Bagatellen

Hill's Heroes, Heuristically Speaking

First in what will hopefully be a continuing series of dispatches, Adam Hill regales the readership with an annotated shortlist of some of his prized authors- an op/ed entry with an olive branch positive spin. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but many of the names are new to me. And with summer swiftly approaching (although the spontaneous snow-dusting the Twin Cities endured yesterday seems to suggest otherwise) the harvest will likely serve as a welcome primer for humid days spent swinging in the backyard hammock. What’s it mean exactly when your libro list is longer than your grocery one? Still, I’m a long way from a Dolphyesque legumes & rice diet and have the spare tireage to prove it. Note to self: time to load up the MuVo with Art Pepper’s Galaxy Recordings and hit the west bank of the Mississippi running. But enough of my blathering…

WRITERS’ WRITERS

They are the unsung, the underappreciated, the writers whose books rarely sold many copies, rarely won any prizes, but who are often name-checked by famous writers. Sometimes their work has lapsed out of print, sometimes they lived off a little mad cash from the movie people, but mostly they’ve been neglected. Here is a list of some of the best contemporary American writers’ writers, and what I think is the best book from each. Some are deceased; some are still living and writing in relative obscurity or just north of it. You should be able to find their books in the better used bookstores.

James Salter: LIGHT YEARS. A beautiful stylist. Both macho and romantic. Was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, and his first two books are about that experience. Wrote some great late 60’s early 70’s movie scripts like “Downhill Racer.” Also wrote a wonderful erotic novel called A SPORT AND A PASTIME that actually got reissued in the Modern Library series.

Gina Berriault: WOMEN IN THEIR BEDS. She won a few big prizes at the very end of her life. Concise, precise, a realist of the after effects. (Her story “The Stone Boy” was a fine movie with Robert Duvall). Such crystalline insights about women: “The flattery was demanding something of Dolores. She couldn’t reject it because she needed even flattery’s imitation of praise.”

Richard Yates: REVOLUTIONARY ROAD. Devastating depictions of suburban delusions. The model for Elaine’s father on “Seinfeld”—Larry David dated one of Yates’ daughters. He also worked as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. You read Yates’ books with a slowly accumulating sense of dread, knowing these people will smash up their lives. And they’re autobiographical.

Frederick Exley: A FAN’S NOTES. One of the greatest sports-themed novels is also a fictionalized memoir of drinking, reading, mental breakdowns, and other sedentary thrills. Brings you into his dual obsessions with Frank Gifford and Edmund Wilson. And if you’ve ever wondered what insulin shock treatment is like, this book describes it for you.

Joy Williams: STATE OF GRACE. Loopy, weird, lyrical. Effortlessly eccentric. Somehow every story and novel she’s ever written has some reference to the abuse of animals. She also wrote one of the great anti-hunting essays, first published in of all places, Esquire.

Denis Johnson: JESUS’ SON. Perhaps the most widely admired living American writer by other writers. His poetry too, particularly THE INCOGNITO LOUNGE, is beloved. Most of the stories in JESUS’ SON end with memorable anti-epiphanies, such as this one: “It was raining. Gigantic ferns leaned over us. The forest drifted down a hill. I could hear a creek rushing down among rocks. And you, you ridiculous people, you expect me to help you.”

Barry Hannah: AIRSHIPS. Crafter of some the language’s finest sentences. Such as: “In Mississippi it is difficult to achieve a vista.” or “As a thought of consolation, when you see a beautiful woman, just remember: somebody’s tired of her.”

Honorable Mentions:

Leonard Gardner: FAT CITY. His only book, made into a good John Huston movie. Boxing and day labor in Stockton, CA. He went on to become a very successful TV writer and producer (“NYPD Blue”).

Theodore Weezner: THE CAR THIEF. One of the great bleak books of all time. Extreme teenage alienation and the consolations of grand theft auto.

Stanley Elkin: THE FRANCHISER. King of the one-liners. Made tragedy funny again. There’s a scene (from THE MAGIC KINGDOM) where a group of terminally ill children meet with Queen Elizabeth and one asks her a question she finds ridiculously obvious, and the Queen responds rhetorically, “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

John Hawkes: THE LIME TWIG. A much admired experimentalist; highly influential teacher at Brown. Creepy, dream-like narratives. Subversive imagery.

Paula Fox: DESPERATE CHARACTERS. Rediscovered and brought to some attention by Jonathan Franzen. Also, she’s Courtney Love’s grandmother!

Stephen Dixon: INTERSTATE. Master of the obsessive narrative. If possible, read this book while measuring your heart-rate.

Stephen Wright: GOING NATIVE. (No, not that Stephen Wright.) This book is a violent tour de force, darkly funny, and utterly relevant. Don DeLillo calls it “a slasher classic.”

- Adam Hill reviews books for The Los Angeles Times among other places.

Dexter Gordon - The Complete Prestige Recordings

Prestige 11PRCD-4444-2-2

According to the conventional wisdom, Dexter Gordon's career can be plotted on a timeline that looks something like this:

• 1940s - Major Be Bop Tenor Innovator; participant in several classic "tenor battles"
• 1950s - Lengthy stays in prison with occasional recording dates
• 1960s – Spectacular return to form; moved to Europe
• 1970s – Began decade in Europe; returned home to hero's welcome
• 1980s – Slowly fell victim to dissipation; one final hurrah as star of the film 'Round Midnight

Likewise, in terms of recordings, the conventional wisdom has it that the "essential" Dexter Gordon is to be found on Savoy (1940s), Blue Note (1960s), and Columbia (1970s).

As conventional wisdoms go, the first is pretty good (one might even call it a reasonably accurate summation of Gordon's career as a leader) while the second is only not too bad. But, as with most conventional wisdoms, there's a lot more to the story than you'll find in either. Which is where the recent 11 disc Dexter Gordon: The Complete Prestige Recordings (Prestige 11PRCD 4442-2) comes into play. It is at once more than it claims to be, and, considered as its own whole, less than it could be.

First of all, the set contains more than just Gordon's "real" Prestige recordings, that is to say, those recorded specifically with intent for release by Prestige. Said "real" recordings consist of: four near-perfect studio albums -- The Tower Of Power!, More Power!, The Panther!, and The Jumpin' Blues -- all produced by Don Schlitten between 1969 and 1970; one extremely spirited album, recorded live in Chicago from 1970 and co-led with Gene Ammons -- The Chase!; two Ozzie Cadena-produced sessions from 1972 that resulted in three albums (Ca'Purange, Generation, and Tangerine); and a 1973 live set from the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The 1969/1970 sessions represent a musically significant, if chronologically narrow, segment of Gordon's recorded legacy, and are somewhat overlooked by many fans, as per the "conventional wisdom" mentioned above. Dexter had moved to Europe in 1962, cleaned up his lifestyle (somewhat), and began devoting much time to practicing, composing, and expanding his harmonic knowledge. Although he was playing regularly in Europe (most notably at Copenhagen’s Montmarte Jazzhus), Gordon was not too terribly interested in recording commercially once his Blue Note contract expired in 1965. But he was interested in growing and evolving as a musician, and that he did marvelously, as numerous (and ongoing) releases of his Montmarte gigs from the mid-60s on both Black Lion and Steeplechase continue to reveal. (The irony that the period of Gordon’s career in which he was least interested in recording may well end up being his best documented is not lost here). For the latter half of the 1960s and the very early 1970s, the Schlitten-produced Prestige albums were the only tangible proof the general American jazz audience had that Dexter Gordon was alive and still kicking, and, even then, they didn’t actually begin appearing in Stateside record shops until the very end of the 1960s. The market for jazz in general -- and bebop-based jazz in particular -- at that time could only be described as "depressed", and these albums didn’t make a big impact upon first release, rave reviews and a few Down Beat Critics Poll awards notwithstanding. (Not for nothing was the phrase “all but forgotten”, or some variant thereof, bandied about when discussing Gordon’s place in the American jazz consciousness prior to his triumphant homecoming in 1976.) Even today, these albums are not as well-known or appreciated as they should be, which is unfortunate, given their uniformly high quality and historical importance as documents of Gordon’s ongoing evolution.

What we get in these best of these sessions is the first obvious inklings of Dexter's 1970s style, where modal (based on scales instead of chord progressions) and quartal (based on intervals of fourths) melodic conceptions, and altered/extended harmonies (i.e. – playing outside a song's basic harmony in a way that is still relevant to it) really came to the fore in his improvising. These changes are more fully realized on the great 1970s Steeplechase studio recordings (made by Gordon after his Prestige contract expired, and worthy of collective appraisal in their own right; luckily there’s a box set available), but these Prestige sides show the beginning of the changing approach. His energy and spirits are always high, as is his level of invention. Of these sessions, only The Panther! finds Gordon at a less than full-bore level of intensity. Yet that album has a mature, mellow, knowledgeable and peaceful quality to it that makes the lower surface intensity more than merely palatable. The others show that he was having no problems making his newer ideas agree with his established personality. And, no matter what methods, old or new, Dexter was beginning to use to do it, he was still projecting the same supremely hip effervescence and almost larger-than-life joy that had been his trademark almost from the very beginning of his career. These sessions form the core of the set, and they are all exquisite.

Sidemen on these sessions include: James Moody -- turning in marvelously thorny solos that show that he, too, was successfully working on expanding his expressive palette (apparently Moody presented some "problems" at the session divided between The Tower Of Power and More Power, "problems" that led to his "dismissal" from a follow-up session; nevertheless, I personally think his playing is nothing short of fantastic in its quality of aggressive diffidence) -- Barry Harris, Buster Williams, and Alan Dawson on the Power! albums; Tommy Flanagan, Larry Ridley and Dawson for The Panther!; and Wynton Kelly (one of his last recording sessions, if not the last), Sam Jones, and Roy Brooks on The Jumpin' Blues. This last album is perhaps my personal favorite of the bunch, it being my first real exposure to the artistry of Dexter Gordon. I first heard this album as a freshman college music student, in 1974, and Dex’s solo on the opening cut, “Evergreenish”, with its hard-driving rhythm and harmonic sophistication -- to say nothing of a near-total lack of the type of double-time figurations that had left my teenage self totally befuddled as to just how the hell it all was done (tenorally-speaking) -- opened up a new musical world for me to think about. Directness of purpose and directness of expression was what I heard, with absolutely no sacrifice of wit, subtlety, virtuosity, or sophistication (musical or personal). Once I began to get a handle on that, the rest fell into place naturally. No doubt, I am not the only tenorist (or musician, period) to have "gotten the message" from Dexter. Although that particular album is a sentimental favorite, all of the Schlitten-produced Gordon Prestige albums display these same qualities in splendid abundance.

Aside from those recordings, all of them made in the studio, special mention must be made of the session with Ammons, The Chase! Simply put, this one is a classic of atmosphere and vibe, an example of two extremely charismatic tenor masters at the top of their games. Here, Ammons and Gordon are working with two (afternoon and evening) local rhythm sections, "local" in this case being Chicago, which means as good as any to be had anywhere, and harder-grooving than most, including many in NYC. More than that, the "leaders" are playing in front of audiences that were more than ready to receive what they were being offered. (By the way, Don Byas also performed, but was not recorded due to contractual issues). I'm told by somebody who was present -- legendary jazz record producer Chuck Nessa, who also offered "professional assistance" -- that the recording of these sets was far from a forgone conclusion in technical terms, that it was almost literally a down-to-the-wire affair in terms of making sure that everything was going to get captured effectively, if it was even going to be captured at all. We should all be thankful that it did. This one is truly "live" in every sense of the word.

The availability of all of these outstanding dates in a single set augmented by 14 previously unreleased performances, all of them worthy and revealing, is reason enough for any serious fan and/or student of the music to add this box to their collection.

Of the remaining “Prestige-specific” Gordon material, the 1972 sessions, although good enough to hold initial interest, find Dex less energized, less focused, and victim to some really bizarre mixing on the part of, one must assume, producer Cadena. Either Fantasy did not have the budget to fix this weirdness, or else it was flat-out unfixable. I bought these albums when originally released, and the mix was distracting even then. Hopes that the problem (and that's how strange it is -- it really is a problem, a serious distraction from the music-making going on) would be fixed for this release have proven, unfortunately, to have been in vain. Four alternates from these sessions have been added to this issue, and they have a considerably more normal sounding mix, which only adds to the frustration. On the bright side, however, the sidemen on these sessions -- Freddie Hubbard, Cedar Walton, Buster Williams, and Billy Higgins on one; Thad Jones, Hank Jones, Stanley Clarke (still on acoustic bass at this stage of his career), and Louis Hayes on the other -- are in fine fettle throughout. Thad in particular plays with enormous sparkle and imagination. This session (originally split between (Ca'Purange and Tangerine); is a very valuable addition to the cornetist's recorded legacy as a bright, inventive, and, at times, shockingly iconoclastic improviser. By the time of this session, his energies had mostly shifted to arranging, as well as fronting the big band he co-led with Mel Lewis. As a result, there are very few recordings made during that period which afford an opportunity to hear him solo at length in a small-group context such as this. The results are simply delightful. Actually, he is the reason I still listen to these particular albums, although brother Hank’s choice of chords in accompaniment might raise the eyebrows of those who think of him as only a "traditionally" minded player.

The 1973 Montreux material is much the same as the 1972 studio dates: Gordon seems a bit tired, wasted, suffering from a case of the "whatevers". He plays well enough, but is not up to his own highest standards. Hampton Hawes is similarly in good, if not great, form. The most interesting aspect of his performance here is that Hawes plays exclusively on electric piano, an instrument that he was more than dabbling with during this time. The rhythm section is rounded out by Bob Cranshaw and the great Kenny Clarke, who turns in a typically rousing performance throughout, and is, on this occasion, the player most worth listening closely to. For one tune, this group is joined by Nat and Cannonball Adderley, Kenneth Nash, and Gene Ammons. Unfortunately, this pairing of Dex and Jug does not produce the same electricity that it did three years earlier.

Also counting as a "real" Prestige date here, although not a Gordon one, is a 1965 guest appearance with Booker Ervin on Ervin’s Setting The Pace, which was also produced by Schlitten. It bears saying that Schlitten's work at Prestige in the mid-to-late 1960s in the service of keeping serious bebop and bebop-related music in the studios and on the shelves -- as well as keeping exclamation points in album titles -- was of consistently high quality, and was as important then as it is in need of reappraisal, examination, and praise today. Its significance as an example of the producer's work aside, Setting The Pace is an incendiary and essential date. Also featuring Jaki Byard, Reggie Workman, and Alan Dawson, this sessions was recorded during a Schlitten-produced tour of Germany that featured Gordon, Ervin, and Sonny Rollins (that tour is where Schlitten and Gordon first established their professional relationship). Quite a collection of talent and, well, character; perhaps as a result, this album is perhaps the most heated of all of Gordon's tenor battles. This is due in no small part to Ervin -- who, it seems, was always heated -- but especially to the rhythm section, which is taking no prisoners and respecting no traditions simply for the sake of being respectful. Boundaries are stretched and grooves are maintained in equally intense measures. This album is one for the ages, one of the most rewarding two-tenor dates ever recorded, and, oddly, also one of the most overlooked.

Whew. That's a lot of music right there. The Ervin date, plus the 1969 / 1970 sessions, are as good as anything to be found under Gordon's name from any period. But there's even more material included in this box, and that’s not automatically for the better. Also presented are items that were released by Prestige as "after the fact" issues, things not recorded for the label that it ended up holding the rights to anyway. These include: one piece recorded at a 1950 Los Angeles jam session with Clark Terry, Sonny Criss, and Gordon's old-time "sparring partner" Wardell Gray (posthumously released on Prestige under Gray's name); Gordon's 1960 "comeback" album for Jazzland (then a subsidiary of Prestige's competitor Riverside, but now under the same Fantasy / OJC umbrella as Prestige); a 1969 live session recorded at (and by) Baltimore's Left Bank Jazz Society; and a 1970 set from Montreux that has Dexter guesting with the Junior Mance Trio, a set that was recorded but not released by Mance's label (Atlantic) and sold by them in 1974 to Prestige, which used it to complete Gordon's contractual obligation to them.

The 1950 cut is not the best documentation of the fire that Gordon and Gray stoked in each other, but it is nonetheless a priceless snapshot of a scene long gone and almost totally unknown to all but the most scholarly jazz fans today. The additional presence of the fleet and fiery Criss as well as a quite young Terry makes it an even more valuable document. If it seems out of place in this set stylistically and sound-wise, that's not to say that it shouldn't be here. This is the style of playing that made Dexter Gordon a jazz star, and, as such, it provides a very nice context for everything else that is to follow.

The Jazzland side, originally released as The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon, is a perfectly fine date. In 1960, Dexter had emerged from a long, dark decade of drug addiction, complete with stints in prison, and was ready to resume playing in earnest. The group he assembled for this Los Angeles session -- trumpeter Martin Banks, trombonist Richard Boone, pianist Dolo Coker, bassist Charles Green, and drummer Larance Marable, members of L.A.'s predominantly African-American hard bop "underground" -- was one with which the tenor saxophonist no doubt felt personally and musically comfortable with, and it shows. Everybody plays with vigor, and the only "drawback" is that none of the players (with the possible exception of Marable) are quite in Dexter's league when it comes to skill and / or personality. (Then again, very few players have been!) This is a fun session which holds up quite well, and although it is justly overshadowed by the Blue Note albums that Gordon was soon to make as he continued his re-ascendancy to true greatness, it nevertheless is quite enjoyable on its own terms.

It's in the Left Bank and Mance sessions that the set begins to get bogged down a bit, and these sets take up the better part of three of the set's eleven discs. In Baltimore, Dexter is teamed with the trio of Bobby Timmons, Victor Gaskin, and Percy Brice. On paper, a decent enough grouping. The problem is that they don't quite gel as a unit. They don't give Gordon the concentrated and concerted group momentum that allows his playing to locked in -- to get rolling and keep rolling as he was so capable of doing when all the elements were in place. Dexter at his best was all about building rhythmic momentum, starting strong and finishing even stronger, enveloping everybody in his presence in a tsunami of swing to which resistance was not only futile, but downright undesirable. (As a side note, it should be mentioned that although Gordon continued to evolve and expand harmonically, the rhythmic aspect of his playing remained pretty much unchanged throughout his career, the only noticeable change being an increasing tendency/ability, as he aged, to play further and further behind the beat –sometimes deliciously so, sometimes perilously so, and sometimes bizarrely so.)

Much has been made over the years of Gordon’s personal and musical charisma, as well as his "movie star"-like aura. Less often noted, but quite relevant, I think, is the fact that he came of age in an era when the Big Bands were to the fore, and Big Bands of all stripes in that day inevitably, as a matter of both professional necessity and artistic choice "show business". The common thread through all this -- personal charisma, movie star aura, and the show business aspect of the Big Bands’ manner of presentation -- is to be found in the end result: a distinctly unified product. It is a product that speaks to a distinctively collective concept of individual style, an esthetic of presentation that as a matter of course ties a ribbon around a package in which everybody’s arrayed and synchronized. Yet, crucially, the ribbon serves as a final touch of elegance, not as a crude means of restraint or oppression. Everybody inside the package remains fully able (and are indeed encouraged) to move gracefully, effortlessly, and instantly between being as wholly anonymous or as highly individualistic as the goal of deriving the maximum impact from any given situation demands. In short, it is a manner of presentation in which every member of the "organization" has an individual role to play in the service of a final collective objective. Everybody executes, executes well, and nobody hesitates in doing so, or displays any reservations about the rightness of doing so.

Gordon’s best recordings have always had this quality. Some think of it as a group playing as a band rather than functioning as a soloist (or soloists) in front of a generic rhythm section. However one perceives of it, the difference between when "it" is there and when it is not is palpable, and frankly, on these Left Bank recordings, it just ain’t there. Bobby Timmons, Victor Gaskin, and Percy Brice are all fine players (and Timmons was one of the most original voices of a slightly earlier period), but there’s no sense of a band playing here. And given Timmons’ near-definitive work as “band pianist” in his work with Art Blakey from a few years earlier, the sense of this being an opportunity lost, if (given that this was a live performance and not a recording date) only for this one moment in time, is all the more acute. There are plenty of good moments by all, to be sure, but there's never a time when everything fires on all cylinders from start to finish. Particularly noticeable as an example of this is "Love For Sale". Dexter's version of a few years earlier (from the Blue Note album Go) became an instant classic. Yet here, there is confusion in the rhythm section from the first beat. Nobody seems sure how to handle the Latin feel on the opening choruses, or even if there should be a Latin feel! Gordon can be heard attempting to give instructions while at the same time trying to continue playing, but finally, he just gives up and blows. That's pretty much what happens on every tune in some form or fashion: Dexter just blows (quite well, too), determined not to get wrapped up in whatever looseness is going on behind him. It's a tribute to his professionalism and his spirit, but it doesn't make for a particularly engaging ongoing listening experience for anybody but the most dedicated (or research-minded) listener.

The set with Junior Mance is even more problematic. Dexter with Mance in, say, 1960, or 1963, would have worked splendidly. But by 1970, Dexter was playing harmonic ideas that Junior wasn't yet considering, and this causes some rather awkward musical problems. Mance is laying down older concepts of harmony in his accompaniment, and Gordon quite often plays things that blatantly clash with them. This is painfully -- almost literally -- evident on "Body and Soul". Dexter had yet to record it in this arrangement, which uses John Coltrane's vamps and chord changes. (He would do so about a month later, on The Panther!) But Coltrane's version was recorded in 1960, and although it was not released until 1964, by 1970, the date of this gig, it had achieved a great deal of exposure, and the arrangement was hardly "unfamiliar" to anybody who had made it a point to keep up with the latest developments in the music. Yet, the arrangement throws the entire Mance trio for a loop, harmonically and rhythmically, from the git-go. Nobody's sure exactly how this thing is supposed to go! They fake their way through it adequately enough until they get to the bridge, where Trane inserted his "Giant Steps"-like chord progressions as a substitution for the tune's original changes. Right then and there, it becomes obvious that the trio doesn't even know where to begin, so they just sort of noodle around while Dexter effortlessly sails through the changes, doing his best to outline them in hopes that somebody would figure out what the deal was. Nobody does.

What this shows, as clearly as it can possibly shown, is that, unlike some of his peers, Dexter Gordon had been paying attention to what the players he had influenced had themselves been discovering. And not just paying casual attention to it either, but learning from it as well, adapting much of it to his own personal ends. Junior Mance, Martin Rivera, and Oliver Jackson, it seems, had not been. That's not a slam on them, since they did what they did just fine, and they probably had no pressing personal needs to go beyond where they already were. But when they came face-to-face with Dexter Gordon, it was obvious that Dexter wanted, probably in fact needed, to do something different than what he, and they, had been doing in the years before. And Gordon, being the powerful force that he was, went right on ahead and did it in spite of the reluctance or inability of his accompanists to keep up. And remember -- this was their gig!

This type of uncomfortable stylistic clashing, as well as other less-than-stellar moments on the Left Bank, 1972, and 1973 dates explain why this set is less than it could be, even though it is also more than it, at face value, claims to be. If a set had been released that contained only the Schlitten-produced material (including the Ervin-led tenor battle) with all the unissued material included, the result would be an uncontested classic, an "essential" part of any collection, and a document of unquestionable historical importance, documenting as it does a key phase in the evolution of one of the music's uncontested masters. People who wonder how the Blue Note Gordon became the Columbia (or Steeplechase) Gordon would have a ready-made answer in one convenient package. Add the 1950 performance and the Jazzland date, and the set is still a no-brainer. You still get the important work, as well as two historically relevant points of comparison.

However, the inclusion of the less-than-great material makes the issue of "essentiality" a little less cut-and-dried. On the one hand, this is as complete a gathering of Fantasy’s assorted Gordon holdings as we could ask for. On the other hand, the lesser material could well divert focus away from the real meat of the set for a casual or new Gordon fan. Between the Left Bank gig, the encounter with Mance, and the 1972 / 1973 material, about a third of this set is material that could best be classified as "for hardcore fans only". Plus, with the material being presented in chronological sequence, listening straight through results in a repeating sequence of highs and (relative) lows that could easily dull the appreciation of just how high the highs really are. Listening in this manner is, of course, optional, and truthfully, it is not recommended, at least not more than once. This variance in musical quality and how it plays out in the grouping of sessions across the set’s 11 discs should not go without at least a perfunctory noting, so here one is.

On the other hand, Dexter Gordon had one of the most infectious spirits in the history of jazz, and once you get infected by it, there is no easy cure should you decide to seek one (an unlikely scenario, to be sure). So I would say that this is a set that every Dexter Gordon fan, serious, casual, experienced, or novice, should own. Eventually. Just be prepared to listen to some parts of it a lot more than others.

Packaging is modest but effective (and attractive in an economically dignified manner). The booklet includes many not commonly seen photographs, as well as a lengthy, well-researched, and historically interesting essay by Ted Panken. Besides the usual reminiscences of fans and contemporaries, there's some interesting quotes from younger tenorists like David Murray and Eric Alexander, who relate the musical and personal specifics of what Dexter Gordon has meant to them as players who are trying to follow in the wake of his legacy. This adds a nice touch, in that it gives the non-musician reader / listener a chance to experience the perspective that some contemporary musicians have on an undisputed "giant", a perspective that may well help enhance their own. This essay is far from superficial, and is definitely a positive asset of the set.

Remastering is by Kirk Felton, and is just dandy, the allowance of the 1972 horrors to stand notwithstanding. I've owned much of this material on LPs for many years, and on each session that I've referenced, Felton’s remastering compares equally or favorably to the original LP issues.

Stated reservations aside, Dexter Gordon: The Complete Prestige Recordings stands as an important documentation of a crucial period in the development of one of jazz' greatest artists, a testament to his indomitably joyous spirit and his refusal to fall victim to self-imposed obsolescence. If you even slightly enjoy the music of Long Tall Dexter, you owe it to yourself to check this material out, either through this comprehensive box set or through individual albums (which, it must be stressed, will not provide you with the alternate material from the best sessions). The best of it is as good as you’d want (and there’s more of it here than has been previously available), and the rest is, well... the rest.

~ Jim Sangrey

So Sayeth the Sub-Mariner

Huzzah! Bags' long-lost Atlantean Al “Namor” Jones just launched his own blog. Am I sad that he decided he needed his own separate set of hatches to batten? A little. But now there’s a source for undiluted Joe Christmas badinage, esprit & verisimilitude for web surfers the world over to enjoy. The vessel’s still in the infancy of its voyage with only a handful of posts so far, but the modest number covers an expectedly capacious range of topics riffing from the perils of Hawaiian real estate, to Keiji “Coon Skin Cap” Hano, to deposed politico Lucio Gutierrez.

Namor and I don’t always see eye to eye. But that swarthy sea dog sure can write, so I’m signing on as a steadfast subscriber. Now to get the elusive Emory on the horn and see about having a permanent URL link cemented into the “Points of Interest.”

[and a succinct parting shot to my combative colleague Adam: I promise not to become unglued if you lob the epithet “press release” at this post, since that’s precisely what it is. ;)]

Ornette & the Round Man

Spent a slice of the weekend hemming and hawing over whether to scribble something on last week’s Ornette concert. Coleman touched down in the Twin Cities with his working quartet of Tony Falanga and Greg Cohen basses, Denardo on drums; their gig the apex of a three-day celebration dubbed somewhat clumsily: The Festival Dancing in Your Head. Tix were steep at a Grant-spot apiece, but damn, it’s Ornette & if The Eagles can command a hundred a head then he’s certainly worth half that bread.

Thinking long and hard I decided my post-performance equivocal feelings weren’t worth the virtual ink. I also skipped out on the remainder of the fest that sandwiched the show, a sprawling conglomeration of artists ranging from a handful of bands in the Happy Apple/Bad Plus orbit (drummer Dave King could easily give Matt Shipp a run for the money in any brazen self-promotion contest) to Bang on a Can, George Cartwright, Douglas Ewart and Anthony Cox among others. So instead of plastering up my lukewarm broodings on a hero’s less than transcendental showing, I figured more ardent hagiography would be better, compliments of my pally Ted in Brooklyn.

Ted had the extraordinary good fortune of attending two nights of the Joe Maneri Quartet’s three-evening stand at Barbe’s [I’m hoping our man Michael Anton Parker also made the scene and is prepping a celebratory piece on all the happ’nin’s as I type this]. I last caught Joe at the ACME Fest a little over a year ago. He wasn’t entirely well health-wise and had to wheel an oxygen tank beside him, but the inconvenience did little to hinder his gregarious spirit and good humor. The chimney-like environs of The 40 Watt Club only exacerbated the circumstance, but an impromptu smoking band mandated by Ken Vandermark saved the day and Joe’s lungs (not to mention the audience’s). That joyous experience still fresh in my mind I bemoaned being stuck in land-locked Minneapolis while the action went down on Eastern shores. Coleman’s gig ending up a somewhat flimsy consolation only added to the sting. Oh, and those early rumors of a farewell send-off seem to mostly be the product of a clever ploy to move merch. Anyway, to cop a tag-line from LA jazzbo Fred Jung, here’s Ted’s take “unedited and in his own words”:

“Joe was looking great. No tanks. He sat there all quiet for at least 45 minutes beforehand. Think there was some family besides the wife. Joe started talking and livened up a little before the set. The rest came in. Mat looking all slick with no band on his finger and all darkly dressed with some drink in his hand. Think he had some ladies there. Not sure who was family though so don't quote. Joe opened with a poem. He wished for love and all the right notes (but not correct). Mat plugged the CDs while the cameras got ready. Mat had his homemade jammy for the first set. They sounded good and then Randy just ripped shit up on the traps and everything just changed. The intensity was heavy. The room was small and most seemed enthralled (except for the Skippy wannabe who snapped 8000 digital pics all sitting in the front row--no flash but the back had the viewer and the light kept blinking.) I was in the back and Joe was still maybe 15 feet in front of me. The first set was nice but drinks were flowing and everyone seemed happy. It was more boisterous for the second set. Joe told everyone to buy the damn CDs already to shut Mat up. Then he confessed he couldn't buy any because he couldn't afford them. It came out so earnest that the laughter didn't end for minutes. He is the sweetest. The second set just raised the roof. Shit was intense. Mat had the viola out now and him and pop were just in some mode with Mat lightly behind him creating almost an echo while Joe is all there with his shit sounding layered. Man, I was shaking it out afterwards. Randy still ripped but after that insane solo in the first, he tried to compete but never got back up there. Besides, Matt Moran was all shining on the vibes creating an electric forcefield of high pitched tones and the drums just sounded too damn hard. One duet with Joe and Mat was exceptional. Everything stayed on that eastern european dirge/funeral feel except for the drum solos. The drums just kept it sounding so jazz. Not necessarily bad but there is a sound there that gets lost when the rhythm is more traditional. Well, traditional in an improvised way. When do I get to hear the wedding music? Anyway, it was great and I told you to call so I could put you on speaker.”

[special gratitude goes out to Jon Morgan for the lead snap- d.t.]

The Roots - The Tipping Point

Shall it be said again? Their own instruments. Now that that's out of the way, The Roots have arguably outdone themselves with The Tipping Point, released late last year. Consider the opening segue into "Star/Pointro", from a beautifully reverberated sample from Sly & the Family Stone's "Everybody Is A Star." The Roots fuse their own nostalgia with retrofitted slices and understated beats to deliver allusive messages overflowing with metaphor. Questlove's drums are a high point as usual -- see the stop-time post-production that drives "Web" -- and Black Thought is at the top of his game, "It's Philly world-wide phenomenom/ And reinforcin' that shit is my 9-to-5." There's plenty to sit with, including "Guns Are Drawn," perhaps a necessary counterpart to Phrenology's "Sacrifice", albiet without the luscious vocals of guest Nelly Furtado. Nonetheless, the guest spots on "The Tipping Point" are wonderfully spaced, never stealing from the main act, and always on point as elements -- rather than cosmetics -- to the music. The album's a solid bet for middle-of-the-roaders looking for a safe snapshot of current American hip-hop. For the initiated, you already know the potency of the record.

Brew Moore - Zonky

Steeplechase 36037

In jazz, addiction ain’t fiction. Saddled with a poetically accurate sobriquet, Brew Moore belongs to that sad-eyed psychological subdivision- the dipsomaniacs. Like Zoot Sims, Lin Halliday and a number of others, his bouts with the bottle bookended spates of brilliance. Sims never succumbed fully, aging gracefully like the fine libations he so loved. Moore wasn’t so resilient, his horn prematurely silenced by a drunken spill down some stairs in the summer of ’73. The record library left behind is scant. AMG lists a mere nine albums to his name over a career that spanned several decades. Sideman appearances maybe double that figure.

Moore spent his final years in Europe, gigging periodically at the Montmarte in Copenhagen and mustering various attempts at a comeback. Steeplechase acquired the rights to many of the radio airshots recorded at the club during this time frame. This new offering joins two previous ones from roughly a year earlier in spotlighting the saxophonist’s mid-60s stand at the club. Kenny Drew’s trio, the regular house rhythm section at the Montmarte, provides able-bodied support. Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen handles bass duties and Makaya Ntshoko bangs the cans in regular drummer Alex Riel’s stead.

Moore sounds only mildly zonked, the spirits sipped prior to the set accentuating rather debilitating his powers. Spoken introductions serve as the bread to the meat of four long cuts. These verbal prefaces fare better than the band sonically, but fidelity is still passable and the easy banter finds Moore in an amiable, dry-witted mood. The set opens with the extended extemporaneous warm-up “Gene’s Blues.” Moore strolls through an abundance of choruses, occupying the first seven of sixteen languorous minutes with one curlicued phrase after another and leaning heavily on Lestorian roots. As the improvisation progresses his inflection hardens with the stain of an underlying wail until it almost seems as if a different horn player has usurped the stage. Pedersen anchors the action with superb harmonic aplomb. His switch to the foreground after a nimble turn from Drew delivers the first of several solos. It’s these callus-abrading inventions that are among the true hidden troves on many of these Danmarks Radio broadcast tapes.

Also on the bill: a billowy reading of “I Should Care”, a romping rundown Bird’s “Donna Lee” and the colloquially-christened title cut in incomplete form (product of a probable faulty tape splice). Moore attunes particularly well to the ballad feature, playing plushly piquant in the first half, pillow soft in the second. Combined he achieves a compelling intimacy with the melody. With a mere five years remaining on his mortal cabaret card, Moore settled back into his usual routine, hooch holding sway until the bitter end. His was an improvisatory light that thanks to the numbing effects of inebriants only shone beyond an average wattage intermittently. This was one such fateful occasion. Thanks are due Steeplechase for financing its circulation.

~ Derek Taylor

Another Kind Of Conclave

This past weekend, I attended the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. I was there to deliver a paper called "It's Not Just A T-Shirt," about the ethics of wearing metal T-shirts when you're not actually a metalhead. (I'm agin it.) I've posted the text of the paper on my blog; here's a link.

The event was a lot of fun. I met people whose work I'd read online, some of whom were smarter than their published opinions. My own talk got a solidly favorable reception - a few people came up afterwards and said they'd never thought about class issues w/r/t metal, which shocked me, because I find those issues pretty unavoidable once any discussion of metal gets beyond "Dude, the new Priest album fuckin' rocks!" (Which it does, by the way, though they shouldn't be selling it as the return of their "classic lineup" when they've got Scott Travis, who only came on board for 1990's Painkiller, on drums.)

There were a lot more women than I expected to see - my own panel was 50/50, and one of the most interesting discussions was "How To Rock Like A Black Feminist Critic," which included a contribution from a black female metalhead from Canada. Other talks I caught included "Steely Dan And The Pleasures Of Simulation," "Albert Ayler In Vietnam - And Out," and "Creating The Cool Mask: From Expression To Construction To Simulacra." Most of the speakers I heard kept it pretty jargon-free, which was nice, and I gotta say I had a much better time than I was initially afraid of having. Seattle's a pretty nice-looking town, too - wouldn't bitch too much if I had to move there.

When they call for submissions for next year, I'll be throwing my hat in the ring again for sure.

...and someone else, that...

Twice today I've sat down to make an entry, and twice today I've come up with nil. It's not block, rather it's nothing to say, so let's turn to stream-of-conscious deliberation over a whole lot of nothing.

Trying to simultaneously read all five of the books you've bought in the past two weeks is less educational than it is maddening. Not recommended. Running errands with the wife and the kids the other day, doctor's office, gymnastics, a dive into the local pharmacy so she could pick up a prescription. She normally takes a while so then was the time to sit back and enjoy a 25-minute piece of music freshly uploaded to the iPod. The boy's in the back seat studying and I'm wondering if I can make it through the whole 25 minutes (surely she'll be at least that long in the pharmacy) without an interruption. Impossible. He studies without a question, working on math and time, and I'm 21 minutes into the music, looking forward to and guessing toward its conclusion, and she shows up with the medicine and our daughter, and I press 'pause'. Six months of absence has left a considerable void in the research of my interests, ..., and what in the world to hear next? Certainly that looper that Schaumann told me about. Nikos and Kuchen and someone else, that one. It's two months before the move and I'd kill to hear some live music, but there's nothing on the calendar that looks at all worth the trouble, unless it's hearing Sam Rivers again. A jaunt to Portland or Vancouver is possibly in the pipe. And how in a sidecar do you stomach the mistakes? Not mine, theirs. I'd shake a friend or loved one to death in frustration were they to go ahead with the same amount of short-sightedness. Tomorrow I'll call the registrar. Oh, ugh, and TV today, who could avert their eyes from the news? Man, why couldn't it have been a Pius or a Fabian?

Feh.

lemon-red

Art Blakey - Free For All

It’s amusing to ponder the reactions of certain button-down record buyers upon their perusal of Art Blakey’s classic albums on local Woolworth’s racks during the racially-stymied 50s and 60s. Picture Blakey, as snapped by Blue Note shutterbug Francis Wolff: a succession of proud, usually intense, sometimes defiant expressions on his various visages, and always, a healthy supply of sweat. Perspiration is such an intrinsic component to the covers and the music insulated inside. Beaded across his furrowed bald pate on Moanin’, trickling in glistening rivulets down his cheeks and chin on Three Blind Mice- the liquid results of his athletic workouts are a sure-fire evidence of the exponential calories expended in putting his impregnable kit through its paces. A Galactus with sticks, Blakey concocts tsunami-sized cross-rhythms with enough propulsive force to topple skyscrapers. That caricatural comparison isn’t ideal though since the infamous Marvel Comics world-devourer couldn’t command even a fraction of Buhaina’s dynamism or agility.

Free For All embodies the arguable apogee of the fabled Blakey ardor. At just four cuts, it’s a short jaunt, but any longer and the ensuing bumps and bruises might prove chronic. The title cut and “The Core” are tornados of gloriously stentorian rhythm, but the action avoids devolving into Buddy Rich-style bombast. Blakey always holds the helm, but he never browbeats his sidemen. He’s the general who galvanizes his troops and garners the best from them by leading by example. Shorter responds in kind, conjuring some of his most florid and fulminating solos on record, statements that retain their improvisatory incisiveness without ceding an ounce of zeal. Hubbard scales similar heights. Matching Blakey’s mettle on the title piece in a game of dramatic brinksmanship, the clarion-toned trumpeter eventually pulls back. The drummer ploughs forward and past him, detonating a solo that rattles the rafters of Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and likely the dentition of everyone present with a barrage of pile-driving press rolls. Even the characteristically genteel Curtis Fuller reciprocates in the fervor. “Pensativa” acts balm to the towering infernos of the earlier cuts, but Shorter doesn’t let the relative calm restrain him from lighting another bottle rocket of a solo. With more energy unfettered and expended than the majority of the Jazz Messengers live dates, this is also among the venerable outfit’s most incandescent.

Martin Kuchen - Music from One of the Provinces in the Empire

Martin Kuchen
Music from One of the Provinces in the Empire
Confront Collectors Series
CCS 3

With solo sax improv sides suddenly appearing more frequently than Cedric the Entertainer in bad movies, here comes yet another, an exposition for alto and soprano by Martin Kuchen. He’s a member of Exploding Customer, a band I’ve not heard but am told can be roughly compared to the AALY Trio, so I take it that his work therein might bear some resemblance to Gustafsson’s in that context. There’s a tinge of Mat’s more experimental approach in this collection of fifteen fairly short pieces (all between one and five minutes long). Going in, one is suspicious of a “catalog” set-up, a pyrotechnic extravaganza where you might expect to hear every extended technique the musician has mastered laid out for appreciation and the dropping of jaws. I tend to find this approach uninspiring, although way back it was essentially the avenue Braxton took: each piece being an explication of a given technique. At his best, of course, Braxton used it as only a starting point, digging in well past the surface. There are several other ways, at least, around this problem. You might, a la John Butcher, simply possess the inherent musicality to, often enough, subsume any notion of technical prowess into the wider and abstract idea of “song”. Or, like Stephane Rives in his fine Potlatch disc, “Fibres”, you can plunge into things with such a degree of obsession that you (at least occasionally) transcend the digital manipulations and land on some whole other plane. Kuchen pretty much opts for presenting a catalog, not unfascinating here and there, but lacking the cohesion of concept I’d like to hear.

The first track (titles range from Imperial Music I to Imperial Music XV) is one of the strongest, a juxtaposition of rushed breath tones with a furious clacking that sounds as though Kuchen removed the felt pads from his keys and went nuts (it sounds overdubbed, as do some other cuts, but I’m assuming it’s not). When some inquisitive growls and mumblings enter in, the music takes on an interesting imagistic character, the clicks and wheezes suddenly acquiring a feeling of place, the vocalizations implying a narrative. The next enters shakuhachi range (as do several others) while III sounds like Greg Kelley adapted for soprano, a thin sheet of metal set abuzz near the bell if I’m guessing correctly. VIII locates the water barrel, spittle retained for uses elsewhere, and XII is an accurate evocation of a blowtorch. Again, fine in and of themselves. Every piece is solid and played with an impressive degree of command but, after listening, I find I want more in the way of context, of ideas. The last couple of tracks begin to gel and hint at something greater than the sum of their techniques. On XIV, Lacy-like arabesques swirl very attractively through the bubbles and mist; I wouldn’t have minded this one going on a good bit longer. XV, however, is the winner of the bunch for these ears, a sequence of overlaid breath tones and burrs possessing an odd quasi-regularity that gives intimations of circuitry and backwards tape. Here, Kuchen gets into an area I’ve heard explored most successfully by Butcher but makes something of his own well worth further inquiry. I’m curious to hear how things develop with Kuchen, to see if he can put some of the ideas touched on here to wider, more thoughtful use.

More info at: http://www.confront.info/

You See Me Laughin'

And the screenings continue. Sat down last night with the newly released You See Me Laughin’ from Fat Possum. Akin to Robert Mugge’s earlier Deep Blues, but more localized and specific in scope, it makes for a mostly engrossing and entertaining 73-minutes. Director Mandy Stein structures the narrative loosely around biographical sketches of the Fat Possum label’s principals. More recent recruits like Robert Belfour and James Caldwell aren’t mentioned. Neither are others in the rogues’ gallery of sidemen like SPAM. Most of the episodes are filled with the expected chronicles of hardship, woe, poverty and violence: Junior Kimbrough’s 28 offspring (a figure that’s since ballooned to “36” in recent FP press releases), the deaths of most of R.L. Burnside’s immediate family in an eight-month time span, and so on. One of the most disturbing unfolds with T-Model Ford’s testimonial of the boyhood demise of his testicle as outcome of a whupping. Several others recount shootings and stabbings with a troubling supply of braggadocio. Stories are told in an effective overlapping style and the anecdotal flow only drags in few spots, most noticeably in the final third.

The amassed footage is both the film’s strongest feature and its most vexatious one. Grainy film stock captures and enhances the environs and denizens of Holly Springs, MS- the stomping grounds of most of the musicians. A revolving soundtrack culled from the vaults magnifies the atmosphere of rural privation and stewing disaffection. These sorts of documentaries always manage to draw on revelatory sources. And the desire to screen the tantalizing chosen snippets in guises closer to their entireties is a natural reaction. But here director insists on persistently hacking them up. There isn’t a single performance in the film allowed to run start to finish without interruption. And some of the clips beg for such unexpurgated treatment. One vignette features Asie Payton tearing through a raucous version of “Worried Life”, but a string of inserted asides bleed its momentum. Another excerpts an early 70s juke performance by R.L. Swaying on a one-chord riff he repeatedly flashes a toothsome Cheshire grill at the camera, his lascivious smirk conveying volumes. It’s a fit, feline countenance strikingly at odds with the dentition-decimated, rheumy-eyed fogey that is the older Burnside throughout much of the film.

The segment on Cedell Davis makes for fascinating and harrowing viewing too. Walloped with the triple whammy of typhoid malaria fever, polio and the wrong place-wrong time results of a barroom riot that left him wheelchair-restricted for the remainder of his life, Davis has paid more dues to the fates than most folks can even fathom. Sitting slumped in his corrugated shack he demonstrates his singular method of guitar speak. Butter-knife clutched in an extremity that’s more claw than hand, he carves out an accompaniment to grunted lyrics in an alien tuning of his own devising. “Jo-Jo” Herman nails the sound perfectly during an adjacent interview segment when says: “It’s sounds out of tune to begin with because you’re not used to hearing that tuning, but when you listen to it for five or ten minutes, all of a sudden, it sounds like it’s in tune, you know, you just fall into his tuning." Davis’ Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong is a must hear.

Watching segments roll by I kept waiting for the profile of Kenny Brown, Fat Possum’s unsung session man and for quite awhile one of few white faces on the music side of the mics. Brown’s easily the most technically accomplished of all the musicians on the roster and his gritty fretwork has shored up many otherwise rickety records. Looking like a gaunt, leathery Tom Petty in bib overalls with Adam’s Apple bobbing and collarbones poking at emaciated skin he tells the tale of his first gig with R.L. back in the 70s, before he acquired the honorific of Burnside’s “adopted son.” Miles from nowhere at country juke packed with local color, R.L. abandoned the stage for a game of dice out back and left Brown to his own devices- sink or swim, the lone cracker in the joint.

The film hits most, if not all of the bases and I had fun checking them off in succession. One chapter delves into the contentious economic arrangements that exist between the label and its stable of songsters, taking pains to present the blurred sides of the debate. What comes out is how the cleaver of exploitation cuts both ways. Some critics have berated the label as a modern day minstrel show and there are certainly kernels of truth to the claim in the regular cultivation and celebration of the most misanthropic aspects of the bluesman archetype. The egocentric and avaricious attitudes and behaviors of some of the Possum bullpen could easily give certain gangster rap superstars a run for the money.

Fat Possum honcho Matthew Johnson is definitely out to make a buck, but he repeatedly counters these capitalist goals with a nobler calling to document and promote as many of the musicians as possible before the impending Reaper’s call. The same can’t as easily be said for some of musicians, most of whom are more than content to leave the particulars up to him as long as the greenbacks continue to roll in. There’s a particularly telling and awkward scene where Johnson and his associate Bruce Watson counsel R.L. about the faulty wisdom in the latter’s attempts to continue fraudulently collecting disability checks. When queried as to the monthly amount of his guilefully-gained assistance, R.L. croaks “$111.” Johnson counters, “shit R.L., you make a lot more than that in an hour.”

Stein also explores the critical flak from attempts at making the music more youth/pop culture friendly. A scene in an Oxford, MS studio remixing one of R.L.’s tunes looks more like a casual game of crapshoot than anything meticulously crafted or premeditated. Johnson laments the prevailing public viewpoint of the music as antiquated and even obsolete and defends the postproduction gimmickry as a necessary evil. There’s a related segment on partnership of Burnside and the punk rock band The Blues Explosion. Both sides speak candidly about the resulting albums and the ire they engendered amongst purists. As usual R.L. boils it down to financial terms: “I didn’t thought it sound too good, you know, but after awhile a lot young peoples [bought it].”

Interviews with Bono and Iggy Pop, at once reverential and oddly patronizing, further elaborate on the FP covey’s infiltration into more popular musical culture. The U2 frontman’s anecdotes are particularly amusing, especially the pull-quote: “I guess in some college campuses we were big shots, but right there in Holly Springs you couldn’t fit us in a shot glass.” Iggy has his comeuppance when Junior Kimbrough coins him the mocking moniker “Lollipop” while on a shared tour circuit.

Another recurring theme emerges in the reality of the label’s finite talent pool, one that been rapidly evaporating for years. The director inserts long shots of Johnson roaming the dirt roads in his pick-up to exemplify the many trips spent combing the hill country in search of new blood. Most unlikely of the new ‘finds’ covered is Johnny Farmer-- the world’s most reluctant bluesman-- a guy who taught himself a few blues tunes for his own pleasure and was palavered, inveigled and finally out-right bribed into cutting a record. When his health nose-dived after the platter’s release, he took to ardently believing it the origin of all his ills thereby short-circuiting the probability of a proposed sophomore project. The above-mentioned Caldwell was positioned to be the label’s saving grace, his debut Remember Me bearing out Johnson’s confidence with a body of music rivaling some of Burnside’s best. Bricks in Johnson’s pillow, Caldwell passed away just prior to the record’s release.

Safari discoveries have winnowed to virtually nil in recent years. The prevailing paucity pushed Johnson to switch gears and focus his attention on alt rock acts like 20 Miles and Thee Shams as well as keeping his remaining roster as healthy as possible. Fat Possum’s latest coup is the Heartless Bastards out of Ohio. Fronted by Erika Wennerstrom, they’re also the first band on the label with a prominent female presence. Considering the label’s lingering misogynistic rep, it’s a step in the right direction. Stairs and Elevators, their debut, has been in near constant rotation at Rancho de Taylor and a small club gig I caught in February further cemented my esteem. With the Bastards in its ranks the label that’s perpetually tread water just off the shores of insolvency might have a renewed shot at financial security. As a sharp, entertaining foray into a subculture that is both fascinating and frightening Stein’s doc definitely does the trick.

...Just to Keep From Cryin'

And the screenings continue. Sat down last night with the newly released You See Me Laughin’ from Fat Possum. Akin to Robert Mugge’s earlier Deep Blues, but more localized and specific in scope, it makes for a mostly engrossing and entertaining 73-minutes. Director Mandy Stein structures the narrative loosely around biographical sketches of the Fat Possum label’s principals. More recent recruits like Robert Belfour and James Caldwell aren’t mentioned. Neither are others in the rogues’ gallery of sidemen like SPAM. Most of the episodes are filled with the expected chronicles of hardship, woe, poverty and violence: Junior Kimbrough’s 28 offspring (a figure that’s since ballooned to “36” in recent FP press releases), the deaths of most of R.L. Burnside’s immediate family in an eight-month time span, and so on. One of the most disturbing unfolds with T-Model Ford’s testimonial of the boyhood demise of his testicle as outcome of a whupping. Several others recount shootings and stabbings with a troubling supply of braggadocio. Stories are told in an effective overlapping style and the anecdotal flow only drags in few spots, most noticeably in the final third.

The amassed footage is both the film’s strongest feature and its most vexatious one. Grainy film stock captures and enhances the environs and denizens of Holly Springs, MS- the stomping grounds of most of the musicians. A revolving soundtrack culled from the vaults magnifies the atmosphere of rural privation and stewing disaffection. These sorts of documentaries always manage to draw on revelatory sources. And the desire to screen the tantalizing chosen snippets in guises closer to their entireties is a natural reaction. But here director insists on persistently hacking them up. There isn’t a single performance in the film allowed to run start to finish without interruption. And some of the clips beg for such unexpurgated treatment. One vignette features Asie Payton tearing through a raucous version of “Worried Life”, but a string of inserted asides bleed its momentum. Another excerpts an early 70s juke performance by R.L. Swaying on a one-chord riff he repeatedly flashes a toothsome Cheshire grill at the camera, his lascivious smirk conveying volumes. It’s a fit, feline countenance strikingly at odds with the dentition-decimated, rheumy-eyed fogey that is the older Burnside throughout much of the film.

The segment on Cedell Davis makes for fascinating and harrowing viewing too. Walloped with the triple whammy of typhoid malaria fever, polio and the wrong place-wrong time results of a barroom riot that left him wheelchair-restricted for the remainder of his life, Davis has paid more dues to the fates than most folks can even fathom. Sitting slumped in his corrugated shack he demonstrates his singular method of guitar speak. Butter-knife clutched in an extremity that’s more claw than hand, he carves out an accompaniment to grunted lyrics in an alien tuning of his own devising. “Jo-Jo” Herman nails the sound perfectly during an adjacent interview segment when says: “It’s sounds out of tune to begin with because you’re not used to hearing that tuning, but when you listen to it for five or ten minutes, all of a sudden, it sounds like it’s in tune, you know, you just fall into his tuning." Davis’ Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong is a must hear.

Watching segments roll by I kept waiting for the profile of Kenny Brown, Fat Possum’s unsung session man and for quite awhile one of few white faces on the music side of the mics. Brown’s easily the most technically accomplished of all the musicians on the roster and his gritty fretwork has shored up many otherwise rickety records. Looking like a gaunt, leathery Tom Petty in bib overalls with Adam’s Apple bobbing and collarbones poking at emaciated skin he tells the tale of his first gig with R.L. back in the 70s, before he acquired the honorific of Burnside’s “adopted son.” Miles from nowhere at country juke packed with local color, R.L. abandoned the stage for a game of dice out back and left Brown to his own devices- sink or swim, the lone cracker in the joint.

The film hits most, if not all of the bases and I had fun checking them off in succession. One chapter delves into the contentious economic arrangements that exist between the label and its stable of songsters, taking pains to present the blurred sides of the debate. What comes out is how the cleaver of exploitation cuts both ways. Some critics have berated the label as a modern day minstrel show and there are certainly kernels of truth to the claim in the regular cultivation and celebration of the most misanthropic aspects of the bluesman archetype. The egocentric and avaricious attitudes and behaviors of some of the Possum bullpen could easily give certain gangster rap superstars a run for the money.

Fat Possum honcho Matthew Johnson is definitely out to make a buck, but he repeatedly counters these capitalist goals with a nobler calling to document and promote as many of the musicians as possible before the impending Reaper’s call. The same can’t as easily be said for some of musicians, most of whom are more than content to leave the particulars up to him as long as the greenbacks continue to roll in. There’s a particularly telling and awkward scene where Johnson and his associate Bruce Watson counsel R.L. about the faulty wisdom in the latter’s attempts to continue fraudulently collecting disability checks. When queried as to the monthly amount of his guilefully-gained assistance, R.L. croaks “$111.” Johnson counters, “shit R.L., you make a lot more than that in an hour.”

Stein also explores the critical flak from attempts at making the music more youth/pop culture friendly. A scene in an Oxford, MS studio remixing one of R.L.’s tunes looks more like a casual game of crapshoot than anything meticulously crafted or premeditated. Johnson laments the prevailing public viewpoint of the music as antiquated and even obsolete and defends the postproduction gimmickry as a necessary evil. There’s a related segment on partnership of Burnside and the punk rock band The Blues Explosion. Both sides speak candidly about the resulting albums and the ire they engendered amongst purists. As usual R.L. boils it down to financial terms: “I didn’t thought it sound too good, you know, but after awhile a lot young peoples [bought it].”

Interviews with Bono and Iggy Pop, at once reverential and oddly patronizing, further elaborate on the FP covey’s infiltration into more popular musical culture. The U2 frontman’s anecdotes are particularly amusing, especially the pull-quote: “I guess in some college campuses we were big shots, but right there in Holly Springs you couldn’t fit us in a shot glass.” Iggy has his comeuppance when Junior Kimbrough coins him the mocking moniker “Lollipop” while on a shared tour circuit.

Another recurring theme emerges in the reality of the label’s finite talent pool, one that been rapidly evaporating for years. The director inserts long shots of Johnson roaming the dirt roads in his pick-up to exemplify the many trips spent combing the hill country in search of new blood. Most unlikely of the new ‘finds’ covered is Johnny Farmer-- the world’s most reluctant bluesman-- a guy who taught himself a few blues tunes for his own pleasure and was palavered, inveigled and finally out-right bribed into cutting a record. When his health nose-dived after the platter’s release, he took to ardently believing it the origin of all his ills thereby short-circuiting the probability of a proposed sophomore project. The above-mentioned Caldwell was positioned to be the label’s saving grace, his debut Remember Me bearing out Johnson’s confidence with a body of music rivaling some of Burnside’s best. Bricks in Johnson’s pillow, Caldwell passed away just prior to the record’s release.

Safari discoveries have winnowed to virtually nil in recent years. The prevailing paucity pushed Johnson to switch gears and focus his attention on alt rock acts like 20 Miles and Thee Shams as well as keeping his remaining roster as healthy as possible. Fat Possum’s latest coup is the Heartless Bastards out of Ohio. Fronted by Erika Wennerstrom, they’re also the first band on the label with a prominent female presence. Considering the label’s lingering misogynistic rep, it’s a step in the right direction. Stairs and Elevators, their debut, has been in near constant rotation at Rancho de Taylor and a small club gig I caught in February further cemented my esteem. With the Bastards in its ranks the label that’s perpetually tread water just off the shores of insolvency might have a renewed shot at financial security. As a sharp, entertaining foray into a subculture that is both fascinating and frightening Stein’s doc definitely does the trick.

V5 Hatches an Even Dozen

Cecil tied Butch Morris at 10. Ayler earned 9. Ornette occupied 6 and Silva secured 4, albeit in hand carved, hand painted Treasure Boxes. Vandermark trumps them all with 12 and in so doing releases the largest discrete collection of “free jazz” by a single band/artist to date with Alchemia.

This pie-eating contest rouses memories of the picayunish fracas surrounding Vandermark’s MacArthur Fellowship back in ’99. I can hear the same naysayers echoing similar arguments in the now, each grousing about the gaggle of other musicians better deserving of such lavish box set treatment. Such spitting into the wind seems both petty and childish. By my lights Vandermark advanced to his present position by virtue of a lot of toil and gumption. Luck had something to do with it, but the mantle of “hardest working man in free jazz” isn’t some flippant joke. The moxie and achievement behind this project seems to me to bear out his storied industry.

I remember Vandermark speaking from the stage at the 40 Watt Club on the opening night of the ACME Fest just over a year ago. He had the look of a man who hadn’t slept at any length in some time; tufts of beard scruff sprouting from cheeks and chin & puffy bags underscoring each eye. Gripping the mic he edified the audience with a short account of the Polish travels that directly preceded the band’s touchdown in Athens, GA. His inebriating enthusiasm for the tenure that had just transpired directly fed into the excitement of the next three days. His bold claim that the stand at the Krakow club Alchemia represented some of the best music the V5 had ever conjured stuck in my head, a pang of lingering regret for having missed it tempering ever so slightly my impressions of the excellent music to follow.

Last night while nursing the mental bruises of typical Monday at the office with a few fingers of George Dickel, I discovered another parcel tucked under the doormat. The contents: one copy of Alchemia. Having the sum total of that storied sojourn in hand a year later is an undeniably exciting stroke of good fortune, but the duty of writing it up is a daunting one. The package is deceptively compact in terms of tangibles: an evergreen-colored, cloth-covered cardboard box embossed with a photo of budding flower. Inside: a dozen discs grouped in fours on heavy cardboard placards, beneath each disc another floral image. Lastly, there’s a Mosaic Records-style booklet containing a lengthy interview with Vandermark along with copious photos and annotations.

The numbers are equally inclusive and impressive: “55 pieces: 32 compositions from 8 different albums, including 3 world premiers- “Camera”, “That Was Now” and “Pieces of the Past”.” One complete set per disc, it’s a bushel of aural wheat along with the chaff from five days of intensive, all-consuming music-making. Peppered throughout are the sorts of covers that have become the band’s calling cards over the years: tunes by Roland Kirk, Don Cherry, Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. Also included are two jam sessions with Polish musicians Marcin Oleś and Bartłomiej Brat Oleś sitting in.

Vandermark likens his mindset and approach during the residency to that of his idol Ellington. Momentarily free from the rigors and stresses of the road he and his mates were able to compose, rehearse and play with the strengths and particulars of each other at the forefront. The result was a Petrie dish of teeming creative activity nourished both by the musicians and their audiences. The risky economical viability of releasing the residency in sum steered the project in the direction of a joint venture between Not Two and Atavistic: a double cd distillation of the full capacious corpus. But Marek Winiarski, owner and producer of Not Two, lobbied hard for the unabridged outcome and here it is.

So far I’ve only had an opportunity to listen to the first disc (blame the Dickel!), but can report that fidelity, while not quite on studio par, is more than serviceable. Rempis rips through “Telefon” and “Other Cuts”, his alto an interval sprinting blur on the former. Daisy’s his boisterous, slightly over-ambitious, self and Vandermark exercises his customary deference to his colleagues, sounding solid each of his reeds. Best of all the palpable energy of the V5 funnels through largely intact in this solely audio facsimile. If the rest of the set rivals the first half of this debut night the compelling value of what’s here will be easy to endorse. And with news out now of Bishop handing in his walking papers to be replaced by an incoming Fred Lonberg-Holm the music here may represent some of the last by the classic V5 line-up.

Henry Grimes Trio - Live at the Kerava Jazz Festival

Henry Grimes Trio
Live at the Kerava Jazz Festival
Ayler 028

http://www.ayler.com/

Bassist Henry Grimes' re-emergence after thirty-five years away from music is old news, and the resultant barrage of hype from all quarters made me approach this disc with a fair amount of apprehension. It was needless, as Grimes, Hamid Drake and David Murray put on a hugely enjoyable, often transcendent, concert of improvised music.

From the expectant hush that opens "Spin", punctuated by Drake's brush strokes and Grimes' glissing harmonies, dynamics and energy levels have nowhere to go but up, and up they go with an almost malevolent vigor; beyond all recall and redemption. All three players, masters of that increasingly chameleon art of reference and subreference once mislabeled "free" jazz, spend the gig propelling each other to further and further-flung corners of the stratosphere or down below the gutbucket into the expressionism of uhr-blues. Just where lines are crossed, summits are reached and homage becomes whim is often difficult to gage, as the stirringly frenetic rendition of the Murray classic "Flowers for Albert" will demonstrate. Murray assimilates, sublimates and transcends Ayler, Drake thumps and punches from moment to moment at the borders of jazz and rock, delicate cymbalwork providing a gorgeously glistening backdrop, while Grimes seems to hear and anticipate every harmonic nuance Murray can muster. Murray is no less a rhetorician, as his funkily slapped bass clarinet work on "Eighty Degrees" places him beyond any further comparison with Dolphy, and that's only one of his many and multifarious contributions to this date.

Despite fireworks of all colors and shapes from Drake and Murray however, Grimes softly steals the show with his bass solo on "Spin". I hope it will eventually be the subject of a thorough analytical study; its conception and execution are so unified that it might have been a free-standing "organic" composition. Its first half bowed and the remainder plucked, it begins nebulously enough, like Mahler's first symphony, with strong hints of the pitch A amidst clusters of rising harmonics. As melodic fragments gradually emerge, they still hover around B-Flat, G, sometimes intimating G-sharp, but often leaving A implicated if not achieved. The arco section exudes white heat, but key moments of silence, especially in the plucked passages, speak even further to Grimes' compositional leanings as a soloist and to his continued and re-invigorated power as a diversely gifted improviser. His sound is leaner but more direct than on much of his 1960's work, but his energy and evident enthusiasm remains undimmed. Despite all the buzz, please don't miss such a transformative listening experience.

~ Marc Medwin

Tamba 4 - We and the Sea (A&M)

One of the freer-thinking Brazilian outfits of the late 60s, the Tamba 4 were something of sore-thumb signing on the Herb Alpert officiated A&M imprint. On one end of the label’s roster sat the brazenly milquetoast Tijuana Brass. The industriously inquisitive Tambans held court at the other. Led by canny pianist Luiz Eça, the ensemble also included: José “Bebeto” de Castilho e Souza on flutes, bass and vocals; Dorio Ferreira on bass, guitars and percussion and Rubens Ohana on drums, jawbone, conga and other sundry percussion. Together they roped in an ambitiously eclectic array of elements from Debussy-indebted lyricism, to pervasively popular Jobim, to indigenous sonorities borrowed from their country’s melting pot culture. Even forays into free improvisatory dissonance weren’t outside the reach of their explorations. “O Morro (the Hill)” uncovers early evidence of their multiplicity of interests as they adapt the Jobim-scripted theme to a shortlist of permutations from rhapsodic piano samba to a romping percussive solo rife with martial stick-play from Ohana that would make Buddy Rich reel in envy. “Moça Flor (Flower Girl)” suggests something else entirely, a moody flute-nourished ballad feature for Bebeto’s satin-soft vocals. “Iemanjá,” a Baden Powell number, evokes mystery via whirring organ, percolating hand percussion, flute and lush harmonizing vocals on a chassis of dark rolling piano chords. Other standout cuts encompass two more Powell-penned tunes. “Chant of Ossanha,” further spotlights Bebeto’s flute and Ohana’s fluttering palms and fingertips on tautly stretched animal skin. The closing “Consolation” revels once again in Eça’s digital dexterity as a fulcrum for fast break improv, the theme to “O Morro” resurfacing repeatedly in his wild interpolations amidst precocious rhythmic stops. Despite the sometimes dizzying thematic shifts, the four remain boldly creative and tightly attuned to each other. It’s this shared consistency and vision that easily earns them the trophy amidst many of the other so-called “Brazilian” albums of the same era on A&M.

Activity Center/Phil Minton - Activity Center & Phil Minton

Absinth 6

“Too risky! It’s too fuckin’ risky, I think, these days. Yeah, ahhh. I don’t think I could take it anymore.”

With that preamble from Minton, this unlikely project takes off. Unlikely in the sense that, going in, one might have a misgiving or two on pairing the voluble vocalist with a duo that, at least as far as prior recordings evidence, tend toward the recondite and austere. Well, it turns out just fine, Minton generally adapting his mouth sounds toward the quieter, more contemplative end of dial where Burkhard Beins and Michael Renkel happily reside. This is not to say that Minton doesn’t occasionally burp forth some post-digestive eructations, but they don’t usurp the proceedings and instead happily coexist alongside the gentler meanderings of his mates.

The Beins/Renkel duo are a nicely offsetting pair themselves, Beins’ stringent but rich percussion well-balanced by Renkel’s slightly-to-the-left-of-Stangl’s nearly melodic strumming. Minton adds a fresh color, a rather more liquid presence, bubbling freely between them, gurgling around the edges. It’s a plus, I think, when male free improv vocalists operate in the baritone-bass range as they’re able to sink under the other activity and have a greater chance of “disappearing” that is, allowing the listener to momentarily forget that he/she is hearing a singer. Some of the most effective minutes on this disc are precisely when that occurs, when, as with much good improv, the instruments themselves are subsumed by the music, a difficult trick given the psychological reactions listeners automatically have to the human voice. The handful of times the voice becomes too identifiable with a given emotional quality, as on the groaning sections of the second track, “Pick Force”, one is jerked a bit out of the “now” and into an area of pathos perhaps better left to other forms of music. Happily, this is a rare instance and for the most part the trio maintains a serene, richly-detailed surface with the odd flash of brilliance. The longer pieces, “Hide” and “RubbleRubble”, are well-paced, varied without any sense of the grab-bag and evince careful listening by the musicians—not merely call and response but additive and creative solutions. When Minton breaks into quasi-song during the former, over a near-vamp by Beins and Renkel, it’s a lovely and oddly welcome surprise. A few moments later, his buzzy whistling over koto-like guitar and the clacking of sticks manages a similarly wonderful, if brief, time suspension. The final cut, “Hi! Friction”, cemented early on by another Stanglesque guitar figure, is perhaps my favorite of the bunch. Beins’ bowed zither (guessing here) blends in perfectly with Minton’s strained, saliva-laden gasps and questioning low tones, the seven minute piece achieving a solid, almost compositional feeling.

Good job. As with everything else so far on Absinth, well worth hearing, no risk at all

McPhee at The Stone

It's in the nature of Joe McPhee's art that every gig feels special, but last night's solo set was the stuff of legend. Even objectively it had historical clout as McPhee's first attempt at presenting a program of solo trumpet music, but subjectively it was a group of devoted improv listeners experiencing rare heights of rapture at the hands and lips of an international treasure, rapture that found outward expression in gasps and upward glances to the psychosomatic heavens.

On top of the deep private significance of the evening to McPhee and some of his devoted fans, I experienced a feeling of birth-celebration for The Stone, a new space in Manhattan's lower east side founded by John Zorn to host the the communion rituals of creative musicians and creative listeners. In its 6th day of public life, The Stone had an air of institutional gravity far outpacing its age, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who sensed it was the first of many sound-life pilgrimages to come.

Walking into the stark, unornamented room of wood, brick, freshly painted cement, and newly hung velvet curtains, the first thing that caught my eye, besides the familiar and elegant glistening of a piano, trumpet, and doublebass resting in readiness for the evening's first set, was a long horizontal strip of beautiful black-and-white photos dividing the longest wall. Each panel poeticized the familiar visage of a member of this polycephalic musical community who has been entrusted with a month's worth of curatorial responsibilities. There's no room for speculation about Zorn's vision in either methodology or content; this room will celebrate and nourish the music of a diverse, but well-defined community. Scanning the photographs on the wall, I can report that our ears are in good hands. Word is that Misha Mengelberg is handling the May festivities with himself on the bench throughout, but only for half the month; the space will be closed for the other half while some physical improvements are made. This inaugural month of April was curated by Ned Rothenberg and I was impressed by the vitality of the lineup, especially the inclusion of some of the lesser-known young improvisors trying to find their niche.

This was a night of storied heavyweights though; preceding Sir McPhee's 10pm revelation was an 8pm hit for Mark Dresser, Herb Robertson, and Denman Maroney. The fact that the room--larger than the Old Office but smaller than Tonic--was filled beyond seating capacity probably had as much to do with the fact that the Zeus of doublebass gods was visiting his erstwhile metropolitan haunt, as it did with the attraction of checking out the new venue in town. Yes, music lovers miss Mark Dresser gigs at their own peril, especially us East Coasters who have even less of an excuse to take him for granted now that he's calling San Diego home. The seating is split into two quite separate sections and I didn't think twice about picking my seat on the bass-side, a choice rewarded as I watched what I understand to be human hands effortlessly interweaving clear note-rivers and apocalyptic note-volcanoes about five feet in front of my eyes perched well below their lids and well above my lower jaw. I have a bad habit of saying that every Dresser gig I happen to catch is "the best ever", but I really mean it this time. Okay, okay, I'm still reeling from the last one, the legendary one-off free improv meeting of Dresser, Robertson, Tim Berne, and Jay Rosen (the latter two in attendance last night) a few months ago at Barbes, and that really was the best bass playing I've ever heard in my life. Er, well, there was that Barre Phillips set last spring... Okay, moving along.

Seeing Dresser and Robertson together again with such fresh memories of that grueling, transcendental quartet set was a lesson in what separates the thousands of great musicians in the world from the mere handfuls of true masters like these two, because the music was in a very different stylistic range this time but they played with indistinguishable immersion and naturalness, hinting at a huge range of possibilities in the space of mere seconds, as if all possible music was in finger's reach at all times. Listening to them slip in and out of just about anything that could be slipped in and out of, even if only for a split-second, it occurred to me that if there's anyone who fits Edwin Prevost's somewhat self-congratulatory self-description of "meta-musician", it's cats like Robertson and Dresser, not Prevost and his mates in AMM. I say this as a passionate admirer of AMM; my concern here is simply semantic accuracy. What kind of music could be more about music than a total mastery of the full periodic chart of musical atomic elements, expressed as spontaneous traversals up and down the scale of molecularity across an unbounded space of combinatorial vectors? I think Prevost is confusing his opening of new parametric doorways to music with the transcendence of parameter. The latter is certainly not a claim that can be made for Prevost or AMM, and probably not for anyone, but if anyone comes close enough it's the rare Dressers and Robertsons of the world. I can hear AMM buried inside the playing of a musician like Robertson or Dresser; I can hear Charlie Parker, Charlie Patton, James Brown, Bhob Rainey, you name it. On the other hand, there is little beyond AMM itself that I can hear in AMM. That's not a criticism and I'm not making any value judgements here; I simply wish to reflect on a possible case of abused terminology while calling attention to the special nature of these gentlemen who invigorated my senses last night.

With Denman Maroney in the trio, I was privately hoping for a set along the lines of the classic Dick/Dresser/Maroney/Hemingway project Tambastics, especially since Robertson is one of the elder statespersons of experimental trumpeting and a New Winds alumnus like Dick who can push his instrument to the nether regions of extended technique. While that facet of their musicality was certainly represented in the set, what we got in greater supply was tender melody, post-jazz pulses, and several fantastic scored pieces using conventional notes and straightforward interlocking parts, one by Maroney and the rest by Dresser. I love the way these guys can freely move between the feeling of American jazz and blues and the abstraction of classical European free improv; they own the entire continuum. Robertson has bridged these worlds in his career as much as anyone I can think of.

A gig like this is also an opportunity to celebrate community and history as it resides in a web of human relationships, and I know Robertson's presence meant a lot to Stephanie Stone, who's known Robertson longer than just about any other musician still around these days, a friendship that dates well into the 70s. But it's Stephanie's presence that probably meant even more to a lot of people, as she's the very living heart and soul of this space, which was named after her husband and equal partner in improv connoisseurship for decades, Irving Stone, who passed away on June 18, 2003 but will surely visit the thoughts of a great many people who visit The Stone. Starting in 1978, the Stones were among the very first people to offer their ears on a regular basis to Zorn, Chadbourne, and their gang of struggling, marginalized radical improvisors, becoming de facto parents of sorts for many in the downtown improv family, notably including Zorn, who, as the artistic director of The Stone, still has an unfaltering ethical commitment to this grass-roots community symbolized by the Stones, even with his long-solidified artistic status alongside the Stockhausens and Braxtons of the world. (And how many of those sorts of people are there anyway? 3? 4? If you say more than 5, I think you've missed the point.) Bruce Lee Gallanter was also at the gig last night, another pillar of this community who sat beside the Stones and the tiny handful of other people who spent countless evenings from the early 80s onwards opening their ears and hearts to the curious aesthetic volleys of the emerging downtown improv scene. I don't know how to explain this, but somehow the music just sounds better with people like Stephanie and Bruce in the audience.

And music simply can't sound better than Joe McPhee's solos did last night. Inspired by the 100th anniversary of his father's birth on March 27th, 2005, Joe J. McPhee Jr decided to pay tribute to the instrument that Joe J. McPhee Sr [pictured below] foisted upon him at the tender age of 8 in the unsuspecting environs of Poughkeepsie, NY. Tweaking the plurality of Horace Silver's "Song for My Father", Joe planned a suite of improvisations entitled "Songs for My Father" to be performed on his trusty pocket trumpet.

A human being and their instrument. That's what Joe's music is about. He has no aesthetic agenda besides beauty in the moment of sounding and listening. With little more than soft air massages to his mouthpiece for the first few minutes, he created a sacred space where any sound could become a conduit to his human experience at that moment in time, gradually varying his timbral palette and virtually crying through the trumpet as he touched upon more conventional voiced sounds. In the recent history of experimental improvised music, extended techniques on common acoustic instruments have become as entrenched and accepted as those dang-blasted twelve pitches we're still so hung up on, and genuinely new categories of aesthetic experience have been discovered by something like a decentralized global research team of obsessive instrumentalists who've gotten past the technical novelty of their craft and learned how to hear new sounds as music and not just new sounds. These categories of experience can't be reduced to vague chestnuts like "emotion"; the human mind is a tangled jumble of experiential gizmos with buttons and knobs just waiting to be discovered and fiddled with. The sorts of commonplace emotions emphasized by musicians over the millenia are just a small part of the story that can be told about sound and beauty. Yes, it's an exciting time in the history of music, but unless you've heard Joe McPhee you might never imagine that old-fashioned, honest-to-goodness, unmistakable, raw emotional narrative can be conveyed with the same sorts of abstract alien sounds that genii like Greg Kelley and Axel Doerner have put to quite different purposes in recent memory. Who would've thought?

On paper it sounds too simple, even downright boring--a marriage of the naked and familiar passions of idiomatic improv traditions like free jazz or Azerbaidjani mughum with the timbral restlessness of the current avant-garde--but that's exactly what I was hearing last night in Joe's trumpet solos, and I felt some things I'd never felt before. Ecstatic introspection. "expression" has become something of a dirty word in many circles these days, and, sure, the mere thought of yet another skillful musician with good intentions and a good heart sends us running to escape with hands covering our ears. And if the "j" word is involved, then we're running even faster. Godspeed these feet to save these ears. But what's so bad about "pure expression"? I don't think the problem is anything inherent to expressionism as some overarching set of possibilities for connecting with a musician as a human being and not just a sound-generator, but rather that, in practice, we tire of being manipulated to feel the same emotions over and over again until it becomes some kind of routine that masks the irreducible buzzes and hums of our central nervous system at a given moment in time. When Joe plays, it's as expressionistic as it gets, but he's squirreling paths through emotional territory that simply can't be traversed by a casual stroll or steady jog. It takes concentration, hesitation, observation, and possible contortion at every step to follow him. No risk of numbed affect there!

Anyway, if reading my tedious and academic ruminations is taxing your patience, you might just want to hear what Jay Rosen said about the set: "He's just playing the blues". I can't argue with that, but the blues section in my record collection wouldn't be so small if that's all there was to it.

I had been primed for this event a few weeks ago when during a characteristically beautiful duo performance with Dominic Duval at Slought in Philadelphia, Joe surprisingly announced his solo trumpet agenda and proceeded to play a kind of music I'd never heard before, but I heard plenty more of last night. It was a single circular-breath for ten minutes or so of quiet pocket trumpet sounds mostly falling somewhere in between conventional extended techniques and conventional non-extended techniques, mingled with his trademark vocalizing as a simultaneous layer of sound. Joe wasn't messing around with this whole trumpet scheme of his! The audience, from neophytes to veterans, were in a state of total shock from that solo. He's been playing the thing for upwards of 60 years now, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but somehow I do wind up feeling surprised every time he plays.

His own celebratory glance towards the past prompted one of my own as I realized I'm now in my 10th year of Joe McPhee listenership, and that my very first time hearing him in the flesh was nothing other than a pocket trumpet solo! It feels like one of the endless succession of overlapping circles in life has closed for me. I still remember sitting in the Empty Bottle in Chicago amidst a packed house on February 14, 1996 anxious to find out what this whole McPhee thing was all about after so much hype from John Corbett and the other cats whose improv background dwarfed mine to the point of invisibility. It was the now-legendary first-ever McPhee concert in Chicago and the first day Joe ever played with Ken Vandermark and Kent Kessler, soon to become staple collaborators as Joe's career was steadily revitalized in association with this new slew of worthy partners. Earlier in the day they'd recorded their very first meeting as a private studio session that became the classic A Meeting in Chicago on Okkadisk. So this unpretentious man walked on stage by himself with nothing but a pocket trumpet and played so softly that there were unpleasant reminders that the place was, after all, a bar and an evolving indie-rock club, but he played so meditatively and creatively that I was sucked into his world for good. He set the mood and pacing for the trio set that followed, which was full of eloquence and sensitivity.

My personal approach towards being a music fan is to focus in on a very small handful of musicians I'm consistently excited by, and try to get more and more fluent in their private musical language instead of aiming for breadth and trying to keep up with the ridiculous amount of music I'd love to indulge in if it were feasible. There's certainly a downside to this as I wind up neglecting a lot of incredible musicians, but the rewards have been priceless as I attend concert after concert and buy record after record of the same musicians without any loss of enthusiasm, without ever being disappointed, as I constantly discover new nuances in their work. Needless to say, Joe's on my list; in fact, the only musician who's been on the list longer is Tim Berne. (If anybody cares, the full list of musicians I make an attempt at completist fanhood for is: McPhee, Berne, Jack Wright, Joe Maneri, Mat Maneri, Randy Peterson, Michel Doneda, Bhob Rainey, Nels Cline.) So last night was a sort of a private celebration for me of a landmark in my McPhee fanhood, as I'd never seen him do a full solo set before; he's done a few over the years, but it's been rare.

This set revealed the naked essence of his love triangle with trumpet and saxophone. For all his attempts at focusing on trumpet for this concert, he put it down midway through, moved towards his tenor sax case, and warmly told the audience that he never leaves home without it. Sitting a few feet behind me, I could hear Margaret Davis gasp with delight as we all licked our ears with full awareness of what was about to happen. With the stark contrast gained from a context of solemn, softly played pocket trumpet solos, the sheer sonic force of his tenor playing was a kind of high-dosage spiritual medicine. One of things that sets Joe apart from other post-Ayler saxophonists is the way he has such control over the details of tone and phrasing even at full blast that he can make overblown catharsis feel like a tender ballad. With my ears mostly ranging between 3 and 5 feet from Joe's saxophone as he moved around, his small movements from side to side gave me a kind of stereo sound experience unlike anything else I can cite. Instead of a solo, for me, it was a duo between Joe and that acoustic prism.

After two pieces on tenor that left audience members sharing knowing glances with each other, he started a piece on trumpet for a few minutes and switched to tenor with a pause so small he lost no momentum in his development of a phrase. It was a rare and beautiful opportunity to hear the two instruments deal with similar material side-by-side, and he reversed the transition a few minutes later to give the piece a symmetrical form. He finished the set with another tenor solo and then a short piece of what he called "air trumpet", quiet breathing sounds related to the early portions of the set.

Spirits ran high as the crowd dispersed. Music Witness Jeff Schlanger, who had been invited by the musicians from both sets to do his inimitable paint documentation of the music, had his explosive creation turned around for our enjoyment. After relaxing in the audience for the evening, Henry Grimes shared in some of the exchanges of appreciative remarks on Joe's set. Gilles Laheurte, the intimate friend of Steve Lacy whose friendship with Joe goes beyond their mutual trepidation in playing soprano sax to embrace a similar multi-instrumentalism on reeds and brass, was warmly effusive in his gratitude for the inspiration the set gave him to try new things in his own playing.

It was refreshing to be part of a gathering based 100% on a musical experience without being awkwardly contextualized by alcohol like so many gigs are. Having greatly enjoyed life without a single alcoholic drink for my 28 years on the planet so far, I was especially comfortable free from any guilt or conspicuity not participating in the financial substrate of a music venue. While I'm probably in the minority in my enthusiasm for this unalcoholic social environment, I think it has a lot of significance for the creative music community because these kinds of gigs are often formative, life-changing experiences for young people who are making tentative forays into this marginalized musical culture and may be part of its necessary human renewal in years to come. It's depressing to think that a teenager might be ready for a vital spiritual pilgrimage to the real-time act of creation by one of their musical heroes, only to find a roadblock in the arbitrary impositions of a society where alcohol has lost any semblance of integration into the fabric of life like it enjoyed in traditional, pre-industrial societies. In fact, come to think of it, that special experience I had hearing Joe for the first time was due to sheer luck in my social context that allowed me to get past the door guy as a 19-year old at the Empty Bottle, where there was a fairly strict 21-and-over policy. It's pretty ridiculous that an experience that vital dangled by such a thin and arbitrary thread. So when Zorn says The Stone is about the music, not refreshments or merchandise, those are not empty words to me. (As far as merchandise goes, though, I certainly hope performing musicians won't be prohibited from selling their wares, such a vital and elegant economic adaptation for struggling avant-garde musicians.)

In its sense of philosophical focus on music and community and intimacy without any bar culture, The Stone has a similar vibe to my favorite place in the world to see a gig, The Red Room in Baltimore, even though the, uh, interior decor, couldn't be more contrastive! As a physical space, The Stone is beautiful, but rough around the edges in its opening days, especially the edge on the ceiling, above which the peripatation of the second-floor apartment dwellers can be quite audible. On The Stone's website there is an explanation of its financial structure and a call for donations, which seems entirely warranted given such matters as soundproofing the ceiling.

I think The Stone will fill a different niche than Tonic for the mainstream avant-garde improv and post-jazz scene in NYC, as Tonic has become more of a "hang" (not a bad thing!) than a locus for austere musical rituals. I've probably had more transcendental musical experiences at Tonic than anywhere else (even The Red Room, where I've gone far more often than anywhere else), so I'm relieved that they recently triumphed over a severe financial crisis and I certainly expect to have plenty more transcendental experiences there in the future (still feeling bad for not buying any drinks), but I'm thrilled to ponder the gap being gloriously filled by The Stone in a city with an absurd overabundance of musical talent and a paucity of suitable venues, though there are other vital spaces currently in service, like Location One, The Issue Project Room, CB's Lounge, and the The Vision Club series at Les Gallery Clemente Soto Velez.

~Michael Anton Parker
~April 7, 2005

Visit the Joe McPhee website and read an interview at All About Jazz.

Special thanks to Joe McPhee for sharing the photograph of his father.

Three Types Of Fusion

http://www.fantasyjazz.com/

If reissues are one means a label uses to reuse material, then it seems only fair that a review of reissued material should be allowed to reuse a device that has been a time-honored tool of reviewers for years, namely, beginning a review with a dictionary definition, in this case "fusion".

My dictionary defines "fusion" as:

The merging or blending of two or more things, for example, materials or ideas.

Granted, this is hardly a great revelation, and it is more than a bit of a cliché to begin a review like this. Nevertheless, the concept of "fusion" as defined above is very relevant to the music contained in three recent reissues from the Fantasy/OJC organization, because the music of each, although superficially inhabiting different realms of the jazz spectrum, contains players and concepts that all represent fusions of one type or another.

Take Johnny Griffin, for instance. It would be easy to classify him as a "hard bop tenor great" and take it from there (or just leave it at that). That would be right as far as it goes, but that would be overlooking the fusion of elements that makes Griffin not just a great player, but also one of the most distinctive, personal, and virtuosic voices in the annals of jazz (I seriously doubt that there is anything that Griffin cannot play on his instrument). Certainly, Griffin is a master of the bop/hard bop language, but he also brings a deeply natural and genuinely nasty blues feeling (honed by spending many of his formative years playing in R&B bands, as well as Lionel Hampton's near-R&B orchestra), as well as a sense of humor that often borders on the surrealistic. The result is a player whose playing, although definitely bop/hard bop at its root, is liberally sprinkled with extremely vocal moans, groans, shouts, screams, as well as with quotations and "outside" passages that are often as startling as they are hilarious. Griffin, like his former employer Thelonious Monk, is a master of the "serious joke".

The music contained on Bush Dance (Galaxy GCD-95004-2) was recorded in 1978 and 1983, during a period when Griffin had followed the lead of fellow expatriate Dexter Gordon and returned to the U.S. after a decade or so abroad. Unlike Gordon, Griffin did not permanently settle in America, yet he did play almost as many gigs (including at least one with Dexter himself at New York Carnegie Hall), and even assembled a regular working band for them.

That band, consisting of Mulgrew Miller (piano), Curtis Lundy (bass), and Kenny Washington (drums) is heard on the disc's 1983 date, originally released (with one tune not included here for timing reasons) on Galaxy as Call It Whachawana. The program is a varied, if not particularly innovative, one, and the playing by all is about as good as it gets. Griff's band is young but able, and the tenor saxophonist spends the date molding and re-molding them into a highly sensitive and responsive unit, one that gives him exactly the type of support he needs. Indeed, while they play about as well as they can and you would expect, they remain a supporting cast, and they do what a supporting cast is supposed to do – rise to the challenge, soak it all in, and take a series of lessons in the finer points of life and music. Meanwhile, Griffin hangs out the "master at work" sign, assuming the role of elder statesman and playing it for all its worth. He lets his spirit soar and his chops fly in the service of his muse.

The 1978 session is different in concept, but not, ultimately, in quality. Here, Griffin is backed by a veteran cast of Cedar Walton, George Freeman (another highly idiosyncratic voice out of Griffin's hometown of Chicago), Sam Jones, Albert "Tootie" Heath, and percussionist Kenneth Nash. The program here is, if anything, more varied than on the '83 session, and the fare is not at all typical or simply straight-ahead. Yes, the group plays "A Night In Tunisia", but here it is prefaced (and post-scripted) with a lengthy African-tinged vamp, chant, and melody (the fusion continues...) that will have you wondering if this might not be a new tune that just happens to have the same name as the Dizzy Gillespie classic. There's also a "Since I Fell for You" that is about as stone-R&B in flavor as anything Griffin's ever done since he began recording as a leader; a Griffin original, "Bush Dance", that combines the sensibilities of Hard Bop with the feel of ‘70s dance music; and two more pieces that are more traditionally "jazz"-oriented. All of it is played with fire and abandon, and until we are blessed with a complete collection of Griffin's Galaxy recordings – which will hopefully include plenty of yet-unissured material from his 1979 live date at The Village Vanguard – this release must be considered a definitive example of Johnny Griffin's post-"homecoming" work. Whatever the case, its a "must have" for fans and novices alike.

Musically, Joe Henderson represents one kind of fusion all by his lonesome, and the 1970 performances to be heard on Joe Henderson Quintet At The Lighthouse (Milestone MCD-47104-2) are another type of fusion altogether. The observation that Henderson's recording career in the 1960s found him making meaningful and lasting contributions to sessions led by everybody from Grant Green to Andrew Hill to Lee Morgan to Larry Young. He also made series of "conservatively progressive" albums under his own name that still represent the core of his legacy. Truly a man for all seasons (and sessions), a man who even in the first stages of his career was synthesizing all the various then-current currents of modern jazz. The tenor saxophonist took bop, hard bop, modal, free, Bird, Rollins, Trane, all of it, as well as his own personal concepts of tone and rhythm, and made of this mélange a single (and singular) voice that made him one of those rare players who, though he could play in almost any setting, fit into it with a perfect and unforced appropriateness, still sounded like nobody but himself whatever the circumstances.

It should be no surprise, then, that when Henderson formed his own working group in the late 60's, he continued his natural tendencies to assimilate and transform whatever trends, materials, and ideas he found useful and to adopt / adapt them to his own ends. Among these incorporations will be obvious to even the casual listener: the use of electric piano; a heavy emphasis on Latin percussion. But others are less obvious, such a the leader's careful assembling of rhythm sections that are conversant with both the loose, open ended swing of post-Trane Miles Davis groups and a strong dance pulse (although this music is in no way "funk", it nevertheless consistently throbs with the dance impulse). The repertoire on At The Lighthouse consists almost exclusively of pieces drawn from Henderson's 1960s Blue Note recordings, but the feel and sound of the group is far removed from that of the groups that originally recorded them. Actually, it would not be too big a stretch to view this period in Henderson's career as a fusion between the advanced Hard Bop of the 60s, the stretched harmonies and sprung rhythms of Miles' 60s quintet, and the electric elements that Miles' then-brand new bands had been utilizing.

It is precisely this fusion that made these recordings (and others by Henderson from roughly the same time, with much the same approach) so influential among a certain sector of younger musicians. Here was a way to be "contemporary", "inside", and "populist" all at once. If it wasn't "new" music, it was definitely a new way of looking at slightly older music, of keeping it fresh for the players and the audience alike. I know from personal experience that the inclusion of electric piano, percussion, and this type of material was very common in the 1970s, as was the reality that these changes to the music had a very real populist appeal. Audiences (and the ones heard here at The Lighthouse were no exception) responded to this blend as being totally in step with the overall sound and feel of the times. This was a time when "straight ahead" jazz still maintained a relevancy to a distinct portion of the non-musician, "blue collar" public, a dynamic that was frittered away when the Neo-Conservative "revolution" that followed not too many years later determined that such elements were somehow "demeaning" to the music. Dashikis were replaced with three-piece suits, clubs by recitals masquerading as concerts, and "the people" by "the sponsors". (But that's another story altogether, a sad one at that, and outside of the purview of this review.)

The group heard here is an excellent one – the great Woody Shaw on trumpet, George Cables on keys (his role as one of the earliest exponents of electric piano in this type of jazz is often overlooked), Ron McLure on bass (himself then not too far removed from his gig with another jazz populist / popularizer of a different stripe, Charles Lloyd), a very young Lenny White on drums (displaying none of the bombast and lack of taste that would mark his work in the jazz-rock fusion vein a few years later), and percussionist Tony Waters. Admittedly, nobody plays to the absolute peak of their individual capabilities here, but the whole thing gels nicely. After all, this is a live recording, not a tightly controlled studio date. Notes are occasionally fluffed, pet licks occasionally called upon to sustain fleeting moments of non-inspiration, intonation occasionally goes south, but none of that detracts from the collective spirit that this band was putting out. "Good vibes", in the vernacular of the day, abounded, and the beauty of the moment overrides any lack of perfection in the finer details.

The only real drawback to these recordings is the balance of the instruments. The horns are way forward, and Cables and White pulled back much further in the mix than they would have actually been in person. A key factor to popular appeal and relative commercial success of music such as this is exactly its density of texture and volume, the palpability of the sound, the physically confrontational reality of the collective output. The original albums, unfortunately, suffered from this mix as well, and the digital remastering of the material only brings its drawbacks into greater relief. This should not really be a surprise, as producer Orrin Keepnews and the original engineer, the great Bernie Grundman, was of an older era, and live recording technology of the time was still less the exact science than it is today. Still, a fatter sound to the "background" would have given a more accurate picture of the way this type music really sounded. And, in fairness, Keepnews' studio recordings of the time (often engineered by Elvin Campbell) did provide this type of mix.

Still, these are relatively minor quibbles. How much one will be attracted to this music will decidedly depend on how one feels about the Henderson/Shaw type of jazz, how one feels about the electric piano and the added percussion, and how much of this material one already owns. It is all available in other discs (although some of it only in the 8-CD set of Henderson's complete Milestone recordings), but not all in a single disc as is presented here. And even here, it is not totally complete – one tune, "Gazelle", although readily available elsewhere, was left out due to time restrictions. But if one digs this type of music, this is an excellent document of a working group playing in front of a receptive audience with plenty of fire and good spirits all around. The only thing better would be hearing it in person, and, since Henderson & Show are both no longer amongst the living (and because this type of jazz, or at least, this type of jazz with these kind of trimmings) has been deemed "unworthy" by the arbitrary arbitrators of today's "jazz culture"), that ain't gonna happen. So grab it where it is, on this release, or on some release.

Now, for our third example of fusion in jazz, we come to an example of the term as it is most commonly used: the blending of jazz improvisation with blatant rock- and/or funk-inspired grooves. This is a genre that still creates great controversy, and justifiably so, since the results have ranged from genuinely original and innovative to blatantly commercial, exploitative lowest-common-denominator bullshit to sincere but clueless, hopelessly misguided attempts doomed to fail before they even begin.

Regretfully, it is in the last category that Roy Haynes' Quiet Fire (Galaxy GCD-95005-2) falls. I say regretfully because Haynes, still one of jazz' seemingly eternally youthful souls today, was no stranger to this type of fusion at the time these sessions were recorded. Besides his earlier work with Gary Burton and Larry Coryell, his own early-70s Hip Ensemble records for Mainstream got into some of this type material, admittedly to varying degrees of success. But those efforts all had the benefit, such as it was, of being seat-of-the-pants, in the moment type affairs. The material on this disc (originally released on two LPs, 1977's Thank You, Thank You and 1978's Vistalite) ranges, mostly, from trite to contrived, with the performances, again, mostly, range from perfunctory to generic (generic relative to the player's specific styles, that is). The production doesn't help any either. It's neither high-sheen enough to offer true pop-jazz appeal, nor immediate enough to offer true jazz grit. In short, everything comes up to the table all steamed-up and hyping the delivery of a banquet, but all that is really served is a buffet of room-temperature take-out leftovers. Roy himself plays wonderfully (Roy always plays wonderfully), but it's a bad, bad case of so what, who cares, if I can hear Roy play wonderfully in a situation where there's something happening, why should I listen to this? That is a question for which there is no answer other than, "I shouldn't".

We would not be wrong for expecting that banquet, either, because the cast of characters on these dates is a distinguished one indeed: Joe Henderson, Bobby Hutcherson, Stanley Cowell, George Cables, Ron Carter, Cecil McBee, the list goes on. You'd expect that if these guys were going to phone it in, that they'd at least fake some involvement. They're all pros, and that's what pros do when they have to (and, truthfully, these guys have all done it before elsewhere). But they didn't.

Chico Hamilton made a lot of records similar to this one in the ‘70s, but Chico had the sense to either use young, then-unknown players who brought some sense of eagerness to the proceedings, or else avail himself of some very slick production. Either one of those options would have helped these sessions, but neither was used, not to any effective extent. Ironically, I saw a Roy Haynes gig ca. 1978 with a quartet that included three of the players heard on some of the pieces here – altoist Ricardo Strobert, guitarist Marcus Fiorillo, and electric bassist Dave Jackson. They were young and they were green, and it was obvious, but they were nonetheless going for it. Here, they sound like they're running from it. Maybe they had studio jitters (it happens), but somebody, Roy, Ed Michel (who produced both sessions) should have taken whatever the necessary steps would have been to get these youngsters into some kind of groove. Their live work showed that they had it in them. The record, though, does them no favors. It does nobody any favors.

However, every cloud has its silver lining, and this one is no exception. The very last cut on this otherwise forgettable and disposable collection is a version of "Invitation" played by a quartet of Haynes, Henderson, Cowell, and Jackson. This is a tune that Joe Henderson owned, and never more so than here. For six minutes and two seconds, the depressing nothingness of the preceding 71:53 is replaced by one of Joe Henderson's greatest recorded outings. The other members of the quartet rise to the occasion splendidly. They saved the best for last. Whether or not that one cut is enough to justify the purchase of this otherwise unnecessary CD is up to you. It's a testament to the greatness of that take of "Invitation" that I'd even consider leaving the option open.

Aside from that one cut, Quiet Fire spoils an otherwise excellent set of releases. Still, two good out of three ain't bad, especially when the two are as solid (and in the case of the Griffin, spectacular) as these. Fantasy's ongoing habit of leaving a cut from an original album in order to fit two albums onto one CD continues to irritate, but the reality of jazz economics earns them a begrudging, teeth-gritting pass from me. In the best of all worlds, this would not be an issue. However, this, obviously, is indeed not the best of all possible worlds.

Johnny Griffin, Joe Henderson, and Roy Haynes, however, go a good long way towards making it a helluva lot better.

~ Jim Sangrey

Reviewer Jim Sangrey is a Dallas-based tenor saxophonist, composer and all-around raconteur. He may be heard on the Quartet Out releases Welcome To The Party and Welcome To The Meathouse. He can be read in the liner notes to the Nessa CD reissue of Warne Marsh's All Music.

A Few Thoughts On Pierre Boulez On The Occasion Of His 80th Birthday

I had the honor to speak with Maitre Boulez last Labor Day. Our conversation was going smoothly enough, so I mustered the courage to ask him something that had been bothering me. "If you are such a fervent proponent of new music, why do you keep re-recording the same material, even your own?" Without missing a beat, he responded in his clipped, incredibly precise and heavily accented English, "Because I am a better conductor now." Evasion of the first order: "What did you expect?" I chided myself, and moved on to my next question.

Further reflection changed my opinion. It now seems to me that Boulez's most recent -- and greatest -- accomplishments as a conductor has less to do with detail, precision and orchestral virtuosity, even though these are, and have always been, obviously important components of his distinctive style. He has become a master of temporal manipulation. Here, I'm not referring to what Jonathan Kramer labels "absolute" time, but to all the substrata of linear and non-linear motion on which the continuum of each piece of music evolves in Boulez's hands. This newly gained relativity has been hard-won and long in coming, but it now informs everything he records, Twentieth Century or not, from Berlioz to Webern.

Listen, for example, to his 1999 recording of Scriabin's Prometheus. The opening "Mystic" chord -- marked Pianissimo I believe -- is so rich in sonorities of all sorts that the emergent brass melody often necessitates unsanctioned disruption of the chord or artificial foregrounding of the melody line. Boulez manages to maintain the chord's dynamic integrity while rendering the brass motive perfectly audible. He effectively produces one long sweeping motion to the first crescendo, faithfully and accurately rendering a compound of two simultaneously linear goals.

The Scriabin is just a small scale example of Boulez's more recent conducting style. As I thought over our conversation later, I recalled his mentioning that he preferred recording in large segments rather than patching or splicing. Certainly, his Wagner recordings of the late 1970's, whatever their shortcomings, demonstrate a deeper understanding of longer forms and dramatic structures than is afforded by much of his back catalogue for Sony. Despite being a landmark interpretation and eclipsing most preceding attempts, his early 1970s traversal of the published Webern scores often treads the uncomfortable line between forced Modernity and a latent Romanticism that has now been properly assimilated. I do not accuse Boulez of any over-luxuriance or of relinquishing his iron grip on detail. Quite the contrary. The major difference between those performances and his recordings for Deutsche Grammophon since 1989 lies in the symbiotic relationship between large-scale structure and moment-to-moment execution of detail; if Schonberg's assertion that the Art of Fugue was a work to be heard best as a unity in the mind is applicable to other works of equal merit (and I believe it is) Boulez should be recognized for exposing the multinarrative structures in each work he conducts.

His recent Mahler Symphony 3, especially the slowly building, then morphing last movement, exemplifies this all-encompassing approach on a grand scale. His take on the chorale-like opening, hushed and reverent if less ponderous than most, guides each return of that section's ethos, imbuing the movement with a kind of moment-form or spontaneous aesthetic alien to most conductors. I can understand that those used to the raw emotional impact engendered by Bernstein, Solti and Barbirolli might be put off by Boulez's seeming detachment, but his Mahler cycle, nearing completion, bestows many rewards of its own where the dialectic of continually shifting narrative is concerned. Conversely, while many conductors stretch Mahler's elastic tempi to the breaking point, Boulez's restrained flexibility often reveals long-range connections lost in other performances.

As I began to write this, I acquired his brand-new recording of Le Marteau Sans Maitre. Compared to Boulez's own live 1985 production for Sony, this new reading eschews the more "atomistic" post-Webernian aspects of the score in favor of what sounds to me like a transgenerational reading. The Messiaenesque instrumentation is offset by long lines of post-Debussy counterpoint, layers that are submerged in most performances. I do not mean to imply that this interpretation is overly precious; when, for example, flute and guitar smack the same pitch with astounding precision in this new reading, no pointillistic holds are barred, and Hilary Summer's vocal delivery sports better intonation than I've heard in any other performance; simply sample the flute-and-voice interplay of "L'artisanat Furieux" or Summer's first B-flat in "Bourreaux de Solitude" to appreciate the nature of her accomplishment.

Marteau has always been hailed as one of the most important pieces of the last century for its realization of serial principles of organization as well as its exploration of an innovative soundworld, but Boulez's most recent traversal places it in two simultaneous traditions, adding a layer of historical intrigue to Marteau's already formidable musical and temporal intricacies. It is a fitting reminder, for his eightieth birthday, just how vital and important Boulez's interpretations continue to be.

~ Marc Medwin

Desperate Man Blues

Channel surfing yielded a bona fide find last night in the form of the final two-thirds of Desperate Man Blues, a ’02 film spotlighting the life, times and nonpareil vinyl trove of one Joe Bussard. It’s got the usual music documentary tropes: the foreign film crew (in this case Aussies led by Sydney-based Edward Gillan) seeking out an unsung custodian of aural culture long operating under the public radar in an effort to place him and his efforts on the proper pedestal of importance; the round table of talking heads explaining & corroborating the subject’s relevance and stature; prosaic shots of the subject’s daily life, visiting his favorite diner, holed up in his basement listening room, two of the four walls stocked ceiling-to-floor with meticulously catalogued 78s (25K of them by one count), music-related nick-knacks and collectibles festooning other available shelf-space; puffing on stogies, poring over his finds and congenially entertaining the ignorance of the general populace. Most engrossing are the repeated scenes of the vinyl addict in his element, venturing out on record recon safaris. One excursion to a rural elderly black man’s house is a bit sobering as subtle racial and class disparities rear up in Bussard’s interactions with his potential vendor. Surveying the stacks of moldering records in the seller’s basement, he’s polite, but dismissive of the cache and invites the man and a friend out to his truck to hear some “real sounds.”

But what’s continually charming is how Bussard both fits the prevailing stereotype & exists puckishly outside it. His income appears largely derived from taping sides (50 cents apiece) and sending them to fellow collectors, though recurring gigs in radio have padded his pockets occasionally since his teens. That tenure facilitated the formation of an idiosyncratic, if curiously familiar, & endearing world view. There are Bussard’s fuddy-duddy assertions that rock is the cancer of all music; his apparent contentment at catholicizing his daily listening to the library in his basement and taped compilations on his various drives about town; the encyclopedic awareness of record-related trivia and ephemera. One scene documents a game of brinksmanship between Bussard and a visiting friend. The two engage in a face-off over Blind Willie McTell’s biographic minutiae that will ring amusingly familiar with most record geeks. Another Bussard acolyte divides people down along colorful dichotomy: the minority who view Pre-War recordings as the pinnacle of American musical achievement and the eclipsing majority who only hear “scratchy old records.” Bussard holds position as Chief Poobah of the former camp with a congenial nonchalance.

But rather sealing his recherché sides in hermetic sleeves and relegating them to dust magnet status on the shelves, he regularly pulls them out, handles them and plops them on his turntable, a tactic at odds with the usual Cerberus-style curatorial mindset. There’s one scene where he produces what he claims is the “rarest blues record of all” --“Original Stack O Lee Blues” by the Down Home Boys on the Black Patti label-- slides it out of its mummified paper sheath, deposits it on the player and unceremoniously drops the stylus. In another he stomps his feet and gregariously plays air banjo right along with a rollicking Uncle Dave Macon record. Later, holding an audience with two young reporters from a local newspaper, he fetches first a mint copy of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues” and then another antique picture platter by Jimmy Rodgers, mirthfully spins each for the ladies, regaling them with reasons as to why Rodgers has no vocal equal. The smiling, if slightly perplexed expressions on women’s faces will once again ring true to record fiends who’ve tried in vain to explain their obsessions to friends and acquaintances not afflicted with the addiction.

Despite his comfortably no-shit lifestyle and easygoing exterior, Bussard is definitely and incurably infected with the fever. He muses repeatedly on the diminishing returns nature of his passion, but ultimately appears nonplussed by the finite supply that fuels his pursuits. Vindication comes at the end with the discovery of a rare Gitfiddle Jim 78 at a garden-variety estate sale amongst a crate of records he procured for a mere five bucks. Bussard’s ear-to-ear grin as he proudly holds the priceless relic up to the camera is, well… priceless. All-in-all a great way to kill an hour as, it appears, is a recently released compilation of some of Bussard’s choice selections from his collection.

Bussard's Basement

Channel surfing yielded a bona fide find last night in the form of the final two-thirds of Desperate Man Blues, a ’02 film spotlighting the life, times and nonpareil vinyl trove of one Joe Bussard. It’s got the usual music documentary tropes: the foreign film crew (in this case Aussies led by Sydney-based Edward Gillan) seeking out an unsung custodian of aural culture long operating under the public radar in an effort to place him and his efforts on the proper pedestal of importance; the round table of talking heads explaining & corroborating the subject’s relevance and stature; prosaic shots of the subject’s daily life, visiting his favorite diner, holed up in his basement listening room, two of the four walls stocked ceiling-to-floor with meticulously catalogued 78s (25K of them by one count), music-related nick-knacks and collectibles festooning other available shelf-space; puffing on stogies, poring over his finds and congenially entertaining the ignorance of the general populace. Most engrossing are the repeated scenes of the vinyl addict in his element, venturing out on record recon safaris. One excursion to a rural elderly black man’s house is a bit sobering as subtle racial and class disparities rear up in Bussard’s interactions with his potential vendor. Surveying the stacks of moldering records in the seller’s basement, he’s polite, but dismissive of the cache and invites the man and a friend out to his truck to hear some “real sounds.”

But what’s continually charming is how Bussard both fits the prevailing stereotype & exists puckishly outside it. His income appears largely derived from taping sides (50 cents apiece) and sending them to fellow collectors, though recurring gigs in radio have padded his pockets occasionally since his teens. That tenure facilitated the formation of an idiosyncratic, if curiously familiar, & endearing world view. There are Bussard’s fuddy-duddy assertions that rock is the cancer of all music; his apparent contentment at catholicizing his daily listening to the library in his basement and taped compilations on his various drives about town; the encyclopedic awareness of record-related trivia and ephemera. One scene documents a game of brinksmanship between Bussard and a visiting friend. The two engage in a face-off over Blind Willie McTell’s biographic minutiae that will ring amusingly familiar with most record geeks. Another Bussard acolyte divides people down along colorful dichotomy: the minority who view Pre-War recordings as the pinnacle of American musical achievement and the eclipsing majority who only hear “scratchy old records.” Bussard holds position as Chief Poobah of the former camp with a congenial nonchalance.

But rather sealing his recherché sides in hermetic sleeves and relegating them to dust magnet status on the shelves, he regularly pulls them out, handles them and plops them on his turntable, a tactic at odds with the usual Cerberus-style curatorial mindset. There’s one scene where he produces what he claims is the “rarest blues record of all” --“Original Stack O Lee Blues” by the Down Home Boys on the Black Patti label-- slides it out of its mummified paper sheath, deposits it on the player and unceremoniously drops the stylus. In another he stomps his feet and gregariously plays air banjo right along with a rollicking Uncle Dave Macon record. Later, holding an audience with two young reporters from a local newspaper, he fetches first a mint copy of Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues” and then another antique picture platter by Jimmy Rodgers, mirthfully spins each for the ladies, regaling them with reasons as to why Rodgers has no vocal equal. The smiling, if slightly perplexed expressions on women’s faces will once again ring true to record fiends who’ve tried in vain to explain their obsessions to friends and acquaintances not afflicted with the addiction.

Despite his comfortably no-shit lifestyle and easygoing exterior, Bussard is definitely and incurably infected with the fever. He muses repeatedly on the diminishing returns nature of his passion, but ultimately appears nonplussed by the finite supply that fuels his pursuits. Vindication comes at the end with the discovery of a rare Gitfiddle Jim 78 at a garden-variety estate sale amongst a crate of records he procured for a mere five bucks. Bussard’s ear-to-ear grin as he proudly holds the priceless relic up to the camera is, well… priceless. All-in-all a great way to kill an hour as, it appears, is a recently released compilation of some of Bussard’s choice selections from his collection.

Tom Bruno & Sabir Mateen - Getting Away With Murder (Eremite)

Certain musical projects embody a continuum of ponderable pleasure from germinative idea through eventual fruition. This is one of them. Saxophonist Sabir Mateen and drummer Tom Bruno, together one half of the NYC free jazz ensemble Test, jamming for the Manhattan masses and captured for posterity by a single stereo microphone to DAT. The album’s title is perfect, but the more utilitarian subtitle: “2/28/95 12:48-1:33 PM Grand Central Station” would’ve worked just as well. Both men are veteran buskers, well-versed in the DIY set-up and strike-down strategies honed through innumerable subway gigs. The cover shot shows Bruno grimacing behind a simple three-piece kit-- just snare, ride cymbal and hi-hat-- but I swear I can hear a kick-tom undergirding some of the rhythms. He favors an assiduous akimbo-limbed approach at the traps that reminds me of Louis Moholo in its liquidity, like the waters of a mountain creek washing all manner of flotsam and jetsam downstream. Beats bounce off his skins like a profusion of ping-pong balls, his brushes sustaining a near constant stutter as Mateen’s horn surfs the ripply support. Limiting himself to tenor for sake of mobility and economy, Mateen comes off like a slightly anemic, if no less loquacious, Sonny Rollins, reeling out one fluttering phrase after another and never straying too far in his fealty to melody. No Test-style wailing and combusting here; instead the pair keeps things to a smoldering simmer that regularly stops just shy of boiling over. Train schedule announcements, mimicking the mush-mouth speak of a Peanuts™ school marm, regularly intersect their interplay, though the fleeting conversations of the countless passerby largely escape the sonic scope of the mic. Byron Coley’s typical blotter acid liners (radiant candira catfish, pineal glands and urethral entryways, all referenced in a single sentence) supply the buttery icing. The Eremite catalog is chock-full of precious bullion, but this particular ingot is the one I return to most, perfect for spinning on an afternoon drive in the country as the scenery speeds by.

Two from Relapse

Origin Echoes of Decimation Relapse 6637

Cephalic Carnage Anomalies Relapse 6638

http://www.relapse.com/

Most fans of advanced, often experimental metal (however flimsy the term is as a genre-marker these days) are aware that Relapse is one of the flagship labels out there. These two releases confirm the good ship Relapse’s commitment to challenging, in-your-face, even overwhelming stuff. In the great heartland between the coasts lie desolate expanses of plains and prairies. What’s an angry young’un to do out there? Shred, baby.

Kansas has actually produced a fair number of heavy bands over the years, most notably the mighty Coalesce and their offspring (The Esoteric’s debut full-length is set to drop this spring). But thrash/death maestros Origin are distinct. Featuring insanely fast blast-beats, complex skirling guitar lines, and multiple vocal attacks (from the sub-guttural Cookie Monster growls to the demonic shriek, most courtesy of primary vocalist James Lee), the band blaze through nine songs in under 30 minutes, each replete with breakdowns, texture and time changes, and so forth. The worldview is somewhat predictably bleak too, from the demonic face staring at you from the cosmos on the cover to the track titles (“Debased Humanity” or “Staring from the Abyss,” for example).

It’s brutal, unwavering, technically jaw-dropping stuff. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine anything tighter, more complex, or more punishing than this; one exposure to “Amoeba” – with Paul Ryan’s and Clint Appelhanz’s guitar spasms and James King’s ridiculous blastbeat drumming – should confirm this. And compared with Origin’s earlier stuff, and with a lot of monochromatic death metal releases out there, these tunes actually do have considerable harmonic complexity and musical nuance for those attuned to this kind of stuff. But somehow it just doesn’t get the old head banging so much. Curiously unmoving but certainly worth listening to.

Cephalic Carnage, on the other hand, is as quirky and complex as it gets. The self-styled practitioners of “Rocky Mountain Hydrogrind” have taken the basic materials of death/grindcore – scary chops, scary vocals, presto-chango tunes – and filtered them through a unique combination of tongue-in-cheek satire, Butthole Surfers-esque perversions, and the occasional jazz fusion spasm. From the two-dozen-and-counting tunes on Exploiting Dysfunction to the epic sprawls and doomy menace of Lucid Interval to this brand new disc, the Denver quintet (who prefer to be listed simply as Len, Steve, Jawsh, Zac, and John) has proven nothing if not unpredictable and challenging. Things start of promisingly with the opening “Scientific Remote Viewing,” a memorably pummeling track that swandives from lightning fast shred sections into murky dungeons.

But by the time the band is into “Wraith,” it’s pretty apparent that Cephalic have tweaked their sound again, this time with some Dillinger-esque twin guitar breaks (of the wiggy, post-Zappa variety that are heard so often on Miss Machine). It’s not demonstrative, it’s incorporated pretty smoothly into their overall sound (which, make no mistake, remains painful enough to please hardcore fans); but it’s a testament to the breadth of their listening and their growth as a band. There is a demerit to this disc, though. At times, however, the parodism that has often characterized their music gets a bit too heavy-handed, as on the black metal stylings of “The Will or the Way” or the emocore goof “Dying Will Be the Death of Me.” And there’s something about the prog-fusion insanity of “Inside is Out” that doesn’t convince as much as earlier experiments in this vein. But overall, Cephalic remains at the top of experimental metal.

~ Jason Bivins