Bagatellen

Raphe Malik / Joe McPhee / Donald Robinson - Sympathy (Boxholder)

You'd expect more fanfare. But the enterprising Boxholder label, based out of Woodstock, Vermont, seems to specialize in modestly excellent releases such as this. The listener would typically be well-advised to approach a 75-plus minute free jazz recording that opens in media drum solo with some trepidation, but, then again, these are not typical virtuosos of the aforementioned style. From his days as a young firebrand clamoring to be heard in the Pentecostal fervor that was the classic Cecil Taylor Unit of the mid-1970s (with Jimmy Lyons, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone, and Ronald Shannon Jackson), Malik has developed into a conversational trumpeter with an attractively throaty tone. Drummer Robinson plays with true circumspection, even when he swings, which is not infrequently; his contributions to the late Glenn Spearman's music should be more widely celebrated. Joe McPhee, of course, is the traveling star of the global free jazz scene, a multi-instrumentalist (heard here on pocket trumpet and soprano sax) whose intensity and mastery of color -- refracting his own white light, as it were -- is never gaudy and never sheds any glare.

Nor is Sympathy a collective improvisation blow-out. Although all three men receive (relatively) equal billing here, this is definitely a Malik session. Not only are all the compositions credited to him, they, well, actually sound like compositions. Moreover, they sound like extensions of the distinctively restrained material Malik has been writing and performing since at least the early 1990's. It is music that shares some of the same beautiful lugubriousness that falls like autumnal sunlight through the veils and shrouds that hang across the work of fellow brass players Bill Dixon and (yes) Kenny Wheeler, but is less weighty and both more sinuous and more capable of inspiring exuberant solos. Although themes such as "Testament", "Space March" and "Motivic" are not exactly catchy, they are quite sturdy, and reinforced by Malik and McPhee's tendency to underscore each sound and give each sound enough room in which to unfurl to its full definition. This is true even of the fast runs that dominate "Resolving A Quote" or the circular-breathing phrases, hewed out with a careful eye fixed on asymmetry, that are the coda to "Call And Response". Occasionally these performances have a tendency to plod along, with Malik slipping into "routine" rather than "pulse". Yet, although both are used rather sparingly here, Robinson, especially with his cymbal and tom-tom work, and McPhee call blither spirits back to the proceedings. McPhee's solo on "Escape Route" is remarkably playful and sensitive. In fact, his solo is positively Steve Lacy-esque; it is bouncy, angular, and charming.

Those hoping that this disc will shake the pillars of their one's own private heaven, or those listeners looking for the diversity of brainiac approaches they customarily find on McPhee's own leader dates, or even those looking for a continuation of the original What We Live might conceivably be disappointed by Sympathy. Which is not to say that there isn't much here. As with a great many of Boxholder's productions, there is well-prepared, well-executed, well-recorded, but non-insistent music, presented with an attention to craftsmanship -- a quality not often respected in an art that enshrines the passions and their volatilities -- and offered to the listener with few frills… which really are not missed at all, honestly.

~ Joe Milazzo

Mundell Lowe - Guitar Moods

Riverside 208

“An album of mood music for the mind as well as the spirit”- so reads the capstone sentence of the preambluary blurb on the back of this recent Riverside reissue of a 1956 album. It’s a statement, however vague, that communicates the lilting, highly introspective nature of the accompanying music. Mundell Lowe plays close attention to structure and melody, but his variations on a dozen ballads realized by trio and single horn support (with a sole instance of overdubbing) are strangely aloof in relinquishing their charms. Tune times are almost universally terse. Blink or sneeze and you might miss one as it saunters by. The guitarist’s chops are manifold, honed across a sessionography that continues to accumulate today and contains many dates with vocalists. Here his style is one designed to quickly beguile, but the overt elegance masks a deeper beauty.

I found my experiences with this disc timely to the recent Paris Trans editorial on listening frequency. My first spin came up pretty close to empty in terms of emotional and creative piquancy. Initial impulse: write the session off as another antiquated ‘mood’ session organized to fleece the casual housewife jazz consumer from her cash. The next trip through didn’t fare much better. I still couldn’t get beyond the cloyingly strummed chords coupled to soporific snail-paced tempos and skeletal bass drums accompaniment.

The bassist here, one Trigger Alpert, possesses a moniker on par with the leader. His supple figures accentuate rather than interfere. Drummer Ed Shaughnessy is barely audible in places, seemingly shaping his Swiss-cheese beats with feather-tipped brushes and cotton swabbed sticks. If anything the presence of various classically-grounded instruments brandished by Al Klink (bass clarinet, flute) and Phil Bodner (oboe, English horn) only compounds the droopy-lidded temperament pregnant in Lowe’s ploddingly passive musings.

Somewhere around the sixth sitting with the disc my opinion underwent a tectonic shift. Lowe’s filigree constructions, so often wrapped in sheathes of shimmering tonal gauze, began to click. So did the languid clarity of his sidemen’s floating intuitive support. This music is minimalist, but still exudes a quiet, entrancing appeal. Much like Giuffre, Lowe relies on space and placement to erect patterns of subtle extemporization. But his tone is a warm glowing hearth to the clarinetist’s textured cobalt blue cool. It isn’t so much what he plays (the aforementioned drowsy chords and gilded note chains), but instead what he and his colleagues leave to the imagination. Where they falter is in the delivery. All of the immaculate playing almost undermines the details of what’s developing beneath the beauteously rounded surfaces. For a mood music session, this disc requires surprising amounts of scrutiny to fathom what’s going on. Patience pays off. I found my opinion converted and feel confident others will have attitudes of skepticism reversed too.

~ Derek Taylor

Hailing, Preamble, Syllabus, Projection, Colloquy

Some of you may remember this entry, but, in case you do not, I'll reenter the gist of it here:

On the first and third Tuesdays of each month, I meet with a local arts group. We share our own work and discuss it… Occasionally, if a participant does not have anything of their own to present, he or she may talk about an artist, a specific piece, or even a discipline that has had a significant impact of his or her own work… Tonight [06/01/04], rather than reading from one of several "things" I have in progress, I am going to talk a bit about contemporary improvised music and "eai"… I'll be making some off-the-cuff remarks, dropping some names, and referring folks to places on the web such as Paris Transatlantic and the Erstwhile site… Finally, I plan to run the Keith Rowe / Toshimaru Nakamura footage from balance beams [a somewhat non-representative example, as I realized as soon as I cued up the DVD player; the excerpt included in Leddington's film begins with the hint of a regular pulse] … I am curious to see what happens once I engage them on the subject of these sounds. I hope to be able to report the results shortly.

Well, shortly has come and gone, but I assure you I have heretofore not posted anything further on this event NOT because no one in my arts group had anything interesting to say. Most of them, in fact, were willing to share their most personal reactions -- often relying on associations to which the group would not be otherwise privy -- to improvisation and electronic sound, two subjects that lie mostly outside each participant's aesthetic training. Certainly, none of these individuals -- save one; try to guess which -- had ever been exposed to this music before.

With that in mind, then, I offer these paraphrases:

• "I've seen modern dance choreographed to this sort of music. And I've often wondered, 'why?' Can the human body even cope with that kind of very digital sound? If you pull too far away from those analog things we know from the lives lived in our own bodies, where do you find yourself?" [the "classically-trained vocalist"]
  
• "This reminds me… When I was in college, I had access to an old Moog synthesizer. Some friends of mine and I used to take our instruments, including the Moog, to an old abandoned building and just jam. We thought of what we were doing at the time as just experimenting with sound, and searching for a way not to be so unskilled. But, looking back on it now, I see that we were actually learning to speak a very specific language, and then to converse in it. A lot of the time what we were doing was self-indulgent in the sense that was only really fun for those of us involved. But, there were times when the music would suddenly come together. I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t explain it now." [the "filmmaker"]
  
• "I'm most familiar with these kinds of sounds when they are supporting an image, and then they are often very effective. Do you know Takemitsu's score for Woman In The Dunes?" [one of the "photographers"]
  
• "I hear an interest in meditation." [one of the "painters"]
  
• "I hear an interest in aggregation, in clustering. Things bigger than oneself." [another one of the "photographers'"]
  
• "Because there is no form… I feel there is nothing to hold onto. I always feel like this sort of music just leaves you standing there, with your mind wiped clean. I'm not sure I like that, or that it agrees with me. Though I do understand its relationship to Eastern holism, Eastern art." [the "classically-trained vocalist"]
  
• "I would say you cannot confine that impulse to one side of the world or one civilization to the exclusion of the other. Think of plainsong in the West. There is its role in the liturgy, but what's important here is how that requiring vocalists to work within very real restriction. The music is monodic, and there are a limited number of pitches available. And the vocal approach demanded is one in which all vibrato and extraneous noise -- sweetening -- is to be purged. The goal is a certain purity of sound. And, what is really interesting is that, vocalists who specialize in 'historically accurate' performances of this style of music, their voices go much more quickly. The discipline required is so great, and so is the strain. I think it is less about transcendence than making one's way through to… it's that Augustinian or Dante-an principle of going down before you can go up." [another "vocalist" also active in a variety of the media, visual as well as verbal]
  
• "Its music made from that annoying noise you cannot identify, cannot locate, but you want to because you want to eliminate it." [the "digital animator"]
  

Ferran Fages/Ruth Barberan/Alfred Costa Monteiro - Atolon

Ferran Fages/Ruth Barberan/Alfred Costa Monteiro
Atolon
Rossbin
RS017

There’s something afoot on the Iberian Peninsula and it sounds damn good. Over the last couple of years, almost everything I’ve heard from that vicinity (beginning, if I recall correctly, with Manuel Mota’s ‘Leopardo’) has had at least something to recommend it, often much more. ‘Atolon’ might be the strongest album from that territory I’ve yet heard. My perhaps unfortunate penchant to think of analogies to visual art when listening to music finds me drawn, in this case, toward the work of Antoni Tapies. This might be close to the way a Tapies piece sounds.

Fages (on “acoustic turntable”—don’t ask me), Barberan (trumpet) and Monteiro (accordion) construct a single improv (divided into four tracks) of immense earthiness, of to-the-bone rawness. You can feel the grit, the rough sand, the sere pavement. It goes without saying that each musician uses non-traditional techniques, but on “Atolon” they’ve chosen to reside almost entirely in the harsher regions of their instruments, those likely to yield rougher textures and more strident tones. While Barberan’s contributions can usually be isolated (breath tones, valve manipulations, scrapings along the trumpet’s body a la Greg Kelley), it often takes sharper ears than mine to distinguish between the other two, Monteiro’s squeezebox never emitting remotely accordion-like sounds. By default, I assume Fages is responsible for much of the blistering ferociousness. But all of that is beside the point. The piece follows a fairly standard arc, gathering steam over the first two sections, peaking (in terms of both volume and emotional intensity) during track three and then subsiding (with several small resurgences), but what a ride it is! While “weiur” (track one) is often rather whispery, it’s full of anxiety and restlessness, rattles, sputters and gratings scurrying rapidly through the space, summoning up an alien, insectile world. By the time you’ve reached the third section, “98y2r”, the assault is almost overwhelming: shuddering bass rubbings slamming against brass-tube roars mixed among god knows what else resulting in an unholy, frightening but, ultimately liberating cacophony. It putt-putts out of existence like three exhausted motors after a grueling climb. Searching for comparisons, I’m thinking of the more raucous sections of Kelley and Lescalleet’s “Forlorn Green”, but “Atolon” truly has a unique, brutal and hyper-imaginative attack that sets it apart from much of the other music I’ve heard this year. Highly recommended.

~ Brian Olewnick

An Ounce of Prevention...

Dan’s thought-fomenting (not to mention highly entertaining) editorial over @ PT this month touched a nerve that’s been poked repeatedly in my brain pan over the last year or so. How many times should a reviewer listen to a disc before he or she hashes out a written opinion of it? It’s a bit like that old confectionary conundrum “How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll™ pop?” So many variables to consider: tongue pressure, saliva acidity, etc.- all done in by the inescapable urge to *crunch*.

A related question: what sort of standards should the reviewer hold him/herself to in giving said disc the respect/attention it deserves? Equally subjective, and as with Dan’s query there are as many answers as there are potential reviewers. Some seem to take the enterprise seriously, others not so much so. It’s this latter camp that’s an occasional source of vexation for me. The number of bush leaguers appears especially prevalent on the online side of the fence. Cursory combing of various jazz/improv chat boards uncovers plenty of folks grousing about the state of music ‘criticism’. We’ve even gone round about it here (ie. what’s with all the sycophantic praise surrounding certain artists, does reviewing require a command of music theory in order to be credible, etc.)

Rather than seasoning my beef with a lot more obfuscating verbiage allow me to present Exihibit A, swiped from a sister website. It’s a review of the recent Paul Murphy Trio outing on Cadence Jazz. I covered the same disc here at Bags and don’t mean to suggest that my take evinces any sort of literary or analytical brilliance, but I do feel that it’s a damn sight better than this tripe:

"Over the course of thirty years or so, drummer Paul Murphy has been in and out of the avant-garde jazz scene. Notable dates include affiliations with the late saxophonist Jimmy Lyons among many others of note. This trio session, recorded in 2002, features alto saxophonist Marco Eneidi and cellist Kash Killion. And it’s a vibrant one at that!

Murphy’s polyrhythmic metrics serve as a bustling foundation for his musical cohorts. As Killion’s bowed cello work offers an interesting contrast to the band’s sprawling grooves and hyper-mode, type frameworks. Essentially, the trio dishes out swirling sheets of sound to correspond with the soloists’ cleverly enacted improvisational maneuvers. This outing is notable due to the artists’ perceptive compositional structures, as each piece stands on its own, setting it apart from the abundance of unwieldy, “free-jazz” style blowing sessions. (Highly recommended…)"

I guess what I’m wondering is does this sort of botched paint-by-the-numbers job bother anyone else? And by proxy are the label reps who send out promo product satisfied with such coverage. Is it simply enough to have the disc’s title, personnel, etc. mentioned in print without much if any regard for commenting meaningfully on the music made? If so, we all might be able to save ourselves a whole lot of time and effort [insert sarcasm here].

There really aren’t any mechanisms in place to police this kind of thing & I staunchly stand behind the belief that there shouldn’t be. But there are professional organizations such as the Jazz Journalists’ Association (of which the author of the above piece is a member) that presumably have an interest in maintatining certain levels of credibility & could easily cry foul. I’m curious how they view such ‘reviewing’? I personally haven’t sought out writing gigs with the cash-compensating glossies because I enjoy the flexibility of the ‘independents’ & feel stretched thin as it is (plus it’s entirely possible that my work wouldn’t pass muster in those forums, I dunno). Even operating outside these accepted focal points of the biz I think it’s important to maintain a set of personal standards.

Is this a superlative case of making a mountain out of a mole hill? Not sure on that either. And I do accept culpability for seeking out such reviews. Even as they irk me I still get a perverse laugh out of reading them.

Modern Drunkard

Tomasz Stanko - Suspended Night / Marilyn Crispell - Storyteller

Tomasz Stanko - Suspended Night (ECM 1868)		Marilyn Crispell - Storyteller (ECM 1847)

ECM Records

Once upon a time ECM cover art had a thing about photographs of gaily coloured sheets blowing in the wind on washing lines – my own favourites were Miroslav Vitous' First Meeting (ECM 1145) and the Art Ensemble's Full Force (ECM 1137) – but nowadays, since the label started protecting their jewel boxes in cardboard outer sleeves (who the hell would want to protect something as bloody dull and functional as a jewel box?), they favour predominantly dark, slightly blurred arty photos: the one used for Suspended Night is a still from Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinéma", and I can't imagine anything more blurred and arty than that. On this, his seventh outing on ECM, Stanko is joined once more by pianist Marcin Wasilewski, bassist Slawomir Kurkiewicz and drummer Michal Miskiewicz, and, apart from the opening elegiac "Song for Sarah", it consists of ten pieces grouped together under the name "Suspended Variations."

ECM albums, as you probably know by now, are like comfortable, dependable air-conditioned BMW cars, and leave about as much room for the imagination. One snorking blast of earthy vulgarity à la Lester Bowie would probably set off the airbags. Long gone are the days when the label could come up with surprises by the likes of the Art Ensemble or Sam Rivers – play Suspended Night back to back with Stanko's first ECM release, Balladyna, and you'll be surprised how much fresher the older album sounds (though it's probably not very fair to bassist Kurkiewicz to compare him to Dave Holland). Yep, since Balladyna was recorded back in 1975 – and that feels like a long time ago – Manfred Eicher's imprint has really got its act together, in terms of "product" (the use of record industry jargon is not inappropriate) and marketing strategy. Jack DeJohnette and Jon Christensen, working in conjunction with the label's star engineers, Jan Erik Kongshaug and Martin Wieland, defined a veritable ECM drum sound dominated by light skittery snare work and topped off with pristine long-pinging cymbals, with hardly a kick drum in sight and toms used more for colour (like timpani in the classical symphony orchestra) than rhythm. Even the Great Black Pulse of the Art Ensemble's Don Moye was washed as clean as the sheets blowing on the album cover. Similarly, Keith Jarrett and especially Kenny Kirkland paved the way for the distinctively melodic and seriously close-miked piano sound that has become a hallmark of the label (though a quick flick through Herbie's 1960s Blue Notes will make it clear where it all originally started). It goes without saying that Wasilewski has got his Hancock, Jarrett and Kirkland chops down to a tee, and Miskiewicz was probably listening to Jon Christensen in infant school. As for Stanko, well, the photograph of his upper lip on the last page of the booklet isn't exactly endearing, but his trumpet playing won't make him any enemies. All in all, it's a prime cut of ECM music, which, you will no doubt recall, has been described variously as "jazz for people who don't like jazz", or (thanks to Ben Watson for this one) "the sound of the middle classes falling asleep" – all very beautiful and accomplished but about as interesting as listening to two middle-aged businessmen sitting in a pub talking about car accessories. No disrespect to any middle-aged businessmen reading this who actually find discussions of power assisted steering and engine capacity interesting – many do.

You might also trace the ECM drum sound back to Paul Motian's work in the mythic trio with Bill Evans and Scott Lafaro (now that’s one group Manfred Eicher would surely have snaffled up had ECM been in operation in NYC in the early 1960s), so it's no surprise to see him in action again on the label, again in the company of Marilyn Crispell, on whose celebrated (overhyped, rather) Annette Peacock covers album Nothing Ever Was, Anyway he also appeared. The bassist on that date was Gary Peacock (suppose you could make a case for an ECM bass sound too: take equal measures of Peacock and Eberhard Weber, add a dash of Arild Andersen and… oh never mind), but here it's – wait a minute, is that really the same bassist (Mark Helias) who tore shit up with my pals Edward Perraud and Jean-Luc Guionnet on Joe Rosenberg's Do What We Must Do (CIMP)? Dearie me, he does sound tired. In these days of political correctness, you can't describe people as deaf, dumb and blind anymore – fuck knows what they'd do if they had to do a PC remake of Tommy – so I suppose dull and boring are out too. Let's just say that Storyteller is harmonically and rhythmically challenged.

Well, never mind, it certainly looks like it was a pleasant, even cosy, session. Don't you just love album booklets that include shots of the musicians in the studio itself, that kind of wish-you-were-here-well-now-you-can-be voyeurism and they do look really nice people don't they Betty and would you like some more tea and some cake too it is tasty isn't it remind me to give you recipe of sorry pardon? oh yes the music oh it's one of those ECM records George bought when he was in New York last week for the middle managers' symposium yes it is nice isn't it and the nice thing is you can carry on a conversation at the same time I can tell you some of the stuff George used to listen to was so loud and nasty I wouldn't even let him play it when I was in the house one lump or two well we all change don't we dear I know I used to listen to oh what were they called you know they used to use their thing on Top Of The Pops Led Zeppelin that's right it's true yeah can you believe it can you imagine me dancing to stuff like that today well George had all these strange free jazz records when he was younger but when we moved to Dulwich I made him throw them all out they were those vinyl things they were just sitting in the garage going mouldy it wasn't nice music like this zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Whit Dickey -Coalescence

Clean Feed 21

The Portuguese Clean Feed label continues to provide a mouthpiece for New York’s Lower East Side scene, an area of improvised music most often associated with American labels like AUM Fidelity and No More. Some would argue that this community already has more than enough conduits. That it ails under a case of overexposure. For me the issue is largely moot and while the music here aligns with the customary of those involved, it still takes some entertaining turns. It’s notable as evidence of Joe Morris’ continuing evolution as a contrabassist and Whit Dickey’s presence as a drummer of sizeable power and precision.

As liner author Steve Loewy duly notes, Dickey’s deserving talents have long eluded laurels in most jazz circles. It’s a predictable situation but in this case the reasons behind snubs aren’t entirely clear. A likely culprit is the drummer’s proclivity for downplaying his own merits. Jazz, like most forms of commercial music, is a forum that demands self-promotion and Dickey’s style of rigorous self-critique runs contrary to the practice. His deprecatory personality ticks suggest why his sessions as a leader have been until recently so few and far between.

The program and mood of this new disc feels much like a Black Saint/Soul Note album from the 80s, with its economical LP-length attached to a handful of lengthy blowing vehicles. Themes are largely perfunctory. The lure lies in the improvised solos spooled out by each member of Dickey’s cherry-picked quartet. No surprises arise in the identities of the anointed. Roy Campbell handles trumpet, Rob Brown unpacks both alto and flute and the aforementioned Morris shoulders bass in place of guitar. The two horns generate some solid playing, but each man’s best work lies elsewhere.

On “Mojo Rising” Morris’ fingers churn out an effervescing bass ostinato that has much in common with the hypnotic patterns accessible through African kora. The line undergirds the entire piece from initial anthemic theme through ensuing solos. Campbell takes first crack, voicing a stream of brittle legato arcs that ride the boiling rhythm set in motion by bass and Dickey’s frothing beats. Brown’s solo opens light and nimble, but by its close he’s spewing gnarled squeals. A free collage of breath sounds follows, played out across a rhythmic current of throbbing strings and clattering sticks. No allusions to the Lizard King here.

Two versions of the title track traffic in shuffling freebop. The first advances on a fulsome walking line from Morris. Brown crafts a keening solo on alto as Dickey carves and cavorts underneath him. Campbell’s statement comes on ferrous and sassy, taking shape out of a string of bent, compacted notes. A corpulent, impressively parceled solo from Morris feeds directly into a fulminating turn from Dickey, one that fuses propulsive vigor with incisive attention to touch and texture, culminating in a drenching cymbal cascade. “Coalescence 2” favors a freer approach, but yields similar results. Finally “Steam” supplies a vehicle for Brown’s bansuri-sounding flute and Campbell’s muted brass. It’s a piece long on atmospherics, but somewhat lacking in the cohesion that characterizes the earlier cuts. The odds as to whether this will be Dickey’s breakout disc are certainly debatable. My money says not, but it’s still a highly enjoyable album in line with what has solidified over the last decade or so into what could be called a Lower East Side tradition.

~ Derek Taylor

Support Regular Folks' Music

KNON -- 89.3 on your FM dial -- needs your help, and they have a tradition of holding record sales, sponsoring fund-raiser music performances, and, yes, conducting on-air pledge drives in order to keep the bill collectors at bay.

But wait -- I'm not asking for chumps to line up. I'm talking here about community radio, staffed by volunteers, kept pumping out its 55K watts through donations from listeners and "local small businesses" (not Guggenheim, Eurex, and / or MacArthur -- much less Ford or Bell Helicopter or even the neighborhood military-industrial complex academic institution). KNON plays real honest-to-goodness community sounds: blues, gospel, R & B, country, reggae, Tejano and salsa, highly charged and frank talk regarding local politics (Dallas city politics are engrossingly draconian, believe you me). Sure, they stream their live feeds on the web, but KNON is really all about broadcasting straight to the blue-collar man / woman hunched over or well-reclined back from (elbow hanging out the driver's side window) the wheel of his / her car. To be "working class" in a city as spread out as Dallas is to be a semi-permanent resident of one's motor vehicle, whether you are commuting over 25 pot-holed miles to and from the office everyday, or taking their pick-em-up truck out into the field where the fence needs unsnarling, or taking your lunch hour to go down and idle in queue at the credit union drive-thru, or tooling around from South Dallas to West Dallas because your job with Health and Human Services or Big Brothers / Big Sisters requires you to interview prospective clients where the run-down sidewalks end.

My last exhortation, then: God bless KNON for not giving up on the medium. God bless KNON for being the station on which I first heard Sonic Youth, Ray Price, Roy Brown, The Swan Silvertones, Fifty Foot Hose, Don Cherry, Buster Smith, The Buzzcocks, and Esteban Jordan. God bless KNON for airing shows like "Radio Free Burro", Rev. Ivan Stang's (Church of the Subgenius [TM] "Hour of Slack", and the Friday night Hip-Hop flava throw-down that my younger brother rolled tape on back in the summer of 1989 -- the summer of Paul's Boutique. There may be a station much like KNON in your hometown, but, these days, local is the new global, and its all about ensuring the resilience the network of ideas undergirding these scattered operations. Maybe you didn't have a chance to say to "the check's in the mail" to representatives from KAOS (Olympia, WA), KGNU (Boulder, CO), WBAI (NYC), or WWOZ (New Orleans, LA). Well, I'm giving you an opportunity to say it NOW to the good folks at KNON. Please don't disappoint.

(Besides, they have an unusually fine array of premiums to entice you into immodest charitability: CDs, ball-caps, and some beefy T's with cool vintage-y graphics provided by Eddie Winterhawk.)

Blue Collar - _______ Is an Apparition

Blue Collar
_______ Is an Apparition
Rossbin
RS016

There are probably two ways you can approach this disc, the first recording from a New York-based trio consisting of trumpeter Nate Wooley, trombonist Steve Swell and percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani. One is to listen to it as an extension of the discoveries of certain elements of 60s post-Coltrane jazz, notably the AACM and, within that, of its (often) more purely sound-involved members such as Roscoe Mitchell or George Lewis. The other is hearing it in the context of contemporary free improvisation on the acoustic side of the eai contingent (nmperign, for instance). The former is decidedly more rewarding than the latter, despite the fact that Nakatani has performed extensively with nmperign and other members of the Boston improvising community.

The problem seems to lie in the all-too-frequently encountered notion that one just has to utilize the vocabulary—the rest will fall into place; it’s not necessary to be saying something. On several of the pieces, Wooley and Swell engage in a veritable catalog of extended brass techniques, here a breathy whoosh, there a plangent plop, but with little regard for context. The sounds have no apparent reason for existing other than as a knowing signpost: Here there be avant-garde improvisers. It sounds far too much like a group of musicians trying for a certain effect rather than happening upon it as part of their natural tendencies. Swell in particular, whom I’ve greatly enjoyed in more straight ahead environs (especially a couple of Philip Johnston’s post-Micros ensembles), sounds out of place, blustering when he might be better served listening, bringing a Ruddian approach into an area where it’s far too obtrusive. Oddly enough, it’s Nakatani, the musician who, going in, one might have expected to be the most well versed in the quieter end of free improv, that kicks things into gear on a few of the better pieces (Although untitled on the disc itself, Rossbin’s website yields bracketed, numerical titles. Here, I‘m thinking of [63] and [49]). Thus prodded, the trio begins to cook in a general fashion not far removed from what you might get with a Bauer/Kondo/Oxley confab or, at its best a Lewis/Bowie/McCall combination or suchlike (Wooley even sneaks in a brief Bowie-ism at one point). An album full of tracks in this spirit would have proven far more rewarding.

As is, “________ Is an Apparition” (clever enough title) can be recommended to listeners who are keen on the style of music generally showcased at the Vision Festival and looking for one of several possible steps further outside. Fans of music to the left of nmperign, however, will likely be disappointed.

~ Brian Olewnick

Reinhold Friedl/Bernhard Gunter/Michael Vorfeld - Message Urgent

Reinhold Friedl/Bernhard Gunter/Michael Vorfeld
Message Urgent
Trente Oiseaux
TOC042

“Message Urgent” is a selection of four untitled pieces whose driving impetus appears to be the investigation of long, bowed tones. Reinhold Friedl, the leader of the avant chamber ensemble, Zeitkratzer, is credited with “inside piano” (I have no idea how much his approach differs from that of Andrea Neumann or others) and, for the most part, seems to be rubbing or stroking the strings with various devices. Likewise, percussionist Michael Vorfeld (who has been known to physically enter his bass drum to play it) spends much of his time bowing cymbals and, one assumes, other parts of his kit. Bernhard Gunter picks up from where he left off on his recent fine disc with Mark Wastell and Graham Halliwell (+Minus) and sticks to his new creation, the cellotar, which bowings he integrates with the similar sonorities created by his companions.

On three out of the four improvisations here, drones are the rule. While I have a strong predilection toward just such investigations, I’m not sure that much new ground is covered from one piece to the next. The general area is similar: high, keening lines (probably emanating from the cymbals more often than not) juxtaposed against, between and around mid-range and low hums from the inside-piano and cellotar. The variations are there, though slight enough. Vorfeld will occasionally inject a series of taps, Gunter will switch from long sawings to circular rubbings with the bow (a technique I’m sure there’s a name for of which I’m unaware), but the underlying premise remains unchanged. This is attractive enough, as is the album as a while, but I would have liked to have heard either greater variety or the reverse, a single piece wherein the drones are more deeply and lengthily investigated. Actually, toward the end of the final piece, the trio steps it up a level and a high degree of strength and elasticity emerges, the drones obtaining a wrenching quality that’s marvelously chewy. Only on the third track do they break stride, releasing a lovely little torrent of percussive and pizzicato sounds, drops of rain between bouts of howling wind.

On the whole, “Message Urgent” is a worthwhile disc and its high points are quite enjoyable. I’m hoping the three musicians continue to perform and record as a unit as I get the feeling they’ve only scratched their potential.

~ Brian Olewnick

Various – A Warrior on the Battlefield: A Cappella Trailblazers: 1920’s-1940’s (Rounder)

Dredging deeply into doo-wop has never been high on my listening priority list. I dig the snatches of the genre that I’ve come in contact with, but frankly a capella combos don’t usually gas my engines. This trepidation is a chief reason why this Rounder comp turned out to be a bit of a revelation. The detailed (if toast-dry) liners to a solid job of tracing the web of relationships between minstrelsy, vaudeville, barbershop (a tradition often attributed to white pioneers which in point of fact actually arose out of black sources) and jubilee styles and how all have tenacious roots in the Church. What’s most impressive to me is how well this evolutionary pattern plays across the 25 tracks chosen by the compilers. Rousing vocal harmonies abound in the gospel hymns brought to life by ensembles like the Norfolk Jubilee and Pullman Porters Quartettes. The latter group revels in a secular call and response rondo on “Jog A-long Boys” braiding a rich bass croon with a pair of soaring altos. The Bethel Quartet returns listeners to a place behind the pews with a pious rendition of “Jesus, the Light of the World.” Both songs follow fairly regimental patterns of soloist backed by unison support and only hint at the innovations in the wings. As involving as the early cuts are it’s the later ones by the Golden Gate and Silver Leaf Quartets that truly set the bar. With complex harmonies and polyphony of pitched lines these groups attain magnitudes of mellifluous synergy far greater their foursquare configurations would suggest. Rescued from heirloomed 78s, many of the sides carry the signs of age endemic to their shellac origins, but a strong emotional euphony still seeps through. Give this comp a spin & I’m quite sure it will stimulate your senses for more.

Filament - Filament BOX

Filament
Filament BOX
F.M.N. Sound Factory
FMC-030~034

Someone must have said this already, but just in case: Filament is like listening to a light bulb. Maybe it’s even like looking at a light bulb. Up close. Needless to say, this is a good thing, light bulbs being the amazing objects they are. I’ve done my share of drawings and paintings of these gorgeous globes, including the delicate arabesques traced by their filaments. There’s the additional bonus of the intense afterimages available while gazing at them in their active state, perhaps a faint echo of the diverse effects one achieves when moving one’s head in an onrush of sine waves. Of course, most of the volume of a light bulb is “empty” space that’s not empty at all.

“Filament Box” contains five discs, very attractively packaged with designs that echo aspects of the music, each consisting of a single performance ranging in date from November of 2000 to January of 2004. They’re relatively short, the total time clocking in at a little over three hours, but for at least the first four recordings, the length is just about perfect (Disc Five is something of a unique animal). Additionally, each disc shines a light on a different facet of Otomo’s and Sachiko’s partnership. Their work is actually quite as varied as you could ask for, even if the casual listener would consider much here to be a lot of the same. “Kyoto 09012004” may be the most serene, Sachiko maintaining a steady, soft pitch for its first half before subsiding to a low, calm hum, Otomo gently working abstract vinyl, forming small, lacy swirls and eddies like wisps of windblown sand on burnished metal. Ten minutes later, Otomo introduces a wooly swatch of static, wrapped around a deep, dangerous drone. It’s almost like a three-note composition: 20 minutes, 10 minutes, 10 minutes. That’s all and that’s plenty.

The second disc, “Helsinki 11102001” is the shortest, most rambunctious and, arguably, my favorite of this litter. It begins with a low, abrupt thump that immediately forks into high and deep hums, nestling there, biding its time until a wavering throb spirals up from the depth about five minutes in, smoothing the bass tone in its wake and leaving a deceptive calm. From here on, the fluid drone is periodically assaulted, punctured and strafed, like a cool pond riven by kingfishers, but it coalesces implacably, always re-attaining equilibrium until the very end where the chaotic forces lay final claim to the territory. A wonderful performance. “Barcelona 01122002” is all feathered softness, airy, distant-sounding trills and powdery vinyl scratches, interrupted here and there by gusts and rattles as though a slight breeze has picked up…outside. Disc number four, recorded in Brussels in 2000 is harsher, full of grainy buzzes and whines, like several miniature chainsaws slicing through glass. Only slightly less active (violent?) than the second disc, it’s perhaps more unsettling, the combination of pitches verging on the queasiness-inducing. But, of course, that’s part of the thrill, being affected by the music not only intellectually (and, on all the performances, there’s plenty of meat on that bone) but viscerally as well. When it settles into a crunchy, 33-rpm scratch-bed zapped through with needles of pure sine tone, the effect is delicious. On this track, the duo possibly achieves their most organic sound, a writhing, reptilian aspect that’s as exciting as it is threatening. I seesaw back and forth between this and Disc two as to my favorite. Oddly enough, the two oldest pieces.

The final disc was recorded in Tokyo in January of 2004. I’m given to understand that Otomo and Sachiko were stationed in separate rooms, out of both eye- and earshot, with the idea of improvising for an hour. I’m not certain if a similar conception to Rowe’s currently-in-progress notion with MIMEO was in effect (playing as though together, attempting to anticipate what the other was likely to be doing) or not. In any event, the result has a very different feel. If it’s not quite as successful as the prior discs, it’s still enjoyable enough on another level, one less overtly musical and more as “just” an aspect of the environment. It’s the sparsest and, unsurprisingly, most random sounding performance of the collection, each musician apparently opting for reticence more often than not, occasioning numerous patches of silence. Some won’t care for the lack of cohesion and, if released on its own, maybe that would be my take as well. But as a fifth of a larger set, I rather like the implicit declaration: this, too, is part of our persona.

If you’ve enjoyed previous editions of Filament, this set is a no-brainer. Rich, wonderful and varied, it’s also a fine place to dip in for the first time.

~ Brian Olewnick

Illinois in Name, Texas in Soul

Father of R&B sax & early cartographer of the freak register are just a few of his encomium-worthy achievements. His departure is sad, but his stature secure. Safe flight home, Mr. Jacquet: 10/31/22 – 7/22/04.

Before There Was Grant...

There was Freddie Green, the great brakeman on the steam locomotive that was the classic Basie rhythm section. Perhaps the most important and renowned jazz musician never to take a solo -- some discographer will correct me, I'm sure, which is cool by me, as I'd love to know if even a single recording exists of Green taking a single-line solo, and I'm too lazy and / or overwhelmed to invest in the research myself -- Green has nonetheless inspired what has to be one of the most comprehensive and flat-out deep websites dedicated to any musician, jazz or pop or avant-flake, living, dead or crippled by chronic inebriation.

Freddie Green - Master Of The Rhythm Guitar

Site features include the customary photo gallery, the obligatory list of recordings, and visitor guestbook, but numbered in the highlights are a wealth of transcriptions, a nice piece on the exquisite, buxom Epiphones and Gretschs over which Mr. Green ran his fingers for so many years, and tons upon tons of full-text articles, excerpts from monographs, anecdotes, and the like.

A really, really, really valuable resource. Besides, the home page features one of the finer examples of front-porch-swing aesthetic theorizin' I know:

Rhythm guitar is like vanilla extract in cake. You can't taste it when it's there, but you know when it's left out.

Black As Tar, Sweet As Sorghum

So, in light that it’s been nine months since the last confectionary post I figure the time is ripe to bring everyone up to speed on what my sweet tooth’s been sinking into of late. Licorice is normally a wintertime repast for my taste buds, but for some reason it’s been finding its way into my gullet, even with temps cracking the 90s and humidity hovering around the same. Not the measly over-sweetened Twizzlers™ or Red Vines© that are foisted on the American candy consumer mind you, but the mouth-puckering European stuff that turns your tongue black in a matter of seconds.

My favorite brand of the moment is Katjes and more specifically their Grün Tee Lakritz and Salzige Heringe varieties. The former combines a tart nectary flavor with a pleasantly robust chewiness. The latter is much more potent, rolled in a salty crystalline powder that dissolves away to reveal a deep molasses tang. I tore through four 7 oz. bags sitting sequestered on a jury bench this past week. It’s not easy sneaking bite-sized nuggets shaped like tea leaves and fishes into one’s mouth under the scrutiny a hawk-eyed circuit court judge, let me tell you.

As yummy as these are though there’s a brand/variety that’s even better by my estimation. Unfortunately its name escapes me & I haven’t been able to locate a supply after sampling only a single package from a local sweet shop. They’re shaped like tiny coins and carry engraved denominations ranging from “1” to “25”. They’re hard in texture, but lose their rigidity under repeated mastication from a good set of jowls. Oh yeah, I think they're Swedish. Any help in hunting down a name to go with admittedly slight description would be much appreciated. Also tasty on a hot summer’s eve, Ginger Chews crafted by the Ginger People & imported by Royal Pacific Foods out of Monterey, CA.

Anthony Braxton - 23 STANDARDS (QUARTET) 2003

Anthony Braxton
23 STANDARDS (Quartet) 2003

Leo CD LR 402-405 4CD

Even those with just a passing acquaintance with Anthony Braxton's voluminous discography can't have failed to notice his recurring need to square up to The Tradition by covering – probably not a word he would approve of – material from the whole accelerated history of jazz from Fats Waller to Dave Brubeck, Antonio Carlos Jobim to Sam Rivers. This quartet alone, which features Braxton on (alto, soprano and sopranino?) saxophones with guitarist Kevin O'Neil, bassist Andy Eulau, and Kevin Norton on drums, has already recorded three albums of "standards": Ten Compositions (Quartet) 2000, Nine Compositions (Hill) 2000 (both for CIMP and largely devoted to the music of Andrew Hill) and the more wide-ranging 8 Standards (Wesleyan) 2001 on Barking Hoop. 23 Standards (Quartet) 2003 features material recorded on tour in Europe that year, from concerts in Antwerp on February 19th, Brussels (three days later), Amsterdam's BIMhuis (November 15th), Verona (November 17th), Rome (18th), Lisbon (19th) and Guimaraes (in Northern Portugal, 20th). Quite a punishing touring schedule by anyone's standards – that the music recorded should be, for the most part, of such high quality is quite an achievement. The 23 standards include, in addition to much loved chestnuts as "After You've Gone", "Crazy Rhythm" and "I Can't Get Started", three Coltrane compositions ("26-1", "Countdown" and "Giant Steps", two Monks ("Off Minor" and what is billed rather sloppily as "Round Midnite"), two Dave Brubecks ('It's A Raggy Waltz" and "Three To Get Ready"), a handful of 1960s Blue Note classics (Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", Sam Rivers' "Beatrice", Wayne Shorter's "Ju-Ju" and Joe Henderson's "Recorda Me", and continuing the bossa nova theme, Jobim's "Desafinado" and Luiz (misspelled here) Bonfa's "Manha de Carnival" (here billed as "Black Orpheus").

In his extensive and well-researched liner notes, Stuart Broomer writes: "The difference between a Braxton performance of a canonical work and the performance by any of the current neo-traditionalists is that the work (its meaning, its messages) is again indeterminate, again liable to new mutations. It is in the imagination of this larger collectivity that the tradition comes alive, and with it the possibilities of risk and meaning." Hmm… while this undoubtedly applies to the more off-the-wall Braxton covers outings such as the Charlie Parker Project (1993, hatART, featuring the benign anarchy of Misha Mengelberg and Han Bennink), or the Knitting Factory (Piano / Quartet) 1994 discs on Leo, it's hard to see what Broomer is referring to here, other than Braxton's own soloing, since Eulau, Norton and O'Neil certainly play things straight throughout – one could easily imagine grafting a straight hard-bop solo by Benny Golson or Warne Marsh over their three-man rhythm section and it would sound just fine (not only are the musicians' contributions respectfully traditional, but the tracks follow the time-honoured head – solos – head structure, and several even trade fours with the drummer from time to time – hardly iconoclastic stuff..). Broomer's not wide of the mark though when he describes O'Neil as "the most remarkable musician to emerge on guitar (that most marketable of instruments) in a decade, and (at 35) as gifted as any musician of his generation," but after over four and a half hours of his playing, even O'Neil's moves, impressive though they are, do become a little predictable. Bassist Eulau sticks resolutely to the changes throughout – no flights of fancy à la Dave Holland, Joe Fonda or Matt Sperry here – and Norton gives no indication whatsoever of the wildly inventive free playing that characterizes his other outings with or without Braxton. The furthest "out" he gets is a bit of tinkling on an adjacent glockenspiel.

Braxton's soloing itself is certainly unpredictable, and at times inspired – as you might expect, there are numerous highlights, but his readings of Coltrane are particularly impressive – but I'm not sure it lives up to Broomer's hype. The nagging question that remains after listening to all this is why the saxophonist insisted on releasing a 4CD box. OK, so it's a limited edition of 1000, and there are surely at least that many hardcore Braxton fans out there to shift Leo Feigin's units (at least I fervently hope so: this is after all the 23rd Braxton release on Leo, including eleven double albums), but someone along the line should have raised some serious questions about actual musical quality. Brubeck's "It's A Raggy Waltz" should have been binned outright: quite apart from Braxton's squeaky sopranino having difficulty getting round the theme itself, O'Neil gets lost in the middle eight and Norton's heavy-handed hemiolas sound positively amateurish – in all honesty, if you were majoring in jazz and turned this in, you wouldn't graduate. I imagine the only reason the track wasn't rejected was that it contains O'Neil's wildest and most Sharrock-like guitar playing. Another question mark hangs over the brutal fade that ends "26-1" on Disc One, right in the middle (it seems) of Norton's drum solo. Who pulled down the faders, and why? And why keep the rest of the track then, since there are plenty of equally impressive Braxton and O'Neil solos elsewhere in the set? It might seem mean-spirited to draw attention to such odd glitches and bloopers, especially when there are so many extraordinary moments on offer (my own favourite tracks are the readings of "I Can't Get Started" and Sam Rivers' exquisite "Beatrice"), but I can't help thinking that in choosing to release 23 tracks instead of settling for half as many, Anthony Braxton has missed out on the chance of releasing one of this year's most spectacular double CDs.

~ Dan Warburton

Peter Brötzmann – 14 Love Poems (Plus 10 More)

FMP 125

Derek Bailey’s Ballads album from a few years back threw many listeners for a loop. There were those who thought it some sort of perverse joke that the doyen of nonidiomatic improv would stoop to embrace a program of jazz standards. But it wasn’t a prank and Bailey appeared- at least on the surface- sincere in his interpretations of the Great American Songbook. In similar fashion the notion of Peter Brötzmann applying his well-muscled horns to “love poems” seems a prospect antipodal to the storied obstinacy and aggression so commonly attached to his style of improvisation. Such a narrow supposition leaves out whole segments of the German reed-splinterer’s art. A wounded lyricism frequently steeps his music. Even his most exorbitant exhortations contain slivers of pathos, as if he were operating a blowtorch fueled by passion-scented butane.

This recent FMP reissue of music recorded in the summer of 84’ points to the longstanding precedence of pathos in Brötzmann’s playing. Taking as his inspiration the love poems of Kenneth Patchen- a source of comfort by way of a tattered paperback he used to pack with him on the road- he cycles through seven horns and a litany of ruminatively-rendered ideas. Some are mere snippets, the shortest only twenty-four seconds in duration. Others unfurl more fully, but none run longer than six minutes. With ten more pieces added the album’s original fourteen running time balloons to just shy of eighty minutes. Given the gravitas of much of the music it becomes a program best digested in parceled morsels. The structural elements of the pieces are often quite simple and unpolished. Brötzmann places the majority of his energies on texture and tonal variation. He employs his various reeds as one might pigments squeezed in oily globs onto a wooden painter's palette. His burlap-lunged breath and mustachioed embouchure become the brushes with bristles both coarse and feathery.

Lest listeners fear Brötzmann’s complete conversion to the Robert Bly School of the sensitive male, there’s still plenty of stubborn atonality and serrated-edge bellicosity shot through many of the pieces. The opening baritone sax rendering of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman” the only cover of the set, is a fortuitous shot across the stereo channels. Starting with a morose suspirating line, he only hints at the familiar theme at first, voicing it slowly and softly. Suddenly his tone fractures and explodes into a barrage of overblowing, exploiting the horn’s lugubrious girth in a spate of blurting fisticuffs. But restraint largely wins out over truculence and there are some deeply-affecting moments peppered across this set. The original album’s closing cut, a keening exercise for verdantly droning tenor, most notably.

In a peculiar way, this sort of solitary self-reflexive style of expression is especially important to an improvisor like Brötzmann. Quite often in the context of a band and especially in concert he’s called upon to adopt his customary role of cathartic purveyor of ragged multiphonics. Space and subtlety of shading crumble in the face of momentum and volume. The quiet isolation of a studio allows freedom to indulge in those facets of his musical psyche that don’t jibe soundly to the preconceived mold.

~ Derek Taylor

loveecstasycrime

Mandarin - fast>future>present

In the not-so-distant past, Denton, Texas was a tiny, sprawling cultural center, comfortably cooling in the shadow of Austin's bigger, better music scene, but with arguably more talent. Now Denton is a cultural hub in the state's north, and not without its own capital from the ever-evolving dynamic of the University music school and its core of students who both individually and collectively want to do something new, and for themselves. The town has a Wal Mart now, too. Its local Indie scene has always been hit or miss as a result of college student overeagerness, and the bands share a mortality rate with the bars, but when the town hits, it hits hard.

Mandarin is the latest product of the Denton scene, a guitar band with catchy, unassuming riffs and spoonfuls of edge sprinkled into swirling compositions distinguishable enough to give this young ensemble their "sound" but independent of one another nonetheless. They're Kaleidoscope-era Banshees with punch and Death Cab for Cutie without frailty.

Jayson Wortham's whiff-laden vocals appeal to side of the brain that yearns in passivity for the apocalypse, just to see to what degree your world will change. "Shadow Your Shadow", an infectious number where spare crunch chords climb the fretboards, addresses paranoia and the tendency to succumb to unqualified adivce. The music is not ashamed of influence, as with "Smother the Spark." A double take reveals this is not Sonic Youth, further clarified by the tune's atmospheric piano interlude and quick return to the upbeat. Clever hooks abound and complicated signatures meet the wonderfully sublime ("When Heat Sleeps," "Eye on Time"). Vanilla song titles and Wortham's songwriting are workable on their own but his delivery render the lyrics erudite, punctuated by the guitar/drum combo of Matt Leer and Dave Douglas.

Mandarin's debut shows the 54°40 or Fight! label continuing its steady performance as one of the most dependable outfits housing today's indie music. That the label is able to to grab outstanding acts from Oregon, St. Louis and Denton from their headquarters in Podunk, Michigan is either indication of PR savvy or simply a set of good ears. I'm inclined to think the latter.

Mandarin - fast>future>present

Mandarin - fast>future>present
54°40 or Fight!

In the not-so-distant past, Denton, Texas was a tiny, sprawling cultural center, comfortably cooling in the shadow of Austin's bigger, better music scene, but with arguably more talent. Now Denton is a cultural hub in the state's north, and not without its own capital from the ever-evolving dynamic of the University music school and its core of students who both individually and collectively want to do something new, and for themselves. The town has a Wal Mart now, too. Its local Indie scene has always been hit or miss as a result of college student overeagerness, and the bands share a mortality rate with the bars, but when the town hits, it hits hard.

Mandarin is the latest product of the Denton scene, a guitar band with catchy, unassuming riffs and spoonfuls of edge sprinkled into swirling compositions distinguishable enough to give this young ensemble their "sound" but independent of one another nonetheless. They're Kaleidoscope-era Banshees with punch and Death Cab for Cutie without frailty.

Jayson Wortham's whiff-laden vocals appeal to side of the brain that yearns in passivity for the apocalypse, just to see to what degree your world will change. "Shadow Your Shadow", an infectious number where spare crunch chords climb the fretboards, addresses paranoia and the tendency to succumb to unqualified adivce. The music is not ashamed of influence, as with "Smother the Spark." A double take reveals this is not Sonic Youth, further clarified by the tune's atmospheric piano interlude and quick return to the upbeat. Clever hooks abound and complicated signatures meet the wonderfully sublime ("When Heat Sleeps," "Eye on Time"). Vanilla song titles and Wortham's songwriting are workable on their own but his delivery render the lyrics erudite, punctuated by the guitar/drum combo of Matt Leer and Dave Douglas.

Mandarin's debut shows the 54°40 or Fight! label continuing its steady performance as one of the most dependable outfits housing today's indie music. That the label is able to to grab outstanding acts from Oregon, St. Louis and Denton from their headquarters in Podunk, Michigan is either indication of PR savvy or simply a set of good ears. I'm inclined to think the latter.

~Alan Jones

The Velveteen Solipsist

Savaged by audiences and critics at Cannes 2003, Vincent Gallo's second film has now secured an American release for late August (it opens in NYC on my birthday, as a matter of fact). As a public service, I will now mention (ahem) that you may check the openings schedule at Gallo's own web site.

Though I admire Gallo's taking inspiration from auteurs such as John Cassavetes and Robert Bresson, I found his first film, Buffalo '66 most remarkable not for the director's incredible egotism -- the love story in which he stars plays much like Godard's Contempt if that film were made to run backwards -- but its brilliant soundtrack. Juxtaposing prog rock classics such as King Crimson's "Moonchild" (Christian Ricci tap-dances to it in the film), the Stan Getz / Eddie Sauter collaboration "I Remember When" (from the truly sui generis Focus LP), Gallo's "real-life" father sweetly crooning, karaoke-style, over Nelson Riddle's arrangement of "Fools Rush In" (lip-synched to brilliantly by Ben Gazzara), and incidental music composed by Gallo himself, the Buffalo '66 soundtrack is an almost visionary document. Or at the least one of the greatest mix tapes ever made. I mean, before I saw this film, I know I would never have associated Yes' "Heart Of The Sunrise" with images of a most put-upon loser striding with murderous intent through the coruscating tawdriness of an upstate strip joint at 3 AM.

Really, Gallo, despite the fact that he has not graduated from either music video or TV ad crank-out to directing feature film, seems to understand better than many filmmakers of his generation how to use music to define the many dimensions of his characters, who otherwise appear to be governed by rather hum-drum manias: craving for parental validation, football, revenge, a desperate need to take a leak. I keep meaning to sample Gallo's own records, When (2001) and Recordings Of Music For Film (2002), but I am just not hep enough to do much more than remain intrigued by their existence yet ignorant of their contents.

The soundtrack to The Brown Bunny promises to be another eclectic, incisive affair, featuring original music by John Frusciante as well as vintage recordings (licensed at great pains, no doubt) by Ted Curson, Jackson C. Frank, and Gordon Lightfoot. Moreover, the cover art to the CD -- see http://www.brownbunny.net/ -- identifies as well as any IMDB thread where the locus of the controversy surrounding the film is to be found.

From Guido To Bodhisattva

I dig Buddy DeFranco OK, and I certainly respect him, strange as it may sound, as a clinician; DeFranco commands a virtuoso clarinet technique that has allowed him to demonstrate the formal principles of bebop to countless music students, and he has even himself toyed and flirted with bop as discourse throughout his long and distinguished recording career (most often when he was working with Sonny Clark). But I also feel that a comprehensive review of DeFranco's discography would show that he is really a swing player of rare refinement. His playing is sprightly and adroit, its buoyancy never dragged down by either the angst or the high Romanticism that the most probing bop players soaked in as if it were the water that is everywhere yet not fit to drink. For me, the clarinet player who has most thoroughly expressed himself as a bopper on the instrument is Tony Scott.

In fact, I don't think I've ever heard the "jazz clarinet" played with as much passion, raw lyricism and sheer volume -- and, amazingly, without distortion -- as the former Anthony Sciacca could muster in his peak years in the mid to late 1950's. He was obviously intoxicated with Bird, but his tone is classically "hot" in the manner of Pee Wee Russell or Irving Fazola, another Italo-American who sounded at times as if his horn were flying apart and was only kept in one piece by the pinprick force applied by his fingertips on the keys.

I won’t bother you too much with interpretation of the man's work, or reflection on the meaning of Scott's existential quest, which is itself a great, Bellow-esque novel. (I find it very telling that his three "homes" have been, in succession, New York City, Japan, and Italy itself.) Instead, better to visit his website and read it all for yourself. You may not ever think about "world music" -- really, an early attempt at a truly non-idiomatic form of improvisation -- perhaps the most reviled musical genre in existence, quite the same way again.

Another Great Moment In The Annals of Consumerism

Apple Press Release : "100 Million Songs Have Been Legally Downloaded From The iTunes Music Store"

Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas downloaded “Somersault (Dangermouse remix)” by Zero 7, the 100 millionth song purchased from the iTunes music store. He will receive a 17-inch PowerBook, a 40GB iPod and a gift certificate for 10,000 iTunes songs to create the ultimate music library for his new iPod. In addition we awarded 50 special 20GB iPods — one to the purchaser of each 100,000th song downloaded between 95 million and 100 million songs.

Other downloads that happened to fall on a lucky number include the "love theme" from the Best Picture Winner at this Years Academy Awards® The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, the title track to the latest Kraftwerk album, Ray Charles "Dawn Ray", and a lone country tune from Clay Walker.

But compare this carefully vetted litany to the the lists of "top downloads" (Monday, July 12, 2004) from these three major licit MP3 sites.

mp3.com	napster.com	iTunes
"Confessions", Usher	"Yeah!", Usher	"Yeah!", Usher
"The Reason", Hoobastank	"The Reason" [Album Version], Hoobastank	"Welcome Back", Mase
"In The Zone", Britney Spears	"Slow Motion" [Album Version (Explicit)], Juvenile	"Turn Me On", Kevin Lyttle
"Under My Skin", Avril Lavingne	"Pieces Of Me", Ashlee Simpson	"Let’s Get It Started..." [Spike Mix], Black Eyed Peas
"Nevermind", Nirvana	"Leave (Get Out)" [Album Version], Jojo	"The Reason", Hoobastank

100 million sure seems like an impressive number (iTunes has been in operation for only a little over a year). But 100 million of what? And how will Apple build on this success? Bear in mind, too, that the trading volume on the NASDAQ for yesterday was 1,491,043,275. And counting. Always counting. The looming presence of so many decimal places just leaves me feeling that, after all, music is as inconsequential as any other commodity shrink-wrapped in speculation. Pork bellies. Orange juice futures, silver, West Texas crude, soybeans, and the chance that the The Von Bondies are really gonna break out this quarter.

Righteous anger is the only tonic. Steve Jobs is off his rutabaga if he thinks I'm going to be sold on any correlation between Clear Channel-subsidized reactionaries like Hoobastank and the promise of the "insanely great".

Where's that blissfully anti-establishment frobnicater Woz when you need him?

The Night Chicago Died

June 12, 2004 is the 25th Anniversary of "Disco Demolition Night," held at Chicago's Comiskey Park. MSNBC has a fascinating, if somewhat horrifying article about the event.

I don't get it. Maybe because I was born in 1971, but really...what was so bad about the Bee Gees and Donna Summer, that REO Speedwagon and Electric Light Orchestra and Fleetwood Mac weren't seen as 1000 times worse?

Givelets, Trautoniums & Optigans

This link ought to provide hours of learning and entertainment. 120 years of electronic musical instruments, from the Musical Telegraph to the various products of the Alesis Corporation. Wish there were sound samples...

Allan Chase - Dark Clouds With Silver Linings (Accurate)

This week I'd like to revisit an old -- or it is a younger? -- enthusiasm for this recording.

Having been exposed to the Herbie Nichols Project discs, Andrew Hill's Dusk and intimate sessions led by Dewey Redman, Cecil McBee and Lee Konitz, it has gotten to the point that, if I see trumpeter Ron Horton's or drummer Matt Wilson's listed in the credits, I'll give the CD in question at least a cursory listen. Both musicians are present here, along with Tony Scherr on bass and the leader himself -- a veteran of both Your Neighborhood Saxophone Quartet and Rashied Ali's Prima Materia -- on soprano and alto saxophones. Yes, another pianoless quartet, but with a twist, one that flirts deliciously with the arch: as the liner notes say right up-front, these musicians are "playing music associated with pianists".

So we have the Sun Ra title track, with its characteristically unusual proportions (those melodic lines seem to be of random lengths) and elliptical harmonies, two rarely played pieces from the twilight of Bud Powell's career as a composer (the Monkish calypso "Comin' Up" and the children's song sketch "Borderick", each of which presents the improviser with unique challenges, one of Horace Silver's knottiest bop themes ("Yeah!"), and some cherry-picked standards, including an exuberant version of "Poinciana", the into to which would make Albert and Donald Ayler proud. Wilson, a truly swinging drummer who also knows how to exploit the vast array of colors available to him, is a terrific asset here. Horton is engaging as usual; some may find him "derivative" of the increasingly dour Tom Harrell and Dave Douglas, but, where both those men sometimes ignore the most musical option in their solos in favor of the idiosyncratic effect, Horton is a brass player whose ideas are equal to the beauty and strength of his tone -- an Art Farmer for the post-modern age. Chase himself excels more on alto than soprano. Like so many technically proficient sax doublers, Chase adjusts himself to the smaller horn, rather than reshaping the instrument into a medium for self-expression. On alto, however, Chase commands a sound that is both rubbery and crystalline, or not too juicy yet not desiccated (otherwise know as the Pete Brown / Earl Bostic "chicken fat" factor). On his feature, ("East Of The Sun"), he blows lithe, skipping, cart-wheeling phrases in a half-smiling, nonchalant manner that recalls both the "Dolphy-esque" Makanda Ken McIntyre and the "cool" Hal McKusick.

The arrangements here may lack the garret-dwelling, scribbled intricacy of George Russell's classic mid-1950's Jazz Workshop masterpieces, but all the members of the quartet evince the poise and versatility that Russell's favorite soloists of that era -- Farmer, McKusick, Barry Galbraith, Bill Evans, Don Ellis -- possessed. This is not to say that, as expression, Dark Clouds With Silver Linings lacks that lofty quality of ambitiousness. Chase and company may be well-schooled ("Berklee" and "The University of North Texas" appear on most everyone's c.v. here), but they aren't shut away in any ivory tower, either.

Liebig/Vatcher/Golia

Steuart Liebig/Michael Vatcher/Vinny Golia
In the Cusp of Fire and Water
Red Toucan 9324

Over the years, I’ve tried to keep up with some of the Los Angeles-based improvisers who don’t get enough recognition as they would if their zip code were more high profile. Bass guitarist Liebig and omni-reedist Golia are both adventurous composers but, in the last several years, they’ve snuck out some killer free trio sessions (usually with Billy Mintz at the kit). I’ve enjoyed all that I’ve heard by them, but when I got this one in the mail I thought I knew more or less what to expect from it. Not so! California-raised, Amsterdam-residing percussionist Vatcher – who knows a thing or ten about open loose trio sessions – was home for a visit and Liebig wisely hooked up some studio time. Partly because of the excitement generated by any new musical formation, and partly because of the rhythmic goosing Vatcher gives these old partners, this hour-plus of creative music is pretty distinct.

They range from the heat of the opening “Flurries” to the long meditation of “Prelude,” with Golia’s marvelous flute expression set in a bed of bowed percussion and huge reverberant thrums from Liebig’s bass guitar (both he and Vatcher, by the way, use electronics and toys like popguns to create a sense of mischief and danger on occasion). Liebig has the uncanny ability to switch between lead lines and deep-down rumbling on his instrument; that he does it without inviting charges of wankery, and instead comes across as just deeply musical, is much to his credit. But really it’s no surprise, given the thoughtful free music these three resourceful musicians have made so often. The wonderful surprise of the session – or, perhaps better, the delight – is Vatcher’s playing, which is so liquid and so firm at the same time, slipping between idiomatic references playfully while still hewing close to the sense of alien complexity that characterizes the best free improv sessions. This trio can crank out fire music, they can float gracefully through restrained textural studies, and they can even funk it up pretty convincingly. Listening to Golia blow is always worth the price of a ticket, but it’s this trio’s ability to shift between different musical voices with integrity that really distinguishes this session.
The disc probably would have been just as strong without the 20-minute closer “Undertow,” but it’s still a highly enjoyable disc.

Jeff Gburek - Energariums

Jeff Gburek
Energariums
Nurnichtnur

What is it with the Nurnichtnur label and experimental solo guitar releases in metal boxes? It’s as if the raw electricity contained therein were some kind of biohazard needing to be contained in an industrial strength package. Gburek is a tabletop man, a croucher, a peerer through nests of wires, switches, and processing devices. It must be daunting to cross over into the world of the table; one must hesitate at the almost inevitable Keith Rowe comparisons. (Only the brief “Detail” sounds overtly Rowe-like, with its symphony of clangs.) At any rate, this is a guy who certainly doesn’t fetishize the guitar as guitar; after all, he’s officially credited with “electro-acoustic guitar, selected materials, machines, field recordings & voices,” and among those materials are apparently kitchen implements and large pieces of metal. Gburek is also in love with high frequencies throughout his music, which he apparently produces by rewiring his amp circuits so they feed back on themselves independently of the guitar. He also gets some good sounds by placing small motors on the wooden body of his guitar. With nine selections here, several of which are improvised, and a recording time just a few seconds shy of an hour, Gburek is diving headfirst into the music, associations and expectations be damned.

He’s got a good ear for contrast, frequently combining guttural punctuations with theremin-like whines to good effect. He certainly is fond of scraping vigorously on many of these pieces, almost as if he’s trying to unsettle and shake off those lush drones and hums in which he ensconces himself. On a lot of these tracks he’s far busier than a lot of tabletop folks, and instead of relentless focus on a single idea he tends to layer things (so his music has a real thickness, a real heft to it). At times, this leads him into some territories that I didn’t find all that successful. For example, I don’t actually think the agonized vocals on “Oum Kas’r, Mother of All Ports” are very good (there are lots of Eye-like vomit noises and so forth). And I found the improvisations (tracks 6-8) to be somewhat less focused, playing around with some Bailey-like crankiness. But the rest of the music is strong.

The vocabulary will not be radically new, but Gburek’s voice is nonetheless a compelling one. With his ear for the spaced-out and the ethereal, his playing will delight fans of contemporary electroacoustic music; but with his radical preparations and additions to the instrument, you could almost see him as a kind of lab technician, a Harry Partch of the guitar who will eventually reach the limits of what he can do with a guitar and simply build an instrument entirely from scratch. Each one is like a particular angle of vision onto a strange landscape, albeit one with a few familiar properties (or lines which evoke the known). Sounds like radios, bells, drills, and moans may emit, brief effervescences whose traces linger in your memory even as the sounds are reshaping themselves.

Searching for Van Shipley

I’m a betting man by nature. So I feel safe in asserting that each of us harbors one or two musical enigmas. Figures who stuck in our craws at some point, but have so far subverted easy elucidation or ingress. For me it’s Van Shipley. I first encountered Shipley at my pal Ted’s cramped pad in Brooklyn three or so years ago. Ted’s long been casual collector of 78s. Not on the level of those socially nebbish, highly cutthroat connoisseurs satirized in Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, but still possessing an eye cocked perpetually toward the obscure and ephemeral. I’m still not certain where he procured the Shipley 78 he played for me- probably at some stoop sale or from the bottom of a flea market milkcrate- but I still recall my reaction when the stylus sunk into the grit-pocked grooves of the platter.

Here was an electric guitarist, sounding much like a proto-Jimmy Bryant, picking out fast reverb-laden single notes & mixing them with shimmering slide flourishes a la Speedy West, but playing in a style that was clearly derivative of Indian Classical music. And the session band backing him wasn’t some standard issue keyboards, bass, drums studio combo, but a Carnatic Sangeet ensemble equipped with violin, vina, manjira, tamboura and percussion. The fusion of Western lead instrument and Eastern accompaniment was both jarring and extremely intriguing, especially given its vintage. Subsequent internet searches yielded little explanatory info. Canvassing of various chat boards & even our own Mr. Milazzo (a man well-versed in Indian music’s many byways) came up mostly empty too. All I could find were cursory references to the man and his recorded output (a few session serial numbers and the like) & thusly threw in the towel. Shipley remained pretty much a tantalizing mystery relegated to one of the back burners of my brain.

Fast forward to yesterday. Trawling the net during some downtime I typed in Shipley’s surname on a lark. Up pops Hamara, a site specializing in hard-to-find Indian music and no less than 36 tracks from his catalog, all with audio samples. Needless to say, the disc is in the mail. Here’s a background blurb on the man from Brad’s Page of Steel an indispensible oasis for info on lapsteel guitar.

Van Shipley was the first electric guitarist in India. The name Van Shipley is Methodist, he is from Lucknow UP. He designed his own electric eight string steel guitar in the 1940's. The reason he did this was that he'd studied Indian classical music under Ustad Alaudin Khan, the leading classical musician in India, who was also a contemporary of Ravi Shankar. He also studied the violin with a German teacher. This Western style influence is what compelled Van Shipley to design his own electric violin as well. He currently owns a Gibson E5, given to him as a gift over 50yrs ago. That's why he wanted to play Indian classical music on guitar. He wanted to hear a particular the drone, so he made an eight string guitar, instead of a five string. His guitar was a solid guitar, designed to his style at the time, it was futuristic. He listened to all types of music and played Indian classic on Western instruments. Van Shipley resides in Bombay with his wife and family.

So my Shipley riddle is solved and I’m a happy chap. Still curious to learn more about him as well as stories from others about comparable discoveries- those artists who’ve fallen down the hourglass of time and been buried by its sands, only to be dusted off by the judicious search. Call this an impromptu clearing house for such information.

Oren Ambarchi - Grapes from the estate

Oren Ambarchi
Grapes from the estate
Touch
TO: 61

Two salient points stand out in Oren Ambarchi’s fine new album. Conceptually, the four pieces utilize a surprisingly song-like structure, albeit one that’s drastically extended and iterated in languid fashion. Formally, many of the guitar sounds share an unusual element. This latter becomes apparent from the very opening of the first track, “Corkscrew”. It’s made up of a series of humming tones, very organ-y in nature, but every tone is introduced with a kind of plosive click, as if each is being turned on independently and the sound of the switch itself is retained. This lends the piece an odd, almost a-temporal quality, as though individual hums are spontaneously generating in the sound space, blooming and overlapping each other in three-dimensional fashion. I’m reminded of a work that I can’t quite put my finger on (perhaps Bags readers can help me out), wherein a series of tones is triggered by the composer (I’m thinking maybe Ashley or ‘Blue’ Gene Tyranny) saying, “Start now” in an irregular rhythm. This hard/soft aspect is both prickly and satisfying, keeping the listener teetering in giddy unbalance. The midrange tones are soon accompanied by shuddering low ones in a fairly regular cadence. It’s around this point that you become aware of the larger regularity of the piece, of its slowly lilting sense of song and it begins to read almost like a lullaby. It expires with a small, gorgeously soft explosion.

“Corkscrew” turns out to have been something of a prelude for the remaining works which amplify and elaborate on issues it raises. Throughout the disc, the pop-hum element is omnipresent as is the repetitive structure. Ambarchi has often tended toward the relatively tonal in the past but here, he lets that side of his persona pour out unabashedly. Because of this (and because of the label), there will doubtless be comparisons raised with Fennesz (with whom he’s recently worked in the Four Gentlemen of the Guitar quartet) but, while there’s some commonality, Ambarchi appears to have largely different concerns, including little abstractly fractured pop nostalgia. “The Girl With the Silver Eyes” introduces brushed drums and zither-like guitar (faint echoes of Laraaji!), slathered onto the drones like icing on a cake, beguiling the listener with sheer lusciousness. In terms of quasi-pop structural allusions, things ratchet to their peak on “Remedios the Beauty”. The tempo is picked up to a gentle trot, there’s something of a melody in play, and the brushed drums become more insistent. Small morsels are appended: a faint raised pitch here, a small spray of static there, but you have to listen hard to notice them as you tend to be lulled by the sonic bliss. When the “ensemble” drops out leaving only a spare scaffolding of low tones, it’s almost (well, not almost, but at least slightly reminiscent of) a bass break in a funk tune. One of the lovelier moments in the disc occurs as elements reappear after this interlude, bells, surges of muted guitar and, eventually, brooding strums of same, accompanied by a shuffling cymbals ‘n’ brushes beat. A descending, four-note piano motif, long-held notes taking about 15 seconds per cycle, becomes the central figure for the remainder of the piece, forming a delicious, obsessive and stubbornly opposing force to the rhythm.

The final track, “Stars Aligned, Webs Spun”, pulls back a bit from the relative delirium, playing off a clear, two-note figure (as always, with the popping intro) against low, sputtering tones, a calm, if bleak coda. “Grapes from the estate” is very much of a piece, four variations on a lovely conceptual theme. Not an accession, but a gentle nod toward Ambarchi’s melodic sensibility, the music has certainly been strengthened and reinforced by the more overtly severe work of past years, imparting to these pieces a spine which may otherwise have been lacking. It will be interesting indeed, in a prospective pendulum swing between these poles (and perhaps others), to hear how the discoveries made herein tinge his subsequent music.

~ Brian Olewnick

Come On In

If you noticed the new review of Spring Heel Jack's latest Blue Series release The Sweetness Of The Water, I hope you also noticed that it is not yet-another turgid blurt from the pen of yours truly. Not at all.

Rather, it is the work of the newest writer here at Bagatellen, Marc Medwin. Marc is currently completing a Ph.D. in musicology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, his dissertation focusing on Olivier Messiaen. While he did play keyboards in a few jazz-rock, improvisational and hip-hop bands in college, most of Marc's efforts have centered around composition and academics. His musical influences include Throbbing Gristle, Captain Beefheart, Pierre Henry, Fred Frith and Popol Vuh, among many others.

Please join me in extending Marc the warmest of welcomes.

Spring Heel Jack - The Sweetness Of The Water

Thirsty Ear Blue Series 57146.2

Spring Heel Jack is certainly no stranger to change and diversity. Anyone who knows John Coxon and Ashley Wales' 1990's work probably also witnessed the astonishing shift in sound and compositional technique which accompanied their move to Thirsty Ear some four years ago.

This is not to say that the sonic modifications were completely unheralded. Eclecticism was an SHJ trait from the start, and it only increased as their discography grew. Their first album, There Are Strings, certainly demonstrated a strong Orbital allegiance; the typically Orbitalesque triadic harmonic gestures, sweeping synth patches and melodic earworms were there in abundance, but the avant-garde kept creeping into the lush harmonies and catchy tunes. Ashley Wales' classical approach to composition undoubtedly fueled an adventurous streak, and by 1997's Busy, Curious Thirsty, dissonantly stacked pianos, hard-edged beats and fuzzy synth-bass were constants. As a backdrop for these sonic experiments, jazz-inflected saxophone and trumpet solos, somewhat reminiscent of those on Digable Planets' Blowout Comb, began to infiltrate the duo's soundscapes, sounding refreshingly live as they floated over the frenetically repeated rhythms.

The duo had begun down the path of no return. Their sound pallet increased, the solos got longer, and the beats often vanished for lengthy stretches of time--the albums Treader and Disappeared exploring these expanded sonic and compositional landscapes. The drum-‘n-bass and dub roots of their early output finally gave way to free but focused jazz-rock leanings on Masses, Amassed and Live, all recorded for Thirsty Ear. The group began to make extensive use of live collaborators—veterans Evan Parker, Matthew Shipp and "Spaceman" Jason Pierce among them—and their contributions were then re-configured in the studio by Coxon and Wales. Certainly, the customary electronic manipulations and juxtapositions were still there, but the first three Thirsty Ear discs alternately soothed and pummeled with walls of solid sound and equally colorful silence; the rhythms were often internal, resulting from the impossibly dense overlay of acoustic instruments, whereas much of the duo's earlier material afforded some breathing room—not a lot, but some—between propulsive beats and breaks.

With The Sweetness of the Water, SHJ's sound has changed again, even if the core membership remains the same. Coxon and Wales, again with Evan Parker on saxophone, are now supplemented by Wadada Leo Smith's trumpet, Mark Sanders on drums and John Edwards on bass. To hear the many Smith and Parker exchanges throughout the album is heart-stopping, so transcendent is their communication; each solo or dialogue is accompanied with absolute sensitivity by the other musicians. The track labeled "Quintet" is quintessential in that it lays these processes bare, and each sound—brush strokes, Coxon's guitar-driven samples, each mesmerizing phrase by Smith and Parker—would seem out of place anywhere else. This disc is clearly a group effort, a beautiful venture into collective improvisation of the free jazz variety.

This is the album's greatest strength and its inherent weakness. The other three recent SHJ discs were special—the Thirsty Ear Blue Series is special—because they attempted to defy simple categorization. The pieces on Sweetness come in two varieties, one with chords and one without. "Lata" and "Autumn" exemplify the former, while "Track 4" (really track 1, don't ask me) and "Quintet" resemble nothing so much as Wadada's recently re-released Kabell ruminations. As fresh as Smith's early 1970's work still is, it has become archetypal, and I believed that boundary blurring was SHJ's modus operandi.

Only "Autumn" boasts the brash sonic explorations, the probing and swirling harmonies and pregnant silences which set the duo apart from so many. Smith's lyrical musings hang over vast harmonic abysses, all fades to black, new polytonal vistas are open only to be traversed, and the process begins again. Is that an electronically manipulated Smith trumpet I hear after the opening chords? "Autumn" stands as a testament to what the album might have been, a newly freed SHJ with disembodied but wise and liberated voices guiding and reacting in an electronically induced miasma. It brings together the sweep and space of their earliest work with the innovations gained from nine years of growth. Predictability, not lack of care or musicianship, causes the rest of the album to be less than satisfying. I hope that Sweetness is a precursor to even finer efforts.

~ Marc Medwin

Paul Murphy Trio - Shadow•Intersections•West

Cadence Jazz 1160

Creative music listeners are in the midst of a Paul Murphy Renaissance. This recent disc constitutes the third recent release by the barrel-chested, Popeye-forearmed drummer in a trilogy for the Cadence Jazz label. The previous two entries included Red Snapper, a collection complied from rehearsal tapes featuring Jimmy Lyons and Karen Borca, and Ennare, a trio date matching him with cellist Kash Killion and pianist Joel Futterman. As good as those discs are it’s this new one that has an edge in terms of urgency and substance. Killion is still on board, sounding feisty and animated on his amplified strings, but it’s the biting, combative alto of Marco Eneidi that truly gives the date its viscera and punch.

In a recent sit-down for Cadence magazine Eneidi supplied a frustration-fueled summary of his last few years trying to survive as an improvising musician. Merciless potshots at John Tchicai and the demoralizing apathy of most music listeners were among his tactical invectives. It wasn’t a flattering oratory and I have to admit to coming away with a bitter taste after reading it. Translated musically though, these feelings of anger and anomie have a much more palatable cast. Eneidi channels his angst into a body of music ripe with wounded emotion and bottle-necked pride.

Murphy’s oceanic rhythms work almost as a tincture to the blistering lines of Eneidi’s horn and the punishing thrumming of Killion’s callused fingers. They end up the tempered glue that counterbalances the more recalcitrant leanings of his colleagues. On the opener “Outlines” the three only rarely relinquish momentum. A near continuous fount of skidding figures pours from Eneidi’s alto and he recalls the velocity of Lyons as Murphy matches his speed with rolling mallets. “Spectral Traces” is a study in spatial acuity and minute accents. Here Murphy fashions a dialogue with his sticks, bouncing between stereo channels and leaving plenty of space for the stringent sparsely placed interjections of his partners. Later Eneidi sketches rasp-infused legato lines atop the steadily building rhythm of frothing cymbals and percussive arco cello.

His initial solitary cry on “Ghibli” carries the vinegary tone of Jackie McLean, but with the elder reedman’s optimism largely removed. The entrance of Killion’s carbonated pizzicato and Murphy’s cymbal splashes once again acts like soothing water tossed on white hot embers, causing a catalytic reaction that unleashes hissing aural steam. Eneidi ties the piece off with an unaccompanied coda, calling down the spirits with another affecting entreaty that turns from caustic to surprisingly delicate in its final seconds. A gravity-defying gossamer wisp dispersed by inevitable silence.

“Winds Run” finds Murphy churning up more rhythmic spindrift on snare and cymbals and Eneidi once again almost blowing a gasket with the amount of lungpower funneled through his mouthpiece. All the while Killion hunt and pecks a canny pizzicato ribbon amidst the din. On “Ixion” the cellist saws his strings down to frayed braids as he and Eneidi riding another tidal crest set in motion by Murphy’s fluid stickplay. Tracks like “Jacinthe” and “Rouge” contrast the burners beautifully, diffusing comparable energy into structures that rely more prominently on space and gradation.

At just shy of seventy-minutes it’s a hefty slab of music, but the rewards for devoting one’s ears are manifold. Murphy’s constantly recalibrating rhythms make the minutes glide by and in close league with his partners he hatches a program that generates a high degree of replay value. As hopeful as I am that Eneidi’s circumstances have improved, his indignation supplies an undeniably potent source of improvisatory brilliance.

~ Derek Taylor

Overheard At The Vetiver / Joanna Newsom / Devendra Banhart Show

The Gypsy Tea Room, 2548 Elm Street, Dallas, TX. 9:07 PM: Friday, July 2, 2004 -- 1:26 AM: Saturday, July 3, 2004.

You're beautiful! [shouted]
(young man to Joanna Newsom, just after she concluded the first song of her 40 minute set, "Bridges And Balloons")

That always happens.
(stage whisper in response to the sound of a plastic cup being kicked into the crowd before the stage and crunched underfoot, only to rebound into its original shape with a loud, hollow popping, during a particularly quiet moment in Vetiver's set… "Without A Song", I believe)

[A private but hearty chuckle.]
(the box camera operator and his sidelong glances, mitigated not at all by his small, very round eyeglasses, from his position at the rear of the stage)

So, this guy has much of a following?
(genuinely perplexed and possibly impressed individual behind me, in reference to a suddenly torso-bearing Devendra Banhart, as the crowd continued to multiply and "Excuse me"'s softly exploded around me in the progress of intent listeners towards the foot of the stage)

That'll be 2 bucks, pardner.
(bartender to me, in exchange for 12 ounces of bottled water [Ozarka])

By the end of the show Mr. Banhart had risen from his seat and only occasionally revisited his guitar. He stretched and swiveled shirtless, reminiscent of a bearded guru full of Eastern wisdom. His voice shook the room.
(review of the concert from The Dallas Morning News, Sunday, July 4, 2004, page 7B ["Overnight"]: Folk acts mesh at concert, by Margaret Myrick, Special Contributor [no email address provided])

[The crackle and whistling of campfire sticks splitting into threads of ash.]
(something I thought I heard)

I think she must be from Iceland.
(either a hypothesis based on Ms. Newsom's personal appearance or an approximately clever reference to the Bjork-like qualities of her singing; the latter is more unlikely, however, unless the speaker's ignorance was feigned, as the comment was made before Ms. Newsom began her performance)

[Sigh.]
(the damp brown towel laid by cellist Alissa Anderson on her thigh to protect it from chafing in the gentle, polished concavity of her chosen instrument)

I don’t know any other philosophy majors.
(one young man to another, just before Ms. Newsom took the stage to tune up. Both young men had tousled curls and underage "X"'s magic-markered across the backs of their right hands, the knuckles causing the diagonal lines to veer and fracture. I could swear I had seen both of them the night before, stooping with a large crowd of smokers outside Café Brazil, a 24-hour coffee shop located near the Southern Methodist University campus)

I'd like to dedicate this next song to the moon. Have you all seen the moon tonight? You should take a look at the moon. It's incredible.
(Andy Cabic of Vetiver, introducing the song "Luna Sea with a slight drawl and half-lidded eyes)

I'd like to dedicate this performance to the state of Texas.
(Mr. Banhart, on-mike)

[A slang dictionary, its black binding licked and gnawed down to sticky gray netting by silverfish, open to the entry for "soup" and that term's idiomatic derivatives.]
(the image I developed of what sits before Mr. Banhart as he compses his lyrics)

[Vladmir Nabakov, 1. William Blake, 0.]
(tally of literary references made by Ms. Newsom in a recent interview printed in the magazine The Believer [June 2004])

[Hush.]
(the rustle of gingham and thin cotton onstage as Ms. Newsom, Ms. Anderson of Vetiver, vocalist Stacy, as in "my friend Stacy" [onstage announcement by Ms. Newsom] gathered at a microphone positioned stage left for the evening's final jamboree.)

[I shall not want. Let no man put asunder. His leaf also shall not wither.]
(the words behind Mr. Banhart's teeth)

Where were you all those other times?
(the old posters and handbills -- advertising personal appearances by Mance Lipscomb, Townes Van Zandt, Alejandro Escovedo -- framed behind glass and mounted on the venue's interior, wood-paneled walls, to all assembled; my answer, much delayed, is that I was not alive yet, or that I did not know I was alive then)

Is she Russian?
(speculation upon Ms. Newsom's national identity, said very near my elbow, at that time crooked [drink not in hand])

Oh, SHIT!
(uttered with deliberate volume, and in admiration, or disbelief, or in mockery of fandom awe as a form of dismissal, as Mr. Banhart hit the first high notes on the refrain to the opening song in his 40-minute set, "This Is The Way")

What kind of drinking establishment in Texas doesn’t serve Lone Star?
(me, to myself, shaking my head and returning to the sway with a Shiner Bock)

ZzzzzzzzzzzFFFFFFFffffffffffzzzzzzzzzzzFFFFFFFffffffffffzzzzzzzzzzzFFFFFFFffffffffff [etc.]
(the narrow-wale and alternating black and white stripes on Mr. Banhart's jersey)

[Minnie Marx. Captain Beefheart. R.E.M.'s first album. Nick Drake. Caddo Lake.]
(comparisons I kept at bay that evening, but which I have no compunction in indulging right now)

Do I have time for one more or two?
(the disarming Ms. Newsom, head tilted with sincere inquisitiveness, and holding non-thimbled fingers aloft)

"Swallow Song"!
(a request not honored, and not without some regret, by Mr. Banhart)

[Pinyon smoke. Chalk. Dry, unmixed pigments. Limes. 40 watt bulbs (incandescent). Red dirt. Rock salt. Crepe myrtle aspirations (spherical gems of water and sap). Tambourines. Trampolines. Cumulus clouds. The absence of rain. The loll and warp of laundry in the wind. Catalpa beans in their stringy pods. Quilts. Screened windows. Turpentine. Victrola horns. Crawdads and creek stones in an old red coffee can. Boats made from three-hole notebook paper.]
(the air in the room)

Like Jeff Buckley molested by Jim Morrison.
(my younger brother conflating his impressions of Mr. Banhart's vocal range and Mr. Banhart's hirsute physiognomy)

-- You know what you are? You're my Richard Burton.
[Laughter, non-distracting, followed by an embrace]
-- You know what that makes you?
-- What?
-- My Cleopatra.
-- Oh great… I've still never seen that one.
(the parties to this exchange request to retain their anonymity. But I can tell you that he wore a paisley sports-shirt and she had on button-fly jeans)

She looks like a mermaid!
(female observation on Ms. Newsom's fashion accessories)

Rich Perry - East of the Sun and West of Second Avenue

Steeplechase 31558

Not so long ago the question of influences was a common supposition in jazz. Record sleeve scribes weren’t the least bit shy about asking their subjects who had shaped their sounds and how. Ira Gitler was (in)famous for it, grilling Paul Chambers on his affinity for Oscar Pettiford or pressing Philly “Joe” Jones on his debt to Kenny “Klook” Clarke. These days influence doesn’t carry the same cachet. Players seem more reticent about admitting the presence of elders’ fingerprints in their own personal art. Perhaps it has something to do with the music’s long history of precedence, or maybe with the near constant drive to carve out a niche.

Regular Steeplechase liner librettist Mark Gardner doesn’t cross-examine him on the subject, but something tells me saxophonist Rich Perry wouldn’t have much compunction about coming clean in the face of such questioning. His sound and style are steeped in the past, but with a method of phrasing highly cognizant of postbop vicissitudes. The closest proximity my ears can come up with are of tail end Prestige Trane tempered with the relaxed pneumatic diction of late period Pres. There’s also something of Warne Marsh’s punctilious way of voicing a melodic line. Perry’s periscope lenses these roots lucidly and without the least bit of timidity.

Perry’s a representative of what I’m coming to call the Steeplechase school of quiet fecundity. Nine albums as a leader over the last decade with a steady one-a-year schedule except for a brief hiatus between 98’ and 99’. Add another eighteen or so sessions as a sideman to this number and the proof that Perry’s been an in-demand man for much of his career becomes plainly visible. Posts prior to his mutually-beneficial sojourn at the label included tenures brief and lengthy with the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis big band, Jack McDuff, Tom Harrell and Machito. The diversity of these past employers pegs him again as a man comfortable in many stylistic suits.

His tenth outing for the Danish label looks pretty unassuming on the surface. Old compadres Harold Danko and Jeff Hirshfield handle keys and trap kit respectively with the youthful John Hebert, most recently of Andrew Hill’s ensemble, assuming the bass chair. There’s also the usual Steeplechase focus on a cherry picked cache of classic standards rendered in crystalline studio sound. These are all but petty particulars to a set of music that from the start welcomes with a laidback focus on arch melody and interplay.

Perry limits all of the nine pieces in the six to seven minute range, just enough space and uniformity for pithy solo and ensemble statements without turning longwinded. His lush voicing on his old mentor Thad Jones’ “Yours and Mine” fits like a satin headrest cushioning the cranium in a cottony stream of notes. The group works a similar magic with “The Touch of Your Lips.” Harold Arlen’s “My Shining Hour” advances at an accelerated tempo, Perry engaging Hirshfield in a mercurial string of exchanges before the Danko assumes the lead in a flurry of elegant chords.

Danko plays a bit too pretty some of the time, his prodigious blemish-free technique overshadowing his more spontaneous impulses, but Perry seems spot on for practically the entire program. Hebert and Hirshfield hang back, filling in the cracks but leaving the spotlight largely to the ivories and sax. The occasional solo from each, as during the bassist’s supple demulcent improvisation on Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes” are unexpected pleasures. At the very least this disc has planted the abiding desire to revisit his past output squarely between my ears. With several dozen Perry discs in the racks there’s certainly plenty to choose from.

~ Derek Taylor

Nicedisc - DVD

Nicedisc
DVD
RebuildAllYourRuins
01

Sometime in the 60 and 70's, in NYC, a split in practices between avant-garde filmmakers and video artists became pretty apparent. It wasn't total, there were plenty of figures that occupied a mid-ground, but it was pretty easy to see that there wasn't all too much crossover between the visionary romanticism of Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, amongst the circles that surrounded the Anthology Film Archives, and the conceptual schematizing of Bruce Nauman and Joan Jonas. The latter investigated the conceptual space of the video image, the former the sensual and emotional immediacy of the film frame. Of course, there was plenty of the inverse, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton and the structuralists made conceptually dense films, while Nam June Paik and Bill Viola made beautiful and sensuous works for video, but despite many of these figures, avant-garde filmmakers tended be more materially minded than their friends in video, hanging onto the works of the older New York art culture, the Abstract Expressionists, and the Surrealists. Video art went the other way, denying that sensuality, and went deeper and deeper into it's conceptual belly button. Many of those videos are admittedly really, really boring, only the most ardent masochists/scholars have the time to sit through the excruciating dullness of Vito Acconci's videos ("The Red Tapes" in particular, man, do yourself a favor and steer clear of those.).

In the impasse, there has been some work done to reconcile the two sides. Those artists that lie between the two camps have had a strong influence on these contemporary practictioners, amongst whom are the duo of Jeff Pash and Nick Phillips, comprising Nicedisc. Two figures are especially worth noting, Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits. Conrad is probably the more well known of the two for the crowd that frequents this site, his long form-drone works are noteworthy examples of the form. His drones are rough, vaguely caustic and overtone rich, played loudly they make the walls buzz with sheets of beat frequencies. In the 70's he made a somewhat notorious film called "The Flicker", which is prefaced by a warning to people with epilepsy, advising them to vacate the theater, because the next 30 minutes are just that, a continuous "flicker" of alternating black and white frames. This description is perhaps a bit misleading, for although the elements are the most basic the film has to offer (white frames and black frames), Conrad strings the frames in a variety of patterns, creating a variety of rhythms, against which play modulating analogue electronics on the audio track. What is most remarkable about the entire film is that you see color, which results from the afterimages of the light hitting your eyes. The film becomes this strange thing, in which half of the drama is happening in your eye, a little like listening to sine-waves and tilting your head.

This sort of thing was what avant-garde filmmakers tended to consume themselves with: this sort of intense formalist excersize, in which the medium is stretched to it's breaking point, and closely inspected at it's very edges. Nicedisc do a funny thing on their self titled DVD: they set the flicker to video, and bump it up against another technique; the fade. In fact, this comprises the majority of the DVD, one piece is called "Fade" the next "Fade + Flicker" and the other "Flicker." The titles describe the techniques at work in each piece, "Fade" consists of colors fading in and out, crossfaded with other colors, "Flicker" consists of varying patterns of flickering frames, and "Fade + Flicker" consists of a combination of the two.

The closest point of reference, other than Conrad is Paul Sharits. Quoting a "general statement" of his, in his contribution to the Structural Film Anthology (British Film Institute: 1976) will make my job easier.

"In this cinematic drama, light is energy rather than a tool for the representation of non-filmic objects; light as energy, is released to ?create? it?s own objects, shapes and textures. Given the fact of retinal inertia and the flickering shuttering mechanism of film projection [here: pulse of electrons against a tube], one may generate virtual forms, create actual motion (rather than illustrate it), build color space (rather than picture it) and be involved in actual time (immediate presence)" (90).

The connection with abstract music should be fairly apparent. Just here, sub in "melody" for "representation" or "illustration." The pleasure is similar to that derived from the overtone clouds listening to loud drone music, say Charlemagne Palestine, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, etc. What's going on is, if not paid close attention to, fairly simple, a good hard look provides a wealth of microscopic detail. In "Fade", one notices repeated patterns that introduce a gentle rhythm, the crossfaded colors create subtle interference patterns that suggest minute variations in how the screen is illuminated. However, on a frame by frame look, these patterns disappear. The detail occurs only in time, if you freeze it, it goes away.

The music on the soundtrack bears an oblique relationship to the image, on the whole the tones and drones therein remain consistently modulating, offering a backbone for the asynchronous rhythms. The flickering may be difficult for some to enjoy, but for those that do, the phrase "light is energy" sounds less like a simple physical explanation, or a high-minded metaphor, but rather a description of the pleasure gained from the throb of flashing lights against the eyes. To some it?s maddening, but lots of people say the same thing about sine waves.

Appended to these three is a short quartet of pieces, markedly different than the three mentioned above (click on the "*" for these). They are strikingly different than the aforementioned, in that they are all black and white with harsh soundtracks, recognizable images and a very clear coordination between what you hear and what you see. Where the earlier three are full of a real grace and warmth, these 4 pieces are bright and caustic. And if they aren't as immediately appealing as the former, the hints of recognizability offer a way out of the former?s pure formality.

What's especially interesting/heartening about this DVD is the absolute lack of any attention drawn to the aesthetic conditions of the creation of this work. If one spends enough time in movie theaters that show avant-garde film, they'll find themselves with a fairly large ream of paper with elaborate conceptual justifications for the filmmakers aesthetic choices. But here, nothing. It's as though there's a greater reliance by younger artists for a work to stand on it's own, both as musicians and (some) visual artists. The loose collective of artists that fall under the "New No York" umbrella (I'm not exactly sure who comprises this collective, for sure I know Dion Workman, Luxury Estates, Backbreakerneckbrace, and probably some more) all share a tendency not to overburden their work with treatises, polemics, and lengthy explanations. Refreshing, to say the least.

- Nirav Soni

Roy Ayers Ubiquity - Live at the Montreux Jazz Festival (Verve)

Fusion had the commercial edge in 72’. Roy Ayers’ set from the Montreux Jazz Fest of that year suggests solid evidence as to why it held supremacy. Originally circulated in heavily edited form, the album features Ayers’ quartet Ubiquity just two years old and at a stage nascent to the massive popularity that would greet them in the coming years. The cover shot conveys the most obvious bon mot, depicting as it does Ayers peeking out from inside an upright bamboo coffin with a handful of mallets outstretched, looking like Marley’s Mr. Brown (controlled by remote?). The Verve/Polygram reissue adds four unissued tunes and nearly an additional thirty minutes. Ayers’ ensemble is economical in instrumentation if at times a bit too prolix in deployment. Pianist Harry Whitaker’s preference for electric over acoustic keys and Clint Houston’s turgid amplified bass strings give the music a healthy dose of funk-inflected juice. The fizzy “Daddy Bug,” ripe with rapid fire note chains, vivid splashes of tonal color and a corpulent unison line voiced by Ayers mallets and Houston’s plucking digits, arrives after a preface peppered with percussive gongs and boom-bams. Whittaker regularly apes the more luminescent tonalities of the leader’s vibes in an effulgent cascade that works well with Lee’s hyperactive traps. On a garrulous rundown of Miles’ “In a Silent Way” he flips a switch and prickly guitar distortion suddenly impregnates his swirling clusters of chords. Houston peels off a percolating ostinato against the steady clip-clop of Lee’s cymbals and cowbell. “Move to Groove” draws on the simple directive of its title and is the most overtly funky of the concert’s tracks with a break beat that all but begs to be sampled. There are misses too, such as the Whittaker-penned “Thoughts,” which winds up sounding quite empty-headed with all its muzzy introspective noodling. Randy Newman’s “He Gives Us All His Love,” revamped as a sparkly slow-grooving ballad and a funkified double-time reading of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” might be pop-pandering choices, but Ayers makes them work in a loungy incense and peppermints sort of way. It’s an album optimal for lazy summer afternoons when heady humidity creeps at the corners of your consciousness and respite comes in the form of a several ice cold beers in quick succession.

Unhook The Stars / And Take Them Down

Whatever you do, don't call it Kafka-esque. Just call it the Kafka Effect: the willful destruction of an artist's work, either by the artist himself / herself, or by others working via the sanction or under the command of the artist. After all, it was Franz Kafka who told his dear friend and de facto literary executor Max Brod:

"Of all my writings the only books that can stand are: The Judgment, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, Penal Colony, Country Doctor and the short story "Hunger-Artist"... When I say that those five books and the short story can stand, I do not mean that I wish them to be reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary, should they disappear altogether that would please me best."

Brod did not do as Kafka asked, but Dora Dymant did as he ordered; she burned whatever manuscripts were in her possession. His body wasting away from tuberculosis, Kafka, ever the enigmatic counter-irritant-- no accident he should turn his back on the bourgeois virtues of posterity -- made sure there was something cataclysmic about his life's undoing. I'm not one to speculate on what were without doubt complicated motives, but it was almost as if Kafka grew weary of, and, more to the point, bored with waiting for his demise and settled upon the idea of spurring it on by disposing of all those fictional characters who were, in miniature, in distortion, in abstract torment, in abject anonymity, him. Or at least could bear witness for and against him. More chilling is the fact that, like some middle manager whose compromises have led to his individual will becoming indistinguishable from the "responsibilities" associated with his sinecure, Kafka' delegated the murderous deed. He transformed a single, dismissive wave of the authorial hand into the reaper's scythe. Kafka's acts were private, situated well within the realm of self-determination, but they smack of fascism: impersonal, ruthless, and fixated, all rhetoric to the contrary, on the mind-altering power of aesthetics.

I was prompted to think of Kafka recently not just because I went back the "The Great Wall of China" for inspiration, but also because I've been reading a new Spanish novel, The Shadow Of The Wind by one Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the plot of which turns on the systematic, copy by copy, destruction of an obscure author's oeuvre. The terrifying figure who is, yes, burning these books is himself charred. In his presence, cigarette smoke takes on the qualities of brimstone. And, as if he weren't demonic enough already, he operates under an alias -- a pseudonym? -- drawn from one of the novels of which he is in pursuit, a name which is itself an alias adopted by Satan. Of course, Kafka himself -- rather, the conditioning I have been subjected to after havind read Kafka -- ruined the mystery of this book for me; 50 pages of rather brisk exposition into The Shadow Of The Wind and it was obvious to me that Laín Coubert was really the author himself, Julian Carax, or an individual in Carax's possession. Is there something archetypal about this idea? And is it a purely modern archetype, a critical piece of collective unconscious infrastructure that is nevertheless entirely post-Gutenberg?

I don't think it is too much to use the adjective "demonic" here, for there is the sense that, as much as the destruction of art is a destruction of human work and not life, it is still destruction undertaken in extreme disobedience of some natural law. But subtle variations on the core notion exist, such as works of art whose demolition is built-in and / or whose maladaptation to the ephemeral is enshrined as virtuous decadence. Jean Tinguely's "Homage To New York" is perhaps the most famous example of the former, while Andrew Goldsworthy's various constructions made from pebbles, icicles, leaves, stamens and petals do not completely defy being interpreted in the context of the latter. However, Tinguely's piece is capable of evoking disgust -- one friend of mind likened the "homage" to an act of public masturbation, by which I suppose he was indicating his distaste for spectacular but specific and measurable displays of wasteful energy -- while Goldsworthy's works prompt deep reflections on the endurance of forms despite the fleeting of nature of that on which we rely for the externalization of those forms. The eternal dance of concepts and precepts... Goldsworthy's assemblages may be the ultimate -- but which I mean paradoxical -- image of aesthetic imperviousness we have. (The trouble is, I have not quite worked out all of the how this is so just yet, though I do know that there is internal debate on the subject of technology ["with a small 't'"] standing between myself and egress from this question.) In this respect, his work is not unlike that of free improvisers in the British musical community; there is something quintessentially "English" at work in these creative endeavors.

Back on track with more straight-forwardly troubling or just plain perplexing cases, consider the man who is now arguably considered to be the most significant Russian artist of the Modern era, Kazimir Malevich. Encouraged by political or economic circumstances to "remake" many of his most important, and several of his lesser paintings, Malevich habitually antedated these works. For the arch-Suprematist, the process of canonization itself was a work of art, chronological accuracy aside. According to Elena Basner:

"[Malevich] embarked on the unprecedented step of reconstructing his own creative path in accordance with the theoretical ideas being professed at the time. Here we have a phenomenon without analogies in the history of twentieth-century art, whereby an artist reinterprets his entire oeuvre at the end of his life, from the point of view of a mature master, theoretician, and teacher. He rewrites his own story life story and creates a new, theoretically adjusted chronology, as if attempting to go back through his life and make a 'fair copy' of it."

In spite of the confusions thus engendered, of course, the leap from the "work" to the "body of work" is a logical, not theological, one. For had Malevich not been working with a summation in mind ever since he began his career in earnest? So he might have us believe. Of course, Malevich was also (re-)painting from memory as he painted over what once was, in one respect capitulating to the whims of recollection rather than, as in Kafka's case, subjecting those predilections to scorn and abuse. But there is a dark side to the decorative. Embellishment and revision, vital to the finish one puts upon a production, can, in their cumulative scope and weight, become destructive elements, especially when plied by the evil genius of an artist tempted into collusion with the notion of the "second chance". Malevich elected to confound rather than consume for all time. The effect has been about as equally devastating, but the pace with which you experience the unease of learning that there is no more is very different. Ripples outward, oozing, you follow one example into multiple examples. With Kafka, the effect is that of stumbling blindly through dense forest, violently fighting forward, only to ultimately put your foot down into black, bottomless emptiness.

But aren't artists entitled to the suppression of completed works? Isn't their work their personal property? Whether or not the artist is the best judge of his or her own output, doesn't he or she have both the authority and the power to apply those judgments? Another contrarian, Foucault, suddenly springs to mind, specifically his observation that the "influence" networks of power (here meant less despotically that my previous use of it suggests) have "on the often insignificant aspects of the hierarchy" is most in need of comprehension. When tools -- modes of knowledge, circumscribed natural forces, other artifacts designed to meet the specifications of a unique utility or set of utilities -- are employed in order to generate wreckage, what we witness is as much the exertion of power over one's self as power over something external and objective to the self. Actions cause behaviors to be reproduced in very organized ways. This connection is made with a cold clicking. Kafka could not stop the penalties he exacted upon himself, whether he intended them to be punitive or not, from proliferating.

None of those questions yields up a definitive answer, really. I want to say that bad work is self-suppressing, and, moreover, such censorship can never be complete. As with Malevich's chronological bowdlerizations, history, in the sense of collective knowledge active not just in other cultural artifacts but alive in individual, happening human perceptions, eventually rejects all such efforts. The truth seeps out no matter how cleanly swept the grave appears to be. And, as Italo Calvino points out, censorship is an act of violence against the very process of artistic production, and the lasting wound it leaves takes on the character of an addiction:

"To be sure, repression must... allow an occasional breathing space, must close an eye every now and then, alternate indulgence with abuse, with a certain unpredictability in its caprices; otherwise, if nothing more remains to be repressed, the whole system rusts and wears down." (If On A Winter's Night A Traveler, 236)

As well, and in many cases, those works -- failed experiments, juvenilia, fragments, commissions that don't pan out -- which artists choose to downplay in or excise from their c.v.'s serve as the good, old-fashioned Shakespearian "foils", reflecting just how one actually did emerge into the light of greatness (or competency) from out of shadows of anonymity. All comparisons imply the presence of a nothing -- nothing in common, nothing to differentiate the work from a predecessor work, the out of left field / out of nowhere / ex nihilo that abolishes context and isolates works within the open space of the character for "naught", the negation of tradition. All evaluations carry zeroes in their columns, and those digits don't just hold places in the operations of addition and subtraction.

By what means do accomplishments become apocrypha? Is such relegation less a destruction than an undoing? The latter, as a verb, augurs a make-the-film-run-backwards action in which original form is still hinted at. Imagine pulling the pins out of a marionette and letting the limbs, head and torso tumble into one another as they make their way down into an inanimate heap. However, when the "work", such a musical work, is less an object and more of an event, and therefore more reliant upon performance for its manifestation, maybe it becomes folly to make statements about suppression and obliteration.

Of course, music is not singular in being a performance-centric art. Drama and dance also rely on agents -- I don't mean personal representatives -- and upon very corporeal means of recreation. One could argue that to read a novel is to "perform" it privately, to stage its action in one's own consciousness, but the points-of-view, characters, deeds, settings, and props that accrete in one's mind as one reads grow like quartz in the most lightless of caverns. You may be able to feel the smooth transparent surfaces of the crystals, you may even be able to imagine how the transparencies of various thicknesses overlap to craft bright, cloudy patterns, but, in this space, you'll never be able to see much more than a jangling mass of dim glimmerings. (Of course, works of fiction that are nothing but illumination can be read once, if that many times, and then safely put away; in such cases, there really is nothing worth returning to.) Such an argument also ignores how the act of reading takes such a very long time, days, weeks, months, other chunks of time taffy-pulled and -twisted even further if one factors in re-readings -- longer than the time it takes to listen to music "in one sitting", even if the music in question is Wagner's Ring cycle or LaMonte Young's The Tortoise, his dreams and journeys. Moreover, reading is an activity the pleasures of which are normally accepted only to be amplified by huge interruptions, by tiring, by obstacles to making enough time to finish (interacting with) the damn thing (I suppose one could build a strong case that John Cage was interested in making music more like literature by concentrating on these paradoxical delights in music.) And, too, on going back over (what the...) and peeking forward. This you can do with a CD, but in not a live performance (those prepositions are absolutely vital) -- the latter at least not in any literal sense, even though music allows artists to mold the plastic forms of anticipation and tedium in ways artists laboring in other media cannot.

At first, I thought my next question would be: "is the phenomenon of artists deliberately disowning, concealing, and / or destroying their works more or less common in music?" But I see my question is whether composers and especially contemporary musician s would even be able to alter the features of their oeuvre using such methods. As more and more critically important musical works exist only as magnetic impulses on tape and as one and zeros digital files (the precise nature of those ones and zeros defined by meta-ones and meta-zeros), musical works therefore impossible for a number of reasons to reproduce in the aesthetic, not industrial, sense of the term, is music is more or less susceptible to the vagaries of artist's will?

Let's say that I burned a hypothetical last existing copy of the score to Alan Hovhaness' Mysterious Mountain. Someone could still hire a transcription agent who, working from a either a widely available or private recording of the piece, could produce a score reasonably close, perhaps even identical, to the original. Scores, being primarily instructions, are always approximations anyway, however structured and codified the system of notation may be. But let us go further and imagine that I somehow managed to cause every known recording of Mysterious Mountain to disintegrate. An individual could still perform the necessary research into symphony concert programming and, if allocated the requisite amount of time and money, locate enough musicians who know the piece, can play it accurately from memory, and can produce a new recording which in turn can be transcribed. Admittedly, in this last case, our conjectural patron will end up with something lesser than the lost original, yet still recognizable as being closely -- very closely -- derived from it.

Equally hypothetically, let's say I destroy the "master" digital file of Steve Roden's Resonant Cities. Resonant Cities is a piece of music realized without the benefit a score written in any sort of vernacular. The music in this case is inseparable from an artifact. Roden's is a piece that can never be duplicated in the sense that the substances incorporated into its construction are too "natural" to be reproduced. One of the bases for Resonant Cities are field recordings of specific events, particular places, unique visitations of sites, and one-of-a-kind climactic conditions. More crucially, the identity and attributes of the recording and post-production equipment utilized, what settings were applied to that equipment, how these settings and the physical parts of the machinery were adjusted in the process of crafting the sounds... that is, those variables that are inconsequential to the transcriber's consideration of the movements of Mysterious Mountain are constitutive of Resonant Cities. Unless all those details are logged in some interpretable fashion, and recorded so minutely that their reading guarantees the "experiment" can, in part, be replicated, then the finished product really is finished. However, with his understanding of the nature of digital files, Roden could have made a potentially infinite number of copies of his work and secreted those copies all over the world; reproduction of digital media, if executed minus the interference of file compression, renders each copy a "master", each equivalent in the richness of the information it contains. In effect, every CD of Resonant Cities ever manufactured is an exact copy of the original, and, as long as one copy still exists, so does the work itself. But what if, with a wave of my hand, I make it impossible for all playback devices in the work to parse or decode those discs? Although far-fetched, it is still much more likely than every musician in the world suddenly becoming musically illiterate, or ever trumpet player in the world having their memory of how to hold and blow through their instrument erased. The point I wish to make is that purely mechanical means are adequate to the complete destruction of Roden's music, while Hovhaness', while nothing much more than a baggy collection of symbols, is more obdurate. A recollection of Resonant Cities (memory is one of Roden's themes) by even its creator can at best render a description of how the piece's sounds were experienced, singularly and in toto, whereas a memory of Mysterious Mountain shared by an individual possessing non-unique expertise can contribute to the actual reconstruction of that piece. And again, although the Mysterious Mountains thus cobbled together above are "different" from Hovhaness', they are not radically different, I trust, in either body or spirit. In the Hovhaness cultural continuum, performance does not exist just for performance's sake, which actually does apply in Roden's case, despite the apparent "hard" material reality of his post-modern musique concrète. One consequence of his musical reasoning is that he transforms every sonic episode to which he turns his attention into performance. In order to make himself an artist, he first must make himself an audience. All composers / improvisers behave in this manner, of course, and are even instructed to pursue it as a discipline. But I cannot help but feel that the conceptual schools that have sprouted up around the fringes of electronic music lift the sanctions held against "mere listening" by more conservative practitioners and critics. Understand too that these considerations have no real bearing on the aesthetic quality of the work being discussed; they only open one path to be explored in the question of what a musical work is, and how, as fluid as the musical work has always been, it may be in the process of becoming even more fluid and yet simultaneously more susceptible to marginalization.

Sounds, such as those that populate Resonant Cities, are sounds that a large percentage of listeners would be quick to say are strictly not music, are noise, organized noise but noise nonetheless. Yet somehow Resonant Cities constitutes the more unique "work of art" and expression of individual "genius" than Mysterious Mountain in that the instabilities the former's maker have introduced into the thing made, into the techniques, the methods of making, themselves, and even into "his" raw materials are unmistakably distinctive. As generative as these subversions of hegemonic technological practices may be, however, they still perpetuate specific technologies. For these works to survive, a certain amount of the artist's creative power must remain invested in the networks that prevent the artificial illumination cast by certain devices, applications, and consensual apprehensions from waning towards obsolescence. Such methods keep technologies -- and here I want the disreputable connotations associated with that concept to be at play -- on life support. The "movement" or "school" of contemporary electronic music has no center other than the virtual one of the personal computer, perhaps, more specifically, the laptop, and, most specifically, the Apple PowerBook and the social, culturally, intellectually, geographical and economic -- and all historically over-determined -- predispositions of one Steve Jobs. (A related question is whether "sound art" of this sort demands that the listener know as much as possible about how the work was made -- it never discretely is made in the sense of being recreated with each new performance, a predicate which means much less here than re-played, so I leave the making in the past tense -- in order to appreciate it / an experience of it? But I think that question is a whole other essay in and of itself.) On the other hand, the "big ideas" of the Western canon which gird Hovhaness' composition -- scales and modes, counterpoint, tonal centers, tempo, etc. -- endure with impressive efficiency. Though these are capacious abstractions, they are wide and thin, and theirs is a very tensile, blade-like austerity. They can and have slotted into every conceivable verbal, musical and graphical discourse by which musical knowledge can be transferred. Both scenarios are parasitic, but the fault may lie in my choice of conceit.

So which is more perishable, the Hovhaness or the Roden? From an more musicological perspective, it appears that, historically, fashion has eroded Hovhaness' work already, and so perhaps the specific traditions with which his work is aligned (American mysticism, alea, "exoticism") is more precariously positioned within the institutions that sustain "classical" music: symphony orchestras; music schools; recording companies. Meanwhile, there are hundreds or even thousands of artists spanning the globe who are working with the materials and in the manner of Steve Roden. These individuals may not even be aware that they are colleagues, divided as they are by socio-political factors, language, and physical distance. At the risk of sounding anthropologically and economically naive, technology -- not technological innovations or even teleological actions, but rather the impulse to design and make actual things -- transcends cultural barriers. One could say technology outpaces culture in its spread, but how does something that is universally "grass roots" spread, exactly? True, technological artifacts can carry any number cultures within themselves, and thus technological artifacts are serviceable, within certain limits, in terms of technological determinism. But expressions of culture that are truly artistic... I think they are easier to ignore, and to reject than the utilitarian contrivances that provide them entree into new cultures. If I am in the Sudan, I may choose to block all broadcasts of American pop music within my immediate surroundings. (Minorities can filter and censor in this as easily as majorities do, and perhaps do it more often and conscientiously than we would like to admit.) Kelis' lyrics may be unintelligible to me as a native Sudanese, but, even if I the words to "Milkshake" [?] translated for me, they would still be desperately decontextualized and thus possess little significance for me beyond the alien character of the point-of-view they communicate. I may, effectively, hear "Milkshake" and still keep it at bay without killing it. I still have my radio, and on it I may somehow be inundated with stray signals. Worse, I may discover that Sudanese pop musicians have been listening to Kelis and have been seduced by her. Their music may begin make audible reference to American pop music. If I smash the radio, I smash more than an appliance on which to receive music. I have destroyed one of Keith Rowe's primary instruments: a means with which to capture, manipulate, and transmit sound. Whether those "sounds" are of Kelis or not is of secondary... or tertiary... concern. I've just committed overkill, my resistance has failed insomuch as it has cut off one potential source of support, and I've just contributed a little more waste to the world, an amount equal to or surpassing what I would have contributed if I had just gone out a bought a bigger, fancier shortwave set.

The question remains: if I am out to destroy music, what am I out to destroy? Scores? Records? Inventors? Microchip manufacturers? Do I go chasing vibrations? Do I hunt down musicians? I fear the answer is that I target entire cultures. I fear the answer involves striking at human consciousness and human sacredness in the form of a human habit of being Agostino Di Scipio has described this way: "the work of art is always created by creating the technique of its making." I fear the answer involves fascism, the corruption of culture, the co-optation of the cultural apparatus, the promotion of what Veblen termed "trained incapacity" over artisanship and creative curiosity, and the tidy elimination of cultural dissidence. I fear it involves the coddling of a kind of selectivity that, fed imprudently, distends and gluts with the impulse towards genocide.

I've not been circumspect in brandishing this word "fascism". Is my aim to link, as in some intelligence report, artists and tyrants -- even if metaphorically? Have we truly lost musical traditions to the machinations of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosevic, even Sadaam Hussein? Didn't these evil men -- Hitler the postcard painter, Hussein the romance novelist, Mao the storefront philosophizer -- also break and demolish cultural artifacts and cultural relationships by means of exhaustion, abuse, by over-playing their hands? Among other things, fascism is pageantry perverted. Art can also be made to say and to do more than it can nefariously, leaving certain aesthetic operations and notions and exemplars threadbare, frayed, broken-down, tainted, or bludgeoned into caricatures of themselves. "Social realism", Heidegger, Furtwängler, the "UFA Style"... And yet, in a grander moral / aesthetic accounting, haven't we gained new artistic traditions from the opposition that met these regimes? The 80's and 90's have seen a great renascence of "degenerate art" the Nazis pilloried, defaced and demolished, from George Grozs' caricatures [?] to Ernst Krenek's opera Jonny Spielt Auf. As is so often the case, the battle against art is a losing one. Not even Kafka could call himself a champion, or, qua The Hollies, a King Midas in reverse; he changed our vocabulary, he gave us a name for experiences we had previously kept in the dark, allowed us to yelp out these names so as to warn others and, simply, so as to signal our distress. Kafka-esque. An adjective whose continued real-world efficacy is disquieting, though in the final analysis I am glad to have it at my disposal. An adjective I actually saw applied to the predicament faced by Tom Hanks' character in the recent Steven Spielberg film The Terminal, which, I protest, is much more Capra-esque. After all, both Franz and Frank confronted the horrors of being human, and both deflected those horrors into view using mirrors; their favored angles of reflection were quite divergent and the comforts they kept with them in their observation posts would have been frightening and even a bit painful had they switched places.

I can be calm. My paranoia is baseless, even if my fears are not. Destruction of any given work of art is till not the complete annihilation of knowledge of how that work of art functioned, nor of the proficiencies vital to the making of new works of art. Maybe the large-scale forgettings, then rememberings we label "discoveries" and "insights", those wrought imitations of what has already been wrought before us, and perhaps four our benefit, are our cultural fate (as the Hindus believe, nothing is perfectible in this life). Whenever a work of art passes from history -- into ahistorical time? into nothingness? into what? -- some other work always takes that work's place. We just have to be mindful of this process, and remorseless in our assessment of gaps and gaps apparently filled. Art really is too important to be left to artists, just as religion is far too significant to be given over to the clergy. Art is release, and art is released. Every time we interact with a work of art, we have the opportunity to acknowledge art as technology: as that which grounds certain obligations, such as recognizing the highly evocative overtones that, eliding each other only to converge here and there, arise from the mutual recognition of each other's essential humanity. We cannot play at being Prometheus forever.

~ Joe Milazzo

DiCrescendo

It looks as if every other blog in the world has a "whoa, dude, did you see what went down at pitchfork?" entry on the subject of Brent DiCrescenzo's highly fictionalized, since-retracted, replaced-but-with-middle-finger-outstretched review of The Beastie Boys' To The 5 Boroughs, and, though I know I should be posting a "check it out" on Walter Horn's provocative and rigorous review of Eddie Prévost's latest book (Minute Particulars), I cannot allow Bagatellen to lag too far behind these times.

I never got a chance to read the offending review DiCrescenzo turned in, but the 7.9 parting shot he has left online for posterity @ pitchforkemedia.com is one or several of the following:

1. a review that makes "me" want to buy / download / listen to the new Beastie Boys record;
   
2. a review that makes "me" NOT want to buy / download / listen to the new Beastie Boys record;
   
3. a masterpiece of confessional solipsism, and yet another study in how David Eggers and his buds have ruining all the would-be bards to the slacker generation
   
4. an example of creative-yet-informative wordsmithing that explains better than any marketing report why major glossies like Rolling Stone and Spin are about as relevant to today's music fan culture as commercial radio is;
   
5. the pathetic conclusion to an episode that only proves how the Internet has gravely compromised journalistic integrity;
   
6. an example of why "I" hate pitchforkmedia.com -- they finally got what was coming to them, the pretentious little twerps;
   
7. an example of why "I" love pitchforkmedia.com and have helped make pitchforkmedia.com the most popular music site on the web;
   
8. "(pssshhhtt) Who cares?";
   
9. long-overdue, public vindication of the writer's rights, particularly the writer's right to a persona, to agitation, and to freedom from having to take his / her subject(s) too seriously. To wit: see Sub-Pop records brilliant / brain-dead parody of the pitchfork site, Popdork, in which the spoofed writers have been transformed into the exact literary forms in which they specialize.

I can certainly sympathize with being frustrated with writing about music. I too don't think I can ever really write another record review, even though I have committments to fulfill. But music is also a subject I have been unable to abandon. Music is contagious in my imagination, and not in the way it is -- I suspect -- for practicing musicians. My real subject, then, must be this helpless fascination with sounds. Or I can thus rationalize this subject into being.

Has ptichfork changed the face of music criticism? Editor Ryan Schreiber believes it has, or at least has the potential to effect such changes. Schreiber recently told a reporter from the Dallas Observer,

"As far as the Internet being revolutionary, sort of a next wave? You know what? I think it is. In a way it's similar to the punk revolution in the '70s--'Oh, I don't need to know how to play an instrument. I don't need to sign with a major label to make the music or express myself.' The Internet has basically allowed the same thing. You don't have to go through four years of an English program at Columbia to get your opinion out and get your voice heard. And I think it's breeding a lot of people who are inherently talented, sort of naturals at it."

The wrinkle now is that pitchfork has had to reprimand, if not shitcan -- I think one would be remiss in taking DiCrescenzo's "resignation" at face value in the context of the body of work he has generated for the site -- its best writer, "best" in the sense of being the writer who most completely and most recklessly lived out this ideal. If pitchfork's readership figures are not dented hard by DiCrescenzo's departure, then what are we to make of their accomplishments in this regard? Were individuals visiting the site because of DiCrescenzo or in spite of him? Who reads this stuff, and why? Does DiCrecenzo's work communicate anything, does it merely express, to paraphrase Richard Hell, in spurt after spurt? It's a question that nags at the hem of why I myself write, and why I almost never, ever turn down any writing gigs: any opportunities for public acts of subversion. Such professional indiscretion is the price paid for articulation.

DiCrescenzo's final words are both a promise and a threat, and though I have to wonder what sort of career in letters awaits someone as terminally clever as this (I should be so lucky), I must admire the man's confidence (if not his ego).

"I have more interesting stories to tell."

I admit that I don't. The trick is, if I am very adept at teasers (record reviews being a form of such), I might be able to convince you that I do. I think, finally that such sleight-of-mind is the secret of the true artist.