TT 376: Vincent and Vincent

plus: a notable Review, Mark Morris, and the Mazurka

Last night in Seattle there was an epochal first meeting, between Vince Keenan (left) and Vinnie Sperrazza (right).

Both of these Vincents are my friends and associates. Now that the team is assembled, nothing can stop us.

(If you aren’t reading their Substacks — Keenan’s Cocktails & Crime and Sperrazza’s Chronicles — what the heck are you waiting for?)

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In Seattle we are performing The Look of Love with Mark Morris and the Mark Morris Dance Group; it will be the 32nd performance of the work at Meany Hall tonight. The music features the songs of Burt Bacharach and Hal David arranged by myself and sung by Marcy Harriell; the rest of the band includes Nadje Noordhuis, Blaire Perrin, Clinton Curtis, Simón Willson, and Vinnie Sperrazza.

Burt Bacharach came to the dress rehearsal in Santa Monica and gave his blessing.

Next week Wednesday-Saturday we bring The Look of Love to BAM in Brooklyn with original cast member Jonathan Finlayson back in for Nadje. Be there or be square!

On Tuesday, I join Mark Morris in conversation at the National Arts Club in Manhattan. The event is free but does require registration.

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Fred Kaplan has reviewed Technically Acceptable for Tracking Angle. While Kaplan didn’t interview me for the piece, he nonetheless offers a well-written overview of my progress:

Ethan Iverson may be best known as the original pianist for The Bad Plus, a trio that made an improbably huge splash in the early 2000s by grafting jazz rhythms onto such pop and punk tunes as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” Aphex Twin’s “Flim,” and Abba’s “Knowing Me Knowing You”—and doing it with energy, wit, virtuosity, and genuine cross-genre feel for idiom: no nudge-wink po-mo irony. The group’s drummer and bassist, Dave King and Reid Anderson, had deep roots in jazz and rock. Iverson was the ringer: he looked like a poster boy for downtown hip—goatee, shaved head, black horn-rimmed glasses—but he knew nothing about rock. He was more into 20th-century classical music. (He’d never heard of Nirvana before King and Anderson took up the band’s hit; he told me in an interview that he liked, and played up, Kurt Cobain’s “Stravinskian fifths”).

Iverson acquired some fame and fortune, certainly by a jazzman’s standards, from his nearly two decades with the band, but he quit in 2017. He was tired of playing rock (even fusion-modified rock) and wanted to immerse himself in the music that had drawn him to move from Wisconsin to New York in the first place—tradition-steeped modern jazz. He wrangled sideman gigs, eventually earning a permanent slot in drummer Billy Hart’s quartet. He arranged duet dates with older masters. (I saw him play at Mezzrow, a very small club in the Village, with Ron Carter, who didn’t take anything for granted; he played at peak power.) He wrote big-band arrangements of Bud Powell tunes. (The band was about to tour, until COVID struck. They did record an album, though.) In 2022, he lived what would have been a jazzman’s dream in an earlier era: he signed with Blue Note Records.

Iverson’s second album for Blue Note, Technically Acceptable, is his first album that nearly approximates the full range of his prowess and sensibilities.

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Cafe Solstice in Seattle’s University district sells “Berry Mazurkas.”

When I played Chopin mazurkas for my teacher Sophia Rosoff, she would ask me, “Is the foot stamp on beat two or beat three?” (This was a crucial question!)