“What up, everybody?” pianist Gerald Clayton asked the crowd at Manhattan’s Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night. “We’re about bringing everybody together, from different genres and headspaces.”
By then, Next Collective, a tight and smart band of young jazz musicians on the rise, had worked through versions of songs that spanned contemporary pop. “Twice,” by Swedish band Little Dragon, began as an overlapping dialogue between saxophonists Walter Smith III and Logan Richardson, then gave way to ringing chords and a thrashing 4/4 beat. “Africa” spilled out nearly as silkily as neo-soul genius D’Angelo’s original, yet with fresh harmonic suggestions and a tiny stutter to its step. Trumpeter Christian aTunde Adjuah joined in for “No Church In the Wild,” summoning tenderness to match Frank Ocean’s sung version (on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne”), as guitarist Matthew Stevens and bassist Ben Williams traced that tune’s serpentine line in tandem. But then Adjuah blew hot, fresh improvisations and squealed asides to his bandmates; drummer Jamire Williams began messing with the song’s throb of a beat, splitting and sliding it gently but just enough.
The mostly young listeners hooted and hollered as much for Pearl Jam’s “Ocean” as for the melody of “No Church.” Here was that meeting of headspaces Clayton mentioned, and it came naturally: These songs form the playlist for the lives of both those onstage and, mostly, in the audience. Formally, Next Collective was assembled by Chris Dunn, an executive at Concord Music Group, by drawing from the label’s roster. Yet these musicians already led overlapping lives, and have already been turning each other on to the music on the collective’s new CD, “Cover Art.” Tuesday night’s gig was a release party, and its success owed in large part to the savvy promotion and production work of New York-based Revive Music Group, who have deep hooks into the crowd Concord hopes to reach.
Next Collective might invite comparison with New Directions, the young-gun amalgam band of a decade ago created by Blue Note Records. But that project looked largely to reinterpreting classics from the Blue Note catalog, not current hits. There’s nothing new in playing jazz versions of alternative rock and hip-hop tunes, nor is it radical by now for a small jazz ensemble to find a sound as influenced by, say, Bon Iver (Next Collective covered “Perth” on Tuesday) or MeShell Ndegeocello (her “Come Smoke My Herb” is on “Cover Art”) as by Miles Davis’s 1960s quintet. Back when he called himself Christian Scott, Adjuah (who changed his name last year) built a solid career with such philosophy, leading a band that included both drummer Jamire Williams and Stevens. The shared cohesion and sense of purpose from that experience was evident at Le Poisson Rouge. Genres cease to matter when a rhythm section slides as gracefully from rock’s straight four to jazz’s swing to hip-hop’s layered beats as this one did. Ben Williams briefly stole the show during “Fly or Die,” by N.E.R.D, yet his more subtle moves throughout the set offered the sort of details and prompts that help elevate such an enterprise from cover band to jazz ensemble. The same could be said of Clayton, who soloed little on piano, yet squeezed unexpected lyricism out of even Dido’s “Thank You.”
Still, these musicians have been and still are doing this stuff on their own recordings and in bands led by others. (Pianist Kris Bowers, who is on the new CD — and, by the way, is in the mix on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” — missed Tuesday night’s gig because he was touring with singer Jose James.) Their calendars are full enough for Tuesday’s show to be the lone listing on Next Collective’s itinerary. That’s a shame for two reasons. Working as collective with Concord’s backing might — and should — make for better marketing to the very listeners so many jazz presenters are desperate to attract. Also, touring as a unit would be revealing — not only about how much these players can grow as an ensemble, but just how much invention they can breathe into this material. The latter is an interesting question.
A few months ago, Benjamin Schwarz, literary editor and national editor of The Atlantic, reviewed Ted Gioia’s book, “The Jazz Standards” (Oxford University Press), under the unfortunate headline “The End of Jazz.”
More often than not and especially recently, such foolish obituaries about jazz concern a shrinking audience. But Schwarz focused on an aesthetic concern — chiefly, the drying up of jazz’s lifeblood of raw material, the great and sophisticated tunes of the so-called “Great American Songbook.” Schwarz ended his piece like this: “Jazz, like the Songbook, is a relic — and as such, in 2012 it cannot have, as Gioia wishes for it, an ‘expansive and adaptive repertoire.’”
In his essay, Schwarz made a deep and deeply correct point about a mid-20th-century phenomenon: yes, there were a “fleeting set of cultural circumstances” that gave rise to a “Songbook,” the recurrence of which is conspired against by everything from demographics to education policy to commercial music formats. But I didn’t buy anything he said beyond that. Frankly, I don’t think jazz needs a songbook. It moves forward — or better, along its big circle — just fine without one. But if it did, that songbook would be a playlist that does not cohere in structure, style, and social references like Gershwin and Berlin did. This new songbook is in the phones of many who were at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night, not to mention the musicians onstage. How “expansive and adaptive” it is remains an open question, one I’d like to hear this band consider further still.