Le Poisson Rouge, Sullivan Hall, and Kenny's Castaways are not necessarily hostile to the idea that jazz audiences like to sit and stay in one place and enjoy a set from beginning to end in silence and then go home. They're just not interested in it.
The festivals 35 bands represented the sparky, autodidactic present in American jazz, which of course gathers in the past as well. So there was Steve Coleman's multimetric funk; the blurriness of cool and spastic in Bill McHenry's kind-of-post-bop quintet and the kind-of-rock Minneapolis trio Happy Apple; the immaculate and roughed-up big band music from John Hollenbeck's Large Ensemble and the Virginia band Fight the Big Bull; David Weiss's Point of Departure quintet exploring the liminal state of some lesser-known jazz form the mid-60s, both inside and outside of traditional time and harmony; and Josh Sinton's Ideal Bread playing songs by the saxophonist, composer and cult hero Steve Lacy.
Undead felt pretty much unmediated. You stood, walked, sweated and stayed out late. (Oh, there were a few chairs, but you weren't sitting in them.) In return, you were rewarded with the absence of a sponsor or a restrictive philosophy, which look bad with jazz and always have. Its two organizers are Brice Rosenbloom of boomBOOM Presents, which books Le Poisson Rouge year-round, and Adam Schatz of Search & Restore, which scrappily books and promotes jazz gigs in new settings around Manhattan and Brooklyn. They say they're looking for an underwriter to go forward with Undead next year. Maybe corporate money will force them into a more clear-cut mission, and maybe that will change the festivals future, but well see. For now, all is Eden: soulful and brandless. About 1,500 people attended over the two nights. About one in six seemed to be a musician.
What can you compare it to? The long-haul energy evoked the last two years of Winter Jazz Fest, devised by the same organizers and staged in the same clubs. But that festival caters to the visiting attendees of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference, the marketplace for performing-arts presenters; this is a proper hometown event. And it could remind you of the What Is Jazz? festivals at Knitting Factory after that club moved into its three-tiered space in 1994: constant staggered activity, a packed house, a mix of generations on stage and in the audience. But Undead wasn't promoting the glory of a single club. The clubs were just containers for the music. Since all three are relatively small, you weren't always computing scale: how much does it cost to put something like this on? How can it be sustained? A production like this can be sustained.
Practically every set was about one notion morphing into another: genres, approaches, eras. The guitarist Miles Okazaki and the drummer Dan Weiss performed a duo set on Friday at Kenny's Castaways that suggested some of the new jazz musicians inexhaustible options as they fit ideas together without stopping. They played credible bossa nova, free-improvised fantasias, Indian tabla rhythms. Later that night, Tony Malaby presented his new group, Novela, with improvised or notated music as conducted by the pianist Kris Davis. In its collapsing of structure and intuition it had roots in some older experimental jazz--Roscoe Mitchell, Butch Morris--but it was still strong and strange, properly bewildering.
