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PRESS
THE MUSICAL LIFE A LONG-LOST BAR INSPIRES A SONG CYCLE
The New Yorker, April 17, 2000.
The imaginary bar in "Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill," the eccentric song cycle that was recently released on CD is by the saxophone player Roy Nathanson, is based on an organ bar in Charleston, South Carolina, where Nathanson played twenty years go, as a member of the late Charles Earland's band. Organ bars existed in the back parts of small cities like Newark, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee, and they had the kind of big Hammond organs that were too cumbersome for musicians to travel with.
The CD is the score of a theatre piece that Nathanson views as a "plotless radio play that is character-driven." The idea of inventing a calamity in a bar and describing it in a series of songs came to Nathanson about two years ago, shortly after he learned that Deborah Harry was about to leave his hand, the Jazz Passengers, which she had sung with since 1994, in order to tour with Blondie, her rock-and-roll band. This meant that the Jazz Passengers would have some time on their hands. Nathanson remembered the bar in South Carolina. "In all the other bars I played in with Charles Earland, the trumpet player and I were always the only white people," he says. "But this bar was black and white, and the Clash was on the jukebox with Tammy Wynette and John Coltrane, and it was a haven." He mentioned the idea of the bar and the disaster to his friend Ray Dobbins, a writer and lyricist. "He's Irish," Nathanson says, "and he's a bar person, and he knows bar talk." In addition to writing the lyrics for some of the songs, Dobbins wrote the liner notes, which depict Keaton's and the night of the fire.
By means of set pieces that are a mixture of tango funk, straight-ahead jazz, and modern composition, and that are sung by nine of the bar's customers, the songs portray the bar and the winter night it caught fire and left everyone standing on the sidewalk, watching it burn to the ground. The fire dispersed them, and they never gathered anywhere again. Richard Butler, a member of the Psychedelic Furs, plays a character named Richard Malin who is suspected of starting the fire, Deborah Harry, plays Cups, "the bartender everyone is in love with."
Nathanson was born in Brooklyn in 1951. His mother was a classical pianist, and his father played the saxophone in big bands. "A third-chair kind of guy," Nathanson says. "He would go to the union hall Saturday night looking for work. He also had a construction business. When I was a kid, I mainly practiced the clarinet and played basketball. I didn't read a book until I was in the tenth grade." In 1994, Nathanson joined the Lounge Lizards. "At the same time," he says, "I was reading a lot of theatre; I read thousands of plays. All I really cared about was music, and its relationship to theatre, whatever that means." In 1987, he started the Jazz Passengers with Curtis Fowlkes, a trombone player of the Lounge Lizards. Elvis Costello liked the Jazz Passengers and invited them to perform at a festival he was producing. In "Fire at Keaton Bar & Grill," Costello plays Singleton who is the narrator and is obscurely described in the CD's notes as "the guy with the car."
On May 5th and 6th, Nathanson and Costello and Harry and sixteen other musicians and actors will present what Nathanson calls "an onstage realization" of "Fire at Keaton's" St. Ann's in Brooklyn, as part of the Arts a St. Ann's SpringWorks 2000 series, the arts festival that has included new works and performances by David Byrne, Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Beth Orron. To prepare, Nathanson plays songs from "Keaton's" with a big band on occasional nights at Tonic, club on Norfolk Street, on the Lower East Side. The elements of "Keaton's" keep changing, as characters assert themselves in different ways. This is intentional but also anxiety-making. "When I started, I didn't want the plot to be so clear that it was inflexible, "Nathanson says, "I wanted a theatre piece that would grow from the sound up rather than the other way around. What's happening as we rehearsed is that Ray and I have become detectives trying to find the perfect plot. We have faith that when we finally get everyone on the stage together the clues will combine, and we'll be introduced to the remaining mysteries."
- Alec Wilkinson
NEW YORK TIMESMUSIC REVIEW
THE ROOM IS SMOKY AND THE JAZZ IS JAZZY
By JON PARELES
For all the Inroads jazz has made into concert halls, the music's mythic home is still an out-of-the-way littler bar where saxophone lines entertwince with curling wisps of smoke. That's fine with Roy Nathanson, the alto saxophonist in the Jazz Passengers. He has just released "Fire at Keaton's Bar and Grill" (Six Degrees), a jazzy song cycle set in a ficticious dive.
Its characters, some portrayed by jazz-leaning rock singers including Elvis Costello and Deborah Harry, are a batch of barlifes -- lovers, watchers, poets, musicians and lsot souls -- reminiscing about a place that one of them may have burned down. It was staged, with videos by the director John Jesusrun, at St. Ann's in Brookly for three weekend shows.
A video screen above the stage showed barrom scenes, blurred squiggles of neon or abstract billows of smoke, rippling water, clouds and climbing flames behind close-ups of the musicians. The singers wore slightly retro outfits -- hats were carefully slouched -- and Ms. Harry, as the bartender, sang "Imitation of Kiss" while holding a barkeep's dishcloth. But more of the atmosphere came from Mr. Nathanson's time-warped music.
He is fondest of jazz from the mid-1950's to the mid-60's, when a place like Keaton's would havce an organ trio playing nightly, and when band leaders like Charles Mingus and Art Blakey devleoped ways to put a bluesy, down-home foundation under complex structures. mr. Nathanson has a gift for counterpoint, meshing irregular riffs to mix spaciousness and propulsion. And he doesn't let one idiom contain him; the song cycle included unaccompanied saxophone quartets, unconventional fuck tunes and a modernist tango.
A few of the songs were direct throwbacks, like "Bar Stool Paradise," which recalled the 1950's vocatese of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross; Nancy King and Kenny Washington made it sound like a jovial improvisation. But more often, Mr. Nathanson added extra twists: odd meters, ambiguous chords, strethces of altered funk. The easy-swinging riff of "Jazz Night at Keaton's" switched between 5/4 and 7/4 time, then steamed into doubletime, letting Reuben WIlson on organ send quick lines charging across the beat in classic organ-trio style.
Even the ballads -- which, anywhere else, could have been torch songs -- challenged the singers with tricky chromatic leaps. Mr. Costello handled his songs with an intimate vibrato; Ms. Harry sounded worldly and resilient, even as she spoke-sang phrases between the pointillistio disonances of "Cups." Dartus de Haas and David Driver crooned a "A Bend in the Night," the poised, slow-motion love duet of two theoretical physicists: "a quantum embrace/let particles fly."
"Fire at Keaton's Bar and Grill" didn't try to recreate a bygone place and time. Instead, true to nostalgia's version of jazz past, it took memory loosely, letting creative distortion improve things.
Pop Graduates
by Stuart Nicholson
The Spectator, November 26, 2000.
Mainstays of the progress "Downtown" Manhattan jazz scene for more years than they care to remember, the Jazz Passengers enjoy a moke more than your average jazz ensemble. Given they claim to be influenced as much by the Marx Brothers as Louis Armstrong and Sun Ra, then adding Deborah Harry, former frontwoman of Blondie and Punk rock'sanswer to Marilyn Munroe, to their line-up might seem like a move inspired by Groucho himself. But the Passengers' mix of humour and innovation has long set them apart from the eternal purists and the earnest avantgardists, and Miss Harry's presence in their midst prompted a vigorous piece of conceptualising that allowed space for both singer and band to shine.
The Jazz Passengers grew out of the saxophone-trombone duo of Roy Nathanson and Curtis Fowlkes in the mid-Eighties with the addition of violin, vibes, bass and drums. Their early albums revealed a witty reordering of contemporary jazz leavened by occasional rambunctious humour. Maybe in the conservative Eighties the world wasn't ready for their brand of avant-garde merry-making but, after Miss Harry's cameo appearance on 1994's Jazz Passengers In Love, the union of band and vocalist was hailed as 'a startling triumph' by Village Voice. It was followed by 1997's Individually Twisted, and on it Miss Harry emerged from the footnotes of Seventies pop in an inspired piece of casting that saw her explore a range of emotions far beyond her role as sex goddess with Blondie.
Alternating world-wise charm (she's now 35) with coy little-girl-lost-isms (she looks in her late twenties), she moved from pathos to humour in a single stride, mixed ribald asides with whisper-in-your-ear soft talk yet sang lovesongs with bruised passion. The heart-of-glass of her Blondie days was replaced by a quintessential New York attitude that was at once wry, sardonic and cosmopolitan -- witness how she and the Passengers reinvented 'The Tide is High', her 1980 hit (and only concession in her Blondie pas) or how she responded to the Passenger's nerotic 'Maybe I'm Lost'. Guesting on the album was Elvis Costello, who sang his own original 'Aubergine' and dueted engagingly with Miss Harry on 'Donca Go Way Mad'.
Remaining commited to the Jazz Passengers, Miss Harry toured America and Europe with them singing their quirky, sometimes arty songs with their poetic, funny and occasionally bizarre lyrics with increasing conviction and saying, "Jazz is sort of like graduating from pop, you have to know more about music." Lead by saxophonist Roy Nathanson, the Passengers have always attempted to explore new musical territory, in contrast to much jazz todya which merely refines the map. Four years ago, Nathanson created an extravagant tableau called 'The Jazz Passengers in Egypt' tha had an Egyptian queen with a Brooklyn accent you could cut with a knife, a portrayal of Walter Cronkite dancing the lambada and an ancient Egyptian jazz band smoking marijuana.
This uniquely eccentric backdrop and a tenuous libretto linked a series of jazz compositions to the Passengers' humour (two people wrangling over a duck: one says 'The duck stops here'. and so on), creating a multi-media show that drew praise from the New York Times. Nathanson's latest project is 'Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill', which tells the story of an imaginary bar and the extraordinary characters that inhabit it. Mounted at the Royal Festival Hall for the recent Racing Green London Jazz Festival, it provided the highspot of the ten-day event.
Like Passengers in Egypt, the concept created a context for a series of original vocals and instruments: unlike Passengers in Egypt the presentation left out the jokes and used only four Passengers -- albeit augmented by seven additional instrumentalists from guitarist to saxophones. Nine singers represented the habitués of Keaton's of whom Nancy King and Kenny Washington offered a bracing, straight-ahead jazz duet on Bar Stool Paradise that dissolved into the onomatopoeia of scat -- the ultimate destination of most up-tempo jazz singing. Nathanson (a dead ringer for Groucho, incidentally) directed traffic and contributed some lucid sax solos but it was Elvis Costello, as Singleton the narrator, and Miss Harry, as Carol Ann 'Cups' -- 'bartender to the masses' -- tha impressed. Miss Harry had a stage presence that suspended gravity and on Imitation of a Kiss, understood that, while most love songs are simple, love can be complicated.
This imaginative production, by far the most successfull of its kind in jazz, became something of a minor cause célébre prior to the concert: even Radio Four's Today programme work took up the theme that 'critics had been harsh about pop stars crossing over into jazz'. However, Miss Harry and Costello (whose father Ross MacManus was vocalist with the Joe Loss Orchestra for 18 years) emerged as singers who gave real, personal meaning to the words they sang while conveying the drama inherent in the song's lyrics. These are concepts lost on most young jazz singers on today's crowded scene who are weighed down by the jazz tradition and the precedent set by legends like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. In trying to navigate a route between vocal callisthenics and passion they usually end up sounding bland and predictable. In contrast, by approaching jazz singing from an entirely different perspective and unencumbered by such heavy baggage, the 'pop stars' sounded startingly original and, in Miss Harry's case, electric.
The New Yorker, April 17, 2000.
The imaginary bar in "Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill," the eccentric song cycle that was recently released on CD is by the saxophone player Roy Nathanson, is based on an organ bar in Charleston, South Carolina, where Nathanson played twenty years go, as a member of the late Charles Earland's band. Organ bars existed in the back parts of small cities like Newark, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee, and they had the kind of big Hammond organs that were too cumbersome for musicians to travel with.
The CD is the score of a theatre piece that Nathanson views as a "plotless radio play that is character-driven." The idea of inventing a calamity in a bar and describing it in a series of songs came to Nathanson about two years ago, shortly after he learned that Deborah Harry was about to leave his hand, the Jazz Passengers, which she had sung with since 1994, in order to tour with Blondie, her rock-and-roll band. This meant that the Jazz Passengers would have some time on their hands. Nathanson remembered the bar in South Carolina. "In all the other bars I played in with Charles Earland, the trumpet player and I were always the only white people," he says. "But this bar was black and white, and the Clash was on the jukebox with Tammy Wynette and John Coltrane, and it was a haven." He mentioned the idea of the bar and the disaster to his friend Ray Dobbins, a writer and lyricist. "He's Irish," Nathanson says, "and he's a bar person, and he knows bar talk." In addition to writing the lyrics for some of the songs, Dobbins wrote the liner notes, which depict Keaton's and the night of the fire.
By means of set pieces that are a mixture of tango funk, straight-ahead jazz, and modern composition, and that are sung by nine of the bar's customers, the songs portray the bar and the winter night it caught fire and left everyone standing on the sidewalk, watching it burn to the ground. The fire dispersed them, and they never gathered anywhere again. Richard Butler, a member of the Psychedelic Furs, plays a character named Richard Malin who is suspected of starting the fire, Deborah Harry, plays Cups, "the bartender everyone is in love with."
Nathanson was born in Brooklyn in 1951. His mother was a classical pianist, and his father played the saxophone in big bands. "A third-chair kind of guy," Nathanson says. "He would go to the union hall Saturday night looking for work. He also had a construction business. When I was a kid, I mainly practiced the clarinet and played basketball. I didn't read a book until I was in the tenth grade." In 1994, Nathanson joined the Lounge Lizards. "At the same time," he says, "I was reading a lot of theatre; I read thousands of plays. All I really cared about was music, and its relationship to theatre, whatever that means." In 1987, he started the Jazz Passengers with Curtis Fowlkes, a trombone player of the Lounge Lizards. Elvis Costello liked the Jazz Passengers and invited them to perform at a festival he was producing. In "Fire at Keaton Bar & Grill," Costello plays Singleton who is the narrator and is obscurely described in the CD's notes as "the guy with the car."
On May 5th and 6th, Nathanson and Costello and Harry and sixteen other musicians and actors will present what Nathanson calls "an onstage realization" of "Fire at Keaton's" St. Ann's in Brooklyn, as part of the Arts a St. Ann's SpringWorks 2000 series, the arts festival that has included new works and performances by David Byrne, Philip Glass, Lou Reed, and Beth Orron. To prepare, Nathanson plays songs from "Keaton's" with a big band on occasional nights at Tonic, club on Norfolk Street, on the Lower East Side. The elements of "Keaton's" keep changing, as characters assert themselves in different ways. This is intentional but also anxiety-making. "When I started, I didn't want the plot to be so clear that it was inflexible, "Nathanson says, "I wanted a theatre piece that would grow from the sound up rather than the other way around. What's happening as we rehearsed is that Ray and I have become detectives trying to find the perfect plot. We have faith that when we finally get everyone on the stage together the clues will combine, and we'll be introduced to the remaining mysteries."
- Alec Wilkinson
NEW YORK TIMESMUSIC REVIEW
THE ROOM IS SMOKY AND THE JAZZ IS JAZZY
By JON PARELES
For all the Inroads jazz has made into concert halls, the music's mythic home is still an out-of-the-way littler bar where saxophone lines entertwince with curling wisps of smoke. That's fine with Roy Nathanson, the alto saxophonist in the Jazz Passengers. He has just released "Fire at Keaton's Bar and Grill" (Six Degrees), a jazzy song cycle set in a ficticious dive.
Its characters, some portrayed by jazz-leaning rock singers including Elvis Costello and Deborah Harry, are a batch of barlifes -- lovers, watchers, poets, musicians and lsot souls -- reminiscing about a place that one of them may have burned down. It was staged, with videos by the director John Jesusrun, at St. Ann's in Brookly for three weekend shows.
A video screen above the stage showed barrom scenes, blurred squiggles of neon or abstract billows of smoke, rippling water, clouds and climbing flames behind close-ups of the musicians. The singers wore slightly retro outfits -- hats were carefully slouched -- and Ms. Harry, as the bartender, sang "Imitation of Kiss" while holding a barkeep's dishcloth. But more of the atmosphere came from Mr. Nathanson's time-warped music.
He is fondest of jazz from the mid-1950's to the mid-60's, when a place like Keaton's would havce an organ trio playing nightly, and when band leaders like Charles Mingus and Art Blakey devleoped ways to put a bluesy, down-home foundation under complex structures. mr. Nathanson has a gift for counterpoint, meshing irregular riffs to mix spaciousness and propulsion. And he doesn't let one idiom contain him; the song cycle included unaccompanied saxophone quartets, unconventional fuck tunes and a modernist tango.
A few of the songs were direct throwbacks, like "Bar Stool Paradise," which recalled the 1950's vocatese of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross; Nancy King and Kenny Washington made it sound like a jovial improvisation. But more often, Mr. Nathanson added extra twists: odd meters, ambiguous chords, strethces of altered funk. The easy-swinging riff of "Jazz Night at Keaton's" switched between 5/4 and 7/4 time, then steamed into doubletime, letting Reuben WIlson on organ send quick lines charging across the beat in classic organ-trio style.
Even the ballads -- which, anywhere else, could have been torch songs -- challenged the singers with tricky chromatic leaps. Mr. Costello handled his songs with an intimate vibrato; Ms. Harry sounded worldly and resilient, even as she spoke-sang phrases between the pointillistio disonances of "Cups." Dartus de Haas and David Driver crooned a "A Bend in the Night," the poised, slow-motion love duet of two theoretical physicists: "a quantum embrace/let particles fly."
"Fire at Keaton's Bar and Grill" didn't try to recreate a bygone place and time. Instead, true to nostalgia's version of jazz past, it took memory loosely, letting creative distortion improve things.
Pop Graduates
by Stuart Nicholson
The Spectator, November 26, 2000.
Mainstays of the progress "Downtown" Manhattan jazz scene for more years than they care to remember, the Jazz Passengers enjoy a moke more than your average jazz ensemble. Given they claim to be influenced as much by the Marx Brothers as Louis Armstrong and Sun Ra, then adding Deborah Harry, former frontwoman of Blondie and Punk rock'sanswer to Marilyn Munroe, to their line-up might seem like a move inspired by Groucho himself. But the Passengers' mix of humour and innovation has long set them apart from the eternal purists and the earnest avantgardists, and Miss Harry's presence in their midst prompted a vigorous piece of conceptualising that allowed space for both singer and band to shine.
The Jazz Passengers grew out of the saxophone-trombone duo of Roy Nathanson and Curtis Fowlkes in the mid-Eighties with the addition of violin, vibes, bass and drums. Their early albums revealed a witty reordering of contemporary jazz leavened by occasional rambunctious humour. Maybe in the conservative Eighties the world wasn't ready for their brand of avant-garde merry-making but, after Miss Harry's cameo appearance on 1994's Jazz Passengers In Love, the union of band and vocalist was hailed as 'a startling triumph' by Village Voice. It was followed by 1997's Individually Twisted, and on it Miss Harry emerged from the footnotes of Seventies pop in an inspired piece of casting that saw her explore a range of emotions far beyond her role as sex goddess with Blondie.
Alternating world-wise charm (she's now 35) with coy little-girl-lost-isms (she looks in her late twenties), she moved from pathos to humour in a single stride, mixed ribald asides with whisper-in-your-ear soft talk yet sang lovesongs with bruised passion. The heart-of-glass of her Blondie days was replaced by a quintessential New York attitude that was at once wry, sardonic and cosmopolitan -- witness how she and the Passengers reinvented 'The Tide is High', her 1980 hit (and only concession in her Blondie pas) or how she responded to the Passenger's nerotic 'Maybe I'm Lost'. Guesting on the album was Elvis Costello, who sang his own original 'Aubergine' and dueted engagingly with Miss Harry on 'Donca Go Way Mad'.
Remaining commited to the Jazz Passengers, Miss Harry toured America and Europe with them singing their quirky, sometimes arty songs with their poetic, funny and occasionally bizarre lyrics with increasing conviction and saying, "Jazz is sort of like graduating from pop, you have to know more about music." Lead by saxophonist Roy Nathanson, the Passengers have always attempted to explore new musical territory, in contrast to much jazz todya which merely refines the map. Four years ago, Nathanson created an extravagant tableau called 'The Jazz Passengers in Egypt' tha had an Egyptian queen with a Brooklyn accent you could cut with a knife, a portrayal of Walter Cronkite dancing the lambada and an ancient Egyptian jazz band smoking marijuana.
This uniquely eccentric backdrop and a tenuous libretto linked a series of jazz compositions to the Passengers' humour (two people wrangling over a duck: one says 'The duck stops here'. and so on), creating a multi-media show that drew praise from the New York Times. Nathanson's latest project is 'Fire at Keaton's Bar & Grill', which tells the story of an imaginary bar and the extraordinary characters that inhabit it. Mounted at the Royal Festival Hall for the recent Racing Green London Jazz Festival, it provided the highspot of the ten-day event.
Like Passengers in Egypt, the concept created a context for a series of original vocals and instruments: unlike Passengers in Egypt the presentation left out the jokes and used only four Passengers -- albeit augmented by seven additional instrumentalists from guitarist to saxophones. Nine singers represented the habitués of Keaton's of whom Nancy King and Kenny Washington offered a bracing, straight-ahead jazz duet on Bar Stool Paradise that dissolved into the onomatopoeia of scat -- the ultimate destination of most up-tempo jazz singing. Nathanson (a dead ringer for Groucho, incidentally) directed traffic and contributed some lucid sax solos but it was Elvis Costello, as Singleton the narrator, and Miss Harry, as Carol Ann 'Cups' -- 'bartender to the masses' -- tha impressed. Miss Harry had a stage presence that suspended gravity and on Imitation of a Kiss, understood that, while most love songs are simple, love can be complicated.
This imaginative production, by far the most successfull of its kind in jazz, became something of a minor cause célébre prior to the concert: even Radio Four's Today programme work took up the theme that 'critics had been harsh about pop stars crossing over into jazz'. However, Miss Harry and Costello (whose father Ross MacManus was vocalist with the Joe Loss Orchestra for 18 years) emerged as singers who gave real, personal meaning to the words they sang while conveying the drama inherent in the song's lyrics. These are concepts lost on most young jazz singers on today's crowded scene who are weighed down by the jazz tradition and the precedent set by legends like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. In trying to navigate a route between vocal callisthenics and passion they usually end up sounding bland and predictable. In contrast, by approaching jazz singing from an entirely different perspective and unencumbered by such heavy baggage, the 'pop stars' sounded startingly original and, in Miss Harry's case, electric.