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Scott Gutterman
Scott Gutterman has written about art and music for Artforum, GQ, The New Yorker, Vogue, and other publications. His most recent book is Sunlight on the River: Poems about Paintings, Paintings about Poems (Prestel, 2015). He is deputy director of Neue Galerie New York and lives in Brooklyn.
Andy Statman: Practical Mystic
By Scott GuttermanThe Charles Street Synagogue occupies a narrow, slightly ramshackle brownstone in the West Village. Inside the temple’s low-ceilinged main room, where the Andy Statman Trio has had a monthly gig for the past eighteen years, a long folding table covered with a plastic cloth holds halvah, currants, and macademia nuts, a perfect Jewish tableau completed by a box of Manischewitz marble cake mix.
Pharoah Sanders: Spirit Ascending
By Scott GuttermanI was in a state of high excitement at the prospect of seeing Pharoah Sanders play the Celebrate Brooklyn festival in June 2018. This was not just another musician gracing the great outdoor amphitheater stage in Prospect Park.
Outline: A Festival for All Seasons
By Scott GuttermanThe Knockdown Center is a former window and door-frame factory in Maspeth, Queens, that has been transformed into a multi-purpose arts center. It has hosted concerts and exhibitions in the past, but has now taken a big step forward by starting to produce events of its own. One of these is a new series called Outline.
Listening in: Vision and Revision
By Scott GuttermanFor the time being, we carried on. On March 4, I saw the concert, and it was spectacular. I looked around Town Hall, its 1,400 seats gradually filling, and thought, “Should I really be here?” A cough from an audience member set off a shudder of alarm.
Listening In: All the Way Live
By Scott GuttermanSo now we stumble headlong into the majesty of fall, autumn in New York. It won’t contain its usual energy, its rush of activity, the endless stream of cultural refreshment. What will take its place?
Listening In: Illuminating the Landscape
By Scott GuttermanOrsós is always illuminating the community around him, sometimes literally.
Listening In: The Art of Intuitive Engineering
By Scott GuttermanUžupis is also the name of a band led by American drummer and vibraphonist Kenny Wollesen, who found inspiration in the place. The band was planning to come together in order to play the Vilnius Jazz Festival, one of the best in Europe, in October, but the pandemic prevented the group from uniting there. The longtime artistic director, Antanas Gustys, found a creative solution.
Hindsight
By Scott GuttermanAnd so this is Christmas, and what have you done? If you're like a lot of people, very little. Or less than you'd hoped. Or it's hard to remember. Or all three.
Listening In: Jakob Bro, A Dream Reconstructed
By Scott Gutterman“Reconstructing a Dream” is the oneiric opening track on guitarist Jakob Bro’s recent release, Uma Elmo (ECM), and it is up to the challenge of its title.
Listening In: Leni Stern, High-Flying Bird
By Scott GuttermanHer new release with the group, coming out in June on her label, Leni Stern Recordings (LSR), is called Dance, and it was recorded in NYC in the COVID summer of 2020: “The music has a drama to it. It’s really uplifting, even though the time it was made in was very dark.”
Sound and Vision
By Scott GuttermanLive music in New York City in the summertime: nothing could be more natural, or more welcome. But after the canceled summer of 2020, nobody knew what to expect this year.
Into the Blue
By Scott GuttermanFrom a single session in 1939 grew an inimitable label devoted to jazz “with a feeling,” as they described it. Blue Note moved from swing into bebop, then fell into its role, for about 10 years, as the defining label of hard bop.
Amayo: Fist of Flowers
By Scott GuttermanThe sound of Antibalas (Spanish for “bulletproof”) is thunderous. When this 15-piece horn-heavy ensemble is on stage, the effect is orchestral. Interlocking rhythms create a form of internal combustion, a self-generating energy source.
Rhythmic Conclave
By Scott GuttermanThe name of the band came about because it can be read to mean a gathering, particularly a religious one, or “con clavé.” “’Clavé’ means key, and as an instrument and as a rhythm, the clavé holds all this music together. Through these connections, the ancestors are speaking to you and through you.”
Winter Jazzfest
Winter Jazzfest 2020:
My Kind of Marathon
By Scott Gutterman
With its scores of stages already filled with superb musicians every night, does New York need a Jazzfest? I’d say a strong yes. Besides offering a comparatively cheap way to see a ton of great music, it does link disparate musicians and their audiences in a larger enterprise.
Listening In: Version and Inversion
By Scott GuttermanIn this column last month, for a piece called “Vision and Revision,” I concluded with a poem by Rumi (“The Guest House”) about the inevitability of change, and the need to accept it. The story struck a fairly optimistic note. But if I am honest, my predominant feeling lately has been one of dread. To open the newspaper is to unleash a cascade of barely imaginable stories. Yet how can we be surprised when we knew? The answer: We don’t want to know.
Listening In: Olivier Conan, The Soul of Barbès
By Scott GuttermanI’ve sometimes puzzled over what people mean when they say, “be fully present.” But my nights at Barbès often provided a natural version of that phrase. It was like a literal expression of that beautiful Rumi line, “I have fallen into the place where everything is music.”
Listening In: Cat Toren, Inside the Sound
By Scott GuttermanPianist and composer Cat Toren combines classical training with a commitment to the questing, open-ended nature of free jazz. Her playing is lyrical and spare, with a deep affinity for the qualities of space and silence. Likewise, her composing is attuned to the importance of simplicity.
Listening In: Keshav Batish, Both/And
By Scott GuttermanBatish celebrates hybridity, while also recognizing its costs.
Goldberg Variations
By Scott GuttermanChoreographer Trisha Brown once said of the artist Robert Rauschenberg, “[He] arrives fresh at the scene of the accident he’s about to create.” I ran that line by composer and clarinetist Ben Goldberg recently, because it reminded me of his approach.
Listening In
By Scott GuttermanThe films Scholl creates are open-ended; “they’re narrative, but in a non-narrative context,” says Ulrich. “It’s sort of like how we describe the music of Big Lazy, which people are always calling noir and cinematic: ‘We write the music, you write the script.’”
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