, and vice versa. In lieu of being able to bring a Revive show to all blog readers, I recently sat down with Stabile and two associates, MC/DJ Brian "Raydar" Ellis and pianist/writer Jared Pauley, to talk about jazz records for the hip-hop crowd.

"There's a way back to jazz through any kind of song that a 13, 14-year-old loves," Raydar Ellis said. "It's just a matter of tracing it back in a way that they find appealing. And that's what we do. That's our thing."

From our informal discussion, I've culled five (six, really) songs or albums to feature. Do leave us your suggestions, in the comments below.

---

1. Dorothy Ashby, Afro-Harping (1968).

 

Meghan: A lot of stuff comes from listening to Pete Rock. He sampled a lot of records. We were speaking yesterday about Dorothy Ashby, and Raydar had mentioned this record. Even from that, another record called Dorothy's Harp: you can find samples from Madlib, Rahzel, Jay-Z, Pete Rock for sure — the list goes on.

Patrick: What about that particular record makes it so interesting?

Raydar: It's the way that that record was made. It's the sonic — and maybe this is just the audiophile in me, but — the way it was mixed and recorded. Her harp has this beautiful delay on it, but the bass has most of the low-end along with the drums. ... You can also hear what she did on some of Stevie Wonder's records.

2. Donald Byrd, Stepping Into Tomorrow (1975).

Raydar: I think the stuff that got me into jazz was, oddly enough, it was Incognito and Pieces of a Dream. My dad played a lot of the smooth jazz stuff on the radio — he'd be listening to CD 101.9 — and then he also had a bunch of records at the same time.

Coming at it from a perspective that a hip-hop listener understands, which is where the samples are generated from, I guess Donald Byrd Stepping Into Tomorrow has the "Think Twice" cut — "Looking out the Front Door," by Main Source is a direct link. But it's also been covered by J. Dilla on Welcome 2 Detroit, and by Erykah Badu. And that's just one song, let alone the whole record, let alone his whole catalog. That's a really dope record to start with.

3. Miles Davis, In A Silent Way (1969).

Jared: Miles Davis' In A Silent Way really changed the way I could hear music. I hate to go back to the word "organic," but everything is such an "organic" blend. As he progressed further into his fusion phase with Bitches Brew and On The Corner, it became a little more chaotic with the way he and [producer] Teo Macero edited all the tape together. But In A Silent Way — it's got this meld of electric pianos, and vibrato, and abstract, atmospheric music going on. It's hard to describe it. And it's like every great piano player of all time is on it, and every great musician — anybody who ever did anything great in fusion was on one of [Miles Davis'] records. Fact.

4. Charlie Parker, "A Night In Tunisia" (March 1946) and McCoy Tyner, "Impressions" (from Trident, 1975).

Meghan: With Hip-Hop 1942, we took records from the '50s, '60s, '70s — well, specific songs — and we played the original. For example, [a] Charlie Parker version of "A Night In Tunisia" was later used to create Gang Starr's "Words I Manifest." So we had a line up of stellar musicians — Marc Cary, Ben Williams, Louis Cato, Casey Benjamin and bunch of others — and they performed the original, as the original, and transitioned it into "Words I Manifest." So it went from the jazz record to the popular hip-hop song that derived from that record. And we had a whole audience there, which was mainly a hip-hop audience, that didn't know the original. So we had the album covers on a screen behind the band, showing which song this was, and what it was [sampled] into. They went crazy. It was a ridiculous show.

The other, which is my personal favorite, is McCoy Tyner's version of "Impressions." Ron Carter's bass solo was later used to create Black Sheep's "The Choice Is Yours." So Ben Williams — this was his idea — when he was soloing ... he just went into this subtle "Dum-dum-dum-dum Dum-doo-dum-dum," and then just went into it real hard, and the audience is screaming, 'cause they just didn't expect it.

Patrick:: Ben has that way of just plucking really hard — making you feel it.

Raydar: Yea, that's my cousin! [laughs] It's all in the family.

5. Robert Glasper, Double-Booked (2009).

Raydar: I really think it's great for a hip-hop head to come into jazz with that record because Rob was born from both sides of it. He has equal footing in both worlds, and he represents that on the record really well, whether it be that breakdown before "Butterfly," where they kind of flip the "F- - - Tha Police" joint, or the "Forever" joint, where [drummer] Chris [Dave] is laying the drums back kinda crazy. It's something that a hip-hopper can instantly recognize, but that they can sit back and listen to multiple times, and find the subtleties in the solos and performances. It's a really good record.

---

Related At NPR Music: Listening To Rap With Robert Glasper.

About as soon as I hit "publish," I began to see gaps in my recent short rant essay, titled "You're Not Too Dumb To Like Jazz." In particular, Dan DiPiero points out something which I feel I ought to clarify here. I think he's misreading my intent a little bit, but I'm certainly leaving that possibility open by leaving out a few missing pieces.

Thinking about those lacunae, and how to fill them, dovetails nicely with my thoughts on another collection of music which has captivated me this summer: Steve Coleman's new album Harvesting Semblances And Affinities.

---

The unifying idea of Coleman's new album, he writes, is "energy harvesting, i.e. the gathering, through musical symbolism, of the energy of particular moments." He describes the opening track as follows:

"Attila 02 (Dawning Ritual)" represents the opening energy of this assemblage of compositions. It is a sonic ritual that opens the way and prepares for what is to come. The tricky rhythms, dominated by the number 3, are reminiscent of combined energies of the Yoruba Orisha Eshu-Elegba, the Opener of the Way.

Have a listen to the first part of "Attila 02," before the solos:

 

"Attila 02 (Dawning Ritual)," from Steve Coleman and Five Elements, Harvesting Semblances And Affinities [Pi Recordings]. Steve Coleman, alto saxophone; Jen Shyu, vocals; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet, Tim Albright, trombone, Thomas Morgan, bass, Tyshawn Sorey, drums. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Recorded Oct. 19, 2006.

On my own, I'm having trouble figuring out if it has a constant or variable meter, how a pattern of threes can be located in here, what exactly this might have to do with any Orishas. But where I do connect is how well drummer Tyshawn Sorey asserts a groove that is not a groove, how vocalist Jen Shyu declaims atop it all, how the horns are arranged for such maximal color and emphasis, how it all unravels so well before picking up again. There's certainly an energetic mood being conveyed, and I like to think that even when so many of my critical faculties abandon me, I can identify something akin to what Coleman was trying to capture.

I saw a more recent version of Steve Coleman's Five Elements perform this material this year at the Undead Jazzfest. I like this detail that Ben Ratliff captured in his writeup:

Above all, the band was an amazing system. Sweating through my clothes, I heard couple of good musicians behind me — there was almost always one within arm's reach — reacting with kind of sickened wonder. "What is going on up there?," one asked, sounding almost worried. Exactly.

---

When people say they don't "understand" jazz or are "too dumb" for jazz music — or, conversely, call it "overly intellectual" or "too cerebral" — it's often a euphemism or rationale for not liking a certain strain of it. If we take them at their word, there's a lot to be potentially confused by: Jazz in general is unfamiliar to the average bear, and more complex than your average pop music. So it doesn't make you dumb if you can't immediately dissect a work of jazz. Seems to me you're an above average intellect for even caring enough to engage with it at all.

Here is the missing link: Most people like a lot of music they don't "understand." Musicologically speaking, I certainly can't break down everything I like about any recording I enjoy, or know what inspired it. The best musicians of any genre have a way of transcending this in order to communicate something more human than the artifice of music theory.

A few weeks ago, I broke down the rhythmic foundation of Guillermo Klein's arrangement of "Coplas del Regreso." But even so, there was a lot in that song I wasn't able to decipher into technical terms; more importantly, there remains the fundamental mystery about why those particular combinations were so affecting. (That was the point of that exercise anyway, to muse on its futility.)

Even though I like his new album, I feel like I "understand" even less about Steve Coleman's work. I confess I don't know his discography very well yet. I've met Coleman a few times, but I've never talked to him at length about his music. I wasn't around when M-Base, a philosophical framework he helped devise, was first formulated; I don't know what the critics said about him when he was releasing music on major labels.

I do gather Coleman has studied music in Cuba, Ghana, Senegal, southern India, at IRCAM in Paris. I also know that he is interested in new ways of structuring music — a website and now-defunct blog lays out a few of his ideas about negative space, Greek and medieval modes, symmetry, Charlie Parker and so forth. It's my impression that he likes to devise unconventional structures, from disparate inspirations. But I fully admit that I am generally unfamiliar with what those musical structures are, here or otherwise.

Given all that, this record still exerts such a powerful and mysterious appeal that after nearly three months, I keep reaching for it over and over.

---

By way of analogy, I think about the summer blockbuster Inception, a fast-paced science-fiction film about implanting an idea within somebody else's dream. That movie was complex! It asked you to accept all these fantasy concepts native only to the world of the movie: shared dreaming, totems, "extraction," the "kick," the idea of an active subconscious, interminable limbo states, etc. The climactic final sequence features, depending on your interpretation of events, three or four different layers of dreams within a dream.

It would take a few viewings, and probably a few conversations with director Christopher Nolan, to fully comprehend everything that was going on in Inception, philosophically and technically. (Not to mention the plot holes.) But it wasn't difficult for much of the audience to enjoy at some level: Currently, it enjoys an IMDb user-generated rating of 9.1 out of 10.

Admittedly, the sonic language of Harvesting Semblances And Affinities is certainly less familiar than the visual language of Inception.** But the unfamiliar is not the same as the cerebral. Jazz, and especially stuff like Steve Coleman's music, is saddled with a certain meta-language that implies that the music's appeal is a sort of mental arithmetic game (or worse, posturing of appreciation). It's complex, sure, but in and of itself, that's not the draw.

Jazz fans and musicians don't like the stuff because they enjoy being able to dissect its chord changes, scale modes and time signatures. Those combinations of chord changes, scale modes and time signatures makes them feel something good inside.

That's why words like "brainy," or "highbrow," or this entire lexicon of left-brain appeal is discomfiting. Jazz is generally intricate, sure. But this oughtn't deter from the idea that the music can be for anyone who likes what they hear. In other words, you're not too dumb to like jazz: You're too caught up in thinking that dumb vs. smart is the right way to approach this stuff in the first place.

---

_{**I'm not so naive to think you would get comparable sales results if you marketed Steve Coleman's album as widely as Christopher Nolan's movie was. But I do think it's worth trying.}

A few months after Miles Davis taped that material that would become Bitches Brew, he went on a two-week European tour with his quintet. A short clip of their Copenhagen, Denmark performance appears above. That's Miles with the pink shirt, multi-colored vest and red trumpet; elsewhere, that's Wayne Shorter on soprano sax (not seen here), Chick Corea sporting the robe-like garment that remains his sartorial signature (also, sadly, obscured from camera), and youthful incarnations of Dave Holland (upright bass) and Jack DeJohnette (drums).

They play "Miles Runs The Voodoo Down," and it's quite different than the album version. On Bitches Brew, this thing is ... well, it's just as unclassifiable. But it's definitely a different breed of unclassifiable, with that insistent bass line, and that shape-shifting lounge-funk (stoned-funk?) beat, and all those keyboard and guitar and percussive interjections.

We only have two-and-a-half minutes of the video here, but this live performance feels both freer and less willing to let go. Miles' live band hasn't fully become the impossible future funk-rock enterprise it would become; it's still tied to something like a ride cymbal-based swing beat. But there are only five people here, versus the 11 on the recording (plus Teo Macero in the studio), and man: they go out.

 

It's a transitional sound, somewhere between the inside-outside post-bop of mid-'60s Blue Note recordings/the second Great Miles Quintet (Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, Tony Williams) and the Weather Reports, Mwandishis, Lifetimes, Returns to Forever and yes, Miles Davis fusion bands to come. Then again, Miles Davis' entire career seems like one big transition in retrospect; it was just faster at certain times than others.

Back to the video: It's available on a DVD which comes with both standard and deluxe reissues of the album. (The bonus edition comes with another live audio set, plus a vinyl record and other goodies.) It's out on Tuesday Aug. 31, a few months after the 40th anniversary of the original Bitches Brew album release. You can purchase either version through the record company directly, if you're so inclined.

Forty years on, a fair amount of the noteworthy things going on in jazz/"jazz" are fusions: collisions with hip-hop, R&B, electronic music, Latin folk, Carnatic improvisation, indie rock or even other styles within jazz history itself. Likewise, Bitches Brew doesn't sound like jazz as we know it (still doesn't); it does feel like something a restless experimenter who came from the jazz world might devise, though. This DVD find, I think, supports that view.

---

Related At NPR Music: The Bitches Brew beer taste test.

Last summer, I sat on my front porch with Orr Shtuhl, Washington City Paper's Beerspotter, and paired six summer jazz songs with six summer beers. Sun Ra smoked funky grooves with a La Sancerroise au Gruyt and Charles Mingus' "Ysabel's Table Dance" was seduced by a Verdi Imperial Stout. To quote one torn commenter about our project, "I don't know whether to hate you or make you my hero."

On Tuesday, to celebrate 40 years of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, Dogfish Head brewery will release a limited edition Bitches Brew ale. And in order to verify the Brew-ness of such an ale, I invited back Orr, as well as our Blogger Supreme Patrick Jarenwattananon, to taste the imperial stout and honey wine fusion.

Pouring out the first glass, there was no foam and a lot of black.

 

---

Lars Gotrich [NPR Music]: What are we seeing, Orr?

Orr Shtuhl [Beerspotter, Washington City Paper]: Well, it's not quite black. It's one of the darkest stouts I've seen, but not the darkest. While a stout in the glass looks black, you always look at the edges to see the character. The edges have a dark amber color, while at the middle, it’s going to be pitch black.

Lars: I love the sediment I get when I tip the glass.

Orr: It's very viscous. We're drinking out of fancy wine glasses, which lets you see how it clings to the side of the glass. It leaves a clear wall like a syrup.

Lars: So what's in Bitches Brew Ale?

Orr: It's three parts imperial stout and one part tej, an African mead. An imperial stout is a strong version of a stout, which is a dark ale that usually has notes of chocolate, coffee and/or molasses. It's usually very sweet and, in this case, has a very low hop profile.

Tej is an African mead wine (or honey wine) and in place of hops, it uses gesho root. Today we use hops for flavor. Beers like IPAs are really hoppy, fresh, fruity, bitter, floral, and delicious. Originally, though, hops were used as a preservative, and some herbs and flowers are also preservatives. Before European brewers used hops, they'd use herbs like rosemary. In Africa, one of the plants they used was gesho and that's what's still used in this traditional honey wine and what's used in one of the four parts of this beer.

Lars: I think we should drink some. We've been waiting too long! [After a sip.] I get an immediate hit of coffee.

Patrick Jarenwattananon [NPR Music]: It's certainly malty compared to hoppy, but it doesn't quite hit me in the way of a pure imperial stout. There's a definitely an edge rounded off of it.

Orr: It feels like honey in the way that it sits on your tongue. Many imperial stouts will have some roast elements because the dark color of stouts comes from the roasting of the barley before it's used. The level of toasting determines the color of the beer. A stout can be very heavily roasted — that's why you get these coffee flavors, chocolate flavors. This one really sits on your tongue and one minute afterward, I can still taste it. The mead wine lingers longer, it doesn't have that bitterness to clip off the finish. To me it tastes like old-timey Cola.

Lars: Well now that you say that, it's like when you go to a restaurant and the fountain is extra syrupy that day. And that's the best time to drink Coke, you know?

Patrick: It also isn't terribly carbonated. It goes down very smooth.

Orr: It's almost does feel like a concentrate and that's why it's certainly worth drinking out of a smaller glass. ... Dogfish Head's beers are much like its president, Sam Calagione — they're not soft spoken. They're like the fun guys at parties — they're loud, they talk a lot, they present themselves to you pretty openly. I think this beer definitely fits that mold. It's got a lot of flavors going on, and they're all out front. Right away you get these roast coffee notes, thick, sweet molasses, and really complex sweetness in the honey, which is what I really like about this. You can can make lemonade with white sugar, but if you make lemonade with honey instead, and it gives such a rich, floral sweetness. I think that's what you're getting in this beer. It's a lot of flavors that just sit on your tongue like a down blanket that just hangs on top of you.

Lars: I like that image a lot, which makes me want to transition into the music.

Patrick: The Bitches Brew album is kind of like this beer — it's a weird cut and paste. It's coming from jazz, from guys who worked with Miles Davis. And then he instructed them to basically jam with electric instruments, in a not entirely swing way. Then Davis and his producer, Teo Macero, recombined what they did in the studio. The same way you have these three different breeds of stout and then this "exotic" honey wine, it's sort of how the album turned out: three parts jazz and one part ineffable something else.

But I think In a Silent Way is a slightly better analogue for this beer. I know I'm going out on a limb here, but [Bitches Brew] is really complex, almost strident — full of rich sounds like Fender Rhodes, the screeching Miles Davis trumpet, bass clarinet, soprano sax, electric guitar and the drums clipping along. In a Silent Way tends to have more of a rounder edge. Maybe it's just that we're talking about the honey component so much, but I definitely feel like it goes down easier despite everything that's going on in the beer.

Lars: I think that's fair. But Bitches Brew is a little abrasive. It's not harsh Albert Ayler-style noise, but it hits you over the head the first time you put it on. It's like the first whiff of coffee I mentioned earlier. The funny thing is that I don't even drink coffee.

Orr: This beer is one of the least aggressive beers I've ever had. I mean that in a good way. It's very rounded, exceedingly mellow, and you'd never get that it was 9 percent alcohol. It's a very nice introduction, actually, to the imperial stout style. It's one of the tamer, more accessible ones I've had recently. If I had to draw a musical analogy, I'd be more inclined to pick Billie Holiday — it's a mellow mood that anyone can get into. If I had to give a Budweiser-only drinker an imperial stout, this is probably one of the easier ones for them to try.

Lars: Ultimately, does Bitches Brew ale compliment Bitches Brew the album?

Orr: To say that this is a better beer to complement Bitches Brew than Budweiser is like saying one beer is better to complement something like Miley Cyrus.

Lars: Although "Party in the USA" should totally be a beer.

Orr: Right. As far as the pairing, I don't know how academic [Dogfish Head] intended to be, but I think the only common point is high quality. If that's all we got, then it's nothing to complain about. If you want to get really high-minded about it, I think this beer would go better with a more mellow album.

Patrick: Maybe we should move onto another track. Perhaps "Spanish Key"?

Orr: This sounds like more of a late night track. I'm familiar with good beer, but new to jazz. I latch onto more hypnotic, groove-based songs like this. It has more rock touchstones and easier to dig into for me. It's less frenetic to me like the opener, "Pharoah's Dance." I'd rather be drunk to this song.

I think that tasting is more conducive to groove-based music because you're repeating the same thing over and over. You're enjoying the same flavors — every sip is more faint. Really what you're doing is putting yourself in this mood to enjoy something continuously and when you have a more groove-based track, it actually meshes pretty well. I could listen to this song on loop and drink the whole bottle.

Lars: It's a 17 minute song, so you could probably make it through the whole bottle if you wanted to.

More links from this week:

• Nate Chinen on the youthful elements of the Seattle jazz scene, for the Times. Very glad somebody has told this story.
• Brad Mehldau writes on "Coltrane, Jimi Hendrix, Beethoven and God," filtered through the lens of German authors and philosophers. Also, Mehldau recently duetted with John Mayer.
• Branford Marsalis turned 50. Here's a Nate Chinen reflection, and a discordant note from Phil Freeman.
• Howard Mandel on the #jazzlives Twitter hashtag, after one year. Also, in the comments last week, Mandel linked to this amusingly dated 1997 piece he wrote called "Jazz Vs. Computers."
• Mark Stryker of the Detroit Free Press on Mulgrew Miller, who is artist-in-residence at the Detroit International Jazz Festival.
• A Chicago club, actually doing well in this rough summer.
• The Smithsonian National Museum of American History blog posted photos and audio clips about Lena Horne and Abbey Lincoln this week.
• A 1979 Abbey Lincoln interview. Also, Chinen (again!) on Abbey's lasting influence.
• Chico and Rita: The animated story of a Cuban couple of musicians making their way in bebop-era New York (H/T Peter Hum).
• More Savory Collection goodies from Newsweek. Also, Seth Colter Walls speaks with historian Loren Schoenberg. And WNYC spoke with Schoenberg and Bill Savory's son at length too.
• It takes two saxophonists to replace one Joe Lovano.
• This is a fun New York Times human interest piece (plus video) from Aidan Levy about jazz musicians' ping-pong obsessions after hours. (Who knew that Aaron Goldberg was so good at table tennis?) Also, I'm a little confused as to why it's a bit heated in the comments.
• Dennis Hopper among the jazz beatniks, from WFIU's Night Lights.
• From The Onion: "Ask A Guy Who's Not Doing The Gig For Less Than $200."
• Destination: Out re-posts a Pat Martino jam.
• JazzWax has an interview with historian Phil Schaap (a personal mentor as well).
• The Jazz Session speaks with Jimmy Amadie and Shane Endsley.
• The Checkout this week was a rerun. It is, like, the second rerun in about a year and a half? Busy man, that Josh Jackson.
• Finally, this is funny (H/T Jazz24):

A few links we have mentioned:

 

• JazzCorner's InnerViews, and Anil Prasad's Innerviews.
• The National Visionary Leadership Project video oral histories, and the Smithsonian jazz oral histories.
• "Has Your Partner's Musical Taste Ever Been A Dealbreaker?" Apparently, yes.
• The Village Vanguard folding bicycle.
• The Vijay Iyer trio + M.I.A. "Galangs" mashup.

Links to other NPR Music jazz stuff:

• You have one weekend left to hear all of the fantastic new Danilo Pérez album Providencia as part of NPR Music's First Listen series.
• The Take Five series this week explores lesser-known Indo-Jazz Fusion.
• JazzSet airs a 2000 set with Abbey Lincoln and Kendra Shank.
• Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz reruns the Allen Toussaint and Elvis Costello episode.
• Bluesman Piano Red does "CC Rider."

One of my pet peeves in this jazz racket I'm caught up in is when people describe complex music they don't understand as "overly intellectual," or one of its variants: "brainy," "highbrow," "mental masturbation," etc. The implication is that "normal" human beings aren't intelligent enough to "get" jazz, as if the music required naturally advanced-level mental faculties to begin to appreciate.

I'm on the subject because of a few comments in our recent musing on the "jazz boyfriend" phenomenon and The Dolphy Test. They're actually quite charming, friendly comments, but I am puzzled about the sentiments within. This is from Megan Bartlett (megggers):

This May I married my Jazz Boyfriend. As the non-jazzer there are many reasons to accuse me of not "getting it" or not being an "intelligent listener." My offenses include, but are not limited to ... complaining about 28 min. songs and when asked how I like Lovano's set at The Vanguard replying with, "I was too grossed out by the jazzgasms everyone was having to listen" (you know — the head bobbing, facial contorting and moans that are required to listen to jazz). Sometimes my Jazz Husband makes me feel like a Jazz Widow. ... I'm too dumb to like jazz. But when its 1am and we walk into the club where my husband is about to play ... I'm smart enough to know the tenor will be the most beautiful and complex thing I've ever heard.

This is from Lin Harraway (coffeeiv):

 

My husband and my second child love jazz, especially the kind where the musician takes off on a solo and leaves the theme — and me — in the dust. I'll have to admit that I am not smart enough for this type of music. I need someone to remind me of the melody at least every sixteen measures or so. If my husband had used this as a litmus test early in our relationship, he would have expelled me — except for the fact that I allowed him to kiss me for hours while this type of music was playing.

Ok, so I may personally plead the fifth when it comes to being a "jazz boyfriend." And I also hear Bartlett and Harraway on long, meandering solos: Sometimes I lose track too if the music isn't captivating. (Not all jazz is good, of course.)

But it strikes me that what Bartlett and Harraway are complaining of is slightly misdirected. It doesn't make you "dumb" or "not smart enough" if you don't like something you've tried repeatedly to engage. And if you don't understand it, shoot, any musician will tell you: Jazz takes a lifetime to learn. It's really hard!

Jazz, as a whole, requires a bit of buy-in. Much of it is instrumental, and for people who listen to music for lyrics, that component often goes missing. Performance conventions can be uncommon: applauding in weird places, sitting down, being really quiet. Sometimes jazz composers also like to write complex harmonies, meters and forms not usually heard in pop music. But even before you get to "complex even for jazz" music, some of jazz's most treasured central precepts — swing, 12-bar blues, "rhythm changes" or AABA form, solo improvisation — are unfamiliar to many of today's music listeners in the first place. All things considered, the deck is stacked against jazz.

That said, many jazz musicians manage to transcend these things nightly to convey some greater beauty or depth or joy. Like any other musicians in the Afro-Western tradition, they're trying to communicate some emotional or spiritual feeling through notes and grooves. They're trying to create something affecting with what they do, trying to convey some sort of artistic statement. They're just choosing a medium — improvised, often instrumental music — which is uncommon to many human beings.

One of the most interesting comments, at least with respect to my thesis, comes from Evelyn Chester (EvelynChester):

It's funny that you describe the Dolphy piece as "jarring" and "spiky". I was expecting something completely different than what I heard. But maybe if you didn't grow up with jazz (which I did), it would be jarring. To me, this mostly sounded like my childhood.

If I absolutely had to choose a piece of jazz music to describe as cerebral or the like, Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch would be a good contender. But Chester's comment rebuts me there, to some extent. She says: Well, not if you're already familiar with jazz.

Robert Glasper straddles two distinct worlds. He's an accomplished jazz pianist, who was signed to Blue Note Records in his mid-twenties. And he works with lots of hip-hop and R&B artists, both in the studio and on the stage: Q-Tip, Mos Def and Maxwell, to name a few. Both sides are reflected on his 2009 album Double-Booked, which captures both his acoustic piano trio and his electrified Robert Glasper Experiment collective.

Most interviews I've read approach Glasper from a jazz angle; I wanted to talk to him about hip-hop. So in late 2009, I sat down to play him five different rap songs and talk about them. At the end, we talked further about the idea of being both in jazz and hip-hop worlds at once. I'm happy to finally present the results here.

---

1. Mos Def, "Auditorium" from The Ecstatic (2009).

Robert Glasper: Mos Def! [hums along]

Patrick Jarenwattananon: How'd you meet him?

 

RG: I met him because I was playing with Bilal in the city. Mos is on Bilal's first record, on this track that J. Dilla produced called "Reminisce." And the track starts off with Mos, and the ends with Common. So whenever we do shows in New York with Bilal, Common and Mos would come through ... and sit in with us.

PJ: You're also musical director for this big band thing he does. Tell me about that.

RG: It's a big band in the sense of — we have saxophones, a few trumpets, a few trombones, bass, piano, drums — the normal setup of a big band. But we do not-traditional big band jazz music, if you will. We do a mixture of old jazz classics, but we also do modern-day hip-hop stuff. Like, we rearrange stuff — we've done Ghostface [Killah], stuff like that. We do from Ghostface to Bell Biv DeVoe to Neil Diamond — not Neil Diamond — well, I wouldn't doubt Mos would do Neil Diamond. I mean we've done so many random [artists], from Radiohead to any genre of music that comes to mind. Because he loves all types of music, and everybody in the band loves all types of music. So it's like a big band, but open to whatever.

PJ: And some of your fellow jazz musicians are in this too.

RG: Actually, I called everybody in my phone that I know to be in this band, you know? Pretty much everybody's a jazz musician, but they're jazz musicians that are open, that can play other things and get it, you know what I mean? Everybody doesn't get it, but everybody in this band gets it, so it works out.

2. Jay-Z, "Empire State Of Mind" from The Blueprint 3 (2009).

PJ: As we speak, this tune is sort of the track of New York City right now. I know you often work with so-called "conscious" hip-hop artists, fair or not, whatever that term is. But you must have grown up with Jay-Z?

RG: Actually, no, because I'm from Houston, Texas. So I didn't even get into — me and my lady always have these disputes, 'cause she's Brooklyn hardcore, she's straight hip-hop like, born in the Bronx, so we always have these little things. But I'm actually from Houston, so I didn't get up here until '97. So I wasn't a hardcore Jay-Z fan or nothin'.

I wasn't a hard hip-hop fan, really, until I got up here and I started meeting these people and seeing it actually live. It was like, "Aw, man!" I liked hip-hop in high school, but I didn't really get into it and be, like, "Aw, man, I want to do this!" until I got here and got to meet the cats and really get in the vibe.

But I have played with Jay-Z.

PJ: What's it like?

RG: It was amazing. I've never seen that much love for somebody on stage at one time. I was playing Radio City Music Hall — on and off, I play with The Roots for special occasions or whatever — and Jay-Z just came through. Out of nowhere, just came through. They were like, "Do y'all know this song?" And we were like, "Yea, we know, we know it." So he just walked on stage with this hoodie, and turned around, and the lights were off. And the lights came on, but he still had the hoodie on. And when he took that hoodie off, I've never been in the presence of something that major, where the applause, and screaming was like — it was ridiculous. He just has so much respect, first of all, and love from people. It was great playing with him.

PJ: I read somewhere that you went to high school with [Jay-Z's wife and collaborator] Beyonce. Do you still keep in touch with her?

RG: Yea, every now and then. ... A bunch of my friends are in her band too, and that whole thing, you know what I mean? Yea, I see her like once a year [laughs], randomly somewhere. I've known her for years, and my little cousin LeToya [Luckett] was in Destiny's Child, and that whole thing. So I've been around them and their families. So we're cool.

3. A Tribe Called Quest, "Bonita Applebum" from People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm (1990).

RG: I'm not sure who that is! [laughs]

PJ: So this was 1990. How old were you when you heard this?

RG: It might have been then. I was like, 12, in 1990.

PJ: Did it hit you that, you know, this was my sort of thing?

RG: I liked this. When I first heard this, I liked this. Because what I gravitated to most was hip-hop with chord changes, that was really melodic, that had instruments. So those were the kind of things that really grabbed me first. So [A] Tribe Called Quest was the first group that really, I listened to and I gravitated to and I actually bought some of their stuff, like, "Yo, what's this?" You know, because it had some elements I like, which is, a lot of jazz influence. Even at 12 — you know, I had just started playing the piano, so when I heard stuff that had piano in it, I was like, "Yo, what's that?" I couldn't identify with too much of what they were talking about, but the music element I really liked.

PJ: You work with Q-Tip now too: how'd you come to be working with him?

RG: Actually, I met him when I was with Bilal as well. 'Cause when I first moved to New York, Bilal was the first cat I met at the New School — we both went to college together. We became best friends from that day, you know what I mean? We were always together. So when he got signed, he started meeting a lot of people, doing that, doing that. So I met Tip through him. And then Tip started coming to my shows when I would do random shows, random clubs, jazz gigs and stuff ... Tip and Ali Shaheed [Muhammad] would come through, hang out and stuff. And I started going to Ali's house, recording stuff with him. So we just got that rapport going...

A few years later, he was like, "I'm doing a record — will you help me do some stuff on this record?" I was like, "Cool." So then we did some stuff at his house for the record. And as you know, two of the albums never really came out, and that kind of thing happened. But then this album came out [The Renaissance], and I'm on a few joints on this record, and I actually co-wrote the single that's out now called "Life Is Better" featuring Norah Jones. I did a lot of touring with Tip in the last three years.

PJ: He uses live musicians still. Does he ever talk to you about having a "musical" production sense?

RG: Oh, totally. He's one of the most musical cats — like, MCs — it's funny. I always tease him and Mos [Def], because they both have perfect pitch, and they both can play keys, and Mos plays a little drums too. And they both just have a really good sense of theory when it comes to music as well. I can actually tell them chord changes — I always tease Tip, 'cause he'll be in the middle of a verse and be like, "You know what? When we get to that A-flat minor 9, I want you to play—" And I'll be like, "What? You're an MC, you're not supposed to do that." So it's really funny. But I have a lot of respect for those guys, because their knowledge of music is huge. And they have a lot of respect for what I do as well. And that's why we work well together — it's hard to work with somebody who doesn't know anything! [laughs] That sucks.

4. De La Soul, "Stakes Is High" from Stakes Is High (1996).

RG: [Almost immediately] Whoo! [rhyming along]

PJ: I heard you perform this with Mos Def at Newport. So obviously you've studied this record.

RG: I love this tune. It's one of my favorite beats period. Well, J. Dilla [who produced this song] is my favorite hip-hop producer, hands down. I just love this beat — it's so melodic. And it comes from "Swahililand," Ahmad Jamal. I just love this tune.

PJ: This was one of Dilla's early beats. What says "Dilla" about this beat?

RG: Well, first of all, the kick drum and the snare. He has a very recognizable — just his sounds. He uses certain sounds, and I can hear something and be, like, "Oh, that's Dilla. That's Dilla right there." Certain drum patterns are very Dilla-esque. And he's a stickler for melodic things as well — that's why I gravitate toward him. Those kinds of [producer] cats are the cats I like, as far as that stuff goes. Dilla of course, Pete Rock, DJ Premier — who's from Houston, Texas [laughs] — Ali Shaheed, [Q-]Tip. A lot of people don't know Tip is actually a producer — he does a lot of that stuff. Those are the cats that I look up to as far as that goes.

PJ: You were friends with Dilla. What was his creative process like?

RG: He heard the whole beat before he even did anything. I remember when he actually made "Reminisce," the song off Bilal's first record. And me and Bilal watched him make it. Because the bass line alone came from, like, four different records. Just the bass line alone. So he chopped up, like, three or four notes from three or four different records. And he literally put on one record and be like, "Bilal, can you sing over these three notes? Right there, those three" — change the record and be like — "And, those three, right there, and" — put on another record — "those three, right there. If I put those together, can you sing over it?" And we were both like, "What? I don't understand what you're talking about." So he was like, "OK, give me a minute." He put it together, and then it became [hums complex bass line]. And we were like, "Oh my God, how'd you hear that?"

After he did that, he laid the drums down first, and he did that, and then, he was like, "I need something else." He walked around for five minutes, was like, "Whoo!" pulled out a record, and went right to a chord. I'm not going to mention the record, but he went right to a chord of this record, and laid that "bling, blung, bling" on top of it. It was like, "How did you do that?" He heard the whole thing before he made a sound. That was just, "Wow." And it happened in like 15 minutes. He was a genius, period.

5. UGK feat. OutKast, "Int'l Players Anthem" from Underground Kingz (2007).

PJ: You grew up in Houston. Did you grow up listening to Scarface, etc.?

RG: Yea, I went to school with his little sister! Like, Scarface used to live down the block from me. I mean, I didn't really know him, but I knew his little sister. He's a legend around Houston, around the crib.

PJ: You said you didn't really get into hip-hop until later, but obviously you were listening to it at the time when Houston rap was developing a certain distinct style.

RG: I was more aware than into it. It wasn't like I was going home and putting on some UGK. But I knew who they were. ... I think my favorite things that I was listening to in high school was [A] Tribe [Called Quest] and Busta Rhymes. And then, of course, you have your Houston-based things: Geto Boys — whom I used to love — Geto Boys, you've got your Scarface, and there were certain things that were just extremely Texas, like DJ Screw, and stuff like that. That was just extremely "the crib." Stuff like that I was aware of. When you would go out, you had no choice but to hear it — people were playing it in their cars and stuff like that.

But I was really a nerd, and I was really more of a jazz nerd. [laughs] So when I had my chance to put on something, most of the time it was going to be jazz, or gospel, or something like that. But once I got into Tribe, it was Tribe, or Busta. And then when I moved to New York, it became bigger. It was like, "Oh, what's this. Oh. Who was that I just played with? Oh, nice." You know?

---

PJ: Do you feel that's pretty common for a young jazz student? To be like, "I'm going to just listen to jazz records for a long time."

RG: I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will "taint" their jazz style. Some people have a perception of how jazz is supposed to sound — "it's supposed to sound this way, so I can't bring this flavor to it, because then it's not going to be jazz any more, or the jazz police are going to come after me." For me, I'm not really married to the craft of jazz — I'm married to me, and my style, and whatever I produce. So if you don't want to call it jazz at the end of the day, what do you want to call it? 'Cause maybe I made up something new. [laughs] I don't know, you know what I'm saying? I started out playing traditional jazz, and I still do: I love standards, I love the music. But it must move on, and it must live and breathe, and continue to grow, and continue to change, and continue to mesh with other music — all that kind of stuff. Jazz can be on the playground too, you know.

PJ: So what does that mean to you? I mean, a lot has been made of this jazz and hip-hop that you do. But it's not like you have rappers on this record [Double-Booked].

RG: Well, I have Mos on my new record, but that's specifically for that thing [a shout-out]. It's not like we're swinging, and out of nowhere, there's Mos, like, "I'm mixing it up, y'all!" This is really like me saying, "Hey, this is what I do, I do these two things at the same time." I don't really try hard to mix the two — it's just what it is. ... There is that Thelonious Monk composition ["Think Of One"] where I mix Dilla and Monk together on purpose. [Glasper plays the melody with the same underlying rhythm of the Ahmad Jamal sample on De La Soul's "Stakes Is High."] But these are two genres that I really love, and I wanted to put it on one album, and make it make sense.

PJ: That's interesting, because you still make it a priority to play jazz when you're, for lack of a better term, "making money" with Mos Def and Maxwell. And you seem to love doing that as well. Why is it important to you to play jazz?

RG: It's just in my soul — I love it. I don't think I could go without it at all. People get the wrong idea when I'm like, "Yea, we've got to move on, the music's got to move on." That doesn't mean totally abandon jazz at all — it just means, "Hey, also do something else." ... I love the music — but I also love this kind of music, and I also love this kind of music, and I also love this kind of music, you know? I'm a musical mutt, so I have a lot of desires, musically, that I want to accomplish.

PJ: You've said before that this will help make jazz more "relevant." What does that mean? It's not just like adding different beats to jazz — or is it?

RG: No — well, there's a way to do it. A lot of jazz cats I've heard on records that think if you add a backbeat to something, now it's new and now it's hip-hop and everybody's going to buy your record. No. [laughs] There's a thing to it. And that thing is hard to describe — it's one of them things you can tell if somebody is being honest or not. Period. Or you can tell if somebody's just doing something to do it, to try to sell records.

My case is just a little different than other cats, because I am a Blue Note recording artist, jazz pianist, but I also play with hip-hop icons. I'm in both worlds as deep as you can get in them, at the same time. I play in front of the audience of Mos Def, Q-Tip, Common, Maxwell, Bilal, all those kinds of people. So those kinds of people are checking me out now, and buying my records, and hitting me up on MySpace. When I see them at Maxwell concerts, I have people come up to me like, "Hey, I got your album! Maxwell Twittered about it the other day, and I went and picked it up! I don't even listen to jazz, but I love number three!"

That kind of stuff I get off on — I love hearing that. I love hearing people say they don't listen to jazz normally, but they got my record, and they love it. So I feel like I've brought a new member to the audience of jazz. That's what we need, new audiences, new, fresh audiences. People that aren't just jazz heads. That's the thing: If you're not a hardcore jazz head, you're probably not going to know what records are coming out. You're going to know what Rihanna records are coming out whether you want to or not! But a new jazz record, you have to dig and find it. So you have to be a fan already even to know who certain people are. A hardcore fan at that, 'cause you're not going to see an advertisement on the commercial on TV. You probably won't hear an advertisement on the radio, let alone there's only a few jazz stations in the world anyway. So it's very hard for this music in general. So that's why I say I think it's "relevant," what I'm doing — because I'm putting myself in front of other people who wouldn't normally know where to find it, or even hear about it.

Coming up on A Blog Supreme, we'll be exploring some of the intersections between jazz and hip-hop. Soon, we'll post a conversation with pianist Robert Glasper — the jazz musician who also happens to play with Mos Def and Q-Tip — where we played five rap records for him. (UPDATE: Now posted.) Later, we'll post part of our interview with the folks behind the innovative concert presenters Revive da Live about getting the hip-hop generation into jazz.

As prologue to all this, and also kind of just 'cause it circulated around the various Internets yesterday, we submit to you Wayne Marshall's rather amazing mashup of M.I.A.'s "Galang" (2003) and the Vijay Iyer trio's version of the same song (2009). (A download link is here, and technical details here.) Yes, I know M.I.A. isn't exactly "hip-hop" by many definitions. But for those who quibble over terms for this one: Let them eat truffle fries.

Vijay Iyer has a new solo album coming out soon, we might mention again. It's called Solo. (More info here.) And you can see the original videos for both versions of "Galang" below.

 

First, watch this short video:

We admit it's pretty funny, even if it does cut to the quick for some. (If you smart guys out there are wondering, no, I have never dated the lead singer of Mindtroll.) It also comes courtesy of Jezebel, which used the video as a launching pad for its piece "Has Your Partner's Musical Taste Ever Been A Dealbreaker?"

Being a jazz blog, we at A Blog Supreme have a slightly different spin on it. I suspect that for some of you more dedicated jazz fans and musicians, your love for the music has indeed been a point of contention in your romantic relationships. I know quite a number of couples where one person is obsessed with the stuff, and the other — usually, though not always, the female in a heterosexual couple — couldn't generally care less.

Even if you've never been in one of those relationships, we fans who care deeply about jazz generally realize: Most human beings don't. Which is cool by me, since I love a lot of not-jazz music too. But loving music in general — whether actively pursuing new sounds, regularly going to concerts or even making it at some level — that's very important to me. I don't know about the rest of y'all: I don't think I could ever be in a relationship where the other person doesn't care for music even remotely as much as I do.

Owing to both its depth of craft and general unfamiliarity, I think that good jazz music is a good test for this.

 

At university, my college radio friends and I — male and female, jazz hounds or not — liked to joke that Eric Dolphy's Out To Lunch was the perfect litmus test for a potential romantic partner. The whole record has a certain oblique, mysterious quality to it: Bobby Hutcherson's spacey vibes, the strutting way Richard Davis walks on "Hat and Beard," Tony Williams' magical way with cymbals. The compositions seem to jut out at you asymmetrically, but they somehow resolve in a way that's just satisfying enough. And there's Dolphy, a swirl of note spirals and that strident signature lick on three different instruments. I mean, that bass clarinet on "Something Sweet, Something Tender": c'mon now.

The reason this works well, we surmised, is that Out To Lunch isn't what most people think of when they're asked to imagine the standard sonic template of jazz. It certainly took me more than one listen to understand why people saw this record as a classic. But if you keep listening, you begin to hear something beautiful in there, in spite of its spiky exterior. And I like to think you can hear at least a hint of that beautiful core the first time through, and even become entranced by it — if you keep an open mind and an attentive ear.

So it makes for a good yardstick for one's musical curiosity. Does your potential mate care enough to think deeply about this somewhat jarring music? If there's no evidence of mental activity upon this really rich, dark, multi-layered stimulus, you might not want to pursue this avenue much further, at least not in the bedroom. (Contrariwise, if the other person already knows about Eric Dolphy, shoot, "look at this effing jazz-nerd love connection.")

Eric Dolphy's masterwork — and jazz in general — is far from the only music one might use as a litmus test for a potential romantic partner's musical inclinations. (After all, certain frilly-shirted folks see jazz fandom as a turn-off, apparently!) Inquiring minds want to know: what are your benchmarks? Leave us a comment about how you pre-screen your dates for musical compatibility — or, in the case of some, if it's an issue you still live with every day.