A jazz tribute to Pavement sounds like a
bad idea — at best a willfully silly experiment conceived by
a gaggle of giggling stoners, at worst a transparent attempt to
make aging hipsters feel more sophisticated, the Generation X
equivalent of the Moody Blues’ gigging with a symphony
orchestra. With a few exceptions, these high-art/low-art collusions
aren’t good for much besides squeezing money out of squares
during PBS fund drives. Although music fans are wise to greet such
middlebrow monstrosities with suspicion, it would be a shame to
dismiss Gold Sounds on the basis of its gimmick. Neither a gussied-up rock
album nor a dumbed-down jazz album, Gold
Sounds succeeds on its own terms,
a triumph of soul over style. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this
ad hoc quartet comprises saxophonist James Carter, pianist Cyrus
Chestnut, drummer Ali Jackson, and bassist Reginald Veal. Carter,
who portrayed Ben Webster in Robert Altman’s film Kansas City, is widely
acknowledged as a sax visionary, a mercurial shaman whose catalog
ranges from idiosyncratic takes on Django Reinhardt and Billie
Holiday compositions to ridiculously funky collaborations with
Motown session men. Recently decreed a legend by New York magazine, Chestnut
played gospel before establishing his cred as a brilliant jazz
sideman; his solo career spans more than a decade and fuses frantic
bebop with incantatory soul. Veal, a versatile player best known
for his work with bop purist Wynton Marsalis, has also toured with
iconoclast par excellence Cassandra Wilson. The junior member of the
ensemble, twentysomething Jackson, has done time as a bandleader,
earning critical acclaim for his 1997 album Live at Jazz en Tête.
So great is the collective talent of this
quartet that even my friend Steve, a self-proclaimed “supreme
Pavement hata,” loves Gold
Sounds. “I had no idea they were playing Pavement
songs,” he confessed. “This is a really great jazz
record.” Indeed, Steve and his brethren have excellent reasons to
blame the group for its imitators, those slovenly swarms of ironic
college bands that plagued the lo-fi ’90s, but Gold Sounds proves that
Pavement’s influence isn’t always pernicious. If Stephen
Malkmus and company weren’t the most technically proficient
musicians on the planet, they made up for it with their shambolic
grace, their ability to contain fracas and fragility in deceptively
melodic forms, their combustible potions of off-kilter riffs and
inscrutable pronouncements. Taking its title from a track on 1994’s
Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (a song that, oddly enough, doesn’t appear
on this CD), Gold Sounds includes at least one cut from each of
Pavement’s five albums, with the exception of 1995’s Wowee Zowee. Slanted and Enchanted gets top billing, with three stellar transfigurations: The slacker
anthem “Summer Babe” becomes a groovy shuffle built on
lustrous Fender Rhodes, high and twanging electric bass, and sassy
tenor sax; the bruised lullaby “Here” recasts
Malkmus’ offhand vocal melody as a soaring soprano sax line
while twinkling piano figures reveal heretofore unimaginable
harmonies; and the fractured post-punk workout “Trigger
Cut,” arranged here for solo piano, serves as fertile ground
for Chestnut’s playful, cerebral, and magisterial
improvisation. Pavement’s biggest (well, only) hit single, “Cut
Your Hair,” is rendered as a languid blues, and “Blue
Hawaiian,” from 1997’s Brighten
the Corners, becomes a slinky
late-night reverie. A cynic might say that Carter and his cohorts
are slumming, converting pig’s ears into silk purses and
unschooled indie rockers into bona fide jazzbos just to prove that
they can. But as virtuosic as these musicians are, their real
achievement lies in the passion, sympathy, and joy that they bring
to Pavement’s music. You can’t fake those with a
fakebook.
This article appears in Oct 6-12, 2005.
