Where I'm Calling From: Part II

On Friday, I packed my bags and moved from San Telmo to my new digs in Colegiales, a residential neighborhood in the north of the city. I live on the second floor in an annex to the larger house downstairs, basically a nice shack on the roof that offers privacy and a big rooftop outdoor space. I'm thinking that I should follow my pugilistic forbearers Malloy and Tyson and start keeping pigeons...

The door on the left is my entrance

My sun porch

The shack on the roof

Tango Town Swing

Sooner than expected, All About Jazz has published my first column, "Friday Night at Thelonious," in what will, hopefully, be a long and fruitful series entitled "Tango Town Swing."

As the April entries can attest, jazz has become the central part of my life here. Between going to shows, listening to albums, transcribing interviews (by far the most time-consuming), and writing articles, I'm immersed in the music like I never have been before. That said, I'm happy to report that my boxing career is still flourishing, I'm cooking more than ever (I even made a loaf of bread on Saturday), and am putting together an article of a very different sort that hopefully will find a taker...

All About Jazz

Well, the smoke has cleared for the moment and it's a idyllic sunny and 72 degrees. Not a bad mid-autumn Sunday...

Today marks the beginning of my stint writing for All About Jazz. My decidedly mixed review of the Charles Lloyd New Quartet's late March concert in San Francisco has been posted, and seems to have already gotten 127 hits (not bad web exposure). My first piece on the Argentine jazz scene should be coming soon, to be followed by an interview/profile of drummer Pipi Piazzolla, tango master Ástor Piazzolla's grandson and one of the leading lights in contemporary Argentine jazz.

In more terrestrial news, I'm moving. San Telmo was a great place to cut my teeth, but I'm ready for a change. I'll be relocating to Chacarita, a more residential barrio in the north, where I'll have a patio and considerably easier access to jazz clubs.

The Days Buenos Aires Stood Still

For the last two days, Buenos Aires has been inundated with smoke. Massive brush fires in the Tigre Delta to the north have put the city under a smelly, irritating haze. Life continues to go on—and the smoke is supposedly non-toxic—but everything feels a little off. The streets are less crowded; the traffic is moving more slowly; the domestic airport has been shut down; many highways in and out of the city have been closed.

The smoke has also changed the days into a perpetual dawn. Even at noon, the light has the soft orange tone of sunrise and sunset. At night, the smoke makes Buenos Aires look like London on its foggiest nights. It's all very cinematic, but unpleasant to live in. BBC Mundo reported that by Monday, we should be back to the promised good airs.

Jazz Sharks

I wouldn't say I'm the toast of the Buenos Aires jazz scene quite yet, but I'm making headway...

On Friday, I spent an hour with Dino Saluzzi and his son, José, talking about musical education, improvisation, and the future of Argentine music. (For those who aren't up on their tango-folkloric-jazz fusion, Dino Saluzzi is the world's reigning bandoneon master and probably second only to Ástor Piazzolla in his influence on the course of Argentine creative music.) Dino and José were generous and insightful. My interview with them should be up on All About Jazz sometime in May.

Yesterday, I spent part of my afternoon with Pipi Piazzolla, the grandson of the aforementioned Ástor and a top-notch musician in his own right. Pipi is the drummer and leader of Escalandrum, one of Argentina's most decorated and prolific jazz groups. They have a dark tango texture amidst some really sharp, rhythmically complex jazz playing.

The band's name, Escalandrum, does not come, as I had thought, from some conjunction of Escala (scale in Spanish) and drum, but rather from a conjunction of escalandrún and drum. What's an escalandrún, you ask? Why, it's the Argentine name for a sand shark.

And why would you name a band after a sand shark?

Pipi said it had something to do with not being able to go shark fishing with his father the year he started the group (the Piazzollas are big shark fishermen) and, no doubt, also because sharks are bad ass. Pipi proudly showed me a picture of his father and him posed next to a ten-foot sand shark that they bagged off the coast of Mar del Plata. If I unexpectedly end up staying in Argentina through the next austral summer, shark fishing with the Piazzollas will be of the highest priority.

Between interviews, I caught two excellent shows. The first, a Friday night gig at Thelonious with Ramiro Flores's Quintet, a group that has already gotten some love on this blog. The second, a Sunday night trip to the nearby city of La Plata, to see my friend Ale Demogli play with his quintet and a dynamic Brazilian saxophonist named Marcelo Coehlo.

My first article for All About Jazz, a review of the Charles Lloyd New Quartet's San Francisco concert is slated for publication this Sunday, and my first dispatch from Buenos Aires has been submitted as well...

Argentina: Part II

It's not a very good sign when every other post on this blog begins with something like: after a long unannounced hiatus, Type and Tonic is back and better than ever. Granted this hiatus was announced—I was in the U.S. for the last three weeks—but if I'm going to keep this blog up, I need to be significantly more prolific. A limited output may be a virtue in film directors (see: Kubrik vs. Woody Allen), but it certainly isn't in bloggers.

I also need to get this back up and running because now I'm really out on my own as a writer. I've left the Argentimes editorial team and am hoping to strike out a path as a freelancer, jazz columnist, and amateur pugilist. (The pugilism is by far the most promising at this point.)

My web presence has expanded since last I was in Argentina. Through The Tube, a new website by the graphic designer Joshua Goldfein, is posting a lot of content that originally ran in the Argentimes. My articles currently on his site are a travel piece on El Chalten, and a news analysis/interview on corruption in Argentina. There's word that my Nazi hunting story will run on the site in the near future.

Through The Tube is a very polished site and is a major boon to the Argentimes. Finally, you'll be able to access our articles online without downloading an entire PDF of the paper.

I've also taken on a new job as Argentina columnist for the web's biggest jazz site: All About Jazz. My first article, a review of the Charles Lloyd Quartet's San Francisco concert, has been submitted, and should go up next week. My column will start soon, with an introductory summary of jazz in Buenos Aires to be followed by a string of articles on tango-jazz and folkloric-jazz in Argentina.

As a final note, I've just bought Brad Mehldau's new double album, Brad Mehldau Trio (Live), and I'd recommend that if you have an inclination for the jazz piano, you do the same. Carla Mazzio, a U of C English professor, once told me that the font size of a title was inversely proportional to the quality of the work. In Mehldau's case, there must be an inverse relationship between quality of title and quality of playing.

BMT (Live) is sensational. I'd begun to lose some faith in my favorite jazz pianist after a string of fairly ho-hum studio recordings. This is his best album since Art of the Trio, Vol. 4: Back at the Vanguard, and may be his strongest recording to date.

Beyond showing that Mehldau is still at the top of his game, this album raises the question: should Brad Mehldau ever enter a recording studio again? His live albums are so much richer than what he does in the studio—the extended form of live performance documents his tightly-controlled virtuosity in a way that has never really come across in the studio. Removed from the tightrope sprint of live performance, he tends to sound disappointingly restrained.

Take it as a sign of my enthusiasm that I bought not only the album, but also the complete recording of the Friday night sets (over three hours of music) from the Nonesuch website.