You Grooving?

So I was asked by the saxophonist Dave Liebman before his concert tonight in Buenos Aires. After learning that I was from New York and living in Buenos Aires, he wanted to make sure that my time here was living up to the jazz ethic. I told him it was.

Courtesy of my friend, the guitarist Ale Demogli, I had full run of the theater where Liebman was playing and was able to chat with him for a bit before the show. Way back in November 2000, I went to a jazz club for the first time and saw Liebman playing with his big band at the Knitting Factory's Old Office. While my friends (fellow travelers of the spaceways and waterways Greg Kress, Dude Friedman, Zach Seward, and Dan Hemel) and I liked hanging in a real live jazz club, we certainly didn't get the music.

Tonight, I introduced myself to Liebman by telling him that he was the first musician I ever saw play in a club, omitting the fact that I didn't really like what he'd played then. Since that fateful night in 2000 (earlier in the day, Dalton football had won its first championship in 20 years in an epic 14-13 win over Horace Mann) I hadn't heard Liebman play live, so my view of him continued to be of an eccentric and inaccessible performer.

What a difference seven and a half years makes.

Tonight's concert was one of the finest I've seen in a long time. I don't recall ever hearing a saxophonist that was more powerful than Dave Liebman was tonight. In his hands, the soprano sax, an instrument with a proclivity for Kenny G sacchrine, was a flame thrower. On tenor, he evoked the spirit of Coltrane more earnestly and powerfully than any other player I've seen. Liebman's originals were stirring, but the concert reached a new level on his ten-plus minute solo on 'My Favorite Things'. The man had the gall to poach directly from the Coltrane cannon, perform a sheet-of-sound attack solo, and come up with something ferocious and new.

The last show I saw that reached this kind of level was a August 2007 concert at Blue Note in New York of Don Byron's Ivey Divey Trio. That night, I left the Blue Note and needed to walk the streets of Greenwich Village for an hour just to process what had gone on. Take this gushing missive as the digital equivalent of that bewildered and awestruck stroll..

The Return

It's been a long, unannounced hiatus for Type and Tonic, a fact due to my week and a half trip to the South, my final weeks at the Argentimes, and, most importantly, my mind being occupied with the big queston of what next.

First off, a brief and incomplete recap of what's gone on.

My good friend (and guest blogger) Adam Bloch and I spend a week in the spectacular lake district of Argentina around Bariloche and El Bolsón. Longtime readers of Type and Tonic will be familiar with El Bolsón as the place where I both made my fateful Piltriquitron hike and where attended the El Bolsón Jazz Festival.

On my second visit, the town didn't disappoint. In late summer, it was a little more lively than it had been in early December and its laid-back hippie spirit was fully on display—most colorfully when a Carnaval parade of school kids and eccentric old men made its way through the town plaza.

Blocho's and my consensus from our time in the region was that the two highlights were our trip to Cajón del Azul and our brief achievement of human flight. I wrote an article on Cajón, which will be coming out in the next issue of the Argentimes. The place was as idyllic a spot as you could dream of—a quaint mountain cottage set between two mountains and above a river canyon. The proprietor was a wizened mountain sage named Atilio Csik who drove a tractor around the premises and declined to sell Adam a t-shirt, because he "didn't believe in that sort of commerce."

Human flight took the form of paragliding off my old friend Piltriquitron. If you ever have the opportunity to go paragliding, do it. You stand on a steep slope on the mountain looking down at El Bolsón's bucolic valley when, suddenly, you're told to start running and soon after find yourself taking steps in thin air as you rise up on the thermal drafts. Flying a hundred feet or so above the the trees and following the contour of the mountain as it descended toward the valley floor, I got as close as I ever think I will to being a bird.

Other highlights of the last month include the discovery of an underground, Friday-night only jazz club where Adam and I attended two jam sessions. The first featuring the powerful bebop quartet of my friend, the saxophonist Leonardo Paganini, the second showcasing an precise sax trio that played a faithful Ornette Coleman tribute set.

I have also recently ended my tenure on the editorial team at the Argentimes. An excellent experience, and a great place to start my Argentine odyssey, but I'm now ready to try my hand at more freelance journalism and, while nothing is set, there have been some rumblings from promising corners.

Tomorrow, I'll be setting off on yet another journey, this one back to US shores for the first time since October. It should be a very full slate with the Winnebago alumni reunion scheduled to bring a motley crew to New York in time for my return, and a trip out west to the mountain home of Paul "The Dude" Friedman for some early spring skiing.

When I return in April, I'll be moving in with two Argentine friends, hoping that some of the freelance leads will pan out, and attempting to get a job at a Spanish-language publication. A lot of uncertainties, but a lot of possibilities, which is why in the end it seems like an adventure worth taking.

Not sure how much blogging there will be from the States, but will certainly return to Type and Tonic in April...