Bagatellen

Earl Bostic - Jazz Time (Le Jazz / Charly)

I was listening not long ago to guitarist Rodney Jones' The "X" field, a 1995 Musicmasters set featuring frequent collaborator Greg Osby. Fine, stream-lined M-Base style date, and on it Osby takes several unusually up tempos. That's when I started hearing, of all things, an Earl Bostic influence in that "skipping" rhythm Osby trips into here. I'd always pegged this characteristic of Osby's playing as an Anthony Braxton influence, and thus something that came partly out of the elder reedman's study of Paul Desmond. But what if those steps were first laid on the light fantastic by Bostic? Which got me to thinking and flipping through the private collection...

Beginning in the late 1940's and carrying through to the early 1960's (at the least), there was collection of sax players that, in hindsight, really straddled the worlds of R & B, rock 'n roll, and jazz. Louis Jordan (justly celebrated), Big Jay McNeely, Lee Allen, Lynn Hope, King Curtis, Tab Smith, Red Prysock, Eddie Chamblee, and Bostic -- arguably Bird's rival as the most immediatedly recognizable alto saxophonist of the era. And, as my friend Jim Sangrey said when I once asked him if he thought Rahsaan Rolad Kirk "was familiar" with the Bostic school of playing:

Dude, you look at the background of SO many "avant garde" players, and what do you find?

R&B backgrounds. Blues backgrounds. Southern/Midwestern/and/or rural backgrounds. Gospel backgrounds. "Common" backgrounds.

Coincidence?

I think not.

But despite (or because of?) his popular success, and even thought he was probably the most technically accomplished of these musicians -- not that that's any guarantee of good music -- Bostic seems to have been treatly pretty roughly by critical opinion over the years. Granted, I don't really enjoy hearing him play "Twilight Time", and some of the Latin numbers he did are terminally ricky-ticky, mechanical affairs (though they sure do remain dance-inducing). But turn Bostic loose on a good blues or a ballad; wow. One of the best examples of his abilites as a "true jazzman"... whatever that ultimately means; its helpful to remember that at certain points in their careers, jazz "stars" such as Arnett Cobb, Lockjaw Davis, Gator Jackson, and even Gene Ammons were given the same high hat flipped to Hal "Cornbread" Singer... can be found on the 1963 King session Jazz As I Feel It (reissued on Charly / Le Jazz as Jazz Time), with Joe Pass, Shelly Manne, Groove Holmes, Jimmy Bond, Charles Blackwell, and Buddy Collette (as arranger). Fantastic stuff that shows off Bostic's improvising chops, his infectious rhythmic feel, and his distinctive, piquant but huge, tone.

Of course, Bostic's earlier King material can be found in plentiful supplies on CD, of course, and at budget prices (usually), but Chronological Classics has recently issued Bostic's very first recordings in a package that finally begins to accord him some of the respect he deserves. 1945-1948 collects Gotham and King material, and those interested in the transition from swing to bop should certainly look at the bands Bostic assembeled here; sidemen include Tony Scott, Tiny Grimes, Cozy Cole, Benny Morton, John Hardee, Don Byas, Little Benny Harris, Jimmy Shirley, and others. Still, doubters should start with this release.

~ Joe Milazzo

"No Says The Echo": 2 by Jeff Gburek

Orphan Sounds

Perched atop magazine mastheads and perched upon by both musicians and their fans, musical genres are precarious things. With even the most gentle nudging, they can topple into one another. Play AMM's The Crypt at high enough volume, and people might think you've pulled your Blindfold Test item from the Chondritic Sound label. The song scraps of Will Oldham's Ode Music are similar to melodies Alan Lomax or Harry Smith might have recorded on one of his field trips, but the method to which this material is subjected is pure Phillip Glass. Is Beiderbecke's "In A Mist" jazz or some naive example of Impressionism? Did Mongo Santamaria specialize in a Cuban form of hard bop or a particularly street-wise variety of "world music"? Do the tape experiments collected on the Electronic Kabuki Mambo disc (Locust) receive approbation for what they tell us about the depth and extent to which the essential microtonality of much "Eastern" music was a concern of Bay Area composers active during the middle of the previous century, for being early examples of non-idiomatic improvisation, or due to the fact that they were produced by electronic means? But this is genre confusion as a result of speculation. Genre transgression and genre corruption are often only good for novelties: think of used CD store clearance racks crammed with Marilyn Manson and String Quartet Tribute To... and Pickin' On... discs, each one of which, much like The Rolling Stones' Emotional Rescue, should bear a stamp reading "Seemed like a good idea at the time". However, for serious artists, considered movement in and around genre distinctions can be a valuable component of larger, long-term explorations. One thinks especially of contemporary musical heroes such as John Fahey, Cornelius Cardew, Henry Threadgill, Arthur Russell, and others. Certainly one characteristic of a good many early 21st century musicians is that they favor an intuitive disregard for genre as a basis for culling. "If I like it, I feel free to include it, that's what history is for. Rethinking context is what liberation is all about." I wonder what choice these musicians could otherwise make. Not always trained in the traditional sense, they are often extremely well-informed, and have the benefit of knowing what, musically, precedes them as well as what, musically is happening in places very far from where they live and work. If it has all been done, they the most one can hope to do is reassemble that corpus in the most imaginative, perhaps even personal, way. (Which prompts me to observe that it is easy enough to dismiss Post-Structuralist thought now that it serves as nothing more than explanation for the way in which the world has broken.)

All this prompted by two recent limited edition CD-R releases by table-top guitarist, electronic musician and free improviser Jeff Gburek. Although Gburek's music thus might be most conveniently classified as electro-acoustic improvisation, The Only Escape Is A Dream and The Black Transparency, Volume II provide evidence that not only is this "genre" easy to destabilize, but it also benefits from being disturbed. Gburek applies force from the fringes whose edges have melted to fashion this descriptor, with the result that fissures heave up right through the core of the "style". Not all sound artists are also recordings artists. Many sound artists would consider a recording based on one of their installations or events, packaged for individual purchase and engineered for playback on a conventional home stereo system if not an unhappy alteration of their original work (akin to a photographic reproduction of a piece of sculpture) then, at best, another opus unto itself. Gburek is both a sound artist and a recording artist, and although he is not alone in assuming both roles (Steve Roden, prominently), the present recordings demonstrate that his ideas are big enough and elastic enough to justify his not opting for one medium (or forum?) to the exclusion of the other. For these two rather different projects, Gburek mixes industrial noise and spectral ambience, utilizes field recordings (i.e., captures not strictly intentional processes) and offers instrument-based free improvisation. Expanse as well as enclosure is of equal concern to him, and his music is capable of transmitting a sense of both the hermetic as well as the socially engaged. He interacts not only with sound but also with programmatic elements, such as dance -- Gburek's partner in many ventures is Butoh dancer Ephia -- and architecture. In this same vein, Gburek treats as programmatic what we know about listening (e.g., that music is experienced differently depending upon whether one hears it over speakers or through headphones) as well as what we expect of music (e.g., song-form as musical cipher, what song-form transmits: a message and the key to decrypting that message). Finally, Gburek does manage to extract something whole from the churn of all this disparity, yet his concept of unity rather bravely owes more to an unfashionable Surrealism than those -isms -- Futurism, Minimalism, Conceptualism -- that the highest-profile musicians performing music of this variety have claimed as relevant to their activities.

Credited to "Djalma Primordial Science", The Only Escape Is A Dream consists of recordings made as part of a performance installation mounted by Gburek and Ephia in various New Mexico locales (Los Lunas, Fort Stanton and Albuquerque proper). the guitarist describes this recording as an "acoustic documentary... [it] is built from sonically tracing the contours of the various post-institutional asylum sites with microphones and reassembling them." By "post-institutional", one can only guess that Gburek means abandoned structures or, at least, structures which are no longer being occupied per their original purpose. One man's wreck is another man's temple. The titles assigned to the individual pieces (movements?) here, such as "basement 611+" and "kitchen/fntn/jaws*", certainly reinforce the sense that these are interior spaces that are gradually being opened, but unhurriedly and with great care, as if those spaces were bomb cases. Area is transformed into outline, which is not the same as reducing three dimensions to two. Instead, Gburek layers the sonic material -- "taken" from the sites as well as improvised -- in such as way as to reveal the essential contribution one's movement in and through a place makes to the definition of that place. It is significant that Gburek opts for the term "documentary" as opposed to "document", for in know way does his choice carry the meaning of "in actual time". As in a documentary film, accuracy is maintained, but not at the expense of orchestration via the placement of recording devices, the sensitivities of those devices, the use of cutting and splicing, the use of mixing, etc. Gburek takes the listener further and further out of real time as The Only Escape Is A Dream progresses. This represents a real break with the prevailing trends in electro-acoustic music in which improvisation plays a prominent role. The emphasis on improvisation in such music is also a prizing of the instant or sound-by-sound realization of musical form in a mode of unconditioned response. To improvise is thus to be connected to real time, time without rupture. In freely and collectively improvised settings, meaningful events succeed one another and musical dialogue is still rather straight-forward, even when those meaningful events do not involve the generation of new or different sounds but simply the re-positioning of existent sounds, e.g., in an AMM performance in which background and foreground seem constantly to be shifting. No matter how much self-editing an improvising musician exerts upon themselves / what they intend to play -- and the Keith Rowe, John Tilbury and Eddie Prevost are among the most conscientious of improvising musicians in this regard -- the process of collective free improvisation inevitably entails transition, not to mention anticipation. (Granted, much contemporary collective free improvisation substitutes strictly unintended musical gestures, accidents, or sounds produced by attempts not "to play" for impulsive sound. And improvisers are always capable of ignoring their collaborators -- a flatly perverse response -- in pursuit of a musical goal. But such a decision, unless a planned, i.e., agreed upon prior to performance, component of the improvisation's overall design, often results in music that is unsatisfactory to the improvisation's participants, both "on stage" and in the audience. In any case, both strategies are attempts to break the tyranny that traditions of "listening" hold over spontaneous structures. ) Gburek, on the other hand, also operates as a composer; he manipulates his material so that sounds often displace both one another in addition to the very continuity of the musical content. The first look may not be the best look. In terms of narrative, then, the sounds with which Gburek interacts are free to move in additional directions, or they may move in more than one direction simultaneously. When one is self-contained, so to speak, collision can really be a collision and not a temporary concurrence of that which was at variance once and will soon diverge again. The Surrealist welcomes the eruptive and enshrines detritus. The Surrealist abhors tidiness. The Surrealist takes comfort in your uneasiness. But the expert Surrealist is one whose automatism is surgical, efficient and exact, rather than gory. Unlike a surgeon's exposing and severing motions, however, the Surrealist's need not be especially cautious.

That said, consider that The Only Escape Is A Dream's opening track, "rm.315.no.3", features sparse sounds -- high-pitched sine tones, the pops of electrical connections being made and broken, metal rubbing against metal, and ambient throbs, as of motors in precision instruments, or perhaps one's own pulse being checked -- that only gradually achieve meaningful audibility. The need to scan obviates against obvious gestures at first, and the landscape is deceptively bleak. Everything may look as if it is desert, but that is only because the vegetation is sunburned to the same color as the sand, and the sheer distance you are being asked to perceive requires that you protect yourself by blurring what confronts you. Once the readings are taken, however, recognizable guitar textures become noticeable: strum, pluck, scrape, are used very sparingly, a "whang-whang-whang". The real "source" of these sounds, however, is completely open to question. Softly articulated, seemingly random in placement, of very short duration; although they arise from a "musical instrument", they might have been evoked by a hot wind vibrating through the strings as easily as they could have been stirred by hand.

The disc's other tracks are all similarly animated. That is to say, throughout, the accepted elements of what Gburek has expressed in an interview (with Jerry Kranitz) as "the consciousness of pleasure in sound that we then call music" (rhythm, melody, harmony) are present in attenuated and half-effaced forms. Moreover, those musical scraps are buried or pushed into recesses, or concentrated around certain objects, like the stone surrounding an imprint made by a once-living thing, making a fossil. Music thus haunts these rooms and passageways. Music, made by human beings and not some fortuity of nature in force, is effectively wandering spirit. Like a ghost, sound here is disembodied and yet it behaves as if it were corporeal. The blurts of synthesized speech on "kitchen/fntn/jaws*" will no doubt turn off some listeners for whom intelligible utterance is the worst intrusion. Nonetheless, its presence, answered in a clipped hush by the reconnoitering musician, serves Gburek's interests perfectly. Choppily spouting fragments of what sound like instructions ("leave the server on"?), this non-singing voice is that of a human intelligence in search of patterns, patterns that will beget further patterns. As if vitality is locked within those patterns, or to take residence within a pattern, even one that has fallen into ruin, is to guarantee the solidity of one's reality. Yet so much living is predicated on habit, when habit is, like a recurring dream (and not matter how puzzling or distressing) is a form of stasis, and eventually death. It is a theme on which much uncanny literature is based: some pasts are impossible to reclaim, and will only claim the one who delves into them body, mind and soul. In these eerie places, customary music and music-making are evidence of a pathology, or are types of necrophilia. The challenge Gburek has set for himself is to situate himself as an improviser in such a way that he can avoids the dangers presented by the habitual even as he calls attention to the fact that the aesthetic alternatives he has chosen are the most interesting under the circumstances, and, ultimately, the most humane means of discovering sounds that, in his words, "evoke states of physical transformation".

So "underneath" or perhaps "between" the scrapes, waves of feedback (recalling Skip Spence's "War In Peace", of all things, but there's always a band fooling around in the basement...), and up-way-past-the-fret-board pinpricks of guitar tones on "basement 611+" there is a low, sustained frequency that might be hymn-like -- resonating in the chest as opposed to the head -- in a different context, but here recalls the sing-song of air entering and leaving the mouth of a slumbering or sickened person. And we could be inside of a mouth here, which is a sort of cave. We might also be in the midst of a lullaby, a tune that can lift and re-orient noises so that they become more "musical" than their origins would predict they could be. By the time we have moved to "kitchen/fntn/jaws*", this inhaling / exhaling is no longer drowsy and groaning but somewhat desperate, whistling. The tines, concavities and blades of cutlery jangle against one another. The gestures on this track are of rifling, as if something very important has been mislaid. At one point, it sounds as if someone is trying to tip pills out of a bottle. "(t)raum: basalt, granite, limestone" commences with what sounds literally like a trawl across a huge and littered (small stones, bones) and cratered floor. Around the seven-minute mark, there is a loud crack, exploration ceases, and noise rushes in. The microphone that previously extended our perceptual abilities can suddenly be seen as another kind of barrier. Howling and "red lining", amplified static promises at several points to overwhelm, yet the piece ends with a fade-out on the sound of water dripping, running out, running away, and the creaking of what could be a rocking chair or a door swinging back towards closing on rusty hinges. In other words, with the regret clinging to objects left behind and with the pathos of ebbing.

This diminishing, however, is echoed in the rain that falls on "fort stanton walk". Where "(t)raum: basalt, granite, limestone" seems to penetrate the deepest, to the point of pulverization, this final track seems to place us on the roof. Somewhere an alarm sounds. The most guitar-centric of these works, it is also the least conventionally "musical". Gburek coaxes penetrating whines, obnoxious beeps, and high, thin, often descending and grating slurs (a bow or tube of glass or metal being pulled perpendicular to the string) from his modified instrument. Still, overall, the (relatively brief) piece is not so much harsh as detached. It possesses a floating quality, but as of sediment that has condensed into a buoyant mass that remains opaque as well as obdurate. It recalls a painting with which I'm sure I'm familiar † in which a huge toxic block sits like some off-center mushroom cloud at the top of the canvas, connected to the landscape below by a column that is either a tail or a plume. As such, the initial feeling of release, aided by the reflex that reads the image from bottom to top, turns ambiguous. Is this matter rising in defiance of gravity, or it is about to drain back down to the ground? The Only Escape Is A Dream is a work rich in implications. Is configuration identity? What relationship does the reconstructed really bear toward that which originated it? What are the connotations of "site": a place to be surveyed? cordoned off from its surrounding environment? a place to be exploited? something momentous happened there? has the potential to happen there? Can we simultaneously celebrate and mortify the body? While creating, what qualifies as a valid use of people --including oneself -- and what counts as using people poorly? What is it to be dead is not less than human? But what it is to be more than human other than dead to this world? Suppose there really did exist electro-biological organisms that made electro-acoustic sound? Would these organisms, no matter now animate, truly be alive? What sort of mind might this being have? Would it have a mind? (Would "it" be an "it"?) Sentient or not, is such a being's inalienable rights primarily moral or aesthetic? What do we do once we encounter a product of evolution -- which is transformation in its ideal state, isn't it?

On the second installment of his Black Transparency series, Gburek returns to solo free improvisation and restricts himself to sounds sourced from "electric guitar, looped board interface, [and] signal processing." An, as if to provide one set of answers to some of the questions articulated above in connection with The Only Escape Is A Dream, the result is a recording that instead of expanding, with the extravagance characteristic of a fevered imagination, upon a theme instead progresses from multiplicity to austerity. The Black Transparency requires of listeners that they be able to endure, more so than that they willing not to reject what they are witnessing. Much like a Glenn Branca "symphony" or portions of The Hafler Trio's How To Slice A Loaf Of Bread, here a single instance of euphony may be sustained for so long that it is deformed into dissonance, or dissonance pushed past certain limits becomes euphonious. Inside the loop or drone, patience is constitutive of drama, cessation in a mere interval, and complexity is a system in which simple entities -- single pitches, or mutating cells of musical material -- connect with one another via repetition. The object of such music is not to lead the listener through an ingenious labyrinth to the treasure that is kept safe therein, but to reveal to the listener how that treasure is inherently without center. What has been refracted cannot be plundered; it has been scattered, is what encloses, is the obfuscatory rumor of its very existence.

So much for heroism. Not that Gburek seems to mind, or that we should, either. The fourth track on The Black Transparency (all are untitled) is 22 minutes of feedback and signal overload the musician describes as "utter compression, constriction... like heating a fluid to the boiling point and then covering it quickly, so that the [B]rownian motions shudder and ding the sides of the pot." This reviewer would liken the experience of listening to this piece to that of watching a laser beam focus and break apart as power surges through it. Sometimes the photon stream veers away from you, and you lose sight of it, and sometimes you are its target. Of all of the music to be heard on these releases, this is the performance that calls to mind the stances (as opposed to the concepts) of the Butoh aesthetic, with its emphasis self-contortion and self-infliction in pursuit of metamorphosis, metamorphosis being one means of reconciling the inner with the outer. Gburek again: "although it seems loud [I] might point out I recorded [it] with headphones only, the sound does not come out of the amplifiers, very internal dimensions..." Surmounting and conquering are of no consequence now, yet neither is passivity: we just to resist long enough for the endorphins to kick in.

The difference, though, is that this pain is not actual. It is not simulated, either, as these sounds are often ear-splitting and nerve-wracking. But the pain is largely metaphoric, a glimpse into those realms of consciousness that are normally inaccessible. And the opening track on The Black Transparency prepare the listener for this experience. Here, Gburek actually conjures the space, and lets us know that we settling in for something. Volume swells, electronic tones, a chattering buzz: they augment and subvert each other. At one point, this listener could swear that those locust-like sounds are directly behind him. These sounds operate like vertical and horizontal lines that, if they intersect perfectly, point the way toward this vortex's vanishing point. On the third tracks, Gburek fashions guitar figures into loops that quickly decay. This method allows him explore the depth of the sonic field without erecting permanent or even semi-permanent constructions. That is, he does not chase himself, thinks only one or two sounds ahead, and, with the help of a delay effect, strives to make very unlike sounds co-exist as long as they can. Each gesture, not one of which would benefit from being called supple, nonetheless has its own function. Yet more to the point seems to be the trial-and-error combination of these functions.

Until track 4, then, the nature of this location is truly mysterious. It is not empty; it contains a secret. The Black Transparency's fourth track reveals how this secret responds to the threat posed by interrogations of it. It dismembers those questions, transforms those questions' basic impertinence into monstrous phantoms, and unleashes them with indiscriminate force. Musically speaking, this is not that outlandish a notion. Gburek refers to such possibilities when he says "in the improvisatory field... we question silence with out sounds and silence does not, at first, respond." Or imagine what it might sound like if all those lovers who have been jilted, stripped naked, kicked out, kissed off, vituperated against, all those ex-s who have had to listen while only one side of their story is told in song after song decided, all at once, to protest their treatment? It might sound something like this track 4, and not Fleetwood Mac's Rumors or The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs-- which, hurtful as they are, are nonetheless accompanied by their own alleviation in the form of romantic rationale.

The artist responsible for such a reply and such an outcome may have been prepared for it, but the listener may not, at least not upon his / her first audition of this recording. (Orphan Sounds' slogan? "Giving the creeps back to the system.") Does this mean the music loses potency or lacks surprise with each replaying? Not necessarily. The Black Transparency does lack some of the amenities of The Only Escape Is A Dream. True, it also delivers more in terms of what it risks than how it rewards. Ultimately, however, The Black Transparency is the less gripping of these records. Perhaps Surrealism lets Gburek down. Perhaps there is no grace in abomination, and maybe there is no Utopia whose capitol lies in the irrational. Paradoxically, though, as long he remains true to the Surrealist tradition and assents to the value it place upon the bewildering juxtaposition, Gburek can entertain this option. That one of the best ways to prove a hypothesis wrong is to follow its steps perfectly. To do it up right. Revision, then: "Ultimately, however, The Black Transparency is the less emotionally gripping of these records." Perhaps the emotions themselves, being in the main negative (revulsion, terror, agony), are at fault. Gburek does not attempt to excuse his inclinations by invoking catharsis. That cure will not take. What after all does catharsis mean to someone interested in primal energies, in "crossing and re-crossing imaginary boundaries", and in being "deliberately and confrontationally eclectic"? As Antonin Artaud ‡, the arch-Surrealist and Ur-eclectic (world traveler and amateur anthropologist... what an odd muddle of Puritanical and permissive adventures Artaud embarked upon...) whose name appears prominently at the Djalma website, believed, mind is division, therefore torment, selfhood is madness, and catharsis but a spectacle deserving only of reproach. For Artaud, there is always something greater, some totality that transcends all that is fleshly -- including appearance, including genre -- and to which his work refers, but in referencing betrays. Which is just as well; you probably don't want direct access to this authenticity, or want to admit this authenticity access to you, anyway. Best to stick with the accepted violence. I recommend the not-so naked lunch. It really is quite good here.

~ Joe Milazzo

† Now that all my research has not panned out, I'm convinced that I only imagined this picture. I can find nothing in the canons of modern art that corresponds to the description given. But the image itself, and occasionally its colors -- taupe, scumbled red, black flecking -- is now a phosphene no amount of blinking will dispel, and it haunts, as much as latency haunts, every early Rothko, every Helen Frankenthaler, Antoni Tapies, Adolph Gottlieb and Joan Mitchell abstraction I see.

‡ Artaud was actually excommunicated from the Surrealist movement in 1927. To place this break in historical perspective: it would take André Breton another two years to write and to publish the overtly Marxist Second Manifesto, and almost a decade would pass before the remaining Surrealists found their vogue in New York. Even if we accept the deep and abiding antagonism he held towards language -- associations of Surrealism with visual hallucination aside, the "word" was Breton's and Louis Aragon original path to l'infini -- Artaud endures as the purer occultist. For Artaud, his failure to ascend to the condition of what Breton described as "mental matter... different from thought, of which thought [is], perhaps, just one special example" was much more than a noble but doomed rebellion. It was his damnation. From this perspective, then, and despite his fate, Artaud was the true believer, and his former colleagues the heretics.

How Stuff Works

Shillings

Received this message via the Avant-Garde Yahoo! group list this morning...

Apparently two eBay sellers, "donaldbyrd" and "soulful-i", have been contracted by Evan Parker to sell off about 800 LPs this year from his vast collection. Some of these things are very rare, including a copy of "The Topography of the Lungs", the very first Incus Records release, for which the master tapes were lost or destroyed long ago:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=306&item=4068999301&rd=1

... and the rare Brotzmann/Van Hove/Bennink 3-LP box from FMP:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=306&item=4069004811&rd=1

Many of these auctions end later today, so if you're interested, hop to it!

Thoughts on the back story to this sale? Or is it really a divestiture?

Other questions that spring to mind:

• Mostly these are older LPs; is Parker selling these becuase he has claculated that he will get the most return on them, or becuase they really are "old" in some other sense and not likely anything he will listen to in the future left to him?
• How much new music does Evan Parker -- or pick your favorite practicing musician -- acquire, by what means, and to what purpose (pleasure? study? other?)?
• There are quite a few Evan Parker items available here, including both volumes of his Ogun duets with John Stevens, The Longest Night. How does an artists as prolific as Parker possibly keep track of his own output? Is he himself a completist in relationship to it? How might this attitude affect honest appraisals of one's own work? (From these auctions, it appears that perhaps not.)
• When does being a collector get to be a drag?
• When does being a collector begin to prevent personal growth, artistic or otherwise?

  In other words, there are just as many possible good reasons as bad for doing it Ebay...

  ~ Joe Milazzo

  Posted by joe at 8:29 AM | Comments (3)

Two From Kowald

Aria [Free Elephant 004]	Silence And Flies [Free Elephant 005]

Only with the hindsight of his inevitable mortality do the final years of Peter Kowald’s life feel anything like an ebb. He was active until the very end, even playing a performance earlier on the night of his passing, leaving the world abruptly and without fanfare. Tours, concerts and collaborations with an ever-evolving circle of peers were a regular part of his daily routine prior to the sudden finish. That sustained level of activity means a reservoir of music that still has yet to receive wide-ranging posthumous release. Enter the folks at Free Elephant who have welcomed the work of stewarding this legacy-rich archive. Kowald remains the focal point of their endeavors, but the umbrella is also open to encompass those in his immediate orbit as the first Free Elephant release, Gunda Gottschalk’s superb solo outing Wassermonde, substantiates.

Entries four and five in the modestly expanding catalog turn the lens back on Kowald. Aria visits him in the company of pianist Alberto Braida and clarinetist Giancarlo Locatelli and it’s a bit of a frustrating release. The program fluctuates between trio tracks taped in Milan just six days before Kowald’s demise in September 2002 and solo “Cantus” pieces rendered subsequently by Braida and Locatelli in the winter of 2003 and early spring of 2004. Though recorded later and registering at significantly shorter durations of two to three minutes each, these latter tracks serve as far more than filler. They succeed not only in fleshing out the set, but also leaven the often intricate and gelidly intense interplay of the ensemble numbers. The trio’s instrumentation aligns readily with Giuffre Trio precedence, but any semblance in conception and execution ends up only coincidental. Theirs is a more fragmentary and ultimately antiseptic lexicon of shared sounds.

Kowald actually seems a bit stymied by the positioned parameters of the program and the three together are similar tethered by the terse running times. The bassist finds the space to stretch on pieces like “Ricercar II,” carving out stout plucked clusters or bowing florid scurrying bursts, but at other junctures he relegates himself to almost pensive sounding embroidery. Much of it is punctiliously crafted, but points are scarce where he’s truly in a position to put his bull fiddle through the paces. Such bellicose eruptions of emotion don’t appear to be the purpose of this music. Indications arise in the way Locatelli and Braida wear their new music propensities prominently. Many of the tracks, both solo and in trio formation, revolve around incremental gradations in timbre and stoic repetition in irregular phrasing.

The three routinely exercise a preternatural ability in anticipating each other’s intentions, particularly on the “Ricercar” pieces. Locatelli chirps and clucks on both clarinet and its bass cousin, authoring porous lines out of stippled stutters. Braida exercises a comparably precise hunt and peck strategy at the ivories, repeatedly stabbing out dense and dampened block chords. Kowald is frequently left to caulk the cracks with muted harmonic patterns. A clinical austerity cloaks much of the action. It’s a mood that fits with the overriding chamber music schematic, but sometimes results in the side effect of a rather bloodless and severe body politic. This disc holds distinction as Kowald’s swan song studio session. Its relative asceticism, though perhaps fitting given the circumstances that would soon ensue, is made all the more nettlesome in lieu of the dramatic heights he was so frequently fond of scaling.

Silence and Flies documents a solo Kowald concert in the German village of Nigglmühle in late June of 2001 and finds him on more familiar footing. Removed from responsive sounding boards other than the attending audience he digs deep into his voluminous repository of extended techniques. The recital breaks into two spellbinding slabs of music. The first clocks at just over three-quarters of an hour while the finale occupies temporal space just beyond twenty-two minutes. Both pieces carry an episodic essence as the bassist’s fingers stroll from one callus-abrading idea to the next. Virtuosic arco play figures heavily into the first with Kowald sculpting a shimmering brocade of bow-point harmonics via tautly-wound horsehair cantilevered against steel-encapsulated string.

Concentration blurs a bit near the ten-minute marker in a repetitive rut of whirring rotor-blade arcs, but Kowald soon extricates himself with a switch to strenuous bowing pregnant with an underlying propulsiveness. He also makes ample use of the percussive tactic of placing sticks between strings and fingerboard, parsing out deeply resonating rhythms that thrum and throb with the sanguine vitality of a human heart. It’s this ability to imbue his bass with a tonal girth far beyond the scope of most of his peers that truly situates Kowald on a pedestal of his own. Melodic pizzicato strums, leaking lyrical ballast, converge at roughly the mid-point and mark the exploration of another haunting folk-oriented motif. Thirty minutes in his digits scamper at a descending sprint, pecking out a perfect duck-row of spidery staircase notes. At other points his bass mimics the tonalities and traits of other stringed instruments: zither, komungo, koto, Aeolian harp, and bouzouki. Near the close a stretch of ethereal filigree harmonics hardens into coarse-grained drones and Kowald treats the audience to a preciously brief specimen of his throat-singing.

The concert’s second piece follows similar suit with the bassist annexing a few minutes to find his bearings, falling back on a replenishing swathe of grit-flecked arco watercolors that lack the dynamic breadth of what will follow. Beating bow sharply against strings he creates coursing field of rhythmic energy before turning to a deeply contemplative extended pizzicato reverie. Another section opens with what at first sounds like raining droplets of mercury bouncing off a corrugated roof, evolving into a prickly thicket of percussive dissonance. It’s as if he’s attacking his instrument with talons instead of finger-tips. Kowald culminates with a return to a somber motif from the concert’s first half, birthed on a bed of comet-tail harmonics. All told this is an eminently listenable master-class in the contrabass, one without any stilted sentiment or stodgy pointy-headed pedantry.

Both of these discs sketch the primacy and versatility of Kowald’s art with striking accuracy, but it’s the solo outing that truly touches the stature of superior. Listeners who visit either will likely find their ears properly primed for more. Free Elephant appears able and willing to oblige.

~ Derek Taylor

Johnny Coles - New Morning (Criss Cross)

There’s a single, or singular, maybe, reason I love this record: Johnny Coles’ tone. Yes, "warm" as the title of his first session as a leader (Epic, 1961) described it in near space-age bachelor pad terms, but with a cool center. Breathy, slightly hoarse. Maybe its better to say his timbre is singed at the edges. Whatever; the Coles sound is a careful, maybe even trembling grasp of oppositional elements. Coles holds them together as much as their natural tension -- like magnetic repulsion -- does. His is a sound difficult to describe adequately, in such a way that it calls to mind the late David Rosenthal’s description of Art Farmer’s sound – “tart”. Sour, but... sour cream.

Now, usually, I don't dig flugelhorn all that much. Its a little too roly-poly for my taste, and its mechanics can make even the most fleet player sound logy. But listen to how Coles exploits the fullness of the instrument’s qualities on this record. “Johnny Coles... in PANAVISION!” Couple this tone with Coles super-hip articulation, and you have a rare brass player who somehow bridges the gap (which may anyway exist only in my mind) that separates Rex Stewart from Chet Baker. Maybe this is why Gil Evans showcased Coles in the 60’s whenever the arranger wasn’t re-negotiating with Miles and Teo Macero.

I almost don’t have even to listen to Coles’ solos on this record. I could just listen to him play the unusually lyrical theme to saxophonist Charles Davis’ "Super 80", hit the stop button, and be happy. But my curiosity invariably gets the best of me, and I let the track play. Listen to how involved he gets in the harmonies during his solo. In some ways, the solo on “Super 80” is a jazz improvisation that spins out so many arabesques and penetrates so deep that it is nearly "out". And speaking of "out" –- isn’t the title track something else? A modal, flamenco-tinged construct that really keeps your interest and doesn’t just see-saw back and forth from major to minor. This is the track, I feel, on which Coles’ esteemed accompanists really out-do themselves, from Billy Hart’s quasi-AEC opening gong to the oft-kilter, killer groove that the Parlan / Johnson / Hart trio sets up.

It seems to me, in listening to this disc yet again, that, much as I feel that Coles, and not Miles, was the trumpet player born to bring life to Gil Evans’ scores, that the association with Gil may have hurt Coles’ career in the long run. Not only did it force him somewhat into Miles’ shadow, make him Miles’s understudy for many fans, but -- oh, irony -- it deflected attention away from his considerable abilities as a soloist onto his talents as a musical colorist. (I know some have complained that Coles is habitually out of tune. I can’t tell. Or I don't care.) And there’s no question that Coles could shade like few other players could. Perhaps more than his other few leader dates, New Morning really shows off what Coles could do, and how inventively he could do it. That the opportunity came so late in his career seems both a shame and a blessing.

~ Joe Milazzo

William Ash - The Phoenix

Smalls Records 0006

“The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Nowadays, jazz guitarists tend to be stylistically eclectic foxes, but William Ash is a hedgehog: not a copycat by any means, but an unapologetic Wes Montgomery acolyte nonetheless. He’s already released a few discs on Japanese labels, but this new trio album (with bassist Dwayne Burno and drummer Mark Taylor) is his first for an American label. The pleasure of listening to The Phoenix is the pleasure of hearing something simple done right. It’s all about sound, pace, and mood: the elemental guitar/bass/drums set-up; the dark-chocolate live-in-the-studio recording; the originals crafted around terse call-and-response patterns and no-tricks chord changes; the stripped-down but faithfully rendered standards (including a fat-free “Sidewinder”). His playing is direct, undramatic and in-the-moment: there are no climaxes, beyond the inevitable development from plainspoken single-note lines to choppier passages of octaves and chords. It’s as “pure” an album as any Cool School document: not a disc to go to if you’re looking for heart-on-sleeve playing, but a terrific album if you’re looking for something as simple and as pleasurable as a glass of ice water.

Unquote

I have told no one I am working on this piece.

For the poet, the artist, the mystic and the survivor, silence has many facets, zones and shades. Silence has its own texture, its own spheres, its own archaeology. It has its own contradictions as well. The silence of the victim is one thing, that of the killer, another. And that of the spectator, still another. There is creative silence, there is murderous silence. To a perceptive human being the universe is never silent -- but there exists a universe of silence, and only perceptive human beings are aware of it.

Elie Wiesel
Somewhere A Master:
Further Hasidic Portraits And Legends
(1982)
p. 200 - 201

When I first heard this passage -- appropriately, I did not read it "silently" to myself, primarily with my eyes, but heard it enunciated (the voice Jewish, yes, Texan, and theatrical) -- I thought that surely Wiesel was not trying to catalog the many varieties of silence. Such a compendium would be infinite. I am no longer so certain. If you are at all familiar with Wiesel's fiction, you know that "The School OF Work", the chapter to which this text belongs, you understand that the author's aim is not simply to recount the story of Reb Itzikl, his son Reb Mendel, and spiritual meaning of the meekness they demanded of themselves. Wiesel wants his readers to see how the mystical and the pragmatic complement one another. Wiesel also wants to understand how, in our world, silence can so easily be not a sign of steadfastness but a symptom of passivity; how silence can shape our world so that, in it, human slaughter is not only possible, but countenanced.

In a world such as this, in which silence is the mark of the accomplice, perhaps we have a moral obligation to enumerate silences, and thus render them retrievable as well potentially computable. Silence is never equivalent to contentlessness. Our accounting should have modest beginnings... we could concentrate on silence as a component of human expressiveness. We can simply annex silences to the names of known emotions:

• the silence of disdain
• the silence of reproach
• the silence of embarrassment
• the silence of great fury
• the silence of romantic intimacy
• the silence of restraint
• the silence of loathing
• the silence of indifference

The problem as I see it is not that these silences are overwhelmingly Old Testament in affect. Rather, the difficulty is that these silences are not unique. The silence of one who listens, intently (to what he or she is listening is immaterial), the silence of the unanswered question, the silence of "if you don't have anything nice to say…", the queer silence of that which is never heard, the silence of "Hear that?" "Hear what?" "Shhhh… that!", the silence we associate with tranquility: those seem to me soundless states which deliver on the quasi-epistemological challenge to which Wiesel's concluding sentence makes its pledge.

Yes, why all that emphasis on human beings? For silence exists without us, doesn't it? Or does silence change its spots, materialize from the tip of its ringed tail to its inscrutable grin, as soon as it is sure there are no more predatory human beings around? Silence is one with its habitat, and that habitat is a pristine but fragile ecology which we often view as useless, as barren, seek to traverse as expeditiously as possible, but manage so poorly that rather than reclaim it we give it the resources it needs to make incursions into our settlements. Silence as uninvited. It is more comforting then to think of silence as the absence of human utterance. Thus even those silences that represent privation become domesticated, such as in the case of the voluntary surrender of speech that unites the residents of a monastery, each pursuing his personal salvation. Yet, by this definition of silence, a book -- or even a musical score -- is not exactly silent, despite the fact a book is incapable of producing sound unless it is manipulated in some way, i.e., its pages are rustled by browsing fingers, or the writing inside it is used to clear a reader's throat. OK, then. Is silence then that which is free of... free from... without vocal humanity? Is silence that which is without or beyond all sound, human or otherwise? I believe that the former often becomes confused with the latter. As long as there is atmosphere, literal air to be scattered and stirred, silence of the last sort is impossible. (John Cage being one of many but not the first Sensei to observe this.) Human beings have shown a reflex by which they crane their necks and contemplate the heavens with faith that there, in a vastness that no clamor however mighty could cause to reverberate, they will spy the Divine. Wiesel, setting the stage for what has been cited above: "We have so far failed to decipher or even to confront God's silence in a world empty of God -- or worse: filled with God."

There are many silences, but the only silence that matters is the silence that involves us. As a Catholic with a strong interest in Eastern spirituality, I acknowledge that silence as mystery does speak to the problem of humanity's place in the cosmos... if you're an atheist and uncomfortable with this notion, then just think of the SETI technicians at their consoles, listening, trying to discern intelligible patterns in the roiling quiet of interstellar space. (If you're a devout skeptic, then I'm not sure what helpful example I can give you. Perhaps this words from Joseph McElroy's essay "Socrates On The Beach: Thought And Thing", "Talking unchecked all night all day, philosophy in its need of questioning looks endless...") The anonymous Medieval author of The Cloud Of Unknowing views consciousness as both grace as pestilence and seeks to extinguish the feeble illumination of language and darken his mind so that he will not be distracted from the lightning bolt of divine visitation he is sure will strike. For him, inner quiet is rauisching in Middle English, ravishment, to be abducted or carried away, transported, impelled into ecstasy. Silence become climax. Silence sunders us from the quotidian and the corporeal. Corollary to these notions is that silence itself can be broken. Its breaking can represent a breakthrough, as when an autistic, thought drowned in a inner ocean of muteness, emerges from those depths and gulps the oxygen of speech. Or this breaking can be a breakdown, as when a confession is finally extracted from a suspect. Silence is dear, tightly held, secret. Silence can also break in: a radio signal crashes into some interfering structure, a hand is clamped over a mouth, a door or window is slammed shut and the music of the street can no longer disturb. The silence, then, of being sequestered, quarantined or otherwise drastically confined. In sum (how cabalistic), silence as exemplum of experiences, if not lonely, then at least inward in station and reach.

Wiesel says silence is one thing, then -- quick cut -- silence is that thing's opposite number. Wiesel is not a contrarian (I don't think) or a witness out to expose any particular silence as an imposture. But he does testify to the integrity of silence's obverse. He must take up this defense because silence must be scrutinized from the other end of the exchange (whether of argument or of action) that silence itself invariably does open, even if it seems just as suddenly to forswear dialogue. I see; Wiesel is not making an inventory. He is presenting us with the beginnings of a list. So I am back where I began, only not exactly. Realize, no list of silences could be ever be completed, and, in fact, the very initiative would seem to deny silence itself by depleting it. And as no list can the paradox -- without substance yet inexhaustible -- that is silence, no list can limit silence's mutability or fix it in a sequence of manifestations. All a litany such as this can convey is that silence is not some exactness other than these exactnesses. There are therefore innumerable noises that exist outside of the vacuum created by this litany of silences, some of them profound, but only insofar as they eclipse silences heretofore not encountered.

Implicit in every litany is the pause, and so the litany binds silence to discourse. Like certain kinds of music that lingers over low volume events (Lachenmann's „…zwei Gefühle…”, Musik mit Leonardo, Taku Unami's intransigent towards the detectives of capital), the list ensures that silence does not become extinct even as it prevents silence from growing over all our works in a flourishing devastation. Like a great jazz solo, even one as Aristotelian as, say, Ruby Braff's (trumpet) on a 1955 rendition of "Button Up Your Overcoat" with Mel Powell (piano) and Bobby Donaldson (drums), a list thrives on divergences as much as it does on concurrences. Like a collective improvisation or a late novella by Henry James, a list allows insertions. How I love litanies and they way they fool you. Litanies -- "on and on", tedious by most definitions -- do not preclude possibilities, but entertain them. How I want to proclaim after but not like Job that all narratives are litanies. Or, allowing myself a juggle, how narrative is all litany. It occurs to me how writing is all about the interruptions. That the best ideas come when I walk away for a moment from the notes, the desk with the ergonomic chair, the tap-tap of making marks and then wiping them out to tap-tap more worthy (I hope) marks in their place. Editing is impossible with interruption. Interrupt yourself with doubt, with straining for the exact word, with the exhortation that you aren't thinking hard enough through the theme. The act of listing is the process of moving to the next alternative, an alternative which is more interesting that its predecessor, or more general, or more specific, more or less ambiguous, or, perhaps, is an alternative that recaptures the essence of an alternative already chosen but for some reason forgotten. Like music or story, a litany takes time. Every list has its own interims, its own valences. Listing enacts the hope that one can simultaneously release and stem the heedless onrush of thought. Again, from The Cloud Of Unknowing: "Consciousness in itself is a faculty of such a kind that, so to speak, it has no proper activity of its own." So a list's progress is deceptive, for it is always being delayed and reordered, and it disguises the way it branches and involutes unless you understand that, like silence, a list is not one form, but, in its nodal construction, the potential coexistence of several forms. Both silence and the list, including the list that would be about silence, embrace the non-responsive. Silences and their negations: they presage and approach and spill over into one another.

When Wiesel says, "[t]o a perceptive human being the universe is never silent -- but there exists a universe of silence, and only perceptive human beings are aware of it," he is telling us that, more than it is fitting to inquire into the thunderous and through the dramatic, it is fair to ask about silence just as it is appropriate to ask of the litany: "When will it stop?"

• the silence that descends on the battlefield once the hostilities cease
• the silence of humility
• the silence of the absolute
• the silence of the abandoned
• the silence of reduction
• the silence of longing

~ Joe Milazzo

Conelrad

Millie Jackson - Caught Up / Still Caught Up (Hip-O)

Love affairs and their ruinous consequences have long served as fodder for musical commentary. From “Frankie and Johnny” to Bob Mould’s “Thumbtack” popular song is rife with indictments of infidelity and the cheating heart. Most of the time the point-of-view fixates on the jilted spouse or lover, the lyrics scripted as a cathartic means of leveling guilt and weathering grief. Millie Jackson tilled a fresh plot of ground with the back-to-back albums captured on this budget-priced two-fer. Widening her lens to encompass not only the voice of the archetypal wronged woman but also the unpopular angle of the woman doing the wronging she crafted an influential landmark. Both records are high concept Soul sagas. Caught Up outlines each side of the affair (conspicuously leaving out the vantage of the man in the middle) as first the “other woman” and then the wife state their emotion-fueled cases and concerns. Side A is a minor revelation as Jackson pulls no punches in running down a first-person account of the nameless coquette’s conceits and deceits. “The Rap” proves especially revealing as the woman rolls out a cold-hearted checklist of her devious tactics in snaring a married man, noting: “you can think of a whole lotta good stuff to tell a nigger when you're by yourself” over a tight funky backdrop supplied by the legendary Muscle Shoals Swampers. Another kernel of callous wisdom: with a married man “the sweetest thing about the whole situation is the fact that when you go to the Laundromat, you don’t have to wash nobody’s funky drawers but your own.” The inevitable confrontation between seductress and scorned wife occurs on “All I Want is a Fighting Chance” with the former audaciously pronouncing to the latter “we’re wives-in-law” atop a chugging fuzz-tone guitar and riffing horn rhythm. Later songs sketch the ensuing train wreck of the triangle with tight (if occasionally sappy) musical arrangements and Jackson’s always passionate oratory. Still Caught Up reverses the testimony order, opening with the somewhat implausible plot turn of the wife offering an olive branch to the adulterous husband and the tables turning poetically on the duplicitous “other woman.” Everything wraps with the now-abandoned vixen’s colorful and histrionic descent into cackling jealous hysteria. Plenty of supremely soulful jams pave the story along the way from inception to denouement, making the journey’s various excesses more than potable.

Four Color Fandom

Plane trips offer some of my most productive time for reading, especially on travels to and fro Tucson where my folks live. A few days prior to taking to the friendly skies this year I stopped by the library to peruse the new non-fiction shelves. The tome of choice for the holiday flight ended up being Give Our Regards to the Atom Smashers! Edited by Sean Howe, a former editor at The Criterion Collection, it's a slim-bound colorfully-covered anthology of writers waxing nostalgic about comic books. Howe, an inveterate comic freak himself, cherry-picked a broad round table of writers that includes: Greil Marcus, Luc Sante and, much to my surprise, Gary Giddins among about a dozen others.

The seventeen essays run a fairly wide gamut in terms of subject and voice. Howe left the latitude largely up to those he tapped asking only that their prose be related at least peripherally to the four color medium. Many of the authors capitalize on the freedom and end up covering lively creative ground. There’s a bit of now-moot stumping for the art form’s worth as serious literature along with occasional hand wringing over its historic marginalization. But Howe and the writer’s wisely rein it in. Some of the best essays include:

It Came From The Basement

That's right, the dates, times and line-ups for the 3 Brooklyn days and nights off the 2005 No Fun Fest have been announced. I will have to reserve any fist-pumping re: the particulars of noise bacchanalia, as with few exceptions -- Hair Police, Chris Corsano, Nate Young (DJing), Alan Licht (ditto), SUNN O))), Sightings/Tom Smith, Hive Mind -- I know little about these acts.

But it is worth noting that this is (at least?) the second of these gatherings, and that, again, it looks as if the organizers have managed to invite a diverse area of underground musicians from across North America. (The DFW folks I used to know who were heavily into cassette-trading, amp detonation and the pursuit of the ugliest "Om", the "brown sound" -- Wheatboy Dave where are you now? -- do not seem to have received an invite, though.) The Bagatellen. piece explaining just how and why this North American scene thrives differently, aligned with but not necessarily allied to somewhat higher-profile noise happenings in Europe and Asia. That piece can wait; the fact remains "ours" is an entity in and of itself, internally quite diverse, and ultimately a significant expression of global concerns about brutality, both in the arts and in those communities in which each of us make our homes.

It also should be said that several of these artists are not simply kids who have stumbled into what it is they do. Some have been mangling waveforms and outraging the senses since the 1980's. So, while Rolling Stone and Spin were hyping the godawful Prodigy and their ilk as rock and roll saviors who were going to make the clanging and beeping of automata palatable to the masses, artists like these were, by disdaining the mainstrean, scouring second-hand stores for obscure No Wave and M.E.V. records, and basically just fucking around, doing as much as anyone to keep electronic music vital and, I submit, true to its "roots".

In closing, I would say enjoy, but...

~ Joe Milazzo

Joe Giardullo - Weather

Not Two MW 755-2

Solo soprano saxophone albums in so-called free improv are surprisingly frequent these days (think Alessandro Bosetti, John Butcher, Stéphane Rives, Michel Doneda...) but in jazz they're still relatively rare, probably because the musicians concerned don't exactly relish being compared to Steve Lacy, whose work still remains something a benchmark in the genre, albeit an idiosyncratic one. In fact the distinction I'm trying to draw is a rather silly, maybe even nonexistent one, insofar as three of the four pieces on offer on Weather are marked as Joe Giardullo "compositions" (though they sound pretty open and improvised to me). The fourth track though is most definitely a composition, and a well-known one too: Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" (rather sloppy titling, that: in fact it's "Acknowledgment"). Giardullo, taking advantage of an intimate acoustic and attentive audience in Cracow's Klub Re (home base for Not Two's Marek Winiarski), seeks to lift Coltrane's work gingerly down from the ridiculously high pedestal on which it's been placed over recent years and return it to the domain of the personal, the introspective. It's a lonely business, playing solo, especially if you happen to choose a theme that everyone in the room knows well enough to imagine the harmony of (which is probably why the vast majority of solo horn albums don't contain cover versions). Joe Giardullo might be pleased to read – though I'm sure he knows it already – that I hear hardly any Lacy in his work at all, either in terms of structure – he's far more rhapsodic and given to flights of fancy than the clinically precise (though never cold) Lacy – or sound. Lacy's sound, like John Coltrane's on the instrument, was fat, round and rich, while Giardullo's is leaner, more fragile and feminine and content to explore the cracks, especially on the beautiful title track, which sustains interest effortlessly over nearly 19 minutes: no mean feat. There is, though, another reference when it comes to soprano sax playing, in the form of Evan Parker, particularly his legendary circular breathing outings, and hearing Giardullo try his hand at the same sort of thing on "Times Change" – albeit using harmony that sounds more like Phil Glass – leads to a twinge of regret. Not much of a twinge though, as it's still a fine, coherent and impressive piece from an album well worth hunting down.

~ Dan Warburton

Brötz's Power Trios

Atavistic/UMS 149

Victo 93

It’s been a while since I’ve heard any new Brötzmann. Still enjoying something of a creative renaissance (or perhaps simply an invigoration through greatly expanded exposure), Herr B. has clearly had an abundance of energy since the mid- to late-1990s, when his Die Like a Dog and Tentet groupings marked a series of new alliances with younger American and European improvisers. There were pretty big waves of excitement that initially greeted these activities, but in the last five years Brötz’s listeners again have polarized: at one end sit those committed listeners who study his solo work and hear the nuance in his tarogato, the subtlety in his balls-out tenor salvos, and the clarity in his ensemble work; at the other end we find those who tire of his relentlessness and the purported sameness of his playing regardless of context. Regardless of their eventual opinion, neither camp will be able to deny the power and conviction of these two very different recordings.

Medicina features one of Herr Brötz’s lesser-known groups (he is in quite a number of them, despite the fact that the above-mentioned combos receive by far the majority of coverage), a power trio with electric bassist Peter Friis Nielsen and drummer Peeter Uuskyla. This new date is actually their fourth release. Though the record is divided up into eight tracks, each nominally composed by a member of the trio, the 75-minute recording has the feel of a long, lusty free improv session. As is often the case in a live setting, Brötz is inclined to visit each of his horns – alto, tenor, tarogato, and clarinet – and touch on a number of familiar feels, from raging full on (the bellicose “Justicia” or “Artemisia”) to groove based blowout (on the opening “Rocket Tango”) to melancholy repose (the fine “Some Ghosts Step Out”).

The texture here is certainly different than one might expect, owing largely to Nielsen’s fairly supple electric playing and Uuskyla’s unique timbres (his sound and approach to the kit owe a bit to Sven-Åke Johansson). The electric bass is a widely scorned instrument, at least as far as improvised music fans are concerned. But Nielsen is quite resourceful, coaxing moans, sighs, burbles, and thunderclaps out of the thing, shying away from Laswellian excess (think Last Exit) and fret-monster locquaciousness alike. So the trio is a basically sympathetic unit, and their music is as good as any small group stuff Brötzmann has recently released. It’s not particularly my thing but for those who like it loose and hard charging, dig in.

Somehow The Bishop’s Move, though featuring real veterans and thus perhaps seeming like it might be more predictable, ends up being the fresher and more satisfying of these two recordings. Most people know the back story by know: Brötz’s trio with bassist William Parker and Hamid Drake was on tour at the same time as Parker’s group with pianist Alex von Schlippenbach (subbing for Barry Guy) and percussionist Paul Lytton. Some scheduling tweaking was done, and the two groups appeared onstage simultaneously at the 2003 Victoriaville Festival. The result is this 73-minute slab of exuberance, history, and possibility.

Each of these long-standing trios has its own distinct style of improvisatory momentum, Parker’s trios tending more towards a mercurial sizzle and Brötz’s towards a tumbling force. Believe it or not, it works quite well here. It’s not just that the musicians give each other lots of space – they do, letting each independent group do its thing while also allowing the collective to permutate into several different sub-groupings (including an excellent section with Schlippenbach, Drake, and Lytton; a superb section highlighting Brötz’s tarogato and Drake’s frame drumming; and a slightly less compelling encounter between the two Parkers) – but they also sound pretty damn fine as a whole (though there are surprisingly somewhat few moments when the two horns play together, one frequently ceding to the other, as Parker quickly does upon Brötz’s brusque entrance 1/3 of the way through). True, there are a fair number of awkward moments, periods of tentative reserve where the music is held up for fear of toe-trodding. But on balance I have to say that this is a surprisingly varied and vigorous set that will please even the jaded.

Creations Dunois

[Link originally supplied by Dan Warburton; English translations by special request only.]

Here's a wonderful site commemorating the many concerts of jazz and freely improvised music sponsored by Paris' "collective of the 28 street Dunois" from 1982 to 1986.

With over 50 streaming video clips -- all in the 1 to 1 1/2 minute range -- to view, the site is bound to make sure the average new music fan is even less productive per 7.5 hrs. spent at the day gig. I know I've certainly never sen performance footage of The Recedents, Bobby Few, or Han Reichel. Plus:

• a 1982 clip of Tony Coe and George Lewis, with the clarinetist pacing and running scales behind Lewis, seated, as he "tests" mouthpieces on his trombone; to the uninitiated, the whole thing must look like a very strange sort of waming up;
  
• in another 1982 clip, a member of the Aoxlotl ensemble -- or is it the sound-man? Dan? -- casually sips a glass of red wine and then, as if slowly noticing that the camera has turned on him, leans into the fray;
  
• John Stevens in full but cool flail in January 1986 with an edition of Detail featuring Paul Rutherford, Frode Gjerstad (why is he standing so far back from the mike?), and a bassist who is billed as Johnny Dyani but who rather resembles Kent Carter (just a guess);
  
• a Sam Rivers / Mal Waldron duet;
  
• Sonny Sharrock with quartet from 1984, the guitarist looking and moving over a nasty electric bass ostinato like a Run DMC-ed-out B. B. King -- black windbreaker, black jeans, broken strings trailing from the neck of his black Gibson Les Paul;
  
• and more.

The quality of the video is quite good, "professional" as they say, with multiple cameras obvious in some clips. I know nothing about the circumstances of filming, but here's hoping that this is just a teaser for a comprehensive DVD set of Dunois material.

Enjoy.

~ Joe Milazzo

Anthony Braxton - Charlie Parker Project 1993

Hatology 2-612

Braxton’s single-composer tribute albums began in the late 1980s with the Monk album for Black Saint and the Marsh/Tristano album for Hat Art. After a few years’ gap came this double-album, which remains something of a lightning-rod for discussions of Braxton’s abilities as a player of standards. It takes a different tack from most of his other standards projects, which have typically featured relatively conventional rhythm-section accompaniment; instead, he’s surrounded here by a crew of sly-devil avant-gardists who aren’t shy about messing around with – or just plain messing up – these tunes. Trumpeter Paul Smoker (who used to work with the reclusive bebopper Dodo Marmarosa, by the way) and saxophonist Ari Brown fill out the front line, and there’s a jolting-jalopy rhythm section: Misha Mengelberg on piano, Joe Fonda on bass, and Han Bennink (disc one) or Pheeroan AkLaff (disc two) on drums.

The original sessions took place over three days – a Zürich concert and then two days in the studio in Köln. Several tracks were discarded because of recording flaws, which might explain the not-quite-the-whole-story feel to the album: Brown, for instance, is sidelined for long stretches, and AkLaff plays on only four tracks (most of disc two is drummerless). The music on this reissue remains the same as on first release but is given a welcome facelift by Peter Pfister’s remastering. The original cover (a close-up of Braxton’s pensive head) has unfortunately fallen foul of Hatology’s current design programme, which favours drab, unpopulated urban landscapes. Essays by Peter Niklas Wilson and Alex Dutilh have been dropped from the liner notes, but at least Graham Lock’s informative interview with Braxton is still included, and this time around the composer credits are actually accurate. Pia Uehlinger’s original role as co-producer is, as usual with Hatology reissues, quietly excised from the credits.

So what’s this album about? The core problem is that any response to it is going to be seriously overdetermined. There are “free” tracks on here, but many of the tracks are faithful enough to bebop convention that you can’t help comparing them to “competent” bebop performances – from which perspective the playing here is often perfectly frightful. But, aha!, there’s the readymade argument: of course Braxton isn’t interested in producing copybook bebop – he’s interrogating the bebop legacy (Dan Warburton even uses the dread word “deconstruct”...). From this perspective Braxton is faithful to the spirit of Charlie Parker, not the dead letter. This is the point at which the Braxtonophile inevitably mentions Wynton Marsalis, and the argument proceeds down a more or less predictable path.

What makes playing wrong sound right? It’s eventually up to the listener to make that judgment call. But I get the impression that many Braxton fans are unwilling to acknowledge how much is wrong. Which is just a sign of not paying attention, or not wanting to – because there’s a lot wrong on this album by any usual standard. First of all, Braxton loses his place a lot. On “Hot House” he goes astray a mere 7 bars into the tune, fudges the second A section, and the band finally has to drop a bar to sort things out in time for the B section. On “Passport” he forgets where the B section is and adds an extra 16 bars. On “Dewey Square” Braxton returns to the head at the wrong spot, and he and Fonda are forced to fudge the ending. And it’s not just Braxton who’s messing up, it’s the whole band. The heads at the start of pieces are messy, and the restatements at the end are worse: the players rarely manage to scramble back to the head without lots of turned-around beats and extra bars. “Koko,” the album’s last track, turns into a real melee, unravelling after Misha plunks down the opening chord of the B section (rather than the A section he’s supposed to be playing) and the others become increasingly befuddled.

It’s not that seasoned mainstream jazz musicians don’t make mistakes too – they do, all the time – but that they also have highly developed damage-control skills that permit rapid and sometimes unnoticeable recoveries. Whereas problems here often go unresolved for long stretches: virtually all these tracks feature extended ships-in-the-night passages from the rhythm section. (A particularly awkward passage comes at the end of the live “Klactoveesedstene”: Fonda and Bennink lose each other and never do hook up again.) To be sure, a lot of this chaos is deliberately cultivated – Bennink and AkLaff are each in his own way equally unhelpful and Mengelberg is positively treacherous – but this is making a virtue of necessity. This band couldn’t play it straight even if they wanted to.

Does any of this matter, except to bookkeepers and the jazz police? In a certain sense it doesn’t – Braxton’s playing doesn’t depend on exact harmonic navigation anyway, so if he misses a few bars, so what. He tends to alternate between two strategies: 1) leisurely which-way-am-I-going slithers up and down the chromatic scale or the home scale of the piece, with a thinned-out, erratic tone; and 2) fast-as-possible scurrying around, his tone now thick and hoarse; every so often he lands on a note with a triumphant cock-crow and proceeds to jiggle it violently back & forth. One never gets the impression of a player at ease with manipulating materials – for instance, the kinds of fluent transposition and variation with which orthodox jazz musicians develop solos. He’s on the hunt for happy accidents – which come frequently, but once they’re elicited stay stubbornly in place, however excitedly he fusses over them.

What I’ve said so far concerns his “straight” jazz playing. Listen to his free playing here, on the other hand, and it’s contrastingly pithy, elegant – in fact downright exquisite. This delicacy is especially evident in a series of short tracks on disc two, which feature chamberish instrumentation (drummerless trios and quartets), languorous tempos, and the more delicate instruments in Braxton’s arsenal: sopranino, flute, contrabass clarinet. (Yes, in his hands the contrabass clarinet is delicate, not a monster – when he pulls it out on “Scrapple from the Apple” and “Sippin’ at Bells” it casts a hush over the music.) Braxton’s standards albums have often suggested an itch not only to play fast but to speed things up – sometimes ruinously so, such as the reading of “April” once memorably savaged by Lee Konitz in a Wire Invisible Jukebox. But much of the best music here comes when Braxton defamiliarizes bebop by slowing it down, making it more lustrous and more tentative.

But, though it’s tempting to just say that the free tracks are good, the straight tracks chronically awkward, it’s impossible to be as clear-cut as that. It would be easy to mount both the case against and the case for this album, yet I’m not sure I want to do either, even though I can’t dispose of my irritation with its pervasive sloppiness (not just jam-session sloppiness: it’s something more deep-rooted). As I reread the foregoing paragraphs they seem (to my eye anyway) less and less judgmental, more and more just plain description. This is what you get. Do you like it? If you don’t shudder from time to time, or shrug in despair, you’re either a true believer or just not listening very carefully. If you don’t like it at all – well, you probably just don’t like Braxton.

Count Basie - Good Time Blues

Pablo 5319-2

The dawn of the Seventies marked a relatively bleak time for the Basie Band on record. Swing sales were in a serious slump and even customarily lucrative European tours were tougher to come by. The Count responded to the waning tastes in a manner comparable to his immediate peers. He hit the road harder and longer, stewarding his sidemen on grueling schedules that sometimes involved road-stints of over three hundred days in a single year. On the fortunate side the orchestra was stocked with players who could handle the rigours and lean rewards. Old hands like “Sweets” Edison and Freddie Green filled slots right alongside journeymen like Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Sonny Cohn and newcomers like trombonist Mel Wanzo. By most accounts, all took the tribulations in stride, the privilege of serving in the Count’s court a potent counterweight to any physical or financial discomfiture.

This new Pablo disc’s proffers an airshot from a gig in Budapest, Hungary in the spring of ’70. Basie’s outfit registers at a formidable sixteen men strong, with Carmen McRae-influenced vocalist Mary Stallings joining the fun for two numbers “Four or Five Times” and “The Party’s Over.” The set’s fourteen tunes tick off in rapid succession, a sort of on-stage Basie jukebox with most clocking at three minutes or less. Lockjaw earns bragging rights as the most frequent soloist, muscling through meaty choruses on tracks like “Light and Lovely” (for which he also supplies the arrangement) and “Magic Flea.” Saxophonist and flautist Eric Dixon handles the majority of arranger’s chores and revamps both “Summertime” and “A Night in Tunisia” into spirited features for Harold Jones’ Buddy Rich-style drumming and “Sweets” Edison’s sassafras trumpet, respectively. The former tune receives a shot of rhythmic nitrous, as the horns dispense with the theme and commence to riffing at a racing clip behind the soloists. The latter makes fortuitous use of the familiar loping theme in a layered foray buttressed by Cecil Payne’s plush baritone. Edision’s pungent brass also garners the spotlight on the lengthiest cut, a nine-minute rendering of Quincy Jones’ jaunty blues “I Needs to Be Bee’d With” that also yields some killer Green.

Dapper Basie adopts his usual utilitarian and understated stance. His spry digits preface several of the tunes with sleek piano preambles that say more with a handful of strategic notes than most other pianist’s are able to convey with a songbook full. It might seem like easy hyperbole, but his impeccable and intuitive sense of swing anchors each and every number. Also advantageous, Basie leaves little room for filler and the disc carries the welcome quality of an LP in its economical forty-nine minute scope. Sound quality is notably clean and scrubbed free of blemish. Basie enthusiasts and listeners with fondness for large group swing should waste no time in adding this disc to their grocery lists.

~ Derek Taylor

William Parker - Testimony (Zero In)

Pressed on the tiny and now extinct Zero In imprint out of Austin, TX (an apartment address on the tray card is always a telltale sign of shoe-string finances), Parker’s second solo recording represents the good, the bad and the ugly of his monologue style on bull fiddle. I first caught him in person in just such a setting, summer of 97’ while doing an internship at Smithsonian/Folkways. His was the second concert presented by the then fledgling Transparent Productions -- a cadre of volunteer "promoters" who would go on to curate over a hundred performances under the aegis of awarding players one hundred percent of each event’s proceeds. Against the odds, they’re still going strong. The recital took place at Kaffa House, a tiny corner pub (much like the Knit where Testimony was taped) and WP pulled out all the stops, at one point cantilevering a separate bow against each of his four strings to create a floating grid of tentacled harmonics. Similar tactics deploy on disc. The five tracks represent full two sets, tugging at the maximum capacity of the medium. Parker punishes and massages his bass in equal measure, falling prey to his tendency to cleave and burrow away mercilessly at his strings to the point of near tedium. The fidelity, rendered by a single stage side engineer, is coarse-grained and muddy. These are the major minuses, but the music still ends up transcending them. Parker’s massive technique, his canny ability to coax, in his own parlance, tonal rainbows is frequently in full, sweeping effect. Streaks and splatters lift from his fingerboard like arcs of paint flung from an action painter’s brush. There’s so much incandescent and percussive bowing, that a place of prominence for his mighty pizzicato capabilities is hardly missed. Parker has recorded at least one more solo album since this one, ‘97’s Lifting the Sanctions, but my preference goes to its predecessor as the more engrossing and electrifying excursion. Today marks his fifty-third birthday; hopefully his celebrated fecundity will continue for many years to come.

~ Derek Taylor

John Zorn - 50(8) and 50(9)

Tzadik 5008

Tzadik 5009

Zorn’s vaunted 50th birthday series continues with entries Eight and Nine. Both slim-line discs celebrate the same stylish linear graphics and font script as previous volumes. Eight documents the late September 03’ meeting between Zorn, drummer Susie Ibarra and trumpet tone scientist Wadada Leo Smith. The night’s two full sets constitute a generous program of music and the clarity of engineer Daniel Goldaracena’s recording simulates a stage-side seat front and center.

Zorn and Ibarra face off first, each playfully announcing the other before catapulting into a brisk exchange of register leaping squeals and frothing drum chatter. The shared sounds unfold fast and furious with Zorn scampering full bore and Ibarra playing agile catch-up, coloring and accentuating his florid exhortations. “Meridan” is over so swiftly that the audience even pauses in its applause to make sure the two have finished. On “Rising Sign” staccato reed pops and trilling stutters disperse over a cushion of malleted drums and kulintang accompaniment. The piece culminates with Zorn adopting his best simulacrum of a belfry-full of bats escaping through a broken-shutter window as Ibarra underscores with a scintillating cymbal wash.

The energy and wanton ebullience of “By the Mark, Eight” parallels Zorn’s previous conclave with drummer Milford Graves two weeks earlier. Once again he barrels ahead with a barrage of geysering renal screams, leaving Ibarra to flush and fill the gaps. Smith steps to the fray with “Visitation.” The tripartite improv unfolds like a Kabuki theater production staged by a buzzing hive of insects as flapping moth-wing brushes vie with reed and brass mouthpiece sputters that range from puckered squeaks to guttural breath expulsions.

Ibarra sheathes her sticks for the remaining numbers, leaving Zorn and Smith to resume the conversation as a tandem. “Ipsissimi” opens in a fanfare of fluctuating tones as the sparring horns try to out-soar each other across a suite-like assemblage of segments. Smith commands one of the most consistently clarion sonorities in creative music and as such quickly establishes the edge. Zorn doesn’t sound dissuaded by the differential, trundling out an artillery of reed effects and furnishings that keep the music moving despite the lean constituency. Warbling scales, crenellated metallic cascades, stentorian octave-hurdling blasts- all come into play and overlap during the dialogue at one juncture or another.

Ibarra resumes the kit for the piebald exchange of “Ghost Writing.” Her gongs and shakers assume an ancillary role alongside mallets and brushes in the atmospherically heavy performance. The interplay hinges on a sliding cadence that eventually segues into an agitated gallop. Zorn and Smith render the disc’s next piece as duo, once again trading in a lingua franca of ephemeral airborne noises. The press roll-fueled grand finale of “Full Fathom Five” reconvenes the trio with Ibarra engaging first Smith, then Zorn in a vigorous series of skirmishes.

Nine represents an event some might claim two decades overdue. Zorn’s first two volumes of The Classic Guide to Strategy, originally pressed in 1981 and 1985 and since reissued by Tzadik in a single package, set the cognoscenti of solo reed music on their collective ear. Evan Parker called it a treatise that “demands our attention” while others dismissed it as the work of a spotlight-soliciting charlatan. Wherever one falls in the debate, there’s no denying an evolution in Zorn’s solo art. Drawn from the second set on the aforementioned night with Graves this ostensible third volume subtitled The Fire Book, clocks at a mere forty or so minutes but it’s more than enough. Zorn still packs in phonebook-sized pasticcio of sounds and textures. He leaves the duck calls in the display case at home and straps on only his alto in the service of scripting a challenging omnibus of alien inflections and dialects.

If Zorn’s penchant for narcissistic displays of naked technique was held in check by Ibarra and Smith on the evening two weeks hence, here his id flourishes right alongside a prodigious intellect. He chews through fibercane reeds like a woodchuck masticating tree trunks into moist pulp. Speed limits seem a desultory distraction too as his rapid jump-cut diction races from one idea to the next. Piercing tea kettle whinnies, bugle-style blurts and vibrato-slicked tongue flutters all roll out in the first few minutes of the recital.

The consequent cumulative feel is a bit like that of a bean counter scratching off items on an inventory checklist. Experienced on headphones much of the action assaults like prickly pipe cleaners excoriating the ear canals. But Zorn tempers the accelerated stringency and dissonance on occasion with startling segments of lyricism and humor. Delicate strings of percussive reed pops serve as segue agents between the repeated bouts of onanistic excess. Capricious about-faces are regular part of the road-map.

There’s skill and sleight-of-horn aplenty on display, but at times Zorn’s gesticulations and manipulations come across more as empty exercises than cohesive pieces of an overarching whole. Many are headache-inducing in their intensity and obdurate attention to the upper register reaches of the alto. On “Part Four” finds him indulging in what sounds like his old trick of submerging mouthpiece sans horn in a bucket of water and birthing streams of mucid bubbles. The sections of relatively straight blowing such as the opening minute or so of “Part Three” arrive like restive and restorative eyes in a recurring storm. The set would probably have benefited from more of them. Consequently, I had a hard time digesting sections of the concert. Steadfast Zorn admirers are likely less prone to such difficulties. But from my vantage it might be a good plan to spike the soft-shelled crab in his next pre-performance Bento box with a duplicitous dose of Xanax™.

~ Derek Taylor

Anthony Braxton / György Szabados / Vladimir Tarasov - Triotone

Leo CD LR 416

Seasoned readers of Paris Transatlantic might recall PT's roving Balkans correspondent Vid Jeraj's splendid review of the 9th Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music that took place in Kanizsa, Serbia Montenegro in September 2003, one of the highlights of which was this trio set featuring Anthony Braxton on saxophones, György Szabados on piano and Vladimir Tarasov on percussion. It's no surprise that it should eventually have been released on Leo Records, given that both Braxton and Tarasov (as one third of the legendary Ganelin trio) are Leo household names. Less well known perhaps – though hopefully this release might go some way towards setting that straight – is Hungarian pianist Szabados, now 65 years old, as important and iconoclastic a figure for progressive jazz in Hungary as Ganelin, Chekasin and Tarasov were in the former Soviet Union. His 32-minute suite "Trioton" forms the backbone of this set, which also includes a shorter Szabados original "Black Toots" and three brief trio improvisations. Vid Jeraj recalled a 40-minute set with "the briefest of brief encores" (one not three – not sure which of the three improvisations he might be referring to) and seemed to indicate a certain lack of enthusiasm on the part of the musicians. Fortunately that doesn't come across so much in the music, though Tarasov sounds a little skittery and unfocussed (Barry Altschul or Gerry Hemingway he definitely is not – and Braxton is at his best when supported by a top notch drummer), and Szabados's excursions inside the piano aren't always entirely convincing. Braxton is as quintessentially Braxton as ever, with that unmistakable tone, simultaneously fluffy and gritty like a Brillo pad hidden in a pair of woolly mittens, and is surprisingly adept at following Szabados's Bartók-inflected charts (the two first played together in the early 1980s, recording an album of duets in 1984). But it's the pianist that steals the show, and when those folk rhythms kick in with a vengeance even Tarasov wakes up and starts to swing.

~ Dan Warburton

said the gramophone

André Previn - Previn At Sunset (Black Lion)

André Previn is a brilliant nuisance. A bona fide prodigy, a superb orchestra leader, and an arranger / composer of distinction, he is also one of the least convincing "jazzmen" I've ever heard. Try as hard he might – and such effortfulness is part of the problem -- he never quite swings, and his solos often burst with as much filler as with effervescence.

However, Previn has never been slavishly imitative; he is simply too prodigious a musical thinker to slip into others' routines, even in the most heated moments. What is surprising about the 1945 / 1946 recordings (originally made for the Sunset and Monarch labels) is not that they were made when Previn was all of 16 years old. Rather, these trios startle to the extent that they reveal a piano stylist who has already made something personal out of powerful influence Art Tatum's music had on him. So, at least for a few moments "back then" the mid-1940's, Previn stands alongside Bud Powell as one of the few pianists of the era to work both through and out of the older virtuoso. This is apparent on the trio performances, which borrow the Nat Cole Trio instrumentation (Dave Barbour, the once Mr. Peggy Lee, or Irving Ashby on guitar; John Simmons or Red Callendar on bass) but not that ensemble's relatively even temperament. This version of "Take The 'A' Train" does not steam ahead, or glide ahead on rails of luxury, but accelerates and decelerates as slope necessitates, rattles around, spins it wheels. As an interpretation, it is speed as Impressionism. How the performance avoids preciosity is something of a mystery to me, but it does. Previn's solo performances are similar if more startling exercises in almost going overboard: a torrid "Body And Soul"; a rather convincing blues "That Old Blue Magic" that tantalizes with echoes of both Jess Stacy and Chopin; and, more to the point, "Variations On A Theme", which seems to deliver on the promise of so-called "Third Stream Music" a full decade before that genre was ever defined, and thus calls to mind some of Charles Mingus' earliest West Coast-based experiments in "legitimate" composition. Consider the jam tracks with Willie Smith, Howard McGhee, Vido Musso, Buddy Childers and Eddie Safranski mere bonuses.

Could it be that this brat Previn was crafting his own form of modern jazz, one contemporary with bop but that had little or nothing to do with the innovations offered by the Parker, Gillespie, Powell and all those other great African-Americans working at the opposite end of the continent? I don’t know, but Previn At Sunset is an excellent place from which to begin to try and understand a very misunderstood musician.

~ Joe Milazzo