#2 Nature bis

Monarch catepillars, as long as my hand and as thick as a thumb and a half. Look closely and you'll see their little spike tail. Over a few hours, a half-dozen of these did serious damage to this plant's branches.

#2 Nature

Martinique is a hilly island with 400,000 inhabitants. There's a highway featuring round-the-clock traffic jams, but you have abandoned cars being reclaimed by vegetation to look at to pass the time. There are no trains but there are old buses and unreliable boats mascarading as public transportation.

The hills are called mornes. The newer roads are straighter, imposing their will on the environment. The older roads snake up and down. When building a house, the disadvantage is that you're most likely to be on a slopey plot. The advantage is that a well-situated slopey plot gives you an awesome, kilometers-long view. Higher than the hills is the Montagne Pelée, a volcano that last erupted in 1902, razing the city of Saint-Pierre and famously leaving a prisoner under thick fortifications as lone survivor.

There's the Atlantic side and the Carribbean side. The former is wilder, with black sand beaches, colder water and dangerous currents. The latter is more swimmer- and lounger-friendly. The Carribbean side decisively shaped my opinion of what a sea was: small, curved beaches with white-ish sand, blue water and brown seaweed. Hence my enduring repulsion at the idea of bathing at Brighton Beach. Some beaches have little bits of mangrove. These used to be considered foul mosquito breeding grounds. Later, too much later, their ecological importance was recognised.

One of the first animals I met was a red and black crab, affectionately known as a loulou. He tried to run (or side-scramble) away through the grass, but when I got close to him he stopped and confronted me. He spread his claws wide and seemed to be saying You want some of this, ese?, just like a Latino gangster from Los Angeles. I don't know where a Martiniquan crab would have picked that up from. There are also fireflies, known more elegantly in french as lucioles and awesome red dragonflies, which are called an overly cutesy libellule.

As my father and I walked down Fort-de-France's sea front, schools of small fish suddenly appeared out of the water like a bad rash, looking and sounding like they'd been dropped on a hot skillet.

In the late afternoon, the symphony of frogs and crickets starts up. It's not something that starts or ends: at some point you realise that it has started, but can't know how long it has been going on; it stops during your sleep. The frogs provide a continuous, undulating and mellifluous texture, which the crickets overlay with their shrill high-pitched drones. If I knew anything about Minimalism, I'd probably draw a comparaison. Feel free to do so now, if you have such knowledge.

Among other things, there are plants whose leaves close when you touch them and at night when they go to sleep.

#1 Departures
Getting off the Brussels-Paris Nord train, I spot two customs officers at the other end of the platform. I know they'll stop me. As they search through my suitcase, they launch pleasanteries at me, which I deflect with a smile and terse replies.

Where are you going?

Martinique.

Are you carrying narcotics?

No.

(jokingly) You'll be able to get everything you need over there anyway.

*smile*

The RER (subway lines that extend into the suburbs) takes me to the airport. Returning, there will be an incredibly beautiful café au lait-skinned woman - doubtless a model, as my neighbours on the subway will agree - waiting to take the RER. There will also be the interesting sight (but not sound) of a guy seemingly succesfully flirting with her. I will almost be able to see his brain furiously scrambling to come up with things to say to her. She will go sit next to him when the subway arrives. They will walk together when they get out at Paris-Nord. I will lose sight of them as he, realising that they are soon to separate, gets ready to ask for her phone number.

A small two-wagon conducterless train whisks me to the terminal. We go through tunnels lit only by lamps on the ceiling or on either side. It feels like a cross between an evil genius's underground lair and Indiana Jones, minus the boulder.

I get to the check-in counter. This is where Martinique begins. A massive line of variously coloured people, many luggin massive packages for the folks back home. Those who simply have too much overweight are seeking out fellow travellers with lighter loads. The family visits, the meals, the smells, the music and the beaches are almost tangible here, an Atlantic Ocean away.

Trickle-down theory works in the airline industry, if nowhere else. Since the last time I flew long-distance, individual TV screens have trickled to the back of the plane.

still not the way back to blogging

not the way back to blogging

It's 2 AM

[Grain of salt alert: this is coming from someone who still can't make heads or tails of hyperstition. Maybe I'm slow.]

Look, I take it as a given that anything exclusively appreciated by the white middle classes is probably suspect. They / we are not the engine of popular culture, that's obvious...

This is, I feel, the crux of Mark K-Punk's epic Glastonbury rant, even though it only comes in the comments. It's hinted at in the body of the piece:

balding accountants getting down to Basement Jaxx, Jemima studying Fine Arts at Sussex being 'blown away' by Macca ('he was so gid!')

What irks me about this line of argument (apart from the fact that I'm a Sussex alum, perhaps) is that it is bases musical value judgements on who makes music and, worse, on who listens to it. While a music and its audience are not wholly separate things, invective based on the perceived origins of both generally has little to do with the quality of the music. What if you like something, only to find out that it is made and/or listened to by the wrong people? Granted, Mark does also throw in

The bill was almost parodicallly LCD MOR, so safe and organic and wholesome and unimpeachable and uncontroversial:

Macca! Oasis! Franz Ferdinand!

but this is counter-balanced by a rather absurd focus on age:

No black folks of course unless they're well into their sixties (James Brown; Toots and the Maytals), but no whiteys EITHER unless they're into their sixties (Macca) or sound like they could be in their sixties (Franz Ferdinand, Scissor Sisters)...

Yes, James Brown has been thoroughly de-fanged: do music stores still carry a non-Greatest Hits album? But the generalisation is spurious: the best concert I saw last year was given by Peter Broetzmann, who must be at least approaching sixty, if he hasn't passed it by now. This also ties in with the aspect of community and embourgeoisement.

I mean, music in a field - in the daytime? Wtf? It's almost deliberately delibidinizing....

Apart from questions of sound quality, I find it odd that quelqu'un qui parle d'embourgeoisement would also deride the outdoors as a venue for music. It seems to me that taking music indoors is the first step towards gentrification: chamber music, the merchant's daughter playing the latest tunes for her parents in the salon, the rigidity of the concert hall... Contrast this with music colliding with the living sounds of the market-place, the gypsy's assemblage of mobile homes, the instant mash-up of rolled-down car windows and street-corner musicians... Similarly, having something more than a weeks-long generation gap is less a sign of stagnation than of community. Let's see where James Brown came from and what crowds he played for before becoming internationally famous.

balding accountants

Can they be hip enough? Could they make music hip enough? Could they make music at all? Crucially, I must believe so. Then again, I'm not very worried about who's driving pop culture. I'm more worried that people are able to take themselves out of commercial relationships to everything and create their own art: strum or paint or run or write or talk. It's our first line of defence against so many alienations, that to deny people even the possibility of doing this or doing it vicariously, even implicitly, rankles me.

They / we are not the engine of popular culture, that's obvious...

Too much complexity is hidden in this assertion to let it stand unquestioned: commercial engine? creative engine?

A tactical nuclear strike wd have taken out virtually everything that's debilitating, deadening and reactive about the Brit culture industry

Irony (cf. comments)? Hyperbolic sarcasm, more likely. And yet: Muse is probably in Mark's LCD MOR sights, so the news of the death, at Glastonbury, of the band's drummer's father and the subsequent cancellation of future concerts is a step in the right direction, no?

I'm gone, this post is still very rough.

Outta here

Tomorrow I'm off for two weeks in Martinique. Haven't been there in 4.5 years and haven't been on a family holiday in the same amount of time, I don't think. Not so long ago it was hard to get the four of us on the same continent...

I don't know what blogging conditions will be, but I'll try *not* to post anything the whole time. It should do me good.

Anoyingly, I'll have to miss the Tour de France passing through my little village, possibly the rest of Euro 2004 and probably a job opportunity... Them's the breaks, as they say.

Ciao!

Citizen Jazz update

Two Belgian albums this time, one by newcomers, the other by a veteran pianist.

Jazzisfaction - Issues
A very good Belgian debut, full of trumpet-led landscapes, some moody, some sunny. And a nice electro remix to cap it all off.

Diederik Wissels - Song of You
A very arranged album, but one that falls flat because there are only 3 good songs and the solos are transparent at best. There's also a kind of annoying bourgeois air about it all.

The. Greatest. Ever.

Derek over at Bagatellen points us to the greatest musician interview of all time. And I'd never even heard of Ted Nugent before.

20 big ones + 3

The Observer's Top 100 British albums led to the obligatory, more or less righteous, reactions from various quarters.

I'm crap at making lists, but Evergreen Daze's yeah everything on this list I have and genuienly (sic) enjoy struck a chord and got me thinking about music I really have a strong connection with. Beyond mere appreciation, listed below is music I've lived with in one way or another. Because of my absurdly bereft-of-music childhood, my tale is a lot shorter than others', but here's my honest answer, 20 albums and 3 entries that aren't albums. Many of these I wouldn't even list among my favourites, but they've earned their spots here nonetheless. They're presented roughly in the order in which I encountered them.

"Feelin' Hot Hot Hot"
I don't even know who sang this, but it reminds me of all those Carribbean expat parties back in the Kenya days, growing up.

Snoop Doggy Dogg - Doggystyle
The first album I ever bought, on cassette, was Kriss Kross's debut, but the first I really got into was this one, a little over 10 years ago. I listened and listened, learning all the lyrics. A few years later, I bought Tha Doggfather, but quickly lost interest. I still like hearing Snoop's trademark laid-back flow, however. I'll note my enjoyment of Eazy-E's It's on (Dr. Dre) 187um Killa here, but after a while I noticed that it was starting to corrupt my mind. Thinking about it, it probably marked the very beginning of the decline of my involvement with hip-hop.

The Fugees - The Score
Wore headphones to school and listened to this all day long and felt cool. Our sort-of school radio station (actually, simply a stereo playing into a hall), of which I was a peripheral member, was playing the "ooh-la-la-la" single that came out before "Killing Me Softly," so I felt justified in going with the commercial flow. I was miffed when, in their year-end Top 10, Time (hmm, I wonder if Jon Abbey was working there at the time?) called this "thinking man's hip-hop." My anti-mainstream media feelings have yet to develop to Carlin-esque proportions, however.

Tupac Shakur - Strictly For My Niggaz, All Eyez On Me
I started out with an unmarked tape of the first album, I wasn't even sure who it was. From the latter, "California Love" and "Trading War Stories" stick most in my mind.

Xzibit - At the Speed of Life
With Snoop and Tupac, Xzibit completes my "finest voices in hip-hop" trio. I wonder if they've ever appeared together on a track. I bought 40 Days and 40 Nights but paid little attention to it, whereas Restless got some play, despite a number of weak tracks.

The Roots - Illadelph Halflife
I think that this was the first album I bought because of things I read on the Internet. The Roots kept on being mentioned on various hip-hop sites, so I got this unheard and haven't regretted it since. Soon after, easter 1997 I think, I went to see the band in London. Back then, Rahzel still toured with them, it was incredible. Now I have all the Roots' albums and remain a huge fanatic (I've seen them in concert four more times), even if I don't visit okayplayer.com anymore. I'm worried about The Tipping Point being their first stinker, as the first single is very bland. I take heart in the fact that I also found "Break U Off" bland when I first heard it, but Phrenology turned out great anyway. The Roots led to the Common (Like Water For Chocolate), D'Angelo (Voodoo) and Mos Def (Black on Both Sides).

Count Basie compilation
Mid-way through university, hip-hop was getting boring. After a brief blues phase, I moved on to jazz. My father had (and has) a huge, mostly jazz, record collection, which he never got to play because, I suppose, of my mother's hyper-sensitivity to "noise." Just its presence, though, sufficed to make me naturally assume that jazz was a "higher music," one that I'd have to come around to eventually. A cheapo Basie two-disc compilation was my starting point, and had me dancing.

Art Blakey - Moanin'
I've already said it all. One of my best listens to this was while strolling on the outskirts of Salamanca, Spain. It was a sunny day, but a bit cold.

Dave Holland Quintet - Prime Directive
This is probably the album that has most accompanied the growth in my understanding of jazz. I know that that sounds pompous, but I can't put it any other way. I bought it because I was reading Robin Eubanks's thread on Jazz Corner (he seemed like a cool guy) and there were glowing reviews everywhere. At first I clung to the great melodies and Billy Kilson's drumming, but over time I kept coming back to it and came to appreciate the solos as well. A number of albums and concerts later, I'm still in their thrall.

Roots Manuva - Brand New Second Hand
Probably one of the last hip-hop albums I paid a lot of attention to. I even tried to penetrate Manuva's cryptic narratives. I rarely succeeded.

Steve Coleman - The Way of the Cipher
I first heard this at a friend's house. He only had an unmarked CD-R, but the musicians were announced at the end, allowing me to track the album down, with some friendly online help. At the time, it was a kind of Holy Grail for me: jazz/hip-hop fusion that actually worked! Gene Lake held it down something lovely. Nowadays there are other Coleman albums I prefer, but this was my entry point.

Miles Davis - In a Silent Way
I had unsuccessfully tried listening to Bitches Brew and Dark Magus, but IASW made them audible to me, as well as transporting me into the blissful zero-gravity of its space-funk. Also, it fits nicely into my "Miles x9 trilogy:" Birth of the Cool, Kind of Blue, IASW. I'll footnote Cannonball Adderley's Somethin' Else here, for its definitive version of "Autumn Leaves." Not only the head, but also the hand-off from Miles to Cannonball.

John Coltrane - Blue Train
In the Eurostar waiting room at Waterloo Station (or was it Brussels?), I read the first or second chapter of Invisible Man, then put on the headphones to hear this. The effect was almost overwhelming: Coltrane was blowing exactly what Ellison had written, the Black American experience was contained in both and they reinforced and enhanced each other.

Donny Hathaway
I can't single out an album because, great as they all are, they're all equally flawed. The first one I got was Donny Hathaway, I think. If I remember correctly, I checked Donny out because I kept on hearing and reading references to him. He couldn't write a tune and stay focused on it like Stevie, but in a way Donny's emotional impact is deeper. The live version of "A Song For You" is his greatest moment, in my opinion.

Stevie Wonder - Innervisions
I alreay had Hotter Than July and my favourite song, "They Won't Go When I Go," is on Fulfillingness' First Finale, but Innervisions, my second Stevie purchase, is the album that really turned me on to him.

Outkast - Stankonia
"Bombs Over Baghdad," "Gasoline Dreams," Big Boi's verse on "I'll Call Before I Come:" getting hooked on Outkast was inevitable after that. ATLiens still strikes me as their best album. It was weird to suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, hear the source of one of one of their most effective samples live.

Anne Wolf - Amazone
One of the first albums I reviewed. I played it so much that even my girl-friend could sing along to the solos.

Rêve d'Eléphant Orchestra - "Les folies de Cécile"
The band's "hit" tune. I drove my girl-friend crazy sitting on the floor in front of the stereo, hitting the play button again and again as I taught myself to play the melody on a tin flute I had bought in Ireland.

Mal Waldron - One More Time
One of the few albums I've heard that I firmly believe will be in jazz magazines' "Best of the '00s" lists. I saw Waldron three nights in a row in Brussels, playing with a quartet. The first set of the second night was the best 40 minutes of music I have ever experienced: I was almost levitating from sheer happiness. I didn't get to talk to him, but he did smile at me and crinkle his eyes. That was enough.

Dizzee Rascal - Boy in da Corner
Just because hearing it for the first time was one of those "Yes, this is it, this is fucking it!" moments. First heard about it on the blogs, naturally.

Charles Mingus - The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady
I could have put Ah Um or Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus, but re-listening to this one relatively recently (I shelved it for far too long in favour of the more tune-laden MMMMM. Well, I shouldn't say "for far too long" as I believe that music comes to you when you're ready, always in good time) opened up new worlds to me (Mingus will do that to you), thinking about how it is possible to write what amounts to a symphony using the jazz language (almost) exclusively. And of course, those flutes rock (I wonder if Dave Holland had them in mind when he wrote "Conference of the Birds?")

Dexter Gordon - Complete Blue Note Recordings Disc 1
Only just heard this, but I was entranced by Gordon in a way repeated listens to Go have failed to do. I think I'm ready now.

is this thing on?

Blogger has now enabled free audioblogging. I wonder if music bloggers would be interested in doing something similar - but far more interesting, naturally - to what the NYT does in their multimedia features: discussing a track while it's playing. For the moment, the only available number is in the US, so I won't be trying it out, but maybe someone else will?

Did he or didn't he?

SF-J says Usher cheats on his girlfriend in "Yeah!":

The lyrics are about a guy meeting a girl in a club and cheating on his girlfriend

There's probably a back-story I'm not fully aware of, but it seems to me that Usher arrives at the club with his friends, firmly intent on getting some on-the-side action, a girl starts throwing herself at him, Usher is strongly tempted but finds redemption on the dancefloor (and the wherewithal to remain stoic). In the video, he appears to go home and be dragged into the bedroom by his girlfriend. Of course, all of this is shrouded in ambiguity and ellipses, so who knows?

Lil Jon urges Usher on by yelling “O.K.!” and “Yeah!” and not much else.

But how can you ignore his enthusiastic Let's go! right after Usher sings She's going to my head now/Got me thinking that it might be a good idea to take her with me/(pause)She's ready to leave. But our hero is conflicted: I gotta keep it real now...But that just ain't me. Then again, right after that line there's a big Hey! that sounds like a "yeah, right." All this to say that the commenting Lil' Jon is doing in the background is very cool and enriches the narrative.

the only sign that the chorus has arrived is a sour little flute sound bumping leisurely down to land on a blue note

I just love how the flute pops in out of the blue and strolls through the chorus without a care in the world.

Is it just me, or is Ludacris getting less funny by the day?

bits 'n' bots 'n' swing

I'm a jazz fan
It might seem like a weird thing to say, but recently I've been surprising myself: the urge to balance my listening diet is dissolving, my enthusiasm for jazz is increasing. It's a happy surprise, somehow similar to perpetually re-discovering just how much I love the woman I've been with for 8 years. All the more so when she can, as she did last night, suddenly say that she doesn't like Keith Jarrett's vocalisations. Bless her, I need to subject her to some more Jarrett soon.

Down in the Cellar
Listening to this as it downloads leads me to one conclusion. Miles, Gary, Keith, Michael, Jack and Airto, mid-December 1970, in Washington D.C.'s Cellar Door: the funkiest band in the world, surely? Just because Keith renounced electricity, doesn't mean we have to: he was awesome on keyboards, bursting out of sputtering clouds of notes with gloriously radiant funk. David had expressed some reserve at Jack's jazz-rock playing but (granted, he's playing funk here) he sounds great to me. And is there really any need to discuss Miles's supremacy as a player of funk? Apparently a Complete at the Cellar Door box is in the works. An alternate, funkier Live-Evil drawn from the nights without John could, I'm sure, turn around many (if not all) of the post-Bitches naysayers.

Ornette...
Re-listening to some of his early quartet albums to verify ressemblances with Dennis Gonzalez's NY Midnight Suite (Clean Feed, a shoo-in for my year's best list, highly recommended!). Ended up opining that an album like The Shape of Jazz to Come did as much to liberate/redefine improvised melody as Kind of Blue. Just listening to Mingus's Ah Um and thinking about how Mingus created the impression of free jazz through superposition (his mid-size bands could sound chaotic, taken as a whole, but can always be broken down into coherent, interlocking segments), while Ornette achieved his goal more directly. And how the best description of Mingus I've ever read is still "It's like putting on a tuxedo and rolling in the mud." I'm annoyed I can't remember the source.

...and Don
Rightly or wrongly, some people consider Ornette's albums to be the saxophonist's best work, but I don't think that Cherry's best playing is to be found there, far from it. Not that I have much of it, but Complete Communion and El Corazon seem *so* much better to me, as representatives of Cherry's work.

At the mid-way point
The year's half done, here are some hot albums in no qualitative order:

Ben Allison & Medecine Wheel - Buzz (Palmetto)
Bruno E - Lovely Arthur (Trama)
Dennis Gonzalez - NY Midnight Suite (Clean Feed)
Frank Hewitt We Loved You (Smalls)
Joel Frahm - Don't Explain (Palmetto)
Josh Roseman Unit - Treats for the Nightwalker (Enja)
Louis Sclavis - Napoli's Walls (ECM) (okay, it's 2003)
Maak's Spirit - Al Majamaa (Igloo)
Pascal Schumacher Quartet - Change of the Moon (Igloo)
Rêve d'Eléphant Orchestra - Lobster Caravan (De Werf)
Stefano Bollani - Smat Smat (Label Bleu)
Steve Coleman - Lucidarium (Label Bleu)
The Claudia Quintet - I, Claudia (Cuneiform)
Tomasz Stanko - Suspended Night (ECM)

Reviews of (almost) all of these are either online (see the article index) or forthcoming.

Some sound-good-but-not-listened-to-enough-yet

Chris Potter - Lift (Sunnyside)
Frank Kimbrough - Lullabluebye (Palmetto)
Fred Hersch Trio - +2 (Palmetto)
Jacob Young - Evening Falls (ECM)
Youngblood Brass Band - center:level:roar (Ozone) another 2003 entry, but I just heard it

Disappointments

Brad Mehldau - Anything Goes (Warner) because it's too comfortable a record
Magic Malik - 13 XP's Songs (Label Bleu) because it's incredibly weaker than his previous two, which were fabulous. While I'm at it, the hidden track at the end of disc 1 of 00-237 is hilarious.

Jef Neve Trio - 16/06/2004, Brussels

This is the third time I've seen Jef's trio in the space of a few months. I even passed up the France-Croatia game to go see the concert. Following someone like that (I also see him regularly in Pascal Schumacher's Quartet and a few days ago got a CD with Jef as sideman) creates an interesting tension: I've built up so many reference points that there's a sort of objectivity within my (strongly favourable) bias. I can hear (to a degree) when he's pulling an old trick out of the bag and when he's doing something new. I can hear the trio (Piet Verbist on bass and Teun Verbruggen (photo) on drums) evolving, its repertoire getting sharper. I revel in the always radically different piano intros to "When Spring Begins," which have ranged from maudlin hymn to austere abstraction.

One major evolution was the trio's interpretation of standards. Back in March, they had only recently started integrating standards among the original compositions (mainly written by Jef, some by Piet). They slipped into a kind of pastiche of Miles Davis's first quintet's rhythm section or amused themselves by superposing 3 tempi, which "sounded very much like bad jazz well-played." Pleasant, funny, even, but anecdotal. Now it's a different story.

The second set was having a little trouble taking off, when on the fourth song Jef opened with a beautiful, long piano intro. He's a big fan of Russian composers and I think he was taking his not-too-abrasive dissonances from there* (that's another positive evolution: the increasingly imaginative integration of classical music into his jazz playing). The trio eventually slid into "Blame It On My Youth." The slow and spare accompaniment complemented Neve's dramatically pianissimo forays into the upper register, the intro's classical bent came back in discreet touches. Bill Evans probably owns this tune, but Jef was staking a strong claim.

The magnificent first set ended with "Get Yourself A Wheelchair." This tune is as cock-sure as the title suggests, racing between three different tempi. What made it really impressive is that the tempi weren't simple multiples of each other and that the trio didn't jump-cut from one to the other, but accelerated and decelerated together towards the new tempo, over a bar or two.

You know you're gaining fans when people recognise unreleased tunes. When Jef announced "Lament," the person in front of me commented knowingly (in Dutch) to his neighbour "That's a really great tune." It won't remain unreleased too long though, as the recording sessions for Jef's second album are done.

* Not that I actually have any firm knowledge to base that on.

Baga-moving-tellen

I've moved the link to Bagatellen from "Links" to "Blogs" because as Joe Milazzo said somewhere in this giant commenting frenzy:

At the end of the day, and certain appearances to the contrary, Bagatellen is much more of a true blog than it is a "magazine" in the manner of STYLUS, DUSTED, ONE FINAL NOTE, PT, or the example of your choice.

TV Rays

Last night I saw 40 minutes of a Ray Charles concert from 1991. Charles was full of energy, feet flying and diction, as always, hindered/made better by teeth seemingly too big for his mouth. The only unfortunate thing was that he wasn't with his big band. Instead, he had a drum/bass/guitar rhythm section and rather large string and (classical) horn sections to accompany him. No back-up singers, either.

Still, the first song shown was an* english version of Jacques Brel's "Ne Me Quitte Pas," which opens:

If you go away
On this summer's day
You might as well
Take the sun away

* A more faithful translation

Eric, Eric, wherefore art thou, Eric?

Well, the Coltrane documentary will have served at least two purposes, this being the second.

While I admire (really) Marcello's ability to diss jazz musicians (or specific contributions) like they're pop musicians, it's hard not to say something about my man Booker. But let's stick to the positive. Eric Dolphy + Charles Mingus, but how can you leave out "Stormy Weather"? October 20, 1960, Mingus and Dolphy alone together (almost), making some of the most soulful, heart-rending sounds ever. I love it because it shows how Dolphy, without straying too far from the in he Parker lineage, could be one of the purest, most imaginative and most powerful carriers of emotion in all of jazz. Contrast with Curson's brief incursions: right away, you hear playing, you hear blue notes. Mingus and Dolphy aren't carrying that baggage.

The beautiful game

Innovations in blogging continue: e-2004 for the football nuts and the casual fans and the cynical patriots.

One Final Note Update

Skalpel - Skalpel
It's funny, in reading review excerpts on Skalpel's website, many pointed to their retro-ness as a virtue, whereas I saw it as a fault (Ninja tune-by-numbers).

More on 'Trane

The Naked Maja goes into the documentary far more deeply than I did. *Half-assed excuse alert* Actually, Marcello reminded me of a few things I noticed, but did not mention here.

I'm hearing people scream SO WHAT? already Not me.

Coltrane is allotted 45 minutes in a vacant post-World Cup slot whereas if, say, Michael Frayn popped his Chablis tomorrow he'd get a suffocatingly reverent four-part series Isn't that post-Euro Cup? I don't know who Michael Frayn is, but it is indeed sad that one of jazz's only two (in the mass popular imagination, the other being Miles) eminently cool figures can only carve out 45 minutes of TV time for himself. The BBC did, however show a two-part Miles documentary and the Ken Burns thing. I saw neither.

But at no point during the programme did Yentob convey the impression that he had to make this documentary, that he was so consumed by the consumption of Coltrane that this programme could not have waited. I got the impression that by the angle was to make us understand the source of
the fascination for Coltrane: the church, the WKCR orgy, the Japanese fan(atic). Consumption by proxy.

From heroin to clean to LSD. Even before this documentary, I'd wondered what was up with that. Miles's cold turkey drug break is also well-known, but his autobiography makes it fairly clear that he continued taking various drugs, just not to the point of re-becoming a junkie who stole his friends' possessions to get his fix.

"I would like to be remembered as a saint" I'd never heard that one before, it was rather strange.

yes, musicians are sometimes HAPPY shock horror! I'd read that Coltrane rarely smiled for pictures because he was embarassed about his bad teeth. After finally seeing a picture of him smiling, I can see that that was indeed the case. As one who also modified my way of smiling because of my teeth (and not just for pictures), I understand. The funny thing is that those unsmiling, far-off-in-the-cosmic-unknown gaze photos have greatly contributed to the Coltrane myth.

an overly diplomatic McCoy I was hoping for some discussion of why the Quartet ended (and maybe, why did Garrison stay), but no possibly negative comments on Coltrane were possible, apart from the happily-ever-after and oh-so-inspiring drug addiction tale.

Meanwhile, Yentob walks right past the Village Vanguard without mentioning it, and walks into a deli which used to be the Half Moon club. It was the Half Note, but I found that funny too. Especially as the narrator is saying something along the lines of "I went looking for the scene of some of Coltrane's greatest performances" as he walks past the VV.

Not a word about how his influence spread into rock and even pop - the ghost of Hendrix must be wondering if he's deliberately being written out of history

Hendrix being written out of music history? Where do you get that impression from? The pop connection could have been interesting (thought it probably whouldn't have been done well in this show), as jazz has always served as an interface between high and low.

crucially NO Alice Coltrane I'd be very surprised if they didn't ask her. Maybe she turned them down. Of course, they could have made it more explicit that she replaced Tyner, especially as Alice is on-screen several times, both as a wife/mother and as a performer. Less crucial, but equally puzzling, was the absence of Ravi Coltrane. Or, indeed, any sense of the legacy of Coltrane beyond those who played with him (Tyner, Shepp, Ali).

BUT HOW GOOD WAS 'TRANE AS A FREE IMPROVISER? I'm not sure that this is as crucial a question as Marcello makes it. Why this one rather than "BUT HOW GOOD WAS 'TRANE AS A BEBOP IMPROVISER?"? Marcello mentions the live version of "A Love Supreme," I would also put Sun Ship up as a good example of the Classic Quartet playing free.

What bothered me more was the documentary's description of only latter-day Coltrane as "experimental," when he was clearly experimenting and experimental right from the beginning. Cf. some of the fumbling he does on Walkin' or Tenor Madness.

there was nothing in this documentary which would have been likely to convert an unbeliever I find that difficult to determine. Ultimately, what converts people is the music

I forgot to mention that Benny Golson also appeared - he seems to be everywhere at the moment, doesn't he? Kenneth Clarke popped up too. I'm not sure why, as he had nothing coherent to say.