Ni Kantu

Resounding Vision Award 2012: Alvin Fielder

2012-01-22T23:16:00.001-06:00

I've been asked by a few people to see the transcript of a talk I gave at the 2012 Nameless Sound Resounding Vision Award, honoring Jackson, Miss. drummer, educator and historian Alvin Fielder. What follows is the text that I read to introduce one of America's national treasures. Following introductions and the presentation of the award, Alvin played in duo with tenorman Kidd Jordan and in a trio with two drum students, Abel Cisneros and Juan Martinez. The next day saw Fielder, Jordan and William Parker give a workshop at Sterling High School in South Houston, Texas followed by an evening's performance by the trio (with special guest pianist Darryl Levine) at the Eldorado Ballroom. It was a fascinating end to the week and a wonderful start to the new year...

--

First hearing this music it seemed like it came from nowhere, or that it was rebelling against the old, that it was freedom from just as much (if not more than) it was freedom for. To me it seemed like Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman, and the music of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) were counter to the prevailing legacy of jazz, rather than part of it. But in the course of listening to the music and talking to those who were there – and listening some more – that understanding became more fleshed out.

I first heard Alvin Fielder on Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound – the first AACM record to be released in1967. Probably that’s where some of you may also have heard his work. In the last few decades, based out of Jackson, MS his associates have included Kidd Jordan (New Orleans), William Parker (NYC), Joel Futterman (Virginia Beach), Ike Levin (the Bay Area), Dennis Gonzalez and Stefan and Aaron Gonzalez (Dallas). That’s a merger of a lot of different ways to play this music.

I met Alvin in 2005 after a gig here by the trio you’ll be seeing tomorrow night at the Eldorado Ballroom – with Kidd and William. He graciously allowed me to interview him, which was a really special experience (and anyone who’s talked to him for even a few minutes has had a hint of that). We’ve continued to talk regularly and each time we talk I get a history lesson, and maybe a drum lesson too (and I don’t play the drums). Alvin is a drummer but more than that, he’s a drum historian, and even more than that he’s an archivist, or rather a living, playing archive of jazz percussion. He collects stories and experiences from other drummers as a way of not only understanding what the drums’ possibilities are in this music, but as a way of playing within the orbit of the music’s history.

Now, you might expect a drummer to speak highly of people like Max Roach or Kenny Clarke or Roy Haynes, but the joy and awe that comes through when Alvin speaks about them – experiencing their music, sure, but also being a fly on the wall to their conversations, writing letters to them, documenting their own studies, is another thing entirely. Alvin speaks with equal depth about those drummers we may not know so well – Cuba Austin from McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, or Vernell Fournier, Ed Blackwell, Arthur Edgehill, Jimmy Wormworth, Beaver Harris, Joe Harris, Shadow Wilson… learning techniques from these musicians (a little phrase from Max, another phrase from Vernell) as well as about their humanity and how they contributed to this music. For him, this drive for learning is both an aesthetic necessity and it ensures that the music he creates (or imparts) remains grounded in history.

Archiving might certainly be about letters, drum exercise books, cymbals, sticks, tapes and records, but in the case of something as ephemeral and personal as the history of this music, that information must be lived. Whenever Alvin Fielder plays the drums, he’s playing a mental and physical history lesson (ancient to the future) that is n the here and now. Not that one has to take disassemble it – one can take in, receive it, and learn from the whole.

Let me say a word, too, about community because that is what the Resounding Vision Award is all about. First, community is something that is tied to living history, built on the foundation of what came before and truly knowing that. Being able to experience history in real time can draw us together as we understand our place in it. Alvin brought creative music to Missisippi with Black Arts Music Design, and was a founding member of Chicago’s AACM, which also had a community and educational basis to it. He continues to teach and impart the music’s development from a drummer’s perspective, ensuring that those lesser-known musicians’ stories are told. He will be teaching while he is in Houston – he’s always passing knowledge down. Implicit is that his own story and archive become part of that information. Now, Alvin’s licks are part of the drums’ language.

Clifford Allen
January 19, 2012

Happy New Year from Ni Kantu - Reflections on Creation and Space

2011-12-31T19:02:00.001-06:00

Originally I was going to try to squeeze in a few more reviews for the last Ni Kantu post of 2011, but it looks like those will be running next week as the first post of 2012. At any rate, I won’t spend too much time reflecting on the past because the year’s end is, in my mind, an opportunity to leap forward. Nevertheless, and despite the political and cultural hardships we endure – not to mention financial challenges, wars, environmental insanity and sickness – this is an exciting time to be alive. Musically there is so much going on that it is impossible to keep up with it all, and that’s really quite a good thing.

When I first began to explore the world of jazz and creative music as a college student, I mostly looked at it from a historical perspective and made myself aware of the artist-soldiers who had come before my time. Some are still with us creating, many are not. As I turned to the music of my own time – that made by my peers and those somewhat older than me – it made me happy to realize that a lot of this work was new work, not retreading previously exhausted principles. While I haven’t heard or studied all the great jazz musicians from history, I still feel that what I hear now is possible only in the present, and is uniquely reflective of all the great things we, as human beings, now have available to us. I’m saying this not only in terms of technical and aesthetic resources, but spiritual (read: ineffable) ones too. Sure, we have lost many veteran masters in 2011 and it’s a trend that will no doubt be on the increase, but as we think back on the great works of those musician-composers, we must think of the fact that without these players in our physical midst, a) their work and spirit will remain with us and b) we can honor them by making the most of ourselves.

I’m really lucky to be in the position of being able to write and think about music, even as the time I have available for this work has shrunk a fair amount. Those who make music, or those who are scholars and who can pass on appreciation of the work, are also very lucky people and we’re lucky ouselves to have them in our midst. I balk at the idea that there aren’t enough musicians and artists who “bring it” left on the planet – for in my opinion, the weight of an excellent, original artist is worth ten thousand bullshitters and I’m glad there are so many fine musicians on the scene, many of whom we can see potential even if they haven’t yet come into their own. It’s a great time to look forward and to believe in oneself, perhaps keeping in mind the words of trumpeter and improvising composer Bill Dixon: “everything I did was all I could do.”

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2012!
Clifford Allen / Ni Kantu

The Thirteenth Assembly Minus One: Taylor Ho Bynum, cornet; Mary Halvorson, guitar; Tomas Fujiwara, drums. Filmed 2010, Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC.

Music Briefly Reviewed - End-of-Year Roundup 2011

2011-12-24T00:38:00.001-06:00

BOBBY BRADFORD/JOHN CARTER QUINTET
Comin’ On
(Hat Hut)

The Carter-Bradford Quartet was one of the great long-lasting ensembles of the second wave of avant-garde jazz, but due to their location in Los Angeles (not exactly the center of the jazz world) and fiscal challenges that beset any feasible touring schedule, their work was sadly unrecognized outside the cognoscenti. Trumpeter Bradford and reedman Carter waxed a number of excellent LPs for the Revelation and Flying Dutchman labels (the former are collected in a Mosaic Select boxed set) and appeared in various later aggregations for mostly European audiences. The 1988 performance captured on Comin’ On is a reunion of sorts, featuring drummer Andrew Cyrille, bassist Richard Davis and keyboardist Don Preston for a program of five original compositions.

Many writers have tried to connect Bradford and Carter with Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman – Bradford played with Ornette and Carter grew up in Fort Worth, but the combination of the trumpeter’s fat, incisive post-Brownie tone and Carter’s almost (avant-) “classical” sense of tonal organization does separate the two camps. This is true both soloistically and compositionally (though clearly such concepts overlap). Ultimately, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much whether they’re comparable ensembles or not because once one becomes aware of the music, individuality tends to be what’s memorable rather than how things (or people) are similar. Carter had switched exclusively to the clarinet well before these recordings were waxed at LA’s Catalina Bar & Grill, an apparent hotspot during the decade for creative music – pianist-composer Horace Tapscott’s contemporaneous stand was captured on The Dark Tree (Hat Hut, also featuring Carter and Cyrille). The set opens with Bradford’s title composition, a jovial but piercing fanfare for the horns, ducking and diving cadenzas before the rhythm section falls in line as the drummer’s light, skimming bash straddles bop and freer flow. Bradford’s phrasing has a sunny logic, roundly following thematic elements with a swagger that’s both hefty and slender, with simple and direct recapitulations of the tune’s essential swing. Carter’s statement is quite counter, high-register flights anchored by warbling chalumeau and slick, false-fingered movement that gives Preston’s harmonic chunks a heady challenge.

It is here that mention should be made of Preston’s synthesizers, which allow lush orchestration to present itself in a small-group setting. “Ode to the Flower Maiden” is a fine example of this, with echoes of strings, piano, metallic percussion and double reeds adding ghost registers to Carter’s absolutely fascinating exploration of breath and structure. It’s interesting to hear Bradford’s trumpet in this context – there’s a clear delineation between “jazz” and what Carter does - an extremely broad-minded instant encapsulation of the harmonic possibilities laid out in the theme’s initial voicing. A crisp, ascending figure steels the Davis-Cyrille vamp on “Encounter” as Preston approximates a modal hall of mirrors with crashing chords, oblique washes and unearthly sound-clusters surrounding the composer’s lengthy series of trilling clambers. Even when crumpled and abstracted, it seems as though Bradford is set on finding the bebop in this composition, and that’s not a slight – creativity includes finding one’s own ground within the form of others’ art.

“Sunday Afternoon Jazz Society Blues” is a complex theme that one could easily imagine as an orchestra piece with quintet interludes, massive synth chords augmenting chortled and splayed knots, Ornetteish laughter and rhythmic gulps. Bradford and Preston support Carter’s volatile cornucopia with alternately saccharine and sharp long tones, leading into cascading woody digs buoyed by loose and impeccable time. Where the clarinetist pushes against rhythm with his asymmetrical inventions, Bradford rides and crests those detailed waves, occasionally goaded into difference by Preston’s prickly accompaniment. Both approaches are entirely valid and grant the music a diversified power on the whole. Comin’ On is an exceedingly strong example of the leaders’ rapport, not to mention their abilities as composers, bandleaders, visionaries and traditionalists of the highest order. Thankfully it is in print once again.

MARC DUCRET
Tower Volumes 1 & 2
(Ayler)

Mostly known for his work with saxophonist-composer Tim Berne, French guitarist Marc Ducret and, while that collaboration has been extraordinarily fruitful – resulting in about a dozen albums under Berne’s leadership and a number of others variously helmed – Ducret’s own dates might be a bit overshadowed. Along with countrymen François Courneloup (saxophones), Dominique Pifarély (violin), Bruno Chevillon (bass), and Benoît Delbecq (keyboards), he’s created some fascinating music under a hybridized rubric of free jazz, modern composition and progressive rock. The two volumes of Tower, released on Ayler Records, eloquently display Ducret’s mastery of powerful free jazz-rock with two multinational ensembles.

The first volume is a French-Danish meeting and joins Ducret with trombonist Matthias Mahler, saxophonist Fred Gastard, trumpeter Kasper Tranberg and drummer Peter Bruun on three rather intense compositions. “Real Thing #1” starts the set off extra crunchy, with midrange guitar flutter and hum approximating shorts and small explosions as Ducret’s volatility jibes with whining trumpet and Bruun’s cymbal scrape. But things really kick into high gear with a series of mouthy ensemble knots, Gastard and Mahler providing a serious bottom end to cutting trumpet, adroit martial clatter and Ducret’s scumbled, cottony electricity. The composed lines are charged with a tensile weave, motoring huffs befitting a Six-era Softs until Ducret and the horns put forth dense power chords, rocked-out poles that segregate and shore up fragmentary duo and trio improvisation. Though not evincing as much multiphonic shredding as someone like Mats Gustafsson, Gastard’s bass saxophone work is in that tradition and fits well with the twining spires of Ducret’s choppy and compelling jazz-rock vision. Bruun is the drummer to realize this, building tension with top-heavy, caterwauling rhythms that are nevertheless precise and delicate. The absence of a bass-centered rhythm section also helps to push the ensemble’s rockist tendencies into a weirdly light overdrive. Real Thing #2” follows, Ducret spinning out funky flint against muted cymbals and agitated roll, augmented by a chunky front line. An area of knife-like interplay between guitar and brass emerges, very free, before Gastard and Bruun build a fat motion for sinewy mid- and upper-range colors to ride, with Tranberg’s keening young-lion blast getting some fine stretching room.

Tower Volume 2 presents the French-American contingent, with Ducret and Pifarély joined by Berne and drummer Tom Rainey. The opening “Sur l’Electricité” melds a soundtrack of the Paris Metro and cityscape with guitar and electric violin at the outset, amplified ponticello skirls, triple-stops, and scrambled staccato elegantly contrasting Ducret and Rainey’s slim, blues-rock backing. That’s not to say that the violinist doesn’t pick up on these advances, wailing flatted fifths and then some before he, Berne and Ducret assemble a bright, atonal progression. A choppy guitar-drums duet emerges, wiry, backbeat-heavy and painted over with an awesomely aggressive swirl. As much differentiation as exists in the quintet of Tower Volume 1, the quartet here is extremely well matched and dare I say familiar – Pifarély and Berne complement one another perfectly, alto curling in soft salts as the violinist works through a deep, sinewy harmonic range. “Real Thing #3” opens with guitar, alto and violin approximating some of the spacious, toothy tones of Morton Feldman (especially apparent in Pifarély’s long, dissonant quaver). Even as Ducret begins assembling crotchety, fuzzy clusters, there’s a sense of poise against those rough blues that’s really remarkable. As with the other “Real Thing” compositions, the group alternates between patches of scrappily open detail and rugged, seafaring movement. Perhaps this quartet is a bit more delicate, with Berne’s lip-curls and Pifarély’s rangy poems in the front line. Either way, Ducret has assembled two fantastic groups to work through six collective compositions striding across free and rigorous form. Both volumes of Tower are essential new-millennial listening.

KALI Z. FASTEAU
An Alternate Universe
(Flying Note)

Multi-instrumentalist and improviser Kali Z. Fasteau is somewhat of a veteran in creative music who, alongside Don Cherry, could easily be said to have helped bring non-Western music and “jazz” together under the banner of world improvisation. Not as well-known as Cherry, she first began working alongside her late husband, Chicago bassist, clarinetist and instrument maker Donald Rafael Garrett in the Sea Ensemble, an important yet unsung outfit from the halcyon 1970s. The Sea Ensemble incorporated a vast array of non-Western instruments, homemade sounds and educational-participative practices into the landscape of free improvisation. Since the late 1980s, most of her releases as a leader-collaborator have been on her own Flying Note label, including partnerships with Kidd Jordan, Noah Howard, William Parker, Rashied Ali and Bobby Few. An Alternate Universe joins her on a collection of 1992 archival recordings with Parker and drummer Cindy Blackman (a rare avant-garde encounter) now seeing their first release.

Fasteau’s choice of instrumentation here is perhaps a little closer to the Western ear – she plays cello, soprano saxophone and electric piano – but in these trios and duets, the intent remains expansive and by the same token the narrower palette concentrates the improvisations. Recorded in a deliciously lo-fi manner, the twenty-five minute “Ardor” is the disc’s centerpiece and pairs Fasteau’s cello and Parker’s arco bass harmonics in a devilish saw-and-sway that is occasionally in the red, furious and free in its naked expressionism. Perhaps we’ve gotten somewhat used to Parker’s hypnotic vamps, and this piece serves as a nudge in the direction of a different kind of trance – that of the consciousness-raising immediacy of concentrated, varied impasto. Though classically schooled, Fasteau’s cello work is a more homebrewed, generative and reactive virtuosity (i.e., playing the shit out of the instrument). “Liquid Geometry” finds Blackman roiling in scattered brush attack behind a jagged, almost unsettling quilt of electric piano/harpsichord lines and Parker’s bowed bass, while the bright, dervish-like soprano twirls of “Fervor” and its mildly overdriven groove spotlight the trio’s lofty energy. Blackman’s approach to the kit, while sometimes overtly concerned with technical implications, here recalls the eye-popping interleaved rhythms of Ed Blackwell and Charles Moffett. “If You Knew” is a grungy threesome for cello, bass and drums and, while the contrast between sharp, rolling accents and sawing bows is almost sore-thumb apparent, that collision makes for an engagingly strange listen. Fasteau, Parker and Blackman present an unflinchingly raw collective vision that is certainly a must-experience for fans of free music, and An Alternate Universe is also a great place to dip your toes into the Fasteau discography.

THE FOUR BAGS

Forth
(NCM)

Though it’s become patently unhip to call an artform quintessentially “New York” – as much as contemporary music can be regionalized in the age of the internet and so forth – but the work of chamber quartet The Four Bags doesn’t seem like it belongs to any other locale. Formed in 1999 by trombonist Brian Drye, clarinetist Michael McGinnis, guitarist Sean Moran and accordionist Jacob Garchik, Forth is their fourth disc to date of original compositions and obscure covers that draw from modern composition, klezmer, Brazilian pop, jazz and “indie rock.” The set begins with the accordionist’s “Wayne Shorter’s Tune With All Different Notes” (which I couldn’t quite identify), but no matter as this is a fine introduction to the Four Bags’ modus operandi. That is to say it's flinty and funky as guitar commingles with Drye’s stately, Mangelsdorff-like chortle and the knotty tango of clarinet and accordion, shifting from oddball stomp to flecked detail and long, heaving squeeze-box tones within a very short time span.

The Four Bags’ weirdness is not a put on – they come by it honestly, as their deft individual phrasing is immediately clear and, instead of appropriating a bunch of different strains to make something “different” from grafted-on parts, this is a unified whole of bright, off-kilter construction. A cover of the Air tune “Run” (Air as in the French electro-pop group, not the AACM trio) follows, tautly insistent patter and warble offsetting Drye’s chortling bugle-flicks and snatches of minimal, phased wowing. The guitarist’s “Terpsichore” crosses the Greek/East European axis with curious tonal juxtapositions and a nagging tendency to undermine its own furious tempo and intricacy with blats and thick, grungy swaths of sound, while “Comfort Toon” pits filmic calm and folksy progressions against spots of unsettled wheeze and winsome clarinet. These patches of dissonance briefly take over around the halfway point, fuzzed guitar and accordion sticking in the sand as the horns cut a tall profile. Though areas of improvisation occur, The Four Bags are not really an improvising ensemble (they are certainly creative, however). The focus is on structured compositions that draw from collectivity, personality and a broad understanding of how divergent musics can fit together without leaving too many holes and patches. Tart minimalism, recast Persian melodies (Parviz Meshkatian's "The Burning") and signs of Downtown jazz are just part of The Four Bags’ fascinating, eminently listenable whole.

THE GREEN PASTURE HAPPINESS
Aut Disce Aut Discede
(Peira)

The Green Pasture Happiness is a trio of Chicago-based electronic (mostly) improvisers consisting of Brian Labycz, Aaron Zarzitski, and Daniel Fandiño, and Aut Disce Aut Discede is their first release, appropriately enough on Labycz’ Peira CD-R label. The group’s main objective appears to be confrontationally straddling the perceived boundaries between noise music/non-music and improvisation. Of course, those twain have met before in the context of people like Michel Waisvisz and groups such as Musica Elettronica Viva and Gentle Fire, though the crucial difference among the latter two is that those were collectives drawn from academic composers “reinventing” music through electronic and non-musical means, rather than artists starting from a less well-heeled pedigree. Interactive events and their results are nakedly present, especially on the centerpiece “Should I Take Your Silence as a ‘Not Interested’?” and its Hugh Davies-inspired contact microphone huffs, disembodied growling and the whittled scrape of small, metallic objects. Essentially, noises are sounds without music and their occurrence is defined as random and disembodied. Once organized, attached to something/someone and developed through impulse and refinement, they are no longer “noises.” Through collective engagement, this trio’s actions and reactions pile on, augmented and set against the movement of the whole. At times the pieces’ structure appears loose, with constant textural shifts and amplified behaviors calling to mind workmanlike imagery, even if the exact sources aren’t obvious. Other sounds are drawn out, shaped and even hierarchical. The closing “A Spiritual Brown” offers multiple sections of haranguing blocks of sound, hard shifts demarking the changes. Obviously, this is music resulting from a trio of someones, as much as the landscape that they create may at first blush seem inhuman.

MILES GRIFFITH/MICHAEL JEFRY STEVENS QUARTET
Only Love
(ARC)

Vocals weren’t really present in my initial forays into this music, whether growing up or in later investigations live and on record. I didn’t really think that “jazz vocals” represented the music’s serious side. It wasn’t until hearing people like Eddie Jefferson, Joe Lee Wilson, Patty Waters and Jeanne Lee that my understanding of, at the very least, the power of the human voice in both improvisation and song craft became clearer. After all, getting interested in jazz was partly a “freedom from” popular music as much as it was a “freedom for” grasping music (including pop) with a bit more relativity (that’s still an ongoing process). So it is in this personal tradition that Only Love, the third recording from vocalist Miles Griffith and pianist Michael Jefry Stevens, entered my orbit. Joined by drummer Dieter Ulrich and bassist Dominique Girod on ten original compositions recorded for Swiss radio, the quartet is full of power, muscle, beauty and humor in its cooperative search.

Miles Griffith walks an elegant tightrope between clarity of form and purity of expression – that’s why, I suppose, his work here feels more akin to a “traditional” instrumentalist. Sure, voice is the “original instrument” (to quote Joan La Barbara), but it’s become so connected with words and meaning that sometimes one’s appreciation of tone and phrasing gets lost. The irony is, in the case of Griffith’s approach, that his original lyrics are striking, simple poetry clearly enunciated and that clarity is used as part of his phrasing, integral to what makes his “sound” so elegant. Crisp, bubbly, mildly acrid intonation on the gorgeous spiritual modes of “Sometimes” mirrors the head-on wail of alto saxophonists like Carlos Ward and Gary Bartz, in conference with rolling, mildly dissonant arpeggios and a steamrolling rhythm section. The tune’s closing improvisation includes volcanic, leaping scat – something Griffith is technically adept at while also an instance of expression superseding traditional language (the rollicking Afro-Cuban “Oh Mama” almost recalls some of Milford Graves’ antics). That said, his sculpting of the literal word is what I find most intriguing as he purrs, kinks and renders sharp or flowing stanzas that, on the surface, would read rather basic. In that sense, he’s an excellent foil for Stevens, whose pianism has always entranced with poise and wryness in its language of open post-bop. Only Love and the Griffith/Stevens Quartet mark an extremely worthwhile modern jazz collaboration that is well worth seeking out.

ALEXANDER HAWKINS ENSEMBLE
All In, Ever Out
(Babel)

English keyboardist and improvising composer Alexander Hawkins is fast proving to be one of the most unique voices in contemporary music, a young master for whom terms like “free improvisation” and “avant-garde” don’t exactly cut the mustard. His work in the bi-continental Convergence Quartet and the rugged organ trio Decoy would have put him on the modern creative music map by themselves, but it’s in the elegantly cooperative Alexander Hawkins Ensemble that his work really stands out. The instrumentation is curious – piano, marimba, guitar, cello, bass and drums – but utterly gimmick-free. One gets the feeling that the Ensemble’s collective voice and the structure that arises straddle two poles - that the player’s personality stands ahead of instrumental specifics and the particular sound of these instruments (together and in opposition) is extremely important to the overall work. All In, Ever Out is the group’s second disc (following the 2009 standout No, Now Is So on FMR) and joins Hawkins with guitarist Otto Fischer, drummer Javier Carmona, cellist Hannah Marshall, bassist Dominic Lash and Orphy Robinson on marimba for nine compositions, all of which are originals. This is somewhat of a departure from other discs, which have featured highly personal interpretations of Sun Ra, Wadada Leo Smith, and South African township jazz alongside Hawkins’ own pieces.

“Ologbo (double trio)” may take its title from a Nigerian township, but following the initial bass-cello duet, its theme (primarily voiced by guitar and piano) has more in common with the erudite, Monkish swing of the Attila Zoller-Don Friedman group. The ensuing improvisation adds Robinson’s resonant wooden cascades to the strings’ pizzicato surge, as flourishes of cymbals, electric guitar and piano gradually pile on. Fleet, dry fire from Carmona’s kit prods the twined inversions of Fischer and Hawkins in another brief and exceptionally busy trio before the ensemble, ragged and right, takes the tune home. “Tatum Totem III” follows, independent jaunt and overlapping parallel blocks drawing together as choppy improvisational currents that, while they relate to and inform one another, reflect the individuality of their contours as much as they do an overarching scheme. It’s not something that, on the surface, would seem all that unique in improvised music but the way it’s scored among these six musicians is a resounding collar grab. The penchant for parallel commentary seems almost lackadaisical in “Owl (Friendly)/A Star Explodes 10,000 Years Ago, Seen By Chinese Astronomers” as a delicate, short phrase and its refrain are teased out and elaborated upon in gently wheeling mingle and Marshall’s deep, lithe cello is front and center with tousled romance.

“Ahab” is boisterously resolute in its seaworthiness, a slightly out-of-tempo orchestral jounce in the head that gives way to the staggering, Schlippenbach-Lovens interplay of the pianist and drummer as Lash motors along underneath. Fleshed out by the rest of the ensemble, bass, cello and piano kick and chomp towards a regal conclusion. “Elmoic” could take its title from a Paul Rutherford piece; its first two and a half minutes are given over to the leader’s kaleidoscopic unaccompanied piano before the ensemble enters in a circular dance, anthemic downstrokes countering a series of short, florid solos. Hawkins tends to subsume his own highly virtuosic playing to the greater good of collectivity, so it is fascinating to hear him step out front on this piece. The closing “So Very, Know” is as striking in its somberness as other compositions are exhortations of joy, sparsely-drawn harmonics a padding for the guitarist’s flourishes and Hawkins’ gospelized but oddly unresolved piano. All In, Ever Out is unlike anything else in modern creative music and, while it may be produced under nominal leadership, it’s a testament to mutual selflessness and a trust in convergent personalities. That is, after all, what our music is rooted in.

JOE HERTENSTEIN/THOMAS HEBERER/JOACHIM BADENHORST/PASCAL NIGGENKEMPER

Polylemma

(Red Toucan)

There’s a small group of New York-based European musicians who seem to be developing a real collective voice. As of yet they aren’t getting a ton of press Stateside but that will probably change. Four of them are represented on Polylemma – drummer Joe Hertenstein, trumpeter Thomas Heberer, and bassist Pascal Niggenkemper are from Germany, and bass clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst hails from Belgium. Heberer (the eldest) is the most well known because he has played the “straight man” in the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra for many years, though his own work as a soloist and bandleader is fairly obscure. With only trumpet in the front line, a pared-down version of this group recorded the excellent HNH for Clean Feed in 2010, and without drums another trio variation waxed Klippe under Heberer’s leadership for Clean Feed earlier this year.

Back to Polylemma, though: the eight compositions are split between Hertenstein and Heberer, and range from subdued tonal agitation to more rhythmically excited bounce. The latter’s “One Ocean at a Time” starts with a pedal point reminiscent of Coltrane’s “India,” which quickly begins playing off of a series of knotty rows, first from bass clarinet and bass, then adding Heberer’s clarion tone. Skimming across all of it is Hertenstein in rolling, punchy detail, building phrases from damped toms and broad, coppery crash. Niggenkemper’s arco solo is deft and guttural, and driving in a way that no beat is lost when he surges alongside the drummer’s tense chatter. “Crespect,” composed by Hertenstein (and also the title of his disc with bassist Achim Tang and pianist Philip Zoubek), is vibrant and singsong with a Bley-like wander, Heberer embellishing with cackling, wry turns, maudlin lines and boppish fragments while Badenhorst needles the theme into an intense harangue. When they intertwine it’s brilliant, but there’s a lot of enjoyment in this piece from the quartet’s well-schooled ricochet.

The four musicians are quite a study in contrast – Hertenstein is busy but empathetic, contradicting his colors with undermining action as Heberer ties a kaleidoscopic understanding of history and technique into knots. Niggenkemper and Badenhorst are bound among woody tones that they serve in clean, expressionist dollops. Even a stab at modernist post-bop like “Nupeez” is imbued with a weird sense of polyphony that nearly subverts its very flow. But if Polylemma’s options were all smirk, it would lose the compelling holler of sweaty groove and powerful synchronicity, which this quartet has in spades.

INGRID LAUBROCK & SLEEPTHEIF
The Madness of Crowds
(Intakt)

It sounds strange to say this – especially when a non-musician is considering the work of an artist who’s been active for a number of years – but German-born saxophonist and improvising composer Ingrid Laubrock really is coming into her own. October saw Laubrock performing the Falling River Music with Anthony Braxton, whose breathy, cutting fragility makes an excellent foil for her tenor, which transliterates Archie Shepp’s coiled velvet into tonal-spatial research. Aside from stretching the tenor’s boundaries with mutes and inserted objects, on soprano she has a golden plaintiveness that brings to mind Steve Lacy and Marion Brown. Though she’s worked with a number of bands around New York and in her previous home base of London, Sleepthief (which also includes pianist Liam Noble and drummer Tom Rainey) might be among the most compelling. The Madness of Crowds is the trio’s second disc and finds them working through nine stunning, continually-shifting and rigorous explorations.

Continuing the reference of the disc’s title to economist Charles Mackay, the opening “Extraordinary Popular Delusions” (not to be confused with the Chicago free music quartet of the same name) begins with a mixture of piano strings, zither (Laubrock) and cymbals. Whittling scrapes, strums and muted insistence are supported by Rainey’s delicate architecture and precise tom rhythms, keyboard flourishes an arching dusk for Laubrock’s phrases, which turn Charlie Rouse into parsed caterwaul. Following an ending swatch of percussive vulcanism, “You Never Know What’s In the Next Room” flutters tersely as Laubrock’s tendrils carve balladic space against a dangerous harmonic seam. Beautiful, ringing near-romantic progressions fall back into the murk, parlor phrases snake out of bubbles and chatter, beats and lilting melody in a haze of undisclosed gurgle. Laubrock's soprano is given the spotlight on “The Slow Poisoners” – growling yet pure, warm trills caught in an updraft from piano and brushes.

A kaleidoscope of harried angles isn’t out of her vocabulary, evidenced by “There She Goes with Her Eye Out,” which starts in a haranguing volley-trade with Rainey’s drums as Noble's occasional creeping blocks of commentary outline shivs of gauze. “Haunted Houses” finds Laubrock’s snapped shouts rattling drum heads and piano guts with terse vibrations, before shifting into the purrs and crackle of “Does Your Mother Know You’re Out?” The latter explores a range of chirps, wheezes, gulps and whistles that nevertheless contain an incredible amount of energy, tiny explosions that produce enough tension to open throttle with, Rainey galloping along with Noble’s swirled turnarounds and Laubrock’s conch-like muted call. The trio references boppish phrasing in brief snatches before a lush, overlapping finale. Sleepthief is clearly a special trio that has grown by the experience not only of playing together, but the contrasting advances that each player has made independently. The group reveals an expanded language awash in pure sound as much as it values Monk, minimalism, and orchestrated explosiveness. While Laubrock is busy finding new improvisational paths, it will help her (as it would any improviser) to have a home base that is regularly refined.

DAUNIK LAZRO/BENJAMIN DUBOC/DIDIER LASSERRE
Pourtant les Cimes des Arbres
(Dark Tree)

Though perhaps an ongoing concern for French baritone saxophonist Daunik Lazro, it is safe to say that with Pourtant les Cimes des Arbres (Still Treetops) he's made a record that turns the notion of a saxophone-bass-drums “power trio” on its head. Certainly a number of such configurations have explored range, space, and physicality in nuanced ways before – and they will continue to – but the four improvisations Lazro, bassist Benjamin Duboc and percussionist Didier Lasserre (snare and cymbal only) create are both volcanic and confrontationally essentialist. Each piece’s title is taken from a French translation of a Bashō haiku, meaning shifting line by isolated line. The literary-musical effect is of a stripped-down, workmanlike sublime. The three musicians play with a sense of naturalness that is quite striking as their collective sound increases or decreases in density with the ease of measured breathing; there’s certainly no theme-solos-theme organization, and even traditional go-for-broke power play has been thrown out the window.

The closing “Retiennent la Plue” (Holding the Rain) is a prime example of what this trio is capable of. Starting with throaty pizzicato and bare, ringing cymbal taps in a slightly uneven pulse, Lazro’s purr winds its way around the territorial statements of bass and drums. It’s a trio of parallel advances, each musician loosely tied together and snaking through a veritable rockpile, where confrontation is marked by resonant snaps and scrapes from a minimal kit, generating a charge for the saxophonist’s huskily polished horn. From floor-shaking rumble he builds a stately impasto cry, offset by furious bowed harmonics and brushy accents until the group decides on torqued long tones and declamatory froth.

Lasserre’s kit deserves special mention – playing only a ride cymbal and snare drum, his approach recalls the portable necessity of Sunny Murray and John Stevens without a bop-inflected level of quickness. Lasserre marks time and creates decisive actions that shape the ensemble’s flow in an unpretentious, simple and direct fashion. That said he still gets a range of sounds and kinetics out of minimal instrumentation – witness the unearthliness of rolled sticks on the opening “Une Lune Vive” (The Quick Moon) as they set the stage for microtonal crackle and bellows. Narrowly-defined, tense clusters are worried into a frenzy and released ever so slightly as waves, flutter-tongue and arco approximate the earth along a fault line. Col legno patter, metronomic whine and subtonal sputter become the trio’s language in the piece’s next section with similarly narrow and equally effectual spacing. The power of Pourtant les Cimes des Arbres is in relatively simple iterations of mass and distance, but these are drawn out of three very distinct personalities.

JOE MORRIS' WILDLIFE
Traits
(Riti)

With a discography as sizable and diverse as that of guitarist-contrabassist Joe Morris, either finding a strand to tie it all together or compartmentalizing it into different “concept groups” is the usual critic’s task. But that would be a disservice to how unadorned most of his records are – whether occupying the role of leader/principal composer or sideman, there’s often a basic, unfussy presentation to the work that simply expresses the joy of playing in different configurations. That’s not to say that these groups don’t have varied aesthetic purposes, but at the end of the day Morris lives to play and is very serious about documenting both his own path and that of his comrades. Wildlife is, on the surface, a vehicle for collective exploration – nothing more, nothing less. Morris holds down the bass chair here, supported by regular rhythm confrere Luther Gray on drums and the twined saxophones of altoist Jim Hobbs and tenorman Petr Cancura. To put it simply, their music is collectively improvised, dyed-in-the-wool free jazz – each of the six pieces on Traits (the group’s second disc and first on Morris’ own Riti imprint) grows naturally out of individual statements and rhythmic motifs into robust parallel conversations.

The opening “Howlin’” is out for blood with classically-rendered bray, wide-open burred vibrato carried by the bassist’s wound note clusters and Gray’s loose, circular bash. Both saxophonists reach back towards Ayler-ish fire and brimstone in their playing, elongated revelries that gradually twist and change shape while the rhythm section remains active and pliant. Morris’ solo features gobs of detail and a dusty tone, and while the upright bass might look and sound a fair shake different from a hollow-body six string, there’s something about his attack that translates across both instruments. “Tracking” starts with inventive unaccompanied additions from Gray’s kit, with the remaining three musicians entering in layered tempi, chopping and swooping in a manner not unlike the fractured, swinging independence of the New York Art Quartet. Cancura takes the next spot, sinewy tenor in strands that weave through particulate, stuttering rhythms. It’s a beautiful solo of studied, warm oddness (a cross between Jimmy Giuffre and John Tchicai comes to mind) that stands in direct contrast to Hobbs’ agitated, declamatory buzz. “Game” is husky and round in its groove, a snappy and excited jounce that doubles, triples and halves underneath steely, pirouetting quotes and sputtering joy. Cancura’s hard flutters gradually find their phase. Hobbs’ alto logs bent, non-Western tonalities with a snake-charming effect, recalling Sonny Simmons’ Afro-Asiatic flights. Wildlife’s collective unity is never a sure thing, and that tension is one of the group’s charms. If such a fact can be read as concept, so be it, but it’s more interesting to open oneself up to concept-less discovery.

PHILL MUSRA
Love, Life & Games
(Sagittarius A-Star)

Love, Life & Games is the second LP of saxophonist Phill Musra’s music to be issued on the Sagittarius A-Star label, an offshoot of revered left-field imprint Qbico Records. Musra’s name – and that of his brother and near-constant collaborator Michael Cosmic – should be quite familiar to Ni Kantu readers, as his historical and recent music has been to this blog what Joe McPhee was to the early days of Hat Hut. Here, Musra is heard with two different quartets on two compositions that were performed twenty-five years apart. Interestingly, both pieces were written during his time in the AACM at the close of the 1960s. They’re both very fragile lines that could quite easily be imagined in a loose, free, Creator Spaces-like setting, but the ensembles are a far cry from mid-Seventies Boston improvisation – rather light, boppish grooves that stand apart from Musra’s quavering, moment-to-moment cries, murmurs and eviscerations. The first piece is a 1986 recording with Cosmic on electric piano, Mike Mowen on electric bass and Kay Ballard on drums for “Promise of the Sun,” Musra’s steely tenor eking out a simple, brightly embellished solo atop Cosmic’s wandering chords and gooey peck and the rhythm section’s dry, even time. The rendition has a homemade, very personal quality hat seems set apart from time and the broader jazz consciousness of the mid-1980s (or even now).

The title piece is a half-hour romp with Don Hooker on drums, Steven McGill on conga and vibes, and pianist Walter Barrilleaux, recorded earlier this year. Slight variations from the central motif become gruff litmus for struggle as Musra digs in on tenor. Switching to soprano, the wistful aspects of his personality really come out – a barren lament that quavers in contrast with the clean and often lush backing of piano, vibes and Hooker’s tasteful swing. Barrilleaux gets some stretching room and McGill’s accents and rivulets give varied flesh to the proceedings (the percussionist’s Kujichagulia disc is also worth investigating). Again, the journey of Musra and his mates is a very personal one that, while it may not reflect the broader creative music consciousness, presents a semi-private window on spirit and communication. This is the same unique, “outsider” charm that imbued his 1974 recordings with Cosmic and Ertunç, albeit within a less frantic ritual. It’s a special opportunity to hear this music and, while the limited-edition vinyl of Love Life & Games is technically now out of print, the intrepid internet researcher should be able to scare up a copy.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Quartet Solo Series, Volume 2
(Striking Mechanism)

Multi-instrumentalist, sound artist and composer Jonathan Chen instituted the Quartet Solo Series on his Striking Mechanism imprint to present the work of young players whose art traverses those very same worlds that he does – sound, improvisation, instrumentalism and composition. It’s a simple prospect, really, but so few recordings in this music present the artform with such simplicity and directness as this series does. Both of the volumes present four musician-composers on four pieces each, all solo and doing what they do in an unadulterated manner. The first volume featured Chen (with his excellent electro-acoustic piece “Drummer”), saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, German electronic artist Philip Schulze and cellist Marina Peterson. Volume 2 brings together the works of violinist Jessica Pavone, bassist Carl Testa, bassoonist Katherine Young and electronic artist/multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Zorn. As with the previous disc, all of the musicians are directly connected either to Wesleyan University or to composer Anthony Braxton.

Jessica Pavone starts the disc with “This is my Violin” (winner of the most-unpretentious title award), a twenty-minute exposition for violin and echo. Ringing col legno gives way to a stomping folk melody – Mediterranean or Irish, it’s hard to say, but as it’s a simple variation swathed in echo, it could be comparable to an American Folk Music take on Steve Reich’s Violin Phase. Pavone’s spiky attack, parsed to an extreme from the theme’s rhythm, is reverberated through electrified gauze, but never loses that hard-bitten energy and the recurring folksiness brings out a heeled stomp. She revels in the sound of the violin, tough and hanging in space, as much as she does its ability to generate song. The presence of naked abstraction alongside (and developed from) an old-world tunefulness calls to mind one of Braxton’s favorite collaborators, Leroy Jenkins, and his solo recitals that included pieces like “Keep on Trucking, Brother.” Carl Testa is a New Haven bassist who has worked in a variety of Anthony Braxton ensembles as well as the New Haven Improvisers Collective and his own solo, duo and trio projects. The five short pieces represented here are all for solo bass and a range of expertly produced auxiliary shades. Testa’s general approach is to build up masses of harmonics, exploring the strings on either side of the bridge in walloping low drone and in high-pitched, sonorous cries. While definitely utilizing a palette that’s rough around the edges, the pieces are relatively simple studies of mass, tone, and motion that, while resoundingly physical, aren’t overpowering. That said, he does know how to dance on the strings as the flitting, circular harmonic gestures on “Part Two” attest.

There aren’t too many improvising bassoonists on the modern creative music scene, but judging from the work of two of the music’s young masters – Sara Schoenbeck and Katherine Young – it’s an instrument that could gain some prominence. Young has performed the Diamond Curtain Wall musics of Braxton, as well as in duo with violist Amy Cimini and her own solo bassoon and electronics pieces (well represented by the indispensible Porter Records CD Further Secret Origins). “Storm” is a twelve-minute piece that sometimes makes it difficult to discern how much is produced through the wizardry of circular breathing and how much is overdubbed (that’s always been a challenge with her music). Delicate, pecking alto-range wander peeks out from vicious, massive impasto and jagged superimposition, her phrases only broken for a cuckoo clock’s chime. It’s quite an interesting polarity between obnoxious, harried mass and soft pure-toned stabs, exemplifying the garish, somewhat gallows humor that is at the heart of the most “serious” of music.

“Dia No Vive Aqui” is Zorn’s entirely electronic contribution; he’s also known as a contrabassist and his works for both acoustic and electric music have appeared on a range of CDs on his Set Projects label. Defiantly analog and recalling some of the more abstract computer music that appeared on a variety of CRI and collegiate music labels throughout the ‘70s, Zorn’s work is both crotchety and expansive, a panoply of fuzzy patches, organ-like swirl and microcosmic echolocation (David Behrman’s “Runthrough” comes to mind). Haranguing chords enter and recede, jutting out of an ebbing field of gooey long tones, wows and beeps, and for the diversity of textures and actions it’s somewhat hard to imagine all of this sound coming from one person, well-organized as it is. With an array of computers at Zorn’s disposal, it’s fascinating to hear how internally reactive the music’s structure is – in other words, there is a collectivity and an improvisational feel to it, arrived at through both gradual change and immediate chance. This is a powerful piece and really pushes the boundaries – like the entirety of the disc – of what it means to create and perform solo music.

KRIS WANDERS OUTFIT
In Remembrance of the Human Race
(Not Two)

The name Kris Wanders might be obscure, but the Dutch saxophonist is synonymous with the embrace and appropriation of Afro-American fire during the halcyon years of European free music. Alongside Peter Brötzmann and Gerd Dudek, he was part of the 1966 and ’67 iterations of German pianist-composer Alexander von Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity. In 1970, he worked in a heavy quartet alongside Dutch pianist/multi-instrumentalist Kees Hazevoet, bassist Arjen Gorter and drummer Louis Moholo, which resulted in the excellent LP Pleasure One (Peace/Atavistic UMS). Dutch jazz has been given over to a single, humorous and pastiche-filled worldview qua New Dutch Swing and the later recordings of the Instant Composers’ Pool. Of course there were other interesting ways to make improvised music in Holland around the turn of the ‘70s, from post-bop to Afro-Caribbean liberated soul-jazz. And then there were musicians who embraced searing post-Ayler freedoms, for whom Kris Wanders is a fine representative. He’s been living in Australia for quite a few years and following a scarce self-released quintet date (On the Edges of Silence, 2004), two discs on the Polish Not Two label are the hard-edged calling cards of his return to the scene.

In Remembrance of the Human Race joins Wanders with trombonist Johannes Bauer, bassist Peter Jacquemyn and drummer Mark Sanders on three lengthy group improvisations recorded live in Antwerp. The title piece opens with a stripped-down, Ascension-like tenor call to arms, Wanders' cascading movements recalling the thin, regal chords of a bagpipe. Jacquemyn and Sanders provide furious tumbling accompaniment as the tenorist digs in with split-toned rally and a wide, guttural plow. The rhythm section builds a dry, martial vamp underneath a freight train of rending squeals and false-fingered exhortations, Bauer countering with singsong chortle. Low drones gird the bottom end as Bauer flutters and mocks and Sanders’ percussion provides the death rattle – somber and stately thrash that evokes the piece’s bleak title. “Uwaga” is somewhat more charged, opening with a Gato Barbieri-like trill as Wanders’ lines chip, worry and coalesce into long, hoarse wails offset by Bauer’s loquacious expressionism. Following the bassist's furious solo, the ensemble soon drops into sparser interplay and Bauer’s multiphonic whinnies and blats nearly goad Jacquemyn into a loose swing, but it doesn’t take long before Wanders’ flayed tone spurs over cracked earth. Sure, In Remembrance of the Human Race is ultimately a blowing date and perhaps some of the improvising is a bit monochromatic, but it’s the kind of free music that inspires a bitter beer in hand and the volume cranked. They don’t make many records like that anymore in any genre and, alongside Taken By Surprise (Not Two, 2011), the European stage looks cleared for Kris Wanders once again.

Things We Like #2 - The Best of 2011

2011-12-13T10:39:00.000-06:00

While it can be a challenge to keep up with all the new music being released, most of it is of really, exceedingly high caliber. But seeing as how it's the end of the year, that means that it is list-making time and I have to take stock and whittle down all that I've heard into a short run of top-notch material. Importantly, picking ten standouts doesn’t negate the hundreds of excellent albums that are also out there and well worth hearing. If I put in a “runners up” list, it would be excessively long and one day I might prefer listening to any of those recordings over one that’s been “picked” (cue some of the absolutely ruling discs that will appear in the year-end review roundup shortly). There have also been some particularly fine reissues this year – not only a healthy group of boxed sets, but also some first-time-on-CD classics from trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon and saxophonist Julius Hemphill. And while there have some tremendously sad losses in the world of creative music, the fact that our young masters continue to create such vital work gives me hope for the continued flourishing of this music.

All of these are listed in alphabetical order, by the way, because internal list hierarchies are troubling.

New Releases:
Muhal Richard Abrams – Sound Dance (Pi Recordings)
Anthony Braxton – Trillium E (Braxton House)
Bill Dixon – Envoi (Victo)
Agusti Fernandez – El Laberint de la Memoria (Mbari Musica)
Rick Reed – The Way Things Go (Elevator Bath)
Akira Sakata with Jim O’Rourke and Chikamorachi - …and that’s the Story of Jazz (Family Vineyard)
Matthew Shipp – Art of the Improviser (Thirsty Ear)
The Thirteenth Assembly – Station Direct (Important)
David S. Ware – Planetary Unknown (Aum Fidelity)
Nate Wooley - (Put Your) Hands Together (Clean Feed)

Reissues and Unearthed Gems:
Bitch Magnet – Ben Hur/Umber/Star Booty (Temporary Residence)
Miles Davis – The Bootleg Series vol. 1 (Columbia Legacy)
Bill Dixon – Intents & Purposes (International Phonograph)
Julius Hemphill – Dogon A.D. (International Phonograph)
The Rev. Charlie Jackson – You Got to Move: Live Recordings vol. 1 (50 Miles of Elbow Room)
Roscoe Mitchell – Before There Was Sound (Nessa)
Warren Smith – Dragon Dave Meets the Black Knight from the Darkside of the Moon (Porter)
Social Climbers – Social Climbers (Drag City)
Juma Sultan’s Aboriginal Music Society – Father of Origin (Eremite)
John Surman – Flashpoint: NDR Jazz Workshop ’69 (Cuneiform)

Phill Musra - The Creator Spaces (Intex, 1974)

2011-11-30T20:57:00.002-06:00

Rarely do I offer downloaded music at Ni Kantu, but in the spirit of a previous offering of the music of Michael Cosmic’s Peace in the World (Intex/Cosmic), here is another volume of the Phill Musra/Michael Cosmic trilogy. Though picking favorites isn’t really my thing, I would have to say that The Creator Spaces has gotten the most spins in my household over the years, probably because the program sort of “eases you in” to the far out stuff, starting with a beautiful flute melody set to the shifting sands of hand percussion and Huseyin Ertunc’s steady, pulsing cymbal waves on “Egypt.” Certainly the music gets quite free, but there’s a homemade fragility to it that puts it in a different class from that of, say, the AACM (which Musra and Cosmic were a part of early on). Like Ertunc’s Musiki (probably recorded at the same session), the band is a stripped-down trio with Musra on reeds and percussion; Cosmic on reeds, organ and percussion; and Ertunc on drums. There is also some track overlap with Musiki, as that album features an alternate of “The Creator Spaces.” Musra has said he hopes to reissue this album someday but in the meantime has asked me to make it available as a download.

Tracks:

Egypt
Arabia
The Creator is So Far Out
The Creator Spaces

Phill Musra – flute, tenor, soprano saxophone, zurna (oboe), percussion

Michael Cosmic – flute, alto, sopranino saxophone, clarinet, zurna, organ, percussion

Huseyin Ertunc – drums and cymbals

Recorded 1974 in Cambridge, MA and engineered by Larrymar Richards, released as Intex 84.

Get the FLAC files here (from about as clean a copy as you could get).

Reviewed: Bill Dixon's "Envoi"

2011-11-28T13:26:00.000-06:00


The artist at work in Victoriaville

Note: this review has been repurposed from a project that was ultimately shelved for the time being. Here it is in its entirety. Thanks to Stephen Haynes and Jeff Golick for their thoughts.

BILL DIXON

Envoi

(Victo CD 120)

There is certainly a lot of significance that can be attached to an artist’s final recording before passing on – one thinks of the delicate, free beauty of Coltrane’s late work as exemplified on Stellar Regions (Impulse, 1967/1997) or the promise of new directions on Lee Morgan’s eponymous final Blue Note date, recorded in 1971. These were, however, artists cut down unexpectedly in their youth. It’s a little different when death is an expected eventuality in the autumn of an artist’s career, and we’re able to listen to their music with the understanding that age has brought them both experience and physical changes that require an instrument to be played differently. Composer, improviser and trumpeter Bill Dixon (1925-2010) seemed to experience a great deal of interest in his work in the last years of his life – opportunities to lead orchestras at festivals in Chicago and New York, highly-regarded recordings on labels like Thrill Jockey, Aum Fidelity, and Firehouse 12 – yet there wasn’t any more work being done than over the previous fifty-odd years. A significantly influential figure on the way the trumpet is played and thought of among creative musicians, recent years saw him able to convene a core group that reflected broader structural concerns as well as the individual instrumental languages that his work has helped shape.

The Small Orchestra has proved to be one of the most interesting of Dixon’s ensembles on the whole; convened first to record in 2008 for Firehouse 12 the excellent two-disc and one DVD set Tapestries for Small Orchestra, the group harks back to the brass-heavy units he led in the late 1970s, also mirrored by unrecorded units in late ‘60s New York. The group joined Dixon with brass multi-instrumentalists Stephen Haynes, Graham Haynes (no relation), Rob Mazurek and Taylor Ho Bynum, low reeds player Michel Côté, cellist Glynis Lomon, bassist Ken Filiano and percussionist Warren Smith. This is the ensemble that recorded Envoi in May 2010 at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville, weeks before Dixon’s passing. The combination of low reeds, brass, strings and percussion might be seen as hallmarks within Dixon’s music from 1967’s “Voices” to the present, not because he has a “style,” but because these instrumental combinations have allowed him to get an absolutely huge range of colors from a relatively small ensemble. Dixon found ways to expand what eight people can sound like, through physical placement and textural instructions that encourage depicted sounds to overstep their literal dimensions (cf. the optical qualities of painters like Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella). In other words, the music often sounds positively huge, but in a way that spreads out instead of singularly overpowering.

The word “Envoi” is defined literally as a look back over what has come before – in poetry, the reflective and often short final stanza that comments on the whole. It would be easy to think of Dixon’s Envoi as a similar summing up of a fifty-odd year recording and performing career, because we know it’s the last thing he did (and that it took a hell of a lot of work in his final months to assemble the piece). We want to say “this is it,” but as significant as any one of his recordings might be, attaching anything extra is the onus of the listener rather than the composer. Dixon has famously quipped that he just “likes the ring” of certain words, and that he likes his pieces to have a nice-sounding name attached. In that sense, “Envoi” is just a word used to title this work, which just happens to be the final piece he recorded. The only thing different about Envoi from other pieces, insofar as one might use the “jazz” perspective, is that he does not perform in the traditional sense. His music increasingly surpassed the notion that he had to “play” to make the work live – composition, conducting, instructing and assembling the group clarified the artist’s signature. One could easily say that his instrument became the ensemble as well as the trumpet, singularly masterful at both. Bisecting the two movements is a pre-recorded trumpet solo, 1972’s “Shrike,” which is a brief and extremely hot slice of sound turning the instrument and the experiencer’s body “inside out” (to quote Stephen Haynes), in this setting both hinting at musique concréte and a shocking declaration of physicality.

In this music, composition and conducting are two very fraught terms. We know that a musician uses resources accumulated over time to assemble something meaningful on the spot, but under the direction of a singular vision, being unfettered comes with a responsibility to do what’s right. Dixon has said that his music – especially the later work – is less didactic in its scoring, because trusting the musicians to do what they do is necessary to give the compositions life. That said the responsibility bred through suggestion results in an ensemble subsuming itself to the broad whole, and while extremely intense, it is some of the most patient music one is liable to hear. One is brought into a state of concentrated calm, sounds emerging in lengthy passages where nothing appears to be hurried and there is no ego. Rather, players emerge when it’s necessary, when another musician has cycled through the process of whatever line or area needed to be completed.

The music of Envoi is, in effect, democratic and responsible. It’s a state as natural as breathing, the ears of performers and listeners able to latch onto accents but never forced into a position. Sure, there are anchoring themes, brass coagulants that call to mind the testy chords of Takemitsu and Ligeti, but with the pacing of Feldman – none of these figures are “improvisers,” but Dixon’s music at this stage has transcended such boundaries. When Dixon was alive and could give the music an extra nudge, the kaleidoscope of emotions was shored up with implicit (and perhaps explicit) pronouncements of “don’t hurry” or “just wait.” That gradual rightness makes the realization of this work extraordinary. When we think of the tone or phrasing of musicians like Ben Webster or Dexter Gordon late in their lives, we think of similar softness and burnished delicacy, arrived at through lived experience. Though Envoi is an ensemble composition, it can be said that Dixon’s late music has a similar quality to the fragile but lived-in sound of those musicians, even as it can be just as strikingly aggressive.

Envoi was revisited after his death (though his trumpet was on a stool in the conductor’s place) at the 2010 memorial at St. Mark’s Church in New York. The ensemble worked through the piece with the addition of Joe Morris on second contrabass, and that was my first hearing of it. While an excellent performance in its own right, it was more hurried, more agitated in its execution compared to what transpired at Victoriaville. It begged the question whether Dixon’s music is possible to perform without his presence, and if so, how to manage it. The idea of a repertory group, as much as Dixon’s works – both heard and unheard – are loved, is hard to conceive. Yet his legacy can and should live on, beyond what’s been recorded. In the face of that, there is no finality to the music of Envoi – it’s too open-ended, too declarative in its necessity to bother with such a concept. The set closes with Dixon’s voice, reflecting and instructing on the fact that, whether an audience (including critics, listeners, and other musicians) grasps the magnitude or not, giving it one’s all is the only valid response. With that in mind, the implicit understanding from this moment forward is that the body of Dixon’s work is only a hint at what’s possible.

The Continuum Passes - Graham Collier, Michael Garrick, Gordon Beck

2011-11-15T00:16:00.000-06:00

Every year followers of jazz and creative music must say to themselves that, despite the wide array of fascinating new music becoming available, history slips further into the past with the deaths of musicians both prominent and obscure. It’s always a challenge when our heroes pass on, leaving us with their art and lasting influence but no corporeal presence remaining. There is no denying that as the architects of modern jazz of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s age, death becomes a more frequent part of that reality, and sometimes we're just catching up now to what they were doing years ago. 2011 was hard for fans of British jazz as three of the Brit-jazz scene's leading lights passed away – two within just days of one another. The pianist-composer Michael Garrick died November 11 at age 78, while pianist Gordon Beck died November 6 at 75. Composer, thinker and bandleader Graham Collier passed away September 10 age 74.

All three of these musicians had seen a renaissance of interest in their work in recent years – Garrick mostly in the form of reissues of his catalog of rarities via Dutton-Vocalion and Trunk Records, while Collier continued to write and was working on important new works this year [a footnote to that is that my interview with Mr. Collier from January 2011, which was condensed for the New York City Jazz Record, will run in full at the Paris Transatlantic website next month]. Gordon Beck’s more recent work, recorded for the Art Of Life label, didn’t garner quite as much notice as the reissues of his scarce back catalog either, but in terms of the jazz mainstream he might have been the most visible, recording with saxophonist Phil Woods, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler and guitarist Allan Holdsworth.

Of these artists, Collier is the one who I was most familiar with; his small groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s are fascinating studies in the interchangeability of improvisation and notated structure, carried to an equally intriguing fruition in later orchestral works. Much of Collier’s music, as well as his writings, has been made available through the Jazz Continuum website. Garrick is a figure that has always been on the periphery of my research and interests, though his work with saxophonists Joe Harriott and Don Rendell and vocalist Norma Winstone has always struck me as far outside the expected modern-jazz lexicon, introducing poetry and non-Western sound forms in some very unique ways. Beck was (and is) an extraordinary pianist in the post-Bill Evans school, applying athleticism to a melodic-harmonic openness that allowed him to work equally well alongside a bebopper like Woods or the free improvising drummer John Stevens.

Here's a film of Graham Collier being interviewed about his work with young musicians in the context of the 25th anniversary of the Derby Jazz Festival in 2007. The piece is quite fine and features some incredible playing by guest trumpeter Harry Beckett (1923-2010), a veteran of Collier's groups of the early years. I don't think I've ever heard a youth orchestra rip like this. Like all new and up-and-coming musicians, knowing the work of the masters will help them project into the next sphere.

Where it all comes from...

2011-10-31T00:08:00.001-05:00

My dad is a writer and a psychologist, and though his writing isn't about music, I guess one could say that we do have a hereditarily-linked fascination with people and how things that are otherwise ineffable seem to work. My dad is also - or has been at some times in the past - a jazz pianist (avocationally) and he's a pretty big jazz fan. It's funny, when I first heard in college bassist Dave Holland's Conference of the Birds LP with Anthony Braxton and Sam Rivers, I thought the tune "Four Winds" sounded incredibly familiar. I then found out that my dad owned that LP when I was an infant, and played the tune a lot (though he'd gotten rid of the record by the time I was old enough to know what an album was). Not merely settling for playing jazz standards and so forth, my dad would often compose tunes - pastorals, blues and jaunty postbop things - for his friends and family as gifts and statements of feeling. I don't think I really got how cool that was when I was a kid, but now it seems pretty amazing.

Now, my dad has gotten a dedication of his own from the NYC guitarist-composer Amanda Monaco (a dear friend of mine) and her Deathblow quartet. When she was in Austin a couple of years ago I introduced her to my parents and my dad had, I think, just written a blog post for the Menninger blog on "excrementalizing," riffing on one of his primary areas of research, mentalizing. If mentalizing is the practice of thinking about one's mind and its actions, reactions, and the mental state that one inhabits, it stands to reason that "excrementalizing" is doing a shitty job of that (also a brilliant testament to my dad's sense of humor). Whether or not that side of the mentalizing process becomes part of the psychological lexicon, at least it's been immortalized in Monaco's newly-minted tune, "Excrementalizing." Here it is played at the Stone in NYC with Deathblow, featuring Michael Attias (alto saxophone), Sean Conly (bass), and Satoshi Takeishi (drums). Enjoy!

Music Briefly Reviewed - October 2011

2011-10-26T17:40:00.004-05:00

BOOM BOX

Jazz
(Jazzwerkstatt)

Boom Box is the curiously and perhaps banally named trio of German saxophonist Thomas Borgmann and drummer Willi Kellers with Japanese bassist Akira Ando, all of whom reside in Berlin. Compared to countrymen like Peter Brötzmann (whom he has performed and recorded with), Borgmann is probably not as well known to American audiences, though one would hope that could change. After all, his 1990s-early 2000s trio with bassist Wilber Morris and drummer Denis Charles (succeeded by Reggie Nicholson) was quite a formidable part of the international free-jazz scene, recording for Konnex, CIMP, Silkheart and Lotus. Despite a heavy pedigree – Kellers has also worked extensively with Brötzmann, and Ando spent time in New York with Billy Bang and William Parker – the trio’s cooperative music is decidedly swinging, lyrical and detailed rather than limited to full-bore, aggressive intensity.

“Albert & Frank,” which channels Albert Ayler’s “Ghosts” at the outset, is a rollicking nugget, Borgmann’s breathy curlicues and pillowy chunks a far cry from the impassioned screams we’ve come to expect from this music. On tenor, Borgmann is positively quacky in his cadences and extends Lacy-isms as he switches to soprano for a warm, golden exposition on the tune’s folksiness and Ando and Kellers eke out dryly chattering interplay. The closing five minutes are the “Frank” part of the equation as Borgmann comes charging back on tenor a la the Reverend Frank Wright, flinty shouts mirrored by shimmering cymbal pulse, but even as blowsy as he might get it’s nearly impossible to hide the gentle tease inherent in this search. Two of the compositions reference “Little Bird,” Ayler’s nickname when he was coming up in Cleveland, though perhaps beating such comparisons into the ground isn’t a worthwhile exercise – sure, one could toy with Ando and Kellers as ancillary to Henry Grimes and Sunny Murray and the latter’s time-playing on Spirits (Debut, 1964), an insistent loose grapple with the concepts of forward and allover motion. The rhythm section of Boom Box is incredibly throaty and taut behind Borgman’s flights, which adds an interesting balance to the ensemble on the opening “Little Birds May Fly,” where the soprano is the saxophonist’s sole axe. Being European doesn’t preclude the presence of a bluesy drawl from Borgmann’s tenor on “How Far Can You Fly?” as he purrs, dips and wails in a meaty landscape of strings, skin and copper. But as rhythmically and harmonically liberated as the proceedings are, they're still quite tied not just to tradition, but a sense of groove and lyricism that’s immediately accessible. Importantly, it doesn’t necessarily require Borgmann to be accompanied by American musicians, either.

ELLERY ESKELIN
Trio New York
(Prime Source)

Tenor saxophonist Ellery Eskelin is a complex figure in modern American jazz, specifically because his relationship with the vernacular and the avant-garde is so fluid. The child of organist Bobbie Lee and cultish composer-arranger Rodd Keith, Eskelin formed a trio in the 1990s with drummer Jim Black and accordionist/electronic artist Andrea Parkins that held tenuous relationships with both “free jazz” and wry songcraft. Following in the heels of that band somewhat, Trio New York joins Eskelin with organist Gary Versace and drummer Gerald Cleaver for a set of five lengthy takes on the standard songbook. The tenor-organ trio and the program would seem to be mainstream fare through and through, but these three musicians don’t make cut-and-dried music.

Apparently the tunes were not called or presented to the musicians before the recording session; Eskelin builds from oblique references that swirl around thematic nexuses, with Versace and Cleaver drawing on knowledge and instinct to maintain the line between familiarity and surprise. Eubie Blake’s “Memories of You” opens the disc, Eskelin's pillowed volleys and circularity supported by impulsive-but-lapping percussion and the clanging, spiky roll of Versace’s organ. Even as the tune becomes clearer upon phrases “straightening out” amid the rhythm section’s light, foot-patting swing, the relationship between song and freedom remains two sides of a twirling coin, ready to subtly pull apart at any moment (though “pulling apart” in this case shouldn’t be confused with disregarding melody, rhythm and tunefulness). Versace’s work is incredibly individual – one can hear Larry Young, Freddie Roach, Sun Ra and plugged-in Herbie Hancock rolled together in striking statements of sentimentality, bitterness and depth beyond feeling. Following suit, “Off Minor” is extremely disjointed from the get-go and it’s fascinating to hear the trio tie together loose strands into a rollicking, gummy stream of group telepathy. Cy Coleman’s “Witchcraft” is stupendous, Eskelin’s tenor approaching Ike Quebec with a healthy dose of peppery left-hand turns that grow out of staccato ebb and shuffle, and as the chestnut emerges from an inter-communal stew there’s the “aha” of recognizability resting atop an understanding of how daring this ensemble is. Versace’s high-register weirdness echoes Fuel-era Young in a clambering hunt-and-peck before turning to a chitlin circuit groove. The closing “How Deep is the Ocean” begins in a space with Terry Riley-like organ minimalism as part of the undertow, gradually shaping and caressing reference points along with Cleaver’s brushy allover time.

The conceit of arriving at these tunes through spare group interplay and then heightening that collectivity might, in lesser hands, make such a recording sound “samey” but the musicianship here makes each nugget a challenge wherein the players are leaping to and from places that seem more certain than they really are. It’s a risky proposition, but Trio New York maintains a healthy connection to the challenge inherent in an improvising life. This is a beautiful record by a band that hopefully continues to record.

AVRAM FEFER
Eliyahu
(Not Two)

The second disc to date from New Yorker Avram Fefer’s trio with bassist Eric Revis and drummer Chad Taylor, Eliyahu might be the saxophonist’s strongest album so far, which is saying quite a bit. He’s probably best known for a longstanding duo with pianist Bobby Few in which the pair run pell-mell through the standard repertoire as well as a healthy dose of spontaneous improvisation; Fefer has also been a fixture in the ensembles of bassists Adam Lane and Mike Bisio. On tenor he’s got a wonderfully burnished tone and bright, slinky rhythmic cadences that, while sonically attractive in-themselves, are decidedly in service of themes. His phrasing and attack allude to Frank Lowe, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Odean Pope – fellow individualists whose quixotic ruggedness is also very lyrical.

For example, the jaunty and simple boat-rock of “Wishful Thinking,” in which Fefer’s riding of the beat encircles, bends, lies behind and amplifies as Taylor’s studies of Blackwell and Max Roach subdivide the rhythmic environment. Building on stutter and elision, “Appropriated Lands” has a curt lope, the saxophonist adding flesh to his lines as Revis and Taylor maintain an elemental earthiness. The trio is perfectly synced and while some amount of raggedness is almost always preferable, it’s hard not to appreciate the exactitude with which some of their communication seems to play out, such as on the opening moments of the title composition where tart alto, tumbling mallets and supple pizzicato arrive in a plenum and yet never crowd one another. Here, Fefer calls to mind the great Arthur Jones in his sad-eyed keen atop Taylor’s resonant kettle-like accompaniment. Sure, the saxophonist has a lot of fire and seems to revel in picking apart the melody’s varied strands, but there’s also the simple weight of experience. “Essaouira” calls to mind its namesake North African setting with a lilting but ropey melody supported by circular drum patterns and a hypnotic vamp. Here, Taylor is like an extra-crackling Hamid Drake, building athletic cymbal workouts and a steadily expanding and contracting fabric underneath. With Eliyahu, this threesome cuts a formidable but absolutely infectious figure in the landscape of contemporary improvisation.

AGUSTÍ FERNÁNDEZ
El Laberint de la Memòria

(Mbari Musica)

AGUSTÍ FERNÁNDEZ & JOE MORRIS
Ambrosia

(Riti)

Spanish pianist Agustí Fernández is mostly known for his work in free-improvisation settings with bassist Barry Guy, usually in trio or duet, where he explores the full resources and broad palette of the piano to include the instrument’s strings and wood for a rugged, tense and sometimes airy freedom. He’s also worked with players from across the European free improvisation spectrum like Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson and the rough-hewn English rhythm section of bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders. El Laberint de Memoria is a different bird altogether, presenting Fernandez in solo performance across fourteen shortish pieces inspired by 20th century Spanish classical music and released on the Portuguese label Mbari (inspired, no doubt, by saxophonist Julius Hemphill’s 1970s imprint).

I don’t know whether it’s something that is quintessentially Iberian, but Fernandez’ quote in the liners that “in a sense I am perfectly aware that the pieces in this record are echoes of another music that, in turn, is probably an echo of other echoes.” The idea of labyrinths – mazes – of memory and the multivalence of mystery recall the writer Borges (Argentine and of Spanish descent) and the familiarity of tradition within decidedly, strikingly new contexts. There’s a filmic vibe to the opening “Joan I Joana” which, through the course of nine minutes, evokes passing romanticism in lush trills and upturned minor balletic melodies. “Flimic” is a stand-in term for music that evokes an image of something though, as music isn’t supposed to represent anything other than itself, there’s a bit of discomfort in saying what, precisely, a piano piece such as this “shows.” Hence, that nondescript grayish scene is, simply, “filmic music,” an evocativeness of many points that Fernández renders nearly – but not entirely – concrete with his pianism. The title composition is pointillist and rocking, key strikes and short runs hanging in the acoustic air with wonderful precision as phrases simultaneously hurtle and interlace. Previously I didn’t really think of Fernández as a left-hand player in the sense of, say, Horace Parlan or Mal Waldron (and maybe I still don’t), but his left is quite massive, punchy and sublimely well-rendered. Based on a Chilean folk song, “Tonada” is both stark and romantic, pillars of finely-wrought largesse that, as dense as they are, still stand nuanced and wistfully fractured, simple ringing chords droning behind unresolved right-hand filigree. “Pluja Sorda” finds Fernández working the piano with muted, roiling harmonic buildup from the instrument’s preparations, which neatly segues into “Porta de Mar” and its bright, lyric vignette. “Catedral” plays on swirling resonance and full-stop chordal mass that recalls postwar organ music, but as with most of the pieces here, its brevity doesn’t detract from how this music actually seems to stop time. If you have heard Agustí Fernández before, you most certainly haven’t heard him like this, dissolving the boundaries between not only composition and improvisation, but classical/art and folk, music and vision, and points in between.

Ambrosia might be a little closer to “old-fashioned” Fernández, though it’s the result of a first time meeting between the pianist and New Haven guitarist-improviser Joe Morris across six spontaneous improvisations. It’s natural that they would pair well together, Morris’ horizontal string scrapes and subtonal metallic plinks mating with Fernández’ preparations and piano-guts workouts. Sheets of metallic whine and rumble from damped wire provide a daunting partner to needling riti scrapes on the fourth movement, with the guitarist approximating a West African or South Asian string instrument flitting about a rather darkly sculpted canvas. While a sense of precision characterizes much of the playing here, neither musician is entirely beholden to such a narrow linguistic range that their interplay doesn’t encompass diverse possibilities. There is a beautiful clambering improvisation that starts off the disc, right from the first notes of the first track, as individual sounds form rivulets that entertain and extend brief paths, Fernández and Morris channeling a jaunty, embellished cook. Finding an unaccompanied area, the guitarist structures something that’s almost country-blues if decidedly bent. It’s brief, but an acknowledgement of the history in this avowedly “free” music. Fernández soon steps into where he left off in a previous phrase, an example of reaction and memory that is quickly redoubled upon (lest one think that spontaneity is without thought and awareness). Stepping into unaccompanied waters himself, the pianist seems less spiky as his improvising is a continuous embellishment of language from skeleton to flesh, taking atomistic phrases and turning them into the bedrock of something much larger – a polar dance of lushness and monoliths. Both massive and microcosmic, Ambrosia is a welcome document of an auspicious and colorful meeting between two of contemporary improvisation’s most individual voices.

JOEL FUTTERMAN
Perception

(self-released)

In creative music, the piano might be the instrument most imbued with a sense of tradition. From Earl Hines to Bud Powell to Cecil Taylor (and points in between or beside), the artist-soldiers that have gone before seem to inhabit every chord and note progression an improvising pianist plays. I suppose it could be a situation ripe for immobility – how do you make that first mark on the canvas? – but creative musicians have wrapped that tradition into their own voice and vocabulary time and again. Pianist Joel Futterman, whose appearances with saxophonists Kidd Jordan and Ike Levin, drummer Alvin Fielder, and bassist William Parker (among others) is peerless, works in a method of continual spontaneity that is free within the tradition. His solo recordings, most of which are self-released on fairly unassuming-looking documentary CDs and CD-Rs, are a case in point. It would be hard to accurately compare Futterman to his forebears though one can certainly hear – if one tries – Bud, Jaki, Cecil, Monk, Tatum, Evans, Tyner and others. That tradition is wrapped into his playing and emerges in volumes of lyrical ideas, which despite an avowed blank-mind, are carried through to their logical conclusions and next-steps. Perception is the latest disc of his solo music (which also includes a bit of soprano saxophone and wooden flute), and is one of the finest and most fully realized examples to date of his varied and firmly tied together language. Perception is divided into three parts, with the first clocking in at fifty-two minutes and the remainder in thirteen and four minute sections. Resonant arpeggios, rolling boogie-woogie, glassine classicism, blocks and flits overlap cyclically to build the first movement’s beginning sections. Volcanic density almost imperceptibly gives way to a steady, anthemic pulse articulated through sways, eddies and clusters. Coagulating ideas separate into songlike streams, with lyrical lines piling onto one another as sparks fly. There is the adage that solo music is often a language workout rather than “free improvisation” – one can’t effectively play solo without preconception or a net. However, if history is all around you, welling up from the instrument, the hope is that one can recombine past and present over the clean slate of immediacy. Futterman’s music certainly does that, words and phrases spilling out and merging into gorgeous lines that draw from nearly every tradition in improvised piano music with palpable weight and joviality. If you are looking for a place to start in Futterman’s catalog, Perception is the full monty.

RED TRIO & JOHN BUTCHER
Empire
(No Business)

While it doesn’t always do contemporary music good to compare individual works, which have emerged from and created their own present context, sometimes a nod to forebears does illuminate the broader environment. Though Empire, a meeting between British saxophonist John Butcher and the Portuguese trio of pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro, bassist Hernani Faustino and percussionist Gabriel Ferrandini (RED), certainly has enough of an improvisational pedigree to need no introduction, there is a strong connection with another intra-continental free jazz meeting some forty-two years earlier. When saxophonist Evan Parker met up with the Pierre Favre Trio (featuring pianist Irene Schweizer and bassist Peter Kowald) in 1968 for a Wergo Jazz recording, the results were monumental. RED Trio draws from numerous sources of its own devising, but upending the piano trio to include a palette drawn from decidedly non-traditional pianism, as well as a range of diffuse tonal colors, has quite a strong tradition in European free improvisation. Furthermore, Butcher has perfected his art of multiphonics, resonance, percussive sound and close-miking to a degree that the skirling plate-shifts of Parker seem a distant animal, but from the standpoint of atomistic variation, there is still a relevant historical path to be drawn between the two musicians.

Historical reference points serve here only to strengthen Empire’s place among its company – in other words, it’s a hell of a record. The first of the LP’s three improvisations, “Sustained,” finds Butcher on tenor in clicking harmonics and goading purrs, short but full arrays of verbosity mirrored by rattled, linear phrases from piano, bass and drums. Faustino and Ferrandini maintain a surprising degree of kinetic energy and, while their playing isn’t “time” it does maintain a very direct pulse that’s athletic without being top-heavy. Muting the piano strings, Pinheiro’s flights are concise and warm while, like Butcher, being internally reflective. In other words, he organizes small sounds that mirror themselves, seeming microscopic while being tonally ambiguous enough to propose a range of improvisational possibilities. Switching to soprano for “Pachyderm,” Butcher swings between concentrated burrs and progressive lines as the ensemble builds from collective subtonal growls to quilt of angled and relative flights. The latter portion is spare, woodwind gurgles and low, loose string noises supplanted by the sawing whine of gongs and piano strings. The lengthy title piece, which takes up all of the LP’s second side, is an exercise in tension that barely goes released, Pinheiro muting his instrument in a taut, unwavering bedrock as arco bass and cymbals present a controlled surrounding thrash, Butcher’s flutter building into sinewy metallic flakes. To those who’ve only experienced the saxophonist in what could be termed “sonic research” mode rather than flat-out blowing, Empire is a great opportunity to hear him buoyed and engaging a fine trio of comrades while bearing down with impassioned split-toned shouts. “Playing” and “investigating” are, of course, two sides of the same equation that are often closer than they might seem at first blush.

VERYAN WESTON
Different Tessellations
TREVOR WATTS & VERYAN WESTON
5 More Dialogues
(Emanem)

Pianist-composer Veryan Weston has a history in British creative music going back over four decades, cutting across some of the music’s most significant periods and in cooperation with the country’s improvisational architects. Weston has played extensively with saxophonist Trevor Watts; he’s also worked with soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill, percussionist Eddie Prévost, vocalist Phil Minton, and the London Improvisers Orchestra. It’s too simple to call Weston an improvising pianist, though that is part of what he does as an artist. Over the last thirty years – and especially during the most recent decade – he has been researching and constructing a musical system around the idea of geometric tessellation, or “visual interlocking symmetries… transferred to the audible world of pitches, rhythm and counterpoint” derived from pentatonic scales.

Different Tessellations, recorded in 2010 and recently released on Emanem, is the latest iteration of the plot, consisting of the first half of Tessellations 1 (working through 27 of 52 pentatonic scales) for solo piano and the entirety of Tessellations 2 for a nine-piece choir. The piano Tessellations are performed by Leo Svirsky, which is an interesting and important separation from having Weston perform the works himself as he has done in the past. Though Tessellations does give room for improvisation and is designed around giving the “spirit and feel of jazz,” it’s sometimes quite difficult to separate the improvising composer from the concept of improvising. In other words, one might try to maintain the thought of Weston as quite strictly a player when performing his own written work instead of an interpreter of something more grand. One could compare the pianism to Canadian composer-pianist Lubomyr Melnyk’s continuous music in parts, as well as the ceaseless flow of Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, though Weston has built into it sections of boogie-woogie, dense overlapping interval leaps and cluster-like patterns, cascading pointillism rolling into driving swells and ricochets. As a piano solo across four movements, the work is both open and self-contained, expounding on reflective multipart cells but recalling enough of the history and presence of piano music from improvised and notated sources to revel in expansiveness – that one could insert into its patterns Brahms, Taylor, and Ammons.

The choral work is of a related character but altogether the results are quite different – for example, the ear doesn’t necessarily gravitate towards the “Africanized tone row” aspect of the pianistic Tessellations, instead compartmentalizing the music into a Western sensibility. As Tessellations 2 is performed by the Vociferous Choir (including the composer himself) one hears the multilayered rhythms of African pygmy music set against throat-sung drones and lilting chords that slide between major and minor. Watts’ fascination with African musics might be the jumping-off point for the choral work, a modernist, exuberant improvisational pluralism that delves into uptempo beatboxing and a capella Afro-pop minimalism on the lengthy third movement. As with a lot of modern vocal music, the tendency is to extrapolate the human voice onto certain instrumentation and the Vociferous Choir is no exception – low, swirling bass, chattering cornet, trombone multiphonics, sawing violin and dry, choppy alto are brought into orchestral play against cracking rhythms and brassy swagger. Both readings of Tessellations are structurally a lot to digest, but that process is made easier by the fact that this is extraordinarily bright and rather accessible (heavens!) music, swinging and joyous. Adjectives such as these are rarely intoned to describe contemporary British improvisation, but that just goes to show how little of these artists’ work gets an ear properly turned in its direction.

5 More Dialogues is a sort of follow-up to the Weston-Watts duo that recorded 6 Dialogues in 2001 (Emanem 4069) and presents an hour’s worth of improvisations waxed just shy of ten years later. If Weston is a composer of works like Tessellations, then his compositions must come from something and that is experience. It seems too simple to say that his work as an improviser gives rise to his work as a composer, though it probably does – rather, the experience and process of playing gives rise to overarching works (though even a surface listen to his compositions will make clear the fact that they are as much about play as they are about the written phrase). Playing in its nakedest form derives from interaction of two or more individuals through shared dialogue, and one can hear in the immediacy of the rapport between Weston and Watts the gestation of compositional ideas as well as unfettered spontaneity. Associated early on with the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, from its initial head-solos-head compositions to more non-idiomatic music, and his own free-jazz-rock and West African-influenced Amalgam (and later, Moire Music), Watts is a partner whose language draws from an incredibly diverse range of sources and is, even at its most open, beholden to form.

Starting the proceedings on alto, “cuTWOrm” finds Watts digging deeply into his Johnny Hodges bag, skirling soulfully outward from roiling chordal interstices (I suppose that if Jeep and Dave Burrell had recorded a duo, it might have sounded something like this). Weston is neither singly a carpet-weaver nor sparring partner, countering and supporting with glassine airiness and dense arpeggiated landscapes as well as high-stepping left hand progressions. They are a divergent pair and that’s partly what makes the Weston-Watts duo so compelling, for they have different concepts of angularity and smoothness that, beyond the limits of instrumentation, create dissonant complements. In one area, the saxophonist’s acrid flights may be vocal and fizzy while Weston’s responses are chunky, scattered and insistent. The soprano-piano duets, represented well by “Exchanged Frequencies,” don’t call to mind Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron (the obvious precedent), clanging tone rows and painterly eddies (circular and linear motifs) giving charge to Watts’ agitated, particulate trills. There are upper-register corners from Weston’s right hand engaging pinched repetition, but the players have a tendency to never stay in one place too long, moving just as easily into a ballad of smoke and dust. Mutability doesn’t negate form or an interest in maintaining structure, but the reality of process also doesn’t necessarily dictate that these two musicians should end up right back where they began. Elegant, delicate and full of a coarse energy, on 5 More Dialogues Trevor Watts and Veryan Weston present a kind of immediacy that’s shapely and constant. It's a sound world all their own.

Forthcoming: The Tri-Centric Music of Anthony Braxton (Article)

2011-10-10T22:37:00.000-05:00

Last week and weekend, I was in New York for a celebration of the music of composer-reedman Anthony Braxton at Roulette’s new space near the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Each night presented a series of wonderful and amazing contrasts - small group music including the venerable Diamond Curtain Wall trio as well as new integrated performance strategies like Pine Top Aerial Music, piano music, choral music, the dense electronic hybrid Echo Echo Mirror House, and orchestral music. The closing night featured two movements from Trillium J, the latest installation in Braxton’s opera cycle. The cast of musicians was drawn from “regular” participants in Braxton’s work - Mary Halvorson, Taylor Ho Bynum, Jessica Pavone, Carl Testa, Aaron Siegel, Anne Rhodes, Sara Schoenbeck, Erica Dicker, Matt Bauder, Andrew Raffo Dewar - as well as local heavyweights not normally part of the Braxton circle who nevertheless fit in splendidly (Nate Wooley, Ken Filiano, Josh Sinton, Tomas Fujiwara, Mark Taylor). Having only listened to Braxton’s music on record, it was a great opportunity to see these works – some of them in first or otherwise rare performances – in the flesh.

There is a vibe around festivals that’s often harried but usually quite friendly. Roulette and the Tri-Centric Foundation made this festival work – or appear to work – seamlessly, so that everything was on time and the players were relaxed and happy, as was the audience. Braxton is, of course, an extraordinarily kind, warm and generous individual so the reality is that he encourages a similar environment around his work. Whether people were there to experience the works from an audience perspective or if they were playing in the ensembles, the overarching feeling was that people were similarly warm and engaged, happy to be with one another sharing in Braxton and his music. The Tri-Centric vibe is, in the best sense, a familial one.

My plan is to generate some sort of text from all of this, culled from notes taken during the performances, memories, listening, reading, and interviews with participants. It also looks (fingers crossed) like the interview that Anthony and I did a while back will finally be fine-tuned and brought up to contemporary speed so these might make an interesting complementary pair. In any event, what I hope emerges isn’t your standard festival/concert review, but an impression of the experience of this music and the environment surrounding it, and how that environmental sensibility works as part of the Braxton worldview. At the very least, it’ll be something worth reading whether you were there or not. I have no idea where this as-yet-unplanted seed will take root, but I’ll be sure to link it when such a thing occurs.

Until then, it’s catch-up time as usual. If you want to learn more about Anthony Braxton and the Tri-Centric Foundation, check them out on the web here.

Biting Off More Than We Can Chew

2011-09-28T11:45:00.000-05:00

As I write this, it's becoming more and more of a challenge to find the time to post serious reviews, interviews and articles - what with a full time non-music job, partner and other interests. I've lamented the fact that the inflow of new releases (most of which, at this point, I'm interested in and would like to review) is quite heavy, while the available time for output is light. Recently, I have thought about taking a bit of a hiatus to see how it feels. However, one overarching problem is this - the world of creative music moves extraordinarily quickly in terms of its conversation, to the point that it is very easy to all of a sudden feel completely left out. It's an ironic problem because if the music is really lasting, a few weeks or a few months lapsing between a disc's release date and writing about it shouldn't matter. At All About Jazz and the New York City Jazz Record, for example, there is a one-year delay applied in that one can write about 2010 discs in 2011. It allows the material to settle in and also shows an understanding that there's just so much to sort through from year to year, the community of writers can't possibly be expected to stay on top of it all.

The artists whose work I return to time and again are those who seem above or beyond the fleeting temporality of bleeding-edge discourse, but that doesn't make it easier to feel that sometimes the train has left the station. A case in point is a collaborative review-discussion on Bill Dixon's Envoi (Victo, 2011). This will soon be published at the Destination: Out website, where my review and a short interview with trumpeter-improvising composer Stephen Haynes about the work and performance will be in dialogue. Through various exigencies, it's taken a few months longer to get this piece completed and posted and it will be well after the initial onslaught of reviews have gone to press. The music itself is so far beyond "contemporary" that such timeliness shouldn't matter - it was released only a matter of months ago, anyway - yet in the initial sales-hype machine to which the reviewer is inexorably linked, that slice of time could be decades past.

While lately it has been hard to find time to pop the headphones on at work and strike a few keys in the direction of criticism, one easy place to remain attached to the conversation is Facebook. It only takes a few seconds to "like" someone's post or contribute a pithy comment. The same goes for retweeting things on Twitter. It's already been established that this is a poor facsimile of dialogue, but nevertheless it does give the creative music community some degree of visibility and virtual activity. For a few days on either side of the event, people can honor the birthdays of John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Sam Rivers or rail against an abusive club owner until we once again slip into our normal day-to-day. It's something we're all part of here - myself included, most definitely - and that fleeting immediacy seems to be the state of critical discourse as well. Writing about music right now requires keeping pace with the ADHD-inflected state of information dispersal, whether one likes it or not.

Obviously I have no answer for this dilemma, or even whether I'll take a break or not - after all, things have to get finished including several end-of-month reviews for this and other sites, tidying up the transcription of an interview with the late composer Graham Collier, and a couple of exciting liner-note projects. Next week I'll be in New York to catch Anthony Braxton at Roulette; maybe that will be just the shot in the proverbial arm that is needed to keep the work at the "right" level. We shall see.

Interview: Percussionist-Composer Nick Hennies

2011-09-20T12:09:00.004-05:00

Depending on where one falls on the spectrum, the name Nick Hennies could mean one of two things (or both). If you’re a central Texas indie-rock fan, his work as drummer-vocalist in the psychedelic chamber-pop quartet Weird Weeds (with Aaron Russell and Sandy Ewen, guitars and vocals; Lindsey Verrill, bass and voice) is a bright spot in the Austin underground. Also an instrumentalist-composer schooled at the University of Illinois and UC-San Diego, he’s steadily engaged the landscape of both “lowercase” and “uppercase” percussion, recording his own pieces as well as the music of Alvin Lucier, Arnold Dreyblatt, Radu Malfatti, Jürg Frey and others. On April 16, shortly before the May 2011 Austin New Music Coop performance of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning, Hennies and I sat down to discuss his recent projects and some of the ideas behind them. Note: portions of this interview were also used for a Summer 2011 article in Signal To Noise Magazine.

CA: So you’re working with architects for an installation project, I understand?

NH: Well it turns out only one was an architect, and one of them has a math degree but he said he took some classes as a student from this architect. I don’t know how Sean O’Neill [Lustigiovi] knows them, but he said they read what I wrote about what we’d done. I saw a couple photos of their work and read what they’d written and it sounded really similar. When we were talking yesterday, we just rattled things off and at some point earlier in the day, I was thinking to myself like, the common theme about what I’m doing right now is that it’s really direct and deliberate – it’s not complicated but it provides an unusual experience. When we were talking yesterday, the architect said “I can tell you right now that what most architects will submit is going to be really convoluted and complex, and this is great because it’s so direct.”

CA: Tell me more about what exactly this project is going to entail.

NH: Originally it was going to be a CD, and this is an idea I had almost two years ago – it was going to be a solo percussion piece that lasted a very long time, and originally I was thinking I’d also have some electronics or field recordings on it. I never had any ideas that I liked, and almost exactly a year ago at [Austin’s] Fusebox Festival I played and Sean played right before me, and I was just blown away. I was more impressed with him than almost anything else I’ve experienced in Austin. Immediately, I was like ‘we have to work together.’ I’d never heard of him, though [Austin promoter] Aaron Mace knew him somehow and put us on the same show.

I was always under the impression that it would be a recording that could be performed live as well, but the idea was to have an hour of music on it. As I thought about it more, for a long time I’d wanted to do something epic, like hours and hours long, but I never had any ideas that would support that. Now I do, so in February we did a partial last-minute performance, agreeing to play a show where we didn’t have much time. I wrote three sections of percussion music and I played one for about an hour. After that, I decided that not only did we need a bigger room to perform in, but that it should be much longer. Still, I think there might be someone who would be interested in putting out the CD, and it will be the same as what we’d been thinking about. Sean has already filled two hard drives with material himself.

CA: Is he processing what you’re doing or sending him, then?

NH: What he’s creating has no relation to what I’m doing – I specifically told him not to listen. They are separate things occurring at the same time, though I guess they share certain qualities. It sounds a little bit loop-based and some of the sounds are repetitive, but not rhythmically.

CA: When I listened to the clip on the site, my first inklings were of loops, but it’s imprecise and atmospheric as well.

NH: I’m not sure what his process was, but he was trying millions of different sounds – sounds he made from recording acoustically. He has lots of found objects – there was a bass drum sound, and I asked him what it was and he said it was just an oil can. We’re still working on the recording aspect, and this competition came out of nowhere. When I sent the link to Sean, he was like ‘we’re already doing this.’ Bringing people in with eyes for design, I figured they’d probably have better ideas about space than I would. We had some ideas but nothing that was specific to the space.

CA: I think of your solo percussion music as definitely dealing with resonance of objects. You’re going to have to think of environmental variability there, so you must be thinking to some degree about that already.

NH: A little bit, yeah. Having done it once, I realized that every time I do the piece I’m going to have to deal with the space, how it differs from the last one, and so forth. That’s common sense – if you have a small room, you can’t put as much stuff in it. One last minute addition to the piece that we thought of was, I had a couple drums with lamps underneath them and an iPod attached to each drum head. They were playing files that were mostly silence, but maybe every twenty minutes or so a bunch of recorded cut-up noise would come out of the speaker. There was a piece of aluminum foil between the speaker and the drum, and it would buzz and seemingly start doing this on its own. The space we’re looking at doing this in the future is the new Visual Arts Center at The University of Texas at Austin, and we were talking yesterday about doing something where the space was so big that if you had two objects so far apart, and you were standing next to one of them you’d have no perception of what’s going on at the other end of the building. It’s different from being somewhere where you know everyone can hear everything.

CA: That kind of independence could be really interesting.

NH. One idea I had that stuck in my head was that a percussionist plays a composed four seconds of music for about twenty minutes at a time. After twenty minutes, he or she would go somewhere else and do a constant sound, like a bass drum roll or rubbing a piece of paper on a drum, and it goes from really complex rhythmic music to something very simple. Clay, the architect, had mentioned making little compartments that people could walk into and somehow being inside would alter the sound, and that gave me an idea that I could go somewhere that nobody could see me and the sound I’m playing is somehow amplified. I have no idea how or what, but the idea is interesting.

CA: Could you talk about your process for Objects [Kendra Steiner Editions, 2011] and Psalms [Roeba, 2010]?

NH: Those came about originally through two pieces. I wrote a vibraphone piece my senior year of college, a little five minute piece as a sort of elegy after Herbert Brün died (because he hated long pieces – he said that everything over nine minutes was an imposition except in special circumstances). Anyway, somehow by accident I found out that if you hold the pedal down on the vibraphone and play something over and over, the sound actually changes without the performer having to change anything. I think what happens is that you’ve got the resonator tube underneath the key. That’s closed and you’ve got air running up and down the tube, and sometimes the sound wave hits the bottom of the key at the same time the mallet hits the top of the key, and causes the key to go dead. If you do that fast, it does this weird constantly changing rhythmic resonance. I started to think about Psalms around the same time the Austin New Music Coop did an all-Alvin Lucier concert. I’d wanted to do the triangle piece for a long time, and I realized that those two concepts were somewhat similar. They informed making pieces with different instruments; the first three are more or less the same compositional idea as those pieces – the performer doesn’t change but the material does. The two vibraphone pieces are examples of what I’d discovered, whereas the snare, woodblock and triangle are examples of the performer subtly changing what I’m doing.

CA: What surprised me was the woodblock – I’d never really thought about the resonance of wood, even though I’ve listened to things like an upright bass or a marimba.

NH: Everywhere I go, people are like “I can’t believe that woodblock.” I actually don’t understand some of the physical aspects of what occurs during that music. I think what you hear is actually a combination of properties of the instrument that people aren’t aware of, and the acoustics of the room you’re in. The snare, triangle, and woodblock are very dependent on the room you’re in and that JD Emmanuel show when I played Psalms was a very dead room and you heard less. More alive rooms allow it to be more interesting, but in general one thing that these pieces do is make a sonic profile of the room you’re in and the way things echo.

CA: When you did that concert at Travis Weller’s place of Psalms, I thought it sounded incredible in his house.

NH: I like that space a lot. My favorite rooms have been live, and when we recorded that CD we tried doing it several places. One was at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and you hit one note and it decayed forever. I like that, but the room that was the best was a long rectangular room where James teaches bass lessons. We emptied out the room and I set up in the middle, and that was it. My second favorite was his house, which is similar to Travis’ because they’re not so live that it muddies things – the room’s natural reverb can obscure things a bit – but it still always works. The only thing I don’t like is doing it in a room without any echo. Of course, it’s less clear in an overly echoing room, but I don’t mind that too much.

CA: Are you at all thinking towards ensemble pieces again?

NH: I wrote one for five drummers on the Lungs CD [Full Spectrum, 2010], but that was the first in a while – and I can’t even remember how I thought of that. I wanted to write something that Greg Stuart and I could play on. It would be great to do things involving more musicians but I haven’t had any ideas yet.

CA: Would it be fair to say that being in the Weird Weeds with an ensemble, that that gives you a fix?

NH: Sort of, but being in a rock band is a lot different from writing chamber music. One isn’t better than the other, and a lot of times when I try to make something consciously it doesn’t work. The things I finish are the ones that didn’t come out from specificity, but arose naturally or by accident. Clots I had the idea of while I was jogging two summers ago; when I was playing Psalms live in Houston, before I left I was talking with [Weird Weeds guitarist] Sandy Ewen and lamented that I was having to bring my vibraphone because it’s hard work to fit it in my car, and she said “don’t be lazy.” She was right – it was August and my car is un-air-conditioned and the vibraphone I have is a pain in the ass to move. I brought it anyway, and the show was on the second floor without an elevator, and I got there early enough that nobody was around to help me with it. By the time the show was ready to start I was dripping with sweat, and I actually played incredibly well – the show was really good and I was focused. I had the idea that, well, the worst thing about being a percussionist is moving shit around – everybody hates it – so if I hate moving equipment but the piece is made better by my moving equipment, then that makes moving it around more palatable.

The idea for Clots was like, okay if my doing physical labor makes me play better, that’s part of the piece. It also ties into meditation practices – part of the reason I don’t listen to music while jogging is that certain things you do while jogging are very meditative, you’re breathing heavily and it’s a repetitive thing, and you don’t want to channel your thoughts in too many directions. I feel more focused after a run if I don’t listen to music. But as I was running one day I thought ‘what if I make a piece where the piece of music is work?’ That idea was also to write something really rhythmically difficult but short.

CA: Obviously classical and experimental musicians do perform on tour, but you doing solo works on tour seems birthed from the touring rock musician idiom.

NH: Oh, definitely. That was one thing I really liked about touring with the Weird Weeds – it’s just work, it’s not like being on vacation or anything. I like feeling like what I’m doing has a connection to a tangible act that requires time and investment. It’s better than making pieces in my bedroom and releasing it.

CA: Psalms gets to be what it is through performing it in different situations and with different moods.

NH: That’s how it was written; I have final versions that came about through work, and that’s how I learned the Lucier piece. I tried to do it with a predetermined approach and it didn’t really come out that well, and instead I kept playing it in a way that if I heard something emerge that seemed interesting, I’d follow that and see where it went. Through that process I got a final version and the composition of my own pieces also came about through working on them live until it was right.

CA: Since you’re dealing with direct material engagement and change over time, and we’ve talked about this before, the concept of minimalism and reductive music, how do you deal with terminology for what you’re doing? Do you see the work in a pantheon or is it isolated?

NH: I’ll let other people deal with terminology – I don’t think of it that way. I don’t feel a connection to other composers’ music, with the exception of Lucier, though on the surface it may seem like he’s more influential on these works than he actually is. What I really want to do is harness my natural inclinations rather than decide to “do” certain things, and that’s why there’s a wide variety of music that I’ve put out recently. I’m a little self conscious that I have music that doesn’t sound like it was made by the same person, but I would like to think that over several years there would be a palpable connection between these things. I would like to create a body of work that gives one an example of where I was at certain points, and this is one of the biggest influences I got from John Duncan, where he says that “all of my work is about self-discovery and trying to learn about [himself].”

I wasn’t really making solo music until the Lucier show; Charles Curtis was here and he said “people always ask me why Lucier is so obsessed with echoes and resonance, and really it’s just that he’s like that. He just wants to know – he’s inquisitive about that certain thing.” I thought, okay, people just have natural inclinations – some people are amazing at basketball and others aren’t. So instead of making a string quartet or whatever, what am I naturally interested in and how can I use that to make music? I still don’t know the specific answer. Michael Pisaro wrote something about Wandleweiser, saying “there’s no reason people should like this music – they just do or they don’t.” It seems like a simple thing but for a long time I was like ‘why am I drawn to this music with so much silence where not much happens?’ What is it about me that I enjoy this stuff? I just do.

CA: What I try to draw lines to is that, well, I know the Weird Weeds and your solo work differ, but I feel like there’s a quality that informs both.

NH: I would hope over time that it becomes clear the relationship between the two. If I were to make several albums over time there would be a visible connection.

CA: I can’t put my finger on the word for it, but I don’t unsee an almost pop quality, or accessibility to the solo music.

NH: When I made Lineal [SRA, 2009], I was conscious of that part near the end where there’s a choral sound to it. I was worried that it might be too ambient or whatever, and the difference between a really good drone CD and one that’s just mediocre is pretty slim. If I were going to say that there was a thread between the Weird Weeds and the solo stuff, I would say that all of it has a kind of affection for sound. I think the Weird Weeds use sound really economically and very responsibly, and the way that we perform it’s a lot like chamber music – the guitar parts are delicate and, say, it would be very obvious if Aaron [Russell, Weird Weeds guitarist] made a mistake and moreso than if, say, the guy from Superchunk made a mistake. It’s really intricate but it’s not rhythmically complex. That was another thing that informs what I do now is that I used to make really quiet music, and it took me a while to get out of it for some reason. The solo drum music that I recorded before – I stand behind the music, but I also feel that it was within a style and I continued doing things like that because I figured “this is my thing – I’m the guy that plays quiet music.”

CA: Knowing what I do about the kind of music you like – whether it’s [punk band] Bitch Magnet or solo percussion music – there is a kind of directness or straight-ahead quality to all of it.

NH: I really like a lot of singer-songwriter stuff and the ones I like have absolutely no bullshit to what they do, like Mark Kozelek. There’s not really anything to the music other than what he’s doing. I read an interview with Greg [Saunier] from Deerhoof and he responded to a question with “I think that if a lot more people used their imagination to make music, there would be a lot more music that gets called ‘weird’.” That quote stuck in my head – everybody’s different, and that’s why I like simple folk music a lot, because there’s a tendency for people to show their inherently interesting qualities.

CA: I’d like to get some of the historical stuff down and frame it in how you got on the path that you’re on musically. I know you grew up in Louisville and played punk rock, but I’d be interested in when you got into studying percussion.

NH: After my second year of high school I switched schools to an arts magnet school, and before that I didn’t even know that you could go to music school for an instrument like percussion. I’d played in band and so forth, but I didn’t know there were these options. There were two guys around my age and one of them owned a marimba – they were already percussionists. The first CD of composers that I bought was because these guys told me about the Elliott Carter tympani pieces and I really wanted to learn how to play them. I found a CD of American composers that had Crumb, Cage, Carter, Copland and Paul Creston on it. There was Cage’s Second Construction, the Carter tympani pieces, and Crumb’s Five Piano Pieces and at the time I thought it was the most revolutionary stuff I’d ever heard. Before that I didn’t even want to go to college – I hated school and I didn’t know that you could go to college for music.

I’ve known how to read music since I was nine; I had a teacher at a music shop whose basis for everything was notated music, and because of that I have good rhythm sight-reading abilities. Even at that time, the point at which I discovered that music, there were a couple of good record stores in Louisville and I pored over the Trouser Press guide, listening to Henry Cow and stuff like that. When I was 15, I started making weird noise music and I got into this band Nero as well; I have tapes of messing around with feedback and stuff when I was a teenager, and it’s not like there was a ‘scene’ in Louisville or anything.

Because of that Cage piece on the CD I’d bought I ended up reading Silence, and the last paper I wrote in high school was a book report on it. That book is one of a small number of things that fundamentally changed the way I think about music. Then I went to the University of Illinois because I had a friend there; in retrospect I could have gone somewhere better, but Herbert Brün was there and that ended up also changing how I think about music. A lot of people don’t know who he is, but the people who have been near him all say that he changed their lives. Honestly I think he was a more talented writer and thinker than he was a composer; he has good music, but in general the things I think are most valuable about his stuff is instilling a value of anti-commercialism.

He died my senior year of college, though he’d been forcibly retired because he was a pain in everyone’s ass and the department was becoming really conservative. In the 60s, Herbert was the one who brought Cage to the University of Illinois. He was one of the first people, along with Lejaren Hiller, to use a computer to make music. He taught a seminar in experimental music, and ended up starting a school in Urbana called the School for Designing a Society, which was a small DIY school focused on progressive social change. He was really intensely political, and it was teaching in a way to encourage positive social change. Composition was very important to his idea of an ideal society – his definition was something like, “a composition is anything that couldn’t exist without the composer.” In its simplest form it’s trying to do something that hasn’t been done before.

CA: Which would really allow for improvisation, I would think.

NH: Ironically, he hated improvisation. All of his students loved him and they all love to improvise.

Then I went and did a year abroad in England my junior year, and after I graduated I went to San Diego to study with Steven Schick and I knew the program was specifically contemporary music. That’s also where I met Greg Stuart; he primarily plays Michael Pisaro’s music now.

CA: When I met you, I thought of you as an improviser; have you gone away from it at this point?

NH: When I was an undergrad, I was involved with this group in St. Louis around the Lemp Arts Center, and they were all students of Herbert Brün who were interested in improvisation as a model for an ideal society. It was very politically motivated improvisation, and when you’re around people who are that dedicated when you’re young, it’s impossible not to think that is what you should be doing. I played with them until I finished college, and when I went to grad school I played somewhat with [trombonist] Tucker Dulin but other than that, I had stopped improvising. I was tired of what we were doing in St. Louis and reached a point where it seemed like it was repeating itself.

When I was in San Diego, I saw nmperign with Axel Doerner and Andrea Neumann, and that was very freeing – there was something new to do in improvisation. Having never heard anyone play like that before, I was blown away. But then I got to a point again where I felt like I’d used up all my ideas and the last thing I wanted to do was create something that was unnecessary. Since 2004, I haven’t been that interested in improvisation; I still enjoy it from time to time, but it’s just not what I should be doing. I’m better suited to other things and I find it more satisfying to play the same five pieces over and over again than playing five completely different improv shows.

CA: Well, it evolves more slowly and you can mark the changes within it.

NH: I think the meat of it is that I’m not excited enough by spontaneity to keep improvising, and I prefer to play composed music.

CA: Could we talk about how Lineal came together?

NH: It’s a different focus – an audio collage with a narrative element that’s almost dramatic. My mom’s father speaks on it and so forth. As long as I can remember, every Thanksgiving or Christmas my grandfather would recite a poem – he’d memorize these poems, and this was one of the reasons I wanted to make the piece, because I didn’t understand why he did this. He didn’t seem to enjoy much, and for some reason he did this thing that he got something out of. As he got older, it was like “oh, it’s time for grandpa to recite a poem…” and the last time I remember seeing him do it, my mom and her sisters were talking and laughing the whole time, and it seemed pretty sad. He had developed Parkinson’s and was barely conscious, but he could still do things like reciting Casey at Bat from start to finish. I was 17 or 18 the last time I saw him.

One of my aunts had suggested that I record grandpa, which we all found kind of awkward, and three years ago my dad found the tape of him reciting poems and sent it to me. It sat around for a while and one day I decided to digitize it, and at some point while I was listening to the transfer I decided I had to use it for something. I worked on that CD for a long time, kind of intermittently, and a lot of the sounds on it were things I just made and recorded with very little processing. The drone part is a banjo solo played by my great grandfather with so much reverb applied that there’s no more rhythm. It’s a harmonically simple piece of music, just a big chord I could use.

CA: Right, he recorded some music of his own.

NH: Yeah, he was in a band called Taylor’s Kentucky Boys. Aaron is really into prewar music and I asked him if he’d ever heard of Marion Underwood, and he said he had a boxed set with him on it. It’s called Kentucky Mountain Music, and it’s got a bunch of songs by the Kentucky Boys along with a Marion Underwood banjo solo. One of the songs we had on a tape when I was a kid was a real hokey tune, and at my grandma’s funeral (Marion was her dad), they were supposed to play this instrumental song and they played the silly one instead – that came on and people were totally giggling at the funeral, which I still think is really charming and better than if they’d played the right song. I hadn’t done anything like Lineal before, and I didn’t want to use the recordings of him talking by changing them – rather put them on top of other things.

CA: Brün’s definition of composition seems pretty apt in this case, because you don’t usually think of solo percussion music as biographical but of course, yours is because it describes what you enjoy doing, and then you also have Lineal which has a family history element to it. Would you ever do something like this again?

NH: I have way more of those poems and I’d like to do something with them, but who knows. I don’t reject ideas if I think they’re good enough to be worth pursuing. I’m just waiting around until something comes into my head that’s worth doing. It’s not always the case – pieces on Lungs came about because it was a matter of harnessing things I knew I could do. Honestly, the music on that CD is closest to the music that I thought I would like to make before I began doing the things I’m doing now. I like that album a lot, and I would like to do some similar things to that again.

CA: Accessibility has negative connotations in this music, but a lot of your work is pretty accessible – with the exception of Lungs.

NH: It’s pretty severe. Part of the reason I like it is that there are things on there that I didn’t realize would work together in service of an album concept, until after I heard it. The second track has a traffic noise on it from recording at [Austin musician-composer] Bill Baird’s studio, for example, and at first I was pissed off because of the noise but I ended up using it anyway and I feel that it works. Each piece uses a different type of silence; the bass drum pieces use absolute recorded silence, and the ensemble piece uses the phenomenon where, for example, the air conditioner is on and you don’t notice it until it turns off. That’s what that piece does – whenever you’re not making a pitched sound with the drum, you rub it really quietly and almost imperceptibly. There’s a lot of traffic noise at Ceremony Hall, and when we did the piece there, it blended in almost completely with the environmental noise. When it got to the actual silence it was deafening and was really effective. The definition of silence in that piece (“Second Skin with Lungs”) was “whatever sound is audible when I’m not playing.”

CA: Well, I have a tough time with silence because of course there’s so much ambient noise, my hearing sucks, and I have tinnitus – so no quiet for me.

NH: Absolute silence doesn’t really exist, and that’s why I think about different grades of it. “Silence” within the context of Lungs includes street noise. In a concert hall if someone stops playing and there’s a car horn outside, nobody thinks that the performer made that happen – it’s understood “the performer is not playing – therefore the piece is silent.” Michael Pisaro said about the Wandelweiser composers that they picked up on the implications of Cage’s 4’33” in that they heard it not as silence but as music, which is important. I think most people don’t hear it that way.

CA: In Feldman, the pauses and rests can have more gravitas than the music – they can be heart-stopping.

NH: Alvin Lucier said that he really liked the Second String Quartet, the six-hour one, because there is no time to stop playing and re-tune so the instruments naturally become out of tune with one another and it becomes microtonal music. Very gradually over the course of six hours it goes out of tune. I’ve never listened to the whole thing to find out.

CA: So at this juncture, are you more interested in being a musician or a “sound-artist?”

I don't make a distinction between those two things and I've never really understood the need for the term “sound art” instead of “music” either, but that’s another issue. The most interesting thing for me in music right now – at least as far as what I'm doing is concerned – is engaging with familiar sounds and/or instruments in a way that exposes things inherent to their construction that may have been overlooked or haven't been exposed yet. The most exciting thing for me is making music that can be immediately understood by anyone but is still innovative and unusual in its composition and execution. I want to show audiences something that provokes them to ask questions about the way the world works. It's an approach that appeals to absolutely anyone, as long as they're willing to listen with an open mind and ears.

The Austin New Music Coop did a performance and Q&A at a small community college outside of San Antonio last year where I played Lucier’s Silver Streetcar for the Orchestra. When the piece ended, the first question from the audience was, “Why?” to which I said, “Why go to the Grand Canyon? You go because you want to see something natural and amazing.”

Selected Discography:

Objects (Kendra Steiner Editions, 2011)
Jürg Frey - Metal, Stone, Skin, Foliage, Air (L'innomable, 2011)
Psalms (Roeba, 2010)
Lungs (Full Spectrum, 2010)
Alvin Lucier - Still and Moving Lines of Silence... (Quiet Design, 2010)
Lineal (SRA, 2009)
Turned 3" (Architect, 2009)
Radu Malfatti - l'effaçage (B-Boim, 2008)
Jandek - Austin Sunday (Corwood, 2006)

All images courtesy of Nick Hennies.

On Listening.

2011-08-31T15:32:00.001-05:00

If we are to talk about “problems” in appreciating and engaging art, one of the chief concerns is that after a certain point in life, people don’t want to have to be taught to do something unless they are getting paid for it. That in-itself is understandable at the basest level (who doesn’t want some sort of non-intrinsic reward sometimes?), but it isn’t a very fruitful path if one wants to expand one’s horizons. By the time you get to be of a certain age, you don’t want to be taught how to listen to music or see what is in a work of visual art. That seems like something that you should know how to do from an elementary age. The thing is, we still have to learn how to appreciate even the things we like. With music – and with jazz/improvised music especially – understanding how to listen came well after my first or even second engagement with it, and unknowingly I sought teachers who would help me to hear the history and beyond it so I could hopefully have some grasp of what this music is.

With the drums, I thank Alvin Fielder for helping me to hear the lineage and really study where different rhythms and phrases come from. Even as a non-musician and someone who, when I was a musician, didn’t have the greatest sense of “time,” I’ve learned more about where modern jazz drumming comes from through knowing and talking to Alvin. He is a historian and a treasure.

For finally beginning to love the trumpet, as well as a true appreciation of tone and understanding how this music is put together orchestrally, credit is due to Bill Dixon and Stephen Haynes. I am still learning how the trumpet does what it can do and it is a challenge, but for gaining knowledge about the subtleties of sound and assembling the “parts” of a piece of music, I owe Bill and Stephen a lot.

Picking apart the music critically and thinking about the literature around it started with David Raskin (my art history mentor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and continued with Bill and Stephen as well as (writer-musician-composer) Allen Lowe, (writer) Larry Kart, (producer-label owner) Chuck Nessa, (musician-scholar) Karl Evangelista, (musician-educator) Jeff Crompton and a number of others.

Of course, having the good fortune to interview and interact with quite a few of the music’s most important figures has helped tremendously, and that also goes for getting to know and being involved with a community of fellow travelers/friendly experiencers who are enthusiastic and willing to share. In writing for Ni Kantu and other places as a critic, one might take away from that a lack of substantial negativity about the music – rarely do I give negative reviews, though it does happen sometimes. Acquiring an understanding of how to listen (and I’m still doing that and will probably always do that) has quashed most of the propensity to give a recording bad marks. Plus, I barely have time to write about all the great music that enters the marketplace, much less a set of music that (to me) isn’t interesting.

Without trying to sound like I’m on any enlightened plane – far from it – I do think that appreciating art is a learned thing, taught through getting to know the creators (biographical experience) and others who are part of the sub-cultural fabric. As pianist Burton Greene wrote in his autobiography Meditations of a Musical Pesty-Mystic (Cadence Jazz Books, 2001), and quoting Swami Satchidananda, “to understand is to stand under where you are already standing.” Being willing to learn and try to have humility in that process, remaining a student even if it can be agitating to do so, is an undeniable step in the right direction.

Sparked by a question of whether audiences are "afraid" of new music earlier today I'm not sure that they are, but I can say that to accept the idea of continual learning is a tall order, and ultimately a rewarding one.

Happy Birthday Mal Waldron

2011-08-16T15:17:00.001-05:00

Today would have been pianist and improvising composer Mal Waldron's 86th birthday (he died in 2002). Since I first heard him on record with reedman-composer Eric Dolphy in the 1990s, Waldron has been one of my favorite pianists. That anthemic insistence, coupled with didactic minimal variations and a wistful classicism captured the "intellectual" fascination I had with the music early on, but his emotional power and affable wit have filled the humanist side of the music, which has been the most lasting way in which he has affected me.

Known as an accompanist/collaborator with Billie Holiday in the 1950s, Waldron was the "house pianist" for Prestige records throughout the decade and is one of the most unique voices in hardbop. His work-songs appeal to a strange, obsessive side that isn't always obvious in the music of Bobby Timmons and the Adderleys, but it could be said that they are a foundation of the genre. In the late 1960s, he became associated with the avant-garde after relocating to Europe, frequently working with other unclassifiable expats like Steve Lacy, Fred Braceful, and Charlie Mariano. He even recorded with members of the krautrock ensemble Embryo. Popular in Japan, Waldron recorded numerous sessions for Japanese labels as well as European independents. Walking the line between inside and outside, his vast catalog is one that I can honestly say is entirely worth dipping into.

Below are two very different tracks - the first is a wonderful, knotty arrangement of the standard "The Way You Look Tonight" from 1957, while the second is a sterling example of his "free" period (notice that as busy as it is, metrically it remains very tight) on the French Futura label from 1970. Finally, I highly recommend the documentary Mal by Dutch filmmaker Tom Overberghe, which you can also find on YouTube. Wish I could have met him - he seems like a sweet man and a deep spirit.

Late Summer Review Roundup

2011-08-16T12:09:00.001-05:00

Summer in Texas (yolk, yolk)

Sometimes a little desk-clearing is in order, though that sounds like a rough way to put it. Some of these reviews were slated for publication elsewhere and got cut due to space/magazines shutting down/etc. Others are cases where the material has just fallen by the wayside (with no impact on its quality, it's just a time thing) or as with a couple of these discs, they have just been in my car stereo too much to bring inside to write on. Anyway, the music discussed here is timeless and hopefully will get us all through the dog days of August. Enjoy!

ARRIVE

There Was

CYLINDER

Cylinder

(Clean Feed)

Composer-reedman Aram Shelton is a very unassuming character, which is partly why his trajectory is so interesting to watch. Based in Oakland, California for the past several years while studying at Mills College, he’s still found time to maintain his Chicago roots, playing with cooperative ensembles like Fast Citizens and Rolldown as well as various West Coast aggregations. As an improviser, he’s probably one of the most consistently exciting altoists on the contemporary scene, having studied intently the music of historic messengers like Jackie McLean, Gary Bartz, Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Braxton and wrapping it all into his own conception. Two recent discs on the Clean Feed label put an excellent spotlight on some of Shelton’s activities – namely, the quartets Arrive (which began in Chicago) and the decidedly Bay Area band Cylinder.

Arrive features fellow Rolldown members Jason Adasiewicz (vibes) and Jason Roebke (bass) along with drummer Tim Daisy, and There Was is their second disc to date. The opening title piece gradually shifts from spare tonal exploration to sharp alto pirouettes atop a taut, active thrum, Roebke’s fistfuls making this groove edgily pliant and brightly accented. The vibist’s solo shows just how much he’s progressed over the last few years, bright pools and fragmentary sub-tunes making themselves clear in one of the most strikingly (no pun intended) individual statements on the instrument in recent memory. “Frosted” exhibits a shredded view of a nocturnal half-ballad as Shelton takes a caressing tone and eviscerates it with gutsy near squall, at other times making coagulated blues. Adasciewicz matches delicacy with crisp, snaking movement in a mirror to the saxophonist’s devilish turns before Daisy inflects the tune with calypso-like rhythms. From the lilting melody of “Lost,” it’s a quick transition into Roebke’s woody muscle, using hands, bow and forearms to craft tensile opposition. Reprising the theme, its resonance is catchy and Shelton’s blistering statements rekindle the fiery gobs of AACM sound as much as they do an aggressively-tinged hardbop push. He’s clearly a player who knows two divergent traditions well, but his own work as an instrumentalist-composer is to find ways to bring them together.

Cylinder is the cooperative quartet of Shelton, trumpeter Darren Johnston, bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and drummer Kjell Nordeson (who splits his time between California and Stockholm). The trumpeter composed the opening “The Ear That Was Sold to a Fish,” which recalls the John Carter-Bobby Bradford Quartet in its uneasy funereal unison before splaying out into curling alto, as meaty pizzicato bass and Nordeson’s light rattle build a rhythm environment. “The Deep Disciplines” pits short, darting segments against sawing insistence, alto and trumpet in loose commentary atop a swaying hull and obsessive patter. A drummer who builds his language from small rimshots, highly-tuned taps and deadened thuds, Nordeson is one of the most engaging parts of this quartet, especially as he counters Mezzacappa’s robust and steadfast bass playing. The pair tugs at one another on the brief “Shells,” written by the drummer as a chunky rhythmic exploration that soon steps out of bounds while horns pile on with cutting interplay. Mezzacappa’s closing “Earthworm” is a spacious roil with bass clarinet and drums played off of rude harmonic scrawl in varying degrees of density. Cylinder presents a solid program of piano-less quartet music and, while not all of it is entirely distinctive, the contrasts between the group’s four personalities should make for excellent future results. Both discs are a fine place to introduce oneself to Aram Shelton’s music

RHYS CHATHAM
Outdoor Spell
(Northern Spy)

I remember the first time I heard “Waterloo No. 2” from composer Rhys Chatham’s Die Donnergötter LP (Homestead, 1986). What was immediately so striking about this minimal appropriation of the drum-and-bugle corps was that it seemed so celebratory while at the same time reveling in a sort of stasis. The piece captured something of Albert Ayler’s marching band music of the mid-60s, but turned that static, pliable free time into a different web. Chatham’s minimalist pulsations were not so much points to be leapt from but rather ensconced within. That enveloping quality has been a part of his music ever since, especially among guitar orchestras like An Angel Moves Too Fast to See (1989) and A Crimson Grail (2007). Outdoor Spell returns to the small ensemble and to brass, with Chatham’s multi-tracked and electronically augmented trumpet the basis for the four tracks here, often utilizing chuffs, spit, and whine to create an environment that moves well beyond our expectations of brass music. Certainly the Bill Dixon school has done a lot to expand the conception of how the trumpet can be played (at its simplest) and the possibilities of the instrument’s linguistic capabilities (which seem nearly limitless). Chatham is not basing this work on anything Dixon might have developed (though it does have parallels) – rather, it follows from his previous work, creating deep sound fields out of grouped filaments, overlaying long tones, short upturned phrases, sputters and kisses into gradations of color.

“Crossing the Sword Bridge” is extraordinary in this regard, assembling a march from ptooeys and multiphonic inflections, a surface pockmarked by growls and screams that nevertheless has an obvious interest in texture, with sections that range from chunky to gauzy. Once an area is defined, Chatham overlays it with events that soon multiply and themselves are integrated into a regal and swirling canvas, though surprisingly the piece never feels overly dense. “Corn Maiden’s Rite” is a duet of sorts, employing the cajón of Beatriz Rojas as a resonant bottom for intertwined, piercing calls in environmental folds; the percussive base is counteracted by paced blats, giving this dance an immobilized bounce. In trio with guitarist Jean-Marc Montera and drummer Kevin Shea, “The Magician” is the closest I’ve heard Chatham come to free improvisation, glitchy dives and pot-boiling agitation vying for space with the composer’s breathy slabs. However, improvised mass doesn’t suit Chatham’s conception well – at least how it’s done here – and this is the least successful of the four pieces here. Though its closer is unnecessary, Outdoor Spell is still a fine notch in Chatham’s discography and shows an instrumental side of his work that we don’t often experience. Not only that, but “Crossing the Sword Bridge” is a particularly stunning new piece in his oeuvre.

EXTRAORDINARY POPULAR DELUSIONS
Apocryphal Fire in the Warehouse, and Other Explanations

(Harmonic Convergence)

For the second disc by Chicago quartet Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Mars Williams, reeds and misc. instruments; Jim Baker, synthesizer and piano; Steve Hunt, percussion; and Brian Sandstrom, bass, cello and guitar), their work falls even more squarely within the realm of non-idiomatic improvisation than it did on their 2007 eponymous Okka Disk release. Though it is important to their gestation – especially on the side of Williams and Hunt – the connection to the blistering grab-bag of Hal Russell’s music seems a bit more distant, to the point that if one were interested in comparisons, the group’s texture would be the result of a triangulation between AMM, the AACM and the Sun Ra Arkestra. The music is surprising, but within the juxtapositions on which it thrives, there’s an organic quality to the work. The opening “Cold Child with Fedora” employs soprano saxophone, gongs, patchy analog electronics and thin, bowed harmonic glissandi in a steady burble, a fuzzed-out “bug music” investigation that shifts to expansive dynamism once ringing piano chords and the chug of bass and drums enter. Surfing atop this volcanic rhythm section is Williams who, switching to alto, unleashes torrents of choppy peals (it’s no wonder he’s been a favored sideman of Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, and Russell) up to an abrupt end.

“Treadmill to Obliviousness” wraps sopranino saxophone and jaunty keyboard angles in a healthy dose of reverb, giving this rough-and-tumble fragment a curious distance. The title piece is a paint-peeler at first blush, piano and alto in shearing mode until the ensemble falls away to give space to a vaguely saccharine bit of unaccompanied saxophone. When Baker and Sandstrom return, it’s with a healthy dose of electrification to the point that the pianist’s fragmented melodies have a twinge of grunginess. Elsewhere, Baker is reminiscent of Paul Bley, in the bluesy turnarounds of “Screen Door Slam” for example. Though Extraordinary Popular Delusions could easily ply their trade in saxophone-and-rhythm free jazz, and they do that well, it’s when they investigate areas outside of any idiomatic comfort zone that the music becomes really interesting. Patchwork synthesizer, guitar feedback, electric zither and indeterminate rattle are tools to not only broaden the quartet’s textural resources, but also proof that they’re able to continually surprise themselves with the challenge of investigating other sonic wells. Of course, we know that the secret to why this group works so well is what’s in between those poles, as well as a deeply shared history.

The Harmonic Convergence label doesn't appear to have a website, but you can buy their releases from Forced Exposure.

DENNIS GONZALEZ/INGEBRIGT HÅKER FLATEN

The Hymn Project

(Daagnim)

One could say that The Hymn Project is Norwegian contrabassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten’s first proper Texas recording since moving to Austin in 2008, though for all intents and purposes it is a cross-traditional, global set of music. Assembled with Dallas-based trumpeter Dennis González and his sons, bassist Aaron and drummer Stefan González alongside Austin-based cellist Henna Chou, The Hymn Project presents a mixture of traditionals and music composed and improvised with Norwegian and rural Southern American folk hymns in mind. Of course, it’s not too hard to draw a line from this work to the music of Albert Ayler, perhaps the most significant musician in modern jazz to have used hymns and folk music from both America and Europe in his work, and to a striking result. Granted, the Flaten-González group is far from being Ayler-esque, though in the opening “Hymn to the Incoherent” I detected a pizzicato cello quote of Ayler’s “Ghosts” that was gone almost as quickly as it appeared. Of the two bassists Flaten is often the throatier, lower-toned player while Aaron González employs a higher-pitched, lute-like pizzicato. With a string trio, there’s a variety of blended and oppositional sonorities that sweep around and underneath the trumpet, Dennis Gonzalez’ soft, skimming brass footfalls able to find nooks within a mass of swirling arco on the stately “Doxology.” The Norwegian traditional “Eg Veit I Himmerik Ei Borg” envelops Chou’s amplified cello in a dose of rafter-shaking reverb, while Flaten’s Garrison-like strums and the trumpeter’s chunky flits maintain an earthward glance. The closing “Herido” is a stone classic, bolstered by a monstrous vamp that occasionally tugs at its own sense of time, with the trumpeter singing the words of St. John of the Cross (in Spanish) and supported by driving cymbal and conga rhythms. One could easily imagine such a tune being compiled by Universal Sound twenty years hence. Though Flaten’s work with The Thing, Atomic, and other high-octane Scandinavian improvising groups is unimpeachable, it’s wonderful to hear him in a context that finds its strength in delicacy and a diverse set of musical-cultural streams.

RICH HALLEY QUARTET

Requiem for a Pit Viper

DAN RAPHAEL/RICH HALLEY/CARSON HALLEY
Children of the Blue Supermarket

(Pine Eagle)

Portland-based tenor saxophonist Rich Halley might not be a household name – at least, not outside of the upper West Coast environment that he plies – but that shouldn’t stop anyone from investigating his work. I’ve written about him before in the context of his playing with Los Angeles trumpeter Bobby Bradford on Live at the Penofin Jazz Festival (Pine Eagle, 2010). In short succession, Halley has released two more discs on his Pine Eagle label – one another quartet and the other a set of poetry matched by tenor and drums.

This particular version of the quartet “replaces” Bradford with trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, another longtime fixture on the West Coast creative music scene who’s also worked with reedman-composer Vinny Golia and trumpeter-composer Jeff Kaiser. On Requiem for a Pit Viper, the rhythm section of Rich’s son Carson Halley on drums and bassist Clyde Reed returns to work through a program of ten original compositions. The format is reminiscent of the mid-Sixties Shepp/Rudd aggregation as well as Dutch tenorman Hans Dulfer’s work with Willem van Manen (check the rumbling “Maj”), and though Halley is certainly a player who stands ably on the shoulders of history, this is decidedly contemporary music. His volleys are spry and rubbery while connected to the burred, throaty wail of modernists like Sam Rivers, stomping and sinewy lines that mate well with Vlatkovich’s poised, detailed chortle. As for the rhythm section, Reed is a strong-yet-malleable supporting player, and while it’s hard to tell whether he’s gotten more comfortable or I have with his playing, Carson Halley’s presence here has both bite and a tense, spacious quality. It seems like he spends an ample amount of time listening to the other three players and works his way in (or out) when (and only when) it’s called for, and that wasn’t something I noticed on Live at the Penofin. Full of jovial slushiness and impassioned fire, Requiem for a Pit Viper is definitely a session not to sleep on.

The father-son team support poet Dan Raphael on Children of the Blue Supermarket, which is culled from the Penofin Jazz Festival archives. Poetry and improvised music certainly have a long history together going back at least to the Beat poets and recordings of Kenneth Patchen and pianist Al Neil, finding flower in the work of Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and New York free players. It’s not too surprising that the Halleys would find interest in a wordsmith, because the tenorman’s titles frequently implore a poetic impulse. That said Raphael presents a challenge because his poetry (perhaps unsurprisingly) doesn’t explore the same musical approach that a Don Lee, Jayne Cortez or Nikki Giovanni brought to the idiom. Tenor and drums offer a parallel commentary to Raphael’s surrealistic, agitated observations of a person outside/confused by the complexity of modern reality. His phrases often co-opt clichés like “the rain falls mainly on…” and surround them with echoes of techno-despair. In cases where words and music don’t peaceably coexist, butting heads can often create a fantastically messy tension, but that presupposes that each are independently valuable examples of the form. In this setting, only the work of the Halleys bears repeated attention, and for that reason Children of the Blue Supermarket doesn’t get off the ground. However, it does whet the appetite for a Rich Halley-Carson Halley duo CD.

NEIL METCALFE/OLLIE BRICE
Brackish

(FMR)

From out of the depths of London’s Freedom of the City crew of young improvisers comes the pairing of flutist Neil Metcalfe and bassist Olie Brice, who have been playing together for several years though Brackish is their first duo recording. Brice’s frequent confreres also include tenorman Mark Hanslip and drummer Mark Sanders. Metcalfe’s name could be familiar from work with reedman Paul Dunmall, guitarist Roger Smith, and the Dedication Orchestra. None of this necessarily describes the duo, but it does give one an idea of where these two players might stand in the context of English improvisers. Brackish features eight improvised pieces that, firstly, use a rather expanded palette on two very specific axes and, secondly, the pair have a sense of dynamics and space that far exceeds the numbered value of two people. Between guttural swatches and harmonic wisps, Brice’s bowed and generally manhandled bass makes a fascinating study of contrasts with the panoply of tonguing and breathing techniques – and the colors that result – from Metcalfe’s flute. The music is perhaps a little more poised than, say, the work of Bob Downes and Barry Guy, as the flutist’s pops and twirls have much in common with the language of the 20th Century concert flute (bringing to mind Averil Williams and Barre Phillips on Max Schubel’s Son of Quashed Culch). Buzzing and deadening the instrument’s metallic nature towards wood or clay is another aspect of Metcalfe’s approach, heard at the opening of “Hidden Song” and dovetailing with Brice’s fiddled whispers. Between the harmonic and percussive aspects of the bass and similar, albeit much higher-pitched echoes from the wind spectrum, and the fact that these players have a turn-on-a-dime sense of reaction, it all makes for an incredibly engaging and unique duo. FMR releases don’t get a lot of talk Stateside, so hopefully Brackish won’t slip through too many cracks – it’s wonderful.

SEI MIGUEL/PEDRO GOMES
Turbina Anthem
(No Business)

Though Portuguese trumpeter-composer Sei Miguel has been a fixture on the Lisbon creative music scene since the 1980s, it was not until Clean Feed released Esfíngico in 2010 that I became aware of his work (and even then, only through the prodding of guitarist Joe Morris to give the music serious thought). While that session was a quintet featuring trombone, circuits (courtesy of frequent collaborator Rafael Toral), percussion and electric bass, the trumpet-guitar duo of Turbina Anthem is an instrumentally pared-down affair. It’s an interesting combination; Gomes’s guitar playing generally harps on noise effects, and those gobs of tinny six-string fuzz shouldn’t have too much in common with the very clean nature of Miguel’s trumpet. Certainly it’s not that simple, because both musicians operate outside of traditional tonality, and while on the surface Miguel’s trumpet playing might seem to have a relaxed precision, he tends to hit his notes on either side of consonance, fluffing or bending them ever so slightly, causing a shaky and knobby essence that is brilliant in tandem with the metallic overload and wiry coagulants in Gomes’s playing. There’s a limpid incompleteness to both musicians’ phrasing as well, Miguel reveling in tones that seem to be near death and phrases that act half-completed as feedback, distortion and preparations merge in an oddly conversant symphony of unruly explosions. In five different iterations across the LP, “The Pale Star” features acoustic guitar informed by the dustbowl anthems of steel-string Americana in a diversion from the electrified pieces, as Gomes constructs wispy circular motifs alongside Miguel’s unresolved statements. While the guitarist might find ways to obliterate the guitarness of his instrument, focusing on rhythms and sounds that seem closer to non-musical din, in what’s clearly a conversation between two very rigorous improvisational minds, those sounds become musical by the structure they inhabit. Through reflection and a sense of architecture, those sharp sounds are given an active musicality, one that results from opposition and shared creative space. Turbina Anthem is a tough, sometimes stark, but very rewarding collaboration.

BLAISE SIWULA
Live in London
(No Frills Music)

Saxophonist and clarinetist Blaise Siwula is an acolyte of the fire-and-brimstone school of reed playing, abstracted to the sonic sources that have welled up over the years in musicians like Albert Ayler, Peter Brötzmann, and Shoji Ukaji. Live in London is just that, a series of eight solo tenor and clarinet pieces recorded in December 2008 on a visit to England, along with one duet featuring Alan Wilkinson on baritone saxophone. As much as Siwula pulls from the sandblasted reaches of energy music – and the closing “Time’s Up” with Wilkinson is a joyous shout of hard-bitten, screaming multiphonics and wind shear reminiscent of messengers McPhee and Gustafsson – there’s a lot of variability in his playing. “Stutter’s Waltz” is a three-minute slice of whittled resonance that plays a tense game with the possibility of breaking off into whoops and hollers, yet far exceeds any sense of “exercise.” The connection with McPhee isn’t too implausible, although perhaps Siwula is a little more interested in garishness in his wide-vibrato, wall-shaking preach. That’s notable with “On the Plains of Brooklyn,” which calls up both Rust Belt river silt and the music of the Scottish highlands, somehow mincing a penny-whistle with blustery tenor skronk. It’s a lot to fit into a short piece, but Siwula does it.

“Old Friends” takes a well-worn melodic fragment and ramps up the swagger into athletic curls, blats and paint-peeling sharp masses, though at the piece’s center is an awareness of the instrument’s stately history even as the saxophonist tears through it with winking abandon. Lest one forget Siwula has worked with melody hounds like pianist Nobu Stowe and guitarist Dom Minasi, “Time One Down” is an approximation of a pre-bop chestnut, sweetly closing the disc’s first third. Although that first third is also a bit more lo-fi, the music isn’t harmed, and the following thirty-minutes recorded at Ryan’s FlimFlam grants longer pieces (including the aforementioned duet) that, while mostly not as hell-bent, nevertheless provide a window into Siwula’s quick wit, massive tone, and love for his forebears. “Ryan’s Shuffle” is a fine example of this fact, toying with and building on some arcane melody much as a free mid-60s Rollins, albeit with a little of the non-idiomatic sandblasting school thrown in. Even when he’s taking it the distance, Siwula knows how to bring the music home to an almost hokey-sounding prewar vibe before stretching into high-pitched screams. If you really want a slice of Blaise Siwula’s world, Live in London comes highly recommended.

WARREN SMITH

Race Cards

(Freedom Art)

Seven years of waiting isn’t really that long, considering how consistently “fresh” creative music is (or is supposed to be). Released in 2010 but recorded in 2003, percussionist-composer Warren Smith’s Race Cards follows on a spate of ever-greater visibility in contemporary American improvised music, which has resulted in new recordings by the Composers Workshop Ensemble and a presence in the ensembles of Bill Dixon and Stephen Haynes. One might call him a veteran – Smith has been recording and performing since the early 1960s – but his approach to percussion and ensemble color is something that is continually evolving. Race Cards joins Smith with French horn player Mark Taylor, bassist Tom Abbs and tenorman Andrew Lamb on nine original compositions that also include Smith’s poetry. Compared to some jazz-poetry combinations, Smith’s recitations are extremely musical, following the rhythmic cadences of his drums – filling, accenting, encircling, and exploring lines and variants. Following the knotty opening title piece, “Tel-lie-vis-sion” is a bit more didactic and trance-like, chanting with simpler rhythmic inflections on corporate media and the war machine (both poem-compositions are political protests). Referring to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, Smith is topical, but even if the names have changed since the recording date, the concerns remain the same.

Of course, to call anything Warren Smith does “simple” is unfair – his music is a studied and experienced natural fluidity, which is why his speech and drum patterns mate so perfectly well to the point of being one and the same. “Linke und Rechte” begins with a march, lilting tenor and French horn commingle until the piece shifts into an open section for shakers, cymbals and auxiliary percussive devices. Taylor and Lamb each give tightly controlled orations supplanted by Abbs’ deep-toned counterpoint and a shimmering, rustling field. There’s an ease to the proceedings and never a hint of overplaying, which might encourage less-attuned ears to miss something like how elemental Smith’s time is, or how perfectly-placed his ricocheting notes and movements are. “Indiana’s Wedding Song” segues almost seamlessly from “Linke,” a Spanish-tinged keen backed by Abbs’ motoring vamp and a delicate, pervasive ride cymbal. The horns tug at the theme but never get too far out, and at four minutes in length, the tune carries a concise elegance. The closing “Sippin’ an’ Smokin’ wif Milton” (one would assume the reference is to bassist Milton Suggs) is both laid-back and terse, salty blues riffs played out over a walk and Smith’s marimba cascades. Switching to drums, the leader’s loping time backs Taylor’s huffing brass, although it’s loose enough to provide the soloist with a wide range of movement. Lamb is stately and sublime in his tenor work, occasionally reaching strangulated tongue-speak but mostly enunciating very direct R&B lines. Though far from “plain Jane,” Warren Smith’s Race Cards is a shining example of undiluted modern jazz with soul and subtlety.

GEBHARD ULLMANN/STEVE SWELL 4

News? No News!

CHRIS DAHLGREN & LEXICON

Mystic Maze

(Jazzwerkstatt)

German reedman Gebhard Ullmann (tenor saxophone and bass clarinet) has been a fixture on the international improvising scene for a number of years, splitting his time between Berlin and New York and culminating in such cooperative groups as Conference Call (with pianist Michael Jefry Stevens, bassist Joe Fonda and drummer George Schuller) and Basement Research (with trombonist Steve Swell, saxophonist Julian Arguelles and the rhythm team of John Hébert and Gerald Cleaver). As a tenor player, Ullmann is exceptionally steely, his hard-bitten tone recalling the more cerebral side of Sam Rivers’ work, an architect of clean, short chord-rearranging bursts and sinewy, athletic lines that are far from pages torn out of the Brötzmann playbook. It’s hard not to hear Eric Dolphy in his bass clarinet, which is strong and detailed, but he quite naturally expands on the “Hat and Beard” composer’s woody apparitional presence. Ullmann also writes interesting tunes, unresolved tone poems and throaty knots that retain a hot sense of swing.

The Ullmann/Swell 4 unites a woodwind-slide front line with veteran bebop and loft-jazz drummer Barry Altschul and bassist Hilliard Greene; News? No News! is their third disc, second of 2010 and first on Berlin’s Jazzwerkstatt label. Across the set’s sixty-plus minutes, Swell and Ullmann share compositional duties quite equally and there are also two shortish group improvisations. The idea and execution of a reed/trombone front line and piano-less quartet recalls mid-Sixties New York free jazz, certainly abetted by the presence of Altschul, who brings a “ragtime to no time” approach to the kit loosely moving in and out of free-bop swing toward shimmering, allover flickers. There’s an ebullient roar to the trombonist’s opening “More Hello,” searing reedy peals and bright, slick bluster characterizing the horns’ jovial, animated dialogue around a surge of rhythm. A cruel, groggy slink is part of the theme to “New York 5:50,” Swell’s slushy tailgate a wry declamation to Ullmann’s pensive bounce. The frenetic clunk that closes “Composite #1” leads into woody sway on “Kleine Figuren #2,” bass clarinet belches trailing off into wistful snatches of melody as drums, arco bass and trombone comment in lazy parallel. The companion piece to “New York,” “Berlin 9:35” has a more insistent purr, trilling into acrid, burnished collective wrangle. News? No News! is an excellent update from the Berlin-New York camp.

Bassist Chris Dahlgren has worked with Ullmann since 2005, recording as part of a trio with pianist Art Lande. His band Lexicon also includes Ullmann and Christian Weidner on reeds, percussionist Eric Schaefer and keyboardist Antonis Anissegos; Mystic Maze is their first disc. It’s a concept date in the fullest way possible, with several of the compositions setting early Twentieth Century American and British anti-Bartok criticism to pan-tonal music, both fixed and improvised. Except for the short take of Bartok’s “Mesto,” the set of twelve tunes is credited entirely to Dahlgren, and at their best the pieces move through loose, atonal jaunts at a mild clip. But the angular, inflected recitation of scathing, mocking reviews of Bartok performances are suited to a particular taste – that of the undergraduate composition student, perhaps. Recasting these essays as angular beat-like accompaniment to the music is already a bit pretentious (even if the goal is to make them “musical”), and is made even moreso by the fact that their subject has been part of the canon for at least half a century. Given that the recitation of text is so crucial to this music, it’s difficult to erase the erudite hipness of its delivery even as instrumentally compelling actions occur. That said, there are some interesting pieces here – “Painless Dentistry No. 1” is a particularly strong update on mid-50s West Coast outside modernism. Anissegos is a revelation on piano, and coupled with Dahlgren’s precise tone and open instrumental elocution, and Schaefer’s charge, the rhythm section sounds good. Though it’s pointless to suggest an artist make a record different than the one they already made, I’d be interested to hear Lexicon without an explicit concept attached.

NATE WOOLEY QUINTET

(Put Your) Hands Together

(Clean Feed)

Trumpeter and improvising composer Nate Wooley is a tough person to keep a bead on, mainly because with each passing year, his discography gets ever lengthier and his work broadens in scope. Able to bridge the worlds of modern creative (jazz) and noise/experimental music with seeming little effort, the intrepid listener/collector has a lot to keep track of. Another challenge is the fact that he approaches each end of that spectrum with honesty, curiosity, and believability – in other words, he sounds utterly convincing as a noise musician as he does a jazz player, which is far from an easy feat. On (Put Your) Hands Together, Wooley leads a quintet that follows in the framework of modal post-bop that his work in drummer Harris Eisenstadt’s Canada Day evinces, but with a decidedly hard-edged spin. He’s joined by Eisenstadt and Canada Day bassist Eivind Opsvik, vibraphonist Matt Moran and Josh Sinton on bass clarinet for a program of ten originals, three of which are different versions of the piece “Shanda Lea,” named for Wooley’s wife. In fact, all of the compositions here are named for important women in the trumpeter’s life.

The first iteration of “Shanda Lea” opens the disc, heartfelt and lilting cadenzas with little turns and swallows that bridge harrowing flurries. There would be a tendency to hear this as a starting coda, or even a run-through of approaches to the trumpet, but it is in fact a self-contained and poetic solo composition that more than holds its own. The title track follows and is strikingly reminiscent of Andrew Hill’s “Ghetto Lights” in its laconic slink; Wooley’s solo takes on the hardbop lexicon and toys with it, building out from Woody Shaw-like arpeggios into bold, screaming peals and subtonal chatter. Sinton follows in trio with free-time squawk that gets into the low-down dirty side of Dolphy to an almost grotesque degree. It’s hard not to think of Bobby Hutcherson in Moran’s glassy swing, ricocheting off the push of Eisenstadt’s drums before Wooley and Sinton return with the head. “Erna” is a different sort of piece, bowed vibes and soft patter leading before the quintet moves cautiously into a march, unifying iterations of the stair-stepped theme. From a short Sinton-Wooley duo on “Shanda Lea,” moving from stateliness to daring pierce, the quintet returns for “Ethyl” and its hanging, cyclical minimalism. While the bar lines reflect roundly suspended areas and quiet control, the improvised sections allow Sinton stretching room over a tugging rhythm. The degree to which Wooley has orchestrated this ensemble allows one to hear beyond his voicings in duo with Opsvik, or in a cracking trio with Eisenstadt, and feel the entirety of the group without necessarily anticipating its direction. Sure, this is a strong “jazz quintet” record, but Hands Together is so well organized and diverse that it is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

ZOMES
Earth Grid

(Thrill Jockey)

Zomes is the name that guitarist/multi-instrumentalist and composer Asa Osborne has given to his post-Lungfish solo work, and Earth Grid is his second album (first for Thrill Jockey). It might be safely assumed that with vocalist/shaman Daniel Higgs primarily working banjo-raga revivals and drummer Mitchell Feldstein now in Arboretum that the age of Lungfish’s particular brand of monolithic trance-rock has come to an end. Zomes is an entirely instrumental proposition, eschewing the larger imprint of Lungfish for condensed, low fidelity home recordings. Once Osborne settles into the crisp downstrokes and lock-stepped drumbeats of “Pilgrim Traveler” abetted by a snaky electronic pulse, his status as the onetime architect of Lungfish’s music is made abundantly clear. Muffled keyboards and beats make their way out of the ether on “Melody, the Prism,” but just barely. This leads into fuzzed organ chords hanging in a breathy stasis, gone quickly enough that the piece is nearly incidental. Lungfish were never psychedelic in the traditional sense, but they were quite minimalist; Zomes has basically isolated that gene even further, presenting it with a very personal home-recorded vision. The most curious pieces are a bit harsh, such as the distorted guitar fragment opening “Step Anew,” jarring attention before Osborne moves into another variation on loops and crafted, head-bobbing environments. Each of the fifteen pieces is rather short, most hovering around two or three minutes, but as oddly sparse as they are, their song status is forthright. Zomes presents essentialist, subtle rituals, metronomic and hummable structures that yield potently spiritual music.

Bill Dixon and the Impossible Coda

2011-07-16T18:01:00.001-05:00

"For Charlie Parker" - Lithograph, 50 x 34.5 cm.
Villeurbanne, France. [Winter/1994]

Shortly, I'll be publishing two reviews of and reflections on music by Bill Dixon - one a reissue of the landmark LP Intents and Purposes, recorded for RCA-Victor in 1967 and now on CD for the first time through International Phonograph, the other Dixon's final new recording, Envoi, just released on Victo (for Paris Transatlantic and Destination:Out, respectively). It would be unfair to completely compare two discs of material recorded nearly forty-five years apart. There has been so much done in between these two poles that it would be disingenuous to attempt to even put them on the same page in a discussion. As Bill Dixon often said, "the only thing these works have in common is that I did them." There's a little bit of discomfort stemming on my part from the fact that the newer work could be overshadowed by the first CD issue of a storied classic. I've lived with Intents and Purposes for many years - it's among the first creative music LPs that I purchased in college, and it holds a great deal of love and continued fascination for me. But having gotten to know Dixon personally in his last years, the new work or the next work and its importance often took precedence, as it should. Truly, there is very little in common between the two recordings, though textures of low reeds and strings, coupled with high brass explosions and surging percussion might on the surface be a shared language. We don't have him among the living anymore, and there will not be any "new" work of his to hear, but in a way that's all right. He opened things up in an extraordinary way for what's next, and for me personally, understanding the necessity of the present is what gets me more excited about cracking open a new CD from a young or middle-aged master than most of what comes down the reissue pike. That said, the timelessness of great music is still something to reflect on, and that's why it can (and should) take years to parse archival recordings by people like Dixon, or Roscoe Mitchell, or Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Teddy Charles, Andrew Hill or any of the other great musician-composers who have come before. Hopefully the reflections to come will be accurate, and that his music not only continues to be heard, but that it will continue to inspire musicians to do what they do.

Note: Rather than copying images of the album covers in question or photos of Bill, I've used one of his lithographs originally included in the article In Medias Res. His artwork is just as much of a fascination, although of a different sort. Hopefully a folio of his visual art, writings, and scores will become available.

To My Buddy, Buddy (Full Disclosure)

2011-07-12T14:23:00.004-05:00

It’s easy to feel lucky being part of the relatively close-knit community around improvised and creative music. Whether one is a supporter through buying CDs and going to gigs, or a writer/interviewer, or a historian and collector, the shared interest and accessibility of the music’s living creators is something not always available in the rock and “indie” world. But in the age of social networking – which has become pretty much part and parcel of the writer’s tools as well as the musician’s or the promoter’s – these relationships become more complex. I started thinking about this more in earnest when I began writing reviews for Tiny Mix Tapes, which is a site covering (mostly) current indie rock, punk, experimental and what-not releases; I’ve been occasionally plugging some of the new improvised music releases as well as the occasional “other folks’ music” disc. Anyway, one of the rules at TMT – as well as, one would assume, a number of the larger or more mainstream review magazines and blogs – is that one is not allowed to review releases by one’s friends (or, obviously, significant other or family member). That’s all well and good, but it becomes a challenge being part of the real and virtual music community.

After all, with Facebook, Twitter, and now G+, the lines between “friends,” “acquaintances,” “colleagues,” and “network” are quite blurry. I am proud and happy to consider friends some excellent artists and musicians (and label owners, promoters, etc. as well), and my hope is that objectivity is still part of the equation. A very close friend runs a psych and experimental music label, and I feel comfortable enough asking pertinent questions for a review of one of his discs. I also don’t feel obligated to review something he puts out that isn’t to my taste. Recently, I wrote an article on a Texas percussionist-composer for Signal To Noise, which did not in any way feel like buttering up a drinking buddy (as though that would ever need to be done). Another good friend is a guitarist in New York who gigs frequently and whose records I’ve enjoyed and reviewed positively – but for whom I also would not feel required to do so. There are a lot of examples in my own life of this kind of thing. It is a very common situation, and now even moreso as lines between personal and professional relationships become diffuse. Many of the younger writers (and even some from earlier generations) are tied in to social networking sites and spend time back-and-forthing with the subjects of their articles and reviews, though it’s probably not a new phenomenon. I can imagine someone like Ira Gitler sharing a beer with Roswell Rudd in the mid-Sixties or another writer sending back-and-forth communiqués on life and interests with a musician whose work they follow.

It seems like one should be able to be honest enough in their discussion of a record that friendships would not suffer (or that reviews would be just more back-washing). But then again, the question of objectivity or non-objectivity has itself become rather absurd as nobody in their right mind reviews something they don’t have some taste for or against. If I write about a recording (usually positively, because negative reviews seem like a waste of energy), it’s because it fits in with the things I like listening to, thinking about, and writing about. Ultimately, the idea of encouraging community and, perhaps, a broader dialogue on issues in creative music would seem to trump whether or not one went halvsies on a pizza with a restructural trumpeter. In good faith, I’ll continue to be engaged as much as I can with trying to parse the meaning and value of this music with friends, colleagues, and new faces via the online and real-time network. In the meantime, please stay tuned for July reviews of music made by people I’ve never met as well as those for whom I was, perhaps, best man at their wedding.

Music Briefly Reviewed: June 2011

2011-06-22T21:05:00.003-05:00

MICHAEL BISIO
Travel Music
(self-released)

The solo improvised contrabass recital got its start in 1968 with a work by Barre Phillips, “Journal Violone,” which was recorded in London and issued privately on the Music Man imprint as Unaccompanied Barre (it was reissued in the 1970s by the Opus One and Futura labels – so far not on CD). It’s a staggering tour de force of poetic expressionism and tonal subtlety befitting a then-young master, and deserving of study by anyone interested in improvised music, whether a musician or not. In the ensuing forty-plus years, quite a number of bassists have stepped out into the unaccompanied realm, with recent New York transplant Michael Bisio among the latest to approach the medium with Travel Music. Bisio has been active on the creative music scene since the early 1980s, primarily working with saxophonists like Joe McPhee, Stephen Gauci and Joe Giardullo. This disc features six of Bisio’s own compositions as well as wonderful renderings of Coltrane’s “Alabama” and Charlie Haden’s “Human Being” (first recorded on Ornette Coleman’s Soapsuds, Soapsuds LP).

Travel Music doesn’t present a blistering whorl of techniques and approaches to shatter one’s preconceptions of what’s possible with the instrument in a solo setting. Rather, the set finds Bisio working through melodic and textural areas in vignettes that range from four to ten minutes. The opening title track is a simple, relatively somber and folksy pizzicato piece, deep and throaty eddies augmented by delicate strums and chunky anchor points with a minimum of filigree and a focus on whole, crisp tone. “Livin’ Large” could be construed as a piece to send horsehairs flying, but there’s a painterly delicacy to Bisio’s arco, circular motions teasing out wispy subtones and insect-like agility stoking multiple fires that coagulate into a harmonic field. “Nitro, Don’t Leave Home without It” is the disc’s centerpiece at a hair over ten minutes, and it’s a hymnal for the bass, laden with the pathos, searing vibrato, and abstract grotesqueries of Albert Ayler’s scorched-earth ballads. Following the fluttering and clustered digits of “MI” are the sawing chords of “Oil” that, while reaching into the instrument’s bowels, still engender a gorgeous, poised quality. While recorded on two separate days in late 2010, Travel Music gives the feel of a continuous performance (a la Phillips' work), Bisio putting himself and his “horn” through paces with unadorned conviction.

HARRIS EISENSTADT
Canada Day II
(Songlines)

Formed in 2007, drummer-composer Harris Eisenstadt’s Canada Day was initially conceived as “a love letter to the mid-60s Miles Davis quintet filtered through '60s Blue Note records, with vibraphone replacing piano.” A collective approach to advanced harmonic-rhythmic modern jazz conceptions also paying homage to Eisenstadt’s birthplace, the group consists of trumpeter Nate Wooley, tenorman Matt Bauder, vibraphonist Chris Dingman and bassist Eivind Opsvik. Following their Clean Feed Records debut, a move to Canadian label Songlines presents eight of the drummer’s original tunes. Of course, it would be natural to assume that over the years, a shift in focus and output would naturally occur, and Canada Day II, while holding fast on the original lineup (the only change was a brief sub for Dingman in the form of cellist Chris Hoffman), the music is quite different in some crucial ways.

Eisenstadt is a multi-faceted composer, and one of the most interesting (and perhaps not initially obvious) inclinations in his work is toward the popular music of Senegal, Mbalax, and an ongoing study of Gambian Mandinka drumming (engendered through visits in 2007 and 2002-3, respectively). It’s taken a while for those influences to clarify in Canada Day, though recordings like Guewel (Clean Feed, 2007) and Jalolu (CIMP, 2004) immediately grew out of those experiences. Though Eisenstadt is a drummer-leader, like his other projects Canada Day II is not a “drummer’s record” in any expected sense, inasmuch as dates led by George Russell or Carla Bley aren’t really “pianistic records.” Leading from the drum chair shouldn’t necessarily be equated with extensive percussion parts, though his compositions are often rhythmically knotty and executed with a from-behind push and delicious swing.

There is only one real drum solo on the record, a quick compositional distillation of the opening “Cobble Hook,” which leads into a lilting, sunny horn and vibraphone line that nods at pan-tempo Afro-pop influences. Dingman gets the second solo, and his glassy, pelting vibraphone work recalls Jamaican vibesman Lennie Hibbert as much as it does postbop architects like Bobby Hutcherson or Karl Berger. Bauder’s quixotic keen enters into a flickering duo with the leader before bass and vibes encourage a bright, collective gallop. “To Seventeen” has an easy, pendulous plod that Eisenstadt picks apart, generating play between breathy stasis and metronomic beat. One wouldn’t know that Nate Wooley is a progenitor of contemporary brass and electro-acoustic noise judging by his solo here, which takes fat snatches from the gentle melody and winnows them into indicators of harmonic daring. As trumpet and tenor move through the theme towards arranged collectivity, the overarching texture is of a deceptively simple ensemble walk. Like all the titles here, the piece arose from experience – in this instance, of the composer’s neighborhood jaunts – which could be traced to the “songs from life” storytelling in certain traditional and popular music.

“Now Longer” and the following suite “To Eh/To Be/To See/Tootie” have more in common with the previous installation of Canada Day, with the latter being among the first compositions written for this record and expanding on arranged openness. Moving outward from Opsvik’s supple muscularity, “Now Longer” takes close-valued exhalations and places them atop a rock-solid vamp and percussive shifts. In an event-oriented analog to Wayne Shorter, Bauder parcels out flint and circular spurs before joining Wooley in a stroke of ambiguity. No contemporary tune has quite captured the essence of Andrew Hill’s loose Latin melodies like “To Be,” a jubilant and molecular theme with chunky tenor pitches buoyed by surprising chord changes. Dingman quotes Hutcherson, inventing and discarding his own net as Opsvik and Eisenstadt skirt the tempo. Coupled with a highlife vamp, the piece’s final melody looks from Port-Au-Prince toward Dakar. Throughout, extremely thorough arrangements give the leader’s four comrades a lot of choices and provide a taut balance between the “inside” and “outside.” Canada Day II is, quite thankfully, far from a recap and shows a very healthy growth of ensemble conception.

MARK HANSLIP & JAVIER CARMONA
DosadoS
(Babel)

ELLERY ESKELIN & GERRY HEMINGWAY
Inbetween Spaces
(Auricle)

WILLIAM HOOKER & THOMAS CHAPIN
Crossing Points
(No Business)

It’s said that there are about as many ways to play the saxophone as there are saxophonists, but sometimes it seems easy to forget that, in a stream of recordings in similar formats, instrumentalists and the myriad combinations they find themselves in can produce surprising and extraordinarily different results. Take, for example, the saxophone-drums duo, which has its gestation in Coleman Hawkins’ duet with Shelly Manne on “Me and some Drums” (2 3 4, Impulse, 1962) and in the free idiom, flourished in response to the Coltrane-Elvin duets and Interstellar Space with Rashied Ali (Impulse, 1967/released 1974).

Peter Brötzmann, whose recorded duets with Han Bennink, Willi Kellers and Andrew Cyrille (among others) are extremely well-regarded, once told me that the most intense performance he saw was a duo between altoist Jackie McLean and drummer Art Taylor at the American Center in Paris in the ‘70s; it had been initially billed as a quartet with Siegfried Kessler (piano) and Patrice Caratini (bass), but the ridiculous tempo that McLean and Taylor worked with engendered casualties as bass and piano dropped out, leaving the pair to push forth for what Brötzmann estimated was three quarters of an hour uninterrupted. Three new duo releases from London (Hanslip-Carmona) and New York (Eskelin-Hemingway, Hooker-Chapin) spotlight just how different three breath-and-rhythm pairings can be.

Mark Hanslip has worked with pianist Hans Koller [not the German tenor player - ed.], and brings to his instrument a massive and cottony sound while fitting naturally into bop-derived phraseology. Extremely dexterous, Hanslip maintains facility while also being a rather unhurried improviser, and has a harmonic sensibility that also nods to Lou Gare and John Butcher. The first release in a decade-long recording career to feature his name on the cardboard marquee, Dosados presents him in an open setting with Spaniard Javier Carmona on ten improvisations and a reading of Steve Lacy’s “Deadline” (with liberal references to “Evidence”).

After the opening flits of “O Pointy Pointy,” the pair settles into “Mucha Mierda,” deft tenor volleys never reaching explosiveness, holding melodically true on simple repeated and abstracted phrases as Carmona’s selected and unselected animalian pummeling contrasts with Hanslip’s urbanity. After a brief and stripped-down percussion foray, the piece motors to a close. “Preambolo to Nipple 2” begins with hushed Rollins-like exhortations on top of resonant membranes, taut bounce and patter in ebbing density and sparseness, Carmona inventing an array of bullishly contrapuntal rhythms sparked by stoic keen. The Gare-Eddie Prévost version of AMM is a precedent for the quieter improvisations, nearly environmental ring to cymbals and toms as tenor gradates from cottony particulates to throaty post-bop arrows (such as on “ffs”). Dosados is an extraordinary set of duets from a very engaging pair, oddly complementary and not entirely combative. Hopefully there will be more down the pike soon from this pair.

Tenorman Ellery Eskelin and percussionist Gerry Hemingway have a long history together in New York’s downtown scene in larger groups as well as scaled-down conversations, though Inbetween Spaces (on Hemingway’s recently revived Auricle imprint) is their first official release as a duo. One might say that it’s about time considering the breadth of their shared experience. Eskelin is a player who is quite able to navigate traditional and open-form frameworks, exploring areas of softness alongside hard-bitten phrasing. Hemingway, too, has traversed historical lineage qua Klook and Max (the term “free-bop” was practically invented for the work of BassDrumBone) as well as engaging a somewhat “Europeanized” approach to tonal coloring.

Throughout the six improvisations on Inbetween Spaces Hemingway is on fire, presenting a detailed energy that gives Eskelin a range of different shoves – broad brushstrokes on the opening “Motion and Thought,” sashaying augmented patterns behind thick, unhurried tenor chugs. As density increases, the pair still conveys a boppish lilt, reedy and loosely referential arpeggios buoyed by an even urgency. “Stillness and Flow” seems like it could easily cross over into contemporary non-idiomatic acoustics, Hemingway scraping cymbals and gongs toward deep, metallic resonance as Eskelin flutters and teases out pillowy harmonics. Eskelin’s voice is beholden to the American tenor lineage, conscious of phrases and lyricism in a way that’s relevant to a sounding dialogue. In that sense, the duo retains a timeworn bent despite drawing from sources that butt up against “experimental” improvisation (especially in Hemingway’s use of techniques one might find in an Alvin Lucier percussion piece).

Baby Dodds and Sonny Greer make their way into the dry gallop of “Sustain and Footwork,” as well as the plastic tubworks of New York street musicians, which complement beautifully Eskelin’s burnished wrangling. Following the straight-arrow crackle of “Deft and Bounce” (there really aren’t any other words to describe it), “Shaken and Spill” traverses Parker/Lytton territory in its first few minutes, tenor worrying small patches and drawing up miniature acrobatics around chunky electric chatter. Hemingway gradually assembles strokes into damped rhythms and shining beats as Eskelin steps on the gas. Inbetween Spaces is a set of creative duo improvisation with a clear understanding of jazz past and immediate present.

Connecticut-raised and New York-based drummer William Hooker has been a massive, tempestuous aesthetic force on the American improvisation scene since the 1970s, though most people who know his work are probably aware of it from the perspective of ensembles with electronics, guitar noise and turntablists. His first LP …is Eternal Life… (Reality Unit Concepts, 1976) was a double record featuring a duo with David S. Ware, a Babi-like trio with saxophonists Hasaan Dawkins and Les Goodson, and a brutal tenor-bass-drums trio with David Murray and Mark E. Miller. A few years later, he returned to the duo format for Brighter Days, playing in an almost ethnographic-sounding conversation with altoist and flutist Alan Braufman on one side. Crossing Points is a 1992 recording now seeing its first issue, and finds Hooker setting up for a power play with altoist Thomas Chapin (1957-1998) recorded in drummer Jerome Cooper’s loft. There are three improvisations here covering two sets of music, one taking up two sides of an LP. According to Bruce Gallanter's notes, No Business has issued the performance with the sets reversed, though from listening it's hard to tell which order is proper (and it doesn't matter too much anyway).

Chapin is an interesting choice for a duo partner as though he was (and is) a very intense player, one doesn’t usually associate his work with fiery free music, though his earthy flights are certainly the stuff of a fine rhythm-centered combo. Starting with the ostensible first set first (LP2), “Addiction to Sound” recalls a bit of the Braufman-Hooker duo, not in that Chapin is a similar player, but because the piece offers a surprising amount of space at first, centering on tambourine as Chapin blows on a reed to the effect of wispy, brass-like sounds. Hooker’s vocal exhortations are in force from the beginning, encouraging from the bandstand while whipping up a tinny, miniscule storm on the lone frame drum. For what on the surface might not seem like a lot of music, it’s felt bodily as an environment of urgency, moving and grooving out of necessity as much as what’s inherent in the sounds themselves. Hooker eventually adds a tom and Chapin switches to a more standard manifestation of his horn and the salty pitch, curls and vibrato recall North African reed music inasmuch as the drumset evokes a monolithic choir redoubled on itself. The drummer starts with deceptively simple phrases and adds to them in a somewhat didactic way, which allows the listener (and maybe the player as well) to get comfortable with a sound or rhythm and as complexity is introduced, to be able to follow it very naturally. Superimposing these sound-rhythms and punctuating them with vocal cries brings a static circularity to the proceedings, a ritual of encouragement to Chapin’s harried growls, only to be broken off into more angular phrasing moments later with the altoist on a Johnny Hodges/Mike Osborne bent.

“The Underground Dead” takes up the second side in a rather different vein, Hooker keeping dogged time and gradually assembling his snare and tom rhythms from accent into significant sculpture as Chapin stretches out on worried bebop trills. Eventually, a deep, splashing tidal wave of metal and membrane envelops the altoist’s honks and searing yelps, swinging coagulations of infectious beat occasionally surfacing as a reminder of the music’s central kinetic force. It’s extraordinarily heavy, but toe-tapping and head-bobbing all the same. The first record comprises the concert’s second set in a continuous improvisation split over two sides, and titled “The Subway.” Circular-breathed alto and a constant, shuffling hum from Hooker’s drumset connote supreme agitation, tense and coiled haranguing that mirror the condensed, invariable grooves of the side’s vinyl. Of course, there are dynamics to be heard for once Chapin has exorcised certain demons, he moves on to an upward-reaching panoply of squawks and rubbery shouts that would have given Arthur Jones a run for his money. It’s easy to get ahead of oneself and lose sight of the fact that, although this is extraordinarily dense music, it’s also got rhythm and pulse and Chapin and Hooker are in a constant ballet of response as well as giving one another great support. As weighty, too, as the percussion parts are, there’s also lightness in Hooker’s playing, gossamer cymbal work lifting gobs of potential entanglement. Crossing Points is one of the crown jewels in both musicians’ discographies, and certainly one of the best examples of fire music duo playing in a recent setting.

LEFTERIS KORDIS/ALEC SPIEGELMAN/THOR THORVALDSSON
Bebop Trio
(Creative Nation Music)

This spry trio recording grew out of the fertile environment produced by the New England Conservatory, home to such explorers of historical breadth as saxophonist-composers Joe Maneri and Steve Lacy, pianist-composers Ran Blake and George Russell, and others. For a group of young musicians to call themselves simply a “bebop trio” and engage the work of Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Herbie Nichols, Elmo Hope, Duke Ellington and George Shearing via the pre-bop combination of piano, clarinet and drums is, if not subversive, at least somewhat odd and the threesome produce interesting, inspired results. It wouldn’t be surprising if pianist Kordis, clarinetist Spiegelman and drummer Thorvaldsson took Lacy’s dictum to heart, that the music of Thelonious Monk became a way to get to the “other side” – a place of free improvisation and unique compositional aims structured around a band identity.

One can hear the Jewish wedding music that inspired Maneri in the clarinetist’s desert flights on “Celia,” coupled with an almost stiff, rolling approach to the left hand (a la Blake) in Kordis’ piano. Of course, when one says “conservatory,” the expected result is something rarified and precise, which is exactly what this trio is not – there’s a lively blockiness in some instances, a frazzled European timing that belies how seamless this unit is as compositions and group improvisations merge in a lengthy suite. Ellington’s “Zurzday” is noirish and minimal in its first few minutes, supported by needling taps and woody pinpricks toward soft, chamber-like interplay, teased by Thorvaldsson’s rattle. Shearing’s “Conception” is a contrapuntal anthem, tone rows and vampy strum leading into the deceptively open and spry inventions from piano and clarinet. The curious choice of Hope’s “Boa” is relegated to near-theatrical swirl and fractured, coaxing yanks, drum and piano soli soon birthing the chromatic wisps of Nichols’ “Change of Season,” a segregated Thorvaldsson rattling underneath. Jaunty, harmonic pushes from Spiegelman signal the introduction of Nichols’ parlor-like melody with insistent knots. Whether or not Bud, Bird and Monk imagined the music of Bebop Trio – or like-minded groups Clusone and MI3 – recordings like this ensure the plasticity and longevity of the form.

SEABROOK POWER PLANT
II
(Loyal Label)

Twenty-five years removed from its influences, the approach of Seabrook Power Plant (Brandon Seabrook, banjo and guitar; Jared Seabrook, drums; Tom Blancarte, electric and contrabass) is a fresh take on merging progressive angularity with speed, volume, and nuisance. At its simplest, the trio is a blend of Eugene Chadbourne, Henry Kaiser and the Minutemen with a nod towards brutal prog clarity. After all, though the aforementioned forebears have technique in spades, it could easily be buried in the joy of throwing things at the wall to see if they stick (more often than not, they didn’t, and that was their fun). With the way paved, Seabrook Power Plant unleashes a series of eight salvos on their second disc that, while frantic and bright, can seem a bit sterile.

The opening “Lamborghini Helicopter” (which also features Judith Berkson on wordless vocals) could be a Shockabilly outtake, amphetamine-fueled and pedal-assisted banjo approximating a hornet’s nest as bass and drums stomp, hack and throttle one another. As an overture the piece works quite well, embracing precision and absurdity with equal aplomb. At almost seven minutes, “The Night Shift” is the longest piece here, ringing strums over pummeling choogle that measure out into torqued, math-y riffage, underpinned by Blancarte’s meaty arco (he doesn’t get enough stretching room here, methinks). Fuzz bass and reverberant banjo make “I’m Too Good for You” into a grungy, clattering aside; just when the opening section seems to wear out its welcome, sarangi-like bowed banjo and electronic drum clusters guide the piece to odder shores. Unsettling drones return on “Sacchetto Mal d’Aria” as a queasy counterpoint to nattering flits, before the rhythm section compounds its energy into a knowingly lunk-headed series of grooves, creating tension between doldrums and harsh, troubled activity. Seabrook Power Plant certainly has chops and ideas, but the pervasive feeling is that the trio needs to let its hair down even more.

Music Briefly Reviewed: Gems from the Archives

2011-06-02T16:34:00.001-05:00

EDDIE JOHNSON
Indian Summer

(Nessa)

While predominantly known for issuing important recordings of members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago/AACM during the 1960s and ‘70s as well as ancillary recordings of interest to followers of modern creative music (trumpeter Bobby Bradford, multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell, saxophonist Charles Tyler), the onward-rolling Nessa juggernaut also includes a number of other postwar individualists. In the saxophone chair, recordings by Warne Marsh, Von Freeman and Ben Webster have risen to the top of the label’s estimable catalog. One of the imprint’s lesser-known dates is a 1981 session led by Chicago tenorman Eddie Johnson (1920-2010), now seeing its first issue on CD. Indian Summer was Johnson’s first 12” LP as a leader, though he’d waxed a number of sides for Chess in the 78rpm era, as well as appearing in the Ellington orchestra and on James Moody’s Last Train from Overbook (Argo, 1958). A decade and a half of silence preceded the Nessa date, which joins Johnson with trumpeter Paul Serrano and the rhythm section of pianist John Young, bassist Eddie De Haas and drummer George Hughes on a range of somewhat obscure tunes from the standard repertoire.

Johnson has a huge, taffy-like sound that certainly aligns him with figures like Coleman Hawkins and Ike Quebec, and he also has an avowed affinity for Lester Young and Paul Gonsalves. Like some of the latter’s fine recordings from the early 1960s, there’s a curious juxtaposition between swing era or pre-bop sensibilities and the crisply updated conception of his bandmates. Serrano is generally a rather brittle trumpeter, his bright phrases skimming over Young’s ornate peaks and the dry, easy push of bass and drums. It’s just tenor and rhythm on the opening Ellington-Strayhorn number, “Self Portrait (of the Bean),” in which Johnson starts out with the wide, pillowy theme before digging in for bonier but gently swinging choruses - how he constructs his phrases is not something that is technically obvious (to me), but there’s simple power and beauty in his bridging unvarnished prewar sonics with a rough-yet-straight modern phraseology. The title track is a prime example of how the front line is unified in its differences, Johnson’s plunging and serrated neckline giving way to a steady, condensed brass exposition and the pianist’s tumbling arpeggios. The rhythm section provides ample support for the leader’s cottony bounce, which becomes steadily more heated as he moves through the changes. De Haas has space to explore the nuances of middle and upper register pluck with introspection, aided by a brief right-hand piano tessellation before the theme closes.

It’s on the ballads where Johnson’s sound really becomes most clear, enveloping with colorful and heavy-grade vibrato fabric as Young and Serrano peck and stairstep over their own reflections on “Blue Star” and Jordan’s “Misty Thursday.” Even with the latter’s relaxed ebb Johnson wrings more jaggedness from the theme, setting it up for orchestral trills. The CD reissue adds a version of “I’m Old Fashioned” to the original set of seven tunes, filling out this fine introduction to an under-recognized Chicago tenor giant. Indian Summer was followed by sideman appearances with vocalist Kurt Elling and pianist Jodie Christian, as well as another date led for Delmark in 1999 (Love You Madly, with the same rhythm section). While Johnson was not particularly noticed outside the Windy City, Nessa is doing something to change that.

VESA-MATTI LOIRI
4+20
EERO KOIVISTOINEN & CO.
3^rd Version
(Porter)

It’s always seemed like the Europeans were better at making jazz-rock fusion work, and that’s partly because neither jazz nor rock music were originally European art forms. Somehow coming to neither form naturally allows a more honest blend to take place, often with an over-arching sensibility drawn from either regional folk or art musics. Of course, the best American or Afro-American jazz fusion generally is closer to electric jazz – and simply that – than anything else, forgetting for the moment that jazz itself draws from a diverse range of sources. Being a bit more isolated than other Scandinavian countries might have allowed the Finns to render jazz-rock in an even more individualist light, resulting in a cluster of fine electric jazz and progressive music on labels like Love, Blue Master, Odeon and even RCA Finland. Though most Finnish creative music from the 1970s is rather difficult to find, a few titles have seen their way to reissue, most notably as a result of the interest of American indie label Porter Records, which has already put out three excellent discs by Finnish pianist-composer Heikki Sarmanto and now adds two ultra-rarities from flutist Vesa-Matti Loiri and saxophonist-composer Eero Koivistoinen to the label roster.

Known more for his acting abilities than the music he made, Loiri did wax a rather popular 45 in 1980 as a result of the Eurovision song contest, “Huilumies” or “Flute Man.” Nine years earlier, he recorded an obscenely rare LP for Finnlevy, based around the Stephen Stills tune “4+20” and also including an early version of “Flute Man,” here titled “Itkevä Huilu” (and one of the standouts). He’s joined by an ensemble consisting of guitarist Hasse Walli, bassist Pekka Sarmanto, Koivistoinen on soprano, percussionist Reino Lane and keyboardist Tuomo Tanska, among others. While many of these names might be quite unknown even to keyed-in European audiences, thirty-odd years ago they were the cream of the Finnish jazz crop. 4+20 isn’t exactly in keeping with jazz-rock, though, having much more in common with folksy acid-prog, even if three Herbie Mann tunes make it into the set (a natural choice for a young countercultural flutist).

The title track, done in three versions across the record, actually lends itself quite well to flute, guitar, bass, wordless vocal and bongos, in a groovy time-capsule raga like better-executed Seventh Sons. Pekka Sarmanto is a fine linchpin, acting as the Danny Thompson to the dusty freight train of Mann’s “Turkish Coffee,” Loiri buzzing and wailing through an effervescent cylinder. Walli’s overdubbed electric guitar spreads out its flints before the piece segues into audio collage of playing children and crashing waves (not unlike the divisions between sections on Swedish reedman Gunnar Lindqvist’s Orangutang LP). “Candle Dance” is a somewhat abrupt juxtaposition of claypipe ceremonial dances and pinched, Coltrane-esque blues courtesy of Koivistoinen and Tanska. Following the effected vocals and goofy, parlor aside of “Mummon Kaappikello” is a break-laden version of “Coming Home Baby,” taken at a brisk, slinky SoCal rock tempo. Loiri certainly isn’t the flutist that Herbie Mann was from a technical perspective, but he’s aided by strong players like piccolo artist Esa Pethman and Tanska’s compellingly gritty organ. 4+20 is a period document, but it’s interesting and gives a view of how many different aesthetic pots some of these Finnish musicians’ hands were in.

1973's 3rd Version is, on the other hand, prime Finnish fusion, and presents the Helsinki- and Berklee-educated Koivistoinen at his early heights. On what was his seventh album as a leader and second for Finnish RCA he’s joined by guitarist Jukka Tolonen, Reino Laine and Craig Herndon on drums and percussion, with Heikki and Pekka Sarmanto rounding out the rhythm section. Koivistoinen is probably one of the most-recorded Finnish jazzmen, though that hasn’t translated to any real visibility outside Scandinavia. Four lengthy pieces (three by the leader and one by Heikki Sarmanto) make up this disc, which both seems of a piece with early American electric jazz (Weather Report, plugged-in Wayne Shorter, Steve Marcus, etc.) and distinctly apart from it. The opening title track is rhythmically busy and sets the stage, diametric but synced drums filling in the nooks between amplified upright chug, wowing Fender Rhodes and the tasteful complexity of Tolonen’s flits and lines. Sailing atop this stew is Koivistoinen’s soprano, bright corkscrews stepping gently away from the prevailing Coltrane model into a classicism that, while slightly detached, is nevertheless a driving complement to the rest of the group’s florid funk. Tolonen is a master of creative and integrated soloing, bugged and distorted with earthy blues-rock drive, and gives someone like Jan Akkerman a run for his money. Paired with the more introspective electricity of Sarmanto’s Rhodes, the result is a strong textural and expressive juxtaposition.

“Near but Far Away” is an open and stately tune that gives space to Koivistoinen’s tenor in a pliant and craggy mixture as airy cymbals support a meaty fraternal engine. The pianist’s “Muy Bonita Ciudad” blends Nordic pastoralism with a Spanish tinge and toothy grit, bowed bass and droning strums echoing a Vitous-Sharrock vibe that strengthens the gooey, tone-row hymnal at its core. While some of the pianist’s earlier acoustic work recalls Keith Jarrett, there’s more individual range available here, in robust company and with a few years of regular work under his belt. Following the composer’s mood-shifting dives, Koivistoinen stretches out from saccharine pinch to rending wails, egged on by collective surge. Tolonen’s lengthy solo is threaded workmanlike through vamp and castanets, from unaccompanied poems to heady wrangled clusters. Not enough can be said about the active accompaniment of guitar, Rhodes and rhythm throughout the disc, creating a continually shifting environment around one another as well as the leader’s bright flights. 3rd Version is a hell of a record and comes with the highest possible recommendation to anyone interested in jazz of the 1970s.

OTHERWAYS/FREE SPACE
Life Amid the Artefacts
(Emanem)

The creative music environment is full of characters that, while perhaps not crucial to the music’s overall growth, nevertheless contributed some fascinating documents. It’s always debatable how or whether someone’s work was canonically necessary – individual fans may love or be dismissive of certain obscure artists – but then again, that’s part of the reason why canons are so oppressive. Of course, when a certain musician never appeared on any contemporaneous recordings, it’s hard to judge their place in history – but a “record” of a performance, whether studio or live, doesn’t negate its value. While the UK label Emanem has long been a major documentarian of British free music and brought to the CD and LP a number of fascinating archival recordings, Life Amid the Artefacts might take the cake as an unheard curio. The disc brings together a number of performances whose common denominators are percussionist Dave Solomon and saxophonist Herman Hauge; the latter is nearly absent from recordings (the only LP representation is in the saxophone section of the Spontaneous Music Orchestra’s += album) and no longer active as a musician. The material here includes a fifteen minute presentation of the octet Free Space and the quartet Otherways in recordings from 1973 and 1984.

At first glance, one might think that these two groups are a perfect complement to the recently reissued Teatime sessions, as both discs focus on the second wave of London improvisers. Though collectively these three groups share musicians – Solomon, violinist Nigel Coombes and guitarist John Russell – the music is entirely different. A September 1973 rehearsal joins Hauge and Solomon with bassist Marc Meggido and pianist Simon Mortimer for three improvisations that, while similarly low fidelity, are very different from the subversively Dutch-themed work of Teatime. Solomon chatters and bashes in a field derived from somewhere left of Sunny Murray, while Hauge’s alto playing stitches together cooler, worrying inventions from the John Tchicai/Lee Konitz playbook with occasional bursts indebted to Trevor Watts. While piano and bass are under-miked, their wandering chordal flesh helps to outline the group’s collective, spiky pulse. From just days earlier is a Little Theatre Club recording with Coombes in for Mortimer, high-pitched glissandi mating with bowed cymbals and piercing alto squeals that gradually coalesce into a biting, shimmering stew that, on the surface, seems reminiscent of some of the textures one would find in early 1970s Afro-American art music – violin, bass and drums as a more jittery Revolutionary Ensemble, perhaps. The closing two tracks are alto-drums duets recorded in a mid-80s London Musicians Collective performance, and are quite cleanly rendered as Solomon’s rattle and pop complements the quixotic, lyrical trills of Hauge’s alto.

Free Space is altogether quite different from Otherways, and is more closely related to the sonic exercises John Stevens was doing with the SME/SMO during the early 1970s. The group apparently shifted in membership and “Intermediate” is the only surviving example. It features Stevens on cornet, Hauge and Watts on saxophones, Russell, Solomon, Coombes, Meggido and ex-SME bassist Ron Herman. “Intermediate” is an additive piece that moves from hushed breath to micro-movements and responsive, short phrases exuding delicacy as well as lemony sharpness. While not nearly as massive as the SMO material, Free Space provides an interesting missing link between smaller and larger-scale collective interaction, as well as being an interesting aside in the story of “not necessarily ‘English’ music.”

HEINER STADLER
Tribute to Bird and Monk
(Labor Records)

Polish-born pianist, composer and arranger Heiner Stadler was, if not extremely well known, nevertheless a significant force on the New York scene of the 1960s and ‘70s. He recorded two excellent LPs worth of material between 1966 and 1973, released as the two volumes of Brains on Fire on Labor Records. These sessions featured such artists as vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater, trumpeter Jimmy Owens, saxophonist Tyrone Washington, bassist Reggie Workman and drummers Joe Chambers and Lenny White. Stadler’s compositions are fundamentally interesting as inside-outside jazz, and it’s a testament to their value that he was able to recruit such high-caliber soloists. His third record as a leader (though he doesn’t play, his arranging and direction does shine through) is this collection of six Monk and Parker compositions, recorded in 1978 and originally released as a double LP on Tomato Records. Here, Workman and White make up the rhythm section along with pianist Stanley Cowell. The front line consists of trumpeters Thad Jones and Cecil Bridgewater, AACM trombonist George Lewis, tenorman George Adams, and Warren Smith on tympani. This self-produced re-release is the set’s first appearance on CD, and the only difference from the original is a slightly shuffled track order, which probably reflects the original recording sequence rather than what the exigencies of format allowed.

Though modal soloing, vast dissonances and deceptively free sections bridged by knotty post-bop are, on the surface, reminiscent of composer-arranger George Russell (especially in the more to-the-original-point recastings of Parker), Stadler’s music is its own thing. Reimagining Bird and Monk pieces in the way that the composer has, source material is a lifting-off point by no means covering already hallowed ground. The chunkily dispersed progression of “Ba-lue Bolivar Ba-lues-are” is recognizable, but painted in such a way as to call up Alban Berg and Carla Bley, where snatches of the melody seem more like quotes and oblique nods than a desire to “play it straight.” Cowell is in particularly fine form on this piece as well as elsewhere on the set; he’s not particularly Monkish – at least not obviously so – instead calling up ringing vortices that provide their own rhythmic direction. It’s not hard to see why he was the pianist of choice for heavies like Max Roach, Marion Brown and Charles Tolliver.

Between Adams’ gutbucket salvos and the more condensed needling of Bridgewater (who replaces Jones on this cut only), the front line is quite boisterous, melding earthy funk and bullish freedom towards a caterwauling close. Even if the Parker tunes are a bit more in the pocket, Stadler nevertheless encourages a considerable amount of collective interplay, overlapping restatements of the theme sparking Lewis’ bright, slushy flywheels on “Au Privave.” “Misterioso” is tumultuous and, while the crotchety theme makes its way through White’s jabs and clumping piano, bass and tympani, one is immediately struck by how Stadler and the sextet have entrenched the piece in referential avant-garde pointillism. That is to say that this “Misterioso” isn’t so much the tune, but an open restructuring, oblique and more concrete references cohabiting precariously. Stadler has both stripped away aspects of the real “tune” as well as its more ineffable essence, only leaving fragments of each, and if one is looking for absolute faith, one should look elsewhere. Hence Stadler’s music is, in this case, a Tribute to Bird and Monk in idea more than logical execution, but there's a lot to be said for its uniqueness.

Alvin Fielder Calling...

2011-05-22T18:42:00.000-05:00

The author, left, with Alvin Fielder

Every so often, I get a phone call from the drummer and percussionist Alvin Fielder, who lives in Jackson, Mississippi. His work with the Roscoe Mitchell group in the mid-1960s was documented on the Delmark LP Sound, as well as a forthcoming disc of pre-Sound recordings on the Nessa Records imprint. Over the past decade-plus, he’s been part of the Southern Extremes group with pianist-saxophonist Joel Futterman (Virginia Beach) and saxophonist Kidd Jordan (New Orleans), which is sometimes expanded to include New York bassist William Parker and Bay Area reedman Ike Levin. I interviewed Alvin in 2005 for All About Jazz, and we have kept in sporadic touch, especially over the past couple of years since his recovery from a health scare.

Every conversation is like a drum lesson, going back to the originators of jazz drumming as we know it today – not in the sense that he’s necessarily showing me certain patterns (although that does come up, which as a non-musician I do my best to understand), but because he is a historian and archivist of information about the drums in modern jazz. These talks have enlightened me to the origins of sounds and approaches, and understanding where Alvin’s forebears – people like Max Roach, Elvin Jones, Kenny Clarke and Philly Joe Jones – got some of their ideas from, and how the kit has evolved from not just a technical standpoint, but from a biographical and experiential one.

Alvin is a treasure trove of knowledge and a fascinating human being, but he’s far from flashy about it – and that’s just like his playing. He is a subtle musician, and how he approaches the kit is economically detailed. He’s got an effortless swing and spaciousness to his playing, and yet it’s packaged in such a way that it’s easy to miss some of the beauty in his phrases. Maybe that’s part of being a musician of a certain caliber – a fluidity and warmth that eases the collective ship along while ensuring that motion, action and thought remain at a high level.

Here’s a video that I recently discovered through Alvin’s student (and a fine musician in his own right), Dallas-based drummer Stefan Gonzalez (you'll have to go to the Youtube site to watch it). It features a 1976 performance of the Improvisational Arts Quintet of Fielder, Kidd Jordan, bassist London Branch, trumpeter Clyde Kerr, Jr. and saxophonist Alvin Thomas. The group produced one LP for the Prescription label, No Compromise!, released in 1983 with a slightly different lineup and reissued on CD by Danjor. It’s a small tribute to a fantastic musician whose significance in my life – as well as that of the music – I’m still working to understand. Here’s to many more years of music and conversation.

Jumping into the Sandbox

2011-05-14T16:39:00.000-05:00

I remember last fall when I was out with a friend at a bar and was flirting with a woman, who proceeded to ask what I did. I told her I was an archivist and a music critic, to which she responded “you must be an asshole.” You can probably see where that went, but it did beg the question whether being a critic is an assholish pursuit in most people’s minds. The way I approach it might not be how most people criticize – which is to say that I feel it requires one to put as much work into writing as the musician ideally puts into his or her work. Generally, I try to avoid writing negative, snarky things about a record or a musician – if I can’t write positively about a piece of music, then I would hope that there is someone out there who can and will, and who might understand or appreciate the music better. Reporting (though it's not my favorite word, it'll have to do) what’s occurring with an ear to where the work fits with contemporary related music, as well as a sense of history, is an ideal to strive for. Also, I’ve found it difficult to avoid comparisons but it seems like that would the highest form of description, when one can completely skirt referring to a musician or a band as sounding like something else. That’s probably easier to do with improvised music than with rock music, but either way it’s a challenge.

It was rather prescient to come across this article on the Pillow Fights and Boxing Tuesday blog, which is a response to another article on Collapse Board. In reading about pop music (and sometimes this happens with jazz/experimental music, though less often), it’s striking how much of the writing is generally about the critic and not about the music. A review can have very little to do with what’s on a disc or in a performance, or what the music “means” (which can be a very interesting proposition if one chooses not to write about songs and specific references). I have to patently disagree with Pillow Fights on this point, however, that “I have read a lot of complaint and criticism about reviews that compare a band or record to other bands or records, and I've never really understood why that's so wrong. First of all, forgive me, but since virtually everything had been done a hundred times before, nothing being created today is so amazingly unique as to allude to any comparisons.” It’s certainly something I struggle with, because how many ways are there to play the tenor saxophone, or to write a two-chord two-minute rock song? The answer on both points is, of course, many, but that doesn’t make it easy to write about those myriad specificities. Reviewing the umpteenth Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet record this week, I challenged myself to write about it in a way that discussed very little of what points I’d already made in past reviews, instead focusing on some aspects that I hadn’t thought about too saliently before, but that being said I’m pretty sure it still isn’t the ideal review.

Part of the point of this blog has been as a sandbox where I could play around with my writing, to the point that I would hope it got better. After all, criticism to me is a sustainable activity, though it can be exhausting, especially with a day job and a number of disparate life goals that I’d like to accomplish. The number of truly interesting outlets for writing about music – any kind of music – is shrinking, despite the existence of hundreds of music and review blogs out there (to which I’d add that I’m honored that this little spot gets some traffic). Two of the publications that I had regularly contributed to have recently shut down while certain others are becoming harder to deal with in terms of content and user-friendliness, which makes it difficult to place writings, both short and long-form (the latter is something I’ve been delinquent on and hopefully that’ll change soon). Therefore, Ni Kantu has stepped into the void and now has its own set of deadlines and so forth.

Anyway, part of that sandbox aspect is to work through ideas about how to write about music, and to a degree the critic must come through in the review or in the piece. Of course, by choosing what to review, the taste and personality of the writer automatically comes to the surface, but if the writer cares about the music and the process of dealing with music, working through that engagement should be an option to interested readers. Call me crazy, but I assume that most people who listen to and read about music want to feel a connection being made, and that the challenges a writer faces in coming to terms with the work are a way to say that ‘we’re all in this together’ – the musicians, the listeners, and the writers. I would hope that this goes for all genres of music but my familiarity with those who write about improvised music makes me think that the most literate potential is there. That being said, I wouldn’t mind reading a powerful and cogent piece on Low or John Darnielle, either.

I’m pretty sure that most music critics aren’t assholes, and that music criticism is a valid pursuit, and hopefully through the proliferation of some interesting sites with writers who are encouraged to work hard, live a little, and care about what they’re doing. There’s a line in the film Almost Famous, where the protagonist (music writer and director Cameron Crowe) is told by a caricature of Lester Bangs to not make friends with the band. Of course, part of the problem with music writers is that they don’t try to develop relationships with musicians and with music, so dedication and care has no way to be actualized. Whether or not one chooses to be pals with musicians, one should at least be able to call music a good friend – though I’ll also say that writing about music, in that sense, soon becomes like writing a best-man speech for a wedding.

Music Briefly Reviewed: Gems from the Archives

2011-05-03T10:30:00.003-05:00

STANTON DAVIS’ GHETTO MYSTICISM
Brighter Days
(Cultures of Soul)

Recorded in 1975 and issued in 1977 on the local folk label Outrageous Records, Boston trumpeter-composer Stanton Davis’ Brighter Days is something of a holy grail in jazz-funk collector circles. It’s also a fine document of some of what was going on in the Boston area in the mid-Seventies – a milieu which also encouraged the explorations of Phill Musra, Michael Cosmic, John Jamyll Jones and others. Davis studied with George Russell at the New England Conservatory, and while at first it might seem spurious to draw a direct line between the choral-orchestral funk of Davis’ music and Russell’s work, the connection certainly is there. Davis is quoted in the liner notes as saying “he guided my own curiosity to where I could articulate it… [and] he encouraged me to branch out into my own style.” Ghetto Mysticism is/was a large ensemble of Boston-area players that Davis convened, and while tight, at times the group (which is often plugged-in) tends to shroud his lyrical if not overly confident phrasing.

The opening “Things Cannot Stop Forever” seems like it could have ended up on a weirder, perhaps more psychedelic Tamla presentation, synthesizers (two, credited to Alan Pasqua and Delmar Brown) swirling around an uplifting and unison, new-day exposition of a simple melodic phrase and supported by a syrupy electrified groove. Where the Russell influence starts to become clear is in the second track, “Space-A-Nova,” oscillating keyboard wash and echo-heavy guitar helping to strengthen galloping, superimposed rhythms and as the chorus moves from lyrics to wordless dissonance, the fruits of Russell’s Scandinavian choral experiments are made visible. “Play Sleep” was co-composed by Davis and Russell alum Jan Garbarek, and merges gauzy electricity with a delicate funereal line, featuring tenorman Leonard Brown and Bill Pierce on alto flute alongside the leader's pitch-divided brass. Pasqua’s lilting piano emerges over a gentle clip, a dry fast waltz floating on a field of overdubs.

“Funky Fried Tofu,” in addition to its whimsical title and choral chant, exhibits an instrumental strength and underneath the basic hooky nature is a layered composition, funky but harmonically and rhythmically dense and with a surprising amount of stretching room. “Nida” employs a much smaller group, joining Davis with Pasqua on electric piano, bassist Jerry Harris and Leonard Brown on percussion, fleshed out with synthesizer and mellotron. It’s a pensive, pretty composition that allows for a broad view of the leader’s bright yet rather soft tone, as well as a programmatic respite. The set closes with “High Jazz” and “High Jazz Reprise,” the latter including a brief spoken part on “jazz death” by Dan Windham. Musically, skittering Freddie Hubbard-like phrases meld with ensemble bounce and heavy reverb. By the end of the record, one does get a feeling of sameness to the proceedings – there isn’t a lot of variety among the short tracks here – and considering the size of the ensemble, sometimes it feels underutilized. But to really criticize a thirty-five-year-old recording for its faults is pointless. Davis and his group were caught up in the tenor of the time while trying to find ways to employ their personal experience and history in a new music. Maybe Lydian Chromatic funk didn’t really “catch on,” but Brighter Days is an enjoyable listen and it’s good to have it legitimately out again.

BOB DOWNES OPEN MUSIC
5 Trios

(Openian)

Reedman and improvising composer Bob Downes isn’t particularly well-known on this side of the Atlantic, though his Brit-jazz peers have slowly begun to gain recognition for their strings of excellent and highly collectible recordings from the late ‘60s and throughout the ‘70s. Downes’ first record was an ambitious suite for Philips, Dream Journey (1970), which was commissioned as part of a score for the Ballet Rambert. Though most of his work has been in the context of the Open Music trio (save the prog-rock Electric City on Vertigo), it tends not to work in the way that the “average” power trio functions. Remembering the fact that he was involved with dance early on – even if such situations weren’t his bread and butter – explains the somewhat programmatic aspects of the shorter tracks on 5 Trios, which seem purposefully evocative of somewhat theatrical aims. He’s joined on twelve tracks here, all from the leader’s archives, by regular partner Denis Smith on drums, as well as bassists Paul Bridge, Barry Guy, Jeff Clyne, Neville Whitehead and Mark Meggido (Guy also being a fairly frequent collaborator).

The most recent set on the disc is from 1979 and offers three tracks featuring Bridge, which are very well-recorded and perfectly preserved (as much of this disc). “Living it Up in Rio” is a fine example of Downes’ vocal cries and excited flutter on the flute, humming and yelping along with Gazzeloni-esque birdsong. The second part of the piece finds the leader switching to alto flute for a detailed and introspective nocturne, supple pizzicato offering deft accompaniment. “Circus” is somewhat hokey and absurd, but that’s pretty clearly part of the point to the knotty theme, which moves through an almost vaudevillian melody. As Downes stretches out on alto, reed-biting squeals and burred lines evince a predilection towards R&B and one is reminded a bit of Graham Bond before Downes’ phrases fragment. “Moonstruck” (1970) is the only piece here to feature Barry Guy, with Smith’s metallic shimmer offering a base for alto flute variations on “Round Midnight,” the bassist’s harmonic whacks and deep vibrato building toward a North African-inspired vamp and gritty rhythmic inventions and erasures.

On “Spooks,” Downes dips into a wider range of instrumentation, employing tenor sax as well as a disassembled flute, riding the axis of Smith and Jeff Clyne (himself one of the most contextually diverse players in UK jazz). Digging in with a short and abstract jounce, the leader’s gruff buzzsaw is matched with sinew and skitter, as an open section calls for dual mouthpieces in a perverted duck call. There’s a hint of reverb on the recording, which gives it a raw spaciousness. “Ghosts in Space” also appeared on Downes’ debut LP (the original version featured John Stevens and Harry Miller in addition to Smith and Downes), long tones stretching out into sputtering and spiky interplay, heaving inhalations marking action and inseparable from “music.” That feeling of getting ahead of oneself, at times the voice moving faster than the fingers, is part of Downes’ improvising conception and makes for profoundly human listening – preaching like the Reverend Frank Wright on “Ready Steady Blow” and humming/screaming through “Soul Cry,” technicality seems a few notches below naked expression. Perhaps it’s no surprise that he has since gone into healing/meditational music, but if you’re at all interested in the UK jazz heyday, you owe it to yourself to investigate 5 Trios and the rest of Downes’ free-jazz catalog.

JOE McPHEE
Sound on Sound
(Corbett vs. Dempsey)

Sound on Sound presents two discs of Joe McPhee’s solo music from his personal archives, recorded between 1968 and 1973 and issued for the first time on the audio imprint of the Corbett vs. Dempsey Gallery in Chicago. The first disc consists of a mere twenty minutes of music, but it is more than enough to whet one’s appetite for things to come, featuring some of McPhee’s earliest recordings on the tenor saxophone, which he’d picked up in early 1968. This would be slightly earlier than his Underground Railroad LP of quartet music, issued on CJR and reissued by Atavistic. His tone is very much out of that young-and-hungry persuasion, influenced by Ayler and Shepp as well as Rollins and Don Byas, with a fragility one might also associate with a player like Kalaparusha. In fact, though that fragility and control is a hallmark of his more recent music – often equated with finely-aged spaciousness – it’s clearly evident on these early home recordings.

The title composition features tenor front and center with an oddly distant palimpsest of overdubbed saxophone screams behind it, almost like the leavings of a revision poking through alongside the “completed” performance. McPhee also plays toy piano and percussion here, building blocky rhythms and adding occasional glissandi with an echoed countenance that’s reminiscent of textures from Sun Ra’s Strange Strings. Two untitled tenor solos follow this piece, delicate balladry coupled with muscularity and poetic energy on the first, splayed out even further on the second towards rounded, husky phrases and finishing with steely shouts. The disc closes with a solo recorder piece, rendered in a way that evokes Andean flute music or certain woodwind musics of Asia and while somewhat noodling, is evocative of McPhee’s exploratory openness through split tones and linear variety.

The second disc is significantly longer, and except for “Sound on Sound” (a revision of the disc one opener, recorded in 1973), all of it was recorded in 1970 and predates the multi-instrumental and overdubbed collaborations with electronic artist John Snyder featured on Pieces of Light (CJR/Atavistic) by a couple of years. In addition to tenor and soprano saxophones, McPhee is found on flute, kalimba, echoplex, “Space Organ,” percussion and feedback across sixteen compositions. The opener, “Cosmic Love” is a real surprise, a duet for tenor and toy organ with synthesized rain-like fuzz washing over it, McPhee moving from pensive delicacy to hoarse, unhinged cries while backed by an oddly saccharine processional. It’s some of the most unique – even strange, perhaps – music in McPhee’s discography, coupling lofty powerhouse barks with kosmische minimalism in a brief six minutes. There is a second take of this piece, as well as an organ solo that uses the same material with heavy reverb attached. The first percussion piece is oddly damped, sounding almost electronically produced (it’s certainly effected) as McPhee patters and wipes it away; like a number of the pieces on this disc, it has the feel of testing out part of a palette that could be used later in a larger textural improvisation.

The three pieces for soprano and echoplex are psychedelic, rooted in simple phrases wrapped in a sheen of spatial volume. Differing from the “Cosmic Love” organ pieces, the organ works from July 1970 explore pulsing environmental burble, again feeling like parts of a larger work that might employ more instrumentation. The first builds to a finely ominous crunch midway through, while the second segues from a doughy creep into obsessive low tones. “Nagoya Harp (inspired/informed by Harry Partch/Lukas Foss/John Snyder)” is the longest piece here, and finds McPhee exploring the Japanese box harp and its tinny resonance (a cross between a detuned guitar and piano strings) with results that are both playful and haranguing. Sure, like much here it’s an outtake of palette-broadening impulses and presumably a study for later work, but what these discs show is a fascination with sound and color that separate McPhee from his hard-blowing confreres. Whether whole or in parts, the music on Sound on Sound could not have been composed by someone without vision and a love of study, which Joe McPhee clearly has long exemplified. This is an essential set and comes with the highest possible recommendation.

CHARLIE NOTHING
Outside/Inside
(De Stijl)

Poet, philosopher, visual artist and instrument maker Charlie Nothing (Charles Martin Simon, 1941-2007) produced a scantly visible catalog of recordings in his time on the planet – a handful of cassettes, a single or two, and two LPs of which this is the second. All but one of these documents were privately issued – his 1967 debut was on Takoma, of all imprints, and titled The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing. From two years later comes Outside/Inside, published on his Everit Enterprises imprint. Nothing would notoriously just tape the jackets of the LPs and seven inches shut, affix a mailing label, and send them on their merry way to the intended recipient; it’s a wonder that any of them survived unscathed.

Though later recordings often featured his homemade dingulators – guitar-like instruments made from scrap car parts – Outside/Inside, like the Takoma date, is a woodwind and percussion duo. Here, Nothing is on flute rather than alto sax, and he’s joined by Tox Drohar (an associate of British bassist Peter Ind and the Tristano school) on hand drums. The vibe is like a much more lackadaisical counter to the heavily Afro-Latin flute and percussion sides led by Will Crittendon or Big Black, with Nothing letting the tapes roll to capture studio chatter, mistakes and random pauses before he returns to the instrument. Though his saxophone playing was/is imbued with an autodidactic urgency and somewhat reminiscent of fellow Californians Byron Paul Allen and Tony Ortega, he seems less sure of himself on the flute, mostly approaching it with a low and wandering warble culled from Latin American mountain ether. That’s not to say that he and Drohar don’t get inspired – they do, especially on the second side – but the pervasive vibe is a primitivist intimacy. De Stijl was going to do a career retrospective a few years ago, collecting all of Nothing’s recordings under one umbrella, but Concord/Fantasy stubbornness negated a legitimate reproduction of the crucial Takoma side. That’s too bad, because isolated incidents of Charlie Nothing, while mysterious and intriguing, don’t give out the vision in a totality that the work deserves. Nevertheless, having a more readily available version of Outside/Inside is a good thing, indeed.

Music Briefly Reviewed: April 2011

2011-04-20T11:38:00.001-05:00

The secret to fine
Scandinavian free-bop

BALLROGG
Insomnia

(Bolage)

It’s been a few years since the self-titled debut of Norwegian reeds-bass duo Ballrogg (Klaus Ellerhusen Holm, saxophones and clarinets; Roger Arntzen, bass) made some ripples in the international jazz underground. On the previous disc, compositions by Holm mixed with curious choices from the songbooks of Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and Jimmy Giuffre, although the latter might have appeared to be the most direct, linear influence on their jauntily spacious duo concept. Insomnia is their follow up, and some things have changed in that span; with the exception of Morton Feldman’s “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” all of the pieces on this disc are originals. The instrumental palette has been expanded with the introduction of feedback and electronics, as well as guitar and violins from guest musicians Lars Myrvoll, Ole-Henrik Mole and Kari Rønnekleiv.

The 1981 Feldman piece, originally for piano and cello, harks back to the composer’s earlier, more aggressive dissonance with seasick, airy strings encircling spry keyboard thunk. Ballrogg approaches the piece at a shorter duration, with Holm’s amplified alto playing the cello part and Arntzen’s throaty pizzicato emulating stuttered pianistic events. Where Feldman’s music is distant and opaque, there’s humor in Ballrogg’s rendition of the piece, garish and filled with imprecise, floor-rattling humanity. More delicate moments with harmonics and feedback are neither precious nor quaint, but have a playfulness that is clearly the duo’s own. Ironically, the title track (which employs violins and laptop) has a hot and nearly oppressive air with scrabbling ponticello strings, saw-like warble and electronic-harmonic waves. Feldman and Ligeti are precedents and kin for these unsettling but intriguing atmospheres. The opening “N.R.E.M.” explores the spare, alien wander of Free Fall-era Giuffre, pinched chamuleau and high-end flutter against the bassist’s warm, calloused pluck both filmic and immediate. “Woody Creek” employs a Feldman-like pulse at the outset, then moves into more direct overlapping minimalism with a fluttering tag, Holm’s breathy alto soon finding a cliffhanging unaccompanied space before being massively undergirded by bass and violins. The pieces on Insomnia are all fairly short, but each makes clear the thrust of simultaneous specificity and ambiguity.

ANTHONY BRAXTON AND JOHN McDONOUGH

Six Duos (Wesleyan) 2006

(Nessa)

From solo to multiple orchestra works, composer and reedman Anthony Braxton has long been a force in the international creative music community who, at times and for some, has also been a challenge to reckon with (ironic considering his humble and humorous demeanor). The sheer breadth of his discography is staggering and frequently encompasses numerous releases per year, each one significant enough in itself to call for immersion – not least of which because quite a few of his recordings are also spread out over several discs. I myself am guilty of trepidation around such commitment – there is something about starting a listening period with Braxton’s work that seems so precise and ritualized, even though in actuality much of his work is not that difficult to access or get involved with at basic and intermediate levels. This accessibility is especially true in the Ghost Trance Musics (though not limited to that music), as the trancelike rhythmic structures (transportation systems) do just what they’re designed to do. The music becomes part of you, working its way into various strata of consciousness while being energetic and is itself multivalent. But with all of the diverse contexts for Braxton’s music, the duets often seem the easiest to bridge and there’s a reason for that – naked dialogue, communication between two individuals, is a particularly relatable event.

6 Duos (Wesleyan) 2006 is one of a number of significant Braxton recordings made that year – alongside the 9 Compositions (Iridium) boxed set on Firehouse 12, there was a great set of duos with guitarist Joe Morris recorded for Clean Feed, four discs each consisting of an hour-long improvisation between two masterful and very different musicians. On 6 Duos (Wesleyan), Braxton is joined by trumpeter John McDonough for six pieces on a single disc – one duo improvisation, two interlocking Braxton compositions, John Philip Sousa’s “Hail to the Spirit of Liberty,” and three of the trumpeter’s short works. It’s the first disc under Braxton’s name to be released on Nessa Records, though he has made sideman appearances as part of two monumental Roscoe Mitchell sets, Nonaah (recorded 1976/77) and L-R-G/The Maze/S-II Examples (recorded 1978). That fact is somewhat surprising, considering that Nessa was among the first labels to document the nascent South Chicago jazz vanguard in the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). 6 Duos is sort of a sequel to a 2002 date that Braxton and brass multi-instrumentalist Taylor Ho Bynum (then a student of the composer) recorded at the same institution, later to be released on Innova. Though nothing like it has surfaced, one might also imagine that in the heyday of AACM music Braxton and trumpeter/multi-instrumentalist Wadada Leo Smith recorded in duo.

McDonough’s “Finnish Line” opens the set, a buoyantly pecking pair of overlapping upward strokes that find Braxton on soprano measuring breaths against McDonough’s steely clarion call. The two complement one another beautifully in terms of tone and attack, McDonough with a high, fat and cutting trumpet tone and incredible control that puts him in league with Smith, Booker Little, and Kenny Wheeler. A lengthy improvisation follows, Braxton switching to alto and employing phrases and range attributable to Konitz and Desmond; even as he builds cascades they’re smoothed off and delicate in counter to McDonough’s more biting swatches. Braxton is careful, almost painstaking in his choice of sonic areas, narrow but extraordinarily open runs on soprano and sopranino setting up a latticework for the trumpeter to thread with swaggering and direct (albeit often microcosmic) phrases.

The held tones of “Massive Breath Attack” are alternately laconic and saccharine or pensive microfilaments, Braxton and McDonough each taking turns to build off of these areas into sputters, sinewy walks and dramatically warped fragments. This piece nearly segues into Braxton’s Composition 168 + (103), the latter originally a work for seven trumpets that featured McDonough, Bynum, Nate Wooley and Forbes Graham in its 2007 Festival of the New Trumpet incarnation. As with many of Braxton’s pieces, the improviser can choose to insert fragments of other compositions within the composition’s greater structure – they have that kind of flexibility, with the possibility of referencing and invoking the greater oeuvre. Initially built on longer lines that dovetail laconically, creating a pulse in free time that nevertheless remains insistent, McDonough’s straight arrow guides bunched soprano ornaments before both musicians unspool their improvisations in peaks, valleys and abrupt turns. The saxophonist might be more relaxed and whimsical in his choice of notes and phrases – not without improvisational conviction, but there’s casualness or ease to his breaths and the way he comments on the trumpeter’s inflections, which are somewhat tautly controlled and edgier. McDonough has an incredible sound, ranging from deep Maggie-isms to microtonal smooches, and the contrast between the two is what builds a fascinating conversation between an “older dog” and the bugle calls of a younger individualist. The final five minutes (presumably Composition 103) explore pitched, ambling rows in a loose, chunky rhythm that gradually intersect in ascendant trilling motions. Filled with daring and congeniality, 6 Duos (Wesleyan) 2006 is a fine entry for both musicians into the Nessa catalog, and a great step out into the recorded open for McDonough.

Nessa Records does not currently have a website, but its releases are available from The Jazz Loft, CD Universe and Amazon in the US, as well as better brick-and-mortar record stores.

IPA

Lorena

(Bolage)

IPA is a strong free-bop quartet, a cooperative consisting of trumpeter Magnus Broo, tenorman Atle Nymo, bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, and drummer Håkon Mjåset Johansen across six originals recorded live in Oslo in 2008 (all but Sweden’s Broo are Norwegian). Scandinavian jazz – if we can consider the music of several individual countries as one lumped region – does owe a lot to the music of itinerant Afro-American jazz musicians like Don Cherry and Albert Ayler; recordings made at Stockholm’s Golden Circle and Copenhagen’s Jazzhus Montmartre by such luminaries as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and the New York Contemporary Five are as much a part of Scandinavian jazz as they are American “fire music.” Of course, these musicians took much from the local flavor, too, as regional folk music entered Ayler and Cherry's work especially.

Broo’s lengthy opener “Ting” has echoes of the Cherry-Gato Barbieri unit in tone, high and incisive brass slicing through the Latinate buzzsaw of Nymo’s tenor (indeed, Nymo and the rhythm section also recorded a trio interpretation of Cherry’s Complete Commnunion). Initially an Ornette-like singsong melody, the composition develops into a painterly four-part conversation as Broo and Nymo’s energy employs cutting swagger. Johansen and Flaten provide an amped-up level of rhythmic detail, dry and foregrounded, with the drummer paying respect to Blackwell, Higgins, Denis Charles and Roy Haynes at a rather hyped-up clip. As the horns embellish his three minute solo, Johansen exhibits a range of dynamics and phrase logic (albeit overly busy at times), drawing from Pierre Favre as he fleshes out encircling patterns with bright accents. Further snatches of Cherry and Eric Dolphy work their way into the following theme, “Mossbacken,” the trumpeter’s spotlight granted to piercing quips and disembodied, whittled-down runs of fluffed bebop.

Flaten’s “City” is spare and cool, brushes and fully-plucked thrum bordered by deft, reduced cells growing into a curious display of harmonic stasis that retains swing as Nymo squeezes out throaty stabs. Broo and Flaten duet in taut plink and hushed, Dixonian smears that splay out into bright, crinkled areas as bass and drums launch into a skimming vamp. A brief unaccompanied trumpet section leads into a thicker restatement of aspects of the original theme. The bassist’s ode to his wife (and the title track) is supple folk singsong, burnished reed and brass elaborating plastically on the simple tune. IPA present a strong set of contemporary Scandinavian avant-garde jazz with feet in both tradition and accessibility.

DARIUS JONES & MATTHEW SHIPP
Cosmic Lieder

(AUM Fidelity)

Cosmic Lieder is a suite of thirteen stratospherically-themed improvisations between pianist Matthew Shipp and altoist Darius Jones, who represent two different generations of musicians to have come through the AUM Fidelity stable and the New York creative music climate. Shipp is celebrating his fiftieth year and his twenty-fifth on the leading edge of contemporary improvisation, while Jones has emerged more recently to co-lead ensembles of free-rock skronk and soulful individuality. His tone has a deep, crying quality, both hard-bitten and extremely soft at the same time, nearly saccharine but not overwhelmingly so – he’s certainly out of the Johnny Hodges/Trevor Watts axis, but to attach a specific other voice to Jones’s playing would be incomplete.

Caterwauling reedy buzz is something he reaches for in the densest passages, but mostly he chooses to put flesh into his phrases rather than eviscerate them. He and Shipp make an interesting pair because both are resolutely spiritual in approach though the pianist’s transcendence seems more directly related to a profound there-ness, a physical confrontation with material and truly-rung resonance. That’s not to say that either a) Shipp’s pianism isn’t humanist or that b) Jones’s very vocal cry isn’t material in some way. To put it in painterly terms, Shipp is akin to a Barnett Newman or Clyfford Still, while Jones is closer to a Bob Thompson, a curdled fauvism working through flowingly angular structures. There is a necessary distance (tension) between the two approaches, but it’s more of a parallel commentary that frequently intersects – churchy chords arcing over and submerging keening bluster on “Nix Uton”, then telescoping outward into thinner, refracted structures before a mild hunt closes the piece. On “Jonesy,” Shipp brings up romantic, Evans-like eddies and immediately counters them with dense, repeating blocks, sketching around the altoist with the varied pressure of a right-hand dance. Though there is a sense of severity to the proceedings which, unsurprisingly, takes a few listens to crack through, the warmth of intent is quite clear on this excellent first-time meeting.

CHRISTIAN MUNTHE & FRIENDS
Living Rooms

(For Sake Recordings)

On this two-disc set, part of a trio of recently-released recordings by Swedish guitarist, improviser and philosopher Christian Munthe, the presentation is of work within small spaces (hence the title). Each of the seventeen free improvisations here – for solo guitar, duos and small groups – is either a home or a small club recording collected over the past few years, preserving the intimacy of the music and its surrounding environment. Among Munthe’s cohorts here are guitarist and electronic artist Anders Dahl, saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui, flutist Kelly Jones, and bassist Nina de Heney. The music, most of which is comprised of first-time meetings (in the Company tradition), ranges from delicate to frightfully absurd, such as the soul-inflected glossolalia of vocalist Mariam Wallentin who, across two improvisations on the second disc, ranges from sputters and high-pitched squeaks to stammering gulps in songlike form as Munthe accents and spins out broken blues like a cross between early Loren Connors and Derek Bailey.

In trio with Jones and percussionist Pascal Nichols, gleaming kisses cut through muted clanks and cantankerous, odd-interval slide in advancing and receding jangle, eventually joined by Munthe’s young daughter on percussion and a harmonica-like tuning pipe. These improvisations are alternately poised and playful, the latter especially so as young Saga bows a second guitar for sheer sonic participation as percussion and dad’s playing reach a feverish burble. John Butcher’s exploration of resonance seems like a leaping off point for Sehnaoui, whose language is a thin mixture of chuffs, globular chunks and piercing minor explosions. One would think that the spiky rhythms of Munthe’s guitar and their clearer instrumental origin wouldn’t fit with her playing, but these oppositional sound-shapes create a goaded dialogue. Throaty lyricism is immediately present in de Heney’s pizzicato bass as Munthe’s bunched actions generate sparks and miniature hum on disc one’s “Flat Out.” Clarinetist Alberto Poppolla engages an Ayler-esque form of glossolalia in the three homemade duets, sometimes warbling in staccato pops as Munthe fills space with directly-applied clatter. Living Rooms provides an excellent introduction to some of the finer European improvisers you’ve probably never heard - most importantly, at “play.”

TØRN

Crespect

(2^nd Floor)

Tørn (“stint” in Danish) is the trio of drummer Joe Hertenstein, bassist Achim Tang and pianist Philip Zoubek, all of whom have a connection to Cologne, though Hertenstein now calls New York home. Crespect finds the three musicians navigating twelve improvisations and compositions by members of the group and Carla Bley (“Batterie” and “And Now the Queen” bookend the disc). Bley’s trio music was a profound influence on the landscape of modern jazz piano trios – from the work of Irène Schweizer to Nobu Stowe, not to mention Keith Jarrett’s early trio with Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Floating ambiguity coupled with jagged, twittering rhythms and a dusting of bebop were a different but equally valid direction in free music alongside that of Cecil Taylor. One can certainly hear Jarrett in Zoubek’s playing (at the most basic level, he’s sort of like a cross between the former and Augustí Fernández), upwardly trilling phrases pierced by pauses that allow the pianist to collect himself before jumping into the next “now.”

After the rondo-like head of “Batterie,” the pianist is off at a start, florid and direct lines supported by continual hack and crash from drums and bass. There’s a distance to the collectively-composed “Weeep” that follows, a series of loosely-connected parallels in open-form melodicism and subtle turnarounds that mark the trio as an organism of one breath. Tang’s plucked lines climb similar ladders to Zoubek’s, perhaps skipping a step while Hertenstein’s shimmering field encompasses. Also in the pianist’ss bag is the inside of his instrument, both prepared and unaltered, which he uses to coax terrific discomfort from the instrument’s string-and-wood bowels on some of the shorter pieces. An icily noirish sheen inflects Tang’s composition “Prag,” which pits a concrete groove against wispy movements for a dance-like vignette. The pianist’s “Subminus” continues the atmospherics as well as a bit of unruly, almost rockish motion in a way reminiscent of the Portuguese pianist-composer Bernardo Sassetti’s trio music. The title track, composed by Hertenstein, moves through a few iterations, building with romanticism and a knotty lope on a simple tone row, rhythm tying phrases up and shunting them around as Zoubek adds and subtracts improvisational flesh in detailed whirlpools. For those who enjoy adventurous but unfailingly melodic piano trios, Tørn is definitely worth investigating.

C.S. YEH

In the Blink of an Eye / Condo Stress

ED ASKEW

Here We Are Together Again / Yellow Dollars

(De Stijl)

Believe it or not, it does take something special for an artist’s work to be released on a label like Minneapolis’ De Stijl, despite the seeming catch-all at present in the catalog. Take, for instance, this new single by C. Spencer Yeh, known primarily as a violinist and electronic artist in some of the weightiest regions of contemporary noise. His releases on CD-R, cassette, and vinyl have appeared on a host of underground micro-labels, so what would set a De Stijl release apart from any other boutique Yeh collector’s item? It’s pretty simple, actually: songs. Yes, you read that right – Yeh sent De Stijl some mid-fi pop songs that would fit alongside the work of Bill Baird or other quirky, mildly shambolic orchestrators. “In the Blink of an Eye” is hand-clapped dance pop with a calypso tinge, a little sloppy but incredibly groovy, and Yeh’s lightly flat delivery is a little reminiscent of Beck (the music sounds nothing like Mr. Hansen’s, thankfully). The flip is a slower number for keyboards, guitar and vocals, something of a surreal torch song of bitingly hangdog wit. Squealing grit notwithstanding, hopefully there’s more like this down the pipeline from Yeh.

The issue of Ed Askew’s aborted ESP session Little Eyes seven years ago was an early triumph for De Stijl, and helped to put the Connecticut folkie back on the map. This single apparently contains the last releasable archival recordings of Askew’s work on the Martin tipple and finds him performing live on WYBC (Yale Radio) in late 1969. His strained nasal delivery (certainly, in part, due to the difficulty of playing the tightly-wound tipple) and stark arrangements are quite visible and while the tunes don’t quite reach epic proportions, a lot of Askew’s “epicness” is arrived at through the length of an album. Picking out a song for a single isn’t an easy task, but one can get at the intensity and wry bitter-sweetness that imbue part of Askew’s world – bookishly unrequited love, countercultural protest and death – especially in “Yellow Dollars.” Fine stuff as usual from the De Stijl camp.

The Instant Composers Pool Orchestra on tour in 2011

2011-04-03T14:04:00.001-05:00

On Thursday, April 7 the Dutch-American-German (and mostly Amsterdam-based) collective the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra will be performing in Austin at the AAMP space, 411 West Monroe. The last time I saw the ICP Orchestra play was during my first semester in graduate school at the University of Texas; that was five years ago and it was stunning. I’d seen them a few times before in Chicago, and the results were usually strong, but being in a new city and experiencing the vitality of something both familiar and exciting was a special and comforting introduction to Austin’s fine track record for improvised music performance. Tonight I’ll be doing the second of two programs dedicated to ICP-related music on KOOP; you can also look forward to a review of ICP 049, the latest orchestra disc, at the Austinist this week. Hopefully an interview with orchestra drummer Han Bennink will also be part of this extravaganza.

Dutch jazz has fascinated me for a long time, although chiefly from a historical perspective (regionalism doesn't mean now what it did then) – the great recordings of Hans Dulfer’s Afro-Cuban ensembles, Theo Loevendie’s North African-inspired orchestras and small groups, trumpeter, pianist and composer Nedley Elstak, multi-instrumentalist and zoologist Kees Hazevoet, the straight-ahead players like Rein de Graaff (piano) and Wim Overgaauw (guitar), the ICP and the Willem Breuker axis. Primarily focused on the ICP end of things, Kevin Whitehead’s New Dutch Swing is essential reading, though it doesn’t grant quite as much information on other jazz activities in Holland during the Sixties and Seventies. Of course, for many people the tension between subversive humor and artful subtlety (interpretations of Ellingtonia, Monk, and Herbie Nichols), alongside more open improvisation, is what makes the ICP’s music quintessentially “Dutch.” Indeed, they are the ambassadors of Dutch jazz to the rest of the world. Though parallel to the absurdist classicism of the Willem Breuker Kollektief, that breed of Dutch music has been only one part of the landscape, with quirky post-bop, Afro-Caribbean influences and full-on free jazz being of equal interest. There was some cross-pollination – I have a radio recording of the ICP Orchestra performing one of Loevendie’s great, Arabic minimalist pieces, for example. But while the performances of the ICP Orchestra in the States this week will be inspiring and delightful in their own way, I hope that listeners and experiencers are spurred on to investigate other aspects of Dutch jazz, both historical and of the present day.

Here is the Facebook invite for the Austin performance.

Visit the ICP Orchestra website here.

Some rare Dutch jazz LP covers are viewable here, at the great Birka Jazz covers resource.

Music Breifly Reviewed: March 2011

2011-03-29T15:09:00.006-05:00

Cut it out. No, seriously.

LOL COXHILL & ROGER TURNER
Success with your Dog
(Emanem)

Though soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill and percussionist Roger Turner have a long history together as visionaries and stalwarts of English free improvisation, working together in combinations such as the Johnny Rondo Trio and electro-acoustic ensemble The Recedents, Success with your Dog is their first official recording together. It captures the pair in two concert recordings from 2003 and 2010, interesting also because Coxhill isn’t one to normally work in saxophone-percussion duos. Seventy-one at the time of the first set, recorded in Brest, France in 2003, Coxhill is absolutely on fire, the economy of his uncompromising vision offered up with utmost clarity on this well-recorded document. Despite the odd title, Success with your Dog is rather pure soprano-and-drums improvisation, constant dialogue in both micro and macro textures, clanging, damped rustle, scrapes and jabs from Turner’s kit paralleling breathy elaborations into a language that’s both shared and separate.

Coxhill may not always get the props that Evan Parker and Steve Lacy do among followers of improvised music in Europe (sure, Lacy is a New Yorker, but his most fruitful years were spent abroad), and that’s chiefly because many in this music find whimsy a troubling thing. Like Steve Beresford, Terry Day and others in the field, Coxhill has often been wry, titling pieces with plays on words and presentin absurd instrumental combinations. His work also brought him into progressive rock contexts – albeit some of the most open, such as Delivery with Steve and Phil Miller, and Kevin Ayers’ the Whole World with David Bedford. Serious credentials, but perhaps not always something for the “bearded jazz fan” (to quote Aric Effron). Coxhill is more indebted to R&B than Parker; his squeaky multiphonics on “Tails that Wag” inhabit ranges both soprano and tenor, and are almost Ayler-derived. He does, in a moment’s notice, bring about a thoughtful wander a la Lacy, but that quest is something older and uninfluenced, soon developing into husky repetition.

“Groomed for the Job” was recorded in August 2010 in St. Leonard’s Church in London, and honors an environment with both space and claustrophobics. Turner spreads out a bit more as a soloist here, but even that’s in the loosest of terms for Coxhill’s presence is felt even when he’s not distinctly playing (the best duets work this way). There’s a wistful, wide-open quality to the opening salvo, bent and stratospherically traveling, while also nodding to deeper timbres and starting the process with a shaking-off of excess. His lines have an unfolding quality as they’re gradual and go to unexpected places, often moving off trail only to return to a previous phrase a few bars later with utmost logic and gorgeous honesty. A section for unaccompanied percussion begins a third of the way in, Turner balancing gruff aggression with warped and resonant clang, parceling out sounds with a lump-in-the-throat arc. The saxophonist returns with medium-pitched warbling at a very low volume, the pair worrying narrow colors and actions before Coxhill strings together a hushed, singsong line, cymbals and toms giving the passage an incredible amount of motion. A brief bomb-drop at thirteen minutes in is mimicked by soprano, a leap into the void spurring Turner into refining his small-phrase world. Success with your Dog is an absolutely essential document of contemporary English improvisation and a wind-drum duet for the ages. Coxhill's place on an axis with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker as part of the soprano triumvirate of the 1970s and 80s is unimpeachable, but his playing now should not be forgotten. We can be very thankful that this music has surfaced in short order.

MIKE DI RUBBO

Chronos

(Posi-Tone)

Chronos is altoist Mike DiRubbo’s sixth date as a leader and the first to feature him within the bristling context of organ and drums. A student of Jackie McLean (among others) at the Hartt School of Music, DiRubbo has gone on to work with a number of luminaries of modern straight-ahead jazz, such as trumpeter Jim Rotondi, trombonist Steve Davis, pianist Harold Mabern and drummer Joe Farnsworth. He’s joined here by drummer Rudy Royston and organist Brian Charette; the leader and the organist contribute all of the disc’s nine compositions. The opening “Minor Progress” certainly sounds like an ode to McLean’s mid-60s recordings in its stop-time trills and chugging bursts; DiRubbo is a little cooler than his mentor, picking apart thematic nuggets and worrying them in passages that also nod ever so slightly to Marion Brown. “Cool” isn’t to say unemotional – it’s clear that he’s a player with a lot of heart and energy – but more that one can hear him thinking for the first part of his solo, until he puts the gas pedal down and soars over a mighty rhythm clip. Charette has, like Larry Young or John Patton, a pianistic approach to the organ that fits nicely with the tune’s incisive character, though his solo is a bit brief.

The title track that follows has overdubbed altos at the outset, giving the introduction a bit of a Living Space vibe, Royston and Charette spinning an Elvin-Young whorl behind DiRubbo’s searchingly sharp eviscerations, which alternate with passages of soft, lyrical introspection. Charette has a bit more space here, carving out a jaunty groove with subtle surges and eddies as bass pedal and drums keep loping time before the leader takes it out. “Rituals” is a decidedly funkier piece, supported by agitated backbeat and a simple, driving chord progression as DiRubbo builds tart phrases and burbling cries in curious opposition to the tune’s initial feel and expected outcome. A somewhat psychedelic, gooey organ statement shifts the tune’s direction yet again, building upon simplicity into dense, anthemic closure. The set is well-balanced between these more uptempo tunes and caressing, urban-twilight ballads that, when in good hands like these, offer another side of the trio’s capabilities. DiRubbo’s approach on “Nouveau” is delicate and slightly bitter, his improvisation full of quiet flurries and athletic runs that are still within the character of the piece, while steering clear of an easily embodied saccharine approach. I’m still wishing for a hotter recording quality on these Posi-Tone discs and I think that Chronos would benefit from that, but all in all it’s an excellent neo-bop date that should be heard, especially if one is pondering a dearth of truly engaging modern jazz recordings.

JOEL FUTTERMAN & IKE LEVIN
Dialogues and Connections

(Charles Lester Music)

Bay Area reedman Ike Levin (also the proprietor of Charles Lester Music) and Virginia-based pianist and soprano saxophonist Joel Futterman have been collaborating for more than a decade, either as a duo or in trio with Jackson, Mississippi drummer and historian Alvin Fielder or cellist Kash Killion. Dialogues and Connections is their third duo disc to date, filling eighty-minutes with two multipart, marathon conversations. Though Levin has quite a different approach to the tenor from Kidd Jordan, another regular collaborator with Futterman, Dialogues and Connections makes an interesting counterpoint to the recently released Jordan-Futterman disc Interaction (JDF, 2010). Futterman’s pianism is partly rolling barrelhouse, part dusky introspection and completely immediate, drawing upon history in flashes and flurries, clustered and parsed to meld with Levin’s sharply-burnished exhortations.

Without a drummer to carry gestures forward in a traditionally rhythmic sense, Futterman and Levin must rely on an extraordinary amount of force and velocity to maintain toe-tapping dynamism, but their telepathic language of sweeps and harrowing drive keeps the pair in constant flight. The third part of the first conversation employs glassy near-stasis, rustling piano strings a silvery background to Levin’s breathy, warbling bass clarinet (on which his phraseology is palpably different from the high-octane post-Rollins tenor), slowly moving into a quietly keening Dolphy-Byard paean. Of course, the pair moves into distinctly different areas from there, Levin popping linear asides to Futterman’s pointillist carpet. The second suite of conversations begins with the pianist doubling on curved soprano in concert with Levin’s tenor, left hand keeping particulate tempo while the right takes over in dervish-like wails that encircle an urbanely throaty, Johnny Griffin-like cadence. Lush outlines signal the second conversation’s second part, in which a Trane-like modal ballad form creeps out, though Futterman takes it in a new, scribbled direction as pillowy blats and knotted squeaks pile on in contrast to roiling chordal blocks. This set of duos is more than "mere" musical conversation, instead deliberately forging new and immediate pathways with serenity and intensity.

GORD GRDINA TRIO WITH MATS GUSTAFSSON
Barrel Fire
(Drip Audio)

I remember an op-ed written years ago in the Wire about European free jazz and masculinity, particularly the post-Ayler/Brötzmann legacy of Swedish reedman Mats Gustafsson and The Thing and their punk-jazz skronk aesthetic. While the tongue-wagging yelps of Gustafsson’s stage presence (maybe, just maybe we can separate his music from his persona for a moment) are valid confrontation, a sort of hyper-sexed theatre to some, it’s also easy to lose sight of the music within. In certain contexts – those that don’t rely too much on flutter-tonguing, abstracted pops and micro-breath sounds – he brings a flinty and haranguing approach to phrase that remains impressive. There’s sort of an old-school Gustafsson vibe throughout Barrel Fire, which joins him with the powerful Canadian trio of guitarist/oudist Gord Grdina, bassist Tommy Babasin and drummer Kenton Loewen on a set of five pieces (one Iraqi traditional and three by the guitarist) recorded at the 2009 Vancouver International Jazz Festival.

Grdina’s work isn’t rooted in the guitar pyrotechnics that free improvisation fans have come to expect, for this trio draws most heavily on Middle Eastern modes and aesthetics, strummed electric drones over a frame drum-inspired gallop on “Burning Bright” on which Gustafsson’s split-toned tenor cries only add seasoning. To be sure, it’s rockishly whooping and hollering, but offers more than just punk-jazz (witness the intense oud-and-vocals romp in “En Shakoota,” where the saxophonist almost channels Barney Wilen for a moment). As the rhythm section digs in to a malleable locomotive swing on “229,” Gustafsson’s baritone bluster gets an ample shove before giving way to Grdina’s tersely-spun unaccompanied poetics. Once Babasin and Loewen reenter with a stone-skipping thrum, Grdina unfurls into condensed midrange pyrotechnics, a gradual but exacting burn that clearly exemplifies this trio’s honed language. It’s a telepathy that’s tough for Gustafsson to crack sometimes as he frequently seems off to the side of the proceedings, and I’ve witnessed it firsthand. Thing bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten sat in with Grdina and Loewen in a Texas performance in 2010, and he seemed to be fighting for space within their highly codified group structure. That’s not a slight on the art of Grdina and company, but a testament to the fact that they’ve worked out a mode of improvisation and composition that’s highly specialized, if a bit insular.

HONEY EAR TRIO
Steampunk Serenade
(Foxhaven)

The Honey Ear Trio consists of saxophonist Erik Lawrence, drummer Allison Miller and bassist Rene Hart with a disc chock full of spry compositions and improvisations that mine the fields of jazz/free music, rock, funk, and electronica. All but two (including a Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow”) of the thirteen pieces here were composed by members of the group. Though the trio is a recent concern, the three musicians share a degree of empathy befitting a veteran unit and all have worked together previously in some form or another. Lawrence is a new name for me, but he’s a tremendous force on tenor, baritone, alto and soprano – velvety purrs and slipperiness through the opening ballad “Matter of Time” as Hart and Miller accent and disassemble an easy swing into a wide range of color, beat, and comment. It’s an interesting way to start a record, giving one a clearer idea of the measured nature of the trio’s interaction before kicking things up a notch with the electro-rock aided “Olney 60/30,” searing alto squeal carried by loops and fleshed-out bass Miller’s airy clatter.

The title track is reminiscent of post-rock textures at first, electronic whir and rimshots knit together to form a spry backing for Lawrence’s elastic, Latinate reeds. He’s a little reminiscent of Gato Barbieri at times (check “Whistle Stop”), as well as the new Newk approach of Iberian tenorman Jesús Santandreu, steely but with romantic flourishes that work well against bright swirls of percussion and bass. “Six Nettes” is a corker, fitting neatly into a harmonically open but bop-derived bag, scumbled fluffs and phrase construction like a young Archie Shepp as the rhythm section makes subtle gradations of time, while “Over the Rainbow” is a series of subtle, chamber allusions on baritone as the familiar melody is stated through pinched electronics. “Eyjafjallajokull” is an Icelandic hymn – or an approximation of it – reminiscent of some of the Scottish themes employed by Ken Hyder’s folk-cum-Ayler band Talisker. Lawrence signals a wistful call over a delicate march, punctuated by synthesized chords in one of the set’s shorter but more effective pieces. Steampunk Serenade is an excellent disc and while a couple of tunes could have been excised for the sake of compactness, overall my impression is that the Honey Ear Trio is a band to keep an eye on.

PARASITES OF THE WESTERN WORLD

Parasites of the Western World

(De Stijl)

It’s not so easy these days to be set apart among the masses of labels documenting otherwise-underheard and unclassifiable music of both the present and recent past. It might seem on the surface like Minneapolis’ De Stijl is a bit of a cultural grab-bag, unearthing gems from early ‘70s psychedelic folkies like Ed Askew and Michael Lee Yonkers alongside Smegma’s racket and the free-jazz slop of Barry Greika’s Orange. Their latest “sensation” is the downtempo art-smirk of Hype Williams, sure to be a winking flash in the pan. But the reissues are carefully curated projects, mostly serving to fill in gaps in our understanding of what the “underground” really is, and how parallel some of the activities of basement obscurities are with the broader musical-cultural consciousness.

The Parasites of the Western World apparently hailed from Portland, Oregon and self-released their first, self-titled LP on Criminal Records in 1978. Brought into existence by Patrick Burke and Terry Censky with the assistance of guitarist Mark Weatherford, one would be hard pressed from the stark white-on-black jacket that this private press rarity was anything other than basement sludge. The home-recorded part might be right, but the Parasites have far more in common with new wave, though of a slightly unhinged DIY variety. The opening “MO” is a stomping, swirling electro-punk anthem that sounds like it should have emerged from Cleveland, Ohio a year or two earlier – one would assume that the Parasites were well aware of Pere Ubu and Devo, and this was a way to put their stamp on a similar impulse. But the group’s inclinations are more instrumental in nature, covering the Beatles’ “Flying” with grit and grin, or the epic “Funeral for a Mouse,” a fuzz guitar and synth processional that cuts through with dorm-room recastings of Yes and Vangelis, or slightly recalling the Social Climbers’ instrumentals. “Accessories” opens up the second side with a collision between orchestral synth-laden prog and a totally bewildering keyboard-heavy, homemade twist on Black Sabbath. Once the processed vocals work their way in, pretty much all hope for normalcy is lost and the Parasites clearly have wormed their way into the small canon of outsider-rock Americana. As often happens with archival reissues on De Stijl, it’s a (re)discovery well worth investigating.

More on the Parasites here.

TEATIME
Teatime
(Emanem)

In 2010, one of the sleeper LPs in the early discography of Incus Records marked its thirty-fifth birthday, and is now enjoying its first non-vinyl issue. Teatime is a document of what was termed the “second generation” of British free improvisers, though its participants were/are not that much younger than founding figures like saxophonist Evan Parker or percussionists Tony Oxley and John Stevens. Incus was founded in 1970 to release music by Parker, Oxley, guitarist Derek Bailey (1930-2005) and their cohorts, including Dutch drummer Han Bennink and the large scale works of bassist-composer Barry Guy and trumpeter-composer Kenny Wheeler. Fifteen releases into the catalog came Teatime, a pair of mostly sidelong quartets featuring multi-instrumentalist Steve Beresford, guitarist John Russell and percussionist Dave Solomon, and either violinist/noisemaker Nigel Coombes or tenorman Gary Todd. The music was recorded by Emanem’s Martin Davidson at the Unity Theatre in 1974-1975, and is somewhat analogous to the more extreme works found in the early Bead Records catalog.

Like a number of the Incus dates not featuring Bailey, Parker, or their immediate partners, Teatime (and its semi-predecessor Balance, with Frank Perry, Phill Wachsmann, Colin Wood and Radu Malfatti) seemed to fall through the cracks. Though Beresford was the musician to probably make the most significant name for himself in the ensuing few decades (a writer and improviser, he’s worked in ensembles as diverse as Alterations and The Slits), all of the partcipants are still active, with Russell’s work as a guitarist also a large part of the contemporary free music landscape.

Beresford and Solomon were especially inspired by the work of the Instant Composers’ Pool that emerged a few years prior, all manners of subterfuge inspiring creativity through sometimes uncomfortable situations and controlled anarchy – and indeed, that further inspired Incus founder Bailey to begin the Company concerts in the late 1970s. In terms of sheer sound, Beresford and Solomon resemble ICP ringleaders Misha Mengelberg (piano) and Han Bennink in their toothy opposition – Beresford tinkling obstinately on an out-of-tune instrument as Solomon thunders, crashes and abruptly shifts direction with brazen surefootedness belying his occasionally distracted rumble. On “European improvised music sho’nuff turns me on” they’re abetted by the isolated plinks and scraping of electric guitar and Coombes’ absurd fiddle manipulations (sometimes the violin is poised between his knees), feedback, and contact-miked springs and objects. Rather than formlessness, however, the foursome generates clear responses, either subtle combativeness or extended commentary – a snatch of violin song met with duck calls and cymbal clatter, phrases beaten down but not submissive. It’s all done at a fairly low volume, which in some ways is an even more direct confrontation with the senses than full on “free jazz.” An inane back-and-forth between electronic glitches and drumkit is laughable but also displays cunning musicianship, while hushed activity behind a layer of feedback gives a situational theatricality to the proceedings.

The second side begins with “I didn’t get up this morning,” which replaces Coombes with Gary Todd’s tenor. He adds a completely different structure to the group, a post-Ayler squall reminiscent in this context of a young and blustery Willem Breuker. Coupled with the abrupt editing practices (apparently Beresford and co. just cut out pieces of tape that they found boring, or at their whimsy), jarring mid-squawk endings or jumping in amid the skronk at the beginning of an East European piano folk melody, the noted allusion to the ICP record Fragments (1971) is fairly obvious. There’s a marked intensity to the proceedings cutting through even as Beresford noodles a bit of “Chopsticks” and parlor tunes inside of meaty free playing, delicate opposition creating a fascinating degree of tension. The reissue closes with a previously unissued guitar-drums duet entitled “Low-fi” from 1973, and while it certainly is poorly recorded, offers another side of this cooperative’s aesthetic in Ray Russell-inspired tweakiness and Solomon’s constant bash. The improvisation is bisected by a brief (and nutty) call-and-response between feedback and voice, after which the pair’s play becomes more jagged and compact. Teatime is not for the feint of heart, but if you’re into maddeningly out European free music, it is an essential document.

WHITE SUNS

Waking in the Reservoir

(ugExplode)

White Suns are a Brooklyn-based trio specializing in what Weasel Walter (drummer, improvising composer, and the engineer and label honcho who helped bring this release into existence) probably somewhat tongue-in-cheek calls “noisecore.” The instrumentation consists of guitar, vocals, drums and power electronics, and the music essentially recalls a collision between No Fun-style glitch-heavy noise and the Gravity Records catalog of early ‘90s oddball hardcore. Waking in the Reservoir is their first proper CD/LP release, following micro-run cassettes and CD-Rs over their five year lifespan, and while it’s often the case for both noise and hardcore records that it’s easy to wear out one’s welcome with this music (hence the appeal of EPs, singles and the like), White Suns keep the proceedings at a manageable half hour of blistering, screaming, pummeling intensity. It would be easy to over-intellectualize the avant-garde credibility of this music – and it does have some of that, for sure – but at its most basic level this is primal, stripped-down expression, minimal and repetitive slagwerk from drummer-electronics purveyor Dana Matthiesson in monolithic motion over, behind and around searing feedback, Rick Visser’s guitar crunch and Keith Barry’s young art-politik ranting. For a three piece, at times they sound positively huge and can veer towards the incredibly detailed (I’m sure part of their appeal for Walter), which is perhaps most evident on the excellent, kinetic “Skin Deep” and its merger of precise, theatrical poise and caterwauling skree. Waking in the Reservoir is a compelling document of what’s possible – musically, emotionally and aesthetically – in approaches to music one usually finds utterly condensed.

South by Southwest 2011 - Improvisationally Inclusive

2011-03-16T12:23:00.000-05:00

In the past, I've lamented the lack of quality improvised music during South by Southwest (SXSW), which takes place every middle of March in Austin and is probably the States' largest and lengthiest showcase for modern popular music. Sure, one can catch certain "cutting edge" rock, punk and indie bands ad infinitum, but jazz and related musics are routinely left out of this one-stop-Hypermart of indie rock, film and technology. 2011 is a little different - on Thursday at the Hideout (617 Congress Ave.) we can look forward to Norwegian bassist and Austin resident Ingebrigt Håker Flaten's new band, The Young Mothers (with Frank Rosaly, Stefan Gonzalez, Stian Westerhus, Jawwaad Taylor and Jason Jackson), which brings together Norwegian, Texan, and Chicagoan strains for a truly unique experience.

Last night I was able to check out recent Austin transplant Gaute Solaas' project Serpentine (Gaute also hails from Norway) in its American incarnation at Central Presbyterian Church. The band present for last night's performance was different from those in the video below, but you can get an idea of the vibe present throughout. Try to imagine three interweaving tenor saxophones and their attendant colors and sonic shapes filling up a large church - the only apt response seemed to be leaning back and closing one's eyes. I can only imagine what Albert Ayler and Ornette Coleman sounded like filling up St. Peter's in New York in 1967 for Trane's funeral. Gaute also has a local ensemble with guitarist Jonathan Horne and drummer Matt Armistead called Southwestern Free, who are totally worth checking out and I sincerely hope that they record. Their version of Keith Jarrett's "The Cure" (also done by Serpentine) is an absolute killer in a sort of tweaked Garbarek-Rypdal vibe. Hopefully this music won't continue to fall through the cracks during SXSW, for it is indeed strong potion.

Shameless Self-Promotion: Dickie Landry Reissue

2011-03-14T15:22:00.001-05:00

Coming out this spring on New York/Seattle/Austin-based label Unseen Worlds Records is the reissue of seminal late 1970s solo saxophone and flute work from composer-instrumentalist and visual artist Dickie Landry. Fifteen Saxophones was originally issued on Northern Lights Records in 1977 and had a German pressing on Wergo back in the late 1970s, but this is its first time on CD (there will be a high quality LP reissue as well, and dig the new cover art). I penned the liner notes, which were culled from hours of interviews conducted at Mr. Landry's home in Lafayette, Louisiana. If you haven't heard Landry's music and are curious about his work, which straddles the lines between 1970s process music ("minimalism") and avant-garde jazz-derived improvisation, there probably isn't a better place to start than here. Hopefully this project will result in the surfacing of more of Landry's archival recordings in the future. Though I've been lucky enough to be involved with a number of releases from the liner-writing perspective, I'm proudest of this one, for I can recall when the project was just a glimmer in the collective thought patterns, over cheap beer most likely, of UW proprietor Tommy McCutchon and myself. Starting on the ground floor and now seeing the work in one's hands is a special feeling indeed. You can purchase this and other Unseen Worlds releases here.

Marion Brown - You See What I'm Trying to Say?

2011-02-27T22:35:00.001-06:00

Marion Brown and Arild Andersen in Oslo,
1968, photo copyright Erik Stenvik

Here's a rare find, also noted over at Inconstant Sol - the first film by filmmaker Henry English from 1967, You See What I'm Trying To Say?, which features the voice and music of alto saxophonist Marion Brown (1931-2010) in a quartet with pianist Dave Burrell, bassist Sirone and drummer Bobby Kapp (probably shortly after the Three For Shepp session on Impulse). Though apparently most of English's films have been in commercial and documentary contexts, this work captures beautifully the profoundly visual expression of the music and vibrant life in New York in the late 1960s. Having watched the film numerous times over the weekend, I'm also curious to know whether more music from this recording/rehearsal section exists.

Please follow this link to view the film on Vimeo.

Update: I missed this in the Inconstant Sol posting, but there is more information about the film here, further illuminating the circumstances behind this fascinating work.

Other Folks' Music: Tim Kerr in the Austin Chronicle

2011-02-24T11:10:00.001-06:00

Austin resident, artist and musician Tim Kerr (Big Boys, Monkeywrench, Lord High Fixers) is profiled in this week's Austin Chronicle. I'm not normally one to post others' writing here, but this is a good slice of what too often gets obscured in the environs of our fair city. While Austin has as its tagline the "Keep Austin Weird" mentality and it's turned into a tired signifier in some ways, there are still pockets of creativity and intrigue well beyond what one would expect. Whether or not you're into the punk music/art ethos, Tim's story is definitely worth a read and while you're at it, you can purchase his work Your Name Here from Monofonous Press.

Music Reviews: February 2011

2011-02-23T10:40:00.000-06:00

Ideal bread?

BRIAN DRYE/JONATHAN GOLDBERGER/KIRK KNUFFKE/CHES SMITH
Bizingas
(NCM East)

Trombonist Brian Drye might be a new name outside of the New York environs, but he’s certainly a figure to keep a bead on. Probably most recognized for his work as part of the Kirk Knuffke Quartet (recording for Clean Feed in 2008) and his quartet The Four Bags (trombone, accordion, guitar and reeds), Bizingas combines these two going concerns for a frenetically off-kilter stew in keeping with the blends of jazz, avant-garde composition and underground rock song structure that prevail in some of the more interesting new music. Drye is joined by semi-regular partner Knuffke on cornet, guitarist Jonathan Goldberger, and percussionist Ches Smith for ten of the leader’s original compositions that, while recorded two years ago, remain tartly fresh. The trombonist is well-versed in boisterous slush (positively Rudd-like on "Sifting"), but he approaches that feeling with a deft, bugle-flicking poise that meshes perfectly with Knuffke’s sharp classical technique; it’s no wonder their partnership is so fruitful. This fact contrasts elegantly with the gritty, ringing indie-rock textures of Goldberger’s guitar and Smith’s animalist but melodic attention to the beat.

A few years ago it might have seemed cloyingly populist to merge improvised composition with forms and sounds gleaned from the clipped language of punky contemporary music, but that bright energy is certainly something that, in its best instances, gives difficult music a sly accessibility. Bizingas fits well into this aesthetic; take for example the closing “Untitled Moog Anthem,” which blends stark, dust-kicking guitar twang, Krautrock-inspired reverberating loops (a la Popol Vuh), lockstep rhythm and ebullient, brassy knots. The opening singsong “Tagger” recalls the Deerhoof-inspired vibe of Ches Smith & These Arches, while “TMT” elicits both somberness (through its dusky piano-guitar left side) and pointillist excitement (with right hand fills, careful cornet incisions and stone-skipping percussion). Drye and company have waxed a solid date with interesting, between-the-lines compositions that serve as a distraction from the musically obvious.

DOMINIC DUVAL/JIMMY HALPERIN/BRIAN WILLSON
Music of John Coltrane

(No Business)

On a previous collaboration, bassist Dominic Duval and saxophonist Jimmy Halperin explored the music of Thelonious Monk (Monk Dreams, a 2009 No Business release), which was particularly interesting because not only was there no piano or drums, but Halperin’s playing is an amalgam of Warne Marsh and Sam Rivers – two figures not often associated with Monk’s music. It’s a little more believable, in terms of format, for a tenor-bass-drums trio to “chase the Trane” as it were, but what is immediately striking (especially if Halperin is in one’s unheard file) is that the improvisational lines here are about as far from Coltrane as Duval’s bass playing is from John Ore. Here, the pair is joined by drummer Brian Willson (a regular past participant in some of saxophonist Ivo Perelman’s groups) on a program of six well-worn Coltrane originals such as “Giant Steps,” “Moment’s Notice,” and “Naima.”

Opening the former with a tempestuous rubato section is a step in the right direction, and Halperin – as he did throughout the Monk program – enters the theme with oblique reference, catching only fragments of the tune at first and expanding upon them. When he finally states the familiar melody, it’s done in a halting, inquisitive manner, almost as if he’s respecting the signification and power of the tune’s composer by clearly and confrontationally delineating his own path, which though full of scalar runs, has a simultaneously cool methodology and a rough tone. Willson has all the cuss and spit of an Elvin Jones, tidal waves of coppery crash a gutsy foil to the tenorman’s questing introspection. After a brief bass solo, Halperin returns to peck obstinately at small sections of the theme; Willson takes his spot and the tune halts without any more space given to the head. The South Asian-North African landscape of “Living Space” certainly remains in the trio’s improvisation, but it’s still quite shocking to hear how far from the original’s group-rhythmic implications these three musicians stray, decidedly into their own tumbling, gutsy orbit. “Naima” begins with flinty pirouettes as bass and tenor spar, Halperin corkscrewing upward in florid lines that import a few trampoline moves from Trane and Sonny Rollins, though he mostly occupies a tense area that shrouds the tune’s bedrock, making phrase choices just to the side of what one would expect.

“Moment’s Notice” starts with a squawk and, while the tune itself is more clearly outlined, the absolute individuality with which Halperin approaches it is staggering, as though the Father, Son and Holy Ghost had all been wiped away (cue Willson’s absurd bop-to-backbeat approach for a final death knell). Lest one think this set is all some sort of Freudian head trip about desecrating the compositional “specificity” of Coltrane’s work, it’s rather a highly-charged blast through the master’s songbook by three players who have an extraordinary amount of individual things to say and can find other harmonic areas to occupy from Trane’s blueprints

BOB GLUCK/JOE GIARDULLO/CHRISTOPHER SULLIVAN

Something Quiet

(FMR)

Known primarily as an electronic music composer and instrument maker, Bob Gluck is also a pianist of some renown; Something Quiet is his second disc of improvised music for the British FMR label and joins him in a trio with soprano saxophonist Joe Giardullo and bassist Christopher Sullivan on six slices of group music, and a take of Herbie Hancock’s “Dolphin Dance.” The precedent in this drummer-less trio might be a revamped/skewed variant on the Jimmy Giuffre/Paul Bley/Steve Swallow unit of the early 1960s, but obviously this music is of its own stripe and not altogether as quiet as its title implies. “Dolphin Dance” is a duo for piano and bass, focusing on Gluck’s lush, strident approach while retaining a gently atonal ambiguity around rhapsodic chords, supported by delicate, woody pluck in both rushes and thumping shades.

“October Song” begins with condensed needling, Gluck stabbing at Giardullo’s reposed statements before heading off in a clangorous run, a whorl of motion that recedes as quickly as it appeared, moving into a play of refracted light and supple interlocking, cubic details. As with most of the compositions on this disc, it segues into another area of feeling, extrapolating from section to section. “Going Away” focuses on an upward harmonic movement; Giardullo, whose soprano has a whole, soft sound, climbs through breathy intervals and, in a way, acts as a winsome foil to the pianist’s more architectural phrase concepts. Sullivan’s bass, mostly played pizzicato, offers robust, chugging counterpoint to the kaleidoscopic foraging of reed and keys. The trio’s sparse weight can fill in, expanding into spiky orchestral mass in “Still Waters” as Giardullo howls over the top, the piece culminating in a meaty bass workout. Something Quiet is full of wide-open and often extremely intense music from this colorful chamber trio, and it is well worth seeking out.

IDEAL BREAD

Transmit

(Cuneiform)

When filling out the umpteenth best-of-year list for 2010, one category that I consistently failed to fill out was “best tribute” or “best repertory band.” The main reason for this is because I don’t really think about repertory bands, although as any jazz follower would, I find new interpretations of old chestnuts and lesser-covered tunes to be rewarding. A group like Ideal Bread, which was formed in 2006 to interpret the music of soprano saxophonist and composer Steve Lacy, doesn’t feel like a tribute project. Of course part of that is because there is no soprano present (saxophonist Josh Sinton is a baritone player), and until now what we thought made Lacy’s compositions distinctive was the presence of his curling, piercing-yet-warm straight horn. But most of what’s happening here is that Ideal Bread have made these tunes so much their own that it’s hard to think of this as just a “repertory” situation – they’re a band playing someone else’s compositions and inhabiting them honestly, beautifully, but they also have their own strong personality as a unit. The quartet is rounded out by trumpeter Kirk Knuffke, bassist Reuben Radding and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, and Transmit is their second disc to date, featuring seven Lacy tunes from the obscure to the more well-known.

One of the most intriguing pieces here is their rendition of “The Breath,” a tune that’s fairly frequently revisited throughout the Lacy discography, albeit in a much sparer version than what’s presented here. Sinton noted in an email that “‘Breath’ outlines a Major 7th chord, a fairly static object that implies only itself and its own tonality. It can go somewhere, but it needn't. This static hum is often an area for pensive reflection in the program of a Lacy concert or album, however the quartet version has an uncanny similarity to Bernstein’s composition “Somewhere” as performed by trumpeter-composer Bill Dixon and tenorman Archie Shepp on their 1962 Savoy record. Sinton said he hadn’t heard the recording, and puts it this way: “‘Somewhere’ is simply an ascending minor 7th, but given the harmonic context, it is clearly outlining a dominant 7th chord, which is a fairly dynamic harmonic object that immediately implies motion to another chord/place. They need to go somewhere. Creatively I hear the opening gesture of ‘The Breath’ as a literal exhalation of the breath whereas I always seem to hear ‘Somewhere’ as longing or reaching.” Being a non-musician myself, I felt an analogous audible connection in the arrangement, without thinking of the specific structural/formal concerns. Thematically the horns circle delicately, wispy whirligigs and upturned winks on a measured, soft-shoe swing. Bari huffs and mouthpiece twitter couple with Dixonian gulps and wails in the ensuing improvisation, shaded by a halved pulse and retaining a song-like outline before the final upward rejoinder.

“Papa’s Midnite Hop” is from Trickles (Black Saint, 1976), and Radding and Fujiwara give the throaty shuffle of Kent Carter and Beaver Harris a crisp update. Sinton’s baritone is burly as hell, navigating a bluesy bar-walk sensibility that curiously extrapolates from Harry Carney into Roswell Rudd (trombonist on the tune’s original version), while Knuffke inhabits a high-and-winsome chattiness. Meanwhile the sharp, repeating tap of “Flakes” is given a nearly pattering groove, the rhythm section alternating skates and shoves behind the trumpeter’s poised swagger; Sinton’s solo moves through athletic runs, syrupy odes and garish circular-breathed strokes in concert with Fujiwara’s shimmering, fleet rumble. More than just a covers band, Ideal Bread are one of the most invigorating contemporary jazz quartets working. Recently at New York's Salt Space, they performed some of the most “far-out” Lacy music from Forest and the Zoo (ESP, 1966), Roba (Saravah, 1969) and Lapis (a solo-with-overdubs classic recorded in 1971 for Saravah). It’ll be interesting to see what facets of Lacy-dom they workshop next.

IVO PERELMAN

Near to the Wild Heart

(Not Two)

Brazilian-born saxophonist Ivo Perelman is a player who exploits very well the vocal/expressive link between the reed and string families – one of the more pertinent arguments for a link between him and fellow South American tenorman Gato Barbieri, with whom he has (not always accurately) been compared. Perelman also doubles on cello, and some of his most rewarding discs have featured ensembles heavy on the presence of arco swirls – like those of cellist Daniel Levin and bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg (on Soulstorm, Clean Feed, 2010). Near to the Wild Heart is an eight-part suite of improvisations for string-reed trio, joining him with bassist Dominic Duval and violinist Rosie Hertlein.

A significant portion of Perelman’s work has been in power trios, where his throaty split-tone tenor can hurtle with the added force of bass and drums (one of the best examples was his group with William Parker and Rashied Ali). But this is different music, not easily compared with the tropes of tenor and rhythm. Even with the muscular interplay of Duval’s gestural bowing and the cottony arrowheads of Perelman’s tenor ostensibly signs of a certain kind of kinetic, there’s a sort of manic post-Webern scrabble that pervades these duos and trios. Hertlein is a major factor in the improvisations’ strength; I’d only heard her work with clarinetist Rozanne Levine’s Chakra Tuning, and the combination of deft classical language with wordless vocals and triple-stopped, bowed whoops and hollers sails over keening tenor and bass thwack with an otherworldly energy. The third movement is a particularly fine example of this, jarringly flitting between poles of liquid femininity and masculine rumble. Violin, voice and high-pitched tenor shriek become a blur as Duval works up a cloud of horsehairs underneath in dense, sweaty motion.

Curiously, the final minutes of the piece find Perelman working out a delicate, almost languid phrase pattern, having its origins in the Shepp/Webster school (even if the string interplay doesn’t match its direction one for one) and culminating in a reference to Charlie Haden’s “Song for Ché” or a similarly keening Latin American folk melody. There is a robust, songlike quality that emerges in other fragments throughout, melody and rhythm spontaneously becoming foregrounded as pure-sound/action canvases fall to the side. A sinuous dance-walk gains ground in the fifth section, for example, first with trudging tenor and bass before Hertlein takes flight over a deft, full walk, finally intertwining with Perelman in a ballet of paired strokes. At turns viciously powerful and delicately gorgeous, Near to the Wild Heart is some of the most compelling string-driven free music I’ve heard in ages and as one who has not always been shaken up by Perelman’s music, I’m already being sent back to the shelves for more.

ELLIOTT SHARP
Spectropia Suite
(NEOS)
Abstraction Distraction
(d'autres cordes)

Composer and multi-instrumentalist Elliott Sharp is a curious figure, and one whom I haven’t always cottoned to as a listener or a reviewer. He’s a guitarist of extraordinary ability, sure, and he’s able to crane a diverse range of phrase structures out of custom-made and standard guitars, all within an improvisational structure that, while not entirely “warm” or “forgiving,” nevertheless remains clear in intent. But above that intent is the presence of a remove that, time and again, has always made Sharp’s work difficult to inhabit – electronic processing and sheen cloud over the mistakes and references to tradition that, even among the “freest” of improvisation, gives it an essential sense of humanity. That’s not to say that Sharp and his work aren’t valuable parts of our musical-artistic climate, just that I personally have always found him difficult to enjoy. Finally watching him perform on film did unlock some of the person behind the music, as has reading some of his writings, but for me that’s been limited to his work as an instrumentalist.

As a bandleader/composer he draws from a de-centralized, post-structural grab bag straight out of the New York art scene of the 1980s, and it is here that his group music resides. Spectropia Suite is film music, and brings Sharp together with a cast of major improvisational figures – not improvising – such as alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, trombonists Steve Swell and Curtis Fowlkes, pianist Anthony Coleman, bassist David Hofstra, cellist Tomas Ulrich and others. Sharp himself plays guitar, woodwinds and has processed the entire thing to retain a certain noirish appearance that was necessary for the visual element to adhere. That said, it does stand on its own in some instances, as events like a collision of twanging, scumbled guitar and tapping din with laptop-induced fuzz seems divorced from a greater unseen action, while massive dissonances imbue snatches of cabaret-jazz and atonal string quartet music alike. The real ringer is Debbie Harry’s rendition of “This Time That Place,” which is altogether reminiscent of some of Lydia Lunch’s damaged torch-singer pieces; though not quite as full of personality, its mere presence is enough to get one to sit up straight. More interesting is the solo piano version, “This Place That Time,” with Coleman’s airy poignancy a fair shake deeper thana gravelly voice and a somewhat dead arrangement. Mostly, the music here is difficult to get in touch with because it all seems designed toward a purpose other than itself, whether film or concept, and if cohesiveness is part of that vision, it certifiably suffers.

Abstraction Distraction is music for saxophone and electronics and follows a similarly dissonant architecture to that of his group music, wrapping husky reed work in a sheen of electronic whir and reverberating drum samples to the point of near burial. However, in practice it‘s much more interesting work. On “Limbium,” Sharp’s tenor playing is a genuinely engaging, throaty post-Ayler/Shepp exploration without “exploring,” a signifier of emotional evisceration pushed further underground by over-the-top rhythm samples, loops and long, swirling tones. Again, one is faced with the fact that this music is a constructed environment for detached humanity, techniques of freedom being codified and subsumed into “sound art.” It’s perplexing because clearly what’s exhibited here is saxophone playing that, on its own, would be quite engaging, but it’s instead a tool to be used toward disembodied statements. This disconnect can, at times, be forceful enough to objectively stand on its own as a “thing” – “Boot the Plute” is quite interesting in its malleable abuse of gutbucket tenor playing through electronic demarcation. While not as wincingly left-field as Alfred Harth's Cassiber or as naked as Dickie Landry's saxophone delay (indeed, the closing “Manaus” is akin to a mangled Landry soprano piece), Sharp's reed-and-synthesizer work is rooted in difficult contrasts. That's not to say that there aren't moments of unity, though, as clattering pads meld with processed glitch on “Vortex Field” and clouded multiphonics coalesce into a ghostly trio with sampled electric bass, drums and plugged-in sounds on “Blown Away.” Sharp's music is confounding, to say the least, but not without certain artistic necessity.

JASON STEIN’S LOCKSMITH ISIDORE
Three Kinds of Happiness
(Not Two)

Three Kinds of Happiness is the third disc and first on the Polish Not Two label to feature Windy City-schooled bass clarinetist Jason Stein’s Locksmith Isidore, a trio with bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Mike Pride, on eight of the leader’s tunes, which are becoming less about exploring instrumental capacity and more about negotiating motion and group unity. After all, Stein isn’t a doubler – he only plays the bass clarinet, and aside from Luxembourg’s Michel Pilz and Germany’s Rudi Mahall, I can’t think of too many artists who are such dedicated specialists on the instrument. He’s really honed his lateral phraseology, which initially differentiated him strongly from such clear predecessors as Eric Dolphy (he’s most indebted to the reedman’s sound on the bluesy “More Gone Door Gone”) and Michel Portal – now it’s utterly clear when he hunkers down into the bowels of semi-introverted texture.

The boppish “Crayons for Sammy” that is our entrée into Locksmith Isidore’s world is a sure sign that this is a different record for Stein and his mates, whimsical and fleet-footed swing somewhere between Klezmer and West Coast jazz distinctly reminiscent of clarinetist Perry Robinson’s early tunes. There’s a dry push-pull to “Cash, Couch and Camper” with Roebke’s calloused warmth a decided anchor to the trundling, leaky swagger of Stein’s horn and Pride’s perfectly-placed bombs. This is, of course, new music, but it’s hard not to think of, say, a Wilbur Ware-Bruz Freeman combo out of Chicago’s past (Pride is a New Yorker if one wants to split hairs) when hearing the choppy swing of the rhythm section on a number like this. Stein is such a distinct player that the natural response should be to focus on what he’s bringing to the table here, but then again this group isn’t called the Jason Stein Trio, and as he enters into what could be a burbling auto-dialogue that takes Dolphy at his most guffawing and smooths over the intervallic leaps, Roebke and Pride keep a steady if diffuse time around him on the agit-ballad “Little Bird.”

While occupying a lower end of the spectrum, the “Straight Up and Down” inebriation of childlike walking phrases in the first half of “Ground Floor South” are Steve Lacy-ish, as is the crystalline, Monkish wistfulness of its second half. While blurring the tonality and phrasing of what might be deemed acceptable in mainstream jazz, Stein’s soloing here is as beautiful as it is mercurial. When the trio takes things “out,” it isn’t without a sense of where the “one” is; gritty subtonal arco peals offset by clattering rimshots and reedy gurgle retain pulse and togetherness, only to erupt into a slick ramble on “Arch and Shipp.” The closing “Miss Izzy” hearkens back to the first Locksmith Isidore date, 2008’s A Calculus of Loss (Clean Feed, with Kevin Davis on cello), and was recorded live at Krakow’s Alchemia. It’s by far more brazen and Stein’s phrasing recalls Willem Breuker at his most reed-bitingly bullish, bass and drums pouring on a clumpy funk as the leader winds down to conciliatory purrs. Locksmith Isidore is, quite simply, a bad-ass modern jazz trio assembled by one of the strongest voices on the bass clarinet to emerge in recent years.

Four Decades of Spiritual Unity - Space and Albert Ayler

2011-02-18T16:23:00.008-06:00

Recently, I was lucky enough to be invited to write the liner notes for a new recording from tenor saxophonist Louie Belogenis that features drummer Sunny Murray and bassist Mike Bisio. It’s called Tiresias and it will be out soon on Porter Records. In talking with Louie, a major point that came up was how important Albert Ayler’s 1964 ESP-Disk recording Spiritual Unity (with Sunny Murray, drums and Gary Peacock, bass) was, as a way of expanding the tenor-bass-drums trio approach toward a sense of group listening. He says the following: “Bisio and I listened to that record intensely; Ayler switches back and forth between dusky and bright, or open and more condensed actions, but it always flows. A lot of free music is process, versus classically-structured event-oriented music. To that end, Sunny changes things up immensely all of the time, because he’s an astute listener, prodding and suggesting to the soloist all kinds of ideas – he’s playing with you as much or more than he’s giving you a carpet to play ‘on’.” This Ayler recording is often thought of as, following Sonny Rollins’ piano-less trios of the late ‘50s and Coltrane’s “Chasin’ the Trane,” a real formative piece in the “power trio” mold. My thinking has become – and it wasn’t always this way – that Spiritual Unity is the anti-power trio, or at least its power isn't only because of its full force. It’s as much about group interaction and space as it is the harrowing density of Ayler’s tenor. After all, that early music was also very influential on the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (“One Two Albert Ayler”) and the AACM (the Art Ensemble of Chicago composition “Lebert Aaly”). Those are two settings for which group interaction across space and environment are paramount, and one might not expect Ayler to be crucial in their palette of influences.

Joe McPhee, the saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist, has also been suggested as a major acolyte of the Ayler school. In a 1999 Cadence Magazine interview with Robert Spencer (published 11/2000), he notes: “I know I’m associated with Albert’s music and I love it, and I’ve certainly been inspired by it, but I don’t see that my music is that close to it, in terms of sound, even. But certainly that was the direction I was aiming for when I started playing the saxophone. That’s what I wanted, was that sound. That wonderful – just filled with colors! It really excited me!” McPhee’s work in Trio X is a sparse reflection on Ayler among other things – as I wrote in a forthcoming review of their 2008 US tour boxed set (CIMPoL), “[this set] captures very well the seamlessness with which the band moves through a palette of emotions vis-à-vis theme and improvisation. McPhee can get an extraordinarily huge sound out of his tenor, and he works through lines with cascades, splashes and drizzles that explode out of folk forms, often in tandem with Dominic Duval’s pizzicato plenum and Jay Rosen’s airy, continuous crash. Obviously there’s a precedent for this music in Spiritual Unity, but Trio X does not end there – rather, this kind of improvisation is a node arrived at on their collective journey.” McPhee’s music has long been rooted in parallel actions, contrasting and unifying, and that certainly has a precedent in Spiritual Unity – Ayler’s hot tenor blur set against the independent pizzicato filigree of Gary Peacock and the disappearing-reappearing shades of Sunny Murray’s percussion. They gel into a unified field of action, but that doesn’t mean that each musician is exactly complementary – rather it’s an independent, related search for higher expression on a canvas of three.

The back cover of Spiritual Unity

The back cover of Spiritual Unity, shown at left, features a Gnostic “Y” symbol, said to represent the whole earth and presumably, in early Christian thought, relating to the Holy Trinity. Ayler himself did say, in reference to a trinity of modern saxophonists, “Trane was the Father, Pharoah the Son, and I am the Holy Ghost.” It’s pretty difficult to engage Ayler’s music on a non-spiritual level because he was such a deeply spiritual person, the self-created mythology of an old-world mystic slinging a tenor saxophone and wearing modern suits. For sure, he was perhaps a bit of an eccentric character, but most of the great creators in this music, and in art, have been a bit “out.” Leaving out his spirituality requires avoiding something that for most of is is so personal, and it’s hard to place that meaning alongside the work’s musical significance. Though the spiritual aspects carry resonance for me, it always seems like a massive issue of its own, not meant to be carried alongside the music. Ayler has been talked about as a visionary for freeing things up in certain ways, but much of the musicological analysis (I’m thinking especially of the German scholar-musician Ekkehard Jost’s chapter on Ayler in his book Free Jazz) focuses on the density of his playing rather than the sparseness of it, or for that matter the multivalent way in which the Ayler trio worked through ideas. The music’s anti-systemic (spiritual) way of being is a revolt against some analysis, but the in touch and inquisitive mind naturally wants to figure out where the clear implications that have ensued actually come from – “I see the tree, but where are the roots and circles?”

I can’t exactly recall what I heard when I first listened to Spiritual Unity, but I can remember how shocking it was to hear Albert Ayler on record. I’d heard Coltrane, Eric Dolphy, Miles and Wayne Shorter (and apparently my dad played me Sam Rivers and Anthony Braxton when I was a baby), but nothing prepared me for the huge and garish sound that came out of that man’s saxophone. And I wasn’t even able to hear it live, which must have been quite a shock. My first Ayler record was Bells (ESP, 1965), a larger-group affair which I have a soft-spot for, but it didn’t take long before the trio and quartet music (with Don Cherry) entered my consciousness. My perception of it certainly has changed, as it sounds natural and swinging to my ears now, and that’s partly because it’s set in relief to – dare I say – more superficially “challenging” or “difficult” music. That’s not to say that Ayler is not still a stubbornly fascinating figure or that his music isn’t an about face from how jazz is “supposed” to sound to this day. But familiarity has brought my ears to a place with it that is comforting, finger-snapping even. After all, it’s impossible for me not to feel a kinship with a music that’s so clearly based on conversation and unification through difference, and that’s part of why Spiritual Unity remains resonant. That space is important, because it lets one either fill in with one’s own ideas and experiences, or leave it there for the sake of wonder – either/any response is correct. Maybe the “big” sound isn’t only of Albert Ayler’s saxophone, but of an immense area being granted us as listeners (and musicians) to do or feel something in accordance (or discordance) with. As with any great piece of art, it’s what you do because of it that matters most.

The Jukebox Shuffles - New(er) Singles Reviewed

2011-01-25T00:03:00.006-06:00

CIRCUIT DES YEUX

Ode to Fidelity

(De Stijl)

Ode to Fidelity is the new three-song 45 from Indiana’s Haley Fohr, a torch singer soloist who goes under the name Circuit des Yeux. She’s put out two full length LPs on Minneapolis’ De Stijl already, though this newest set of pieces strikes a chord that’s a bit more direct (less willfully experimental, perhaps), and as a result, it’s quite compelling. The A-side, “Barrel Down,” is the most fully realized cut, muffled processional strums providing a framework for a vocal impulse that moves through several iterations, from Magik Markers’ Elisa Ambrogio/Myra Lee-era Cat Power into a ghostly operatic siren song, multi-tracked and swirling into the red before being overtaken by six-string scree. The flip features a riff from the minimalist gutter, a la Thalia Zedek fronting The Static, in the opening “Self Satisfaction,” followed by the shambled instrumental trance of “March with the Rich.” These days, oddball sides either seem to slip through the cracks or get too much hype, making one yearn for the days of, quite simply, a good lo-fi single, which Ode to Fidelity certainly is.

KEEFE JACKSON / FRANK ROSALY DUO

s/t

(Molk)

JOOKLO DUO

The Warrior

(Northern Spy)

If there’s ever a genre of music that hasn’t really made it to the seven-inch single format, it’s probably free jazz. Sure, Blue Note released 45s of top selling artists like Hank Mobley, Lou Donaldson and Art Blakey back in the ‘60s (there were even some sweet red vinyl Kenny Dorham singles floating around), but that music had a danceable relevance in clubs and with Black radio DJ’s. The format wasn’t too well-suited to the avant-garde at the time, considering statements were often album-length at least. Sure, ESP had a couple of odd out-jazz singles for some reason (a Paul Bley Trio and an Ayler/Ornette split!), as did FMP and the ever-irreverent Dutch label ICP, and even stranger was a jukebox variant of Coltrane’s Ascension. But these were extreme oddities.

Cut to now, as the 45 has gone through a period of being the de facto medium for punk rock and outsider music, the concept of an avant-garde single isn’t quite as strange. Regular partners Chicago drummer Frank Rosaly (Scorch Trio, Dave Rempis Percussion Ensemble) and tenorman Keefe Jackson (Fast Citizens) cut a hand-printed example on white wax in 2009 for the Windy City indie label Molk (though it was recorded in 2005). More than anything this record is a testament to the concision apparent in modern creative music, as the pair are able to make engaging, spry statements that aren’t cut short by the format, fitting limber Kalaparusha-like tenor flint and Rosaly’s dry tidal waves into two four-minute sides. The saxophonist’s jaunty composition “Word Made Fresh” takes up the A side, heel-digging yelps and smooth, eliding phraseology in direct counterpoint to the drummer’s chunky melodicism. A bent, keening purr against the push of mallets and churning patter makes up “Real Absence,” an improvisation credited to both musicians.

Jooklo Duo consists of reedist Virginia Genta and drummer David Vanzan, and their work has appeared on a number of instantly-out-of-print LPs, cassettes and CD-Rs that have captivated the New Weird Europa environment. The Warrior is the first Jooklo-related material to be released on a US label (the young Northern Spy Records is run by former ESP staff), and is supposedly going to be followed with a full-length. That’s a good thing, because the pair takes the screaming buzzsaw over-blowing of Duo Exchange (Rashied Ali-Frank Lowe, Survival, 1973) as a starting point, reed-splitting tenor micro orgasms slicing the air as fractured rhythmic brutishness stokes the flames on “Primitive Power.” The flip continues at the same absurd pace, clattering metallic polyrhythm supporting reedy vomit in both tenor and soprano variants, as well as clarinet. Like Arthur Doyle, the reed instruments are channels for expressive ferocity, and their precise nature seems unimportant beyond slight refinements on extreme action. The Warrior plays at 33 rpm, extending by a couple of minutes each slice of brain-scraping and smoke-clearing exorcism. Good shit.

Ed. Note: Northern Spy honcho Adam Downey has informed me that the Jooklo single is indeed a 45, though it has been sounding great at 33 rpm (the labels don't specify). This reminds me of the scenario where a friend had Coltrane's Black Pearls LP on 45 by accident and declared what a smokin' bebop record it was... anyway, try it at both speeds if you dare!

TALIBAM!

Cosmoplitude

(ESP-Disk’)

As mentioned above – and contrary to some of the literature out there – Cosmoplitude is not the first ESP-Disk’ 45, though it is the first to be released since their reemergence at the beginning of the last decade. At any rate, these two tracks exemplify the side of Talibam! (Matt Mottel, keyboards/vocals and Kevin Shea, drums/vocals) that’s keyed into the context of absurd dance-rock, as opposed to their more Zappa-Ra-noise leanings. “Cruisin’ the Cookie Isle” seems like an outtake from ESP debut Boogie in the Breeze Blocks, even reusing a police operator sample, and merges it with a hyperactive dance-party train wreck. It’s a fun and upbeat piece, but even Talibam! at their most Ritalin-addled still benefit from a longer-form setting to explore their ideation overflow. “Cosmic Attitude” is comparable, albeit a slower repetitive jam with Casio gloop pooling around electronic and acoustic beats, occupying a space of bleary-eyed early morning, semi-vacant dance floors and piss-soaked bathrooms. It’s a world that Talibam! may or may not be familiar with, but their mockery is one of the cruelest evocations of that setting I’ve heard. Cosmoplitude may not contain the most compelling music in their discography, but as with other Talibam! releases, it makes no claim to be anything beyond wry paradigm-changing gyration.

Music Briefly Reviewed: January 2011

2011-01-11T17:35:00.001-06:00

The first (second?) installment of 2011 reviews probably should have been run late last month, but preemptive holidays and general malaise shoved them into this month. Hopefully you find something here that's both enjoyable and a good way to spend that leftover holiday dough. Support independent music and media!

PIERRE FAVRE/SAMUEL BLASER
Vol à Voile

PIERRE FAVRE/PHILIPP SCHAUFELBERGER
Albatros

(Intakt)

Along with pianist Irène Schweizer, percussionist-composer Pierre Favre is one of the central figures in Swiss jazz (not to mention European improvisation as a whole). His early recordings supported the Italian guitarist Franco Cerri; later in the 1960s he worked with Schweizer, bassist Peter Kowald, saxophonist Evan Parker, trumpeter Manfred Schoof and others involved with the nascent “new music.” Forty-two years after his first date as a leader (Santana, PIP, 1968), Favre continues to be an important name among the masters of European improvised music. Two recent Intakt discs capture the percussionist in duets with young but important Swiss improvisers – Vol à Voile (“Gliding”) joins him with trombonist Samuel Blaser, while Albatros finds Favre and guitarist Philipp Schaufelberger working together. Both musicians are also members of Favre’s larger groups.

Blaser splits his time primarily between New York and Berlin; across these seven improvisations and two of the trombonist’s compositions, he shows himself to be, along with Joe Fiedler, one of the keepers of the multiphonic flame since the death of Albert Mangelsdorff in 2005. Far from such trombone-percussion precedents as Gunter Christmann and Detlef Schönenberg, the Favre-Blaser duo puts forth an elegant, meaty sense of motion, deftly humming blats and graduated peals ensconced by Favre’s punctuated clang and brushy swing. “Franchement” is a fine example of the pair’s interplay, crisp ride taps and rumbling polyrhythms a gradated field for Blaser’s bugle flicks and subtle tempo shifts. Favre’s language is so well-developed, especially through solo-exploration/composition, that in some instances it seems as though Blaser is chiefly responding to the percussionist’s structured rhythm. Blaser’s conservatory tone and controlled charge certainly carry enough kinetics themselves, however, to spur Favre into detailed thrum and plodding gong-and-bass landscapes. While the recording’s dynamics tend to be lateral, textural spins rather than vertical pyrotechnics, Vol à Voile remains an excellent slice of duo improvisation.

Schaufelberger has worked with Favre and fellow Swiss drummer Lucas Niggli since the 1990s, appearing in both improvised and contemporary classical contexts. His approach to the instrument offers curious rhythmic counterpoint to Favre, low- to middle-register repetition and spiky, cyclical forms drawing, presumably, from West African influences not dissimilar to the drummer’s areas of study. Courtly jabs imbue “Pino Caro” (like many of the tracks here, rather brief at a hair over three minutes), Favre decisive yet sparse in a bobbing meter as Schaufelberger’s lines tread similarly ambiguous territory. “Seeing” is marked by long, bowed gong tones and hanging plucks, Favre’s metallic artistry somewhat akin to disembodied feedback. Even when ostensibly atmospheric (and it isn’t always), the music on Albatros is still fraught with tension, sounds and events popping out in relief with subtle textural shift. At times airy and in other instances coiled, Schaufelberger and Favre make a well-matched pair, as though a Sublime Frequencies contemporary Afro-rock disc was being translated into the language of contemporary European improvisation. I’m curious to hear a melding of these three sensibilities – Favre, Blaser and Schaufelberger – into a trio, which could be quite engaging.

JOE HERTENSTEIN / PASCAL NIGGENKEMPER / THOMAS HEBERER

HNH

(Clean Feed)

HNH presents a trio format unique though not unheard-of in jazz and creative improvised music, that of trumpet, bass and drums. There are precedents, for sure – German trumpeter Manfred Schoof had his New Jazz Trio with bassist Peter Trunk and drummer Cees See, and Bill Dixon worked regularly in the format, especially in the 1980s. Current Dixonian torchbearer Taylor Ho Bynum just recorded a set with drummer Gerald Cleaver and bassist John Hebert (Book of Three, Rogue Art). So for sure, this group has kin though we can effectively count them on one hand. Germans Hertenstein, Niggenkemper and Heberer (drums, bass and quarter-tone trumpet, respectively) all now call New York home at least some of the time, and Heberer is probably the most well-known of the three, having worked frequently with the Instant Composers Pool Orchestra (Holland) and the Berlin Contemporary Jazz Orchestra. With the exception of Heberer’s closing “The Tolliver Toll” (for hardbop trumpeter-composer Charles Tolliver), all of the pieces work together as an uninterrupted suite, with the trumpeter and the drummer sharing most compositional credits.

Heberer has always been an interesting force in the ICP Orchestra – younger than most of the band, his steely classicism and erudite concentration sticks out from the painterly theatrics of figures like Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink and Tristan Honsinger. That’s probably part of the point, as much as the group was a collision of personalities as well as musical-historical impulses. He’s in good company here, as Hertenstein and Niggenkemper retain loose, tumbling precision in cool rhythmic telepathy. In the closing moments of “Screw the Pendulum” and the short “Glulan,” Heberer’s movement is towards biting multiphonics and metallic circular chuffs, a maximum made from micro-sounds a la Axel Dorner and Nate Wooley. He takes a crisp, Baroque tone and teases it with barbed blats, then lilts poignantly over spare tom flecks and pizzicato mapping in the boppish “Paul’s Age.” Sharp, gutty maneuvers from Niggenkemper’s bow alongside Heberer’s valve highlights, shrikes and pirouettes outline an improvisation on “Doin’ the Do,” which cycles into a taut, vamp-heavy tune halfway through. Enough can’t be said about the toe-tapping swing of Hertenstein and Niggenkemper – the drummer has the subtle complexity of an Ed Blackwell, able to patch infectious rhythms into the most abstract of group improvisations. HNH is definitely the kind of hip little record that might easily pass one by (especially in the vast Clean Feed catalog), but it’s well worth a second look.

HUMANIZATION 4TET

Electricity

(Ayler)

Austin, Texas, though considered by some to be the Live Music Capital of the World, it isn’t exactly a hotbed for jazz and improvised music. So a May 2009 performance by this international quartet featuring members from Lisbon, Portugal and Dallas, Texas at the city’s Salvage Vanguard Theatre came as quite a pleasant surprise. Representing the Iberian Peninsula are guitarist Luís Lopes and tenorman Rodrigo Amado, while the sibling rhythm section of bassist Aaron and drummer Stefan González (the progeny of Dallas-based trumpeter-composer Dennis González and 2/3 of Yells at Eels) make up the unit’s other half. When performing, Lopes stands or crouches, delicately smudging phrases and creating small, haranguing cells in a mixture of spattered flecks and feedback/distortion. His tone is rather thin, and he draws from a vocabulary aware of Ray Russell, Stefan Jaworzyn and Rudolph Grey, except quite absent much of their pyrotechnics and rather skewed toward choppy condensation.

Much of what made the group’s music attractive on their Clean Feed debut is present on Electricity, the follow-up on French label Ayler Records. Whereas the previous disc was made up solely of Lopes’ compositions (and therefore it seemed like Humanization 4tet was predominantly his project), Electricity also sports excellent tunes by Amado and Aaron González on a pretty equal numeric footing with the guitarist’s. Amado is a consummate tenor saxophonist, albeit one who still isn’t well-known on the international stage. One could easily make the comparison of Archie Shepp drawn through Ken Vandermark, but Amado’s tone is softer and his phrasing far less blustery, his peals wrapped in care and delicacy. The González brothers are an extraordinarily tight, telepathic rhythm section and maintain pliant, chattering grooves around wiry, staccato tenor/guitar improvisations and funereal lines. The bassist penned the opening “Dehumanization Blues,” fierce downstrokes leading into a flinty update on crime-jazz and husky, spiky motifs from tenor and guitar. Collective improvisation ensues after the jaunty, darting head of “Jungle Gymnastics,” but in this four-minute piece, the group’s empathy and constantly-directed comment (not to mention rhythmic acuity) maintain vital interest. “Procurei-te Na Noite” has a boppish bounce, distantly-hanging notes from Lopes’ guitar sliding the tune deliciously, obstinately out of tempo. The Humanization 4tet present unruly but accessible inside-outside jazz, very much worth further investigation.

INGRID LAUBROCK

Anti-House

(Intakt)

German tenor and soprano saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock has, especially through her association with drummer Tom Rainey, become a regular in the New York improvising milieu. As such, her latest group also includes Rainey, guitarist Mary Halvorson, pianist Kris Davis and bassist John Hébert, all of whom are among the leading lights of contemporary music in the city. Of the disc’s fourteen cuts, nine are Laubrock’s own, which on paper might not be all that surprising but upon hearing them, their openness seems to operate in an area quite removed from “fly shit on paper.” Overall, the saxophonist’s playing has a fuzzy slink and exhibits a penchant for bunched rhythmic gobs, sly shifts that ensure the compatibility of someone like Halvorson, and Laubrock’s group concept also necessitates that she often guides without playing. That said, her dynamic range is pretty staggering, moving from low blat to high-pitched screech, vocalizing though the horn and plying cool, boppish runs, all with a low heat that seems to encapsulate both ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ improvisational languages.

The first piece engenders a creeping quality, quickly morphing into pounding, streetwise bite as Halvorson brings out sharp distortion over hacking rhythms in a tug-of-war between density and hushed delicacy, Laubrock directing the group with pinched straight-horn shouts. Interplay between fuzz guitar and piano characterizes the improvisation “Flowery Prison Cell,” absent any saxophone and a link to the harmonic razor of the short tenor-guitar-bass trio “Messy Minimum” and the bent, choked string warble that opens “Quick Draw.” Guttural huffs, piano and percussion scrape open “Funhouse Glockwork,” which tows an interesting line between simple, repetitive events and seemingly isolated actions. The title track is a wonderfully clattering array of parallel tempi that gradually falls into its free-bop place, and offers a fine cutaway view of Laubrock’s soprano playing as well as a Davis piano solo that tugs at post-bop seams, the whole unit maintaining a compelling rotation of interplay while never flagging rhythmically. Yet as the group explores sparser regions of color and shape, the heft remains, such as in the Miró-like field of “Big Crunch,” grey areas shot through with garish, winking blobs. At just over seventy minutes, my only difficulty with Anti-House is that its length can be trying, even as the music itself is full of ideas and intent. Perhaps that’s a more general indictment of our post-LP era or the shortened attention span of this reviewer, but by the time the seasick divergence of “Betterboon” (track 11) rolls around, it feels complete. Still, Ingrid Laubrock has wrangled four New Yorkers into quite a strong team effort.

RADAR FAVOURITES
Radar Favourites

(Reel Recordings)

Prior to this first issue of their music on a typically well-done Reel Recordings archival CD, I hadn’t heard of England’s Radar Favourites – nor had probably most people. A footnote in the history of British progressive music, despite an apparently prime bit of real estate in the form of a feature in Melody Maker, the group was a quintet formed by individuals with a broad and interesting pedigree. The music presented on this self-titled disc comes from archival tapes cut in 1974, as the group never cut a “proper” LP (whether or not that means anything). Saxophonist Geoff Leigh and guitarist G.F. Fitz-Gerald were in Mouseproof (Leigh was also in Henry Cow and Hatfield & the North), while drummer Charles Hayward made appearances in Massacre, This Heat and Crass, among other bands. The group is filled out by bassist Jack Monck (Delivery) and vocalist/keyboardist Cathy Williams on three original compositions and two improvisations.

Williams’ “Umbrella Walk” is probably the most fully explored piece here, melding Robert Wyatt’s haunting vocal playfulness with gong and cymbal detail in free time, rubato minimalism and angular small-group symphonics taking over the rest of this composition’s space. Fitz-Gerald’s guitar uncoils towards the last two minutes, stretching out in wooly, fragmentary blues atop a thrashing Hayward before fading out. Leigh’s opener “Peggy Delaney’s Hothouse Tinkers” is a decidedly lilting progressive-psych theme along the lines of the first Hatfields LP. As the piece stretches out, Fitz-Gerald’s minimalist raunch collides with syrupy organ fuzz and amplified alto saxophone towards an abrupt fade. There’s an odd, punky thrift to the jam “Blues for Henry,” opening up into snatches of interplay between Leigh’s soprano and Fitz-Gerald’s guitar (echoing some of guitarist’s collaborations with Lol Coxhill) before transitioning into the “Peggy Delaney” theme and a wonderfully relaxed, lengthy six-string exploration. “Blastest” seems to exemplify the group’s penchant for high-volume electricity apparently inspired by the visuals and density of the Sun Ra Arkestra. In this improvisation, fuzz organ, synthesizer gloop and guitar skronk are brought into play with piercing soprano in a free pulse, closing with an approximation of a Terry Riley organ/flute raga. Reel Recordings deserves kudos for unearthing this intriguing (if not unequivocally successful) entry in the history of avant-progressive music.

CHES SMITH & THESE ARCHES
Finally Out of My Hands

(Skirl)

These Arches is New York-based drummer Ches Smith’s quartet, somewhat of an all-star game featuring guitarist Mary Halvorson, accordionist/electronic artist Andrea Parkins and saxophonist Tony Malaby across eight original compositions. Noted for his work with Xiu Xiu, Carla Bozulich, Trevor Dunn, Marc Ribot and Halvorson, Finally Out of My Hands is (somewhat surprisingly) Smith’s first recording leading his own group. Considering some of the musicians that Smith has worked with over the years, as well as the instrumentation, an obvious precedent exists in tenorman Ellery Eskelin’s trio with Parkins and drummer Jim Black, which tore up the Downtown scene over a decade ago. Nevertheless, this quartet does present a strong identity, starting off with the anthemic punch and cabaret-themed oddness of “Anxiety Disorder.” Malaby is a fairly straight-arrow tenor player, but coupled to the church-organ diabolicalness of Parkins’ accordion and Halvorson’s spry clusters the four-and-a-half minute tune is a veritable creative improvisational “hit.”

The title piece is rather like a quirky folk-pop tune, albeit arranged for the odd trio of tenor, guitar and accordion. It becomes somewhat hamfisted as Smith and Parkins lay down plats of frantic goop underneath steely reed and scrambled guitar forms, but would have fit interestingly into a Bay Area setting (a la The TFFTHF). Similar vibes are conjured in the tweely-titled “It rained and the tent fell down.” Apart from the songs, as clear or as sketchy as their lines might be, the group’s modus operandi seems to be filling the area between thematic statements with dense racket, though it’s also hard to say how the pieces would play out as vehicles for soloists. There are occasions where it seems like the collective improvisational direction isn’t clear, like Malaby (in particular) is waiting for a cue, which is too bad because most of what bookends these moments is fairly interesting. The idea of blending off-the-wall rock tendencies with free music isn’t a particularly new one, but Smith and These Arches do capture a contemporary zeitgeist within this idiom in a way that’s engaging and quirkily fun.

Briefly Reviewed: Four on Posi-Tone Records

2011-01-03T12:35:00.001-06:00

As the year draws to a close, with most holidays celebrated and top-ten lists submitted, the hope is that space has been left for tastes to grow and expand with new musical horizons and relationships to form over the coming twelve months. One challenge that I’ve had – and expressed here on a few occasions – is where dyed-in-the-wool jazz music fits into all of this. Despite an avowed love for historical jazz recordings as well as enjoying new music in the idiom, nevertheless the bug of challenge bites and I find myself questioning the current place of making refined statements within a timeworn linguistic structure (not that the same can’t be said for people working in the ‘free’ or avant-garde idioms).

Questioning, one must remember, doesn’t necessarily mean that a musical statement isn’t valid or engaging; rather, questioning something is a dynamic engagement with a thing or a concept. I can still find myself interested in and moved by music in the tradition while at the same time inquiring of that music’s function or value. Not coincidentally, the contemporary jazz that I find the most interesting is that which questions (in-) itself and for which expressive and structural boundaries are pushed at, even if only slightly.

Los Angeles’ Posi-Tone is one of the labels keeping close to a vision of modern, straight-ahead jazz that, while not particularly rough around the edges, remains full of surprises and engagement. Among their nearly fifty releases are discs by multi-instrumentalist and improvising composer Sam Rivers, trumpeter-composer Jim Rotondi, trombonist-composer Steve Davis (the New Jazz Composers Octet, etc.) and tenorman-composer Wayne Escoffery, alongside lesser-known or up-and-coming artists and ensembles. Not every title in their deep catalog is a winner, but in the several months that I’ve had to familiarize myself with a selection of their releases, there are a number which stick out.

Organist Jared Gold is one player whose work is impressive, drawing on the playing of such seminal figures as Larry Young and John Patton for his harmonic choices, which are often salty and slightly dissonant. On Out of Line, his third disc for Posi-Tone, Gold is joined by guitarist Dave Stryker, drummer Mark Ferber and tenorman Chris Cheek on six originals and three covers. It’s a fairly strong statement to open one’s set with a cover of a tune like Hank Mobley’s “An Aperitif” (which appeared on 1967’s Thinking of Home, first issued in 1980). Cheek’s flinty, cutting tone meshes well with Gold’s stopps-pulled jounce and steaming modal clamber, propelled by a loose stoke from guitar and drums.

Minus tenor, the trio settles into an easy lope for “Preachin’,” which despite missing hard-toned fire (and not that Cheek is particularly ‘out,’ but his phrasing and projection are unequivocally weighty), nevertheless sports fine grit and ebullience. Stevie Wonder’s “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” has openness to its groove, though one does get the feeling that Ferber’s drums could have an external push to them. His dustily tasteful propulsion/carpet is clearly part of the axis on which chunks of electric grease turn, so a little more recorded presence could balance the proceedings. There’s pregnant ballpark goo to Gold’s tone on “It Is Well,” mostly a vehicle for organ, tenor and barely-there brushes, with Cheek’s cottony minor explosions providing an interesting counter to the leader’s grinding evocations. In all, Out of Line is a solid disc with some fine grease and expansive playing, but could have been better served with a little more realization of its “in the red” qualities.

Tarbaby (winner of the “most charged band name award”) is a collective made up of drummer Nasheet Waits, bassist Eric Revis and pianist Orrin Evans, which formerly also included saxophonists Stacy Dillard and J.D. Allen. On the group’s second disc and first for Posi-Tone, The End of Fear, Allen is present as a “guest” along with altoist Oliver Lake and trumpeter Nicholas Payton. Evans has a kaleidoscopic approach to the tradition, heavily gospelized but also florid, ethereal and rhythmically crepuscular. The presence of Revis and Waits – along with the odd bits of studio chatter and samples – might seem to nod in the direction of Bandwagon redux, but there really isn’t much basis to compare Evans with Jason Moran. The trio moves deftly through “Brews,” a shifting array of reflections and expressions of the piano-trio, never losing its step or becoming overly flashy. That’s an island of pure form in a disc that does lean on conceptualism a bit – mostly clear in the use of sound-bites to shape the area around forays into dissonance like “Heads.” One would hope that they believe their music can stand on its own, free or inside, but attaching snatches of verbiage seems to unseat what otherwise is honest group playing.

“Jena 6” is pointillist, full of gradient shifts and subtle turns in its shortish length – like much of the music here, a wide range of colors and shapes are worked into and out of tracks that mostly hover around five minutes. This disc is one of the more adventurous recordings to feature Payton, and he gets a full seven minutes to stretch out around alternately lush and thrashing piano, bass, and percussion on “Hesitation.” Revis’ muscular arco, echoing an interest in players like Henry Grimes, Steve Tintweiss and William Parker, is quite well represented, and his throaty pluck helps to bolster the questing lilt at the heart of “Tough Love,” which compositionally (if not pianistically) recalls Andrew Hill. At times, one might wish that Tarbaby stretched the performances a bit lengthwise and shrunk their reliance on snatches of verbiage intended to shape our appreciation of the music’s aesthetic and social weight. Nevertheless, concision never really hurt expressive actualization.

Tenor saxophonist Brandon Wright and alto saxophonist Jacám Manricks lead two strong small-group dates recently waxed for Posi-Tone; the former with Boiling Point and the latter with Trigonometry. Wright's session features venerable drummer Matt Wilson alongside pianist David Kikoski, bassist Hans Glawischning and trumpeter Alex Sipiagin. Wright has worked with the Mingus Big Band, Maria Schneider Orchestra and Chico O’Farrill, among others. A mix of originals and standards, Boiling Point opens strongly with “Free Man,” its bright head arrangement reminiscent of incisive Blue Note 1960s dates, and something about the tune and the front line nods toward the Freddie Hubbard/Wayne Shorter team. Wright himself is a rough-and-tumble hardbop tenorman, drawing from the school of tenor playing exemplified by Joe Henderson, Tyrone Washington, Sam Rivers, Alan Skidmore and their brethren, buoyed perfectly by a hard charging rhythm section. Though on the surface such a tune can easily fall into the “revivalist bag” (and it does), one forgets comparisons as “Free Man” rockets forward. Filmic lyricism imbues the following “Drift,” explored further in Kikoski’s opening, Wynton Kelly-like cadenza to “Odd Man Out,” which moves into odd-interval Shorterish lilt once the head comes around. Wright’s husky and sandblasted tone, coupled with turns of phrase that move well outside of cookie-cutter territory, mark him as one of those rare products of jazz education (U-Mich., U-Miami) willing to actually “search” within the idiom. One can’t say enough about the importance of that impulse, as well as the presence of inventive and dynamic sidemen, making Boiling Point feel like a “band” effort.

Already a busy figure on the New York scene, Manricks is going forward with young, semi-free innovators like drummer Tyshawn Sorey and pianist Jacob Sacks to support his larger-form compositional efforts (heard on Labyrinth, available here). Trigonometry is a quirky small-group date with pianist Gary Versace, drummer Obed Calvaire and bassist Joe Martin, with trombonist Alan Ferber and trumpeter Scott Wendholt guesting on three of the disc’s ten tracks (all are originals save for a cover of Eric Dolphy’s “Miss Ann”). On the latter track, Manricks is supported only by bass and drums, moving from the loquacious theme to a soft burble and gooey cry, with odd flurried warmth to his collected tones. Some of Manricks’ lines seem like those of a classical saxophonist, but their movement is bop-informed, like a weird update to Lee Konitz’ Motion. It’s no surprise that Dolphy would be an important influence – not necessarily because both are altoists, but because Manricks is also interested in broader concepts of organization, and has employed lush orchestral arrangements to his compositions in some intriguing ways. That lushness comes through on the sextet piece “Nucleus,” which if it nods in the direction of Gil Evans, does so in simpler knots, perhaps a little more on the Graham Collier side of things. The leader’s curlicues occupy a wholly immediate world, while chordal backing keeps Manricks’ arrangements hovering in the air. “Mood Swing” is a particularly fine feature for Versace’s darting classicism as a partial framework for the altoist’s lateral sketches, implications of dark grandeur from the composer’s horn. With two fine discs under his belt, as both a composer and improviser Jacám Manricks is a player to watch, questioning the nature of his art while still holding fast to tradition.

Ear Conditioning with Tenor Saxophonist Ted Brown

2011-01-01T18:08:00.001-06:00

Perhaps there’s a simple reason why followers of creative improvisation are inspired by and have embraced the music of the school around pianist-composer Lennie Tristano. Tenorman Ted Brown, who began studying with Tristano in November 1948 and continued working with him throughout the 1950s, puts it this way: “Tristano taught me how to get as free as possible on a tune and its structure. We would practice a tune enough that it became second nature – it was a feeling more than something strict or clearly laid out.” Ted Brown is one of the lesser-known disciples of Tristano and his music, whose tone is equally allied with predecessors Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, and whose approach to improvisation is given to flights of airy delicacy and fluidity while also putting forth significant, flinty weight.

Brown was born December 1, 1927 in Rochester, New York and had the good fortune of a musical family. His father was a banjoist and four-string guitarist in a traditional jazz band, and he taught Ted to read music at age six. “I got lessons from both my father and my grandfather, and I began to play the violin in sixth grade. There was a woman who I liked from the Eastman School of Music who came to our school to teach; I started practicing three or four hours a day on violin until the eighth grade.” Brown’s uncle played tenor sax and clarinet, and it wasn’t long before an interest in the woodwind family was instilled in him – while taking violin lessons, Brown also got lessons from his uncle on the clarinet. He and a cousin, a saxophonist, began rehearsing stock arrangements to play at the school dances – dance bands had impressed him, but the absence of a violin chair had nudged Brown in the direction of the reeds. Brown’s father, a professional pilot, was recruited by the Navy following Pearl Harbor, and was eventually stationed in California, necessitating a move to the West Coast in October 1942. “By the time I got to Redondo Beach High School in the fall, all the classes had filled up and I wasn’t sure what to take. I wasn’t planning on taking music classes, but band was one of the few things still open, so I joined the school band.” The band was led by a trumpeter who also had an after school rehearsal band as well as a gig at the local country club, which got Brown into playing out at a young age.

Christmas 1942 was good to the Brown family – his father bought him a tenor and a clarinet of his own, as well as a phonograph and recordings of clarinet and tenor solos (including Hawkins’ “Body and Soul”), which his father helped him transcribe. “I got a good feel for playing solos, and it helped to be able to memorize them from records.” Brown graduated in 1945 from Long Beach High School, where he’d transferred a year earlier, and had started playing in an impressive area rehearsal band. Later that year he began playing in a big band in Huntington Beach, which afforded him lots of tenor solo spots. “I got on a USO tour of the Army bases that fall; we went up and down the West Coast. In January 1946 I was in a road band that toured bases in Texas and the Southwest, but even though the war was over, I got drafted because they’d discharged so many soldiers. My father sent me a telegram that I’d gotten my notice while I was on the road and the guys in the band were giving me all sorts of advice to help me fail my physical – staying up all night, drinking tons of coffee, pretending to be mentally ill, but none of it worked and I passed. I was shipped off to Virginia for eight weeks of basic training, but since I listed my occupation as a musician, I was assigned to Army Band Training School. It was very boring – our training was like how to go up and down a C major scale. I got to know some other musicians, though, like the Chicago saxophonist Lloyd Shad, who really got me listening to Lester Young. Don Ferrara was also there, and Red Mitchell. I first heard Charlie Parker in the Army. Warne Marsh was in another company, but we were stationed on the same base and I knew him a little then, too.” After being transferred in 1946 to the Post Band at Camp Lee in Virginia, Brown’s duties included “keeping up the library, having hour-long rehearsals and we were free on the weekends – it was very easy, so there was a lot of time to transcribe records.”

It was also during his service that he visited New York City for the first time, and saw Lester Young, Allen Eager and Bud Powell at the clubs on 52^nd Street. “Bud was playing a tune I’d transcribed, “Koko” (which is based on “Cherokee”) but he played it so fast – I’d never heard anything like it.” After being discharged, Brown went back to Southern California, sitting in on sessions in LA and San Pedro. It took a bit of work to be accepted into the Central Avenue scene around saxophonists Teddy Edwards and Sonny Criss – “they’d call these obscure bebop tunes, ones they thought I wouldn’t know. But I’d go out and buy the records so I’d make sure I knew them by the next week. It got to a point where they couldn’t call anything I didn’t know, so at that point they were cool with me.”

But New York was calling, so Brown moved there in September 1948 and immediately got a day job working a sales floor on 5^th Avenue preparing for the holiday rush. Brown’s army buddy Bob Stacy, a clarinetist, was a student of Lennie Tristano and recommended he stop by a session; that November, Brown began studying with him. “I finally found someone to answer my questions about chord changes and progressions (because my father had only taught me melodies), and I also wanted to become more confident in my improvising. Lennie convinced me that I only needed some basic information, and helped me to understand chords and rhythmic figures. After my first lesson, he told me to write a tune to bring in to my next lesson, and to write a solo that I would like to play if I could. I had to memorize these pieces, and he liked what I wrote so I had to bring something new in each week for the next two years.”

There wasn’t really anywhere for Tristano and his students to play; they’d rented studios occasionally, but in 1951 Tristano found a loft on E. 32nd St., and brought in all his high end recording equipment from his home on Long Island. “At the beginning, sessions were on Wednesday and Saturday. I played with Lennie and the drummer Al Levitt on Wednesday nights while Warne and Lee played on Saturdays. When Lee went on the road with Stan Kenton in 1952, I substituted with him on Saturday. Lennie would have another pianist there – Ronnie Ball, whom I liked very much – and he would instruct from the control room.” This was the nexus of the Marsh-Brown band with Ball, drummer Jeff Morton and bassist Ben Tucker that eventually recorded three albums of music on the West Coast. From 1952 through 1955, Brown had a lesson once a week with Tristano and made the Saturday sessions, which usually lasted until 2AM. “One night, while they were playing cards, I grabbed a pair of brushes and started playing on a snare. Lennie liked what he heard and walked over and started playing the piano – he told me to keep it up. I had a little money in savings, so I bought a snare, bass drum and a ride cymbal and began playing along with records. One night while Lennie had his stand at the Confucius Restaurant, he asked me to sub for a couple of nights while the other drummer was away. I got through it, but we played at a slower tempo. Lennie had taught me to feel the pulse of a tune in my head, and I suppose I always had a good feeling for rhythm and drummers.”

The 32^nd Street studio was condemned in 1956, forcing the end of the New York school. Marsh, Morton and Ball moved to Los Angeles to find work, and Brown, who had recently married, followed suit that year; he hadn’t seen his family since moving to New York and felt like it would be a good change. “Ronnie, Warne, and guitarist Don Overberg had a gig and Don left, so I came in and everything fell into place. We had some pretty good gigs at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach and in Hollywood. Three weeks after I got there, Warne had a date for Imperial, which came out as Jazz of Two Cities. Dates for Kapp (one side of the compilation Modern Jazz Gallery) and Vanguard (Free Wheeling) followed, with the latter released under Brown’s name because of contractual issues. “Ronnie arranged the tunes initially for two horns plus rhythm; we brought Art Pepper in as well, and Ronnie re-arranged the charts for him. I doubt Art even looked at them – he came in and of course played wonderfully.”

Marsh’s manager was pushing him toward a group with Pepper, so Ted left the band and, tiring of LA, returned to New York in April 1957 to begin raising a family. “In 1961, my day job was with a company that went bankrupt right before Christmas – I had two kids and a wife, and I wasn’t sure if I could make rent. My wife was from Massachusetts so we moved to Lawrence, Mass. and I got a job in a textile mill, which I completely hated. I read an article that said musicians made good computer programmers because of their creativity, so in 1963 I started doing night school in Boston to learn computer programming. I wanted to leave the mill, of course, but my boss – once he learned that I was studying to be a programmer – convinced me to stay because they were going to institute computers in the mill. He put me in charge of the computer department.” Music wasn’t plentiful at this time, though Brown had a gig with a trio in Lawrence and also played a little bit with the bandleader Herb Pomeroy and drummer Alan Dawson. “I was trying to figure out how to get back to New York, so I accepted a job as a computer programmer at CBS, and then once that job got consolidated, I moved around to other programming gigs in the City. My old job at the mill wanted me to come back – they doubled my salary, so I took the job, but work took more time than I realized it would, and music was out. Besides, nobody was really playing the kind of stuff I was interested in.”

In 1972, a former student who was interested in learning some of Tristano’s lines asked Brown to sit in, which got him playing again. He returned to New York in 1976 after the mill laid him off; Brown began spending time with Lee Konitz and they gigged together in New York and New Jersey, which resulted in the Konitz-Brown quintet recording Figure and Spirit (Progressive), with Joe Chambers, Albert Dailey and Rufus Reid. After more schooling to learn new programming developments, Brown worked as a programmer for Polygram until 1982, and then as a database manager for a commodities trading company. Music was becoming, once again, a major factor – in 1987, he went to Holland with pianist Hod O’Brien, playing the BIMHuis with drummer Johnny Engels and bassist Jacques Schols, and he later worked gigs with Konitz and Dutch pianist Rein de Graaff. This European live presence, though still sporadic, resulted in recordings for Criss Cross Jazz and Steeplechase, including dates with Konitz, pianist Harold Danko and guitarist Steve LaMattina. The Japanese jazz public also turned out to be rabid Ted Brown fans, which resulted in a 2009 gig at Tokyo’s famous Pitt Inn and a resultant recording. As for his current group, bassist Joe Solomon, a student of Tristano, invited Brown to a session with pianist Michael Kanan, who was very much a disciple of Ronnie Ball. “He impressed me right away; I could sense where he was, and everybody was listening and interacting. Of course, Ronnie was one of the swingingest pianists around and since Michael sounds a lot like Ronnie, it’s a great fit. Improvising in this way, when it happens and everyone is aware, is what keeps me sane and healthy.” At 83 years old, we can only hope for many more opportunities like this from Brown and his mates.

This article appears in abbreviated form in the January issue of All About Jazz New York. Images courtesy the archives of Ted Brown.

Complete Discography:

Ronnie Ball All About Ronnie (Savoy, 1956)
Warne Marsh Jazz of Two Cities (Imperial, 1956)
Various Artists Modern Jazz Gallery (Kapp, 1956)
Ted Brown Free Wheeling (Vanguard, 1956)
Lee Konitz & Jimmy Giuffre Lee Konitz Meets Jimmy Giuffre (Verve, 1959)
Lee Konitz Figure and Spirit (Progressive, 1976)
Ted Brown & Jimmy Raney In Good Company (Criss Cross, 1985)
Hod O'Brien I Hear a Rhapsody (Blue Jack, 1987)
Ted Brown Free Spirit (Criss Cross, 1987)
Lee Konitz Sound of Surprise (BMG, 1999)
Lee Konitz & Ted Brown Dig It (Steeplechase, 1999)
Ted Brown Preservation (Steeplechase, 2002)
Ted Brown Shades of Brown (Steeplechase, 2007)
Ted Brown Live at Pitt Inn, Tokyo (Marshmallow, 2009)

List of Recorded Compositions:

“Blimey” (1985)
“Dig-It” (1976, 1999, 2009)
“Featherbed” (1956, 1976, 1999)
“Jazz of Two Cities” (1956, 1987, 2009)
“Little Quail” (1956, 2002)
“Preservation” (2002)
“Smog Eyes” (1956, 1976, 1999)

Some Other Stuff - Recent Reissues Reviewed

2010-12-20T00:37:00.003-06:00

LESTER BOWIE
All the Numbers

(Nessa)

The early recordings of the Art Ensemble of Chicago are somewhat tough nuts to crack. Their first salvos were released in semi-succession by then-Chicago-based Nessa Records under the nominal leadership of principal hornmen Lester Bowie (trumpet; Numbers 1 & 2) and Roscoe Mitchell (saxophones; Congliptious and Old/Quartet). Beyond stalwarts in bassist Malachi Favors and reedman Joseph Jarman, the group (billed early on as the Roscoe Mitchell Art Ensemble) early on included drummers Robert Crowder and Philip Wilson.

When Wilson departed the group in summer 1967 to tour with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Art Ensemble soldiered on first as a drummer-less trio and then as a quartet with the addition of reedman Joseph Jarman (it would be a few years before Don Moye joined as the group's regular percussionist). All the Numbers consists of several takes of the group improvisations and compositions that made up Lester Bowie’s first LP, also the debut from the solidified AEC lineup, which would go to Paris in 1969. To produce the LP, takes were mildly edited and spliced; here, they’re presented in unadulterated form across two discs, which also made up part of Nessa’s Art Ensemble 1967/1968 boxed set from several years ago.

As the group’s approach developed into a unified sound, the ensemble integrated the languages of R&B, bop, free improvisation, modern composition, and African musics into an often-theatrical whole. Early on, the seams between such focal points were much more obvious, present in a raw, go-for-broke aesthetic. The intensity of the individual and collective statements wrapped into All the Numbers is quite startling. Bowie’s growling, sputtering drawl and cutting pre-bop brass tones, paired with Mitchell’s feral, piercing alto make a striking combination. Of course, also ever present are the little instruments, providing orchestral nuance from the beginning – you didn’t usually hear bells, tin cans and harmonicas in New York free jazz.

While the music is unbridled in its intensity and able to achieve extreme volume with minimal means, meditative passages of arresting detail conjure the most depth – a stately duo ballad for trumpet and bass midway through “Number 1” is augmented by twittering scrapes, vocal wails and bells. As Favors’ strums pick up steam, Mitchell engages him with a brief, lyrical flute solo (actually recalling Nicole Mitchell), before resuming percussive clatter and yelps. Piquant, nearly saccharine alto tones dovetail with Bowie’s long brass lines amid halting, wound pluck, Mitchell unraveling longer sounds into haranguing staccato collisions and serrated brays, obliterating pensiveness with garish violence. Favors’ meaty, taut pizzicato is the primary rhythmic guide for this music, echoes of Jimmy Garrison and Gary Peacock in both his unwaveringness and dexterity, while he maintains a healthy swing and beautiful tone. The mishmash of dirge and Rip/Rig/Panic in the theme of “Number 2” might not be so carefully plotted without his bowed, metronomic sensitivity.

The quartet tracks – three versions of “Number 2” (which also gets the trio treatment) bring an only slightly thicker palette to the proceedings – Jarman’s additional reeds and percussion are certainly crucial to an orchestration of contrasts and give the piece a little more flesh. There’s an anarchic streak to his playing; Jarman's clarinet leaps from woody tension to volatility in a few short moments, sharply divergent from Mitchell’s delicate breaths. Bowie and Mitchell surely have that same element of “dangerousness” in their playing, but it seems much more controlled and when, for example, Mitchell’s phrasing becomes seemingly unbound, it’s still within a clear phrase logic, developing from terse and often repeated statements into something broader than intervallic relationships. Jarman, on the other hand, provides nattering comment alongside crushed brass while Mitchell is crisply unhinged on the opening minutes of “Number 2 (Take 7)” before the threesome become inseparable, swirling wind against Favors’ unyielding thrum. This latter twenty-minute take is closer to a group improvisation than the others, heave-ho rhythm and bent march-like rhythms engaged very loosely as Jarman, Bowie and Mitchell blast through its signposts in oblique reference.

All the Numbers provides a window into the earliest iterations of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, which entered its 43^rd year of existence in 2010 despite the absence of Bowie, Favors (who passed in 1999 and 2004, respectively) and Jarman’s now occasional participation. Great Black Music began with a small group of individuals seeking transcendence through, among other things, rebelliousness and wit. If this merger of contrasting expressions of a great tradition is not always rendered seamlessly, the music is completely honest and often startling, retaining uniqueness and prescience decades on. Chuck Nessa and his estimable label deserve kudos and more notice for keeping this music in circulation.

Nessa Records currently doesn't have a web presence, but CDs on the label are available in the US from the Jazz Loft, City Hall, and Squidco.

COMMITMENT
The Complete Recordings 1981/1983
(No Business)

There’s a curious blip in the early discography of bassist/composer/multi-instrumentalist William Parker, one which at first might not register as a crucial document of Afro-Asian improvised music, much less a need-to-have avant-garde rarity. Commitment was the name of a cooperative group based in New York which began performing out in 1978 and ceased working together in 1984; it consisted of Parker, violinist Jason Kao Hwang, drummer Takeshi “Zen” Matsuura and reedman Will Connell, Jr. Recording one self-titled LP in 1980 that was released on Hwang’s Flying Panda label, the group was a fixture in Lower Manhattan performance spaces like Verna Gillis’ Soundscape, also performing at the Sound Unity Festival, Kool Jazz Festival, and in Europe. But like many jazz records released in the early 1980s underground, its status as a self-produced document rendered it unheard by all but the most serious devotees of the music. This two-disc set on Lithuanian free-jazz devotee label No Business includes the complete Commitment LP as well as a recording from the Moers Festival in Germany, and constitutes the group’s only appearance in the digital realm.

The group initially came together via Hwang and Connell; as detailed in loft-jazz historian Ed Hazell’s liner notes (he also did the booklet for the wonderful Muntu boxed set also on No Business), the pair met at one of the jam sessions held on Sunday afternoons at the Basement Workshop, an Asian-American cultural center whose mission was to broadly serve communities of artists to enable visibility for Asian-Americans. It’s hard to quantify what exactly makes the music itself sound “Asian” though certainly Hwang’s violin work approaches tonalities quite far from those in Western music, a narrow, high and piercing sound that reminds one – perhaps – of some Chinese string music. When plucked, there’s an air of poise and the ears could hear zither or harp as well as violin. In improvised music, one is quite used to being able to parse certain African and European influences, even at the general level, while Chinese (Hwang’s heritage), Japanese/Korean (Matsuura’s), much less South and Southeast Asian influences, are harder to pinpoint. In some passages of Commitment’s music, it is rather a distinct “otherness” that prevails – tones and combinations not seemingly relatable to anything one has heard in Afro-American or European-American free jazz.

Compositionally, Commitment runs the gamut from a decidedly measured pace to frenetic free-bop. The high, lonesome whine and the scales that Hwang improvises on in “Grassy Hills, the Sun” for example, end up quite far from the prevailing Leroy Jenkins model. That particular piece’s spacious moving-through of thematic material, almost duet-like as Hwang, Parker and Connell occupy it at Moers, does have more than a twinge of AACM-music in it, specifically the early work of Anthony Braxton or Muhal Richard Abrams’ “My Thoughts are My Future – Now and Forever.” From the Moers set, Parker’s composition “Whole Grain” is a free-bop tune of the highest order; a jaunty series of cycles for alto and violin across a snappy, swinging rhythm erupt into Connell’s braying post-Ayler/post-Roscoe Mitchell worrying cells, needled by Matsuura’s dry chatter and eloquently placed bombs. Hwang’s solo is nothing short of astounding – ferocious ducking and diving, shrieks and hoe-downs paired with rusty honks and horsehair swirls. A Stuff Smith bounce edges in and Hwang doubles on a passage both strummed and bowed in a technical feat that serves expressive complexity. While traditional motifs are certainly part of this tune, its movement into spaces beyond that are nevertheless controlled marks a work of early maturity in Parker’s writing/organizing canon.

Two of Connell’s compositions open the original LP, “Mountain Song” and “The Web of Forces.” The former espouses pensive delicacy, flute and arco strings winding through a lilting theme outlined by malleted cymbals and toms. Narrow fiddle sawing and centered abstraction parallel and buoy Connell’s thin breaths on this brief, measured piece. Halting, chunky rhythm and bundled keen on the latter are a nod to composer-pianist Horace Tapscott, with whom Connell studied, though the quartet is quickly off to a run, heel-digging triple-stops leading into uncorked alto skronk, Matsuura’s floating amalgam of Klook, Elvin and Max providing a cooking anchor to front-line freedom. The drummer also gives a grounded energy to the precarious swirl of bowed violin, bass and alto clarinet on Parker’s unsettling tone poem “Famine.” When the foursome stretch out, as on the two Hwang tunes that make up side two of the original album (including the aforementioned “Grassy Hills, the Sun”) and especially on much of the Moers set, room to embrace spacious textures and concise energy is taken full advantage of.

Even at its sparsest, Commitment carries with it a foot-stomping energy, the push-pull of Parker and Matsuura a forward-moving presence even in Hwang’s delicate, AACM-inspired processional themes. “No Name” is imbued ever so slightly with Braxton/Jenkins alto and violin pacing, while also seemingly a nod to the pathos-laden pairing of Ayler and Michel Sampson. The solo order follows lines of lead voice and rhythm, though concentrated subdivisions of meter offer supportive activity to the similarly coiled instant compositions of Connell and Hwang. While barely heard in their half-decade lifespan, this peerless ensemble is once again available for investigation. Those interested in the work of William Parker will especially enjoy this set, as not only does it provide early strong examples of his work, but the germinating seeds of pan-cultural influence on his later career are also quite visible.