Source: Blue Dog Press web site
"Telling Stories With Dream Logic" By Jeff Miers
Article reprinted from Blue Dog Press web site, March 30, 2001
Jeff Miers waxes poetic on jazz, the Jazz Passengers, and, particularly, Deborah Harry–Ed.
Source: Blue Dog Press web site
Music, born of a rebellious spirit of wanderlust and a desire to communicate on a transcendent level, is still often beleaguered by politics. A politics of separation; of apartheid, if you will. The art form has become territorial, and a desire for one to “stay with one’s own,” so to speak, has become the predominant ethic in musics as disparate and diverse as pop, classical and Jazz. Hence, Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Jazz Center Orchestra pay heed to tradition, which is fine, until it comes to exist in opposition to bold hybridizations which seek to move the music forward. And pop artists – Elvis Costello, for example – who strive to fuse a pop or rock approach to more complex, harmonically speaking, musical underpinnings, often do so at the expense of record sales. Not cool, but very real, nonetheless.
In the mid 90s, vocalist Deborah Harry, most famous as the peroxide–blonde punk chanteuse leading pop pioneers Blondie, joined forces with Avant jazz geniuses The Jazz Passengers, and the territorial moanings began in earnest. Led by saxophonist Roy Nathanson, The Passengers rose from the ashes of The Lounge Lizards, and by the time they met Deborah Harry, had garnered a serious reputation among those in the know as the leading light in the future of jazz, based on the strength of such albums as Implement Yourself, Plain Old Joe, and Jazz Passengers in Love. The Big Apple buzzed on the band’s irreverent will to musical power; Nathanson knew the future of jazz lay in the composer and performer’s ability to confidently blend styles, from Wagner to the West Coast Cool of the 60s. He set out to follow the mandate of the Jazz composer a artist....