WHERE JAZZ, SHOW BUSINESS AND POLITICS CONVERGE
By Ben Ratliff

New York Times
Published: September 19, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 – The Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, now
20 years old, has a private face and a public one, and there is a
dissonance between them.

Bill Crandall for The New York Times
Tigran Hamasyan performing at the Thelonious Monk International Piano
Competition, which he won.

The private one involves a small postgraduate program in jazz
performance, operating out of the University of Southern California,
presided over by the trumpeter and educator Terence Blanchard. The
public one is an annual jazz contest and a sparkly, self-celebrating
concert, usually recorded for television, buttressed with top-ranking
federal government officials and famous nonjazz performers.

There is a point at which pop’s intersection with jazz is a good idea:
their histories are intertwined, and each can renew the other’s
aesthetic resources. And there is a point at which the federal
government’s intersection with jazz makes sense, like the State
Department’s 50-year history of sponsoring jazz tours in foreign
countries. Past those points – and some of the events around the Monk
Institute’s Thelonious Monk International Jazz Piano Competition,
last weekend, kept going past them – a spectator starts to wonder
what the institute’s real purpose is.

Nevertheless, the semifinals of the Monk Institute’s annual
competition, which happened Saturday afternoon in the auditorium at the
Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, remain a fascinating index
of what young jazz musicians in the mainstream are sounding like,
and of what judges choose to reward year by year. The contest is
open to musicians under 30, and this year the instrument was piano;
the heavy-duty contest judges were Herbie Hancock, Andrew Hill,
Danilo Perez, Renee Rosnes, Billy Taylor and Randy Weston.

The winner was Tigran Hamasyan, a 19-year old Armenian pianist
currently studying at the University of Southern California, though
as an undergraduate, not within the Monk Institute program. His
performances, in both the semifinals and the finals, were intensely
searching, and stubborn in their intuitive force: jazz, for him,
is about constantly moving around the rhythmic accents in a piece
of music so that nearly every bar seems to be in a different time
signature from the last.

His concept of style, as he revealed in the standards "Cherokee" and
"Solar," had something to do with Keith Jarrett (as did the sound
of so many other pianists in the contest), with his long-phrased,
almost intemperate melodic improvising; it had to do with Mr.

Hancock, too, and his sense of order and harmonic vocabulary. But
Mr. Hamasyan’s particular kind of nonstop rhythmic reshuffling seemed
his own.

Those who lost were piles of promise. Victor Gould, an 18-year-old
with a lovely, mysterious sense of time, drifted around "You and
the Night and the Music," leaving phrases half-turned and drawing
out the house rhythm section, the bassist Rodney Whitaker and the
drummer Carl Allen, to help him finish phrases. Aaron Parks, 22,
who has been heard for four years in Mr.

Blanchard’s band, used strong arrangement ideas and leaned hard on
solo-piano performance to show the judges what he could do.

And Gerald Clayton from California, also 22 and the son of the bassist
John Clayton, came to destroy: his playing had huge, authoritative
presence, an Oscar Peterson-like style, highly controlled touch and
dynamics and rhapsodic, episodic soloing. (The audience broke into
applause during his solo.)

Had he won, it would have cast a different light on the whole
enterprise. Any musician can use the $20,000 prize money (half of it
earmarked for some kind of academic study), but Mr. Clayton seemed
fully formed.

Mr. Hamasyan was, excitingly, not.

At what point will jazz just crumble under the weight of the
glib encomiums paid to it? During Sunday night’s gala concert at
the Kennedy Center, former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright
talked about how "the power of jazz enhances our cultural diplomacy,"
and another former secretary of state, Colin L. Powell, theorized
that the qualities that made effective international relations were
"the same as those that create a good jazz band."

On Thursday night, at a half-hour White House performance presented
by the institute, with the president and the first lady as hosts –
which will be seen in February on PBS – Laura Bush gave a speech about
jazz as "an American cultural treasure." No art should have to live
up to such cliches.

Sunday’s concert included a short, tenebrous duet between Mr. Hancock
and Wayne Shorter, as well as a number by Mr. Blanchard’s students
from the Monk Institute graduate program, playing adventurously in
up-to-the-minute mainstream jazz idioms.

But the institute saves prime spots for showboaters who aren’t
necessarily jazz performers. Anita Baker, at Thursday night’s event,
sang "My Funny Valentine" before the president, and on Sunday Stevie
Wonder was awarded the institute’s Maria Fisher Founder’s Award for
public service. Flanked by Ms. Albright and Mr.

Powell – in the kind of surreal tableau this event provides annually –
Mr. Wonder dedicated the award to his mother. "I don’t think she was a
Republican," he added, impulsively. "I’m just trying to keep it real."

Then he performed a drawn-out version of the standard "Midnight Sun,"
playing harmonica and singing. The rest of the band was Mr. Hancock
on piano, Ron Carter on bass, Terri Lyne Carrington on drums and Mr.

Blanchard on trumpet. (Not bad.) But it became overly eccentric,
and Mr. Wonder tried some awkward scat singing; despite the booming
power of his voice, the performance fell apart.

The program for the finals competition and gala concert recycled
old news clips implying that record-company bidding wars follow the
announcement of the winner. This is not true: the bigger labels are
barely signing new jazz artists these days, and the excellent last
two winners, the singer Gretchen Parlato and the guitarist Lage Lund,
have yet to cut much of a profile.

But whatever happens to Mr. Hamasyan, the contest brought him around
people like the judges and the contest’s rhythm section, and brought
them around him.

That’s good enough.