Graham Haynes Returns to New York | Bklyn Sounds 3/6/2024—3/12/2024

One of Downtown's great improvising futurists begins a month-long residency + Shows: Aquiles Navarro + Tcheser Holmes / Testu Collective's 'Haptic Drift' / Nicky Siano's 'Love is the Message' / more

When I first came back to the city from college in the early ‘90s, I would scan the Village Voice’s concert listings and regularly run into Graham Haynes’ name in some odd contexts, in spaces and next to musicians where I didn’t expect to find a “jazz” “trumpeter.” By that point, it wasn’t a  trumpet but a cornet, and my accidental education of “the lie of genre” had commenced. As I got my bearings, the fact that Haynes’ best-known credits then revolved around saxophonist Steve Coleman’s Five Elements — which from its mid-’80s beginnings showed affinity for dance grooves, electronics, plus rap and future music — already helped frame Haynes less as an unconventional jazz experimentalist, than as a modernist radicalizer. 

As the decade bled into Y2K, and various “movements” — Coleman’s M-Base, acid jazz, jazz-rap, avant-funk, Illbient, drum’n’bass, whatever one calls the global dub fusion Bill Laswell was imagining — lined up to offer jazz some non-traditional paths of rhythm, Haynes always seemed instinctively around to help give directions. It took the better part of that decade for me to actually piece together that his father was the Roy Haynes, one of jazz’s greatest drummers — and who remains, at age 98, one of its greatest living practitioners.        

Of course, recognition of Graham Haynes’ adventurous spirit didn’t always translate to appreciation. Even for those tracking the evolution of downtown’s aesthetic — how it was cross-pollinating jazz with electronics, DJ equipment, club beats, global rhythms, rock textures, rap vocals, East Asian classical timbres (and on and on) — not all of this activity made sense. Saying “yes” to the new and the unexpected meant, on occasion, winding up in a creative and critical cul de sac, not as enjoyable as the “idea of it,” even if a quarter-century later it’s historically acknowledged as a sonic leap forward. (Ask me about a few illbient and drill’n’bass nights from that period.) 

What seemed to separate Graham Haynes even back then was an unwavering dedication to an alternative path, a comfort with embracing left-field sonorities that his own work required, but also with changing up and moving into another direction, an ingrained looseness but also a seriousness. Maybe what’s most surprising in listening now to many of Haynes’ experiments from that flush period at the turn of the century, is how great and natural they continue to sound: the fluidity and unfolding ambiance of the incredible With a Heartbeat album Haynes made with Pharoah Sanders, and Laswell’s Axiom crew; or the adventurous synth- and percussion-heavy work of The Griots Footsteps. This longevity of sonic vision is perhaps another way that the artist Graham’s career most resembles may be the late Don Cherry, another oft-underappreciated cornet player and fusioneer only now getting his flowers.

There is no doubt that Haynes’ early experiences and environment seeded this comfort with change. Growing up as the son of a musician famously unafraid of stylistic evolution (from bebop to free jazz), in a Queens neighborhood (Hollis) populated by other jazz legends but also at a moment when a new form (hip-hop) is taking shape on those same blocks, is a heady incubation. But also a safe one. 

In a great 2020 interview with Anders Griffin, Haynes discusses his early experience listening to Sun Ra and electric Miles and messing around with a Moog when he went to study classical music at Queens College in the ‘70s, before going out to the city clubs because he “wanted to be a player…to be on the scene.” Spending time with Butch Morris while the late trumpeter was developing his conduction method, periodically leaving the country to live within other cultures (Haynes has resided in Paris and London, and since lockdown in Salvador de Bahia), embracing drum machines and turntablism from the very beginning — these creative patterns and circumstances have always been geared towards accruing information, whether indigenous knowledge or new breakthroughs, then using these to look forward. And like many other greats, Haynes was clear what his methodology was for; just check the names of his great records of the Nineties — The Griots Footsteps (1994), Transition (1995), Tones for the 21st Century (1997).           

Over the next month, Graham Haynes will be all over New York, serving as an artist-in-residence of FourOneOne Projects, playing music, speaking about it, teaching others what he has learned from it. (Full disclosure: I am DJing at the first of these events, Tuesday (3/12) at The Sultan Room in Bushwick, an evening dedicated to Gift of the Gnawa, the classic 1991 album that Moroccan guembri master Hassan Hakmoun and drummer Adam Rudolph, both long-time Haynes collaborators, recorded with Cherry. Gift was one of the many beacons for Haynes’ inquiries into global rhythms. The trio and Hakmoun’s brother, Abdurrahim, will perform music from it and also speak about their experiences.) 

The participating musicians and lecturers at the various residency events are a gleaming cast of artists, once and future collaborators, and general smarties — including Robin D.G. Kelley, Vijay Iyer, the Momenta Quartet, Lucie Vítková, Shakoor Hakeem, and members of Morris’ Nublu Orchestra, who’ll convene to perform one of Haynes’ conduction pieces at Nublu in April. (Info will be on future Bklyn Sounds, if the events do not sell out.) The program is an opportunity to acknowledge and salute a body of work that Graham Haynes, an undisputed son of the city, has contributed to its rhythm, improvisation and musicking community. New York, stand up! 

Gift of the Gnawa with Maalem Hassan Hakmoun, Abdurrahim Hakmoun, Graham Haynes, and Adam Rudolph + Dada Strain, Tues 3/12, 7p @ Sultan Room, Bushwick - $15 (Dada Strain discount code: DADASUBS) / $20doors

This Week’s Shows:

AND, they’re back! Dada Strain’s favorite local post-hardcore sons with the punk-rave synths, YHWH Nailgun, are gigging once more. I saw somewhere that they might be headed to SxSW, but we’re not gonna hold that against them. The last show I saw, at Sundown, ripped like very few do. Can’t be at TV Eye, but they deserve the love before they get pillaged by the industry. Also: Tribute Band and Kassie Krut. (Wed 3/6, 8p @ TV Eye, Ridgewood - $13)

The folks behind the Fridman Gallery’s excellent New Ear Festival team up with Luke Stewart’s Union of Universal Unity to present In Completion. It’s an evening with a wonderful group of Irreversible Entanglements-related improvisors (Blacks’ Myths, Aquiles Navarro & Tcheser Homes, Keir Neuringer), the tap-dancer Melissa Almaguer (who often performs in a great percussive duo with drummer Warren ‘Trae’ Crudup III of Blacks’ Myths), topped off with a reading by New York State Poet Laureate, Patricia Spears Jones. Highest Recommendation! (Thurs 3/7, 8p @ Fridman Gallery, Manhattan - $20)

It tells you a lot that, while Baltimore trumpeter Brandon Woody is getting groomed for his capital-J Jazz moment in the sun, the music he’s best known for lives on the outskirts of the tradition’s institutioning (Solange, Slauson Malone, Sudan Archives); and that he still gigs with fellow Charm City oddballs (he was magnificent last Sunday with Konjur Collective). UPENDO is the quintet he leads, in which keys and synth — respectively, Troy Long and Vittorio Stropoli — share the focus. It’s ethereal music, at once part of the orthodoxy but constantly switching out. Watch his space! (Thurs 3/7, 9p & 10:15p @ Bar LunAtico, Bed-Stuy - $10suggested) 

It’s the second week of March, so it doesn’t feel too early to bust out one of the greatest songs written about our fair city. And, hey, what-do-you-know: its mighty composer, the folk-singing, standards-writing punk-pop leviathan destined for history’s cut-out bins (and not the Hall of Fame? shame!) is moving into the Bell House for a weekend of shows. At press time, there were only tickets left for Thursday and Sunday. If you’ve never seen Jonathan Richman and care about songcraft, do yourself this favor. (Thurs 3/7, 8p & Sun 3/10, 8p @ Bell House, Gowanus - $35)