Bagatellen

RVG A.I.

Well, perhaps not. But a few quick words of (virtual) love and respect for the developers and maintainers of Audacity, a free, open-source audio editing aoftware. With the basic Audacity package, I've recently been able to transfer some old interviews from cassette to a more immediatedly stable digital medium. And more: with Audacity, I was also able, and without the intervention of several synchronizing-impaired acquaintances, to create my own "complete" mix of The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka!.

The more enterprising -- and more soncially imaginative -- among you either will already be familiar with this product, or might care to measure it up against Apple's GarageBand or GoldWave. I'd certainly be interested to know if any working musicians were relying on this or a similar shareware application, whether for truly creative work (say, running the output from an emulator through it), or at least for for production. I'd also be interested to read any thoughts on or experiences related to recording directly to disc (computer) as opposed to tape.

Meanwhile, my next Audacity project will be to scrub some of that reverb off a few old Phil Spector records (exact titles TBD)... just for the heck of it. I want to x-ray those frescoes; I want to peer behind the Wall of Noise.

~ Joe Milazzo

Lisle Ellis / Marco Eneidi / Peter Valsamis - American Roadwork (CIMP)

CIMP 312

Recorded in CIMP's Spirit Room on May 17th and 18th 2004 (as usual Bob Rusch's liners go into all kinds of detail, including even the local weather forecast), this is a smoking session from a trio that deserves the kind of attention and exposure usually reserved for the likes of Shipp, Parker and Ware. Marco Eneidi's running head to head with Ivo Perelman for the Most Unfairly Neglected Living Great Free Jazz Saxophonist Award, but it's to be hoped that this outing and the recent Botticelli release Live At Spruce Street Forum (with Peter Brötzmann, Jackson Krall and Ellis once more) will turn some more heads his way. The fact that no fewer than 7 out of 12 tracks on American Roadwork are entitled "Blues" is significant, as Eneidi digs deep into the blues -- we're talking the spirit rather than the letter of the law -- to reveal some dirty and sweaty roots to his playing. He's all too frequently compared to his erstwhile teacher Jimmy Lyons, but as I've said elsewhere there's plenty of Ornette and Moondoc in there too. Of course, Lyons has left his mark in the fleet post-bop flurries of "Shock and Awe Shucks", "Dreamt Up Blues #5" and the title track, all of which go so damn fast you can almost hear a Doppler effect, but the dangerous curves he drives on a dirty sheet (to quote Tom Waits) in the opening "Baby Please Don't Go" and "Contractual Obligation Blues" are low, slinky, musky and irresistible. Bassist Lisle Ellis is the ideal partner, melodically curvaceous and suggestive on the slower cuts and impossibly agile on the up-tempo numbers, and drummer Peter Valsamis inventive throughout, especially as a soloist. Sorry to bitch once again about the CIMP recording aesthetic -- I have total respect for and understanding of Marc Rusch's work -- but I wonder if a slightly flashier drum sound might not have helped matters a little. Still, a piddling quibble, to be honest. This is great stuff and copies should be sent post-haste to every major festival promoter throughout the civilised world.

~ Dan Warburton

Roy Dunn – Know’d Them All (Trix)

Remarkable in his frank unremarkableness, Roy Dunn is my kind of bluesman. His life traces familiar arteries of itinerant gospel and harmony group singing pocked by derailments due to tragedy. The most recent in relation to these early 70s sessions was a car wreck that killed his infant child and landed him and his wife in the hospital with a profusion of broken bones for months. His chosen repertoire here is derivative, but erudite, learned mostly from old phonograph records. This sole Trix offering (as far as I know his sum total of recordings) contains reworkings of tunes by Tampa Red (“Stranger’s Blues”), Jim Jackson (“Move to Kansas City”) and DeFord Bailey (“Don’t Tear My Clothes”). His plectrum and finger-picking approaches are respectably spry, but rarely stray from rote pre-existing forms. Each song receives the stamp of a personal watermark- an inserted verse here, a deft complementary riff there. Voice and inflection-wise he reminds me a bit of Brownie McGhee, sharing the same dry warmth and laconic locution that can segue from a slow drawl to an emphatic whoop over the span of a verse. Taped by Trix kingpin Pete Lowry (a guy whose A&R acumen mirrored Testament’s Pete Welding) the tracks carry crisp fidelity with Dunn exquisitely miked and in a congenial and crafty mood. Some nifty string percussion effects spice up “Further on Down the Line” and some tart harp work sounding a bit like rice paper and comb adds flavor to the aforementioned Bailey song. “Everything I Get a Hold To” finds Dunn decrying his diminutive stature and how it so often leads to his susceptibility to bullying while “Pearl Harbor Blues” constitutes his stab at a topical blues. “Mr. Charlie” offers a clever extended meditation on the ability of song to transcend disability. The shot on the cover typifies the overarching arcadian ambiance of the music. Just Roy and his guitar(s) sitting porch side and playing for himself and whatever passerby might stroll past.

Who Cares What You Think?

It's list-makin' time again, folks. I recently filed my Top Ten of 2004 for the Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, and it looks like that's the only list I have to make this year. (I wasn't asked to contribute to year-end issues of Jazziz or The Wire, and that's fine with me.)

So here's what I heard and liked this year. File your own year-end thoughts below, if you like.

First of all, the Top Ten I actually chose (in alphabetical order, with no ranking as to merit):

1. Anata, Under A Stone With No Inscription (Earache)
2. Björk, Medulla (Atlantic)
3. Decapitated, The Negation (Earache)
4. Electric Wizard, We Live (Rise Above)
5. Ghostface, The Pretty Toney Album (Def Jam)
6. Lamb Of God, Ashes Of The Wake (Epic)
7. Mastodon, Leviathan (Relapse)
8. Necrophagist, Epitaph (Relapse)
9. Pig Destroyer, Terrifyer (Relapse)
10. Matthew Shipp, Harmony And Abyss (Thirsty Ear)

Now, here are fifteen more that didn't make the cut. Some were very close calls (Isis and Björk were in head-to-head contention for a slot, but I went with Björk because the Isis disc was a refinement of their existing style, while her album was a sharp left turn, and thus the greater achievement). Others I cut because I felt like nominating all new efforts, rather than worthy reissues, for the final year-end tally. Anyway, here are the also-rans.

Anaal Nathrakh, Domine Non Est Dignus (Season Of Mist)
Albert Ayler, Holy Ghost (Revenant)
Chaosbreed, Brutal (Olympic)
Alice Coltrane, World Galaxy [reissue] (Universal Japan)
Isis, Panopticon (Ipecac)
Kataklysm, Serenity In Fire (Nuclear Blast)
Megadeth, The System Has Failed (Sanctuary)
Motörhead, Inferno (Sanctuary)
Sunny Murray, Homage To Africa [reissue] (Sunspots)
Pharoah Sanders, Live At The East [reissue] (Universal Japan)
Pharoah Sanders, Izipho Zam [reissue](Sunspots)
Spring Heel Jack, The Sweetness Of The Water (Thirsty Ear)
Cecil Taylor, Live In The Black Forest [reissue] (Universal Japan)
Cecil Taylor, One Too Many Salty Swift And Not Goodbye [reissue] (Hatology)
Unleashed, Sworn Allegiance (Century Media)

Noid - Monodigmen

Noid
Monodigmen
aRtonal
aRR06

Cellist Noid (Arnold Habert) takes an interesting approach to his solo improvisations here, combing a kind of minimalist-derived structure to a very rough and visceral attack, resulting in what might be thought of as a cellistic (!) equivalent to music like that of Charlemagne Palestine where mirage-like details emerge from the melding of repetition with chaos.

There are thirteen tracks, ranging in length from a handful in the 10-12 minute area to a bunch of shorter ones, two clocking in at less than ten seconds. The opener, “melodien”, is the cello as respiratory system, an in/out bowed figure with thump that sounds like something you might pick up by inserting a contact mic into your lung. I get the impression, here and elsewhere, that Noid adapts his bow in various ways, including loosening it a great deal. The wooliness that results is part of what enables the music to transcend the relatively simple patterns generated. The second piece, “herz”, employs a repeated six note sequence, first in the middle register, then the lower, that isn’t essentially much different from one you might hear in early Steve Reich. As there, however, the obsessive repetition either a) allows hidden sound aspects to emerge or b) the listener creates these emergent qualities on his/her own. I’m not sure which and less sure if it matters. So, for instance, I begin to hear an accented three-note pattern within the latter six-note one. The grainy and corporeal way Noid aggressively plunges into these pieces goes a long way toward laying a messily fertile field for such meta-patterns to develop. When he switches to a cleaner attack, as on “vacuum”, with its high register swirls that unfortunately but unavoidably remind one of “Flight of the Bumblebee”, my interest waned and I found myself listening to the random taps and rubbings that the vigorous performance entailed—perhaps that’s the point. “instrument [containing: urlaub]” reduces any notion of pattern down to one, unsteadily wavering, bowed tone and succeeds in a more purely meditative way. There’s a very attractive, shorter track, “irgendwas”, whose delicate strummings remind me a little of Arild Anderson’s work of the early 70s, followed by a tangentially similar, shimmering piece; both are rather lovely. The final selection seems to retain a pattern of sorts though its extreme spacing of very quiet bow scratches makes it (pleasingly) difficult for the listener to think in pattern terms. It gives the impression of lying somewhere just on this side of the ppp improv of the Malfatti school.

“Monodigmen”, I found, grew on me the more I listened and repays close attention. Its range may be limited, but Noid teases out some pretty fascinating tufts of ideas from his obsession.

Listen, The Snow Is Falling

Point your browser on over to the Eigenradio site and check out some of the oddest -- yet most true to life -- holiday music you're likely to hear before 2004 calls it a day.

A condensed version of the Eigenradio conceptual shtick, or, at the very least, the Eigenradio concept expressed a plaid-sports-coat-clad, wink-and-a-nod humbug:

All those stations, playing all that music, all the time... Who has enough time in the day to listen to them all? Eigenradio plays only the most important frequencies, only the beats with the highest entropy. If you took a bunch of music and asked it, "Music, what are you, really?" you'd hear Eigenradio singing back at you. Eigenradio makes its optimal music by analyzing in real time dozens of radio stations at once. When our bank of computers has heard enough music, it will go to work on making more just like it. What you hear on Eigenradio is the best of New Music, distilled and de-correlated. One song on Eigneradio is worth at least twenty songs on old radio. This season, as a present to friends worldwide, our system listened to as much Christmas music as it could handle. When it was done it synthesized these sixteen new timeless classics.

The results are, surprising, not nearly as cut-up-y as I anticipated. There are certainly tracks here, such as "Blanket And Frosty Holler" that sound simply like signals being diced and shuffled one into one another. As if someone -- and someone obviously not afflicted with carpel tunnel syndrome -- were frobnicating the controls on their Grundig in obsessive-compulsive spasms: locked in some loop of zooming through the same frequencies, over and over again. Ah, but only if the violence and duration of those spasms could be plotted according to a computable algorithm. (Truth be told, I'm not sure what algorithms are at work in the Eigenradio project; I have seen references elsewhere on the web to Transverb and FFT [Fast Fourier Transformations], but no one other than Brian Whitman, it seems, has anything definitive on the how.) A Singular Christmas is not the sound of raw data, of individual bits that would be mellifluous or crackly all on their own. A Singular Christmas is the result of statistical analysis. This is raw data that has been automatically sublimated.

And we all know what perverse amusements sublimation is capable of. Forget choppiness and think about samples -- social science and not beat science samples -- bleeding into one another as digits are rounded up and rounded down. Brass ensembles and choirs merge and gently blurt "fa's" and "la's" against the din. Just as the radiant spines of snowflakes melt into one another before freezing into the thick whiteness of frost. "Holy Night", were it not so abbreviated, would be downright eerie, defined by a sort of anti-tranquility in the manner of P.i.L.'s "Radio 4" (Metal Box / Second Edition). Handbell glitches, icicles jingling in the wind, or bouzoukis? Whatever; in "Cherry Misfortune" they pluck out freely over the solstice hush that hangs over Miles' In A Silent Way. The animal cries in "Bright Reindeer Cap" don't echo over a desolate winter landscape, but synthesized-speech-like tonalities taken from the earlier "Mountain Noel", tonalities themselves reminiscent of the sounds of the mainframe you can hear on an old, old Nonesuch LP, Computer Music (H-71245). (Barry Vercoe has a piece on that record, and Mr. Whitman is currently a student of Vercoe's at MIT). Some pieces are abrasive, such as "Summer's Farmer Gray", while others to-and-fro with as much madcap as the concourse of any American shopping mall on Black Friday ("Grand Hotel Pout Twice"). There are also references to musical tradition, as the set's last two tracks, "City Sidewalk Steadfast Clime" and "Radiant Bells" (church organ, hmmm, where's that been?) incorporate Pendereckian and Fennesz-like textures, respectively.

But this is all associative window dressing. Because, and naturally, after multiple listenings, it becomes very apparent just how persistent those oh-so familiar Christmas songs and their evocations, insinuations and counsel are. A Singular Christmas may be in part about the core of dissonance in every limp, blandly heterogeneous mass. "Ha, ha, the joke is on you, consumers. The sum of all those popular sounds you invest in or at least tolerate is a sound you would normally classify as disturbing, would flee from." However, the Eigneradio method, rhetorical as it is, strikes me as being most apropos to holiday unease. I cannot think of one person I know, and not everyone I know is nearly as much a crank as I am, who enjoys Christmas music as it is generally defined. Employing very unscientific techniques, I performed my own survey, and was given these descriptions of this seasonal variety of environmental sound (in the States, Christmas music is truly ubiquitous):

• "annoying"
• "a nuisance"
• "so worn out; I mean, I might be more charitable if maybe there were new Christmas songs"
• "depressing as Hell"
• "completely meretricious"
• "creepy"

"Christmas music, why are you, really?" I think A Singular Christmas provides one kind of answer. Cheer at any other time of the year would be healthy, not to mention downright generous; at Christmas time, cheer is mostly anesthetic. See, many, many of us so approach each Christmas not with the expectations that new and happy memories are soon to be made, but rather with a faint wish that things will be slightly less awful than usual. A mean or median of misery would be a relief. And the closer one comes to December 25th, the more desperate this hope becomes, and the more one fades into denial, trying to live through it all while remaining as disconnected from all its significance as possible. One way to accomplish such withdrawal is to open oneself to a non-cleansing inundation. And so there follows a temporary, strangely willed obliteration of personal knowledge. The actual occasions in which these songs were heard, or themselves sung through, the reasons for celebrations past, flashbacks to faces and voices and places where one congregated -- these don't quite disappear or become identical, but sit gathering dust, unclaimed, items once lusted after but which are now only tokens of old and stinging disappointment. Yet, predictable as the holidays are, even this process must be renewed, and so every experience of its rigors (and it certainly possesses its rigors) has is somehow novel. A Singular Christmas, which is new only insofar as no one has attacked this problem quite from this angle before, is not a window looking out on Stevens' "nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is" so much as a mirror turned back on those who would endure that chill, all the while harboring a secret hope that its bite will kill them once and for all. "So much for your precious moments", this music seems to be saying, "taken in bulk, they are an indecipherable blot. Unless you can select from them what is only tedious without discarding what in them is merely palliative."

Or, as one of our greatest ironists, Ken Nordine, once said: "It's lovely to look at love when you're average."

~ Joe Milazzo

Michael Bloomfield – If You Love These Blues, Play ‘Em As You Please

Kicking Mule 9801-2

Call it a personal prejudice if you must, but certain fairer-complexioned blues guitarists rarely hold the allure of their more mocha-skinned counterparts in my personal (and admittedly persnickety) hierarchy. Sure, there are exceptions: Keith Richards and Lonnie Mack can both ace bonafide licks with the best on either side of the imaginary (& superfluous) color line. But the list of laggards is longer (Eric Clapton, John Mayall, George Thoroughgood, even Stevie Ray Vaughn- blasphemy, I know). Mulling hard about it I think it has to do with what my ears greet as substance over flash, verity over technique. Guys like Jeff Healey have chops to waste, but I always hear something glaringly missing in their canned stabs at the idiom. Mike Bloomfield fits in this category too. A recent Fantasy reissue of two his Kicking Mule platters from the 70s illustrates why.

The prolix-titled If You Love These Blues, Play ‘Em As You Please dates from 1976. Originally designed as an instructional album for Guitar Player magazine, it’s basically a survey disc with Bloomfield playing the part of tour barker and master blues mixologist. A bulging crew of session men on reeds, keys, strings and percussion assist him across a 22-tune itinerary. His own arsenal includes acoustic and electric guitars of various shapes and tunings, coupled with banjo, piano, organ and bass. The aural trip attempts to trace every tributary from the barrelhouse style stomp of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell to the urbane jump revelry of T-Bone Walker. Blind Blake, Howlin’ Wolf, Tampa Red, John Lee and Earl Hooker, Jim Jackson and a host of other elders also receive their share of flattery through imitation.

Bloomfield nails every vernacular nearly to a “T”, but there’s something intrinsic lost in his sanguine translations. The music is entertaining, but much of it reflects a slick sheen of studio production and a laconic ease in execution that bleeds out any sense of pain or desperation. Bloomfield’s spoken intros also quickly wear out their welcome, reciting the dry specs on gear and tune taxonomy. The experience reminded me of what it might be like shelling out and signing on for the Harry Connick, Jr. Nawlins Whiste-Stop Jazz Tour. It carries that same sort of commodified Cliff’s Notes flavor.

Bloomfield/Harris, captured on the disc’s final eight cuts, dates from three years later and offers a better proposition than its companion. Joining his colleague Woody Harris’s acoustic frets, Bloomfield clams up and let’s the music do the talking. Here he switches between acoustic and electric slide depending upon the tune, all of which are gospel-related in origin. The contemplative cast to the conversations harbors a much more personalized stamp. Highlights include a shimmering version of “Gonna Need Somebody On My Bond,” and a tranquil reading of “Great Dreams of Heaven” that threads in elements of both Spence and Fahey through a finely-crafted Harris solo.

Bloomfield’s work here hasn’t swayed my opinion. Like a stubborn and loutish musical segregationist I still clench tightly to my biases. His albums are convivial diversions, but when the blues bug bites it’s the Bukka White and Fred McDowell that my fingers go reaching for.

~ Derek Taylor

Voodoo Chile Immemorial

Dagger Records’ latest compendium of Hendrix curios just dropped, right on schedule for the holiday consumer rush. As the mail-order boutique bootleg end of the Experience Hendrix Empire, the label specializes in minting legally-legit versions of material that’s long been circulating through the tape-trading web that crisscrosses the globe. Though probably not on par with its predecessor Morning Symphony Ideas, Hear My Music still looks mighty inviting.

Ideas was a minor revelation. Jimi and Band of Gypsys drummer Buddy Miles jamming at length through a litany of familiar melodies and riffs (the opening cut “Keep on Groovin’” clocks just south of a half-hour and another woodshed improv “Scorpio Woman” sprawls over 21 fret-filled minutes). Boon compounded on boon, their prolix antics were preserved in nearly pristine studio fidelity. Music doles out the first Hendrix family sanctioned release of “Jimi/Jimi Jam”- a 17-minute improv bender previously available in only edited form on the old Reprise cassette Nine to the Universe (my copy’s long been on the verge of conking out). Also in the mix: a full-length version of “Trash Man” that renders the previous abridgement on Midnight Lightning (another antique Reprise tape release) obsolete, and demo versions of “Valley of Neptune” on guitar and piano(!?)

Hendrix’s lasting appeal remains a difficult phenomenon to pinpoint or explicate. He’s been six feet under for nearly thirty-five years, yet the posthumous releases keep coming (now outnumbering those albums issued during his egregiously-short 27 years on the planet by a ratio of nearly 30:1). A lot of it revolves around a cult of personality- Jimi was the quintessential counter-culture icon on a myriad of levels; a black rock patriarch when the world desperately needed one. And there’s also the relentless branding and commodification that’s continued unabated since his passing. But even with all the ceaseless deifying hype I still hold fast to comforting belief that the crux of his enduring fame still rests in his music. Hendrix’s experiments, even his effluvia, are frequently more stimulating to my sensibilities than much of what passes as rock these days. I’d rather slip the ear goggles on and eavesdrop on a thirty-year old loosey-goosey living room jam- the principals stoned out on whatever cocktail of substances was the menu for the evening. Hear My Music is definitely chalking near the top of the post-Christmas purchase list.

Exuberance - Live at the Vision Festival

Ayler 9

Memory can be a fickle mechanism. While I’m still a young buck by boilerplate ‘jazz critic’ standards, my melon seems increasingly prone to lapses and absences. I’m pretty sure I was among the audience for the gig presented on this new Ayler disc, but the details are nebulous. Fortunately Frank Rubolino’s impassioned liners scrub clean the picture made sooty by time’s ash. Encapsulated under the effusive sobriquet Exuberance the quartet of Louie Belogenis, Roy Campbell, Hilliard Greene and Michael Wimberly assumed the Mulberry Street stage back in the summer of 03’ and alternately glided and ripped through a four-song set.

Countless saxophonists continue to crib from the Coltrane chapbook, but Belogenis’ borrowings are less tangible than most. Honing in on the noble humanity at the core of Trane’s sound, his burnished tenor traces lines writ with keening rasps and fits snugly into a frontline with Campbell’s freebop trumpet stylings. The latter man might not be nearly as fluent on flute as he is with brass, but his twittering tones on the opening “Invocation” aren’t the work of a neophyte either. Wimberly’s Africanized vocal preamble evolves over an athletic hand percussion patter and high bridge arco bass by Greene. Belogenis’ dry vibrato-shaded tenor inflections milk an even more melancholy mood as the drummer switches over to his trap kit. The piece meanders a bit in its middle minutes, but the return of emphatic saxophone geysers, which segue into Campbell’s textured smears and tail-end solo, ensures an exit on an appropriately emotive crest.

Keeping with the ceremonial and spiritual disposition “Procession,” a prolix cut at 21+ minutes, offers up even more terrain for free range blowing, almost to a fault. After an athletic prologue by Greene’s bow and fingers the four cycle through a series of loosely improvised segments. Campbell is more fractious here, sometimes on target, at other junctures distractingly diffuse. “Evocation” spotlights his muted bell and oddly ends just as it’s getting good. “Incandescence” immolates in a fulmination of florid overblowing. Belogenis is especially explosive on the closer, galloping across another funk-structured stomp from Wimberly with a spray of whinnying sorts. Patricia Parker supplies the sign-off with band introductions amidst the hoots and whistles of the audience. A boisterous and fun way to go out, it’s one that clinches their chosen moniker.

Jan Ström’s decision to start releasing sets from the Vision Fest a few years back has proven an inspired one in my book. Limited to neighborhood of forty to fifty minutes they approximate the running time of LPs. And while the performances can sometimes wander, their comparative brevity is usually a refreshing departure from the norm of most free jazz/improv discs. Exuberance’s album subscribes astutely to this economical mold. It’s one that makes repeat spins all the more probable and persuasive.

~ Derek Taylor

Galaxie 500 - On Fire (Rykodisc)

They were the non-Pixies. By which I mean to say that Galaxie 500 and the Pixies are divided as much by what they shared in common as they are unified by that which made them such distinct propositions. Both bands came together in Boston in 1986, and both featured laconic visionaries in the lead guitar / vocals chair, both also hailing from foreign climes: in the case of Galaxie 500's (and later Luna's) Dean Wareham, New Zealand; for Black Francis Black, the no less antipodal (culturally speaking) Southern California. Both bands were also gender-integrated, with a "chick bassist" -- Naomi Yang and Kim Deal -- who, while not conventionally hot, sported unconventional looks that meant that, no matter where she stood on stage and regardless of how much of her raven hair covered her faces, she was always intriguing. And both groups have had a tremendous influence on what has since become "alternative rock", even though both began as simple little college bands. Formed by students, each band catered to a similar youth audience: Reagan-era smart-asses and slummers discovering the bleak joys of garage rock, the Beckett-esque pronouncement, poseur-ism, and cheap, strychnine-heavy acid tabs. But where The Pixies' shoulda-been hits were cranked-up, all deflecting irony and searing flash, Galaxie 500 specialized in a narcotized lyricism, were into swell, scatter and soar; their "heaviness" was the cumulative effect of ample reverb and high volume, and of feeling suffused. Otherwise, the trio actually would have been what a British interviewer (see the Plexifilm Galaxie 500 1987 -1991 DVD) rather scurrilously reported some people had said they were anyway: "wimpy".

Nowhere is the peculiar tension Galaxie 500 could establish -- assuming that verb makes any sense vis-à-vis tension -- more apparent than on their sophomore album, On Fire, from 1989. True, there are few moments in all the brief history of shoe-gazing as glorious as when Wareham's guitar cuts through the pastel murk of "Flowers", the very first track on Galaxie's very first album (Today). True, too, that their last record, 1990's This Is Our Music contains the band's most sophisticated work, both in terms of song-craft and actual performance. But On Fire stands up best as a coherent artistic (arty?) statement. The noise -- primarily guitar feedback, but also saxophone (courtesy Ralph Carney), shaken and stroked percussion, and the muted howl of backing vocals -- is more chromatic here, the echo more expansive, the pop fizzier, the psychedelia sillier yet also less cloying (cf., "Leave The Planet", which also incorporates "Love Me Do"-style harmonica, as if the band were confused about which Beatles they want to pay tribute to), the evanescence, as on the follow-the-bouncing-ball sing-along "Another Day", more immutable, the cheerlessness more honeyed, the sensuality starker, and the emotional denial seems as if it is being put under pressure in some even further recess. Take "When Will You Come Home", which seems to start out as a jangle-ballad but ends as a seething freak-out. Has the song's protagonist tired of waiting and "watching TV all alone" and finally gone out of his apartment to search for his erstwhile love? Or is he just spinning mad, frustrated circles in his ennui? "Snowstorm", On Fire's other epic track, is pure "first winter in the big city" impressionism, with wah-wah guitar simulating the waft and impact of fat, moist flakes. And here, as elsewhere, Wareham's observational lyrics are so mundane (but not gritty, i.e., with the cockroaches in plain view) they become oblique, then so oblique they swirl into the uncanny. In this respect, "Strange" and especially "Plastic Bird" represent the twin apotheoses of Galaxie 500's music. The music is so big, nearly anthemic, but the sentiments as intoned are so small -- petty, even. The complete lyrics to "Plastic Bird": "And when I left your place / Gave me a plastic bird / You won it at the festival / Well I pulled both legs off / And then I smashed its nose / And left it on First Avenue".

Coupled with Yang's imperturbably melodic bass lines and Damon Krukowski's asymmetrical pitter-patter thrash, and the results are stirring, but not immediately, as though one were burning up in the core of a time lag, or spinning down in the comet tail of super slo-mo. Of course, it is conceivable that I'm just too close to similar personal experiences. I've been through those break-ups during which personal effects which might otherwise be trivial are invested with great emotional significance only so they can be flung over fences, backed over, burned, trod upon, or rent in two with a mighty scream. Yet I think my admiration has much more to do with the collision of scales, maxi and mini, in Galaxie 500's music. The plaintiveness of their best songs is so intense that you can only do justice to what it means to listen to them by calling them "hallucinatory." Together, Krukowski, Wareham and Yang were gracefully stoned entity. Only not literally. They were actually high on emotion: stunned by the ordinariness of their own feelings and the ease with which those feelings reach escape velocity. Hardly ever before and certainly never since has the poetry of the humble "Whoosh!" been probed so fruitfully, or with such undaunted aching.

~ Joe Milazzo

The Exciting Trio – In Chicago There Is Willy

482 Music 482-1023

The inept band name is surely an in-joke: far from power-trio excitement, this is hazy, laidback music in the indie-rock-meets-jazz vein. The basic format is the classic guitar trio – Matt Schneider, guitar; Griffin Rodriguez, bass; David Pavkovic, drums – but they also vary the sound with electronics, studio tweaking and the occasional creepy melodica interlude. The balance of the band is pleasantly upside-down: the drums may be clicking along nicely, but Schneider has a daydreaming, unhurried way of playing guitar that often melts into the background. Some of the tunes themselves are peppy, but the performances tend to slip into long episodes of near-suspension, and this tendency grows as the album wears on: the last track, “Lutrell”, is a blissed-out 14-minute drone piece, with Pavkovic on melodica the whole way. Though touching on the territory of a disc like Jeff Parker’s Like-Coping, In Chicago There Is Willy is mostly dreamy, slightly impersonal mood-music. Nice stuff, though not all that exciting.

~ Nate Dorward

Simon Fell - Four Compositions

Simon Fell
SFQ1 & SFQ2

Red Toucan 9326

With this two-disc set of quintets and quartets, composer/bassist Simon Fell demonstrates that his brilliant eclecticism is as vibrant as ever. Four Compositions is made up of SFQ1, three pieces for a quintet including the composer, Alex Ward (clar), Gail Brand (trmbn), Alex Maguire (pno), and Steve Noble (perc); and SFQ2, a lengthy suite for the (Liverpool) quartet of Fell, Ward, Guy Llewellyn (fr horn), and Mark Sanders (perc and elec) entitled "Composition No. 70." Several of Fell’s influences are easy to discern. On SFQ1’s "Trapped By Formalism 2" one can hear early Stockhausen (think Kontakte) and middle period (pre-electric) George Russell quite clearly. The two strains—both certainly formal, but one "academic," the other "jazzy"—are braided together brilliantly. This may be "difficult" music, but it is also exuberant. Fell explicitly references both Russell and Stockhausen in his liner notes (he even calls one piece "Gruppen Modulor 2"), but perhaps one shouldn’t make too much of these nods, since he also mentions Shostakovich, Boulez, Stravinsky and Birtwistle as influences, composers I don’t hear in any of these works, (and fails to credit Braxton, whom I hear all over the place). The main point, of course, shouldn’t really focus on from where but rather on where to, and the destinations here are uniformly worthy of intensive sightseeing. We should all by now recognize Fell’s wonderful, if sometimes maniacal, counterpoint from his Composition #30 and his Thirteen Rectangles (of which these SFQ pieces are said to be a subsequent installment). One shudders at the rehearsal time that must have been expended on the SFQ1 pieces. Don’t expect any high school ensembles to be tackling these soon. The gnarliest passages are all handled with ease by Fell’s gang, however, as if they’d been memorized several weeks prior. While the free blowing here is limited, there are fine solos from all concerned on SFQ1 as well as on the subsequent disc. The two main differences between the three quintet pieces on disc one and the slightly later suite that constitutes "Liverpool Quartet" are that the Russell influence has almost disappeared, and somewhat less compositional direction is maintained on SFQ2. The quartet engages in considerably freer ensemble play, but the result is uniformly "classical," except in "GM3 Rhythm" where it’s pretty straightforwardly Braxtonian: Fell’s Russelliana is easily distinguishable from his Braxtoniana, even though both largely consist of wacky unisons vehicles. In any case, the walking bass passages seem to have mostly sauntered off (hand-in-hand with the necessity for 20-hour rehearsals) by the time SFQ2 was recorded. It shouldn’t be inferred from this, however, that SFQ2 is haphazard. It also has a serious, though never solemn, feel. The London Quartet suite is generally more pointillistic than the earlier pieces (again excepting "GM3 Rhythm"), but doesn’t seem more "spacious" for some reason. I find it a curious accident of history that in the "jazz" context, complete freedom has often seemed to result in a higher density of notes than more traditional compositions, while in the "classical" and ea-i contexts, complete freedom often produces many fewer notes per minute than something like, e.g., a Ferneyhough opus. I should point out, however, that, like Braxton, Fell is an absolute master of integrating composition and improvisation, so it’s often quite difficult to guess which (if any) passages are entirely spontaneous creations. Finally, something that may (and, I think, should) also entice percussion fans is that both Sanders and Noble slam together crackling, electrifying solos-- one on each disc.

Goddamn Electric

Lead guitarists have shaped almost every major evolution in metal. Where would the headbanger nation be without pioneers and paradigm-shifters like Tony Iommi, Kerry King, or Dimebag Darrell? Well, we’ll have to find out where we go without Darrell – he was shot on Wednesday night, one song into a set with his new band, Damageplan.

A 38-year-old Texan, Darrell formed Pantera in the late 1980s with his drummer brother Vinnie Paul and bassist Rex Brown. The group recorded four studio albums of 80s-style power metal before unearthing vocalist Phil Anselmo and signing with Atlantic. The five albums they released on the label (Cowboys From Hell, Vulgar Display Of Power, Far Beyond Driven, The Great Southern Trendkill and Reinventing The Steel) changed metal in their image.

Pantera seemed almost absurdly intense at times. Anselmo started out as a typical thrash screamer, but on the band’s two best albums, Vulgar Display Of Power and Far Beyond Driven, he developed a more explicitly metallic take on Henry Rollins’ man-on-fire bellow and blossomed as a performer (as he sang in “Becoming,” he was “born again/with snake’s eyes/becoming god-sized”). But behind him, it was Darrell and Paul who were driving the machine, and refashioning metal, and they were much more down-to-earth. Dimebag owned a topless bar in Texas, and frequently championed younger, up-and-coming metal bands. He also never missed a chance to talk about the acts he admired, the groups (and guitarists) who'd inspired him as a child.

Pantera’s music was heavy, to be sure, but it grooved instead of grinding. They were slower than peers like Megadeth and Slayer, and Darrell’s guitar solos pushed shredding dissonance through a blues framework. He and his brother expressed admiration for fellow Texans ZZ Top as often as they praised Judas Priest and Black Sabbath, and the influence could be heard in their music. All five of their Atlantic albums are worth hearing, but again, Vulgar Display Of Power and Far Beyond Driven (which debuted at #1 on the charts in 1994, to everyone's shock, including the band's) are their best. To hear Dimebag Darrell at his best, check out “Walk,” “Mouth For War,” “Becoming,” “I’m Broken,” and their cover version of Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” all available on Far Beyond The Great Southern Cowboys’ Vulgar Hits, a best-of from Rhino.

Taylor Comes Alive!

CECIL TAYLOR
All The Notes
CJR 1169

CECIL TAYLOR UNIT
One Too Many Salty Swift And Not Goodbye
Hatology 599

I’ve seen Cecil Taylor three times – twice with the trio documented on All The Notes (Dominic Duval on bass, Jackson Krall on drums), and once, less rewardingly, leading a one-off big band. This is his action-painting trio – Duval does his best to saw the bass in half with his bow, while Krall attacks the drums like a shylock’s leg-breaker. Cecil pummels the keyboard at full strength; none of the subtlety of his Victoriaville collaboration with Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley (which many have been unable to identify as a Taylor disc, when blindfold-tested), or the melody of solo recitals like The Willisau Concert or Air Above Mountains, is present when these three gather and mobilize. Gary Giddins has compared the experience of this trio live (reviewing one of the same shows I saw) to being washed in blood, and that’s about right.

All The Notes lives up to its title. I don't think Taylor misses one key on the piano during the course of this punishing disc. There are moments of great beauty, particularly in the second track (of 3), but it shouldn’t be anyone’s entry into the world of Cecil Taylor. Its biggest weakness is that, when I listen to it, I wish I’d been there. Having watched these three sweat and contort themselves over their respective instruments, I have a better insight into the mechanics of collective explosions like the one documented here. Without that visual element to help anchor the performance in physical space and time, All The Notes becomes a tidal wave of sound – an irresistible force, intimidating and not at all friendly. It can clobber you into insensibility, until your mind starts to wander away, forcing you to slowly worm your way back into the music through deep concentration. I’m not sure how many times I’ll return to it in the years to come, but I’m glad to have done battle with it a couple of times already.

By contrast, One Too Many Salty Swift And Not Goodbye, reissued (and it’s about goddamn time!) by Hatology, is an ideal entry point for Taylor neophytes. Though it may seem overwhelming (a double disc, mostly taken up by a single mammoth piece arbitrarily divided into a few tracks), it’s his own Double Live Gonzo or Space Ritual - an encapsulation, one of his greatest recordings, no question.

The Cecil Taylor Unit of 1976-78 was an astonishing band: Jimmy Lyons on alto sax, Raphé Malik (the weak link, but not by much) on trumpet, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Sirone on bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. All four of their other albums (3 Phasis, The Cecil Taylor Unit, and Live In The Black Forest are the others) are currently available on CD, even if Black Forest is a pricey, limited-edition Japanese import. One Too Many... has been commanding exorbitant prices on eBay for years, and to have it in the company of its fellows again is good fortune indeed.

The concert begins with duos – Lyons and Malik at first, then Ameen and Sirone. Lyons understood Taylor possibly better than any other musician, but that doesn’t mean the two men were similar in approach at all. The saxophonist’s duet with Malik is a fanfare, not the concerto for car alarms some might expect. The trumpeter was the weakest player in the group, forever returning to high-pitched, squealing runs in place of melodic innovation. Here, though, he almost rises to the level of the company he’s keeping. The violin/bass section of the intro (for that’s what all this is – the bandmembers setting the stage for Taylor’s entrance) is less abstruse than the trumpet/saxophone section, possibly because two stringed instruments duetting sits more comfortably in the ear than two horns and no rhythm. Speaking of rhythm, Jackson solos for five minutes or so, and every time I listen to this disc, I wonder how Taylor arrived at the idea of hiring him. Sure, they traveled in the same circles a decade earlier – Jackson drummed for Albert Ayler, too. But Jackson’s trademark is the piling of polyrhythm upon polyrhythm upon a bedrock of pure country blues. He’s a psycho redneck jazz-metal octopus. Did Taylor think his band needed whipping into line? Or did he just want Jackson’s incredibly hard-hitting boom-bap behind him as he demolished the keyboard?

In any case, this band fired on all cylinders, all the time, and this double disc documents that, gloriously. Every home should have one, as the cliché goes.

BlueJay's Way

Recently 60 Minutes featured a story about 12 year-old prodigy Jay Greenberg. Young master Greenberg, however, is not just another prepubescent violin virtuoso. Jay is musically proficient to the extent that he is taking and not simply auditing advanced music theory courses at Julliard, can play Beethoven scores upside-down and backwards -- literally -- and has completed five symphonies in the course of about two years (i.e., since he was 10). Jay is a compositional prodigy. This is uncommon indeed. Or, as his instructor Sam Zyman says with unflinching confidence, it means that Jay Greenberg is " a prodigy of the level of the greatest prodigies in history."

Of course, many great musicians start very young. But I have to admit that the 60 Minutes teaser for this story kept me parked in front of the television, and in spite of the fact that the broadcast had been delayed by more than half an hour by a Week 12 slopfest between the Patriots and the Ravens (NE, 24 B, 3). Despite what I know about the fast start gotten off to by Clifford Brown, Mozart, and so many others, I really did want an answer to CBS' ratings sweep question: "What's going on in Jay Greenberg's head?"

The question was not rhetorical, but it did end up being a dodge. No correspondent -- not Wallace, not Murrow, and certainly not Scott Pelley, seemingly cross and permanently brow-furrowed, not unlike The Daily Show's mock bureau chief Rob Corddry in one of his many brain-fart moments -- was going to penetrate the mysteries of the prodigious in any fifteen televised minutes. Instead, there was a good bit of talk about things, mostly "sounds", going in and out of Jay Greenberg's mind. You see, Jay does not sit at a piano with his hair pulled into stiff peaks, agonizing over bar after bar of music. He simply hears the music "playing like an orchestra in his head" and records it. "I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written, when it isn't." Over footage of Jay slouched back at his PC, headphones donned, humming as he pounds out virtual notes on virtual staves with great rapidity, the home audience is told: "All the kids are downloading music these days. But Jay, with his composing program, is downloading it from his head." Later, the camera crew follows Jay on his commute to Julliard. In the subway station, Jay peers into the darkness of the not-yet-arrived but incoming train. It is not that he needs or wants to be especially punctual. "Jay has been told his hearing is many times more sensitive than an average person's. The sounds of the city need to be shut out manually." Jay presses his palms to his ears and grimaces when the train is still mostly a rush of wind and a glob of bright yellow light no bigger than, well, a child of 12. It is as if he is trying to keep the melodies, harmonies and rhythms that are so constituent of his consciousness from leaking out and becoming contaminated with noise. (Children are to be protected, after all, and they need to learn early these days how to protect themselves and their "gifts".) And, judging by Jay's coolly exasperated responses to his interviewer's queries, both the squeal of steel wheels on steels rails and conversations about what it's like to live with his condition count as "noise".

And just what is this condition? CBS' story, predictably enough, focused on the semi-supernatural -- flatly preternatural for the PBS viewers -- aspects of Jay's experience. Although the exact words were never uttered in the course of the broadcast, they could be heard as subliminal signals underneath the carefully edited footage: predestination; channeling; genius; purity; the ineffable. It makes for a better story, pretending by glossing over how he may have acquired the aptitude otherwise, that Jay possesses an innate ability to notate music. Jay's mother, Orna, a painter (his father Robert is a linguist): "I think, around 2, when he started writing, and actually drawing instruments, we knew that he was fascinated with it. He managed to draw a cello and ask for a cello, and wrote the word cello. And I was surprised, because neither of us has anything to do with stringed instruments... This child told me, he said, 'I'm gonna be dead if I am not composing. I have to compose. This is all I want to do.' And when a child that young tells you where their vision is, or where they're going, you don't have a choice." As if Jay Greenberg were born, perchance conceived, literate. Yet any recovering dyslexic will tell you that literacy is a social skill, a product of our being in the world of other people's lives. Nevertheless, the moving pictures of Jay are compelling, and, what's worse, inflame the viewer's awe (understanding that modicum of awe equals a load of dread) more than any producer's spin ever could. Gawky, with a slightly pinched face that is studded with a constellation of moles and fringed with the black down of a baby moustache, his dark eyes flashing with a kind of haughtiness, one could almost believe Jay Greenberg were a genetic anomaly. Or haunted, as prophets are. A transcriber guided by heavenly intelligence. A conduit. (Imposing musical talent typically stirs us to thoughts of the divine -- or the infernal.) An abstraction breathed into being, at least.

"Jay told Pelley he doesn’t know where the music comes from, but it comes fully written -- playing like a orchestra in his head." So does Jay Greenberg have no responsibility for what he produces? If the music "comes" unbidden, isn’t it only his in the same way a Buffalo nickel belongs to the kid who found it while digging a grave for his little green Army men? Because he is a kid, must Jay be answerable for this music? Because he is a kid, and an artist, I want to say: not to any debilitating extent. By the same token, were Jay not so young, he would not receive the attention he does. It seems to me that it is extremely hard, if not futile, to purge ideas of the pristine from music, and certainly a "graced" figure such as Young Master Greenberg is embedded in such associations -- as if, because of his (lack of) worldliness, he is that much closer to music's fundament, the universal chord, the Om / Aum. Any complexity in Jay's music is not evidence of a sophistication beyond a teen's, even a keenly bored teen's, years. Rather, it serves to confirm the wisdom in graciously receiving that which has been handed down to us since days long past reckoning. Its not as if Jay's work -- from the snippets I have heard -- is terminally glib, but it's also not as if he's producing meta-narrative's such as Tony Conrad's Slapping Pythagoras. (This may come as a great relief to some of you.)

To wit, Sam Zyman (again) expands on Jay's abilities with a more qualitatively claim: " Jay could finish a piano sonata before our eyes in probably 25 minutes. And it would be a great piece." Great how? This claim may be verifiable on a purely technical basis. The resulting piece of music is well-formed, is tonal, etc. But the forms are artificial. So I have to posit the idea that, if Jay truly is receiving brilliantly logical, complete sonatas from some source, it is a source much closer to humanity than to Deity. Just hypothetically, how might we deal with the presence of clichés in a Jay Greenberg fugue? Under the circumstances, one cannot rely on Nathalie Sarraute's definition of the cliché: "what people force themselves to think and feel in order to escape from the vertigo of reality." Perhaps such the longueurs and uninspired bits get included because they are nigh unavoidable given the forms in use. Maybe Jay simply plugs what he hears into those reputable old dramatic modes. Thus the clichés would be a consequence of mimicry. Which opens up possibility that all of what Jay is doing is mimicry. Subtly variegated and highly sensitive mimicry, but still just a regurgitation of noises previously heard. Or -- and we cannot ignore this possibility, living in the Digital Age as we do -- that Jay's composing software (application unknown as of this writing) offers the positive feedback, the subtle, as-you-work guidance via templates, pattern detection, auto correction, and simple visual stimulation, that allows Jay to continue to validate the Western canon of musical forms. Perhaps Jay does have to do some shoe-horning. If so, he does not know how to communicate any aspect of how it happens under his fingertips. "When the music enters Jay's head, he has a lot of confidence about what he puts down on paper. Does he ever revise one of his compositions? 'No, I don't really ever do that,' says Jay. 'It just usually comes right the first time.'" With so little separation between the instant of conception and the process of realization, is what Jay is describing and doing that much different from improvisation?

Here's one solution: forget that Jay is a child at all. Because, in many respects, he is not. Jay's brain is so big in one or two (or three) dimensions that that which is esoteric for so many of us, formulae difficult to grasp much less manipulate are for him mere Tinker-Toys. (Zyman again, getting almost into particle physics and Heisenbergian Uncertainty: "How do you notate this rhythm? What's the range of the oboe? Can this be played on the piano? How do you compose for the harp? There are hundreds of thousands of bits of information [read: variables] that you need to master to be able to write a piece of music.") Jay is a dexterous giant, and his condescension is pardonable. He is also his own beanstalk.

Still, no matter the level of genius at issue, why should I concern myself with the inner workings of someone else's brain? I mean, I should understand my own dementia so well. But one of the alternate meanings of "prodigy" is abnormal, even monstrous. Too much humanity, I'm tempted to say. I'm always curious about claims of greatness in our midst, and I understand now that this is very probably a morbid curiosity. I could flatter myself and say my fascination stems from my skepticism. Sure; we're living in the 21st Century, our scientific acumen should be such as to allow us to probe Jay Greenberg, to study the prodigy with suitable dispassion, not get waylaid by aesthetic superstition. How is Jay Greenberg can hear sounds that have no acoustical reality? Maybe those vibrations are really rippling around in his cranium on a freak frequency, but more like seismic waves propagate through the Earth's mantle than a distant flute melody, caught by the wind and striking a note of reverie in a distant auditor. Call in the neurologists and cognitive psychologists, Elefix-up the electrodes on the EEG and administer the Brown-Peterson test. Right? The curious individual in me is perhaps also the hanger-on in me. Or that persona is an eruption of pure envy? Hmmmm. Can the prodigious be treated prodigally? My own musical experiences began very early. One of the first birthday presents I ever received was when my mother exchanged some of her Green Stamps for a toy piano. I played on it for hours every day, but my sister was no fan of my early experiments. When I was four years old, she put her Dr. Denton-ed foot right through my poor little Schoenhut. That was a discouraging day. I also used to love to sit on our back porch (enclosed), perched actually atop the washing machine, conducting with a drinking straw along with arias from Madame Butterfly or the "1812 Overture". But I may have only been imitating my father, who truly could have led an orchestra. I know I used to sing to myself when I was very small, but I was shamed into stopping when a good friend of my grandmother's (her best friend, in fact, whom she still mourns) hinted to me in the way that older people will to young children -- with a wide, terrifying, "we're friends, aren't we!" smile -- that she knew my habits. When I was 11, I took up harmonica, but dental work that summer made it impossible for me to master tonguing and so I gave it up. My consolation was that I never had to wear a retainer, those things which always looked to me as if they would taste like a giant watermelon Jolly Rancher. My gifts were more than simply not nurtured; they were exterminated.

Yeah, what if I was meant for a career in music, a great career. Yeah, maybe... It is not that I wasn't indulged, I was just indulged in other, less rewarding ways. I also suffered the kinds of thwartings that taught me valuable lessons about avoiding the temptation to understand myself too much through other people's experiences ("vicariously" does not quite cover it). Lessons that are often hard to heed. Because talents, even modest talents, cry out for indulgence. Watching Jay Greenberg in his guise as "kid" on Sunday night, standing awkwardly in some park in Manhattan, being introduced to all the subtle declivities and acclivities of his baseball mitt, I thought to myself that here was Charlemagne Palestine in reverse. Jay Greenberg signs his works "BlueJay": "I learned that a blue jay is a rather small bird which makes a lot of noise. I felt that characterized me quite well." Jay does not perform at all, actually, much less perform surrounded by stuffed animals, his own covey of friendly woodland creatures. The Disney-fied bird is his very avatar. And it seems odd as well as fitting that we should encounter a musician proficient beyond his years during a cultural moment in which so much contemporary popular music -- popular music that is both successful and enjoyable-- is fixated on a return to the childlike: Joanna Newsom; Animal Collective; a widely scattered and not-at-all affiliated group of popsters hacking obsolete home video game consoles (Cory Arcangel, Tree Wave) for new sounds; Brian Wilson, now that Smile's long, long gestation is over. While BlueJay appears to be blessed / cursed with nigh-precognitive faculties, the rest of us are prosaically suffering from what Thomas Pynchon diagnosed in V. as a "great temporal homesickness for the decade we were born in." (148)

As an adult, I have dreamed -- not dreamed of -- music that otherwise never existed. I have made music in my dreams, or my dreams have made sweet music. Two definite occasions, the first when I was 19, a slumbering, fluorescent vision of a musical that was part Bewitched (Astroturf lawns, big cars, Googie architecture), part Love's Forever Changes, the big number being a song about a magic broom that would sweep away one side of a love triangle. Then, one night several years ago, I dreamt that I was a modern jazzman, beret and all, a trumpeter. Or I dreamt so deeply I completely identified with a fictional trumpet player of acute inspiration, Van Dyke-d, poised, impossibly, improbably unperturbed by the nastier vicissitudes exhibited by his Muse, such as sweat, doubt, addictive tendencies, or "sincerity". But I can only recall the perfect outline of the solo I played, and the elation of plunging into rhapsody, but not any real musical detail. I remember the waterfall, but could not tell you what streams fed it. In fact, I can only really remember that what I felt was a form of compensation: my imagined inspiration was so melodically powerful, it seemed to subsist outside of harmony and pulse well beyond tempo. Sounds like a wish, doesn't it? Regardless, without Jay Greenberg's ability to transcribe, I only have the vague sense that what I dreamed was truly original music. And because I'm pretty Freudian in attitudes towards dream interpretation, I am more inclined to believe that what I heard and amazed myself with was a pastiche -- not quite a medley -- of much of what I had heard that day, or in the previous days. (This was back when I was processing a lot more new music, one platter at a time, rather than lingering over favorites for days or even weeks at a time.)

Not all fools are fortunate, and not all of the lucky ones are blissful ignoramuses, but Jay Greenberg has been shown favor. He is obviously more than bright (astute?), and, actually, he is forging his own favored status every time he writes / types a measure of music. See, Jay Greenberg is living in a place most children are tricked into wanting to reside in, only to find that they can only infrequently visit, and then only via the help of a mediator, such as story. That place is a dream world. A place where you can write symphonies about things that grown-ups take for granted but which are daily marvels for children, like thunderstorms and what you saw on television the night before. Where you can be a rock star who can still snuggle up with a cup of warm cocoa. Walking, humming, conducting as he trundles his schoolbag caddy behind him, Jay Greenberg's genius is contingent upon a sublime preoccupation. But Jay will be jostled. CBS has given him a preliminary shake, but still an extraordinary one. What happens when Jay begins to undergo all the humdrum and necessary miseries you and I have had to call our own? Will he be able to escape them? Delay them? Caution: to put off those experiences will not prevent them from occurring. A childhood prolonged is a childhood spoiled. It is also a childhood lost. Then there's nothing left to reclaim but the knowledge that you failed to grow when you had the chance.

~ Joe Milazzo

Ellery Eskelin - Ten

Ellery Eskelin Ten	eRikm & Fennesz Complementary Contrasts

Hatology

From the opening moments of Complementary Contrasts’ initial track, a seemingly random array of static bursts, high-frequency whines and blips and aborted and gated drones, a polyrhythmic interplay emerges in which the improvisers’ individual identities become blurred and then meld. The first of this disc’s many intensely beautiful moments, this brief passage combines stuttering rhythm, expansive harmony and an internally generated melodic sensibility to create a texture simultaneously transparent and opaque, akin to the impact of rapidly moving water. The tension then dissolves, leading to a series of tinkerings and metallic meanderings until the next cathartic moment is reached. (While Fennesz forsakes the adventurous sonorities of his Erstwhile collaboration with Keith Rowe in favor of more familiar territory, his timbre choices work well in this context.) The disc as a whole moves in similar cycles; the gelling of ideas, when it occurs, is overpowering in sonic scope and rhythmic intensity, especially at high volume or with headphones. On first listen, the “in-between” bits seemed superfluous, failed searches for synchronicity and scrappy of non-sequiturs posing as dialog. But repeated exposure impressed on me that the journey, the first for this duo on record, is as important a part of this document as is the resultant music—seemingly why both the Donaueschingen concert and its studio rehearsals are included. The structural build-up to each climax is laid bare, demonstrating a musical partnership from workshop to stage, so that when the final monumental soundscape rises, threatens to envelop and then fades rapidly, I now have the admittedly subjective but palpable sense of having traveled rather than merely being a spectator in front of a well-carved monument. The disc’s very brief intertrack pauses enhance this effect, rendering it an experience rather than a collection.

If eRikm and Fennesz bond at crucial moments, Ellery Eskelin demonstrates how telepathic communication functions as a constant. His long-term association with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black, the band whose tenth anniversary this disc commemorates, undoubtedly benefits these totally improvised sessions. According to Eskelin’s liner notes, the original plan -- a rather fluid conception -- was to feature several pieces by the trio and others with various duo and trio configurations of the three guests on this disc: Marc Ribot, electric guitar; Jessica Constable, voice; and Melvin Gibbs, electric bass. On a whim, Eskelin decided to attempt a sextet improvisation in some spare studio time and was impressed enough with the results to alter his objective.. I can see why! Far from being, as Eskelin feared, “a recipe for disaster”” the results are sophisticated and beautiful, often resembling contemporary chamber music as much as jazz. “I Couldn’t Say” creeps into life with Ribot’s clean guitar tremolo and what sounds like a celesta from either Parkins or Black. “When” displays all the interplay of an early Igor Wakhevitch composition, the duo of Eskelin’s saxophone and Constable’s shimmering vocalizings matching timbres perfectly. “Say it Again” opens with Eskelin swapping motives with Gibbs’ acoustic bass and some pointalistic brushwork from Black. Which is not to say there isn’t some fractious free-blowing here, “Anyone’s Guess”, for example, featuring the frantic clatterings of Black over Parkins’ beautifully placed keyboard sonorities; Eskelin’s playing is always a bit understated as he floats above the din. Overall, however, lucidity, born of intense and sensitive listening, reigns, and Eskelin is able to preserve his trio's characteristic sound in the full group setting.

As usual for the Hat label, these two new releases demonstrate remarkable diversity and the highest quality of execution and communication.

~ Marc Medwin

eRikm & Fennesz - Complementary Contrasts

eRikm & Fennesz Complementary Contrasts	Ellery Eskelin Ten

Hatology

From the opening moments of Complementary Contrasts’ initial track, a seemingly random array of static bursts, high-frequency whines and blips and aborted and gated drones, a polyrhythmic interplay emerges in which the improvisers’ individual identities become blurred and then meld. The first of this disc’s many intensely beautiful moments, this brief passage combines stuttering rhythm, expansive harmony and an internally generated melodic sensibility to create a texture simultaneously transparent and opaque, akin to the impact of rapidly moving water. The tension then dissolves, leading to a series of tinkerings and metallic meanderings until the next cathartic moment is reached. (While Fennesz forsakes the adventurous sonorities of his Erstwhile collaboration with Keith Rowe in favor of more familiar territory, his timbre choices work well in this context.) The disc as a whole moves in similar cycles; the gelling of ideas, when it occurs, is overpowering in sonic scope and rhythmic intensity, especially at high volume or with headphones. On first listen, the “in-between” bits seemed superfluous, failed searches for synchronicity and scrappy of non-sequiturs posing as dialog. But repeated exposure impressed on me that the journey, the first for this duo on record, is as important a part of this document as is the resultant music—seemingly why both the Donaueschingen concert and its studio rehearsals are included. The structural build-up to each climax is laid bare, demonstrating a musical partnership from workshop to stage, so that when the final monumental soundscape rises, threatens to envelop and then fades rapidly, I now have the admittedly subjective but palpable sense of having traveled rather than merely being a spectator in front of a well-carved monument. The disc’s very brief intertrack pauses enhance this effect, rendering it an experience rather than a collection.

If eRikm and Fennesz bond at crucial moments, Ellery Eskelin demonstrates how telepathic communication functions as a constant. His long-term association with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black, the band whose tenth anniversary this disc commemorates, undoubtedly benefits these totally improvised sessions. According to Eskelin’s liner notes, the original plan -- a rather fluid conception -- was to feature several pieces by the trio and others with various duo and trio configurations of the three guests on this disc: Marc Ribot, electric guitar; Jessica Constable, voice; and Melvin Gibbs, electric bass. On a whim, Eskelin decided to attempt a sextet improvisation in some spare studio time and was impressed enough with the results to alter his objective.. I can see why! Far from being, as Eskelin feared, “a recipe for disaster”” the results are sophisticated and beautiful, often resembling contemporary chamber music as much as jazz. “I Couldn’t Say” creeps into life with Ribot’s clean guitar tremolo and what sounds like a celesta from either Parkins or Black. “When” displays all the interplay of an early Igor Wakhevitch composition, the duo of Eskelin’s saxophone and Constable’s shimmering vocalizings matching timbres perfectly. “Say it Again” opens with Eskelin swapping motives with Gibbs’ acoustic bass and some pointalistic brushwork from Black. Which is not to say there isn’t some fractious free-blowing here, “Anyone’s Guess”, for example, featuring the frantic clatterings of Black over Parkins’ beautifully placed keyboard sonorities; Eskelin’s playing is always a bit understated as he floats above the din. Overall, however, lucidity, born of intense and sensitive listening, reigns, and Eskelin is able to preserve his trio's characteristic sound in the full group setting.

As usual for the Hat label, these two new releases demonstrate remarkable diversity and the highest quality of execution and communication.

~ Marc Medwin

Bob Mould Band – LiveDog98 (Granary Music)

Here’s one I seek out every six months or so. Cut on the London leg of a European tour, it’s a pretty generous live document from the year Bob decided to serve his band its walking papers and swear an oath to a solo-gig-only lifestyle for the foreseeable future. The move was an attempt to avoid what he perceived as the Neil Young Syndrome. The tendency for aging rockers to forgo the auguries of their advancing years and flaunt a foolhardy belief in the Jethro Tull adage: “Never too old to rock & roll, if you’re too young to die.” Consciously or not, damn if he doesn’t do his best to prove them right, shredding and stomping through an 18-song set running the gamut from Workbook-era anthems like “Lonely Afternoon,” given here a Promethean punch by snarling white noise guitars and skull-ratting low-slung bass, to Bob Mould rave-ups like “I Hate Alternative Rock.” Michael Cerveris rides shotgun on second guitar, matching the front man flange for flange and fuzz for fuzz. The two-prong skyscraper sound works magic on tracks like the opening “Moving Trucks,” Bob’s nth paean to a broken relationship. Bassist Jim Wilson tunes low and subterranean fleshing out the band’s sound beautifully. Drummer Matt Hammon sustains a foursquare propulsive beat. Other highlights to my admittedly-biased ears include an almost dub style hardcore reading of “First Drag of the Day” and an epic seven-plus minute flameout on “Hanging Tree” that finds Bob scraping the bottom planks of the ennui barrel. There’s even room for what might be his most over-the-top angst-ridden title “Roll Over and Die.” Everything culminates with a ripping carousel version of “Man on the Moon”, a tune that playfully borrows the Sun Ra mantra “Space is the Place” in its closing chorus. The Vesuvian racket is fierce and the eighty-or-so minute gig always hits me very similar to the Milwaukee show I caught a month prior to this one. Especially on ear goggles with the volume cranked open enough to send tsunami-sized tendrils of distortion slamming into my Organs of Corti. Bob took stage wearing a light gray t-shirt. By the close of the fifth song it was stained a much darker hue by a heavy saturation of sweat. The memory makes me wish he would toss his ad-hoc moratorium in the trash, reconvene a band (preferably Sugar, Hüsker Dü is too much to hope for) and hit the tour circuit, hard.

Fire Music Under Fire

Adam Hill takes another crack at what he seems to deem abject musical idolatry in this month’s OFN. This time it’s Fire Music and its progeny essayed in the cross hairs. Brötzmann is “low art blown big with hot air.” Zorn’s Masada is “simply punishing.” Albert Ayler, one who oddly escapes Adam’s invective, is “far more inviting than challenging.”

Adam is certainly entitled to his opinion(s), but my own experience with the work of his cherry picked whipping boys yields very different conclusions. Like anyone Brötz, Zorn and Gayle are susceptible to ruts. I was just listening to the Die Like a Dog trio’s exhaustive Never Too Late, But Always Too Early (Eremite) the other night and found the opening cut with Brötz ululating on tarogato for the better part of 19+ minutes a tough slog.

But to discount their respective (and dare I say, individualistic) roars as “trite” or “tired” seems to miss the point of what they’re attempting to convey. Not to mention deflate the decades of effort each has devoted to his particular craft. The argument that all three are overexposed is pretty easy to lodge (though Gayle hasn’t put out a new record in a handful of years). But I for one keep coming back and it’s not because I find the experience “limited” or am somehow trying to “gauge the misanthropic temperature of our anger and disgust.”

Adam holds Gayle’s Touching on Trane under the heat lamp of scrutiny, suggesting that with the artifice & hype burned away there’s little more than a “short, brutish tour” left standing amongst the ashes. It’s one of few specific recordings he names in his indictment. Am I privy to the same disc? For my money there are far harsher more unrelenting entries in Gayle’s folio as well as several (including the album Adam chooses to malign) that contain returning flirtations with melody and lyricism. A personal favorite in is his catalog is More Live, my entry point into the free jazz of the 90s and a set that took me a dozen or so listens to even crack. Is it an ‘easy’ album? One that “commands much more than it demands”? No, but then again why should it be? Why can’t there be worth in noise? Why must the ride be without rigours?

With his most recent piece and the earlier suckerpunch at the EAI idiom as the sum total (so far) of his op/ed work for OFN I have to wonder a little how much of this indignant hand wringing is just an attempt to create a persona of agent provocateur. With each new lambast he succeeds in whittling steadily away at the finite number of styles/individuals left to pillory.

Adam wonders out loud what so-called firebreathers like Brötz and Gayle are trying to communicate. Here’s a novel idea, why not ask them? If the obfuscatory formats of interviews & the music itself aren’t articulating the answers why not fire off a quick e-mail or better yet attend a show (where I still believe this sort of music is best experienced) and query the musicians in person after all the racket stops. This is the primary problem I have with Adam’s argument(s). He seems to stop short of seeking the answers to his own questions, content instead to nestle into an instigative stance built on opinions that assume rather than affirm.

Beñat Achiary - The Seven Circles

FMP 128

Two years have passed since the premature passing of Peter Kowald. His departure was sudden, the rift left by his demise deep. Testaments to his stature, tribute projects continue to trickle into circulation. Die Like a Dog’s Never Too Late, But Always Too Early, the four-bass choir’s performance at Victoriaville captured on After You’ve Gone are but a few of the aural wreathes erected in his memory. This recent FMP release represents one of the latest emblems of esteem.

The extent of Beñat Achiary’s connections to Kowald aren’t explicated much in the album’s notes- the pair used to perform together in a Kurdish café in Wuppertal- but their friendship was such that he felt fit to pay homage at the Music Unlimited XVI Festival in early November of 02, mere weeks after the bassist left the planet. Achiary’s recital opens with an invocational recitation in French, beyond the scope of my meager linguistic capabilities to comprehend. The remaining nine tracks weave improvisatory vocals with spoken texts and percussion played on clutch of small percussion and bamboo pipes of varying sizes and diameters. Achiary’s borrows liberally from the poetry of Gherasim Luca and the prose of Jon Mirande, Federico Garcia Lorca and Josean Artze for the sung passages. Applause is uniformly absent from each track.

Working his cheeks like bellows and using his palms as baffles Achiary presses choppy streams of air through tightly pursed lips. On “Pansori for Peter” the resonances in his throaty ululations recall the basic dynamics of throat singing. Not the otherworldly pitch control of Tuvan strains, but a more primitive and coarse hewn terrestrial variant. At one point his garrulous glossolalia sounds like a strange cloning of an agitated Kabuki character with a chanting Navajo shaman. Towards the close he places some sort of membrane covered hand drum over his mouth to create droning overtones. “Chant D’Exil” joins soaring Cantorial-like singing to the tether of a brittle fluctuating drum beat. His voice turns lilting and fragile for “Pigalle” bobbing atop a spidery lattice of djembe tones before suddenly breaking into boisterous scat.

Affection for this set will largely hinge on listener embrace of Achiary’s quixotic vocal style. He rarely seems content to stick with one vernacular or method of enunciation and frequently romps all over the phonetic map. Clicks, clucks, stutters and sputters constitute a regular part of the ad lib libretto. For me it took some acclimatizing, but clicked on the second trip through. The percussion is frequently incidental, save on tracks like “Harvest Song” and “Nuit Sans Sommeil” where friction-fed drones underpin other free-associative bouts of oral acrobatics. On the latter Achiary delves into a deep African American spiritual groove.

Like its source of inspiration this music adopts a free range perigrinary spirit without equivocation. As Achiary aptly and poetically notes Kowald’s absence is a presence, an entity that will exist for many years to come.

~ Derek Taylor

Charles Calello : Arranger

Concord Fantasy Tutti

What was rumored and reported in June is now official. Concord Records, founded by the late Carl Jefferson (one of jazz's most benign patrons), has closed on its purchase of the Fantasy Inc. holdings, "its huge library of masters, its studios and its publishing interests." That last one is the kicker, naturally. And so the new majority shareholder of John Fogerty's soul is nor Mr. People For The American Way himself, Norman Lear.

Besides potentially continuing the sad saga of self-plagiarism as a footnote to the First Amendment, though, this particular divestiture feels like the end of an era to this listener who built his jazz library on an OJC ("Original Jazz Classics") foundation. The fact that Universal Vivendi is now a partner, albeit just a distribution agent, in this enterprise isn’t exactly encouraging. And given that Concord itself has allowed major portions of its catalog -- not least of which its Maybeck Series of solo piano recitals -- fall out-of-print (OOP), I have to wonder, as respected "audiophile music restoration specialist" Steve Hoffman does, whether this portends major and alarming attrition for the Fantasy catalog as well.

That would be a tragedy indeed, not to mention a condemnation of American acquisitiveness, our wheeler-dealer infatuation with amassing a stockpile of wondrous Easter Eggs -- especially golden ones laid by geese of a different color -- and stuffing them into one basket. Should Concord reengineer biz practices in the wake of this $90 (or is it $80?) million USD stock exchange, we could lose massive quantities of Prestige, Riverside, Contemporary, Stax / Volt, Galaxy, Milestone, Takoma, and Specialty titles might be removed from circulation. We're talking here about some of the most important independent labels in American recording industry history. We're talking about epochal recordings by Miles, Monk, Trane, Rollins, Mingus, Bill Evans, and many others. We'd also be looking at the potential loss of obscure gems such as Webster Young's For Lady, Duane Tatro's Jazz For Moderns, René Thomas' Guitar Groove, Shorty [Baker] & Doc [Cheatham], or your favorite here. I certainly don’t expect Concord to begin throwing money at these sorts of reclamation projects any more. Nor do I expect Concord to be as risk-taking and innovative in the ways that Fantasy has been (e.g., the "Legends Of Acid Jazz" series).

In the interest of fairness, of course, I should say that the OJC series was not always the most consumer-friendly. $11.99 for a 38-minute disc! Then again, if you ordered direct and in bulk, you would get a discount and a shipping waiver, which meant it was easy to take chances on records that looked interesting on paper but, well, who knew how they might play out. More than sneakily encouraging a form of completism, however, the people running Fantasy have long seemed to understand that they are not just running a business. They are fulfilling critical curatorial obligations. Saul Zaentz may not be able to dance, but he was a robber baron in the most honorable sense of the appellation; what my father liked to call "an honest crook". As the era in which so many of these great records were made and first pushed to market recedes a little more with each passing day, and as the individuals intimately involved in the production and distribution of those old long-players pass away, facsimile reissues that retain the original artwork and liner notes (yes, even Ira Gitler's exercises in vacuity) assume a totally different and, I would argue, superior, significance. Under the current circumstances, we are able to examine these recordings "in state" and "in context". Should the new heads at Concord decide, for example, to take out the modestly selling OJCs that focus on Prestige's important Swingville subsidiary, our picture of that label's activities, not to mention the multi-layered, overlapping African-American music scenes of the time (late 1950's – early 1960's) in general, would become that much more incomplete. Just think about the European chop-shop label versions of some of the seminal bebop recordings you may have seen. Made from ripped-off digital or analog masters, sloppily annotated, with basic information pertinent to the origin(s) of the recordings often missing in order (I have to assume) to avoid prosecution, Proper, Classics, or the many-tentacled Fresh Sounds operation ultimately do both the music and the listener a disservice: they leave too much information about the music -- its origins, its legitimacy, its sequence and actual substance -- in doubt.

Come to think of it, why would Saul Zaentz want to sell such a valuable and apparently still-lucrative assets? Copyright may indeed be the key. EU copyrights have a lifespan of only 50 years. The next decade promises havoc for the Fantasy holdings overseas. Did Zaentz decide he could not compete with the Jordi Pujols of the world? Is this sale an acknowledgement that the costs and logistics of maintaining intellectual control of this "content" are projected to be too much, too great a threat to Fantasy's solvency? That seems a bit far-fetched. Especially as, in the wake of the Iraq War debacle, the appetite for American culture dissipates abroad and the target demographic for this kind of musical "sophistication" dwindles back home. Whether out of optimistic defiance ("I will survive!") or bitter resignation ("We can’t give this stuff away!"), Fantasy boarded the high-speed MP3 train early on. And if one thing looks to be sacred in this brave new world, it is that more and more Fantasy properties will be semi-locked down via Emusic.

No explanation of this sale is likely to be forthcoming, ultimately. And, whatever happens, the new owners will put a happy face on the transaction. For the time being, there's still an online order form up at the fantasyjazz.com website. And it is the giving season.

Splurge, baby.

~ This is Joe Milazzo, and I endorse this message.