Bagatellen

Low + Dirty Three [EP] (KonKurrent / Fishtank)

A meeting of two of the most idiosyncratic and atmospheric bands of the 1990s -- one looking very Australia, the other feeling very Minnesota -- recorded in Amsterdam, 2001. I mean for you to take "atmospheric" as literally as you can manage, each band's personality an expression of dominant climactic conditions in the place they call home. Low's melodies are chilly, uninflected, and slowly circle nowhere. The husband / wife vocal harmonies of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker evoke the High Plains and open fields of old-time country and western music, and words they sing call to mind a sedated, more Biblical X. The Dirty Three, on the other hand, specialize in sweltering, waterfront dive rhapsodies. The sawdust on the barroom floor is thickened with spilt blood and pints of stout, their colors indistinguishable, and people are groping in the dark here in more ways than one. Warren Ellis' caught-in-the-throat violin, Mick Turner's highly individual take on the blues guitar tradition, Jim White's freely accented dance-hall rhythms... even at its most forlorn, there is something defiant about The Dirty Three's music. And maybe you'd think as I did, which is that, if you exposed these two approaches together, you'd only end up with something lukewarm and gelatinous, like the air in a ruined hothouse. Those stalks that end in huge, delicate flowers are bent double by the weight of the blossoms themselves, and even if their colors are that much more vivid under the light-diffusing influence of humidity, there is something oppressive about the fragrances breaking out all around you.

But, as it turns out, of course these extremes of temperature are compatible, and, dare I say it? sanguine. Each powered by its own steam, both bands produce a sweet but not intoxicating immobilization in the listener, and both blear clarity. Low... a veil of fog, a curtain of ice, a fall of snow that disguises the stars. The Dirty Three... a haze of antipodean heat, a spray of warm ocean, a pouring down of sweat. These sensations may last, but they don't endure, really. What is more significant is that both bands confront all the pleasures and pains of loneliness in their work. In Low's case, this loneliness is a spiritual desolation. God is so far way, the world is fallen, trust must span such vast spaces. The lyrics to the opening "I Hear... Goodnight" can serve as a summation of the Low's particular religiosity:

I hear the cars go by
I hear the baby cry
I hear the darkening sky

I hear the window shake
I hear the silence break
I hear the moon turn to blood

It says... [oooohhh]
It says... [ooohhhh]
goodnight

For The Dirty Three's, the struggle involves disappearing into and emerging out of human intimacies. Every one of their songs truly is a full romance, and I think it is no coincidence that the lead-off track of their self-titled album (first issued on the Torn And Frayed label) is entitled "Indian Love Song".

As for the recording at hand, it was achieved using overdubs. Not surprising given the participants, then, distance still defines these collaborations. But if it can produce performances as lovely and palpably yearning as "Invitation Day" (in which the sun also rises) and the organ-dominated hymn "When I Called Upon Your Seed", then I have underestimated separateness. It wouldn't be the first time. I was also stupidly afraid these two bands would attempt a straight retelling of Neil Young's "Down By The River", arguably the record's centerpiece. But had I forgotten who I was listening to? Of course, they detain original's violence in whispery, echoing guitar, sighing, scraping violin, and percussion thrum and murmur as "lowercase" as anything on Dean Roberts' Be Mine Tonight. Where Young's performances of the song are still living through the violence -- "I shot my baby" -- that has just recently past. Low and The Dirty Three have not even lived through it yet, but can envision its aftermath, feel its pull. The whole track, as long as Young's version from Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere but really only drawing upon a fraction of the musical material in the "composition" creates a sense of the imminent resisted. In fact, Mimi Parker's vocal chorus, culminating in a single refrain, basically occupies the territory -- that high river bank -- occupied by the guitar solos on Young's 1969 album. The air is sodden but super-charged, and the storm never really breaks, except in the sight of far-off, silent lightning and the sound of softly falling water that could be rain, or could be the river -- the witness -- itself.

Yes sir, it's such strange weather that prevails 'round these parts. But is it as capricious as it appears to be? My skin and my nose and my tongue scream, "Yes!" but my soul responds with thunderous, "No".

Founding Fathers

I’ve had a deep respect & affection for the Public Broadcasting System since I was a kid. Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers and the The Electric Company were all a part of my television diet growing up. Later on during and after adolescence it was Cosmos, Bob Ross’s Joy of Oil Painting, and In Search Of.... I even dug on Ken Burns’ trilogy The Civil War, Baseball and Jazz. No matter where I’ve established my digs over the years the station affiliates have always been reservoirs of cultural information as well as refuges from TV mediocrity.

It’s for these reasons that the network’s recent decision to take the easy bait of ‘reality’ programming stung my sensibilities so bad. Granted, the PBS version of what is swiftly becoming the scourge of television credibility and content is several cuts above the sort of tripe (Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Playing it Straight, etc.) that clogs the airwaves of the prime time networks. Their first foray, Frontier House, followed the adventures of three 21st century families asked to live under the conditions of a 19th century homesteaders for span of seven months in the Montana “Territory”. I missed out on that series and ruefully dismissed it as a case of the station trying to cash in on the latest craze.

Surfing through channels the other night though, I stumbled onto what turns out to be the follow-up, Colonial House. This time the setting is 1628, near the site of the original Plymouth Colony. Cast is comprised of 26 participants divided into five ‘houses.’ Each cast member is assigned a role in the social hierarchy ranging from indentured servant to Governor (other guises include: freeman, lay preacher, quartermaster, etc.). The colony is a venture-capital project of a company in Bristol, England. The colonists are given four months to settle the coastal strip of land and prove that they can become a sustainable profit-making entity.

After an intensive two-week immersion period where experts educate them in the elements of 17th century living (cooking, construction, livestock care, social mores, etc.) the cast is set loose upon the land to cobble together a positive coexistence. The same experts will return four months later to judge whether the colony is a success & whether it will be afforded a future by the company. Another difference from most reality shows is that the participants are expected to role-play their fictional selves as accurately as possible. A narrator provides historical commentary to the events as they transpire.

While not quite on par with other PBS original programming like Jim Lehrer’s New’s Hour, NOVA, Frontline or P.O.V. the show has a lot going for it. I came in late and have only caught the final four episodes, but after sitting through the first in this quartet I was hooked. There’s the usual trope of combining a relatively disparate group of folks. Devout Christians with agnostics, the requisite minority & openly gay cast members incongruous with the times, etc. But these orchestrations feel far less contrived. Sure there’s friction, but compared to the transparent and manufactured discord of so many other shows, it’s tame and dare I say, realistic. The far more interesting and recurring conflicts are ideological, entrenched in and arising out of the participants’ attempts to reconcile their 21st century selves with the 17th century ones they’re trying to create and sustain.

One of the most fascinating exchanges occurs in episode seven when a Native American tribe passing through the area confronts the colonists. The tribe consists of other cast members, descendents of a tribe that originally occupied the land the colonists have settled on. The predictable disparities between how the two groups view each other develops, but what’s surprising is the reflexive nature of how each responds & buys into the roles they’re playing. Various members of the tribe express deep animosity toward the colony (one remarking that he’d like to burn it down and only partially in jest). The colonists in turn are caught in an uncomfortable limbo between their genuine feelings of ‘white guilt’ and the artificial roles/perspectives they’re supposed to inhabit.

Other arguments arise out of religious differences, gender inequity and the explicit social stratification of the populace. All colonists are expected are to attend mass and observe the Sabbath, but one of the families is agnostic and refuses. A series of punishments ensues. True to colonial custom women occupy subservient stations, much to the chagrin of several female members of the cast. Late in the series, the producer’s also integrate a power-wielding company outsider into the colonist’s ranks to “shake things up”. Overall the show’s got many of the addictive elements of ‘reality TV’ but temper them with an educational bent that is both sweeping and creative. Long story short, my earlier prejudices are allayed and I’m definitely going to try to catch the series from the beginning. Has anyone else seen this?

Footprints

I was working yesterday on a review of Warne Marsh's All Music and got entangled in an extended metaphor that, while I quite like it, I had to cut from the final copy in order to keep at least somewhat within my word limit. It may work best as a fragment, and it may only really come to any meaning whatsoever if I hand it over to the possibility of it becoming a conceit. So I post the happy (i.e., hopeful) little fragment here, and invite you to test its resilience.

Lester Young's feet never touched the ground. Coleman Hawkins was a 400 lb., 6'8" kingpin, mantled in an impeccably tailored suit and wielding a diamond-headed walking cane, who strutted down his streets with unflappable grace. The length of his legs and the size of his feet meant that Dexter Gordon's stride, no matter how deliberate, invariably broke into a jog, a run, a sprint. Sonny Rollins lopes and sidles; sometimes he waits around corners and hops out into an approaching pedestrian's path. John Coltrane charges ahead, his whole body titled slightly forward: shoulders pressed up towards his ears, chest out, head tucked, gaze focused… where? Warne Marsh is a man walking backwards with great alacrity and purpose. The initial impression his manner of "progress" leaves with you is that the man himself is some sort of daredevil, as perverse as he is fearless. Only later are you able to perceive how Marsh's gait is that of a man obsessed with the conservation of motion. So obsessed, in fact, that no system which promises to balance what God preserves and what humanity would squander can be too elaborate.

poire_z + Phil Minton - Q/Norbert Moslang - lat_nc

poire_z + Phil Minton
Q
For4Ears
1551

Norbert Moslang
lat_nc
For4Ears
1549

I was fortunate enough to be in attendance at this poire_z plus Minton concert, held at the Musique Action festival in Vandoeuvre in May of 2002 though, admittedly, by the time of this performance, the music-appreciating portion of my brain was likely more than a bit addled by several days packed full with amazing shows. In any case, my memory of the event was rather different than what appears on the disc, mostly involving intensity level—I recalled it as being louder and more balls-to-the-wall throughout and, evidently, missed much of the subtlety. Asking the doyen of British free improv singing to sit in with the cast of poire_z (Gunter Muller, Norbert Moslang, Erikm and Andy Guhl) seemed on the face of it to be an intriguing idea. Their music tended to rich and bubbling enough to easily absorb and integrate even the wilder vocal articulations Minton often proffers. And, indeed, the fit is fairly seamless. During the course of the long, main track, the four instrumentalists rumble and lurch into the sort of off-kilter quasi-patterns (with brief interspersions of rhythms) they did so well as Minton darts in and out of the matrices with a wide range of groans, shouts, baby squeaks and more, not very far at all from what Guhl or Moslang might elicit from one of their light-activated, “cracked” electronic devices. There’s a good deal of fluctuation in volume and density level, including an especially lovely section about halfway in where someone (I suspect Muller) generates a fluttery, low drone that accommodates some wonderful spurts of creativity from his companions. The piece ends in a chugging, catchy rhythm with Minton sputtering atop, Daffy Duck expostulating over a surreal Warner Bros. soundscape. A brief, rather unnecessary encore closes the disc. “Q” is a good, solid album that fits comfortably amongst poire_z’ all too limited discography.

Voice Crack (Moslang and Guhl) have since parted ways, resulting not only in the dissolution of that duo but in poire_z as well; the above recording turns out to have been their last performance. “lat_nc”, Moslang’s first full-length solo effort was actually recorded a couple of months prior to the Musique Action date but only released in 2004. It’s a little difficult to get past the idea that something is missing, as attractive as much of the music is. Voice Crack’s success depended heavily on the duo generating a massive sound-wall, at once dense and liquid, allowing the listener numerous areas for discreet concentration while at the same time threatening to overwhelm anyone determined to be so discriminating. Moslang pares matters down a bit here—it feels very much like what it is: a solo recording. Rhythmic loops are often in play although, in a sparser context such as this, they stand out a bit much for my taste (as opposed to existing as a single element among many others, as was often the case with poire_z) and some of the actual sounds employed get a bit too close to spacey electronica (bloopy, moog-like lines and such) for comfort. It’s perhaps an unfair consideration and maybe I’m simply having a problem making the required mental shift, but I have a nagging sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, of desiring to hear a collaborative element. “lat_nc” is perfectly fine, if ultimately unexceptional, as is and I imagine Voice Crack fans will enjoy hearing Moslang’s individual experiments, but part of me can’t shake the sensation that it’s half of a Voice Crack disc and wants the sweet with the sour, the yin with the yang.

~ Brian Olewnick

Atomic/School Days - Nuclear Assembly Hall

Okkadisk 049

Tenacious collaboration stands as one of the most identifiable facets of Ken Vandermark’s musical credo. In the early Nineties he set about forging alliances that continue to yield a plurality of working groups today. Caffeine, Steam, DKV, V5, Territory Band, FJF, Free Fall, Sound and Action- these bands and others stock Vandermark’s vitae and provide accommodating pockets for his peregrinating esthetics. He’s also not reticent about combining them together as strong outings by his double quartet (Utility Hitter on Quinnah) and the AALY/DKV merger (Double or Nothing also on Okkadisk) attest.

The body of precedence saps some of the surface surprise from Nuclear Assembly Hall, the latest accord teaming the plaudit-earning Norwegian quintet Atomic and the Vandermark-founded collective School Days, but there are still plenty of thrills in store. Roll call on the resulting aggregate reads as follows: Vandermark and Ljungkvist on reeds, Magnus Broo and Jeb Bishop on brass, Hårvard Wiik on keys, Kjell Nordeson on vibes, Ingebrigt Håker Flaten on upright and Paal Nilssen-Love taking names on traps.

The ninety-odd minute program spans two discs and draws on the nine compositions, the majority scripted by the Scandinavians. Vandermark’s quill yields only the grand finale “Bulletin” tagged with his customary dedication, this time to the shutterbug icon Weegee. His deference translates beautifully into the arrangements, which accord plenty of solo space for all involved and an assortment of combinations. A premium does seem to be placed on cramming as many twists and turns as possible into the music. Like that notorious ride at an amusement park the ensemble’s compositions feature no shortage of hairpin turns, drops, loop-de-loops and ear-lurching shifts in direction. The outcome is often either exhilaration or vertigo depending on one’s tolerance and taste.

Wiik’s bright and breezy “Light Compulsion” is a welcome exception to this apparent rule and a feature for Ljungvist’s lush tenor. “W Meets A” hits like the bubbly spray from a champagne bottle struck against ship’s bow, and is constructed on a supple substructure of riffing horns, ostinato bass, choppy drums and melodically charged mallets on planks. Wiik’s jaunty center solo deals out turbulent clusters from a set of closely miked ivories, feeding hungrily on the blustery energy advanced by the reeds and brass.

Riffing horns steer the Broo piece “Transparent Taylor” sliding lyrically against the elastic bounce of the Flaten-fueled rhythm section. The composer claims first solo crack, spouting off cantankerously as his band mates comment above and beneath him. A rip-snorting joust between tenors comes next as Nilssen-Love carves out a complementary pounding surf from behind his kit. Dusky verdant interplay foliates Flaten’s “Green Wood” as Vandermark’s alternately piercing and pensive clarinet swings through an airy arboreal expanse erected by piano, bass, vibes and drums. Several ensemble passages unfold before Flaten’s bass peeks through the harmonic branches and has the final say. Nordeson’s “Ink Worm” turns the tables in a four-way exchange between the horns that solidifies into another hard swinging riff piece. Suddenly the bottom drops out leaving the composer’s mallets in floating conversation with a revolving cast of chirruping instruments.

Disc two contains four more compositions beginning with Bishop's “Conjugations,” which builds from a shrill layering of clarinets and the composer’s telegraphing trombone. Flaten sets up a fleet chugging bass line and series of rousing fractional gatherings comes to pass. Broos smears and slurs expressively on top of a bustling backdrop. Flaten and Nordesson trade playful rhythmically ripe punches. Finally Bishop, muted and gnarly, spreads sibilant growls over another floating counterpoint from Love, Wiik and Nordesson. Vandermark ties things off on meaty baritone, shaping rock-ribbed lines against a dusky vamp set forth by Wiik. Nilssen-Love’s “Dog Days” spreads like an opaque intoxicating substance set free from a fractured perfume bottle. A pair of floating ensemble sections bookend the querulous tussle between Ljungvist’s clarinet and Vandermark’s baritone.

Taking into account their close stylistic ties, the snug fit between these two bands might not seem like much of a feat. But such a dismissal would be an egregious case of selling them short. Where they succeed best is in the ability to operate cooperatively without compromising a driving forward momentum and decisive deployment of resources. Each band is well worth hearing individually. In light of this simple realization the success of their merger makes perfect sense.

~ Derek Taylor

Kid Ory - Creole Jazz Band 1954 (Good Time Jazz)

Back in the 1950s, California-based Good Time Jazz functioned much like Delmark still does today. Keeping the torch of traditional Nawlins music aflame with a succession of fresh sides from the legends of the idiom along with the revivalists. Ory, linchpin of the seminal Oliver and Armstrong outfits, inked a contract and cut a half dozen or so records for the label. Nothing much new in the way of repertoire, but the real draw here, then as now, is hearing classic tunes, previously the province of groove-eroded 78s, in the high fidelity and extended running times allowed by the LP format. Ory’s combo, cacheted under the generic sobriquet described by the disc’s title, contains colleagues both long standing (Alvin Alcorn & Minor Hall) and new (George Probert & Don Ewell). Together they climb nine robust evergreens from Dixieland’s halcyon era. Probert’s clarinet adopts a Jekyll & Hyde persona, dapper and dulcet on “Yellow Dog Blues,” tart and ornery on “Maple Leaf Rag.” Ed Garland slugs his upright like a pugilist pummeling a punching bag and produces a fat snapping thump alongside Hall’s peppy snare beat. Ewell’s spit-shine strutting piano chords are certainly spry, but carry a bit too much poise in places. Something Ory’s recalcitrant trombone seems more than happily strip and stomp away. His tone is cavernous, gruff and chocked with grit, scrawling ropy smears across the hot-stepping cadences of the tunes. With plunger pistoning in and out of bell, he gives a textbook lesson in proper tailgate enunciation on practically every track. Ory even finds space for a quick leather-throated vocal on the opening rundown of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Almost a half century before Tim Berne put the culinary liner note custom back into practice, there’s also two tasty recipes from the Ory Creole Cook Book included- one for gumbo filé, the other for shrimp jambalaya. Both sound just as tasty as the music.

+minus - [first meeting]

+minus
[first meeting]
Trente Oiseaux
T00041

I’ll admit there’s something refreshingly disarming about this recording in the sense that, in some ways, it’s almost an “old-fashioned” quiet improv recording. We’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that not all of it is improv and that’s it’s pretty well up to date. But the immediate, sensual impact is something akin to what one may have felt hearing Iskra 1903 for the first time: an extreme naturalness of approach, a rightness that obviates, or at least makes secondary, any theoretical discussion. That is to say, one simply hears three wonderful musicians.

These musicians are bernhard gunter, Mark Wastell and Graham Halliwell, collectively adopting the name +minus, a band only since November of 2003. To be sure, there is something a bit unique about the way they go about their duties. Three of the pieces are based on compositions by gunter, giving improvisers Wastell and Halliwell a different set of challenges than they’re normally exposed to. Of course, the reverse is also true—gunter is thrown into an at least quasi-improvisational format. Contrary to the instruments gunter and Wastell are known for, the former wields a cellotar, an electric, five-string instruments whose range Wastell exclaims includes sounding like “a cello, a violin, a sarangi and a viola da gamba”, whilst the latter, according to the credits, abandons his cello and instead makes great use of bowed Nepalese bowls and “amplified textures”. Not surprisingly, the music tends toward the quiet and meditative, filled with soft, extended lines and whispered rumblings. The cellotar is heard to great effect on the opening of the third track, “[minus] two” and lends a fascinating anachronistic air when heard against the amazing feedback generated by Halliwell’s alto. This last deserves special mention. I take it he’s using a similar attack to that recently favored (pioneered?) by John Butcher but, in a group context, it’s incredibly subtle and beautiful. After my first hearing of the disc, having neglected to check the credit listing, I thought to myself, “Well, where was Halliwell?” It turns out, on closer, better-informed listening, he’s all over the place but so perfectly integrated into his surroundings that he’s almost invisible.

I’ll be damned if I know much more of what to say about [first meeting] except that it’s remarkably consistent, full of unexpected but perfect decisions and, as a whole, is exceedingly lovely. Check it out.

(www.trenteoiseaux.com)

~ Brian Olewnick

Accident, The Servant & The Go-Between

Lincoln Center is in the midst of an overarching Joseph Losey retrospective, showing films from his pre-Blacklisted Hollywood period, through to his adaptations of Don Giovanni, and Brecht’s Galileo.

I’ve been interested in Losey since I first saw the second of his three collaborations with Harold Pinter, Accident (1967), a marvel of the 60’s Euro Art Cinema: cold, elaborately structured, cruel. Since then I’ve seen the other two Losey did with Pinter, The Servant (1962) and The Go-Between (1971) and they’re worthy of a little discussion.

The Servant is the one that made Losey a star. Before, he was well appreciated by good auteurists like Andrew Sarris and the Cahiers du Cinema crew, but from what I understand, this one brought him to the widest attention. The film is well steeped in the sorts of class struggle which brought Losey under the eyes of the Committee for Un-American Activities, and led to his fleeing America for Europe in order to continue to make films in early 50’s. Dirk Bogarde stars, as he does in Accident, as Hugo, a servant hired to attend to a Tony, a young, well to do Englishman, played by James Fox. Bogarde’s performance is uncanny, he moves between well-mannered butler and low-born brute within the same scene, as he slowly works his way into the household, bringing his wife Vera, played by Sarah Miles in as maid to seduce Tony. The class element seems to have some slightly politically allegorical overtones, an article in Senses of Cinema points in this direction, but the tension between the two men seems more universal.

The seduction highlights what ties all three films together: sex as a weapon. In The Servant the seduction is used to throw off the power dynamic between master and servant, though Tony employs Hugo, Hugo can manipulate Tony through Vera. In Accident two professors are tied within their contempt for each other through a student, whom both have been fucking. This thematic plays a somewhat minor, but important role in The Go Between: a young boy, the “go-between” of the title tries to use his privileged position as secret messenger to learn about sex from one of the two persons between whom he is passing letters. This variety of cruelty ought be no surprise to readers of Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party) who specializes in men finding ways to destroy each other. The menace of The Servant even finds its way into the set design, in that the very furniture of the house oppresses the characters. Characters are routinely overshadowed by the massiveness of the pieces of furniture, they fight over who has the right to control the way the house is to be decorated. The set pieces are cold, solid and omnipresent, while the characters themselves are often awkward, fickle and nervous: the seduction scene between Tony and Vera is by no means graceful, the tenaciousness and awkward hesitancy of Vera would almost be comic were Losey not cutting between a dripping faucet that becomes louder and louder through the course of the scene. The pair, sweat in discomfort, and fumble on tables, with the metal of the kitchen contrasting the skin and lumps of the lovers. When the film “turns”, and the power relationship between the two men shifts, you can see it manifested in the condition of the house itself, what was formerly immaculately kept, has gone to ruin and disorder; Hugo and Tony play vaguely sadistic games amongst clutter and filth.

Compared with Accident and The Servant, The Go-Between is a minor film, it takes place primarily on an estate in the English countryside, and has a few of the class issues prominent in The Servant, but aside from a few choice moments, the film rests awkwardly in its framing device: an old pair, sorta remembering a summer in their youth, which only really breeds confusion and anachronism (“Huh? Why is there a TV in late, vaguely Victorian England? Oh, right, we’re flashing forward.”) It’s the last film they did together, and in my mind is well overshadowed by the other two. But those earlier two are masterworks of subtle emotional evisceration.

~ Nirav Soni

Losey/Pinter

Lincoln Center is in the midst of an overarching Joseph Losey retrospective, showing films from his pre-Blacklisted Hollywood period, through to his adaptations of Don Giovanni, and Brecht’s Galileo.

I’ve been interested in Losey since I first saw the second of his three collaborations with Harold Pinter, Accident (1967), a marvel of the 60’s Euro Art Cinema: cold, elaborately structured, cruel. Since then I’ve seen the other two Losey did with Pinter, The Servant (1962) and The Go-Between (1971) and they’re worthy of a little discussion.

The Servant is the one that made Losey a star. Before, he was well appreciated by good auteurists like Andrew Sarris and the Cahiers du Cinema crew, but from what I understand, this one brought him to the widest attention. The film is well steeped in the sorts of class struggle which brought Losey under the eyes of the Committee for Un-American Activities, and led to his fleeing America for Europe in order to continue to make films in early 50’s. Dirk Bogarde stars, as he does in Accident, as Hugo, a servant hired to attend to a Tony, a young, well to do Englishman, played by James Fox. Bogarde’s performance is uncanny, he moves between well-mannered butler and low-born brute within the same scene, as he slowly works his way into the household, bringing his wife Vera, played by Sarah Miles in as maid to seduce Tony. The class element seems to have some slightly politically allegorical overtones, an article in Senses of Cinema points in this direction, but the tension between the two men seems more universal.

The seduction highlights what ties all three films together: sex as a weapon. In The Servant the seduction is used to throw off the power dynamic between master and servant, though Tony employs Hugo, Hugo can manipulate Tony through Vera. In Accident two professors are tied within their contempt for each other through a student, whom both have been fucking. This thematic plays a somewhat minor, but important role in The Go Between: a young boy, the “go-between” of the title tries to use his privileged position as secret messenger to learn about sex from one of the two persons between whom he is passing letters. This variety of cruelty ought be no surprise to readers of Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party) who specializes in men finding ways to destroy each other. The menace of The Servant even finds its way into the set design, in that the very furniture of the house oppresses the characters. Characters are routinely overshadowed by the massiveness of the pieces of furniture, they fight over who has the right to control the way the house is to be decorated. The set pieces are cold, solid and omnipresent, while the characters themselves are often awkward, fickle and nervous: the seduction scene between Tony and Vera is by no means graceful, the tenaciousness and awkward hesitancy of Vera would almost be comic were Losey not cutting between a dripping faucet that becomes louder and louder through the course of the scene. The pair, sweat in discomfort, and fumble on tables, with the metal of the kitchen contrasting the skin and lumps of the lovers. When the film “turns”, and the power relationship between the two men shifts, you can see it manifested in the condition of the house itself, what was formerly immaculately kept, has gone to ruin and disorder; Hugo and Tony play vaguely sadistic games amongst clutter and filth.

Compared with Accident and The Servant, The Go-Between is a minor film, it takes place primarily on an estate in the English countryside, and has a few of the class issues prominent in The Servant, but aside from a few choice moments, the film rests awkwardly in its framing device: an old pair, sorta remembering a summer in their youth, which only really breeds confusion and anachronism (“Huh? Why is there a TV in late, vaguely Victorian England? Oh, right, we’re flashing forward.”) It’s the last film they did together, and in my mind is well overshadowed by the other two. But those earlier two are masterworks of subtle emotional evisceration.

Lee Konitz - Peacemeal

OJCCD-1101-2

Something of an anomaly in the Konitz catalog- at least that portion that’s made it onto compact disc- this 1969 album might look scattershot on the surface, but it’s actually quite methodical in design. The program offers up a grab bag of surprising selections. Three Bela Bartók pieces culled from Mikrokosmos, the composer’s set of 153 short piano pieces, all arranged by Marshall Brown, who plays valve trombone and baritone horn form the centerpiece. Also on hand: an arrangement of “Body and Soul” based on an improvised trumpet solo by Roy Eldridge, a version of “Lester Leaps In” constructed from two Lester Young solo choruses transcribed by Konitz with the melody excised, a new reading of Konitz’s evergreen “Subconscious-Lee” and three compositions by pianist Dick Katz who also handles keyboard chores on the session. Konitz’s “Fourth Dimension” brings the original session songbook to an even ten.

At the time of the date, Konitz, like his contemporaries Sonny Stitt and Eddie Harris, was in thrall of then newfangled electronic saxophone attachments like the sci-fi sounding Multivider. Pianist Dick Katz also plugs in, tickling the ivories of his electric piano periodically throughout the session. Fortunately both men employ these augmentations judiciously and creatively. The sleeve notes contain a priceless group shot of the quintet in a sound proof booth that provides a funny visual counterpart to the vintage sonic trappings. Konitz sports tinted spectacles, lamb chop sideburns and an uncanny semblance to John Lennon while drummer Jack DeJohnette stares seriously into the camera, his head capped with a helmet-coifed afro. The one-word title of the disc, twisted into a then-as-now timely pun, further reflects the era of its origin.

The Bartók pieces make for loamy jazz fodder and receive radical reworkings. “Thumb Under,” which is actual No. 90 in the series, works off a surprising underlying groove. DeJohnette carves out a backbeat-fueled beat that locks with Katz’s plush electric keys and Eddie Gomez’s bubbly bass ostinato that’s more Holiday Inn cocktail lounge than highbrow concert stage. Konitz’s tone-treated tenor serves up a faltering solo on top, flanked by the lubricious putter of Brown’s baritone horn. “Village Joke” (No. 130 for those keeping count), works off a weighty Eastern European oompah beat, playful piano tinkles, sparse snare syncopations and a contrastingly dour arco bass line at the onset. Suddenly the rhythm section silences, allowing for a successon of unaccompanied solos starting with Konitz’s aerated alto phrases and ending with gunshots from DeJohnette’s brittle snare. “Peasant Dance” (No. 128) translates from similar folk elements into a gorgeous chamber group oration with odd detours into funk- dig Gomez’s fatback pizzicato patterns mid-piece. Brilliant stuff!

Other standout tracks in a set brimming with enterprising ideas include the Katz-scripted title tune and Konitz’s “Fourth Dimension.” The former is a tricky tempo-swerving beast that requires the players, particularly DeJohnette, to stay poised on their toes. Konitz’s piquant sax snakes through angular intervallic contours with seeming ease, as various patterns of counterpoint are erected in response to his lithe lines and in surprisingly freer meters. On the latter, a tune that feels and sounds structurally akin to a Wayne Shorter composition circa 1965, the band engages the deceptively intricate harmonic essence of the piece with an interplay that never lags. Alternate takes of “Lester Leaps In,” “Body and Soul” and “Sub-Conscious-Lee” bolster the running time to just over an hour and make the time capsule all the more value-added. This liberal slice from Konitz’s ‘long-hair’ days is welcome reissue and well worth seeking out by anyone with the slightest interest in his music.

~ Derek Taylor

Fictional Jazz Musicians (A Working Checklist)

Please feel free to contribute. Characters associated with radio, film, television, and literature are all allowed. Both major and minor characters are OK. Fictionalized representations of actual musicians are also appropriate. I would like to see this grow into a sort of annotated matrix which would allow us to catalog and analyze the salient features -- musical, behavioral, psychological, demographic -- of these "created" individuals.

• Bleeding Gums Murphy (The Simpsons)
  
• Shadow Henderson (Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues)
  
• Edgar Pool (John Clellon Holmes' The Horn)
  
• The Bear (Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home)
  
• Emmet Ray (Woody Allen's Sweet And Lowdown)
  
• Hideo Yamaguchi (Donald Barthleme's "The King Of Jazz")
  
• Peter Hammond, Jr. (Garson Kanin's The Rat Race)
  
• Danny Smiricky (Josef Skvorecky's The Bass Saxophone)
  
• Buddy Bolden (Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter)
  

Vaya Con Dios, Mr. Jones

9/9/27-5/18/04

Many Faces of Milazzo

I feel reasonably confident in asserting that we have all thrilled to Joe Milazzo’s musings here at Bagatellen on a regular basis. But who is the mysterious man behind the mantle really? Chalk it up to a dull day at the office if you must, but I decided to do a bit of web-sleuthing to satisfy my own curiosity & hopefully gain some dope on our resident prose laureate. Little did I expect the number of possible identities that would surface from my query:

Pen & ink Western theme artist commissioned to do the portraits of the inductees into the Cow Horse Hall of Fame: “His delicate, yet intricate lines speak of a time remembered in our not-so-distant past, which honors the lifestyle of the legendary cowboy.”

Executive Director of the Regional Transportation Alliance, a business leadership organization dedicated to identifying, facilitating, and promoting mobility solutions for the Triangle region.

Current quarterback for the Valparaiso Crusaders.

Schedule Maker for the New York Penn Class A Baseball League.

First Mate/Angler on the Sandy Cove, a 32’ Albemarle sportfishing boat competing in the 2004 Islamorada Sailfish Tournament.

Bit-part Hollywood actor w/ roles in Mannequin Two: On the Move (1991), The Lemon Sisters (1990) and Penn & Teller Get Killed (1989)

Will the real Mr. Milazzo please stand up?

Howard Riley/John Tilbury/Keith Tippett - Another Part of the Story

Emanem 4088

This recording of three fine pianists struggling to work together is very uneven. I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I have a great deal of respect for Keith Tippett as a solo pianist, but find him too "bossy" as an ensemble player. Actually, however, he’s proven in the past, and again here, that he’s capable of nice duets with Howard Riley. Riley is not (usually) quite so bossy in this way, and is what might be called a good counterpuncher. While he doesn’t as often initiate the attack as either of his compadres here, he is capable of cogent commentary on pretty much anything that’s going on around him. So, he and Tippett mostly get along pretty well on Another Part of the Story, just as they have in the past. In addition, Riley’s support of Tilbury (when the latter is allowed by the others to take to the lead) is generally pretty cogent. But one or another pianist’s desire to turn up-tempo sections into Cecil Taylor mimicry (plus piano preparations) or slow, meditative material into versions of hypnotic Bartokian adagios mostly doesn't work at all. I like the second cut, "Equanimity," with its chordal choral center surrounded on each side by glittering arpeggios. And there are lovely bits to be found within each of the other seven improvised pieces. But there are also nasty outbursts of style-conflict and miscommunication that pop up all over the recording. Tippett will break into some gospel riffing while everybody else is gently scrapping a string or two with paper clips; a Feldman-style passage is overtaken by a Ganelin-style waltz. I also think listeners may sometimes be distracted from the central story by instances of needlessly showy chops displays. I like a cutting contest as much as the next guy, but in a Cagean work? Whatever. It’s my view, in any case, that each of these musicians can be heard to much better effect on many other recordings.

Walter Horn

Tony Bianco/Dave Liebman/Tony Marino - Line Ish

Emanem 4104

Dave Liebman has been turning up in a lot of unexpected places lately. There’s his duo Cosmos with Abbey Radar released on Cadence Jazz Records. Then there’s the short stack of discs for Hatology in collusion with pianist Marc Copland and solo. This Emanem-released date delivers the latest in his recent flirtations with top tier labels associated with the freer leanings of improvised music. Turns out drummer Tony Bianco was the catalyst, gigging with Liebman and Tony Marino, the saxophonist’s regular bassist, stateside at the suggestion of producer Martin Davidson.

The music is most definitely jazz-oriented, but Liebman’s loosely sketched lines allow for plenty of extemporaneous blowing. Bianco’s no stranger to working with Coltrane-influenced saxophonists having teamed with Paul Dunmall and Simon Picard on an earlier Emanem, Utoma Trio. He’s also at the heart of Hour Glass, another session with Dunmall and the switch-hitting basses of Marcio Mattos and Paul Rogers. The music here is in line with those previous projects though Liebman etches a more obvious spiritualized aura into the contours of his horns. There’s also room for his piano and even a bit of contemplative wooden flute to make appearances. The overarching metaphysical mood carries over into the colored pencil cover art depicting a gaunt Brahmin deep in meditative thought.

“Line Ish” dominates the disc’s running time and is broken into four parts. The sections are further separated by comparatively terse solo detours for each musician along with a “Group Interlude” that veers off from the focus of the main piece and into a fuzzy forest of chimes, bells and arco bass and the aforementioned flute. More striking and memorable is the shrill steam whistle soprano piece that marks the median point of the set.

Liebman sounds energized by the dynamic presence of Bianco and his playing at the onset echoes the blazing note-packed approach of his best 70s work. Bianco responds in kind pounding away at his kit and crafting huge shoals of rhythm in tandem with Marino furious pizzicato. The bassist’s clarity is compromised slightly by some shadow-inducing amplification, especially during the more agitated arco passages, but considering the thunderous nature of much of the interplay the augmentation proves a necessary evil. On his solo “Interlude” Marino actually makes the added ballast work to his advantage, coaxing corpulent slabs of sound from his strings that push at the edges of the studio space.

Later sections revert to more ruminative interaction as during Liebman’s oblique piano foray on “Part Two.” Here he moves from a piecemeal investigation of the interior strings into a filibuster of splashing right hand clusters. Bianco’s rolling beats accompany and eventually assume control in a snowballing solo that takes the track out. Martial press rolls and tumbling tom tattoos are a regular part of the drummer’s trick bag and these propulsive tactics balance out the various detours into more introspective inclinations. This is classic cut-from-the-mold free jazz, born from the common currency of saxophone, piano, bass and drums. From the opening strains to the somewhat depleted-sounding sign off these three fellows abandon any sense of artifice as to it being anything else.

~ Derek Taylor

Leroy Jenkins' Sting! - Urban Blues (Black Saint)

Of all the first generation AACM'ers, I've always like violinist and violist Jenkins' music the least. Sure, the Revolutionary Ensemble (Jenkins, bassist Sirone [aka Norris Jones], and percussionist Jerome Cooper) could be thrilling as the similarly configured Air, but the group's discography is all but non-existent in the CD era, and it never really did great justice to what was much more than a "free jazz cooperative." Jenkins own projects -- Space Minds, New Worlds, Survival Of America (1978), The Legend Of Ai Glatson (1978), Mixed Quintet (1979) -- all feature impressive ensembles and inventive, vibrant scoring, but, in large measure, I have failed to connect to that music so that it lasts for me once the stereo has been switched off. Maybe it is Jenkins' compositional sense, which is more conventional than Braxton's, George Lewis', Wadada Leo Smith's, Roscoe Mitchell's or Muhal Richard Abrams'. Maybe it is Jenkins' intonation, which, to my ears, has definite longhair associations; at times, he sounds as if he is angling for a legitimate sound on a period string instrument, such as a viol or violino piccolo, instruments whose resonance is thinner than what I have come to want from the fiddle. And I do mean fiddle.

More than just stating a preference for less trebly, grittier players such as Stuff Smith, Rat Nance, and Billy Bang Maybe all I am revealing here is that Jenkins' music violates too many of the personal stereotypes I have attached to the jazz violin. If so, shame on me. Having said that, then, how to convince you of the excellence of this live recording from 1984, which may do nothing more for some listeners than make them want to rip it off the turntable and slip on their Sugarcane Harris' LPs instead? Well, Urban Blues is different altogether. It is also a record that makes perfect sense to me, in that it is quintessentially of its time, and because, in being so uncharacteristic of Jenkins' work up to this point in his career, it most fully communicates how and where he concentrates his instrumental and formal energies.

Sting! consisted of Jenkins and Terry Jenoure on violin, a pre-Cassandra Wilson Brandon Ross on electric guitar, James Emery on amplified acoustic guitar, Alonzo Gardner on electric bass and Kamal Sabir on drums. Despite all the electricity, the chief characteristic of the band is the preponderance on stringed instruments. In fact, Sting! itself is like one giant violin, one in which the pizzicato and the arco engage each other in a cutting contest. You can hear this within the ensemble itself, in the juxtaposition of Gardner's pop-pop funk bass and the sawing lyricism of Jenoure and Jenkins in particular, or in the way the Emery's jagged, multi-noted lines prickle against Ross' sinuous, sustained twang, like a barbed-wire fence running alongside a river bank. You can also hear it in the compositions, all of them by Jenkins, in which ecstatically bent tones, notes articulated with fat vibrato, vertiginous glissandi and hard-strummed passages fall into step and then dance free of charging staccato and stop-time rhythms. This is electrified, jazz-based improvisational music that also makes reference to rhythm and blues, old-time stomps and hollers, gospel, and early hip-hop. The twinning of the instruments may initially suggest that Ornette's Harmolodics offer a point of comparison. But although collective improvisation is prominent in the Sting! repertoire -- the resulting cacophony is often impressive, as "O.W. Frederick", a tremendously exciting performance that belongs on any Black Saint label sampler ever assembled or ever to be assembled, bears out -- Jenkins' approach here is much more single-minded than Coleman's. At times, the accompaniment is so precise that it almost slackens into Fuzak ("Looking For The Blues", a "string of solos" piece which is less about flash than it sounds on first audition), but Sabir especially does not allow the tension to slip. These beats belong to the boom-box blaring at the corner where the break-dancers are spinning out on flattened cardboard boxes, not the dentist's chair.

In addition to funky work-outs, Urban Blues features a selection of pop songs, all of which serve as reminders of the talents of Terry Jenoure, a fine improviser and piquant, declamatory vocalist who has not been heard from on record, it seems, since John Carter completed his Roots And Folklore cycle. One of these songs "Why Can't I Fly?" is one of the album's highlights. I'd like to think the lyrics were inspired by Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, for as universal as its sentiment of wondering is ("Here I am / once again / right back where I started from... / Why can't I fly?"), it assumes a more variegated, subtly graded hue in light of music which soars upward, glides a bit, then swoops down into a landing that becomes a trudge. The performance also features Jenkins best solo on the date. His somewhat delicate sound renders the feelings of hope, awkwardness, distress and defiance the solo carries all the more poignant.

I wonder myself what the folks at Sweet Basil that January in the mid-1980's thought of it. "Why Can't I Fly?" seems to me to fit right into a tradition of coded African-American songwriting in which the lyrics, at a strictly literal level, remain inoffensive to a mass audience even while they convey a message of protest against a systemic evil in which that same audience is complicit. Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone To Love" is a great example of this art, as is Waller and Razaf's "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black And Blue". Is it strange that an avant-garde musician of Jenkins' (supposed) inclinations would try his hand at this? Art Lange, who wrote the liner notes for Urban Blues quotes Jenkins on Sting!'s origins as follows:

Musical periods come and go, and there seems to be particular styles popular in each period. I had heard a lot of the other "electric-type" groups, and I wanted to feel like a part of this time. I always felt that I could do that sort of thing, put together a band, with a more commercial sound -- at least, in my own style -- and get more people involved in my music, get more people to hear me.

What happened to the African-American audience for "jazz" beginning in the late 1960's? Is there any way for today's creative musicians to get that audience back? Yes, we've all heard the questions before. Perhaps they have even been bludgeoned to death, or, if not, then at least to the very limits of their endurance. But I beg of you not to perform the autopsy just yet. I do not think these questions have gone away. Whatever the case, they are questions that deserve to be treated with the complete disregard for dispassion that Jenkins and his worthy constituents demonstrate on this occasion.

Tsunoda/Stern/Tarab/English - Overland/Tarab - surfacedrift

Toshiya Tsunoda/Joel Stern/Tarab/Lawrence English
Overland
Naturestrip
NS3002

Tarab
surfacedrift
Naturestrip
NS3001

Long ago, in my college years while studying painting, I “developed” a visual awareness of space that I found quite fascinating (something, I’m sure, that has been independently realized thousands, if not millions of times by others, but something I don’t see referred to very often). It has to do with simply being cognizant of the air between one object and another, of the volume of space surrounding things, the distance between this thing and that. Most of us, I feel fairly safe in saying, go about our daily lives looking at the world in essentially a two-dimensional way, from object to object (I’m talking about purely looking at, not interacting with). So do I, of course. The increased registration involves throwing a mental switch, of turning on one’s “air awareness”. Try it sometime. I find it most dramatic in large spaces, say, the canyons created by buildings in Manhattan, but any location will do. So, shortly thereafter, when I encountered the theories of Cage, especially those involving the hypersensitivity to the generally ignored but rich sound world that’s always available, it was only a small sideways leap to grasping them. Similarly, however, I imagine even those of us who express routine reverence for Cage usually go about our business ignoring the enveloping aural environment, only considering it when we turn on one of those “switches”. In these situations, it seems to me, obviously, impossible to be evaluative of what we perceive in terms of “good” or “bad”; if anything, it’s all good. A sound environment may be lulling, shrill, deafening, almost-not-there, but it is what it is and judging it in any manner seems utterly beside the point.

All this by way of considering how one reviews field recordings, which loose category I’ve been hearing (and enjoying) more and more of in recent days, including new releases discussed here. Toshiya Tsunoda’s “Reclaimed Land”, the opening track on the fine compilation disc, “Overland”, was recorded one August evening (your writer’s 44th birthday, in fact) in Yokosuka City. Tsunoda has previously worked with airflow sounds (including the movement of air in glass bottles and through manhole covers) and, as no other information is given, it’s possible that similar investigations were undertaken here and collaged into the final product. But it sounds for all the world very much as indicated: “simply” a field recording wherein one hears crickets, small fireworks, some radio play and, throughout, the dull drone of nearby traffic (perhaps—it’s edges are muted enough to make one sometimes unsure as to the source but engines can certainly be heard as well as the odd siren). And it’s fantastic, beautiful. To whom or what does credit accrue? And does it matter? Tsunoda, clearly, exercises a number of specific options, including picking this site instead of another, presumably setting volume and acuity controls, possibly mixing the sounds later, for instance accentuating the audio-spatial distance between foreground and background noises. But let’s say that “Overland” is a fairly faithful replication on 15 or so minutes of that evening, in that place. How could it be “bad”? It sounds very much as I imagine I would hear things were I operating in Cage mode at the time. This, I guess, is one reason I find it so persuasive; maybe others hear environments like this somewhat differently and would find this particular “rendition” of the space as somehow off-putting. On the other hand, why listen to something like this on disc rather than just opening my window to hear current Jersey City variations on the same theme? I’m not sure, but perhaps it has to do with the enjoyment derived from witnessing another human’s appreciation of the sounds he was hearing that evening and the affinity felt by a different person, several years and many miles away.

While Tsunoda’s work might be the closest to pure field recording of the four pieces included in this compilation, each of the others uses sounds derived almost entirely from extra-instrumental sources and each offers some fine, deep listening. Joel Stern’s “Saltwort” lists soda water as contributing element and you get the sense that he’s elaborating on Xenakis’ “Concret PH” which hyper-amplified the tiny sounds of burning charcoal, the pings heard when microscopic air pockets exploded. Here, the prickly bubble sounds audibly effervesce in a delightful spray, evoking an unusually pristine pachinko parlor. Tarab (Eamon Sprod, of whom more below), notes that his “Of hollow traces” was “arranged from a series of improvisations”, making its creative history rather murky, but the initial sounds employed appear to have been generated from ambient sources including water. In an odd way, Tarab’s pieces shows glimmers of narrative structure; one can, without too much difficulty, imagine various story lines traveling along with the music, abstract though the latter is. The second part of the work, with delicate crinklings suspended over harsh, scraping drones, connotes quite an effective sense of foreboding. The final track, Lawrence English’s “A Summer Crush”, returns a good measure toward clearer field recordings, including a great deal of conversation recorded between Japan and Brooklyn. Incidental talk from a restaurant or marketplace, with its accompanying clatter of pans and dishes, is layered upon and weaved through strands of moody hums and various natural sounds such as duck calls, blinking between the threads like small jewels. There’s certainly more a sense of collage structure here than in the Tsunoda, an intentionality that imposes a kind of rigor while at the same time forfeiting the serene naturalness encountered earlier. Both approaches work excellently and if I prefer the former to the latter, it’s only by a handful of subjective degrees.

Tarab’s debut CD, “surfacedrift”, expands on the ideas shown in “Of hollow traces” and does so with depth and beauty. A student of Philip Samartzis, Tarab has clearly acquired something of his teacher’s ear for separation and apposition of sound as well as dramatic structure. He lists among his sound sources, “texture created by microphones dragged through leaves and gravel” and “rain pounding against buildings” and I’m thinking it’s sound derived from this sort of action, outwardly clear but made up of infinitely complex elements, that provides such a rich starting point for much of the music herein. There’s always some form of underlying strata, some bed of noise in place whether it’s a thick tangle of rustles or a lacy scaffold of pings that confuse the listener as to whether they had their genesis in fire or water. There’s a particularly evocative several minutes at the end of the first section made up of creaking wood (a pier?), whistling wind and anonymous bangs and bumps that sounds as dark and ominous as it does coolly bracing. As the title implies, “surfacedrift” alternates skimming over hazily glimpsed scenes and plunging into them with vigor, suddenly immersing you in a welter of noise, buffeting you from all sides. And so it goes, visiting a given area for several minutes, taking in the wealth of noise, moving on, dipping into the next territory, never encountering anything of less than at least passing interest, more often of deep fascination. Tarab even saves the best for last, a piece called “bottle” that, indeed, begins with what sounds like a heavy, rounded glass object being rolled over a flat stone surface in a large, echoing chamber. As elements are added—wet ones, staticky ones, large clangs, mysterious whooshes—the piece begins to bubble, becoming a lava pit of roiling, ceaseless activity. As it subsides, I feel some regret, wishing to tarry longer.

Both of these wonderful discs provide a different approach to eai (if the term applies at all) than much of what we’ve been hearing in recent years. Not better or worse, just another branch that has picked up lessons from AMM, et al and applied them to a framework described by Ferrari and others. It’s an invigorating mix. If the results aren’t too distinguishable from what you hear as you walk around your neighborhood, well, congratulations for having amazing ears and/or living in an awesome neighborhood. Otherwise, check out what these ears, those represented here, have been hearing.

More information is available at: www.naturestrip.com

~ Brian Olewnick

The London Headphone Festival

I received an e-mail from one of the many music discussion lists I'm subscribed to requesting submissions for the London Headphone Festival. I'd heard odd bits about this festival before, but this albeit indirect call for submissions initially caught my interest, especially when I realised that no sounds generated from acoustic or even amplified sound sources could possibly be admitted into this festival, unless already pre-recorded. Both this announcement and the website for the event itself specify that all listening at the festival will be "via headphones only", requiring the sound to be transmitted from performer to listener without any escape into the air, short of that tiny acoustic space between the headphone speaker and the ear drum. That the audience must have "brought their own headphones" to plug-in in order to participate, suggests that the organisers, should the technology be available, would be happier to broadcast the sonic information directly into the brains of the participants. Removing any need for an interaction between the sounds and their performance space whatsoever.

Here's the message:

Message: 1
Date: Fri, 14 May 2004 13:44:03 +0100
From: ". m u r m e r ."
Subject: call for performers, london headphone festival

hi all,

we are now accepting proposals for performances at london's second annual placard international headphone festival, to take place on saturday, july17th from 12pm-2am.

over forty artists will each perform a 20 minute slot; slots continue non-stop without breaks (thanks to multiple performance areas and automatic crossfading) for the full 14 hours. listening is via headphones only; upwards of 100 plug-in points are provided throughout the space for listeners who have brought their own headphones. last year's event saw performances by the likes of leafcutter john, jonathan coleclough, colin potter, jem finer, peter cusack and max eastley. this year has plans to feature, among others, main, janek schaefer, kaffe matthews and paul hood.

for more info on this and last year's event see here: http://placard.slab.org/

if you would be interested if performing, now's the time to get in touch! please send a short proposal directly to me - we will be looking for proposals that make specific and original use of the listening format. everyone welcome!

all the best,
patrick

It's my understanding that previous festivals have been broadcast over the net so that listeners internationally, or simply those who for whatever reason don't want to leave their houses in order to attend in person, can participate. Since the method of listening (isolated on headphones) is the same, I see no reason for anyone to attend as an audience member, in fact they're fairly likely to have a more pristine listening environment at home. That many of the submissions to last year's festival (arctic field recordings, the readily available selections from "Your Favorite London Sounds") were field recordings, simply played back during the "performance", the act of recording or creativity had already taken place long before the performance was to take place. In that sense, there was really no need for the "performer" to be there at all - merely the digital information present on the recorded medium is necessary for the experience to occur. So we now have a situation where neither the presence of performer nor audience member is required for the event to occur.

Having said this, surely there are conceptual concerns posed when up to one hundred people gather in a room in London to listen to sounds recorded by an individual alone in the Arctic (or a mile and a half away at the Brick Lane Beigel shop, which incidentally is open 24 hours a day - almost identical sounds are available to anyone with 60p in their pocket for a beigel to listen to in person, whenever they want if they reside in London). What is usually a private listening experience becomes a public event. The listeners, although sonically isolated, are aware that the other people in attendance, either physically or virtually, are listening to the same sounds as they are. Some sense of community might occur through this shared aural experience.

However, rather than de-alienate the private listening experience, it seems to me that the effect of this event will be to introduce the alienation and central control of everyday broadcast media into the performance space, and an avant-garde/experimental performance space at that. In many East End pubs, it is possible to walk in and see East Enders watching EastEnders on TV. For those outside the UK, this is a soap opera about a fictional neighbourhood in the East End of London, in which the characters are generally shown interacting with each other forcefully and intimately at their local pub. In this scenario, the only interaction is between the actors in the soap opera, whose interactions have been planned however many weeks beforehand by the scriptwriting team, in response to around 20 years of "history", character development, and programme policy. The real people, in the real location, in the real pub, don't interact, they merely accept the government subsidised entertainment being broadcast to them, which for that half-hour three times a week (plus the omnibus repeat on Sundays!), happens to be an approximation of their own lifestyle, albeit one which apparently doesn't involve watching TV.

Television increasingly finds its way into public houses - first as a medium for sports broadcasts, but increasingly left on in between. And in some bars (ones which I only ever enter once), live entertainment is replaced by MTV, often with the soundtrack provided separately by CDs on the stereo system; completely divorcing any sense of connection between performance/performer and audible sonic reality (or perhaps reinforcing the interchangeability of the music presented via these media). It's unfortunate that this social reality is seems to be entering the world of experimental music.

At the London Headphone festival, the event, and the technology, would appear to take on a status far above that of the contributors - divorced as they are from any direct communication with those in the audience, to the point where it is an indistinguishable experience from staying at home and listening to CDs (or the radio). Except "lots of people are doing the same thing at the same time in the same place". Simply being present at an event doesn't mean that your presence has any effect on what occurs, or that the presence of others will affect your experience of it, other than negatively. If anything, the likely chatter at an event with no audible sounds in the room will more obstruct the experience than participating vicariously would.

The Master Of Go

I was browsing the latest Atlantic Monthly (June, 2004; on news-stands everywhere) only to find a nice essay on Wayne Shorter by the always-insightful if sometimes Balliett-besotted Francis Davis. In promotional terms, the piece itself is a much delayed response, and something of a shrug at that; I wonder what the average suit at Vivendi / Universal / Verve will think when this clipping hits his / her desk. Puffery aside, however, Davis’ essay does reveal more about its subject’s personal life than just about anything else I’ve read on the man, from his bond with his brother, the shadowy flugelhornist Alan ("we had wrinkled clothes, because we thought you played better bebop with wrinkled clothes… [y]ou had to be raggedy to be for real"), to the fact that he spent much of the late 1970's and early 1980's caring for a daughter born with serious brain damage (she passed away at the age of 14 in 1985).

More importantly, in trying to introduce this rather idiosyncratic, very cerebral but extremely significant artist to a mass readership, Davis wisely defers to a number of other writers, prominent among them Lawrence or, as his byline reads, Larry Kart. One of the music's most perceptive and literate critics -– IMO, his is the standard against which all other works on the Tristano School should be measured -- Mr. Kart also, along with fellow Chicagoans John Litweiler and J. B. Figi, provided invaluable documentation of that city's experimental jazz scene during the 1960's and 1970's. If you're fortunate enough, you may even be able to engage him on a number of jazz bulletin boards these days. So I was quite surprised and pleased to find Davis quoting Kart at length, specifically, from his 1972 Downbeat review of Shorter's final Blue Note album Odyssey Of Iska.

Protesting Shorter's growing "devotion to sonic color, virtually at the expense of any other kind of energy and invention," the critic Larry Kart attributed this to his "seeming desire to renounce the notion of the improvising musician as the purveyor of a competitive, flamboyant ego."

A noble impulse at first thought, but one that cannot be achieved, I think, by the amplification of simplicities and restraints that amount to little more than a toning-down of invention. What I hear on this album is a musician trying to disappear. I wish he wouldn't.

Somewhat remarkable comments for their time, but even more pertinent today than they ever were. Except that now, these observations could be applied not just to single recording, but to an entire "genre" of music. No bashing intended, really. But this passage does cause me to wonder about the perhaps still not fully comprehended pervasiveness of Shorter's influence on the world of improvisation, and, by extension, to pause again over the idea that there is more "jazz" in "eai" / whatever than maybe meets the ear.

To wit… taking their cue from John Cage, many contemporary musicians cite Zen concepts in (partial) explanation of their own working methods, or, like Bernhard Günter, claim to be adherents of the wabi-sabi aesthetic. (Interestingly, reverence of the quintessentially Western concept of the clinamen – thank you Lucretius – appears to be much more rare.) I have little doubt that Kart was making at least oblique reference to Shorter's Buddhist faith here, however, not in order to exploit it for the purposes of his argument, but rather in order to delineate just how the very culture of the music was changing. Here we are standing at the other end of that change, I would argue, and now its time to return to the question that I feel is implicit in Kart's analysis, expressed as it is, and only could best be expressed, in a tone of slight resignation. "[T]o renounce the notion of the improvising musician as the purveyor of a competitive, flamboyant ego"... is improvisation as a practice even suited to this pursuit?

John Tilbury/Eddie Prevost - discrete moments

Tilbury/Prevost
discrete moments

Matchless Recordings

I don’t know any details about either the studio session that took place on January 6th, 2004 between keyboardist John Tilbury and percussionist Eddie Prevost, or the process by which the resulting tapes became discrete moments. This makes it a bit difficult for me to know how to proceed. The recording is over 75 minutes long and consists of eight cuts of widely varying length. Most of the music is exquisitely beautiful—as beautiful, in my humble opinion, as anything else you are likely to hear this year. Unfortunately, somewhere around ten minutes of it isn’t much good at all. Now, if Tilbury and Prevost had put out an absolutely perfect 65-minute (or even 55-minute) disc—say just by excluding the meandering third track—people might be whispering things involving "recording of the decade" or "pinnacle of their careers." I have a sense, however (in spite of my above-admitted absence of actual information about this recording), of why this track was included in the final product. It has a very cool final minute that sounds as if it might have come from an early Cage piece for prepared piano. There was no way to retain that clunkily wonderful coda while scuttling the rest of the cut, so (perhaps at the last moment?) it was decided to keep the whole 11:18 piece intact and put out a very long album. I believe that this was a mistake, but, as is quite well known, it is now pretty easy to program CD players to skip this or that section of a recording—at least when the artists are kind enough to provide reference points on their discs. Let us therefore proceed as if there were no track entitled "S" and discuss only the absolutely terrific remaining discrete moments.

Tilbury plays organ as well as piano (and prepared piano) here, and it is interesting to note the great extent to which he tailors his playing to his instrument. Much of his work on piano utilizes a technique that is entirely appropriate for the great 1950s piano pieces by Feldman and Cage (more Cage here than I’m used to from him). But on organ Tilbury adopts the Palestine/Ligeti approach of holding chords or tones for a very long time and letting the strangely irregular internal pulses that result do the hypnotizing. He understands, that is, the difference between a ringing stringed percussion instrument and a keyboard simulacrum of a wind instrument. As one might expect, he’s great on both horns: he seems to have a perfect knack for landing on just those pitches, rhythms, and sounds that will produce the perfect effect. His remarkable touch is at work here, of course, but there’s a deep wisdom evident too. Prevost brings his arsenal of percussion, traps, tam-tam, stringed barrel and bows, and, as always, he knows how to get the most out of each one. The long cymbal hisses he creates to accompany some of Tilbury’s high-pitched drones would give Nakamura a run for his money. Unsurprisingly, Prevost's high degree of sensitivity and consummate skill is a pretty good combination when it comes to improvised music. Naturally, it also helps that these guys have been playing together since long before many of Bagatellen’s most avid readers were born. Some of their music is delicate and pointillistic with wide spaces between sounds, but there are also rich, thick webs and, as indicated, Cage/Klee/Rube Goldberg thunkity-thunk machines. The two men also provide a hefty helping of what seems to me missing from too many of the "non-I" recordings I hear: drama. (For those who don’t like drama, there’s sonic variety—which may or may not be acceptable these days: I don’t know.) For all its multiplicity, however, unlike Tilbury’s recent fiasco with Tippett and Riley, the vision is constant and coherent throughout. discrete moments is so so beautiful.

Walter Horn

Give the Conductor Some

I’ve been mulling lately about the man with the magic wand. The chauvinistic bent of this prefatory statement is intentional. A majority of conductors seem to be of the male persuasion. Why is that? And more to the point from whence and where does the allure and esteem of this CEO of the orchestra originate? What does he do exactly and why is it so essential? To a layperson such as me, the conductor- decked out in dapper coattails, perched imposingly atop his podium, commanding the troops with every dramatic swipe and slash of his baton, every grand gesticulation of his hands- is an impressive presence, but also a puzzling one.

The actions I described above have a strong visual slant. Telegraphing cues, silencing certain sections of the orchestra while prodding others to swell. This visual segment is largely excised from the aural experience on disc or record. Still it bleeds through in the solicited responses of the musicians. A conductor’s presence can be perceived strongly even though he is not commonly a sound source himself. As a continuous catalytic agent, he must know his troops, their talents and their faults. Similarly, the musicians must become adept at reading and reacting to the conductor’s clues on the fly.

Zorn’s Cobra pieces, Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Lightbox orchestrations and Masashi Harada’s Condanction systems are but a few of the Space-Age alterations to the centuries old métier. Senescent wand replaced with flash cards, colored light bulbs and kinetic dance steps. But these young Turks are far removed from the members of the guild who carry legendary status. I’ve been trying to come to grips with what it is about them that generates such reverence and adulation. What are the attributes of a top echelon conductor and how are they taught and honed? Is there even any strong semblance of consistancy between them? Harold Schoenberg is quoted as asserting: “a conductor must be not only a complete musician, thoroughly absorbed in the score and intimately conversant with each instrument, but an administrator, minister, psychologist, philosopher, disciplinarian and, above all, a compelling leader.”

Who are the members of this long-standing fraternal order and what are their histories? Surnames like Celibidache, Furtwängler, Mengelberg and Munch are uttered with awe by those in the know. Beecham, Klemperer, Toscanini and Bernstein are a few more. Are there others working today who rouse such respect? And what of women in the field? I’m firing off these questions in the hopes that others with more knowledge might be able to answer them (Uncle Walto? Messrs. Olewnick & Warburton? Dear Readers?).

Jeff Fuccillo - Disturbed Strings

Jeff Fuccillo
Disturbed Strings
Roaratorio
Roar 07

There’s a rather unusual story behind this recording. Jeff Fuccillo is an Oregon-based guitarist who, back in 1998, had the nerve-wracking opportunity to open for one of his heroes, the late John Fahey. The senior guitarist apparently liked what he heard (Fuccillo’s sound might briefly be described as somewhere between Fahey and Derek Bailey) and invited him to go to the studio and record an album for Fahey’s label. When the day came, Fuccillo gathered together material and instruments, set up in the recording studio and began to play. Immediately, torrents of taped sound (effects, musical samples, etc. not dissimilar from those employed on some of Fahey’s later releases, such as “Womblife”) began to issue over the studio’s speakers. It seems that, unbeknownst to the young guitarist, Fahey, for undisclosed reasons, had quite a different session in mind. Fuccillo played for a couple of hours (including some unreleased duo work), battling through and around the intrusions, ending the date with Fahey’s promise to meet again for editing. This never occurred. They re-encountered each other a year later, Fahey expressing the opinion that the recording was “too nice” and thinking they should venture back into the studio again to go for something more “pure and raw”. This never happened either.

So, “With some hesitancy”, Fuccillo decided to release the session “as is” in 2004 on vinyl LP. Fahey’s rude interruptions are immediately apparent. Fuccillo’s opening piece, a song that recalls the older musician quite a bit, is quickly in combat with symphonic extracts, explosions and whatnot hurled his way without any obvious rhyme or reason. One imagines Fahey’s rationale was something along the line of introducing roadblocks of a sort into what might otherwise be (in his mind) a too smooth process, forcing the would-be protégé to explore pathways that would normally be left untrammeled. It’s not clear that Fuccillo always accepts the invitation (bait?). On the more straightforward, blues or bluegrass-inspired songs, he generally plows ahead, the taped sounds running down their own parallel road. The freer, more Bailey-esque numbers seem more amenable to Fahey’s ideas, though how much of that is Fuccillo’s doing and how much is the listener’s own integration of the sounds heard is open to argument. In any case, the success of the lovelier pieces here strikes me as more dependent on what Fuccillo brought to the session rather than Fahey’s subterfuge. On “Lilt of the Butterfly”, he nods toward Harry Partch’s kithara before veering into some delightful, only slightly abstracted, country picking. “Nogawa River” is one where the interplay works quite well, Fuccillo’s furious (possibly koto inspired) playing merging with dark wells of sound from various sources, including low, bowed strings.

All of the pieces succeed to a greater or lesser extent, though I find myself better enjoying Fuccillo the more “traditional” he keeps his playing. This might be more of an issue I have with various musicians who straddle avant and older forms—it takes a lot of dedication to be a Derek Bailey; either go for it or don’t. Finding a satisfying middle ground can be problematic (viz. Henry Kaiser). Though he has instrumental ability to spare, it’s when he lets himself relax and settle into what seem to me to be his natural, melodic tendencies that the music blooms and expands into fascinating areas. That some of those areas are infested with sonic detritus issuing from that erratic genius occupying the room next door usually doesn’t matter and occasionally works to the music’s benefit. “Disturbed Strings” is an enticing introduction to Fuccillo’s “solo” art (he had recorded previously—not familiar to me—with the Irving Klaw Trio, Wham-O and Hochenkeit) and something that Fahey completists will need to own.

Further information can be found at www.roaratorio.com

~ Brian Olewnick

A Minor Announcement

Just a quick note: I'm blogging again.

As the blog's title suggests, it's not going to be as open, subject-matter-wise, as the last one. It's basically there to promote my book once it's published, and give me a space to think about the book, or post excerpts for comment, until that fateful day. It probably won't be updated daily, or anything like it. But please feel free to stop on by.

Charlie Feathers - Tip Top Daddy (Norton)

Rockabilly isn’t a genre renowned for its restraint. Knocking em’ back and tearing shit up goes part and parcel with the pomade-slicked ducktails and creased-cuff dungarees. Charlie Feathers had the package down pat and in spades. Present at the early Sam Phillips Sun sessions and author of some of the label’s earliest hits, he started cutting his own platters comparatively late in the game. As one of the ghostwriters for Elvis he also enjoyed financial compensation for his tune-smithing, if not public notoriety. Still, his situation was a damn sight better than that of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup who had his songs swindled wholesale by Sun. The stuff here, mostly solo acoustic demos from a fifteen-year span, lacks the punch of his more polished band sides. The swap is an even more persuasive pathos and often startling amount of musical integrity. Twenty-three tunes trot by in just over three quarters of an hour. Rudimentary guitar, frequently in the form of just a single strumming chord, brackets Feathers’ singing verses in a sparing laidback style. Topics trace a typical ‘tears and beers’ trajectory, but an underlying poetry permeates the lyrics. “Bottle to the Baby” wraps in just under a minute and the stark “Live and Let Live” finds Feathers audibly choking up with emotion during the plain spoken plea to his woman not to leave him. Not much in the way of gloss or frills, but it’s enough and the intimacy of his songs in this setting almost demands the Spartan delivery. Feathers’ voice was one of the most offbeat in all of ‘hillbilly’ music, his singing often imbued with a preternatural throat warble that drew on the crooning yodel of guys like Jimmie Rodgers and Cliff Carlisle and commingled it with the high lonesome cry of such hill country eremites as Roscoe Holcomb and Clarence Ashley. There’s also more than a hint of the minimalist esthetic of Feather’s boyhood friend Junior Kimbrough in the twangy embryonic riffing and a loose adherence to lyrical content. Revenant has a more comprehensive collection available that includes a handful of these tracks. But the overlap isn’t enough to preclude the purchase of this disc right along side it.

Evan Parker/Eddie Prévost - Imponderable Evidence

Parker/Prévost
Imponderable Evidence
MRCD57

The title isn’t an intended cull from Bacon, which would further the theme of their last recorded effort, but both Wittgenstein and Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (although the expression can indeed be found in Bacon). As circumstance would have it, the infinitely tentative results of this affair have more to do with sensory intention than imponderable evidence. The sound is markedly richer than that of Most Materiall; Prévost much in the fore of the procession. Admittedly, some narrow trepidation had crept in once I noticed that merely ‘drums’ were listed as his instruments. Alas, identical to those listed on the tandem's precursor whence Eddie pulls all stops and few punches, but different than what is described on the back of the contemporaneously released Matchless duo w/John Tilbury, Discrete Moments, upon which various tools are mentioned.

Eddie on strict drums throughout counters Pan Parker, solely on the larger horn. No protracted circular breathing platform diving, no darkest of blues as with the opening three minutes of “Nil Novum,” no violent squeezing/indeterminate tenor saxophone and frankly little of Parker’s metall-urgency throughout. . .passive resistance, passive acquiescence, passive adherence. I don’t want to appraise two albums, but I have to. This is far removed from extroverted Evan, but for whatever reason one can’t deem it introverted work. It’s unconvincing limning, relegated with Eddie’s West Ham to the First Division.

Over six years have passed. The emotive strengths of MM mayn't be circumvented. Why look back? Why contrast? Does each work matter to or depend upon the other? Are they automatic antipodes? Either I've no answers or choose to ignore them. I do, however, assert that there exists at least some remote, derelict rope bridge in Peru between these two recordings.

As disc two of MM begins jabbing, softly and deliberate, so does “Exhibit A,” a morning work, breezing--loosely tuned Slingerland, working much along the lines of what we’ve gathered from the mid to late 60s, snare, sock and tom. Also included I believe to be that alien concave cymbal DeJohnette strikes from time to time. There is tentativeness in abundance which I find frustrating and off-putting. What were long, curious, get ‘em fray-ush lines from Evan’s tenor on MM he deliberately seems to abbreviate here, and what is most confounding is that it’s indeed a similar but truncated approach.

Eddie in this context reminds me at his kit of Sigmar Polke’s 1967 sculpture/installation The Potato House. It’s a droll, farcical, nonetheless very serious rendering of orderly post-WWII German everyday life. I’d estimate a 10 x 10 sq. ft. exploded house of matches, potatoes pinned to the slats with toothpicks every four or so inches. As you walk around it, the potatoes prima facie appear frozen (naked on the fork, Jack) only to be relieved of their fasteners in the minds of the audience, plunging downward in motion toward the floor. Cards falling into place at a studied yet unruly constant, Prévost tosses the elements high into the air, to subsequently manipulate their collective descent.

“Exhibit B” finds Prévost ruminative, tattooing drumheads of greater perimeters.
By the third selection it becomes evident that this is improvisation very much in the tradition, not bull-headed, but with an all-pervasive hint of forged (as in the felony) refinement, stark tentativeness. Very briefly, Eddie nods to a march, and like Cecil’s troughs and crests, he wants to dispense ASAFP, divest this current state of the proceedings. . .thaw it. The skins grow more noticeably up front with each listen. His recurrent press rolls are wonderfully smoky incantations, shoving toward fresh dialectics. Around 8:40 into the final selection occurs a rare communion. Tonic resolution becomes somewhat apparent though not cursory (again, note the black, unguent resolutions of “Nil Novum”).

Going against critical grain of late, I want Evan’s straight horn on this record. There is little diverse about the affair. He isn’t in my face but duly inclined to follow his comrade. While homogeneity doesn’t necessarily confound an album, it’s certainly awake on this one. I find none of the sanguine drama of MM, no urgent consanguinity. No arco cymbal, no ‘found string-drum’ tug-of-war through barbed wire with one of those high-speed chase thwarting chains fond of in Derry. Events aren’t unfolding, they’re seen undressed. They're being recorded half an hour after a big lunch at the Olive Garden. This is a tenor saxophone/trap drums duet. One would wish this second marriage was held at some really hot, makeshift outdoor venue. Like Bu to Morgan, I want Eddie to tell Evan to “Get mad!” as the music often sinks flaccid. It’s contrived reduction, or gentler, reduction that ends up overly and quite overtly manipulated as such, forcing a tulip in a pot--beautiful but ultimately all too intended at given space in time.

With the current prices of Matchless discs approaching those of barreled crude oil, one yet can’t underestimate the plum good things this purveyor does and has done for improvised music. Yes, perhaps their approach to the music retains that .org-ish humility stirred with rigid order and self-importance but that’s Eddie, replete with what looks like pretense, though in the end is something genuinely honed, and in no sense fabricated.

The drumming is wonderful, no less. The latter half of the final exhibit comes together quite well, but it’s not enough horse today. I always weigh too damned heavily the artist’s approach. What were the plans of Eddie and Evan? Look at Conic Sections’ impetus.

Parker: “These improvisations were recorded on impulse. I felt things were going well in practice and was anxious to document that stage of development.”

What balls! What incomprehensible balls! That’s what’s missing on this one. Imponderable Evidence is a date on the calendar a few months from now. It may be imponderable, but certainly not too probative. We shouldn't forget that a meeting of two old friends with instruments in their hands is still a meeting of two old friends. I didn’t want to write two reviews, but I had to, as I expected more diversity of components and am left frustrated.

Bacon: "In the greater bodies the forge was easy."

~Michael Schaumann

cover art courtesy of Ominous Drone

Sachiko M - Bar Sachiko

Sachiko M
Bar Sachiko
IMJ
517

First things first. If you found Sachiko’s “1:2” on a bruit secret to be a total bore, an artsy infliction of almost unvarying sine waves imposed on fans who will accept anything she chooses to dish out, stay way the hell away from this one. Unlike the mere 20 minutes of that mini-disc, “Bar” offers a full hour’s worth although the structure differs in, I think, important ways. Roughly speaking, the first 30 minutes consists of one held tone, the next 25 of two (the original and a louder one of approximately the same pitch but a slightly different timbre) and the final five minutes where the pitch is adjusted upward and the texture subtly changed.

As one of the apparently meager handful who greatly enjoyed that last effort, I hesitantly put forward the proposition that “Bar” is even better. Previously, I entertained the idea that an analogy could be made between Sachiko’s current work and early minimalist art like Rauschenberg’s White Paintings (or Reinhardt’s black ones). Listening to “Bar” for the first time (more accurately, having listened through it in its entirety), I found myself thinking of a different painter.

Listening to Sachiko’s work “horizontally” struck me as reasonably similar to “reading” a Barnett Newman painting from one side to another. There’s a long stretch of almost nothing (a single color, a single tone), an abrupt change to a different color/tone, then perhaps another. As in a Newman, the beauty (or at least one aspect of it) lies in the choices made regarding shape placement in space, adjacent tones, etc. A few minutes later, I realized, “Hey, the disc is called ‘Bar’, after all. Could it be…?” I don’t know and it’s probably just a happy coincidence but I can’t shake the parallels in my own perception of their work. The major difference, of course, being Time. One initially takes in the Newman at a glance, the ratios of shape and color being immediately absorbed and aesthetically evaluated even as you might go back for further examination later. Sachiko’s piece takes an hour during which, on first hearing, you have no idea of its ultimate form and, given that there are only three sections that remain static within their span, there’s the tension (perceived as exciting or otherwise, depending on the listener) of “What’s going to happen next? Is anything ever going to happen?” That is, there’s this kind of tension if one is approaching it in such a way as to anticipate development rather than to submerge oneself in the “now”. Imagine a very large Newman scrolling itself past a stationary viewer at extremely low speed. At first, you wait for a change in the blue but eventually, you simply look at the blue, look more deeply than you thought you could and begin to see worlds in it. Just as some of the visual effect will be the result of the paint surface interacting with the light of the room in which it’s situated, so Sachiko’s “Bar” becomes part of the listening space, its sound varying drastically with each tilt of the head, especially in the second section where the amount of variation achievable between these two closely-placed tones is remarkable. Of course, this is a common aural phenomenon with sine waves, but I’ve rarely experienced it more viscerally than here.

At the 55-minute mark, these two tones are suddenly replaced by a gently higher one with something of a whistling, flute-like quality to it. I get the sense that there might be a subtle, secondary tone mixed in but it’s hard (for me) to tell. It’s tempting to read in a kind of ethereality into this coda, a wafting away of sorts. It ends with a very brief upswing in volume and the quick snap of a machine being turned off. One is left with the memory of thin slabs of sound, their relationship to each other and the details (many supplied by the actions of the listener) contained therein.

I’m not sure how to explain why I like this so much except that the extreme openness of Sachiko’s approach, her willingness to simply lay out certain musical “facts” on the table strikes me as psychologically bracing as well as aesthetically beautiful. Your mileage may vary widely.

~ Brian Olewnick

Hey Hey Hey

The music that is playing on a near-endless loop in my head this week is a song by long-gone Dallas / Denton band Transona 5, one from their 1998 album Duffel Bag.

Like so many quality Dallas groups, Transona 5 met with a good bit of indifference in their day. The area press was fond of pointing out the 5's debt to the Kadane brothers' Bedhead, still maybe the best band to ever come out of North Texas, and the more filigree-d proponents of "space rock" (believe it or not, this term had some critical currency in Texas independent music circles in the 1990s). But Chris Anderson, G. P. Cole, Chris Foley, Scott Marks and Rachel Smith also produced a number of performances -- "Trucker Talk Ch. 1", "Transona Borealis", "Electrosprite", "No Door", "3 Way Glider", "Coin Toss", "The Great Escape" -- that were so gentle and unassuming you hardly noticed how entrancing they really were. For me, "Hey Hey Hey" is the most superb of these songs.

If the guitars lines weren’t so indolent and yet somehow chiming, you could say they interlock. Instead, the notes circle in semi-established orbits around one another, motes convected upwards up in a shaft of light, falling again as clouds intrude. The rums don’t establish a beat or even much of a pattern. Imagine a porch swing, vacated in some hurry, twisting from end to end and along its suspending chains, but slowly swaying to a point of rest. The intricacy of Transona 5’s music is almost "jazz-like", but the emotional universe it inhabits is very distant. The song pivots on lyrics like "I don’t wanna concede ya", "I didn’t wanna come over", "I didn’t wanna complete ya", and "I couldn’t even conceive it / Now I’m gonna leave you". Chris Anderson sings in a slightly horse drawl, a liquid, anodyne reflection of white noise. Extra ellipses are attached to every statement of rejection…… renunciation…… resignation? I don’t know. The song builds to a guitar "solo" that is both as devastating and as concise as anything Tom Verlaine ever laid down in the studio. And the magical thing is that it came from here, is an expression of here, where I am, part (at least) of what I have known.

There are these climatic qualities of the summertime Dallas that is my home; the city is hot, humid, windy, hazy with allergens. The architectural realities: glass skyscrapers, strip malls, ranch-style homes, cracked pier-and-beam foundations. The economic and social ills of the city I won’t even catalog. Because, damn it, there is the Dallas of my imagination: the hum and regular sibilance of old, black iron oscillating fans set on a hardwood floor -- you can feel the vibrations in the soles of your bare, dusty feet; the overgrown fragrance of honeysuckle, stagnating lake water, wild onions; the sight of pink mimosa blossoms burned less by the sun and more by the smarting blue of the clear sky; the conversation of black and green cicadas leaping from treetop to treetop. I've never left East Texas except to visit, it comes to me, because it floors me, this place.

Yes, I've thought about staying put recently, conserving movment, baking and being baked, weather as a mind-altering experience. All in connection with Texas music. Listening to Charalambides, Transona 5, Bedhead, Mazinga Phazer, The American Analog Set. Something about all this music transmits the unmistakable feeling of flopping down on one's back, staring up. Allowing oneself to be cooled in laying oneself open, in being flattened, boneless, small. To be buoyed, modestly so, by a nameless yearning that sounds just like the sucked-in sigh preceding one's response to the question, "Where am I?"

Tomas Korber/Erik M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide - brackwater

Thomas Korber, Erik M, Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide
brackwater
For4Ears
1550

An intriguing combination of musicians recorded here in the spring of 2003 (at a former state prison, no less): three relative veterans of the scene and youthful offender, Bags’ own Tomas Korber. There are two longish tracks. The first, “brackwater”, is pretty rarefied, the quartet lodging themselves for the most part in the higher-pitched, more spartan neck of the woods but not always maintaining the sort of cohesiveness I want to hear. Guessing somewhat at the contributions of each, Nakamura extracts crackles of static from his nimb while Yoshihide and Erik M generate varying (although only slightly) thin whines from their equipment. There’s a tentativeness that leaves me rather unsatisfied, though I admit it’s a close call and that, perhaps, merely adjusting my perceptive abilities would allow a different hearing, something about it just refuses to gel for me until only several minutes from the piece’s conclusion. At that point, Korber emerges from the opaque hum with some very, very lovely guitar work that immediately and resolutely stakes out a patch of tantalizing ground. It’s a pretty marked contrast and one that throws the preceding music into a different sort of relief, intended or otherwise.

The second improvisation, “and a slice of bread” (I take it these fellows were conscious of performing in an ex-prison) is far more successful, beginning with a rough and tumble conglomeration of sounds (more akin to what one might normally have heard with Erik M’s erstwhile group, poire_z), eddying and colliding in viscerally scrumptious fashion. Here, unlike the opening piece, there’s a spine out from which events unfurl, providing both a firm structure and a platform allowing things to surge forward. Sometimes, you just have to have a base, in this case the wooly drone underlying initial events. About halfway through, it shifts back into an area adjacent to much of what was presented in the title track, but there are subtle, crucial differences (don’t ask me to elucidate on them!) that allow a fullness and level of fascination that was missing earlier. All the touches are light and deft and, perhaps unlike parts of the first piece, the listener easily forgets that four individuals are performing, instead becoming enveloped in the poetry of the whole. It winds down to a single, high sine tone that you expect to be the ending phrase, but again Korber’s guitar appears, summoning up a brief splatter of electronic debris to serve as the final punctuation.

I’ll be very interested, if such should occur, to hear more from this quartet.

~ Brian Olewnick

Philip Samartzis - Soft and Loud

Philip Samartzis
Soft and Loud
Microphonics
01

For the past several years, ever since first hearing him in his very fine duo recording with Sachiko M. (“artefact” [sic], on Dorobo Limited Editions), Philip Samartzis has been a regular source for some of my favorite new music. Several pieces of his that appeared last year on some compilations (“Grain” and “Variable Resistance”) turn out to have been sketches of a sort for this piece, originally intended as a surround sound experience. “Soft and Loud” is comprised entirely of reworked field recordings compiled in Tokyo and its environs, concentrating on everyday sounds, natural and man-made. By choosing which aspects to accentuate, which to maneuver into foreground or background, Samartzis constructs a subtle, “unfolding narrative” (as he puts it in his liner notes) that, without going so far as to suggest a story-line, certainly has something of a closely (aurally) examined walk, one executed in a hyper-conscious, aesthetically sensitive state. This has become, I think, a very interesting mini-trend among certain musicians: a tenuous, almost-not-there storytelling quality that offers a “way around”, perhaps, some free improv roadblocks. Samartzis is not quite as imagistic as Olivia Block but I hear a degree of similarity in feel, a like desire to heighten and contrast real world sounds, at the same time molding them into something of a tale.

Part of the fascination has to do with the near hyper-reality of the sounds in terms of their sonic vividness that, paradoxically, sometimes renders them eerily difficult to identify. At the beginning of the first track, you immediately think of sharply etched water sounds, perhaps rain, but then you pause and wonder if it’s not the crackling of fire. You’re presented with the psychologically disorienting but giddily thrilling sensation of both acute awareness and uncertainty. Several elements reappear at irregular intervals (the sheared-metal screech of an abruptly shut steel gate, fractured, hiccupping acoustic guitar strums, a melancholy solo flute) as though you’re randomly walking through a neighborhood, occasionally retracing your steps, touching familiar bases though hearing them juxtaposed against different surroundings on each pass. Given its original design, this sense of linear movement might well be an artifact of the CD format but if so, it nonetheless functions superbly. It may only be due to the geographical source of the recordings, but I couldn’t help thinking of the aura of everyday magic achieved in Murakami’s “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles”, where an amble down a back alley could lead to fantastic, unexpected experiences. Samartzis generally limits himself to a handful of sound-strands at any moment, carefully playing particular textures off one another, allowing ample amounts of “air” into the pieces. As with much of what might be called (but not to pigeonhole it as such) post-Ferrari music, the success of a work may have much to do with the listener’s perception of the poetry involved in the placement of elements, the unforced yet surprising naturalness of the apposing sounds. For myself, it’s deriving the feeling of, “Yes, this is how I might have heard these things, had I been attuning my ears appropriately at that time and place.” I suspect that for many listeners, given the opportunity, this affinity with Samartzis’ aesthetic sensibility will be the rule more often than not. “Soft and Loud” is an exceptionally fine and rewarding work, well worth seeking out.

Additional information is available at: www.philipsamartzis.com

~ Brian Olewnick

Feel the Pain

Rarely have I seen the tortures and traumas of adolescence zeroed in under the microscope as well as they are on Freaks and Geeks. The short-lived TV show traces the travails of the Weir siblings Sam and Lindsay and their small circle of friends, family, acquaintances and foes. Sam and his chums Bill Haverchuck and Neil Schweiber represent the geek half of the titular equation. Bill’s like an exponentially magnified version of Paul Pfeiffer from The Wonder Years, all lanky awkwardness, dorky demeanor and perpetually gaping mouth. Neil’s the smart-alecky, sweater vest wearing Jew, always quick with a corny quip or canard. But Sam arguably gets fucked with the most. Woefully shy and shrimpy for his age he continually shoulders abuse at the hands of his peers. Oddly enough, he’s the most promising and endearing of the three. Lindsay, former mathelete and brainiac, aligns with the freak camp, hanging out with the stoners and burnouts in the ennui-inducing wake of the death of her grandmother in an attempt to shed her former image. Leading that side of the cast are James Franco as the rougishly vacant slacker chieftain Daniel Desario and Jason Segal as Neil Peart-obssessed loafer Nick Andopolis. The ep that leads in with Nick ‘practicing’ on headphones in his basement to Rush’s “Spirit of Radio” on a 29-piece drum kit tricked out with spiraling rainbow stage lights & DIY fog machine (dry ice dropped in a metal bucket) had me rolling on the floor.

The school faculty and parental characters are just as biting and sardonic. Jean and Harold Weir are the typically well meaning, but bumbling parents largely oblivious to the troubles that are a daily tax on their children’s lives. Coach Fredricks comes on like that gung ho jocko gym teacher you always hated. Mr. Rosso riffs as the reality check version of the hippy dippy guidance counselor from Beavis & Butthead, painfully unhip in his forced faux hipness. But none are caricatures and there’s surprising depth and range to their behavior. A modest but effective array of guest stars grace the screen as well including Jason Schwartzman as a slippery fake Id salesman who works a cover gig in a men’s boutique. The show is bursting with meticulous detailed late-70s/early-80s nostalgia. From striped velour Izod™ shirts to high-water Toughskins™ the wardrobes of the cast are spot on. So is the music, which runs a wide gamut from arena rock ringers like Kiss, Styx and Van Halen to the cheesiest delegates from the AM dial including Kenny Loggins, Journey and Billy Joel.

Plot lines dance around familiar themes: cutting class, starting a garage band, falling in with the ‘wrong’ crowd, generally bearing the brunt of ridicule and ostracization & trying your damnedest not to go insane negotiating the long, booby-trapped road to adulthood. What’s most impressive to me is the degree of gravitas that permeates each episode- even when leavened with often side-splitting humor many of the stories tread regions that are mordant and unsparing in their depiction of the demoralizing high school condition. A bitter pill to swallow when you stack the show against such comparatively candy-coated fare as any of the teenage tripe on the WB or UPN and reason enough as to why the show was sadly shelved in its first season with only 12 of the 18 taped episodes actually broadcast. The dvd set, a direct result of rabid fan lobbying, does the show’s memory proud and is brimming with extras including scores of commentaries, deleted scenes, production notes and other assorted ephemera. It’s a damn shame this show hit the skids so early, but the frayed silver lining is that it never had a chance to slip in quality.

Hill on EAI

Thanks to Nate Dorward for drawing my attention to the following article that's just appeared on the One Final Note site. Though my first reaction on reading Adam Hill's piece, which I'll take the liberty of quoting from below (though do the site a favour and use the link to the Webpage – we can all do with the hits), was along the lines of "oh dear, but never mind", a closer reading of the text raises some uncomfortable questions that perhaps ought to be addressed.

After an opening paragraph describing the "hype" associated with eai – we'll return to that ever-problematic term later – Hill's second and third paragraphs run as follows: "The records are sold by jazz shops on-line and off, written about by jazz magazines both on-line and off, and commentary about them has dominated the discourse of quite a few of the jazz-themed digital discussion groups. Oddly, though, the music, by any definition, is not jazz, and after listening to about three dozen of these records, it's difficult to see much, if any, relation to jazz. In fact it seems to be loved for what it is mostly lacking, which are some of the very basic elements of jazz in all its traditions—melody, grooves, swing, and rhythm." Insofar as improvised music was a logical outgrowth from free jazz – and several of its most notable practitioners still to this day reveal ample evidence of a solid technical grounding in jazz (Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann..) – it's hardly surprising that albums on Erstwhile, For4Ears, Cut, Grob, IMJ, Hibari or any other small eai-ish label you might care to mention should be discussed in jazz-related publications, though Hill must also be aware of an increasing number of newsgroups and sites devoted to the discussion of this music. If eai-related discussion has "dominated the discourse of quite a few of the jazz-themed digital discussion groups" it's as much due to the dearth of exciting new "jazz" (another term that we perhaps ought to define more carefully) as it is to the tireless efforts of eai apologists/activists like Jon Abbey.

Bagatellen readers may smile wryly at my taking sides with Jon here, but, to paraphrase the first rule of orchestration ("know thy instrument"), it's a question of "know thy repertoire", which Abbey undoubtedly does. Hill admits to having listened to "about three dozen of these records", which, assuming he's referring to a phenomenon that began about five years ago (see his first paragraph) amounts to about seven albums a year. I myself edit the Paris Transatlantic website, a modest affair, and write reasonably regularly for The Wire and Signal To Noise, so I can't compare myself to the case-hardened jazz journalists I meet each week who go around local emporia with duffle bags full of new CDs to exchange for cash, but I do know (since I happen to make a note of these things) that I have acquired – received free, or bought – no fewer than 2600 CDs since the beginning of 1999, well over two thirds of which are filed in my own idiosyncratic system under "free jazz / improv". I respectfully submit that a total of three dozen discs is hardly scratching the surface.

Hill continues: "To my ears (and quite a lot of this music must be listened to with headphones in order to be heard), it is music with no soul, no heart, and certainly no hips." Well, on the subject of headphones he certainly has a point, but I would refer readers back to my own discussion of eai in a recent Bagatellen feature. I suspect that Hill is using the "eai" term to refer to predominantly lowercase (quiet, reductionist, minimal, call it what you will) music. I rather doubt he'd have to listen to Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma through a set of cans. No soul, no heart and no hips, eh? Forget the hips for a moment – this seems to be saying it's all too cerebral. I somehow imagine that Hill would have no difficulty welcoming the recent ensemble works of Anthony Braxton, Scott Rosenberg, Scott Fields and Denman Maroney under his jazz umbrella, but surely their music is at times as thorny as Milton Babbitt's. As far as the hips go ("it don't mean a thing if ain't got that swing"..), I also wonder whether Hill's definition of jazz would stretch wide enough to include the plethora of soft crossover jazz funk albums that clogged the remainder bins back in the 1970s and early 80s (Spyro Gyra, anyone?). Anyway, back to the text.

"While it has always been difficult to write clearly and concretely about abstract music" (amen!) "there has been no shortage of vague, ponderous prose when it comes to eai." Once more, I think Hill has a point – and I'm not prepared to go trawling through the Bagarchives to dig up examples of ponderous prose from some of our recent altercations – I'm half-tempted to return to my favourite warhorse of terminology here, but compared to the dull post-Hentoff (no disrespect to Nat, either: I grew up reading his liners) "this-happens-and-then-that-happens" kind of jazz writing, I think much of the discussion that has been spawned by recent outings on labels like Erstwhile has been quite instructive, to say the least.

"Jazz of today seems to have let many of these people down, and rather than listening again to Hot Fives and Sevens or Live at the Plugged Nickel they break out their special limited edition Amplify 2002 because it's cutting edge and current," continues Hill. Well, I'm afraid in many respects jazz has let me down – though I can happily cite dozens of recent examples that haven't – jazz (I'm talking Matthew, not Brad) has, like almost every other genre of music, fallen victim to the market saturation engendered by the advent of high-performance technology. With a good pair of mics and a DAT machine and a few basic software programmes, any concert in the world can be recorded and released commercially, and even musicians who in my opinion should know better – Parker (both William and Evan), Shipp, Vandermark, to name but three – have been offloading onto the public the kind of work that thirty years ago would never have made it out of the studio / concert hall. Want examples? How about the tepid McJazz of most of the releases on the Thirsty Ear Blue Series? Or the recent ragged outing by Zu / Spaceways on Atavistic? (Damn, Ken should seriously consider giving some of that prize money to the folks at Atavistic so they can invest in a decent A&R department). It's funny though that Hill refers to Hot Fives and Sevens or Live at the Plugged Nickel... couldn't he cite a more recent example of "classic jazz"? What about Ivo Perelman's Suite for Helen F, Mat Maneri's Sustain, Alan Silva's "Treasure Box", Dominic Duval's Rules of Engagement... but perhaps these aren't accessible enough for Mr Hill. Anyway, he continues: "This is what happens, I can only surmise, when enough highly intelligent men with enough disposable income have reached their middle years and need to find some way to feel cool again, and so they sit in rooms or cars with high-end audio systems, and cock their ears to listen to the dramatic uses of spatialty [sic], the correspondence of textures and silence, the metaphoric suggestiveness of barely audible sonic events." Quite apart from the (presumably unintentionally) sexist implication that no women listen to eai, I'm inclined to wonder what kind of car stereo I could possibly afford that would allow me to enjoy Tomas Korber's recent For4Ears album in rush hour traffic. Maybe I should go visit some local dealerships instead of writing Bag features.

"If one is to spend time and money listening to hours upon hours of sine waves, lap-top plops and fizzes, scrapes of disembodied guitar, string-plings from the inside of a piano, and abrasions of drum skins, one has to invent and embrace a highfalutin justification, and veil it in obscurity until it tends towards dogma. (Pretentiously they love to use the verb 'document' for recording, and their festivals are 'curated'.)" While being the first to recognise that some pretentious nonsense has been written on the subject (and on William Parker, Anthony Braxton and even Norah Jones too, if you know where to look), I question the verb "has to" in the above phrase. In normal circumstances (ie when I'm not reviewing a record or concert for a publication), I don't feel under any obligation to say why I like certain kinds of music – I actually have and enjoy listening to the first Norah Jones album, by the way – I like it, voilà, fuck it. I like Radu Malfatti, Steely Dan, Kevin Drumm, Shuggie Otis, the Beach Boys, Steve Coleman, AMM, Arthur Doyle and Sun Ra for all kinds of reasons. Of course, if it's a review, I tend to choose something that I like not only because I like it (shooting an album down in flames is by and large a pointless and demeaning exercise) but want to explain why I like it. Or -- witness the huge review of the Amplify box that triggered a lengthy discussion in these pages back in January -- explain why I would like to like it more and perhaps cannot.

Anyway, Hill continues: "But what eai enthusiasts won't tell you, but most fans of jazz will discover for themselves if they dare, is how fucking tedious this music actually is." I would never dare to presume I could speak for "most fans of jazz", though several of my acquaintances (possessing copies of Live at the Plugged Nickel to boot) find much to enjoy in eai. Funny, somehow I can't imagine an art historian writing "most Edward Hopper fans will discover for themselves how fucking tedious Mark Rothko is", or a cinema critic writing "most Truffaut fans will discover for themselves how fucking tedious Chris Marker is". Yet, for some reason, this stuff really rubs some music critics up the wrong way. But anyway, the expletive says it all – Hill might as well have put the pen down there and then, instead of citing two what I consider to be atypical examples of the genre, Duos For Doris (on Erstwhile) and the CD that accompanied the Improvised Music from Japan book. (In particular, a piece on that disc that featured Radu Malfatti on trombone and Taku Sugimoto on guitar – hardly eai, one supposes, unless the mere presence of an electric guitar qualifies the music as such.. in which case I love the eai back catalogue of Charlie Christian, Jim Hall and Wes Montgomery..).

But wait, there's more! "Perhaps the only thoughtful discussion (and criticism) of this music, has ironically come from Eddie Prévost, percussionist of AMM [..] Lamenting the lack of expressiveness in the music, Prévost said, 'The primary characteristics of this music are its determined equalization of tone, timbre, activity, dynamics, and it's [lack of] volume. All 'reductionist' instrumentalists seem bent on producing similar sonic effects—no matter what the source material. What is produced seems too often dull in its lack of differentiation (The Wire 231).' You might think that such controversial remarks would engender an interesting, provocative discussion of the music in succeeding issues of the magazine, but alas, it didn't." They certainly did in the circles I frequent (and in the Letters Page in The Wire, as I recall).

"And so the glorification of this opaque, haphazard music continues on, and critics like me are dismissed as philistines. It seems particularly ripe now for a sort of Sokal hoax." (I take it Hill read and enjoyed my spoof Erstwhile press release a few months back? Hmm, maybe not..) "Perhaps a mischievous (but well-known) musician will fill a seventy-seven minute disc documenting the hum and surge of a refrigerator and the sound of ass-scratching, send it in to IMJ or Erstwhile, and soon after experience the rapture of critical praise for its reverberant beauty and austere references to man vs. machine struggles and all its attendant colors and textures." Hardly likely, as (I can tell you from personal experience) Jon Abbey's ear for quality product (oh, sorry Adam, let's call it music) is far too acute and well-trained. "Or," concludes Hill, "you could just turn on a tape machine, get out a dog whistle, and blow, blow, blow, while the yammering mutts encircle you, wagging their tails, and cocking their ears." That's funny too; I've often compared the team of Wire journalists to a pack of slobbering dogs trying to get hold of the next big bone ("who's gonna review the new Erstwhiles, David?!"). So I'm quite happy to be counted among the yammering mutts. Even yammering mutts, though, have to heed the call of nature from time to time, and I have to say that if journalism like this were the only tree for miles around, I wouldn't even bother cocking my leg up on it.

~Dan Warburton

Warne Marsh - All Music

Nessa 7

The student body of the original Tristano school always carried a cliquish mien. Guys like Ted Brown, Warne Marsh and Ronnie Ball stayed close to campus, while mavericks like Lee Konitz hung out regularly with the townies and colleagues from other ‘colleges’. Consequently, the appelations of Cool, intellectual and ascetic, each sometimes meant in the pejorative, were in part a product of listener and peer awe and intimidation at the chops these men commanded. The fallacy of superior technique arriving at the expense of emotional content somehow stuck.

By my estimation, Marsh was arguably the most formidable of the matriculants. Of all the Tristano alum he seems to shoulder the stereotyped attributes described above to the greatest degree. Marsh's discography reflects a resultant skew with only a handful of records cut during the 50s through the late 60s and the bulk of his work arriving in the 70s and 80s for mostly European labels. His higher profile position in the popular repertory collective Super Sax may have had something to do with the late boon, but I can't help thinking it was also partially a case of people finally catching up.

When I was first familiarizing myself with Marsh’s music these assumptive traits certainly worried me. The amount of prowess and complexity that supposedly imbued in his every solo, made me question whether I could even grasp what was going on? Let alone the prospect of writing about it or describing it accurately to someone else. Fortunately, the actual music absolves those apprehensions. Embossed with an astute title, the recently reissued All Music offers a prime case in point. Marsh's music isn't some lofty abstraction or arrogant conceit. It can be and often is as viscerally pleasing as anything committed to tape by his bop and 'free jazz' cousins.

For the fall 1976 session Marsh fronts what was then the regular rhythm section for Super Sax- pianist Lou Levy, bassist Fred Atwood and drummer Jake Hanna. The quartet tackles eight tunes, and take numbers are listed next to each track title. Marsh's Tristano-borrowed tactic of lopping off themes to standards and improvising on the remaining chord changes finds an early target. The opener, "I Have a Good One for You," is actually built on the chassis of "It's You or Know One."

Marsh's "Background Music" sounds almost as if it's joining the band in progress, so volacious is the leader's opening. Levy's "On Purpose" acheieves resolution with a gracefully articulated solo from Atwood that wears its light amplification proudly and without excess. As if impressed by the bassist's skill, Levy and Hanna lay out, leaving Marsh to sign the piece off with a gossamer curlicue autograph. Tristano's "317 3. 32nd" accentuates the quartet's simpatico once again. Marsh's plush succession of inaugural phrases suggests a complete familiarity with the tune's harmonic content. The sense of supreme composure feeds into a sparkling solo by Levy and another punchy workout from Atwood against the rippling underscore of Hanna's brushes.

Levy's "Lunarcy"- the longest cut of the set, at nine minutes- sheds light on the superlative relationship between leader and the composer through a lubricious switch to a galloping double time in the closing minutes. Throughout the entire set Marsh always seems sure of what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. Any undermining friction arises in his various attempts to communicate these incisive decisions to his band mates and their ensuing anxiousness to assimilate them.

Words of praise are also due Chuck Nessa, who demonstrates how high the bar can be set by a label chief who is also a stalwart music lover (not as common a combination, I fear, as it once was). Three sets of liners - the originals by Larry Kart (author of a seminal essay in the Tristano/Konitz/Marsh set from Mosaic), guest musings by web bulletin board ace Jim Sangrey, and production details from Nessa himself - couple with choice session pics and a streamline design. Four alternate takes of "I Have a Good One For You" offer a windfall similar to that on Sam Rivers' Fuschia Swing Song reissue on Blue Note a few years back. Each one offers a chance to hear the quartet working through a piece and hashing out various ideas. Levy even takes a turn on electric keys, a choice he also makes on a voluptuous reading of the Mandel ballad, "A Time For Love."

The cake’s icing? Everything conveys a meticulously remastered sonic sweetness thanks to Chicago studio engineer Steve Wagner. If only all such reissue projects could carry this sort of devotion to detail and obvious reverence for the source.

Note: copies are available direct from Chuck Nessa: cnessa@earthlink.net or at your discriminating local brick & mortar.

~ Derek Taylor

Eddie Harris - Live At Newport (Atlantic)

Poor Eddie Who?. In the years since his death, the musician has all but vanished within the hall of mirrors that was the several personae he buffed to a high polish over the course of a long, habitually frustrated career. For a subsequent generation of saxophone players, Harris has perhaps been most influential as the author of several instructional texts. Paid tribute by the Beastie Boys ("So Wat'cha Want", Check Your Head), many listeners still know his as a freak crossover hit-maker for "Theme from 'Exodus'", "Listen Here", and "Compared To What?". As Ray Stevens was a zany oracle to many Red State Americans in he 1970's, so was Eddie Harris to African-American audiences of the decade. For those who also bought Parliament / Funkadelic and Millie Jackson LPs, Harris was know primarily as the mastermind of records such as That Is Why You're Overweight, I Need Some Money and the "live" album The Reason Why I'm Talking Shit, which consists of (virtually) nothing but on-stage, off-color patter by the bandleader. (The latter remains as revealing a document of the "jazz life" as, say, Babs Gonsalez's various outsider crooner albums, or Art Pepper's autobiography Straight Life.) Established critics have tended to fixate on the overtly comedic aspects of Harris work, as well as his pioneering use electronics, and dismiss him as a medicine show trader in gimmicks and shoddily-cast frivolities. The situation is not likely to be improved given the fact that Harris' mature work for the Atlantic label has been safeguarded to chop-shop labels. Important documents such as The In Sound, The Electrifying Eddie Harris, Free Speech and Excursions have drifted in and out of print in the digital era, sometimes with inferior remastering, sometimes with tracks abridged or removed altogether in order that two original albums can be crammed together on one 80 minute disc.

Live At Newport (from 1970) is one album to be treated to rough handling, yet, even in its current format, it offers one of the best introductions to Eddie Harris in all his audacity: as an experimenter whose passions are proximate to those of contemporary musicians as diverse as The Bad Plus, John Butcher, David Murray and Otomo Yoshihide. "Children's Song" opens with Harris yodeling through a delay switch -- spoofing Leon Thomas? -- and taking a solo that is nothing more than the amplified sound of his saxophone pads clicking open and shut. Sure, it is something listeners to free improvisation have heard countless times, but, I'd wager, probably never in this particular context. "Carry On Brother" is one of Harris' very best funk pieces, a showcase not only for his estimable skill at crafting deceptively simple solos but for drummer and former AEC-associate Robert Crowder as well. "Don't You Know The Future's In Space" is an almost unclassifiable opus in three movements. The first is fast, pseudo-modal jazz, full of harmonic indirection. After some fine work by Jodie Christian on electric piano and a drum solo, tempo is dis-established and the band references Bitches Brew, with Harris sounding rather Miles-ish on trumpet. Finally, the band hits -- bull's-eye! -- a funky groove, and here Harris exploits the potential of his Varitone shamelessly, making his tenor saxophone sound like a baritone attached to a fuzz box and a wah-wah pedal. Rude and colorful stuff. Harris was never one to waste notes, though, as "South Side" demonstrates,. "South Side" also offers evidence that he knew his Coltrane backwards -- mostly backwards -- and forwards. "Walk Soft" has a brief, characteristically loping theme that is so catchy the saxophonist can dispense with it immediately, and his solo emerges directly from the melody. Here is Eddie Harris as James Brown, telling the band how and where to start, but also three steps ahead of them at every turn.

Predictable comparisons that aim for street cred aside, however, the truth is that Harris had deep and awkwardly tangled roots in the Chicago jazz community of his time: the Chicago of Sun Ra, Von Freeman, the Chess Brothers, and the AACM. No dubious distinction, Harris helped invent "soul jazz" by modernizing -- read: "streamlining" -- many of the features of hard bop, perhaps most crucially, by realigning it metrical patterns in accordance with polyrhythms. An attempt to separate the riffs of pieces such as "Freedom Jazz Dance" and "Olifant Gesang" from their very individual syncopations is ultimately an exercise in frustration, but it is valuable insofar as it reveals reveals an elusive and Escher-like intelligence on the part of the composer. It is just that Harris' medium is not Euclidean geometry, but an African-American musical vernacular. So, although not true funk, Harris' music, no matter how hard it drives, often opens up into the same spaciousness. As for his tenor saxophone tone, I suppose one could side with those who have remarked that it is somewhat scrawny, but I like to think of it as being a classically, idiosyncratically broad-shouldered Chicago tenor sound, only more light and darting in its athleticism. Scottie Pippen, not Dick Butkus. Eddie Who? was also the most gifted Varitone player in jazz; and don't laugh, either, as Harris' accomplishments on the electronic saxophone are every bit the equal of Miles Davis' on his plugged-in trumpet. In fact, his contributions as an instrument builder are still awaiting proper recognition. The saxophone-style mouthpieces Harris designed for trumpet and trombone were intended to be a boon to brass players; at the conclusion of this record, you can hear Harris give an explanation of just how to the Newport audience. Yet this generosity of spirit seems slightly at odds with Eddie Harris the professional musician. As Iain Lang wrote of Fats Waller, a figure whom he resembles in a number of other respects (though not gastronomically), so it could be said of Harris: "on the stage, [he] played brilliantly, yet never too brilliantly... He accepted that there was no paying audience for the best he had to give." Eddie Harris did almost always kept something in reserve. And, as Waller's are, some of Harris' most memorable performances are very public struggles with the formulas mass produced by his own popular success. So The Little Tramp -- clever but hungry and ill-starred – pitches himself against the modern assembly line all over again, and the attrition that results from waging this losing battle leads to a rather sad, cynical detente.

By the time of this 1970 Newport performance, Eddie Harris had already paid his dues in full, but I'm not sure he ever lost that feeling of being an apprentice. By which I mean to say that I think Eddie Harris never really broke out of the circuit he imposed on himself as a working entertainer. Stand-up comedian, pop star, jazz improviser, funk godfather, Vegas act, educator, ringer... Until his death in the late 1990's, Harris moved among these roles just as he toured from city to city for three decades. Always the same cities, but, by virtue of the fact that they are visited at different times, not the same places. I wonder what the passage of time looks like from the perspective of one who just passes through. The glimpses are progressively more disheartening with each return. You arrive, you rest for a moment in comfort, you feel connected to this place. Yet, simultaneously, you understand that you have no real claim to intimacy with where you are. This place is just another distance seen in close-up, familiar, maybe, but not as familiar the sound of your conscience's voice. You know you really make no difference to this place. Although you need it, it has no use for you, only your absence; there will be someone else occupying this dressing room tomorrow. And suddenly you realize that all is callousness, and there is nothing you can do to alter, to restore, to develop what you see has happened here, and you accept it for what it is, until it has been utterly dismantled and your acceptance cannot settle anywhere anymore. And then where do you find yourself?