Commenting away

Please allow me to draw your attention to the comments at the end of the Lou Donaldson interview a few posts below. David's thoughts on John Coltrane are quite interesting, and I would be curious to hear other opinions.

Computer troubles

My computer is slowly but surely dying, so if the blog suddenly goes cold, you'll know why. I will try to get the computer out to repair before it goes totally dead (and hope that something can be done), so despair has not set in just yet.

Atomic - Boom Boom

Magnus Broo (tp), Fredrik Ljungkvist (ts, cl), Håvard Wiik (p), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (b), Paal Nilssen-Love (d)
Jazzland Records

To claim that jazz that such and such a musician proves that jazz is not dead is just as big (if not bigger) a cliché as declaring jazz dead. That said, listening to a group that merrily goes beyond (or around) the technical difficulties of contemporary jazz so as to simply expend their youthful energies and make some noise, still evokes a special kind of pleasure. Furthermore, just because Norway is a cold country doesn't mean the music should be too. It's not for nothing that Ken Vandermark wrote the over-excited liner notes: Chicago in the winter is probably almost as cold as Oslo.

With a name like Atomic and two albums titled Feet Music and Boom Boom, one could be pardoned for expecting electro-jazz of some brand or other. However, Atomic sports a most traditional trumpet-sax-piano-bass-drums line-up. As the Vandermark reference suggests, what makes this band a joy to listen to is that they are part of that fraction of the jazz world that is not afraid to combine the energies unleashed by both bop and free jazz. The title track shows this clearly, as Paal Nilssen-Love drums up a thunderous, Elvin Jones-like swing: he, along with pianist Håvard Wiik, is the group's lynchpin. While trumpeter Magnus Broo shatters his tone and pauses only to avoid fainting, reedman Fredrik Ljungkvist would rather draw lazy blotches or dotted outlines without breaking a sweat.

Feets From Above and Hyper show a marked Ornette Coleman influence. The former rests on a rickety melody, after which Ljungkvist is free to pay his own tribute to Coleman in his harsh herky-jerky phrasing. The latter frames a furious piano-drums bashing in a more dignified unisson theme.

Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans come into play on Re-Lee, its bouncy swing and three-way simultaneous improvising recalling the blind pianist, and in Wiik's solo on Cleaning the Dome possesses that barely restrained aggression tempered by only by the last remnants of lyricism of late-period Bill Evans.

Not everything is about high-energy playing. The calm and spare, but not austere, Toner Fran Forr cuts up increasingly New Orleans-tinged written and improvised material with clattering percussion interludes. Praeludium is a Hindemith transcription, a warm ballad which is slightly soured by Ljungkvist's uncertain clarinet.

The album closes with Radiohead's stately Pyramid Song. Not much is added to the original's unusually paced 4/4, but it's still a nice moment. It is often said that post-Tin Pan Alley popular music is too musically poor to make good jazz material, but I would argue, rather, that it is much more difficult to add something of significance to a piece conceived as a self-sufficient studio creation (be it Radiohead or Stevie Wonder) than to a Tin Pan Alley song made to be portable from one format to another.

Those who have heard Feet Music will notice that Boom Boom is more conceptual and less direct. While this could be reason to prefer the former to the latter, it is not a reason to pass it over.

Scarlet fever

Sifting through a second-hand bookshop (on the same trip as the epic CD harvest detailled below), I came across the sheet music to two Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757) sontatas. His 555 sonatas were originally written for harpischord and have been killing me recently.

They're awesome, and I don't even like the harpischord. Rather, I didn't like the harpischord when I was listening to it like a piano: Scarlatti often makes it sound like a guitar, which may be due to him having spent a lot of time at the king of Spain's court. In any case, the guitar sound suits the harpischord's harshness extremely well. Also, what he writes for left hand is extremely hip and even modern sounding, even if you do sometimes get those clunky descending tonic-fifth-tonic figures.

For those of you in Belgium, check out Scarlatti's Complete Sonatas on that ridiculously cheap classical albums they have at Kruidvat. I have volumes 2 and 3, which are both 3 CD sets and cost around 4 euros each.

To come back to the sheet music I bought, my Clavinova has a harpischord setting which will be getting a much-needed workout. "1910" is pencilled in on the cover's upper-left hand corner, which merely added to my geekish excitement.

It's a disease

New:
Eskelin, Ellery - Figure of Speech
Hill, Andrew - Passing Ships
Outkast - Aquemini
Radiohead - Hail To The Thief
Roach, Max - We Insist! Freedom Now Suite
Tatum, Art - Solo Masterpieces, Vol. 6

Used:
Adams/Pullen Quartet - City Gates
Jambangle - Trinity Song

Borrowed:
Evans, Bill - Turn Out The Stars (6 CDs)
Music, Inc. - Live at Historic Slugs
Nilsson-Love, Paal - Dual Pleasures
Sclavis, Louis - Les Violences de Rameau
Shaw, Woody - Little Red's Fantasy
Shaw, Woody - Two More Pieces Of The Puzzle
Zulfikarpasic, Bojan - Koreni

"This should hold me for a while," he thinks, lying to himself.

Swinging fascists

From the news pages of the Belgian RTBF radio's jazz show:

Romano Mussolini is the youngest son of the italian dictator Benito Mussolini, but he has no interest in politics: his real passion is jazz. He had the opportunity to accompany Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Chet Baker, Helen Merrill... This gentleman is forever a fan of the swing pianists he admired in the forties. "Le Grand Jazz" features him in an unreleased concert-series until december 16th.

Lou Donaldson interview

Lou Donaldson interview from 1981. Seeing Donaldson with Dr. Lonnie Smith on B-3 in january of 2002 was great fun, even if the music wasn't all that interesting. He really knew how to warm up a cold winter's night. Interview highlights:

Yeah, I’m way away from that commercial period in the ‘seventies. Well, at that time two of my kids were in college; so it was a different situation then. I needed a whole lot of bread. But they’ve completed it now—and I’m back to normal
(...)
People have seemed to shy away from the avant garde movement, and they’re coming back to the mainstream . . . straight–ahead jazz, whatever you want to call it.
(...)
See, everybody liked everybody—that’s all you need, to play jazz. That’s a funny thing; it’s different from any other type of music. If you’ve got the feeling between the drums, piano and rhythm, and the horns—that’s it. In fact, you don’t even have to like ‘em; you can hate ‘em, but you like the way they play.

I’ve heard of bands where guys didn’t even speak to each other for fifteen to twenty years; but they liked the way they played—so they played.
(..)
Most everything of intrinsic value in jazz left with bebop—that ended it. From then up to now, it’s nothing—it’s just a waste of time, really. They’ve tried to categorise jazz into something that it’s not. Spontaneous improvisation can be done with any type of music, not just jazz, but what they’re trying to do now—they’ve got ‘harmonic improvisation’ now. They’re concentrating on it in schools, and most of the young musicians are playing that way—and the essence of jazz is gone. You know, the bluesy feeling, and the soul, and the feeling in the rhythm—that’s gone. It even pains me to hear some groups now—some of the top, highly–rated people. It’s really sickening to hear it, because they don’t have the basic ingredients. Like taking the sugar out of cake—it’s got a lot of dough there, nothing else.

I had a young fellow ask me: “Man, why did they rate Lester Young so great? He doesn’t seem to be playing anything.” I said: “Well, my friend. . . I don’t know how to explain it to you. You would have to have lived back in that time, to understand what I’m telling you. It’s not a matter of how many harmonic changes you can play. You’ve got to realise that Lester Young was given two–and three–bar solos, and he had to get something in there, within two or three bars—and that’s really hard to do.” You didn’t have time to stretch out; you had to play what you were going to play, and play it quick. See, in those bands like he played in, it wasn’t a matter of how much a guy could execute a facility—it was just his concept of the music and what was done. And if you didn’t play to suit those bandleaders, that was your last solo. Some guys sat in those bands twenty years, and never got one solo—the bandleader didn’t like their concept. They had to accept it, if they wanted a job.

All they call jazz today is: soloing, knowledge of harmonics and facility on the instrument. Those things are very important—only if you’ve got the other ingredients to go with ‘em.
(...)
See, a lot of people don’t know that Coltrane was not a great bebop player. He was there all the time, but he never did really capture the bebop feeling in his soloing. Well, he was a hard worker; he practised a lot, and he got a lot of stuff together—but it has nothing to do with jazz. Not really. When you play harmonics, and play through the changes of blues, that’s really not playing blues. Some guys play one note and play blues; if you don’t believe it, you listen to some old records—those cats played at best, four notes, and they played a whole blues chorus. And it sounds good too.
(...)
Believe me, I have yet to meet one A. and R. man who knows anything at all about music—let alone jazz. They just don’t know anything about music, period. You could play a wrong note, play in the wrong key, anything—they’d never know. But the reason Blue Note was successful is that they had two guys who really loved jazz. When they’d get in the studio, they’d start the tape, you’d play what you were playing; when it was over, they’d pay you and you’d leave. They wouldn’t come up there in the middle of a song, and say: “Wait a minute—that doesn’t sound right. Do this, do that,” because they didn’t know what to tell you to do, anyway. So, by not getting in your way, they were very successful.
(...)
My name was on albums like “Sophisticated Lou”, “Sassy Soul Strut”, “Pretty Things”—and they earned me a lot of money.

What would happen there: they’d record it, and I just overdubbed it. A lot of times, I never saw the musicians; I don’t even know who was on the dates, unless you tell me. Because it was a drag to me, anyway. They’d say: “Why don’t you come and rehearse with the group?” and I’d say: “Not really—because if I do, I’d most likely have the arranger change all the music. So just put it on tape and I’ll come and play it. I’m not going to play it but once, anyway.” I never played ‘em more than once; I listened to it one time, and then I’d cut it—that was it. Because it was nothing to play—everything else was already there.

...But see, with that commercially packaged kind of stuff, you can’t do that; there’s nothing spontaneous about those records. It’s just one of those things, man. But fortunately, it didn’t hurt me at all; financially, it worked out fine.

Dangerously Beyoncé

Listening to Beyoncé's Dangerously in Love for the first time, I'm quite pleasantly surprised. Maybe that's because I don't listen to much contemporary r&b, so I enjoy the diversion disproportionately. I don't even have any Destiny's Child album, even though I enjoyed a lot of the singles from The Writing's on the Wall.

There are a surprising amount of direct old-school references for someone many to be consider to be simply bubblegum pop. Straight-up sampling is, of course, not unusual in this day and age, but the way they are integrated and re-made into new songs take it beyond simple jacking: Beyoncé is showing her knowledge of the genre. Shuggie Otis samples on "Gift From Virgo" and on "Be With You" Shuggie is interestingly mashed together with a hook from a much more recent r&b hit, which I really can't remember the details of... (En Vogue?), "Work It Out" is a mix of James Brown vocals ("Huh, Break it down now!" and Maceo-like sax interjections) and updated The Meters-style rhythm, Donna Summer's "Love to Love You Baby" is interpolated on "Naughty Girl" and of course I wonder where the horns on "Crazy in Love" come from.

To call Beyoncé pretty would be something of an understatement, but that doesn't necessarily mean the music itself is going to manage to be sexy. I think she pulls it off on "Speechless:" its achingly deliberate build-up to the prolonged "Yeeeesss-oooooohh" is pretty explicit, without being crass.

Clap clap pegged "Yes" as experimental, but surely so is "Hip Hop Star," with its heavy shuffle and Beyoncé's completely un-r&b-style singing. And of course a Big Boi cameo never hurts.

The only duds are the collaboration with Missy (maybe because discussion of Zodiac signs as a signifier of profound spirituality annoys me, as well as the totally needless shout of "Reeeeeeeewiiiiind!!!!") and "Baby Boy," as well as some of the sequencing. Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I find transitioning from "Be With You" to "Me, Myself and I" or from the slow "Speechless" to the bouncy "That's How You Like It." Overall, I'm not sure how easily the harder, more hip hop, songs sit with the r&b. There's also that odd line on "Daddy:" "I'm so proud of what you've become" is a strange thing to say to your father.

Coldplay it again

The ironic appreciation of Coldplay I hinted at here is bourne out in this Pitchfork review:

Coldplay are arguably the world's biggest rock band, so according to my indie rock guidebook, I should treat them with smugness and derision. In the past, Pitchfork has only given them compliments as if they were confessions-- and the site wasn't alone (or necessarily wrong), either.

I know lowercase has been listening to the album - how is it?

Unusual keyboards

Following on from the review below, here is a description of an East-meets-West instrument found in Iraq:

Early media reports after the war lamented the destruction of a keethara: an unusual piano with a dual keyboard, one tuned to Western scales, the other to Eastern quarter-tones. Actually, the keethara is intact, damaged but reparable.

Wajdi Cherif - Phrygian Istikhbar

Wajdi Cherif - p
Diego Imbert - b
Habib Samandi - perc
Jeff Boudreaux - d

I received this CD on the 28th of october and have been completely taken by it, playing it three times in a row the morning I got it, and several more times since. Wajdi Cherif is a Tunisian pianist and as such mixes jazz and North African music. The particularity of his music is how natural it sounds. It can be put in the same ballpark as Rabih Abou-Khalil, but making the piano sound arabic is a challenge in itself, and Cherif comes up with beautiful results. The track titles hint at Cherif's position between France (he lives in Paris) and Tunisia: "Voyage," "Waiting For Paris" and "Tunis by Night." The title track seems to carry an unwieldy name, but in fact, "istikhbar" means improvisation in literary arabic and "phrygian" is the name of a mode.

The piano does not have a huge history in Tunisian music, for obvious reasons: its tempered nature does not lend itself to arabic music, with its quarter-tones, as naturally as stringed instruments. However, there is a tradition of vocal accompaniment (briefly cited in the closing "Tunis By Night") and nowadays many orchestras use synths. Cherif uses appogiatura (grace notes) and other forms of ornementation to achieve an "arabic" sound, to stunning effect. This procedure is neatly summed up right at the beginning of the disc, in the piano solo introduction to "Voyage." However, these colorations never sound like mannerisms. Rather, they ably convey his Arabic origins, just as his melodic and chiselled improvisations show how Cherif has absorbed jazz culture. On "Waiting For Paris," the pianist even abandons his Arabic side in favour of more Bill Evans-ish atmospheric playing.

The pianist is clearly the star here, but Habib Samandi is wonderful throughout on derbouka (a great percussion instrument in itself, it ranges from deep and booming when struck in the middle to high-pitched and metallic when struck at the edge, and being played with the fingers gives it great flexibility and subtlety), but especially so on the piano-derbouka duo "Phyrgian Istikhbar."

The only downside is that this is an EP rather than a full-length CD. At 30 minutes, I was definitely left wanting more. Quality over quantity.

The CD is available from Jazz Valley (for Europe) and CD Baby (for the USA).

Wajdi Cherif's website

Happy St. Nicholas!

UN Music Club concert

My father, during the Club's first concert on the 2nd of December, which he tells me was a huge success. I had first mentioned the Club here.

Club International de Musique

Unexpected concert intrusions

Not a problem I've encountered yet, but of course, I'm young and hip.

Dylan Drazen mixtapes

Nightclub jitters is already proving itself a valuable resource. I just downloaded a CD-length mix-mp3 from dylandrazen.com.

If, like me, you don't like techno/house stuff enough to actually buy any, but would like to have some handy for parties or occasional background music, then check it out and help yourself. I downloaded the mix entitled "Carry On" and shall be returning for more.

Steve Coleman on boxing

There is a venerable tradition of jazzmen being fervent boxing fans (eg. Miles Davis) or even practicioners (eg. Red Garland). Steve Coleman is in this tradition and expounds on it at unusual length in an article on the Sudden Thoughts website, relating boxing to improvising in an interesting way. I'll quote two passages directly related to music below, but you can read the whole thing here.

Floyd, like many great boxers varies these rhythms in subtle ways that are difficult for opponents to time, and he can seamlessly flow from one rhythmic form to the next without any break in the forms. Usually the opponent is not even aware that the transition has occurred until it is too late.

This is something that is very difficult to teach, a boxer must recognize it on his own. The way this is done is similar to most forms of dance of the people of the African Diaspora (and in other sports like basketball, football, Capoeira, etc.) where there is a smoothness to the shifts of direction that is based on timing. I like to use the analogy of improvising in music where there is a sense of being in a zone during which you visualize the negotiation of the rhythms through time and everything is moving in a kind of slow motion dance. The mind operates on a level where time seems to be suspended and the constantly shifting 'paths of possibilities' seem to lay before you.

For the master boxers and musicians alike a lot of preparation is involved. The various 'paths of possibilities' have been studied, worked out, analyzed and internalized, after which the mind and body have been trained to respond by reflex to the dynamic configurations as they develop in real time. The artistry manifests when patterns unexpectedly shift and an alternate flow is established. The master boxer (or musician) must then time the shift and adjust the response patterns in mid flight. Of course without intense insight, research and training none of this will manifest, but the initial recognition of these dynamics is crucial to knowing how to prepare and train oneself in the first place.

(...)

Creative improvising is very similar in many respects to the boxing techniques I describe here. While improvising one needs to respond not only to the dynamic structure of the composition that one is playing but also to the possibilities that unfold as a result of the contributions of the other instrumentalists. In a sense the music itself is your ‘opponent’. One of the challenges is to execute your responses in the currently functioning window of time while still dealing with both the nuances of the structure. In addition to this the musician must manage the details of spontaneously composing musical phrases that represent what you are trying to ‘say’ in your music. To do this smoothly while maintaining your equilibrium is not an easy feat. A finely tuned and constantly adjusting balance needs to be developed where one can respond in reflex to the changing musical conditions. In this way it is similar to the responses of the great boxer.

In all music and boxing this would be true but in the African Diaspora this balancing act is as much about style (i.e. how it is done) as it is about what is being done. Style has always been important in the African way of being. For the inner city kids honing their basketball skills, putting the ball through the hoop and ‘how’ it is done carry equal importance. The same is true of the countless jam sessions of musicians or freestyle cutting sessions of MCs. What is most important in the style is the rhythm, the timing and ‘slickness’ of the endeavor. This is as true in a Nicholas Brothers’ dance routine as it is in a Charlie Parker improvisation. When the content is also on a high level it begins to take on the form of high art.

William Parker/Matthew Shipp duo

BBC Radio 3's Jazz on 3 show currently has some Parker/Shipp duo music online (as well as lots of other stuff in their archives). I'm heading over there to listen to it, myself.

Link stolen from nightclub jitters

The musician's life?

Not very glamorous, is it? This account is probably closer to the reality of the vast majority of musicians than what we get to read in glossy magazines about the very few (relative to the mass of musicians) stars.

devotion, determination and limited alternatives: a look into the life of a musician in a struggling u.s. orchestra

Young jazz singers still popular

Not exactly a newsflash, but the Diana Krall-Norah Jones trend seems to be spilling over into young male vocalists, at least in the UK:

Cullum First Jazz Artist to Get Platinum Disc

Cullum becomes first British jazz man to go platinum


(Cullum is on the left...)

This kind of joins the discussion of jazz and dancing, detailling which brands of jazz remain today in the popular eye.

One Final Note reborn

After being shut down for over a year (if the online archives are up-to-date), jazz and improvised music magazine One Final Note is relaunched today.

I contributed a Jason Moran concert review which is slightly different from the one that ran here. I must say that it looks great surrounded by OFN's spiffy design. Plus, I'm in the company of really good, even famous, writers:

Joe Milazzo's review of the Jimmy Lyons Box Set is a detailled look at the music (which can be supplemented with other listener reactions over here).

In an opinion piece, the noted Howard Mandel asks:

What good is abstract, intellectual jazz if it isn't grounded somehow in blues, and rhythm, and soul? How can you dig Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, John Zorn, and similarly brainy players, if you don't sense the passions of Jelly Roll Morton, early Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Mississippi delta guitar demon Robert Johnson, Chicago's Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, pianists Otis Spann and Professor Longhair—not to mention Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Jimi Hendrix, Al Green, James Brown and George Clinton?

That's a good question, if you ask me.