Jun 10, 2025 4:13 PM
Theo Croker’s Dream … Manifested!
Partway through his early set at Smoke Jazz Club, Theo Croker blinks the room back into focus. He leans over the piano.…
Sarah Elizabeth Charles “Dawn” at Loove Labs Annex on Jan. 11.
(Photo: Lev Radin)
Mike Reed’s Separatist Party on the Dada Strain Stage during the Brooklyn Marathon.
(Photo: Lev Radin)
Rudresh Mahanthappa Hero Trio at Loove Labs Annex on Jan. 11.
(Photo: Lev Radin)Brooklyn has long harbored a self-contained jazz (and broader music) scene of its own — but that’s not the subject of Winter Jazzfest’s Brooklyn marathon. It’s really a function of the fact that the once-compact marathon program has grown too big for its Lower Manhattan origins. The music heard Jan. 11 in venues across the Williamsburg neighborhood aren’t proprietary to the neighborhood, the borough or even necessarily to New York City itself: The venues are just an extension of WJF’s overall celebration of the whole jazz world.
That being the case, this writer decided to spend the night among the tight cluster of bandstands orbiting Wythe Avenue in the neighborhood’s northern section. It started at National Sawdust with one of the night’s more exciting, cutting-edge summits: the Vijay Iyer Trio +1, with guest trumpeter Adam O’Farrill. (Iyer and drummer Tyshawn Sorey were joined by Matt Brewer, sitting in for regular trio bassist Linda Oh, who had her own festival gig.)
“Forgive me for talking like an old man, but I’ve known this trumpet player since he was in middle school,” Iyer said before the set. “He’s part of a dynasty of incredible musicians.” Indeed, all of them are incredible, as they demonstrated on this night. Sorey and Brewer locked in immediately on the opening “Arch,” with the drummer balancing a soft touch against a complex rhythmic matrix and the bassist bringing a confident authority that was as much felt as heard. Alternating between open horn, mutes and electronic effects, O’Farrill ripped forth with foreboding lyrical lines alternated with severe, syncopated figures to brilliantly off-kilter effect.
The real star of the set, though, was Iyer. Always a percussive, passionate player, he held court at National Sawdust with a rare degree of soulfulness, as if the winter cold and the energy of the crowd had trigged something unusual in him. There was an iceberg-theory ferocity in his piano playing and a glow to the Rhodes lines he switched to on “Tempest.”
There was nothing submerged, however, about the ferocity that Isaiah Collier unleashed down the street at Brooklyn Bowl. The Chicago-born tenor saxophonist led a quartet version of his band the Chosen Few (pianist George Burton, bassist Jon Michel, drummer Joe Dyson) through tunes from his politically charged recent album, The World Is On Fire (“I didn’t see that [title] landing as strong as it did in the current circumstances,” he said, acknowledging the wildfires that were at that very moment devastating Los Angeles). From the moment they started, The Chosen Few tore the place apart. There was a furious alchemy at work among the four players, mindful of the classic John Coltrane quartet but with its own manifestation of unrelenting momentum.
“Amerikkka The Ugly” — which, Collier explained, was a meditation on the horrors of Jan. 6, 2021, now reascendant with Donald Trump’s return to the White House — made a deep emotional impact as it sonically evoked the angst, dread and shock of that day’s notoriously violent uprising. Collier’s performance hit hard. He followed it with “The World Is On Fire,” which despite its title came as a welcome catharsis. It also featured his Chicago mentor, saxophonist Ernest Dawkins, letting loose with bluesy howls that shook the walls of the place. (I should note that I was close to the stage in what was an enormous venue, but one offset by the bowling alley that the place is really designed to be. Other attendees, further back, reported only hearing an unnuanced roar from the stage.)
A trip to Loove Labs Annex, a small recording studio on North 6th Street, demonstrated one of the pitfalls of Winter Jazzfest: These venues fill up, and the smaller ones fill up fast. Loove was full to capacity, leaving a line outside to wait, for example, until three people trickled out before a party of three could go in. Getting inside turns out to be the easy part; there’s an outer foyer, holding an overflow crowd nearly as big as the one in the actual performance space. Hence an attempt to check out Darius Jones resulted only in his coarse but powerful alto saxophone bursts being occasionally heard over the nattering would-be audience.
The good news, though, is that the room turned over for the Matthew Shipp Trio. The pianist, alongside regular collaborators Michael Bisio (bass) and Newman Taylor Baker (drums), did an hour’s worth of impressionistic, undiluted abstraction that lived up to the name of their 2024 album New Concepts In Piano Trio Jazz. In fact, the performance seemed to be one long variation on that album’s opening track, “Primal Poem” — also a good description of what we heard at Loove Labs. Shipp began with a riff that seemed to invert the album track’s tune, with Bisio (alternating between bow and fingers) and Baker following, commenting, rejoining and diverting Shipp.
It wasn’t as smooth and seamless as that may sound: At times the pianist’s attack on the keyboard resembled a swimmer’s doggy-paddle, though always with surprising harmonic care. At another point, Shipp and Bisio launched into a two-way dialogue, the bass laying down a walking line as the piano crashed against it, while the drums added some minor asides. Baker, however, made up for that later, in the show’s most striking and memorable moment: He played a drum solo with open hands on the skins, then transferred it to his chest and shoulders.
These were snapshots of a festival that’s grown exponentially in its 20-plus years in New York. If its size is becoming a bit unwieldy, its quality is still managing to keep up. DB
To record Dream Manifest (Dom Recs), Croker convened artists from his current and recent past ensembles, plus special guests.
Jun 10, 2025 4:13 PM
Partway through his early set at Smoke Jazz Club, Theo Croker blinks the room back into focus. He leans over the piano.…
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