bits 'n' bots

The Veils - "Lavinia"
I'd already heard and liked the single version of this song, but hearing the lead singer sing it accompanied only by an acoustic guitar brought it to another level, for me. I still don't have much of a clue of what he's talking about (whatever it is, it sounds Important!), but the cracked, leaping emotion in his voice more than made up for it, carrying enough meaning for anybody to grasp. It's kind of like the pain of slithering over broken glass. What really struck me, though, is how much he sounded like Archie Shepp's saxophone in his ability to transcend a melody with a splintered tone. It might get over-bearing if he does it for every song (I haven't heard any others), but it works very well here. Speaking of acoustic versions...

Phoenix - "Everything Is Everything"
Caught the last minute or so of a voice + acoustic guitar version of this while shopping for a clothesline. While you'd guess such a version would involve high-energy staccato strumming, this was a slow and somber rendition that eliminated the original version's tension between bubbling rhythm and downcast lyrics. Very weird, but not in a good way, unfortunately.

Take your time
Listening to Hail To The Thief (remember that album?), I found myself wishing that writers could wait 3, 6 or 9 months before reviewing an album. Let it sink into your subconcious rather than force 10 listens into a week. A high-school french teacher once compared cramming for an exam to splashing water into a glass, as opposed to slowly pouring it in. In which case does more water end up in the glass? I find that even when I haven't listened to something for a month or more, it has discretely worked its way around my mind. Maybe I have a more time-elastic reaction to music than up-to-the-zeitgeist music journalism demands. A blogger who shall remain nameless because I can't remember who it was described situations in which the reviewer is aloud one listen, supervised by label employees, before writing the article. Good enough reason to remain an amateur.

Lenny Kravitz - "Where Are We Runnin'?"
Have you seen the video to this? It's kind of like an art-house-meets-Led Zeppelin version of Britney's "Everytime" video, isn't it? For Lenny, even debauchery is done in a 70s style. As for the song, well, you think it's going to get good when Kravitz shouts "Where you runnin', girl?" to kick off the drum breakdown, but then, instead of a Polaroid picture moment, all we get a short guitar solo. My screen is congenitally dark, I can't make out the last scene, when Lenny is looking at himself in the mirror. Does anything interesting happen?

Candi Staton
I checked out the Candi Staton reissue after hearing so much raving about it, only to find it rather predictable. I'm glad to see that I'm no longer in a minority of one, even though I'm far from [fretting] sometimes that I've probably heard all the great early-'70s deep Southern-soul records already. Of course, the album is also totally irresistable, if only because the soul music template is coming from is totally timeless (check out those quietly hopping trumpets on "He Called Me Baby").

mix'n'match

Various people have been picking up on the Keeping Score website, which is based around the the San Francisco Symphony's performance of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony, and it's an awesome website, indeed.

In the "Match the Music" section, I associated (some of these feel a bit embarassingly obvious, sorry):

-Klimt's "The Kiss" with Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," although Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta" could have fit, with its slightly exotic feel (I thought about putting it with Berteaux's "Selim III," but the sultan seems rather too relaxed and Bartok rather too busy).

-Kandinksy's "Contrasting Sounds" with Berg's "3 Orchestral Pieces."

-Davis's "Hot Still-Scape for Six Colors - 7th Avenue Style" with Copland's "Music for the Theater": both have a joyous hustle'n'bustle about them.

-Chagall's "The Wedding" with Mahler's "Symphony No. 1".

-Vermeer's "Girl With a Pearl Earring" with Ravel's "Valses nobles et sentimentales," mainly because the background figures at the beginning of the sample seem to imply that things aren't quite what they seem and points to much more below the surface of the melody.

-Munch's "The Scream" with Brahms's "Violin Concerto" because the latter has the sweetest melody, which the character in the painting is attempting to escape from.

-Monet's "Impression: Soleil levant" with Debussy's "La Mer." Simple-minded, I know.

-Raphael's "The Small Cowper Madonna" with Mozart's "C Minor Mass."

Despite being more linear, Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio could almost fit the Kandinsky and Davis paintings. I could find any matches among the four remaining paintings/music samples.

What's your take?

Rule #8036

More in the life in the music business series:

after recording and promoting two albums, Semisonic had accumulated millions of dollars of debt, an amount from which mere platinum sales couldn't begin to extricate the group.
(...)
Initially, he is scared and alienated by the road. At the group's first McDonald's stop on its first tour, Slichter is surprised to find his bandmates and their sound man sitting at three separate tables eating in silence. He later asks Dan:

'' 'Dan, do you find the road to be an emotionally cold place?'

'' 'Yes.'

'' 'What do you do about that?'

''Without lifting his eyes from the page, he spoke. 'Eventually, you'll grow to enjoy that coldness and learn to crave it.' ''
(...)
Not many newly signed musicians seem to remember that, from their artist royalties, they are going to have to pay back every penny the label is spending on them, right down to the lunch tabs ostensibly picked up by the local reps.

''I always thanked the locals for lunch, and then one day it occurred to me. . . .

'' 'Dwayne, that's a corporate Amex, right?'

'' 'Yeah.'

'' 'And you write ''Semisonic'' on the credit card slip, and that gets billed to our recoupable account, right?'

'' 'Yeah.'

'' 'So really, shouldn't you be thanking us for lunch?' ''

he heard my cry

So, Benny Golson's in a film? Spielberg probably also has Moanin' sitting on a shelf.

Ratliff muses: You've possibly written more standards than any other living jazz composer.

How many would that actually be, ten? a half-dozen? It's kind of depressing. As for other contenders to that title, Wayne Shorter comes to mind, but who else? Chick Corea? Pat Metheny? Herbie Hancock? Would it be safe to say that their generation (around 60) is the last to have composed new jazz standards? I'm a fan of Dave Holland's compositions, but they don't seem to have caught on, despite his being around the same age as the above-named. Do people play Marsalis (B. or W.), Dave Douglas and other 40-ish leading lights get their compositions played?

B(l)agging it

Pathos, hubris and air guitar, baby.

For some reason, Bagatellen was not in my list of links. That oversight has been corrected.

Something borrowed, something gold

Scroll far down

KELIS TO REMOVE HER GOLD TEETH FOR NUPTIALS
R&B singer Kelis' family have banned her from wearing her new gold teeth when she weds Nas this summer.
The couple -- who have been showing off their matching $36,000 caps in London this week -- are planning a traditional wedding, but Kelis is convinced her rapper beau will ignore her family's pleas.
She says, 'We're going to have a traditional wedding and my family don't want me wearing my gold teeth.
'But Nas is his own man, so no doubt he'll still be wearing his.'

This explains that but does little to still my rising doubts about Kelis and Nas's lucidity.

Risk rewarded? Unknown made known

I picked this one up because its round, pink, transparent slimline case intrigued me. The only info is printed directly on the CD: Conrad Schnitzler, Rot, "Meditation" 19'44", "Krautrock" 20'09", Recorded in 1972, plate lunch music, pl01. A quick look around the Internet reveals that Schnitzler was a German sound artist (rather than musician) working in experimental electronic music from the '60s on.

"Meditation" begins by setting up a handful of drones that remain very nearly up until the end of the track. The other main element are regularly-paced synth notes with "bouncing ball" effects trailing behind them. At one point, the textures start to shift, with long, carefully-shaped notes reminiscent of Big Fun's trumpet layers. The track ends with an homage to tonality (ie. arpeggios) after the drones have been stripped away. Apparently, Rot was culled from an installation in which the machines were set in motion, then left to their own devices; that process is quite audible here.

"Krautrock" is more percussive and twitchy. It begins with mechanical birds warbling in some alien jungle, as ground-crawlers create an ad hoc rhythmic foundation. 8-9 minutes in, something magnificent happens: a few layers are dropped and the slightest inkling of a synth-percussion-driven beat (actually, my tapping foot probably contributed as much to the beat as anything on the disc) emerges, a wonderful kind of minimal techno. At first elusive, the blissful beat is reinforced by a latin clave before fading away, as these things must.

Rot is the product of a time when the year 2000 still meant flying cars, food pills and holidays on the moon: now kitsch sci-fi movie sounds make up its vocabulary; gaudy uniforms, plastic aliens and goatteed evil-doers abound. I couldn't help but think of Keith Rowe and Toshi Nakamura's Weather Sky. They knew what the year 2000 really was about: we still haven't launched ourselves into inter-stellar regions, so they must work on a smaller scale than Schnitzler's planet-conquerors; machines are talking to us (or is it for us?); we need subtlety and quiet in order to listen for missives from a desperately empty universe.

stamping the music/musicking the stamp

Relatively new series of jazz-themed Belgian stamps.

Technocrati expands my worldview

Being the ego-centric bastard that I am, I checked my Technocrati linkage and came across a couple of new blogs.

What I Like About...
This is a specific-project blog. The very first sentence I read there was This is not music that came from silence. How could one not continue reading after that opening? A few posts later, Isaac says:

The French knew swing even before the States were anything. Lully's band of string players answered the royal demand for dance tunes with enough elegance and motion to be remembered hundreds of years later. When we think about Jazz we must remember that it is not a simple fusion of African and European traditions. Because of Lully, I suspect the European contribution was not devoid of rhythm and I would not be surprised to learn that the African influence included pitch organization.

is josh roseman
If you're wondering "who?", Josh is a trombonist. I've seen him play once with the Dave Holland Big Band. He has a relatively new CD out called Treats for the Nightwalker, which is just as intriguingly weird as his blog. It's a rather good album, with a massive rotating cast, groovy, fusiony at times (but never overwrought) and richly orchestrated, intricate without being overly intellectual. Kind of like Steve Coleman reading pulp on the beach. There's plenty of audio on the blog too.

Sitting in the second-tier

In this Greg Osby starts out on a tired subject, but throws a nice spanner in the works.

Everyone wants to write their own new music and be responsible for the development of something that's completely devoid of any kind of historical references. . . . You hear players, they're proficient, they have great technique, great facility, great sounds, but they lack the depth of someone who has — I hate to use the term ‘paid their dues' but they really haven't. They've paid academic dues, but they haven't paid homage dues, they haven't paid road dues, they haven't paid acknowledgment dues. Acknowledgement of great players. And by great players I don't mean the top 10 great players — the Coltranes, the Parkers, the Monks, the Rollinses, the Wayne Shorters. I'm talking about the periphery cats — the cats that these people admired and in many respects were just as deep: the Eddie Lockjaw Davises, the Eddie Harrises, the Sonny Stitts, the Booker Littles, the Herbie Nicholses. These people were incredible theoreticians and conceptualists and they just didn't get the break. This is every one's obligation who participates in this music — they're obligated to study to the Nth degree every facet of what went into the development of this great music.

Anything that goes against the Succession of Great Men view of musical history is fine with me.

setting Injustice right

This is suffixed TrackBack (0) and that just isn't as it should be.

bits 'n' bots: belgian edition

This was this blog's original remit (hence the clever title, see), but it soon feel by the wayside. Still, there are only three online venues that regularly cover Belgian jazz: Jazz in Belgium (obviously) and Citizen Jazz (see links on the right) and Zicline. So it's a rather underreported on area. Here's a quick and sloppy and not-very-informative round-up of some good stuff. Just because I can.

Rêve d'Eléphant Orchestra - Lobster Caravan
On their first album, you could pick out the separate elements (Indian and African musics, swing, rock, techno, imaginary folk...) that went into their crazy mix. Now, it's much more difficult to do, as things have blended together in a more personal, more detailled and more "produced" sound. The new one is less tuneful than the old one, as tubist/trombonist/composer/clown Michel Massot has taken a bit of a back seat, but when he does step up, he turns out a couple of beautiful tracks. Otherwise, Jean-Luc Evrard's guitar is more present and roaring than ever, the music is more aggressive and, despite an overly fragmented feel, better than before.

Maak's Spirit - Al Majmaâ
Their first album was a live quartet date, the second a sextet studio session and the third a sextet + the Moroccan Gnawa Express + a Malian kora player captured live in various places. But somehow it all makes sense. While others have worked with a kora or Gnawa musicians before, bringing two different African traditions together is pretty rare, it seems to me. The repertoire is a mix of Maroccan traditionals and original compositions. As you might have guessed, it's a percussion- and chant-heavy, rocking affair. When the (electric) bass kicks in on the first track, it gives the song a Bill Laswell ethno-dub kind of feel.

Pascal Schumacher Quartet - Change of the Moon
I can't remember if I've recommended this album before or not. Regardless, I can't say a bad word about this one, as these are some of my favourite musicians here. Melody, dynamics, energy, cleverness and bravura. I've lost count of the number of concert reviews I've done here, so I'll just leave it at that.

Fabrice Alleman Quartet - Sides of Life
A more mainstream album, but a very fine one. Saxophonist Alleman writes most of the tunes, pianist Michel Herr provides his trademark classy restraint and bassist Jean-Louis Rassinfosse his beautiful boom and guests chip in when needed: guitarist Peter Hertmans provides a nice shuffle-blues solo, trumpeter Bert Joris is, well, Bert Joris.

Jazzisfaction - Issues
Wide open, melancholy landscapes sometimes tinged with electricity dominate on German (but based in Belgium) trumpeter Peer Baerlein's debut with his quartet. The blurry romanticism is enhanced by Peer's soft, lyrical trumpet, Yves Peeter's delicate drumming and the fact that no-one touches their instrument more than they need to. There are enough changes in mood and tempo (such as a more confident paso doble) to keep this one interesting, however. Drummer/producer/label boss Dre Pallemaerts adds a great remix at the end, sampling and cutting up one of the songs and adding his own drumming underneath.

Kraving a reply

Luke Kaven's e-mail in reply to my Smalls Records article.

Sampling/Sampling

Chromatic Musings points to an interview with Chuck D and Hank Shocklee:

Stay Free!: There's a noticeable difference in Public Enemy's sound between 1988 and 1991. Did this have to do with the lawsuits and enforcement of copyright laws at the turn of the decade?

Chuck D: Public Enemy's music was affected more than anybody's because we were taking thousands of sounds. If you separated the sounds, they wouldn't have been anything--they were unrecognizable. The sounds were all collaged together to make a sonic wall. Public Enemy was affected because it is too expensive to defend against a claim. So we had to change our whole style, the style of It Takes a Nation and Fear of a Black Planet, by 1991.

Shocklee: We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.

"It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood." I'm still pondering this.

Village Voice Jazz

The Village Voice is running a jazz mini-series. Let's see.

Band in My Head by Greg Tate
I'm in the middle of a post that crosses paths with this article once or twice. I feel very small right now. Go read this. Wynton Marsalis as P. Diddy: isn't it obvious?

Darn That Dream by Martin Johnson
OK, jam bands, again. Next.

Crossover Realities by Larry Blumenfeld
We learn that there are three kinds of crossover: musical, commercial (ie. shifting/expanding fanbase) and institutional (ie. getting a job because the music isn't paying the rent). A few straw men are burned down (Louis sang and played? Miles never let fans hold him back? Really? Oh yeah: Was Miles interested in Sly & the Family Stone simply because he envied their income?: where's the contradiction? (cf. the Tate article: Miles's greatest enemy was good taste, and vice-versa))

Miles's post-Bitches Brew music inspired an endless wave of fusion, occasional glimmers of creativity subsumed within a sea of banal sound, and in the years since, jazz has not successfully crossed into non-jazz venues.

You might not hear much J.A.Z.Z. on commercial radio, but I hear a lot of snatches (and sometimes more) of it in lots and lots of music: Radiohead, St-Germain (and busloads of house music), Prince to name a few.

So we needn't run from the crossover impulse. It's cursed us with some miserable music. But trust me—it's a blessing.

Oh, Greg Tate said this so much better a few links earlier.

Fleishedik and Milchedik by Francis Davis
I've been reading a lot of Davis (Francis) recently: cf. his archives at The Atlantic (you have to lowercase the D in the URL to get the article to appear. Someone notify the webmaster). That famous Ernest Ansermet quote has me thinking that he understood Tate's Ignant 85 years ago.

The Joan Baez of Jazz by Tom Smucker
Smucker's by now, we've got plenty of distance from Coltrane—too much
vs.
Davis's Anthony Davis's X—not a jazz opera, whatever that might be, but a legitimate one in which jazz from ragtime to Coltrane and beyond played an integral part. Given the decelerated pace of jazz evolution, that period feels like just yesterday.

Ross on the radio

I've just finished reading Alex Ross's mega-article on Radiohead and it's well, well worth your time. Apart from everything else, I love how, at the end, he drops in [Colin Greenwood] picked through some LPs and CDs, putting on Brad Mehldau, leaving it up to the reader to figure that one out.

An aside: does anyone know how to access the New Yorker's archives? I can only ever manage to access the current The Critics > Music article.

Tying up loose ends... wouldn't want you to trip, now would we?

Rhythm in rock songs, an example. Heard Fountains of Wayne's "Mexican Wine" on the radio today. First you have a harpsichord playing in straight-eights, then the big guitars come in in the same steady rhythm. The former is a dainty enough sound, but the latter overload the rhythm and make it plod, don't you think? (I know at least one FoW fan reads this blog...) In any case, it's just one example of the rythmically very boring rock I hear a lot of.

"I don't want to have sex with you... at all" is by a Belgian duo called Sold Out, on a brand new album called Stop Talking. It's wonderfully dripping with disdain and free of pointless explanation/rationalisation, which is what differentiates it from the Pink/Avril songs.

Everybody loves Elvin Jones

So, it's nice to read tributes here and there, even if Carlos Santana thinks certain big media outlets were conspicuously quiet. But then you read something like this

Thank you for sharing information about the Jazz
Foundation and their important charity. They have an
arrangement with Englewood Hospital in New Jersey
whereby jazz musicians without medical insurance are
treated at no cost.

It is not a coincidence that this is the hospital
where Elvin Jones received his treatment.

and you remember what was said in Barney Kessel's NY Times obituary and begin to think that, yeah, appreciation is nice and artists live on dreams and such, but it would be nice if they could die with a bit more than that. That's one way of putting it, the other is fuck you, pay me.

Celebrate Good Times

I'm now a published, translated (into all of one (1) languages!) and paid writer. Let us rejoice.



(Rekto:Verso May 2004, available free all over Flanders)

You can see a scan of the article in Dutch here. Maybe I'll get the English version published somewhere, someday.

One Final Note Smalls feature

My first OFN feature article is a Smalls Records label profile. It starts with an overview of the label's mission and then reviews their first four releases. If you're going to buy only one, make it Frank Hewitt's We Loved You.

I found out that it was online when Smalls Records (website) producer Luke Kaven sent me an incredibly deep, thoughtful and detailled rejoinder to the article. I hope that his e-mail (or something similar) will be reprinted on OFN. Failing that, I'll see if I can put it here. It's rare to get this level of written response from a review. I shouldn't be surprised, really, as practically every e-mail I've gotten from Kaven has been thought-provoking.