night of the amsterdamned

Friday July 21 was the 176th birthday of Belgium's creation. To celebrate, we decided to drive to Amsterdam. IVN and I disagreed as to whether the last time we went was in 1997 (me) or 1999 (IVN). Any credibility those memoirs I was planning to write might have had is now lost.



Hotel rooms there are expensive, so we ended up spending the night in a rather funky camping site on the city's eastern edge.



We rented a couple of bikes. Definitely the best way to see this city, despite the blazing heat on Friday and the brief, unexpected downpour on Saturday. The backpedal braking system is kind of treacherous.



For those less motivated, the leisure of cycling can be combined with the effortlessness of driving.



This trip was totally unprepared, so we simply bought a map and cruised the canals, did some shopping and napped in the Vondel Park, Amsterdam's equivalent of Central Park, until the rain chased us away.







Of course, there's more to Amsterdam than pretty canals, H & M and the Indonesian restaurant on Spuistraat. There are museums and the red light district as well. We didn't do any of the former, but did pedal through the latter Saturday morning on our way to a neighbourhood market. Understandably, Saturday morning is not the district's finest hour: apart from a few unsavoury stragglers, we did cross the path of a stag party. I assume the bridegroom was the one wearing nothing but sandals and a jock strap.



Modern dutch design and architecture are formidable. The cars parked outside the appartment blocks in the northern dock area indicated that they were not social housing. The barrier (I have no idea what it was) outside of Utrecht, which we passed on the highway, also deserves mention.



The same docks area also houses some upscale interior design shops. Upscaleness doesn't guarantee taste, though.


Decades of bloody dictatorship, but at least they got a snappy name out of it (translates to Pol's Pots, Pol being a common first name or nickname).

I tried to fit some jazz into our Friday night by going to the BimHuis (another architectural marvel). I didn't know any of the participants, but they sounded good from the entrance. Still, I felt too sweaty and stinky from a full day's worth of driving, cycling and shopping in crushing heat to be truly comfortable in the BimHuis's rarefied atmosphere. The night before, Ahmad Jamal's trio had played there. I would have stunk up the place for that. Instead, we hung out on the waterfront underneath the building for a while, which allowed me to watch (from a distance) Beyoncé's BET Awards performance on some guy's Mac laptop. Without the sound, it was awesome. I don't like "Déjà Vu," but the visuals remain awesome. YouTube has it in very lo-res.

the record store underbelly

Lucas Van Lenten points to this hard-hitting documentary on indie record store clerks. Check out Lucas's music on MySpace.

lots of echo in here

I'm know you've heard "Crazy" enough to last you several lifetimes, but have you heard the spaghetti western tune that spawned it?

I'm fairly certain you've watched the ultra-slow airline version, but have you seen the slightly faster, low budget bathrobe version? Or the fast, high budget Star Wars version?

It may now seem that Gnarls Barkley (cool website) is its own ultimate cover band, but there are other contenders: Ray Lamontagne in the keep-only-the-melody-and-strum-along category; Nelly Furtado's is a Euro 2004 throwback, rather than a 2006 Timbaland-fueled model.

Exhausted? Confused and wondering where the substance of "Crazy" really lies? Put all that aside and check out the time-travelling video for Smiley Faces.

meow

For the sake of parity, here's Nwabhu back when he was roughly the age the as-yet-unnamed kitten is now.

The comments to the original post have been good, please keep them coming if you can. A few things I forgot to mention initially: it's a male kitten, ideally I'd like an abstract, sounds-good-but-isn't-really-identifiable name (like Nwabhu) that works in English and French and will be accepted by IVN.

The following thoughts will probably benefit me more than anyone else...

Tim's suggestion of Mdenko is good, but maybe a bit too identifiably African. Then again, watching him prowl through our garden's yellow, dried-out grass yesterday, he did kind of look like a stripy lion in the savannah... Bootsy (as in Collins) is a cool name for a cat, but this one isn't bad-ass enough. It might have suited his brother.

Names ending in "u" are summarily rejected (sorry, G), because they rhyme with Nwabhu. Even if he were a girl, Nwabhi wouldn't work (sorry, Ethan) because it sounds like one of Nwabhu's myriad nicknames.

Musician names are difficult, because generally too identifiable and I'd feel weird regularly shouting out "Mingus, come here!" Hmmm, Shihab? Maupin? Jeff Albert?

djassmunkurinn (thanks for writing in!) suggests the Icelandic Brandur. I don't like that one too much - it's kind of harsh - but I hadn't thought of exploring Icelandic names, they should prove interesting. Kisa means cat in Icelandic and is also a pretty cool cat name. In a similar vein, Swahili offers up some interesting words for cat (topito means catapult, which would be a funny translation, but it too comical).

I kind of like Sabi (popped into my head yesterday), which is apparently both African and Japanese.

tales from the record store crepuscule

S/FJ is hosting a series of reader-submitted record store stories, starting here, spurred by an article on fading stores.

My favoured mode of purchase remains the record store: the whole trip/gathering/unwrapping experience is highly pleasurable. Scouring the web to save a euro or two is tiresome. Recently, I even had some interaction at the FNAC's till for the first time (it only took 5 years), mainly consisting of the cashier approving of my TV On The Radio purchase. I got to know P (who works or worked in the jazz section) at concerts, through a mutual friend and regular FNAC visits, so I felt at home there. And I have never had unpleasant clerk-related experiences anywhere.

I've chronicled the decline of the Brussels FNAC (a French cultural supermarket that evolved from a single store set up by a couple of ex-Trotskyists to a multi-national behemoth), which will probably force me online, as I am unaware of any other good jazz section in Brussels (if you are, please let me know). All the other good shops I know are second-hand.

further down the forked road

Settled in Shipping adds some excellent points to the US/EU debate (which I also touched upon late last year).

As I've seen it, the contentious issue regarding the acceptance of European approaches to jazz music is the non-linearity with which many European musicians regard the jazz tradition.

Excellent point (which is developed further), but wouldn't apprehending the tradition in a rigourously linear way mean confronting everything from ragtime to Armstrong to bebop to Ornette and Cecil and the AEC to Miles in the 60s and 70s to Zorn, etc.? I don't think that's even possible for an individual to do. So isn't everybody picking and choosing, and it's just that certain pick 'n' mixes have been canonised?

SiS states (and then dismantles) a couple of well-worn clichés:

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. Europeans are either regarded as inherently incapable of swinging, or of willingly ignoring it as an essential part of jazzdom.

It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation: Europeans can't swing, but if they can, they're merely derivative. That said, many, many European musicians love to swing and play swinging music. The whole Europe = 70s free jazz/improv equation is quite false.

Peer beyond the free jazz/straight-ahead dichotomy, and you'll see that Steve Coleman's Hot Brass recordings from the early 90s had a huge impact (in France, but also in other countries, I think) on musicians and listeners.

Europeans, by virtue of their non-American status, do not understand the jazz tradition at all. It is impossible to gloss over the bebop section of the history, and equate the early jazz and Dixieland with the avant-garde rumblings of the late '60s.

Sorry David, I don't get what you're saying in the second sentence.

I'm surprised that critics and some musicians alike still regard the treatment of repertoire from artists like Bjork, Paul Simon, Radiohead or Nick Drake (to cite only the people I've covered in my own groups) as mere novelty, and that the inevitable next step - to write music evocative of these artists - is considered as some sort of jazz heresy.

I think lots of critics are fine with it, but opinions are still pretty strongly divided (cf. the controversy around The Bad Plus playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on a major label (if you do it on a small label like FSNT, it doesn't matter)). I wonder if Miles got the same reactions when he played "Someday My Prince Will Come."

kitten like me

This kitten needs a name. If you have one handy, please suggest it in the comments box. Guidelines:
- Ginger and Socks are not acceptable
- Entries that go well with Nwabhu (the first cat) will be favoured.

The winning entry (if there is one) gets a CD.

howling forever

I think I have to admit that my great enjoyment of TV On The Radio is deeply linked to the fact that on one section of "Blues From Down Here," whoever is singing sounds a lot like Andre 3000.

Is the preceding comment merely a flimsy excuse to post a photo of myself with the cover of our new garbage can on my head? Perhaps.

finally, a saxophone for magicians

The Bushman Pocket Sax "sounds like a sax, looks like a clarinet and is played like a recorder... It is a true portable instrument that can be carried everywhere - in your pocket, backpack, even up your sleeve!" You will be happy to learn that "it is tuned in the popular key of C." Unless you're one of those snobbish underground types who only play instruments in the unpopular key of G#. The Pocket Sax can also improve your social life, as "its uniqueness will jump start many conversations."

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Maybe it's not the right thing to do (and notice how I'm hiding this under the pocket sax), but sometimes, you have to call your fellow amateur critics out.

Recently I had a conversation about a certain gigantic jazz webzine and defended it by pointing out that because reviewers aren't paid, reviews naturally slide towards the positive: who wants to listen intently to bad music, for free? I could have added that its writers probably get little to no editing or outside help.

Blogcritics functions in similar fashion, except with an extra dose of anarchy. I sometimes consider starting to post there again, but then I read stuff like the staggering accumulation of haphazard pronouncements and bizarre metaphors in Larry Sakin's last two reviews:

"Pianist Monk and sax player Coltrane revolutionized music, adding a measure of soulful, spiritual rhythms which exposed the African heritage of jazz. They knew each other well, and considered each other mentors."

"[Miles Davis] is probably best remembered for his forays into be-bop in the forties and early fifties and as the progenitor of cool jazz in the fifties and early sixties"

"Listening to Monk and Coltrane play is akin to watching a splendidly exotic rose open its petals to capture the warmth of a spring morning."

"Van Gelder acts as professor here, rendering tutelage to this young, brash septet." (50+ years ago, RVG was tutoring Miles? I doubt it)

"The music on The Complete Riverside Recordings will clue jazz novices in on what all the fuss is about-- it’s exalted lovemaking as compared to average sex."

"Davis and his group ascend to the apex of musicianship on Walkin’ and they put the word 'genius' in a whole new category."

I'm opening myself up for harsh criticism, but I welcome it: the way things are going, there probably won't be any paid primarily-jazz critics at all, so us rank amateurs will have to start monitoring each other and, especially, helping each other improve our writing.

bottom of the jazz, to you

You may have been taken in by Daniel Cassidy's discovery of Irish roots for just about every English word, in particular:

Jazz: from teas, meaning heat, warmth, passion, enthusiasm. The common adjective associated with jazz is “hot”. Cassidy attributes its emergence in New Orleans to Irish immmigrants.

However, you should not believe anything Cassidy says.

[via Nate Dorward]

it's that ole devil, again

Francis Davis has apparently survived the Village Voice's recent reshuffling and is back with a bang, taking on the Euro-US issue with more subtlety than most. He uses a review of Trygve Seim's work to expand into a full-fledged discussion. A good one, but I continue to be bothered by the latent us-versus-them mentality the article's very existence implies (cf. the article's confrontational title). Also, the Europeans-struggling-for-acceptance angle is slightly distasteful, if you set it against a wider historical backdrop.

But the question I can hear the jazz police asking is whether that much originality is desirable in a foreign musician.

"Originality" has become dissociated from "origin," Raymond Williams holds in Keywords: "Indeed, the point is that [originality] has no origin but itself." The problem in a nutshell, the Stomping the Blues crowd would say... [T]heir argument [is] that jazz becomes something else, something not nearly as vital, when it loses touch with its blues ancestry... [T]he increasing dominance of elements from their own [European] cultures is [felt as] an affront to both American and black exceptionalism—though I doubt the affronted would ever put it that way.

That last sentence is quite a zinger.

If jazz were a folk music, the belief that only its originators can do it justice would have validity. But art music embraces change and claims universality, and not even Albert Murray can have it both ways.

I've never understood the hostility towards Europeans bringing their own, non-American influences to jazz. Does "if you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn" (and, especially, its implicit corollary "what you live is what comes out of your horn") not apply beyond America's shores?

In free's lasting wake, there are at least three distinctly European schools of jazz, two national (Dutch dada and British improv) and the other defined as much by a label (Germany's ECM) as by a region (Scandinavia).

That's all well and good (one would have no difficulty adding a few schools, French and Italian, for starters), but when will people start talking about transatlanticism? Ken Vandermark finds common ground between Chicago, Germany and Sweden, improvisers on the electronic edge of things meet in Vienna and Tokyo, Americans move to Berlin to record albums or paint and many European musicians you've never heard of regularly spend as much time in New York as their visas will allow. But even transatlanticism is an outdated term: pretty much the entire world meets at Berklee.

Europe is still a lucrative market for American jazz, more lucrative now than the U.S.. With jazz on the ropes commercially back home, the unspoken fear is that if it ceases to be regarded as a touchstone of African American culture, the mass media are unlikely to pay any attention to it at all. But getting used to the fact that different European outposts now have their own jazz traditions needn't involve buying into the British critic Stuart Nicholson's belief that American jazz is played out, any more than it has to mean sharing his enthusiasm for tepid Scandinavian techno.

Certainly not. Again, it's disappointing that, in 2006, such manicheistic views continue to hold sway. Then again, maybe Davis is setting up straw men (or maybe just thinking of Jack Reilly's hilarious diatribe). Speaking of whom, for those of you who missed it, the infamous Jason Moran review is back online.

kerblog

Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj is blogging, drawing, crying and joking about current events.

[via Bagatellen]

shin-ding

secretly drooling

Darcy has a new concert for you to download and enjoy.

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I don't know about you, but I can't stop drooling over Kelefa Sanneh. Justin Timberlake's new single is actually as good as Sanneh implies.

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Great solo voice/acoustic guitar performance by Thom Yorke. It's like he's suddenly morphed into a bluesman, or something.

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Steve Coleman interviews Dave Douglas.

But the one thing about these new business models is that listeners and people who love music also have a responsibility to support the artist. It doesn't take a lot. With an artist-run web site, you assume the goodwill of people-that they will buy the CD but not copy it for their friends. I see it at gigs. With a group of college guys, where once I'd sell five CDs, now I just sell one. How you purchase music is a political decision. To perpetuate the music, people have to pay back into the system. It's only happened a few times, but I've been approached by fans asking me to sign a CD-R. They don't understand the humor of that.
(...)
(Coleman) There's a lot of detail you don't see by just looking to the past. Looking back to the '40s and '50s is like seeing the highlights of a basketball game on ESPN versus seeing the entire game. We're not hearing conversations that Charlie Parker was having.

a piece of pie

PopMatters' Will Layman on critical humility and the enduring worth of simple, seemingly outdated things. And the inescapable Lizz Wright.

for the non-believers...

...I know you're out there. Sure, it's "Summertime," but how can you not love/be impressed by/bow down to this?

spider webs of inspiration

Derek Bermel does not post to inspirations very often, but when he does, he truly lives up to the blog's name. This time, he discusses cross-cultural hearing in the context of learning traditional West African music.

yorke coltrane zidane

Radiohead as the evil U2? Sounds plausible.

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Destination: Out's Alice Coltrane post is a revelation. I'd never heard her music before, but the way she brings wild passages together with straight-off-the-soundtrack ones on "My Favorite Things" and the ominous strings surrounding the spluttering saxophone outburst are both really cool.

Everything on Destination: Out is worth listening to.

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Zidane head-butts his way to a glorious, tarnished legacy.

unmasked

Ethan is in the middle and an unidentified fan is getting a CD signed on the left. Photo by Jazzques.

Klinkende Munt Day 3 - 07/07/06, Brussels

Kurt Van Herck Trio
Van Herck is a near-ubiquitous saxophone player, with the Brussels Jazz Orchestra for instance, but he rarely leads his own groups. His last album came out 10 years ago. His new album (which, coincidentally, was waiting for me when I got home) is in trio with guitarist Jacques Pirotton and drummer Mimi Verderame, playing the unrecorded compositions of Karl Van Deun, a barely known guitarist. It's almost the Herbie Nichols Project, on a Belgian scale (and Van Deun is alive and well). The sparsely populated tent wasn't exactly the best environment for this music, what with kids running around, people moving in and out, a basketball tournament outside, etc. Still, what I managed to hear (I got there late) was unexpectedly good, but I'll listen to the CD before discussing it further.

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The Bad Plus
I had high hopes - very high hopes - for this one, which were easily surpassed. If anyone invites a blow-by-blow review, it's TBP, so I apologise in advance for what's to come.

The concert was insane, as in insanely good, but also as in "TBP is crazy!" On the left, you had Ethan Iverson, generally cool as ice behind the piano or dead-panning these incredible spoken introductions that must be at least partly improvised or embellished, because even his bandmates were laughing. The intro to "1980 World Champion" was particularly good, involving Lyle Mays (not Lyle Mays), a ski jumping world champion from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who celebrated his title every day by dancing in the street. On the right, you had Dave King, whose body movements have to be seen to be believed. I guess he has a reputation as a banger, but he's actually more likely to be making a subtle kind of clatter. And then, in the middle you had Reid Anderson, the dapper bassist. What they do as a group is even more impressive live than on record: you can really see how they fit bits of improv into the the manic arrangements' interstices. And, of course, there's the random stuff thrown out apparently just to keep people guessing, such as the brief groovy soul bass solo that served as coda King's "Thrift Store Jewelery," totally unrelated to the modest melody and Latin undertow of the body of the song.

They played a lot of new, unrecorded songs. Ethan's concert-opening "Mint" continually seemed to have two things going on at once, and juxtaposed a dozen more, starting with some great abstract piano blues. Reid is an awesome composer, whose pieces tend to have a rock song feel to them. The first encore, "Physical Cities," was the biggest and best of them: it switched between ascending piano arpeggios over a hard-driving riff and a stabbing hip hop groove. The downshift from the stomping latter to the low-lying former was particularly delicious. And then, out of nowhere, came this unison morse code staccato section, with lots of dramatic rests. Imagine the rhythm of a Tim Berne composition, played on one note. It might have lasted 90 seconds, but what was so thrilling about it was that I truly had no idea how long it would go on, or what would come next (which happened to be a massive beat based on the morse code).

"Casa Particular," another unrecorded tune, surprised - shocked, even - by staying in one engrossingly low-key place throughout: King pushed forward relentlessly, but on brushes and very quietly (I was reminded of Jorge Rossy on the version of "Exit Music (For A Film)" on Mehldau's Art of the Trio: vol. 4), while the piano drifted and dreamt prettily. "1980 World Champion," like "1972 Bronze Medallist" before it, set up big, simple chords and then sprinkled them with dissonance. Here, though, it was done over a fast 2-beat that, when King picked up a tambourine and Ethan played some blues, lent the song a fervent gospel feel.



Of course, TBP is loved and hated for their covers (even though I generally find their originals more rewarding). Their versions of Interpol's "Narc" and Bacharach's "This Guy's In Love With You" had some common ground: sweeping crescendos leading to a big chorus, for example. The Bacharach was the more sarcastic one: a subdued 12/8 led to faux cocktail piano; sleigh bells comically accented a break. Ornette Coleman's "Song X" (I don't have that album, must get it) started with the melody played in trio unison three times, with yawning chasms of silence in between. This led to fast Ornette-ish swing, open and rambunctious, and the most traditionally-configured piano solo + rhythm section passage of the concert. What happened next was, therefore, totally unexpected. Reid subverted the song twice: first by playing a slow and relatively melodic solo, then, as he stuck ultra-quietly and minimally to a couple of high-register notes, King rubbed a whining, blinking toy on his floor tom. Deploying near-silence against a somewhat talkative crowd was bold and brilliant. Well, it all seemed subsersive to me, and on a tune by the nec plus ultra in jazz subversiveness, no less!

Finally, the second encore (concerts in the tent usually struggle to get one encore, so it's a tribute to TBP that they could easily have gotten a third, if the organisers hadn't wrapped it up) was "Chariots Of Fire," as requested by an audience member. Some people don't like this cover, but I think the superposition of the theme, played at varying tempos, and an unrelated funky bass line really works. Also, the way it opens up into a scrambling free section reminds me of my all-time favourite TBP cover, Blondie's "Heart Of Glass" on These Are The Vistas. Here, Ethan started the song standing stock-still, staring unblinkingly out into space and playing a few notes with his hand behind his back. Those theatrical touches are fantastic and really help them communicate with the audience. Both times Ethan named the band members, they'd play fragments of a theme music: silly, but great fun.

Afterwards, we had a jazzblogger tripartite summit (not quite Yalta, but almost?) with Ethan and Jazzques at the Archiduc, laughing and discussing everything from Brad Mehldau to hip hop to blogging to TBP itself to writing/reading about music to the virtues and advantages of the siesta and many other things I'm forgetting. Reid and sound man/engineer/designer Michael (I think) joined us later. Excellent times. One interesting thing I hadn't really realised was the extent to which Ethan is a jazz kid. Do The Math hints at that, but I'd always assumed he started out from a classical and contemporary music background, but not at all. On a personal note, there was absolutely none of the awkwardness you usually get around visiting musicians, who are, essentially, people you've never met before. Maybe it's Ethan's sense of midwest hospitality or something.