be.jazz

after reading about matisse (blue stool on radiator)

2008-01-09T20:50:00.000+01:00

it says more about the author than the music

2007-11-18T03:53:00.000+01:00

A frequent response to negative criticism, but one I don't really understand.

"They played a blues in F. Then a variation on rhythm changes clever enough to prove there's still life in that old method." "XYZ is possessed of a fine technique, but thanks to an unforced modesty, it never eclipses melody and feeling." Do these sentences tell us more about the player or the listener?

I can't tell you much about music, but I can tell you about myself. In fact, I think music is fairly rarely talked about - see any feature-length article on a musician in, say, the NY Times. If music is not fully contained in either its technique, its context, its consumers or producers, is it possible to talk about it, or only around it? Obviously, if music's artistic space could be fully duplicated (in words, painting, film, etc.), it wouldn't have much reason to exist.

Trio Grande w/ Matthew Bourne - 26/10/2007@Beursschouwburg, Bruxelles

2007-11-14T23:08:00.000+01:00

Laurent Dehors - b cl, contrabass cl, two more straight clarinets I don't know the keys of, ts, ss, hca, jew's harp, bagpipes
Matthew Bourne - p (website)
Michel Massot - tba, tb, euphonium
Michel Debrulle - d

Bagpipes over the slow funk of an African-tinged vamp in 7. Michel Massot and Matthew Bourne spastically dancing opposite each other during the first encore. Bourne letting his improvising be guided by a plastic water bottle cap springing across the piano's strings. A cartoonish take on dixieland abruptly catapulted into mid-20th century classical music, expressed through a series of short waltzes. Possibly the funniest impromptu explanation of how clarinets work ever given.

Those are a few of the things that made this yet another great Trio Grande (plus guest Bourne) gig. The pianist fit surprisingly well into the group's aesthetic, moving easily from doubling melodic lines to pounding out scattered free playing to lush romanticism. Whether it was his influence, or the general direction the band's music is taking, there was a loose, drifting feel to much of the repertoire, whereas I tend to think of Trio Grande as both more barn-storming and more melodic. While the group seems to focus more on melody and timbre (eg. Massot's nuanced use of multiphonics), the song structures they use - impressive without really calling attention to themselves because they sound so organic - sort of replace harmony's forward drive. In any case, the upcoming quartet CD should be a worthy heir to the fabulous Signé.

That I am elated by these kinds of concerts and am left somewhat indifferent to Mikkel Ploug or even Drew Gress has me slightly worried. Am I able to appreciate what Nate Chinen calls "the deeper subtleties of harmony and form," or am I merely attracted to "a lot of surface dazzle," like some sort of musical magpie? I'd like to get really excited by that subtle stuff, too...

The Bad Plus - 14/10/2007@N9, Eeklo

2007-11-13T19:58:00.000+01:00

Ethan Iverson - p (blog)
Reid Anderson - b
David King - d

[Yes, this post is almost a month overdue. Consider it a prelude to The Bad Plus's return to Belgium on the 15th. I'll be seeing Brad Mehldau that day, but you should go if you can.]

I bought a PlayStation 2 a while ago, just to play Guitar Hero. Passing in front of a second-hand video-game shop, I popped in on the off chance they might have something of interest. They didn't, but there was a book section in the back. So, instead of Fifa 2007, I walked out with Sartre, Proust and Boris Vian. The Bad Plus is a bit like that: first you hear about the Nirvana, Black Sabbath and Vangelis covers, then you find out that that's not really what they're about, at least not in a superficial way.

Perhaps it wasn't obvious with their first couple albums, but having "Street Woman" on Give, then a series of blog posts and, on a personal level, my very recent discovery of The Complete Science Fiction Sessions, have made evident how indebted TBP is to the Ornette Coleman/Charlie Haden/Keith Jarrett American Quartet axis.

Given that (and taking other influences into consideration), it's not too surprising for one section of Dave King's new "My Friend Medatron" to totally draw up a new intersection of pop's teleological movement, the wheel-within-a-wheel rhythms of funk and the disassembling impulse of free jazz, like Julius Hemphill's "Dogon AD" or the Art Ensemble of Chicago's "Le Thème de Yoyo" before it. And it is as un-sellout as its predecessors (we can add On The Corner to the list), a point emphatically made as "Heart of Glass" (my favourite TBP cover) was torn to shreds: they aren't pandering. And somehow, this all goes well with the absurd tangents TBP like to go on, whether spoken ("We're big fans of disco... Especially roller-disco" prefaced the Blondie tune) or musical (the juxtaposition of two completely different uses of handclaps in "1980 World Champion").

While none of the new tunes jumped out and grabbed me quite like "Physical Cities" did a year ago, there were a number of really good ones. "People Like You" was a classic Reid Anderson ballad: a tender melody (suggesting that the title's "like" was a verb, not a comparison) and a steady crescendo from a spare beginning to a more emphatic climax, without losing a certain sense of drift, in the vein of "Prehensile Dream," the concert-opening oldie-but-goodie. Ethan's "Old Money" featured Reid in a different mode, as his solo started with vigorously syncopated arpeggios, wriggled into a funky single line and suddenly slowed for a poignant close.

Finally, as it was the eve of Reid's birthday, we (the audience) sang for him, to a very slow drum accompaniment that was kind of destabilising: I, for one, was never too sure when, or where, the next beat was going to land. A mini-taste of what it's like playing with Dave King, I guess.

Matt Wilson Arts & Crafts - 05/11/2007@De Werf, Brugge

2007-11-06T23:46:00.000+01:00

Terell Stafford - tp, flh
Gary Versace - p, acc
Dennis Irwin - b, cl
Matt Wilson - d (myspace | website)

A few days ago, Jeff Albert wrote a quasi-love letter to Matt Wilson. After seeing Arts & Crafts last night, I feel like doing the same. Here's what it might look like:

Dear Matt,

I love you. I know that might sound a little forward - after all, you don't even know me - but let me explain.

Let's face it: in 2007, straight-ahead jazz be boring. It is too often, if anything, the sound of constraint, or of missed opportunities. But when you guys started the concert with Monk's "We See," all I could think was how it was bursting with life! With happiness! It was real. It swung in a natural yet unsystematic way. Like kids in a playground, there was a sense of freedom to it. And then your "Free Range Chicken" reminded me of Jimmy Giuffre's cowboy songs on The Western Suite.

Terell was bouncy and impassioned, Gary gave things a soulful bent. Dennis even played some musette-style clarinet on a fun couple of tunes. And you... Well, just how is it that you can make a drum solo consisting mostly of rolling a drumstick on the snare drum sound so good, in this context?

You talked to us about playing with Dewey Redman for a dozen years and dedicated the last song of the second set, "In Touch With Dewey," to him. You launched it by clanging away irrevently on a small gong laid on the floor tom. That spirit of irreverent celebration (of Dewey, of classic jazz feels) infused the whole set and made everyone in the room happy. It made the guys on the bandstand happy (it even made the people at the bar happy: the Tongerlo dubbel that had cost me 2.50 before the concert cost me 50 cents less at intermission). And what makes you happy, makes me happy, Matt.

By the way, why do you pronounce Gary's last name "verse ace", rather than "versacci," like the fashion designer? Maybe that's something we could talk about by the fireplace, on a long winter's evening.

xoxo,

Mwanji

P.S. I loved the glasses, too.

Then again, maybe I should wait until our second date to let my feelings out. I wouldn't want to scare him off.

Mikkel Ploug Group ft. Mark Turner - 07/10/2007@L'Archiduc, Bruxelles

2007-11-01T23:12:00.000+01:00

Mark Turner - ts
Mikkel Ploug - g (myspace)
Jeppe Skovbakke - b
Sean Carpio - d
Joachim Badenhorst - ts

On what could very well have been the last sunny and warm days of the year, it felt unnatural, perhaps even heretical in these suddenly eco-concious times, to sit inside the gloomy and electrically-lit Archiduc. One constant pleasure of this cramped and impractical room remains, whatever the season: the passing of the trendy neighbourhood's local fauna. There are the good-looking, expensively-dressed women, the eccentrically hip, those who wander in and look appalled (when it's free jazz), who look put off (when it's non-free jazz) and those who look lost (in any circumstance). In this particular instance, there was also the woman sitting next to me. At one point, I looked downwards for a while, at nothing in particular. She had slipped off her sandals, her bare foot dangled in the air. She must have gotten the impression I was staring at it: she freaked and hurriedly put her sandals back on. Maybe she was just self-concious about them.

This to-and-fro was more entertaining than the concert itself. As when I last saw Mark Turner, the audience was musician-heavy (as it was, though in a lesser proportion, for Drew Gress). I am beginning to seriously distrust this measure as a barometer of enjoyment, but maybe I just have a problem with New York-based Scandanavian guitarists.

Sean Carpio and Jeppe Skovbakke kept up a dynamic beat, hearing Turner close up was interesting and when Joachim sat in towards the end, the two-tenor combination gave the music a sensuous heft. For me, though, the show suffered from boring writing: it took four pieces before we got to hear something that sounded like a song rather than like a series of riff transpositions. Mikkel Ploug's guitar sound - bright, dry, unadorned - isn't one I'm really attracted too, either. Listening to the tracks on his MySpace page, I kind of like them (even though the trio version of "I'll Be Seeing You" makes me wonder if it's meant as a joke), so I'm not sure if the problem was a lack of familiarity, a sub-par performance or music that sounds better at home.

pod #14

2007-11-01T22:52:00.000+01:00

The new issue of Point of Departure is out, with its usual payload of interesting columns. Travellin' Light gives Taylor Ho Bynum another chance to express his well-known and much-appreciated belgophilia (he once boasted of owning "one of the best Belgian jazz CD collections in New York." One of? Who's the competition?):

What are your three favorite venues?

There are a couple of spots I love in Belgium, the deWerf Theater in Brugge, and the deSingel Theater in Antwerp (they let me play on the roof!). I also always enjoy playing outdoors, especially in some of those beautiful European amphitheaters. But my favorite spot is my home away from home, New Haven’s wonderful Firehouse 12.

Taylor will be at deSingel next year, a gig I am very much looking forward to, as I have missed his last few performances here.

In the What's New? roundtable, Jason Hao Kwang gives a very interesting account of how he became concious of his own cultural identity:

I began to understand and therefore, imagine my identity, while touring South Korea with vocalist/choreographer Sin Cha Hong in 1992. This was my first trip to Asia. The experience was startling, both radically familiar and foreign. Though I am of Chinese decent, simply seeing, for the first time, streets bustling with heads of black hair was an inexplicable déjà vu. I remember witnessing myself in the dance mirrors of the Samul Nori studios, rehearsing with Korean musicians and dancers. The body language, smiles and laughter all seemed familiar. Being American-born Chinese, this was the first time an environment appeared to reflect at least some aspect of my being. At the same time, very few people in the project spoke much English. Also, I couldn’t read Korean. Paradoxically, I could not participate socially in all that looked so familiar. The inability to communicate is perhaps the ultimate foreign experience. Music was our only language.

I returned to the States with a new understanding of how much I had in common with my parents, who came from China in the 1940s. I sound like my father when I laugh or sneeze! Looking back, I also recognized how I responded to various life events emotionally, like one or both my parents. It is this mass of “micro-learning” ingrained into my personality, not Asian scholarship, that defines my cultural self. These realizations generated insights about the shape, sound and phrase of my violin improvisations and compositions. In my sound was evidence of who I am.

What defines “non-Western” is complex and nuanced, far beyond simple markers of musicology, like the pentatonic scale.

gimme translation

2007-11-01T17:59:00.000+01:00

It Is Not Mean... responds to and elaborates upon a comment I had left on his blog (also see Jeremy Stuart's comment on De Saussure):

Because "I don't speak no languages" there is very little I can say to the art and science of translation. The mechanist in me doesn't understand why there isn't simply a "right" translation and an everything-else-is-wrong translation. How is it that there is so much "wiggle room" going from one language to another?

DO WORDS MEAN ANYTHING?

I don't think one has to speak several languages to understand how translation works. Simply watch a Chinese or Japanese film with subtitles, and then the same film dubbed into the language of your choice. It's kind of like watching the same play with two different sets of actors, only a lot worse. Not only are the words not the same, but the myriad tiny-yet-essential inflections (accent, volume, timing, etc.), the actors' personal styles and their cultural backgrounds are, literally, erased. There is nothing to be gained, artistically speaking.*

SJZ also wonders, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, if poetry would be easier to translate, "because they usually have less words." To me, that is precisely what makes translating poetry impossible. In film, the actor's performance has to be re-created. How can you re-create a poem? What do you do with rhyme and meter? Well, I don't know much about poetry, so let's take song lyrics.

At the moment, I'm working my way through six CDs' worth of Congolese music, some of which include translations in the liner notes. The music is generally great, but the lyrics always seem stupid on paper. Generally speaking, even lyrics that haven't been translated generally look stupid, written down (e.g. any number of instances of Kelefa Sanneh quoting rap lyrics in the New York Times).

In the case of the Congolese music, I wish I could speak lingala, not only to be able to understand the lyrics as they are sung, but also because I would have greater insight into the culture and thought system they come from. I always get the impression that the deeper meanings of seemingly simple lyrics escape me, much in the same way many of the culturally-embedded references rappers do. So, one is not just translating words and their own characteristics (sound, rhythm, syntax, etc.), but also a whole cultural world.

Turning to jazz, SJZ asks: "Do methodologies in music also lose their snap?" I have been listening a lot to Josh Sinton's very good album altogether...all at once. Josh wrote an excellent essay on Steve Lacy's music for Darcy's blog, in which he made some comments relevant to SJZ's question:

When musicians talk about what they learned from music of the recent past, they talk about abstract concepts like ‘freedom’ and ‘finding your personal voice.’ When they talk about music of the more distant past (pre-’65), they talk more often about concrete things like songs and harmonic approaches. I don’t have a beef with any of this, I just thought it might be interesting to turn this status quo on its head. Why not talk about concrete contributions of the recent past? That is, why not use the songs and improvising strategies of this ‘era?’ You don’t need Julius Hemphill to play “Dogon A.D.” to make it a great song, it IS a great song. The same can be said for the music of Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, John Carter, Marion Brown, Jimmy Giuffre, Misha Mengelberg, Steve Lacy, etc. While I admit some compositions may be knottier, thornier, or more ephemeral, that doesn’t disqualify them from being performable. Just because their strategies differ radically from improvising strategies on “All the Things You Are” doesn’t make them useless.

--
* The exception that proves the rule is the guy who dubs Columbo into French. He does a better Columbo than Peter Falk, and is probably largely responsible for the series' enduring popularity in France.

Tied + Tickled - 05/10/2007@Ancienne Belgique, Bruxelles

2007-11-01T11:40:00.000+01:00

Any band with two girls (cellist/xylophonist and keyboardist, plus some guy on drums) has my immediate sympathy, but, in this case, that dissipated very quickly. The unannounced opener, which remained anonymous throughout a brief set that seemed too long anyway, was undoubtedly among the worst concerts I've attended. Perhaps the worst.

They played simplistic, repetitive, my-first-chord-progression motifs devoid of any creative effort. I could be accused of taking them altogether seriously, but I think it's the other way around: they drew such disproportionate self-satisfaction from the faintest sign of creativity or humour (playing "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy" on kazoo, a burst of noise at the end of one song, the shaking of a banana-shaped shaker) that my loathing seemed justified.

If this was a terrible-opener-makes-headliner-look-good gambit, it totally back-fired. After a few songs of Tied + Tickled's electronica equivalent of bar-room rock, I left, fed up. I had come to this concert because of distant memories of a prior album, Observing Systems. I haven't yet re-listened to refresh my memory, but I can't imagine it sounded like what I heard here. As I went down the stairs leading outside, a woman ahead of me confirmed my suspicions when she complained to her partner: "That was so crap, compared to they used to do."

Othin Spake - 18/10/2007@PP Café, Bruxelles

2007-10-25T23:29:00.000+02:00

Teun Verbruggen - d (website | myspace)
Mauro Pawlowski - g
Jozef Dumoulin - Fender Rhodes

The Ankh is a fabulous album (apparently , it's also available on iTunes), and Othin Spake's great concert early last year was one of the best of 2006, but here, texture kind of came back to bite me. The group started with really shambolic, discombobulated noise that couldn't help but to bring to mind disparaging clichés about noise-rock. No hopeful melodies or unstable grooves were hewn out of the din, no skeletal motifs made the onslaught legible. Their absence made evident why the high points in their 100% improvised music sound so miraculous: there's a very real chance they won't happen.

About halfway through, though, a few signposts started slipping in, as Mauro's approximation of 3-chord rock nudged Teun into a busy back-beat. A capitulation, perhaps, but it was the first time anyone (listener or player) seemed to be having any fun. And, let's face it, noise is a lot more fun when you can dance to it and cataclysm can always do with a catchy jingle (there are plenty such moments on The Ankh).

The last improvisation rewarded those who had stuck with the music. It started with a single repeated guitar note: warm, luminous, gentle; a fragile solitude in an unexpected stillness. These characteristics survived even as the music grew louder, more violent and gloriously crunchy in texture. And then it was over, too soon.

Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings - 24/10/2007@Ancienne Belgique, Bruxelles

2007-10-25T00:35:00.000+02:00

The album covers, the period recording equipment, the strict adherence to the rules of the genre, or rather, the codification of the epoch, even playing on Amy Winehouse's retro-soul record: all this could have made the Dap Kings' thing seem like a pose, like the vintage get-ups some in the crowd were wearing, or other audience members' less-vintage t-shirts that put quotation marks around soul clichés.

But then, this woman, Sharon Jones, shakes, shimmies, struts and dances across the stage. Her mere presence takes the band, which in the purest tradition had started the show without her, to a higher level. And then, she begins to sing: powerful and clear, grit thrown in as needed. She's electrifying. The kind of voice that hip hop producers want to sample and that house producers get to belt over four-to-the-floor beats. The kind of voice that doesn't even let you imagine thinking about listening to anything else. This is no pose, Sharon Jones isn't wearing anyone else's clothes. She is soul music, and she'll make you soul music, too. She'll pull you on stage* and insert you into her theatrical mini-production. She'll take you through a 200-hundred year genealogy of her dancing style. She'll whip you into a frenzy and cut it off early enough to leave you begging her for more. As Rob Harvilla says, Sharon Jones will obliterate your cynicism.

--
* Well, not me, but, one by one, four young, good-looking black people from down front, stage right, all seemingly at ease on a stage in front of hundreds of people.

viewing notes: spike lee, bamboozled

2007-10-17T19:54:00.000+02:00

Bamboozled was shot in Digital Video, which makes the image flat, shiny, cheap-looking. Devoid of texture, it loses gravitas without really gaining intimacy. I got past this, eventually, but it brought up the question of the importance of texture and its role in conveying meaning, in music and in general.

How much of an old photograph's meaning and emotional (and perhaps artistic) weight comes from yellowed paper, curled-up edges, creases, loss of colour, gradual disappearance of its subjects and the thousand other disfigurements it might suffer? Similarly, the pops, hisses and clicks of LPs and the warm, muddy sound of music played on a gramophone are part of the listening experience.

Photographs and vinyl add texture at the moment of reproduction, but music is a bit more complicated, as texture happens along with everything else, at the moment of production. Paul Desmond was sometimes accused of coasting on his tone: texture was seen as superficial (literally and metaphorically). Indeed, "How can you watch Bamboozled and only talk about what it looked like?" is a perfectly reasonable question. Still, what would be left of Ben Webster without that feeling of a cavernous rush of air?

There is an irresistible attraction to the dirty, the outdated, the broken, the ruined that's not just nostalgia: we must imagine their past potential, recreate their splendour for ourselves. We are an indispensable participant in what they are and what they were. They need us. The new, polished, perfect, finished don't need us, they need admirers: disengaged viewers who need not imagine anything, as it is all laid out in front of them. They can't even offer encouragement: everything has already been achieved. Perhaps this is merely a rationalisation of the mundane complaint against technical over-proficiency: "Admire my perfectly-formed blur of slick notes, which leave you neither time or toehold to add to them, to imagine, to recall." And you leave the concert feeling empty and vague: no memories have formed on the sterile ground of admiration.

This last point goes beyond texture alone, but most players regarded as unemotional generally have sleek tones. Steve Coleman succintly explains the issue in his blog post on timbral improvisation:

Early in the history of the spontaneously composed music in the United States (the Armstrong-Parker-Coltrane continuum, and probably in most music) there seemed to be more emphasis on expression, therefore things like timbre and phrasing were the most important elements. However, rhythm and pitch (when and how high/low) are the basic elements of any music system.

I have spent most of my career concentrating more on the rhythm/pitch/form aspects of music versus timbral considerations.

I sometimes wonder if jazz's principal contribution isn't contained in a brass's slangy growl, from Bubber Miley to Taylor Ho Bynum, but Coleman suggests that it serves, more modestly, to "amplify" expression. So how does texture relate to harmony, melody, rhythm, form? Is it a pretty bow tied around note choice/harmony/etc.?

listening notes: booker ervin, the freedom book

2007-10-13T21:12:00.000+02:00

It's unbelievable that Jaki Byard's 1999 murder, in his own home, remains unsolved.

Peter Watrous described him as "one of jazz's great surrealists, a comic who hasn't a moment's fear of disturbing the sanity of the performance." And, in his obituary, said "In his playing he spanned the history of jazz, and his improvisations, filled with quick stylistic changes, moved from boogie-woogie to free jazz. He was a stylistic virtuoso, his fecund imagination saw comparisons and contrasts everywhere, and his improvisations were encyclopedic and profound. He also had a sense of humor that rippled through everything he played."

That is the standard view of Byard, casually flipping through an encyclopedia, pointing out the funny bits. I actually kind of dislike this aspect of his playing. Not because it is un-serious, but because it obscures the awesomeness of what I see as his "straight" playing. I wouldn't say that that is when he sounds most like himself, but when I am least reminded of anything else.

On The Freedom Book's opening track, "A Lunar Tune," after Ervin's Texas tenor has ridden the rhythm section's intense swing (Alan Dawson, another underrated player, changes up his accompaniment so fast and so fluently it's impossible to keep track), Byard effortlessly straddles an inside-outside line that had only recently been created. There are no overt references to stride or anything else. Instead, Byard starts with a jovially ringing melody, then turns up the heat by alternating slightly blurry fast lines and crisp left-hand punctuation: a free sensibility is injected into a strict respect for the song's form.

Has any piano trio recorded jazz more modern than what Byard, Richard Davis and Alan Dawson produced on December 3, 1963? (A thought, both depressing and thrilling, often formed when listening to the masters, from any era)

Drew Gress Quintet - 04/10/2007@CC Luchtbal, Antwerpen

2007-10-13T20:15:00.000+02:00

Tim Berne - as
Ralph Alessi - tp
Craig Taborn - p
Drew Gress - b
Tom Rainey - d

It's hard not to expect great things from the above line-up. It's equally hard not to assess their concert as an indication of the current location of contemporary jazz, or at least a couple of its strands. So any lingering doubts and disappointment must be measured against those expectations. You know how it is: great musicians, some creative thinking, a few great moments. You leave not quite elated.

This was an all-star band, but also the leader's group: Drew Gress's long suites charted long-form courses through series of themes and a variety settings for solos. They were well played, but the sequences initially felt arbitrary and the melodies inexpressive. The second set consisted only of two even longer suites, but somehow they moved more convincingly, for example connecting a reconstituted Hard Cell's (Berne/Taborn/Rainey) free-ish manipulation of basic intervallic motifs to flowing post-bop.

The smaller moments were generally more engaging than the larger ones: the semi-spontaneous formation of duos and trios, the mingling of straight time and free rumbling, Tim Berne and Ralph Alessi repeatedly blending to produce buzzing overtones, Tom Rainey limiting himself to a ringing pattern on a single tom, Alessi handling a motif as he might a Rubik's Cube.

This quintet doesn't particularly strive to hide its identity as a jazz quintet. Occasionally they issued intriguing mixed signals by grappling with the past, as when the antiquated romance of Alessi's cup mute and Berne's dollops of vibrato perched atop dissonant, wide-interval piano plinks. At times, Tom Rainey's extraordinary playing rested on nothing solid, held together by centrifugal forces that could dissipate at any moment. Similarly, Craig Taborn is one of those people who somehow manage to reconcile exacting math-funk with wide-open free jazz and a linear bop sensibility.

Habib Koïté - 28/09/2007@Flagey, Bruxelles

2007-10-10T21:16:00.000+02:00

I went to this concert almost randomly. Over here, a Habib Koïté will play a cultural institution like Flagey, which classifies him as World Music (that said, the Touareg band Tinariwen are playing the rock-oriented Ancienne Belgique soon), but back home, I guess he'd be seen the way a rock band is here, or perhaps more accurately, like an r 'n' b band which plays contemporary stuff, but also knows its tradition. Interestingly, the drummer didn't really do the kind of awesome polyrhythmic African stuff you'd expect, but pounded out these dark and slightly laconic beats. Cheap sunglasses boosted his cool quotient.

Like a number of other concerts in Flagey's massive Studio 4, the amplified sound was flattened and muddied (I've been particularly sensitive to the depth-of-field possible when music isn't routed through two speakers since seeing the Free Music Festival and Maak's Spirit at the Vooruit). A lot of the rhythmic filigree that makes up so much of the interest of Malian music - even of a modern one like Koïté's - was inaudible, unlike when I saw Afel Bocoum at the Théâtre Molière, and the balafon sounded harsh, a far cry from its normal raindrops-on-wood timbre. One thing the venue didn't stop, though, was people rushing the stage to dance (or offer lap-dances, several times).

The second half of the concert favoured the slow, quiet and hypnotic one-riff tunes characteristic of traditional Malian music. The drummer moved to calabash and the balafonist to violin (modern and electric, not the ancient one-string kind), as the others slipped, almost instinctively, into the simple back-and-forth dance steps that resemble those of old doo-wop groups, and are just as essential.

listening notes: ella fitzgerald and louis armstrong, ella and louis

2007-10-09T23:50:00.000+02:00

Like a rusty dagger dragged across new silk, each makes the other seem more miraculous: how does the former not fall apart? how can the latter even exist in the first place? Usual gender roles are inverted: the trumpeter's frailty makes his every move appear daring, while the singer provides infallible strength. Or maybe those are the usual roles.

Octurn - 27/09/2007@Jazz Station, Bruxelles

2007-10-09T22:53:00.000+02:00

Octurn (myspace | website)
Bo Van Der Werf - bs
Magic Malik - fl, voc
Guillaume Orti - as
Laurent Blondiau - tp, flh
Nelson Veras - g
Fabian Fiorini - p
Jozef Dumoulin - Fender Rhodes
Jean-Luc Lehr - el b
Chander Sardjoe - d

Of late, I've been listening a lot to a very rough draft of Octurn's next album, their first live one (I was at one of the recording sessions). It's very amorphous structure-wise, with lots of texturally-oriented interludes, and only a few moments where the band's full forces flex their muscle in collective improvisation or uplifting rhythmic or melodic riff. It is totally unlike their previous (and still fairly recent) North Country Suite, a gorgeously melodic work written by Pierre Van Dormael (who, in the liner notes, thanked Bob Dylan, naturally, but also Nicole Kidman, inexplicably), that could be seen as a sequel to the latter's masterful Vivaces from 2001.

A year after the upcoming album was recorded, things have changed substantially, and generally for the better. Without losing the gentle, soft-focus feel Magic Malik has brought to the band, the contours have grown sharper, more readable, even as interpretative freedom has grown freer. This is quite a feat: the last time I saw Octurn, individual freedom occasionally led to collective chaos, ora too-great density of information. This time the assemblage was carefully grounded, without being too constrained. These clearer structures even lent the music an unusually proggy feel, as when a pastoral tableau was stomped upon by interjections of a pounding one-note tattoo. A meeting-ground was eventually found as the pastoral melody crescendoed and the riff decided to follow the contour of the chords. Not that things have become simple: even when Chander Sardjoe elicits foot-tapping, it can be difficult to get any idea of where the 1 might be.

By doing less, complexity communicated outwardly more clearly, reflecting the better internal communication enabled by an unorthodox stage configuration: Fabian Fiorini, Jean-Luc Lehr and Sardjoe occupied the Jazz Station's small stage, while the rest of the band fanned out in an inwards-facing semi-circle. They took up a third of the club's floor space, giving rise to the unusual sight of patrons and musicians facing in the same direction, looking at an empty space.

I increasingly look forward to Guillaume Orti's contributions. It is unsurprising that he should feel at home in Octurn, since it has much in common with Kartet, a long-running band that includes Sardjoe and Benoît Delbecq. His clear and bright tone almost obscures his radical phraseology: its linearity and clear articulation give it something of a '00s bop aura, but it is tied into ferociously unpredictable knots. And when he cut loose on the anthemic, drum 'n' bass-driven "Flash," avant-jazz was reunited with gritty drive.

literal metaphors #3

2007-10-07T03:25:00.000+02:00

black keys

2007-10-02T12:34:00.000+02:00

The early 80s is also when the performance and cheap housing possibilities for free jazz musicians pretty much dried up in lower Manhattan. So, where in 1977 you could go out on any given evening and hear Julius Hemphill, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Davis, and Arthur Blythe in one loft, and Lester Bowie, Cecil Taylor, and Jimmy Lyons in another, Oliver Lake and Michael Gregory Jackson dueting in a third, all for the cost of a couple beers, by 1982 when I actually moved to the city that deal was pretty much done. The strain of music those players represented didn't die out, of course, and became the foundation for the range of things being done by people like John Zorn and Bill Laswell in the 80s. Yet the demise of that musical scene was also the last time relentless, progressive Black jazz musicians had a street presence on the ground, as it were, in NYC bohemia.
- Greg Tate, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age"

Does it matter whether progressive Black musicians play jazz now or in the future?

Does it matter whether Black people ever listen to another lick of real jazz from now until the end of time?

Has jazz more than fulfilled its sociocultural, esthetic, and political mandates for Black people given the advances well-educated Blackfolk have made in American society over the past 25 years?

Have jazz's possibilities as a Black art form been exhausted, or does the virtual absence of a coherent community of Black jazz listeners explain the creative stagnation of the art form at present?

- Greg Tate, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age"

As I survey the stage of the Black intellectual conversation going on today, I find that the self-conscious engagement with philosophy I once heard in 70s jazz, politics, religion, and literature has migrated to contemporary African American visual art where one is expected, after Basquiat’s example, to wrestle with race, politics, history, identity, and knotty conceptual questions as a matter of course. Why this is no longer the case in jazz has something to do with the class aspirations and subject position of most younger musicians who are not, at the end of the day, social rebels, but middle class arts professionals whose art has no significance even among a Black middle class—American mass media oriented consumers who prefer soul and hiphop to postbop.
- Greg Tate, "Black Jazz in the Digital Age"

[via SoundSlope]

Free Music Festival XXXIV - 21-23/09/2007@deSingel, Antwerpen

2007-10-01T23:25:00.000+02:00

The Free Music Festival has gained in comfort since its move a few years ago from some back-alley theatre in the center of Antwerpen to the prestigious DeSingel on the city's southern fringe, but, as you'd expect, it just isn't the same. Despite the well-conceived flow of concerts, I'll take a transversal view here. Three themes emerged from this 34th edition: crazy Dutch bands, august first-generation EFI pianists and otherworldly vocalists.

Saadet Türköz is a Turkish singer born of Turkmenistani parents. Her singing was completely astounding, but its reception suffered from a culture gap that Martin Schutz's acoustic and electric 'cellos could not quite bridge. It was like watching a foreign film, but without the subtitles: hard work, even at its most thrilling. Moments of fevered glossolallia that sounded like parallel universe Louis Armstrong scat-singing had me laughing in delight and sheer disbelief at what I was hearing. Other passages employed a more Asian, austerely dramatic kind of oratory style that were particularly difficult to relate to. If Sainkho Namchylak's were to be defined as non-idiomatic, Türköz was most definitely idiomatic.

Compared to Türköz, Sainkho Namchylak's singing could be considered non-idiomatic, as she wandered from Die Zauberflöte to "Crazy Frog" and many less identifiable points in between and beyond. She performed with drummer Eric Thielemans's A Snare Is A Bell project, which can consist of just him, but in this perfomance was a quartet. For roughly half the set, Thielemans played nothing but a steady snare drum roll, while Jozef Dumoulin did even less on piano. That left Namchylak and Peter Jacquemyn with lots of work to do, but lots of space to do it in. The bassist's bowing found a lot of common ground with her, an affinity perhaps explained by the former's Kowald-ian penchant for throat-singing. Even as Thielemans and Dumoulin progressively loosened the initial constraints, overall the piece didn't seem to amount to much, as if the initial premise had handicapped their efforts rather than focused them.

What is the natural sound of the trumpet? After Peter Evans's concert, that was a difficult question to answer. Like Türköz and Namchylak, Peter put the naturalness of any sound in doubt. Sometimes even simple gestures sufficed to deconstruct sounds usually taken for granted: when he inserted his Harmon mute's stem, I couldn't help but wonder why so few trumpeters do. Just because Miles Davis only used the buzzy stemless sound, doesn't mean everyone else has to. Watching Peter simultaneously circular breathe, blow grainy texture and clear notes simultaneously, it can be hard to get beyond the sheer technique of it all, not that I felt much need to, anyway: the sheer thrill of witnessing the creation of trumpet sounds never heard before was enough. To hear him play in more overtly "musical" contexts, check out Sparks, Mostly Other People Do The Killing ("Andover" is the tune I recommend), Carnival Skin, the May entry in Reuben Radding's 12 in2007 series or his own hard-hitting quartet's debut album, soon to be released on Firehouse 12.

Following tradition, Fred Van Hove opened the festival, this time in a first encounter with Jim Black and Peter. Three generations of improvisers, clearly with different concerns. Black is perhaps best known for punkish, off-kilter grooves, but here he reveled in quieter sounds: I've never seen anyone look so happy to shake a tiny bell. While never bad, this set suffered from the bane of many a first-time meeting: in only a few instances wasthe whole more than three individuals each doing their thing. As Van Hove rubbed his piano's strings for a sort of slide guitar effect and Evans trilled on piccolo trumpet, I imagined the mating calls of Venusian tropical birds. Later on, Black allowed himself to build up a head of steam, Evans sank back a little and a collective groove coalesced. Those moments were fabulous, but all too rare. Some in the crowd may have been more underwhelmed than me, as, for a while, loud snoring was heard.

Alexander Von Schlippenbach's solo sets opened the second and third days with interpretations of his Twelve Tone Tales repertoire. The first one featured a Monk's Casino-style medley of concise Monk readings. Von Schlippenbach concentrated on rapidly and radically reconfiguring the melodies, without ever letting them drift out of sight. The Monk section was surrounded by more overtly twelve-tone-inspired works, which served to highlight the ways in which the two weren't all that distant, despite the totally different cultural, rhythmic and melodic contexts. The second set was a breath-taking tour de force into which the pianist held nothing back. By often keeping a strong bass function in the left hand, he somehow managed to distantly evoke ragtime, stride and boogie-woogie in an abstract but very physical way.

The two-piano duet of Benoît Delbecq and Fabian Fiorini was a beautifully serene oasis in a mostly boisterous festival. The two tones and styles were complementary: Fabian Fiorini had a full sound and effusive spirit, while Benoît Delbecq was more impressionistic, his touch slightly veiled, his notes coming as if through a mist. They clashed as easily as they collaborated, oblique beoppish lines were splashed atop free rumbling, Delbecq's sophisticated prepared piano percussion laid foundations for playful divagations, for a set that was wide-ranging yet unostentatious. Whereas Von Schlippenbach had folded serialism into jazz, these two had a greater sensuality: rich, solemn chord progressions mutated into simpler, more soulful motifs. But when the set ended with "Misterioso," they showed that even thirty years on, Monk continued to be a springboard for avant-garde jazz.

Misha Mengelberg embodies comedy: his hat, his walk, the way he slumps over the piano and plays with one hand, even his ballooning stomach are all funny without even trying. The ICP Orchestra put ironic, muddy swing/circus music alongside thorny contemporary string music, made use of improvisation, composition and conduction (cellist Tristan Honsinger's turn in front of the band was a riotous highlight that involved imitating a rabbit), let rip some earnestly burning horn solos and roved the stage to produce antiphonal effects (especially effective when coming from backstage and making a great case for the superiority of unamplified music), or combined three clarinets in unison at full blast to create ear-bending overtones. And they did all this effortlessly, as they should, after having been at it for 40 years.

Two other, slightly younger, Dutch Dadaïst ensembles followed. Luc Houtkamp's POW Ensemble, featuring guest Joseph Bowie, had at least three things no other band in the festival had: a tap-dancer, a woman who wasn't a singer and a lo-fi conception of electronic machines as "contraptions" rather than "sleekly-designed lifestyle enhancements" (even though there was an Apple laptop on stage). The ramshackle ensemble started with dry ping-pong-balls-on-vibrating-horizontal-bass-drum randomness, but then rollicked through improv-distorted new wave/Tom Waits blends and electronicised Fats Waller. The people left happy.

Michiel Braam's Nopera consists of a rhythm section, a string quartet and three singers. Like a next-gen ICP or Willem Breuker, hilarity and incongruity stripped away the trappings of seriousness, but left the foundations of well-written and -performed music. There was self-deprecating opera in some of the singing and most of the acting, but also bouts of gospel diva belting, tango merged into soul jazz, astringent pointillism crushed into ragtime. South African saxophonist Sean Bergin was used mostly as a singer, but also took a few excellent solos on curved soprano.

Spring Heel Jack closed out the festival, fell outside of my three themes and was the only concert I didn't see in full. After a few times through cycles of silence/white noise/silence I had had enough: the improvising trio of clarinetist Alex Ward, pianist Pat Thomas and drummer Paul Lytton were essentially doing what they might have done had the Spring Heel Jack guys not been there. Which might as well have been the case, as they seemed to hardly do anything at all. It was pretty disappointing, so I left after half an hour.

mistaken identities

2007-09-30T22:24:00.000+02:00

While I was in the city I tried to take advantage of the other great aspects to being in New York- by... buying records (in one shop, after picking out Peter Brötzmann's, "Full Blast," among my selections, the gentleman managing the store suggested that I might be interested in the new Sonore album, "It's got Brötzmann with Vandermark and Gustafsson." I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was one of the guys he was referring to and the saxophonist on the poster for "Musician" taped to the wall by my head next to the cash register. Better to nod at the suggestion, take my albums, and walk out before I started to laugh.
- Ken Vandermark, Notes From The Field Sep 20, 2007

[John Coltrane's "Dearly Beloved"] is like the current ballad paradigm--no steady pulse, just a miasma of tone and a soloist sort of fighting to stay afloat.
- Hank Shteamer, "Promises" Kept // Thunderkiss '65

At one point, the blonde wig guy climbed a mound of dirt next to a construction site, dragging a wooden barrier up with him. He threw it off and broke it, and then he ran down the street yelling: "We're so getting in trouble!" Immediately afterward, he ran right past an idling police car; the two cops inside either didn't see him throwing the barrier or just didn't care. This was Williamsburg, after all; it's tough to imagine a single neighborhood on the planet where an ironic art-kid brass-band parade would cause less of a stir.
- Status Ain't Hood, Live: The Black Lips Are Dumb

Gretchen Parlato & Lionel Loueke - 20/09/2007@Flagey, Bruxelles

2007-09-29T02:14:00.000+02:00

Gretchen Parlato - voc, perc (website | myspace)
Lionel Loueke - g, voc (website | myspace)

Lionel Loueke is a giant of a man whose gentleness doesn't equal complacency. Alongside catchy rhythms, sing-song melodies and showmanship deployed singing a bass line and tongue-clucking percussion while playing not-simple guitar parts, he has a hard-nosed sense of abstraction that ranged from scattered bop lines to near-avant noise-making. His every intervention in this intimate concert was hopeful, luminous, thrilling. I've raved about Loueke's solo album In A Trance before. I won't hesitate to do so again.

It was my first encounter with Gretchen Parlato and she left me with mixed feelings.
Parlato's voice had the kind of gentle attack and limited tessiture and dynamic range that I tend to associate with Brazilian singers, so it seemed logical that they tackle a number of bossa novas. As her expressive nuances weren't always convincing - a crucial element, for her kind of voice - her singing often seemed to meander.

On somber material, however, she could be mesmerising. Rodgers & Hart's "Spring Is Here" was issued in a regretful sigh beyond fatigue, and demonstrated her ability to create a slow, charged, stark atmosphere. The set's first tune emphasised the contrast within the duo between Loueke's sharply articulated rhythm and sheer physical presence, and Parlato's more semi-rubato, ethereal approach, creating great tension by hinting at incompatibility and deftly avoiding it.

the abundance of scarcity

2007-09-27T12:46:00.000+02:00

When the long-playing record (LP) format was introduced by Columbia Records back in the late 1940s, the industry as a whole resisted it, and many predicted it would never take off because 78s sounded better. Without question, early LPs did not sound nearly as good as 78s. But given the choice of listening to all of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on two sides of one record versus sixteen sides of eight records, the consumer opted for convenience and simplicity (not to mention less shelf space).

The industry also resisted the audio cassette. Who in their right mind would prefer a format with an ever-present hiss over the pristine sound of an LP? The answer: nearly everybody.
- Fredric Dannen, in What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum

The majors thrived in an era of artificial scarcity when they were able to control the production and distribution of music. Today, we have an infinite number of choices available to us, and when content is infinitely abundant, the only scarce commodities are convenience, taste, and trust.
- Peter Rojas, in What’s the Future of the Music Industry? A Freakonomics Quorum

So, you all know what I’m talking about. You go to the New Music Concert and the textures are appealing, the information is vivid and valid, the performances are excellent. And then there arrives a moment. And in that moment you think to yourself, “Is it possible that this is still happening? What time even is it.” And then you reconnect, and you listen, and you realize, this is still going on. And then you start looking up on the stage to see how many pages are left on the parts. And then the cellist fold out one of the pages to reveal THREE MORE. Say what you will; this is a problem.
- Nico Muhly, Too Long

With [Sharon] Jones and [Lee] Fields on board, Daptone's music is sometimes indistinguishable from the funk of 40 years ago. [Gabe] Roth has even passed off new records as old. When Desco started out, the idea of new bands playing old-style funk was a hard sell to the soul aficionados they were trying to reach. So the label's first album, The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji, was credited to "Mike Jackson and the Soul Providers" and purported to be a reissue of a soundtrack from an obscure 1970s kung-fu movie. The movie never existed. "Nobody would even listen to it if they thought it was new," Roth says. "I mean, I wouldn't have either. I can't really blame anybody. Our take on it was, 'Look, the music is real.' "
- Indrani Sen, "The 35-Year Plan for Soul Superstardom"

black and blue and green

2007-09-25T12:38:00.000+02:00

“It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country,” a furious Mr. [Louis] Armstrong told him. President Eisenhower, he charged, was “two faced,” and had “no guts.” For Governor Faubus, he used a double-barreled hyphenated expletive, utterly unfit for print. The two settled on something safer: “uneducated plow boy.” The euphemism, Mr. Lubenow says, was far more his than Mr. Armstrong’s.

Mr. Armstrong bitterly recounted some of his experiences touring in the Jim Crow South. He then sang the opening bar of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” inserting obscenities into the lyrics and prompting Velma Middleton, the vocalist who toured with Mr. Armstrong and who had joined them in the room, to hush him up.
- David Margolick, "The Day Louis Armstrong Made Noise"

But music written solely for the comfort of its audience is equally irrelevant. Pushing ethnic buttons as a form of quick access to the worshiper’s attention is only advertising.
- Bernard Holland, "Does Simple Music Form Simple Faith?"

I feel that there will always be CDs. It's hard to imagine, when I play a concert and we have a CD signing afterwards, the day when there won't be anything to sign. It's hard to imagine something that costs $10, but you can't see or feel it. It's hard to imagine that such a thing will hold its value.
- David Finckel (Emerson Quartet cellist, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center co-artistic director), in David Patrick Stearns, "Classical fans must give in to downloads"

Cavalia - 19/09/2007@Tours et Taxis, Bruxelles

2007-09-21T17:46:00.000+02:00

You know how during Olympic Games, it's easy to become totally engrossed with sports that will never even enter your mind again for the next four years? Curling, archery, modern biathlon, female wrestling, synchronised swimming. Those hours spent watching dressage finally came to some use at Cavalia, a Cirque du Soleil meets 64 horses spectacle (why is it that all these things come from Canada?).

Inside a semi-circle roughly the width of half a football field, all different kinds of horses ran around, pranced, bowed, shuffled, reared, had people jumping on and swinging around on their backs and one person riding two (and even four!) at once. There were acrobats, too (some of the horse-riders doubled up), so sometimes the horses were mere scenery to acrobatics. There were Mists of Avalon/Lord of the Rings Elvish aristocracy moments and more athletic ones. A live band played behind a scrim, appearing and disappearing through clever use of lighting effects. I'm not a horse person at all, but it was all very beautiful (and expensive; I highly recommend not buying any drinks and trying to swing a last-minute two-for-the-price-of-one deal, as we did).

The white-robed, long-haired and bare-footed leader Frédéric Pignon swanned around and smiled beatifically, seeming not to do very much, but clearly possessed of powers beyond the comprehension of mere mortals. Kind of like pre-Attack of the Clones Yoda.

The most moving moment for me, though, came right at the beginning, when one, then two, then a small herd of horses ran around, totally on their own. Something about watching them be obedient doing fairly simple things in this semi-wild state was infinitely more powerful than having someone guide them through complex and unnatural cross-legged moves.

ironic excellence

2007-09-21T13:02:00.000+02:00

On the other hand, if improvisation really is "composition without the benefit of an eraser," then composition is probably improvisation without the benefit of an audience.
- Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, A most peculiar paradox

Excellence is what matters, and the reason why doors to concert halls and opera houses should be opened wider is so that the message can be shouted more loudly. More people should be encouraged to make their minds up. Music isn’t there to be lapped up by some supine audience like a doctor’s potion; it is there to be tasted and assessed, and no one who cares about it should avoid the responsibility of making a judgment.
- James Naughtie, "Classics For The Masses"

Jazz musicians have been doing ironic covers since the very beginning.
- Darcy James Argue, Irony, man

this versus that

2007-09-19T00:41:00.000+02:00

Two threads currently circling the jazzblogosphere seem linked: Dave Douglas's discussion of repertoire vs. originality and "are the Bad Plus ironic?" Both could be boiled down to the age-old structure vs. agency debate, and its eternal attendant question: "Where to start?"

Ambivalence is crucial: the first art music to appear in the era of recording (Charles Delaunay, co-founder of the French magazine Jazz Hot, invented discography), jazz actively resists being defined by it ("you should have heard them on the nights the microphones weren't there"); relentlessly modern in its embrace of rationalism, abstraction, universality and progress, but always in thrall to nostalgia and cultural particularism; empirical learning and grubby basements fascinate (the streets, paying dues), while access to rationalised curriculae and gilded concert halls are sought; what is the difference between composition and improvisation, anyway?; communal demands for conformity (standard repertoire, techniques and modes of interaction) confront individual yearnings for... something else (visionsong puts this simply as tradition vs. expression).

These tensions, a few among many other possibilities, are not only irresolvable (except in the music itself, at its best), they are constitutive of what jazz is and therefore crucial to its existence. I don't think anyone who truly cares about this music can choose any one side of the oppositions listed above without adding a caveat or feeling dispossessed of something. Dave Douglas's indecision is indicative of precisely this:

An argument put forth by a certain member of the Collective says that you have to learn tunes because all great jazz improvisers learned by playing tunes. All the vocabulary is there. If you want to learn vocabulary and what to do when the page falls off the music stand you have to go through the great repertoire of song form.

I've always rebelled against that idea because I feel that one method should not have hegemony against all others. I was lucky enough to grow up learning tunes, but I have played with and admired so many great musicians who don't know and don't play tunes. You ought to be able to learn the nuts and bolts and simply make your own music.

But I was swayed by a truth in the argument. If you choose to study music and improvisation: from other musicians, from books, scores, recordings, and other texts, well, then, that's what there is, repertoire. This is not to say that you can't learn to make music with other kinds of materials and with other kinds of forms. But maybe there is a basic instinct in learning to play songs. I am not resolved about this, but I am shifting.

In passing, Settled In Shipping's take on this issue yields a great encapsulation of how the improviser works, and why he encroaches on the composer's territory much more readily than the interpreter might:

I think the idea of "learning tunes" can be broadened. It boils down to figuring out why music works the way it does.

The results of bludgeoning the contradictions out of the music are quite apparent. Jazz "died" not when some of its practitioners went "too far," but when "Avant-Garde" became its own category at some point in the '60s and was relegated to lofts in the '70s, facilitating the excision of the idea of Progress from the Tradition.

Where Tradition intersects with Authority, another dynamic is created. Take Anthony Braxton's standard-playing, as presented by Destination: Out, for example. I pretty much agree with Peter Breslin's assessment: these renditions are particularly unsatisfactory. Thinking back to when I saw Braxton play standards with an Italian pick-up rhythm section, I can only compare that with, say, Quintet Basel (1977) and dream about how mind-blowing four nights of Braxton's own music would have been. I am left with the question, "Why bother with standards when one's own music is so amazing?" Fittingly, this leaves us right where we started.

rss enterprise

2007-09-18T17:22:00.000+02:00

You don't even need to turn on the sound to be convinced.

literal metaphors #2

2007-09-18T16:53:00.000+02:00

depressed

my mind is scattered all over your

2007-09-18T00:25:00.000+02:00

I've been waking up to this song for the last few days. Which is rather appropriate, considering the lyrics. A little more annoying than, say, Fiona Apple, but Regina Spektor's voice is often totally irresistible.

+

It seems that the highest praise that I can give to a French TV series is "It doesn't look French."

+

I recently bought Ethan Iverson's Deconstruction Zone (standards) new and Construction Zones (originals) used, which is pretty ironic.

i love you with your bib on, baby

2007-09-17T14:30:00.000+02:00

Sometimes Ethan [Iverson] has an idea for something he’s heard recently—and he has no sentimental attachment to it. There’s none of that “Oh man, I danced to that at the prom.” He’s got none of those feelings, so he approaches everything like, “Hmmm, Kurt Cobain liked to use open fifths, just like Stravinsky does.”
- Dave King, interviewed by Paul Olson
[What I love about this quote is the use of past tense for Cobain and present tense for Stravinsky in the last sentence. Might have been accidental. Go read the whole interview, though, it's fantastic.]

When Jazz is the subject there always seems to be an argument for the value of ignorance.
- Wynton Marsalis, in My Favorite Things, Wynton

If seeing Wilco live was cooking a meal, it would be like making a big pot of stew or sauce; starting off with a few ingredients, simmering, sauteing, adding spices, and eventually bringing the whole thing up to a boil, the sum of its parts creating a greater whole.

I'm more accustomed to rock shows that are more akin to cooking lobster: you start off with a pot of boiling water, throw in live creatures that squirm and submit, leading to a decadent feast of meat dipped in butter. A meal that requires a bib.
- Soundslope, Wilco, Millennium Park, 9/12/2007

Bert Joris Quartet - 14/09/2007@De Roma, Antwerpen

2007-09-16T23:10:00.000+02:00

Bert Joris - tp, flh (myspace)
Dado Moroni - p
Ira Coleman - b
Dré Pallemaerts - d

Bert Joris is not the kind of trumpeter to blow you away with volume or chops. He is a veteran now, but early in his apprenticeship, Joris felt an affinity to the likes of Art Farmer, Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham and has continued to cultivate a different kind of power, based in precisely aimed cantabile lyricism and emotionally expressive shadings. During this concert, he never sought to dominate his sidemen or soar above them, but always let himself be almost submerged by them. That he never quite was gave his playing much of its appealing sense of controlled vulnerability, along with a buttery flügelhorn and slinky Harmon mute.

As last time, "Magone" was a highlight, Joris's movements between the centre and the edges of the pocket creating a delightful tension. The leader's greatest moment of the night came at the end of the second set, with the first few choruses of "I Fall In Love Too Easily." The arrangement paired the trumpeter first with Moroni, then with Ira Coleman, and in the nakedness of the contexts his every nuance was perfect, delicate and infinitely touching. Earlier, Coleman had sparked the concert's first moment of grace, with an unaccompanied introduction to "To Philip:" a thick tone, a wide array of techniques (such as when his left hand evoked an oud by plucking on the neck) and gentle precision were transparently deployed in service of a beautiful, deep musicality.

De Roma is a pittoresque old theater/cinema that is semi-dilapidated, or, more precisely, recently semi-renovated. The vast ground floor was strewn with wooden tables, creating an atmosphere equal parts Cinema Paradiso (as Oana noted), a jazz club and a beer hall. The quartet's repertoire, entirely original apart from the standard mentioned above, complemented each element of this combination, with Moroni's take on Maiden Voyage-era Herbie Hancock, the funky soul-jazz of "Science and Signatures" and the encore of "Benoit." The latter is a light-hearted tune based on a composition by the Flemish 19th-century composer Peter Benoit, set to an old-fashioned bounce. Antwerpenaars know the original, but don't necessarily know where it comes from, which, according to the liner notes to the Brussels Jazz Orchestra's The Music of Bert Joris, the trumpeter's setting of it is meant to describe the following scene:

Imagine yourself standing atop the Antwerp cathedral early one morning, overlooking the waking city.The wind softly stirs the carillon, and while a nighthawk loudly makes his way home, life slowly gets into gear...

what have you got to sell, what have you got to tell

2007-09-16T22:51:00.000+02:00

On Cryptogramophone's blog, Jeff Gauthier has expanded upon the comment I mentioned a few days ago:

we know our music isn't for everyone. Someone who loves a Nels Cline CD, may not love a Myra Melford or Bennie Maupin title, so we know that even the most responsible writer will trade-in some of our promos. Plus, our percentage of reviews vs. CDs sent is about 5%. So, what's the sense in sending out full CDs when most of them will just be resold, thereby wiping out two sales for every CD we give away (the sale we lost, and the CD we can't sell), while having to pay $5,000 per year for the privilege!

It's difficult to make a precise and definitive hierarchy of the participants in the music business ecosystem (musicians, fans, writers, labels, studios, promoters, lawyers, publishers, venues, equipment-makers, rights collections agencies, and so on), but I would not hesitate to put reviewers lower down the ladder than labels.

literal metaphors #1

2007-09-14T12:15:00.000+02:00

the grass is always greener on the other side of the (barbed wire) fence.

from guelph

2007-09-13T22:27:00.000+02:00

HurdAudio has been doing a huge amount of reporting from the Guelph Jazz Festival. His initial post covered Anthony Braxton's keynote speech and contained this quote:

anyone seriously studying composition and making music in this current time-space needs to pay attention to what the video game people are doing. They're navigating a dynamic system that can go just about anywhere at any time and we can learn a lot from their solutions.

Among many other things, there's a report from a panel with William Parker and Amiri Baraka. Regardless of what you may think of him now, you have to admit that this (long-ago?) performance of Baraka's poem "Dope" is devastating.

I got it some time ago from Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches, a blog I don't mention often, but is awesome.

chivalry and the art of obtaining promo copies

2007-09-13T16:59:00.000+02:00

Remember Tom Hull's complaint about promo copy stinginess? He's expanded on it:

I'm also annoyed that more and more of the latter are turning up lame, as CDs without packaging or with narrow slipcases that are hard to track or file... Then there are labels which let me download, which might be a nice perk for an I-Pod-wielding high schooler, but is a mechanical nuissance for me -- one of many new labor-shifting technologies, like self-checkout lines, that I've steadfastly refused to facilitate.

I don't read much about other critics complaining about these matters, which may mean I'm being overly sensitive, or may mean I'm just becoming overly frazzled. But it raises the question: if it all comes down to money for the label, shouldn't it all come down to money for me? It hardly takes any time at all to determine that writing Jazz Consumer Guide is a dreadful expense of time. Of course, it's not all money to me... But how much that's worth is hard to gauge. And it's far easier to imagine that writing my book might somehow pay back the effort than that I could parlay any amount of music writing into a future.

Jeff Gauthier, head of the Los Angeles-based Cryptogramophone label has chimed in on the promo copy debate from the murky depths of Jeff Albert's commenting system (shouldn't it also be on Downbeast?):

This is a sensitive issue for all concerned. For 8 years Cryptogramophone dutifully sent full Digipaks to writers to show off our beautiful packages. However, 500 digipaks (which is about how many we used to send to radio and press) is about 1/4 of our average sales on a title these days, and most of these ended up on Amazon and the used bins before a title was even released. Since Amazon is now our biggest customer, we’re just shooting ourselves in the foot by giving away so many finished Digipaks. By now writers should know that we are committed to beautiful (and expensive) packaging as well as great music. They should also know that we will always send a finished copy to a writer if they ask for it. We understand the writer’s perspective on this issue, and we hope they understand ours. We will never deny a legitimate reviewer access to our Digipaks if they ask for it. It’s kind of like sex. We’ll even give it up on a first date if they ask nicely!

take advantage of me, now!

2007-09-13T00:15:00.000+02:00

Down in the murky depths of Darcy's commenting system, Kris Tiner asks a very pertinent question:

how far can blogging potentially be in (and bring others into) a dialogue with the actual music, be an integral part of it, rather than just a record or scrapbook of it...

I've been trying to think about how this blog should work (hence the poll, the listening notes, the quotes, the sidebar link feeds, etc.) and am very interested in ideas about the ways the blog format can fully take advantage of not being a magazine (print or electronic), a radio show or a TV show, but some kind of intersection of all that.

getting better

2007-09-12T12:09:00.000+02:00

In dark times for older jazz masters, it is good to see that a few can pull through, with the help of friends and strangers: Kermit Driscoll has written a moving account of his recovery from Lyme Disease

a throw of the dice

2007-09-12T00:41:00.000+02:00

What does it say about the hallowed tradition of Western concert music when it would more readily welcome the chance throwing of dice as a legitimate path to musical decision making than accept the blues-based improvisations of African-American jazz musicians (and post-jazz innovators who were guilty by association, like Cecil Taylor, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and the AACM)?
- The Soul and the System, Why Improvisation?

Mr. West and Mr. Cent may indeed be assholes, but they're symbolic assholes who remind us that American Darwinism has produced a species of Negro Male who can now exploit his fetishized vernacular aura as profitably as multinational corporations can the minerals in your whole damn ancestral homeland.
- Greg Tate, "In Praise of Assholes"

I reckon my continuing indifference to [Maria] Schneider's highly refined art is subliminal. She doesn't set off the gag reflex that I have long had to highly orchestrated classical music, but that's what I suspect is lurking, somewhere near the chronic level of an allergen. Clearly, jazz fans who also like euroclassical simply adore her
- Tom Hull, Jazz Prospecting (CG #14, Part 13)
(I actually think it is the opposite: orchestral thrills, quite possibly for people who have difficulty with classical orchestras)

Further, back in the day, the music never seemed to get started until 10 or 11 p.m. or even later, with the real action getting under way long after midnight. It was great for musicians, who would often show up in the wee, small hours after their gigs at other clubs were finished, but not very welcoming for anyone who had to be in an office at 9 a.m. or filing a story on a morning deadline.
- Will Friedwald, "Smalls Redux"

are sleigh-bells the new maracas?

2007-09-11T08:37:00.000+02:00

There's the dramatic sleigh-bell break in The Bad Plus's "This Guy's In Love With You." The Pascal Schumacher Quartet's "Monday Night At The Cat Club is gently propelled by them.

Other members of the bell family are seeing action as well: John Hollenbeck regularly makes things go all twinkly on The Claudia Quintet's For and Nels Cline uses bells (or maybe a glockenspiel) to create a luminous finale to Draw Breath.

This all surely adds up to something more than a random blog post. But to what?

Flemish Jazz Meeting - 08/09/2007@Vooruit, Gent

2007-09-10T23:49:00.000+02:00

The Flemish Jazz Meeting is essentially a showcase to hip foreign concert promoters to what's happening in Flanders (though not all musicians involved were Flemish, and a few were even Dutch). It's an insider thing, somewhere between a pageant, a super-market and a mail-order catalogue, that's not even listed on Vooruit's website - I got in because I won a ticket (and, thankfully, I was in excellent company). Five bands each got a short set of generally three songs each.

Robin Verheyen Narcissus Quartet (myspace)
Robin Verheyen is maturing out of his wunderkind phase (the challenge, I guess, is to move from impressive to meaningful), no doubt helped by spending a lot of time in New York. Taking off from the more abstract end of '60s bop, they played a single, continuous improvised piece that may (or may not) have incorporated some written material at some points. The quartet moved from colouristic rubato and free-form to a percussive climax and finally slipped into a slow-burn time feel that perpetually threatened to be overturned. Verheyen was mostly above the fray, urgent and slashing on soprano, gentle and thoughtful on tenor. I still find him a little cold, but at least he's working hard to push his music outwards.

Narcissus Quartet - "Wudalianchi"

VVG Trio + Jozef Dumoulin (website)
This was a surprise. On the VVG's first two albums, the open-mindedness was implicit, but the music remained melodically-oriented and neatly organised even at its most improvisational. The three pieces they played here came from a brand-new album I haven't heard yet, and brought in a denser group sound as well as electricity (in the form of an electric bass and pre-recorded sounds). On the third piece, after having looped a sort of sneezing sound that was both funny and irritating, Bruno played with and around a pre-recorded version of the song's melody. The inflexibility of the recording was artfully embedded into a loose almost-groove in an intriguing and unusual way.

The most satisfying piece, though, harked back to the old days. In Gulli Gudmundsson's "Too Soon," against a pre-recorded backdrop of Sigur Ros-ian slow-moving strings and the rustling and plinking of drums and piano, the bassist and Bruno played and played around an elegiac melody.

VVG Trio - "In Orbit - the blast one"

Jef Neve Trio (myspace)
Back again so soon? I'm not complaining. "Sehnsucht," a piece of Schubert-inspired brooding, has become a staple, and in it the jazz looseness and the classical melody sit down and chat like old friends. The other two pieces managed to imply bustling activity and barely-contained enthusiasm even in their quietest moments. Jef is in such a fertile patch right now, he's like the Lil' Wayne of Belgian jazz.

Jef Neve Trio - "Nothing But A Casablanca Turtle Slideshow"

Maak's Spirit (myspace)
Quite clearly, Maak's Spirit is the closest thing Belgium has to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Their usual theatricality was enhanced by a low-budget light show made up of neon lights and studio projectors strewn across the stage and operated by someone sitting next to the drums. The great concert I saw last spring had been based on the compositions from their latest album, but this time they improvised freely and delighted in humourously poking at standard codes of conduct. The dynamic range was vast: they projected more loudly and more harshly than everyone else, despite Laurent Blondiau (trumpet) and Jeroen Van Herzeele (tenor) and Eric Thielemans (drums) not being miked, but ended with a silence (and in near-darkness) caressed only by Jean-Yves Evrard's unplugged electric guitar strumming.

Maak's Spirit - "Strange Meeting"

Flat Earth Society (website)
A big band that draws the raw energy of Duke Ellington's jungle music into a contemporary complexity and an absurdist sense of humour: a growling wah-wah trumpet solo ended up being accompanied only by a coffee mug. To draw a really blog-centric comparaison, FES is an Industrial Jazz Group with a lot more institutional support and regular work.

Introducing the last of the three pieces, the clarinetist, leader and composer Peter Vermeersch mentioned a cameo by Joseph Goebbels. This turned out to mean FES's accordionist repeatedly interrupting the band, first to instruct them, in German, to play with less swing, then with a flat-footed two-beat, then with less chords and so on, until they were reduced to a single staccato note blown in unison. By that time, the docility with which the Nazi's orders were followed had become a little troubling. It was uplifting and poignant, then, when the musicians (the Goebbels impersonator and Teun Verbruggen, in his third appearance of the evening, excepted) filed out from behind their music stands to gather in a semi-circle at the front of the stage and attempt to reconstruct a quiet, swinging music.

The only album I have of theirs is fairly old and not nearly as good as what they played here, so no MP3.

the night of the living roast-chicken-skinned baby-boomer rock performers

2007-09-10T12:54:00.000+02:00

John [Hollenbeck] handles the tension between dissonance and consonance, density and transparency, structure and freedom, darkness and light, repetition and transformation, etc., better than just about anyone else writing small-group jazz right now. I think this is because he really gets that these concepts aren't mere abstractions -- they are all deeply emotionally meaningful, and anyone who wants their music to actually communicate needs to learn how to blend them effectively.
- Darcy James Argue, Claudia Quintet, Todd Reynolds @ The Stone

I’ve been downloading masses of old albums that aren’t available for sale in any form. These things were never released on CD, they were deleted in the 70s, and they just don’t exist anymore. But there are these guys who have collections that they’re ripping off vinyl, tidying them up and putting them up on their blogs at 320kbps.’

‘I’d never have got to hear any of this stuff otherwise — and it’s like archiving them, only backwards. It’s making sure they don’t ever disappear by releasing them into the wild, rather than locking them up in a vault.
- anonymous musician, in New Music Strategies, Three Conversations About Music

If you’re a no-talent wannabe, who needs publicity to get noticed as you sell singles and never generate any touring income, the major label is FOR YOU!
- Lefsetz Letter, More Rubin/Columbia

I genuinely believe that this current generation of clean living, still performing, stage hogging, liver spotted and roast-chicken-skinned baby-boomer rock performers will not only live on for decades - thanks to advances in computers and robotics they will live forever.

Welcome to a nightmare world where Elvis Costello never ever stops releasing albums. Where Sting is constantly 're-sleeved' into newer, blonder, smugger bodies, like in that sci-fi book Altered Carbon. Where Phil Collins shags your great great granddaughter. Where the babyboomers live on into eternity, sucking all the oxygen out of the pop sphere.
- Steven Wells, Sting, where is thy death?

other names of the rose

2007-09-09T23:55:00.001+02:00

Is glam a code word for opera?

sparking more attention

2007-09-08T13:50:00.000+02:00

Herbie Hancock was on French TV last night, promoting his new album. Don't get too excited and romantic about the possibility of high culture on French state TV - he performed at the end of a literary show (guests included former center-right Prime Minister Dominique De Villepin, who has just written his second book on Napoleon, and Régis Debray. Bizarrely, they seem to be good friends) that had started at 11:30 PM.

Hancock's performance was announced at the beginning, but a clip of the band, probably shot during sound check, showed Wayne Shorter alongside Hancock. Amazingly, Shorter went totally unmentioned until just before they began playing. The band was essentially Shorter's quartet with Hancock instead of Danilo Perez and the addition of Luciana Souza to sing Joni Mitchell's "Amelia." I've yet to be really taken with Souza (I've only heard her album of Elizabeth Bishop poetry and her appearances the last two Maria Schneider albums), and she seemed particularly (and voluntarily) colourless here.

As on the two excerpts I posted recently, the music intimated through small strokes and constantly eschewed big gestures, or even repeated ones. Low-key as it was, the quintet attempted a high-wire act nearly impossible to pull off in a few minutes in a TV studio. Ultimately, it was kind of boring. There was, however, one moment of grace when, on the wordless vocalisations after the third verse, Souza held a note and Shorter (on soprano) joined her to sound like an overtone in the singer's voice. It lasted perhaps one second or two, but I'm happy I stayed up late to hear it.

You can see the performance by going to the show's website and clicking on the video camera in the right-hand sidebar. It starts around the 1:37 mark (don't worry, you can move the slider right to that point, you don't have to watch the whole thing).

The show opened with Vanessa Paradis, who also has a new album out (produced by the great Mathieu Chedid alias M, and the first single is vintage him, especially the backing vocals and the interruption on the verse). My favourite part, though, is the cover painting, a Klimt-pop portrait of Paradis by her husband Johnny Depp.

Le jazz, c'est le SEXE

2007-09-07T17:06:00.000+02:00

The finest singers not only hit the notes but erase the difference between notes and words. Singing is most thrilling when it becomes a kind of heightened talking. That’s what happens in Pavarotti's “Che gelida manina” or “E lucevan le stelle” or "Una furtiva lagrima": the beauty of the sound envelops you, but you’re not conscious of the artifice of art. It’s as if someone were making conversation in a dialect of dreams.
- The Rest Is Noise, Thougts on Pavarotti

We're gonna have fun on Sept. 11
- Stephen Hill, a BET executive vice president, in "50 Cent, Kanye West face-off on BET"

Bellowing ridiculous lyrics without so much as batting an eyelid is a cornerstone of rock n roll and I for one will forever defend the right of bands to pen songs about Tolkien, The Crimean War, Genghis Khan, Stonehenge to the hilt:)
- bertjansch, commenting on The Led Zeppelin reformation rocks

Through Musician, the audience gets to share the joy of booking gigs. You will see Vandermark pay one sideman a dollar extra for driving. You will start to understand how much fun load-in can be.
- J.B. Spins, Work: Musician

Ce qui est drôle, c'est qu'en France le jazz a deux images : celle d'une musique d'intellos torturés et incompréhensibles, ou celle des bons fêtards entre le pastis et le cassoulet.

Mais aux Etats-Unis, c'est une autre affaire. Le jazz, c'est le SEXE. Faites attention la prochaine fois que vous voyez un film hollywoodien où le héros va passer une soirée "intime" avec sa bien-aimée. S'il met un disque, ce sera du jazz. Bonne nouvelle ! Née dans les bordels de la Nouvelle Orléans, cette musique centenaire semble donc garder dans l'inconscient collectif américain toute sa puissance érotique... à condition bien sûr de la rendre présentable à la copine de Spiderman !
- Laurent de Wilde, Jazz et Super-Héros (on the jazz club scene in Spiderman 3)

La seconde partie du concert de ce mercredi soir 5 septembre à Jazz à La Villette a confirmé que pour faire du neuf, 5+4 est une formule imparable.
- Alex Dutilh, Imani Wayne

first be.jazz reader poll

2007-09-06T14:38:00.000+02:00

I occasionally put up MP3s, but I don't know if they actually interest anyone. So I've put a poll in the sidebar to get your opinion. It will be active for a week. Please answer, as it'll also be a handy way for me to get an idea of how many different people read this thing.

jazz and blogs #22

2007-09-05T21:14:00.000+02:00

The Soul and the System
Kris Tiner's new blog. At his old one, he promises "to take the blogging project much more seriously, to offer fewer and more concentrated posts that will be distilled from a series of essays that I've already been poking at for years."

My Favorite Things
Russ Neff, from jazz radio and press in Central Pennsylvania, US. [via Rifftides]

Le son du grisli
Chroniques d'albums, interviews...

Mysteriojazz
De jolis petits billets sur les grands maîtres.

forget the cloned tortoises

2007-09-05T12:43:00.000+02:00

Much of what we’ve accepted as jazz repertory over the past eight decades has been forgettable popular songs and dull variations on popular songs, raised to the level of art by intensely creative performances which do not merely interpret but vastly improve upon the original material. And there are a lot of corny, boring, or banal songs and jazz originals out there which resist such treatment because they are simply too corny, boring, or banal.
- Art Lange, "A Fickle Sonance" Point of Departure September 2007 (an excellent and stimulating article overall)

At a time when globalization, stylistic hybridization and post-modernism’s dismissal of dialectical progress has all but atomized the traditional jazz family tree model – with the roots of blues, spirituals and work songs supporting the trunk, limbs and branches – the Italian jazz grapevine model has matured. Though it honors graying trailblazers like trumpeter Enrico Rava and pianist Franco D’Andrea (who performed as a duo mid-way in the Siena Jazz festival that coincides with the seminars), the grapevine model is horizontal, spidering outward in various directions, with shoots entwining about each other. This model has engendered a refreshingly dogma-free pluralism in Italian jazz, which is at the root of the growing international recognition of its vitality.
(...)
Both Schiaffini and Battaglia point to the need to let students learn. “If you tell them everything,” Schiaffini suggested, “then there is nothing for them to discover.” Battaglia believes that “you have to leave space for them to fill in,” whether the student is performing or composing... “This is jazz we’re trying to teach,” said Schiaffini with a faint incredulity. “You can’t give them all of the answers. If they all have the same answers, they will be clones,” Schiaffini added, tapping the table with his fist, as if he was cutting cookies.
- Bill Shoemaker, "Page One," Point of Departure September 2007

Anyone Fancy A Chocolate Digestive was predictably Mahler-esque in its intensity, but the best song was about tortoises. There aren't nearly enough songs about tortoises; I bet even bloody Tortoise have never written a song about a tortoise. This is, frankly, pathetic.
- Do You Come Here Often?, Dish Launch

vandermark on film

2007-09-05T12:36:00.000+02:00

Anyone seen Musician, the Daniel Kraus documentary on Ken Vandermark?

New York Times movie review
be.jazz interview

lay lady lay your money on me

2007-09-04T17:45:00.000+02:00

In his breakdown of the 2007 Downbeat Critics' Poll, Tom Hull makes an aside:

I'm picking up cost-cutting vibes from ECM; tsk, tsk

I guess that he's referring to ECM'snew electronic delivery system that allows reviewers to download MP3s and burn CDs of new releases:

Far too frequently, we sent out CDs to a large number of writers for titles which then received only 2 or 3 reviews. Many of you have written articles about the enormous decline in CD sales so it doesn't need much explaining - we simply cannot continue to send out promo CDs in such large quantities.
(...)
CD's will still be available when necessary for reviewing - but please try using [our new electronic servicing system] so you can limit your CD requests to titles you actually plan to review.
- from an e-mail ECM sent 'round

I gather from his "tsk, tsk" that Hull does not approve. I've never been a massive recipient of review copies (though I've gotten a fair amount of them), so maybe my opinion doesn't count for much, but I think that this is a logical move. A few other labels already use similar, though simpler, systems.

ECM's software is relatively simple and not restrictive. I guess this could backfire if the jazz reviewing community turns out to be a hide-bound bunch that refuses to have any of its priveleges semi-taken away in these lean times. Actually, this could make an even bigger difference for smaller labels for which the cost and time if takes to mail stuff out are perhaps bigger shares of the overall budget.

IODA Promonet (which I used for the MP3s in the post on Nels Cline's New Monastery) has a system targeted at blogs and podcasts. A similar virtual bazaar for review copies could be interesting.

the jazz club & music spots map

2007-09-04T16:50:00.001+02:00

View Larger Map

There's been a link to this map in the sidebar for a while now, but it has only recently become easy to embed a Google map in another web page, so, here it is. I've only done Brussels so far (and maybe not everything in Brussels, either), but I intend to add places in Antwerpen, Ghent, Brugge, etc. I've only listed places I've been to, but I'm not sure how important it is that I keep it that way. Additions are welcome.

A worldwide map with automatically updated concert listings and geo-located photographs would be cool, obviously, but let's keep it simple for the time being.

listening notes: nels cline, new monastery

2007-09-04T00:38:00.000+02:00

Nels Cline
"McNeil Island / Pumpkin" (mp3)
from "New Monastery - A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill"
(Cryptogramophone)
Buy at Napster
Stream from Rhapsody

"Reconciliation / New Monastery" (mp3)
from "New Monastery - A View Into the Music of Andrew Hill"
(Cryptogramophone)
More On This Album

The strangest thing about this very, very good album is Bobby Bradford's cornet. In fact, it is probably among the strangest cornet/trumpet tones I've ever heard. It is acidic, flattened, bitter to the taste, alienating and seemingly barely keeping a grip on the proceedings but somehow supremely arrogant, too, for example in the way he stands outside the ensemble on "Pumpkin"'s ensemble theme statement. It would be a stretch to say that I loved it, but I am really intrigued, almost fascinated.

One—You have to have a healthy irreverence for what everybody else is doing; two— you have to be willing to take risks; and three—you have to be really confident that what you’re doing is for you.
- Bobby Bradford, in Michelle Mercer, "Jazz West"

His exposed lead on the slow and soulful "Dedication" shows just how little he cares about being friendly to you. There's something irreparably cracked about Bradford's playing. This is probably due, at least partially, to the effects of aging: on 1969's Seeking with John Carter, his tone is much purer, his phrasing adheres more closely to the beat and the front-line's unisons have a surgical precision, at the highest of speeds. It is interesting to note the contrast with the age-tempered warmth Charles Tolliver brought to Andrew Hill's Time Lines.

Even compared to his younger bandmates, Bradford seems sour. However brash clarinetist Ben Goldberg and Cline himself get (and they are just as often overtly sweet), they're always ready to make nice and play pretty, as in their duo version of "McNeil Island." Andrea Parkins, here and in Ellery Eskelin's trio, seems to me closest to Bradford's aesthetic.

What does our local Bradford expert think?

francis marmande does not exist

2007-09-03T12:44:00.000+02:00

Francis Marmande is Le Monde's (France's newspaper of record) long-time jazz and corrida critic. I haven't read any of the books he may have written, or even any classic reviews that may have cemented his stature. I just read whatever he deigns to send my RSS reader.

There are many kinds of reviewers (chroniclers, storytellers, analysers, mystics, socialites, ideologues and preachers, to name a few), all of whom have their merits. Marmande adapts the orator's sly, sexy allusiveness (is there any other kind of sexiness?). Perhaps more than any other critic I know of, Marmande is keenly aware that we are reading him reading the music. In other words, yes, we are reading about music, but the critic must make his own kind of music. See the variation of phrase lengths, the repetitions (it's almost a chorus-verse kind of structure) and the interjections in the magnificent fourth paragraph of this review of Bojan Z's Tetraband (Josh Roseman, Christophe "Disco" Minck, Seb Rocheford).

Comment se forme un Tetraband ? Par affinités, par désir de l'autre, et de ce qu'il ne peut pas donner, on verra. Le jazz n'existe pas. Les musiciens de jazz, oui. Vérifiables, tangibles, présents. Lorsque quatre corps, quatre expériences telles que celles-ci se réunissent, les choses sont simples. Ou ça tourne en rond. Chacun englué dans son ego, sa soif de démonstration. Ou ça prend. Les musiciens de jazz connaissent tous cette preuve ontologique du jazz : la première fois qu'ils se rencontrent, ils jouent. Quoi ? Rien. Ils jouent un nouveau rien ensemble. Pour voir.

So sometimes the music is lost in Marmande's ellipses, but when it has "eroticised" the air around it, he is able to pass that charge on to us. Describing the power and hazards and mechanisms of a first-time meeting, he is gentleman enough not to preempt our own pleasure in possible later performances. And unlike some writers who are excellent at maneuvering tight spaces, in a longer article like "Les aigus, c'est grave," Marmande loses none of his density.

attention sparked and courted

2007-09-03T12:02:00.000+02:00

Herbie Hancock - by which I mean 2007 Herbie Hancock, of course - is pretty much off my radar. Normally, I wouldn't really even pay attention to something like his new Joni Mitchell album (as an aside, does anyone believe that Hancock came up with the idea himself, that "Hancock sought out Larry Klein, Joni’s ex and the producer of nearly half of Mitchell’s catalogue," as the New York magazine article states?). I mean, I don't even know Joni Mitchell at all. But About Jazz has posted links to two of its songs and I may have to rethink everything.

The unaccompanied piano intro to "Court And Spark" sets the chiaroscuro mood, the soprano solo (Wayne Shorter, most likely) and Hancock's comping adventuroursly edge into uncertain territory. The spaces they have are tightly circumscribed, yet accommodate vast thought. Can the whole album be this good?

Oh, and Norah Jones sings with a pleasantly roughened grain, but is so far out of her league, everything around her becomes a kind of negative space.

so fall great trees

2007-09-03T10:52:00.000+02:00

When great trees fall, it is wise, I think, for us to praise the ground they grew out of.
- Maya Angelou, from her eulogy for Max Roach

An image is still fresh in my mind of the shaven-headed black man in a dashiki whose technique I glommed, or tried to: he bent at the waist, snapped his fingers and shook his bright dome as if in a self-amused trance. His obliviousness to our regard was what I wanted for myself, was what I wished to hijack on behalf of my own craven pursuit of regard. I began immediately shaking my head, not yet capable of observing the finer details, how his head-shaking must surely have been driven by less ostentatious but completely authoritative movements through his feet and hips, zones I'd yet to learn to activate. But my ears were open, I wasn't deaf to the music, I know I was in the kind of bodily rapture-in-sound where all real dancing begins. Alas, I was trying to lead my dance with my head, like trying to play a song's bass line on a pair of cymbals, or a triangle. Somehow I made this my trademark - no one intervened to advise me otherwise - and so I built my dancing body from the head-shake downward, like a Cheshire cat begun at the grin.
- Jonathan Lethem, "We happy fakes"

[Rick] Rubin then invented a label, calling his company Def Jam ("Def" meaning great, and "Jam" meaning music)
- Lynn Hirschberg "The Music Man"

Christian Brun In Brooklyn vs. Don Cherry Complete Communion: inspiration, quote or theft? (and no, the former is not on Blue Note)

geneva 24-26/08/2007

2007-09-02T19:45:00.000+02:00

the obligatory "view from my room's window" shot

Visiting my family is always instructive (especially as my sister is just back from Brazil, where, in addition to attending a baile funk party, she introduced a Rio neighbourhood to a Martiniquan delicacy and had the local version named after her), but all the blog-interesting stuff seemed to happen in the airport.

At the airport, then, a man walked through the crowd with a ladder slung over his shoulder. Classic slapstick scenes played through my head: someone called out to him, he turned, bystanders ducked, then ducked again as he turned back. None of this happened, of course, just as no-one slips on banana peels in real life, but it didn't matter. I laughed on the inside.

On my way back to Brussels, I confirmed once and for all thaat I like girls' drinks.

Jupiler beer's men-targeted advertising (football league sponsorship, "Men know why" slogan) has always turned me off (the Mini's "TESTOSTERONE" ads are even more repellant. Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to find an example of what you are looking for when your search words include mini and testosterone. This article is close enough.). Less macho approaches appeal more: Hoegaarden Rosée's "dumb men" jokes scrawled on beer coasters, for example.

In the duty-free, I found the pink bottle pictured above. It stood under a big photo of two women pressed together in a nightclubbish environment that I can only imagine would appeal more to men and lesbians than your average heterosexual girl. I liked the ambiguity and the prospect of a vodka-cognac-rasberry-litchi combination and figured IVN would enjoy the look. I'm not sure what it means to be on the wrong side of the advertising demographic fence.

Okay, some family stuff:

then

now

+

I am reminded of an anecdote I meant to post at the beginning of the year, after my last family visit:

My father spent five weeks working in New York last year. During that time he met up with his old friend Jimmy Owens. When he told me this, I had been listening to the reissue of Mingus's At UCLA and perked up. "Do you mean this Jimmy Owens?" (It was an email conversation, I have yet to find a way to hyperlink speech) Granted, this is not of that much interest to you, or even to me. What is of greater interest to me (but perhaps not to you) is that I found out that I had "performed" with Owens once, at some kind of function for UN employees' kids somewhere between the ages of 5 and 8. It's not much (and I can't remember it), but it does put me two degrees away from Mingus and Ellington, among others, and I'll happily accept that.

musician questionnaire: frederik leroux

2007-09-02T18:01:00.000+02:00

Frederik Leroux is a guitarist. Last year, he released his quartet's debut album on his own label. Angular is a careful, Downtown jazz kind of album, throwing in incongruous hard rock riffs. He actually sent me this way back in February...

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:

1. Movie score : Ennio Morricone stuff for the Sergio Leone spaghetti trilogy, Bernard Hermann scores for Hitchcock (ex. Vertigo), Eraser Head (more for the crazy sounds, I don't know the name of the guy that did the sound effects)

2. TV theme : Twin Peaks (I don’t know who wrote it actually...), Black Adder (first series with the very silly voice and lyrics, makes my day every time)

3. Melody : "My One and Only Love" (Wood/Mellin), "My Heroics Part 2" (Absynth Minded)

4. Harmonic language : Bill Evans, Claude Debussy

5. Rhythmic feel : "It's all around you" by Tortoise (on the album It’s all around you)

6. Hip-hop track : "Runnin'" (The Pharcyde)

7. Classical piece : Bartok String Quartets, "Le Sacre Du Printemps" (Stravinsky)

8. Smash hit : 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' by Michael Jackson

9. Jazz album : The Science Fiction Sessions (Ornette Coleman)

10. Non-American folkloric group : Gamelan Jegog Wedi Sentana, I think this is the name of the artist (probably without 'Gamelan' in front of it). This is Gamelan music of Bali. Very hypnotic stuff and a lot of dynamics. Not if you’re having guests over, they might get a tad nervous...

11. Book on music : Style an Idea (Arnold Schoenberg), Silence (John Cage)

BONUS QUESTIONS:

A) Name a surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years: Passion and Warfare by Steve Vai , where did you think I got those monsterchops from ?

B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated: Nels Cline, he’s a very versatile musician but few people know him. He plays in free impro settings like for example with Tom Rainey, but also in the rock band Wilco.

C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn't, not really): Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco

D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer: John Bonham (Led Zeppelin), oh yeah, he's good. I love his playing on all of the Led Zeppelin albums I have.

building your own diyPod

2007-09-02T15:33:00.000+02:00

I first mentioned making a CD shelf three years ago this month. So it's about time I actually got around to building the damn thing.

Long experience has taught me that the success of any engineering project hinges on accurate and detailed technical drawings:

caetano minds the extension cable, as rapturously involved and helpful as ever

yeah, i just had to throw some kind of pseudo-arty thing in there

the dr. frankenstein moment

hanging out with my creation

It is inevitable that a first-generation technology product should contain a few design flaws:

my back panel

stacks of CDs i prepared earlier - a few months earlier

the classification begins - that's the fun part

alpha-chronological (by recording date) organisational bliss... for jazz, at least

I thought I'd made the shelf big enough to take all my CDs, but it's pretty much filled up with just the jazz. I'll probably end up building a similar shelf in a few months (or years...). At least now I can survey my CDs and perhaps participate in group activities such as '70s, '90s and year-best lists.

In closing, the moment you've all been waiting for:

iPod (80 Gb) vs. diyPod

cost: 369€ vs. 53.92€ (+ two half-days' labour, and not counting tools)
capacity: roughly 150 uncompressed CDs vs. over 1,200 uncompressed CDs in jewel cases
time to fill: ripping included? vs. a half-day
portability: as far as you can get in 20 hours vs. centimetres, with great difficulty
metadata management: who has the time to input the bpm of every song? vs. exactly what I need
probability of theft or loss: fairly high vs. fairly minimal
coolness: high, but in a sterile way vs. high and totally authentic

I think the diyPod wins.

fly on the wall

2007-09-01T16:15:00.000+02:00

On [Money Jungle], as on so many other great jazz recordings, the possibility of failure is tangible, and the participants don't seem interested in concealing it: the result is not artful, it is art.
- Jazz: The Music of Unemployment, A Little Max

Ms. [Geri] Allen [is] a member of the first jazz generation to encounter the avant-garde as something other than an insurrection. At 50, she is roughly two decades younger than Mr. [Reggie] Workman and Mr. [Andrew] Cyrille, and roughly a dozen years younger than Mr. [Oliver] Lake: the right age to have absorbed free improvisation as a thread in the canvas of jazz tradition.
- Nate Chinen reviews Trio 3 + Geri Allen

But particularly cozy to my cardiac is Toronto sax-and-buckets, ecstatic-jazz duo Feuermusik... I suspect that for many judges it was their first time hearing F'musik... a real testament to how captivating their Coltrane-on-a-skateboard sound is.
- Zoilus, Look at this Showroom, Full of Fabulous Prizes
(Vote Feuermusik!)

I can’t escape the academic calendar; every time I try to recenter myself to a January-is-the-beginning it backfires.
- Nico Muhly, Fuel

Jazz Middelheim (Day 5) - 19/08/2007@Antwerpen

2007-08-30T12:24:00.000+02:00

Every time I go to a festival and see the people, the tents, the setting (idyllic or not), the scramble for seats that haven't been "reserved" by means of jackets or cordoned off for VIPs that only show up for the headliner, the mind-numbing excess of music, the crush of photographers at the lip of the stage (Volume12 was apparently amongst the mob and got some nice, crisp shots out of it), the food stands and the picnicking, I ask myself why I put myself through it at all (maybe I attend the wrong festivals). Two years ago, Jazz Middelheim was for Wayne Shorter, this time it was for Ornette Coleman.

Jef Neve Trio
Jef Neve - p (myspace)
Piet Verbist - b
Teun Verbruggen - d

The M.C. ran down Jef's accomplishments, insisted on the word "philharmonic," and my resentment grew: must the audience really be reassured of the social worthiness of the music they are about to hear? Would they be less accepting of it if Jef had not won lots of prizes or not had the top-selling Belgian jazz album of 2005 (and, according to a press release, of 2007)?

The actual music was as magnificent as ever, and demonstrated its continued evolution. Gladly, the seven song set was made up exclusively of original (and mostly unrecorded) compositions: their shape-shifting, mischievous and romantic ways have always been far more vivid vehicles for Jef and the group than their takes on standards. Indeed, the uniqueness of this music is becoming ever clearer, from small gestures like the odd, fleeting shapes Jef used to accompany the bass solos, to the larger ones, such as the broadly-written story arcs the drove each piece. And between the two poles, there was Teun's liquid groove, whose details shifted around so continuously that it became almost amorphous.

For a long time, the immediate point of comparaison for Jef has been Brad Mehldau, and he'd be the last to deny the influence. However, I'm increasingly hearing that of Keith Jarrett as well (which undoubtedly has as much to do with my own listening as with the music itself) in the mix of vamp-based pop/blues, mainstream bop (the hard-edged '90s kind), heart-tugging melodies and classical clarity. A section in "Nothing But A Casablanca Slideshow Turtle" (which is as wacky as its title: it begins with a Hanon exercise gone psychedelic and shoots off from there) that featured the heaviest percussive playing I've ever heard this group do, also pointed in this direction. Whereas Mehldau and Jarrett inject everything they do with A Great Significance, Jef did all this in a spirit closer to Jacky Terrasson's playfulness.

every year i love this less and less

Nicolas Thys & The 68 Monkeys
Tony Malaby - ts
Andrew D'Angelo - as, bcl
Ryan Scott - g
Jon Cowherd - p
Nicolas Thys - b (myspace)
Nasheet Waits - d

Thys called up some heavyweight New York friends for a set that ended up looking better than it sounded. It started promisingly, with D'Angelo and Malaby climbing to a dual scream atop a steady vamp. Their mindsets were compatible despite their very different styles: D'Angelo, rocking violently back and forth, raced ahead with a tone that always seemed on the point of bursting, while Malaby, nearly immobile aside from a twitching leg, hung back with a calmer, slower-building power.

The steady vamping, as melodic as it was rhythmic continued, in pretty much all of Thys's compositions, but the overall mood felt a little too smooth, despite Waits's characteristic churn and the front-line interweaving. It was only at the very end that Thys's bass solo turned the mood from appeased to soulful.

Bert Joris Quartet
Bert Joris - tp, flh (myspace)
Dado Moroni - p
Philippe Aerts - b
Dré Pallemaerts - d

The Brussels Jazz Orchestra's The Music of Bert Joris is an absolutely great album of Joris's compositions (and soloing) that I cannot recommend enough. His quartet has just released a new CD, and it's with its title-track, "Mangone," that the concert really took off. The understated 4-bar vamp and the steady ticking of four-to-the-bar rim clicks allowed Joris's sensual phrases to hang in uncluttered air. The sense of stripping away the superfluous to arrive at a pure melodic core is central to Joris's playing, and emerged fully when he played fluegelhorn on an almost-ballad. Despite its quality, I didn't listen to the whole concert because I wanted to rest my ears before Ornette Coleman came on, but the crowd went wild for its local hero.

Ornette Coleman 3 Bass Quintet
Ornette Coleman - as, tp, vln
Tony Falanga - b
Charnett Moffett - b
Al McDowell - el b
Denardo Coleman - d

Most miraculous to me about this performance was that it made music mysterious again. How did they decide to begin and end? Why the trumpet, now, the violin, later? How was the inscrutable relationship between alto and the rest determined? With his spoken introduction, Coleman offered a seemingly simple answer to all these questions, and others besides: "If you follow the sound, we'll all be in the same room."

The three bassists mostly kept themselves out of each other's timbral range (Falanga and Moffett swapping bowing duties, Moffett judiciously applying Milesian wah-wah pedal as Coleman played trumpet, McDowell chording in the upper register), but three improvising bassists is never going to be easy for the listener to follow, so perhaps Denardo's steady, but not unsubtle, pummeling is meant to act as a counterweight to that tangled complexity.

The habitual (though always spine-tingling) encore performance of "Lonely Woman" (no improvisation, just an interpretation of a melody well-suited to a bass-heavy setting, as the original recording already featured that amazing bass thrum) highlighted a second outstanding aspect of Coleman's mysterious music-making. His tone and melodic playing have a conservative beauty that is startling in the context of the rough and tumble of Denardo's high-octane drums and the three-bass mêlée. I once read somewhere that Coleman was unhappy with the way the classic Atlantic quartet albums were mixed, because he wanted the instruments to be more equal in the mix. Here, though, it is difficult not to hear him as above the fray, even as he pushes and pulls against it. It is often said that musicians mellow as they get older, but I wonder if it is not rather that they are rid of all extraneous elements. Everything Coleman played sounded essential, in any case. The crowd roared.

"The Good Life" was included in the set-list (along with a Bach prelude that drew some laughter and some stuff from Sound Grammar). How could you not love this tune, even though the tumbling section in the middle was absent from this rendition?

dumbed digital

2007-08-30T12:00:00.000+02:00

Recently I've had a couple of interesting conversations on photography with Alexis, Michael Chia and Oana (the first two are pros, the third an elightened amateur), notably about the traditional/digital split. So I thought of them when Volume12 linked to this:

I, of course, do not feel in any way concerned.

duff boobs

2007-08-29T23:06:00.000+02:00

And few grown-up fans — except for parents — were paying attention in 2002, when she released her first CD, a concept album loosely inspired by Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of Myra. (It was called “Santa Claus Lane.”)
(...)
There were a couple of duds, including “Gypsy Woman,” a funk-pop misfire that probably wouldn’t exist if the Romany community had a stronger political lobby.
- Kelefah Sanneh reviewing a Hillary Duff concert, in "Amid All the Cheers, a Few Signs of Change"

I'm not hearing gravity radiance there
- Anthony Braxton, in Zoilus, Braxton in Session: 'Go to F as in 'fox' - but not as in Fox News'

So help me figure out what to call the-style-formerly-known-as-minimalism. I'm tempted to suggest something arbitrary like Cogluotobusisletmesism, or Btfsplkism, some ungainly, difficult-to-parse term that the critics can't pronounce nor the public remember, so they won't appropriate it again and make it mean something else.
- Kyle Gann, Bowing to the Great God Usage

My boobs are okay
(...)
Go boobs!

- Lene Alexandra, "My Boobs Are OK"

Os Meus Shorts - 20/07/2007@Le comptoir des étoiles, Bruxelles

2007-08-29T22:29:00.000+02:00

Nico Roig - g
Joachim Badenhorst - bcl (website | myspace)

Le comptoir des étoiles has become the place for young jazz musicians in Brussels to perform and hang out. With three performances a week, it's making it possible to hear what twentysomethings here make of this whole jazz thing (especially as entrance is free). I kind of feel bad about not getting down there more often.

Os Meus Shorts performs the compositions of Nico Roig, a Barcelona expat. They are wide-ranging and very short, (sometimes) sharp shocks. The basic premise is somewhat diluted, however, by their practice of bundling two or three pieces into medleys. This is unfortunate, from my point of view, because the unsettled tension consistently "too-short" performances could create is lost. For example:

That said, there was much to savour, from disassembled-clarinet-dipped-in-water wackiness to hard-driving noisy blues to effusive melody and tortuous guitar lines. I spent much of the second set outside chatting with some Italian girls, and when I came back in, I couldn't find a good location (those are in extremely short supply at this particular venue). I figure that's a good enough excuse for the brevity and tardiness of this review.

standing on a bulkier corner

2007-08-29T22:04:00.000+02:00

In a comment, Tom Djll links to Paul Tingen's informative Complete On The Corner Sessions tracklisting.

For the curious, along with the original On The Corner, the box covers Get Up With It and one track from Big Fun. In addition, there are several CDs worth of alternate takes, unedited masters and a few wholly new tracks, too.

Feerieen Day 2 - 28/08/2007@Parc Royal, Bruxelles

2007-08-28T23:46:00.000+02:00

Feeërieën is a free festival organised by the venerable Ancienne Belgique, and therefore a good opportunity to hear some music I don't know and would never seek out on my own.

The Bony King of Nowhere (myspace)

A soft, dragging voice and soft, dragging songs. The singer was affecting in a lullaby kind of way when he quietly pleaded "Let me sleep in your arms" and got a little Thom Yorke-ish when he fixated on "I taste my own blood," but the comparison ended there. Pretty enough, but the line between being low-key and having nothing happen was crossed fairly soon: all the songs were at the same tempo, built on similar plucked guitar riffs and had identical instrumental climaxes, with stuttering drum cascades. A bit of timbral variety was added when the female member of the four-piece sat behind a keyboard and produced long church organ tones, but the more energetic moments were spoiled by a horrendously inappropriate snare drum sound.

The Partchesz (myspace)

Better-known, as the female singer is from Laïs and the male singer/guitarist from Zita Swoon. They put on country singer accents and sang country songs, but it mostly felt hollow and irritated me, perhaps because I don't listen to country music. The first song swathed the tune in electronic buzzes, drum pads and a heavily reverbed guitar solo, which made it palatable, but further songs were more straight-forward, so we left midway through.

too young to hold on, too old to just break free and run

2007-08-28T16:13:00.000+02:00

"Jazz artists look more cool as they get old. Rock musicians just look lost."
- Pete Townshend, in George Varga "Break out the Ben-Gay - concert venues are being invaded by graybeard stars and they're ready to roll"

It seems to me that when you are getting your [symphony orchestra] asses handed to you by a bunch of Venezuelan street kids, it's time for everyone involved to take a long hard look in the mirror.
- Darcy James Argue, Brave New World

jazz and blogs #21

2007-08-28T01:54:00.000+02:00

Ned Goold
A saxophonist. Plays for Harry Connick, Jr. and records for Smalls, but probably doesn't sound like what you're expecting. Like his music, his blog drops surprises off-handedly. My favourite of quote is not the Biggie Smalls one, but: "Accompaniament to action in a brothel or a burlesque house cannot consist of strict diatonic harmony." With any luck, now that people know about his blog from this New York Magazine article, he'll start posting again.

The 5th Sharp
Trombonist Dave Gibson.

MetalJazz
Writer Greg Burk. I've noted the critical metal-jazz connection before, now it's been spun it off into its own massive article, on the musicians' side, and is itself responded to and expanded upon. [via DownBeast]

Free Jazz
Mostly reviews of new free jazz albums. I find myself fascinated by the cover of the Tribute Allstars' Upate Miles Live in a post on Miles Davis tribute albums: the idea of a claymation Miles is oddly compelling. Another post on Myriam Alter's If and Nathalie Loriers's L'arbre pleure suggest that Stef is Belgian.

Philly Jazz
Sort of an internet TV station.

Heliocentric Worlds
Links to videos.

Classical supplement:
Nico Muhly
I saw him perform earlier this year. I've listened to his CD, which is very good. His blog is great: it's all chatty but dense, you know?

vivre sa vie, Jean-Luc Godard

2007-08-22T23:15:00.000+02:00

In the aftermath of Vivre sa vie's abrupt final scene, is it possible to not feel like a Philistine? I mean, during the long philosophical discussion in the café with the old guy about the relationship between thought and speech, I felt like I was watching a literary show on TV (perhaps because the old guy was the only one in the whole film to speak naturally?). I feel kind of defeated, but at least I know Godard feels the same way I do about Anna Karina's face.

my favourite song right now

2007-08-22T23:01:00.000+02:00

Pierre Akendengue's "Ta'Nzambe" is to Timbaland as Fela Kuti was to James Brown: it sounds of its time (e.g. production values on female choir and the clipped, interstitial vocal shards at the end) yet sacrifices none of its inherited clattering, multi-meter/-tempo/-everything communal rhythmic complexity, and renders it perhaps even more mind-boggling.

Zoilus recently pointed to this new blog, the introductory post to which tackles a question I sometimes ask myself, especially after reading about a musician delving into traditional musics from far away: what of those countries' modern music?

This one of numerous ways in which world music is constructed leaving most of us thinkin that most countries just have really traditional music, collaborative projects with Ry Cooder and westernized pop in their own language(s). Even then, a lot of times, people tend think of most music from other countries as being "traditional," "folk" or "ethnic", forgetting that other cultures might have a different rubric for pop music, and for classical music.

incompatible quotes

2007-08-22T22:39:00.000+02:00

Phil Woods likes to tell a story about his fellow alto saxophone virtuoso and longtime musical partner, the late Gene Quill. One night, Quill played what Mr. Woods described as a "blazing solo" to wild reception from the audience — with the exception of one finger-waving self-appointed critic, who walked up to Quill and declared, "All you're doing is imitating Charlie Parker." Quill removed his saxophone from its strap, handed it to the guy, and said, "Here, you imitate Charlie Parker."
- Will Friedwald, "Ageless Woods Feels a Bit Quincy"

Cecil [Taylor] to me is more like Bud than a person who imitates Bud, just as Anthony Braxton is more like Charlie Parker than a person who imitates Charlie Parker.' Cecil is adventurous, and creative, and he decided to be on his own, to go his own way.
(...)
You know, I worked with Lester Young after he left Count Basie's band. We were at one of the joints in the Village. I just assumed that if I played like the great drummer Papa Jo Jones who worked with Count Basie, that would be the way to play with Lester Young... Well, one night, when I thought I had everything down, I said, 'Ok, Lester, that was a good night.'

And Lester looked at me and said, 'You can't join the throng 'til you write your own song.' He sang that to me. And he said, 'Do you dig the tones?'
- Max Roach, in Howard Mandel's Miles, Ornette, Cecil -- Jazz Beyond Jazz [via Jazz Beyond Jazz]

It may not always come off, but that's what creativity's about.
- Max Roach, in Mike Zwerin "MAX ROACH: From Hip Hop to Bebop" [via Alexander Hawkins]

Here lies, to me, one of the key fault lines between the two main camps on the ways of thinking about jazz (and music/art in general, but let's keep it simple).

--
with acknowledgments/apologies to Doug Ramsey for the title.

jazz for not-dummies

2007-08-15T12:47:00.000+02:00

Another critical attribute of jazz music in general is that it has considerable intellectual content, and that the jazz performer needs high level of both cognitive and subconscious abilities - and a lot of discipline. The originals in particular contain so much harmonic and rhythmic substance that only the serious student of music is equipped to deal with them. At the same time, the solos demonstrate the enhanced level of consciousness needed to spontaneously compose a melody while taking into account so many external factors simultaneously (the tune structure, harmony, melody, themes and variations, time, sound and texture, tension and release, etc.) In short, you have to be really smart in order to play jazz, and these guys are wizards!
- Don Braden, for Steve Wilson's Blues For Marcus

Does anyone feel that this is an attractive description of jazz? Is all that about being super-smart or is it about working at it?

Plus, if the Harry Potter books and movies have taught us anything, it's that wizards aren't necessarily all that smart.

everything's great when you're over 98

2007-08-15T12:26:00.000+02:00

Marc Myers discusses Benny Carter, who was born 100 years ago this month. Rifftides has more information and recommended recordings. Carter's not someone I know much (I don't even have what seems to be his magnum opus, Further Definitions), so I did a little searching. The oldest footage I could find of him on saxophone is a couple of JATP performances with Coleman Hawkins, from 1967. The tenor saxophonist isn't in the best of shape, but Carter is brilliant and fluid. They were born only three years apart, yet Carter seems far more modern than Hawkins, which perhaps has something to do with his knife-sharp phrasing and tone. I don't know if that's a testament to the pace at which jazz evolved in its early years or to Carter's searching mind. Hawkins is in better form on the second video, a blues, and Carter is equally delightful.

Bellson blues - Louie Bellson
Uploaded by boberwig

Carter played many instruments, one of which was trumpet. Here, he plays plays back-up in an awesome Fats Waller music video from 1943:

The rhythm section on this 1975 Montreux date is rather heavy-handed, which every soloist (Carter, Clark Terry, Zoot Sims) demonstrates by not being heavy-handed. Doesn't Sims kind of look like Bill Clinton?

Rifftides links to more videos of Benny Carter performances.

From Brett Primack comes a public conversation between Carter and fellow saxophonist Mel Martin. The promo video for a CD of their subsequent performance together shows that Carter retained considerable powers at the age of 87.

In the conversation with Martin, Carter declares Cannonball Adderley to have been his favourite player. I chose the 1963 German TV session below in part because I love the studio's set, but also because in the first of the three songs performed, you can hear some of what the latter inherited from the former (and having Yusef Lateef, Nat Adderley, Jozef Zawinul, Sam Jones and Louis Hayes in the band doesn't hurt either).

Cannonball Adderley - German TV 1963
Uploaded by madafonka2

Carter's compositions have also left their mark. Stan Getz and Kenny Barron made "People Time" a staple of their duets:

Stan Getz & Kenny Barron
Uploaded by rl666st

music: perhaps not the healing force of the universe

2007-08-14T22:04:00.000+02:00

Man attacked for singing Coldplay in karaoke bar
The story is initially run-of-the-mill funny ("the woman reportedly exclaimed: 'Oh, no, not that song!... I can't stand that f*cking song!'. She then proceeded to beat the man with her fists and the microphone he was holding all the while continuing her tirade against him, the band and the song."), but gets disturbing: "Police were called. Undeterred, the woman continued her assault; headbutting an off-duty policewoman several times and forcing the call-out of both patrol officers and a special Gang Unit."

Bandwagons, snobs, networks and non-functional demand curves
Economics comes snappily to the rescue of "Is X dying?" musical debates (in this case, X = classical music, but it could be anything). [via Alex Ross]

Will the NY Phil go to North Korea?
If they do, would it be a bad idea to perform excerpts from Dr. Atomic?

Non-musical, but funny supplement:
Blind driver caught again
He didn't see that one coming. According to the police, "He was drunk. There were three people in the car with him giving him instructions."

she can sleep whe she's done

2007-08-14T19:13:00.000+02:00

Howard Mandel has a very nice feature on Maria Schneider. I admire its construction: various topics run through it, picked up and dropped at various points along the way. It seems a little odd at first, but by the end of the article, you can see that Mandel was thinking of the big picture from the beginning.

He depicts the contemporary studio situation - almost virtual, even though everyone is physically present:

Three trumpets, four trombones and five saxophonists -- most of them behind stands of flutes, clarinets, double-reeds and other extra horns -- faced Schneider
(...)
Guitarist Ben Monder sat off to the side of the horns on a folding chair, not-so-idly stroking his instrument, though he wasn't audible. His amp, in a hallway, fed directly into the mix board run by engineer Joe Ferla.
A singer was sequestered out of sight, and trumpet soloist Ingrid Jensen played in a glass-enclosed room, a fair throw behind the other horns. As for the missing rhythm section: Pianist Frank Kimbrough and bassist Jay Anderson shared a separation booth, and drummer Clarence Penn played in another one, so no bleed-through would impinge on final mixes of renditions of the complicated charts.

All the musicians wore earphones to hear the ensemble sound, and they had some control over what they heard in those phones. But only Schneider seemed in a position to have eye contact with everyone... except the singer

Perhaps I'm too touchy, but I flinched when I read this:

And whether in the studio or on the concert stage, she attends to her music and musicians more like a perfect hostess than a commander-in-chief, insuring that everyone has a good time as the way to make a well-planned party a memorable success

Well, she is a woman, after all.

It seems to me that Schneider's college-age awakening to jazz is very common, even among musicians, though perhaps not always so extreme. Well, I guess one can't really be expected to grow up with this music any more (I didn't, not really):

I didn't even know that jazz developed beyond swing until I went to college. I didn't know. I had some Teddy Wilson, I had some old Ellington. I thought that jazz basically had died.
(...)
All of a sudden I discovered several decades of jazz music that I hadn't heard. Bill Evans, Gil Evans, Mingus, Monk. I was crazy for George Russell, Bob Brookmeyer's music when he did 'Make Me Smile.' I heard all these amazing jazz musicians who used contemporary techniques. Gil Evans' music -- the intricacies of Ravel or Debussy together with the emotion and spontaneity of somebody like Miles, and the raw rhythm and stuff.

listening notes: miles davis, on the corner

2007-08-13T21:04:00.000+02:00

I know, I know, I'm letting my thought processes be driven by evil empires and their release schedules, again. Still, it'd been a while since I'd listened to On The Corner, so the imminent coming of yet another Miles Davis box-set (already getting mid-listen raves) will have to do as a reminder to put that record on. Also, the great Cellar Door box generated some good discussion, maybe that can happen again.

I love that three of the four tracks are basically variations/remixes of each other, with the blaxploitation 16th-note hi-hat pattern as the common thread. There's enough variety to realise that it's not exactly the same thing the whole way through, but not a whole lot more variety than that. Who needs it? At the same time, there's so much going on, so you have funk, trance and madness all at once.

I love that a single hi-hat splash can drown out the soloist. It's all about the drums and the collective tumult, ebb and flow. Some might take the fact that you barely notice that Miles actually plays on the record as a bad thing. I don't, though some of the best moments come when things quieten down and he is given space.

I love that the first track is called "On The Corner/New York Girl/Thinkin' Of One Thing And Doin' Another/Vote For Miles" even though the sections the title would seem to indicate don't exist.

I would love to say that this album has proven its critics wrong, but I still have not read Stanley Crouch's "On The Corner: The Sell-Out of Miles Davis."

I love "Black Satin." Whistling? An off-kilter beat! An actual melody? Handclaps! Unbridled absurdity?

Sleigh bells!

I love that this music is irreproducible. A few seconds of looped sitar 20 minutes into "Helen Butte/Mr. Freedom X" creates and dispense with the template for a huge amount of future music.

Martha Bayles's "Miles Davis: An Innovator With Dueling Ambitions" brings a good deal of nuance to her appreciation of Davis's career, as she frames his work within a "lifelong struggle to achieve three goals: high musical art, commercial success and a deep connection with his fellow African-Americans." There is one mis-step, however: for her, Tutu lacks "excitement... because one of the players, the producer assembling the recording, is not a player." Of course, that album was produced by Marcus Miller. The same site has a couple more articles of interest, on Miles as pimp, and an overview by Ben Ratliff.

let our garden grow

2007-08-13T19:51:00.000+02:00

It's a jungle out there.

--
title composed by Ethan Iverson

jazz and blogs #20

2007-08-13T17:26:00.000+02:00

Jazz Underneath
Bassist Bill Harrison. On why he's a jazz bassist and not an orchestral one.

Clean Feed Blog
News from the great Portuguese label.

JazzWax
Writer Marc Myers. In his initial post, he declares that "At its core, jazz is an art form best experienced in front of a stereo." He does elaborate on the statement, but has the death of jazz ever been declared more depressingly?

Open Sky Jazz
The Independent Ear magazine, recast as a blog.

The Ring Modulator
Young guitarist Adrian Stevenson, on the trials and tribulations of learning to play jazz.

taking the damned city by strategy - and in silence

2007-08-12T14:06:00.000+02:00

Some more Jarrett discussion:

- a collection of tirades and another one that shows he actually has a sense of humour, as well.

- the inevitable massive jazz forum thread.

In the Perugia case, I think it's important to keep in mind that Jarrett's outburst did not come in reaction to an unruly crowd, but as the trio was walking out and being warmly applauded. It was a pre-emptive strike that's almost enough to make me think that Jarrett's been enlisted by the State Department.

- a great post that folds an eyewitness account account from Paris in 2006 into some more general thoughts. The eyewitness concludes:

If people were finding it hard to concentrate on the music at the start, by the end, I think all people could do was concentrate on not coughing. Doing what he did, KJ just assured HE could concentrate on the music. The audience were silent afterwards, but their attention was not with the music - it was with trying to keep as still as possible.

PWS then declares "I am put off by a lot of Jarrett's music, especially when he drifts into dangerous new agey waters of embarrassingly Romantic tonal backwash." The more I listen to Jarrett, the less this bothers me. I don't dislike it less - I hope I never come to like the sappy fusion tracks on Expectations - but the fact that Jarrett can juxtapose the thorniest inside-the-piano improvisation with mush and seem equally happy doing both somehow feels fearless, to me. I mean, was it obvious, in the late '60s, that Bill Evans and Ornette Coleman could be brought together, as they are on Life Between the Exit Signs?

listening notes: bobby jaspar, modern jazz au club st-germain

2007-08-12T13:20:00.000+02:00

I'll grant that the sentiment is telegraphed by the album's title, the Jazz in Paris series it is a part of and the cover, but this music is essentially Parisian. It's about flâner, the unhurried and destination-free strolling that may involve checking out an open-air book stand by the Seine, sitting in a café's terrasse or lying down on the banks of the canal St. Martin. Of course, Jaspar (and bassist Benoît Quersin) is Belgian, transplanted into Paris from Liège, but he has absorbed the city and it has absorbed him: according to the liner notes, his All Stars was recognised, in 1955, as "the greatest current modern small jazz ensemble in France."

On the opening "Bag's Groove" Jaspar makes understated nods towards the blues by letting his intonation waver, attack slacken and phrasing float, but otherwise he is a crooner for whom everything must sound effortless. This is best demonstrated on his own "Memory of Dick."

Another sublime moment of balladry comes later with "I Can't Get Started," but, interestingly, its interpretation somehow sounds more American, to me. "Minor Drops" is perhaps the only instance of the big city bustle encroaching on the Sunday afternoon pleasantries, as Jaspar, Sacha Distel's guitar and René Urtreger's piano jockey uncomfortably for position before returning to the head.

This cool approach wilts under the glare of, say, Miles Davis's definitive recording of "Bag's Groove" or of more assuredly rhythmical versions of "Night In Tunisia," but douceur de vivre is no bad thing: even Louis Armstrong sang "C'est si bon" (Armstrong's rolled growl "yeah" is one of the greatest sounds in music).

it's hard being a young werther all the time...

2007-08-12T00:32:00.000+02:00

...so sometimes only a Casio will do.

listening notes: bill evans/jim hall, undercurrent

2007-08-11T18:38:00.000+02:00

The most intriguing thing about this album, for me, is the relationship between the packaging and the music. For many, this is a minor concern, maybe even a superficial one: the music towers above whatever thing (or, in the mp3 age, non-thing) it happens to be wrapped in. Still, ill-advised fonts, corny photographs and dreary layouts are painful, while amazing visual art can only enhance (and, in some cases, redeem) the music. And so-bad-it's-great cover art is an inexhaustible source of fun.

Joanna Newsom's Ys probably goes overboard, but the cover painting, embossed outer sleeve and gold-trimmed booklet create a rich context for the music to unfold in. It's not just about the size of the budget, either: Erstwhile's covers are regularly fantastic, especially Keith Rowe's paintings.

If this context provided by packaging was unimportant, musicians wouldn't title their compositions, give their group names, decide to wear expensive suits rather than combat pants, etc. And there wouldn't be this trend, that I'm really tired of, of record companies imposing a really strict look in order to create a "label identity." A part of the music's individuality is erased in favour of factory-line streamlining. Hat Hut, ECM, Ayler and De Werf are examples from different levels in the food chain.

Undercurrent's beautiful cover is tragic, dramatic, oneiric and mysterious. Barry J. Titus's original liner notes read like extremely bad William Burroughs ("Blue, yellow tinged, Mars capillaried, eye, blue crystal, white slash, 'I know what I want! Why is it such a struggle for you? I feel revolutions.'" And so on.). What do either the cover or the liners have to do with the music?

The duets are neither orgiastic gibberish nor haunted ruminations. Even Jim Hall's "Romain," which starts and ends somberly, lightens as guitar and piano give in to the sensual pleasure of intricate dialogue. There's an implicit lightness running through the album (made explicit in John Lewis's "Skating In Central Park") that's at odds with the cover's dramatic weight and a swinging drive on an unusually fast "My Funny Valentine" that's the opposite of Titus's pretension. I suppose music can (and sometimes, must) stand apart from the visual art that is inflicted upon it, but a successful union of the two leads to a more satisfying experience.

An aside: every time I see a picture of Jim Hall, I can only wonder: has he ever looked young?

la boite a musique

2007-08-11T01:25:00.000+02:00

Why am I only now, in its second season, finding out about La boîte à musique? It is, believe it or not, a 90 minute show with no ad breaks about how music is made and, especially, how it is played, on French state TV channel France 2. It's just stunning TV, made for people who love music and have a little bit of technical knowledge of it. Last week's show, which I came across by happy accident, was dedicated to opera. Now, I don't really care for opera, but seeing a counter-tenor sing a stubbornly staccato song about freezing to death on the ground was, dare I say, chilling. The show proceeded to display various styles, voices and music of opera, from Mozart to Wagner, baritone to counter-tenor and make occasional comparaisons to pop singing.

This week's episode was dedicated to the piano, of which the host is an impeccable player, and featured a classical pianist and jazz pianist Antoine Hervé. The keyboards ranged in time from an 1817 pianoforte to a vocoder and detoured through the celeste, glockenspiel, a West European cymbalum variant and the orgue de Barbarie (which is kind of a combination between a punch-card computer and an iPod). Organ fans might have felt left out. The pianoforte was pretty surprising. I'd never heard one, and the radically different timbres it gives to each register and less clinical sound compared to the modern piano reminds the listener of how each sound, especially the ones we are most used to, is a historical construct. It also reminded me how shameful it is that I have never been to Brussels's Musée des Instruments des Musiques

The three pianists had different styles and despite the camaraderie (they ended with six-handed Rachmaninoff), there was a fascinating moment of conflict. The host talked about making the piano sing had and demonstrated by playing a bit of Ravel's "Concerto" (Stravinksy's "Petroushka" had shown its percussive potential). He emphasised that he was playing the melody later than the bass, to which the classical pianist countered that he disliked this style, preferring a more "vertical" and "colder" interpretation he felt was closer to the original intent. He demonstrated. The host's version had been pretty and sensual, but the second one was, in the span of a few - too few - seconds, transcendent.

Every show has a solfeggio section on a slightly out-of-tune hundred year old upright. Last week was about cadences: perfect, plagal, etc. The host joked, as he pounded away, that if you repeated a perfect cadence 30 times, you got Beethoven. The counter-tenor cracked up. This time, it wasn't really about theory, but about how Satie, by limiting himself to one rhythm and two chords, suspended the passage of time.

Hopefully this show will turn up on a bittorrent somewhere, it's great and too-rare TV. There are three episodes left, and I can't imagine a better reason to stay home on a Friday night.

i'm getting out of this goddamned city

2007-08-08T22:29:00.000+02:00

Darcy has video and reactions to the latest Keith Jarrett audience-hating outburst. It seems to be as regular a feature of his concerts as anything else: last month James Hale reported an identical incident in Montreal and asserted that in Toronto, Jarrett "threw the mattress out of his five-star hotel room and ordered a new $2,000 one in." In this age of diminished expectations, Jarrett continues to party like a rock star.

As is his/her/its wont, The Improvising Guitarist asks a lot of pointed questions.

Who do we expect our performers/artists/musicians to be? And why? And what happens when they don’t perform as expected?

I'm not sure Jarrett is the best person to rest this line of questioning on, though. We expect this from him. We expect Jarrett to irritate us, sometimes, as is the case with his vocalisations, even as he thrills us. We expect insufferable arrogance. We expect him to be paid a lot of money and we expect to pay a lot of money to see him (I've never seen him live, but I'd like to). While Jarrett's wealth and position within the jazz musician hierarchy don't negate the servant/master relationship tig outlines, it doesn't feel to me like the right one in this case. I don't know, maybe he's more of a well-heeled bad boy. However, the issue of what a performer is "allowed" to do is an interesting one.

I vaguely remember someone telling me (forgive me if this story is apocryphal) about Marion Brown getting on stage at a festival and only pretending to play, saxophone in mouth but not actually making a sound. The crowd grew irate. Further, what is the audience member allowed to do? For example, there's Forbes Graham's interruption music, which in most cases I suppose would be deemed "unacceptable behaviour." I often wonder what would happen if a listener took a musician's mid-concert political statement as an invitation to open debate. When I saw Dave Douglas in Liège, he linked George W. Bush to the unseasonably warm April and early May we were having (ironically, the weather has been terrible since - in mid-July it was so cold people had to get their sweaters and jackets back out). What if someone had stood up and said that the current weather wasn't Bush's fault, because of the inertia inherent to climate change?

Does "jazz as democracy" extend beyond the stage and the music? Can a lavishly-produced event (the concert took place in a big conference room with fancy lighting and was filmed by lots of TV cameras, including a remote-controlled one on rails in front of the stage and a highly annoying one on a crane) be interrupted in such a fashion?

Lafayette Gilchrist - Three

2007-08-07T23:59:00.000+02:00

Writer Geoffroy Himes is on a tear: along with the great article on Ryan Shaw, Robert Randolph and the pop vs. church conundrum for the NY Times I linked to yesterday, he's got an absolutely brilliant feature on Lafayette Gilchrist (myspace) in the Baltimore City Pages. There's also a companion blindfold test in which Gilchrist speaks freely on a wide array of musical and non-musical topics, a lot of which revolves around the music-society relationship.

The feature goes in-depth about Gilchrist's own style and branches out into a discussion of the challenges of melting contemporary beats into jazz.

one of the most vexing dilemmas in modern music: How can jazz transform the black popular music of today into complex improvisations as it once transformed swing and ragtime? Or, to turn the question around, how can funk and hip-hop shrug off their formalist straitjackets and stretch out into new musical territory?
(...)
These questions are vexing because the very quality that makes funk and hip-hop so pleasurable--the power and the precision of their beats--makes them difficult for jazz to digest. Jazz requires a rhythmic elasticity for the sudden shifts that make it so pleasurable. As thousands of bad fusion and smooth-jazz records have demonstrated, adhering too closely to a repetitive groove kills the pleasures of jazz. As thousands of straight-ahead jazz records have proved, abandoning the groove too often kills the pleasures of pop. How can you accommodate the best of both worlds?

I first saw Gilchrist in David Murray's quartet maybe five or six years ago (with Jaribu Shahid and Hamid Drake). He impressed me by ably following anywhere the others went, from hard-driving groove to austere free improv. Afterwards, we talked a bit and he ended up singing Andrew Hill and Herbie Nichols lines to me.

I've been following his own work since The Music According To Lafayette Gilchrist, his first release on Hyena Records. On it and its follow-up, Towards The Shining Path, his band the New Volcanoes justified its name with heavy, dark funked-up jazz. The emphasis was on Gilchrist's fine horn voicings and arrangements and the solos of his sidemen, relegating the leader to intriguing comping and all-too-rare solos that stood out within a somewhat inflexible template. His third and latest is Three, on which he foregrounds his own playing by paring down to a trio and upping the quality of the compositions, notably that of the slower ones.

Gilchrist combines an old-school beat and fullness (see his comments on Eubie Blake, two-fisted piano and the relationship between music, dance and society in the blindfold test) with contemporary swagger and a dark, rumbling kind of harmonic daring. When he gets really worked up, the effect is great: you're dancing and thinking at the same time, as dense flurries, bluesy figures, melodic fragments and quiet, prolonged trills pirouette around sturdy syncopated beats.

While Jason Moran's trio weds loose, organic cycles of expansion and contraction to high-art concepts, Gilchrist's remains at street-level, producing its sparks in the tension between the short, syncopated riffs Anthony Jenkins and Nate Reynolds are tethered to and the great latitude granted the pianist to dive in and out of the groove. The thrill is in finding out what he'll do next, and Gilchrist's playing is strong enough to carry that burden.

questions and answers

2007-08-06T20:34:00.000+02:00

Peter Margasak's feature on Nicole Mitchell is excellent. The Indigo Trio album (with Harrison Bankhead and Hamid Drake) on Greenleaf is, too. I'd expected it to be a "mere" blowing session, but it's much more than that. Her background is impressively difficult for someone who seems to radiate positivity. [via Greenleaf]

+

The church-music-versus-devil's-music conflict lives on, as seen through the eyes of singer Ryan Shaw and guitarist Robert Randolph.

"It’s that Catch-22," [singer Ryan Shaw] explained backstage at Artscape. "The traditions of the church allow it to preserve musical styles that might otherwise be lost, but it can also make for stagnation...

"If the church gives in too easily to those changes, gospel music will lose its identity," he said, "but if it resists those changes too much, it will alienate the youth. That’s why you have all these battles about what is gospel music and what God wants to hear."
(...)
It's funny, Mr. Shaw said, what churches will and won’t accept. "When R&B started using jazzy chords like 7ths, 9ths and 13ths, you couldn’t use them in church because that was 'the devil's music,' " he said. "But as soon as R&B moved on to something else, suddenly it was O.K. to use those chords because the devil wasn’t using them anymore."

Randolph has actually been barred from playing in his own church because he "plays out." Maurice Beard, one of Randolph's mentors, puts it memorably: "I've had offers to play out in the world, but I made a promise to my grandmother to stay in the church, so I did."

+

visionsong asks if jazz can have its own Mahler:

I'm inclined to argue no- our music, unlike European art music, was built from a small scale, from three minute 45s, from brothels and the Cotton Club and Birdland and lofts and the 200-seat Knitting Factory, so by it's nature it's not as broad as Mahler, or Strauss, or Nixon in China. And when it tries to be- Kenton, Ellington's Sacred Concerts, the Rock-operas of the 70's- it falls flat on its face.
(...)
In jazz (for lack of better language) our brilliance is in many ways in the intimacy of it- watching Trane communicate his processes, technical, emotional and spiritual, seeing Miles break a room apart with three notes, hearing Billy Holiday seemingly wilt into the microphone or Johnny Hodges climb ten stories in a second during a ballad. And currently, watching Dave Douglas and The Bad Plus and Darcy and Ron Miles and so many others try to thread the needles of tradition and innovation, irony and passion that our time demands. Even at their most political, it's a most beautiful form of retail politics, hardly an international soapbox.

+

Hopefully, Steve Coleman will continue blogging like this for a good while to come.

I refuse to accept that 'Jazz' exists. 'Jazz' for me is the not-so-creative part that most people relate to when they hear some forms from the past. I don’t know if I am being clear, but I have never considered the music of people like Duke Ellington, Don Byas, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, John Coltrane, Muhal Richard Abrams, Henry Threadgill – I have never considered this creative tradition 'Jazz'. I don’t care what others call it and I don’t even pay much attention to what these people themselves (i.e. the musicians) call it.

jazz and blogs #19

2007-08-04T15:19:00.000+02:00

M-Base Blog
Steve Coleman blogging, baby! [via SoundSlope]

Holey Lint Out Two Alewife
Trumpeter Forbes Graham. He clearly understands why a musician should have a blog, and says why other might not be too happy to have him in their audience. Also, see mixed feelings on the European orchestra

Streams of Expression
Searching discussions (not just reviews) of concerts, albums, movies, poetry and more general musical topics.

Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel.

Jazz, yeah, but: Jazz prescribes inclusivity not exclusivity, embrace of change rather than resistance to it. Jazz beyond jazz is the result -- conclusions reached after absorption of something new, realizations that are different, insistently innovative and illuminating, not a shadow of or reminiscence about the way things used to be.

And, reviewing a John Hammond, Jr. concert: "Real estate -- a subject as devastating as spurned love in NY blues"

Jazz Workshop
Michael J. West's new column for BlogCritics. See his two-part treatise "In Defense of Fusion." Is John MacLaughlin under-rated? Was Miles's '70s output "a muddy mess?" Is Zappa's "King Kong" better than Weather Report's "Birdland?" Is it true that jazz musicians and fans were "So convinced... that rock musicians could never compete with [them] that they wrote them off without having heard what they were doing," leaving to the best of jazz-rock unexplored?

Outside London, 27-29/07/2007

2007-07-31T20:56:00.000+02:00

We spent last week-end in Epping Forest, Essex, just outside London, England. The weather was unstable, but the company was good and the walks through the woods muddy. The most interesting details, though, came from the travelling.

Just after our RyanAir flight had landed at Stanstead, a trumpet fanfare blared. A voice rejoiced, somewhat along these lines: "Congratulations, you have arrived on time. Surprised? You shouldn't be: 90% of RyanAir's flights arrive on time, making us Europe's number one." A canned audience cheered wildly. In terms of convenience, we should have taken the Eurostar and I always feel sorry for the young, pretty stewardesses who are forced to wear uniforms a middle-aged cleaning lady would refuse, but the surreal humour of the announcement almost made it all worthwhile.

Coming back on Sunday, I used the hand dryers in the airport's washrooms. They're pretty amazing, using blast power rather than heat to get their job done. Which they do extremely well and quickly, but I carried on using it for a while after my hands were dry, just to look at the small, moving circle of depressed flesh it imprinted on them.

In addition to unpacking your laptop and taking off your jacket and your belt, you now have to take off your shoes and have them scanned as well. Considering that this measure led to Paul Wolfowitz's downfall, the fact that the Eurostar doesn't care which socks you wear is another point in its favour. All that remains is for airport security to require us to bare our souls. That said, the idea of a beeping hand-held soul scanner is somewhat attractive.

Michelangelo Antonioni - The Passenger

2007-07-31T20:05:00.000+02:00

Thanks to a more traditional narrative, The Passenger seemed both clearer and weirder than Blowup. Jack Nicholson's David Locke lets himself go into the unknown of another man's identity and wonders what's become of himself, surrounded mostly by stony-faced (African or Spanish) locals who offer him little to latch on to. Logically, then, he seems most at ease when interacting with the lady behind the Avis car rental desk.

Once again, absences come to the fore. Not only that of the desert's emptiness or the characters' lack of explicit motive, but also the lack of music and, to a degree, of movement between obvious climaxes. Those moments that could seem portentously symbolic (Locke "flying" in the cable car, Maria Schneider doing the same in the car, the amazing slow zoom out of Locke's room at the end) are cut short, as if to ward off the idea of a possible pivot point, one moment being more important than another. Even the moment when Locke decides to change identity is underplayed.

While this takes us out of the usual cinematic manipulation, where every action or emotion is articulated and commented upon (music, acting, etc...), isn't Antonioni's removal of those signposts equally manipulative? It does suceed in putting the viewer in a certain state. But maybe this a wrong question to ask: isn't the point of art to manipulate, whether in clichéd ways or not?

I wondered if some of the elements weren't more about Antonioni himself than the film. Notably, the scene in which an interviewee turns the camera on Locke seems like an admission to the viewer.

I met my photographer friend Alexis (who did the photography for Melanie De Biasio's album) at the screening and we had a great, long talk afterwards, on the film (I am unable to do justice to his insight, even though I got a few of the ideas above from him) and his view of photography. Alexis still uses traditional cameras and develops his own shots, which he framed in similar terms to the CD vs. vinyl debate. I hadn't seen his work before; check out his gallery on MySpace, it some fantastic stuff that makes great use of the organic side of traditional photography.

Coincidentally, Antonioni passed away the same day.

mosesin'

2007-07-26T20:22:00.000+02:00

You may already have read Bob Moses's letter to the Boston Phoenix, as it dates from 2001. Actually, I think I've already read it, too. But I just chanced across it again and found it fun.

For those who've never read it and to refresh the memories of those who have, Moses wrote the letter in reaction to an article about "local saxophonist James Merenda." According to the article, the latter is "unsatisfied by the strict neo-traditionalist viewpoint offered by Wynton Marsalis and the anything-goes irreverence of John Zorn and his downtown crew, [so] he's carved out his own niche somewhere in the middle."

Moses is totally opposed to Merenda's repertory project. He even goes so far as to threaten to become a "powerful enemy" if this path is pursued and reminds Merenda of a certain Mingus composition with Charlie Parker in the title. As it happens, you can download Merenda's hard-charging live rendition of that very piece. The reasons Moses cites for his displeasure are: the band names chosen (Mingus Three among them), insufficient musical skill and, most deeply, because "what you like is not yours; only what you live is yours." He continues:

Here are some questions for Mr. Merenda. Do you intend to play Mingus' music for the rest of your life? After all there are many great composers. Two years from know is it going to be Herbie Nichols? Andrew Hill? Elmo Hope? Don't you see this trivializes the life and work of these singular innovators to something akin to changing a hair- style or way of dress every few years?

I can only wonder if any among those three did not study and play the music of earlier, dead or otherwise unreachable, composers. So as not to single out Merenda, Moses also blasts Branford Marsalis's take on A Love Supreme and puts down a future blogger:

On the same concert is the trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum who claims to "explore the concepts of Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman". This is arrogance supreme! I haven't heard him play and perhaps he's a genius but this treats the life and work of these singular masters as lightly as two flavors of ice cream in the same cone because we feel like tasting both. The truth is that Miles and Ornette, both geniuses couldn't have played each other's music. Are we to believe that Taylor Ho Bynum can play both?

So, how is one supposed to learn? Moses prones a Mr. Miyagi/reinvent-the-wheel/school of hard knocks pedagogy:

Start at the bottom. Don't try to play Mingus, Miles, Coltrane etc., until you can play the more basic forms. Join an R&B or Gospel group. (Mingus was a master of these styles.) Play for non-white audiences. Do it for years until you can get the people dancing by yourself... Join a reggae band with Jamaicans (if you are good enough). Master several forms of simpler, but not simple black music, like zouk, calypso, reggae, samba, afro-cuban, funk, r&b or hip-hop. Then you might be ready to take on "jazz" the most harmonically complicated and virtuostic form of black music. Spend twenty years mastering that which for starters means knowing every standard and jazz composition in every key, at any tempo, without ever owning or looking at a Real Book.

At this point, I ask myself why it reduces lives to hair-styles, fashionable clothes or ice cream to go from playing Mingus to playing Hope every few years, but careening through all manner of Afro-Diasporic music is fine, because they are mere stepstones to the more complex and virtuosic forms. Not to worry, however, as after all that hard work (and is that final challenge attainable or mere myth? If not, is it a worthwhile way to spend one's life?), there is a pay-off, slim as it may seem:

If you do all that you might be ready to play a Mingus or Miles Davis composition convincingly. This I can do. Nevertheless, I choose not to because I know the master's dance is to always grow, move forward and create anew, not to look back and rehash what's already been.

But does the hypothetical Moses Method student make that choice before or after finally transposing that 1,274th standard to D# and articulating it clearly at 250, but also able to keep it sprightly at 60? Is it while reflecting on a lifetime of second-rate r'n'b and salsa gigs that he decides that he is now able to "move forward and create anew"?

Hal Galper adds a funny comment:

How many Charlie Parker, Coltrane, Monk, Duke, Armstrong tributes can wesuffer?

This has gotten so out of hand I made the following suggestion to Phil during a period when the band was almost dormant. We should fake Phil's death and start the "Phil Woods Tribute Quintet" Led by a Woods clone. Phil could sit at home and collect a percentage of the band's income. Then every Easter we could have a CarnagieHall concert where we resurrect him.

Last summer my quintet with Jack Walrath on trumpet had just returned from a week at the Estoril festival. I had never played with Jack before and was raving to her about his playing. I mentioned that he had played for years with Mingus's band. [My old lady Lillyan] asked "when he was dead or alive?"

A sign of the times?

more pretty colours

2007-07-24T21:25:00.000+02:00

One of the cooler public art works in Brussels. Unfortunately, I was never in the area at night to try it out myself while it ran, though I'd heard about it. I hope that the music that accompanies the video wasn't actually inflicted on the participants. Nowadays, the prettiness continues, though in scaled-down form.

Michelangelo Antonioni - Blowup

2007-07-24T21:00:00.000+02:00

I know I'd promised the next movie I'd go see would be Transformers, but I was overcome with a sudden craving for something serious and went off to Flagey, which will be showing a few Antonioni films this summer. It didn't help that I dozed off a couple of times (likely at crucial moments, although I'm not sure there are any, in this movie), but I probably bit off more than I could chew (comfortably recognisable Herbie Hancock soundtrack aside).

So, what is Blowup about? A photographer, Swinging London, models, a woman, a murder, beautiful shot composition, mimes? I was mostly left baffled by the meaning of what was going on: the concert (loved the clothes and stock-stillness of the crowd)? the propeller? the groupies that come to the studio? How do these elements fit in? Even the things that might have been centrepieces (the murder, Vanessa Redgrave's character) are regularly left aside. Everything remained mysterious, cognitive dissonance abounded (an early example is the scruffy guy in tattered clothes getting into the posh car; the guy turns out to be the fairly well off main character). The photographer's photos were all undeniably amazing, though. Perhaps they hint at the longing to be compassionate/meaningful that pushes him to investigate the mystery?

Bill, the painter, says early on of one of his own pieces that they look like a mess at first, until you find something to hang on to and it all makes sense. He could have been describing the film (an exquisitely rarified kind of mess, of course), except that I haven't yet really found anything to hang on to. They're showing other Antonionis, such as The Passenger (with a young Jack Nicholson, who would have made such a great Wolverine in X-Men) soon, so maybe seeing a couple more will help me understand the director's work.

tech notes

2007-07-24T00:10:00.000+02:00

New sidebar feature: shared items from my Google RSS Reader. I wouldn't dream of forcing you out of your own RSS reader bliss to follow it: it also has its own feed and web page. I'll leave the del.icio.us plugin for now, I guess for stuff that I don't get from a feed.

Also in the sidebar: I've added some means of contacting me, in order of decreasing probability of get a response. Having gotten the hang of the Blogger 2 widgets, I've updated the various blogrolls, mainly with stuff from the jazz and blogs posts.

And most importantly, comments work again. I think.

jonesin'

2007-07-23T23:38:00.000+02:00

Gary Giddins has a nice Hank Jones feature in the New Yorker.

Jones is perhaps the most venerated of contemporary jazz pianists, and not just because he has outlived so much of the competition. Jazz taste oscillates between decorum and expression, usually favoring the latter. In the years when jazz piano was dominated by obdurate, percussive modernists like Thelonious Monk and Cecil Taylor, Jones was often perceived as a genteel professional, and admired more for the reliability of his technique than for his wit. In today’s more ecumenical musical climate, in which pianists like Bill Charlap and Jason Moran tend to mediate percussive dynamics with lyricism, Jones’s approach seems almost prophetic.

jazz and blogs #18

2007-07-23T17:25:00.000+02:00

Alexander Hawkins
Young British pianist at the crossroads between jazz and improv. His Convergence Quartet (with Dominic Lash, see below, Taylor Ho Bynum and Harris Eisenstadt, perhaps the first-ever fully-blogging jazz group?) has just put out a record I look forward to checking out at some point. You can also hear some of his music on myspace (currently, it's all solo piano). There's a diamond-hard edge to his touch and a Taylorian bent to his brief, sort-of unison motifs, though his improvising prefers fast-flying detail to all-devouring flurries.

Forces of Circumstance
Dominic Lash, bassist. Soberly well-written. Read about his practice regimen and various concert reviews.

Fred Kaplan
If, like me, you were frustrated that Kaplan didn't write about jazz more often on Slate (although his politics/security/war articles there are fascinating), check out his new blog. Lots of good writing (on Jarrett, Konitz, Moran, Anat Cohen, JJA Awards, etc.), but a great bit of news I'd totally missed: Sonny Rollins is to perform and record with Christian McBride and Roy Haynes. My admiration for Haynes knows no bounds: did any other early bebop player match his ability to follow avant-bop evolution for 20-30 years, from Parker, to J. Coltrane, to Kirk, to Corea, to A. Coltrane and more I'm probably forgetting?). Perhaps this album will please those who feel that Rollins has been coasting for the last few decades. [via The Jazz Clinic]

Learning To Listen
Richard Pinnell: Cathnor label owner, man-about-eai-cyberspace. His label recently released MIMEO's sight, which has garnered much discussion where you'd expect it to.

exhumed ephemera
Stephen V. Funk's mp3 blog. Not only jazz, but enough of it, and well chosen.

Melanie De Biasio - a stomach is burning

2007-07-19T23:47:00.000+02:00

Melanie De Biasio - voc (website | myspace)
Pascal Mohy - p
Pascal Paulus - wurlizter, hammond, clavinet
Axel Gilain - b
Teun Verbruggen - d
Steve Houben - as, fl
(Igloo)

Melanie Di Biasio's voice is infused with a dark, caramel warmth that is at its best when given time to ooze out slow and quiet. Occasionally clumsy lyric-writing and diction (De Biasio sings mostly her own English-language songs) is rendered irrelevant through timbre and lingering phrasing. Although a sprinkling of more melodic and sprightlier songs enliven the album, it's when the tempo crawls and forms are distended that the singer can generate her most powerfully absorbing atmospheres, as she does on the title track.

Her high-pedigree lineage (Billie Holiday/Nina Simone/Erykah Badu) places the singer at the centre of the songs, rather than as a mere bookend to instrumental solos. Swathes of well-chosen keyboards, cymbals washes, discreet guitar, rumbling drums, double bass ostinati and occasional backing vocal chants deepen the mood. This thick middle ground provides an apposite texture: luxuriant and enveloping, without a hint of sappiness.

The instrumental solos are sucked into De Biasio's orbit, emerging naturally from the singer's silences and keeping her sense of enchanting understatement, either in thickly interwoven tapestry of brief interjections or in brief, quietly dramatic statements. And sometimes, solos don't even need to emerge: on "My Man's Gone Now," a full-bodied lament emerges from shell-shocked realisation, and the slow swinging 12/8 is given the space for the news sink in. Even when she's not singing, De Biasio is all over the record.

a stomach is burning is a refreshing, unified debut that is low in volume but high in seductive impact. It's not like there have been any notable Belgian jazz singers since David Linx, but De Biasio may be the one to fill that big gap.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2007-07-19T23:07:00.000+02:00

I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the first time on DVD a few days ago. It not only confirmed that the HP films had been getting steadily worse since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, it was simply terrible, all disjointed and bland. Everything that had initially made the series fun (magical details like people moving in photographs and staircases randomly changing places, colourful characters, comaraderie, a sense of fun, etc.) were replaced by an obsessive focus on the least interesting part of the whole thing, the three Tri-Wizards Cup challenges.

So I went into Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix with little hope. It turned out to be great, possibly the best yet. Whereas Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire felt over-stuffed, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is densely-packed and coherent. You actually care about the main characters again and the secondary ones (the Wesley twins, Imelda Staunton, a few gravely hissed words from Snape) add life. And, there's lots of magic!

Next up: Transformers. Lots of gigantic robots! High culture, you see.

roadworks

2007-07-18T01:24:00.000+02:00

I realise the blog is looking terrible and is missing comments, some links and sidebar widgets. I attempted a late-night transition to a Blogger 2.0 layout and experienced some difficulties. Hopefully all will be better soon.

sonny likes him too

2007-07-17T21:07:00.000+02:00

There are lots of ways to commemorate the 40th anniversary of John Coltrane's death. I'm leaving it up to everyone else to find good ones. Brett Primack has a video discussion with Sonny Rollins, Jimmy Heath and Paul Jeffrey, along with footage and sound clips from Rollins and Coltrane.

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Wall of Sound has an interesting Gary Giddins quote that climaxes with "The 1960s avant guarde in clearing the slate of preconceived notions paradoxically opened jazz to a more generous involvement with its past." This of course completely stands the widespread "acoustic, historically-informed jazz was reborn in the '80s" theory on its head. Avant-gardism not as rupture but as a non-ideological embedding of the past into the present... that's a nice possible description.

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Erik Friedlander feature in the New York Times. After seeing him with Bar Kokhba, I'm pretty convinced I should be checking out his own music. Any suggestions?

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Speaking of that Barcelona show, Vanishing Signs has a nice post on Marc Ribot.

From Cuban dance music to punk skronk, cerebral film soundtracks to soaring interpretations of the Ayler hymnal - he plays it all with a rare authenticity.

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Authenticity! Improvising Guitar is starting a series on post-modern guitar with a discussion of Mina Agossi and Bill Frisell (visionsong has a first stab at a response).

I don't know Frisell well at all, but I've been listening to a couple of recent sideman appearances, on Cuong Vu's It's Mostly Residual and Jewels & Binoculars' (Michael Moore/Lindsey Horner/Michael Vatcher) Ship With Tatooed Sails. Vu's album is excellent, and everything Frisell does on it is spectacular.

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Somewhat related to what I think about when I hear guitarists like Ribot, Frisell or Nels Cline, is the textural issue David Valdez lays out.

So often Jazz devolves into a string of connected 8th note lines, with little change in the texture that is being created... Think like a sculptor or a painter instead of a musician once in a while.

How important are individual notes when the larger sound sculpture is bland and lame. Hip Be-Bop lines aren't enough to keep things interesting. Go ahead a make subtle shadings to individual notes! (Alternate fingerings and overtones are great for shading pitch and timbre)

You want to make your solos have a texture at least as complex and interesting as someone speaking a romance language.

Listening to Ellery Eskelin's Vanishing Point the other day, he's a great example of someone who manipulates textures and lines masterfully, well beyond the point of applying the former to the latter. Add in the clashing overtones of multiple bowed string instruments (including Erik Friedlander's cello, so maybe I haven't drifted too far off topic after all) and Matt Moran's vibraphone, and it's an ideally-suited immersive foamy textural wash that's quite different from his better-known trio with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black.

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Eat your heart out, Domino Day!* A compilation of a Japanese TV show's great Rube Goldberg-inspired opening credits. [via Very Short List]

* Believe it or not, Domino Day is shown live on France's biggest TV station. It lasts hours. It's like watching paint dry, only, unlike the paint, it claims to be entertaining. Admittedly, watching the dominoes fall to reveal grotesque tableaux has a repugnantly hypnotic effect.

back on stage, back on the page (ii)

2007-07-16T23:48:00.000+02:00

Sly Stone's return to the concert stage is not going too well, apparently. In Gent, the Blue Note Records Festival organiser is asking for his money back. He says he had to literally drag Stone from his hotel room to get 20 minutes stage time from him (some photos of the gig here, and an unrelated one that's not to be missed)

Vibrations searches long and hard to come up with a kind description of his Montreux Festival gig, comparing Stone to an archeological artifact (they call him "almost mummified") that has lost all of its sheen and serves only as a pointer to past splendour. A commentor is less gracious, calling the concert crap, despite a good band and reporting that Claude Nobs semi-apologised for the performance.

listening notes: horace tapscott, the dark tree volume 1

2007-07-16T23:27:00.000+02:00

I was ecstatic, yesterday, to find the first volume of Horace Tapscott's The Dark Tree. It only takes a few minutes of the title track for it to live up to the hype: John Carter lingers dispassionately high above the dark, dark ostinato Cecil McBee and Andrew Cyrille are hammering down, before diving in fully. Tapscott layers on thick, roiling piano textures that manage to change just enough for the whole not to be too static. The ostinato lightens for Tapscott's own solo, which allows him the space for ominous texturising and frantic, stumbling-over-itself line-spinning. It's just a fabulously intense performace throughout.

"Sketches of Drunken Mary" starts as a more traditional swinging waltz, but with an appropriately tipsy feel. "Lino's Pad" opens with a military snare drum pattern that's great because you can hear the drum's metallic overtones (that's a sound I've always loved). The pattern and a bass vamp anchor a more relaxed, bluesier version of "The Dark Tree" ostinato, in seven and with a swinging bridge in four. The alternation threatens to get a little tedious over sixteen minutes, but doesn't, not quite. Tapscott gets to mix percussiveness and rough-hewn lines to great effect.

Carter pulls off the trick of always seeming just a little distanced, but audibly tearing it up at the same time. He creates high drama in "Lino's Pad," suspending the action by ending phrases with strangled whispers in the kettle whistle range, before grandly swooping into something else. It's only on "One For Lately" that his sound seems to emerge from the heart of the ensemble, rather than descend upon it from above.

The final track recaptures the brilliance of the opener, but takes an opposite route: complex, abruptly zigzagging interaction that lives off an unstable energy stuffed into a compact ten minutes. It never settles into anything near a groove, but is tense and fascinating all the same.