Jazz in the Schools

In 2006, the National Endowment for the Arts put up a "classroom resource" for teachers who wanted to do a jazz curriculum. Curious to check out the party line, I investigated. Imagine my astonishment at discovering the web project was produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center (and funded by Verizon Wireless).

Why does the mugshot of Dana Gioia on the "Welcome" page creep me out as much as it does?

No matter. Down to brass tacks. Let's look at the curriculum. Hmm, it appears to be nearly identical to the Ken Burns jazz documentary! And, for that matter to just about every other "history" of jazz ever written, from the perspective of the guardians of culture. (for a very telling snapshot, check out this Lesson Objective from Lesson 1, from the Teacher's Guide: "Students will identify the major early New Orleans jazz musicians, name the various roles they played (e.g., entertainer, teacher, transmitter of cultural tradition), and be able to describe their activities and achievements." Entertainer, teacher, transmitter of cultural tradition. Man, does that have Marsalis sauce all over it or what?)

But you all know what I'm most interested in. Once you get past the King Oliver, the Louis worship, the Bix and Benny and even Parker and Diz, golly, how will this National Endowment for the Arts/Jazz At Lincoln Center/Verizon Wireless curriculum make sense of all that Crazy Experimental Freedom?

Let's go to Lesson 4, "From the New Frontier to the New Millenium," and look at the list of Major Artists. Betty Carter. Ornette Coleman. John Coltrane. Wayne Shorter...hey, hang on a second kids! We missed one! How could we have skipped Wynton Marsalis?? And the perspicacious wisdom of his quote: “Jazz is an art form,” trumpeter Wynton Marsalis has said, “that gives us a painless way of understanding ourselves.” I have a painless way of understanding how Marsalis could be listed as a Major Artist with the likes of Betty Carter, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter...it involves scrolling down to the bottom of the page and being reminded that the educational materials have been Produced by Jazz at Lincoln Center. As the Verizon Wireless guy would say, "Can you hear me now?"

Check out these "Jazz Lesson Objectives" provided for teachers:

• Students will understand how jazz reflected the political and racial turbulence of the 1960s.
• Students will learn about trends in jazz during the 1960s and 1970s, including free jazz, fusion, and neo-mainstream.
• Students will learn how jazz earned its place as a significant American art form that today enjoys the support of government programs, private conservatories, and major cultural institutions.

"Teacher, how did jazz earn its place as a significant American art form that today enjoys the support of government programs, private conservatories, and major cultural institutions?"

"Well, sonny boy, read page 4 of the essay that goes with lesson 4, "From the New Frontier to the New Millenium," of the National Endowment for the Arts/Jazz at Lincoln Center/Verizon Wireless Jazz In The Schools Curriculum."

"Well teacher, it says:

"It turned out that, while the commercial vitality of mainstream jazz was fading during the free jazz and fusion eras, a younger generation of jazz musicians was being quietly cultivated not in urban lofts or in experimental ensembles but in colleges, universities, and music conservatories. By the early 1980s, the ranks of the “neo-mainstream” movement, as this new direction in jazz came to be called, were being filled in large part by talented young musicians who had undergone a rigorous program of instruction encompassing the entire history of mainstream jazz. In 1983 and 1984—after paying his dues as a sideman with the veteran drummer Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and the pianist Herbie Hancock—a young trumpeter from New Orleans, Wynton Marsalis, won two Grammy Awards, in both the jazz and classical categories. He was a convincing spokesman for jazz, and his music balanced inventiveness with tradition, group interaction with personal expression. The publicity he earned helped launch the careers of a score of likeminded performers—Terence Blanchard, Nicholas Peyton, Geri Allen, Cyrus Chestnutt, James Carter, and Joshua Redman, among others—whom the press collectively dubbed the Young Lions."

"That's right, sonny boy....but, keep reading, it gets better."

"For the many critics and fans who had been fearing the demise of jazz, the music of the neo-mainstream movement was a welcome revival of the music’s core values. Others worried, however, that jazz was now in danger of being confined to a narrow orthodoxy that would blunt the music’s cutting edge. Their concerns would soon prove to be unwarranted, however. During the 1990s, as musicians such as Don Byron, Cassandra Wilson, Dave Douglas, Brad Meldhau, and Jason Moran—whose styles variously incorporate the full spectrum of American and world musics, from country blues to Baltic folk songs to hip-hop—joined the fray, it became clear that contemporary jazz was a big tent that could accommodate a huge variety of aesthetic approaches."

(our courageous student begins to ask what "being confined to a narrow orthodoxy that would blunt the music's cutting edge" really means, but decides against it...and reads on):

"Meanwhile, having already secured a prominent place in the academic arena, jazz began receiving recognition and support both from the government and from private foundations. In 1982 the National Endowment for the Arts created the NEA Jazz Masters program to honor individuals who have contributed to the advancement of jazz; as of 2006 more than 80 artists had received awards. In 1986, four years after the death of the brilliant pianist and composer Thelonious Monk, his family established the Thelonious Monk Institute for Jazz, which quickly became a potent force both for jazz education and for the recognition of aspiring young jazz musicians (its annual jazz competition has become the preeminent event of its kind in the world). And in 1987, Lincoln Center, New York City’s premier arts complex, added jazz programming to its lineup; less than 10 years later, Jazz at Lincoln Center, with Wynton Marsalis at its helm, took its place alongside the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic as a full-fledged constituent, introducing a full concert season, a permanent jazz orchestra, and a broad range of educational programs that reach audiences of all ages.

When, in 1997, Marsalis’s epic oratorio Blood on the Fields became the first jazz composition to win the Pulitzer Prize, the vital role of jazz in American culture in the coming millennium seemed assured. It’s true that jazz was no longer the nation’s dominant form of popular music as it had been during the heyday of the Swing Era, but in fact jazz had in some ways transcended the popular realm and had become a form of expression equal in stature to classical music, fine art, and literature."

"But teacher," says our courageous student, "I still don't understand how jazz earned its place as a significant American art form that today enjoys the support of government programs, private conservatories, and major cultural institutions?"

"Well, sonny boy, if you ask to ask, you'll never know...."

deserts, oceans, reissues

An ancient barrel (Ferocactus cylindraceus) just south of El Rosario, Baja California Norte.
Rancho Santa Ynez, near Catavina in the Central Desert. Sign by Gary Larson.

Playa Saldamando, off the toll road from Tijuana to Ensenada, with tent sites right on the Pacific. Typical of off season experiences, we were the only people camping. There are a couple hundred tent sites.

Dizzy Gillespie reissue on Prestige called "In the Beginning" now spinning. Double album with recordings from 1945 to 1950. There seem to be errors in the titles and personnel, so I'll have to dig a bit. Some tracks seem correct, including early work by Dexter Gordon, Al Haig, others. Dizzy's world is a flashing mix of adventure and entertainment. There are some funny moments of sudden transitions on here, including some discordant and ballsy big band performances followed by stuff like Oop Bop Sh'Bam.

Cut to Arthur Blythe's "Illusions," from Blythe's Columbia period, 1980. This is a Behearer selection and I can instantly hear that. I didn't catch much of what Blythe and some of his colleagues were doing in the late '70s/early '80s, as I was more focused on Cecil Taylor and the FMP stuff at the time. I was tired of explicitly composed music and suspicious of the Columbia catalogue in general. I'm deeply admiring of the playing by the personnel on here: James Blood Ulmer, Steve McCall, Fred Hopkins, Bob Stewart, Abdul Wadud. It seems funny that I thought of this music as "commercialized" at the time. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but the larger aesthetic impacts get lost in elitist judgments such as the ones I used to make with great certainty.

With the wisdom of hindsight what amazes me is that a major American label put this music out at all.

ugly beauty?

various survival analogies

the whole point to the alkaloids is to make creation possible. I mean, if you're eaten before you can set seed, you've just been an herbaceous blip.

What's reprodcutive age for an American artist? Cecil Taylor performed at Newport in '55, I think, and won a MacCarthur in 1990 (I think...it was the early '90s, at any rate).

Camouflage is important too. If your flower is too showy you can give yourself away amongst the protective grass.

The above left is a Toumeya papyracantha, probably about 20 years old. The type locality for this bizarre cactus with grass-like spines is Santa Fe. Hardly anybody who lives here knows it exists.

On the Galapagos Islands, without predation, Opuntia echios v. gigantea, which otherwise may have remained just another "prickly pear," grows into a 30 foot tall tree with a 30 foot wide trunk. It's something like a trust fund plant, or a grant recipient, or a plant with patronage.

attitude

Images...mp3's and music files in general, soon. I want to be high tech, I really do. Especially, since I don't have any recordings out or available anywhere, I want to convert old cassette tapes to digital and archive them. Funny to look at the whole pile of recordings of concerts I did and see it change to CDs after about 2000 or so.

The above represents the two main defense strategies of cacti in a harsh environment. Spines out the wazoo in the back row. From left to right: Thelocactus bicolor v. falvidispinus, Thelocactus bicolor, Glandulicactus wrightii. The front row...don't they look tasty, inviting, chewable? The stems are loaded with toxic, bitter alkaloids. From left to right: Ariocarpus kotschoubeyanus v. macdowellii, Ariocarpus fissuratus, Ariocarpus trigonus.

So which are you? Spines or alkaloids? (Not to say some cacti don't have both...)

The Kings of Jass

Paul Whiteman spinning as I write this, a collection called The Bix Beiderbecke Legend, on French RCA. These are 1928 sessions, possibly unmarketable were it not for Beiderbecke's presence. The overall effect is refined flour pancakes coated with margarine with three times the optimum syrup, except that certain spare and inventive solos briefly poke through the sucrose. Interesting to note the lead lines that Whiteman often gave to Beiderbecke and how much muscle he brings to otherwise unbelievable fluffy music. I am by no means an expert on '20s and early '30s jazz, and I know there are those listeners out there who are obssessive about these early recordings. But in comparison to Armstrong's Hot 5's and 7's, which I have heard, or Duke's efforts from roughly the same period, this is remarkably soft and genteel music. Whiteman's dense yet unswinging and predictable charts get some small part of "jazz," and the rest is treacle. The two feel is unrelenting, underpinned by the constant 4. There's an offbeat, but the main thrust of the rhythmic motif is on 1 and 3. The dotted 8th note choppiness is unrelenting and overall the phrasing is extremely tidy. The vocal numbers are nearly unlistenable. The strings goop around, providing a tiny bit of fairly tidy melisma. I wonder...if I had decided to play this music 80 years ago would I have also begun to drink myself to death?

But this music must have been extraordinarily easy to dance to. The expropriation of just enough of the more blatant facets of a "jazz" style is balanced quite skillfully with absolutely explicit and unsubtle THUMP thump THUMP thump. The proceedings are fairly well-recorded, and I assume that, relatively speaking, there was money for Whiteman and his orchestras. Is this the first example of white jazz? And did the guy really have to be named Whiteman? The music gods have a sense of humor, for sure.

There a few tracks of Beiderbecke with Hoagy Carmichael and a few of Beiderbecke's own 1930 band with the Dorseys, Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa and Peewee Russell. The Hoagy Carmichael instantly has a different feel from Whiteman. It's funkier, it hops more. But the version of "Rockin' Chair" is sullied by the minstrelsy mugging of the vocals. "Barnacle Bill the Sailor" is a manic and extremely discomfiting "novelty number." Beiderbecke's own band provides a happy go lucky version of one of those searingly ironic tunes, "Deep Down South," a paean to...well, the Deep South. In general, Beiderbecke's own 1930 ensemble recordings feel closer to Whiteman than to Carmichael's syncopation. Except for more of a two-beat feel (one TWO one TWO) and more space for some inventive solos.

When I read Reading Jazz, the anthology edited by Robert Gottleib, it struck me how much romanticization and hero-worship young Beiderbecke received from a generation of "jazz" musicians from roughly 1940 to 1960 or so. The racism inherent in many comments about Beiderbecke is glaring. One famous musician said, "Beiderbecke helped to make jazz civilized." Is this not a deflected way of saying he helped to make it whiter? I'll stand by the queasy feeling I get of "making jazz safe for The Man," and the veiled "great white hope" whistfulness behind Bix worship, despite, of course, not being able to substantiate it.

Bix hagiography also reminds me too much of Dave Douglas's recent odd comments regarding the "crazy experimental freedom" of the '60s and '70s and how improvising musicians now are "harnessing" all that. It is important for creative musicians to remember that only the most blatant ploys (or natural tendencies) toward instant digestibility result in significantly greater sales figures. "Harnessed" CEF is still CEF, and has a very high LD 50. The handful of "jazz" musicians who make any real money (and they are not "jazz" musicians, really, most often) present few if any challenges to the listening public. Even a smidgeon of "crazy experimental freedom," just the slightest hint of it, and one's career is suddenly below the radar. I often innocently pick tracks for my radio show that I am convinced are non-threatening and "inside," perfectly mainstream, and have gotten feedback that "it's just too weird for me, too noisy/strange/hyper/dissonant." The general American listening public has all the sense of adventure of Immanuel Kant.

Having waded through the enjoyably odd Bix sides, it's now Charlie Parker/Fats Navarro/Curley Russell/Bud Powell/Art Blakey, execrable recordings captured live at Birdland, June 30, 1950. Twenty years after Goldkette, Whiteman, Carmichael, Bix. Dirge-like 'Round Midnight. Crazy.

shelter, longitude, fantasy

Some days here if you stand just right, against a wall or in an outside alcove, when the sun is shining at the right angle, it's warm, like spring. You suddenly feel like you've traveled hundreds of miles south, or it's 8 weeks from now. The body goes into a strange swoon in moments like these, having been clenched against the cold or artificially warmed for months. Every cell comes alive and the energy of escape, of mad release, of being free, finally, from the limitations of winter cascades like snowmelt.

Maybe it's a moment or two like this that makes me mellow, makes me look back at a winter of carping and criticizing and wonder why I don't post more positive posts. I hear Kenny Davern and Steve Lacy with Swallow and Motian on the radio in the morning and I think "no wonder people think they don't like creative improvised music...this is aimless, wandering trash. Clever, soulless mindfuck music." I hear Branford Marsalis and company from Crazy People Music on the radio this afternoon and think "The Coltrane Quartet on a really bad night. Trane has a canker sore and Elvin's using the wrong sticks. No, it can't be Trane, not when that opportunity to burst through the fog is glaringly missed, not when the piano playing completely lacks direction or spine, not when the whole band falls apart when the tenor takes it too far away. Ah, it's Branford! Now what the fuck was the point of that crap?"

It's hard being me, stuck with my carping negativity every day, day in, day out. There's lame and lazy Freddie Hubbard on the stereo right now. Philly Joe Jones wasting his talents again. A version of Body and Soul that's a total miss. With personnel like Wayne Shorter, Cedar Walton, Reggie Workman and Philly Joe, how can Hubbard fuck up? I don't know, but he manages it.

And what possesses someone like Archie Shepp to record a bunch of duets with Neils Henning Orsted-Pedersen of Charlie Parker tunes? Just play Shepp, Shepp. Goddamn this slack and faltering. Where's The Magic of JuJu Shepp?

I keep thinking of Miles Davis in his last, most famous Blindfold Test with Leonard Feather. Here's his full reaction to the famous trio recording of Duke's Caravan on Duke/Mingus/Roach, Money Jungle:

"What am I supposed to say to that? That's ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music? It's a mismatch. They don't complement each other. Max and Mingus can play together, by themselves. Mingus is a hell of a bass player, and Max is a hell of a drummer. But Duke can't play with them, and they can't play with Duke. Now how are you going to give a thing like that stars? Record companies should be kicked in the ass. Somebody should take a picket sign and picket the record company."

This is from the Blindfold Test where he basically hates every single recording and most of the musicians Feather puts on, except The Fifth Dimension's Prologue, The Magic Garden. ("That record is planned, you know. It's like when I do things, it's planned and you lead into other things. It makes sense.") Davis has kind words for The Electric Flag and Stan Getz as well.

I can be just about that ungenerous and irrational. The Davis Blindfold Test was in June, so you can't blame seasonal bitterness for that. But I'll use it as an excuse. Elvin, Elvin, Elvin...who talked you into doing watered down afro-cuban fusion hard bop in 1973? Was it Jan Hammer and his little Moog? Just play Elvin, Elvin.

The strange thing is I like all of these recordings. Not the Branford Marsalis, actually. I can't imagine ever listening to that a second time. But Lacy is a hero of mine. Shepp's duets have a spare, muscular strength and wit. Money Jungle is gorgeous and Miles was wrong, the three of them could play together (although I think Caravan is the weakest cut). Hubbard's sides are great to relax into. Elvin's early '70s recordings are wildly adventurous and take some real risks. And give you a chance to hear Pepper Adams.

I do fantasize about being chill. About enjoying everything. About warming up, thawing out, lightening up. Maybe next month.

Cecil Taylor versus Behearer

Mwanji Enzana's blog recently featured a note on the continued interest in behearer.com, the wonderful re-accounting of (loosely speaking) "jazz" during the Dark Ages (click on the link for the timetable for the Northsea Jazz Festival, July 1982) of disco and Flock of Seagulls, etc., namely, 1970-1990. Dave Douglas, Ethan Iverson and others went into a kind of list-making frenzy, and the results are generally excellent. If I could figure out how to edit the galldurned lists by year, I would add several recordings by a major figure in American music during this period, someone whose compositional and pianistic strategies emerged in a wholly new way (on record anyway) and then went through at least two other major transitions during this period: Cecil Taylor

Not that Taylor is ignored by the Behearer project. 9 of his recordings are listed for this 20 year period. Compare that, however, to Mr. Taylor's discography for the same period: at least 25 recordings, and that's counting the 11-CD FMP 1988 marathon as one release (the FMP box set is listed on Behearer, in its entirety, as one entry, "Berlin '88.")

Taylor recordings that were essential to me during this period and that I think could easily be argued belong on the lists include:

1973- Indent, Akisakila, Spring of Two Blue J's
1976- Dark Unto Themselves, Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)
1978- Cecil Taylor Unit, One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye
1979- Max Roach/Cecil Taylor Historic Concerts
1980- It Is In The Brewing Luminous
1981- The Eighth
1984- Segments II: Orchestra of Two Continents Winged Serpents/Sliding Quadrants
1986- Olu Iwa
1990- Double Holy House

Notes by year:

1973

Indent (and its equally stunning counterpart, "Solo," an obscure Japanese release on Trio Records) heralds the "new" Taylor brilliantly. It stands in stark contrast to any of his earlier periods and makes for fascinating listening A/B-ed with "Praxis," another obscure solo piano recording, supposedly from 1968. Akisakila features unbelievable and unrelenting energy and inventiveness from a bare bones trio with Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons. Some of the most remarkable "free jazz" drumming in the history of the music. Spring of Two Blue J's is simply gorgeous.

1976

Dark Unto Themselves (sometimes erroneously called "Dark to Themselves," an error Inner City Records made that lingers) is absolutely ripping and features the buzzsaw drama of David S. Ware, ballsy trumpet from Raphe Malik, and the roiling and precise drumming of Marc Edwards. The composition is extraordinary as well, and meticulously arranged. Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) is yet another revelation in the solo Taylor catalogue, somehow managing to be a flood-like onslaught of ideas yet minimalist.

1978

Two recordings spotlighting the landmark Unit of CT, one of the greatest groups in the history of jazz: Jimmy Lyons, Raphe Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone and Ronald Shannon Jackson. The Cecil Taylor Unit is the New World Records counterpart to "3 Phasis," which is listed at Behearer. It's especially remarkable to follow the much more ballad-like swells and tidal shifts on this one. As for One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, it is, quite simply, one of the all time great albums, regardless of style, time period, what have you. It's an epic, even in its edited three record original release, clocking in at more than 2 hours. The CD resissue includes some stunning solos and duets that were a prelude. I've owned this recording since it was released and have yet to absorb it. Every time I sit with it I hear new things.

1979

The Max Roach/Cecil Taylor duets from 1979 are *essential listening* for anyone and everyone. Hard to believe this recording is not on the list.

1980

It Is In The Brewing Luminous is a gorgeous set featuring both Sunny Murray and Jerome Cooper, with particularly stunning solos from Jimmy Lyons and a great, massive yet delicate overall swing.

1981

The Eighth, originally released as "Calling It The Eighth," in edited form, is especially worthy due to the constantly surprising and sensitive interplay of William Parker and Rashid Bakr.

1984

Winged Serpents/Sliding Quadrants...How could this not be on the list as a shoe in? Relatively brief excursions featuring Taylor's indelible mark as composer and arranger. Great ensemble playing. Burnin' solos. In some ways this is a distillation of everything Taylor had done to this point.

1986

Olu Iwa is a fascinating, layered recording. It marks yet another transition for Taylor into different territory. Check the personnel: Earl McIntyre, Peter Brotzmann, Frank Wright, Thurman Barker, William Parker, Steve McCall.

1990

A new chapter in Taylor's solo approach is represented by Double Holy House. His ritualized spoken word and percussion is dubbed over solo piano. The piano atmospheres are more spacious, more explicitly bluesy, gloriously percussive and rumbling with low notes.

Admittedly this is a lot of Taylor. But one could argue that the period from 1970-1990 was his most prolific, his most unrelenting and tenacious in the face of overwhelmingly depressing antithetical forces in America. Sad that almost all of these recordings were recorded or released in Europe. But maybe including more Taylor from 1970-1990 on Behearer is some slight way to remedy that.

Wrapping up this Taylor-like, epic post, I'm spinning "The Eighth." Jimmy Lyons! I had forgotten that the proceedings are launched by a Lyons solo. The fiery and sure backing of Parker and Bakr, and Taylor's earth-rattling dialogue with Lyons: simply not to be missed.

New and Improved

The second box of vinyl arrived from my friend Emery. Now playing: The World Saxophone Quartet Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, December 1985, an '86 release on Black Saint. Somehow my ear has been tuned to pick out the now-clear separation between Hemphill and Lake, which in past hearings of the WSQ was never particularly clear to me.

The list, ones I've heard:

Oscar Peterson in Russia- two lp's with Jake Hanna and Orsted-Pedersen...more on Peterson in an upcoming post
David Murray Trio, The Hill- Joe Chambers and Richard Davis
David Murray, Spirituals- Dave Burrell, Fred Hopkins, Ralph Peterson, Jr.
Metheny/Coleman, Song X- On first re-listen, I don't like it. Can't stand Metheny's playing. Go figure.
Oliver Lake, Heavy Spirits- unbelievably gorgeous. Olu Dara playing some lines clearly influenced by Freddie Hubbard; quite surprising. More on this recording in the future too, probably.
Albert Mangelsdorff, Hamburger Idylle- with Elvin Jones, Eddie Gomez, and the unfortunate Wolfgang Dauner on piano...otherwise, killer stuff.
Albert Mangelsdorff, The Wide Point- even more killer, no piano this time; a wonderful multiphonic version of Mood Indigo

not listened to yet:

Fats Navarro w/Tadd Dameron- 2 records on Milestone
Archie Shepp and Orsted-Pedersen- Looking at Bird (duets, 1981)
Jimmy Smith, The Sermon!
Sun Ra, Nothing Is
Ronald Shannon Jackson/Decoding Society, Eye on You
RSJ/Decoding Society, Decode Yourself!
Arthur Blythe, Illusions
Dizzy Gillespie, In the Beginning (amazing looking 2 record set, recordings from 1945 and 1946)
Rashied Ali/Frank Lowe, Duo Exchange- who knew there was a Lowe/Ali duet recording?
The Genius of Bud Powell- 2 records on Verve
Duke Ellington/Ella Fitzgerald, The Stockholm Concert, 1966
Charlie Parker, One Night at Birdland (2 records, June 30th 1950)
The Bix Beiderbecke Legend, 2 records on RCA, mostly Bix early with Goldkette and Whiteman
Bill Evans, Montreux II, live 1970
Dizzy Reece, Manhattan Project- I'm not even sure I've ever heard Dizzy Reece.
Eddie Palmieri, Sueno
Eddie Palmieri, Palo Pa Rumba
John Coltrane, Coltrane Time (the legendary session with Cecil Taylor...my vague memory is it didn't really work, musically, so I look forward to hearing it again)
Henry Threadgill Sextet, Just the Facts and Pass the Bucket
The Quintet: VSOP (Hancock, Hubbard/Carter/Shorter/Williams)
James Blood Ulmer, Freelancing
Fats Waller, Piano Solos 1929-1941
Teddy Wilson, Statements and Improvisations 1934-1942
Lester Young/Roy Eldridge, The Jazz Giants '56 (2 records, Verve)
Fletcher Henderson: A Study in Frustration (4 records from Columbia, looks like it spans 1923-1928. What possessed Columbia to put this amazing set out?)
Oliver Lake/Julius Hemphill, duets "Buster Bee" on Sackville, 1978
Charles Mingus, Mingus and Duke- a 1957 performance and a 1964 performance
Freddie Hubbard, Here to Stay- one of the old double album Blue Note reissues, including Hub Cap and some previously unreleased stuff
Elvin Jones, The Prime Element- another Blue Note reissue double album; what's strange is none of the material was released before this album was put out...
Jelly Roll Morton, 1923/24, includes all of the classic Gennett recordings
Lee Morgan, The Sidewinder
David Murray Big Band, Live at Sweet Basil, Vols. 1 and 2...I was there 2 of the 3 nights, at the callow age of 23.

As with the last box, this list astounds me. I haven't included about 9 records that I have but that are in unplayable condition, replaced with pristine copies. Thank god Emery not only has impeccable taste but also took meticulously excellent care of his vinyl (as opposed to me over the years, especially a trip across the country in August with 115F temps and the resulting catastrophic warping).

I'd write more but now I'm checking out Dameron's arrangements and Navarro's lead lines.....

Talking with the QT

Quincy Troupe visits town February 15 courtesy of The Lannan Foundation and the Institute of American Indian Arts, and I'm working up a preview piece for the Reporter. I reached him at "the Historic Sundy House" hotel in Delray Beach Florida, where he's staying while participating in a poetry reading and workshop. (The Artist in America very occasionally snags these luxurious gigs...) "When would be a good time to interview you?" I asked. "Right now! I haven't even unpacked my bags, just got here, just walked in the door. I'll be here until Sunday but we can do the interview now!"

That was a surprise. I hadn't done my homework. I know Troupe from two books: the Miles Davis autobiography and Troupe's own account of the experience of working with Mr. Davis, Miles and Me. I remembered vague trumpetings (sorry) about his poetry, including that he had won the Heavyweight Slam Championship at the Taos Poetry Circus a couple of times (1994, 1995).

Usually I try to keep my "look good" happening. This time, for some reason, I heard myself say "well, I'd love to do the interview right now, but I haven't done my homework-- I've never read any of your poetry and I know you only through the Miles Davis books." (There was that other little voice, in my head, saying "what the hell are you doing?? don't say that!!" etc.).

Fortunately Troupe found that hilarious and, referring to his writing career as "schizophrenic," he launched into the interview at full steam. An hour and fifteen minutes later the proceedings temporarily concluded. I hope we can also do a prerecorded discussion of music that I can run on my radio show. The print interview will run February 14th and I'll link to it. Troupe was by turns hilarious, passionate, insightful, distractable and had all the energy of a Sunny Murray performance.

You call yourself a jazz musician?

The first box of vinyl finally arrived two days ago from my old elementary school friend, Emery. The deal is that he sends the records he has transferred to digital and I pay shipping. It's a windfall kind of deal considering the sonic riches he's tossing over my way. Like winning the lottery.

For now I'll just list and maybe make a few brief comments.

In the first box, listened to already:

The Duke Ellington Carnegie Hall Concert, January 1943 (three records)
Money Jungle- Ellington, Roach, Mingus
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra: The Ellington Suites
Duke Ellington Meets Coleman Hawkins
Other Aspects- Eric Dolphy
The Apartment- Dexter Gordon Quartet
As Long as There's Music- Charlie Haden/Hampton Hawes
Sargasso Sea- John Abercrombie and Ralph Towner
Album Album- Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition (Purcell, David Murray, Rufus Reid, Howard Johnson)

Big news: prior to this afternoon I had never heard Ellington's _Black, Brown and Beige_, which is included in a spliced version on the above-mentioned Carnegie Hall album. I had also never heard the Ellington Suites. I should go back to age 12 and redact every single time I said I was a "jazz fan" or a "jazz musician." As I've mentioned before, every time I hear Ellington now I'm blown away, and Miles Davis's statement to Leonard Feather that everyone "should get down on their knees and thank Duke" sounds more and more reasonable.

Is there a stranger album in the entire history of "jazz" than Dolphy's Other Aspects? And to add strange to strangest, it turns out the lead composition is not titled Jim Crow but Personal Statement, and is by none other than Bob James. (And the vocalist is not a woman but a countertenor named David Schwartz).

Album Album---- from the days of free-wheeling multifaceted small group jazz albums (1984) that weren't shy about enthusiasm, interesting compositions and arrangements and spirit. This is sort of a "standard" jazz album that is endlessly entertaining while at the same time taking creative risks. What the fuck happened to those?

Sargasso Sea- O dark dark dark! I had completely forgotten the moody, brooding pull this murky album had for me when I was in high school. The Sorrows of Young Werther indeed. It's also gorgeous and inventive, if somewhat leaden and/or capricious in spots.

Dexter Gordon makes me happy. So does drummer Albert "Tootie" Heath, who takes flight on The Apartment.

Also in the first box, not yet listened to:

A Love Supreme- Recorded live in concert Europe 1965
Virgin Beauty- OC and Jerry, dude! I already have this on vinyl but it's unplayable
Body Meta- this OC I also have on vinyl but it's unplayable
Ornette Coleman: Town Hall 1962- bass, three violins, cello and drums...45 years ago
Benny Carter: Jazz Giant- BC with Ben Webster, Frank Rosolino, Andre Previn/Jimmy Rowles, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar and Shelley Manne
Marion Brown: Solo Saxophone- live recording from 1977 on the megalabel "Sweet Earth Records."
Porto Novo- Marion Brown with Han Bennink and Maarten van Regteben Altena, also one I have that's unplayable and that I remember as being absolutely ripping
In the Tradition- Anthony Braxton w/Montoliu, Pedersen/Heath
The Great Pretender- Lester Bowie, one of his outings I completely missed somehow
The Third Decade- Art Ensemble
Phase One- Art Ensemble, another one of mine that got destroyed. Especially looking forward to hearing "Ohnedaruth" again.
Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village- another one I used to have that got trashed.

I think there's 3 or 4 more boxes coming. Rants, raves, revisitations and re-evaluations forthcoming...

facing the music

Another change in music criticism brought about by the internet: you might just invite a rebuttal from the musician. On the freejazz.org site (see sidebar, look for post Unity: A Lack Thereof-New Year's Eve 2006, William Parker and Friends. Check out the 117 comments so far....), Dr. Yusef Copeland wrote a negative review of a live show featuring William Parker, Roy Campbell and others. Lo and behold, Mr. Campbell took the time to wade into the fray. (My grandfatherly advice to Campbell was to quote William Blake: "The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow." Wasn't that clever of me?)

This sort of thing may have happened all the time on the NY scene, for example, but there's something interesting in the breakdown of a wall that often stood in public-- that between critic and musician. Who knows how many times musicians have decked writers outside the Village Vanguard or wherever, but the debate rarely got conducted publicly.

On the internet, for example when I post here, I'm aware that whoever it is I'm writing about might see it. The only change that brings about is for me to take responsibility for my opinions, to avoid the slimy ad hominem and the insinuated backhand, formerly in great currency among jazz writers. (a writer on Miles Davis's On the Corner when it was first released, in a two star Downbeat review: "I hate to think that anyone would be so easily pleased as to dig this record to any extent.")

Everyone's a critic....

Literally, according to Brian Raftery of Idolator.com, in an NPR story by Jacob Ganz from January 5 with the headline "Voice Music Poll Undermined by Internet":

"I feel like it makes a little more sense for an online property to be doing this," says Brian Raftery, an editor of Idolator.com, a blog in the Gawker media network. In November, Idolator announced a critics poll of its own, to be called Jackin' Pop. Raftery and his co-editor Maura Johnston -- like many bloggers -- both work from home. In a Manhattan cafe, just a dozen blocks away from The Village Voice offices where Harvilla will put together Pazz and Jop, Raftery argues that the web has changed the very nature of music criticism.

"I think right now the world of music criticism -- whether it's blogs or alt weeklies or newspapers putting their stuff online for free everyday -- the day to day, hour to hour metabolism of talking about music is only found on the Internet," Raftery says."

Of course the Village Voice poll referenced in the headline is Pazz and Jop, long the pet project of Robert Christgau, fired from the Voice after the paper changed owners. The article continues:

"Robert Christgau, who says he will vote in both polls this year, has been a witness to that change. He's seen the critical establishment grow from just a few dozen writers into a new world where everyone with an Internet connection can sample the music of the day and post an opinion on it. When everyone's a critic, what's the point of a critics' poll?

"Has the Internet made the rationalization of critical opinion easier? Not in my opinion. I don't think so. Because there's simply too much for anybody to digest. You need gatekeepers," Christgau says."

So on the one hand you have Raftery's "day to day, hour to hour metabolism" and on the other you have Christgau's "rationalization of critical opinion." (We'll ignore the "gatekeeper" comment.)

Never mind that the edge had long dulled for the Pazz and Jop poll, long before Al Gore invented that new fangled interweb thang. (Admittedly, last year's Pazz and Jop, topped by Kanye West, had a few curveballs, including both Astor Piazzolla and the Pat Metheny/Ornette Coleman reissue Song X topping Shakira's Oral Fixation Vol. 2.) Never mind also that Idolator's poll, oddly titled Jackin' Pop, is as dull and predictable as music polls in general are these days. If Jackin' Pop is supposed to represent some sort of blogger revolution, it's a dismal failure. The greatest thing about the music blog universe is the proliferation of unusual, outre, under-distributed and underground music. The Jackin' Pop poll reads pretty much exactly as one would expect any major media poll to read. (Although it is interesting to disaggregate Jackin' Pop's demographic, perhaps one very effective tool at the "rationalization" of critical opinion that doesn't require a "gatekeeper," just a pull down menu. For example, by age, the under 30 voters have Clipse, Joanna Newsome and Ghostface Killah in the top 5 albums, the over 40 voters pile it on for Dylan, Springsteen, Dixie Chicks, etc. Cross reference at a glance to media outlet: newspaper critics? There's Dylan and the Dixie Chicks again (admittedly with Clipse and Ghostface Killah in the top 5 as well). Alt.weeklies? TV on the Radio, baby. Finally, blogs? Almost identical to the top 5 albums selected by writers under 30. Draw what conclusions you will).

The point is that Christgau has a point. There is too much to digest, even poking around simply in the tiny internet realms of creative improvised and composed music, let alone the entire field of jazz. Entirely by accident, I've stumbled on orgasmic encomia about Chris Botti shows and strange claims referencing recently deceased Michael Brecker as the greatest tenor saxophonist since Coltrane. I've read essays by the children of jazz greats (Professor Darius Brubeck) calling into question the legacy and artistic integrity of geniuses such as Ornette Coleman. (Whose 2006 release, Sound Grammar fares thusly on Jackin' Pop: invisible except for voters over 40, who placed it at 16). I've waded through jaw droppingly passionate 60-comment firefights waged between musicians, critics and onlookers over the musical merit of figures like Bill Dixon, who, no matter his uncontestable brilliance is virtually unknown to the general public. The sea of words swells every day and it does sometimes feel...indigestible. Comment strings are howlingly funny sometimes, simply idiotic at others. (Witness someone named simply "jazzlunatic" responding with typical internet bluntness to Taylor Ho Bynum's guest post at destination-out, for example.)

On the other hand, I have grown fond of Raftery's "day to day, hour to hour metabolism." In the short time that I've been checking into jazz and so-called "free jazz" blogs, I've had many eye and ear opening experiences. But what the NPR article neglects to mention is the impact of the audio blog, the MySpace page, any and all internet outlets where the music itself is instantly accessible, without middleman and with a minimum (or complete absence) of critical opinion. The most amazing resource is the mp3, certainly. Who needs a music critic when you can download the music yourself and simply listen? This alone has changed the nature of music criticism. Let's say you've occasionally heard ecstatic murmurings about a legendary genius, but have never heard any music by him or her, maybe someone like Japanese madman Karou Abe He's out there (on the net I mean) and thanks to Web 2.0 you can hear him, see for yourself if the myths and legends are borne out.

Perhaps it's underground and already marginalized forms of music that ultimately will benefit most from the blogosphere. From this perspective, it's laughable that the NPR article makes a big deal out of a critic's poll on a blog owned by a media company challenging the supremacy of a critic's poll in the Village Voice.

The NPR article concludes:

"The Village Voice will release this year's Pazz and Jop in February. Idolator's list is scheduled to be posted today. Young acts like TV on the Radio and Joanna Newsom are expected to do well.

But don't count out the veterans. Asked to predict a winner, both Harvilla and Raftery picked Modern Times, the 31st studio album from Bob Dylan."

Let me guess: both Harvilla and Raftery are, like yours truly, over 40.

composing

From Joe Phillips' Pulse, this interesting composer's symposium. (With my own attempt at lucidity interspersed...)

PULSE Composer’s Salon #1

The Audience

“The public is a thick skinned beast which must be continually beaten to let it know you are there.”—Walt Whitman

“Historically, the artist has been a slave, an unregarded wage earner, a courtier, clown and sycophant, a domestic, finally an unknown citizen trying to arrest the attention of a huge anonymous mass public and compel it to learn his name.” —Jacques Barzan from The Use and Abuse of Art


"I. In an interview (New Voices by Geoff and Nicola Walker Smith, Amadeus Press, 1995), Laurie Anderson says that her work/composition is not complete until it has been observed or heard [and subsequently] evaluated by an audience. She goes on to say that the measure of a good work of art is one that (as you experience it) “makes you want to jump up and get out of there” and go and create something yourself. How do you view this statement (especially in relationship toward how your own compositions are received by the public)?"

Anderson's first comment makes me think about completion more than anything else. My understanding is that Anderson is not an improvising artist. For me, as an improvising composer (not that I'm entirely satisfied with that phrase), my experience is that pieces emerge out of practice/rehearsal/performance opportunities, take a few different shapes, sometimes hang around as themes or get transfigured or transliterated into different formats and settings, and then mysteriously (either abruptly or slowly) disappear. The life of certain "composed parts" of an improvised piece peregrinates through many audiences, live and recorded. I just played some solo piano stuff I did in 1986 for the unnarrator and it had a completely different feel to it than I had ever heard before. So for me completion isn't really possible, at least not on my own terms. With this in mind, and remembering (for example) that a friend of mine has a huge box full of Cecil Taylor scores which have never been played or have only had performance in sections, I end up wondering about what Anderson means by "completion." On the one hand, there's a lovely aspect to performance, especially in composition with significant improvised sections and a huge amount of leeway even in the reading of composed sections. Performance always has mysterious energies. Things arise that were inconceivable in rehearsal. Energies are unleashed or redirected. My favorite phenomenon in live performance is the long silence after a piece is finished. If that's there, it feels that sound, space and time have worked themselves out into the mystery they are.

On the second comment, I generally agree that this interactive, inspirational muse experience, this sense of having a fire lit under one's ass to make something, seems common to my experience of many of the works I admire the most. But I wonder about it because I am also sometimes just a consumer. There are art forms that are good to be there for, like dance, but they don't always make me want to run out and make something.



II. One premise of the book Hole in Our Soul by Martha Bayles (Free Press, 1994) is that with the rise of modernism (in art) in the early 20th century, there came a disconnect with audiences—an “antagonism” between the artistic creator and the consumer of the art. Before this perverse (her words) turn of events, the relationship between creator and consumer was not so great. (At least in jazz) high art and the commercial and popular were not always mutually exclusive. As Gary Giddins states, people like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong had the “…ability to balance the emotional gravity of the artist with the communal good cheer of the entertainer…” However, with the advent of such movements as Dadaism or Abstract Expressionism in painting, the literary explorations of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Wolff, and James Joyce, and in music the dodecaphonic and serial explorations of Arnold Schoenberg, chance and aleatory music of John Cage and in jazz the rise of bebop and free jazz, large audiences mostly tuned out. Jazz critic Philip Larkin is quoted in Hole in Our Soul stating, “To say I don’t like modern jazz because it’s modernist art simply raises the question of why I don’t like modernist art…I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by (Charlie) Parker, (Erza) Pound, or (Pablo) Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor to endure.”

Do you agree or disagree with Bayles’ and/or Larkin’s statements/premises? How do you as a composer/performer, balance artistic and commercial viability in your own work? In the presentation (i.e. performances) of your works? What other composers/performers do you feel balance artistic and commercial viability well? Is this even necessary?

I heatedly, passionately disagree with Larkin. (I haven't read Bayles, but the way her thesis is stated here it sounds like a simple statement of fact, more an observation than a lament, with the caveat that the "antagonism" just arose and was not intentional in many cases). For those who are interested in more of Larkin's rant, his essay "All What Jazz?" is anthologized in Reading Jazz:A Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage and Criticism from 1919 to the Present, an excellent if cautious and generally moldy-figgish collection edited by Robert Gottlieb. ("All What Jazz?" originally appeared as the introduction to Larkin's 1970 book collecting all of his jazz reviews that he had written for The Daily Telegraph). Larkin shows himself to be an insufferable idiot, willfully hoi polloi and proudly dumb as a box of rocks. His fetishistic fondness for Bix, Louis, that good old Nawlins jass, is revealingly framed as a nostalgia for his simple minded college days. There is great, acid, biting humor in Larkin's essay and one suspects that his queeny claws-out bitch-rant is meant at least partly ironically and definitely is suffused with his usual alcohol-soaked self-loathing. Not the best milieu for any kind of insightful criticism of Modernism, let alone jazz after 1938. His two central complaints about Modernism are worth spending some time with, however. The first, the "irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction to life as we know it" begs the question: who the fuck is Larkin's "we"? Perhaps more to the point, what would irresponsible exploitation of technique mean?

Larkin and other critics of Modernism (not to mention the avant garde, whatever that is) fail to talk about aesthetics. This is the fatal flaw in every critique of art that focuses on the moral character of the artist, or the solipsism or self-indulgent idiosyncrasy of the artist, or the "failure of the artist to communicate," or the favorite fallback for scared, murine little-eared reactionaries of all stripes, the "charlatanism of the artist." These critiques confuse initial shock or unfamiliarity with the presence of something wrong with the art or inherently suspect about the artist's methods or intentions. The height of irresponsibility is to ignore one's own taste.

Which leads me to Larkin's second major statement: "it (Modernist art) helps us neither to enjoy nor to endure." Again, who the fuck is "us"? And again, more importantly, I'm living proof that Larkin's wrong. An Art Ensemble of Chicago performance at the 9:30 Club in DC in 1982 saved my life. For example. So did ditching school my senior year in high school and staying home reading everything by James Joyce I could get my hands on.

General things to think about:
-As a composer and/or performer how do you generate audiences for your performances? How does audience reaction to a piece affect your future writing? your programming? Do you think about the audience when writing?
-Can you recommend any composer, group, or recording that balances the artistic with the popular (or at least commercial successful)?

I generate audiences by promoting my own shows. I have sometimes felt quite discouraged by lack of audience or poor audience reaction. Discouragement has sometimes taken the form of many months or even years of not performing. (This was of course my own choice in regard to the matter). I don't think about the audience, but I do think about a few admired people.

I can't find a meaningful way to respond to the last question. It sets up a false dichotomy to begin with.

Great questions, though...look forward to more...

RIP Turiya (and Brecker)

Sad to get the news that Alice Coltrane has passed. Surprised she was "{only" 69 years old.

Amazed by the following excerpt from an article on her on the AP wires:

"> "As fascinating — and influential — as her later music was, it
> tended to obscure the fact that she had started out as a solid,
> bebop-oriented pianist," critic Don Heckman told The Times on
> Saturday. "I remember hearing, and jamming with, her in the early '60s
> at photographer W. Eugene Smith's loft in Manhattan. At that time she
> played with a brisk, rhythmic style immediately reminiscent of Bud
> Powell.
>
> "Like a few other people who'd heard her either at the loft or
> during her early '60s gigs with Terry Gibbs, I kept hoping she'd take
> at least one more foray into the bebop style she played so well," he
> said.

Okay, Don Heckman.

My favorite Alice Coltrane performance is the live two album set with Reggie Workman and Roy Haynes, Transfiguration.

Just a few days ago I was listening to Billy Cobham's Crosswinds and said to myself, "Self, who is that on tenor sax?" It is, of course, Michael Brecker. Gifts come in all sorts of packages.

As for Alice Coltrane...imagine being John Coltrane's pianist after McCoy Tyner. Imagine carrying on a completely unique and immediately recognizable musical (and pianistic) style after John Coltrane's death. Yeah, Heckman, really too bad she didn't play that bop again.

year end frenzy

I notice many blogs, music and otherwise, engage in a year end retrospective. For some reason this didn't occur to me as something to do until I visited destination-out's "Top Downloads" and Mwanji's couple of posts of what grabbed him last year and the *unbelievable* list of live shows he attended.

On the playing side, the year began with Bing's work with Circus Luminous, followed by The Miles Davis Electric Project, followed by the Live Music/Silent Film Festival, followed by work with Chris Jonas in Rrake. As predicted, things came to a sudden halt after Rrake. There is no lack of interesting projects here in Santa Fe, but the issue is sustainability. The usual pattern is a high speed ramp up involving short(ish) notice, lots of rehearsals (when possible) and a high profile appearance or two followed by months of deafening silence and zero dollars. The lack of venues, the busy lives of all of us struggling to survive, the utter lack of funds for ongoing and remunerative initiatives all contribute to this vexing pattern.

In the offing: perhaps more silent film work? Perhaps another Miles Electric configuration? Perhaps a duets concert of improvisations? Who knows.

Listening has taken many fascinating twists and turns this year, spurred largely by the radio show and the imperative of developing a library. Rediscoveries abound with many thanks to destination-out and other bloggers. Huge swaths of music that were firmly in the center of where my ears were at various times in the past, but that I somehow missed, mix with constant revisiting of work that I am hearing with new ears.

Here's a top ten list for the past year:

1. Duke. Anything and everything. I never gave Ellington's music the comprehensive hearing it deserves. In fact, the only Ellington I owned for many years was Ellington '55, an attempt by Capitol Records to position Ellington as a more commercially viable option by having him revisit great compositions. The goal this year is to continue on the quest for anything and everything Ellington did.

2. Brotherhood of Breath/Chris MacGregor. I somehow missed MacGregor's work entirely. Destination-out posted a couple of pieces from the first album. I was already somewhat familiar with Dudu Pukwana and Mongezi Feza, but I look forward to hearing more.

3. Evan Parker. In general, the Euro free scene was only represented for me by a few FMP's of the Brotzmann/Van Hove/Bennink trio and the Globe Unity Orchestra. I am glad to get closer to Parker as well as Breuker/Schlippenbach/et al.

4. Andrew Hill. This seems to be Hill's year, what with the praise for his new recording and so on. I have long had Point of Departure but it's been great hearing much more of his other work.

5. Elmo Hope. The Blue Note reissue that includes dozens of tracks is definitely head turning.

6. Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley. This great trio recording is perhaps not warmly received by Cecil Taylor fans, but I am impressed by it. In general, rediscovering Bill Dixon has been a splendid adventure.

7. 1960s Blue Note and Capitol funky jazz. In my callow youth I always wrote this form off as "less than." In fact there is some great arranging, soloing, and a wonderful groove on much of it: Blue Mitchell, Stanley Turrentine, Cannonball, etc. Much of what passes for "contemporary jazz" is a pale and insipid imitation of this period.

8. Art Ensemble of Chicago's pre-Paris stuff. Again thanks to destination-out, Carefree, Tatas-matoes, etc. Great, funny, vital and groundbreaking.

9. Mal Waldron. A renewed appreciation for his architectural deliberateness, his note placement, his direct honesty. The duets with Steve Lacy are remarkable.

10. Randy Weston. The only exposure I had to Weston previously was African Cookbook. As is the case with many other musicians lately, the question is: How did I go so long without tons of Weston in my life?

A pattern: this seems to have been at least partly the year of the piano. Duke, Cecil, Hill, Weston, Hope, Waldron. Part of the fascination of the mid-60s Blue Notes is the pre-fusion appearances of Hancock, Corea, Zawinul.

Anyway I could list a top 100, given how much has opened up for me in music this year. I could also revisit the year's favorite rants (the jazz culture wars, for example). But I have to do the dishes.

como se dice?

More snow last night, admittedly not all that much but ridiculous. Side benefit: softens the bone jarring drive over ruts and mounds of solid ice sometimes a foot thick. I'd be more sanguine if my 1991 Honda Civic weren't randomly and quite mysteriously stalling. It's an avant garde stall, as it only occurs when the car is well warmed up, and seems usually to be when I go a constant speed in one gear for any stretch. I have vague hopes it's dirty fuel injectors or water in the gas or the old vapor lock phenomenon (about which I of course know nothing) but also vaguely suspect there might be a more serious problem.

The most serious problem is $5,000 in unpaid federal taxes, fines and penalties from two chaotic years, 01/02, when I lived in astonishing disarray and did not file at all. I have attempted a few times to settle the matter but the IRS decided to levy my savings account over the holidays. Pathetic, really, as it had less than a grand in it and I qualify for temporarily uncollectable status but just didn't jump through the necessary hoops to get that officially settled before leaving the country. The situation makes me regret that I returned. Is there anything more romantical than a tax exiled improvising musician living in Mexico? I'm sure Mexico needs another drummer, ex-teacher and sometime writer.

Speaking of Mexican music...I have to admit my almost complete bafflement at Mexican popular song. Well, the forms represented loudly by the employees or owners of Daggett's campground on Christmas Eve, by the Mexican patriarch who parked his family in front of our tent the night after Christmas (howling out of his tinny car stereo, complemented by the constant beep beep beep of his "door open" alert), by car stereos and stores/businesses with music blasting. Most of what I could place was indistinguishable from mariachi music to my ears. Brass was unrelentingly featured, usually with a front line and a second line underpinned by tuba or synth tuba. All of the singers were male. Tonally, the singing contrasts with the brass in several different inflections that are microtonally flat or sharp, giving the music a drunken, swaggering, jangling cast. Sometimes the arrangements seemed to have a New Orleans/Chicago jass influence, sometimes more clearly a US country music feel. But otherwise it was impossible for me to hear many other influences. The accordion was not as present in the mix as I would have liked, nor the drums. The overall tonally glaring and garish effect is highlighted by the music's unrelenting IV-V-I diatonicism. Also emphasized by the inevitably horrible stereos on which I heard it, often turned up to volumes that created searing distortion.

Admittedly, a small sample that was most often a sonic assault in otherwise quiet (sometimes mystically so) surroundings. And other than the way my interest was piqued-- tonal inflection, trying to catch lyrics with my abysmal understanding of Spanish, the very occasional switch up of the formula-- my impression was of a music absolutely lacking in any trace of sophistication, isolated from the past decades of musical and technological changes elsewhere, cloyingly pathetic (encapsulating some of the feeling of the blues but with absolutely none of that music's irony). It is rare, in my smoothed out so-called open-mindedness, for me to encounter music to which I respond with blind rage. But such was my feeling at times. It's been a while since music made me want to commit violent acts. Even when I hear the worst of "jazz" (syrupy, bland, limp garbage) I don't generally want to smash things, set fire to villages, bulldoze the world to rubble. But Mexican popular music eventually led me to these dark places in my soul.

The most generous place I was able to go was "how quaint." But that racist dismissal also rankles. It is all too easy for an American to view Mexican culture and people as "quaint." I could vaguely sense (was I projecting? of course) something strained and darkling in many interactions with hotel, store and gas station employees. I kept thinking that if I knew Spanish I would not stir up this oddly polite resentment, a standoffish mutual bemusement. No doubt US "tough on immigration" policies have provided Mexican citizens with additional reason to despise a bumbling Yankee such as myself, waving pesos around and obviously using their country as a playground.

One can be aware of these many layers of political and economic injustice and still think the local popular music is horrifying.

American popular music is horrifying too. That's fair. I remain politically correct. nyaa nyaa nyaa.

Relapsin' with the Miles Davis Quintet

The above blog header was the peak of hilarity while driving the sandy flats south of Bahia de Los Angeles in Baja last week, the eversnerkling unnarrator's splendid idea for a headline, blog post header, maybe even a CD title. But there was no relapsin' to be had on this miracle of excursions, a sojourn I was formerly in the habit of using as an excuse to marinate in a veritable Sea of Cortez of tequila and beer.

There will be more about The Baja Trip. For now, I figured I would just sort of...get warmed up. Only fitting considering that mere days ago the un and I were hot and sunscreened on the long hook of playa called La Gringa and we have returned to 2 feet of snow here in the City of Holy Faith. Que lastima.

I didn't feel like listening to a shred of music of any kind almost the entire trip. One goes through these things from time to time. Moratoriums. toria? Uh, silences.

Today's show was hilarious as I simply grabbed whatever came out of the CD case and tried to make some sense of it. It was a fine moment, finally playing The Art Ensemble of Chicago's Duffvipels (well, an excerpt anyhow).

Much Baja regalia and perhaps very little music to come.

vaya con dios

Off to warmer southern climes in a couple of days so Stochasticactus goes silent for about two weeks. I'll miss every single one of you with great pangs of sadness tempered by monumental denial and beachside gloating. Bennie Maupin's spacey Ensenada will be on the car's CD player. The un and I toy with outlandish fantasies of never returning. Sure, Mexico has stolen elections just like here, but think of the cache resulting from being the white guy who "launched the Mexican improvisational music scene." (i.e., *stole* from the many fine Mexican musicians who are no doubt already launching all sorts of shit about which we have no clue....)

Thanks to Bagatellen's alert, I've visited Church Number 9 and Nothing Is, amazing sites offering complete album downloads of hard-to-find improvisational music. The only item I took the time to snag, for now, is Andrew Cyrille/Milford Graves, Dialogue of the Drums. My late friend Greg Kidd (who played trumpet in the first group I was ever in, 33 years ago at age 12)had a vinyl copy of this that we listened to after sharing some "mind expanding" substance, 23 years ago on a hot summer night in south Philadelphia. Somehow the album led to a marathon walk involving the Mummer's Museum and the catwalk over the Ben Franklin Bridge just until the Jersey line. You know how it is: "hey, let's walk to New Jersey!" har har. It's good to hear it again.

In other news, the arts/music community (and the rest of the community as well) here pulls together to support vocalist/composer/improvisor and bruja, Molly Sturges, diagnosed with tongue cancer last week. She and her husband Chris and daughter Quinn are already in Houston seeking the best oncologists in the West. Prayers and energies (and money) are needed and emerging from this small town's circles. There's a blog that will have occasional updates. Also on the blog eventually will be ways to support Molly and Chris as they deal with the realities of Molly's treatment.

Not to change the subject, but happy holidays. Is there anything worse than Christmas "jazz," by the way? Don't go there! Nat King Cole, sure. And remember: the best things in life and art are free....

art of the imitators

The thought-provoking and unrelentingly honest blog, not mean if true continues to challenge my overly facile views regarding influence, imitation and originality, related to improvised music. One thing is for certain, and that is that I have long held an unexamined opinion that *originality* is the hallmark of worthiness (if not always "greatness") in improvised music. As a listener I'm constantly "measuring" originality by a very simple test-- can I tell who is playing and is it distinct? Simple on the surface of things. Listening to the radio Friday I heard some big band music, a really terrible arrangement of Old Man River, and I knew it was either Louis Bellson or Mel Lewis on the drums. Turned out to be Mel Lewis with the Bill Holman big band. Just terrible music. But I have a lot of respect for Mel Lewis. Is this merely because I can pick him out, and so I have the opportunity to reconfirm my "special knowledge" when I hear him?

One of the mysteries lately for me is finding that I can hear influences within the playing of the musicians I admire, but their playing is not flatly *imitative*. The generosity of spirit in great musicians is such that the influences are welcomed without resistance, it seems. Perhaps because there is the basic faith/knowledge that the kernel of individuality will not be tainted or sullied somehow by the embrace.

Also instructive was hearing Sonny Rollins with Donald Bailey and Pete LaRoca Sims instead of Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones, from the Night at the Village Vanguard sessions. I wanted to hear Ware and Jones throughout the version of Night in Tunisia. Typically we say something like "Jones/Ware was a "better" rhythm section on those dates..." and leave it at that. Lately I have been working at digging more. I was surprised also to find myself thinking "what a terrible choice of material for Rollins to try out in that trio format...Night in Tunisia is a total set up. Softly as in a Morning Sunrise and other tunes work much better." Still don't know where that came from, really.

Which also reminds me of unquestioningly embracing Money Jungle, the trio with Duke, Mingus and Roach, and later reading the Miles Davis Blindfold Test where Feather puts that recording on and Davis goes ballistic about what a ridiculous idea the whole thing was, and how record producers should be shot.

acquiring minds want to know

Been out and about too much lately to post, but there's been a certain amount of reflection, again spurred largely by Reading Jazz. My experience of almost the entire criticism section of that book was one of sustained outrage. More about that later.

On the recorded music front, a recent trip to the huge metropolis of Albuquerque resulted in my picking up the Arista Freedom double album by Dave Burrell, High Won-High Two, from 1968 with Sirone and Sunny Murray as well as Bobby Kapp on drums and Pharoah Sanders on...tambourine. Something odd about that. Anyway I have only listened to the West Side Story medley and I'm reminded again of how much is going on with Burrell, a player with whom I only have had passing familiarity. I saw him with David Murray and Andrew Cyrille and Amiri Baraka many years ago and was struck by the uniquely pianistic approach to phrasing and the deceptively "light" sounding touch/attack. I look forward to learning more.

I also picked up George Russell's Living Time Orchestra Blue Note record from 1983, The African Game. I've only given that one listen and I have no idea yet what I feel or really what I'm hearing. There are unfortunate and all-too-facile associations that leap up (in particular, echoes of television cop show soundtracks) and these are definitely unwanted associations. All in all, it's great to be experiencing music from both Burrell and Russell that expands the concept for me even further, a frequent recent experience.

The great windfall is a result of a friend of mine (the beginning of our friendship was playing in a trio when I was 12 years old, 33 years ago, tunes like Walk, Don't Run and Delta Dawn) transferring his vinyl to digital and offering to ship the vinyl to me. He sent me a four page list of such a huge variety of recordings, many of which fill in serious gaps in both my listening and my library. So after the holidays are blessedly over I'll be getting the best Christmas present I could imagine, probably about 80 albums or so, only a few of which are replacements for vinyl that I have but that's unplayable. He was more thorough than I over the years in getting a broader historical perspective so there's a significant amount of Bix, Fletcher Henderson and Duke. But there's also a Marion Brown solo album, for example, that I've never heard of, etc.

On the live music front, the inspiring and surreal and deeply moving Tatsuya Nakatani blew through town and I managed to catch his solo set at High Mayhem. This indirectly led to reconnecting with Gary Hassay who was a central figure in my musical experience in 1979-1980 in Allentown, PA. Nakatani is based in Easton PA and it turns out he's in a trio with Hassay. Hassay is still going strong and I'm looking forward to getting some of his recordings for possible air play on the radio show. Also, I'll be pitching a profile of Nakatani to a percussion mag or other publication in the next week or two.

The most extraordinary aspect for me about Nakatani's art is the complete reconfiguration of the trap set, despite its traditional (though stripped down)set up. On a technical note, I'd love to know how he gets such a warm, basso profundo tone out of his tiny bass drum. Anyway the overall aesthetic effect was trancelike, otherworldly, both beautiful and somewhat daunting. The use of metal (cymbals, bowls, metal wire beaters, gongs, bells, ratchety coils) in combination with the membrane of the drums (and Nakatani's "blowing" against the snare head, creating banshee wails and screeches) coalesces into a sound somehow simultaneously primal and ethereal. Nakatani's relationship to his materials allows for startling chance events, especially in his arrangements of bowls on either floor tom or the snare, sometimes muffled with a towel underneath and sometimes naked, either ringing against other bowls or not. The placement, especially of his largest bowl on the floor tom, also allows for constant swaying of the bowl itself, which creates a rolling, washing sound. His use of the bow is masterful. It was the kind of performance where I wanted the sound first and so closed my eyes often, but then absolutely could not help myself and would gawk again, wondering what the hell is that and how does he do it?

Finally, I'm hoping I can still get tickets for Public Enemy, playing a few blocks from where I live this Friday. Yeah, Public Enemy. Santa Fe is so very odd.

story ville

The previously mentioned Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb, has me up late in what has turned into absorbing the book from cover to cover, which at roughly 1,100 pages is somewhat ridiculous. But the great fact that is emerging from the Reportage and Criticism sections is perhaps somewhat best summed up by two quotes. "To the outsider, the aggressiveness with which the aficionados of one school of jazz attack another school may appear silly, a tempest in a teapot. It is far from this. Beneath the surface it is a defense, whether well- or ill-advised, of an attitude toward life." (William Grossman, Jazz Review, 1956). "After all these years, I find myself unable to avoid an unhappy conclusion: jazz criticism is a bad idea, poorly executed." (Orrin Keepnews, 1987)

For the moment, I'm still reaching for a broader understanding of the culture wars of the 1940's:

Leonard Feather's writing about the Esquire jazz polls of the mid-40s and the uproar between the "moldy figs" and the "progressives," yet another reminder that the lines were clearly drawn in the years before bop, even though it is now the fashion to point to jazz controversy as first arising with Parker, Gillespie, Monk. The black vs. white lines were clearly drawn as well. Here's a quote from Feather talking about the reaction to the first Esquire poll in 1943 in The Jazz Record, a specialty publication co-edited by white pianist Art Hodes: "But the most memorable statement was (the writer's) complaint that Joe Stacy, Joe Sullivan, and Art Hodes received only four, three, and two votes respectively. 'These men,' he wrote, 'are the three greatest small-band piano men on wax. To mention Art Tatum in the same gasp with them is blasphemous!'" Another quote from the same article: "If this isn't inverted Jim Crow, what is?"

The winners in 1943 (who went on to perform at the Metropolitan Opera House) were: Louis Armstrong, Teagarden, Goodman, Hawkins, Tatum, Al Casey, Pettiford, Catlett, Red Norvo and Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday and Artie Shaw. The second place winners were Cootie Williams, Lawrence Brown, Barney Bigard, Johnny Hodges, Earl Hines, Oscar Moore, Milt Hinton, Al Morgan, Cozy Cole, Leo Watson, Mildred Bailey, saxophonist Willie Smith and Dave Tough.

So these are the musicians signifying something catastrophic, impure, degenerate or at least questionable to an entire camp of jazz writers who seemed to have seen jazz's salvation at the time in Eddie Condon and Wild Bill Davidson. Is it any wonder that when Bird and Dizzy et al were heard, a very few short years later, the reaction was what it was?

Also, coincidentally I just bought a copy of the recording of the concert at the Metropolitan in 1944, originally produced by the US Army and only available on shellac V-Discs. My first few listens reveal that something was going on among these highly disparate musicians within the supposed confines of...whatever genre they were supposed to be confined by. Partly I'm sure it's the "jam session" atmosphere, partly the "superband" syndrome, just too many voices trying to get heard. But even beyond these circumstantial reasons, I hear a music definitely in transition already. It's struggling with two competing organizing principles, for one thing (perhaps three): collective improvisation versus comping behind the individual soloist. The intense irony is that the radio announcer insists on saying the name of the individual soloists while they are playing, in the manner of a sports broadcast. The third conflicting strain on the efforts of the musicians is the "swing" style itself, which lends a kind of war-time desperation and frantically happy, happy, happy (who put the benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine?) energy. There's more concatenating throughout the proceedings, including strange versions of "the blues," highly divergent instrumental styles, and probably more that I'm not even aware of.

Yet there are revealing moments from individual musicians. Lionel Hampton's extended solo over Flying Home is most amazing for the intense presence of his vocalizations, especially in the rests between his phrases. (Compare with Cecil Taylor's, on for example, The Great Concert of, Side 3, or less pleasantly, with Jarrett). Are there shades of bop already emerging from Hawk and Tatum? Absolutely. Could there be any starker contrast than that between Billie Holiday singing "I'll Get By" and Mildred Bailey "singing" "Squeeze Me"?

It's a terrible stew, really, and I can see why the moldy figs had an opening to be aghast, but only now that I am listening with an awareness of the turf wars and infighting that had everyone up in arms. What I heard before this was quaint, occasionally brilliant, energetic, but hearing with bop-through-21st Century ears meant feeling grateful that the music soon found more consolidated and "sophisticated" organizing principles. I have too often bought hook, line and sinker the "official" stories of whatever jazz is, and, lately, every time I turn around, I'm encountering new awareness of a much broader and much more messy picture.

up to your boobies in white satin

"You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation." (Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues).

Jazz books on the floor next to my bed currently include Reading Jazz, edited by Robert Gottlieb and Visions of Jazz by Gary Giddins, as well as Ted Reed's Progressive Steps to Syncopation, which I keep returning to over and over to find new ways to apply the studies not only to drumset work but music and composition in general.

Reading Jazz is a remarkable anthology heavily weighted toward the mainstream but still stuffed full of great material. The autobiographical section ranges from Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet to Cecil Taylor and others. The Cecil piece is from Len Lyons' 1983 book, The Great Jazz Pianists, and Gottlieb's comment says something like "sometimes the life of an interviewer is a difficult one." I suspect this is meant with a dash of humor and as a tongue in cheek commentary on Taylor's apparently combative and argumentative responses, but truly, although you can tell he's trying, Lyons' questions are superficial and idiotic. How little must the man have known about Taylor to begin his interview with "What approach did you use for developing finger dexterity, and what would you recommend that younger pianists do in that regard?" Not only does he open with that absolutely inconsequential question, but he persists doggedly. This is Lyons making his own life difficult.

It's also representative of a thread that keeps winding through these autobiographical texts, which is a white attitude that is clearly condescending, racist, patronizing and unconciously or blatantly infantilizing. The position of the artist in America, let alone the black artist, is laid bare repeatedly and it's ugly.

Giddins' compilation of short essays is a wonder to behold by comparison. Yes, it leans a bit toward hagiography at times, but his respect is welcome even if it borders on reverence. Giddins is so obviously a fan of the whole spectrum of genres and approaches, and in particular it's a lovely experience to read articulate and knowledgeable insights into the work of musicians as disparate as Budd Johnson and Roscoe Mitchell.

Acquisitive jazz slut that I am, I recently snagged Randy Weston's latest (at 80 years old!), Zep Tepi, as well as the odd Impulse reissue that combines Taylor's Into the Hot pieces (Pots, Bulbs, Mixed)with Roswell Rudd's Everywhere session. Every time I hear Weston I want to hear more, and it's too bad that I somehow managed to miss his work along the way. I only gave Taylor's sessions for Gil Evans a cursory listen when I was younger, largely because I had already been absolutely riveted by Indent, Silent Tongues, Dark to Themselves, 3 Phasis, etc. and too quickly dismissed Taylor's early work as unformed and quaint. With fresh ears these Taylor originals are absolutely mind blowing and yet again mark a whole range of possibilities that Taylor perhaps left behind too quickly. (That's my greed talking). There's something lush and humid about his orchestrations, the song forms, the dense and usually not reiterative themes. Amazing that Ted Curson was working with Mingus at the time. I wonder what he thought working his way through Taylor's Mixed?Not because it is different from the Mingus workshop, but because it launches off of so many similar strategies. (It's also instructive to hear Sunny Murray on these recordings; his odd 5/4 boogaloo beat, his leanings toward the concept he'd plunge into quite soon after).

Roswell Rudd is one of those rare musicians who intuitively understands sound. The trombone is a perfect fit for the man's ears and soul. My first impressions of the Impulse session is that it's unfortunate he wasn't surrounded by heavier players. Charlie Haden is too far behind Lewis Worrell in the mix and I don't get grabbed by Guiseppi Logan and Robin Kenyatta, really. I just want to hear Beaver Harris and Roswell Rudd do duets.

playlist

today's show was...interesting.

Sahib Shihab Blu Around Jazz Sahib
Benny Golson, Phil Woods, Bill Evans, Oscar Pettiford and Art Taylor join Shihab in 1957

Miles Davis Blue in Green Kind of Blue
from the gussied up reissue that's pitch-corrected and remastered.

Thelonious Monk Mood Indigo Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington
Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke join Monk for this example of how jazz musicians lovingly make something their own

Hamiet Bluiett Tranquil Beauty Jazz Loft Sessions
Is there a better name in jazz than Hamiet Bluiett? Juney Booth, Butch Campbell, Olu Dara, Don Moye, Billy Patterson, Bobo Shaw, 1976

John Carter Sweet Sunset Night Fire
From one of Carter's "Folk Suites," underrated jazz classics that will probably get a lot of hype in 10-15 years

John McLaughlin Binky's Beam Extrapolation
astonishing first recording with McLaughlin as leader, 1969, with Tony Oxley, John Surman, Brian Odges

Billy Cobham Spanish Moss Crosswinds
How does Cobham manage to make 17/16 funky? The Breckers and John Abercrombie help, but it's Cobham's show

Sonny Rollins East Broadway Rundown East Broadway Rundown
with Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison. A centerpiece at 21 minutes, worth every second.

Billie Holiday/Esquire All Stars I'll Get By/Tea for Two
The First Esquire Concert, recorded and released by the US Army on shellac V-disks. Check out the announcer. 1944.

Charlie Parker Back Home Blues/Lover Man Swedish Schnapps +
This is what Parker was up to during the WWII recording ban

Steve Lacy/Mal Waldron Star Crossed Lovers Sempre Amore all duets, all Duke or Strayhorn. 1987.

Cecil Taylor Pemmican/Points Garden
I can hear the whole history in Taylor's playing. This is the last 8 minutes of a 103 minutes solo piano performance, November 16, 1981

I seem to be getting better at transitions that are relatively smooth between stuff that one would normally think of as widely divergent. I have no idea how it happened, for example, that the Tea for Two piece segued so naturally into John Lewis's piano intro to Back Home Blues. I think playing the entire 21 minute East Broadway Rundown may have rattled the daylights out of my station manager...and how ironic is it that Rollins/Hubbard/Garrison/Jones perhaps pushed the aesthetic limits the most out of all the selections on the above list?

I had forgotten how much I admire Extrapolation. McLaughlin sets up a fairly straight rhythm section concept with Oxley and Odges, but his guitar sound has rich shades of Brit "blues revival" and then astonishing jazz chording. One wonders if this was something McLaughlin jumped off too soon, after, say, Emergency! or some of the Miles stuff. Surman blows the everloving crap out of the bari, great gorgeous yawps.

And Spanish Moss, the funkiest 17/16 ever. Cobham plays more 8.5 than 17 which helps funk it up. This too is a kind of music that seems largely undeveloped. Fusion-esque textures and instruments, but great horn lines. Sophisticated yet accessible. Lose the fake wind sound and everything would be fine....

Mr. Taylor's last bit of Garden tied the whole thing up somehow. At least I thought so....

The Only Music Worth Playing

I've been part of several tribute/homage/songbook projects, notably with Zimbabwe Nkenya, doing an Ornette Coleman project, a mid-'60s Miles quintet project, part of a Monk tribute; now the main thing happening musically for me is the Miles Davis electric project. So I've been involved with this experience where someone (maybe even me) loves the music of so and so enough to get a group together, try it out, do some of the favorite pieces. With some of Zim's projects it was a drag, ultimately, because he wanted to do OC's songs, he wanted to do the tougher material too from the MD quintet, some very nuanced Monk tunes too, and where were the musicians? Myself included! I always felt completely behind the curve there, exposed, unable to develop a statement of my own and left either poorly imitating Higgins, Blackwell, Roach, Jones (man, Broadway Blues is a bitch!) Williams or, well, generally, lost. With the Miles electric project it's different, because that grew out of players I had already heard here: DJ's, live and pre-produced samples, guitarists, keyboard, bass. It happened more organically, the sounds and approaches already fit before we started to shape pieces like Honky Tonk, Yesternow, Black Satin, etc. The end result is sometimes our versions are flat out imitative...how close can we get to some of the suspense of Yesternow, for example...sometimes the versions, even of the same tune, are unrecognizable. It's filtered through a kind of freedom that was not available on the OC or Miles quintet projects, because the mastery and the understanding was not in the ensemble, was not in the sound. The tunes there were out of reach, some kind of Platonic eidos that we could only genuflect at the base of or stumble around within, offering our pale stabs, no matter how much we loved the originals.

The Vandermark 5's "Free Jazz Classics Vol. 3: Six for Rollins" sounds like this to me. Both forced and lost. The format is head-solo-solo-solo-head, the arrangements seem desultory, and the overall effect lacks so many of the qualities of Sonny Rollins' music: daring, humor, space, fluidity, elan. The playing is superb, yet another example of unequivocally fine musicianship standing still, running in place, sounding contained and distant, even when the bar lines drop. It's as if the music is a museum piece, a simulacrum, with the homage not reverent enough or all too reverent, I can't decide which. There's a spirit joyless and formulaic in it. I love hearing Vandermark's bari, Jeb Bishop's bone, Kent Kessler's bass and Dave Rempis in particular (shades of Dolphy, Roscoe Mitchell...he is in my opinion the best soloist on the date), but Tim Daisy's drums are so literal. It's jazz drumming on music that I can't help but hear with Roach, Jones, etc. The elasticity of the tempos on The Bridge make me wonder-- are we hearing people play or think about playing while they play? The device itself is not at fault, it's the way it clobbers me over the head.

But for me the signature problem piece is East Broadway Rundown. The original of this recording has long been one of my all time favorite recorded performances in all of jazz, period. It somehow manages to be hilarious, ominous, introspective, playful, pandimensional, inside, outside, abstract, gutbucket, splatteringly free yet stompingly funky, all at once. The line itself is a deceptively simple, seemingly throwaway bit of classic Rollins-- conversational, arch, inscrutable, with a recursive jumpiness that doesn't take itself too seriously and with a hilarious switch to the major in its raggy tag. The best thing about the Vandermark 5 version is hearing Rollins' line. The rest of it just misses me.

I don't know any of the other work of the Vandermark 5 and I'm not qualified to say much about Vol. 4, Free Kings, based on Rashaan Roland Kirk's compositions, as I am way behind on my Kirk.

But the larger questions for me: why bring the repertory idea to so-called free jazz? And why Rollins? Rollins as sound innovator, structural innovator, one of a kind and absolutely original-- no contest. But free jazz? I'm not opposed, I just need more of a conversation around that. Why the self-consciousness in the packaging, the marketing, the use of the questionable phrase "Free Jazz Classics?" I wonder-- who is the audience for this music? Not that there is necessarily one audience.

In the liner notes by Vandermark he concludes with two very strange paragraphs:

"Maybe investigating the groundwork for the improvised music from the 1960's and 70's taught me that it was time to get off the shoulders of those artists in order to look in another direction.

Maybe the point has come when it's necessary to realize that the only music worth playing is happening now."

These statements seem simultaneously so thoroughly arrogant and benighted to me that I'm left (almost) speechless. The only thing I have to say right now about the last sentence is...when Monk played Duke's music, when Rollins played I Can't Get Started, when the Art Ensemble played Zombie, when Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy played A Flower is a Lovesome Thing, was that happening now?

score!

Looking forward to writing more about the Vandermark 5's "Free Jazz Classics Vol. 3: Six for Rollins" but for the moment, a bit of a gloat. The local chain media store (I know, it's strange, "local chain," but there are more startling oxymorons..."Free Jazz Classics," for example...) surprised me by having a ton of used jazz CDs. For less than 50 bucks I snagged:

1. The pitch-corrected remaster of Kind of Blue (mine was stolen out of my car by some impecunious Miles fan with a Flamenco Sketches jones)

2. John Carter's Black Saint recording, "Night Fire," with Bobby Bradford, James Newton, Roberto Miranda and William Jeffrey. Makes me want to get all of the other suites Carter did, especially recordings with Andrew Cyrille.

3. A CD compilation of the Douglas Wildflowers Loft Jazz series (now playing "Black Robert" by Dave Burrell, Stafford James and Harold White). It seems they culled the most "radio friendly" or close to the tradition cuts from the multiple LP series, several of which I have on sadly distressed vinyl. I had forgotten how much I loved the sound of Burrell's piano.

4. "Thelonious Monk Plays Duke Ellington," with Klook and OP. Man, I've thought of getting this about a million times. Can't wait to hear it.

5. John McLaughlin's innovative "Extrapolation" with John Surman, Tony Oxley and Brian Odges. Again, I had it for years on vinyl but now it's digital.

6. Jackie McLean's "New Soil," 1959 Blue Note in keeping with my recent re-evaluation of the late 50s through mid-'60s Blue Note catalogue. This one I picked up in particular because it has Pete La Roca Sims on drums, and I don't hear nearly enough of him, but there's also Paul Chambers, Walter Davis, Jr. and Donald Byrd.

The advantage of an amorous relationship with underrated music? Maybe. What kind of fool would hand over their used Monk to a chain CD store? Okay, maybe a fool with an iPod or whatever, but still.

east broadway standstill

Latest "candle in sunshine" discovery that speaks volumes about the current state of things, The Vandermark 5's Free Jazz Classics, Volume 3, Six for Rollins. It's entirely possible that I'm benighted and quite out of line to suggest it's better not to make this recording *at all*. But before I go any further, mistrusting first impressions as I do and wanting perhaps to open my ears...maybe I'm missing something? Maybe it isn't fair to compare *even when the musicians beg the comparison* by calling something "Six for Rollins." Anyway, before I say more here, I'll listen more. If anyone out there wants to give me their own version of "glowing liner notes" to this or other Vandermark 5 recordings go for it.

parochial blues

The calendar entry I wrote previewing Wynton Marsalis's show here actually generated a letter to the editor, expressing dismay. Expressing a lot of things, including the strange opinion that it's parochial, calling Marsalis "largely derivative" and calling Jazz at Lincoln Center "backward looking." On the contrary, one could argue that calling Marsalis a "National Treasure" (as the letter writer did) just might be...something like parochial. What is especially of note is that I write all sorts of snarky, backhanded blurbs for this Performing Arts calendar every week, and it was the Sacred Cow that generated the first letter ever.

Also of note is the flurry of interaction with Outpost Productions, who booked the event. I've known Outpost's director, Tom Guralnick, for many years. He and I are in email dialogue now about my comments. By the way, if you can get your hands on the Tom Guralnick Quartet with Steve Feld, I highly recommend it. Or any other of a number of Guralnick's kickass electroacoustic Mobile Saxophone and Mute Unit recordings. There's old stuff of mine, 1990 or so, with unbelievable bass sax playing by TG on there.

Today's show as a substitute DJ was very strange. I decided to focus on jazz vocals in the first hour, including Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella, as well as the too-hip Babs Gonzales and a Dizzy Gillespie vocal number. Oh yeah, Billy Eckstine too. I don't really hear jazz vocals and it was interesting listening. The strangest of all was probably Rae Pearl with Tadd Dameron, a number called "Casbah" that one critic has called "the most extravagant three minutes in be-bop history."

Call me parochial, but a lot of jazz vocal music is just bizarre. Then again, I'd rather hear CT's spoken word epic Chinampas than Diana Krall or Kurt Elling, so I guess that says something....

society of esoteric and arcane flamethrowers

Interesting what stirs the loins of internet gladiators. Destination-out puts up some Herbie Mann and the unexpected (or perhaps entirely predictable?) result is an argument about the significance of a certain Miles Dewey Davis. Analogous to the ridiculous Ornette Coleman "debate" of a few weeks ago. The theme is the same: "I know far more about cultural history than you do, and if you knew what I knew, you'd know more than you know. Miles is overrated, you are ignorant of the secret world of true artists, you have been duped."

If I didn't have to finish two pieces that are due tomorrow for SFR's Gift Guide (one on music to buy for people you love, the other on games to buy for people you love...) I'd make a project out of this Miles thing today. I'd also upload some of the Adrian Belew pics from last Saturday and write my take on that. I'd also write a few more 4th step pages. I might even eat lunch.

trumpet unfanfare

I observe with some curiosity that Wynton Marsalis's visit to the City of Holy Faith gets very little press. There's my blurb in the performing arts calendar in SFR, (scroll down) but I fully expected a two or three page puff piece in the Santa Fe New Mexican, which did not appear in their "arts and culture" weekly magazine, Pasatiempo. What did appear was the best my friend David Prince could arrange with Marsalis's press people, a one page interview with Walter Blanding, Jr., who plays tenor in the band. On the one hand this may simply be a continued reflection of the shithouse coverage that jazz in general gets here. On the other hand, it could be a "conspicuous in its absence" indication of a more specific lack of interest. I'll be interested to find out what the house is for Marsalis's performance. Again, I expect it will sell out, but who knows?

What does it mean that Peter Nero got more coverage than Marsalis? I had a great time interviewing Nero for SFR. Personally, I would rather shoot myself in the kneecap than spin a Nero record, but he was unpretentious, funny, world-weary, honest and made no bones about who and what he is and what his music is.

elephant talk

Through an odd series of events (me to arts editor: do we have any comps for Adrian Belew's show? arts editor: not yet, I'll check it out. Arts editor calls venue (Santa Fe Brewing Company). Guy from venue calls KBAC during contest for free tickets, a meet and greet, and an autographed guitar, wins but can't accept prize, gives KBAC my name...) I get to talk with Adrian Belew, I get an autographed guitar, I get two free tickets. I think I'll review my Belew discography a bit...I know him from King Crimson's Discipline, Talking Heads Remain in Light, his own recent Side 3 and I guess that collaboration between Henry Rollins and William Shatner. (you know, "I Can't Get Behind That...," about which experience Rollins included a hilarious 20-25 minutes or so in his Shock and Awe monologue when I saw him here a couple of years ago).

The other odd thing about this is I already had comps to see Wynton Marsalis the same night. Typical Santa Fe log jam, nothing for weeks, Adrian Belew and Marsalis on the same night. I was set to go to the Marsalis show just to see what he's up to these days but I'll pass now.

Comps for shows have become not just a nice occasional fringe benefit of being a writer, but an economic necessity. I have no idea what ticket prices are like in other parts of the country but here they have bumped up faster than gasoline. The Marsalis show starts at $45 and goes up to $80. Belew, appearing at what is basically a pub without a stage, is $30-$45. Freelance writing rates here are in line with wages in general (in the sub-basement) so a lot of shows are prohibitive. This new ticket pricing deal here is a fairly recent development and would be interesting to do a story on.

Yesterday's show sparked more phone calls than I usually get, including from the 85 year old Meredith Fink who deeply appreciated my playing some '70s "fusion." The main impression that sticks with me is just how fresh and jagged Ornette Coleman's Dancing in Your Head sounded next to some of the other pieces I played. That and how profoundly fascinated I continue to be by Miles Davis's electric trumpet/wah-wah pedal set up. So close in time to the big, brassy open horn sound he was using on Jack Johnson, etc., coming out of what one could call the peak of his technical proficiency as a brass player.

Speaking of which, have to check out a Roswell Rudd disc called Blown Bone handed off by station manager: "Here, this is the kind of thing you seem to like..." haha.

boo

Last week, vaguely toying with the idea of putting together a Hallowe'en themed jazz show, I had a hard time coming up with ominous, frightening jazz. Lots of the listeners to KSFR would probably be frightened by lots of what I'd like to play...Brotzmann, Silva's "Luna Surface," CT's Indent, Zorn. But it's not frightening per se. Miles Davis occurred to me as a musician and composer who went into a sort of shadow-aesthetic that a lot of so-called jazz seems to lack. I'm thinking Bitches Brew up to Pangaea. (excluding the obvious).