Bagatellen

Tonalamotl (etc.)

I'm bringing up this recording on Rob Forman's Sedimental label for a few reasons.

1) I think this is one of the best releases in this scrappily non-idiomatic idiom -- contemporary improvised music, with and without electronic -- I've yet heard. It is crammed full, but not too full, of gossamer, hypnotic, suspenseful and sumptuous sonorities; identifiable sounds include those of toys, audience restiveness, hinges, guitar feedback, bowed cymbals, and glockenspiel. Over the course of “33º”, "#34", and "I35", the members of the ensemble (see below for further details) reveal themselves to be admirers of the Prevost / Rowe / Tilbury iteration of AMM, but they are the best kind of admirers one could hope to have. These musicians, at least when working together on this project, possess an original, not to mention sophisticated, sense of musical argument. This is perhaps most apparent in the long (25 minutes, plus) central performance, which begins in a kind of pointillistic ferment, only to allow itself to be dominated by what I would call a buzz rather than a drone. Alternately, this performance -- "#34" (Ricky Williams, for those of you counting) -- is an excellent study in why the designation "ambient" should be rehabilitated.

2) I was wondering if anyone else had heard this record and had anything to say about it.

3) One of the unanswered, perhaps even unasked, questions floating around in connection with this kind of music is: "Who is qualified to play it?" I'm sure this is much less of a concern for those making the music than for those striving to track the music's movements with nouns, adjectives and verbs, but it remains an issue nonetheless. Certainly, there is no conservatory training per se for the variety of musicianship exhibited here. In fact, the activity I'm talking about may not even be musicianship. It is certainly not traditional musicianship. (Chorus: "duh!") It is by now a cliché that electronics, especially laptops robustly kitted out with emulators and wave crunchers and loop engines, enable "non-musicians" to create and organize sounds that possess musical validity. This specific facet of the dilemma has been noted with characteristic eloquence by Nate Dorward, an occasional commentator on these pages, in a review of Nikos Veliotis' Radial (Confront):

… the distance between the implicit stance of [Derek] Bailey's kind of improviser - the agent of point-by-point, moment-by-moment renewal and change - and that of the lowercase improvisor, whose actions might often better be described as "adjustment" or "maintenance" Paris Transatlantic Magazine, February, 2004).

In another column altogether, now, I'm going to list for you the names of the "members" of Tonalamotl, as well as some of their other associations…

• Andy Beta
• Chris Branca (White Heat)
• Jeffrey Filla
• Rick Reed (Abrasion Ensemble, Charalambides [?])
• Sam Sanford
• Ryan Sawyer (Bruce Eisenbeil, The Fiery Furnaces)

These Texans -- from San Antonio and Austin -- are not exactly household names, not even in "eai" circles. Many of these musicians have backgrounds in indie-rock. Consider, too, that these recordings, though released in 2002, date from 1997 and 1998. If these pieces are examples of a certain "style", then they are pretty early examples at that. The music also seems to exist pretty far outside of any of the regional contexts -- Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo, the Boston area -- that have become centers for musical activity of this general persuasion. So, is it fair to ask what "business" they have making records like this? I would say it is unfair, but I feel I may be in the minority on that one. As evidence in support of this supposition, I feel I should mention that I have yet to see the musicians affiliated with the Penumbra label out of Wisconsin -- Hal Rammel, Lou Mallozi, Peter Zummo -- and whose work is decidedly electro-acoustic and improvisatory in nature seriously discussed in the expected venues. (J.A. Deane is another one...)

Finally, riding the hydra-headed beast that Alan's AMPS DO NOT EQUAL RESISTANCE post has become, there's this comment by Chris Flemmer:

Are there any American musicians on the Amplify box? Are there any scheduled for the festival in Germany? (All I could find is a small mention of T. Barnes as part of a tiny sideshow). What's happening on the home scene? I'm sorry but I can't see Lescalleet or Kelley as being in the same league as Rowe, Sugimoto, G. Mueller, Stangl, Siewert or Brandlmayr. Does that mean that the only important [American] eai musician is a non-musician (i.e. Mr. Abbey)?

The easy response is to say that there are many, many talented individuals out there working in a number of related sonic fields, that they are deserving of some level of attention, but that, ultimately, the responsibility for discovery falls to the individual listener. When you're informed by a record reviewer or label profiler that you may have to "work" towards an appreciation of this music, what often goes unsaid is the sheer amount of labor involved not just in analysis and interpretation, but in gaining access to the music at all, whether it is burned to limited edition CD-R's or performed in dank basements in dilapidated buildings. The trickier answer is to come back to the idea that our critical picture of this music is still developing and is very incomplete. We need to be quite careful not to rush the process. If we do, we run the risk of ending up with a faulty representation of what, after all, happened -- and insists on happening.

Irene Schweizer/Pierre Favre

Irene Schweizer/Pierre Favre
Ulrichsberg
Intakt

Schweizer has been one of Europe’s finest improvising pianists for decades now and yet her visibility has never been as high as those of her contemporaries. Aficionados know, however, that she’s been at the keys for some of the most invigorating piano/percussion recordings (with Bennink, Cyrille, Moholo, Sommer, and a previous one with Favre) since Cecil’s triumphal stand in Berlin in 1988. This rambunctious live date from 2003 has Schweizer with longtime friend Favre (usually found these days in highly structured contexts like his European Chamber Ensemble, who have recorded excellent work for Intakt) cranking out the kind of free-flowing but utterly cohesive playing for which they are known.

The two must have been feeling particularly joyous that night, since they dip regularly into not just the waters of free improvisation but those of blues, swing, bop, and other formative influences which they clearly relish. These are the kinds of sources that for years Europe’s free players kept suppressed or masked, but have recently (think Parker, think Schlippenbach, think Johansson) been unashamedly exploring. Sure, Schweizer’s heavy touch, her interstellar Tristano lines, and her punchy rhythmic cells are all here, as is her wonder-to-behear structural imagination. But there’s a real playfulness and lyricism to these improvisations that lifts this recording a notch or two above others like it.

On “It’s About Time,” for example, the two somehow work their way into a space which recalls a lost Monk composition of some sort, with a ragged dissonance and fractured rhythmic sense that lingers in the memory. And the swaggering “Nomads” even borders on freebop, thrashing away with abandon. Though they play with form, they don’t do so in a predictable fashion: for example, I love the fact that the piece dedicated to Peter Kowald isn’t some tritely reflective affair but a raging, head-first barrage filled with the spirit of Kowald’s music. Favre opens it with a solo turn filled with tom-tom thunderclaps which are soon joined by sheets of pianistic sound in a crazed romp that recalls the intensity (but thankfully not the excesses) of Willi the Pig. Elsewhere, the inside-piano clatter of “Unwritten Messages” isn’t always convincing (though I enjoyed the Tippett-like harpsichord imitation), but when this piece evolves into a textural essay it becomes compelling. And finally, it’s only with the closing “Waltz for Lois” where you really get a chance to savor the musicians’ reflective side, with Schweizer coming up with some engagingly chromatic playing.

Taken altogether, there might be nothing particularly revelatory about this recording. But that’s no knock. Roiling, energetic, propulsive, but nonetheless filled with subtleties, this is duo music of a high order.

Duck, You Sucker

Just caught this flick, also known as A Fistful of Dynamite at a local art house cinema over the weekend. Sergio Leone seemed to get more whacked out & audacious as the years wore on & this 150-minute slab of propagandistic melodramatic mayhem is the arguable apogee of his iconoclastic vision. A buddy Western laced with liberal does of lysergic acid and black humor. Rod Steiger plays Juan Miranda, a greedy bandito cut from the same cinematic family tree as Eli Wallach’s The Ugly. The physical likeness between the two- all sun-chapped paunchy skin, toothy grin, greasy unkempt hair & over-the-top accent- is uncanny. James Coburn plays former IRA terrorist and fugitive Sean Mallory, whose disillusionment with the ideals of his former life leads to, in his own words, a belief “only in dynamite.” The film’s irreverent title originates from his tagline tossed as cautionary quip before every detonation. Early in the plot the two cross paths and soon become embroiled in the Mexican Revolution unraveling around them.

The body count is huge (easily in the hundreds), as is the scale of havoc, helped immeasurably by Mallory’s seemingly endless supply of explosives. Parallels to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are frequent too: from the opening shot of Juan urinating on an ant hill to the penultimate scene where he and Mallory annihilate an entire armored column of governmental troops with a pair of cliff mounted machine guns and strategically placed demolitions, to the nihilistic grand finale involving a train stocked with soldiers. There’s also a surreal patina to much of it, as during the opening ‘duel’ between the leads where each ups the other in a call & response of escalating destruction. Extreme close-ups are employed in excess, especially in the beginning, brilliantly emphasizing the repulsiveness of many of the characters & keeping the audience dizzyingly off-balance. Ennio Morricone’s eccentric score threads through the entire thing, equal parts cheesy kitsch & oddball strings & electronics. Overly long and flawed by a preponderance of long shots that overstay their welcome, this cinematic artifact still swings a heavy punch. Anyone else seen it?

Duck, You Sucker

Just caught this flick, also known as A Fistful of Dynamite at a local art house cinema over the weekend. Sergio Leone seemed to get more whacked out & audacious as the years wore on & this 150-minute slab of propagandistic melodramatic mayhem is the arguable apogee of his iconoclastic vision. A buddy Western laced with liberal does of lysergic acid and black humor. Rod Steiger plays Juan Miranda, a greedy bandito cut from the same cinematic family tree as Eli Wallach’s The Ugly. The physical likeness between the two- all sun-chapped paunchy skin, toothy grin, greasy unkempt hair & over-the-top accent- is uncanny. James Coburn plays former IRA terrorist and fugitive Sean Mallory, whose disillusionment with the ideals of his former life leads to, in his own words, a belief “only in dynamite.” The film’s irreverent title originates from his tagline tossed as cautionary quip before every detonation. Early in the plot the two cross paths and soon become embroiled in the Mexican Revolution unraveling around them.

The body count is huge (easily in the hundreds), as is the scale of havoc, helped immeasurably by Mallory’s seemingly endless supply of explosives. Parallels to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch are frequent too: from the opening shot of Juan urinating on an ant hill to the penultimate scene where he and Mallory annihilate an entire armored column of governmental troops with a pair of cliff mounted machine guns and strategically placed demolitions, to the nihilistic grand finale involving a train stocked with soldiers. There’s also a surreal patina to much of it, as during the opening ‘duel’ between the leads where each ups the other in a call & response of escalating destruction. Extreme close-ups are employed in excess, especially in the beginning, brilliantly emphasizing the repulsiveness of many of the characters & keeping the audience dizzyingly off-balance. Ennio Morricone’s eccentric score threads through the entire thing, equal parts cheesy kitsch & oddball strings & electronics. Overly long and flawed by a preponderance of long shots that overstay their welcome, this cinematic artifact still swings a heavy punch. Anyone else seen it?

Shankar - Pancha Nadai Pallavi (ECM)

At the heart of Satyajit Ray's majestic film Apur Sansar (The World Of Apu) (1959), there is a brief (perhaps no more than 2 minutes in length), wordless sequence that stirs something so fundamental within me that the only expression I can give to the experience is to say that it haunts me. And that it will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life. Apu Roy has just lost his wife, Aparna; their first child arrived prematurely. Although Apu married this girl in order to rescue her from a decidedly dishonorable form of spinsterhood, we have seen him fall helplessly in love with her, and with the ways in which she is, in fact, so much stronger than he is. Apu is immobilized by grief, and rouses himself only as if to make his body respond in some way to the terrible spiritual force that is his mourning. And a real force it is to, for it resists his will at some level; Apu is unable to commit suicide, even if all the act entails is waiting to be crushed under an oncoming train. Unable to think of his duty to his son, Apu finally turns to wandering. He writes to his friend (and brother-in-law) Pulu. "I am going away. I do not know where, but I know why." Words I myself have said, and written, and acted upon... Apu leaves Calcutta and we see him, far from the crowded thoroughfares of urban India, staring out at the tides. He passes through a bright forest, his eyes turned up toward the light and the mingled song of many unseen birds. After a time (and a quick cut), Apu reaches the summit of a mountain. Before him, the sun is either setting or rising over the landscape that lies on the other side of what he has just traversed. The moon is a small white shadow just at his right elbow. To the melody from the raga "Jog", Apu sits himself so as to face that horizon where the rays of the sun and the rolling of the hills meet. Apu reaches into the bag -- his only company -- he has been carrying all this time and extracts a double-folded sheaf of papers covered in longhand (the characters you can faintly make out are Bengali characters): the novel, based on his own life as an orphan, that he has been exerting himself towards over since his days as a student. The novel is not just his autobiography in some form, which, honestly, is enough in terms of what follows. Yet this novel, the title of which is never given to us, has also been the living receptacle into which Apu has "poured" -- as it is so often and so often glibly said -- himself. The book was, before Aparna, Apu's true love. It contained both his past and his future, both the frustrations of his youth and his adult ambitions. Taking the first page of the manuscript into his left hand, Apu glances down as if he would begin reading. But no, he lets his novel go. The fall from his hands, raised as if in offering, is thus slow, gradual at first, then suddenly utter. From his right hand, one huge section unrolls and plummets, then another, slightly lesser, and it is gone, all of it. We see the translucent pages flutter above the treetops of the forest below Apu, as if in play, twisting around themselves or swooping lazily... easterly, westerly... toward the bottom of the frame. One last page swings upward in a breeze, accompanied by an incredibly expressive flute trill, then floats away. This sequence -- it is really a single shot -- is so sedate a "presentation" or, to use a term from a much older critical discourse, "objective correlative", that it is nearly beyond common "feeling", except there is a hidden wonder and exhilaration in it.

The source of this movement of mind and heart is not really to be found in the poetic visualization of destruction offered by this scene, even if, as it may be for some writers, it is slightly nightmarish. Apu's life, put in a form that resembles scripture, is dispersed and descends as the divine light itself dies. This is only one reading, however. For there is Apu himself, who we see again in close-up once his novel is no longer what it was. Apu is still, his hands upraised, slightly open. He seems not to have moved at all, not to have noticed or responded to what he has allowed to happen. Except that on his face is an expression that is at one and the same time frozen and searing, static and yet in constant upheaval. With one look into a distance that does not include those of us watching him in his suffering, though it could be directed at us (yet why would he beseech the audience at this moment?), Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu gives what would otherwise be an entire performance. Anger, pain, disgust, scorn, exhaustion, and, above all, yearning for surcease are all contained in Apu's gaze.

Of course, I believe that there is some drama in self-abnegation. Self-abnegation in the case of Apur Sansar or devotional music from India -- of which this album by "double violinist" L. Shankar (a founding member of Shakti) is a stunning example -- is not an emptying or, more radically, a voiding. If Ray had wanted to convey that, he would never have shown us the pages of Apu's manuscript in their release. If the practitioners of Indian classical music intended to convey as much, they would not fill their music with virtuoso displays of instrumental command and improvisatory imagination. Self-abnegation here is a nothing that possesses a positive charge. It is a zero that is really an open parenthesis and a closed parenthesis (a plus and a minus) in the state of attraction: the edges of the curves do meet, but only after covering a certain distance filled with many occurrences. Self-abnegation, reducing the self to a zero state, if you will, is really an openness to the nigh-overwhelming complexity of the cosmos. Self-abnegation is a passion for projection, or for one's self -- every vein, every sinew, every neuron, every tendril of desire and memory -- to be expelled out of one's self in order to find its true place in Nature.

If all this sounds somewhat carnal in its intensity, I think it's no mistake or matter of misrepresentation on my part. Devotional songs in India music are, by and large, "love songs" in the sense that those of use well-versed in the American popular songbook would understand that designation. And if you have read the Vedas or the Upanisads or even Tagore's Sadhana, which lays bare the bride that is the human soul in Hindu theology, then you've been exposed to this notion. And if the idea still seems strange and perhaps heathenish to you, take a listen to this ragam-tanam-pallavi (no WorldBeat here…) -- dedicated to late mridangam (drum) master Palghat T. S. Mani Iyer "with love". A ragam-tanam-pallavi is a distinctly Southern Indian (i.e., not Hindustani) performance that moves from pure scalar improvisation in "free time" (ragam or alapana) through further modal ornamentation set now against ebbing and flowing, yet always accelerating pulsed material (tanam) to, finally, improvisation in strict meter based on a formal composition, often a kriti or a strain from a kriti, kritis being explicitly religious in nature (pallavi). Shankar's custom instrument, capable of unleashing both high, keening melodies and deep-pitched, warm, sobbing counterpoint, is as powerfully androgynous in sound as the voice of the great Carnatic / Karnatak vocalists such as Ramnad Krishnan. Shankar also sings as he plays, so that we have a violin mimicking the sounds and cadences of a human voice, that voice itself embodied in vowels and aspirated consonants that are not enunciated as part of any text per se but rather allude to the most ancient and most generative of breaths. More than this cycle of imitations that are never immaculate and repetitions that are never without flaw, there are also sounds for which there are no strictly syllabic and semantic vocal equivalents, not even in the "percussion language" of konnakkol. Shankar's double-stops and bass thrummings, those pluckings and rubbings, those manipulations that belong almost entirely to the hand, that are brisk, that require only a short, taut gap between manual and objective extremities, that are acute... those sounds, make the central section of the ragam portion of this performance ("Ragam: Sankarabharanam") ache with a palpable tension.

Some listeners are quickly irritated by the melismata and the marathons of increasingly frenetic antiphony, often between the principal voice (sitar, e.g.) and tabla drummer, which characterize Indian classical music. Is the restlessness these listeners experience in the music itself, which is undeniably active, or is this impatience one with a disarray that is revealed in and to those listeners by the music itself? Inundated with content, perhaps, they miss the form that is at work, guiding what they "hear". Or, worse yet, they have taken form to be an enemy, a vandal, and they douse every one of form's fires before it can fully ignite -- and illuminate.

Me? I could never be bored by this music. I could never appreciate it as exotica, even with the most well-meaning or humble appreciation, that is, by saying how much I feel reveals to me my shriveled, rootless, neurotic Western self. I don't think this music aims at any sort of reduction. In the same way, I have to accept that Apu's story is, by all rights, as much Ray's, and yours -- and hers and his and yes, theirs -- as much as it is mine. Even when I sit in a room of complete strangers watching Apur Sansar (which I have done recently), I am confident that each person in that room releases something in response to Apu's letting go. The Personal and the Universal... it's a conundrum, sure, and irresistible, but not one that flattens everything in its path. Instead, it is the kind of mystery that dictates that certain vibrations traveling at a certain speed result in identifiable sonorities that have specific properties which, if plied just so and arranged in one of a variety of established patterns, can evoke certain emotions and states of mind. It is also an enigma that, come to think of it, leads me to suggest that the image of those pages in flight from Apur Sansar may even be as profound an image of life itself... of the human lifespan, anyway... as the film's final, redemptive shot of the father, Apu, united with the son, Kajal; of new life, of the boy embraced, held on to, and lifted onto the man's shoulders, the two of them moving together down a road that itself winds beside a winding river.

Klaus Janek - Casper²

a/l/l/ 8

Musicians are always on the hunt for pockets of inspiration. The search often leads them high and low and in the best cases, down the most unexpected paths. Case on hand, Berliner bassist Klaus Janek who chooses the life of Kaspar Hauser as the basis of his solo recital. For those like myself not versed in Hauser’s history he was one of the wild children that were the rage in scientific circles of the nineteenth century. Discovered in a ‘savage state’ near Nuremberg in 1828, he served as a controversial pawn in the ‘nature versus nurture’ debates when claims were made as to his noble ancestry. These alleged royal ties led to several attempts on Hauser’s life and he was eventually murdered by an assassin’s knife in 1833.

As I was reading the tale recounted in the disc’s accompanying notes with the first cut “First Years” piping through my ear goggles I was struck by how well Janek’s relentlessly chugging pizzicato fit the political intrigue of the story. His own brief biographical sketch references ‘abstract’ and ‘groove’ music as well as the guiding influences of Dave Holland and Peter Kowald. In line with both of these bull fiddle heavyweights, he favors the deep resonating regions of his instrument, milking a viscous tone from his tautly strung strings. “Arriving in the Box,” continues the chronological slide show with Janek working his bow like serrated crosscut saw, injecting scrabbling commentary with furiously rubbing fingers. He produces quite a racket and exerts quite a bit of effort as evident by his groaning asides. In spite of the energy expended, only sections achieve the sort of space-filling harmonics and accompanying sense of compressing captivity he seems so intent in conjuring. The remainder feels like well meaning, if founderous, worrying of the same provincial segments of his fingerboard.

“One Day of 16 Years” and “Free” also seem unnecessarily protracted, though there are some stunning moments peppered throughout each piece. During the opening of the latter Janek sets a revolving wheel of rasping tones in motion, approximating the flow of fetid air down the ventilation tunnel to a prisoner’s cell. But the artifice goes on too long and the same patterns repeat with very little appreciable variation. “Free” is more frenetic, but similarly obsessed with stitching another tangle of friction-saturated arco scribbles. Here it’s a case of too much rather than too little and Janek resorts to the sort of overly busy playing that periodically plagues even seasoned bassists like William Parker. The felling of trees for no apparently good reason. “Last Minuet” removes much of the clutter and finds Janek once again focusing on a clean, gorgeously crafted swathe of tones before turning to the staggered titular pattern for the close. “Epilogue” is even better, an all too brief return to Janek’s robust pizzicato style. If only the over-stuffed pieces of the program’s middle exercised equal amounts of frugality.

Janek’s presumable goal of translating Hauser’s powerlessness in the face of exploitative actors and agents feels only partially on target to my ears. An imbalance exists in terms of technique and outcome that is naggingly recurrent throughout the program. Still, an hour of solo bass couched in the context of a historical tragedy is at root an inspired undertaking. The disc has made me curious to hear Janek in the company of others where he has room to bounce his numerous ideas off those who would respond in kind.

Irene Schweizer/Pierre Favre

Irene Schweizer/Pierre Favre
Ulrichsberg
Intakt

Schweizer has been one of Europe’s finest improvising pianists for decades now and yet her visibility has never been as high as those of her contemporaries. Aficionados know, however, that she’s been at the keys for some of the most invigorating piano/percussion recordings (with Bennink, Cyrille, Moholo, Sommer, and a previous one with Favre) since Cecil’s triumphal stand in Berlin in 1988. This rambunctious live date from 2003 has Schweizer with longtime friend Favre (usually found these days in highly structured contexts like his European Chamber Ensemble, who have recorded excellent work for Intakt) cranking out the kind of free-flowing but utterly cohesive playing for which they are known.

The two must have been feeling particularly joyous that night, since they dip regularly into not just the waters of free improvisation but those of blues, swing, bop, and other formative influences which they clearly relish. These are the kinds of sources that for years Europe’s free players kept suppressed or masked, but have recently (think Parker, think Schlippenbach, think Johansson) been unashamedly exploring. Sure, Schweizer’s heavy touch, her interstellar Tristano lines, and her punchy rhythmic cells are all here, as is her wonder-to-behear structural imagination. But there’s a real playfulness and lyricism to these improvisations that lifts this recording a notch or two above others like it.
On “It’s About Time,” for example, the two somehow work their way into a space which recalls a lost Monk composition of some sort, with a ragged dissonance and fractured rhythmic sense that lingers in the memory. And the swaggering “Nomads” even borders on freebop, thrashing away with abandon.

Though they play with form, they don’t do so in a predictable fashion: for example, I love the fact that the piece dedicated to Peter Kowald isn’t some tritely reflective affair but a raging, head-first barrage filled with the spirit of Kowald’s music. Favre opens it with a solo turn filled with tom-tom thunderclaps which are soon joined by sheets of pianistic sound in a crazed romp that recalls the intensity (but thankfully not the excesses) of Willi the Pig. Elsewhere, the inside-piano clatter of “Unwritten Messages” isn’t always convincing (though I enjoyed the Tippett-like harpsichord imitation), but when this piece evolves into a textural essay it becomes compelling. And finally, it’s only with the closing “Waltz for Lois” where you really get a chance to savor the musicians’ reflective side, with Schweizer coming up with some engagingly chromatic playing.

Taken altogether, there might be nothing particularly revelatory about this recording. But that’s no knock. Roiling, energetic, propulsive, but nonetheless filled with subtleties, this is duo music of a high order.

Various Artists - Void/Full

Various Artists
Void/Full
Antifrost 2019/2020

This is a two-disc concept collection wherein the participants were asked to submit a piece designed to fit into one of two categories: Void or Full. Not too surprisingly, these terms can possess multiple meanings and enable a wide range of approaches. In fact, someone taking a blindfold test and asked to determine which section a given work resided in would likely fail as often as not. However, I presume that merely haven been given this loose constraint, the musicians created their pieces in a slightly different manner than they would otherwise have so there’s some amount of inherent interest that might be lacking in a simple, arbitrarily chosen collection.

The tracks are relatively short (two to eight minutes), twelve on “Void”, thirteen on “Full”. Generally speaking, there’s some very nice work on both, though nothing that’s truly remarkable or (to the extent I’m familiar with the work of the artists involved—some are new to me) very different from other examples of their craft. Ami Yoshida leads off “Void” with a fine, brief piece that appears to be entirely electronic, though it’s quite possible her amazing voice is mixed in somewhere. There are also strong contributions from Antifrost founder Ilios, Roel Meelkop, M. Behrens, Francisco Lopez and Dieb 13. While the tendency on this disc is toward quieter music with more empty space, this isn’t at all adhered to universally; Lopez’ piece, for example, derives from the same roaring engine sound field as much of his recent work (albeit with an odd, pop song radio grab appended). It’s an open question whether a given musician decided to read “void” as more than a physical condition.

Starting the “Full” disc with one of Toshi Nakamura’s “nimb” constructions (#39 if you’re keeping count) is a nicely perverse idea. His static manipulation might strike many listeners as the epitome of emptiness but it’s well within his character to play with such vague notions and cause you to reconsider your premises. The qualitative range on this portion of the project is somewhat greater than on “Void”, the best works (Daniel Menche’s “The Hagakure and Myself” and Sachiko M’s “33”) being outstanding tracks while the weakest (Evol’s “Jiggerypokery” and Maja Ratke’s “Punkhouse Conversation”) tilling a rather shallow furrow in the extreme noise field. But again, the offerings maintain a pretty stable level of interest, including strong work from Nikos Veliotis, Joe Colley, Edwin van der Heide and Eric la Lasa. It concludes with a delightful quasi-lullaby by the team (new to me) of Alejandra and Aeron called “Now I’m Full”, just the sort of surprise that can make an entire set seem rosier in retrospect.

So while there may be nothing of overwhelming import herein, the two discs are solid enough overall to warrant investigation. Fans of this music will likely encounter several voices they’ve not yet heard and may be interested to follow up on (in my case, Edwin van der Heide and Alejandra and Aeron) and the semi-completists among us will enjoy having the tracks by our hometown favorites.

~ Brian Olewnick

Label Profile: In Situ

IN SITU

French cellist Didier Petit was born in Reims in 1962, and with frequent playing partner Denis Colin, was closely involved with Alan Silva's IACP (Institut Art Culture Perception: an unorthodox jazz school at the best of times), working as Pedagogical Director there from 1987 to 1990. The In Situ label, which Petit curated for a decade before passing the job over to journalist and Peace Warriors founding editor Théo Jarrier two years ago, is a good place to start any investigation of French improvised music. As the name suggests, Petit's aim was primarily to document live performances, through a complex series of co-productions with theatres, festivals and clubs throughout France. Not exclusively though: one of his earliest projects was to reissue pianist François Tusques' landmark 1965 Free Jazz (see below), and one of the most beautiful albums in the collection features violinist Carlos Zingaro playing in a Portuguese monastery accompanied by... a seven-second reverb (is076)! Other treasures on the label include the fabulous La nuit est au courant (is040), documenting a rare tour by an extraordinary quartet featuring enfants terribles Jac Berrocal (trumpet) and Jacques Thollot (drums), with bassists Francis Marmande and Hubertus Biermann, Impulse-Elan (is075), a breathtakingly intense collection of Joe McPhee/Daunik Lazro duets, and a 1985 solo set from Steve Lacy (Solo, is051) which no serious Lacy collector should be without. Come record shopping to Paris if you wish: the trademark red and black neo-constructivist graphics of the early In Situs are easily spotted in local shops. The entire In Situ catalogue is once more available, and though each item in it merits careful attention, I've selected just five (re)issues here to whet your appetite.

François Tusques
FREE JAZZ
IN SITU is039

Journalists a while back were all celebrating – justifiably so – the reissues of the groundbreaking Joe Harriott Quintet albums Free Form and Abstract, but many seem to have overlooked Didier Petit's 1991 reissue of another epochal album recorded in October 1965 by a sextet led by pianist François Tusques, featuring saxophonist François Jeanneau, clarinettist Michel Portal, trumpeter Bernard Vitet, bassist Beb Guérin and drummer Charles Saudrais. The outstanding interplay between Jeanneau and Portal, both of whom are still major figures on the French scene while never perhaps quite living up to their real potential, inevitably recalls Coltrane and Dolphy; one could even hazard a bet that Eric would have been playing and recording with these guys about this time had he not died in Berlin the year before. Tusques is a lean, mean improviser with a keen sense of space – blind tested on this before I knew it I was pretty sure I was listening to Andrew Hill – and the rhythm section is as supple and subtle as any mid-Sixties Blue Note line-up you'd care to mention (Guérin, of course, went on to feature prominently in the 1969 explosion of fire music on BYG/Actuel detonated by the arrival of Shepp, Murray, Thornton, Burrell and others). Like the Harriott quintet, this is proof, were any needed, that free jazz was not just an angry cry of oppressed Black America, and whereas Harriott's group in 1961/62 was still solidly anchored in bop structure, Tusques' sextet three years later is moving into more abstract territory. Free Jazz is a document of singular beauty and passion that no serious jazz lover should be without.

Alan Silva &c:
TAKE SOME RISKS
IN SITU is011

Though the name Alan Silva is no doubt familiar to anyone reading this – his discography after all reads like a roll-call of the all-time great free jazz albums – his post-Center of the World recordings are less well-known and sometimes hard to track down, particularly the later recordings of his Celestrial Communication Orchestra released on his IACP label). Take Some Risks was recorded in the Maximilien Guiol Gallery in 1986, and features Misha Lobko on clarinets, Bruno Girard on violin, Didier Petit himself on cello and Roger Turner on percussion. Those poor souls who take sides for or against free jazz in favour of improvised music could do no worse than go back to this album and clean their ears out: at its wildest, this could be the Cecil Taylor Unit of the late 1970s (though without the piano!), while next minute you might be fooled for a moment into thinking it was SME-style "insect music". Sure, Turner's extraordinary fireball percussion work is light years away from "conventional" jazz drumming (he was one of the first to abandon the standard kit set-up in favour of a seemingly miscellaneous pile of bric-a-brac, metal and toys), but Silva's booming bass work is just as recognisable as it ever was on his recordings with Taylor, Ayler and Frank Wright. The album is aptly named – the music lurches forward with apparent abandon, a blind man walking a cliff top footpath: some of it is absolutely breathtaking, some of it fails.. magnificently. Younger generations of improvisers who pore over master tapes in studios trying to mix out odd spots of trouble should go back and listen to this, have the courage of their convictions, and take some risks themselves.

Michel Doneda / Lê Quan Ninh / Dominique Regef:
SOC
IN SITU is163

Soprano saxophonist Michel Doneda and percussionist Lê Quan Ninh have worked together on many occasions (you can find them along with Daunik Lazro on In Situ 037), but SOC was a relatively short-lived trio featuring Dominique Regef on hurdy-gurdy and israj. The album was recorded, as have been several In Situs, at the Musique Action Festival in Vandoeuvre-les-Nancy in 1992 and is regarded – rightly – as one of the landmarks of French improvised music in the 1990s. Doneda's soprano is rich and reedy, and his interest in Eastern European and Oriental musics to the fore, complemented by Regef's hurdy-gurdy, and Ninh's extraordinary percussion. The final track, "Le paradoxe en long", is a brooding, almost Mahlerian slow movement, with Ninh's cymbals and bass drum the ominous rumblings of an approaching storm and Regef's swirling drones the perfect backdrop to Doneda's searing soprano. Folk music for the 21st century.

Alan Silva / Johannes Bauer / Roger Turner:
IN THE TRADITION
IN SITU is166

Seven years after the Take No Risks session, Silva and Turner teamed up again, at Vandoeuvre, with trombone whiz Johannes Bauer. The album title might lead one to expect one of those "respectful" tributes to the elders, à la Marsalis, or Carter (but also Braxton and Shepp), but five seconds into track one (all the tracks are called "Standard"s) it's clear we're in for a trip of another order. Silva is featured exclusively on synthesizer, perhaps to the horror of purists expecting his bass, or at least a bit of violin, and very impressive he is too: the synth has long been regarded as belonging to rock, techno and fusion, but Silva's wild work on it serves to remind us that free jazz musicians such as Burton Greene and Sun Ra were among its very first champions (and Ra's Moog adventures sound as far out today as they did back then). Bauer and Turner are just as insane (the tray curiously credits Turner on trombone and Bauer on percussion – a Silva joke or a cock-up?), and the album cooks from beginning to end. Slip this CD into a Conversations with the Elders jewel box and offer it to a jazz snob as a Christmas present.

Daunik Lazro / Carlos Zingaro / Sakis Papadimitriou / Jean Bolcato:
PERIPHERIA
IN SITU is164

Recorded at Vandoeuvre just two days before In the Tradition was Peripheria, a killer quartet consisting of Daunik Lazro (alto and baritone), Carlos Zingaro (violin), Sakis Papadimitriou (piano) and Jean Bolcato (bass). Lazro, one of the first important French free (as opposed to jazz) players, and Zingaro have been frequent playing partners since the mid-Seventies (and are still active as a duo: check out 1998's Hauts Plateaux on Potlatch, P498), and their interplay is formidable – never forced nor violent, but always emotionally charged. Anchored in Bolcato's solid bass and gently underpinned by Papadimitriou's filigree piano work (his solo Piano Cellules, IS 010, is an unjustly overlooked landmark album of extended piano techniques), this 47-minute set is magic from start to finish. Once again the tape was rolling at the right moment: and Didier Petit had the foresight to release the resulting recording for the rest of us.

~Dan Warburton

Three from Auscultare (Colley, Menche/Mizutani, Yau)

Joe Colley
Desperate Attempts at Beauty
Auscultare
020

Daniel Menche/Kiyoshi Mizutani
Garden
Auscultare
019

R. H.Y. Yau
Coagulation” Selected Works 1996-2000
Auscultare
018

The good folks at Ground Fault (who are affiliated with Auscultare and co-produced these recordings) recently sent along this batch and, though they originally appeared sometime last year (I notice that Nirav included two on his 2003 Year’s Best list), they’re well worth bringing up for discussion. Well, two of them are….

Joe Colley’s “Desperate Attempts at Beauty” is a wonderful collection of “conceptual and research exercises” wherein his ear for sonic deliciousness far outweighs any science experiment overtones. Using fairly minimal original sources (guessing a bit here: some contact mic work, inherent malfunctions in recording equipment—rattles, blown speakers—and water interacting with clay), Colley creates convincing and deep sound worlds with endlessly absorbing gradations. Personally, this is one of the prime characteristics I listen for in this type of music and one that seems rather difficult to achieve, that is for the disc to be as “real” (and, thereby, fascinating) as the sounds heard, for example, outside my window, when leaning against an engine housing or when listening to the interaction between the wind and a faraway airplane while sitting on a cliff. Colley is right on target here and then some, including subtly dramatic portions as when a brief, surging rhythm invades the abstract sphere of the first “Claysound” piece. Importantly in this field, Colley is quite willing to allow “nothing” to occur for extended periods, forcing the listener to hear the volumes of sounds that are, in fact, present and happily percolating away. It’s an old and curious problem to analyze why this music works so well and something like the Hegenbart disc I reviewed earlier leaves one wanting. One obvious answer may be simply that Colley’s ear and my own find some degree of overlap in the sounds we deem beautiful. But I think there’s also a fine-grained appreciation of drama at play, something of an almost narrative feel that I hear in, for example, Philip Samartzis’ work (as well as several others). Sometimes this is achieved with the introduction of rhythmic elements and their accretion and layering, as on the lovely (and enticingly titled), “Lost, Or At Last Realizing That Very Soon None of This Will Matter” which builds, subsides, builds and ebbs again in a suspense-filled manner that keeps one rapt. The final, unlisted track develops an oddly syncopated motif that, surprisingly, conjures up spoon and washboard rhythms (with manipulated static), not something you’d normally expect to hear in this kind of context. These kind of unexpected pleasures contribute to Colley’s generally solid and often profound slate of ideas in which a given work both succeeds as a whole and repays investigations into its microstructure in spades. A fine, fine recording. (A word of warning, however: on my original recording, there was a flaw in the disc which resulted in a repeated skip pattern near the end of the final cut. I wondered if this was intentional on Colley’s part, if it was a CD equivalent of a vinyl locked groove, but then saw references to it as a problem on the IHM site. When I contacted Ground Fault to inquire, I was informed that they were aware of the problem and happily sent me a replacement disc. Well, the skip appears on this one too. For myself, it doesn’t significantly detract from the overall experience, but potential buyers should be forewarned.)

“Garden”, by Daniel Menche and Kiyoshi Mizutani, is a very different sort of document, a 65-minute piece that largely remains within several degrees of its starting points in a kind of modified drone state. Mizutani is credited with the “high sounds”, Menche with the low, so it’s fairly easy to isolate the contributions of each and, indeed, one of the interesting facets of the piece is in its relative lack of a mid-range for the first 2/3 of its duration. Up top, one hears bird and insect sounds blended in with various high-pitched electronica, the bright strands inevitably evoking, given the piece’s title, the upper reaches of tree branches and perhaps some loft cirrus clouds. Underneath it all, maybe subterranean, are Menche’s deeply pitched thrums and pulsations, the roots, earthworms and, one guesses, the interred power lines beneath the flowers. This puts the listener at ground level, midway between and enveloped. It’s a luscious cocoon in which to be swathed. As with Colley, this pair is quite content to let things simmer for a good while, refusing to accede to any event-driven urge. If “something happens”, fine, if not, we’ll wait. But again, just when you think there’s not much going on, you reattune your ears and, lo and behold! this is occurring and that too! Closing in on the 40-minute mark, things get denser as an intermediate soft, white noise element (rain?) emerges, shooing the listener back under some foliage where the throbs from that buried generator are more pronounced. Gradually, that mid-ground comes to predominate, sweeping aside the highs and lows and establishing itself as a rather alien presence, replete with harsh, ringing tones that remind one of the mycological protagonists from the classic SF film, “Them”. As the piece winds down, the original balance returns, albeit with the giant ants still ambling about. It’s tempting, in a way, to think of “Garden” as ambient music but, if so, it’s some of the most riveting around—no bliss-outs here.

But then we come to Randy H.Y. Yau’s disc. I know Nirav listed it among his favorites from last year and, as I greatly respect his knowledge and taste, I might require an explanation. Perhaps it dwells, for me, in that same inaccessible-to-oldsters region as the Prurient release I was cool on but this collection of eighteen pieces, to these ears, ranges from fairly interesting to downright puerile. After a disposable opening extract from an answering machine message (a tired enough trope), Yau’s “Prescription (Excerpt 1)” is one of the disc’s stronger works, a manic agglomeration of noise piled atop enormous (and rather humorous) organ chords, an unholy grafting of Stockhausen and Keith Emerson. The second excerpt, however, and much of what follows, lurches into Eye territory, bursts of throat-rending screams alongside this or that noise explosion. The vocals have an overbearing character to them, something that, regardless of their situation in an ostensibly avant context, brings to mind the same sort of preening you hear in the most commercial of metal bands. You tended to believe Eye; Yau sounds imitative and second-hand to me. Belches form some percentage of his arsenal (actually used to nice effect on a piece like “Scherzo 7810003”) and he’s not above interpolating the odd urine stream, but fratboy antics reach their nadir on “Intermission”, six minutes of closely miked, impressively ferocious vomiting into a toilet bowl. I was trying to pin down a date when this sort of thing might have at least gotten a few points for daring, nose-thumbing provocation. Maybe 1965. Hell, maybe 1915. Tristan Tzara might be chuckling to himself. The tracks that are more purely abstract noise, or where the vocals are sublimated enough to reduce their annoyance quotient, work the best (things like the misanthropically titled, “I’ve hurt you today…I’ll do it again”) but even here there’s not a heck of a lot to distinguish them. Brutal, yes, but brutal on its own doesn’t tend to hold my interest.

Two out of three ain’t bad, though, and those two are mighty good.

~ Brian Olewnick

Dink Johnson – Mr. Johnson Signing Off

Delmark 646

History can be a cruel and fickle arbiter. When it comes to the written record those remembered comprise a tiny minority when compared to those forgotten. In jazz, the differential is no less conspicuous. The process of natural selection necessarily raises certain surnames to iconic status while others submerge under the shoals of time. Pianist Dink Johnson’s case is a bit different. He had two shots at immortality- one forfeited, the other realized. As drummer in Freddie Keppard’s Original Creole Orchestra he narrowly missed the opportunity to take part in the very first jazz recording session. This thanks to Keppard’s fears that preserving his music on shellac would lead to rivals stealing his trumpet chops. The honor ended up going to the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, an all-Caucasian outfit, several years later.

Johnson’s second brush with perpetuity came nine years on in 1921 when he held the clarinet chair on Kid Ory’s records for the Sunshine label. These were the first jazz platters waxed in LA and are arguably the first employing an African American band. Sadly, the luster of Johnson’s early milestone faded in the following decades and by the 40s he was a slave to the bottle, eventually drinking himself to death in 54’. He appears to have played actively up until a few years prior to that all too common demise.

This new Delmark compilation reissues the contents of a November 1950 date originally released on vinyl through Paul Affeldt’s Euphonic Sounds label, with three previously unreleased numbers added. The disc also tacks on two tracks by pianist Russ Gilman that were originally mis-identified as being the work of Dink. The mistake seems odd given Gilman’s obviously more polished and, by proxy pedestrian, approach. Drummer John Joseph provides raw-boned rhythmic support for both men on all cuts.

Johnson sounds in good spirits throughout his eighteen-song recital, to the degree that spirits of another sort were presumably involved in the prep. Loose and limber at the ivories, there’s an extemporaneous feel to his delivery that’s immediately endearing. Rags and blues are the staples of the day and Dink charges through them with a surprising brio. His stabbing, jaunty stride runs on calcified tunes like “Kansas City Stomp” and “Twelfth Street Rag,” supply a badly needed personal stamp that levitates the music out of most potholes of predictability. On the former song he scats expressively along with his own staggered percussive lead as snare shots insert sparse punctuation. Johnson’s joyful eccentricities stand out boldly on other pieces like the just plain kooky “Pigeon Walk” where he gurgles amorously “You better wrap your wings around your love, baby, just like a dove.”

Joseph keeps things off-kilter too, striking sticks against sticks and bouncing tips off rims in a peculiar, responsive style that would make Cie Frazier proud. Wantonly capricious in spots, this music is at once a faithful invocation of a past era while simultaneously standing euphorically apart. Regardless of his rightful place in the jazz lineage, Dink’s name and visage probably won’t register much recognition in the minds of potential record buyers. That’s a damn shame considering the amount of earnestly entertaining music in abundance here.

Boris D. Hegenbart - [smip]

Boris D. Hegenbart
[smip]
Quecksilber
3

Operating here under the nom de musique “2/TAU”, Boris Hegenbart serves up a collection of pieces based on field recordings of sorts, sometimes (always?) apparently involving devices and incitements of his own creation, all leavened and strained through baths of post-production. For instance, on the opening track, [snooze], one hears engine sounds, night crickets, ambient room hum and who-knows-what-else gathered together, tossed into a sonic grinder and admixed with tonal organ chords and irregular bell-like tones. It works rather well, evoking a sense, though disjointed, of place, a remembered one if not an actual one. “Disjointed”, however, becomes a key word as Hegenbart flits, dreamlike, from one room of sonic apparitions to another, frequently using grabbed snatches of conversation (English, Japanese, French, German, Chinese) that loom into earshot in nightmarish fashion only to immediately recede. At times (maybe, considering my lack of understanding of Japanese, Chinese and German, it’s a consistent feature), the voices appear to be reacting to an object, presumably one presented to them by Hegenbart. One supposes that they are manipulating the object and producing sounds which are later transmuted. ”[smip]”, for example, stands for “something moving inside plastic box” and, I’m guessing that the item in question, given the repeated instance of certain sounds, might be the primary source for much of what is heard here. Regardless of the instigatory mechanism, the proceedings tend to center themselves in a very similar space. A little of this goes a long way and each subsequent iteration of this idea adds little to the first, pleasurable impression, indeed only watering it down as the disc progresses. There’s also a certain hermeticism to all this, something that might attract some listeners as it puts off others as Hegenbart both indulges in his gentle provocations and documents the results in a fairly claustrophobic sound world. Not that this isn’t, in fact, what goes on in many a release of this sort, but there’s more than a whiff of someone creating these miniatures in a darkened basement, fashioning intricate constructions that, for all their complication, have little capacity for breathing. I can see some listeners enjoying [smip] quite a bit and there are certainly multiple points that are tasty for seconds or minutes at a time, but for my taste, the choices made too often sound routine and self-satisfied and I’m left feeling that on the whole there’s too much science experiment and too little, for lack of a better term, art.

~ Brian Olewnick

Cecil Taylor Quartet - Incarnation

Cecil Taylor Quartet – Incarnation

FMP

One of the rarely mentioned features of the growing treasure chest of Cecil Taylor recordings since the early 80s is that much of the variation in both quality and material on these discs is largely a function of factors that are almost entirely independent of Taylor’s performance. On one outing the sound or balance may not be so good, on another, the bass player may be out of tune or the horn player or marimba work particularly wonderful. Cecil himself, while pretty much always terrific, has, in a manner often lately remarked in connection with Evan Parker, generally played fairly similar material from session to session. He may have a slightly more frenetic or longer climax here or a slightly prettier balladic section (or longer “poetry” section) there, but his approach has generally been pretty consistent. In addition, his range of intervallic and rhythmic choices seems to have narrowed a bit since the seventies. This isn’t meant as criticism, however. Every musician has (or ought to) have a style, and the fact that Parker and Taylor are easily recognizable is thought by many to be factors to be urged in their favor. The point is that since Taylor seems almost always to be inspired by the same divinity (Mars?) and his tremendous energy has not flagged with age, comparisons of his recordings will, to a large extent, focus on the contributions of his sidemen. Those do vary considerably. On Incarnation, Taylor is joined by cellist Tristan Honsinger, electric guitarist Franky Douglas and old friend Andrew Cyrille on percussion (including a set of tympani). Honsinger is very assertive here, from his opening Wild Wild West pizzicato to some Slavic-sounding bowed rhapsodies. As I’ve written elsewhere, assertiveness is particularly important with Taylor sidemen: Cecil will simply trample the diffident in much the same way a stampede of rhinos will squash a couple of worms clinging to in-path underbrush. There's no danger of that with Honsinger. Douglas, on the other hand, does seem a bit cowed occasionally, but when he snaps out of it, his contributions—from “soul” elevenths to “spacey” sound effects—are quite refreshing. He even breaks out his wah-wah pedal at one point. Douglas also spends considerable time clicking away at lower pitches than I believe can be produced on a traditionally tuned electric. This is beneficial to the torque quotient: since Honsinger spends so much of his time scrubbing midrange double-stop tremolos, he can't put in much time on bass substitution duty. (Tristan also fiddles around with some stuff that sounds like it could have been culled from a transcription of L’Histoire du Soldat.) Cyrille provides a somewhat broader palette of timbres here than I’m used to hearing from him. He seems to have made considerable use of his tympani mallets (as well his hands?) in addition to flashing his sticks in his more customary “charge ahead with Cecil” traps style. On this outing, he often seems to focus exclusively on Honsinger: the two regularly provide a tightly in-synch roiling sea for Douglas’s deep bubbles and Taylor’s violently spinning broken propellers. Each player is given considerable space (it’s a 77-minute disc), and each acquits himself quite admirably both in solo and ensemble contexts, though there are several awkward or uncertain moments. In spite of its periods of tremendous intensity, Incarnation also provides generous glimpses of space and warmth and calm—and they are perhaps integrated a bit more gracefully than, for example, the quieter moments were stapled into Nailed or “Lord of Character” (if anybody cares about graceful integration in those wonderfully fierce contexts). In sum, Incarnation is another first-rate Cecil Taylor creation.

~Walter Horn

AMM At the Roundhouse

AMM
AT THE ROUNDHOUSE
Anomalous ICES 01

This is the first installment of what will hopefully be a series of releases documenting Harvey Matusow's "International Carnival of Experimental Sound" festival at London's Roundhouse in 1972 (the story of which is told by Eric Lanzillotta in his liner notes), and a major release it is too. Two brief extracts from this concert, which took place on August 22nd that year, were released as a 7" single on Incus, but this is the first time the performance has been available in its entirety (in quad sound too, if you have ProLogic decoding technology, whatever that is). Mention AMM to most folk today and the names of Keith Rowe and John Tilbury will probably spring to mind, but it's worth recalling that in the mid 1970s, following some internal changes in socio-political ideals, the group consisted of only two musicians: percussionist Eddie Prevost and tenor saxophonist Lou Gare. When Rowe rejoined AMM in 1976, Gare himself bowed out – "I could not go back after the freedom of the duo", he writes in a brief postscript to Prevost's notes to this disc. Gare continued to perform in and around Exeter, where he moved in 1976, and even rejoined AMM briefly later, but in recent years has tended to concentrate on other interests, notably teaching Aikido and making and repairing stringed instruments (if you're in Devon and your fiddle needs a twiddle, go to http://www.lgare.fsnet.co.uk).

Prevost is right to describe the duo's work as "decidedly non-jazz"; true, apart from the instrumentation itself (Interstellar Space inevitably comes to mind), one can find certain points of comparison – Prevost plays his snare drum like Sunny Murray uses his cymbals (think of "Real" on the BYG Actuel album Sunshine) to set up complex fields of vibration, extending the concept of rhythm far beyond the traditional confines of time-keeping – but as writer Wayne Spencer has pointed out, Gare and Prevost are at their most radical when not playing. Or, rather, when the level of volume and event-density drops to something more akin to today's lowercase improv. "In the silences and pregnant pauses that were a characteristic of our performances you can hear doors swinging open and closed, a child's voice echoes in the distance, and there are other indistinguishable human murmurings and nameless isolated clonks", writes Prevost. "At the end of our performance – nothing. No applause, no cat-calls. Merely the empty sound of indifference."

Small audiences for improvised music are nothing new, though it's hard to imagine music of this quality being greeted with stony silence today – not that one could expect a tenor saxophone / percussion duet to sound anything like this anymore. This particular incarnation of AMM (also documented on the Matchless album To Hear and Back Again) was neither ahead of nor behind its time, but quite simply not of its time. The high-speed clatter of Pauls Lovens and Lytton (not to mention Roger Turner and numerous others), which has become the accepted (I'm tempted to say "traditional") way of playing percussion in a free improvised context, is notably absent from Prevost's vocabulary. Similarly, Gare's tenor playing bears absolutely no relation either to his immediate predecessors in free jazz (Coltrane, Ayler et al.) or to the then-emergent extended techniques of Parker and Brötzmann. Nor is it a precursor of today's saxophone language: multiphonics, key clicks, breathy flutters and splutters are conspicuously absent, as are cathartic blasts of screaming noise. If Prevost had frisbeed his cymbals at the ceiling or destroyed a potted plant or two à la Han Bennink, or if Gare had blown his saxophone through his nose (to quote Zorn) and burst a few blood vessels à la Brötzmann, perhaps the handful of people present in the cavernous space of the Roundhouse would have reacted. But that's not what AMM music has ever been about. Prevost and Gare make no concessions to popular fads and fancies. "It is perhaps difficult for people now to appreciate how important the music was to us", Prevost writes. I seriously doubt that anyone listening attentively to these 47 minutes of extraordinary music could fail to appreciate the importance of this magnificent document.

~Dan Warburton

Amps do not equal resistance

The latest in a continuous stream of near-gushing reviews of Erstwhile's Amplify boxset has been published by the good folk at Dusted.

What I'm wondering is, aside from Warburton's midtoned take on the box at his own Paris Transatlantic, have their been any pans of the box? Not that I think it needs it -- I've gotten more than my share of enjoyment from its music since it was bestowed upon me in December -- it's just that it's rare to see such a large comprehensive project slip away from negative criticism. It's fairly often that larger sets will have plenty of holes in quality, ranging from misplaced music in the sequencing to mismatched stretches of tunes that would have been better left on the tapes.

I notice that the expansive IMJ box is mentioned toward the end of Wellins's review, and it is one that has received plenty of negatives for oversight and overkill. Having not heard the Japanese set, what is it that makes Erstwhile's in many senses so superior?

Finally, there are many labels that have been in the same area of business for a few years now. I haven't heard of any other such sets being in the works, and not for not keeping my ears to the rails. Is there any such buzz? A large project from the folks A Bruit Secret would be plenty welcome, as I consider their music and minimalist production to be consistently top-notch. Label profile on that group forthcoming here, btw.

Flat & Scruggs - Complete Mercury Recordings (Polygram)

John Fahey titled one of his recent anecdotal biographies “How Bluegrass Destroyed My Life.” The dire assertion works just as easily in reverse in my own experience. I discovered bluegrass at a time when my listening habits were largely mired in late-80s pop rock. The melange of banjo, mandolin, string bass and fiddle tied to rich vocal harmonies was like a rescue ladder rolled down into my narrow musical cave. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys were my first ambassadors into the art form. This disc collects every extant Mercury side by the band, spanning from just after their highly contentious defection from the ranks of Bill Monroe’s outfit in 1948 to a Florida radio spot in the fall of 1950. They dubbed their sound “Mountain Music” to further separate themselves from Monroe, the self-styled Father of Bluegrass. Plenty of classic ditties fly by including “Down the Road” and “My Cabin in Caroline.” Sacred songs are more prominent in the collection’s second half and there are also a handful of breakdowns that feature Scruggs blindingly fast banjo runs peppered throughout. His insanely accelerated and exacting method picking would influence everyone from surf guitarists to thrash metal rockers in the decades to come. O Brother Where Art Thou? and its brethren of soundtrack sequels put a modern commercial spin on this sort of music, dusting off veterans like the Stanley Brothers and taking the public by storm, Buena Vista style. My money’s still on the source.

Robert Lax/Various - Wake up. re:Lax

Robert Lax/Various Artists
Wake up. Re:Lax
Intermedium 019

The poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) is largely known for being a major influence on the Beats (Kerouac called him “one of the great original voices of our times”) possibly more than for his poems themselves which have a spareness and something of a Buddhist nature that might affect readers in a manner akin to some of Cage’s works—they’re admired conceptually but perhaps not dwelled on as deeply as they deserve. For example:

arf
arf!

(silence)

arf
arf!

(silence)

arf
arf

arf
arf!

(silence)

Or:

come

come

here

-

The first of two discs presented here is comprised of Lax’ readings of some 30 of his poems, recorded in the early 90s. He has a droll manner, the twinkle in his eyes manifesting clearly in his voice, a voice that still has a youthful ebullience despite his age at the time. Admirers of his work will find this portion alone worth the price of admission.

Apparently he’d gained enough of a respectful following to entice the artists gathered here to set several of his wry, mantra-like pieces to music. Given Lax’s tendency toward insistent repetition and the complementary bent of several participants here toward looped beats and rhythms, it’s largely a successful marriage. There are 16 pieces by seven interpreters, each presented sequentially. Tarwater (Bernd Jestram and Ronald Lippok) set “The Bomb. Scenario for Auditorium” to a rippling, percussive beat that surges along with the bomb's fall to earth only to recede upon its explosion into a surprising, lovingly strummed acoustic guitar set against ringing tones, the poet’s voice calmly reciting the horrors he sees. Sixtoo’s two short pieces position the words against thick, cloudy beats and drifting Rhodes-like bell tones while Iso 68 (Thomas le Beog and Florian Zimmer) use odd overlays like gamelan and melodica, reed organ (?) and tuned drums or low register piano and electronica rhythms to establish exotic and lush beds for amusing pieces like “Are You a Visitor?” (asked, I believe, by Lax’s dog). Next up, four poems are strung together by Loopspool into a dense, throbbing electronic mesh, here using a young woman to read the works, softly split into multiple voices, echoing off into the hiss and spatter. It’s quite effective, somewhat reminiscent of late period Golden Palominos with Nicole Blackman. Chilean Ramuntcho Matta (yes, son of that Matta) supplies some Rypdalian guitar behind the arch “Wake Up Jack” (it’s 1949) and looser, more interesting playing to support Lax’ listing of the permutations of light, dark, black and white, “Bright White”. Not surprisingly, one of the highlights of this set is created by Christof Kurzmann in his version of “One Stone”, combining a pulsating rhythm with a panoply of extraneous sounds, voice extracts, and other sonic detritus (including a wonderful, skittering series of tones that sounds like a balafon at Mach 10) that perfectly complement Lax’s intoning, “one stone, one stone, I lift, one stone, and I am thinking, one stone, one stone, as I lift…” Unfortunately, the disc concludes with two mediocre numbers by Marc Ribot (along with an uncredited alto saxophonist/bass clarinetist—maybe Ned Rothenberg?) They opt for a harsher, far more angular approach, something with roots, perhaps, in things like Zorn’s “Locus Solus” project but which seem to have little to do with Lax’s worldview. Stridency and overt angst are at a far remove from the poet's supremely contemplative and quietly humorous nature.

These last pieces aside, “Wake up. re:Lax” is a generally enjoyable collection and a reasonably fitting tribute to the poet. The second disc includes a video of Lax reading from his book, “Mogador” and the accompanying booklet provides a short, appreciative essay and some lovely photos.

~ Brian Olewnick

Morton Feldman - Early and Unknown Piano Works

Morton Feldman - Early and Unknown Piano Works
Debora Petrina
OgreOgress

We’ve all heard recordings described as being "for completists only." Well, this OgreOgress issue of hitherto unrecorded piano music of Morton Feldman is a paradigm case of such a project. Three of the six works here are performances of early, unpublished manuscripts, and only one of the offerings is a substantial, mature piece. Unfortunately, even that one, "Two Pieces for Three Pianos" (1966) is, based on this recording at least, not among Feldman’s better works. The "First Piano Sonata" is dedicated to Bartok, but it sounds a bit more like an early Schoenberg work, albeit more episodic and laden with breast-beating than the future Austrian renegade would have put together, even at fin de siecle. The other two pieces from the mid-forties, "Preludio" and "Self-Portrait" are folksier(!) and a bit less Scriabinesque, but all three of these works are not only immature, they represent a sort of innocent romanticism of a type that Feldman would soon strongly react against. There’s a bit of both Bach and Copland in the pretty, if slight, "Preludio," while "Self-Portrait" veers, though somewhat awkwardly, toward a more mature New Viennese approach. This 3:46 piece seems like the toughest of the lot to play, and it briefly gets away from Ms. Petrina in a couple of places. The "Three Dances," written for a solo dancer in 1950, are in a more recognizable Feldmanian pointillism and are enjoyable. They are, however, only about seven minutes in total duration, and are not really substantial enough to stand as an independent instrumental work—at least not as a memorable one. Interestingly, the third dance requires the pianist to play a drum and a glass with her right hand: it’s a cute effect. "For Cynthia" is a 40-second ditty, presumably written on a dinner napkin. As indicated above, the big piece here is "Two Pieces for Three Pianos," which Petrina handles alone with the help of overdubbing. The three piano parts are not consistent in their method of specifying durations, which one would expect to produce some interesting rhythmic results. Here, however, there is very little but homophony. For most of its thirty-five minutes, we are basically treated to a lethargic display of chord—pause—chord, delivered in a manner that would make it hard for any blindfolded listener to tell that more than one piano is being utilized (though such a one might guess the pianist is being more than usually liberal with his/her damper pedal). The echoing effects one would anticipate from a live performance are almost completely absent in this version. What’s worse, the glimpses of eternity that often emanate from a single chord in the best Feldman pieces and performances (check out the recent Tilbury 4-disc set on London Hall for a couple thousand examples) just don’t materialize here. Veniero Rizzardi’s (quite difficult to read) liner notes to the Petrina disc describe "Two Pieces" as a masterpiece. If it is, one would be hard-pressed to prove it from this plodding rendering. In my view, a much better introduction to Feldman’s wonderful output for multiple pianos is the old Columbia/Odyssey "The Early Years" LP, which contains three such works from the mid-fifties: if you can find one of these records around somewhere, snatch it up! (And pick up one for me too—mine’s all scratchy.) In the meantime, I suggest that Feldmaniacs feed any longings they have for new releases by immediately purchasing the marvelous Fong/Rangtzen Quartet performance of "Violin and String Quartet," also recently released by OgreOgress.

~Walter Horn

Bob Blog

Bob Mould’s been a part of my listening diet for a long time. I’ve been a fan from his flannel-flying post punk days with Hüsker Dü onward across various solo records and the mighty magnesium flash that was the power trio Sugar. Over the years he’s gone through a lot of changes- from scowling self-hater to soul-searching acoustic minstrel to his current persona as proud homo technocrat. He also has a blog, which I discovered on a recent surf past his Granary Music site. It’s been up since the beginning of the year and within its numerous cyber pages Bob waxes revelatory about lots of topics personal, professional, political, and even occasionally musical: wrestling, exercise, dieting, match.com, gay marriage, travel, etc.

It’s an interesting read and one I plan to return to, but what surprises me most is the level of intimate detail he’s willing to go into in what is basically a public forum. Especially considering the fiercely private person he was in the past, at constant psychological odds with the trappings of fame. It’s got me thinking about the whole concept of ‘celebrities’ and blogs and wondering what other musicians maintain similar diaries on the web. This is an age where a blog is available to every boy or girl who wants one. So I guess it makes sense that the ‘famous’ would engage in the activity right along with the ‘anonymous.’ Still, there’s something vaguely unsettling about it. Maybe it’s just that part of me selfishly wishes Bob would spend less time posting on the web and more time putting the finishing touches on his upcoming album Body of Song.

Ekkehard Ehlers/Franz Hautzinger/Joseph Suchy - Sound Chambers

Ekkehard Ehlers/Franz Hautzinger/Joseph Suchy
Sound Chambers
Staubgold 049

On the one hand, it seems a bit unfair to judge a disc containing music meant to be heard in situ, as ambient music designed for a specific location, under specific circumstances. Then again, here it is, presented as an independent document so one plays it as it lays whatever the misgivings. “Sound Chambers”, recorded in September 2003 and intended to be deployed in a park filled with a “geometrical configuration of hedges” at the Museo Serralves in Portugal, begins in beguiling enough fashion with soft, dripping sounds and thin washes of hiss supporting long, gentle trumpet tones. As the hisses spread into thicker slabs of guitar-like drones, one is hard-pressed not to recall Jon Hassell’s Fourth World investigations of the late 70s and early 80s though here, especially near the beginning, there’s a greater undercurrent of unrest and agitation (often supplied by Ehlers’ introduction of staticky sounds) and far less of a tropical feel. However, Hassell had enough fascinating personal idiosyncrasies (like his vocalized trumpet) and an obsessive character that served him well. Those qualities are, unfortunately, lacking here.

Ostensibly improvised, there’s enough of an episodic character to the developments that I wonder if there wasn’t some degree of sketching out beforehand (or perhaps reconstructed post-production). The second track, for instance, appears like a storm cloud, the music suddenly becoming quite dense, replete with thunderclap-like explosions and multiply-echoed trumpet. It’s this seemingly imagistic trend, which continues for the disc’s duration, which weakens the recording and sends it teetering perilously close to the shallower waters of gauzy ambience. It certainly never recedes enough to imagine it disappearing into its intended surroundings; each musician’s contributions tend to be up-front and, if not generally pyrotechnic, pretty attention-drawing. Hautzinger plays in a much more post-Miles fashion than I’d guess most of his listeners are familiar with (actually, his playing sometimes sounds eerily reminiscent of Chet Baker’s work with Terry Riley from the early 60s, especially when looped), Ehlers seems not to be above the occasional electronic splooge that recalls early Moog effluvia and Suchy’s guitar often finds itself just this side of Frisell. While this combination is not entirely unpleasant, it does come off as rather lolling, if not lazy and the listener’s interest begins to flag when, after the first several tracks, you realize that you’ve heard all there is to hear and, short of vacantly grooving to the plush vibe, there’s not going to be much coming down the pike to distract you or cause you to focus.

Again, there’s a kind of attractiveness in all this; it goes down quite easy. But you’re left with little impression afterwards and not little enough impression to guess that it would work successfully filtered through and around those hedges. Neither ignorable nor worthy of very close inspection, “Sound Chambers” ends up being a bit of a frustrating listen, the more so considering the caliber of its participants. Ear candy, yes; lasting nutritional value, I don’t think so.

~ Brian Olewnick

Night and Day Plays Them All

Night and Day
Plays Them All
Edition Artelier

When the Night and Day quartet was formed, it was unlikely without a little outside protest. Some may remember a short-lived release on the FMP label (Night and Day, FMP S13) some 20 years ago. For the uninitiated, Sven-Åke Johansson, Alexander von Schlippenbach, and Rüdiger Carl christened the group in 1984 with Amsterdam-based bassist Jay Oliver and it would last for nearly twelve years, functioning almost exclusively to play traditional jazz music at artists’ functions and various parties throughout Germany, Switzerland, Austria and France. Their first gig was in response to a request to play music for the premiere of an art exhibition. The idea itself suggests some controversy. What were these veterans of European free improvisation doing playing bebop and swing standards to crowds often consisting of higher society? Some likely suspected rebellion or betrayal, but anyone who has kept up with the musicians in the last 20 years knows that they have anything but dismissed the free aesthetic. Instead, Night and Day was both an outlet from already niche conventions, given the area of music Johansson, Schlippenbach and Carl were immersed in, and an opportunity to revere and re-translate the music that obviously had so much impact on their musical livelihoods.

It is difficult to imagine these four musicians performing in a hushed environment, where applause is faithfully delivered following each solo, where sidebar audience conversation is actively frowned upon, and where performance is more often measured than simply appreciated. Johansson recounts that the music was not presented under the restraints that often come with intelligent repertory music. In fact, more times than not, Night and Day’s audiences were rowdy, consisting largely of drinkers and dancers in attendance primarily to have fun and then only as a matter of imbedded affection for the music itself.

Supposedly there was more than one occasion that the band had to install thick barrier rope to keep the dancers (there were always dancers) from bumping into the performers, or knocking over hardware. Good music and traditional fun make good bedmates, and so the ensemble quickly became popular for society functions, and with their popularity came some stretching out: Lol Coxhill, Ernst Ludwig Petrowsky and singer Uschi Bruening were all occasional invitees to shake things up on the bandstand.

While guest performers were common, these six discs present the quartet alone, taken from three consecutive nights in May of 1992, and while the range of music is not in any sense astounding, the energy and flawless execution the band is able to maintain are hallmarks of the set. Twelve sets in all were recorded (two per evening), and by the looks of it, every number is presented in order, as they were played over the course of those three evenings.

The tunes, largely ballads and mid-tempo swing numbers selected from the likes of Ellington, Cole Porter, Hammerstein, Irving Berlin, and Jerome Kern, run from mostly three to six minutes in length. In listening to conservative takes of “Stella By Starlight,” “Speak Low,” “These Foolish Things,” and “I’ll Remember April,” it is clear that the group was more concerned with the music’s sense of brevity than stretching out before their audiences in the name of adventure. The songs themselves are tightly wound, but not without a fine layer of looseness that permeates every head and solo.

Looking at the set lists, you have to wonder, do “Rüdiger Carl” and “Surrey With the Fringe On Top” belong in the same sentence? Occasionally doubling on clarinet over the course of the set, Carl plays his side with remarkable warmth but without any real semblance of overt caution, and so decidedly is detached from the tenor heard on his King Alcohol (FMP 0060), from decades earlier. His familiarity with the standards is not unsurprising, but most of his followers will probably be astounded by the number and sheer range of individual songs played on this set. There are many positives to his straight playing, but a repeat characteristic of his horn that achieves great dramatic effect is a vibrato employed at the end of many lines (see “Stareyes” at the beginning of disc 4), especially in the lower register. At the same time, it would be difficult to identify any default licks employed by Carl; his is a vocabulary that is apparently quite extensive. For all Carl achieves on his own – his is the lyrical voice in the instrumentation here, after all – the chemistry between he and Schlippenbach is critical to the group’s air.

Schlippenbach has a renowned affinity for the music of Thelonious Monk, and is considered by many to be the foremost modern interpreter of Monk’s music. He has recorded a number of records including or devoted to Monk interpretations, and it might be only a matter of rotten chance that Schlippenbach would dismiss the opportunity to break into a Monk tune in live performance. One can only wonder how many times Schlippenbach wanted to incorporate a riff from “Trinkle Tinkle” or “Nutty” into a solo during these performances. Those impulses, if even extant, were never acted upon. Instead, the pianist, like Carl, sticks to the blueprint with delicate fingering, religious adherence to scales, and dead-on recognition of all the changes, incorporating the surprise chord here and there, though nothing near system-shocking. The control and concision exhibited by Schlippenbach and his stagemates is admirable (no, nobody tears into “The Morlocks,” either) as none of the tunes ever transition into shadow territory, but rather remain as the melodies and changes that made them such resilient standards in the first place.

The group profits from Jay Oliver’s and Johansson’s effortless timekeeping. As a whole, the quartet was incredibly tight, perhaps too much so at some points. You can’t perform six cd’s and over 100 songs worth of standards without sounding stiff from time to time, but those occasions are easily looked over for Johansson’s drumming and soothing brushwork.

In terms of production, the recording itself benefits the music to a great degree. Some may call up Shelley Manne’s memorable Blackhawk recordings when listening to this set; the essence is there, what with the passing ambient sounds from Berlin’s Badenschen Hof Jazz Club, where these dates were recorded. In listening, you are very “there” due to the antique-yet-polished presence of each instrument, in unison and independent of one another. And the atmosphere of each disc makes a fine partner for winding down with a nightcap, or a little rowdiness of your own.

It should not go unmentioned that players from Schlippenbach’s and Johansson’s discipline are often challenged by the mainstream, often with the assumption that they couldn’t play conventional (read cultivated) jazz to save a life. They certainly need no defense, and perhaps even the mentioning of such doubts is wasteful and devoid of value. But I find it ironic that Plays Them All not only exemplifies the wide ranging talents of these four musicians, it also sits comfortably alongside the best in the lineage for its modest delivery of these timeless compositions.

Finally, the set’s brief liners notes exist only in German, and the packaging leaves a little to be desired. However, the music and annotation (the track list was evidently compiled long after the performances, and then only through listening to each number, track by track) more than make up for any shortcomings, and so making justification secondary. It’s a rare set of music I assume won’t be around for too long, so collectors, aficionados, completists, music lovers and nostalgia-seekers should take note.

~Alan Jones

no title

I overheard someone say, maybe 3 or 4 years ago (and I'm paraphrasing), that to ignore or to deny the influence of hip-hop is to lose almost complete touch with modern culture. Admittedly, hip-hop never spoke to me the way its 70's root music once did, but that is beginning to change.

I suppose I'm fairly ignorant of racial matters. This has largely to do with the color-blind work environment I've been part of for 10 years -- those issues simply never are raised, at least in practice, though some race-oriented matters surface from time to time as a product of news developments or whatever. And even so, I'm just not that charged about race.

On the other hand, with reference to the hip-hop anecdote above, one could easily say the same about race: To ignore or deny the influence of racial undercutting and similar unethical conscious or unconscious motives is to lose almost complete touch with modern culture. Am I saying that hip-hop = turbulence in race matters? Hell no, though I've been accused of ignorance when it comes to racism, or naivety at lease.

As more and more hip-hop (The Roots, Mr. Lif, Kanye West) works its way into my listening rotation, maybe I am becoming more aware, if not from a distant not-in-your-shoes perspective, of the issues that really are pervading Western culture. Yet there are certain elements to the headlining of these issues that seem to me, at some level, problematic.

I watch Dave Chappelle's show on Comedy Central. His writing and skits are some of the bravest in television, or anywhere in the performing arts, as he is able to address hot stereotype issues from a completely original comedic standpoint, thus giving some semblance of levity to matters many would consider appalling under any other context. But then I am reminded of another mindset: that to recognize and give positive weight (even through comedy) to cultural thorns like the word "nigger," or substance abuse in the younger black demographic, does nothing but increase and give weight to the longevity of those thorns.

I disagree, though not entirely. Part of me feels that the only way to purge cultural thought of such issues is to allow them to undergo their own natural metamorphosis. Hip-hop and people like Dave Chappelle are undoubtedly instrumental in either positively transforming these matters, and, at the least, awakening larger portions of society to their existence through (harmless?) entertainment.

But even those on the conscious tip in hip-hop could be readily, easily accused of glorification/glamorization of immoral lifestyles. Likewise, Chappelle stands to face such criticism from conservative thinkers who need a motive to channel their aggression toward anything that reminds white America of its shady past.

Consider this article, which addresses the "seasonin" of groups through the watering of stereotypes. I live far and away from parts of society (either that or I'm just blind) where these stereotypes are practiced and, more importantly, felt. I would say that the author's intentions are strongly positive, but how to act upon them? Would it be best to recognize these issues, digest, and then turn away? Or are these matters that need to be addressed again and again? How is the outcome of spreading this awareness determined?

John Fahey - Best Of, Vol. 2: 1964-1983

Takoma 8916-2

Best of compilations are tricky beasts. The very signifier itself suggests an inherent subjectivity that can’t help but breed contention. Then there’s the problem of scope. What part of a musician’s folio is under scrutiny and why so? Is he or she even part of the winnowing process? What are the parameters for inclusion/exclusion? Fortunately in Fahey’s case the answers to these questions are forthcoming.

Guitarist Henry Kaiser does the cherry-picking, attempting to build upon his subject’s own choices for Volume 1. The disc covers a nineteen year span, but in a fashion reminiscent of Fahey himself, three cuts jump the borders and come an album, Azalea City Memories (and Dreams of Prince George’s County), originally intended for release on Shanachie in 1991. It’s these cuts that make the set valuable to Fahey neophytes and fanatics alike. There’s also the rare 13-minute “The Fahey Sampler,” a pastiche of pieces recorded in 1967 that incorporates fragments older tunes like “When Springtime Comes Again” and “The Transcendental Waterfall.”

Other selections draw on material from albums both rare and readily available including: Dance of Death & Other Plantation Favorites (1964), Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death (1965), Old Fashioned Love (1975), Visits Washington D.C. (1979), and Live in Tasmania (1981), Railroad (1983), among others. Programmed as such, it’s an absorbing tour through Fahey’s looking glass psyche where Americana regularly fuses with fantasia. The agenda adheres solely his acoustic guitar works. His various experiments with loops, samples and other instruments are left by the wayside. Kaiser’s decision regarding their omission seems sound. The result is just under eighty-minutes of prime finger-picking steel guitar.

I’m always on the lookout for fresh driving music, whether it’s for the morning/afternoon commute or longer weekend excursions. Fahey’s music fits this purpose like few others. There’s something in the stark and measured voicing of his guitar that aligns preternaturally with the winding open road. His cyclic layered riffs, whether bright and sunny or dark and brooding (often simultaneously) seem to complement and even enhance the miles logged. This second helping and it’s earlier counterpart volume are valuable companions on road trips of varying sceneries and durations, say from Dalhart, TX to Monolith, CA? There’s a cement factory there that I hear is worth visiting.

Urban Think Tank

Morton Feldman – Violin and String Quartet (Fong/Rangzen Quartet)

Morton Feldman – Violin and String Quartet
Christina Fong/Rangzen Quartet

OgreOgress

There is something almost harrowing about the later works of Morton Feldman. Although they aren’t the least bit jittery, they are as obsessive in their tranquil way as Cocteau’s opium drawings. A particular chord or three-note motif may be examined exhaustively, perhaps for a good half hour, only to be returned to when some aspect of the intervening material calls up a reminiscence. While Feldman’s early work utilized a kind of evolving repetition that differed from the usual suspect minimalists by its eschewal of chugging for individual points of light, repeating patterns were, almost from the start, an important feature of his through-composed work. But it was only with the compositions of the 1980s that Feldman’s investigations of the small (never really microscopic, however) became marathon events, with layer upon layer of a one- or perhaps two-chord passage being peeled, re-sealed, tilted slightly, and unpeeled again. His two-hour Violin and String Quartet, which received its first recording on this impossibly beautiful OgreOgress recording, is no exception. Usually when string quartets are expanded to quintets, it’s through the addition of another viola, another cello or a string bass. I don’t know of any other examples of the instrumentation chosen here (and I also don’t know if this piece resulted from a commission), but Feldman’s love of (and skill with) high harmonics certainly made this grouping a natural one for him. It’s a species of anti-concerto, though. Fong is much more likely to hover quietly above her comrades than to take anything like a traditionally leading role. The piece is difficult—rhythmically, as well as for reasons involving intonation—but is dreamily handled here: the balance and tempi are perfect, the tone of all the players, whether providing harmonic glisses or faintly insistent conventional notes, is uniformly delicate without ever being prissy. Those reedy "Feldman chords" may seem vulnerable, even helpless, but they are always perfectly in tune. While many performers (along with their rapt listeners) might be hypnotized by Feldman’s seemingly infinite representations of cell divisions and reunitings, Ms. Fong and the Rangzen Quartet remain focused and committed throughout. Violin and String Quartet is a wonderful example of Feldman's mature output that strangely went unrecorded until 2002, but it is here magnificently realized on this two-disc OgreOgress release.

~Walter Horn

Alan Hovhaness – Works for Violin/Viola and Keyboard (Fong/Ashby)

Alan Hovhaness
Works for Violin/Viola and Keyboard
Christina Fong/Arved Ashby
OgreOgress

The nine pieces on this disk—one piece of juvenilia, seven pieces from between 1944 and 1954, and one work of 1962—constitute everything Alan Hovhaness (1911-2000) wrote for fiddle, with or without piano or harpsichord. All but the two most recent compositions—even the piece he wrote when he was eleven—are in Hovhaness’s patented "Eastern Regions" style. He was deeply influenced by the musics of India and central Asia as well as that of his favored Armenia and there is a heavy folkloristic influence to most of his output. Hovhaness was extremely prolific, so it is a bit surprising that there was nothing but this hour of music for violinist Christina Fong and pianist Arved Ashby to release (they tried and failed to get permission to include at least one unpublished work). Several of these pieces are slight (although the fifteen-minute "Saris" is about ten minutes too long): "Shatakh" strikes me as something that could have been used for a meditative entracte to a discarded melancholy scene in Fiddler on the Roof. But all the works here are at least pleasant, and most of the playing is superb. "Chahagir," for unaccompanied viola is probably the most dramatic work of the bunch, sorrowful and passionate without repetitively bludgeoning an "exotic" scale (or containing any hammered open fifth accompaniments), the sort of thing that, during "Saris," will likely nudge a few listeners in the direction of their fast-forward buttons. Hovhaness provides a lighter (for him) foray into "modern" eclectism with his clever 1952 "Duet for Violin and Harpsichord," but he returns to a more somber (perhaps slightly Amramian?) mode with his 1962 "Three Visions of Saint Mesrob," which is quite lovely. Ashby’s playing could, I think, be a bit less heavy (and less sloppy) in a couple of places, but its emotional depth and clarity of vision more than make up for any occasional technical shortfalls. Fong’s restrained passion and beauty of tone are perhaps shown to best effect on "Chahagir" and the unaccompanied violin piece "Yeraz." I also like her performance of the Blochian harmonics on the little "Khirgiz Suite," with its two touching movements for violin and gently rippling piano (the silly third movement is probably best skipped). Fong, Ashby and the OgreOgress label are to be congratulated for putting out this enjoyable, if often mournful, disc.

~Walter Horn

Mississippi Goddamn!

The Fat Possum Juke Joint Caravan steamrolled through Minneapolis last night & I had grand plans of covering it for Bags. Sadly, my shutterbug friend forgot his digital camera so glossy pics won’t accompany the prose.

I’ve caught the Caravan on two other occasions and on both they delivered nothing less than a ripping good time. This version of the cavalcade included regulars Paul “Wine” Jones, T-Model Ford and Kenny Brown, with drummers Craig the Dog, Spam and Cedric Burnside holding down traps duties. The Fine Line, the venue for the gig, isn’t known as a blues joint, favoring instead a schedule more in line with pop tastes (Eighties mall rat Tiffany headlines there next week). So it was great to have these Mississippi delegates throw some sonic mud on the walls.

Fat Possum’s roster is one of necessarily diminishing returns, dealing as they do in the geriatric end of the blues spectrum. Most of their original heavy hitters like Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside have either passed on or are ailing to the point were touring is no longer logistically feasible. Case in point, James Caldwell, their latest find, succumbed to cancer shortly after the recording of his debut record ironically titled Remember Me (a record all fans of country blues should check out). Others, like Cedell Davis, seem to have jumped ship for other labels.

There have also been cries of foul from the blues cognoscenti aimed at the label’s tendency to play up the bad man, misogynistic personas of its talent pool; the argument being that much of the music reinforces long-standing stereotypes of the rural black poor. From what I gather, most of the musicians don’t really care one way or other how they’re represented as long as they’re selling albums/tickets and having a swell time doing it.

Each of the three sets followed the same stark template of matching a guitarist with a drummer. “Wine” Jones took the stage first, decked out in a black bowler, black dress shirt and shiny silver slacks. Craig, a paunchy thirty-something white guy in black t-shirt and jeans affectionately known as The Dog, set up shop behind the modest drum kit at the ready to hammer out a series of steady shuffle beats. Lobbing any sense of subtlety summarily into the rafters, Jones kicked the set off with the terse anthem “Fuck It On Up” from his second Fat Possum opus Pucker Up Butter Cup. The rest of the eleven-song set drew liberally from that album and his from debut Mule with a couple surprises tossed in.

Spidery fingers scuttling across capoed strings, Jones recycled slightly tweaked chords from tune to tune. Infused with a jolting supply of amp-driven electricity the simple riffs were more about volume and crunch than any real attention to diversity. The Dog’s relentless beat was almost metronomic. On “Big Bell Ringin’,” one of the rare deviations from form, Jones slowed the tempo to a sludgy crawl, barking out the single verse lyrics and reeling out a solitary chord that a contingent of ball-capped long hairs to stage right could bang their heads to.

Jones also drew on the repertoires of his North Hill Country peers tackling covers of R.L. Burnside’s “Poor Boy” and Eddie Cusic’s “Stop Arguin’ Over Me” along with a raucous, ramshackle reading of “Boney Maroney” played at a fever pitch mostly below the bridge. Between songs he asked the audience repeatedly, “What time it is?” To which T-Model would croak “Get Dangerous Time!”

Ford’s own set came next. Hobbling to his seat atop the stage, nursing the bad hip that’s been giving him trouble the past few years, he kept flashing toothy grins at the crowd. FP Tour Manager Justin McGuirk strapped on Ford’s Peavey guitar and drummer Spam, sporting a nifty hip hop knit cap and what looked like bifocal lens cued up his sticks. Anticipation was high, but the set sadly didn’t follow through on the hype.

Ford’s four albums for Fat Possum trace a motley track record of quality. Pee Wee Get My Gun, the first, ranks as easily the best. Brimming with ferocious boogie riffs and clattering drums it’s a case of volume and brio eclipsing dearth of material. Regrettably, Ford appears to have little fuel left in his tank. The bite of his guitar dwindled by an overly diffusive and twangy reverb, his scanty, rudimentary lines, played often by simply brushing fingers across strings, were laid bare.

Spam seemed bent on accentuating the foibles, playing beats with a single stick and trafficking in theatrical movements that set the simplicity of the tunes in bold relief. In both appearance and temperament he struck me as the Bizarro-equivalent of Hamid Drake, dealing in simple subtractions and additions of beats and moving his sticks methodically over each drum head. Ford also had visible trouble on a sketch of “Catfish Blues,” his cumbersome reverb getting the better of him and prompting a mid-tune cut off. Across the terribly uneven eight-song set he poked copious holes in his own opening assertion that he was “The Boss of the Blues.”

Still, there were bright moments amidst the dregs and things got better as the set dragged on. Shredding rundowns of “Sweet Home Chicago” and Ford’s own “Chicken Head Man” carried the clout in evidence on his debut disc. On the latter and “Feel So Bad” the pair locked into the sort of trance and smile-inducing drone that’s been a Fat Possum staple for most of the label’s history. All and all a disappointing show, but Ford’s enthusiasm, punctuated by his directives to the ladies “to shake what you got” made it easy to cut the octogenarian some degree of slack.

Turns out the Caravan saved the best for last. The lanky frame of Kenny Brown, one of the few white bluesmen signed to the label, stepped on stage clad in tan cotton shirt, jeans and cap that made him look suspiciously like a cross between Johnny Winter and Floyd from the Muppets. Cedric Burnside, R.L.’s grandson, took his place at the drum kit, white wifebeater practically glowing in the stage lights. The two hit the ground running with a ripping rendition of “Miss Maybelle,” with Brown adding slide flourishes between verses and the stage amps cranked to unholy levels. The noise from the pair was massive, but tempered with genuine technique that gave the tunes an even greater punch.

“Shake Em’ On Down” and “Skinny Woman,” with Cedric on vocals, tore by in quick succession, driven by a pounding beat and Brown’s flaying fretwork. Banter between tunes was top notch too with Brown telling the crowd, “we’re so happy to be in Indianapolis tonight” only to be greeted by a chorus of boos and correct himself, “oh yeah, it’s Minneapolis; at least I hope it is.” Frequent sips from an ever-full wine glass kept his pipes well-irrigated.

A Joe Callicot tune whose name escaped me and original from Cedric kept the set moving at freight train pace, but the peak came with the pair’s take on John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillun.” Brown turned his amp up even louder and tore through the tune’s single chord. Cedric whipped up rolling fife and drum style beat behind him before tumbling into a solo that had his entire kit wobbling from the violence meted out on its surfaces. During his break, Brown switched to lap steel to carry the piece out segueing into a pile-driving version of “Walking Blues” laced with denture-rattling distortion. Fred McDowell’s “You Got to Move” and R.L.’s “See My Jumper,” each infused with a bevy of careening slide runs carried the set to conclusion.

As a finale, “Wine” Jones returned to the stage joining Brown and Burnside on one of his best tune’s “Rob and Steal.” The fit between the three was a rickety one, but by that point my ears were shot, and the thrill of hearing the combination was undeniable. A contingent of Jones’ extended family, along with what by my suspect count was his 6th gin on the rocks, worked as catalysts for some of his most inspired playing. The trio said a collective adios by way of Elmore James’ “Dust My Broom” caked once again in Brown’s caustic slide. Ears and head ringing like the big bell of Jones’ earlier song; I hit the early morning pavement and headed for home.

Italo to the West, Zero to the East

Working my way through Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, I've found that I've been hipped to an author who, much like Vonnegut, silently suggests that one must read all of his work at the soonest opportunity (and perhaps the shortest interval) possible. Here is a writer who clearly respects the role "atmosphere" takes in storytelling and one who can make vital characters of the simplest resources, i.e., inanimate objects. I can only imagine the care Calvino must have taken in building his prose, yet everything is so seamless, uncut.

As intrigued as I am by Calvino's book, I must remember that a few weeks back, I shelved Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, a biography of a function and a mathematical nothing/something. Both the science dork and the pragmatist in me loved this book, truly a work of art that brings out the romantic edges of something otherwise mundane. As a follow-up, Charles Siefe's Zero is hanging out on the nightstand, atop Calvino's Cosmicomics.

Much of the early evening tonight was spent preparing dinner, with a new Broetzmann/McPhee disc at a formidable level. The music will be revisited before bed, after some mindless television intake, and prior to facing the reading choice that I predict will then naturally be made.

Sten Sandell - Solid Musik (nuscope)

Pianist Sandell is known, if known at all, to a great number of listeners primarily as a sometime associate of Mats Gustafsson, and, by extension, Ken Vandermark: another proficient yet sly improviser, another musician happily occupied with both fastidious investigation and sheer play. By virtue of his association with two of the most cited names in contemporary transatlantic "free jazz", Sandell is also something of pre-approved taste, a musician -- slightly rumpled, avuncularly middle-aged, largely unheralded -- whose work is much esteemed among fellow musicians but whose work is also deemed to be a bit too subtle for those of us on the outside. Which is all very strange, because not only is Sandell a charter member of the Gush ensemble, he is also the mastermind behind two substantial releases on the (lowercase before lowercase was cool) nuscope label, an enterprise that has made a specialty of documenting pianists (Fred Van Hove, Georg Graewe).

Solid Musik, Sandell's second nuscope effort, is highly individual solo piano recital made up of rather diverse exercises in instrumental preparation. Sandell avoids obvious modifications to his "Baldwin SD-10" and instead concentrates on exceedingly subtle refinements of the manner in which strings are muted and otherwise made to resonate differently; in his deployment of uncommon yet abundant acoustical resources, e.g., the wood of the piano's frame; and in his own keyboard "touch". This is not to say that Sandell is a technician who has little to no use for thematic material. He has a fine, prickly sense of melody. His rhythms often allude to ragtime and boogie-woogie... as re-imagined by Conlon Nancarrow. Sandell introduces space -- rests -- into his extemporizations (most notably, "not gas") the way a photographer negotiates with light, through an aperture. Dilating, dwindling. Suffused, penumbral. Quite partial to contrasts, particularly of pitches and tempi, Sandell nonetheless loves unifying these contrasts within carefully rendered dynamic ranges. The pianist also makes his own overtures to the kind of processes favored by minimal composers -- addition in small, nimbly manipulated increments; transpositions that "chase", and sometimes "catch", one another -- but, because these flourishes are just several strategies among many in the development of a rather capacious design, they emerge, if not randomly, then at least considerably transformed by an exponential unpredictability: their own raised by their own circumstances'. Sandell's is a surreptitious, ever-branching rigidity, presuming the term is not lost completely in this adjectival thicket. So that listening to Solid Musik is a little like learning about the curvature and consistency and texture and thickness of the invisible walls of an enclosure by observing the behavior of tiny particles as they deflect and are deflected about, then scintillate in destruction.

Any resemblance to popular accounts of matters quantum mechanical is purely coincidental.

Duane Thamm & the Chuck Hedges Swingtet - Tribute to Hamp

Delmark 552

By most accounts, Delmark impresario Bob Koester can be a curmudgeon of the crankiest kind. His impromptu tantrums at the Jazz Record Mart are the stuff of infamous legend (I’ve actually witnessed several myself), but his dedication to jazz is just as famous. What’s even more special about Koester is his abiding love for less popular styles within the music. His affections for traditional Dixieland and swing styles coexist alongside his open ears toward the avant-garde. As such there’s usually a traditional jazz ringer released in every four title-batch of new releases from the label, often by bands unknown out of their own regional enclaves.

Duane Thamm is just the sort of local hero Koester adores. Conceived as a tribute to Lionel Hampton, an influence not usually audible in Thamm’s playing, the live concert taped at the Harold Washington Library Center features coarse fidelity by audiophile standards. The vibrancy and freewheeling feel of the presentation circumvents any cosmetic concerns with the music. Eight standards commonly associated with the Hamp songbook zoom by in the equivalent of a vinyl album’s duration. Running time may be a bit terse in comparison to the typical Delmark title, but the brevity actually works in the band’s favor.

Thamm is pretty much all over his planks most of the time, wielding his mallets, sometimes two to a fist, like a Benihana chef twirling razor-sharp Ginsus. His colleagues seem equally enthused. Chuck Hedges’ clarinet darts and cavorts, spilling out legato streams that capitalize on his instrument’s flighty upper register. He often plays Goodman to Thamm’s Hamp. Bassist John Bany shears away at his strings with bow and fingers on the bass-friendly “The Man I Love” sustaining a steady momentum. Guitarist Frank Dawson and drummer Charlie Braugham complete the package. Braugham is perhaps the most ebullient of the bunch, stirring up a rhythmic lather on pieces like “Seven Come Eleven” before rinsing off with supportive accents to his partners’ constructions. He can play it mellow and easy too as his sparse brushwork on “Memories of You” decisively demonstrates. In line with the band’s velocious tendencies, Dawson’s plectrum is also a frequent blur, alternating bright strumming chords with stinging single notes. What comes through most in the interplay of the five is a consensus on conveying a swinging good time spirit.

The surprise standout cut of the set is “I Surrender Dear” where Thamm turns his attentions to a set of chimes. Stating the melody on the less tonally elastic instruments proves a challenge he rises courageously to match. During his ensuing solo the brittle sound of the chimes begins to grate and his switch back to the more familiar vibes for the finale is almost welcome. Even so, it’s an intriguing experiment just the same.

Ripe readings of “Autumn Leaves,” “Moonglow” and “Avalon,” while less adventurous, round out the program with a solid symmetry. If the disc’s notes are any indication, Thamm’s chances to record have mostly been the province of sideman gigs with the likes of Hedges and departed drummer Barrett Deems. This invigorating live concert will hopefully foment renewed interest in the man’s work and yield fresh additions to his discography.

~ Derek Taylor

Reptet - S/T

MCMC 2

Replicas of the Seattle-based Reptet exist across the globe. Small regional ensembles that tailor the jazz tradition to their own designs, but largely toil away in localized obscurity. Quartet in size, the band is actually an offshoot of the Monktail Creative Music Concern, a larger outfit that’s been generating quite a bit of buzz on the Northwest scene. Their core instrumentation here follows the standard reed plus rhythm concept of countless other groups, but they rise to the occasion of crafting something signature with their chosen tools. Various other instruments also aid in adding further diversity. Tenor saxophonist Tobi Stone doubles on flute. Pianist Stefan Nelson also tickles the keys on Fender Rhodes and melodica while leader/percussionist John Ewing incorporates bells and mini-conga as additional agents beside his drum kit. Holding down the anchor spot, Evan Flory-Barnes alternates between acoustic and electric bass. There’s also the guest musings of flugelhornist Ron Barrow on the Latinized opener “After Before.” Starting at a slow, reflective tempo, the tune repeatedly accelerates between solos. The band contrasts languor with vigor and in the process supplies welcome tension and depth.

Gil Melle’s “The Gears” and Misha Mengelberg’s “A Bit Nervous” reference the Reptet’s wide-ranging listening habits. On the former, Nelson’s Rhodes bobs with Flory-Barnes’ rubberized electric strings giving the classic composition from Blue Note’s nascent hardbop period an unexpectedly funked-up fusiony edge. Ewing’s martial backbeat also assists in keeping the groove fluid and fresh. The Mengelberg piece places focus on Nelson’s acoustic ivories in a staccato dance with Ewing’s brushed snare that later expands into a Horace Silver-worthy Cape Verdean vamp. Stone’s tenor assumes the lead on the airy ballad “Open to Morning,” tracing textured phrases with fluttering breaths against a throbbing bass backdrop. “The Sun Is Beautiful” mixes luminous Rhodes with a fleshy ostinato by Flory-Barnes and a steady rolling beat from Ewing. Stone blows lazily above, accentuating the relaxed tropical feel of the piece. The island vibe carries over into “Resigned to Evening” where bells and chimes bracket Stone’s mercurial flute. Nelson’s melodica, sounding uncannily like a bandoneon, makes an appearance on “Distant Distorted You” threading with Flory-Barnes’ arco underpinning to create a dirge-fueled tango that almost derails from a snail-paced tempo. An upbeat rundown of Monk’s “Introspection” serves as the third and final historical nod of the disc and another chance to hear Flory-Barnes’ flexible pizzicato in the foreground.

Whether the Reptet will roam far beyond its regional base of operations remains open to speculation. They fit comfortably within the parameters of a wide variety of jazz tastes, from thoughtful post bop, to playful fusion and funk, without wedding to a single style for too long. It’s latitude likely to resonate strongly with the average audience palate. If the desire to tour widely is there, this debut disc should be an effective implement in garnering gigs.

~ Derek Taylor

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

— Richard Brautigan, 1967

Kylie Minogue’s new album, Body Language, fills me with a feeling of warmth and comfort. She’s playing with the sound of the early 1980s, the synthed-up post-soul sound of Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam or the Tom Tom Club. (Indeed, one of the producers on the record is Kurtis Mantronik, an Eighties electro hip-hop icon.) But the album never feels cold or implacable the way electronic pop far too often does. It feels exactly right.

Kylie tried to make an alt-pop record in the mid-1990s (Impossible Princess); it tanked. Only in the embrace of machines can she find commercial and artistic success, it seems. And on Body Language, she’s finally achieved a near-perfect balance. Her voice is totally human, in that it’s often weak. She’s not a great singer by any stretch, but she knows it and never goes in for cartoonish oversinging like Mariah Carey or Christina Aguilera. Instead, she allows the programming that surrounds her to cushion and bolster her, floating amid the electronics with the aplomb of a female Bryan Ferry.

Her two previous albums, Light Years and Fever, were both extremely appealing, too. Fever in particular was a sugary yet sophisticated pop album, understanding the value of choruses and perky melodies but never dumbing itself down. Its Euro-disco feel was very different, both in contrast to what was getting played on US radio at the time of its (belated) American release, and what I was listening to day-to-day when its single, "Can’t Get You Out Of My Head," was released. Fever holds up two years later, too. I still pull it out from time to time, and it still rewards me the way it did in the first few weeks I owned it. It reminds me of Daft Punk’s Discovery, in that its disco-derived repetition never becomes monotonous. Further, I view both Fever and Body Language, but particularly the latter, as part of a cybernetic musical tradition going back probably all the way to Conlon Nancarrow, but certainly having strong roots in Kraftwerk and Gary Numan—performers who embraced technology not as a tool, but as a home.

When I listen to Kylie sing, as the machines hum and click around her, I’m reminded of the Richard Brautigan poem I quoted at the top of this page. She seems to treat the machines that make her music as protectors, as collaborators in an almost symbiotic way. She doesn’t want to become a machine, like Daft Punk or Kraftwerk did, but she understands that the computers are her friends. For a useful contrast, examine the career of Britney Spears.

Britney’s first album was almost entirely computer-built, but it wasn’t overt about that fact. She sang in a relatively naturalistic voice, with only occasional tweaks (aside from the pitch correction that surely went on pre-release). On each subsequent album, though, she’s become more and more artificial. Part of this is the result of the latitude granted her by her audience. Since Britney Spears concerts are universally recognized to be more about the dancing than the singing, she feels free to commission tracks that have little or nothing to do with organic song construction. At this point, there are often two and three Britneys singing on any one track, most of them vocodered. That’s more than anyone could lip-synch, and she, being of moderate entertaining skills at best, is pretty much at sea through substantial stretches of her shows. Sometimes, like on her last HBO concert, she doesn’t even try to pretend she’s singing. Watch her lips, and you can see her counting dance-steps as the vocal track plays. Plus, the voices are quite obviously no longer human (at minimum, they’re post-human, like a David Cronenberg vision of pop).

It’s that post-human quality that makes Britney’s songs so weird and off-putting. The beats are much more hyped-up than Kylie’s, and whoever’s writing Britney’s stuff has no idea how to flow from verse to chorus. Her newest single, "Toxic," is a perfect example. It jerks from one rhythmic mode to another and back, with pings and clunks and sproingy sounds substituting for melody. Somewhere in the middle of this pachinko-parlor of pop, Britney herself floats, sounding out of breath and a little panicky. Her own voice is thrown back at her, bent and crushed under the weight of technology. (The first single from the current Spears album was called "Me Against The Music," and it couldn’t have been more aptly titled—it, too, sounds like a video game where the object is to keep Britney alive till the end. Madonna appears as the supervillainess who mocks the heroine until she’s confronted and vanquished on the final screen.)

Kylie has no such conflicts with her electronics. She’s comfortable with them, caressing them with her voice as one would stroke a domesticated big cat. The sounds, in turn, coil around her, protective and familial at once. Within the glossy, yet emotionally accessible world of Body Language, she is, indeed, watched over by machines of loving grace.

Yield at the Intersection

Can anyone remember a time when conversations about jazz and improvised music weren't preoccupied with newness? Certainly our contemporary moment exemplifies this concern, and happily there is plenty of genuine risk and chance-taking around in various idioms. But of all the multiple forms of expression that have emerged in a saturated marketplace during the last twenty years, perhaps none has attracted more attention than the possibility of fusing hip-hop with improvised or experimental music. Hip-hop is widely, and in many ways rightly, celebrated as one of the only genuine innovations in popular music since punk in the 1970’s. And while it's a long way from "Rapper's Delight" or Cannibal Ox, I think the genre is still vital. Vital or not, though, the question remains as to how hip-hop - some of whose most audible and recognizable features include lock-tight beats and dense lyrics - might merge with or influence the seemingly open-ended styles often lumped under "experimental" and "improvised" music.

Hip-hop's roots lie - like those of all truly vernacular musics, certainly not a pejorative term here - in highly specific socio-historical circumstances (i.e. the Bronx, circa the mid-1970s). And the evolution of this music has been linked, even through its manifold proliferation, to specifically African-American expressions of identity (Chuck D famously referred to rap music as "Black people's CNN"). Now it's obvious that hip-hop is far too broad a genre to be limited by these kinds of musicological generalizations; and, for that matter, so too is improvised/experimental music. But it seems equally apparent that, while hip-hop has become one of the defining musical idioms to (now) a couple of generations of musicians and listeners, most of its influence on improvised and/or experimental music to this point has become detached from the specificity of its origins. In other words, paradoxically this influence has been lyric-less.

Early efforts to fuse improvisation and hip-hop tended to graft instrumental solos - sometimes very creative ones - onto fairly conventional hip-hip forms. Examples of this include the early Guru (whose Jazzmatazz release, along with similar forays by Us3, provided a template for dozens of hip-hop artists who would sample jazz records, all the way from Miles Davis' lonely trumpet fire to the hyper-obscure referencing of, e.g., Mike Ladd, whose wonderful Welcome to the Afterfuture contains the memorable line, "I want to fuck like Cecil McBee plays bass") and the raft of M-BASE artists like Steve Coleman and Greg Osby. Coleman's and Osby's dense, polyrhythmic concept was for a time quite influential, and even went so far as to include actual rappers (usually bad ones, though). As enjoyable as M-BASE records were, and as suited as jazz samples occasionally have been to the creation of great hip-hop, these are both mostly mainstream approaches which don't really experiment or push boundaries too much. More recently, this kind of combinative approach has been tried by a bevy of artists ranging from the Thirsty Ear crowd (including the collective Spring Heel Jack, Craig Taborn, and others) to the venerable Derek Bailey (okay, he didn't try hip-hop, but his drum n' bass record is a clear example of genre-crossing influence). I tend to be pretty underwhelmed by the majority of what I've heard from this crowd, but the desire to foreground this combination of musics seems significant.

But overall it seems to me that these kinds of projects - whatever their merits or deficiencies - don't really represent the key point at which hip-hop has influenced experimental music. For that you have to search for what Greil Marcus calls a "lipstick trace," a significant detail or hidden connection between disparate objects or forms. If we draw a line between Stockhausen and musique concrète composers like Pierre Henry all the way to electric Miles, extending the link from there in two directions - one to hip-hop, the other to improv - then we begin to trace the outlines of an influence. Clearly it's not the case that all practitioners of these various idioms acknowledge one another; but nor is that the point. They drink from the same sonic waters. Most important here is the common presence of layered sound, fragments of concrete noise, and the predominance of texture. Strip away the breakbeats and the vocals, and this combination is what's made hip-hop so vital: gathering up sonic detritus, abandoned parts, and "background" noise, and fashioning from them something new and, in its very resistance to conventional modes of expression, meaningful.

The obviousness of the technology used in hip-hop - its "artificial" nature, if you will - calls attention to the process of music making and also creates a context of undermined expectations. I'd venture the same about a lot of the finest improvised music, whether it problematizes conventional instrumental techniques or radically restructures musical form in the way of post-AMM improvising. In hip-hop, both sound and method are templates for experimentation and there is also an emphasis on dialogism; these are the same kinds of things I look for, and delight in, in improvised and/or experimental music. As Tricia Rose wrote in Black Noise, hip-hop's most radical musical innovations "create and sustain rhythmic motion, continuity, and circularity via flow; accumulate, reinforce, and embellish this continuity through layering; and manage threats to these narratives by building in ruptures that highlight the continuity as it momentarily challenges it."

What I'm saying is that aside from the most obvious influences and overlaps - the block-rocking beats of, say, Jim Black and Martin Brandlmayr, or the continuous attempts to blend genres - hip-hop and its aesthetics of sound are quite simply in the blood of young musicians, especially evident in the "downtown" NYC musicians coming up since the 1980’s and, even more so to my ears, in contemporary electroacoustic playing. Goodness knows what fruit the influence will bear in the future. But I'd guess that it's less likely to consist of the obvious pastiches or awkward combinations of the Thirsty Ear crowd than of a slow merging of approaches to sound construction itself. I'll be listening.

~Jason Bivins

IHM, RIP?

Just noticed the cryptic epitaph over at the I Hate Music board. Did that particular pork barrel go bust with the shellacking the old server gave us? Inquiring minds & all that…

the site welcomes itself back

A certain web host really handed it to Bagatellen. I'll do the best I can.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

The Noble Collective (bagatellen)
The Iniquitous Cloven-Footed Unethical Ninnies (jackass old webhost)
The Knuckleheads (The Domain Registrar)
The Defenders of All That Is Good (the new webhost)
Johnny Fisticuffs, the Protector (www.nightclubjitters.com)

The Story, abridged...

Last week the The Noble Collective was illegally, inexplicably relieved of its right to post, publish, gab, rant, and read. In January, I verified that The Noble Collective's account had been automatically renewed with The Iniquitous Cloven-Footed Unethical Ninnies. Be that as it may, said group of nincompoops neglected to renew the registration for this domain name, as specified in our initial contract. Truth be told, they just let it die. They obviously hate music and those who talk about it.

Johnny Fisticuffs recommended that I visit The Defenders of All That Is Good, but not first without talking to The Knuckleheads. The Knuckleheads said, "How do you do? Have at it and God bless with the server transfer, but first pay us $150 for letting your registration lapse." I deferred responsibility to The Iniquitous Cloven-Footed Unethical Ninnies, with whom The Noble Collective is still in dispute for reimbursement.

Seven days and as many migraines later we are back up, heads still ringing from a nightmare sequence of file transfers and second guesses (we employ complicated software fit to negotiate the Federal Reserves, you see) good to go with our new home under the protection of no-shit 24-7 phone support (a term the jackass old webserver uses to disguise a perpetual phone loop of BS recordings). Try to call them, I dare you. If you get in touch with them (numbers with the bookies are currently 117:1) give them a hearty PFFFFFT! for us.

It's good to be back.

Gilberto Gil - Copacabana Mon Amour (Polydor)

Wise friends are essential to the proper maintenance of any personal musical library. My pal Ted hipped me to this album when he spotted a cheap used copy on one of our forays to Kim’s, that venerable East Village record emporium on St. Marks. I picked it up at his insistence and it instantly won me over. Gil’s long been my favorite exponent of the Tropicalia aesthetic. Not as eclectic as Caetano, not as funky as Jorge and not nearly as unhinged as Tom Zé, to my mind his early 70s work is still the most intuitive and organic of the loose-knit cadre of Brazilian troubadours. This one, the soundtrack to an eponymous film by Rogério Sganzerla, distills Gil’s folk roots and filters them further through a friendly hipster seive. Just a quartet in instrumentation with his unvarnished guitar and vocals augmented via overdubbing by Péricles Cavalcanti’s second guitar, David Linger’s sweet & salty flute and Claudio Karina’s battery of small percussion consisting of hand drums, claves, triangles and shakers. Seed time in the studio was likely minimal and the improvisational flavor of the pieces sparks some wonderful off-the-cuff interplay. Gil sings in both Portugese and English, but more often just scats along with the winding colloquial rhythms, most impressively on the fourteen-minute “Yeh Yeh Yah Yah.” I’ve found that this set works as an equally effective aural tonic winter or summer, melting away the film of frost and gloom in the former, or serving as supplement to deck chair, iced rum and perhaps a puff of stronger substance in the humid bliss of the latter. Obrigado, Ted.

Rope - Widow's First Dawn

Widow's First Dawn
Family Vineyard FV25

My first reaction to this new Rope record was that there's too much of the same thing. That can be a good or a bad mark, depending on your needs when hanging out with a record. The beautiful trait shared in those old Skinny Puppy, Revolting Cocks and Sisters of Mercy records was in fact the overkill in both subject matter and in the mood these bands were seeking for the platter as a whole. Robert Iwanik, Michael Kendrick and Chris Drazek have achieved similar ground with Widow's First Dawn. While not every tune sounds so much "alike", with each lies an ominous sense akin to the voices of strangers in an unsettling darkness. As musicians, Rope are fantastic, giving as much attention to timbre and resonance in their choice of notes as they do with the microscopic points along the line of delivery. Kendrick's percussion work brings to mind Danny Carey's mathematically precise time keeping for Tool, but Kendrick's approach adheres more to the loose free structures that come with extensive experience in improvisation. Adding to the band's sound are modest doses of extended instrumention, namely, Vineyardite Darin Gray on piano and Marty Belcher's soprano saxophone. But lending heavily to Widow's atmosphere is the presence of Graznya Auguscik, augmenting Iwanik's vocals. Both achieve a dramatic effect for the tenor of the record, something truly ghastly but immediately complementary to the music pouring out of the band. Some might be interested to know that Steve Albini produced this outing, making for a fine marriage of experience with the open-ended aesthetic of the truly consistent Family Vineyard label. It's a welcome re-entry for Albini, whose recording gigs of late have been capricious at best. His signature heaviness is present, as is the attention to all the right details in Rope's progressions. The band's debut takes you by the throat, and it's an eerily welcome sensation.

~Alan Jones

Kapital Band

Kapital Band 1
Mosz 001

Over the last few years, the young generations of Austrian (specifically Viennese) and German improvisers interested in post-AMM electronics have been getting some attention. Erstwhile Records has certainly brought a lot of players like Burkhard Stangl steady exposure, but so too has the decision of “indie” labels like Thrill Jockey to sponsor new recordings by both Radian and Trapist, two exciting trios emerging from this heady musical environment. And while there has been some recent debate on this board as to the merits of Trapist’s latest release – specifically concerning whether or not they have become too “smooth,” too “accessible,” even too “pop” – there’s little denying that bands like this have struck a particularly resonant chord with a lot of listeners.

The common denominator may be drummer Martin Brandlmayr, who brings a trunk of funk to both units. Along with Berlin-based electronics whiz Nicholas Bussman (of Beige Oscillator and Ich Schwitze Nie), Brandlmayr makes up Kapital Band, and his wickedly tight drumming drives these eleven slices of what the duo unapologetically (but not without complicated feelings) call “pop music.” While there are no hooks, no catchy melodies, no ringing choruses or anything of the sort we typically associate with pop, Kapital Band music is saturated with the groove, knee-deep in directness, and stripped down for maximum effect.

What distinguishes it is the fact that it incorporates improvisation and that it’s steeped in a new electroacoustic aesthetic. The music captures your attention from the start, but it nonetheless – for all that it is compelling and direct – eludes reduction in meaning, via its ever shifting nuance and texture. Don’t think necessarily of the swirling, tonal clouds of Fennesz; think, rather, of the glitch-pop of Oval mixed with the crisp precision of Kraftwerk and the general sensibilities of seasoned AMM listeners. Keyboard sounds ping and pong back and forth between speakers; crackling feedback flames lick at Brandlmayr’s shuffle and pop; subtle, near-references to genre (including the occasional sample of a “hot” guitar lick) flicker at the music’s edges. The pieces often develop courtesy of Brandlmayr’s subtle fluctuations of the pulse in concert with Bussman’s minute orchestrations (from processing noises in the air, generating drones, providing click tracks or quasi-basslines of his own, or conjuring rushes of sonic wind). Each track ebbs and flows, cycles through assemblage and deconstruction. The process might sound familiar, but the materials used are uncommon for this idiom: the stripped and weather-beaten bones of genre, shorn of their context and reframed. Whether in slight whispers of a tune or in pieces that bubble over with noise and energy, Kapital Band’s music should be heard. It’s one of the few recordings I’ve heard recently that can stimulate your brain and move your ass.

~Jason Bivins

Required Reading?

Reading for pleasure; I find more and more that it is a luxury. I've enlisted for a life that requires more than an epicurean appreciation of language. There are more than words wandering in this world, there are great settlements of subjects to be mastered. Not only do I spend a good deal of time surveying contemporary literature (a good deal of which I either do not like or to which I discover I have feelings of simple hostility) in order to better understand my own fiction's orientation, but, as long as I choose to write about music, I also continue to look for new plateaus from which to gain perspective, and new tools to measure my distance from being a musician: an individual who both serves and commands music.

And so I read a good deal about the science of musical production. By science I mean not only hard science, such as mathematics and physics, but also softer science, such as psychology. So, being infatuated with the vague as only a Humanities guy can be, I end up reading a good bit of very technical writing about music. Another Whitney Balliett article, however poetically wrought and insightful, leaves me feeling more stuffy-headed (cotton in the inner ear) than inspired or enlightened. On my musical reference shelf are frequently consulted volumes such as:

• Benade's Fundamentals Of Musical Acoustics (2nd rev. ed.);
  
• Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns, as it sat famously on Coltrane's bookshelf;
  
• Sudnow's Ways Of The Hand, that mind-wrenching exploration of the cognitive states that the author experiences as he learns, not just how to play a specific instrument -- the paino -- but to improvise on it as well;
  
• Helmholtz's On The Sensations Of Tone, important for what it tells us about the form of attention we call "hearing";
  
• Thom Holmes' Electronic And Experimental Music, an excellent, single-volume hisotry / reference resource that I read in high school and which is now available in a second edition;
  
• Berliner's massive, transcription-happy Thinking In Jazz;
  
• Fux's Study In Counterpoint;
  
• Bart Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information For Instrument Making, less for pure instruction than for the ideas ("adjustments") the author suggests;
  
• and more, like studies on Indian classical music [ICM], histories of musicology, treatises by composers from Schoenberg to George Russell.
  

Gaining more than a strictly personal comprehension of music has meant that I live with it, the way I reside with language, in steadily more awkward intimacies. There are those who see guidance as a prerequisite for self-propulsion, then there are others who are comfortable sitting by the banks of the river, waiting for guidance -- a felicity, after all -- to float into their field of vision. Intuitionism vs. Empiricism? Perhaps. Don't you have to know where the oracle is before you can seek its wisdom?

How much knowledge is necessary? I own the books, but do I possess what is "in" them? Music has so many metaphysical realities, I find. Some of them consist of numbers, alone or in formulas; others are traceries (made by blowing dust into a shaft of light) of waveforms and other typically invisible motions; others are purely historical, costumed tableaus whose anachronistic perseverance is interpreted as a kind of immortality; while still others are planes and colors like those that Kandinsky distilled from the air vibrating around him. I am convinced it is folly to seek a unification of these things. I also see the virtue of dispersing one's understanding of it "all". That which refuses to cohere can never be conquered.

Besides, there's a more practical difficulty here. Reading often forms a glut that blocks one's writing. The writing life too easily slips into a certain rhythm: wild vascillations between being in the world and being out of it, or hungrily accumulating interactions and then longing for the solitude in which to make sense of them. Writer's block -- which is not my real subject here, honestly -- may just be a symptom of information overload. Too much data. The mother board becomes heavy and obdurate and black with the carbon discharged from too many made connections. Cut, splice... contemporary musicians understand these procedures well, and they understand how vital, perhaps even universal, they are as activities, much as "play" is… but are the cords of thought infinite in their divisibility?