back on stage, back on the page (ii)

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

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.

an inconvenient suspicion

If you listened to the Cecil/Braxton concert, you may have heard something about people dressed as chickens. More information (and, especially, a photo) on what that was all about can be found in John Fordham's BBC Jazz Awards report. You can also find this memorable sentence:

an insiders' audience of musicians, promoters, PRs, scribes and broadcasters, that generally exercises a healthy suspicion of star-systems and best-of-this-and-thats

I can only assume he's being sarcastic, as "promoters, PRs, scribes and broadcasters" are precisely the people who create the "star-systems and best-of-this-and-thats".

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The good Prof. McJeebie has taken a commendably firm and principled stance.

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J.B. Spins reviews the autobiography of Frankie Manning, creator of the Lindy hop, and excerpts a great anecdote from it:

All the buses had signs about three-quarters of the way down the aisle that said 'colored.' One day my buddy Claude, and I got on a bus that was practically empty and, for a joke, moved the sign up to the front, so there were only three rows left for white people. Rather than go into the colored section with just the two of us, these folks kept getting on the bus, crowding themselves into the little front area. It was hilarious to see them packing in like sardines.

You can see the book's promo video, but the classic scene from Hellzapoppin' is too great not to post:

taylor! braxton! parker! oxley!

I would have loved to have seen the Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton/William Parker/Tony Oxley summit meeting, but no-one deemed it necessary to bring them to Belgium, so a, um, deluge of press and web commentary will have to do:

Alexander Hawkins [via Taylor Ho Bynum, who also gives the long-awaited account of Nicole Mitchell's Vision Festival set]: "the group felt much more than the sum of its parts: fairly remarkable given those constituent parts..."

Words and Music: "Eyes were on Cecil and [Braxton], I suppose, for this unique meeting – yet what combat there was occurred under good-natured rivalry – better to see it as a high-powered collaboration."

John Fordham: "The rest of the evening had Taylor, Parker, Oxley and multi-saxist Anthony Braxton on a single, seamless, mostly improvised jam, full of dynamic contrasts and idiosyncratic, on-the-fly logic."

A dissatisfied Night After Night commenter: "I found the whole thing rater (sic) dull."

[added by The Improvising Guitarist]

Dominic Lash: "the gig was in all ways one of the best concert-going experiences I have ever had."

Starting tomorrow and for a week, listen to it for yourself.

a sense of scale

I find the following passage from Ethan's interview of Ron Carter puzzling:

EI: How many records are you on?

RC: Over 2000.

EI: I've heard only a couple of hundred of them

Only? Perhaps that's just Ethan being deferent, but surely hearing 200 of a musician's recorded performances doesn't need to be thus qualified? It's as if that old Frank Zappa joke applied to the whole of jazz. Five albums by, say, Stevie Wonder, if well chosen, might tell you everything you need to know about him. Five by Monk (by five), no matter how well chosen, will get you shouted/laughed out of any discussion. But maybe they are enough?

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Extensive article on the concertisation of jazz in Chicago.

"It's as if we've discovered another side of jazz, where jazz functions in a similar way to classical music," notes Orbert Davis, music director of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic (which plays Millennium Park on Aug. 27).

Jazz in a concert setting, adds Davis, "allows us to think, to reflect, to consider the music in a different way." ...

"It's like the difference between eating a home-cooked meal [and] going out to a restaurant."
(...)
"There's no other city in the country that does so much free music," says Weisberg, noting that the city now spends about $2 million a year on various music events, much of it jazz.

Furthermore, by joining forces with organizations such as the Chicago Jazz Partnership -- a collection of blue-chip corporate foundations that committed $1.5 million to Millennium Park's "Made in Chicago" jazz series and other jazz events -- the city has leveraged additional resources to jazz concert-going.
(...)
In Chicago, however, the combination of high-toned jazz series and a plethora of free, citywide shows may -- or may not -- have taken a toll on the club life. "I think the free stuff has been more detrimental than anything," says Jazz Showcase founder Segal. "If people can see stuff for free, why should they pay money for it?"

Dan, Uli, what's the scene like?

A classic passage:

The quintessential jazz performance always will unfold in clubs, where sparks fly not only among the performers but between the musicians and the listeners, who can watch the sweat gather on their heroes' faces.

Yeah, that's why I'm there, the sweat. And if you're sitting in the first row and lucky enough, some of it might even fly onto you!

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CD sales crash in the UK:

The problem began in January after a surge in sales of digital music players over Christmas. Apple’s dominant iTunes online record store allows listeners to buy two or three single tracks in preference to a whole album, depressing revenues.

Piracy also remains widespread, as is listening to songs and watching music videos – legitimately – without paying on internet sites such as YouTube.

The conclusion is obvious: ban MP3 players and force everyone to wait for their favourite songs to be played on MTV.

Meanwhile, Prince is up to no good once more.

please stop my world from raining through my head

I'd long known that Nick Drake had died really young, but it's only very recently that I realised he had recorded Bryter Later and Five Leaves Left before his 21st birthday. This pushed me to revisit his three main albums. I'm not really a big consumer of musician biographies or biographies in general*, so I just know the basic Nick Drake facts. Still, I am amazed that a 20 year old could express the darkness and distress (as well as a few breezy trifles) he did without sounding fake or boringly shoegazing.

The opinion that Bryter Later is equal to or better than Five Leaves Left seems to be fairly widespread. I can't understand that. While suggesting that Drake wasn't all doom and gloom, his second album is much less of a satisfying experience than his debut or the trilogy-closing Pink Moon: his voice is placed in competition with the music and has no chance of winning.

The relationship between lyrics, voice and music feels much more distant, anonymous even: I mean, bossa-nova on "Poor Boy"? I'm a big fan of Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, but what does his solo here bring to the song? The decidedly non-maternal female chorus of "Oh poor boy/So sorry for himself/Oh poor boy/So worried for his health" is tragically comic, but still. The peppy trumpets and upbeat, trouble-free beat on "Hazey Jane II": why? "Peppy" and "trouble-free" are the last words I'd think of when describing Drake. Having alto saxophonist Ray Warleigh improvise through "At The Chime Of A City Clock" is a pretty good idea, but the contrast between his sure-footed, professional lightness and Drake's sophisticated confessions is stark. What does Warleigh's carefully controlled cries have to do with lines like "For the sound of a busy place/Is fine for a pretty face/Who knows what a face is for"? The rhythmically interesting descending vocal line of the first few verses of "Hazy Jane II" is hurried and nearly drowned out by the accompaniment, which also diminishes the effect of the implicit frustration of the ending ("If songs were lines/In a conversation/The situation would be fine").

It is only on the moving "Fly," where Drake yelping "Please!" is foregrounded, or "Northern Sky," with John Cale's distilled keyboards (interestingly, far more appropriate than McGregor's more rough-hewn style), that the natural unity of the debut album is recaptured. Also, compare the easy, professional prettiness of Bryter Later's instrumental tracks to Pink Moon's stark, almost motionless "Horn."



Ultimately, Bryter Later sounds like producer Joe Boyd's album more than it does Drake's: the bigger cast, the obviously bigger budget. It's notable that the Drake-only Pink Moon is much closer to Five Leaves Left than to Bryter Later (all three were produced by Boyd, though). Or maybe the singer decided to take a radically different approach. Or maybe the problem is that I know absolutely nothing of the likes of Fairport Convention.

Perhaps the ternary and open-ended rhythms frequently found on Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon are more adapted to Drake's slowness than binary grooves. Just the way he exhales the word "cure" in "Time Has Told Me" - voice high in the mix, with plenty of time to drag - would have been impossible, or at least impossible to fully appreciate, in Bryter Later's overstuffed context.

"Time Has Told Me" opens an incredibly strong A side. It's thematically-unified, stressing the difficulty to communicate and transmit information between individuals and the "ban on feeling free" imposed by society. In every song, the dark and stripped-down context is tailored to convey Drake's meanings. For example, the rhythmic propulsion of "Three Hours" supports rather than overwhelms or hurries, underscoring the escapes Drake sings of.



"River Man" is quite simply extraordinary on all levels. Its lyrics contrast the eternal and deeply hidden (the titular figure makes me think of Charon, the character from Greek mythology who ferried souls across the Styx river) with the air-headed but somehow enviable Betty, while Drake is again engaged in a doomed quest for knowledge. Robert Kirby's string arrangement on "Way To Blue" magnifies every chord change and finds a moving resonance between Drake's voice and the low-register strings (the double basses?) at the end of certain lines.** On this song as on several others, the music ends abruptly, as soon as the lyrics do, as if nothing could exist outside of them and perhaps recalling that Drake had enough trouble dealing with everything inside his own head to deal with anything outside of it.

On the B side, Drake falls back to earth, and it's almost reassuring. For example, "Man In A Shed," despite the fairly clever self-commentary in the last verse, is pretty much what I would expect a bright, lovelorn teenager to write. "'Cello Song" sinks under the weight of an inflexible conga beat and singing that's a little too evanescent. The flute on "The Thoughts Of Mary Jane" makes a sweet song a little too sweet. Even on this lighter song, the singer remains an observer, unable to fully share in the expression of everyday happiness. That A side, though, is something else, of incredible depth and power.

The photography in the album's booklet show a Romantic Drake, detached from the daily hustle and bustle. The most striking portrait, though, is one of him seated at a table, almost entirely consumed by impenetrable shadows. Only the left side of his face and his right hand are visible, implying that only this small part of him - the one that writes lyrics and plays the guitar - are left to interact with the outside world. Indeed, considering the poetic frailty exposed in his voice and words, his guitar playing is surprisingly competent and ambitious. Perhaps this hints at the troubled mix of strength and weakness necessary to Drake's art.

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* There was a time, long ago, when I read a lot of biographies of basketball players. Of those, Bill Russell's Go Up For Glory made the most vivid impression: imagine not only being a smart, outspoken and headstrong black athlete in the whitest town in America, but also being undeniable because you were key in building the greatest NBA dynasty of all time.

** Perhaps it is no coincidence, then, that Brad Mehldau has Larry Grenadier play the melody and first solo on his cover of "Day Is Done" on the album of the same name (though, overall, his forceful, beat-driven interpretation is closer to the mood of Bryter Later). Mehldau's second-encore rendition of "River Man" in Antwerpen three years ago nearly had me in tears. It's an inappropriate place, but I can't help but profess my undying admiration for the way Mehldau plays certain chords under the melody of "Knives Out" on Day Is Done: Individual notes are staggered yet joined in a way that makes the whole seem melted, gone almost before it has time to coalesce.

bill dixon - forgotten?

Stephen Haynes asks why Bill Dixon's Vision Fest concert has received so little mainstream press attention (Haynes, a cornetist, participated in the performance):

Nate Chinen's thoughtful appreciation of the concert premier... has been the only review devoted solely to the piece that I have found to date in the mainstream press.

The silence has been shameful and somewhat puzzling. If one believes in the notion of the "community" in this music, one wonders who has chosen not to comment and why. Food for thought.

I'm feeling rather innudated with it, myself, having read three or four different accounts. Haynes blames the mainstream press, but who apart from the NY Times, Village Voice, Time Out NY and JazzTimes is supposed to cover such an event? The NY Sun reported on a couple of non-Dixon days. And the "community" was there (nowadays, is the "mainstream press" still a part of the "community"?), as Vision was all over the blogs: Darcy twice, Brian, Dan twice. Destination: Out had a Dixon tribute. AAJ probably has a zillion articles, and there are probably blog posts I'm forgetting or haven't seen. How much more is necessary? (A question for The Dixon Society to answer?) Also, the demand that the article be "devoted solely to the piece" is a little weird, in the context of a festival emanating feel-good hippie collective vibes and the multi-set bill.

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A rather different jazz event that has perhaps not received all the attention it deserves: the Diana Krall wine list.

hard-time jazz in chicago

Bobby Broom tells of Chicago's Northwestern University's closure of its jazz department.

If a seemingly enlightened institution such as N.U. doesn’t wish to accept the cultural importance and equal aesthetic value of jazz and therefore cannot and will not carry out the implementation of a successful and superior program of study (in spite of its having much to gain by doing so), then as difficult as it may be for some of us to accept, the art of jazz is actually better off without their partnership.

still more hajdu-zorn

Catching up on my Postclassic reading, I see that Kyle Gann has commented on the Hajdu/Zorn debate, coming down more on Hajdu's side, which is unsurprising, given his past anti-Zorn comments. Gann reports an interesting Zorn anecdote in the comments:

The Downtown improviser I knew best once told me he played a terrible gig with Zorn, that completely flopped. Afterward he was down, and Zorn asked him what was wrong. "We played terribly out there." "So what?," he said Zorn replied. "It's only improvisation."

I get the impression Gann means that in a negative way, but I see it as a totally liberating statement. Sure, it goes against the give-me-my-money's-worth mindset, but I liken it to the extreme sports motto "If you aren't falling, you aren't trying." And maybe I'm just a little miffed at being referred to as "someone."

Klinkende Munt Day 4 - 07/07/07@Beursschouwburg, Brussels

Ah, dear old Klinkende Munt (reports from previous editions), where a saxophonist's wails compete with the cries of children running around, where bass solos coexist with the chatter of grandmothers eating shish kebabs and where a bandleader's announcements compete with the general indifference of the free festival crowd. While a less numerologically significant event than The Boredoms' 77BoaDrum, at least we were lucky enough not to have any of the usual weirdo drunkards drop by.

Atomic (website)
Fredrik Ljungkvist - ts, cl
Magnus Broo - tp
Havard Wiik - p
Ingebrigt Haker Flaten - b
Paal Nilssen-Love - d

I've been listening to the Norwegian-Swedish Atomic for a few years, since their first two albums Feet Music and Boom Boom. Several of its members, Paal Nilssen-Love and Ingebrit Haker-Flaten (the first time Frederik Ljungevist pronounced the bassist's name, he made it sound like an adventure) in particular, are among Ken Vandermark's many regular collaborators.

Like a few other Scandanavian bands such as Exploding Customer (myspace), Firehouse or Jonas Kullhammar's (myspace) Nacka Forum (myspace), Atomic is very much attached to the idea of being recognisable as a jazz quintet, but injects into that format lots of post-free jazz American avant-garde language that prevent things from simply chugging along. I just got The Thing's (Nilssen-Love, Haker Flaten and Mats Gustafsson) Action Jazz, which, though more given to open blowing, could fit in with the others. In Atomic's case, even when they get boisterous, the free playing is always embedded in an overarching structure, made visible when the band shifts gears in tight formation (is that a mixed metaphor?). Interestingly, they all sound fairly American to me, in any case far removed from any "sound of the fjords" clichés and other elements that I tend to associate with European jazz/improv (to be really simplistic about it, maybe it's just that they all swing, in some way or other). They are what I like to call "hot jazz for a new millenium," but most of the time I have enough sense to keep that appellation to myself.

On the set's first piece, solos were sandwiched by heads, but each one received a radically different treatment: rumbling mid-tempo swing for an explosive Fredrik Ljungkvist, a quasi-dirge for a thoughtful Magnus Broo and a langourous ballad feel for Havard Wiik to subtly disrupt with dissonance. Themes were stated in conventional front-line unisons, but Wiik almost never comped or played lines in a regular manner. Instead, he covered vast expanses and created dense, rippling textures. On the set-closing ballad "Kerosene," he split the difference by first doling out chords under the saxophonist's tender, soft-focus solo, and then engaging Nilssen-Love in a duet that gathered dark clouds before growing into an all-encompassing storm.

As the concert progressed, the repertoire increasingly broke away from traditional forms in favour of more involved, ad hoc ones. Paal Nilssen-Love toned down his usual busy, powerful playing for a quiet feature that had clarinet and trumpet tones floating underneath and between his desolate cymbal screeches and distant mallet hits. Later, Ljungkvist got into a Jimmy Giuffre-ish mood, issuing terse fragments that got loud in very short spurts.

On "Two Boxes Left," a deranged, absurdist fanfare theme gave way to a twittering front-line dialogue that stopped to allow Haker Flaten to shred his bow his a furious, high-register arco solo accompanied by comically short, Ljungkvist-conducted punctuations from the rest of the band. It was like a sudden injection of Dutch comedy - a Southern glance in an otherwise Westwards-looking set.

Byron Wallen (myspace)
Byron Wallen - tp, conch, fl
Julian Siegal - ts, bcl
Larry Bartley - b
Tom Skinner - d
Boujemaa Boubul - voc, guembri, perc,

Byron Wallen is a fluent British trumpeter, clearly steeped in the hot-blooded hard bop of Freddie Hubbard and others, but also willing to explore sounds both harsher and more exotic. His front-line partner Julian Siegal preferred to keep a more even-keeled tone as he spun harmonically involved lines. On "Merry-Go-Round," the two intertwined melodically over a sunny beat like a Gerry Mulligan Quartet gone Carribbean.

For part of the set, they invited Boujemaa Boubul, a Gnawa musician, to join them on guembri, qraqeb and occasional singing. His characteristic dancing, polyrhythmic 6/8 grooves created a new baseline for the group, but also a new challenge. Wallen slipped naturally into this new context: he emerged from the groove and used it as a reference even when he freed himself from it, and added flute and conch shell to the more prayerful moments. Wallen's current album, Meeting Ground, is apparently about jazz-Gnawa fusion and his playing truly made the meeting happen. Siegal, however, stuck to his harmony-oriented playing and ended up sounding pasted on to the music, rather than a part of it. His more textural bass clarinet fit in better, though.

Jeremy Warmsley (myspace)

Jeremy Warmsley's dramatic pop put elaborate construction, literary lyrics and lots of falsetto leaps in the place of catchy hooks and a memorable voice. Songs had titles such as "The Young Man Sees the City as a Chessboard" and content such as accidentally watching pornography (he said pornography, not porn - the distinction seemed important) on French TV ("Which is easy to do," Warmsley stated in his defense), played in a four-handed piano arrangement, which must be a rarity in the world of indie-rock. Words created uncertainty by their content as well as their quantity, as in "I Keep the City Burning for You," where he sang:

I keep the city burning for you
Beacon to guide you home
Furnace to keep you warm
Smoke to poison your lungs

All the ingredients of a great relationship, then.

They did ecstatically rock out on one tune. The strange thing about it is that I developed an unusual physical reaction: I sneezed throughout the song, then stopped as soon as it did. Perhaps it was a sudden, temporary (I hope) allergy to ecstatically rocking out?

While I've never been a fan of oversize hip hop clothing, neither can I understand the show-your-socks-small jeans indie guys like Warmsely wear. His bassist, who I'd issue a blipster warning on if I worked for the NY Times, was supremely cool, though.

Gary Lucas was scheduled to perform with a DJ at 12:15 AM, but in a sign of encroaching age, I didn't feel like waiting.

shop 'til you drop

I'd like to make a special recommendation of Indie Jazz, the online store attached to the Cryptogramophone label. A little while ago, I ordered a couple of CDs from them: Nels Cline's New Monastery and Andrew Hill's A Beautiful Day.

When the package arrived, instead of Cline's album, I found Myra Melford's The Image Of Your Body. Things could have been worse, but it still wasn't quite what I wanted. I wrote an email asking what I should do about it, already dreading having to find time to go to the Post Office and mail the CD back. All of six minutes(!) later, I got an answer: keep the Melford, we'll send you the Cline at no charge. Now that's what I call customer service.

All three CDs are worthwhile, by the way.

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Swiss retailer DiscPlus is offering 30% off on its HatHut stock through July. The shipping costs are a little high, but individual CD prices reach as low as 6.61 Swiss francs.

brainy coincidence

I just bought my first Bad Brains album today, semi-randomly, with no idea if it's a good one or not. Here's a little interview with Darryl Jenifer, conducted by Beastie Boy Adam Yauch, who produced their latest one.

How does D.C. differ from New York?
D.C is the head of the beast; N.Y. and L.A. are the ass and heart. They can fight over that.
(...)
What do you feel is the biggest misconception about the Brains?
That we are problematic and primitive. Of course we as a collective have our views, but we are Jah respecting, Jah youth. I think being black and playing in a white rock world and industry puts us at a slight disadvantage when it comes to our actions and words.

house fight starting

Roughly a year ago, there was a stir around the topic of jazz education (a recap: an initial gathering of several posts revolving around the topic, Nalbandian and Crouch, Djll on Bill Evans, Ryshpan on Ryshpan). The subject was revived by Nate Chinen's IAJE article and a bunch of bloggers.

Now, Casa Valdez has a rant on the state of jazz and then has a talk with Bob Mover that has proven controversial. The former is more on the futility of it all, considering the state of the "jazz market." The second is the more controversial one, about how young players just aren't taught to swing any more, but rather left to their own Josh Redman-, Chris Potter-, Mark Turner- and Seamus Blake-derived devices (Valdez later throws Chris Speed into this group, along with Donny McCaslin and others, under the heading "George Garzone students," but I don't see how Speed can be lumped together with the other guys, stylistically speaking). Mover concludes "the inmates are running the asylum!" Both posts have attracted a lot of comments.

One comment links to a similar article by George Duke, of all people. It's hard to read it without feeling that the pot is calling the kettle black. Some of what Duke says strikes me as contradictory:

I realize that trends in jazz will change - that’s the essence of what jazz is, and change and inclusion are what a creative musician uses to create an environment. But why the move away from traditional African American musical values?

Now at times I’ve heard some of these players play the blues, and it’s quite apparent that they don’t have a clue how to do it. The blues is a feeling and attitude. In my playing it is at the core of everything I do, so when young players abandon that, it’s almost like they are abandoning a large part of what I love about jazz.

Leaving aside the question of what the traditional African American musical values are (specific styles or more broadly-defined attitudes?), I wonder what the average Afro-American teenager knows about the Blues: indirectly through the story-telling lineage that extends into hip hop, slightly more directly in songs such as Kanye West's "Gold Digger" and in whatever remains of it in r'n'b. Maybe more for those who search back through their parents' record collection or listen to Gospel. So, how can you "abandon" something that isn't part of your life? Duke himself captures my sentiment:

You know maybe that’s it. Even though I didn’t experience slavery, my mom and dad did, so I had that direct connection to the gut feeling of the blues and its’ musical predecessors – in reality it is a direct connection to the past through a musical tradition. For me, that feeling tells the story and displays the soul of my people.

So if "some of these players" don't have a connection to the Blues, why should they play it? Conversely, to me, hearing Bojan Z play on Balkan rhythms and melodies is exactly like hearing a jazz musician from Mississippi include Blues inflections in his playing and is "expressing the soul of [his] people."


On the other side of the fence, Brian Olewnick has been criticising the Vision Festival for being too stuck in outdated ways:

The odd (sad?) thing was that the better music from each evening almost inevitably referred directly to earlier great music. So you get pastiches of Handy, the Art Ensemble, Ellington etc., which are enjoyable enough but hardly possessing any "vision". Not surprising, of course, but still. Worse, as always, for something describing itself as "free music", countless strictures were constantly in place. There was rarely a moment where you got the idea that a given musician could do anything that came to mind. Solo order tended to follow the standard routes (horns to piano to bass to drums). Hell, the whole "solo" thing was sometimes laughable. During Dickey's set, bassist Todd Nicholson was soloing and Dickey's accompaniment (not as a joke) was tapping the ride cymbal in a "ching-chinka-ching" pattern. It's 2007 and people who are purportedly experimental, avant and free musicians are still doing "ching-chinka-ching". Jesus.

And later:

But if you've chosen to push things, if you're out there advertising your work as "free", well dammit, it should be free. And forty plus years on, there's no excuse for not understanding "free" to mean exactly what it says. It doesn't mean a hierarchy of musicians, a hierarchy of solo order (it doesn't mean solos being obligatory at all!). It doesn't mean constructing a situation where you can't do this and you can't do that, no matter how much musical sense it makes at the time. It doesn't mean you can't stop playing when you have nothing to add. It doesn't mean that when the bassist starts soloing, the drummer automatically reverts to cymbal tapping mode while the horn players look on (they can't play of course! that's against the rules!) and the pianist dutifully punches out a handful of appropriate chords.
(...)
the great majority of music being performed at Viz ain't free and, for my bucks, shouldn't in good conscience mislead people into thinking that it is. Insisting on that aura, imho, weakens the music. For the most part, it's every bit as essentially conservative as what's being presented uptown at Wynton's place. Different veneer, very similar core.

I can only wonder if we're all living in the same world: on the one hand, youngsters are criticised for being too heavily invested in the mainstream of contemporary saxophone (on this point, take a look at this very pertinent comment: "sometimes it takes a while to sink in," it being the historical recommendations teachers make to their students), on the other, the purported avant-garde isn't avant-garde enough. It's like we're caught in a Bermuda Triangle of immobilism on one side, cultural loss on the second and ignorance on the third, into which all hope and joy disappears.

While too much of Brian's argument rests on the terminology associated to the Vision Festival (I say this as someone who loves musical taxonomy), I do recognise some of the limitations he cites, limitations which come to seem arbitrary because innovative musicians have already rendered them obsolete. At the same time, I think a lot more people are continuing to break away from, or at least significantly loosen, those solo/accompaniment, improvised/composed, free/not-free binaries than Brian is giving credit for. And those very same limitations can give immense satisfaction, still. Of course, for Jazz Corner veterans, Brian's complaints themselves are old hat.

Dan Melnick asks the question of the importance of change in "free, experimental, or avant-garde music." I don't really agree with his conclusions (for one, I'd say that he believes in the timeliness of creative expression rather than prizes novelty over all else), though I do believe that the heated moments of great performances that really touch us totally eclipse the questions of innovation, tradition, styles and eras we ask ourselves in the cold light of day.

I would like to flip Dan's interrogations around (forgive me if the following sounds wishy-washy): listeners cannot ask of musicians more than they ask of themselves. Instead of demanding that musicians push boundaries, for example, we can only ask that we challenge our own listening habits and comfort zones. It's a risky entreprise, one I find difficult and don't do often enough: it takes time and perhaps money, our current opinions may be proven wrong or misguided, we might somehow stumble. But hopefully, in some way, we learn and broaden our perspective. Only by doing this, I think, can the listener get a taste of what it means for the musician to undertake a similar endeavour.

back on stage, back on the page

The resurgent Sly Stone gets a feature article in Vanity Fair.

[L]ike John Wayne emerging from 'cross the prairie in The Searchers … a strange form advances through the wavy air in the distance: some sort of vehicle, low to the ground, rumbling mightily as it turns off the highway and into the parking lot. As it comes closer, the shapes become clearer: a flamboyantly customized banana-yellow chopper trike, the front tire jutting four feet out in front of the driver. He sits on a platform no higher than 18 inches off the ground, legs extended in front of him, his body clad in a loose, tan shirt-and-pants ensemble somewhere between Carhartt work clothes and pajamas. His feet are shod in black leather sneakers with green-yellow-red African tricolor trim. Behind him, on an elevated, throne-like seat built between the two fat back tires, sits an attractive, 30-ish woman in full biker leathers. He always was good at entrances.

Indeed. Here's another:

[S]ometime around midnight—the stroke of April Fools' Day—a man who looked like an extra from a blaxploitation version of Buck Rogers sauntered onto the stage. He was wearing a black knit cap, wraparound white sunglasses, outrageous black platform boots with sneaker-style laces, spangly black trousers cut like newsboy knickers, a matching spangly black jacket, and a red spangly shirt. He sat down at the Korg synthesizer parked center stage and pumped his fist.

I actually saw a vehicle that looked a lot like Stone's on the way back from work today.

Monné-Solsona Quartet - 30/06/2007@Jamboree, Barcelona

Vincens Solsonna - g
Joan Monné - p
Giula Valle - b
Ramon A. Rey - d

A strange happened when we returned to the Jamboree for the Monné-Solsona Quartet's second set: they played the exact same set-list again. It's not as if the house had been turned out: the guy at the door stamped our hands as we stepped out for air specifically so that we could get back inside without paying. So I have no idea what they were thinking. That said, I have equally little idea why guitarists play like Vincens Solsona did, either: that slightly echoey, unrelentingly bright, treble-only tone is one I have little affection for, especially when coupled with lots of fast lines relatively bereft of rhythm and Pat Metheny-lite ballads. Thankfully, the rest of the quartet was more interesting.

When the guitar laid out, the trio gained in impact and rhythmic cohesion. Joan Monné's playing wasn't terribly interesting harmonically or melodically, but it was lively and intricate. Ramon A. Rey had an interesting style that distributed busy polyrhythms all over the kit. Giula Valle was the real musician of the bunch, though, leaving in some rough edges and really interacting with her bandmates and trying to push them. Her composition, "Love Song," was the most interestingly-constructed original of the repertoire, as its ostinato-fuelled, almost Reid Anderson-style rock song intensity suggested a rather... vigorous personality. How out-of-step she was with the leader was highlighted whenever Solsona attempted to accompany one of her too-rare solos: he was painfully ill-at-ease and square.

Valle's contribution aside, there was a worrying schism between cute head arrangements and the blowing sections that reduced them to mere window-dressing. Still, a nice hall of mirrors effect was achieved on a mash-up of "Evidence" and "All The Things You Are." The first time around, before learning of what, exactly, was going on, I wondered why they were playing "All The Things You Are" with "Evidence"'s staccato phrasing. The second time, I understood that it was "Evidence," but with the chord changes to "All The Things You Are" underneath. It was a little disorienting, but that aside, is there a deeper musical reason to bring these two together?

It looks like I missed David Valdez's visit to Jamboree by a few days, with Libert Fortuny putting on a wild show.

John Zorn: Complete Masada (Day 1) - 28/06/2007@L'auditori, Barcelona

I only got to attend the first of two Barcelona concerts by John Zorn's travelling circus. After all the controversy of David Hajdu's article (cf. Pat Donaher, Peter Breslin and Armen Nalbandian, twice), I was looking forward to some "assaultive noise crafted with meticulous care," to quote David Hajdu, but I got a whole lot more meticulous care than assaultive noise. Each of the three sets provided a distinct view into the Masada songbook, but all seemed to carry formal concerns and stylistic mash-ups nearer to their hearts than the expression of Jewishness.

Bar Kokhba mostly used gently-swaying Latin rhythms and more vigorous free-jazz-inflected ones to underpin the typical Masada minor-key Jewish themes, with a few side-rips into tango and surf music. Zorn kept a firm, if discrete, grasp of the situation from the conductor's chair. The music was both surprisingly easy listening and satisfyingly well-written. Marc Ribot was the standout soloist, for me. On one tune, he created a time-stopping junction between Cuban and cowboy movie soundtrack guitar styles; elsewhere he followed up a driving Mark Feldman solo with floating, distended notes. So soon after seeing him in action with Sean Noonan, it was fascinating to watch him in a completely different context, still managing to bring a vast array of styles together in a completely logical, integrated way.

It's unfair of me to single Ribot out, though. Joey Baron, Cyro Baptista (who I came across outside before the show and thought "Who's that interesting-looking guy in the gray-flecked goatee and red glasses?"), Greg Cohen, Erik Friedlander and Feldman are all exceptional and sensitive musicians. Feldman managed to maintain a strong drive even when he broke away from strict adherence to the band's propulsion and displayed an astounding range of timbres on the last piece, when he went from a very high whistle to half-voiced low-register rumbles.

Despite his massive beard and the "Reggae/Metal/Blues" description on his MySpace page, Jamie Saft's trio (with Greg Cohen and Kenny Wollenson) was the most classically jazz of the three ensembles: it adhered to the usual soloist-accompanist division of labour and head-solos-head shape. Bar Kokhba's attention to form was probably no greater, but in the piano trio context, it was all the more evident: the Jewish themes appeared, dissolved into bluesy solos or furious cascades that emerged from moody fragments, then resolidified. The piano might have been scurrying over a free rumble, but a few unison hits or a collective wax and wane showed that everything was tightly controlled and delimited.

Despite the obvious stylistic differences, this trio didn't work all that differently from, say, Bill Charlap's. This was a little frustrating, but also provided opportunities for a few tunes that actually sounded like real songs rather than the mere running of a scale that some of the Masada compositions seem to be. A couple of tunes reached a "Gymnopédie"-like intimacy on which Saft seemed to hold back each note a tiny bit, to poignant effect. Another combined funky hard bop, a Latin beat and a Jewish tonality to end up sounding like some kind of weird throwback '50s exotica.


Asmodeus provided a radical change to the previous two sets from its very first notes, as Ribot, Trevor Dunn and Calvin Weston simultaneously erupted into an electric roar. Ribot showed that he could play all-out noise and classic rock just as well as all-out melody (along with, I'm sure, all-out changes, though he didn't do it here). Dunn tore into lines derived from metal. Weston was like a man possessed, playing hard-hitting thrash-funk. Despite the volume and my distance from the stage, the drummer could be clearly heard screaming - unmiked - from behind his kit. For those members of the audience who might have missed it, though, he continued screaming as the trio took its bows, after having ended the set with a loud smash of the gigantic gong at the back of the stage. Zorn conducted again, which made plain that despite the energy and volume, conditions were still very much controlled. Indeed, an unaccompanied introduction of Weston's felt like extreme skiing: an adrenaline rush wrapped in pinpoint control.

Despite the high quality of and enjoyment I'd gotten from everything I'd just heard, that last point nagged at me a little. Would a little more looseness have enhanced or weakened the performances? Also, I couldn't help but wonder if the whole Jewish angle really mattered: did it go deeper than those zigzagging minor-key melodies, to serve as compositional focus, perhaps? If they were merely a veneer to loosely unify a wide stylistic range, does that make Hajdu's interpretation of the Brubeck anecdote stronger, or weaker? Because, if Zorn's Masada repertoire isn't really about Jewishness, then why couldn't it include Brubeck? Maybe these questions all have obvious answers that I'm not familiar enough with Zorn's music to answer.

More opinions: Jazzman on days one and two.

jazz and blogs #17

Words from the Front
Bassist Reuben Radding. A particularly interesting post on navigating the cleavages within the NYC improv community.

Downbeast
Cryptogramophone's new blog. There are already a number of interesting posts by violinst/label boss Jeff Gauthier, among others.

SloaneView
Singer Carol Sloane. Musician bloggers tend to be relatively young, so it's nice to hear a voice from a different generation. Every post is carefully constructed. [via Rifftides]

The Jazz Session
Podcaster Jason Crane. Lots of interviews with musicians and, of late, reports from the Rochester Jazz Festival. [via Rifftides]

Shanghai Jazz Scene
What's really happening in Shanghai. [via a comment from godoggo]

the exceptional mr. zorn (addendum)

David Hajdu writes in to say that his article's subtitle of "The breathtakingly bad John Zorn" was not of his choosing.

industrialising jazz, in the netherlands

Andrew Durkin's Industrial Jazz Group was in The Netherlands recently and Andrew's recently completed a tour-de-force write-up in three parts (1, 2 and 3).

Singer/Queen Bee Jill has her own account and provides a live MP3, a fun track (aren't they all? Comedy is the IJG's 11th commandment) for those of you who've never heard the IJG.

the exceptional mr. zorn

Ted Reichmann reacts to a David Hajdu article on John Zorn in The New Republic*. Depending on the part of the web page you look at, it is called "Tzaddick" or "The breathtakingly bad John Zorn."

Hajdu best sums up his argument in this paragraph:

Zorn is an exceptional artist, without question, because he prizes and seeks exceptionalism above all. This is not to say that he is exceptionally good at his art. What he is good at--so very good as to suggest a kind of genius--is being exceptional. Unfortunately, uniqueness is not an aesthetic value; it is a term of classification. To say that Zorn is one of a kind, as he certainly is, is to ignore the larger matters of his nature as an artist and, more significantly, the nature of his work, much of which is thin and gimmicky, and some of which is elementally corrupt.

The first thing I wondered was why TNR chose "breathtakingly bad" as secondary title, rather than "exceptionally bad." Otherwise, it seems to me that Hajdu is feigning sudden surprise and indignation at things (He wears t-shirts and camouflage! He's more of a scene-builder than a virtuoso! He takes the Jewish thing too far! He's not necessarily particularly friendly to fans standing in the rain!) that have long been debated.

Hajdu presents very mixed feelings about Zorn's work. Some of his well-written descriptions make it sound wonderful, but there are a lot of put-downs, too.

Wonderful:

Performing in a trio with piano and drums, Zorn played an improvisation of sound graffiti sprayed in bursts and flurrying splashes of accelerating propulsion. He began with a series of short modal phrases, but quickly abandoned modality and, in little time, dropped tonality altogether, screeching and cronking. Early in his career, Zorn began to develop an expansive vocabulary of extramusical sounds that he could produce with precision on the alto saxophone, often by using only the mouthpiece of the instrument, sometimes by playing the mouthpiece through a bowl of water. For a few years, he tried to devise a system to identify all the noises he could make and to notate them with hieroglyphic-like symbols, an effort along the lines of his idol Harry Partch's attempts to invent new scales and notational methods to accommodate the odd tones, microtones, and quasi-tones that emanated from the instruments that he constructed out of old light bulbs, empty liquor bottles, and driftwood. To the uninitiated, the sounds that Zorn produces may sometimes seem like assaultive noise blurted out arbitrarily. In fact, they are assaultive noise crafted with meticulous care. For this piece, Zorn employed the entire saxophone, though he blew into it so hard that the instrument rattled in his hands and appeared about to fly apart.

Put-down:

As Zorn explained, "What I came up with was this kind of game structure that talks about when people play and when they don't play but doesn't talk about what they do at all." Not what, but when: the content, the music itself, scarcely mattered to Zorn, who was concerned mainly with the novelty of its system of generation, a scheme not devised in service to the expression of human feelings, but brazenly indifferent, if not hostile, to them. As such, Zorn's game work was less an innovation in the creative process than a debasement of it.

That makes me think of Brian Olewnick's recent post in which he discusses the brutal beauty of the photography used on some of Zorn's covers.

The comments are kind of surreally humourous, too.

--
* STC provides no link, but yesterday, I was able to circumvent TNR's subscriber-only policy, by using links provided by Google. The article is also available here.