Paul de Barros: Critically Speaking

AAJ: You mentioned the Triple Door, a club that has live music every night, but not always jazz. They've been around for three years now. Could you comment on that club three years later and how you feel in there?

PdB: Well, I have to say that one of the great things about the Triple Door is its accommodating Origin (Records) in the Musiquariam. To have free sets in a really lively bar with really good jazz, we don't realize how lucky we are in this city to have that and Tula's and Bake's Place and the traditional kind of stuff that they have at the New Orleans (Creole Restaurant and jazz club).

Most cities don't have that kind of depth in their jazz scene, so I wouldn't spend a lot of time complaining. That said, the (Triple Door's) big room itself has a lot of problems as a jazz room. It's not making money, contrary to what anybody might tell you down there, I've been there for performances when there were seven people in the audience, but they do sell out a lot of shows. Hey, more power to them; they're bringing all these people in that Jazz Alley won't book because they can't make any money off them, but it can't go on forever. And as a room I find it very remote. I've been on that stage and I don't like feeling the distance between the stage space and the audience.

AAJ: It's almost like a Las Vegas feel.

PdB: That's how Phil Woods described it to me. I wouldn't go that far, but the piped-in music to the private dinner suites, that's pretty Vegas, and I find it very remote being in those tables, as fancy as they are and as nice as they are and as great as the light show is and everything, when you're in this kind of cul-de-sac of a table with waiters and candles and all this stuff, I can't relate to the musicians. I want more intimacy. It's not intimate enough for me as a jazz room.

AAJ: Of your fellow jazz critics, past and present, who do you most admire?

PdB: The people who really inspired me as a teenager were Ralph Gleason, Nat Hentoff, Dan DeMicheal who edited Down Beat for a while, Leroi Jones who later became Amiri Baraka, I think those would be the main ones. They inspired me in a real broad way. I can think of liner notes that I've read by them and columns that I've read by them that made me aware of an American culture that jazz was part of as a kind of alternative to what I was being taught in school, a world of poetry and painting and I guess what you'd call an outsider or bohemian world that included the painters that were hanging out in New York in the '50s—Jackson Pollack and Larry Rivers and Robert Motherwell—that made me feel part of something different that I wasn't going to get exposed to otherwise.

Those are the people that really informed my whole point of view because they were cultural writers. They weren't just writing about jazz; and I've always aspired to be that kind of writer who tries to draw in the whole social picture, the whole cultural picture. The piece I'm working on now for the LA Times asks, where does jazz fit into this culture? Why does it have so much trouble finding its place right now? What happened between 1959 when Miles Davis' Kind of Blue was made and John Coltrane was featured in Time magazine, and now, when jazz is on the margin and kind of off the radar of the average person? That's the kind of stuff that I was inspired to think about by writers like Hentoff and Amari Baraka and Ralph Gleason.

AAJ: What about some of your contemporaries?

PdB: Well the people that I really trust, depending on what they're writing about, are Kevin Whitehead, who does the NPR Fresh Air, Lynn Darroch in Portland, Kirk Silsbee in Los Angeles, these are guys who if they write something, I'll read it from start to finish. I might not agree with them, but I'll take them seriously.

AAJ: Locally, you recently reviewed Doug Ramsey's book about Paul Desmond (Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond).

PdB: I thought Doug's book, as I wrote in my review of it, was like the dream book that any jazz musician would want to have written about him.

AAJ: Jim Wilke doesn't do criticism, but he's been in Seattle broadcasting jazz for a long time, and in a way he's a critic by what he plays on his radio shows.

PdB: Well Jim's not a critic; he's very specifically not a critic. But I guess I would say one of the things that attracted me to those early writers I mentioned is that they weren't just critics, they were advocates for the music and that's the reason I couldn't sit still in 1983 and '84 and just watch the scene go down the drain and say, "Well, here I am writing for the Seattle Times; the jazz scene is going in down the drain, I'll see you later." I couldn't do that; it wasn't in my makeup. I wanted to fix it, I mean I didn't fix it, but I tried and other people came in and tried to help, and that's how I think of Jim.

He's an advocate for the music and he's a voice for the music. He has good taste. He's an honorable person. We're so lucky to have somebody who's so devoted, who tapes people at their concerts and presents them with respect, so that you've got a jazz community here who says, "Yeah, I really like Marc Seales. I heard him on the radio the other night." And they'll say that in the same breath that they say, "I really like Brad Mehldau." Because it's presented with the same honor and respect and in the same (time) slot on Friday night that they might hear that other person (on Jazz After Hours). That really counts for a lot.

AAJ: As a critic you're going to step on some people's toes and upset some people. You've got to deal with a lot of hurt feelings. Is that hard for you to live with?

PdB: Only when people get really so angry that they don't want to talk to me. That's the biggest sorrow that I have with regard to that: musicians who become so angry about a point of view that they just can't see that the world isn't all about them. Ernestine Anderson is so angry at me because of a review I wrote fifteen years ago that she just can't get over herself and that's really sad.

AAJ: I think of the Broadway shows in New York, and I don't know if this is a fair comparison, but this is a livelihood issue for some artists, if they get a bad review the show's over.

PdB: I don't think it's a fair comparison in Ernestine's case; I certainly haven't hurt her career. But you're right, as I tell the Cornish (College of the Arts) students every year: If you get a bad review, unless there's something in it that you feel is particularly valid that you can use, just throw it away and try to forget about it. But some people take things so personally that they just can't get over it. The saddest part of the job for me is that somebody would cease to be your friend because they got a bad review, because I count a lot of musicians as friends and that means a lot to me, not only because they are honest critics themselves of what's going on in the scene, and I like them. That's part of my milieu.

AAJ: Don't you find it difficult to write an honest review criticizing a musician who is also a friend?

PdB: It's difficult, but I came out of a poetry and literature scene in Vancouver and in the Bay area where people did that routinely. In the academic environment it's the same way. To make honest and constructive criticisms shouldn't mean, in an ideal world, that you can't be friends with somebody.

But, in fact, for some people it does; for others it doesn't. It depends on the artist. Jovino Santos Neto is a great friend of mine and I just panned the shit out of something that he did in Down Beat, he knows that, but that's part of my job and part of his job. Other people might feel completely the other way, like you somehow stabbed them in the back. Part of the sadness is that those kinds of friendships, those kinds of relationships are in jeopardy, and I always say that to people, you know, Bill Frisell is coming over here for dinner and tomorrow I could write a review and say, this record sucks. Bill knows what that's about.

AAJ: It makes me think of musicians and how they hesitate to criticize each other's playing, because the moment you criticize someone's playing, then that player is not as comfortable, not following his natural inclinations.

PdB: I think you're talking about two different things. If you're working with a musician and you criticize him, that's part of the dynamics of being a bandleader. So if you're a bandleader and you say, "I don't like the way you're doing this," you can say that in a lot of different ways: you can fire people, you can ask them respectfully to do something different, or you can tell them, "Man, that really wasn't happening, I think you can do better."

And of course that does create tension, but in another arena, where musicians are speaking privately to me or to you or to themselves about other musicians, I find them much harder critics of each other than I am on anybody, in the same way I am of writers. When something's your profession, you don't have to have an Olympian view of the whole scene. I have to take in everything. I have to listen to a lot of music I wouldn't listen to otherwise, but I don't have to read any writing I don't want to read. So when it comes to writers, novelists, poets, other jazz writers, I can tell you straight out who I think sucks, and I'm just not going to fuck with their stuff, I don't care about it, and I think some musicians are the same way: "I'm not going to listen to that shit, that guy can't even play." How many times have you heard somebody say that?

I can't say that in public; that's not really useful to a reader to say, "This guy can't even play." I've said it a couple of times when it really needed to be said, but for the most part that's not a conversation that a reader needs to have with a critic. But I understand what you're saying about the tension created by musicians criticizing each other publicly in a playing situation.

AAJ: You mentioned you recently went to hear Jim Knapp. I read somewhere that Maria Schneider said some good things about Jim's band, and coming from Maria that's pretty high praise. He's had his orchestra together for quite a while; he's put out a number of CDs; and although we can't talk about all the musicians in Seattle, I thought I'd ask you to comment on his compositions and the stuff he's done and continues to do.

PdB: Well it's interesting that Maria said something nice about him: it's on his website, and she said it to me, actually. Because Maria writes very similar to Jim. They're both inspired by Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, in a chamber jazz approach, using French horn and flute, finding really interesting sonority instead of writing in a call-and-answer swing tradition, taking influences from other classical music in terms of extended form, which really goes back to Ralph Burns in the '40s, Jim being a trumpet player inspired by the Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaborations, using a lot of moving parts, extended forms, and a lot of jokes.

There are a lot of musical jokes in Jim's writing. He uses a lot of sophisticated compositional techniques. He's a master composer, I love Jim's music, and probably one of the reasons he hasn't become more well-known around the world is that Jim is a real modest guy who just doesn't get the world of self-promotion that musicians who succeed get. He stayed in Seattle, which is a minor market for jazz, instead of moving to New York. He didn't want to do that. He's a masterful trumpet player and wonderful composer.

It's too bad that he didn't put himself in the kind of position that Maria Schneider did when she started writing for her band at (New York jazz club) Visiones because, in addition to making herself more visible to the national media, I think it also makes her a littler sharper. If I have any criticism of Jim's music it's that sometimes he doesn't edit himself well enough, so he'll go on and on with something, no, that's not fair. Sometimes he's a little bit complacent in expecting your attention for parts of the music that aren't always going somewhere. I was thinking about this a lot actually when I went to that concert; I loved it so much and thought, well, I always say this is like Maria's music, but what's the difference? And I think there's a sense of urgency that's not always in Jim's music that is in Maria's music, a sense that you're moving toward some emotional climax, and Jim takes a long time to get there sometimes.

But I love his music, it's like clouds of music, atmospheric clouds, that doesn't always have a thru-drive like a sports car, it's more like a guy meandering through the hills and enjoying being there. There's also something that I haven't written about, I don't think, but there's a real sense of sadness in a lot of his music. I realized that that night. A lot of his best music is really melancholy.

AAJ: I want to wrap it up and give you the chance to talk about anything else on your mind.

PdB: When you called the first thing that I really thought of talking about was how much the scene has changed from 1979 to 2006. It's gone through so many transformations. What we have today in Seattle is so different than what we had 26 years ago in having this completely solid infrastructure: We didn't even touch on the school programs that have come to rise in the middle schools and high schools; the University of Washington jazz program taking off, or at least getting started; Cornish having gone through several different phases, and I think, being in a very strong one now, producing musicians like Dawn Clement; radio being strong; having five clubs that have jazz, sure Jazz Alley might do smooth jazz, but we have the Earshot Jazz Festival, and as much as I may criticize it for not having a title sponsor or being a big whiz-bang festival that I wish we had, and having a little higher civic profile, it does bring in all these great musicians like Dave Douglas and Vijay Iyer and all these people that you're not going to see otherwise. So kudos to John and kudos to Earshot for that.

With a non-profit organization, with great jazz programs, with visiting artists that come to the U of W, with Cornish, radio, frankly, the big missing piece is the criticism. I'm the only jazz critic at a major newspaper in town now; there's nobody out there kicking my ass. When Roberta Penn was at the P-I at least I had to worry if she was going to scoop me on something. There's nobody writing about jazz at The Weekly, The Stranger or the P-I, and that's very sad. That's the big missing piece.

But otherwise you've got Tula's, Bake's Place, the Triple Door, all these places. There's so much music and so many great local musicians. The caliber of music that's produced here, and the caliber and regular presence of original music, I think back to '84 and '87, kicking local musicians' asses and saying, "Play some original music! Compose something!" Now it's: "Not so much! How about a standard!" (laughs)

There's so much great original music, so many creative projects: Origin Records, the Seattle Repertory Jazz Orchestra, all these things that were talked about as possible projects that Earshot itself might at some point take on have actually blossomed as their own thing, the Ballard Jazz Festival, and now there's something on the east side, the Eastside Jazz concerts produced by Cooksie and Lionel (Kramer); they're doing their thing. Jim Wilke and Jazz After Hours. I mean we have, and whenever I say this it sounds like such a booster, but Seattle has the best regional jazz scene in the country. There's absolutely no question in my mind about it.

Photo Credit
Courtesy of Paul de Barros

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