Jazz and poetry are soul mates. Since the live club sessions that paired writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg with jazz adventurers, and before, the two art forms have informed, supported, enlivened and challenged each other to higher expressiveness. From poetic firebrand Jayne Cortez to cerebral jazz/poetry synthesist par excellence Steve Lacy, the range of moods and subjects covered is panoramic. Saxophonist Archie Shepp once said that jazz was the lotus that grows in spite of the swamp. And barroom bard Charles Bukowski “grows” beautiful blossoms of poetic verse, in spite of his harsh surroundings and chronic alcoholism: his garden is a place of conscious contemplation of life’s grating contradictions beatified. Bukowski’s poetry finds in jazz composer/arranger Nicholas Urie an empathetic respondent, who creates jazz “flower beds” for eight poems to flourish. His pieces serve to expand the poems core qualities by bonding them with jazz orchestral works played a crack 12-piece band and vocalist Christine Correa. There is a film noir feel to tunes, especially “Slaughterhouse,” featuring outstanding soloist soprano saxist Jeremy Udden. Bukowski’s knowing humour makes an appearance in the robust “Round and Round,” wherein Correa vibrantly and repeatedly declaims, “You have my soul and I have your money.” Urie’s juxtaposition of street roughness, bedroom intimacy and razor-sharp sonorities make My Garden an organic, sonically rich greenhouse of poetry-and-jazz flowers.

Glen Hall

Things seem to be going well in Chicago as evidenced by this lovely write-up by Neil Tesser from the Chicago Jazz Music Examiner, “A U.S. premiere: Kurt Elling in Chicago, with a little Danish on the side.” Neil says in the piece, ”These days, Klüvers Big Band features a number of arrangements by Nicholas Urie, an American-born wünderkind arranger, who at the age of 26 has released two ambitious and uncompromising albums of original compositions while penning arrangements for a slew of other artists.” If you’d like to see the show in NYC, below is the info from the New York Times.

On a personal note, I am really excited that the band is playing in New York. I don’t get to go to many gigs where my arrangements are being performed (travel economics) and to have this wonderful band that I love working with in town, is just, well, special. I feel like I know everyone in the band already, despite my never having had the opportunity to shake their hands. It will be wonderful putting a face to a line on score paper. Very excited, indeed.

★ Kurt Elling, With the Klüvers Big Band (Tuesday through Oct. 30) On “The Gate,” released on Concord this year, the mercurial jazz singer Kurt Elling seeks out a meditative mood, without forsaking the imperatives of a searcher. Here he draws partly from the album with an estimable big band from Denmark, making its New York debut, and a succession of guests, beginning with the alto saxophonist Miguel Zenón (Tuesday), the tenor saxophonist and flutist Lew Tabackin (Wednesday) and the tenor and soprano saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (Thursday). At 8:30 and 11 p.m., Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton, (212) 581-3080, birdlandjazz.com; $40 cover, with a $10 minimum. (Chinen)

I’ll tell you right now, folks, this CD is almost too much for any listener (even experienced reviewers) to take in one sitting… the keyword here is – AMAZING!  Nicholas’ compositions and arrangements include swirling big-band epics with spoken/sung-word woven through the pieces… check out the opener, “Winter – 44th Year” to get an aural glimpse into a world you’ve not heard before.  As that tune bends away from the spoken word into the second piece, “Round and Round“, I realize I’ve already found my favorite track!  The vocal by Christine Correa, combined with the high-energy instrumentation of the host of other players, is just superb… I was especially impressed with the keyboard on this one (Frank Carlberg), & you will be too!  All 8 tracks are gems, and this CD gets an immediate MOST HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for adventuresome jazz listeners of all persuasions… “EQ” (energy quotient) rating is 4.98.  This is an album you won’t soon forget!

Jazz has a singular ability to elevate mediocre poetry to surprising heights. Jack Kerouac’s recitations with jazz improvisations is a telling example and now the talented arranger and bandleader Nicholas Urie lifts Charles Bukowski’s poetry in a delicious big band setting with soloists such as John Carlson and Douglas Yates.

However the most important ingredient is the vocalist Christine Correa. She has an easy, “cool” technique and with her voice she captures Bukowski’s words in a dark net where the poems get a clearer shape than ever was possible on the page of a book or in a pure recitation. Never before have Bukowski’s texts been so captivating as when Correa rises with Udden and Yates while Kenny Pexton blasts on the tenor and Brian Landrus, like a weight pulls down the music to an existential zero.
It is cold, dark and totally glimmering.

Magnus Eriksson, Lira Magazine, Sweden. Translated by Frank Carlberg.

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Check out the Downbeat Indie Life article on me from the June 2011 issue. Click this link: Downbeat Jun. 2011.

Nicholas Urie made an impressive footprint with the release of his Excerpts From and Online Dating Service (Red Piano Records, 2009). The composer/arranger modus operandi changes little on My Garden, where he takes is texts from the poetry of West Coast writer Charles Bukowski (1920-1994), and weaves them into provocative and often violent tapestries of contemporary big band sounds.

Bukowski was a gutter poet laureate, who at the height of his popularity, labored in a Post Office job. He wrote in “dirty realism,” the impolite language and cadence his Los Angeles home, straight from the streets and skids. Urie already proved himself creative in finding a “book” for his music and the composer’s adoption of Bukowski is in perfect keeping with that.

Urie is a master of revealing sonic tactility, the feel of sound. He does this with equal ability, whether in the rhythm section, where he marches with the quiet militancy of a feather army (“For Crying Out Loud”), or in the chaotic frenzy of squeaking trumpets or sputtering low brass (“Finality”). “The Lioness” proceeds like a Wiemar Berlin opium dream, as does “Lean,” a baritone saxophone solo gushing from the gaping wound of the arrangement. Urie structures his arrangements around the given atmosphere of a poem, atmospheres as depraved and venal as the online texts he used for Excerpts From and Online Dating Service.

This is not pretty music, nor is it particularly easy to listen to. But this makes it no less genius. This is music of high intelligence that expects as much as it provides, and what it provides is a listening experience like little else in our barren sonic desert.

Click to read – Nicholas Urie in Jazziz.

Friends of mine have sometimes complained about jazz’s lyrical landscape. For those steeped in standards, the idiom can feel like a wash of “My Foolish Hearts” and “Body and Souls.” No wonder that most of my cliché-averse colleagues at school preferred instrumental jazz, with its angularity and friendliness to experimentation.

Of course, there’s nothing cliché about the way Theo Bleckmann or Kurt Elling interpret the old repertoire, but there seems to be room for new kinds of lyrics in jazz. Charging into this gap have been John Hollenbeck, who set William Blake in Joys and Desires (Intuition, 2006), and more recently, Nicholas Urie. Urie’s first release, Excerpts from an Online Dating Service (Red Piano, 2009), set personal ads from across North America. His most recent release, My Garden (Red Piano, 2011) sets selected poems by Charles Bukowski, the late Los Angeles-based poet whose brash, postmodern verses have become favorites of many young artists at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Urie’s Bukowski selections are brief. The longest, “Winter: 44th Year,” includes only 29 short lines; the shortest, “Round and Round,” only nine words. The feat, then, is how Urie stretches such concise material to fit his through-composed, extended compositions. Repetition is key to his approach. “Round and Round” takes its cue from the text’s title, cycling “You have my soul / and I have your money” in an asymmetrical 9/8 time signature before Frank Carlberg develops the mechanistic theme on the Rhodes, adding bebop language to the mix as he goes. Horn backgrounds enter, first punctuating, then tying knots around Carlberg’s solo, eventually strangling it in a contrapuntal crescendo before releasing their grip to Kenny Pexton’s tenor saxophone solo.

Urie has an acute sense of drama, allowing his pieces to blossom thematically over long periods of time, whether through themes, solos, or background figures. “Round and Round” ends at peak density, with saxophone improvisation, vocal improvisation, brass stabs, and the vocal theme all happening simultaneously. So skilled is Urie’s writing that none of this density compromises clarity; never does his ensemble, for all its chaotic rollicking, sound muddy.
Those who see jazz music as a strictly modal enterprise should check out the title track, “My Garden,” with its wandering chromaticism. After an opening trumpet solo, Urie weaves the poem’s first stanza upon itself, blurring beginning and end. Christine Correa’s voice delivers the poem in melancholy drips, oozing “pain is a flower / pain is flowers / blooming all the time.” Solos by John Carlson on trumpet and Alan Ferber on trombone, though, show what a sweet pain this can be.

My Garden is a thematically compact, vivid recording that rewards concentrated listening. Urie’s ensemble evokes everything from coy humor in “Lean” to fiendish courage in “Lioness.” The music’s scope is at least as large as that of the poetry, and the combined effect of the two make this one of my favorite recordings in any genre of the last two years.

By Matt Marshall

“With My Garden, an album of songs for large ensemble with poetry by Charles Bukowski, composer/conductor Nicholas Urie continues his exploration into modern-day isolation and disconnect begun on 2009′s Excerpts From an Online Dating Service (Red Piano Records). On Excerpts, Urie invited the listener to hear (“imagine” might be more fitting) a certain poetry in the missives he lifted from actual online dating sites. Fit into Urie’s jumping or eerily longing scores and sung with complete conviction by Christine Correa, the dating posts do offer unexpected jolts of crude lyricism–the supplicant’s plea rushing out into a cyberspace of desperately comic emptiness.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Urie would turn to Bukowski–the skid-row poet of fated desperation, failure and trying–for his follow-up record. Culled mostly from collections published after Bukowski’s death, the songs here trace a similar, yet more expertly crafted path than that heard on Excerpts. Inherent in that project was the technology that enabled it–a thrillingly advanced social network that too often pushes a user toward isolation. And that sense of imprisoning technology carries over into My Garden, which opens with “Winter: 44th Year,” a suicide note in the making, intoned in overlapping cycles by Urie’s father, Walter, pianist Frank Carlberg and bassist John Hébert. The readings are part of the music, not out front, and are almost swallowed by the bass-heavy strains. The man is trying to reach the one woman who can help him–who can pull him back from the edge–but his message is directed into the dead end of a phone service.

Correa handles the singing from here on out. As on Excerpts, her frank, straightforward manner lends a detachment to the poems, but induces fewer laughs here; instead, opening disturbing, stretching gaps of dread. While the voice and visage of Bukowski will, no doubt, float before many a listener, Correa sings few lines that seem necessarily a man’s (a common occurrence on Excerpts that supplied a good portion of that album’s quirky humor). Yet Carlberg, tenor saxophonist Kenny Pexton, trumpeter John Carlson and others are again afforded ample solo space, and commune wonderfully, forlornly, desperately with Correa’s singing and Bukowski’s poetry. “Round and Round” offers especially poignant contrapuntal statements from Carlberg, on an inspired, but eerily aseptic Rhodes, followed later by Pexton on the earthier, more human tenor sax; “You have my soul and I have your money,” Correa repeatedly implores, meanwhile.

The swirling, mad, repetitious incantations of anxiety and longing that cut across the record may seem a bit much to endure. But Urie and his band also supply a good deal of punch and funk, most notably on “Round and Round,” “Lioness” and “Lean,” that keep matters moving. And while the narrative ends by dragging a mad Ezra Pound through the streets of Italy in a crate, the poet (Bukowski too?) realizing that all he has written is ultimately “worth nothing,” Urie attacks this modern, losing arc with increased surety and insight. It’s an attack helped by Bukowski’s poetry, to be sure. But Urie succeeds wonderfully in transferring the grime of skid row to the sheen of the concert hall without sacrificing any of the poet’s bite and desperate humanity.”