David Murray Octet, Blue Note, March 17, 8pm show

I have heard that in order to truly understand jazz, one must not only know music theory well but also be a musician oneself. Satisfying neither of these categories, I've long felt exiled to the fringe of jazz fandom and sheepish about professing love for any of my favorites, from Jelly Roll Morton to Ornette Coleman to Mantana Roberts. It was thus with much trepidation that I agreed to see the David Murray Octet last Monday at The Blue Note at the invitation of the great Brad Luen (subscribe to his brainy, wide-ranging Substack, Semipop Life). The last jazz show I recall seeing was Sun Ra at Milwaukee’s Shank Hall in the early 1990s. And while I dug that show (more for the band than for Ra who punkily never acknowledged us and hit a few pings on his synthesizer), I was still nervous about dress (could I wear shorts?), demeanor (is talking okay? hooting? tapping my foot?), or just generally being caught out as not belonging there. Turns out there’s a full menu so you can stuff your piehole with burgers and fries before the show. And shorts were fine; I didn’t look any more haggard than the tourists who showed up in St. Patrick's Day garb. Seating is pretty cramped and, since it's first come, first served, I quickly grasped why there was such a long line two full hours before the show. As it was, we barely got a table for ourselves arriving with about 40 minutes to spare. But here's the rub - with burger in belly along with several Negronis and my chair turned toward the stage for a comfortable vantage point (even a bit of room to stretch my legs), I had a fantastic time!

I assume there are adepts who adjudge Murray the greatest working saxophonist on the planet, especially since Sonny Rollins' retirement in 2014. At 70, he's been at it since the 1970s and he's amassed an impressive array of accolades including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989. I've heard several of his myriad albums including Revue, the 1982 album he recorded with the World Saxophone Quartet, which a 1990 Village Voice poll deemed the best jazz album of the 1980s. These were intermittently arresting. But I often hear jazz as wearying iterations of genius within a limited sonic and/or conceptual palette such that a great Billboard Top 40 single seems more difficult to achieve (and hence more precious) than a great John Coltrane album. In short, Murray will always be a side dish to my pop/rock buffet. So I was at the Blue Note not to honor genius but to observe how this music came to life, embodying tensions between composition and improvisation, group work and solo flights. 

The most fascinating aspect of the show was how openly the octet managed soloist duties. Of course, Murray led the charge here with nods and verbal signals to various band members to take their turn. But sometimes one member would hand signal to another for some sort of predetermined direction. No doubt these allotments of freedom within strictures are de rigueur for most jazz shows. For me, though, it helped drain some of the intimidating mastery from the event.

As a rhythm guy, the musicians who impressed me most were the bassist and drummer and, later, the pianist. (There were nine musicians on stage including David Murray. I couldn't find the names of the bassist and drummer and I don't want to assume the roster listed on the Blue Note website is correct since it lists only eight musicians. But I assume the pianist was Lafayette Gilchrist. The others listed were: Russell Carter, Luke Stewart, Corey Wallace, Mingus Murray, Shareef Clayton, and Immanuel Wilkins.) I paid close attention to their supporting roles while the others were soloing. And even when I lost the thread, I intuitively appreciated their generosity in remaining in the background while the soloists came forward (this might be why the bassist and drummer's own solo turns felt a bit abstract to me). Gilchrist contributed to the bedrock on later numbers and helped me understand why I much prefer jazz pianists to saxophonists - no matter how showy they get, they always seem to be selflessly rhythm-a-ning rather than accessing the deepest recesses of their souls. 

The only moment that thrilled me (goosebumps popping, blood rushing, silly grin forming) came at the climax of the last number with the entire ensemble coming together for a shrill wall of confrontational gush. But watching the attempts at keeping the music going was enough to captivate me for the entirety of the two-hour show. It was also enough for me to rue the fact that I haven't taken advantage of the copious jazz performances NYC offers daily. Wonder who's playing at the Village Vanguard this weekend. 

North to Alaska (Henry Hathaway, 1960)

I was convinced this was a near-masterpiece when I first saw it about twenty or so years ago. Today it reads as little more than a solid western, with John Wayne and Stewart Granger pawing at Capucine for 122 minutes and Ernie Kovacs waiting for a paycheck. But its value to me has increased in that it provides more ballast against an argument of Pauline Kael's, from her infamous 1963 essay "Circles and Squares," that has always bugged me: "Movie-going kids are, I think, much more reliable guides to this kind of movie than the auteur critics: every kid I've talked to knows that Henry Hathaway's North to Alaska was a surprisingly funny, entertaining movie and Hatari! (classified as a "masterpiece" by half the Cahiers Conseil des Dix, Peter Bogdanovich, and others) was a terrible bore" (15). It doesn't matter if she actually talked to kids about these films; she chose to center them as the prime audience for North to Alaska because the film does as well. It courts pre-teen boys with cartoon sound effects during fight scenes and an older-brother surrogate in Fabian who plays a horndog teenager competing with Wayne and Granger for Capucine. But it's the verb "knows" that annoys suggesting it is somehow preordained that North to Alaska is superior to Hatari! in entertainment value or art or even auteurist credentials. And with no further evidence about either film's value provided, the statement just sits there in all its crankiness. It feeds into Kael's own theory about entertainment, developed more diffusely throughout her writing but no less a theory than auteurism, as an unpretentious, often gritty/violent, male-oriented aesthetic register. That entertainment can take many other forms doesn't concern her, at least not in this essay. In short, I still prefer Hatari!; its discursive drift and lax attitude towards the three-act structure provide plenty of entertainment for me and perhaps for the millions of moviegoers who made it the #7 highest-grossing film of 1962 in America. 

Grade: B+

2024 Best Picture Oscar Nonimees Ranked

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross) - Ross applies the unlocked, myriad-faceted ways of seeing from his 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening to this adaptation of Colson Whitehead's 2019 novel and the worst I can say for it is that his phantasmagoric technique blunts the twist ending of the novel. But even that minor drawback has compensations for Ross demonstrates the capacious properties of Black sound and vision to vanquish the forces that attempt Black genocide. Grade: A

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat) - Reviewed here. Grade: A-minus

Anora (Sean Baker) Whizzes by at roller-coaster speed until the devastating ending in which two atomized laborers try to find a connection and together wonder if they’ll be exploited for an eternity. Also, a sequel to The Last Showgirl avant la lettre. Grade: A-minus

I'm Still Here (Walter Salles) A brutal but somehow relatively quiet account of Eunice Paiva’s quest for justice concerning the 1971 murder of her politician husband Rubens Beyrodt Paiva at the hands of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The multiple endings that push the story into several futures started to irk me until I realized what Salles was doing - bearing witness to the rich and accomplished lives Eunice and her family enjoyed despite rage-inducing tragedy. Grade: A-minus

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold) Now that Boomers got their anonymously directed Wiki-film on Bob Dylan’s betrayal of folkie purity, based on Elijah Wald’s brisk, fun Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties, we need one about his betrayal of Boomer purity, one that, in the words of ILX user President Keyes, “covers the important parts of Dylan’s life: Kurtis Blow collab, We Are the World, Soy Bomb, lingerie commercials, Nobel prize, joining Twitter” to which Alfred Soto adds "...talking to Arthur Baker about producing Empire Burlesque" to which I'll add Self Portrait, Renaldo and Clara, lyrics that acknowledge the existence of Alicia Keys, posting a Machine Gun Kelly video on his Instagram, etc. Grade: B+

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet) A pungent take on the Jewish immigrant experience in America post-WWII. But the controversial epilogue is not the problem; it’s the random point at which the story breaks immediately before. Why end it with Erzsébet making Harrison’s abuse of László public? What happened to Harrison in the wake of this news? And why not dig deeper into what made László an architectural genius, meditating on process more or what made him stand out against other architects? In short, why did it have to be 215 minutes if such huge, compelling chunks of László’s life would be excised, leaving the feeling that the film is both too short and too long? Grade: B+

Wicked (Jon Chu) Too damn long. But I loved all the discourse around it - the memes, the straight boys performing friendship via its songs on TikTok, the girls who came dressed in full costume on opening day, the singalongs. This film was popular. Grade: B+

Emilia Pérez (Jacques Audiard) Reviewed here.  Grade: B+

Conclave (Edward Berger) Typically mid Oscar fodder, more TV Movie of the Week than Cinemah. Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B

Dune: Part Two (Denis Villeneuve) Actually sustains interest across its length. But that’s still 166 damn minutes of humorless proper nouns to stomach. Are camp and world building at odds forever? Docked a notch so I’m not tempted to watch it again. Grade: B