Sam Gendel is at the vanguard of what might be called the Adult Swim-ification of jazz. Like the late night cable block, which has its own formidable music history, the saxophonist’s compositions are both glitchy and luxurious, written for sporadic, needy attention spans raised on the internet. Almost ambient and always restless, Gendel’s music has roots in hip-hop, forefronting boom-bap beats more often than triplets or free-jazz clatter. His approach coolly rejects candlelit supper clubs and university classrooms; his videos are irreverent, funny, and disjunctive with the genre’s ordinary contexts, featuring the composer cruising in a lowrider or eating a banana. As one fawning YouTube user commented, “This is so avant-garde that it’s circled right around and become a sketch show skit.”
If his music sounds like a gimmick, Gendel’s latest record takes the impression even further. LIVE A LITTLE joins the California native with singer Antonia Cytrynowicz, the younger sister of Gendel’s partner Marcella. Cytrynowicz, who was 11 years old when the songs were recorded, improvises vocals while Gendel extemporizes on various instruments. She brings to the album the question mark of extreme youth. Listeners might ask: Is LIVE A LITTLE a pet project for a talented family? A career boost for a nascent artist who couldn’t possibly have found her voice yet? Gendel, though, has an ear for collaborators who challenge convention, and with feet in both the avant-garde and mainstream, he recognizes when the two sensibilities share utopian common ground—such as their relative willingness to overlook age and accomplishment as artistic prerequisites. He’s hardly the first jazz composer to collaborate with kin and kid: Ornette Coleman asked his son Denardo to join his trio when the precocious drummer was 10.
Unlike a drumset, a voice is transformed by a child’s range and timbre. Audiences have to believe a voice—or find its lack of believability compelling. Strangely, the context for Cytrynowicz’s capable soprano is right in front of us: Contemporary pop prizes producers who use Auto-Tune and other digital effects to make adult voices sound childlike. Listen to LIVE A LITTLE without knowing her age, and you’ll think Gendel has simply found a grown collaborator with a natural sense of melody, a modern musical sensibility, and a near-psychic ability to play off of his sax, keyboard, bass, and guitar lines. Cytrynowicz’s phrasing on “Clouds in Me” makes the album closer an earworm; her performances on “Lightly” and “Treasure That I Treasure” are full of feeling, a quality missing in Gendel’s vocals on his own album-length songwriter project, 2017’s 4444. LIVE A LITTLE’s quietly obvious, pop-conscious production fosters a necessary sense of distance.
Cytrynowicz’s improvisations cover lyrical territory commonly considered the province of those more mature in years. Most of her songs think through the appeal and pitfalls of intimacy: “When you come by me/I wonder if I should like it/Or if I should not like it/There is no telling.” Sometimes, she reflects on love’s physical dimensions: “When you touch me/When I like you/When you love saying/You are ready.” Cytrynowicz’s romantic pondering runs counter to a culture that often denies children an inner life apart from corporate-derived, gendered, and pre-censored imagery.
For Gendel, the album is a step into the previously uncharted terrain of cosmic cabaret. He allows himself a more relaxed relationship with the saxophone than he has before, at least on his own projects; rather than processing his tone into murmuring unrecognizability, Gendel erupts into giddy spurts of bebop on “Leap” and lead single “Wondering, Waiting.” The scope of his career is its own argument against snobbery, yet the odd couple at the core of LIVE A LITTLE seems like a particular rebuke of a society that condescends by categorization—whether prescribing culture to children, or predictable career paths to improvisatory musicians. LIVE A LITTLE flips gimmickry on its head. Charting out an oasis for themselves, Gendel and Cytrynowicz reclaim their creative instincts from a patronizing world.
